THEÂ CITYÂ From a sermon written in 1710 on Awakening Truths Tending to Conversion, by Increase Mather in Boston, Massachusetts. Sinners should consider of Death, that the thing is certain, and the Time uncertain, and that they run an infinite hazard if they neglect making sure of an Interest in Christ one day longer. O that they were wise, that they would consider the latter end! And they should consider of the eternity which follows immediately upon death. If they would do that, surely it would affect their Souls. A late Writer speaks of a pious man, that One in Company with him observing a more than ordinary fixedness and concern in his Countenance, asked him, What his thoughts were upon, he then thereupon uttered that Word For-ever, and so continued saying nothing but repeating that Word, For-ever! For-ever! For-ever! a quarter of an hour together. His Thoughts and Soul was swallowed up with the consideration of eternity. And truly if an Unconverted Sinner would be perswaded to go alone and think seriously of Eternity, if it were but for one quarter of an hour, it may be it would have an Everlasting Impression on his heart. This Sinners can do if they will: And if they will not do as much as this comes to, towards their own Conversion and Salvation, how inexcusable will they be? Their blood will be upon their own heads. Let them no more say, God must do all, we can do nothing, and so encourage themselves to Live in a careless neglect of God, and of their own Souls, and Salvation. Most certainly, altho' we cannot say, That if men improve their Natural abilities as they ought to do, that Grace will infallibly follow, yet there will not one Sinner in all the Reprobate World, stand forth at the day of judgment, and say, Lord, Thou knowest I did all that possibly I could do, for the obtaining Grace, and for all that, Thou didst withhold it from me.
A publication of Houston Baptist University
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THE CITY Publisher Robert Sloan Advisory Editors Francis J. Beckwith Adam Bellow Paul J. Bonicelli Joseph Bottum Wilfred McClay John Mark Reynolds Editor in Chief Benjamin Domenech Books Editor Micah Mattix Writer at Large Hunter Baker Contributing Editors Matthew Lee Anderson Ryan T. Anderson Matthew Boyleston David Capes Victoria Gardner Coates Christopher Hammons Anthony Joseph Joseph M. Knippenberg Louis Markos Peter Meilaender Dan McLaughlin Paul D. Miller Matthew J. Milliner Russell Moore Robert Stacey Joshua Trevino THE CITY Volume VI, Issue 3 Copyright 2014 Houston Baptist University. All rights reserved by original authors except as noted. Letters and submissions to this journal are welcomed. Cover photo by M. Glasgow. Email us at thecity@hbu.edu, and visit us online at civitate.org.
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4CONTENTS$ Faith & Work Salim Furth on The Challenge of Global Poverty Jay Richards on A Christian Approach to Debt Jordan Ballor on The Biblical View of Work Jeff Haanen on How We Lost the Craftsmen
4 9 25 39
Features Greg Forster on Religious Liberty’s Future John D. Wilsey on Religious Liberty’s Past
47 56
Books & Culture Fred Siegel on Highbrow Culture Jake Meador on Faith & Freaks Tim Goeglein on The Conservative Mind Micah Mattix on Russia’s Other Dissident Novelist Jerry Walls on Basketball & Ethics
70 75 78 82 86
A Republ ic of Letter s Hunter Baker
91
Poetry by Aaron Belz
46,90
The Word by Cyril of Jerusalem 3
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T HE C HALLENGE OF G LOBAL P OVERTY 4THE)ROLE)OF)THE)CHURCH$ Salim Furth
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he Bible tends to make us feel uncomfortable about pov‐ erty. It should. The libertarian learns that “if anyone has the worldʹs goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does Godʹs love abide in him?” And the progressive reads, “If anyone is not will‐ ing to work, let him not eat.” Even the philanthropist is warned, “If I give away all I have... but have not love, I gain nothing.” But by pur‐ suing holiness and using the global structure of the church, Chris‐ tians can play a meaningful role in alleviating global poverty. In Biblical times there was little difference in the incomes of na‐ tions. Every economy was poor. Most people did not have consistent nutrition. Shelter, lighting, and heating were primitive. Transporta‐ tion was costly and dangerous. Reading and writing were luxuries. Medicine was overwhelmed by common diseases and infections. Few became wealthy, and the surest path to wealth was force of arms. The equality of poverty persisted until the 18th century. But then, as if by alchemy, the application of free enterprise to technological innovation launched entire continents into riches beyond imagina‐ tion. Shockingly, the growing wealth was evenly shared: The wages of typical workers rose alongside the general opulence. But not every country has fully escaped into the stratosphere. Some remain close to the pre‐modern standard of living. What’s more, to‐ day’s urbanized poverty has an uglier mien than its ancient rural counterpart. The great growth in common incomes has, paradoxical‐ 4
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ly, added two more varieties of poverty even as it alleviated so many material needs. To ancient poverty—the poorest people of generally poor socie‐ ties—we can add relative poverty in wealthy countries and relative poverty between countries. Someone can be poor in global terms, despite being middle‐class or affluent in his own society. Conversely, someone who is poorer than her neighbors may be affluent by global and historical standards of material consumption. The importance and means of addressing each type of poverty differ. The roles of enterprise and government in ending or ameliorating poverty are widely studied. Enterprise is the origin of affluence, and it is not surprising to learn that countries where living standards have risen almost universally relied on enterprise in free markets. When China and India loosened strictures on markets and trade in the last decades of the 20th century, the result was the greatest mass movement out of absolute poverty in the history of the world. Econ‐ omists Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion estimate that 84 percent of people in China lived on less than $1.25 per day in 1981, but only 13 percent did so in 2008 (controlling for inflation). Less dramatically, government‐run social programs in rich countries have extended middle‐class living standards to those who might otherwise have been much poorer, with greatest success among the elderly. But gov‐ ernment and non‐profit programs (including those of the church) often usurp the leading role in overcoming poverty from the poor themselves. What is missing is “agency,” the central participation of each individual in providing his own sustenance. It is instructive to note that the government’s most effective poverty alleviation pro‐ grams, such as pensions and the Earned Income Tax Credit, give agency to the recipients, whose labor qualifies them for the benefits. The church’s role complements those of business and government. Free enterprise is the only long‐term solution to persistent poverty, but the process is slow and can be forestalled by war or oppression. The church can redistribute income internationally to alleviate be‐ tween‐society poverty in the short term. Governments can redistrib‐ ute income and provide public goods domestically, but often imper‐ sonally and without leaving room for individual agency. The church, in both rich and poor economies, can actively involve the local poor in its efforts, including poverty alleviation. By their tithing, their equal membership in the local church, and their work through its 5
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ministries, the poor retain agency when the church’s work benefits them. The New Testament Church had the privilege of being led by one of its poorest member congregations. When Paul took up a collection from wealthier Greek churches to support the persecuted and pro‐ vincial Jerusalem church, he could write to the Roman church that the Greeks “were pleased to do it, and indeed they owe it to them. For if the Gentiles have come to share in their spiritual blessings, they ought also to be of service to them in material blessings.” The spir‐ itual leadership of the poor Jerusalem church gave them agency in the gifts from the younger, wealthier churches: They were receiving aid as a mother from her child. The Jerusalem offering highlights the church’s unique ability to ad‐ dress poverty. Because the church can be so personal at the local lev‐ el, but hierarchical at the international level, it can effectively bridge the gap between the wealthy and the poor in a way that government, most non‐profit organizations, and individuals cannot. But now that the U.S. is implicitly the world capital of evangelical Christianity, international redistribution faces an additional hurdle because the American church has both spiritual and financial leadership.
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mericans and others around the world tend to see the U.S. as the natural origin of missionaries, headquarters of denomi‐ nations, and font of theology. The plague of short‐term mis‐ sion trips is the most obvious symptom of the U.S.‐centric view, but implicit U.S. spiritual leadership is a barrier to alleviating poverty in a Christian manner. Many Christian efforts today still place the do‐ nor at the center of poverty alleviation. A middle‐class American can become a hero in a Haitian slum and experience the honor that is normally reserved for platinum‐level donors to an art museum, un‐ wittingly stealing the stage from those whose persistent efforts could actually achieve lasting gains. Instead, the American church should embrace the commands to give in secret and to give outside its own walls. After all, giving in public is no blessing, “for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.” And too many American congregations spend most of their funds on congregational consumption— roofs, books, dinners, childcare, and other goods. Churches are usually very well equipped to identify needs in their congregations and 6
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neighborhoods and to directly involve the poor in poverty‐alleviation efforts. Those efforts are not merely financial. With its diverse mem‐ bership, the church allows unemployed people to network with business owners and puts teenagers intimidated by college applica‐ tions in pews with graduate students. In addressing the poverty and inequality of opportunity that persist in wealthy countries, the church’s greatest advantage is its creation of social capital. But for global poverty, the inequalities involved are so much greater that the church’s hierarchical structure is its advantage. The natural channels for the gifts of the rich to reach the poor are worldwide Christian denominations, which can uniquely preserve the dignity and agency of the recipients. At the international level, when funds move within the denominational framework across na‐ tional borders, they do so without fanfare. The church is rare in hav‐ ing organic, locally led branches in most countries. The local church is best equipped to identify local needs within poor countries. Unlike outsiders, the local church can find those most in need and can quickly respond to changing needs or abuse of re‐ sources. What’s more, each local church belongs to its members. They should tithe, even out of their poverty, and outside funding should be added to the church’s own resources. Thus, instead of foreigners offering a low‐accountability alternative to local church poverty alle‐ viation, the foreigners indirectly support the local church’s efforts. Of course, moving money around requires integrity throughout. To pre‐ vent abuses, an established congregation should not receive more in outside aid than its members have given. And maintaining equality among the churches (see II Corinthians 8:14) requires that the de‐ nomination have structures that prevent American dominance. Finally, the church is structured to promote holiness, not to maxim‐ ize donations or exposure. When a wealthy donor gives to her church, she can do so in secret. Much of her donation will remain local, as it should, meeting needs within her church’s own society. As the local churches pass their abundance up the hierarchical chain, anonymity prevails. Thus, both the donor and the recipient have a meaningful, personal, spiritual relationship with their church, and each can benefit without the dangers that attend direct giving. Scripture’s commands to give to the poor are not predicated on an empirical claim that giving alleviates long‐term poverty or creates economic development—the poor, after all, will always be with us. 7
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But the paradoxes of the Bible—give, but only in secret; share every‐ thing, but starve the lazy—are aligned with the structure of the glob‐ al church to solve the paradox of agency and to alleviate modern poverty.
Salim Furth researches and explains how public policy affects economic growth as senior policy analyst in macroeconomics at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis. He previously served as a visiting assistant professor of economics at Amherst College and a visiting research scholar at Northeastern University. 8
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A CHRISTIAN APPROACH TO DEBT ]biblical0wisdom} Jay W. Richards
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he moral struggle with debt is as American as apple pie. “Come into [debt] with the pace of a Tortoise,” preached Puritan Cotton Mather in 1716, “and get out of it with the flight of an Eagle.” Two generations later, the American Founders were still preaching the dangers of debt. Ben‐ jamin Franklin depicted it as a despotic master. “Maintain your Inde‐ pendency,” he warned. “Be frugal and free.” Many of us have been raised to believe that both lending and borrowing are vaguely unsa‐ vory. But debt’s bad rap is hardly something American or something new. Human beings have been arguing about the morality of money‐ lending since money was first invented. Invariably, the lead character in these debates is the greedy banker. This stock stereotype has been kept alive, undoubtedly, by a steady supply of abusive moneylenders down through the centuries. It has also been nourished, I suspect, by a centuries‐long debate— and persistent confusion—about the concept of usury. Judging from the nonscientific sample of people I’ve asked, most people don’t actually know what the word usury means. If the state cam‐ paigns of the Center for Responsible Lending continue, however, a lot of folks will hear from the pulpit about what the Bible says about it. Unfortunately, much of what they hear will be misleading. These days, we think of usury as charging an astronomical inter‐ est rate on a loan, but for most of the last 2,000 years, usury did not refer to high interest rates but to any interest charged on a loan— 9
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that is, usury meant selling money. Far from being a trivial moral peccadillo, usury was seen as a damnable offense. In his Divine Com‐ edy, written in the early fourteenth century, Dante Alighieri describes a journey through hell, purgatory, and paradise. In the Inferno por‐ tion of the poem, the poet Virgil leads Dante down and down, ever deeper into the circles of hell—the deeper the circle, the worse the sin and consequent punishment. Noble heathens get off easy in the rela‐ tively pleasant, if wistful, first circle. Adulterers and gluttons find their eternal abode in the next. Farther down, murderers are confined to the outside ring of the seventh circle. And, in the inner ring of this tough neighborhood, Dante discovers usurers. For most modern readers, even for those who don’t like bankers and banking, the usu‐ rer’s punishment seems like overkill. You might think Dante’s harsh judgment against usury was simply the benighted prejudice of medieval Christians, but hatred of usury was not unique to Christianity. The Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle—along with such Roman thinkers as Cicero, Seneca, and Cato—also disdained it, with the latter comparing it to murder. It wasn’t even just a Western hang‐up. Buddha denounced it, and Islam still follows Muhammad in condemning it. While Greek and Roman thinkers shaped Christians’ view of usury throughout the Middle Ages, the other influence, of course, was the Bible; the Old Testament in particular seemed to prohibit charging interest on money loans. In Leviticus, for instance, God describes the rules that should apply after the Hebrews have entered the Promised Land: If any of your kind fall into difficulty and become dependent on you, you shall support them; they shall live with you as though resident aliens. Do not take interest in advance or otherwise make a profit from them, but fear your God; let them live with you. You shall not lend them your money at interest taken in advance, or provide them food at a profit. But wait. If the Hebrew Bible condemns usury, how did Jews come to be associated with usury in the Middle Ages? The short answer is that the Old Testament allows Jews to charge interest to non‐Jews. Christians, for their part, had to grapple with a passage from the New Testament book of Luke, where Jesus seems to condemn charg‐ ing interest altogether: 10
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And if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High. Because of these admonitions, for centuries Christians were offi‐ cially forbidden from charging interest while Jews were free to make interest‐bearing loans to Christians. Since Jews were often prohibited by laws and prejudice from pursuing other lines of work, many Jews ended up working as moneylenders to Chris‐ tians. When these Jews became successful financiers, they often were vilified for appearing to exploit Christians. Hence the long‐ lived stereotype of the miserly Jewish banker, brought to life most famously in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice through the char‐ acter Shylock.
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lthough profound developments in science and technology took place in the intervening 2,000 years, in terms of their economies, most classical and medieval Europeans were not all that different from the ancient Israelites. Most were subsistence farmers. Some fished for a living. A few worked at crafts such as car‐ pentry and had regular access to basic goods in open city markets. But most people lived and worked in the country or in villages and traded mainly within their extended families, clans, or tribes. So the way they interacted economically was more informal and reciprocal than the typical market transaction of today. By modern standards, almost everyone was dirt poor, and banks as we know them didn’t exist. Moneylending, then, involved rich people lending to their poor neighbors, probably their kin or longtime employees, for a basic need such as food or winter clothing. The early Christian world, like the Roman world before it, tended to see money as sterile, functioning only as a means of exchange but without value in itself. This was Aristotle’s view, and in the Middle Ages the great theologian Thomas Aquinas, along with many others, adopted the philosopher’s thinking on the subject. Money, they noted, doesn’t wear out like clothing or a house. If somebody wears your clothes for a year, you can’t get your original clothes back. At best, you’ll get used clothes. So you can rightly 11
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charge rent for your clothes. When coins get too shabby‐looking, however, they are simply removed from circulation and replaced with freshly minted coins of the same worth. Also, a borrowed sum of money can be repaid exactly, even if repaid with different coins or bills. So charging for money seems different from charging rent on, say, a horse and cart or a three‐bedroom apartment with a carport. These differences led most people to conclude that charging inter‐ est on money was more or less charging for nothing. So what changed their minds? In the West, scholars slowly realized that they hadn’t really understood the changing nature of money. The growth of trade and banking exposed the problems. Around the twelfth cen‐ tury, trade began expanding throughout Europe, leading to a greater division of labor and higher productivity. This created several di‐ lemmas. First, growth in trade led to a shortage of gold and silver coins—the common form of currency. Second, it’s hard to make large exchanges of money over hundreds or thousands of miles when money is made of gold and silver and easily stolen by roadside ban‐ dits or lost in a shipwreck. Finally, the different coins used in Bruges, Milan, and Rome were often reminted and debased with less valua‐ ble metals, so the ordinary person could easily get ripped off by un‐ scrupulous merchants or conniving kings. Out of these exigencies, the bank as we know it was invented. Moneychangers were crucial to the new system. They knew how to compare florins, guilders, and pounds, and to separate them from the counterfeits. Moneychangers also began keeping deposits for various clients so that when two clients made an exchange, all the money‐ changer had to do was credit one account and subtract from the oth‐ er. Simple arithmetic had replaced a risky and cumbersome move‐ ment of coins. Eventually banks emerged with branches in different cities. This gave merchants a way to transfer payment safely over large distanc‐ es, since bank notes now stood in for the money stored safely in a bank vault. This process became so common that not only merchants but also governments and even the Pope used bank notes to pay bills. In fact, some banks had such large deposits that they could lend money to kings. What was fit for a king was soon fit for the common‐ er. Individuals and firms with extra money began depositing their money in banks, to be withdrawn as needed. This could only happen once people were convinced that their money was safer in a bank 12
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than hidden in a mattress or a hole in the ground. Thus banking grew only as ties of trust grew beyond family and ethnic lines to connect larger and larger groups of people. Eventually bankers realized that if they had enough depositors, they didn’t need to keep all their deposits on hand to meet the day‐ to‐day demand from depositors. They could safely lend some of it out, not literally by dispersing coins, but by circulating more bank notes than they held in reserves as coins and precious metals. Be‐ cause they were now putting the money of their depositors at a slight risk, they started paying interest to the depositors. They were issuing credit. Over time, all sorts of credit forms developed for purchasing land, equipment, and other forms of capital. Insurance was also invented in the Middle Ages, allowing inves‐ tors who transported goods by ship to spread out the risk of a shipwreck. Everyone who owned cargo paid a little bit up front, just in case disaster struck. If the ship with its cargo went down, the insurer would pay out the benefit. The sharing of risk prevented any one investor from suffering catastrophic loss. This, in turn, attracted more investors into international trade.
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o it was that, with these new modes of buying and selling risk—insurance and banking as we know them today—many new ventures and enterprises came to life. Banks and insurers, of course, needed to earn a living, and so they charged for issuing loans and insurance policies. Usury was still condemned, however, so instead of talking about interest on money, they spoke of a fee for service. This fix fell short of a robust theological understanding and defense, but the result was that the use of business credit and insur‐ ance spread. Soon the surplus money of a privileged few was no longer hoarded and unproductive but set free for others to use crea‐ tively in launching new enterprises. People began to create more wealth than they consumed, and, with the accumulated wealth, banks could create yet more wealth by functioning as brokers be‐ tween depositors and investors. Aristotle had argued that money, unlike monkeys and monkey trees, did not produce after its own kind. (The Greek word for usu‐ ry, tokos, translates as “offspring.”) Quarters do not sprout quarters, and if you plant a dollar in your garden, you won’t get a money tree. What followed from this, Aristotle argued, was that while 13
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charging interest on money might enrich the banker, it is ill‐gotten gain because it’s based on a fact “contrary to nature.” It’s treating something as fertile that is in fact sterile. The argument seemed plausible to Aristotle and many who fol‐ lowed him over the next two millennia. Certainly it would be wrong to trick someone into paying for something that had no value in it‐ self. But in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, it slowly became clear that money, at least in certain settings, is indeed fertile, and has what economists call a “time value.” As Ben Franklin said, “Time is mon‐ ey.” If I lend my neighbor $1,000 for a year, I forgo the opportunity to invest the money in some wealth‐creating enterprise for a year. That’s worth something. Notice that charging interest for money was no longer likely to be a rich man bilking his destitute brother or cousin. Now banks were making capital loans, that is, loans that could be used to start or fund business ventures. When a bank lends money with interest, it isn’t charging for nothing. Strictly speaking, it isn’t charging for the mon‐ ey itself, as a butcher would charge for a ham that will be smoked and eaten. It’s charging for the “opportunity cost” that the lender bears by not having the money for a while. To lend the money, the lender has to forgo all other uses he might have for the money. And for the borrower, getting the money now rather than a year from now is a benefit. It’s no surprise, then, that people will pay a premium for that benefit, since it self‐evidently has value to the borrower. That’s why if you lend someone $1,000 today, he will be paying you for something if, a year from now, he repays you $1,000 plus interest. Whatever this is, it isn’t usury as the ancients envisioned it. Besides the time value of the money lent, there is also risk. A bank‐ er or insurer charges for the risk that he won’t get his money back on time, or ever. So what is the just price to offset that risk? There’s no one answer. The price to borrow money, just like the price of any‐ thing else, depends on the situation. If only one bank can lend, and lots of people want to borrow money, the bank can charge a relatively high interest rate, though it is still limited by what potential borrow‐ ers are willing to pay. But in a free market with lots of banks compet‐ ing for customers, interest rates will be much lower as the rates re‐ flect the underlying supply and demand for credit—along with the perceived riskiness of a given loan. A wealthy tech executive with a perfect credit rating can get a much lower interest rate than the guy 14
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who just graduated from college and has never had a checking ac‐ count or a credit card.
