I have noticed something of a pattern with National Public Radio (NPR) lately: when they interview or feature religious persons, said persons tend also to be homosexual. In February 2023, Ashlee Green wrote a gushing review of Lamya H’s, Hijab Butch Blues, a memoir written by a Muslim woman (who identifies as “they”) struggling to reconcile her Islamic faith with her inclination to be with other women. She has come to peace with this, we are told, by re-reading the Koran in such a way as to find evidence for the approval of lesbianism. “By the end of [the memoir],” Green assures us, “readers will see queerness—theirs, others’, and the concept—for what it is: a miracle.”
In October 2020, Rachel Martin interviewed Fr. Bryan Massingale (on Morning Edition) in the light of Pope Francis’s alleged endorsement of same-sex unions. Massingale is identified on the show as an “openly gay Catholic priest,” and it becomes obvious during the interview that, although he admits that Pope Francis did not change the Church’s teaching on the sinfulness of same-sex acts, he sees this move as a change in the “right” direction.
In a November 2022 interview with Terry Gross, singer/songwriter Brandi Carlile told an agonizing story about her experience as a lesbian in an evangelical Protestant church. She had been making preparations to be baptized, had invited her family and friends, only to be refused when the pastor found out that she had no intention of desisting from her lesbian lifestyle. The hushed, empathetic tones throughout the interview could barely disguise the soft undercurrent of moral superiority.
Finally, to take just one more example, in April 2024, Gross interviewed the Irish actor Andrew Scott; a fair portion of the interview was dedicated to his struggles as a “gay Catholic” growing up in “Catholic Ireland.”
In each of the above cases, and these are just the ones that I can remember in recent years, the unstated purpose of the interview or review was to elicit audience sympathy for the person at hand, while calling into question the traditional teachings on human sexuality of the various religious communities in question. In two of the cases (Lamya and Massingale), there was a strong suggestion that the time was ripe for Muslims on the one hand and Catholics on the other to catch up with NPR, either by deconstructing sacred texts or calling for an about-face in Church teaching.
The shrinking of the horizon of discourse
My main point here, however, is not to tackle the complex question of same-sex attraction and traditional religion, but to point out an irony in the approach of the ostensibly omni-tolerant, omni-open world of left Liberalism. Namely, what we see here is not greater openness, but a shrinking of the horizon of discourse in order to make complex and mysterious questions extremely simple.
Allow me to unpack this, as I think it’s essential to understanding the situation of traditional religion, and particularly Catholicism, in the modern world.
First, the problem is not with Gross and her colleagues’ sympathy regarding these individuals and their stories. It would be hard not to sympathize, for instance, with the account which Carlile gave of her anticipated baptism. The problem is with the false simplification of what is, in fact, an extremely fraught problem. The sacred texts and traditions that give rise to the prohibitions under question give expression, according to the people who inhabit these traditions, to more-than-human wisdom on the matters at hand. The notion that a 2000-year-old tradition, in the case of Catholicism, can or should change its teachings because the modern West has recently decided so is at the very least open to question. And yet it doesn’t seem so in the neat, little world of NPR.
Next, it should be noted that in none of the above cases is there any attempt whatsoever to understand people who joyfully and thoughtfully embrace such long-standing teachings. I have numerous and devout Catholic friends, for instance, who have children who identify as “gay” or “trans.” For them, life just isn’t as simple as it is for the contemporary left. On the one hand, every one of them loves their children unconditionally and continues to support them in whatever way they can. On the other hand, each one of them agrees with the teachings of their Church on human sexuality. But because their world is not as insulated as the NPR world, their situations are difficult and often painful. They both believe Catholicism to be true and love their children with an unconditional love. I suspect the same is true of many Muslims and Protestants in the same situation, not to mention Orthodox Jews, Hindus, or adherents of other religious traditions.
Such situations simply do not fit into NPR’s clean divide between those on the side of love and those on the side of hate.
Locke and the Liberal project
And this brings me to the heart of the matter. The shrinking of the horizon of modern discourse has roots that go back to early modernity. At the beginning of the Liberal project,1 John Locke (and the mainstream Enlightenment)2 makes a few moves which help to account for the actual narrowing of the modern mind.
First, Locke radically reduces the scope of reason, so that it no longer puts us in touch with things in themselves, with reality that is, but only with our mental representations of reality.
