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A Baseball Tour. And Hooters (concluded)

          The next day after the Cleveland game the baseball touring entourage were back on the bus for the longish trip to Baltimore. To break up the journey, the baseball movie Ed was shown. I will forgive you if you are not familiar with this movie, so I will summarize what I remember. “Deuce,” played by Matt LeBlanc, is a raw pitching prospect from a California farm. For some now forgotten, but I am sure entirely plausible reason, he rooms with a chimpanzee, who wields quite a good bat, on his minor league team. Surprise, surprise, Deuce and Ed become—get ready for it–“friends.” There is also a love interest, and this lovely lady has a kid or maybe two. On Deuce’s big day with major league scouts in attendance, he starts out disastrously, but—I don’t know why they weren’t in attendance earlier—the love interest, the adorable child or children, and, of course, Ed find seats in the park. Deuce becomes the pitcher that was always within him, blows away the other team, and gets promoted to the Los Angeles Dodgers. I am sure that this will shock you, but the movie got 0% from Rotten Tomatoes and was near the top (or is it the bottom) of the lists for the worst film of the year. Despite this, I thought that Ed was the Citizen Kane of chimpanzee-baseball-playing movies. On the other hand, the film may have made the six-hour trip even longer.

          Camden Yards in Baltimore at that time was a new ballpark that had gotten many raves, and I became one of the ravers. It was my favorite place to see a ballgame, and I loved the barbecue from Boog Powell’s place. We all sat together behind the right field foul (fair?) pole. Phil sought out the roving camera man who shot images of the fans to display on the jumbotron telling him that we were a special group who should be shown. I hope that my lasting fame does not depend on the few moments my face was available for all in the stadium to see. (For an essay about some of my media appearances, see post of January 18, 2018 Meet the Press – AJ’s Dad (ajsdad.blog).)

          The next morning we were off to the most anticipated stop for almost all—Yankee Stadium. The stadium was the most iconic park we were visiting, and few on our trip had even been to New York City. As we approached the Lincoln Tunnel for our entrance into midtown Manhattan, the tour guide started making announcements. We were staying at a hotel on Lexington Avenue, and the bus would have to double park on the left hand side of the street. We would have to get off and collect luggage on the street with traffic a few feet from us. We needed to be careful. I tuned out as he talked, but since he repeated himself several times, I began to realize that he was not just warning about the traffic. He was also indicating that New York City was not just dangerous from whizzing vehicles, but because this was New York, we could be mugged during our walk from the bus to the hotel lobby. There was disgust and fear in his voice as he repeated his refrain about the dangers of New York City. At first I was amused by this yahooism, but then it bothered me. I was about to go to the front of the bus to ask for the microphone to explain that I lived in this city. There was no more danger on Lexington Avenue than there had been in Cleveland or Baltimore and that New York was safer than most big American cities and that New Yorkers were helpful, friendly, smart, attractive, and many were knowledgeable about baseball although a disturbing number were Mets fans. Before I did that, a member of the group came up to me and said that he wanted to see the Empire State Building and could I tell him how to get there. I replied that I would take him there, and hearing that, others asked if they could join us. They were excited to be in New York and wanted to experience it, and I realized that not everyone from the other side of the Hudson had the same New York fear and disgust as the tour guide.

          After checking into the hotel and depositing luggage in our rooms, five or six met me at the front door, and long before I became a licensed New York City guide, I led my first tour. We went down Fifth Avenue so they could see St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the New York Public Library, and then went on to the Empire State Building. We went through the lobby but did not have time to ascend to the viewing platforms. Instead, we went a few blocks west and then north to go through Times Square. They, like many seeing New York for the first time, were wide-eyed and full of excited questions, which I did my best to answer trying, mostly successfully, not to make anything up. 

          The group left early for the game so that they could visit Monument Park, with statues and other memorials of great Yankees of the past, before the opening pitch. I had been there several times. I decided to rest and take my usual route to Yankee Stadium, the subway. When I got to our seats, I was pleased to see my fellow travelers still talking about the Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio images.

          The next day I parted ways with the tour. They were going to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. I had never been there, but it did not interest me to take the bus from there to Toronto only to have to catch a flight back to JFK. Instead, I chose to go to Pennsylvania to play in a parent-child tennis tournament. I might say that I felt that I should do this to satisfy the child, but in all likelihood, that child was not at all eager to play in it. The NBP did not like competition in general and doubles tennis in particular, but I felt that it was my parental duty. It’s also very conceivable that I was influenced by images of a long, long bus ride for the purpose of getting on a plane to get back to where I already was.

          I headed home with my memories one of which was my first, and so far only, trip to a Hooters. The trip had been in the hot season during a hot spell. Every place we went had above-normal temperatures. Baltimore was particularly brutal, and after the game, Phil and I headed off to our hotel, located in the recently “renovated” harbor district. The renovation had taken a distinctive part of the city and turned it into what looked like a mall that could be found in hundreds of other places. Phil said that he would like to get a beer before going to bed, and I agreed. He pointed out a Hooters not far from the hotel and said, “I’ve always wanted to go to a Hooters.” I did not know what to make of the statement. I had never wanted to go to one. I like women. I like looking at women, but Hooters to me was a place that demeaned women. Nevertheless, I agreed to go. The area may have been renovated, but few people were around, and the Hooters seemed remarkably desultory. It had few patrons when we entered. Phil was jovial; I was not at ease. If I had been there without a minister maybe I would have felt different, but it all seemed surreal to me. My discomfort increased when Phil, with a big grin, announced to everyone within earshot that he was a minister. On the other hand, the servers were indeed attractive.

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A Baseball Tour. And Hooters

          The next morning after the Toronto baseball game Phil and I and others boarded a bus for a four-or five-hour trip to Cleveland. If I had been traveling alone, I would have read for much of the trip, but that seemed rude sitting next to Phil, who did not seem to have any reading material. So I chatted with Phil some and then started to learn a bit about others on the excursion, all of whom, except for Phil and his companion (me), had paid for it. I was curious, but never asked anyone how much it cost.

