The City: Summer 2009

THE CITY The Iconoclast, as printed in The Everlasting Man, authored by Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Beaconsfield, England, 1925.

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s soon as I had clearly in my mind this conception of something solid in the solitary and unique character of the divine story, it struck me that there was exactly the same strange and yet solid character in the human story that had led up to it; because that human story also had a root that was divine. I mean that just as the Church seems to grow more remarkable when it is fairly compared with the common religious life of mankind, so mankind itself seems to grow more remarkable when we compare it with the common life of nature. And I have noticed that most modern history is driven to something like sophistry, first to soften the sharp transition from animals to men, and then to soften the sharp transition from heathens to Christians. Now the more we really read in a realistic spirit of those two transitions the sharper we shall find them to be. It is because the critics are not detached that they do not see this detachment; it is because they are not looking at things in a dry light that they cannot see the difference between black & white. It is because they are in a particular mood of reaction and revolt that they have a motive for making out that all the white is dirty grey & the black not so black as it is painted. I do not say there are not human excuses for their revolt; I do not say it is not in some ways sympathetic; what I say is that it is not in any way scientific.

An iconoclast may be indignant; an iconoclast may be justly indignant; but an iconoclast is not impartial. And it is stark hypocrisy to pretend that nine-tenths of the higher critics & scientific evolutionists & professors of comparative religion are in the least impartial. Why should they be impartial, what is being impartial, when the whole world is at war about whether one thing is a devouring superstition or a divine hope?

A publication of Houston Baptist University

Summer 2009

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THE CITY Publisher Robert Sloan Advisory Editors Francis J. Beckwith Adam Bellow Paul J. Bonicelli Joseph Bottum Hugh Hewitt Ramesh Ponnuru Editor Benjamin Domenech Reviews Editor Micah Mattix Contributing Editors Ryan T. Anderson Hunter Baker Joe P. Carter Victoria C. Gardner Coates Christopher Hammons Joseph M. Knippenberg Louis Markos Dan McLaughlin Joshua Trevino Pejman Yousefzadeh THE C ITY Volume II, Issue 2 Copyright 2009 Houston Baptist University. All rights reserved by original authors except as noted. Submissions and letters to this journal are welcomed. Subscriptions are free of charge. Cover photo by Katya Horner. We welcome your emails to us at thecity@hbu.edu. Visit us online at our website, civitate.org.

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Contents a very model of a modern evangelical John Mark Reynolds + Francis J. Beckwith Matthew Lee Anderson features The Soul & The City + Wilfred McClay Who Owns Science? + Hunter Baker Solzhenitsyn & Our Future + Peter Augustine Lawler Obama & Abortion + Robert P. George On Marriage + Jonathan Rauch & Joseph M. Knippenberg Christ in the Classroom + Louis Markos poetry Lovejoy Street = A.E. Stallings books Updike’s Run : Russell D. Moore Gore Walk : Matthew J. Milliner The Media’s Blind Spot : Jordan Ballor Aid For Africa : Paul J. Bonicelli the word Leadership & Politics + St. John Chrysostom 3

Lovejoy Street The house where we were happy, Perhaps it's standing still On the wrong side of the railroad tracks Half-way down the hill.

Perhaps new people live there Who think the street name quaint, And watch the dogwood petals shiver Down like flakes of paint.

Perhaps they hold each other When the train goes railing by, Shaking up the windowpanes And dressing down the sky.

And perhaps it strikes them rich When spring is making shift, To find the bank in blooming pink Where we had planted thrift.

Perhaps they reap our roses In an antique jelly jar.

And maybe they are happy there, And do not know they are.

A.E. Stallings is an award-winning American poet and classicist.

Her collections include Archaic Smile and Hapax . She lives in Athens, Greece.

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T H E S OU L & THE CITY [the0house0of0our0realities{

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Wilfred McClay

ven with all our prosperity and freedom, there is much that is amiss in the ways we live today—not only in our individual lives, but in the larger patterns of habitation that we have devised for ourselves. The built environment matters, not only for our bodies but for our souls, and the souls of our brothers and sisters and neighbors.

Somehow we all know this to be the case. And yet Christians, as Christians, seem to have had very little that is useful or insightful to say about these matters. This represents a serious failure on our part.

It means we have fallen short in the fundamental Christian responsibility to attend to the careful and reverent stewardship of creation. It may mean that in our zeal to speak of final things we have forgotten first things—and one of the first things to know about Christianity is that it is an incarnational faith which celebrates the goodness of the created order, in which God became man, in which the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, in which the promised vision of the end of time is not a world of disembodied spirits, but of the flesh, resurrected and perfected. If you fully take in that thought, you will soon realize that, whatever else it may be, the physical world cannot be thought of as a mere moral obstacle course that we run on the way to eternity.

Even without such religious assumptions in our minds, we should be able to see that there are, as we say these days, feedback effects of our physical environments, ways in which the rooms and corridors 5

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and buildings and streets and landscapes and skyscapes through which we move have their effects upon us, and end up influencing us, often in very profound ways. Hence the choices we make about the places where we choose to situate ourselves—keeping always in mind that there are many things that we cannot choose about our lives—are of great moment.

Such choices have particular importance when they relate to the built environment. Winston Churchill gave a speech in October of 1943, in the midst of the still-raging Second World War, that expressed the matter perfectly, as he so often had a talent for doing. The German air force had destroyed the British House of Commons building in an air raid on May 10, 1941, and, after a period of time in which the Parliament had moved temporarily to the House of Lords, it was now possible to contemplate rebuilding the House of Commons. But how closely should the new structure follow the old lines? Or was it an appropriate moment to contemplate alterations and improvements? A larger, more spacious meeting chamber, for example? Churchill thought that any such change would be a matter of the utmost importance, hence he chose to weigh in forcefully on the matter, as Prime Minister and national leader.

Churchill did not have a professional's understanding of architecture. But he showed at the outset that he understood what was at stake better than a whole battalion of experts. "We shape our buildings," he said, "and afterwards our buildings shape us." He went on to explain, briefly but powerfully, why the Commons building should be rebuilt exactly as before, and on the same foundations. This was not merely a sentimental gesture, born of a desire to maintain aesthetic continuity with the past; or a patriotic one, meant to keep faith with the ancestors.

It was meant to preserve functional continuity as well.

The preservation of the shape and size of the small oblong Chamber of the Commons might seem a matter of indifference. But Churchill insisted otherwise. Parliamentary government had flourished in Britain within precisely these structures, and partly because of these structures. The shape of the building crucially influenced the way that political factions organized themselves, and the manner in which debate 6

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was conducted. Churchill even argued that the Chamber should not be big enough to contain all its members at once, precisely so that occasions requiring momentous acts of deliberation would be attended by a proper “sense of crowd and urgency.� To alter the sense of place of that chamber, he argued, was to tinker with the most fundamental institutions of British government and society.

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his is a beautiful statement of the feedback effect that links our souls to our built environments. But that is of course not the whole truth of the matter so far as orthodox Christianity is concerned. In the first place, Christianity is not deterministic, so that the environment may condition, but it does not dictate, the outcome of human affairs. Moreover, the Christian believes that things are out of joint, the natural order has been corrupted by sin and death, and the soul of man stands in disordered relationship to that already corrupted order. Hence, in our fallen state we often experience a tension between affirming the world's beauty and guarding against its temptations.

That tension is central to the Christian faith. Think how often, and how darkly, Jesus warned us about "the world," and pointedly insisted that His Kingdom is not of this world. Are we not called, in part, to overcome the world just as He did? And think of this: In a perfectly harmonious and commodious world, how could we ever learn the truth of the words, "greater is He that is in us than he that is in the world"? Isn't it a part of our calling, at times, and a part of our growth as spiritual beings, to find it in ourselves to transcend the world, to walk by faith rather than sight, by what is beyond and hoped for rather than what is present and tangible?

We cannot resolve this antinomy. But its chief import for us is this: that we take care not to lapse into utopianism when we think about our cities and how they might be made better. Yes, we shape our cities, and then our cities shape us; and there is much hope and potentiality in that realization. But it's also important to remember that we live in a fundamentally broken world. Christianity is not about perfecting this world. We can repair aspects of it, but we cannot restore it by our efforts. We should love our cities, but we have to know that, as in all our 7

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earthly loves, sometime that love must come in spite of a fundamental and uncorrectable brokenness.

Hence our efforts at reform must be balanced by our efforts at acceptance. We should take it as our first task to learn to be grateful for what we have, and respectful of it, and to do what we can to flourish where we are planted—in the families, marriages, communities, and nation in which we have been placed. Just as we should not strive to reinvent ourselves, so we should be modest about reinventing our worlds overnight by slashing away at the given order of things. Every change in the built environment involves unforeseeable changes in the texture of many other people's lives—and that statement is just as true for the most earnest and pure-intentioned reformers as it is for greedy developers and accredited planners.

The great cautionary example here is the urban-renewal movement of the postwar era, a well-intentioned but disastrous effort undertaken with all the arrogant blindness of which high-minded social engineers and visionaries are capable. They “knew” what was best for the urban poor, and in forcing it upon them, demolished countless acres of existing historically rooted neighborhoods in favor of grim and soulless housing projects. These “improvements” uprooted and decimated countless human lives, depriving them of nearly every vestige of what was familiar to them. We should not romanticize the difficult conditions of the slums they replaced. But the wanton erasure of memory wrought by “renewal” was perhaps the greatest indignity of all—by robbing the inhabitants of their sense of relationship to their own past, they robbed the city of a piece of its very soul.

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ur reflections need to begin, then, with a consideration of what cities are, and are for, what they accomplish that can be accomplished no other way. Indeed, given the strong emphasis on the individual in our times, we would do well to begin with an even more fundamental question. Do we really need to dwell together?

That's easy: Yes, we do. It is a fundamental part of our nature. Aristotle argued that man is by nature a political animal, and that a man who lives outside of the city is either a beast or a god. For Christians, this emphasis on relationship is at the very foundation of things, be8

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cause God Himself is, in the Trinitarian understanding, defined by relationship in His fundamental being. The Bible consistently relies upon our human and natural relations to explain God's nature to us: as Father and Son, for example. Or as in the act of marriage, as laid out rather mysteriously in the Letter to the Ephesians, which explains and is explained by Christ's relationship with His Church, which is also His body, or the body of which He is the head. For our purposes, what this means is that relationship with others is not something we do but something we are—we may shape our relationships, but we are more fundamentally shaped by the need for them, and we cannot understand ourselves without reference to them.

In short, we humans are made by, through, and for relationship with one another. The forms of these relationships are various—in marriage, in family, community, nations, the Kingdom of God. Each has a unique valence. Perhaps the most powerful of all Biblical insights into relationship is in the organismic model put forward in I Corinthians 12, in which the individuals comprising the Church are compared to the specialized organs and members of the body—powerful when they operate in concert, but useless in isolation.

But what about great cities, then, such as New York, Paris, London, Rome, Los Angeles? Are they not a very particular kind of relationship, one in which anonymity, impersonality and instrumentality are often the watchwords, and tend to replace fully human face-to-face personal relations as embodied in small-town life? Aren't the great cities of our age dehumanizing and mechanistic by their very nature, tending to produce people who have lost touch with the lived realities of nature?

Such has very often been the verdict that Americans have rendered about their own great cities. Indeed, the problem of the city may be more advanced here, precisely because we Americans have, for most of our history, lacked an urban ideal.

What I mean in saying this is that Americans in general have had a hard time reconciling what they think of as characteristically American aspirations with the actual life of modern American cities. It's a certain disharmony between the way we think and the way we live. Our fierce attachment to ideals of individualism, self-reliance, self-sufficiency, 9

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and closeness to nature do not always seem, for many Americans, to comport with the conditions of modern urban life. Perhaps that is because America, as historian Richard Hofstadter quipped, is a nation that “was born in the country and has moved to the city,” but has never entirely adapted the city’s mentality. Or to put it another way, altering a famous saying about the British Empire, we became an urban civilization in a fit of absence of mind, having never fully adjusted our ideas about ourselves to the conditions in which we find ourselves actually living.

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esistance to urban identity goes back to the very beginnings of American history. At the time of the Founding, and well into the early national years, the United States could well be described as a rural republic. At the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century, there were only six places featuring populations of more than 10,000, a number that is hardly a city by most present-day standards, and the combined population of these six was 183,000 in a nation of five million. Agriculture was not only the predominant mode of economic activity, but the one held to be most exemplary, a sentiment most vividly expressed in these famous words of Thomas Jefferson: “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.” Nor was Jefferson shy about extending the implications of this analysis to urban life: “The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.” His fellow Virginian George Washington agreed: “the tumultuous populace of large cities are ever to be dreaded.”

Such sentiments were not restricted to Virginians. Dr. Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia civic leader, agreed on both counts, asserting that “farmers and tradesmen are the pillars of national happiness and prosperity,” while cities by contrast are rightly compared to “abscesses on the human body, viz., as reservoirs of all the impurities of a community.” It is safe to say, as historian Thomas Bender has put it, that Jefferson and his contemporaries believed that “if cities ever exerted a 10

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controlling influence upon American life, political morality would decline and the republican experiment would be doomed.”

Urbanism did not come immediately thereafter for America, but it was not long in arriving. Indeed, it descended in a rush, in tandem with a number of other wrenching changes: the massive waves of immigration, industrialization, mass production, mechanization, and so on, changes that transformed the “walking cities” of Jefferson’s time into the massive and intricately segmented metropolitan areas we know by that name today. Even the most exuberant celebrants of modern cities praise them for qualities that give one pause: as hubs of creative destruction, engines of mobility, oases of anonymity—activities about which no civilized person can be unqualifiedly enthusiastic.

Arguably, it was the problematic character of human relations in the city, more than any other single effect of modernization, which became the stimulus and the chief object of the new discipline of sociology.

Georg Simmel and other sociologists were fascinated by the new modes of human consciousness and behavior that the modern city made possible, or necessary. The city was the place without roots for people without roots, the place where you came to reinvent yourself . Literary depictions of the city consistently cast it in just this way, as in American novels like Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, or Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, or in the more general “revolt against the village,” one of the persistent themes of early 20th-century American intellectual and literary life.

It is interesting, by way of contrast, to think of the gravamen of a mid-nineteeth-century work like Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, a work that is also about American self-making, but that goes about it in a strikingly different way. Walden proceeds by way of an isolation and stripping away of the effects of culture and history, in order to uncover and liberate the real and true self, free of the impediments of social life itself. This form of romanticism looks for freedom not to the teeming life of the city, but rather to the vibrant world of nature. The woods is where you go, not to reinvent yourself, but to rediscover what you already are, to get back in touch with the core of yourself. Hence the continuing vitality of the idea of the frontier, and hence the conclusion of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, arguably the greatest of American 11

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novels, in which Huck lights out for the wilderness, to get away from the corrupting effects of “sivilization.”

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ut American culture is nothing if not double-edged, and there are important exceptions to this rule. The poetry of Walt Whitman, for example, positively overflows with warm and passionate urban imagery, and finds a liberation of human possibility in the vast urban prospects. And there is the writing of Lewis Mumford, one of our most eloquent spokemen for the meaning of the city in human history. In his autobiography, Mumford describes at length the experience of growing up in New York City, and in one particularly vivid passage, he describes a moment in which the spectacle before him seemed to burst forth with larger meaning: Yes: I loved the great bridges and walked back and forth over them, year after year. But as often happens with repeated experiences, one memory stands out above all others: a twilight hour in early spring— it was March, I think—when, starting from the Brooklyn end, I faced into the west wind sweeping over the rivers from New Jersey. The ragged, slate-blue cumulus clouds that gathered over the horizon left open patches for the light of the waning sun to shine through, and finally, as I reached the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, the sunlight spread across the sky, forming a halo around the jagged mountain of skyscrapers, with the darkened loft buildings and warehouses huddling below in the foreground. The towers, topped by the golden pinnacles of the new Woolworth Building, still caught the light even as it began to ebb away. Three-quarters of the way across the Bridge I saw the skyscrapers in the deepening darkness become slowly honeycombed with lights until, before I reached the Manhattan end, these buildings piled up in a dazzling mass against the indigo sky.

Here was my city, immense, overpowering, flooded with energy and light; there below lay the river and the harbor, catching the last flakes of gold on their waters, with the black tugs, free from their barges, plodding dockward, the ferryboats lumbering from pier to pier, the tramp steamers slowly crawling toward the sea, the Statue of Liberty erectly standing, little curls of steam coming out of boat whistles or towered chimneys, while the rumbling elevated trains and trolley cars just below me on the Bridge moved in a relentless tide to carry tens of thousands homeward.

And there was I, breasting the March wind, drinking in the city and the sky, both vast, yet both contained in me, transmitting through me the great mysterious will that had made them and the promise of the new day that was still to come. …I have carried the sense of that occasion, along with two or three other similar moments, equally enveloping and pregnant, through my life: they remain, not as a 12

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constant presence, but as a momentary flash reminding me of heights approached and scaled, as a mountain climber might carry with him the memory of some daring ascent, never to be achieved again. Since then I have courted that moment more than once on the Brooklyn Bridge; but the exact conjunction of weather and light and mood and inner readiness has never come back. That experience remains alone: a fleeting glimpse of the utmost possibilities life may hold for man.

No one has better captured the unique feeling of exaltation induced by the modern city. There is surely an element here suggesting the great earthly city as a token of the New Jerusalem, the heavenly city at the end of time that transcends all earthly cities and fulfills all God’s final intentions for man. Perhaps Mumford even felt himself to have been offered a foretaste of heaven, never to be repeated, but leaving a lingering hint of eternity. But one can sense terrifying elements in this rapture, echoes of Babel, of hammers without masters and dynamos without Virgins, of force unleashed without an accompanying sense of guiding purposefulness. What, after all, was that "great mysterious will" he talking about? Was there not a profound and enduring reason why St. Augustine insisted upon the radical distinction between the City of Man and the City of God? Do we, in exalting our cities, risk falling into the error of mistaking the one for the other?

Mumford’s epiphanic portrait of the city is incomplete, precisely because it tends too much toward the city’s glamour, movement and abstraction, thereby missing some of urban life’s greatest virtues. And no one knew better than Mumford himself that cities are not only blast furnaces of change, but agents of conservation.

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he very idea of conservatism itself, far from being intrinsically anti-urban, has in the West always been inextricably bound up in the history and experience of a particular succession of great cities. When Russell Kirk wrote his celebrated book on The Roots of American Order, he could have chosen to present that history strictly in terms of unfolding structures of ideas. But instead, he built it around the central cities of the history of the West: Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, London, and Philadelphia. Each city was taken to exemplify a foundational stage in the development of American liberty and American order. This was not merely a literary conceit, like a metonym. The clear message was that such developments could only occur in cities. The 13

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very civilization that conservatives wish to conserve is rooted in such cities. It is no accident that the Book of Revelation aims at the creation of the New Jerusalem, not the New Tara Plantation or the New Mayberry. We should think about why this is so.

We have been taught to think of our American cities as hothouses of “creative destruction” and holding pens for atomized and anonymous “mass men.” But our actual experience of cities tells us something different. For one thing, every great city is really a collection of strong neighborhoods, in each of which there is far less anomie than may appear to be the case to an outside observer. But the conservative, civilization-sustaining aspect of the city goes far beyond that. As Mumford writes in his book The Culture of Cities: The city, as one finds it in history, is the point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community. It is the place where the diffused rays of many separate beams of life fall into focus, with gains in both social effectiveness and significance. The city is the form and symbol of an integrated social relationship: it is the seat of the temple, the market, the hall of justice, the academy of learning.

Here in the city the goods of civilization are multiplied and manifolded; here is where human experience is transformed into viable signs, symbols, patterns of conduct, systems of order. Here is where the issues of civilization are focused: here, too, ritual passes on occasion into the active drama of a fully differentiated and self-conscious society.

In other words, cities constitute civilization, as the very word “civilization” implies. They are its chief transmission belt. Properly understood, a city is a profoundly conservative institution, particularly if one thinks of conservatism as an outlook that urges faithfulness to memory. As Robert Pogue Harrison has observed in his luminous book The Dominion of the Dead, civilization is ultimately built upon the awareness of our dead predecessors. “Only the dead can grant us legitimacy,” he writes. “Left to ourselves we are all bastards.” We bury the dead not to separate ourselves from them, but to join ourselves to them. By burying them in our midst, as Joseph Bottum has noted, we also humanize the grounds on which we ourselves live.

Hence burial has a certain civilizational priority, in that what we make of the dead creates the foundation for what we make of ourselves. After all, as Harrison neatly puts it, “human beings housed 14

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their dead before they housed themselves.” Prehistoric nomads established permanent habitations of the dead, such as caverns, mounds, barrows, which were the chief settled landmarks and points of return, often also serving as shrines and sacred places with particular access to the spirit world. Only later did such men exchange their mobility for settled habitations, cities of the living built amid reminders of the dead. Which is why Mumford was right to proclaim that “The city of the dead antedates the city of the living” and is “the forerunner, almost the core, of every living city.”

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ven today, when we think of our great cities as having even more dynamic, even frenzied, aspects that those that Mumford described in his epiphany, this profound cultural function of carrying forward the past is still very much present, undergirding all else. For all its constant hubbub and upheaval, a great city is much more likely to carry forward the material vestiges of the past, and the memories those vestiges hold, than is most any American suburb or small town.

Permit me to draw on my own experience for confirmation of this. I grew up in a very pleasant and agreeable suburb of Baltimore, and would not have traded it for Mumford’s Manhattan. But I have to admit that my very earliest memories are of urban scenes: toddling across a busy Cincinnati intersection while clutching the hand of my big sister, or gawking at the glorious lobby of the Palmer House in Chicago, or my first glimpses of the Lincoln Memorial and the National Gallery in Washington, or of what is still the most majestic tall building in the world, the incomparable Empire State. These are all scenes that I can revisit and experience and enjoy today, along with the memories, both personal and collective, that flood back when I see them. (Even absences, such as the still-fresh absence in our minds of the Twin Towers in the New York skyline, are sources of memory in the great city.) But my beloved hometown, and even the house that I grew up in, have been transformed beyond recognition since I lived there. Which setting, one may ask, is more conducive to a sense of continuity, or faithfulness to the past?

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These thoughts preoccupied me ten years ago, when I took up a post as a Fulbright professor at the University of Rome. In the Eternal City, the achievements of humankind over twenty-five centuries have been accumulated and recorded as a largely haphazard and undifferentiated collection riddled with serendipities and self-contradictions— which is to say, just as the past appears to us. Its physical and political history is so deep and rich that no one could ever fully control the meaning of any architectural addition to the city. Rome does not tell one story, or five, or even a hundred, but an infinitude, and it is up to you to jump in if you ever hope to sort them out. Yet the potential rewards in doing so are immense. “In Rome,” wrote George Santayana, “I feel nearer to my own past, and to the whole past and future of the world, than I should in any cemetery or in any museum of relics.”

An observer lacking lengthy experience with Rome can never be sure whether he is seeing something with a fresh eye, or merely seeing the obvious, what a hundred thousand others before have seen and expressed. Yet Rome is, even more than most great cities, always the same and yet always changing, since it is a place where material reality is always enveloped in the web of consciousness, particularly historical consciousness. Hence even the past changes, simply by virtue of having been “the past” for so long, and having passed through the new lights of so many passing presents. If a city is like a text, this particular text, the text of Rome, utterly defeats the idea of authorial intentions.

We have to work at extracting what the city knows, and remembers.

The Italian writer Italo Calvino explains this wonderfully well in a passage from his book, Invisible Cities, speaking of an imaginary city called Zaira.

