Lutherans and cake bakers and Calvinism... oh my

FireDragon76 said:

I'm comfortable that civil rights legislation is proper because it has helped to get rid of gross injustice against black americans and I hope we can at least end the worst discrimination against gays.

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Well, let me begin by being clear that I think the enslavement of blacks in the U.S. was an unmitigated evil as well as the Jim Crow treatment of them after they were freed. I say it because you're not going to like what follows. In essence, the end doesn't justify the means. I wish slavery/race conflicts in the U.S. could have been dealt with in a different way, because the legal precedents that followed from it are a problem. You say you don't like Calvinist theology. If ever there were an example of the impact it can have on government, civil rights policies in the U.S. is it.

I'll also mention that I did a large body of work on African-American history for my M.A. To be honest, I didn't do it by choice. I was trying to focus on Lutheran history - specifically Lutheran education, but you don't always get to choose. It actually made me very uncomfortable for several reasons. First, I don't identify with race - flat out don't think in those terms. No aspect of my identity is based on being "white", and I don't think about it when I deal with other people. It never even enters my mind. Unfortunately, I've learned from a very close, personal relationship with someone who is not white how that can actually blind me to certain racial difficulties. Oddly enough, the fact that I don't see race makes me insensitive to some of the burdens minorities carry. Sad as that is, I can't shake it.

Second, it is mind-numbingly complex, and I get tired of all the gross over-simplifications people throw at me. Attitudes toward race & slavery ranged from militant blacks who violently opposed help from whites to the very bizarre situations that caused free blacks to ask for enslavement - from slave owners with a brotherly love for their slaves to ardent abolitionists who had the most arrogant racist attitudes - from anti-slavery politicians who accommodated slavery because they felt states' rights were more important to racists who opposed slavery because they wanted to get rid of blacks - from pro-slavery southerners who worked side-by-side with free blacks because they wanted cheap labor to anti-slavery Germans who fought blacks because they feared losing their jobs.

Third, people react in a variety of odd ways to a white guy studying black history. Maybe they shouldn't, but they do. I get reactions of, "What is this? Some kind of fetish?" or "What do you know about being black? You'll never understand and it's insulting for you to try." or "Am I supposed to be impressed? Do you think this makes you better than other whites?" or (from a particular southerner) "You buy into that liberal Yankee trash history?" The really uncomfortable moments are when I have to go to an archive and request material written by Confederates during the Civil War or by the KKK during the 1960s, etc. It's part of the history and I have to know it. In a sense, all of that negative attention is good for me. It helps me understand what blacks endure. But it's not fun, and it strips away what I enjoy about history. By the time I finished my seminar paper on abolitionism in Illinois colleges, I was so sick of it I almost quit.

So, I understand grabbing onto whatever solution will get you there. But that doesn't make it right. This semester, for my last class (I just finished my M.A.) I did the legal history of the U.S. It's no surprise that legal views in the U.S. have changed over time, but IMO the point to which we have come is scary.

FireDragon76 said:

How do you think Calvinism influences civil rights policy?

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As I said, it's a long, complex history. U.S. religious history has four major threads to it: Puritanism, Separatism (Congregationalism), Presbyterianism, and Methodism. With the rise of abolitionism in the U.S., you'll find people bouncing back and forth among those 4 churches as they pushed their agenda. For example, Jonathan Blanchard began as a Presbyterian minister, but was forced out of Knox College and became a Congregationalist.

The result was a cross pollination of ideas among those 4 churches that blurs attempts to think of them as 4 distinct churches. They all originated in a Calvinist tradition, yet at times rejected certain parts of Calvinism. The point is, that although the Holiness Movement sprang from a Methodist base, it affected all of those mainline church branches. Tocqueville referred to it as the "Puritan spirit" and considered it essential to the success of the American experiment because it drove piety and discipline. Others have referred to it as the "Protestant ethic".

All of this created a millennial fervor in the 19th century. You can find blatant statements from some 19th century ministers that Christ's second coming had to be worked out by crushing all vice and making everyone holy. That meant making blacks as well as whites holy. In order to make them holy, they had to be able to read the Bible, and in order to read they had to be educated. If slave owners were going to stand in the way of that, then slave owners had to be crushed as well. The Battle Hymn of the Republic, etc.

