HT to Jim McCrea for linking this article in the New York Times. If you are paywalled out of NYT, Jim's email thread copies the article. Though the topic of the article is abortion law in Poland, I don't want to focus on abortion itself, which has been discussed and re-discussed. I wish instead to focus on relationships between civil authority and religion. This article explores some of that territory:
"What is underway in
Poland is a forceful renegotiation of the foundations of government power, and
the back-room deals, almost exclusively among men, that built them. Women’s
demands for reproductive freedom and their calls for greater equality threaten
to upend a power structure that has held since the fall of Communism."
"Such disruptions have been seen
globally in the wake of the #MeToo movement, which has toppled many powerful
men, but none have gone to the heart of politics as directly as in Poland.
Gender equality would disrupt a political arrangement in the country that has
been set for decades: a symbiotic relationship in which the Catholic
Church lends its authority to politicians in exchange for the government’s
enforcing ecclesiastical morality, including by restricting abortion."
"...the church’s claim to be the defender
of Polish democracy, won by supporting the Solidarity movement against
Communism in the 1980s, has been undermined by its embrace of the
governing Law and Justice party, which has dismantled
liberal institutions and promoted xenophobic and authoritarian policies."
"...Most scholars of political transitions
will tell you that successful transformations have one thing in common: Their
leaders do not allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good...
"...Subsequent governments have struck similar bargains over issues like Poland’s membership in the European Union. And in 2015, the Law and Justice Party, led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, swept to power with a pitch to voters that combined economic generosity and disgruntled nationalism with Catholic social conservatism. The party’s presidential candidate, Andrzej Duda, won re-election this year."
"...But women have gained economic and social power even as the far-right government pushes to preserve traditional gender roles that remain popular with voters, both men and women, in many rural areas. According to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the gender wage gap for median earners in Poland is only 10 percent, one of the smallest differentials among the group’s countries. Forty-three percent of young women earn university degrees, compared with only 29 percent of young men. When Poland joined the European Union, that brought new opportunities to work and travel in more secular countries. "
"Many Polish women, especially in the
cities, empowered in other areas of their lives have become less willing to
embrace a church that excludes them from positions of power and authority — or
a political system that gives that church power over their lives."
"...Ms. Ślusarczyk, the high schooler from Warsaw, said she fears those who believe in that vision of Polishness, and believes that many hate her for not conforming to it. “If I go out of the house and I see someone wearing a shirt with a Polish flag or a national symbol or a symbol of the independence day, I feel afraid,” she said. “Because of the way the country is divided, it’s always ‘us’ and ‘them.’”
"..Ms. Huebner, the member of the
European Parliament, said that for young Poles, “this discontent has been
brewing for a long time.”
"Anna Jakubowska, 40, a businesswoman from Warsaw, kept returning to one word when trying to explain what had moved her and so many other women to protest: anger. “We are very angry,”
My take-aways from this article and others in the news cycle are these:
One, anger is a reaction when people feel that they are not being heard. that could apply to many situations in our own country.
Two, a perception that religion is hand-in-glove with civil authority often ends badly...for religion. From the article; "A poll last year by IBRiS research found that fewer than 40 percent of Poles trusted the church, down from 58 percent in 2016." People lose trust when they feel that church and state alliances favor the institution and its leadership over people.
And three; the issue of religious leaders using civil government to try to enforce their teaching, and civil government using their power as a carrot to keep religion in line isn't new. It has been going on for a very long time, going back at least to Good Friday.
So much change is generational. Young adults in Poland seem more secular than their parents and grandparents. In my opinion, that isn't an unalloyed good.
ReplyDeleteThe church should teach what it teaches, and encourage its disciples to bring their faith into the public square. Church leaders should not lead the church to take partisan positions. That is for the people to work out.
"Church leaders should not lead the church to take partisan positions. That is for the people to work out." Definitely agree with that.
ReplyDeleteAbout young people, I think they want to see the church set a good example. I believe many of them get turned off when they see the church as aligned with authoritarian civil leaders.
"Two, a perception that religion is hand-in-glove with civil authority often ends badly...for religion."
ReplyDeleteMany social scientists think that the support of conservative religious groups for the Republican party is largely responsible for the growth of the NONES, who view many religious leaders as hypocrites because of their engagement in and toleration of sexual abuse and financial abuse by church leaders.
The NONES, especially the young ones, are far more likely to be Democrats than Republicans.
As for youth and religion. In the sixties and seventies many young people ceased to attend church regularly though they often reported their religion as that in which they had been raised. The option for NONE was not on the questionnaire so few reported themselves as agnostic or atheists. Many of these young people returned to their religious upbringing or joined other churches when they began to raise children.
In recent decades however young people are not returning to religion as they age and get married. That may be because it is now easy to say your have spiritual interests but not a member of a religious group.
In the United States, young adults often have no religious tradition to return to. Many of them are in the 2nd or even 3rd generation of practice which has ranged between perfunctory and non-existent (usually sliding over time from the former to the latter). This phenomenon is rooted in trends which go back much longer than the alliance between (some) religious institutions and conservative political parties.
DeleteThat religious/conservative alliance explanation doesn't really hold much water, anyway (regardless of how young people perceive it). There are plenty of religious organizations which haven't allied themselves with conservatism but are doing no better (in many cases, doing even worse). And there are religious groups (Islam, Orthodox Judaism) which probably would rate as conservative on many social issues but which don't have a strong political identity in the popular mind.
Personally, I think this perception of an alliance between religious authority and conservative political parties is an American Protestant phenomenon. The Protestant mainline is a wisp of a specter of a shadow of what it was during the first half of the last century - surely in part because of leftward drift (or steering) on the part of its leaders and activists. It is evangelicalism which has aligned itself with conservative politics. And even that heyday is in the past, despite Trump.
Catholicism never fit that conservative narrative comfortably. Politically and ideologically, Catholics are all over the map. Some prominent prelates surely have been conservative, but they haven't succeeded in pulling their flocks rightward. Their influence over their own faithful, much less the country as a whole, commonly is grossly overestimated. Ironically, if young people would have been dragged across the threshold of actual churches more frequently when they were growing up, they'd have a more realistic and less media-driven idea of what the Catholic church actually is.
I think we need to make the distinction that "conservative" doesn't always equal far right or authoritarian. In a Venn diagram we would see some overlap, but not coencentric circles.
DeleteAgree that religious practice has been on a two or three generation slide.