A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira's past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the pols of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

That is why even the ruins of a city are important, as is vividly shown in the famous Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church of Berlin, whose ruined structure was preserved as remembrance of war and a 16

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symbol of peace. Or in something as commonplace as the faded and peeling painted advertisements one still sometimes sees on the side of older brick buildings in American cities, ghostly reminders of vanished products—soaps, tobaccos, elixirs—sold to equally vanished consumers. We are not only talking about the places that are seen as consciously memorializing the past. We are talking about everything, down to the names of streets and buildings and bridges and airports and neighborhood landmarks. These mark the places where many thousands of people who came before us have walked, and fallen in love, and grieved, and died, and gone about the ordinary and pluriform business of life.

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ometimes in the natural course of things, objects have to be torn down, and reconstructed, or remodeled, or so on. The same is the case with our individual memory. Life cannot be lived in a museum or memory bank, and it must make room for what is new, else it ceases to be life. But we try to preserve as much as we can, partly because human life is lived best when it honors the memory of what came before it. This is part of living with a high regard for the future too. As Edmund Burke put it, “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.” That is yet another reason why cities must be understood both as vehicles of preservation and as vehicles of anticipation.

Our memories are essential, but they play tricks on us, and they are full of idiosyncrasy. That is why we so profoundly need landmarks, for the tangible and visible things that we measure ourselves against, for permanence. Cities do this well, and for many, many people. Not that we measure all aspects of our lives against such public landmarks; that would be both ghastly and inappropriate. In our private lives we have other and better ways to remember, ones more suitable to the untranslatable particularities and intimacies of our own worlds. Such associations are triggered by contact with the backyard apple tree, the porch swing, the worn wooden pew, the albums of photos and boxes of keepsakes, by homecomings and holidays with family, by religious services, by comings-together for births, marriages, funerals, and other transitions. We find ways to mark those things for future remembrance. The 17

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best and least conflict-ridden of all secular American holidays, Thanksgiving, is a moment in which all our private and idiosyncratic markers receive a rare kind of public visibility and endorsement.

But the landmarks of cities do something different and something unique, for they serve to unite the experience of all of us. They lift us out of our idiosyncracy and individuality into a world of common experience. They are a visible token of how individual experience is woven into the larger fabric of reality itself, and as such, are not implausibly seen as an anticipation of the Kingdom of Heaven. As Burke implies, preservation is a necessary component of anticipation. The party of memory is also the party of hope—understanding what Christ meant in promising to make all things new.

This is not newness in obliteration of the past, but newness of redemption and resurrection in which nothing of value is ever lost. Consider: when do we feel most keenly aware of the world to come? Is it not when we contemplate the deaths of those who have left us, and begin to reflect on the meaning of “the communion of saints,� that state of unity that brings together all that is worthy and beautiful at the end of time? Preserving the memory of what we have lost turns out to be an essential prod to our anticipation of what is come.

And both preservation and anticipation are at odds with the other way of understanding the city, as raw material in the hands of wellmeaning but arrogant planners and technocrats who would wipe away every mistake of the past, and use their ingenuity to comprehensively refashion every feature of our collective lives into something new and better. Against this impulse, we should be on our guard.

I am not counseling complacency. On the contrary, I am suggesting that we remember that there is a significant difference between improving our world incrementally and setting out to perfect it. And that in undertaking improvements, we need to remember not only that we can change the world, but that there is much to be grateful for in what we have already. To fail to see that, to fail in gratitude, is also a failure of stewardship.

To leave you with a better sense of exactly what I mean, let me ask your indulgence, and quote one last time from Lewis Mumford, once 18

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again from his autobiography. He is here describing the house that he and his wife Sophia purchased and lived in for many decades in Amenia, New York—a tiny village far away, one may note with amused interest, from the urban locales of which he wrote so beautifully. That irony is an insight into the complexity of the man, just as Thomas Jefferson’s ecstatic descriptions of Paris throw his own agrarianism into a more complex light. But such ironies need not detain us here, because the core of what Mumford is saying applies across the board, to all habitations and all human affairs: We took possession of our property in the autumn of 1929, though I it would be more correct to say that our land gradually took possession of us. The house itself was in a state of utter disrepair: the trappers had hung their pelts on big nails that broke what plaster still remained on walls and ceilings. There was a small weedy patch outside the kitchen on the south side that indicated there might once have been a vegetable garden there, and there was a clump of peony bushes and a few old-fashioned roses; but the remaining land was bare of almost everything but burdock and plantain.

But we gradually fell in love with our shabby house as a young man might fall in love with a homely girl whose voice and smile were irresistible. As with faces—Abe Lincoln bears witness—character is more ingratiating and enduring than mere good looks. No rise in our income has ever tempted us to look elsewhere for another house, still less to build a more commodious or fashionable one. In no sense was this the house of our dreams. But over our lifetime it has slowly turned into something better, the house of our realities. In all its year-by-year changes, under the batterings of age and the bludgeonings of chance, this dear house has enfolded and remodeled our family character—exposing our limitations as well as our virtues.

So let us be similarly attentive to the houses, and cities, of our realities.

Let us appreciate them and preserve what we can of them, to keep that which can be kept—even as we live in anticipation of a reality toward which these realities can only point, the light that glimmers through the darkened glass.

Wilfred McClay is the SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he is also Professor of History. This essay is adapted from a speech to the John Jay Institute.

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The Very Model of a Modern Evangelical 9 [ A Debate ] 20

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C R I T IQU E 4THE)EVANGELICAL)INTELLECT$

M

John Mark Reynolds

atthew Lee Anderson, a rising new media public intellectual, has written an article worthy of time and attention. He wishes to inform us in his recent piece “The New Evangelical Scandal” (appearing in the Winter 2008 issue of T H E C I TY ) that the Evangelical youth are not, in fact, okay. This is a thankless task that opens up the writer, even one as bright as Anderson, to immediate scorn, especially if he is young. The tired will respond that the youth are fine, that people are always worrying about them, and that Mr. Anderson will understand all of this when he is older.

This dismissal is very dangerous. If Christian theology is true, then the youth are never alright and it takes someone to worry about them to avoid the situation becoming permanent. It is true that many people in the past have warned us about the young, but this does not show that their warnings were wrong. In fact, it strongly suggests that they were effective. Anderson, like President George W. Bush in the War on Terror, will, if he is successful, cause people to doubt the very existence of the original danger.

Anderson correctly warns against perennial mainstream media narratives that claim youth are rejecting the “religious right” and the faith of their fathers. Anderson brings to mind the stories that claimed that my own generation, now the most conservative in American history, was also supposed to reject traditional Evangelical concerns. The repeated announcements of the end of the pro-life movement as a political concern have been made all my life.

Anderson also lists several problems often overlooked in Evangelical youth. For one, they accept a facile bipartisanship, which may 21

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doom them to political impotence. Secularists should stop worrying about a theocracy: Anderson finds young Evangelicals to be like young Mark Studdock in the C.S. Lewis novel That Hideous Strength—more spaniel than pit bull in their desire to charm rather than snub those that despise them. In fact, Anderson’s article essentially accuses young Evangelicals of being just like the characters Mark and Jane Studdock.

Like Mark, young Evangelicals desire admission to the “inner ring” of the culture more than any other temptation. Like Jane, they are lightly educated, but take their thoughts very seriously. Unlike Mark and Jane, young American Evangelicals are given Blue Like Jazz rather than Taliesin through Logres.

Anderson does not, however, identify the bad guys, today’s version of the Progressive Element at Bracton College. This is really too bad.

Anderson’s article is rather like reading the story of a dread illness with not a word about the first cause or how to cure it. He has catalogued the symptoms without diagnosing the disease. He has with rather too much prudence refused to give much advice, and his modesty threatens the health of the patient.

Still, Anderson is wise to try to help the young people of his country and perhaps he is wiser still to be careful and chary in his prescriptions. Perhaps he is remembering what Socrates said in describing the young man Meletus: What sort [of person is he]? No mean one, it seems to me; for the fact that, young as he is, he has apprehended so important a matter reflects no small credit upon him. For he says he knows how the youth are corrupted and who those are who corrupt them. He must be a wise man; who, seeing my lack of wisdom and that I am corrupting his fellows, comes to the State, as a boy runs to his mother, to accuse me. And he seems to me to be the only one of the public men who begins in the right way; for the right way is to take care of the young men first, to make them as good as possible, just as a good husbandman will naturally take care of the young plants first and afterwards of the rest.

Socrates praises Meletus for worrying about the youth, but was concerned about Meletus’ diagnosis of the problem. Meletus believed Socrates was the problem and his death the cure for what ailed Athenian youth. The disastrous impact of Meletus’ wrong diagnosis often obscures the fact that the youth of Athens were in trouble. Athenian in22

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dependence was in peril and would soon vanish under the weight of a wicked educational system and hedonism.

As Socrates points out, Meletus was trying to do something vital and important. Anderson has pointed out that Evangelical youth are being corrupted, but, perhaps overly fearful of becoming Meletus, has told us too little about who is responsible. Sometimes the youths of the city are being corrupted and fixing the blame correctly is of utmost importance.

Being, perhaps, not overly burdened with the modesty or the prudence of youth, I shall give both diagnosis and prescription. After all, curmudgeons will rush in where bright young men fear to tread.

E

vangelical youth are being corrupted and Evangelical scholars and leaders are at least partly to blame. Why? The church and the Evangelical academy have, by and large and for various reasons, rejected Christendom and left Evangelical youth to create their own inadequate pseudo-culture on the fly.

What is Christendom? Christendom is the culture created by the happy fusion of Greek and Roman philosophy with Jewish and Christian thought. This culture, this city of God, has had many citizens.

Many of those citizens have made mistakes, but it is also responsible for most of the glorious achievements of Western culture. I describe the birth of Christendom in my recent When Athens Met Jerusalem, but Pope Benedict has defended it far more ably. Christendom has become a dirty word amongst smart, young Evangelical scholars.

There is no good theological reason for this abandonment of Christ’s kingdom by Evangelicals. Evangelical icons like John Wesley were educated in that great tradition and did great deeds as citizens of Christendom. As “mere Christians,” Evangelicals certainly are a voice in the great conversation that has shaped the public policy of Christendom. Excellent journals like Touchs tone and Salvo prove this point monthly. Evangelical groups with even a very low-church background, such as Baptists, have a good historic connection to the broader heritage of Christendom. Schools such as Houston Baptist University and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary have leadership that make the connection between Christendom and Baptist theology plain while 23

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advocating for the corrections to historic errors and a distinctive theology that they believe God has given them.

Oddly, this attack on Christendom is often made in the name of breaking down barriers to the poor or to people groups outside the Evangelical sub-culture. Christendom, of course, embraces over a billion of the world’s citizens and has done so for centuries. The rejection of Christendom can lead to tiny churches made up only of intellectualists entranced with Stanley Hauerwas, while the rest of the neighborhood goes to the large Pentecostal Holiness group down the street.

Evangelical academics, young as well as old, are becoming cut off from the groups they hope to serve, especially Evangelicals. One weakness of the Anderson article is that it says almost nothing about the two-thirds of Evangelical youth who will not even get an undergraduate degree. In my experience, Evangelical academics decry the anti-intellectualism of Evangelical sub-culture as the main reason for the gap, but do not consider that to the extent that it exists it is a reaction to their intellectualism.

Intellectualism, in the sense I am using it, is not merely valuing the life of the mind, an unmitigated good. It is confusing intellectual activity, which is good, with the attitudes, beliefs, and social characteristics of one’s peers who went to the school you attended. The intellectualist is socialized into a peer group, but confuses his choices in music, clothes, and beverages with intelligence. He or she reads the right books and knows how to talk about them properly, to feed the proper perceptions.

There are genuine benefits to intellectualism in mainstream culture.

If an intellectualist bluffs about the “Bush doctrine,” he will get a pass, but if anybody else tries a bluff in this area she will be called on it.

President Bush read a great deal, but as he was not an intellectualist, he got little or no credit for it. The intellectualist will always get the presumption of intelligence. A good case can be made that Dwight Eisenhower was at least as smart as Adlai Stevenson, but Stevenson was an intellectualist, so he got the benefits and liabilities that come with the territory.

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Of course, there are liabilities in being perceived as an intellectualist, a group ripe for parody, though these liabilities have declined in recent years. It can be disheartening for an active intellectual to find herself part of a group whose members are less noted for an actual devotion to intellectual activity than the appearance of being cultured, rather like Lizzie Greystock in Trollope’s magnificent novel The Eustace Diamonds.

Poor Lizzie was fond of reading poetry in settings that would highlight her tragic beauty for the romantic appearance without much knowledge or real love for poetry. A modern Trollope would have no problem putting a modern Lizzie in the right jazz club, drinking the right drink, while clutching a copy of the right misunderstood novel.

A

s recently as the mid-eighties being called an “intellectual” (when what was meant was an “intellectualist”) could be a fatal political charge. Obviously, the election of President Obama marks a shift in public opinion. The rise of technology jobs, growth in the number of college graduates, and positive portrayals of intellectualists in films (the romantic college grad has utterly supplanted the cowboy), have all contributed to this change.

Anderson’s article describes an intellectualist with perfect accuracy.

He notes that his generation often despises the Republican Party of their parents. The reasons Anderson cites are the product of college or university consensus about the politics of the 1980s and have little to do with facts. Evangelical youth “know” that Reagan era was the decade of greed—and that Reagan himself hated the poor, gay people, and smart people—without knowing much at all about Reagan or the details of his administration. Most know nothing of Reagan’s rise from poverty, his actual intelligence, or social tolerance. Their history of the 1980s is missing any reference to the late Jack Kemp, the happy warrior of the GOP for inclusion, and a major figure in the Reagan Revolution.

It entirely glosses over the depths of Carter era America. In fact, like most intellectualist attitudes, it is nearly fact free.

Intellectualist culture despises Christendom, so Evangelical intellectualists do as well. What made some sense for secular intellectuals, however, makes almost no sense for Christian thinkers. Intellectualists appropriate the attitude and then do some of their real thinking, trying 25

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to make it fit with Christian history. Cornel West, who strongly rejects Evangelical theology and social policies, can get a standing ovation at Gordon College for denouncing Christendom, even though Christendom created most of the colleges in which he goes about denouncing.

Poor Saint Constantine is blamed for things he did not do, like putting the state in charge of the Church, and given no credit for the obviously good things he did, like ending the persecution of Christians.

The attack on patriotism is a part of this assault on Christendom.

“Christendom” in the mythology of the academy is about power and politics. Patriotism is a simple trick to get the rubes to turn over power to politicians. Evidently the solution to this problem is to either to abandon politics altogether or to “speak prophetically to power,” though generally only to Republican power. Of course, Christian intellectualists ignore the ties of prophets like Nathan or Isaiah to the royal house of David since this would spoil their pristine idea of the non-partisan Biblical prophet.

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great positive of the last two generations of white Evangelicals has been the utter rejection of open racism. Successful rainbow coalitions, like the one in California that helped pass Proposition 8 and defend traditional marriage, are a good model of real diversity, but too often the Evangelical intellectualist ignores or despises those examples. They fit too neatly with old concerns and stereotypes that are too often a hidden motive behind his concern for diversity. Continued legitimate concerns about diversity and racism are sometimes hi-jacked to undermine traditional Evangelical moral and theological causes. Instead of linking arms with like-minded theologically conservative churches from a different social or ethnic background, groups easy to find, the intellectualist seeks groups that are theologically left-of-center.

If you doubt this, try to find an interracial conference of Christian scholars devoted to defending the error-free Bible as the common ground between them. There is relatively easy common ground amongst traditional American Christians on this issue, but this is not the common ground the intellectualist seeks. In fact, it supports values he would really rather dismiss or deemphasize, even if he works for 26

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institutions that were built to defend those doctrines. He does not seek out the scholar who is to his theological right, but almost always looks for one to his theological left.

Announcements that God is not a Republican or a Democrat are not usually made for the benefit of the demographic of Evangelicals that vote in the highest percentage and the most consistently for one of the political parties: African-Americans and the Democratic Party. They are made for white Evangelicals that vote for the Republican Party.

Anderson is right that this generation is remarkably post-patriotic.

Of course, disdain for patriotism contradicts another value of intellectualists: the love of authentic community. Isn’t “a strong love for your folks” just another way of describing patriotism? The solution in many Christian colleges has been to allow everyone in the world to love and take pride in their people group except for Americans. Americans who visit a country and expect it to cater to their cultural whims are (rightly) considered “ugly,” or at least boors. Non-American nationals who visit American Christian colleges have a right to demand cultural accommodation or the Christian college is “ugly” and boorish. The only inauthentic culture and community in the world, it turns out, is American, particularly Evangelical American, culture. Anyone who works in Christian academia has heard some form of this very argument made.

Anderson is right that his intellectualist friends have trouble with traditional Evangelical doctrine and standards of holiness, but it is part of the cure for the self-loathing gained from exposure to secular intellectualism. Recently a friend of mine was interviewed for a job at an Evangelical Christian college and was asked about his view on Scripture. When my friend replied he believed in inerrancy, the college administrator was shocked to the point of jumping out of his chair and letting loose a profanity. He asked if the upper administration knew of this shocking fact and was only calmed by the fact that my friend was not a member of an Evangelical denomination. Evidently, the very part of his views that made him love and respect Evangelicals and assume agreement with them was only tolerable to these college Evangelicals because he was not one.

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The group Anderson describes are more horrified by the strong, traditional Protestants than by Catholic or Orthodox beliefs, but this is no real sign of an ecumenical spirit. Too often the Evangelical young adult merely uses Catholic and Orthodox thinkers to tear down those parts of Evangelicalism they do not like while ignoring those parts that that challenge their assumptions. They are cafeteria ecumenicists. Roman Catholic teaching on birth control and sexuality are not quoted or applauded, though nothing is a greater challenge to the norms of Evangelical sub-culture. Evangelical intellectualists tend to ignore those writings by John Paul the Great or the brilliant Benedict XVI that attack post-modern or pop culture views of sexuality or scholarship. John Paul certainly spoke truth to power and helped liberate millions from murderous tyranny, but the tyranny was a leftist one and Evangelical parents admired him, so he is not the kind of Catholic they admire.

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nderson is also exactly right in his analysis about the desire for Evangelical intellectualists to fit in on the media and popular culture front. This is driven by the lack of cultural confidence that comes from picking up “intellectualist” attitudes.

The best example in my own experience to illustrate Anderson’s point was changing attitudes toward the Gibson film The Passion of the Christ amongst Evangelical film students. Early on I heard them moan about how the sub-culture would reject the film because it was subtitled, too violent, and too Catholic. Film students bemoaned the fact that here was an artistically excellent film and the idiots in the pews would reject it because of their prejudice. Soon it became obvious that in fact they had (as intellectualists often do) underestimated the people in the pews and that they were willing to go see the film and give it a chance, R-rating and all. The film also became “politically incorrect,” as its orthodoxy disturbed Hollywood elite. Almost immediately the opinions I encountered in many Evangelical young adults changed from advocacy and excitement to antipathy toward the film. I had been arguing that film students should cheer up and that a positive reception of Gibson’s difficult and complex film was a sign of maturation in Evangelicals. Perhaps, after all, if they made good films they would be watched, and that the major problem with their previous art films had been that they were not very good. After all, Evangelicals bought scads 28

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of books by Frankie Schaeffer in an earlier era telling them how stupid and boorish they were—so we knew there was a market in the community for hard truths.

Instead of being encouraged, it became routine for me to hear mockery of the Passion and Gibson. I heard more than one student say, in a voice dripping with disdain, “Well, look at that. Christians only turn up to see a movie about Jesus.” Of course, there is no evidence that Evangelicals only go to movies about Jesus—quite the contrary—though it would be odd to find an Evangelical uninterested in his story. Instead, a false belief about how boorish the community is helps one become the ‘good Evangelical’ in secular meetings (“I am not like one of those Evangelicals.”) and also provides a built in excuse when one’s creation fails to sell. (“I broke too many barriers. I was too daring. I was too witty.”) The fact that it also cut you off from the majority of Evangelicals is an added bonus, because it gives you the benefits of a bloodless martyrdom from people you wanted to despise anyway.

Anderson is right that young Evangelicals are intent on outer signs, and that they are not culturally clueless or “fundamentalists.” What he is wrong to think is that there is anything new in this. It is hard to expect much different when the head of an Evangelical arts program, about my age but dressing younger, can tell me that a goal of his program is to let the “kids know it is o.k. for Christians to say ‘bastard.’” I remember thinking at the time that it might be more useful to have a program in the arts reminding students that it was o.k. for a Christian not to say ‘bastard.’

Anyone who loves dialectic, art, and culture can only mourn the lost opportunity such a statement represents. All who put great hope in the promise of Christian higher education must pause to guard against such groupthink. Intellectualism in our midst is a call to return to the examined life of Socrates and of the Lord Jesus Christ. Christians believe all are sinners and that sinners cannot be saved by reason alone.

In fact, an easy explanation for much of intellectualism is that it is an elaborate justification for what my grandfather would have called sin.

Anderson comes close to saying it. However, as Anderson recognizes, that is too simple an explanation. There is real and ugly opposition to 29

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intellectualism in the Evangelical subculture that does much to promote the opposite vice. Anderson sees all of this, but he forgets the two-thirds of Evangelicals who have never been exposed to intellectualism or given an opportunity to accept or embrace it. When traditional Christians celebrate the mental mediocrity of a candidate as a virtue, or act as if not reading a book is praiseworthy, it is an equally serious problem. There is an anti-intellectual streak to American life, and some Evangelicals have fallen for it.

Patriotism is a noble “lesser love” that trains the mind for heaven, but some have made a god of it. Products like The Patriot’s Bible really are grotesque. I have talked to some Christians who were less concerned about my doctrine, where we had important disagreements, than about my blog posts expressing caution about Rush Limbaugh. I didn’t vote for President Obama, but I only need to look at the online comments section, or listen to some very popular talk radio voices, to read and hear things that make me sympathize with him. My students regularly meet Christians who will pass on any slander about the President. It does not help that the left is equally annoying, because these young adults are reacting to the toxic attitudes they see, not the ones they do not see. In fact, Evangelicals who waste time on Obama’s birth certificate and nutty leftists who want to know the real mother of Trigg Palin turn off young Evangelicals to both parties.

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ntellectualism in Evangelical young adults is at least partially the product of anti-intellectualism that has been tolerated for far too long amongst people with views like my own. People often have less tolerance for the first sinful attitude they experience, than for one met later. The tendency is to say, “This other group is just overreacting to the first group.” Evangelical young adults are too often burned out on patriotism, conservatism, and traditional theology by a first exposure to folk who do it badly. This works both ways as I have met many very anti-intellectual Christians who were reacting to the intellectualism of their early life. Anti-intellectualism and intellectualism are really just types of the same error.

Evangelical anti-intellectualism leads to a rejection of Christendom just like Evangelical intellectualism. Badly written, inaccurate, and poorly 30

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argued Christian fundamentalist textbooks (used in many Evangelical schools) are skeptical of Christian philosophy, Christian civilization, and almost all Christian scholars. Poor Constantine is slandered in these books as well. There are entire home-school curriculums written who overtly reject any contributions from Greek philosophy, logic, or classical education to Christianity. Some fringe groups, fearful of radical feminism, do a greater evil and forbid their daughters to go to college! Anybody “educated” in such an intellectual prison would be profoundly grateful for any idea that liberated him from this.

It is the rejection of Christendom that must be reversed at almost any cost. Christendom has a place for the Joe the Plumber and Joseph the professor, but it must be in the great tradition of Christendom. Our present situation would be enough to make a man despair, if it were not for articles like those of Anderson. If Anderson is too hard on his own class, he at least is not tempted to join the anti-intellectualists. He demonstrates in his essay a desire to adopt positions not in reaction to other positions, but through critical examination.

Fortunately, I have met Anderson and thousands others like him.

They wish to love God with their whole heart, soul, and mind. They don’t emphasize any one part of that list over the other. If there is hope for the future, then it will be found in thoughtful, open-minded younger Evangelicals like Matthew Lee Anderson. He and his friends are in truth, the very model for modern Evangelicals.

