The New Pantagruel Hymns in the Whorehouse 2.1 Winter 2005 Editorial Statement on Terri Schindler-Schiavo by The Editors of The New Pantagruel 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 Fr. Gassalasca Jape, S. J. Features Resurrecting Caelum et Terra by Jeremy Beer Why Catholics Should Be Wary of “One Nation under God” : Richard Neuhaus in a Time of War by Michael J. Baxter Babel-On by Blyvyn and Screwtape Jonah "Jonah" by Barry Moser Articles Milosz’s Century by Bruce Berglund Slothward Christian Soldiers: Stuck in Traffic Between the Two Cities by Randy Boyagoda Scrutinizing a Scandal: A Christian Worldview Analysis of a Christian College Professor Who Flunks Christian Worldview Tests and Doesn’t Teach from a Christian Worldview by David Naugle Hollywood’s Evangelicals Read Alan Wolfe, and lo! They Are Angry! by Patton Dodd The Parliament of The World’s Religions and The Axis of Theism by Mustafa Akyol Crucifixion (detail) "Crucifixion (detail)" by Barry Moser Interviews Perfect Clumsiness: An Interview with András Visky by J. Clayton Johnson with András Visky Death and Transfiguration: An Interview with Barry Moser by Barry Moser Review Essays Reading Spiritual Memoir: A Reader’s Spiritual Memoir by David Wright So What? Theology and American History by D. G. Hart Creative Non-Fiction Dirt, What Have You Asked of Me? by Laurie Klein The Nativity "The Nativity" by Barry Moser Drama Juliet, excerpts by András Visky • translated by David Robert Evans Disciples, an excerpt by András Visky • translated by David Robert Evans Poetry From This Distance • Ghazal • after laughter by Ed Higgins Baby Born with Antlers • Real Life Cat Woman Found in the Ozarks and She’s Looking for Love • Smartest Ape in the World Goes to College by John Leax We Go Out Searching for Sermons in Stone • Advice for Walkers • Note from the Week After Next by Jeff Gundy Lean Enough • Belly Dancing by Jean Janzen Contributors The NEW PANTAGRUEL, published by Pantagruel Press, a 501(c)(3) non-profit company, is a quarterly journal run by a cadre of intemperate but friendly Catholics and Protestants who have seen other journals run by Christians, and thought that while they might not be able to do better, they could certainly do no worse. EDITORIAL BOARD Caleb Stegall, Editor Dan Knauss, Associate and Design Editor J. Clayton Johnson, Managing Editor Christi A. Foist, Managing Editor Annie Young Frisbie, Managing Editor Fr. Gassalasca Jape, S. J., Inquisitor, Expectorator & Director of Polemics CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Jeremy Beer, Bruce R. Berglund, Randy Boyagoda, Patton Dodd, Thomas Heilke, Jack Heller, Joshua P. Hochschild, Zachry O. Kincaid, Eugene McCarraher, Eric Miller, Scott H. Moore, Read Mercer Schuchardt, Christopher Shannon, Gideon Strauss, David Wright © 2005 Pantagruel Press, Inc. * cum priuilegio Regis * Website: www.newpantagruel.com * Email: editors@newpantagruel.com * SnailMail: 11448 39th Street, Perry, Kansas, 66073 Editorial Statement on Terri Schindler-Schiavo by The Editors of The New Pantagruel Beginning March 18, 2005, Terri Schindler-Schiavo will be starved to death by order of the State of Florida. The gross injustices of the judicial decisions and the gross inequities of the actions of her husband and guardian, Michael Schiavo, leading up to this point have been well documented and are beyond dispute. It now appears that all legal recourse to save Terri's life has failed. As Terri's family and millions of people know, the State is wrong. There is a higher law. If last ditch efforts in the Florida Legislature and the United States Congress also fail, and the administration of Governor Jeb Bush fails in its duty to uphold the higher law, those closest to Terri---her family, friends, and members of their communities of care---are morally free to contemplate and take extra-legal action as they deem it necessary to save Terri's life, up to and including forcible resistance to the State's coercive and unjust implementation of Terri's death by starvation. The Christian community and all people of good conscience, rather than accepting the State's actions with the small consolation that "everything that could be done was done," should acknowledge the true horizon of morally acceptable responses, and should actively encourage and support all such responses when taken by those with immediate responsibility for Terri's care and wellbeing. Caleb Stegall, Editor in Chief and Attorney at Law Dan Knauss, Associate and Design Editor J. Clayton Johnson, Managing Editor and Attorney at Law Annie Young Frisbie, Managing Editor Christi A. Foist, Managing Editor Randy Boyagoda, Books Editor Jack Heller, Contributing Editor and Assistant Professor, Huntington College Jeremy Beer, Contributing Editor and Editor-in-Chief, ISI Books A continuing survey of the farce; or, where the folks are given the last word; or, a pointed laugh by Gassalasca Jape, S. J. 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 Understanding the Pirahã 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. Lost in the Mega-Church: Sitzpinkeln oder Stehpinkeln? 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. The World-View of A Gelical Prufrock "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. A Mighty Blast of the Trump Against the Monstrous Rule of Evangelical Women--and the CTI Horse They Rode in On 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! The Outrageous Ideas of Mark Noll 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. Swarming the Pub(l)ic Square: Resurrecting Caelum et Terra by Jeremy Beer IT is difficult, in retrospect, not to think of the end of the Cold War as a missed opportunity for orthodox Catholicism in America. The dominant school of Catholic political and cultural reflection since the collapse of the Iron Curtain has been of a neoconservative or neoliberal cast, orthodox in doctrinal and moral matters, progressive in most economic and some political ones (no matter that this progressivism is known as conservatism). Tracey Rowland, in her recent Culture and the Thomist Tradition, helpfully affixes the label "Whig Thomism" to this school. The adjective captures its flavor, politics, and perhaps even its intellectual antecedents nicely, even if the noun may credit its program with a philosophical precision to which it rarely ascends. One way to characterize the defects of the Whig Thomist project is to understand it as a failure to transcend the dichotomous categories of the Cold War, during which we were regularly reminded--by intellectuals and politicians alike--that our choice was simple: freedom or totalitarianism, capitalism or socialism, statism or individualism. Thus, though its first issue appeared in February 1990, not long after the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, First Things, the flagship journal of the Whig Thomism, has nevertheless drawn on the dominant anticommunist narrative of the Cold War which holds that the Soviet defeat meant, necessarily, the triumph of liberal democracy--emphasis on liberal. On this reading, even John Paul II (as Richard John Neuhaus has argued) is a liberal, or at least sympathetic to liberalism properly understood, and the importance of his pontificate has been to prepare the way for a rapprochement between Catholicism and the liberal tradition.1 For Neuhaus and his fellow Whig Thomists, there is no going back from this liberalism, no viable alternative.2 There is only an argument--a vitally important one, to be sure--as to what precisely this victory of liberalism means, especially for religion. The Whig Thomists have, to their credit, voiced a number of misgivings about contemporary culture. But they have simultaneously refrained from undertaking any sort of deep critique of Western liberalism, arguing instead that the rejuvenation of religious faith can leaven liberal democracy sufficiently for its institutions and assumptions to allow for Christian flourishing. The important thing is that there not be a "naked public square" (Neuhaus's coinage) denuded of specifically religious content. As for the basic tenets of liberalism and its economic manifestation, capitalism, the Whig Thomists have had few qualms. In fact, they have typically argued that the American system of "democratic capitalism" is best for all concerned, including the Church, which can thrive in the new dispensation as it never could have under the only truly thinkable alternative, state socialism. Indeed, the liberal state acts as a guarantor against the Church's committing again the authoritarian blunders that stain its past. Unfortunately, the Whig Thomists' understanding of liberal democracy as a praeparitio evangelii has meant that they have had to leave a range of issues essentially unexplored. Thus, First Things has usually responded dismissively--or else with implausible optimism--to critics of technology, consumerism, mass society, modern warfare, and environmental degradation, especially when those critics have insisted on linking their concerns to the intrinsic logic of liberal capitalism. This response is understandable, for to the extent that such critics have sought to articulate fundamental critiques of liberalism, they hack at the root of the only genuine, historically available option for Christians today. If they are not cranks, they are knaves or fools. For instance, the Acton Institute's Fr. Robert Sirico--the Whig Thomist par excellence, just as his organization's namesake was the quintessential Whig historian--wrote recently that his organization's "prayer" for the "holiday season" was for the continued "integration of the world economy," since, after all, "free economies are the God-given means to help us all peacefully fulfill the ideal"--of what?