“Questioning Our Questions”: In Faith As In Science, Finding The Right Answers Inevitably Involves Questioning Our Own Questions
It is a mark of our pluralistic moment that I learned of an old joke among rabbis from the writings of a great Christian scholar, Jaroslav Pelikan.
In his book “Jesus Through the Centuries,” Pelikan tells the story of a rabbi who is challenged by one of his pupils: “Why is it that you rabbis so often put your teaching in the form of a question?” To which the rabbi replies: “So what’s wrong with a question?”
Trying to imagine what will matter in a new year is daunting, but it takes no clairvoyance to see that in 2015, one of the struggles around the globe will be between those who acknowledge that religion is as much about questions as answers and those who have such a profound certainty about their answers that they will kill in the name of the divine.
To cast the matter this way, I know, invites dissent from both believers and nonbelievers. The believer can plausibly argue that you can be utterly certain about the truth without killing anyone. Nonbelievers might note that both halves of my formulation undercut religion. If religion is primarily about questions, what truth can it contain? And if it preaches certainty, where is the space for dissent and dialogue?
Holding on to faith’s middle ground — what my friend Arnie Eisen calls “moderate religion” — is one of the most important tasks in the world now. Eisen, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, is not referring to a faith that is weak or tepid. Rather, he thinks that all traditions need to recognize the radically new situation in which they find themselves.
“The job market is global, and so is the thought-and-values market,” Eisen said in a lecture in November in Jerusalem. “It is more difficult for ‘The People of the Book’ to sustain the belief that it is in any meaningful sense ‘The Chosen People’ — or is ‘the’ anything — because an unlimited diversity of claims is literally in our face every time we look at a screen on a laptop or smartphone.”
Admitting this does not produce all the answers, but, as the rabbi in the story might say, it does lead to the right questions.
My hunch is that Pope Francis’s understanding of Eisen’s point has much to do with his worldwide popularity. A recent Pew survey across 43 nations found Francis with a median favorable rating of 60 percent and an unfavorable rating of just 11 percent.
Political consultants would love to have access to the pope’s secret sauce. Some of the ingredients are clearly personal: Francis conveys the reflectiveness of a holy man and the compassion that most hope religious engagement encourages. But he also manages to juggle the imperative of making tough judgments, especially about injustice and poverty, with an awareness that justice without mercy and understanding (“Who am I to judge?”) lacks both humanity and the sense of a God whose most important characteristic is mercy.
By simultaneously conveying a certainty about what his faith teaches him and a confident openness to those who are seeking answers along other paths, Francis gives an intimation of what holiness needs to look like in the 21st century.
One of my favorite political acts at the end of 2014 was the Senate’s confirmation of Rabbi David Saperstein as the State Department’s ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom. I admire Saperstein for many reasons, but why I think he is perfect for his new job was illustrated during his 2004 visit to my Religion and Politics class at Georgetown University.
It was around the time that Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” was released. Saperstein had been a sharp critic of what he (and many others) saw as anti-Semitic tropes in the movie. But several of my students had appreciated the film. Rather than launch into an attack on Gibson’s work, Saperstein invited them to have their say.
When he finally did express his view, Saperstein began with these words: “If you believe that the birth of Jesus Christ is the most important event in human history, you cannot help but be moved by this movie.” Only then did he offer his critique.
Religious freedom will thrive and religion itself will be a force for good only if religious people can convey this sort of empathetic understanding of the truths that others hold dear. In faith as in science, finding the right answers inevitably involves questioning our own questions.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 31, 2014
“John Roberts, Abysmal Failure”: How His Court Was Disgraced By Corporations And Theocrats
It wasn’t quite March 6, 1857, or Dec. 12, 2000, but make no mistake: June 30, 2014, was not a good day for the U.S. Supreme Court. Not simply because it saw the court once again unveil two major decisions decided by a slim majority along partisan lines, but because the argument offered by the majority in the more controversial and closely followed of the two decisions was so conspicuously unprincipled that it will almost surely further erode public confidence in the nation’s highest court. As a Gallup poll also released Monday morning showed, it was already low; I bet it’s about to sink even lower.
