Why Attack Liberalism?

I applaud the New Pantagruel but, with respect, Liberalism is not the enemy of Christianity or Western Civilization. The true enemy is the same this century as it was in the last, as well as in the 17th Century. The enemy is the evil in the world that tempts most men into abandoning self-control and surrender to idol worship which, of course, leads to nihilism. What difference could Liberalism make to this virtually timeless problem?

Is the idolatry of hiphop, stock options, pornography or militant and resentful Islam any different at core than the idolatry of the Golden Calf or the Roman cinerary columbarium? Moses still gave the law in his time and Jesus defeated Roman death in His. The idolatry and hyper materialism of our time comes simply from our failure to live in obedience to grace, not from Liberalism.

Liberalism, as the late Walter Lippmann noted, is older than all existing constitutions and more deeply rooted than any formulation that can be put into words. Lippmann wrote, and I understand, Liberalism as simply “the philosophy that holds that enduring governments must be accountable to someone besides themselves. Liberalism is the idea that there must be a reasonable method of changing governments without wrecking the state.” Liberalism is simply a reflection of a higher law that men, crowds, and churches must not be arbitrary toward challenging people, ideas or situations. Liberalism need not mean that man has inalienable abstract natural rights and is essentially good. As narrowly defined, Liberalism is demonstrably a force for good which, with fits and starts along the way, has generated reforms freeing humans from bondage both physical and mental.

The expedient 18th Century Liberal (Whig, actually), Edmund Burke, argued for change from circumstance and worked consistently to wrest absolute power from the few but was, nevertheless able to say: “the principles of true politics are those of morality enlarged.” It is Burkes’ pragmatic Liberal and even utilitarian thinking which should guide our journey into tomorrow.

Burke would have said freedom of speech? Good. Freedom of religion? Good. But, if he were confronted with pornography capable of harming the society or a militant, murderous, ideology capable of undermining an otherwise just and efficient state, he would draw the line. Is too much freedom the child of Liberalism? More likely, a cowardly and lazy return to worshipping the Golden Calf. Only this time the calf has been constructed by Locke, Hume and Rousseau. The modernist calf is the “idea” of a priori abstractions in the form of “rights.” Burke would say, as do I, this is nonsense. Man has a priori (and practical) boundaries, not rights. Rights are evolved from the reasonable, and hopefully temperate, power shifts which occur, thanks to Liberalism, over time.

Western society has become over tolerant, but this is likely due to our human tendency to focus on the golden calf of societal utopianism rather than focus on our potential personal perfectibility. God could have made us perfect but, as Irenaeus saw, He chose not to because we were not capable of receiving that gift. Instead God created us with great potential; we can choose to grow toward perfection. Liberalism simply allows the growth to proceed both from within our hearts, as we are moved by the Holy Spirit, and from without as we move our minds to new frontiers.

Imagine, if you will, the possibility of some miraculous time transcending potion. By taking a dose, our minds could be transmogrified in a way that the world of Augustine or Aquinas or even Chesterton would seem to us comfortable and acceptable; we would feel at home. But, in the face of the “progress” and innovation we have seen, even in our lifetimes, would anyone of us honestly want to drink? Would we be willing to leave our time? The place where we have arrived and from where we may flower from potential into perfection? We live in a post Hegelian, post Marxian world where the liberal dialectic, though not always to our taste, at least flourishes. From here, we can still hope to see our Father’s kingdom come. I do not argue, as Schleiermacher or Tillich, that Christianity should link itself to, or flow with mass culture, however, Christians must proceed into the 21st Century confronting its challenges, spreading the good news, and providing light in the darkness.

A sincere example of Christian virtue and humility which we can set today and tomorrow, will be as moving for our contemporaries as the witness, sacrifice, and even martyrdom of our Christian forbearers was in the past. Today, for example, a Christian lawyer may choose a kind of martyrdom by agreeing to submit himself or herself before cynics sitting on a judiciary committee intent upon destroying persons committed by conscience and free will to the natural law. Teilhard de Chardin said that “we have only to believe, and the more threatening and irreducible reality appears, the more firmly and desperately we must believe. Then, little by little, we shall see the universal horror unbend, and then smile upon us, and then take us in its more human arms.”

Your project is laudable; go forward with the humanism and the humor of Rabelais’ Pantagruel and Shakespeare’s Falstaff, but keep going forward. Do not become lost in the Epicureanism of the Koheleth and the cycles of Vico or even Voegelin. Contra Voegelin, there is a gnosis that is good, in fact, divine and it is hidden in the parables of Jesus and it is nothing less than the key to the Kingdom of God. In fact, among the last lines of Ecclesiastes we find a most important message: “here is the conclusion of the matter. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.” The gospels tell us the good news and command Christians to live differently from the world and to carry out the Great Commission. Now is our time in the desert, our time to resist temptation before evil and before God. It is now our duty to make the ideas of our time and our circumstances consistent with the commands of God. We may now use the tool of Liberalism to unlock the gates to His Kingdom for the 21st Century. This can be done in humility and with the deepest regard for the tradition–humanist and otherwise–which leads us to this time; this new circumstance before the unfolding future where God waits.

Seamus McCracken

Topeka, Kansas

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

by Gassalasca Jape, S. J.

Contents

• A Sea-Change or the Old Bob-and-Weave?
• Who’s Afraid of Alan Wolfe?
• Getting to Yes
• The St. Benedict Option – Classic
• The St. Benedict Option – Remix
• Cakes and Ale

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

A Sea-Change or the Old Bob-and-Weave?

erhaps 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.

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.]

Who’s Afraid of Alan Wolfe?

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?

Getting To Yes

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 St. Benedict Option – Classic

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?

The St. Benedict Option – Remix

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.

Cakes and Ale

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.

The Morality of Complacency, from Icarus Fallen

by Chantal Delsol

he morality of our time could be defined as a morality of complacency.

Contrary to what one might at first think, there is no contradiction in terms here, since complacency does after all have its norms, and even its demands, to which society ultimately submits.

Complacency is an overall penchant, an art de vivre. It could even be considered an ethical system, in the sense that it can eventually become a practice that establishes norms for itself. What interests the contemporary individual is less the accomplishment of a “good,” which he does not know how to define in objective terms, as self-fulfillment in the short term, which has now become the ultimate criterion of the “good.” An act is considered to be good if it allows the individual to fulfill himself. The question of criteria remains unresolved, however, for how is one to define self-fulfillment? In fact, it can be measured only by the standard of satisfaction.

Complacency indicates a predisposition to seek pleasure. Raised to the level of a principle, it supposes the permanent identification of the good with that which pleases. To be complacent means to be easily accommodating, to admit whatever is convenient, or to look kindly on whatever comes one’s way. It indicates an open or easily obtained indulgence, without any judgment attached. It accepts things in advance.¹ It can become a sort of selfish servility. All this is true of present morals in general–in the relationships contemporary man has with his work, with money, with authority, and with others.

The ethics of complacency legitimizes and recognizes all thought, all behavior, and all ways of life–on the condition, of course, that they do not oppose complacency itself.

The complacent man is, in a manner of speaking, a slave to what pleases him, in the sense that he has trouble stepping back from what pleases him and examining it with a critical eye. He is therefore just as accepting of the unhappiness associated with what displeases him.

He is complacent in sorrow and discouragement, and readily complains about what has befallen him, for he is unable to distance himself from his own ego, to lift himself above his displeasure.

