The fascination with what's heilege

I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but it was in seminary I was introduced to the idea that "dirt" is simply "matter out of place."

Soil in the garden is good; soil tracked into the house from the garden is "dirt."  Dirt is bad.

I've made the point with my students, from time to time.  Imagine, I tell them, that I've brought a coke  into the classroom, straight from a vending machine.  I put it on the table, never touch it again or open it, and on the way out I leave it.  Would you take it?

Most students say they would.  Now, I say, change the facts (and change the outcome!):  now I scoop up the same can on the way out the door and drop it in the trash can, a container filled mostly with discarded paper (no food or coffee grounds, etc.).  Now would you take it?

Why not?  Because it rests against a piece of discarded paper?  What if I left a piece of paper leaning on the can on the table?

You see where this goes:  we have boundaries, lines we do not cross.  From a young age we are taught that trash is trash, and it must remain trash.  That can is now "dirty," and it would certainly be out of place if it were removed from the trash can and put back on the table.  We live by these boundaries, by keeping certain things "pure" and not letting them get "dirty."

To quote myself:

Derrida is helpful here. He points out that holy, heilege in German, (the change of language helps us realize this doesn't involve just English or English speakers), means "set apart in order to be kept pure." It's a word almost wholly connected with religion, but it could be accurately (if oddly, given its connotations) used to describe a bandage in a sterile package: the bandage is set apart, sealed off, so it can remain sterile, which is to say, pure. Of course we don't connect "sterile" and "pure." We think of "pure" as describing something singular, like a precious metal which has no admixtures in it. "Sterile" means something germ-free (and so "clean") or something unable to reproduce (which may bring in connections to sexual reproduction as "dirty," but that gets us unto contemplating how "dirt" is simply matter out of place, and then we're off on a whole 'nother pursuit). But to be sterile in the germ-free sense is to be pure for the purpose of medical treatment, like a sterile bandage. And both can mean to be "holy," because that's why we call things holy: they are pure, they are singular, they are set apart and should not be contaminated with admixtures or "dirt."

And I bring it up because of this article at Salon, which insists I cannot possibly think as I do:

 It’s true that there are people who believe in God, and who also accept science in general and evolution in particular. This is an observably true fact: it would be absurd to deny it, and I don’t. I’m not saying these people don’t exist.

I’m saying that this position is untenable. I’m saying that the “God made evolution happen” position is rife with both internal contradictions and denial of the evidence. You don’t have to deny as much reality as young earth creationists do to take this position — but you still have to deny a fair amount.

What you first have to deny is most of the ideas and assumptions about the nature of God, the nature of Creation, and the relationship of Creator to created, that are made in that argument.  It's not really a philosophical dismantling of a theological position; it's more of a blindly stupid set of assertions which, were they made about science instead of religion, would be laughable and discarded as the "messed up" opinions of Ken Hamm.  It's not the assertions about evolutionary there that disturb me; it's the ignorance of Christian theology.  But that ignorance is almost beside the point, because the real purpose of this article is to declare there is only one kind of believer:  the Christian fundamentalist; and everyone knows "they" are wrong on everything.  So "progressive" Christians need to renounce their beliefs and join the side of the atheists, because there is no middle ground, and there is no world in which science and religion can co-exist.

Because if they can co-exist, that means science is not paramount and doesn't trump all human understanding and answer all human questions and fill all human needs.  It means, in brief, that science is not holy and cannot expel that which is unclean from the temple of Reason.  It's the simplest of fundamentalist assertions:  what I believe is true, and that can only mean what you believe is false.  Any attempt to mix the two, or reconcile them, renders what I believe impure, unholy; and that cannot be permitted.

The "internal contradictions" identified there are mostly contradictions of the author's own invention. The argument presented itself is rife with contradictions, such as this:

And at the risk of anthropomorphizing: Evolution doesn’t care if you’re comfortable. Evolution doesn’t care if you’re happy. Evolution doesn’t need you to be perfect: it just needs you to be better than your competitors, your predators, and your prey. Evolution cares if you survive, and produce fertile offspring that also survive. Actually, even that’s not exactly true. Evolution doesn’t care if you live or die. If you die, something else lives. Evolution doesn’t give a damn who it is.

Evolution doesn’t give a damn about any of this. But God supposedly does. So why did he do it this way? If God is so powerful that he could bring all of existence into being simply by wishing it; if he’s so powerful that he can tinker with the genetics and circumstances of evolution simply by wishing it — why would he wish it to be so clumsy, half-assed, inefficient, jury-rigged, superfluous, and brutal?

The second paragraph is right:  evolution doesn't care, because evolution is a theory, it is not a deity or a human being.  It is merely an idea, an explanation.  As such it is not even itself reality; it is an abstraction from reality.

Secondly, survival doesn't rest on being better than your competitors, predators, or prey.  Mostly it involves being in the right place at the right time, or not in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Prey usually evade predators on a "survival" scale by being more numerous.  It's a fairly simple matter:  if the prey is greatly diminished solely by predation, the predators die, too.  Does evolution "fix" this?  Or does the balance simply occur often enough to keep predator and prey around for more than one generation?  Predator and prey certainly persist, even as species and individuals die or go extinct.

Circumstances for any one individual matter far more than "fitness."  "Fitness," after all, simply means you lasted out a generation.  Dinosaurs were "fit"; until they weren't.  Under evolutionary theory they were never anything except alive.  Their variety is explained by evolution; their survival, or lack thereof, is not.  If we are going to insist that "fitness" is the standard for reality (because we must "accept reality in general, and the reality of evolution in general,"), then we are going to rapidly find ourselves considering again whether "Three generations of imbeciles is enough!"

The argument here is a weak variant on the problem of theodicy: if God is good, why does evil exist? But the argument from theodicy posits a "god" who is a simple creation, rather than a complex one; a god simpler than human beings, a god we can put in our pocket and draw out when it is convenient for us.  Why does evil exist is a theological question, not a scientific one.  And the argument here rests on a specific concept of God which cannot be challenged because theology is not science (the Dawkins' Retreat) and therefore cannot be taken seriously, but at the same time must be taken seriously so that it can be refuted with science!

But theology can only be taken seriously insofar as it proves science is right, by the theological argument being limited to what the atheist insists it is.  For example:  "Given that there’s not one scrap of evidence suggesting that this invisible Divine Tinkerer actually does exist — and a whole lot of evidence suggesting that he doesn’t — why would you conclude that he does?"\

Evidence of existence is a mug's game.  It is not at all the same thing to say "I exist" and to say the computer I type on just now "exists," but the argument about God's "existence" never so much as acknowledges that distinction.  Still, the more interesting issue there is:  is God an "invisible Divine Tinkerer"?  According to whom?  Some Christians say so; some don't.  Are the latter wrong, because it makes it easier to discard the beliefs of the former?  And why does it matter if some people believe in the existence of God?  I mean here the ones who don't insist evolution cannot be reconciled with "God's word."  Why can't I conclude God is real?  Because it offends the presumptions and ignorance  of an atheist?

Seems to me that problem of holiness extends beyond the ideology of scientific materialism.  Science is holy, and all that is not-science must be discredited in order to leave science pure.  And all this religious talk is just getting our science dirty.  This disgrace shall not stand!

In the spotlight, losing my religion....

The problem with popularizing theology, as with the problem of popularizing philosophy, is that in doing so you can get it all wrong.

Karen Armstrong here, speaking to Oprah, says that the secret truth of all religions is that one can only say what God is not, even though she claims the Bible is a "starter kit" about what God is.

So already we have a kind of jumble that's pretty much a "do it yourself" kit for religion, which of course appeals enormously to people like Oprah Winfrey, because: a) it puts you, the individual, in charge, and b) it means that whatever you think God is, God is.  That this plays right into the anti-theist charge that any concept of "god" is mere sophistry cannot be denied, but let that go; intellectual rigor is not this "scholar's" point, at least not here.

