In a new article on the Relevant Magazine website, The Church and Domestic Abuse, reporter Lyz Lenz describes in chilling detail how conservative churches keep women in abusive relationships. Citing the sanctity of marriage, women’s duty to submit to their husbands, or the general Christian obligation to forgive wrongdoing, these faith communities wholly ignore the power imbalances that were the primary focus of Jesus’ own moral teachings. Lenz writes:
I can’t tell you her name or how I know her. This is because she is still living with her husband despite years of emotional and physical abuse. He’s cheated on her and cleaned out their bank account to spend on drugs, pornography and online gambling. She left him briefly after a young girl accused her husband of molestation, but she went back to him after a week. Why? I asked her.
She told me that a woman spoke at their church a couple weeks before. The speaker explained how her husband used to be violent, but she didn’t leave him because she knew that God’s plan for a marriage was that it should last forever. Once, the husband’s violence put their baby in the hospital. When he saw what he’d done, he repented and was never violent again.
“That’s why I went back,” the woman told me. “What if it doesn’t end?” I asked. But the woman didn’t answer. The conversation was over.
According to the Department of Justice, almost one-quarter of Americans were raped and/or physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner or date at some time in their lifetime. Jocelyn Andersen, a Christian domestic violence survivor and author of Woman Submit! Christians & Domestic Violence, argues that the Church’s teachings on women and submission have given rise to an epidemic of domestic violence among Christians. In her book Quiverfull, journalist Kathryn Joyce argues that the Christian belief system, which focuses on women’s submission and the headship of men, encourages the abuse of women. In his book Domestic Violence, What Every Pastor Needs to Know, Al Miles reveals that the theological training and beliefs given most clergy can actually contribute to increased violence and abuse of the victim. Christianity, according to some, is the problem….
Later in the article, Lenz tells the story of a woman who was ostracized by her church for trying to divorce her abuser:
“I was raised in the church and fully intended on marrying someone who fully shared my faith,” says Lisa Van Allen, a licensed therapist and owner of Van Allen and Associates. “I went to a Bible school and came home and met the man who would be my husband at church. There was a total of three years from the time we started dating until we were married. ”
Not everything was perfect. Van Allen found out later that there were some people in the church who knew her husband had problems, but no one told her about them at the time. She says: “When it got closer to the wedding, I had some concerns. He struggled with intimacy. Anything with touch or opening up, he pulled away.” Van Allen took her concerns to her pastor who told her that they were just pre-wedding jitters and all the trouble would go away once they were married.
But it didn’t go away. “In the car on the way to the honeymoon, I knew I had made a horrible mistake,” she says. Her husband began to exhibit bizarre behavior on the honeymoon: He locked himself in the bathroom and ranted and raved in front of the mirror. When they got home, the physical abuse began. Again, Van Allen took her concerns to her pastor, and he told her she was nagging and henpecking. She talked to her pastor a third time he told her, “You go home and you obey your husband and everything will be fine.”
The violence escalated. At one point, he exploded and pushed her down the stairs. Van Allen tore a ligament and hurt her back. She told her parents who confronted her husband, but it didn’t help. “The way I was raised,” Lisa says, “divorce was never supposed to be an option.” Van Allen and her husband moved and went to a new church, but there she experienced the same accusations and stonewalling she endured at her previous church. “No one did anything,” she recalls. “Most of the time I was put down, I was told I was ‘pushy’ and not being ‘in submission.'” The violence escalated and Lisa reached out to a professor she was working with in graduate school. He got her husband into a drug trial and his personality improved. “Toward the end of the trial,” Van Allen says, “I went to the pastor and I told him how sick my husband was and how the drugs had helped, but that I knew he would go off them. I asked them for help and again, they blew me off, like they did before.”
