Cynthia
Burack, Department of Women’s
Studies
Ohio State University
Abstract
Churches and conservative
religious organizations now conduct well-coordinated and effective compassionate
pedagogies for their followers on contested social issues such as sexuality. In
this essay, I examine the ways in which conservative compassion is put to work
in Christian Right morality politics. I use the work of novelist Ayn Rand to
analyze a variety of features of these campaigns, but especially the fixing and
defending of boundaries between those who deserve compassion and those who do
not. I argue that Rand provides a fruitful analytic for understanding how
Christian conservative leaders conceptualize and execute their politics and
pedagogy of compassion
Complicating
Compassion
[1] Compassion is a significant
form of political rhetoric and pedagogy on both the American left and right,
however—or whether—it is operationalized in policy. On the political
right, the conservative Christian movement is not generally associated with
“compassionate conservatism,” a rubric that was first articulated with regard
to conservative economic policies.[1] Certainly, the sexuality politics of
the Christian right are more often identified as repressive and punitive than
as evincing compassionate concern. However, the U.S. Christian right now
conducts well-coordinated and effective compassionate pedagogies in the
contested moral/cultural terrain of same-sex sexuality. Compassionate sexuality
campaigns appear to conflict with other approaches to non-normative sexuality
that are more harsh in tone and punitive toward their objects. Indeed, to many
observers they may signal a completely new direction in conservative Christian
politics and rhetoric. I argue that the application of compassion to same-sex
sexuality is a significant development, though neither as new nor as far from
more traditional condemnations of non-traditional sexuality as its proponents
might claim.
[2] In this essay, taking
compassion as an object of analysis “seeks ... to explain the dynamics of its
optimism and exclusions.”[2] I examine conservative compassion as
it is put to work in Christian right compassion campaigns on same-sex
sexuality, and I use the work of novelist (and putative philosopher) Ayn Rand
to analyze the most salient feature of these campaigns: the fixing and
defending of boundaries between those who deserve compassion and those who do
not. Rand is renowned as a best-selling author, a popular philosopher, and a
guru who created her own system of thought and her own cult of personality. There
is a dearth of scholarship on Rand because she is not regarded as worthy of
serious consideration by most academics. In spite of this rebuff to her claim
to philosophy, by any estimation Rand has enjoyed a huge following and has
influenced American political ideology.[3] What is striking is how many of her
ideas anticipate the politics of the contemporary Christian right.
[3] Why turn to Rand to elucidate
the role of compassion in the antigay politics of the Christian right? After
all, like Nietzsche, Rand is an unrelenting critic of Christian morality,
including an ideal of unconditional Christian love or charity. But this
distinction between Rand and Christian ethics supposes a homogenous conception
of Christianity that cannot be reconciled with the contemporary landscape of
theological politics. In the U.S. today, Christian doctrines and denominations
are distributed across the economic and political landscape, identified with a
wide range of policies and ideologies from left progressivism to right
conservatism. More important, these versions of Christianity are not only
products of differing interpretations of scripture, as important as these diverse
modes of exegesis are. The doctrines of sects, denominations, and other kinds
of Christian groups are profoundly influenced by a variety of factors,
including demographic shifts, social changes, perceptions of threat, and
popular culture.[4]
[4] Rand is a thinker to be
contended with in the realm of popular ideas. One example of her popularity is
that when the Modern Library polled readers in 1998 to determine their favourite
works of fiction, Rand scored four works in the top thirty selections, including Atlas Shrugged in first place and The
Fountainhead in second.[5] Atlas
Shrugged is Rand’s monumental work of
fiction: “the astounding story of a man who said that he would stop the motor
of the world—and did.”[6] In Atlas, Rand uses the sphere of industrial manufacturing as
a backdrop for a philosophical, social, economic, psychological, and political
conflict between two great isms: individualism and collectivism. Atlas
Shrugged has sold over twenty million
copies since its publication in 1957, but it is only one of many vehicles for
the dissemination of Rand’s ideas. In addition to novels and non-fiction
writing, her ideas have been spread by Institutes and Centers dedicated to the
exegesis and popularization of her philosophy, college and university Objectivist
clubs, training seminars, newsletters, biographies, websites, blogs, and films.
[5] It is likely that many
conservative Christian elites—like Americans from many walks of
life—have imbibed Rand’s work at an impressionable age. And anecdotal
evidence from Objectivists suggests that many of their fellows have held a
combination of ideas: libertarian in the economic realm and conservative in
the social realm.[7] It is also likely that many Americans
who are not Christian conservatives have absorbed Rand’s philosophy in ways
that make compassionate conservatism intuitively morally appealing. Like the
foundational ideas of other modern thinkers, Rand’s ideas have passed into
popular discourse, many having been detached from their origins in the specific
texts of their idiosyncratic creator.
[6] In spite of the gap between
Rand’s popular fiction and non-fiction and the morality of the Gospels, there
are strong similarities between particular dimensions of Christian right
political ideology and Rand’s thought. As we will see, Rand’s own perspectives
on gender complementarity and same-sex sexuality strongly suggest the morality
politics of the Christian right. But moving beyond Rand’s positions on gender
and same-sexuality, Rand elucidates a mode of boundary production that bears
fruitful similarities to that of the Christian right, even as she and the
movement disagree on many particulars of ethics and the verisimilitude of
religious faith.
[7] Rand’s thought is also
provocative in comparison to the ideology of the Christian right because of the
movement’s own embrace of laissez-faire capitalism.[8] Rand’s
strenuous defense of the purest versions of unregulated market capitalism can
be found today among Christian conservative elites who read the Bible as a brief
for capitalism and those who defend the economically conservative positions of
the Bush administration and the Republican New Right. Thus, multiple
continuities—socially conservative positions on gender and sexuality,
modes of setting boundaries for compassion, and an unparalleled defense of
laissez-faire capitalism—inspire a return to the Randian canon as a
resource for contemporary American political ideology.
