Swarming the Pub(l)ic Square:
A continuing survey of the farce; or, where the folks are given the last word; or, a pointed laugh
“The people swarmed on the public square
And pointed laughingly at me,
And I was filled with shame and fear.”
–Alexander Pushkin, Boris Godunov
Contents
The Situation is Very Good, it is Hopeless
Irrepressible Hope
ast November, introducing the inaugural issue of the Brandywine Review of Faith & International Affairs in his own journal First Things, Father Richard John Neuhaus noted that “a publication marked ‘Volume 1, Number 1’ is always bracing evidence of irrepressible hope.” The publication of our own “Volume 1, Number 1” gives us good cause to reflect on Fr. Neuhaus’s comment, both for what it says about journals of opinion and for what it says about hope. “Bracing” is one of Neuhaus’s favorite words, and he isn’t sparing in his use of it. “Bracing stuff, that,” is a phrase often seen in his monthly columns in First Things. For all its Chestertonian gusto, Neuhaus’s imprimatur “bracing stuff” is often a rhetorical genuflection toward something transcendentally good, but while the reader’s gaze is directed upward, crucial questions go unasked. Neuhaus’s comments regarding the advent of a new journal of Christian opinion are significant in that he gestures towards the transcendent good of “irrepressible hope” while at the same time avoiding the important question, which is: Hope in what?
Certainly the proliferation of all manner of journals of opinion (such as this one) addressing themselves in some manner to the “crisis of this age” is evidence of a need for hope in something. The perception has been growing for some time that the order of Western Civilization is more vulnerable now than at any time since the Protestant Reformation: threats from without coinciding with threats from within seem, at times, to portend coming disaster. Enlightenment liberalism—the new consensus of “public truth” which emerged from the Reformation—is widely viewed by orthodox Christians (though not only orthodox Christians) as diseased: the principle of the autonomous individual having resulted in the widespread western sins of sexual licentiousness, abortion on demand, gross materialist consumerism, and the denigration of any serious effort towards religious faith. At the same time, the liberal western order is beset from without by increasingly aggressive competing ideologies, most notably, radical Islam.
This situation puts religious conservatives in a difficult quandary. On the one hand, continued criticism of the liberal order feels like an act of disloyalty to the entire western tradition, which is still, after all, the tradition that Christianity built. Moreover, liberalism remains the only viable “public truth,” and so continued dissent becomes a self-imposed exile into the wilderness of public irrelevance. But on the other hand, strengthening and restoring the liberal order feels, for the orthodox Christian, like giving aid and comfort to the enemy, for that is what liberalism has often become to the traditional Christian conception of what is good, true, and beautiful. It is this situation that Neuhaus has described as “the divided soul of American liberalism.”
J. Bottum, a friend of Neuhaus’s and former editor at First Things recently put the problem this way:
[As] liberalism’s triumph worked itself out over the last two centuries, certain people have felt the desire to get off the boat. For some in America, for instance, the impetus was the disaster of socialist economics. For others it was an inability to stomach abortion. For others it was crime rates. For others it was euthanasia. For a few recent converts it is biotechnology and cloning. But, for all of them, a point is reached where they decide, “This is where I say, ‘Enough.’ This is a good place to stop.”
The problem with this approach, according to Bottum, is that “each disembarking group proves to have been seeking not to undo modernity but to freeze it at a particular moment—a moment when certain vestigial elements left over from the premodern world kept at bay the worst effects of modern times. And yet, lacking a coherent unmodern philosophy, we can offer no compelling reasons for modernity to stop where we wish it to.” Thus, the argument goes, once the liberal motor of individual autonomy and choice is started, its momentum is too powerful to stop with merely passive “freezing” strategies; a stronger, opposing, premodern force must be brought to bear.
Healing the Divided Soul
Neuhaus and First Things are in the vanguard of a powerful movement to reconcile the disparate halves of this divided American soul, but, perhaps surprisingly, not on the grounds of a “coherent unmodern philosophy.” Rather, Neuhaus founds his restoration project on the ground of liberalism itself. Importantly to Neuhaus, this project is not conceived as a “freezing” strategy; he doesn’t want to either get off of the boat or stop it altogether, but rather to steer it safely back to calmer waters. Liberalism is, for Neuhaus, the wayward child of Christendom, in stern need of discipline to be sure, but still loved; still of “our” bloodline.
Perhaps the most compelling and theoretically coherent voice from the forefront of this movement is that of David Walsh, a professor of politics at The Catholic University of America. Walsh’s central argument, most notably in The Growth of the Liberal Soul
, is that the liberal order bequeathed to the west by the Reformation and the Enlightenment after the break up of old Christendom contains within it sufficient resources to mount a successful resistance to liberalism’s own excesses. According to Neuhaus, of “particular note is [Walsh’s] intelligently hopeful understanding of the liberal democratic tradition and the ways in which modernity, after a century of catastrophically wrong turns, may be fulfilling its aspiration toward transcendence.”
Walsh contends that liberalism’s huge success in creating the modern world comes from its deep convictions about its own destiny and place as the only legitimate public truth; the only truth compelling enough to bind disparate factions which might otherwise make war into a unified society living at peace with itself. This “liberal construction” has functioned so fruitfully “because it embodies an authoritative moral truth that resonates with the deepest intimations of who we are.” And chief among these “intimations,” according to Walsh, is the notion that we are individuals with dignity, and that dignity demands liberty. Thus, in the political realm, liberal democracy is “the most appropriate form of government for human beings [because it is] … the form of order that speaks to our human dignity as rational, self-governing beings.”
