Mercy v. Justice

Mercy Sakes! part 1

Mercy. It seems to be a species of compassion -- especially that compassion represented in forbearing from punishment, leniency, or forgiveness. Since it is unearned, it also overlaps substantially with grace.

One thing that uniquely emerges with mercy – that isn’t indicated in compassion or forgiveness or grace -- is the challenging relationship it has with justice. If justice is treating like cases alike – following rules about what sort of crime warrants what punishment, and applying those rules fairly and equally, then mercy looks like deciding to be unjust. If the judge is merciful to one convicted defendant but not others, that’s not fair. And if the judge is merciful to all of them, then that’s not mercy – it’s just that judge’s rules of procedure.

Mercy has not been a great focus of attention among Unitarian Universalists, but justice is. In the seven principles which Unitarian Universalist congregations covenant to affirm and promote, justice is the only word – other than articles, conjunctions, and prepositions – that appears twice. It’s in the second principle: “Justice, equity, and compassion in human relationships.” And it’s in the sixth principle: “The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.” Justice is big for us. So if there’s something called mercy that is at odds with justice, we need to look at that. We need understand how this mercy-justice relationship works, and begin to integrate that into how we are in the world.

St. Anselm, the 11th-century theologian and philosopher articulated what appeared to be a problem for imagining God to be both just and merciful:

“But how canst thou spare the wicked if thou art wholly just and supremely just? For how does the wholly and supremely just do something that is not just? We can find no reason to explain why, among men who are equally evil, thou does save some, and not others, through thy supreme goodness, and does condemn the latter, and not the former, through thy supreme justice.”

The issue was dramatized in Shakespeare’s "Merchant of Venice." Antonio offers a pound of his flesh closest his heart as guarantee of a loan. When the loan is not repaid, Shylock claims his pound of flesh. Portia then tells Shylock he must be merciful. Shylock retorts, “On what compulsion must I? Tell me that.” Portia then famously explains,

“The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”

“Not strained” means we cannot be constrained to be merciful. Mercy can’t be compelled. If it’s compelled, it isn’t mercy. To Shylock's question, on what compulsion must I be merciful? the answer is there's no compulsion. It's not about compulsion.

Justice, on the other hand, IS about compulsion: there are principles of fairness that rightfully do constrain our behavior. On Portia's account, mercy doesn’t work that way. Mercy just happens, the way gentle rain falls on the ground. When it does, it blesses both giver and receiver.

A few lines later, Portia makes the point: “in the course of justice none of us should see salvation.”

Wait. What? None? OK, I think I see our problem here. If justice is understood as that which, strictly adhered to, condemns us all, then we need a new idea of justice. Alas, the idea that we all deserve damnation is our Western heritage. Theologians and priests for centuries emphasized what sinners we are. They gave us a picture of ourselves as fundamentally corrupt at our core. Every one of us is so profoundly, inherently sinful, that if we got what we deserved, we’d all be thrown to the worst punishment we can imagine.

So mercy enters the picture. No one is good enough to deserve going to heaven on their own merits, but some people get in just because of God’s benevolent mercy.

The Church has generally avoided stating precisely how many would receive this grace. (The Jehovah’s Witnesses are an exception. They teach that exactly 144,000 faithful Christians will go to heaven to rule with Christ in the Kingdom of God.) Mostly, only a rough sense of the proportions was indicated. In John Calvin’s theology, for instance, it seems like very few. I get the impression from Calvin that he imagines maybe something around 2 percent of all people will get to heaven. Our forebears, the Universalists, taught that God’s benevolent mercy extends to all -- every person will go to heaven. We get our name, Universalists, from this doctrine of universal salvation. But even the Universalists, for the most part, didn’t think people deserved it, or had earned it. Justice would condemn, but God’s mercy saves. On that point, the Calvinists and the Universalists agreed -- they merely disagreed on how many of us God’s mercy saves.

Through the 20th century, Unitarians and Universalists slowly shed the sense that sin – inner corruption – was humanity’s essential feature. Instead, we began to see human suffering in terms of disconnection: the deprivation (in the lower classes) and alienation (in any class) that accompanies uprootedness from healthy community of care, respect, meaning, and opportunity.

