Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 297 of 447 · 20 per page

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  And the worst of it all is that the highest function of man has been degraded by foul words so that it is almost impossible to write the body’s hymn of joy as it should be written. The poets have been almost as guilty in this respect as the priests: Aristophanes and Rabelais are ribald, dirty: Boccaccio cynical while Ovid leers cold-bloodedly and Zola like Chaucer finds it difficult to suit language to his desires. Walt Whitman is better though often merely commonplace. The Bible is the best of all; but not frank enough even in the noble Song of Solomon which now and then by sheer imagination manages to convey the ineffable! We are beginning to reject Puritanism and its unspeakable, brainless pruderies; but Catholicism is just as bad. Go to the Vatican Gallery and the great Church of St. Peter in Rome and you will find the fairest figures of ancient art clothed in painted tin, as if the most essential organs of the body were disgusting and had to be concealed. I say the body is beautiful and must be lifted and dignified by our reverence: I love the body more than any Pagan of them all and I love the soul and her aspirations as well; for me the body and the soul are alike beautiful, all dedicate to Love and her worship. I have no divided allegiance and what I preach today amid the scorn and hatred of men will be universally accepted tomorrow; for in my vision, too, a thousand years are as one day. We must unite the soul of Paganism, the love of beauty and art and literature with the soul of Christianity and its human lovingkindness in a new synthesis which shall include all the sweet and gentle and noble impulses in us. What we all need is more of the spirit of Jesus: we must learn at length with Shakespeare: “Pardon’s the word for all!” I want to set this Pagan-Christian ideal before men as the highest and most human too. Now one word to my own people and their peculiar shortcomings. Anglo-Saxon domineering combativeness is the greatest danger to Humanity in the world today. Americans are proud of having blotted out the red Indian and stolen his possessions and of burning and torturing negroes in the sacred name of equality. At all costs we must get rid of our hypocrisies and falsehoods and see ourselves as we are—a domineering race, vengeful and brutal, as exemplified in Haiti; we must study the inevitable effects of our soulless, brainless selfishness as shown in the world-war.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  By the late twentieth century, the dreadful Mrs Butler had gained a commemorative feast day in the Church of England’s liturgy. [18] Temperance and prostitution were the supernova causes in a galaxy of fights against such expressions of hyper-masculinity as duelling, gambling, tobacco-smoking or the eating of meat. They were all summed up in a phrase that on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1870s became a common shorthand for moral campaigning movements: ‘Social Purity’, really a euphemism for sexual purity. In this cause, the US Women’s Christian Temperance Union used its considerable political influence to diversify its concerns. At the end of the two-decade reign of its Methodist President Frances Willard in 1898, twenty-five of its fifty-nine departments had campaigning briefs other than temperance; naturally they included votes for women, in the cause of pushing for legislation on alcohol. [19] It is significant that the WCTU also sought to limit Catholic immigration, a clear threat to the purity of Protestant America. The tone of such campaigning organizations was white, female, Protestant, middle class. They did not spare either men or social elites in seeking to hold all Americans to a common standard of sexual behaviour, and were determined to educate the next generation in principles to reflect that standard; public censorship of literature and entertainment was high on their list of priorities, merging into temperance campaigns. Their Christian values became American family values. In all this, they were in uneasy alliance with the increasingly powerful and well-organized medical profession, the uneasiness in large part because doctors were almost exclusively male, and might not share their moral preoccupations. In one important respect doctors yielded to Social Purity activists, in leaving public sex education to Protestant organizations led by women. It was an aspect of women’s duties to their families, and male clergy were as generally inclined as doctors to make a grateful escape from the obligation. [20] The cautious alliance of the Social Purity movement with the new medical establishment reflected a respect for the remarkable advances in medical science from the mid-nineteenth century that made diagnosis, treatment and surgery less threatening to human life than they had ever been. Western humans simply knew more about the physical realities of reproduction than in any previous generation, but, as so often in rapid advances of knowledge, there was overconfidence about the implications. One considerable wrong turn was to take too seriously the intellectual respectability of the ‘science’ of eugenics: the proposition that it was possible to breed high achievement through bloodlines, which just happened to favour members of the white social elite. The arguments were fostered from within what appeared to be a textbook case to prove the point: the extended clan of British intellectuals that included Charles Darwin. Darwin’s polymathic cousin Francis Galton’s major publication in 1869, Hereditary Genius, set the standard for constructing what looked like scientific arguments, effectively inventing intelligence tests and allied statistical tools, which other scientists much expanded into the twentieth century.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  It was Patterson who convinced them to write Unveiling Islam after the terror attacks, and in its first year the book sold 100,000 copies; it would eventually approach 200,000 in sales.4 In Unveiling Islam , the Caners told of growing up as devout Muslims, but after the attacks on America they felt compelled to expose the faith as violent and dangerous. War was “not a sidebar of history for Islam,” they wrote, but “the main vehicle for religious expression.” Muslims quickly raised red flags concerning a number of assertions in the book, accusing the brothers of “either purposely or ignorantly” presenting “half-truth after half-truth, mischaracterization after mischaracterization and falsehood after falsehood.” But the book told conservative evangelicals exactly what they wanted to hear.5 Inspired by the Caners’ book, Jerry Vines, former president of the SBC, denounced Islam in provocative language: “Christianity was founded by the virgin-born son of God, Jesus Christ. Islam was founded by Muhammad, a demon-possessed pedophile who had 12 wives, the last of which was a 9-year-old girl.” Speaking on the eve of the Southern Baptists’ annual convention in 2002, Vines denied that Muslims and Christians worshiped the same God: “Allah is not Jehovah,” he insisted, and “Jehovah’s not going to turn you into a terrorist.” (When President Bush addressed the SBC gathering via satellite the next day, praising Baptists as “among the earliest champions of religious tolerance and freedom,” the irony was not lost on some observers.) Vines’s claims struck many as extremist, but he