Via the Washington Post:
The Hutterites are Protestants similar to the Amish and Mennonites who live a life centered on their religion, but unlike the others, Hutterites live in German-speaking communes scattered across northern U.S. states and Canada. They don’t pay wages, don’t vote and don’t enlist in the military. They make their own clothes, produce their own food and construct their own buildings.
“Their core belief is that they have no property. All the property and labor they have, they contribute to the colony,” Ron Nelson, an attorney for the Big Sky Colony, told the Montana Supreme Court.
The state’s high court on Wednesday heard arguments by the colony and the state on whether Montana’s requirement that employers carry workers’ compensation insurance can be expanded to religious organizations. A state judge has already ruled the 2009 law expanding the workers’ compensation law to force the Hutterites to pay for the insurance violated their right to freely exercise their religion.
The state is asking the high court to reverse that decision, arguing the new law deals only with commercial activities and stays out of the Hutterites religious affairs.
The Hutterites’ argument that everything they do is tied to their religion cannot exempt them from regulation when they voluntarily enter into an outside commercial activity, assistant Attorney General Stuart Segrest said.
“They’re not allowed to become a law unto themselves,” Segrest said
Quite.
From the Wall Street Journal’s Houses of Worship column, by the author of When God Talks Back:
in more experientially oriented evangelical Christian communities . . . people expect to have a personal relationship with God. They go for walks with God, have coffee with God, ask God what shirt they should wear in the morning and even what shampoo they should buy. They expect God will talk back. . . . Looking at your closet and asking God whether he’d prefer the black shirt or the blue one is a way congregants [learn which of their thoughts] they should treat as God’s communication with them.
But wait:
evangelical Christians doubt, too. Doubt is part of the experience of faith . . . People doubt that they understand God rightly; they doubt that the promise of joy they hear from the pulpit really applies to them. And in a world in which they know wise, good people who do not share their faith, they may doubt divinity itself. [Emphasis added.]
Oh, well, that’s OK, then.
Why does having doubts about an arguably absurd belief—that the same God who let five people die in this month’s Oklahoma tornado, say, or 16,000 in last year’s tsunami, nevertheless cares about your clothing choices or is worth praying to because you are the center of his multi-centered universe—why does doubt make that belief more respectable, or, in many formulations of the meme, even admirable and courageous?
I consult my horoscope each morning to find out how I should conduct myself or what I should expect from the day, but I occasionally doubt whether the person who authors it actually has done a close reading of the star charts, and, on my despairingly skeptical days, even whether there really are astral influences from some intangible celestial substance that determine human characteristics on a monthly basis and that govern our fate. But then after wrestling with my doubt, I conquer it. That’s success? I realize that the presence of doubt is supposed to show that belief in a loving God is not simply reflexive but rather fully compatible with reason. But it’s not as if the doubting believer has gone out and done some careful experiments.
The mother of Trayvon Martin credited Jesus for the indictment of George Zimmerman. Was she right, in the eyes of conservative believers? And if not, why not? How can a believer avoid making such mistakes?
When I first brought home our sleek, silver, double-deck, Panasonic stereo cassette player during the summer of 1993, my then-wife, Gitty, frowned.
“It has a radio,” she said with an accusing glare.
The device, fresh out of the box, lay on the chintzy oilcloth on our kitchen table, and she stuck her index finger at a spot on the top, near the volume control. Tape, AM, FM, printed in tiny white letters along the ridge of the circular switch. There was no denying it. And in our all-Hasidic village in Rockland County, N.Y., radio — along with TV, movies, newspapers and other sources of secular influence — was verboten.
“We’ll do what everyone does,” I said, slightly annoyed at the suggestion of impiety. Many of my friends had cassette players, and when the device came with a built-in radio tuner, there was a standard procedure for it: Krazy Glue the switch into the tape-playing position, paste a strip of masking tape over the channel indicators, and put the antenna out with the next day’s trash…
That seems sad to me, but there it is…
As Orrin Hatch is forced to face a primary challenge, here’s a little reminder from 2009 about the (very) long-serving senator’s attitude towards taxpayers’ money:
WASHINGTON — Backed by some of the most powerful members of the Senate, a little-noticed provision in the healthcare overhaul bill would require insurers to consider covering Christian Science prayer treatments as medical expenses.