In order to understand why Monday was such an important — and unfortunate — day for one of the United States’ most hallowed institutions, it’s necessary to revisit something Chief Justice John Roberts said in an interview way back in 2006. After crediting John Marshall’s legendary diplomatic skills for maintaining the unity and establishing the credibility of the court during its crucial early years, Roberts argued that, after 30-odd years of discord and squabbling, the Supreme Court was “ripe for a similar refocus on functioning as an institution” rather than as a collection of individuals with their separate politics, prejudices and philosophies. If the court failed to come together under his leadership, Roberts warned, it would “lose its credibility and legitimacy as an institution.”
Remember now, this was in 2006, when 5-4 splits on major, hot-button decisions was not yet the norm. This was before Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, before National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, and before Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, that ultimate embodiment of the partisan rancor and ideological polarization that’s so defined the Roberts-era court. It’s weird to think of the era of President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist as the good old days, but when it comes to the Supreme Court in the modern era, it more or less was.
Cut to today, and it’s hard to conclude that John Roberts is, by the standards he established in 2006, anything more than an abysmal failure. More than at any time since perhaps the Lochner Era, the court is not only seen as a political actor, but is considered a particularly ideological and combative one at that. Far from ushering in an era of good feelings, Roberts has presided over a court that is at war with itself, one in which justices like Antonin Scalia on the right, or Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the left, have become partisan heroes whose writings are studied not for their analytical insight but rather to see if they offer any good lines for use as weapons in the Internet’s endless partisan wars. And the public has noticed: In 2005, Gallup asked Americans how much confidence they had in the Supreme Court: 41 percent said “a great deal” or “quite a lot.” That number today? A paltry 30 percent.
It’s in this context that Monday’s two big rulings — Harris v. Quinn and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. — are most properly understood. While it’s true that many of the decisions handed down by the court this summer were unanimous, that harmony was never going to be enough to counterbalance the effects of the court’s two most closely watched decisions coming down, once again, as 5-4 splits. For one thing, the unanimous rulings Roberts engineered were far more internally divided than the 9-0 end results would lead you to think. For another, the public’s ability to follow or remember Supreme Court rulings is rather limited, which means that when it comes to public perception of the court, it’s the big deal decisions like Citizens United or Hobby Lobby that really count.
So when Justice Alito, who was the chief author of both of this term’s blockbuster decisions, relies on arguments as transparently political as those he wielded to decide Harris and Hobby Lobby, it makes Roberts’ work toward improving the court’s image that much harder. When Alito argues, as he does in Harris, that home-care workers paid by the state are not real public employees — not because of any intuitive distinction between your mother’s home-nurse and her bus driver, but because doing so is one of the easiest ways for him to rule against unions without taking the politically momentous step of nuking them entirely — it hurts the court. And when Alito echoes Bush v. Gore, as he does in Hobby Lobby, and states that the logic of the majority should not apply to medical services other than birth control — like vaccinations or blood transfusions — it hurts the court.
When John Roberts first assumed control of the Supreme Court, he spoke like a man who wanted to prove that the institution had earned its ostensible reputation as floating above politics and seeing beyond the tribal emotions of the culture war. But as the decisions on Monday showed, the reality is that the Roberts court is as political as ever. In Roberts’ court, it’s not abstract ideas of justice and law and republican government that win the day — it’s corporations, religious conservatives, employers and anyone who worries first and foremost about the interests of the powerful and the elite. Unless John Roberts’ goals were other than those he outlined in 2006, Monday’s decisions can only be interpreted as yet another saddening defeat.
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, June 30, 2014
“Republican’s Tricky Dancing Dilemma”: The GOP’s Religious Liberty Sham Is About To Blow Up Their Immigration Reform Excuse
The Supreme Court’s determination that Hobby Lobby and other closely held corporations can be treated as religious entities, and are thus exempt from the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate, happened to fall on the same day that President Obama announced he’ll take executive action to reduce deportations from the U.S. interior now that John Boehner has confided to him that the House won’t vote on immigration reform this year.
I’m sure the timing was coincidental. But as the consequences of each development begin to play out, I think we’ll find that they’re much more revealing side by side than they would have been running sequentially.
