The New Pantagruel Hymns in the Whorehouse 2.2 Spring 2005 Articles The Lasting Legacy of Pope John Paul II by Eduardo J. Echeverria Evangelicalism’s Insecure Calvinists: The Proliferation of the Evangelical Self-Critique Book at the End of the Twentieth Century by Gregory Johnson Harsh Medicine by Wesley J. Smith Understanding Traditionalist Conservatism by Mark C. Henrie Liberalism and Its Meaning for Christians by James Kalb The Eighth Capital Sin by Eric Scheske Moby Dick and the Culture Wars by Randy Boyagoda Review Essays Chaucer in His World by Daniel Sullivan Creative Non-Fiction Justice: A Semi-autobiographical Fiction by James Rovira Medium-Beige Brick by Kay Darling Poetry 5 Poems by Jendi Reiter 6 Poems by Jerah Kirby Fiction 3 Short Stories by Matthew Kirby Correspondence Converting the Jesuits Libidinous Sin Terri Schiavo 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 The Lasting Legacy of Pope John Paul II by Eduardo J. Echeverria In the wake of the death of our Holy Father, Karol Józef Wojtyla, John Paul II, I’m certain that many things will be written about his legacy to the Church as well as to the world at large. Indeed, much discussion of this legacy has already been taking place both before his impending death and, almost without ceasing, after his dying on Saturday evening, April 2. The rich and varied character of his thought makes it impossible for me here to do it justice. Nevertheless, there are six features of his great papacy that I would highlight as essential to his lasting legacy and without which we would not understand his Catholic worldview. First, John Paul II revitalized the papacy by recovering its evangelical roots. This is the thesis of papal biographer George Weigel. It means that he recovered the biblical teaching that the Church, and by implication the papacy, has a missionary nature, the great commission to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and this has revitalized the evangelical dynamism of the Church. "Being essentially 'missionary'," says John Paul, "does not mean merely that the Church has a universal mission to all humanity, but that, in her constitutive reality, in her soul . . . she possesses a dynamism that concretely unfolds in preaching the Gospel, in spreading the faith and in the invitation to conversion proclaimed 'to the very ends of the earth'" (Missionary Catechesis of John Paul II). Hence the evangelical style of John Paul II--an evangelist, surely the greatest evangelist of the twentieth-century, a pastor, and a witness to, and defender of, the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, namely, “The truth ... that only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light” (Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes - "The Church in the Modern World", no. 22). "St. Michael" (oil on canvas)by Kay Darling In this connection, I cannot fail to mention John Paul’s rejection of religious relativism, namely, the notion that “Christianity . . . is merely one form among many of the generic human reality called ‘religion’,” and its corollary that all religions are hence equally vehicles of salvation. Says the Holy Father, “This is not the message of the Second Vatican Council, which boldly proclaimed the centrality for human history of Jesus Christ and the essential mission of the Church to preach the Gospel to all nations: for ‘there is no other name under heaven given to man by which he must be saved’ (Acts 4:12). “The Church is sent to the world with a proposal,” he adds, “and the evangelical proposal we make is that the world can understand its history and its aspirations most adequately, most truthfully, through the Gospel. If this is the truth we proclaim, then the Church is never marginal, even when she seems weak in the eyes of the world.” Second, John Paul II has provided an authoritative and authentic interpretation of the teachings of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). In the wake of the Council, there seemed to be a mentality afoot that everything was up for grabs, that the Church’s historic teachings about Christ, salvation, God, the teaching authority of the Church, particularly the papacy, the priesthood, and sexual morality, had radically changed. As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in his own memoirs about this time, "The impression grew steadily that nothing was now stable in the Church, that everything was open to revision. More and more the Council appeared to be like a great Church parliament that could change everything and reshape everything according to its own desires." In response to this mentality of liberalizing Christianity, John Paul has left the Church with a prolific and substantial body of writings--for example, books presenting the rich texture of his Catholic worldview including Crossing the Threshold of Hope and, most recently, Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium; great encyclicals including the “Splendor of Truth,” the “Gospel of Life,” “Faith and Reason,” and the “Mission of the Redeemer,” several apostolic exhortations including the empowering work, “The Vocation and Mission of the Lay Faithful in the Church and in the World;” the Apostolic Letter, “The Christian Meaning of Human Suffering,” which world-renowned Calvinist philosopher Alvin Plantinga rightly called a “profound meditation,” a “seminal work” on the “meaning of suffering from a Christian perspective”; and, last but not least, the Catechism of the Catholic Church—all with the aim of giving direction, restoring clarity about the Church’s historic teaching, and sorting out the critical issue of true and false renewal in the post-conciliar Church. Third, John Paul II also provided a profound interpretation of the spiritual, moral, and intellectual dynamics of Western modern, secularist culture. In this culture there co-exists both authentic developments of the truths of the Christian faith (for example, the dignity of the human person, the right of religious freedom being the foundation of a free society) and also a closing off to, indeed even a refusal of, those truths and the development of anti-Christian worldviews and ways of life (for example, religious and moral relativism)--most notably the antithesis between the “culture of life” and the “culture of death.” The Holy Father has left us the basic theological and philosophical framework in which to discern between the authentic and inauthentic, truth and falsity, good and evil in our culture, and thus to accomplish the task that the Apostle Paul gave us: “Test everything—hold on to what is good and avoid every form of evil” (1 Thessalonians 5:21-22). It is against this background that John Paul II has called for a new evangelization of culture, renewing our commitment and fellowship with Jesus Christ, under His Lordship in the whole spectrum of life. According to John Paul II the Church's unity is at the very heart of the proclamation of the Gospel, not only in the sense that it belongs to the very essence of Christ's body, and Christ cannot be divided, but also because disunity is a grave obstacle for proclaiming the Gospel credibly and authentically. Fourth, John Paul II’s commitment to authentic ecumenism is also a fundamental element of his legacy to the Church. Christ calls all His disciples to unity (John 17:20-23). Of course, as John Paul II correctly writes, "Love for the truth is the deepest dimension of any authentic quest for full communion between Christians" (Encyclical Letter, Ut Unum Sint - "That All May Be One", May 25, 1995, no. 36). In other words, he adds, "The unity willed by God can be attained only by the adherence of all to the content of revealed faith in its entirety. In matters of faith, compromise is in contradiction with God who is Truth. In the Body of Christ, 'the way, and the truth, and the life' (John 14:6), who would consider legitimate a reconciliation brought about at the expense of the truth" (no. 18)? In the Gospel of John, we read that Jesus Himself prayed to His Father, at the hour of His passion, "that all of them may be one" (17:21). The Church, which is Christ's body, is not a collection of individuals, and hence the unity of Christ's disciples is not a mere gathering of people. Furthermore, it is not quite right to think of the Church's unity as simply a goal to which we aspire. Rather, the Church's unity is a present reality; indeed, it is Christ’s gift to the Church. According to John Paul II, thus, the Church's unity is at the very heart of the proclamation of the Gospel, not only in the sense that it belongs to the very essence of Christ's body, and Christ cannot be divided (1 Corinthians 1:13), but also because disunity is a grave obstacle for proclaiming the Gospel credibly and authentically. The world will not believe that God Himself is an eternal fellowship of love between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and that He has chosen us to share by grace in that fellowship unless the world sees some manifestation in Christians of that fellowship. The world will not believe that God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son (John 3:16), unless it sees in Christians some evidence of God's love rather than division. It will not believe that Jesus' claims are true, that the Christian faith is true, unless it sees visible unity-in-truth among Christians. Fifth, John Paul II’s commitment to the youth of the world is certainly one of the most visible and, indeed, powerful signs of his papacy. In overwhelming numbers they responded positively to his message: "Christ alone is the cornerstone on which it is possible solidly to build one's existence. Only Christ—known, contemplated and loved—is the faithful friend who never lets us down, who becomes our traveling companion, and whose words warm our hearts (cf. Luke 24:13-35)." These words, spoken by John Paul II to an estimated six hundred thousand young people in Toronto on July 27, 2003 at the seventeenth, and, sadly, his last World Youth Day reflect the Holy Father’s consistent message to young people since 1985. It is the heart of the Gospel: "Without Jesus Christ, who is the revelation of God, the ultimate question of human existence has no answer." Thus, this evangelical Catholic Pope proclaims to these young people the very truth that Jesus gave to His apostles, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). Sixth, John Paul II's commitment to a society of peace, justice and freedom is also essential to his legacy. How does he define peace? According to the biblical view, peace is man dwelling in harmony with all his relationships: with God, firstly, and then with himself, with his fellows, and with nature. What is essential for peace, in particular for dwelling in harmony with one's fellows? John Paul singles