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Protesting Students Joined by Alumni: “Change the Church”

In late December, while marriage equality became law in New Mexico and Utah, a Washington vice principal and coach at a Catholic school got fired for marrying his partner, and a Philadelphia Methodist minister was defrocked because he performed a wedding ceremony for his son. Earlier in the month, Notre Dame University filed suit to ensure that student and staff insurance wouldn’t cover contraceptives, while a Michigan couple simultaneously sued the Catholic Bishops claiming that religious directives in a Catholic hospital had forced her doctors to commit malpractice during a miscarriage and nearly cost her life.

In all of these cases, Church dogmas and mandates are out of line with not only America’s secular government and growing population of nontheists, but also the spiritual and moral beliefs of members—beliefs about what God wants and how we should then live. Defrocked Methodist minister, Frank Schaefer, reports that even those making the decision on his regional Board of Ordained Ministry were torn. Per Schaefer, some came to him with tears in their eyes, “They said, ‘We really don’t want to do this, you know that, don’t you?’”

In Bellevue, Washington, students at Eastside Catholic responded to the firing of their beloved teacher and coach by pouring en masse into the street outside the school, where they chanted, “Change the church!” Students at other Catholic schools responded with tweets and solidarity sit-ins. But changing the Church is easier said than done. Even Pope Francis, who is increasingly beloved for allying himself with the poor, has made no substantive movement on issues of equality for women and gays. In fact, the first priest excommunicated under his rule was stripped of authority because he advocated ordination of women and performed a gay wedding. As one 71-year-old practicing Catholic put it, “I believe that the Catholic Church will come to the point where we will legitimize gay marriage. But it’s going to take time.”

Christians see themselves as a light shining on a hill—a moral beacon to the world—and the faithful love to say that they have taken the lead in humanity’s moral growth, in the abolition of slavery, for example. Indeed many great abolitionists were inspired in part by their faith. But the darker reality was that Christian texts and teachings had been used for centuries to justify slavery and less extreme forms of economic servitude, and the Christian abolition movement emerged only in concert with broader cultural and economic changes. A close look at history suggests that moral and spiritual changes occur independent of religion, and then religion gives voice, organizational structure and moral authority to those changes—and often claims the credit.

Why do churches so often have to be forced to admit what has become obvious on the outside—that slavery is wrong, that no skin color or bloodline is spiritually superior, that love can grow between two people of any gender, that women and children are fully persons and not possessions of men, that the pleasure and pain of other species matter profoundly, or that bringing babies into the world with thoughtful intention helps families to flourish?

Religion, by its very nature, is change averse. Each religion explains and sanctifies a specific set of cultural agreements—a worldview that is a snapshot of human history. Most of today’s largest religions emerged during what is called the Axial Age—a time in which male superiority was assumed, the wheelbarrow had yet to be invented, and nobody knew that the other side of the planet existed. People at the time were doing the best they could to understand what was real and what was good, what caused what, and, especially, why there was so much suffering and death. They fused what they knew about the way things worked with their understanding of human power hierarchies, and they made gods in the image of men, both literally and psychologically. They turned rules into Rules.

At the time the original agreements emerged, many of them served human wellbeing. But what is adaptive in one context can be maladaptive in another—and what is moral in one context can become immoral in another. When rules become Rules, when they become sacred, people forget why they existed in the first place. I once heard a joke that stuck in my mind because it so beautifully illustrates this aspect of how religion works:

A girl is watching her mother prepare a roast. The mother carefully trims a thin slice off of each end before putting it in the pan. “Why do you trim the ends off?” asks the girl.

“I don’t know,” answers the young mother. “That is the way your grandma did it.”

The next time the woman speaks with her own mother she asks, “Why do you trim the ends off of a pot roast before cooking it?”

“I don’t know,” comes the answer, “That is the way my mother did it.”

It happens that the girl’s great-grandmother is still alive, and sometime later the family pays her a visit. “Why do we trim the ends off of a pot roast before cooking it?” the young mother asks. “I don’t know why you do it,” the great-grandmother answers. “I always did it because I had one small baking pan and a small oven, and that was the only way the roast would fit.”

Tribalism, patriarchy, and pro-natalism had their place in history. There was a time when blood-loyalties and hierarchy likely increased cooperation and reduced conflict. There was a time that infant mortality was high, men and women had no control over their fertility, and it made sense to honor and maximize childbearing. In this context, the Abrahamic religions may well have helped people survive and thrive. But the very structures that once let communities and families flourish have become a source of strife. Rules and rituals that bound people together now drive them apart. They have become mere tools of entrenched oppression.

The high school students who stood in the cold chanting “Change the Church” can be seen as naïve idealists who don’t understand how religion works and why. Alternately, they can be seen as people whose eyes aren’t clouded by the veil of history, who are free to trust their own sense of compassion and fairness and draw hope from the future rather than some idealized past.  Eastside Catholic - Act JustlyAnd yet even they get inspiration from struggles of our ancestors, gleaning what seems timeless and wise from among the mixed fragments in the Bible and Christian history. One young girl stood in the crowd holding a sign with the words of the Hebrew prophet Micah (6:8): Do Justice. Love Mercy. As news of student protests spread, alumni of the same Catholic schools took up the torch. When the hierarchy didn’t budge, the students announced that they are taking their fight for justice to the next level:  a national day of protest, dubbed Z-day (in honor of Mark Zmuda), on January 31. Sometimes it takes a teen to remind us of who we are and what really matters.

Originally published at Away Point

5 Ways Conservatives Promote Shirking and Freeloading

Freeloading CrowEarly in high school my daughters learned a lesson about group projects: some people don’t like to pull their weight. It wasn’t the kids who struggled to produce quality work that the girls found most frustrating. As fiery Ohio State Senator Nina Turner says, “We don’t all run the race at the same pace,” and the girls got that. It was the shirkers. I myself used to want one of those bumper stickers that say, “Mean people suck.” The girls would have wanted one that said, “Freeloaders suck.”

If life were just about bumper stickers, most conservatives would agree. The welfare queen icon of the 1970’s is credited to of conservative strategist Lee Atwater, and Republicans ranging from self-serving paranoia mongers like Glenn Beck to self-righteous fundamentalists like Phyllis Schlafly wax eloquent about personal responsibility.

But if you pay attention to conservative policy priorities you will notice that conservatives don’t actually want all Americans to step up, pitch in, and take responsibility. Responsibility is for ghetto dwellers, and fat kids who eat at McDonalds, and teens who get knocked up, and poor people who have fallen on hard times. Bootstrap it, baby, even if your feet are bare.

The delusion that each of us is master of his or her own destiny generates a callous attitude toward people who are struggling; it also generates a lack of appreciation for what successful Americans have received from generations past. Conservatives who think success is a matter of bootstrapping don’t ask what investments we need to make today so that future generations have the same bounty and opportunities we had. Bootstrap believers are oblivious to the principle of pay it forward.

Seattle, where I live, is scattered with people who got rich in the high tech lottery. Some of them are keenly aware of the conditions that allowed them to win big: rule of law, great schooling, teamwork, early government investment in the internet, and so on, along with their own hard work. Some are not. I remember one retired Microsoft millionaire commenting wryly about another, “He was born on third base and thinks he hit a home run.” As venture capitalist Nick Hanauer reminds us in his book, The True Patriot, there’s no such thing as a self-made man.