We stand, as ever, in need of justice: not justice as punishment for our wickedness, not justice in the course of which none of us should see salvation, but justice as the construction of fairness in the face of oppressions that undermine community, justice as healing the wounds of separation, justice as the restoration of belonging. We stand, as ever, in need of mercy: not mercy as respite from harsh punishment (though we could use a lot more of that, too), but mercy AS reconnecting justice.

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "Mercy Sakes!"
See also
Part 2: Sin v. Disconnection
Part 3: Justice AND Mercy

Related
What Is Mercy?
Just Mercy

What Is Mercy?

Words do twist and meander, don’t they? The etymology says mercy comes from Latin mercedem (reward, wages, pay hire) and merx (wares, merchandise). “See market,” it says! (etymonline.com.) The Latin root also gives us mercenarius (mercenary -- originally any laborer hired for wages), Mercury (the Roman god of commerce), and merces (bribe). The market doesn’t give away merchandise for free, and wages or payment for hire are given to those who do some work (or at least appear or promise to). Wages have to be earned, and so does merchandise insofar as earned wages must be exchanged for them. How did this merx turn into mercy – a thing necessarily unearned? How did pay hire and merchandise turn into compassionate forbearance?

By the 6th century, the sense of “wages, reward” had morphed, in Christian usage, into the reward God extends to those who show kindness to the helpless. The primary text for this idea that God's mercy is payment/reward to those who show mercy is Matthew 5:7, from the Sermon on the Mount:

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.”

Matthew's line about mercy is not repeated in the Luke Sermon on the Plain (though much of the Matthew Sermon on the Mount is), leading some scholars to suppose the line may be a construction by "Matthew." The Greek root is eleos (hence eleemones, "merciful," and eleethesontai "will receive mercy"): "kindness or good will toward the miserable and afflicted, joined with a desire to relieve them" (Thayer; Vincent). In the Latin Vulgate Bible, created in the late 4th-century, Matt 5:7 is:

"beati misericordes quia ipsi misericordiam consequentur."

Misericordes is from miseria "misery, distress, woe, wretchedness, suffering," hence the verb misereor "to pity (the miserable)" -- but already, in Vulgar Latin, mercedem "reward, pay" and miseria had become somewhat intermingled, as mercedem came to mean "favor or pity." Alms to a beggar, for instance, is both payment and pity.

As conversion to Christianity spread north from Rome in the 5th- and 6th-centuries, missionaries speaking Vulgar Latin used mercedem to mean "reward, a bargain, or a blessing." This usage became accepted in Gaul, and elsewhere, where, for centuries the Classical Latin term for wages, merchandise, and trade had been resisted as representing everything that was despised about the occupiers. (The Old French began using the word to express appreciation, shortening it to mercit, hence merci.)

I read Matt 5:7, whether Jesus actually said the words or "Matthew" put them in his mouth, as making the important point that love is all around; that to receive it we have but to open our hearts; and both the cause and effect of an opened heart is a welling up of love for others. I don’t read the Sermon on the Mount as talking about extrinsic reward from a cosmic third-party -- yet that is the reading that was the emerging orthodoxy of the early medieval church. “Isn’t this a little odd?” I might have said (in Latin) to a Medieval priest. “The mercy I showed -- my kindness in aiding the helpless -- was not any kind of reward or payment for anything. The recipient didn’t earn it. But God’s mercy is then tendered as a reward I earned (by being merciful). That doesn’t seem quite right. On the one hand, it debases me: my act of kindness has been turned into a service for which I get paid. On the other hand, it debases God: if I am ennobled by extending unearned mercy, wouldn’t that mean God is debased by extending mercy only when we earn it?” Next thing I’d know, I’d be arrested, tortured, and executed as a dangerous heretic. Sigh.

Over time, the meaning morphed further. The sense of payment from God for good behavior became muted, and the emphasis on God's mercy as unearned and unearnable grew. What started as a word for merchandise and wages became a name for something quite removed from marketplace values. By the 13th century, we see “mercy” being used to mean a disposition to forgive or show compassion. It took a long time for the derivatives of merx and mercedem to become translations of the Greek eleos and the Latin misereor.