Second, he and the mainstream Enlightenment, in general, will reduce reason to the realm of the temporal, empirical order, to Kant’s “phenomenal,” or Mircea Eliade’s “Profane,” or Charles Taylor’s “immanent frame.” The notion that one can begin with the things of this world and work one’s way up, so to speak, to the realm of God is unthinkable in this approach. If there is a God, he is most definitely outside of the order of nature and can be known only through faith.
Third, he reduces the scope of “religion” to private and voluntaristic beliefs about other-worldly matters, matters beyond the realm of reason, politics, or “public” discourse.
Fourth, he reduces the role of politics to the adjudication of rights disputes between self-interested individuals. Politics should no longer, in this view, concern itself with ascertaining the transcendent Good and trying to form society in accordance with that Good.
Finally, in addition to these “spatial” constrictions, we should also note modernity’s tendency to be dismissive of the past, and, by implication, those parts of the world that are still “stuck in the past.” To borrow from Augusto del Noce, to be modern is to “have entered a period of philosophical research marked by a sharp break with respect to the Greek and medieval periods, which are thought to have ended.” He goes onto say that mainstream modernity just is the rejection of the medieval Christian-Greek synthesis.3
But here is where the irony comes in. Locke thinks that it is true that we cannot know transcendent truth; Locke thinks that it is good that politics not concern itself with transcendent goodness. He thinks that the Liberal solution is, in fact, the only legitimate one,4 something he seems to have in common with the people at NPR.
Reason v Freedom
Let us return to the problem illustrated in the NPR interviews. First, there is a false humility that haunts mainstream, modern thought. While it claims to limit what we can know, it does so only in order to have total domination over the newly constricted space. Reason is limited to the empirical realm, so that science can gain absolute mastery over nature; politics is limited to the “immanent frame,” so that a putatively “secular” reason can hold absolute sway.
Second, in the insistence that the knower never genuinely finds an object outside of his own mind, we get an ironic exaggeration of the importance of the individual and his opinions about reality. We could paraphrase Chesterton by saying that the individual, when cut off from reality, gets really big in direct proportion to the world’s growing very small. Let’s listen to Justice Kennedy in the famous Casey decision of June 1992: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
Notice what happens when we pair this sentence with Barack Obama’s 2008 response to Rick Warren’s question regarding when human life begins: “That’s above my pay grade.” Obama’s epistemic humility (his shrunken sense of what reason can know) ironically gives the individual the right to decide for himself when human life begins. The shrinking of the scope of reason radically increases the realm of individual freedom.
This makes it easier to understand how the ever-so-open-minded and ever-so-non-dogmatic reporters at NPR can make the counter-intuitive move to make what is a complicated problem, one that ought to be open to serious discussion, into an obvious battle between haters and lovers. If the individual is cut off from reality, we must take his or her private opinions about the matter—whether it’s Lamya’s idiosyncratic reading of the Koran, or Massingale’s private theological opinion on where Church teaching needs to go—as the last word. The very idea that Truth has authority over individual opinion cannot help but seem fascist in such an approach.
This is only exacerbated by the reduction of reason to the immanent frame. If reason has no natural knowledge of the transcendent, then reason has no natural obligation towards it. NPR’s purely secular reason, then, is simply taken for granted. If some people wish to opt for something in addition to the merely empirical, they should be free to do so, provided that they do not think that such opting offers any bearing on the nature of reality.
What tends to happen in such a world is that “secular reason” is given jurisdiction over non-secular reason. It is after Kant has limited reason to the realm of the “phenomenal” that he goes on to write a book called Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone. Similarly, the generally irreligious types over at NPR see no problem with their attempts to treat religion on NPR’s terms. This, it seems, is why they prefer to talk only with the most secularized and westernized religious believers, “believers” who also seem to have placed their religion within the boundaries of their own private opinions.
The need for a genuine religious identity
Finally, there is the relegation of reason to modern reason. The reason of the past—which included Plato’s convictions concerning a transcendent and unchanging Good which stands as the Source and Measure of all that is, Aristotle’s insistence on the need for an Unmoved Mover to account for all that is in motion, and Aquinas’s arguments in favor of a Being which simply is by nature—must be set aside as so much childish preparation for the mature reason of modernity. We must set aside, to borrow from Kant, this “self-imposed tutelage” to the past.