The ethics of complacency legitimizes and recognizes all thought, all behavior, and all ways of life–on the condition, of course, that they do not oppose complacency itself. In doing so, this ethics constitutes a worldview, for it is not merely the attitude of the smiling sage, or of the fool who takes what comes without regard to its consequences.

The ethics of complacency’s indulgent accommodation of everything corresponds to a refusal to accept any established limits, or to a refusal to refuse, which brings to mind the the catchphrase of the 1968 generation, “It is forbidden to forbid.” The sweeping away of moral taboos during the preceding two decades was probably due less to a fading of the previously dominant religious thinking as to an inability of traditional thought to justify the barriers that, in the end, were being propped up only by the force of habit. Traditional thought had come to live more through its institutions than through its points of reference. We know that institutions, created to embody and perpetuate the certitude of these points of reference, often ended up abusively replacing what they were supposed to protect, and became mere hollow shells in the process. Thus, the ethics of complacency never had to impose itself by arguing for its legitimacy. On the contrary, it was able to impose itself without any argument at all, filling the vacuum left by other ethical systems whose points of reference had been lost along the way.

The ethics of complacency is an openness to all that is possible, which it justifies in advance. It closes no doors. Thus, the highest virtue of our time is open-mindedness. Our contemporary has said it all when he speaks of an open-minded person. We are not dealing here with the humanist who has pointed out errors and misdeeds but, without legitimizing them, is able to see the suffering humanity behind them. Rather, this is the man of accommodation, who has decided in advance that nothing can be called deviant or unnatural because he does not recognize any criteria according to which an idea or a behavior might be considered deviant. Unaware of any criteria of the good apart from that of well-being and pleasantness, he rejects any and all judgment: above all, “do not judge”–this is the obsession of our contemporary.

It is significant that this “open-minded” man is, as a social model, the heir to the Greek kaloskagathos and the honnête homme of a bygone era.² These men were characterized by their devotion to external, objective points of reference. Our “open-minded” man, in contrast, is characterized by his disowning of any exterior point of reference. This is what makes him historically unique. And it is precisely this absence of reference that makes him a modern model.

His behavior, which is at the same time a way of thinking, corresponds to what his detractors call “easiness,” “indulgence,” and overall weakness. These pejorative appellations, however, are entirely insufficient as critiques of complacency. For why should “easiness” be in itself reprehensible? There is certainly something vain about seeking difficulty for difficulty’s sake.

Complacency might appear worthy of contempt to an ideology of force or virility–to an ideology of the superman. Some might even find a hint of lowness in complacency, which is what we sense in the expression the wink of complacency. But here we are in the realm of sentiments or even passions, not rational argument. It is difficult to see on what basis the rigor or intransigence of established limits is more legitimate than well-being or pleasantness. We find ourselves here in an area of debate where the only exchanges occur at the level of anathema–and no amount of anathema has ever constituted an argument.

The identification of the good with what pleases amounts to an extreme constriction of the imagination’s conception of time. The good, whatever its foundations, generally extends over the long term. How is it possible to seek the good today without wondering if it does not compromise the good of the future? How can one aim for a result without being interested in what are its consequences?

Contrary to what some pessimists might believe, we do not find ourselves in an era without “values,” but rather in an era characterized by the appearance of an unstructured, erratic, and deficient ethics.

The “good,” in the sense of what leads to happiness, encompasses the individual in time, melding the present and the future, and in the space of his human and natural environment. This is why we distinguish it from capriciousness, which we generally associate with children because of the lack of a broader vision it supposes. What is essential about caprice is less its arbitrary nature than its “primal” character. The contemporary individual thinks that well-being is happiness; however, well-being is short-term pleasure, whereas happiness is a “good” anchored in a given time and place.

The ethics of complacency deals only in what immediately seems obvious. And in doing so, it indicates a short-term vision, a narrow conception of time and space. It simultaneously denies the temporal dimension of personal life and of social history. Complacency dismisses all futures. The virtue of what pleases cannot be judged in the present by the measure of a religious or ideological good, but by a good that lasts in time. If the vertical criteria are no longer accessible to our contemporary, the horizontal criteria cannot be avoided.

Contrary to what some pessimists might believe, we do not find ourselves in an era without “values,” but rather in an era characterized by the appearance of an unstructured, erratic, and deficient ethics. Of course whether we are in fact dealing here with an ethics or not remains open to discussion. Nonetheless, contemporary man has not abandoned the idea of the good, even if he talks so much about it that his logorrhea raises suspicions. Of course, he does not actually seek the good, since he is without the necessary criteria to accomplish this quest and in fact rejects any such criteria in advance. He seizes anything at hand that pleases him, anything that moves him or stimulates his emotions, and calls it good. In doing so, he believes he has discovered a new pragmatic outlook, one free from his former prejudices, and a way to provide for his general happiness, which is the purpose of any ethics.

The appearance of the ethics of complacency marks a complete rupture with what we knew before, not only concerning the source of norms, but also concerning the spectrum that the identified “good” covers. As we know, modernity is the era where the determinant of what is good is no longer an authority or doctrine, but the individual himself. But everything is happening as if the rise of subjectivism had conjured up not only a new source of the good, but also, and probably in a related way, a good that serves a different purpose.

The break with the notion of an objective “good,” which specifically characterizes modernity, allows the rise of a “good” defined by each individual within the sovereignty of his own conscience. The “good,” as something objective and given from the exterior, was the product of a religious or ideological worldview and brought with it a hierarchy of norms that rested upon a truth. It proposed, or imposed, not only the meaning of existence–it identified what existence can expect–but the very blueprint of a “good” existence. It brought with it the architecture or model of a respectable human life that was generally esteemed and devoted to happiness. Ancient morality, and later, Christianity–and even modern ideologies–spoke less of a series of piecemeal collection of “goods” as of a “good life.”

The individual who has now been left to himself to determine his own “good” has not only been “liberated,” in the modern sense, from this truth that weighed upon him. He has at the same time lost the overarching rationale by which the idea of the “good life” is made intelligible. We might expect that the sovereign individual would become the creator of his ethics. After all, he is not supposed to receive anything from anyone, and must find within himself everything he needs to exist with dignity, which corresponds here to an idea of the good.

However, if the human subject defines himself by the ability to create norms, each individual cannot really be expected to be able to create his own ethical blueprint. In an earlier time, each individual’s birthright was an ethical blueprint given him along with the first smile of his mother. He could of course later modify it or reject it altogether, but he then had to bear the marginalization that this choice would inevitably bring. In this respect, each individual was blessed at birth with an ethics, and it is uniquely modern to have understood this blessing as a form of slavery, since, for modern man, to have to accept an ethics from someone other than oneself is oppressive. This is why contemporary man is born into a shapeless, soundproof, de-clawed, and innocuous world, and why it is up to him to give it direction. He has to assign a name to his own dynamic impulse in the darkened absence of signs, and he has to do this alone.

Each person is henceforth called upon to choose his own values, or even to invent them. Furthermore, these values are for internal use only; that is, they must not be imposed on others. The ethical project each man invents is valid only for himself, from which follows a twofold difficulty that inevitably serves to confirm the individual’s place within the destructuring ethics of complacency.

The first difficulty is that each individual must in principle be able to discover or invent the alpha and omega on his own, for no one is going to rush to his side to propose an alternative ethical project. On the contrary, such a gift would be understood as a form of alienation. Contemporary man is supposed to find due north without a compass. Or rather, he is expected to use himself as a compass to find his own north. However, we have to have the courage to recognize that no society is made up of millions of theologians, avant-garde moralists, inspiring visionaries, and prophets.