The fact is, just like those Microsoft and Google millionaires, America’s prosperity has been a group project. The most archetypal image of American history is not the lone cowboy but the barn building. Generations past laid the foundation for our economy, everything from physical infrastructure like roads that transport goods to market, to the abstract rules of the market itself—copyright protection, for example, or anti-trust laws. But even with that well-built foundation there are some things the market doesn’t do well. Clean water, sewer systems, national security, air traffic control . . . these are things we can’t very well create alone or by competing with each other, so we build and own them together, and we hire employees we call public servants to manage them. Many of these basics of prosperity only work if we all play by the same rules and all do our share.

But for all of their hardnosed rhetoric about personal responsibility, conservatives get mighty squishy when responsibility gets personal. Basic human flaws like selfishness and greed and a near limitless capacity for hypocrisy mean that we humans often end up with our heads on backwards; we talk one way and walk the other. That is how it is with conservatives and responsibility. Look at the walk instead of the talk, the policy priorities instead of the bumper stickers, and you will see that freeloading and shirking are perfectly compatible with conservative thinking. Here is just a handful of examples.

1. Disaster relief for some. Faced with someone else’s disaster or one that hasn’t yet made landfall, conservatives in the House and Senate fight to cut disaster relief funds. Why should I pay more taxes when my back yard is high and dry? Yet when election time came in November, New Jersey governor Chris Christie got points from Republican allies for securing federal funds in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. In the words of William Palatucci of the RNC, Christie truly cared about the problems confronting families. At the time of Sandy, Oklahoma Senators James Inhofe and Tom Coburn voted against providing relief funds for the Eastern seaboard. But when tornados touched down in their home state, they had no trouble putting out a hand and asking those East Coast liberals and the rest of America for assistance. They sought help from the same FEMA insurance funds they had been trying to whack back.  

I personally don’t consider it mooching when people who have been hit hard want to draw on an insurance pool that they’ve paid into, but some want to draw out without paying in. Oklahoma senators aren’t the only culprits. Most religious organizations claim that paying taxes on their real estate or income would blur the line between church and state, God forbid. But they don’t express the same concern when money flows in the opposite direction. Legislation currently advocated by both Catholic and Protestant lobbyists would allow churches to draw on public disaster relief funds that they haven’t paid into.

2.  Subsidies for religion. That’s not the only way that religious organizations and individual are hoping to get something for nothing. Rather like corporations that want the rights but not the responsibilities of personhood, churches and even some religious individuals want the benefits of citizenship without the duties. They want exemptions from basic human rights laws, like the obligation to serve gay people in public accommodations or to provide preventive health coverage to employees or to respect religious freedom in the military. They also want public money without having to chip in. In recent decades, figuring out how to pay for religion on the public dime without paying into the public kitty has become big business.  

Religious clergy use the same roads, electric line, water pipes, and sewers as the rest of us. They benefit from the same police services, military protection, and international diplomacy. But since 1954 they have not had to pay income tax on any compensation designated as a “housing allowance.” A clergy member could have $25,000 of his $75,000 salary so designated, use the money to purchase a house, and then, in a practice called “double dipping,” deduct mortgage interest and property taxes. On November 22, a federal judge ruled against the exemption, which re-directed an estimated $2.3 billion out of public coffers over a five year period. Given the amount at stake, it is expected that church lobbyists will pressure the Obama administration to appeal the decision. When clergy and churches don’t chip in for the services they use, either the rest of us pay more, or our country goes farther in debt. It’s that simple. 

3. Corporate profits; public losses. Corporations gain a competitive advantage when they can get someone else to pay their costs—someone like taxpayers or future generations of Americans. For example, one small bike shop in Colorado Springs spends $24,000 on medical insurance for four employees, while their biggest competitors, Walmart and Target, get the general public to subsidize healthcare for their workforce. They do it by paying below-poverty wages and limiting employees to part time work. In 2011, the state of Massachusetts spent $14.6 million on insurance for Walmart employees and their dependents, and even more for employees of Target. Freeloading lets irresponsible businesses undercut good-citizen competitors and drive them out of business. 

The same is true when irresponsible corporations are able to use our air and water like a free dump for hazardous waste. In India, it is estimated that pollution from coal plants causes 20 million new cases of asthma each year and kills 120,000. Here in the U.S., pollution levels are lower and asthmatics are more likely to get timely treatment. Even so we have data going back to the 1970’s showing that coal burning increases asthma attacks and respiratory ailments. Coal companies like Peabody don’t have to pay the cost of harm done, which means their profits are subsidized by the American public who take a hit in terms of both health and healthcare costs. Who really pays? The elderly and children. If coal companies had to step up and take responsibility for the real costs of their dirty products, energy innovators might find themselves on a level playing field.

4.  Right to Work or Right to Shirk? Speaking of level playing fields . . . The tug-of-war between living wages and corporate profits isn’t actually a tug of war unless workers can team up and pull together, and conservative profiteers realized a long time ago that they could skew the balance of power in their favor if they could somehow defund the labor movement. The strategy they came up with, which they call “Right to Work” legislation is a stroke of freeloading genius.  These laws basically say that anyone who works in a union shop gets union scale wages and benefits even if they don’t join up, pay dues, or participate in negotiations. Conservatives are banking that if some people have the right to a free ride, they will take it, and eventually there won’t be enough dues-paying members to keep labor organized.

In the children’s book, Swimmy, small fish Swimmyget terrorized by big fish until they learn to team up and swim together in the shape of an even bigger fish.  For the past century, the labor movement organized small fish to swim together, to cast the shadow of a big fish both in wage negotiations and in the halls of congress. Now, with globalization and technology shifts, old models aren’t working so well, which makes this particular conservative freeloader tactic well timed.      

 5.  The Smoking Gun. If one institution in the U.S. could be held up as the pinnacle of conservative freeloading it should be the NRA. The objective of the gun lobby is to ensure that profits accrue to the manufacturers while public health and safety costs do not. In other words, for its funders the NRA advocates the opposite of personal or corporate responsibility. Thanks to relentless lobbying, weapons manufacturers are exempt from liability caused by their deadly products.  

Gun advocates often are as guilty as manufacturers when it comes to shirking and freeloading. The libertarian ethic that idolizes gun rights is actually one that says I play; you pay.  Today, if I left a sword lying around unsecured where it could be found by a curious child or suicidal teen, I would be more legally liable than if I left an enticing gun lying around under the same circumstances. A sword owner has a responsibility to protect the general public under what are called “attractive nuisance” laws. Seventeen percent of gun owners keep their guns both loaded and unlocked. Last year, 52 kids in King County, Washington, were caught with guns at school. If guns were treated like other dangerous possessions, careless owners would be in a world of hurt, because the hurt they create would belong, at least financially, to them.

I could give dozens more examples—extraction companies that want to draw down America’s bank account of natural resources and then put profits in offshore tax shelters; online retailers that want to replace brick and mortar stores without paying local taxes that fund worker retraining; university educated bankers who pay expensive accountants to help them avoid chipping in for higher education. . .  . But the bottom line is this: When conservatives talk about responsibility, don’t read their lips; read their white papers. Corporate conservatives want special rules that let them privatize profits and socialize losses. Religious conservatives want special exemptions from civic duties and laws that apply to everyone else. Libertarian conservatives simply believe they are special—that 4000 diaper changes and university educations notwithstanding, they truly are self-made and don’t owe anything to anyone, past, present or future. It’s time we challenged the notion that the Republicans are the party of responsibility. 

Originally posted at awaypoint.wordpress.com

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Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light and Deas and Other Imaginings, and the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org.  Subscribe to her articles at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com. 

Making Marriage Last – Do Atheists Do It Better?