While the uses of mercy today are not always entirely shed of associations with extrinsic payment to those who merit it, I am encouraged to find that contemporary writings on the topic of mercy often address social justice issues.

• Pope Francis calls us to ecological responsibility, and he couches his plea in terms of mercy.
• Parker Palmer, stunned by gun violence and racial injustice, turns to mercy for healing and hope.
• Linda Ross Meyer, also addressing racial injustice, argues the need for “micro-mercies”: “the basic human kindness and generosity” routinely extended to whites and routinely denied to people of color. 
• Franciscan friar Richard Rohr sees many “unhealed memories, painful human woundings,” and particularly the tragedy and suffering of the Syrian refugee crisis. In response, his plaintive call is for mercy.
• UU minister Erika Hewitt also sees the needs for immigrant asylum as centrally an issue of mercy.

Mercy has come a long way, and has come to have a meaning that our times need. Certainly we need compassion and pity, forgiveness and grace, humility and magnanimity. We also need a concept that brings all of those together into one thing – a virtue which, as it did for Tolkien’s Bilbo in the postscript below, shapes our character into a counterweight to evil.

Postscript

From J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 1, Chapter 2.

“But this is terrible!” cried Frodo. “Far worse than the worst that I imagined from your hints and warnings. O Gandalf, best of friends, what am I to do? For now I am really afraid. What am I to do? What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!”

“Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity.”

“I am sorry,” said Frodo. “But I am frightened; and I do not feel any pity for Gollum.”

“You have not seen him,” Gandalf broke in.

“No, and I don’t want to,” said Frodo. “I can’t understand you. Do you mean to say that you, and the Elves, have let him live on after all these horrible deeds? Now at any rate he is as bad as an Orc, and just an enemy. He deserves death.”

“Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends. I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it. And he is bound up with the fate of the Ring. My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many – yours not least.”

* * *
See related:
Three-post series, "Mercy Sakes!" (BEGINS HERE)
Four-post series, "Just Mercy" (BEGINS HERE)

Politics and No-Self

What would be the political implications of mass awareness that the self is an illusion? Arriving at and integrating that awareness through a devoted spiritual practice generally facilitates a pro-social orientation -- caring and compassion for others. But suppose the increasing reliance on artificial intelligence algorithms leads us to abandon the illusion of self that has been so powerful in the human psyche for millenia. What then? Hard to say.

Yuval Harari's new book, Homo Deus, argues that automation is making people unnecessary. In particular, the less powerful people (a.k.a. the masses) may come to be regarded as unnecessary by companies and governments. Japan and Europe provide free health care to their populations, and even the myopic US has some form of social safety net. Harari's point is that one of the motivations for government programs that take care of people is to strengthen their industry and their army. But if a country's industrial and military needs can be met with robots, governments may have no reason to care about people.

As the recent election made even more clear, voters have no particular interest in electing politicians that care about them, or in policies that promote their well-being. If governments decide that people are disposable, the people themselves will not be inclined to disagree. A majority of us have been taught to blame ourselves for our misfortunes and discount the benefits of cooperatively working together to ensure we are all taken care of.

"The reason to build all these mass social service systems was to support strong armies and strong economies. Already the most advanced armies don’t need [as many] people. The same might happen in the civilian economy." (Yuval Harari, "The Post-Human World," Atlantic, 2017 Feb 20)

Indeed, we are, in certain ways, already beginning to lose the need for our selves -- or certain parts of ourselves. We are increasingly handing over to algorithms our very own decision-making judgment -- traditionally a central aspect of what makes us who we are.

"Look at GPS applications....Today, everybody is blindly following what Waze is telling them. They’ve lost the basic ability to navigate by themselves. If something happens to the application, they are completely lost. You reach a juncture on the road, and you trust the algorithm. Maybe the junction is your career. Maybe it’s the decision to get married. But you trust the algorithm rather than your own intuition. The most important invention that’s spreading now is biometric sensors. They may become ubiquitous. Humans will consult their biometric data to determine how to live. That is really interesting and scary stuff, because we will no longer be in charge of our identity. We will outsource our executive decisions to biometric readings of our neurochemical signals to decide how to live." (Harari)

In the not-too-distant future, perhaps, we won't even decide for ourselves what to have for dinner. Some Artificial Intelligence with access to our biometric readings will tell us what foods will best contribute to our health and happiness. What's left of "me" if I'm not even deciding for myself what to have for dinner?