--of "the division of labor." Some may see the Americanization of the entire world as lamentable, even imperialistic, but Sirico assures us that "until the Golden Arches in Paris or the Wal-Mart in Beijing closes because enough people choose not to go there, they will exist because of consent and will continue to bring jobs and prosperity to places in need."3 The much more thoughtful Neuhaus, conceding that there is an "element of truth" in complaints about Americans' "consumerism," nevertheless finds these complaints tiresome and overblown, applying to contemporary spending habits Johnson's dictum that "a man is seldom so innocently employed as when he is busy making money."4 The theologizing of corporate capitalism comes easily to Michael Novak, who tells us that "solidarity is another way of saying globalization." He means it: "People find it increasingly hard to think only about local conditions. Is this not a major step in the direction of the realities of solidarity? Are human beings not planetary creatures, one another's brothers and sisters, members of one same body, every part serving every other part? These are the best of times for those committed to solidarity. . . ."5 In adopting positions such as these, Sirico, Neuhaus, and Novak are only giving voice to the neoliberal, Americanist prejudices widely shared among U.S. Catholics, high-, middle-, and lowbrow alike. The Whig Thomists have probably done less to shape those prejudices than they have to solidify them by providing intellectual ballast and cultural respectability. And to most committed Catholics they seem to be the only game in town in this post-Cold War era. After all, when the Berlin Wall fell, so also did the doctrinally unreliable, politically liberal "Commonweal Catholic" project and its interpretation of the proper relationship between America and the Church. For when it came to the question, "Where did you stand during the Cold War?" the Reaganite anticommunist intellectuals grouped around First Things have much the better claim to have been on the right side of history. Fortunately, even excepting those still clinging to the exhausted liberal Catholic project (who sometimes seem to be the only opponents that the Whig Thomists are willing to acknowledge), the Whig Thomist cultural project has been challenged in different ways by various Catholic thinkers during the last couple of decades. In her study, Rowland outlines the alternatives offered by David Schindler, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, among others. The New Pantagruel itself is impossible to understand except as a reaction to the dominance exercised by Whig Thomist assumptions and ideas not only in Catholic circles but among doctrinally orthodox Christian thinkers generally. It is worth noting, then, that a decade ago there was a short-lived magazine that also sought to challenge the hegemony of the Whig Thomist school: Caelum et Terra (1991-96), an uneven but vigorous and often wise lay magazine which pursued a brand of traditionalist radicalism that allowed it to see through the ahistorical Whig prejudices of Cold War Catholicism. Caelum et Terra had the courage to claim, against the grain, that the necessary project was not the Catholicizing of liberalism, but rather the articulation and creation of a traditionalism that was truly American while also authentically and fully Catholic. And it was a genuinely countercultural and communal magazine that embodied the principles for which it stood and profoundly affected the lives of at least a few dozen--which is to say, a startlingly high proportion--of its editors, contributors, and readers. Never well known, and now almost totally forgotten, Caelum et Terra deserves to be remembered. CAELUM et Terra was not marked by theoretic brilliance. It compensated with frankness, simplicity, and moral clarity. Founded by Daniel Nichols and Maclin and Karen Horton in 1991, C&T was for the most part written and edited by earnest, literate, and intelligent laymen removed from political power centers, academe, and the Church bureaucracy. Its contributors were not well known: only Juli Loesch Wiley, Thomas Storck, and Allan Carlson (one article) might be known to tNP readers. For the most part, C&T's writers consisted of stay-at-home mothers, adventurers, ranchers, activists, librarians, and, in the person of Daniel Nichols, one artist/mailman. Few religious wrote for the magazine, even fewer scholars. The east and west coasts were poorly represented; on the other hand, because its first issue was mailed to graduates of John Senior's famous Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas, the magazine attracted many writers and readers from the plains states. Nichols, originally from Fenton, Michigan, was living in northern Virginia when he founded the magazine but moved to Wooster, Ohio, in 1994. The Hortons lived on Alabama's gulf coast. No one was using C&T to advance his career, least of all the editors. The result was a magazine brimming with honesty and directness, if not always originality. A Caelum et Terra cover by Daniel Nichols That honesty and directness was the fruit of Nichols's editorial guidance. Caelum et Terra embodied his ethos as much as First Things has embodied that of Neuhaus. As it did most issues, Nichols's art adorned the first number of C&T, published in summer 1991. Done in black-and-white, that issue's cover features a pen-and-ink drawing by Nichols: a church in a pastoral setting, while receiving divine grace from the hand of God reaching down from a cloud, is surrounded by a ring of anthropomorphized figures of the sun and moon as well as fish and doves. The image is both New Agey and wholly typical of the art to be found in each issue. The magazine's name was helpfully translated for the Latin illiterate as "heaven and earth," while at the bottom of the cover there appeared three pairs of words: "Grace and Nature," "Christ and Culture," and "Tradition and Renewal." The back cover contained only a simple, broadly drawn sketch of the back of a large, caped man followed by a much smaller cow. It was labeled "Three Acres and a Cow (after G. K. Chesterton)." Some reflection on all this would have revealed to the attentive reader much about this new magazine. First, as the masthead confirmed, C&T seemed to be, and was, a low-budget, cottage enterprise run by just three persons: editor Nichols, assistant editor Maclin Horton, and technical editor Karen Horton. It regarded art as essential to its mission; Nichols's distinctive, dreamy drawings and scratchboard prints--a sort of countrified iconography--would appear in virtually every issue. And it embraced an earthy, neo-hippie sacramentality that would continually perplex those of its readers who were certain that the flower children of the utopian Sixties had ruined everything. About all this, Caelum et Terra was quite up front. The editors' opening editorial, which they would later call with ironic self-consciousness their "manifesto," began with their claim, quoting Ratzinger, that the current era is best described as "an anti-culture of death." "Indeed, the shadow of death looms starkly over this society," wrote the editors, where few can remember a time when the innocent have not been targeted by the arsenals of mass destruction or the more selective weapon of the suction machine. And this shadow also extends its reach in more subtle and even seductive ways into all our lives: in the frenzy of consumerism, in the hurried pace which robs us of reflection, in the soul-numbing artificiality of the technological hum which pervades our days. Yet, paradoxically, the moment seems one of promise. There is a hunger in the heart of humanity and we as Catholics are heirs of the Wisdom and sharers in the Grace which humanity seeks--though most of us have proven unworthy servants. The editors attempted to carve out for themselves a cultural space not adequately represented by either the contemporary political Left or Right, claiming that the "whole Catholic, it seems to us, . . . would not consider the terms Catholic and radical or orthodox and prophetic to be mutually exclusive." Their new magazine's vision, they announced, would be guided principally by the great "personalist and distributist thinkers, saints, artists, poets and activists," a tradition of Catholic thought with which the editors saw their project "in creative continuity." Nichols and the Hortons also emphasized that their magazine would strive to be highly practical, seeking to flesh out the concrete ways in which the Christian life might be lived and authentic community be built. They made good on their promise "to publish articles on home schooling, family prayer and ritual, gardening, cooperative enterprise, and other very down-to-earth matters." Nor did they stray from their stated goal of attempting to once again make clear the indispensable relationship between the divine and the natural--between heaven and earth, with the latter term understood as necessarily including the land itself: We expect that the magazine will show a deep interest in the agrarianism which was prophetically recommended by Catholic and other thinkers in the earlier part of this century and which re-emerged as a conscious and practicing movement in the 1960s. At the same time, we believe that a well-ordered commonwealth includes both town and country and want to explore means of humanizing city life. We would also like to affirm the worth and examine the present state of that often-mocked but very valuable part of American life, the small town. These concerns, they noted, were of little interest to the politicians and pundits of mainstream liberalism and conservatism, and in turn, claimed the editors, these -isms were of little interest to C&T, since to their way of thinking both were ultimately committed to the assumptions of Enlightenment modernity. Although they claimed to seek nothing less than "personal, familial, and cultural transformation," the editors' expectations for their project were modest; they worried that "[t]here may not be much of an audience for this venture." That may have been true. But Caelum et Terra nevertheless helped to create a larger audience for their venture than many might have imagined possible. There is one more thing to note about that first issue of Caelum et Terra, and that is that the first two books reviewed in the magazine together identified the "left" and right-- poles of decentralist traditionalism between and around which the C&T discussion would continue. Maclin Horton's review of a reissue of Russell Kirk's Prospects for Conservatives faulted Kirk for promoting "the fitness of class as a natural ordering of society." But for the most part Horton found in Kirk a thinker whose conservatism could be built on. Kirk's "concern for community, for place, for order; the bias against the machine, the giant corporation and the giant state; the conviction that the severing of the person from nature will end in disaster; the desire, in general, to conserve, to re-establish the permanent things which have been displaced by industrialism," marked him as a penetrating cultural critic whose work could be used to build a bridge to the "erratically and selectively traditionalist left." Daniel Nichols, on the other hand, in his review of Wendell Berry's What Are People For? noted that Berry, though having an audience primarily at the "Green/Left/New Age end of the spectrum," was clearly "friendly to the western and biblical tradition." Berry's "critique of contemporary society," wrote Nichols, "is rooted in love of family, region and land and a hearty respect