6 ms·

Families of Choice: On the Shakers and Catholics in Early America

29 points by Vigier 5y ago

aeneasmackenzie 5y ago
I don't know about Shakers, but dragging Catholic religious into this is laughable. > Breaking away from families of origin and remaking them into families of choice were not incidental for ... Catholic men and women, but should be understood as a deeply political act. The alternative structures of ... monastic family life and the intimacies they created without sex built an explicit, nonnormative sexual culture in a society that rigidly presented heterosexual love and family as the only legitimate and legal option. Catholic religious will be happy to tell you that "heterosexual love and family" is the only moral option.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Catholic religious will be happy to tell you that “heterosexual love and family” is the only moral option. The Catholic heirarchy will be happy to tell you that consistently. Catholic religious are…not the same thing, and substantially more diverse. (Source: been Catholic approximately my whole life, and known quite a few religious, having spent a long time in a parish run by an order, and some more time regularly attending and volunteering in a retreat center run by a different order.)
  - aeneasmackenzie 5y ago
    Can you be specific? I anticipate that the people you are thinking of are heretics. I mean specifically that they deviate from dogmas of the church, not any colloquial definition.
    - ijasidfjiajsdf 5y ago
      Some Catholic priests and parishes are considerably more "progressive" than others. Every major city has at least one progressive parish, often it can be the Jesuit parish. Catholic teaching is quite strict that the purpose of sex is "bonding and babies." (More formally, sex is "unitive, marital, and procreative.") The progressive priests and bishops don't blatantly contradict this, but they do stress how "welcoming and inclusive" they are to practitioners of sexual acts that are neither unitive, marital, nor procreative, while never choosing to preach any homilies about God creating sex for the purpose of strengthening the bond between husband and wife and to enable the two to "be fruitful and multiply."
      - trasz 5y ago
        This is true in certain places, but far from universal. I'd be quite surprised if you found such progressive priests in Poland, for example. The official Catholic stance - essentially "teaching" people are no different from cattle, sexuality-wise - seems to be enforced very heavily there.
        mensetmanusman 5y ago
        “The official Catholic stance - essentially "teaching" people are no different from cattle, sexuality-wise - seems to be enforced very heavily there.” This is a straw man assertion…
        bobthechef 5y ago
        What's with your condescension? It's horrible. The Catholic position is grounded in natural law theory. The telos of the sexual organs is essentially procreative; deny the procreative end and sex becomes incomprehensible. To use sexual organs in a manner that _intentionally_ works against their end is to intentionally frustrate their end. To intentionally thwart the operation of your faculties and misuse them is immoral and therefore contradicts one's fulfillment and actualization as a human being. Calling people cattle for living in accordance with the procreative end of sexual intercourse, which is the ultimate end of sexual intercourse, is nasty, if not irrational. Before you do so, I suggest you acquaint yourself[0] with the actual position held and defended by the Catholic Church. [0] https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/lets-think-about-sex https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/lets-think-a...
        gammarator 5y ago
        This is the naturalistic fallacy.
        javagram 5y ago
        > The official Catholic stance - essentially "teaching" people are no different from cattle, sexuality-wise The church is perfectly fine with promiscuity, artificial insemination, sterilization etc. among cattle or pets. The same behaviors they tell humans are immoral, because they think humans aren’t just cattle.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > The Catholic heirarchy will be happy to tell you that consistently. To correct myself, actually, relevant to the instant article, no, even they won't. Because choosing neither heterosexual love nor family in the usual sense (or, for that matter, even the sense that religious communities are a kind of family, as both lay committed celibacy and eremetic life, both private and consecrated, are recognized vocations) is very much an option, even to the heirarchy. They hierarchy is fairly certain to say romantic love and family are a moral option only within a committed, exclusive, heterosexual context, though.