For Walsh, the universal truth which liberalism proclaimed about the individual necessarily implies an intimation of transcendent good. In fact, without an intimation of transcendence, liberalism’s belief in the universal dignity of the individual is undermined. So, Walsh writes, the order of liberty is an “order that, not being something that can be maintained indifferently by every human type, depends for its flourishing on the capacity to evoke those qualities in its citizens that are its living foundation.” And, according to Walsh, the principle “quality” that is the living foundation of the liberal order is an openness to transcendent good, and an intentional directing of liberty towards that end.
This is the notion of “ordered liberty,” and it stands in contrast to the current understanding of liberty as unlimited license to do as one pleases. For Walsh, recent developments in the notion of liberty leave it “stripped of all intimations of direction.” The individual is thus governed by nothing but its own appetite, and then, perhaps, by the appetites of others. Walsh’s primary goal is to demonstrate that the liberal order was never intended to exist apart from openness to transcendent good and liberty ordered towards that end. For Walsh, there is hope that the liberal order itself will provide the necessary fortifications against the increasing disorder of the current western crisis. Importantly, this solution purports to resolve the dilemma of the “divided soul” because it permits one to keep one foot firmly planted in Christian orthodoxy and the other in a legitimate boosterism of liberalism over and against its non-western enemies.
Particularly since September 11, these questions have taken on added urgency. If Walsh and Neuhaus are correct and liberalism does have within it the resources to resist the slide towards dehumanization and disorder, then the self-stated goal of the Bush Administration to export liberal democracy around the world (on the strength of a muscular global economy and a muscular American military) can be viewed as a reasonable, even laudable thing. However, if the mature sins of western liberal democracies are the irresistible end point of the march of liberalism, then our policies, seen in that light, are nothing less that the sowing of future disorder and disease around the world.
Interestingly, Neuhaus and other prominently conservative Catholic intellectuals have been out front with Protestant Evangelicals in vigorous support of George Bush’s neoconservative vision of “classical liberalism” spread around the world. In this, Neuhaus and his First Things cohorts have placed themselves at odds with their own Pope.
In response to Bottum’s forebodings, Neuhaus wrote: “On days when I am tempted to resign myself to the inexorable triumph of the modernism/liberalism nexus that Bottum describes, I wonder if it might not take a catastrophic wreck, after which, with heroic labor, a chastened world repairs the damage and lays tracks in a different direction. On better days, I hold to the promise of the ever ancient, ever new, and only coherent truth that the human project cannot fail, not finally. And that because the Word became us, and by his victory we already participate in the life of the One who, by definition, cannot fail. Our circumstance is too hopeless for any lesser hope.” This sounds commendable enough, and Neuhaus is careful to hum all the correct religious notes. But his clever nonengaging-engagement with Bottum’s argument conceals a failure to distinguish carefully enough between the one who cannot fail and the “modernism/liberalism nexus.” Neuhaus’s formulation of the matter tends to exclude the possibility that the fulfillment of our one great hope in the Word may not be delivered to us through the liberal order. Thus, when Neuhaus writes of his hope in the human project that cannot fail, the returning echo is heard as hope in a liberalism which must not be allowed to fail.
For example, when President Bush said, during his New York City September 11 anniversary speech that “ours is the cause of human dignity: freedom guided by conscience, and guarded by peace. This ideal of America is the hope of all mankind. That hope drew millions to this harbor. That hope still lights our way. And the light shines in the darkness. And the darkness will not overcome it,” Neuhaus commented—while simultaneously recognizing and dismissing the danger that Bush might be confusing America with Christ—that “[Bush] understands, as many public figures have not and do not, that American virtues such as tolerance and resolve are grounded in religious, and mainly Christian, commitments.”
Here, then, is the central question: is enlightenment liberalism a legitimate reconstruction of what are essentially Christian principles of order for a pluralistic, “modern” age? or, is liberalism a deformation of those principles, destined by its internal logic of choice to slide into disorder and chaos?
Culture of Choice vs. Culture of Heredity
At this point, it might be suggested that purveyors of Christian journals of opinion and propagators of “irrepressible hope” pause to take counsel from T.S. Eliot, who cautioned us to “Wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.” For both Walsh and Neuhaus, hope is all too often hope in liberalism itself, hope in “freedom guided by conscience;” specifically, hope in what Walsh has called a “robust debate” and what Neuhaus calls the “Public Square.”
This hope proceeds along two tracks. First is the explicit project of forcing open the access door to the public square so that everyone is admitted, regardless of their faith commitments. This track can proceed on the strictly liberal basis of neutrality: liberalism’s prime directive to recognize the dignity of every individual requires that every person be given equal access to the public square—to the “marketplace of ideas”—regardless of their convictions, so long as they comply with the procedural safeguards of civility and tolerance. Therefore, Christians who take their faith commitments seriously must be entertained within the square. The second, and far more problematic track is the implicit hope that when (and if) Christians (as such) are admitted back into the public square, they will, by dint of argument and power of persuasion, be able to expand the field of “public truth” laterally and backwards in time to include an intimation of transcendent good and the ordering of liberty towards that end.
Both Neuhaus and Walsh have clearly adopted this strategy. Walsh explains, taking the issue of abortion as a prime example, that when the transcendental openness of early liberalism is allowed back into the “robust debate,” the pro-life camp will be able to argue, in sympathy with those who are pro-choice, that they too are concerned primarily with individual liberty. Abortion is bad, then, because treating a fetus as a thing which may be sacrificed for the convenience of another undermines the transcendental sanctity of all individuals which is the necessary foundation for liberty.
Last September, Neuhaus likewise gave voice to his hope that out of the intellectual confusion and contradiction of the pluralistic public square could come “a culturally potent understanding of self and community that will modify the stark antimony between freedom as the freedom to do what one ought and freedom as the freedom to do what one wants.” This understanding is made possible, Neuhaus believes, by “the prospect of individuality realized by an act of decision in obedience to a communal gift of grace.” However, this prospect “depends in very large part upon thinkers, writers, and public exemplars who persuasively propose a more compelling ideal of freedom.”