for what Buddhists call 'right livelihood.' . . . His criticisms of unbridled capitalism and consumerism, his respect for small land ownership and his embracing of the principle of subsidiarity (though he does not use the word) all echo the great Catholic tradition of social thought." THE differences between the Whig Thomist and traditionalist narratives of the relationship between American "democratic capitalism" and the Church were brought most clearly to the fore in the debate that arose between the two camps in response to John Paul II's encyclical Centesimus Annus (CA), which was promulgated in May 1991. Not a few American neoconservatives responded to this encyclical by choosing to interpret it as a papal affirmation of their political and economic views--in short, of the Whig Thomist project. Neuhaus, for one, understood that the encyclical had been written "with specific reference to the world-historical experiences of this century"--that is, that the pope was attempting to delineate the Church's historic mission and prophetic role in the new, post-Cold War era. Yet he also saw it as a cautious and nuanced affirmation of the triumphant Western liberal democratic tradition, including its economic system. Novak went further in his discussion of the document, in which, somewhat oddly, John Paul emerges as a theorist of capital creation and convinced defender of modern corporate practice. In CA, Novak writes, "the pope sees that the market is, above all, a social instrument" and that "market systems shed practical light on Christian truth and advance human welfare." In Novak's account, the pope also argues "that markets generate new and important kinds of community, while expressing the social nature of human beings in rich and complex ways." The editors of Caelum et Terra, in contrast, were part of an orthodox Catholic coalition which came together to challenge this interpretation. Fifteen editors and writers--including David L. Schindler of Communio, Fr. Ian Boyd and Stratford Caldecott of the Chesterton Review, and Michael O'Brien of Nazareth--affiliated with nine different periodicals signed and published in their own pages a full-page response titled "The Civilization of Love: The Pope's Call to the West." Their statement, admirable but--like Caelum et Terra itself--now seemingly forgotten, deserves to be quoted in full: The collapse of international communism has destroyed one of the most obvious enemies of human freedom, but it has left the starving of the Third World in their misery, even while the moral anarchy of a mass popular culture prevails in the affluent West--destroying those "common things" (G. K. Chesterton) that lie at the root of social order and organic community. In the long run, communism itself may have had less power to destroy traditional morality and historic cultures than the disintegrative consumerism of the West. And so, when Pope John Paul II criticizes the complacency of the developed nations, and looks to them to make "important changes in established life-styles, in order to limit the waste of environmental and human resources" (Centesimus Annus, n. 52), this is no mere "vestigial rhetorical fragment that somehow wandered into the text . . . notable chiefly for its incongruity with the argument that Pope is otherwise making" (as one leading neo-conservative theologian has asserted). The Pope is setting out one of the most fundamental requirements of the new evangelization. The universal call to holiness, made concrete in the promotion of justice and leading towards a civilization of love, demands nothing less than a change of life-styles. The Pope goes so far as to question the "models of production and consumption" that dominate present-day economic theory, and even the "established structures of power which today govern societies" (ibid., n. 58). The need to respond to this call could not be more urgent. "Everyone should put his hand to the work which falls to his share, and that at once and straightaway, lest the evil which is already so great become through delay absolutely beyond remedy" (ibid., n. 56, citing Rerum Novarum). No one wrote more persuasively against the neoconservatives' tendentious interpretation of Centesimus Annus than did Daniel Nichols. Nichols first noted that American neoconservatives had chosen to interpret CA as "both a profound break with previous Catholic social teaching and a ringing endorsement of the American economic system and contemporary capitalism in general." He cited Novak's remarkable assertion that the pope's "vision of a free economy . . . is American in spirit and definition." But this sort of reading was as ideological as had been previous attempts of the Catholic Left to appropriate papal teaching for their own political ends. John Paul II's teaching on economics in CA was no different than that which he had promulgated in two previous encyclicals, Laborem Exercens and Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, observed Nichols. The pope, in fact, had even said in an interview on September 9, 1993, that the Church "has always distanced herself from capitalist ideology, holding it responsible for grave social injustices." After noting that in fact the pope had called for nothing less than conversion, Nichols zeroed in on the response of Neuhaus, who had claimed that John Paul's call for "important changes in established life-styles, in order to limit the waste of environmental and human resources, thus enabling every individual and all the peoples of the earth to have a sufficient share of those resources" had "all the appearances of being a throwaway line" and was "most likely a vestigial rhetorical fragment that somehow wandered into the text." In other words, such an attack on consumer capitalism was not to be taken seriously; the subtext of Neuhaus's complaint seemed to be that it was inconceivable that the pope might think authentic freedom could exist outside such an economic context in the modern world. In fact, charged Nichols, both Neuhaus and George Weigel had included misleadingly edited versions of CA in books they had published. Their versions, for example, did not include the pope's statement on the injustices of capitalism: "Would that these words, written at a time when what has been called 'unbridled capitalism' was pressing forward, should not have to be repeated today with the same severity." Nor would the reader of the Neuhaus/Weigel versions have known that, after first praising worker cooperatives, the pope had written that "the worker movement is part of a more general movement among workers and other people of good will for the liberation of the human person and for the affirmation of human rights." A reader would not know that the pope had quoted Aquinas to the effect that "the Church replies without hesitation that man should not consider his material possessions as his own, but as common to all," nor that "the human inadequacies of capitalism and the resulting domination of things over people are far from disappearing." In addition, a lengthy section condemning economic oppression was omitted from the Neuhaus/Weigel versions of Centesimus Annus which is actually quite useful in understanding the pope's position: Ownership of the means of production, whether in industry or agriculture, is just and legitimate if it serves useful work. It becomes illegitimate, however, when it is not utilized or when it serves to impede the work of others, in an effort to gain a profit which is not the result of the overall expansion of work and the wealth of society, but rather is the result of curbing them or of illicit exploitation, speculation, or the breaking of solidarity among working people. Ownership of this kind has no justification, and represents an abuse in the sight of God and man. Finally, Nichols noted that whereas the pope had written, "We have seen that it is unacceptable to say that the defeat of so-called 'Real Socialism' leaves capitalism as the only model of economic organization," the Neuhaus/Weigel version read, "It is unacceptable to say that the defeat of 'real socialism' leaves [the present operation of capitalism] as the only model of economic organization." This edit was no accident, for Nichols went on to quote Neuhaus as writing that "despite [the pope's] disclaimer, capitalism is 'the only model of economic organization.'" Apparently John Paul was too open-minded. Nichols's reading of the encyclical, on the contrary, was as a cautionary document. For unlike his neoconservative interlocutors, he instinctively realized that to maintain a credible witness in the world the Church must not be seen as blessing, or of being blind to, the "destruction of the world's economies, ecologies and cultures" that had been the fruit (if not the only fruit) of Western cultural dominance. "Americans must hear the prophetic word the Holy Father speaks to us," wrote Nichols, a word that calls us to conversion, conversion that remains incomplete until it includes a social dimension. A failure to recognize that existing social structures are in need of radical reform would be but another expression of the separation of faith from culture decried by successive popes as "the great tragedy of our times." Let us embrace the call to build the civilization of love, and let us return to an honest and faithful reading of the whole of Catholic doctrine, which continues to be a "sign of contradiction" and a call to reform, both personal and social. Caelum et Terra found itself in conflict with conventional American Catholic prejudices on much more than the economic questions that emerged with regard to the Pope's teaching in Centesimus Annus. On questions of war, in particular, Nichols was just short of being a pacifist; not believing much, if at all, in the moral superiority of the goals or ideals of Christian America, he saw little justification for what other Christians would describe as necessary military measures in Hiroshima or Nagasaki or Dresden, or especially in Baghdad. Nichols and a number of contributors tried also to articulate what a realistic but meaningful Catholic response to modern technology might look like. After one gathering of a C&T reading group had examined Neil Postman's Technopoly, Nichols stated the group's cardinal principle, which was that the thoughtful Catholic ought to consider criteria other than mere efficiency, including ecological, social, and aesthetic criteria, when deciding whether to adopt a new technology. A not impractical approach, but a pretty radical one nonetheless. For many conservative Catholics then, as now, the Greens were merely the new Reds. Caelum et Terra, however, consistently published good articles on