The kind of heroes who bring with them points of reference, or who are able to shine a light on previously unseen points of reference, are few and far between. The vast uninspired mass of people finds its moral blueprint through the mediation of a Moses, Socrates, Saint Paul, Luther, or Solzhenitsyn. No egalitarian theory, however sophisticated, will ever be able to hide the obvious: not all Greeks are Socrates, but the existence of Socrates allows other Greeks to name their own existence, and to assign a reason for it. Our contemporary has rejected prophets, but has great difficulty formulating his own moral blueprint; at the same time he cannot do away with the idea of the good. He therefore contents himself with an erratic good, jumbled norms, and a succession of incoherent “goods,” which are inevitably tied to the immediate present since no moral project binds them together.

The second difficulty our contemporary faces is the following: even if he does possess an ethical project able to structure his existence, taken from himself or from elsewhere, he must keep it to himself. Whoever holds the key to a life-giving hope normally seeks to share his convictions. And anyone would naturally prefer to uphold a universal conviction rather than a uniquely personal value.

But our contemporary distrusts those who defend values, that is, those who want to found values in truth. He suspects that values will transform themselves into absolute truths as soon as they find proponents to defend them. He fears nothing more than the fanatical domination of a moral project. And because of this fear, he circumscribes the defenders of certitude within a perimeter of safety, where he can cautiously watch over them.

So it is that the individual who develops a moral project and decides to equate his destiny with it becomes dangerous. He is suspected of judging others by his decision, and of secretly harboring the desire to force others to imitate him. It is true that every individual choice implicates all of humanity by forging–even unconsciously–a model that becomes a standard, or a sort of unofficial point of reference.

Moreover, any coherent ethical project takes on overblown proportions in the face of the deconstructed nature of contemporary ethics, and immediately threatens it, for chaos is uncomfortable, and nothing is more reassuring than certitude. He who deliberately embarks on a project of this nature–he who chooses meaning–implicates, like it or not, the whole of society, and tends to transform a value into truth, which revolts contemporary man. This is why our contemporary so conscientiously tries to protect himself from the dangerous whisperings of seekers of meaning and strives to conserve a smooth and colorless society peaceful in its indetermination. The only defendable ethics is the ethics of complacency.

Enjoined to invent for himself his own norms, and forbidden to speak about them once he has found them, the contemporary individual is finally reduced to doing without a structured ethics at all, either because he finds that he is not clear-sighted or patient enough to invent one, or because he becomes discouraged by a project that is valid only for himself and derided as soon as it has universal pretensions.

Subjectivism does not in fact engender the end of all striving after the good, nor does it produce cynical men. It engenders the end of a structured good, of projects that lead to the “good life.” The desire for the good, characteristic of man as a moral being, must then express itself in an impulsive way, and so it finds a place for itself in the ethics of complacency. The good can no longer manifest itself through global and long-term visions, rather only through fragmented intuitions.

Notes:

¹ We might say that it is quintessentially “laid back.” Trans.

² Or the English gentleman of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Trans.

Weddings and Wrong Choices

by Ragan Sutterfield

was recently at a wedding that was, as weddings often are, the reunion of old friends. Afterwards, a few of these friends and I got around to discussing our feelings about the marriage. The conversation was, surprisingly, one of concern–concern for the choices our friend was making and for the kind of life that he was moving toward. That life was domestic and simple. Having decided against earlier plans for graduate school, he had decided to work instead as a house-framer, an occupation he had come to love over several summers of work. He and his wife were to live on two acres in a rural community and hoped to create a good home economy which produced some of its own food. Moreover, both were open to the possibility of children in their marriage–meaning that they were not interested in the expense and effort required to technologically exclude them.

I could not have been happier at the choices the new couple were making. I felt that they were better suited to rural living than to life in the academy, and I felt that at its base it was a good life, one concerned with justice and responsibility toward neighbors. Yet I was the only one among my companions who felt this way. The rest feared that the couple was making a mistake; that the groom was throwing away his talent and intelligence, not to mention his “education.” Such criticisms are examples of a quiet and pervasive prejudice that animates our age and economy–a prejudice that legitimizes our economy of violence and keep us ultimately from an economy of Good.

The first result of this prejudice among my friends was their aversion to family. They could not understand why someone would so entangle themselves. It was not that they were against marriage. They could understand the idea of marrying some loved one. What they could not understand was the idea of marrying and allowing oneself to be “tied down” with children.

Children, undoubtedly, often keep one from doing what one may want to do. With children, travel is limited and more complex. Schedules become more regular and less spontaneous. Time and attention must be concentrated on activities outside of our list of wants and goals. Children interrupt the ideal modern marriage in which both partners want the same things and share the same goals. In short, children inevitably break the modern ideal of shared selfishness.

That the groom’s critics were implicitly aware of these facts was obvious. What is no longer so obvious is the assumption that selfishness is a vice. On the contrary, advertisers have done a good job of turning it into a near virtue, a momentary good against our otherwise complete altruism: “Do something good for yourself today, you deserve it.” Yet if any ethic is to have success it must begin with the understanding that there are people other than oneself; this is the first step that must precede the real ethic of treating others as oneself.

Children not only offer a break from narcissism but are also instructors in care. It is commonplace for people who once lived risky lives to change when they have children. By excluding children from both married and societal life, our culture has indefinitely prolonged our ability to act irresponsibly in the pursuit of our desires. Children make one think not only of the future, but also give a sense of purpose beyond personal goals. A culture that welcomed children would be less destructive to both the social and natural worlds simply because the focus would be turned, even slightly, from our selfishness. Children remind us of our dependence and thus of our own responsibility to those who came before us and those who come after us. The young and old demand our care, and the disabled require it. And for each demand our personal freedom is limited. The dependent “tie us down,” they “trap us.” And ever since Rousseau the temptation of liberalism has been to leave the epileptic in the street–to remove the limit and forget about it. If we cannot completely remove a limit (as in abortion) then we give it to an institution that can absorb it (as in childcare). The result is an unbounded person, free to move from place to place and buy without limit on abstract credit. And while limits will eventually impose themselves on us, we continue to view them as “problems” that must be mitigated rather than the very possibility of community.

Of further concern to the groom’s critics was the fact that it appeared his education would be wasted; that it would not be put “to use.” But in what sense can education be used? Is it not the same as saying that love should be used or hope should be used? Education can be used no more than the sun can be “used” by a plant in its growth. The sun is a natural and integral part of the flourishing of a plant. It is not “used” to grow a plant–it is not imaginable that a plant could flourish without it. It is the same with human flourishing. Education is as essential as the sun. It may be formal or it may be informal, either way it is essential. Education is not money; a commodity that can be exchanged in the market place. Education is an integral part of life–it is an aspect of being human. To demand that education be used is on par with demanding that people be used, and that demand is not uncommon in our age.

“Using” education seems, from the way people talk about it, to have something to do with working in an institution such as the government, or the academy or, perhaps, a corporation. That our friend had decided to put his gifted mind to work in building a good home economy was seen as an abdication of this goal. Society wasn’t getting its expected return on its “investment” in his education. If instead he was putting his intelligence to work helping the Tyrell Corporation make more money or helping the government become a more efficient bureaucracy or in the academy, I think there would have been no complaint. But to willingly commit to becoming a skilled craftsman–one interested in the intricacies of house-framing and in how good or bad buildings, good or bad architecture, might affect a place–was nearly incomprehensible.

