Having returned at last to his office in Crim Tartary, and availing himself of his superior’s speediest carrier pigeons, Fr. Gassalasca Jape, S.J. (Pantagrueliste and Controversialist Extraordinaire giving aid and comfort to Misfit Traditionalists everywhere) has resumed his regular business of reformative suggestions for sinners and heretics all, hammer and tongs. He recounts at length his Amazonian sojourn with the Pirahã and subsequently with North American moralistic-therapeutic-biblical-experimentalists. Along the way, Fr. Jape exhorts the One True Church to learn to save souls from the abyss without recourse to mathematics. Next he inadvertently visits a “mega-church,” gets lost and befuddled in its restroom facility, breaks the Buddhist monastic law against stehpinklen, and Gerhard Schroeder warns him of the penalties. Finally he opines on the Naugle-Heller debate and contemns the editors of Christianity Today and Books & Culture to a purgatorial reward amid mighty blasts of his trump against whiggish evangelicals, the therapeutic church, “worldview studies,” and more.
Understanding the Pirahã
Lost in the Mega-Church: Sitzpinkeln oder Stehpinkeln?
The World-View of A Gelical Prufrock
A Mighty Blast of the Trump Against the Monstrous Rule of Evangelical Women
The Outrageous Ideas of Mark Noll
For roughly the last half of 2004, I found myself on a singularly bizarre mission, and I do not doubt I was sent on it for largely punitive reasons by my superiors who enjoy (as do I) the humor of Will Self’s fiction, particularly “Understanding the Ur-Bororo” from The Quantity Theory of Insanity.
Far more daunting than the fictional Ur-Bororo are the very real Pirahã. The main source of amazement about them to the academic world (and a stumbling-block to the Church) is their inability to count. The Pirahã lack numbers in their language. The most they are capable of is “one-ish” (which may mean one, two or three), “two-ish” (which may mean two, three, or four), “few,” and “many.” “More” or “less than” do not exist; they are alien concepts. Five can be distinguished from eight, but not five from six. Only one other tribe, the Mundurukú, has a similar facility, but they actually have a number–just one–“ebadipdip,” but it may mean three, four, five, or six. (Usually it is just four.) Astonishingly, all the Pirahã adults have proved incapable of learning the most basic mathematics after months of lessons. Moreover, the Pirahã have no creation myths, no fictional tales of any kind, no memory of events that go back more than two generations, and no interest in the future.
In one anthropologist’s view, despite their efforts and expressed interest in learning, the Pirahã have evolved a protective cognitive barrier between their minds and any abstract thought. This barrier is based in a fundamental principle of survival:
The principle is that the Pirahã see themselves as intrinsically different from, and better than, the people around them; everything they do is to prevent them from being like anyone else or being absorbed into the wider world. One of the ways they do this is by not abstracting anything: numbers, colours, or future events. This is the reason why the Pirahã have survived as Pirahã while tribes around them have been absorbed into Brazilian culture.
Thus it is a calculated but unconsciously willful ignorance that has enabled the Pirahã to survive as a community with their linguistic-cultural integrity.
This trait both disturbs and appeals, for it has crossed my mind that perhaps the Pirahã are, in some ways, superior to most Western Christians who are at once radically absorbed with the forces of secularism, materialism and the prevailing Culture of Death while also proving themselves incapable of much abstract reasoning. Indeed, they might be better without it, if knowledge only makes men unhappy, as it’s often been said. But then again, the Pirahã are not ignorant in areas where most of us are. Few modern folk have the skill and familial-communal resources to build their own homes, hunt, farm, fish, procreate and raise their offspring in such ways that also sustain and renew the community and its skills and resources. Untoward influences on the radically dependent life are inevitable because so much is needed for its mere survival, and the business of living must be carried out on terms set by outsiders of one kind or another. Of course it is a devil’s deal to choose between concrete skill and cultivated abstract thought. Tragically their glorious synthesis has not been seen since the first reformations of the church with the development of the various Monastic rules…
But I shall tire you no longer with this nostalgia. Naturally I was not sent to the Pirahã simply to learn about them. The Church does not much care whether potential converts confirm the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or variations of the same, however interesting that may be to the scholars. (Does language circumscribe consciousness, does it constrain the thinkable? Or vice versa? Are our thoughts determined by the language we inherit? Are great poets innovators in consciousness?) My humble mission was simply to save souls and to work with the small group of converts that was established among the Pirahã some years ago.