In other words, Neuhaus and Walsh are pinning a great deal of hope on the ability of Christian marketers of “a more compelling ideal of freedom” to sell their product to people who neither want nor (in their view) need it. One is tempted to say that Neuhaus wants to preserve the Protestant genie “Choice” in the Catholic lamp “Obedience.” For Neuhaus, at least, this is almost an autobiographical statement.
More critically problematic, though, for Neuhaus’s program for the recovery of order is the assumption that obedience will not be changed in any fundamental or significant way when it is hung with the accoutrements and baubles of choice. This assumption seems little more than willful blindness in the service of unlimited cultural access. For, of course, any persuasive proposal for “a more compelling ideal of freedom” must be dressed up in the clothes of choice before it is admitted to the public square. That is the price exacted by the liberal order in exchange for a neutral sphere of public activity. So even if the committed religionist is admitted on liberal grounds to the public square, his arguments are admitted only as propositions which may be freely agreed or disagreed with. The criteria for choosing between propositions remains a subjective value system which, due to the autonomous principle of choice, cannot be “wrong.”
Put simply, Neuhaus and Walsh overestimate the capacity of rational argument and propositional truth to sustain the structures of order. This overestimation is not surprising as it flows from what is a fundamentally liberal misunderstanding of the sources and character of order itself. For cultural order does not find its source principally in right judgments, but rather in a rightly ordered soul, or even better, in a community of rightly ordered souls. The rational argument of the liberal public square reinforces and entrenches a culture of choice. As such, it is a remarkably poor vehicle for communicating and passing on ordered liberty. Only an exceptional few can fashion an ordered soul from the aggregate of their choices. For most, order is something that must be received and nurtured to maturity, and passed on to those who repeat the process. This culture of heredity stands in stark contrast to the culture of choice, and the liberal public square itself has become one of the primary destroyers of the culture of heredity. In this situation it may make more sense for orthodox Christians to try to figure out ways to cultivate and support the accoutrements of heredity.
Hope in the Waiting
In that light, it is encouraging to note that in recent months, Nuehaus has himself shown signs of being conflicted and confused regarding the potential for success of his own project. There are indications that the long term results of Neuhaus’s engagement with liberalism may result less in a healed liberal soul and more in a fracturing of Neuhaus’s soul.
In October, President Bush said: “There is a voice of conscience and hope in every man and woman that will not be silenced … This untamed fire of justice continues to burn in the affairs of man, and it lights the way before us.” Neuhaus noted that these words “deserve to be called historic.” Yet when Tony Blair gave much the same speech in Congress, saying that “[w]e are fighting for the inalienable right of humankind … to be free; free to raise a family in love and hope; free to earn a living and be rewarded by your efforts; free not to bend your knee to any man in fear; free to be you so long as being you does not impair the freedom of others,” Neuhaus asked: “Is the … freedom to be you … really at the heart of the beliefs that bind us together? Surely truth, decency, honor, and excellence-including moral excellence-somehow come into play.” But, of course, Blair’s “freedom to be you” is no different from Bush’s “historic” reliance on the “voice of conscience and hope in every man and woman that will not be silenced.” Seeming to recognize this, Neuhaus concludes that “[p]erhaps the ‘freedom to be you’ is all that does hold us together. If so, it is understandable that many others, including millions of Muslims, are not enamored of the Euro-American ‘beliefs’ that Mr. Blair and others purport to be universal.”
What is our hope in, then, if the liberal order cannot be salvaged from within? Surely it must be in the Church and its Betrothed, the last bulwark and ultimate embodiment of heredity. But there is depressing evidence that the Church, at least in America, is distracted by another suitor. Alan Wolfe’s recent book The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith argues, convincingly, that “[i]n every aspect of the religious life, American faith has met American culture-and American culture has triumphed.” In his book, Wolfe tells his non-religious friends to quit worrying so much about the “religious right,” because they are really part of the gang. “Always in a state of transition, faith in the United States, especially in the last half century or so, has been further transformed with dazzling speed. … H. Richard Niebuhr documented the many ways in which Christ could become a transformer of culture. But in the United States culture has transformed Christ, as well as all other religions found within these shores.”
On December 30, 2003, David Brooks confirmed, as the conservative columnist for the New York Times, both Wolfe’s thesis and Wolfe’s conclusion that the domestication of Christian orthodoxy in the liberal order is a good thing. “[I]n the United States, we simply take it for granted that people will move through different phases in the course of their personal spiritual journeys, and we always have,” writes Brooks. This means that “millions feel free to try on different denominations at different points in their lives, and many Americans have had trouble taking religious doctrines altogether seriously.” As a result, “[c]hurches compete for congregants. To fill the pews, they often emphasize the upbeat and the encouraging and play down the business about God’s wrath. In today’s megachurches, the technology is cutting-edge, the music is modern, the language is therapeutic, and the dress is casual. These churches are seeker-sensitive, not authoritarian. … [E]vangelical churches are part of mainstream American culture, not dissenters from it.”
Neuhaus himself has recognized that this dynamic is not limited to Protestant churches, but has made significant inroads in the Catholic Church as well. Neuhaus quotes favorably Father Joseph Komonchak’s observation that “the new individualism”—with its tendency to “reduce religion to one’s own very personal, even private spirituality … which then becomes the criterion by which to decide what tradition, if any, to follow, what community, if any, to enter, what beliefs to hold, if any”—is widespread even among Catholics.
If this is the situation, and it is, where does a “Volume 1, Number 1” such as this turn for wisdom concerning hope? First, perhaps, to Eliot, who, after warning against false hope, reminds us that “hope is in the waiting.” Second, to the Hungarian dramaturg András Visky, subject to years of persecution at the hands of the Romanian communist regime before the fall of the iron curtain, who likes to say: “The situation is very good, it is hopeless.” Bracing stuff, that.