This meant borders were of no consequence, the concerns of slave owners of no consequence. Everyone would eventually succumb. I could show you a speech where Jonathan Blanchard says that very thing. Ideas of "Christian soldiers" and a "Christian nation" followed. Any thought of pluralism or states' rights went out the window. If it was right, it should be enforced at a national level no matter how much blood had to be spilled to do it.

It wasn't just an anti-slavery campaign. It was an anti-vice campaign: abolitionism, prohibition, anti-masonic, anti-tobacco, feminism, etc.

The path to ending misery was to make everyone holy.

As I said earlier, the German Lutherans who immigrated to the U.S. had a much different idea about how to approach the whole thing, but they were largely stifled.

The march of Christian soldiers morphed into ideas of Manifest Destiny, and you can still hear the echo of it today as politicians tout American exceptionalism and the superiority of American democracy - attitudes that have caused stupid blunders in Central America, the Middle East, Vietnam, and so on. Of course that is not all due to Calvinism alone. The positivist attitudes of the Enlightenment are mixed in as well, but they worked hand-in-hand to create the current mess.

[edit] You can also see the effect by contrasting JFK (Catholic) with LBJ (Disciples of Christ). JFK tried to change the direction of the civil rights agenda being pushed by the Warren Court (a Baptist background, I believe), but after his assassination LBJ marched on with the Great Society.

Sorry for the continual amendments, but I could go on and on and on and ...

Upon reflection, the better, shorter answer would have been: Why wouldn't our civil rights policy have Calvinist influences? The religious history of the U.S. is largely Calvinist.

I think it's wrong to make this Lutheran vs Reformed. You're from a liberal Lutheran denomination, criticizing a conservative Reformed reaction. But the LCMS submitted an amicus brief in favor of the cake shop, Synod joins amicus brief for Colorado baker under fire for marriage view. If the equivalent conservative Presbyterian church has done so, I haven't been able to find it. (Several liberal Presbyterian activist groups have filed amicus briefs for the other side, but not the PCUSA. The UCC, ELCA and Episcopal churches did.)

Here's an interesting article on statements by religious groups on this topic: How religious groups are responding to the Masterpiece Bakeshop Supreme Court case. Several groups are concerned about restrictions on our ability to practice religion. In my opinion this case is a bad example of freedom of religion, but I also think there's some reason for concern.

FireDragon76 said:

That doesn't completely surprise me that the LCMS took that stance.

I would like to understand the PC-USA's social ethics, it might help to clarify things. I think I will send you a PM

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These positions are generally taken by the General Assembly office or the Clerk. They are somewhat limited, because they can only take positions where there are GA policies supporting it. If it's just the rights of gays, there are clear policies. But this is a more complex issue where there probably isn't a real GA policy.

The Catholic Church submitted a brief in favor of the bakers. If it were just gay rights, I believe the Catholic Church would support them. But the Catholic church takes positions on gender and sexual issues that are against the direction of the culture. They have many institutions that are at least partly public, and which in one form or another take public money. They can reasonably be worried about the impact on hiring staff, teaching in college, and practices in their hospitals, given directions on gender discrimination, practice of abortion, and acceptance of gays and transgenders.

hedrick said:

I think it's wrong to make this Lutheran vs Reformed.

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I'm assuming your comment was addressed to @FireDragon76 since I'm from a more conservative Lutheran denomination (LCMS). However, I wanted to clarify that for my part, I didn't intend to make this all about Lutheran vs. Reformed. I did make the following comment:

Resha Caner said:

Of course that is not all due to Calvinism alone.

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But I can see how that might have gotten lost by the length of my response. My post was framed to answer a question regarding Calvinist influences on civil rights policy. It wasn't meant to be a balanced overview of the complete history of civil rights. So, I focused on Calvinist influences. There are significant secular influences as well.

With that said, I will note it is easy to find Calvinist fingerprints in U.S. government policies. That is not the case with other traditions such as Confessional Lutheranism or Orthodoxy. Probably not even Catholicism. The liberal mindset does bear some resemblance to Catholic Social Gospel [edit: i.e. liberation theology], and the Kennedy's have been an influential family, but historically the resistance to Catholicism in the U.S. has been very strong, so some of that might be more a coincidence than anything else.