out four requirements for realizing peace: truth, justice, love, and freedom: "The order which prevails in society is by nature moral. Grounded as it is in truth, it must function according to the norms of justice, it should be inspired and perfected by mutual love, and finally it should be brought to an ever more refined and human balance in freedom." In the first place, peace is intertwined with truth. Most important, the truth about God matters. Peace is grounded and anchored in God's own reality and truthfulness. God is the first truth and the highest good of man, of individuals, and of society. The truth about human nature also matters—man is created with value and inviolable dignity and inalienable human rights. Peace is also intertwined with justice because peace is a moral community. Right relationships with others involve each person enjoying his rights. Yet, a moral community is more than man enjoying his rights. It is also a community where persons have corresponding duties, obligations to other persons. Peace is absent when we do not carry out our responsibilities to others. Peace is also intertwined with love. Says John Paul II, "Love will build peace if people feel the needs of others as their own and share what they have with others, especially the values of mind and spirit which they possess." The Bible calls us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves (Matthew 22:37-40). Indeed, Jesus himself teaches, "As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me" (Matthew 25:40). Again, Jesus says, "Love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another" (John 13:34). In sum, "Respect for the human person proceeds by way of respect for the principle that 'everyone should look upon his neighbor (without any exception) as "another self," above all bearing in mind his life and the means necessary for living it with dignity'." The only way to establish a truly fraternal society is through the "charity that finds in every man a 'neighbor', a brother" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1930). Lastly, peace is intertwined with freedom. Says John Paul, "Freedom will build peace and make it thrive if, in the choice of the means to that end, people act according to [right] reason and assume responsibility for their own actions." Man abuses his freedom when he fails to respond to the moral law, and he becomes self-centered, breaking neighborly bonds, and rebelling against God's truth (Catechism, no. 1741). Freedom then only attains its proper ends when "directed toward God, the sovereign Good" (no. 1744). In conclusion, the most important element of John Paul II’s lasting legacy is his conviction that, as he often put it, Jesus Christ is the answer to the question that is every human life. This is the heart of the Gospel, and he tirelessly and boldly proclaimed it throughout his life: “Our age needs to hear the revealed truth about God, about man, and about the human condition. The moment is right for kerygma. The pastoral challenge . . . is to proclaim with renewed vigor ‘Jesus Christ, the one Savior of the world, yesterday, today and forever’ (cf. Hebrews 13:8) . . . The challenge is enormous, but the time is right. For other culture-forming forces are exhausted, implausible, or lacking in intellectual resources adequate to satisfy the human yearning for genuine liberation—even if those forces still manage to exercise a powerful attraction, especially through the media. The great achievement of the [Second Vatican] Council is to have positioned the Church to engage modernity with the truth about the human condition, given to us in Jesus Christ who is the answer to the question that is every human life.” Evangelicalism's Insecure Calvinists: The Proliferation of the Evangelical Self-Critique Book at the End of the Twentieth Century by Gregory Johnson After half a century of unprecedented growth in both evangelicalism's adherents and its cultural visibility, and after the development of a vast network of evangelical seminaries and colleges, publishing houses and periodicals, parachurch organizations and churches, an increasingly vocal cluster of evangelical leaders is questioning whether American evangelicalism can survive its success.1 Nestled among the devotionals, bibles and self-help books of the evangelical Christian bookstore, one notices a recent spurt of books criticizing the evangelical movement from within. Almost all of the authors of these evangelical self-critique books are confessional Calvinists, conservative in their evangelical faith. All perceive a theological declension within American evangelicalism in which the movement's historic theocentric theology has been replaced by an anthropocentric and experience-driven faith without a theological grounding. This "club" of Reformed authors illustrates the declension in various areas of evangelical faith and practice, warning of impending catastrophe unless American evangelicals return to the theologically grounded, God-centered faith of evangelicals past. These volumes---all written since 1991---demonstrate a pronounced insecurity about evangelicalism's successes within the movement's Calvinist branch, an uncertainty that is noteworthy considering that the movement's modern incarnation began in the 1940s among a small group of northern Calvinists.2 1. Join the Self-Critique Club: On Recommending Each Other's Books If one is fortunate enough to find a collection of these evangelical self-critique books with their original dust jackets intact, one is quickly struck by the recommendations on the back covers of these volumes. The same handful of names keeps recurring in each volume: Anglican theologian J. I. Packer, Presbyterian minister and former head of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy James Boice, historian Mark Noll, founder of Reformation & Revival Ministries John Armstrong, New Testament scholar D. A. Carson, Prison Fellowship founder and Templeton Award winner Charles Colson, biblical counseling advocate David Powlison, Baptist leader John F. MacArthur, Presbyterian theologian and founder of Ligonier Ministries R. C. Sproul, evangelical sociologists James Davison Hunter and Os Guiness, Reformed theologian David Wells, President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Albert Mohler, and Reformed theologian and founder of Christians United for Reformation (CURE) Michael Horton, who also serves as vice-chairman of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals (ACE), of which many of these authors are a part. It would appear that when one of these figures composes a book, the others provide the recommendations. One is also struck by the number of these books that are multiple author compilations. Four of the eight works central to this study are compilations, and this same pool of authors---with additions or subtractions depending on the volume---provides the essays within each of these books. The names read like a who's who of modern evangelical Calvinism. With the odd Lutheran thrown in from time to time, these figures are the most recognized confessional Calvinists within Presbyterian, Baptist and Christian Reformed circles, and not a few oversee large Christian radio, publishing and multimedia ministries. These self-critique authors are writing in consultation with one another; they are reading each other's works. Their concerns represent the uncertainties of the theologian's club of American Calvinism. 2. The Evangelical Theological Declension Observed These authors perceive a declension within American evangelicalism, a decline from a theocentric world and life view to an anthropocentric one, a turn from a life grounded in theology to a life grounded in the personal experience of the divine and the benefits such experience brings. Perhaps the earliest of these contemporary Calvinist jeremiads is Michael Horton's 1991 Made in America: The Shaping of Modern American Evangelicalism.3 Here Horton lays out the program for the works that follow. Horton speaks of a crisis of truth in the evangelical churches, a crisis badly needing a return to classic Protestant theological orthodoxy. He writes, "The crisis of truth in our time, even in the evangelical church, is indeed serious. And it is due in part to our cultural accommodation."4 Horton criticizes the American tendency to want to "make God safe for democracy," targeting in particular the tendency to market God and Christianity as means toward an end rather than ends in themselves. This fundamental idolatry, which Horton terms the "How To" gospel, paints sinful humanity as consumers and God as a product, reversing in Horton's view the doctrine of God's sovereignty and making humanity--not God--ultimate. Evangelicals, Horton argues, are more concerned today with their "felt needs"--self-esteem over salvation, religious feelings over religious truth, and individual prosperity over the health of the institutional church. This narcissistic turn in conservative Protestantism, Horton warns, has made the Christianity of many churches into an idolatrous religion in which Christ is eclipsed by concern for self. With personal passion, Horton protests: I'm tired of hearing sermons on "How to Have an Effective Quiet Time" or "How to Get More Out of Your Christian Life." Don't offer me another list of "Four Steps to Victorious Christian Living." I've tried them all and not only do they fail to answer the deeper questions; they don't even work for the superficial ones. "I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead."5 Horton credits a shift away from the theocentric theology of the Reformation with providing the background for the modern evangelical church's decline into narcissism. He writes: When we tipped the scales from celebrating God's glory and grace to human happiness and capacity for good, hedonism was an inevitable consequence. When evangelicalism left the soli (only) out of Deo gloria (to God be the glory), so essential to the Reformation and Puritan faith, and became a product to be used by consumers in "the pursuit of happiness," it not only failed to restrain the "Me generation"; it helped foster it. This is why the theological shift from Reformation realism (God-centeredness) to Arminian optimism is so decisive.6 The other authors follow Horton in these same core concerns of cultural accommodation, perceiving behind such compromise a theological shift away from a God-centered Protestant orthodoxy toward a narcissistic recasting of the biblical message. Indeed, Horton himself would bring other authors into the battle a year after his Made in America with the publication in 1992 of Power Religion: The Selling Out of the Evangelical Church?7 This project, initiated and edited by Horton, brought to the discussion Boice, Armstrong, Carson, Powlison, Colson, Packer, Sproul, and