The provision was inserted by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) with the support of Democratic Sens. John F. Kerry and the late Edward M. Kennedy, both of Massachusetts, home to the headquarters of the Church of Christ, Scientist.
The measure would put Christian Science prayer treatments — which substitute for or supplement medical treatments — on the same footing as clinical medicine. While not mentioning the church by name, it would prohibit discrimination against “religious and spiritual healthcare.”
It would have a minor effect on the overall cost of the bill — Christian Science is a small church, and the prayer treatments can cost as little as $20 a day. But it has nevertheless stirred an intense controversy over the constitutional separation of church and state, and the possibility that other churches might seek reimbursements for so-called spiritual healing.
As I wrote back at the time, in this context I could not care less about the separation of church and state, but I do care a great deal about the separation of the taxpayer from his money. Senator Hatch clearly did not.
In the event, the proposed change did not get through, but that Hatch even tried this stunt is a reminder that, when it comes to protecting the taxpayer, Hatch is not a man who can be trusted.
Christian Science · church-state separation · Obamacare · Orrin Hatch · taxes
One of life’s minor pleasures is the spectacle of ‘progressives’ calling for Christians to pay more attention to the Bible. Here’s David Sirota writing in Salon:
As the Pew Research Center recently discovered, “Most people who agree with the religious right also support the Tea Party” and its ultra-conservative economic agenda. Summing up the situation, scholar Gregory Paul wrote in the Washington Post that many religious Christians in America simply ignore the Word and “proudly proclaim that the creator of the universe favors freewheeling, deregulated union busting, minimal taxes, especially for wealthy investors, and plutocrat-boosting capitalism as the ideal earthly scheme for his human creations.”
Mr. Paul would, I think, benefit from a calming cup of tea and a nice lie-down. Nevertheless let’s look at the issue that he is trying to address rather than the childish caricatures he deploys. Few successful religions are static. They develop. They change. They split. They borrow from other faiths and traditions. The syncretism and supple nature of an always evolving Christianity is one of the sources of its strength and endurance. We should not be surprised that there is also room within it for variants more friendly to the free market than one confined within a crudely literal interpretation of some of the reported comments of a figure who was (probably) born more than two thousand years ago.
But Mr. Sirota, it seems, is more comfortable with at least some (ideologically congenial) strains of fundamentalism:
The good news is that this may be starting to change. In recent years, for instance, Pew has found that younger evangelicals are less devoutly committed to the Republican Party and its Tea Party-inspired agenda than older evangelicals. Additionally, surveys show a near majority of evangelicals agree with liberals that the tax system is unfair and that the wealthy aren’t paying their fair share. Meanwhile, the organization Faith in Public LIfe has highlighted new academic research showing that even in America there is growing “correlation between increased Bible reading and support for progressive views, including abolishing the death penalty, seeking economic justice, and reducing material consumption.”
And Mr. Sirota tut-tuts at those whose (presumed) studies of Christianity do not measure up to the standard that he deems appropriate.
Of course, many Americans who cite Christianity to justify their economic conservatism may not have actually read the Bible…
Or maybe they have just read it a different way from that laid down by Mr. Sirota. The notion that the Bible is a collection of texts that can, quite reasonably, be interpreted in many different ways does not appear to be one that he is prepared to accept, or debate. No wonder he likes those fundamentalists of his…
Ross Douthat has a provocatively titled book out, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, so he’s making the media rounds. In general I find Douthat to be an interesting thinker, but there is one domain where I feel that he lacks a proper sense of balance, and that is in the domain of religion. By this, I don’t mean that I disagree with his belief in Roman Catholic Christianity. I do, but that’s a rather conventional disagreement. Rather, Douthat seems to perceive religious history and the relationship of religion to societies through the eyes of a nerd. It seems in his world that the particular theology of a religion is of greater import. Not simply because he happens to believe that the theology of his own religion, Christianity, is true, but because he believes that that theology has material consequences on the world around us.
