Religion, doubt, and dishonesty.

The John Patrick Shanley play Doubt is now a movie. A movie that feels a lot like a play that has been filmed, rather than its own piece of art. While I found the movie intriguing, the significance of it for me has nothing to do with whether or not that fictional priest was guilty of sexual abuse of the boys under his care.

What I was most interested in was a philosophy expressed by Sister Aloysius twice in the movie. I checked some of the online websites to see if I could find the actual quote, but I could not. It was something along the lines of "Sometimes when you are fighting evil, you have to step away from God." I know that's not quite right, but the sentiment is close enough.

In a recent Edmonton Journal article, on the Religion page under the Offerings section, a local Christian Reformed pastor wrote about how a recent polygamy case in Bountiful BC shows that the definition of marriage, made nebulous by the decision to allow marriage of same-sex couples, must be re-affirmed as a voluntary union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others.

The problem is this: the pastor used arguments against same-sex marriage as if they were the same as arguments against polygamy. He referenced passages of the Bible and he also referenced a scholar from McGill University. Unfortunately, when I checked out the references I found that they did not support his position vis-a-vis polygamy (although they partially supported some of his other points - only partially). I don't want to be too blunt here, but the gentleman was not being truthful, including in the way he used the reference to the McGill scholar (who had admitted to polygamy as a variant of marriage in her submission to a Commons committee - I looked it up).

It made me wonder if he felt he, like sister Aloysius, was justified in playing loose with the facts because he was serving a higher good.

Unfortunately, many people know that

• polygamy is still permitted for Muslims in India (a country with a diverse population of more than 1 billion),
• it was practiced in China until 1953 (at which point China had a population of more than half a billion) it is still practiced in parts of the Middle East and Africa,
• it was clearly practiced without prejudice in the stories of the Old Testament - including the non-voluntary practice of levirate marriage (where you had to marry your brother's widow).

And of course there is the history of the Mormon church - currently 13 million people who know that polygamy was a part of the practice of the early Mormon church.

All of which means the reader of the article had to decide whether the author was ignorant or if he was deliberately presenting a distortion. Neither option is pleasant to contemplate.

What would it have hurt to say "I know we practiced polygamy in ancient times. I know the Christian church even had same-sex unions in pre-modern Europe. But the Christian church has always been a dynamic, changing force suffused by the Holy Spirit in order to keep God's plan for the world relevant and alive. Our branch of the church currently believes in holy matrimony as a sacrament which is intended to unite one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others."?

Of course, the problem is that the whole goal of the letter was to convince people that marriage has NOT changed and SHOULD NOT be changed. To admit that it has already changed, not only from polygamy to the current standard but also from religious sacrament to civil arrangement, would be to open up the argument to people who say "Yes, it has changed in the past and it must continue to change to reflect our reality."

I am drafting a letter to him. Not to the paper - I am not interested in publicly humiliating anyone. But the good pastor will have to figure out what he wants to do with the knowledge that he has been caught doing something which is against the teachings of his faith. Perhaps he will know the Sister Aloysius quote.