conservation, environmentalism, and the natural world. How wonderful to discover Will Hoyt's sensitive and intelligent article on the intense religiosity of John Muir's journey and vision. With the publication of such articles Caelum et Terra's editors demonstrated that they understood that the American nature writing tradition had been unjustly neglected by the Christian community, not to mention self-identified conservatives, for mostly superficial reasons. Muir, Sigurd Olson, Helen Hoover, Aldo Leopold, and the other masters of the genre may not have been orthodox believers, but they recall us, often with lovely and evocative prose, to the natural world that is the source of our religious longings. In this sense, Wendell Berry has written, even the anarchist Edward Abbey was a traditionalist, one whose reverence for nature made him the most religious of agnostics.6 Caelum et Terra possessed the same insight. In all this, C&T was trying to resuscitate the intellectual trajectory of the prewar Catholic revival and its "unclassifiable political equation" (a phrase used by historian Christopher Lasch to describe his own brand of heterodox radicalism). With the advent of the Cold War, this revival had become replaced, or conflated, among American Catholics with a spiritually flaccid, flag-waving nationalism. (The historian John Lukacs reports that "when in the 1950s I asked my then orthodox and rigidly catechized American Catholic students, 'Are you an American who happens to be a Catholic, or are you a Catholic who happens to be an American?' all of them chose the former, not the latter.")7 Caelum et Terra drew on and was inspired by a number of prewar Catholic thinkers, including Dorothy Day, Vincent McNabb, Eric Gill, E. F. Schumacher, Peter Maurin, Fr. Conrad Pepler, Christopher Dawson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Chesterton, Romano Guardini, Tolkien, Peguy, and Belloc.8 C&T even reprinted pieces of McNabb's in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of his death in its winter and spring 1993 issues. But the writer that the magazine did more to recover than anyone else was Graham Carey, cofounder of the Catholic Art Association, whose articles were reprinted for eight consecutive issues beginning with the spring 1994 number. Carey had been the editor of an obscure Catholic journal himself some decades earlier, the association's Christian Social Art Quarterly, which eventually became Good Work. Boasting Gill, Dawson, Schumacher, and Thomas Merton among its contributors, Carey's periodical sought to overcome Fr. Sirico's vaunted division of labor by, in Nichols's words, "bridging the modern chasm between artist and workman." Traditionalist but not imitative, Carey's attempt to recover wholeness through the renewed integration of art and work, thought and life, strongly resonated with Nichols's vision for Caelum et Terra. And Carey understood well the nature of the challenge that American culture posed for Catholics. "In every way not actually forbidden by faith and morals," he had written in 1954 in the first piece of his to be reprinted in C&T, we accept the cultural forms of the secularism around us. We do this not maliciously, but because our education does not enable us to see the cultural forms of secularism for what they are--logical expressions of the secular ideology. This is not a stable situation. Either the Catholic body will prove unable to withstand the pressure of its cultural environment, and will be gradually absorbed by secularism; or it will build a cultural environment of its own, worthy of its inner principles. DOUBTLESS it was largely because of Caelum et Terra's refusal to identify the victory of liberal democracy with the victory of Catholic truth (while simultaneously rejecting collectivism) that a community of desperate souls was almost immediately attracted to the journal. The letters to the editor and the advertisements placed in C&T's classifieds section ranged entertainingly, and satisfyingly, along the hazy borderlands between mysticism and kookiness, orthodoxy and fanaticism, ground that most journals quite understandingly fear to tread. C&T never refused to publish a letter that was even partially coherent. A total of seventeen letters were printed in the second issue, for instance, including one from a collapsed Catholic who took the opportunity to vent some rage ("Sorry, but I fled the Catholic faith and the 'Mother Church' years ago"), and one from a reader from Richmond, Virginia, who advised the editors to "loosen up, baby." Indeed, for the editor of a journal that was trying to establish itself, Nichols was remarkably unafraid to print correspondence from his more hostile and possibly clinically insane readers. Among the more lucid correspondents in this latter category was one from Virginia who thought it his duty to write a letter after every issue, for which C&T charitably provided him space until he finally took his leave, with a flourish, in 1995. Fortunately, another exercised reader, this time from the Pacific Northwest, emerged soon afterwards. "An old friend passed through and left behind a fat stack of Caelum et Terra. Like wow man, so groovy! . . . All the uplifting chatter about Farming and Soul and Marriage and Worship etc. etc. etc. makes me want to puke. . . . If only you all would basically mind your own (pathetic) business." Every now and then a blue-stocking would write to express her moral objections. "I did not like your cover representation of St. Francis," scolded one such from Columbus, Ohio, troubled by the saint's scruffiness. "Your description of him made him look like one of the weird people one sees on the streets. He is one of our greatest saints and should be treated with reverence." (Please, Mr. Nichols, put St. Francis in a proper suit and tie next time, or at least a golf shirt and khakis.) And the prudes were not infrequently offended: "that nude drawing of Eve without even a fig leaf" troubled one from Wisconsin. For sheer entertainment, nothing could eclipse the fireworks when the magazine fell into the hands of America-love-it-or-leave-it types. "I had somehow come under the impression that Caelum et Terra was a serious magazine prepared by responsible grown-ups for thoughtful and faithful Catholic Christians," huffed one correspondent. "It appears, though, that Caelum et Terra is simply one more inane counterculture mouthpiece (albeit, one with an eclectic spiritual bent) published by and evidently for superannuated flower children. I had plenty of the '60s in the '60s, thank you." The first letter published by the magazine, in its second issue, came from John Senior, whose former IHP students composed a sizable proportion of the magazine's subscribers and contributors. "How good to hear again those names from the Second Spring of Catholic England--Belloc, Chesterton, McNabb and Gill, sprung up again in Virginia and the South Bronx." Senior's former student Scott Bloch first wrote a letter and then became a contributor, a path followed by several others, whether or not their letters had been critical (Bloch had taken Horton to task, and none too subtly, for his free-verse poetry). In fact, this was the path trod by Eric Brende, who would go on to become the author of the magazine's most successful running column, "Homesteader's Journal." Brende's first appearance in Caelum et Terra came in the third issue, when he wrote that he had been "overwhelmed when I (just now) read your summer issue." Brende, who had graduated from Yale, was then a graduate student in MIT's "Science, Technology, and Society" program. But what an odd sort of grad student he was, even by MIT standards. As he wrote in his letter, he was a Catholic convert who had been much influenced by both the Catholic Worker movement and the Amish, with whom he had worked during three summers and one fall. Furthermore, he was at MIT "to study the desirability and feasibility and philosophical credibility of alternatives to high-tech living. Some time soon (maybe this spring) I will leave Boston with my wife-to-be, and we tentatively plan to live near an Amish community I know, at least temporarily, so that we can learn more from and drink in the experience of their wonderfully wholesome (albeit a bit sectarian) way of life." Brende was serious, as Caelum et Terra readers would soon find out. His "Homesteader's Journal" began to appear in the magazine's second year and detailed the Brendes' experiences homesteading among a Kentucky Amish community. Romantic, nostalgic, utopian: these are the usual charges leveled against such efforts. Brende was not entirely innocent on these counts, but he was sufficiently cognizant of such traps to at least partially avoid them. Often enough, romanticism, nostalgia, and utopianism were present in their proper measures, in which case they manifested themselves as virtues that allowed him to transcend cramped rationalism, temporal provincialism, and an unduly accommodationist realism. With sharp and descriptive prose, Brende presented their life among the Amish as honestly as possible. The Brendes' life was hard, often frustrating, uniquely rewarding--just as one would expect, which doesn't make his accounts of their life any less fascinating: coping without electricity, their attempts to grow and sell produce, including pumpkins, sorghum molasses, and sweet potatoes; their twenty-six-mile round-trip commute to church, at first by bicycle, later by buggy; their often bemused but friendly Amish neighbors; their attendance at an Amish church service; the thousand-and-one things that go wrong when a Catholic couple from Boston tries to go Amish--like dropping the flashlight in the outhouse toilet. Nor is killing and cleaning a chicken as easy as it sounds: Our pot of boiling water for dunking chickens before plucking them turned out to be too small. The first time I plunged a fresh-killed chicken into it, the water overflowed all over the stove. This made for a gooey and unappetizing slime. So I poured out some of the water. This left us too little. The remaining bath did not cover the chicken. And we didn't have any more piping water on hand. So I tried ladling water from below the chicken over the feathers in hopes that this would loosen them. Mary, meanwhile, was becoming demoralized. Rivulets of lukewarm brown-bloody liquid coursing over the carcass of a zonked chicken--exuding a chicken death-smell--made her gag. Meanwhile, increasing death-rigors only added to the tenacity of the quill pores clutching the feathers. It was difficult enough fighting with the chicken when it was alive, and wanted to stay that way. Now that it was dead, the feathers were still hanging on. Most