John Mark Reynolds is the founder and director of the Torrey Honors Institute and Professor of Philosophy at Biola University.

His most recent book, When Athens Met Jerusalem: An Introduction to Classical and Christian Thought , was published this year

by IVP Academic.

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R ESPONSE ]evangelical0catholicity} Francis J. Beckwith

I

A self-ordained professor's tongue, too serious to fool Spouted out that liberty is just equality in school "Equality," I spoke the word, as if a wedding vow Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.

Bob Dylan, “My Back Pages.” 1964

need to make a confession. I am not entirely comfortable offering an assessment of an article with the title, “The New Evangelical Scandal.” It is not that I do not think I am qualified for the task. Rather, as the former president of the Evangelical Theological Society who resigned his post within days after returning to the Catholic Church of his youth, I suspect that some readers will think that I am more adept at scandalizing Evangelicals than providing them with any insights about Matthew Lee Anderson’s well-crafted essay.

But that is a false dilemma. I am fully capable of accomplishing both in one sitting.

Nevertheless, I write with deep affection and appreciation for my Evangelical friends and what they have taught me over the years. I am convinced that if not for the Holy Spirit working through the many gifted and devoted Christian scholars and teachers in Evangelical Protestantism, some of whom I have had the privilege to know, love, and study under, my present faith would be significantly diminished. Their tenacious defense and practice of Christian orthodoxy is what has sustained and nourished so many of us who have found our way back to the Church of our youth. Thus, for me, as well as for many other Catholics, a diminished or theologically heterodox Evangelicalism that strikes at the movement’s catholicity is bad for Christianity. For it is that catholicity that kept many of us spiritually afloat when we—in our desire to follow Jesus—drifted from Rome but not from Christ.

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What I mean by Evangelicalism’s catholicity is its traditional allegiance to classical Christian orthodoxy and all that it entails about the good, the true, and the beautiful, including its commitment to the authority of Scripture and the veracity and normativity of the Catholic creeds. This is why if Evangelicalism is to survive, it has to grow up and not “emerge.” It needs the wisdom of David Wells’s The Courage to Be Protestant rather than the beatnik aphorisms of Donald Miller’s Oprah-fied narrative, Blue Like Jazz. It needs more Augustine and less Pelagius, and a theological and pastoral leadership that understands that it is not above its pay grade to suggest to its people that a purpose-driven life requires a purpose-driven death.

Not surprisingly, Anderson persuasively argues that the stature of theology has declined among the young evangelicals. But I do not think that this means that the “new evangelical scandal” is the result of young evangelicals abandoning the great creeds of Christendom or even biblical inerrancy because they have thought deeply and carefully about these issues and have just come to conclusions inconsistent with what their predecessors believed.

Trust me, I wish it were that intellectually interesting. But it is just not that deep. Let’s concentrate on what I like to call “Starbucks Gnosticism” or “Goth Chick Authenticity.” Although he does not use either phrase, Anderson describes the phenomenon this way: For young evangelicals, authenticity is synonymous with struggle…. The language of character formation, virtue, right and wrong has been supplanted by pseudopsychological language about authenticity and feelings. With respect to decisionmaking and evaluation, the rightness or wrongness of an action or an attitude is downplayed if the action itself is “authentic.” When it comes to political decisions, policy, character, and experience take a back seat to whether the politician strikes us as a “real person.”

This call for authenticity and to be a “real person” comes from the same people whose population dominates Facebook, Twitter, and the blogosphere, who acquire their “information” from online bulletin boards and leftist news sites, and who often find themselves texting friends while driving down the freeway at 75 miles per hour. They clamor for truth, beauty, and goodness while looking on Wikipedia for a tattoo pattern that includes the question in calligraphy: “Who are you to judge?” If anything, they are the most image-hypnotized, and 33

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thus easily manipulated, generation in American history. This is why their idea of “authenticity,” unbeknownst to them, is itself another commodity they feel compelled to purchase from the manufacturers of the consumer culture they so often condemn for being “inauthentic.”

They do not even realize that the reason why they bought Blue Like Jazz is because some marketer knew how to target them with the intellectual equivalent of sitcom one-liners combined with cool images and cutting-edge profanity. In an age of irony, that’s about as good as it gets. It’s as if Jack Nicholson were channeling Richard Rorty.

According to Anderson, the young evangelicals are questioners: “For previous generations of evangelicals, questioning one’s faith was anathema. Now, it is a rite of passage, necessary for maturation and perfectly acceptable to God. It is, after all, part of the journey toward authentic faith.” As a philosophy professor, I love questions and questioners. I encourage my students to think critically about their faith.

Jesus himself was the master questioner, always asking just the right question to the right people at just the right time. But the young evangelicals are selective, self-serving, questioners, just like their Baby Boomer grandparents. They have bumper stickers on their car saying “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries” and “Question Authority,” while not realizing that the truth of the first requires that you not question the driver’s authority. So, what the bumper should have is just one sticker that asserts, “Question everyone’s authority except mine.”

The young evangelicals are a lot like that. They like to “share their feelings” about how they believe they are constrained by what Anderson calls, “puritanical legalism,” because “Jesus really cares about the heart and our intentions.” But they are, at the same time, absolutely certain about lots of other things that they would never dream of questioning, such as “social justice” and environmental sustainability. Thus, they “know” precisely in what bin each piece of garbage should be deposited (you dare not show contempt for God’s creation), but they feel it is “judgmental” for one Christian to tell another Christian that it is wrong to have sex with one’s boyfriend or girlfriend regardless of the genders of the participants. Thus, they are dogmatists, “puritanical legalists,” about the proper end of garbage and recycling, but “thoughtful questioners” about the proper end of their reproductive organs 34

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within the confines of the one-flesh communion of husband and wife.

This is, of course, exactly the direction in which secular culture is heading, about which the young evangelicals refuse to take a “skeptical, authentic, thoughtful” pose they claim their parents’ generation lacked.

The acorn does not fall far from the oak tree after all. Sorry to say, but if your worldview has more in common with Al Gore than Thomas Aquinas, you are not a “questioner.”

I

f the young evangelicals are really serious about “struggle” and “authenticity,” they should ignore drama queens like Donald Miller and look to those who have actually lived it. Take, for example, my late grandmother, Frances Guido (1913-2002). She lost her husband (my grandfather) to stomach cancer in 1952. Widowed at the age of thirty-eight, she worked as a seamstress and provided each of her four children with twelve years of Catholic-school education.

I once asked my grandmother why she never remarried. Her answer initially seemed stunning to me, though, given her beliefs and convictions, it made perfect sense. She said, “How can I bring a strange man into a home with two young daughters?” What an amazing (and politically incorrect) answer. Her first thought was not of herself and what she should have wanted. It was about what advanced the common good, and in this case, the good of her family and her young children.

What my grandmother’s understanding manifested was the incarnational faith of which Jesus spoke when he told his disciples that “whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8:35). If you want to be an authentic real person, put down your iPod and pick up your cross.

You might say that I have been a little rough on the young evangelicals. But that is a lot less painful than the initial throbbing one feels immediately after the Goth Chick’s boyfriend impales your tongue with the metal stud you paid him to implant so that you can announce to the coffee shop set your individual authenticity, just like everyone else. So, I write these things for the sake of being authentic to my own narrative. And I know that the young people will understand.

Francis J. Beckwith is professor of Philosophy and ChurchState Studies at Baylor University.

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D EFENSE

,the0next0generation.<

I

Matthew Lee Anderson

n the months following the publication of “The New Evangelical Scandal,” Michael Spencer argued in the Christian Science Monitor that evangelical institutions would collapse within ten years, Calvinism was heralded by Time magazine as one of the “10 Ideas Changing the World,” and Jon Meacham pronounced “The End of Christian America” in Newsweek.

The increasing volume of such commentary—from both inside and outside of evangelicalism—suggests that evangelicals are entering a period of self-reflection. To their credit, much of it has been prompted by those younger evangelicals who have challenged the traditional categories of evangelicalism. And (contra Spencer) such self-criticism is a sign of a health, not infirmity. The early church’s self-understanding was shaped by both the internal and external challenges it faced, a situation with some parallels to our current position.

In “The New Evangelical Scandal,” I attempted to play a very limited role in this dialog. My intent was to offer an insider’s perspective on some of the superficialities and intellectual problems with the new evangelical ethos. Specifically, I wanted to identify a number of points of disagreement between the generations of evangelicalism and demonstrate how young evangelicals may not have escaped the problems they were criticizing.

As I began to receive replies, I found myself in the unenviable position of agreeing with the vast majority of my critics, many of whom criticized me for ignoring the problems within traditional evangelicalism. As one reader reminded me, I am responsible both for what I do, and do not, say. My only defense is that I attempted to stay within the overly generous boundaries that had been given me. The thesis that I set out to prove was not that traditional evangelicalism is full of ex36

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cesses, abuses, and problems. That point has been made frequently enough, including by me, so as to no longer be particularly interesting.

Instead, I wanted to point out that the new evangelical reaction against those abuses and excesses has not yet escaped the troubling horizons of individualism, consumerism, and as Francis Beckwith points out, selective questioning and dogmatism. In other words, young evangelicals have criticized our elders for sins that have simply manifested themselves in our communities in different ways. We have not yet plucked the proverbial log from our own eyes.

That, of course, does not necessarily mean we should ignore the criticisms by younger evangelicals. I simply contend that they do not begin where they should—within ourselves—and that they are grounded in a reactionary ethos that leads to mischaracterizations and distortions of traditional evangelicals. My pastor—a self-confessed new evangelical—put it best: “You just want us to think, and not simply react.” My suspicion is that if new evangelicals examined their own positions with the same amount of rigor as they examine those of their predecessors, they might find them equally troubling. It was my hope, as a new evangelical, to begin that process.

My attempt at doing so was harmed by my claim that new evangelicals have diminished the role of eschatology in their theology. This was criticized from nearly every angle, and rightly so. The omission of N.T. Wright and the implicit assumption that all evangelicals adhere to dispensationalist eschatology were errors on my part. Yet while careful exegetes like Wright are able to keep the apocalyptic in the center of their framework, my concern is that in practice, less careful pastors and educators functionally move eschatology—however one wants to articulate it—away from the center of our theology in favor of ecclesiology. As N.T. Wright has demonstrated with the Gospels, and J. Christian Beker has with Paul, the apocalyptic must be at the center, and not at the edge, of our theology. It is the decisive victory of God over sin and death at the Resurrection that is the foundation for our Christian life, and it is our participation in that eschatological reality through the Spirit that establishes the Church as the Church. The Church, as the creed puts it, looks for the resurrection from the dead. It is a forward oriented institution. My concern is that the reaction against dispensa37

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tional eschatology has obscured this dynamic. We have separated the church militant from the church triumphant to our own detriment.

That is, at least, my observation. I am happy to be proved wrong.

All this leads me to the generous critique by Dr. Reynolds. He rightly suggests that I did not address the core problem of the new evangelicalism, and correctly identifies my timidity in articulating a cure. Reynolds’ proposal is that the core problem is the rejection of Christendom, the marriage of Athens and Jerusalem, and that rejection stems from evangelicals being co-opted by the Scylla of intellectualism (carefully defined) or the Charybdis of anti-intellectualism.

Reynolds’ credentials on this issue are impeccable. He speaks as one who has navigated both of these extremes, and sacrificed the prestige that comes from embracing the prevailing intellectualist winds. Reynolds writes not from the standpoint of an intellectualist commenting on some abstract social trend, but from someone who has confronted the very difficulty he articulates all his life.

Not surprisingly, Reynolds’ analysis of the disease is exactly right, insofar as it goes. The only problem with it is that his insistence on finding a cause for the evangelical malaise has prompted him to too quickly settle on one cause. While I find myself in agreement with his analysis, I believe it suffers from being too one-dimensional.

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llow me to tease out one additional reason why evangelicals have rejected Christendom: our understanding of the relationship between Church and culture will not allow it. Evangelicals have made the dualism between Church and culture fundamental.

They are two separate worlds that may or may not overlap. The escapist mindset of traditional evangelicals was replaced by the notion that the Church is to ‘engage’ culture or ‘create’ or ‘transform’ culture. Both, however, presume that the Church is not itself a culture that comes into contact with an alternative culture that may or may not agree with it. What’s more, the insistence on ‘engaging culture’ by young evangelicals is nothing more than a tacit admission that secular culture is the fundamental ground of human existence, and that the Church exists as something above and beyond that secular culture. In his famous Regensberg address, Pope Benedict writes, “A reason which is deaf to the 38

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divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.” This is precisely right. But notice the order of relegation: secular reason relegates religion to a sub-culture, not the other way around. The acknowledgment that religion can exist as a sub-culture in a secular society, and not as a competing paradigm, is a tacit affirmation that it is secular reason, not religion, that is the basic paradigm for our existence.

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his is true to any evangelicalism that does not establish a viable culture as a robust alternative to that culture which is shaped by secular reason. In other words, if the Church is not a culture, then it exists only in relation, and in response, to secular reason—and as such will not be able to escape its domain. This is why the new evangelical insistence on engaging culture and the traditional evangelical withdrawal both result in the accommodation of lifestyles and behaviors previous generations would have described as ‘worldly.’

Evangelicals live in the world and of the world because we have no other alternative. The Church is not a culture of its own, and so we are left to live in the world as individuals, and so have no strength to withstand its temptations and pressures. This is particularly true for younger evangelicals, who have been told to ‘engage culture,’ but have no framework to engage it out of. It is no surprise that ‘engagement’ is reduced to ‘consumption,’ and young evangelicals are transformed into what they consume.

This is, I should point out, the basic criticism of Professor Beckwith, who points out that young evangelicals value ‘authenticity’ largely because it has been marketed to them. On both this point, and on their selective questioning, Beckwith implies that the prevailing cultural winds have younger evangelicals at their mercy. The point is a fair one, yet Beckwith should understand that evangelicals are susceptible to marketing not simply because we are image-laden, but because we have no viable alternative culture. In such a situation, consumption is the only possibility, and accommodation the inevitable result. I believe Beckwith’s real critique should be extended to traditional evangelicals who, by and large, have failed to impart a substantial cultural worldview to help younger generations ward off consumerism.

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This is not to say that this problem has not been noticed by traditional evangelicals. Indeed, they have been the driving force behind the Christian worldview movement, which is an attempt to give young evangelicals tools to ‘engage culture’ without being co-opted by it.

However, this movement is deficient in that it is unable to enculturate the Christian worldview. Those who are trained in worldview thinking may have the intellectual arguments to remain vibrantly Christian, but the dispositions required to avoid being accommodated by intellectualism, anti-intellectualism, or consumerism can only be cultivated in the context of real communities and cultures. As helpful as it is, worldview thinking is no substitute for the Church existing as culture.

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he question, then, that new evangelicals should address is not whether to engage culture, or whether to escape it, but which kind of culture the Church is. The differences are not strictly semantic; once the Church starts thinking of itself as culture, all the external behaviors of baptism, communion, and ceremony find a more natural home. And the arts, music, science, literature, philosophy, architecture and, as Reynolds puts it, “public policy” will all begin to take root, not as a response to secular culture, but as a response to the Word and Spirit, the foundation of the Church. In short: Christendom.

Dr. Reynolds wishes evangelicals would reintroduce Christendom, and rightly so. However, such a reintroduction is currently impossible.

Christendom must be built on a sold ecclesiological foundation, and until evangelicals clear away the intellectual rubble and develop more robust understandings of what it means to be the Church, it will remain impossible. Eradicating the social realities of intellectualism and anti-intellectualism is a necessary but insufficient adjustment.

What, then, of the way forward? This was, not surprisingly, the most common question I received from younger evangelicals who resonated with my analysis. Dr. Reynolds has moved us closer to the root causes of the evangelical malaise, but has offered us surprisingly little in the way of cures. He is right to offer a third way between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism, but does not tell us how to find it.

For my own part, my hope is to cultivate what I might describe as a critical loyalty to evangelicalism, and in this I take my cues not from an 40

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evangelical, but a Roman Catholic: G.K. Chesterton. In “The Flag of the World,” Chesterton writes: The evil of the pessimist is, then, not that he chastises gods and men, but that he does not love what he chastises—he has not this primary and supernatural loyalty to things. What is the evil of the man commonly called an optimist? Obviously, it is felt that the optimist, wishing to defend the honour of this world, will defend the indefensible. He is the jingo of the universe; he will say, "My cosmos, right or wrong." He will be less inclined to the reform of things; more inclined to a sort of front-bench official answer to all attacks, soothing every one with assurances. He will not wash the world, but whitewash the world.

Beneath these two impulses is a fundamental loyalty that allows one to be at the same time a cosmic pessimist and a cosmic optimist. As he puts it, “This at least had come to be my position about all that was called optimism, pessimism, and improvement. Before any cosmic act of reform we must have a cosmic oath of allegiance.”

It is this basic loyalty to evangelicalism that is crucial for healthy evangelical self-reflection. Only when individuals have this loyalty to evangelicalism will they be able to appropriately see it as it is, criticize it, and then reform it. It is the man, Chesterton argues, with a transcendental patriotism toward a thing who can stare the facts in the face. The man who loves a thing for a particular reason must make all the facts fit that reason, or leave the thing behind.

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y concern, which Reynolds’ articulates well, is that many critics of traditional evangelicalism have not offered their criticism from within the confines of this oath of allegiance, but from a sense of self-loathing that is induced by a desire for affirmation and prestige by the secular culture. ‘Evangelical’ has become a dirty word, and few seem intent on saving it. Practically, this has deepened the divide between young and old evangelicals, and has muted whatever prophetic criticisms younger evangelicals have to offer.

But alternatively, my hope is that when evangelical reform movement matures, it will mature into a historically sensitive, theologically rich, artistically fruitful, socially conscious, politically astute, Biblically grounded, and (Holy) Spiritually sensitive tradition, as evangelicalism once was. Give younger evangelicals their due: we have identified many of the problems, even if we do not (yet) have much to offer in the 41

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way of solutions. We too can be saved from our pseudo-authenticity and our consumerism.

Cultivating a critical loyalty is a stop-gap measure, but an important one. Semper reformanda; but reformation should begin not with our neighbors, but with ourselves. It is, after all, the acknowledgment and confession of sin in our own movements and institutions that paves the way for peace. And as a young evangelical, I write not as a casual or distant observer, but as one among many. Many of the themes and problems I identified were themes and problems I have noticed in my own life. Confronting those issues has, I admit, given me more grace toward previous generations of evangelicalism.

This, of course, is no more a cure than what Reynolds has offered. It is, instead, my hope for the way in which evangelicals will conduct the conversation—with humility, openness to critique, and an eagerness to outdo each other in love and forbearance. Ultimately, evangelicalism’s life and future depends upon the working of the Holy Spirit and our openness to him, and in young evangelicals finding models and mentors to teach us how to navigate the theological, social, and political challenges of our day. As Dr. Reynolds has taught me, the only ‘cure’ we should look for is love—the love that moves the heavens, and all the other stars.

Matthew Lee Anderson is a twenty-six year old writer, public speaker, educator and editor. A graduate of the Torrey Honors Institute and Biola University, you can read more of his writing at his blog, MereOrthodoxy.com.

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W HO O W N S S C I E NC E ? ]the0end0of0secularism}

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Hunter Baker

ere is the real knowledge situation. We have science to give us unparalleled understanding of the natural worlds. We can gather an astounding array of facts, methods, and theories. None of them can help us formulate political ends. The rest of it, the non-material things that are unquestionably real in our experience as human beings in a material world, things like justice, love, morality, righteousness, charity, and mercy, these things all lie outside the ability of science to fill with meaning. Therefore, what I propose to the reader is that we stop simplistically contrasting science and faith or science and religion and refer more honestly to science and all other types of knowledge with varying levels of dependability.

A thoroughgoing positivist would look upon the situation I have described and would say there is empirically verifiable knowledge and the rest is mere sentiment. The problem, of course, as Francis Schaeffer and many others have pointed out, is that no one lives as though they really believe that. Show me a positivist and I will show you someone who rages at being treated unfairly. We all believe in justice, fairness, love, and morality. There are differences to be sure, but they are not so great as to render them utterly unrecognizable to each other. Stanley Fish remarked on the chasm of understanding between versions of fairness with which he might identify and which others might embrace. Nevertheless, we know we are talking about fairness still, and not aliens or petting zoos or softball. Morality cannot be empirically 43

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verified. Justice cannot be proven to exist as other than something we like to prattle on about and demand for ourselves and/or others. But we all believe in justice. If adherence to a scientific worldview means that justice is nothing more than a sentiment, then a scientific worldview is not worth having. The truth is that there is no such thing as a scientific worldview. There are merely a variety of worldviews informed by science to lesser or greater degrees.

The secular Enlightenment worldview is clearly informed by science, but it has no monopoly upon it. Certainly, we can produce lists of great scientists who were simultaneously devout Christians. We can also produce survey evidence indicating that practitioners of hard sciences (far more so than their comrades in the social sciences) are really quite likely to believe in God and not merely the blind watchmaker. The United States generates more scientific research and technological innovation than any other nation, yet it is one of the most religious societies on the planet. The goods (and potential evils) of science are available to anyone willing to make use of its power to investigate and control. That includes totalitarians and religious extremists—witness the heavy emphasis on science by both the Nazis and Soviets. Also observe the coming of nuclear nation status to Iran (as appears to be coming soon). John Gray reminds us, “[S]cientific knowledge is used to further the goals people already have—however conflicting and destructive.”

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o, though science is a highly effective tool for knowing things about the physical world and the creatures in it, it is unable to serve as some master decoder ring for ways of life or politics.

Those who would present the case of scientific outlooks being oppressed and restrained by religious ones are working primarily from two motives. The first is that revealed by the earlier analysis of the history of science, particularly the section about the Victorian period. Unnecessarily engineering the estrangement of science from religion was a method of gaining social and financial priority. The second motive is to turn science into what postmodernists call a master narrative that trumps and controls the competition. By claiming science for themselves the secular Enlightenment group hopes to characterize their opposition as the enemies of real knowledge. Thus, opposition to some44

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thing like embryonic stem cell research is cast as some kind of war on science rather than as a valid ethical concern. Because science, as discussed earlier, is unable to generate ethical constraints by its own nature, any attempt to set limits can conveniently be portrayed as unscientific. The success of that sort of story depends mightily upon a lack of critical insight from the intended audience. Because that audience already possesses the handy science v. religion template, it too easily accepts the argument as legitimate. They do not stop to ask how any limits on scientific endeavors that are viewed as legitimate are somehow independently justified outside of some extra-scientific view of the world.

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onsider two icons of the movement for a more scientific outlook in society. John Dewey wrote about the impact of Darwin on philosophy and insisted that taking a more scientific approach would rid us of the philosophical mistakes we make in consequence of our apprehension of design in the universe. Dewey could write about the chance ordering of life by nature and how we do not solve old questions, “we get over them.” But he very quickly followed that thought by insisting in the same volume upon the need to create a more just social order. The reader finds himself breathless: What?!! But we thought you said life has been ordered by chance. Then what is this thing called justice? And why should we care to attempt to bring it about in the industrial order?

One finds the same near neck-breaking turn in the kinds of things Richard Dawkins says. He is a dogmatic atheist and an evangelizer of the strongest possible anti-metaphysical conclusions from Darwin’s work. Does this turn him into a Nietzschean nihilist of some kind? No. Dawkins has very proudly proclaimed that though he is a “passionate Darwinian” in the academic sense and holds Darwinism as “the main ingredient” for understanding all of life and our existence, he is at the same time a “passionate anti-Darwinian when it comes to human social and political affairs.” So, the survival of the fittest and natural selection is the real reality underneath our veneer of civilization, but we must actively think differently when it comes to ordering political life.