The tour company was Canadian and there were a smattering of Canadians on board, but I felt that most of my companions represented aspects of an America where baseball was still the true national pastime. A young couple were on their honeymoon shortly before he was to start a new job as a baseball coach at a small college in upstate New York. Nice people, but I could never get him to explain how he threw a slider versus a curve ball. A young, single woman, who always seemed to have her energy switch on, was from one of the Dakotas (Ok. It shows some sort of prejudice in me that I can’t keep the two apart in my mind.) She had never been to the eastern part of the U.S., where the trip was going to take place, and although she regularly attended minor league games in her hometown in one of the Dakotas (Again: I can’t keep them straight and am still somewhat surprised there are two of them), and before the previous night, she had never attended a major league game. Two decades older and quieter was another woman traveling by herself who, too, had never before been to a major league game, but she was an avid college baseball fan, especially of Louisiana State, whose games she regularly attended near her home. My favorites were a forty-year-old man traveling with his father. They were extremely knowledgeable baseball fans from Dallas and were excited about seeing baseball parks they had only viewed on television. I especially liked what I saw as a deep bond between. I thought that on some level this was as American as it gets—a father and son at baseball games discussing the pitchers and whether there should be a sacrifice and moaning over an error.

          The Toronto-Cleveland trip took us past exits for Niagara Falls, but this was not the usual sightseeing trip. We motored on until we got to the hotel not far from what was then called Jacobs Field. In the early afternoon, we walked to The Jake for a guided tour. I was interested in this because this park was then at the forefront of a change in baseball architecture. For a generation newly-built stadiums were large with little character, but Jacobs Field was smaller, more intimate with quirks to give it a personality. The Indians had been regularly selling out the stadium, partly because Cleveland was fielding good teams but also because the park was a fun place to watch a game. As an employee of the club showed us around under the stands, I also learned something about home field advantage. We were shown subterranean batting cages and video monitors for players to practice swings and study pitchers and hitters. I don’t know whether baseball rules required that such home team facilities—or their equivalent–be made available to the visiting team, but if so, equality had its limits. So, e.g., just because the Indians had air conditioning in their practice area, that did not mean that the “equivalent” one had to be cooled. On a mid-summer afternoon, the visitors’ under-the-stands batting cage was stifling.

          We continued on to the Indians dugout, but we were not going to go farther. The head groundskeeper stood on the top step that led to the playing field. He explained that The Jake’s infield was composed of some very, very, VERY special dirt. It was not the sandy color of other ballparks, but a deep black that reminded me of the bottomland soil of the Mississippi delta (or what I imagined that delta soil to look like because I had never actually seen it). I was not paying much attention as the groundskeeper told us–at length–of the dirt’s special qualities, where it came from, and what painstaking care he took to maintain it. I was just curious to touch it, and perhaps put a tiny, tiny sample in my pocket. I doubt that he could read my mind; I am sure it was a standing rule. He made it clear–at length–that we were not going to put one single solitary step on to that field, and we were not going to get to the dugout’s top step to even touch it. Overwhelmingly disappointed, I mostly tuned him out, but I believe that he mentioned–at length–the Cuyahoga County Jail.

          We strolled back to the hotel, but I have no memory of what we did before we headed back to the park for the game. Our group’s tickets were scattered, and Phil and I had seats in the lower deck down the right field line. Baseball games, with long pauses between intermittent actions, almost compel conversation with those seated nearby, and we started talking to some young men in the row behind us. Walking to our seats I had noticed that The Jake sold a wide choice of beers, and these new friends were sampling many of them. I don’t remember anything about the game itself, which is true for many games that I have seen, but I do remember that the liquid refreshments made our recently acquired companions increasingly loquacious. They insisted time and again that we go with them to their favorite bar in the neighborhood after the game, and we agreed.

          The establishment was crowded and smoke-filled with a pool table and dart boards, but my eyes were drawn to framed photographs around the place. I would have expected them to be of Cleveland Indian players of the past and present—Tris Speaker, Bob Feller, and the like. Or because Cleveland once had a proud professional football history, the walls would have pictures of Jim Brown and Otto Graham. Instead, what I saw were Paul Hornung, Bart Starr, Ray Nitschke, and other Green Bay Packers of the Vince Lombardi era, fierce rivals of the Cleveland Browns, who lost crucial games to the Packers. I turned to the new friend and asked why the bar had pictures of famous Packers. He replied with the simultaneously obvious and mystifying answer, “This is a Packer bar.”

(concluded August 4)

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A Baseball Tour. And Hooters

          The only time I have gone to a Hooters was at the insistence of a minister.

          Phil and I had gone to grade school and high school together. We were not close friends, but we were friendly and traveled in the same circles. During the summers of college years, we were teammates on a successful slow-pitch softball team. I played various infield positions, and he was at first base. His play aggravated me. He loved to stretch as far as he could for a throw, but he would stretch before the ball was tossed not to meet the throw giving the infielder (meaning me) a smaller target than he should have. (In those days, we had little or no instruction in proper techniques in any sport we played.) I had a few throwing errors (very few I still maintain, and I doubt that the record books still exist to prove me wrong) that a proper first baseman would have easily caught.

          After that team disbanded, I don’t remember seeing Phil until I settled in New York City. I received a call from him and learned that he was working in an administrative position at a prestigious women’s college—I think it was Smith. He was coming to New York for a weekend, and we attended a college basketball game at Madison Square Garden, a venue he had always wanted to see. Over the next year, I saw him a few more times, but then we lost touch again.

          Two decades later, he called. He had become an ordained minister in the Reformed Church, known in my youth as the Dutch Reformed Church. I had not the least inkling that he was religious, and although he had a Dutch surname, I was a bit surprised by his career. His church was in New York City on the Queens-Brooklyn border, an area whose Dutch roots went back to the seventeenth century.