disastrous was their attempt to establish a small Catholic community by inviting other Catholic families to join them. "Catholic couple seeks to draw others to Amish area to be neighbors and learn more about Amish living. . . ." "Seeking priest who is interested in future chaplaincy for Catholic agrarian community. Write to Eric Brende. . . ." These rather extraordinary classified ads were run by the Brendes in several issues of C&T. Two families did move to Kentucky to join the effort, so beguiling had his articles been. Things didn't work out. There were happier times, though, enough that it would be unfair to characterize the Brendes' experiment as a failure. The experience of driving one's own horse-and-buggy into town, with the accompanying leisure to take in the countryside; of coming to appreciate the gentle light of the kerosene lamp; of understanding the charitable egalitarianism that lies behind the seemingly incomprehensible Amish rules regarding dress and hemlines; of initially resisting but finally longing for and finding silence, real silence; of being corralled by a heretofore unknown family and compelled to eat a dinner of "the most delicious smoked grilled chicken breasts, buttered noodles, cole slaw, pickled beets, mashed potatoes and gravy, and, the piece de resistance, peach upside-down cake with whipped cream piled on top. . . ." Pleasures and insights that most of us will never know, not really. Brende's accomplishment was to remind us of the goods, and the knowledge, that we moderns have lost. Or are losing. THE first indication that C&T would soon hoe its last row came in the summer 1996 issue. First, Nichols's editorial reported that a major benefactor had announced that his funding had come to an end. Furthermore, renewals of subscriptions continued to be frustratingly low and the money that C&T had poured into advertising had brought little if any return. Nichols was hard pressed not to conclude that "we are trying to articulate something that not too many people want to hear," words reminiscent of the fears expressed in the very first editorial back in summer 1991. But just as fateful was the ad that appeared on page forty-six, "snuck in by friends," congratulating the bachelor Nichols for his impending nuptials to a certain Michelle. Caelum et Terra would last only one more issue, and as much as finances, Nichols's marriage was the reason. He had never been one to separate ideas from life itself, and after five years of promoting the goods of marriage and family, he was ready to go down that road himself and would not hold anything back (he already had a full-time job, after all, and his fiancé had a two-year-old child). The magazine's readers, who had long since become aware not only of Nichols's bachelorhood but also of his tenderness towards children, cannot have helped but to have mixed feelings about the event. The genre of the Caelum et Terra story had not always been clear, but the matrimonial ending made it clear: a comedy, with the sort of honest hope for the world that comedy--despite and in the face of everything--always represents. Not only did Nichols, as the lead, get a wife and family, but supporting player Eric Brende got a book deal. His Better Off, which incorporates--without mentioning the magazine--rather loosely much of the material he first published in Caelum et Terra, was published by HarperCollins last July. Furthermore, there are signs, and not only here in the flourishing virtual environment of tNP, but even in the pages of First Things itself,9 that the hegemony of the Cold War--shaped Whig Thomist narrative among orthodox Christians will not go unchallenged. The verse from the Gospel of Mark that appeared on the masthead of each Caelum et Terra issue may have applied to the efforts of Nichols and the Hortons more than any of them had the right to expect: "The Kingdom of Heaven is as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground and should sleep and rise day and night, and the seed should sprout and grow, he knows not how." Notes See Neuhaus's essay "The Liberalism of John Paul II," a slightly revised version of which is included in Doug Bandow and David L. Schindler, eds., Wealth, Poverty, and Human Destiny (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2003), 289-306. Unless otherwise specified, each of the Neuhaus quotes in this essay come from this article. Neuhaus writes that "we have not the luxury of imagining the reconstitution of [our] social and political order on foundations other than the liberal tradition." All of these quotes are from Acton Notes: The Newsletter of the Acton Institute, December 2004, vol. 14, no. 12. "While We're At It," First Things, December 2004, 78. Michael Novak, "Catholic Social Teaching, Markets, and the Poor," in Bandow and Schindler, eds., Wealth, Poverty, and Human Destiny, 55. Unless otherwise specified, all Novak quotes in this essay come from this chapter. See Berry's essay, "A Few Words in Favor of Edward Abbey," in What Are People For? (New York: North Point Press, 1990). The quote comes from chapter nine of Lukacs's End of the Twentieth Century (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1993). Dietrich von Hildebrand, Balthasar, Catherine de Hueck Doherty, and Walker Percy were important interwar writers to Caelum et Terra's editors, while it is probable that no two living thinkers exerted more influence on the journal than did Wendell Berry and John Paul II. Neil Postman might be third. See the articles by Chris Shannon ("Catholicism as the Other," First Things, January 2004, 46-53) and Eric Miller ("Alone in the Academy," First Things, February 2004), both contributing editors to tNP. Swarming the Pub(l)ic Square: Why Catholics Should Be Wary of "One Nation under God" : Richard Neuhaus in a Time of War by Michael J. Baxter, C.S.C. This article appeared in the Houston Catholic Worker, Vol. XXV, No. 1, Jan.-Feb. 2005 and an earlier version appeared in God Is Not: Religious, Nice, One of Us, an American, a Capitalist, D. Brent Laytham, ed., (Brazos, 2004). Reprinted with the author's permission. 1. �I always thought Jesus was an American� I know you're all going to think this is crazy, but I always thought Jesus was an American." This statement was uttered by a young woman in a seminar at the University of California at San Diego on the first century of Rome and the dawn of the Christian era. The seminar was taught by Mark Slouka, who reported the incident in an article entitled "A Year Later: Notes on America's Intimations of Mortality."1 The main point of the article is that Americans think of themselves as separate from the rest of the world, that they imagine themselves living in a strange physical and metaphysical isolation, so that even after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon they had yet to come to grips with death. Americans only manage to absorb what Slouka called (in a variation on the poem by Wordsworth) "intimations of mortality," subtle hints that history is not, as they suppose, of their own making, under their own control. But such intimations are fleeting; they pass, allowing them to remove themselves from the filth, the rotted flesh, and the smoldering bones of the world beyond these shores. Thus, in the year following September 11, 2001, Americans dealt with the reality of death in their usual way: by denying it. "We erased it," he observed, "carted it off in trucks. It had nothing to do with us. There was nothing to learn. We were still innocent, apart."2 ...there is the related problem of the vague, unspecified identity of the deity to which Neuhaus refers when he states that "America has once again given public expression to the belief that we are 'one nation under God.'" This vagueness is reflected in his wizened concept of faith as "confidence that we are under His protection..." What makes Americans so resilient in their denial of death? This is where Slouka's article is most insightful. It is, in a phrase, American exceptionalism, the myth of "America as an elect nation, the world-redeeming ark of Christ, chosen, above all the nations of the world, for a special dispensation."3 It is this myth of exceptionalism that the young woman articulated in the seminar that day. And this same myth, Slouka observes, has been articulated by a host of better known actors in American history: from John Winthrop, who in 1630 sermonized that the people sailing aboard the Arbella had been chosen for a special covenant with God to be "as a City upon a hill"; to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the nineteenth-century best-selling author who in 1854 wrote that "the whole world has been looking towards America with hope, as a nation specially raised up by god to advance a cause of liberty and justice"; to the evangelists of the Third Great Awakening, who envisioned an America "bounded to the north by Canada, to the south by Mexico, to the East by Eden, and to the West by the Millennium"; and to President Ronald Reagan, who drew on Winthrop's city-on-a-hill image for his first inaugural address in 1981. Slouka argues that "although the specifically Christian foundation of American exceptionalism had been largely buried by the years, the self-conception built upon it---however secularized and given over to Mammon---remained intact.4 America's national myth of exceptionalism is, so to speak, still Christian after all these years. An incident exhibiting the persistence of this Christian national myth arose in the summer of 2002, just in time for Slouka to be able to slip in a footnote reference to it. "Is all this talk of covenants and destiny," he asks, "merely a vestigial limb, a speechwriter's rhetorical trope?" he asks. "Hardly. We need only recall the recent reaction to the attempt by those godless liberals in the U.S. Court of Appeals to deprive us of our divine patrimony by excising the words 'under God' from the pledge of allegiance to understand the power of myth in America today."5 The incident to which he refers had to do with the ruling from the Ninth Circuit Federal Court that the phrase "under God" in the pledge is unconstitutional on grounds of the First Amendment's establishment clause, in that it compels some citizens to acknowledge a reality contrary to their belief, namely God. The connection Slouka made is an appropriate one. Given the state of the national psyche after 9/11, this ruling touched a raw nerve, and in light of the hue and cry that rose up in its wake, it reminded us how widespread is the notion that the United States of America was founded on religious principles, that it is "one nation under God." But this and similar expressions of America's national myth came into public prominence well before the pledge-of-allegiance controversy in the summer of 2002. Claims that the United States is a Christian nation could be seen and heard everywhere in the wake of 9/11, on billboards and business signs, on talk shows and TV programs, on email chains and internet websites. One of the most controversial claims along these lines came from Jerry Falwell, a leading spokesman for the so-called religious right, who, in a discussion with Pat Robertson on the Christian Broadcast Network, suggested that the September 11 attacks were a divine judgment visited upon this nation for what is being done by gays, lesbians, feminists, abortionists, the ACLU, People for the American Way, and others who "have attempted to secularize America, have removed our nation from its relationship with Christ on which it was founded."6 The problem with such statements is that they are so outlandish that many moderates, including moderate Christians, dismiss them as the talk of a few wacked-out religious fanatics from some backwater town in the Deep South who want to bring back the Scopes Monkey Trial. But the basic claim, albeit in more sophisticated terms, also comes from quarters that seem far removed from the regions of religious fanaticism. 