“The people swarmed on the public square
And pointed laughingly at me,
And I was filled with shame and fear.”
— Alexander Pushkin, Boris Godunov
“The people swarmed on the public square
And pointed laughingly at me,
And I was filled with shame and fear.”
— Alexander Pushkin, Boris Godunov
But Littlefield’s great value was as a spiritual example. Despite his strange learnings he was as strict a Presbyterian and as firm a Republican as George F. Babbitt. He confirmed the business men in the faith. Where they knew only by passionate instinct that their system of industry and manners was perfect, Dr. Howard Littlefield proved it to them, out of history, economics, and the confessions of reformed radicals.
- Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt
It is written, When the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch: wherefore, in such circumstances, may it not sometimes be safer, if both leader and led simply–sit still? Had you, anywhere in Crim Tartary, walled in a square enclosure; furnished it with a small, ill-chosen Library; and then turned loose into it eleven hundred Christian striplings, to tumble about as they listed, from three to seven years: certain persons, under the title of Professors, being stationed at the gates, to declare aloud that it was a University, and exact considerable admission-fees,–you had, not indeed in mechanical structure, yet in spirit and result, some imperfect resemblance of our High Seminary. I say, imperfect; for if our mechanical structure was quite other, so neither was our result altogether the same: unhappily, we were not in Crim Tartary, but in a corrupt European city, full of smoke and sin; moreover, in the middle of a Public, which, without far costlier apparatus than that of the Square Enclosure, and Declaration aloud, you could not be sure of gulling.
- Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus
If you wish to study a granfalloon
Just remove the skin of a toy balloon.- Bokonon
Perhaps against the general inclination of their editors, recently the engines of conservative Christian opinion have been pulled in a Pantagruelian direction by contributors questioning the viability of a religious traditionalism that has agreed to cooperate with the dominant order of Liberalism. As Eugene McCarraher succinctly put it in Books & Culture: “Is liberal capitalist democracy now the horizon of the Christian political imagination?” When they are distracted by such inconvenient questions from their main task of cheering any signs of conservative Christian success on the political and cultural front, the editors of publications like Christianity Today, First Things, Touchstone, and Books & Culture typically shift into “oh, please!” or “circle the wagons!” mode. But perhaps a more honest and engaged bit of self-reflection and internal dialogue is forthcoming. The bandwagon has been accumulating baggage that needs to be attended to.
The Grain and the Weeds by Jim Janknegt
In the February 2004 issue of First Things, long-time editor James Nuechterlein announced his retirement. Nuechterlein explained that while he remained committed to the ideas present at the founding of First Things–a grounding in traditionalism that “had come through modernity, not around it” and a perception that First Things was “of the neoconservative persuasion”–he had recently seen “signs of ideological malaise” in the “increasingly familiar” quality of the arguments being submitted to the journal. One is left to wonder if Nuechterlein sees the political-ideological alliance between tradition and neoconservatism as a mistake.
Fortunately, not all contributions to First Things have a familiar ring. The January issue featured an essay by Christopher Shannon whose line of inquiry we hope will become further developed in the future. Shannon pointed out that in the dominant liberal discourse of the day, the Catholic idea of culture as something given and received “must give way” to the Protestant idea of culture as choice. “Tradition/Catholicism oppresses, modernity/Protestantism liberates: this simple opposition sets the limits of diversity in America for liberals and conservatives alike.” Shannon went on to argue that this habit of mind destroys any sense of a life ordered by Tradition and increasingly assimilates “American Catholics to the secular Protestant norms of middle-class American consumerism.”
Shannon would no doubt agree with Allen Guelzo who wrote in a recent Books & Culture review of John T. McGreevy’s Catholicism and American Freedom that “Catholics might be better advised to forget assimilation to a culture drunk with autonomous individualism”–culture as choice–“and be content with Catholicism’s own authentic strangeness.” Guelzo comes close to suggesting what Shannon might have added himself: the “secular” norms of “individualism” and “choice” have such purchase among conservative, observant Protestants–the sort who are often keen to denounce “secularism” and “liberals”–that Alan Wolfe is correct in The Transformation of American Religion when he deems them “harmless” to the dominant liberal order. [Listen to Wolfe discuss the arguments in his book on UCTV. Read an excerpt of his book on BeliefNet.]