          We got together a few times after his arrival, including a Thanksgiving dinner as he was still settling into his new location, but soon his time became taken up by his job, and we drifted apart again. A few years later, he called me. He had just won a contest, and the prize was a trip for two to tour major league ballparks. Phil went on to say that he had two brothers, and he did not want to choose between them. He also did not want to make a choice among his parishioners. Then he embarrassedly added that the contest had been sponsored by a major brewing company, and he did not want his church to know that. Would I go with him? “After all,” he added, “you and I played a lot of sports together.” And so Phil and I went visiting baseball stadiums.

          I flew to Toronto, where Phil had proceeded me. On the trip, Phil and I shared hotel rooms, and this one overlooked Lake Ontario. (Later on, an old girlfriend, having heard about this trip, asked if I was concerned about sharing a room with Phil. She and others thought Phil, who never married, was gay. Phil and she had dated. She said that their experiences were pleasant enough, but that “nothing ever happened. He never tried. He was always a ‘gentleman.’”) I don’t remember much about what Phil and I did before going to the ballgame except that I discovered I had a previously unknown fear. We went to the top of the tower next to the stadium, which afforded lovely views, but part of the floor was made of glass. I had been to the observation deck of the World Trade Tower several times where there were seats right next to glass from which I could look out not only at New York but could almost look straight down to the street a hundred stories below. I always enjoyed it and had noticed with arrogant amusement that a fear kept many people away from the windows. But in the Toronto observatory, I found that while I could look out at the city, when I stood on the glass floor and looked straight down the forty stories or so, my heart started an unknown rhythm, my breathing became irregular, and my stomach clenched. I had to move to the more normal floor. I, of course, glanced around hoping that no one had noticed my wussy characteristics.

          I remember little of the Toronto baseball game, as I remember little of any of the games I saw on the trip. I have gone to many baseball games and seen on TV and heard on the radio many more. I appreciate the skill and strategy involved, but, like others, I find baseball intrinsically boring. I have to be a fan of a particular team playing to get immersed into a game. I didn’t care about the Toronto game and don’t even remember who the Blue Jays played. Even so, it is magical to go into a major league stadium, and I enjoyed myself. As I do at almost all baseball games I attend, I walked around the stadium to watch the game from different viewpoints to notice how the game seems to slightly change from varying vantage points, but I also always notice what food is for sale. This trip was at a time when concession choices, at least at the New York ballparks, had not expanded, but Toronto was on the forefront of the change. It had a much broader array of beers than at Yankee stadium, and to my surprise, it offered one of my favorite foods—funnel cake—which I had only had at carnivals and street fairs. I don’t go to ball games expecting to eat healthily, but I did not expect to have artisanal beer with fried, powder-sugared dough. I can’t say that I would recommend this combo, but it was memorable. And I loved it.

(continued August 2)

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Anti-Vaxxers Should Know this History

          The disease did not originate there, but a preventive measure began in China. The measure spread around the world. Knowledge of it came to North America, where the disease had helped Europeans dominate the land, on a slave ship. The preventive inoculations led to claims of violations of personal and religious liberty. A vaccine was developed, and states began to require its use. Courts were asked to find a law requiring vaccinations unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court upheld the statutes. The vaccine was so successful that widespread inoculations have led to the elimination of the disease. This particular virus is no longer the scourge that killed hundreds of millions.

We don’t know precisely how or when smallpox developed, but we have evidence of it five thousand years ago in Egypt. It endured through the millennia. By the fifteenth century, it had spread to all parts of the globe except the Americas. That changed when Europeans brought it to what they thought of as the new world. Native populations, who had no immunity to the disease, succumbed at perhaps a 90% rate, making it easier for the Spanish and English to colonize what had once been extensively populated lands. Smallpox persisted. Millions of cases still occurred in the second half of the last century.

          People tried to prevent the disease, and by the sixteenth century, China was using an immunization method against smallpox in which powdered smallpox scabs were inserted into scratches made in the skin of the healthy. When this went well, the recipient developed only a mild form of the disease, but one that gave the person lifetime immunity. This inoculation method called variolation (Variola is the virus that causes smallpox) spread to the Middle East and Africa.

          Puritan Minister Cotton Mather learned this technique from his West African slave Onesimus and used it in the 1720s when Boston suffered a smallpox outbreak. Objections to the inoculations were strong. Although Cotton Mather was hardly lax on the religiosity front, the method was said to be ungodly because it was not mentioned in the Bible. Furthermore, it affronted God’s right to determine who was to die and how and when they should meet God. Others raised the non-religious objection that using the product of a disease to prevent a disease did not make sense. But the empirical data overwhelmingly showed that variolation prevented deaths from smallpox. The practice spread in colonial America, and in 1775 George Washington required the variolation of the Continental Army. It soon gained general acceptance in the larger cities and towns of the United States.

          The practice, however, did have dangers. While the inoculation recipient usually got only a mild case of the disease, occasionally it was severe, and deaths occurred. Near the end of the eighteenth century many recognized that a cowpox infection (which is related to, but much less virulent than, smallpox) seemed to protect against the more serious infection. Dr. Edward Jenner vaccinated (the terms vaccine and vaccination are derived from the name of the cowpox virus, variolae vaccinae) people with the cowpox virus and then later showed that this made the recipient immune to smallpox. Jenner is credited with creating a smallpox vaccine–the first vaccine ever. In doing so he is thought to have saved more lives than anyone else in history.

          Even with the vaccine, however, smallpox continued not just in backwaters or “primitive” areas of the world, but also in the United States. In 1827, Boston was the first American city to require school children to be vaccinated against smallpox, and other states and cities adopted the policy and added similar requirements as other vaccines were developed. Over a century after Jenner’s discovery, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in response to an outbreak and pursuant to a state law, required adults to get smallpox vaccinations.