Again, why? If Dawkins is right and blind nature is running the show, 45

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isn’t that anti-Darwinian stuff in politics little more than cheap sentiment? Why not just follow nature and install a program for culling the weak and breeding stronger, smarter human beings? What exactly is wrong with being a passionate Darwinian in politics, as well in “the academic sense?” It is a question to which Dawkins should address himself. Carefully.

This implicit trouble in the statements offered by luminaries of the science/religion battle like Dewey and Dawkins in addition to the already obvious problems raised for any idea of a secular/scientific politics by the existence of the fact/value dichotomy leads nicely toward a highly relevant example. The ultimate test for the claim of a scientific worldview by secularists rests upon the very great value they place upon equality (as do most of us). Scientifically speaking, it is extraordinary difficult to argue for the equality of persons. One could certainly rank the individuals in a society based on empirical factors like physical abilities, mental abilities, potential, real accomplishments, etc.

Political philosopher Louis Pojman notes that if we are to accept the empirical reality of people and their differences, there should be a presumption of inequality rather than the presumption of equality upon which so many political philosophers depend. If we are equal, it is almost surely in the sense of being equal before God, because we are in fact equal in virtually no other way.

Pojman has critically examined the emphasis upon equality by political theorists who insist on avoiding metaphysics and present their ideas as secular. He begins the article by pointing out the natural weaknesses of the various secular Enlightenment takes on political egalitarianism. They key weakness is that they make a presumption in favor of equality without successfully grounding their theory. Current theories compare poorly to competing frameworks in favor of inequality that could be equally said to proceed quite reasonably with empirical reality on their side. I fear that I am beating a dead horse when I suggest at this point the congruency between prized secular thought and the deliverances of science is somewhat strained.

Pojman goes on to state what we know to be true, which is that the ideas we cherish about “equal worth” and “inalienable rights” are products of our religious heritage. They simply cannot be justified by a 46

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naturalistic/empirical view of the world. Secular egalitarians, then, “are free riders, living off an inheritance they view with disdain.” A divorce from comprehensive views leads to instrumental reason, which in turn is incapable of justifying the basic commitments of the American constitutional order.

The standard trope is to counter Christian claims to having provided the basis for modern egalitarianism by adverting to classical culture or some other source. Pojman freely admits there are a variety of alternatives such as “Stoic panentheism which maintains that all humans have within them a part of God,” Islamic and Hindu notions about human worth, and possibly “a Platonic system” as well. The possibilities, Pojman writes, “are frighteningly innumerable,” but the multiplicity of possible sources does not relieve the need of “some metaphysical explanation” to ground equal human rights. Even though there are problems with the religious systems in question, that still does not take away the problem secular rights systems face in justifying their own priority for equality.

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o-called secular approaches to political thought have gained an advantage over more obviously religious approaches for the simple fact of their lack of ties to religious specificity. The susceptibility to believing they represent some more rational way comes directly from the history of the West, and particularly the Reformation break-up, which featured massive disputes within and between polities over which form of religion would officially reign. For that reason, political thought models that have been thought to divorce themselves from religion have been welcomed as liberators of the polity from the troubles of faith. Now that the secular has become the established mode and the religious has become the critical outsider, these modes of thought become obvious targets for the type of critique and demand for justification posed by postmodernism, and, for that matter, by this book. Secular thought is becoming a subject of study and critique just as religion has been and the cracks in its foundations are becoming clearer all the time.

If I am correct in dividing knowledge into two areas—the scientific which we are largely bound to accept and then everything else which 47

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encompasses a great deal of social real estate and is seriously contested —then there are clear implications for political thought. The first, and most important in my view, is that it becomes senseless to speak of the religious and the secular as two utterly different methods of reasoning, one of which is private and mysterious and the other which is common and rational. For too long, there has been tacit acceptance of the presentation of religion as irrational, but perhaps emotionally satisfying, while the secular insists upon hard-headed truth. I think I have demonstrated the incorrectness of that way of distinguishing the secular from the religious. For no reason other than to provoke a few sparking neurons I ask whether it possible that there is more evidence for something like the bodily resurrection of Christ than there is for a nonmetaphysical insistence upon human equality or even justice.

The second implication follows from the first. Secular liberals should cease demanding restraint from religious persons in reasoning from their religious convictions. Arguments that such persons should not offer religious arguments or should offer religious arguments only in their own community while bringing secular arguments to the public square or should not even vote on a matter without an independent secular rationale are unjustified. Political theorist Christopher Eberle has written a far more detailed and technical account of these epistemological issues. His conclusion is worth repeating here: Religious convictions are neither more controversial than nor “different in epistemically relevant aspects from some of the moral claims citizens will unavoidably employ in political decision making and advocacy.” In fact, what is often ignored in the discussion about accessibility is the simple fact that religious appeals are often more generalizable and universal than purely secular alternatives.

In this connection, I recall talking to a friend in graduate school who was enthusiastic about secularism. Knowing his appreciation of Martin Luther King, Jr., I reminded him King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”. The letter explicitly appeals to religious sources such as St. Augustine who claimed that an unjust law is no law at all. My friend’s reply was memorable. “King wouldn’t have had to do that if he had had access to a higher Marxian critique, which he got later, by the way.” I am not poking fun at my friend, but there are two things im48

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mediately occurred to me when he made that remark. First, does anyone think “a higher Marxian critique” would have moved America beyond segregation? It was King’s appeal to the quality of persons as God’s children, not “workers of the world unite” that succeed in America. Second, King’s appeal was religiously explicit and it made his message anything but inaccessible. The fact that the majority of Americans are not alienated by religious talk should “count for something” in a democracy.

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ecular liberals have misconceived the entire knowledge situation.

The practice of politics is far from an organic result of perfect critical rationality. It is in fact a hotbed of ideals, emotion, and stage management. There is no way to formulate adequate political ends scientifically and thus there is no reason to cabin off religion from the political process. The contemporary academic and legal culture has too easily assumed that there are clear differences between concepts like secular, religious, religion, and morality. There is no such thing as metaphysical neutrality for states. They affirm fundamental values with metaphysical foundations in doing and in not doing. A very great proportion of the large decisions made by the state are, to employ an inexact phrase, faith-based. Implicit faith claims deserve no hegemony over explicit ones. To fail to recognize that much is to threaten real pluralism without adequate reason to do so. Though the rank and file member of the conservative Christian community might not find just these words to describe the problem, the above is a fair explanation of much of the resentment behind the American culture war. There is a feeling that religious convictions are unfairly discounted in favor of other systems of morality without firmer grounding. This analysis, I contend, is what Christians have been attempting to get at with their perpetual campaign against the “religion of secular humanism” in schools and government.

The best summation of the real knowledge situation and how it sits with reference to politics has been set forth by Robert George. Secularism finds itself in a conundrum because if it draws the requirements of reason in too tightly, then it is unable to satisfy its own ideal of public reason just as it suggests religious thought does not. At the same time, 49

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if secularism does not insist on essentially scientific, hard reason, then it leaves the door open to full engagement with religious worldviews, something which its attempts to segregate and privatize religion suggest that it is not eager to do.

Christians, for example, react to this information in two different ways that are compatible. The first is to concede the difficulty of grounding religious and moral claims in rationality, but to point out that secularism has the same problem. Thus, the public square must essentially remain open to all comers, specifically religious or not. The second, and Georgeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s preferred tactic, is to affirm the demand for public reason and to appeal to â&#x20AC;&#x153;fully public reasons provided by principles of natural law and natural justice.â&#x20AC;? This book has been far more concerned with the first strategy rather than the second, as it argues against secularism rather than for any particularistic Christian positions. If secularism cannot stand up to highly rationalistic requirements for participation in politics, then a version of public reason that leaves religion out of the picture has little value for deployment in the public square. On the other hand, if we expand our understanding of public reason in a manner that is realistic with regard to what secularism really can and cannot offer, then religious contestants, like Robert George, have much to say that is potentially convincing.

Hunter Baker is Associate Provost and Assistant Professor of Government at Houston Baptist University. This essay is adapted from his book, The End of Secularism , which is being published

by Crossway this fall.

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S OLZHENITSYN ON OUR F UTURE /technology0and0purpose?

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Peter Augustine Lawler

he Russian novelist, historian, and essayist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who died in August of last year, was perhaps more responsible than any other man—and certainly any other writer—for the West’s great victory in the “ideological war” with communism. It was a war, as James Schall has written, that was “about what is a human being,” during which Solzhenitsyn demonstrated his “intellectual courage, the courage to tell the truth when the regime, any regime, is built on a lie.”

The Russian was even courageous enough not to hesitate to criticize the West—including our country. In a 1993 Address to the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein entitled “We Have Ceased to See the Purpose,” Solzhenitsyn said that the defeat of communism in many ways left the West worse off. There was no longer any “unifying purpose” to mask the deepening moral vacuum characteristic of modern, progressively more technological life as such. “All we had forgotten,” Solzhenitsyn contends, “was the human soul.” The prevailing answer to “what a human being is” remains far from complete.

What we have been given, he explains, is “an extremely intricate trial of our free will” brought on by our technological success.

Solzhenitsyn readily admits what people gain when they come to think of themselves mainly as beings with interests. Today, the average person lives longer, more freely, and with more creature comforts than at nearly any point in the history of the world. There’s nothing wrong with being comfortable in freedom for a very long time. Our modern 51

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technological thinking certainly succeeded in correcting the otherworldly excesses of medieval spirituality. And it really is true that one responsibility given to free beings with bodies is to attend to one’s interests. Anyone who thinks he’s above or below really is mistaken about who he is. But modern human beings remain stuck with the trials Solzhenitsyn describes. We can’t and shouldn’t shirk from facing them. Rather, we should be grateful for having been given morally demanding lives, lives which require that we display our courage and make possible both human responsibility and human happiness.

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p until now, it seems that the cost of modern progress has been the neglect of our souls. “We have ceased to see the purpose” of particular human lives, Solzhenitsyn observes; we no longer know who or what we are living for. True progress is always individual or personal, moral, spiritual, and truthful. It depends upon the individual’s self-limitation with a purpose in mind he didn’t just make up for himself. It involves humble submission to a real authority higher than ourselves, an authority that calls us to personal responsibility. Anyone with eyes to see knows that he’s been given moral responsibility as a personal being that can’t help but know and love.

“There can be,” Solzhenitsyn wrote, “only one true Progress: the sum total of the spiritual progress of individuals, the degree of selfperfection over the course of their lives.” A truly progressive society would subordinate technological progress to personal progress. Technology would be good as one means among many for the responsible pursuit of personal perfection. But that subordination, Solzhenitsyn observes, has so far seemed to have been almost impossible. The characteristically modern view has become that all human experience should be reconfigured in a technological way. The modern slogan is, he says, “All is interests, we should not neglect our interests.” The being with interests and nothing more thinks he must devote every moment of his life to securing his own being in a hostile environment.

And he thinks he neglects his interests—his true self—every time he attends to his soul.

For Solzhenitsyn, what we’ve lost by thinking of ourselves as “beings with interests” overwhelms what we’ve gained. The “gifts” of our 52

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“technological civilization” have both enriched and enslaved us; we are in some ways materially more secure, but at the cost of “spiritual insecurity.” Even in the squalor of the Gulag, Solzhenitsyn knew his purpose, he knew why he was there. And, as his own example shows, people certain of the why part of their lives can live well with almost any how. No amount of how can replace the absence of why—of some idea of what we are living for.

Even with the advantages of technological advancement, people in our country are more lonely, worried, and disoriented than ever. Just beneath the surface of the happy-talk of our therapeutic pragmatism, Solzhenitsyn heard “the howl of existentialism”—the desperate expression of profound spiritual insecurity.

Beings with interests and nothing more think that words are nothing but weapons to pursue their freely chosen private goals. So they don’t have the words to express their social, personal longings—their loneliness in the absence of love and their inability to live well with the prospect of death. They howl because they’re so detached from other persons that they can’t truthfully communicate their experiences. They howl because they think that they are nothing but accidents in a world so hostile to their existence that they’re stuck with constantly securing themselves all by themselves. They howl when they think about their biological demise, which they think will be the end of being itself. For them—for us, “the thought of death becomes unbearable,” because “[i]t is the extinction of the entire universe in a stroke.”

Solzhenitsyn may exaggerate how much we’re stuck with howling, but all serious critics in our country are compelled to exaggerate in typically futile efforts to get our attention. Our philosopher-novelist physician Walker Percy wrote in Lost in the Cosmos that American writers suffer from “Solzhenitsyn envy.” In fact, Solzhenitsyn was taken so seriously by his government that he was thrown into prison for over a decade and later just kicked out of the country; the Soviet rulers knew that his truthful words were a fundamental threat to the future of their regime. But no American writer is considered so dangerous. From Solzhenitsyn’s viewpoint, we are more recalcitrant students or slower learners than were the Soviets. Even he was not really able, despite many attempts, to get our attention.

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Solzhenitsyn is right to suggest that the narrative of our country’s historical progress that makes the most sense is that of the liberation of the individual. As the Supreme Court pointed out in Lawrence v. Texas, what seem like necessary and proper limits of individual liberty to one generation of Americans seems like despotism to the next. The very word “liberty” in the Constitution, the Court contends, has no definite meaning; it was placed there as a weapon to be used by individuals to increase their freedom over time. Free individuals have, over time, even detached the bonds of marriage from all biological imperatives.

The modern experience is of “lifestyle options,” of rights detached from duties.

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ccording to social critic Christopher Lasch, writing in The Culture of Narcissism, the increasingly common product of our effort to understand ourselves as free individuals with interests and nothing more is the narcissistic personality. To be narcissistic is to experience everyone and everything as existing for me—people experience themselves as more alone than ever.

The narcissistic person, Lasch observed, aims to be protectively shallow, so as not to lose himself or his interests in other people, in deep thought or in love. He also has a fear of binding commitments and a willingness to pull up roots, to maximize his emotional independence and keep his options open. He wants to free himself to judge every moment of his life according to his interests, or according to what’s best for securing his own being. Most of all, the narcissistic person is repulsed by an experience of dependence—on other people, on nature, and even on his own body. He opposes himself—his free existence—to any attempt to limit his freedom. Because he can’t acknowledge his dependence, he’s incapable of feeling or expressing loyalty or gratitude. He is aware of his reality, but also his emptiness, of existence as a collection of pixels, disconnected in every respect from the world around him. He insists on defining himself by himself for himself.

Consider the incoherent way sophisticated Americans understand themselves today. They are, more than anything, proud of their autonomy, and they favor choice in nearly all areas of life. Since Darwin teaches the whole truth, they know they are qualitatively no different from animals—just chimps with cars, cell phones, and bigger brains.

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If you look at the behavior of these self-defined autonomous chimps, it’s clear who they really think they are. They work to maximize their personal autonomy. They don’t really believe they’re stuck with what nature gave them—they refuse to act like chimps. They labor against nature, refusing to spread their genes by having little chimps, and rebelling more insistently against nature’s indifference to their particular existences. They act like they don’t like being chimps and have freely chosen to do something about it—and many look down at those nonnarcissist evangelical and orthodox religious believers, doing their natural social duty of reproducing, going through life not nearly as upset by their contingent and ephemeral biological existences.

According to the great thinkers of the pre-modern world, human beings are political, familial, and religious animals. Their mixture of reason, love, freedom, and embodiment leads them to give institutional content and communal form to the lives together. But the contemporary narcissist hates any formal limitation or direction to his freedom.

So he does what he can to live without politics, family, and church. He tries to live nowhere in particular, because he experiences himself as being nowhere in particular.

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ociobiologists tell us that the narcissist is somehow deluded into thinking that he’s better off cut off from the natural, social sources of the happiness of human animals. Christians say that his protective withdrawal is based on the mistaken judgment that love is more trouble and more dangerous than it’s worth. Today it sometimes seems as if people have to choose between either living happily by being suckered by others and subjecting themselves unnecessarily to various risk factors or living more securely for a long, free, comfortable, and miserable time. With the help of their family physicians, many Americans seek ways to escape the burden of that choice through artificial happiness provided by Prozac and similar drugs.

Chemically-engineered happiness promises to be free from both the dangerous unreliability of others and having to give even a moment’s thought to one’s soul—it is merely a transaction with a desired output.

There is, of course, a tension between the technology of mood control and the progress of real technology—what really promises to sus55

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tain the free being indefinitely. If my mood becomes too “Don’t worry, be happy,” then I might stop working really hard to secure my real self. I might neglect to take my Statin or scientifically work out or even take action to divert the asteroid about to pulverize our planet. What we really seem to want are “designer moods” that reconcile happiness with productivity. We want to be, as David Brooks observes, “bourgeois bohemians,” to be both hyperproductive and enjoyably selffulfilled. Yet bourgeois always trumps bohemian, because the truth is the narcissist knows of no standard higher than his own productivity.

Whatever the hard working “bobos” might say, the bohemian part of his life is always just around the corner.

A perfectly technological world would be one in which every natural resource was harnessed to maximize the productivity of free beings. The philosopher of narcissism John Locke said my body is my property—a natural resource that I might exploit at will. Because I am not my body (or the chemical reactions that produce my moods), I am free to use my body like all my other property. From some undisclosed location, I’m free to give orders to and about my body.

That technological insight is the source of our enthusiasm today for cosmetic surgery and cosmetic neurology. Thanks to high-tech medicine, I can—by nipping, tucking, botoxing, and so forth—make my body seem younger, more pretty and more pleasing—or more marketable. I can also, with the right drugs, make myself smarter, have a better memory, be more attentive, be less moody, and even have more physical endurance. From the traditional standards of medicine, surely the physician shouldn’t turn a healthy person into a patient just to make him more productive. And any responsible physician should have some qualms about the inevitably perverse psychological result of turning a perfectly normal memory or mood into an enhanced one.

But those concerns are now trumped by the patient’s autonomy—or freedom from, and for, bodily determination.

Society still says we shouldn’t do anything chemical or artificial to boost the performance of athletes. We want natural gifts to be combined with real self-discipline to produce authentic excellence. The home-run hitter who takes steroids increases his own value as a player, and so in a sense his productivity. But the money he gets comes from 56

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entertaining an audience, and the customer is going to be right when it comes to what sort of display of excellence will please him the most.

Steroids or not, the customer is always right.

Yet the choice for nature over technological artificiality has little relevance for areas of life where the standard of productivity is less ambiguous. It’s easy to say the athlete shouldn’t “cheat” in a game—it’s much harder to say, for example, that physicians should turn down safe and reliable enhancements that greatly improve their medical judgment and reduce medical errors. Nobody’s going to say let’s stick with the natural way at the cost of significant suffering and loss of life.

Athletes just play games according to basically arbitrary rules; medicine is about really keeping free beings going. Somebody might say that the physician, as an autonomous being, shouldn’t be compelled to use a drug that improves his memory or judgment or endurance. But it seems to me that productivity in the service of health and safety will eventually trump personal autonomy, even just as a consequence of the marketplace. Physicians who fall short of the expected performance standards won’t be kept on the job out of respect for their conscientious objection to enhancement or their personal flourishing. With the possibility of artificially enhanced performance a fact of medical life, and the selfless sacrifice of one’s autonomy for the good of the patient will be expected as part of the professionalism.

Productivity will, in fact, trump autonomy in most areas of work, whether for the businessman who must work ridiculous hours in the global marketplace, the VIP worker who can’t keep the smile going on a double shift, or even the notoriously unproductive and autonomyobsessed college professor, who drove some students off and never got it together enough to publish much. Soon enough, none of them will be able to claim a right to their so-called natural moods if they can easily go down to drugstore and get brightened up. From a technological view, moods are just collections of chemicals, and, if possible, we should choose the ones that are of the most use to us. Because I am not my moods, I should give orders to them with my productivity in mind.

The same sort of thinking will probably determine the outcome of another important bioethical issue we now face, along with an economic downturn: Should I be able to sell my allegedly redundant 57

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second kidney, or should a woman be able to sell her eggs? Some say that it’s undignified to reduce human beings to commodities, but the free individual responds: I am not my body. My kidneys or my eggs are a commodity, to be used by me or sold as I see fit. It will be a new birth of freedom, the narcissist believes, when I can count my body as part of my net worth in dollars, and other people are free to do the same. It’s my business if my doctor has turned me—a healthy person with a top-notch kidney—into a patient to dispose of my resource as I please. In doing so, after all, I benefit not only myself, I preserve the life—the very being—of another free being, without having him become in any way dependent on me. Entering the kidney market is one way among many I can find to enhance my productivity. There are already some serious ethicists who say that, given the plight of the poor in our unjust society, we should free them up to improve themselves by marketing what is a very valuable—and until now an untapped—resource. How easily we forget that if we allow people to sell their kidneys, we might end up expecting them to.

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hese are the best times ever to be young, smart, pretty, and industrious. Productivity is the standard in our increasingly meritocratic society—but the pressure is on like never before to be young, smart, pretty, and industrious. The preferential options inaugurated in the Sixties turn out to have technological justifications. The young are the most flexible and techno-savvy among us. We go to the youngest member of the family—certainly not grandpa—to find out how to use own iPhones, iPods, and various other iThings. What do the old know that we need to know now? Technology obliterates the need for traditions, for guarding and passing on. More generally, we’re now stuck with the question of “What are old people for?” We tell them it’s time for them to enjoy, but human life, to be either dignified or happy, has to be for more than enjoyment. As Solzhenitsyn says, technology is an undeniable cause of a “rift” between the generations, often “dooming” the old to loneliness and abandonment and depriving them of “the joy of passing on their experience to the young.”

Our technological standard of productivity increasingly favors the young. But our technological success is causing our population to age.

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and attentive responses to every newly discovered risk factor. We are living longer than ever. And (except for religiously observant Americans and certain immigrants) people in the Western world are having fewer and fewer children, partly because they don’t want to limit their options by thinking of themselves as parents. Insofar as I identify being itself with my being, I see no need to generate replacements.

It’s very good news that people are living longer. There seems to be a new birth of freedom in the growing period between parenting and productivity, and debility and death. That freedom, for prosperous Americans, seems to be for whatever purpose the individual chooses.

But, from another view, the individual is productive for a small part of his life, and a dependent for longer, as a child and as an old person. If freedom and dignity are intertwined with productivity, then it may not be so great after all to live a very long time. Will the shrinking number of productive young people be willing or even able to support the increasing number of the unproductive old? “The gift of heightened life expectancy,” Solzhenitsyn observes, “has, as one of its conquences, made the elder generation into a burden for its children.”

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ertainly both the young and the old are aware of the individualistic, meritoratic principle that nobody owes anyone else a living. As Locke himself told us, in an individualistic society the only reliable hold the old have on the young is money. It’s more important than ever to be rich if you’re going to get very old, as almost all of us hope to do. But pension systems are collapsing, Medicare is demographically untenable, health care and caregiving costs are skyrocketing, and our economic future is in question. It’s tougher than ever to have confidence that your money is going to last as long as you are.

I tell my students I want to enroll them in my two-point program for saving Medicare. First, they need to start smoking and really stick with it. Second, they need to start making babies, and I mean right now, this week. So far I haven’t been persuasive enough to get them with the program. But members of the Greatest Generation, in effect, did. They had lots of kids and gave very little thought to risk factors. They often smoked like chimneys, enjoyed multiple martinis, and only exercised for fun. The excellent TV series Mad Men, featuring advertising execu59

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tives in 1960, displays the unhealthy habits of highly successful Americans for our horror. Don’t you idiots know you’re killing yourselves!

They really did drop dead much earlier and more often, without drawing a dime of Social Security or (after 1962) Medicare, but not before generating several replacements to fund those programs for the future.

Our whole medical safety net is premised on demographics that have disappeared and aren’t likely to return, and that’s because, for good and bad, we’re more narcissistic than people used to be.

One downside of thinking of oneself as a self-sufficient individual is the inevitability of becoming old and frail. Nobody, it turns out, is stuck—out of love or at least familial loyalty—with taking care of you.