Van Allen stayed in her marriage for 10 years because of the advice of her church. “It was hard for me,” she says. “I was raised to believe that pastors were second to God and that wives were supposed to be submissive and that divorce was not an option.” But that changed the night her husband tried to kill her. When her church found out that she had filed for divorce, they disciplined her. “They told me I could no longer serve. They told me I could come if I wanted, but I could only sit on the pew. I couldn’t sing anymore, I couldn’t play the piano, I couldn’t work with the kids. I was treated like a pariah.”
“Looking back,” Van Allen says, “what [the church] did to me was abuse. They used their power to control me—to not help me but to add to my pain.” After the divorce, Van Allen left the church and went on what she calls a spiritual journey, visiting and working with different churches. When her husband started stalking her, those churches provided refuge. Van Allen recalls once when her husband broke into her apartment; she fled to the Episcopal church she had only recently started attending. “The pastor there sheltered me and went with me to make sure my apartment was safe.”
Read the whole story here.
For good advice on the difference between healthy Christian forgiveness and submission to abuse, I recommend the book Don’t Forgive Too Soon by Dennis, Sheila and Matthew Linn, and the Boundaries book series by Henry Cloud and John Townsend.
“They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.” (Matthew 23:4, TNIV)
Author Archives: Jendi Reiter
The Guardian’s Andrew Brown Makes Christian Case for Gay Marriage
In today’s blog post, Andrew Brown, a religion columnist for Britain’s The Guardian newspaper, makes a pithy case for why Christians should support gay marriage. Brown deftly avoids both the liberal fallacy that sex between consenting adults has no public moral dimension, and the conservative fallacy that gays are just disordered straight people.
Brown observes that before the issue was forced into the open, the Church of England quietly ordained gay men who were in stable long-term partnerships, on the theory that they made better priests than potentially promiscuous singles of either orientation. Writing about one London bishop who had this sub rosa policy, Brown says it is important to recognize that “it wasn’t in the least bit liberal. He did not believe that the sex lives of his clergy could be a private matter, still less that they ought to be. He would have agreed with St Paul that sex could be so disruptive and so dangerous that it must be channelled.”
This insight about sex informs the conservative Anglicans who feel that gay marriage is a threat to the family. They’re protecting important values, they’re just wrong about where the real threat lies. Brown continues:
When they say that they are defending the family, they are sincere. They understand that families matter, and that restraints have to be put on adult sexual behaviour if children are to be brought up reasonably selflessly. Children need hope and self-discipline: they don’t invent them all by themselves, and if they do they don’t hang on to their inventions without encouragement. They learn them from the adults around, who can only teach by example.
And the adults, in turn, keep themselves on the strait (not straight) path of righteousness partly because they are afraid of being found out. It may be reprehensible to do the right thing for a squalid and ignoble reason, but it is better than to do the wrong thing for a squalid reason. So one of the great slogans of the liberal society, that it doesn’t matter what consenting adults do with each other in private, turns out to be false. It does matter what other people do in private, even when they are not parents. Our natural prurient interest in gossip reflects this fact in a rather repulsive way. Other people’s sex lives are a legitimate matter of public interest – not just in the News of the World sense that they interest the public, much though they do – but because they also affect everyone around them, and influence their behaviour as well as their feelings.
Thus far the strong case for a conservative sexual morality. But there is a final twist. The stronger the case is for reining in sexual appetites, the more wicked it becomes to scapegoat gay people, and in particular open, monogamous ones like Gene Robinson. They are not the problem. As the wonderful New Yorker cartoon has it “Gays and lesbians aren’t a threat to my marriage. It’s all the straight women who sleep with my husband.”
What the Akinola-ites deny is that there is such a thing as a natural homosexual. To them, a gay man is merely a turbocharged straight man, like the Earl of Rochester, who boasted of his penis that “Woman nor man, nor aught its fury stayed.” On the other hand, what many of their opponents deny is that there must be painful restraints on our sexual (and other) appetites if civilisation is to survive. It’s hard to tell which are furthest from Christianity. But the people who believe in unrestricted sexual freedom tend to grow out of it; the pleasures of scapegoating and self-satisfaction only increase with age.
(Emphasis mine.)