          Henning Jacobson said that forcing him to be vaccinated violated the liberty guaranteed by the Constitution and that no one should be subjected to the law if they objected to vaccination no matter what their reason. The issue made its way to the United States Supreme Court. In 1905 Jacobson v. Massachusetts held that individual liberty could be restrained by reasonable laws for the safety of the general public and that “real liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own liberty, whether in respect of his person or property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others.” Jacobson had offered proof that some medical authorities contended that vaccinations would not stop the spread of smallpox and would cause other diseases and adverse consequences. The Court noted, however, that many other medical authorities held contrary opinions. The Court concluded that legislatures—not the courts– had the authority to decide how to protect the public. The mandatory vaccination requirement for adults was upheld.

          In 1922 the Supreme Court extended its Jacobson ruling. Zucht v. King upheld the San Antonio, Texas, school district’s rule that excluded children from both public and private schools if they did not have a smallpox vaccination. Since then lower courts have found many different vaccination requirements to be constitutional.

          Smallpox vaccinations, of course, have been a huge success. Intensive containment and vaccination efforts in the second half of the last century led to the worldwide eradication of the disease. The last case of it was in 1978.

          Since the development of the smallpox vaccine, many other vaccines have prevented much human misery, but in spite of what the Supreme Court held more than a century ago, many claim they have a constitutional right to refuse a mandated vaccination. The law and the Constitution are not on their side. They will succeed only if the present Court will be activist enough to overturn the settled precedents and find that individuals have a right never before found, a right to place others in peril. If so, society will suffer. And American life expectancy, which took the largest nosedive since World War II under Trump, the Has Been Guy, will drop further. Such a finding will, in fact, MALG–Make America Less Great.

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First Sentences

The steamer, Sestri Levante, stood high above the dockside and the watery sleet, carried on the wind blustering down from the Black Sea, had drenched even the small shelter deck.” Eric Ambler, Journey into Fear.

“Ed Greenfield collected people the way other men collect comic books or old stamps or vintage cards.” Jill Lepore, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future.

“Whatever Mum’s saying’s drowned out by the grimy roar of the bus pulling away, revealing a pub called The Fox and Hounds.” David Mitchell, Slade House.

“We know so little of the worlds beneath our feet.” Robert Macfarlane, Underworld: A Deep Time Journey.

“Emma sat on the shingle bank and watched the kids on the beach below build a bonfire.” Ann Cleves, Wild Fire.

“On the morning of October 1, 1907, the hotel bellmen and front desk staff were scurrying about the marble lobby, smoothing their uniforms and making final preparations.” Julie Satow, The Plaza: The Secret Life of America’s Most Famous Hotel.

“In the spring of 1926 I resigned from my job.” Thornton Wilder, Theophilus North.

“His upper jawbone was massive—a long, curved bone with nine tiny holes meant to hold his teeth.” Kate Winkler Dawson, American Sherlock: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI.

“Castle, ever since he had joined the firm as a young recruit more than thirty years ago, had taken his lunch in a public house behind St. James’s Street, not far from the office.” Graham Greene, The Human Factor.

“By the time Charity had heard about the young woman, it was too late to help.” Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story.

“He lay, flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees.” Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls. (The last line of the novel: “He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest.”)

“John F. Kennedy was a man with a keenly developed sense of humor.” Bill Adler (ed.), The Kennedy Wit.

“The night Effia Otcher was born into the musky heat of Fanteland, a fire raged through the woods just outside her father’s compound.” Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing.

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Snippets

When has the Senate filibuster aided non-conservatives?

You have some new bodily lump, pain, or discoloration. Do you feel better if you learn that this condition has a name?

John is the ranger, as his father was before him, for the community’s 4,000 mostly wooded acres. Recently I have worked with John on a conservation easement for a portion of this land. My admiration for him has grown. He seems to know every inch of the land, and his conversation is filled with landmarks such as Turkey Hill field, the path going from Fox Run Creek to Porcupine Parade, the Hardy’s 1930s hunting grounds, and much more. I nod as if I understand. His devotion to the conservation of the lands is palpable, and he has been invaluable as I and others have worked on the easement. I have known who John was for a long time, but only because of this recent project have I felt comfortable in trying to get to know him a bit better. He is about to retire, and I asked him what he was going to do. He was vague as I might have expected from someone who retains something of a mountain man from yesteryear. Thinking that perhaps this might be an activity in his retirement, I asked him if he hunted. He replied, “I used to hunt with a lot of the old-timers here,” and rattled off a host of names I did not know. He continued, “I haven’t hunted in six or seven years.” And then, almost blushing and with a shy tone, he said, “I have gotten soft. I’ve killed enough deer in my life.”

“The key to success was having parents who had succeeded.” Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind.

Old joke: Southern Baptists do not believe in making love standing up. It could lead to dancing.

The Olympics are upon us. Margaret MacMillan in War: How Conflict Shaped Us (2020) points out that the modern Olympics have taken on many attributes of war. The competitions are by nations, award medals, incorporate national anthems, and have teams in uniforms behind national flags.

Growing up and well into adulthood, I could stand alongside a Wisconsin farm fence, moo, and cows would amble to me. The spouse, once again doubting me on the important stuff, thought I made this ability up until I demonstrated it to her several times. But then after a considerable absence from Wisconsin I found that I was out of practice or the voice timbre had changed, I had lost my cow-calling trait. I have had many sad moments in life.

I watched videos of the invasion of the Capitol on January 6 and was reminded of the words of David Hume: “Everyone has observed how much more dogs are animated when they hunt in a pack, than when they pursue their game apart. We might, perhaps, be at a loss to explain this phenomenon, if we had not experience of a similar in ourselves.”

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Baptists-American, South, and Right (concluded)

          In the days when I attended the church, Baptists seldom mentioned abortion. That may have been because then there was little public discussion of it. I have learned since then that there were many private conversations about the practice because many people sought one. The lack of a Baptist discussion, however, may also have been due to Baptists’ reverence for the Bible and for liberty of conscience. The last time I checked a biblical concordance—admittedly quite some time ago, but surely this has not changed—the word “abortion” was not in it. One has to interpret or extrapolate from verses and contexts to conclude that the Bible condemns abortion. Biblical passages can be construed to say that life begins at conception, but what “conception” meant in biblical times is not clear. I doubt to ancient Israelites it meant a sperm fertilizing an egg. Other biblical passages, however, indicate life begins with the first breath. But even though the Bible does not explicitly, and may not implicitly, condemn abortion, it is also hard to suggest that it supports the view that abortion should be the choice of the woman and her doctor.