As you might guess by now, the Pirahã present an ecumenical problem insofar as the Trinity is far less intelligible to them than it was to the Irish, previously the slowest learners when it came to Trinitarian dogma. (To their credit, the Irish really came around when they came around.) But lest we lose the Pirahã to the burgeoning independent charismatic sects of Brazil (which are short on abstract dogma and ritual requiring mathematical literacy), Mother Church must develop a Pirahãnic rite quickly; she must also find alternatives and aids for most traditional forms of individual devotion. For instance, the Pirahã are perpetually short on rosaries and are unable to make reliable rosaries of their own. Thus it is not unusual for a poor Pirahã to be found locked in endless repetitions of prayer, his beads having been worn out or traded for some tool. (Such is their love for the faith, they would rather continue than guess when they are done praying.) Partial indulgences are, understandably, a hard sell along with the notion of purgatorial punishment, but the Holy Father’s announcement of plenary indulgences for 2005 are blessedly easy for the Pirahã to comprehend.
When I had completed my required stint with the Pirahã, I procured a bargain ticket on a floating retirement home which brought me to the United States after a leisurely month of shuffleboard and burials at sea which are both economical, environmentally friendly, and approved by the Church. I have not preached in some time, but I believe the retirement community on board S. S. Alimento de los Pescados was soundly inspired by my memento mori series, “A King May Go A Progress Through A Shark.”
Following this brief respite, I spent late November trekking toward Alaska. (The short route back to Crim Tartary.) It was a mostly uneventful journey except for the unfortunate event of an inadvertent visit to what is evidently called, in Omaha, a “mega-church.” A friendly trucker who had picked me up in Tucson dropped me off at a place that I assumed was an airport terminal. Hungry and in search of a restroom, I entered and found myself startled into silent observation of a wholly unexpected scene.
At first I thought the place was a very successful business that produced corporate management training materials and organizational leadership seminars while also doubling as a church on weekends and evenings. Now I understand that there is not a real distinction between these “functions” in such a church. It is the most rationalized, organized form of religion I have ever witnessed.
They had a “program” for everything you could imagine: daily programs for women, men, seniors, youth, children, handicapped people. They had Bible studies, book studies, and many other kinds of support groups. They had sports–one of their buildings housed a gymnasium. They had all kinds of ministries. They operated or supported programs outside the church from local to international groups. They were big enough to attempt to structure a whole community through the church’s life and activities. A person could throw himself into the life of this church and find something for every member of his family and for almost every activity they could possibly desire on every day of the week.
Later I realized that this “organization community” was really more of an abstract association than a real community which depends on the concreteness of geography (rather than a facility one commutes to) and normal life lived out in one’s natural surroundings. Activities at the commuter-based mega-church, by contrast, is like “Quality Time”–that cheap solution to the guilt of compromised parenting and atomized households: Busy parents who “do not have much time” for their children frequently try to make the most of the time they do have by spending it as “quality” time with their children. It is very programmed time with many hopes and expectations for its “outcomes.”
The problem with such thinking quickly becomes apparent, for it is impossible to schedule “quality” time with children. They are very resistant to being sat down and told that now things are going to happen that are “quality.” That is often the hardest time to get anything of quality going at all. Real quality time only comes in the context of a great quantity of time spent with others where there is not necessarily a plan or program. The real quality times often take one by surprise in the midst of what one thought was just ordinary time. In fact, some real quality time is totally unnoticed by parents, but their children remember it all their lives.
These are the things I learned in the American mega-church of Omaha, but even as they are in some ways unfortunate, the misfortune that befell me there was far more concrete. As I made my way to the restroom–the destination that had brought me to this church in the first place–I found that it was, like the rest of the church, extremely busy. Several programs had just ended, and there was a line for the urinals. As luck would have it, I had tarried too long, and the flushing and rushing sound of water in a busy bathroom speaks directly to the body. I spotted an open, commendably large stall for handicapped persons, and I entered. In my haste, I thought I might relieve myself whilst standing in my robes. There are several ways that, in theory, this can be done, but I had not performed the feat in many a year. Custom and prudence are against it for self-evident reasons. In fact, Buddhist monks are charged never to make such an attempt, except in an emergency: “Not being ill, I will not defecate or urinate while standing: a training to be observed.” Some modern, liberalized monks have decided that, as in my case, a monk “who needs to urinate, finds himself in a public restroom, and can no longer hold himself in while waiting for a toilet, would qualify as ‘ill’ here and so would be able to use a urinal without penalty.” This seems a cop-out to me, but fortunately or unfortunately, I am no Buddhist monk and there are no rules for how a Jesuit may piss.
