The Survival of Culture

Here's a fascinating exchange between Will Wilkinson and Megan McArdle, pegged to this Kerry Howley piece, on whether people invested in the survival of their culture (and particularly of Western, liberal culture) should panic over plunging fertility rates. Obviously I'm in the camp that considers declining birth rates to be a serious problem for the liberal West, and so obviously I agree with Megan's point that "the most important core beliefs most people have are transmitted not through dialogue, but through inheritance," and its corollary that no matter how "immense" and "salient" the rewards of the "liberal market culture" that Will favors, it will be much harder to pass it on down through conversion than through child-rearing. That being said, culture certainly can be passed on through conversion - otherwise Christianity wouldn't have survived Goths and Franks and Vandals - and given that low fertility rates and open borders seem to be integral to the sort of culture that Will favors, I think he more or less has to take the position that he's taking. Like it or not, the aspects of liberal modernity that he approves of aren't going to passed on through inheritance fast enough to keep up with the changing population composition of the West, and especially Western Europe, so it's conversion or nothing.

Moreover, despite my skepticism about the viability of the sort of social order that he favors, I'm enough of a Fukuyaman that I won't be shocked if Will ends up vindicated.

Comments

Of course, Will has to ignore real world examples like Lebanese Christians to believe that his view is correct.

Posted by superdestroyer | June 17, 2008 3:48 PM

Ross, Low fertility rates aren't integral to the kind of culture I favor. I just don't think they threaten the kind of culture I favor.

Also, for you worry warts, it's worth noting that the U.S. fertility rate is not declining and is right at replacement. (Gapminder chart... takes a second to load.)

This isn't all fecund immigrants, either. Fertility among American women of European descent is close to replacement. Even for absurd "we are and should always be a culture of white people" types, there is no real basis for demographic panic. Of course, that won't stop them from panicking, for reasons Kerry so ably lays out.

Posted by Will Wilkinson | June 17, 2008 3:50 PM

OK, I've reached my limit and must speak out: everything on the Internet, or the blogosphere, has become "fascinating" the last month or two or maybe just the last couple of weeks, and it's driving me up the wall. On the other hand, I haven't seen "vanishingly small" for a while, so that's something.

Posted by HJA | June 17, 2008 3:58 PM

No need to condemn unborn children from other countries as less likely to use their human freedom to choose liberal, democratic values.

Posted by M | June 17, 2008 4:13 PM

It's very hard to support your position, which I believe to be in good-faith and free of racism, when so many people who agree with you do so merely in the "more white babies" sense.

Posted by Freddie | June 17, 2008 4:15 PM

Superdestroyer,

To be fair, the problems of the Lebanese Christians were caused as much by Christian emigration and Muslim immigration as by differential fertility rates.

I don't think that Western European populations should be _growing_, since I think that natural resources are very finite, but I would be much happier if their populations were _stable_ or shrinking _gradually_. Russia's fertility rate for example is much too low and I'm happy that it is finally starting to rise. And I definitely don't see the point of allowing in large numbers of Muslims to contribute to the creeping Islamization of the continent. Europe needs to stop mass immigration now, and learn how to live with closed borders, else it will go the way of Lebanon.

Posted by Hector | June 17, 2008 4:18 PM

Will's point about western culture winning the argument is exactly why I can't get up-in-arms about fertility rates or immigration. Western liberal capitalism is winning by virtue of being a more attractive society in which to live by more people. Immigrants by and large come to the US/EU because they prefer it to the place they left. Thus you're never going to see a critical mass of people try and change their new home to become like the place they fought to leave.

Posted by Phaedrus | June 17, 2008 4:22 PM

Phaedrus,

Except that Pakistani immigrants who fled Pakistan to come to Britain are now the same ones who are trying to introduce Shariah law to make Britain like Pakistan. The Muslims who emigrated to Lebanon have succeeded in turning it into a Muslim nation. And I don't think Western culture is hardly 'winning the argument' just because a lot of people migrate here. Apartheid South Africa had lots of immigration too. That doesn't mean it was any less of a creepy Hitleresque abomination.

Posted by Hector | June 17, 2008 4:35 PM

Hector,

And you think it is - let's say even remotely possible - that radical 8th century Sharia Pakistani immigrants to Great Britain will be able to have so many children, indoctrinate them with so much efficiency and success, and do this so quickly so as to reverse any trends towards modernization - that they will be able to use the democratic process to destroy British liberal democracy and free market capitalism?