[8] I do not argue that the
Christian right relies upon Rand in any kind of deliberate way; such an
explicit appeal would extremely unlikely given Rand’s disdain for superstition,
a category that for her would include mainstream Christian doctrines. Even if
Christian conservative leaders do not turn to Rand to justify ideas, however,
her work provides a useful analytic lens for reconstructing and understanding a
particular ideological configuration of ideas and projects, not only in secular
conservatism but also in the variant of conservatism deployed by the Christian
right. With regard to same-sex sexuality, Christian conservative leaders carry
out a politics of compassion while teaching their followers how to distinguish
the deserving from the undeserving. In what follows I will show how the famous
contours of Ayn Rand’s beliefs about gender, same-sex sexuality, and the
appropriate dimensions of compassion both anticipate and help to elucidate the
compassion campaigns of the Christian right.
Compassion
Campaigns and Antigay Pedagogy
[9] As Lauren Berlant notes in Compassion, there are many versions and definitions of this
prolix term. One way to understand compassion is as “an emotion in operation;”
compassion is relational, alluding to the action between sufferer(s) and actors
who are capable of responding to or alleviating suffering. There is also a
pedagogical dimension to compassion: “it is crucial to appreciate the multitude
of conventions around the relation of feeling to practice where compassion is
concerned. In a given scene of suffering, how do we know what does and what
should constitute sympathetic agency?”[9] Members of social movements learn
what constitutes appropriate compassionate agency in part through targeted
moral and political instruction. In the case of the Christian right, moral and
theological instruction and policy goals are linked together and disseminated
by ministries and national organizations, as well as through Christian popular
culture.[10]
[10] The principal arena for
compassion campaigns in the area of gay rights is the ex-gay movement, which
offers a variety of therapies to treat unwanted same-sex desire. It is worth
noting that, like Christian conservative therapists, Objectivist therapists
have practiced reparative therapies intended to reorient homosexuals to
heterosexual desire and functioning.[11] Besides therapies, the ex-gay
movement includes instruction for conservative Christians on the origins and
treatment of same-sex desire. Ex-gay pedagogy rests on narratives of
development that seek to chart etiologies of same-sex desire. Compassion
follows from a developmental understanding of the origins of same-sex sexual
desire. In this understanding, people do not choose same-sex attraction but are
conditioned for it by failures (or perceptions of failure) in their early
relationships. Because dysfunctional family dynamics and relations create
same-sex attraction, those with same-sex attractions are not responsible for
their desires but only for the ways in which they may act on them.[12]
[11] Neither proponents nor
critics of compassionate conservatism would dispute that at the heart of
conservative compassion is the practice of drawing distinctions and making
boundaries between categories of objects. Conservative compassion splits the
object of political will and directs compassion toward one group and
condemnation toward the other; for Christian conservatives, this means
compassion toward people who resist their same-sex desires and condemnation
toward people who embrace a gay or queer identity. Pedagogies and practices of
boundaries of compassion raise the question of whether LGBT/queer people are in
need of compassion. Indeed, many political theorists question whether
compassion is an appropriate category of political thinking and motivation with
regard to such citizens/subjects. This is a legitimate concern and one addressed
by scholars who are concerned either with the condition of the public sphere or
with the well-being of particular categories of citizens.[13] My
goal here is neither to make the case that the Christian right emphasis on
compassion is an appropriate deployment of political emotion nor to make a case
for extirpating compassion from politics. Instead, it is to analyze the
sexuality politics of the Christian right using Ayn Rand’s texts to articulate
the terms of sexuality politics in gender, sexuality, and the boundaries of
compassion.
Ayn Rand and the Conservative Context
[12] One testimony to Rand’s broad appeal at mid-century comes from
author and contemporary Gore Vidal, who noted that when he campaigned
unsuccessfully for a seat in the US House of Representatives in 1960 Rand “was
the one writer people knew and talked about.” Vidal was startled to find
Rand’s “philosophy” “nearly perfect in its immorality,” and he argued that this
reversal of traditional morality “makes the size of her audience all the more
ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.”[14] At the time of his brief comments on Rand, Vidal did not give specifics of the
curious new phase, but other political authors fill in that gap and analyze the
emergence of the contemporary conservative movement in the 1960s. In his
discussion of the period of conservative “fusionism,” E.J. Dionne emphasizes
the differences between Rand’s philosophy of “objectivism” and the conservatism
of William F. Buckley and the National Review. It is not surprising that
the most salient difference between Rand’s followers and the National Review revolved around the question
of Christianity as a moral basis for conservatism.[15] However, other reconstructions of the era suggest more complex and paradoxical
ideological relationships than a simple cleavage between Rand’s objectivism and
Buckley’s social conservatism allow.
[13] In her study of “the origins of the new American right” in
California during the period, Lisa McGirr explicates the “distinct ideological
strands” of right-wing ideas that cohered around the presidential campaign of
Barry Goldwater. Prominent among these strands were Randian
objectivism/libertarianism and social conservatism:
While these
diverse strands of right wing thought differed at their logical philosophical
endpoints, they shared a belief that the tendency toward liberal “collectivism”
undermined older moral principles and what they perceived as fundamental
truths.[16]
Nor, despite the differences
between the philosophies, were these similarities superficial. McGirr cites
four areas of agreement that motivated “joint mobilization”: a distrust of the
federal state; a commitment to well-defined authority (even if conceptions of
authority differed between the sides); the equation of freedom with economic
freedom; and the repudiation of “egalitarianism.”[17]
[14] Jerome Tucille provides a
more entertaining memoirist account of the Goldwater phenomenon that
supplements McGirr’s history of conservative convergence. Tucille relates that
Goldwater was understood by Rand’s followers as a “Randian character” who
“belonged in Galt’s Gulch [the redoubt of superior characters in Atlas
Shrugged]”—before his election
defeat, “a hero straight from the pages of Atlas Shrugged.”[18] In addition, Tucille complicates
Dionne’s binary between Buckleyite social conservatism and Randian objectivism.
