Threads

Threads, I have been thinking about threads running through the culture.

Recently the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Williams, gave an address to an assembly of British lawyers. He has been roundly criticized both for what he did say and now is trying to deny saying on the one hand and a great deal he did not say at all on the other. Dr. Williams has a certain talent for taking clear aim at a target, and then wounding himself, but his public relations abilities aside, he raised an issue worthy of some discussion.

England, like most of the West, has in its basic law, some Christian assumptions. The French left which is the European Union’s moderate wing as near as I can tell, attempts to deny this, but it is there. England, and the West generally, assume monogamy; lending for legitimate (often regulated) interest rates, individual free speech (albeit what we mean varies,) individualism, and other concepts. The shock moment for many who commented on Dr. Williams’ speech was when he failed to consider these universal.

Now Dr. Williams did not say the UK or anyone else should adopt Sharia as it is (mistakenly) applied in some Islamic majority States. He did not say that the UK or anyone else should abridge the UK Bill of Rights or the UN’s Declaration of Rights. In fact, he said exactly the opposite. But that was buried in the outcry because he also said that maybe, just perhaps, some aspects of Sharia or the cultures from which Moslem citizens of the UK come might be worthy of consideration in UK law.

One need be careful here as Dr. Williams’s experience shows. He did not say; I did not just say(!) that we need to have two legal systems. He did not say; I did not just say(!) that any Western state should subordinate its understanding of equality or fairness to another culture’s.

However, we do in fact take various populations into account. England has for some time recognized the use of Jewish Talmudic courts as arbiters in some sorts of disputes, when all parties agree to such usage. American courts are divided in a number of ways. Our States have their own criminal statues. Native Americans have reservation legal systems that operate for those within their populations and use tribal tradition as well as local legislation as their law. These can and do enforce their judgments in American courts – ask anyone who has ever gotten a speeding ticket on a reservation road! Many courts accept ‘binding arbitration’ or mediation panel results as definitive.

In large part the idea Dr. Williams was advancing is controversial because it brings something else into focus. That something else is the reality that we now have significant if not dominant Moslem populations in the West. Some cities in France, I have been told, are majority or nearly majority Moslem. In the US, we have a larger Moslem population than we have an Episcopalian one – upsetting to precisely those most likely to notice a speech made by Dr. Williams.

I have read elsewhere the suggestion that the reaction to Dr. Williams was ‘anti Semitic.’ That is perhaps a bit too simple. After all, in England where the remarks are most controversial, Islam is mostly Asian. Pakistani heritage accounts for rather more Moslems in England than does Arabia. Of course, I don’t know if the person on the street knows that.

All of that leads me to another recent item. There is a movement perhaps not well noticed in the North or West, to erect huge crosses near our interstate highways, especially at significant intersections. One looms over the mile 141 interchange on the I75 freeway in Kentucky. The individual responsible wants to put up more, in other Kentucky counties. Another is in my home State, in central Illinois near Effingham.

I think we may conflate the phenomena of crosses, public anger about where nativity statuary can be shown during Advent, where engravings of the Ten Commandments can be displayed, and the reaction to Dr. Williams. They are of a single substance. They are about our desire to live in a monochromatic world.

There were efforts to be tribal in some sense in the early American colonies. Maryland for Catholics, Pennsylvania for Quakers, New England for puritans, all were part of our history and all failed. By the time of the founding, enough Germans had come that the convention could not decide between German and English – leaving us without an official language. Moravians had become so common in the colonies they had official recognition from Parliament. Jews signed all of the founding documents. And of course those pesky natives and black slaves were always part of the mix.

And yet now, “multi-culturallism” is a favorite whipping boy for rejectionist commentators. It all holds together. English failures and American failures all want to blame someone. And there is the archbishop, Islam, multi-culturallism, and the Civil Liberties Union. Of course, there too are lesbian and gay couples, female clergy, and who knows who else. The list of bad people and ideas is unending.

What strikes me most is that these people are failures mostly in their own minds! I am writing this as I read resume requests from Monster because I am out of work and broke. I don’t think of myself as a failure, merely unfortunate at the moment. I know people who could pay cash for all of my assets who are convinced they have been robbed by blacks, liberals, Moslems, someone.

As the 1960’s song has it, “There’s something happening here: what it is taint ‘xactaly clear.” That leads me to think that what we have missed, we white guys is the call from Jesus and 2000 years of tradition to store up treasures in heaven not on earth. Jesus taught that our sense of entitlement, of power was not important, what is important is what we do about those in need, how we live out His commandment that we love one another. It appears we have lost that.

The nativity statuary controversy has some amusing aspects. The desire is to put these scenes up during Advent, precisely when traditional catholic Christians should find them inappropriate. The Protestants who advance the idea are the inheritors of a tradition that smashed statuary all over Europe. And yet they come together to demand nativity statuary in the public square.

Whether it is the triumphantalist (horribly smug) expectation that bad people will suffer while the good are ‘raptured’ or the complaints against Dr. Williams, it is all of a piece. So from our abundance, we have learned nothing of charity, nothing of love. In our mosaic society, some of us persist in the fiction that we can ‘return’ to a world of white (male) straight privilege and this would be a good thing. That is how I see the threads coming together as I read the news.

HDTSTY?