Transgender Civil Rights Video: “Everyone Matters”
As the Massachusetts legislature considers the Transgender Nondiscrimination Bill, a coalition of activist groups (MassEquality, GLAD, and the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition) has put together this moving and informative 10-minute video about the lives of transpersons and their need for civil rights protections:
Self-Care as Lenten Discipline
I give up strange things for Lent. During a high-pressure year in college, I gave up my superego. Another year, I stopped going to church, because arguments over theology were making me prideful and distracted. The goal of these counterintuitive resolutions was always to jolt myself out of legalism, to develop a healthy sense of humor about my so-called good behavior and start living in God’s grace.
But this year, I forgot all that. I made big plans. Lent was the equivalent of a corporate productivity retreat. Six weeks! Surely that would be enough time to write a book on gay theology, work on my novel, be a good friend to everyone on Facebook, and (oh, right) do my job.
Now I am cranky, exhausted, yelling at the telephone, and dreaming about being the unpopular contestant on “Stylista”.
It is hard for me to believe that the world, my world anyhow, will not come to an end if I do what I really want to do: dial back my social life and service projects so I can be alone with God and my novel. I can’t pretend that I am closing the door and turning off the phone for the benefit of anyone but myself. “People aren’t supporting me,” I say, when I’m actually the one who isn’t telling them what I need–because I’m afraid that they aren’t strong enough, or that they will stop loving me, or that it’s just plain weird to tell a flesh-and-blood person, “I’m sorry, my novel character outranks you.”
My husband, another stunning overachiever, talked to me recently about the discipline of renunciation. He has been increasing the time he spends in meditation, and working on his impatience to change the world all at once. Suddenly, “renunciation” began to sound like a sweet word, a blissful self-indulgence, like getting a massage.
Just as awareness of sin is only tolerable and productive after awareness of being safely held in God’s forgiving love, healthy renunciation requires a prior commitment to one’s own self-worth as a child of God. Just after Ash Wednesday, the womanist blog The Kitchen Table published a wonderful post about how the Lenten call to sacrifice can be mis-heard by women who have been socialized to suppress their own needs. Blogger Melissa Harris-Lacewell wrote:
I was sitting in the audience at an extraordinary event honoring the intellectual contributions of black womanist theologians Katie Cannon, Delores Williams, and Jacquelyn Grant. These womanist foremothers are the sisters who courageously challenged the deep and often destructive assumptions of academic theology and ethics.: assumptions that either ignore or silence black women….
I had been looking forward to this event for a month. It turned out to be the perfect way to spend Ash Wednesday.
These preeminent scholars themselves were not on the panel. Instead, the panel was composed of second generation womanist scholars who were their students: Rev. Dr. Joy Bostic, Dr.Teresa Delgado, and Rev. Lorena Parrish. Together they articulated an ethical and theological vision for black women in America and in the Diaspora.
Their message was a challenging one on the precipice of Lent because at they offered up a message that black women must refuse being transformed into sacrificial lambs for the good of everyone but ourselves.
These women refused to uncritically embrace the notion of sacrifice. Instead they forced us to ask what would happen if we imagine that God and our communities are deeply, unalterably invested in the existence, survival, and thriving of black women. Would a God, a church, a home, or a community that was committed to our survival, our joy, and our redemption be so willing to use and abuse our bodies, our talents, our hearts, and our gifts while offering so little in return?
These sister scholars laid hands on the discomfort I’d felt earlier in the day and lay it bare before the entire gathering. The created new insights by drawing on the work of white feminist scholars, black male liberation theologians, and even traditional church doctrine to craft new meaning from the Christian imperative for Lenten sacrifice.
Dr. Delgado asked us to reconsider the communion assertion: “This is my body which is broken for you.” What if we read that idea in light of contemporary women’s experiences of forced sexual slavery, intimate violence, and soaring HIV infection? It seems that the bodies of poor and black women are indeed broken by and for others.