others, the authors arguing that power had become the idol of American evangelicals---power politics, power evangelism, power church growth, power within, power preaching.8 The volume concludes with two essays, the first by R. C. Sproul arguing that theology, as the study of God, is of ultimate relevance, though evangelicals have traded the contemplation of God for lesser things of no ultimate value. The final essay, by Horton himself, calls evangelicals back to the Christocentric gospel as the final and ultimate enemy of the religion of power. Also in 1992, Os Guiness and John Seel brought together another eight authors in a single volume No God But God: Breaking with the Idols of Our Age.9 Again laying down a strong critique of evangelical faith and life in contemporary America, this volume begins by likening the current state of the movement with the immediate pre-Reformation period, an image of veiled gospel and unbridled idolatry. Guiness and Seel write: It is time once again to hammer theses on the door of the church. As on the occasion of Martin Luther's ninety-five theses in the sixteenth century and Soren Kierkegaard's single thesis in the nineteenth century, Christendom is becoming a betrayal of the Christian faith of the New Testament. To pretend otherwise is either to be blind or to appear to be making a fool of God.10 They continue: The main burden of this book is a direct challenge to the modern idols of evangelicalism. But this idolatry is only part of the wider cultural captivity of evangelical churches in America. We therefore look beyond idolatry to the broader need for revival and reformation within evangelicalism. Our greatest need is for a third Great Awakening.11 Indeed, the volume ends with a lone Arminian voice, Methodist Thomas C. Oden's essay "On Not Whoring after the Spirit of the Age," a stern warning to theologians against picking up modernity's lust for novelty just as modernity itself collapses. Guiness and Seel's group effort was joined that same year by David F. Wells' widely recognized No Place for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?12 Wells argues that the evangelical church in recent years has "cheerfully plunged into astounding theological illiteracy."13 Wells describes a theological declension within the movement since the 1950s. He writes: Those who had marched gladly under the banner of evangelicalism and had affirmed the truths of historic Protestant orthodoxy now began to look sideways. As the theological center began to give way, there arose a multitude of evangelical amalgams with, among other things, Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, special interests such as feminism, the pieties of the World Council of Churches, and radical politics. The most important thing that this potential movement needed---theological unity---grew ever thinner and more insubstantial.14 Also in 1993, the Calvinistic independent Baptist leader John F. MacArthur entered the field of these evangelical critiques, having spent much of the previous decade beleaguered with evangelical infighting over lordship salvation, a debate over whether or not is was possible for a Christian to be genuinely saved without pursuing holiness in daily life. MacArthur's new volume, Ashamed of the Gospel: When the Church Becomes Like the World,15 stressed the same themes as had Horton, Guiness and Wells, but MacArthur, with his popular radio, book and tape ministry Grace to You, brought a wider audience than the Presbyterian, Anglican and Congregationalist authors before him. MacArthur's primary metaphor for the current state of the church was the English Baptist Downgrade Controversy a century earlier, a debate which pitted Calvinistic preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon against theologically moderate leaders who hoped to soften the "harsh" and "offensive" Calvinism and Biblicism that had previously characterized the English Baptists. The evangelical church in America today, MacArthur warns---with its reigning pragmatism, user-friendly methods, and low view of God---is in the midst of a theological downgrade as well. MacArthur followed up Ashamed of the Gospel in 1994 with Reckless Faith: When the Church Loses its Will to Discern.16 With heavy emphasis on the need for theology and for rational reflection on the Bible as the standard by which truth is discerned, MacArthur criticizes both evangelical emotionalism and the Roman Catholic notion of infallible church authority, here targeting two newly perceived enemies: the joint statement Evangelicals and Catholics Together on the one hand, and the laughing revivals sweeping charismatic churches in mid-decade on the other. But in targeting the theological "fuzziness" of Evangelicals and Catholics Together, MacArthur was firing upon some of his former allies, mentioning by name Charles Colson who co-authored the statement with Richard John Neuhaus, MacArthur mentioning co-signers Os Guiness and J. I. Packer as well.17 Though substantial peace over evangelical-Catholic relations would come a year later, Colson, Guiness and Packer would not be found in any later evangelical critique books.18 By the middle of the 1990s, a new leader had arisen within the club of evangelicalism's Calvinist critics, John H. Armstrong. Armstrong edited the last two major evangelical self-critique volumes, The Coming Evangelical Crisis: Current Challenges to the Authority of Scripture and the Gospel in 1996,19 and The Compromised Church: The Present Evangelical Crisis in 1998.20 The former volume stresses the importance of classic evangelical theology as the definitive characteristic of authentic evangelicalism, documenting a declension in evangelical attitudes to Scripture and the authority of the gospel. Michael Horton concludes the volume with a call to "recover the plumb line" of biblical authority. In The Compromised Church, a companion volume to the former work, Armstrong explains, "The crisis that the earlier book spoke of as 'coming' is clearly here."21 By 1998, these authors saw not merely a severe theological declension and resulting anthropocentric evangelicalism, but a crisis needing immediate attention. 3. The Evangelical Theological Declension Further Observed Other analysts of the evangelical movement (both from within and from without) have noted a marked change in the nature and centrality of evangelical theological life. Nathan O. Hatch demonstrates a shift within evangelicalism since 1942 from a theological emphasis characteristic of fundamentalism to a more relational emphasis today. This shift from a theological to a relational grounding, Hatch suggests, may be due to evangelicalism's success. The movement's subculture, he explains, may not be as deep as it once was (with distinctions between evangelicals and non-evangelicals being less clear), but the movement's current theological "fuzziness" gives it a much broader appeal.22 The observations of these conservative Calvinists have also been made on an academic level by sociologist James Davison Hunter, himself an evangelical in the Reformed tradition. In Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation, Hunter examines the changing theological viewpoints among the faculty of major evangelical seminaries and liberal arts colleges.23 Hunter demonstrates extensive cultural accommodation among these evangelical academics, themselves considerably to the theological left of their students and having less concern for affirming traditional evangelical doctrines and practices. Hunter explains, "The symbolic boundaries of Protestant orthodoxy are not being maintained or reinforced."24 He suggests that such reinforcement may now be impossible due to an evangelical "ethic of civility" which makes conservative Protestants want not merely to be tolerant of others, but be tolerable to others. Hunter writes: To be sure, there is good reason to believe that conservative Protestantism may be incapable of adequately reinforcing these boundaries.... The first [reason for the inability] has to do with the "ethic of civility." ...Evangelicals generally and the coming generation particularly have adopted to various degrees an ethical code of political civility. This compels them to not only be tolerant of others' beliefs, opinions, and life-styles, but more importantly be tolerable to others. The critical dogma is not to offend but to be genteel and civil in social relations.25 Hunter continues: While their adoption of this ethic expresses itself politically, it expresses itself as a religious style as well. In this latter sense, it entails a deemphasis of Evangelicalism's more offensive aspects, such as accusations of heresy, sin, immorality, and paganism, and themes of judgment, divine wrath, damnation, and hell. Anything that hints of moral or religious absolutism and intolerance is underplayed.26 Indeed, considering the continuing negative image evangelicals bear in American culture as "intolerant" and "harsh"---despite their characteristic deemphasis of socially offensive doctrines---Hunter deduces that the only way for American evangelicals to reinforce the symbolic boundaries of orthodox Protestantism would be for evangelicals "to operate defiantly against these social and cultural constraints." He concludes, "They would have to publicly invoke and rigorously apply the 'harsher' and more 'offensive' symbols of their faith." But, as Hunter notes, by reinforcing Protestant orthodoxy, evangelicals would alienate not only non-evangelicals, but "their own following as well."27 Indeed, Hunter observes that little consensus remains today among evangelicals as to the very nature of the symbolic (theological or practical) boundaries of evangelical orthodoxy.28 Another recent study suggests this theological shift within American evangelicalism---and Protestantism generally---at a more local level. In All is Forgiven: The Secular Message in American Protestantism, Marsha G. Witten analyzes the language of Protestant sermons, comparing mainline versions with their evangelical counterparts.29 A scholar working from outside the Christian tradition, Witten discerns extensive cultural accommodation from evangelical and mainline sermons alike, albeit more pronounced among the mainline selection. She finds that in the great majority of the sermons in her sample, "God is portrayed exclusively or predominantly in terms of the positive functions he serves for men and women." She continues, "Chief among these functions is one that can be labeled 'therapeutic.' God relieves negative feelings, especially anxiety and doubt."30 While almost all sermons speak of God as a benevolent father, only 16 percent of sermons centrally concerned with God speak of God as also being a transcendent judge. And even those few sermons in Witten's study that do speak of judgment never place emphasis upon that judgment; the theme is mentioned only in passing, and even then God's agency in judgment is downplayed---sinners pass judgment on themselves, God only witnessing the fact. She writes: The connection between God's function as judge and a sinner's punishment in hell is made only by implication. The language here suggests that God's judgment is responsible for the reward of heaven, but human beings alone decide on their course to hell.31 Discussing the almost complete lack of fearsome qualities in the God of Protestant preaching, Witten observes: "The transcendent, majestic, awesome God of Luther and Calvin---whose image informed early Protestant visions of the relationship between human beings and the divine---has undergone a softening of demeanor throughout the American experience of Protestantism, with only minor interruptions."32 The accusation that modern American evangelicalism is functioning with anthropocentric assumptions would appear to find confirmation in Witten's study of American preaching, where evangelicals fare little better than more liberal Protestants. Humanity does not exist for God's pleasure, but God for humanity's pleasure. God is not transcendent, and when he appears so, the emphasis is upon his benefits. The God of the Bible has become a commodity that evangelicals seek to sell to consumers who find God personally useful. Given their commitment to Protestant orthodoxy, there is ample cause for insecurity among evangelicalism's Calvinist theologians. 