2. "A nation under God" Barry Moser, "Jonah" Take, for example, the editorial published in the December 2001 issue of First Things, a "mainstream" publication edited by Richard John Neuhaus and published by the Institute on Religion and Public Life in New York City. Entitled "In a Time of War," the editorial begins with a bald descriptive statement: "This is war. Call it a sustained battle or campaign, if you will, but the relevant moral term is war."7 With the passion of one who witnessed the effects of September 11 firsthand, Neuhaus insists that "it is not, as some claim, a metaphorical war. Metaphorical airplanes flown by metaphorical hijackers did not crash into metaphorical buildings leaving thousands of metaphorical corpses. This is not virtual reality; this is reality. This [war on terrorism] is, for America and those who are on our side, a defensive war."8 In this last sentence, Neuhaus makes the further descriptive statement that this is a just war. Writing in the middle of October 2001, he invokes the traditional just-war doctrine to argue that the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan meets the criteria for determining the justice of going to war (ius ad bellum). His one reservation pertains to the criterion of reasonable chance of success, but it is nothing more than a cautionary note: "not immediately," he writes, "but in due course, we need a clear statement on how we will know that the war is over and a just peace is reasonably secured."9 He also argues that one can reasonably hope that the United States will prosecute the war in keeping with the traditional criteria for just conduct within a war (ius in bello). Here too he allows a caveat: "It seems likely that unjust acts will be committed, also by our side, and when they are known they must be condemned. Known or unknown, they are wrong."10 But for Neuhaus, this does not make waging the war prohibitive, only risky, because, a "just war is undertaken in the awareness that its conduct and costs cannot always be anticipated or controlled."11 So Neuhaus employs the ad bellum and in bello criteria of just-war theory to arrive at the judgment that the United States' invasion of Afghanistan is just. This judgment itself did not spark much interest. Given how the preponderance of commentators across a wide spectrum rushed to support this initial campaign in the War on Terrorism, it is not very startling that Neuhaus and the neoconservative crowd at First Things came out strongly in support of war. What is interesting, however, is Neuhaus's portrayal of the role of God in this War on Terrorism. This portrayal comes to the fore in his account of President Bush's televised speech to the nation on September 20. "In the coda of that historic speech," Neuhaus suggests, "boldness is touched by humility," and to illustrate he quotes from the President's speech itself: "The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war. And we know that God is not neutral between them. We will meet violence with patient justice, assured of the rightness of our cause and confident of the victories to come. In all that lies before us, may God grant us wisdom and may He watch over the United States of America."12 Then, in the next section of the editorial, with the subheading "A Nation under God," Neuhaus offers a defense of the president's speech. In President Bush's words, Neuhaus writes, "some claim to detect not humility but hubris, an uncritical identification of our purposes with the purposes of God." To these critics, he delivers a blunt challenge. "Let them make the case," he writes, "that between freedom and fear, between justice and cruelty, God is neutral. Let them make the case that those who have declared war against us do not intend to instill fear by inflicting cruelty. Assured as we are and must be of the rightness of our cause, the President submits that cause in prayer to a higher authority. In a time of grave testing, America has once again given public expression to the belief that we are "one nation under God"---meaning that we are under both His protection and His judgment. This is not national hubris. Confidence that we are under his protection is faith; awareness that we are under His judgment is humility. This relationship with God is not established by virtue of our being Americans, but by the fact that He is the Father of the common humanity of which we are part. Most Americans are Christians who understand the mercy and justice of God as revealed in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Recognizing the danger that the motto "For God and country" can express an idolatrous identity of allegiances, most Americans act in the hope that it represents a convergence of duties. All Americans, whatever their ultimate beliefs, have reason to hope that reality is not neutral in this war against the evil of terrorism."13 Neuhaus's argument here is problematic in several respects. For one thing, it casts the war on terrorism in the exaggerated terms of a struggle of freedom and justice against cruelty and fear. While it would be a dreadful mistake to treat the United States and al-Qaeda as moral equivalents, it is also a mistake to overlook the possibility, as Neuhaus seems to do, that neither the United States nor al-Qaeda may be on the side of freedom and justice (properly understood) or that both may be given to spreading cruelty and fear. Possibilities such as these do not appear when the world is viewed through the simplistic lens of Neuhaus and President Bush. For another thing, after identifying the cause of the United States with the cause of freedom and justice, Neuhaus employs a flawed argument to align both of these causes to the purposes of God. The argument is flawed because while it is true, as Neuhaus argues, that God is not neutral when it comes to freedom and justice, it is also true that God's purposes may well be aligned with a form of freedom and justice that is represented neither by the United States nor by al-Qaeda, but rather by some other political body or by the church itself. And then, in addition to these two problems, there is the related problem of the vague, unspecified identity of the deity to which Neuhaus refers when he states that "America has once again given public expression to the belief that we are 'one nation under God.'" This vagueness is reflected in his wizened concept of faith as "confidence that we are under His protection," which falls far short of a more traditional definition of faith as the virtue or habit whereby the person gives intellectual assent to revealed truths regarding the identity and nature of God, including, for example, the truths about the Trinity.14 This vagueness is also evident in his truncated definition of humility as "awareness that we are under His judgment," which is true, but which must be further defined as the virtue whereby the person is restrained in his pursuit of great goods by subjecting himself to God for Whose sake he also humbles himself to others.15 Now, both faith and humility are understood in Christian tradition to be theological or infused virtues, that is, virtues given by grace, and as such they are not normally realized apart from life in Christ and in the church. Therefore any definition of faith and humility must include an account of the concrete practices, specific virtues, and forms of life entailed in being Christian. But Neuhaus fails to include such an account, probably because this would render his argument too ecclesially specific to qualify as public discourse in a pluralistic setting such as the United States. So instead he ventures the claim that "most Americans are Christians who understand the mercy and justice of God as revealed in the gospel of Jesus Christ."16 This is a deeply questionable claim and, without further explanation as to the criteria and method used to arrive at such a conclusion, it is an unwarranted one. But for Neuhaus it is nevertheless a very useful claim, inasmuch as it fortifies the notion of a "convergence of duties" to God and country, all the while never acknowledging that Americans worship strikingly different gods, whether it be the god of New Age crystal users in Seattle, Buddhists in the Bay Area, Black Bumper Mennonites in Ohio, Mormons in Utah, and so on. As for those who do not believe in God at all, Neuhaus provides the assurance that "reality is not neutral in this war on terrorism" either, thereby offering a variation on the for-God-and-Country theme: for Reality and Country.17 In either case, Americans can rest assured that as their nation goes to war, it does so under this all-purpose higher power that Neuhaus calls "God." All of which is to say that the god Neuhaus invokes is the god of American civil religion, a god of and for the United States. Thus, it is not surprising that he goes on from the above passage to describe the United States as "an overwhelmingly Christian nation rooted, albeit sometimes tenuously, in the Judeo-Christian tradition,"18 a description that, for him, is verified by the remarkable display of patriotism in the wake of September 11. Specifically, Neuhaus notes "that following the attack, the first gathering of national leadership and the first extended, and eloquent, address by the President was in a cathedral; that Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" is getting equal time, at least, with the less religiously explicit national anthem; that children in