You might be able to make an argument that liberal Judaism has had an influence via the Anti-Defamation League, etc. But even that has some connections to the Reformed Millennialist views that obsessed over the return of the nation-state of Israel and merged with the rise of Zionism.

FireDragon76 said:

I think I'm starting to understand the LCMS position better on this issue. It sounds to me like we just have very different understandings of what it means to be Lutheran, particularly how we understand the orders of creation and its place in our theological systems.

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Hopefully you're basing this on more than my comments alone. Otherwise, it probably means you're understanding me more than the LCMS. My father used to be DoC, and though my family joined an LCMS church when I was 12, that influence long remained - probably still does.

Though you understand the LCMS, I don't understand your view. Maybe you'd be willing to share more detail regarding some of the differences you see.

This is a most interesting case to say the least and I see both sides of the issue. I hate to see the gay couple being discriminated against and yet I do not like the idea of the baker being forced to do something against his religious views. What a mess we have found ourselves in in 2017 it would appear.

FireDragon76 said:

It seems that the LCMS emphasizes the Law as divinely revealed ordering of society. You all just emphasize how this relates to the actual existing social order in a different way from some of the Reformed.

In contrast, I see the ELCA regarding the Law, as applied to the civil sphere, as something like "natural law" which is accessible to human reason and experience. We seem much more comfortable with secularism, as a result.

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I love it when someone can succinctly describe contrasting views as you have. During the Enlightenment that skill was referred to as "common sense". As Garry Wills points out, that is different from the modern usage of the term, which tends to mean "easily accessible common knowledge". People of the Enlightenment didn't consider knowledge an easy thing to obtain; those who did and who could express it clearly were said to have common sense.

I mention that for several reasons. First, your description of the ELCA position sounds as if it was influenced by the Enlightenment. The LCMS view is definitely pre-Enlightenment, but that leads to several misunderstandings.

I'll use Deuteronomy 16:18 as a starting point to clarify. The LCMS does not view the Law given in Scripture as exhaustive (as many American churches do). To quote Pirates of the Caribbean, It is "more what you'd call 'guidelines' than actual rules." To explain further, what is stipulated in Scripture is inviolable Law, but it's not meant to be Pharisaic - to cover every jot and tittle. Judges are appointed to decide specific cases as best they can based on the examples given in Scripture.

Therefore, where the specifics of the Law are silent, judges should use reason to decide the case. Likewise, people should use reason to guide their daily lives. Those are the types of things that fall into the Kingdom of the Left and/or are a matter of conscience as per 1 Corinthians 10:23.

It is common to accuse Luther of opposing science and reason, but that is not the case. For the situations described above, where God is silent, people should use reason. What Luther was opposed to were the philosophical games people play with revealed truth. If God has revealed it, it is truth - end of story. There is little role for reason to play. So, we need to separate theology (God's revealed truth) from philosophy (man's best attempt via reason), and apply one or the other in the appropriate context.

Understanding the Law in that way brings a completely different perspective on issues such as homosexuality than our Reformed brothers have without succumbing to secular moral systems - which the ELCA is danger of doing (already has done IMO).

Slavery would be another example. The Bible has explicit instructions regarding slavery, and abolitionists really struggled with that during the 1800s. But the Lutheran view of the Law allows one to recognize that stating how slaves should be treated doesn't mean the Bible condones slavery.

FireDragon76 said:

I don't believe its possible to be premodern in the way that the premodern actually was.

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That's true to some extent, but I don't think it's an insurmountable issue. If it were, God would have to repeatedly sacrifice Christ so that each new generation could experience it in their own way. But, as we know, it was done once for all.

FireDragon76 said:

At the same time, I don't think the premodern is adequate for constructive engagement with the world.

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Taken as a whole, maybe not. I'm not saying that bleeding people is a good idea. But there is always a "we now know" tendency to think the current age is smarter than past ages. I disagree. Some ancients demonstrated stunning intelligence, and so it's arrogant to throw that away.

Though it is a daunting task - something that the first German immigrants tried to avoid - it simply means translating the past for each new generation. If one does that, pre-Enlightenment systems have a lot to offer - sometimes the answers are better than today's pablum.