Conservative Christians think of themselves as the last line of defense for a time honored and holy tradition, marriage. In the conservative Christian view, marriage is a sacred union ordained by God. It binds one man and woman together so that the “two become one flesh” until they are parted by death.Old couple cartoon

This view of marriage is unbiblical, to be sure. See Captive Virgins, Polygamy, Sex Slaves: What Marriage Would Look Like If We Actually Followed The Bible. But hey, who actually reads the Bible? Surely, what God meant to say, is that marriage should take the form that is most familiar and traditional to us: One male plus one female who is given to the male by her father–that part is biblical–for life.

In this worldview, Christian marriage is under assault by an anti-trinity of powerful and dark forces: feminism, homosexuality, and godlessness. Faith, on the other hand, saves both souls and marriages. When I was young, a slogan made its way around my church, The family that prays together stays together. Dr. Tom Ellis, former chairman of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Council on the Family boldly claimed that “…born-again Christian couples who marry…in the church after having received premarital counseling…and attend church regularly and pray daily together… experience only 1 divorce out of nearly 39,000 marriages.”

But then came data. According to Barna research over a decade ago, American divorce rates were highest among Baptists and nondenominational “Bible-believing” Christians and lower among more theologically liberal Christians like Methodists, with atheists at the bottom of the divorce pack. When the findings were made public, George Barna took some heat, and Ellis suggested that maybe he had sampled badly. Perhaps some people who called themselves born again had never really devoted their lives to Christ. But Barna held his ground, saying, “We rarely find substantial differences” [in the moral behavior of Christians and non-Christians].

Fancy that.

In 2008, Barna again sampled Americans about divorce rates. The numbers fluctuated a bit, but once again atheists came out painfully good from a prays-together-stays-together perspective. Thirty percent reported being ever divorced, in contrast to thirty-two percent of born-again Christians. Slicing the U.S. by region, the Bible belt has the highest divorce rate, and this has been the case for over a decade, with the institution of marriage faring better in those dens of blue-state iniquity to the north and west.

What is going on? Even some secularists are puzzled. Churches provide strong communities for families. Many offer marital counseling and parenting classes. Love, they say, is a commitment, not a feeling. God hates divorce. They leverage moral emotions in the service of matrimony: a righteous sense of purity rewards premarital abstinence and post-marital monogamy—replaced by guilt and shame when nonmarital sex is unveiled or a marriage dissolves. Couples who split may find themselves removed from leadership positions or even ostracized. On the face of it, even if there were no God, one might expect this combination to produce lower divorce rates.

The reality, however, appears complex. Churches do honor and support marriage. They also may inadvertently promote divorce, especially—ironically—those churches which most bill themselves as shining lights in a dark world.

To prevent that greatest-of-all-evils, abortion, such communities teach even high school students to embrace surprise pregnancies as gifts from God. They encourage members to marry young so they won’t be tempted to fornicate. But women who give birth or marry young tend to end up less educated and less financially secure, both of which are correlated with higher divorce rates.

After marriage, some congregations, like those in the “quiver-full movement” encourage couples to leave family planning in God’s hands. Leaders echo the chauvinistic beliefs of Church fathers like St. Augustine and Martin Luther or the Bible writers: Women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety (1 Timothy 2:15). Such teachings grow congregations, literally, from the nursery up, but the very same attitudes that help to fill church pews can erode marital bliss. Ample research shows that for couples under age 30 marital satisfaction declines with the birth of each child. (Parenting tends to make couples happier only after age 40, when kids become more independent, and only in countries with comparatively weak social supports for aging adults.)

Secular couples increasingly see both marriage and divorce as personal choices. Overall, a lower percent get married, which means that those who do may be particularly committed or well-suited to partnership. They are likely to be older if/when they do formally tie the knot. They have fewer babies, and their babies are more likely to be planned. Parenting, like other household responsibilities, is more likely to be egalitarian rather than based on the traditional model of “male headship.” Each of these factors could play a role in the divorce rate.

But a bigger factor may be economics, pure and simple. In the words of some analysts, marriage is becoming a luxury good, with each partner, consciously or subconsciously looking for someone who will pull their weight financially and declining to support one who won’t. “The doctor used to marry the nurse,” says Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. “Today the doctor marries the doctor.” Sixty percent of college educated women get married, as compared to fifty percent of women who hold only high school degrees or lower. Couples who stay married also tend to be wealthier than those who divorce. In Barna’s 2008 sample, couples with an income of less than $20,000 a year broke up almost twice as often as those earning $75,000 or more (39 percent vs 22 percent). Advocates who want to promote traditional marriage might do well to foster broad prosperity.

Even if they did, though, they might be swimming upstream. In 1960, almost three quarters of American adults were married; by 2008 that number had fallen to a half. The difference came from a combination of two factors—more divorce and more people who had never married. The concept of family isn’t becoming less important, but Americans are more and more flexible in how we define  the term. Over 80 percent say that a single parent living with a child or an unmarried couple with a child is a family. Over 60 percent say that a gay couple with a child is a family. A growing number say that marriage is obsolete.

In one of those peculiar twists of fate, conservative Christian obsessions with abortion and sexual purity may be accelerating this trend. Naomi Cahn and June Carbone, authors of Red State, Blue State, propose that Bible-belt opposition to abortion has increased the non-marital birthrate and acceptance of single parent families:

The working class had long dealt with the inconvenient fact of an accidental pregnancy through the shotgun marriage. As blue-collar jobs paying a family wage have disappeared, however, so has early marriage. Women are then left with two choices: They can delay childbearing (which might entail getting an abortion at some point) until the right man comes along or get more comfortable with the idea of becoming single mothers. College-educated elites have endorsed the first option, but everyone else is drifting toward the second.

Conservative Christians thought they could have it all by promoting abstinence until marriage. But virginity pledges and abstinence only education have failed. If anything, they have once again accelerated the trend, leaving Christian leaders fumbling for answers. Some hope that more flexible, egalitarian roles for Christian wives and husbands may be the answer. Others think that doubling down on traditional gender roles is where it’s at. Either way, gone is the bravado that once proclaimed marital salvation by faith alone. “Marriages and families within faith communities are no healthier than in the rest of society,” concedes Christian author Jonathan Merritt. “Faith communities must provide support systems to salvage damaged marriages.” Whether the institution of marriage itself can or should be salvaged is, perhaps, a question none of us are prepared to answer.

Do atheists do it better? That is unlikely. Divorce rate differences between theists and nontheists tend to depend on how you slice the demographic pie, and for both groups, the shape of marriage itself is changing. As culture evolves, we’re all in uncharted territory together.   ——————–

Related:
Losing Your Religion – Keeping Your Spouse  (Youtube)
15 Bible Texts Reveal Why “God’s Own Party” is at War with Women
Captive Virgins, Polygamy, Sex Slaves: What Marriage Would Look Like if We Actually Followed the Bible
What Christianity and Kink Have in Common

 

Holy Freeloading! Ten Ways Religious Groups Suck the Public Tit

Money and hand of GodHave you ever thought about starting a new religion or perhaps a hometown franchise of an old one? Perhaps you’re just looking for a career ladder in a religious enterprise that already exists. No? Maybe you should.

Religion is big business. There are lots of options (over 30,000 variants of Christianity alone), and if the scale is right it can pay really, really well. Creflo Dollar, founder of World Changers Church, has an estimated net worth of $27 million. Benny Hinn comes in at 42. Squeaky clean tent revival pioneer Billy Graham bankrolled around 25. Even Eddie Long who has been plagued by accusations of sex with underage male members in his congregation counts his bankbook in seven digits.