quickly drew the support of fellow evangelicals. Falwell jumped to his friend’s defense, explaining how Vines had hard evidence from Unveiling Islam . “If you want to raise the ire of the mainstream press and the swarm of politically-correct organizations in this nation, just criticize Islam [as Dr. Vines learned],” Falwell wrote to his newsletter subscribers. When asked about his support for Vines a few months later, Falwell didn’t mince words: “I think Mohammed was a terrorist.” Falwell’s remarks unleashed a global furor. The Iranian foreign minister condemned Falwell’s comments, intimating that they were “part of a propaganda war by the US mass media and the Zionists” intent on sparking “war among civilisations.” The British foreign secretary called Falwell’s comments “outrageous and insulting.” In India and Kashmir protests erupted; in the Indian town of Solapur violence left at least eight people dead. Falwell ended up apologizing, claiming he “intended no disrespect to any sincere, law-abiding Muslim.”6 In 2003, Falwell hired Ergun Caner to teach at Liberty University’s School of Religion, and in 2005 Caner was appointed dean of the school’s seminary, the first former Muslim to head an evangelical seminary.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Mrs Thatcher might have suggested her agreement with the social anxieties that fuelled NFOL or NVLA activism, and both ladies were outraged at what they saw as the elitist liberalism of the Church of England hierarchy, but Mrs Thatcher was much more subtle in her vague deployment of such phrases as ‘common sense’ or ‘Victorian values’. Until the early 1990s, the vagueness paid electoral dividends for her and her party, where a more explicit alignment would have put off many British voters. [24] By contrast with Mrs Thatcher, neither the NFOL nor all Mrs Whitehouse’s skills at self-promotion in the NVLA achieved much. Their problem was

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Moore’s thesis about Catharism, Western Christianity was now intensely bounded, even paranoid. Not only ‘heretics’ were its victims; so were Jews. They first suffered systematic murderous violence from Christians while armed crowds were gathering in Germany for the First Crusade; they have never been entirely free of it thereafter. England, in the twelfth century the leading component in a transmarine empire under the French Angevin dynasty, has some unenviable firsts in the persecuting society: the first European example of the infamous ‘blood libel’ against Jews, in a Norwich Cathedral cult following the supposed ritual murder of a local boy in 1144; the first mass victimization of accused Christian heretics in 1165–66; a particularly ghastly massacre by fire of the whole Jewish community at York as a ‘flagship’ of nationwide massacres in 1190, and finally, exactly a century later, official expulsion of the kingdom’s entire Jewish population, the first such expulsion in the whole continent. [24] Paranoia in the Iberian Peninsula about the large-scale survival of Jewish populations as Christians reconquered regions from their Muslim rulers produced one lasting Catholic peculiarity: a rebranding of an inescapable part of Jesus’s Jewish identity, his circumcision. From early centuries this was a liturgical Christian feast in East and West, to be celebrated around the turn of the year in January, but the Western growth in anti-Semitism stimulated the idea that it represented a Jewish physical assault on the infant Christ, the first shedding of his blood in anticipation of his crucifixion – to be blamed on the Jews just like their supposed murder of contemporary children. There resulted some disturbingly binary depictions of the Circumcision particularly in Iberian church art, ranging Mary and her Son against an ill-intentioned collection of Jews, with Joseph as a helpless spectator. In certain sections of the modern Roman Catholic Church, this is still perpetuated by the notion that the Circumcision is one of the Sorrows of Joseph, in parallel with the more long-standing devotion of the Sorrows of Mary, rather than the reality that it would have constituted a high point in any Jewish father’s life. [25] Victims of suspicion of the ‘Other’ varied over time. A particular moment of social panic throughout France in 1321 drew in all levels of society up to King Philip V himself, in the belief that lepers and Jews had combined together with the external enemy, Islam, to overthrow all good order in Christendom by poisoning wells. Lepers, normally the subject of institutional charity in medieval Europe, were victimized, tortured into confessions and burned at the stake, and the pogroms against Jews were no less horrific. Muslims had the good fortune at this time to be out of reach of French malice. [26] As the association of heretical Catharism with ‘buggery’ demonstrates, it was a very small step to bring same-sex activity defined as ‘sodomy’ into this circle of repression, although curiously, in the panic of 1321 mass hysteria passed the sodomites by.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  16 Revolution and Catholicism Rebuilt (1789–1914) During the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment seemed the ally of princes and even of popes. The Society of Jesus until its dissolution in 1773 was at the centre of scientific discussion and curiosity about the natural world, just as was the Royal Society in Protestant London. As an ‘Enlightened Despot’ the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II attempted large-scale dissolutions of monasteries in his dominions, but his thoroughly rational Enlightenment plans included redeploying confiscated assets for Catholic reform from a Religious Fund under his control, with such measures as endowing new parishes to meet modern needs. The Emperor was taken aback by the popular fury that he met, particularly in the Catholic Netherlands, where full-scale popular revolt broke out in 1789, derailing his schemes. [1] Yet we do not remember 1789 for this triumphant defence of Catholic Christendom and monasticism in the Low Countries. The Revolution that sprang out of the bankruptcy of the French monarchy became seized by the rhetoric of the most anti-Christian version of Enlightenment in Europe, provoked by hatred of a Church that, despite considerable internal tensions, had seemed one of the most powerful and successful versions of Catholicism on the continent after its victory over French Protestantism in the seventeenth century: it was distinguished by its proud ‘Gallican’ independence of Rome under its ‘Most Christian’ kings. The last of them, Louis XVI, took his name like so many of his predecessors from that King Clovis who in the fifth century turned the Christianity of Francia away from a possible Arian future towards Catholicism (above, Chapter 11). [2] It was only to be expected that the destruction of the Bourbon monarchy and the religious system in which it was enmeshed radically altered European attitudes to sexuality and the family – though not always with the revolutionary effects that we might expect. This chapter explores the resulting complications. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: A BID TO CRUSH CHRISTENDOM In view of events over the following two decades, it was ironic that the crumbling of royal power in 1789 was provoked by the French clergy’s traditionalist insistence on recalling the States General, the kingdom’s medieval representative body, to tackle France’s financial crisis. As the remaking of the regime moved into a parliamentary monarchy, its inaugural Constituent Assembly pressured the King into accepting a complete reorganization of the French Church, including an extension to all faiths of a royal measure which in 1787, before the Revolution, had tentatively opened toleration for the Reformed Protestant Church. Monasteries were dissolved, Church wealth confiscated for the State, an oath of loyalty to the Civil Constitution required of all clergy. Soon it became apparent that the Pope was bitterly opposed to the measures; as provisions for a Constitutional Church unfolded during 1791, the Church became fatally divided as to whether to accept the new order, while the King was increasingly identified with conservatives opposing the very Church of which he was now nominal head.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  28. St Peter’s Seminary, Cardross (Argyll and Bute) was planned for clergy training in the glory-days of the Scottish Catholic Church in the 1950s, and eventually designed in a self-confident Brutalist architectural idiom. Concrete Quarterly commented in 1967 that ‘the timber-lined bedrooms are comparable with those of a comfortable hotel, and better designed than most.’ The collapse in numbers entering the priesthood rapidly rendered it redundant; it closed in 1980 and is now a poignant ruin. One of the reasons for that long-drawn-out result was the divisive effect of this issue on the theological parties that had emerged worldwide in the nineteenth-century Anglican Communion. Both Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics now fissured between traditionalists and those sympathetic to change, and that has endured into subsequent fights, notably around attitudes to homosexuality. There has never been an exact transference: it is notable that a few female Evangelical bishops still fail to notice that the same theological arguments propelling them to consecration to the episcopate apply just as much to accepting homosexual relationships on equal terms, while the same inconsistency is perceptible among some gay Anglo-Catholics who still deplore the ordination of women while gratefully accepting the liberalization that has helped them organize their lives as they would wish. Indeed, for obvious historical reasons, conservative Anglo-Catholics have never been as convincing or full-throated opponents of gay equality as conservative Evangelicals, despite usually voting in the same direction when Church legislative bodies have proposed change. Campaigns for gay rights were the logical fulfilment of Bishop Charles Gore’s prophecy on contraception (above, Chapter 18), though not a result he would have sought. The first impulse of gay Christians in the West, like African Americans in eighteenth-century north America or African Independent Churches in subsequent centuries, was to found their own Church communities, free of condescension or worse from the existing Churches. So, in 1968, Troy Perry, a former Pentecostal pastor, gathered a little congregation, at first in his own home in Huntington Park, a low-income suburb of Los Angeles. Perry chose to call his congregation the ‘Metropolitan Community Church’ (MCC). The carefully neutral description additionally reflected a consistent characteristic of the emerging gay liberation movement: as with self-assertions of identity throughout Western history, it was easier to make one’s own choice amid the relative anonymity of an urban setting. The MCC ethos remained Bible-based in a Pentecostal fashion, though from the beginning a diverse sacramental flavour was mixed in by Perry’s insistence on the centrality of a weekly Eucharist. He performed the first public same-sex wedding of the modern age in 1969, and after many difficulties in finding a place to worship, the congregation gained its first permanent building in 1971 – the victim of arson within two years. Conservative Evangelical hostility was predictable and vocal, often wildly misrepresenting the reality of the MCC. Interestingly it echoed the anger that Evangelicals had expressed towards Pentecostalism in general at the beginning of the century, and for a similar reason: the MCC looked too infuriatingly similar to Evangelical revivalism for comfort, so much of the vitriol was directed to alerting those who might have been tempted by its devotional style to the moral dangers that the community offered. Evangelicals had some reason for their alarm: the MCC grew at a rate that Evangelicals or Pentecostalists could only envy, having within five years of its foundation achieved 40 congregations with 13,000 members. Over the following half-century MCC congregations have emerged in hundreds of different contexts, still largely urban, across at least thirty-seven different countries. [11] Just as in the days of slavery in America, other gay Christians were determined to make their presence felt within existing denominations. Roman Catholics, inspired by Vatican II, were pioneers, with pastoral counselling groups founded by clergy that turned into more public witness and campaign organizations: Dignity from 1969 in the USA and, in the UK, Quest from 1973. Hardly surprisingly the Quakers were early pioneers as well, in the UK founding the Friends’ Homosexual Fellowship that same year. The next logical step was to try for a more ecumenical approach, witnessed by the creation of the Gay Christian Movement in 1976. The name was significantly male-centred, and the early ethos of GCM was predominantly Anglo-Catholic or liberal Anglican. In an organization notable for strongly fought internal debate, it took nearly a decade for a renaming as the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement. Since 2017 the recognition of further complexities in queer identities have brought a name that is a more inclusive as well as theological proclamation: OneBodyOneFaith. [12] A TIME FOR JUDGING

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  For example, Schlafly concluded her book with her “Vision for America.” First and foremost, “The Positive Woman starts with the knowledge that America is the greatest country in the world and that it is her task to do her part to keep it that way.” She must oppose bureaucratic government and creeping socialism (with its “destructive goal of equality”) in order to protect the American family and the greatness of private enterprise. She was a patriot and defender of “Judeo-Christian civilization,” and she supported legislators who did the same. Finally, the Positive Woman must work to keep the military strong. Women shouldn’t think that the problems of military defense were too complex or controversial to engage with. It was up to women to help save their country—God’s country.19 Schlafly didn’t have much to say about race, at least not explicitly. But at a time when racial politics found expression in an array of adjacent issues, her views came through clearly. Needless to say, they were frequently at odds with those of civil rights activists. She defended private schooling and sought to keep the federal government from interfering with parental choice. That she meant white parents went without saying. (She would later oppose immigration and promote English-only schools.) In an era when race was increasingly discussed through coded language, her ideas were embraced by the same communities who opposed civil rights. In fact, the ERA was the first issue conservatives rallied around after they lost the legal battle for