Inflammatory language, perversions, and the church

This new push to downplay pedophilia was shared with appropriate outrage on Facebook lately.

What I want to point out here is the danger that this sort of talk poses specifically to those, including Christians, who have leaned in the wrong way on the act-orientation distinction concerning homosexuality. It is entirely possible that we will be asked, to be consistent, to apply the act-orientation distinction in the same way to pedophilia, and I'm afraid that some won't know how to reply and will be sitting ducks for what is, in effect, a partial normalization and, at a minimum, a desensitization.

Many Christians have been so concerned about the charge of homophobia and so eager to show love toward homosexual individuals that they have applied the act-orientation distinction in a confused way. I'm not saying that there is no such distinction nor that it is never relevant to bring up. But I think the contexts in which it makes a big difference to our actions are fewer and narrower than some may think. If you are a pastor or priest advising someone in private on whether he's sinning, then it is relevant and appropriate to tell him that having temptations and inclinations toward homosexuality is not in and of itself a sin, as though he sins just by breathing in and out. At the same time, there is a delicate matter even there concerning fantasies, entertaining thoughts, self-identity, and so forth, so it's still not cut and dried. The homosexual, even the Christian, who goes around loudly proclaiming his problem and demanding that everybody must accept him and complaining about how he's not sufficiently accepted is, most likely, sinning in thought with some frequency. So a non-naive pastor counseling such a person shouldn't just keep telling him over and over again that his orientation isn't a sin. But, okay, the act-orientation distinction is relevant there.

It's not nearly so obviously relevant to issues of discrimination, and especially not if the person is "out." There are all sorts of issues of discretion, morale, normalization, and so forth that are created by an "out" homosexual, especially one with a chip on his shoulder, especially in a business or non-profit that aims for a high moral tone. And there are direct practical issues in a residential context, such as a college, camp, retreat, and traveling. Who even can be the appropriate roommate, with all the loss of privacy that entails, of a person with same-sex attraction disorder? So already when Christians (and, I'm sorry to say, the catechism of the Catholic Church) go on about how baaad discrimination is on the basis of sexual orientation, they are doing a disservice to clarity of thought.

But there's even more. Here are two false implications of an overuse and misguided use of the act-orientation distinction that will come back to haunt us as the push for "understanding" pedophilia starts to ramp up:

1) The false implication that all sins are equal. No, they are not. Scripture never teaches that all sins are equally bad, it teaches the contrary, and common sense teaches us that all sins are not equally destructive in a social context. Hence, the temptation to all sins is not an equal problem. The fact that a man is tempted to a sexual perversion ought to create more complexities in which jobs he can hold, how to arrange for his accommodations when he travels, and in many other areas, than the fact that a man is tempted to gluttony. That's just how it is. But saying that "the orientation isn't sinful, and we're all sinners and tempted to sin in many different ways" glosses over these practical and moral facts.

2) The false implication that disgust is an inappropriate feeling for normal people to have in response to finding out about a "mere" orientation. The idea seems to be that if the "mere" orientation isn't a sin, we shouldn't feel disgusted when we learn about it, because that is "phobic" and unloving. Baloney. Pedophilia is an obvious counterexample, and we're going to have big problems if we continue on this path that says we're not supposed to feel, act, or convey disgust about anything as long as it's "just" an orientation.

It's a tragedy that there are people who have same-sex attraction disorder and who are upset and don't want it. For that matter, it's a worse tragedy, in a different way, that there are homosexuals who are proud of their orientation and their acts. But what even those who resist and don't act are tempted toward, what they are oriented toward, is a perversion. It was a mistake for Christians to stop saying that. I think we said to ourselves, "What possible value could there be in using inflammatory language such as 'pervert'? That just looks unloving. We don't want to look like those Westboro Baptist types" (always a useful comparison for getting as much compliance and apology as possible from Christians). "It's just a pointless insult." Well, no. To say that someone is a sexual pervert by orientation, even if he does not act on it, is to retain the knowledge of the unnaturalness of what he is inclined toward. It is to remind ourselves and those to whom we speak that his temptation is not merely contrary to God's law but also contrary to nature, and that this matters. But errors #1 and #2 tell us that we aren't supposed to know this, that we are supposed to elide it. So much of our language becomes conciliatory and deliberately erases all references to disordered affections and perversion: "The LGBT community," "God loves gay people very much," and the like.

These two errors are going to turn on us when it comes to pedophilia. Because frankly, if #1 and #2 are true, then why not try to eradicate disgust from our thought and language concerning people who "merely" have a pedophile orientation? If it is a settled doctrine that all sins are equal, then "all" presumably means "all" without exception, so this one should be included. If disgust is generally a wrong feeling to have concerning any "mere" orientation, then that's it. The principle is set.