"What really happens is that the self disintegrates. It’s not that you understand your true self better, but you come to realize there is no true self. There is just a complicated connection of biochemical connections, without a core. There is no authentic voice that lives inside you....The very idea of an individual that exists, which has been so precious to us, is in danger." (Harari)

But "the self disintegrates" isn't quite right. Rather, the illusion of a self disintegrates. When a person comes "to realize there is no true self," they are aware of what has always been the case but they didn't know it.

Longtime meditators grow accustomed and familiar with the arising of thoughts. Thoughts simply arise. Sitting and watching them arise, we become aware that there was no decision for a given thought to arise -- it just appears. Spending some time with this awareness, day after day, gradually leads to integrating the understanding that our thoughts are not us -- our thoughts are just something that happens to us, like a cold, or a traffic jam. In meditation we see for ourselves what the Buddha taught: there is no self.

If Yuval Harari is right, then popular neurobiology and artificial intelligence algorithms are now leading nonmeditators to understand what meditators have understood for centuries: the "very idea of an individual that exists, which has been precious to us" has always been an illusion.

The path of meditation tends to cultivate compassion and lovingkindness along with insight into the emptiness of our concepts of self. Along that path, there is a natural connection between seeing the way the ego constructs its illusions and feeling an opening of the heart to care for other beings. The path of artificial intelligence may be different. Algorithms may make better decisions than the wet-ware inside our skulls -- and growing comfortable with that may, as Harari suggests, have the effect of disabusing us of our notions of a transcendent "decider" soul. It's just wet-ware (100 billion neurons firing across 100 trillion synapses) on the one hand and microchips on the other hand. But this path of arriving at the insight of no-self might do nothing to improve our compassion.

It might, indeed, merely facilitate a growing assumption on the part of our governments and our corporate leadership that humans are superfluous -- an assumption we might be increasingly making about ourselves.

Evolving Religion

"Church! Huh! What Is It Good For?" part 3

Religion came to early humans as both a blessing and a curse. Faith community provided a feeling of connection, of at-home-ness, of being with our people, and in a world that made sense, just where we belonged. This blessing made early communities cohesive, and that cohesiveness proved essential to survival.

We need the blessing today as much as ever: overcoming alienation with community belonging and overcoming stress and greed with greater spiritual awakening. We need moral grounding today as much as ever, and we seem to be losing it.

At the same time, we need forms of religion that don’t do what religions often have done: inculcate intolerance and distrust of outsiders. The future holds to us the possibility of expanding the circle.

We can learn to take our sense of US-ness that evolution wired into us, and keep expanding it until it takes in, well, everything. Expand US until there is no THEM. All beings are US.

Just as nature wired into us a need for faith community, so it wired into us a propensity for going further with that capacity. Our inherited structures that made us able to bind together for war are available to be appropriated to connect us to live in peace and justice, without domination, or mastery, or hegemony. What evolution created for one purpose can now be put to a new purpose.

This is the method of transcendence that nature has often taken. When we think of evolution of abilities, we think of incremental improvements in serving a given purpose -- like the eye, starting with a layer of photosensitive cells and slowly getting better and better at seeing. An important part of evolution, however, lies not in incremental improvements of a function, but the abandoning of the original function and appropriating the capacity for a completely different purpose from the one it originally served.

• Mammalian forelimbs turned into bat wings – or, going another direction, into dolphin fins -- though the original purpose of forelimbs had nothing to do with either flying or swimming.
• Insect antennae turned into mandibles, with a function completely different from antennae.
• A jaw bone in dinosaurs, fish, and reptiles emerged for reasons that had nothing to do with hearing, but, in mammals, that small bone was appropriated and made into a part of the auditory system.
• An ancestor of wasps and bees had an ovipositor (egg-laying tube). It was there to lay eggs, not to sting with -- yet it was appropriated and made into a stinger.
• Before there were land animals, certain fish developed a swim bladder, which they could fill with gas, usually air. This allowed the fish to stay at a given depth without expending energy on swimming. The swim bladder evolved into the lung of the earliest lungfish – and from there into the lungs of land animals. This device for staying at a given depth in water turned into the essential step for moving onto land -- which was entirely different from the purpose for which it originally evolved.