- mustafa_pasi 5y ago
  The "nonnormative sexual culture" they are referring to is celibacy. Besides monks and nuns there are also hundreds of lay Catholic organizations that require members to remain celibate.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  Early Christianity had indifference bordering on disdain for marriage, and there's no record of a Christian rite for marriage until the 9th century. Celibacy was considered the ideal. Same for the Shakers, which is why they died out.
  - iammisc 5y ago
    Catholicism taught that celibacy is ideal until vatican II. Nominally, it still does. That being said, marriage is still the only appropriate place for sex, and then only heterosexual sex, by church teaching. So both you and the one you replied to are correct.
  - bobthechef 5y ago
    Not really.[0] This sounds like one of those bizarre confections that occasionally surface among progressive Protestants et al. [0] https://www.catholic.com/tract/the-permanence-of-matrimony https://www.catholic.com/tract/the-permanence-of-matrimony
  - lebuffon 5y ago
    I think that's because in the early decades Paul had the impression that the messiah was coming back any time now. Who needs children. If you read his letters in chronological order (not bible order) you can see the wind come out those sails. :)
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Maybe Protestant Catholics, but that hasn’t been true since 34 AD :)
dr_dshiv 5y ago
If you are interested in early Christianity, I've put together some quotes from Philo of Alexandria (b.25 BC) — he describes the hellenized Jewish scene in Egypt that Jesus would have been connected with. The core idea in Philo is that god is conceived as an ineffable Oneness — from which emanates the Logos (translated poorly in English as "word", but is much more complicated than that— see Plato). Philo describes the Logos as "the son of god". This is all very esoteric though; it is definitely not referring to personality gods or large persons living in the sky. Seeing this as the root of Christianity may help make sense of why it resonated with some of the philosophical intelligensia of the time. (Because otherwise, Christianity makes is really incomprehensible). See what you think. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JATMRSh4b6wlFlYWw8t1FdrGfg7bfTFjFKcnMktW_I4/edit?usp=drivesdk https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JATMRSh4b6wlFlYWw8t1FdrG...
- bobthechef 5y ago
  Esoteric? Maybe his version, but see John 1:1. It's practically the first sentence. Jesus is the Logos incarnate (the "Word").
  - cat199 5y ago
    not OP - agree it's not actually esoteric - but it is esoteric to people who have only been presented with pop christianity or pop strawman revisionist christianity, like the article here...
    - dr_dshiv 5y ago
      I know what you mean about pop Christianity, which has been a major issue in America. No desire for any kind of philosophical engagement, past or present. When I say esoteric, I mean having hidden layers of meaning. See www.shwep.net for the best podcast on esotericism in Christianity
  - FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
    This is actually the thing that most bothers me about Jesus. So much of Christianity -- especially early Christianity -- is about the Word "vs." the Flesh. It's like a meme that wants so badly to colonize you that it will torpedo your biological interests to do it. But Christianity was also very syncretic in the way it spread, and it took on pagan influences, and my feeling is that those practices helped reconcile the meme a little more to biological reality. Maypoles and marriages worked their way back in... It seems to me that the Word (or the meme) and the Flesh have to be in harmony, each serving the other. Left unchecked, the Word always seems to want to mutilate the flesh. (Maybe because irreversibility is good for anything that's desperate for an absorbing state.) And I have a real problem with that.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