That we value the institutional mind over the integrated one is a symptom of our diseased society. In placing our values thus, we go against the ancient traditions that thought of value in terms of necessity. Thus in Confucian thought, farmers were considered to be more important than merchants because they are more basic. A society can do without merchants, but it cannot do without farmers. In the same way Plato, in his dialogue The Laws, gives farming an elevated place that belongs to citizens, while retailing and mercantile work is given over to resident aliens. The opposite is true in our society: resident aliens do most of our agricultural work (which is considered beneath most citizens) while citizens vie for mercantile work. Someone who wants to do the basic work of farming or house-framing is now thought to lack ambition or skill. Such a choice is not “professional” in the sense that it does not submit to the values of the market. I would suggest, however, that we could learn much from an older view of profession which measures work in terms of real value, calling, and contribution, not according to market value.

A true sense of profession is rarely found without community and thus, necessarily, place. My friend’s choice to become a house framer was, I think, motivated largely by the fact that he was already initiated into a placed practice. Over several summers of work with an old order Mennonite house-framing crew, he had become attached to the particular practice of that crew. The crew dressed in plain clothes and worked as a community. In many ways the crew was a guild–a group guided by a common pattern of practice and motivated by a sense of work that was not based on merely abstract value. There was a sense of excellence in the work and a belief that certain virtues could be gained by working well.

The market’s exclusive reliance on utilitarian virtues is, in fact, a de-professionalization of work. The “professional” institutions in which most “educated” people work maintain regularity and functionality not through internalized skill or a “giftedness” of work, but rather through an external policing of standards. Such standards must be maintained because those carrying out the work are interchangeable. They have no obligation to the work, or the place where they are working, and so the institution employing them is left with only external means of controlling service. Continuing with the example of my newly married friend, by working with a crew of framers who were united by a common faith, dress, and values, these external standards were rendered less important. There was a common agreement upon what good house-framing should be, and one’s ability to meet that standard was a reflection of one’s very character (something absent in the mechanized systems of external control). House-framing then was not just a “job,” it was a practice through which virtue could be developed.

But to practice such virtue my friend had to be a part of a particular place and a particular community. House-framing for him was then attached to a certain climate, a certain geography, a certain people, and to some extent, a certain architecture. While the skill of house-framing was transferable to other places, its virtues were to some extent tied to this particular place. What made house-framing a virtuous form of work among the Mennonites was the commitment of the crew members to be there for one another as a crew. That commitment allowed for the development of a guild community. Importantly, such a guild cannot be achieved in a system of interchangeable workers.

By making such an intimate association between work and place my friend was also drawn into belonging to that place in other ways–politically and ecclesially. He joined a church in his community and became involved there. He also became involved in the political concerns of the small community that he had entered through work. Each of these aspects of his life tied easily together because they were all connected through a common landscape, both physical and spiritual.

Yet this community and place are not available without costs, nor are they always sustainable in the face of external pressures. The choices that were available to my friend were largely possible because of his connections to a placed community. Such connections are rare in our day. They can be found only with difficulty, and when they are found they are often in decay. Any life that seeks to maintain ties to a local place outside the confines of “certifying” institutions will be met with much difficulty and perhaps “failure.”

The human soul has a deep desire for permanence, for community, for goodness, and too often we settle for less than these. But the world also weighs heavily upon us; our commitments to a place or community are interrupted by the crude realities of economics, by the difficulty of wading against the current. I do not know if my newly married friend will be able to sustain his chosen life. Perhaps time will prove his critics the wiser. Either way, there is a certain tragedy in the loneliness of his choices: that when he sought a life based on responsibility and goodness, his friends responded with the mantras of a tired world. The discovery of true community may well lie in such loneliness.

My Faith Is In The Rock And My Name Is On The Roll

by John Paul Davis

friend of mine has a habit of inviting me to accompany him on what he advertises as “a quick run over to” a given merchant we both frequent; the “quick run;” always morphs into a Mammoth Shopping Expedition which lasts hours and usually involves a meal. I rarely make any purchases on such trips; in general, I’m no good at shopping for shopping’s sake, since I most often only buy something when I know what I want and where to get it. I will, at times, carry a few items for potential purchase around the store with me, watching my friend try on, taste, smell, or listen to the various products he’s sampling, but I almost always return the items to their shelves before we leave.

Sometimes, though, I’m wise enough to remember I won’t buy anything, and I spend my time browsing or proposing to my friend that he buy something absurd or wholly unsuited for him. This is always much more fun than buying anything for myself; I have made quite an art of it, and will spend considerable energy finding the most useless or offensive products for my friend.

It was such a quest that led me to the soft-edged, bulging cardboard box of cassette tapes in the Village Outlet (a thrift store). I was hoping for an old Vanilla Ice cassingle or perhaps an entire album by Debbie Gibson, but for the most part I found blank cassettes onto which had been recorded various pop rappers; there were many, many copies of Puff Daddy albums from that distant time before he changed his name to P. Diddy, and albums by various “original gangstas,” but little that was not dubbed from something else. The Scott Wesley Brown album was in the bottom of the box, flanked on all sides by sucka MCs enshrined by Maxell.

The cassette itself was a sort of overeager electric blue color chosen without regard (or with blatant disregard) for the fact that it clashed with the queasy royal blue of the cover which, in the minimalist fashion of the 70s, contained no information at all save for the artist’s name, the album name, and the song listing. Who played on the album, where it was recorded, who Mr. Wesley Brown would like to acknowledge and thank, who produced the album, or who was responsible for the photo of Mr. Wesley Brown standing on a beach in a Hawaiian shirt and bug-eyed spectacles is all information lost to the ages. This was most definitely a record from the mid seventies; Mr. Wesley Brown sports, in the cover photo, a white man’s afro and a watch larger than some cell phones. I admit envy of his Hawaiian shirt. The album’s name is “I’m Not Religious, I Just Love The Lord.” I am certain I have seen bumper stickers expressing the same sentiment.

My friend, on being presented with the cassette, whoops with delight; the find even elicits celebratory swearing. He calls the cassette “hot,” like so: “That is HOT, man.” He is not being ironic. He really likes it. It is worth sixty cents to him, which in the economy of thrift store shopping, amounts to high praise. He pops it into his car’s tape deck when we leave. The cassette’s previous owner was kind enough to rewind the tape before making a gift of it to Village Outlet. It starts, however, on side two, so we miss the title track and instead are treated to “Dance,” which expresses SWB’s determination to “dance like David.” I have to explain the metaphor to my friend, who knows who King David is, but wasn’t familiar with the dancing.

“Like” is an adverb of sweeping scope; I deflate my friend’s astonishment at the thought of SWB dancing in the streets wearing nothing but thick-rimmed glasses and a bulky watch by pointing out that I think he probably intends “like” to mean “just as.” We agree, however, that it would be far, far cooler if SWB would indeed have danced naked in the streets, but my friend observes that if he were going to, he’d need a different soundtrack.

The title track, when we get to it, expresses, over a shamelessly Elton John-ish tune the uber-protestantism of the hippies-turned-evangelicals who made up the Jesus Movement. “Religion” is out; “loving the Lord” is in, which gives the song a sort of anti-authoritarian, theologically liberal gloss. But the song’s subtext suggests that there is only one way to “love the Lord,” which necessitates some kind of organization and mechanism of indoctrination so that everyone knows what that one way is. I don’t imagine SWB, who has spent a significant portion of his career advocating “missions,” and not the kind whose primary purpose is in service of the sick or needy, agreeing that polytheistic Africans can “love the Lord” differently than middle-class Americans, which sounds an awful lot like religion to me. The scope of the denial required to maintain this dichotomy boggles the mind.