segregation. As one politician noted at the time, conservatives didn’t talk about desegregation and busing all the time, but they were “seething inside,” and that anger could erupt in the form of impassioned opposition to the “equality of rights” ensconced in the ERA.20 The very language that critics of the ERA employed mirrored that used by segregationists. They spoke not of “forced” busing but of “forced” women, and they coined the term “desexegration.” Racial anxieties also surfaced in their rhetoric around “the potty issue.” Schools and public facilities had recently been integrated, and now the ERA threatened to turn public restrooms into unisex spaces. This was intolerable. One white woman in North Carolina wrote to her state senator to explain what was at stake: “We will have to use the same restrooms as the men both black and white.” A state legislator, too, made the connection plainly: “I ain’t going to have my wife be in the bathroom with some big, black buck!”21 This blending of racism and the perceived sexual vulnerability of white women had a long history in the South, even if historical evidence irrefutably demonstrates that it was black women who had reason to fear white men’s sexual aggression, not the other way around. But with the civil rights movement ending legal separation by race, white fears of imagined black male aggression reached a fevered pitch. That anti-ERA rhetoric focusing on the vulnerability of women found expression in racist terms is not altogether surprising.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  When the dust settled after the election, the time would come “to make ‘evangelical’ great again.” Moore used his platform to denounce the scapegoating of religious minorities and the racist and anti-immigrant undertones of Trump’s campaign: “The man on the throne in heaven is a dark-skinned, Aramaic-speaking ‘foreigner’ who is probably not all that impressed by chants of ‘Make America great again.’” Trump, confident in his evangelical base, shot back on Twitter: “Russell Moore is truly a terrible representative of Evangelicals and all of the good they stand for. A nasty guy with no heart!”20 Denny Burk, president of CBMW, insisted that “men of principle” should do what they could to keep Trump away from the presidency: “If ever the country needed its statesmen to be men of courage, it is right now.” Michael Gerson, former speechwriter for George W. Bush, pleaded with his fellow evangelicals that they must not “bear the mark of Trump.” He noted that it was, to put it mildly, “unexpected for evangelicals to endorse a political figure who has engaged in creepy sex talk on the radio, boasted about his extramarital affairs, made a fortune from gambling and bragged about his endowment on national television.” How could evangelicals identify with a man who fueled racist tension, endorsed religious discrimination, advocated war crimes, and promoted incivility and intolerance, a man “who holds a highly sexualized view of power as dominance, rather than seeing power as an instrument to advance moral ends”?21 Perhaps Gerson hadn’t been paying attention. Trump was hardly the first man conservative evangelicals had embraced who checked off this list of qualifications. With the forces of evil allied against them, evangelicals were looking for a man who would fight for them, a man whose testosterone might lead to recklessness and excess here or there, but that was all part of the deal. Not all evangelicals were as puzzled as Gerson and Moore. “Evangelicals see what’s going down,” explained a senior advisor to Huckabee, before Huckabee—the onetime Baptist pastor—exited the race; they were looking for somebody “to be strong and stern,” somebody with an aggressive leadership style.22 Before long, “real” evangelical leaders began to fall in line. Less than a month before the Republican Convention, Dobson, who had initially endorsed Cruz, testified on behalf of Trump’s nascent faith. Granted, the candidate didn’t exactly talk the talk. “He used the word ‘hell’ four or five times” in his meeting with conservative Christian leaders, Dobson acknowledged, and “he doesn’t know our language.” And yes, he’d had a rough time on the campaign trail, getting tripped up on questions about whether he’d ever asked for forgiveness (no), or what his favorite Bible verse was (“I don’t want to get into specifics”).

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  29. Outside the Anglican Lambeth Conference debate on homosexuality in August 1998, Emmanuel Chukwuma, Bishop of Enugu (Nigeria) (right), made a spontaneous and apparently unsuccessful attempt to exorcise homosexuality out of the Revd Richard Kirker (left), General Secretary of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement. Less frequently articulated is the history of serious sectarian violence within African Christianity itself. The East African Evangelical Revival that, from the 1930s, spread through the region and into central Africa, brought with it conflict and destruction of property affecting Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Protestant breakaway Churches; that was in the background of the Rwanda genocide of 1994. [33] In Uganda, violence in the Revival interacted with much older tensions between the hegemonic Anglicanism of Buganda and disadvantaged Roman Catholics, and it was exacerbated in the 1970s by President Idi Amin’s murderous campaigns to promote Uganda’s Muslim minority over the Anglicans. [34] Any crusade against homosexuality in Uganda therefore acts as a scapegoating force to transcend this legacy of hatreds, particularly because it handily coincides there with a proud local narrative of martyrdom: the story of forty-five royal pages in Buganda, both Anglican and Roman Catholic. Over two years in the 1880s the victims were burned alive by Mwanga the then Kabaka of Buganda, apparently because, among other acts of defiance, they had refused to yield to his sexual demands – an aspect of the atrocity that has been increasingly emphasized in recent years, whatever its original part in Mwanga’s brutality. That complex of considerations lies behind Uganda’s move in 2023 to criminalize homosexuality up to imprisonment and even execution, to the baffled horror of Westerners who are not aware of the backstory (see Plate 36). [35] * Sex has for more than half a century had an even more important instrumental role in promoting right-wing secular politics, particularly in the United States. Here it has become the most salient issue for identity in the Republican Party, gathering together conservative Evangelicals and ultra-right Catholics. The process began in the 1960s and represents a paradox. The Democrats started out as the party of the white supremacist South after the Civil War of 1861–5: the Republicans were the party of President Lincoln, who oversaw the South’s defeat. In terms of historic Evangelical Protestant campaign issues, the Democrat record was ambiguous: the populist Democrat and sometime Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan was the leading counsel against the teaching of Darwinian evolution in the Scopes ‘Monkey Trial’ of 1925 (above, Chapter 18), dying just after the end of proceedings. On the other hand, in the 1930s the Democrats were responsible for bringing down the nationwide experiment in Prohibition, that cause which Evangelicals had latterly made their own; and then in the 1960s successive Democrat presidents and Congress majorities formulated the Civil Rights