THE CITY From the thirteenth Catechical Lecture by Cyril of Jerusalem, on The Crucifixion & Resurrection, delivered on or around 350 a.d. For we were enemies of God through sin, and God had appointed the sinner to die. There must needs therefore have happened one of two things; either that God, in His truth, should destroy all men, or that in His loving-kindness He should cancel the sentence. But behold the wisdom of God; He preserved both the truth of His sentence, and the exercise of His loving-kindness. Christ took our sins in His body on the tree, that we by His death might die to sin, and live unto righteousness. Of no small account was He who died for us; He was not a literal sheep; He was not a mere man; He was more than an Angel; He was God made man. The transgression of sinners was not so great as the righteousness of Him who died for them; the sin which we committed was not so great as the righteousness which He wrought who laid down His life for us—who laid it down when He pleased, and took it again when He pleased. Let us not then be ashamed to confess the Crucified. Be the Cross our seal made with boldness by our fingers on our brow, and on everything; over the bread we eat, and the cups we drink; in our comings in, and goings out; before our sleep, when we lie down and when we rise up; when we are in the way, and when we are still. Great is that preservative; it is without price, for the sake of the poor; without toil, for the sick; since also its grace is from God. It is the Sign of the faithful, and the dread of devils: for He ‘triumphed over them in it, having made a show of them openly’; for when they see the Cross they are reminded of the Crucified; they are afraid of Him, who bruised the heads of the dragon. Take therefore first, as an indestructible foundation, the Cross, and build upon it the other articles of the faith.
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 Christopher Hammons Anthony Joseph Joseph M. Knippenberg Louis Markos Peter Meilaender Dan McLaughlin Paul D. Miller Matthew J. Milliner Russell Moore Robert Stacey
THE CITY Volume VII, Issue 2 Copyright 2014 Houston Baptist University. All rights reserved by original authors except as noted. Letters and submissions to this journal are welcomed. Cover photo of Galveston. Email us at thecity@hbu.edu, and visit us online at civitate.org.
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4CONTENTS$ The Question of Inequality Josiah Neeley on What Bono Knows Don Devine on The Pope & Capitalism Bruce Baker on Capital in the 21 s t Century David VanDrunen on Thomas Piketty and Morality Salim Furth on a Biblical Response to Inequality
4 9 15 18 22
Features Michael Hanby on Life on the Wrong Side of History Hadley Arkes on Religious Liberty & Hobby Lobby Ryan T. Anderson on The Right to be Wrong Dylan Pahman on The Value of Ordered Liberty
29 38 45 53
Books & Culture Louis Markos on The Flesh & Blood Saint Megan Mueller on Feminism & Modesty Holly Ordway on Tolkien’s Beowulf Tim Goeglein on Poetry & The Great War Micah Mattix on The Master of Poetic Deadpan
61 66 70 75 80
A Republ ic of Letter s Hunter Baker
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Poetry by G.K. Chesterton
27,84
The Word by Charles Spurgeon 3
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W H AT D O E S B O N O K N OW T H AT T H E P O P E DOESN’ T? 4EQUALITY)AND)SOCIAL)EVIL$ Josiah Neeley
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conomic inequality (or, to be more precise, opposition to it) is very much “in” these days. Occupy Wall Street may have fizzled, but talk about the “one percent” has en‐ tered the common lexicon of politicians, pundits, and academics alike. Concern over rising inequality has grown to the point that Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty First Century, a 700 page academic tome full of graphs and equations, is a best seller. Even the Pope is getting in on the action. In April, Pope Francis entered the inequality debate, tweeting a statement on the evils of inequality that was widely shared throughout social media: “Inequali‐ ty is the root of social evil.” As a practicing Catholic who is also a fan of the free market, and who can’t seem to get all that worked up about inequality, the Pope’s tweet provoked a number of different reactions. One temptation would be to try to interpret Francis’ statement in a way that is more anodyne. As one non‐Catholic acquiatance described it to me, it often seems like conservative Catholics respond to each new statement by the Pope on economics by getting out their decoder‐rings, and en‐ deavoring to show that “What the Pope Really Meant” was complete‐ 4
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ly unobjectionable. Sometimes the end product is so different from Francis’ original words as to be unrecognizable. Another possibility is to try to downplay what Francis is saying. After all, there’s a lot of nuance that inevitably gets left out when you’re limited to 140 characters. Probably it was just a Vatican staffer who wrote the thing anyway. And so on. But the truth is that the tweet is very much in keeping with Pope Francis’ other statements and writings on the matter. Last year the Pope devoted a substantial portion of his apostolic exhortation Evan‐ gelii Gaudium to the issue of inequality, stating that: Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of inequality… [S]ome people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. If anything, the tweet is milder than the exhortation. The tweet only condemns inequality, whereas the exhortation seems skeptical about the free market system itself. I confess that when Evangelii Gaudium came out, I was a little an‐ noyed by it. Part of it was that the document seemed to be a bit casu‐ al with respect to the facts (suggesting that inequality was on the rise worldwide, when global inequality has fallen in recent decades). Just a few months prior to the release of the apostolic exhortation, U2 front‐man Bono gave a speech where he noted that capitalism had lifted more people out of poverty than any other force in human his‐ tory. And heʹs right! In the last few decades alone hundreds of mil‐ lions of people have been lifted out of poverty in India, China, and elsewhere due to the forces of market globalization. Bono, like the Pope, doesnʹt have any special training in economics, and by temper‐ ament is pretty left wing. Yet he seemed to have grasped an im‐ 5
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portant truth about the world that has so far eluded Francis. I found myself thinking something very strange: why can’t the Pope be more like Bono?
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t was particularly galling to me given that this Pope is from Ar‐ gentina. A hundred years ago, Argentina was one of the richest nations in the world. Then a century’s worth of Peronist led au‐ tarky, welfarism, and right wing socialism intervened, with the result that Argentina is now the worldʹs only “formerly developed” coun‐ try. From my perspective, Argentina is a classic example of how a government intervention in the economy can lead to ruin. And yet the lesson Francis seems to have drawn from this is that Argentinaʹs problem was too much capitalism. Similarly, when I hear condemnations of economic inequality, my mind jumps naturally to the classic responses: is a society where eve‐ ryone is equally poor preferable to a society where everyone is richer but some are richer than others? How does the fact that Bill Gates lives in a mansion make me any worse off? Doesn’t the failure of at‐ tempts to achieve an egalitarian utopia, ranging from Brookfield Farm to Red Square, show that inequality is a necessary part of a healthy social order? These responses are all valid, and if anyone but the Pope were to make the same statement, I probably would just leave it at that. But it is a feature of the decidedly non‐egalitarian structure of the Catholic Church that I am inclined to reflect more deeply on a statement by a high ranking cleric, even when on the surface it seems obviously wrong to me. When I do so, I find that there is a great deal of truth in Pope Fran‐ cis’ statements about inequality, particularly when viewed (ironically enough) in the context of his Argentine origins. As a conservative, free market loving American, when I hear about inequality my mind immediately envisions a creative entrepreneur who got rich by mak‐ ing people’s lives better. Inequality, in that case, seems like just a nec‐ essary byproduct of prosperity. That, however, is not necessarily how inequality is experienced in many parts of the world. Consider, for example, the following de‐ scription of life in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from the book Why Nations Fail, by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson: 6
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As an independent polity, Congo experienced almost unbroken economic decline and mounting poverty under the rule of Joseph Mobutu between 1965 and 1997. This decline continued after Mobutu was overthrown by Laurent Kabila. Mobutu created a highly extractive set of institutions. The citizens were impoverished, but Mobutu and the elite surrounding him, known as Les Grosses Legumes (the Big Vegetables), became fabulously wealthy. Mobutu built himself a palace at his birthplace, Gbadolite, in the north of the country, with an airport large enough to land a supersonic Concord[e] jet, a plane he frequently rented from Air France for travel to Europe. In Europe he bought castles and owned large tracts of the Belgian capital of Brussels. In Congo, inequality was not the result of certain people working harder than others, or of being more talented, or of being rewarded for being innovators whose creations were a benefit to society as a whole. Rather, their fortunes were amassed and maintained through connections and government favors. And the DRC is hardly unique in this regard. For Latin America, the stereotypical rich guy is not Steve Jobs but Carlos Slim, who became one of the world’s richest men through a telephone monopoly in Mexico. This, clearly, is an example of an inequality that is toxic; an inequal‐ ity that is responsible for social evil. It is not the result of freedom and prosperity, but a hindrance to it.
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f we are honest about it, we must admit that even in the United States a great deal of inequality is the result not of the heroic in‐ novator but of government favoritism. From Goldman Sachs to Archer Daniels Midland, a not insubstantial proportion of modern companies owe their success at least in part to taxpayer bailouts, government subsidies, or other kinds of restrictions on competition. Nor is this process limited to much demonized multi‐national cor‐ porations. An increasing number of professions use occupational licensing restrictions to limit competition and hence boost the salaries of members at the expense of everyone else. Nurses are prohibited from administering even routine care (which studies show they per‐ form as well as doctors). Attorneys charge hundreds of dollars an hour for their time, while much of their work is or could be done just as well by paralegals for a fraction of the cost. People are precluded from occupations ranging from hairdresser to interior decorator, un‐ less they spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours securing 7
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a degree that, in many cases, is not even relevant to the work they want to do. These aren’t the sorts of thing that is captured in inequality statis‐ tics. To my way of thinking, any measure that ranks Canada (which has a Gini of 32.6) alongside Egypt (30.8) and Bangladesh (32.1) is probably not a reliable indicator of societal well‐being. Still, there clearly is a form of inequality that is socially toxic, and it’s more common than those of us who believe in the power of the free market might like to admit. It may be that, like cholesterol, there are good and bad types of inequality, and we need to focus more on combatting malignant inequalities, rather than just dismissing the issue out of hand. Flannery O’Connor once said that “the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it. “ In the grand scheme of things, hearing the Pope say things about economics that make me cringe is not that great a form of suffering (whether this cringing is really my fault I will leave for God to judge). And if Pope Francis’ statements help me to think more deeply about how our society does or doesn’t live up to its own principles, then that’s a form of “suffering” I am more than willing to endure.
Josiah Neeley is an attorney and policy analyst at the Armstrong Center for Energy & the Environment at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. 8
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D OES P OPE F RANCIS H ATE C APITALISM ? [poverty0and0inequality{ Donald Devine
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n an interview commenting upon the election of Pope Francis, the president of the Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Albert Mohler, remarked upon the fundamental theological differences between their two faiths but noted a very interest‐ ing paradox: “You’ve had an incredible intersection of interest on so many of these issues, like abortion and the sanctity of human life, and the family, and sexuality, with Evangelical Christians and the last two Popes—John Paul II and Benedict XVI. And it’s this odd thing that the people who are most likely to argue over issues of the‐ ology, because we believe them to be of ultimate importance, are the people who believe in truth, and thus are those who share those commitments to family and marriage and truth, and the sanctity of human life. And so it’s going to be the Protestants who are most Protestant who will actually appreciate that aspect of the Pope’s stance. In other words, it’s going to be the Protestants who have the least belief in the validity of his office who will agree with him more than liberal Protestants.” Dr. Mohler was likewise prescient in noting that the new pope was not a philosopher like John Paul nor a theologian like Benedict, pre‐ dicting that Francis would be “more pastoral” than his more intellec‐ tual predecessors. Mohler’s insights here were remarkable both in anticipating Pope Francis’ tendency to upset many Christian tradi‐ tionalists with some of his off‐the‐cuff remarks on marriage and ho‐ mosexuality but also in predicting that Francis was unlikely formally 9
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to challenge his predecessors on such doctrines. Where Francis did challenge them was on inequality, poverty, free markets and capital‐ ism, concerning which a long literature demonstrates evangelicals themselves have had concerns. Francis’ very first social teaching, Evangelii Gaudium, opened by ob‐ serving that “The majority of our contemporaries are barely living from day to day,” enveloped in a “crisis of inequality” with an in‐ come gap that has been growing “exponentially.” Still, in the face of this, “some people continue to defend trickle‐down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the pre‐ vailing economic system.” Meanwhile, the excluded poor are still waiting as a “culture of prosperity deadens” the consciences of the fortunate to the sufferings of the many. “The gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few,” Francis continued is “the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and finan‐ cial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of con‐ trol.” A “deified market is the only rule.” For “as long as the prob‐ lems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation, and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems. Inequality is the root of social ills.” Today, “we can no longer trust in the unseen forces and the invisible hand of the market. Growth in justice re‐ quires more than economic growth, while presupposing such growth: it requires decisions, programmes, mechanisms and process‐ es specifically geared to a better distribution of income, the creation of sources of employment and an integral promotion of the poor which goes beyond a simple welfare mentality.” Francis uses very strong language against capitalism’s economic order. That being said, this analysis is merely a dozen paragraphs of 288 long sections in his essay that focus mostly upon promoting “a fraternal love capable of seeing the sacred grandeur of our neighbor, of finding God in every human being, of tolerating the nuisances of 10
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life in common by clinging to the love of God, of opening the heart to divine love and seeking the happiness of others just as their heavenly Father does” with which sentiments few evangelicals would disa‐ gree. In a following interview with La Stampa defending his criticism of “trickle‐down” economics (and published in On Heaven and Earth, co‐authored with Rabbi Abraham Skorka in 2013), Francis responded that he “did not talk as a specialist but according to the social doc‐ trine of the church”.
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rancis’ tone is very different from that of John Paul and Bene‐ dict. John Paul lived under communism and was forced to ask why capitalism had produced the sounder and more prosper‐ ous society. Benedict lived under Nazism and was forced to consider the other major economic systems. Sufficient study on their part could not fail to notice the obvious, that capitalism worked better and in fact reduced world poverty. They even questioned the welfare state for “its bureaucratic way of thinking” rather than having “con‐ cern for serving its clients” and proposed political and social decen‐ tralization and “perceiving the deeper human need” of the spirit in‐ stead, placing much of this reasoning into their formal encyclicals and their updated Catechism. What accounts for this difference? Francis was born in a country with a troubled economic history. Its independence was declared in 1810 but Argentina’s powers immediately engaged in civil war with each other for the next fifty years. A classical liberal government and Constitution were finally established in 1853. As an agricultural oli‐ garchy with a major port and developing industry, free trade was the norm and central government controls were light. As historian Jose Ignatio Garcia Hamilton has noted, even with much political instabil‐ ity, by 1910 these policies made Argentina’s per capita Gross Domes‐ tic Product number ten in the world, higher than France, twice Italy’s and five times Japan’s. This prosperity attracted a large European immigration, with 30 percent of Argentineans foreign born by 1930, 80 percent Italian and Spanish. While providing the labor for its growing manufacturing these also brought the fascist and communist ideologies of the home nations to the inevitable industrial clashes between the new capital‐ ists (many from landed families) and a muscular unionism, which spread to the feudal agriculture of the Pampas exacerbating existing 11
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aristocratic faction grudges. Military coups in 1930 and 1943 prom‐ ised order and led to the long influence of Juan Peron, who removed the Supreme Court, politicized the education system, nationalized industries, controlled agricultural prices and distribution, established an export monopoly favoring both unions and businessmen in a gen‐ erally syndicalist regulatory environment, and vastly increased spending for client groups that produced enormous debt. Peron’s Argentina was perhaps the first comprehensive welfare state, trading benefits to the masses for their political support. Since there never were enough funds for everyone, a state capitalism under strong political regulation was developed to direct benefits to power‐ ful clients such as unions and producers without so fettering the businesses as to deprive Peron of the wealth needed to support his regime. But debt soared and markets stagnated. Market reforms were adopted under Carlos Menem in the 1990s but social spending and debt continued, ending in corruption, currency devaluation and un‐ popular austerity programs, culminating in the restoration of Peron‐ ist policies and even slower growth under the Kirchners up until today. Under Argentina’s many forms of repressive government, capital‐ ists could only survive by being political partners of the state, some‐ times its power behind the throne but more often too powerful to eliminate but clearly having to defer to state power to remain in business. In the U.S. this is called “crony capitalism” where the capi‐ talists are in collusion with the government to get favors for them‐ selves, precisely the opposite of a market. By 2012 Argentina had sunk to number 73 in world per capita GDP by World Bank esti‐ mates, at Int$12,043, down to only one‐third that of France. Its ratio of the top ten percent richest to the bottom ten percent poorest was 31.6 to one (compared to half, 15.9 to one, in the U.S.). With all of Argentina’s government welfare the result has been a much poorer country and larger inequality even than the capitalist U.S.
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he capitalism Francis describes is indeed unjust. But it is dis‐ torted by the Argentine experience. As such, much of it is cari‐ cature, useful for making moral points perhaps but distortion nonetheless. In another place Francis contends that “wild capitalism” and communism must be condemned with “the same vigor”. Really, with the latter killing 100 million of its own people? His whole idea 12
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of the “absolute autonomy of the market” is a straw man. The man most responsible for the modern capitalist revival, Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek, wrote as early as the nineteen sixties that there was no such thing as pure laissez faire, for markets always require rules, certainly against coercion but also for contracts, safety, property and so forth. The actual experience of markets is hardly autonomy. The U.S., one of the freer countries, has 300,000 regulations. Likewise, there is sub‐ stantial income redistribution in the U.S. as the top one percent earned one‐fifth of the income but paid two‐fifths of the income taxes and its government redistributed 40 percent of total wealth (but mostly to the middle classes rather than the poor). As far as an expo‐ nentially expanding inequality crisis, after India, China and others adopted more market‐oriented reforms, Brookings Institute scholars Laurence Chandy and Geoffrey Gerz estimated that between 2005 and 2010 the total number of poor in the world actually fell by half a billion people as trickle down prosperity lifted millions from abso‐ lute destitution. Even Adam Smith, the inventor of the “invisible hand” analogy, would agree Francis’ capitalism is unjust since Smith insisted upon the necessity of charity and even local government welfare. Today’s reality is the over‐regulatory welfare state, not wild markets, which Francis implicitly recognized by saying now we must go beyond “a simple welfare mentality.” Francis likewise noted that the “great temptation” in aiding the poor “is falling into an attitude of protective paternalism that does not allow them to grow”. He understood the benefits of decentraliza‐ tion but he despaired that it is becoming “difficult to find local solu‐ tions.” Francis conceded that business can be a “noble vocation” in creating jobs but he simply presupposed such growth, which re‐ quires the very dynamic market he criticizes. My 1978 book Does Freedom Work? critiqued Paul VI’s encyclical Populorum Progresso and argued his morality was sound but his em‐ pirical understanding of economics was not. Popes are not infallible on empirical matters even under Catholic doctrine. As Mohler had anticipated, Francis even specifically said he was speaking only as a pastor, one who accepted the church’s teachings. Evangelii Gaudium was merely “pastoral advice.” Would anyone have listened if he were as intellectually sophisticated as were his predecessors? He did get 13
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the world’s attention to the fact that prosperity can breed indiffer‐ ence, can lead to mindless commercialism, prurient escapism and neglect of neighbor. As a worldwide wake‐up call, it worked. One can reject the validity of his office and still recognize Francis’ uninhibited passion for the dignity of every human person and the “most Protestant of Protestants” can accept his challenge to turn from indifference to true love of neighbor, while still recognizing that his admitted lack of interest in technical matters about free markets and governance, if followed blindly, could have horrendous consequenc‐ es in denying the poor the opportunity to rise from a squalor encour‐ aged too often by rapacious and bureaucratic welfare states.
Donald Devine is senior scholar at The Fund for American Studies, the author of America’s Way Back: Reconciling Freedom, Tradition and Constitution, and was Ronald Reagan’s director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management during his first term. This is adapted from a previous article in Liberty Law Blog. 14
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C APITAL IN THE T WENTY-F IRST C ENTURY ,tale0without0morality< Bruce Baker
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homas Piketty has given economists a lot to argue about, but their arguments miss the point of the book’s success. Capital in the Twenty‐First Century is not a bestseller based on its economic merits. It’s a bestseller because it speaks to a deep moral anxiety which has animated the early part of this century. We sorely need a story that places capitalism within the larger context of transcendent human dignity. The story has grown complicated of late. During the second half of the twentieth century, capitalism seemed more straight‐forward. Post‐war growth “lifted all boats” and benefited a growing middle class. To be sure, there were cycles of expansion and contraction, even a troubling spell of “stagflation,” but overall those decades told a story of undaunted progress: capitalism created phenomenal wealth, re‐shaped the world political order, and lifted masses of peo‐ ple out of poverty. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 vindicated this view, and sealed the victory of the free market as the most dominant force on earth. Yet for all this, confidence in capitalism has been shaken. The crisis of 2008 exposed weaknesses in the most sophisticated and technolog‐ ically advanced financial products. Recovery has been slow and une‐ ven. By some measures, wage stagnation and inequality have in‐ creased. Nationwide, debate swirls around a move to increase the federal minimum wage. Here in Seattle, rallies have marched in sup‐ 15
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port of boosting the city’s minimum wage to $15 per hour. Mean‐ while, globalization has left billions in poverty. How are we to make sense of these things? As moral beings, we find meaning within the context of stories. We judge the morality of an act—whether someone is being helped or hurt—by how it fits into the narrative context. Here Piketty connects with our deeply felt need for a story. Moreover, he tackles the most pressing issue—growing inequality. He explains inequality in a simple equation: r > g. In oth‐ er words, the return on capital ( r ) continually exceeds the rate of economic growth ( g ) linked to pay. Piketty worries that this “inequality of returns” leads to an “exces‐ sive and lasting concentration of capital”, in which “fortunes can grow and perpetuate themselves beyond all reasonable limits and beyond any possible rational justification in terms of social utility.” Given the popular concern over rising inequality, it is no wonder that Piketty’s thesis is attracting so much attention. Controversy is height‐ ened by his nod in the direction of Karl Marx, who set the original benchmark for historical criticism of capitalism. Like Marx, Piketty offers a storyline to explain why the rich get richer, and the poor poorer. Extrapolating from this simplistic premise, he proposes a global progressive tax on capital, even while admitting this to be utopian and unrealistic. He seems to apologize for his failure to offer workable advice.