You say you don’t have star power? No worries. Millions of ordinary ministers, priests, missionaries, religious hospital administrators and other church employees earn solid middle or upper middle class incomes in the God business. The pay is good, and for most positions it doesn’t matter what race you are or what grade you happened to get in chemistry. Getting real revenue flow in religion is all about scale, which means its a straightforward matter of recruiting loyal members.

That said, growing a religious enterprise doesn’t come cheap, even in an established religion that transforms ordinary members into volunteer outreach staff. Christianity spends an estimated sixteen billion dollars annually on the kind of marketing-service blend traditionally called “missions.”

Missionary work may include disaster relief or education with recruiting in the mix. An earthquake survivor might receive a solar-powered Bible to go with his rice and beans and sutures. A Hindu child might get free schooling, pencils and paper included, along with the message that the gods his parents worship are actually demons. Among people who are less desperate, the offerings can be more nuanced and less expensive. For example, a lonely student might get offered kindness and dinner by someone who is paid to live near campus as a friendship missionary. Sometimes mention of heaven or hell is the only recruiting tool needed–though even then there may be costs associated with print materials and distribution. Soldiers in Iraq gave out Jesus coins and a little cartoon book showing that when an IED killed a Muslim, he or she went to hell, a fate that could be averted by conversion.

The cost of rice, beans, medical supplies, pencils, swag, facilities and salaries all can add up. Fortunately, some of religion’s bigger players have gotten creative in recent years. They’ve figured out how to pay for at least part of their growth on the public dime. Having taxpayers cover a portion your costs, even overhead or infrastructure, drives up your margin. It may actually make the difference between a religious enterprise that is a fiscal black hole and one that is lucrative. So, whether you’re thinking about positioning within a small religion or large, one that’s new or one that’s well established, it’s worth taking a look at these ten examples to see if there’s something you can borrow. Unfortunately most of these rewarding opportunities are available only to organizations based in the United States.

1. Fund your religion classes with school vouchers, tuition tax credits or capital grants.
Muslim school kidsIf your religion has or can open accredited private schools, public funding prospects are growing rapidly. Thirteen states created or expanded voucher programs in 2013, accelerating a trend from recent years. Vouchers allow parents to divert their children and tax dollars away from public schools and into private institutions, which then have wide religious latitude. Such a school can include classes in which children memorize sacred texts, for example, but also can infuse a religious perspective into classes as diverse as literature, history, and computer science. The opportunities aren’t limited to grade schools. In New Jersey, an Orthodox Jewish Yeshiva is slated for $10.6 million in higher education grants to improve their male-only training in “Talmudic scholarship.” Mind you, the ACLU is quibbling.

To maximize your own public funding you may have to get creative. In Arizona any resident can divert a part of his or her state income tax to your school to fund a specific student. That means you need those students or their parents to get out and do the solicitation for you!

2. Get free facilities for after-school clubs in public facilities.
Good news club sign
Child Evangelism Fellowship recruits grade-school children in the U.S. and abroad to born-again Christianity. In 2001, they took a case all the way to the Supreme Court and won the right to use public school facilities for their afternoon clubs. They persuaded the justices that they were teaching moral values, rather like the Boy Scouts and other groups that have long had access to public facilities. But parents who have sat in on the clubs assure us that these “values” include very specific dogmas and doctrines—things like heaven, hell and even biblical justification of genocide. Last year CEF operated over 4000 Good News Clubs in public school facilities. If you have worries about whether your recruiting activities will be allowed in public schools, the experience of Child Evangelism Fellowship should put your mind at ease.

3. Nudge your doctrines into public school textbooks and discussions.
Dinosaur with Adam and Eve
Texas sets textbook standards for the whole country, and if a tenacious group of Texans gets their way, you may be able to move your message directly into public school curriculum. Members of the state’s textbook review panel have recommended adding creationism to biology texts while reducing coverage of the dominant competing theory. You may think that their account of the creation story is mistaken; yours may be different. But in the long run, their long hard work to blur the boundary between science and myth helps the whole religious sector.

To make matters better, allies in the Texas Republican party proposed a platform in 2012 that prohibited schools from teaching critical thinking skills. Others have pushed to require that each high school offer “Bible as literature” electives, confident that devout teachers will know how to use the course material.

4. Support military missionaries on government salaries.
Military chaplain preaching
Twenty to thirty years ago, Evangelical Christians identified the U.S. military as a prime mission field and soldiers as potential missionaries to the world. Hundreds of Evangelical and Pentecostal “endorsing” agencies began credentialing chaplains. Today, according to investigative reporter Jeff Sharlet, more than two thirds of U.S. military chaplains come from one of these two traditions. They have successfully redirected female cadets into the more time-honored roles of wife and mother, shaped entertainment and education in military academies, and cultivated a cadre of officers who support their mission. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has resisted some of their bold attempts to build an army of Christian soldiers, but missionary-chaplains continue to serve and shape America’s fighting men and women—all on the public dime. The door for more remains open.

5. Use federal disaster relief to rebuild after “acts of God.”
Hurricane Katrina First Baptist
Thanks to lobbying by religious leaders like the Catholic bishops and the Becket Fund, four U.S. senators are promoting legislation that would qualify churches, mosques, temples and synagogues for federal emergency (FEMA) funds if they get damage in natural disasters. The House of Representatives approved a similar measure early in the year. If you own or manage church property, it’s worth keeping your eye on this legislation. Your odds of having real estate damaged by a hurricane or earthquake may be low currently, but extreme weather events, like sea levels, appear to be on the rise. Should the bill pass, you might get to make a claim on a public insurance pool that lets you (as a religious entity) skip out on the premiums.

6. Leverage historic preservation grants to rehab your real estate.>
scaffolding on church
If you’ll be making an investment in religious real estate as a base for operations or to attract members, you might want to do a little digging in the archives. Federal grants may be available for restoration and repairs if your church is deemed historically significant. Like many other aspects of public funding for religion, this boundary has shifted in recent decades. Spending tax dollars on church buildings was ruled illegal in the 1970’s but acceptable by 2003.

If you want to sell your historic church later for redevelopment, don’t worry. Jefferson’s wall of separation applies. In Washington State, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that a church could to sell to the highest bidder, even though their iconic building had been designated a landmark and the deal included a likely wrecking ball. Some knives don’t cut both ways.

7. Position so that the public underwrites your infrastructure.
Real estate assets
If you form up your religious group properly, you may be able to build a portfolio of real estate investments without having to contribute to public amenities, utilities, transportation, or policing. Many community services and assets get paid for by real estate owners through property taxes. But for a long time, houses of worship have been exempt, making them effectively subsidized by surrounding properties. In March of 2013, pro-religion Arizona lawmakers proposed to expand that exemption to all properties held by religious entities, as long as they are not producing a profit. Such a change might allow a savvy investor to sit on undeveloped or underdeveloped land without incurring the annual costs faced by other speculators. Tax exempt real estate can offer a way to invest those tithes as membership grows.

8. Build your appeal and reach with international aid dollars.
veggie tales + world vision
World Vision, a multi-national with an Evangelical mission and employee statement of faith has built a vast loyal following largely by appending evangelistic priorities to US aid dollars. World Vision offers desperate people the basics: food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and education—with a carefully titrated dose of Biblical Christianity. Their genius lies in the fact that most of their services are funded by Americans at large.

In 2007, three employees sued because they were fired over their interpretation of Christianity, which was at odds with the required employee statement of faith. World Vision fought all the way to the Supreme Court and won. In other words, their administrators and lawyers have succeeded in persuading governmental granting agencies that World Vision is non-proselytizing aid organization, while simultaneously persuading the courts that they can’t fulfill their mission with heretics among warehouse staff. If Harvard Business School should need a case study on how an enterprise can solicit government contracts while circumventing the Civil Rights Act and other cumbersome employment laws, this is it.