Another track, “Friend,” lends itself very easily to misreading. It is part of a mini-genre of “love songs to Jesus” in which the metaphor of a human romance is used to illustrate the relationship between Christ and the singer. Songs like these, very popular in Contemporary Christian Music in the 70s and 80s, are typically bland or unsubtle or both. Usually they take a form which makes it difficult for listeners to know if the singer is singing about Jesus or his girlfriend. In this case, SWB’s use of masculine pronouns with few references to Jesus in the song can be heard, without too much effort on the part of listener, as homoerotic; the metaphor overpowers the song and its religious meaning is lost.

SWB covers “House at Pooh Corner,” badly, but well enough that we didn’t fast-forward.

We listened to the entire album, but “Dance” contains our favorite line: “My faith is in the rock, and my name is on the roll” (which I believe I have also seen on a bumper sticker). We adopt this line as our own (the cultural studies academics would say we ‘appropriated’ it) for a week or so as our greeting.

‘What’s up man?”
“My faith is in the rock…”
“…and my name is on the roll, baby.”

The tape makes its rounds; various denizens of the local coffee shop borrow it to listen, none of them Christian, most of them atheist. The fascination is similar in all cases; none of them are in danger of being converted or even slightly convinced by SWB’s music. Most express amazement that while the music isn’t that good, it isn’t nearly as awful as one expects Contemporary Christian Music to be, and that it is clear that the session musicians have chops. Something’s missing.

The music isn’t terrible, but it is highly derivative, mostly of Elton John. The influence is strong, especially in the music and arrangements. Even the fingering style of the pianist (is SWB the pianist? I don’t know: there are no liner notes, remember) tears a chapter from Elton’s book. And, now, thinking about Elton and SWB simultaneously, I wonder if the cover of I’m Not Religious.. was influenced at all by the cover of Elton’s Caribou. The two are similar enough for this to be plausible, but different enough to keep me from being certain.

The differences between the two covers are like the differences between Elton’s music and SWB’s. Caribou features Elton in an outlandish, ridiculous tiger-print shirt and trademark oversized Elton John glasses occupying the middle third of the cover, surrounded by a beach and mountainscape; I’m Not Religious… features SWB in an moderately gaudy Hawaiian shirt, almost Elton-esque oversized glasses occupying the middle third of the cover, surrounded by beachfront. In short, the cover art for “I’m Not Religious…” is like the cover art for Caribou, but watered down.

This is interesting to me for several reasons, the most salient of which is that even if the cover art is not derivative, the music most definitely is, and this means that there exists a fascinating relationship between SWB, his fans, and Elton John. It is probably safe to bet that among the folks who own or owned copies of I’m Not Religious…, there are few who owned any records by Elton John, whose music, especially in the early 70s, was sexually charged, and whose stage persona has always been gender-bending and homoerotic. John’s songs in the 70’s represent the peak of the Elton John/Bernie Taupin collaboration; Taupin’s lyrics are filled with the lust, anger, exuberance, bluster and swagger of the 70s. Not exactly fare suitable for Christian radio. SWB acted (at least on I’m Not Religious…) as a sort of filter for CCM of the ideas and music of Elton John; it’s clear that he didn’t just study John’s music - he was a fan. SWB had obviously listened to and loved Goodbye Yellow Brick Road; there’s no way he could have made I’m Not Religious… otherwise.

But this isn’t just a plight of Scott Wesley Brown’s; if one spends much time listening to “Christian” music and one is aware of “secular” music, it is obvious that as a genre, CCM is derivative. CCM artists act as kidneys for their largely evangelical audience, straining secular pop culture and inserting Dogmatically Correct lyrics. Until the Jesus Movement, Christian music was largely old-time music, bluegrass, gospel, and drippy ditties performed by acts with Gaither in somewhere in their names. When “Christian Rock” was evolving, there was no infrastructure designed for it, and the closest thing was the small network of radio stations and labels that promoted gospel music being made by white people. The aesthetic and mores of that demographic determined the course of CCM up to today.

Then, too, there is the music’s utter failure to achieve what was likely its primary goal: to win converts. CCM music, especially in the 70s and 80s, was almost entirely either schmaltzy, sappy “Praise and Worship” music, which was mostly bad paraphrases of certain Pslams set to soft rock, or the kind of stuff SWB wrote, whose goal was evangelism. The idea was that since music had been shown to be a powerful uniting force in the 60s and 70s, that Christian musicians could Trojan horse susceptible non-Christians into believing. Until the early 90s, most Christian concerts ended with altar calls, the lead vocalist or main act becoming a preacher for the show’s final fifteen minutes. The musicians often acted as prayer counselors themselves, adding the persuasion of Star Power to the mix.

But almost no one over thirteen who’s listened to CCM music has become Christian, or even become more sympathetic towards the idea because of it. None of the several people who have passed around the blue SWB cassette have prayed the Sinner’s Prayer so far as I know. Most of them only listened to it for its campiness; the odds of them going near any modern CCM are pretty slim.

That’s because, in thirty years, not much has changed. I went to the local library and filled up a shopping basket with samples from the rather impressive collection of CCM. The bands still dress like famous mainstream bands of five years ago; the production and styles and instrumentation and graphic design are similarly five years behind the times. Right now I’m listening to the latest album by a band called Switchfoot; they have been mentioned in Rolling Stone and on the iTunes Music Store. But they’re still frightfully bland and unoriginal. They have had the good sense to hire a mainstream producer (John Fields, producer of Pink and Mandy Moore), but the lyrics are cliche-ridden, the music is predictable, and yes, derivative, this time of the soft-grunge genre that pervaded top forty radio in the mid-nineties (think Bush, or Third Eye Blind).

Or, more famously, there’s Jars of Clay. Propelled to what counts as superstardom in CCM’s small pond by winning a songwriting contest in the early 90s, Jars released an album unashamedly derivative of U2. They quickly mellowed out though, and their second album, much afraid drew heavily on not only the “sound” of the Pennsylvania acoustic folk-rock band The Innocence Mission, but also the concept behind The Innocence Mission’s third album, Glow, and that album’s cover art. Both covers use an antique black and white photo tinted yellow for the principal artwork; both use a red, lower-case serif font for the text.

Since then, Jars have widened their palette somewhat, but a listen to Who We Are Instead, their latest album, reveals that they’ve settled for sounding like the Gin Blossoms or Toad the Wet Sprocket (both bands popular in the early 90s). Like SWB’s band, or Switchfoot, Jars have musical chops, but they seem to have decided to bury their talents in a hole in the ground rather than take any risks with them. Lyrically, they’re not as clunky as Switchfoot, and nowhere near as bad or unintentionally campy as SWB, but they’re also not as interesting to listen to, probably because Toad the Wet Sprocket are not as interesting (or dangerous) as Elton John.

Some readers aware of how vast the universe of CCM really is will no doubt be protesting that there are interesting, relevant, original CCM artists, and I won’t disagree with them; I own a few Daniel Amos records. These same readers might also observe that mainstream music is by no means without its own copycat acts, and again, I will not dispute. but what is of interest to me is not only that the CCM cosmos is almost wholly lit by stars whose light is not their own, but what light acts as source for these artists. Where artists in the mainstream may betray heavy reliance on great songwriters, those songwriters are almost always practitioners of the same or a similar genre to that of the copycat.

