by publius
Man oh man, this is a good point. Citing Ali Gharib, Spencer Ackerman writes:
reaffirmation of the Islamic Revolution, not a repudiation of it. . . . If
Gharib is right, then what’s unfolding is a measure of reconciling the
revolution with greater openness. . . . If
they can harmonize the Islamic Revolution with those concepts, they’ll have
done themselves and the world a great service.
so to speak. And reconciling the Islamic
Revolution to more openness would indeed be a great example to the world. One recurring problem in recent years – both here
and abroad – is the equation of a particular interpretation of Islam with Islam
itself. But other, less hardline,
interpretations are possible – ones that more open, more fair to women, etc.
Dobson’s specific version of it. Just
like Christianity, Islam can be interpreted in different ways. And these alternative interpretations – ones that fully
accept, and work within, the tenets of Islam – present far more dangerous challenges
to militant fundamentalist movements than Western happy-talk about democracy
does.
– extends far beyond the streets of
way to bring conservative Christians around to gay marriage (or young ones,
anyway) is to ground the argument within Christianity – to work within the
religious narrative.
anything other than to harden opposition.
But, if you can convince evangelicals, etc. that supporting gay marriage
is fully consistent with the Christian message of love, tolerance, empathy,
etc., then it’s no longer such a threatening boogeyman to them. I mean, think about it. Jesus didn’t spend his time hanging out with
the people enforcing rigid rules of morality.
He hung out with people who had faced discrimination by the larger
public. He embraced them, healed them,
etc.
roll though. My hunch is that James
Dobson, if faced with a thirsty Samaritan woman at a well, would have chased
her off screaming “we don’t associate with you people – everyone, please send me money
so I can help drive these wretched Samaritans away from our water.”
Yeees, I was happily following your argument until you brought up a topic about which I know a great deal: the discussion of gay marriage within the Christian tradition.
I’m an Episcopal priest and I’m here to tell you that even within the Christian tradition it is well nigh impossible to talk about this. Even though I have absolutely no problem with the Nicene Creed (which is pretty remarkable, actually), I have been called a heretic–quite literally–for the sole reason that I think homosexuality is not a sin. The support many of us feel for GLBT people is branded “revisionism” and discounted as an abandoning of the faith rather than a conversation or strand within it.
So. Getting back to Iran and Islam. There is no guarantee that the discussion even within the narrative will bring about the changes we think are happening when we look at it from the outside. Even within the narrative there will be friction and factions and fault lines.
I think the point here may be listen and learn, listen and learn. Again, using your example, I am not best pleased when people who feel they are enlightened try to tell me how it ought to be without ever finding out what it is I actually think and believe. Never assume that the label means everyone agrees on one particular party line.
“I’m an Episcopal priest and I’m here to tell you that even within the Christian tradition it is well nigh impossible to talk about this.”
That sounds odd. Maybe I’ve been in liberal Christian circles for a very long time, but even the more evangelical Episcopal church I used to go to had a mix of views, all openly expressed, and where I go now everyone seems to be a liberal–if there are traditional types opposed to gay marriage they must be keeping it to themselves.
That was off topic for this thread, however, so I probably shouldn’t have said anything about that here. I agree with your (LKT) main point–those of us who are not intimately acquainted with Iran could well be misinterpreting much of what we see.
I am not a fan of Christianity, and certainly not of the modern Christianist faction of American politics. And Dobson is a jerk. But I would not expect most evangelical leaders to engage in the kind of personal hate-talk you describe.
I frequently hear/read evangelicals condemn activity they see as sinful (homosexuality, abortion, fornication, nudity…let’s just say “sex” and be done with it) and they surely do rail against straw-men liberals who supposedly try to force them to condone or pay for these activities (as in the Proposition 8 campaign). I notice much less in the way of expressions of hatred for the actual sinners themselves. Hate the sin, love the sinner, hate the person urging tolerance for sin, seems to be the rule.
It’s a fine distinction, and even the leadership sometimes fails to make it, let alone the rank and file. I suspect, as well, that the leadership really does harbor a lot of hatred or at least contempt for the sinners, because they don’t seem to try hard to discourage their followers from making the jump from, for instance, anti-homosexuality to gay-bashing. And whatever the evangelicals may think they are saying, the average gay person rightly feels despised and threatened when told that one of the most important parts of his identity is a horror and should be outlawed.
Still, I have talked to evangelicals who are very offended and upset that what they see as earnest concern about sin is portrayed as hatred of sinners. That makes it much harder for them to confront the damage they are doing to, e.g., gays, sick pregnant women, etc. The left drives away these moderates when it overstates the case.
