Theology Has Consequences

What will provide the theological content of the nation's civil religion now that the "mere orthodoxy" of the evangelical-Catholic alliance has proven unsuitable for a pluralistic nation of 300 million people? To my mind, the most likely and salutary option is moralistic therapeutic deism. Here is the core of its (Rousseauian) catechism, in the words of sociologist Christian Smith:

1. "A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth."

2. "God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions."

3. "The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself."

4. "God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem."

5. "Good people go to heaven when they die."

Theologically speaking, this watered-down, anemic, insipid form of Judeo-Christianity is pretty repulsive. But politically speaking, it's perfect: thoroughly anodyne, inoffensive, tolerant. And that makes it perfectly suited to serve as the civil religion of the highly differentiated twenty-first century United States.

Whether you share this optimism about the "salutary" advance of moralistic therapeutic deism ultimately depends on whether you share Linker's sense that the biggest problem facing America in the Bush years was the "siege" of secular America by orthodox Christians. The more you fear the theocon menace, the more you'll welcome the Oprahfication of Christianity - since the steady spread of a mushy, muddle-headed theology is as good a way as any of inoculating the country and its politics against, say, Richard John Neuhaus's views on natural law.

But let's say you think that the biggest problems facing America in the Bush years were, I dunno, the botched handling of the Iraq occupation and a massive and an unsustainable housing and financial bubble. In that case, you don't have to look terribly hard to see a connection between the kind of self-centered, sentimental, and panglossian religion described above and the spirit of unwarranted optimism and metaphysical self-regard that animated some of Bush's worst hours as President (his second inaugural address could have been subtitled: "Moral Therapeutic Deism Goes to War") and some of his fellow Americans' worst hours as homeowners and investors. In the wake of two consecutive bubble economies, it takes an inordinate fear of culture war, I think, to immerse yourself in the literature of Oprahfied religion - from nominal Christians like Joel Osteen to New Age gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Rhonda Byrne - and come away convinced that this theological turn has been "salutary" for the country overall.

Easter

Good Friday (II)

... for Christian teaching, God's love and forgiveness are ruthlessly unforgiving powers which break violently into our protective, self-rationalizing little sphere, smashing our sentimental illusions and turning our world brutally upside down. In Jesus, the law is revealed to be the law of love and mercy, and God not some Blakean Nobodaddy but a helpless, vulnerable animal. It is the flayed and bloody scapegoat of Calvary that is now the true signifier of the law ...

Here, then, is your pie in the sky or opium of the people, your soft-eyed consolation and pale-cheeked piety. Here is the fantasy and escapism that the hard-headed secularist pragmatist finds so distasteful. Freud saw religion as the mitigation of the harshness of the human condition; but it would surely be at least as plausible to claim that what we call reality is a mitigation of the Gospel's ruthless demands, which include such agreeable acts of escapism as being ready to lay down your life for a total stranger. Imitating Jesus means imitating his death as well as his life, since the two are not finally distinguishable. The death is the consummation of the life, the place where the ultimate meaning of Jesus's self-giving is revealed.

... What is at stake here is not a prudently reformist project of pouring new wine into old bottles, but an avant-gardist epiphany of the absolutely new - of a regime so revolutionary as to surpass all image and utterance, a reign of justice and fellowship which for the Gospel writers is even now striking into this bankrupt, dépassé, washed-up world ... The coming of the kingdom involves not a change of government, but a turbulent passage through death, nothingness, madness, loss and futility ... signified among other things by Christ's descent into hell after his death. There is no possiblity of a smooth evolution here. Given the twisted state of the world, self-fulfillment can ultimately come about only through self-divestment.

Good Friday

Beginning with the story of Cain and Abel, the Bible proclaims the innocence of mythical victims and the guilt of their victimizers. Living after the widespread promulgation of the gospel, we find this natural and never pause to think that in classical myths the opposite is true: the persecutors always seem to have a valid cause to persecute their victims. The Dionysiac myths regard even the most horrible lynchings as legitimate. Pentheus in the Bacchae is legitimately slain by his mother and sisters, for his contempt of the god Dionysus is a fault serious enough to warrant his death. Oedipus, too, deserves his fate. According to the myth, he has truly killed his father and married his mother, and is thus truly responsible for the plague that ravages Thebes. To cast him out is not merely a permissible action, but a religious duty ...

This interpretation is reinforced by the optimistic endings of myths. The conjunction of the guilty victim and the reconciled community is too frequent to be fortuitous. The only possible explanation is the distorted representation of unanimous victimization. The violent process is not effective unless it fools all witnesses, and the proof that it does, in the case of myths, is the harmonious and cathartic conclusion, rooted in a perfectly unanimous murder.

...

Instead of blaming victimization on the victims, the Gospels blame it on the victimizers. What the myths systematically hide, the Bible reveals ... The false or insignificant causes of mythical violence are effectively dismissed in the simple and sweeping statement, They hated me without a cause (John 15:25), in which Jesus quotes and virtually summarizes Psalm 35--one of the "scapegoat psalms" that literally turns the mob's mythical justifications inside out. Instead of the mob speaking to justify violence with causes that it perceives as legitimate, the victim speaks to denounce the causes as nonexistent ...

The true Resurrection is based not on the mythical lie of the guilty victim who deserves to die, but on the rectification of that lie, which comes from the true God and which reopens channels of communication mankind itself had closed through self-imprisonment in its own violent cultures. Divine grace alone can explain why, after the Resurrection, the disciples could become a dissenting minority in an ocean of victimization--could understand then what they had misunderstood earlier: the innocence not of Jesus alone but of all victims of all Passion-like murders since the foundation of the world.

Some Links For Holy Week

The Church, AIDS and Africa, Cont.

... while I probably wouldn't accuse the Pope directly of causing "massive death and suffering," here are some facts: many, if not most, Catholic hospitals and dispensaries in Africa refuse to give out condoms. Their staff, both Africans and Westerners, constantly promote the myths, half-truths and outright falsehoods about birth control that perpetuate early births, poor family planning, a whole host of STIs (including HIV) and, by extension of all this, crushing, grinding poverty and maternal and child mortality. This is fact in every African country I have worked in.

That the Catholic Church provides - through its hospitals, clinics, schools and organizations like Catholic Relief Services - many other incredibly valuable services to people in the developing world, including Africans, makes it deserving of praise; but equally, it does not excuse the Church from knowingly doing direct harm to public health efforts in the region of the world most affected by HIV/AIDS.

It seems that your main source of frustration is the hyperbolic - these comments will result in "massive death and suffering" - reaction to Pope Benedict's comments.  I wonder what you think about the more subtle assertion that Pope Benedict's comments may contribute to confusion and misperception about how HIV/AIDS is transmitted, whether or not condoms are effective in preventing transmission, and to what extent that confusion may counteract or negate the work of public health officials attempting to reduce the rate of transmission. Both here at home, and in Africa, providing education and accurate information about how HIV is transmitted is an important part of the battle ... Clearly the Pope has the obligation to advocate Catholic principles and dogma, but need that advocacy come at the expense (potentially) of established science/medicine?  Would it not have been possible to advance the Catholic position preferring abstinence without intimating that condoms are not an effective tool in preventing the spread of HIV? 

It seems to me that much of the anger directed at the Pope's comments is a response to something new (condoms are not the solution) as opposed to something old (we prefer abstinence).  I wonder whether a statement that ignored the condoms issue entirely would have been received as negatively, and attacked as ferociously.

The Heresies of Freeman Dyson

... The hypothesis that paranormal are real but lie outside the limits of science is supported by a great mass of evidence. The evidence has been collected by the Society for Psychical Research in Britain and by similar organizations in other countries. The journal of the London society is full of stories of remarkable events in which ordinary people appear to possess paranormal abilities. The evidence of entirely anecdotal. It has nothing to do with science, since it cannot be reproduced under controlled conditions. But the evidence is there. The members of the society took great trouble to interview firsthand witnesses as soon as possible after the events, and to document the stories carefully. One fact that emerges clearly from the stories is that paranormal events occur, if they occur at all, only when people are under stress and experiencing strong emotion. This fact would immediately explain why paranormal phenomena are not observable under the conditions of a well-controlled scientific experiment. Strong emotion and stress are inherently incompatible with controlled scientific procedures ...

The AIDS Libel

The Religion of John Rawls

We reject mysticism because it seeks a union which excludes all particularity, and wants to overcome all distinctions. Since the universe is in its essence communal and personal, mysticism cannot be accepted. The Christian dogma of the resurrection of the body shows considerable profundity on this point. The doctrine means that we shall be resurrected in our full personality and particularity, and that salvation is the full restoration of the whole person, not the wiping away of particularity. Salvation integrates personality into community, it does not destroy personality to dissolve it into some mysterious and meaningless "One."

The Church and the World

Griefs Observed

Don't Go Away

Secular America and the Culture War

Religion stirs up the most controversy, a group of Harvard economists recently argued, when roughly half the population is actively religious; conflict ebbs when the devout constitute large majorities or small minorities. The more evenly divided a culture finds itself on the ultimate questions, the more likely politicians are to pursue "strategic extremism" and mobilize one side against the other. Precisely this kind of polarization dominated European politics from the French Revolution until the middle of the 20th century, sparking regular clashes-- Germany's Kulturkampf, France's Dreyfuss Affair, Spain's Civil War--between secular and religious ideologies.

America has long avoided this trap by enjoying near-universal piety; Europe, at least lately, has escaped it by cultivating near-universal skepticism. But if the religious gulf between the two continents narrows, the divides within each one are likely to open ever wider ...

In other words, unless conservative religiosity goes into a steeper decline than is visible in the latest data - and such a decline is possible, of course - the growth of "Godless America" may only make the culture wars hotter over the short run.

Obama's Traditionalists

Darwin, the Fall, and Christian Fantasy

Further to your post, I wonder if you've ever read any of Tolkien's later philosophical musings about his mythology, in particular the essays and drafts collected in the volume Morgoth's Ring. Tolkien says that Morgoth -- the original Satanic figure responsible for the fall of the elves and (implicitly and off camera) the fall of humans -- imbued the physical world with a large part of his evil essence: "Just as Sauron concentrated his power in the One Ring, Morgoth dispersed his power into the very matter of Arda, thus 'the whole of Middle-Earth was Morgoth's Ring'". This explains why, from the elvish point of view, death is the "gift of men" because it gives them a ticket out of the fallen, Morgoth-tainted world. The problem with this from a orthodox Christian perspective is that death is supposed to be the punishment for the Fall and not part of the solution for the Fall.  Tolkien was very much troubled by this deviation from orthodoxy and justified it by saying his mythology was just the elves' imperfect understanding about how things worked. But I find Tolkien's mythology/theology to make more sense and it certainly fits better with the idea that evolution "red in tooth and claw" is part of the residue of the Fall.

Darwin and Christ

From the beginning, it was moral panic more than scientific scruple that drove Christians to jump on the bandwagon of anti-Darwinism. But it wasn't just driven by the ignominy of the common biological ancestry of all hominids ... even more significant was the elimination of teleology from the study of nature and its implication for social ethics. But this is actually exceptionally good news. Because the fact that "the causal heart of Darwinian theorizing is against the idea of progress" (Michael Ruse) clears an intellectual space for biblical eschatology: more precisely, for the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as the world's apocalyptic counter-evolutionary moment in which the weakest kata sarka turn out to be the "fittest" kata pneuma. John Howard Yoder famously said that "those who bear crosses are walking with the grain of the universe." Strictly speaking, that should be: against the grain of "nature, red in tooth and claw" (Tennyson; cf. Romans 8:22), and with the grain of the new creation, where babies play with sidewinders (cf. Isaiah 11:8).

God and Man in Big Love

Television doesn't do terribly well in portraying people of faith. To a real degree, this is a function of television being a mass medium and mass media wanting to do their best to keep their audiences as mass as possible, even in today's age of niche markets. To some degree, this has to do with fundamentalist Christian and Mormon audiences in the U.S. being deeply suspicious of a pop culture that portrays them as buffoons more often than not. Indeed, a good number of evangelical Christians have embraced The Simpsons' Ned Flanders, satirical warts and all, simply because he's a nice guy trying to live up to his creed in a world that continually tests him ...

... I say all of that, but Big Love has pretty much just gone ahead and MADE a show about the struggles of having faith in the modern world and has done so in a largely respectful and fascinating way on the network you'd least expect to be interested in broadcasting the good, clean fun of living by a strict religious creed. Big Love's occasionally anthropological feel - the series tends to shoot the religious ceremonies of the Henricksons as though it's a National Geographic documentary - is often overwhelmed by the sheer compassion it feels for all of its characters (outside of, arguably, Roman Grant (Harry Dean Stanton), who seems to be viewed as venal and unsalvageable). There's another scene in "Come, Ye Saints," scripted by Melanie Marnich and directed by Dan Attias, that struck me silent with its beauty. Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin), reeling from the death of her mother and the revelation that Bill's oldest son Ben (Douglas Smith) is in love with her, is destroyed when she accidentally leaves the urn carrying her mother's ashes atop a car and then drives off, scattering the ashes to the wind. She finally seems to let loose some of the grief she's been carrying, and then, Bill baptizes first wife Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn) in a hotel room hot tub as a proxy for Margene's mother, ensuring that when Margene dies, her mother will be there waiting for her on the other side.

It would be easy to play this scene for goofy laughs (it IS a pretty weird concept), but Big Love plays it for every ounce of poignancy it can muster, from the look of comfort on Goodwin's face to the cool lighting of the hotel room. "No soul is lost," says Bill, and for an instant, Big Love strikes you with the sensation of why these people are in this seemingly unsustainable setup, of why anyone would want to be a part of a religious tradition seemingly at odds with the modern world ... 

Plantinga v. Dennett

Anne Rice's Christ

Alas, Babylon

Publicly, the discourse is all about the dangers of "false market assumptions" and the now-infamous "financial engineering." (I seem to remember it being called "financial innovation" last year.) But offstage, top bankers, private equity bosses, and hedge fund stars keep chitchatting and socializing, just as if banks had not had $1 trillion write-downs, the financial markets had not lost $25 trillion, and up to 30 million jobs were not at risk around the world.

To achieve this state of mind, any human being probably needs to construct a formidable mental shield. A survey I personally conducted at Davos this year of 60 top central bankers, financial market regulators, fund managers, and industry opinion-makers gives an idea of what this shield looks like.

When participants were asked whether they think they have done something in their career which "might have contributed, even in a minor way, to the financial crisis," 63.5 percent opted for a clear "no"; 31.5 percent went for a "yes," often adding in the same breath that nobody in the industry can honestly claim otherwise; and 5 percent said "maybe."

The "yes" people were then asked to explain what triggered their wrong decisions. They had three options: "too much optimism" (68.7 percent), "I felt I had to keep dancing while the music was playing" (31.3 percent), or "greed" (0 percent).

David Rubenstein, cofounder and managing director of the Carlyle Group, expressed surprise at the results. "How strange," he said. "I thought 100 percent of them would say they had nothing to do with it."

The Church and the Lefebvrists

The Pope is not stupid. He knows the ins and outs of the SSPX better than any of us and is deeply familiar with the various currents of belief, practice and attitude that run through it. There are virulent anti-Semites in the SSPX. There are near-sedevacantists. There are many who believe that the Second Vatican Council was an illegitimate, invalid council. There are those who believe that the Mass that most of reading this blog go to every Sunday, if not every day, is invalid and that the elements are not consecrated.

But he also knows, particularly in Europe, there are many SSPX adherents who do not share these views and are simply seeking to practice a richer Catholic faith than is available to them in their local regular parish. I think to really understand the whole picture on this, you have to understand the European situation, which in many ways is quite different than it is here.

I think what the Pope knows is that there is going to be a huge degree of self-selection going on over the next few years, as well as some inevitably self-destructive behavior. In short, those who truly want to be union with Rome will do so, and the holdouts will hold out until some fantasy moment occurs in which the Novus Ordo Mass and the Second Vatican Council is repudiated.

The problem, of course, is that by create this opening for those SSPX-ers who should be in full communion with the Catholic Church, the Vatican is temporarily empowering Bishop Richard Williamson, Holocaust denier and all-around charmer, who gives every evidence that he shouldn't be - and probably doesn't want to be - back in the fold, but who's instantly become the poster boy for the Pope's decision, and for the Traditionalist community more generally. This is a price worth paying, hopefully, for the sake of closing unnecessary divisions, but the price wouldn't be nearly so steep if the Vatican had a better sense of how to do public relations in a controversial case like this. The average reporter or commentator isn't going to understand the nuances of canon law, the history and background of the SSPX, the context of the excommunications, the status of these bishops post-excommunication, and so forth. What the average journalist does understand, though, is how to write this headline: "Pope Rehabilitates Holocaust-Denying Bishop." And while the potential for bad publicity shouldn't prevent the Vatican from showing mercy to excommunicants when appropriate, it should incentivize wrapping any such mercy in a forceful, detailed, "Catholicism and canon law for dummies" explanation of what such an action doesn't mean: In this case, an endorsement of poisonous anti-semitism and conspiracy theorizing.

And this is exactly what hasn't been forthcoming. Oh, the Papal spokesman said that Williamson's Holocaust-denying remarks were "completely indefensible," and L'Osservatore Romano had an editorial (not yet translated into English, of course) stating that the decision "should not be sullied with unacceptable revisionist opinions and attitudes with regard to the Jews." But in the contemporary media environment, that's not good enough. If the Pope de-excommunicates a Holocaust denier, the Vatican press office should be working around the clock, with press releases flying, to provide context and do damage control. What's more, if the Pope de-excommunicates a Holocaust denier, the Pope himself needs to say something about it, and not just obliquely nod to the decision in his latest homily. Yes, the Church's primary business is saving souls, not public relations - but in this day and age, public relations is part of the business of saving souls. And nobody in Rome, from Benedict on down, seems to have figured that out.

The Teapot Analogy

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.  

More Judeo-Christianity

Probably and Perhaps

The Christian Science Monitor, on those anti-theist bus ads:

Much of the campaign's initial buzz centered on the assertion that God "probably" doesn't exist. Does this suggest a hedging of bets - a move past atheist dogma? Only partly.

Some organizers wanted a flat "there is no God" statement. Dawkins favored an "almost certainly no God" wording. But Ms. Sherine says that British advertising officials advised that a phrase less absolute and not subject to proof would ensure the ad did not run afoul of the advertising standards authority.

Clearly, the advertising officials have been reading their Joseph Ratzinger:

No one can lay God and the Kingdom on the table before another man; even the believer cannot do it for himself. But however strongly unbelief may feel itself thereby justified it cannot forget the eerie feeling induced by the words "Yet perhaps it is true." That perhaps is the unavoidable temptation which it cannot elude, the temptation in which it, too, in the very act of rejection, has to experience the unrejectability of belief. In other words, both the believer and the unbeliever share, each in his own way, doubt and belief, if they do not hide away from themselves and the truth of their being. Neither can quite escape doubt and belief; for the one, faith is present against doubt; for the other through doubt and in the form of doubt. It is the basic pattern of man's destiny only to be allowed to find the finality of his existence in this unceasing rivalry between doubt and belief, temptation and uncertainty. Perhaps in precisely this way doubt, which saves both sides from being shut up in their own worlds, could become the avenue of communication. It prevents both from enjoying complete self-satisfaction; it opens up the believer to the doubter and the doubter to the believer; for one it is his share in the fate of the unbeliever, for the other the form in which belief remains nevertheless a challenge to him.

Somehow, though, I doubt Richard Dawkins would concur.

Hamas, the IRA, and America

This comes back to the point I was making in an earlier assessment of the counterfactual. The IRA was a genuine terrorist group, but it was listed as such by our government most of all because it was a sworn enemy of one of our closest allies. The record seems clear: terrorist groups that are useful to us or harmful to states we officially oppose are given a pass, while those that target us or our allies are condemned in the strongest terms. That's the nature of things in the real world, I suppose, but it is something that none of the reponses to the counterfactual seems to be taking into account. Had things gone very differently in the last century and London and Washington became enemies once more, it is very easy to imagine that the IRA or similar groups would have been made into anti-British proxies of the U.S. government. In the unlikely counterfactual event that an independent Arab Palestine had emerged out of a very different '67 outcome, the official attitude towards the enemies of that state would have depended entirely on U.S.-Palestine relations. All of this is by way of saying that the official opprobrium heaped on Palestinian militants, for example, is primarily a matter of condemning the enemies of an allied state; their use of terrorist tactics is secondary to whether or not they are labeled this.

.... nationalist causes start out and end up with co-ethnics being their main sympathizers, and this forms the floor of their support, but when a nationalist cause is growing in strength and has appropriated the rhetoric of liberty (or democracy or some other favorable buzzword) its sympathizers will tend to come from many other groups who identify with the cause in a more abstract way. For that matter, think of the western European response to the Greek War for Independence-Philhellenes and political liberals supported the Greeks almost in spite of who they were, and rallied to the cause because of what they hoped the modern Greeks might become once they were free of the Porte. Obviously, Byron didn't die at Missolonghi because he felt strong ethnic ties to his comrades-in-arms, but because he was a romantic liberal.

Christian, Muslim, Jew

Neuhaus, Ctd.

Neuhaus and Liberalism

In his obituary for Richard John Neuhaus, Douthat claims, in response to some nameless silly person (who just happens to be me), that Neuhaus was dedicated to reconciling Christianity with the liberal tradition. I suspect that will sound pretty odd to those familiar with Neuhaus' role in arming the conservative side of the culture war with arguments intended to decimate liberalism. But then everything begins to make sense once you follow the link that Douthat supplies with his statement, which brings you to a Neuhaus article on "The Liberalism of John Paul II." Oh, that liberal tradition. The liberalism that traces American democratic ideas not to the Enlightenment but to medieval Christendom. The liberalism that believes (in Neuhaus' words, written in 1984) that "only a transcendent, a religious, vision can turn this society from a disaster and toward the fulfillment of its destiny" as a "sacred enterprise." The liberalism that holds (in Neuhaus' words, written in 1997) that the American experiment "may well be ending . . . under the iron rule of the 'separation of church and state.'" The liberalism that espouses the Manichean view that one of the country's two major political parties, the nation's media, and its courts--and perhaps 52.9 percent of the American people--are in the grip of a bloodthirsty "culture of death" that needs to be combated by champions of the "culture of life," who just so happen to make their home in the country's other major political party. That's the liberalism of John Paul II and Richard John Neuhaus.