Dr. Bostic then offered a stunning counterpoint by invoking Toni Morrison’s powerful, woman preacher from Beloved: Baby Suggs Holy. Morrison, through Baby Suggs Holy, calls black men and women to love their flesh and to resist allowing it to be broken. This woman preacher, standing in space she clears for her prophetic witness, encourages black men and women to love their embodied selves. “Here in this here place, we flesh; Flesh that weeps, laughs; Flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it.” The holy act is cherishing and nurturing the self, not denying it, not limiting it, not covering it in sackcloth and ashes.
Yes, I agree with your assessment that as a nation of privilege we are called to sacrifice our consumption and privilege to end oppression and inequality. But as black women we must be careful to complicate and challenge the idea of sacrifice. We have too often internalized this Christian call for self-sacrifice so fully that it became self-denigration. We nail ourselves to a cross just to serve and please others. And others allow us to do it. They smile on our sacrifice, claim that our suffering is redemptive, and enjoy the ways we relieve them of discomfort. They act out their patriarchy and racism all over our lives and we too often accept it as though it is the cross we are supposed to bear in order to prove ourselves worthy of divine love.
From the audience the Rev. Dr. Joanne Terrell reminded us of her work which constructs a new theology of joy and fun. She admonished us that we act as though loving our lives is a sin. We behave as though pleasure and happiness are ungodly. Dr. Terrell sounded like Baby Suggs Holy to me, telling us to dance our way into the arms of a God who loves our audacious, happy, fabulous, whole selves and does not need us to crawl to divinity half-starved and over burdened.
Poem: “Wedded”
This poem of mine was chosen by Chris Forhan as a runner-up for the 2008 Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry from The Broome Review, and also appears in their Spring 2009 issue and on their website.
Wedded
Why can’t the dog and the cat get married,
the postman to the bishop, the nurse to the queen?
In the days when mud was chocolate
we could march the egg cups down the table,
humming that universal tune.
The teddy bear and the piggy bank,
the lightbulb and the tomato.
Not all of these relationships would work out,
as we knew from the sound
of cloth tearing in another room.
Still we imagined,
in those days when peppermint was money,
that a bit of lace thrown over
the cat’s spitting head would make her beautiful,
and a dropcloth would stop the parrot quarreling
with his mirror mate.
We were dizzy with weddings,
even when the books fell to the floor
inky and torn, face-down like bridesmaids
with their mascara running.
Why do the things that were sold together,
the obvious salt and pepper,
rows of rolled socks like dull neighbors,
always go missing?
So we married the glove to the mitten,
in those days when morning was bedtime,
when lunch was rice flung in the street
after the tin-can fugitives,
we matched the boot to the baby’s shoe
and no guests came.
Maureen Sherbondy: “Vanishing Sarah”
This piece first appeared in the Knoxville Writers’ Guild Anthology, Low Explosions: Writings on the Body. Maureen Sherbondy’s collection of short stories and flash fiction, The Slow Vanishing, will be published this fall by Main Street Rag. Visit their New Releases page to buy this book at a pre-order discount price of $9 (normally $13.95). MSR has also published two of Maureen’s poetry chapbooks, After the Fairy Tale and Praying at Coffee Shops.
Vanishing Sarah
Bit by bit, Sarah vanished. It began slowly — a swatch of fingertip tugged off. Everyone wanted something: her five children, her corporate husband, the in-laws, the neighbors, her two terriers, the PTA, her four younger sisters, the church parishioners. They were the takers, and she was the giver; this is the way it had always been. She barely noticed the initial throb of missing fingertip. The dull pain was interrupted by the disappearance of the small toe on her left foot, removed by her husband. Then, an ounce of flesh above her hip, which, really, she didn’t mind, as there had been so much extra flesh since that fourth pregnancy. The removal of flesh was like being gnawed by a very large rat. Chomp chomp. First she swatted the hand of the taker, a PTA parent this time; then she accepted this loss and waved goodbye as the ounce of flesh floated out the open window.