The more substantial problem is that Armstrong takes an idea as old as Christianity itself, and makes it the the only theology available.  Christian mystics constructed the idea of "negative theology," not as an intellectual escape hatch from all those hard-to-answer or defend questions of theology (which, after all, is the study and discussion of the nature of God), but as an acknowledgement that God is not encompassed within human understanding (and one response is that anything not within human understanding simply is not; but leave that aside for the moment).  There are various negative theologies, all aimed at giving an intellectual framework to the notion that God is, ultimately, ineffable.  Negative theology is a way to talk about that ineffability, by talking about knowing the nature of God through discerning what God is not.

There is something valuable and subtle about negative theology; but it is not a substitute for a theology.

Unless you are Karen Armstrong, who turns her concept of God into a description of a wall; or a snake; or a whip; or a tree trunk.  She abandons, in other words, the humility that negative theology is supposed to engender (God is ultimately beyond our experience or understanding) and replaces it with "God is whatever we think God is, because no one can say what God is!"

Nice work, if you can get it; but lousy theology, and really pretty lame scholarship.

I mention this not to gratuitously bash Ms. Armstrong, but to note a new trend in reporting on American Christianity (I know Ms. Armstrong is British, but she appeals to that most American of Americans today, Oprah):  the idea that the most valid religious experience is one that denounces religion in favor of some much more secular viewpoint.  A man decides the thin skein of doctrine and theology he grew up with in the Pentecostal church can no longer sustain his faith, so he abandons faith in God for the equally tenuous faith in human reason, and by his atheism becomes a subject worthy of an NPR radio story.  Another also abandons his evangelical theology, but again keeps the basic premise that fervor is what matters, and defines Jesus as a Zealot; defines Jesus, as he tells Terry Gross, as someone he wants to worship.  Nothing wrong with that, either; except that we all do it, and writing a book about it doesn't mean you have a better insight than others.  It just means that, once again, to the man with a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.

So, to Karen Armstrong, who wants God to be a much more convenient proposition, God is simply indefinable, and what cannot be defined cannot impose constraints; or, for that matter, raise pesky intellectual problems.

Let me take the words of Reza Aslan for my example:

[The Apostles] were farmers and fisherman. These were illiterates; they could neither read nor write, so they couldn't really espouse Christology, high-minded theology about who Jesus was. They certainly couldn't write anything down. Instead the task of spreading the Gospel message outside of Jerusalem, of really creating what we now know as Christianity, fell to a group of urbanized, Hellenized, educated Jews in the Diaspora; [and] for [the Romans], having grown up immersed in this Hellenized, Romanized world, the concept of a God-man was something quite familiar. Caesar Augustus was a God-man. What we really see in these 20 years after Jesus' death is this process whereby this Jewish religion based on a Jewish revolutionary becomes transformed into a Roman religion, where Jesus is transformed from a Jewish conception of a Messiah to a kind of Roman demigod.

All of which is accurate; it comports with what I learned in seminary.  Does it mean, though, that all of Christianity is wrong?  That I must throw out the baby with the bathwater, consider the scriptures merely a "starter kit," and set out on my own to define God for me?

Well, I suppose I could; but it would seem more admirable if I engaged my faith community in how to understand this information within the framework of what I learned as the Sunday School version of Jesus.

I like, by the way, the dismissive "Christology, high-minded theology about who Jesus was."  Simply to answer the question reportedly put by Jesus to his disciples "Who do you say that I am?", is to engage in Christology.  You don't have to label it with a Grecian term in order to do it, and you don't have to be high-minded about it to try to answer the question.

I find the reasoning that avers that Jesus can't be Christ because the idea is too akin to Roman notions of divinity an interesting one.  On the one hand, no less a scholar than Dom Crossan uses the very idea of Jesus as Messiah as the explanation for his crucifixion and for the ultimate crucifixion of Paul, as well as an impetus for Paul's theology, which Crossan argues set up and continued the idea of Jesus of Nazareth being a political counterpoint figure to Caesar in Rome.  So, you see, you can do it without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.  But there's also underlying Aslan's argument a need for purity that is wholly unrealistic, and to understand this we need to understand the concept of the holy.

Derrida is helpful here.  He points out that holy, heilege in German, (the change of language helps us realize this doesn't involve just English or English speakers), means "set apart in order to be kept pure."  It's a word almost wholly connected with religion, but it could be accurately (if oddly, given its connotations) used to describe a bandage in a sterile package:  the bandage is set apart, sealed off, so it can remain sterile, which is to say, pure.  Of course we don't connect "sterile" and "pure."  We think of "pure" as describing something singular, like a precious metal which has no admixtures in it.  "Sterile" means something germ-free (and so "clean") or something unable to reproduce (which may bring in connections to sexual reproduction as "dirty," but that gets us unto contemplating how "dirt" is simply matter out of place, and then we're off on a whole 'nother pursuit).  But to be sterile in the germ-free sense is to be pure for the purpose of medical treatment, like a sterile bandage.  And both can mean to be "holy," because that's why we call things holy:  they are pure, they are singular, they are set apart and should not be contaminated with admixtures or "dirt."

God, therefore, is holy.  And if God is holy, God is singular.  And if God is singular, God cannot partake of human concepts or of things which are not God, such as Roman demigods or Caesar's who claim themselves to be "Son of God."  If Jesus was declared "Son of God" in his lifetime, it would have been a political declaration, since that was a title claimed by Caesar.  The Gospels say the cross was decorated with a sign "Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews."  Had it said "Son of God," it would have been no less political in the Empire; but it would be quite confusing to say so today, after centuries of reserving that title for divinity, and that divinity a single historical person.  The need to keep God holy, then, often undergirds ideas like Aslan's, that Jesus couldn't have called himself "son of God" because it would be too much like a Roman, and not enough like a Jew.

Which also sort of avoids the work of Paul, a Roman citizen and a Jew, who declares Jesus divine by virtue of the crucifixion (Jesus' faithfulness to God even unto death) and the resurrection (the sign of God's favor), which is the "first fruit" of a general resurrection Paul seems to have anticipated within his lifetime.  Is that a version of a Roman demigod?  It's a very odd one, although resurrection was a Hellenistic notion of a display of divine favor (and more useful than becoming a constellation, which was an early version of much the same idea).  And was Paul, by the way, literate?  Not in the way we think.  He could read, but writing was a menial task unconnected to reading.  It's clear Paul dictated his letters, much the way an executive or professional today would direct a secretary to turn his words into neatly typed prose.  Typing is still the menial task left to others by those who do the "writing."

Do I mean, then, that Jesus never called himself divine?  I am less sanguine about the issue than Aslan, largely because Aslan demands a purity in his concept of God which the world does not allow.  Did God create the culture of Abrahamic faith, or did the culture of the region where the tribes who came together to become Israel, create their understanding and expression of the nature of God?  I think it more likely, as well as reasonable, that culture is the shaping force; but that doesn't mean concepts of God are merely cultural and wholly human inventions.  I just don't think you can know the dance apart from the dancer.

The pursuit of holiness, in other words, leads you in circles.  As Yeats also noted:  

'Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,' I cried.
'My friends are gone, but that's a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart's pride.

'A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.' 

I'm not so concerned with purging my religion of Hellenisms or Romanisms, in other words.  Many a Christian mystic has focused more on what God is, than on what God is not, and yet they've kept true to the notion that God is, ultimately, ineffable.  They are also quite comfortable with the notion that God is known bodily; more than one Christian mystic describes the encounter with God as akin to sexual ecstasy.  I'm more comfortable with that theology than with one that insists we can know nothing (which means we can't know anything about God, except that somehow the hole has a donut) or that our God must be so heilege as to be beyond human comprehension; or perhaps, too entwined in human comprehension.

You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!

It's an otherwise busy week in which I won't get much done, so I might as well let this go; it may be the last thing I post for a week, and in part it's inspired by this post at Thought Criminal, if only because the worship of science one sees on the intertubes is a truly appalling thing.