public schools gather in the classroom for prayer; and that the fallen beams of the World Trade Center, forming a cross, are blessed as the semi-official memorial to the victims." In light of these hopeful developments, Neuhaus remarks that "that intellectuals are forever in search of 'the real America,'" and he goes on to announce proudly that "the weeks following the attack of September 11 provided one answer to that search. It is an America that Tocqueville would recognize, even if it surprised, and no doubt offended, many intellectuals."19 The claims Neuhaus makes here are again problematic on several scores. First, he cites the national prayer service and prayers being said in schools as evidence that the United States is "an overwhelmingly Christian nation," but the national prayer service, although it was held in a cathedral, included prayers recited by a Jewish rabbi and a Muslim Imam. Would they agree that they live in "an overwhelmingly Christian nation?" Would this be the view of Irving Berlin, the Jewish composer of "God Bless America"? And as for those who died in the attacks, is it true that the fallen beams arranged in the form of a cross is a fitting, semi-official memorial for them? Including those who were Muslim? Those who lived across the river in Williamsburg? What about the notion that America is a pluralist society? Moreover, Neuhaus suggests that the America that emerged in the weeks after the attacks is "an America that Tocqueville would recognize," but what he does not mention is that the "god" that emerged during those weeks is likewise one that Tocqueville would recognize. This is because Tocqueville's god, as scholars of his work have pointed out, is a peculiarly modern god, one that serves to keep society and the state intact in this disenchanted, post-Christian world. This god is not the one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Who is named and praised in traditional Christian belief and practice.20 Driven by his enthusiasm for "the new patriotism," which he judges to be "all in all, a very good thing," Neuhaus does not address the complex and contested aspects of Tocqueville's "America" and "god." But the most obvious problem in Neuhaus's claim that America is a Christian nation is that it does not account for the fact that Americans in large numbers engage in practices that run clearly counter to the Christian way of life, practices related to marrying and having children. If the United States is a Christian nation, what are we to make of the fact that roughly fifty percent of all marriages in America end in divorce? Further, if the United States is a Christian nation, what are we to do with the fact that each year in America there occur more than one million abortions? This is not to say that Neuhaus is unaware that of these problems in the United States. He certainly is, as he has amply evidenced in his editorials of these and similar moral challenges facing the nation. Thus he attempts to clarify his position to commend the upsurge in patriotism following September 11. But he also attempts to clarify his position by drawing a distinction between rendering to God and rendering to Caesar, based on the question posed to Jesus by the Pharisees, "Is it permissible to pay taxes to Caesar or not?" (Matthew 22:15--22; Mark 12:13--17). After admitting that Christians will probably never get the relationship between God and Caesar exactly right, he notes that nevertheless "it is agreed by all that the emphasis falls on the second injunction---do not render to Caesar what is God's. Whether with respect to patriotism, wealth, family, or anything else, it is always a matter of the right ordering of our loves and loyalties."21 To elaborate on this point, Neuhaus directs our attention to the Letter to Diognetus, a second-century, anonymously-authored text. But as it turns out, his reading of this letter is most significant for what it leaves out. 3. A (mis)reading of the Letter to Diognetus The passage from the Letter to Diogetus that Neuhaus presents to his readers runs as follows: Christians are not distinguished from the rest of humanity by either country, speech, or customs. They do not live in cities of their own; they use no peculiar language, they do not follow an eccentric manner of life.* They reside in their own countries, but only as alien citizens, and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign country is their homeland, and every homeland a foreign country.** They obey the established laws, but in their own lives they go beyond the law.*** In a word: what the soul is in the body, that Christians are in the world. The soul dwells in the body, but does not belong to the body; just so Christians live in the world, but are not of the world.22 According to Neuhaus, this passage shows that "these 'alien citizens,' still far from their true home in the New Jerusalem that is history's consummation, have followed the course of Christian fidelity in accepting responsibility for the well-being of what is their home in time before the End Time." In other words, Christians have an ultimate love and loyalty toward God, yet a penultimate love and loyalty to their homeland; they have an ordered love both for God and country. On the basis of this quotation and his interpretation of it, Neuhaus then introduces "the doctrine of just war associated with St. Augustine in the fourth and fifth centuries and further developed in what is aptly called the Great Tradition of Christian thought down to our own day."23 But what is noteworthy, and troubling, about this quotation is that in several instances it deletes significant portions with no acknowledgement of having done so, not even ellipses. In this important and admittedly delicate matter, only a display of the deleted portions of the text will suffice. There are three such deletions from the original text, each of which I want to present and then comment on. The first deleted section (located in the original text at the single asterisk) reads as follows: Their teaching is not the kind of thing that could be discovered by the wisdom or reflection of mere active-minded men; indeed, they are not outstanding in human learning as others are. Whether fortune has given them a home in a Greek or foreign city, they follow local custom in the matter of dress, food, and way of life; yet the character of the culture they reveal is marvelous and, it must be admitted, unusual.24 In this passage, Christian teaching is described as distinct from conventional wisdom and as not based on outstanding human learning. And Christians themselves are portrayed as both similar and different than others, similar in respect to their dress, food, and way of life, different in respect to "the culture they reveal" which is described as "marvelous" and "unusual." It is not clear what their being simultaneously similar and different means concretely in this passage, but some hints can be found in the two other deleted passages. The second deleted passage (located in the original text at the double asterisk) reads this way: They marry like the rest of men and beget children, but they do not abandon their babies that are born. They share a common board but not a common bed. In the flesh as they are, they do not live according to the flesh. They dwell on earth but are citizens of heaven.25 Here we see that Christians, unlike others of their day, do not "abandon"---that is to say, abort---children (or as another translation has it, they do not "expose" their children). And while they share a common board, they do not share a "common bed" (or as it is put in another translation, "they share their meals, but not their wives"). Avoiding these practices is seen as part of "not liv[ing] according to the flesh," part of their being "citizens of heaven." Thus, in light of this passage, Christians do not accommodate themselves into whatever country in which they live. They are different from others in important ways, such as in the way they marry and have children. There is a tension, in other words, between Christians and others and it is a sharp and costly tension, as can be seen in yet another deleted passage. The third deleted passage (located in the original text at the triple asterisk) reads as follows: They love all men, but are persecuted by all. They are unknown, and yet they are condemned. They are put to death, and yet are more alive than ever. They are paupers, but they make many rich. They lack all things, and yet in all things they abound. They are dishonored, yet glory in their dishonor. They are maligned, and yet are vindicated. They are reviled, and yet they bless. They suffer insult, yet they pay respect. They do good, yet are punished with the wicked. When they are punished, they rejoice, as though they were getting more of life. They are attacked by the Jews as Gentiles, and are persecuted by the Greeks, yet those who hate them can give no reason for their hatred.26 In this passage, the identity of Christians as "alien citizens" involves being condemned, put to death, impoverished, dishonored, maligned, reviled, insulted, punished, attacked, and persecuted. This is not their fault, the author makes clear, using a rhetorical pattern taken from the Apostle Paul (2 Cor 6:9--10; 4:12), in that they respond to persecution by loving, enriching, blessing, and paying respect to others. And yet mistreatment is often their lot. Each of these three passages quoted above, then, reveals that for the second-century author of the Letter to Diognetus, Christians are significantly different from others in both their beliefs, which derive not from human wisdom or learning, and their practices, such as marrying and having children. So much are Christians different that they are often at odds with people around them to the point of being regularly hated and sometimes killed. But when these passages are omitted, as they are in the quotation presented by Neuhaus, a different impression is created, the impression that ancient Christian teaching calls for the kind of love of God and country that is commended in the editorial. And this impression is put to the service of Neuhaus's more specific message that love of God and country is entirely fitting for Christians in the United States because it is, as he suggests in his subheading, "a nation under God," or as he puts it elsewhere in the editorial, it is "an overwhelmingly Christian nation rooted, albeit sometimes tenuously, in the Judeo-Christian moral tradition."27 To his credit, Neuhaus is aware of the potential problems with this claim; hence the qualification in the subordinate clause: "albeit sometimes tenuously." To understand his equivocation here, it is illuminating