It is this last move that spares the NPR crowd from having to take seriously any thinkers outside of Western modernity. An Islam that still thinks in traditional ways about human sexuality is simply an Islam that is still under a “self-imposed tutelage,” and is in desperate need for a “butch” Muslim to set it free.
Each of the foregoing, modern moves help to explain why NPR can sound so humble and open on the one hand, while proclaiming the gospel of individual liberty with an almost fundamentalistic fervor on the other, and why a bunch of at-onetime-pacifistic-left Liberals have all of a sudden become globalist war hawks intent on rooting out “enemies of democracy” wherever they might be found.
If all of this seems very gloom-and-doom in nature, it gives me reason for hope. For years now, we Catholics have been working hard to show that we can fit into the secular, Liberal order. Our Supreme Court justices have all promised that their faith would be, like Locke’s, a private matter. But all of this stems from the fact that we’ve largely accepted the mainstream, modern framework outlined above. We would do well to re-read the great religious scholar Mircea Eliade, who has shown in his numerous studies that religion is not a matter of private beliefs about otherworldly matters; it is a public, social and culture-founding quest for the meaning of reality, and it is rooted in our natural desire to know the truth about the whole. As such, religion cannot be privatized and separated from public affairs, politics, economics, or education without ceasing to be what it is. Liberal Protestantism’s capitulation to being little more than the civil religion of Liberalism ought to serve as a warning sign in this regard. It’s not uninteresting that the symbol of this religion is no longer the cross, but the rainbow flag.
The time is ripe, then, for us Catholics to advertise our de facto larger view of things. First, we have believed in and defended a notion of reason that puts us in touch with reality.
Second, that reason is not limited to the immanent frame, but opens up to the realm of the Transcendent. This is why the First Vatican Council pronounced with full, ecclesial authority that Catholics must believe that they can know, via natural reason, that God exists!
Third, our openness to the wisdom of various cultures of the past (the Greeks, Romans, and, in the Middle Ages, the Arabic) makes it easier for us, than it does for NPR, to take seriously those traditional cultures currently outside of the West and its hegemonic Liberalism.
I write all of this in the light of the fact that so many of our Catholic educational institutions, including my own, have marginalized and attenuated Catholic identity to become more “inclusive” and “diverse.” Because they have uncritically embraced Liberal (and increasingly left, Liberal) assumptions, they have become narrower, more doctrinaire, and less open to the genuine dialogue. At the same time, they have become more pragmatic, technocratic, and corporate, in a strange attempt to combine the worst elements of our two-party system. Since they, like NPR, have lost sight of the primacy of the Transcendent, their world, too, has become small. This, of course, means the death of the university, and we should be thankful, at least in part, that so many nominally Catholic universities are currently going out of business.
I conclude, then, with this counterintuitive suggestion: it is not until genuine religious identity has been restored to our institutions of higher learning that we will begin to see an opening of the American mind, and, perhaps, even a market niche in the world of higher education.
Endnotes:
1 Throughout this article, I will capitalize liberal when I am speaking of the broad, classical Liberalism that comes out of the Enlightenment. When I do not capitalize it, I mean it in its common, American usage: a democrat or progressive or “lefty.” When I use the phrase, “left Liberal,” then, I mean a liberal in this latter sense, but use it this way to distinguish left Liberals from right Liberals (aka, Republicans). I am not writing from within the Liberal tradition in either its left or right form.
2 With Augusto del Noce, I would distinguish between the Descartes-Nietzsche trajectory (calling this the mainstream Enlightenment) and the Descartes-Rosmini trajectory (which continued to defend the possibility of metaphysics). See Augusto del Noce, The Crisis of Modernity, edited and translated by Carlo Lancellotti (Chicago: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 5, but the entire essay is indispensable.
3 Augusto del Noce, The Crisis of Modernity, edited and translated by Carlo Lancellotti (Chicago: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 4.
4 It should be noted that neither Aristotle nor Aquinas thought that there was only one legitimate political order: monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy could all work, provided the common good was being served.
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
Coffee cheers to hoping NPR is defunded.
What about Trump telling women that if they have a child, he will give them $1,000. Then, he defunds the Head Start children’s program for ages 1-3.
Right-leaning “Republicans??? Immoral!!! Too political?
Head start really doesn’t do much for academic outcomes. I used to teach in a Catholic preschool for 3-4 year olds and there’s nothing wrong with a few half days a week but anymore than that it’s daycare. But perhaps daycare is what you’re talking about?