Things were going swimmingly when suddenly an alarm rang above my head, and Gerhard Schroeder’s voice called out! The message was roughly something like this: “Attention! Urinating while standing [stehpinkeln] is not allowed here, and will be punished with fines, so if you don’t want any trouble, you’d best sit down [sitzpinkeln]!” After recovering and my curiosity piqued, I went out to the information kiosk to ask what the church had against stehpinkeln.
I was told that I had run afoul of a technology developed in Germany to relieve people (mostly women, minorities, and unpaid church staff) from menial cleanup duties exacerbated by stehpinkeln. I was apologized to and assured that a kinder, gentler, English voice recording would be installed soon. Herr Schroeder was scaring “seekers” who are by nature “sensitive” and uninformed about the customs of the church. On that inauspicious note, permit me now to turn to even graver subjects.
“Now, we are living today in a civilization where the confusion of ideas is such that everything that Plato had rejected as philodoxie is called philosophy.” – Eric Voegelin
Imagine my surprise, upon reading the recent “unpleasantness” between Jack Heller and David Naugle as they tussled over whose view of worldview was right, to learn that “Christian scholarship” is just now passing out of infancy and into adolescence, and that it recommends analytic tools of a personalist and subjectivist nature as fortification against the demon “postmodernism.” I confess to confusion. But then, I am nothing but an unfrozen sixteenth-century Jesuit who heretofore believed “worldview” to be the startling space photography I have seen recently which undoubtedly proves my old enemies correct when it comes to the shape of the earth. Round—who knew?
It appears, upon further study, however, that the worldview wars are an all too serious game in current Christian debates. It need not be so, for here is how the thing appears to me:
The ancients taught us that there are two minds: one which loves wisdom (philosopher) and one which loves opinion (philodoxer). Philodoxie is not bad, per se. It serves a useful function. Aristotle classified the various philodoxies as topoi, or categories of thought that are not real things, but exist only on the level of existential rhetoric. The topoi are “values systems” which create a consensus of belief within a group of people bounded by ethnicity or geography or religious myth or statehood or what have you. But they do not penetrate to reality, or to the true experiences that engender the various values systematized. During periods of relative historical stability, the topoi tend to rigidify and the group enters what Aristotle called stasis, or dogmatomachy–the rule of opinions. Dogmatomachy fosters a degraded human spirit that is closed to the real problems of human existence because those problems have been concealed by wide agreement (or disagreement) over the topoi. According to the philosopher Eric Voegelin, quoted at the beginning of this section, those who enter the foray are limited to a discussion of existing institutions and an apology for their principles, which quickly devolves into a mere defense of the powers that be. The very act of putting a subject in the public’s eye under the reign of dogmatomachy, is, in the words of Walter Baghot, “a clear admission that that subject is in no degree settled by established rule, and that men are free to choose it. It is an admission too that there is no sacred authority—no one transcendent and divinely appointed man whom in that matter the community is bound to obey. … Once effectually submit a subject to that ordeal and you can never withdraw it again; you can never again clothe it with mystery, or fence it by consecration; it remains for ever open to free choice, and exposed to profane deliberation.” As a remedy to the rule of opinion, at least as it pertains to men’s souls, if not their society, is a recovery of the classic experience of reason. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Voegelin classified Weltanschauungen (or “worldview”) as one of Aristotle’s topoi. I tend to agree with him. The back and forth between Naugle and Heller in these pages is not wrong, it simply exists on the level of existential rhetoric rather than penetrating to reality. And that is the problem. Having a “Christian worldview” gives parochial-and-anxious-about-it Evangelicals and various attenuated Protestants an ersatz catholicity and depth which they need for a variety of reasons—both to meet their honest and well-placed desires for membership, proper beginnings, and to keep the Times from lumping them in with Pat Robertson. Christians are urged to “articulat[e] a Christian worldview [of] … ‘comprehensive and far-reaching power.’” (That is Nancy Pearcey quoting Abraham Kuyper.)
Worldview, like all the topoi, is an identity tool. Its talk is all about the group and its characteristics and principles—a classic dogmatomachy. It is a game of self-fashioning. Here stands A. Gelical Prufrock before the mirror. Do I dare approve the worldview that elects President Bush? Do I dare admit the worldview that permits gay marriage? Do I dare, do I dare?