Tucille notes the conflicting strands of conservatism at work in Buckley’s own
thought and why many of Rand’s admirers—including himself—supported
Buckley: “Buckley was bad, but the others were worse.”[19] It is
not necessary to deny divergences between the libertarian/market fundamentalist
and social conservative strands of late twentieth century conservatism to
recognize that their cooperation and likenesses have been a feature of the New Right
since its inception.
[15] Admittedly, Rand is a
strange thinker to link to Christian conservative ideas. As a novelist and
self-styled philosopher of Objectivism, Rand extolled reason, rejected religion
as superstition, and created characters that exemplified—or
caricatured—prototypes of reason and unreason as she understood them. Vidal
concludes that Rand “declared war” on Christ and Christian morality.[20] Ethical and base, hard and soft, deserving and undeserving, Rand’s fictional
heroes and antiheroes are didactic caricatures, or in a more generous vein,
ideal types. They are certainly not Christians, and Rand’s own attitude toward
Christianity would seem to foreclose productive comparisons between the two systems
of belief. A provocative demurral on this point comes from some of Rand’s
critics, including Tucille, who points out that Objectivist philosophy shares
key characteristics with doctrinaire forms of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish
faith (as well as Marxist ideology). For young people from a “regimented,
religious background,” Rand’s thought has provided a “dogmatic” and “closed
system of ideas.” This system, Tucille argues, lets “you know everything is
going to be all right forevermore. The world is intact and so are you. You’ve
become a devout Objectivist.”[21]
[16] If Rand’s own rejection of
religion is not dispositive on the issue of her usefulness as a guide to
contemporary Christian right thought, there are two categories of linkage
between the Christian right’s compassionate sexuality politics and Rand. The
first is Rand’s conceptions of same-sex sexuality and gender, which she wrote
into her fiction and philosophy, while the second—and even more
productive—is a set of theoretical implications of ideas in her work that
are not connected directly to sexuality.
Rand, Sex, and
Gender
[17] Unlike the Christian right,
Ayn Rand was libertarian with regard to legal proscriptions and prosecutions of
same-sex sexuality. However, like the Christian right, she was harsh in her
assessment of homosexuals, noting in her most public statement on the subject
that homosexuality
involves
psychological flaws, corruptions, errors, or unfortunate premises. ... Therefore
I regard it as immoral ... And more than that, if you want my really sincere
opinion. It’s disgusting.[22]
Although
she did not express her views on the subject often, Rand’s perspective on
same-sex sexuality has had a long life and occasioned a good deal of discussion
and dissent among her followers and interlocutors. A key text in this debate is Ayn Rand, Homosexuality, and Human Liberation, by Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Rand’s most persistent
academic expositor.
[18]
In his brief monograph, originally published as essays in an Objectivist
magazine, Sciabarra surveys past and present Objectivists on the subject of
Rand’s and her movement’s orientation toward same-sex sexuality.[23] What he finds is that the history of Objectivism has been marked by bias
against lesbians and gay men, in the name of the founder’s own beliefs and of
the morality and rationality she championed. Using the narratives of
respondents and his own interpretation of Objectivist philosophy, Sciabarra
denounces this bias. He argues that human liberation can be achieved through
adherence to the precepts of Rand’s philosophy when those precepts diverge from
Rand’s own flawed judgment and taste. Even though respondents attest that
antigay bias in the movement has diminished since the 1960s and 1970s, not
everyone is persuaded that the shift toward greater tolerance is consistent
with Objectivist thought. So, for example, Reginald Firehammer’s The
Hijacking of a Philosophy: Homosexuals vs. Ayn Rand's Objectivism is a response to Sciabarra and a putative “homosexual
agenda” within the ideological precincts of Objectivism.[24] This
disagreement over the correct Objectivist position on same-sex sexuality is
plainly a struggle over Rand’s legacy. Still, assuming that pure reason does
not dictate antigay morality, the struggle helps to clarify the continuing
relevance of antigay social conservatism among Rand’s admirers.
[19]
Rand did not arrive at her conclusions by way of religious belief, yet there
are deep similarities between her understanding of same-sex sexuality and the
in-group positions now expounded by the Christian right. There was a time when
Rand’s view that same-sex sexuality could be summed up by noting its
immorality, the psychological problems of its practitioners, and the natural
disgust of heterosexuals was common in both in-group and public discourse of
the conservative Christian movement. However, as the movement has become both
more politically sophisticated and more integrated into governing institutions,
a bifurcation of discourse has become increasingly common. Beginning in the
1990s, Christian right leaders have directed this kind of “abomination”
rhetoric to conservative Christian in-groups while directing more compassionate
and democratic rhetoric to both in-group and public audiences.[25] When
it works effectively, this message segmentation mobilizes supporters, pacifies
potential adversaries, and provides crucial forms of moral, theological, and
political instruction to Christian conservatives.