The fastest growing demographic category is men over 65 with no children or spouse, and even having a child might not help you much in our mobile and increasingly duty-free society. We’re persistently pushing heart disease and cancer back, but more people seem destined to die of Alzheimer’s. Imagine what Alzheimer’s must be like for someone who has no one to rely upon who loved them prior to their getting the disease. The number of old and frail, debilitating and slowly dying wards of the state, are only going to increase. And the care they’re going to get, because they’re really on their own, isn’t likely to be good. As a nation, we have no idea how we’re going to afford it.

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hen there is caregiving. Thinking in terms of productivity and caregiving are two very different ways of looking at the world, and at the purposes of human beings. Productivity is a measurable metric of dollars and cents, and its benefits are diminished if shared. It turns friendship into networking, and creates a standard that’s tough on those more motivated by love. Caregiving is unproductive, can’t be measured by money, is all about loving solicitude, and usually seems boring and easy to people obsessed with productivity.

We Americans used to have a rough division of labor based on the traditional distinction between productivity and caregiving, a division between men and women. Men took care of politics and business and women the home and the children. Roughly speaking, men were about the money and women the love. Men were about the pursuit of happiness and women happiness itself. And I’m not only thinking of mar60

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ried women—the legendary Sisters of Mercy were tough, intelligent, and adventurous women who devoted their lives to the sick and the dying out of love.

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he American view, as Alexis de Tocqueville famously described it in Democracy in America, was that what men and women did was separate but equal—really incommensurable. People need both to be productive and to be cared for, and it’s impossible to rank one human good over the other. There’s no denying, Tocqueville added, that American men often didn’t really think that what women did was as important as what they did, just as they were reluctant to admit how indispensable caregiving was to their happiness. The division of labor was, in fact, unjust. Men had all the public power, and the option of contributing to caregiving, which they rarely exercised. The more productive ways of living were denied to most women. This injustice, Tocqueville reports, was willingly endured by the most intelligent and admirable American women, because they knew better than American men the true purpose of human life. They knew better than men the true purpose of human life. Because they knew the “why,” they found themselves remarkably able to live with any “how.” American men, by comparison, were prone to bragging, quite unrealistically, that everything they did could be comprehended by the doctrine of self-interest rightly understood. Tocqueville couldn’t help but subtly give his judgment that American women are superior to American men.

Women eventually demanded their liberation in the name of justice.

But, for the most part, they were liberated to be productive—to be wage slaves—just like men. Men and women are now supposed to share equally in being productive and in being caregivers, but nobody really denies that women took to the men’s traditional role far more readily than men did to the women’s. Women flooded the labor market and significantly enhanced our country’s productivity, but real wages dropped. The family wage became an increasingly distant ideal. Families increasingly seemed to need to work more hours than one person reasonably could to live well. Women who wanted to remain “unproductive” out of love have had a hard time defending their choice or being honored for it. As people become more unreliable and narcissistic, any wife and mom who can’t pay her own way has a very risky 61

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existence. While close to 80% of longterm caregiving is still done voluntarily by women, the amount of voluntary caregiving seems bound to continue to decline.

Today, more and more caregiving is done for money, by workers.

We have healthcare workers for the sick and disabled, daycare workers for children, and so forth. Insofar as such workers save and prolong lives with their technical skill, they’re clearly being productive. What gives caregiving incommensurable value is loving solicitude or what makes life most worth living. But we can’t expect someone we hire to feel that love. When caregiving is reduced to what we can measure with money, it seems like much less than it really is. For the same reason some would rather pay for a kidney than be given one—once money changes hands, they owe the provider nothing more.

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his cuts to the heart of our inability to sustain our health care system, even as technology advances. It continues to get tougher for increasingly productive and narcissistic individuals to identify themselves—especially lovingly—with anything but themselves. They think of themselves less and less as basically parents or children, creatures, citizens, friends, or even parts of nature and think of themselves more and more as free individuals. Our time is characterized, Tocqueville first noticed, by the “heart disease” of individualistic withdrawal. The narcissistic individual is both certain that he’s not a biological being, and that there’s nothing real about him that survives his biological death. Death, for him, is meaningless total extinction, and that’s why Solzhenitsyn observes that what people in the West lack, most of all, is “a clear and calm attitude toward death.”

People are more concerned than ever with doing what’s required to stay alive, even as they do everything they can to divert themselves from real thoughts about love and death. They’re increasingly convinced that they’re stuck with securing their free or contingent beings on their own. So they’re sure to be increasingly anxious consumers of the biotechnology that aims to break ever more completely the natural life cycle, to achieve indefinite longevity for each particular individual.

Those who claim we should do as nature intends and not make a big effort to keep people alive beyond a certain age—say, 75 or 80—aren’t 62

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facing the fact that there’s no natural limit that free individuals can’t challenge with considerable success. There’s no reason why I should rest content with the thought that my being has definite biological limits. I have the right to more and more, as the technological means become available. We’re going to end up living as long as we can. Even the Bible seems to be in favor of people living a very long time, if they can. That Book also explains why we’re the beings who aren’t limited by nature like the others.

Being so death-haunted explains our birth dearth to some extent; we get little solace from thinking about the children who will live on after us. Nor do we get much satisfaction from producing any accomplishments that will stand the test of time much better than we can as biological beings, and that’s why there’s so little building or writing for the ages these days. Being so death-haunted also helps to explain the extreme measures taken by the old to look young, not to remind us that they’re dying It’s one reason why the old are increasingly separated from the rest of society, and their care turned over to workers. It might even have something to do with why physicians have less time for their dying patients, and why the best and the brightest medical students are choosing dermatology—which, as medical specialties go, has very little do with either birth or death. Is death God’s will, or an unexpected accident? Today, we are reluctant to answer.

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merica’s health care crisis also has to do with productivity trumping caregiving. The system of health insurance largely being a benefit of employment is a vestige of the past. One problem, of course, is that too many people—those un- and underemployed are uncovered. A bigger one is that this system, supported by tax deductions for employers and employees, is incompatible with the requirements of a dynamic and competitive global economy, as well as with the increasing pressure on ordinary people to be productive. Employers, saddled with rapidly escalating health costs driven by medical malpractice, the demands of technological innovation, and millions of uninsured Americans, can no longer offer that benefit and remain competitive. Employees fear losing their coverage, while employers fear being stuck with an unproductive employee with an expensively sick child.

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Our present health care system depends on the paternalistic employer being an intermediary between the individual and government.

But in an economy where employer and employee cannot afford the price of loyalty to each other, the last vestiges of social paternalism are fading away. Health care has to devolve either to the individual or to government. Some say that the government has a duty to provide the best possible health care for every dignified human being. That conclusion might be supported by Christian or Kantian morality. It might even flow from the Lockean view that people consent to government to have their right to life protected. That might mean that government has the duty to employ all means available to keep me alive as long as possible. A thoroughgoing narcissist wouldn’t hesitate to claim that every possible resource should be thrown into the technological project of indefinitely delaying his death—a providential government should assume the burden of sustaining isolated individuals. But as we’ve seen, the European idea of a paternalistic government caring for the health of everyone as a common good undermines the personal caregiving indispensable for sustaining our system. And American demographic realities prevent government from fulfilling even a modest view of that responsibility indefinitely.

Today, public bureaucracies are far more likely than private concerns to be infused with the self-indulgent, narcissistic cultural excesses of our intellectuals. These same bureaucracies would decide about rationing, compelling abortions, and make the hard calls about the profoundly disabled or those very near death. We wouldn’t want to turn health care decisions over to those most contemptuous of the moral choices of the least narcissistic Americans.

Nevertheless, health care shouldn’t devolve to individuals left simply to their own ingenuity and resources either. Repeated attempts to “socialize medicine” have failed, and I believe the fears of Hayek and Tocqueville were mistaken. We’re not slouching toward some soft despotism full of dependents who have surrendered concern for their futures to the nanny state. Instead, people are more on their own than ever. Their safety nets are collapsing; they’re stuck with securing their own futures in an increasingly indifferent world, and one that inevitably penalizes the most vulnerable among us—the old and the infirm.

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Curbing the narcissism of our time begins by enabling and encouraging people to act out of love. Programs that help parents, children, friends, citizens, and creatures do what they’re inclined to do in terms of voluntary caregiving borrow principles from the European Christian Democratic parties calling for care to be given in the most personal way possible. A sustainable health care system is possible only insofar as productivity is balanced with love, or by the thought that each human being is more than a being with interests.

One example of such a program, in my hometown of Rome, Georgia, is an outpost of a hospital still run by the Sisters of Mercy. Old and very frail people—many with early stage Alzheimer’s—can spend the day at a center staffed by a nurse and caregivers. The center is missiondriven and personal enough that the staff members, although paid, think of themselves as a lot more than workers. And this “daycare” allows old people to stay at home with their families—or “deinstitutionalized”—without impossible or unreasonable sacrifices of productivity and ambition. It is a program premised on assisting people in being as self-reliant as they can reasonably be. Yes, we want as little caregiving as possible to be done by government, which can’t help but treat people as isolated individuals or needy dependents. At the same time, we want people, especially the vulnerable among us, not be all on their own in navigating our technological future. We want to keep the lonely howling down to a minimum.

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oday’s challenges aside, we must remember that we are not in the thrall of some impersonal technological process bound to deprive of us of our humanity. Technological civilization really is a trial of our free will, and we can still think and act as if human beings are more than beings with interests. We really have been given distinctive purposes, and we really still can live in love with what and who we really know. We certainly live in demanding times, with anxious insecurity and profound loneliness making happiness difficult to find, but far from impossible. As Solzhenitsyn wrote, the result of neglecting our souls is a “nagging sadness of the heart” in the midst of plenty. But our souls are still there, and if we do not care for them, there is still one who does.

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The most immediate intended audience for Solzhenitsyn’s speech on our vacuum of purpose was those individuals, in the early 1990s, who bought into the “naïve fable of the happy arrival at ‘the end of history,’ of the overflowing triumph of an all-democratic bliss.” That fable or lullaby, we now know, failed to produce either human happiness or human “tranquility.” At the end of history, we would be freed from trials of free will and living in peaceful contentment in the present. But the truth is that the trials of the twentieth century have been replaced by new ones. We see, more clearly than ever, that modern progress has not been humanly satisfying, and so we should be more open than ever to coming to terms with the distorted incompleteness of the modern or allegedly “progressive” understanding of who we are.

Solzhenitsyn, in his 1978 Harvard Address, reminded us, that “if man were born only to be happy, he would not have been born to die.”

That’s not to say that he wasn’t born to be happy, but that his happiness comes from fulfilling the purpose he has been given—“his task on earth,” one that “evidently must be more spiritual” than “a total engrossment in everyday life.” Thank God, that total engrossment is impossible for beings born to die, and we have no choice but “to rise a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled on, as in the Modern Era.” Our thought and public policy must be informed by postmodernism rightly understood, by what we can now see with our own eyes about the truth about who we are. Our social and political vision that guides us toward “progress” of a political level needs to be based on the ideal of true progress—the genuinely moral drama of the good’s truthful, courageous, and happy struggle against the evil of lies—that should constitute every human life. “In the end,” as James Schall explained it, “ultimate things have to be rediscovered in each of our souls.”

Peter Augustine Lawler, a former member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, is Dana Professor of Government and International Studies at Berry College.

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O BAMA & A BORTION ]0a0discussion0} Robert P. George At the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on May 28, 2009, Princeton Professor Robert P. George and Pepperdine Law Professor Douglas Kmiec had what was described as a “Discussion of Life Issues.” What follows are Professor George’s opening remarks, which he has graciously given us permission to print.

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ne does not treat an interlocutor with respect if one refuses to speak plainly. Candor, far from being the enemy of civility, is one of its preconditions. And so I will speak candidly of the points where I, as someone dedicated to the principle that every member of the human family possesses profound, inherent, and equal dignity, find myself at odds—deeply at odds—with President Obama and his administration.

In my judgment, citizens who honor and seek to protect the lives of vulnerable unborn children must oppose the Obama administration’s agenda on the taking of unborn human life. Our goal must be to frustrate at every turn the administration’s efforts, which will be ongoing and determined, to expand the abortion license and the authorization and funding of human embryo-destructive research. Because the President came into office with large majorities in both houses of Congress, ours is a daunting task. But the difficulty of the challenge in no way diminishes our moral obligation to meet it. And I here call upon prolife Americans, including those who, like Professor Douglas Kmiec, supported President Obama and helped to bring him to power, to find common ground with us in this great struggle for human equality, human rights, and human dignity.

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Professor Kmiec and I share common ground in the belief that every member of the human family—irrespective of race, class, and ethnicity, but also irrespective of age, size, location, stage of development or condition of dependency—is entitled to our care and respect and to the equal protection of our laws. This is what it means to be pro-life. In this shared conviction, Professor Kmiec and I are on one side of a crucial divide, and President Obama is on the other. Professor Kmiec and I stand together in our opposition to abortion and human embryodestructive research, but we share very little common ground on these matters with President Obama and those whom he has appointed to high office who will determine the fate of vast numbers of our weakest and most vulnerable brothers and sisters.

I appreciated the President’s candor at Notre Dame when he said: Now understand, understand, class of 2009, I do not suggest that the debate surrounding abortion can or should go away. Because no matter how much we may want to fudge it . . . the fact is that at some level the views of the two camps are irreconcilable.

The President is right. His view regarding the status, dignity, and rights of the child in the womb, and the view shared by Professor Kmiec and myself, are irreconcilable. A chasm separates those of us who believe that every living human being possesses profound, inherent, and equal dignity, and those who, for whatever reasons, deny it.

The issue really cannot be fudged, as people sometimes try to do by imagining that there is a dispute about whether it is really a human being who is dismembered in a dilation and curettage abortion, or whose skin is burned off in a saline abortion, or the base of whose skull is pierced and whose brains are sucked out in a dilation and extraction (or “partial birth”) abortion. That issue has long been settled—and it was settled not by religion or philosophy, but by the sciences of human embryology and developmental biology.

So it is clear that what divides us as a nation—and what divides Barack Obama, on one side, from Robert George and Douglas Kmiec, on the other—is not whether the being whose life is taken in abortion and in embryo-destructive research is a living individual of the human species—a human being; it is whether all human beings, or only some, possess fundamental dignity and a right to life. Professor Kmiec and I 68

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affirm, and the President denies, that every human being, even the youngest, the smallest, the weakest and most vulnerable at the very dawn of their lives, has a life which should be respected and protected by law. The President holds, and we deny, that those in the embryonic and fetal stages of human development may rightly and freely be killed because they are unwanted or potentially burdensome to others, or because materials obtained by dissecting them may be useful in biomedical research.

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he President speaks of human rights, and I do not question his sincerity. But he does not understand the concept of human rights, as Professor Kmiec and I do, to refer to rights—above all the right to life—that all human beings possess simply by virtue of our humanity. For the President, being human is not enough to qualify someone as the bearer of a right to life. Professor Kmiec and I, by contrast, believe that every member of the human family, simply by virtue of his or her humanity, is truly created equal. We reject the idea that is at the foundation of President Obama’s position on abortion and human embryo-destructive research, namely, that those of us who are equal in worth and dignity are equal by virtue of some attribute other than our common humanity—some attribute that unborn children have not yet acquired, justifying others in treating them, despite their humanity, as non-persons, as objects or property, even as disposable material for use in biomedical research.

President Obama knows that an unborn baby is human. He knows that the blood shed by the abortionist’s knife is human blood, that the bones broken are human bones. He does not deny that the baby whom nurse Jill Stanek discovered gasping for breath in a soiled linen bin after a failed attempt to end her life by abortion, was a human baby.

Even in opposing the Illinois Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, which was designed to assure that such babies were rescued if possible or at least given comfort care while they died, Barack Obama did not deny the humanity of the child. What he denied, and continues to deny, is the fundamental equality of that child—equality with those of us who are safely born and accepted into the human community.

During his campaign for the Presidency, then-Senator Obama was asked by Rick Warren: When does a baby acquire human rights? In 69

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reply, the future president did not say, “well it depends on when a baby (or a “fetus”) comes to life, or becomes a human being.” He knows that an unborn baby is alive and human, and he did not pretend not to know. His response to Pastor Warren did seem to express doubt of as to when rights begin, saying that the question was “above his pay grade.” But Obama’s record as an activist, legislator, and now as President makes clear his view that an unborn baby, or even a baby outside the womb like the one discovered in that soiled linen bin by Jill Stanek, possesses no rights that others are bound to respect or that the law should in any way honor. Throughout his political career, Obama has consistently and fervently rejected every form of legislation that would provide unborn babies or children who survive abortions with meaningful protection against being killed. Indeed, he has opposed even efforts short of prohibiting abortion that would discourage the practice, limit its availability, or directly favor childbirth over abortion.

Professor Kmiec and I believe in the equal fundamental rights of all, including the equality of mother and child. We recognize that women with undesired pregnancies can undergo serious hardships, and we believe that a just and caring society will concern itself with the wellbeing of mothers as well as their children. We agree with Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who by precept and example taught us to reach out in love to care for mother and child alike, never supposing that love for one entails abandoning care and concern for the other.

President Obama holds a different view. He has made clear his own conviction that the equality of women depends on denying the equality and rights of the children they carry. He has made what is, from the pro-life point of view, the tragic error of supposing that the equality of one class of human beings can and must be purchased by denial of the equality of another.

One wishes that President Obama had listened carefully, and with an open mind and an open heart, to the pleas of Mother Teresa during her last visit to the United States. Her message was that a pregnant woman in need is not in need of the violence of abortion. What she and her child need are love and care—love and care from all of us. Our task, Mother reminded us, as individuals and as a society, is to love and care for mother and child alike.

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President Obama’s supporters do him no good service by pretending that his expressions of willingness to find “common ground” with pro-lifers involve, at some level, recognition that abortion or embryodestructive research is bad or tragic because it kills a living member of the human family. Unlike, say former President Clinton or former New York Governor Cuomo, or even Vice President Biden, President Obama does not profess to be “personally opposed” to abortion, or to believe that abortion is a wrongful act that must nevertheless be legally permitted because the consequences of outlawing it would be worse than those of tolerating it. His belief, and his policy, is that abortion, if a woman chooses it, is not wrong. That is why he is not personally opposed to it. There is no wrong there to oppose. Indeed, the President made crystal clear his view that abortion can be an entirely legitimate and even desirable option, when he said that if one of his daughters made a mistake and became pregnant, he would not want her to be “punished with a baby.” In such a case, he saw abortion as the right solution to a problem—a solution that we should be happy is available, and that we should make available if it happens not yet to be available.

Without it, a young woman would be “punished.”

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have no doubt that the President regards it as deeply unfortunate, sometimes even tragic, that the problem giving rise to the woman’s need for an abortion exists; but there is equally no room to doubt that President Obama regards it as fortunate that a solution to the problem—in the form of abortion—is available. For someone holding this view, and many people in the academic world hold it, abortion is not in itself a bad or wrongful thing, any more than a knee replacement operation is in itself a bad or wrongful thing. Of course, it would be better if no one ever injured a knee and found himself in need of a knee operation. No one regards knee operations as desirable for their own sakes. No one deliberately injures himself just so that he can have a knee operation. And people don’t have knee operations performed on them for frivolous reasons. But a knee operation is not something that one would discourage or be personally opposed to. It is a solution to a problem, and should therefore be made as available and accessible as possible for people who need them. For those who share President Obama’s view of the moral status of the child in the womb, the deci71

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sion to abort may be more wrenching for many women than the decision to have a knee operation typically is, but it is like a knee operation precisely inasmuch as it is a legitimate solution to a problem.

All of this was made transparently clear at a recent meeting at the White House in which people on both sides of the abortion issue were brought together to see if they could find some common ground. The meeting was led by Melody Barnes, the Director of the President’s Domestic Policy Council and a former board member of Emily’s List, one of the nation’s most aggressive organizations devoted to legal abortion and its public funding. At one point in the meeting, she recognized pro-life activist Wendy Wright, who attempted to explain ways that the President could begin to achieve his reported goal of reducing the number of abortions. Barnes interrupted her to make clear that the precise goal of the administration is to “reduce the need for abortions.” Two days after the meeting, the President spoke at Notre Dame, and he chose his words carefully. In speaking of common ground, he did not propose that we reduce the number of abortions, but rather “the number of women seeking abortions.”

Get it? The President and his administration will not join us on the common ground of discouraging women from having abortions or even in encouraging them to choose childbirth over abortion. The proposed common ground is the reduction of unwanted pregnancies—not discouraging those in “need” of abortion from having them. The idea that the interests of a child who might be vulnerable to the violence of abortion should be taken into account, even in discouraging women from resorting to abortion or encouraging alternatives to abortion, is simply off the table.

The President and the people he has placed in charge of this issue, such as Melody Barnes, have a deep ideological commitment to the idea that there is nothing actually wrong with abortion, because the child in the womb simply has no rights. This commitment explains the policy positions President Obama has consistently taken since he entered the Illinois legislature. It crucially shapes and profoundly limits what he and those associated with him regard as the “common ground” on which he is willing to work with pro-lifers. And it explains 72

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why he and they reject what we, as pro-lifers, propose as common ground.

Because the President does not believe in the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of every member of the human family; because he does not believe that babies acquire human rights until after birth; because he does not see abortion as tragic because it takes the life of an innocent human being, he is utterly and intransigently unwilling to support even efforts short of prohibiting abortion that would plainly reduce the number of abortions. Moreover, he is adamantly in favor of funding abortions and abortion providers at home and abroad, and has already taken steps in that direction by revoking the Mexico City Policy and proposing a budget that would restore publicly funded abortions in Washington, D.C.—despite the well-documented and universally acknowledged fact that when you provide public funding for abortion, you get more abortions.

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ome pro-choice people think that the killing of unborn children where there is no grave threat to the mother, though bad and unjust, should not be made illegal at least in the earliest stages. Potentially we would have significant common ground with these fellow citizens in the form of policies to discourage abortion and reduce the number of killings.

For example, we could join together to oppose the funding of abortion at home and abroad; we could work together for bans on second and third trimester abortions, on abortions for sex-selection, and on particularly heinous methods of abortion, such as partial-birth abortions; we could agree on what Professor Hadley Arkes calls “the most modest first step of all,” namely requiring care—at least comfort care— for the child who survives an attempted abortion and is born alive. We could provide desperately needed financial support for pro-life clinics that assist pregnant women in need—need that is not always financial, but is often emotional and spiritual—and encourage and help these women make the choice for life. We could enact waiting periods, informed consent laws, and parental notification laws that have been shown, in research by Michael New and others, to reduce abortions.

We could reject the funding of embryo-destructive research, and join 73

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together to support promising research and treatments using nonembryonic sources of stem cells.

However, far from meeting us on any of these areas of common ground, President Obama opposes our efforts. Political realities have prevented him from making good on his promise to the abortion industry to sign the pro-abortion nuclear bomb called the Freedom of Choice Act as one of his first acts in office. But he was not lying when he made that promise. His policies, and above all his appointments to key offices in the White House, the Justice Department, Health and Human Services, and elsewhere make clear that his strategy will be to enact the provisions of FOCA step by step, rather than as a package. As anyone occupying the role of David Axelrod or Karl Rove will tell you, this is obviously the politically astute way for the President to prosecute his agenda. The country does not accept President Obama’s extreme position on abortion. A recent poll showed that a majority of Americans now regard themselves as pro-life, and a majority favors significant legal restrictions on abortion. Plainly the President’s actual views are far more favorable to abortion than those of the general public; so if he is to advance his goals, and the goals of those who share his commitment to making abortion more widely available and easily accessible, the last thing it would make sense to do is try to enact FOCA as a package.

