If I wasn’t clear earlier.
Yes, I think First Things and their leftist counterparts, embodied in Sojourners and similar organizations have degenerated to nothing more than religiously baptized movements of partisan hackery.
Ironically these groups show, in a crystal clear way how Roman Catholics and Evangelicals in America alike have failed to sustain any sort of theological vision capable of mitigating the ideological force of partisan divides in the American political apparatus.
A great article at Slate.com takes a sober and helpful look at the recent changes in federal policy in regard to stem cell research. One particular salient point related to Rove’s recent attacks on Obama’s ban on the use of torture in interrogation: “In a war, you do not take tools that are working and stop using them and say we’ll get back to you in four months, six months, eight months, a year, and tell you what we’re going to do to replace this valuable tool which has helped keep America safe.”‘ Saletan expounds on this:
To most of us, Rove’s attack is familiar and infuriating. We believe, as Obama does, that it’s possible to save lives without crossing a moral line that might corrupt us. We reject the Bush administration’s insistence on using all available methods rather than waiting for scrupulous alternatives. We see how Rove twists Obama’s position to hide the moral question and make Obama look obtuse and irresponsible.
The same Bush-Rove tactics are being used today in the stem-cell fight. But they’re not coming from the right. They’re coming from the left. Proponents of embryo research are insisting that because we’re in a life-and-death struggle—in this case, a scientific struggle—anyone who impedes that struggle by renouncing effective tools is irrational and irresponsible. The war on disease is like the war on terror: Either you’re with science, or you’re against it.
The consistent line from Obama and from the scientific community has been that science needs to cease to be “driven more by ideology than by facts.” Besides being a rather naive take on the nature of science itself (read Khun and Polanyi–science is always ideological), this sort of rhetoric is a pretty pathetic shield for the blatantly ideological nature of the current advocacy of stem cell research.
Saletan again:
Think about what’s being dismissed here as “politics” and “ideology.” You don’t have to equate embryos with full-grown human beings—I don’t—to appreciate the danger of exploiting them. Embryos are the beginnings of people. They’re not parts of people. They’re the whole thing, in very early form. Harvesting them, whether for research or medicine, is different from harvesting other kinds of cells. It’s the difference between using an object and using a subject. How long can we grow this subject before dismembering it to get useful cells? How far should we strip-mine humanity in order to save it?
If you have trouble taking this question seriously—if you think it’s just the hypersensitivity of fetus-lovers—try shifting the context from stem cells to torture. There, the question is: How much ruthless violence should we use to defeat ruthless violence? The paradox and the dilemma are easy to recognize. Creating and destroying embryos to save lives presents a similar, though not equal, dilemma. . . . The danger of seeing the stem-cell war as a contest between science and ideology is that you bury these dilemmas. You forget the moral problem. You start lying to yourself and others about what you’re doing.
Just because we don’t want to be taken for neocon wingnuts is not a reason to stop asking critical questions about this stuff. That’s the point.
Stringfellow nails it in this one. I along with, I suspect, tons of the rest of us are implicated in this. Railing is easier than blessing, but its often the less subversive act.
“The categories of popularity or progress or effectiveness or success are impertinent to the gospel. . . . ‘Bless those who persecute you, bless and do not curse them’ (Rom 12:14). As has been mentioned, this is no adage prompted by sentimentality. It is a statement of the extraordinary relationship between Christians and the ruling principalities radically constituted in the discernment of the imminence of the judgment of the Word of God in history by which Christians are authorized to recall political authority to the vocation of worship and reclaim dominion over creation for humanity. It is a statement about the implication of the Lordship of Jesus Christ for the rulers of this age. To bless the powers that be, in the midst of persecution, exposes and confounds their blasphemous status more cogently and more fearlessly than a curse.”
–William Stringfellow, Conscience and Obedience, 110.
In the midst of conservative backlash against the evangelical left supporting Barack Obama’s cabinate appointment of Kathleen Sebelius something strikes me as odd. Now, no one could deny that Wallis, Sider, et al are not toeing the standard evangelical party line on this. They are making a different argument about what it means for them to allegedly be pro-life. They claim in their press release that abortions were reduced by 10% in Kansas under Sebelius’ leadership. Now I don’t know if this is true, or that, if it is it has anything to do with Sebelius. However, what’s interesting is that none of the conservative backlash (that I’ve seen anyway) takes up this point.
In other words, its all about ideology. Even if her policies reduce the number of abortions it doesn’t matter because she is ideologically in favor of abortions. This seems to smack of what McCarraher spoke of regarding the way pro-life Christians have tended to make fetuses into a fetish. What matters is not whether or not some abortions get prevented, but whether or not our leaders, both ecclesial and political regard the fetus with the same sort of sacrosanctness.
Now I’m not saying this question is unimportant, only that when the ideological position of people are more important in our consciousness than the actual abortions being avoided a boat somewhere has been missed.
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