Phones rang endlessly with additional requests: to bake two dozen cupcakes for the school bake sale, volunteer for the book fair, organize the church charity talent show. Then the takers became ruthless. They descended, a swarm of hands and teeth. A finger, wearing her wedding band, floated away from the four-bedroom brick house, and then a large toe left the suburban cul-de-sac. Her slightly bulbous nose sprayed with tiny freckles drifted into the sky, a loss which made smelling the burning cupcakes difficult. She saw twenty freckles in the night sky lit up like red stars.
At night, achy, feeling scattered and lost, she closed her eyes (still intact, she had covered those with palms, no fingers) trying to find a dream where only givers lived. But, piece-by-piece even dreams parted.
When the children and husband and in-laws and PTA and church parishioners searched for Sarah, to ask just one last little favor, all that remained was a stain — a perfumed outline of who she had been.
I’m a Barbie Girl, in a Fallen World
Few things give me such pure, long-lasting happiness as finding a treasure trove of vintage Barbie clothes, as I did yesterday at the Happy Valley gift shop in Northampton. I’m counting the months till the Hadley flea market opens, when I can once again wander the muddy pasture, eating corn dogs and searching for Kens to squire my fashionable girls around. And don’t get me started on the Brimfield antique fair…the only thing that will get me out in the sun in July. (This cold-weather gal even skipped the second half of her Harvard graduation.)
Today, Barbie turns 50. Canada’s CTV has a good history of Barbie’s unusual careers (paleontologist? NASCAR driver?) and photos of how the doll has changed through the decades. Check out SkyNews for “German Chancellor Angela Merkel Barbie” and highlights from the tribute to Barbie at New York Fashion Week.
Of course, Barbie has her detractors. Some feminists argue that the doll, like the fashion industry generally, promotes unhealthy and unrealistic standards of beauty and perpetuates the problem of women being valued for their looks alone. Not so, says Courtney E.Martin, author of a well-regarded book on anorexia, who says girls are influenced much more by whether the adult women in their life have a positive self-image.
Why do I love Barbie? She represents pure femininity, with all its contradictions, pushed to the point of campiness and playful self-parody — as this video shows:
When I’m with my Barbies, I can simply enjoy being a girl. I can pretend that I’m working on narrative structure by inventing elaborate storylines for them — TV show producer Barbie, transgender fashion designer Barbie, 12-step rehab Barbie, closeted evangelical gay teen Barbie, Korean radical feminist ex-stripper Barbie, and the rest. But the truth is, I just love clothes. Frilly, tiny, pink clothes. Gender is performance, and Barbie puts on the show of a lifetime.
Hate Crimes Bill, Prop 8 Update
A brief roundup this morning of some news of interest to gay-rights activists:
Recently I sent an email to my legislators through the MassEquality website, asking them to sign on to the hate-crimes bill that’s pending in Congress. Back when I was a young libertarian, I had my doubts about hate-crimes legislation. As I saw it, violence and bullying were uniformly bad, whether motivated by bias against one’s group affiliation or by plain old personal cruelty. Why did we need to single out some forms of victimization as more worthy of attention than others?
As I now see it, one reason we need the federal government to pay special attention to hate crimes is that the attitudes motivating the bullies may be shared by local law enforcement and juries. This was certainly the case during African-Americans’ fight for civil rights in the mid-20th century.
The office of Senator Ted Kennedy (D, Mass.) sent me back a form email expressing his support for the hate-crimes bill, which I’m reprinting below because it does such a good job of explaining the difference that this legislation would make:
Thank you for your recent letter about the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act. I understand your concerns and appreciate this opportunity to respond.
The United States is a nation founded on the ideals of tolerance and justice for all. We cannot accept violence motivated by bias and hate. According to the FBI, over 9,000 Americans a year are victims of hate crimes, and that number does not include the many hate crimes that go unreported. These crimes have a reach and impact far greater than the individual victim. They target whole communities, attacking the fundamental ideals our nation was founded on.