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Evangelical Self-Fashioning
Jonathan Edwards: Covenanter, Gnostic or Fellow Evangelical?
The publication in 1994 of Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind served as a much needed wakeup call to Evangelical scholars and institutions. Noll argued that Evangelical scholarship had too long remained bogged down in intramural disputes and arcane anti-intellectualism, and was becoming irrelevant in nearly every field of study. Since then, with an infusion of big grant money, young talent, and motivation born of desperation, Evangelical scholars like Noll have led what Alan Wolfe called, writing in The Atlantic Monthly, “a determined effort by evangelical-Christian institutions to create a life of the mind … [and to] establish a presence in American academic life.” In recent years the resurgent presence of Evangelical scholarship has been the subject of a great deal of attention in both the Christian and the secular press.
As an important and planned part of the movement, Evangelical scholars have used the occasion of Jonathan Edwards’s tercentennial year, 2003, to reintroduce Edwards as the father of the modern Evangelical movement. Noll and George Marsden both recently published books on Edwards. As a result, Edwards has been in the national mainstream media spotlight of late. Both Noll and Marsden have been quoted widely, particularly in a U.S. News and World Report cover feature by Jay Tolson. Tolson’s article imparted a message that Noll, Marsden and others have been trying to put out for some time: contemporary “American Evangelicalism … originated with the theology of Jonathan Edwards” and has much to learn from him. Edwards is especially recommended as a key model for combating the ills of modernity with a full-orbed application of faith and reason in the public square.
James Skillen, however, draws attention to Edwards’ Puritan, Calvinist, covenantal theology:
New England Puritans of the 17th and 18th centuries saw “their whole society as standing in covenant with God,” as Mark Noll explains … The Puritans, however, never resolved the question of how, on biblical grounds, a politically organized community should be related to God when all of its citizens are no longer members of the church. For at the outset, New England covenantalism conditioned citizenship on church membership.
Unlike contemporary conservative or “paleo-orthodox” Calvinists in the Anglo-Scottish tradition, Skillen rejects Edwards’ covenantal theology. Skillen argues, as does Noll in America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, that “Puritan” covenantalism (Skillen declines to call it “Calvinist”) has led Evangelicals to a private religious pietism as the covenanted people: “Individuals ‘getting right with God’ is more important than the maturation of the church as the visible community of God’s people.” If this does not lead to sheer withdrawal from the national public, Skillen says, it leads to the conflation of the state with the church:
Evangelicals, leading the way for many Americans, have transferred the seal of “God’s covenant people” to the American nation as a whole. Or to say it another way, Evangelicals retained the Puritan idea of the “city on a hill”—God’s new Israel—as the designation of America rather than of the church… . [Thus], national politics becomes the means to ends known only by fathoming the hidden purposes of God. Meanwhile, the cause of public justice, domestically and internationally, and the health of the church, as a worldwide community of faith at work, both languish in America.
Skillen takes on Edwards from a position of Dutch Neocalvinism—the widely credited fount of the Evangelical cultural-intellectual renaissance. The Neocalvinist tradition stems from key late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Calvinist thinkers such as Abraham Kuyper and Herman Dooyeweerd in the Netherlands who promoted a new Christian engagement of modernity, particularly its political scene. Kuyper’s work in particular coincided with and was in part motivated by a similar movement in the Catholic church initiated by Pope Leo XIII and Rerum Novarum, his encyclical on capital and labor. Unique among the conservative protestant traditions, the Neocalvinist or Kuyperian position claims to transcend the impasse Skillen sees in the Anglo-American development of Puritan political theology. In the famous formulation of H. Richard Niebuhr, Neocalvinism advocates neither “Christ against culture” nor “Christ of culture,” but rather, “Christ transforming culture.”
This is clearly a key issue. Noll is at pains to distance both his subject and himself from Puritan covenantalism. Not only does Noll underemphasize the paleocalvinism of Edwards, he claims that Edwards discarded his belief in a national covenant. (See Gerald McDermott’s comments on Noll’s argument.)
Interestingly, Skillen concludes his critique of Edwards by appropriating an argument about “gnosticism” most famously advanced by Eric Voegelin: “The Evangelical answer to the unresolved Puritan dilemma,” writes Skillen, “is … radically in error, owing more to the gnostic tradition than to biblical Christianity.”
Popular among an older generation of American political conservatives whose religious confessions have often been Anglican and Roman Catholic, Voegelin is an interesting source for Skillen, a reconstructed Calvinist, since Voegelin contends that modern “political religions” (like Marxism) had their first strong precursor in Reformation Calvinism, particularly its English Puritan form.
Historical Accuracy and Contemporary Agendas
The preceding survey of inter- and intra-denominationally partisan religious historiography—paleocalvinists, neocalvinists, and evangelicals all claiming different constructions of Edwards—adds depth to Allen C. Guelzo’s testy review of Marsden’s biography of Edwards:
Substantively, the ‘largest theme’ of this book is how ‘a religion that claims universal and exclusive truth’ can fit ‘into a pluralistic environment.’ This is, of course, the theme that dominates [Marsden’s] The Soul of the American University and The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, and it suggests that the biography’s focus is not the Edwards of the 18th century but the evangelicals of the 21st, with Edwards as a stand-in and marker for them… . Marsden’s Edwards will be remembered less as a biography and more as a period piece from the ‘evangelical surge’ in American academic culture.
To be fair to Marsden, he is frank about his intentions with his Edwards biography in the last chapter:
My belief is that one of the uses of being an historian, particularly if one is part of a community of faith, is to help persons of such communities better understand what they and their community might appropriate from the great mentors of the past and what is extraneous and nonessential. … It should also be to help people see how to put things back together again. We need to use history for the guidance it offers, learning from great figures in the past-both in their brilliance and in their shortcomings. Otherwise we are stuck with only the wisdom of the present.