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ll of this seems pretty commonsensical once it’s been worked out, but the historical debate among theologians over usury and interest has been anything but simple. For centuries everybody believed charging interest on money was immoral, and they tended to identify such acts as “usury.” Slowly but surely, though, scholars found flaws in the arguments that charging interest was necessarily wrong. Catholic scholars worked out many of the details, and then in the sixteenth century, John Calvin abruptly dropped the ancient ban on interest, concluding that “it cannot be said that money does not engender money.” Martin Luther, the Ger‐ man priest who had sparked the Protestant Reformation, continued to rail against usury for all the traditional reasons, as did many Cath‐ olic thinkers. Most Christians, though, eventually came to the same conclusion as Calvin. As it was said in debates at the time, “When the reasons for the law ceases, the law itself ceases.” These days, few Christians—whether Protestant, Catholic, or Or‐ thodox—offer a blanket opposition to charging interest, and the Vatican participates in modern banking. It wasn’t that they decided simply to ignore inconvenient biblical passages against usury. It was that once they had gotten rid of the false assumptions about the nature of money they had brought to such biblical passages, they could draw some key distinctions that had been overlooked. In reading the Bible or any text, context is everything. Many scriptural ordinances are epigrammatic. Pithy and concise, they rely on a specific context and typically leave the exigencies, excep‐ tions, and alternate circumstances to the side. Of the three passages forbidding usury in the Hebrew Torah, two refer to the rich Israel‐ ite lending money to a poor “brother” in dire straits; the lender should not take advantage of the situation by charging interest. The third passage, in Deuteronomy, repeated this ban but allowed Jews to charge interest to people outside the community. So the practice must not have been seen as intrinsically evil. Ancient Jews were simply forbidden from confusing family relationships with com‐ mercial ones. 15
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Look at the passage in the New Testament book of Luke, which I referred to earlier. “If you lend to those from whom you hope to re‐ ceive,” Jesus said, “what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return.” Historically, many readers have thought that Jesus was prohibiting the charging of interest. But in context, things look quite different. In the first part of this sermon, Jesus has given his famous “beati‐ tudes,” such as “Blessed are you who are poor” and “Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.” Then, he says, among other things: “If anyone takes away your coat, do not with‐ hold even your shirt.” Does Jesus mean we should hope for everyone to be poor, so that they can be blessed? Is he commanding us not to laugh? Are Christians not allowed to sell shirts and coats? Is Jesus forbidding society from enforcing laws against theft? Of course not. Jesus is using a rhetorical device common in first‐century Judaism: hyperbole. Even sinners lend money, he observes, and they expect to receive back the same amount. Jesus says nothing about interest. And Aristotle’s argument is nowhere in sight. Instead, Jesus says we should lend expecting nothing in return. Jesus is encouraging his followers to be generous toward friends in need; he is not denounc‐ ing banks for charging interest on loans. Similarly, when Jesus drives the moneychangers out of the Temple, he also drives out everyone selling sheep, cattle, and doves. Nobody concludes from this that Jesus issued a blanket ban on livestock auctions. He did not de‐ nounce commerce or money‐changing in general, but rather the mis‐ use of a house of worship. Jesus also condemned hoarding and stinginess. “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth,” he told his disciples, “where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasure in heaven.” Here he’s reminding his disciples that their ultimate loyalty is not in wealth or possessions, but in God’s kingdom. He’s denouncing selfish hoarding, not pensions. In the parable of the talents, Jesus even draws a distinction between the sterile hoarding of money on the one hand and, on the other hand, the interest‐bearing savings of money placed in a bank; and he seems to approve the latter. There a man calls three servants and en‐ trusts each with huge sums of money. While the master is away, the first two double their capital while the third servant “went off and 16
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dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money.” When the master returns, he compliments and rewards the first two for their productive investments but castigates the third: “You wicked and slothful servant! You knew that I reap where I have not sowed, and gather where I have not winnowed? Then you ought to have in‐ vested my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with interest.” (Though modern banks did not exist yet, first‐century people in the Near East were familiar with investing.) The first two servants are rewarded for investing the money they were given—for putting it at risk, where it can bear fruit. The third servant is condemned for playing it so safe that he is rendered eco‐ nomically sterile. The master expected the servant to invest, to put the money at risk. At the very least, the master tells him, he should have put it in a bank where it could bear interest. Jesus isn’t giving an economics lesson—the parable is about the kingdom of God— but he treats prudent risk, investment, and interest in a positive light, and trusts his listeners to do the same. This overview is just a brief sketch of how scholars came to see that the Bible doesn’t teach that charging interest on money is al‐ ways and everywhere wrong. Wouldn’t it have been better if all the cultures that condemned charging interest for money had understood this from the begin‐ ning? Perhaps. But John T. Noonan, in his distinguished study of usury, argues that the usury debate helped give rise to modern banking and economics by providing us with unique insights into the nature of money and commerce. “[T]he scholastic theory of usury is an embryonic theory of economics,” he argues. “Indeed it is the first attempt at a science of economics known to the West.” The centuries‐long debate over usury gave the West an economic head start.
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redit and debt have been around even longer than money itself. When a shepherd first gave a goat to a farmer on the promise that the farmer would repay him with wheat at the next harvest, there was credit, and there was debt. Seen from the twenty‐first century, when Americans have racked up a trillion dollars in consumer debt and another trillion in stu‐ dent loan debt, we might view that long‐ago exchange involving 17
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the wheat and the goat as an early step down the road to financial perdition. But such acts of trust, when rewarded with a trustworthy response, are the seeds from which widespread prosperity grows. This is because large markets and large wealth‐creating enterprises can never get off the ground until trust spreads beyond tribe and kin. But even after Westerners came to accept charging interest on mon‐ ey, they still made sharp distinctions—between lending and partner‐ ing, and between money lent as investment capital and money lent for consumption. These distinctions are useful but not as clear‐cut as they seem at first glance. In the 1990s, a young, energetic guy approached an older, estab‐ lished venture capitalist at a dinner party in the Seattle suburb of Medina and pitched him on the idea of an online bookstore. It seemed a bit farfetched at first: how was a website going to compete with multibillion‐dollar bookstore chains like Barnes & Noble, where customers could see, feel, and smell the books, and even sit and read them in lounge chairs while sipping a latte? Despite these obvious objections, this venture capitalist was a risk taker, and so he offered the impetuous young entrepreneur $100,000 in start‐up money. The entrepreneur’s name was Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com. The venture capitalist’s return on that investment was about $20 mil‐ lion after five years. He had allocated his capital extremely well. Here we have the quintessential capital loan: an investor risks his own money in support of a venture that may, or may not, pay off. If we thought of the $100,000 as a bank loan, the interest rate on the amount repaid at the end of the five years would be vastly higher than any small‐dollar loan from the most avaricious loan shark in history. We’re talking about an annualized interest rate of something like 4,000 percent! Still, few people find that morally troubling, even though when we hear about credit cards that charge, say, 36 percent annual interest, we consider it an outrage. Why is that? It may be because we don’t understand what is involved. But it may also be because we view credit card loans as consumption loans rather than capital loans. Of course capital loans should yield interest, we think, since the whole venture is about creating more wealth. But where’s the good in charg‐ ing interest for people to go out and buy things for their daily con‐ sumption? 18
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For instance, imagine that my wife and I have always wanted to drink a bottle of Dom Pérignon in elegant surroundings and, blast it, we’re tired of waiting, so we go to Canlis, one of the most elegant and expensive restaurants in Seattle. Along with our Kobe steak dinners, we enjoy a bottle of the famous champagne. Unfortunate‐ ly, the bill is so high—the champagne alone costs $300—that I have to charge it on my Visa card and then pay it back over several months with interest. And the extra expense means I can’t afford to take my two daughters to the dentist for a year. That, my friends, is the quintessential dumb‐as‐a‐sack‐of‐hair consumption loan—paying a wheelbarrow full of interest on a lux‐ ury item consumed instantly, that I don’t need and can’t afford, and that wipes out my ability to make another important expenditure. We have to eat, of course, so we fulfill a legitimate need in eating the dinner. But we could have eaten burgers, fries, and shakes at Dick’s for about $13. I’ve given two extreme examples—a clever venture capitalist versus a profligate purchaser of pricy Champagne—to illustrate the value judgment hanging over practically every conversation about credit for the last 200 years: “Capital loans are good; consumption loans are bad.” At one time or other, everything from mortgages to remodeling loans to car loans and credit card payments have suf‐ fered bad branding as “consumer loans.” Adam Smith and other classical economists approved of “productive” loans but dispar‐ aged loans for “immediate consumption.” Capital loans seem gen‐ erally virtuous since they are productive; consumption loans are vicious because they are, well, consumptive. A few generations on, Victorian‐era Americans had made their peace with productive credit, such as for land, “which underlay the geographical expansion and entrepreneurial business activity of the United States.” According to one study, in 1895 “at least 90 per‐ cent of the country’s private debt went to acquire capital goods or durable property.” Borrowing money was okay as long as it was “used to purchase things that increased in value or had productive uses.” Such debt usually took the form of an installment loan. Boiled down to essentials, this form of loan is like a rent‐to‐own agreement, since the buyer gets the item up front, unlike a layaway plan. 19
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s it happens, it was not retailers but the U.S. government that introduced installment loans. The appropriately named fi‐ nance historian Lendol Calder explains that after the Land Act of 1800 the federal government “sold 19.4 million acres of north‐ west public lands on terms calling for a down payment of one‐fourth of the purchase price and the balance due in equal payments two, three, and four years after purchase.” Later, installment credit al‐ lowed ordinary farmers to buy mechanical farm equipment. The point is easy to miss. We marvel at the innovations that trans‐ formed farming starting in the nineteenth century—from the me‐ chanical reaper credited to Cyrus McCormick to giant “combines” (combined harvester‐threshers). But these inventions would have been far less revolutionary without the less tangible credit inventions that allowed so many farmers to own the new technologies. McCor‐ mick’s grandson didn’t miss the connection. He described installment lending as “the most important innovation introduced into his [Cy‐ rus McCormick’s] selling system.”31 The loans were tailored to the changing income stream of farmers, who might be in debt part of the year and then relatively flush with cash after a bountiful harvest. Not technology alone, but new technology combined with innovative credit allowed farmers to reduce “the man‐hours required to harvest an acre of grain from twenty hours to one.” Yet “consumptive debt” for perishable goods, such as fine wine and caviar, or even rice and beans, was still frowned upon. In fact, as late as the 1920s, the word consumption was still commonly used to refer to people suffering and dying from tuberculosis. Nevertheless, the thick black line between productive and consumptive loans had started to fade. The two loan types, which look quite different at first, really occupy a lot of overlapping territory. Take the mortgage loan to buy a house. We clearly use our houses. Some folks even wear out their houses. In that way, we “consume” them. Yet even in a flat housing market—where prices don’t change—buying a house with a mortgage loan can be a sort of in‐ vestment. After all, if you live in a house and slowly pay off a 30‐year mortgage, you end up with a house. If you had rented a house in‐ stead, at the end of that period you’d still have to pay rent and wouldn’t own so much as a single two‐by‐four in the house you’d lived in for half your life. 20
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As mentioned above, even in the nineteenth century, farmers bought farm equipment on credit, just as they now get loans to buy tractors, seeders, irrigators, and the like. Farm equipment doesn’t retain its value like land does, but it allows farmers to produce more with their land and so to make a better living, possibly em‐ ploy more people, and have more money to repay the loan. If a farmer couldn’t buy a tractor until he had saved all the money to pay for it, he might be stuck in a Catch‐22—unable to earn the money to buy a tractor because he didn’t already own a tractor. Still, under the older reckoning, he would be taking out a con‐ sumptive loan to purchase that tractor. Or what about a poor kid from Yazoo, Mississippi, who borrows money to help her pursue an engineering degree that lands her a job at Microsoft? She’s buying short‐term access to libraries, class‐ rooms, computers, and teaching services—but for that kid a stu‐ dent loan is more an investment in the future than consumption in the present. Alternately, what if that student’s parents bought a piano on an installment plan when she was a child (as many people did even 100 years ago)? That’s not immediate consumption. If the piano allowed her, after years of lessons, to get a scholarship to the Juil‐ liard School, we might think of it as an investment. What if she took lessons for a few years, but eventually the piano became a nice piece of furniture in the living room? Would that mean the loan taken out years before was a consumptive rather than a productive loan? What if the piano lessons increased her IQ by six points? Or three points? Half a point, but lots of fond memories? When does it cease to be a productive loan? If you need a car to get to work or to do your job but don’t have enough savings to buy it outright, is it shameful to get a loan to buy the car and pay it off slowly? Surely not. When my wife, Gin‐ ny, and I got married, her dowry was an old Toyota Tercel that had seen too many Michigan winters. It worked for a while, but rusty parts kept falling off in the road. Eventually the monthly repairs cost more than a monthly payment on a car. I was in graduate school full‐time and Ginny’s job required a long commute. So we got a 5‐year car loan and drove the car for 10 years. (There’s a defi‐ nite pleasure in driving a car that’s been paid off.) Referring to the 21
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loan we got as a “consumption loan” seems to lard the act with moral opprobrium that it doesn’t deserve. These days we don’t have to pinch as many pennies as we did then, but I couldn’t do my job now if I didn’t spend money on cell phones, Internet connections, and Advil. If we didn’t have a good mattress, I would probably fall asleep in front of my computer every day. Are these expenses consumption or investment? Luxury or necessity? I happen to have enough income and savings at this point so that I don’t need a loan to buy these things. Am I more virtuous than the poorer people who have to borrow money to do so? These expenses are not pure investments like an investment in a new medical device company. But neither are they mere consumption.
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ow, don’t get me wrong. Consumption and production are not the same thing. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t exert self‐control. We shouldn’t pretend certain items are neces‐ sary to our daily functioning if they are really not. I have not found— nor am I looking for—a way to turn that bottle of Dom Pérignon into a necessity. We don’t need to justify everything before the bar of productivity. Some luxury items are just that. A society can’t habitually and indefinitely consume more than it saves and produces (though we’re giving it our best shot). Neverthe‐ less, the economy depends not just on production and investment but on consumption as well. If no one bought cars or houses or meals, there would be no car manufacturers or builders or restaura‐ teurs. And if having some of these things makes people more pro‐ ductive—as the office chair with lumbar support makes me—then it seems that credit that allows people to have access to them sooner rather than later could make society as a whole more prosperous and productive. And, if so, why would it be wrong, in principle, for fi‐ nance companies to lend people money at interest to make that pos‐ sible? By the end of the nineteenth century, such considerations led Americans to put loans for items such as pianos and sewing ma‐ chines on the “productive” side of the ledger. This is not simply be‐ cause manufacturers and consumers were overcome with avarice. With mass production, more and more consumer goods became available to the ordinary person. Goods that were a luxury and af‐ fordable only for the wealthy in an earlier age—such as pianos— 22
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were now within reach of the growing middle class. Technology and credit worked hand‐in‐hand. Technology lowered prices; credit lifted the reach of lower‐income Americans. The watersheds were the invention of the sewing machine and the automobile. In the nineteenth century, the sewing machine em‐ powered millions of Americans, mostly women, to become income earners. I.M. Singer and Company is remembered because its ma‐ chines found their way into so many American homes. The forgot‐ ten part of the story is that Singer and other sewing machine com‐ panies made installment credit popular nationwide. Similarly, history students learn that Henry Ford used mass production to get the price of his Model T within reach of middle‐class Americans. They rarely learn that installment loans, which Ford opposed at first, made up the difference. “Installment credit and the automo‐ bile were both cause and consequence of each other’s success,” writes Calder in his award‐winning analysis, Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit. Despite a lingering worry, by the 1920s installment credit began to lose its stigma and slowly found its way into ordinary retail sales for everything from furniture to clothing and jewelry to appliances. Most people came to realize that the right forms of credit, with the right rules, allow us to create more wealth and improve our lives.
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he pervasive use of credit is one of the marks of the modern world. Even paper money, when it was first introduced, was a form of debt. It represented “a promise by an issuing bank to redeem fiat money with real money,” as Calder explains. “In this sense, the introduction of paper money into everyday life anticipated the arrival of a complex economy operating on the basis of sophisti‐ cated credit transactions.” Now practically all we use is fiat money, backed, not by gold or silver, but by the faith and credit of the U.S. government. The good news is that this is possible only because bil‐ lions of people trust the arrangement enough that they will accept paper dollars in payment for virtually anything. The bad news is that the whole thing can collapse if a critical mass of people lose that trust. Our age is far more complicated and diverse than the bygone era when neighbors exchanged goats for wheat. As a result, our forms of credit and debt are far more complex and diverse, and they don’t 23
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fit neatly into the old contrast between capital and consumption loans. Today there are myriad ways to start, organize, and finance businesses, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Ditto for consumer credit. Available to American consumers today are credit cards; mortgage loans, which come in different shapes and sizes; installment loans for everything from car repairs to surgery; payday loans; and even pawnshops. These meet different needs for different people at different times. Each of these credit instruments has pluses and minuses. Each can be used or abused. When we ponder the economic and social costs of debt and credit, however, we also should remember the great bene‐ fits they have brought to ordinary people in the last century and a half. Especially when we’re in the aftermath of a financial crisis, we shouldn’t fall for bad moral arguments or throw out the good parts along with the bad. Our financial industry has helped millions of people pursue the American Dream and succeed. We should all want it to continue to do so for our children and grandchildren.
Jay W. Richards serves as distinguished fellow at the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics, author of The New York Times bestselling books Infiltrated and Indivisible and author of Money, Greed, and God, which won a Templeton Enterprise Award in 2010. He is also executive producer of several television documentaries, including “The Call of the Entrepreneur” and “The Birth of Freedom”, and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. 24
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THE BIBLICAL PERSPECTIVE ON WORK [rediscovering0labor{ Jordan Ballor
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or those who have the gift of employment in today’s American economy, the right to work can seem more like a privilege. And for those looking for work, the hope of being hired soon can sometimes seem more like a fantasy. But it is precisely in this kind of challenging economic environment that we can most clearly see the blessing that work is, both to ourselves and to one another. For ourselves, work helps give life meaning and purpose. Human beings are naturally productive, tending, when unimpeded, to use our minds and hands to make things, to be creative. The very term manufacturing comes from root words that mean “making by hand.” Indeed, God has set up the world in such a way that work is a bless‐ ing, the way he provides for us to provide for ourselves and our fam‐ ilies. The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer in this context called work God’s “order of grace,” the regular means God has given to take care of our material needs. Anyone who has been out of work knows this to be true: having a job and receiving a paycheck is a great blessing. But God has also given our work a spiritual meaning. The Apostle Paul exhorts us in this way: “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men” (Col 3:23). That is, we are accountable to God for the opportunities he gives us to be productive, as well as for the energy and talents that we apply in our work. The first great commandment is to “Love the Lord your God 25
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with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37). We are to love God in all we do. This includes that portion of our day which we spend at work. We are, quite simply, to show our love of God in our work. It is one thing, however, to say that we are to love God in our work. It is quite another to do so. What does loving God in our work really look like? It is here that the second great commandment comes to the fore: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39). As the Christian writer Lester DeKoster puts it, at its core “work is the form in which we make our‐ selves useful to others.” It is in putting ourselves in the service of others that our work also finds meaning. For in making ourselves useful to others, we do for them as we would have them do for us. And this is, as DeKoster puts it, the great secret connecting work and the two great love commandments. For in making ourselves useful to others, we make ourselves useful to God. This is how we show our love for God: in serving others. After all, that’s how he shows his love for us. The incarnation is God’s entrance into a life and death of service for human beings. The Apostle Paul makes this connection as he writes, “Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of oth‐ ers.” He says this just before he points to the example of Christ as the one who serves others, “taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phillippians 2:4, 7–8 ESV). This is the good news of Jesus Christ, for our life and death, our rest and our work. The early church father Augustine says, “Every human being, precisely as human, is to be loved on God’s account.” For God loves us so much that he sent his only Son to die on the cross as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. So let us love one another, this day and always, not simply in our leisure, but also in our labor. That human beings were created to be creators, to work, is undeni‐ able. The anthropological concept of homo faber, man the tool‐maker, attests to this basic aspect of what it means to be human. From a Christian perspective, we confess that human beings make things in a way that imitates their Maker. While God creates “out of nothing” (ex nihilo) and then orders and arranges it, we create in a creaturely way, dependent on God’s primary acts of creation. All this is true about the human person, and it is good that it is so. 26
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But ever since the fall into sin work has been bittersweet. This neg‐ ative aspect of work is communicated to us in the biblical narrative in the form of a curse. As God says to Adam, “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life” (Genesis 3:17). As fallen creatures we no longer relate to the world around us, whether the world of plants, animals, human beings, or spiritual truths, the way we did before. So, on the one hand, work is a basic created good that God has giv‐ en us to meet our temporal needs and fashion our souls in disci‐ plined obedience. But, on the other hand, work often becomes toil— laborious, monotonous, repetitive, and unfulfilling. This dissatisfac‐ tion creates in us a deep and abiding sense that things are not the way they are supposed to be. As the book of Ecclesiastes reads, God has “set eternity in the human heart,” such that the things of this world often pale in comparison with our attraction to spiritual things (Ecclesiastes 3:11). We imagine, we believe, we hope that there must be a better world to come. We find this sense of brokenness in something as common as fish‐ ing. In a Michigan Radio story about the challenges facing the fishing industry in the state, veteran angler Ed Patnode mused that “we’d be rich if we could tap into the mind of a fish.” Sometimes the fish seem to like a particular color of lure, and if we could “just get that fish to talk and tell us why do you like pink, or can you tell us what days you’re going to bite pink on and what other factors are influencing your decision to bite this pink lure today,” says Patnode, fishing would be a great deal easier. Patnode’s notion that the challenges of fishing could be overcome if we could understand how fish “think” seems to point toward the possibility that human beings once did, and perhaps will again, re‐ late to the rest of the world in a way that perceives how things really work. And so while we live an existence marred by the curse, we still live. We still can work, even if that work is more troublesome and diffi‐ cult than it would have otherwise been. The Dutch theologian and statesman Abraham Kuyper describes this dynamic between things being imperfect and yet still good in his doctrine of “common grace,” an idea enjoying renewed attention with the publication in English of portions of his magnum opus on the subject. Kuyper writes that, af‐ ter the fall, “we can arrive at the knowledge of things only by obser‐ 27
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vation and analysis. But that is not how it was in paradise.” Before the fall we read that Adam “named” the animals, by which we should understand that “Adam immediately perceived the nature of each animal, and expressed his insight into the animal’s nature by giving it a name corresponding to its nature.” Things are far different today, however, as we see in the case of Ed Patnode and other fisherman, or any professional who deals daily with the natural world. Kuyper writes, “If we want to learn to under‐ stand a plant or an animal, then we must observe that animal and that plant carefully for a long time, and from what we observe grad‐ ually draw conclusions about their nature. This occurs apart from us ever learning to understand their essence.” Indeed, says Kuyper, “Even their instincts still remain a completely unsolved riddle for us,” to the extent that we do not really know what causes lake trout to prefer pink lures to green or orange on any given day. In this way the daily routine of work reminds us both of what we have lost and how we are still blessed. It reminds us that amidst the brokenness and blindness of sin, God has not abandoned this world. And so we are called, in our own limited and often wayward way: “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might” (Ecclesi‐ astes 9:10). This is the nature of our “lot in life” and our “toilsome labor under the sun” until such time as we “shall know fully” (1 Co‐ rinthians 13:12) the extent of God’s redeeming grace. Indeed, in the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25:31– 46), Jesus differentiates between those who have done good to others by working well and those who have not. The king, taking the place of Christ in the parable, says that “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” Whatever good was done was counted as being done to the king, and whatever bad was done was counted the same way. And on this basis the king separates the righteous sheep and the unrighteous goats. The goats “go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” It is natural to think that the good the sheep do to others (“I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink...”) refers to special acts of kindness, things that are only done occasionally and usually within a charitable context. Lester DeKoster provides a refreshing understanding of this para‐ ble. He writes that the good Jesus refers to includes these special acts of charity, but also refers to the service we do every day within the 28
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context of work. Consider that “God himself, hungering in the hun‐ gry, is served by all those who work in agriculture, wholesale or re‐ tail foods, kitchens or restaurants, food transportation or the mass production of food items, manufacturing of implements used in agri‐ culture or in any of the countless food‐related industries, innumera‐ ble support services and enterprises that together make food produc‐ tion and distribution possible.” The same goes for those who thirst, or who need clothing or shelter. “To work is to love—both God and neighbor!” concludes DeKoster.