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he real weakness in Piketty’s book however, lies not in its wonkish proposals, but rather in its lack of moral substance. There is no moral to the story. There is only data. Piketty’s empiricism succumbs to the same fatal flaw John Paul II diagnosed in Marxism—it leads to an incoherent statement of moral order, because “The visible world, in and of itself, cannot offer a scientific basis for an aesthetic interpretation of reality.” Human dignity is not reducible to natural philosophy. As John Paul II argues, the moral life of man becomes “the central problem under discussion” in defense of eco‐ nomic theory, and natural philosophy fails to deliver a workable un‐ derstanding of human freedom, because “Man affirms himself most completely by giving of himself.” He goes on to say, “If we deprive human freedom of this possibility, if man does not commit himself to becoming a gift for others, then this freedom can become dangerous. 16
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… If we cannot accept the prospect of giving ourselves as a gift, then the danger of a selfish freedom will always be present.” Piketty attempts to elide the larger moral questions by refusing to “indulge in constructing a moral hierarchy of wealth.” Aye, but there’s the rub. For until and unless we are willing to cross over the threshold from sterile empiricism to the larger context of spiritual reality, we will not be able to weigh market effects on the scale that matters most: the moral scale. The need for a new, more robust, more realistic story of capitalism is apparent. Piketty’s book merely raises the question. To make sense of the moral legitimacy of capitalism we need a story capable of deal‐ ing with good and evil, greed and sympathy. Adam Smith insisted upon sympathy and benevolence as the guiding influences of a moral society in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He never countenanced a story of capital divorced of these moral guardrails. The transcendent significance of human dignity, rooted in relation‐ ship, neighborly love, and spiritual commitment to higher purpose gives the story meaning. Apart from this overarching context, eco‐ nomics fails to engage with questions of morality. To address the moral implications of capitalism, we must cross the threshold that Piketty avoids, and consider God’s will for humankind. This requires a more holistic understanding of business as a co‐creator of shalom, and wealth as a responsibility for justice.
Bruce Baker is assistant professor of business ethics at Seattle Pacific University. 17
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P IKET TY ’ S A BSENT M ORAL P HILOSOPHY \a0moral0analysis| David VanDrunen
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homas Piketty’s recent best seller, Capital in the Twenty‐ First Century, argues that capitalism, left to itself, will tend to produce ever‐increasing inequality of wealth, and that the best way to counter this phenomenon is through a steeply progressive, global tax on capital. A number of writers have critiqued Piketty’s economics over the course of the summer. Curious readers should examine Donald Boudreaux’s excellent review in Barron’s, for example, which incisively explored flaws in his method of economic analysis, and Alan Reynolds’ piece in the Wall Street Journal in July exposed several problems with his data. Evaluating Piketty’s moral philosophy, however, may be just as important as evaluating his economics. To be sure, Piketty does not advertise himself as a moral philoso‐ pher. Although he strives to be more than an economist—utilizing the methods of historians, sociologists, and political scientists to bol‐ ster his conclusions—he doesn’t mention ethics. But his frequent ap‐ peal to “social justice,” “optimal” levels of wealth inequality, and the shape of the “ideal” society leave little doubt that a moral vision un‐ derlies his broader case. To be precise, Piketty makes many strong moral assertions that reflect deeply held assumptions, but he offers few moral arguments to support his claims and ignores important moral considerations at crucial points. Yet without his grand moral vision of a global reform of the economic order, it’s doubtful this big 18
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volume filled with statistics and equations would have shot to the top of sales charts. So what is Piketty’s moral philosophy? Let’s begin with justice. Piketty obviously could have written a descriptive study of the histo‐ ry of wealth inequality and steered clear of debates about what’s just, but his book also prescribes a course for combating inequality. Ac‐ cordingly, he frequently refers to “social justice” and similar terms. What does Piketty think justice is? He never says. Scholars have been debating the nature of justice for millennia, but Piketty makes sweep‐ ing appeals to social justice dozens of times without a definition. It isn’t difficult to figure out what he means, however. His numerous references to the “general interest” and “common utility” point to a basic utilitarian perspective: what is just is that which promotes the greatest good for the greatest number.
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ow, many of the most famous modern moral theorists have been utilitarians, but it’s hardly an uncontroversial perspec‐ tive. The most influential work on justice in the past centu‐ ry, John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, was strongly anti‐utilitarian (though, curiously, Piketty cites Rawls’ book in support of his appeal to the “common utility,” and then, in the very next sentence, associ‐ ates Rawls’ approach with that of Nobel Prize economist Amartya Sen, who’s a staunch critic of Rawls). In addition to the danger of letting the “general interest” or “common utility” trample the inter‐ ests of individuals, one of the great challenges for a utilitarian ac‐ count of justice is determining what exactly is the greatest good for the greatest number. For Piketty, the greatest good for the greatest number obviously requires a relative equality of wealth. This doesn’t mean an equal distribution of wealth, but certainly much more equality than at present. It’s vague. And basing strong claims of “so‐ cial justice” on vague notions of relative equality for the general in‐ terest doesn’t promote productive debate. But if we must talk in terms of general interest, surely an essential consideration is that the absolute economic condition of the masses has risen astronomically, and continues to rise, under modern capi‐ talism. This is a glaring omission in Piketty’s book, as Boudreaux’s review noted. All told, Piketty’s idea of justice, even judged on its own utilitarian basis, is crucially vague and ignores perhaps the sin‐ gle most relevant economic fact. 19
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Another salient feature of Piketty’s moral philosophy is his vision of government. He states clearly that the early twentieth‐century move away from the government’s sole focus on “regalian” functions (i.e., keeping order and protecting life and property) and toward the “social state” (i.e., providing a broad range of goods and services) has been an enormous advance in human civilization. He assumes that nations should maintain, and even expand, the social state in the twenty‐first century. Its enormous expense is one of the reasons Piketty believes steep progressive taxation is necessary. Such a vision of government is also controversial (more so in America than in Piketty’s European context, undoubtedly). But even those sympathetic to the “social state” surely ought to be sobered by what Piketty’s proposal requires, and skeptical of his optimistic as‐ sessment of human moral nature. According to Piketty, for example, a global tax on capital demands that the governments of the world obtain, and share with each other, a complete account of every per‐ son’s assets on an annual basis. Think the National Security Agency now has a little too much information about you? Piketty’s proposal puts exorbitant power into the hands of trans‐national bureaucrats who, sadly, have the same range of moral flaws the rest of us have— and a much bigger stage on which to exercise them.
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iketty’s moral philosophy also touches individual conduct. He often contrasts the masses who work with the rentiers who don’t, or don’t have to. Wealth is gained either by labor or by inheritance, and those who inherit large fortunes can sit back and collect rents without working. Implied throughout is that the latter is morally appalling. Surely the moral issues are more complicated than Piketty lets on. For one thing, corporate and individual fortunes rise and fall. A great many people who inherit wealth blow it. Piketty’s model of a seem‐ ingly automatic growth in capital in families over generations seems far removed from real life.
The fragility of fortunes is morally fraught. We may all agree that laboring for a living is good and noble, but is inheriting and growing wealth so entirely different? It takes virtues of self‐control and de‐ layed gratification to resist temptations to spend down an inher‐ itance. It’s also not as if inherited wealth grows in any sort of uni‐ form fashion among those who have it. Investment strategies (and 20
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non‐strategies) vary widely. Growing wealth requires research, wis‐ dom, courage, patience, and foresight, and those who find produc‐ tive ways to invest tend to profit more, at least in the long run. They also tend to benefit society more, both by providing capital for new enterprises and by pursuing philanthropic causes (so that govern‐ ment doesn’t have to do it all). Conversely, the lazy, irresponsible rentier probably won’t be a rentier for long. Evaluation of global capitalism requires sound economic analysis, but it also demands sound moral analysis. Piketty’s work provokes many important moral questions, but unfortunately often obscures their answers.
David VanDrunen is Robert B. Strimple Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics at Westminster Seminary California. He is the author most recently of Living in God's Two Kingdoms: A Biblical Vision for Christianity and Culture (Crossway 2010) and Divine Covenants and Moral Order: A Biblical Theology of Natural Law (Emory 2014). 21
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A BIBLICAL VIEW OF INEQUALITY ]faithful0prosperity} Salim Furth
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nequality is falling rapidly and more people have access to opportunities for material advancement than ever before. The rapid rise of a new global middle class—concentrated in Chi‐ na—is a new phenomenon. For the first time in history, the 21st century may see a majority of the world’s population liv‐ ing well above absolute poverty.
Paradoxically, the same globalizing forces that have been pulling incomes closer internationally have pushed them apart within most rich countries. In the U.S., there is strong evidence of growth in household income inequality from 1970 to 1990, and some evidence of further growth in inequality from 1990 to the present. At the very least, the top earners—those who own or manage capital—have had far more income growth than the rest of the population. Responding to the rising domestic inequality and the recently lagging labor mar‐ ket, the American Left has taken up economic inequality as a central theme. Christianity has long held concerns that are consistent with an overarching focus on achieving economic equality, such as equal dig‐ nity, poverty alleviation, and freedom from wealth. So is equality in income, wealth, consumption, or market opportunity central to the Biblical view of a good and just society? Distinct from economic equality, equality of dignity is a central concern of Christianity. Equality before the law is explicit in the To‐ rah (Leviticus 19:15) as is the believers’ equality before God in the 22
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New Testament: There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28, English Standard Version). It’s easy to overlook the importance of equal dignity and move on to more contentious questions. But Christians, like others, often fall short of respecting dignity in practice. James warns the early church against “showing partiality:” For if a man wearing a gold ring and fine clothing comes into your assembly, and a poor man in shabby clothing also comes in, and if you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say, “You sit here in a good place,” while you say to the poor man, “You stand over there,” or, “Sit down at my feet,” have you not then made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? (James 2:2-4, ESV) Charitable giving has struggled in every era to maintain the dig‐ nity of the recipients. The very use of the word ‘charity’ to mean ‘giving’ is an old and sordid euphemism, long ago disowned by its divine etymology. Government giving has run into the same prob‐ lem. Indeed, any government leveling effort must begin with an over‐ riding concern for dignity. Otherwise, one ends up simply serving government cheese. When leftist economist Noah Smith wrote an article encouraging Americans to “redistribute respect” by extend‐ ing good manners to low‐wage workers, he was cheered by all sides. This is especially true as regards labor, which should always be regarded with dignity. If those who clean the toilets in your church are treated with less respect than those who play the piano or write magazine articles, the culture needs to change.
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second Biblical concern that coincides with the goal of eco‐ nomic equality is the passion for alleviating poverty and suffering. God’s co‐suffering with the sick and hungry is vividly illustrated from Exodus 2 to Revelation 21. Yet, there is a sense of sloppiness—lots of inspiring stories, but if alleviating pre‐ sent suffering is God’s main goal, He’s not doing a very good job of it. This is the first clue that physical insufficiency and pain are not first‐ order concerns. In fact, Christ upends the “prosperity gospel:”
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“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh.” (Luke 6:20-21, ESV) They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.” Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life.” (John 6:34, ESV). For politically conservative Christians especially, there is a tempta‐ tion to hide our wealth behind these and similar passages. But if we work to maintain material possessions for ourselves while denying their importance to others, we are hypocrites. The temptation to find excuses for remaining comfortable is not new, and there is a strong anti‐wealth strain in the prophets and the New Testament. Most often, imprecations against wealth are directed against corrupt politicians and rent‐seeking priests, as in Micah 2 and James 5. The book of Amos condemns the easy living of the wealthy who were outwardly religious but “trampled the needy,” made “the ephah small and the shekel great,” doing business “deceitfully with false balances” (Amos 8:4‐6, ESV). But at other times, wealth is condemned as a barrier to personal ho‐ liness—Philippians 4:12, Proverbs 30:8, and Matthew 6:24. Luke 6:24‐ 25 inverts the conventional view of happiness: “But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry.” (ESV) These warnings against wealth as an idol are the closest the Bible comes to joining Occupy Wall Street. But mammon is served whether one does so from a position of ownership or envy. And envy is as central to the movement against inequality as greed is to the motiva‐ tions of many of the movement’s targets. Even morality itself is not the core value of Christianity. In Mat‐ thew 20, Jesus tells the parable of the generous landowner, who pays his day laborers the same whether they worked twelve hours or one hour. The story works because it plays on His audience’s sense of fairness: how dare the latecomers receive twelve times the hourly wage of the early risers? Of course, the parable’s point is spiritual, but it is indirectly related to temporal wealth: He told the story to ad‐ dress His disciples’ questions after He sent away the “Rich Young 24
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Ruler” in Chapter 19. Peter points out that the disciples have left everything to follow Jesus, and fishes for a promise of greater re‐ ward. Jesus turns aside the attempt to earn favor through sacrifice: those who toil in the kingdom will be rewarded, but “many who are first will be last.”
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hristianity’s core value, of course, is love. All the concerns noted above flow from love. Love of God—foremost, above self, above money. Love of neighbors, putting their material needs above your own. The disorganized charity and profligate kindness of God are the responses of love to the pain or joy of the beloved. There is no program. Love is particular: it never averages. Those we love, we treat with respect and dignity. We care about their needs, but we don’t impose our own solutions. When some‐ one we love is suffering, we don’t tell them to buck up and trans‐ cend the physical world—we weep with them. If my love of pos‐ sessions exceeds my love of others, what kind of Christian am I (I John 3:17)? If I feel insecure or envious because of my poverty, do I trust in God (Hebrews 13:5)?
Thus, Christian values do not grow from a central concern for economic equality but from a core of love. And while some of those values are consistent with a concern for economic equality, using the coercive power of government to hurt the rich has no clear con‐ nection to the core of Christianity. It is worthwhile to contrast the willing divestment of wealth by Christians with the (proposed) programmatic opposition of gov‐ ernment to high incomes or wealth. We learn a lot about the Church’s model of property rights in Acts 5. Two affluent believers, Ananias and Sapphira, wanted to appear holy and trendy, but maintain some of their own property. So they sold property, gave part of the proceeds to the church, and reported that they had giv‐ en it all. God struck them dead on the spot for their lie—a terrify‐ ing and very unpleasant result for a sin well within the capacity of a typical American reader. But the Apostle Peter, rebuking Ananias, is clear that the money was the couple’s to keep or give. There is no obligation to charity. And in Mark 7, Jesus rebukes the Pharisees for letting people use public charity to evade their private obligation to care for aging parents. Giving alone is nothing if unaccompanied by love. 25
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Any program of government leveling must be systematic and un‐ lovely, and it must be focused on hurting the rich. If inequality could be easily reduced by improving opportunities for the poor, it would be called justice or poverty policy and would be much more con‐ sistent with Christian principles. Ending the tyranny of Jim Crow in the American South, for example, raised the opportunities and in‐ comes of many poor people without directly attacking the rich. Likewise, giving poor children the opportunity to attend better schools could lower inequality by improving opportunity. But nei‐ ther justice for the oppressed nor education for the poor tends to re‐ duce the wealth of the rich. In fact, the great rise of the global middle class is spinning off new fortunes and unlikely billionaires around the world. Ultimately, Christians must avoid getting drawn into a debate about who deserves what from whom. Christianity has very little to do with deserving. Salvation is undeserved, as is God’s love. Giving sacrificially does not make a Christian more deserving, nor does Christian charity require that the recipients be among the “deserving poor.” Finally, neither good policy nor bad policy is an excuse for Christians to continue in greed or envy. Love must triumph.
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.
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The Song of The Strange Ascetic G.K. Chesterton If I had been a Heathen, I'd have praised the purple vine, My slaves should dig the vineyards, And I would drink the wine. But Higgins is a Heathen, And his slaves grow lean and grey, That he may drink some tepid milk Exactly twice a day.
If I had been a Heathen, I'd have crowned Neaera's curls, And filled my life with love affairs, My house with dancing girls; But Higgins is a Heathen, And to lecture rooms is forced, Where his aunts, who are not married, Demand to be divorced.
If I had been a Heathen, I'd have sent my armies forth, 27
THEÂ CITYÂ
And dragged behind my chariots The Chieftains of the North. But Higgins is a Heathen, And he drives the dreary quill, To lend the poor that funny cash That makes them poorer still.
If I had been a Heathen, I'd have piled my pyre on high, And in a great red whirlwind Gone roaring to the sky; But Higgins is a Heathen, And a richer man than I: And they put him in an oven, Just as if he were a pie.
Now who that runs can read it, The riddle that I write, Of why this poor old sinner, Should sin without delightBut I, I cannot read it (Although I run and run), Of them that do not have the faith, And will not have the fun.
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LIFE ON THE WRONG SIDE OF H I S T O RY 4MARRIAGE)AND)SOCIETY$ Michael Hanby
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t is almost a cliché now that Christians and all those who op‐ pose same sex marriage are ‘on the wrong side of history.’ I do not dispute the assertion if by ‘history’ we mean the train of cause and effect set in motion by our deeds but escaping our control. Popular opinion is shifting rapidly, fueled by relent‐ less media promotion and by the perception of unstoppable momen‐ tum. Same sex marriage is legal in seventeen (or is it eighteen?) states and the District of Columbia, and the Attorney General has an‐ nounced that the federal government will honor those unions. State attorneys general in a number of other states, following the Obama Administration’s lead in ignoring laws it doesn’t like, have declared that they will not enforce the same sex marriage bans in their own states. Courts across the nation are taking their cues from the spe‐ cious reasoning of Justice Kennedy in U.S. vs Windsor and striking down those bans as fast as they can. Even The New York Times’ Ross Douthat has thrown in the towel. Same sex marriage, awaiting the fall of all but the last few dominos, is for all intents and purposes already the law of the land. Irrespective of what the state decrees, there remain institutions and individuals who regard same sex marriage not simply as politically unwise, sociologically harmful, or morally objectionable, but as onto‐ logically impossible—as a matter of fundamental philosophy and not merely as a matter of faith. Those of us who find ourselves in that position should therefore strive to understand more deeply just what 29
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it means to be ‘on the wrong side of history’, not least because we have no choice but to remain there. And we need begin to think long and hard about what may be required of us and how we are going to have to live. We must recognize first of all what this appeal to the inevitability of history is. It is not an argument but a ‘conversation stopper’ de‐ signed to put an end to argument by urging opponents of same sex marriage to resign themselves to a fate which they are powerless to resist and exempting advocates of ‘marriage equality’ from the bur‐ den of having to think about, much less defend, their position with depth or rigor. And by placing opponents of same sex marriage be‐ yond the pale of progress and civilization, it encourages those who fancy themselves on the ‘right side of history’ to treat their opponents with contempt. The appeal to history is thus a nifty little piece of rhe‐ torical violence, a ‘performative utterance’ that seeks to bring about the fate that it announces and to excuse the opposition’s loss of agen‐ cy as the inevitable triumph of justice. Of course all of this has been underway for quite some time, well before the bend in the ‘arc of history’ became so obvious. Some American Christians—more American, perhaps, than Christian— were easily blown about by a change in the prevailing cultural winds. Many others have capitulated under the weight of enormous social pressure, indifferent or perhaps unaware of the profound theo‐ logical and anthropological stakes of this question, which far surpass the narrow framing of this issue. Same sex ‘marriage’ raises unavoid‐ able questions about the truth of the human being and the nature of human society, questions about the meaning of freedom, embodi‐ ment, childhood, and even human nature itself. But the public and legal argument over same sex ‘marriage’ has been framed from be‐ ginning to end by the ontological and epistemic assumptions of clas‐ sical liberalism. Liberalism answers these questions in advance, effectively deter‐ mining the public meaning of human nature and the human good, while its constricted notion of public reason conceals the fact that such fundamental questions are being adjudicated in the first place. Liberalism thus prevents a real argument over these questions from ever taking place by excluding its philosophical rivals a priori and preventing philosophy from entering the realm of public reason alongside sociology and other quasi‐empirical disciplines which 30
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share its ontological assumptions. From the constricted vantage of liberal public reason,philosophical objections to same sex marriage lack even a rational basis, as the courts have repeatedly opined. And so opponents of same sex marriage, unclear about the ontological presuppositions already at work in liberal jurisprudence and desper‐ ate for their arguments to qualify as ‘public reason’, have largely de‐ clined to raise them. Liberalism thus determines that opposition to same sex marriage can only be a matter of private morality which, after the legally conjured fact, cannot but become public bigotry. Justice Kennedy and several of the lower courts have declared as much, and this is exactly how the opposition to same sex marriage is now regarded by the media which have apparently renounced any interest in the truth.