Structures that served one purpose get put to very different purposes. It happens all the time. The fact that we evolved with a given structure or tendency does not obligate us to continue the purpose for which that structure or tendency evolved. Evolution has never been under any such constraint; if it were, then swim bladders would never have turned into lungs, and we’d all still be fishes. (It's easy to miss just how radical a point this is. Through millennia of Western civilization we have been making moral arguments "from nature": that certain actions -- for example, certain sexual actions -- were "unnatural," and therefore wrong, because they violated the purpose of, for instance, reproductive organs. It turns out nature herself repurposes organs.)

Building upon its inheritance, the lungfish transcended that inheritance and became a new thing on this earth. Bats and dolphins, mandibular and stinging insects, mammalian auditory systems -- and, one way or another, ultimately every complex feature of every species -- built upon its inheritance to transcend that inheritance and become a new thing on this earth.

We, too, may transcend our inheritance: put the wiring that enabled cohesive war-fighting to a new use, building peace. The wiring that finds such comfort and delight in the company of friends, gets active during spiritual experience, and orients us to live in peace within our group, is available for being universalized beyond our group. In this case, we don't even need any further genetic evolution. We already have the necessary neural structures of social orientation. With the appropriate training of those neural structures, we can teach ourselves to expand our perceived circle of "us" until there is no “them.”

Building upon our inheritance, we can transcend that inheritance and become a new thing on this earth. Our spiritual perception can plumb more deeply, can see more than just what selective pressures once needed our ancestors to see. My awareness can be trained to know, more thoroughly than cognition alone can know, that all humans are I, all sentient beings are I; all bugs and plants, all amoebas, paramecia, bacteria, and fungi are I; all rocks and dirt, rivers and oceans; air and fire; sun, moon, and stars are I.

Church, huh? What is it good for? “Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free.” And strength that joins our strength to do the work of building a peaceful and just world. What is it good for? Could be everything.

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "Church! Huh! What Is It Good For?"
See also
Part 1: Where Religion Came From
Part 2: Religion and Social Health

Religion and Social Health

"Church! Huh! What Is It Good For?" part 2

“People who frequently participate together in religious rituals achieve a feeling of community that enhances their ability to cooperate and avoid conflict. Even though they may not be conscious of it, they also are able to monitor one another for the sincerity of their commitment, thus making participation in religious rituals a credible signal of commitment.” (William Irons, 2001, 364)

That's where religion comes from. Shared rituals would have included music, drumming, and dance, and a variety of ritual behaviors to perform and watch others perform. Sacred stories supported the group's moral code and reinforced the group's identity.

And a third thing: Early humans attributed a stronger sense of agency than most modern humans do to trees, rivers, mountains, animals, sky, and, perhaps, "reality as a whole." They understood these features of their world to have beliefs, desires, and various means for effecting their desires. They understood trees and rocks and sky to be watching them. This probably triggered the same parts of the brain that account for gossip's effectiveness. Feeling watched made them more likely to "stay in line."

Through the rituals, the stories -- and this sense of being watched and accountable even when other people aren’t around to see -- religion is a cohesive power.

This shows up in studies of communes – communities that hold property in common. Communes often do not last long: if you were a young adult in the 1960s, you may have some direct experience of that. They tend to fall apart because the level of trust and cooperation required is just so difficult to maintain. Studies have found, though, that “communes that base their existence on religious ideals tend to last roughly four times as long on average as do those that base their existence on a secular ideology.” Groups with shared rituals and sacred stories cohere better. Marxist or Skinnerian Behaviorist communes could have benefited from some good hymns -- as well as other features of religion.

So here’s the upshot: Religion is an adaptive strategy fostering group cohesion in larger groups than can be managed by gossip alone.

Religion gives us a sense of US. The corollary is that it also gives us a sense of THEM – a feeling that those who don’t participate with us in our rituals and story-telling are different, are other, and dangerous.

So here’s the further upshot: We have religion because we had war. War places a premium on group cohesion, and “religion” is the rituals and stories that produced what was needed. War! (Huh!) Church! (Huh!) What are they good for? Each other!