And therein lies Neuhaus' greatest ideological innovation. Rather than maintaining that the religious right should replace liberal politics with some other, religiously grounded form of political association, he insisted that, properly understood, liberal politics is (or once was, or should be--on this he was often unclear) a religiously grounded form of political association. Viewed in this way, the Pope, Neuhaus himself, and their Protestant friends (like Pat Robertson, Chuck Colson, James Dobson, Ralph Reed, and Karl Rove) become America's true liberals, while all those millions of Americans on the right and left who prefer a more mundane form of politics (and who in nearly every other context are considered liberals of the classical or modern variety) become the antagonists the true liberal tradition.

Damon and I have been round and round on these questions many times before (though unfortunately our major exchange has vanished into the maw of TNR's archives), so I'll be brief. Basically, if you set aside the tendentiousness, there's truth to what he says above. Neuhaus argued that the American constitutional order, and the form of liberalism it embodies, "is premised upon moral truths secured by religion," to quote from his essay on John Paul II and the liberal tradition. Moreover, he believed that the modern left's emphasis on the separation of religion and politics (as opposed to church and state) ran toward illiberalism, and that the left-wing promotion of legalized abortion and euthanasia amounted to a frontal assault on essentially liberal principles - human rights and human dignity and so forth. These are not uncontroversial views, to put it mildly, and they certainly made him a conservative in the modern political landscape. But they are views have deep roots in Anglo-American political history - the notion that liberalism's basic premises depend in some sense upon religion, in particular, is as old as Hobbes and Locke - and as such they properly belong within the big tent of the American liberal tradition, rather than outside it. And a liberal tradition that cannot find, within its many mansions, room for Neuhaus (and, yes, for John Paul II as well), is a liberalism that any Christian worth his salt should think twice for before subscribing to.

For more on the Linker critique of Neuhaus's work, Noah Millman and Russell Arben Fox have characteristically thought-provoking musings. And for anyone interested in passing a fuller judgment on Neuhaus' thought, and its relationship with the liberal tradition, I recommend going to the horse's mouth: To the above-mentioned essay on JPII and liberalism; to Neuhaus's fascinating exchange with Stanley Fish on religion's compatibility with liberal democracy (and vice versa); to his rebuke to the theonomist temptation; to his recent lecture on "Our American Babylon" (which forms the basis, I believe, of what will be a posthumously published book); and to many other places as well. Whatever one's opinion of Neuhaus's political and theological commitments (and here I think Damon would agree), his writings ought to be required reading for anyone concerned with religion, politics, and the first principles (or "first things") that undergird the two - and he deserves as wide an audience, if not a wider one, in death as he enjoyed in life.

Richard John Neuhaus, RIP

The Church and the Morning After Pill

Ross Douthat faces a fascinating (to me) dilemma: the Vatican officially says one thing about the morning-after pill, but Ross believes that the Vatican has reached an incorrect conclusion based on a misunderstanding of reproductive science.

Ross is a Catholic. If a friend said to him that she wants to take the morning-after pill, but is concerned that it might be the moral equivalent of an abortion, so she wanted his recommendation -- what would he be morally obliged to advise?

It seems to me from the Church's perspective, if he advised his friend to take the pill, he would be committing a sin. But what if you, like Ross, honestly believe the Church has erred on the facts? Is an orthodox Catholic -- that is, a Catholic who actually believes that his conscience is bound by the teachings of the Church -- therefore required to counsel what the Church counsels, even if he thinks in good faith that the Church has fundamentally erred? Isn't an orthodox Catholic required, moreover, to believe that the Church teaches truth in matters of faith and morals, and that despite the appearance of error, the individual Catholic is, in fact, wrong?

An orthodox Catholic is required to believe that the Church teaches truly in matters of faith and morals. He is not required to believe that the Church teaches truly in matters of science; indeed, the Church does not have "teachings," properly understood, on scientific questions.  Where the two intersect - well, there things get a bit dicey. My sense of that matter is that I am bound to accept the Church's moral judgment that the taking of innocent human life at any stage from conception to natural death is a grave evil (and would not have become a Catholic if I did not), but that I am not bound to accept a Vatican document's summary of where the science stands regarding whether the morning-after pill does in fact take a life, by preventing implantation of a fertilized embryo. And therefore, to take up Rod's hypothetical, if someone contemplating taking the morning-after pill asked for my opinion on the matter, I would tell them that I've seen no persuasive evidence that suggests that emergency contraception is anything save, well, contraception - whose use is sinful according to Catholic teaching, obviously, but not nearly so gravely sinful as abortion. That doesn't mean I would urge them to go take it: It just means that if they asked me if I thought it was an abortifacent, I'd feel obliged to say no.

Abortion and the Morning After Pill

The Implications of Christmas

... Suppose we put the question like this: Imagine that conclusive archaeological and textual evidence emerged to prove that the whole story of the birth, life, and death of Jesus of Nazareth was either a delusion or a fabrication? Suppose the mother had admitted shyly that, in fact, she had fallen pregnant for predictable reasons? Suppose we found the post-Calvary body?

Serious Christians, of the sort I have been debating lately, would have no choice but to consider such news as absolutely calamitous. The light of the world would have gone out; the hope of humanity would have been extinguished. (The same obviously would apply to Muslims who couldn't bear the shock of finding that their prophet was fictional or fraudulent.) But I invite you to consider things more lucidly. If all the official stories of monotheism, from Moses to Mormonism, were to be utterly and finally discredited, we would be exactly where we are now. All the agonizing questions that we face, from the idea of the good life and our duties to each other to the concept of justice and the enigma of existence itself, would be just as difficult and also just as fascinating. It takes a totalitarian mind-set to claim that only one Bronze Age Palestinian revelation or prophecy or text can be our guide through this labyrinth.

Gods and Monsters

Nothing very surprising there. It's interesting to note one's own reactions on reading a news item like that. The reaction must, I suppose, be personality-dependendent. It will fall somewhere in a range from:  "I am surrounded by idiots!"  to:  "What an oddball freak I must be!"  (I find myself closer to the latter end of that spectrum.)

News items like this also raise the cog-sci questions that our Mr. Hume is good at:  What do people actually mean by any of this?  Do they actually conduct their lives on the working assumption that the next stranger they meet may be an angel, a ghost, Satan, or a UFO crewman? (Ans: Obviously not.)  How many could give a coherent account of the theory they reject? (Ans: Vanishingly few.)  What does "believe" actually mean in this context? (Ans: Nothing very functional.)

Well, it depends on how you define "functional." I doubt that very many people who believe in angels and devils play an "is he a demon in disguise?" guessing game every time they meet a new co-worker. But having spent a fair bit of time around such people (and, well, being one myself), I'd argue that belief in the existence of supernatural beings does actually tend to exert a not-inconsiderable pull on the way that people interpret and respond to life - both to their ordinary experiences, psychological and otherwise, and to the supernatural/numinous experiences that are reasonably common features of human existence.

Now the relative importance of a belief in supernatural agents, and the extent which it intrudes on day-to-day affairs, depends, as you might expect, on the specifics of the belief system in question, and the particular emphases it places. For instance, Evangelicals and (especially) Pentecostals tend to invoke demonic agency much more frequently than Roman Catholics, at least in my experience (and in the American Catholic Church; things are rather different elsewhere). Thus while Hollywood's exorcists invariably come clothed in priestly habits, actual exorcism-prayer of various sorts - the kind of "spiritual warfare" that freaks Christopher Hitchens out so much - is a far more important part of religious practice among American Pentecostals than among American Papists, for whom the demonic is something you invoke to explain and understand extraordinary experiences, not more mundane body-and-soul crises like, say, alcoholism or drug addiction. (Though of course Catholics frequently invoke saintly agency, which is its own category of supernatural belief, in ways that members of other Christian traditions don't.)

When Hilary Mantel was seven, she met the devil. Well, not exactly: but she did encounter something so evil that even now she finds it hard to explain what she chanced on in the garden. "I couldn't say I saw it," she says slowly. "I'm talking about something at the very border of sensory experience. I could walk to where it was, could say how high it was and describe the speed at which it moved. But how I got the information, through which sense, I don't know." What Mantel does know is that she felt she had witnessed something she wasn't meant to. "The experience was absolutely destroying, as if my body was falling apart at a cellular level, which expressed itself in intense nausea. The way I rationalised it was that it was the devil. As a Catholic, that was the theology I had at my command." The family home itself was haunted and this presence seemed like "a concentration of things that were going on in the house - the unhappiness of our family and the pressure of secrets and lies."

Presidents and Heretics

Palin, Plumbers, and Polarization

... the Palin pick was the electoral equivalent of an atomic bomb. It was one of those tactics that turns into a strategy. What the Palin pick did was to unleash a latent class tension in American life and turn the two parties, previously somewhat socially mixed, into vehicles of social classes. Prominent intellectuals who once leaned rightward sorted themselves into the Obama camp. So did most north-eastern Republicans. The party has focused on its proletarian rump. Rallies have grown more strident, with howls of 'Communist!' when Obama's name is mentioned. McCain singled out an Ohio man -- 'Joe the Plumber' -- who had buttonholed Obama as he canvassed his neighbourhood. Soon McCain and Palin were building a following of tradesmen with sobriquets out of children's books: Tito the Builder, Suzanne the Sandwich-Maker. There have been a lot of books lately urging Republicans to think more about the interests of their lower-middle-class base. That is a problem that is going to take care of itself.

The Democrats are now the partisan home of the upper crust of the American meritocracy, of the credentialled classes, the classes that believe every endeavour is some variety of IQ test. USA Today did a review of fund-raising data and discovered that Obama dominates fundraising among the leaders of 'finance, insurance, real estate, health, communications and law'. His campaign has run through hundreds of millions more than McCain's, and will spend a quarter of a billion dollars on television alone before this election is over. Obama has far more than twice as many ads up in Colorado, Georgia, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. In Florida, he has run 18,909 ads to McCain's 5,702. The Democratic party is the vehicle through which, after a populist interlude, the governing classes are proposing to take their country back. Obama is a restoration candidate but that doesn't mean he has a plan.

There's some smart analysis here, especially in the latter paragraph, but I don't know what Caldwell means by "a problem that is going to take care of itself." It certainly didn't take care of itself in this election: Instead, you had a lot of posturing from the Republican ticket about how the GOP is the more proletarian party, joined to very little substance addressed to the actual interests of lower-middle-class voters. If the Palin pick had actually turned into a vehicle of class polarization, and if for every lost country-club Republican the GOP ticket were adding a Joe the Plumber or a Tito the Builder to its pool of voters, then the polls wouldn't look nearly so dire for McCain. But compare the last Pew poll conducted in this race to the results from 2004. Among voters without a college degree, George W. Bush beat John Kerry by 53 to 47 percent; in 2008, Obama's going into today's vote leading 47 to 43 percent in that working-class demographic. The same goes if you define class in terms of income rather than education. In 2004, Kerry beat Bush by just one point among voters making $35,000-$50,000; among voters making $50,000-$75,000, Bush beat Kerry by thirteen points. Fash-forward to '08, and according to Pew, McCain's beating Obama by only six points in the $50,000 to $75,000 demographic, and he's losing to the Democrat by seven points in among voters making between $35,000 and $50,000.

In other words, the GOP has lost ground both among the elites and among the proles in this campaign. The Palin-and-the-plumber strategy didn't polarize the race by socioeconomic class: It cost the Republicans votes among the upper crust, most likely, without gaining them anything with the Joe Sixpack demographic, which is going for Obama too. All of this is subject to revision pending tonight's actual results, but for the moment it looks like the GOP's relationship to working class voters worsened considerably between 2004 and 2008, Palin-related class tensions notwithstanding, creating a problem for Republicans that may be resolved eventually (ahem), but almost certainly won't take care of itself.

Dispatches From The Culture War

Superstitious Minds

The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor's Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?

The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.

Even among Christians, there were disparities. While 36% of those belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama's former denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin's former denomination, did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead.

Hat tip: MBD, who has the requisite reference to the most famous aphorism G.K. Chesterton didn't actually coin.

Jamie Lynn, Bristol and Hypocrisy

You don't suppose, even for a second, that people are angry at the social conservative movement for choosing this one particular person to rally around? Show me James Dobson praising Jamie Lynn Spears pregnancy, for example, or any other social conservative declaring her pregnancy to be a great and wonderful thing.

"In the 32-year history of Focus on the Family, we have offered prayer, counseling and resource assistance to tens of thousands of parents and children in the same situation the Palins are now facing. We have always encouraged the parents to love and support their children and always advised the girls to see their pregnancies through, even though there will of course be challenges along the way. That is what the Palins are doing, and they should be commended once again for not just talking about their pro-life and pro-family values, but living them out even in the midst of trying circumstances.

"Being a Christian does not mean you're perfect. Nor does it mean your children are perfect. But it does mean there is forgiveness and restoration when we confess our imperfections to the Lord. I've been the beneficiary of that forgiveness and restoration in my own life countless times, as I'm sure the Palins have.

"It's a tragedy when a 16-year-old who is not really prepared for all the responsibilities of adult life is going to be now faced with all the responsibilities of honest-to-goodness adult life," he told CBS News in Iowa.

"Apparently, she's going to have the child and I think that is the right decision, a good decision, and I respect that and appreciate it," Huckabee continued. "I hope it is not an encouragement to other 16-year-olds who think that is the best course of action."

"But at the same time I'm not going to condemn her," he said. "I just hope that she will make another right decision and that's to give that child all the love and kindness and care that she can."

So, to recap: Teen pregnancy, bad; carrying the child to term, good; Spears-Palin hypocrisy, not so much.

The Times and Christians, Cont.

No Party For Pro-Choicers?

How Do Religions Spread?

Obama-Carpathia '08

Ross thinks it's "(ahem) a joke," which it is. A harmless joke, given the legions of evangelical Christians waiting for the Rapture and convinced that only the Republican party represents the will of God? I guess it's just as well that Ross thinks the religious right is entirely a function of the liberal media's imagination.

Evangelicals, Catholics and Abortion

There are variable measurements of this phenomenon, but no real doubt about the basics.  A September 2007 Pew survey showed white evangelical Protestants agreeing that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases by a 65-31 magin; Catholics favored keeping abortion legal in all or most cases by a 51-44 margin (with no appreciable difference between Hispanic and non-Hispanic Catholics) ... Moreover, the evangelical-Catholic gap on abortion looks likely to increase in the future. An April 2004 Pew survey providing generational breakdowns showed that white evangelicals under 35 favored abortion restrictions by more than a two-to-one margin (71% among those under 25), while those over 65 actually (if narrowly) opposed more restrictions.  The generational trend lines among white Catholics moved in exactly the opposite direction.

As Kilgore notes, there's nothing obvious or inevitable about this breakdown:

Catholic anti-abortion views, after all, are undergirded by a long series of increasingly emphatic papal encyclicals; a natural law and bioethics tradition stretching back all the way to Aristotle; an overall theological position making church teachings on matters of faith and morals binding on believers; a relatively low level of tolerance for individual dissent; and a teaching and disciplinary system that can be (and in some parts of the country, is being) deployed to influence the views and behavior--personal and political--of the laity.

Not one of these is a significant factor for Sola Scriptura Protestants. And unlike other moral issues ranging from gay and lesbian rights to divorce to adultery, the belief in scriptural inerrancy common among evangelicals doesn't really explain the vast gap between evangelicals and their mainline brethren on abortion. I've yet to read or hear a purely scriptural justification for banning abortions that doesn't ultimately come down to circular reasoning based on the condemnations of homicide from the Decalogue onward. 

Evangelical hard-line views on abortion are not a matter of an unbroken tradition. In 1971, before Roe v. Wade, when nearly all states maintained abortion bans, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution calling for abortion laws that would recognize exceptions not only in cases of rape and incest, but where the "emotional, mental and physical health of the mother" might be endangered.  Needless to say, that would be considered a radically liberal position among evangelicals today. 

Gopnik on Chesterton, Yet Again

In these books, Chesterton becomes a Pangloss of the parish; anything Roman is right. It is hard to credit that even a convinced Catholic can feel equally strongly about St. Francis's intuitive mysticism and St. Thomas's pedantic religiosity, as Chesterton seems to. His writing suffers from conversion sickness. Converts tend to see the faith they were raised in as an exasperatingly makeshift and jury-rigged system: Anglican converts to Catholicism are relieved not to have to defend Henry VIII's divorces; Jewish converts to Christianity are relieved to get out from under the weight of all those strange Levitical laws on animal hooves. The newly adopted faith, they imagine, is a shining, perfectly balanced system, an intricately worked clock where the cosmos turns to tell the time and the cuckoo comes out singing every Sunday. An outsider sees the Church as a dreamy compound of incense and impossibility, and, overglamorizing its pretensions, underrates its adaptability. A Frenchman or an Italian, even a devout one, can see the Catholic Church as a normally bureaucratic human institution, the way patriotic Americans see the post office, recognizing the frailty and even the occasional psychosis of its employees without doubting its necessity or its ability to deliver the message. Chesterton writing about the Church is like someone who has just made his first trip to the post office. Look, it delivers letters for the tiny price of a stamp! You write an address on a label, and they will send it anywhere, literally anywhere you like, across a continent and an ocean, in any weather! The fact that the post office attracts timeservers, or has produced an occasional gun massacre, is only proof of the mystical enthusiasm that the post office alone provides! Glorifying the postman beyond what the postman can bear is what you do only if you're new to mail.

Just as we all like love tales because there is an instinct of sex, we all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door. Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales -- because they find them romantic. In fact, a baby is about the only person, I should think, to whom a modern realistic novel could be read without boring him. This proves that even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

Chesterton, Solzhenitsyn and Liberalism

Gopnik on Chesterton (II)

... he dreamed of an anti-capitalist agricultural state overseen by the Catholic Church and governed by a military for whom medieval ideas of honor still resonated, a place where Jews would not be persecuted or killed, certainly, but hived off and always marked as foreigners. All anti-utopians cherish a secret utopia, an Eden of their own, and his, ironically, was achieved: his ideal order was ascendant over the whole Iberian Peninsula for half a century. And a bleak place it was, too, with a fearful ruling class running a frightened population in an atmosphere of poverty-stricken uniformity and terrified stasis -- a lot more like the actual medieval condition than like the Victorian fantasy.

There are many good ways to interpret Chesterton's distributism, and there are good ways to criticize it. But this is not one of them. It is a very long way from the Napoleon of Notting Hill to Alcázar. Chesterton was, as Gopnik insists, a localist, but there was really nothing localist about Franco's regime, which was characterized by strict centralization, cultural uniformity, and militarism -- things Chesterton always opposed. (Ask a Catalonian about Franco's tolerance of localism.) Chesterton's main criticism of "Prussianism," and later of Nazi Germany, was not, as Gopnik says, that it resembled Judaism in its belief in a chosen people, but that it was essentially militarist and autocratic. Despite Chesterton's "medievalism," it is not at all obvious what sort of modern political mechanisms would have best embodied his distributist theory, which is arguably the theory's greatest weakness. What is clear is that distributism was as different from Franco's brutal politics as it was from Bernard Shaw's socialism. Gopnik is impatient with such theoretical distinctions. For him, it is all about tendencies: all radical critiques of capitalism tend toward Communism, which has failed, or toward some kind of anti-Semitic authoritarianism. One is allowed to have a few mild reservations about capitalism, of course, and even to look down at the pitiless people who seem to have fewer reservations (i.e., Republicans), but any less mild opposition to our political economy, whatever its name or origin, is headed toward trouble: if not the Gulag or the gas chamber, then the Inquisition.

Gopnik on Chesterton (I)

The insistence that Chesterton's anti-Semitism needs to be understood "in the context of his time" defines the problem, because his time-from the end of the Great War to the mid-thirties-was the time that led to the extermination of the European Jews. In that context, his jocose stuff is even more sinister than his serious stuff. He claims that he can tolerate Jews in England, but only if they are compelled to wear "Arab" clothing, to show that they are an alien nation. Hitler made a simpler demand for Jewish dress, but the idea was the same. Of course, there were, tragically and ironically, points of contact between Chesterton and Zionism. He went to Jerusalem in 1920 and reported back on what he found among the nascent Zionists, whom he liked: he wanted them out of Europe and so did they; he wanted Jews to be turned from rootless cosmopolitans into rooted yeomen, and so did they.

Chesterton wasn't a fascist, and he certainly wasn't in favor of genocide, but that is about the best that can be said for him-and is surely less of a moral accomplishment than his admirers would like. He did speak out, toward the end of his life, against the persecution in Nazi Germany, writing that he was "appalled by the Hitlerite atrocities," that "they have absolutely no reason or logic behind them," that "I am quite ready to believe now that Belloc and I will die defending the last Jew in Europe." Yet he insisted, "I still think there is a Jewish problem," and he denounced Hitler in the context of a wacky argument that Nazism is really a form of "Prussianism," which is really a form of Judaism; that is, a belief in a chosen, specially exalted people.

The American Heresy

From Jody Bottum's very fine essay on American Protestantism in the latest First Things, a brief analysis of the theology of Katherine Jefferts Schori, presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church:

To be saved, we need only to realize that God already loves us, just the way we are, Schori wrote in her 2006 book, A Wing and a Prayer. She’s not exactly wrong about God’s love, but, in Schori’s happy soteriology, such love demands from us no personal ­reformation, no individual guilt, no particular penance, and no precise dogma. All we have to do, to prove the redemption we already have, is support the political causes she approves. The mission of the church is to show forth God’s love by demanding inclusion and social justice. She often points to the United Nations as an example of God’s work in the world, and when she talks about the mission of the Episcopal Church, she typically identifies it with the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals ... Her Yahweh, in other words, is a blend of Norman Vincent Peale and Dag Hammarskjöld.

The Norman Vincent Peale bit, I think, is particularly telling, because it gets at something that I think is often missed about the current religious landscape: Namely, the extent to which Schori's theological premises are shared across the culture-war divide, by Christians who oppose gay marriage and abortion and voted eagerly for George W. Bush as well as by liberal Protestants who consider the contemporary GOP an abomination. Peale's heirs occupy the pulpits of what remains of the Protestant mainline, but they preach from the dais at numerous evangelical megachurches as well. The people who read Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer and The Prayer of Jabez may be more politically conservative then the people who read A Wing and a Prayer, and read certain passages of Genesis and Leviticus more literally, but the theology they're imbibing is roughly the same sort of therapeutic mush. Indeed, the big difference between the prosperity gospel that Osteen and his ilk are peddling and Schori's liberal Episcopalianism has less to do with any theological principle and more to do with what aspect of American life they want God to validate. And this difference, I suspect, has a great deal to do with social class. Osteen and Co.'s God wants us to pursue financial fulfillment because they're largely preaching to entrepreneurial, upwardly-mobile members of the middle class, whereas Schori's God wants us to pursue a more personal fulfillment - sexually, emotionally, philanthropically - because she's preaching to a demographic that, financially speaking, has already got it made. (Which, in turn, is why it isn't a surprise that as American evangelicals grow more prosperous, they're starting to discover their God's Dag Hammarskjöld side as well.)