          A Baptist, however, might extrapolate from Baptist principles and conclude that because there are ambiguities in the Bible on the matter, whether an abortion is sinful must remain a matter of conscience. The opinion would hold that the state cannot dictate what is sinful and should not dictate that a woman cannot have an abortion. In fact, when some states began to change their absolute proscriptions of abortion before Roe v. Wade in 1973, many Southern Baptist leaders held quite liberal views on the subject. For example, a poll in 1970 found that 70% of Southern Baptist ministers supported abortion to protect the mental or physical health of the pregnant woman; 64% supported abortion in cases of fetal deformity; and 71% supported abortion in cases of rape. The next year the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution stating, “We call upon Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such circumstances as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”

          This liberal viewpoint, however, soon vanished. Since Roe v. Wade, the Southern Baptist Convention has passed many resolutions about abortion that are much different from the 1971 pronouncement. On the thirtieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Convention stated that that Supreme Court “decision was an act of injustice against unborn children as well as against vulnerable women in crisis pregnancy situations. . . . We lament and renounce statements and actions by previous conventions and previous denominational leadership that offered support to the abortion culture. . . . We pray and work for the repeal of the Roe v. Wade decision and for the day when the action of abortion will be not only illegal but unthinkable.”

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, then, Southern Baptist shifted away from dogmatic opposition to school prayer and aid to religious school and towards dogmatic opposition to abortion.

And now comes Critical Race Theory, a slogan that appeals to the emotions more than a meaningful phrase that can be rationally discussed. (See posts of June 23, 2021 Advice About Critical Race Theory – AJ’s Dad (ajsdad.blog) and May 10, 2021 From “Socialism” to “Diversity” – AJ’s Dad (ajsdad.blog)) I gather that Southern Baptists are not agreed about CRT, but many maintain that it is anti-Christian. I confess to not fully understanding why. I think all agree that it is neither condemned nor praised in the Bible, but somehow, to some, it promotes a worldview that is “unbiblical.” Perhaps I have not applied myself enough, or perhaps I don’t care enough, but I don’t understand this worldview stuff. I do note, however, that income inequality, incarceration of children at our southern border, a low minimum wage, or the blind eye turned toward sexual abuse apparently do not promote an unbiblical worldview.

Perhaps the changed views about public aid to non-public schools, abortion, and critical race theory are religious ones, but they are assuredly different from those about adult baptism or transubstantiation (I think it was Mark Twain who said, “Do I believe in adult baptism? Yes. I have even seen it.”) They are all opinions that affect how people vote, not how people worship. Southern Baptists, for example, now want their elected officials to be strongly against abortion, generally friendly to public support of religion (or at least some forms of religion), and against the promotion of the concept of structural racism. This certainly has had importance for the country since the Southern Baptists, even with a membership decline, remain the country’s largest Protestant denomination.

Over the last generation or two Southern Baptists have moved even further to the political right than they were before. Theology does not define them as much as their rightist political views, which often includes a commitment to gun rights and exemptions from laws because of religious beliefs.

Baptists and other evangelicals, have become a major political force. Baptists are at the core of the modern conservative movement even though these Baptists no longer seek the traditional principles that defined Baptism. They now advocate the intermingling of church and state. Toleration of private consciences no longer seems a defining principle.

Nevertheless, when I see one of those white frame New England Baptist churches, I still hope that their congregants believe that religion should not be founded on ritual or coercion or enforced rules. Instead, it should be founded on the consciences of individuals, persuasion, reason, and toleration. I want those bedrock principles of Baptism, and of the country, to remain.

 

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Baptists–American, South, and Right (continued)

When I attended the Baptist church, their views of separation of church and state, liberty of conscience, equality, and religious toleration espoused by Roger Williams were strong. Tolerant Baptists may not have been publicly militant about much, but they were militant about the separation of church and state.

  It was easy to predict how American Baptists would react in those days to some prominent church-state issues: prayers in public schools and government aid to parochial schools. For American Baptists the answers were a simple: no and no.

The public prayers profaned God. If one prayed because the state required it, then the prayer came not out of devotion to God, but because of devotion to or fear of the state. This made such a prayer unholy and defiled true religion. If the prayer was uttered, not out of devotion and faith, but merely out of a habit, like saying “Good morning, Miss Ketter” to the teacher each morning, the prayer was still sinful.

          We American Baptists thought that the United States Supreme Court got it right when it held in 1962 that a recitation of a state-written prayer in the public schools violated the First Amendment, which prohibits an establishment of religion. Furor around the country, however, resulted. Godlessness would prevail. Communists would ascend. At the time I found this panic amusing. My public school did not have prayers. I believe they were outlawed in Wisconsin, as they were in many–perhaps most–other states. I listened to the rants about the Court’s decision and looked about me and could not figure out what they were going on about. Wisconsin, to my keen eye that was on a vigilant lookout for such things and disappointed when I could not find them, did not seem to be more a hotbed of iniquity than the places that required public prayers. It was clear to me that there was no connection between morality or godly behavior and the recitation of prayers in public schools.

          American Baptists were not alone in accepting the Supreme Court ruling banning school prayers. Southern Baptists agreed. The Southern Baptists came into being in the1840s when they segregated themselves from other Baptists. It should come as no great surprise that race was the dividing factor. The specific issue, as I understand it, was whether slave holders could be missionaries.