I am being mean now, as I am wont, but it need not be taken so. Every group does this in one way or another. But it is necessary to health and good order and right reason to be able to recognize the pathetic Prufrock.
Worldview studies suffer additionally from being both a child of, and a reaction against, the Enlightenment and especially its dominant epistemology of positivism. Worldview understandings are thoroughly corrupted with subject-object language. Worldview is both something “out there” which can be “possessed” by exposure to the right sources (witness the proliferation of Worldview studies programs at CCCU institutions) as well as something “in here” that can only be had by a personalist and subjective experience of conversion which brings a new “capacity” with it (witness chapter nine of Naugle’s book, cited in his essay, which details the necessity of this kind of conversion for a proper worldview). Naugle exemplifies how a worldview theorist, especially a Christian worldview theorist, becomes quickly boxed in, when he writes, “Therefore, what a person understands a worldview to be is, interestingly enough, dependent upon that person’s worldview! For this reason, I … unpack the implications of biblical faith on the concept of worldview.”
The positivist tale of conversion which entails the adoption of a certain opinion and requires none of the rigor and hard-to-swallow classical marks such as submission to an institutional order and denial of self is an inherently schismatic and liberalizing force which devolves into mere choice (of dogma), as noted by Baghot above. In response, Naugle insists in his book that “‘worldview’ must shed its relativist and subjectivist clothing and assume new objectivist attire,” but only “within the framework of the Bible.”
This is hopeless! It is this kind of circular, rationalist literal hermeneutic which creates the very crises of philodoxa which, as Mark Noll puts it, “only bullets, not arguments” can resolve. Setting an inherently liberalizing, rationalist view of scripture–fortified by a mechanical understanding of conversion as the only timber against criticisms that worldview analysis is relativistic–necessitates, in turn, the “worldview arms race” being escalated by philodoxers at Worldview Weekend and the Nehemiah Institute (and many other places) as they create an ever rigidifying dogmatomachy to act as herbicide against the “postmodern” and liberalizing weed.
The whole house is of cards. Either get out the rubber cement, or watch it all blow away. That is the conundrum my friends Naugle and Heller find themselves in.
Let me end this with a recitation from C.S. Lewis, a favorite of many worldviewers:
Scripture doesn’t take the slightest pain to guard the doctrine of Divine Impassibility. We are constantly represented as exciting the Divine wrath or pity—even as “grieving” God. I know this language is analogical. But when we say that, we must not smuggle in the idea that we can throw the analogy away and, as it were, get in behind it to a purely literal truth. All we can really substitute for the analogical expression is some theological abstraction. And the abstraction’s value is almost entirely negative. It warns us against drawing absurd consequences from the analogical expression by prosaic extrapolations. By itself, the abstraction “impassible” can get us nowhere. It might even suggest something far more misleading than the most naive Old Testament picture of a stormily emotional Jehovah. Either something inert, or something which was “Pure Act” in such a sense that it could take no account of events within the universe it had created. … For our abstract thinking is itself a tissue of analogies: a continual modeling of spiritual reality in legal, or chemical, or mechanical terms. Are these likely to be more adequate than the sensuous, organic, and personal images of Scripture—light and darkness, river and well, seed and harvest, master and servant, hen and chickens, father and child? The footprints of the Divine are more visible in that rich soil than across rocks or slag heaps.
Here Lewis warns against the dangers of philodoxa; against the degraded and closed spirit which conceals, by substituting an abstract consensus of opinion, the engendering experience that is awakened by the immediate language. In contrast, he describes what the philosophers (such as Michael Polanyi, whom Naugle cites but who would never have approved of the worldview project Naugle is involved in) mean by right reason: the experience of openness to the mystery of transcendence which flowers when the soul participates with existence as it becomes luminous for a truth which if known and possessed would be lost. That is the adventure of faith.
Harvard President Lawrence Summers caused a mini-stir recently when he noted that innate differences between the sexes accounted for the relative lack of women in top university math and science positions. Simply put, Summers pointed out that few married women with children were willing to accept the sacrifice of punishing 80-hour work weeks which are typical for those in such positions. Predictably, Summers’ comments prompted outrage and he soon issued a quasi-retraction indicating his “regret.” Such is the strength of the liberal-capitalist junta in these late days that the suggestion—even one so thoroughly untainted by any sectarian or (saints forfend!) religious motive—that 80-hour work weeks are hostile to families and motherhood is cause for shock, outrage, and a quick and efficient campaign to force the heretic to recant.