legislation dismantling the apparatus of racial segregation across the nation. Two religious issues began pulling the Republicans and conservative Evangelicals together: one was the banning of school prayer in America’s public schools in 1962, a result of the courts trying to enforce the principle of the American constitutional separation of Church and State, and then the Roe v. Wade judgment of the Supreme Court in 1973, effectively legalizing abortion. The latter, a deliberate test case like the Lady Chatterley prosecution in the UK a decade before, was not as straightforward as it has been remembered: ‘Jane Roe’ was a lesbian and mother of three who never actually had an abortion, and for much of her remaining rather troubled life she became involved in anti-abortion campaigning. [36] Roe v. Wade might have been more permanently secure if Congress and the Democratic Party had taken more seriously a constitutional amendment proposed by the redoubtable Democrat Congresswoman Bella Abzug to bar states from restrictive legislation on abortion; instead the Supreme Court judgment remained to stand by itself. At the time of the Roe v. Wade verdict, its future significance was not entirely clear. Abortion had been widely available and legal in the early days of the USA, and its steady criminalization in the 1860s and 1870s had been thanks to pressure not from American Catholics (then a minority widely subject to discrimination) but from physicians. [37] Thereafter opposition to abortion had not been strong among conservative Evangelicals, who saw campaigning against abortion as something that Roman Catholics did, and therefore suspect. In 1970, abortion was legal only in Oregon and California, but other states

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  When you read the newspaper or watch the news, take note of the way the Four Fs, often cloaked in high-minded, patriotic, or religious rhetoric, still dominate public affairs and human behavior. They are not confined to the fundamentalist or conservative camp, but can also be detected in some so-called liberal discourse. How often do you hear the “principle of charity” at work? Despite our advanced civilization and sophistication, to what extent are we still prey to the mechanisms of the me-first old brain? When you defend something you feel tribal about, take note of the way your threat mechanism has been activated, so that you lose your dispassion and ability to assess the other side fairly and rationally. Notice the way you become “puffed up” with righteous aggression, your anger, disgust, and desire to wound. Do you sense in yourself, or in your friends and fellow countrymen, a tendency to follow the leader blindly during a political, cultural, or social crisis so that you cry, in effect, “My country, right or wrong”? Recall the seventh step: How Little We Know. How much of the confident talk you hear about the backwardness, arrogance, or intolerance of other national, cultural, ethnic, or religious groups is based purely on hearsay? When you or your friends are critical of another nation, how much do you actually know about it? Make a list of what you know for certain about its history, its culture, and its current circumstances. How reliable are your sources? If you feel incensed when people attack your own cultural or religious values, is it ethical to inflict that pain on others? Consider Jesus’s words: “Why do you observe the splinter in your brother’s eye and never notice the plank in your own? How dare you say to your brother: ‘let me take the splinter out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own? Hypocrite! Take the plank out of your own eye first, and then you will see clearly enough to take the splinter out of your brother’s eye.”5 Do we hear enough international news in the media? Are conflicts in other regions reported objectively and their background explained? Do you get to hear both sides of a dispute, or is reporting based on a narrowly national agenda? If you work in the media, consider how we can learn about the plight of our neighbors and adjust to the realities of our global society. Educators should realize that they have a responsibility to make sure that our children are given accurate, balanced, and respectful information about other peoples. If this had been done more carefully in the past, perhaps we would not be having so many problems in the present.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The general move in the sixteenth century against officially regulated brothels had done little to suppress the sex trade in major cities; it was a particularly notorious feature of eighteenth-century London, complete with meticulously maintained published directories for the discriminating client. [15] Further dramatic urban growth in nineteenth-century Europe, coupled with the huge expansion in standing armies (and navies in the case of Britain’s maritime empire), encouraged a return to official management of prostitution, as in the medieval West. Napoleonic France led the way in 1802, but during the century more or less every European urban society established regulatory systems, even the Ottoman Empire; likewise, the Russian Empire built up regulation from 1843, mostly for its urbanizing European territories. Supervision in Russia included the stipulation (patchily enforced) that brothels should not be situated near churches or synagogues. Just as in the medieval Bishop of Winchester’s ‘Stews’ in Southwark, Russian customers were not to be accommodated on Orthodox holy days or before the Sunday liturgy; moreover, brothels should not ornament their facilities with loyal portraits of the Tsar or imperial family, defenders of the Orthodox faith. [16] In this era of masculine self-assertion, there was no greater gulf between male and female outlooks than on prostitution. As early as the 1830s, respectable American ladies would ostentatiously gather as a group outside town brothels and note down the names of the clients, which they would then publish in a magazine designed for the purpose. [17] No one was more forceful than the English Evangelical Josephine Butler, daughter of a reform-minded Whig MP, and married to a scholarly Anglican clergyman. She applied her father’s hatred of slavery in the Empire to slavery at home. Her fury targeted parliamentary legislation of the 1860s, the Contagious Diseases Acts, that ordered the compulsory medical regulation of prostitutes in the interest of their male clients’ health (the concern being fighting efficiency among Britain’s soldiers and sailors). Often local police singled out poverty-stricken women for bullying and humiliation regardless of any evidence of prostitution, just because they could. It was the gender double standard at its worst. Butler reminisced about hearing a woman’s cry outside her comfortable Oxford home: ‘a woman aspiring to heaven and dragged back to hell – and my heart was pierced with pain. I longed to leap from the window, and flee with her to some place of refuge.’ Instead, she concentrated on more systematic and effective campaigns against male indifference to the impossible situation of women who ended up selling their bodies. Shocked males deplored a well- brought-up married lady speaking on public platforms about venereal disease: ‘That dreadful woman, Mrs Butler’, fumed one leading Oxford High Churchman, Canon Henry Liddon. Yet she won; in 1886, Parliament repealed the Contagious Diseases Acts. Her triumph was in line with a clear development in transatlantic Protestantism: female activism begun by radical dissenting groups moved into the ultra-respectable mainstream and was now shaping the narrative of all society.