At Notre Dame, the President offered to work with pro-lifers to draft what he called “sensible” conscience protections for pro-life physicians and other health care workers. This favorably impressed some in the pro-life community, especially since one of President Obama’s first acts was to rescind conscience protection regulations supported by the pro-life community that had been put into place by the Bush Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services. Here, alas, I must urge caution. It seems to me overwhelmingly likely that the key word in the President’s offer is “sensible.” What is “sensible” to him, I predict, is precisely what is regarded as sensible by the Committee on Ethics of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, namely, requiring physicians to refer for abortions, even if their consciences forbid it, and allowing pro-life obstetricians and gynecologists to refuse to perform abortions only when it is clear that an abortion can 74

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be provided by a willing physician in the area. For physicians and surgeons who believe that abortion is unjust killing and a grave violation of human rights, this is not sensible. It is ominous. I beg the President’s pro-life supporters urgently to request from him a statement clarifying the meaning of “sensible” conscience protection. If it means weakening current laws, so doctors will be compelled to refer for abortions and in so-called emergencies even to perform abortions, then even here pro-life citizens have no common ground with the President of the United States.

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inally, let me say a word about a matter that has been of deep concern to me—the expansion of federal funding for embryodestructive research. I regret that the President passed up a golden opportunity to establish true common ground with pro-life citizens. He could have left the funding of research involving cell lines created by the destruction of human embryos in place, and led the charge to promote ethically unproblematic non-embryo-destructive forms of stem cell science. He could have rallied the nation around adult stem cell science and brilliant new technologies for the production of pluripotent stem cells that manifest the very qualities that make embryonic stem cells interesting and potentially useful. He could have shown that we can give both sides in the great stem cell debate what they want—the promise of stem cell science, without the moral stain of embryo killing.

But the President did not do that. He revoked the restrictions on funding research involving embryonic stem cell lines created after August 9, 2001. He even took the additional step of revoking President Bush’s 2007 executive order promoting research to advance nonembryo-destructive sources of pluripotent stem cells. Finally, he opened the door to funding research involving stem cell lines created by producing human embryos by somatic cell nuclear transfer or other means specifically for research in which they are killed. He delegated the details of any new guidelines to the National Institutes for Health.

The NIH, under Acting Director Raynard Kington, a Bush administration holdover, recently published its draft guidelines, which mercifully decline to walk through the door the President opened. For now, at 75

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least, there will be no funding of research involving embryos created just for destruction. If the President’s pro-life supporters are partially responsible for this piece of good news, they deserve our sincere thanks, and I here heartily offer mine. The NIH guidelines also include strong consent rules for parents. Already the supporters of embryodestructive research and so-called “therapeutic cloning” are pressing the NIH to reverse course in both these areas. For that reason, I plead with all who believe in respect for human life, and especially those whose support of the President politically has given them influence with him and his administration, to work tirelessly to ensure that there is no further expansion of funding for embryo-destructive research or weakening of current consent requirements.

The common ground I am interested in is with pro-life Americans who, like Professor Kmiec, have supported the President politically.

The election is over, and the current question is not who anyone thinks will do the best job as President, or even whether one may legitimately support candidates who deny the fundamental dignity and right to life of unborn human beings and who promise to protect and extend the abortion license and expand the funding of embryo-destructive research. The question is: On which issues will we support the President’s direction, and on which will we challenge him because he is heading in the wrong direction? Those pro-life Americans who voted for him and support him should not object when we speak for the most vulnerable and defenseless of our fellow human beings, even when that means severely criticizing the President’s policies. They should stand with us on common ground, and join their voices with ours.

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. This article, based on the text of remarks given at the National Press Club, first appeared at The Public Discourse . Read more at thepublicdiscourse.com.

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T H E M A R R I AG E D E B AT E \a0new0proposal|

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Jonathan Rauch

n February, when I joined with David Blankenhorn to propose a compromise on the controversial, contentious, and (until then) 100 percent compromise-free issue of same-sex marriage, I had no idea what to expect. I am a firm supporter of gay marriage, he an equally firm opponent. Would our odd-couple proposal be ignored? Pilloried? And where, I wondered, were the landmines? I broke a cold sweat imagining how some foolish miscalculation might leave us both looking ridiculous.

In fact, the reaction was all I could have hoped for, and more. Immediately after our article ran in The New York Times, it ignited a vigorous online discussion. Still more gratifying was that other people came forward with different but interesting suggestions of their own: exactly the kind of fresh thinking we had hoped to stimulate. To my relief, our substantive suggestion held up sturdily. Here it is: Congress would bestow the status of federal civil unions on same-sex marriages and civil unions granted at the state level, thereby conferring upon them most or all of the federal benefits and rights of marriage. But there would be a condition: Washington would recognize only those unions licensed in states with robust religious-conscience exceptions, which provide that religious organizations need not recognize same-sex unions against their will. The federal government would also enact religious-conscience protections of its own. All of these changes would be enacted in the same bill.

Much happened in the weeks after our proposal was made. Those developments have, in my view, made our suggestion more relevant and compelling. That may not be at all obvious, so let me explain.

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Same-sex marriage advocates suffered a body blow in November of 2008, when the voters revoked same-sex marriage in California. In 2009, however, the political momentum shifted. Iowaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s state supreme court ordered gay marriage, to a comparatively tame reaction. Vermont, which had had civil unions since 2000 (court-ordered, but uncontroversial by 2009), enacted gay marriage, a breakthrough inasmuch as it represented the first legislative enactment of same-sex marriage under no judicial compulsion. Maine followed suit, as did New Hampshire.

Gay marriage advocates, in those heady spring weeks, began to think the balance had tipped decisively in their favorâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;so why compromise? Opponents thought they needed to throw every last ounce of energy into stopping the juggernautâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;so why compromise?

Here is why. Despite some dramatic fluctuations in the political weather, the climate of public opinion is changing only gradually. The public is split three ways, with no group large enough to impose its will on the other two. One group supports gay marriage; another opposes any legal recognition of gay unions; a third supports legal recognition short of marriage. The ambivalence of that middle group allows one side to say that a majority supports gay unions and the other that a majority opposes gay marriage. Both are correct. The more important point, however, is that the country is divided on the meaning of marriage. That philosophical argument will not be resolved for years.

The political argument will not be resolved for years, either. Activists on my side of the issue, looking at a run of state victories in the spring, were liable to overlook the equally important fact that 43 states had outlawed gay marriage, 29 of them by constitutional amendment.

Many of those amendments will be on the books for years to come.

The country, therefore, can assume that the gay-marriage argument will continue for years, if not decades. Unless the Supreme Court shocks itself and the country by ordering gay marriage as a constitutional right, neither side can sweep the field. Those who sought to prevent gay marriage on every inch of U.S. soil and those who sought to establish it by pre-emptive judicial fiat have both been decisively rebuffed.

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So now what? Skirmishing will continue in the states, but before long Washington will weigh in. As a candidate, President Obama favored federal recognition of civil unions. In due course, congressional Democrats will introduce legislation to that effect. What will happen then is anyone’s guess, but it seems unlikely either that Democrats would have the votes to enact gay marriage or that Republicans would have the votes to block all action.

At that point, both sides could gain by tying federal civil unions to religious-liberty guarantees. Democrats would win Republican votes and the political cover those votes would provide; Republicans would win religious opt-outs in exchange for civil unions that might have passed anyway. Both sides would walk away with something concrete and bankable—land for land, not land for promises, as they say in the Middle East—without requiring either side to relinquish its core principles. And the public would be grateful for a rare display of bipartisanship on a particularly intractable issue.

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nother reason this kind of swap would appeal to Congress: the concept has been successfully market-tested. In April, Vermont’s legislature attached substantial religious-liberty protections to its gay-marriage bill. Other New England states followed suit.

The particulars vary, but the basic formula that Blankenhorn and I suggested, linking same-sex unions to religious opt-outs, has proven its political viability.

If I emphasize tactical politics, that is only because the fundamentals have not changed since we wrote our article. Make no mistake: in my view, the Blankenhorn-Rauch compromise, or something like it, is no mere tactical maneuver. I support it because it is good for our country, not just good politics.

First, because gay couples, and their children, are today legal strangers to each other under federal law, and sorely need the multitude of protections and tools which only federal legal recognition can provide.

(No, those are not available by private contract. Try asking your lawyer for immigration rights, Social Security survivor benefits, tax-free inheritance, protection from having to bear witness against your spouse, and on and on.) Second, because freedom of religious conscience is the 79

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rock upon which America was founded, and whenever the law can reasonably accommodate religious conscience, it should.

Third, and most important, because the foreclosure of outright victory for both sides in the gay-marriage debate has rendered scorchedearth, all-or-nothing politics obsolete. For those millions of Americans who reject same-sex marriage on grounds of faith, but who wish their gay and lesbian fellow citizens well, now is the time to step forward and make an accommodation—and to receive one in return. Doing so keeps faith with the first commandment of a pluralistic democracy: Thou shalt find a way to live together.

]a0response}

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Joseph M. Knippenberg

ook how far we have come—I use that word, rather than “fallen” or “progressed”—in the space of just over twenty years. In its 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick decision, the Supreme Court upheld Georgia’s law proscribing consensual sodomy and denied that there was a constitutional or fundamental right to engage in homosexual sex. More recently than that, I can remember icons of the civil rights movement indignantly—or was it just emphatically?—rejecting any analogy between the struggles of African-Americans and those of gay activists.

Now, two leading participants in the public debate over same-sex marriage have offered us a grand compromise: federal recognition (as civil unions) of state same-sex marriages or civil unions in exchange for “robust religious-conscience exceptions,” which would exempt religious organizations from any legal sanctions accompanying their unwillingness to participate in the new marriage or civil union regime adopted by a state legislature or state court.

What proponents of same-sex marriage gain from this supposed compromise is clear enough: portability, without having to worry whether the laws of a particular state recognize the legal status of a marriage or civil union established elsewhere. Through the good offic80

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es of the federal government, every state—whether its citizens or legislators wanted to or not—would become hospitable to same-sex marriage. State law wouldn’t much matter any more. Almost any legal right or recognition a state’s law denied would be granted through federal law.

This, it seems to me, would be a major victory for proponents of same-sex marriage. To be sure, the relationship wouldn’t initially be called “marriage” at the federal level, but who doubts that, with the diminution of the difference between marriage and civil unions, it’s only a matter of time before the label follows the legal reality? If Congress doesn’t do it, the courts surely will.

In exchange, religious defenders of traditional marriage receive assurances—ultimately dependent upon the whim of the state legislatures and Congress—that their churches, temples, mosques, and synagogues won’t be compelled to host, or their clergy be compelled to perform, same-sex marriage ceremonies on pain of losing tax-exempt status or otherwise being treated legally as pariahs under state and federal law. What’s more, at least as the law is written in Vermont, religious organizations would not have to admit or extend benefits to any partners in a marriage that they don’t recognize.

Stated another way, the integrity of essentially private religious convictions and organizations would be protected. This is very important, but make no mistake about it: these convictions would be private, without any public effect. Of course, religious opponents of same-sex marriage might seek to change the law but, unlike their counterparts on the other side of the debate, they’re deprived of the opportunity to fight the battle state-by-state. Once the federal government has acted, only that arena really matters. And once the federal government has acted, statelevel resistance is, as I have argued, basically futile.

Let me repeat the terms of the Blankenhorn-Rauch proposal for the sake of clarity and emphasis: if religious defenders of traditional marriage concede to the other side a federal (and hence nationwide) civil union status, they receive a legal promise (not a constitutional guarantee) that their organizations won’t be implicated in or punished by the new regime.

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I’ve already suggested one way this looks like a bad bargain. But there’s another. Suppose proponents of traditional marriage agree to this arrangement, but then have a change of heart. Their opponents will at the very least accuse them of bad faith. But since the terms of the deal involve recognition of civil unions on one side in exchange for a promise of religious liberty on the other, the latter could be revoked.

The liberty of traditional religious believers to worship and govern their churches as God calls them to could effectively be held hostage to their acquiescence in the new civil union/marriage regime—see the recent case of a New Jersey Methodist church group who, upon refusing to rent their beachfront gazebo to a lesbian couple for a wedding, found themselves having to choose between their principles and whether they wanted to keep their tax exemption (as it happens, they chose to lose their property tax exemption, and were immediately hit with a $20,000 bill from the state). The implicit threat to religious liberty would always be present in the terms of the bargain.

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r. Rauch tells us that “freedom of religious conscience is the rock upon which America was founded.” Part of that freedom involves bearing witness in public (which, I hasten to add, can be done by appeals to the rational insight that God through His common grace has given us). Whether he means to or not, Mr. Rauch would condition that freedom on a certain kind of silence. With this in mind, his remark that “whenever the law can reasonably accommodate religious conscience, it should” sounds just a bit chilling.

But perhaps this is the beat deal religious traditionalists can get. If you think that same-sex marriage is the wave of the future, that it’s only a matter of time before the new marriage regime is put in place, with or without a grand compromise, then now might well be the moment to get the most robust possible protections for private religious liberty.

Make no mistake about it. As the contributors to the 2008 volume Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty: Emerging Conflicts make clear, the threats are very real.

If you don’t think so, consider the fragility of the conscience protections for doctors and pharmacists opposed to abortion, the fate of the adoption services charities affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church once provided in Massachusetts, the new vigor with which the analogy 82

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between African-American and gay civil rights is asserted, and the fate of those on the wrong side of that older conflict. To be sure, the protections would be legal, not constitutional, revocable with the flourish of a presidential pen. But at least the defenders of traditional marriage could accuse those who would then deprive them of their religious liberty of bad faith. If we can’t hold onto the sanctity of traditional marriage, perhaps we can still hold onto the sanctity of contracts, another “rock upon which America was founded.” How soon such rocks are turned to pebbles as the mood strikes us.

As for me, I’m not quite prepared to accept this counsel of despair over traditional marriage. I’m all in favor of “creative” thinking about the future of marriage, but not of the sort that effectively silences the witness of one side of the debate and paves the way for the comprehensive victory of the other. If that’s the only way to turn down the heat, I want no part of it.

I’d be much more willing to take a seat at the table if all parties to a grand compromise were willing to consider an understanding of marriage that takes as its point of departure the responsibilities, not just the rights, of the participants and looks at the natural order in which we are placed for some guidance as to what those responsibilities are. But I’m not holding my breath.

Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer with National Journal and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of the book Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America .

Joseph M. Knippenberg is a Professor of Politics and Associate Provost for Student Achievement at Oglethorpe University, and an adjunct fellow at the Ashbrook Center.

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C HRIST IN THE C LASSROOM [the0incarnate0education{

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Louis Markos

f a prize were to be awarded to that group of Christians that has most boldly defended the deity of Christ, then surely we Evangelicals would get the prize. Or would we? As Evangelicals, we have done a wonderful job proclaiming from the rooftops of the world that Jesus is Lord and that his death on the Cross atoned for our sins. But have we really explained, and understood, what it means, really means, to say that Jesus was God in human flesh?

In the midst of a pro-sex, anti-miracle culture, we have championed a literal belief in the Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ. But have we really explained, and understood, the greater miracle of which the Virgin Birth was the vehicle: the Incarnation? The Qur’an, after all, while rejecting utterly the Incarnation, teaches that Jesus of Nazareth was born of a virgin. In the face of a modern, secular age that would separate education from religion, we have continued to train our children, teens, and young adults in institutions—and homes—that are committed to the integration of faith and learning.

We have asserted in our grammar schools, academies, universities, and graduate programs that the Lordship of Christ embraces the mind as well as the heart, and we have sought to make the Christian worldview central to our teaching. But have we really explained, and understood, what impact a belief in the Incarnation might have on the various disciplines through which we usher our children and college students?

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As a Professor of English at Houston Baptist University, I have often asked myself questions like these and have struggled to find the right balance. The truths revealed in and through Jesus Christ must find their way into the classroom, but they must do so without compromising academic freedom, distorting the discipline being taught, or converting the college into a church. Together with my peers across the country, I am well aware that there is a difference between professors and preachers, college students and catechumens, the lecture hall and the altar call. And yet, I am just as strongly aware that unless we as Evangelicals can convince our college students (and high schoolers) that the Nicene Creed is not only relevant but central to their studies, we will leave them as easy prey to the corrosive effects of secular humanism and naturalism on the one hand and relativistic postmodernism on the other.

We will not be able to convince them of this, however, if we continue to allow our narrow, if commendable, focus on the Atonement to exclude a deep and sustained wrestling with the Incarnation. You see, when most Evangelicals think about Christianity, our thoughts immediately fly to the Cross. Unfortunately, though the Atonement is the centerpiece of the gospel message, it is not a doctrine that readily lends itself to classroom instruction. True, professors in the humanities can discuss how the Crucifixion has been represented in literature, art, and music, and how it has impacted human history—but the Atonement as a doctrine is not one that touches at the roots of the academic disciplines themselves. No—if we as Evangelical educators truly wish to see our disciplines impacted and our students galvanized by the tenets of our faith, then we must shift our focus from Good Friday to another key date on the sacred calendar: Christmas.

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hristianity is a faith that rests on paradoxes, and the greatest of these paradoxes, the one upon which all the others hang, is the one for which the Fathers of the Church fought most fiercely: the Incarnation. Recite the Nicene Creed to yourself, and you will discover that roughly a third of this “mere Christian” document is devoted to proclaiming, in the clearest terms possible, that Jesus of Nazareth was, at once, fully God and fully man. Indeed, the majority of the heresies arising in the Church—both then and now—ultimately rose 85

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out of a rejection of the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation. Either it is claimed, along with the Arians, that Christ was a man but not God, or it is asserted, along with the Gnostics, that Christ was fully divine but not fully human: he only appeared to wear the flesh. The major religions of the world may also be divided in two around the theological crux of the Incarnation: with Jews and Muslims insisting that God has no Son, and Hindus and Buddhists accepting the Son-ship of Jesus but then hastening to add that we are all Sons of God, if we only knew it.

Like the doctrine of Christ Crucified, the doctrine of Christ Incarnate—which precedes and makes possible the former doctrine—has ever proven a stumbling block to the religious minded and rank foolishness to the secular minded. It embodies a mystery that the wise have dismissed as illogical and irrational. And yet, the paradox of the Incarnation (the two-into-one) is a paradox that runs through the very fabric of our world. God created beings of pure spirit (the angels) and pure physicality (the beasts), but we, as human beings, are the great amphibians of the universe: not just part soul and part body, but fully spiritual and fully physical. Marriage is not merely a social institution but a mystical fusion of husband and wife. Sexuality, too, is more than a vehicle for propagation, as husband and wife truly become one flesh.

Even in heaven, the paradox of the two-into-one will continue. First, our eternal destiny is not to exist as bodiless souls, but to exist, as Christ himself now exists, clothed incarnationally in a Resurrection Body. Second, we, as the Bride of Christ, will be fully one with Christ the Bridegroom, while yet retaining our individual identity. The Incarnation is what prevents heaven from devolving into a nebulous One Soul, in which individuality is annihilated as the integrity of the raindrop is annihilated when it falls into the ocean. The Incarnation is also, I would argue, what holds nature together and prevents seen, physical matter and unseen, “spiritual” energy from either obliterating or swallowing each other. It is by Christ, Paul assures us in Colossians, that “all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (1:16-7; NIV throughout).

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Needless to say, that “all things” includes our universities and the academic disciplines that are taught there.

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ut off from the physical reality of the Incarnation, the vine of Christianity will eventually wither and die. If we cut off our academic studies from the metaphysical reality of the Incarnation, they will likewise wither and die. No matter the class, a connection can always be forged between what is being taught and the unique Christian doctrine that at a specific moment in history, the invisible God took on human form and became a man. That is not to say that the Incarnation will necessarily be mentioned or even alluded to in the classroom, but its paradoxical truth will be there to guide, enlighten, and undergird.

To substantiate this admittedly bold claim, I shall briefly survey a number of different disciplines that can not only be enlivened by contact with the metaphysical reality of the Incarnation but whose traditional foundational truths can be strengthened and confirmed by the mystery of the two-into-one. Though I write as a college professor, what I say below should prove relevant for teachers at all educational levels, including homeschooling parents.

English: For many decades now, language itself has been under assault in the Academy. Postmodern theories like deconstruction have questioned the ability of literature—and, ultimately, of all language— to embody or express meaning. The traditional belief that poetry offers a purer kind of language that draws its reader closer to divine and timeless truths has been rejected in favor of a radically egalitarian view that consigns all forms of writing—from poetry to novels, advertisements to newspaper articles, comic books to pornography—to the same neutral designation: text. No one text is to be given a special status—all texts are equally meaningful, which, of course, is just another way of saying that all are equally meaningless.

To English professors who wish to reclaim meaning and truth for the literature they teach, the Incarnation offers a way back to academic sanity. In the Prologue to his Gospel (1:1-18), John sings a beautiful hymn of praise to the Incarnation that celebrates Christ as the Word (or Logos) of God. Although no one has seen God at any time, the closing 87

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verse asserts, the Logos has made him known. The Greek for “made him known” can also be translated as explained or narrated, a point that has great bearing on the way literature is taught in our grade schools and colleges. If the unseen God can speak to us clearly through the mediation of the Incarnate Logos, then hope remains that divine and eternal truths can be expressed through human language. It is no coincidence that both Christ and the Bible are referred to as the Word of God. Both are vehicles of divine revelation, and, as such, they attest to the possibility of revelation. Meaning exists, and it can be communicated through words.

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f course, the Incarnation does not mark the only instance in human history when God spoke. According to Hebrews, God spoke in the past “to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (1:1-2). All speech is not the same; there is a natural hierarchy of revelation which culminates and finds its perfection in the Incarnation. Just so, there are certain works of literature—those traditionally referred to as the Great Books—that come closer than others to embodying Truth and Beauty, possessing a greater power to transcend the place and time in which they were written. These Great Books, though they do not share the same authority as the Bible, do bear evidence of being inspired, of being a channel by which unseen realities can be expressed through concrete words and symbols. That is why they continue to be read and discussed. If English teachers could only reclaim this richly orthodox vision for the incarnational nature of great literature, imagine how energized they and their students would be.

Communications: English professors are not the only educators for whom John’s celebration of the Logos bears special relevance. Those who teach in Speech and Mass Communication departments can also be challenged and uplifted by wrestling academically with the doctrine of the Incarnate Word. Neither a removed God who keeps his distance from the world he made—nor an amorphous God who is identical with the world—the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is supremely a bridge builder. He desires to communicate intimately with his creation, and the Incarnation is the means by which he effected this desire.

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Communications professors who would teach their students how to overcome barriers in interpersonal and cross-cultural communication would do well to meditate on how God broke down—or, better, transcended—all barriers on that first Christmas morning. If the most effective speech, the highest form of communication is to find a way to embody one’s thoughts and ideas in a form that all people can understand and relate to, then God is the greatest communicator of all. For in Christ, he found a way to communicate his boundless and eternal being to a world that is limited by both time and space.

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rt: One of the distinctives of the Greek Orthodox Church is its use of icons. Although some Protestants are put off by this focus on icons, wondering if it is not semi-idolatrous to venerate images of Christ, Mary, and the Saints, the Orthodox treasure their icons as proclaimers of the Incarnation. (Catholics treasure their sacraments for a similar reason.) When, through the divine mystery of the Incarnation, the Word was made flesh (John 1:14), a great change occurred in the status of the arts, both sacred and profane. By assuming our flesh, the Incarnate Son baptized physical matter as a fit container for divine presence. Henceforth, physical things could bear, if imperfectly, traces of God’s power, truth, beauty, and holiness.

I can think of no better impetus to spur on the creativity of art professors and their students than this vision of the possibility of divine presence. In the light of the Incarnation, the arts can be freed from their Babylonian captivity to abstraction and nihilism and reclaim both the spiritual and the humanistic legacy that they have lost. Self-expression, the Incarnation promises, need no longer be an end in itself, but can be used by God for higher purposes. Paintings that celebrate, rather than parody and deconstruct, the human form can receive a second birth (a re-naissance) when mediated through the triumphant message that God himself did not think it an indignity to adopt a creaturely body.