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ne may still hope, with Douthat and Rod Dreher, that the victors will be magnanimous, though one may also doubt whether magnanimity will be enough. The inevitability of history falls equally, after all, on the just and the unjust. For magna‐ nimity to prevail it would somehow have to overcome not only the momentum of current social and legal trends, but the very metaphys‐ ical and political logic by which same sex marriage has gained the ascendency. The practical conclusions of this logic appear to be inex‐ orable. If arguments against same sex marriage are irrational argu‐ ments, then, as Crawford says, they are also publicly bigoted argu‐ ments and thus inherently unjust. Publically bigoted and unjust arguments are publicly immoral, antisocial, and uncivil as well, and those who adhere to them inevitably—and justly—suffer the special fate which a civilized culture reserves for such odious views: cultur‐ al intimidation, legal coercion, and de facto exclusion from respecta‐ ble opinion and from public life. If this is what it means to be on the wrong side of history, then the question of what to do about it cannot principally be a question of statecraft; not because Christians should retreat from the public square and content themselves with an ‘Amish’ interpretation of the so‐called ‘Benedict option’—the Catholic Church cannot retreat from the world without relinquishing its claim to universality and thus ceasing to be Catholic—but because this fate systematically excludes us from public life and denies us the very possibility of effective par‐ ticipation in the body politic. This will be a bitter pill to swallow for 31
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those Christians, Catholic and Protestants alike, who have made their peace with classical liberalism and who have perpetuated the defin‐ ing project of American Christianity over the better part of the last century: reconciling Christianity with liberal order. Assuming that liberal order is merely juridical, protagonists of this project have hoped that Christianity might fill the moral and metaphysical void at the heart of liberal proceduralism by supplying the liberal state and civil society with its missing public philosophy—perhaps through some version of natural law theory sufficiently watered down to qualify as public reason. When viewed from an ontological perspective, this project was always misguided; for despite what many of its protagonists be‐ lieved, liberalism was always already a public philosophy with a definitive view of God and human nature and a definitive view of liberal order itself as the human good, a philosophy whose defects tragically vitiate its otherwise noble ideals. Insofar as the liberal un‐ derstanding of nature is mechanistic, it was destined to undermine the foundations for the intelligibility of natural law. Insofar as liberal‐ ism equates freedom with limitless possibility, it was destined to erode the moral and cultural foundations of civil society inherited from Protestant Christianity. Insofar as liberalism elevates this free‐ dom to the highest good, it was destined to make liberal order itself the summum bonum and absolutize the state as the guarantor of that freedom. Same sex marriage, which presupposes a mechanistic con‐ ception of the body and a voluntaristic notion of freedom, can even be regarded as the logical outworking of these philosophical com‐ mitments, which would help to explain its rapid ascent. Whether or not one chooses to accept this controversial diagnosis, the verdict of ‘history’ effectively brings this project to an end. To say that this project is over, however, is not quite the same thing as say‐ ing that it should cease. The same liberal presuppositions that rele‐ gate opposition to same sex marriage to a ghetto of merely private morality tend to reduce religious freedom to the right of privately holding an irrational and idiosyncratic opinion. So conceived, reli‐ gious freedom is unlikely to fare well when it conflicts with per‐ ceived public goods, which will increasingly be the case as the ero‐ sion of our Protestant culture patrimony alters our perception of these goods and as the underlying philosophy of liberalism is more securely codified. The wisdom of casting such controversies as same 32
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sex marriage and the HHS Mandate principally as matters of reli‐ gious freedom is therefore deeply questionable. It looks like special pleading, and it obscures the deeper fact that the state is imposing a normative anthropology and philosophy of human nature through these decisions. And yet this contest of rights is really the only ground on which liberal public reason will permit itself to be en‐ gaged, and the assaults on religious liberty, even on liberalism’s im‐ poverished understanding of freedom, are real. Precisely because of their commitment to liberalism, protagonists of this great twentieth century project have been the most stalwart defenders of religious freedom. Given the aggressive posture of both the state and the cul‐ ture, this fight should certainly continue even though it is unlikely to succeed. I would suggest however that this grim assessment requires us to conceive of this effort in the light of a deeper understanding of freedom than the liberal imagination can provide.
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n April 15, 2010, Pope Benedict XVI gave a brief, ‘off the cuff’ homily to members of the Pontifical Biblical Commission. Though the significance of his words was largely overlooked at the time, history may show them to be among the most remarkable of his pontificate. They are all the more poignant given the fact that they were spoken in the midst of a global firestorm, provoked by a series of misleading New York Times articles which had sought to im‐ plicate him personally in the cover‐up of sexual abuse. Reflecting serenely on the appointed Scripture, the appearance of St Peter and the apostles before the Sanhedrin in Acts 5, Benedict relates that the tribunal made Peter a tempting offer of freedom “on the condition, however, that he does not continue to seek God.” But “a freedom bought at the price of renouncing the journey towards God would no longer be freedom.” Hence Peter’s famous reply, which echoes the words of Socrates before the tribunal in Athens: “We must obey God rather than men,” (Acts 5:29). Contrary to our ordinary juxtaposition of freedom and obedience, the Pope insisted that obedience itself constitutes freedom, even go‐ ing so far as to say that that “without obedience there is no freedom.” “Obedience to God is a freedom because it is the truth; it is the refer‐ ence that comes before all other human needs.” It is precisely this truth that gave Peter “the liberty to oppose the institution.” Autono‐ my severed from obedience, by contrast, is both an “ontological lie” 33
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and “a political and practical lie” which leaves us at the mercy of “subtle forms of dictatorship… a conformism, which becomes obliga‐ tory, thinking as everyone thinks, behaving as everyone behaves.” Without the truth consensus of the majority becomes “the last word which we must obey.” A last word, in other words, which acquires all the necessity of fate. We miss the profundity of these remarks if we interpret them mere‐ ly as a license to civil disobedience. Rather they point to a dimension of freedom typically overlooked in the debate about religious liberty, a freedom more fundamental than the negative freedom, the immun‐ ity from coercion, presupposed by the Constitution. This is the free‐ dom which the truth itself gives. Without it, even this negative free‐ dom eventually collapses in on itself since every assertion of a negative ‘right’ is at the same time an extension of the state’s power to enforce that right. Truth is integral to freedom—“the truth shall set you free”—because it opens up a horizon beyond the ‘necessity’ im‐ posed by fate, even where this fate is otherwise inescapable. Truth gives freedomwithin fate, because witness to the truth transforms the passivity of suffering into the activity of a free self‐offering. Truth thus makes possible the highest form of freedom, the freedom of the martyr to make his fate a gift. As Pope Benedict put it, “The freedom of the martyrs, who recognize God precisely in obedience to divine power, is always the act of liberation through which Christ’s freedom reaches us.” The absolutism of liberal order is a subtle thing in comparison to other forms of absolutism. It consists, in the first instance, not in the state exhaustively dictating everything one can and cannot do— liberalism can be quite permissive in this regard—but in establishing itself as the all‐encompassing horizon against whose backdrop social facts are subsequently permitted to appear, as the whole that bears no relation to anything beyond itself over which it is not finally arbi‐ ter and judge. Liberal order is in this sense more extensive than the liberal state, though the state remains an indispensable instrument in the enforcement of that order. The global media are an important instrument as well. They absolutize this order by mediating reality and determining for all public purposes that what counts as the ‘real world’ appears in the image of liberal presuppositions. We see this absolutism in action in the a priori framing of the same sex marriage debate, both in the courts and in the culture at large, which excludes 34
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even the possibility of a rational dissent from these presuppositions. Liberal order is absolute, in other words, precisely insofar as it de‐ fines the limit of our vision and imagination; for these determine, in turn, our possibilities for action.
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he freedom of the martyr in witnessing to the truth is a threat to this and every absolutism, because it exposes and makes visible the otherwise invisible limits of this horizon. This is the deeper sense—deeper than the negative liberty of the Constitution— in which religious freedom is our ‘first freedom’: because truth is integral to freedom, and only the truth can finally limit the power of absolutism. But this also alters the meaning of religious freedom it‐ self and, with it, the terms of the present debate. Religious freedom is commendable, politically speaking, because the state’s acknowledg‐ ment of religious freedom is a necessary (but not sufficient) step in its acknowledgment of a reality greater than itself. But the Church does not depend on the state for its freedom. Its freedom comes by nature (and by grace) from the truth of God. Insofar as no state can ever fully succeed in abolishing this truth, no state can ever really take this freedom away. Indeed this freedom often seems to grow in propor‐ tion to the attempts to suppress it. The blood of the martyrs, Tertulli‐ an once said, is the seed of the church. The greatest threat to religious freedom therefore comes not from the liberal state, but from the fail‐ ure of Christians to see beyond the confines of the liberal imagina‐ tion. Any mention of ‘martyrdom’ in connection with the tolerant and comfortable West will seem to many to be just one more example of a self‐indulgent ‘persecution complex’ by those who really have noth‐ ing to fear. This is particularly galling at a time when Christians in other parts of the world are paying for their faith with their very lives. The title of a recent Commonweal article by Gabriel Said Reyn‐ olds, “When Martyrdom Isn’t a Metaphor,” expresses this dismissive sentiment. Certainly it would be obscene to equate our present diffi‐ culties with the ordeals faced by Christians in other parts of the world. We in the West should be grateful that this is not our plight, and we should do what we can—no doubt infinitely more than is presently being done—to attempt to relieve theirs. And it is just as certain that there are important distinctions to be drawn between the subtle 35
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forms of coercion and intimidation increasingly confronting faithful Christians in the West and the persecution facing Christians in lands where the faith is effectively proscribed—distinctions important both for avoiding exaggerated self‐pity and for understanding the subtlety and complexity of our evolving situation. But pious sympathy to‐ ward the suffering of others abroad should not be used as a weapon against one’s political opponents at home, and to pretend that there is no price to be paid for being on the wrong side of history is not only to turn a blind eye to a rapidly unfolding reality, it is to refuse the responsibility of understanding that reality and of paying that price if need be, to refuse even the possibility of suffering for the sake of those who come after us.
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f martyrdom is a threat to absolutism, then perhaps we should consider liberalism’s apparent success in eliminating martyrdom not simply as a measure of its benevolence—for which we can be genuinely grateful—but also as a measure of its scope and power. Since a martyr is fundamentally a witness—one who sees—before he is a victim, eliminating martyrdom means eliminating from public view just that horizon of truth to which the martyr’s freedom gives witness. It is a measure of liberalism’s success in wiping away that horizon that the very idea of martyrdom seems so ridiculous and is so unthinkable to us. The end of martyrdom does not mean the end of suffering or coercion, however—just ask the recently ousted Bren‐ dan Eich of Mozilla. It simply means its removal from sight, at least when its victims aren’t prominent CEOs. It belongs not just to the benevolence but also to the genius of liberal order that it creates its ‘martyrs’ not visibly by lions in the Colosseum but invisibly by ten thousand bureaucratic paper cuts. And it is a testament to its power that it succeeds in diffusing its coercive force throughout a center‐less system which is never exactly visible and for which nobody is ever exactly responsible. But then, that’s how ‘history’ works. Ours appears to be a peculiar fate in which the prevailing order coerces in part bydenying the possibility of martyrdom and depriv‐ ing it of its visible witness. It is no easy question how to live freely at such a moment—or even what sort of question this is—and there can be no simple blueprint for it, though it is certain that our ability to do so will depend on whether we can see the truth. The forms this takes will no doubt be as varied as the subtle forms of intimidation and 36
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coercion which we will increasingly face. The legal and political fight for religious freedom, compromised though it may be, can still be a powerful form of witness, and this is why the great civic project of American Christianity should carry on—like Frodo and Sam trudg‐ ing on to Mordor—even though it is doomed. But it makes all the difference in the world whether one carries on for the sake of achiev‐ ing that elusive ‘Christian century’ or ‘Catholic moment’ in American political life or because carrying on is a witness to the freedom of the Church and the truth of the human being. For this will determine whether the horizon of possibility is defined by the pragmatic criteri‐ on of political success or by “Christ’s freedom,” the freedom granted to us by the truth. The point may be moot in any event. Just as liberalism has attempt‐ ed to have Christianity without the cross, so the great project of rec‐ onciling liberalism with Christianity has striven to create a society in which the Church could live faithfully without suffering. To wake up and discover oneself on the wrong side of history is to find oneself living in a world where that is no longer possible.
Michael Hanby is Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy of Science at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. He is the author of No God, No Science? Theology, Cosmology, Biology (WileyBlackwell, 2013), Augustine and Modernity (Routledge, 2003) and numerous articles and essays. 37
THE CITY
T HE D ANGER OF THE R IGHT TO BE W RONG [law0and0belief{ Hadley Arkes
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ount me as a part of that population that rejoiced over the outcome in the Hobby Lobby case. It was a relief that the Green family, owners of the Hobby Lobby craft stores, and the Hahns, owners of Conestoga Wood Spe‐ cialties, were delivered from the mandates of Obamac‐ are; the mandates that compelled these families to cover abortifa‐ cients in the medical care they funded so generously for their em‐ ployees. Justice Alito also did a notable service in making clear that a “corporation” is an association of “human persons”: Every associa‐ tion is directed to a purpose; and there is no principle that deter‐ mines that this kind of corporation, alone among all other associa‐ tions, may not be committed to moral and religious purposes, apart from the making of money. But the rejoicing over the decision could be amplified as the holding rippled outward quickly in the land: The Eleventh Circuit moved instantly to deliver the Eternal World Televi‐ sion Network (EWTN) from the threat of the mandates and the Little Sisters of the Poor seem safe now as well. If I had been a member of the Court in the Hobby Lobby case, I would have written a concurring opinion, celebrating the outcome. But I would have registered the gravest reservation over the reason‐ ing by which this good result has been produced for us. Judges such as Janice Rogers Brown in the Gilardi case (in the DC Circuit) and Diane Sykes in the Korte and Grote cases (in the 7th Circuit) managed to produce the same outcome in comparable disputes; but they did it 38
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without engaging in the gratuitous move of reducing “religion” to “beliefs” held “sincerely,” quite detached from the canons of reason and claims of truth. As my own friends have added their commen‐ taries on the case, that dimension of the argument has been ampli‐ fied, in a manner that only deepens the problem, for it gives us a ju‐ risprudence that cannot give a coherent account of itself. It puts in the mouths of our friends sentences that would otherwise embarrass the urbane, and finally, it accomplishes the inversion of backing the conservatives into the very language and concepts of their adver‐ saries.
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uring the litigation over Hobby Lobby in the 10th Circuit, the Green family professed its “sincere belief” that life begins at conception. To which some of us said: Belief? That proposi‐ tion has been an anchoring axiom in the textbooks on embryology and obstetric gynecology. We should suddenly be hearing again the warning of John Courtney Murray: that the religious would back into the libeling of their religion by reducing religious convictions merely to “beliefs,” uncertain truths, which claim to be valid only for the people who share them. The Catholic position on abortion has not appealed to faith or revelation. It has been a weave of embryology and principled reasoning. No serious Catholic would come into court and say that he “believes” that life begins at conception. And so we’re faced with this oddity: We may have an owner of a business, who disclaims any religious convictions, but he has reasoned his way to a moral objection to abortion with precisely the same reasoning used by the Church and Catholic writers. We might gather now that he would not be protected by the decision of the Court: He would not have a claim to be released from the mandates of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in the way that the Greens and the Hahns would, even if he has a closely‐held family corporation. But take it one step further: The serious Catholic, who disdains to argue on the basis merely of “belief”–who insists instead on the “truth” of his conviction that abortion destroys a human life—he too may not be covered apparently by the judgment of the Court. For he offers no “belief,” and invites no one to test his “sincerity.” But when good people, such as the Greens and Hahns offer their beliefs, we are told by the Court that their beliefs will not be scrutinized. For as the 39
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Court observed, “it is not for us to say that their religious beliefs are mistaken or insubstantial.” No one, of course, takes seriously the notion that the law would re‐ frain from judgment when it comes to the sacrifice of widows on a funeral pyre, or the withholding of blood transfusions from a child, even if it were claimed, as a matter of “belief,” that these lives had spiritually ended. These words of the Court, disclaiming judgment, seem part of a Brigadoon‐like world: they seem to flare into existence in the magic of the moment—only to evaporate when sedate reflec‐ tion comes crashing in again. The mantras of “belief” and “sincerity” are getting baked in al‐ ready, even though they cannot carry the substance of any serious moral question. Our friends draw upon Justice Alito in assuring us that the federal government, in the management of prisons and other things, has cultivated a certain art in discriminating between sincere and insincere claims. Should we really be spending our legal genius in devising methods or tests to find out how serious or “sincere” people are as they invoke their “sincere” belief that the child in the womb is less than human, and that the laws barring abortion are vio‐ lating their religious freedom? And we are not conjuring here any‐ thing implausible, for have we not in fact heard all of this already? If we are really testing sincerity, some of these cases could be deter‐ mined with truth serum or a lie detector test. But who would take any of that as a “justification” for releasing people from the obliga‐ tion to obey any law we regarded as defensible, whether a law that bars the killing of the unborn or racial discrimination? But in these moments when magic words about “beliefs” are given a new loft, we find serious people backing into constructions that would on other occasions embarrass them. And so, getting with the program, one of my favorite commentators, Ryan T. Anderson, re‐ marked about the Hobby Lobby case that: The Court did not second-guess any of these beliefs [of the Greens or Hahns], nor did the Court judge whether these beliefs are right or wrong, true or false. The Court merely determined that the beliefs were sincere. In fact, the Court refused to render judgment, as the Obama Administration and Justice Ginsburg seem to have done, on whether the Hahns and the Greens had the “right” beliefs. Justice Alito notes that “HHS and the principal dissent in effect tell the plaintiffs that their beliefs are flawed.” But re40
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ligious liberty, after all, is about “the right to be wrong” even in the pursuit of religious truth. But as Aquinas and Lincoln both taught us, there cannot be a coher‐ ent claim of a “right to do a wrong.” It is one of those self‐refuting propositions, which may be explained quickly in this way: People claim a “right to do a wrong” only when others are pressing on them, threatening to impose a policy they find objectionable. By saying that they have a “right” nevertheless to hold to their position, they are saying that people “ought not” impose their policy on them—which is to say, that it would be “wrong” of them to do it. But their adver‐ saries now turn upon the complainers and point out that they too have this “right to do a wrong.” When we find polished, accomplished people invoking now a “right to be wrong,” a line that cannot form a coherent ground of argument on any matter, we may see the signs of an argument soar‐ ing with metaphor, but now untethered. The concern here is deep‐ ened by the awareness that none of this was necessary in order to defend the Greens and Hahns from the imposition of these mandates from HHS. These families were being ordered to bear, at private ex‐ pense, what the Obama Administration considers a public obligation. And they would become accomplices, at the same time, in policies that violate the principles that command their respect. As Judge Sykes pointed out in the Korte case in the 7th Circuit, the government could well have decided that there was a compelling public interest in diffusing contraceptives through the land. But it could have ac‐ complished that end by offering tax incentives or even purchasing those contraceptives and giving them away. And yet in that case, the government would have to take on the constitutional discipline of raising the money and justifying to the public the taxes it would have to levy to raise the money. But it was critical for Mr. Obama and his party to insist that no taxes would be raised in order to provide these vast public benefits. Those benefits would be supplied by shifting the costs to the owners of private businesses. This is the sort of thing that would have sounded in the past all of the bells and whistles: that we are in the presence of “class legislation”—we are transferring assets from Person A to Person B, and in that way circumventing the disci‐ pline of the Constitution, and perhaps the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. 41
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t is worth pointing out, in this vein, that this mode of reasoning was available to us—and remains available—even without the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). Yes, Judges Sykes and Brown, and Justice Alito, could say in the language of RFRA that the government should seek the “least restrictive means” of accom‐ plishing a legitimate end. But Richard Epstein (and I) would argue that the same test would come into play when the government re‐ stricts freedom in any domain. Judges understood and applied these principles long before RFRA, and they do not need RFRA in order to do it even now. Years ago, when some of us were arguing for the Defense of Mar‐ riage Act, we pointed out that, if marriage were detached from the purpose of begetting, there would be no rationale confining marriage to a coupling. It would be hard to see any principled ground for denying marriage to polygamous and polyamorous ensembles. Some of our opponents sought to meet that argument by insisting that we were being overwrought, for they saw no likely burgeoning of an interest in polygamy. But they were missing our point: We were not making a prediction; we were simply making an argument in princi‐ ple—namely, that there would be no principled ground any longer for denying those other forms of “marriage.” I raise the point here because I think some of our friends may be slipping into the same misreading when it comes to Ruth Ginsburg’s dissent in Hobby Lobby. Justice Ginsburg drew out these implications that could possibly spring from the decision of the Court as we en‐ countered: employers with religiously grounded objections to blood transfusions (Jehovah’s Witnesses); antidepressants (Scientologists); medications derived from pigs, including anesthesia, intravenous fluids, and pills coated with gelatin (certain Muslims, Jews, and Hindus); and vaccinations (Christian Scientists, among others)? Some of our friends have accused Justice Ginsburg of wild specula‐ tion here because they doubt these cases will arise. But our friends may be replicating the confusion between predictions and principles: Ruth Ginsburg should be read not as offering a prediction, but dar‐ ing us to explain the ground of principle on which we would deny 42
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these claims, made on the basis of “belief.” I think that my side could well provide an answer for most of these challenges: We would point out that one set of things (abortifacients) involves the taking of a hu‐ man life, while the others threaten no injury of that magnitude. But we do not say we “believe” that abortifacients destroy a human life; we assert it as a truth, supported by biology and principled reason‐ ing. In other words we answer Ruth Ginsburg by removing the ar‐ gument from the domain of mere beliefs. We return the argument to the domain of reasons tested for evidence and truth. But we cannot evade the force of Justice Ginsburg’s challenge if we say, as Justice Alito said of the Greens and Hahns, that “it is not for us to say that their religious beliefs are mistaken or insubstantial.” The same thing could be said on the part of the employers conjured up by Justice Ginsburg—unless we move from Justice Alito’s unwillingness to gauge the plausibility of the claims that are offered to us under the banner of “beliefs.” And there we reach, I think, the final inversion here. For years those of us who have argued the pro‐life side have encountered the insistence that our moral objections to abortion involve nothing less than the imposition of our “religious beliefs” on others. In response, we have insisted over the years that a moral argument cannot be re‐ duced to mere beliefs; that it is woven of evidence and principled reasoning and ever subject in turn to challenge and testing on rea‐ soned grounds. But now, if we take our friends seriously, the Greens and Hahns are to be defended only by insisting that their moral ar‐ gument is translated into claims of belief, and those claims are not to be tested with the canons of evidence and reason. With that move, I submit, we would be absorbing the upside‐down concepts of our adversaries. Legislating on abortion would be done then on the basis of nothing more than “beliefs” held “sincerely.” We would indeed be imposing our religious beliefs on others. What should be expected in return is the same argument over “sincerity” that has been accepted as decisive in the Hobby Lobby case. And we can be sure of this: there will be no need for ingenious scales, subtle and elaborate, to establish that the people who deny the human standing of the child in the womb are fully, incorrigibly “sincere.” I’m afraid, then, that we have been bedazzled by the outcome in Hobby Lobby, and too reluctant to speak the plain truth: that this is a jurisprudence that cannot give a coherent account of itself. I feel near‐ 43
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ly like Brooks Atkinson reviewing a Broadway show years ago and remarking that “I’ve knocked everything in this show but the chorus girls’ legs, and there nature anticipated.” My reservations have run deep, and yet I would post one more warning: Lewis Powell, in the Bakke case, dropped the word “diversity” into our cases, and that word, taking wing, has created a new industry in the academy, spread its corruptions now throughout the land. I’d beg my friends to take a sober second look, to be far more care‐ ful before embedding in our law these claims to “rights” or “rightful liberties” depending on “beliefs” that may not be tested for their truth or coherence—and from those materials fashioning a law for us on a matter of deep moral consequence. This is the kind of thing that may not only disfigure our jurisprudence, but corrode the minds of the next generation of lawyers, who will make it their business to learn this new “beliefspeak.” To mix the metaphors, we may be drawn here to “fool’s gold” and find ourselves playing with fire.