The latest consideration at Salon is whether Nietzsche predicted the correct cosmological theory (although I think the Father of the Ubermensch is just click bait in the headline).   I won't even comment on how much Western science is a construct of a certain culture with normative values that aren't necessarily handed down from Nature anymore than Moses got the law verbatim from the hand of God on Sinai (so it's no surprise the Big Bang Theory sounds vaguely Christian, or the alternative model is distinctly Hindu).  Indeed, the very idea that science is not a pure construct of truth akin to the gospel according to fundamentalists has prompted some really ludicrous comments, viz:

When involved in a discussion of cutting-edge astrophysics, introducing Hindu or Buddhist cosmologies makes as much sense as introducing Creationism when discussing evolution.  It isn't science, so it belongs elsewhere. 

Go wherever you want with that, but my first thought was that science is heilege, holy, and so must remain pure and apart from anything that is not science, such as philosophy (don't tell this commenter that science IS a philosophy, he'll burn you at the stake as a heretic!) or religion.  The latter clearly have no place in the discussion of the holy of holies.  It shouldn't even be allowed on the grounds of the temple.

Seriously, these guys are as bad as the fundamentalists they caricature.

Playing with fire

Bouphonia moves me to want to say something about the late Christoper Hitchens, though I am mindful of the admonition never to speak ill of the dead, as they cannot respond. I am also mindful that I can't do better than this:

As you can see, things even out nicely. Granted, Hitchens' political miscalculations have a body count. But how about all those dragons he killed? (Or not actual dragons...but, y'know, the whole idea of dragons qua dragons, per se, in nuce, und so weiter. And not actually killed...but, y'know, personally disputed in some adamantine, ontically oppositional sense of not agreeing with 'em nohow, so there.)

There is also the matter that I don't really want to speak ill of the late Mr. Hitchens: I didn't know him, I marginally know his work, and I was never terribly impressed with his polemical style (so I still haven't tried to know much about his work). My experience has been that polemics and eloquence usually mask a lack of thought, and that Mr. Hitchens work was often, to quote a review, "Thought-provoking but poorly referenced." There's something to be said for provoking thought; but there's also something to be said for being annoying. Socrates provoked thought, too; but he was also, at least in Plato's representation, thoughtful. Again according to Plato, Athens didn't finally think so, though they later recanted (but Socrates refused to play the game with them), so perhaps he was even successful there, too. Who can say? Someone always writes history, and we always move on with the messy and contentious present. But I had heard about Hitchens' famous denunciations of Mother Teresa so I thought, without pretending to do real research into his efforts, I would look into the subject just a bit.

And this, honestly, is as far as I got: his article in Slate about her possible canonization (which is more about the Pope moving swiftly to canonize a saint, more than about the public figure), and a review of his book about her (and frankly, stunts like "Mommie Dearest" and "Missionary Position" don't do anything to endear me to Mr. Hitchens' thinking. Cute and smart-ass are not hallmarks of profound insight; they are the work of schoolboys. It's a reason I've never been enamored of Mr. Hitchens' work.) Alright, I've harumphed; let's get down to business.

Hitchens, notoriously fond of George Orwell, can't resist quoting him in his Slate article. It's supposed to be a clever choice, implicitly comparing the "sainted" (not officially, yet, I don't think) Mother Teresa with the beatific Mahatma Gandhi. But Hitchens doesn't get past the first line of the essay, which is too bad, really; because Orwell is much fairer to Gandhi than Hitchens ever is to Mother Teresa. Of Gandhi, Orwell writes:

In Gandhi's case the questions on feels inclined to ask are: to what extent was Gandhi moved by vanity--by the consciousness of himself as a humble, naked old man, sitting on a praying mat and shaking empires by sheer spiritual power--and to what extent did he compromise his own principles by entering politics, which of their nature are inseparable from coercion and fraud? To give a definite answer one would have to study Gandhi's acts and writings in immense detail, for his whole life was a sort of pilgrimage in which every act was significant.

It's a perfectly fair question, and part of the old "in the world but not of the world" dichotomy so familiar to Western spiritual thinking (but not necessarily Western spirituality). There is, in fact, a problem with Western thinking on matters spiritual: we want our holy men (and women!) truly "holy," which is to say heilege, set apart, limned. We want our holy persons to be truly pure, truly unscathed by worldly matters, but then they are so otherworldly we mock them for their uselessness and ask if they are contemplating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. We preach it, as the old judge said to me once, round and square, and are frustrated that we cannot have it both ways at once. Gandhi must be holy, and wholly apart; Gandhi must be influential, or what's the purpose of being holy, except self-satisfaction? Orwell wrestles (more or less) with this question. Hitchens blows past it without even seeing that it is there.

The end result seems to be an either/or: either Mother Teresa was a blessed soul who never erred and followed the will of God at all times (yet spent her life in Calcutta seeking, selfishly or not, another mystical experience of God which, from recent reports, she never again had), or she was a charlatan televangelist, an Oral Roberts in India, lacking only the 900 foot tall Jesus. The truth, most likely, is somewhere in between, and while Mr. Hitchens' work cursed Mother Teresa's candle, he did little more himself than curse the darkness. Is that an entirely fair assessment? No, probably not. It is, itself, poorly referenced. Was Mr. Hitchens a bad man? Heavens, I don't know, neither do I care. "Judge not, lest ye be judged" is a fine idea, but a poor one for bloggers and people who make their living writing polemics. Was Mr, Hitchens really any good at what he did? I never thought so; and nothing has changed my mind since his passing. According to Tim Challies, Mr. Hitchens plays the fundamentalist atheist in his book, coming off like the strident and unthinking proponents of Christianity he so loved to debate. I always thought it interesting he never debated a true theologian, in front of an audience of theologians and seminary students, or even before a group of philosophers of religion. He might have been surprised at how thoughtful and well-educated they were. Then again, he might not have noticed. I never saw anything in his work to indicate he would notice much of anything he didn't already think was worth noticing.

The whole matter reminds me of my favorite quote from the film version of "Angels and Demons":

"My church comforts the sick and the dying. My church feeds the hungry. What does your church do? Oh, that's right, you don't have a church!"

That's a bit of a slap, but not an unfair one, considering the kinds of diatribes Mr. Hitchens seemed to prefer. The sad thing is, he might have provoked a discussion along these lines:

The liberal must “save” the poor from poverty. The conservative must keep the poor from indolence. Both pity the poor as something less desirable. Neither attempts to challenge the basic idea that the poor are ultimately disprivileged.

[...] True Christian charity, therefore, is something more than our common definition of pity. White guilt is pity. Condescension is pity. Even inaction might be pity, for some conservatives. And what pity obscures is the paradoxical realization that the poor are, by certain biblical definition, worthy of higher honor. They own something we do not. And the means by which we might participate in that honor with them is charity.

12.2 Ultimately, Henreckson is arguing that empathy — specific Christian empathy — should replace pity. I agree.

Which makes me think of Dorothy Day:

I am reading (Simone Weil's) essays as a part of my Lenten reading...She says that we "...must experience every day, both in the spirit and the flesh, the pains and humiliations of poverty...and further we must do something which is harder than enduring in poverty, we must renounce all compensations: in our contacts with the people around us we must sincerely practice the humility of a naturalized citizen in the country which has received us."

I keep reminding the young people who come to work with us that they are not naturalized citizens...They are not really poor. We are always foreigners to the poor. So we have to make up for it by "renouncing all compensations..."

Mr. Hitchens would probably just eschew Simone Weil, too, and point out that Ms. Day was never the fundraising evangelist for her cause that Mother Teresa was; he would do it and think he'd scored a point, when he'd be missing the point, once again, altogether. He probably wouldn't take kindly to her claim about being foreigners among the poor, and would probably quote another of Orwell's essays about his experiences with poverty, missing the point again and going still further off the mark. I can't say, really; I can only speculate. But if we try to "renounce all compensations," and we fall short; well, we should be called on it. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God....oh, wait, that's Christianity, isn't it? I suppose it's unfair to bring that into a discussion with an atheist, also.. Oh, dear, it is so hard to know just what to say about, and to, the dead.