“ rigidly presented heterosexual love and family as the only legitimate and legal option.” This may be a straw man against Catholic culture, and it might have been true in early American Protestant culture, but Catholics have had a theology on vocations of life for over a millennia…
- iammisc 5y ago
  Moreover, traditional pre-Vatican II Catholic teaching (and I mean traditional) says that remaining celibate in the priesthood or in religious life is superior. This is one of the reasons for the evisceration of convents following vatican II. Whereas before women who entered the convent were seen as holy, and in a superior vocation to the laity, Vatican II 'laicized' them and made them like everyone else. Without the special status, the women left. It's quite far reaching. For example, Mother Abbesses would be considered on par with bishops in terms of their 'position' in the hierarchy, and could even hear confessions from her subjects, even if she could not impart the sacraments. People think Vatican II elevated the position of women in the church, but it didn't. It elevated the position of married women, in the same way it elevated the position of married men, who were heretofore considered to be in an inferior vocation to both priests and nuns and brothers. Note the inferiority/superiority is of the vocation, not of the person. All persons are equally unworthy of God's grace, but he gives it anyway.
  - bobthechef 5y ago
    I'm not sure you have this _quite_ right. Vatican II was not some radical break with Tradition. Some of the weird and opportunistic _interpretations_ of Vatican II that followed did (think "felt banner clown mass"), but not Vatican II itself. > celibate in the priesthood or in religious life is superior. This is still the case. JPII even repeats this in one of his books (possibly "Love and Responsibility", can't remember atm). > Without the special status, the women left. I don't think this is the reason. In any case, celibacy is not the abdication of motherhood or fatherhood. We are all called to motherhood and fatherhood. In the case of the celibate religious, those are expressed in a spiritual way. One becomes a spiritual mother or father. > Mother Abbesses [...] could even hear confessions from her subjects, even if she could not impart the sacraments. This is certainly not the case[0]. I mean, you can tell anyone anything you like (though obviously prudence is needed here), but only priests can confer the sacrament of penance. So what would be the point of hearing a confession if you could not offer absolution? [0] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01007e.htm https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01007e.htm
FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
> Those who questioned the centrality of sex to human existence directly attacked the fundamental social conventions of their time. Almost every person who has ever existed, exists because of sex. That is literally what causes people to happen. That's not merely a social convention. I say "almost" because artificial insemination and in-vitro fertilization are possible. Whether those "are" some intermediated kind of sex becomes debatable. The man who masterbates to fill the cup -- is he having sex? The woman who undergoes the procedure -- is that sex? You can worry about the boundaries of concepts and try to shift them around. Certainly I've done this. And very topically you can do that for very basic concepts, like "man" or "woman". So, obviously, the word "sex" is somehow a social convention. Trivially, you at least say it differently in different languages. But there is one act that everyone, everywhere, will agree is sex, and that is penile-vaginal sex between a male and a female. The thing that creates babies. That is central to the concept. And though I'm sure efforts are underway to "de-center" that, and to shift the meaning of the word... ...the thing that underlies it is fundamental to your existence. At most, by altering your internal representations, you can cut away from yourself some ability to think or sense or communicate productively about this aspect of reality. But this aspect of reality won't go away. Granted, this is an aspect of reality whose time dynamics are slow, on the order of generations, so it's possible in the short term to make it seem unimportant. But slow dynamics -- like climate -- are actually very important...