No member of society deserves to be a victim of a violent crime because of their race, religion, ethnic background, disability, gender, gender identity or sexual orientation. It is long past time for Congress to do more to prevent hate crimes and insist that they be fully prosecuted when they occur. That’s why I’m proud to join Republican Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon in sponsoring the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act.
This important legislation will strengthen the ability of federal, state, and local governments to investigate and prosecute hate crimes. It will authorize the Justice Department to assist in investigating and prosecuting hate crimes, when requested by local authorities. The bill will also provide grants to assist localities in meeting the extraordinary expenses involved in hate crimes cases, and in training law enforcement to combat prevent such crimes. Cities and states will be given the assistance and resources they need to protect all members of society.
The House of Representatives has already passed this needed legislation. It now moves to the Senate, and I look forward to working with my colleagues to approve it soon.
In other news, the California Supreme Court today will be hearing oral arguments in the lawsuit to overturn Proposition 8. Ken Starr, whom you may remember for his fascination with Bill Clinton’s ding-dong, is the lead counsel for the Yes on 8 folks. He will be arguing not only that the ban on gay marriage should stand, but that the court should invalidate the 18,000 same-sex marriages that were performed before the ballot referendum passed.
Starr’s brief in the case repeats all the old lies about how nontraditional families are harmful to children. You know what was harmful to our nontraditional family, Ken? Sexism, secrecy, job discrimination, and religious condemnation.
Sign the Human Rights Campaign’s petition telling anti-GLBT extremists to “End the Lies” here. Their wall of shame shows quotes from other prominent figures in politics, religion and the media who are spreading dangerous misinformation about sexual minorities. There’s also a link to suggest your own favorite offenders. I nominate Brian Camenker of MassResistance, who was kind enough to link to my video of the November 2008 Join the Impact rally. Thanks for the hits, Brian.
DIAGRAM Essay Winner Matthew Glenwood: “John Henry’s Tracks”
Online multimedia journal DIAGRAM, edited by poet Ander Monson, is a uniquely satisfying blend of the surreal, the philosophical, and the darkly humorous. In addition to original poetry and prose, they feature offbeat and obscure images from specialized texts, hence the journal’s name. Ever wondered about the proper proportions of a love seat? Do you know everything you ought to know about the appurtenances of perpendicular drinking? Perhaps you need ideas for unusual leg positions. DIAGRAM has it all.
On a more serious note, Matthew Glenwood, the winner of their most recent Hybrid Essay Contest, offers the rhetorical masterpiece “John Henry’s Tracks”, a passionate piece of writing that draws connections between the famous folk song, plasma-selling, Hurricane Katrina, and the dehumanization of the poor. Sample:
John Henry was a mighty man,
Born with a ten-pound hammer in his hand.
—”John Henry”*
Some dirt-diggers in the Holy Land claimed to have found the bones of Jesus and his family. Jesus’ son, too. We’ll probably never know for sure if those were the holy bones or not. That kind of news could prove ungentle to dreamers. Like finding the remains of Amelia Earhart under her front porch steps, or the skeleton of a baby bird beneath its nest. We would hope for a wider arc to the hero’s journey than bones at the starting point. It could be called bad news if Jesus, the alleged foreman of Heaven, left bones behind. News that says nobody’s going very far.
But it wouldn’t be the whole truth. There is somewhere to go.
We can go sell our plasma for fifty American dollars a week.
The journey to the Biolife Plasma Center in Marquette, Michigan came easy for me. I just had to follow an abandoned train track for a few blocks. The track met the edge of the woods along the shore of Lake Superior; rabbit, chipmunk and deer crisscrossed it as beasties would any ready made trail, for there were no tracks left on that line. The rattle of my mountain bike startled ducks from the shallow waters of the ditch alongside. In winter, the flat, open space doubled as a cross country ski trail. You might say everything ran on that track except for rails.
The region, too poor to have a reason to run its trains, pulled up many of its train tracks, and commerce that way moved at the speed of wild grass. The poverty of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is probably why the plasma company came to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. That and the local college students, the reliably poor. As any farmer with a bad back could tell you, the easiest of tall crops to harvest is one that stoops to meet the hand of the harvester.