Perhaps I should say this:

The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

And say I'm quoting T.S. Eliot, and even mention that it's on his marker in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey. It at least gives me more of an excuse to discuss Mr. Hitchens' words, since they are left with us and he is gone.

The point is that there is a branch, a mode, a type of Christianity, which thinks its obligation is to set the world aright and do so on terms agreeable to the agent of such change; and there is a branch or mode or type of Christianity that wants to seek change by taking the world as it is, and responding to the particularities of each person and the life they lead. Mr. Hitchens, per Mr. Challies' review, is disdainful of the cotton diapers used by Mother Teresa's order, noting they use Pampers to impress Hillary Clinton. The implication is they should always use Pampers, but surely the disposal problems of Pampers are as important an issue as the poverty of the people Mother Teresa at least recognized as people (quick, how many truly poor people do you know? By name? Personally? And how many more are simply invisible to you, in your neighborhood and town and in the wide, wide world? Now, how many did Mother Teresa know, or Dorothy Day? And are you a better person if you at least try to help such ministries, even if you try to wash your dirty laundry clean with their good moral purposes?). Religion, like politics, is always inseparable from a certain amount of coercion and fraud. But sometimes it is the goal that matters, not just the means. And sometimes it is the means that matter, not just the goal.

It's just not much of an argument, is it, that what someone is doing in the name of charity is not what you would do? Especially if all you do is point out that they aren't doing it right, at least not by your lights. And what have you done to make the world a better place, besides point out the hypocrisy as you see it? How many mouths did that feed, how many of the dying did that comfort, how many of the sick do your actions, directly or indirectly, help in any way? Oh, I'm sorry, is that unfair? Are we discussing abstractions and ideals and angels on pin heads, and not physical hunger and pain and loneliness and an invisibility that few of us will ever know or, if we do, will ever read about or write about or have any of the luxuries of bloggers or opinion writers or the well-off at the top of the global economic ladder? Yeats wanted to finally end where all the ladders start, in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. Hitchens wanted only to sneer at those who thought such a place could exist, and damn the ones who made any attempt to acknowledge its reality, and do anything at all to improve it, or at least make it more bearable.

It's just not much of an argument, to say that Mother Teresa didn't fit your model of what should be done, that she didn't go far enough in one direction, or went too far in the other, or even that she's undeserving of sainthood. Who cares? Who cares?? Walker Percy at least asked the questions about living a life that matters:

What happened to marriage and family that it should have become a travail and a sadness?...God may be good, family and marriage and children and home may be good, grandma and grandpa may act wise, the Thanksgiving table may be groaning with God's goodness and bounty, all the folks healthy and happy, but something is missing...What is missing? Where did it go? I won't have it! I won't have it! Why this sadness here? Don't stand for it! Get up! Leave! Let the boat people sit down! Go live in a cave until you've found the thief who is robbing you. But at least protest! Stop, thief! What is missing? God? Find him!

Mr. Hitchens wouldn't even ask you to leave the table. He'd only ask that you join him in mocking some public figure because he'd found out she was, after all, only another human being. And if all that matters is that you berate one other human being, if that is what makes you feel wise or vindicated, or just makes it possible for you to earn that Thanksgiving table groaning with God's goodness and bounty, then there is something missing. And what's missing is not what Mr. Hitchens thinks is missing:

The rich world has a poor conscience, and many people liked to alleviate their own unease by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist for "the poorest of the poor." People do not like to admit that they have been gulled or conned, so a vested interest in the myth was permitted to arise, and a lazy media never bothered to ask any follow-up questions.

It is a mean thing to seem to be an advocate for the poor, when you are in fact merely taking care of yourself. But it is a meaner thing to damn an advocate for the poor, while yourself doing nothing for the poor whatsoever, when all the while only doing something for yourself and your pocketbook. Mr. Hitchens left us still swinging that club; what he didn't do, was leave us seeking for understanding. In his writings, at least, he meant only to bludgeon, and seldom, if ever, to discern. But the world has enough and too much of people willing to bludgeon others, metaphorically if not physically, to assert their positions. What we need a bit more of are people more willing to engage in the hard practice of epiphany; of understanding and discernment. We need someone willing to tangle the holy with coercion and fraud, if that's what it takes. One could make the case that that's the line that Jesus trod: his parables we think so simple and clear are, in reality, as complex and confusing and almost fraudulent today as when they were first uttered. The kingdom of God is like a pearl that a man bought by selling all he had? It is like a woman who spends more than the coin is worth burning oil at night to find it, then wakes the family to have a party and spend more to celebrate finding it? It is like an assassin who practices throwing his blade before he goes out? It is like yeast, which makes the whole measure of flour unclean, rather than heilege?

Discernment is much more interesting than polemics; if it isn't nearly as much fun.

And I suspect had he examined Mother Teresa's work, rather than set out to savage it, he might have done the world a great deal more good.It might almost, dare I say it, have been an epiphany.

"Love is no stone on the moon." --Ferlinghetti

Because experience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of Religion, have had a contrary operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.

via Charlie Pierce

I was driving through a section of town I don't visit too often recently; and I was struck by a sense of anxiety, of dread, that pretty much came out of nowhere, until I realized I was passing the location of some church judicatories which I had some experience with only a few years ago (although sometimes it seems like only yesterday, and other times like it was another lifetime and another person).  They were not, obviously, pleasant experiences.

I can honestly say I've never met people as nasty, malicious, and downright cruel to my face, in my presence, about me, as I met when I was actively engaged in ministry.  I lost my pulpit because people felt free to demonize me and damn me for what were more their failings than mine (that I had a hand in those losses, that it was not all a conspiracy against a pure heart and perfect actions, cannot be denied).  After that loss I spent some time seeking opportunities in other denominations, largely so I wouldn't have to uproot my family after only three years (with the very definite option of running into the same kind difficulties I had come to town to escape).  Whereas being a lawyer between firms had meant a certain loss of access, a certain level of rejection in job interviews and queries, it never meant the absolute rejection of me as a person, the damning (literally) assumptions that were stated to my face, that I met in the effort to contact other judicatories of what were supposed to be my colleagues.

I had people in my church who would defend themselves by pre-emptively accuse me of being "a lawyer" when I didn't take a position absolutely identical to their own; but I never met such animosity among lawyers, whether we were professionally opposed or simply working different sides of the Bar (plaintffs v. defendants) as I met in churches and especially among those who determine who will be allowed admission to the clergy, and who will not.  I didn't meet that just in denominations who ostensibly (and in fact as well as by their own rules) should have welcomed me; I met it in my own denomination as well.  But one person stands out in my memory:  a person so personally vicious towards me, and to my face, a person to whom I was a perfect stranger and who treated me as the embodiment of the threatening Other, that nearly 10 years later I don't pass the area where we met and talked, that I don't shudder as if someone has walked on my grave.

Maybe the worst part of that encounter was talking to fellow clergy, a member of that denomination who urged me to talk to his judicatory, about the experience.  He simply couldn't believe my story, and I know from that point on he decided there was something wrong with me, and it wasn't long after we lost contact; when he finally left town to move to a better position, I heard about it from a mutual friend years after the fact.  He was, at the time, about the only friend in the clergy in town that I had.  These experiences leave deep scars.

What was this man defending?  Why did he all but hate me on sight?  He had been ordained in my denomination, and given it up as a bad arrangement years before I knew that denomination existed, much less had I been ordained into it.   He was determined to keep his new denomination pure from the taint of mine (his old one), and he made it quite clear to me he despised me, because he despised those who had ordained me.  His attack on me was as vicious and personal as he could make it.  He knew my church and my congregation, albeit again from decades earlier, so he decided whatever problems I had there were my fault, and he wouldn't have them contaminating his Church.  Had I been a piece of shit he'd stepped in, he couldn't have treated me with greater disgust.