Hadley Arkes is the Ney Professor of American Institutions at Amherst College and Director of the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights & the American Founding. This article is adapted from the Liberty and Law Blog. 44
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W HY W E H AVE THE R IGHT TO BE W RONG \not0mere0beliefspeak| Ryan T. Anderson
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ne of the hallmarks of religious liberty protections is that they protect people of all faiths, even if their be‐ liefs seem unfounded, flawed, implausible, or down‐ right silly. Recognition of a right to religious freedom does not, however, depend on religious skepticism, relativism, or indifferentism. Rather, it rests on the intelligible value of the religious quest—the activities of seeking to understand the truth about ultimate questions and conforming oneʹs life accordingly with authenticity and integrity. The Catholic Church committed itself to precisely this understand‐ ing of religious freedom in the Declaration on Religious Liberty of the Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis Humanae. In doing so, it did not embrace the idea that “error has rights.” Rather, it recognized that people have rights—including the right to pursue religious truth and, within the limits of justice and the common good, to act on their judgments of what truth demands. All people possess these funda‐ mental rights, even when they are, in some respects, in error. Kevin Seamus Hasson, the founder of the Becket Fund, captured this in the title of his book The Right to Be Wrong. Hasson rightly argues that religious liberty is for A to Z, Anglicans to Zoroastrians. This basic view of religious liberty has also found a place in our civil law. James Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance puts the point well: “The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man.” It is an “arrogant pretension” to be‐ 45
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lieve that “the Civil Magistrate is a competent Judge of Religious Truth.” The First Amendment has been understood to embody this vision of religious liberty for much of our history, even as other as‐ pects of religious free‐exercise case law have changed. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) reflects the same vision. Passed two decades ago with a unanimous voice vote in the House and by a 97‐3 vote in the Senate, RFRA was signed into law by President Clinton. RFRA provides a reasonable balance between reli‐ gious liberty and the requirements of public order. It says that gov‐ ernment can substantially burden a sincere religious belief only when it is pursuing a compelling government interest in the least restrictive means available. In a series of articles this summer at First Things, The Catholic Thing, and the Liberty Law Blog, the last of which is reprinted above, Hadley Arkes has tried to recast the argument for religious liberty, not in terms of the sincerity of the religiously held belief and the competing concerns about public order, but in terms of its content, particularly in terms of its truth. Arkes is a friend and mentor of mine. He is a hero of the pro‐life cause and has been a bold voice for moral sanity in the academy. When he speaks, and especially when he offers fra‐ ternal correction, one must listen and carefully consider what he has to say. Yet in this case, I cannot ultimately follow his lead. It is critical that we be clear on the foundation and the scope of religious liberty.
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efore getting to the fundamental questions about the nature and scope of religious liberty, consider some more mundane issues of religious liberty in court. Arkes aims his critique at judges and lawyers who make what he sees as the wrong sorts of arguments. He writes, No one, of course, takes seriously the notion that the law would refrain from judgment when it comes to the sacrifice of widows on a funeral pyre, or the withholding of blood transfusions from a child, even if it were claimed, as a matter of “belief,” that these lives had spiritually ended. These words of the Court, disclaiming judgment, seem part of a Brigadoon-like world: they seem to flare into existence in the magic of the moment—only to evaporate when sedate reflection comes crashing in again… If we are really testing sincerity, some of these cases could be determined with truth serum or a lie detector test. But who would take any of that as a 46
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“justification” for releasing people from the obligation to obey any law we regarded as defensible…? Missing in these paragraphs is any consideration of the second half of RFRA: a compelling government interest being pursued by the least restrictive means. Preventing human sacrifice and ensuring the physical health of legal minors are certainly compelling government interests, and protecting everyone from such assaults seems to be the least restrictive way of serving those interests. Arkes might think that the content of the beliefs makes all the dif‐ ference. After all, true religious beliefs would never require anyone to act in a way that violated the demands of justice or the common good. But even if it’s never socially harmful to protect true beliefs, we can’t infer that a false belief is never worth protecting. Sometimes it is. It’s not disqualified by being false, because even acting on a sin‐ cerely held false belief can realize the good of religion. Sometimes, we can manage to respect that good while still securing the overall common good. When we can do this, we should. That was the lesson of Vatican II and RFRA. Yet even true religious beliefs may be thought to be at odds with justice and the common good. After all, we aren’t governed by phi‐ losopher‐kings with perfect clarity about moral truth. In the real world, government officials make mistakes. Indeed, at issue in the Hobby Lobby case were true beliefs about the morality of killing un‐ born life. Yet officials in the Obama administration (by issuing the HHS mandate) and various federal judges (by siding against the plaintiffs) concluded that these beliefs were at odds with the de‐ mands of the common good.
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rkes is particularly concerned that the language of “beliefs” detaches belief from truth, reason, and evidence. He pleads with lawyers and judges to stop “engaging in the gratuitous move of reducing ‘religion’ to ‘beliefs’ held ‘sincerely,’ quite de‐ tached from the canons of reason and claims of truth.” And he faults the plaintiffs in the HHS mandate case as well: “the Green family professed its ‘sincere belief’ that life begins at conception. To which some of us said: Belief? That proposition has been an anchoring axi‐ om in the textbooks on embryology and obstetric gynecology.” Here 47
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I think Arkes is too narrowly construing both the requirements of RFRA and ordinary linguistic usage. The Green family and their lawyers framed their case in the way that the law required—and one can hardly fault them for arguing their case so as to win. Moreover, Arkes’s description of their posi‐ tion is incomplete. The Greens relied not only on their belief that life begins at conception but also on their belief that it is wrong to do anything that might kill that life. Should they have really made the truth of their beliefs the core of their legal argument—especially when we live in a regime that has declared a constitutional right to abor‐ tion and when the drugs and devices in question are FDA‐approved? Arkes would have the Greens and their lawyers make the founda‐ tion of their case the truth that abortifacients are morally wrong. No doubt it is a worthy project to defend the truths of the natural law. But that is primarily a battle for the public square and legislative are‐ na, not the courts. And disagreement about this moral truth need not prevent us from seeking religious freedom—the Greens were asking, after all, for an exemption from mandated coverage of FDA‐ approved items with which many Americans, if not a majority, have no moral qualms. Apart from the unlikely success of such a litigation strategy, con‐ sider its broader implications. Does an Orthodox Jewish butcher in a case about serving pork have to prove that eating pork is immoral? Or, for that matter, what about an Orthodox Jewish prison inmate: to succeed in a suit requiring the prison to serve him kosher meals, does he have to prove the righteousness of kosher dietary rules? And how about the Little Sisters of the Poor: will that case hinge on their prov‐ ing that they have the right moral beliefs about all twenty FDA‐ approved contraceptives? Do we really want to discard Madison’s advice and empower the government to adjudicate religious truth? Arkes falters when he criticizes the language of belief because, when someone says, “I believe murder is wrong,” it does not imply that he believes it without rational justification or denies that it is objectively true. I believe murder is wrong because I believe in hu‐ man dignity. Likewise, when Thomas Aquinas said, “I believe in God” every Sunday as he recited the Credo, he certainly hadn’t for‐ gotten about his five philosophical proofs for God’s existence. The word “believe” in both sentences is being used synonymously with “judge” or “conclude.” (For that matter, I believe that dogs are 48
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mammals and that Bismarck is the capital of North Dakota.) There is no reason to assume, as Arkes does, that “belief” implies a lack of justification or objectivity. But look at where Arkes would leave the serious Divine Command Theorist. Arkes’s protections for religious liberty have little room for those who do not share his embrace of natural law—those who can‐ not offer a rational defense of their beliefs because they believe none exists. And how about religious believers whose religion demands more than what the natural law demands—say, the obligation to go to Mass on Sundays or to avoid meat on Fridays? These certainly are not derived solely from the natural law—do they not deserve protec‐ tion? Just as Arkes conflated “belief” with “unjustified belief,” so too he has conflated “justification” with “purely natural justification.” RFRA rightly protects religious groups that don’t believe in natural law and religious obligations that go beyond natural law.
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t one point in his piece, Arkes turns his sights on me. Note that in the quoted portion (see page 40), I write about “the right to be wrong” and Arkes responds with a critique of “the right to do wrong”—only then to return to a “right to be wrong” and conclude that it “cannot form a coherent ground of argument on any matter” and is the sign “of an argument soaring with metaphor, but now untethered.” This misreads my argument and misrepresents the underlying issues. Arkes and I agree that there is no natural right to do moral wrong. But having the wrong (i.e., mistaken) religious beliefs need not entail doing any moral wrong at all. Thus, religious liberty, understood as the right to act according to even false religion, need not involve a right to do a moral wrong. Indeed, understanding the nature of the reli‐ gious good and our duties to seek it provides “coherent grounds of argument” fully “tethered” to human flourishing, the basis of natural rights and natural law. The natural law defense of a right to religious liberty is based on the moral truth that sincere religious activity, freely undertaken, is valua‐ ble in itself and deserves the space to flourish. Sound philosophical reflec‐ tion identifies religion as a basic aspect of human well‐being. As a reason for human action, religion corresponds to the search for, ad‐ herence to, and relationship with any more‐than‐merely‐human source(s) of ultimate value and meaning. That religion is an intelligi‐ 49
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ble end of human nature explains the intelligibility of the behavior of Muslims, Jews, and Christians just as much as it explains the behav‐ ior of agnostics, atheists, and anti‐theists. While all six groups come to different conclusions, all are propelled in their religion‐related activities by a basic (if only implicit) awareness that humans really are better off—intrinsically so—when they sincerely seek the truth about ultimate questions and then live accordingly. In other words, people realize the good of religion even if they make (good‐faith) theoretical mistakes about the truth. Assuming that their religious act is sincere (and not an attempt merely to satisfy social expectations), even imperfect expressions of religion are hu‐ manly valuable. That is, if one makes a sincere attempt at discovering religious truth and adhering to what one finds, even if one makes an intellectual mistake, one’s religious act is of real value. And it is this value that gives governments a reason to protect (within the limits of justice and the common good) the ability to search for truth and live by one’s best judgments about it. For acts of adherence and divine‐human relationships can have their distinctive human value—can be genuine religious acts and relationships—only if they are freely chosen. Precisely because of the good at stake in religious actions and the nature of the act that realizes this good, reli‐ gious acts of searching (exploration and conversion), adherence (doc‐ trine on faith and morals), and relationship (worship and conscien‐ tious action) must be free from all coercion. The right to religious liberty has its primary force precisely because of a prior duty to pursue the good of religion by seeking out the truth about God and the cosmos. Indeed, as Madison explained: What is here a right towards men, is a duty towards the Creator. It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage 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. The government protects the space for citizens to fulfill this duty according to their own best judgments. Indeed, Stanford Law Profes‐ sor Michael McConnell makes just this point in an essay for the Yale Law Journal:
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In the liberal tradition, the government’s role is not to make theological judgments but to protect the right of the people to pursue their own understanding of the truth, within the limits of the common good. That is the difference between “the full and free exercise of religion” (Madison’s formulation) and mere “toleration.” Toleration presupposes a “dominant group” with a particular opinion about religion (that it is “false,” or at least “unwarranted”), who decide not to “eradicate” beliefs they regard as “wrong, mistaken, or undesirable.” The natural law right to religious liberty is not unlimited. It is bound by the natural limits of justice and due regard for the common good. Thus, the state can rightly limit religious liberty when justice and the common good require it. In such cases, the limitation of reli‐ gious liberty is an incidental but unavoidable (and thus justified) side effect of the government’s action to secure justice. In our legal tradi‐ tion, this nuance is reflected in RFRA’s requirement that regulations curbing religious expression serve a compelling government interest pursued by the least restrictive means possible.
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said earlier that Arkes and I agree that there is no natural right to do moral wrong. But there are positive law (constitutional and statutory) rights to do moral wrongs—and they exist for good reason. Unfortunately, Arkes conflates natural rights and positive rights. For example, our constitutional rights to free speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly give us positive rights to do some moral wrongs. Government may not prevent us from being rude at home, even though being rude is wrong. It may not prevent us from publishing trashy romance novels, even though a case can be made that such literature is wrong. It may not prevent us from assembling to rally for abortion rights, even though advocating the wrong of abortion is itself also wrong. Of course, freedoms of speech, press, and assembly do not provide unlimited protections for every moral wrong, however harmful to the common good: they do not protect incitement to violence, malicious libel, or group trespassing, for instance. But we and other political communities do protect political rights to do some wrongs precisely out of concern for human flourishing and the common good. By lim‐ iting the jurisdiction of government, we prevent flawed, fallen, weak, error‐prone human beings from deploying the force of government 51
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in oppressive ways. By reducing the range of judgments the govern‐ ment can make, we reduce the risk that it misjudges. So, we can co‐ herently speak of a constitutional right to do wrong. We need to combine Aquinas’s account of natural law with Augustine’s account of the libido dominandi. That said, religious freedom is not a right to do wrong, though it does protect a right to be wrong. Human imperfection ensures that all of us are wrong about some things. Yet it is unjust, a violation of human dignity, for the coercive power of law to be used to punish mere errors of thought or—so long as there is no injustice or other violation of the common good—of honest religious practice. If we are to fulfill our moral duties to seek the truth about God and live con‐ scientiously in line with our judgments, then the law must honor and protect our right to religious freedom—even when we are, at least partially, in error. The right to religious freedom is for everyone, not just for those with the “right” beliefs.
Ryan T. Anderson is the William E. Simon Fellow at The Heritage Foundation and the Editor of Public Discourse, where this article originally appeared. He is co-author, with Sherif Girgis and Robert George, of the book What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense, and is a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Notre Dame. 52
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T HE V ALUE OF O RDERED L IBERTY [the0orthodox0view{ Dylan Pahman
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he subject of liberty or freedom, while central to Ortho‐ dox Christian anthropology, does not come up often in the context of social thought. This is partly because, frankly, there is so little contemporary Orthodox social thought (in English, at least), outside of Orthodox envi‐ ronmental theology. Nevertheless, beginning with the concepts of asceticism and theosis in the family, the Orthodox Tradition contains ample resources for a robust affirmation of religious, political, and economic freedom, with an eye toward the American context of or‐ dered liberty. The Russian Orthodox Churchʹs Basic Teaching on Dignity, Free‐ dom, and Rights (henceforth DFR) highlights two types of freedom in the Orthodox tradition that correspond to the distinction between the image and likeness of God in Orthodox anthropology. The first, autexousio, is the capacity for free choice that all of us have by nature. It includes the freedom to choose between good and evil. Yet, the DFR goes on, “freedom of choice is not an absolute or ultimate val‐ ue.” While important, such natural liberty ought not to be idolized, for it necessarily entails responsibility. As Vladimir Lossky summa‐ rized it, “To be in the image of God, the Fathers affirm, in the last analysis is to be a personal being, that is to say, a free responsible being.” The second type of freedom is eleutheria, freedom from passion and sin. This freedom is attained through the meeting of divine grace and 53
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ascetic effort in theosis or deification. It is the fulfillment of the re‐ sponsibility entailed by autexousio. It is a matter of our growth in the likeness of God, varies according to the degree of our spiritual devel‐ opment, and for the blessed at least, will continue indefinitely into eternity as they forever pass “from glory to glory” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Applied to society, eleutheria may be thought of as an Orthodox basis for ordered liberty.
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rom an Orthodox perspective, these freedoms are not only fundamental to salvation but the fullness of human flourish‐ ing, both now and eternally. While the fullness of Godʹs grace is found in the Church, God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:45). His grace, to some extent, is available to all. An Orthodox point of view does not allow for a strict sacred/secular divide. As one text attributed to St. Justin Martyr puts it, “to God nothing is secular, not even the world itself, for it is His workmanship.” The whole creation is saturated with, created through, and sustained by the energia of divine grace. Asceticism, though often commonly (mis)understood in purely negative terms, “is a positive, life‐affirming attitude and set of prac‐ tices that seeks human freedom by overcoming the passions—the sinful and disordered habits and attitudes that poison our relation‐ ships, primarily with God but also with ourselves, our neighbor, and the world,” write Fr. Michael Butler and Andrew Morriss in their recent monograph Creation and the Heart of Man. As such some level of asceticism is fundamental to human society and attainment of eleutheria. In illustrating this point, we may recall the famous opening words of Leo Tolstoyʹs Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” And what do happy families do that makes them all alike? The members of these families sacrifice their own desires and comforts for the sake of the bond of love between them. Unhappy (or dysfunctional) families are charac‐ terized by a lack of discipline: They do not share meals together or limit their diet for the sake of fellowship with one another; they do not share the labor of household chores (or even do them in some cases); no one spends intentional time with one another; and so on. At best, they fail to express and live in love in a healthy way. At 54
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worst, they express and live in fear, envy, boredom, abuse, and dis‐ dain. There are many ways for a family to be unhappy, but only an ascetic embrace of sacrificial love produces true happiness and hu‐ man flourishing. And inasmuch as healthy families are the most basic and vital societal group, then healthy societies must be ascetic at their roots, “seek[ing] freedom by overcoming the passions.”