Readers of The New Pantagruel will not be surprised to find that Wolfe’s thesis finds little resistance here. Father Richard John Neuhaus, captain of the First Things ship, however, has consistently railed at Wolfe, calling him “the Alfred E. Neuman of the sociology of American religion.” Neuhaus has also suggested more than once in “reviews” with very little analysis that Wolfe’s perceived failure to understand his subject inheres in his status as “a secular Jew.”
I agree with Neuhaus, pace Wolfe, that the assimilation of traditional Christians to the secular status quo is not a good thing for either the Church or the culture. Nevertheless, with serious questions about the integrity of religious traditionalism in general and of Protestant Evangelicalism in particular emerging in First Things and fellow-traveller publications, Neuhaus might do well to ask if he isn’t rather prejudicially shooting the messenger. But no–even when the otherwise admirable David Brooks failed to trash Wolfe’s book in The New York Times, this was clearly due to some lapse on Brooks’ part, and it became another occasion for Neuhaus to snipe at Wolfe. Playing the resentful victim who can never be understood by “outsiders,” Neuhaus’s animated reactions to Wolfe’s presumed “snobbery” resemble the reactions of other cultural minorities who seethe at any criticism from outside the family–criticism that they are quite able to accept from “their own people.”
As Neuhaus observes in his review of The Transformation of American Religion, “thoughtful evangelicals readily admit that their religious world offers a target-rich environment,” and Wolfe’s book “contains considerable truth.” Nevertheless, it is enough of a “caricature” to be dismissed as “superficial sociology of superficial religion–or, more precisely, of religion that the author is determined to construe as superficial.” Or–maybe Evangelicalism really is superficial! Considerably superficial? Nuance and self-critique is not the forté of what McCarraher has called “the embedded intellectual.” Signs of malaise and ideological familiarity indeed!
The sickness reaches also to Books & Culture editor John Wilson as he gushes over Robert Putnam, Lewis Feldstein, and Don Cohen’s book, Better Together. Writing in Christianity Today, Wilson claims that Better Together’s study of Rick Warren’s Saddleback megachurch indicates “[t]he unmistakable conclusion … that evangelicals can be trusted at the civic table.” They’re generating social capital, and what’s more, they’re still maintaining evangelistic agendas. This is supposed to silence the cautionary critics, “notably disciples of theologian Stanley Hauerwas,” who hold that Evangelicals “have been co-opted by the imperial state.” In a complete non-sequitur which does violence to the real arguments offered by Hauerwas and others, Wilson closes his article by posing Jesus–“a man who dined with tax collectors and all kinds of riffraff”–as a “precedent” over against those who don’t “believe that [Christians] should strive to have a place at the civic table.” I suspect that the civic tables Wilson, Warren, Neuhaus and other Christian culture elites sit at are not populated by riffraff. More appropriate would have been a response to Wolfe’s sense that Evangelicals are selling out their patrimony.
I am under no illusions concerning Wolfe’s place in this debate. He is clearly of the mind that the civic table is a good and necessary thing; a “civilizing” influence on the fervent passions that are prone to grip sectarians such as Hauerwas. Thus, like Neuhaus and Wilson, Wolfe dislikes Hauerwas’s adversarial rancor. Wolfe much prefers what he calls the phenomena of Evangelical “Salvation Inflation.” In an interview with Michael Cromartie for the March/April 2004 issue of Books & Culture, Wolfe says that in the Rick Warren mode of post-traditional Protestantism, “more Americans than ever proclaim themselves born again in Christ, but the lord to whom they turn rarely gets angry and frequently strengthens self-esteem.” “People confess fewer and fewer sins, and are rewarded with more and more.” This, to Wolfe, represents a positive development within Christianity, making its adherents better civil citizens of a pluralistic democracy. Wolfe’s manner is strikingly reminiscent of a colonial governor writing home with condescending delight to describe the natives’ halting embrace of the modern world.