If we should try as hard as we can not to "discriminate" on the basis of a "mere" orientation, then presumably we should try as hard as we can to accommodate even an "out" pedophile in as many activities as possible, even if we have to restrict him, for safety reasons, from some activities involving children. Anything like broader avoidance on the part of, say, people with children would be cruel, right? Notice that in the interview linked above the woman "researcher" is very uncomfortable when the interviewer suggests that he should in general try to keep his children away from pedophiles. She never agrees with him on this principle. Instead she turns the question to "child pedophiles," with the obvious implication that keeping such children away from other children would be wrong, so "we" have to find some other way to deal with them. In the Salon article last year garnering sympathy for non-offending pedophiles, the author explicitly states that there are pedophiles he would "trust with" his own children, if he had any.

Moreover, if there is no shame in being "out" about one's inclinations to sexual perversions, because then one can "get help" and because then we as Christians have a chance to show our love and kindness, then why should "coming out" as a pedophile be TMI when coming out as "gay" isn't TMI? The whole idea about discretion and not telling the whole world about your sexual perversions has been abandoned wholesale in the Christian community, even among conservative Christians, with the support groups for homosexuals and the praise for coming out. How are we ever going to reclaim the notion of discretion and the condemnation of TMI, how are we ever going to affirm again that there could be something good about being "in the closet," at least as far as the general community is concerned? We've pretty much tossed those ideas out, and we'll just have to say that "it's different this time" when it comes to some new perversion for which our compassion and support are being urged. To be consistent, I think we will need to back up and say that, after all, it isn't such a great thing for homosexuals to be coming out either, that we don't all need to know about that, and that if you really recognize that what you are experiencing is a desire contrary both to the law of God and to the law of nature, you will understand (except in unusual situations) that you need to exercise discretion and discuss this only with specific people who need to know. And voluntarily exclude yourself from activities inappropriate to you given your problem. Once these principles are established again in our minds, and once we as social conservatives and Christians don't feel ashamed of ourselves for having such principles, we can think more clearly about how to apply them in various situations and to other perversions.

We will also be in a position to recognize the extremely fine line between encouraging people to be "out" about something and abandoning opposition to it. This has come up again and again and again in "support groups" for homosexuals in churches and Christian colleges. Repeatedly the deliberate eradication of shame in being out, the hugging and kissing and support, the frantic urge to assure everyone that we are not phobic, and the formation of open groups explicitly oriented (pun intended) to something so vague as the "support" of people with certain perversions, have resulted in the erosion of opposition to the acts, just as these practices have involved a deliberate erasure of disgust at the outset. After all, how bad can it really be if everybody is telling you all the time that they have this problem? How bad can it be if we are all urged not to discriminate on the basis of someone's having this problem (as long as he doesn't "act on it")? How bad can it really be if the main message we are hearing is that we as Christians need to be kinder, more accepting, less ostracizing, more supportive, and so forth?

Once we admit that it was a mistake to have "support groups" connected with Christian organizations and churches, a mistake to encourage general coming out, a mistake to abandon the "inflammatory" language of disorder and perversion, and a mistake to try so hard to be upbeat and sentimental as part of being loving, we will be able to apply those lessons learned to worse things.

Sometimes you can't go forward without going back. The church's treatment of perversion is one such area.

Good witch hunts

I've been thinking lately about witch hunts at Christian colleges. I've had contact with several very conservative colleges in my time, and I know well how difficult it can be for faculty not to have tenure and to face the possibility of being fired over small deviations from school doctrine on unimportant points. It does not foster a good academic environment for people to have to worry that they will lose their jobs if they have the "wrong" views on the order of events in eschatology, for example. And the more or less "fire at will" atmosphere on some Christian college campuses can just as easily be used to penalize conservatives who want to uphold the school's traditional identity as to penalize liberals who want to tear it down.

But when I read a post like this I have to think that at some point there has been a failure of leadership. The whole point of not granting tenure in Christian colleges, or of making that tenure conditional on continuing to uphold the mission and doctrinal positions of the school, was supposed to be to avoid precisely this sort of attack from within. Given the bio of Stephen Dilley (the author of the above-linked post), it appears that he is talking about Whitworth College, about which I know little to nothing. I do know that there are many other colleges who still have a chance to get it right. Cedarville seems to have been doing some house cleaning lately. Oddly, and receiving most attention in the news, this seems to have taken the form of ruling that women cannot teach theology classes with male students in them. I am anti-feminist but am not sure that biblical teaching on that subject mandates that particular reform at an institution of higher learning. However, my hope is that this is just a signal of deeper and more important reforms at Cedarville--specifically, routing out some more-than-nascent "emergent" and postmodern views which I happen to know were getting far too popular among some faculty in the past. There is some reason to believe that this is so given the proposal that one-man-one-woman marriage be added to the statement of faith. Indeed, that should have been done some time ago, but by all means, it should be added ASAP, and any faculty member who refuses to sign on that ground should be outta here.