Posted by M | June 17, 2008 4:45 PM

How do you feel about immigration of Germanic, Russian and Italian peoples, not to mention Poles, Slavs, and Jews of all stripes, when the birth rate among our dominant native Anglo-Saxon culture is declining? Should we worry that the forthcoming 20th century will see the passing of the American spirit, to be replaced by some bearded jabbering cacophony of Papistry and Semitic rituals?

Posted by Ben | June 17, 2008 4:54 PM

M,

I agree that they won't 'destroy' liberal capitalism, democracy, or any of that jazz. However, I think it will be eroded, especially in majority-Muslim localities. In fact, that's already happening in Britain-see the requests for Shariah law, etc.
The reality is, most immigrants come looking for economic opportunity. Just because they realize that there are better jobs in advanced capitalist societies does not mean they will accept all the other values that go along with those societies, such as the equality of women, etc. In fact, plenty of immigrants will accept the economic benefits of capitalism and reject what they see as the libertine culture of western modernity.
I'm not as alarmed about this as Steyn. But that doesn't mean it's not happening.

Posted by jamie | June 17, 2008 4:58 PM

Ross:

Why reject the idea that babies born into Muslim society have the same robust individual freedom to seek liberty that, say, children born into Soviet society did?

Posted by M | June 17, 2008 5:04 PM

M,

Cosmopolitan globalizers believe that individuals have the right to live the way they want, move where they want, choose the values that maximize their own economic benefit and lifestyle pleasures. They don't like the idea that a society can define itself as a Christian society or a Socialist society or whatever, and defend that social identity against those individuals whose choices would undermine it.

In other words, you want to allow people all freedoms except one of the most important freedoms of all, the freedom to re-create society in the image of what one believes is right. If this is forbidden the other freedoms are worthless. Well has it been said that the kind of 'free' society you want to create is nothing but the Dictatorship of Relativism.

Posted by Hector | June 17, 2008 5:14 PM

Jamie

Let's accept, for argument, that there are some Pakistani immigrants "requesting Sharia law" in Britain. (I believe most of those stories are trumped up fear-mongering, but let's accept them.) Do you truly believe that Parliament, or the Met police, or some other British regulatory body is going to carve out zones of law for the Taliban? That Hertfordshire will be organized in law by Shia radicals sympathetic to the Ayatollah, and Edinburgh for Sunnis sympathetic to Al Qaeda?

It seems to me that the best response you'd make would be something about how British law might protect Muslim minorities by restricting "hate speech," and then you'd say that Britain would simultaneously not restrict "hate speech" from radical imams preaching a death cult, and that would lead to some crazy spiral of anti-civilization and explosions and what-not.

And there are two debates in that response, if you would make it. One debate is whether "hate speech" should be regulated, presuming it can be regulated fairly. The second debate is whether it is possible for British authorities to simultaneously and fairly regulate anti-Christian or anti-Western hate speech and anti-Muslim hate speech.

And it seems to me you'd probably say the British government would never prosecute an Imam who wished death on British civilians, but they certainly would prosecute a Tory who said Muslims are the enemies of the West. But is that really happening? Is it inevitable? A neutral-on-its-face hate speech law, enforced only against right-wingers?

But even then, that seems to me to simply be an argument against hate speech legislation, not rooted in demographic decline.

Posted by M | June 17, 2008 5:20 PM

Western liberal capitalism is winning by virtue of being a more attractive society in which to live by more people.

I'm inclined to say the same thing. Megan's point that "societies don't have arguments" is at least esoterically true, but they do inarguably compete with one another, most importantly for mobile resources like human capital. With that in mind, I think there's an implicit argument that takes place across cultures when they compete with each other for things like college students, foreign investment, skilled workers, etc. You look at how people vote with their feet, to borrow a line from Milton Friedman, and the West is clearly winning this argument, by virtually any measure.

Posted by Jeff | June 17, 2008 5:28 PM

Woah, esoteric is totally not the right word in that sentence. I have no idea why it popped into my head just then.

Posted by Jeff | June 17, 2008 5:35 PM

Cosmopolitan globalizers believe that individuals have the right to live the way they want, move where they want, choose the values that maximize their own economic benefit and lifestyle pleasures.