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  We go to Starbucks and get our coffee. We walk back to HubSpot and sit down on the couches in the lobby on the first floor. At last I ask why he seems so angry at me. “I feel like something must have happened, and I don’t know what it is,” I say. “If I did something to piss you off, I just want to know, so I can apologize and make things right.” I’m hoping he’ll soften up a bit and remember that we’re friends. But unfortunately that doesn’t happen. Trotsky sticks to his guns. He says that he is angry at me, and that I’m doing a shitty job, and I have a shitty attitude. I’m not showing enough team spirit, and I don’t respect him enough. “I’m the only person here who gives a shit about you,” he says, practically seething. “I don’t think you realize this, but I’m the only reason that you still have a job here at all. If it weren’t for me, they would have fired you a long time ago.” “How would they fire me?” I say. “Fire me for what?” “They’d call it an experiment that didn’t work out. They hired a journalist, but it wasn’t a good fit.” “Jesus. So Cranium wants to fire me?” “You’ve shown me no gratitude, and no respect. I’ve gone out of my way to help you. Over and over, I’ve tried to help you. I wanted to help you. But frankly, right now, I’m a lot less inclined to help you anymore. That’s just the truth.” He gets up. I get up too. We walk to the elevators and share an awkward, uncomfortable ride up to the fourth floor and back to our desks. I write to my friend, the C-level executive, and tell her that her suggestion about going out for coffee didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped. It turns out the abuse from Trotsky has only begun. From this point on he will be looking for any possible reason to tell me that I’ve done something wrong. One day I have a lunch set up with a local tech CEO, a guy who might be a good guest for the podcast. To make the lunch I have to miss the marketing department meeting, but this is no big deal. Cranium holds this meeting every Monday. It’s not mandatory. Sixty or so people attend, but it’s just a way to get an update on what’s happening in the department. People miss it all the time. Nevertheless after the meeting I get an angry email from Trotsky demanding to know why I wasn’t at the department meeting. I remind him that I had a lunch with a CEO and that I had cleared it with him in advance. Back comes an angry, argumentative email saying that I’m being standoffish and not making enough effort to demonstrate my loyalty to the team.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  Saint Augustine (354–430), one of the most formative theologians in the Western Christian tradition, insisted that scripture taught nothing but charity. Whatever the biblical author may have intended, any passage that seemed to preach hatred and was not conducive to love must be interpreted allegorically and made to speak of charity. 73 In many ways, Islam can be seen as an inspired attempt to counter the violence of tribalism, urging Muslims to use their new-brain capacities to control and redirect their aggression. For centuries, Arabs had lived a desperate nomadic life in the inhospitable Arabian steppes, perpetually on the brink of starvation and malnutrition. Their chivalric code was called muruwah, which is difficult to translate succinctly; it meant courage and endurance, a determination to avenge any wrong done to the tribe, to protect its more vulnerable members, to respond instantly to any perceived threat, and to defy all enemies. Each tribesman had to be ready to leap to the defense of his kinfolk at a second’s notice and to obey his chief unreservedly, right or wrong. “I am of Ghazziyya,” sang one of the ancient poets. “If she be in error, I will be in error; and if Ghazziyya be guided right, I will go with her.” Or as a popular maxim had it: “Help your brother whether he is being wronged or wronging others.” 74 This loyalty, of course, extended only to your tribal unit: outsiders were regarded as worthless and expendable, and if you had to kill them to protect your fellow tribesmen, you wasted no time on regret. Hence tribal existence was characterized by jahiliyyah, a word traditionally used to refer to the pre-Islamic period in Arabia and translated as “the Time of Ignorance.” But though the root JHL has connotations of ignorance, its primary meaning was “irascibility.” In the early Muslim texts, jahiliyyah denotes aggression, arrogance, chauvinism, and a chronic tendency toward violence and retaliation. 75 By the late sixth century CE, when the Prophet Muhammad was born, tribal warfare had reached an unprecedented level, and there was an apocalyptic sense of impending disaster. The Quraysh, Muhammad’s tribe, had left the nomadic life behind and established a commercial empire based in the city of Mecca. In order to make trade possible, they had abjured tribal warfare, cultivated an attitude of lofty neutrality toward local disputes, and made the area surrounding the Kabah, the ancient shrine in the middle of Mecca, a sanctuary in which violence was forbidden. These measures enabled Arabs from all over the peninsula to do business there without fear of vendetta. But the Quraysh had retained the old jahili arrogance.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  It was an adroit theme to adopt: right-wing Catholic hostility to Pope Francis is international, including many members of the Catholic episcopate in the USA appointed during the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI who share their former patrons’ discreet distaste for the reforming work of the second Vatican Council. Such Catholics were increasingly angry at Pope Francis’s piecemeal reversal of the policies of his predecessors (see Plate 33). In 2022 Alfeyev was sent from his foreign relations post in the Moscow Patriarchate headquarters back to central Europe, to Budapest. Many at the time interpreted this move as a snub and minor exile; nevertheless, it coincided with the explicit turn to Moscow and against Ukraine by Hungary’s authoritarian nationalist Prime Minister, Victor Orbán. Orbán’s recent years in power have likewise witnessed legislation eroding LGBTQ+ rights and ending the legal recognition of transgender people. Patriarch Kirill and Putin have managed to divide the whole Orthodox world, and they cannot be regarded as its spokesmen. Yet they do have a rhetorical advantage in raising the question of sexuality to a place it has never held before in Orthodox theology. In the long years of marginalization, first by the Ottomans and then by the Soviets, Orthodox contact with two centuries of social change in Western Christianity was partial and limited, and there was little incentive to rethink a theology of sexual ethics in step with the Western Enlightenment. In Greece, since the nineteenth century Orthodoxy has had far more contact with the West than elsewhere; Western powers helped to carve the modern state out of Ottoman lands and its Orthodox Church was restructured with the aid of an imported German-Danish monarchy. Yet when the Greek Republic in 2015 extended registered civil partnership to same-sex couples (so far uniquely in an Orthodox country), the Greek Church hierarchy passionately denounced the move in terms little different from anything Moscow might say. [47] The Orthodox world in general has seen the rise of a conservatism that has been labelled ‘rigorism’, to stand alongside Protestant fundamentalism or the ultra-conservative Catholic movement crystallized in opposition to Pope Francis. After our survey of Eastern Christianity in earlier centuries, we might echo the observation of a contemporary Orthodox commentator in Greece: ‘In its struggle to remain true to the Byzantine worldview at any cost, the Eastern Church has opted to remain more Byzantine than truly Orthodox, if Orthodoxy signifies constant growth, self-critical development, and continuous expansion in space and time.’ [48] Much in this present chapter has been sombre. It is easy to despair of both world and Church in the early twenty-first century, particularly if one looks for a Christian message affirming hope and redemption. Yet, as so often in Christian history, light may come through sudden unexpected reversals. A heartening story is that of the sometime evangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, later Messner, née LaValley: a kind of redemption after falling very low.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Give me the grace to do as you command, and command me to do what you will!’ [22] Pelagius interpreted this cry as surrendering all personal moral responsibility to God: the reverse of the fear of sin that he was trying to instil into his flock amid all the temptations to sin that their wealth offered them. Often Pelagius is seen as a generous-minded opponent of a harsh and judgemental Augustine – the reverse is true. Pelagius was by temperament a puritan, determined to frighten Christians into anxiously examining every deed and thought to check for sin. Augustine was as much infuriated by what he saw as Pelagius’s lack of realism, not taking seriously enough the irredeemably confused and fallen state of humanity, as by the apparent Pelagian rejection of the need for God’s grace and mercy. His confrontation with Pelagius and a considerable body of supporters grew bitter, generating a literary war that became ever more extreme in its statements and enlisted Latin Christian leaders from as far away as the community around Jerome in the Holy Land. It took a long time for Augustine to secure the condemnation of his opponents that he sought. Meanwhile he became ever more extreme in expounding the idea of humankind as utterly damned by the Fall in the Garden of Eden, only capable of winning salvation through a merciful but arbitrary decision of God. The Fall was a taint of sin transmitted onwards from Adam and Eve in the act of procreating later generations. That association of guilt and sex (the ‘traducianism’ which had been part of North African theology for at least two centuries) produced in all humanity an inescapable ‘original sin’, before any specific act by any individual human. [23] However virtuous the actions of a non-Christian might appear, all human actions that lacked faith in God had the character of vices, because they displayed the same arrogant self-belief and rejection of God’s commands that had caused Adam and Eve first to sin. [24] Augustine sharpened his thoughts on these matters especially thanks to the critical intervention of Julian, Bishop of Aeclanum in southern Italy. Julian was himself the son of a bishop: an aristocrat with as good an education as Augustine, and perhaps a wider knowledge of the Christian world, backed by a compassionately humorous understanding of humanity. As Pelagius’s most able defender, Julian has suffered the same sort of denigration in Latin Christianity as Helvidius and Jovinian, and, just like them, till recent years he was heard mostly through the quotation of his works by his opponent. Now in addition to those, two works of biblical commentary can be attributed to his pen, and a broader assessment of his significance is possible.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Why have I excluded the conviction that ‘it is wrong to torture people’? Surely any right-minded and liberal person would affirm this without reservation? I happen to believe this is true, but that’s not my point. This ethical conviction has the status of a moral judgement, a belief rather than a statement of fact. It is contestable in theory and is contested in practice. For example, Sam Harris argues that ‘some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them’.17 Killing such people, he tells us, could be regarded as an act of self-defence. As part of his overall argument, Harris offers a defence of torture, based on his assessment of the relative demerits of collateral damage on the one hand, and torture on the other.18 Now many people (and I certainly include myself here) will disagree with Harris and the arguments that he sets out in support of his view.19 Yet while I think he is wrong – in fact, I believe passionately that he is wrong – I cannot prove this. Now, some might suggest that my belief that torture is wrong is a blind faith, as I cannot prove it to be true. If this were the case, we would have to write off humanity’s richest and most noble statements about the meaning of life, the nature of good and how to live meaningfully. Yet this disparaging category of ‘blind faith’ is simply a rhetorical device, increasingly used to limit human thought to the rationally demonstrable by ridiculing those who realise we need to go beyond what reason can prove in the quest for human flourishing. It needlessly and irresponsibly limits the human quest for truth, beauty and goodness to a highly desiccated and impoverished set of rational certainties. My view that torture is wrong may be held by many well-regarded people, whose social influence places them in Aristotle’s category of the ‘wise’ – a group of people whose beliefs were considered exemplary and hence culturally determinative. Yet Aristotle invented this category primarily to lend social approbation and moral force to what he knew could not be proved to be true. The assertion that it is wrong to torture people is an opinion, a belief and not a fact. No matter how many intellectual luminaries pile in to support it, it remains a belief – even if it might be a particularly influential or widespread belief, or one that is enforced by social controllers. Sadly, it has to be excluded from our imagined world of certainties.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Structures of employment in parts of Africa dependent on the earnings of migrant workers make it particularly likely that men away from their wives for months on end will turn to the services of prostitutes; in such circumstances, condoms are essential to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. Any Catholic across the world involved in work for HIV and AIDS sufferers who has faced reality and advises individuals to use condoms if abstinence is beyond them has done so at her or his own risk. Often the contrary message from official Catholic sources has been that condoms do not actually work – demonstrated by ‘serious scientific studies’, according to Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo speaking in 2003 for the Vatican’s Council for the Family. There was a particular irony in Cardinal Trujillo taking a high moral line on sex, as was already becoming apparent. [15] * During the three decades of John Paul II’s papacy, an old story emerged from the shadows into public discussion, to have a catastrophic effect on the Catholic Church worldwide: abuse, sexual, physical