Obviously the world of religious conservatism also includes lots of people who are invested in actual Christian orthodoxy, as opposed to the Osteen-Shori vision of God as a really powerful life coach. But the theological continuum that encompasses both Schori-style liberal Protestants and Oprah-watching, The Secret-reading spiritual seekers - call it moralistic therapeutic deism, call it gnosticism, call it the American heresy - extends way deeper into the "religious right" than a lot of people think.

Waiting For Andromeda

Christopher Hitchens, having demonstrated to everyone's satisfaction that blind salamanders disprove the existence of God (or something like that), adds this characteristic flourish:

... to the old theistic question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" we can now counterpose the findings of professor Lawrence Krauss and others, about the foreseeable heat death of the universe, the Hubble "red shift" that shows the universe's rate of explosive expansion actually increasing, and the not-so-far-off collision of our own galaxy with Andromeda, already loomingly visible in the night sky. So, the question can and must be rephrased: "Why will our brief 'something' so soon be replaced with nothing?" It's only once we shake our own innate belief in linear progression and consider the many recessions we have undergone and will undergo that we can grasp the gross stupidity of those who repose their faith in divine providence and godly design.

What I like about Hitchens is how often he slips into exactly the sort of self-satisfied misanthropy that you find among the people he theoretically hates the most - the nutty apocalypticians and Left Behind devotees, that is. If the world were to end tomorrow in the hail of fire, I'm confident that one of the last things to be heard on Earth, before the meteor hits, would be the sound of Hitchens and Tim LaHaye both shouting in perfect unison: See, I told you so!

Obama and the Evangelicals, Cont.

There are two ways to read Pew's numbers on evangelical voters and the '08 election. You could read them the way Mark Hemingway does, emphasizing the fact that Obama is currently running a point behind where John Kerry was among white evangelicals at this point in the 2004 race. Or you could read them as good news for Obama, since McCain is currently running eight points behind where George W. Bush stood at this point in '04. I'd choose the latter reading. In July of 2004, only 4 percent of white evangelicals said they were undecided about whom to vote for. Now 12 percent say that they are - and while it's possible that nearly all of those undecideds will come home to the GOP once the chips are down, undecided voters do tend to break against the incumbent party, which seems to open a pretty sizable opening for Obama.

When all was said and done, Bush took a whopping 78 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2004. If Obama can hold the evangelicals who are supporting him now, and swipe two-thirds of the undecideds, he'll hold McCain to just 68 percent of this demographic - which could easily turn out to be an election-tipping difference. The opportunity is there. Obama just needs to figure out if he's willing to take the political risks necessary to exploit it.

Update: Obama's performance at Saddleback (and McCain's) will probably be at least mildly important in determining how those undecided evangelicals cast their votes.

Who Speaks For Islam?

The bad news at the Aspen Ideas Festival is that you can't attend two panels at once - which meant that while I was listening to David Brooks yesterday, I had to miss our own Jeff Goldberg moderating a discussion on Islam between Irshad Manji and Dalia Mogahed. Fortunately, Jennie Rothenberg (our crack web editor) was in attendance, providing commentary as well as the following clips:

Continue reading "Who Speaks For Islam?" »

Immortal Longings

Via Andrew, here's John Horgan, contributing to a symposium on the Singularity:

Let's face it. The singularity is a religious rather than a scientific vision. The science-fiction writer Ken MacLeod has dubbed it “the rapture for nerds,” an allusion to the end-time, when Jesus whisks the faithful to heaven and leaves us sinners behind.

Such yearning for transcendence, whether spiritual or technological, is all too understandable. Both as individuals and as a species, we face deadly serious problems, including terrorism, nuclear proliferation, overpopulation, poverty, famine, environmental degradation, climate change, resource depletion, and AIDS. Engineers and scientists should be helping us face the world's problems and find solutions to them, rather than indulging in escapist, pseudoscientific fantasies like the singularity.

But the very fact that the Singularity's appeal derives from some of the same impulses that drive religious faith - even as the prophets proclaiming its imminent arrival insist that they're relying on cold hard science - means that you aren't coming to make very much hay by telling the Ray Kurzweils of the world that we need to train our attention on terrorism or nuclear proliferation or famine or climate change instead. Some of the yearning for "transcendence" that the Singularity satisfies might go away in a juster, safer world, but the fundamental yearning it's addressed to - the desire for immortality - wouldn't. Eliminate terrorism and nuclear weapons, and you'll still die. Do away with poverty, clean up the environment, and ensure a fairer distribution of the earth's resources, and you'll still die. Find a cure for AIDS, and not only will you still die, but so will everybody you've cured.

Seen through this lens, telling people that they need to solve all the world's immediate problems before they take up the biggest Problem of all is like telling doctors facing a bubonic-plague outbreak that they can only address themselves to it once they've found a cure for colds, allergies, and stomach flu. Now of course this lens assumes that there could be a cure for death, which is where the issue of pseudoscience enters the picture, and the (im)plausibility of the claims the Singulatarians are making - an issue, I should note, that the substance of Horgan's essay is addressed to. But the mere fact that the Singularity is inherently "escapist," and bears a not-inconsiderable resemblance to Christianity, isn't a problem with the concept. It's the whole point.

Theodicy Revisited

A reader writes, amid a fascinating comments thread on this post:

From a purely logical point of view, Christianity's free will answer is unassailable: it is only because we have the capacity for evil that good is possible, and without sin there would be no Redemption. QED.

But as you point out the comparative facility of New Yorker writers to make the existence-of-evil argument, it is also grating for the equally well-off to make the free-will counter argument. I have led a pretty sheltered existence, and I've never known true evil, in my bones or in my gut. I have not known real hunger, or real pain. The oh so neat argument of free will seems so cold, so utterly irrelevant, when speaking with, say, a Holocaust survivor who has given up on God after experiencing the camps ... Of course you can point out that it is in that horror that other Holocaust survivors have found a reason to believe in God, but such considerations seem equally useless when talking not about the general presence of evil in the world, but about the precise and unique evils that one person has suffered.

The best Christian answer to the existence-of-evil argument seems to me to be, therefore, not the existence of free will (although, again, it is a perfectly valid response), but the much more concrete reality of Incarnation. God allowed evil to exist but He loves Man so much that He defeated it not just through the abstract (yet essential) gift of free will, but also by embracing His creature's condition and experiencing evil in the same ways.

Of course, from an atheist's perspective, this begs the question: to believe that God mitigated the presence of evil by experiencing and defeating it personally is to believe that God exists. But there is another way to put it: if it were possible to believe simultaneously in the existence of evil and in the existence of a benevolent God, then this benevolent God would have to be the kind of God who is willing to suffer evil alongside His creature and with the same intensity. This seems to me to be a very compelling answer.

The first point - that nobody wants to hear about how the existence of free will requires suffering from someone who hasn't suffered meaningfully themselves - is part of what interests me about the correlation between material comfort and complaints against God for permitting evil to flourish, the rain to fall on the just and unjust alike, and so forth. I've always thought that how you respond to the Christian argument about free will and the necessity of evil depends in large part on how you respond intuitively to the experience of human existence - whether you instinctively regard life, the universe and everything as a Very Good Thing with a certain amount of evil and corruption woven in, or whether you regard human life chiefly as "a business of evenly rationed suffering," as Wood puts it, with the constant possibility that the "truly unbearable" will suddenly consume everything that you hold dear. (Wood employs the evocative term "hellmouth" to describe this all-too-common worst-case scenario, a term he borrows from Norman Rush, who defined it as “the opening up of the mouth of hell right in front of you, without warning, through no fault of your own.”)

Continue reading "Theodicy Revisited" »

Who's Afraid of the Millenarians?

I am no great admirer of the apocalyptic style in religion or politics, but I would find Ian McEwan's essay on the clear and pressing danger posed by end-time thinking vastly more persuasive if he didn't crown his argument with this passage:

Within living memory we have come very close to extinguishing our civilisation when, in October 1962, Soviet ships carrying nuclear warheads to installations in Cuba confronted a blockade by the US Navy, and the world waited to discover whether Nikita Khrushchev would order his convoy home. It is remarkable how little of that terrifying event survives in public memory, in modern folklore. In the vast literature the Cuban missile crisis has spawned - military, political, diplomatic - there is very little on its effect at the time on ordinary lives, in homes, school, and the workplace, on the fear and widespread numb incomprehension in the population at large. That fear has not passed into the national narrative, here, or anywhere else as vividly as you might expect. As Spencer Weart put it: "When the crisis ended, most people turned their attention away as swiftly as a child who lifts up a rock, sees something slimy underneath, and drops the rock back." Perhaps the assassination of President Kennedy the following year helped obscure the folk memory of the missile crisis. His murder in Dallas became a marker in the history of instantaneous globalised news transmission - a huge proportion of the world's population seemed to be able to recall where they were when they heard the news. Conflating these two events, Christopher Hitchens opened an essay on the Cuban missile crisis with the words - "Like everyone else of my generation, I can remember exactly where I was standing and what I was doing on the day that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy nearly killed me." Heaven did not beckon during those tense hours of the crisis. Instead, as Hitchens observes, "It brought the world to the best view it has had yet of the gates of hell."

I began with the idea of photography as the inventory of mortality, and I will end with a photograph of a group death. It shows fierce flames and smoke rising from a building in Waco, Texas, at the end of a 51-day siege in 1993. The group inside was the Branch Davidians, an offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventists. Its leader, David Koresh, was a man steeped in biblical, end-time theology, convinced that America was Babylon, the agent of Satan, come in the form of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the FBI to destroy the Sabbath-keeping remnant, who would emerge from the cleansing, suicidal fire to witness the dawn of a new Kingdom ... In that grim inferno, children, their mothers, and other followers died. Even more died two years later when Timothy McVeigh, exacting revenge against the government for its attack on Waco, committed his slaughter in Oklahoma City. It is not for nothing that one of the symptoms in a developing psychosis, noted and described by psychiatrists, is "religiosity".

So here we have three anecdotes. In the first instance, the world is brought to the brink of thermonuclear destruction by a pair of none-too-religious politicians and their advisers, influenced in their decision-making by a combination of old-fashioned power politics and secular fantasies of global revolution. In the second instance, a religious fanatic who appears to have posed a danger only to the small group of men and women taken in by his mix of spiritual and sexual charisma dies, along with his followers, amid a botched and legally-dubious assault by one of the law-enforcement arms of a secular government. In the third case, a political fanatic of no discernible religious beliefs perpetrates a gruesome act of mass murder, with the aim of punishing the same government for its conduct in the second instance. None of the three offers a particular compelling testament to the dangers of religious millenarianism, as opposed to other motivations for potentially lethal conduct, whether on the level of states or individuals.

Now obviously there are more dangerous religious madmen in the world than David Koresh, and obviously McEwan is on firm ground when he argues that some of the various great crimes of history have been rooted in apocalyptic hopes and fears. But his own anecdotes offer a useful reminder that worldly motivations tend to play a vastly larger role in war and terrorism and similar evils than do spurious prophecies of an imminent Armageddon or dumb misreadings of the Book of Revelation. This is true even among religious believers: From Crusaders trying to conquer the Holy Land to contemporary jihadis hoping to restore the Caliphate, from Woodrow Wilson trying to make the world safe for democracy to George W. Bush trying to, well, make the world safe for democracy, religiously-motivated political actors are much more likely to believe that God wants them to pursue a particular geopolitical objective than they are to assume that He wants them to ring in the actual End of History with a hail of bombs (or suicide bombers). People whose fondest wish is to hasten end of the world can be dangerous, no doubt, and perhaps one such fanatic will yet succeed in ringing in the apocalypse with a suitcase nuke or a vial of Captain Trips. But in general, such people tend not to advance to positions where they can do world-historical damage. Which is why the worst crimes, well-meaning and otherwise, usually aren't committed by the millenarians who keep a good secularist like McEwan up at night; they're committed by rational actors, religious and secular alike, who want to change the world we live in, rather than bring it to an end, and fail to count the fatal cost of pursuing their ambitions.

Religion, Happiness and Socialism

Will Wilkinson has an interesting post responding to Arthur Brooks' interesting work on religion and happiness in the United States, in which he (Will, that is) points out that the religion-happiness correlation seems to be America-specific, and that the advance of secularization in Western Europe has coincided with an increase in levels of reported happiness on the continent. Here's Will's take on the America-Europe discrepancy:

Brooks rightly points out that in the U.S. a great number of community organizations are anchored in religion. And sociality and community are key to happiness. So, sure, non-religiosity in the U.S. is likely to be a socially alienating and stigmatized kind of non-conformism ... It seems to me that Brooks has simply found that America has a religious culture, and therefore it’s less trouble to be religious in the U.S., not that religiosity has some kind of deep connection to happiness.

No doubt there's some truth to this (though I would venture that non-religiosity is somewhat less socially alienating than it used to be). But my suspicion is that the difference has something to do with the role of the welfare state as well - that the benefits of belonging to a religious community are greater in the U.S. than in Europe in part because our welfare state is smaller, and religious participation provides both tangible and intangible forms of security that are more valuable in a society where the free market is more freewheeling and the welfare state weaker. If you're a Christian who prefers the American model, you might say that the Europeans use government as a substitute for God; if you prefer Europe's path to modernity, you'd probably say something about Americans clinging to churchgoing because it's the only protection available against the harsh brutality of our jungle capitalism. Either way, I suspect that this symbiosis between high levels of religiosity and economic individualism is at the heart of American exceptionalism - which is another way of saying that libertarians root for secularization at their peril. (Though perhaps Will has some data in his infinite file cabinet of happiness research that blows my hypothesis out of the water.)

Our Pantheist Future

David Brooks' column on neuroscience and religion has attracted a fair amount of comment from my favorite bloggers: Andrew is favorable, Rod is puzzled, Dougherty and Larison dismissive. Here's Brooks' conclusion:

If you survey the literature ... you can see that certain beliefs will spread into the wider discussion. ... First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day.

Now I take the Larison-Dougherty point that defending particular doctrines and particular Biblical teachings is what Christianity has more or less always been about, and that a faith based purely on "elevated experience" and "self-transcendence" isn't really any faith at all anyway, let alone a serious challenger to the Christian tradition. Another way of putting this would be to note that Christians can agree with the second and third of Brooks' four beliefs and vigorously dispute the last of them. Neither the commonality of moral intuitions across cultures nor the universal availability of some form of religious experience are notions that are particularly threatening to Christian orthodoxy (or to the other monotheistic faiths); what is threatening, out of Brooks' litany, is the notion that the sort of baseline spiritual experiences that neuroscientists can measure is the only sort of spiritual experience there is, and that we should define the concept of God as the sum of humanity's lowest-common-denominator encounters with the numinous.

This notion's major premise is summed up nicely by Brooks as follows: "Particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits." No, the Christian would say: Particular religious systems are cultural artifacts, in a sense, yes, but they're artifacts built around specific human experiences, not universal ones. Christian theology and Christian ritual are compatible with the universal human ability to experience the sacred through prayer and meditation, but they're "built on top" of particular encounters and revelations that tend to have little in common with the "transcending boundaries/overflowing with love" experiences that neuroscientists are equipped to measure. Indeed, in both the Old and New Testaments, the foundational encounters with God - the religious experiences that created Judaism and Christianity - are nothing like a meditative, free-floating sense of one-ness with the universe. Instead, whether it's Moses encountering the burning bush or Job being addressed out of the whirlwind or the disciples encountering the Risen Christ, the encounters with God that shape the Judeo-Christian tradition tend to be extremely personal on the one hand (God has a personality, a voice, even a body; He isn't just some cosmic soup we can all go swimming in) and extremely terrifying and difficult to comprehend on the other. Within the post-Resurrection Christian tradition, too, the defining encounters with the divine have followed a similar pattern - from Paul on the road to Damascus and John on Patmos down through monastics wrestling with demons, saints being addressed out of crucifixes, the various apparitions of the Virgin Mary and so forth. And the higher Christian mysticism, in particular, is defined by its emphasis on the need to move beyond the warm love bath that may - as Andrew suggests - represent our initial apprehension of the nature of the divine into the vastly more difficult terrain traversed by figures like Saint John of the Cross and Mother Teresa.

Having said all this, though, I think that Brooks is basically right: I don't think that the "neural Buddhism" (or "neural Pantheism," more aptly) that he's talking about is an intellectually serious challenger to the great monotheistic faiths, but then I'm in the tank for Christendom, and what I'm looking for in a religion doesn't seem to be what most Americans are looking for. In a society that's simultaneously shot through with spiritual yearnings and addicted to the idea that Science can solve all of life's problems, an approach to spirituality that dispenses with the weirdness and scariness and miraculousness of the Judeo-Christian encounter with God, throws a scientific patina on prayer and meditation and promises that Love is all you need seems like a pretty obvious winner. Especially since replacing a personal God with an impersonal Love Force seems to be a popular - if to my mind puzzling - way around the problem of theodicy for a great many people who take the Holocaust to have disproven the Christian conception of God. Also, what Tocqueville said.

And with that, I'll kick the subject over to Mr. Pantheism himself, James Poulos.

The Evangelical Manifesto

It's an intriguing document, but I think Alan Jacobs - who takes it on, here and here - is right to be frustrated with it, and with the extent to which it merely reflects a muddled moment iin religion and politics, rather than offering a plausible way out of the muddle.

Update: Michael Brendan Dougherty - like me, a Catholic eyeing Evangelical developments with interest - has a more positive take on the document.

Taking the Bait

Daniel Larison wants to know what I make of this passage, which kicks off Damon Linker's review of Charles Marash's Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel From Political Captivity:

Who would now deny that the political ascendancy of the religious right has been bad for the United States? Its destructive consequences are plain for all to see. It has polarized the nation. It has injected theological certainties into public life. It has led political leaders to invest their aims and their deeds with metaphysical significance. It has made America a laughingstock in the eyes of the educated of the world. And it has encouraged devout believers to think of themselves as agents of the divine, and their political opponents as enemies of God.

I hesitate to dignify the deeply irritating "all reasonable people must agree with the self-evident truth of my argument" trope with a rejoinder, but since Daniel asks ... well, look, obviously if you disagree with the religious right's various policy objectives, you'll think that its rise ("ascendancy" seems like a little much, doesn't it?) has been bad for the United States. That's a perfectly reasonable position to take. But it isn't what Linker's arguing here. The "destructive consequences" he's talking about all seem to have to do with the nature of our political culture, not the shape of our public policies - specifically, the level of polarization, moral absolutism, and us-versus-them Manichaeism in American political life, with the damage to our reputation among "the educated of the world" thrown in for good measure.

On the last point, I imagine Linker could find some polling data to back up his argument, though I'm also pretty sure that European sophisticates were wont to look down their noses at American rubes long before Pat Robertson came along. As for the rest of his claims, the available evidence seems to run the other way. Perhaps Linker has a different timeline in mind, but I would date the modern religious right's rise to the late 1970s, and I would urge anyone who honestly believes that the level of polarization, absolutism, and Manichaean excess has risen in our politics since the Seventies to read Rick Perlstein's Nixonland and reconsider. The parties have grown more polarized vis-a-vis one another since then, true, but our politics in general have grown vastly more peaceful, even as arguments over civil rights and Vietnam have given way to arguments over issues like abortion and gay marriage. Which ought to suggest, at the very least, that there's no easy correlation to be drawn between the influence of religion on democratic politics and the tendency of democratic peoples toward division, self-righteousness and violence.

One could, of course, dispute the premise that the politics of the Sixties and the early Seventies were any less flavored by theological concerns and metaphysical yearnings than the era that followed; indeed, I would be inclined to dispute it myself. But that still doesn't provide any grounds for claiming that the religious right "injected" theology into politics in some uniquely destructive way. Rather, it suggests that what Linker sees as an alien and destructive innovation - religious conservatism's intermingling of politics and metaphysics - is actually a more or less constant feature of American life, and one whose consequences for civil order and national unity have been far less dire during the post-'70s culture war than in the supposedly-more-secular era that preceded it.

Christianity, Darwinism and The Fall

Noah Millman makes a good point:

I continue to believe that both sides of the Darwin vs. Christianity battle are missing the most telling point. We should all agree that religious dogma has no bearing on the truth or falsity of a scientific theory. Heliocentrism is true; geocentrism is false. There is an enormous weight of evidence behind the theory of evolution by natural selection. There is going to be more and more evidence behind new theories about the workings of the human mind, and the interactions of the human genome and human personality. All religion can do is react to these discoveries and, as part of that reaction, caution us about drawing unwarranted conclusions (political, moral, what-have-you) from the evidence. But I don’t think that’s the end of the story, because I think science does have implications for the persuasiveness of specific religious doctrines, simply as a psychological matter. And I think evolution through natural selection is extremely uncongenial to the central Christian story about the nature of sin and evil in the world. Why? Because the Christian story has the entry of strife into the world come about as the result of human sin, whereas the core idea behind evolution by natural selection is that our existence – and the consciousness and ability to sin that comes with it – is a product of strife. Put bluntly: natural selection is not the mechanism that the Christian deity would use to create man in His image. Or, if it is, I’d like to see the explanation. I think that natural selection poses similar but less-acute problems for Judaism and Islam; it poses the fewest problems, I suspect, for Hinduism. Again: I’m not speaking of science refuting religion. I’m speaking of scientific results making certain core religious claims less persuasive.

Of course, one reason I think it's a good point is that I just made it myself, in a review of Dinesh D'Souza's What's So Great About Christianity for the the just-released, not-yet-online spring issue of Claremont Review of Books. The idea that evolution-by-natural-selection somehow disproves religion in general, or theism more specifically, is basically preposterous. The idea that the mechanism of natural selection, in which the development of man requires millions of years of strife and suffering and death in the animal kingdom, poses a specific challenge to Christian beliefs about the nature of God is more plausible, and warrants a more serious response than the "hey, evolution is too compatible with a belief in designer God" rejoinder that some Christian apologists, D'Souza included, often employ.