Which contrasts with what you believe? Oh, what a giveaway! And you've got the temerity to rail against "dictatorship" in the same post?

Well. Let it not be said that Western liberalism has a 100% conversion rate.

Posted by Jeff | June 17, 2008 5:42 PM

Illegal immigration into the U.S. is changing America from a middle-class society into a highly unequal Latin American-style society.

In key areas, such as education achievement, it's not at all clear that Latin American immigrants in the U.S. will ever assimilate to the

The new book "Generations of Exclusion" by UCLA sociologists Edward Telles and Vilma Ortiz of the Chicano Studies Center now provides us with data over the 1965 to 2000 time period on how fast American-born Mexican-Americans, out through the fourth generation, are closing the gap in education with the rest of America.

The answer is that they are not. Fourth generation Mexican-Americans, whose grandparents were born in the U.S., do not get any more years of education than do second generation Mexican Americans. The college graduation rate for 4th generation Mexican Americans born 1946-1966 was 6% compared to 35% for non-Hispanic whites of the same era.

http://www.vdare.com/Sailer/080601_barone.htm

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 17, 2008 5:46 PM

Similarly, increased diversity is undermining some of the proudest achievements of our civilization, such as freedom of expression, as the current trial in Canada of McCleans magazine for publishing a chapter of Mark Steyn's book on fertility demonstrates.

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 17, 2008 5:49 PM

It's interesting to note what's not mentioned in Kerry Howley's snarky article in Reason.

Although Mark Steyn's name comes up three times, the court case threatening Canada's leading newsmagazine's right to publish Steyn's writings on fertility is not mentioned. Freedom of politically incorrect speech doesn't seem to be a major concern for politically correct libertarians these days.

Also, there's no mention in Howley's long article about all the efforts by highly respectable Jewish leaders to boost Jewish fertility and discourage Jews from marrying gentiles. For example, Elliott Abrams, a high-ranking official in the current Administration and in-law of the Podhoretzes, spent the 1990s trying to keep Jews from marrying shikses in order to preserve the Jewish race. Perhaps Will should submit an essay to Reason about why it would be A-Okay if the Jewish race petered out, as long as Einstein's and Gershwin's works were remembered? I'm sure Reason would be delighted to publish it!

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 17, 2008 6:00 PM

I have no idea what your last paragraph is supposed to mean, but I'll just point out that Reason covered the Steyn-Levant/HRC squabbles here:

http://www.reason.com/news/show/124925.html

And here:

http://www.reason.com/blog/show/127000.html

Posted by Jeff | June 17, 2008 6:30 PM

Steve Sailer says:

"Illegal immigration into the U.S. is changing America from a middle-class society into a highly unequal Latin American-style society."

This is immensely ignorant. High levels of inequality in Latin America are largely the result of corruption and self-dealing among small groups of connected elites together with poor basic economic institutions that prevent ordinary people from producing much wealth. High levels of inequality in the U.S. are the result of increasing returns to education, increasing returns to entrepreneurial risk, and a number of superstar markets. Institutional quality is high. Corruption is low. The middle class is massive and very wealthy. Illegal immigration adds to American inequality by increasing the proportion of the population at the bottom of the distribution. Most of those immigrants are poor people who enjoy rapid income gains by moving to the U.S., and inequality between those people and the average American is rapidly declining.

Posted by Will Wilkinson | June 17, 2008 6:58 PM

the same robust individual freedom to seek liberty that, say, children born into Soviet society did?

Er, sure they do. And despite the warping of what had developed in a good direction and the corruption and stagnation of the USSR, we now note that Russia is a completely democratic country with little corruption, a thriving public culture, and nothing but good times from now on comin' down the pike.

Right?

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | June 17, 2008 7:43 PM

Jeff,

Way to completely miss the point. Do you even understand what the term 'dictatorship of relativism' means?

Posted by Hector | June 17, 2008 7:51 PM

Yes.

Posted by Jeff | June 17, 2008 8:48 PM

I think a certain dose of reality needs to be interjected here. If the population of Europe and North America fell to half its current numbers Western Culture would still be home to twice as many people as it hosted in the heydey of Queen Victoria. It could fall by 70% and still hold far more people than dwelt in its territory during the Renaissance. The Roman Empire at its height almost certainly had a population of less than 50 million (estimates differ of course). A culture does not require mega-millions to be viable.

