(no subject)

[seekingferret]

Listening to the West Wing Weekly podcast, I'm up to 2x3 The Midterm Elections and one of my least favorite scenes in the West Wing, when President Bartlet 'dismantles' Dr. Jane Jacobs's homophobia.

BARTLET
Good. I like your show. I like how you call homosexuality an abomination.

JENNA JACOBS
I don't say homosexuality is an abomination, Mr. President. The Bible does.

BARTLET
Yes, it does. Leviticus.

JENNA JACOBS
18:22

BARTLET
Chapter and verse. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions while I had you here.
I'm interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7.
(small chuckles from the guests) She's a Georgetown sophomore, speaks fluent Italian, and
always clears the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for her be? While
thinking about that, can I ask another? My Chief of Staff, Leo McGarry, insists on working
on the Sabbath, Exodus 35:2, clearly says he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated
to kill him myself or is it okay to call the police? Here's one that's really important,
'cause we've got a lot of sports fans in this town. Touching the skin of a dead pig makes
us unclean, Leviticus 11:7. If they promise to wear gloves, can the Washington Redskins
still play football? Can Notre Dame? Can West Point? Does the whole town really have to be
together to stone my brother, John, for planting different crops side by side? Can I burn
my mother in a small family gathering for wearing garments made from two different threads?

I know I've complained about similar rhetoric before. The argument is this: There are things in the Bible that a modern religious person doesn't observe. This abrogation means that any parts they do still observe are inherently hypocritical, because if they claimed to follow the Bible they would follow the whole Bible.

This is a really stupid argument. Christianity explicitly rejects some of the Hebrew Bible's obligations. It's not hypocritical for them to not observe these things, it's inherently doctrinal, and it could even be argued (as I've sometimes been forced to, because sometimes Christians do weird and offensive things with Jewish ritual) that it's hypocritical if they DO observe those things. The Christian Bible says that Christians do not need to keep kosher. It's right there in the text!

And even things Christians do still observe that are mentioned in the rant are not necessarily observed in the Biblical way, on purpose! Jesus doesn't condemn the idea of the Sabbath, and Christians do observe a Sabbath, but Jesus condemns the idea of putting people to death for breaching the Sabbath. So Christians have a much more relaxed approach to the Sabbath than Jews do. Again, this does not make them hypocrites. It means they ARE observing their religion.

This infuriates me particularly even though I usually don't care all that much if Christians are revealed as hypocrites, because this argument is the classic anti-Judeo-Christian argument: Ostensibly directed at Christians by people who don't bother to distinguish between Jews and Christians. Jews have our own approaches to difficult passages in Tanakh, but generally we don't believe that the ritual law has been abrogated. We think we still are obligated in most if not all of the things Bartlet mentions as absurd rituals. Orthodox Jewish farmers in Israel, to this day, don't plant two crops side by side in a field. And though we don't have the executive ability to carry them out, most of the stoning laws Bartlet mentions are still technically on the books.

And Orthodox Jews generally still believe we are obligated in the prohibition of et zachar lo tishkav, no matter how difficult that may be to reconcile with modern ideas about love and sex. But it's not like the fact that I don't eat shellfish is what allows me to hate gays without hypocrisy! That's the frustrating part of this argument for me. If you accept it, you seem to be accepting the idea that IF Christians hadn't abrogated parts of the Torah's ritual law, they'd be free to consider homosexuality an abomination. But the people who are making this argument clearly don't believe that. They believe that considering homosexuality abominable is evil and homophobic regardless of whether you eat shellfish. So people making Bartlet's argument are making an argument they don't actually believe to try to trap religious people with sophistry.

So when you're criticizing Christian homophobia, or Jewish homophobia, try to do it with an argument that you actually believe, and which actually engages with Christian or Jewish doctrine rather than with your imagined fake version of that doctrine. Ask a Jew how they reconcile Veahavta lereacha kamocha with the idea of telling your neighbor they can't marry the person they love. Ask a Christian how they can send their churchmates to abusive conversion therapies when Jesus preached kindness and humility and not judging the sins of others.

But don't ask them these things because they're traps you're seeking to catch them in. Ask them because religious people have thought about these questions and we have answers to them, answers our critics often refuse to listen to, and because the conversations about these questions are worth having and worth struggling with. These are hard questions that challenge our faith, and serious theists ask them. Serious atheists ought to, also.

And what frustrates me most about this scene, why it's one of my least favorite West Wing moments, is that President Bartlet, deeply Catholic, who once considered the priesthood, must have some answer to these questions that isn't dependent on taking Catholics to task for eating shellfish. This scene is profoundly out of character on a theological level for the man delivering it. And I don't like when President Bartlet lets me down.


Edit: Thanks for comments- I will not be able to respond until after Rosh Hashanah at earliest

Comments

[the_rck]

I suspect (can't speak for the writers/producers of the episode) that people who love that particular monologue are part of a growing schism in Christianity, one which isn't falling along traditional denominational lines. You can find, say, Catholics and Lutherans and Methodists on both sides of the gap. I'm only vaguely Christian, so I don't entirely understand the fault lines, but I know that my husband very much expects an actual, official split in the Methodist Church in the next decade or two and that it will be entirely about required/acceptable Christian positions on social justice issues.