But even with the split, Southern Baptists maintained the same doctrinal positions as other Baptists. They believed that the Bible only authorized two sacraments—adult baptism by immersion and the Lord’s Supper. They also were without a hierarchy. There was a Southern Baptist Convention to which churches sent “messengers,” but the pronouncements of the SBC did not bind anyone; they were just recommendations or urgings or food for thought. As with American Baptists, the church was congregation-based with the congregants selecting a minister. And Southern Baptists also believed in the strict separation of church and state. Shortly after the Supreme Court held that public school prayers were unconstitutional, the President of the Southern Baptist Convention, praising the decision, said that it was “one of the most powerful blows in our lifetime, maybe since the Constitution was adopted, for the freedom of religion in our lifetime.”

          Soon thereafter, however, Southern Baptists started changing their positions. In 1982, the SBC supported a constitutional amendment that would have allowed individual or group prayer in public schools as long as the government did not require participation in the prayer. (This was a curious proposal since individual prayer was never outlawed, and, of course, silent prayer could not be. Surely, I am not the only one who reached out to the Almighty before a calculus exam. A spoken prayer might run into troubles with school authorities, not because it was a prayer, but because any vocalization in a classroom might be disruptive to school order. Part of the power of prayer, it seems to me, is that at least silent ones can be said anywhere, including in government facilities.)

When I was young, American Baptists opposed government aid to parochial schools on the grounds that it forced people, through taxes, to support religious practices, and no one should be forced—especially through government-imposed taxes–to support religion. Southern Baptists also opposed government aid to religious schools. Thus, in 1971, when a voucher system was proposed to allow public money to go to parochial schools, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution that said, “We reaffirm our belief that the use of public funds for education in church-controlled schools, regardless of the manner in which these funds are channeled to church schools, is contrary to the principle of religious liberty.” The Convention went on to “reaffirm its commitment to our system of public education.”

          But times change, and, apparently, so do religious principles. That adamant opposition to state support for parochial schools has shifted. The Convention passed a resolution in 2014 entitled “On the Importance of Christ-Centered Education.” The SBC now encourages lawmakers to enact policies and laws that maximize “parental choice.” It goes on to say, “We affirm and encourage support for existing Christ-centered K-12 schools as they engage in Kingdom work.”

          What, you might ask, accounts for this 360-degree shift? Although religiously tolerant, Baptists were quite opposed to Roman Catholics, who were not seen as real followers of Christ. (A Sunday School teacher of mine once announced that the United States had three major religions: Christians, Jews, and Catholics.) A generation or two ago, the term “parochial schools” was often seen as a coded term for “Catholic schools,” even though other denominations also had religious schools. (The father and a nephew went to Lutheran schools.) The adamant opposition for aid to parochial schools that then existed might have sprung from opposition to Catholicism, but, in fact, the position was consistent with long-held Baptist views that go back to Roger Williams.

          So, what changed? A generation or two ago, Baptists had few K-12 schools. (A fair number of colleges and universities have Baptist roots, including, for example, Wake Forest and the University of Chicago.) However, then came the school desegregation movement. Even though the Supreme Court outlawed segregated public schools in 1954, it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that meaningful desegregation got underway. And, surprise, surprise, Christian Academies started springing up in places–coincidentally, I am sure—where opposition to desegregation was strongest. Non-Catholic Christian Schools doubled their enrollment between 1961 and 1971. And while there were few Baptist K-12 schools before Brown v. Board of Education, they became more numerous just at the time when public schools were being desegregated.

          Many of the Christian Academies were originally unabashedly segregated. We tend to forget all the preaching that said the separation of the races was commanded by the Bible, and Brown did not apply to private schools. These schools, however, could get back-door government help in the tax code. In the 1960s, donations to the schools were tax-exempt, but that changed through a series of Supreme Court decisions into the 1970s that declared racially discriminatory private schools ineligible for the tax break.

          After these legal decisions, most, if not all, of the schools no longer claimed to be all-white, but not many became truly integrated. The schools increasingly said they existed to fight secular humanism and to oppose liberalism. That message and the costs of the schools attracted few non-whites. The schools no longer touted segregation, but that remained the implicit draw of many of them.

          Funding of a Christian Academy education, however, is difficult for many who desire it no matter what their reasons. Therefore, many of those seeking a religious education today support school vouchers. These vouchers are public moneys given to the parents for the education of their schoolchildren. Thus, parents, not the state, decide which school will get the government money. Conservative economists promoted the vouchers in the 1950s as a way to improve education. The claim was that allowing free market principles, under the slogan “school choice,” would work wonders for educational quality, but the vouchers raise questions about the separation of church and state.

          Because the voucher can be used at any private school including parochial ones, public money is used for religious purposes. The Supreme Court had earlier made it clear that governments could not directly aid religious schools, but vouchers, by giving parents control over the state money, is an indirect aid to religious schools. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court in 2002 held that a school voucher did not violate the federal Constitution.

          In 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention, espousing its traditional religious view, took a strong stand against vouchers as an improper state aid of religion. The Supreme Court, of course, cannot change the religious principles of Baptists, but since that strong stand against vouchers, many Baptist schools have been created, and, for whatever the reason, that adamant opposition by Southern Baptists has disappeared. Apparently, theological opposition to public moneys for religious schools dissolves when those schools might be Baptist institutions.

(concluded June 21)

Posted on by rjonakait

Baptists–American, South, and Right

          The Southern Baptist Convention gathered last month. It got a good bit of media attention because controversies are raging within the group over sex and race—volatile topics to say the least. The issues concern how the Baptists have handled sex abuse claims within its ranks and over the presentation of racial issues, particularly Critical Race Theory. A third issue–“sermongate”–has emerged over the “borrowing” without attribution by one prominent Southern Baptist minister of the sermons of other religious leaders.

The election of the head of the SBC was fiercely fought between a candidate labeled as conservative and another called a moderate with the moderate winning. “Moderate,” however, should be viewed in the context of current Southern Baptists. Elsewhere he might be seen as an extreme conservative. The controversies are especially important because Southern Baptist Churches have been losing parishioners, especially young adults. Southern Baptists are also concerned about waning political influence in a time when political power might mean choosing between conscience, religious principles, and alliance with Donald Trump, a person not well known for his conscience or religiosity.

