Sanders, Murchison, & Henninger

Recently, The State newspaper in Columbia, SC, published a letter to the Editors wherein the author, a respected former legislator and state judge named Alex Sanders, found inspiration from an article on the Episcopal Church and it’s travails.  To quote the learned scribe and jurist:

The world is at war over which religion has the one true path to God; women and children are being systematically raped, tortured, and murdered, notably in African nations where the Anglican Church is most prominent; 11 million children went to be hungry last night, not in Africa but right here in America, the weatlhiest nation in the history or the world; and the Epicscopal Church is mightily concerned about, of all things, boys kissing.  I can’t imagine a more profoundly trivial issue under the circumstances.

My advice: Boycott "Brokeback Mountain", raiser the terror alert to pink and call me when the culture war is over.  I am a conscientious objector.

Spoken as a true post-modern, secular, moral relativist, whose condescension towards another groups’ moral position is so typical of that weltanschauung.  He seems to be saying, if I may impose my understanding on his words (how current!), that hunger, crime, and homosexuality must trump any concern over the morality, values, and doctrines of a Church. To argue about fundamental issues of Church Doctrine when there is so much wrong in the world is "profoundly trivial".

His words are a powerful appeal to the emotions of the many. 

Almost at the same time, there appeared in my newspaper, The Post & Courier, an article by syndicated columnist William Murchison, whose words seemed to be a providential reply to Judge Sanders’ letter.

…I have just the inkling that the Methodists, the Moravian Brethren, the secular humanists, and the far more numerous members of the Sunday Morning Snoring and Starbucks Society are less interested than we are in our present, well-reported travails as a church…

Here I sit, in Columbus, Ohio, at the Episcopal General Convention, watching a worthy and dignified Christian body tear itself asunder – not over theology, as many here would think, but over politics and cultural attitudes.

…Rules? Norms and knowledge bearing the imprint of dead people? Don’t give us all that stuff. Don’t give us hierarchy or the wisdom of the past. Don’t give us revelation….

Down to cases. We Episcopalians…just elected a new presiding bishop name Katherine Jefferts Schori.  I guess she’s nice enough; she went to Stanford, holds a Ph.D and speaks well.  Her experience as a bishop in Nevada? Minimal. Her previous experience as a priest?  Less than minimal. What got her where she is?  Two things: her sex and her commitment to those issues that most fascinate today’s Episcopal Church – peace and justice.

…This agenda came from where? I hadn’t previously heard of it, imagining as I did that salvation through Jesus Christ was Christianity’s priority. Well, big surprise. The determination of the Jefferts Schori faction to see that gays, lesbians, transsexuals, etc. enjoy the same moral status as heterosexuals now trumps, in some, not all, Episcopal circles, the Christian call to repentance and amendment of life.  To these Episcopal Boomers, gay rights is merely the latest step toward the achievement of social and cultural approval…for…well, gosh, I guess everything.

…We’re as we are because society seems to command it – society as imagined by those boomer who can’t seem to get past the good old days when it seemed that all we had to do was whatever felt good.  And, boy, does it feel good – I guess – to shatter glass ceilings, along with the moral consensus of the ages regarding the meaning and purposes of life.

Strong words, and certainly not the zeitgeist of today’s cultural elite.

This collision between two erudite and passionate men of letters words brings to mind the famous "No Guard Rails" editorial that appeared in the Wall Street Journal in 1993, written by Dan Henninger. It left an indelible impression on your humble scribe when he read it, and its words (though echoes of an earlier time) are still relevant.

…In our time, the United States suffers every day of the week because there are now so many marginalized people among us who don’t understand the rules, who don’t think that rules of personal or civil conduct apply to them, who have no notion of self-control.

…The real blame here does not lie with the mobs who fought bloody battles with the hysterical Chicago police. The larger responsibility falls on the intellectuals – university professors, politicians, and journalistic commentators – who said then that the acts committed by the protestors were justified or explainable. That was the beginning.  After Chicago, the justifications never really stopped. America had a new culture, for political action and personal living.

With great rhetorical firepower, books, magazines, opinion columns and editorials defended each succeeding act of defiance- against the war, against university presidents, against corporate practices, against behavior codes, against dress codes, against virtually all agents of established authority.

…Concurrently, the personal virtue know as self-restraint was devalued. In the process, certain rules that for a long time had governed behavior also became devalued. Whatever else was going on here, we were repeatedly lowering the barriers of acceptable political and personal conduct.

…Those endless demonstrations, though, were merely one part of a much deeper shift in American culture – away from community and family rules of conduct and toward more autonomy, more personal independence.  As to limits, you set your own.

In other words, forget the principles and the morals that have existed as cultural norms in our society. You are now free to ignore those standards and create your own, including making the decision to turn your back on the bedrock principles of faith.

The people who provided the theoretical underpinnings for this shift – the intellectuals and political leaders who led the movement – did very well, or at least survived.  They are born with large reservoirs of intelligence and psychological strength…

But for a lot of other people, it hasn’t been such an easy life to sustain. Not exceedingly sophisticated, neither thinkers nor leaders, never interviewed for their views, they’re held together by faith, friends, fun, and, at the margins, by fanaticism…

These weaker or more vulnerable people, who in different ways must try to live along life’s margins, are among the reasons that a society erects rules.  They’re guardrails. It’s also true that we need to distinguish good rules from bad rules and periodically re-examine old rules.  But the broad movement that gained force during the anti-war years consciously and systematically took down the guardrails. Incredibly, even judges pitched in. All of them did so to transform the country’s institutions and its codes of personal behavior…

Henninger’s words of 13 years ago still apply to our time.  He warns us that the principles and morals which have been our societal guardrails, which are necessary to obtain the fullest measure of our society for all of the people, are being destroyed before our very eyes. On the one hand, Judge Sanders urges the reader to laugh at the Doctrine of a church that is nearly 2,000 years old, in which certain principles have persisted from its inception to this moment.  On the other, Murchison argues that the principles and morality that have produced what is arguably the world’s healthiest, most prosperous and generous, and most free society are being eradicated in the name of politics, justice, and cultural relativity.

Into this cultural maelstom is now interjected the Global War on Terrorism. 

Part II To Follow