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Blurring the Church-State Divide

Jill

A disturbing story from my hometown.

Antioch Bible Church, the notoriously anti-gay institution on Seattle’s Eastside (famous for their Mayday for Marriage rally last year, and for lobbying Microsoft to not support an antidiscrimination bill), uses Lake Washington High School (a public school) for their Sunday sermons. Lake Washington’s principal is a member of the church. Some Antioch members teach abstinence-only sex ed in the Lake Washington School District — the materials for such “education” are provided by Life Choices, an anti-abortion-rights group which runs several “crisis pregnancy centers” in Seattle.

Then on June 2, the youngest students at Lake Washington High School—those who attend an affiliated preschool program, Little Roos—received a copy of 10 commandments at their graduation. The commandments weren’t the ones from the Bible, but they were religiously loaded, instructing parents to “please take me to church regularly” and to realize their kids are “a special gift from God.”

The principal won’t discuss his personal beliefs about LGBT issues, but the latest part of the story involves an op/ed criticising the school-church ties, and an administrative decision not to run it in the paper. The newspaper advisor claims it was plagiarized from the Seattle Times; if that’s the case, it shouldn’t be too hard to prove (and, obviously, the article shouldn’t have been run). But high school newspapers aren’t exactly known for their emphasis on journalistic freedoms.

Now obviously, Antioch has the right to rent out space in the high school just as much as any other group. But what about the fact that Antioch violates the school’s anti-discimination policy? Does the school allow any group to use their facilities, as long as they pay up? Would David Duke be welcomed to come and speak on a Sunday afternoon? I’m not necessarily arguing for kicking Antioch off campus, but it’s certainly problematic when their presence has an effect during the school day.

11 thoughts on Blurring the Church-State Divide

  1. Earlier this year David Duke wrote a letter to the New York Sun responding to an editoral that proposed that if he were invited to speak at Hamiliton college the invitation would be “rightly opposed.”

    This editorial attacked a Catholic high school for inviting a member of Parents, Friends & Family of Lesbians and Gays to speak there, opining that the administrators’ explanation that the speaker just happened to be a member of P-FLAG was “akin to saying that David Duke will be coming to campus to speak, but not as a representative of the white supremacist movement.”

    Hey, it hurts my feelings to see “crisis pregnancy centers” in quotes. It makes me feel like I’m volunteering at an imaginary place. Can’t you just call them “anti-choice clinics” like NARAL does?

  2. Would David Duke be welcomed to come and speak on a Sunday afternoon?

    Perhaps not welcomed, but certainly permitted upon request. That’s a pretty easy call to make. The issue here is more Sunday school bleeding over into weekday school.

  3. The underlying problem at the current moment is the militancy of the Christian right versus the lack of militancy among the forces of secularism. The Christians may complain that America has a secular culture, and they can point to the materialism and pornography of popular culture as evidence of a culture that doesn’t embrace their spiritual values, and to an extent they’ll have a case that many on the Left can concur with. But the Christians are currently well organized and well mobalized in a way no progressive organization can currently match. You’d have to look back at the New Deal era of 1932 – 1968, when labor unions were well-organized and their membership fairly militant, to find a time when progressives had such organization as the Christian right does now.

    It is curious that the Christian Left has so greatly departed from the scene. Progressive Christians were critical to ending slavery, getting women the vote and launching the civil rights movement of the 1950s, but they’ve since departed the scene. For reasons I don’t fully understand, it seems as if many people who in the past would be have been left-leaning Christians are now secular and non-religious.

    In a sense, democracy thrives on well-organized factions competing to make their points in the market-place of ideas. Thus a well-organized, militant Christian right-wing is, by itself, no danger to our democracy. What is a danger is the lack of a well-organized, militant response from the Left.

  4. The commandments weren’t the ones from the Bible, but they were religiously loaded

    The hell? What, are the original ten just not good enough for them anymore?

  5. Well said, Lawrence.

    The approach of the Christian Left seems to be to wail in a corner about how the secular Left ignores them. It’s the equivalent of holding their breath and not doing any evangelizing because “it is all your fault”. Often it is left to agnostics such as myself and atheists to point out that what the Christian Right is doing is not square with the words of Christ.

    They have only themselves to blame for their marginalization. When they start organizing and producing some votes instead of trying to avoid offending the one big ultra-conservative skin-bag donor who pays for their electricity and water, then they will be worthy of respect.

    There are those who strive to organize. One group who gets overlooked are scientists. This group has managed to beat back faux Christianity and Creationism on numerous occasions. They are often liberal. Their skepticism can be a powerful tool in debunking the claims of the Bush Administration.

    What holds us back? New Age superstition. A hunger for magical thinking. Our own addiction to the belief that mental health can best be achieved by the use of herbal remedies and “power of mind”. It is time that we don’t suck up to our own version of religiosity and join up with those who have the intellectual power to demolish the claims of television preachers.