At the plasma center, technicians tap into the natural resource of your veins. The process takes, at most, a couple hours, and you’re paid for it. It’s easy money, and couldn’t come much easier; all you have to do is exist. The plasma company calls itself a “donation center”, but really it is a selling center. Poor people coming to sell the one possession they unquestionably own: the materials of their being. Take away those materials and the world would have no more poor.
Our folk songs say that John Henry could drive steel harder and faster than any man. The job of a steel driver was to pound holes in rock by hammering a long metal drill held and rotated by another man known as a shaker. Dynamite was then dropped into those holes—tunnels blasted into mountain stone. Steel driving was done for the mean benefit of the train companies laying track across the nation. In other versions of the song, steel driving was intermixed with pounding spike into the rail lines.
One day a salesman brought a new steam-driven drill to the line. John Henry, fearing for his job and for the jobs of his fellow rail workers, challenged the machine to a contest. John Henry declared to his captain:
Lord, a man aint nothin’ but a man
But before I let that steam-drill beat me down
I’m gonna die with a hammer in my hand
John Henry won. But after beating the machine, he suffered a heart attack and died. That’s to say, he could do no more work for the train company.
Like Jesus, no one can prove the John Henry of legend. Some stories say he was an ex-slave working for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway during the Reconstruction days of the South, following the Civil War. People disagree on where, and if, the events of the song took place. One man thinks the contest of hammers happened in Talcott, West Virgina. But everybody knows that you’ve got to bite the coins that come out of Talcott.
About twenty years ago, a man in my hometown got caught in one of the big machines of the mining company. A rock crusher, if I remember right. He was the father of a classmate. I ought to have attended the funeral, but didn’t. In those high school days I was discovering the books of the American Transcendentalists: Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau. “Transcendentalism” was a big word to me at the time. The idea of it is that you can ride your porch swing to the truth of all flowers. The notion sounds sound to me, still. But, being young, I felt as if I had inherited a mansion up in the blue air; as if everything wrong were, with an idea, suddenly right.
The daughter of the killed miner, my classmate, needed some consoling, but I was too shy, too awkward at social graces, to be one of the people to give it. I had no consoling to give. Her father was a good man of Finnish descent; he left behind a large family. The family had a new lesson to learn about the worst of all possible outcomes. As for me, I had my books which said spirit dances with matter.
Much of my life has passed since those books. Those Yankee writers of old are truer to me now than when I was young, and it’s likely that I need them more now. But an idea isn’t much true unless we are willing to wear its dirt. A frog of ugly sits at the center of true, and his appetite is Void.
Rather than the gift of a mansion in the sky, transcendence now seems to me a lifetime of lonely carpentry. Carpentry on a house nobody can see. And that house won’t shelter from the rain, but make us wetter. Those who ply this trade might not finish even the front steps before the cold evening comes on, before the closing whistle blows. Maybe no one completes the house called Idealism— built, as it is, on the foundation that is the suffering of the world. The hammer is usually abandoned with much work left to do; it hums only a little while with the vibrations of the last nail driven, until stillness takes it.
Had the good miner’s death happened today, I would’ve gone to the funeral. The fact about our portion of transcendence is that some of us get flattened in rock crushers. The fact is that there is blood on the machine.
And in the machine.
Sometimes the crashing waves of Lake Superior, powered by strong winds, sounded like a train through my apartment window. But, in the city of Marquette, the only real locomotion taking place was the centrifugal force of the Autoapheresis-C machine (made by the Baxter corporation) separating plasma from blood. The word “apheresis” is Greek for “take away”.
Read the rest here. Read another piece by this author in DIAGRAM 1.6.
The “Unwritten Constitution” and Biblical Interpretation
Debates over constitutional interpretation have much to teach us, I believe, about ways of reading the Bible. Perhaps more so than the average religious person, lawyers and judges are particularly conscious that they are choosing among different interpretive methods whenever they read and apply a text, and they’ve developed a sophisticated language to discuss this.