Accompanying the Books & Culture interview, Wolfe received an appreciative but anxious review of The Transformation of American Religion from R. Stephen Warner. Warner prompts readers to avoid Neuhaus’s histrionics and give Wolfe a charitable reading in the I’m OK-You’re OK Evangelical way where every critic is ultimately an okely-dokely heckuva nice guy. (Translation: we ignore whatever he says that rubs us the wrong way or try to put a positive spin on it.) For in Warner’s review, truth and accuracy in analysis take a back seat to pop psychology’s language of diplomacy: Wolfe is “well-intentioned,” he has “new evangelical friends,” and he does a fair job of understanding them. Wolfe is “sensitive to [Evangelicals’] vulnerability to his scorn.” Hence, when Wolfe uses negative terms to describe Evangelicals, it is because he “respects” them “too much not to share with them his disdain for the way many of their number flirt with the worst of American pop culture.” On the other hand, Warner wishes that Wolfe had talked about other, more progressive Evangelicals, such as those who took in Central American refugees in the 80s and helped “delegitimate Reagan-era counterinsurgency policies.”
Warner’s review works the way he thinks Wolfe’s book works–not primarily as a real analysis but rather as a negotiation between secularists and Christians. Warner’s main anxiety about Wolfe’s book is not that its analysis of Western Christianity is badly mistaken but that it is inconvenient for the cultural-political agendas of Christian “movement” literature like Books & Culture: “Wolfe’s well-intentioned purpose to allay mutual fears and disarm recriminations on the part of his two audiences would have been better served if the theme of capitulation had not been such a relentless drumbeat. As it is, he lends support to those who see an eschatological slippery slope instead of a perennial tightrope in every instance calling for their cultural discernment.”
Again, perhaps the point is capitulation, and perhaps it is an accurate point. Can it penetrate the hardened positions and hardened arteries among movement personalities–the passive-aggressive approach at Books & Culture on the one hand and Neuhaus’s aggressive-aggressive approach at First Things on the other?
In 1981, Roger Fisher’s international best-selling negotiation handbook Getting to Yes was published. The book was, and continues to be, such a success because it concisely distills the conflict resolution techniques and procedures which must be used by good citizens of a liberal order. The primary methodology taught by Fisher requires a shift in focus from the positions of disputing parties to the interests of the parties, and from there to work towards creative solutions that approximately satisfy all represented interests.
This method for binding disparate individuals or elements of society together in a common scheme of interest preservation is not original with Fisher. It is in fact the quintessential rule of modern liberal society with its required autonomy of individual interest and resistance to the notion of sacrifice for the commonwealth. Karl Marx recognized this structure and aptly named its central point of reference the “cash nexus”: the point at which all disparate interests congregate to achieve satisfaction and the point which must therefore be defended at any and all cost. Marx was famously skeptical about the ability of a society built within the gravitational field of the cash nexus to hang together.
In any thoughtful consideration of the questions raised above, it would be difficult to underestimate the extent to which conservative Christians have absorbed the Getting to Yes philosophy as it relates to the Church and its relationship to the world. An analysis of the pertinent movement literature reveals the overriding goal of most Christian cultural engagement is to find the cultural nirvana where Christians and secularists can finally get to “Yes!”–the culture nexus. Thus, prime importance is attributed to “the conversation”–to the long slow dance towards “yes!” wherein Christian interests are elucidated and differentiated in increasingly abstract and sophisticated ways.
Those committed to this process cannot help but suffer a corrupted view of the Church. The individual Christian is defined primarily by his interests rather than by older notions of membership, and consequently the Church becomes a community of shared interests rather than a community of practice. It is not surprising that in this context “discernment” rather than obedience becomes the most important virtue. And the peddlers of cultural discernment–those vested heavily in publications such as Books & Culture and First Things and in the vast apparatus of culture engaging institutions and universities–naturally have an ongoing interest in maintaining the illusion that the process of getting to “yes!” with the world is a “perennial tightrope” walk which requires careful balance. Loud shouts at those on the tightrope are not merely an annoyance, but a disloyal attempt to upset the balance along the path to the culture nexus.