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rthodox countries are not exactly known for religious liberty. This was the case even before the tragedy of Soviet rule, and still persists, albeit in much lesser degrees, in many contexts today. While the state no longer seeks the destruction of the Church, Church and state often, as in Russia, work together in close coopera‐ tion, for good or ill. While I cannot offer here a complete survey of the history of this re‐ lationship, it is typically traced to the idea of symphonia, first articu‐ lated by the Emperor Justinian in his Sixth Novella: “If the one [the priesthood] is blameless in every respect, placing trust in God, and the other [the sovereignty] rightly and becomingly ornaments the slate delivered to him, there will be splendid harmony which will give to humanity whatever is for the best.” This harmony or symphonia was not Caesaropapism, as Max We‐ ber characterized it, in which the monarch rules both state and Church. Rather, as Deno Geanakoplos writes, “The relationship be‐ tween the two powers [imperial and ecclesiastical] would seem to have been a complex give‐and‐take of authority and influence on various levels—a kind of interdependence.... In actual practice the relationship may well have been mixed, a blend of domination by the emperor over the church in certain areas, and perhaps an absence of imperial authority in other spheres.” While this relationship was closer than American separation of Church and state, it is also clear that what Geanakoplos describes is not necessarily the domination of the state over the Church that many may think of today. In fact, the subordination of Church to state in Russia did not come from sym‐ phonia but the Westernizing reforms of Tzar Peter the Great, in‐ spired by Protestant state‐church models. Moreover, if we look just a few centuries before Justinian to Con‐ stantine, the first Christian Emperor of Rome, we do see a real em‐ brace of religious liberty in the (so‐called) Edict of Milan in 313, ex‐ tending Roman religious liberty to the Christians of the Empire: “that 55
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liberty is to be denied to no one, to choose and to follow the religious observances of the Christians, but that to each one freedom is to be given to devote his mind to that religion which he may think adapted to himself, in order that the Deity may exhibit to us in all things his accustomed care and favor.” This did not make Christianity the state religion (that would not happen until Theodosius I), but simply af‐ forded any Roman the liberty to follow “that religion which he may think adapted to himself,” not excluding Christianity, as had effec‐ tively been the case until that time. Thus, religious liberty is not foreign to the Orthodox tradition. Jus‐ tinianʹs symphonia placed some distance between Church and state and, even earlier, Constantine embraced full religious liberty. Both Emperors are venerated as saints in the Orthodox Church. This, of course, does not necessarily limit the Orthodox to affirming religious liberty (Theodosius is a saint as well), but it shows that there histori‐ cally is room for it. The good of religious liberty has been recently defended among the Orthodox by Aristotle Papanikolaou, who argues in his book The Mystical as Political that it most fittingly accords with “divine‐ human communion” (his preferred term for theosis), as our commun‐ ion with God requires our free, ascetic cooperation with divine grace. He insists that Orthodox Christians on these grounds even ought to defend the rights of atheists to unbelief. While I have some reserva‐ tions regarding the neglect of natural law in his overall project, on this point I agree. If we truly believe that human beings are created free in reflection of the image of God and that this freedom is given to us for the sake of freely progressing in theosis, then liberty to choose and live oneʹs religion (or lack thereof) naturally follows, as well as the liberty necessary for the Church to continually administer the sacraments and preach the Gospel, through which we uniquely receive divine grace and grow in communion with God. As the Epis‐ tle to Diognetus put it, God “willed to save man by persuasion, not by compulsion, for compulsion is not Godʹs way of working.”
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f freedom is not only a dynamic, personal and ethical reality (eleutheria) but a natural capacity common to all human persons (autexousio), then freedom is a natural right, one which the state must respect and uphold. As the DFR states, “Subjection of human will to any external authority through manipulation or violence is 56
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seen as a violation of the order established by God.” One could easily see this as a corollary of the formulation found in the United Statesʹ Declaration of Independence: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Thus, politics must as much as possible preserve human freedom rather than violate it. As the Russian Orthodox philosopher Vladimir Solovyov put it, “The purpose of legal justice is not to transform the world which lies in evil into the kingdom of God, but only to prevent it from changing too soon into hell.” While the state ought to justly intervene out of pity for the oppressed to prevent and correct the violation of human freedom, dignity, and life through “manipulation or violence,” Or‐ thodox Christians need not seek utopian visions of society in which every human good is assumed to be attainable through political en‐ gineering. Such visions deny the reality of human sin and our need for divine grace. Human beings, unfortunately, do not always live up to their divine calling. As St. Paul tells us, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). The social application of this admission of our shortcomings can be expressed in the words of Abba Poemen, one of the desert fathers: “If a man makes a new heaven and a new earth, he still cannot be safe from temptation.” This is the basis for both political liberty and the need for coercive state action beyond its natural function in facilitating good order in our social life. When we fail to uphold justice of our own freedom, the state must step in. Where we succeed, the state must step back. And it must make room for and prudently facilitate that success whenever it can—in a way, practicing its own ascetic self‐denial. We cannot trust the whole of the common good to the state nor any other human means, since true human flourishing cannot be achieved by human means alone—that is the basis of totalitarianism, with which the Orthodox Church has such a painful history in the twentieth century. Furthermore, inasmuch as we are created in freedom (autexousio) and for freedom (eleutheria), to be self‐ruled—or rather, to be freely ruled by God—this accords well with the principle of self‐ governance. Human persons, associations, and institutions all de‐ serve political independence, representation, and respect in some form in a truly just society from the perspective of Orthodox Chris‐ tian anthropology. 57
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hile economic liberty has perhaps received the least affir‐ mation or even reflection in Orthodox social thought, it nonetheless follows just as naturally from the Orthodox bases of religious and political liberty outlined above. However, as Solovyov argues, the sphere of economic relations (conceived broad‐ ly) corresponds to our moral relation to our own, bodily nature. The duty we have toward our bodies is to deny its desires through asceti‐ cism for the sake of the higher, spiritual good of love. In doing so, we do not abuse or harm our bodies but rather spiritualize them, align‐ ing our embodied action with the spiritual grace of God. We are created with a capacity for freedom, autexousio, to be used for the purpose of the moral freedom of theosis: eleutheria. Thus, just as we ought to offer up our bodies as living sacrifices to God (cf. Ro‐ mans 12:1), so also we are to offer up Godʹs creation to him through our labor. God has given us the earth in order “to tend and keep it” in a paradisiacal state (Genesis 2:15). Thus, acknowledging again our propensity for failure, we nevertheless have a duty to make of Godʹs creation what we can, imitating the creativity of God and exercising the dominion he gave us (Genesis 1:26). We must, then, have liberty in society to freely cultivate the re‐ sources of the earth for the sake of the higher good of self‐sacrificing love. Helen Rhee affirms in Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich, her study of wealth and poverty in the early Church, the consistent patristic teaching of both the affirmation of private property rights and our moral duties to use our property for the good of others (what is known in the West as the “universal destination of goods”). Not only do we offer the goods of the earth to God through the sacraments and receive them back transfigured by divine grace, but in our eco‐ nomic activity we must always remember that true freedom lies in serving the needs of others in love. As the Church father Lactantius put it starkly, “He who is able to succour one on the point of perish‐ ing, if he fails to do so, kills him.” When we fail in this regard, the state has a duty to intervene but always as outlined above: with an eye to empowering its citizens to fulfill the work of justice them‐ selves in freedom and love. This understanding of the importance of private property and its mandated use for the greater good is one reason why the Edict of Milan has remained so important historically, even though a previ‐ ous edict in 311 had already granted tolerance to Roman Christians. 58
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The key difference is that Milan returned confiscated property to the Church and acknowledged its right to private ownership. Previously, as Rhee points out, church buildings had legally been the property of individual estates. Because of this unique aspect of Milan, it has been celebrated as the historical moment in which the Church truly at‐ tained freedom in ancient Rome. Tolerance was not enough without equal economic liberty. If ancient Christians so celebrated these rights, Christians today ought to affirm them as well.
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hese liberties are interdependent; each of these spheres of our lives is inseparable from one another. A violation of one inevi‐ tably entails a violation of all three. For example, regulations on businesses that require them to compromise their religious con‐ victions, when they are in no way harming others, violate religious and economic liberty through the overreach of state power. Uphold‐ ing all three is no recipe for utopia but it does affirm ordered liberty. And such ordered liberty, I argue, is the best means of ordering a society that takes seriously both our inclination toward temptation and our great potential for deification. No doubt other Orthodox conceptions of religious, political, and economic liberty are possible. Certainly, many others have already been tried. Yet this is a perspective for social engagement, grounded in the Orthodox Christian Tradition and easily applicable to the American context within which many Orthodox Christians now live. This conceptualization of ordered liberty is firmly rooted in the Or‐ thodox distinction between the image and likeness of God and the need for ascetic effort, in cooperation with divine grace, for us to ful‐ fill our ultimate calling and experience true human flourishing, ever passing “from glory to glory,” transfigured by our communion with God.
Dylan Pahman is assistant editor of the Journal of Markets & Morality and research associate for the Acton Institute. He has a Master’s of Theological Studies in historical theology with a concentration in early Church studies from Calvin Theological Seminary. 59
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Books & Culture
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S IMON P ETER : F LESH & B ONES S AINT \the0life0of0peter| Louis Markos Simon, Who Is Called Peter: Life as One of the Apostles, by Mackenzie Mulligan. Wipf & Stock, 2014.
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s a graduate student in English in the late 1980’s, I was exposed on a regular basis to the word “interdis‐ ciplinary.” In most cases, the word functioned as a cover for a strongly liberal agenda. If we studied Vir‐ gil or Dante or Shakespeare or Milton or Wordsworth in the context of linguistics or psychology, we did so to diminish, rather than augment, the goodness, truth, and beauty of what they had written. If the Bible was the subject under study, then it was a given that any reference to sociology or anthropology would take away from the authority and integrity of the scriptures as the in‐ spired Word of God. To approach literature from an interdisciplinary point of view al‐ ways meant surrendering the expansive transcendence of the hu‐ manities to the materialism of the social sciences. It meant that Shakespeare lost his ability to tap issues and ideas of perennial, cross‐cultural relevance and became just another product of Elizabe‐ than power politics. Marx, Darwin, Freud, Nietzsche, Sartre, Derrida, Foucault: they could rise above their socio‐economic milieu to cri‐ tique the pretensions of the great canonical writer. But not the poets, and certainly not the Bible. They would have to yield their moral and 61
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aesthetic “hegemony” to the academic experts and their new‐fangled, interdisciplinary methods. Thankfully, over the last decade, I have witnessed, particularly in Christian liberal arts universities, a reclaiming and rehabilitating of the interdisciplinary approach. Especially in honors colleges like the one I lecture for, there has arisen a new and passionate desire to unite literature, history, philosophy, theology, music, and art in such a way as to draw students closer to the Good, the True, and the Beau‐ tiful and provide new perspectives from which to appreciate and understand the revealed wisdom of the Bible. Along with that desire has come a renewed commitment to teach from primary texts rather than commentaries and criticisms of those texts. As a graduate of the Torrey Honors Institute of Biola University, Mackenzie Mulligan is a product of just such an interdisciplinary education grounded in the Great Books—and he has put that educa‐ tion to good use. In Simon, Who Is Called Peter: Life as One of the Apos‐ tles, he combines insights from textual analysis, ancient languages, near eastern studies, and theology with a strong sense for literary narrative, psychological motivation, and the cultural landscape of first‐century Palestine. The result: a fresh and beguiling work that is almost sui generis. In a simple but firm prose style, Mulligan retells the familiar stories of the Gospels and Acts from the point of view of Peter as he awaits martyrdom in Rome. Every step of the way, Mulligan remains punc‐ tiliously faithful to his biblical sources. Indeed, in order to support his narrative and explain and justify his interpretations of events and of Peter’s reaction to those events, he offers some 150 footnotes. Alt‐ hough the notes are accessible and never become pedantic, they are backed up by solid research and provide the reader with a helpful and stimulating overview of the sometimes competing, sometimes complementary theories of such orthodox biblical scholars as Richard Bauckham, Darrell Bock, D.A. Carson, William Hendriksen, Martin Hengel, Larry Hurtado, Craig Keener, R.C.H. Lenski, and John Mac‐ Arthur. The mix of first‐person narrative and lengthy critical footnotes makes for a strange hybrid, but it succeeds in doing something that needs to be done more often: namely, building a bridge between the aesthetic and the theological, the emotional and the rational, the ex‐ periential and the systematic. Mulligan’s approach allows us to con‐ 62
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template Peter not only with historical‐textual eyes but with the eyes of faith and piety. Just as importantly, it allows us to reach back 2000 years with an imaginative embrace that takes us inside Peter’s psy‐ che. Here is Peter reflecting back on his own futile attempts, and those of the other disciples, to make sense of Jesus’ claims and deeds: It was all so much bigger than we had thought. We knew he was a teacher. We knew he was a rabbi. We called him the Messiah, we called him “Lord,” but as I look back, I know those were empty words. ... He was not just a better teacher than we had ever heard. He did not just perform more miracles than we had expected. He did not just have more authority over demons than even the greatest of Jewish exorcists. He was entirely more and different than all of that, as if he was in an entirely different category. It is through passages like these that Mulligan adds flesh and bones to the familiar biblical events and characters. He reminds us that the Peter we encounter in the Gospels is neither a Pharisee skilled in the Law nor a theologian able to construct abstract theories. He is a fish‐ erman with a big temper to match his big heart. His closeness to Je‐ sus more often than not increases his sense of confusion and inade‐ quacy even as it challenges him to increase his faith and patience. Mulligan is at his best conveying Peter’s angst‐ridden resistance to Jesus’ predictions of his death. When Peter, out of what he thinks is love and loyalty, rebukes Jesus for seeking after death in Jerusalem, and Jesus responds, “Get thee behind me, Satan,” the impact on Peter is gut‐wrenching: “I felt as though I had been punched in the stom‐ ach, and I stumbled back. His tone and words were bad enough, but his face... his narrowed eyes and clenched jaw showed pain and an‐ ger competing for control.” A third‐person study of the Gospels might have described this scene and its impact on Peter, but it would not have made us wince when we read it. Mulligan’s goal is not to de‐heroize Peter or strip him of his saint‐ hood. To the contrary, the more real he makes Peter, the more he allows his flaws and failures to rise to the surface, the more he en‐ hances our respect for this broken man whom Jesus molded into a great leader and missionary. And we get to witness that molding from the inside out. We are with Peter, inside his head that never stops buzzing with restless thoughts, as he first swears that he will never betray Jesus, then betrays him three times, and then is given 63
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the chance to reaffirm his love for Jesus three times by the Sea of Gal‐ ilee. And we get to follow Peter, to stay in his head, for the miracle of Pentecost when he comes of age and steps into the role for which Jesus has been grooming him. Mulligan captures effectively the sights and sounds of the descent of the Holy Spirit as experienced by a bewildered yet ecstatic Peter: “I was filled with wind and with fire, and I felt that I had to get out, in the open air—I had to speak, to shout, to praise God, or I would burst.” And when the moment comes for him to give his sermon, Mulligan brings together all the worry and second‐guessing and frustrated anxiety that have come before: “What would I say to them? I felt dizzy. It was happening again. I wanted to do something for Jesus, but I was going to fail. I was going to say something foolish, or do something foolish, and I would fail. Or maybe it would be worse. Maybe I would deny him again.”
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racking Peter’s spiritual and emotional growth constitutes the central strength of Simon, Who Is Called Peter. But it brings with it an added benefit. Through the eyes of Mulligan’s flesh‐and‐ blood Peter, we catch glimpses of a Jesus who is fully incarnate. After Jesus cleanses the moneychangers from the Temple, this is what Pe‐ ter sees: “He was breathing hard, and his face was tight and stern. And when he spoke, he was clear and distinct, each word crisp and sharp.” At the Garden of Gethsemane, he sees a very different Mes‐ siah: “When he finally stopped and turned to us, I nearly fell back at the site of his face. It was worse than before, much worse, with pain and fear flickering in his eyes. And when he spoke, his voice was hoarse and strained.” But this too gives way to a different mood, when Jesus has finished his prayers and returns a third time to find Peter, James, and John once again asleep: “And then he came again, a third time, and he was different. He seemed refreshed, calm, in con‐ trol.” Jesus was fully man even as he was fully God, and, through Peter’s eyes, we see the many facets of his manhood. Though Mulligan’s book offers a consistently good read, it does bear the marks of its genesis as a senior honors thesis. It uses too many subheadings that impede the flow of the narrative just as it is picking up steam. The notes, though helpful, should have been trimmed back, and the author too often falls into apologizing for his 64
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narrative choices. Also, as a professor of literature rather than philos‐ ophy or theology, I wish that Mulligan had gone off a bit more on his own and taken more risks in developing his study of Peter. I hope he will someday expand his brief experiment into a more richly nu‐ anced and organic novel with notes grouped in the back of the book. Still, Mulligan stays true to his purpose and travels a road that I hope others will follow. The Christian community needs more books like this that can invite us into the sacred narrative while equipping us to engage the New Testament in a critical manner that is unafraid to borrow insights from multiple disciplines and multiple approach‐ es. Mulligan has offered us a good start.
Louis Markos (www.Loumarkos.com), Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities; his books include From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics, On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to Virtue with Tolkien and Lewis, and Literature: A Student’s Guide. 65
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F EMINISM & T HE A RT OF M ODESTY [the0youth0cult{ Megan Mueller The Lost Art of Dress: The Women Who Once Made America Stylish, by Linda Przybyszewski, Basic Books, 2014.
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he American cult of youth has held a stranglehold on popular standards of female beauty for at least the last fifty years. American women are afraid of aging, and they’re doing everything in their power to delay, hide, or deny its onset. Cosmetic surgery is a multi‐billion dollar industry; the dreaded window of years considered “middle age” has been pushed back from forty to sixty. Flip through a department store advertisement or walk through the mall, and you’ll quickly see that there are few differences between clothing options offered to pre‐teens and those peddled to their grandmothers. Age‐appropriate clothing for older women is such a novelty that companies like Not Your Daughter’s Jeans locate all their brand power in one sad reality: a clothing company offering designs intentionally made for mature women is a rare one. C.S. Lewis addresses this unfortunate attitude many women have toward beauty and aging in The Last Battle. When Queen Susan does not appear with the other Pevensie siblings in Aslan’s country, it is revealed that in addition to no longer believing their adventures in Narnia were real, Susan “wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and sheʹll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of oneʹs 66
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life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can.” Her understanding of reality and beauty is stunted; she only sees beauty in a small window of her life, and limits herself to replicating a fleet‐ ing phase rather than accepting the robust reality that comes with the fullness of time.
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he Lost Art of Dress celebrates the first half of the twentieth century as a time when America embraced this robust reality by using clothing to express the particular aspects of each sea‐ son of a woman’s life. This accomplished two things. First, it meant that women of every age and size were given flattering, practical clothing options. Second, there was a distinct coming‐of‐age narra‐ tive embedded in American culture through clothing that gave young women something to look forward to as they moved beyond youth. This meant that from girlhood to old age, women were shown how to dress in a way that expressed the best qualities of each phase of life. The principle that guided womenswear design was “simplici‐ ty for early youth, added luxury for the girl or woman in the twen‐ ties, splendor for maturity, and suitability with stately magnificence for age.” As an individual changed both physically and mentally, the clothing she wore allowed her to express that change aesthetically and with dignity. In the late 19th century, women began taking on new roles, and this affected the way they presented themselves. Some of these changes were directly related to the social work women were pursu‐ ing. Author Linda Przybyszewski (pronounced pre‐ber‐SHEFF‐skee) points out hemlines may never have stopped sweeping the floor without sanitation clubs discovering in 1870 that urban streets were teeming with bacteria. This marked the first time that the female foot was visible in Western fashion, but the radical four‐inch hemline hike encouraged by ladies’ clubs was rightly done in the name of public health. Other changes came as women were slowly incorporated into the workforce and given the right to vote; as these new responsibilities thrust women into what had formerly been a man’s world, women’s fashion began to fuse beauty with utility in unprecedented ways. The the “Dress Doctors”—as Przybyszewski calls them—did away with the S‐shaped exaggerated hourglass figure of the 19th century and the debilitating corsets that had crushed ribs, restricted breathing, 67
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and prevented rigorous movement. Its replacement, the firm but flexible girdle, molded the figure while allowing its wearer to breathe relatively freely and enjoy athletic pursuits—another pastime newly available to women. This was a time when the girls and teens of America looked for‐ ward to growing up, because they lived in a world where female maturity meant new opportunities and experiences that were reflect‐ ed by a new wardrobe. In the early 20th century in particular, when women were still relishing their newfound freedoms in the voting booth, the office, and on the tennis court, these opportunities and the new clothing appropriate for them signaled to young girls that a bright future of social responsibilities inside and outside the home was now waiting for them. Przybyszewski claims that we owed this understanding of wom‐ anhood and aging to the Home Economics teachers who instructed thousands of female high school and college graduates from 1900 until 1960. They were accomplished academics given the opportunity to join universities as faculty at a time when no other such positions were available to women, and they used their varied fields of study to combine hard sciences and the arts to elevate home life to its right‐ ful place in American society. Home Economics department chairs at universities like Columbia had earned doctorates in physics, molecu‐ lar biology, and architecture. These diverse experts made huge con‐ tributions to the fields of food preservation and textile manufactur‐ ing, in both cases presenting research that greatly aided America’s preparation for World War II. Home Economics professors also taught American women to sew. In a time when buying a dress off the rack was virtually unheard of for the average women, Dress Doctors armed women with strong training in garment construction, fabric types, and the principals of design. They fused practicality with aesthetics and encouraged women to consider their clothing choices both a daily participation in art and an opportunity to responsibly represent themselves and their sex in the public sphere. Rather than urging women to combat aging, they encouraged women to enjoy the freedoms and maturity that age brought—and the clothing, like draped evening gowns, furs, and fragile fabrics like silk, that only older women could wear. When dress was considered a physical indicator of time of life, aging had no negative stigma; rather, a woman’s later years were triumphed as 68
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her “glorious autumn” when the grace, allure, and sophistication that came from womanhood greatly improved her quality of life. In our society, which only recognizes one phase of life as desirable, aging is feared. Gone are the draped, luxurious styles exclusively worn by sophisticated women in their mid‐thirties; gone are the re‐ gal outfits reserved for the worldly and wise matrons over sixty. In‐ stead, American women are largely encouraged, like Susan, to spend their early lives racing toward seventeen only to spend the next five to seven decades trying to stay there.