Even more disturbing to me, however, was the discovery of a different version of this same pathology on the pages of Books & Culture, the latest issue of which continues to display an alarming degree of un-Christian “tolerance.” In “The Real Life of an At-Home Mother,” Carla Barnhill, a former editor of Christian Parenting Today (part of the CTI “family” of publications) purports to expose the dirty secret that the fault for the “desperate housewife” phenomenon lies not with the hyper-sexualized and commercialized anti-family culture of egoism that is late modernity, but with Christian churches! Barnhill’s argument is that the “cult of the family” is “killing” Christian women by, in the words of Christianity Today editor Steve Gertz, “allowing the perception to grow that the mother’s role is the most fulfilling one for married women.” This, according to Gertz, leaves “those parts of [a woman’s] personality that don’t fit with parenting” to a death of neglect. (Gertz’s comments and commendation of Barnhill’s article appeared in a CT e-newsletter and on the CT website.)
Barnhill begins her assault on the “cult of the family” by marshalling several testimonials by women who, it seems, were bullied into giving up lucrative and rewarding careers to “stay home” with their offspring. (In their own words, it is always guilt before God that motivates these women, but in Barnhill’s view it is clear the guilt comes from the church rather than from God.) Traci confesses that after deciding to “sacrifice the career she loved” to stay at home with her [only] child, she “missed work so much that sometimes it physically hurt.” Alana [mother of two] complains: “I don’t feel I have natural skills and abilities as a mom. I take care of their physical needs and keep the house organized and running smoothly, but I don’t always know how to relate to my kids.” Even worse for Alana, her “walk with the Lord has suffered since I became a mom. Spending time with God feels like another obligation—just one more person wanting something from me.” Nora’s children [two] are grown now, but one of her “greatest frustrations” as a parent was “having to put my dreams on hold. … What most stimulated and satisfied me was often not possible to have in my life.”
To this Barnhill adds the conclusion that Christian “stay-at-home” moms lead lives of loneliness, boredom, and depression because they have “been taught that this is the life God wants for us, that to want something more is selfish and worldly.” Drawing Barnhill’s ire in particular is Debra Bendis whose article, “Stressed-Out Mothers,” in Christian Century Barnhill quotes:
While [young professionals] have been able to achieve much in a professional world, which supplies a social life as well as a career, they seem not to have developed the capacities for family life. They seem never to have learned about sewing, gardening, cooking or puttering—the soft activities that can make a home a comfortable and welcome place instead of a prison of isolation. … Without a habit of being at home, the mayhem of a toddler lunchtime or the tedium of a rainy day makes a day at work look like rescue—while home is only a punishment.
What Bendis is talking about here is what has been referred to in this journal as “practicing the discipline of place.” It is the idea that to suffer one’s place and one’s people in the particularity of its and their needs is the only true basis for finding love, friendship, and an authentic, meaningful life. This is nothing less than the key to the pursuit of Christian holiness, which is the whole of the Christian adventure: live in love with the frailty and limits of one’s existence, suffering the places, customs, rites, joys, and sorrows of the people who are in close relation to you by family, friendship, and community–all in service of the truth, goodness, and beauty that is best experienced directly. The discipline of place teaches that it is more than enough to care skillfully and lovingly for one’s own little circle, and this is the model for the good life, not the limitless jurisdiction of the ego, granted by a doctrine of choice, that is ever seeking its own fulfillment, pleasure, and satiation. The Puritan heritage of America has long chafed against this discipline as it necessarily limits one to a small field of action in a world with seemingly little hope for eschatological fulfillment. Thus have American Evangelicals historically pined after their great mission of “giftedness” and “calling,” forsaking that foolishness of the Gospel of our Lord which has ever lain at their doorstep, in need of nurturing care.
So too with Barnhill. She is inured to sight and can only express shock and outrage at Bendis. She responds that “while it’s true that many stay-at-home moms, myself included, think back fondly on the working-girl perks of hour-long lunches and coworkers who notice when you get your hair cut, it’s ludicrous to assume that holding down jobs before we became mothers somehow ruined our ability to be happy homemakers.” On the evidence of Barnhill’s article alone, I should think she would rethink this conclusion. But more broadly, Barnhill fails to see those very tasks Bendis cites as occupations which, when leavened with skill, virtue, competence, and love, become—not drudgery—but the very fruit and flowering of a good home and a good life. In contrast, by way of a perverse advocacy of modern homelessness and existential alienation, Barnhill finds these tasks to be the “bane of our existence.”