9. Cover your overhead and advance your priorities by administering public health facilities.
doctor clergymanWith Obamacare and technology costs driving hospital mergers, religious healthcare corporations like Catholic Health Initiatives ($15B+ in assets) are finding that they can secure monopoly positions in many communities or even entire regions. This puts them in the power position when it comes to pricing services and negotiating labor contracts, which means mergers pay dividends. The Lund Report, which monitors Oregon’s health care system, reports annual profits of 2 billion and counting for the Providence chain.

Like other sectors such as aid and education, health care offers an array of opportunities to expand your enterprise and improve your brand appeal with little of your own money at risk. Consider this:

Religious hospitals get 36% of all their revenue from Medicare; … they get 12% … from Medicaid. Of the remaining 44% of funding, 31% comes from county appropriations, 30% comes from investments, and only 5% comes from charitable contributions (not necessarily religious). The percentage of Church funding for Church-run hospitals comes to a grand total of 0.0015 percent.

Administering health services allows a religious entity to restrict the service mix base on their beliefs about what God wants. For example, in Catholic-run facilities, directives from the bishops prohibit contraception and end-of-life options. Faith-related icons and outreach materials can be made available in waiting rooms. Depending on how your organization is structured, you may be able to preferentially hire members of your group and so keep the money in the family so to speak, all the while reaping the good will that comes with community service.

10. Provide safety net services to potential converts.
prisoner with BiblePrisoners, addicts, single moms, pregnant teens, the elderly, foster kids . . . . The possibilities are endless. President George Bush established an Office of Faith Based Initiatives, which worked to strengthen religious organizations in their ability to provide social services. In the first year, 2005, 2.2 billion dollars in grants were awarded to religious organizations. (Barack Obama later revamped and expanded the Office, appointing a cadre of religious leaders as advisors and putting his personal spiritual guide, Joshua DuBois, at the helm.)

The savvy expansion minded religious entrepreneur will notice that people who are the target of safety net services often are the very same people who make prime candidates for conversion. In both cases they fit the bill because the fabric of their lives has frayed and they are in need of help. From a business standpoint such a focus may seem less than ideal, but remember this: poor, desperate people are the ones who put those celebrity evangelists in their mansions.

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light and Deas and Other Imaginings, and the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org. Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com. 

Originally published at awaypoint.wordpress.com.

Former Fundamentalist and Father of Eleven Now an Evangelist for Evolutionary Biology

Suominen - Evolving Out of Eden coverAn interview with former fundamentalist, Ed Suominen. Ed Suominen was raised in a small sect of Lutheran Christianity called Laestadianism. Of the 32,000 denominations into which Christianity has fractured, his is one of the more conservative. Members believe in the literal truth of the Bible, including the creation story. They eschew sins like drinking, dancing, watching television, wearing earrings, and playing school sports. They marry only within their own sect and believe God alone should decide how many children they have. Suominen followed the rules; he met and married the right kind of girl; and together they have 11 children.

But Suominen is also an engineer, trained at the University of Washington. He has been a patent agent and inventor, and eventually his work with electrical and digital systems led him to notice something his church hadn’t taught him about—the power of natural selection. He was trying to optimize a design, when he came across a useful software tool:

“You set up an artificial chromosome with each digital “gene” determining a parameter for some widget you want to design. Then you created a population of individual widgets by running simulations with different sets of randomly chosen parameters, and had the widgets “mate” with each other. You repeated this process over many successive generations, throwing in some mutations along the way. Those widgets that worked best in your simulation had the best shot at having “children” in the next generation.”

It was the beginning of the end. After discovering the practical value of evolutionary computation, Suominen began reading about evolutionary biology. The Genesis story fell apart and frayed the fabric of his Christian belief.

Outsiders sometimes scratch their heads about the dogged insistence of creationists that Adam and Eve actually existed 6000 years ago in a perfect garden without predators or pain, until they took Satan’s bait and bit into a world changing apple. How is it, 100 years after Darwin, that we are still fighting about what will get taught in biology classes? Why, in their determination to refute evolution, do some Christians seem intent on taking down the whole scientific enterprise?

The answer lies in Suominen’s lived experience. As he puts it, “You don’t have Original Sin without an original sinner. And without Original Sin. . . you don’t need a redeemer.” In other words, the central story of Christianity, the story of a perfect Jesus who becomes a perfect human sacrifice and saves us all relies on the earlier creation story.

After evolutionary computation cracked the walls of Suominen’s information silo, his curiosity and training as an engineer took over. He spent the next year consuming books about Christianity, books by defenders of the faith and by critics. He wrote about his spiritual journey in a series of musings now published under the title, An Examination of the Pearl.

Since evolution is what most compelled his fascination, he began exploring the various ways that Christians try to reconcile biblical teachings and biology. The end result was a second book, Evolving Out of Eden, written with Robert Price, a Bible scholar and former Christian. Suominen launched the project torn between curiosity and a desire to affirm old beliefs. By the end, he confessed: “I was raised a fundamentalist and spent four decades living as one; I’m still not ready to call myself an atheist. But after co-authoring this book, I just can’t see where there’s any room for a god.”

In this interview he discusses his life-changing journey.

Your book is about evolution, both biological and personal. You’ve been through a change in worldview that most people can only imagine. Does it feel disorienting?

Yes, it’s a tremendous change. But I feel much less disoriented than when I was battling cognitive dissonance every day trying to maintain a coherent worldview out of pieces that just wouldn’t fit together. I’d come home from church on Sunday and spend hours or even days trying to recover my intellectual integrity. One part of my brain would continuously play the ominous soundtrack from my childhood indoctrination, repeated in church every Sunday: Believe or be damned. Meanwhile, another part would list off the hundreds of issues that made “belief” impossible and dishonest. And evolution with all of its theological dilemmas headed up that list.

It’s wonderful to be able to stand up and look over that toxic fog of piety and just see, accepting reality for what it so clearly is. I am happier now than I ever was in the church, despite the social loss of leaving it.

Do you ever find yourself wishing that you’d never opened Pandora’s Box?

My old church had its annual nationwide summer services right near our home this July. Here I was, within 20 miles of a gathering of around 2,000 members of “God’s Kingdom,” which considers itself the only true church on earth. There were people I’d grown up with, people I’d been with in the pews and on camping trips for my whole life. They stayed in their place, and I stayed in mine, an outsider now. I certainly felt some pangs of longing. But it was only about the people, not the institution that envelops and controls them.

When I listened online to the sermons preached during those services, I wondered how I’d ever taken any of it seriously. One was all about Noah and the Ark, and how God’s patience had run out when believers started intermarrying with people from “the world.” It’s an ancient myth copied from the Epic of Gilgamesh, and this guy is sitting there doing a gross misreading of the text while taking it all very literally otherwise. The story itself is so ridiculous that many people in the church don’t really buy it. Yet it’s one of those things that you really are expected to believe—the Bible is God’s Word, not to be questioned.

How have your eleven children and wife responded to your changes?

While I was still wrestling with all this, my wife turned to me one Sunday morning and said, “I know this is how we were raised, but I’m not buying it anymore.” She had been doing some reading, too, and that was that. I had to study and ponder and write, even for a while after she made her quiet, no-nonsense departure from the church. She is a wonderful, bright woman whom I love and admire very much.

I respect my children’s privacy too much to talk extensively about their beliefs or lack thereof. That’s their business. But I will say that they seem to all be doing just fine with the changes in my wife and me, from the oldest to the youngest. Our home is a place where they can be free to think and believe, or not believe, for themselves.