I don’t know whether this was always the case, but the adherents of “plain meaning” and “original intent” in the legal sphere frequently share the same conservative politics as Biblical literalists, while political progressives are more likely to see both legal and sacred texts as dynamic, ambiguous, and responsive to changing needs. In both cases, I suspect the deciding factor is whether we see our ancestors as more likely to be right than ourselves. Is the moral awareness of humankind progressing, or declining–and can we be trusted to know the difference?
As for my own personal view, it’s complicated. Some things are better than they were 200 or 2,000 years ago (democracy, the rights of women and minorities, freedom of religion, modern medicine), some are worse (pollution, nuclear weapons, 24-hour adult video channels); thus it has always been. But since we’re the ones who have to live with the consequences–not our ancestors, and not the authorities who interpret them for us–I think we should get the final vote on what a text means.
In the latest issue of Harvard Magazine, BusinessWeek editor Paul M. Barrett reviews legal superstar Laurence H. Tribe’s new book, The Invisible Constitution. The framework he outlines below may help clarify similar debates over the Bible (emphasis added):
Tribe argues persuasively that the most conservative jurists on the closely divided Supreme Court—chiefly Antonin Scalia, LL.B. ’60, and Clarence Thomas—get it wrong when it comes to deciphering our foundational legal document. The originalists, as they are known, contend that judges can look only to the literal words of the Constitution and the “original” understanding of those words held by the men who wrote and ratified them. That’s why the conservatives find it laughable that anyone could ground in the Constitution a woman’s right to choose to seek an abortion. The Constitution doesn’t mention abortion. The Founding Fathers would never have countenanced the act. Case closed.
Not so fast, Tribe says. Jurists of all stripes derive their interpretive principles from sources outside the text of the Constitution, and many of these principles cannot even be traced directly to the document’s words. My favorite example of this seemingly self-evident but often-obfuscated observation is the basis of originalism itself. The Constitution nowhere instructs its inheritors to interpret its opaque terminology (“equal protection,” “due process,” “cruel and unusual punishments”) according to the original understanding of its drafters. The Constitution doesn’t offer guidance on whether to read those terms as static or evolving. There’s an argument to be made that the Founders’ intent deserves special deference, or maybe even something approaching exclusive deference. But such ideas are drawn from someone’s version of what Tribe calls the invisible Constitution: the unwritten premises and intuitions and experiences that have accumulated over more than two centuries of law and politics in America.
Tribe’s liberal version of the invisible Constitution is no secret, and he does not elaborate much on the substance of his views in this book. He believes that judges—whether they lean left or right—inevitably champion the values they perceive as underlying or animating the ambiguous admonitions and protections outlined in the Constitution. In articulating those values, judges give meaning to a phrase like “equal protection.” For him those words, applied to questions of racial relations, can be used not only to strike down intentional segregation but also to uphold race-conscious policies (“affirmative action”) that seek to remedy the lingering injustices of slavery and Jim Crow. For Justice Scalia, equal protection suggests that race can never be taken into account in any way in forming public policies. That’s a legitimate argument. Tribe’s point here is only that it can’t be settled by simplistic appeals to literalism or the parlor game of WWJMD (What Would James Madison Do?).
To use a favorite phrase of postmodernists, any text always already contains “unwritten premises and intuitions and experiences” without which we would be unable to relate it to the rest of the world. Naturally, those unwritten addenda can be elaborated implausibly or in bad faith, and as Barrett says, they can be turned to liberal or conservative ends. But if we don’t admit that they exist, we’re claiming an illusory objectivity for our preferred viewpoint.
I’m planning a post soon about whether the Bible itself gives us any guidance about preferred interpretive methods. For now, I’ll leave you with these provocative questions (and if you’re very good, one of these days I’ll turn comments back on): Does the Bible ever tell us to believe something because it’s “in the Bible”? What other reasons for belief are urged upon us? Does the Bible know it’s the Bible?