Is it any wonder she and her interviewees are desperate housewives? There is, in fact, always a certain desperation to doing one’s duty; desperation which becomes insurmountable when that duty is performed against a backdrop of isolation and self-defeating motives and mores. These mothers’ choice to stay at home conflicts with everything they believe and practice about family, children, and themselves, all of which is profoundly mechanistic and materialistic. Instead of homes, they are running orphanages (albeit very small ones) in which the sole purpose is the housing, feeding, and entertaining of children until they are old enough to leave, at which point, presumably, the mothers will pick up with their “dreams” where they left off. And all the while, the economic and cultural activities spawned by this mind have but one systemic goal: to drive mothers back into the work force as quickly as possible. It is likewise telling that of the eight or nine women discussed by Barnhill, not one is reported to have more than two children. The duty to propagate the next generation at a rate to exceed replacement is an unlegislatable mandate that occurs only when a community is healthy and its members love it more than they love themselves. When the order of a community falls out of health in this way—when it chooses to deny its own fecundity at the expense of its offspring—it chooses death.
The fact is that Barnhill and the women she reports on have been duped and have duped themselves into believing one of modernity’s most insidious lies: they have submitted to the regime of what Ivan Illich called “economic sex.” Economic sex is the “duality that stretches toward the illusory goal of economic, political, legal and social equality. Male and female are neutered economic agents, stripped of any quality other than the functions of consumer and worker.” In contrast is what Illich referred to as “the reign of vernacular gender” which marks a “profoundly different mode of existence” wherein exists the “eminently local and time-bound duality that sets off men and women under circumstances that prevent them from saying, doing, desiring, or perceiving the same thing. Together they create a whole which cannot be reduced to the sum of equal, merely interchangeable parts; a whole made of two hands, each of a different nature.”
It is the latter duality that creates the discipline of place, which in turn fosters a local economy of scale within which humane relationships can develop and fructify and which coheres around the household as its locus, rather than around the impersonal, mechanistic, and dehumanizing hubris of the “global economy.” Others such as Allan Carlson and the Howard Center have done salutary work on this front, and to them I heartily commend you. I cannot do justice to their work here, but let me offer something to whet the appetite from Carlson’s recent speech to the World Congress of Families:
[W]e are here to affirm the necessity of the Autonomous Home or Household. Marriage creates a new household. When gathered together, these households form the second institutional tier in natural social life and the one on which political life is properly built. The household will normally encompass the wedded man and woman, their children, and perhaps extended family. Successful households aim at a certain autonomy or independence, enabling their members to resist oppression, survive economic, social, and political turbulence, and renew nations after troubles have passed.
The basic human need for functional independence dictates the vital importance of a household’s bond to property, including land and various forms of capital. Autonomy requires, at the least, the capacity to secure a regular supply of food and the ability to preserve this bounty for consumption during adverse times. The dwelling or house where the family lives is another vital form of family property. This is where children are protected and nurtured, where love and economy merge together, where the future of nations takes form.
… The autonomous household, rooted in family-held property, also builds its own home economy, including still important productive tasks such as child care and meal preparation. More broadly, it is true that the industrial revolution of the 19th century, dependent as it was on balky power sources such as flowing water and the steam engine, encouraged centralized factories and stimulated the “great divorce” of work from home. This weakened the traditional order of the family farm and village. The 20th and 21st centuries, however, have delivered successive waves of new technologies which have returned “power,” in both senses of that word, to the household economy: from the small electric engine, to most recently, the household computer, linked to the internet. This extraordinary new tool, also once confined to large central work units, is now available for decentralized use. Where the competitive advantage in the 19th century clearly lay with the industrial factory, the productive homestead has improved prospects as the dawn of the 21st century.
Just so. Salutary, as I said. This is the message that our Christian desperate housewives (and their husbands who labor far from home in economic servitude—they cannot be forgotten!) need to hear. For it is by these means that their desperation, loneliness, depression, and boredom will be banished and the recovery of the disciplines of place, which are the crucibles of holiness, can be restored. It is the old old sermon about mastering the appetites, denying oneself, and loving others as the anecdote to everything from wonderbread to serfdom.