Would you say you lost your faith gradually—or might you describe it as a series of plateaus, punctuated equilibrium?

Your “series of plateaus” analogy is an excellent one. I recall a few defining moments, starting with the realization that my God of the Gaps was gone. Evolution provided an elegant and tangible answer to the question for which the guided, supernatural process of creation previously had been my only answer: “How could all of these amazing forms of life, myself included, have just happened to arise?”

Then there was the upsetting day when I spoke with a preacher whom I respected (and still do) after sharing with him some of my thoughts about evolution. I asked him if I really had to reject human evolution and believe in Adam and Eve to be a Christian. He was thoughtful about it, but his response made clear where I stood with respect to the faith we both held dear: Yes, the Fall of humankind in Eden is a foundational point of Christian theology. I wandered around in a daze for a while, sad and scared, but realizing that he had only told me what I already suspected.

I enlisted my friend Robert M. Price to see if there was any plausible theological solution. Dr. Price had been serving as a sort of spiritual therapist for me, helping me deal with the issues I’d been finding with my religion once evolution had “cracked the walls of my information silo,” as you adeptly put it. At this point, our work together turned into a full-blown writing project, and together we plowed through books by Francis Collins, John Haught, Kenneth Miller, and others who claimed to make sense of Christianity in view of evolution. But to us, despite trying to approach the theology with an open mind (which Price does even as an atheist), the only thing sensible about their books were their eloquent defenses of evolutionary science.

Most creationists seem pretty adept at deflecting the evidence for evolution. Why did it get you?

I saw it happening right in front of me on my computer screen. As an engineer with lots of software experience, I understood what the computer was doing. Simulated organisms were evolving remarkable abilities to move, swim, etc., and nobody was designing them to do that. Random mutations and genetic crossover between the fittest individuals in the population produced a new, slightly more evolved population. Repeated over hundreds of generations, it worked.

My reading did nothing but confirm this. All of the arguments I saw against evolution were made by believers in defense of their faith. I tried to look at both sides of the story, but it became obvious that there was only one side with any credibility. The other was just wishful thinking and denial.

Out of all of the ways in which believers have tried to reconcile evolutionary biology and the Christian tradition, which seem to you the most robust or credible?

That’s an insightful and difficult question, because the plausibility of these writers in the realm of theology seems to be inversely proportional to their acceptance of the science. You can head in one direction or the other, but you can’t have it both ways, despite their protests that they can. One of the most eloquent and level-headed about the scientific findings and issues for traditional theology is John F. Haught. Yet his tedious appeals to the “drama” and “aesthetic intensity” of evolution are so far off our credibility meter that it would be difficult to summarize our conclusions without sounding uncharitable. Our view of all these sorts of evolutionary apologetics, his included, might be apparent from the title of one of our subheadings, “Shoveling After the Parade.”

The most robust attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable may well be Philip Gosse’s “omphalos” idea that the universe was created recently with the appearance of great age. Of course God created Adam with a navel and trees with rings! They wouldn’t be recognizable without those “retrospective marks,” after all. (Christians are faced with the same issue concerning Jesus and his magic Y chromosome.) It’s ridiculous and reduces God to a cosmic cosplayer, but at least it doesn’t try to dismiss all of the Bible’s clear teachings about a young earth and special creation, or fancifully reinterpret two thousand years of Christian theology.

Your story makes people feel hopeful that change is possible, that individually and collectively we can change and grow. What should people who are invested in science and progress say to creationist friends and family members? Anything?

The stakes are too high to expect much rational deliberation of the evidence, I’m afraid. For me, the evidence of evolution snuck in the back door when I wasn’t looking.

Perhaps the best thing to say to creationist friends and family is that you understand why they believe so strongly, and that you’ll be happy to help them whenever they might wish to look beyond those beliefs. The first and most productive step might be getting them to acknowledge, to themselves at least, that religion is the real motivation for every single argument against evolution.

Originally published at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington.  She is the author of Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light and Deas and Other Imaginings, and the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org.  Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com. 

 

How the Catholic Bishops Outsmarted Washington Voters

Pope hatWhen it comes to matters of individual conscience, Washington State voters have a don’t-mess-with-us attitude that makes Texans look like cattle—and it goes way back.

In 2012 Washington voters flexed their muscle by legalizing recreational marijuana use and marriage for same-sex couples. In 2008, death with dignity passed some counties by as much as seventy-five percent. In 2006, Washington lawmakers outlawed discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. In 1991 a citizen initiative established that “every individual has the fundamental right to choose or refuse birth control” and “every woman has the fundamental right to choose or refuse abortion.” It also guaranteed an absolute right to privacy around mental health and reproductive issues for teens aged 13 and up. Washington State’s constitution includes an Equal Rights Amendment and (from the get-go) a stronger wall of separation between church and state than the U.S. Constitution.

These measures have broad support from Washington citizens of all stripes including most religious people. That includes most Catholics, who, in the words of one Seattle parishioner, think that the bishops “need to get over it.”

In other words, west of Moscow, Idaho, and north of Portland, any bishops who want to control what they think of as their sacramental turf –birth, coming of age, sex, marriage, trippy transcendent experiences, and death—haven’t got a chance in hell at the ballot box. Washington even has extended statutes of limitations on child sex abuse—something Archbishop Timothy Dolan successfully fended off in New York and Pennsylvania. The Archdiocese of Spokane declared bankruptcy.

But the Vatican hasn’t survived for fifteen hundred years by being stupid. And as my devout family members like to say, “Where God closes a door, he opens a window.” The window the Bishops found open in Washington takes the form of independent hospitals with financial problems.

Thanks to changes in health care delivery, more and more independent hospitals are being forced to merge with large health care corporations. The pressures include expensive equipment, complex electronic record keeping technologies, and an Obamacare-driven push for greater administrative efficiency. Rather like mom-and-pop hardware stores that survived by becoming Ace franchisees with standardized, streamlined supply and distribution systems, independent health facilities are surviving through acquisitions and mergers with other hospitals and health care corporations.

Of the largest health care corporations in the country, five of six are administered by the Catholic Church including the famously conservative Catholic Health Initiatives which operates the Franciscan brand and has $15 billion in assets. By the end of 2013, if all proposed mergers go through, 45 percent of Washington hospital beds will be religiously affiliated. In ten counties, 100 percent of hospital facilities will be accountable to religious corporations, which are rapidly buying up outpatient clinics, laboratories, and physician practices as well.

In the words of the U.S. Conference of Bishops, Catholic hospitals and health care corporations are “health care ministries” and “opportunities:”

New partnerships can be viewed as opportunities for Catholic health-care institutions and services to witness to their religious and ethical commitments and so influence the healing profession,” . . . “For example, new partnerships can help to implement the Church’s social teaching.” 

Here is the diabolical stroke of genius. In any merger between a secular and Catholic care system, fiscal health comes with a poison pill. One condition of the merger is that the whole system becomes subject to a set of theological agreements call the “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services” or ERDs. Rather than care being dictated by medical science and patient preference, a set of religious doctrines place restrictions on what treatment options can be offered to (or even discussed with) patients.

Under these agreements, the patient-doctor relationship becomes a patient-doctor-church relationship: “The Church’s moral teaching on healthcare nurtures a truly interpersonal professional-patient relationship. This professional-patient relationship is never separated, then, from the Catholic identity of the health care institution.” Furthermore providers who work in these systems are required to sign binding contractual agreements to adhere to the religious directives, whether or not they are Catholic: “Catholic health care services must adopt these Directives as policy, require adherence to them within the institution as a condition for medical privileges and employment, and provide appropriate instruction regarding the Directives . . . .”