Genre does not merely determine the style of music; packed with musical style are rhetorical patterns, ways of seeing the world, and attitudes. Blues musicians mustn’t stray too far from the blues’ essential dissatisfaction with the world; rappers, even those who find the bling-obsession and confrontational attitude of popular rap music distasteful, must still self-aggrandize. Bubblegum pop must address the high drama of teenage throwaway romances; industrial music must address and embody human despair and hopelessness. Some genres are therefore more suited to expressions of evangelical lives (there are almost no Catholic or liberal Protestant CCM bands; it is a wholly evangelical endeavor). The singer-songwriter genre, for example, lends itself easily to the kind of introspection one finds in the Psalms or the middle of the book of Romans; folk music, because it has always been prophetic, is easily put to the same use by evangelical folk singers. Genres that can’t be as easily imported must either bend the rather static evangelical doctrine to their requirements or lose essential elements of what makes them what they are.

It is in this importing process that the internal tensions of CCM arise. Usually the CCM artist allows the discourse of evangelical theology to co-opt the surface-level features of a genre (musical style, graphic design, costumes) while ditching the attitudes and ideas that make the genre function resulting in terrible or bland music; rock and roll that champions the causes of the establishment isn’t just a betrayal - it’s also boring.

Sometimes, though, the CCM artist allows the genre certain control, resulting in theological absurdity or self-contradiction. The reggae band Christafari comes to mind. Reggae is a religious music; the religion it arose from, Rastafarianism, is an essential component of the music itself, including reverence for and reference to Haile Selassie (also called Ras Tafari). Thus Christafari’s compromise is evidenced in the band’s name; they attempted to redirect Rastafarian devotion to their messiah toward Christ. The result backfires in ways one hopes Mark Mohr, the group’s songwriter can recognize. The lyrics to the song “Lion of Zion” for example, read as text, present themselves innocuously (and vacuously) as lyrics to a given Hosanna Music “praise and worship” song:

Him a the Lion of Zion
He’s tougher than iron
So burn down the hills of Babylon
The Lion of Zion, it’s him we can rely on
And Him that protects me from wrong

Some of what is theologically wack about this is due to Mohr’s ineptitude as a lyric-writer (Jesus is tougher than iron? Has he gone and joined the WWF now? And does Jesus protect Christians from wrong? Or does the rain fall on the just and the unjust?). But the major theological weakness is a function of the genre itself; any serious fan of reggae will instinctively read references to “the Lion of Zion” as Selassie, not Christ.

A second example is the Gospel Gangstas. A rap group who managed to get some mainstream rap radio play in the mid-90s, the Gospel Gangstas had to keep the genre’s tropes of murder, gang battles, masculine stoicism. This was accomplished by transferring the violence to the slaying of metaphorical demons, turning spiritual warfare into bullets from a Tek 9, and turning Ephesians 6:12 on its head:

Why yes I’m just a spiritual cap peela, life killa, blood spilla
To make it blunt a straight demon killa
…

And in yo midst like a guerilla, pleadin the blood over your pillar
It’s the Sanctified, Bloodwashed, demon killa, killa

Petra stand as a third example; much of the unsubtlety of their lyrics is due to the pop metal genre, often called “cock rock,” that the band has practiced for the past 15 years. This kind of rock music is swaggering, macho, sexually charged and about as subtle as a freight train. The teachings of Christ are not well-suited to expression via “cock rock.” The complexities of theology do not translate well through these tropes, resulting in the absurdities listed above, and twenty albums’ worth more. Bob Hartman’s songwriting is instructive if for no other reason than that his songs interpret scripture with the critical lens typical of most evangelicals, one which ignores (if it’s aware of) Jung’s observation that symbols reduced to mere definition lose their symbolic and mysterious power. So, on Petra’s latest release we’re treated to a reading of 1 John 15:20 that reduces the Gospel message to nepotism (“It’s all about who you know”), and a reading of Romans 7 mangled by an inept analogy to Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Hartman reads Stevenson with about as much finesse as he reads St. Paul; Stevenson’s whole tension between civilized, educated, effeminate humanity and the necessary but repressed masculine, animal side and Paul’s nuanced exploration of sin and grace are both morphed to fit Hartman’s theology).

Being an instrumentalist doesn’t seem to offer a CCMer any clemency; Michael W. Smith’s most recent album, Freedom, proves that CCMers can even get New Age music wrong. And being a well-respected, talented mainstream artist doesn’t seem to offer immunity either: just listen to Bob Dylan’s Shot of Love, Slow Train Comin’ or Saved.

Take Charlie Peacock, an artist often lauded by CCMers as unusually creative and talented, and himself the author of a diagnostic of All That’s Wrong With CCM book (At The Crossroads). Despite a promising mainstream career, he could not escape the CCM curse: his best work is made up of the albums he released before moving to Nashville and signing a deal with Sparrow Records. From the point on, each of his albums was progressively worse. His most recent, Full Circle, celebrates 20 years in the CCM industry, is an album of remakes - Peacock remaking his CCM hits with various CCM stars as collaborators, and is outright awful. Instead of performing music derivative of some famous mainstream artist, Charlie Peacock is now performing music derivative of Charlie Peacock.

But this is to be expected. Peacock went from being an outsider to the CCM industry, signed to the same label as U2, promoted by the famous rock promoter Bill Graham, to being an insider’s insider: songwriter for Amy Grant, producer of numerous CCM bands (Switchfoot being one of them), sought-after author, and columnist in CCM Magazine. His rise in CCM -land is almost directly connected to the decline of his music. Still, in 1997, when At The Crossroads was published, he was able to perform a halfway-decent diagnosis of the problem: CCM artists use the same producers, session musicians and studios as country music artists, and yet the CCM industry continues to churn out embarrassing, second-rate music while country music has recently experienced a renaissance, thanks in part to country artists who are either Christians or who deal in Christian themes, like Emmylou Harris, Johnny Cash, Buddy and Julie Miller, and the performers on the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack (produced by T-Bone Burnett, a Christian) like Ralph Stanley.

This raises an interesting question: country music and gospel music both express Christian themes unashamedly. Why don’t these genres suck as universally as CCM?

The reason might be because both country and gospel center around storytelling, as opposed to the presentation of propositions. Storytelling is the mode of discourse found most often in the Bible, and even in the Creeds. Take out the “I believe” at the beginning of each line in the Apostle’s Creed and what do you have? A story. So perhaps CCM’s problem has to do with the evangelical attachment to propositions as the preferred means of communicating about God. Stories, like the ones in the Bible, are open-ended, and applied ad hoc by readers. Sometimes I identify with the Prodigal Son, sometimes his elder brother.

This is what younger evangelicals find so compelling about Christian musicians outside the CCM sphere, even ones who are unashamedly not evangelical, like members of U2, or Moby, or Lauryn Hill, or Evanescence. Being outside the CCM sphere, these artists are free from the constraints of CCM’s Doctrinal Correctness to make rock and roll that can address Christian themes while still transgressing. Rock and roll is largely about transgression, and about dancing, and ideally, about both at the same time.

Peacock’s diagnosis failed, and the failure demonstrates how little has changed since the 1970s. For Peacock, the problem with CCM is that its listeners and performers and industry folk aren’t “kingdom-minded.” His use of this phrase is vague. On the one hand, Peacock emphasizes that the Gospel is presented as a story, and that Christians ought to be storytellers. He’s just a “follower of Christ,” but he’s doesn’t have much truck with Rules and Doctrinal Correctness. One might come away with the impression that he’s an ageing liberal hippy—he’s not religious, he just loves the Lord.