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ne reflexive response to this claim is to argue that when we do work for money, when we profit from our labor, we are really serving ourselves and not others. Or we might say that our service to others is merely instrumental to our real selfish pur‐ poses. But from the context of Jesus’ parable it’s not clear at all that the sheep explicitly have in mind the idea that they were serving God through their service of others, or that all of what they did for others was simply voluntary and without monetary compensation. They even have to ask the king, “Lord, when did we do these things for you?” The concept of work being at once remunerative and service‐ oriented is not totally foreign to us. We tend to think, at least general‐ ly, of those in “public service” as working for the good of others even though they receive a paycheck. The same typically goes for doctors and teachers, as well as for a host of other jobs. But if it is the case that these kinds of professionals can legitimately be said to serve others (even though they are paid to do so), why is not the same true for the entrepreneur, the waitress, the garbageman, the farmer, the babysitter, the bus driver, the manager, or the factory worker? The fact that our work is “salable,” as DeKoster puts it, is one important piece of evidence that what we are doing is actually of use to some‐ one, enough use, in fact, for them to compensate us for it. This perspective on work and service as understood in the parable of the sheep and the goats also provides us with other norms for judging whether our work is true service or not. One measure, as we have said, is whether someone finds our work to be valuable enough to pay us for doing it. But given the corruption of human nature, people will pay us to do all kinds of things that are not good for them 29
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(or for us). So beyond mere “salability” of our work, we must judge it by its orientation and effects. Does our work actually help others? Is it for their good that this work is done? Does it foster independence or dependence? Does it humanize or dehumanize? Does it feed addiction or satisfy legitimate appetite? By necessity, then, things that are inherently harmful, such as the distribution of illegal drugs, pornography, or abortion, are ruled out of bounds. But there are innumerable other ways that oth‐ erwise valid service or work can be undermined by human sinful‐ ness. Even so, whether it is giving someone something to eat or drink, something to wear or somewhere to live, or any of the other myriad ways we serve one another in daily life, all legitimate forms of serv‐ ing others, whether paid in wages or not, are valid ways to serve Christ. The key to this perspective, writes DeKoster, is to understand that our daily work is “the form in which we make ourselves useful to others, and thus to God.” Another famous story from the Bible is that of “The Prodigal Son,” a tale that has resonated with parents across times and cultures. Like the parable of the sheep and the goats, the story illustrates some basic truths about work and stewardship that are often underappreciated. The basic plot of the story is straightforward: a rebellious youth sets off from home in search of worldly pleasures, and having wasted his father’s money and reputation, eventually returns home in humility to a joyful welcome. Biblical commentators usually note that the par‐ able appears in connection with two other stories in Luke 15, those of “The Lost Coin” and “The Lost Sheep.” The similarities in the stories are, in fact, quite striking, and as bib‐ lical scholars note, well worth attending to. But amid the important similarities of the stories, there are also significant differences that provide some important insights into the biblical vision of human stewardship, particularly our interaction with the material world, animal life, and other people. So the stories should be read together, and understood as Jesus’ an‐ swers to the complaint of the Pharisees that he “welcomes sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:2). In each story the one who has lost something is understood as filling the role of God, who has “lost” something dear to him. The sheep, the coin, and the son represent 30
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God’s people who have gone astray. These lost ones are the “sinners” whom Jesus welcomes. While those who lose things in these stories primarily represent God, the actions of these characters also shed light on how human beings are to conduct themselves as God’s image‐bearers. In one story (which actually is the second parable of the three), Je‐ sus describes a case in which a woman loses one of her ten silver coins. She takes quick action, lighting a lamp, sweeping the house and searching “carefully until she finds it” (Luke 15:8). In this case, that which is lost is a “coin,” a Greek drachma worth about one day’s wages. The woman is the one who “loses” the coin. There is no sense of agency imparted to the coin in this story; the coin, as a material object, is impersonal and inanimate. The coin is passive, receiving the action of the story. The woman loses the coin, lights a lamp, sweeps the house, searches carefully and finally finds the coin; the coin is passive; it is merely lost and found. In another story (which Jesus tells first), a shepherd “has a hundred sheep and loses one of them” (Luke 15:4). Again we see the focus of the action on the shepherd (whom Jesus identifies directly with his listeners: “Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep...”). The sheep presumably wandered off, but it is after all only an animal, and so is impersonal. Even though animals are to be understood as active in some sense, it is an impersonal sense of agency, so that here again the action is ultimately attributed to the shepherd. The shepherd loses one of the sheep, leaves the ninety‐nine, goes after the lost sheep, finds it, and puts it on his shoulders and goes home. But the final story, that of the Prodigal Son (or even better to draw the connection with the other stories, “The Lost Son”), is much more complex than the other two. There are more characters. The action is dispersed, in the sense that agency is not simply attributed to the one who has lost something. In fact, in contrast to the other two stories, the one who drives the action in the story is the son rather than the father. Whereas the woman loses the coin and the shepherd loses the sheep, in this final story the son “got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living” (Luke 15:13). To be sure, the son is lost to the father. But the focus here is on the personal agency of the son rather than that of the fa‐ ther. We can imagine what this would have been like for the father. 31
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We can assume that he raised his son up in the fear of the Lord, that he trained his child “in the way he should go,” with the hope that “when he is old he will not turn from it” (Proverbs 22:6). But when his son demands his inheritance and leaves home, the father seems to do nothing. He neither refuses to give his son what he asks nor pre‐ vents him from leaving. The text does not say so explicitly, but we can again presume that while the son is out in the world living wild‐ ly, the father is at home, attending to his household, and praying dil‐ igently for the son to return. We know the father has this hope be‐ cause once the son decides to return home, “while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him” (Luke 15:20). Once the son takes the initiative (getting up and going to his father), the father finally has some sense of agency: he runs to the son, embraces him, kisses him, and orders a celebration. The contrast between the story of the Lost Son and the parables of the Lost Sheep and Lost Coin are striking on this level. In the case of human relationship to material objects, like coins, and impersonal agents, like animals, the stories account the moral agency completely to the human actors in the story. The woman and the shepherd lose their possessions and work diligently to find them again. But when the story involves human interrelations, there is an emphasis on the moral agency of every person in the story (including the elder son, whose role is often overlooked). The father definitely loses his son, but his diligence in finding him again is limited to means other than actively working to find him; he must instead diligently pray and watch. Reading these three stories together teaches us many things about the nature of God’s love for us, such that when we were lost, “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). But the stories also provide models for how we should relate to the different aspects of God’s created order, from the material, to the animal, to the hu‐ man. In each kind of relationship, humans have a definite role to play. In some cases we are called to work actively to achieve God’s purposes in the world. In other cases, out of respect for human free‐ dom and individual sovereignty, we have to engage in active search‐ ing for the lost things of this world by less direct means, such as prayer. In a short essay on the relationship between work and prayer, C.S. Lewis points to the remarkable continuity between the two, and how 32
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prayer is in its own way an appropriate form of active searching. As Lewis writes of work and prayer, God “gave us small creatures the dignity of being able to contribute to the course of events in two dif‐ ferent ways.” With respect to primarily material reality, like coins and sheep, we can work, or “do things to it; that is why we can wash our own hands and feed or murder our fellow creatures.” But with respect to spiritual realities, we exercise a different kind of creaturely causality, that of prayer, whose results are not always as predictable as in the physical order: “This is not because prayer is a weaker kind of causality, but because it is a stronger kind. When it ‘works’ at all it works unlimited by space and time.” In these parables of the lost coin, sheep, and son, we see modeled in broad strokes the array of human causality, from work to prayer. These are, in fact, the two basic ways that God has instituted to ac‐ complish his purposes in the world through human beings. In these stories, we find that the work and prayer of finding the lost things of the world are foundational for what it means to be a steward, an im‐ age‐bearer, of God.
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uring the 2012 election season, Mike Rowe, the host of Dirty Jobs and narrator of “The Deadliest Catch” from The Dis‐ covery Channel, penned a letter to the Mitt Romney cam‐ paign, highlighting what he calls a generational “change in the way Americans viewed hard work and skilled labor.” His work on “Dirty Jobs”, where he is a “perpetual apprentice,” allowed Rowe to see from the front lines of the workplace our national attitudes towards work. “Pig farmers, electricians, plumbers, bridge painters, jam mak‐ ers, blacksmiths, brewers, coal miners, carpenters, crab fisherman, oil drillers... they all tell me the same thing over and over, again and again,” he wrote. “Our country has become emotionally disconnect‐ ed from an essential part of our workforce. We are no longer im‐ pressed with cheap electricity, paved roads, and indoor plumbing. We take our infrastructure for granted, and the people who build it.” In a similar letter addressed to President Obama in 2008, Rowe wrote that “the ranks of welders, carpenters, pipe fitters, and plumb‐ ers have been declining for years, and now, we face the bizarre reality of rising unemployment, and a shortage of skilled labor.” This is the so‐called “skills gap,” where jobs that require certain abilities or know‐how remain unfilled even in the face of a vast number of oth‐ 33
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erwise available workers. This gap points to the larger crisis we face in America, a cultural attitude toward work that Rowe has elsewhere called “dysfunctional.” This shift is reflected in the attitudes toward work of younger people, often engendered by an educational system that promotes a singular vision of higher education at the expense of vocational and technical training: “I always thought there [was] something ill‐fated about the promise of three million ‘shovel ready jobs’ made to a society that no longer encourages people to pick up a shovel,” says Rowe. There are a number of causes of this complex phenomenon, but at least part of the problem of work has to do with what we think work actually is. If all work ends up being is a paycheck, a necessary evil, a drudgery that only is worthwhile insofar as it allows us to find meaning elsewhere, then it becomes easy to see why our attitudes towards manual labor and hard work suffer. What we need to recover, and Mike Rowe’s warnings attest to this, is a view of work that celebrates it as not merely a necessary evil but rather an indispensable good. Work is, in fact, the basic form of stew‐ ardship that God has provided for human beings to serve one anoth‐ er and cultivate the created order. This isn’t some easy task that might be checked off a list and dispensed with, but is rather a deeply meaningful responsibility laid upon each and every human person. As Gerard Berghoef and Lester DeKoster observe, “The forms of work are countless, but the typical one is work with the hands. The Bible has reference to the sower, to the making of tents and of things out of clay, to tilling the fields and tending the vine. Hand work makes visible the plan in the mind, just as the deed makes visible the love in the heart.” And indeed, the picture of work that we have here is not just a simple dichotomy between manual labor that ought to be disdained and mental labor that ought to be celebrated. All work has a spiritual dimension because the human person who works in whatever capac‐ ity does so as an image‐bearer of God. “While the classic Greek mind tended to scorn work with the hands,” write Berghoef and DeKoster, “the Bible suggests that something about it structures the soul.” If we derogate work with the hands, manual and skilled labor, in this way, we separate what God has put together and create a culture that dis‐ dains the hard and often dirty work of cultivating the world in ser‐ vice of others. The challenge that faces the church and society more 34
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broadly then is to appreciate the spiritual meaningfulness of all kinds of work, to celebrate it, and to exhort us to persevere in our labors amidst the unavoidable troubles that plague work in this fallen world.
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he Bible tells us that we reap what we sow, individually as well as corporately. If we sow a culture that disdains work, then we will reap a dysfunctional society that pits class against class, labor versus management, rich against poor, strong against weak. But if we sow a culture that celebrates all kinds of work as in‐ herently valuable, as valid and praiseworthy ways of serving others and thereby serving God, we will reap a society that promotes flour‐ ishing in its deepest and most meaningful sense. Besides the perennially sinful temptations to shrug off hard work, and particularly to avoid the “toil” with which we are cursed after the Fall into sin, people have often rationalized a worldview that tends to devalue the physical, the material, the dirty, and to idealize the spiritual. This tendency has worked itself out in the Christian tradition in various ways, from heresies like Gnosticism or Manichae‐ ism, to more common phenomena like clericalism or secularism. It was against a radical separation of the material and the spiritual that Cornelius Plantinga once wrote that “the things of the mind and spirit are no better, and are sometimes much worse, than the things of the body.” He continues by asserting that a consequence of this perspective is that “it is not more Christian to play chess than to play hockey. It is not more Christian to become a minister than to become a muck farmer.” Understood as a reaction to a kind of radical separation between material and spiritual realities, and the overvaluation of the latter, this kind of claim indeed has some merit. But it also is a dangerous claim, in that it can result in a worldview that simply conflates (or merely equates) the material and the spiritual. The fact is, as Mike Rowe’s concerns illustrate, we need to properly value the material, the physical, the work that preserves our natural life. But this doesn’t mean that we need to buy in to some radically egalitarian view of all work as equal in every way. This certainly isn’t the Reformational view. The Reformation, with doctrines like the priesthood of all believers and vocation, did make all legitimate call‐ ings equally dignified before God. There is no longer a hierarchical 35
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and qualitative split between offices as such. But there remained a kind of hierarchy of good, a proper way of coming to grips with the complex world and the complicated workings of special and com‐ mon grace. Consider, for instance, the reformer Martin Bucer, who labored in Strasbourg for many years and was influenced heavily by Luther and in turn exercised great influence on Calvin and the reformation in England. As church historian David Hopper puts it, “Vocation was, for Bucer, the necessary concomitant of a restored order of creation, to wit, a disciplined service and love of the neighbor—and all crea‐ tures—in this life, one freed, as in Luther, from concern for merit, but one integrated also into ongoing judgments about service to the well‐ being of the commonwealth.” This perspective necessitated some discrimination about better and worse ways of serving one another. Bucer in fact held to a view of spiritual primacy, focused on the calling to ordained ministry, as the most significant way in which God’s special, redemptive grace was communicated in human work. In the second position Bucer placed the civil magistracy, in part be‐ cause of its duty and concerns for the care of religion, as well as for its responsibilities to maintain public order. But in the third position, behind soulcraft and statecraft, so to speak, Bucer placed farmers and others who work for the material well‐being of their neighbors. So, indeed, we can serve each other and thereby serve God either in the ordained ministry of the Word and Sacrament, or in muck farm‐ ing, or in myriad other callings. But we must also affirm the dignity of all human beings as manifested in legitimate work without con‐ flating the qualitative differences between means and ministries of special and common grace. The reality that ministry as service of some sort is a lifelong calling rings harsh in modern ears accustomed to a model of retirement and relaxation at the achievement of a certain age. But in truth good work never ends. In an undiluted if unwelcome acknowledgment of new economic realities, the CEO of insurance giant AIG spoke candidly when he admitted that retirement ages in developed nations would need to be raised. “Retirement ages will have to move to 70, 80 years old,” said Robert Benmosche. “That would make pensions, medical services more affordable. They will keep people working longer and will take that burden off of the youth.” 36
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While Benmosche’s conclusions are firmly based in the calculus in‐ volving increases in life expectancies and declining birthrates, they also provide a timely occasion for reexamining popular attitudes toward work and retirement. Where work is seen merely as a neces‐ sary evil, it is natural to see retirement as a well‐deserved escape from a lifetime of drudgery and toil. The biblical view of work, how‐ ever, presents a somewhat different picture that shows us that the good work of service to others ought never end as long as we live. Two examples from West Michigan help to illustrate the fact that God designed human beings to be blessings to others through their work and service. John Izenbaard of Kalamazoo, Michigan, turned 90 years old in April 2012, and under any proposed system would have long been eligible for retirement benefits. But Mr. Izenbaard has been working for 74 years at Hoekstra’s True Value Hardware and has the same goal today as when he started there in 1936: “to be a ‘blessing’ for customers.” When asked about the possibility of retirement, Izen‐ baard responded, “I look forward to coming to work. I really enjoy it.” Izenbaard’s work infuses his life with meaning, as he uses his knowledge, experience, and skills to serve his neighbors. Fred Carl Hamilton of Wyoming, Michigan, is a comparatively youthful 71 years old, but when faced with a disappearing retirement fund, he “realized he would have to get a job if he wanted to keep his house.” Hamilton took an unconventional approach. Rather than looking for a local retail job, he decided to innovate. “I was walking around my house thinking, ‘There’s got to be something I can cre‐ ate,’” said Hamilton. Experimenting over the course of three years, Hamilton created the Iron Bite, a tool for weight lifting equipment that secures weights to the bar by using “a spring‐loaded push rod to let weight lifters gently pinch rings together and easily slide the de‐ vice on and off the bar.” Reflecting on the loss of retirement funds that prompted him to pursue a second career as an inventor, Hamil‐ ton says, “It’s not all bad, because I always had a good job, and now I realize how people are struggling out there. And I can put people to work now.” While these two stories show that work arises out of a range of possible motivations, from Izenbaard’s intention to be a blessing in his work to Hamilton’s desire not to take on a retail job like Izen‐ baard’s, they both show that the divine institution of work orients us towards activities that serve others. Whether out of selfless altruism 37
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or simply the human instinct to be creative, work places us in a posi‐ tion to productively bless others with tangible goods and services. Recognition of this fact about work challenges the standard concep‐ tion of retirement as a time to focus on self‐gratification after a life‐ time of unfulfilling and meaningless toil. But it also casts doubt on a model that sees what a person does in their retirement years as final‐ ly achieving significance. The bestselling author Lloyd Reeb de‐ scribes a halftime transition in life as moving “from success to signif‐ icance.” Understood rightly, this kind of perspective can be helpful in reorienting our priorities toward service of others. Not all jobs are good jobs, and not all work is good work. If we are unable to see how our work serves other people, or how it might be anything but grind‐ ing and alienating, then an emphasis on significance can occasion a new outlook, a change in careers, or a move to different kinds of work, whether waged or not. But understood wrongly, this formula can reinforce the idea that work itself, even if successful in worldly terms, is of little or no importance. In his book on the subject of work from a Christian perspective, Lester DeKoster goes so far as to call work “the meaning of your life.” One of DeKoster’s most powerful insights is that we don’t need to look beyond our daily work for significance in serving God and others: “It is your daily work, whatever your job, that does give meaning to your life, not because you will now decide to put mean‐ ing there but because God has already done so.” God has given us the order of work as the primary way in which we serve others, and thereby serve him. Take a look at John Izenbaard and Fred Carl Hamilton. That’s a vi‐ sion of good work that never ends.
Jordan Ballor is a research fellow at the Acton Institute and serves as executive editor of the Journal of Markets & Morality. He is author most recently of Get Your Hands Dirty: Essays on Christian Social Thought (and Action) (Wipf & Stock, 2013), from which this essay is excerpted. 38
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H OW W E L OST THE C RAFTSMEN ]the0value0of0dirt} Jeff Haanen
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t was a crisp, winter morning and I stood outside Manual High School, traditionally one of Denver’s lowest performing schools. Along with twelve other seminary students on an urban ministry site visit, we listened to our professor. “Manual is one of Denver’s oldest institutions,” he said, pointing to the brick edifice. “It opened in 1896, and was named Manual because it was originally intended as a vocational school to train students for manual labor.” We quietly shook our heads in disbelief. How could educators have such low expectations for their students? Didn’t the founders believe all students could go to college? So great was our 21st century dis‐ dain for manual labor that we naturally connected Manual High School’s low academic performance with its original intent: preparing students for the manual trades. Yet Americans today devalue manual labor with an almost righteous indignation. We can see it in our economy, in our schools, in our entertainment, and even in the church. Let’s take these one by one: ECONOMY: Consider these statistics: The average age of today’s tradesperson is 56, with an average of 5‐15 years until retirement. As skilled laborers retire in masses, America will need an estimated 10 million new skilled tradesmen by 2020 (such as a pipefitters, masons, carpenters, or high‐skilled factory workers). But even today, an esti‐ mated 600,000 jobs in the skilled trades are unfilled, while 83% of companies report a moderate to serious shortage in skilled laborers. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and BusinessWeek have all run prominent stories about the huge shortage of skilled laborers. 39
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SCHOOLS: Across the US, as the need for skilled laborers has in‐ creased, the number of classes in “tech ed”—traditionally known as “shop class”—have all but disappeared. For example, in Jefferson County Public School District in Colorado, only three remaining schools have any kind of “tech ed” programs—of a district of over 84,000 students. And in Denver Public Schools, there are only two shop classes remaining—and one of them is currently selling all their equipment to local buyers. As high schools prepare youth to be “knowledge workers,” they unload lathes, table saws, and other “vo‐ cational ed” equipment in droves. The assumption that every student should go to a four your liberal arts college has almost become sacrosanct for urban, suburban and rural students alike. Going to a two‐year trade school is seen as a path for “average” to underperforming students. As educator Mike Rose has said in his book The Mind at Work about the cultural image of the tradesmen: “We are given the muscled arm, sleeve rolled tight against biceps, but no thought bright behind the eye, no image that links hands and brain.” Real thinking, our schools have taught us, happens in the office, not the shop. And today have a veritable mountain of student debt—an estimated $1.2 trillion in the US alone—and the lowest labor participation rate since 1978. CULTURE: Even in entertainment, we’ve persistently devalued trade schools and community colleges. NBC’s satirical TV show “Commu‐ nity” portrays American community colleges (which train many skilled tradesmen, among other professions) as the pit of the academ‐ ic world. The show takes place at Greendale Community College, where “Straight A’s” are “Accessibility, Affordability, Air Condition‐ ing, Awesome New Friends, and A lot of fun.” Perhaps community college is “a lot of fun,” but such merciless mocking finds its way into the future plans of high school students—plans to avoid trade schools and community college at all costs. CHURCH. In the past 5‐10 years, there’s been a renewed interest among Protestants in the topic of work. Three years ago Christianity Today launched the “This Is Our City” project, which profiled evan‐ gelicals working in various industries for “the common good” of their city. Tim Keller’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City has launched a “Center for Faith and Work.” Gabe Lyons’ Q Cities convenes conferences of culturally‐minded evangelicals who work in industries like art, media or education. Conferences, books, 40
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and seminars on God and work have multiplied, and evangelicals in finance, business, technology, art, science and nonprofits have re‐ ceived renewed attention. But one sector has largely been over‐ looked: skilled manual labor. James K.A. Smith, a professor of philosophy at Calvin College, re‐ cently wrote, “Do people show up to your ‘faith & work’ events in coveralls? With dirt under their nails? No? Then whose ‘work’ are we talking about?” Though surely not everybody in the modern econo‐ my will have “dirt under their nails” after a day’s work, he makes a good point: where are the examples plumbers, landscapers, carpen‐ ters, and electricians among this renewed interest in vocation? And more broadly, where are the examples of craftsman and “blue collar” workers who are intentionally living out their vocations in and through their trade? Are executives and professionals the only ones privileged enough to wed meaning with work? All of this is strange for at least two reasons. First, we all depend on the work of craftsmen every single day. Whether it’s your HVAC re‐ pairman, plumber, or electrician, heat, clean water and even light flow as a direct result of their work. The work of the trades is of the utmost importance for nearly every aspect of modern life. But as a Christian, this cultural situation strikes me as even more strange. After all, the Bible is replete with craftsmen— masons, gold‐ smiths, gem cutters, potters and weavers. The Bible even states that the first person explicitly filled with the Holy Spirit is Bezalel, whom God filled “with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills—to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood, and to en‐ gage in all kinds of crafts,” (Exodus 31:3‐5). And, lest we forget, Jesus was a tekton, translated literally as “craftsman” or “one who works with his hands” (Mark 6:3). What has gone wrong here? How is it that we came to devalue the craftsman, to the detriment of our economy, schools, churches and culture? To find answers, we need to look to history.