[20]
With regard to homosexuality and disgust, even Christian right literature on
same-sex sexuality that is produced with the highest production values and is
meant to showcase the inclusion of social science reveals disgust in its glossy
pages. So, for example, the Family Research Council produces a brochure,
entitled “The Slippery Slope of Same-Sex Marriage,” that reports the popular
survey research on “strong negative reactions” to same-sex sexual behaviour:
This
“ick factor,” far from irrational, is
rooted in the subconscious realization of what is normal and what is not, and
which forms an inescapable part of our being. And it may be that by
underestimating the power of this innate understanding, gay activists have made
their greatest tactical error.[26]
Traditionalist disgust is
palpable in much of the literature associated with the Christian right, but so
is earnest pedagogy that appeals to Christians to examine their own disgust and
to try to overcome it for ministerial purposes. One recent example of this
literature is Brian Keith Williams’ Ministering Graciously to the Gay and
Lesbian Community: Pouring in the Oil and the Wine. Williams uses a variety of emotion words to describe same-sex
sexuality as an object, the feelings about same-sex sexuality of other
conservative Christians and those he has confronted in himself: detest,
repulsed, repugnant, repulsive, disgusting, disdain, horror, infested, and
ghastly.[27] The fluency of these verbs and
adjectives suggests the author’s position that what inspires disgust and
revulsion, is, in fact, objectively repulsive and ghastly. The task at hand, a
specifically compassionate calling, is to transform these quite natural
responses into a stance that is informed by God’s charge to minister to those
in need of salvation and repentance.
[21] In addition to the
congruence between her views and those of the Christian right on same-sex
sexuality, Rand’s gender essentialism and gender complementarity are also
closer to those on the Christian right than we might think given her stance
against religious belief. It is clear from Rand’s writings and the memoirs of
her companions that Rand’s views of same-sex sexuality were closely linked with
her conception of gender, and especially of gender complementarity. If Rand’s
perspective on gender as a binary system is not obvious enough in her novels,
her close companions testify to this aspect of her thought and autobiography.[28]
[22] A prominent detail of
Rand’s personal conception of gender difference often has been the subject of
discussion in her work: her belief that by nature a heroic woman seeks to
submit herself to a suitably heroic man. In Rand’s masterpiece, Atlas
Shrugged, the female protagonist, Dagney
Taggart, ultimately falls in love with John Galt, whose superiority over the
novel’s other heroic males is legible even to the least discerning readers. However,
the passage in Rand’s fiction that is most revealing and controversial on this
point is the scene in her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead, in which the male protagonist, Howard Roark, rapes
the female protagonist, Dominique Françon, a scene that has inspired a
prodigious amount of commentary on Rand’s work.[29] Rand
herself famously referred to the scene as a “rape by engraved invitation,”
instructing readers that unspoken consent underlies the encounter.[30]
[23] Christian right
narratives of same-sex sexual development are grounded in consistent binary
conceptions of feminine and masculine gender. These conceptions are taught and
modeled by ex-gay and lesbian spokespersons in the ex-gay movement, who are
taught during their own struggles against homosexuality that a damaged gender
identity lies at the root of same-sex desire.[31] More troubling to
ex-gay movement critics and skeptics is way in which the movement is concerned
with monitoring and adjusting the gender expression and proclivities of
children. An early work in this genre provides checklists of inappropriate
gender characteristics to help parents identify “children who are beginning to
show signs or trends of future homosexual development.”[32] But
the concern with children’s “prehomosexuality” as indicated by gender deviance
remains today in the words and work of, for example, James Dobson, child
psychologist and founder of Focus on the Family.[33]
[24] Christian conservative
women write frequently on the issue of submission, a concept they argue is
often misconstrued by those who do not share their traditionalist faith. Beverly
LaHaye speaks for many when she writes that Biblical teaching on women’s
submission is that women are “subordinate, but not inferior.” Hence, for
LaHaye, popular meanings of submission that suggest inferiority or slavishness
are not appropriate and demean women.[34] Of course, for Christian
conservative women, the requirement of submission is grounded in Biblical
admonitions concerned women’s relations to their husbands and women’s role in
public life. Not so for Rand, who regarded the feminine desire for submission
to be physiologically and “psycho-epistemologically” scripted. Her lover and
first protégé, the psychologist Nathaniel Branden, summarized her view in this
way: “While a healthy aggressiveness and self-assertiveness is proper and
desirable for both sexes, man experiences the essence of his masculinity in the
act of romantic dominance; woman experiences the essence of her femininity in
the act of romantic submission.”[35]
[25] The key distinction
between the forms of submission that Rand repudiates throughout her work and
the form she valorizes between the men and women who exemplify her ideal of
heroism is that the latter is freely chosen rather than a result of
manipulation, false consciousness, or convention. Indeed, gendered submission
is a marker of the individualism Rand celebrates. For Christian conservative
women, gendered submission is freely chosen as well—a marker of a
Christian woman’s relationship with God and a celebration of womanhood rather
than the sign of an abject identity.
[26] The particulars of
gender scripts and female submission in Rand’s work and in the ideology of the
Christian right vary considerably. I am not suggesting that gender conceptions
are the same in these quite different modes of thought but, rather, that the
structure in which gender is thought is similar enough to allow observers to
abstract from the differences. Both Rand and the Christian right understand
gender as a binary system and one that upholds women’s value at the same time
that it scripts natural submission to men in intimate relations. This binary
system of gender in turn underwrites the abjection of same-sex sexuality as
unnatural and morally grotesque.
[27] Writing in an organ of
the Objectivist movement, one admirer asks the question: should Ayn Rand have
been a feminist? He answers: “While her own account of sexuality is in many
ways quite traditional (and thus anti-feminist), her individualist ethics
suggests an anti-traditional resolution to the questions of sex.”[36] Rand’s conceptions of gender and sexuality are certainly anti-traditional in
many important respects. But it is the common ground they share with
traditional views that suggests ways in which they can underwrite other forms
of individualism (and conservatism) than those Rand would have associated with
her thought.