Children need watching when parents have to work. I’ve been there and done that and it’s tough. Does the government have a responsibility to provide daycare? That’s another conversation.
Excellent rebuttal!
Thank you so much.
🙂
NPR played the sounds of an abortion in MI.
No one is going to have a baby for $1000, if they have a clue
The Head Start program was government child abuse.
That’s a non-sequitur. Shocking as this seems to be to most Americans today, not every question is about Trump.
Or perhaps your comment was simply to change the subject, like this: So, do the OKC Thunder have any chance of bouncing back in game 7, or are they toast?
I have no idea but I’m always happy to hear about the Florida Gators. Maybe President Trump is, too. His home team now after all.
🙂
He’s closer to the Miami Hurricanes, both geographically and in style (brash, boastful, etc.). He’s definitely got some Lamar Thomas in him.
Well true geographically speaking but as far as boastful and brash, that describes Gators fans also.
🐊
I assume we’re mostly talking about football. This is the South, and it’s not the Carolinas, so football is king.
With that in mind, it’s been a tough run for the state of Florida lately, with the last school to even pretend to have a share of the championship being Central Florida. But at least you’re not suffering like FSU fans are.
On a much more serious note, the Maundy Thursday shootings were within a few hundred feet of the co-cathedral. The time and location combine to make it feel emphatically demonic.
As someone who actually roasts coffee to earn a living, I wholeheartedly agree.
In addition to “the shrinking of the Western mind,” the NPR syndrome can also be understood in a different way.
Four points:
FIRST, the deconstructionists not only deconstruct transcendence but, rather, they construct a false reality within which their deviations make sense to them. The desperation of the lie within a lie…the Big Lie.
SECOND, is this not the original sin? Adam rationalizes that Eve made him do it. Eve rationalizes that the serpent made her do it. (some might even say that “God made you that way.”) But then the real God intervenes to expel the serpentine Big Lie from both the garden and the human soul. Still, the tendency–the concupiscence–of fallenness and rationalization remains with us.
THIRD, the mention of Islam is only one variation–the Islamic theology of “reading and rereading” (Islamic wording) the dictated (!) Qur’an, under a kind of updating “process theology” (the Western variation)—by which the former/permanent things can be “abrogated” by a new inspiration from the same divine utterance! (The dictated “word made book” displaces the incarnational “Word made flesh.”) This, everywhere, in order to rationalize a new and particular situation.
FOURTH, is the complexity of the will-and-habit and the particular LGBTQ mind-body self-deception exposed (so to speak) in a study completed at University College London and using MRI technology (magnetic resonance imagery)?
The research strongly implies that a HABIT of lying tends to suppress the part of the brain (the amygdala) that responds emotionally to a “slippery slope” pattern of small and then larger lies (Nature Neuroscience Journal, October 24, 2016; reported in New York Times, October 25, 2016). Besides lying, do other behavioral addictions also have this effect toward the personally constructed alternative universe, the Big Lie? Such is shown to be the case with addiction to computer games; and pornography is scientifically reported to be more addictive than heroin or cocaine. Likewise, the drift of backing into homosexuality as then further reinforced/rationalized by the NPR syndrome.
SUMMARY: The answer to the NPR syndrome is at least as psychiatric (and even biblical!) as it is in philosophical openness to transcendence. Politically, do not entrench pubic NPR with public funds. And in synodality, reassign Fr. James Martin’s position (so to speak) to Courage International.
This is an illustration of why I haven’t listened to NPR for decades. It used to have some worthwhile music and books read aloud in the days before audio books. But the political climate got to the point where I just turned it off.
mrs. I did the same with Fox News. Extreme, saturating lies. I remember when Hannity and Combs were “fair and balanced.” Today, with an aging Rupert Murdoch, Hannity and the death of Combs, they have been renamed… “Unfair and unbalanced.” Rupert Murdoch hired a bunch of amoral sociopaths who influence our children.
Well Mr. Morgan, we agree on something.
🙂
At least as far as watching FOX News. I turned it off a long time ago and I haven’t had any kind of TV connection for years. Got rid of the satellite dish. I don’t miss it a bit.
Too bad. Then you are missing everything that CNN and their ilk refuse to cover. Which is a lot of stuff. Cancelled my left leaning newspaper years ago after being a faithful reader for DECADES. and never have regretted it.