4. The Evangelical Theological Declension in Practice Yet these critiques from within evangelicalism's Calvinist branch do not merely restate orthodox Reformation doctrines. Rather they seek to demonstrate the cultural accommodation of the evangelical movement on a practical level by examining various spheres of church life and theology, this declension providing the context for a call back to the perceived theological and ecclesiastical seriousness of Reformation Christianity. As Wells argues, the evangelical acceptance of the values of modernity "has disordered the warp and woof of contemporary life. In the one hand it leaves a faith denuded of theology and in the other a life stripped of absolutes."33 Beyond the direct concerns for biblical authority (sola scriptura) and a high view of God (soli Deo gloria), several key areas of church life receive repeated attention. The Psychologization of Christianity: A major concern within these volumes is a tendency among those seeking to integrate Christianity and psychology to make God a means toward a greater end of having positive feelings about oneself. This is a key theme in Horton's Made in America. It is also the focus of two essays in No God But God, three in Power Religion, and one in The Coming Evangelical Crisis. Emotionalism: The shift from biblical study and rational theological reflection to inner voices and feelings for guidance is a major focal point of MacArthur's Reckless Faith. Horton devotes a chapter to the practice in Made in America. Three essays in Power Religion focus on the parallel infatuation with signs and wonders and the emotional power experiences they produce. An essay in The Coming Evangelical Crisis draws further attention to the question of continuing prophecy. The eclipse of preaching in the evangelical church: Many of these authors object to the diminishing place of the pulpit ministry in evangelical churches. Congregations want therapists or administrators, they fear, more than preachers. Power Religion devotes three essays to the crisis in preaching, The Coming Evangelical Crisis and The Compromised Church one each. The eclipse of worship and sacraments: A major concern within these volumes, evangelical worship is perceived to have shifted its purpose from blessing God to blessing the worshipper through entertainment-style formats. This "show-time religion," as MacArthur describes it, is discussed at length in Ashamed of the Gospel, and serves as the object of two essays in The Coming Evangelical Crisis and another three in The Compromised Church. The eclipse of the institutional church: Evangelicalism, these authors assert, while profiting greatly from the rise of parachurch ministries, has also suffered from a loss of popular respect for the institutional church, many individualistic American evangelicals believing that church membership and participation is optional, to the neglect of the Christian community. Horton hit on this theme early on in Made in America, and MacArthur devotes his concluding chapter to it in Ashamed of the Gospel. An essay is further devoted to church discipline in The Compromised Church. Marketing techniques and business-like church administration: The evangelical church's pragmatic reliance on human-centered marketing techniques for church growth received early attention from Horton in Made in America, and the theme continued in two of Power Religion's essays. Two more essays of this kind appear in No God But God and a chapter in Ashamed of the Gospel. The theme also surfaces in The Compromised Church. Protestant Distinctives over against Roman Catholicism: A major theme by the middle of the 1990s, Evangelicals and Catholics Together brought about renewed attention to the Reformation themes of sola scriptura and sola fide, the supreme authority of the Bible and justification by faith alone. MacArthur first stresses these themes in Reckless Faith, where they account for over half the book. These core Protestant distinctives are visible as a subtext for much of The Coming Evangelical Crisis. These authors oppose what they perceive to be a redefinition of key theological language (like justification by faith) in order to cover over serious doctrinal differences for the sake of unity in political activism. Political Life: And these authors tend to see much evangelical involvement in politics, be it on the political left or right, as involving an idolatrous trust in human goodness or in political power. While none of these authors endorses a separatist withdrawal from public life, the concern over evangelical political involvement is the chief focus of three essays in No God But God and two in Power Religion, but receives much less attention in the latter part of the decade than in the former part. It is ironic that Reformed evangelical leaders felt the need in the 1990s to accuse evangelicals of idolatrous political activism when fifteen years earlier it was one of their number, Francis Schaeffer, whose jeremiad had first called American evangelicals back into the political sphere after fifty years of perceived public withdrawal. Schaeffer had accused American evangelicals of exchanging the biblical, Reformed vision of all of life under Christ's lordship for a self-centered idol of personal peace and affluence. Schaeffer and Presbyterian elder, physician, and later United States Surgeon General C. Everett Koop rallied evangelicals around the abortion issue in the late 1970s with their film series and book Whatever Happened to the Human Race?34 This effort Schaeffer followed in 1981 with A Christian Manifesto in which he challenged evangelicals to a massive movement to re-establish the foundations of government, law, and western culture upon biblical, Judeo-Christian foundations.35 By the 1990s, evangelicalism's Calvinist caucus was objecting, "We're up to their steeples in politics!" Anti-Intellectualism: Parallel to the above concerns, many of these authors further object to an anti-intellectual mindset they perceive behind the popular evangelical distrust of theology. And this anti-intellectualism finds additional critique from the pen of evangelical historian Mark Noll in his 1994 Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.36 Describing his perspective as that of a "wounded lover,"37 Noll opens his volume with a powerful accusation, "The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind."38 While evangelicals have been strong on piety and evangelism, zealous in missions and mercy ministries and activism, they have neglected the serious life of the mind, a charge he repeatedly demonstrates by appeal to the continued lack of an evangelical research university fifty years into the movement's modern incarnation. Indeed, evangelicals "have nourished millions of believers in the simple verities of the gospel but have largely abandoned the universities, the arts, and other realms of 'high' culture."39 Also in 1994, Os Guinness accused evangelicals of anti-intellectualism in Fit Bodies, Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals Don't Think and What to Do About It.40 Blaming the eight 'P's of polarization, pietism, primitivism, populism, pluralism, pragmatism, philistinism and premillenialism---alongside what he terms the "idiot culture" of postmodern America---Guiness calls on evangelicals to think critically about all of life from a biblically-defined perspective. Both Guiness' and Noll's critiques find precedent in Harry Blamires' 1963 classic The Christian Mind, in which Blamires disparages the Christian mind for succumbing to the secular drift of western culture at large.41 Indeed, the evangelical movement's modern incarnation began with a self-critique book accusing fundamentalism of anti-intellectualism and cultural obscurantism, Carl F. H. Henry's 1947 book, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism.42 But in all of these contemporary criticisms of American evangelicalism, personal ethics and morality are nowhere targeted. Nor are evangelicals in these volumes called to new moral or political crusades in the culture at large. No new activism is called for. Rather, the focus is on reforming the theology of the churches with a renewed vision of God's greatness, holiness, grace and sovereign power. And behind this emphasis on the highness of God stands a concern for the ultimacy of biblical authority, an authority these authors see attacked on every front, not from the outside, but from within the evangelical movement itself. 