Objectiv(ist)
Compassion
[28] It is not necessary,
however, to rely on autobiographical details to make Rand a useful resource for
Christian right thinking about compassion. Turning from Rand’s personal views
on same-sex sexuality back to her work and ideas, she provides provocative
resources for thinking critically about the Christian right’s deployment of
compassion. In what follows, I will discuss two key similarities between Rand’s
pedagogy and that of the Christian right: both emphasize the value of
compassion and both demarcate the boundary between appropriate and
inappropriate compassion.
The Value of
Compassion
[29] Because of the emphasis she
places on individual striving in her fiction, Rand likely is read by many to
scorn the tender emotion and helping hand of compassion altogether.[37] And, indeed, Rand invites this reading through her explicit critique of
liberal compassion.
If
anyone ever believed (or tried to believe) that the motive of altruism is
compassion, that its goal is the relief of human suffering and the elimination
of poverty, the state of today’s culture now deprives him of any foothold on
self-deception. Today, altruism is running amuck, shedding its tattered
rationalizations and displaying its soul.[38]
But this interpretation of Rand
as anti-compassion would ignore the explicit treatment she gives the subject in
her work. For Rand, compassion can be immoral, but only when it is extended to
the undeserving. Rand’s novels attest to the interest of her heroes in
extending compassion to their worthy fellows.
[30] Compassion is positive under
two conditions: that the individuals who extend compassion do so willingly and
not as a matter of compulsion and that those who are recipients of compassion
are deserving by the standard of morality Rand elaborates—a standard she
claims is objective and universal. For Rand, as for compassionate
conservatives, liberalism fails as a governing philosophy for three reasons. First,
liberalism subjects citizens to compulsory giving through taxation and various
redistributive schemes. Second, liberalism sanctions the expenditure of
inappropriate compassion on undeserving objects. And third, liberalism incites
or tolerates the leveling of rage and ressentiment at deserving objects, especially those who exemplify
individualism and produce society’s goods.[39]
[31] The Christian right’s
compassion campaigns are not new, but the recent emphasis on compassion, both
inside the movement and in its relations with the broad public, represents a
changed approach to sexuality politics. Critics, including many LGBT activists,
understand this shift from more punitive discourse about same-sex sexuality as
softened rhetoric that merely masks a more devious political agenda. For these
critics, the phrase, “calculated compassion” describes both the public face of
the Christian right and its strategic mode of selling itself to the mainstream
public.[40] The movement’s compassion campaigns
are undeniably strategic, intended as they are to buttress widespread support
for denying queer people freedom from stigma and access to rights and public
goods. However, these campaigns are not strategic without remainder, or at
least they do not only exist to mystify the real aims of conservative Christian
morality politics.
[32] The emphasis on compassion
is not only fabricated for, and broadcast to, the mainstream public in order to
shape public opinion about the movement and its ends. It is also an integral
part of pedagogy within the movement and helps to shape the consciousness and
practices—and not only the public rhetoric—of movement insiders. The
developmental literature provides a case in point of the importance of
compassion in motivating conservative Christians to engage with, and minister
to, people who “struggle” with same-sex desire. In this literature—and in
ministries associated with therapeutic approaches to “strugglers”—authors
call on Christian compassion, using stories such as the “good Samaritan” to
teach Christian conservatives how to treat people who suffer against their will
from homosexual desires as wounded people rather than as demonic enemies.[41] From the perspective of those outside the Christian right movement, such a
conception of compassion is not ideal, but vigorous disagreement between
political adversaries about the nature and meaning of compassion does not
obviate the possibility that activists on both sides are motivated by some version
of compassion whose terms must then be exposed and analyzed.
[33] Rand’s perspective on
compassion runs through her fiction and non-fiction. Indeed, one fruitful way
to read Rand’s work is as a set of guidelines about the appropriate moral
grounds for compassion, including the conditions under which compassion emerges
among the characters in her fiction.
The Boundary of
Compassion
[34] Rand works out the theme of
compassion in Atlas Shrugged. Never a
subtle story-teller, Rand expounds her account of desert and the mind of those
who speak for undeserved compassion in a chapter entitled, “Anti-Life.”[42] As always, she subordinates plot and character to didactic commentary; the
chapter itself consists of a series of confrontations that clarify the values
that underlie the story and move the novel toward its denouement. Dagny Taggart
reaches out to her desperate sister-in-law who has just realized the
collectivist evil being perpetrated by those closest to her: “I feel terribly
sorry for you, Cherryl, and I’d like to help you—not because you suffer,
but because you haven’t deserved to suffer.” Later, Dagny experiencing a
foreboding spasm of concern, invites Cherryl to spend the night with her
instead of returning home to Dagny’s degenerate brother. Cherryl declines, and
at the conclusion of the chapter, Dagny’s anxiety about Cherryl’s fate is
vindicated: Cherryl plunges to her death, driven to suicide by her fresh and
uncontainable knowledge of good and evil.[43]
[35] As the novel progresses
toward its climax, a sentimental scene unfolds that reminds readers of the
conditions under which it is morally acceptable for compassion to come into
existence. The U.S. government is moving to appropriate the productive
apparatus of the novel’s protagonists, and a young man that Dagny’s lover, Hank
Rearden, has dubbed “the Wet Nurse” defies the looters and is shot as he flees
to warn Rearden about their designs. As the Wet Nurse lies dying from a chest
wound, Rearden hears his story, which includes an oddly religious tableau: a
lengthy confession of previous ideological error and the Wet Nurse’s repentance.