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n addition to a Notre Dame associate professor in history, Przybyszewski is also a master seamstress, and her knowledge of the craft proves thoroughly helpful in this fashion history crash course. She carefully walks the reader through clothing terminology and the trends of decades past, and while background information about the fashion world makes a clearer picture, this book can be easily enjoyed by those looking to dip their toes into the subject for the first time. Her wit is sharp, as it should be to properly criticize some of the terrible fashion fads to which American women have fallen prey; her passion for beauty and utility in daily life is compel‐ ling. While it may be too much to expect a complete departure from the current youth‐worshipping sartorial state of this nation any time soon, The Lost Art of Dress looks forward to a time when the lessons of the early 20th century are once again heeded by women seeking meaningful beauty no matter their age. The book’s arguments can also be applied to a number of current battlegrounds, perhaps most notably to recent evangelical conflicts over how to teach modesty and purity in churches. Though fads come and go and expectations shift, clothing has always been and will always be a litmus test that reveals the values and mindset of a society. With a little luck, voices like Przybyszewski’s will win out, and bring women back to an aes‐ thetic, well‐crafted beauty in dress that is firmly rooted in social re‐ sponsibility and personal worth.
Megan Mueller is the director of the Learning Center at Houston Baptist University. 69
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R EADING T OLKIEN ’ S B EOWULF [understanding0intent{ Holly Ordway Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, by J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. by Christopher Tolkien, Harcourt 2014.
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is vivid personal evocation of a long‐vanished world—as it was perceived by the author of Beo‐ wulf.” Such is Christopher Tolkien’s description of his father’s newly published translation and com‐ mentary, and it sets the right tone for approaching this new volume. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Beowulf is a very good thing indeed, but we must know what Tolkien intended it to be before we can rightly appreciate it. The fact that Tolkien’s translation was unpublished during his life‐ time tells us nothing as to its quality or suitability for publishing. Tolkien was both a procrastinator and a perfectionist; it is something of a miracle that anything he wrote saw publication. Most famously, The Lord of the Rings would probably never have been completed had it not been for the encouragement of his friend C.S. Lewis. He revised The Silmarillion endlessly. Even his complete and polished translation of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was released posthumously, because Tolkien never finished writing the introduction. It should thus come as no surprise that the works published in Tol‐ kien’s lifetime are the tip of the iceberg of his overall body of work. It is worth noting that even the most recent volumes, such as Sigurd 70
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and Gudrun and The Fall of Arthur, are not re‐packaged out‐of‐print material, but are completely unpublished material. The Beowulf translation is finished in the sense that Tolkien had, by 1926, completed a translation of the entire poem; however, as Christopher Tolkien outlines in his introduction to the translation, Tolkien continued to modify it, and there is no single final manu‐ script, but rather three manuscripts with a complex relationship to each other. Furthermore, the extensive commentary is drawn from not from a complete manuscript of its own, but from his father’s ex‐ tensive lecture notes. The editorial work here is excellent, generally striking a good bal‐ ance between the interests of scholars and a more popular audience. The supporting material is well chosen. In addition to the commen‐ tary, this volume includes the story “Sellic Spell,” Tolkien’s imagined reconstruction of the ‘mythological’ element of the Beowulf story, and two versions of “The Lay of Beowulf,” a poem in rhymed stan‐ zas that shows how the story could be adapted into different forms. The one inexplicable and glaring omission is Tolkien’s partial transla‐ tion of Beowulf into alliterative verse. Tolkien’s commentary would have been well worth publishing even without an accompanying translation. Here he demonstrates his own sensitivity to context, culture, and the nuances of meaning, even when, as is sometimes the case, he neglected to update his translation to reflect a later conclusion. For instance, arguing against the transla‐ tion “whale‐road,” he writes: The word as ‘kenning’ therefore means dolphin’s riding, i.e. in full, the watery fields where you can see dolphins and lesser members of the whaletribe playing…That is the picture and comparison the kenning was meant to evoke. It is not evoked by ‘whale-road’—which suggests a sort of semisubmarine steam-engine running along submerged metal rails over the Atlantic. Most notably, his commentary provides valuable insight into the balance between historical and mythological material, and the ten‐ sion between the Christian content and the pagan setting. The Beo‐ wulf‐poet has set his poem in a deliberately pagan past, and has made his characters monotheists who “had not heard the Gospel, knew of the existence of Almighty God, recognized him as ‘good’ 71
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and the giver of all good things; but were (by the Fall) still cut off from Him.” However, Tolkien insists that the poet is not simply ig‐ noring Christian teaching, but is engaging with it in a distinctive way: “The poem belongs to the time of that great outburst of mis‐ sionary enterprise which fired all of England… Beowulf is not a mis‐ sionary allegory; but it comes from a time when the noble pagan and his heroic ancestors (enshrined in verse) were a burning contempo‐ rary problem, at home and abroad.” Tolkien’s discussion of these questions as they apply to Beowulf may also yield insight into his own creative process in The Lord of the Rings, which is likewise a deeply Christian work set in an imagined pre‐Christian culture. Furthermore, Tolkien’s analysis on specific points in Beowulf suggests that it may be fruitful to consider paral‐ lels between characters such as Unferth/Wormtongue, Hroth‐ gar/Théoden, and even Wealtheow/Galadriel.
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hat of the translation? Its stylistic faults are evident, yet it remains a lively read. At its worst, it is awkward and stilt‐ ed, with style being sacrificed for accuracy. Here, though, it is important to recognize that Tolkien did not make this translation for its own sake, but rather as an aid to his lecturing on Beowulf at Oxford. The pedagogical context for the translation explains Tol‐ kien’s over‐arching concern for total accuracy. He is not even at‐ tempting a poetic translation, but is trying to convey precisely what was originally expressed by the poet. Even on a technical level this is by no means an easy task, since the Beowulf manuscript is damaged in parts and also has various difficulties in the text likely caused by scribal errors; many of the notes showcase Tolkien as a linguistic problem‐solver. Furthermore, although most recent translations render the poem into fully modern English to make it more accessible for modern readers, one of the stylistic features of the original poem is the poet’s deliberate use of archaic vocabulary. Tolkien’s decision to echo that ‘high’ style in his translation makes his version a slower but interest‐ ing read. What we have in Tolkien’s translation is not Beowulf as it would have been written today, but as it was written in the Anglo‐ Saxon period. Lewis scholars will find it interesting that Tolkien evidently showed the manuscript to C.S. Lewis for critique. The “Notes on the 72
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text of the Translation” include “several suggestions certainly in the hand of C.S. Lewis,” all found in the first 300 lines of the poem. Lew‐ is offered a total of six suggested emendations, such as “the slayer of souls” instead of “the destroyer of souls.” At its best, the translation shows Tolkien’s considerable gifts as a writer: many passages beg to be read aloud, demonstrating a vigor, flow, and rhythm that draw the reader into the pace of the poem. Here is the description of the entrance of Beowulf and his men to Heorot: The street was paved in stone patterns; the path guided those men together. There shone corslet of war, hard, hand-linked, bright ring of iron rang in their harness, as in their dread gear they went striding straight into the hall. Weary of the sea they set their tall shields, bucklers wondrous hard, against the wall of the house, and sat then on the bench. Corslets rang, war-harness of men. Their spears stood piled together, seamen’s gear, ash-hafted, grey-tipped with steel. Well-furnished with weapons was the iron-mailed company. A passage near the end of the poem has the same keenness of visu‐ al detail, but feels rougher, probably from following the word order of the original Anglo‐Saxon more rigidly: Moreover the wise son of Wihstan summoned from the host the king’s own knights, seven in company, men most excellent; now eight warriors in all they went under the accurséd roof, one bearing in his hand a fiery torch, going forward at their head. No need then to cast lots who should despoil that hoard, when keeperless those men espied still any portion crumbling there still; little did any grieve that they in haste brought forth those treasures of great price. The serpent too they thrust over the towering cliff, let the tide the dragon take, the flowing sea engulf the keeper of fair things. I have taught this poem to undergraduates regularly over the past few years, and so I know it well; in fact, it had lost some of its fresh‐ ness. Tolkien’s translation caught me back up into the flow of the story once again, such that I found myself reading with a sense of discovery, encountering many passages as if for the first time. Tol‐ kien’s version has rough edges, but perhaps its very roughness helps Beowulf come alive again. 73
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Will Tolkien’s Beowulf replace Seamus Heaney’s as the go‐to ver‐ sion? No; nor would Tolkien have intended it to. Will it be useful for teachers and readers of Beowulf, alongside other translations? Does it belong on the shelves of Tolkien (and Lewis) scholars? Will it delight and instruct readers of this marvelous poem? The answer to these latter questions is a resounding yes.
Holly Ordway is the director of the MA in Apologetics at Houston Baptist University. Her work focuses on imaginative and literary apologetics, with special attention to C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams. 74
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A Centennial of Cataclysm [poetry0and0war{ Tim Goeglein To you from failing hands we throw The Torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields. “In Flanders Fields”, John McRae,1915
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ne hundred summers ago, one of the greatest calami‐ ties in all of history commenced in Europe. On June 28, 1914, in the Balkan city of Sarajevo, now located in the country of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, and his wife, were assas‐ sinated. Their murders, in the back of an open touring car which had made a wrong turn, lit a torch that set off an inglorious chain of events which would come to include almost every country on that continent and well beyond. The ineffable cataclysm that became World War I would lead to what one poet and literary critic would aptly call “the suicide of Eu‐ rope.” The worldwide conflagration set off by those two killings would set Europe aflame for the next four years. The writer Theodore Dalrymple evocatively wrote of World War I: “The war smashed up European civilization and sapped Europe’s belief in itself: For if the wages of its civilization was such a war, bloody and muddy carnage on so unimaginable a scale, what price its civilization?” The brutality of the war, replete with the first use of tanks, poison gas, and guns which could kill on an unprecedented scale, is almost beyond our imagination now. 75
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In all of the centennial reflections of World War I, I wonder how many will actually focus on the most personal impact of that brutal implosion: the impact it had on the families who had to endure the deaths and maiming of their loved ones on a nearly matchless trajec‐ tory? In all the reams and tomes ever written about what became known as The Great War, why is there comparatively such little at‐ tention paid to the average mother and father, brother and sister, grandparent, aunt and uncle, niece and nephew, and how they react‐ ed, responded, and indeed coped with the deeply acute sense of loss and despair that is always war’s aide de camp?
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his all came to mind when I read an important review in The Wall Street Journal of a biography on one of the most important young poets to emerge during the war, Wilfred Owen. Born in 1893 in Wales to a lower‐middle class family (his father was a train stationmaster), he spent his boyhood in three towns: Liverpool, Shrewsbury, and little Oswestry surrounded by low mountains. Like so many great poets, he was preternaturally shy despite impressive literary gifts which emerged early in his young life. He did not attend one of the great British universities, like Oxford or Cambridge, but rather Reading, which was mostly undistinguished and without an international reputation. Like many children of middle class backgrounds, Owens’ parents had great aspirations for their talented son, and his parents nour‐ ished these abilities tirelessly and from the start. His father was an amateur but lustrous operatic tenor and his mother had an artistic bent, taking her young son with her to art galleries and museums to deepen his love of beautiful things. Their attentive parenting had an impact. Those who knew Owen best said he had an obvious joie de vivre. He once wrote of himself that “you would not know me for the poet of sorrows.” Embedded deeply with this artistic ability was an equally powerful sense of duty. His parents taught their son that attainment without responsibility was hollow and lacking depth; that character trumped intellectual achievement. It was a set of principles he would take with him to the battlefields of France and ultimately to his grave. This constant parental nourishing of this natural joy of life paid off. In 1915, just before he joined the army, Owen wrote: “I know I have lived more than my twenty‐one years, many more; and so have a 76
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start of most lives.” What a remarkably self‐reflective comment for a young man. This was not a statement of bravado but rather one of appreciation and confidence—precisely the traits he was trained to embody in his Welsh upbringing. His life was not unlike that of an‐ other famous British poet whom Owen revered and read with devo‐ tion, John Keats. Yet unlike Keats, Owen willingly enlisted, proving to be a widely‐admired and talented Army officer but with a literary elan. His lyrical flair and probity, all these years later, helps convey to us, the sheer horror and catastrophe of war and its impact on one life and one family. While stationed near what became known as “No Man’s Land”— those barren, desolate pieces of bombed‐out ground between the trenches of the British and the French on one side and their enemies the Germans on the other—Owen’s poems and letters resonate across the years with a brokenness, desperation, and an understanding of the futility of war. He wrote from France: I suppose I can endure cold, and fatigue, and the face-to-face death, as well as another; but extra for me there is the universal pervasion of Ugliness. Hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language, and nothing but foul, even from one’s own mouth (for all are devil ridden), everything unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug-outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth. In poetry we call them the most glorious. He served for two long years, a period of time alternately defined by selflessness and sorrow, disaster and death. Those 24 months wit‐ nessed Owen being mercilessly bombarded near the French town of Saint Quentin in early 1917 and sent home with shellshock. Then, almost inexplicably, he returned to France where he was engaged in yet another brutal hand to hand battle near the town of Joncourt, for which he was awarded the Military Cross. Finally, on November 4, 1918, he met his end, killed while leading his company through the Ors Canal despite the ceaseless shelling and gunfire that accompa‐ nied his and his men’s heroic struggle forward to shelter. In the midst of battle, he wrote to his mother: All one day we could not move from a small trench, though hour by hour the wounded were groaning just outside. Three stretcher-bearers who got up were hit, one by one. I had to order no one to show himself after that, 77
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but remembering my own duty, and remembering also my forefathers the agile Welshmen of the mountains I scrambled out myself and felt an exhilaration in baffling the Machine Guns by quick bounds from cover to cover. After the shells we had been through, and the gas, bullets were like the gentle rain from heaven. It is difficult to think of the emotions that must have stirred his parents when, on the very day that the war’s armistice was declared, and as the bells in their small Welsh village were tolling, they learned by telegram that their 25 year old son, their eldest child, had lost his life. He was the same age as Keats. It is nearly impossible now to read Owen’s prose without weeping and feeling a kind of leaden sorrow for the promise of life cut short. In one of his most solemn, powerful poems, Owen wrote of the World War I generation: What passing‐bells for those who Die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of The guns. Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid Rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons.
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s the centennial of The Great War approaches—the conflict President Woodrow Wilson said was a “war to end all wars”—it is easy to be overwhelmed with the sheer imper‐ sonal, empirical data of it all: 65 million men worldwide served in that war; 8 million lost their lives; 21 million were wounded. Five million Americans served and 100,000 died in the trenches, hospitals, and shell holes of Europe. It was an implosive war which would be only a prologue to a much longer, deadlier one on the same continent just a few years later. We have a moral obligation, it seems to me, not to lose sight of the fact that, giant numbers though those are, each was a unique person made in the very image of God—someone’s son, husband, grandson, nephew, friend. 78
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A famous Quaker once presciently observed: “Now I think I am wrong, after all, in saying that you have a soul. Ought I not to say, you are a soul? Is not the soul really yourself? In truth, my children, it is the soul that has a body, not the body that has a soul; for the soul is greater surely than the body, and will last when the body is laid aside in death.” A century hence, through the mists of time, we must not forget who they were or what they did. Each of them; every soul.
Tim Goeglein is vice president of Focus on the Family.
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The Master of the Poetic Deadpan ,the0fun0of0poems< Micah Mattix Glitter Bomb: Poems, by Aaron Belz, Persea, 2014.
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t is not uncommon for so‐called avant‐garde poets to complain that no one reads poetry anymore and to blame capitalism for the lack of interest. Capitalism, it is argued, has “commodi‐ fied” language, thus “alienating” us from ourselves and from others. We think of ourselves in clichés that have been created by the market and act out those clichés by buying all sorts of stuff, except poetry. And why not poetry? Because poetry—the real stuff, not the fun, comforting verse of Billy Collins—subverts commodified language. It shows us that we are not football‐loving men, fathers, husbands, good Christians, loyal middle‐managers, and so forth—that the mar‐ ket has hoodwinked us into using these terms to sell stuff, but that these words do not express who we are. Poetry shakes us, and we don’t want to be shaken. We don’t want to know that we’ve lived a lie, that even the idea of the self is a lie, and that we only have mean‐ ing to the extent that we live in egalitarian communion with others and nature. Poetry is “violent” because capitalism is “violent.” Aaron Belz is a different sort of avant‐garde poet. He studied under Allen Ginsberg and Philip Levine, but he is also a Presbyterian (his family is associated with World Magazine and Covenant College), a father of three, an entrepreneur and small business owner. While we have, of course, deluded ourselves with all sorts of lies—greed and the philosophical materialism of Marxism included—Belz refrains 80
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from self‐righteously attacking the “bourgeois” or “subverting” in some pretentious way the lies we tell ourselves. His tools are satire and self‐deprecating humor. His third collection of poetry, Glitter Bomb, is an anti‐self‐help book wrapped in shimmering plastic. It’s alternatingly fun and serious, sad and playful, lonely and hopeful. In fact, it’s a deeply Christian book without ever mentioning Christ’s name. Belz is a master of the poetic deadpan. “There is no I in team,” he writes in “Team,” “but there’s one in bitterness / and one in failure.” And in “Interesting About You,” he writes: “What’s interesting about you / Is the unique ways in which / You fail to distinguish yourself.” Epigrams are traditionally two to four line poems that often offer witty conundrums. John Donne’s epigrams, for example, rely on clas‐ sical allusions and logic games. Belz’s epigrams, like the two above, at first seem all surface but end up telling us something about our‐ selves—in this case, that we are bitter failures, that we have very little interest in “taking one for the team,” despite the value‐heavy rhetoric of contemporary youth sports, that we are all preoccupied with our‐ selves above all else. Many of his other poems work the same way. Take “One Star,” for example, which also begins with wordplay. “Of star‐crossed lovers and cross‐eyed lovers,” Belz writes, “fate favors the latter; at least they are together.” The distinction between “star‐crossed” and “cross‐eyed” seems merely funny at first. But with one phrase (“at least they are together”), which initially seems campy (Is he referring to the cross‐eyed lovers’ eyes being closer together?), Belz manages to say something true—that love is about being together more so than passion—without sounding self‐consciously wise. He is, in this sense, the anti‐Khalil Gibran. Belz is indebted to Frank O’Hara, but unlike Ted Berrigan, who aped O’Hara’s style with little interest in O’Hara’s larger questions, Belz’s poetry reminds us of the way we use language to hide our loneliness or construct some meaning out of the disparate moments of our lives. In “Accumulata,” Belz asks: So you string together a number of moments and you call it life? You say My life? And is there a moment in which you notice 81
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this moment is disconnected from the rest? “And this / being the case,” he continues, “do you not regard the darker drops”: the desperate drops, the drops of horror, drops of failure, flat drops, mingled or rather inexplicably interleaved with the funny, the sunshiny, the naps, and see, can’t you see that this is your ordinary? That these, each and each, and all, are neither total nor definitive but are rather, say, She left. There is a moment for it. Or The last words she spoke, which haunts you like a bell whose peal continues to echo down dreams. That these, none of them, will damn you. Here Belz is riffing on the post‐structuralist insight (one seconded by Walker Percy) that we cannot construct a narrative that makes sense of our selves. We always leave something out. Yet, we construct them nonetheless in a failed effort to save ourselves, to give ourselves a name or a meaning that ignores our failures, and even the many bittersweet, mingled moments of life. We don’t want to be damned by our failures, and so we write them out of our life, instead of rec‐ ognizing that these moments can’t damn us if we turn to Christ. This all makes Glitter Bomb sound overly serious. It’s not, or, it is se‐ rious while having a lot of fun. We have poems like “Avatar” in which Belz writes: Blue computer graphics woman with smooth cat nose, you are purer, more in touch with nature, and actually quite a bit taller than I— and although you’ve discovered that your soul mate is really just a small, physically challenged white guy 82
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gasping for air in a mobile home, you’ve decided to stick with him. I’d taken you for one of those shallow pantheistic utopian cartoon giantesses, but now I see that I was way off. Or “Tuberculosis Day,” where Belz writes: “The acronym / we’re going to use / for Tuberculosis Day / is TBD.” But Belz is too honest to let us off the hook for long. Life is full of failures. We are, Belz writes, a kind of ever‐setting sun—your own life’s most familiar error, repeated in the company of those you’d hoped would love you most. This is not dishonest bleakness, but an acknowledgement of our profound fallenness, and of the inability of any language—the lan‐ guage of capitalism, Marxism, or poetry—to save us. That act belongs to God’s eternal Word alone.