I didn't attempt to address that challenge in the review, in part because I wouldn't say that I have a settled opinion on the matter. It seems to me, though, that the possible rejoinders to the Millman argument fall into three broad categories. One view would hold that strife and pain and death are only evils when they are experienced by creatures who are made in the image of God; since animals are not so created, they have more or less the same moral status as machines, and the Almighty is indifferent to their suffering. In this view, evolution by natural selection poses no difficulty at all for Christian theodicy: Pain and death are natural to our animal ancestors but an evil when experienced by self-conscious beings with free will, and for that reason homo sapiens were granted immortality initially, only to subsequently lose it through disobedience to God. (This seems to be the view that Stephen Barr takes in this post, though I may be misinterpreting him.)

The second perspective the one that C.S. Lewis inclined toward; as you might expect from the man who created Narnia, he was particularly concerned by the problem that animal suffering poses for theodicy, and he argued that Satan's influence on the world must necessarily have predated the Fall of Man. Sin entered human history with the disobedience of our first parents, in other words, but it entered the history of the universe at the beginning of time, with Lucifer's disobedience. The emergence of Man through evolution-by-natural-selection, in this view, is a case of God making use of a fallen creation for His own good ends.

The final perspective - which I associate, perhaps incorrectly, with Teilhard de Chardin - suggests that the Fall is both a temporal and an extra- or supra-temporal event, one whose impact on creation runs both forward and backward in time, retroactively poisoning the pre-historic development of man as well as his history. This sounds like the strangest and most implausible of the possible explanations, obviously. But given the mysterious relationship between space and time that modern physics has uncovered, and the still more mysterious relationship between space, time and eternity that obtains if Christianity's account of things is true, it may not be quite so implausible as it sounds.

The Pope and the Scandal

Over at the Current, I have a post up on Benedict XVI's meeting with the sex-abuse victims.

Prosperity And "Fundamentalism"

Daniel Larison has a couple of good posts up in response to Andrew's attempt to defend Obama's comments about religion. Andrew casts the remarks as a reference, not to faith as such, but to "a certain kind of religion, a neurotic, rigid variety that is often - but not always - part of the fundamentalist psyche," and that can indeed be a manifestation (or so "history has sometimes shown," he contends) of "economic, political and cultural frustration." In response, Daniel makes the point that history may have "sometimes" shown this, but usually it doesn't show anything of the sort - a point that dovetails in obvious ways with my own remarks yesterday about cultural conservatism, prosperity and voting behavior.

I would also add that you can usually tell when religion-infused political movements have emerged in response to economic frustrations, because such movements tend to include (unsurprisingly) a strong economic component - from the Thomas Muentzer-inspired peasants' revolt of the 16th century down through the Christian populism of William Jennings Bryan to the variations on liberation theology that you hear from (ahem, Mr. Obama) many African-American churches today. And the fact that the agenda of post-1970s religious conservatism (what Andrew describes, frequently and inaccurately, as "fundamentalism") does not include a strong economic component ought to suggest - at least to informed observers, a category that apparently doesn't include the leading Democratic contender for the Presidency - that "economic frustration" has very little to do with its appeal.

(It's also worth noting that to the extent that contemporary religious conservatives, Catholic and Protestant alike, do emphasize poverty and economic tribulation, it's usually in the context of exhorting their co-religionists to help others in need, whether in the U.S. or (especially) overseas. Gersonism is a politics for prosperous Christians looking to do good in the world, not economically-frustrated believers clinging desperately to their churches, guns, and bigotries.)

Sam Harris and the Prosperity Gospel

You know, I sometimes get the sense that Sam Harris doesn't have a damn clue what he's talking about:

Happily, Obama did a fine job of distancing himself from Reverend Wright's divisive views on racism in America, along with his fatuous "chickens come home to roost" assessment of our war against Islamic terrorism. But he did not (and should not) acknowledge that the worst parts of Reverend Wright's sermons, as with most sermons, are his appeals to the empty hopes and baseless fears of his parishioners--people who could surely find better ways of advancing their interests in this world, if only they could banish the fiction of a world to come.

... The problem of religious fatalism, ignorance, and false hope, while plain to see in most religious contexts, is now especially obvious in the black community. The popularity of "prosperity gospel" is perhaps the most galling example: where unctuous crooks like T.D. Jakes and Creflo Dollar persuade undereducated and underprivileged men and women to pray for wealth, while tithing what little wealth they have to their corrupt and swollen ministries. Men like Jakes and Dollar, whatever occasional good they may do, are unconscionable predators and curators of human ignorance. Is it too soon to say this in American politics? Yes it is.

I suppose it would be too much to ask for Harris to familiarize himself with the literature on the correlations between religious observance and positive personal and financial outcomes, in the nation as a whole but especially in the African-American community; it would apparently be too much, as well, for him to actually read the works of T.D. Jakes before declaring him an "unconscionable predator." There are pure charlatans in the world of the prosperity gospel, but what figures like Jakes (and Joel Osteen, Joyce Meyer, and many many others) represent is something else entirely: They're self-help authors on the one hand and apostles of moralistic therapeutic deism on the other, slapping Christian window dressing on how-to guides for upward mobility and psychological satisfaction. They aren't playing to the follies and fantasies of the poor and desperate; they're responding to the real-world aspirations of the working and the middle classes. They aren't peddling fatalism and false hope; they're offering ambitious Americans advice on how to be prosperous and happy in the workplace and the home, with a little God-talk worked in around the edges.

From the point of view of Christian orthodoxy, obviously, this sort of thing is deeply theologically problematical. From the point of view of a hardened materialist like Sam Harris, though, the sort of religion T.D. Jakes is selling is exactly the kind of religion that he ought to like: A faith that's relentlessly focused on success and happiness in this world, rather than on self-abnegation for the sake of the life to come. But to understand that, he'd have to expand his understanding of religious practice beyond the usual run of atheistic cliches and prejudices. Which would obviously be too much to ask.

Shari'a For Thee ...

Do read Noah Millman, critiquing the defense of Shari'a advanced by his fellow Noah (Feldman, that is) in the Times Magazine.

Easter

John Henry Newman:

Among the wise men of the heathen ... it was usual to speak slightingly and contemptuously of the mortal body; they knew no better. They thought it scarcely a part of their real selves, and fancied they should be in a better condition without it. Nay, they considered it to be the cause of their sinning; as if the soul of man were pure, and the material body were gross, and defiled the soul ... Accordingly their chief hope in death was the notion they should be rid of their body. Feeling they were sinful, and not knowing how, they laid the charge on their body; and knowing they were badly circumstanced here, they thought death perchance might be a change for the better. Not that they rested on the hope of returning to a God and Father, but they thought to be unshackled from the earth, and able to do what they would. It was consistent with this slighting of their earthly tabernacle, that they burned the dead bodies of their friends, not burying them as we do, but consuming them as a mere worthless case of what had been precious, and was then an incumbrance to the ground ...

Far different is the temper which the glorious light of the Gospel teaches us. Our bodies shall rise again and live for ever; they may not be irreverently handled. How they will rise we know not; but surely if the word of Scripture be true, the body from which the soul has departed shall come to life ... The dust around us will one day become animate. We may ourselves be dead long before, and not see it. We ourselves may elsewhere be buried, and, should it be our exceeding blessedness to rise to life eternal, we may rise in other places, far in the east or west. But, as God's word is sure, what is sown is raised; the earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, shall become glory to glory, and life to the living God, and a true incorruptible image of the spirit made perfect.

Good Friday

From The Everlasting Man:

In this story of Good Friday it is the best things in the world that are at their worst. That is what really shows us the world at its worst. It was, for instance, the priests of a true monotheism and the soldiers of an international civilization. Rome, the legend, founded upon fallen Troy and triumphant over fallen Carthage, had stood for a heroism which was the nearest that any pagan ever came to chivalry ... But in the lightning flash of this incident, we see great Rome, the imperial republic, going downward under her Lucretian doom. Scepticism has eaten away even the confident sanity of the conquerors of the world. He who is enthroned to say what is justice can only ask, 'What is truth?' So in that drama which decided the whole fate of antiquity, one of the central figures is fixed in what seems the reverse of his true role. Rome was almost another name for responsibility. Yet he stands forever as a sort of rocking statue of the irresponsible. Man could do no more. Even the practical had become the impracticable. Standing between the pillars of his own judgment-seat, a Roman had washed his hands of the world.

There too were the priests of that pure and original truth that was behind all the mythologies like the sky behind the clouds. It was the most important truth in the world; and even that could not save the world. Perhaps there is something overpowering in pure personal theism; like seeing the sun and moon and sky come together to form one staring face. Perhaps the truth is too tremendous when not broken by some intermediaries divine or human; perhaps it is merely too pure and far away.

Anyhow it could not save the world; it could not even convert the world. There were philosophers who held it in its highest and noblest form; but they not only could not convert the world, but they never tried. You could no more fight the jungle of popular mythology with a private opinion than you could clear away a forest with a pocket-knife. The Jewish priests had guarded it jealously in the good and the bad sense. They had kept it as a gigantic secret. As savage heroes might have kept the sun in a box, they kept the Everlasting in the tabernacle. They were proud that they alone could look upon the blinding sun of a single deity; and they did not know that they had themselves gone blind.

... And as it was with these powers that were good, or at least had once been good, so it was with the element which was perhaps the best, or which Christ himself seems certainly to have felt as the best. The poor to whom he preached the good news, the common people who heard him gladly, the populace that had made so many popular heroes and demigods in the old pagan world showed also the weaknesses that were dissolving the world. They suffered the evils often seen in the mob of the city, and especially the mob of the capital, during the decline of a society. The same thing that makes the rural population live on tradition makes the urban population live on rumor. just as its myths at the best had been irrational, so its likes and dislikes are easily changed by baseless assertion that is arbitrary without being authoritative ...

Some brigand or other was artificially turned into a picturesque and popular figure and run as a kind of candidate against Christ. In all this we recognize the urban population that we know, with its newspaper scares and scoops. But there was present in this ancient population an evil more peculiar to the ancient world. We have noted it already as the neglect of the individual, even of the individual voting the condemnation and still more of the individual condemned. It was the soul of the hive; a heathen thing. The cry of this spirit also was heard in that hour, "It is well that one man die for the people!" Yet this spirit in antiquity of devotion to the city and to the state had so been in itself and in its time a noble spirit. It had its poets and its martyrs; men still to be honored forever. It was failing through its weakness in not seeing the separate soul of a man, the shrine of all mysticism; but it was only failing as everything else was failing. The mob went along with the Sadducees and the Pharisees, the philosophers and the moralists. It went along with the imperial magistrates and the sacred priests, the scribes and the soldiers, that the one universal human spirit might suffer a universal condemnation; that there might be one deep, unanimous chorus of approval and harmony when Man was rejected of men.

Denominations and Double Standards

Here's Matt's take on the Jeremiah Wright controversy:

I'm unsure, in general, of what the standards we're supposed to apply to the political views of politicians' favored clergy. I have no idea what the rabbis at Temple Rodef Shalom (where I've gone to synagogue the past few High Holy Days) or at The Village Temple (where I had my bar mitzvah) think about political issues, but I assume I don't agree with them about everything, and certainly it'd be odd to drag up old statements made by any of the relevant rabbis about this or that and then ask me to either endorse the statement or repudiate the entire congregation.

By the same token, we don't assume that a politician who goes to mass wants to ban birth control nor do we ask Catholics who favored preventive war with Iraq to repudiate the Pope in order to prove their hawk bona fides. In short, we generally assume that a politician's stated political views express his or her position on political topics, and that affiliating with a religious congregation does not constitute an endorsement of everything the leaders of that congregation have ever said.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that I see this as a basically trumped-up issue.

This is slightly more persuasive than Ezra’s take, but it still seems like somewhat strained analysis. Obviously, nobody's going to expect a High Holy Days Jew or a Christmas-and-Easter Christian to account for their clergyman’s political opinion, since he (or she) isn’t their clergyman in any meaningful sense of the word. As for why we don't see Catholic politicians being called upon to ritually denounce the Pope, one might begin with the fact that the Pope rarely makes political statements that fall wildly outside the mainstream of American politics. John Paul II and Benedict XVI's criticisms of abortion and euthanasia and gay marriage are right-wing by American standards, sure - just as some of their comments on economics are left-wing - but for better or worse (and I think better, obviously) they simply aren't considered beyond the pale in the way that Jeremiah Wright's comments about 9/11 and sundry other topics are. Back when Popes did make statements that fell beyond the pale of American discourse (in the Syllabus of Errors era, for instance) Catholics were frequently called upon to clarify their view of the Holy See's position, and while these calls were often laced with bigotry, they also raised valid questions about Catholicism's consonance with American democracy, questions that it was entirely appropriate for Catholics to answer - just as it's appropriate for Barack Obama to answer questions about his church's view of politics today.

More importantly, though, we don't demand that Catholic politicians answer for every Papal address and encyclical because most people understand that a cradle Catholic’s relationship to the magisterium of the Catholic Church tends to be dramatically different from a convert to Protestant Christianity's relationship to the pastor of the only church he's ever attended. A Catholic's relationship to his local priest is perhaps more comparable, though again the weight that Protestantism - particularly in its evangelical strains - places on individual ministry tends to make a Protestant's choice of minister far more revealing than a Catholic's choice of parish. (Traditionally, Catholics weren't even allowed to parish-shop; where you lived determined where you want to mass.) I would also add that in the course of attending mass at dozens of Catholic parishes over the last decade, I can't say I've heard a single homily remotely like the Wright sermons that are stirring up all the controversy. And if I did attend a Catholic church whose pastor went in for, say, the occasional rant about the Freemasons, I wouldn't be surprised if that fact made waves if I ever ran for office.

Here's a thought experiment: Suppose John McCain were a member of Opus Dei. Or to push things a bit further, suppose he attended a schismatic Latin-Mass parish which had, among other things, bestowed an award on a Lefebvrite bishop given to anti-Semitic remarks. Do you think this would earn him media scrutiny, and make a difference in the Presidential race? Do you think it ought to? Your answer, I think, should go a long way toward determining how you think about the case of Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright.

Dobson's Choice

Dan Gilgoff, who literally wrote the book on the Focus on the Family founder, argues that Romney might have won the GOP nomination if figures like Dobson - evangelical leaders who were obviously sympathetic to Mitt - had been willing to confront the Mormon issue head on, instead of tiptoeing around it:

In an interview last year, Dobson acknowledged that "there are conservative Christians who will not vote for (Romney) because of his Mormon faith," but he said that wasn't necessarily "the correct view or my view."

As Dobson warmed to Romney — the two had a getting-to-know-you session at Focus' Colorado Springs headquarters last year — he could have opened a dialogue with his millions of radio listeners about why evangelicals should feel comfortable voting for a Mormon, even if they rejected his theology.

Instead, he took public swipes at Republican candidates Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson and John McCain, leaving his evangelical fans to deduce his support for Romney and Huckabee by process of elimination ...

That "could have" seems persuasive to me - but then again, I'm not James Dobson. It certainly seems like an early effort by quietly pro-Romney big shots in the evangelical community might have made a big difference in the final outcome; on the other hand, I also have to assume that Dobson and his associates have a pretty fine-tuned sense of where his audience stands and what they're thinking. Once Huckabee's star began to rise, in particular, it's possible that they decided that if Focus on the Family were perceived to be siding with a flip-flopping, formerly pro-choice Mormon over a consistent social conservative and rock-ribbed evangelical like Huck, they'd look like sell-outs to an awful lot of their listeners. Huckabee liked to suggest that the religious right's leadership was out of step with its foot soldiers and more concerned with preserving the GOP coalition than standing by their principles; I doubt that Dobson et. al. wanted to do anything that would vindicate this line of argument and jeopardize their credibility with the grassroots. And I imagine, as well, that they took the derision generated by Pat Robertson's endorsement of Rudy Giuliani as a cautionary tale.

At the very least, though, Dobson might have delivered that "undorsement" a little sooner ...

The Archbishop's Academentia

Alan Jacobs, in a fine post, suggests that Rowan Williams is afflicted with “verbal academentia." Frankly, I can't think of a better coinage to describe what’s wrong with the Archbishop’s approach to his office, both in the shari'a controversy and elsewhere.

Consider, for instance, this years-old public conversation with Philip Pullman, which was held shortly after the Archbishop praised and recommended an adaptation of His Dark Materials then playing at the National Theatre. It’s all very polite and erudite and engaging - all very academic, one might say - as the two men range across gnosticism, Original Sin, the role of fiction in education, the representation of religion in cinema, and what-have-you. You can see that Williams just lights up at the chance to be set down in the same room with Pullman, and set free to chat with him: What a fascinating fellow this atheist childrens' book writer is! What a fine chance to discuss the fascinating theological implications of his anti-theological work! Of course every child in England should read the book, and then sit down over tea and have a similarly fascinating discussion about the ever-so-complicated questions it summons up! etc.

Now of course there's a sense in which this style of engagement is preferable to, say, organizing a hamfisted boycott of Pullman's work, as some of the thicker tribunes of Christendom are wont to do. But at least boycotts get at an essential point that Williams' debating-society approach misses, which is that Pullman's arguments aren't just being thrown out for the sake of some ivory-tower bull session about theology - they're embedded in a work of propaganda that's designed to win the hearts and minds of his young readers away from anything resembling Christianity. This doesn't mean that Williams should have kicked over his chair, crossed the stage and hurled holy water in Pullman's eyes, but it would seem to require something more from him that the sort of cheerful, but of course dear boy spirit with which he approached the conversation, as though he and Pullman were fellow Christ's College students chatting about metaphysics over late-night glasses of port.

In the His Dark Materials debate and the shari'a affair alike, one has the sense that Williams doesn't quite understand how poorly his academic approach to controversial questions translates to the real world. Very few readers of Philip Pullman's novels are being inspired to a deeper engagement with Christian theology, as the Archbishop hopefully suggested they might be; similarly, the "parallel jurisdictions" emerging in Britain's Muslim communities bear little or no resemblance to the sort of high-minded framework he gestured at in his address. This doesn't mean that an academic approach, whether to atheism or Islam, is always and everywhere inappropriate; far from it. It's just inappropriate for Rowan Williams, given the office that he holds, and the duties - defending the faith, speaking out against injustice - that he's charged with.

Shari'a Comes For The Archbishop

I’ve done my duty and waded through the full text of the Rowan Williams address on “civil and religious law in England” that’s helped to kick up all the fuss about shari'a, and I can report that the Archbishop’s various defenders have a point – if you detach the address from the actual historical context in which it was delivered, you’re left with a somewhat-turgid but nonetheless interesting meditation on the relationship between civil law and religious law, and between the liberal state and religious communities.

Unfortunately, this is the historical context in which it was delivered:

A few weeks ago, I was chatting to a woman who works in an advocacy role for Muslim women in an area that, quite independently of the Bishop of Rochester, she described as a “no-go area” for non-Muslims. Her clients were women in the process of being sectioned into mental health units in the NHS. This woman, who for obvious reasons begged not to be identified, told me: “The men get tired of their wives. Or bored. Or maybe the wife objects to her daughter being forced into a marriage she doesn't want. Or maybe she starts wearing western clothes.There can be many reasons. The women are sent for asssessment to a hospital. The GP referring them is Muslim. The psychiatrist assessing them is Muslim and male. I have sat in these assessments where the psychiatrist will not look the woman patient in the eye because she is a woman. Can you imagine! A psychiatrist refusing to look his patient in the eye? The woman speaks little or no English. She is sectioned. She is divorced. There are lots of these women in there, locked up in these hospitals. Why don’t you people write about this?'

My interlocuter went very red and almost started to cry. Instead, she began shouting at me. I was a member of the press. “You must write about this,” she begged.

“I can’t,” I said. “Not unless you become a whistle-blower. Or give me some evidence. Or something.”

She shook her head. “I can't be identified,” she said. “I would be killed. And so would the women.”

Perhaps there will come a time when an Archbishop of Canterbury will have the luxury to muse at length on whether it might be appropriate for his nation to consider some sort of “plural jurisdiction” where Muslim communities are concerned. But regardless of his good intentions, it seems to me the height of folly for this head of the Church of England, at this moment in the history of his nation and his faith, to wander in the gardens of intellectual theory while brushing away the actual controversies on the ground. (“The ‘forced marriage’ question is the one most often referred to here, and it is at the moment undoubtedly a very serious and scandalous one; but precisely because it has to do with custom and culture rather than directly binding enactments by religious authority, I shall refer to another issue …”) It seems beyond irresponsible for a prelate in his position to build legal castles in the air, assuring us that “if any kind of plural jurisdiction is recognised, it would presumably have to be under the rubric that no ‘supplementary’ jurisdiction could have the power to deny access to the rights granted to other citizens or to punish its members for claiming those rights,” at a time when Her Majesty’s government seems incapable of preventing the spread of a de facto plural jurisdiction that may do exactly that. And it is frankly embarrassing for a man charged with the defense of Christianity in England to behave as though he's more interested in generalizing about religions (“the umma or the Church or whatever …”) than in drawing distinctions between them, or to imply that there is little in the theology, history and politics of Islam - save for what "some committed Islamic primitivists" would have you believe - that would distinguish it from any other "religious minority" seeking a "degree of accommodation" from the liberal state.

In short, he seems like a complete wally to me.

Photo by Flickr user SouthbankSteve used under a Creative Commons license.

Should Mormons Hate Huckabee?

Russell Arben Fox ponders, Steve Waldman analyzes, Rod Dreher reacts.

Update: And Alan Jacobs weighs in as well.

Have the New Atheists Read Nietzsche?

Edward T. Oakes wonders.

Good-Faith Atheism

From an essay by Father Ranier Cantalamessa, preacher to the Papal household; quoted by Richard John Neuhaus:

“The world of today knows a new category of people: the atheists in good faith, those who live painfully the situation of the silence of God, who do not believe in God but do not boast about it; rather they experience the existential anguish and the lack of meaning of everything: They too, in their own way, live in the dark night of the spirit. Albert Camus called them “the saints without God.” The mystics exist above all for them; they are their travel and table companions. Like Jesus, they “sat down at the table of sinners and ate with them” (see Luke 15:2). This explains the passion with which certain atheists, once converted, pore over the writings of the mystics: Claudel, Bernanos, the two Maritains, L. Bloy, the writer J.K. Huysmans and so many others over the writings of Angela of Foligno; T.S. Eliot over those of Julian of Norwich. There they find again the same scenery that they had left, but this time illuminated by the sun. . . . The word “atheist” can have an active and a passive meaning. It can indicate someone who rejects God, but also one who—at least so it seems to him—is rejected by God. In the first case, it is a blameworthy atheism (when it is not in good faith), in the second an atheism of sorrow or of expiation.”

At the risk of being uncharitable, I doubt that Christopher Hitchens belong to this category of unbeliever.