Rearden responds to this change of mind by humanizing the young
man—calling him by his real name for the first time—cradling him,
and tenderly kissing him on the forehead. Throughout the novels, Rand has
heroic characters to whom compassion is extended express concern that they are
being presumptuous so that she can define the terms by which compassion is
(now) deserved. So it is with Tony/the Wet Nurse:
[36] The boy’s head dropped on
Rearden’s shoulder, hesitantly, almost as if this were a presumption. Rearden
bent down and pressed his lips to the dust-streaked forehead.
The boy jerked back,
raising his head with a shock of incredulous, indignant astonishment. “Do you
know what you did?” he whispered, as if unable to believe that it was meant for
him.
“Put your head
down,” said Rearden, “and I’ll do it again.”[44]
For Rand, appropriate compassion
emerges between hero-protagonists because they embrace a common morality/ideology.
She stages compassion for the reader by reminding the reader of its terms. When
Cherryl Taggart says to Dagny, “That I happen to suffer doesn’t give me a claim
on you,” Dagny responds predictably: “No, it doesn’t. But that you value all
the things I value, does.”[45]
[37] As a political movement, the
Christian right draws a bright line between those who are objects of legitimate
concern as fellow persons and citizens and those who are not. By contrast with distinctions
of status and behaviour that often provide a framework for the treatment of
LGBT/queer people, the Christian right’s compassion campaigns make ideological
distinctions based upon the beliefs/convictions of potential objects of
compassion. Proper objects of compassion believe that what they want to do or
have done is morally wrong, and they commit themselves to a slate of
convictions that is consistent with conservative Christian theology. This is
not to say that behaviour is unimportant to Christian conservatives who police
the boundaries of sexuality, but it is to say that behaviour is not the most
important standard. The priority of ideology over identity becomes most clear
when we focus attention on those designated as undeserving. Conservative
Christians who are involved with the ex-gay movement understand that same-sex
attracted people in the movement may have engaged in homosexual behaviour and
may even continue to experience sexual “falls” while struggling with same-sex
desire. Tanya Erzen documents this dynamic of struggle in her ethnographic
study of New Hope Ministry, the oldest residential ex-gay ministry in the US. Erzen
finds that sexual “brokenness” and falls serve the pedagogical purpose of
reinforcing the wonder of God’s grace and the distance between sinfulness and obedience,
as well as providing a more interesting public witness.[46]
[38] What is intriguing about the
ex-gay movement, and particularly about the way it is often understood by many
outside critics, is that in spite of the emphasis on change of sexual orientation,
there is wide latitude within the movement for the tenaciousness of same-sex
desire and for the substitution of a right relationship with Jesus Christ for a
transformation of proscribed sexual desires. This is true of both Catholic and
Protestant arms of the movement. The Catholic ex-gay project, Courage,
emphasizes celibacy in the presence of what is assumed will be continuing
same-sex desire, while Protestant projects emphasize the hope for
transformation of these desires into normative heterosexuality. But
both—whether publicly or in the private precincts of the
movement—acknowledge that the positioning of individuals within the
boundaries of compassion is conditioned neither on the absence of same-sex
desire nor on the absence of even sexual acting out. Rather, it is a matter of
conviction and testimony—of being willing to attest to a moral system in
which same-sex sexuality is morally unacceptable.
[39] As valuable as compassion is
to the therapeutic and political projects of the Christian right, it does not
extend to those who refuse to renounce their same-sex attractions or who
embrace a public identity as lesbian, gay or queer. If the ex-gay movement
directs compassion toward strugglers, particular segments of the movement
target unregenerate queers for political intervention. Political pedagogy often
begins with the claim that Christian and homosexual identities are mutually
exclusive. This pedagogy repudiates the existence of queer Christians and
reinforces the central split—moral/immoral, Godly/unGodly,
good/evil—that runs through the politics of the Christian right. Once
lesbians and gay men are located outside the Christian community, conservative
Christian followers receive political instruction that assumes and reinforces
the undeserving status of queers. In this pedagogy, there are no happy
homosexuals or satisfying same-sex relationships.
[40] As many observers of the
ex-gay movement point out, accounts of homosexual disease and misery constitute
a mendacious baseline of information that the movement delivers to those who
struggle to transform their sexual desires.[47] Those whose behaviour
and rights claims constitute an assault on morality, the family, and the polity
cannot be tolerated without violating basic precepts of God’s design. Same-sex
attracted women and men who renounce their desires and commit themselves to
conversion and abstinence from same-sex sexuality are proper objects of
compassion, same-sex-attracted people who claim an LGBT/queer identity are
outside the boundary of appropriate compassion.[48] The
repudiation of compassion for the suffering of unrepentant queers is rehearsed
explicitly in the political pedagogy of the Christian right movement. The split
between compassion and chastening is especially evident in such projects as
Focus on the Family’s Love Won Out conferences, which alternate compassion for
strugglers with information and instruction that encourages participants to
pursue antigay politics.
[41] With regard to the deserving
and the undeserving, Rand is every bit as convinced and, to her many admirers,
convincing as those who advocate for conservative Christian sexuality politics.
Rand distinguishes between “hatred of the good for being the good”—“the
naked face of evil”—and its alternative when she writes:
Do not confuse
this response with that of a person who resents someone’s unearned success, or
feels pleased by someone’s deserved failure. These responses are caused by a
sense of justice, which is an entirely different phenomenon, and its emotional
manifestations are different: in such cases, a person expresses indignation,
not hatred—or relief, not malicious gloating.[49]
That there are discrete
differences between Rand’s and the Christian right’s conceptions of justice and
dessert should not erase the structural similarities that dictate the terms of
compassion and, indeed, respect for fellow citizens.
