Implications. . .

A couple of generations or so ago, how a couple parented their children was not always an accurate indicator of how they saw things in the public square or how they voted alone in the polling booth.  Then there was much more in common between liberal and progressive thinkers and religious and conservative ones in terms of how they raised their children.  Of course, there were permissive parents and strict ones, those who were very involved in their kids lives and those who were less intimately involved in their kids everyday lives.  But that did not always equate to a clear indicator of their political or social or moral views.  Parenting was parenting and so parents had a lot in common despite other differences.  At least that was how it was in Nebraska and watching as a young parent in New York and a parent finally of teenagers in Tennessee.  Their were card-carrying liberals who were strict and card-carrying conservatives who were permissive.  But that has changed.

How parents view politics, religion, society, and morality has become a fairly accurate predictor of how they parent.  Those on the left are more likely to be permissive and those on the right more likely to be conservative.  Both sides can and are authoritarian about their views.  It is not quite a rule but it is an indicator no less of the more profound connection between the views of the parent and their parenting style.  The same is true of religion.  Those who claimed religious affiliation a couple of generations ago were probably split among the more liberal and progressive churches and the conservative ones but they were equally religious.  That is not quite the case today.  Those on the left are not simply more likely to be non-religious but to be actively secular in their views and in their parenting.  Those on the right are more likely to be religious and to seek out more doctrinal and doctrinaire religious communities and it shows in their parenting as well.

You see it in the schools.  Again, that was not always the case.  Sure, there were good schools and bad schools but they existed in neighborhoods and communities across the spectrum of liberal and conservative.  Within those schools there were good kids and not so good ones, compliant and defiant, responsible and not so responsible.  Today the distance between liberal and conservative in schools and in the teachers is more pronounced.  It is not hard to predict the political affiliation of the parents or of the teachers in most public and private schools.  Even the vocabulary is different as well as what it taught and how it is taught.  The left and right identities tend to spill over into more aspects of the people's lives and into the institutions in their communities.  That was not always the care or even ordinarily so but it surely is the case today.

The great divide between suburban and urban, between city and rural, and between married with children and not has become not simply more evident across the board but also seems to be incorporated into our kids and into the institutions where they are raised.  In short, we are attempting to raise clones of ourselves.  There was a time when we all assumed that it was better for our children to know both sides of the question or issue before them but we are more likely today to raise them to be unthinking and to respond instinctively, according to our own views on things before us.  And it is showing.  

Is this a good thing?  Some might think so.  Some might even suggest that this is the job of parents -- to incorporate into their children their own political, religious, cultural, and social viewpoints.  The problem, it seems to me, is that we have not raised them to know and hold our views but to not know the opposing views or sides.  In the end this will not help us raise children to be thinking adults capable of defending and reasoning their way into our points of view but just the opposite.  It leaves them vulnerable and unable to defend or reason why they hold to certain beliefs or values.  Insulating children from a real debate and putting them into cocoons in which they do not encounter challenges to their beliefs will not help them to retain these views and beliefs but just the opposite.  Unless our kids know why we think what we think or believe what we believe or value what we value, they will shed our clothes like yesterday's style and become adults without a real anchor to their faith, identities, values, and opinions.  I fear less those who disagree with me than those who hold no real and firm beliefs.  Chaos is the greater problem.  We just might be raising a generation of children who not only do not know why they hold to some view or belief, they are more likely to choose the tyranny of feelings over the concrete of facts and truth.  That is bad all the way around.  

I know it when I hear it. . .

The phrase "I know it when I see it" was first used in legal description in1964 when United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was describing his own threshold test for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio.  He famously explained why the material at issue in the case was not obscene under the Roth test, and fit the definition of protected speech that could not be censored. 

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

The expression became not only one of the best-known phrases in the history of the Supreme Court but an example of the extreme subjectivity of things for which a proper definition could not be offered.  "I know it when I see it" was his attempt to define "hard-core pornography".  Some thought Stewart's "I know it when I see it" standard "realistic and gallant" an example of judicial candor. Others said it was ridiculous, fallacious and subject to individualistic arbitrariness.

The same could be said of "hate speech."  The very promise of “hate speech” laws is that there exists a boundary between permitted speech and criminal speech but the actual definition of where that boundary sits is not only subject to individual decision but judges have disagreed.  As much as some would like to cling to such a distinction, it has become a tool of the WOKE to remove not only speech but the very speech that was almost universally believed and accepted as normal a few generations ago.  In Finland in the case of Päivi Räsänen, a doctor, grandmother, and long-serving member of the Finnish parliament, no less than eleven judges across three levels of the Finnish judiciary spent over six years trying to locate the line between speech permitted and criminal speech and they could not agree.  By the narrowest majority the highest court of Finland found what they considered a boundary line.  