Some of it is geographic, and some is generational, but there's a very strong sense of 'if that bit of the Bible doesn't make ethical/moral sense to me, it must be a mistake because Jesus can't have been a bad person.' That is, there's more emphasis on 'being good'-- whatever that actually means-- than on being obedient and trying to understand why the rules are the way they are. It's more... Are you familiar with the differences between Quakers and other Christians? It rather goes in that direction without following the line of logic to where the Quakers have taken it.

The writers/producers may also have been to some degree anti-religious in the way that a lot of folks are, for one reason or another, either due to their family's views or due to terrible experiences with one or more religious groups.

At any rate, you're right. Those aren't words that President Bartlet would have used, not given his age and background. President Bartlet represented wish fulfillment for many people, and that's one of the most obvious points when something got pushed into his mouth because someone just wanted him to be that sort of person.

I don't know if any of that makes any sense...

[cahn]

an actual, official split in the Methodist Church in the next decade or two and that it will be entirely about required/acceptable Christian positions on social justice issues.

Some of it is geographic, and some is generational, but there's a very strong sense of 'if that bit of the Bible doesn't make ethical/moral sense to me, it must be a mistake because Jesus can't have been a bad person.' That is, there's more emphasis on 'being good'-- whatever that actually means-- than on being obedient and trying to understand why the rules are the way they are.

My religion (LDS) is actually pretty complicated in terms of how we understand things that don't make ethical/moral sense to me personally (see my comment to ferret for some first-draft thoughts on it) but anyway the same divide is happening, particularly with treatment of LGBTQ/same-sex-relationship issues.

[the_rck]

I decided not to mention LDS because I very much don't know enough to understand either the doctrine or the potential changes to it. I know a very little bit of your faith's history but only to be aware that I'm ignorant.

So I very much appreciate your comment.

[cahn]

I'm glad the comment was interesting to you! I was also interested to hear your husband's thoughts on the Methodist Church, which isn't one I know a lot about either. (My husband's Lutheran, so I know a little about that, but I think their divide has already basically happened.)

I should elaborate a little -- I don't anticipate a schism causing an actual break into two churches (or synods, or whatever), given that both LDS doctrine and administration are pretty heavily centralized. The split seems to be largely age-based (see for example here (*)), while the leadership of the Church tends to skew quite old, so I would expect some movement on doctrine there over the next, oh, 50 years. (In fact even in the last ten years I have noticed movement in the area of women's equality and LGBT issues among others, though obviously with some exceptions as below.) But in addition what I expect / what is happening is a lot of younger people just leaving, although this is complicated because there are a lot of other reasons for leaving, of course.

(*) You may have read about this: the "exclusion policy" mentioned in this article refers to a recent (2015) policy forbidding children of same-sex couples to be baptized. I would like to be on the record that I am SUPER EXTREMELY STRONGLY against this policy, which (in addition to social justice concerns, but speaking as a religious person) I consider un-Christlike and against our scripture, and I actually almost left myself over it. It's in large part because my local leadership affirmed and supported that it was OK to be against this policy that I'm still there. (I have a lot more words about this here.)

[seekingferret]

Thanks, this is really interesting!

[elf]

The interpretation I have heard from Jews (not that I have heard a lot, but bits and pieces) is that yes, all those parts are in there - but they are not all absolute dogmatic law that must be followed as strict demands. Some is ethics/moral guidance, and some of that needs to be followed absolutely and some needs to be adjusted to make sense in today's society. And some is history with no morality attached, and the reason there are rabbis instead of robots is that history's lessons needs to be understood in the light of changing circumstances. Being good, being moral, is not a matter of following a list of rules but a matter of improving life for your family and community.

However, many evangelical Christians reject this notion of relative value of different parts of the bible, or the role of spiritual leaders in interpreting abstract messages. It's ALL literally true; it's ALL 100% law that applies today; "interpreting" is wrong because that leads to liberal shenanigans like gay love and premarital sex and divorce of abusers and refusal to tithe to megachurch preachers. They like to claim that there is no variable interpretation and that they're not cherry-picking when they use bible verses to support their views.

Except, of course, they don't like being reminded that "all true all equal all law" means including a whole bunch of rules that they really don't want.

Many of them fall back on, "well, the NT overrides a lot of the OT rules," and use Paul's condemnation of wrongful lusts to argue against gay sex. However, they never mention Paul's statement that Christians should "Greet each other with a holy kiss" - that part, of course, is not meant to be literal.

when you're criticizing Christian homophobia, or Jewish homophobia, try to do it with an argument that you actually believe, and which actually engages with Christian or Jewish doctrine rather than with your imagined fake version of that doctrine

My current argument is, "why should I believe your holy book is more accurate than my holy book? Mine is newer, and thus supercedes the NT much like the NT supercedes the OT." (I have not found this argument to be convincing, but I have found it to be entertaining, so I consider that a win.)