But he suffers from the same malaise as SWB, namely, that underneath all the liberal-sounding talk, he is religious in a very particular way. At The Crossroads takes for granted that Christians ought to be converting non-Christians—the emphasis on storytelling is framed as a means of achieving this goal. The Doobie Brothers thought “Jesus was just alright;” Peacock thinks Jesus is necessary, and what’s more, that particular ways of perceiving and understanding Jesus are necessary. Peacock’s in denial as much as SWB was, and as much as evangelicals in general are.

It’s uniquely evangelical to ape secular pop culture to the extent that evangelical markets do, just as the phenomenon of “mall churches” like Willow Creek, which are based around the idea of preaching a “seeker sensitive” gospel, one that is marketable as a self-help program, is an evangelical phenomenon. “Seeker-sensitive” theology is similar to the theology in CCM lyrics; it’s bland, inoffensive, centered (as Peacock observed) around contentless buzzwords, uncritical of the status quo or of injustice – in short, it’s a demographic more than a proper theology. The demographic wants pop music, but with Doctrinally Correct lyrics. It wants rock and roll, but none of the rebellion or transgression or sexuality that comes with it. At the same it seems surprised and shocked, even, that the music it commissioned isn’t popular with fans of mainstream pop, and from time to time cries censorship.

There is not much difference between what bugs CCMers about the politics of radio play and what bugs mainstream rapper wunderkind Kanye West about it enough to devote a song (“Jesus Walks”) to the topic:

So here go my single dawg, radio needs this
They said I could rap about anything except for Jesus
That means guns, sex, lies, videotape
But if I talk about God my record won’t get played, huh?

But West’s interests are not what CCM’s interests are:

I ain’t here to argue about his facial features
Or here to convert atheists into believers
I’m just tryin’ to say the way school need teachers
The way Kathy Lee needed Regis…that’s the way I need Jesus.

Perhaps this is what makes West’s song, and his complaint, sound more prophetic and less like whining. His goal is that of a traditional witness: to tell his story, not win converts. Perhaps the song’s gospel music roots and structure lend it an authenticity CCM music will probably never have. (Why doesn’t gospel music suck?) Or perhaps it’s because West does something CCMers just don’t: he makes us shake our hips. In that regard, West, whose repertoire ranges from the religious, as above, to the naughty and bawdy. In this way, he’s like Mick Jagger, who, we’ll remember, “don’t wanna talk about Jesus,” but just wants to see His face.

Baylor 2012: Universal Vision in a Particular Place

by Andy Black

n Language and Love, William Mallard introduces the main features of Augustine’s theology through a recounting of the Confessions. Mallard frames Augustine’s intellectual and spiritual pilgrimage as the attempt to find a vocabulary able to unify and encompass the two “worlds” he had known since birth: the religious world of his mother with its talk of sin, salvation, and Jesus; and the world of everything else: business, culture, and philosophy. From this perspective, the conflict between the divided internal and external worlds we inhabit creates the “restless heart” that draws us toward rest in the transcendent yet graciously available God of Christianity.

I am reminded of this interpretation of Augustine as my alma mater, Baylor University, is currently in the midst of a heated controversy over the attempt to transform itself–the world’s largest Baptist university–from a primarily regional school with respectable but not quite prestigious academics into the world’s premier protestant research university. There is much talk on campus in Waco, Texas these days (at least by some) of rejoining what was torn asunder by the Enlightenment; of integrating faith and learning across academic disciplines; of Baylor bravely pointing the way toward peace for the restless hearts of contemporary academe, culture, and Christianity.

Officially launched in 2001, the “Baylor 2012” plan calls for a decade of major building projects, graduate program expansion, increased emphasis on faculty research, lower student-faculty ratios, and the hiring of “world-class” scholars. (This is the point at with writers are tempted to use the cliché “Texas-sized” when describing Baylor’s ambitions.)

The Baylor envisioned in the 2012 vision will become a magnet for Christian intellectual muscle, a place for innovative interdisciplinary programs, a model for the integration of vigorous faith and serious learning and a Christian intellectual community giving students the resources and guidance to develop a sense of vocation and a commitment to service.

Entertaining the prospect of my alma mater achieving or even trying to attain these lofty goals has often been intoxicating. This has partly to do with school pride and the temptation to have it all: to succeed on the world’s terms (U.S. News and World Report’s coveted “Tier One” status!) while retaining enough religious character to feel superior to other religious schools who decisively chose the path of secularism in their quest for academic greatness.

But I have also been deeply attracted to the “vision” of Baylor’s current administration because it holds out the prospect of overcoming the “Scandal of the Evangelical Mind” that Mark Noll so famously analyzed and mourned in 1994. My first reading of Noll’s book affected me like few books have before or since.

As I read Noll’s analysis of evangelical anti-intellectualism, I gained a sense of solidarity: I grasped that I was one of many who had nearly concluded, with heartache, that “at least in the United States, it is simply impossible to be, with integrity, both evangelical and intellectual.” Noll offered keen historical insights into evangelical Christianity’s mistrust or disregard for disciplined reflection about God, human beings, and the world. More importantly, he provided a formidable theological argument for why evangelicals and all Christians should consider this a scandal.

As a Baylor undergraduate during the mid-1990s, I received a rigorous and enjoyable education. Opportunities existed for students so desiring to gain an outstanding academic experience. Baylor’s best graduates have historically been able to hold their own and more at the highest levels of academia and the learned professions. But Baylor has never seriously been considered a bookish place, notable exceptions notwithstanding. I spent my undergraduate years straddling the intellectually stimulating world of my academic peers in the honors program (the majority of whom had no use for the broadly evangelical ethos of campus religious life) and the world of my closest friends, whose sincere and admirable evangelical piety I both shared and struggled to maintain.

Campus worship events and informal spiritual gatherings urged students to be “passionate” for God and the gospel and to settle for no less than the experience of deep personal intimacy with the divine. This highly-charged spiritual atmosphere tended to be extremely inhospitable and off-putting for any inclined to acknowledge complexity, mystery, or doubt. My growing concerns about the appropriateness of sharply dividing the world into distinct “saved” and “unsaved” (or “reached” and “unreached”) segments caused me to question my own Christian devotion. I turned away from considering a ministerial vocation during those years, despite sensing a “call to ministry” (in Baptist terminology) as a child.

I left Baylor immensely grateful for the opportunity to learn in an environment that respected students’ faith. But I hated that so many fellow students could skillfully grasp advanced concepts in their disciplines or receive a rigorous professional preparation yet retain a faith overwhelmingly defined by the fads of pop-evangelical culture. An atmosphere of religious trendiness generally shaped Baylor’s extracurricular student life, while classroom content retained formal autonomy from religious influences. Apart from personal initiative by students or professors, there was no clear incentive or method for these two worlds to be brought into serious conversation with each other.

I decided there was something wrong when students who tried to engage their faith with the best Baylor had to offer academically found themselves at odds with or at least no longer at home within the religious community that nourished and shaped them. A community which included classmates and social peers–not simply the church back home.

This story is largely a familiar one. I have taken the time to tell it in order to emphasize why Baylor’s attempt to beat the odds by integrating high-powered academics with serious Christian commitment casts such a powerful spell over so many–including many with no previous incentive for following the fortunes of a Baptist school in Texas.

Baylor’s ten-year vision has attracted notable and surprising academics to Waco. This is no small feat, and a sure sign that something significant is happening. The most recent hiring coup is probably the arrival of acclaimed sociologist of religion Rodney Stark. (A serious, and reportedly almost successful, run was made at renowned British biblical scholar N.T. Wright). The new Dean of the recently-formed Honors College, Thomas Hibbs, is a distinguished Roman Catholic philosopher and former chair of Boston College’s department.