Not that the judicatory body he represented, nor any of them I approached, were all that interested in my application, either.  This was just the worst experience of a bad experience contacting denominations which supposedly had agreements with my own, only to find no one at a local level was too terribly interested in what the national offices had done, and were implementing their ideas largely by refusing to implement them at all.  I took me years to sort out just how petty, vain, and insecure most of the people I met in the governing bodies of denominations, really were.

It's taken me even more years to figure out why.  And it's because churches now have achieved Madison's ideal; which isn't to say they shouldn't have; it's just to say it's not the paradise Madison might have expected it to be, for the churches or for the larger community.

Despite what Charlie Pierce and others may think, the "god botherers" don't really have the power they wish they had.  The group Mr. Pierce is writing about in his post have been trying in vain for years to get the IRS to pay attention to them so they can take a First Amendment claim to the Supreme Court, where even Antonin Scalia would agree with Mr. Pierce's analysis:  you have a right to free speech; you don't have a right to tax exemption as a charitable institution.  A violation of IRS tax regulations (and the laws they are based on) is not guaranteed to you because of the First Amendment.  A church which is found guilty of violating those regulations won't be shut down; it just won't be tax exempt anymore.  The fact that this group is only now getting attention (and barely got that; I'd heard about their "Pulpit Freedom Sunday" on NPR recently, but I'd forgotten about it again until Mr. Pierce's post.  I forgot about it simply because it never made the news after that.) is a sign of how pathetic and pointless their effort is.  Undoubtedly the IRS has learned that these cases are hardly worth pursuing.*  I wish this group luck in ever getting its wish granted.  And now I'll turn from giving them any more attention than they deserve.

Part of the problem with Madison's dictum in modern times is that we don't have ecclesiastical establishments of the type Madison was familiar with; and we never have.  The Puritans came closest to establishing one (Rome never had that authority here, despite the best efforts of Spain), but it didn't last long (except, perhaps, culturally).  The ecclesiastical heritage of the Puritans was the Congregationalists, a church determined to have no church hierarchy at all (or, indeed, to even appear to be a "church."  I have a friend, a retired Congregationalist pastor, who proudly showed off his "meeting house" to me when we first met.  It was a point of pride with him that, by removing the hymnals, the space could be used by a Jewish congregation, because there were no religious symbols in sight  except for the Christian crosses embossed on those book covers.).  I suppose the ban on Christmas in the Puritan villages was a form of "ecclesiastical establishment," but since they have Christmas trees now even in Boston, that didn't last long.  And while the observance of Christmas actually came northward from the Episcopalian South, we no longer associate the South with Anglicans, and even the Southern Baptists resent too much central authority over how they worship or what they believe (the noose has been tightening over the years, but the ability of the Baptists to control even dry counties in Texas is slipping more and more each year).

It's the decline in ecclesiastical authority that leads to the situation in most church judicatories today.  People supposedly with power have no power at all, and virtually no reason for being in positions of authority.  Authority is granted, it is not generated; and most church denominations can barely get the grant of attention from the larger society, much less gain any authority over it.  Consider the UCC "ejector" ads from a few years ago, seen more often in TeeVee stories about them not being accepted by major networks, than as advertisements themselves.  I think I only saw them on the internet.  I'm sure I never saw them on TeeVee.  Think about the ability of any "mainstream" denomination to get its message out about any public issue.    When the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church speaks; who listens?  When the UCC in Cleveland issues a press release on the death penalty, or on any issue of social justice, who reports on it?  What's the position of Presbyterian Church U.S.A. or the United Methodists on any public issue, and who really cares? 
You may find out if you go to their websites and look around, but if you don't, they are proof that if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear, whether or not it makes a sound is irrelevant.

As for the so-called leaders of the Religious Right, Jerry Falwell is dead, and the issues he championed are largely abandoned, or carry on entirely without him because they began without him, and never needed him to keep them viable.  You may know what Jerry Falwell thought.  But aside from harass Bill Clinton, what did he really do?  Shift the political debate of the country?  Really?  People weren't already predisposed to think the way Falwell spoke?  Was he even a political leader in any sense of the word?  Karl Rove and George W. Bush famously took Falwell's crowd for a ride for 8 years, never doing anything for them while insisting they were the only friends those people had in D.C.   Republicans still make a trip to Liberty University, but it's largely a Republican base thing; Liberty University doesn't figure in any political discussions after the primaries are over.  Ralph Reed was worse than Falwell and Pat Robertson combined.  Reed fleeced the flock better than any Marjoe-wannabe could do, and he's still alive and a respected spokesperson for the "religious right" (which, like the Moral Majority, was always neither), or at least for the right wing that claims religion as their reason to be a voice in the national discussion.  Despite the fact he isn't even ordained (he abandoned it to run for office) Pat Robertson is still treated like a religious figure, when he isn't discarded as a clown.  His political impact was even more negligible than Falwell's.  You may have heard of this group promoting "Pulpit Freedom Sunday."  But have they really had any impact on the national discussion?  And are they really likely to?

Yes, they reflect the sentiments of certain segments of American society; but what power do they really have?  More than the mainline denominations, I'll grant you.  But not nearly so much as the bothered by the god botherers crowd gives them credit for.  In fact, it's a curious kind of situation, watching the small group so annoyed with religious people engaging in public life; it's like watching "The Departed," when you realize the cops and the robbers are basically the same people, and they're playing a game nobody else is involved in; not directly.  The robbers assassinate cops, and the cops assassinate robbers; and in the end, the cops assassinate cops, and robbers assassinate robbers.  And the difference between them is, one side gets paid by taxpayers, the other side extorts its money from store owners, but both claim, under penalty of punishment, to be providing a good and necessary service that they people paying cannot, or had better not try to, do without.

So it is with the god botherers in politics, and their discontents.

So I'm not terribly discontent with the crowd insisting the IRS pay attention to them so they can have their day in the Supreme Court.  It's almost sad, really, because I've seen these people up close, and while they mean well, they're just misguided, think they're important (to borrow a phrase).  They want to be an institution; they want to have some power.  And that's where their troubles begin.

In the church, this is visible among the US Bishops, who don't like that the nuns on the bus have slipped the leash, and don't like that what has been accepted law on insurance coverage for non-religious employees of non-religious institutions, is, well...the law.  The Bishops wants some authority; they want to matter again.  They want to be the princes of the church who can act like princes in the world; or at least draw a line around their church that extends a few more meters out, and shaves off a bit more from the world so the circle of the heilege, or the pure and untainted, covers a little more ground.  It was the same impulse that drove the man at the judicatory to all but spit in my face over lunch; to vilify a stranger whom he despised just because he wanted to keep his little bit of heaven free of taint, just because he had the power to crush someone and by God! (!) he was going to use it!  Think about it a moment; in this world, what other power do clergy have, except to make life miserable for other clergy?  What authority do they wield, except to decide who can be a member of the clergy club, and who cannot?  The Bishops have been roundly excoriated on how they handled that; desperate for members, they let anybody in, and kept them in at all costs.  Unable to correct that error, unable to close the barn door on a barn that has already blazed to the ground, they turn to other arenas to project their power and assert their relevance.  Clergy in denominations, clergy who no longer have pulpits, who know they no longer have and never really had power, exert the feeble power they have against clergy they can punish, clergy then can blame for restive congregations and declining membership and disappearing churches.  They have no authority in society, no respect, not even any consideration from the wider world, and they resent this imagined loss bitterly.  It's the only explanation I have for the outright nastiness I encountered, for the pure disdain I experienced.  I was often accused of being as mean and vindictive as the lawyer I formerly was, especially by church members.  But I never encountered such venom, such bitterness, such vileness, as when I was in the pulpit; and I never knew so much resistance, so much willingness to make me the scapegoat of everyone's problems, as I experienced when I found myself between church members and the clergy who was supposed to support me (but who threw me to the wolves in front of my own church council as soon as he could.  That was another experience I'd as soon forget forever.  People who say life in corporations is cutthroat don't realize that's not the only place where politics turns nasty and where knives in the back are quite common.)