29 points by Vigier 5y ago

I don't know about Shakers, but dragging Catholic religious into this is laughable. > Breaking away from families of origin and remaking them into families of choice were not incidental for ... Catholic men and women, but should be understood as a deeply political act. The alternative structures of ... monastic family life and the intimacies they created without sex built an explicit, nonnormative sexual culture in a society that rigidly presented heterosexual love and family as the only legitimate and legal option. Catholic religious will be happy to tell you that "heterosexual love and family" is the only moral option.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> Catholic religious will be happy to tell you that “heterosexual love and family” is the only moral option. The Catholic heirarchy will be happy to tell you that consistently. Catholic religious are…not the same thing, and substantially more diverse. (Source: been Catholic approximately my whole life, and known quite a few religious, having spent a long time in a parish run by an order, and some more time regularly attending and volunteering in a retreat center run by a different order.)
- aeneasmackenzie 5y ago
  Can you be specific? I anticipate that the people you are thinking of are heretics. I mean specifically that they deviate from dogmas of the church, not any colloquial definition.
  - ijasidfjiajsdf 5y ago
    Some Catholic priests and parishes are considerably more "progressive" than others. Every major city has at least one progressive parish, often it can be the Jesuit parish. Catholic teaching is quite strict that the purpose of sex is "bonding and babies." (More formally, sex is "unitive, marital, and procreative.") The progressive priests and bishops don't blatantly contradict this, but they do stress how "welcoming and inclusive" they are to practitioners of sexual acts that are neither unitive, marital, nor procreative, while never choosing to preach any homilies about God creating sex for the purpose of strengthening the bond between husband and wife and to enable the two to "be fruitful and multiply."
    - trasz 5y ago
      This is true in certain places, but far from universal. I'd be quite surprised if you found such progressive priests in Poland, for example. The official Catholic stance - essentially "teaching" people are no different from cattle, sexuality-wise - seems to be enforced very heavily there.
      - mensetmanusman 5y ago
        “The official Catholic stance - essentially "teaching" people are no different from cattle, sexuality-wise - seems to be enforced very heavily there.” This is a straw man assertion…
      - bobthechef 5y ago
        What's with your condescension? It's horrible. The Catholic position is grounded in natural law theory. The telos of the sexual organs is essentially procreative; deny the procreative end and sex becomes incomprehensible. To use sexual organs in a manner that _intentionally_ works against their end is to intentionally frustrate their end. To intentionally thwart the operation of your faculties and misuse them is immoral and therefore contradicts one's fulfillment and actualization as a human being. Calling people cattle for living in accordance with the procreative end of sexual intercourse, which is the ultimate end of sexual intercourse, is nasty, if not irrational. Before you do so, I suggest you acquaint yourself[0] with the actual position held and defended by the Catholic Church. [0] https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/lets-think-about-sex https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/lets-think-a...
        gammarator 5y ago
        This is the naturalistic fallacy.
      - javagram 5y ago
        > The official Catholic stance - essentially "teaching" people are no different from cattle, sexuality-wise The church is perfectly fine with promiscuity, artificial insemination, sterilization etc. among cattle or pets. The same behaviors they tell humans are immoral, because they think humans aren’t just cattle.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > The Catholic heirarchy will be happy to tell you that consistently. To correct myself, actually, relevant to the instant article, no, even they won't. Because choosing neither heterosexual love nor family in the usual sense (or, for that matter, even the sense that religious communities are a kind of family, as both lay committed celibacy and eremetic life, both private and consecrated, are recognized vocations) is very much an option, even to the heirarchy. They hierarchy is fairly certain to say romantic love and family are a moral option only within a committed, exclusive, heterosexual context, though.
mustafa_pasi 5y ago
The "nonnormative sexual culture" they are referring to is celibacy. Besides monks and nuns there are also hundreds of lay Catholic organizations that require members to remain celibate.
pessimizer 5y ago
Early Christianity had indifference bordering on disdain for marriage, and there's no record of a Christian rite for marriage until the 9th century. Celibacy was considered the ideal. Same for the Shakers, which is why they died out.
- iammisc 5y ago
  Catholicism taught that celibacy is ideal until vatican II. Nominally, it still does. That being said, marriage is still the only appropriate place for sex, and then only heterosexual sex, by church teaching. So both you and the one you replied to are correct.
- bobthechef 5y ago
  Not really.[0] This sounds like one of those bizarre confections that occasionally surface among progressive Protestants et al. [0] https://www.catholic.com/tract/the-permanence-of-matrimony https://www.catholic.com/tract/the-permanence-of-matrimony
- lebuffon 5y ago
  I think that's because in the early decades Paul had the impression that the messiah was coming back any time now. Who needs children. If you read his letters in chronological order (not bible order) you can see the wind come out those sails. :)
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Maybe Protestant Catholics, but that hasn’t been true since 34 AD :)

dr_dshiv 5y ago

If you are interested in early Christianity, I've put together some quotes from Philo of Alexandria (b.25 BC) — he describes the hellenized Jewish scene in Egypt that Jesus would have been connected with. The core idea in Philo is that god is conceived as an ineffable Oneness — from which emanates the Logos (translated poorly in English as "word", but is much more complicated than that— see Plato). Philo describes the Logos as "the son of god". This is all very esoteric though; it is definitely not referring to personality gods or large persons living in the sky. Seeing this as the root of Christianity may help make sense of why it resonated with some of the philosophical intelligensia of the time. (Because otherwise, Christianity makes is really incomprehensible). See what you think. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JATMRSh4b6wlFlYWw8t1FdrGfg7bfTFjFKcnMktW_I4/edit?usp=drivesdk https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JATMRSh4b6wlFlYWw8t1FdrG...