It’s no wonder that human history is filled with wars over religion. This fact once seemed to me ironic and perverse. Why do people have wars over religion, when the religion on both sides teaches peace? But it's hardly surprising that an adaptation for succeeding in war would play a role in prompting us to go to war.

Part Two: What Religion Does Today

Faith community meets real human needs. It feeds people spiritually. But it has also facilitated war, from its very beginning. And, more often than not, it is related to social problems. A recent study in The Journal of Religion and Society did a large-scale cross-cultural comparative analysis, taking into account key indicators of societal well-being for 800 million people in the U.S., Japan, and western Europe. The study found that higher levels of religiosity correlated with lower levels of social well-being. The U.S., where church attendance is high, has had more school shootings than all of Europe and Japan combined. The study found:

“in general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion. The most theistic prosperous democracy, the U.S., is . . . almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so. The view of the U.S. as a ‘shining city on the hill’ to the rest of the world is falsified when it comes to basic measures of societal health.” (Gregory S. Paul, “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies,” The Journal of Religion and Society, 7, 2005. View complete article: HERE.)

Europe scores lower than the US on measures of religiosity and higher than the US on measures of social health and well-being. In Europe, a lot fewer people are in prison -- and a lot fewer people are in church.

Religion reinforces a moral code, binds members into community through ritual and story, and triggers our brains to perceive a transcendent, interconnected whole beyond and more deeply satisfying than the concerns of personality and ego. But at what social cost? Is there a way for religion to be more pro-social? Yes, there is.

Next: Evolving a Better Religion

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "Church! Huh! What Is It Good For?"
See also
Part 1: Where Religion Came From
Part 3: Evolving Religion

Where Religion Came From

"Church! Huh! What Is It Good For?" part 1

In 1970, in the midst of the Vietnam war, Edwin Starr made the charts with a protest song: “War (What is it Good For?)” “Absolutely nothing,” was the song’s answer.



“Church” – or any sort of faith congregation: synagogue, mosque, temple, sangha, vihara – actually is good for quite a lot, though it turns out religion and war have a shared origin.

As Starhawk said:

“Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our power.”

Don’t we need that? In these times of political turmoil, of social conflict and apparent chaos in our national government, we need more than ever a way to come together so that “I” can become “we”; “me” can become “us.” We are wired to have this need.

I want to look today at where this need came from – so we can understand it better. Religion was an adaptation to the conditions of early humans. But how adaptive is religion to modern conditions? The role of religion in modern society is problematic. Let’s ask whether there is a better way to adapt our wiring to modern conditions so we have more faith and more community and less war and conflict.

Part One: Where Religion Came From

The emergence of coherent society begins with reciprocal altruism. My survival chances were enhanced if I did favors for associates who would later do favors for me – although, if I went too far, allowed myself to be taken advantage of by doing favors for associates who would never reciprocate, then my survival odds diminished. In order for a reciprocity system to work, we had to have brains “capable of carefully tracking the behavior of the other organisms with which [we] interact.” (W. Irons) So there was selective pressure to develop the capacity to track and remember others’ behavior.

A second force in the emergence of society was the need for groups to cooperate in order to out-compete other groups. Bands of primates, generally males, competed violently with other bands for food, for territory, for access to females. We see that going on in chimps today – and on campuses. This group-group competition was a powerful force driving us toward formation of larger and better-united groups. Social cohesion required rules, and some method of communicating and enforcing them – keeping most of the members more-or-less in line most of the time. These selective pressures turned our ancestors into the sorts of beings with a facility for learning moral rules.

Reciprocal altruism gradually turned into a system of moral rules. Language allowed us to keep tabs on more and more of each other, which let us maintain a larger group, which allowed a more cohesive and larger fighting force and a better chance of defeating rival groups. Our ancestors learned a technique that we readily recognize and still use, though sometimes we say we don't like it: we call it gossip. Our ancestors met in small groups to monitor others' behavior and moralize about it.

Gossip emerged among early humans because it worked. It tracked who was trustworthy, reinforced the social ties of the gossipers, and strengthened the moral rules of the tribe. There are solid evolutionary reasons why we humans are attracted to gossiping. It’s a part of the system of maintaining the social order.