The cruelty, the meanness, the venom, is, of course, in inverse proportion to the amount of power and authority these people have.

My church members, the ones who were most determined that I go and leave them in charge, had no power at all in their lives.  Their world had changed around them; the church they grew up in, the center of the community, left behind a huge building which most people passed without noticing.  The community that had supported it had grown old, died, moved out, and turned the area over to strangers:  new people (immigrants from Mexico and South America, from Vietnam and Korea), people who weren't at all interested in the history of a German Protestant church.  The problems of that church were peculiar, but then everybody's problems, like all politics, are local.  Having lost all that power they thought they had grown up with, having found themselves in a world where others made the decisions and even the economic vitality of their parent's neighborhood was determined by corporations who moved in, then out, of the area, they struggled with their weakness, and they turned it into anger.  The church hierarchy was faring little better.  Membership in churches has been in sharp decline since the post WWII peak.  Church "authorities" find themselves caught between restive and aging congregations which resent sending any money away from their locale almost as much as they resent giving any money to their locale, and the only communication many have is with church members complaining about their pastors.  Sooner or later you decide the problem is with the pastors, and the best way to rest easy is to remove the problems.  That this is the problem of the Hydra and all you are doing is cutting off a head, does not change the prevailing sentiment.  I've seen this not only in my own personal career, but in the careers of other clergy.

I've also seen the same pattern with political partisans.  Individuals at the top of a national party ticket, from Presidents down to Senators, can't afford to be screaming ideologues demanding the world bend to their desires.  We've seen a few get elected, at the Senatorial level, but they are far outweighed by the somber men who understand the complexities of a nation:  Joe Biden is a more appropriate figure for the Senate than Rand Paul, and even Rand Paul seems reasonable compared to the ravings of Newt Gingrich or Todd Akin.  At the lowest level, the level of the true believers in politics, you get the most invective, the greatest anger that power isn't wielded to vanquish their enemies and sow the ground of their houses with salt.  The less powerful people are, but the more powerful they perceive they should be, the meaner and nastier they become.

What Madison describes is not peculiar to religious institutions at all.  Any institution eventually turns against even its membership, largely because the leadership sees only ignorance and servility in the membership.  "Surely the people are sheeple!" was the common cry of all the anti-Bush forces in his second term.  The least influential partisans were the most convinced that the political leadership of the opposition was indolent and, except for them, the people were stupid and passive sheep.  What did this spawn except superstition, bigotry, and persecution?  All Republicans were fools; all of America's enemies were evil and deserving of torture and worse (if worse is possible); all Muslims want to see us dead ("us" being Americans almost exclusively); the Administration wielded strange and mysterious powers which could only be broken by outright revolution, a revolution as inevitable as sunrise or the Messiah, and which would just as inevitably bring our salvation (yes, I do hang out in the wrong precincts of the intertubes).

One does wonder, too, what "purity and efficacy" of religion means to Madison, if it is meant to be confined solely to the private life of the individual.  What is the point of corporate worship, then?  Even the Society of Friends gathers together to achieve spiritual enlightenment.  Is that enlightenment meant to be confined to the meeting house?  Does it not go forth into the world at least as a pacifism that resists forced military enrollment in time of war?  Did Dr. King, or the Berrigan brothers, or the Nuns on the Bus, sully the "purity and efficacy" of religion with their actions?  Or do we like them because we agree with them, because we benefit from their sacrifice, or at least approve of their politics?  Has the church in now 17 centuries (by Madison's reckoning) done nothing but destroy religion?  If so, where did King and the Berrigans and the Nuns come from?  Government?

I would like to guide this to a logical conclusion, an unassailable point, but I can't seem to do that.  If I have one, it is what I consider the bedrock truth of the power of powerlessness.  Madison is right:  the church is better off divorced from the civil power.  But by that I don't mean banished from the public square; I mean merely the Church fares better when it is not wed to the power of the state.  It also does well when it challenges the state.  Yes, there are always people who will insist that what they believe comes from God and therefore is the only guiding principle the government should be allowed.  But there are always other people to disagree with that sentiment, and while I knew bigots who hated African Americans simply for being black, those bigots seldom based their hatred on religious grounds.  Sometimes it was an excuse, but seldom was it the trigger for their viciousness.  That hatred was bone deep; unfortunately, their religious convictions were always more on the surface.  Perhaps had they allowed their religion to penetrate to the bone it might have changed their hatred.  And after all, it was religion which drove them from the public square, which forced the community to take account of the humanity of those we had collectively treated as wholly other.  And it did it by teaching people their power was in their powerlessness; that their authority lay in the defiance of illegitimate authority through acceptance of arrest, beatings, dogs, and water cannons.

That powerlessness is the true fruit of Christianity.


*as an aside, I marvel as well at the ignorance of people who insist churches are rich and should pay their share of taxes.  A few are well off  (I know a church with finer TV cameras than the local studios can afford), but most are not even property rich.  Ever tried to sell a church building?  It's pretty much useful for one purpose, and even in the best of times banks don't like to lend to churches to buy established buildings.  Who is "the church," especially Protestant ones with no hierarchy?  So who is the bank making the loan with?  An ever changing cohort of people who might split up over the decision to carpet the sanctuary?  

Most churches are valuable for the land they sit on (perhaps), but who wants to pay to clear the property down to construction grade?  Churches, like all charitable institutions, have to give money away or they aren't charities, and so not tax exempt.  How much they actually give away is just as much an issue for the Komen Foundation or United Way as it is for the little brown church in the vale.

It's mighty reckless....

"Many of us saw that video where he said it was the first step. If you're a member of the UAW, you know what that means," Barrett declaimed. "If you're a carpenter, or a painter, even if you're not part of a union, you know what that means. It means they're going after the middle class, and the people who want to be middle class. Scott Walker has said he was going to divide and conquer. He has succeeded in dividing. We will show this nation that Scott Walker will never conquer the middle class of America.... It's just cynical. You know that there's something wrong when your governor is raising 70 percent of his money in $250,000 and $500,000 checks.... He says he doesn't want Wisconsin to look like Milwaukee, and he insults the city he led for nine years. I'll tell you this — I don't want Wisconsin to look like Texas."

Well, there it is.   And I swear, until recently, I had no idea Gail Collins had written a book about politics in Texas.  But, of course, this is why we need one:

Eventually, I asked him why he was here, at the Serb Hall, supporting Scott Walker, whose politics were far more in tune with the people who are trying to strangle the postal service than they are with the people who still work there. Phil told me that it was about his sister-in-law. "The problem is that, when you start handing out free health care out to teachers, that annoys me to no end," he said. "I never got free health care. My brother's wife is a teacher and I once asked her, when I was getting my teeth worked on, what it cost her and she said, 'Nothing.' It should never get to that point where somebody's getting free health care. Something's way out of whack there."

That's why everything in the country is starting to look like Texas.  Because it should never get to the point that somebody's getting something for free.

In Texas, we pretty much resent the fact that anybody else has a functional government, at all.  I thought about that again the other night, because I'd said Texas has gotten used to a non-functioning (it would have to improve to be dysfunctional) government in my lifetime.  The fact is, Texas has always had what it wanted:  a government that does next to nothing at all.