When I need to address the "bible is literal and absolute truth" argument, if they're dragging in the OT, I pull out Psalms 137:9; if they're sticking to the NT, I start with "holy kiss" (Romans 16:16, 1 Cor 16:20, 2 Cor 13:12, 1 Thess 5:26, 1 Peter 5:14) which is nowhere near as rare or as ambiguous as the verses being used to condemn abortion.

The "trap" that Bartlett sprung isn't, "aha! The bible demands this!" but "aha! In order to refute that the bible demands this, you must allow that some parts of the bible are more relevant than others!" And if they admit that, they open the can of worms of, "so... who should decide which parts to follow?"

[cahn]

Yeah, that's a great way of explicating what I think is the actual argument (though the words Bartlet used don't quite match up exactly -- probably because there is some Jewish erasure/conflation going on there, as ferret postulates)

But I'm kind of surprised you haven't run across people who do the holy kiss. When I was in Catholic choir (I'm not Catholic, I just got hired to help the alto section), many of the older (and generally more religiously conservative) members did the holy kiss thing. Of course, Catholicism does answer your question of "who should decide," so I guess that particular data point isn't really relevant to your argument.

[elf]

Yep. I've run across people who do the "holy kiss" thing, but they're not biblical-literalist protestant fundamentalist evangelists. And the evangelists can't fall back on, "well, this other sect does that, but it's not for us" without saying "it's okay to use another group's interpretation of how to be Christian."

[cahn]

I tend to agree with elf that the argument should be (it's not quite, the way Bartlet presents it) for people who don't keep the entirety of the law (which, as you say, is explicit Christian doctrine), "What makes Lev 18:22 the part you keep and not, oh, Lev 18:19? Who decides that?"

(My religion is actually kind of interesting on this point. Current prophet is, explicitly, who gets to decide. But current prophet can always be added to/corrected/overruled by future prophet. And there's a very important component of personal revelation in there, in that our doctrine is that every individual can ask for personal confirmation from the Holy Spirit. In practice -- though this is opening up a bit -- it is extremely, extremely discouraged to come up with personal revelation that contradicts current prophet. The joke is that Catholics say the pope is inerrant, but don't act like it. Mormons say that the prophet is NOT inerrant, but don't act like it.)

[seekingferret]

"What makes Lev 18:22 the part you keep and not, oh, Lev 18:19? Who decides that?"

Right, but, like, Evangelical Christians have an answer to that question, don't they? Or slightly different answers depending on the exact group, but it's not like they pick verses out of a hat to give priority to. Evangelical Biblical literalists have a hermeneutics. And the question you propose is "What's your hermeneutics?" It's a fun question to debate, but the only people who ask it as a trap to catch out the believer are atheists who haven't spent much time thinking about the Bible.

[cahn]

I should ask my sister-in-law, who is the only person I know well enough to ask that kind of question who's an Evangelical Christian -- I think the answer is mostly that a) EC's keep OT law based on whether there's NT support -- Lev 18:22 has support in e.g. Rom 1:26-7, of course, and as far as I know e.g. Lev 18:19 doesn't, and b) NT is wholly taken as commandment, except when it's taken figuratively rather than literally (e.g., holy kiss as above; whether or not you believe Jesus was speaking figuratively or literally when he said of the bread, This is my body; whether we should take Paul seriously when he goes on and on about hair). And here (b) I don't actually get the sense that there's necessarily a structured hermeneutics that makes sense to me -- it seems to me to be much more of a jumbled hodgepodge as to whether you take something case by case as figurative rather than literal. (And, of course, this is why there are so many sects of Christianity.)

Part of it may be my own confusion, though, which is why I should ask my sister-in-law (and will when I see her next) -- it's a little hard for me to wrap my head around because my faith tradition is SO different in this respect (like, with the "holy kiss" thing above, JS literally rewrote it and said that it should mean "holy salutation," so that's why we don't do it! And I hear there's actually a holy salutation thing as part of the temple rituals, although I can't say first-hand).

And part of it may just be that theology, when not developed by a whole bunch of intellectuals arguing it over hundreds of years (which characterizes both Evangelical Christian and LDS theology), is bound to be a hodge-podge. LDS theology is if anything worse in this regard.

Back to Bartlet, though -- I agree (as I said before) that the way it's presented is not actually asking the question about interpretation, but with some changes I think it could be thought of as Bartlet-as-liberal-Catholic asking a question critical of Jacobs' hermeneutics -- which would be consistent with his character, right? Religious people, especially Christian sects, are critical and dismissive of other sects' hermeneutics when they disagree with our own all the time. (But again, I agree this is not at all what the writers were thinking when they wrote that bit.)

[lirazel]

This is a great post, and I appreciate it very much. I've always rolled my eyes at this scene. Agreed on that kind of smug argument inherently misunderstanding both Christianity and Judaism.