Hate speech laws are the very definition of abusive power either by intimidation or by judgment. In any other case, the writer would have simply deleted what was deemed offensive and retreated but in the case of Räsänen and Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola, they refused to delete and fought the charge.  Even with an international team of jurists to help in their defense, how do you defend yourself against a moving line which no one seems to know where it is located except by that vague old pornographic line from Justice Potter Steward -- "I know it what I see [hear] it."  In a world in which those who testify before Congress insist they do not know how to define who a woman is and when the standard of truth itself has become subject to the whims of the individual, hate speech is one more example of a bad idea that cannot be rescued by fine tuning the hate speech laws or getting better judges.  These are the bad kinds of laws that simply need to go. 

 

 

So dangerous. . .

I wrote long ago that the most dangerous thing on earth is a theologically orthodox person -- both those inside the Church and those outside cannot abide such orthodoxy.  Politically, it would seem that anyone who remotely resembles a traditional view of marriage and family is at least that kind of dangerous person.  Frankly, I do not hear the Church universally promoting that traditional view of marriage and family as urgently and passionately as it should.

Imagine that.  In the space of a few generations in which it was nearly a universal assumption that the goal was to have a world where as many people as possible can get married, have stable marriages, and raise children, this has become anathema to the modern mind.  Indeed, the liberal and progressives are not only not choosing marriage for themselves but insisting that anything close to a traditional view of marriage and the family is the worst kind of bondage and unreasonable in this day and age.  How quickly the time has passed.

A world where as many people as possible marry a member of the opposite sex ought to be normal.  It is surely the expectation of government.  Where is the government going to find the money to take care of people who do not have a spouse to take care of them -- whether in illness or in old age?  Not all the tax money in the world could provide for the people to replace where spouses do for each other and to replace the caregivers who enable perhaps 80% of those over 65 to live on their own.  Yet somehow this is deemed more dangerous than the idea that marriage is patriarchal and unreasonable.

Stable marriages should be a practical value as well.  Though divorce, and particularly no-fault divorce, has created an industry of people trading in their spouses for a different model or abandoning them for a life without marriage, stable marriages are the bedrock of society.  Every child of divorced parents and every child who grows up without one parent or the other knows the blessing of growing up in home with a stable marriage.  Our culture so filled with constant and urgent change would benefit from good and stable homes in which marriages work out their problems and remain stable amid the chaos that too often passes for everyday life today.

Children raised not by daycare or government program or other institutional settings is not some sort of gold standard but the most basic norm of all.  Strangely enough, we live at a time in which people too often presume that parents are not well equipped to care for their children and so-called experts must intervene.  That usually happens among those who did not know a stable home with both parents and so have no idea that this is not only the norm overall but the least a child should be able to expect.  Yet this has also become a radical idea as well.

These are not American goals but universal standards for all nations and peoples and are generally espoused by all religions as well.  Well, at least they used to be.  Man for woman and woman for man, marriage until death parts you, and parents raising their children and imparting values and faith while also providing good examples to them.  But, I am sad to say, this has become a racial thought in America today and in the world overall.  It is no wonder we are in trouble. 

Everyone has a voice -- even God!

The value attached to diversity requires that everyone has a say or at least an opinion -- except, of course, where that opinion violates public standards or is deemed offensive.  Modern societies define themselves on the basis of how well diversity is practiced and how broad the diversity within the parameters of what is deemed the public good.  Even churches have come to define diversity as an element of the Gospel and almost a mark of authenticity.  Why else would their be the constant scrutiny given to how white or how diverse the membership is or how broad the latitude given to dissent or doctrinal disagreement?  We present ourselves as Christians as models of toleration and abhor the hierarchies that would rein in any disagreement or dissent from the doctrine confessed and the practice sanctioned.  Even in a church body like Missouri there is push back against too much uniformity and there is an inherent stripe of rebellion against the idea that we march in lock step the walk of the Synod.

Everywhere everyone has a voice. We give the same honor to personal experiences and individual preference as we would fact or universal truth.  That voice is a mixture of feelings and facts that makes it hard to forge the unity once the hallmark of the Church's identity.  Those who favor such insist that this is evidence of the pastoral character of the Church, not dogmatic (bad word) community but a pastoral one.  We even speak of pastoral liturgy as if worship were more about the worshiper than the One worshiped.  We do not give much more than a momentary nod to the faith and practice of those who went before us except, of course, to prooftext our own deviation from the norms of doctrine and life.  We act as if we were the first Christians, the ones still forming from the fluid diversity of the moment any norms for the future and too often fail to acknowledge that we are those lately come who have inherited a massive witness of faith and practice from those who went before us.

It seems that even God has one voice in this conversation but not a final voice or even a definitive one.  We seem to be perfectly comfortable with the contradiction of view and practice that violates not simply tradition but even the clear word of Scripture.  We find it rather easy to suggest that what others have said uniformly about the Scriptures and what they mean does not apply today and we are free to suggest new and novel interpretations of the Bible which do not conflict with modern norms and values and morals.  Indeed, because God's voice is only one voice among the many voices heard, His voice has almost no authority at all anymore.  That is the consequence of a diversity in which no voice is given priority over others and all voices are equal.  The function of tradition is to preserve the voice of God and the voices of those in the past who have given witness to the unchanging testimony of His voice.  When the present takes priority over the past and God's voice is but one of the many voices heard, every age reinvents itself and every Christianity is reinvented to fit that self.  It ends up being a state of all things being new but with a newness that no longer holds the promise of eternity.  It is for this reason that diversity and everyone a voice cannot is not a mark of the Church nor a sign of its catholicity and apostolicity.  Yet this is what liberal and progressive Christianity has left us -- God must vie for our attention as one of many voices and without any deference given to those who went before us, we end up deciding if God's voice fits us and our times and so will be heard or if God's voice will be dismissed without fear.  So tell that to a room that finds any hierarchy of voices suspect or wrong.