The key is that Democrats are going to attempt, through legislation, to remedy the damage the Court did to the contraception mandate while simultaneously acknowledging that their attempts to legislate immigration reform have failed, and that they’ll have to content themselves with whatever steps the administration can take under current law.
But at the same time, Republicans are going to try to side-step the political dangers of the contraception decision and their leading role in killing immigration reform. That would be a tricky dance under any circumstances, but particularly difficult to do all at once.
Republican leaders are pretty surefooted talking about Hobby Lobby as a religious freedom fight (although it wasn’t one). But they are also rightly wary of its potential to draw the party’s latent Todd Akinism out of remission.
Here’s Rush Limbaugh, on Monday: “[S]omehow we’ve gotten to the point where women should not have to pay for their own birth control. Somebody else is gonna pay for it, no matter how much they want, no matter how often they want it, no matter for what reason, somebody else is going to pay for it. That’s the root of all this. The employer should pay it, the insurance company will pay it, but in no way in 2014 America are women going to being pay for it, even though you can go to Target or Walmart and get a month’s supply for nine bucks.”
The risk they face is that a legislative fight over contraception—over making sure female employees of Hobby Lobby and other companies aren’t burdened by the ruling—will draw the real, driving concern out from behind the religious liberty artifice. It’s on this ground that “striking a blow for religious liberty” becomes “we don’t want to pay for your immoral sex pills, either,” and that’s where Republicans lose.
The easy way out of this conundrum would be to get it off the agenda as quickly as possible—to say that Obama administration officials should issue a new regulation, placing the onus for financing the contraception on insurance companies, and move on. Obama already did this for religious nonprofits. He could do it for the religious owners of for-profit corporations, too. And in the opinion of the Court, Justice Samuel Alito all but suggested this remedy to the Department of Health and Human Services.
“HHS has already devised and implemented a system that seeks to respect the religious liberty of religious nonprofit corporations while ensuring that the employees of these entities have precisely the same access to all FDA-approved contraceptives as employees of companies whose owners have no religious objections to providing such coverage,” he wrote. “Although HHS has made this system available to religious nonprofits that have religious objections to the contraceptive mandate, HHS has provided no reason why the same system cannot be made available to the owners of for-profit corporations have similar religious objections.”
In a political vacuum, that’s what Republicans would say in response to Democratic contraception legislation. But in the real world, Republicans are claiming that they can’t pass immigration reform because Obama takes too many administrative liberties and can’t be trusted to implement the law as written. That’s always been a disingenuous excuse, but it loses all semblance of credibility when in the next breath they argue that members of Congress don’t have to stand and be counted in the case of contraception because Obama can just fix the problem on his own. Particularly given that the proposed remedy doesn’t actually satisfy religious conservatives.
Not that Republicans would have any qualms about talking out of both sides of their mouths. But if they try to sidestep a contraception conflagration in this way, they’ll undermine their own excuse for shelving immigration reform. And if they take the contraception fight head on, they’ll stumble into the conservative sexual morality play they’ve tried to avoid by claiming this is actually all about the religious freedom of certain employers.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, July 1, 2014
“A Good Reminder To Voters”: The Political Repercussions Of The Hobby Lobby Decision
Normally it’s not a good idea to jump right into the political implications of a major Supreme Court decision like Hobby Lobby, but in this case there’s no point in waiting. This was a political decision and it is absolutely proper for Democrats to use it as a weapon in the midterm election campaign.
Minutes after the court ruled that closely held corporations have religious rights that permit them to deny contraceptive benefits to employees, Democrats made clear that they would use the case to remind women of the personal consequences of this kind of conservative ideology. An e-mail blast from the Democratic Party called the case a “wake-up call,” and urged recipients to “stand up for women’s rights” by electing Democrats to Congress.
Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the party chairwoman, tied the case to other Republican policies regarding women, including blocking the Paycheck Fairness Act. “It is no surprise that Republicans have sided against women on this issue as they have consistently opposed a woman’s right to make her own health care decisions,” she said.
The Supreme Court, in other words, could become a high-profile stand-in for the offensive remarks of Tea Party candidates (remember “legitimate rape”?) that helped elect several Democrats in 2012, but have largely been quieted this year.