The Origins of the Quran

From this weekend's WSJ:

On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient manuscripts of the Quran.

The 450 rolls of film had been assembled before the war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution of the Quran, the text Muslims view as the verbatim transcript of God's word. The wartime destruction made the project "outright impossible," Mr. Spitaler wrote in the 1970s.

Mr. Spitaler was lying. The cache of photos survived, and he was sitting on it all along. The truth is only now dribbling out to scholars -- and a Quran research project buried for more than 60 years has risen from the grave.

Read the whole thing. Spengler comments here. You can find Toby Lester's fantastic Atlantic piece on the "sensitive business" of Quranic interpretation here.

Religion, Reason and Relativism

Daniel Larison weighs in on Noah Feldman's "all religions are equally implausible" line of argument.

What Is It About Mormonism?

Writing on Mormonism in this Sunday's Times Magazine, Noah Feldman becomes about the eighteen thousandth writer to explain that non-Mormon Christians only find the LDS faith weird and implausible because its revelation is so recent. Even though "there is nothing inherently less plausible about God’s revealing himself to an upstate New York farmer in the early years of the Republic than to the pharaoh’s changeling grandson in ancient Egypt," Feldman writes, for most people "antiquity breeds authenticity," because "events in the distant past, we tend to think, occurred in sacred, mythic time."

To which Alan Jacobs retorts:

But this only makes sense under the assumption that the only reason people disbelieve Mormonism is its recency. It seems not to occur to Feldman to ask whether all propositions of all religions are equally plausible or implausible. Is “antiquity” really the only factor at work here? If only a handful were attracted to the teachings of David Koresh, is the recency of those teachings a sufficient explanation? Such an assumption is simplistic at best. Let me be clear: I do not mean to say that Mormon beliefs are anything like the crackpot tenets of Koresh; I am just claiming that if you want to understand why certain beliefs are not widely respected or admired, you might want to know something besides how old they are. You might want to inquire into the actual content of those beliefs.

Moreover, if the Average Joe takes Judaism seriously than Mormonism — a proposition that may or may not be true — “antiquity” isn’t the reason. If that were the case, then the Average Joe would find the worship of Ashteroth, Baal, and Isis and Osiris as plausible as that of Yahweh. Insofar as people-in-general concede respect to Judaism, that’s not because of Judaism’s “antiquity” but because of its continuity. If we ever have Mormons who have been saying the same prayers to the same God for three thousand years or so, then those Mormons will almost certainly get a hell of a lot more respect than today’s Latter-Day Saints do.

Well said. I don't want to dismiss the "antiquity equals plausibility" argument, since it obviously contains an element of truth, but it tends to function as a conversation-stopper in intellectual discourse these days - as an easy out for secular writers who assume that all religions are equally implausible, or at least equally beyond rational examination, and who don't want to wade into the weeds of history, archaeology and comparative theology to see whether it might be otherwise. In reality, though, the major plausibility issue facing Mormonism isn't when and where and how long ago the events crucial to the religion are supposed to have taken place, but whether the Mormon account of those events feels persuasive as a historical narrative. This is an issue that faces every major religion that claims God intervenes in history; Mormonism's problem - and a major reason why its tenets are often "dismissed as ridiculous" (as Feldman puts it) by mainstream Christians - is that the Book of Mormon doesn't seem to stack up nearly as well in this regard as, say, the Gospel According to Saint Matthew.

Obviously, this historical-plausibility question doesn't matter to every believer, but it does matter (as it should) to an awful lot of people, which is why so much ink has been spilled by foes of Christian orthodoxy, from Elaine Pagels to Dan Brown, arguing from the historical record (as they see it) that the events of the Gospels didn't happen the way the Gospels said they did. The idea that it should be otherwise - that it's "indefensible," as Feldman puts it, to suggest that Roman Catholicism is more likely to be true than Mormonism because Saint Peter really existed whereas the Nephites probably didn't - only makes sense if you assume the premises of a materialistic (or fideistic) worldview. Which seems like a bad way to set about analyzing the beliefs of people who don't assume that worldview, which is what Feldman's essay is supposed to be doing.

Huckabee's Blood Libel?

George Will needs to simmer down:

On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee's role in the '70s Show involves blending Jimmy Carter's ostentatious piety with Nixon's knack for oblique nastiness. "Despicable" and "appalling" evidence of a "gutter campaign" -- that is how The Eagle-Tribune of Lawrence, Mass., characterized this from Sunday's New York Times Magazine profile of Huckabee: "'Don't Mormons,' he asked in an innocent voice, 'believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?'"

Imagine someone asking "in an innocent voice" this: "Don't Jews use the blood of gentile children to make matzoth for Passover?" Such a smarmy injection of the "blood libel," an ancient canard of anti-Semitism, into civic discourse would indelibly brand the injector as a bigot with contempt for the public's ability to decode bigotry.

I, too, think the Jesus-Lucifer dig was inappropriate (for reasons that I get into a forthcoming episode of The Table - try to contain your excitement!). But it's the equivalent of the blood libel? Seriously? An abstruse theological point that makes Mormonism seem weird and possibly creepy is the equivalent of saying that Jews like to drink your kids' blood? Moreover, what Huckabee said isn't even technically a libel: The Jews don't actually use the blood of gentile children to make Passover matzoh, so far as I know, whereas Mormons do, in fact, believe that Jesus and Lucifer are brothers - not necessarily in the sense that most people understand the term, but in a sense that goes to the heart of the LDS Church's theological differences with orthodox Christianity. Raising the point in the way Huckabee did may have been disingenuous and deliberately sleazy (though an interview with the Times Magazine seems like an odd venue to embark on a subtle anti-Mormon smear campaign pitched to Iowan evangelicals). But The Protocols of the Elders of Deseret it wasn't.

Update: The "so far as I know" was a (possibly misguided) attempt at sarcasm. To clarify: The Jews don't actually use the blood of Christian children at Passover, full stop, no caveat appended.

The God Market

Apropos of Romney's talk about Europe's empty cathedrals, Matt writes:

... whatever you may say about Europe's relative lack of religiosity, it's not a lack of entanglement of religion in public life that led to it ... In the United Kingdom ... there is, after all, an established church. And so it goes across northern Europe where each country traditionally had its own established Protestant church. And then across southern Europe, the Catholic Church always had official or quasi-official status. There was no question of pushing the church out of the public square. It's just that many people (the image of Europe as an all-atheist land tends to be overblown, there are churchgoers there, just not as many as in the US) wound up turning their backs on the church. This development most likely seems specifically related to the undue public-ification of religion in Europe. American religious groups, by contrast, have traditionally had to compete in a market of sorts for congregants. A church nobody wants to attend winds up shutting down, a popular church grows. Consequently, people have found ways to keep bringing people into the pews.

This point of view - that market competition is good for religious faith - has become the conventional wisdom nowadays. That doesn't make it wrong: America's most successful churches do behave a lot like successful corporations, and its most successful pastors like successful CEOs and pitchmen. I'm more convinced, though, that our free market in religion explains faith's success in America than that its supposed absence explains faith's eclipse in Europe. America, after all, doesn't just have a free market; it has a free-market culture, where people are used to be treated like consumers and thinking like consumers in almost every walk of life. The social geography of American life, in particular - car culture, suburbanization, and big-box stores - habituates people to constant mobility and competition, and thus makes the idea of church-shopping a natural fit in a way that isn't necessarily the case in Europe.

So it probably isn’t a coincidence that New England, arguably the most "Euro-American" part of the country, has the fewest megachurches of any American region; as Frances Fitzgerald noted in a recent New Yorker:

In Maurilio Amorim's opinion, New England is still the hardest place in the country to work as a church-growth consultant. Local television, he says, doesn't bring very many people to church there, and direct mail isn't as effective as it is elsewhere. Amorim believes that the main problem lies in the "bigger disconnect between the culture and the church." What he means is that church is not a pervasive way of life, as it is in the South. But there are other reasons. In Thumma's view, the strength and independence of the New England towns has militated against the development of regional churches. People just don't like to leave town in order to go to church. Also, in these towns, the civic culture has been shaped by the Protestant churches on the town greens, and the Catholics have fully participated in it. In New Milford, the clergy-mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jews-long ago reached an unwritten agreement to respect one another's boundaries and to coöperate in community-service programs. (As a part of this agreement, they don't send mailings to members of other churches; Faith Church, of course, does.) In the urban and suburbanized parts of southern Connecticut, the towns may be losing their coherence, for regional churches have begun to spring up. All the same, New England remains a hard place to build a megachurch.

It isn’t that there isn’t the possibility of religious competition in a small New England town, or that the Establishment Clause somehow doesn’t apply; it’s just that the fabric of everyday life is woven in such a way as to discourage it. Which makes me skeptical that all the Continent’s churches need is disestablishment of religion, followed by an infusion of pastorpreneurs. It isn’t enough to have churches that behave like Wal-Mart; you need a culture and a social order that conditions would-be parishioners to think that shopping for a church is a normal thing to do.

Continue reading "The God Market" »

Mitt Romney and Al Smith

With all the attention given to the similarities and dissimilarities between Romney's speech on religion and politics and the famous JFK address, it's interesting to note the parallels between what Romney had to say and how the first Catholic nominee for the Presidency, Al Smith, rebutted a critic as part of a back-and-forth published in (where else?) the Atlantic in 1927. Like Romney, Smith first sounded a strict-separationist note, writing that:

I should be a poor American and a poor Catholic alike if I injected religious discussion into a political campaign. Therefore I would ask you to accept this answer from me not as a candidate for any public office but as an American citizen, honored with high elective office, meeting a challenge to his patriotism and his intellectual integrity.

But speaking "as an American citizen," he went on to say this:

... I am unable to understand how anything that I was taught to believe as a Catholic could possibly be in conflict with what is good citizenship. The essence of my faith is built upon the Commandments of God. The law of the land is built upon the Commandments of God. There can be no conflict between them. Instead of quarreling among ourselves over dogmatic principles, it would be infinitely better if we joined together in inculcating obedience to these Commandments in the hearts and minds of the youth of the country as the surest and best road to happiness on this earth and to peace in the world to come. This is the common ideal of all religions. What we need is more religion for our young people, not less; and the way to get more religion is to stop the bickering among our sects which can only have for its effect the creation of doubt in the minds of our youth as to whether or not it is necessary to pay attention to religion at all.

This sentiment goes a bit further even than Evangelicals and Catholics Together, I'd say. But it's certainly consonant with the theme of an ecumenical religious politics that Romney gestured at in his address.

These sorts of general arguments about religion and politics, interestingly, take up only the first third of Smith's essay; the rest is an attempt, dense with quotations from theologians and archbishops, to challenge head-on the notion that Roman Catholicism might be incongruous with American democracy. Obviously, the Republican electorate's doubts about Mormonism are much more nebulous than the fears Protestants had about Catholics and the separation of church and state, and thus less amenable to a frontal assault of this sort. But it's still interesting to see how comfortable Smith (or his ghostwriter) was delving into the finer points of Catholic teaching. (Today's candidates, by contrast, seem to be the heirs of his suggestion that we stop fretting so much about "dogmatic principles" and other details of religious faith.)

Pullman Versus Tolkien

From an interview with the Dark Materials author:

His story is a rival to the narratives put forward by two earlier Oxford writers, J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" and C.S. Lewis's "The Chronicles of Narnia". Pullman loathes the way the children in Narnia are killed in a car-crash. "I dislike his Narnia books because of the solution he offers to the great questions of human life: is there a God, what is the purpose, all that stuff, which he really does engage with pretty deeply, unlike Tolkien who doesn't touch it at all. ‘The Lord of the Rings' is essentially trivial. Narnia is essentially serious, though I don't like the answer Lewis comes up with. If I was doing it at all, I was arguing with Narnia. Tolkien is not worth arguing with."

It’s true that Lewis and Tolkien are engaged in very different projects, and the former is more didactic than the latter; that Pullman would see this as a reason to dismiss the Rings saga as “trivial” tells you a great deal about where his own fantasy saga went wrong. Being a Christian, I’m favorably inclined to Lewis’ polemical intentions, but even I can see that they sometimes step on the toes of his storytelling. Which is to say that I can see why Pullman-the-atheist would find them deeply irritating. But an appropriate response to this irritation would have been to write an “atheist’s Narnia” in which the polemic is less abrasive – and therefore more effective, perhaps – than Lewis’s Christian sallies sometimes are. More myth, in other words, and less message; more Middle-Earth, perhaps, and less Narnia. Instead, Pullman seems to have set out to take the things he hated about Lewis’ writing and recreate them, but at a heightened, more hectoring pitch. The world-building that makes The Golden Compass so compelling and fun – the panzerbjorn and the witches, the Jules Verne-meets-Tolkien landscape – is thus gradually abandoned as His Dark Materials progresses, no doubt on the grounds of its inherent “triviality,” in favor of a thudding polemic that passes well beyond Lewis and approaches the didacticism of Ayn Rand.

I also liked this bit:

Pullman says that people who are tempted to take offence should first see the film or read the books. "They'll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence. It's very hard to disagree with those. But people will.”

Indeed. This is Atlas Shrugged in a nutshell: A style of literature-as-polemic that seeks to persuade the reader of its argument by associating those characters who share the author’s point of view with every possible virtue, and those who don’t with every possible vice. The result is a self-contained world – where Christians are all Nazis, say, or successful capitalists are all saints and geniuses – that’s persuasive so long as the reader stays immersed in it, but that can’t survive any contact or contrast with reality.

Mid-Century Exceptionalism

You'll often hear that when George Romney, Mitt's father, was contemplating a presidential run, almost nobody cared about his Mormonism - which shows how far we've fallen from the ideal of church-state separation. Except that public opinion hasn't really changed between then and now:

As far back as 1967, only three-quarters of Americans said they would vote for an otherwise well qualified person who was a Mormon. This year – some 40 years later -- the results to this question are almost exactly the same.

Larison writes:

[George Romney] did face this problem, but failed to gain any ground as a presidential candidate before there was that much time for the issue to become a prominent one. We may forget, as we now enter the eleventh month of this election campaign (11 down, 11 to go!), that Romney started his campaign for the Republican nomination in November 1967 and by the end of February he was out. He was a declared candidate for a little over four months. He had made his famous “brainwashed” remark earlier in 1967 before becoming an avowedly antiwar candidate (an example his son has definitely not followed). His son started organising the preliminary elements of his presidential campaign in 2005, and there has been active speculation about his presidential run since mid-2006 at least. There has been much more time to ponder the implications of this factor, much more time to do a lot of polling on it, and much more time for pundits and bloggers to write endless commentaries on the topic.

The issue has taken on added significance in the nominating contest because evangelicals, many of whom would have been Democratic voters in 1967-68, have since started voting Republican much more frequently. As a Republican candidate before the 1968 realignment, Romney would have been more insulated from the early pressures his son is now experiencing. Had he been a Democrat, the issue might have become more significant in the nominating contest.

I would only add that a lot of people are confused about why religious issues appeared to be less salient in the politics of 1950s and 1960s.

Continue reading "Mid-Century Exceptionalism" »

Romney's Speech

Both Marc and David Frum note that for Romney to say that candidates shouldn't have to answer theological questions just moments before declaring "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind" seems like something of a contradiction. I agree. I also agree with Bill Kristol's friend's point (echoed by Mickey Kaus) about the off-keyness of Romney's statement that "in every faith I have come to know, there are features I wish were in my own," which was followed by a faintly-condescending laundry list of those features ("the profound ceremony of the Catholic Mass ... the tenderness of spirit among the Pentecostals ... the ancient traditions of the Jews ... the commitment to frequent prayer of the Muslims"). And as I suggested earlier, I agree with JPod that the mere existence of the speech probably moves the political conversation in the wrong direction for Romney.

Allowing those significant caveats, If Romney was going to give a speech about faith and politics, this wasn't a bad one to give - superficially anodyne and pro-separation of church and state enough to earn praise from the mainstream press, but also carefully calibrated to make the crucial "our common enemies are more important than our theological differences" point to evangelical culture warriors, complete with references to Godless Europe and the Islamist Menace. (And whether the absence of a shout-out to agnostics and atheists was intentional or not, I can't imagine that his campaign is all that sorry that "Mitt Romney wants to marginalize nonbelievers" is one of the insta-stories coming out of the speech.)

Anyway, judge for yourself:

Mormonism And Its Enemies (III)

Nate Oman responds to my comments on his earlier post:

I would be the last to deny that there are real and important theological differences between Mormonism and Protestantism or Catholicism. However, it is not simply these theological differences that account for the strange political salience of Mormonism as an issue for some non-trivial segment of the Republican base. Rather, I think that the fact that the details of Mormon theology matter so intensely as a political issue for some voters comes from their need to assert -- if only to themselves -- their theological integrity in the face of political compromises. It is not Mormon theology but the strange series of historical accidents that pushed conservative evangelical protestants and conservative catholics into alliance that is causing most of Romney's "Mormon problem," a development that Mormonism had very little to do with. Furthermore, the fact that this same non-trivial chunk of the Republican base believes that the theological marker for ecumenism is also a valid reason in principle for rejecting a Mormon candidate is simply a graphic illustration of the problems of conflating ecumenism and political coalition building. It also illustrates that at least for some, Mormonism's status as a religious outsider is sufficient reason to relegate Mormons to the status of outsiders within the political community as well. Supporter of a basically liberal political order (and member of the Mormon tribe) that I am, I find that a bit disquieting.

Point taken. I've spent a perhaps-inordinate amount of time defending the idea that it's reasonable to vote against a candidate because of his religious beliefs, and with that in mind I think it’s perfectly understandable that evangelical Christians would feel more comfortable voting for Huckabee than for Romney because they share a theological bedrock with the one and not the other. (In this vein, I like Matt's comments about how he wouldn't vote for a Jew for Jesus if there were other candidates on offer.) But these sort of choices, however understandable on an individual level, are problematic when they start defining a political coalition: The more religious conservatives appear to be treating theological issues, rather than the political issues they inform, as crucial election-season litmus tests, the more they’ll shrink their tent (there are a lot more Mormons than Jews for Jesus in the United States), alienate potential friends, and provide ammunition to the theocracy-shouters. If social conservatism is going to matter in American politics over the long run, then evangelicals would probably do well not to disqualify a Mormon from high office in advance, even if they choose not to vote for him when other alternatives are available. I’m not brave enough to venture into amateur speechwriting, but in an ideal world this is a point that Mitt Romney would strive – subtly, subtly – to get across on Thursday night.

What Romney Should Say

Noah Millman and Russell Arben Fox play speechwriter.

Huckabee And The Mormon Question

Another week, another terrible Richard Cohen column about religion and politics:

What could be called "The Huckabee Moment" occurred Sunday morning when ABC's George Stephanopoulos asked the former Arkansas governor, suddenly and ominously the front-runner in Iowa's GOP contest, whether Mitt Romney is a Christian. Mike Huckabee knew precisely what was being asked of him, and he also knew, because he is a preacher, what the right -- not the clever, mind you -- answer should be. But Huckabee merely smiled that wonderful smile of his and punted. This, with apologies to George W. Bush, is the soft demagoguery of low expectations.

Wait ... so "because he is a preacher," Mike Huckabee knows that the "right answer" to the question is - what? That Mitt Romney is a Christian, in the sense that a former Baptist minister like Huckabee would define the word? Here's what Stephanopoulos asked him:

The President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Al Moulder - and you're a Southern Baptist - has written that we have to clarify, he said that Mormonism is in no way consistent with orthodox Christianity. It borrows Christian themes and texts but its most basic beliefs directly contradict the central teachings of Christianity. Do you believe that the basic beliefs of Mormonism contradict the central teachings of Christianity?

Now, Huckabee ducked the question, saying that "I'm not going to get into that argument because my goal in life is not to evaluate what's wrong with your faith or somebody else's, but it's to be able to live mine," and yada yada yada. This wasn't enough for Cohen, who called the question an opportunity for "a ringing statement in support of religious tolerance." But just a few paragraphs later, he allows that, well, "Mormonism is a significant departure from conventional Christianity. The Book of Mormon, like the Bible itself, is scripture to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints -- downright heresy to some conservative Christians." Yet Huckabee, one of those conservative Christians himself, was supposed to go on national television and pretend that none of this is so, that Mormonism isn't a bordering-on-heresy departure from Christianity, because anything else would be "demagoguery"? Deflecting the question wasn't sufficient - he was supposed to tell what he would presumably consider an outright lie, in the name of Richard Cohen's ideal of tolerance?

More Cohen:

It is absurd that Romney feels compelled to deliver a speech defending his beliefs and that Huckabee does not have to explain how, in this day and age, he does not believe in evolution.

Um ... how many times has Huckabee been asked about evolution in this race? A few hundred times? Maybe more? (Often enough that he's begun bristling at the question, at the very least.) I don't mean this as a defense of his position by any means, and given the campaign he's running, it's completely legitimate for journalists to pester him about it. But they are pestering him: The notion that Huckabee's beliefs are getting a free pass in this race is just silly. And not just where evolution is concerned - you can watch none other than Bill O'Reilly grill him about whether he thinks non-Christians go to hell right here:

Richard Cohen wants to live in a world where these topics never get discussed. Fair enough. But asking candidates for public office to flat-out lie about their theological differences doesn't seem like a great way to get there.

Mormonism And Its Enemies (II)

Russell Arben Fox points me to this provocative meditation on anti-Mormonism, from Nate Oman:

... I think that Romney's speech will serve at least in part as an anvil on which one of the more surprising alliances in American politics will be hammered out: the one between conservative Catholics and Protestants. It wasn't so long ago that the idea of an Evangelical-Catholic alliance would have been anathema to both sides ... That changed beginning in the 1970s, when conservatives from both traditions decided that the forces of secularism were a greater threat than either Rome or heresy. The alliance, however, is not an entirely easy one. (Witness for example, the furor caused by Francis Beckwith's conversion from Evangelicalism to Catholicism.) I suspect that not too far below the surface of the Religious Right one will find a deep-seated theological ambivalence: Did the religious conservatives sell-out theologically by clasping hands across what had been the ultimate divide in American religious politics?