Micah Mattix is an assistant professor of writing and 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. 83
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BY T HE B ABE U NBORN G.K. Chesterton If trees were tall and grasses short, As in some crazy tale, If here and there a sea were blue Beyond the breaking pale, If a fixed fire hung in the air To warm me one day through, If deep green hair grew on great hills, I know what I should do. In dark I lie; dreaming that there Are great eyes cold or kind, And twisted streets and silent doors, And living men behind. Let storm clouds come: better an hour, And leave to weep and fight, Than all the ages I have ruled The empires of the night. I think that if they gave me leave Within the world to stand, I would be good through all the day I spent in fairyland. They should not hear a word from me Of selfishness or scorn, If only I could find the door, If only I were born.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) was an English poet, author theologian, philosopher, journalist, and much more. 84
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A R EPUBLIC OF L ET TERS ]thoughts0on0the0age} Hunter Baker
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he organizers of the Q conferences recently convened an event in Nashville. If you don’t know what Q is, all you really need to do is to think about the TED Talks. Q = Young evangelical version of TED. An organization of‐ fered to pay my entry fee ($500), so I took the opportuni‐ ty to spend a day.
Andy Crouch, a solid Christian writer and executive editor of Christianity Today, kicked things off with what I felt was a very win‐ some presentation on religious liberty. It was the kind of presentation one would give to an audience who is suspicious of the concept. Crouch seemed to feel he would need all of his gifts to convince this group in skinny jeans, rolled jeans, and cuffed jeans that they should not want the state to roll right over the conscientious objections Christians might have to some of its programs. While I thought he did an excellent job, I was a bit taken aback when Rebekah Lyons took the stage to introduce the next talk and briefly indicated she was glad to have such a tense topic pass by. It is worrisome to think that young evangelicals need to be coaxed ever so gently into giving reli‐ gious liberty a hearing and that such coaxing takes place amid tense feelings. In another session, a woman named Donna Freitas came, self‐ consciously as a Catholic, to talk about “the hook‐up culture.” I agreed with almost everything she said up to a point. She had done research and found that young people don’t really seem to enjoy hook‐ups. They confess that they would prefer something more like traditional dating with a stronger emotional connection. It would be wise, she thought, to gently suggest that maybe you don’t hook up 85
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this weekend. Maybe you give it a rest this month. Maybe you ask someone out on a real date. All good. But she flashed a big sign on the ultra‐wide screen that read, “Christianity is bigger than its teach‐ ing on pre‐marital sex.” Freitas asserted that one can not simply con‐ front hook‐up culture with purity culture. Translating herself, she argued that it is not possible to present abstinence as the alternative to young people participating in the hook‐up culture. I think she is wrong about that, at least in terms of speaking to the church. If we can’t present fundamental ideas about sin and holiness, then that would also mean that we can’t present Jesus Christ. Better in my view to take a strong stand as the church and to insist on the real pursuit of holiness. Go ahead and put a real alternative on the table. The strongest critique of the church is not that it has the wrong ide‐ als, but rather that it does not live up to them. So, let us put a higher premium on holiness and let us model it for the world. Paul Lim of Vanderbilt University offered a talk on what it is like to be something of a double agent at his school. On the one hand, he answers to the kingdom of Christ. On the other, he has to be respon‐ sible to Vanderbilt. The two are not coextensive. The secular academy does not have the same scale of values the church does. But is there some common good after which we both seek? Though he did not have time to develop the implications of that question too much fur‐ ther, it was the fundamental theme of the conference. Why the focus on the common good? I am sure James Davison Hunter’s book To Change the World was a motivating force for the conference organiz‐ ers. Hunter clearly emphasized the need to help the secular world see that evangelicals are also interested in the well‐being of the commu‐ nity and that we should not be seen as a tribe of people who care about getting what they want. True enough. But here is the problem. The common good is made out of 80% (and that’s being conservative) propositions. Let’s wipe out malaria. Absolutely. Let’s prevent sex trafficking. Who would disagree with that? Let’s prevent child abuse. Right on. We can agree with every‐ one about these things. These are not the matters, though, which sep‐ arate us. What separate us are the things that already have been and remain the big controversies in our culture. What is the proper place for sex in a relationship? Big disagreement with the dominant cul‐ ture there. What is marriage? Again, a substantial cleavage. When does life begin? Look, it’s the trifecta! These fundamental debates 86
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are not easily resolved by a focus on the common good. It turns out that there are some rather large matters which remain hotly disputed and many of those are disputed by Christians as Christians. Empha‐ sizing the common good in a Christian conference will not make those things go away. And changing our focus away from these divi‐ sive matters will only make matters worse as we will lose momen‐ tum in those battles and leave the remaining fighters isolated, dispir‐ ited, marginalized, and weakened. What I am suggesting is that the battle is where the battle is. We might wish that we didn’t have to occupy the culturally disfavored position on gay marriage. We would prefer not to be so unhip as to argue that young people should not have sex outside of marriage. We don’t want to highlight the truth that abortion kills unborn children and that any scientific ambiguity that there ever was on that matter is well resolved in favor of life by virtue of what we see with our own eyes. More broadly, we don’t want to keep insisting that human be‐ ings are fallen creatures who live in sin and are hopeless without Jesus Christ. When I look at Q, its hosts, and the young people participating in it, I suspect I am seeing the cultural stance of those who have grown up in pervasively Christian subcultures. For them, rebelling means rebelling against Massive Baptist Church or Church Related Univer‐ sity or Clearly Wealthy Famous Preacherman. Those are the holders of power in their world. It is little wonder to them that the dominant culture dislikes us. We are hypocrites. We don’t measure up to our own standards. And we are judgmental while the secular world is more understanding. Or so it seems to them. But things look different from where I stand. I grew up as main‐ stream as mainstream gets. The big television networks, Sports Illus‐ trated (and its swimsuit issue), People Magazine, Dave Letterman’s show, the newspaper funny pages—these are the influences that thoroughly defined my view of the world. I was aware of Christiani‐ ty in a typical American and southern way, but it was just a given. It wasn’t anything I was very interested in or excited about. It was a cultural artifact. When I went to Florida State and moved into a dorm on campus, a couple of big things happened. First, I saw the way people live when they live in a thoroughly worldly manner. The drugs, the alcohol, the casual sex, the treatment of young women, the living for parties, etc. 87
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Second, I met the first really intentional Christians I’d ever known through Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. They were serious. They talked about Jesus Christ as a real person in their lives. They didn’t live a party lifestyle. They saved sex for marriage. They were inter‐ ested in reading the Bible carefully and learning about theologians. And they were really just totally and obviously different from every‐ one else on campus. I was impressed. And when I finally joined them, I felt as though I stepped from a meaningless life with no fu‐ ture into something real and vital and with a destiny to it. For that reason, I was then and am now perfectly willing to be seen as other andalien by the dominant culture. I think the kids who grew up in the Christian subculture often don’t have that same perspective. They are tired of being different, of fighting against broad cultural currents. They can just fight against evangelicalism by somehow reprising the fundamentalist‐modernist controversy in a new way. And the great thing is, they keep one foot in the world of faith and one in the more fashionable world. But those two feet are differently situated. One stands on a dock. The other on a boat slowly drifting away. A choice is imminent. Where will they be standing ten years from now?
: Given the rapid change in culture, Christians will have to sort out where they are on gay marriage. I suggest the following as a guide for reflection. Option One: Gay marriage is wrong both theologically and politi‐ cally. Neither the Jewish nor Christian faiths can be twisted into af‐ firming it theologically. (Andrew Sullivan agrees.) Without male‐ female complementarity, politics would not even exist. No communi‐ ty without that complementarity would even have a future. Male‐ female marriage and childbearing are at the heart of politics. Option Two: Gay marriage is clearly wrong theologically. There is nowhere for the church to go on the issue. However, the aspirations of politics can be different than the aspirations of faith. One possibil‐ ity would be to say that adults are free persons who have to make their own moral choices and those shouldn’t be regulated when they don’t directly interfere with the lives of others. 88
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Option Three: We can simply make a new decision theologically about gay marriage. Maybe we can even find a way to reinterpret sexuality within the Christian context. We can solve the theological problem. And politically, there is no problem. Politics is about majori‐ ties and the new majority is moving swiftly into place. What does it all mean for Christians? I would suggest that faithful Christians can find themselves embracing either option one or option two, but that option three is not available to anyone with any reason‐ able concern for orthodoxy.
: Iʹm always intrigued by the things my son says. We were talking about time travel. I suggested it would be interesting if you could time travel to the creation of Adam and Eve. He said, “That would be impossible.” I asked why. He said, “Because I am a sinful being and sinful beings were not permitted in the Garden of Eden.”
: By now, virtually everyone has taken note of the gigantic fall of one Donald Sterling, who is a billionaire and the owner of the Los Ange‐ les Clippers. The Clippers, usually not worthy of much note, have been playoff contenders this year while their hometown competition, the Los Angeles Lakers, have not. Sterling’s girlfriend recorded him making racist comments. In consequence, the National Basketball Association has taken the unprecedented step of banning him for life and fining him $2.5 million. It is highly likely that he will be pres‐ sured into selling the franchise. All of the action in the Sterling spectacle revolves around his histo‐ ry regarding race. He was known to treat minorities badly when they were tenants of his companies. And now that he has been recorded speaking ill of Magic Johnson, his status as a racist can no longer eas‐ ily be ignored. Even though he had managed to essentially purchase recognition from the NAACP in the past, his words were explosive enough to overwhelm what he’d been able to achieve with his check‐ book. But there is something that no one, really, is talking about. How did Donald Sterling’s attitude come to light? The answer is that his girlfriend recorded a conversation he had with her. And that is the thing that has been missed in the swirling controversy. Donald Sterling is a married man. In an interview with ESPN’s Colin Cow‐ 89
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herd, Larry King noted with some disapproval the way Sterling ap‐ peared at games with his mistresses, but for the most part Sterling’s serial infidelity has been dismissed as a matter of very little import. It seems to me that the Sterling story tells us a great deal about our culture today. Donald Sterling’s poor treatment of minority tenants didn’t sink him. His repeated, in the face, cheating on his wife wasn’t the cause of the tsunami of disapproval and punishment he is experi‐ encing today. No, it was the fact that he spoke in an ugly way about Magic Johnson that sunk him beneath the waves. The impact of all this is dispiriting. We place extraordinarily little value on marriage today. I am not sure how it happened that saying something mean and stupid be‐ came a sin a thousand times worse than cheating on one’s spouse, but that is how it is now. It would be better for us as a nation if outrage had been directed at Sterling much, much earlier. He thought he could do anything, including bringing mistresses to games. Nobody cared. I have a theory for why things turned out as they did. We’ve lost much of our sense of right and wrong. We don’t know what marriage is. We can’t make out the difference between legitimate business and taking advantage. The only thing we are really sure about is that rac‐ ism is wrong. So, we scream pretty loud when someone crosses the line. Racism seems to have become something close to our last taboo. But the lessons being learned in this nasty business are all the wrong ones. There is little about this affair that would lead to right‐ eousness. Rather, the lessons are more like trust no one and if you think bad things, make sure you don’t tell anybody.
: As I drove in to work I heard a media personality offering his views on life, the universe, and everything. On this day he dwelt at length on the issue of social responsibility. Do you think a certain pillar of the community is a good and hon‐ est man? Not so fast, this man objected. What if turns out that he has engaged in insider trading? And did you criticize Tiger Woods for marital infidelity? How do you know that your favorite athlete is not likewise involved in such activities or worse? Do you make an effort to drink “fair trade” coffee because you are concerned for the eco‐ 90
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nomic situation of growers and workers in the developing world? Don’t you know that there is no standard definition of “fair trade” in the coffee business? It’s just a way to get more money from you. Mo‐ rality, social responsibility? Bah, just marketing! We could go on in this vein. It has ever been a popular endeavor to undermine good deeds and those who perform them, thus proving that no one, anywhere, is really worthy of emulation or admiration. So give up, already! I once sat in a St. Louis donut shop with my wife and children. A group of senior citizens sat nearby and talked as they enjoyed their coffee. One of the old men smiled as he talked about how it had re‐ cently been his brother’s birthday. He said his brother was a priest and never had much money. He had been pleased to send the poor priest a little something to spend on himself for his birthday. It was clear that he was proud of his sibling’s commitment to a life of pov‐ erty and charity. This simple statement about a good life lived by a member of the clergy was too much for another man at the table to allow to stand. He immediately jumped in with a reminder about priests who have molested children. It was important for him to scat‐ ter some dirt around. Let us yield the point that no human being this side of Jesus Christ has lived a perfect life. Let us further admit that even the very good man or woman that you know has at some point in the past done something wrong or maybe will do something wrong tomorrow. Perhaps we would be horrified by the inner struggle going on inside the best person we know. But the logic here is all wrong. Those who argue in the way I have described are basically engaged in a cancerous project. They try to keep us from holding ourselves to a higher standard or emulating the good acts of others by constantly reminding us that we may just all be suckers. The real message is something like this: “Don’t deny yourself anything or make sacrifices for others. You think it’s noble, but it isn’t. It’s just a big con. Nobody really keeps promises or honors commitments when it isn’t to their advantage.” Such people tell themselves that they are giving us the hard truth, but they are deceiving themselves and others. It is no great insight to know that the world is full of dirty, self‐dealing behavior. But we also know something better. It is foolish to mistake the evil men do for a guide to living. 91
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: I was raised with as great an emphasis upon respecting my elders as you can have. This is another way of saying I was raised in the south and in the southern way. Though I am in my forties, I am con‐ stitutionally unable to refer to older men in authority by their first names. The scholar Ralph Wood recently invited me to call him by his first name, I had to beg off so as not to destroy my digestion. Nevertheless, as a teenager my pride rose up within me and my re‐ spect for older persons plummeted. I still remember with embar‐ rassment the time when I told my sister that we had “surpassed” mom and dad. Happily, it was a temporary effect, but I observe it today among other young people and have wondered what is the cause of it. After thinking about it for some time, I think I have the answer. When young people look at adults, they see them as fixed in their positions. You are a secretary. You are a teacher. You are a vice‐ principal who wears out of date French cuffs to the prom. You are managing a restaurant. It doesn’t matter what or who you are. Your cake is baked. At least that’s the way the young person tends to see it. They, on the other hand, live in a world of possibility. In your case, we have solved for x, but in their case x remains an open question. The young still hold out billionaire, celebrity, American Idol, and Tony Stark as possible outcomes in their own lives. As a result, when many young people measure themselves against adults, they compare their x versus the adult’s x and find that un‐ known x largely trumps defined x. In other words, if I may be greater than you, then I’ll assume I probably am greater than you. And if that is so, why should I respect you, listen to you, accept your authority over me, etc.? Respect is a matter of algebra.
: Jerry Brown is the governor of California. Jerry Brown has always been governor of California. Jerry Brown will always be the governor of California. California is Jerry Brown. And Jerry Brown is Califor‐ nia. 92
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Though Jerry Brown’s father once appeared to be governor of Cali‐ fornia, his governorship was only apparent and only a trusteeship of sorts for the true occupant of the office, Jerry Brown. Pat Brown could not actually execute the office belonging naturally to Jerry Brown, but he took it as a duty imposed by the universe to serve as governor until Jerry Brown could fully manifest in his gubernatorial form. (Some may mistakenly believe that Arnold Schwarzenegger was once governor of California, they are confused by the film Total Recall in which the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger visited a virtual reality shop and was there convinced that he was the governor of Califor‐ nia.) In due time, California will be known more properly by its true name: JerryBrownifornia.
: When I was a young child (grade school age), my parents spent a few years at the local Episcopal church. I was actually baptized there when my sister was christened as an infant. (I have since been bap‐ tized as an adult after my conversion.) Though I did not understand much about church at that time, I tended to spend the hours looking at the stained glass that filled the two long sides of the chapel. How many times did I stare at the woman wiping Christ’s feet with her hair? Some time ago my father and I ventured downtown to eat at a new pizza place. I wanted to walk around and take in the sights around my small home city. There was the church we had attended. We tried to get in, but the doors to the chapel were locked. I wandered around until I found an open door. After I explained my desire to see the inside of the chapel to the secretary, she found the priest. He was a young guy with red hair and beard. We went together into the small sanctuary. The beautiful stained glass was still there. So, too, was the rich, dark wood of the pews and the arched ceiling. I asked if I could take some pictures. He welcomed me to do so. We began talking about the beauty of the church and how it aids in worship by transporting the mind toward the transcendent. I told him my pet theory that young people will want more liturgy and worship and less emphasis on 93
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preaching because preaching is content and content is available 24‐7 on your phone, in the car, while walking, etc. (The preachers are ris‐ ing up against me as they read this bit. Forgive me!) It was a pleasant conversation and it was good to be in that place with a hallowed feeling. But then he addressed the one thing I hoped he would not talk about, which has become a new gospel for many in the Episcopal church. He talked about gay marriage, its inevitability, and our acceptance of it in the church. I felt it was the wrong moment for him to bring that up. Maybe he wanted to see if I knew the secret handshake. In any case, no more time to bask in memories. Maintain‐ ing a cheerful demeanor, I thanked him for allowing me into the chapel, and walked out into the bright sun of the spring afternoon. After I left, I wondered whether I should have engaged the ques‐ tion with him. I could have worked through one of my hobbyhorses, which is that while there is room to talk about gay marriage in the context of politics (a libertarian turn of sorts), there is nowhere to go on the issue theologically. I might have said with Martin Luther King, Jr. that the church must be a thermostat (something that affects the environment) rather than a thermometer (something that simply tells you what the environment is). But to tell you the truth, I was a little heartsick and in no mood to dispute.
: Every now and then I return to a powerful, little book by Thomas Howard from 1967. The title is Christ the Tiger. There is something great about the name. The author wrote memorably about an architect friend of his: He worried me because he loved God and life at the same time. It had always been one or the other for me. When I had tried to pursue God, I had fled from life. When life began to be dazzling, I had let God slip. I would have called his voluptuous zest for life pagan except that it was not only matched by his appetite for God: it was part of it. He loved heraldry and John Donne and St. Benedict and four‐centered arches and beer and the Mass and bodies and Bach with none of the usual ti‐ midity brought to these things by religious people. I had felt there was a point at which joy becomes indecorous and that religious categories 94
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asked that one become too enthusiastic about anything short of God, whom I understood to be a spirit. I was jarred to discover that my friend had no dichotomy in his mind between spiritual things and oth‐ er things. Upon reading the passage, one may not be surprised to learn that Howard eventually became a Catholic. Tiber‐swimming is not my point, so forgive a little Roman particularity on the author’s part. What I love about this brief text is the full integration of life it sug‐ gests. A man or woman of integrity is a person who is integrated. By the way, do you know who I think about when I read that pas‐ sage? I think of Bill Buckley.
: Little Grace Baker disapproved of April Foolʹs Day. “Itʹs just lying, Daddy!”
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. 95
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4THE`WORD`SPOKEN$ Charles Haddon Spurgeon In each volume of T H E C I T Y , we reprint a passage from great leaders of the faith. Here we present a sermon delivered by the great Baptist preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon, delivered on July 3rd, 1890 at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London, where he was minister from 18541892. It was part of a series of sermons on Ecclesiastes, in this case Chapter 11 verse 4: “He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.”