What I do see is MY side being accused unjustly of being authoritarian Nazis and THER side inciting the worst kinds of riots or violence. But funny thing, they are never held accountable for it. In fact, they accuse US of all the things that THEY do themselves. Its too bad so much of the American public is so gullible, and the press so basically dishonest.
I check a number news sites these days, so it’s all good. I try to keep informed by a variety of media sources. They all have their own bias, but that’s to be expected.
Amoral sociopaths who influence out children???? Why is that MorganD? Is it because they raise such concerns as the morality and legality of the educational establishment abusing children, including small children, with mandatory exposure to depraved homosexual story hours? Or the legality of gender transitions without parental permission??
Try https://classicalkuco.org/. It’s a public radio station in Edmond, OK, but it’s just music.
Thank you. That’s good to know.
My late husband (R.I.P.) listened to NPR. He didn’t listen because he agreed with it. He listened so he could learn and try to understand what “the other side” thinks. (He was very intelligent.)
I can see value in doing this, although not all the time. When we only listen to what OUR side thinks, we don’t realize what others are thinking, and then we eventually run into a brick wall when we try to make friends with them.
I tend not to listen to NPR because most of the time, I find myself yelling at the spokespeople on the show, and that’s not a good way to spend a long drive!
But I do appreciate Rodney Howsare’s article because it provides a summary of information that I think it’s important for many of us to be aware of and thinking about in advance so that we can make a gentle but knowledgeable response when our real-life friends begin talking “NPR Language.”
On the other hand, it seems that most people don’t listen to the radio anymore (or even have a radio), or at best, stream background music or sports of their choice for that long drive or boring workplace!
The problem with “listening to the other side” is that it needs limits. Nobody (rightly) ever says, hey, I’m going to listen to the Nazis, I want to understand them. But yet with Marxists and the other socialists, somehow, we need an inquiry into the perspective of the adherents.
As a general rule, I think the millions that have died as the result of socialism is evidence enough that one should not look for some mythical pearl in the sewer.
It was an honest assessment of the death toll of the left that began the journey that led the radical leftist Eugene Genovese out of that and back into the Church along with his wife who converted.
Recently NPR had a special on DaVinci filmed en locale excellent acting, narration. Similarly a Dante Alighieri epic From Inferno to Heaven. Nowhere within TV Wasteland was there similar.
“It is not until genuine religious identity has been restored to our institutions of higher learning that we will begin to see an opening of the American mind (Howsare). However, should we have a forbidden index of media before and if we ever arrive at a universal Christian culture?
True. NPR folks have their liberal slant. Nevertheless, you usually get the news as it occurs with intelligent analysis. Needless to say, we’re not obliged to agree with the views expressed. Nevertheless, Howsare’s argument regarding Catholic academia is entirely valid and necessary.
Yes, the Dante documentary (by Ric Burns) was excellent. PBS actually ran it, not NPR. They both receive public funds but are separate entities. Does NPR own/operate radio and PBS TV stations? I’m guessing since I really do not know.
Yes, you raise that old yet ever new prudential conundrum of what, if anything, should come with a cautionary note or nuclear radiation warning attached.
Thanks for the correction. Acronyms wiz I’m not.
So, NPR has a few snippets that appeal to our intellectual side. Al Capone ran soup kitchens. Neither justifies the rest of the record.
To the extent that NPR ever had a reason for existing with its snout firmly implanted in the trough of the public treasury-the proliferation of digital media renders it an obsolete anachronism.
Consider the horrible tragedy of the 787 crash in India. There are several practicing pilots with video channels offering their opinion of the accident and continuing it as further evidence and analysis develops. I’d rather their perspective than some dunce with good hair and pearly whites.
Excellent discussion on the state of things!
Just a small disagreement with “It would be hard not to sympathize, for instance, with the account which Carlile gave of her anticipated baptism.” I do not at all sympathize with her – baptism involves the renunciation of all evil, she was unwilling to do that. Why sympathy? The shock of the refusal may have interior after-effects with will one day save her.
It is one of our problems that we, I repeat we, are unwilling to simply endure the accusations of hurt and hate that are flung at us when we speak or act upon the truth, as her evangelical pastor did, rather than think we can find a way to soften everything so that no one ever suffers when encountering the Ten Commandments and the demands of God, and that the world always finds us “nice”. The world thinking us nice is not what Jesus told us to expect.