LKT, of course there’s no guarantee that anyone is going to buy the argument situating gay marriage or a free press within a particular religious tradition. But, from the perspective of someone who’s not Christian but has read the New Testament and knows a little about Christian theology, it looks to me like there are pretty good arguments for a Christianity that’s kind and tolerant towards LGBT folks at a minimum. I also see pretty clear arguments for Christians to not oppose legal same-sex civil marriage, and, given “it is better to marry than to burn,” arguments for religious same-sex marriage.
Not, of course, that Dobson is going to buy those arguments. But it’s easier to convince people who aren’t quite so entrenched in the power they get from bigotry if you make arguments within their own framework.
See? The Episcopal thing isn’t really that off-topic. The Anglican Communion has been under a lot of strain recently, since rather than open exchange of ideas, various more conservative congregations have severed ties with their parent denominations over their views about homosexuality (see “Anglican realignment.”). But if you’re not in one of the conservative-dominated churches in question, or been active at the relevant interchurch level, you could miss much of what has been going on.
It’s also funny that many conservative congregants who endorse such splits over perceived heresies also apparently have a tendency to view Islam as a monolithic religion (at least based on my own fundamentalist Baptist experience).
You could say the same about England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688-9 or of America’s Revolution. Indeed, I recall Uncle Karl going on about how revolutionaries adopt the masks of the past and claim continuity in the Eighteenth Brumaire. (The end of that story was the revolution giving way to the bufoonish dictatorship of Napoleon III.)
“Think about it” “I mean, think about it.”
If I may be so bold as to suggest, this is a very poor trope to use.
Either your audience has thought about it quite a lot, in which case you appear to be, in jejune fashion, making a very banal point that apparently you have never had before, which simply makes you look not very bright; or you are urging a new thought upon your audience, in which case simply repeating “think about it!” implies that they won’t think about it without your hammering them over the head not just with the point, but with the external command that they Need To Think About It, Which Would Never Have Occurred To Them Without Your Awesome Command. In which case you’re implying that you think they’re not very bright.
Either way, “think about it!” does one side or another a bad turn, and makes someone look bad. I suggest not using it. Think about it!
Not to me; I’m not even Christian, but my email box has been full for years of screeds screaming about the evils of the pro-LGBT congregations who are OUT TO DESTROY THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH!!!, and they include links to blogs who have had literally no other topics for many years now.
Has this not crossed your path?
“But if you’re not in one of the conservative-dominated churches in question, or been active at the relevant interchurch level, you could miss much of what has been going on.”
Oh, I hear about it–it makes the secular press and we talk about it where I go, but LKT’s statement seemed so sweeping I wonder if he or she is in a conservative diocese.
I used to be conservative on this and so understand where the “hate the sin, love the sinner” types are coming from, but I get a little impatient with my former self nowadays.
No Gary, I’ve followed the fight within the Episcopal Church and the wider Anglican communion and have attended talks and discussion groups about it at my church. I was only reacting to LKT’s statement–
“here to tell you that even within the Christian tradition it is well nigh impossible to talk about this.”
If he or she just meant it’s impossible to talk about it where LKT happens to be, then yes, there are places like that. But it sounded too sweeping. I probably misunderstood.
Yes, they’re seeking change within the narrative. That’s what you have to do when the correlation of forces are not in your favor. How else could expectations for hopeychanginess be placed on figures as tired as Mousavi?
It’s the refusal of the regime to concede even the most cosmetic change within the narrative that has unleashed peoples’ willingness to risk the consequences of open protest.
But in a dictatorship it takes mighty mobilization even to get reforms. (It seems significant that there appears to be the first non-regular meeting of the Assembly of Experts in many years, and in Qom.) That doesn’t make it a revolution.
The price being paid is rising. Estimates are that 500 targeted people (journalists, human rights activists, political figures) have been arrested with no information available on their whereabouts. Thirty-two people have been confirmed killed, 23 from shootings and attacks at the end of Monday’s demonstration and seven students killed in raids at university dorms (most but not all at Tehran University in the early hours of Sunday morning; raids have occurred in Isfahan and Mashad also). Reports via NIACblog.
I’m an Episcopal priest and I’m here to tell you that even within the Christian tradition it is well nigh impossible to talk about this.