A recent book articulates as political theory a more sophisticated and grandiose version of Fisher’s dispute resolution thesis. In Democracy and Tradition, Jeffrey Stout, a professor of religion at Princeton University, purports to “sketch the proper role of religious discourse in a democracy.” The book flap goes on to say that “against those who see no place for religious reasoning in the democratic arena, Stout champions a space for religious voices,” however, he also argues “against increasingly vocal antiliberal thinkers … that modern democracy can provide a moral vision and has made possible such moral achievements as civil rights precisely because it allows a multitude of claims to be heard.”
Stout argues that liberal democracy survives and thrives by fostering an environment of tolerance and an overriding commitment to “talking things through.” For Stout, the “conversation” cannot occur when certain citizens are either excluded from, or take their leave of, the “public” table. Thus, while Stout admonishes secularists who would exclude religious people from joining the discussion, he reserves his greatest ire (as do Wolfe, Neuhaus, and Wilson) for Stanley Hauerwas–a committed religious particularist whose increasingly “strident” critiques of the liberal discussion table are ruled out of bounds. By making it clear that his highest commitment is not to “talking things through,” Hauerwas jeopardizes the entire democratic project. According to Stout, the greatest necessity to the continuance of a religiously tolerant democracy is “cultivating identifications that transcend ethnicity, race, and religion.” Yes!–the culture nexus.
Because Stout is so entirely focused on the importance of elucidating the interests of religious people in a democracy, he identifies Christians such as Neuhaus who are willing to sit at the discussion table more closely with fellow secular table-sitters than with fellow Christians like Hauerwas. Stout wonders, “what, in the end, do Hauerwas and Neuhaus agree on, aside from calling themselves Christians?” Reviewing Stout’s book in the April 2004 issue of First Things, Gilbert Meilaender asks: “But is that not the point?” Of course that is the point–membership must trump interests. It is a point Stout is blind to, but one which I think even Neuhaus and Wilson would readily concede. Meilaender rightly concludes that if “this primary loyalty [to the Church] must be relinquished in order to argue for democracy, the price is too high.”
The presence of the Meilaender review is reason to hope that the more “thoughtful” Evangelicals and Catholics may still get traction even in Neuhaus’s “public square.” (Although even Meilaender was quite careful and deliberate to distance himself from the “strident” Hauerwas.) In another such hopeful sign, appearing in the February issue of First Things, Eric Miller reflected on Alisdair MacIntyre, Christopher Lasch and Christopher Shannon’s work. Miller rather wistfully described his hope that Christian colleges with “mission statements”–such as the one where he teaches–could be communities of tradition. However, he voiced serious doubts about that prospect given the attenuated, objectified nature of tradition at such institutions: “a stroll through the campus bookstore, or a visit by an accrediting agency, even the phrase ‘mission statement’ itself–all these remind me of the extent to which we at Christian colleges, despite our clear differences of belief and behavior with our secular equivalents, swim in the same polluted waters.” Such observations, coming from Wolfe, would probably be deemed egregiously offensive by Neuhaus.
Miller’s concerns gain poignancy when set in relief against a recent conference at Baylor University concerning “Christianity and the Soul of the University.” (Notable paper titles include: “The ‘Office for Mission’–A New Campus Phenomenon” and “For Teachers to Live, Professors Must Die.”) Ironically, this conference is taking place at an institution that wants to be the Christian university (or at least the Protestant Notre Dame) but is wracked with scandal and vicious internal division. (See Andy Black’s article in this issue of The New Pantagruel.) Given this unfortunate reality, one could conclude that designated Christian intellectuals (embedded or otherwise) may theorize all they want–it is a community of practice that counts in the end.
Many people–Evangelicals in particular–seem to have difficulty grasping that this is the point of MacIntyre’s oft-quoted passage from After Virtue in which he concludes that a new St. Benedict is needed to build a community of traditional moral discourse grounded in practice, discipline, and ritual. So strong is the Christian intellectuals’ taste for brilliant abstract formulations, helpfully prescriptive manifestoes (have you seen ours?), and a perpetual outpouring of books from InterVarsity Press, Baker, and Eerdmans (all summarily reviewed in First Things, Touchstone, and Books & Culture) that they fail to note what is the single most significant difference between, say, real oddities like Thomas More College (in Merrimack, NH) and the relatively mainstream Baylor and Wheaton. At Thomas More, like at a Benedictine monastery, students and faculty live, work, prepare meals, and eat together. Thomas More students are also responsible for housekeeping. This strikes me as a radical idea, a truly countercultural strategy that unfortunately stands little chance for enthusiastic approval in CCCU institutions. It is badly needed. At a certain Calvinist college proud of its commitment to Christian identity and cultural engagement, I have been told that the student dorms once became too filthy by the end of the term for staff to handle. The problem was resolved in the typically modern way: hire the Merry Maids! Is cleanliness next to godliness if you outsource for it?