Yet in the effort to fortify Evangelicals with timbers from the past so that they can gain power and influence within the dominant social and political structures of the present, one certainly risks parochialism at best (for what interest can such a project have for non-Evangelicals?) and an abdication of intellectual honesty at worst, if the project swerves toward confessional partisanship.
Referring to D. G. Hart’s similar charges of Christianity Today’s own evangelical-boosting bias, Mark Galli writes (reviewing Hart’s Deconstructing Evangelicalism in Books and Culture) that CT naturally has “a vested interest in seeing evangelicalism as broad and influential. CT is a movement magazine, the likes of the National Review or The Nation… . The real issue is whether we distort or even falsify our reporting beyond what the evidence shows.” Galli does not offer a distinction between having a vested interest in seeing things a certain way and engaging in distortion. Having a vested interest means having a bias, which is a level of distortion, however inevitable it may be. The important question is, how much distortion is too much?
CT is one thing, but the mere admission of substantial bias in it is problematic when one considers that CT is hardly self-contained. Galli is a managing editor for CT, which is published by Christianity Today International, as is Books and Culture. Books and Culture prints reviews of and by Christian scholars like Marsden. It too has a “movement” mission, and it strains credulity to believe that a vested interest in seeing certain things doesn’t have a significant influence on “what the evidence shows–or what is even considered evidence.”
At least semi-conscious of the need to justify Marsden’s approach to historical scholarship, Chris Armstrong writes in Christian History (also under the auspices of CTI) that “scholarship as ministry” is an idea and practice modeled by Edwards himself. Likewise, Douglas Sweeney suggests in Books and Culture that Marsden’s approach may be justifiable within the context of longstanding ideological tit-for-tat among academics. Sweeney points out that secular intellectuals have preferred to claim Edwards for themselves. But is this the calling of the historian, let alone the “Christian” historian, where such adjectivalism has always threatened to be a mere parochial foray into contemporary culture warring–not to mention a convenient labelling that elides great diversity of identity and opinion under the word “Christian,” even if we assume it is the usual code for “Evangelicals” or “Conservative Protestants?” Sweeney does gesture toward an odd synthesis, urging Christian Edwards scholars to attend to the “significance” their subject has “for the lives of non-Christians,” presumably to avoid mere preaching to the choir. But, he vacillates: “Edwards’ fate within the academic world has always depended in the main on the interests and funding of those who prefer to muffle his evangelical passion… . if evangelicals do not increase their support for Edwards scholarship, we had all better beware.”
If neutrality and objectivity are “myths,” a claim widely employed to legitimize “Christian scholarship” in mainstream academic discourse, then what prevents perspectivalism from becoming subjectivism, parochialism, and ideologism? If “Christian scholars” and the institutions that support them have a vested interest in promoting unity and strength in a movement that actually contains disparate, competing voices, will the resulting conversation be an honest and edifying one? Is it really wise to promote “ministerial scholarship” in the manner of agenda and money-driven political think tanks? Perhaps these are foregone questions in the circles that need to answer them most. At any rate, be warned: if the foundation wells runs dry, Evangelicals will have to subsidize their own scholarly assaults against atheistical academic appropriations of “their” Edwards.
Self-Doubt and the Not-So-Solid Middle
Questions of the proper nature of scholarship aside, the Evangelical Edwards revisionist movement presents an intriguing phenomena worth critical scrutiny for what it reveals about the mind, or rather the discourse, that is contemporary Evangelicalism. Creative, revisionary (mis)reading of the past is the way western civilization, with its various peoples of the book, has always struggled to generate identities, traditions and a sense of united, shared purpose. Many scholars have paid a good deal of attention in recent years to how this process has been integral to the formation and dissemination of Protestantism in America and Europe since the Reformation.
Likewise, “Evangelical scholarship” is not a body of discrete books and studies but rather a site of conflicted dialogue about group identity and purpose that also in good measure shapes group identity and purpose. It is a fascinating process to behold for what it reveals about how conservative, traditional, or tradition-seeking Protestants continually attempt to construct an identity and authority for themselves—a catholicity and unity that is neither Roman nor purely secular and rationalistic. The search for this middle ground is the Evangelical grail-quest. But the “solid middle” has proven to be elusive, and its existence might reasonably be questioned. The notion is assailed fore and aft: by pre-modern, medieval superstition; by modern rationalism or secular humanism; and now emerging from modernity, postmodern pragmatism and relativism. Yet any Protestant self-fashioning must be kept from view lest Protestantism itself become vulnerable to the old question, “Where was your church before Luther?” or, as is more likely nowadays, risk being demystified as a kind of pragmatic institutional self-preservation instinct acting without a coherent foundation and goal.
Considering the phenomena of Protestant self-fashioning in the sixteenth-century, Debora Shuger examines Anglican divine Richard Hooker in her book, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture: “[I]n order to authorize tradition,” writes Shuger, Hooker “must appeal to principles elsewhere put in question” by the Protestant break with the Catholic church. For instance, “the ‘mystical communion’ between different ages” no longer pertained in the original catholic sense, so what authority can be ascribed to would-be magisterial forbears? The conservative Protestant mind since the sixteenth century has shied from the implicit relativism of salad-bar Christianity where one picks and chooses because everything is up for grabs. But despite the desire for an authoritative ground, generating a salad bar is increasingly what “culturally adaptive biblical experimentalism” (Noll’s definition of Evangelicalism) excels at, as Tolson noted in the opening of his U.S. News feature.