There is also more that needs to be done than to correct flawed understanding of human reality that flows from Locke and others, though that is certainly extremely important. The human soul needs to be confronted with and challenged by the demands of God, to be led to understand that we are desperately in need of being saved from terrible evil. The nice soft approach does not do that. While homosexual temptation is not sin, giving oneself over to it remains giving oneself over to a great evil, that fact is often lost in our soft, nice approach to things. Our society, and not just individuals, need to be confronted with such truths, as it does about abortion and other matters. Appeals to natural law will never be enough, nor will scholarly push-back to Locke, etc. as worthwhile as that is. The entire Gospel, not just the nice, soft parts, but the demands as well, needs to be spoken to the world. It can’t be done solely one on one, and it can’t be done solely from pulpits to church goers. The culture at large must be confronted with truth, not just natural law, but spiritual, religious reality. Our previous “who am I to judge” and “all religions lead to God” pope spectacularly failed at this. There is reason to hope, and certainly reason to pray, that Pope Leo may do much better. And perhaps the great timidity of his fellow bishops would then be cast aside.
Hi Mark,
I would answer that Carlile warrants sympathy because she just consigned herself to non-salvation. Who wishes that for anyone?
The philosophy explains why, how, what we know and believe through reason and faith. If we know how to think clearly about human nature and can prove through reason that God exists, then we can use the best philosophy, the best metaphysics, to explain why God is real and show to others that He truly exists with attributes of perfect love, knowledge, beauty, goodness, etc.
I always appreciate philosophical explanations for why we think as we do. I’m no expert, but I’m working on correcting that deficiency.
All that being said, I definitely agree that WE need to evangelize, catechize, and the express our love and zeal for what we experientially and logically know to be good and true for us and for all.
Absolutely 💯
Hello Mark. What about it is as hard for a rich man to enter heaven as it is for a camel to pass through a needle? Do you own two cars much less two shirts? Have you like Francis of Assisi given away all your possessions to follow Christ? Hypocrite. Take the plank out of your own eye before you remove the splinter from Carlile’s eye. We all fall short of the Gospel mandate to love our enemy and do good to those who persecute us. We should never go to war as a soldier and a Catholic if we took this Gospel mandate literally. Be careful that you are repeating what you condemn at NOR
Thank you, Dr. Howsare. Your work has always piqued my interest and acclaim.
Re metaphysical problems, are you familiar with the work of one Andres Ayala at the UT (Toronto)? He has written on Aquinas, Kant, and problematic metaphysical positions of some Transcendental Thomists? I’m not a trained philosopher but it seems Ayala may provide additional perspective on our current problems.
Thanks again. I appreciate your work.
OOPs. I confused/conflated Howsare and Hanby! Two different scholars. Half of my comment applies to Dr. Howsare and the other half to Dr. Hanby. Best to both.
The government should have no part whatsoever in funding journalism.
In the USA, I agree, but I think the funding for AFRTS should be maintained. It’s not really good — or at least it wasn’t in the mid-to-late 1990s — but it’s good to have English-language radio when you’re working overseas.
Thank you, Mr. Howsare, for an excellent article. It prompts a reflection on the evolving nature of National Public Radio (NPR). Approximately four decades ago, my engagement with NPR during commutes to work was a regular practice. Despite an early recognition of a discernible left-leaning bias, this was largely overlooked due to the perceived value of other content.
Over time, however, the balance shifted, and any benefits of listening diminished to a point where any further listening was no longer warranted or enjoyed. Consequently, I now align with the perspective that NPR’s funding should not be drawn from the public purse. Instead, given the programming primarily serves the interests of a specific political demographic, its financial support should originate from private contributions within that demographic. The rest of us should not be burdened any further.
“My main point here, however, is not to tackle the complex question of same-sex attraction and traditional religion….” Ah, yes, the “complex question”. Who can say what the answer might be? It’s so MYSTERIOUS!!!
“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” — Chesterton
And maybe even Chesterton got it wrong. Some synodal operatives floated the premise that the indissolubility of sacramental marriage is only an “ideal”, rather than a fact.
You’re hinging too much on the use of the word “ideal”. It is a false parallel. Chesterton was using the word correctly. To quote Digory Kirke, “It’s all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools!” Ideals are a sort of facts. I’m enough of a mathematician to believe that numbers, a type of Platonic ideal, have a real existence, even though it is not a physical existence.