Instead, Barnhill urges a different route:
Stay-at-home motherhood truly is a mission, one into which not all of us are led—those, for instance, who need constant support and opportunities for respite… . What we need from the church is not a set of unreasonable expectations but encouragement and prayer that God will keep giving us endless reserves of patience, compassion, wisdom, and love… . We need to know that we are free to listen to God’s voice and follow God’s leading—whether that is into our homes or into an office. We need to know that our efforts at parenting well are covered by God’s rich grace and that, whether we stay at home or head to work, it is God, and God alone, who will fill our children with all that they need to love and serve in God’s name.
And later, Barnhill makes the clincher argument that a Christian woman needs to not be “forced to make a choice that doesn’t fit her.”
Let me speak freely: this is blatantly anti-Christian propaganda that appropriates a weak theology of calling to be handmaiden to the politics of choice which is, in the end, the politics of death and ruination. I can only comfort myself with the surety that, for allowing Barnhill’s article to pass under their editorial pens and into print, the editors of Christianity Today and Books & Culture will pay the purgatorial price. Meanwhile, Barnhill may as well cut to the chase and join Barbara Ehrenreich at The New York Times and own up to fact that she too is willing let her children play in the shadow of Moloch if it serves her freedom. In fact, Barnhill takes her revolt against God to a new height—if anything bad should happen, she wants to preserve absolution and assurance from the church that there was nothing she could have done. If there is any fault, it lies with God. Hogwash!
In 2001, Mark Noll sounded an optimistic note regarding Evangelicalism’s “new and serious appropriation of classical Christian traditions” for its own fructification, by which he meant “classical,” “traditional,” or “confessional” Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Cited as examples were the resources of Thomism, Kuyperianism, Scottish realism, Anglican Augustinianism, Anabaptism, Catholic Social Doctrine, Radical Orthodoxy, Martin Luther, Reinhold Niebuhr, “and (again) the principles of Abraham Kuyper.” Then in his recent (October 2004) reflections on The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind ten years after its publication, Noll emphasized the necessity of these resources and of tradition itself:
Without strong theological traditions, most evangelicals lack a critical element required for making intellectual activity both self-confident and properly humble, both critical and committed. In order to advance responsible Christian learning, the vitality of commitment must be stabilized by the ballast of tradition. Tradition without life might be barely Christian, but life without tradition is barely coherent.
D. G. Hart replied with a letter to FT, which stated:
Most of the serious evangelical undergraduates I have met over the last several years are drawn to Roman Catholicism, which they find to be the most attractive outlet for their desire to unite faith and learning. There are several reasons for this, among them that Roman Catholicism possesses a tradition of learning and a body of teaching that has immediate appeal to students starving for a Christian faith that has intellectual depth and rigor.
This may not be a problem for Professor Noll, who was one of the signers of “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.” My own conviction is that historic Protestantism has its own theological and liturgical resources that, sadly, contemporary evangelicals have ignored and in some cases repudiated. We are thus left with the question that Prof. Noll’s book originally raised and that remains unanswered today: Will evangelicals who become intellectually serious remain evangelical once they awaken from their pietistic slumbers? If not, is the “evangelical mind” really a possibility–or is it, instead, an oxymoron?
Astonishingly, Noll’s reply was that Catholicism does retain “considerable resources for nourishing intellectual life,” and “Evangelicals … remain open to at least some positive theological influences from the confessional Protestant past.” BUT: “To imagine that a vigorous classical Protestantism, with well-constructed academic institutions and well-balanced Christian cultural instincts, could repudiate modern evangelicalism and thereby regain intellectual depth, gravity, and authority is to indulge in a romantic fantasy.”
This is a strange position that Noll has reached, not only because he seems to be biting the hand that feeds him, but also because he stresses tradition–which is not properly a grab bag open to the whims of individual choice–as mere “resources” and “influences.” The vitally important “resources” of classical, confessional Protestantism are so much rubble–indigenously non-viable but of great utility in the hands of the Evangelical.
Perhaps it is Noll’s hope that–with the passage of time that he notes Evangelicalism needs–the fragments that it shores up from a past not its own will cohere into a new bulwark of tradition. Where this prospect leaves Hart’s students isn’t something Noll was willing to answer, and that makes his optimism begin to sound more like a mechanical reaction of team loyalty, the flipside of which is his negative, even despairing, projections for classical Protestantism.