Alternatively, one might follow Bishop Hooker and resort to rational argumentation and persuasion as a way to install authorities and thereby establish a tradition. Yet as Shuger notes, “the argument for tradition rests precisely on the failure of reason to deliver certainty.” Anyone can make rational arguments that disturb consensus about what constitutes tradition and authorities within it—indeed, “the attempt itself discloses the inability of rational method to provide an epistemic ground; instead it opens onto the rhetorical arena of competing possibilities, which can only be established by supposedly excluded authoritarian principles.”
Therein lies the fractured history of Protestantism up to the present time, and on it must go. The desire for a solid, established, robust foundation runs deep enough that in Evangelical intellectual circles, it is difficult to differentiate genuine crypto-Catholicism (which supplies a steady stream of converts) from a condescension for Mega-Lo-Mart evangelicalism or a desire to reap all the benefits but none of the negative side effects of Chesterton’s “thick steak, glass of stout, and good cigar.”
Galli himself, in his review of Hart’s critique of Evangelicalism, was able to sympathize with some of Hart’s views because Galli is, “after all, a member of the Anglican communion, which has a rich liturgy and theology.” Galli writes that he is an Anglican because he doesn’t “believe evangelicalism by itself can sustain a deeper Christian life.” Galli’s overall view of Evangelicalism seems to be that it does not need and is unfit to use a “mind” or a movement to “transform the culture” because “‘evangelical’ is only a secondary identity.” With friends and defenders like these, Evangelicals for whom “evangelical” is a primary identity may not need enemies or Hart to deconstruct them.
Alan Wolfe raised his own doubts about the strength of Evangelicalism when it tries to stand on a tradition uneasily cobbled together from sources that are both attractive and repulsive to Evangelicals. Thinking of writers such as Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy, Wolfe observed that “Without a literature that is in one way or another a product of Catholicism, Wheaton [College] could not aspire to a life of the mind. A college that would not allow on its faculty authors whose letters are welcome in its archives has a problem it needs to resolve.” Wolfe might also have noted the phenomena of evangelical and reformed churches in and around both Wheaton and Calvin College that are unique in their use of classic Anglican and Lutheran liturgical forms. In a review for Books and Culture Timothy Larsen mentions these very churches as he muses over several recent books on the history of schism in the Church of England. Then he cautions, “Anglican worship without all the baggage of the Anglican communion continues to be an alluring prospect for some evangelicals. Nevertheless, … secession was the road to oblivion.” Larsen means secession from the Anglican communion, but that is not the only way to read his comment or to understand the principle of unity and integrity he is defending.
Even in the odd passing comment in Christian History (another CTI publication), as when an author compares Edwards’ planned but unwritten “great synthesis of Christian doctrine” with Aquinas’ Summa, rhetorical ecumenism is more than a show of broad-mindedness; it expresses the latent desire of the Evangelical also-ran to remain in the running under his own banner of non-Catholic catholicity.
Though it is very late in the day to begin anew an old effort to shore the fragments against their ruins, this is what the Evangelical academic insurgency intends to do as it revisits classic Protestant strategies to construct a tradition, an order, a subcultural metanarrative. In this movement, perhaps “history” can be as effective as it was for “Christian scholar” John Foxe in the early days of the Reformation, albeit with confessional prejudices comparatively muted in our more tolerant, but no less conflicted, pluralistic society. Loving, sympathetic (though partial and partisan) renderings of selected heroes of the faith may show some of us that men like Edwards were essentially one of us. Christian History and Christianity Today typically assume this kind of discourse, inviting a spiritual identification between the reader and the historical other. G. K. Chesterton, Aquinas, C. S. Lewis (of course–the Evangelical St. Jack) and even the BVM are all revised to some degree for re-presentation as, if not Evangelical, then Evangelical-friendly figures. All for the good, perhaps, but utterly artificial from another perspective, and certainly a strange, studied preservation of division at a time of great weakness for all churches.
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If You Liked the Movie, You Might, uh, Like the Book
Last summer and fall, Mel Gibson, attempting to drum up support and staunch early criticism, made the religious rounds with his new movie The Passion of Christ. The film tour had its desired effect, and now it seems virtually every conservative church leader has come out with ringing endorsements of its power. And by all accounts, The Passion looks to be a remarkable filmic achievement, perhaps even worthy of the name of Gibson’s studio, Icon Productions. I haven’t seen the film and have no reason to dispute the critics on this count (see our own review by Patton Dodd, who has seen it).
I have, however, seen the numerous blurbs from Influential Christians about The Passion, and they are symptomatic of a disturbing disease in the western Church, which is its predilection to denigrate its own traditions in favor the Latest Thing. Often, particularly in Evangelical circles, this tendency grows out of a genuine desire for evangelism: if a JumboTron brings people in the front door of the church, hoist it high. In this, the Evangelical church tends to forget the pastoral wisdom that what the people want may not be what the people should have. More damaging still is the inherent universalizing quality of mass media which tends to quiet (or often mute) any particularist message.
The Evangelical church has engaged in precious little real thought about what happens to the Gospel message when it is projected onto the big screen. And in the case of The Passion, such thinking has seemed doubly overwhelmed by the apparent skill of the artists and artisans who made the film. Such quality is a double-edged sword, of course, capable of magnifying both good and bad.
Instead, we get initiatives such as “The Passion Outreach,” which is a massive attempt to coordinate “church response” to the thousands (if not millions) of converts and seekers this film is expected to produce. Spearheaded by Outreach, Inc., one of the largest church marketing firms in the country, The Passion Outreach considers The Passion to be “the best outreach opportunity in the last 2,000 years. … This is an incredible opportunity for Christians everywhere to help their non-believing friends and neighbors understand the meaning of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, and ultimately receive Christ as their personal Lord and Savior.”
