Newsletter #15: religious liberty and a Minnesota novel

In today's newsletter: perceptions of religious liberty, poor people saving money, the Church in Ukraine, and Charles Baxter's The Sun Collective.

Feb 22, 2022

Happy Tuesday! Here’s what else is in the newsletter today:

Eavesdropping on the collapse of “religious liberty”
Why poor people don’t save
Updated considerations on Christian doctrine
Diocesan policy on transgender persons
Pray for Ukraine
What I’m reading: Charles Baxter’s The Sun Collective

Eavesdropping on the collapse of “religious liberty”

I’m currently sitting in a coffee shop, eavesdropping on a conversation occurring behind me. A woman is sharing her experience working as a nurse. A coworker, currently finishing up her nursing degree, had requested a religious exemption to the COVID vaccine requirement. The woman just said, “But the thing is, everyone knows she’s not religious at all. She’s just using the religious exemption to get out of having to get the vaccine.”

What the woman is sharing is a concern that Justice Scalia shared in the case Employment Division v. Smith. The 1990 case held that an individual could be denied unemployment benefits because of their use of peyote, even though the use occurred as a part of a longstanding religious ritual. The decision largely precluded “religious liberty” claims against “neutral laws of general applicability.” Scalia wrote that allowing religious liberty claims to overcome such laws would result in anarchy:

“To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”

Many religious liberty advocates had hoped that the Fulton v. City of Philadelphia case would result in the Supreme Court overturning Smith, but they were disappointed when the majority decision last summer left Smith intact.

Scalia’s concerns do seem to be borne out by what the woman in the coffee shop had shared. Religious liberty claims and exemptions are not being used to support well-founded sincere religious beliefs. Instead, they are largely being used to try to get out of laws and requirements aimed at supporting the health of society. “Religious liberty” is increasingly becoming synonymous with: “I (and this group I am a part of) don’t like and should thus be exempted from.” This does not bode well for the future of religious liberty in the United States. The general public is catching on to the bad faith claims of believers.

Why poor people don’t save

CNBC recently ran an article on Tanner Chidester, a fitness coach and self-made millionaire. The article focuses on an argument that has often been used to criticize a certain lack of planfulness on the part of millennials: because you are not saving, you will never be wealthy. In the article, Chidester and others argue that the most efficient pathway to wealth is to just make more money. Grant Cardone, another millionaire, says, “I can promise that you will not get rich by skipping your daily latte. If you don’t have income, then there is no money to save.” Essentially, they argue: saving is meaningless if you don’t make enough money. Clipping coupons and trying to live frugally can be a distraction, the article argues. It can distract one from the real route to savings: making more money.

One might read these comments as the naive arguments of privileged white male capitalists (the argue does focus exclusively on the stories of white men). But these arguments are also consistent a certain neo-Marxist argument: What keeps poor people poor is not irresponsible financial management, but a lack of access to opportunities to grow wealth. What they often need is not advice on how to be frugal, but access to higher wages.

Updated considerations on Christian doctrine

A couple of weeks ago, I shared some updated considerations on Christian doctrine, and how they are informed by changes to the Nicene Creed. Five key principles include:

Christian development is integrative.
Christian doctrine develops.
Orthodoxy should be a dynamic principle.
The bishop is owed some form of obedience, and this informs doctrine somehow.
Church teaching is conditioned by the times.

One thing that certain groups of Catholics often want to do is oversimplify Christianity. They want to make doctrine smaller, and less weird, than it actually is. This is related to last week’s essay by canon lawyer Dan Quinan, which I was very happy to publish on this site…

Diocesan policy on transgender persons

Quinan focused on the recently released policy by the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and identified a number of issues. For one thing, the policy doesn't seem to have a good grasp of the actual issues. Quinan wrote, "If you think a deep-dive on hylomorphism is going to have some sort of game-changing influence on this debate, you’ve just implicitly admitted that you don’t really understand what you’re talking about." It also confused areas of competence, making scientific assertions as if they were theological claims. And it engaged in proof-texting, rather than providing a strong biblical or theological basis for its claims.

The diocese’s policy section of the document also alleges "to provide guidance in applying the Church’s moral teachings regarding the challenges presented by ‘gender theory.’” But none of those moral teachings are actually cited in the document. Conclusions are asserted without foundation. And, as Quinan notes, the document is at variance with some Catholic documents, such as a 1975 Rotal decision, which included: "Nothing prevents predominance from being attributed to psychological sex as regards those matters which do not exceed the juridical capacity of the subject."

And the diocese targets trans persons in ways it doesn’t others. The diocese targets trans persons in ways it doesn't others. Will the diocese implement a policy forbid employees and students from using the “preferred last names” of divorced and remarried parents without a declaration of nullity? Of course not. You can use "preferred pronouns" as an act of charity, and still disagree. The Church refers to invalidly-ordained priests/bishops by their preferred religious titles in ecumenical settings, even while disagreeing about their validity. We do many things like this. Ultimately, the Milwaukee policy makes the Church smaller than she is. And it targets trans people in an especially harsh way. We can do better as a Church.