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uch a disdain for the trades was not always present. In the mid‐ nineteenth century, craftsmen were an integral part of the pro‐ fessional and scientific community. For example, the Mechanics Institutes of Britain had over 200,000 members, which hosted lectures that satisfied the intellectual curiosity of millwrights, metal workers, 41
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mechanics and other tradesmen with evening lectures by professors and scientists. Likewise, in the 1884 book The Wheelwright’s Shop, George Sturt re‐ lates his experience of making carriage wheels from lumber. Previ‐ ously a school teacher with literary ambitions, Sturt was enraptured with the challenges of shaping timber with hand tools: “Knots here, shakes there, rind‐galls, waney edges, thicknesses, thinnesses, were for ever affording new chances or forbidding previous solutions, whereby a fresh problem confronted the workman’s ingenuity every few minutes.” Manual labor was not only integral to scientific dis‐ covery, it attracted many of the best minds of its day. In the 18th and 19th century, some of history’s finest scientists—Benjamin Franklin (1706‐1790), James Watt (1736‐1819), Samuel Crompton (1753‐1827)— were also craftsmen who built what they designed, and knew no separation between working with the hands and the mind. Yet the forces of industrialization were changing the skilled trades. Even as early as The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith marveled at the efficiencies of the factory: “One man draws out the wire, an‐ other straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head…Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty‐eight thousand pins a day.” The division of labor could produce more pins in a day between ten peo‐ ple than one person alone could produce in a lifetime. Although the factory had been around for generations, the automa‐ tion of work took on a new dimension in 1911, when Frederick Wins‐ low Taylor published his Principles of Scientific Management. As Mat‐ thew Crawford has pointed out, Taylor’s work focused on gathering the knowledge of craftsmen, organizing it into high efficiency pro‐ cesses, and then re‐distributing that work to laborers as small parts of a larger whole. After extensive time and motion studies, Taylor was able to design processes, overseen by management, which allowed employers to cut labor costs by standardizing manual labor. Accord‐ ing to Taylor, “All possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centered in the planning or lay‐out department.” Thus the previous harmony of craftsmen and thinker, skilled labor and scien‐ tist, began a long process of separation. A “white‐collar” labor force of planners and “blue‐collar” mass of workers began to emerge. The positive side of mass manufacturing was unprecedented wealth creation. In 1913, Henry Ford’s assembly line was able to 42
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double worker wages and still produce cars more cheaply than his competitors, allowing thousands to afford an upgrade from a car‐ riage to a Model T. Yet the negative side of automation was the mo‐ notonous routines for workers, which, according to Ford’s biog‐ rapher, meant “every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963.” Skilled craftsmen would simply walk off the line, with a sour taste for work that made them feel like machines themselves Perhaps business philosopher Peter Drucker was right when he wrote: Machines work best if they do only one task, if they do it repetitively, and if they do the simplest possible task… [But] the human being…is a very poorly designed machine tool. The human being excels in coordination. He excels in relation perception to action. He works best if the entire human being, muscles, senses and mind, is engaged in the work. At the turn of the 20th century, engaging work seemed like it was being lost in the cogs of industry—and in the meantime, craft knowledge was bowing to mechanical processes. In the days when Teddy Roosevelt was preaching the virtues of the strenuous life to East Coast elites, many felt education needed to change to ensure the survival of craft knowledge. Only four years after Ford’s assembly line, the Smith‐Hughes Act of 1917 gave federal funding for manual training. Yet because the bill established separate state boards for vocational education, it had the unintended effect of separating the trades from a liberal arts curriculum. General educa‐ tion would be focused on the liberal arts (college), and vocational education would focus on specific job skills (trade schools) The advent of shop class began to track all “blue collar” work— whether the high skilled tradesmen or the low skilled assembly line worker—into a single category. Over time, shop class meant children of “white collar” workers could make a bird feeder or toy car in shop class, but they had little remaining skills of the craftsmen, which for centuries had been passed on through a process of apprenticeship. We feel the lingering effects of this division between “vocational ed” and a liberal arts education today. Most of those who graduate with degrees in film studies, sociology, or even mathematics or phys‐ 43
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ics haven’t the foggiest idea how to actually fix a car engine, build a table, or wire a light fixture. Yet the greater effect is the enormous economic problem we now have before us. Swathes of young people would never consider a career in plumbing or construction, despite evidence that these jobs pay well and are here to stay. Computers and technology have cer‐ tainly changed our labor force, but they will never change the fact that we live in a physical world—and we will always need physical things because we are physical beings. We will always depend fun‐ damentally on the physical goods—whether made or repaired—that are the unique domain of the craftsman.
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hat is to be done about this problem? Although this is a monumental challenge, we can do at least two things. First, praise examples of excellent craftsmanship—from chefs and jewelers to masons and electricians—that arise from above the criticism and display an ethic of skill, beauty and manual intelli‐ gence in their work. For example, every four years, France hosts the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France (MOF) competition. One event features a fierce three‐day competition between 16 international pastry chefs jockeying for the blue, white and red striped collar that signifies culinary excellence. Chefs are judged on artistry—the visual appearance of the desserts, buffets and, for example, sugar sculptures—taste—entries have very specific size and ingredient specifications—and work—how clean and efficiently the chefs work; including spotless aprons, no waste (exact planning is required), immaculate kitchens. Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker, producers of the documentary “Kings of Pas‐ try”, said in an interview, “The idea of recognizing excellence in manual trades and elevating them to a status equal to intellectual or academic fields is what is uniquely important about the MOF Com‐ petition”. Indeed, Meilleurs Ouvriers de France, when translated, is “Best Craftsman in France,” a title won only by the finest chefs exhib‐ iting the highest levels of skill and manual intelligence. And France’s competition isn’t just limited to chefs; there are also competitions for stonemasonry, plumbing, tailoring, weaving, cabinetmaking, solder‐ ing, glassblowing, diamond‐working, and a host of other trades. In America, Tad Landis Meyers, a photographer, recently published Portraits of the American Craftsman—a stunningly beautiful photo 44
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journal of the work of a “lost generation of craftsman.” Scotty Bob Carlson of Silverton, Colorado makes hand‐crafted skis; Nell Ann McBroom of Nocona, Texas cuts, dies and sews baseball gloves; Steinway and Sons Pianos in Long Island New York makes pianos “designed to last not just for years, but for generations.” Meyers’ five year journey of photographing American craftsmen has revealed an almost forgotten way of life, defined by careful skill, mastery of the physical world, and satisfying work. Brett Hull of Hull Historical Millwork in Fort Worth Texas says, “The simplicity of the clean lines or the intricacy of the detail are exciting to me. Itʹs something that just fills my soul.” But praising excellent craftsmanship can also be more common‐ place. When we choose to buy a table that will last not for years but generations, we place a higher value on skill. But more importantly, encouraging more young people to go to trade school will slowly but surely impact the way we view that labor. The Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology in Lancaster, Pennsylvania recently an‐ nounced a $2.5 million dollar grant to expand training programs for high‐wage, high‐demand manufacturing jobs. With a 95 percent job placement rate, minimal student debt, and jobs like an industrial ap‐ prentice that can start at $60,000 with full benefits, more students will consider choosing trade school over a four year college degree. I’m not encouraging more young people to be vocational mercenar‐ ies (go get the quick money!), but consider these aspects in balance. For those students who nod off in British literature but come alive when rebuilding an engine, we must acknowledge that some people are designed to be builders—and that’s okay. It may even get them a better job than their peers who end up as debt ridden, college‐ educated baristas who can make a mean latte, but find trouble get‐ ting into a career. The craftsman lives on—yet still in the corners culture more enam‐ ored with the virtual world than the physical world. But for the sake of our economy, schools, culture and even our churches, we would profit to once again appreciate our culture’s makers and fixers—the craftsmen.
Jeff Haanen is Executive Director of Denver Institute for Faith & Work. 45
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Country Hardball Aaron Belz You don’t know country hardball until you’ve played with the same ball for three years running, a ball aged by soaking and lying in the shade between rows of corn all fall, retrieved frozen in March, and in May still frozen, hit directly into your worn leather glove at short… stung the palm pulsing. Why scouts never appreciated our handicaps is beyond me.
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THE RELIGIOUS LIBERTY R E S E RVAT I O N 4THE)TASK)AHEAD$ Greg Forster
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uchanan, you have to give the nuts 20 percent of what they want.” This comment from Richard Nixon to his speechwriter Pat Buchanan concerning evangelical vot‐ ers, noted by historian David Courtwright, provides a capsule summary of the relationship between the GOP and most evangelicals in the 20th century. The good news is that to‐ day, evangelicals are more awake to the dangers of this dynamic than at any time in the history of modern evangelicalism. The bad news is that threats to religious liberty could undo the progress we’ve made in extracting our cultural agenda from captivity to a political party. After a century on the Republican reservation, we now know how badly we get exploited when we place our hopes for effective cultural engagement in electing the right people. A lot of problems need our attention in America today. We have learned that “the wrong people are in office in Washington” is not even close to the top of the list, however important it may be in some respects. Even as evangelicals continue to vote Republican in large numbers, they have almost no expectation that their broad array of cultural concerns, or even their specific public policy preferences, will be delivered by GOP victories. This is not cynicism; it is freedom from illusions. That may change if judges and national Democratic leaders contin‐ ue to turn their back on freedom of religion. This is a non‐negotiable issue for American evangelicals. We have a long history as champi‐ ons of religious liberty, going all the way back to the New England 47
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theologians who helped the Puritans outgrow the theonomic tenden‐ cies they brought from Europe, and the Virginia Baptists who res‐ cued James Madison’s political career because of his militancy on this issue. It is not an unblemished record, as our Roman Catholic and Jewish friends could remind us. But it is still a record to be proud of, and we are as firmly committed to it today as ever. And well we should be. Our support for religious liberty grows from the deepest roots of our theology. Starting right from the begin‐ ning with Martin Luther’s stand at the Diet of Worms, one of the bed‐ rock commitments of evangelical theology is opposition to all human claims of authority over the conscience. To preserve a sacred space in the human heart for personal moral agency and the work of the Holy Spirit, we refuse to fight spiritual battles with “the weapons of the flesh” (II Corinthians 10:4) and we stand against those who “teach as doctrines the commandments of men” (Matthew 15:9). When we fail to uphold religious liberty we implicitly betray the gospel itself by intruding human power upon God’s exclusive claim over the heart. Therein lies the challenge. We are right to make religious liberty non‐negotiable, yet at the same time it is difficult to know how to remain faithful to that charge without falling back into the political captivity we have spent the last generation escaping. If things con‐ tinue as they are, our churches may spend yet another generation sojourning in the wilderness of a politicized place in the culture.
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or most of the 20th century, evangelicals delivered large num‐ bers of votes to Republican presidents, mobilized each time by grand rhetoric about the historic rescue and transformation of America that was nigh at hand. The GOP profited enormously from its relationship with evangelicals. However, once they were elected, Republican presidents consistently disappointed the huge expecta‐ tions they had created. They gave evangelicals just barely enough to keep them on the reservation. To what extent, if at all, Eisenhower or Reagan viewed evangelicals as “nuts” whom they could cynically manipulate, as Nixon did, is a matter of some dispute. What is not really subject to much dispute is that no Republican president in the 20th century delivered, or even fought very hard for, the majority of the policy and cultural victories evangelicals had hoped they would provide. Nixon’s “20 percent of what they want” is a pretty good estimate of what evangelicals actu‐ 48
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ally got from the presidents they elected. In fact, in light of enthusias‐ tic evangelical support for Nixon’s policies on issues like drugs, crime and the Cold War, there’s a good case to be made that Nixon gave “the nuts” more of what they wanted than any other president in that century. Even George W. Bush did not give his coreligionists much more than his 20th century GOP predecessors had. Evangelicals’ partnership with the GOP did get them some im‐ portant things. For example, the government subsidies for the killing of unborn children now being introduced through Obamacare would probably have come a generation earlier if not for the Religious Right movement. The 20 percent we actually got includes a lot of innocent lives saved, among other accomplishments, and that is not nothing. However, in the long run we paid too high a price for those victo‐ ries. We compromised our prophetic witness. As historian Daniel Williams reminds us, Billy Graham backed Eisenhower in part be‐ cause Adlai Stevenson was a divorcee; evangelicals worked to defeat Nelson Rockefeller for the same reason. By the time 1980 rolled around, they were panicked enough about the direction of the coun‐ try to turn a blind eye to Reagan’s divorce. Thus, at the same moment American culture was normalizing the monstrous cruelty of easy divorce, evangelicals were busy abandoning their prophetic witness against it. Another price we paid was our complicity in the hollowing out of the shared moral culture. We have participated in the growing ten‐ dency of American political rhetoric toward speaking as though all good, decent people vote one way. This trend has now severely un‐ dermined the plausibility of something that Americans used to take for granted: that we have a shared culture built on moral commit‐ ments that transcend political lines. Politics is increasingly treated as a contest of radically divergent moralities. This is why it has come to be dominated by the mobilization of group grievances and resent‐ ments. Perhaps the greatest price we paid was the politicization of the church’s position in American life and culture. We spent most of a century teaching Americans to think that the gospel is a right‐wing political program. We have spent the last generation repenting from that, but our neighbors still think of us in terms defined by our past triumphalism. Having a place in the culture is like having a tree in the forest—it takes much longer to grow than to chop down. 49
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The path forward is relatively clear, and the number of evangelical leaders willing to say so is growing. We do not need to drop out of politics—human beings are made by God as social, cultural and po‐ litical creatures who participate in the civic life of their communities. But we must radically broaden our perspective on what counts as cultural engagement; everything we do in homes, businesses, schools, neighborhoods and communities should embody the gospel. And we must stop thinking apocalyptically, as if Christ will be knocked off the heavenly throne unless the next election goes the right way. We need to have the patience and foresight to plant trees that will grow for our children. Unfortunately, just as this wiser view of things has begun finding a central place in evangelical thinking and practice, a threat is looming in the worst possible quarter. If there were anything that could drive evangelicals back into a primary focus on electoral politics and short‐ term victory, it would be a threat to religious freedom. And just as we’re turning the corner toward a better approach to culture and a more ordinate place in our lives for political participation, a series of threats to religious freedom is exactly what the world has chosen to produce. What makes this such a challenge is that mobilization on this issue is commendable. Religious liberty should clearly be a non‐negotiable value for us, both as evangelicals committed to the sovereignty of God over the conscience and as Americans who have stewardship over the one culture in world history that has really prioritized reli‐ gious freedom as a national way of life. And religious liberty is clear‐ ly an issue that belongs in the political sphere. It is not the job of gov‐ ernment officials to tell us how to live out our religious beliefs, but it is very much their job to see to it that we have the freedom to do so, insofar as this can be reconciled with the other basic moral impera‐ tives that define the public square.
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eligious freedom is rightly called the “first freedom,” the one from which all the others spring. Once you have said that people need to be controlled by social elites in their religion, you have implicitly said that their entire lives should be under the same top‐down control, for there is no area of human life and culture that is not implicitly religious. On the other hand, if you say that people are fit to have stewardship over their own relationships with 50
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God, you have implicitly conceded that they are fit to be stewards of their own lives in every other area as well. What makes a renewed obsession with political activism an even more plausible prospect is the existing historical link between evan‐ gelical political activism and religious liberty. One of the enduring narratives that circulates among evangelical leaders is that our peri‐ ods of political activism in the 20th century were responses to perse‐ cution. In midcentury, discriminatory rules in federal radio licensure favored mainline broadcasters over evangelicals. In the 1980s, state‐ ments from the Department of Education seemed to indicate that evangelical K‐12 schools could be singled out for unfair treatment. We only mobilized, the story goes, because we were under attack. This narrative has always been badly overblown. The evidence gathered by Williams, Courtwright and others makes it clear that evangelical activism during these periods was only tangentially re‐ lated to persecution of evangelicals. Concern about the moral direc‐ tion of American culture—often raised to the level of panic—was always the central driver of evangelical activism. And yet, after we did mobilize politically, protecting our own reli‐ gious liberty is the area where we most often got the policy victories we hoped for. The federal broadcasting rules were revised to treat evangelical radio ministries fairly; and if there were ever any real plans to target evangelical schools at the Department of Education, they were certainly nixed after 1980. When Republican presidents decide which 20% they’re going to give “the nuts,” religious liberty is always the first thing on the list. The reason is obvious—it’s a lot eas‐ ier for them to give us what we want in this area than in any other because it doesn’t anger their other constituencies, and we appreciate it more than anything else they could give us. So if we did rush back onto the Republican reservation, we would probably get short‐term policy victories on religious freedom. The Democrats can’t win forever, and as soon as the Republicans were in office, the first thing they would do would be to enact broad protec‐ tions for conservative religious subcultures who object to the prevail‐ ing cultural trends in marriage, health care and other areas impacted by public policy. Once enacted, these protections would probably be very difficult to formally repeal. It’s much harder to strike down laws specifically enacted to protect a religious minority than it is to order 51
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religious minorities to obey marriage and health care laws that, on their face, seem religiously neutral. But these victories would be Pyrrhic, just as our victories in the 20th century proved to be. We would have to sacrifice all the pro‐ gress we’ve made in extracting our ability to speak to the culture and our prophetic voice from captivity to the Republican reservation. We would once again be reinforcing the broader breakdown of the cul‐ ture into a brutal, amoral us‐versus‐them war. And we would be ac‐ cepting the re‐politicization of our own place in the culture. Ironically, we also would damage the long‐term vitality of Ameri‐ ca’s culture of religious freedom. In this country, religious freedom has not traditionally been understood as a narrow policy issue con‐ cerning religious minorities who wish to be exempted from this or that particular requirement of the law. Religious freedom has been for us a national way of life, the first and most fundamental shared commitment of our culture. That historic understanding is now being lost, as “religious freedom” comes to be identified with the desire of conservative religious subcultures to be exempted from health care and marriage laws. If evangelicals go back onto the Republican res‐ ervation to fight for religious freedom, we will greatly accelerate this degeneration. While policy protections for conscience rights are important, by themselves they are only what Hamilton called “parchment barriers.ʺ What matters most is a culture that values the conscience. Policy pro‐ tections are one part of such a culture, but only a part. A broader cul‐ tural respect for the conscience is a necessary precondition of effec‐ tive enforcement of narrower policy protections. And it is also more important simply in its own right; our general moral character as a people is more important than policy specifics. An additional danger deserves mention. One of the most critical battlegrounds in religious freedom today is the question of whether institutions like schools and businesses have conscience rights. To make the case for religious freedom, we must challenge a hyper‐ individualistic anthropology, which dominates in both the political left and right, that reduces all social phenomena to the personal deci‐ sions of individuals. We will need to make the case for the role of institutions in our moral life—to depict businesses as culture makers and character makers, not just producers of goods and services. Too close an alliance with the GOP, which is increasingly adopting a lib‐ 52
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ertarian intellectual architecture as the more anthropologically, mor‐ ally and culturally robust forms of conservatism have been socially marginalized, would make that job all the more difficult.
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inister secularists who are out to destroy us are not the ultimate source of the threat to religious freedom. Such people do exist, but the real threat is something woven into the fabric of the religious liberty culture itself. A civilization that does not have an official shared religion will, in the very nature of things, be periodi‐ cally wracked with doubt about whether it has any shared moral values. Under those circumstances, the seductive temptations of sec‐ ular neutralism—with its implicitly totalitarian logic—are and must be perennial. This is why America has been convulsed with contro‐ versies over religious liberty, and has periodically shamed itself with flagrant persecutions, from the time of its founding right to the pre‐ sent day. The only hope for sustaining a culture of religious liberty is to con‐ stantly renew it by doing things that bring people together around shared values in shared institutions in the public square. Cultural enterprises—businesses, neighborhood initiatives, etc.—prove the reality and vitality of our shared moral commitments, even in the midst of diverse religious beliefs. Confidence that there is a shared moral culture is the cure for religious persecution—positively, by reassuring people that cultural unity is not threatened by diverse beliefs, and negatively, by providing a place of strength from which the culture can establish firm constraints on what is permissible (such as prohibiting persecution). As the threat to religious freedom develops in the coming years, I would offer my evangelical family six recommendations. The first and most important is not to panic. Time and again in the last centu‐ ry, panic has been our downfall. We acted rashly because we thought everything was at stake. But even the most serious threats need to be kept in perspective. The challenges we are facing are grave, but they are no more grave than the persecutions America has practiced many times before. From the Baptist preacher who was brutally flogged in a field be‐ longing to James Madison’s neighbor (setting Madison on a course of lifelong dedication to religious liberty) to the persecutions of Roman Catholics and Jews that are still within living memory, this is a regu‐ 53
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lar problem in American life. And what we are facing here is nothing compared with what our brothers in places like Nigeria or Pakistan face. History has shown that religious persecutions often provide the starting point for a renaissance of religious freedom. England emerged with the strongest dedication to religious toleration in west‐ ern Europe at the end of the wars of religion because the conflicts there had been the most barbarous. Persecution forces people to con‐ front the monstrosity of human ambitions to coerce the conscience. If we must carry that cross today to help our neighbors rediscover why religious freedom matters, so be it. If it were possible, we would pre‐ fer that the cup pass—but your will, Lord, not ours. Second, just as we must not panic, we must not resent. Resentment is straight from the pit of hell. As recent court cases show, the roll‐ back of religious freedom is being legitimized by a cultural narrative that says Christians hate those whom they disagree with. We must stand strong for our beliefs, but as we do, we must not say or do even the slightest thing that provides a legitimate basis for that accusation. To the contrary, it is our responsibility to bend over backwards to deinstitutionalize enmity—to show that we love our neighbors who disagree with us, and do not want to be their enemies. Third, as we advocate our views on public issues, we must stop saying and doing things that create the impression we want to use the law to impose our faith on our neighbors. Too often, we advocate public policies by appealing to the Bible or Christian history; when we do this, we imply that we think government should require all people to follow a specifically Christian ethic. This undermines our credibility when we turn around and ask for religious freedom. The sanctity of life, natural marriage, the dignity of work and other moral commitments we advocate in the public square are not specially lim‐ ited to Christians. We can legitimately call our neighbors to honor these commitments in law without imposing Christianity on them. Fourth, we should redouble our efforts to practice cultural entre‐ preneurship beyond the political sphere. When we create new and better ways of doing things in the culture—in schools, businesses, neighborhoods and communities—we bring people together around shared values. Our faith uniquely equips us to do this for our neigh‐ bors, because the Bible gives us unique insight into how people be‐ have and the Spirit liberates us from the guilt, fear and selfishness 54
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that enslave people to existing cultural forms. This kind of entrepre‐ neurship renews the culture of religious liberty, keeps the church’s public role from being overly political, and strengthens the social norms that restrain unjust political action. Fifth, let’s intentionally reach out across party lines to build a bipar‐ tisan coalition for religious liberty. The narrative that Republicans (or conservatives) are for religious liberty while Democrats (or progres‐ sives) are against it must be challenged if we really want to save reli‐ gious liberty. Think tanks, academics and activists who care about this issue should get to work identifying progressives and Democrats who sincerely desire to champion religious liberty, and give them as big a platform as possible. Finally, yes, we should stay in the political arena and fight for poli‐ cies that respect religious freedom. Politics is a legitimate and im‐ portant part of human life and we must not allow ourselves to be‐ come afraid of it, or develop a Pharisaical sense of moral superiority to it. We can’t be evangelicals and not fight for conscience rights— our own consciences don’t (or shouldn’t) permit that. Even a political fight for religious freedom does not need to un‐ dermine our recovery from the Republican reservation. If we fight for everyone’s religious freedom instead of only our own, it could be the start of a new formation of social consensus around shared moral values. Let’s view this as an opportunity to find new ways in which our society can affirm the dignity and social equality of people who don’t share Judeo‐Christian views, while also affirming the dignity and social equality of those who do. If we truly believe in religious freedom, we must believe that this should be—and can be— accomplished. The end result will benefit everyone, and will help restore the church’s influence in the culture rather than further dam‐ aging it.