and emotional, of a variety of vulnerable people, children among them, in Church settings. There was nothing new about the abuse, which had been particularly encouraged by the well-intended restructurings of papal Catholicism in the Counter-Reformation (above, Chapter 14): the novelty was that, with the crumbling of old structures of deference, victims came forward expecting to be listened to, and that there were many listeners. These did not generally include Pope John Paul II, who did not exhibit the capacity to join up the growing cacophony of individual cases into a coherent narrative that needed a coherent solution. A major problem was his anti-Communism. Understandable though that was in view of his past struggles, it disposed him to see any liberal or left-wing agenda through the same prism, including ‘Liberation Theologians’ inspired to social and political action by the memory of the second Vatican Council. By contrast, any conservative who was loud enough in hostility to ‘Marxism’ was likely to win the Pope’s sympathy. Among these was that same Cardinal Trujillo, a major agent in remodelling the South American episcopate in John Paul II’s mould, and deeply involved in campaigns to curb Liberation Theology throughout the continent, extending (without papal condemnation) to brutalizing and assassination. Trujillo was close to far-right politicians and paramilitaries in his native Colombia until his sudden move to Rome to head the Council for the Family in 1990. In that position, he was as fervent in denouncing abortion and homosexuality as he was in condemning artificial contraception; simultaneously, he conducted an energetic sex life with a series of young men. Trujillo’s is simply one of the most prominent among many similar stories: the more sexually active a senior Vatican cleric was with males, the louder was likely to be their theological condemnation of same-sex activity.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  31 What exactly was the problem? For Koestler, Marxism-Leninism may have originated as a purely theoretical account of historical process; it ended up, however, as an ideology that justified and served the interests of the Soviet Communist Party, which proclaimed itself sole interpreter of Marxist theory, enforcing its authority by force. Isaiah Berlin tracked the origins of this authoritarianism back to Marx himself, who interpreted the world ‘in terms of a single, clear, passionately held principle, denouncing and destroying all that conflicts with it.’ 32 Koestler’s most fundamental point remains valid and significant. A worldview may be both ‘rational’ and ‘evidenced’, attractive and compelling to its audience – yet despite these obvious merits, it can still lead to the suppression of human dignity, value and freedom. Koestler reminds us that we should not judge a worldview simply by its intellectual credentials; we must ask what it does to people. Rationalist critics may feel that ‘liveability’ seems a poor criterion to use in making such judgements, but Koestler’s experience points us in a very different direction, and forces us to ask whether the effect a belief has on individuals and communities should be a reason to affirm – or reject – it. Koestler helps us see that the core of any oppressive system is a belief – a conviction that one group is somehow superior to another. For example, many believe that women are physically weaker than men. What matters, however, is how this belief is applied – such as excluding women from certain social roles, or subordinating them to men. Oppressed groups internalise the ideology of inferiority, seeing themselves through a dominant social or cultural lens, rather than challenging the legitimacy of this lens. Koestler is an important witness to how individual beliefs or a ‘big picture’ can entrap individuals, allowing them to oppress others in the fight against oppression, and to tell lies in the fight for truth – while at the same time anointing these beliefs with an ideological balm that somehow makes them appear true, noble and inevitable. Yet Koestler’s realisation of the illusory promise of Marxism-Leninism ultimately led him to question the reliability of any such ‘big picture’. Where many abandoned one worldview to embrace another, Koestler became suspicious of the overreach of worldviews and metanarratives in general. Where he once regarded the universe as an ‘open book’, he now saw it as a ‘text written in invisible ink’, allowing us at most to ‘decipher a small fragment’ of its complexity. 33 Big pictures could only cope with the density and disorder of human history by simplifying and distorting it, offering a ‘specious clarity’.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The Inquisitors, in spite of papal authority, synodal action, and state legislation, did not always have an easy path. In 1235, the citizens of Narbonne drove them out of their city. In 1242, a number were murdered in Avignon, whom Pius IX., in 1866, sought to recompense by giving them the honor of canonization as he had done the year before to the bloodiest of Inquisitors, the Spaniard Arbues, d. 1485. Parma, according to Salimbene,1137 was placed, in 1279, under interdict for three years, the punishment for the act of "certain fools" who broke into the convent of the Dominicans and killed one or two friars in retribution for their having burned for heresy a certain noble lady and her maid. The distinguished Inquisitor, Peter of Verona, otherwise known as Peter Martyr, was murdered at Como, 1252. In Germany the resistance of the Inquisition was a frequent occurrence and more than one of its agents atoned for his activity by a violent death. Of these, Konrad of Marburg was the most notorious. Down to the very close of the Middle Ages, the pages of history were disfigured by the decrees of popes and synods, confirming death as the penalty for heresy, and for persons supposed to be possessed with witchcraft. The great council of Constance, 1415, did not get away from this atmosphere, and ordered heretics punished even by the flames,—puniantur ad ignem. And the bull of Leo X., 1520, condemning Luther, cursed as heresy the Reformer’s liberal statement that the burning of heretics is contrary to the will of the Spirit. To the great humiliation of the Protestant churches, religious intolerance and even persecution unto death were continued long after the Reformation. In Geneva, the pernicious theory was put into practice by state and church, even to the use of torture and the admission of the testimony of children against their parents, and with the sanction of Calvin. Bullinger, in the second Helvetic Confession, announced the principle that heresy should be punished like murder or treason. The treatment of the Anabaptists is a great blot on the page of the Reformation, Strassburg being the only centre that tolerated them. Cranmer persuaded Edward VI. to burn women. Elizabeth saw the death penalty executed upon Puritans. The spirit of intolerance was carried across the seas, and was as strong in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the American colonies, with some exceptions, as it was in Europe. The execution of Quakers in Boston, and of persons accused of witchcraft in Salem, together with the laws of Virginia and other colonies, were the unfortunate survivals of the vicious history of the Middle Ages, which forgot Christ’s example as he wept over Jerusalem, and the Apostle’s words, "vengeance is mine, I will repay," saith the Lord.