Mark Joseph Stern: An Effort at Linguistic Slight of Hand and the Church of Christ Case in North Carolina

“Under North Carolina law, a minister who officiates a marriage ceremony between a couple with no valid marriage license is guilty of a class A misdemeanor and can be thrown in jail for 45 days. And since gay marriage is illegal in North Carolina, that means any minister who dares celebrate a gay union in his church may face jail time.”  So claims Mark Joseph Stern at Slate.com in response to a recent lawsuit by the Church of Christ in North Carolina attempting to overturn North Carolina’s ban on gay marriage on religious liberty grounds.  (This was tried once before in Thigpen v. Cooper, 739 S.E.2d 165 (N.C. App., 2013) but the North Carolina Court of appeals dismissed the case on procedural grounds).

Once again, Mr. Stern uses his significant linguistic abilities for naught.  His argument fails so miserably, it makes my head hurt.  In fact, I’ll go a step further and say this is blatantly false and patently absurd. The lawsuit is concocted to create an issue where none exists and Mr. Stern’s claims are outrageous.

Mr. Stern is correct that the statute he cites (N.C. Code 51-7) could result in a minister being found guilty of a Class A misdemeanor.  What Mr. Stern doesn’t bother to tell you, though, is that the statute in question is a prophylactic measure which is designed to make sure that when a wedding gets performed the license is not only valid, but also properly recorded with the appropriate government authority after the fact.  He also doesn’t bother mentioning that North Carolina law also contains another statute (51-6) that permits a religious ceremony to solemnize a marriage performed elsewhere.  Additionally, the statute does not say that ministers cannot perform a religious ceremony and, frankly, would be in crystal clear violation of the First Amendment if it did say so.

Moreover, what this statute prevents is exactly what is illegal in North Carolina: marriage without a license.  In other words, a minister cannot claim he performed a legal marriage and report this to the state without a valid license.  He cannot tell those whom he has married that their marriage is a legally valid marriage in North Carolina without a valid license.  He cannot represent to those gathered that a legally valid marriage has occurred without a valid license.  Nothing in the statute says that a minister cannot perform a church-endorsed celebration of a union between two people, homosexual or heterosexual, but he cannot call it a legal marriage without a valid license.  In fact, the Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in North Carolina specifically allows for enforceable civil contracts between gay couples, and nothing in either law prevents a gathering to celebrate their union.  But what is prevented is calling something a marriage which is not. 

What is going on here is not a religious liberty issue, which is why the conservative “hypocrites” Mr. Stern rails against aren’t complaining.  Nothing would be any different about the statute he cited if gay marriage were allowed in North Carolina.  A minister still could not perform a legally valid civil marriage without a legally valid marriage license.  However, a minister could still perform any religious ceremony celebrating a union of two people who did not have a marriage license; he would simply have to make clear it was not a state-sanctioned marriage. 

The issue here is that North Carolina law only allows heterosexual couples to obtain marriage licenses.  In order to get arrested under the current law, Church of Christ ministers would have to lie to a gay couple by claiming they were legally married, lie to the two witnesses required by North Carolina law, lie to anybody else gathered at the celebration, and lie to the local register of deeds by providing a fraudulent marriage certificate based on a fraudulent marriage license.  There is nothing remotely Christian about any of this lying (I’m thinking Ten Commandments here).  If Church of Christ ministers have concluded they want to do all this lying so they can get arrested to make what they believe is a meaningful point, then they have every right to suffer whatever consequences attach to their actions.  This hardly qualifies as some sort of religious liberty issue – the state is not stopping religious celebrations from taking place, nor is it requiring Church of Christ ministers to act or fail to act in any particular way.

If the state of North Carolina passed a law stating that if any minister performed a ceremony celebrating the voluntary union of a homosexual couple they are guilty of a class A misdemeanor, I’d be right there with the Church of Christ arguing First Amendment. Religious liberty is at stake when the state steps in and prevents religious action from taking place or  requires action that violates religious conscience.  Neither is occurring here.  This is why the so-called conservative “hypocrites” Mr. Stern bemoans aren’t upset and why he’s so wrong in his analysis.

But, Mr. Stern doesn’t really care about his hyperbole or even whether he’s accurate.  He writes well and with flair, so I know he’s not stupid or incapable.  He doesn’t care because this isn’t about being honest, rational, logical, or even legally accurate.  This is about gay marriage as the law of the land and the ends justifying the means.  So Mr. Stern can muster up his alleged righteous indignation, but it’s all a slight of hand.  It certainly doesn’t qualify as reasoned or, frankly, even reality.