Looking for blame. . .

There are probably many reasons for some of the problems facing the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod today but it has become rather fashionable to look as much for someone to blame as it has for real solutions.  It is tiresome to me that some of the typical culprits in these scenarios have been overplayed to the point where too many actually believe that these are the real reasons for our lack of growth or the problem of filling pulpits.

I am tired of hearing the blame placed upon small congregations.  I am weary of those who spill ink and vitriol against congregations they believe should be closed or merged because they are consuming too much of Synod's resources of both money and pastors and serving too few people.  How odd it is that we have made these small congregations the bane of our existence as if the Word and Sacrament was deserved more by large communities of people than small!  Sure, we have lots of small parishes and so do many denominations these days.  While I suppose there are those who can and maybe should close, the reality is that they are not the reason for a pastor shortage nor are they taking pastors away from places where they might better serve.  Most of these very small congregations do not depend upon full-time pastors but have tapped into the market of retired pastors and those on candidate status or those who are serving in non-parish situations.  You could close them all and it would not free up a ton of pastors to fill the vacant pulpits we have.

Furthermore, many of these congregations are not simply small but isolated and do not have close or reasonably close options for their people if they were to close.  The rural landscape of America has seen an overall decline in people and this is part of the reason these parishes are small.  It is not that they have failed to keep their people or win new converts but the pool of people is diminishing every year as the towns in which they have been planted grow ever smaller.  My own hometown is one such example.  The school is small, main street is deserted, and the population is aging.  This is not due to bad people or bad planning but mechanized agriculture, the fruits of technology, and less need for boots on the ground, so to speak.  The small congregations are surviving because they are serving the population that remains and working hard and creatively struggling to find solutions.  While some dual or triple or even quadruple congregation share a pastor, that presents its own particular need for a certain kind of pastor and sharing arrangements not always possible or beneficial.  God bless them when they work but these are not the end all solutions for every circumstance.

Some think that merging congregations is the answer to all the problems.  Is it wrong to expect that people's loyalties to congregations where they have worshiped for many generations, have multi-generations of family members buried in the parish cemeteries attached to these congregations, or have been taught and believed that this was their church where they belonged for many years could be transferred to other places?  Should we be punishing them for their loyalty and devotion?  Is such loyalty and devotion to buildings or is it to the heritage and history of people who have taught them the faith and and passed on the sacred deposit to another generation?  Should we expect that loyalty is easily shifted to a new place and that all the history and legacy they felt for one identity should be quickly surrendered to be attached to another place?  Ask the legions of Roman Catholic parishes which have merged over the years only to find that the merged parish was empty of the fierce loyalties and associations that were not so suddenly transferred because administrative reasons justified it.  We want our people to be loyal and devoted to the places where they receive God's gifts so should we treat those places as mere access points for such grace?  Merging may work in some places and may not work in others.  It can be useful but will not fix all the problems.

Pastors are sometimes blamed for being unwilling to go where they are needed or for expecting fair compensation as they support their families.  Are those pastors the problem because they have familial ties to certain regions or concerns for the places where they must raise their children?  I am writing as someone who has never served any a congregation closer than a two day drive to my family or a one day drive to my wife's family.  It was a sacrifice to be that far away from parents and grandparents, siblings and extended family and not to be free on the holidays when others would travel home.  There is no denying that it costs the pastor and his family something.  If I had gotten a call closer, who knows if I would have taken it.  But I didn't and yet I am not quite ready to blame every pastor who considers the family factor in their decision to accept or decline a call.  Neither am I willing to condemn pastors who take into the consideration the availability and cost of housing in the calls they receive.  It is a real factor of life for a church body in which parsonages are probably now more the exception than the rule and areas in need of pastors which have housing costs beyond what typical pastors can afford will need to find creative solutions to that problem.

What I am saying is this.  Don't blame small congregations or the pastors and their families for the problems of decline or the pastoral shortage in the LCMS.  Instead of looking for someone to blame, we need to look for answers and solutions to serve all the places where we have parishes and to help them grow as much as they are able.  Along with convenient scapegoats mentioned above, we would be wise not to blame doctrine or the liturgy as the reasons for our lack of growth, shortage of pastors, or struggles as a church body.  For what it is worth, I do not believe all the statistics that say that non-denominational evangelical congregations are the only ones doing better.  In a culture of people looking for transcendency, it is hardly logical to conclude that churches that give people what they say they want over truth are going to win any of the battles before us.  But some of these are probably fodder for another post on another day.