5. The Imminent Evangelical Catastrophe These authors speak of the human-centered and a-theological quality of American evangelicalism not merely as one of many issues facing the movement today, but as the fountain from which all other errors flow. This will result, they warn, in a catastrophe for the American evangelical church. For Horton, the biblical doctrines of God, salvation, church and eschatology are all at stake.43 David Wells writes that, "unless the evangelical Church can recover a knowledge of what it means to live before a holy God... theology will have no place in its life." MacArthur warns that the church will be devoured and her spiritual stamina exhausted unless the churches heed the call to turn from worldly accommodation.44 Indeed, warns Wells, the decline of evangelical theology is a sure sign of the movement's "creeping death."45 If in 1996 John Armstrong and his contributors looked to a "Coming" Evangelical Crisis, by 1998, the crisis had arrived with The "Present" Evangelical Crisis. Such warnings, titles and subtitles bespeak imminent catastrophe. Guiness and Seel call evangelicals to reformation and revival and to a humble but radical obedience to the revealed will of God if the evangelical church is to have a future in serving God's purposes.46 Sproul sees at the center of the crisis a popular misunderstanding of the character of God; one that he warns could keep even the most committed of evangelicals from truly knowing Christ. For Sproul, the question is one of eternal salvation. He warns: Everything else can be correct apart from your doctrine of God and you are still a pagan. You are still an idolater. You may be an inerrantist; your eschatology might be right on target; you may never miss a quiet time or an opportunity to go to church. But if you do not worship the right God, you worship and serve a false one.47 6. The Calvinist Jeremiad in Contrast These authors paint a narrative of declension, one in which a once faithful evangelical movement has exchanged the serious study of God's supremacy and a radical commitment to his Word for a pragmatic, human-centered and narcissistic emotionalism. It is worthwhile to take a closer look at this narrative of declension. In his Content of Form, Hayden White argues that the narrative genre, far from being an unbiased perspective, is in fact the most value-laden of literary forms. A particular set of assumptions guides what information in included within the narrative, and what information is shoveled off into the equally value-laden category of the "insignificant." Data are thus organized at the service of a larger perspective that infuses them with meaning.48 And narratives of evangelicalism vary. Not all evangelical assessments of the evangelical movement are so gloomy. Oxford's Alister McGrath is positively buoyant in its evaluation of evangelicalism, though McGrath approaches the movement from within its more theological English context. McGrath's Evangelicalism and the Future of Christianity posits evangelicalism as the only future for Protestantism and as the rising center of Christianity globally.49 His Passion for Truth: The Intellectual Coherence of Evangelicalism,50 departing from the pessimism of Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, argues for the health and vigor of contemporary evangelical thought, qualifying its academic weaknesses as to be expected in a youthful movement experiencing the pains of rapid growth. Another Anglican, John Stott, considered by many to be the dean of evangelical Protestantism today, is also positive in his assessment of the evangelical movement. In Evangelical Truth: A Personal Plea for Unity, Integrity & Faithfulness, Stott argues for a substantial theological common ground that unites the otherwise varied branches of evangelicalism. Stott lays out his argument for a core evangelical message in Trinitarian form: the supreme authority of the Bible as God's Word, salvation by the substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ and justification by faith, and ministry in the renewing power of the Holy Spirit. While evangelicals may find themselves disagreeing on questions of secondary importance, Stott finds an implicit theology holding the diversity of evangelical branches together in unity, even where evangelicals on the surface shun "theology."51 And even many negative assessments of evangelicalism are not couched within a jeremiad narrative of declension. Despite the volume's title, Carl F. H. Henry's Toward a Recovery of Christian Belief, his published 1989 Scottish Rutherford Lectures, while criticizing evangelicals for not adequately interpreting life in light of a comprehensive biblical worldview, nevertheless avoids the language of evangelical declension and the warnings of impending catastrophe.52 Similarly, Millard J. Erickson's The Evangelical Left: Encountering Postconservative Theology, while critical of recent developments within evangelical theology such as a lessening of the authority of scripture, and anthropocentric and experiential doctrines of God and salvation, still does not frame the debate within a narrative of declension. While Erickson notes the same cultural accommodation as Horton, Armstrong and Wells, Erickson does not warn of impending catastrophe.53 The recent cache of evangelical self-critique books discussed in this essay sets itself apart from other evangelical assessments (positive and negative) of the movement by its narrative of declension and warning of impending doom. Mainline Protestantism has, however, seen a similar warning of impending doom recently in The Empty Church: The Suicide of Liberal Christianity by Thomas C. Reeves, an historian and Episcopal layperson.54 For a movement that began its modern life among the Calvinists, the sometimes strong critique evangelicalism has received in the past decade from its own Calvinist caucus cannot be dismissed lightly. While most of these Calvinist voices have not distanced themselves from the movement they helped create, their accusations of doctrinal declension, human-centered worship and idolatrous narcissism stand in sharp contrast to the more upbeat boosterism found in a movement that has witnessed a remarkable resurgence in the modern era. Yet other scholars both inside and outside the evangelical tradition have confirmed their frequently negative observations, and the authors of these recent critiques are convinced that the cultural accommodation of popular evangelicalism has powerfully affected nearly every area of the churches' ministry. Their warnings of impending catastrophe and their call back to a theocentric Protestant orthodoxy and Christ-centered gospel, while perhaps offensive within a pluralistic and narcissistic culture, reveal a deep insecurity about the future of the evangelical movement in America. 7. Postscript: A Question for Further Study This group of literature could easily be overlooked in the spectrum of evangelical publications. Beyond indicating insecurity about the firmness of recent evangelical gains on the part of evangelicalism's Calvinist branch, one key interpretive question remains open for further study. The question may be variously stated. Are these self-critique authors simply observing what Hunter and others have observed about American evangelicalism? Or is their jeremiad something more proactive, embodying a discursive power move, a move that in fact reinforces the classic boundaries of Protestant orthodoxy? Are these authors merely describing, or is their emphasis on the more "offensive" and "harsher" elements of classic evangelicalism (to borrow Hunter's language) itself indicative of evangelicalism's health, as a movement that is actively counteracting the deterioration of its symbolic boundaries? Indeed, a look at the history of Calvinism reveals a history of jeremiads. From Beza and other immediate post-Reformation figures decrying the theological declension since the Reformation purity of Calvin's Geneva to the American Puritans' Halfway Covenant, Calvinists have often perceived a decline in Christendom generally and their own churches specifically. As Sacvan Bercovitch observes in The American Jeremiad: From the start the Puritans had drawn their inspiration from insecurity; ...crisis had become their source of strength. They fastened upon it, gloried in it, even invented it if necessary... Crisis became both the form and substance of their appeals.55 The Calvinists' strong language of idolatry and judgment has often proven a tool---perhaps knowingly, perhaps unwittingly---of shoring up the boundaries of Reformed orthodoxy. Are these modern authors in fact carrying out the program James Davison Hunter had predicted would be necessary a decade earlier? Are they making use of the harsher elements of their religious tradition to preserve the movement's time-honored definition? The recent proliferation of conservative Reformed critiques of the evangelical movement may be a sign of the movement's sickness, or it may be a sign of the movement's health. For if the rapid resurgence of evangelical Christianity since World War II has also coincided with an even more rapid resurgence of confessional Calvinism among evangelicals---a resurgence this author has observed---then the Calvinists may find they have less cause for insecurity than they at first believed. Their declension may prove to be the foundation for a modern revival of confessional Reformation Protestantism. Notes For a brief survey of evangelical resurgence since the 1940s, see Nathan O. Hatch with Michael S. Hamilton, "Taking the Measure of the Evangelical Resurgence, 1942-1992." In Reckoning with the Past, ed. D.G. Hart, 1995, pp. 395-412. For discussion of the northern, Calvinist origins of the neo-evangelical movement in the 1940s, see Mark Noll & Lyman Kellstedt, "The Changing Face of Evangelicalism." Pro Ecclesia IV. Michael Scott Horton, Made in America: The Shaping of Modern American Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1991. Ibid., 12-13. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 82. Michael Scott Horton, ed. Power Religion: The Selling out of the Evangelical Church? Chicago: Moody Press, 1992. Not the least of which, Alister McGrath, would put a more positive spin on the movement later. See below. Os Guiness & John Seel, eds. No God But God: Breaking with the Idols of Our Age. Chicago: Moody Press, 1992. Ibid., 11. Ibid. David F. Wells, No Place for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans 1993. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 9. John F. MacArthur, Ashamed of the Gospel: When the Church Becomes Like the World. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1993. John F. MacArthur, Reckless Faith: When the Church Loses its Will to Discern. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1994. Ibid., 119, for example. Later moves to qualify their involvement in ECT brought peace to Calvinists who had been divided over the accord. By the middle of 1995, a group of mostly Calvinist evangelical theologians had prepared a five-point statement to elucidate ways in which Catholics and evangelicals were and were not together, particularly emphasizing the continued disagreement over justification by faith alone. See "Evangelicals Clarify Accord with Catholics," Christianity Today, March 6, 1995. John H. Armstrong, The Coming Evangelical Crisis: Current Challenges to the Authority of Scripture and the Gospel. Chicago: Moody Press, 1996. John H. Armstrong, The Compromised Church: The Present Evangelical Crisis. Chicago: Moody Press, 1998. Ibid., 16. See Hatch with Hamilton, footnote 1 above. James Davison Hunter, Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. Hunter, 183. Ibid. Italics original. Ibid. Ibid., 184. Ibid., 185. Marsha G. Witten, All is Forgiven: The Secular Message in American Protestantism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. All of the sermons in Witten's selection are taken from the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15 from pulpits in two large denominations---the Presbyterian Church USA as a mainline source and the Southern Baptist Convention as an evangelical one. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 53. Wells, 7. Francis A. Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1979. Francis A. Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto. Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1981. An interesting exchange among four evangelical leaders---Mark Noll, Alister McGrath, Richard Mouw, and Darrel Bock---occasioned by Noll's book can be found in the August 14, 1995 edition of Christianity Today, titled "Scandal? A forum on the evangelical mind." Noll, ix. Noll, 3. Noll, 3-4. Os Guinness, Fit Bodies, Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals Don't Think and What to Do About It. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1994. Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind. London: S.P.C.K., 1963. Carl F. H. Henry, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1947. See Joel A. Carpenter, ed. Two Reformers of Fundamentalism: Harold John Ockenga and Carl F.H. Henry. New York: Garland, 1988. Horton, Power Religion, 343-350. MacArthur, Ashamed of the Gospel, xx. Wells, 301. Guiness and Seel, 21. R.C. Sproul, "The Object of Contemporary Relevance," in Horton, Power Religion, 325. Hayden White, The Content of Form. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Alister McGrath, Evangelicalism and the Future of Christianity. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995. Alister McGrath, Passion for Truth: The Intellectual Coherence of Evangelicalism. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996. John Stott, Evangelical Truth: A Personal Plea for Unity, Integrity & Faithfulness. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999. Carl F.H. Henry, Toward a Recovery of Christian Belief. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1990. Millard J. Erickson, The Evangelical Left: Encountering Postconservative Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1997. Thomas C. Reeves, The Empty Church: The Suicide of Liberal Christianity. New York: The Free Press, 1996. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978, 62. Harsh Medicine by Wesley J. Smith This is a chapter from Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America, by Wesley J. Smith. Reprinted with permission from the publisher, Encounter Books, San Francisco, CA (2000), www.encounterbooks.com. My mother's doctor is refusing to give her antibiotics," the caller told me in an urgent voice. I asked why. "He says that she's ninety-two and an infection will kill her sooner or later, so it might as well be this infection." As disturbing as this call was, as outrageous the doctor's behavior, I wasn't particularly surprised. I have been receiving such desperate calls with increasing frequency for the last several years. Not every day. Not every week. But with sufficient regularity to know that something very frightening is happening to American medical ethics. "St. Gregory of Nyssa" (oil on masonite board)by Kay Darling Among the more disturbing of such calls I have received was from John Campbell, whose teenage son, Christopher, had been unconscious for three weeks because of brain damage sustained in an auto accident. The boy had just been released from the hospital intensive care unit when he developed a 105-degree fever in the hospital's "step-down unit." Campbell asked the nurses to cool his fever. They replied that first they needed a doctor's orders. Campbell asked them to obtain it, but Christopher's physician was out of town and the on-call doc-tor said no. "It was an evening of hell," Campbell says. "My son's life meant less than hospital protocol. When the doctor refused to order treatment, the nurses said that there was nothing they could do." Campbell desperately tried to reach the on-call doctor himself, but the physician refused to take Campbell's phone calls or respond to his increasingly urgent messages. Meanwhile, Christopher's condition worsened steadily, his fever rising over a period of some twenty hours, to 107.6 degrees. Finally, the nurses — caught between a desperate father's pleas and a doctor's steadfast refusal to treat — insisted that the on-call doctor take Campbell's call. Campbell demanded that his son's fever be treated immediately. The doctor refused. When Campbell grew more insistent, the doctor actually laughed. The boy was unconscious. His life was effectively over. What was the point? "By this time," Campbell recalls, "my son's eyes were black as if he had been in a fight. He was utterly still. He was burning up. The back of his neck was so hot you couldn't keep your hand on it. I said to the doctor, 'This is not a joke! This is my son. His life is at stake. His temperature is over 107 and you are going to do something about it.'" Hearing the angry determination in Campbell's voice and perhaps fearing legal consequences if Christopher died untreated, the doctor finally acquiesced. Shortly after treatment commenced, Christopher's temperature subsided. Soon he was moved to a rehabilitation center for therapy and began a slow recovery. Today, he lives at home with his parents where he is learning to walk with assistance. When not in rehabilitation, Christopher works at a local youth center where he feeds animals and counsels at-risk teenagers. Christopher is very glad to be alive-and his parents and the many troubled people he helps every day are glad, too.1 As I travel around the country speaking in front of various audiences about assisted suicide and other issues involving the ethics of modern medicine, I hear similar horror stories. People are deeply worried about what is happening to medicine: doctors pressured by HMOs to reduce levels of care; hospital nursing staffs cut to the bone; the sickest and most disabled abandoned to inadequate care; elderly people dying in agony in nursing homes because their doctors fail to prescribe proper pain control.2 There have even been reported instances of desperate patients in hospitals calling 911 because they were unable to get needed medical attention.3 I believe that stories such as Christopher's are symptoms of a disintegrating value system in health care, which defines the sickest and most disabled among us as having lives not worth living, which views expensive medical treatments for such people as a waste of valuable resources, and which accepts their demise as a legitimate solution to the difficulties caused by their serious illnesses and disabilities. In short, the ethics of health care are devolving into a stark utilitarianism, which has begun to undermine the "do no harm" credo that has, for millennia, been the cornerstone of medicine. Such attitudes certainly seem to have contributed to the death of Anthony Shatter, my friend Kathy's father. On one otherwise unexceptional Sunday, Anthony, a healthy seventy-six-year-old man, beloved by his family, active in the community and his church, fell on his driveway and hit his head. Seriously injured, he was rushed by ambulance to the emergency room, where he received excellent treatment and was then hospitalized for further care. For the next few days Anthony seemed to be getting better, but then his brain began bleeding and he was hurried into surgery. Anthony emerged from surgery significantly debilitated. He needed a ventilator to breathe and required medically delivered food and fluids. He was in and out of consciousness, some days awake and aware, other days virtually unresponsive. Anthony was not terminally ill. He was not permanently unconscious. He was, however, significantly disabled and almost certainly would be for the rest of his life. Anthony's prognosis was difficult for the Shatter family. But a dark time became excruciating because of the changes they noted in the attitudes of Anthony's medical caregivers. In the beginning, they had clearly valued Anthony's life and enthusiastically provided him with optimum care, but now they urged the family to accept his quick death as the solution to his medical condition and to their own continuing emotional struggle. Indeed, to ensure that Anthony would die, his doctors pressured the family into authorizing the withholding of his tube-supplied food and fluids. The Shatters were appalled at the idea of dehydrating and starving someone they loved. After some back and forth, the hospital staff finally accepted the Shatters' decision. Six weeks after his accident, Anthony was transferred to a rehabilitation hospital where, the Shatters believed, he would receive treatment to help restore as much physical and mental function as his condition would allow. The day of the transfer, in fact, he spoke briefly with his family. All were hopeful. Perhaps he could soon be brought home. Unfortunately, Anthony didn't get better. Moreover, at the new facility, the attitude of the personnel toward his life's value was, if anything, worse than at the original hospital. Then one Friday morning, Anthony developed a high fever and his blood pressure dropped. "We wanted Dad treated," Kathy says. "We demanded that a doctor examine him. Nobody showed up for hours. Dad was burning up and nothing whatsoever was being done. Finally, I spoke with an administrator and threatened to call the police if they did not take care of my father. He hemmed and hawed and reminded us that Dad wasn't making progress. I screamed at him, 'I am calling the police and telling them you are murdering my father by refusing to help him! Get a doctor to my dad's bedside!' That finally got some action."4 Anthony was taken to the hospital intensive care unit and was stabilized. But it was too late. He died early on Saturday morning. The medical neglect of Kathy's father, the refusal of the elderly woman's doctor to treat her with antibiotics, the doctor's derision of a desperate father's request to reduce his son's fever are not isolated or even atypical anecdotes. They are storm signals warning of a quickly developing ethical crisis in a medical world that increasingly devalues some human lives and views people at the margins as expend-able. Traditional morality and medical ethics are crumbling before our very eyes. The New High Priests We have not entered this dark new world by