Long ago, I used to think that a minimalist statement of faith at a Christian school was the way to go. This was an understandable reaction to some over-detailed requirements. The older I get, the more I realize that statements of faith are very much like creeds in Christian history. Why does the Nicene Creed go on and on about the Son's "being of one substance with the Father"? Of course, it is because that creed grew out of the response to the Arian heresy. In the same way, as the Enemy attacks in subsequent ages, it is understandable that the creedal affirmations required at Christian institutions will evolve so as to block the intrusion of new heresies and serious moral false teachings into the institution. The result will, no doubt, be statements that would appear odd in other ages. Others might wonder why statements on marriage suddenly crop up, or statements about God's omniscience (in response, say, to open theism), or statements about the existence of Adam, and so forth. So it will happen, inevitably, that a statement of faith will be to some degree a "monster," in the technical sense of having what appear to be disparate parts put together in an ad hoc manner.

What I am realizing is that this isn't entirely a bad thing. Nor do my own disagreements with the particulars of some school's statement of faith mean that the ideal is to have a "mere Christian" school whose only statement of faith is, say, the minimalism of the Apostles' Creed. (I hate to point this out, but it would be possible to be a non-Trinitarian and affirm the words of the Apostles' Creed.)

The funny thing is that even if I wrote a "monster" statement of faith of my own for faculty at my own imaginary and hypothetical Christian college, it would probably be fairly "mere Christian" in some respects. It might very well not contain inerrancy! It would contain nothing about eschatology except a minimal statement that we look for the return of Jesus Christ, who will come to judge the quick and the dead. It would be by intention broad enough to include both those who affirm only believers' baptism and those who advocate infant baptism. It would be intended to allow both conservative Catholics and conservative Protestants to teach or be administrators. On the other hand, it would be strongly enough worded on Trinitarian theology and the nature of God to make it clear that Mormons would not be regarded as Christians and could not teach at the school and that modalists would be o-u-t, and it would very likely exclude those who refused to affirm the existence of an historical Adam. I'm undecided on whether to exclude open theists. I would like to include something that would exclude doctrinaire, bullying, anti-ID theistic evolutionists and prevent them from taking over the biology department but haven't yet figured out how to word that. The moral section would be fairly extensive, given our present world's Corinthian debauchery and the appalling extent to which approval of this debauchery is entering the Christian world through specious and sophistical arguments. I would support any administrator who was an absolute hawk on these moral issues and promptly fired any faculty member who showed himself to be undermining the mission of the institution on those points.

My point in listing those suggestions is not so much to defend every single one of them as to suggest a trajectory of simultaneous minimalism in some areas and maximalism in others. It seems to me that Christian institutions need to get their priorities straight. I read some years ago about a well-known Christian college that was hiring a high-level administrator whose background was in the Assemblies of God. By my recollection (I haven't time to try to find the exact words) he had also made some disturbingly wishy-washy statements about abortion. I then read about an on-campus interview process (or perhaps this occurred immediately after he was hired) in which he had an open Q & A with students. Even though both his Assemblies of God background and his abortion remarks had previously been published, the students appeared to be questioning him far more about whether he believed in eternal security of salvation than about his down-playing the evil of abortion. In fact, if I recall correctly, I didn't see a single reference in the questions to what he had said about abortion. This was misguided. Was the same set of priorities represented among those who hired him? If so, that was misguided. Eternal security is a far more open question, biblically and in terms of Christian ethics, than the grave evil of abortion.

I suppose it is not surprising that I should have become more authoritarian as I have gotten older, and I'm keenly aware that authority can be abused. But where authority exists, as it certainly does exist in the private "little kingdoms" of small Christian colleges, it should be used aright. Having and keeping faculty who are teaching what Dilley calls "evangelical self-loathing" is a recipe for disaster. If nothing else, it means accepting parents' hard-earned money and/or students' back-breaking debt under false pretenses.