to grasp the broad storyline that shapes his thought, to which we now turn. 4. "An overwhelmingly Christian nation" This notion of the United States as "an overwhelmingly Christian nation" is an overriding theme in Neuhaus's thought, one that is best explicated by means of a broad storyline that shapes his thought. The storyline can be summed up as follows: Once upon a time in America, British colonists banded together to throw off the tyrannical rule of their king and founded a form of government designed to protect the rights of its citizens with respect to freedom of speech, assembly, the press, and religion. This last freedom listed was in fact "the first freedom," the all important one, for it prohibited the establishment of any one particular religion as the official religion of the land and instead guaranteed the free exercise of religion for all, thereby warding off the possibility that the nation would plunge itself into a New-World version of the Wars of Religion while at the same time ensuring that its public life would be guided by the moral and intellectual principles to which its Christian citizens (or the vast majority of them at any rate) subscribed. Throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, this ingenious combination of "ordered liberty," unprecedented in world history, proved to be a formula that brought the nation through the crisis of civil war, enabled it to welcome waves of European and other immigrants to its shores, and allowed it to afford greater measures of freedom to its citizens, particularly women and African-Americans. It also provided the nation with the fortitude needed to fight political tyranny abroad in the First World War, the Second World War, and the subsequent Cold War, all of which were waged on the strength of the so-called Judeo-Christian tradition, a moral and intellectual consensus that now included greater numbers of Catholics, Jews, and (some) secularists. But at some point in this more recent phase of the nation's history, another moral and intellectual perspective emerged, one that regarded any public profession of religious belief or a religiously based morality as constituting a threat to the rights of individuals whose religious or moral beliefs stand outside this supposed nationwide consensus. The emergence of this new perspective can be traced back to any number of cultural trends earlier in the twentieth century, but it gained political and cultural ascendancy in the sixties, when it became anathema to invoke religious and moral principles in public discourse. This constituted a threat to the very foundations on which the nation was founded. The main culprits were left-leaning politicians, journalists, intellectuals, church leaders, and other members of the so-called cultural elite, who also have been derisively labeled (in a recent book that Neuhaus has touted)28 "Bobos in paradise," that is, baby-boomers who sported a bohemian lifestyle and radical politics when coming of age in the sixties and then, in the ensuing decades, made their way into the higher echelons of U.S. society where they exercise an alarming degree of influence over the central institutions of the nation: the government, the press, universities, and the mainstream churches. This created what Neuhaus called "the naked public square," and in a book with this title (published in 1984) he called for a re-infusion of religious and moral principles into American public discourse, a re-clothing, so to speak, of this naked public square.29 This project had become possible thanks to the resurgence of conservative-minded Christians as a political force in the early eighties. Then, a few years later, it had become clear that the group most capable of making a difference in this effort was the Catholics, thus signaling what Neuhaus called "the Catholic Moment." In a book published under this title in 1987, he observed that history had taken a remarkable twist: Catholics, emboldened by the religious and moral vision of Pope John Paul II, were now the ones to embolden Evangelical Christians and others to bring America back from the precipice and restore it to its founding religious and moral principles.30 In light of this storyline, the significance of Neuhaus's claim that America is a Christian nation comes into fuller view. It is a claim that harks back to the founding of the nation and decries the recent betrayal of that founding by those who deny the nation's religious and moral roots. At the same time, it calls for a religious and moral renewal of America that can rescue the nation from its present malaise, a renewal to be led by the Catholics. Since the arrival of "the Catholic Moment," this has been a key theme in Neuhaus's writings, talks, and editorials in First Things. What is crucial to note is that this agenda can have a critical edge to it. This was most clearly demonstrated with "the end-of-democracy" controversy that erupted on the pages of First Things in late 1996. The controversy was over a string of judicial decisions ruling that the Constitution protects a range of asserted practices on the basis of an individual's right to privacy. In the background, of course, was Roe v. Wade (1973), but the immediate focus was on more recent decisions, especially the Casey decision (1992), with its notorious "mystery clause" that consigned religious beliefs and moral principles to a private realm into which state and federal government may not intrude.31 Another ruling along similar lines came in May 1996, when the Ninth Circuit found that the Constitution does not permit states to prohibit physician-assisted suicide.32 It was shortly after this second ruling that the editors of First Things charged the federal courts with arrogating for themselves the power to decide matters that, in the design of the framers of the Constitution, are to be decided by the people through legislative processes. This trend created what the editors called "the judicial usurpation of politics" wherein genuine democratic government was being thwarted by a lethal blurring of the separation of powers, signaling the possible "end of democracy" and the imposition on the people of an alien "regime."33 The symposium brought to the fore some striking arguments. One contributor to the symposium, Robert George of Princeton, identified the workings of "the tyrant state," a phrase taken from the recently promulgated encyclical Evangelium Vitae (1995), in which John Paul II argued that democratic government is not good in itself but is only as good as the virtues of its citizens in enabling them to adhere to the natural law.34 Another contributor, Russell Hittinger, a philosopher from the University of Oklahoma at Tulsa, contended that if this trend of judicial usurpation continued, Catholics and other people of conscience would have only one recourse left to them: "civil disobedience."35 The issue sparked a vociferous controversy among conservative commentators, leading some on the editorial board to resign in protest and generating a rift that came to be characterized as "Neocon v. Theocon.36 Neuhaus defended the editorial stance for raising crucial and unavoidable issues, the kinds of issues, he insisted (quite rightly) that should be raised in a journal such as First Things.37 Commentators of a more radical Christian stripe (Scott Moore, for example)38 viewed the controversy as a sign that politics within the context of the modern liberal state had become morally incoherent and politically untenable, and took hope in the prospect of such a mainstream, quasi-establishment journal declaring that the Enlightenment assumptions on which the United States was founded had come into fundamental conflict with a genuinely Christian conception of political community. But for Neuhaus himself, as it turned out, the end-of-democracy controversy signified little more than yet another occasion to call for the religious and moral recovery of America. In subsequent years, particularly during and after the election of George Bush as president in 2000, editorials and articles published in First Things continued to express hope in a nationwide renewal. Most important among these was a twelve-part series of columns on the idea of "Christian America," the last of which came out in May 2001, coyly entitled "Something Like, Just Maybe, A Catholic Moment."39 All of which brings us up to Neuhaus's post-9/11 editorial in the December 2001 issue of First Things, and his statement that America is "rooted, albeit sometimes tenuously, in the Judeo-Christian moral tradition." The statement's subordinate clause---albeit sometimes tenuously---acknowledges that the nation's Judeo-Christian tradition at times has been obscured or attacked. But this is clearly outweighed by the overriding claim that it is "overwhelmingly Christian." But if this is the case, whatever happened to the end-of-democracy crisis? What about the courts? What about marriage in the United States? What about abortion? These questions are placed on the backburner by Neuhaus. With the help of his broad storyline, he can avoid looking at America in the present by focusing instead on an America of the past and of the future; of a glorious past, when America was founded and developed as a Christian nation, and of a promising future, when America will reclaim its legacy and return to its founding religious and moral principles. When it comes to the present, his argument only refers us to the struggle to bring the nation out of its current crisis. Rather than meet head on any challenge to his characterization of America as a Christian nation, it calls us to join traditional Christians and other religiously and morally conservative Americans in engaging in this current struggle. And a monumental struggle it is, for in the final section of the editorial, we learn that America is engaged in a "war of centuries," indeed "a war of religion." 5. Islam versus the "Christian West" Neuhaus is careful to insist that America does not wish to in war. "We of the West," Neuhaus assures us, "definitively put wars of religion behind us with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. But that was a piece of the story of the West of which Islam was not part and for which Islam has no counterpart."40 As a result, a war of religion has been thrust upon America by the adherents of Islam who have stored up for decades, if not centuries, a burning hatred for the West and who have not integrated into their world view the values of Western democracy. To those who insist that Americans should embrace the otherness of Islam in the name of diversity, Neuhaus gives this rejoinder: "With respect to freedom, human rights, and the dignity of the person, th