Southern Baptists are an important institution because they are the largest American Protestant denomination, but I am especially interested in them because I was raised a Baptist. My family’s strain was that of the American Baptist Convention, which now has the name American Baptist Churches. (Earlier it was Northern Baptists.) There are many different versions of Baptists, but all practice adult, not infantile (ok, infant) baptism, and baptism not by merely the sprinkling of water but by full immersion of the believer.

          Baptists practice adult baptism by immersion because of the Bible. The Bible is divinely inspired, Baptists believe, and the ultimate authority for leading a Christian life. Baptists find no scriptural support for infant baptism. The biblical baptisms of Jesus by John the Baptist and one performed by Phillip were of adults, and there is nothing to indicate that John the Baptist’s other baptisms were not also of adults.

          According to Baptists infant baptism is a man-made ritual, and it is not Christian to use man’s rituals over those of the Bible. And while it takes some extrapolation to conclude that immersion is required, the Bible does say that Jesus and others came out of the water. Other passages also seem to support that the biblical baptism was by dunking, including the verse–I think it is in one of the Romans–that says baptism symbolizes life, death, and resurrection. Sprinkling or the thumb’s spreading of water on a forehead doesn’t really seem to be a good symbol of that.

          Baptists maintained that the only biblically-based rituals were adult baptism and the Lord’s Supper. So on the first Sunday of every month we had communion. Little cubes of Wonder Bread and shot glasses of Welch’s Grape Juice were passed around. (As frugal as the church and its congregants were, it might not have been Welch’s, but an off brand.) I liked communion, but it raised some of my first doubts. I was told to take the Bible literally, but our church also commanded teetotaling. When I asked why communion served no wine, I was told that when the Bible said “wine,” it meant grape juice. Hmmm, I thought to myself.

          Adult baptism and communion and the Bible. Any other ritual or source comes from man and not God. No genuflecting. No stations of the cross. No Book of Common Prayer. No required kneeling. No incense. No icons. No required head covering. No rosary. No “mandatory” church attendance. No prayers other than to the Trinity. No saints. (It still bothers me to hear “The Gospel According to St. Mark.” No, it is the Gospel according to Mark.)

          Baptists are not only separated from other denominations by the lack of ritual but also by the absence of an ecclesiastical hierarchy. The only churches Jesus and his apostles recognized were no larger than a congregation, and Baptists maintain that is what the Christian church should still be. Nothing is above an individual church. No one imposes a minister, priest, or vicar on a Baptist church; the congregation selects its leader. No bishops; no presbytery. Each congregation is supreme.

          American Baptists did not have saints, but there was a theological progenitor—Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island after he was “asked” to leave Puritan Massachusetts. He established the first American Baptist church in Providence. Williams should be considered one of our most important Founding Fathers, but he seems to be almost unknown today. When I used to walk by the Roger Williams Hotel on Madison and 31st Street in Manhattan, I wondered how many of my fellow passersby had any idea who Roger Williams was. The hotel was built on land leased from the neighboring Baptist church, and, I once heard, was owned by the American Baptist Church. Times change. The hotel was sold, and now has what seems like a brand-tested name, The Roger.

          Williams was a remarkable man. Unlike many of his American contemporaries of the early seventeenth century, he treated the Indians with respect maintaining that the Native’s land had to be purchased not just seized for the English to have lawful title to it. He produced a primer of the complex Algonquian language. (Bill Bryson in Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language states that this work “is a feat of scholarship deserving of far wider fame.”) But Williams should be better known because so much of his thought, expressed in his voluminous writings, broke from conventional thinking and was the foundation for many of the bedrock principles of this country—sovereignty in the people, equality of people, liberty of individual conscience, and separation of church and state.

          Williams made the radical argument for his time that governments were not divinely inspired. Nowhere in the Bible does Jesus pick a government or endow rulers with authority. Instead, Williams contended, sovereignty is with the people. Just as people come together and join with God to form a church and then pick its ministers, the people come together to form a government and grant authority to its rulers.

          This led Williams to reject the common notion of his time that the state must enforce God’s laws to prevent religious errors. Instead, since the state gets its powers from the people, government is invested with all the errors of the people. Any attempt to enforce religion by the state will always be error-filled and will, in essence, be an attempt for people to have sovereignty over God. Thus, long before Jefferson, Williams called for a “wall of separation” between church and state, a wall he called for to protect not the state, but religion. He believed that religion always suffered when it was protected or required by the state. For Williams, the church is sheltered by spiritual weapons and harmed by government efforts to enforce religion. God makes Christians, not a government. When religion and politics are mixed, the result is not true religion, but politics.

          For Williams, the progenitor of American Baptists, religion was a personal thing. A person’s conscience is God’s line of communication to the individual. Because humans are imperfect, they might be wrong about what conscience demands, but since conscience comes from God, it is a sin for a person to act contrary to her conscience, even a mistaken one. If I (or the state or a religious leader) forces you to act in opposition to your conscience, I am forcing you to sin, and by forcing you to sin, I am sinning.

          In other words, all must be allowed to worship as their conscience dictates, and no one should be required to worship or support religious practices against his conscience. Jesus did not force or coerce anyone to God. Man, then, can’t force anyone to faith.

          A mistaken conscience can be corrected only by persuasion, not by force or coercion. An appeal to conscience, for Williams, required the related God-given ability of reasoning. Conscience demands proof, and proof comes from intellectual rigor. Proof has to satisfy reason or be from the Bible or from a writing that convinces an individual that it was divinely inspired. Thus, Williams rejected the Quakers who were led to Christ by a movement of an ill-defined spirit within the person. Such movement did not, could not, satisfy reason.

          These views led not just to liberty of conscience and toleration on religious matters, but on all subjects. And since Jesus did not indicate that one soul mattered more than another and that all individual consciences should be respected, it meant that society should treat all equally.