There is, however, a limit to how far gossip can go. Researchers find that moral rules reinforced through gossip can maintain unity up to about 150 members. Indeed, gossip magazines today maintain a list of no more than 150 celebrities that they keep up with the gossip about. More than that, and it’s too much to keep up with – the gossip just doesn’t pull us in. Larger groups need to be held together with something else. That's where religion comes in.

Religion facilitates cooperation among a group's members by serving to reinforce commitments to each other in a recognizable way. Participating in a group's rituals psychologically reinforces your actual commitment to the group and also lets the group know you're committed to them.
Indeed,

“participation in a ritual tends to alter individuals' brain states and to cause them to feel emotions of identity with a group more strongly and to hold this feeling more firmly in memory.” (Eugene Aquili, The Spectrum of Ritual, 1979)

Reciting and listening to sacred stories works the same way: it bonds us to the group with which we share the story.

* * *
This is Part 1 of 3 of "Church! Huh! What Is It Good For?"
See also
Part 2: Religion and Social Health
Part 3: Evolving Religion

Protecting Faith While Preventing Discrimination

Washington State began recognizing same-sex marriages in 2012. In 2013, Barronelle Stutzman, owner of Arlene's Flowers in Richland, WA, refused to provide flowers for the wedding of Robert Ingersoll and Curt Freed. Ms. Stutzman

"knew that Mr. Ingersoll and Mr. Freed were gay and had sold them flowers for years, but then refused to provide flowers for their wedding. Her Christian faith, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman, created a line, she said, that she could not cross." (NYT, Feb 16)

Wait. If her faith defines marriage as between a man and a woman, then, in the eyes of her faith, the event for which Ingersoll and Freed were requesting flowers was NOT a wedding. The couple may have called it a wedding, and the State of Washington may have recognized the result as a marriage, but Stutzman is not being asked to recognize it as a marriage. She can say, "My faith doesn't recognize this as a real wedding. I am simply providing flowers for this social occasion that, in form, resembles a wedding." For her, it's just one more sale of many she had previously made to Ingersoll and Freed.

Recognizing legitimate marriages is required of, say, insurance companies who offer policies that protect one's spouse. If there are any rights or benefits afforded to married couples but not to unrelated friends, then same-sex married couples are as entitled to those benefits as opposite-sex married couples are. But recognizing the legitimacy of a marriage is not required of florists. Florists only have to sell flowers without discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. As long as the florist avoids offering any benefit -- a special discount, say -- to couples who prove they are married, she can have any opinion she wishes to have of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of any "marriage." So Stutzman could have sold the flowers while at the same time, in her own mind and heart, in accordance with her faith, regarding the "wedding" as fake. In this way, Stutzman would remain true to her faith and the couple would get their flowers.

But Stutzman didn't do that. Instead, she refused to sell the flowers. Ingersoll and Freed then sued Stutzman for violating the Washington Law Against Discrimination, which added sexual orientation to its list of protected characteristics in 2006. Currently 19 states -- and Washington is one of them -- ban discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. In the 31 other states, Ingersoll and Freed might have had a tougher case to make.

In the case, State of Washington v. Arlene's Flowers, Stutzman's attorney argued that flower arrangement is artistic expression and is thus protected as free speech. Speech? OK, then what would the florist supposedly be saying by providing flowers? According to Stutzman's side, providing flowers would say Stutzman endorses the wedding.

"She believes that participating, or allowing any employee of her store to participate, in a same-sex wedding by providing custom floral arrangements and related customer service is tantamount to endorsing marriage equality for same-sex couples." (Washington v. Arlene's Flowers)

This is nonsense. Businesses such as restaurants, bakeries, and florists may deny service to unruly customers, or to any customer that doesn't follow a set procedure for ordering -- as in the Seinfeld episode where the Soup Nazi denies service to Elaine. They may not, however, deny service on the the basis that service signals approval when, in fact, the service does not signal approval (a point I argued HERE). Does hiring a person indicate approval of the person's particular or general non-work-related habits? No. Does renting housing to a person indicate approval of the person's particular or general habits? No. Does producing and selling a cake (with no message on it, or with only a generic message like "Congratulations") indicate approval of the context in which it will be displayed or eaten? No. Nor does providing flowers for an event signal approval of the event.