Greg Forster is the editor of Hang Together and the author of six books, the most recent of which is Joy for the World (Crossway, 2014). 55
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R ELIGIOUS L IBERTY, PAST & P RESENT [a0theological0defense{ John D. Wilsey
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rom the first century of the common era to the eighteenth, arguments defending religious freedom were largely based on theological claims. Since the First Amendment went into effect in 1791, theological justifications for reli‐ gious freedom have, in contrast to earlier times, been in‐ conspicuous in legal discourse and court decisions. Only recently have there been attempts to re‐establish the principle of religious freedom upon theological grounds, and not without challenge. If a serious commitment to religious freedom is to be sustained, appeal to robust theological justification should again be made to explain why religion deserves the special consideration given to it in the Constitu‐ tion. In what follows, I will give a brief history of how theological justi‐ fications of religious freedom have been used, from the writings of Thomas Helwys (d. 1616) to James Madison (d. 1836). Next I will consider the relative absence of theological justifications during the twentieth century and some possible reasons for it. I will then discuss recent efforts to recover theological arguments for religious freedom, namely the Manhattan Declaration of 2009. Lastly, I will answer a potential objection to the Manhattan Declaration, to defend its inter‐ nal consistency and its helpful appeal to a theological justification for religious freedom. The emphasis here is on the period after 1600, but a brief acknowl‐ edgement of the history of religious freedom is appropriate to estab‐ 56
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lish the larger context of the idea. Theological justifications for reli‐ gious freedom can be traced back to the teachings of Christ. In His teaching in Mark 12:17, Christ recognized the distinction between civil (“Caesar”) and spiritual (“God”) authority. The apostles Peter and John, when admonished by the Sanhedrin to stop preaching in Christ’s name, famously reminded them that their first duty was not to ecclesiastical authority, but to God (Acts 4:19‐20). The early apolo‐ gists Justin and Athenagoras appealed to Caesar arguing that Chris‐ tians deserved toleration because they were innocent of the charges of atheism and incest, and they worshipped the true God. Tertullian argued in To Scapula that the freedom to follow one’s religious con‐ victions was “a fundamental right” and furthermore, that God “has appointed an eternal judgment, when both thankful and unthankful will have to stand before His bar.” Space does not permit a discussion of the contributions made by Lactantius (ca. 240–ca. 320) to whom the text of the Edict of Milan is attributed, which is the first official government document granting religious toleration in 313. Medieval thinkers such as Marsilius of Padua, Thomas Aquinas, and Desiderius Erasmus made important arguments advancing the idea of religious freedom. The reformers, emphasizing the importance of the individual before God, gave reli‐ gious freedom a new intellectual context in which to flourish. John Witte described the Reformation as, “at its core, a fight for religious liberty.” Anabaptists such as Menno Simons and Sebastian Castellio were also consistent apologists of religious freedom on theological grounds. They believed that the distinct separation between church and state in the first century needed to be recovered as a corrective to the corrupting bond between them that existed in their day. The common thread in the method of arguing for religious tolera‐ tion and freedom from the first century to the Reformation was the reality of 1) the existence of God and 2) the individual’s accountabil‐ ity before God. As E. Gregory Wallace has stated in “Justifying Reli‐ gious Freedom,” “The theological argument for religious freedom did not depend on the subjective value of religion to the individual... rather, it ultimately is based on the plausibility of the essential claim of religion, that God exists.” These common threads were not altered in the English speaking world after 1600. Thomas Helwys made the first case in England for full religious freedom to James I in 1612 in his treatise entitled A 57
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Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity. Helwys did not argue for mere toleration for Christian dissenting sects. He argued for full reli‐ gious freedom for everyone without distinction for their religious convictions. Helwys wrote, “For men’s religion to God is between God and themselves. The king will not answer for it. Neither may the king be judge between God and man. Let them be heretics, Turks, Jews, or whatsoever, it does not appertain to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure.” This was the first argument of its kind in the English language. After reading Helwys’ treatise, James I had Helwys thrown into Newgate Prison and he died there in 1616. Roger Williams (1603–1683) was a thirteen year old when Helwys died in prison. Just as Helwys defended the idea in England, Wil‐ liams did so in New England. Williams’ argument in The Bloody Tenant of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience, written in 1644, was twelve‐fold. The entire work defended the freedom of every person to follow the religious dictates of his conscience, and that the church and the state have distinct jurisdictions. Williams’ sixth argument is that “it is the will and command of God that... a permission of the most pagan, Jewish, Turkish, or Antichristian consciences and wor‐ ships be granted to all men in all nations and countries, and they are only to be against with that sword which is only (in soul matters) able to conquer, [that is], the sword of God’s Spirit, the Word of God.” Like Helwys, Williams did not restrict his views of religious freedom to the various sects of Christianity, but to people of all faiths. William Penn (1644–1718) was also an ardent explicator and apolo‐ gist for religious freedom. Having been imprisoned after George Fox facilitated his conversion from Anglicanism to the Society of Friends in 1667, Penn had a clear perspective on the issue. He wrote The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience from Newgate Prison in 1670, the same prison in which James I imprisoned Thomas Helwys. His third chapter in The Great Case is a collection of biblical references that undergirded the idea. In the second chapter of Great Case, Penn asked what the effect would be upon a society that would “invade the Divine Prerogative.” That society would usurp the throne of God and place its own king over both spiritual and temporal affairs. In that society, Penn asserted, “Caesar (however he got it) has all, God’s Share, and his own too; and being Lord of both, Both are Caesar’s and not God’s.” Further, Penn argued that Christ defined the essence 58
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of the Christian faith in one single statement made to Pontius Pilate. He wrote, “The Son of God... defin’d to us the Nature of his Religion in this one great Saying of his, MY KINGDOM IS NOT OF THIS WORLD.” John Locke wrote A Letter Concerning Toleration as a Christian, and based his convictions of religious freedom on Christ’s example. Locke wrote, “If, like the Captain of our salvation, they sincerely de‐ sired the good of souls, they would tread in the steps and follow the perfect example of that Prince of Peace, who sent out His soldiers to the subduing of nations and gathering them into His Church, not armed with the sword... but prepared with the Gospel of peace and with the exemplary holiness of their conversation. This was His method.” Consistent with the teaching of Helwys and Williams, Locke wrote that the civil government had no jurisdiction in religious matters. The duty of civil government, according to Locke, was to secure temporal rights and goods to its people, viz. life, liberty, and property. Locke justified this assertion on three premises: first, God did not give to civil government the responsibility of soul‐care. Second, civil gov‐ ernment enforces temporal laws through the compulsion of physical force, while the truths of religion are practiced and adhered to through the persuasion of the mind. Third, if soul‐care were within the jurisdiction of the civil power, then salvation would be tied solely to citizenship within the state which possessed the true religion. For Locke, this was absurd. He wrote: “These considerations, to omit many others that might have been urged to the same purpose, seem unto me sufficient to conclude that all the power of civil government relates only to men’s civil interests, is confined to the care of the things of this world, and hath nothing to do with the world to come.” Isaac Backus (1724–1806), a Baptist minister in Massachusetts, be‐ gan his struggle for religious freedom after he was nearly thrown in prison for refusing to pay a religious tax. The tax was being levied to pay for the raising of a parish church in 1748. Backus was a product of the Great Awakening, which in itself sets him apart from those who preceded him in developing the idea of religious freedom. The Great Awakening introduced a thoroughgoing religious pluralism in the British North American colonies through the decentralization of ecclesiastical authority stemming primarily from itinerant preaching which stressed the individual’s relationship and accountability to 59
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God. As a Separate Baptist of the late eighteenth century, Backus would rely heavily on Scripture, in addition to history, in his advoca‐ cy of religious freedom. These two elements distinguished Backus from Helwys, Williams, and Locke. Still, Backus’ writings are con‐ sistent with these thinkers in terms of the relationship between church and state, the individual’s responsibility to God, and the need for a complete separation between church and state. John Leland (1754–1841) was instrumental in the enshrinement of religious freedom in the American Constitution. He was a major in‐ fluence on James Madison. He helped Madison get elected to the First Congress from Orange County, Virginia because of their shared views on the necessity of the inclusion of a bill of rights that would guarantee religious freedom. In considering the question of whether people give up their rights of conscience upon entering into a social compact, Leland said no primarily because all are accountable to God. It then follows that all must have the freedom to come to God in the way their consciences dictate. Leland wrote, “Every man must give an account of himself to God, and therefore every man ought to be at liberty to serve God in that way that he can best reconcile it to his conscience.” Furthermore for Leland, it would be a sin for one person to give up his rights of conscience to another and even more sinful to strip those rights away from succeeding generations yet to be born. Even Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) and James Madison (1751– 1836), who commonly valued reason over revelation, used theologi‐ cal arguments in part to justify their assertions for religious freedom. Jefferson wrote in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom that “Almighty God hath created the mind free... that all attempts to in‐ fluence it by temporal punishments... tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the holy author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do”. Madison was equally theologically assertive and explicit in of‐ fering his rationale. He stated in the Memorial and Remonstrance that “It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such hom‐ age and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of civil society. Before any man can be considered as a mem‐ 60
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ber of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Gov‐ ernour of the Universe”.
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he arguments made in favor of religious freedom would cul‐ minate in the opening statement of the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...” Religion was giv‐ en a favored status in the public square in America because it was commonly understood to be universal and transcendent. Belief in God and individual accountability to Him were accepted as part of the common Western perspective on reality. After the Constitution went into effect, and especially during the twentieth century, argu‐ ments supporting religious freedom were no longer based upon theological assertions. The lack of theological justification for reli‐ gious freedom since its establishment, according to some legal schol‐ ars, has yielded ambiguity in the Religion Clause of the First Amendment. Wallace wrote, “Beyond the understanding that there should be no official state church or single favored religion, few are able to agree on what the Religion Clause means.” In “The Rise and Fall of Religious Freedom in Constitutional Discourse,” Steven D. Smith suggested that introducing any theological justification in support of religious freedom has become inappropriate and thus inadmissible. As a result of the success of religious freedom in Amer‐ ican society, the theological underpinnings for religious freedom have been ignored and replaced by pragmatic considerations. Smith wrote, “the waning of our constitutional commitment to religious liberty need not be explained by any deterioration in religious com‐ mitment. Rather, the phenomenon results from the self‐cancelling character of the commitment itself.” Smith noted the sharp contrast between the method of arguing for religious freedom prior to the adoption of the First Amendment and during the twentieth century. According to Smith, “the religious jus‐ tification, so prominent in the earlier period, has largely vanished from the modern debates” both in legal journals and in court deci‐ sions. The reason for this, Smith suggested, is not that Americans have become less religious but that theological justifications are now regarded as inadmissible. This is because religion is no longer viewed as being shared publicly, but has become a private matter. Furthermore, religious belief has grown controversial over the dec‐ 61
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ades particularly in the twentieth century. These realities have had the effect of making religion less of a transcendent reality and more of an option to be chosen or rejected on an individual and subjective basis. Smith wrote, “because it is optional, religious belief cannot serve as a solid ground or starting place for legal or academic discus‐ sion.” So, the government, it is thought, is to be neutral in its approach to religion and religious issues. University of Michigan law professor Douglas Laycock is a proponent of this view. In the first volume of his Religious Liberty, he wrote that at the time the First Amendment was adopted, “the federal government was declared a permanent neutral...” For Smith, however, the consequence of such an under‐ standing is that when the government must become involved in reli‐ gious issues, it acts on behalf of secular interests “and in ways that have primarily secular effects.” Thus, the government cannot be purely neutral. Many legal scholars have sought to base religious freedom on non‐ theological grounds in contemporary times. University of Mississippi Law School professor Timothy Hall has suggested that, because the Protestant consensus of the early republic is no more, it will not be possible to justify religious freedom on theological grounds as it was then. He wrote, “The continuing task of free exercise jurisprudence is to explore distinct narrative worlds in an effort to create an overlap‐ ping consensus that will sustain religious free exercise.” Hall pre‐ ferred to base religious freedom on civic virtue which stems partly from classical republican ideas of community to take into account the broad religious diversity that exists in America today. But the idea that one can justify religious freedom on non‐religious grounds is not coherent. Religion is different than any other human activity. Its dif‐ ference lies in the obvious fact that religion is spiritual, while all oth‐ er forms of human activity are temporal. Because religion is by na‐ ture spiritual, the argument favoring the free exercise of religion must be justified according to the nature of the activity. Smith said, “religion’s truly distinctive qualities inhere, not surprisingly, in its religious or spiritual dimensions. If one looks only at religion’s tem‐ poral or secular aspects, these distinctive qualities become blurred.” This seems to have happened to American attitudes about religious freedom in the twenty‐first century. Commitments to religious free‐ dom were much stronger and more systematic in American civic 62
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discourse in earlier times than today. Witness the recent controversy over the Obama Administration’s mandate that religious organiza‐ tions’ insurance companies provide contraception to their employees, over and against religious objections to doing so.
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ome Christian leaders have agreed that it has become necessary to recover a theological justification for religious freedom, giv‐ en the deterioration of commitment to the principle. The Man‐ hattan Declaration, which was drafted under the supervision of Rob‐ ert George, Timothy George, and Chuck Colson, was presented in 2009 and addresses the issues of sanctity of life, sanctity of marriage, and religious freedom. On religious freedom, the Declaration states, “the right to religious freedom has its foundation in the example of Christ Himself and in the very dignity of the human person created in the image of God—a dignity, as our founders proclaimed, inherent in every human, and knowable by all in the exercise of right reason.” The Manhattan Declaration is helpful since it seeks to defend reli‐ gious freedom on theological grounds, rather than on an appeal to civic virtue or religious pluralism. Hopefully, the Declaration will have the effect of underscoring the unique quality of religion and that it deserves to have special favor placed upon it in the Constitu‐ tion. The Declaration also has potential to introduce the theological justification of religious freedom to a wider audience. Perhaps there will arise a general appreciation for why religious freedom is funda‐ mental and an uncompromising commitment to its preservation is necessary to its continuation. As valuable as the Manhattan Declaration is to religious freedom, there is a potential inconsistency between its articulation of the sanc‐ tity of marriage and that of religious freedom. The Declaration states that marriage ought to be defined in strict monogamous, heterosexu‐ al terms. In defining marriage, it says, “Marriage is an objective reali‐ ty—a covenantal union of husband and wife—that it is the duty of the law to recognize and support for the sake of justice and the com‐ mon good.” It also claims that marriage is a theological entity, and not merely a human construct: “In Scripture, the creation of man and woman, and their one‐flesh union as husband and wife, is the crown‐ ing achievement of Godʹs creation.” At the same time, the Declara‐ tion affirms religious freedom in theological terms, as stated earlier. If marriage should be understood in religious terms, and human be‐ 63
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ings are entitled to exercise their religious convictions without any interference from the state, then it seems to be contradictory for the state to define marriage as the Manhattan Declaration defines it—as a monogamous, heterosexual union established by God. If this apparent discrepancy can be sustained and demonstrated to be a genuine contradiction in the Declaration, the consequences to religious freedom would be severe. Because of the rising acceptance of homosexual behavior in America, it seems that there would only be two options available to Americans. They could either stifle the freedom of homosexuals to act on what they believe are their natural instincts, or they could accept strict curtailments in freedom of reli‐ gious expression. In a recent article in the Kentucky Law Journal, George W. Dent explained it this way: “one side would need to ob‐ tain either a national law that would establish the full legal and social equality of homosexuality with no substantial religious exceptions; or a law making all claims of religious freedom trump any claim of gay rights.”
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n the surface, the Declaration may appear to be inconsistent but on deeper consideration, it is not. The Declaration in asserting the traditional definition of marriage, in affirming its preserving effect on society, and in calling for its civil protection is not contradicting the spirit of religious freedom as justified theologi‐ cally. There are at least three reasons for this: 1) religious freedom does not necessitate moral license in society, 2) the civil authority has a duty to protect marriage because it preserves the common welfare, and 3) no homosexual relationship can be defined as a marriage—the Declaration has defined marriage accurately, and no inconsistency exists between its articulation of marriage and religious freedom. American notions of individual freedom are indebted to Locke’s political philosophy, articulated in various writings at the end of the seventeenth century. As stated earlier, Locke was an early proponent of religious toleration as an important principle for both theological and political reasons. How did Locke negotiate the balance between the state’s duty to protect the common welfare and its duty to remain within its temporal jurisdiction on religious matters? Even Locke saw some limits to religious toleration among the people. The state is not bound to respect just any behavior simply because it claimed to be religious. Locke wrote, “if some congregation should have a mind to 64
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... lustfully pollute themselves in promiscuous uncleanness, or prac‐ tice any other such heinous enormities, is the magistrate obliged to tolerate them, because they are committed in a religious assembly? I answer: No. These things are not lawful in the ordinary course of life ... and therefore neither are they so in the worship of God.” Further‐ more, Locke said, “no opinions contrary to human society, or to those moral rules which are necessary to the preservation of civil society are to be tolerated by this magistrate.” Locke held a high view of individual freedom, but even Locke knew that to justify immoral practices by appealing to freedom of conscience would have the ef‐ fect of rendering the principle a farce. Locke also understood that with rights came the responsibility to exercise them in a way that did not do damage to the rest of the society. In his discussion on Locke’s view of natural rights, Steven Forde wrote, “A liberal system such as ours enshrines individual rights, but its health depends upon people exercising those rights responsibly. It depends on people taking seri‐ ously their duty to respect the rights of others. Many observers be‐ lieve that, while Americans today are eager to claim their rights, too few are willing to shoulder the attendant responsibilities.” Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down the Defense of Marriage Act in June 2013, recent lower court decisions have justified Locke’s view that there is no contradiction between religious free‐ dom and upholding the traditional definition of marriage. In Hall v. Baptist Memorial Healthcare Corp (2000) and Pedreria v. Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children, Inc. (2001), employees were terminated on the basis of their homosexual lifestyle. The employees in both cases claimed that they were being discriminated against on religious grounds under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In both cases, the court rejected the plaintiffs’ claims of religious discrimination. In both cases, the courts ruled that the basis of the claims to discrimina‐ tion were not religious. In other words, and as Steven Forde has pointed out, they were not claims rooted in the conscience, but in the conduct. This distinction is important, because it underscores the fact that homosexuality per se may be innate, but engaging in homosexual behavior is a choice exercised by the will. But a religious belief that rejects homosexual behavior on moral grounds resides within the individual conscience, which is common to all humanity, as has been argued for centuries and affirmed by founders such as Jefferson and 65
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Madison. Thus, homosexual conduct has no conceivable religious justification. But there is more. Marriage, as defined in the Manhattan Declara‐ tion, has been demonstrated in sociological studies to be essential to the common welfare, and as Locke contended, the good of the com‐ mon welfare falls squarely within the state’s jurisdiction. Robin Fretwell Wilson, law professor at the Washington and Lee University School of Law, cited two studies in an article for the San Diego Law Review that affirm the benefits of traditional marriage as a societal good. The first study, by Wendy D. Manning and Kathleen A. Lamb, found that children living with their married parents were statistical‐ ly less likely to be delinquent or to underachieve academically. The second study, by Sandra L. Hofferth and Kermyt G. Anderson, found that married fathers were far more invested in their children than their unmarried counterparts. Wilson concluded as a result of these two studies, “marriage matters to how children thrive and to the ex‐ tent to which their parents are willing to invest in them.” Blaine Harden of The New York Times arrived at similar conclusions after studying the impact of welfare reform on families in New York. His conclusion was that “from a child’s point of view, according to a growing body of social research, the most supportive household is one with two biological parents in a low‐conflict marriage.” One possible objection here is that these studies do not compare traditional marriages to homosexual marriages, only traditional mar‐ riages to non‐married persons. That much must be conceded. How‐ ever, the point of citing these studies is not to make a direct compari‐ son between heterosexual and homosexual marriages. The point here is to assert that traditional marriage makes a significant contribution to the good of society, and it is the duty of the civil authority to en‐ courage and protect its flourishing. In “Making Business Moral” for First Things, Robert George made the point that if the institution of traditionally defined marriage is undermined, the costs to society are too high to be ignored. Costs in economic inequity, loss of productiv‐ ity, burdens on health care, and decreased domestic security are all tied to the success or failure of the institution of marriage and the family. George wrote, “If we want limited government, and a level of taxation that is not unduly burdensome, we need healthy institutions of civil society, beginning with a flourishing marriage culture sup‐ porting family formation and preservation.” 66
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Finally, the Manhattan Declaration states, “No one has a civil right to have a non‐marital relationship treated as a marriage.” This state‐ ment is key to the consistency of the Declaration’s statements on marriage and religious freedom. Homosexual marriage is not simply marriage in another legitimate form. There are certainly good theo‐ logical arguments that support this claim, but those are beyond the scope of these considerations. Rather, a simple physiological argu‐ ment can be offered to demonstrate this point. Physiologically, what separates a traditional marriage from a homosexual relationship is procreation. Note that this argument is from physiology, not logic. The begetting of children follows physiologically from traditionally defined marriage. It does not follow logically from traditionally de‐ fined marriage, because there are many married couples who either cannot have children or do not desire children. Inability or unwill‐ ingness on the part of married couples does not mean they are not married. But childbearing naturally follows from traditional mar‐ riage in a way that it does not, indeed, it cannot follow from homo‐ sexual relationships. It is not physiologically possible for members of the same sex to beget children. For that reason, the traditional defini‐ tion of marriage must be protected and encouraged by the state, be‐ cause it is in the state’s interest to promote healthy replenishing of its population. Homosexual unions are unable to replenish a nation’s population, and are in this way, not beneficial to the continuance and thriving of a nation. Thus, on this very simple basis, it is possible to affirm a fundamental distinction between what God instituted be‐ tween men and women in Genesis 2 and what humans have con‐ structed apart from God in homosexual relationships.
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eligious freedom has been justified on theological grounds since the first century and early Christian teachings. The indi‐ vidual’s conscience as it was created by God and as each will be held accountable by God, are outside the realm of the state’s juris‐ diction. Religious freedom is a reflection of the special status given to religion in American society, precisely because it is unique among every other human activity. In the current climate, theological justifi‐ cations for religious freedom have become inadmissible, ironically because the success of the principle has led to the idea that the gov‐ ernment ought to remain neutral in regard to religious issues. But pure objectivity is impossible. Religious freedom has been under‐ 67
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mined in America in recent years without its theological underpin‐ nings. In 2009, religious leaders saw the need to recover the theological underpinnings of religious freedom, and the Manhattan Declaration was the result of their vision. Contrary to the charge that the Manhat‐ tan Declaration is internally inconsistent in its statements about the traditional religious definition of marriage and religious freedom, it is the role of the state not only to protect the traditional definition of marriage, but also to uphold religious freedom. It can only do so meaningfully however, by a certain appeal to the theological basis which has been articulated by generations of brilliant thinkers. More brilliant thinkers are needed to defend religious freedom as a theo‐ logical principle. Without theology as justification, commitment to the principle of religious freedom will be diluted, to the extent that it must ultimately disappear.