          (I have refreshed my understanding of Williams’s life and teachings primarily from Roger Williams: The Church and the State by Edmund S. Morgan; Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty by John M. Barry; and Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick.)

These Baptist precepts have led me both to my religious sensibilities as a youth and to my political thinking as an adult. The religious and the American neatly coincided. Just as people come together with God to form a church, the people of America came together to form a country—“We the People . . .” Sovereignty does not belong to the authorities, but starts with ordinary individuals. Both the church and America are founded on freedom of conscience. Religion cannot be imposed, forced, or coerced; it is the result of individual reason and persuasion. In America, a political view cannot be imposed, forced, or coerced; it is the result of an individual decision.

(continued June 19)

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Covid-19. No Big Deal?

Most weeknights I watch the man with the smirk and rolling eyes but only for a few minutes. I can’t stand Tucker Carlson for longer than that.

The other night he was trying to convince us that the Covid-19 concerns have been overblown. His aha information was that the median age of a Covid death in this country is eighty. “That is higher than the average life expectancy in the United States.” A few moments later I turned off the TV and resumed reading Celestial Bodies, the selection for next week’s book group, but Carlson’s information stuck in my head.

So I did some checking the next day. A chart on the CDC website breaks down deaths involving Covid-19 by sex and age groups in 2020 and 2021. It does not provide the median age of the more than 600,000 deaths, but eighty, if not the official median age, is close to it.

Carlson was also right that eighty is more than the average life expectancy in this country. That number at birth is about seventy-eight years. (Carlson did not point out that life expectancy has recently declined for several reasons including the number of Covid deaths.*)

Finding out that his figures were right, however, did not stop me from thinking that the comparison between life expectancy at birth and the median Covid death age is bizarre. Perhaps Carlson thinks that if you get to be eighty, you are living on borrowed time and death is no big deal, or perhaps he thinks you must already be dead. However, life expectancy increases each year a person survives. At age 75, for example, the average life expectancy is not 78, but about 84. At age 80, it’s about 88. He wanted us to conclude from his statistics that the concern over Covid has been overblown, but is it no big deal that hundreds of thousands who died of Covid were deprived of seven or eight more years of life? If you are older than 78 and dying of Covid, Carlson would suggest that you shouldn’t be upset because you have already exceeded the average life expectancy. Perhaps Carlson thinks we also overreact to cancer and heart attacks because they disproportionately affect older people.

Carlson’s data, of course, also mean that half of the over 600,000 Covid deaths occurred to people younger than eighty. It is also the case that more than 120,000 deaths were of people under sixty-five. Starting at age forty, more than ten percent of deaths from all causes during the pandemic involved Covid, and overall, Covid was involved in about one in every eight deaths in 2020 and 2021. Remember how some people tried to tell us that this coronavirus was no worse than the flu? Influenza killed fewer than 10,000 people in 2020 and 2021; Covid-19 killed sixty times that number.

But even if they aren’t much concerned with the pandemic, the conservative news outlets do seem exercised about the recent rise in murders, and it is true that the sharp increase of gun homicides–about 25%–that occurred under President Trump has continued into this year. In 66 major cities, homicides were 33% higher in 2020 than in 2019 and have increased further by 29% in major cities in the first three months of 2021 over 2020.

The conservative news reports those homicides, but seldom, if ever, do they explore possible causes for the increase. These might include the rise in gun sales during the pandemic–a 64% increase in 2020 over the previous year. And alcohol sales, surveys indicate, were more than 50% higher during the pandemic. More guns; more alcohol. Is anyone surprised that there was a surge in gun violence? But guns, alcohol, and the pandemic–which put strains on the police, courts, probation offices, and social services agencies–are seldom considered on the conservative outlets; instead, they point to protests against the police and calls to defund the police as the only possible causes for the increase in homicides. If these were the only causes, there should be a concomitant rise in all street crimes, but this is not the case. While murders have increased, the rate of other crimes has not. Moreover, they fail to present any historical perspective. As it turns out the present rate is much less than recent highs. For example, the homicide rate in a group of cities was 19.4 per 100,000 residents in 1995; it was 11.4 in 2020 in those same locations.

The conservative fixation on city gun violence also leaves out a salient fact: more people die from gunshot suicides than from firearm homicides. The conservative commentators don’t mention suicides perhaps because they have nothing to do with police protests and reforms and are not a big-city problem. Gun suicides, in fact, are disproportionately rural—two-and-a-half times higher in rural than urban areas–and overwhelmingly white—about 85%. The states with the five highest suicide rates in 2020 were New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, and Idaho. They were lowest in New York and New Jersey. While the conservative media likes to emphasize the murder rates in a handful of cities with Democratic mayors, it is interesting to consider which states have the highest homicide rates. So far this year, the states with the five highest rates are Louisiana, Missouri, Nevada, Maryland, and Arkansas.

Conservatives may avoid discussion of suicides because these people cannot be subliminally transformed into an image of dangerous minorities and because it might lead to a serious consideration of guns in the hands of those whom we don’t think of as criminals. While the success of attempted suicides by all methods is low—about 4%–attempted suicides by gun result in death over 90% of the time. And a study concluded that the chances of a suicide in a household with a gun is about three times higher than in a home without a firearm. Shouldn’t we be talking about this?

The Tucker Carlsons of the world (I write that fervently hoping it is in error and that there is only one of him) want to downplay the importance of Covid-19 and disregard the suicides. But they continue to harp on the homicide rate without mentioning a stable overall crime rate. Yes, we should be concerned about the increase in murders, which has now risen to fifty murders a day in the country. Meanwhile, there are about sixty daily gunshot suicides, and about 250 people each day are still dying from Covid. But, apparently, since half of the pandemic victims have lived longer than the average life expectancy at birth, it is no big deal.

*Part of the reason that the median age of Covid deaths is higher than life expectancy at birth is because America does not have an exceptionally long life expectancy. The United States places forty-sixth is the world. It is always surprising to me when I learn that that life expectancy in Cuba, where medicine is socialized and poverty widespread, is longer than it is here.