Part of this tension has been managed by the promotion of "The Great Tradition," a somewhat fictitious creation, that like 'Judeo-Christian culture," provides a coping mechanism for the cognitive dissonance created by the contradictory pulls of politics and theology. In effect, it allows Protestant and Catholic intellectuals to tell themselves, "I didn't sell out my beliefs for control of Congress; after all we both believe in Nicea and Chalcedon." In a world of un-conflicted sectarian competition, I suspect that the Mormon rejection of the creeds didn't matter all that much. Sure, it meant that Mormon theology was wrong, but everyone else's theology was wrong too, so there was no special Mormon problem. Likewise, Mormon rejection of the creeds didn't matter all that much when Ike presided over a culturally self-confident and complacent Protestantism. "Letting Mormons sit at the table," the Protestants in effect told themselves, "doesn't say anything about Protestantism because everyone understands that we wield ultimate control." (Hence, for example, Mormon apostle Ezra Taft Benson -- pictured at his swearing in left -- could serve in Ike's cabinet without the sky falling for Evangelicals.) Not so in a world where Protestant hegemony is challenged by the forces of godlessness.

Hence, I suspect that the reason why many within the Religious Right want to deny Romney (or any other Mormon) the Presidency is because Mormonism is an important theological marker that legitimizes the other theological compromises that have made the coalition possible. "Sure, we'll work with the Papists," the conservative Evangelical subconscious can say to itself, "but the Mormons are one theological compromise too far. I am not a theological sell-out because while I will accept Mormon votes, I will not accept a Mormon leader." Soft-bigotry against Mormons facilitates broader theological cooperation.

As a Mormon, I have to say that living on the anvil where the concerns of others get hammered out can be a bit uncomfortable. On the other hand, I take solace in the fact that much of the time it probably really isn't about my religion.

This analysis makes a lot of sense; I only object to note of self-pity at the end. Just because evangelicals (and Catholics, to a lesser extent) are using Mormonism as a marker to legitimize their own theological compromises doesn't mean it isn't a reasonable marker to use. It isn't only about Oman's religion, but it is about it to a great extent: Mormonism is a useful marker of how far ecumenism can go (and how far it can't) precisely because there are much, much deeper theological commonalities between, say, the Vatican and the Southern Baptist Convention than between either body and the the LDS Church. And while it's true that Mormons get more attention, and hostility, than other similarly-heterodox strands of American religion, they're at least partially victims of their own success. If the Jehovah's Witnesses, say, were doing as well as the Mormons are at winning converts, their tenets might be playing the same sort of "here's where the Great Tradition stops" role in debates over ecumenical cooperation. But they aren't, so they don't.

As an outside observer, it seems to me that Mormonism has a divided soul - there's a yearning for acceptance within the firmament of Christianity (and a hint of self-pity concerning other Christians' unwillingness to welcome them with open arms), combined with a pride in everything that makes the Latter-Day Saints unique. I'm inclined to think the latter is the healthier sentiment for members of a young and rising faith. Attention, and the hostility that comes with it, is the price of being a successful religion, as the larger history of Christianity's rise attests: You don't see Christopher Hitchens writing polemics against the Mithraists or the cult of Isis, after all.

Mormonism And Its Enemies

In a month-old column on Romney's Latter-Day dilemma, E.J. Dionne put his finger on one under-discussed reason for evangelical hostility toward Mormonism:

Mormons now face criticism as a non-Christian "cult" from some wings of Protestantism. The hostility is aggravated by intense competition between Mormonism and evangelical Protestantism for converts.

It's this factor - that Mormon wards and evangelical churches, despite their vast theological differences, tend to offer a similar sociological appeal to religious seekers, and thus are in direct competition for converts - that undergirds the emails that Jonah's been getting from Christians explaning why they wouldn't vote for a Latter-Day Saint. It isn't about politics; it's about souls. As one of his emailers puts it:

I will not vote for a Mormon because they claim to be Christian, when they are not Christians. Electing, or even nominating, a Mormon continues to send the message to Americans that Mormons are fine and dandy, Christians like everyone else. Thousands of Christians are converted to Mormonism each year, and it is done under false pretenses. From what I have read, Mormons are very good at appearing to be orthodox Christians with new recruits. It's only later that the blatantly non-orthodox views come out. So, I rule out voting for a Mormon not because of actual policies they might pursue, but because of the message their election would send to Americans.

This may be fallacious reasoning: JFK's election, for instance, didn't exactly kick off an era of ever-increasing influence for Roman Catholicism, and you could argue that there's no better way to weaken a faith's appeal to converts than to welcome it into the bland and uncontroversial American mainstream. I don't, however, think that it counts as bigotry. And at the very least, it suggests that Ed Kilgore has it exactly wrong when he writes:

If I were Romney, I'd go right at the conservative evangelical Protestant suspicions about Mormonism by stressing and restressing its culturally conservative teachings and practices, ignoring the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith and formal theological issues altogether. Theology aside, Mormons could be perceived as evangelicals with a much better track record of worldly accomplishments and moral fidelity. And in many respects, the LDS church has built the sort of conservative commonwealth in Utah that many evangelicals dream of for the whole country. I happen to have a family member, a longtime Southern Baptist Deacon, who's travelled to almost every corner of the world. The only place I ever heard him wax rhapsodic about was Salt Lake City. "It's so clean!" he kept saying, reflecting a tanglble envy for what Mormons have wrought in comparison to the messy and hypocritical cultural milieus in which most evangelicals live.

The problem is that it's only a short leap from this "tangible envy" to the "tangible fear" that Jonah's emailers seem to feel - and to the extent that evangelical Protestants see Mormons as their major competitor for the lost sheep of the American religious landscape, I don't think suggesting that the Latter-Day Saints have "a much better track record of worldly accomplishments and moral fidelity" than they do is the way to win their votes.

Romney's Mormon Speech

Marc has a good rundown of the pros and cons. Jay Cost, in a characteristically sharp piece, notes that this sort of reactive turn-on-a-dime is par for the course for the Romney campaign:

His candidacy has been the most transparently strategic this cycle. McCain is up? Go after McCain. McCain is down? Leave McCain alone. Thompson enters the race and seems a threat? Take a cheap shot about Law and Order. Thompson fades? Ignore him. Rudy is up? Go after Rudy. Huckabee is up? Go after Huck. You need to win a Republican primary? Make yourself the most socially conservative candidate in the race. And on and on and on.

If somebody asked me which candidate on the Republican side has won just a single election (in a year that his party did very well nationwide) -- I would answer Mitt Romney, even knowing nothing about anybody's biography. This kind of transparency is, to me, a sign of political inexperience. He's only won one election, and it shows.

Meanwhile, Larison explains what makes the speech so hard:

The impossible balancing act is stressing the political irrelevance of the theological differences Mormonism really does have with Christianity while simultaneously claiming that this very same religion, whose distinctive substance is supposed to be irrelevant, informs and shapes his “values” that he will rely on to make judgements about policy. Another part of the balancing act (which is where it becomes really dangerous politically) is to declare that it is “un-American” to judge a candidate based on his religion without insulting the millions of voters who consider a candidate’s religion an important part of selecting their preferred candidate, while also paying homage to the “separation of church and state” without actually endorsing the idea that the separation of church and state has any constitutional basis (which a fairly large number of religious conservatives doesn’t accept). His speech will have to go something like this: “My faith, which is very important to me and has made me who I am, should not be important to you, but it is important that we have a person of faith leading this country, and that person happens to be me.”

Put me down in the "it's a big mistake" camp. The speech should have been given at the very beginning of the primary season, or after Romney won the nomination; it doesn't make sense to give it in response to Mike Huckabee's rise in the polls. Huckabee is vulnerable on all sorts of issues, and Romney has the money and the infrastructure to make sure that every GOP primary voter in America - let alone Iowa and South Carolina - knows all about the tax increases and the ethics complaints and the softness on illegal immigration and all the rest of it. Going after Huckabee on these issues probably wouldn't prevent the Arkansas governor from consolidating his current level of support, but the right line of attack should be able to stall his momentum in states like New Hampshire and Michigan and South Carolina, where Romney is well-positioned even if he loses Iowa.

But instead of making the conversation about issues where Huckabee is vulnerable and Romney isn't, the Romney campaign has guaranteed that for the next two weeks at least and probably beyond, the media conversation will be about, well, Mormonism. If there were more time before the actual voting begins, that might not be the worst thing in the world; they could get the wave of coverage out of the way, inoculate themselves to some extent, and then shift gears and start hammering Huckabee on taxes and immigration and so forth. But there isn't time: Christmas is coming, there's a very narrow window in which to define Mike Huckabee as a Mexican-loving crypto-liberal, and the Romney campaign has just ensured that everyone will be talking about the Urim and the Thummim instead of the Arkansas gas tax. Unless Romney gives the best speech in the history of speeches, I just don't see how that helps him win - in Iowa, New Hampshire, or anywhere.

Photo by Flickr user NJRon using a Creative Commons license.

The Gospel According to ... Ialdabaoth?

I am shocked, shocked, that the much-hyped "Gospel of Judas," a dull third century Gnostic text that purports to tell the Passion story from the Iscariot's point of view, would turn out, upon more careful examination, to be something other than the cross between "Gregory Maguire Does the New Testament" and The Da Vinci Code that everyone made it out to be. I mean, really - how could Elaine Pagels possibly lead us astray?

Needless to say, while the new translation alters Judas's role in the story - he's a an agent of the wicked demiurge the Gnostics blamed for sin and suffering and the whole of creation, not a tragic hero - it doesn't sound as though it much alters the substance of the text, which like most of the "lost gospels" is at once historically bogus and theologically unappetizing (with a Jesus who tends to sound, in Adam Gopnik's priceless phrase, like "the ruler of a dubious planet on Star Trek"). But of course the lost gospels' quality and historical credibility - or lack thereof, in both cases - have never had much to do with their appeal.

Ethical Concerns And Church-State Violations

I was thinking about saying something about this Richard Cohen column while I was ranting at Jon Chait about religion and democracy, but decided to let it slide. In the aftermath of the stem-cell news, though, it seems worth bringing up again. Cohen writes:

Back before Bush, it was considered narrow-minded and, worst of all, elitist, to judge a person by the intensity of his religious convictions. Belief was not supposed to matter, and so it was impermissible to conclude anything about a person even if he thought Darwin was wrong or, more recently, that homosexuals chose their sexual orientation, presumably just to irritate the Christian right. Religion was irrelevant. Everyone said so -- and I agreed.

Bush changed that. He infused government with religion, everything from ineffective programs that promote sexual abstinence to an adamant refusal to authorize federal spending for most embryonic stem-cell research. The administration even erected barriers to the marketing of the Plan B morning-after pill. All these measures ran up against obstacles that were essentially religious, not strictly scientific, in nature.

Richard Cohen, meet James A. Thomson:

Dr. Thomson’s laboratory at the University of Wisconsin was one of two that in 1998 plucked stem cells from human embryos for the first time, destroying the embryos in the process and touching off a divisive national debate.

And on Tuesday, his laboratory was one of two that reported a new way to turn ordinary human skin cells into what appear to be embryonic stem cells without ever using a human embryo.

The fact is, Dr. Thomson said in an interview, he had ethical concerns about embryonic research from the outset, even though he knew that such research offered insights into human development and the potential for powerful new treatments for disease.

“If human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough,” he said. “I thought long and hard about whether I would do it.”

He decided in the end to go ahead, reasoning that the work was important and that he was using embryos from fertility clinics that would have been destroyed otherwise. The couples whose sperm and eggs were used to create the embryos had said they no longer wanted them. Nonetheless, Dr. Thomson said, announcing that he had obtained human embryonic stem cells was “scary,” adding, “It was not known how it would be received.”

Hmmm. So he found the work ethically troubling, but decided to go ahead, on the justification that the embryos he would use were slated for destruction anyway. This is, of course, distinct from George W. Bush's more conservative position, which was that we should provide federal funds only for research on stem cells from embryos that had already been killed - albeit while making no attempt, one might add, to impede private research like Dr. Thomson's. But just how distinct are they, and what's the nature of the distinction? Well, that's a good question ... and hey, maybe Richard Cohen can answer it. He seems pretty sure of himself, after all. So my challenge to Cohen is this: Please explain why the Bush position is so distinct from Dr. Thomson's as to make the latter a responsible scientist, and the former a dangerously-religious zealot who elevated faith over "science," and permanently effaced the bright line between church and state. I'll give you, say, nine hundred words or so to do so.

Meanwhile, I'd saying something snide about this passage ...

If anything, Romney is the anti-Huckabee. There is not the slightest hint that his religion has constrained his politics in any way. You name the issue and he's been for it and against it -- gun control, abortion, gay rights. Call this what you may, it is proof that Romney is not enslaved by any dogma. His religion, to which he is committed, is distinctly his business and would not, as far I can tell, have any bearing on his presidency.

... but it would be tough to top Larison.

Mitt Romney and Faith-Based Politics

Jon Chait refers to me as "brilliant" in his latest TRB, no doubt in an attempt to defang my inevitable rejoinder to his critique of "faith-based politics" - but no such luck, Chait! He begins by complaining about evangelical Christians who might not vote for Mitt Romney because he's a Mormon:

If it were possible for a politician to sue voters for religious discrimination, Mitt Romney would have an open-and-shut case against the Republican electorate. Here is a man possessing all the known qualifications for the job of GOP presidential nominee--strong communications skills, a successful governorship, total agreement on every issue, Reaganesque hair--and yet he may well be denied it on account of his faith. In a poll released in June, 30 percent of Republicans said they'd be less likely to vote for a Mormon. One conservative televangelist dispensed with the subtlety and warned his flock,"If you vote for Mitt Romney, you are voting for Satan!" These attacks have nothing to do with how Romney would conduct himself as president. They're purely theological. Romney's critics are declaring they couldn't support Romney on the sole basis that they consider Mormonism un-Christian.

Well, first of all, polls like this one (see Table 4) suggest that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to rule out voting for a candidate on the basis of his Mormon faith. Now maybe all those anti-Mormon Democrats are African-American Baptists or working-class Catholics, but Dems with a post-grad education are more anti-Latter Day Saint than Dems with just a high school degree, which at the very least suggests that there are plenty of secular voters who wouldn't pull the lever for a Mormon. Not, presumably, because they want to establish an "only Trinitarians need apply" standard for public office in the U.S., but because they consider Mormonism weird and cultish, and they don't want a President who buys into its tenets.

Continue reading "Mitt Romney and Faith-Based Politics" »

Collateral Damage

My mother (yes, even I have a mother) has a web essay over at First Things on the impact of the Catholic sex abuse scandal on the laity, and the creeping tyranny of the insurance industry over the life of the Church. Here's how it starts:

Eight years ago in our urban Catholic parish in Connecticut, a teenager I’ll call Elizabeth started a club for girls ... In the beginning, the club met in the Parish Hall. Anywhere from six to twelve girls, aged ten to eighteen, would sit around a small table, reading the Bible together or making cards for the residents of a nursing home they visited monthly. They would share snacks and devise skits, pray the rosary, and celebrate one another’s birthdays. The older girls mentored the younger girls, modeling for them the endangered truth that a girl can be both sophisticated and innocent, devout and fun. On Holy Days, they attended Mass together. They studied the saints, went on field trips, dedicated themselves to Mary.

Eventually, there was a conflict. The Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, a religious education program for three- to six-year-olds, needed the hall on the same afternoon, and our girls asked for and received from our pastor permission to meet on an enclosed stage in the same hall, far enough from the younger children that noise wasn’t a problem. This stage area turned out to be a kind of teenage heaven, with comfortable sofas, a kitchen in the rear, and its own bathroom. In the wake of the sexual-abuse scandals in the Church, one or more mothers, our backgrounds checked and cleared by the relevant authorities, would sit outside an open door, keeping an eye on the club but also trying to preserve its charism, which was about peer formation, taking responsibility, and making the life of the Church their own.

Summer came, and the club didn’t meet. In August, referred by our pastor to a lay brother I’ll call Giles, I asked if the same arrangement would obtain in the fall. Not meeting my eyes, he said briefly that the girls could continue to meet but not on the stage. They could meet in the library next door, a dark masculine room whose dimensions are almost entirely taken up by a table.

A day later, gathering my courage, I telephoned Brother Giles, explained my concerns, and asked why the girls couldn’t meet on the stage. An abstract, evasive explanation followed, tinged with bitterness, in which the word “bifurcation” figured prominently. No two groups could meet in the same space at the same time, he said. An adult male organization, for example, couldn’t meet in the hall at the same time as the catechesis.

I was still confused, so finally he said what he meant: Our girls couldn’t meet on the stage on Wednesday afternoons because of the possibility that they might molest the younger children.

I was too stunned to make the obvious objections—the physical distance between the two groups; their entirely separate facilities; the intermediary presence of watchful adults. I simply blurted, “But Brother, some of those children are our girls’ younger brothers and sisters!”

“Oh,” he said grimly, “that’s no objection unfortunately.”

The Case of Antony Flew

Yuck. I picked up There Is No A God, by (or perhaps I should say "by") the ex-atheist philosopher Antony Flew about a week ago and found it, well, odd. The book opens with a forward by one Roy Abraham Varghese, whose name appears underneath Flew’s on the jacket but whose specific role is left distinctly ambiguous (there is no “about the author” for Varghese). The meat of the book, which mixes memoir and argument and is ostensibly written by Flew, is followed by two lengthy appendices; in one, Varghese critiques the Dawkins-Harris-Dennett contingent; in the second, the historian and theologian N.T. Wright responds to questions from (“from”?) Flew along the lines of “what evidence is there for the existence of God?” The whole thing is a somewhat peculiar pastiche, and it left me curious about its origins.

Now Mark Oppenheimer has a fascinating and depressing piece about how Flew's theistic friends, led by Varghese, seem to have taken advantage of his advancing senility to write a book about his adoption of deism, run it by him for approval, and slap his name on the cover.

Continue reading "The Case of Antony Flew" »

Free Intellectual Stimulation

As a courtesy for readers of this blog, I have ten tickets available to a forthcoming debate, hosted by the Economist, on the resolved: "Religion and politics should always be kept separate." The Economist's Editor-in-chief, John Micklethwait, will be moderating, with the Rev. Barry Lynn and Irshad Manji for the affirmative and Fr. Richard Neuhaus and Walter Russell Mead for the negative. It's on November 10th in New York City, at Gotham Hall on 1356 Broadway (at 36th Street); put down your name in the comments section (you can request one seat or two), and if you're quick enough on the draw, your name will be on the list at the door.

The Evangelical (Non) Crack-Up, Cont.

A smart, evenhanded take - by a Slate intern who hails from God's Harvard.

The Religious Right After Bush

Jeff Sharlet is right that the "end of the religious right" has been breathlessly predicted many times before, and that evangelical Christians aren't going to cease being an important force in American life just because their supposed "crack-up" was splashed on the cover of the Times Magazine. And Father Neuhaus is certainly right to point out the silliness of liberal mood swings where social conservatism is concerned: As he writes, they "scare themselves by creating the boogeyman of a monolithic theocratic assault and then console themselves that the advancing forces are in disarray." (You can read Sharlet's post, in part, as a furious scream directed at suddenly-complacent liberals: "Don't you get it! The boogeyman's still out there ... homeschooling its children ... telling them not to have sex before marriage ... running crisis pregnancy centers ... trying to convert the heathen overseas - and it'll get us eventually!")

But while the Times article in question didn't deliver anything close to what was promised by its over-the-top advertising and sweeping claims, I think its core points, however modest, were all worthy of note: First, that the close personal identification evangelicals felt with George W. Bush has given way to a certain amount of disillusionment with his Presidency, which feeds into a suspicion of politics in general that's always latent among conservative Christians; second, that the issue matrix, if you will, for religious conservatives may be slowly changing, with concerns about the environment and global poverty rising and the focus on homosexuality, in particular, diminishing; and third, that "none of the 2008 Republican front-runners come close to measuring up to President Bush in the eyes of the evangelical faithful," which is creating significant fault lines and stresses as social conservatives decide where to cast their vote, stresses which didn't really exist over the past eight years.

So yes, as Fr. Neuhaus writes, "there is no evangelical crackup ... there is a normalization of conservative Christian activism in the public square. As on the left, organizations and activists on the right maneuver mightily to direct sometimes contentious constituencies toward their preferred political outcomes." But it's precisely as a look at some of the arguments associated with this maneuvering that - once I tuned out the heavy breathing - I found David Kirkpatrick's article to be an interesting read.

Nothing To See Here

Sorry for the light posting - I'm crashing on a piece, and bleary-eyed from the World Series. While I recover, go read David Kirkpatrick on the religious right's semi-crack-up, if you haven't already; also Theodore Dalrymple's fine City Journal essay on the new atheism; any number of things in the new Claremont Review of Books; and Terry Teachout:

I suppose we all reach a moment in our lives when we lose interest in the new, and I suspect that moment comes sooner for technology than for art. For now I seem to be staying fairly open to new things--my experience as a blogger suggests as much--but I have yet to send my first text message, nor does my somewhat superannuated cellphone contain a digital camera. On the increasingly rare occasions when I feel the need to take a picture of something, I buy a disposable film camera, the postmodern equivalent of a Brownie, at the corner drugstore.

Today a friend walked into my office, all abuzz over some new online service or gizmo - let's call it "Z." He tried to describe to me what it does, failed, and said: "Oh, it's like a much slicker version of Y." I responded, "What's Y?" He said - "Oh, well, it's the newer, more popular version of X." I said: "What's X?" Which suggests that I'm well on my way to crossing the Teachout threshold.

And that reminds me - as a public service announcement, I should mention that while I have a Facebook account, I have never ever used it for anything (except once to look at someone else's Facebook page), and frankly I don't even know my own password. So if you've asked me to be your friend or otherwise acted friendly in the Facebook realm, I'm not ignoring you: I'm just ignoring, you know, the modern world.

The Zeal of a Convert

Ryan Lizza's piece on Mitt Romney is just as good as everyone says, but I found this passage somewhat puzzling:

In private, a Romney aide frankly conceded that, aside from accusations of “flip-flopping,” his greatest political liability is his religion, which is unfamiliar to most Americans. Jan Shipps, a leading non-Mormon scholar of Mormonism, said that it was useful to consider the difference between Romney and Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, who holds the highest government post of any Mormon in American history. “Reid is a Church member,” Shipps said. “But he is a convert. I’m sure he’s devoted, I’m sure he’s a tithe-paying member and all of that”—devout Mormons contribute ten per cent of their earnings to the Church—“but he was not born into the Church. He didn’t get Mormonism with his mother’s milk, as it were. But Romney is a sixth-generation Mormon”—what scholars call a DNA Mormon. “His ancestors were some of the very first converts.”