This kind of thing is to be expected in the Evangelical world; however, an equal and opposite disappointment comes from a Roman Catholic cardinal. In September, Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, prefect of the Congregation for Clergy, praised Mel Gibson’s The Passion in an interview with La Stampa, claiming that the film will inspire people to “want to love more, to forgive, to be good and strong no matter what, just as Christ did even in the face of such terrible suffering.” Hoyos said he “experienced moments of profound spiritual intimacy with Jesus Christ” while watching The Passion, which he sees as “a tool for explaining the person and message of Christ.” Hoyos remarked that he would gladly trade some of his homilies on the Passion of Christ for scenes in The Passion of Christ. He is “confident that [the film] will change for the better everyone who sees it, both Christians and non-Christians alike.” The Passion “will bring people closer to God, and closer to one another… . It … draws out from … the Gospel narratives sentiments of forgiveness, mercy and reconciliation.”
All well and good, perhaps, but Hoyos assiduously avoids saying anything about people being moved to become Christians. He does not say he expects or hopes Christians and non-Christians will, like him, experience a “profound spiritual intimacy with Jesus.” Coming closer to “God” and “others” has the subtle benefit of being open to broad interpretation. One suspects a creeping Liberalism lying behind Hoyos’s description. The universalism of the mass media of film encourages this kind of response in viewers and discourages a participatory engagement with the particulars of the Christian tradition—precisely the point at which the Church is called to minister!
In fact, the whole concept of The Passion as a ministry and evangelization tool makes the movie into a Hollywood version of the Church itself. One would expect a Catholic Cardinal of all churchmen to recognize this. For the Church itself is to be the place where people are drawn in to be “moved” by an encounter with the Real Presence of the crucified and risen Christ. Most disturbing is Hoyos’s suggestion that he would gladly trade his own homilies on the Passion for the effectiveness of the film. His willingness to denigrate his own role in the Church and his eager grasping for a filmic “tool” suggests a too-easy demoting of the word and of the liturgical drama of the mass. Hoyos’s admissions are no incentive to go to a church stuck in musty old orality! The Passion is Even Better than the Real Thing. Apparently, the much more sensory, communal, participatory experience of the mass can’t touch sitting in a dark theater watching buckets of fake blood: the Terminator one Saturday, Jesus Christ the next.
On the contrary, I would expect Hoyos—especially given his position—would think to say: “If this film moves you, you should realize that is why we have retold and re-enacted the Passion daily for two millennia.” The Church does not (or should not) need to prepare a “response” to The Passion; rather, the Church is and always has been the living, continuing response to the (original) Passion, and The Passion is a mere artifact, twice or thrice removed from reality. Artifacts can be good; they can help people become “better” in some way. But the Church ought to more jealously protect its role as the real Body and Passion of Christ in the world, not merely its cheerleader.
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Just Out from Emergent Village Press
A new children’s book just released by Emergent Village is intended to introduce children to the revolutionary ideas of the Emergent movement. The Lobster and the Wildebeest tells the story of B-Mac, an aging but still hip lobster in the Chesapeake Bay. B-Mac is fed up with the sheer lobsterliness of his life, frustrated with the way his lobster friends can’t see the big picture. “Most lobsters are stuck in a world where having a red back, six legs, and two oversized pincher-claws is all that matters,” B-Mac grumbles.
Everything changes for B-Mac, however, when he encounters Neophyte, a Jamaican Wildebeest with a sonorous accented voice and cool dreds. By drawing elaborate charts on table napkins, Neophyte teaches B-Mac that if lobsters are to stay relevant, they must learn to be more like the wandering wildebeests, free from old ways of thinking. Throughout their relationship, Neophyte imparts wisdom such as, “Lobsters must understand that though my horns look different than their pinchers, they serve the same purpose.”
The friendship between the two pilgrims matures and survives bumpy spots (like the time B-Mac accidentally used Neophyte’s marked-up napkins to wipe seaweed off his face) until, by the end, Neophyte triumphantly tells his diminutive friend, “That’s it B-Mac! You’ve figured it out. You’re a Gnu kind of Crustacean!”
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The Middle Mind and the Culture of Death
In The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think For Themselves, Curtis White tries to steer clear of the “poverty in the left-wing critique” as he engages in his own explanation of why so many Americans are immune to the idea that their nation and way of life might be oppressive to the point that radical resentment in other countries, particularly in the third world, is substantially justified. White is attracted to Chalmers Johnson’s “plausible deniability” in Blowback: “We didn’t know. We were out of the loop.” Yet White finally dismisses this theory as incredible. How could we not know? “Are we dupes of propaganda? Is the truth censored?” Not quite. White claims that Americans are victims of their own complicity in a “New Censorship”—a culture of what might be called “self-conscious denial.”
Through historically unprecedented news media access, “everything [is] known and naked” but to such an extreme that what we know is “paralyzing.” (Just think of a normal night of network television: “emergency” shows with visually and psychologically realistic renderings of trauma followed by the decontextualized 10:00 news-more trauma locally, nationally and globally.) So we surrender to “the inevitable,” “the necessary,” and “the way things are,” perhaps with a gritty sense of false realism enabled by Panglossian provisos: we live in the best of all possible worlds, but there are unfortunate, unavoidable incidents.
White observes that the unpleasant “incidents” Americans are responsible for are usually “clarified” further as “accidents.” He asks, “Is there anyone who doesn’t understand that the Sudanese pharmaceutical lab that Clinton blew up with eighty cruise missiles was producing pharmaceuticals? Is there anyone who doesn’t understand that this was an act of state terrorism and a violation of every principle of international law?”
Here the shrill Chomskyian voice overtakes White—“state terrorism” is a bit of a stretch. However ethically compromised and careless in intention and execution, and however evil the result, Clinton is not bin Laden. Do we really want our leaders to err on the side of ethical restraint when faced with threats? Is it not the state’s responsibility to wield the amoral, if not immoral, sword? Yet White has a strong point to make in directing us to look at how easily we turn our vision away from the terrible risks and awful reality of great power. The Sudanese pharmaceutical lab was destroyed in an “accident” from the American point of view, much like “collateral damage” and other horrors we would never accept as “accidents” on our own soil—unless we can blame our machines rather than hostile or unduly careless human intentions.