Conclusion
[42] It is appropriate to focus
on compassion discourse as a matter of fixing boundaries, because making the
distinctions essential to good boundaries is key to understanding the very
meaning of compassion. In fact, the Christian right fixes boundaries in two
senses of that term: fixing in the sense of setting, or determining, and fixing
in the sense of repairing moral boundaries from the damages wrought by
liberalism. Whatever their differences, moral rhetorics—including about compassion—have
in common that they are boundary projects of one kind or another. Seen in this
light, the boundary projects of Christian right and liberal compassion could
not be more different. Christian right compassion, like the compassionate
conservatism with which it shares some features, is a boundary-building
project.[50] Compassion campaigns are constructed
not only as good public relations, as many critics suppose, but also—and
crucially—to instruct movement followers in the moral codes and political
practices that ought to accompany the dispensing of compassion.
[43] When examining the
compassion campaigns of the Christian right on issues of sexuality, the first question
to be answered is not whether queers need particular compassion. A more useful
question is how compassion that might be targeted to those who are treated with
indignity and/or political oppressed is routed away from queers through the use
of narratives of deserved queer suffering, queer miserable individuality, queer
subversion of Godly normality, and/or the good and appropriate disgust that
queer identity and sexuality inspire in others. These narratives protect
traditional believers by vividly contrasting them with the aggressively
unredeemed and unregenerate. They endorse a strict moral code that justifies
punishment for those who transgress sexual dictates set by traditionalist
belief. They shore up defenses against the possibility of guilt and identification.
Unfortunately, they also help to justify a range of public policies that define
those others as second-class citizens and as a threat to a Christian nation.
[44] Christian right theological
politics function like Ayn Rand’s didactic fiction: both discourses constitute
believers into a shared belief system. Ayn Rand and the philosophy she created
are not associated with religion and traditional moral beliefs, but such a
narrow focus obscures the centrality in her system of clear moral distinctions,
many of which mirror and reinforce those found in conservative Christian
doctrine. Like Christian right elites, Rand divided the world sharply into good
and evil and taught her disciples about the nature of appropriate compassion
and just deserts.
Notes
[1] See Marvin Olasky, The
Tragedy of American Compassion (Washington,
DC: Regnery, 1995).
[2] Lauren Berlant, “Introduction: Compassion (and
Withholding),” in Compassion: The Culture and Politics of Emotion, ed. Lauren Berlant, (New York, Routledge, 2004), 5.
[3] Linda Kintz does not mention Rand in her genealogy of
right-wing thought, but this is an odd omission. This is especially so in that
Kintz stresses the theme of victimization that runs through entrepreneurial and
“frontier ideology” and the belief that entrepreneurs receive little in
comparison to their contributions to human welfare. Both are favorite themes of
Rand’s in fiction and non-fiction. See Kintz, Between Jesus and the Market, 192-97.
[4] Cynthia Burack, Sin, Sex, and Democracy: Antigay
Rhetoric and the Christian Right (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008). For an analysis of
conservative Christianity and its relation to pop culture see especially
Chapter 2, “The Nightmare of Homosexuality,” on Chick tracts.
[5] Bruce Headlam, “Forget Joyce, Bring on Ayn Rand,” (New
York Times, 1998) http://tech2.nytimes.com/mem/technology/techreview.html?_r=1&res=
9B01E5DC1738F933A05754C0A96E958260&oref=login (accessed February 2, 2007). In the Modern Library poll, Anthem and We the Living came in at numbers seven and eight, respectively.
[6] This description appears on the back cover of
editions of Atlas Shrugged and in
much copy about the novel.
[7] For accounts by many Objectivist adherents of social
conservatism within the movement, see Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Ayn Rand,
Homosexuality, and Human Liberation (Cape Town, South Africa: Leap Publishing, 2003).
[8] Harriet Rubin. Ayn Rand’s Literature
of Capitalism.” The New York Times (September 15, 2007) http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/business/15atlas.html?ei=5087%0A&em=&en=
c6fc1c1b0f70b13a&ex=1190174400&pagewanted=print (accessed September 17, 2007).
[9] Berlant, “Introduction: Compassion (and
Withholding),” 4.
[10] For Christian pop culture, see
Heather Hendershot, Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative
Evangelical Culture (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004).
[11] One example of reparative therapy in the Objectivist
movement is the work of psychologist Nathaniel Branden. See Chris Matthew
Sciabarra, (Cape Town, South Africa: Leap Publishing, 2003), 11-12.
[12] See Cynthia Burack and Jyl J. Josephson. “Origin
Stories: Same-Sex Sexuality and Christian Right Politics,” Culture and
Religion 6, 3 (2005): 369-392.
[13] The theorist who is most often associated with these
concerns is Hannah Arendt. See, for example, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1977).
[14] Gore Vidal, “Two Immoralists: Orville Prescott and
Ayn Rand, in Rocking the Boat (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1962), 232-34.
[15] E.J. Dionne, Why Americans Hate Politics (New York, Simon and Schuster, 2004), 264-65.
[16] Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the
New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2001), 152.
[17] McGirr, Suburban Warriors, 164-65.
[18] Jerome Tucille, It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand. 25th Anniversary Edition (San Francisco: Fox & Wilkes, 1997), 29; 32.
[19] Tucille, It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand, 44.
[20] Vidal, “Two Immoralists,” 233.
[21] Tucille, It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand, 4-7.
[22] Rand made her comments after a speech at Northeastern
University in 1971. See Paul Varnell, “Ayn Rand and Homosexuality” (Independent
Gay Forum, 2003) http://www.indegayforum.org/news/show/27018.html (accessed January 23, 2007).