chance. We have been steered into it by an elite that has increasingly dominated public and professional discourse about medical ethics and the broader issues of health care policy for the last three decades. Medical ethics deals with the behavior of doctors in their professional lives vis-a-vis their patients. Bioethics, as it has developed over the last few decades, focuses on the relationship between medicine, health, and society. This last element allows bioethics to espouse values "higher" than the well-being of the individual and to perform the philosophical equivalent of triage. Because of the almost imperialistic view of their mandate, many bioethicists presume a moral expertise of breathtaking ambition and hubris. Many view themselves, quite literally, as forgers of "the framework for moral judgment and decision making,”5 those who will create "the moral principles" that determine how "we are to live and act," fashioning a "wisdom" they perceive as "specially appropriate to the medical sciences and medical arts."6 Indeed, some claim that "bioethics goes beyond the codes of ethics of the various professional practices concerned. It implies new thinking on changes in society, or even global equilibria" (my emphasis).7 Not bad for an intellectual pursuit that has only existed for about thirty years. Bioethicists typically see their work as integrating "medical ethics and universal morality," going beyond "a few general principles" toward determining "the meaning of the good life."8 It is "both a discipline and a public discourse, about the uses of science and technology" and the "values about human life ... with a view toward the formation of public policy and a teachable curriculum."9 Put more simply, bioethics seeks to create a new morality of medicine that will define the meaning of health, determine when life loses its value, and forge the public policies that will promote a new medical and moral order. More than a set of tenuous speculations, bioethics in recent years has ossified into an ideology. Many bioethicists "believe fervently that there needs to be a radical transformation in how we live and how we think based on new biological knowledge because our values, our ethical principles, our self conception are based on outmoded religious ideas or philosophical ideas that they think have been discredited." Undoubtedly, some bioethicists will angrily reject such a definition of their trade and calling. They act in good faith, they will contend. They are proponents of "quality of life" and only intend the creation of a better world. Besides, they will argue, bioethics is far from monolithic; the field contains widely divergent opinions about the issues and controversies they confront, ranging from assisted suicide, to cloning, to the definition of "health." Moreover, many would undoubtedly claim, bioethics doesn't have an end goal. It is more akin to a conversation among professional colleagues, a process that merely seeks rough consensus about the most pressing moral and medical questions that arise in a social world affected by an ongoing health care crisis. Indeed, most bioethicists would recoil at the notion that they are "true believers." Their self-image is that of the ultimate rational analyzers of moral problems and facilitators of ethical dialogue, who, were pipe smoking still fashionable, would sit back with pipe firmly in mouth and act as dispassionate mediators between advancing medical technology and the perceived need to impose reasonable limits on access to treatment as required by finite resources.10 That may be their self-image, but it is also a dodge and a self-deception. Once bioethics moved away from ivory tower rumination and began actively influencing public policy and medical protocols, the field, by definition, became a goal-oriented "movement" attempting to affect political outcomes. Indeed, University of Southern California professor of law and medicine Alexander M. Capron notes that from its inception, "bioethical analysis has been linked to action.”11 Even historian Albert R. Jonsen, a bioethicist himself, calls bioethics a "social movement."12 Has there been any social movement that was not predicated, at least to some degree, on ideology? Moreover, the bioethics pioneer Daniel Callahan, co-founder of the Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank, has admitted that "the final factor of great importance" in bioethics gaining societal respect was the "emergence ideologically of a form of bioethics that dovetailed nicely with the reigning political liberalism of the educated classes in America."13 I asked the author, medical ethicist, and physician Leon R. Kass his opinion about my belief that bioethics has become an ideology. Kass told me, "With due allowances for exceptions, I think there is a lot to be said for that view. There are disagreements about this policy or that, but as to how you do bioethics, what counts as a relevant piece of evidence, what kinds of arguments are appropriate to make, there is a fair amount of homogeneity. If you don't hew to that view, you are considered an outsider."14 The noted sociologist Renee C. Fox, a close observer of bioethics from its inception, told me in a similar vein, "I would call it an inadvertent orthodoxy. You could even call it ideology, depending on how you define the term." She added, "I do think bioethics has gotten institutionalized. It is being taught in every medical school in this country. The training people receive and the content of the curriculum of the short courses as well as the masters and doctoral programs can be quite formulaic. In that sense, I think you could talk properly about orthodoxy."15 Sociologist Howard L. Kaye, author of The Social Meaning of Modern Biology,16 believes that this bioethics establishment sees its agenda "less as an attempt to arrive at an ethical regulation of bio-medical developments" than as a program of "biology transforming ethics." Kaye observes that many bioethicists "believe fervently that there needs to be a radical transformation in how we live and how we think based on new biological knowledge because our values, our ethical principles, our self conception are based on outmoded religious ideas or philosophical ideas that they think have been discredited."17 If Kaye is correct — and there is abundant evidence that he is — the ultimate bioethics agenda is startlingly radical: dismantling traditional Western values and mores and forging a new ethical consensus based on values most people do not presently share. This would be of little consequence if the bioethics movement were relegated to the cultural fringe. But bioethics advocacy is pervasive within the nation's most important institutions. In the last thirty years — financed by tens of millions of dollars in foundation grant money — bioethics ideology has spread throughout the depth and breadth of the educational, medical, legal, business, and governmental establishments to become one of the most influential cultural forces in the country. Members of the bioethics elite serve on influential federal and state government policy commissions, influencing the evolution of public policy and popular views. They write health policy legislation and they consult in medical controversies at the clinical level, often influencing life-and-death decisions. Both theoretical and clinical bioethicists testify as expert witnesses in cutting-edge lawsuits and submit "friend of the court" briefs in appellate cases of major significance. They appear on television and in the print media as "expert" commentators. They advise important politicians, all the way up to the president of the United States. But the greatest influence of bioethics ideology is in education. Bioethics is taught to every medical school student, significantly influencing the attitudes of our doctors of tomorrow toward the health care system generally and their future patients specifically. Bioethics instruction is also provided to other university and postgraduate students destined to become lawyers, business executives, government policy makers, and educators. For those who wish to make a career in bioethics itself, there are more than thirty postgraduate programs in our leading universities, whence graduates go on to become consultants to nursing homes and HMOs, clinical bioethicists in hospitals and organ procurement centers, or fellows in the nation's medical and bioethical think tanks. More immediately, the current generation of national, state, and local health care policy decision makers, clinicians, and professional leaders are being steeped in bioethics ideology in continuing education courses and symposia. Many universities around the country sponsor "short courses" in bioethics designed to train nurses, administrators, and other medical professionals who work at the clinical level how to make clinical decisions from a proper bioethical approach, thereby spreading the influence of bioethics to the bedside. For example, the University of Washington sponsors an annual five-day summer seminar designed to teach "physicians, nurses, social workers, chaplains, attorneys, teachers, and other professionals involved in the care of patients or the education of providers" the "concepts, methods, and literature" of the new medicine inspired by bioethics advocacy.18 Bioethics is now an international movement. Bioethics advocacy exists in virtually every developed country. Moreover, the movement is continually seeking to expand its global influence. For example, the International Society of Bioethics urged recently that "the teaching of bioethics be incorporated into the educational system" of nations around the world.19 The philosopher and theologian Richard John Neuhaus described this oozing of bioethics belief into every nook and cranny of the West's institutions most succinctly several years ago when he wrote, "Thousands of ethicists and bioethicists, as they are called, professionally guide the unthinkable on its passage through the debatable on its way to becoming the justifiable, until it is finally established as the unexceptional."20 It is worth reflecting upon what has become unexceptional in our medical and moral lives. Twenty years ago, for instance, it would have been unthinkable to dehydrate people to death by removing their feeding tubes because they were cognitively disabled. It might even have been criminal. Today, due in large part to vigorous advocacy by bioethicists, which in turn has led to court cases and then to new laws permitting the practice, it is routine in nursing homes and hospitals throughout the country.21 Fifteen years ago, legalized assisted suicide was virtually unthinkable in the United States and Canada. Today, thanks in large part to advocacy by bioethicists, it is deemed