Consider his most recent post in Slate. Let’s look at two passages:
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The next battle for “gender equity”
3 Comments · Posted by Heather Mac Donald in Uncategorized
It is only a matter of time before the all-male character of prominent Silicon Valley start-ups triggers the following backlash:
A flood of articles and conferences exploring the “gender gap” in the high-tech sector; personal testimonies from disgruntled female undergrads and grad students about discrimination in the science fields; published rankings of venture-capital firms based on how many female-headed start-ups they bankroll; taxpayer-funded high school and college programs to cultivate female engineers and entrepreneurs; additional diversity bureaucrats in colleges to bludgeon computer-science departments into hiring female professors; internships for females at venture-capital firms; threats from the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights to colleges and high schools regarding their responsibility for the start-up gender gap; Ford and Rockefeller Foundation grant programs to set up mentoring programs for female technologists; and awards ceremonies to honor venture capitalists who have nurtured female-headed start-ups.
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Unlike National Review readers, I find no justification for Romney’s craven exploitation of delusional feminist tropes against Obama. The Republican National Committee is parroting the absurd charge that the Obama White House is a “hostile environment” for females, for example.
What’s next — an RNC Title IX lawsuit against Ohio State University for its football program? Sensitivity training for Army drill sergeants? (Oh, wait, we’ve already got those.) Assigned readings for Republican precinct captains from In a Different Voice? The chance that the Obama White House, staffed by eager products of the feminist university, is a hostile workplace for women is exactly zero — as low as the chance that the Bush I, II, or Reagan White Houses were hostile to women. Any Republican who actually believes [former White House staffer Anita] Dunn’s charge has merely allowed his partisan desire for political victory to silence what should be his core knowledge about the contemporary world.
The entire conceit that any elite workplace could be seriously hostile to females should be retired, not bolstered as the Romney campaign is doing. You can’t feed the female victimology addiction just once and think that you haven’t strengthened it permanently.
The Romney campaign’s weird claims about a female-hostile Obama economic policy are just as destructive.
What would it mean for economic policy to pay attention to “gender,” as the Romney campaign apparently thinks it should? Women are undoubtedly overrepresented in government jobs and government-funded jobs . . . . Does that mean that Republicans shouldn’t cut big government? The Keystone Pipeline and other projects dear to the “drill, baby, drill” campaign will undoubtedly benefit male workers more than women. Should we therefore suspend domestic energy production until we figure out a way to shoehorn more women onto drilling rigs? And if the most certain way to make sure that women benefit more from the economic recovery would be to expand government hiring, should Republicans do so?
Every time that someone in the public sphere repeats the preposterous claim that females face serious discrimination today, he strengthens the falsehood and makes it harder to dislodge. I understand that politics is ruthless and unprincipled. But it is unbelievably short-sighted for Republicans to validate hoary feminist conceits, because those conceits will only be thrown back at them with all the greater force once they are on the receiving end of criticism. It would be just as short-sighted to criticise the Obama cabinet, for example, for not being sufficiently “diverse” (and undoubtedly, some Republican operative has made or will make such a charge). Doing so only lodges the expectations for racial quotas all the more intractably into the political psyche.
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There’s a piece by Mark Oppenheimer in today’s New York Times about the transformation of Blondie’s (ah, those were the days) bassist into a popular writer about religion. Harmless enough stuff, but this passage caught my eye:
Mr. Lachman moved to London and began to write about mysticism and the occult. He has since written books about Carl Jung, the educator Rudolf Steiner, and now Swedenborg: all figures with powerfully rational minds who nevertheless speculated in the irrational. They might be seen as the thinking person’s mystics.
Swedenborg, for example, could be easily dismissed as a crank. Many people today would be dubious of the story, which Swedenborg promoted, that he had flabbergasted the queen of Sweden by relaying a message from her deceased brother. They would be even more skeptical of Swedenborg’s claims that he could visit souls in heaven. There, he said, he could see angels performing domestic chores, or ask about their sex lives.
But Swedenborg also had a rigorous scientific mind. He predicted the advent of airplanes and cars, he discovered the central canal of the spinal cord, and he recognized the existence of neurons. His keen curiosity about the relationship between mind and body fueled his interest in dreams — he went through a period of vivid, ecstatic dreams — and his interpretations presaged the work of Freud and Jung.
Right now, Mr. Lachman, who is single but has two sons, does not follow the spiritual practices of any guru, teacher or historical figure. “I consider all the reading and research and contemplating a spiritual practice, not to sound pompous.”
It does not sound pompous. The idea that research can be a spiritual discipline — and spirituality the subject of rigorous research — has been a commonplace among theologians at least since Thomas Aquinas…
Fair enough, but I suspect that that “rigorous research” should have plenty of room for a psychiatric explanation of what Swedenborg ‘saw’.