History: The Incarnation marks the central and defining moment of human history. Remove it, and history risks deteriorating into a meaningless succession of dates and events with no higher end to give them purpose and direction. Restore it, and history springs to life as both a human drama and a sacred narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. The Church was right to designate Christmas, rather than 89

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Easter, as the nodal point, the nexus between BC and AD. It was when Christ came into the world, rather than when he left it, that the old world ended and the new world began. Viewed from the perspective of the Incarnation, the kingdoms of Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome are transformed from brutal empires into God-ordained precursors of something greater (as was prophesied in Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream of the Giant in Daniel 2). Jesus’ birth was not a haphazard event. He came, Paul tells us, in the fullness of time (Galatians 4:4), at a precise moment when the world—partly through the efforts of the four kingdoms just listed—had been made ready for his coming.

Too often, the history that is taught today in our schools and universities lacks this sense of drama, of the slow working out of an overarching plan that yet leaves room for human glory and folly, triumph and tragedy. The message that the Incarnation speaks to professors of history is that God’s presence and purposes can be discerned in and through the seemingly arbitrary progression of time and events. The Bible may perhaps best be defined as a record or chronicle of God’s actions and interactions in human history, culminating with his physical entry into history. As part of that account, we are given frequent glimpses, as in Daniel 2, of how God’s actions towards Israel necessitate his (generally anonymous) interactions with her pagan neighbors.

Just as God works through those who praise him and those who know him not, so he guides the destinies both of peoples that serve him and kingdoms that reject him. There have been many historians of America who have caught this vision and sought to discern the hand of providence in the life of our nation. But there is no reason to confine this providential history to America. The Incarnation, as the journey of the Magi suggests, was the true shot heard round the world.

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y such methods, and I mean these methods to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, may the central Christian doctrine of the Incarnation be integrated into the Arts and Humanities. But what of the natural and social sciences? Can they too benefit from an academic wrestling with the Word made flesh? I think they can.

Biology: When Evangelicals consider the interplay between faith and learning in the sciences, they tend to think in terms of the debate between naturalistic evolution and intelligent design. I am personally 90

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supportive of intelligent design, and believe that science classes across the country would be invigorated and transformed if the inherent design and purpose in nature was given greater study in textbooks and lectures. But this is beside the point: if biology professors would factor in as well the implications inherent in the Incarnation, they might find an even richer world opening before their eyes.

According to the Psalms, we are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (139:14): a radical claim indeed, and one made even more radical when we consider that God chose to enter and inhabit that fearful and wonderful flesh he made. In the light of such a revelation, those who study and teach human biology should feel not just scientific curiosity but something akin to religious awe when they contemplate the cells and organs and limbs that make up our God-crafted form—Francis Collins of the Human Genome Project, a scientist at the top of his field unashamed of his faith, famously wrote that he considers scientific discoveries an “opportunity to worship.” Modern science tends to think of the human form as the end product of a material, evolutionary process; the Incarnation, along with its logical corollary, the Resurrection, speaks of a final state of restoration and regeneration in which the human form, now fallen, will be perfected and glorified. Jesus’ miracles of healing and of control over nature—also logical offshoots of the Incarnation—point to a potential both in man and nature that has yet to be fully explored in anatomy, chemistry, and geology classes.

Physics: And the same goes for all those more theoretical sciences that are built on an invisible foundation of numbers. Here too the evidence for intelligent design lies all around us. How can there fail to be purpose and order in a universe so finely tuned, so perfectly poised?

And yet it is not only in the intricately balanced laws of nature that God shows his presence. He can be seen as well in the mysteries and paradoxes that continue to befuddle our most brilliant minds.

Of all scientists, physicists are perhaps the most open to such mysteries and paradoxes. What better conundrum for the number-crunching gamesters to unpack than the two-in-one (Incarnation) inscribed within the three-in-one (Trinity). That the multi-dimensional God could “squeeze” himself into three dimensions is well worth some mathematical pondering. If the Incarnation is real, then it bends time and 91

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space in a new and thrilling way that no self-respecting physicist could ignore. The doctrines of the Nicene Creed, when rightly understood, do not halt research into the unknown but beckon it on.

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sychology: As God Incarnate, Jesus Christ invites and challenges us to explore the mysteries that run rampant in our universe and in ourselves. But he also speaks a gentler, quieter message to our world of sorrow, pain, and anguish. In addition to being the Word made flesh, Jesus was also the Second Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45, 47), a living embodiment of what Adam might have been had he not chosen to disobey God and thus rebel against his own created nature and purpose. To put it in the terms of modern psychology, Jesus, as Second Adam, offers us an image, an icon of the total human beingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;of one who is both integrated and self-actualized.

He was not just a brilliant motivational speaker or a selfless humanitarian or an eastern sage. He was the kind of personâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;real, whole, completeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;that we were all destined to be, the kind of person we know we should be but find we cannot be. And Jesus lived and died as that kind of person, not because of, but in spite of his miraculous powers.

Jesus, we must remember, had a real human brain and heart that could feel confusion and despair, a real G-I tract that could feel hunger and thirst, and real limbs that could feel soreness and fatigue. As a result of the emptying process of the Incarnation (see Philippians 2:5-8), Jesus, like all of us, was limited to the confines of his anatomy and physiology. His physical and psychological needs were as real and pressing as our own, yet he remained perfectly obedient to the Father. There is much here, I think, for the psychologist to ponder.

Anthropology: And for the anthropologist as well. Jesus, as the perfected Man, the Second Adam, not only embodies what we should have been, but foreshadows what we will become: a dual role that he fulfills on both the historical and mythical level. That is to say, Jesus is the culmination of the highest desires of all nations at all times, whether those desires are expressed in the actual achievements of flesh and blood heroes or the imagined achievements of the heroes of legend.

Students and professors of anthropology know well that the myth of the semi-divine scapegoat king is one that appears in nearly all primi92

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tive cultures. Whether he go by the name of Adonis or Osiris, Balder or Mithras, Tammuz or Bacchus, his status as a god in human form who must suffer, die, and be reborn makes him appear eerily similar to the Incarnate Son who was crucified and buried, but then rose again on the third day. Although the strongly secular-humanist roots of anthropology have ensured that this cultural phenomenon would be interpreted as proof that the gospel story is essentially a myth, the doctrine of the Incarnation suggests a different reading. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis paraphrasing J. R. R. Tolkien, the gospel story does not simply offer another version of the scapegoat myth; rather, it chronicles the historical enactment of that myth in real time and space—the myth made real. All the greatest and most enduring mythic archetypes find their end and goal in the Second Adam. He is the answer to all of our deepest personal, tribal, and cultural yearnings.

Though not all Evangelical educators will agree with the specific connections I have made between the Incarnation and their disciplines, my hope is that what we can all agree on is that the Incarnation, if it is true, has wide-ranging implications that cut through and across the various colleges and departments that make up our Christian schools and universities. “See to it,” Paul warns the Colossians, “that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ” (2:8). We need not, as academics and educators, interpret this somber and sobering verse as a blanket condemnation of all disciplines whose assumptions and methods are essentially secular.

But we do, again and again, need to be reminded that the only final foundation of truth is the Incarnate Word who not only brought truth into the world but was himself the Truth, as we know from John 14:6, the founding verse of my University.

Louis Markos, (www.Loumarkos.com) Professor in English at Houston Baptist University and Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities/Scholar-in Residence, is the author of From Achilles to Christ , Lewis Agonistes , and Pressing Forward: Tennyson and the Victorian Age .

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U PDIKE ’ S R UN ]the0rabbit0rests}

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Russell D. Moore

housands of years ago, a farmer-poet named Job wailed, “For the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me” (Job 3:25). The same can be said now of a novelist-poet named John. John Updike, one of the most significant American novelists of the past half-century, died of cancer earlier this year. He was 76. And he was, if the themes of his fiction and poetry have any root in his own psyche, scared to death of death.

The New York Times story on Updike’s passing describes the author as the most self-consciously Protestant of contemporary American novelists, dependent especially on the theology of Karl Barth. The Times story also picks up on Updike’s fearful fascination with death, a fascination the article sums up in Updike’s final passage from his short story “Pigeon Feathers”: The story is about a boy, David, who is forced to shoot some pigeons in a barn, and then watches, fascinated, as their feathers float to the ground: “He was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole creation by refusing to let David live forever.”

I’ve read all Updike’s novels but the last one (a sequel to his Witches of Eastwick) and I always finish them with something of the same kind of sick fascination that the boy David would have seen in the pigeons torn apart by gunfire. There’s something beautiful there, a spark of divine creativity, but something sad and pitiable as well. Updike, it seems to me, had a love/hate relationship with Jesus Christ.

Few novelists could illustrate the suffocation of upwardly mobile but spiritually rootless middle class America with more vivid imagery than Updike, especially in his series of four books on the life of Harry 95

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“Rabbit” Angstrom. Those books also lay out the problem of sin, guilt, and judgment better than many gospel tracts, except without the solution at the end.

I was struck several years ago by a New York Times review of a collection of Updike’s early stories. Of Updike, the Times wrote: While his male characters pursue sex with dogged zeal, be it with a neighbor’s wife, a colleague or a prostitute, they also suffer from a spiritual hunger, a craving, if not for God then for some reassurance that there is something between them and the abyss they can glimpse just beyond the familiar world with “its signals and buildings and cars and bricks.”

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his assessment is on to something. After all, Updike’s “Rabbit” is aptly named. He moves through a life of casual sexual encounters, all of them ending in despair and emptiness. He seeks security in his material prosperity, in his high school athletic glory days, and in his sullen family. But, behind it all, he is terrified of death.

Like an animal, he seeks to obey his appetites.

But, like an animal, he is always peering over his shoulder for the Predator he fears is pursuing him. He’s paralyzed by the thought that his death will be no different from that of an animal. In the midst of all this, Rabbit’s conscience seems to point him to something else that he fears so badly—a final accounting for his life. And there’s nothing scarier than that.

One can’t help but wonder if Mr. Updike’s pen was his form of therapy. He seemed to think it was—he spoke of a compulsion to write that would have led him to compose ketchup labels if he couldn’t write poems and stories and essays. Maybe all these words helped him to cope with the terror he ascribes to “Rabbit” and dozens of other fictional characters.

Christians are often eager to chop up literary artists (or visual artists or filmmakers or politicians or what have you) into neat categories of “with us” or “against us.” Sometimes this works. After all, C.S. Lewis is clearly on the side of the angels, and Phillip Pullman is just as clearly on the side of something quite a bit darker.

Such distinctions are not so neat, however, with most artists, as with most people. What about a figure such as Updike who is, it seems, both Christ-rejecting and Christ-obsessed?

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Some Christians point to Updike’s poetic affirmations of the bodily resurrection of Jesus as evidence of a regenerate heart. Other Christians will point to the sordid—and often hopeless—content of his novels as evidence to the contrary. Both are off-kilter.

Updike did know the world of the pew and the Bible. But he did so in the kind of New England mainline Protestant milieu that he describes in his apocalyptic novel Toward the End of Time. It was that of “a shabby United Something (Presbyterian and Methodist? Congregational and Reformed?) with windows that were half-lozenges of clear glass and half sickly biblical scenes from that furtive first-century world of violet and saffron robes and wistful, genteel Aryan faces wedded to the gesticulating poses of Jewish rabble rousers.”

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pdike famously remarked, as Christian novelist Frederick Buechner reminded us, that the universe is a freak show if there is no God. But that was precisely the problem. Updike didn’t recognize just how freakish the universe around us really is. His characters were angst-riddled but normal. From Harry Angstrom to the Angstrom-like suburban figures in his other novels, the distinctiveness of Updike’s central figures lay in just how indistinct they are from the overall human experience.

Flannery O’Connor rightly noted that the Southern literary tradition wrote so much of freaks because it could still recognize them. Updike was haunted by Christ, but not Christ-haunted enough to see just how abnormal—how dehumanizing—the social isolation and libidinal expression he described really were. One couldn’t ever see this from the vantage point of observation, only from the vantage point of the one “normal” human—the One who makes all things new by joining the Creator to the creation in a hypostatic union of love and mercy.

Perhaps, as we note Updike’s passing, we should listen to this angst.

It’s a phenomenon not limited to famous novelists. It’s what all of unregenerate humanity holds in common, whether the unemployed janitor you pass on the sidewalk this afternoon or the Wall Street tycoon planning his next bailout appeal this evening.

The Scripture calls this angst “a fearful expectation of judgment” (Heb 10:27), a warning etched on the conscience that holds every man 97

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and woman in the “lifelong slavery” of “fear of death” (Heb 2:15). It takes more, much more, than familial security, financial prosperity, or sexual promiscuity to silence this gnawing within.

The only thing that can quiet the conscience is a strangely other voice, a voice Mr. Updike seemed alternately drawn toward, and repulsed by. It’s the voice of One who has gone as a pioneer behind the veil of death (Heb 6:19-20), a voice that pronounces the verdict of “no condemnation” (Rom 8:1).

Who knows what happens in the final moments of a man’s life? I can only pray that John Updike heard that voice, the voice of a Galilean whose footsteps in his novels can be heard everywhere in the distance.

I hope that sometime in the moments before the dreaded death overtook him, the Rabbit stopped running at last.

Russell D. Moore is Dean of the School of Theology and Senior Vice President for Academic Administration at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

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G ORE WALK ]night0and0the0museum}

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Matthew J. Milliner

o save money on graduate school rent, my wife and I are houseparents at a Princeton area boarding school. Each year, the 8th graders are responsible for the planning and execution of the annual “Gore Walk” (one astute 6th grader complained it was partisan, but it’s not that kind of Gore.) Preparation involves transforming the school building, so that individual classrooms become the domain of bloodthirsty zombies, and the boiler room the haunted lair of the crazy clown. Strobe lights and screams fill the hallways, as the younger students are guided through by ghoulish tour-guides with flashlights. All this occurs with dutiful staff and parents keeping an eye on things, handing out candy to remind the younger ones it all isn’t real.

My experience with the boarding school's “Gore Walk” explains my déjà vu on a visit to P.S.1, the Museum of Modern Art’s spacious Brooklyn extension displaying what it claims is “the most experimental art in the world.” Like the “Gore Walk,” P.S.1 also inhabits a school building, hence the museum’s titular acronym referring to its onetime Public School status. After paying admission, I walked into the boiler room, and saw no crazy clown, but I did see hanging skulls and twisted corpses. Walking in and out of different classrooms, I encountered a large video projection of an insane man babbling, surrounded by clusters of menacing swords stabbed into the floor. A “Police-State” exhibit consisted of strobe lights, an untidy mound of asphalt, and police harassment blaring at megaphone level. Kathe Burkhart’s Liz Taylor exhibit took up several former classrooms, and was carefully calculated to horrify normal sensibilities. All the while security guards kept 99

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us visitors under control, assuring that it was all just an exhibit. Indeed I had been here before, but where was the candy?

What distinguished P.S.1, however, was that unlike the school I am employed by, P.S.1 didn’t know when to stop. As I wandered deeper into Kathe Burkhart’s exhibit, I read sexually charged haikus that lined the walls to complement equally horrifying images of sexual violence.

There are times when one should just walk out of an exhibit. Was this one of them? Wise friends have counseled me to avoid being too quick to judge the art world, suggesting I give it more of a chance. Just as a lab’s botched experiments are justified by the next medical breakthrough, so are we urged to show patience with art world experimentation; genius could be just around the corner. Furthermore, weren’t the greatest examples of modern art all bundled into Hitler’s 1937 “degenerate art” show? Not wishing to be Hitler, I pressed on.

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availed myself of the iPod. Anticipating discouragement, I had loaded mine with artists’ statements from P.S.1’s well stocked website. Here was the chance for some explanation, but the program I listened to, a pretentiously delivered poetry reading, was nearly as obscene as the Burkhart exhibit. I skipped to the end, something about “kissing God good-bye.” Next on the audio offerings came the P.S.1 interview with up and coming artist Banks Violette. We all know about the art world obsession with taboo breaking. Consider the incestuous scenes explored by artists such as Eric Fischl and Paula Rego, who depict parents seducing children, children seducing parents. “What’s next?” a critic might ask in jest, “A solo show at the Whitney exploring ritual sacrifice to Satan?” Well, yes.

I learned from the interview that Violette is a former Heavy Metal album artist, who after earning a Columbia University MFA, secured a solo show at the Whitney exploring crimes inspired by Satanism. The P.S.1 interview related Violette’s fascination with what happens when Metal fans lose their ability to be ironic, taking instruction to sacrifice virgins to “his horned majesty” and burn churches literally. “Every time that Metal advances itself is by moving away from irony, trying to make it more and more real,” he explained. While I would take issue with the verb “advance,” what Banks Violette said about Metal seemed also to go for contemporary art. I turned off the iPod. 100

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Perhaps, I thought, I could consolidate my understanding in the P.S.1 gift shop. I picked up one of Kathe Burkhart’s catalogues, and opened it at random to a photograph of the interior of a pornographic store. I imagine this was supposed to be ironic, but it was just a photograph, no disclaimer (the disclaimer was, I expect, implied). Puzzled, I put the book down. I wandered through the narrow selection of Leftist literature. Then came illumination, a rare defining moment to help one finally grasp the world of contemporary art: It came when I picked up another item on offer, a $10 bumper sticker that read: “I heart Global Warming.” It seems a previous customer had not understood the assumed irony, and so a clear wrapping now covered each bumper sticker with a warning note, hand-written by P.S.1 staff: “Please use this bumper sticker with discresion [sic] and place on any SUV, or otherwise ironic and ‘ungreen’ locations that seem appropriate.”

“Discresion.” It was misspelled as if to capture my attention. That was the word that brought illumination. While on the one hand contemporary art perpetually assaults bourgeois niceties, on the other hand it is quite dependent upon them, even to the point of having to issue the occasional reminder. The prophylactic of discretion assumes that when I see the Burkhart’s portrayals of viciously disordered sexuality, or when I see a “Police State” exhibit, or when I see a bumper stickler labeled “I heart Global Warming,” that I have enough moral sense to know such behaviors aren’t actually being recommended.

Such discretion enables me to view exhibits as the art world intends to present them—as indefensible behavior that is simultaneously instantiated and critiqued. When viewing contemporary art, these are the subtle, irony-chlorinated waters in which we are supposed to swim.

P.S.1 assumes that if I were to leave the center applauding the Police State, babbling like a sword-wielding crazy man, seeking to imitate the sexual violence displayed by Burkhart, or for that matter murdering virgins, that there would be someone to usher me to another respected New York City institution—Bellevue Psychiatric.

That discretion is the protective layer covering contemporary art may not seem that remarkable an observation. All forms of art, one might argue, assume a layer that distinguishes it from reality. In the Poetics, Aristotle viewed drama as an opportunity to purge the polis of 101

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volatile emotions. The prophylactic of fiction made this catharsis possible, enabling citizens to see—without actually suffering—the disastrous consequences of poor decisions; hence a tragedy could impart life lessons within the space of hours. Horror movies, if for less noble purposes, also assume this fiction/reality boundary is firmly in place. A firm confidence in that protective wrapping is what permits art to push the boundaries to jolt and awaken. The wrapping, however, can be destroyed.

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n a recent book entitled simply Dirt, a geomorphologist argues that aggressive methods of farming and development—initially quite profitable - are eroding precious deposits of topsoil that are extremely difficult to renew. Without some kind of agricultural reform, the author argues, we risk the unhappy prospect of not being able to grow food. Not being agriculturally disposed, I am in no position to comment on the validity of the Dirt thesis, but I can suggest that it is as good as analogy as any to describe the condition of the contemporary art world, at least as that world is represented by my visit to P.S.1.

Decade after decade of boundary-breaking exhibits have cut through protective taboos, eroding our cultural topsoil of normative decency, breaking the layers of discretion. Each spent layer is profitable, launching the careers of new artists whose work fetch top prices. But a limit may now have been reached. With this analogy in mind we could argue it’s not that contemporary art is dirty; it’s not nearly dirty enough.

I exited the museum and walked to the subway station. Notwithstanding Lot’s wife, I looked back at P.S.1. From a distance it was a beautiful Romanesque Revival school building crenellated by the Manhattan skyline. Perhaps the museum should hire Christo, who once shrouded the Reichstag in one million square feet of polypropylene fabric, to wrap the entire P.S.1 complex in the same wrapping that covered the “I heart Global Warming” bumper sticker. It could be emblazoned with the same hand-written note from the P.S.1 staff, urging our vigilant “discresion.” As many participants in our society are not yet initiated into the subtleties of contemporary art, such a warning would only be fair.

On the subway home, I examined some of P.S.1’s complimentary literature. One flier was entitled, “My Child, the Arts, and Learning,” 102

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and promised that “Arts in education stimulate children to engage in really deep conversations about all sorts of things.” I had little doubt that this was a promise on which P.S.1 could deliver. The flier was aimed, I imagine, at the kids in the school I work at, perhaps to compel them to a carefree visit to P.S.1. But until I’m certain they display the discretion that P.S.1 will give them no help in developing, I think we’ll stick to our Gore Walk. However, I looked closer, and realized I was mistaken. The flier wasn’t aimed at Middle-Schoolers at all—explained the flier’s subtitle: “A Guide for Parents, Pre-K to Second Grade.”

Matthew J. Milliner is a doctoral candidate in art history at Princeton University, and a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary.

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T HE M EDIA’ S B LIND S POT ,understanding0religion.< Jordan Ballor Paul Marshall, Lela Gilbert, & Roberta Green Ahmanson, Editors. Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009, 240 pp.

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y almost any measure the newspaper industry is in crisis.

Fewer than half (43%) of people surveyed in a recent Pew poll said that the loss of their local newspaper would “would hurt civic life in their community ‘a lot.’” Some communities will very likely be putting such opinion to the test as the prospect that a major city will be without a daily newspaper increases with each passing day.

This crisis is representative of broader trends affecting the whole of professional media, and the plight of newspapers is only partially attributable to erosion from alternative digital, or “new media,” sources.

The General Social Survey, which has conducted “basic scientific research on the structure and development of American society” since 1972, announced this week that in 2008 only nine percent of those surveyed express a “great deal” of confidence in the press, a decline from 28 percent in 1976.

The new volume Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion addresses what might be the single greatest lacuna in mainstream media coverage today. Blind Spot establishes the global importance of religion in the opening section, highlighted by a compelling survey from Timothy Samuel Shah and Monica Duffy Toft, “God Is Winning: Religion in 104

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Global Politics.” Shah, Senior Research Scholar at the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs at Boston University, and Toft, a professor of public policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, introduce a major leitmotif running throughout the entire book: Religion is not on the decline, as the influential sociologist Peter Berger once proclaimed. Instead, Shah and Toft conclude: “As the world has become more free, more enlightened, and more prosperous, it has also become more religious.”

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he second section of the book focuses on particular case studies that examine what is sometimes good, but all too often bad, media coverage of religious stories. Paul Marshall, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom and coeditor with Lela Gilbert and Roberta Green Ahmanson of the volume, provides a compelling look at the religious contexts of global terrorism—especially the movement headed by Osama Bin Laden—in his essay, “Religion and Terrorism: Misreading al Qaeda.” Marshall makes a strong case that it is impossible to comprehend al Qaeda in any real sense without dealing seriously with militant Islam’s religious selfunderstanding. Marshall writes: The al Qaeda network has consistently explained and justified its actions with a narrative centered on the fall and anticipated rise of the caliphate, the restoration of shari’a, and the inevitable conflict between true Muslim believers and apostates and infidels destined to last until the day of judgment.

This kind of perspective is one that is not easily gleaned from news reports which omit critical portions of statements or filter their coverage through pre-determined lenses. Marshall continues, “Many journalists have, however, tended to ignore this fundamental religious dimension and instead concentrated on those terrorist statements that might fit into secular Western preconceptions about oppression, economics, freedom, and progress.”