    Our new coalition can include the following: scientists, unions, minority groups, working class people, mental health consumers, other health consumers, progressive-minded health workers, progressive lawyers, women, single-mothers, and parents. It can be a powerful antidote to the reign of religious superstition, corporations, stigmatizers, and deadbeat fathers who form the backbone of the Retrograde Political Machine.

  6. “The approach of the Christian Left seems to be to wail in a corner about how the secular Left ignores them. ”

    I hear what you’re saying but those of us who are secular and left-of-center need to keep current of the better elements among the Christian Left. I’d like to recommend The Sins Of Scripture, a book by John Shelby Spong, who is a liberal bishop in the Episcopal church. My short book review here.

  7. “Our new coalition can include the following: scientists, unions, minority groups, working class people, mental health consumers, other health consumers, progressive-minded health workers, progressive lawyers, women, single-mothers, and parents.”

    Yes, but from which groups will the leaders be chosen? I’ve been active, on and off, in progressive activist groups for 15 years, and I know that the idea of drawing some leadership from the working-class is always given good lip service, but the reality is usually quite different. My own experience is that forging an alliance between middle-class and working-class elements is much tougher than I originally expected. The viewpoints of middle-class and working-class people are strikingly different. What one might regard as trivial issues often illustrate the differences best. Take, for instance, cigarrete smoking. Most progressive, middle-class activists that I know support higher taxes on cigarettes as a way of decreasing consumption and therefore improving public health. Most of the working-class labor activists that I knew could not understand why other people felt the need to meddle in their lifestyle that way, and taxes on smoking were viewed as yet another way in which the government oppressed working people. Confronted with a high school drop out who is pro-smoking most middle-class progressive activists that I know will say that better health education is the answer, an attitude that working-class smokers often find offensive and extremly paternalistic. I have a vivid memory of a meeting that was suppose to be about organizing a voter registration drive and instead got derailed into a long, intense conversation about smoking, a conversation which pitted younger, middle-class activists against older, working-class activists. It is amazing to me that such issues have the potential to raise internal conflicts for an otherwise productive coalition, but that is, I think, one of the realities that awaits the coalition that you suggest. I could be wrong about this, but my feeling is that on issues such as these it should be the middle-class activists who show the greatest willingness to compromise. I say this because it relatively easy to get middle-class people involved in the political process, but it is relatively hard to get working-class people involved. But, as I said, perhaps I’m wrong to suggest such a strategy.

  8. Lawrence identifies one of the two primary problems with left-wing organizing. The other primary problem is that, comparatively speaking, the right searches for converts, the left searches for heretics. It’s hard to build coalitions and work towards practical goals when there’s always some splinter ready to accuse you of deviationism for failing to endorse every jot and tittle of the whackjob manifesto of the week.

    The left was able to overcome these back in the days when the oppression was genuinely much greater, when companies really did run company towns and kill people who complained. It’s easy to have solidarity in the face of that kind of evil; even communism worked, when it had Nazis to fight. Now that “oppression” for most leftists means that The Man sometimes busts them for pot, it’s a lot easier to fall prey to the temptation to let out a harpy shriek and fall on your erstwhile allies.

  9. Lawrence: I absolutely don’t mind the Christian Left joining us and I do keep in touch — I’ve written for The Other Side for example. But when Jim Wallis gets talking, he keeps trying to make it sound like it is our godlessness that is all the problem.

    Robert: The only inquisitions I have seen have come from the Right. Not two weeks ago, Pope Rat sent a delegation to investigate closet homosexuals and theologians who are not teaching the faith as the Vatican thinks it should be taught. There’s a lot of fuss about left wing preachers and about those who support the ordination of homosexuals and women. If that’s not a political litmus test, what is? (Oh yes, it only happens when Progressives do it to Retrogrades.) I don’t hear about right wing preachers being thrown out of their congregations, do you?

    What you just spat out sounds like the same old tired line about “political correctness” that we’ve been fed ad nauseum for the last thirty years. The witch-hunts are on, but folks like you are riding the grim horses and carrying the kindling.

  10. Joel, what your wrote about the visitations includes numerous mistatements (and in calling Pope Benedict “Pope Rat” also evidences a disturbing anti-Catholic bigotry). The visitation guidlines included 11 pages of questions, and only one or two questions concerned whether seminarians were involved in homosexual relationships (which would constitute a violation of the celibacy vow). It is was not intended in any part to “investigate closet homosexuals.” That is a flat out false statement.

    It is correct that the visitations concerned “theologians who are not teaching the faith as the Vatican thinks it should be taught.” That is what the Vatican is supposed to do. The Catholic Church is not modeled like a university with the clergy in the role of professors who are free to teach whatever they want. Rather, the bishops are the successors of the Apostles, who were selected by Christ, and are charged with the safeguarding of Christ’s teachings.

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