Posted by JonF | June 17, 2008 9:34 PM

Why reject the idea that babies born into Muslim society have the same robust individual freedom to seek liberty that, say, children born into Soviet society did?

Why accept that idea without any evidence?

Other than Mr. Chalabi's assurances, I mean.

Posted by Glaivester | June 17, 2008 9:42 PM

Will "The Metaphysician" Wilkinson sputters:

"This is immensely ignorant."

Sure, Will, you're just a real expert on all things factual, so we'll take your word that whatever facts would validate your theories just have to exist. They just have to.

Thus, Los Angeles is becoming ever more a middle class society due to the benefits of illegal immigration. It may not look like it is to people living in Los Angeles, but Will Wilkinson's Worldview says it has to, so it has to.

Who cares what the UCLA Chicano Studies Department's study of five generations of Mexican Americans over 35 years found? Who are they to argue with Will Wilkinson?

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 17, 2008 11:13 PM

Glaivester and Carabas are quite comfortable to condemn babies born to Muslim families as the enemies of Western Civilization. That is the conclusion without evidence, the guilt by association, the judgment before an individual can exercise his or her liberty.

Noting that Russia is led by oligarchs and corruption does not mean that Soviet-era and post-Soviet Russians did not want freedom as we understand it. On the contrary, we know the opposite. Many of us know people who lived under Soviet rule and would cringe at the thought that they were perceived as "inheriting anti-civilization ideology" and unlikely to use their individual agency. We know, for instance, that Pope John Paul II's abiding faith that the people behind the Iron Curtain wanted liberty helped power revolution. In the heat of the Cold War, hawks counseled that the Commies on the other side of the Wall were reproducing automatons opposed to freedom. And they were wrong.

Meanwhile, it is precisely that we don't know these children that we shouldn't be making the argument that they should be conceived of as civilization's enemies. That's Al Qaeda logic - that one can categorize a whole people, even the innocents, as civilization's enemies.

Posted by M | June 18, 2008 12:42 AM

M,

Re: Noting that Russia is led by oligarchs and corruption does not mean that Soviet-era and post-Soviet Russians did not want freedom as we understand it.

Um, yes it means precisely that. Putin is the natural and organic outgrowth of Russian history and conditions, as the scumbag Yeltsin was not and never could be. Liberal capitalism and liberal democracy are deeply alien to Russian history and traditions (as you can tell, I don't much like "liberal democratic capitalism" either). Russia is now rejecting them, and that's a very good thing. Its cultural roots lie in the peasant commune and in the Byzantine Empire, not in Western Englightenment thinking. If you leave Russia to itself and stop meddling in its internal affairs, it will always swing back to an authoritarian regime. The notion that political and economic "freedom" are somehow the natural default state and the natural desire of every people are nothing but the crudest, stupidest and most vile form of Western cultural imperialism.

The Russians may not have particularly liked everything about the Soviet era, but it is a fact that about 60% of Russians today say that they wished they lived in the Brezhnev era. I detest Stalin but I'm honest enough to ackowledge that even Stalin is still popular in Russia (heaven only knows why). Of course the _Poles_ didn't particularly like the Soviet era, nor did the East Germans (why would they? it was forced upon them from outside). But in Russia and Yugoslavia that era of history is still quite popular and you would do well to wonder why.

Posted by Hector | June 18, 2008 7:17 AM

M

They condemned babies born to Muslim families as enemies of western civilization? Are you sure?

This accusation is very revealing of the cultural tone-deafness of contemporary liberalism, which seems to be strangely unaware of the way in which people are shaped by the surrounding culture.

You think that since "freedom and democracy" are universal, rational values, they can be discovered by anyone on a purely individual, rational basis.

I think that all historical evidence is that universal, rational values have only been discovered through long collective, meta-rational processes (i.e. religious revelation, tradition, history), and that they will be quickly forgotten as people like you separate themselves more and more from such processes.

Posted by Carlo | June 18, 2008 10:11 AM

Glaivester and Carabas are quite comfortable to condemn babies born to Muslim families as the enemies of Western Civilization.