The "Jesus Said My Wife" Fragment, Redux and Biblical Reliability

            *****IT TURNS OUT AFTER FURTHER RESEARCH THIS SCRAP OF PAPER WAS ALMOST CERTAINLY FROM MEDIEVAL TIMES AND VERY UNLIKELY TO BE AN ORIGINAL WORK FROM ANY TIME NEAR THE EARLY CHURCH DAYS.*****

Over a year ago, a Harvard religion professor produced a scrap of paper that supposedly indicated Jesus said something like “my wife.”  This, of course, became grand news, particularly for many who want so desperately for Jesus to be anything other than what Scripture clearly proclaims him to be: God in flesh, the promised Messiah of all mankind.  Now, however, it appears apologies are in order, as there are some difficulties with this fragment, not the least of which is that its age may well be several hundred years after Jesus lived.  I wonder how this fragment would have been received had it said something different.

Suppose a conservative scholar came up with a piece of paper with the same amount of information on it, written in a fragmentary way.  However, this one says “And Jesus said” followed by “a man having sex with a man is evil.” What then?  The scrap would likely be immediately denounced as lacking reliability and possibly a forgery by the same people who were leaping at the chance to claim Jesus had a wife.  Of course, this assumes it would receive any publicity at all.  Such is the bizarre state of reporting on Christian matters.  Professor King, who is the focal point of the current discussion, is a liberal  scholar (in the religious, Christian sense) with a preconceived, and almost desperate, desire to prove that women have had their role in the formation of Christianity improperly under-reported.  Thus, she initially leaked the story to the secular press, which gleefully picks up on any story which calls into question the biblical account of who and what Jesus was.  Now, Professor King has significantly backed off her initial enthusiasm with a lukewarm claim that we can’t be completely sure what the fragment means.

Why does it matter if Jesus was married, you might ask.  None of the four gospel accounts have any information in them which even remotely suggest Jesus had a wife.  Thus, such a claim is in direct contradiction to the biblical reporting.  Moreover, it seems utterly unlikely the writers of the New Testament would have simply overlooked this major fact – too many people would have been aware of this, making the gospels extremely suspect.  For instance, Peter’s mother in law gets mentioned in Mark, which tells us, by definition, Peter was married.  If the gospels saw fit to mention this, certainly the main character’s wife would have appeared somewhere, particularly at the cross, if nowhere else.

The constant attempts by so-called Christian historians to re-frame the historical narrative attempts to undermine biblical Christianity.  Because Ms. King wants the narrative to be different, she initially claimed this piece of parchment somehow proved there was an ongoing debate about whether Jesus was or wasn’t married.  That is the kind of logical tomfoolery no reasonable mind should accept, regardless of convictions on the matter (more on this idea in a moment).  What this tells us, at best, is that someone at some point long after Jesus and his immediate disciples were gone, scribbled down a few words on a parchment.  These words lack context and they lack any notion of source identity.  We don’t know who wrote the words, why they wrote the words, or even whether the author intended the words to be taken as true.  If a conservative scholar were to suggest Jesus denounced homosexual behavior based on my analogy noted above, people like Ms. King would be suggesting the very things I am suggesting and rightly so!  

            I said I’d get to convictions.  If you are a Christianity hater, then you should want something you can really trust before you decide to hang your intellectual hat on it.  This kind of nonsense gives you nothing but vague, amorphous possibility.  If you accept it wholesale, then what you are saying is that anything, no matter how unlikely, that suggests the Bible is incorrect, is good enough for you.  Is that really where you want to be intellectually?  Supposedly all you atheists and other Christian-haters are the rational, logical ones.  If so, then get with the program. Bring something more than Dan Brown fantasies and scraps of paper written hundreds of years after Jesus was dead before rushing into judgment.  Moreover, you would never accept such silliness in support of anything with which you agree – why would you be willing to accept it as the basis for things with which you disagree?

Lastly, it is worth noting that mainline Christian denominations have been falling into dismal irrelevancy over the past 50 years.  There are good reasons orthodox Christianity is thriving in Africa, South America, and the Far East – they are actually prepared to believe the Bible is true!  This is unlike America and Europe, where so-called Christian sophisticates have thumbed their noses at Biblical truth in favor of man-made notions.  Frankly, I much prefer the agnosticism of my good friend, Mike, who is intellectually honest, than the nonsense spouted by many so-called Christians in mainline Protestant denominations, who eschew Biblical truth in favor of beliefs in almost anything else.  The fundamental problem with the kind of “scholarship” engaged in by Professor King and others like her is that they start from the proposition that the Bible is not a reliable document.  As a result, they come to the text with preconceived ideas but deny that is what they are doing.  Under the guise of “objectivity” people like Professor King claim they are just doing history in an objective, scholarly way.  This is just not true.  As a result, any scrap or wisp of paper that appears to have even the most remote hope of undoing some of the Biblical narrative is deemed worthy of belief and acceptance, often touted as having import far beyond what it actually says.  Recent reviews have suggested the document may well be a clever forgery, which then makes Professor King’s revelation of it even more disturbing, as it proves her ideology is more important than the history which she claims to desire finding.