“Culturally adaptive biblical experimentalism,” as Noll has in the past described the Evangelical ethos, has always sounded to me like “making it up as we go along and turning out to be just like everyone else.” That idea can’t have escaped Noll’s attention. Alan Wolfe, Ron Sider, and Christian Smith (among others) have recently charted Evangelicalism’s dipping into what Smith has called the “heresies” of “moralistic therapeutic deism.” (Carla Barnhill might stand as a case in point.) And certainly Noll has chafed at Evangelicals’ penchant for a right-wing politics that he found impossible to support in the past several presidential elections. In this regard Noll was not alone, and aside from my deep disagreement with Christians (including some of our compatriots at tNP) who abstained from voting or who opposed the incumbent (and despite my sympathy for their motives), it says something singularly significant that Noll finds himself so politically and ecclesially alienated from both his Evangelical brethren and his “classical” Protestant cousins. Wanting a “tradition” but not content with any particular tradition as it actually exists–including Evangelicalism as it is–Noll seems afflicted with the very poverty of coherence that he knows is the fruit of “life without tradition.”
What this impasse portends I cannot say, but perhaps it sheds light on the vigorously hostile and parasitic stance Noll and his likeminded associates have taken in their support for Baylor University’s 2012 program (and its now former president Robert Sloan), which aims at developing a “Protestant Notre Dame.” Predictably resulting in massive tensions and conflict, this great ambition has been directed in large part by (primarily Northern) Evangelical and Reformed ideas and personalities–rather than Southern Baptist ones. In brief, Baylor–a confessionally distinctive Protestant University–is to be saved from itself by becoming the grist for the Evangelical mill.
I do not exaggerate; it has nearly been put as starkly by Noll, Richard Neuhaus, and many other sources who blame an odd coalition of both “fundamentalists” and secularizing “liberals” at Baylor for resisting a life-saving, mind and soul-nourishing program of Christian higher education–not to mention a design to attract superstar faculty capable of redeeming the culture. (I gather this means so profoundly impressing the New York Times with the torrent of genius arising from Waco that the newspaper of record ceases to patronize Evangelicals as a bunch of banjo-strumming crackers.) Perhaps because Southern Baptists are not “classical” Protestants (their legacy does not figure in Noll’s list of admired “resources”) their largest university is available for colonization by those chosen for future glory, in Noll’s view, by history and Providence.
Having some experience with the cure of souls, I will hazard a diagnosis: this sort of presumption and ambition is dangerous and rotten to the core. Arising from the quest of alienated Evangelical intellectuals looking for identity, tradition, influence, and intellectual credibility (all at once!) is a supreme arrogance and egoistic self-assertion that paradoxically derives from self-doubt, disaffection and even self-loathing. It is the false pride of “merit societies” and “gifted” groups whose members are also pleading for a kind of special preferment because of their minority and quasi-victim status. Such operations, religious or otherwise, serve in great measure to perform an identity of success and accomplishment with questionable substance and sustainability. At its worst, the ethos in question may end up requiring forceful takeovers of existing institutions (such as Baylor University) which have a measure of earned virtue, skill, and competence–but only because they were the particular, peculiar communities that bred the qualities that made them come into being and flourish. Thus Noll on the one hand expresses a need for time to mature Evangelicalism, yet he is impatient to push the process along by supporting the destruction (via a kind of social engineering) of what time has yielded at Baylor, however imperfect and imperiled it may be. It may be unpleasant and, in some material respects, disadvantageous for particularist Protestants to accept this diagnosis, but if they see and desire a future that is their own, Noll’s contrary convictions and agendas can’t be taken lightly.
I realize that I have said much of this before, but I did not then grasp these underlying causes, and now it also occurs to me too that Noll’s incoherence also has to do with a conveniently shifting ethic toward power and its use. This appears most clearly in Noll’s aversion to many of the regnant neoconservative political agendas alongside of his acceptance of their underlying principles.
For instance, prior to the 2004 presidential election Noll wrote:
Since the United States is by far the strongest nation in the world–the new Rome of the early twenty-first century–it should ponder the over-extension, the short-sighted presumption, the failures of imagination, and the unilateral use of force that caused such difficulties in the latter phases of the Roman empire.
Presumably, then, Noll would have reservations about supporting an invading force driven by whiggish imperial ideology that seeks to spread its enlightenment and establish a beachhead against a much weaker fundamentalist group of small, particularist bands of insurgents fighting on their home turf for the right of self-determination and the preservation of local customs and mores. The Bush Administration vs. Iraq? No–this is the story of the northern evangelical establishment as led by the likes of Noll, Marsden and others against Baylor.
Copyright 2004-2005 :: The New Pantagruel 2.1.