Of course Republican politicians are trying to portray the Hobby Lobby decision purely as a win for religious freedom, which is a more attractive spin than the loss of reproductive freedom for women who work for these companies.
“Today’s decision is a victory for religious freedom and another defeat for an administration that has repeatedly crossed constitutional lines in pursuit of its Big Government objectives,” Speaker John Boehner said in a statement. A more honest statement of the party’s thinking came in this tweet from Erick Erickson, the conservative blogger: “My religion trumps your ‘right’ to employer subsidized consequence free sex.”
The White House — aware that most Americans oppose letting employers choose contraception plans based on religious beliefs — wasted no time in trying to transform the public’s anger at this kind of thinking into political action. Josh Earnest, the new press secretary, urged Congress to take action to assist the women affected by the decision, implicitly reminding voters that the future of this issue is truly in their hands. And Senator Patty Murray of Washington, a leading Democrat, quickly took up the challenge.
“Since the Supreme Court decided it will not protect women’s access to health care, I will,” she said in a statement. “In the coming days I will work with my colleagues and the Administration to protect this access, regardless of who signs your paycheck.”
The court based its decision not on a Constitutional principle but on an act of Congress, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. Acts of Congress can be overturned or changed if the right lawmakers are in place, and Hobby Lobby is a good reminder to voters that important policies are often not in the hands of nine justices, but in their own.
By: David Firestone, Taking Note, The Editors Blog, The New York Times, June 30, 2014
“The Majority Has Ventured Into A Minefield”: Here Are The Highlights Of Justice Ginsburg’s Fiery Hobby Lobby Dissent
On Monday morning, the Supreme Court finally released its much-anticipated decision on the Hobby Lobby case, a decision that lived up to expectations by being split along ideological lines (the court’s five conservatives overruling its four liberals) and severely weakening Obamacare’s birth control mandate.
Also living up to expectations? Liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s blistering dissent, which excoriated the court’s majority for its ruling, describing it as a “radical” decision “of startling breadth” that would have chaotic and major unintended consequences. You can read her dissent in full here (it starts at page 60) but we’ve also compiled some of its best, key parts.
Ginsburg opens with a bang, immediately describing the decision as one that will have sweeping consequences:
In a decision of startling breadth, the Court holds that commercial enterprises, including corporations, along with partnerships and sole proprietorships, can opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs.
She frames the decision as one that denies women access to healthcare, rather than as one that upholds religious liberty:
The exemption sought by Hobby Lobby and Conestoga would…deny legions of women who do not hold their employers’ beliefs access to contraceptive coverage.
In a similar vein, she rejects that the birth control mandate should be seen as an act of government coercion, describing it instead as one that provides women with the ability to make their own choice:
Any decision to use contraceptives made by a woman covered under Hobby Lobby’s or Conestoga’s plan will not be propelled by the Government, it will be the woman’s autonomous choice, informed by the physician she consults.
She affirms her belief that religious organizations and for-profit corporations serve fundamentally different purposes and have fundamentally different rights (and throws some shade at the majority in the process):
Religious organizations exist to foster the interests of persons subscribing to the same religious faith. Not so of for-profit corporations. … The distinction between a community made up of believers in the same religion and one embracing persons of diverse beliefs, clear as it is, constantly escapes the Court’s attention. One can only wonder why the Court shuts this key difference from sight.
She claims that the majority has actually undermined the very principle, religious freedom, it claimed in its ruling to have upheld:
Approving some religious claims while deeming others unworthy of accommodation could be ‘perceived as favoring one religion over another,’ the very ‘risk the [Constitution’s] Establishment Clause was designed to preclude.
She writes that the majority has pushed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act past its original intent:
In the Court’s view, RFRA demands accommodation of a for-profit corporation’s religious beliefs no matter the impact that accommodation may have on third parties who do not share the corporation owners’ religious faith—in these cases, thousands of women employed by Hobby Lobby and Conestoga or dependents of persons those corporations employ. Persuaded that Congress enacted RFRA to serve a far less radical purpose, and mindful of the havoc the Court’s judgment can introduce, I dissent.
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, June 30, 2014
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