White’s greatest insight is in noticing how “terrorism has seized upon our own technology as its weapon of choice. Our airliners are bombs… . Our bureaucracies (like the postal system) are bombs… . In short, terrorism has seized upon the ‘accidents’ (plane crashes, nuclear meltdowns, misplaced or stolen anthrax, plutonium, nuclear secrets) that have always slumbered within technological rationality.”
Immediately following the deadly November 12, 2001 airliner crash in Queens, White recalls the concern in the media that terrorists were the cause. But soon we learned that it was a mechanical accident, a category of massive destruction we accept in “absolute distinction” over against “terrorist acts of war.” The distinction is valid to a good extent, and it is worth asking, as White does, why Americans and the media should find it reasonable to avoid air travel for fear of terrorism rather than because jets “have always had a tendency to plunge into the ground in a statistically predictable manner.” Indeed, as White observes, we accept massive, horrifying accidents “through expressions of faith in the calculations of actuarial science and cost-benefit analysis, and by faith in the raw ideology of technical progress.”
People of religious faith—and indeed anyone opposed in principle to such a reductionist view of human life—should take pause at its real consequences: 42,000 deaths each year just in traffic accidents in the US. 3,236,000 people killed or injured on our roads between 1985 and 1999. 3.2 Million! Enough casualties in a decade to “wipe out the population of four cities the size of … Bloomington-Normal, Illinois.” These numbers are dependable, predictable, and variable based on things like auto design and speed limits. Even if the American attitude toward highway travel were not “bigger, faster, more,” are the losses engineered into our way of life intrinsically less worthy of lament and resistance than the losses caused by abortion, capital punishment, or any similar concern to people of faith?
Whether they are conscious of it or not, “pro-lifers” may not be consistently pro-life—opposed in principle to elective death for some for the alleged convenience of others. Except perhaps for the odd recluses, we are all complicit in the “culture of death.” Violent death and dismemberment are inevitable on a daily basis only for the purposes of material convenience calculated according to the logic of cost-benefit ratios and, most commonly, the belief that lightning won’t strike me. Looking to the global scene, White wants to ask, “Whose cost, and whose benefit?” He is right that at bottom, it is a human rationality rather than a mechanical one that creates the conditions and structures of life in the modern, first-world. One must ask, then, how critics of the culture of death expect to stand against their enemy if they daily endorse it by joining, for instance, “the march of commuters caught in the same sad and strange necessity of ‘rush hour’” It would be a start, at least, to bear the burden of heightened moral and spiritual consciousness that White finds so absent among Americans.
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What would it profit a man to gain the whole world and yet lose his penis?
In October of last year, just prior to a state visit by George Bush to Thailand to promote, among other things, free trade policies with that region of the world, an alliance of Thai farmers hired a traditional voodoo elder to perform sacred rites that trapped Bush’s soul in a clay pot. The pot was then chucked into a river where, presumably, the President’s soul couldn’t get into much mischief. “This is a traditional northern Thai ceremony aimed at keeping his spirit down on the riverbed so he could not come and exploit our natural resources or suppress our (farming) brothers with his superior influence,” said Weerasak Wan-ubol, a leader of the farmers’ alliance.
Perhaps the scheme will work on President Bush—time will tell. But clearly, the Thai farmers have demonstrated a crucial misunderstanding of their western oppressors. One trembles to guess at the choice most American leaders would make when weighing between free trade and their souls. We humbly suggest that next time the Thai farmers want to threaten western potentates, they hire a voodoo doctor from the West African nation of Gambia—these guys understand the real pressure points of the western mind.
t is time to state clearly what many Christians sense intuitively, and what a few are saying: the Western church is in a historical period of dissolution; and Enlightenment Liberalism is both the engine of our dissolution and its logical end. Liberalism, not Christianity, is the dominant force of Western Modernity. Liberalism is the ideology that enshrines the Enlightenment ideals of a rational and egalitarian society; it seeks maximum individual freedom in politics and markets. As a system of government (democracy) and of material exchange (capitalism), it is the only legitimate ordering system left standing at the “end of history.” It prizes above all else the liberty of an individual to define himself in a fluid environment, unimpeded by any outside constraint save perhaps the reciprocal consent of his fellow citizens—a consent which, by the perverse logic of Liberalism, can almost never be withheld. This freedom, left unchecked, has become endemically exploitative in both the political right and left today, though for a time the areas of exploitation have remained distinct. And it is manifested in a dehumanizing materialism which, in essence, denies the human soul.
n the night of September 10, 2001, Doug MacMillan’s best friend, Todd Beamer, had just returned from a European vacation with Lisa, his wife of seven years, and their children. MacMillan stopped by the Beamer house that evening to welcome the travelers home. After a friendly visit, and realizing that Todd was flying out early the next morning on a business trip to San Francisco, MacMillan left before it got too late. Backing down the Beamer drive, he was surprised to see Todd trotting down to his car. “He stopped me,” MacMillan recounts, “and he put his hand on my shoulder and he said, ‘I’ll talk to you later buddy.’”
riting in opposition to American entry into the First World War, Randolph Bourne reminded his fellow dissenters of the impending vituperation. “In an age of faith,” he mused, “skepticism is the most intolerable of insults.” As we witness, in the invasion of Iraq, an extension of the American Empire that is unprecedented in its arrogance and hypocrisy, we should recall that skepticism can also be the most indispensable of virtues. With our own terms of skepticism, and with a harsh and dreadful love, Christians must openly disparage the martial and pecuniary faith which animates history’s richest, most well-armed, and appallingly parochial superpower.