            Professor King rushed in because her ideology got in her way.  Instead of eyeballing this matter with appropriate scholarly concern, Professor King has embarrassed herself and her ‘cause’ with something that might even be a hoax.  I hope, for Professor King’s sake, the document is real, although even if it is, it proves nothing other than someone, sometime, in some place, for some reason wrote down some words that included the word Jesus.  While this might excite Dan Brown, it provides nothing of value to the rest of us, no matter where we stand.

         

Do You Believe In Miracles?

            On Friday, February 22, 1980, the United States Men’s Hockey team, made up of college players, amateurs all, beat the men of the Soviet Union during the Olympics at Lake Placid, New York.  Al Michaels, then an ABC sportscaster, called the game and started a countdown with 11 seconds left, ending with the now famous line “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!”  Ironically, this game was the semi-final for the right to go to the gold medal game, not the gold medal game itself.

            The question, though, is was this really a miracle?  Are miracles so easy to come by that winning a hockey game counts as a truly miraculous event?  At some level, the sense of the miraculous appears.  The odds of the United States even making it to the semi-finals were long.  The United States was never known as a hockey powerhouse and the Soviets were, essentially, a full time, professional team.  Moreover, the Soviets played together all the time and had taken 6 of the prior 7 gold medals in hockey and were a prohibitive favorite going into the 1980 games.  The United States’ victory was highly improbable.  So when something appears highly improbable we designate it a miracle.  Someone who is told they will die of cancer in six months recovers completely; a woman told she’ll never get pregnant does; a parent is told their child will never walk, but the child does; these kinds of things seem to us miraculous.

            Is highly improbable truly the standard for the miraculous?  It is highly improbable the universe could erupt out of nothing, yet many people claim this is true.  I’ve read and seen arguments that prior to the Big Bang there was nothing, but this “nothing” was unstable, which is why “nothing” blasted into somethingness.  Doesn’t this explanation sound perilously close to a miracle?  Something from nothing seems highly improbable to me but I never took physics in college so I’m sure I’m missing something important here.

            What about how life started on planet earth?  At this point, scientists really don’t have an explanation, other than the amorphous and vague belief that somehow, by some process that isn’t entirely clear, under unknown circumstances which have never been repeated in a laboratory and (obviously) weren’t observed when they happened, the right combination of information and material just happened to all coalesce at a moment in time and life started spontaneously without intervention from any outside agency.  Sounds like long odds to me, which would then make the happening . . . dare I say it . . . miraculous.  I didn’t take biology in college, either, so I’m sure I’m missing something important here.

           

            I mean if we really think the result of a hockey game is a miracle, can we not then say the formation of the universe and the beginning of life were miraculous events?  They surely meet the definition.  But, of course, if we start down that path, then we might find we must believe in other possible miracles.

            So I believe in this Jewish guy whose mother was a virgin but was made pregnant with him anyway, claimed he was God, wandered around in Judea and Galilee back when Tiberius was the reigning Roman Caesar, gathered a bunch of followers, most of whom deserted him at the end of his life, healed people of all kinds of diseases at a time when there was no medicine, told demons to leave people and the demons obeyed, raised at least a couple people from the dead, had his own religious leaders try him for heresy, died on a Roman cross but then came back to life, on his own mind you, after three days, then, best of all, went up to heaven in a cloud with a promise that he would come back at a later date to gather up his true followers and execute judgment on all who don’t believe by leading an army of angelic, otherworldly, beings, riding in on a white horse with a sword in his hand. Whoa!

            Certainly any number of the things I mentioned about this man could be considered miraculous.  But are they really any more miraculous than a universe creating itself out of nothing, or life spontaneously coming out of the primordial slime under wildly uncertain conditions?  Really?

            If our definition is that a miracle is a highly improbable event, than the existence of the universe is a miracle, as is the existence of life on planet earth.  Moreover, logically, then, much of what I believe about Jesus of Nazareth might be called miraculous, but it is no more miraculous than what people are prepared to believe about the beginning of the universe and the beginning of life.  Irony, like a cobra, rears its head again, striking at the heart of those who would scoff at the “miracles” of Jesus.