Er, no. I just think the past has consequences. Unlike our genius of a president, I don't think everyone, everywhere (or much of anyone, anywhere, who isn't 'trained' to) is born yearning to be a modern secular capitalist. I'm less enamored of Russia's current state than Hector (I think Communism did cripple the nation's 'soul', and I don't think czarism was the best authoritarianism to have either), but I'll agree wholeheartedly with him there. I'll also note that this isn't an insult to those 'babies.' I don't love modern European (or American) culture all that much.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | June 18, 2008 10:19 AM

If your goal really is to keep the West from being swarmed by Muslims, you ought to liberalize all intra-Christendom migration paths. Just shore up the European ranks with some Catholic Latinos. Problem solved.

Posted by Consumatopia | June 18, 2008 10:23 AM

Ross, Megan, et al.

All this lamenting over the imperiled values of the West sounded better -- even if it was no more sound -- in the original German (Der Untergang des Abendlandes).

It's a shame that the state of proto-fascist racial mysticism has fallen so far below the standard set by Spengler. Perhaps this is the truest sign of the West's decline.

Posted by Sebastian Dangerfield | June 18, 2008 10:50 AM

If your goal really is to keep the West from being swarmed by Muslims, you ought to liberalize all intra-Christendom migration paths. Just shore up the European ranks with some Catholic Latinos. Problem solved.

That's essentially what Spain has done in the last 10-15 years. They have encouraged immigration from Latin America. Those immigrants have been accepted and assimilated much more readily than the Muslims and Africans that have arrived during the same period.

Posted by Colonel Danite | June 18, 2008 11:15 AM

The problem is more the speed of the population change in some of the US, which was a lot of the motivator for the anti-immigrant sentiment in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In Austin (Texas), where I live, the last 30 years have seen Austin turn into a city with a population that is 40% Mexican. Not Mexican-American -- in the city limits, Austin is now about 40% foreign nationals from Mexico and the vast majority are here illegally.

That's a major change.

And unlike back in the 1970s, we aren't getting illegal aliens from the Mexican states closest to Texas, where people do crazy things like maintain the public infrastructure and pay taxes, but rather from the Mexican south, where, thanks to Mexico's Jim-Crow-on-acid social system, the people who look most Indian get essentially no education at all. So we have social workers trying to explain to mothers of six (at the age of 22) on welfare (with a working husband) why the school system gets upset when their children go to school with lice.

If you took away the problem of Mexico's rich white upper class doing everything in their power to get the US to pay for their poor, I think that the US concerns about the population makeup and fertility would drop sharply. I don't think that people care too much about folks with Mexican names. They do care about seeing the place they live in become essentially Mexican in character. It's no small change, they didn't ask for it, and they don't like the things that come with it (the corruption, the relaxed attitude toward criminality, the abuse of public spaces and public services, and so forth). I think that people feel threatened because they don't want to grow old in what has literally become a foreign country.

Posted by OB | June 18, 2008 11:44 AM

If your goal really is to keep the West from being swarmed by Muslims, you ought to liberalize all intra-Christendom migration paths. Just shore up the European ranks with some Catholic Latinos. Problem solved.

Given that they don't share a border and the flow could be kept to desired levels fairly easily, that's not a bad idea, potentially.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | June 18, 2008 12:00 PM

Fourth generation Mexican-Americans, whose grandparents were born in the U.S., do not get any more years of education than do second generation Mexican Americans. The college graduation rate for 4th generation Mexican Americans born 1946-1966 was 6% compared to 35% for non-Hispanic whites of the same era.

Is this controlled for income? That is, have whites as poor as the average Mexican immigrant shown greater increases in education levels from generation to generation over the last 40 years than the Mexican immigrants? If not, then the problem is not with the Mexicans.

Posted by Led | June 18, 2008 1:14 PM

If not, then the problem is not with the Mexicans.

Even if not, we are not, last I checked, looking to import a maximal number of new poor white people, either.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | June 18, 2008 1:29 PM

Re: I don't love modern European (or American) culture all that much.

When we think about the culture of the past we inevitably think about its high points: Bach, Shakespeare, Goethe, etc. But if we found ourselves in any era of the past we would find that even those times that shine most gloriously in history were also full of much that was crass, tacky, ugly, and stupid. Someday of course people may look back on our era with nostalgia too.