bobthechef 5y ago
Esoteric? Maybe his version, but see John 1:1. It's practically the first sentence. Jesus is the Logos incarnate (the "Word").
- cat199 5y ago
  not OP - agree it's not actually esoteric - but it is esoteric to people who have only been presented with pop christianity or pop strawman revisionist christianity, like the article here...
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    I know what you mean about pop Christianity, which has been a major issue in America. No desire for any kind of philosophical engagement, past or present. When I say esoteric, I mean having hidden layers of meaning. See www.shwep.net for the best podcast on esotericism in Christianity
- FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
  This is actually the thing that most bothers me about Jesus. So much of Christianity -- especially early Christianity -- is about the Word "vs." the Flesh. It's like a meme that wants so badly to colonize you that it will torpedo your biological interests to do it. But Christianity was also very syncretic in the way it spread, and it took on pagan influences, and my feeling is that those practices helped reconcile the meme a little more to biological reality. Maypoles and marriages worked their way back in... It seems to me that the Word (or the meme) and the Flesh have to be in harmony, each serving the other. Left unchecked, the Word always seems to want to mutilate the flesh. (Maybe because irreversibility is good for anything that's desperate for an absorbing state.) And I have a real problem with that.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

“ rigidly presented heterosexual love and family as the only legitimate and legal option.” This may be a straw man against Catholic culture, and it might have been true in early American Protestant culture, but Catholics have had a theology on vocations of life for over a millennia…

iammisc 5y ago
Moreover, traditional pre-Vatican II Catholic teaching (and I mean traditional) says that remaining celibate in the priesthood or in religious life is superior. This is one of the reasons for the evisceration of convents following vatican II. Whereas before women who entered the convent were seen as holy, and in a superior vocation to the laity, Vatican II 'laicized' them and made them like everyone else. Without the special status, the women left. It's quite far reaching. For example, Mother Abbesses would be considered on par with bishops in terms of their 'position' in the hierarchy, and could even hear confessions from her subjects, even if she could not impart the sacraments. People think Vatican II elevated the position of women in the church, but it didn't. It elevated the position of married women, in the same way it elevated the position of married men, who were heretofore considered to be in an inferior vocation to both priests and nuns and brothers. Note the inferiority/superiority is of the vocation, not of the person. All persons are equally unworthy of God's grace, but he gives it anyway.
- bobthechef 5y ago
  I'm not sure you have this _quite_ right. Vatican II was not some radical break with Tradition. Some of the weird and opportunistic _interpretations_ of Vatican II that followed did (think "felt banner clown mass"), but not Vatican II itself. > celibate in the priesthood or in religious life is superior. This is still the case. JPII even repeats this in one of his books (possibly "Love and Responsibility", can't remember atm). > Without the special status, the women left. I don't think this is the reason. In any case, celibacy is not the abdication of motherhood or fatherhood. We are all called to motherhood and fatherhood. In the case of the celibate religious, those are expressed in a spiritual way. One becomes a spiritual mother or father. > Mother Abbesses [...] could even hear confessions from her subjects, even if she could not impart the sacraments. This is certainly not the case[0]. I mean, you can tell anyone anything you like (though obviously prudence is needed here), but only priests can confer the sacrament of penance. So what would be the point of hearing a confession if you could not offer absolution? [0] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01007e.htm https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01007e.htm

FooBarBizBazz 5y ago

> Those who questioned the centrality of sex to human existence directly attacked the fundamental social conventions of their time. Almost every person who has ever existed, exists because of sex. That is literally what causes people to happen. That's not merely a social convention. I say "almost" because artificial insemination and in-vitro fertilization are possible. Whether those "are" some intermediated kind of sex becomes debatable. The man who masterbates to fill the cup -- is he having sex? The woman who undergoes the procedure -- is that sex? You can worry about the boundaries of concepts and try to shift them around. Certainly I've done this. And very topically you can do that for very basic concepts, like "man" or "woman". So, obviously, the word "sex" is somehow a social convention. Trivially, you at least say it differently in different languages. But there is one act that everyone, everywhere, will agree is sex, and that is penile-vaginal sex between a male and a female. The thing that creates babies. That is central to the concept. And though I'm sure efforts are underway to "de-center" that, and to shift the meaning of the word... ...the thing that underlies it is fundamental to your existence. At most, by altering your internal representations, you can cut away from yourself some ability to think or sense or communicate productively about this aspect of reality. But this aspect of reality won't go away. Granted, this is an aspect of reality whose time dynamics are slow, on the order of generations, so it's possible in the short term to make it seem unimportant. But slow dynamics -- like climate -- are actually very important...