Obviously you’re not at an Anglo-Catholic church… 😛
@North has given an excellent example of what I mentioned, “when people who feel they are enlightened try to tell me how it ought to be without ever finding out what it is I actually think and believe.” It looks so simple and straightforward from the outside (and also I appreciate that the arguments look ridiculous when you look at them from the outside), but on the inside it is something different entirely.
Again, I don’t mean to make this about the Episcopal Church. It’s been very enlightening for me, though, to think of Iran through that personal lens and get a greater appreciation of how little I know of what is going on there. And how I dare not presume to give what seems to me to be a very obvious answer.
I also am amused by the presumption of where I am located in space. I mean, we’re all commenting ON A BLOG!
I give it another couple of generations, and there will be social cost for churches which discriminate against homosexuality. And that will be a result of the work from within AND the outside. In the mean time, there is going to be much pain to get there.
I wonder if they can do it. Revive real Bid’ah and Ijtihad….. awe.
It’s the refusal of the regime to concede even the most cosmetic change within the narrative that has unleashed peoples’ willingness to risk the consequences of open protest.
It’s worth pointing out that by all accounts things have changed in Iran in the past, say, 10 years, particularly for younger Iranians (which is a majority of all Iranians). People who’ve actually been there say that various modern fashions and cultural trends have become much more popular, and openly flaunted, despite Ahmadinejad’s fulminations against the corrupting influence of the west, and young people there are obviously very tech-savvy. Iran’s system is going to have to accomodate change, or risk undermining its own legitimacy with the majority of its people – in another ten years or so, I could see that meaning the end of the Islamic Republic, but for now, it probably just means liberalizing some of the more repressive elements of the regime. Moussavi likely only wants a fair election, but from the perspective of a would-be revolutionary he has played things very savvily by casting this as a challenge to the powers-that-be in the system to live up to their own rules. One way or the other, the Ayatollahs are going to be forced to permanently concede ground to the forces of liberalization in order to keep a lid on things.
Rafsanjani literally owns the Universities? …Asia Times Online, long & detailed
Rafsanjani family clan owns vast financial empires in Iran, including foreign trade, vast landholdings and the largest network of private universities in Iran. Known as Azad there are 300 branches spread over the country, they are not only money-spinners but could also press into Mousavi’s election campaign an active cadre of student activists numbering some 3 million.
Rafsanjani vs Khameinei via proxies. K probably wants to name his son Supreme Leader and R wants to use the Assembly of Experts to name somebody else.
Money & power. As usual. Reaffirmation of the Islamic Revolution, my aching butt.
2nd para was meant to be blockqoted
“Council of Experts”?
Here’s more analysis from Asian Times, more critical of Ahmadinejad. Whatever.
Yu know, a 1st gen rural student at one of Rafsanjani’s private universities, dependent for her degree & career, might be under just a little influence and not completely independent. I mean, it’s possible.
Enough with Berlin Wall analogies and Iranian Springs. This is an ugly power struggle among some really nasty people.
Hate the sin, love the sinner
I never understood how this two-step is supposed to work. It requires a strict distinction between the actions of a person and the morality of a person. But to me the morality of a person is to a great extent determined by their actions. Talk is cheap, actions are not. Of course some people we consider to be “good” do sometimes do bad things, but that forces us to recalibrate our judgment regarding their “goodness”. And while goodness and action are not equivalent, we would have a hard time describing someone as “good” if he doesn’t act on it. So if you consider someone’s actions to be a mortal sin, how can you “love the sinner” except in an extremely condescending, paternalistic sense of the word?
I don’t see why this is difficult to understand. “Hate the sin, love the sinner” is the attitude Christians are supposed to take towards everyone, including themselves. Everyone sins and you’re supposed to continue loving them and in God’s eyes, nobody qualifies as “good” anyway. We’re supposed to model ourselves after Christ, who loves us despite knowing our every nasty thought and action. Sticking to human comparisons, if you have a son who goes out and kills somebody, you don’t stop loving him (presumably), but you don’t condone murder. Or on a less serious note, if a friend or relative is bad-tempered or sometimes selfish or does something seriously wrong, you should still care about them. I have some personality traits I think are bad, but though I should work on trying to change, I don’t hate myself.
I don’t think gay sex is inherently sinful, so I don’t think “hate the sin, love the sinner” applies to that issue, but if someone does think it’s wrong, they are still as Christians supposed to love the sinner. Which means in practice that they should be appalled by anti-gay violence, for instance. Their attitude will be condescending, of course, because they are condemning homosexuality as something which is wrong, when they are the ones who are mistaken. If they were right it wouldn’t be condescending.