The ERDs in full are readily available to the public, but here are some key samples and implications:

  • Fertility Treatment: “Reproductive technologies that substitute for the marriage act are not consistent with human dignity.” This provision excludes in vitro fertilization and related treatments. It especially affects same sex couples, who may rely on surrogacy or insemination for childbearing, but it also affects the 10 percent of American couples who have fertility problems.
  • Contraception: “Catholic health institutions may not promote or condone contraceptive practices.” . . . “Direct sterilization of either men or women, whether permanent or temporary, is not permitted in a Catholic health care institution.” While we don’t typically associate contraception with hospitals, state-of-the-art long acting methods like IUD’s increasingly are provided at the time of delivery, because post partum insertion improves health outcomes. Under ERD guidelines, a woman who delivers a baby at a Catholic hospital and wants and IUD or to have her tubes tied has to have a second, separate procedure at a secular facility—if they can find one.
  • Abnormal Pregnancies: “In case of extrauterine pregnancy, no intervention is morally licit which constitutes a direct abortion.” Catholic practice encourages the removal of the entire fallopian tube to end an ectopic pregnancy, rather than the standard practice which simply ablates the developing fetus. That is because the standard treatment is considered abortion, while in the invasive and fertility-destroying surgery, death of the embryo is simply a side effect. More broadly, Catholic “ethics” forbid abortion even to save the life of a mother carrying a nonviable fetus. The battle to save a young woman named Beatriz in El Salvador exemplifies this very situation.
  • Advance Directives – “a Catholic health care institution . . . will not honor an advance directive that is contrary to Catholic teaching.” Where patient directives and bishop directives conflict, the directives of the bishops take precedence regardless of a patient’s own religious or conscience obligations.
  • DNR – “The free and informed judgment made by a competent adult patient concerning the use or withdrawal of life-sustaining procedures should always be respected and normally complied with, unless it is contrary to Catholic moral teaching.” Since this battle heated up, stories are emerging in which Catholic hospitals have force fed incapacitated patients whose advance directives specifically stipulated that this not happen.
  • Death with Dignity – “Catholic health care institutions may never condone or participate in [Death With Dignity] in any way.” Physicians are prohibited even from discussing options that exist in other institutions or making referrals.

To many non-Catholics, the most shocking statement in the ERDs is the suggested alternative to death with dignity: “Patients experiencing suffering that cannot be alleviated should be helped to appreciate the Christian understanding of redemptive suffering.” Redemptive suffering is a theological notion that derives from the crucifixion story—the idea that the blood sacrifice of a perfect being could redeem harm done. (Theories about how this works have varied over the course of Christian history.) By extension, suffering itself has redemptive value, which is why Mother Teresa’s order, for example, practiced self-flagellation and glorified suffering of the poor, ill and dying.

Given the clash between Washington State’s independence streak and the top-down approach of the Catholic bishops, Washington citizens are pushing back. After Catholic Peace Health got an exclusive contract near her home in the San Juan Islands, advocate Monica Harrington created a website, Catholicwatch.org to complement the efforts of the national Merger Watch. Merger Watch has been fighting the religious takeover of secular systems across the country for over a decade, and sometimes winning, but describes a recent surge that overwhelms their resources. The ACLU of Washington is ramping up and aggregating funds to fight for a state-wide solution, the first in the country, and is soliciting stories (confidentiality protected) from patients and providers anywhere in the U.S. who have experienced religious interference in medical decisions.

Even so, on May 20, the Seattle Times announced an affiliation agreement between the University of Washington system and Peace Health. Within Catholic-controlled hospitals, less than five percent of revenues come from the Catholic Church. Most are taxpayer funds in the form of Medicaid, Medicare and capital grants for public services—or insurance reimbursement. So, the thought of the bishops influencing a public owned and funded institution adds insult to injury. In response, Columnist Danny Westneat, of the Times, framed a pointed question. “Most of us aren’t Catholic, so I’m guessing we’d never go along with letting the creeds of that one faith run something as universal as education [even if ‘the Catholics have a good record of running quality schools’]. So why are we allowing it with health care?”

Why indeed?

Originally published at Away Point

Will the Catholic Bishops Decide How You Die?

What happens when religious institutions get to manage public funds, absorb secular hospitals, and put theology above medical science and individual patient conscience?

science_religion_070703_ms What happens when religious institutions get to manage public funds, absorb secular hospitals, and put theology above medical science and individual patient conscience?

In 2010, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, an elderly woman was rushed to a local hospital called St. John. She had suffered a massive stroke and could no longer eat, drink or speak.

In 2010, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, an elderly woman was rushed to a local hospital called St. John. She had suffered a massive stroke and could no longer eat, drink or speak. Mercifully, she was one of the growing percent of Americans who have prepared for such an eventuality by writing an end of life directive. Hers said that said she did not want artificial hydration or nutrition if she wasn’t going to recover. Unfortunately, St. John is a facility where the directives of the Catholic bishops take precedence over the directives of individual patients, and one such directive orders hospitals to feed and hydrate end of life patients whether they want it or not.

Americans would do well to consider what happens when theology dictates health care.

In the official language of the Bishops, St. John is a “Catholic health care ministry,” their term for all Church affiliated hospitals and clinics. Catholic health care ministries are publically licensed institutions intended to serve the general public. They are highly subsidized by public dollars. To fund them the Church uses a variety of public revenue streams including Medicare, Medicaid, county appropriations, federal dollar allocated through the 1946 Hospital Survey and Construction Act, and tax exempt government bonds. As with any hospital, additional revenues come from insurance payments and investments, with the end result that the Catholic Church contributes less than five percent of the funds flowing through their hospitals and clinics. And yet the Bishops place theological restrictions on care for all patients and sometimes forbid providers from telling patients that treatment options exist elsewhere.

According to MergerWatch, Catholic control of health dollars and hospital facilities is on the rise across the U.S. In Washington State, for example, if all currently proposed mergers go through, almost half of hospital beds will lie in the hands of religious institutions by the end of 2013. Across the U.S., as Catholic systems such as Peace Health and Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI) quietly absorb secular hospitals, the Bishops are fighting in court for the religious equivalent of corporate personhood, claiming that the constitution gives them institutional conscience rights that trump patient choice. Meanwhile, Catholic owned pharmacies are suing for the right to deny services; and other Catholic owned business are demanding (and winning) religious exemptions from health insurance obligations.

In an effort to standardize the rules of Catholic institutions and the advice that priests give lay people, the Bishops have created what they call “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care,” called ERDs for short. When secular and religious institutions merge, the Bishops’ directives often restrict services in both. Patients may not realize that a once secular institution named Swedish or Highline is now subject to theology and could impose religious beliefs at odds with those of the patient. Following mergers, changes often are gradual, occurring slowly as staff leave and are replaced with believers, which makes the shift even harder for patients to detect. (Religious hospitals are exempt from non-discriminatory employment practices, somewhat remarkable given that so much of their funding is public.) Hospital administrators may state that they do not interfere in the doctor-patient relationship, while at the same time advertising for staff who are “deeply familiar” with the Bishops directives.