Of particular interest is also how Quinan ties in the policy with concerns related to the clergy abuse crisis:

“[The policy states:] ‘For an updated list of Catholic therapists and other behavioral resources within the Archdiocese of Milwaukee…’
“This is perfectly fine in theory, but (again) such a list must be publicly available – not locked behind a gatekeeper – so that the faithful have basic transparency about whose resources, education, and expertise is actually guiding these conversations behind closed doors.
“I am not saying that this is necessarily an easy demand to meet. I understand that various legal concerns can arise, and individual therapists may desire to have their identities protected. But the Church has now endured multiple decades of abuse scandals, directly tied to a systemic lack of transparency. We have suffered the effects of false ‘experts’ like Monsignor Tony Anatrella, who told homosexual seminarians ‘you’re not gay, you just think that you are’ and is now preparing to stand trial for the sexual abuse of those same seminarians. (Would any of the Archdiocese’s approved therapists similarly tell a student ‘you’re not transgender, you just think that you are’, operating on dangerous or abusive theories about the supposed ‘origin’ of the transgender experience? We don’t know – and this is precisely the problem.)

You can read Quinan’s commentary in full here.

Pray for Ukraine

Russia is mobilizing its military into Ukraine, moving towards what could become the biggest military action in Europe since World War II. The world media is covering what seems to be growing aggression on the part of Russia. In a fiery speech Monday, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin asserted that Russia had created Ukraine and that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.

Last week, The Pillar interviewed Archbishop Borys Gudziak, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Archeparch of Philadelphia. Archbishop Gudziak spent two decades of his priestly ministry in Ukraine, and he provided an important perspective of the conflict:

Why did Russia annex part of Ukraine and invade another part? And why is it threatening invasion now?
It’s a question of life or death for maybe tens of thousands of people. And it's very important to know what stands behind what is happening.
The history is long, and there's kind of a remote and proximate explanation to all of it. And there’s great deal of misinformation and misunderstanding about all this.
…
The Russians are killing Russian speakers, they’re killing members of the Russian Orthodox Church, and the reason is because Ukraine is a nascent and, in many ways, a vibrant democracy.
Ukraine has had tumultuous elections, but it has had democratic elections, certifiably democratic elections, and it has had six presidents elected in 30 years. Power changes from one party to another, from one leader to another. Very different parties, very different leaders.
Ukraine has a free press — the printed press, radio, internet, television — they’re free. And they express all possible vectors of public opinion.
Ukraine has freedom of religion, and no church is favored by the state. No church, legally, is limited in its activity, as is the case in Russia.
And having these kinds of policies at the border of an authoritarian state, a state which is moving in the direction of totalitarianism — this is a great threat to the Russian status quo.
…
Soviet Union means empire. It means the land expands for nine time zones. The Soviet Union also stands for totalitarianism, and for the merciless murder of millions, tens of millions of people.
And that history is now being revisited.”

You can read the rest of the interview here.

What I’m reading: Charles Baxter’s The Sun Collective

I will resist saying what The Sun Collective is “about.” I hate reductions of stories to lessons and platitudes. Charles Baxter is resistant to this sort of thing, too. I was first introduced to Baxter while exploring MFA programs in creative writing and came across his profile at the University of Minnesota. When I read his collection of short stories, There’s Something I Want You to Do, I thought that perhaps he was channeling a new voice of the deceased Catholic writer Andre Dubus II. Baxter’s short stories raised questions of love, desire, and religion and lived in the little details of interpersonal interactions.

I know very little about Baxter’s personal life, except that he was born and raised in Minneapolis, where he went to college here as well. He received his PhD in English from the University of Buffalo and taught at Wayne State University and the University of Michigan before returning to Minnesota. I’ve always wondered if he grew up in a religious household or was Catholic himself. Religion seems to pervade his works. His superb collection of essays, Burning Down the House, explores in one essay the ways in which the Christian understanding of epiphanies has changed the way fiction is written. Michelle Huneven writes that “religious experience shorn of (most) religious context is the overarching subject” of There’s Something I Want You to Do.

The same could be said of The Sun Collective. Baxter’s newest novel takes place in Minneapolis. It focuses on The Brettigans, a retired Midwest couple whose actor-son has gone missing, and a group of young people associated with The Sun Collective, a sort of grassroots movement trying to address poverty and meaninglessness in society. Rumors circulate about the mysterious “Sandmen” who are targeting and eliminating the poor and homeless. The Brettigans seem stuck in a sort of middle aged malaise, but coming across members of The Sun Collective may threaten their comfortable lives.

Poetry critic Harold Blooms argues that the greatest poems will have inevitability. Poems should possess inevitability, not in that they should be predictable, but that their progression must be such that it cannot be avoided. A poem is inevitable when it is “perfectly fulfilled and fulfillable,” and this is partly what makes a great poem susceptible to memorization. It is memorable because it must be. Baxter’s stories possess this quality. He has an active distaste of resolution-through-final-epiphany and seems to prefer a gradual unfolding of events and characters over time. One gets the sense that he doesn’t make the stories, that they are less inventions and more realities he receives.

I won’t share more about the story, other than to say that a desire for transcendence and communion lurks around the peripheries of each character at various points. Their activities take on a religious quality and are challenged by encounters with religion throughout the story. It’s funny and smart and unpredictable but very inevitable. I’d highly recommend a read.

You can follow along with my current reads at Goodreads.

Now accepting submissions!

If you like what I’m doing here and want to join in this developing project, I’d love for you to submit an essay, poems, or a short story for consideration. You can learn more here.

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Chris Damian writes

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