I suppose I see what Shipps is getting at - Romney's family history emphasizes Mormonism's various strangenesses in a way that Harry Reid's non-Mormon family history doesn't. But if you're trying to decide whether you should vote for a politician with peculiar-seeming religious beliefs, wouldn't you be much, much less likely to vote for them if they were a convert, like Reid, than if they'd been born into the faith? After all, most people stay in the religion they're born into, regardless of its theology or history; conversion, by contrast, suggests a much more profound assessment, and acceptance, of your religion's beliefs and practices. So one can look askance at Mormon teaching and still say, well, of course Mitt Romney's going to stay in the Church - he's just sticking with the faith of his father and mothers (and mothers, and mothers ...). But Reid deliberately chose Mormonism (and apparently persuaded his wife to convert from Judaism as well), which suggests a different and more radical acceptance of its doctrines than you'd expect from a member of the Romney family.

(And I don't mean to single out Mormonism here: If you think that anyone who believes in Roman Catholicism should have their head examined, then a convert-politician - like, say, Bobby Jindal - ought to be much weirder and more worrisome than a cradle Catholic office-seeker.)

Christians and the Constitution (II)

As promised, more thoughts on Jonathan Rowe's quarrel with the claim that the American founding lacked a political theology. Here's Rowe:

America’s founders likewise, following Locke, were devout theists and gave God a prominent role in politics. See for instance, the Declaration of Independence. However, the God to whom America’s founders appealed — the individual rights granting Nature’s God — arguably was not the Biblical or Christian God. For one, the Biblical God does not grant men unalienable individual rights, certainly not a right to political liberty while the God of the American founding did. Further, on matters of religious toleration, the God of the American founding was not a “jealous” God but granted men an unalienable right to worship, in Jefferson’s words no God or twenty gods.

In studying their public and private writings in detail I have concluded that America’s principle founders (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin) were not closet atheists but really did believe in this rational, benevolent, unitarian deity who fit their republican ideals much better than the Biblical God could. The inescapable conclusion is that America does have a political theology; it is just not Christianity. (For more on America’s founding creed, see this article.) Nature’s God was theologically unitarian, universalist (did not eternally damn anyone) syncretist (most or all world religions worshipped Him), partially inspired the Christian Scriptures, and man’s reason was ultimate device for understanding Him. He was not quite the strict Deist God that some secular scholars have made Him out to be. But neither was He the Biblical God. Rather, somewhere in between.

There is, I think, a great deal to this line of argument. One doesn't have to share David Gelernter's triumphalism to think that there really is a politico-theological tradition, broadly defined, that one could reasonably call "Americanism" - a kitchen-sink mix of Providentialism, Deism, gnosticism, and Hegelianism that links the Founders to the Transcendentalists to the Progressives to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. And as Rowe points out, "the tension between America’s non-Christian, generally theistic civil religion, and orthodox Christianity does not so easily resolve." That's why if you scratch the surface of many nominal American Christians, you'll find that they really believe in the Osteen-ish tenets of moralistic therepeutic Deism, a faith that lines up more neatly with American political theology; it's why, as well, so many Christian patriots expend so much effort convincing themselves (but not many other people) that America was really founded as a bastion of orthodox Christian belief.

It's also why, like Andrew, I'm personally grateful that the American Constitution is an essentially secular document - not because it protects atheists from rampaging Christianists, but because it allows orthodox Christians like myself to be loyal to America's government without requiring us to accept, whole hog, the not-quite-Christian political theology that has infused American political life from the Declaration of Independence onward. That's the beauty of our Constitutional order: It allows one to be American without being an Americanist.

Christians and the Constitution

Andrew, in the midst of an engaging Cato Unbound dialogue with Mark Lilla, Philip Jenkins, and Damon Linker:

America is substantively and experientially a deeply religious country, and its political discourse has always been saturated with religious rhetoric and imagery ... It is a country whose politics is experientially creedal. It doesn't incubate the kind of high Tory pragmatism that I admire in the English experience; or even the kind of atheist secularism that helped spawn socialism in other developed countries in the twentieth century. But the power of that religious presence — I call it “Christianism” and describe it at length in The Conservative Soul — is in many ways a testament to the strength of the secular constitution that resists it. In fact, I think that without the kind of secularism that Mark detects in the founding documents and Constitution, America would long since have succumbed to some version of theocracy or another.

Mark's basic point is that this is the natural and historical state for humankind. The achievement of keeping God at arm's length in the ordering structure of a polity is very, very rare. Very few countries have achieved it in the history of the world. America's genius is to have sustained it, even while fostering an intensely religious, roiling, and often apocalyptic culture. So Damon is right to worry about theology's political claims — especially in the last few years, and during various spasms of the past. But he is wrong in thinking, I believe, that this will lead to a collapse of the American system as such. It could lead to disastrous social policies, civil dissension, social conflict, and what we have come to call a "culture war." But even then, the impulse to junk the Constitution as a whole, and the ability even to amend it, is limited. In fact, it is remarkable how modest many Christian fundamentalists have been in addressing the Constitution's core secularism. Whether out of national pride or simply denial, it remains a fact that the main policy goals of Christianists in American history has been in amending the Constitution or bypassing it, rather than attacking it frontally.

I think the sheer diversity of religious belief and institutions in the U.S. would make the possibility of an American theocracy pretty remote, whatever our constitution looked like - particularly given that the number of theocracies instituted in the nation-states of the modern West as a whole is close to zero. (It's pretty close to zero for the pre-modern West, for that matter.) It’s possible to imagine a much more politically fragmented North America producing some localized theocracies, along the lines of Deseret and Puritan New England, but on a national level .. not so much.

I'm more sympathetic to the rest of Andrew's comments here, but it's precisely the aspects of American political history that he gets right - particularly the resilience of the constitutional order in spite (or because!) of the persistence of God-infused political activity - that makes his promiscuous use of scare-terms like “Christianist” so silly. The fact that religious conservatives, with the occasional exception, share the same commitment to the Constitution as liberal believers and secularists – and that much of the culture war, from abortion to school prayer to gay marriage, boils down an argument between two perfectly lucid, un-theocratic readings of said Constitution – and that if anything, the religious right tends to be more committed to upholding the actual text of the Constitution than their more secular foes – well, all of these points suggest, at the very least, that constantly slinging around terms that effectively equate James Dobson with a shari’a-happy Islamist might not be the most accurate way to analyze the intersection of religion and politics in the contemporary United States.

Also, you should definitely read Jonathan Rowe's critique of the Lilla thesis, which is helpfully linked from the Cato Unbound page. I'll try to say something more about the issues it raises later on.

Politically Incorrect Debate of the Day

That would be the Derb (no stranger to un-PC topics) versus Robert Spencer, author of Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn't, and other books in that vein. Here's the Derbyshire review of Religion of Peace; here's Spencer's response.

I have all sorts of thoughts on this topic, but for the moment I'll confine myself to taking issue with Derb's remark that "Christianity got its start as a religion of slaves. Perhaps it is fated to end the same way." The debate over the demographics of early Christianity is sufficiently tangled to make it possible that he's right; however, there's more reason to think that Christianity got its start as a religion of middle-class urban women than that it spread primarily on the lowest rungs of the Roman social ladder. Not that a "religion of women" would be any more appealing to Derb, I'm sure - particularly where the struggle with radical Islam is concerned - but for the sake of accuracy I thought I'd throw the point out there.

The Silence of God

That Mother Teresa endured a long dark night of the soul will come as no surprise to anyone who read Carol Zaleski's essay on the subject several years ago, but the depth and duration of her spiritual crisis nonetheless has the capacity to shock, and to humble.

Naturally, Christopher Hitchens has something to say about it:

In 1948, Hitchens ventures, Teresa finally woke up, although she could not admit it. He likens her to die-hard Western communists late in the cold war: "There was a huge amount of cognitive dissonance," he says. "They thought, 'Jesus, the Soviet Union is a failure, [but] I'm not supposed to think that. It means my life is meaningless.' They carried on somehow, but the mainspring was gone. And I think once the mainspring is gone, it cannot be repaired." That, he says, was Teresa.

I think that this is a rather poor analogy for all sorts of reasons, but chiefly because it conflates the experiential and ideological aspects of religion. One can, certainly, experience religious faith as a kind of ideological belief - as the adherence to a compelling and all-encompassing system of thought that explains the world and one's purpose in it. And this sort of belief is arguably analogous to Western Communists' (misplaced) confidence in Marxism generally, and the Soviet Union specifically. But the "mainspring" of religious faith for most believers - and particularly for a mystic like Mother Teresa - is the personal experience of God as a being who loves them and communicates with them, rather than the intellectual experience of Catholicism (or some other specific faith tradition) as a philosophical system that persuades them. This is why most religious people remain religious while being entirely ignorant of anything resembling serious theology, and indeed, why religious bodies can exist and thrive with at best a minimal theological superstructure. The theology is an attempt to make sense of the experience; the experience itself the primary thing.

So if one set out to find a secular analogue to what Mother Teresa experienced in her encounters with the divine, a more appropriate sneering comparison for Hitchens to employ might be to people caught up, not in an ideological fervor, but in a cult of personality - people who believed in the Soviet Union not for Communism's sake but for Stalin's, or in Nazi Germany because they were mesmerized by Hitler. And then her dark night of the soul would be analogous to, say, banishment from the Great Dictator's inner circle, rather than to ideological disillusionment. This analogy would seem to suit some of Hitchens' purposes, since he's forever complaining that the Judeo-Christian God is a totalitarian despot; on the other hand, the thing about cults of personality is that the personality in question tends to be, you know, real, which is hardly a notion that Hitchens is likely to entertain where Mother Teresa's God is concerned.

And his unwillingness to even entertain it is one of the (many) reasons why Hitchens' brief against religion is so thin: An ideologue himself, he finds it easiest to argue against faith-as-ideology, while leaving largely untouched the more difficult and more important question of what we should make of faith-as-experience. Confronting the case of Mother Teresa, who experienced the presence and love of Jesus Christ intensely throughout her young adulthood and (understandably) made these experiences the basis for her career as a missionary nun, Hitchens is like a man who seeks to disprove not only the faithfulness but the very existence of a woman's absent lover by arguing that her mind is held captive by a primitive, oppressive and dangerous theory of eros. Even if such an ideological critique were true (and obviously I find Hitchens unpersuasive on this count as well), it wouldn't get him where he wants to go, because the crucial question - whether the original experience itself is real; whether the now-absent lover still loves her, and whether he exists at all - would remain unanswered, and indeed unaddressed.

The Politics of Fear

Color me underwhelmed by the social science research cited by John Judis in this article, which purports to show how sub-rational responses associated with the fear of mortality explain the political success of George W. Bush specifically, and social conservatism more generally, in the wake of 9/11. On the one hand, it seems unsurprising to the point of banality to suggest that a heightened awareness of one's own mortality can increase the attraction of religious traditionalism, in-group solidarity, and so forth. On the other hand, the specific examples Judis cites to demonstrate how these psycho-political tendencies have impacted the politics of the last six years seem tissue-thin:

For instance, because worldview defense increases hostility toward other races, religions, nations, and political systems, it helps explain the rage toward France and Germany that erupted prior to the Iraq war, as well as the recent spike in hostility toward illegal immigrants. Also central to worldview defense is the protection of tradition against social experimentation, of community values against individual prerogatives ... and of religious dictates against secular norms. For many conservatives, this means opposition to abortion and gay marriage. This may well explain why family values became more salient in 2004--a year in which voters were supposed to be unusually focused on foreign policy--than it had been from 1992 through 2000. Indeed, from 2001 to 2004, polls show an increase in opposition to abortion and gay marriage, along with a growing religiosity. According to Gallup, the percentage of voters who believed abortion should be "illegal in all circumstances" rose from 17 percent in 2000 to 20 percent in 2002 and would still be at 19 percent in 2004. Even church attendance by atheists, according to one poll, increased from 3 to 10 percent from August to November 2001.

Moving backward point by point, there's no evidence that the post-9/11 spike in church attendance persisted beyond a very narrow window of time. On an issue where polls vary as wildly as they do on abortion, a three percentage-point swing would seem to be at most barely meaningful, and probably just statistical noise. Maybe the debate over gay marriage was more salient in 2004 than 1996 because of "worldview defense" in the wake of 9/11, but Occam's Razor would suggest that a certain Massachusetts Supreme Court decision, and the predictable public backlash against judicial activism that ensued, might have had at least something to do with it. (Gay marriage wasn't much of an issue in the '02 midterms, you'll recall, when "worldview defense" should have been at its height.)

The rising hostility toward illegal aliens sounds like a better example of what Judis's researchers are talking about, since immediately after 9/11 there was a spike in the percentage of Americans who suggested that we should admit fewer immigrants every year. But by the time immigration surfaced as a major political controversy, in the autumn of last year, the numbers had settled back to around pre-9/11 levels, which suggests that the salience of the issue lately has far more to do with normal politics - specifically, voter hostility to a sweeping immigration reform proposal championed by none other than President Bush - than with some atavistic hangover from September 11.

Finally, I don't know how much outright "rage" there was toward France and Germany - I think it was more a question of people jumping at the chance to crack jokes about effete, weaselly Europeans - but sure, the whole "freedom fries," pouring-out-French-wine business was dumb and chauvinistic, so I'll give that one to Judis. It doesn't change the fact that much of his piece seems like typical liberal heavy breathing about how certain voter preferences - for security over liberty, and tradition over experimentation - are illegitimate and dangerous because they tend to favor conservatives, and because they helped George W. Bush win re-election.

The Mall of Mecca

Just "steps away from the holy mosque.” With a "spectacular view of the Ka’abah.” Cartier, Starbucks and Tiffany have already signed leases.

As Michael Linton writes, it's not as strange as it sounds (to me, at least). But it's still strange.

The Political-Theological Problem; Or, "A Whiff of Nativism"

On the question of whether the separation of church and state should be extended to the separation of religion and politics, I wrote that "Andrew misunderstands American history, American religion, and the intersection thereof," and accused him of "trying apply a continental model of faith and politics to a context where that model has never applied, and so and so forth." He responds:

His argument is weak, which is why, I suppose, he feels the need to grace it with a whiff of nativism ... If someone thinks I'm wrong about a country I wasn't born in but have lived in my entire adult life, then please say why I'm wrong. Don't play the "you weren't born here" card, however guilefully.

The "and so and so forth" in my original point was intended as a suggestion that I have said why I think that Andrew's wrong, at length and ad nauseum, in many other places, and didn't see the point of rehashing the arguments again. For what it's worth, you can find my brief against what I take to be Andrew's vision of secular politics elucidated in this review essay, this exchange with Damon Linker, and a host of blog posts (see here or here or here or here; I'm sure I've written others as well).

But for the sake of debate, let's take up Andrew's latest salvo:

Continue reading "The Political-Theological Problem; Or, "A Whiff of Nativism"" »

All For Secularism

Andrew:

I suppose it is worth noting that Sam Brownback's recitation of the "All for Jesus" line is a quote from Mother Teresa that he apparently deploys in his stump speech regularly. It isn't his original formulation but he uses it to describe his political motivation. It is the core of his political message. In a religious context, it is a vulgar but completely legitimate expression of faith. In a political context in a secular society, it is a toxin that will eventually corrode civil discourse into sectarian warfare. Which is, of course, what the Christianists want. They have the biggest sect, after all.

Yes, indeed: Today, 15 percent of the vote at the Iowa Straw Poll; tomorrow, majoritarian theocratic tyranny. (Hitler came to power by democratic means, you know ...)

I would go on, but it would just be the usual tedious argument about how Andrew misunderstands American history, American religion, and the intersection thereof, and how he's trying apply a continental model of faith and politics to a context where that model has never applied, and so and so forth. Instead, I'll punt to Larison:

Sullivan’s larger point is worth keeping in mind: so long as it remains nicely separated from anything involving real life, confined to an irrelevant private sphere of “religion” that need never include venturing outside beyond the front door, religious faith is fine, albeit a bit crude for the high-minded doubt-filled pundit, but once it moves into the public sphere it is poisonous and vile. Devotion to the Lord, once it escapes the safe environs of the closet, becomes an acid that destroys the bonds of the political community. That is what Sullivan and other such “skeptical” conservatives believe about religion. Religious conservatives would do well to remember this whenever they are tempted to entertain sympathy for the appeals of the “skeptics” to reason and moderation.

I would only add that I think the sentence "it is a vulgar but completely legitimate expression of faith," with its snobbish overtones and arm's-length distaste for Mother Teresa (!), is the most unfortunate - and revealing - part of the whole post.

Update: A bit more - okay, a lot more - here.

The Latin Mass (II)

Rod Dreher's thoughts are here. Among other things, he writes:

I don't understand how it is that the Latin mass can be something that nobody but the tiniest sliver of Catholics want, but it can also be a nuclear bomb that obliterates the Catholic Church. Benedict is making a slight accomodation to help a certain number of Catholics who have endured a lot of very, very difficult times, and who are in many cases making extraordinary sacrifices to keep the faith. I don't understand why making the Tridentine mass more widely available should be interpreted as a move designed to force non-traditionalists out of the Church. If the Pope were withdrawing the Paul VI mass and replacing it with the old mass, they'd have a point. But he's not; he's only offering more choices to the faithful, within the Church's continuing tradition. And that's wrong ... why?

Downes' point about the pope's latest move exacerbating the factionalizing of contemporary Catholicism is more on point, but it says more about Downes' lack of paying attention these past decades than it does about the pope. Many engaged Catholics of the left and the right already parish-shop. Everybody knows which parishes in a given diocese have the reputation for being orthodox, and which have the reputation for being progressive. It shouldn't be that way, I recognize, but that's how it's shaken out since the Council. The divisions Downes sees coming have been with us for some time now. True, most Catholics continue on at their parish, and probably don't get involved with the faith at the level of caring overmuch whether the pastor is orthodox or progressive. But is that a good thing? In most of the parishes I was involved in as a Catholic, peace was kept because the priests/deacons avoided talking about controversial aspects of Catholic teaching.

I agree with all of this, and - just to be clear - I don't think that the slight damage that may be done the tattered unity of American Catholicism outweighs the benefits of restoring a much-beloved liturgy that probably never should have been restricted in the first place, and that will enhance the religious devotion of many thousands of faithful Catholics, most of whom are not nutty Hutton Gibson types but sincere, ordinary believers who merely want to worship God in the most elevated manner they know. I just find myself very, very weary of the divisions in the American Catholic Church, of which the liturgical division is just one manifestation, and which make it so very hard to just be a ordinary Catholic, orthodox and American at the same time. (Not that Christianity is supposed to be easy, of course ...)

Jody Bottum wrote a long essay on Catholic culture in America last year, in which he suggested that "one can find at least hints that Catholicism has finally begun to leave the deadlocked past behind." I liked the essay and the sentiment, and I certainly hope that he's right, but I don't always see it. The post-Vatican II battle has cooled off, yes, but sometimes it feels like there's an awful lot of scorched earth left behind where nothing green is growing.

The Latin Mass

As a self-identified conservative Catholic who's regularly appalled by the state of the liturgy in the American Church, I'm generally sympathetic to those cheering the reinstatement (or, since it was never technically banned, the promotion) of the Tridentine Rite. However, the argument raised in this op-ed (via Andrew) speaks to some of my own fears:

It’s easy enough to see where this is going: same God, same church, but separate camps, each with an affinity for vernacular or Latin, John XXIII or Benedict XVI. Smart, devout, ambitious Catholics — ecclesial young Republicans, home-schoolers, seminarians and other shock troops of the faith — will have their Mass. The rest of us — a lumpy assortment of cafeteria Catholics, guilty parents, peace-’n’-justice lefties, stubborn Vatican II die-hards — will have ours. We’ll have to prod our snoozing pewmates when to sit and stand; they’ll have to rein in their zealots.

And we probably won’t see one another on Sunday mornings, if ever.

I suppose I would fall into the author's "smart, devout, ambitious Catholic" camp, but I also think that shifting to the vernacular was the right decision overall, however badly implemented; I think that the attempt to increase lay participation in the Mass, however dreadful many of its fruits, was a necessary and long-overdue step in a Church that still has a serious problem with clericalism; and I'm troubled by the self-marginalizing tendencies among many of the people who share my understanding of what Catholic orthodoxy is supposed to mean. I admire what home-schooling parents do, but I don't want to home-school my kids; I wish more people went to confession and fewer people went up to Communion, but I also want to attend a church where the lukewarm and the zealous can feel comfortable sitting side-by-side in the pews; I understand the impulse behind Ave Maria University and all the other redoubts of neo-orthodoxy, but I'm wary of the separatism they embody. And I hate the polarization in the Church that makes me feel like I have to choose between what the op-ed accurately describes as the listlessness of the typical suburban Mass on the one hand - thick with "parents sedating children with Cheerios; priests preaching refrigerator-magnet truisms; amateur guitar strumming that was lame in 1973" - and what often seems like a strident, more-Catholic-than-the-Pope zealotry on the other.

God's Comeback?

This WSJ piece, on the revival of religion in Europe, dovetails perfectly with my argument in the last Atlantic that European life - and particularly European politics - may be partially desecularizing (even as a mass secularism rises in America). Which is reason enough to be suspicious of it: Every writer should be wary of arguments that coincide too neatly with his own. So yes, there are real signs that faith may be making something of a comeback on the continent, but it's also worth remembering that Christianity in particular has dwindled so far in recent years that it has nowhere to go but up - and that journalists and intellectuals have been writing organized religion's obituaries for so many years that they're hungry for anything resembling a trend in the opposite direction. Which means that any "here comes God" analysis on this front, including my own, needs to be taken with at least a grain of salt.

Continue reading "God's Comeback?" »

God is Not Great Is Not Great

You can find my contribution to the great Hitchens debate in the latest Claremont Review of Books.

Secularism and Marxism

Ruminating on whether the new mass secularism is really all that new, Jonah writes:

... both Waldman and Ross seem to be ignoring a fairly large elephant in the corner: Communists — or Marxists, doctrinaire socialists, dialectical materialists, whatever you want to call them. Here was a very tribal bunch. They were dedicated to the overthrow of religion and religious opiates. They protected themselves in tribal fashion in academia, government and politics. They defined themselves largely by what they hated. Etc, etc. Indeed, it's worth remembering that both Marx and Engels came to their Communism via their atheism rather than the other way around (Josh Muravchik's book Heaven on Earth makes this point vividly).

Oh, definitely - but it's important to distinguish the American experience from the European here. While Communism was certainly a tribal phenomenon in the American context, it was never a mass phenomenon in the way that the new secularism seems to be, or seems capable of becoming. It was an intellectual tribe, but not a political demographic. In Europe, by contrast, Marxism was a mass movement, as were various other anti-clericalist ideologies. That's why my Atlantic piece argues that the rise of a politically-assertive secular demographic in American life, however narrow its appeal, represents an unexpected case of continental convergence, in which America's religious politics are likely to look at least somewhat more like Europe's going forward. (And vice versa, I suggest, given the culture-war battles provoked by the rise of Islam across the Atlantic.)