John D. Wilsey is Assistant Professor of History and Christian Apologetics at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. 68
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Books & Culture
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H OW H IGH B ROWS K ILLED C ULTURE [the0banality0myth{ Fred Siegel
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ne of the foundational myths of contemporary liberal‐ ism is the idea that American culture in the 1950s was not only a stifling swamp of banality but also a subtle form of fascism that constituted a danger to the Re‐ public. Whatever the excesses of the Sixties might have been, so the argument goes, that decade represented the neces‐ sary struggle to free America’s brain‐damaged automatons from their captivity at the hands of the Lords of Kitsch and Conformity. And yet, from a remove of more than a half century, we can see that the 1950s were in fact a high point for American culture—a period when many in the vast middle class aspired to elevate their tastes and acquired the means and opportunity to do so. The wildly successful attack on American popular culture of the 1950s was an outgrowth of noxious ideas that consumed the intellec‐ tual classes of the West in the first five decades of the twentieth cen‐ tury—ideas so vague and so general that they were not discredited by the unprecedented flowering of popular art in the United States in the years after World War II. And, in the most savage of ironies, ra‐ ther than changing popular culture for the better, that attack has in‐ stead led to a popular culture so debased as to obviate parody. Throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century, Ameri‐ can liberals engaged in a spirited critique of Americanism, a condi‐ tion they understood as the mass pursuit of prosperity by an energet‐ ic but crude, grasping people chasing their private ambitions without 70
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the benefit of a clerisy to guide them. In thrall to their futile quest for material well‐being, and numbed by the popular entertainments that appealed to the lowest common denominator in a nation of immi‐ grants, Americans were supposedly incapable of recognizing the superiority of European culture as defined by its literary achieve‐ ments. This critique gave rise to the “anything goes” ferment of the Jazz Age, as young writers looked to break free from the conventions of mainstream Protestant America. The concept of mass culture as a deadening danger took on a new power and coherence with the publication in 1932 of two major works, José Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses and Aldous Hux‐ ley’s Brave New World. Both books, which became required reading for a half century of college students in the wake of World War II, came to be seen as prophecies of 1950s American conformism. Their warnings about the dangers of a consumerist dystopia have long been integrated into the American liberal worldview. Ortega’s extended essay and Huxley’s novel were written at a dark time for democracy. In the course of the 1920s, first Portugal, then Spain, Italy, Greece, Japan, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, followed by Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and a host of Latin American coun‐ tries had turned to dictatorship. As both The Revolt of the Masses and Brave New World were being composed, Fascism was in the saddle in Italy and the Nazis were threatening to seize power in Germany—yet Ortega and Huxley saw American culture as the greatest threat to the future. Ortega mocked common sense and empiricism as the “idiot,” “ple‐ beian,” and “demagogic” “criteriology of Sancho Panza.” They were, he said, the tradition of the mob. Like Huxley, he had a literary sense of reality that drew heavily on rhetorical flourishes. He saw no irony in first publishing The Revolt of the Masses, a book denouncing popu‐ lar culture, in a popularly circulated Spanish newspaper. Obsessed with the danger of overpopulation, Ortega set himself squarely against admitting the upwardly mobile into civilization. Ortega’s assertions about the resentful, barely literate mob were built in part on Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), which decried the inau‐ thentic life led by mass man. Both Heidegger and Ortega wrote in the tradition of imperial Germany, arguing that World War I was in part a struggle to defend the Teutonic soul from the debased modernity of modern machinery and mass production represented by America. 71
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The Revolt of the Masses, which has been described as a Communist Manifesto in reverse, was a bestseller in 1930s Germany. Such success with the mass book‐buying public of the Third Reich should have unnerved Ortega, but it didn’t. When he added a prologue in 1937, he neglected to mention the Nazis as he lamented the “stifling mo‐ notony” mass man had imposed on Europe, converting it into a vast anthill. Congratulating himself on the anti‐Americanism of his text, Ortega scoffed at the idea that America, that “paradise of the mass‐ es,” could ever defend European civilization. Huxley’s Brave New World was heavily influenced by Mencken. Un‐ like the other great totalitarian dystopias, Huxley’s World State is ordered on the wants of the governed rather than the governors. The only potentially dissatisfied people in Huxley’s dystopia are a hand‐ ful of Alphas—or what we would today call “the creative class”— who, unlike the bovine masses, aren’t satisfied with a steady diet of sex and drugs. Mencken and Huxley shared an aristocratic ideal based on an idyl‐ lic past. They romanticized a time before the age of machinery and mass production, when the lower orders lived in happy subordina‐ tion and intellectual eccentricity was encouraged among the elites. In this beautiful world, alienation was as unknown as bearbaiting and cockfighting, “and those who wanted to amuse themselves were,” in Huxley’s words, “compelled, in their humble way, to be artists.” Both writers considered the egalitarianism of American democracy a degraded form of government that, in Ortega’s words, discouraged “respect or esteem for superior individuals.” Intellectuals, they com‐ plained, weren’t given their due by the human detritus of this new world. Huxley, a member of the Eugenics Society, saw mass literacy, mass education, and popular newspapers as having “created an im‐ mense class of what I may call the New Stupid.” He proposed that the British government raise the price of newsprint ten or twentyfold because the New Stupid, manipulated by newspaper plutocrats, were imposing a soul‐crushing conformity on humanity. The masses, so his argument went, needed to be curtailed for their own good and for the greater good of high culture. Huxley, writing in a 1927 issue of Harper’s, called for an aristocracy of intellect, and in a slim volume entitled Proper Studies, published the same year, he called for culling the masses through negative eu‐ genics. “The active and intelligent oligarchies of the ideal state do not 72
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yet exist,” he told Harper’s readers, “but the Fascist party in Italy, the Communist party in Russia, the Kuomintang in China are still their inadequate precursors.” In the future, he insisted, “political democ‐ racy as now practiced, will be unknown; our descendants will want a more efficient and rational form of government.” He warned Ameri‐ cans that while they were wedded to “the old‐fashioned democratic and humanitarian ideas of the eighteenth century…the force of cir‐ cumstances will be too powerful for them” and they, too, would come to be governed by a new aristocracy of spirituality and intel‐ lect.
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n 1931, as Huxley was composing Brave New World, he wrote newspaper articles arguing that “we must abandon democracy and allow ourselves to be ruled dictatorially by men who will compel us to do and suffer what a rational foresight demands.” It was Huxley’s view that “dictatorship and scientific propaganda may provide the only means of saving humanity from the misery of anar‐ chy.” Many of the elements in the “brave new world” that contem‐ porary readers find jarring actually appealed to Huxley. The sorting of individuals by type, eugenic breeding, and hierarchic leadership were policies for which he had proselytized. The problem with dys‐ topia he created in Brave New World, as he saw it, was the lack of spiritual insight and spiritual greatness in its leaders. The “brave new world” is America, to some extent, or rather, Hux‐ ley’s bleak view of America, which he once described as “a land where there is probably less personal freedom than in any other country in the world with the possible exception of Bolshevik Rus‐ sia.” In this Americanized Brave New World, workers are mass‐ produced, Henry Ford–style, and they live in a mindless drug‐ induced state of happiness little different from the drug‐like state induced by the American popular culture Huxley so loathed. In the “brave new world,” as in America, the lack of freedom isn’t external‐ ly imposed—it is, rather, an expression of a culture and polity orga‐ nized around the wishes of the masses. America’s failing, Huxley insisted, was its “lack of an intellectual aristocracy…secure in its po‐ sition and authority” so that it could constrain people from “thinking and acting…like the characters in a novel by Sinclair Lewis.” This potent critique of mass culture was suddenly muted in the 1930s by the rise of the Communist Party in the United States, which 73
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required of the intellectuals who flocked to it a sentimental reconsid‐ eration of the masses. And it seemed as though it had been discredit‐ ed to some degree by World War II. The middle‐class “hollow men” (as in T.S. Eliot’s poem of the same name), whom liberal intellectuals had been taught to despise, proved their mettle by defeating the Na‐ zis and saving Western civilization itself. But writing in 1944, Bernard DeVoto anticipated that the surcease of scorn would be only temporary: “The squares, boobs, Babbitts, and Rotarians despised by literary liberals would soon again become targets for their betters. America would once again become the land where the masses were organized to crush an artist’s hopes.”
Fred Siegel is a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. This essay is excerpted from Mr. Siegel’s latest book, The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class (Encounter Books). 74
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F AITHFUL OR F REAKS ? \the0right0metaphor| Jake Meador Risky Gospel: Abandon Fear And Build Something Awesome, by Owen Strachan. Thomas Nelson, 2013.
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n 1995 Christian rock band dc Talk released their fourth studio record, “Jesus Freak.” The record would go on to become a bestseller and a seminal record in 1990s Christian rock. Its theme was a call to listeners to embrace a “radical” brand of Christian faith as they went out into their schools and youth events—to be “Jesus Freaks.” The band went on to release two books in the style of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, each called Jesus Freaks that told the stories of real life Jesus Freaks, people so passionately following God that they endured terrible suffering for their faith.
Following “Jesus Freak,” The Newsboys sounded a similar note with their song “Shine.” Conferences like Acquire the Fire and Dare2Share pushed the same line of thought, with Dare2Share going so far as to call those of us unfortunate enough to be rejected by our non‐Christian peers “graduates of Persecution University.” The idea behind all these songs, books, and ministries was the same–a genuine Christian experience had to include some kind of obvious zeal often described as being “on fire” for God. This brand of Christianity was thought to stand in stark contrast to the apparently safer, milquetoast spirituality practiced by many American Christians. Being a “Jesus Freak” didn’t mean being a Christian in general; it meant being a certain type of Christian (a bet‐ ter Christian, if the purveyors of this line of thought were honest). It represented a rejection of a safe, middle‐class Christian status quo in favor of a more “radical” brand of Christian faith. 75
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In one sense, Owen Strachan’s new book Risky Gospel belongs to this same genre. Consider the subtitle: “Abandon Fear and Build Something Awesome.” By using this sort of rhetoric, Strachan is link‐ ing himself not only with the 90s‐era radicals mentioned above, but also with more recent iterations of the same brand of Christian spir‐ ituality. John Piper revived this rhetoric with Donʹt Waste Your Life released in 2003 and Alex and Brett Harris’s 2008 release Do Hard Things sounds the same note. Of course, there are more recent exam‐ ples of this rhetoric as well—David Platt’s Radical, Francis Chan’s multiple books, and Kyle Idleman’s Not a Fan have all been pub‐ lished and enthusiastically received by campus ministries, youth groups, and young adults. (Idleman provided the foreword to Stra‐ chan’s book, further demonstrating Risky Gospel’s “radical” creden‐ tials.)
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hat (thankfully) sets Strachan’s book apart is two‐fold. First, whereas a lot of the rhetoric associated with these other books, musicians, and conferences centers around some sort of higher Christian experienced brought about by a greater amount of zeal, Strachan’s book isn’t trying to argue for a higher form of Christian spirituality so much as it is arguing that Christian piety is itself innately risky and radical. This makes the book refreshingly free from the snide remarks I heard about “lukewarm” Christians at Dare2Share or that sometimes sneaks into today’s radical literature. This would be an easy point to gloss over, but it’s important that we not. One of the unintended con‐ sequences of radical rhetoric is often that it drives wedges into the body of Christ, separating a holier, more zealous group from a group whose piety seems more ordinary. While it’s true that there are lukewarm members of the church— that’s what the letter to Laodicea is all about—it’s also true that en‐ trusting naive young people with the task of judging who is luke‐ warm and who is simply living a quiet, peaceable life is the height of stupidity. By avoiding judgmental comments about older or less “radical” brothers and sisters, Strachan’s book avoids this error. Second, if you removed all the intensifying language from Stra‐ chan’s book and all mentions to risk, you’d actually still have a very helpful book. Strachan’s counsel on work, church, marriage, and dai‐ ly Christian living is all healthy, sound, and helpful. He begins by 76
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placing the Christian life in a context which we can all relate to—a mixture of culturally‐created stress and overwork blended with more garden‐variety struggles with sin that exist across all cultures. Stra‐ chan’s “risky Gospel” then isn’t an antidote to lukewarm Christiani‐ ty. Instead, it is an antidote to the life lived apart from Christ. For Strachan living a risky Christian life doesn’t require insane displays of “devotion,” like what some friends of mine felt pressured to show from their fundamentalist church when they literally sold everything they owned and went on a cross‐country mission trip. For Strachan, a “risky” Christian life is really just a faithful Christian life. The idea isn’t to use intensifying language to describe a loftier Christian expe‐ rience, but simply to show that an ordinary, quiet, faithful Christian life comes with extraordinary risk. Of course, this point raises a reasonable concern: Does Strachan even need to use this radical rhetoric if his proposals actually aren’t all that radical? Put another way: What is better, to try and save an over‐used and mostly unhelpful publishing trope or to reject the trope altogether in favor of a different way of describing the Chris‐ tian life? Your answer to that question will almost certainly determine your opinion of the book. I doubt I’ll find a better book using this radical trope to describe Christian piety. Strachan avoids divisive language as well as unhelpful rhetoric that seems to elevate “authentic” Chris‐ tian piety to intense emotional experience and unusual (and often imprudent) actions. For avoiding those pitfalls so endemic to the radical genre, Strachan’s book deserves praise. That said, I’m not sure that the book is helped in any way by using the radical trope at all. It’s perhaps easier to sell a book riffing off Platt and company then it is to sell something that is simply giving wise, prudent Christian counsel. Of course, if that’s the case, then the problem isn’t with Strachan’s book, but with the audience the book was written for. In either case, Risky Gospel is a helpful book that of‐ fers wise counsel to its readers and that would be particularly benefi‐ cial to college students and young adults, who are young enough to fully benefit from following Strachan’s sound advice.
Jake Meador writes for MereOrthodoxy.com and is an editor at FareForward. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska. 77
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T HE C ONSERVATIVE M IND AT 60 ]appreciating0kirk} Tim Goeglein
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ne of the foundational texts of the conservative movement, Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, is turning sixty this year. Published in 1953 by the Hen‐ ry Regnery Publishing Company of Chicago, Kirkʹs book instantly became an unlikely overnight publish‐ ing sensation. It is widely regarded as one of the seminal tomes of mid‐century American conservatism, in the same iconic pantheon as F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944), William F. Buckley, Jr.’s God and Man at Yale (1951), and Whittaker Chambers’s Witness (1952). The text, which began as Kirk’s doctoral thesis at the University of St. Andrews, was initially accepted by a major New York publishing house. But when one of the chief editors demanded that the young author cut significant portions from the manuscript, Kirk demurred. He looked elsewhere for a publisher and eventually inked a deal with Regnery, commencing a lifelong friendship. The Conservative Mind achieved a kind of minor‐classic status al‐ most from the beginning, and it launched the young Kirk into a spot‐ light that shone for the rest of his long life. Henry Luce was personal‐ ly smitten by its erudition, scholarship, and popular appeal, and Time magazine devoted its entire book review section to Kirk’s tome. The book was widely reviewed and roundly praised even by most of the major liberal publications in mid‐century America. The content of Kirk’s first book mirrors the character of its author: high principles, a probing intelligence, and an unimpeachable and 78
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unassailable integrity of ideas. The book contains no wistful senti‐ ments or misty nostalgia about the central figures and ideas of con‐ servatism. Contemporaries such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Lionel Trilling, and Daniel Boorstin all acknowledged the significance of Kirk’s central thesis, even if they did not agree with his conclusions. Great writers themselves, they knew that Kirk abhorred formulaic rhetoric, spectacle, and—above all—ideology. The center of the book is Kirk’s assertion that there is an Anglo‐ American conservative intellectual tradition that is distinct from its better‐known liberal counterpart. This bold thesis contradicted the regnant left‐wing narrative that had come to dominate most of American scholarship, and much of campus life, by the early 1950s. Kirk was eager to reintroduce a host of political and intellectual wor‐ thies, many of whom had been forgotten in the mists of time. Kirk saw these great thinkers as vital, timely, and relevant for a new era.
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ith precision and finesse, Kirk illustrates that, beginning with the British parliamentarian Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century, there is an identifiable, unique, and manifestly conservative tradition in the arts, letters, morals, manners, and politics that is, if not ideologically consistent, singular in its own excellence of shared first principles. Kirk’s conception of tradition is quite distinct from the Whig view of history as a natural, inevitable progression toward centralization and consolidation in a variety of spheres, including government. According to Kirk, this conservative tradition has its own intellectual and imaginative architecture, born of ardor and brilliant writing and thought. It springs from the natural law, integrating variety and mystery with hierarchy and order. The conservative tradition emphasizes the close associations between property and liberty, and custom and prudent change, that favor reform over rebellion or revolution. Kirk’s compelling narrative echoes the belief of one of his conserva‐ tive icons, the English poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that every country, culture, and civilization had a kind of philosophi‐ cal personality. The philosophical personality of liberalism readily accepts theory and speculation and tends toward secularism, while its conservative counterpart finds greater comfort in experience, practice, and a religious and spiritual sensibility. The former was 79
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litigious and legislative in its natural development, while the latter was inclined more toward morals, manners, and habituated virtue. The Conservative Mind, which has never been out of print, went through seven editions as Kirk continued to revise his original man‐ uscript with significant changes made throughout his lifetime of wide reading and thinking. He extended the conservative sensibility well into the mid‐twentieth century, culminating with the poetry and literary/social observations of his friend T.S. Eliot, with whom Kirk had developed an important epistolary friendship across the Atlan‐ tic. With this addition, the book’s subtitle was changed from the orig‐ inal From Burke to Santayana to its present form, From Burke to Eliot. Kirk was particular in choosing his canon, selecting not only Burke, Coleridge, and Eliot, but also a veritable cavalcade of worthies: John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Walter Scott, Alexis de Tocqueville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Henry Newman, James Fenimore Cooper, and Samuel Johnson. Kirk also included two now‐obscure Harvard professors, Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt; the stu‐ dents influenced by these professors (including Eliot himself) consti‐ tute a veritable Who’s Who of American political and literary leader‐ ship. Kirk etches finely wrought mini‐biographies of all these great men, with a special emphasis on their ideas. The Conservative Mind made deep impressions, conveying a con‐ servatism imbued with moral purpose and alive to the challenges of modernity. Kirk’s flinty intensity and heart animated a prodigious life, and he worked with an almost monkish energy. For the next twenty‐five years, he wrote a regular column for National Review called “From the Academy,” and his weekly newspaper column for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate was among the most popular in the country. Kirk was a widely sought‐after speaker on every major campus in the United States and abroad, speaking at nearly 500 col‐ leges and universities. Barry Goldwater actively cultivated his sup‐ port and counsel in his run for the presidency in 1964. Thirty more books and hundreds of reviews, essays, and short sto‐ ries would flow from Kirk’s typewriter in the little Michigan village of Mecosta over the next forty years. After The Conservative Mind, his writing developed with more depth and probity. Burke’s central as‐ sertion that healthy civilizations are defined by the strength and courage of what Eliot called “the permanent things”—religious faith, the natural family, the centrality of mystery and transcendence, du‐ 80
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ties and obligations, and the ability of each succeeding generation to cohere confidently in defense of liberty, the free society, and the foundations of private property and free enterprise. In a 1966 New York Times essay, Kirk had deftly predicted that Reagan’s election as governor of California would usher in a con‐ servative era in American politics, which came to fruition when Reagan was elected president in 1980. Kirk’s gentility, humility, and well‐bred manner played no small role in the resurgence of conserva‐ tism, and he would receive the Presidential Citizens Medal in 1989. At a dinner honoring the distinguished thinker and writer shortly after Reagan’s election, the president said: “Dr. Kirk helped renew a generation’s interest and knowledge of ‘permanent things,’ which are the underpinnings and the intellectual infrastructure of the conserva‐ tive revival of our country.” Kirk’s big book was viewed as both a catechesis and a colossus of the American conservative movement, evoking the intersection of past and present. The Conservative Mind proved that conservatism and intellectual elegance were not incompatible. The book was so central to the burgeoning conservative movement and its coming clash with the left that it defined what it meant to be an American conservative for the rest of the century. Kirk’s aesthetic, religious, and moral principles were elemental to his Burkean worldview, and he defended them with a hopeful con‐ viction that negated despair. He was a man of culture and deep pie‐ ty, subtle and serene by temperament, yet astonishingly prolific. His was a sublime, elevating view, and his great book was a celebration of what conservatism was and could be for a new epoch of post‐war Western culture. In Kirk’s own words: “The conservative . . . is con‐ cerned, first of all, for the regeneration of spirit and character—with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest.” The Conservative Mind is evergreen, animated by stylistic grace and eloquent poignancy. Sixty years on, Kirk’s masterwork abides, its cadences of rich prose and deep learning as refreshing as ever.