Among other figures from the “integration of faith and learning” corner of academia now at Baylor are literary critic David Lyle Jeffrey and Kierkegaard scholar Stephen Evans. Both became finalists for the job of Baylor’s Provost shortly after arriving on campus. Jeffrey, a Wheaton and Princeton-educated Canadian with no significant Texas or Baptist ties, was eventually given the academic responsibility of transforming Baylor into a Christian university “in the fullest sense of the word.”

Despite real reasons for excitement and anticipation, this is a painful time for all who love Baylor. Now into its second year, the ten-year vision is bitterly dividing the university. In September 2003, the Faculty Senate passed a lopsided vote of no-confidence in the leadership of President Robert Sloan. Not long afterward, Baylor’s Board of Regents responded by reaffirming Sloan’s leadership in a similarly decisive vote. Faculty members regularly square-off with dueling op-ed pieces in the Waco paper. Rival alumni groups have funded extensive and expensive media campaigns to attack or defend the Baylor administration and the 2012 vision. Feelings run deep, and both sides’ tactics show signs of desperation.

The “loyal opposition” fears that all that was good and unique about Baylor is being destroyed by zealous ideologues unqualified to wield such enormous power over the destiny of a major university. They charge the Sloan administration with doing violence to a venerable institution and its traditions by imposing a trajectory neither shared nor wanted nor fully understood by major swathes of Baylor’s constituencies.

In July 2003, several thousand alumni attended a “Baylor family dialogue” over the Baylor 2012 plan held in the basketball arena that was moderated like a presidential debate. The daughter of a former Baylor president and leader of the opposition provided a headline moment when she compared Sloan–a former pastor and biblical scholar–to infamous fundamentalists who founded their own colleges (e.g. Bob Jones, Jerry Falwell.). She implored Sloan to follow their lead, establish his “vision” somewhere else–“and let us have Baylor back!”

Critics point to reckless financial strategies and academic and curricular overhauls imposed by administrative fiat. Numerous faculty members protest an atmosphere of mistrust and intimidation in which dissent is demonized and doubt-raisers are bullied into submission. Many lament that the new requirements for faculty research will erode Baylor’s historic commitment to quality undergraduate teaching. They note that many beloved long-time professors–universally acknowledged to epitomize Baylor at its best–would not be hired under current publication standards and perhaps even under recent efforts to use interest in and capacity for theological reflection as hiring criteria. (These criteria lead many to ask: “What on earth does theological reflection have to do with being a good calculus or accounting professor?”).

The Sloan administration has scored some rhetorical points by exposing and refuting the most hyperbolic accusations and sinister rumors of the naysayers. But Baylor 2012 supporters’ primary reaction has been to define the protest as simply the typical anxiousness provoked by institutional change and to shift focus onto the rightness and boldness of Baylor’s ambitions.

The sheer grandiosity of these ambitions makes it almost inevitable that they will be used to justify morally ambiguous tactics. This is cause for great concern among Baylor alumni–like myself–with great sympathy for the administration’s goals yet with enough respect and admiration for Baylor’s heritage and those who built it to take the critics seriously.

Donald Schmeltekopf is the recently retired Baylor Provost. He was a central force behind Baylor’s shift toward and eventual adoption of the Baylor 2012 goals in the 1990s. In an interview with a university publication in 2003, he admitted that implementing this kind of institutional change is not for the weak of heart.

“There is a tension within myself about the degree to which you really assert and press the agenda of the university–being serious as a Christian university, increasing the expectations for research and scholarship, higher standards for tenure and hiring,” he confessed.

“There is a tension among all of that … and on the other hand of not wanting to ignore or leave anybody out of the life of the University. But the fact is, at a university of this complexity and magnitude, if you’re really going to move forward, inevitably–and this might be overstating it–some people might be hurt. They’re not going to be as happy in their work as I wish they could be and I’m sure as they wish they were themselves.”

Lives and careers have been disrupted and it appears that many alumni have withheld financial support and no longer recommend Baylor to younger friends and family because they do not trust or recognize their alma mater. Whether this damage is merely part of the inevitable growing pains of progress or is an early sign of disintegration is the question at the heart of the matter.

For years, Baylor enjoyed a reputation for solid undergraduate education (with an emphasis on quality teaching) and excellence in selected graduate and professional programs–all at an affordable price, by private school standards. But Baylor has never been a major research university and U.S. News and World Report continues to place Baylor in the “second tier” of national universities (although near the top of that group).

Then, heady optimism fueled by a strong economy coincided with an identity-shaping moment for the school. In 1996, Baylor entered as a charter member of one of college athletics’ most powerful conferences–the “Big Twelve”. Baylor is the only private school in the Big Twelve, which includes three Texas public universities and other major state schools of the southern and western heartland (Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, etc.).

Even more significant for its internal and external perception, Baylor joined a fairly prestigious group of private universities in the elite athletic conferences that included Stanford and Southern California (PAC-10); Northwestern (Big 10); Vanderbilt (SEC); Duke and Wake Forest (ACC). The longing to achieve recognition as a legitimate academic peer of these institutions while enjoying the money, exposure, and fan support (especially in this part of the country) that big-time college sports bring exerts an understandably strong pull on many alumni.

Baylor would make a unique addition to the “tier-one” academic club. Undergraduates are still required to attend two semesters of chapel and to take two religion courses. Vestiges of in loco parentis policies still regulate campus life. Visiting hours (although lenient) still remain in place in gender-segregated campus housing. In 1996, Baylor drew international media attention by permitting the first on-campus student dance. (This was a savvy PR move: a policy relic was abandoned without controversy, while giving Baylor positive press as a quaint, yet relatively progressive place).

The only religiously-affiliated major research university resembling Baylor’s aspiration is of course Notre Dame. (Notre Dame is not included in the above list since Notre Dame, as an “independent”, does not play football as part of an athletic conference, and football is clearly the reference point). Baylor as the “Protestant Notre Dame” is a goal most alumni could support enthusiastically, in theory.

By the late 1990s, it was easy to see Baylor as poised for something significant. In addition to the prestige of major conference athletics, Baylor enjoyed a legacy of sound financial and academic management, a committed base of loyal alumni (making it possible for serious people to refer to the “Baylor family” with a straight face), and had managed to maintain meaningful connection to its religious roots.

But even given this shared recent history, the strategists and administrators behind Baylor 2012 are motivated by a sense of crisis their critics do not generally share: a crisis of integrity for religiously affiliated universities with serious academic aspirations. The simple fact that some in the Baylor community are motivated by an urgency not felt by all has created an identity crisis which has steered Baylor into the chaos of contemporary American Protestant Christianity. And this identity crisis at Baylor is only a part of the broader identity crisis currently gripping the whole of Baptist life in the South.

In the last decades of the 20th century, a well-organized fundamentalist movement began seizing control of Southern Baptist institutions. Its leaders publicly declared their intentions to gain control of Baylor, the “crown jewel” of Baptist institutions, and purge it of a perceived liberalism. Many Baylor loyalists and Baptist moderates feared that this fundamentalist juggernaut would capture the Texas state convention, as it had the other major state conventions, enabling new leadership to add trustees to Baylor’s board with fundamentalist marching orders. Those orders focused primarily on mandating an institutional commitment to biblical inerrancy and requiring the same commitment from all faculty. In a shrewd and unexpected move, Baylor officials responded by changing the school’s legal charter in 1990 to es