Re: But in Russia and Yugoslavia that era of history is still quite popular and you would do well to wonder why.

Russia and Serbia were both on the top of their respective heaps in those days (the Serbian heap being much smaller than the Russian one of course). So the nostalgia is not hard to understand. If Russia had tarnsitioned to become a successful and prtosperous democracy (like, say, post-Nazi Germany) I doubt there would be many fond memories of Comrade Brezhnev.

Posted by JonF | June 18, 2008 6:58 PM

Led says:

"Is this controlled for income? That is, have whites as poor as the average Mexican immigrant shown greater increases in education levels from generation to generation over the last 40 years than the Mexican immigrants? If not, then the problem is not with the Mexicans."

Try reading the article linked to above. Here it is again:

http://www.vdare.com/Sailer/080601_barone.htm

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 18, 2008 8:38 PM

JonF,

Well, yes and no. Of course the past was crass, tacky, ugly, stupid, and evil. It was inhabited by fallen man, just like the present. I specifically mean that the best art of the past culture was often, though not always, Christian in a way that our best contemporary art is not. Even if you ignore the dregs, the heights are simply something I don't think is as true to the nature of man and the universe. Even the great Christian writers of the 20th century are mostly, in some sense, reactionary -- rather than look directly at true things, they must use horrors and jokes and indirection to slyly point to the man hanging on the tree.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | June 19, 2008 11:43 AM

JonF,

The key word being "if". I could just as well say (and I do) that if Japan went through another economic crisis, their vaunted 21st century commitment to pacifism would go out the window. Neither of us can prove or disprove the other's hypotheticals, but the fact is that Russia _didn't_ become prosperous and liberal and I don't think that's an accident.

It wasn't just Serbs who are nostalgic for the old days- it seems to me like lots of Yugoslavs (except perhaps the Slovenes and the Kosovars for different reasons) would have reason to mourn Tito. Yugoslavia under Tito was a _relatively_ politically and economically liberal place with a predominantly market socialist economy, with most concerns owned by the workers that worked in them, and a standard of living comparable to countries like Spain or Greece.

Marquis,

There wasn't much that's Christian about most of Shakespeare's oeuvre, as far as I can see, or much of Chaucer for that matter. The Christian writers of the 20th century spoke in a different idiom, true, but they were no less Christian for that.

Posted by Hector | June 19, 2008 1:06 PM

Agh! The brown people are coming! My values! My values!

Posted by praxis | June 19, 2008 8:16 PM

"Agh! The brown people are coming! My values! My values!"

The brown people are coming, & in multiple ways they reflect more traditional values.

They however are not immune from "assimilation.”

Currently the illegitimacy rate stands at 50% for Latin Americans. They are fast following African Americans into family breakdown. Consigning them to the status of a permanent underclass.

Posted by Fitz | June 20, 2008 11:56 AM

Re: It wasn't just Serbs who are nostalgic for the old days- it seems to me like lots of Yugoslavs (except perhaps the Slovenes and the Kosovars for different reasons) would have reason to mourn Tito.

I rather doubt that the Croats, Bosnians or Macedonians long for the return of Yugoslavia, after all they could reconstitute it easily enough, asusming the Serbs were willing too. Au contraire though, the former Yugoslavia has continued to fall apart: witness the recent defection of Montenegro.

Re: the fact is that Russia _didn't_ become prosperous and liberal and I don't think that's an accident.

I rather think it is an accident: history
is largely a record of contingencies which have produced the present. What if someone has asassinated Lenin before he landed at Finland Station? What if Tsar Alexander II had avoided assassination?
What if WWI had been averted? I can think of any number of events that would produce a very different Russia than we know today-- and likewise, events that would have created an illiberal, conflict-ridden North America.

Re: I specifically mean that the best art of the past culture was often, though not always, Christian in a way that our best contemporary art is not.

I have to agree with Hector here. Dante, Bach, and Dostoevsky are Christian. Shakespeare, Goethe and Mozart only marginally so. Other art (e.g., da Vinci or Michelangelo) may focus on Christian themes, but somehow seems Pagan even when the Blessed Virgin is depicted at her loveliest. And being Christian does not guarantee any work greatness. The awful state of today's Christian music and Christian fiction ("Left Behind" anyone?) is example enough of that.

Posted by JonF | June 20, 2008 8:08 PM