Tim Goeglein is Vice President for External Relations at Focus on the Family. 81
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R USSIA’ S O THER D ISSIDENT N OVELIST [remembering0bulgakov{ Micah Mattix
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ot all dissidents are condemned, executed, deported or shipped off to the Gulags. Some are bought. Oth‐ ers are silenced by the heavy hand of poverty and the careful attention of censors. The third method has often proven one of the most effective. To be condemned is a success of sorts. It is to make a mark, to become a martyr in some instances, which both redeems the suffering of the dissident and energizes his followers. To be neither condemned nor allowed to speak, to suffer with nothing to show for it, can cripple a man with doubt and despair. There is no worse punishment for a dissident than oblivion. Such was almost the case with Mikhail Bulgakov. Born in Kiev in 1891, Bulgakov trained as a doctor but left medicine to write full time after he moved to Moscow in 1921. Unlike many of his fellow writers (Boris Pasternak, Daniil Kharms, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and others), Bulgakov never supported or expressed anything but antipathy for the 1917 revolution. He wrote in a letter to the Soviet secret police that during the revolution he had been “entirely on the side of the Whites, whose retreat filled me with horror and incomprehension.” He staged four plays during his lifetime and published several sto‐ ries, but many of his works were suppressed, particularly after the production of The Purple Island in 1928. While his plays are excel‐ lent, today Bulgakov is largely remembered for his exquisitely surre‐ al novel The Master and Margarita, which skewers Soviet atheism, 82
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the narrow‐mindedness of socialism, and the emptiness of passion without love. Impoverished, angry and depressed, and in increasing‐ ly poor health, Bulgakov edited the novel up until his death in 1940, not knowing whether it would ever be printed. In 1967, a little over a quarter century after his death, the novel was finally published, though a number of passages were redacted. The first complete ver‐ sion of the novel was published in 1973. In Bulgakov’s Diaries and Selected Letters, which covers his Moscow years until his death, we have a study in the effects of suppression and the bravery of an artist who was almost silenced by it, not to mention a rather bleak picture of what life after the revolution was like for those who did not toe the party line. Bulgakov was plagued by money worries from the beginning. In his diary, he constantly counts his Russian chervonets, complains about his excessive drinking and his lack of an apartment. While he occasionally experienced “a brief upsurge of confidence,” as he writes in one of his earlier entries, he was regularly saddled by a sense of hopelessness. In 1930, when his play on Molière was stalled again, he told the theatre director “If this play fails, I shall have no means of salvation—as it is, my situation is catastrophic. I have no help, no defense. I’m telling you in all sobriety: my ship is sinking.” Yet, he continued to work, whether or not that work was published or performed, relying on his faith for strength. “When I’m ill and alone,” he writes in 1923, I give in to sad and envious thoughts. I bitterly regret that I gave up medicine, thereby condemning myself to an uncertain existence. But, as God is my witness, I only did this because of my love of writing. Writing is difficult at the moment. With my views, expressed as they are involuntarily in my works, it is difficult to get published and earn a living. And being ill under such circumstances is extremely unfortunate. But I must not get depressed…Strong, courageous people may not need him [God], but the thought of him makes life easier for people such as myself. My illness is complicated and prolonged. I’m a completely broken man. And that can prevent me from working—that’s why I’m afraid, and that’s why my hope is in God. 83
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Life in Moscow at the time was surreal. Bulgakov wrote that in the city “life is getting better, while simultaneously being in a state of utter gangrenous decay”: In the centre of Moscow, starting at the Lubyanka, the water company has been testing the soil to investigate the possibility of an underground railway line. That’s life. But the underground will never be built, because there is no money. That’s gangrene…Nothing progresses. Everything is gobbled up by the hellish maw of Soviet red tape. Bulgakov knew about the “hellish maw of Soviet red tape.” He was asked for revision after revision in his works only to see his play or story rejected by the Soviet censors or the performance or publication delayed without reason. When he requested permission to travel to Europe (he longed to see Rome and Paris), permission was denied just at the moment when it seemed it would be granted. What’s particularly admirable in Bulgakov is that while he claimed that he was “broken” and “drowning,” his response to offers to re‐ pudiate his politics and write more acceptably socialist fare was to send an angry letter to the Soviet government stating that he could and would do no such thing before going to complain about his treatment at the hands of Soviet critics. “Am I thinkable in the USSR?” he asks. “I appeal to the humanity of the Soviet authorities,” he writes, “to ask that you magnanimously set me free, as a writer who cannot be of use in his own homeland.” They would, of course, do no such thing. It is around this time, and during what would be the last ten years of his life, that Bulgakov would begin working on his masterpiece. Knowing that the novel would not be published during his lifetime, he kept the existence of the manuscript secret, fearing that it would be destroyed if the Soviet police discovered it. In the final letters collected in the volume, Bulgakov’s complaints about his poverty and lack of opportunity fade as the prospect of finishing what he senses will indeed be his greatest work preoccupies him. “I must finish the novel! Now! Now!” he writes his wife in 1938. And again: “Yes, the novel…I have an unbearable itch in my fingers to convey its spirit as it emerges onto the typed pages.” As he worked on the final edits of Master and Margarita, he would write to a friend, telling him that he is “tormented by the vague idea 84
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that I must bring my literary career to a conclusion.” In a little more than a year, he would be dead from an inherited kidney disorder. In Master and Margarita, the devil states famously that “manu‐ scripts don’t burn.” There is something of a personal admonition in this phrase coming from Bulgakov who burned many of his letters, and requested that his wife do the same, for security reasons. Manu‐ scripts may burn, but truth does not. And while the truth of com‐ munist oppression rings loudest in Master and Margarita, Bulgakov’s diaries and letters are not silent either.
Micah Mattix is an assistant professor of literature at Houston Baptist University and is the Books Editor of The City. His blog on books, arts, and ideas, “Prufrock,” can be read at The American Conservative. 85
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Basketball & What’s Wrong With America ,weight0of0character< Jerry L. Walls
I
am a huge basketball fan—indeed, sports fan in general. Since I am also a Christian philosopher, people have often assumed that I must be a fan of John Wooden, the legendary coach who won numerous national championships at UCLA. In fact, I am not. People are often surprised when I tell them so, and I have had more than one person become visibly agitated with me when I shared with them my opinion of Wooden. It is sometimes even more of a surprise, however, when I go on to tell them that I am a big fan of Bob Knight, also known as the Gen‐ eral, an equally legendary coach who won three national champion‐ ships at Indiana. How, they often demand, can I admire the volatile coach who is infamous for throwing a chair during a game more than the elegant “Wizard of Westwood”? I have answered that question in detail in an essay entitled “The Wizard Versus the General: Why Bob Knight is a Greater Coach Than John Wooden.” Here I will briefly give the two main reasons. First, Knight won with far less talent than Wooden. Whereas every one of Wooden’s teams had at least one player who went on to be‐ come an NBA all‐star—including some of the most dominant players who ever played the game—Knight had only one player who became an NBA all‐star. That player was Isiah Thomas, a 6’1” guard who played only two years at Indiana, but who led them to the national championship in 1981.
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Knight had many excellent players to be sure, and he is famous for getting the most out of them, but the talent level of his players was not even close to that of the players Wooden coached. A good exam‐ ple is Steve Alford (the current coach at UCLA), a player who did not have NBA caliber athleticism, but who was a two time All American for Knight, leading Indiana to the national championship in 1987. But the second reason I consider Knight a greater coach is the truly decisive one for me. Whereas the General was staunchly committed to playing fair, the Wizard succeeded with the help of a booster named Sam Gilbert, a corrupt businessman who provided a variety of benefits to his players that violated NCAA rules. I know this will come as a surprise to many people, and I recall my own stunned surprise, if not shock, when I first learned about this several years ago. I found it hard to believe, given the impression of Wooden I had always had. He has been held up for decades as the very epitome of coaching excellence, as a man who “did things the right way.” To be sure, Wooden won at a level no one likely ever will again during his tenure at UCLA. Wooden was hired in 1948, and won no championship during his first fifteen years as head coach with the Bruins. Then, amazingly, after fifteen years with no championships, he won 10 in 12 years in the period from 1964‐1975. What changed? Well, during this period UCLA’s recruiting was el‐ evated when a steady stream of the top players in the nation chose to play for the Bruins. Many think this was all due to Wooden’s famous “Pyramid of Success” but the Gilbert Factor was no doubt a signifi‐ cant part of the equation that explains why his fortunes turned so dramatically during those dozen years. To be fair, Wooden won two or three championships before Gilbert got involved with the program, and he had some outstanding players on those teams. But the recruiting elevated and remained at an excep‐ tional level during the next several years when UCLA dominated college basketball. By contrast, Knight was a stickler for playing by the rules. In his autobiography, Knight discussed his passion for winning, but reject‐ ed out of hand the idea of winning at any cost. “No, absolutely not” he said. “I’ve never understood how anybody who cheated to get a players, or players, could take any satisfaction whatsoever out of whatever winning came afterward.” 87
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Victory bought at the price of cheating is a hollow affair. Worse, it is a form of theft. It steals the honor and glory from those who played by the rules, and who would have won if everyone had played fairly. And it steals the joy of celebration from the fans of those who played fairly. I cannot admire Wooden’s record breaking accomplishments for the same reason I cannot admire those who hit record numbers of home runs, or win Tours de France by using illegal performance en‐ hancing substances.
H
ere is what I find curious and deeply ironic. Everyone who knows anything about sports knows Bobby Knight threw a chair, but even among fairly well‐informed fans, few know, or care, about Sam Gilbert. So what does this have to do with what’s wrong with America? Well, a couple of things. First, it is an interesting window into the fact that our culture is more inclined to assess things in psychological terms than moral terms. Our culture is far more concerned about personality and good manners than it is about character. Indeed, it is more important to be “likeable” and charming than it is to be honest. For us, after all, image is everything. This is true in our culture eve‐ rywhere from the basketball court to the highest levels of politics, where likeability counts far more than honesty. Wooden was gracious and gentlemanly, even a grandfather figure. Knight is straightforward, even blunt, and he can be gruff and tem‐ peramental. Our culture is accordingly quick to judge Knight but prone to ignore altogether the shadow of Sam Gilbert when assessing Wooden because it is far more concerned with personality than char‐ acter. But second, the way these two coaches are assessed also shows we have a badly distorted sense of moral proportion even when ethical considerations do come into the picture. Several years ago, during the controversies that led to Knight’s firing at Indiana, Dave Kindred of Sporting News wrote an article in response to the fact that Wood‐ en’s name was often invoked as a coach to be emulated, in contrast to the more controversial Knight. After citing the evidence of Wooden’s tarnished legacy at UCLA, he concluded with what he called a “scruples question: Would you rather have a coach who throws a vase against a wall or a coach who turns a blind eye to the buying of players in his behalf?” To me, the answer is clear. 88
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Knight’s critics, of course, will be quick to argue that his infamous temper detracted from his own illustrious career. And as much as I admire him, I am hardly suggesting he is a saint. The General will likely need some time in purgatory before he is ready for that honor. But I would still insist that Knight’s flaws do not detract from his greatness as a coach even remotely as much as the corruption that Wooden ignored detracts from his. And I would contend that to think otherwise, you must have developed quite a taste for swallow‐ ing camels.
Jerry L. Walls is Professor of Philosophy and Scholar-inResidence at Houston Baptist University, is author most recently of Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation (Oxford). 89
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Love Letter Aaron Belz
In the spirit of leaving no stone unturned I’ve spent the better part of this morning out in the garden turning stones; or rather not in the spirit but the letter. And I suppose that until morning’s over no one really knows which part of it’s better.
Aaron Belz’s poetry has been published in journals coast to coast, from Fence and Boston Review to Eleven Eleven and Zócalo Public Square. He’s released two chapbooks and three full-length books of poems, the most recent two from Persea Books. He’s the former editor of The Curator and a contributing editor to Capital Commentary. He lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina. 90
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A R EPUBLIC OF L ET TERS ]thoughts0on0the0age} Hunter Baker
A
s long as I have been alive (more than four decades), the knock on liberal arts majors has been in force. I heard it as a student. I hear it as a professor and aca‐ demic administrator. “It’s great that you love history (or English or philosophy), but what are you going to DO with that?” The answer, based on the results of a study pub‐ lished in the Wall Street Journal, may surprise you. It turns that out that while students who major in a wide variety of professional fields out‐earn their liberal arts peers at the outset, the liberal arts majors tend to pull ahead in later years.
How can this be? The liberal arts major doesn’t learn a market‐ driven skill such as nursing or business management. On what basis would they earn more money at any point in their careers? There are a variety of answers available, but I would like to focus on one in particular. By doing so, I think I can also make a case, not only for liberal arts majors, but also for strengthening (rather than cutting or eliminating) the liberal arts core. College is a time of preparation. Thanks to the high cost of tuition, we are looking for a highly predictable runway to successful and well‐compensated employment. It is easier to envision that sort of dynamic playing out when your student is a nursing or business ma‐ jor than it is when the young person wants to major in English. The problem with this view is that it gives too much credit to the profes‐ sional fields and not enough to the liberal arts. If you really think about learning, there are some master disciplines which unlock all the others. They are philosophy, history, mathemat‐ ics, language (reading/writing), and science (mainly mastery of the 91
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scientific method). These disciplines form the core of learning and comprise the engine of its expression. The student who gains profi‐ ciency in these areas will maintain, for virtually the rest of his/her life, the capacity to learn new things and to organize those new things within the context of the older things. The learning that takes place in these areas does not really expire. It does not become dated. It is a fund that maintains its value. The same is not necessarily true of knowledge gained in professional programs. The great management theorist Peter Drucker addressed the matter insightfully in his 1957 book Landmarks of Tomorrow (emphasis mine): Whatever does not add to the capacity for sustained growth of personality or contribution is impractical – and may indeed be deleterious. That this or that subject adds to a man’s ability to get a job, or to do well on his first job, is not irrelevant. But as a measure of the effectiveness of a long-term advanced investment it may be the most impractical yardstick, may indeed cost heavily in terms of the really practical results. The practical test of education in educated society is whether it prepares for the demands of the world fifteen years after graduation. Since we live in an age of innovation, a practical education must prepare a man for work that does not yet exist and cannot yet be clearly defined. To be able to do this a man must have learned to learn. He must be conscious of how much there is still to learn. He must acquire basic tools of analysis, of expression, of understandingAbove all he must have the desire for self-development. The person who has mastered a particular market‐driven skill of to‐ day is in a good position to profit in the short term, but given that we live in a highly dynamic society, the better long term investment is an education that equips the person to learn for the rest of his life. The liberal arts, if taught well and approached with desire by the student, have the ability to unlock almost any subject the student wishes to learn for years to come. If you understand how to think, how to draw lessons from past experience, how to write and speak, how to calcu‐ late, and how to put information through the kinds of tests which yield knowledge, then you have the tools you need. Drucker was right about the kind of education people require in order to thrive. But if we are to put the liberal arts to work and get the most out of them that we can, we have to address our cultural expectations. All the players in the higher education world – stu‐ 92
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dents, parents, colleges, governments – need to give proper priority to the traditional arts and sciences as the keys to further learning. In other words, we have to throw out the self‐defeating view that those courses are just hurdles students must jump because they have in the past. They are not hurdles. The traditional fields are fulcrums, levers, and pulleys that magnify the strength of subsequent learning. Institu‐ tions should stop throwing together core curricula on the basis of turf battles, faculty preference, and expedience and instead should come up with principled plans for liberal arts cores that will make them what they should be. Various professional majors should stop de‐ manding more and more hours at the expense of liberal arts core curricula. Without a solid foundation at the bottom, the education at the top will be poured into a sieve. At a minimum, it will not be as effective as it otherwise would have been. Finally, to return to the issue of liberal arts majors where we began, it is time we stopped treating them as though they were merely aes‐ thetic in value. The student who has taken the time to read and un‐ derstand Shakespeare’s plays and the novels of Jane Austen and Fyodor Dostoevsky as part of an English literature major is no one to be taken lightly or dismissed as some kind of throwback relic. She is a person who is capable of sustaining attention and learning what she needs to as her life and career develop.
: During a recent visit to twitter, I happened across a post from a noted Christian academic. He had composed the kind of pithy re‐ mark which is tailor‐made to launch a hundred admiring retweets. Paraphrasing slightly, it was something like this: ”Conservatives, don’t talk to me about family values if you doesn’t endorse a mini‐ mum wage increase.” I am sure that he thought it was a pretty high‐ powered zinger. The problem is that there is no necessary connection between fami‐ ly values and increasing the minimum wage. First off, there is a vig‐ orous, unsettled debate over the effectiveness of the minimum wage. Economists differ substantially over whether it helps poor people, hurts them by reducing entry level job opportunities, or exerts little effect. It would be entirely possible for a proponent of family values to rationally conclude that the minimum wage is counterproductive and to therefore take the position the aforementioned prominent 93
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Christian academic presented as completely at odds with a “family values” perspective. This academic failed to take account of the fact that arguments about the minimum wage are not like arguments about something like gravity. There are respectable and even com‐ passionate arguments on both sides. Second, the noted Christian thinker did not consider that there are fundamental questions about things like minimum wage laws. What is a minimum wage law? It is a demand, underwritten by the threat and/or use of government force, that employers pay no less than a stated amount for an hour of work. It is entirely possible to think that such a power should not be wielded by the government of a free people and still to be a caring person. Hobby Lobby is well‐known for paying substantially more than the minimum wage in its stores. The owners of that corporation are devout Christians. Would this academic suggest that the owners of Hobby Lobby would be defi‐ cient in their family values if they paid their employees well above the minimum wage while opposing such an exercise of power by the government? Perhaps they might rightly believe that if a govern‐ ment could dictate a wage, it could also dictate things such as the provision of birth control and abortifacients by a corporation whose owners conscientiously oppose the use of such products. We have seen such a thing occur, have we not? Third, the prominent Christian thinker seemed to embrace mini‐ mum wage legislation as a sort of a panacea. If law is so easy to use as to wipe out problems of poverty through the stroke of a pen, then why not simply set a minimum wage close to $50,000 a year? For that matter, why not dictate that every employee earn several hun‐ dred thousand dollars a year and enjoy 2‐3 months of vacation? We could end every social problem with nothing more than political will. Of course, the problem here is that employers would not choose to hire people if they became such an expensive input. As Jonah Gold‐ berg has pointed out, if we ignore the concatenating consequences of our political decisions we will end up giving employers a massive incentive to do more of what they have already been doing, which is to use fewer and fewer people while employing more and more au‐ tomation. Investment dollars are like water, they flow where they are less hindered. If we overuse our much vaunted political will to solve problems through mandates, we will chase away potential sources of prosperity. 94
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There are other directions we could go with this complaint about the overconfident Christian academic tweeter, but at a minimum it is not too much to ask to insist upon a more rigorous consideration of the problems large government actions entail. While the individual in question may not be moved to reconsider his position endorsing the minimum wage, he should absolutely have more sympathy for the analyses offered by his opponents for they are not frivolous, cru‐ el, or irrational in nature. The claim that support of family values naturally entails advocacy for increasing the minimum wage simply goes too far.
: I like to read church signs, so I’m always attentive to the ones around town. A short time ago, I exited North Park and observed a local church advertising the debate between Bill Nye “The Science Guy” and Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis. Most readers have prob‐ ably noticed that the debate came and went with little effect, though it provided grist for the internet content mill for a couple of days. When it comes to the great media battle of Science versus Religion, I have noticed that the controversy consistently revolves around Genesis, creation, and the age of the earth. But why is that so? My contention is that the fight over Genesis is the wrong battle. Many years ago, when I courted the woman who would become my wife, I asked her father to tell me about his favorite portion of the Bible. I was still a relatively young Christian at the time and did not have much mastery of the text. He told me that his favorite part was Paul’s visit to the Areopagus in which the apostle engaged the men of Athens. I played along as if I knew what he was talking about and went home to look it up. The interaction takes place in Acts 17: 22‐33. Paul takes note of the “unknown god” of these men and then de‐ scribes the God he knows does exist. Paul doesn’t base his argument upon the age of the earth, but rather insists that God has raised Jesus Christ from the dead as a form of assurance or proof (depending on the translation) for men such as those in his audience. What I am suggesting is that while the headline battles over Gene‐ sis command all the attention, the real action revolves around the Gospel accounts and the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Those who hope to diminish or destroy the influence of Chris‐ tianity in the United States and the world should turn their attention 95
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there. Likewise, those who hold Christian beliefs should stand upon that foundation. The resurrection of Jesus Christ, rather than the correctness of a particular interpretation of the first chapters of Genesis, is the ful‐ crum upon which all of Christianity depends. Either Jesus Christ was the son of God or he was merely a carpenter’s son who unaccounta‐ bly built the most spectacular martyr’s reputation of all time. It is difficult to explain why his memory persisted with such force while other rabble rousers who died at the hands of the Romans and other historical oppressors were forgotten almost instantly, historically speaking. The resurrection is one way to answer that question. Gary Habermas has gone so far as to argue that “Even if we take the New Testament as simply an ancient text with excellent creden‐ tials, which it surely is at a minimum, there is enough historical evi‐ dence to make a very strong case for the resurrection of Christ.” Here we have a debate that really gets at the crux of the matter. The essential question for a world considering the claims of Christianity is not “How old is the earth?,” but rather, “And whom do you say that I am?”
: Andrew Sullivan and Erick Erickson recently agreed on something having to do with gay marriage and community life. Well, sort of, anyway. The nature of Sullivan’s agreement is productive of further discussion. Erickson pointed out, quite sensibly, that Christians who are pho‐ tographers or bakers are not seeking to reject any and all business from gay customers. Rather, he noted, that Christian photographers and bakers object specifically to participating in a gay wedding. A wedding, for many people and certainly for Christians, is an explicit‐ ly religious activity. It is really not unreasonable for people with a particular religious view of marriage (such as Christians well within the mainstream of Christian belief) to not want to participate in something they believe to be wrong. Bravo to Erickson for making a subtle point clear and to Sullivan for recognizing the point has merit, or at least is worth further thought. There is a hitch here, however. Sullivan argues that gays can afford to cede this discretion over thought and action to Christians who object because such people are obviously losing. Given the fact 96
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of tables being suddenly turned, surely champions of gay rights can afford to “leave the fundamentalists and bigots alone.” How gracious of Sullivan to make such a charitable offer. But is the characterization of such people fair? We are experiencing a change in the way we define the good society. In the past, it was uncontrover‐ sial (and biologically pretty natural) for communities to think that in a good society men marry women and that same sex pairs do not marry. Rather, the appropriate mode for same sex pairings was friendship rather than sexual intimacy. At this point, it is clear that our definition of the good society is changing and that the majority are at a minimum saying that people have to decide these things for themselves and that men can thus marry men and women can marry women. But here is the essential question: What exactly is it about a social tipping point that turns yesterday’s commonsensical person into today’s bigot? I think one way I could try to defend opponents of gay marriage from charges of rank bigotry is to examine the moral intuitions of children. In the course of raising mine, I have noticed that they had no underlying matrix of reason by which to understand racism. When they were a little younger, they never talked about a child as being black or white. The racial awareness simply wasn’t there. If I heard them telling a story about a classmate and wanted to know more about the child, I would ask them to describe the child. They would then include a description which might include something like light skin or dark skin, straight or curly hair, tall or short, etc. The implication is that bigotry must be cultivated. Same sex marriage is susceptible to a similar analysis. Because of a situation in our extended family, my children became aware of a man who wanted to be with other men instead of women. They simply did not understand why a man would want to share romantic love with another man. The idea violated their concept of what a man is. A man shares romantic/marital love with women rather than men. I learned this about their reasoning before I ever tried to explain things to them or to help them understand it. Just as a child’s natural under‐ standing tilts away from racism, I would suggest that it tilts toward a complementary view of the sexes. In other words, men go with women and women go with men. Just as bigotry must be cultivated, so, too, must the appreciation of same sex pairings. In other words, bigotry is the result of intentional cultural work and so is the appre‐ 97
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ciation of same sex pairs. Neither is a natural understanding from the child’s point of view (Please understand that I am not morally equat‐ ing bigotry with cultural advocacy of gay acceptance – that is not the point.). In the case of racism, we would see the culture’s work in the child to be pernicious. Creating an awareness of racial difference is not a good thing. The question, then, is whether the culture’s current work to change the understanding of marriage is good. I would suggest that the answer is not as obvious as it appears to have suddenly be‐ come. Is it really so difficult to understand the people who do not think that it is? Is it necessary to demonize them as “fundamentalists and bigots,” especially when their view was uncontroversial as little as ten years ago? The physical complementarity of men and women is powerfully suggestive to the ordinary conscience, is it not? And yes, religious understandings run in that direction, too. God is the designer. People infer intent from the complementary design of men and women. The underlying point here, though, is that the percep‐ tion of same sex marriage as something that is improper is not only religious in nature, it is intuitive and has been for thousands of years. Are those who have not acclimated themselves to the cultural mo‐ ment, then, really “fundamentalists and bigots?” Or are they people who have legitimate reasons to think what they think? You, the reader, may not be convinced by them, but does your lack of assent invalidate the viewpoint entirely? I think a little more respect is in order, especially from those who are building a case primarily on the logic of freedom. Free people have to be thinking people. And free people must also be generous toward those who dissent. As a final side note, I recognize that the points I have made about the moral intuitions of children do not constitute some kind of bul‐ letproof defeaters of arguments for same sex marriage. Just remem‐ ber that I have not proposed to win the argument. Rather, I have sought to give pause to those who would run roughshod over the consciences of those who protest the current cultural movement. It seems to me that the burden of establishing respect for a conscien‐ tious standpoint should be lower than the burden imposed on one who seeks to completely prevail in argument.