            You see, we all believe in miracles, we just don’t agree on which miracles.  Some of us choose to believe in the miracle that something came from nothing, and that something that came from nothing somehow without any rational or logical force nonetheless “caused” life to start in such a way that this life would actually transform over time into human beings.  Others of us choose to believe in the miracle that the absolutely holy God of the universe has chosen to save some of us from eternal destruction, despite our actions in denying the glory due Him.  We have all done things that violate the requirements of the holy creator God’s order of things.  Despite this, God determined to provide a way to satisfy the demands of his perfect justice through payment for our transgressions by his own son, Jesus, who died on the cross in our place.  He came back to life on the third day in order to complete the transaction and provide eternal life to all of us.

            Do you believe in miracles?  Yes, you do.  The question is which miracle?

Confessions of a Not So Tender Man

            I wish that when people asked my wife what was the greatest thing about me she would immediately say “he’s such a tender guy.”  Don’t get me wrong.  I have been married almost 30 years and I know my wife well.  She’s a circle the wagons kind of gal.  If you ask, she’ll say lots of great things about me, many undeserved but that won’t be one of them.  She’ll be honest (although likely a bit subjective).

            Gag if you want, he-men, but I’m not asking that you think I’m tender.  That’s something reserved for my wife.  You see, I lack the true kind of tenderness that I really ought to have for my wife – she deserves better.  That doesn’t mean I’ve never been tender, nor does it mean I can’t be.  I just don’t do it enough.  Yet, for some reason she has stuck with me through all of our adventures.  Why?

            Certainly there is no chance it’s because I’m such a great guy.  We can wipe that out based on several missed birthdays over the years and various moments of forgetting things I should have never forgotten.  I often don’t say the right thing when I should.  I often don’t do the right thing when I should.  I have to work overtime to be really romantic.  Sure, I manage a romantic moment here and there – but overall, I’m mostly a dud.  You’d think after all this time, I’d have it figured out completely.  Nope.  Too often the word most often on the tip of my tongue is “me.”  More evidence I’m not a great guy.

            I’ve seen tenderness, so I have no excuse for claiming I don’t understand.  I’m not talking about Hollywood (forgive me for this next word – it comes from my Dad) “crapola” that says if I’m not whisking my wife off to Monte Carlo and constantly whispering new sweet nothings in her ear every day, while bringing chocolates and flowers home every night, I’m not tender.  I’m talking about watching my dad (not the most romantic guy on the earth) almost fall apart not knowing what he would do if my mom died because of a brain hemorrhage several years ago.  When he and I went into the recovery room to see her after she had brain surgery, he held her hand so carefully and stroked her face so gently, not out of fear for her life, but out of simple love for the woman he had married 43 years earlier.  Tender is inadequate, but it’s the only word I have.

            You see, my wife deserves better.  She deserves for me to hold her hand that carefully and stroke her face that gently regularly, not just when something bad is happening.  The thing is, my wife knows she can count on me for the manly stuff because that stuff is easy.  I’ll provide for her material needs.  I’ve worked three jobs at once, before, in order to help make ends meet.  If anyone says anything bad about my wife, I will make sure they hear from me about it.  If someone threatened my wife, they’d get all 5 feet 9 inches of me in their face, even if it meant me suffering a thrashing or worse.  I would die for my wife.  I’m just following Christ, right, Ephesians 5 and all that?

            But, no, I’m really not following Christ’s example at all.  We don’t know all that Jesus told his disciples, or did for them, but what we do know is that he was, above all, tender.  He cared about them, and about us, with a depth of passion that ultimately led to his death on the cross.  He didn’t die because someone forced him to do so.  He died because it was the ultimate caring act, not because it was his manly duty.  He died because his tender heart bled for those who were and are his.

            I think the words from an old hymn strike me as appropriate here:

Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling,
Calling for you and for me;
See, on the portals He’s waiting and watching,
Watching for you and for me.

            Then the refrain:

Come home, come home,
You who are weary, come home;
Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling,
Calling, O sinner, come home!

             

            How, oh how, can I honestly call myself a true Christian man, when the one person on the planet who deserves the most tenderness from me, doesn’t get enough of it?  I’ve got my theology down – I’m about two-thirds through a Master of Divinity; I’ve read the Bible for years; I’ve read lots of theology for years.  But what does it matter if I can’t show Christ-like tenderness to the one person who ought to see it in me the most?

            Why has my wife stuck with me all this time?  Because every so often she’s seen tenderness gleam through and she’s hoping, and praying, that I’ll get it figured out before she goes to meet Jesus.  While it will benefit her, she wants it as much because of how it will really and truly make me more like Jesus.  I thank God for such a wonderful wife.  I'm going to do everything I can to answer those prayers I know she has prayed.

            Even more I thank God he sent his son – my wife gets better than me through our savior – and Jesus will always call on her softly and tenderly even when I fail.