"The decision to either provide or refuse to provide flowers for a wedding does not inherently express a message about that wedding. As Stutzman acknowledged at deposition, providing flowers for a wedding between Muslims would not necessarily constitute an endorsement of Islam, nor would providing flowers for an atheist couple endorse atheism." (Washington v. Arlene's Flowers)

The only "statement" Stutzman would be making by selling the flower arrangements is that Stutzman is a florist.

It's pretty clear-cut. The lower court ruled in the couple's favor, and the 9-Justice State Supreme Court ruled unanimously in upholding the lower court.

David French, writing for National Review, characterizes the court's ruling as meaning

"a florist was bound by state law to use her artistic talents to design floral arrangements to celebrate what she viewed as an immoral event: a gay wedding."

But, of course, (1) said florist is not bound to celebrate anything. She only has to provide her business services without discrimination. Selling flowers to an event does not constitute celebrating that event. (2) Her faith says that same-sex weddings are nonexistent. Again: since her faith defines marriage as between a man and woman, then a wedding-like ceremony between two men is not a real wedding -- even if the couple, their families, and Washington State happen to regard it as real. As the Court's opinion notes:

"Stutzman is an active member of the Southern Baptist church. It is uncontested that her sincerely held religious beliefs include a belief that marriage can exist only between one man and one woman." (Washington v. Arlene's Flowers)

It's not that Stutzman believes same-sex marriage to be wrong or immoral. Rather, her faith belief is that no such marriage can exist.

Might Stutzman regard it as immoral to simulate a wedding? If so, she would have to regard every play or movie with a wedding scene in it as immoral. That is not a position that Southern Baptists have taken. In any case, Stutzman did not argue that she found it immoral to engage in what she regarded as a simulation of a wedding.

A distinction between actual marriage and apparent marriage is familiar to us from the concept of annulment. Catholic doctrine holds that a marriage is annulled when it is determined that the marriage, despite initial appearances, did not actually exist. Annulment occurs when a diocesan tribunal decides that no marriage covenant was created because the wedding was conducted under false pretenses. Pretenses which might later be discovered to have been false include: openness and honesty, maturity, emotional stability, full consent, and appropriate motivation. Thus, faith organizations sometimes determine that a "wedding" wasn't a real wedding. Similarly, Stutzman may take the position that, in the eyes of her faith, there was no real wedding.

Looking at the Catholic list of grounds for annulment, raises the question: May a florist refuse to provide flowers for a wedding in which the florist has strong reasons to believe that the parties lack emotional stability, haven't given full consent, or aren't appropriately motivated? Proprietors may, as mentioned, refuse service for a variety of reasons -- generally having to do with the customer's behavior on the business premises. It would certainly be highly unusual to refuse service for a wedding on these grounds, and I don't know how the courts would end up ruling. On the one hand, sale of flowers does not endorse, or approve -- or "celebrate" -- the wedding. On the other hand, if the parties to the marriage (or "marriage") are not in a protected class, perhaps the courts would allow that denial of service. There is no Washington law forbidding discrimination against people planning to wed under false pretenses -- but there is a law forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. My point is that annulment has been around a long time, and it is based on a distinction with which we are accustomed and familiar: between apparent marriages and actual marriages. When it comes to whether a wedding, same-sex or opposite-sex, is apparent or actual, churches and individuals are free to have an opinion differing from the state's.

The sincerely-held religious belief in question denies the existence -- not the morality -- of same-sex marriage. (By contrast, that same religious belief does deny the morality, and not the existence, of sexual relations between members of the same sex -- though this moral judgment had not previously prevented Stutzman from selling flowers to a couple she knew to to be gay.) Ingersoll and Freed were asking Stutzman to sell flowers for what she was religiously bound to regard as a simulation of a wedding -- which her religion does not forbid. The Washington Supreme Court's opinion, alas, does not make this point. That's too bad. Allowing for individuals to make faith-based determinations about which marriages are "real" -- as long as those determinations do not result in denying a benefit that would otherwise be provided -- protects faith while also preventing discrimination.