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There is little question that higher education is a difficult field of endeavor right now. Though the MOOC experiment clearly seems less a threat now than a year or two ago, there are major challenges which have to be surmounted. There are two that come immediately to mind. First, cost has become a serious problem. Tuition prices have risen in a way similar to healthcare prices. The existence of third‐party payers in healthcare finds a mirror image in the third‐party financiers in higher education. Many students and families obtain loans and push payment off into the future, thus creating some insensitivity to price. At the same time, institutions have managed the price of tui‐ tion in a non‐sustainable way. They make their budgets in a highly incremental fashion. ”It cost us this much to function this year. It will cost a bit more next year. Plus, we have to provide raises to everyone. That means we will need to increase tuition. Ask the board to declare a 5% increase.” Do that enough times and the compounding effect of all those tuition increases becomes quite substantial. Thanks to gov‐ ernment financing, the reaction to the massive increase in tuition has been delayed, but it is growing. Parents and students are looking for a better deal. Institutions will have to find a way to give it to them. Second, universities are governed in an unusual fashion. While the endeavors carried out within the university can be quite different (compare the business school to the nursing program to the philoso‐ phy department to research‐driven physics), the governance can be highly collective and democratic in nature. The differences become even more significant when you start to mix‐in fully online pro‐ grams, continuing studies programs for adults in the evenings, and other programming. A problem that arises out of this situation is that the very broad decision‐making group is not necessarily appropriate. As an example, the people who love online education are quite dif‐ ferent than those who have staked their lives on classroom teaching and mentoring during office hours. Yet, these same people are often tied up in the same group in terms of curricular decisions and other matters. The major problems I have identified are related to cost and gov‐ ernance/policy/administration. It seems to me that a good strategy for meeting those challenges might lie in disaggregation and decen‐ tralization. Rather than having one university with one tuition rate and lots of centrally made decisions, I think we should have a uni‐ 99
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versity comprised of several distinct entities with a great deal of in‐ dependence. The colleges within the university should really operate as colleges with different tuition rates and a lot of ability to run their own affairs. The professional colleges/programs can charge a signifi‐ cantly different tuition rate from the college of arts and sciences. The online program will have the ability to hire its own professors who have a special interest in that type of instruction. Each group will be able to make important choices about their curricula and methods. They should even be able to make some of their own choices about marketing. By breaking up the constituent parts of the university, we will increase the likelihood that innovation will occur and that cost challenges can be attacked. But universities, especially the private ones, have missions they are trying to fulfill. How will they make sure a group of decentralized operations manage to achieve the overall mission? I think the answer there has to do with Peter Drucker’s early insights about General Motors at its peak in The Concept of the Corporation. GM’s separate lines were able to do what they needed to bring about the greatest success within their market segment, but the execs at the top set the policy within which the sub‐groups operated. In other words, the executive management exercised an almost constitutional type of authority over the Buicks, Chevrolets, Pontiacs, and Cadillacs. Permit the widest independence consistent with the overall policy and mis‐ sion of the organization. Now, I am not making the case that decentralization is always a panacea. One of Machiavelli’s better points is that different types of leadership are more applicable to particular times and circumstances. But it seems to me that decentralization is the best answer for the ills that plague the universities. How would it all work out from a budgetary perspective? After all, some parts of the university are clearly more profitable than oth‐ ers. Yet, the unprofitable parts might represent critical elements of the overall mission? The budget would need to be set‐up in such a way that the profit‐making sections are able to benefit from their suc‐ cesses and can reinvest in their own efforts. However, it would also be a simple matter to require them to make a contribution to the broader institutional treasury which could be used to subsidize the areas of the university worth subsidizing. That point brings me to another one of Drucker’s propositions. He argued that the market 100
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should rule where it is good for it to rule, but there should be some activities or principles that are not exclusively guided by market re‐ sponse and thus deserve some protection. I would argue that some‐ thing like a philosophy or theology department fits that description. Whether or not the market values those offerings, they should be part of the university’s program. These are all just preliminary thoughts, but I think decentralization provides the potential for real, substantial gains in the intermediate term and still more in the long run. I hasten to add that this same advice would not necessarily apply to an entity which has avoided the university designation and has remained a true college. A true college may well be small enough and have a cohesive enough com‐ munity of interest to keep the parts together.
: Brand dominates everything in our social and commercial lives. I have a massive attachment to the Honda brand. I have come to asso‐ ciate it with cars that offer durability, reliability, and fuel efficiency at a reasonable cost. As a result, I bought my last three cars from the company. My family has been similarly affected. Between my par‐ ents, my sister and her husband, and my wife and me, we have pur‐ chased about 12 cars from Honda in the past quarter century. It has become our go‐to brand. Why don’t we re‐evaluate the whole thing every time there is a buying decision? Because information, once we believe we can rely upon it, is like an investment that pays off for years to come. Once you know something, you can worry about fig‐ uring out other matters. When we think about brand and automobiles, the association is pretty non‐threatening. Of course, we will be attached to certain brands and often with good reason. The Honda brand is not irration‐ al in terms of what it offers. It doesn’t purport to provide romance or status prestige. It offers clear, consistent value. But there is a darker and more unjust side to brand. We use brand as a form of social intel‐ ligence which applies to persons as much as to manufactured goods. When I was a child, for example, I feared and mistrusted teenagers in my neighborhood. I didn’t have much experience of them, but my small selection of observations plus what I had seen on television and in movies led me to consider them dangerous. You could say that the 101
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teenager brand was a bad one. It still is. Generally speaking, most people who are not teenagers are not thrilled to find themselves in a place dominated by them. Their behavior is likely to be unrestrained and often poorly considered. They are at their physical peak and tend to overestimate their immunity to accidents and other harms. That’s the brand, anyway. Not many people are worried about discrimination against teens because those years are but a brief period in the life of a person. We go through it and emerge from it more mature. We escape the nega‐ tive stigma of being a not‐quite‐yet adult. There are other types of human brand discrimination which are more enduring and far more harmful. Racism may be the ultimate example. People make judgments about others based on race. If you see an Asian‐American man dressed in a business suit, you will likely assume that he is intelligent and capable. If you hear him speak the impeccable English of the American‐born Chinese, for example, then your estimate of him will climb still higher. This is an example of a more or less positive form of racism. The individual benefits from the brand established by people who resemble him. There is little ques‐ tion that there are other racial groups whose members suffer discrim‐ ination based on a bad brand. That bad brand entails fear of a variety of negative behaviors. When we talk about a brand of car or tooth‐ paste, it makes for an interesting case study to see how the brand might be improved and money made rather than lost. When we talk about a brand that adversely affects millions of human beings, then we begin to think in terms of morality and justice. But how to overcome a bad brand that damages the lives of human beings who must wear it like a label? We have to remember what the purpose of brands, both formal and informal, is. We use brands as a mental shortcut when we decide how to invest our time, our atten‐ tion, our presence, our money, and our trust. It is simply too difficult and too time consuming to uncover enough information to make solid decisions about every person who comes across our paths. This failure of intelligence is where Google Glass comes in. At some point, it will be possible for human beings to rate their interactions with each other in the same way we do now with buyers and sellers. If I buy something on Ebay or through a third party working with Ama‐ zon, I can do so with more confidence if I see a thousand positive ratings for the seller. A credit rating is basically a report on the expe‐ 102
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rience creditors have had with a specific individual. Imagine what interactions with other human beings will be like when something like Google Glass is combined with extensive social ratings of per‐ sons by those with whom they have interacted. Think bigger than business. Think about dating. What if the woman you went on a date with could leave feedback letting others know that you seduced her after the first dinner together and never called back? The women you encounter in subsequent meetings will be able to access the re‐ ports of others. She may be scanning the reports as she stares at you across a room and considers how she might react to an entreaty by you. What Google Glass or something like it will make possible is real‐ time, relevant intelligence on every human being whom we encoun‐ ter. When it will becomes possible to possess that kind of infor‐ mation, then the reasons for employing shortcuts such as race, sex, and religion to judge people will be far less compelling. Human be‐ ings will have the opportunity, truly, to be judged on the bases of their individual actions and on the impact their actions and choices have had upon other people. Certainly, such information will be cor‐ rupted to some degree by the contributions of vindictive persons or various cranks and trolls, but as it accumulates it should be more reliable as a corpus. This kind of social evolution will raise other interesting questions. For example, how much of racial, ethnic, and religious identity is based on a self‐defensive solidarity? If individuals come to feel that they are dealt with justly on the basis of the reality of the lives they live and the decisions they make, will they continue to look to vari‐ ous crusaders to defend them as members of a group? How would the ideological landscape change? How would individuals reconsid‐ er their behavior as they interact with others? Would the combina‐ tion of Google Glass plus social rating cause a great resurgence of interest in virtue? Would human beings return to religion in an at‐ tempt to become more virtuous, to become better people? Would workplace laws change? Would various civil protections become irrelevant and unnecessary? Right now, the big questions about Google Glass seem to revolve around the fear of persons that their activities might be recorded when they do not wish to have them preserved and/or published. The potential implications are far bigger and far more positive. We 103
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may establish a more just life for individuals and may remove the corrupting influence of group discrimination from our interactions and our laws.
: My Grandmother Winnie lives in Columbia, Tennessee. This April, very close to Mule Day, she will turn 98 years old. Her mind is still clear and she stands nice and straight. When we visited this Christ‐ mas, I suddenly realized, despite her good health, that I should take the time to ask her any questions I had about her life. I am still haunted by my failure to do so with my grandfather who died in 1995. I was young, nearly married, and didn’t have time to learn the lessons of the past. Today, I want to know as much as I can about our family’s history. She was born and grew up on a farm in Hohenwald, Tennessee. I think the German translates that name into “high forest.” Her moth‐ er was a formidable woman known to me as “Nando.” I always wondered where that odd name came from. Apparently, it was the label my father applied to his grandmother as a child. I say she was formidable because relatives talk about how strong she was, how much work she could do, what a great cook she was, and how she hustled to make everything go. I only knew her as a woman dying in a back room of my grandmother’s house when I was a child. The great depression hit when my grandmother was a teenager. When we study it in school, we see pictures of jobless men standing in line for soup and bread. I asked her what impact it had on her family. “Not much. We were poor, but we always had enough to eat and a house to live in.” She remembered her first job as a young married woman. She worked in a department store six days a week, all day. On the weekends, when there were movies she worked late at night in case any moviegoers wanted to shop after the show. She and my grandfather were a two career couple. He worked with the phosphorus that was once plentiful in the state and would often come home with holes burnt in his clothes from handling the stuff. On a couple of occasions they owned and ran a small grocery store, but each time they got it going the landlord wanted it back so he could run it himself. They decided not to go for a third time. He thought about becoming an undertaker, but his wife and child vetoed 104
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that. Eventually, he settled into a long run of work with phosphate and she became a school lunchroom manager. On a couple of occa‐ sions she has told me with amusement about the time she attended a state workshop for her and her peers around Tennessee. “Do you use the state menus or do you just go by golly?” the state supervisor asked. When she tells the story she looks at me with a smile on her face and says, “I reckon I just went by golly.” She and Grandpa raised my father in Mount Pleasant, though he often spent summers with his cousins on the family farm in Hohen‐ wald. He was an excellent student and went to Vanderbilt on scholar‐ ship. He is blonde, hale, and hearty in his early 70’s. I suspect he may have his mother’s longevity. Over the years she and I have sometimes talked about politics. I know that she has voted almost exclusively for Democrats. Why did she vote for the Democrats? Because her mother and father did. She voted for Reagan in 1984, not in 1980 when she supported Jimmy Carter. “Why did you vote for Reagan in 1984?” I asked. “Because he was funny and good.” When she and Grandpa retired, they became volunteers together at Maury General Hospital. He was extroverted and put people at ease, so he chose to work in the emergency room. She preferred the gift shop and worked there many years until they changed to a more new‐fangled cash register. She figured she was old enough not to make that transition. She still makes the trek to the Church of Christ in Mount Pleasant every week as she has for decades. I can’t wait until Mule Day to talk some more.
: On a recent Saturday morning I watched a program on the Ameri‐ can presidents. My 11 year old son walked by and asked, ʺIs that Useless Grant?ʺ
Hunter Baker serves as Dean of Instruction and associate professor of political science at Union University. He is the author of two books, The End of Secularism and Political Thought: A Student’s Guide. You can read more at his website, endofsecularism.com. 105
The Word
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4THE`WORD`SPOKEN$ Cyril of Jerusalem In each volume of T H E C I T Y , we reprint a passage from great leaders of the faith. On or around the year of 350, Saint Cyril of Jerusalem delivered his twenty-three lectures in the basilica erected by Constantine. What follows is an excerpt from his second sermon, “On Repentance and Remission of Sins, and Concerning the Adversary.”
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hat can sin be? Is it a living thing? Is it an angel? Is it a demon? What is this which works within us? It is not an enemy, O man, that assails you from without, but an evil shoot growing up out of yourself. Look right on with your eyes, and there is no lust. Keep your own, and seize not the things of others, and robbery has ceased. Remember the Judgment, and neither forni‐ cation, nor adultery, nor murder, nor any transgression of the law shall prevail with you. But whenever you forget God, immediately you begin to devise wickedness and to commit iniquity. Yet you are not the sole author of the evil, but there is also another most wicked prompter, the devil. He indeed suggests, but does not get the mastery by force over those who do not consent. Therefore says the Preacher, If the spirit of him that has power rise up against you, quit not your place. Shut your door, and put him far from you, and he shall not hurt you. But if you indifferently admit the thought of lust, it strikes root in you by its suggestions, and enthrals your mind, and drags you down into a pit of evils. But perhaps you say, I am a believer, and lust does not gain the ascendant over me, even if I think upon it frequently. Do you not know that a root breaks even a rock by long persistence? Admit not the seed, since it will rend your faith asunder: tear out the evil by the root before it blossom, lest from being careless at the beginning thou have afterwards to seek for axes and fire. When your eyes begin to be diseased, get them cured in good time, lest you become blind, and then have to seek the physician. The devil then is the first author of sin, and the father of the wick‐ ed: and this is the Lordʹs saying, not mine, that the devil sins from the beginning: none sinned before him. But he sinned, not as having received necessarily from nature the propensity to sin, since then the 107
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cause of sin is traced back again to Him that made him so; but having been created good, he has of his own free will become a devil, and received that name from his action. For being an Archangel he was afterwards called a devil from his slandering: from being a good servant of God he has become rightly named Satan; for ʺSatanʺ is interpreted the adversary. And this is not my teaching, but that of the inspired prophet Ezekiel: for he takes up a lamentation over him and says, You were a seal of likeness, and a crown of beauty; in the Para‐ dise of God were you born: and soon after, You were born blameless in your days, from the day in which you were created, until your iniquities were found in you. Very rightly has he said, were found in you; for they were not brought in from without, but you yourself begot the evil. The cause also he mentions immediately: Your heart was lifted up because of your beauty: for the multitude of your sins were you wounded, and I did cast you to the ground. In agreement with this the Lord says again in the Gospels: I beheld Satan as light‐ ning fall from heaven. You see the harmony of the Old Testament with the New. He when cast out drew many away with him. It is he that puts lusts into them that listen to him: from him come adultery, fornication, and every kind of evil. Through him our forefather Ad‐ am was cast out for disobedience, and exchanged a Paradise bringing forth wondrous fruits of its own accord for the ground which brings forth thorns. What then? Some one will say. We have been beguiled and are lost. Is there then no salvation left? We have fallen: Is it not possible to rise again? We have been blinded: May we not recover our sight? We have become crippled: Can we never walk upright? In a word, we are dead: May we not rise again? He that woke Lazarus who was four days dead and already stank, shall He not, O man, much more easily raise you who art alive? He who shed His precious blood for us, shall Himself deliver us from sin. Let us not despair of ourselves, brethren; let us not abandon ourselves to a hopeless condition. For it is a fear‐ ful thing not to believe in a hope of repentance. For he that looks not for salvation spares not to add evil to evil: but to him that hopes for cure, it is henceforth easy to be careful over himself. The robber who looks not for pardon grows desperate; but, if he hopes for for‐ giveness, often comes to repentance. What then, does the serpent cast its slough , and shall not we cast off our sin? Thorny ground also, if cultivated well, is turned into fruitful; and is salvation to us irrecov‐ 108
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erable? Nay rather, our nature admits of salvation, but the will also is required.
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od is loving to man, and loving in no small measure. For say not, I have committed fornication and adultery: I have done dreadful things, and not once only, but often: will He for‐ give? Will He grant pardon? Hear what the Psalmist says: How great is the multitude of Your goodness, O Lord! Your accumulated offens‐ es surpass not the multitude of Godʹs mercies: your wounds surpass not the great Physicianʹs skill. Only give yourself up in faith: tell the Physician your ailment: say thou also, like David: I said, I will con‐ fess me my sin unto the Lord: and the same shall be done in your case, which he says immediately: And you forgave the wickedness of my heart. Would you see the loving‐kindness of God, O thou that art lately come to the catechising? Would you see the loving‐kindness of God, and the abundance of His long‐suffering? Hear about Adam. Adam, Godʹs first‐formed man, transgressed: could He not at once have brought death upon him? But see what the Lord does, in His great love towards man. He casts him out from Paradise, for because of sin he was unworthy to live there; but He puts him to dwell over against Paradise: that seeing whence he had fallen, and from what and into what a state he was brought down, he might afterwards be saved by repentance. Cain the first‐born man became his brotherʹs murderer, the inventor of evils, the first author of murders, and the first envious man. Yet after slaying his brother to what is he condemned? Groan‐ ing and trembling shall you be upon the earth. How great the of‐ fense, the sentence how light! Even this then was truly loving‐kindness in God, but little as yet in comparison with what follows. For consider what happened in the days of Noah. The giants sinned, and much wickedness was then spread over the earth, and because of this the flood was to come up‐ on them: and in the five hundredth year God utters His threatening; but in the six hundredth He brought the flood upon the earth. Do you see the breadth of Godʹs loving‐kindness extending to a hundred years? Could He not have done immediately what He did then after the hundred years? But He extended (the time) on purpose, granting a respite for repentance. Do you see Godʹs goodness? And if the men 109
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of that time had repented, they would not have missed the loving‐ kindness of God. Come with me now to the other class, those who were saved by repentance. But perhaps even among women some one will say, I have committed fornication, and adultery, I have defiled my body by excesses of all kinds: is there salvation for me? Turn your eyes, O woman, upon Rahab, and look thou also for salvation; for if she who had been openly and publicly a harlot was saved by repentance, is not she who on some one occasion before receiving grace committed fornication to be saved by repentance and fasting? For inquire how she was saved: this only she said: For your God is God in heaven and upon earth. Your God; for her own she did not dare to say, because of her wanton life. And if you wish to receive Scriptural testimony of her having been saved, you have it written in the Psalms: I will make mention of Rahab and Babylon among them that know me . O the greatness of Godʹs loving‐kindness, making mention even of harlots in the Scriptures: nay, not simply I will make mention of Rahab and Babylon, but with the addition, among them that know me. There is then in the case both of men and of women alike the salvation which is ushered in by repentance. Nay more, if a whole people sin, this surpasses not the loving‐ kindness of God. The people made a calf, yet God ceased not from His loving‐kindness. Men denied God, but God denied not Himself. These be your gods, O Israel, they said: yet again, as He was wont, the God of Israel became their Saviour. And not only the people sinned, but also Aaron the High Priest. For it is Moses that says: And the anger of the Lord came upon Aaron: and I prayed for him, says he, and God forgave him. What then, did Moses praying for a High Priest that sinned prevail with God, and shall not Jesus, His Only‐ begotten, prevail with God when He prays for us? And if He did not hinder Aaron, because of his offense, from entering upon the High Priesthood, will He hinder you, who has come out from the Gentiles, from entering into salvation? Only, O man, repent thou also in like manner, and grace is not forbidden you. Render your way of life henceforth unblameable; for God is truly loving unto man, nor can all time worthily tell out His loving kindness; nay, not if all the tongues of men unite together will they be able even so to declare any considerable part of His loving‐kindness. For we tell some part of what is written concerning His loving‐kindness to men, but how 110
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much He forgave the Angels we know not: for them also He forgives, since One alone is without sin, even Jesus who purges our sins. And of them we have said enough. But if concerning us men you will have other examples also set before you, come on to the blessed David, and take him for an exam‐ ple of repentance. Great as he was, he fell: after his sleep, walking in the eventide on the housetop, he cast a careless look, and felt a hu‐ man passion. His sin was completed, but there died not with it his candour concerning the confession of his fault. Nathan the Prophet came, a swift accuser, and a healer of the wound. The Lord is angry, he says, and you have sinned. So spoke the subject to the reigning king. But David the king was not indignant, for he regarded not the speaker, but God who had sent him. He was not puffed up by the array of soldiers standing round: for he had seen in thought the an‐ gel‐host of the Lord, and he trembled as seeing Him who is invisible; and to the messenger, or rather by him in answer to God who sent him, he said, I have sinned against the Lord. Do you see the humility of the king? Do you see his confession? For had he been convicted by any one? Were many privy to the matter? The deed was quickly done, and straightway the Prophet appeared as accuser, and the of‐ fender confesses the fault. And because he candidly confessed, he received a most speedy cure. For Nathan the Prophet who had ut‐ tered the threat, said immediately, The Lord also has put away your sin. You see the swift relenting of a merciful God. He says, however, You have greatly provoked the enemies of the Lord. Though you had many enemies because of your righteousness, your self‐control pro‐ tected you; but now that you have surrendered your strongest ar‐ mour, your enemies are risen up, and stand ready against you. Thus then did the Prophet comfort him, but the blessed David, for all he heard it said, The Lord has put away your sin, did not cease from repentance, king though he was, but put on sackcloth instead of purple, and instead of a golden throne, he sat, a king, in ashes on the ground; nay, not only sat in ashes, but also had ashes for his food, even as he says himself, I have eaten ashes as it were bread. His lust‐ ful eye he wasted away with tears saying, Every night will I wash my couch, and water my bed with my tears. When his officers besought him to eat bread he would not listen. He prolonged his fast unto sev‐ en whole days. If a king thus made confession ought not thou, a pri‐ vate person, to confess? Again, after Absalomʹs insurrection, though 111
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there were many roads for him to escape, he chose to flee by the Mount of Olives, in thought, as it were, invoking the Redeemer who was to go up thence into the heavens. And when Shimei cursed him bitterly, he said, Let him alone, for he knew that “to him that forgives it shall be forgiven.” …
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ake heed lest without reason you mistrust the power of re‐ pentance. Would you know what power repentance has? Would you know the strong weapon of salvation, and learn what the force of confession is? Turn and bewail yourself, shut your door, and pray to be forgiven, pray that He may remove from you the burning flames. For confession has power to quench even fire, power to tame even lions…
Having therefore, brethren, many examples of those who have sinned and repented and been saved, do ye also heartily make con‐ fession unto the Lord, that you may both receive the forgiveness of your former sins, and be counted worthy of the heavenly gift, and inherit the heavenly kingdom with all the saints in Christ Jesus; to Whom is the glory for ever and ever. Amen.
+++ We encourage you to visit T H E C I T Y online at C I V I TAT E . O R G .
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