Texas has been, since the Civil War, a one-party state.  It was pretty much a one-party state when it was a Republic, so it's in the bones of the place; we drink it in the water.  And I can vaguely recall a parade of lackluster men, all Democrats, who sat in the Governor's office and did....well, pretty much nothing.  It was all they were expected to do.  We may recall "Pappy" O'Daniel, but only because of his connection to the Light Crust Doughboys (yes, the inspiration for the "Soggy Bottom Boys").  We may recall "Ma" Ferguson, but only because she was the first female governor of Texas (no, it wasn't Ann Richards).  In my lifetime it's been John Connally, a man best remembered for being in the car with JFK in Dallas (and later for spending more money than any hopeful in the GOP primaries to get only one delegate to the convention); Preston Smith; Dolph Briscoe, and then some governors who actually tried to do things, such as William Clements (R) and Ann Richards.  But Texas learned its lesson, and made sure after Gov. Miz Ann that the Governor would be a useless and non-embarassing figure head.  So we got Bush, and then Rick Perry (who is in political trouble now because he did embarrass Texas.  That is the one political sin we cannot forgive.).

Don't ask me what Dolph Briscoe and Preston Smith did; nobody cared.  But what I'm saying is, this ain't quite right:

Not until she visited Texas, that proud state of big oil and bigger ambitions, did Gail Collins, the best-selling author and columnist for the New York Times, realize that she had missed the one place that mattered most in America’s political landscape. Raised in Ohio, Collins had previously seen the American fundamental divide as a war between the Republican heartland and its two liberal coasts. But the real story, she came to see, was in Texas, where Bush, Cheney, Rove, & Perry had created a conservative political agenda that is now sweeping the country and defining our national identity. Through its vigorous support of banking deregulation, lax environmental standards, and draconian tax cuts, through its fierce championing of states rights, gun ownership, and, of course, sexual abstinence, Texas, with Governor Rick Perry’s presidential ambitions, has become the bellwether of a far-reaching national movement that continues to have profound social and economic consequences for us all. Like it or not, as Texas goes, so goes the nation.

Which isn't to say it's wrong; just that Texas hasn't really changed, and the political agenda created here existed long before Bush and Cheney got hold of it.  After all, OPEC was modeled on the Texas Railroad Commission, the state agency that over saw the oil bidness in Texas for decades.  Long before Texas had any political influence, it had plenty of economic influence, and the TRRC was part of that.  What has changed is the desire of the GOP to run things as they are done (now) in Texas; and what's really changed, is that this isn't about the Tea Party anymore.  In fact, it probably never was.

Let me try to explain.  Texas began its political life as a debtor's haven.  The Texas Constitution includes a homestead exemption which means no homeowner can lose their house for debts which are not:  a) taxes; b) the mortgage; or c) a lien for work done to improve the homestead.  A widow (or widower) has a survivor's interest in the homestead which lasts as long as the survivor is alive, and there's nothing the heirs can do about it.  It used to be a requirement of Texas law that, when it came time to sell the homestead, the wife had to be questioned separately, apart from her husband, to ascertain that she was freely and of her own accord agreeing to the sale (she still has to agree, but the rather paternalistic separate meeting with the lawyer is no longer necessary).

This meant, of course, there were no second or third mortgages in Texas.  But Texas also has broad protections over what can be seized to pay debts.  Personal property to a certain value is exempt, but so are specific items of personal property (the list runs rather long in the statutes).  Wages cannot be garnished, except for child support payments.  It is, frankly, hard to collect on a civil judgment against an individual in Texas.  The homestead exemption runs to 10 acres inside the city limits, and 100 acres outside of it.  There is no limit on the value of the house.  George Bush managed to change some of that, and I'm still not sure it was a good thing.

It is now possible, thanks to W., to take out a second mortgage on a homestead in Texas.  One might say, in good times, that accessing one's equity in a home is a good thing.  But considering how many people lost their homes in the S&L collapse in the '80's, and that without second mortgages, it's never seemed like a good thing to me.  Who it benefits, of course, is the lenders.  In fact, there's an obvious linkage between that piercing of the homestead exemption and mortgage backed securities:  they are both ways to play with property as if it were stocks on the market, rather than shelter and, well, a home.

Remember Enron, and what it did to the electricity market in California?  Bush liked that, too.  But then, as I say, the TRRC was controlling the oil market when that market was primarily Texas, for a long time.  We have a history, in other words, of using government to prop up business, and business likes it.  The Texas Constitution was born in an anti-railroad./anti-banker fever, but that quickly cooled.  A few decades back, when there was a renewed effort to fix the clanking 19th century constitution (which really is a mess; every two years voters have to amend it after the Lege meets (for only six months every two years) to get almost any laws enacted.  Nobody ever knows what they are voting for, and most people don't bother to vote, but the amendments pass anyway.), a businessman led the effort to oppose reform.  His reasoning:  "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."  And from a businessman's point of view, there's very little that's broke about Texas government.

And that last stab at Constitutional reform was when George W. was still mostly known as the drunken scion of Poppy, who was still an Ambassador or running the CIA or something.

So this didn't start with Rove and Cheney and Shrub.  It's just gotten worse since then.

On the other hand, Texas is now the second most populous state in the nation, behind only California; and it's getting bigger all the time.  A state with that many people in it is bound to finally start throwing some weight on the national stage, no matter what its ambitions are.  The upside is, naked ambition doesn't work:  Rick Perry sank faster than a stone on the water on the national stage.  He gets elected in Texas because he's a Republican, not because he's a good politician (a Democrat getting elected since William Clements was governor would be the mark of a great politician; just ask Ann Richards).  Perry is the distraction; Perry is the freak show.  Forget Perry.  The real power here is Grover Norquist.  Just ask Molly Ivins:

Norquist is just the sailor you want in the crew when contemplating the disaster about to engulf the public schools [in Texas]. He is behind the national anti-tax movement, and 38 Texas Republican legislators have now signed his pledge to never, ever raise taxes, without exceptions, including for catastrophic emergencies. Norquist himself is a noted contributor to the sweet science of state governance, saying last year: "We are trying to change the tones in the state capitols and turn them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship. ... Bipartisanship is just another name for date rape." 

 I pause only to note this was written 8 years ago, long before the current dyspepsia about the "Tea Party" and the "divided" Congress.  Ms. Ivins went on to connect this directly to Texas:

Texas is the National Laboratory for Bad Government, and think what a splendid opportunity we now have to completely ruin our public schools by doing absolutely nothing. Our schools are funded by the Robin Hood plan adopted in 1993, which arrives at an approximate level of fairness between rich and poor districts by taking money from rich districts and giving them to poor ones.

            Local property taxes have skyrocketed, while state lawmakers complacently brag they haven't raised taxes. The state's share of the cost of public education has dropped from 52 percent in 1980 to 38 percent today. The state, which has an infinitely larger lax base than local districts, may not have raised state taxes, but they have sure as a by-God raised your local taxes.

            This cannot continue. Over half of the school districts are already within 1 percent of the top tax rate allowed by state law. They can raise local taxes no further. They are cutting programs, and firing teachers and administrators. More and more are applying for waivers to get their districts exempted from the state requirements that there be no more than 22 pupils per teacher in the first elementary grades, and that was the great triumph of years of school reform efforts. As we have all learned over the long struggle to improve the schools, smaller class size is the one improvement we know works no mater what the other variables are.

            We need at least $10 billion in new taxes to fix this without harming the schools. The alternative is a $2 billion fix patch on the old system that will further decay the schools. So, attention all Americans, the case study beings, right here in Texas, home of so much bad public policy: how to destroy the public schools.

Suffice to say, it did get worse.  Here's how that worked out in the intervening 8 years:

Under pressure from federal courts demanding more equitable school funding, Texas revised how it pays for education through high school in 2006. The state enacted laws to cut local property taxes and expand a levy on business income. While the recession crimped state revenue in 2008 and 2009, companies using loopholes avoided paying as much as forecast.  

In 2011, Perry was proud of a budget that was described as doing this:

 Rep. Sylvester Turner of Houston, the highest-ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee: “This budget will dismantle the educational infrastructure in the State of Texas.