Though it's certainly possible, as a commenter points out, that if the religious right fragments (and the Republican Party goes into the political wilderness), the nascent mass secularism will fragment as well, and what seems to be an anti-clerical dawn in American life will prove to be a false one. At the very least, there's going to be ebb and flow in the culture wars, and since we've just experienced a high tide in the Bush years it's likely that passions will cool off somewhat in the short run. Still, my sense - based both on the data and on my own personal experience - is that mass secularism has put down sturdier roots in American soil of late than anyone would have expected, say, thirty years ago, and that it's both something new and something that's here to stay.

The New Secularism

Paul Waldman, in the Prospect:

In 1984, 7.3 percent of respondents answered "none" when the General Social Survey asked what their religious preference was. Twenty years later, nearly twice as many, 14.3 percent, gave the same answer. Of course, the number of non-religious people will varies depending on how you ask the question. (For instance, the National Election Studies asks respondents whether religion plays an important part of their lives; in 2004, 23 percent said no.) But however you define them, no one doubts that their numbers are increasing.

So the question now is whether non-believers will, in large numbers, begin to define themselves as a tribe of their own ... Whatever the answer is, the possibility does seem real for secularism to achieve a new awakening of its own as a political and social movement.

This dovetails - unsurprisingly, since we're looking at some of the same data - with my piece in the latest Atlantic, which you could read for the price of, say, two lunches at Subway if you felt like taking advantage of this only-for-blog-readers subscription deal. (But no pressure.) The argument, in short, is that just as the elite-level secularization of the 1960s and '70s (in the intelligentsia, the Courts, and the Democratic Party) produced backlash in the form of the religious right, so now that backlash has bred its own backlash, in the form of a mass secularism whose attitudes toward religion, politics, and church-state separation are more European than anything we've seen before in American political life. This, not the supposed right-wing religious revival that conservatives champion and liberals dread, is the newest new thing in American political life, and the trend that's likely to have the most impact on the culture wars over the next decade or so.

That Is Not What I Said

Andrew, on my post about Linker, Rorty, the religious right and liberalism:

Ross responds by arguing that Richard John Neuhaus and his theocon friends are only interested in persuasion and changing the culture, not using the levers of politics and the law to insist on their religious convictions. Please.

Please yourself. I said no such thing. I said that Linker sometimes seems to oppose both political action based on religious conviction and non-political attempts to Catholicize (or Rortyize, or whatever) the culture through proselytization and persuasion. I also said, as I've said many times before, that I disagree on both counts: I think that Americans should be free to proselytize privately and that they should feel comfortable using "the levers of politics" (I love how Andrew makes the democratic process sound sinister) to promote policies that spring from religious convictions. And obviously Richard John Neuhaus is interested in doing both; only an idiot would claim otherwise, and I don't know why Andrew is mistaking me for one.

The Pope and the Rabbi

Religious dialogue, the way it ought to be. (hat tip: Amy Welborn)

Linker, Rorty and the Theocons

I've been following Matt's back-and-forth with Damon Linker over Linker's interpretation of Richard Rorty with interest, not least because what Matt sees as Linker's misunderstanding of Rorty and Rawlsian liberalism seems to me to be linked to some of Linker's arguments about the "theocons."

Continue reading "Linker, Rorty and the Theocons" »

Dying Into Life

"Faith is not a state of mind but an action in the world, a movement toward the world."

Read the whole thing.

Science Has Spoken, The Case Is Closed

Two years ago - has it really been that long? - I wrote a quick piece for TNR Online arguing that conservatives who embrace "intelligent design" are playing into their enemies' hands. Here's the nut graf:

In the long run, though, intelligent design will probably prove a political boon to liberals, and a poisoned chalice for conservatives. Like the evolution wars in the early part of the last century, the design debate offers liberals the opportunity to portray every scientific battle--today, stem-cell research, "therapeutic" cloning, and end-of-life issues; tomorrow, perhaps, large-scale genetic engineering--as a face-off between scientific rigor and religious fundamentalism. There's already a public perception, nurtured by the media and by scientists themselves, that conservatives oppose the "scientific" position on most bioethical issues. Once intelligent design runs out of steam, leaving its conservative defenders marooned in a dinner-theater version of Inherit the Wind, this liberal advantage is likely to swell considerably.

I think this argument hold up rather well, and I thought of it while reading Jerry Coyne's attack on Sam Brownback, which contains various unobjectionable points about the nature of science and so forth, but then arrives at this conclusion:

What happens if scientific truth conflicts with a politician's "spiritual truth"? This is not a theoretical problem, but a real one, as we see in debates about stem-cell research, abortion, genetic engineering, and global warming. Ignorance about evolution may be widespread, but it's not nearly as dangerous as dogmatic certainty about the real world based on faith alone.

Uh-huh. I'm very curious to know what the "scientific truth" about abortion, stem-cell research and genetic engineering happens to be. (Somehow I assume it tracks remarkably well with liberal policy prescriptions on those issues.) But here's the thing - whenever conservatives attack a scientific consensus because they don't like its moral and political implications and don't have adequate firepower to carry the day (which the intelligent-design crowd doesn't, to my mind, in its battle against Darwinian theory), they make it that much easier for folks like Coyne to wrap their own moral convictions in the mantel of absolute scientific truth and caricature anyone who disagrees with them as "anti-science" yahoos. And you don't win many debates, in a society as mad for technological progress as ours, if you find yourself cast as an enemy of Science.

Just something for the Sam Brownbacks and Mike Huckabees to consider ...

Quote For the Day

I'm no great fan of Stephen Schwartz's politics - other neoconservatives are accused of being Trotskyists; he seems to actually be one - but this, on Paul Berman on Tariq Ramadan, is a pretty good line:

Berman’s opus appeared like an iceberg in the middle of the Potomac: immense, dismal, unexplainable, melting before one’s eyes.

The whole thing is here. (hat tip: Andrew)

Why Are Americans So Religious?

Because we're geographically mobile and ethnically diverse, says Brink Lindsey. Because our families are stronger than Europe's, says Mary Eberstadt. My own preferred explanation - which is doubtless a small part of the pantomime - is theological rather than sociological: Christianity has thrived in the United States by adapting its theology to the habits and mores of the American people, in a way that religion in Europe hasn't managed to do. America is an Emersonian country, and its religious innovators have invented an Emersonian form of Christianity - which some might suggest isn't Christianity at all, of course - that's nicely tailored to the broader culture in which it swims. Call it gnosticism, or Moral Therapeutic Deism, or just plain Americanism - it means Elaine Pagels and Karen Armstrong for highbrow audiences and T.D. Jakes and Joyce Meyer for the masses, and it works.

If Christianity in America meant the Christianity of Benedict XVI - or even the Christianity of C.S. Lewis, for that matter - I bet that about 15 percent of the country would be practicing believers. But you don't get Benedict or even Lewis from most pulpits; you get socially-conservative Emersonianism in Red America and socially-liberal Emersonianism in Blue America. This wouldn't fly in the European cultural context, but maybe there's a form of organized religion that would - its theology just hasn't been invented yet.

Mormonism and Democracy

Speaking of faith and reason ... every year, twice a year, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life holds a conference for journalists in Key West, featuring all sorts of fascinating speakers as well as a really nice beach. I went last winter, but unfortunately wasn't able to attend this spring's session; happily, they post transcripts online, and if you're looking for a lively discussion of Mormonism in America, I highly recommend browsing through this talk (and the Q&A that follows) given by Richard Lyman Bushman, a professor at Columbia, a Mormon, and a biographer of Joseph Smith.

(More thoughts, and some excerpts, from Mollie at Get Religion.)

Huckabee on Evolution

Roll the tape:

Of this, and Jamie Kirchick's suggestion that Huckabee believes in "fairy tales," Matt writes:

My understanding is that Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama all believe that Jesus Christ died for the sins of mankind and then rose from the dead. This strikes me as a hell of a tall tale. But, obviously, it's not what you'd call a rare view in the United States and if we're going to start writing off politicians who believe in "fairy tales" of this sort there's going to be nobody left.

I like Huckabee, and to a certain extent I liked his answer, but I don't think this will quite fly. I understand that atheists and agnostics have a vested interest in arguing that all religious beliefs are equally absurd - that there's no difference between believing n the God of Abraham and the flying spaghetti monster, say, or between a belief in the possibility of miracles and the belief that the Genesis account is literally true; and that the only reason the Book of Mormon looks more implausible than the New Testament is because the New Testament is older, and so forth. But serious Christians should reject that view (for reasons that I think should be self-evident, though I'm sure I'll have reason to elaborate on them at a later date), and within Christendom there's a pretty big distinction between the faith-and-reason crowd and the kind of fideism that Huckabee seemed to be gesturing at last night. I don't necessarily object to a President who claims to be agnostic on evolution, and I think Huckabee's point that "I’m not planning on writing the curriculum for an eighth-grade science book ... I’m asking for the opportunity to be president of the United States" is basically correct. But all things being equal, I would prefer a President who can reconcile his belief in the truth of Christianity with what seems to me to be the only conclusion that reason allows for at the moment - namely, the common ancestry of life on Earth.

What Is Secularism?

I can't recommend Razib's enormously intelligent post on religion, secularization, and various associated topics highly enough, and Reihan's (somewhat more personal) response is likewise thought-provoking. I'd only quibble with Razib's remark that "Europeans are post-Christian, but not predominantly 'secular,' if that means lack of belief in God and a 'spirit or life force'" - not because he's wrong that a widespread "supernaturalism" prevails even (or especially) in the absence of organized religion, but because I think that it's worth employing a definition of secularism that doesn't conflate it with atheism.

In the forthcoming, not-yet-online Atlantic, for instance, I have a short piece analyzing the rise of mass secularism in America, which draws on this paper by Michael Hout and Claude Fischer on the remarkable growth in the percentage of Americans with "no religious preference." Hout and Fischer attribute this growth, in part, to people self-defining against organized religion because of its association with conservative politics, but (like Razib) they shy away from calling this phenomenon "secularism" because many of the "no religious preference" types retain supernatural beliefs. But I tend to think that the term "secularism" is actually most useful, and exact, when applied to a political hostility to organized religion of precisely the kind that Hout and Fischer are documenting, rather than to a more general disbelief in the supernatural. "Secularist" should be synonymous with "anti-clericalist," in other words, rather than with "unbeliever." (It seems like a poor definition of secularist that excludes Deists like Thomas Paine and Voltaire - or that excludes Sam Harris, for that matter, because of his forays into Eastern mysticism.)

There are two strains of secularism, I would argue, which are usually intertwined but philosophically distinct: A soft secularism that argues for a legal separation of church and politics - no school prayer, no federal funds for churches, etc - and a hard secularism that militates for a complete separation of religion and politics, and shades easily into hostility toward organized religion in a general. But neither form precludes private belief in the supernatural. A perfectly "secular" society would be defined not by universal atheism, but by a religion-free politics in the short run, and probably a long-run "decoupling," as Razib puts it, of supernatural beliefs from religious institutions.

The dictionary, of course, tries to have it both ways, like the squish it is.

Photo by Flickr user Dhammza used under a Creative Commons license.

Memento Mori

What better day than Memorial Day to take some time and digest Jody Bottum's thought-provoking essay on "Death and Politics", in the latest First Things? (It's just the thing to kick back with after the barbecue ...)

Invincible Ignorance

I'm sure there will be worse reviews of Benedict XVI's Jesus of Nazareth, but it's hard to imagine there will be many that are more annoying that Lisa Miller's, in Newsweek. Here's a representative passage:

In a discussion elsewhere in "Jesus of Nazareth," Benedict goes to lengths to show that when Jesus said, "The Kingdom of God is at hand," he didn't mean the apocalypse. What he meant, the pope writes, is that "God is acting now—this is the hour when God is showing himself in history as its Lord." This interpretation may be profound and in keeping with Benedict's Christ-centered message; it is not, many scholars would say, historically accurate.

Ah - those "many scholars." All honor and glory be theirs! There is, indeed, an interpretation of Jesus of Nazareth's life that holds that when he said "the Kingdom of God is at hand," he meant "the end of the world is coming, prepare to be raptured!" But it is by no means the consensus view, and the Pope - who has, one might venture, read slightly more recent Biblical scholarship than Lisa Miller, "religion editor" of Newsweek though she may be - ought to be able to argue with this interpretation without being accused of painting over "historical accuracy" in the service of a fairy tale - er, "Christ-centered message." (Particular by a writer whose summary, elsewhere in the piece, of recent historical-Jesus forays starts with the Jesus Seminar and ends with the Jesus tomb.)

And then we have this:

"Jesus of Nazareth," then, will not bring unbelievers into the fold, but courting skeptics has never been Benedict's priority. Nor will his portrait join the lengthy list of Jesus biographies so eagerly consumed by the non-orthodox—the progressive Protestants and "cafeteria Catholics" who seek the truth about Jesus in noncanonical places like the Gnostic Gospels. Moderates may take "Jesus of Nazareth" as something of a corrective to fundamentalism because it sees the Bible as "true" without insisting on its being factual. Mostly, though, "Jesus of Nazareth" will please a small group of Christians who are able simultaneously to hold post-Enlightenment ideas about the value of rationality and scientific inquiry together with the conviction that the events described in the Gospels are real.

All the other Christians, of course, will be too busy snake-handling, blowing up abortion clinics, and beating their wives to read it. Plus they're illiterate.

(More in this vein here and here.)

Falwell vs. MLK

Via Matt, here's Michelle Goldberg on Jerry Falwell:

It's hard to believe now, when evangelicals and fundamentalists make up the most organized bloc in American politics, but before the Moral Majority a person's churchgoing habits didn't tell you much about how they voted, and politicians weren't expected to make lavish displays of their piety. The notion of church/state separation, now widely regarded by Republicans as part of a devious war against Christianity, was a widely shared principle. Falwell himself once denounced preachers who got involved in governance, though not out of devotion to a secular republic: As a committed segregationist, he decried the work of Martin Luther King Jr, saying, "Preachers are not called to be politicians, but to be soul winners."

Two points. First, before the 1970s, whether a person went to church didn't tell you that much about their voting habits, but where they went to church certainly did. Is the separation of church and state really more imperiled today than it was in, say, the 1920s, when Catholic Democrats and Republican Protestants did battle over whose interpretation of Christian teaching on alcohol should be the law of the land? Or in 1900, when William Jennings Bryan, he of the "Social Gospel", ran for President against William "let's Christianize the Filipinos" McKinley? Seriously?

Second, isn't it a little weird that Michelle Goldberg basically seems to agree with Jerry Falwell's critique of Martin Luther King?

The Black Legend

Sherwin Nuland, reviewing a book about dissection in the latest TNR, writes:

A few weeks before reading Katharine Park's intriguing volume on the early history of anatomical dissection, I found myself at a luncheon where alumni of a large Ivy League university had gathered in the interest of educational sodality and fund-raising, a variety of rite commonly favored by organizations of aging graduates and their alma maters. Perhaps to prepare the mood for the postprandial speaker--a visiting art historian about to discuss the works of Leonardo da Vinci--one of the group's officers was holding forth at my table on a thesis so consistent with common preconceptions about the intellectual backwardness of the Catholic Church that it always finds a receptive audience. With a forcefulness honed by decades as a trial lawyer, he was regaling his attentive listeners with accusations of the obstinacy with which the church opposed human dissection during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This, he pointed out … had necessitated all kinds of clandestine and gruesome activities on the part of those whose aim was to study the human body, whether for scientific purposes or because they were artists of the caliber of Leonardo, Titian, and Raphael. Not only was medical knowledge thus stunted in its advancement … but such opposition necessitated the well-known horrors of grave-robbing in order to obtain cadavers for study, an unnatural activity that marred the image of the profession of healing until late in the nineteenth century.

Of course, Nuland points out, this is all hogwash:

Continue reading "The Black Legend" »

Kinsley on Hitchens

Matt's right that Michael Kinsley's review of God Is Not Great offers some profound insights into how the the media-public intellectual complex works. It's also a textbook example of how that complex works. First, Christopher Hitchens writes a polemic that ranges across religion, religious history, philosophy and science. Then, the editors of the New York Times Book Review decide to commission a review from Michael Kinsley, presumably because both Hitchens and Kinsley are well-known figures in the media-public intellectual world and "Kinsley on Hitchens" has a nice ring to it. Never mind that Kinsley has never evinced any expertise or even any particular interest in the topics and arguments that Hitchens is covering - it's Kinsley on Hitchens! How can they go wrong?

And sure enough, Kinsley has produced a review that, because he's a smart guy and a good writer, has some interesting things to say about Hitchens' career, but has absolutely nothing of interest to say about the book itself. Indeed, the review is essentially a felicitously-written plot summary, which lists some of Hitchens' arguments and deliberately shrugs off analysis. For instance:

The book is full of logical flourishes and conundrums, many of them entertaining to the nonbeliever. How could Christ have died for our sins, when supposedly he also did not die at all? Did the Jews not know that murder and adultery were wrong before they received the Ten Commandments, and if they did know, why was this such a wonderful gift? On a more somber note, how can the “argument from design” (that only some kind of “intelligence” could have designed anything as perfect as a human being) be reconciled with the religious practice of female genital mutilation, which posits that women, at least, as nature creates them, are not so perfect after all? Whether sallies like these give pause to the believer is a question I can’t answer.

But you're reviewing the bloody book! Should they give the believer pause? Has Hitchens devastated religious faith, as he plainly thinks he has? I'm glad he's entertaining - but is he persuasive? Does his book confirm you in your nonbelief, or leave questions unaddressed? Hitchens takes these questions seriously - shouldn't the reviewer, whether an atheist, a believer, or somewhere in between, have the decency to do the same?

Ah, but it's Kinsley on Hitchens. Brilliant!

Update: The line I bolded doesn't appear in the IHT version, which I linked to above, but only in the Times itself.

Be Not Afraid?

Eve Tushnet, in a post from a while back, had some thoughts that seem relevant to the "should atheists envy believers" question:

Continue reading "Be Not Afraid?" »

God in the Dock

Credit where credit is due - Christopher Hitchens seems willing to argue the question of God's greatness or lack thereof anytime, anywhere. Here's an account of his debate with Al Sharpton, which sounds (as you might expect) like fine entertainment that left something to be desired on the intellectual side of things; here, more promisingly, is the beginning of an extended exchange between Hitchens and Douglas Wilson, hosted by Christianity Today, on the question "Is Christianity Good for the World?" (Wilson is also blogging his way through God is Not Great on his own site.)

Of course, what I'd really like to see is a Hitchens-Daniel Larison face-off ...

The Fortunate Faithful?

Matt sides with Jon Chait; Ezra sides with Karl Rove. I take Matt's point that the atheist's self-proclaimed envy for the believer's faith is often a form of condescension, along the lines of saying "I wish I could believe in your crazy religion, you gullible fool, but I'm just too smart for that." On the other hand, I think there are circumstances where the condescension fades into the background: It's hard to see, for instance, why an atheist parent trying desperately to cope with the loss of a child wouldn't envy a Christian who believes in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting, even if that envy has an element of condescension woven in.

Of course, the death of a child is an extreme circumstance, and in the daily round of eating, sleeping, working and copulating, it's possible to make the case that - assuming there is in fact no God - the consolation that religious believers get from their creed is outweighed by the inconvenience, repression and sacrifice their belief system requires. (There's also the fact that a non-trivial number of believers, as one of Ezra's commenters points out, are as likely to be freaked out by their experiences with the numinous as comforted by them.) In the Western context, there's the question of hell as well: If the possibility of eternal damnation seems more frightening to you than the possibility of extinction, then you have less reason to envy an orthodox Christian his belief system. The moralistic therapeutic deism that passes for Christianity for many Americans, of course, is more self-evidently enviable - though also more self-evidently ridiculous. (There's that condescension!)

And then there's the variance in religious teachings to consider. Were I not a Christian, for instance, I'm pretty sure I would envy Christians their beliefs about the afterlife, since the survival of consciousness and the resurrection of the body more or less matches up with my deepest longings concerning what awaits after death. (This correlation is one of the many reasons, of course, why I am a Christian to begin with.) I'm less sure that I'd envy someone who believes in reincarnation, or the annihilation of the self in some pantheistic sea, or some of the other religious notions about last things, because I find these concepts barely more consoling than the materialist attempts to reason away the fear of death - which is to say, not consoling at all.

The Fortunate Believer

Of Karl Rove's statement (according to Christopher Hitchens, at least) that he's "not fortunate enough to be a person of faith," Jon Chait writes:

The quote itself is far more interesting than the fact, which doesn't surprise me in the least. If you don't believe in God, then why would you think believers are "fortunate" for putting their faith in a nonexistent higher being? You wouldn't. Yet Rove, for political reasons, must genuflect to the notion that religious people are morally superior to atheists. The line perfectly encapsulates the condescending and way Republican elites have manipulated religion.

I don't think calling religious believers "fortunate" is the same thing as calling them "morally superior." I've heard plenty of atheists remark that they envy religious people their faith in God, an afterlife, the beneficence of the universe, or what-have-you. This sentiment isn't universal, obviously (see Hitchens himself for a counter-example), but I think it's perfectly reasonable for someone who's convinced that life is a meaningless round of pleasure, pain, and Machiavellian campaigning that ends when you die to feel a little envious of people who believe something slightly more optimistic.

What Is Truth?

Like Andrew, I'm withholding comment on Christopher Hitchens' anti-God broadside, since I have a review of it forthcoming in the next Claremont Review of Books. One thing I didn't get a chance to take up in the review, though, is the famous quote from Gotthold Lessing that Hitchens uses as an epigraph for one of his chapters, a quote that also serves as the epigraph for Andrew's entire book. It follows below:

Continue reading "What Is Truth?" »

Quotes For The Day

"The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist."

- Philip Roth, "Writing American Fiction," 1963

"James E. McGreevey, the nation's first openly gay governor, has become an Episcopalian and wants to become a priest in that faith, according to a published report ...

McGreevey, 49, shocked the nation in August 2004 by proclaiming himself "a gay American" who had an extramarital affair with a male aide, and that he would resign that November.

He has applied to the General Theological Seminary in Manhattan and is awaiting word of whether he has been accepted to the program there, the newspaper said, citing two people familiar with McGreevey’s plans who declined to be identified because McGreevey has not formally announced his plans."

- New York Daily News, May 2, 2007