A straight line segment is an ideal. While it is true that a carpenter cutting wood or a seamstress cutting cloth can only make cuts that are approximately straight line segments, it is what they can understand (as opposed to the nearly infinitely complex structure of the cut wood or cloth), it what they plan, it is what they attempt, and it is the standard against which they measure their cuts. The ideal of the line segment is not invalidated by the limited skill of the cutter or the detailed structure of the material being cut.
Likewise, the Christian ideal of marriage is not invalidated by the limited virtues of the married couple. It is the plan for their marriage, and the less a marriage deviates from that plan, the more it may be said to be a good marriage.
Something being an ideal does not mean that it is unachievable. Nor does it mean that its nature is a “complex question”. Neither of these is why the Christian teachings on marriage are downplayed.
Progressive radio hosts discussing spirituality with gay “christians.” Talk about the blind leading the blind 🙄.
I disagree that NPR is evoking sympathy, just acceptance. I am not so holy that I have time to criticize or worry about other’s actions or the fate of their souls. If you don’t like the programming, don’t listen. I find that concentrating on Jesus and trying to emulate his works and kindness feeds my soul much more than wondering about other’s sexual orientation.
You say you are “not so holy that [you] have time to … worry about … the fate of their souls.” If we are to take that seriously, then you are not holy enough to be giving anybody advice. If you really don’t worry about whether people are going to Hell or not, then you really don’t love them, and you are really NOT emulating Jesus in any meaningful way. He showed in very dramatic fashion that the fate of souls is very important to Him.
Also, I have to point out that when you criticize people for criticizing what they disagree with, you are yourself criticizing what you disagree with. That doesn’t necessarily mean you are wrong — to claim that would be the tu quoque fallacy — but it does make you something of a hypocrite.
Do you care about child rape, the inevitable result of poisoning a mind about sexuality, a pervasive practice among homosexuals?
And what does the fact that 98 percent of homosexuals support killing the unborn mean to you?
Goodness, I do try to take the time to worry about the fate of other’s souls. Isn’t that part of being a Christian: to care about each other? We care about the worries of this life but we also pray we may all be reunited in the next.
NPR is merely a symbol of elitist pride. Our belief systems often follow less from what we think we believe about God than what we decide to believe about the nature of evil. If evil is personal, then the human condition is permanently imperfectible. If we decide to believe evil is determined by the tides of history, possibly to escape confronting our personal need for reform, we end up accommodating or siding with the principalities of elites who view evil as a problem of social engineering, a management problem, which they promise to eliminate once they are allowed to impose their self-anointed vision on the rest of humanity.
Catholicism views human rights, personal virtues, and moral obligations as innate qualities, divinely endowed to the human condition, rather than cultural or political inventions. Natural principles of how we ought to order our lives together are true, not because of popular acceptance, favor by intellectuals, or enshrinement in statutory law, but are true because they are inherent to the nature of being a decent human being. Our vanities resist this idea, even when cognitive dissidence tries to have it both ways. The very capacity for anger reveals we have innate expectations of one another, yet we often prefer to focus on finding affinity groups that claim original solutions to humanity’s problems that will eventually lead us to utopia, and who would be scrupulous about personal misdeeds when we’re busy saving the world?
Acts 5
So now I tell you, have nothing to do with these men, and let them go. For if this endeavor or this activity is of human origin, it will destroy itself. 39 But if it comes from God, you will not be able to destroy them; you may even find yourselves fighting against God.”
About 40 years ago NPR featured diverse programming such as the Irish Hour, Arabic Hour, Indian Hour, etc. giving a window into diverse communities and their culture. The office was and still is in the heart of the Gay community. They were the ones who pledged and were/are the backbone of financial support. I noticed the Gay community began playing a larger role through the years. I backed away. Money buys access.
I have a very close friend who escaped from some 20 years enslaved to the “G” option of the LGBT “lifestyle” menu. He returned to his childhood faith, and thrives spiritually, while physically, he is suffering the physically ravaging consequences of male homosexual behavior, with multiple STDs.
He says this about the prevailing social “acceptance” and “support” for homosexuality: “It is insanity for adults to teach children that it is OK for a man to inseminate someone’s intestines.”
As to the “2000 year tradition” of the Church teaching against homosexual acts (and fornication and adultery), we are NOT merely observing a “tradition.” These are commandments of the God who created all creation.
You illustrate why I am annoyed with “traditionalists” using that word rather than emphasizing that the civil war in the Church is about truth.