[23] Sciabarra, Ayn Rand, Homosexuality, and Human Liberation. For an alternative reading that is critical of
Sciabarra, see Reginald Firehammer, The Hijacking of a Philosophy:
Homosexuals vs. Ayn Rand's Objectivism (BookSurge Publishing, 2004).
[24] Reginald Firehammer, The Hijacking of a
Philosophy: Homosexuals vs. Ayn Rand's Objectivism (BookSurge Publishing, 2004).
[25] See Burack, Sin, Sex, and
Democracy.
[26] Timothy J. Dailey, “The Slippery Slope of Same-Sex
Marriage,” Family Research Council (Washington, DC: Family Research Council, 2004).
[27] Brian Keith Willams, Ministering Graciously to the
Gay and Lesbian Community: Pouring in the Oil and the Wine (Shippensburg, Pennsylvania: Destiny Image
Publishers, 2005).
[28] See Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand (New York: Anchor, 1987).
[29] See The
Fountainhead, Part 2, Chapter 1. Both
feminist critics and admirers of Rand are drawn to the rape scene, as essays in
this volume demonstrate: Mimi Reisel Gladstein and Chris Matthew Sciabarra,
eds., Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand (University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 1999).
And the scene continues to entice commentators outside academia; a parody
treatment can be found in Robert Lee, The Fountainhead, Starring Skullforce,” (undated) http://jeffcomp.com/faq/parody/ (accessed February 5, 2007). In it, Francon says to Roark, “Hello.
To prove how far above the masses we are, would you like to break into my house
tonight and rape me?”
[30] Barbara Branden, The
Passion of Ayn Rand (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1986), 134. Rand’s second, and final, “intellectual heir,” Leonard
Peikoff, describes Rand’s view of love between two men in this way: “this
relationship, she holds, can exist between two men who are both healthy; it
would not include sex—because, she thought, they won’t have the desire
for that form of expression of their love.” Leonard Peikoff, “An Interview
with Leornard Peikoff from Essay on Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead” (Leonard Peikoff: Philosopher of Objectivism,
2006).http://www.peikoff.com/fountainhead.htm (accessed February 18, 2007).
[31] For a recent example, see Joseph
Nicolosi and Linda Ames Nicolosi, A Parent’s Guide to Preventing
Homosexuality (Downer’s Grove, Illinois:
InterVarsity Press, 2002). The theme of damaged gender identity is so
ubiquitous in the ex-gay and reparative therapies literatures that virtually
any examples of the genre could be used as examples.
[32] See Frank M. du Mas, Gay is Not Good (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1979).
[33] See James Dobson, Bringing Up Boys: Practical Advice and Encouragement for Those
Shaping the Next Generation of Men (Wheaton,
IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2001), p. 123.
[34] Beverly LaHaye, I am a Woman by God’s Design (Old Tappan, New Jersey: Fleming H. Revell Company,
1980). See also Tim LaHaye and Beverly LaHaye, The Act of Marriage: The
Beauty of Sexual Love (Grand Rapids,
MI: Zondervan, 1978).
[35] Nathaniel Branden, The Psychology of Self-Esteem:
A New Concept of Man’s Psychological Nature (New York: Bantam, 1971).
[36] Bryan Register. “Should Ayn Rand Have Been a
Feminist?,” (The Atlas Society and Its Objectivist Center, 2005) http://www.objectivistcenter.org/showcontent.aspx?ct=139&h=53 (accessed February 6, 2007).
[37] One set of writings on Rand and compassion, although
it is sympathetic to Rand, constitutes a kind of defense of compassion against
Rand’s repudiation of altruism. See W. Teed Rockwell, “Altruism, Pity and
Compassion: Significant (and Ignored) Differences,” Truth Seeker 120, 2 (1993): 10-5; W. Teed Rockwell. “Altruism,
Pity and Compassion: Significant (and Ignored) Differences. Part
Two—Compassion,” Truth Seeker 120, 3 (1993): 4-9. In staking out his position, Rockwell seems unaware of the
role of compassion in Rand’s thought.
[38] Ayn Rand, “Return of the Primitive,” p. 139.
[39] These arguments are found throughout Rand’s massive
canon. See, for example, Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy
of Ayn Rand (New York: Random House,
1961). In this text, Rand lays out some basics of her worldview in an essay
entitled, “For the New Intellectual,” and then abstracts passages from her
novels to define a variety of terms and to make didactic points.
[40] See Surina Khan, “Calculated Compassion: How the
Ex-Gay Movement Serves the Right’s Attack on Democracy,” (Public Eye, 1998), http://www.publiceye.org/equality/x-gay/X-Gay.htm (accessed November 6, 2001).
[41] The parable of the Good Samaritan appears in Luke
10:25-37.
[42] “Anti-Life” is Chapter IV in Part 3 of Atlas
Shrugged.
[43] Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: New American Library, Inc., 1957), 824-28;
842-43.
[44] Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 921-22.
[45] Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 825.
[46] Tanya Erzen, Straight to Jesus: Sexual and
Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
[47] See A. Lee Beckstead, “Cures versus Choices: Agendas
in Sexual Reorientation Therapy,” in Sexual Conversion Therapy: Ethical,
Clinical and Research Perspectives, eds. Ariel Shidlo, Michael Schroeder, and Jack Drescher, 87-115 (New York,
Haworth Medical Press, 2001).
[48] Christian right literature on homosexuality often
employs the shorthand abbreviations, SSA women and SSA men.
[49] Rand, “The Age of Envy,” 132.
[50] See Angelia Wilson’s account of “conditional love” in
Angelia R. Wilson, Below the Belt: Sexuality, Religion and the American
South (London: Cassell, 2000).