From a consumer standpoint, one problem with putting religion rather than science in charge of healthcare is that patients may not know they are being denied the full range of medically appropriate options. They may have no idea when institutional rules prevent doctors and nurses from honoring end-of-life wishes or discussing services that are available in secular settings, services like contraception, abortion, tubal ligation, vasectomy, fertility treatment, or death with dignity. For example, one woman tells of being diagnosed with an ectopic pregnancy at a religious hospital. She was advised that she needed to have her fallopian tube removed. Fortunately, she consulted her smart phone and realized that elsewhere she could simply obtain a medication to end her nonviable pregnancy. The medication is safer and leaves fertility intact, but the Catholic directives treat this as a direct abortion, while the surgery (which damages long term fertility) kills the fetus indirectly and so is acceptable.

Other countries where Catholic theology limits health options offer a dire warning of what might happen here if the Church had an equal hold on the levers of power. In El Salvador, Catholic theology was written into law in 1998, banning all abortions, even those intended to save the mother. As a consequence, a twenty two year old mother named Beatriz, who carries a nonviable fetus, lies in a hospital bed with her kidneys failing, hoping to be granted an exception by El Salvador’s Supreme Court. She has been waiting for over a month. In Catholic Ireland last October, a young dentist, Savita Halappanavar, died after being refused an abortion.

In an ironic twist, the extremity of Catholic directives leads many people to believe that they couldn’t possibly be implemented here. Consider the case of Beatriz. She is the mother of a young child. Her fetus is anencephalic, meaning it has no brain and never will be a person under any circumstance. (Note: Somewhere between sixty and eighty percent of human fertilized eggs self-destruct naturally before a full-term gestation, most before a woman knows she is pregnant, and many because they are defective.) In other words, the Salvadorian anti-abortion law risks the life of a young mother for an incomplete fetus that is a normal failed reproductive product rather than a potential child. For someone who thinks that morality is about wellbeing, this just sounds crazy. Of course this could never happen in the US, right? You may be astounded to learn that a Phoenix nun was excommunicated and her hospital was forcibly disaffiliated from the Catholic Church for allowing an abortion under similarly hopeless circumstances.

In Ireland, after Savita’s unnecessary death, thousands of men and women demanded medical services based on scientific evidence and individual conscience. Savita became the tragic face of an international movement. Even so, given the power of religious institutions and traditions, legal change in Ireland is likely to be minimal. The largely Catholic Irish Medical Association has declined to request abortion rights even in cases of incest, rape and nonviable fetal anomalies. Currently Irish law allows abortion only when a mother’s life is threatened, which is not good enough for a case like Savita’s. A leading obstetrician testified that Savita probably would have survived if she had gotten an abortion during the first three days of her hospital stay. But at that time, there was not a “real and substantial threat to her life.” By the time she met the legal criteria, it was too late.

Patients count on their doctors to know and suggest their best options to protect health and wellbeing. But as medical options increase, especially at the beginning and end of life, the range of services excluded for theological reasons also increases. Catholic “ethicists” devote millions of dollars to analyzing biomedical technologies in the pipeline and then advocating policy based on theological priorities. They block certain lines of research and prevent affiliated hospitals from participating in clinical studies that require participants to be on contraception, for example a cancer treatment that might cause fetal defects. Procedures opposed by the theologians are likely to be absent altogether from patient-doctor conversations.

Some patient advocates say that mandatory disclosure is part of the solution: Pharmacies that refuse to fill some prescriptions should post the fact that they are not full-service. Church-run abortion diversion centers known as crisis pregnancy centers, should post that they are not medical providers. Treatment consent forms should list the scientifically and medically accepted practices that a doctor or hospital refuses to provide so that patients know that these services are available elsewhere. Conversely, providers who sign onto a “Patients’ Bill of Rights” promising to base care only on medical science and patient conscience could get the equivalent of a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

But disclosure alone won’t ensure state-of-the-art health care for many Americans, especially those living in small towns or rural settings. Sometimes one clinic or pharmacy serves a wide area, or all nearby services are managed by the same religious institution. In these cases, a woman with a painful and life-threatening ectopic pregnancy might not be able just to get in her car and drive to another clinic. Denial of service hits low income communities hardest because members often have less flexible time off work, transportation, and childcare. The right of religious doctors and institutions to deny services obstructs the right of patients to receive timely care that meets normal medical practice standards, which are designed to maximize wellbeing.

That is because Catholic theology isn’t necessarily about wellbeing; it is about submitting to the perceived will of God. Sometimes these two align, and sometimes they don’t. To serve God’s will, Catholic theologians attempt to derive moral principles that are about the inherent goodness or evil of certain beliefs and behaviors, regardless of their consequences. In this way of thinking, contraceptives or abortions should not be provided because they are “intrinsically evil,” even when contraception or abortion may save a woman’s life.

To make matters worse, Catholic theology values passive submission to harm when it is believed to serve Catholic practice or faith. Saints are heralded for their commitment to theological principle even in the face of outrageous and foreseeable outcomes, including martyrdom. In fact, Catholic theology sees pain as having positive soul-purifying benefits. This is called redemptive suffering. In the ERDs, it is offered up as an alternative for patients whose unbearable pain leads them to seek death with dignity:

Dying patients who request euthanasia should receive loving care, psychological and spiritual support, and appropriate remedies for pain and other symptoms so that they can live with dignity until the time of natural death. . . . Patients experiencing suffering that cannot be alleviated should be helped to appreciate the Christian understanding of redemptive suffering.

Former nun Mary Johnson (author of An Unquenchable Thirst) spent twenty years working with Mother Teresa’s organization, the Missionaries of Charity, who have been accused of providing substandard treatment and pain management. She explains the sometimes abysmal conditions in their facilities thus:

Most people today would say that we help the poor by helping them out of poverty. That was never Mother Teresa’s intention. Mother Teresa often told us that as Missionaries of Charity we did not serve the poor to improve their lot, but because we were serving Jesus, who said that whenever service was rendered to one of the least, it was rendered to him. Jesus promised eternal life to those who fed the hungry and clothed the naked.

The point, in other words, is not necessarily to solve the problem but simply to perform service. Ultimately, it isn’t about real world outcomes for the person on the receiving end but about eternal outcomes for the person on the giving end. The difference is important. And although Johnson doesn’t mention it, the passage she quotes mentions the ill as well as the hungry and naked. The Jesus of the gospel writer promises eternal life to those who feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit prisoners, and care for the ill. When religion and healing are at odds, the way to get to heaven is to offer theologically principled care, even when more compassionate options are available.

This difference in objectives seems like reason enough to separate religion from medicine. Thanks to science, fertility treatment has come a long way from the mandrakes and dove blood prescribed in the Bible. Victims of sexual assault now have options other than being forced to bear rape babies (also the Biblical solution). As we face death, we have alternatives to convincing ourselves that suffering is redemptive. Do really we want theology at the helm of our biggest hospital and clinic systems?

If not, it may be time for ordinary men and women to speak our minds. In Washington State, where the battle over Catholic hospital mergers is heating up, the state constitution specifically prohibits the use of public funds to support religious institutions. Despite that prohibition, one district actually has a line-item in the property tax code to subsidize a Peace Health facility, leaving the local community with no secular alternative. With the Peace Health clinic newly open the local bishop has already tried to block the now Catholic system from providing lab work for Planned Parenthood, as was done in the past. Legal challenges may play out in court thanks to a patients’ rights campaign by the ACLU and grassroots groups, but the broader question is this:

When it comes to medical options, whose beliefs count, the Bishop’s or the patient’s? Who gets to say whether one woman is forced to incubate a pregnancy gone wrong or another is force fed at the end of life? Whose version of god gets to dictate how you live and how we die?

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington.  She is the author of Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light and Deas and Other Imaginings, and the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org.  Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.

This article first published at Truthout:  http://truth-out.org/news/item/16391-will-the-catholic-bishops-decide-how-you-die-or-whether-you-live