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ow when the time comes, whatever wind blows. Reap when the times comes, whatever clouds are in the sky. There are, howev‐ er, qualifying proverbs, which must influence our actions. We are not to discard prudence in the choice of the time for our work. “To every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.” It is well to sow when the weather is propitious. It is wise to “make hay while the sun shines.” Cut your corn when there is the probability of getting it dry. But Solomon here is pushing the other side of the matter. He had seen prudence turn to idleness; he had noticed some people wait for a more convenient season, which never came. He had observed slug‐ gards making excuses, which did not hold water. So he, with a blunt word, generalizes, in order to make the truth more forcible. Not troubling about the exceptions to the rule, he states it broadly thus: “Take no notice of winds or clouds. Go one with your work whatever happens. ʹHe that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that re‐ gardeth the clouds shall not reap.ʹ“ The first thought that is suggested by these words is this: natural difficulties may be unduly considered. A man may observe the wind, and regard the clouds a great deal too much, and so neither sow nor reap. Note here, first, that in any work this would hinder a man. In any labour to which we set our hand, if we take too much notice of the difficulties, we shall be hindered in it. It is very wise to know the difficulty of your calling, the sorrow which comes with it, the trial which arises out of it, the temptation connected therewith; but if you think too much of these things, there is no calling that will be carried on with any success. Poor farmers, they have a crop of hay and can‐ 97
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not get it in; they may fret themselves to death if they like, and never earn a penny for a seven yearsʹ fretting! We say of their calling that it is surrounded with constant trouble. They may lose everything just at the moment when they are about to gather it in. The seed may per‐ ish under the clods when it is first sown. It is subject to blight and mildew, and bird, and worm, and I know not what beside; and then, at the last, when the farmer is about to reap the harvest, it may dis‐ appear before the sickle can cut it. Take the case of the sailor. If he regards winds and clouds, will he ever be put to sea? Can you give him a promise that the wind will be favourable in any of his voyages, or that he will reach his desired haven without a tempest? He that observeth the winds and clouds, will not sail; and he that regardeth the clouds will never cross the mighty deep. If you turn from the farmer and the sailor, and come to the trader, what tradesman will do anything if he is always worrying about the competition, and about the difficulties of his trade, which is so cut up that there is no making a living by it? I have heard this, I think, about every trade, and yet our friends keep on living, and some of them get rich, when they are supposed to be losing money every year! He that regardeth the rise and fall of prices, and is timid, and will do no trading because of the changes on the market, will not reap. If you come to the working‐man, it is the same as with those I have mentioned; for there is no calling or occupation that is not surround‐ ed with difficulties. In fact, I have formed this judgment from what friends have told me, that every trade is the worst trade out; for I have found somebody in that particular line who has proved this to a demonstration. I cannot say that I am an implicit believer in all I hear about this matter. Still, if I were, this would be the conclusion that I should come to, that he that observed the circumstances of any trade or calling, would never engage in it at all; he would never sow; and he would never reap. I suppose he would go to bed, and sleep all the four‐and‐twenty hours of the day; and after a while, I am afraid he would find it become impossible even to do that, and he would learn that to turn, with the sluggard, like a door on its hinges, is not unal‐ loyed pleasure after all. Well now, dear friends, if there be these difficulties in connection with earthly callings and trades, do you expect there will be nothing of the kind with regard to heavenly things? Do you imagine that, in 98
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sowing the good seed of the kingdom, and gathering the sheaves into the garner, you will have no difficulties and disappointments? Do you dream that, when you are bound for heaven, you are to have smooth sailing and propitious winds all the voyage? Do you think that, in your heavenly trading, you will have less trials than the mer‐ chant who has only to do with earthly business? If you do, you make a great mistake. You will not be likely to enter upon the heavenly calling, if you do nothing else but unduly consider the difficulties surrounding it. But, next, in the work of liberality this would stay us. This is Solo‐ monʹs theme here. “Cast thy bread upon the waters:” “Give a portion to seven, and also to eight;” and so on. He means, by my text, that if anybody occupies his mind unduly with the difficulties connected with liberality, he will do nothing in that line. “He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.” “How am I to know,” says one, “that the person to whom I give my money is really deserving? How do I know what he will do with it? How do I know but what I may be encouraging idleness or begging? By giving to the man, I may be doing him real injury.” Perhaps you are not asked to give to an individual, but to some great work. Then, if you regard the clouds, you will begin to say, “How do I know that this work will be successful, the sending of missionaries to a cultivat‐ ed people like the Hindoos? Is it likely that they will be converted?” You will not sow, and you will not reap, if you talk like that; yet there are many who do speak in that fashion. There was never an enterprise started yet but somebody objected to it; and I do not believe that the best work that Christ himself ever did was beyond criticism; there were some people who were sure to find some fault with it. “But,” says another, “I have heard that the man‐ agement at headquarters is not all it ought to be; I think that there is too much money spent on the secretary, and that there is a great deal lost in this direction and in that.” Well, dear friend, it goes without saying that if you managed things, they would be managed perfectly; but, you see, you cannot do everything, and therefore you must trust somebody. I can only say, with regard to societies, agencies, works, and missions of all kinds, “He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.” If that is what you are doing, finding out imperfections and difficulties, it will end in this, you will do nothing at all. 99
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Going a little further, as this is true of common occupations and of liberality, so it is especially true in the work of serving God. Now, if I were to consider in my mind nothing but the natural depravity of man, I should never preach again. To preach the gospel to sinners, is as foolish a thing as to bid dead men rise out of their graves. For that reason I do it, because it has pleased God, “by the foolishness of preaching, to save them that believe.” When I look upon the aliena‐ tion from God, the hardness of the human heart, I see that old Adam is too strong for me; and if I regarded that one cloud of the fall, and original sin, and the natural depravity of man, I, for one, should nei‐ ther sow nor reap. I am afraid that there has been a good deal of this, however. Many preachers have contemplated the ruin of man, and they have had so clear a view of it that they dare not say, “Thus saith the Lord, Ye dry bones, live.” They are unable to cry, “Dear Master, speak through us, and say, ʹLazarus, come forth!ʹ” Some seem to say, “Go and see if Lazarus has any kind of feeling of his condition in the grave. If so, I will call him out, because I believe he can come;” thus putting all the burden on Lazarus, and depending upon Lazarus for it. But we say, “Though he has been dead four days, and is already becoming corrupt, that has nothing to do with us. If our Master bids us call him out from his grave, we can call him out, and he will come; not because he can come by his own power, but because God can make him come, for the time now is when they that are in their graves shall hear the voice of God, and they that shall hear shall live. But, dear friends, there are persons to whom we should never go to seek their salvation if we regarded the winds and the clouds, for they are peculiarly bad people. You know, from observation, that there are some persons who are much worse than others, some who are not amenable to kindness, or any other human treatment. They do not seem to be terrified by law, or affected by love. We know people who go into a horrible temper every now and then, and all the hope we had of them is blown away, like sere leaves in the autumn wind. You know such, and you “fight shy” with them. There are such boys, and there are such girls, full of mischief, and levity, or full of malice and bitterness; and you say to yourself, “I cannot do anything with them. It is of no use.” Just so. You are observing the winds, and regarding the clouds. You will not be one of those to whom Isaiah says, “Blessed be ye that sow beside all waters.”
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ome one may say, “I would not mind the moral condition of the people, but it is their surroundings that are the trouble. What is the use of trying to save a man while he lives, as he does, in such a horrible street, in one room? What is the use of seeking to raise such and such a woman while she is surrounded, as she is, with such examples? The very atmosphere seems tainted.” Just so, dear friend; while you observe the winds, and regard the clouds, you will now sow, and you will not reap. You will not attempt the work, and of course you will not complete what you do not commence. So, you know, you can go on making all kinds of excuses for doing nothing with certain people, because you feel or think that they are not those whom God is likely to bless. I know this to be a common case, even with very serious and earnest workers for Christ. Let it not be so with you, dear friends; but be you one of those who obey the poetʹs words: “Beside all waters sow; The highway furrows stock; Drop it where thorns and thistles grow; Scatter it on the rock.” Let me carry this principle, however, a little further. You may undu‐ ly consider circumstances in reference to the business of your own eternal life. You may, in that matter, observe the winds, and never sow; you may regard the clouds, and never reap. “I feel,” says one, “as if I never can be saved. There never was such a sinner as I am. My sins are peculiarly black.” Yes, and if you keep on regarding them, and do not remember the Saviour, and his infinite power to save, you will not sow in prayer and faith. “Ah, sir; but you do not know the horrible thoughts I have, the dark forebodings that cross my mind!” I know that, dear friend; I do not know them. I know what I feel my‐ self, and I expect that your feelings are very like my own; but, be what they may, if, instead of looking to Christ, you are always study‐ ing your own condition, your own withered hopes, your own broken resolutions, then you will still keep where you are, and you will nei‐ ther sow nor reap. Beloved Christians, you who have been believers for years, if you begin to live by your frames and feelings, you will get into the same condition. “I do not feel like praying,” says one. Then is the time when you ought to pray most, for you are evidently most in need; but if you keep observing whether or not you are in the proper frame of mind for prayer, you will not pray. “I cannot grasp the promises,” says another; “I should like to joy in God, and firmly believe in his Word; but I do not see anything in myself that can minister to my 101
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comfort.” Suppose you do not. Are you, after all, going to build upon yourself? Are you trying to find your ground of consolation in your own heart? If so, you are on the wrong tack. Our hope is not in self, but in Christ; let us go and sow it. Our hope is in the finished work of Christ; let us go and reap it; for, if we keep on regarding the winds and the clouds, we shall neither sow nor reap. I think it is a great lesson to learn in spiritual things, to believe in Christ, and his fin‐ ished salvation, quite as much as when you are down as when you are up; for Christ is not more Christ on the top of the mountain than he is in the bottom of the valley, and he is no less Christ in the storm by midnight than he is in the sunshine by day. Do not begin to meas‐ ure your safety by your comfort; but measure it by the eternal Word of God, which you have believed, and which you know to be true, and on which you rest; for still here, within the little world of our bosom, “he that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that re‐ gardeth the clouds shall not reap.” We want to get out of that idea altogether.
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have said enough to prove the truth of my first observation, namely, that natural difficulties may be unduly considered. My second observation is this: such consideration involves us in several sins. If we keep on observing circumstances, instead of trusting God, we shall be guilty of disobedience. God bids me sow: I do not sow, because the wind would blow some of my seed away. God bids me reap: I do not reap, because there is a black cloud there, and before I can house the harvest, some of it may be spoiled. I may say what I like; but I am guilty of disobedience. I have not done what I was bid‐ den to do. I have made an excuse of the weather; but I have been dis‐ obedient. Dear friends, it is yours to do what God bids you do, whether the heavens fall down or not; and, if you knew they would fall, and you could prop them up by disobedience, you have no right to do it. What may happen from our doing right, we have nothing to do with; we are to do right, and take the consequences cheerfully. Do you want obedience to be always rewarded by a spoonful of sugar? Are you such a baby that you will do nothing unless there shall be some little toy for you directly after? A man in Christ Jesus will do right, though it shall involve him in losses and crosses, slanders and rebukes; yea, even martyrdom itself. May God help you so to do! He 102
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that observeth the wind, and does not sow when he is bidden to cast his seed upon the waters, is guilty of disobedience. Next, we are guilty also of unbelief, if we cannot sow because of the wind. Who manages the wind? You distrust him who is Lord of the north, and south, and east, and west. If you cannot reap because of a cloud, you doubt him who makes the clouds, to whom the clouds are the dust of his feet. Where is your faith? Where is your faith? “Ah!” says one, “I can serve God when I am helped, when I am moved, when I can see a hope of success.” That is poor service, service de‐ void of faith. May I not say of it, “Without faith it is impossible to please God”? Just in proportion to the quantity of faith, that there is in what we do, in that proportion will it be acceptable with God. Ob‐ serving of winds and clouds is unbelief. We may call it prudence; but unbelief is its true name. The next sin is really rebellion. So you will not sow unless God chooses to make the wind blow your way; and you will not reap un‐ less God pleases to drive the clouds away? I call that revolt, rebellion. An honest subject loves the king in all weathers. The true servant serves his master, let his master do what he wills. Oh, dear friends, we are too often aiming at Godʹs throne! We want to get up there, and manage things: Snatch from his hand the balance and the rod, Rejudge his judgments, be the god of God. Oh, if he would but alter my circumstances! What is this but tempt‐ ing God, as they did in the wilderness, wishing him to do other than he does? It is wishing him to do wrong; for what he does is always right; but we must not so rebel, and vex his Holy Spirit, by complain‐ ing of what he does. Do you not see that this is trying to throw the blame of our shortcomings upon the Lord? “If we do not sow, do not blame us; God did not send the right wind. If we did not reap, pray not to censure us; how could we be expected to reap, while there were clouds in the skies?” What is this but a wicked endeavour to blame God for our own neglect and wrong‐doing, and to make Di‐
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vine Providence the pack‐horse upon which we pile our sins? God save us from such rebellion as that! Another sin of which we are guilty, when we are always looking at our circumstances, is this, foolish fear. Though we may think that there is no sin in it, there is great sin in foolish fear. God has com‐ manded his people not to fear; then we should obey him. There is a cloud; why do you fear it? It will be gone directly; not a drop of rain may fall out of it. You are afraid of the wind; why fear it? It may nev‐ er come. Even if it were some deadly wind that was approaching, it might shift about, and not come near you. We are often fearing what never happens. We feel a thousand deaths in fearing one. Many a person has been afraid of what never would occur. It is a great pity to whip yourselves with imaginary rods. Wait till the trouble comes; else I shall have to tell you the story I have often repeated of the mother whose child would cry. She told it not to cry, but it would cry. “Well,” she said, “if you will cry, I will give you something to cry for.” If you get fearing about nothing, the probability is that you will get something really to fear, for God does not love his people to be fools. There are some who fall into the sin of penuriousness. Observe, that Solomon was here speaking of liberality. He that observeth the clouds and the winds thinks “That is not a good object to help,” and that he will do harm if he gives here, or if he gives there. It amounts to this, poor miser, you want to save your money! Oh, the ways we have of making buttons with which to secure the safety of our pock‐ ets! Some persons have a button manufactory always ready. They have always a reason for not giving to anything that is proposed to them, or to any poor person who asks their help. I pray that every child of God here may avoid that sin. “Freely ye have received, freely give.” And since you are stewards of a generous Master, let it never be said that the most liberal of Lords has the stingiest of stewards. Another sin is often called idleness. The man who does not sow because of the wind, is usually too lazy to sow; and the man who does not reap because of the clouds is the man who wants a little more sleep, and a little more slumber, and a little more folding of the hands to sleep. If we do not want to serve God, it is wonderful how many reasons we can find. According to Solomon, the sluggard said there was a lion in the streets. “There is a lion in the way,” said he, “ a lion is in the streets.” 104
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What a lie it was, for lions are as much afraid of streets as men are of deserts! Lions do not come into streets. It was idleness that said the lion was there. You were asked to preach the other night, and you could preach, but you said, no, you could not preach. However, you attended a political meeting, did you not, and talked twice as long as you would have done if you had preached? Another friend, asked to teach in Sunday‐school, said, “I have no gifts of teaching.” Somebody afterwards remarked of you that you had no gifts of teaching, and you felt very vexed, and asked what right had anyone to say that of you? I have heard persons run them‐ selves down, when they have been invited to any Christian work, as being altogether disqualified; and when somebody has afterwards said, “That is true, you cannot do anything, I know,” they have looked as if they would knock the speaker down. Oh, yes, yes, yes, we are always making these excuses about winds and clouds, and there is nothing in either of them. It is all meant to save our corn‐ seed, and to save us the trouble of sowing it. Do you not see, I have made out a long list of sins wrapped up in this observing of winds and clouds? If you have been guilty of any of them, repent of your wrong‐doing, and do not repeat it.
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will not keep you longer over this part of the subject. I will now make a third remark very briefly: let us prove that we have not fallen into this evil. How can we prove it? Let us prove it, firstly by sow‐ ing in the most unlikely places. What says Solomon? “Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.” Go, my brothers and sisters, and find out the most unlikely people, and begin to work for God with them. Now, try, if you can, to pick out the worst street in your neighbourhood, and visit from house to house, and if there is a man or woman more given up than another, make that per‐ son the object of your prayers and of your holy endeavours. Cast your bread upon the waters; then it will be seen that you are trusting God, not trusting the soil, nor trusting the seed. Next, prove it by doing good to a great many. “Give a portion to seven, and also to eight.” Talk of Christ to everybody you meet with. If God has not blessed you to one, try another; and if he has blessed you with one, try two others; and if he has blessed you to two others, try four others; and always keep on enlarging your seed‐plot as your 105
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harvest comes in. If you are doing much, it will be shown that you are not regarding the winds and the clouds. Further, prove that you are not regarding winds and clouds by wisely learning from the clouds another lesson than the one they seem made to teach. Learn this lesson: “If the clouds be full of rain, they empty themselves upon the earth;” and say to yourself, “If God has made me full of grace, I will go and pour it out to others. I know the joy of being saved, if I have had fellowship with him, I will make a point of being more industrious than ever, because God has been unusually gracious to me. My fulness shall be helpful to others. I will empty myself for the good of others, even as the clouds pour down the rain upon the earth.” Then, beloved, prove it still by not wanting to know how God will work. There is a great mystery of birth, how the human soul comes to inhabit the body of the child, and how the child is fashioned. Thou knowest nothing about it, and thou canst not know. Therefore do not look about thee to see what thou canst not understand, and pry into what is concealed from thee. Go out and work; go out and preach; go out and instruct others. Go out to seek to win souls. Thus shalt thou prove, in very truth, that thou art not dependent upon surroundings and circumstances. Again, dear friend, prove this by consistent diligence. “In the morn‐ ing sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand.” “Be instant in season, out of season.” I had a friend, who had learned the way to put a peculiar meaning upon that passage of Scripture, “Let not thy right hand know what thy left hand doeth.” He thought that the best way was to have money in both pockets; put one hand into each pocket, and then put both hands on the collection plate. I never objected to this interpretation of the passage. Now, the way to serve Christ is to do all you possibly can, and then as much more. “No,” says you, “that cannot be.” I do not know that it cannot be. I found that the best thing I ever did was a thing I could not do. What I could do well, that was my own; but what I could not do, but still did, in the name and strength of the Eternal Jehovah, was the best thing I had done. Beloved, sow in the morning, sow in the evening, sow at night, sow all day long, for you can never tell what God will bless; but by this constant sowing, you will prove to demonstration that you are not observing the winds, nor regarding the clouds. 106
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now come to my concluding observation: let us keep this evil out of our hearts as well as out of our work. And, first, let us give no heed to the winds and clouds of doctrine that are everywhere about us now. Blow, blow, ye stormy winds; but you shall not move me. Clouds of hypotheses and inventions, come up with you, as many as you please, till you darken all the sky; but I will not fear you. Such clouds have come before, and have disappeared, and these will dis‐ appear, too. If you sit down, and think of manʹs inventions of error, and their novel doctrines, and how the churches have been be‐ witched by them, you will get into such a state of mind that you will neither sow nor reap. Just forget them. Give yourself to your holy service as if there were no winds and no clouds; and God will give you such comfort in your soul that you will rejoice before him, and be confident in his truth. And then, next, let us not lose hope because of doubts and tempta‐ tions. When the clouds and the winds get into your heart, when you do not feel as you used to feel, when you have not that joy and elas‐ ticity of spirit you once had, when your ardour seems a little damped, and even your faith begins to hesitate a little, go you to God all the same. Trust him still. And when thine eye of faith grows dim, Still hold to Jesus, sink or swim; Still at his footstool bow the knee, And Israelʹs God thy strength shall be. Do not go up and down like the mercury in the weather‐glass; but know what you know, and believe what you believe. Hold to it, and God keep you in one mind, so that none can turn you; for, if not, if you begin to notice these things, you will neither sow nor reap. Lastly, let us follow the Lordʹs mind, and come what will. In a word, set your face, like a flint, to serve God, by the maintenance of his truth, by your holy life, by the savour of your Christian character; and, that being done, defy earth and hell. If there were a crowd of devils between you and Christ, kick a lane through them by holy faith. They will fly before you. If you have but the courage to make an advance, they cannot stop you. You shall make a clear gangway through legions of them. Only be strong, and of good courage, and 107
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do not regard even the clouds from hell, or the blasts from the infer‐ nal pit; but go straight on in the path of right, and God being with you, you shall sow and you shall reap, unto his eternal glory. Will some poor sinner here to‐night, whether he sinks or swims, trust Christ? Come, if you feel less inclined to‐night to hope, than you ever did before. Have hope even now; hope against hope; belief against belief. Cast yourself on Christ, even though he may seem to stand with a drawn sword in his hand, to run you through; trust even an angry Christ. Though your sins have grieved him, come and trust him. Do not stop for winds to blow over, or clouds to burst. Just as thou art, without one trace of anything that is good about thee, come and trust Christ as thy Saviour, and thou art saved. God give you grace to do so, for Jesusʹ sake! Amen.
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