This is especially true in this day and age when it comes to having faculty who are teaching that moral perversion is right. As I noted here, this has apparently happened at Gordon College. Quite frankly, I am not terribly sympathetic to talk about the lawsuits that a Christian college would or might face if it fired a "gay" professor who was opposing the mission of the school by advocating the legitimacy of homosexual acts. For decades Christian colleges have been leaning on religious exemptions to non-discrimination laws to allow them to enforce minor points of doctrine. If they cannot now use such exemptions, or at least attempt to do so, to fire members of "sexual minorities" who are teaching gross sexual perversion (or anyone who is so teaching under their auspices), then the sooner they cease to put themselves forward as Christian schools, the better! Indeed, the sooner they cease to exist, the better, since their raison d'etre will be gone. What? If open advocacy by faculty of the morality of homosexual practice is not a reductio, what is? Would an administrator refuse, out of fear of lawsuit, to fire a faculty member at a Christian school who was openly advocating orgies in the chapel? I suppose the time might come when that person's "orientation" would also gain the sympathy of the intelligentsia and the courts, but that certainly would not mean that he should be kept on staff, paid by the dollars of pious parents under the impression that they are sending their students to receive a grounding in the Christian worldview! Better for the school to close its doors altogether. The same applies to anyone who is teaching the licitness of homosexual sodomy. An administrator who lacks the stomach for that legal and spiritual fight betrays, at least to my mind, a failure to understand the serious moral evil involved.

I'm sorry for those who have been harmed by misguided witch hunts. But I'm even more sorry for students who will someday go to hell because of a failure of proper vigilance against seriously false teaching. May God give grace and wisdom to Christian leaders to know the difference between one and the other.

Cross-posted

They really do want your children

Most of you will have seen this post of mine already at W4, but for anyone who hasn't...My husband found an incredible, amazing quote from the well-known (now late) philosopher Richard Rorty openly bragging about discrediting Christian parents in their children's eyes, about reprograming them, and the like. I want to point out for those of you who are (understandably) hesitant about quoting what you see on the web that Tim verified this quotation from the "look inside" function for the book itself on Amazon. It's legit, and in fact the full version is even more shocking than the portion quoted on Wikipedia. Here's a teaser to get you to go to W4 if you aren't a regular W4 reader:

The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire “American liberal establishment” is engaged in a conspiracy. Had they read Habermas, these people would say that the typical communication situation in American college classrooms is no more herrschaftsfrei [domination free] than that in the Hitler Youth camps.

These parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students....When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank....I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents.

And there's more, here.

Soul-losing risk-taking

Over at W4 I've put up a post on the subject of how kids lose their Christian faith in college. Actually, I'm looking for information more than giving it. One theme that comes up again and again in the responses is the theme of the entire atmosphere of a secular college and how the Christian student feels immersed in it, feels lonely as a Christian, perhaps wants to try out some of the hedonistic experimenting his peers are trying, and is therefore almost looking for excuses to throw out his Christianity.

This leads me to wonder seriously about parents who deliberately send their children to live on the campus of a secular university. Nowadays, we have all heard the horror stories about the brain-washing PC residence hall sessions. But even aside from that, as one commentator put it,

It takes a lot of personal fortitude to hold onto what you believe in when everyone around you operates entirely on the presumption that it doesn't even exist. You have to be able to go home at night and think about it, you have to be able to drag yourself out early in the morning and go to church, you have to be able to say "eh, not this time" when good clean fun goes bad.

Right. So surely living in the dorms must make this effect particularly strong. Or so it would seem to me. I mean, what if there is no "home" to go to in order to get away from the atmosphere and think about it?

So I was thinking over reasons why parents and children agree to do this. These seem to me to include things like this: 1) The assumption that going away and living in dorms at college is a necessary part of growing up, an absolute rite of passage that it would be cruel to have your kids miss out on. 2) The worry that sending your child to a Christian college will not get him a good enough education and/or will not allow him to get a job. 3) The worry that sending your child to a local college, so that he can live at home, will not get him a good enough name on his transcript to allow him to get a job. 4) (Related to 3.) The assumption that, despite post-modernism and the death of the academy, there is enough objective difference in quality across disciplines between a more "elite" secular school and a secular school that no one has ever heard of that your child really will get a good education at the former and not at the latter and that you therefore have a duty to send your child away from home to go to the former.

I certainly understand that parents agonize over such decisions, and I don't want to sound harsh. But there is that whole thing in the Gospels about gaining the whole world and losing your own soul. This is not meant as an advertisement for Christian colleges. Christian colleges often have their unique problems, some of which arise from the fact that young people and parents go in trusting them and are therefore particularly vulnerable to faith-attacking professors and trendy movements (like the Emergent Church movement, for example). But I would say this: Question all of 1-4 if you have a decision of this kind to make. And try to do something other than sending your children away to be immersed in the "college experience" of a secular college. For what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?