This more comprehensive religious context—including on the idea of the re-establishment of the caliphate—is one that belies a standard narrative focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In an April 2009 interview with King Abdullah II of Jordan, NBC’s David Gregory raised precisely this point concerning global terrorism. King Abdullah had said that the “core issue” is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Gregory 105

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then introduced a clip of President Obama in which the president said that a change in policy towards this conflict would not in any way deter al Qaeda. King Abdullah responds by glossing over these apparent differences, reiterating his point: “Any crisis that you want to talk about, whether it’s al-Qaeda, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, all comes back to the sore, the emotional issue that is Palestine and Jerusalem.” But on Marshall’s presentation, and one that is rarely heard relative to the narrative put forth by King Abdullah, al Qaeda’s interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not nationalistic at all, but rather specifically religious and limited in scope. Bin Laden does refer to the Palestinians, “but because he believes that nationalism is anti-Islamic and is even a form of apostasy from Islam,” writes Marshall, “his concern was not with a people fighting for a homeland but rather with the fact that infidels were in control of the Al-Aqsa Mosque,” Islam’s thirdholiest site. Because al Qaeda’s concerns are not nationalistic or regional, but rather global and religious, boiling down the “core problem” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict obscures the scarlet thread connecting acts of violence all over the world.

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ichael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, follows up Marshall’s essay with a pointed piece addressing the journalistic treatment of two other Middle Eastern nations, “Three Decades of Misreporting Iran and Iraq.” Many of the same problems and faults are apparent here. Journalists too often are dependent upon political templates and politically selfinterested sources for their coverage. In downplaying or ignoring religious stories and religious angles to other stories, the Western media is chronically incapable of adequately understanding and communicating the news to its various publics. The spotlight remains abroad for Allen D. Hertzke’s chapter on a series of campaigns united by a shared commitment to the promotion of human dignity. In “The Faith-Based Human Rights Quest: Missing the Story,” Hertzke, a political science professor at the University of Oklahoma, addresses a set of initiatives on a host of issues, ranging from issues of religious freedom, to war in Sudan, to human rights abuses in North Korea. In each case a broad coalition of diverse religious groups worked together toward a com106

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mon cause, and in each case the movements were largely caricatured in the media as machinations of the “religious Right.”

The second section concludes with chapters on the media treatment of popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI by the writer Amy Welborn, and an analysis of the reception of Mel Gibson’s blockbuster film, The Passion of the Christ, by Jeremy Lott, a contributing editor to Books & Culture. In addition, James L. Guth and C. Danielle Vinson, both professors of political science at Furman University, dissect the mainstream media coverage of the 2004 presidential campaign, whose result shocked many in the journalistic intelligentsia. Terry Mattingly, a syndicated columnist and director of the Washington Journalism Center at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, describes in his contribution to the volume the reaction of one of his colleagues to Bush’s election in 2004. Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, was abashed at his inability to understand the election result.

In a reflective essay, Clark wrote revealingly that “the ‘churched’ people who embrace Bush, in spite of a bumbling war and a stumbling economy, are more than alien to me. They are invisible.”

Mattingly’s chapter introduces the third and final section of the book, which focuses on constructive proposals for moving forward.

Clark had acknowledged “that journalists frequently get big religion stories wrong or miss them altogether. Once that was accepted, they could start talking about ways to improve their work.” Roberta Green Ahmanson’s essay, “Getting It Right,” brings all of these disparate threads together. Ahmanson, a multi-talented writer, philanthropist, and award-winning journalist, returns explicitly to Peter Berger’s secularization thesis, and applies its demise to the contemporary situation in the press. Journalists may have been one of the few groups to whom Berger’s predictions accurately applied, and as such they “often do not know how to cope with or comprehend the increasingly religious human beings in their own countries or around the world.”

There is indeed a divide between most journalists and the rest of the country. In their disconnection from religion, reporters have also distanced themselves from the American public. Lott’s observations about The Passion of the Christ apply to the broader situation: “The story is about the estrangement of American journalists from their audience.”

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The causes of this estrangement vary, but the result is always the same: the quality of journalism suffers and therefore so does the quality of our public discourse.

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ne way to address the problem would be for newsrooms to be more welcoming to reporters whose profiles do not fit the standard secularist model. As Hertzke writes, “reporters matter, and their backgrounds matter.” At the very least newsrooms should not be overtly hostile to colleagues of faith and should appreciate those who do not practice faith but are able to approach religious topics with a measure of professionalism. Mattingly urges editors to hire reporters “who can treat religion with empathy and also skepticism, quote people accurately, show respect for the lives of their sources, and stop mangling the technical, yet often poetic, language of religious life.” This would mean a serious investment of resources, or at least a reallocation of resources from other desks to a religion beat.

And this would therefore mean a significant shift in the status quo.

Welborn observes rightly that “media organizations don’t prioritize or finance adequate ongoing coverage or the hiring of competent, knowledgeable full-time religion reporters.” They just don’t see the value in it. But the crisis of confidence in the mainstream press and the shuttering of newspapers around the country provide as strong a case as any for a change in approach.

Indeed, there is an economic case to be made for providing more resources for serious religion coverage. It is here that the challenge presented by new media can also be an opportunity for traditional news outlets. The new media phenomenon is a chance for professional journalists to assert their authority and to show their value by embracing their own high standards. These standards, like the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists, are largely foreign to bloggers, self-styled “citizen journalists,” and other mavens of new media.

But poor reporting of religious stories, or of any stories for that matter, endangers journalism itself. Hertzke rightly contends, “Missing or misapprehending crucial stories, especially by the mainstream press, damages the credibility of journalism as a profession, because as we have seen, laypeople are reading these accounts of faith-based activism in religious magazines, bulletins, and alternative news outlets.” Terry 108

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Mattingly cites the wisdom of William R. Burleigh, a veteran newsman with over fifty years experience at the E. W. Scripps Company. Mattingly writes that Burleigh supports the devotion of new resources to religion beats, and “that this strategy makes sense in this era of declining readership and revenues, while the news industry makes a painful transition to digital media. If they care about the future, journalists cannot afford to ignore or misreport stories that are important to the lives of so many readers and viewers.”

Opening newsrooms to reporters of faith is one thing, but filling those positions with journalists who will maintain high professional standards is yet another. That’s why the work of places like the World Journalism Institute at the King’s College in New York, which is committed “to recruit, equip, place and encourage journalists who are Christians in the mainstream newsrooms of America,” has such a crucial role to play in any revitalization of religion in the press—and more programs like it are needed.

It seems to be the case then that professional journalism still has an important place in our society, or as a Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism study puts it, “The old norms of traditional journalism continue to have value.” If the omission or distortion of religious life has contributed to the downward trend in public support for traditional press outlets, then perhaps a newfound emphasis on responsible religion reporting is a recipe for the revival, maybe even the redemption, of professional journalism. Blind Spot is a critically-important contribution to this ongoing discussion, and journalists, religious and secular alike, will ignore it to their own detriment and to the detriment of their profession.

Jordan Ballor is a doctoral student in Reformation history at the University of Zurich and moral theology at Calvin Theological Seminary. He serves as associate editor of the Journal of Markets & Morality .

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A ID F OR A FRICA ,a0better0solution< Paul J. Bonicelli Dambisa Moyo. Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009. 208 pp.

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ambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa should be all that is needed to convince even the most committed “LiveAider” or student of the Bono School of Development that state-controlled foreign aid does not work and cannot work. But it probably won’t convince them, and for exactly the reason that Moyo says it won’t: people who think well of handing out cash to corrupt and incompetent regimes are not focused on the facts and logic of development aid. Rather, proponents of foreign aid are essentially using emotions, not facts, to maintain their support for these programs and garner new supporters.

In the last twenty years we’ve developed a “pop culture” of aid that supports a misconception that Moyo explains succinctly: “…in a world of moral uncertainty one idea is sacred, one belief cannot be compromised: the rich should help the poor, and the form of this help should be aid.” Moyo’s explanation of why such aid still has so much support, after five decades now of it failing to bring on development (in fact, she shows how it is actually making matters worse), is one of the best reasons to read this book.

Moyo was born and raised in Zambia, holds a PhD in Economics from Oxford University, a Masters from Harvard University, and an MBA in Finance from the American University in Washington D.C., and has worked for both the World Bank and Goldman Sachs. She is more than qualified to opine on these matters, having both academic knowledge and practical experience of how the aid agencies do their 110

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work. More importantly, she is skilled in matters of finance, knowledge that informs the solutions she offers to the problem of African debt.

She defines foreign aid narrowly in this work, and it is a good thing, because she is in my view too critical of all aid (more about this later).

Specifically, she is careful to note that her book is not about humanitarian aid (e.g., relief when a tsunami or earthquake hits), nor is it about charity aid—that is, the aid that is distributed by various non-profits and non-governmental organizations. This latter type of aid, though funded largely by governments, comes in the form of training for political parties and election workers, education for civil servants, help setting up a stock market and other infrastructures of capitalism and commerce, and the transfer of technology. Moyo notes that because this is not much money compared to the wads of cash handed out to the governments of poor countries by Western governments and international organizations, nor is it inherently wrong-headed in her view, she focuses only on the cash handouts to governments. For this form of aid I prefer the term state-controlled foreign aid for its exactness. We are not talking about all foreign aid here, just that kind that provides the wherewithal for inept kleptocracies to continue in power, rape their people’s patrimony and, having done that year in and year out, get yet another tranche because “look how poor the country is, we must help them for the sake of the starving millions.”

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oyo’s goal is to explain state-controlled aid and reveal why it is not only ineffectual at promoting development but also harmful. This aid encompasses the systematic transfer of billions of dollars from rich countries to poor countries in the form of budget support and concessional loans—loans so easily granted and forgiven that recipient countries see them as no different from grants.

In describing what this aid is and revealing its history, she shows us the “myth” of aid. I have seen no better description than hers, and the book is worth buying simply for this. As a former foreign aid official, I found myself “Amening” as I read her paragraphs, having seen the facts just as she lays them out in my teaching and having lived them out in my years of government service. I saw the same people doing the same things over and over again, heard the same mythical references to the power of aid to transform a society, and of course observed 111

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the same people and institutions ignoring the history of aid-giving--all things are made new once the cycle begins again with new tranches of money because a new program or leader is now in place. Haiti comes to mind, but a couple dozen easily jump to mind also.

Moyo explains why state-controlled aid does not produce developed countries and how it is actually causing poor countries to regress. Fifty years and two trillion dollars of foreign aid later, with Africa getting the lion’s share (1 trillion US$), Mayo analyzes the accumulated data and renders a devastating conclusion. Her work destroys the argument for the continued doling out of cash and “loans” that have amounted to little more than grants with a little nagging for repayment thrown in to save Western face. Her analysis stings all the more because she demonstrates that many poor countries have succeeded—some joining the ranks of the most developed nations—without being on the dole and subjecting themselves to the cycle of aid dependence.

We are taken on a tour of the arguments for why Africa can’t attain development. Geography, culture, bad institutions, history, all of these have been put forward as possible explanations—but Moyo maintains that these reasons are not sufficient to explain why development escapes African nations. And we are told all the reasons—proofs even— that aid officials put forward to show how Africa can break the cycle of aid dependency. A new Marshall Plan can work, some say, or the right conditions must be placed on aid, or better institutions must be fostered and then aid can work. Moyo dismisses them all, but in the case of democracy, I would say she does so too easily and without sufficient consideration of the root problem of development.

Her point is this: no matter what groundwork or conditions we add, the problem is aid itself, not whatever is lacking that aid is supposed to fix. The problem is that aid breeds corruption and dependence. It keeps Africans in a childlike state, at least in the eyes of the aid givers who prefer to treat Africans like children who need to be showered with largesse. Put another way, the problem is that Africans are not treated as responsible adults who are no different in intelligence or any other innate characteristics from people in developed countries, and this promotes and sustains all the obstacles to development. The cure is truly worse than the disease. How else to explain the many cases 112

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where aid by the billions has been transferred from a rich country to a poor country for decades, resulting in flat or negative growth attended by corruption and mismanagement, when those not caught in the downward spiral of aid have flourished? A case in point is instructive: Mobutu’s Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) received some of its largest loans right after the highest International Monetary Fund official in the country announced in the plainest terms that there was no hope of creditors ever seeing any of the money paid back because of incompetence and corruption. This is only one of dozens of cases over the years. Here we have a mix of wishful thinking, the desire to keep the aid machine humming, Western guilt and the pop culture of aid all at work together to the detriment of Africa’s poor.

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o offer her prescription to solve the problem, which is one of the great values of the book, Moyo employs a useful hypothetical: the Republic of Dongo. In this chapter, she takes a fictional country of Africa that looks like most of them that she has been describing, and with significant detail shows what is wrong both in an aid dependent country and in the councils of its donors. She then carefully explains the cure for which all her forgoing material has been a prelude: cut off aid in five years, permanently, and require Dongo to do what anyone in business or the private sector would have to do if it wants to achieve sustainable economic growth by means of its population’s skill and effort: borrow money from international capital markets at market rates for strategically planned projects that are attractive to investors. That is, Dongo should put itself on the bond market, earn creditworthiness by being a good performer, and steadily improve its creditworthiness to the point that it solves development problems by being attractive to investors, who will fall over themselves to lend to a going concern. This method requires accountability, and that’s why it will work; no accountability means any funds coming to Dongo, either in aid or private capital, will be wasted. With aid, the spigot never runs dry. It hasn’t in fifty years anyway, so there is no incentive for the government to do well with the invested funds. With investments from the private sector, there is pretty much only one chance to get it right. To waste it on foolish projects or to steal it through corrupt governments 113

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whose interest is keeping a protective palace guard (the military) wellfed and happy means the regime will have lost its chance at making it.

One of the most interesting parts of the book is when Moyo asks the question: what would happen if African governments who are recipients of state-controlled aid were to receive a phone call telling them that in five years the aid will come to a complete stop? The reduction would be systematic but sure, and at the end of it, the country would be on its own, forced to borrow from the global capital markets. That is the starting point for her “capital” solution. One thinks of welfare reform in the United States. The premise is the same: you must take responsibility for yourself and in doing so you will reap the rewards of investment and credit for sustainable solutions to economic problems.

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here I think Moyo’s work falls short is in how she treats the all-encompassing problem of the lack of democracy in most African countries. While she notes that it is a serious issue, she does not deal with the problem thoroughly, and she does not treat it as the problem that must be solved if there is to be any sustainable development in Africa. And we should be clear, it is the problem. No amount of resources, public or private, will make any lasting difference, nor will they break the cycle of dependence and poverty in Africa, if they are not invested in countries that are governed justly and democratically and where governments and private citizens alike have the technology and know-how and desire to promote, protect and regulate free markets by law and uphold contracts and private property rights. To think otherwise is to assume that African leaders and citizens are somehow innately more knowledgeable and more ethical than Westerners, who themselves took a long time and much pain and suffering to get to where we are now, having gone through agricultural, industrial and political revolutions. (As I write this, though, we seem to be violating in the US everything we know is true from the past 400 years). The argument is not that Africans have to repeat exactly the history of the West, but surely much that we have passed through must be the destiny of Africans as well if they are to succeed.

Development practitioners—those who have been on the ground doing this work, not those who talk about development between songs during their concerts or on Oprah—know that the root of the problem 114

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in Africa is two-fold. One, venal or incompetent governments spend much time stealing resources or misusing them. Two, the citizens are in many cases more like subjects, lacking the ability to think of themselves as having the right to self-govern and hold their leaders accountable for bad policies. As scholar Daniel Etounga-Manguelle notes, “It is difficult to explain African passivity other than by the fear inspired by a God hidden in the folds of the clothes of every African chief.”

These are serious problems indeed: leaders govern as dictators because they want to, or believe they have to in order to stave off the next coup plotter, and populaces are kept in semi-bondage by their culture and the habits ingrained by generations of subservience to presumed elites or men with guns. As Etounga-Manguelle writes, “Culture is the mother; institutions are the children.” That is, the habits of mind both in the individual and in the society must change, in both the people and the leaders, and then both must have and put to use the ideas and technology that produce a modern society characterized by freedom, self-governance and the flourishing of private property.

Moyo’s excellent plan to end the cash handouts is certainly part of the answer. That is, kleptocrats and incompetents will get one shot to steal or squander investment money from the private capital markets.

After that, they get nothing else. They would learn painfully and tragically that private bond investors are not government or UN aid agencies who forgive and excuse ad nauseum. But the problem of incompetence and lack of experience in operating in a culture of freedom, transparency, and entrepreneurialism will not be solved simply by ending state-controlled aid and replacing it with private capital markets. Many countries in Africa will need a “jump-start” on the political, industrial and even agricultural revolutions if the citizens of African countries are ever going to be able to make the most of these investments. In short, free citizens with knowledge of how democracy and capitalism work (see Michael Novak) won’t appear overnight simply because state-controlled aid has been cut off. They have to be helped by the West. Africa has many democrats and capitalists, but they are yet too few and too oppressed to be able to share their knowledge, experience and spirit with their fellows.

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Moyo is right to argue that Africans are not children, nor are they innately less wise or less intelligent. But I think she is wrong to ignore that in much of Africa, the culture is not conducive to democracy or free market capitalism. We’ve seen the change in Germany, Japan, and Russia (the jury is still out on that last one) in our lifetimes, but there were changes in America as well. We all had to shift the way we thought and behaved as leaders and citizens, and while the shift in Africa must be greater, I believe it can be made.

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or Moyo’s plan to work, much more needs to be done in Africa,

by Africans, but with the help of those that through aid work teach the principles and practices of democracy and capitalism.

Joe Siegle’s book, The Democracy Advantage, provides excellent and well-researched evidence that it is indeed the democracies of the developing world—even the fragile ones—that have the best track record and prospects for building long-lasting economic viability, even as they broaden and strengthen the franchise. Simply put, when the people can hold their leaders accountable for good results and throw them from office when they fail, from a position of knowledge and the boldness of true citizenship, these countries have a chance to break through the cycle of poverty and backwardness and build up their creditworthiness for the world’s potential investors. We all want to see development take hold in Africa, but we should remember this dictum: there is no development without good governance, but there is no good governance without democracy.

I wish Dambisa Moyo and her work much success. She has written what just might be the best text for both policymakers and the general public to understand the problem and what can be done about it. As she dedicates this work to Lord Peter Bauer, she is his most compelling successor in my opinion to influence policymakers. The main obstacle she faces is the one we all face in politics and policy today: emotional fervor outstrips reliance on reason, facts and sound judgment. We must get people to think again, instead of simply emoting while humming “We Are the World.”

Paul Bonicelli is the Provost of Houston Baptist University and a former Assistant Administrator of USAID. 116

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4THE`WORD`SPOKEN$ Saint John Chrysostom In each volume of T H E C I TY , we reprint writing or remarks from great thinkers of the faith. Here is an excerpt of a homily delivered by St. John Chrysostom (c.

347-407) on the nature of leadership, as translated by Philip Schaff in 1889.

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ould you like me to show you yet another phase of this strife, charged with innumerable dangers? Come, then, and take a peep at the public festivals when it is generally the custom for elections to be made to ecclesiastical dignities, and you will then see the priest assailed with accusations as numerous as the people whom he rules. For all who have the privilege of conferring the honor are then split into many parties; and one can never find the council of elders of one mind with each other, or about the man who has won the prelacy; but each stands apart from the others, one preferring this man, another that. Now the reason is that they do not all look to one thing, which ought to be the only object kept in view, the excellence of the character; but other qualifications are alleged as recommending to this honor; for instance, of one it is said, “let him be elected because he belongs to an illustrious family,” of another “because he is possessed of great wealth, and would not need to be supported out of the revenues of the Church,” of a third “because he has come over from the camp of the adversary;” one is eager to give the preference to a man who is on terms of intimacy with himself, another to the man who is related to him by birth, a third to the flatterer, but no one will look to the man who is really qualified, or make some test of his character…

Now formerly I used to deride secular rulers, because in the distribution of their honors they are not guided by considerations of moral excellence, but of wealth, and seniority, and human distinction; but when I heard that this kind of folly had forced its way into our affairs also, I no longer regarded their conduct as so atrocious. For what wonder is it that worldly men, who love the praise of the multitude, and do everything for the sake of gain, should commit these sins, when those who affect at least to be free from all these influences are in no wise better disposed than they, but although engaged in a contest for hea118

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venly things, act as if the question submitted for decision was one which concerned acres of land, or something else of that kind? For they take commonplace men off-hand, and set them to preside over those things, for the sake of which the only begotten Son of God did not refuse to empty Himself of His glory and become man, and take the form of a servant, and be spat upon, and buffeted, and die a death of reproach in the flesh. Nor do they stop even here, but add to these offences others still more monstrous; for not only do they elect unworthy men, but actually expel those who are well qualified. As if it were necessary to ruin the safety of the Church on both sides, or as if the former provocation were not sufficient to kindle the wrath of God, they have contrived yet another not less pernicious. For I consider it as atrocious to expel the useful men as to force in the useless. And this in fact takes place, so that the flock of Christ is unable to find consolation in any direction, or draw its breath freely. Now do not such deeds deserve to be punished by ten thousand thunder-bolts, and a hell-fire hotter than that with which we are threatened in Holy Scripture?

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et these monstrous evils are borne with by Him who willeth not the death of a sinner, that he may be converted and live. And how can one sufficiently marvel at His lovingkindness, and be amazed at His mercy? They who belong to Christ destroy the property of Christ more than enemies and adversaries, yet the good Lord still deals gently with them, and calls them to repentance. Glory be to Thee, O Lord! Glory to Thee! How vast is the depth of Thy lovingkindness! how great the riches of Thy forbearance! Men who on account of Thy name have risen from insignificance and obscurity to positions of honor and distinction, use the honor they enjoy against Him who has bestowed it, do deeds of outrageous audacity, and insult holy things, rejecting and expelling men of zeal in order that the wicked may ruin everything at their pleasure in much security, and with the utmost fearlessness. And if you would know the causes of this dreadful evil, you will find that they are similar to those which were mentioned before; for they have one root and mother, so to say窶馬amely, envy; but this is manifested in several different forms. For one we are told is to be struck out of the list of candidates, because he is young; another because he does not know how to flatter; a third because he has of119

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fended such and such a person; a fourth lest such and such a man should be pained at seeing one whom he has presented rejected, and this man elected; a fifth because he is kind and gentle; a sixth because he is formidable to the sinful; a seventh for some other like reason; for they are at no loss to find as many pretexts as they want, and can even make the abundance of a manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wealth an objection when they have no other. Indeed they would be capable of discovering other reasons, as many as they wish, why a man ought not to be brought suddenly to this honor, but gently and gradually. And here I should like to ask the question, â&#x20AC;&#x153;What, then, is the prelate to do, who has to contend with such blasts? How shall he hold his ground against such billows? How shall he repel all these assaults?â&#x20AC;?

For if he manages the business upon upright principles, all those who are enemies and adversaries both to him and to the candidates do everything with a view to contention, provoking daily strife, and heaping infinite scorn upon the candidates, until they have got them struck off the list, or have introduced their own favorites. In fact it is just as if some pilot had pirates sailing with him in his ship, perpetually plotting every hour against him, and the sailors, and marines. And if he should prefer favor with such men to his own salvation, accepting unworthy candidates, he will have God for his enemy in their stead; and what could be more dreadful than that? And yet his relations with them will be more embarrassing than formerly, as they will all combine with each other, and thereby become more powerful than before. For as when fierce winds coming from opposite directions clash with one another, the ocean, hitherto calm, becomes suddenly furious and raises its crested waves, destroying those who are sailing over it, so also when the Church has admitted corrupt men, its once tranquil surface is covered with rough surf and strewn with shipwrecks.

+++ We encourage you to visit T H E C I TY online at C I V I TAT E . OR G .

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