And it has; the layoffs of teachers and staff in Texas last year was massive.  The budget cut $4 billion from education funding for two years.  And there's no sign any of that money is coming back in the next session.  And Gail Collins' book and interview with Rachel provides ample evidence of how poor the Texas education system is now.  The result is fairly clear, but no one wants to admit it:

Lawmakers on the Public Education Committee were alarmed that so many of the first ninth-graders to take the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, test this year performed poorly. They branded many aspects of the implementation of the new test sloppy.

Yes, STAAR is a joke of a test, as is any "standardized test."  But who is surprised when an underfunded school system produces students incapable of passing a test, any test?  The test is only part of the problem, but it will get all the blame.  I can't go on.  I'll go on.

Texas is now a nightmare dreamed by Samuel Beckett.

I mentioned, at the beginning, that resentment is a driving force in American politics; but it always has been.  Texas started out as a debtor's paradise; what better origin to breed resentment of what others have that you don't?  Of course, not all Texans are like that, or Planned Parenthood wouldn't be run by Ann Richards daughter, and LBJ would never have waged a War on Poverty.  And resentment is not peculiar to Texas by any means.  But resentment has always taken a curious form here.  There's a reason we don't like being embarrassed by our politicians, why that is the unforgivable political sin.  It's because we don't like being mocked.  And being a debtor's haven, we resent anyone who has more than we do, unless of course they are business owners who have "earned" it.  That's pretty universal; if I can't earn it, why should you have it?  The special form of resentment in Texas comes from this sense of inferiority, of being a debtor's haven, a last redoubt, the final refuge of those who couldn't make it anywhere else, and don't come here to reverse their fortunes, so much as to escape the consequences of seeking fortunes.

Texas, in other words, is full of people who feel like they got the raw end of the deal, and now they only want to be left alone.  A debtor's haven pretty much guarantees that.  The government won't help you, but it will see to it that you are left alone.  Texas has always been a draw for people with nowhere else to go; it makes for a mighty peculiar culture, though.  It makes us mighty touchy about how we are perceived.  We really don't like public figures who make us look foolish.  That's the kind of attention we came here to get away from; even those of us who were born here.

Divide and conquer, of course, has worked spectacularly well in Texas.  Rick Perry knows that:

As Texans, we always take care of the least among us.

The frail, the young, the elderly on fixed incomes, those in situations of abuse and neglect, people whose needs are greater than the resources at their disposal – they can count on the people of Texas to be there for them.

We will protect them, support them and empower them, but cannot risk the future of millions of taxpayers in the process. We must cut spending to keep our economic engine on track.

He never precisely identifies who that abstract group of faceless frail, young, and elderly are, nor what protection they will be offered (or how adequate it will be).  And then he weighs them against the taxpayers, and he finally decided Texas schoolchildren and Planned Parenthood should take it in the neck.  But then, those people:  poor women who need healthcare; teachers; students; don't deserve any help from Texas.  Or at least, not enough to do them any good.  And if Texas' "economic engine" is measured by unemployment, it's still pretty much tracking with the national average.   Any real difference can best be attributed to the energy sector of the economy, especially oil and gas.  It certainly is a stretch to say that Texas government policy has anything to do with it, since the only government policy in Texas is:  do as little as humanly possible.

Some of this, of course, is funny, because now the "liberal media" is discovering it again.  Gail Collins has an article in the current New York Review of Books which contains absolutely no new information at all, and certainly nothing I didn't already know from reading Molly Ivins (who is much funnier, and a better writer, too.)  Yes, Texas still dominates the public school textbook industry, and yes the textbooks they choose are disastrous.  The only response I can make is that my daughter is a product of Texas public schools, and she is not ignorant about evolution or economics, for that matter.  I've found I'm far more an influence on her than the school textbooks she never read were.  Did anybody read the textbooks in school?  I have a vague memory of reading some, and I never got a decent education in Marxism or economic theory, for that matter; not in public schools.  But there were libraries and bookstores and now, the internet; not to mention intelligent teachers (and some not so intelligent, to be honest).  My daughter was lucky enough to be in a school district where they were less concerned with ideology than with instruction.  I attended Texas schools when the Gablers were in full flower, and I still managed to learn what they would have had me never know.  It's bad, but it's not the end of civilization as we know it.

Gary Wills is closer to the mark:

Those who think there is no difference between the parties should look at the state that no longer elects any Democrats, the Texas described so well by Gail Collins, with its schools attacking evolution, its religious leaders denying there was ever any separation of church and state, and its cowboy code of justice. If people like Professor Unger, people too highly principled for us folks who muck around in the real world, get their way, they will not give us a prince turned into a frog, but America turned into Texas.

 As the late Ms. Ivins said, "I love the state of Texas, but I regard that as a harmless perversion on my part and would not, in the name of common humanity, try to foist my pathology off on anyone else."  The Tex-Mex is good, the people are friendly, the beer is cold, the music foot-stompin', but the politics?  Heaven forbid.  What I take from Mr. Wills' critique, which is about politics and not just about Texas, is that you have to be willing to get your hands dirty in the world, if you are going to complain about the world.  Pardon the seeming hard turn, but this is a lesson that goes back to the Desert Fathers.  As Thomas Merton pointed out, they went to the desert because society (Rome was collapsing) was falling all around them, and in the shipwreck they could only grab a piece of floating debris and hang on.  Thomas Cahill's argument about how the Irish saved civilization is similar, as the Irish missionaries came in from the fringe of the collapsing empire toward its center, bringing literacy, compassion, and spiritual discipline with them (interesting how many "Catholic" practices common today came from Irish Christian spirituality). And no, I don't mean now to be comparing the problems of the country as seen through the lens of Texas with the collapse of civil order.  That expectation is sheer nonsense.  But if you can't delve into the world and reshape it at the foundations, you have to stay out of the world altogether.  Mr. Wills' article is about Professor Robert Unger's inability to be either hot or cold, and his attempts to remain heilege; pure; unscathed.  Nice work if you can get it.

But you can't, in this world.  The Desert Fathers struggled with their own human nature.  It was enough struggle, just tending their own gardens (read the number of  stories where they have to remind the other monastics to stay out of each others business, if you doubt me).  And if you want to engage the world, you have to do it on the world's terms.  You have to get messy with politics, and make compromises, and try to accomplish something rather than nothing at all.  But I think in that course you have to prize humility above hubris, effort above accomplishment, and purity of heart above purity of will.  The problem with the purists on either side is, as Reinhold Niebuhr said of revivalist preachers:

They never seem to realize how many of the miseries of mankind are due not to malice but to misdirected zeal and unbalanced virtue.  They never help the people who corrupt family love by making the family a selfish unit in society or those who brutalize industry by excessive devotion to the prudential virtues. (Reinhold Niebuhr, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic, Louisville, Kentucky:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 1980, p. 45.)

 Niebuhr links this to power, wondering if power is possible without sacrificing some measure of truth.  He would probably stumble over my insistence on the power of powerlessness.  Still, it is a question of power, and the power here resides in the abstraction:  the "family as a....unit in society," or "excessive devotion to the prudential values."  As ever, looking for something outside of us to provide salvation for us, to save us from ourselves so we are relieved of responsibility for our actions, miserable creatures that we think we are.

The problems of Texas, or of politics in America, are of the same ilk:  an insistence that the right ideology will usher in the millenium, or at least save us from our humanity.  Rick Perry speaks in comfortingly abstract bromides about compassion for the poor, with no more regard for poor people than he has for rattlesnakes.  I am wary of people who come promising salvation, through governmental mechanisms or religious promises; just as I am wary of the claim that someone somewhere is getting something for free, and I'm gettin' nothin'.  Two sides of the same coin, and I'm tired of trading in that currency.  Give Caesar what has Caesar's image, and God what has God's image, and the rest will take care of itself.

And the sign?  Seriously, it's an anti-litter campaign.  Get over it.