On Religious Authority, Gay Marriage, and the Family

Elder Dallin Oaks’ latest bursts against gay marriage not only remind one he has spent a good part of his career as an Apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on a jeremiad to first define so-called “traditional” marriage and family, second to make them sacred, and third to impose them on a general public--far beyond the ranks of members of his faith. Though he has tried with his words and political activities to stop the flood of history on this issue, it seems he has failed. And, he fears the net result will be a decrease in the space allowed for religious leaders to influence publics.

While I can only imagine the anguish he must feel at the failure of his gargantuan efforts and the ways he must be cloaking it all in conviction and even notions of spiritual martyrdom, there are analytical issues here that interest me. To get there, let me add another religious leader and a sociologist to this essay.

Yesterday it was reported that Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle of the Philippines, one of three presidents of the Vatican’s Extraordinary Synod of Bishops convoked to consider issues of the family, professed in an address to the Catholic University of America to be shocked with the responses the Church obtained to its survey on the family as a lead up to the conference.

Any sociologist could have told the prelates there was a discrepancy between the ideas of the hierarchy of the Church and the beliefs and practices of ordinary Catholics on sex, sexuality, the family, marriage, divorce, nature and so on. This has not been a mystery.

What is shocking is the depth of failure Vatican’s efforts to define, control, and impose teaching on these issues have been during the last half of the twentieth century. While they have led to the formation of “orthodox” Catholic groups who can claim to be “true” Catholics as opposed to “cafeteria” Catholic or some such, they have not changed the direction of the ships of state, or the ideas of the vast majority of Catholics, other than very briefly in historical terms.

This situation both Mormon and Catholic requires a thinking through of the notion of a church. Now we come to the sociologist, Max Weber.

 Weber defines the church as something that, while having some relationship to the state (the country and its government) is not the same as it. For Weber, the main difference lies in the state having a monopoly on violence, while the church only has hierocratic control. What he means by this word is a control by ecclesiastical figures of access to the sacred and salvation. Weber takes pains to argue this control is primarily psychological.

But in the failure of Elder Oaks and his colleague in the trenches, Pope Benedict, we see some things that are important. The church is not the same as society (the country) and its controls have varying degrees of tightness as a result.

 We see this in Cardinal Tagle’s words. He sees the discrepancy between hierarchical teaching and the failure of the surveys to repeat that back to them as a “lack of understanding” on the part of the people. He feels that “The language by which the church proposes the teaching seems to be a language not accessible to people.”

He thinks the language of the prelates is a manifestation of the gospel and that to access the gospel, the Good News, people need to somehow exercise understanding. He claims this is “a real pastoral and evangelical concern for the Church: How do we present the Good News of the family to this generation, with its limitations, with its greatness, with its unique experiences? We should not be talking only to one another. The gospel of the family, the good news that is the family, should be presented to families where they are and how they are.”

In other words, the prelates manifest the gospel to the people who engage it by understanding it. This also seems to imply, putting it into practice.

This is a strange ideology of language and also a weak one of hierocratic power, since the understanding depends, in part, on the relationship of people to all the rest of society.

An earlier Catholic gathering, one in response to the Protestant Reformation, took a somewhat different argument. The Council of Trent noted the importance of building the gospel into the infrastructure of society, something beyond the ordinary day to day consciousness of people.

In this are two different notions of hierocratic power and control. The one attempts to build it into the background: the lay of the land and the society. The other is one of leaders speaking and people showing their adherence to hierocratic power by demonstrating “understanding” in their repeating the texts and arguments manifested by the elite as well as in their behavior, their lives.

Both hold a recognition that the church is not the same as society and that in that gap lies both the basis for their power and the need to elide the gap, in one way or another, so that they can be seen to exercise power.

Of course, here we are speaking about the elite, those who exercise hierocratic control. However there is another notion of religion, the sacrality that is common among the people and built into their ordinary lives and experiences.

Liberation theologians took note of this and saw in it salvific power, though that proved troublesome to Cardinal Ratzinger and two popes, Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict.

Elder Oaks also has trouble with the notion that God may be moving in ordinary people and ordinary lives. To his way of thought that is the space of the “World”, and hence of opposition. His authority seems built on the notion of speaking and it taking effect. He, of course, does not trust that completely. Like the post Council of Trent Catholic hierarchs, he and his colleagues, attempted to build their words of the Gospel into the infrastructure of society, its laws and practices, including notions of normal. He failed and now fears.

Religion and the church is a very complex reality. In this struggle over Gay marriage, the family, and gender, we find some intriguing analytical issues that should be more carefully observed in discussion about the power of religious leaders and of the nature of leadership itself.