Unfortunately, there are numerous examples in the movement literature of a stubborn adherence to the Fisher/Stout method of cultural engagement. Even worse, however, is the tendency to assimilate into the preferred matrix any truly threatening alternative so as to dissipate its potency. That is the unstated, and perhaps unconscious, goal of John Owen as he takes up MacIntyre in the April issue of First Things.
Owen’s thesis begins reasonably enough with a recognition that the ancient dialectic between freedom and moral restraint is particularly acute in the contemporary Christian’s relationship to a culture dominated by Liberalism. For Owen, it is this situation which has “prodded us to look for another St. Benedict.” But Owen’s proposed way of resolving this tension is a warmed over and sentimental version of Stout’s argument from Democracy and Tradition. In Owen’s thesis, monolithic symbolic constructions–“the America we have” and “the Church to which we belong”–must be defended simultaneously. (“The Church” is apparently an Evangelicals and Catholics Together kind of pragmatic fiction without the friction.) The social order Owen imagines–symbolized by “the Church” and “our secular fellow citizens” who together compose “America”–must be preserved because of its “continuing toleration of institutions that mediate between the individual and the state, institutions such as the Church itself.”
Which brings us full circle back to Wolfe–what kind of Church is America’s “civil society” willing to tolerate? Rick Warren’s Saddleback megachurch? Probably. A church operating on a Benedictine model? I have my doubts. Owen is likewise daunted by the image of ascesis that the “St. Benedict Option” conjures up. Fortunately for Owen and for the dual loyalty he imagines, his solution does not require us to follow the saint “all the way into the cloisters … . Our love for the Church, our families, and other communities” will suffice.
Owen’s piece makes a striking contrast with another essay in the same issue of First Things, “The Church as Culture,” by Robert Louis Wilken. Wilken responds to secularization and the question of Christian renewal with a poem by Dana Gioia that is an implicit critique of the historical trajectory of Protestantism and “culture as choice.” (Gioia’s poem, “Autumn Inaugural,” is well-worth reading in full.) Given the spiritual weakness of a church within this trajectory, Wilken argues that it is now “less urgent to convince the … culture in which we live of the truth of Christ than it is for the Church to tell itself its own story and to nurture its own life, the culture of the city of God, the Christian republic.” In other words, the Church must relearn how to be a community of practice rather than an interest group marketing its wares along the road to “Yes!” Wilken concludes: “If Christ is culture, let the sidewalks be lit with fire on Easter Eve, let traffic stop for a column of Christians waving palm branches on a spring morning, let streets be blocked off as the faithful gather for a Corpus Christi procession. Then will others know that there is another city in their midst, another commonwealth, one that has its face, like the faces of angels, turned toward the face of God.”
I know nothing about either Wilken or Owen, but my guess is that Wilken is a Catholic who thinks orthopraxically and through the Mass whereas Owen is an Evangelical whose primary source of order and reflection–his tradition–is the mass of literature he cites. Owen’s primary commitment to the “conversation” leads him into all kinds of errors, including a strong tendency towards reductive (and erroneous) pigeonholing: Wendell Berry and Stanley Hauerwas become “left-wing” and are thus safely defined and dealt with exclusively in terms of “their place” in the conversation.
Wilken, by contrast, embraces a carnivalesque humanism. Putting it pointedly: Christian renewal means virtue and the cakes and ale. This truth about the Church is central to its transforming power and the one without which, no matter how many concessions are obtained at the negotiation table by self appointed Christian representatives, it will surely fail.
Copyright 2004-2005 :: The New Pantagruel 1.2.