Thursday, July 30, 2015

Other things that disappoint me:

Let's talk about a few other things that disappoint me about religious discourse lately! While some of the things I have in mind here are clerical errors, I want to make clear that I don't intend to be disrespectful of clergy exercising their pastoral ministry.
  • Argumentum ad hitlerum. I think it is in singularly poor taste to compare things to Nazis and it is a rather poor rhetorical move, as well, since it will only serve to annoy readers rather than illuminate your point. It also makes you sound weird. This is, of course, a standard internet trick.
  • I don't have a short name for this, but have you ever noticed that when, say, there's a discussion of women's issues and somebody wants to have anything other than the "easy" "traditionalist" perspective, particularly if they are a woman, they have to very carefully distance themselves from the more "radical" positions, be extremely polite, and play up their "orthodox" bona fides? At least in some quarters. I noticed a recent conversation where people were discussing women's ordination and there was one woman in the conversation who wanted to know more about deaconesses, the opposition to the modern reinstitution of them, and anything else about the issue.

    She had to be extremely polite, unfailingly orthodox, and make great pains to clarify that she had no interest in ordaining women to further orders and probably no interest in agitating for the restoration of deaconesses. Meanwhile, people responded at times impolitely, "mansplained" at points, and often treated her discourse as if it were coming from some past life of theirs in the Episcopal Church or from some radical advocate of women's ordination (which she had previously had to indicate she was not). Their behavior, of course, was perfectly acceptable, since they were, after all, On The Right Side. This kind of behavior comes up regularly in discussions of sexual issues, but it also comes up occasionally in a few other contexts, but particularly when it is a woman in the conversation.

    A related problem is how abortion gets brought up by men every time a woman tries to discuss just about any issue of sex, gender, sexuality, etc.
  • An undue preoccupation with the details of private lives of private individuals. At the merest, slimmest hint of scandal over the last few years, certain quarters of the church have called for (or released) an open discussion of the private lives of private individuals. To do what? Prove a point, or ruin a churchman, or silence a voice in whatever nonsensical ecclesiastical controversy is bubbling up. Mind you, the private lives of private individuals (with perhaps named names on public internet fora) were not churchmen, they're simply used to question the exercise of pastoral ministry by certain clerics. Or something. It's okay because they're protecting the Church.
  • You can always go further right. Any step to the left is death. Essentially, anything up to explicit race realism, overt pick-up artist nonsense, or literal Nazi-ism (sorry about transgressing the first point) is given a free pass. However conservative one's theology, however, one cannot be a feminist or even say things that sound feminist. One cannot discuss "white privilege". Indeed, these will often be criticized using terminology and methods from the above three groups.

1 comment:

Eric said...

On point #1, the art of tasteful rhetoric has most definitely been lost.

On point #2, One of the things I have observed is that this type of person tends to be poorly self differentiated and cannot separate themselves from the ideology they identify with. The result is that they assume the authority structure of Orthodoxy for themselves (because they self-identify with and as Orthodoxy). In other words, they cannot speak about Orthodoxy, they must speak as being the voice of Orthodoxy itself, which comes across condescending, authoritarian, and jerk-ish.

On point #3, Like American politics, religious discourse, especially in Orthodoxy, has less and less room for moderate voices all the time. One is either a Maria McDowell or a TradOx, and anything in between is unfairly caricaturized according to one or the other pole.

But, yeah, word.