justifiable, not only in Oregon where it is now sanctioned by law, but if public opinion polls are accurate, elsewhere in the country. It was once unthinkable to procure organs from someone in a coma. Today, some of the most mainstream bioethicists and physicians in the organ transplant community dispassionately debate the issue in bioethics and medical journals. The new medicine, ethics, public policies, and philosophical beliefs that bioethics espouses are being forced upon a reluctant public. Dr. Leon Kass explains: "There is a kind of condescension toward the views of the general public [among bioethicists] and a considerable divide about core moral views. The American people, as a whole, are a religiously affiliated or God-believing people and it is on the basis of the wisdom of these traditions that they express their fears about the threats to sanctity of human life and to human dignity." On the other hand, mainstream bioethicists specifically reject these values. "At its founding bioethics involved a fair number of people who came at it from a religious perspective but the field has since been taken over by a secular form of doing ethics that is very little informed by any kind of metaphysical or transcendent view." Thus, bioethicists proclaim answers to our most pressing moral questions based on attitudes, sensibilities, and mores that are not shared by the very people who are supposed to benefit from their "moral expertise." Kass warns, "There is the very real danger that what constitutes a 'meaningful life' among the intellectual elite [who make up the bioethics establishment] will be imposed on the people as the only standard by which the value of human life is measured.”22 John Keown, a University of Cambridge law professor and lecturer in the law and ethics of medicine, accurately identifies this fundamental conflict: Traditional common morality, as its name suggests, comprises ethical principles common to civilized cultures. The notion that there are certain objective principles which societies must respect if they are to qualify as civilized, has been expressed in the West in the Hippocratic Oath, in Judeo-Christian morality, the prohibition against killing the innocent, and in the common law... . [But] much of modern bioethics is clearly subversive of this tradition of common morality. Rather than promoting respect for universal human values and rights, it systematically seeks to subvert them. In modern bioethics, nothing is, in itself, either valuable or inviolable, except utility.23 Creating a Hierarchy of Human Life "The traditional Western ethic," a California Medicine editorial stated in 1970, "has always placed great emphasis on the intrinsic worth and equal value of every human life." This "sanctity of life ethic," the editorial continued, has been "the basis for most of our laws and much of our social policy" as well as "the keystone of Western medicine... This traditional ethic is being eroded at its core and may eventually be abandoned... Hard choices will have to be made ... that will of necessity violate and ultimately destroy the traditional Western ethic with all that portends. It will become necessary and acceptable to place relative rather than absolute values on such things as human lives."24 In the decades since these chilling words were written, this is exactly what has happened. Rather than believing in inherent human equality, most contemporary bioethicists measure the value of human life subjectively. Instead of embracing the human community — which means all of us — they worry instead about the "moral community," which in theory and often in practice excludes some of us. For most bioethicists, basic human rights are not inalienable, but must be earned by criteria they have created. Thus, equality ceases to be a universal vision. If these words seem harsh, consider the thinking of the late Joseph Fletcher, a philosopher whose ideas had enormous impact on the West in the second half of the twentieth century. Fletcher is most famous for creating "situational ethics," which emphasize "cutting loose from moral rules" and view "reasoned choice as basic to morality."25 Applied to medical ethics and health care, situational ethics made Fletcher, in Albert R. Jonsen's term, "the patriarch of bioethics."26 Fletcher was a radical utilitarian whose stated goal was to maximize human happiness and minimize suffering. That sounds good in the abstract, but in fact, once he had freed himself from "moral rules" Fletcher developed a worldview that was paradoxically both anarchic and totalitarian. Thus, in the name of human freedom he supported the wildest ideas, such as the manufacture of chimeras (part human, part animal) through genetic engineering.27 Yet individual humans per se actually counted for little in his scheme, and those he perceived as interfering with the general pursuit of the greater happiness were expendable. Early on, Fletcher dismissed the traditional medical "reverence for life," sniffing that "nobody in his right mind regards life as sacrosanct." Developing his thesis from the then newly won right to abortion, Fletcher distinguished mere "human life" from what he called "personal life." "What is critical is personal status," he wrote in 1973, "not merely human status." Fletcher created a list of "criteria or indicators" that he hoped could be used to divide society between those individuals who possessed "humanhood" and those who did not — between "truly human beings," deserving of great moral concern, and others who were "subpersonal" and of scant consequence.28 Here, he used the terms "humanhood" and "truly human" not as biological descriptions but as subjective terms connoting those people he considered to have the highest moral value. The immediate problem facing Fletcher, and those contemporaries who agreed with him, was to devise a method that would allow them to cull the human herd. Toward that end, Fletcher proposed a formula to gauge the quality of a human life "for the purposes of biomedical ethics."29 These included fifteen qualities to measure and define humanhood, among them the following: Minimum Intelligence (Score too low and one is deemed "mere biological life.") Self Awareness ("Essential to the role of personality.") Self Control (If someone is not in control of him or herself, "the individual is not a person.") A Sense of Futurity ("Subhuman animals do not look forward in time.") Memory ("It is this trait alone that makes man ... a cultural instead of instinctive being.") Concern for Others ("The absence of this ambience is a ... clinical indication of psychopathology.") Communication ("Disconnection from others, if it is irreparable, is dehumanization.") Neocortical Function ("In the absence of the synthesizing function of the cerebral cortex, the person is non existent. Such persons are objects, not subjects.") Fletcher also factored five "negative" points into his thesis. For example, he claimed that man is not "anti-artificial" and that "to oppose technology is self-hatred." Thus, "a baby made artificially by deliberate and careful contrivance, would be more human than one resulting from sexual roulette — the reproductive mode of subhuman species" (my emphasis). Fletcher dismissed the notion of innate human rights: "Man is not a bundle of rights. The idea behind this is that such things are objective, preexistent phenomena, not contingent on biological or social relativities."30 In other words, Thomas Jefferson was all wet. To understand how dangerous the thought of the patriarch of bioethics really is, one need only read Fletcher's 1975 essay "Being Happy, Being Human."31 Here he describes participating in a panel discussion of the treatment of babies born with serious birth defects. A physician who cared for a profoundly mentally retarded boy reported that while possessing a very low IQ, the child was clearly happy and clearly a human being. Fletcher coldly dismissed the human worth of this defenseless child — and many other mentally retarded people: Idiots are not, never were, and never will be in any degree responsible [because they cannot understand consequences of action]. Idiots, that is to say, are not human. The problem they pose is not lack of sufficient mind, but of any mind at all. No matter how euphoric their behavior might be, they are outside the pale of human integrity. Indeed, sustained and "plateau" euphoria is itself prima facie clinical evidence of mindlessness.32 Such a provocation had a purpose: to gain support for the notion that killing "idiots" could, depending on the facts of each individual case, be ethical and right, and that such decisions, rather than even being morally portentous, were merely a "clinical" matter.33 In the case of disabled infants, Fletcher wrote elsewhere, killing should simply be considered "postnatal abortion."34 Not every bioethicist agrees with every idea Joseph Fletcher ever expressed. Nor will every radical policy Fletcher ever promoted eventually become culturally or medically acceptable — although many of them, such as dehydrating to death cognitively disabled people, which Fletcher proposed as early as 1974,35 already have. But it is telling that Fletcher was not dismissed by the fledgling bioethics movement as some fanatic kook when he advocated infanticide, "research on living fetuses outside the womb,"36 combining human and animal DNA,37 and dehumanizing cognitively disabled people. In fact, his ideas were given immediate respect, which allowed them to travel from the realm of the unthinkable, to borrow Richard Neuhaus's terminology, into the region of the debatable, whence many have gone on to become unexceptional. That is not to say there was no intellectual resistance within the early bioethics movement to the steady growth of this sort of secularist, radically utilitarian thinking. A strong countermovement, led by theologian Paul Ramsey, provided a significant challenge to the Fletcher school for many years. Ramsey believed that people owed each other a duty of fidelity based upon "covenant responsibilities," rooted in "justice, fairness, righteousness, faithfulness, canons of loyalty, the sanctity of life, hesed agape [steadfast love], or charity." This meant, according to Ramsey, that there is "sacredness" in "bodily life" from which flow our mutual duties to care for each other, including the most weak and vulnerable among us.38 Where Fletcher's approach was a bioethical version of anything goes, Ramsey stood firmly against the idea that the ends justify the means. Where Fletcher sought to create invidious divisions among people based on whether they measured up to his humanhood criteria, Ramsey explicitly rejected the entire plan as immoral. "Fletcher is simply a sign of the times," Ramsey worried as he asserted that creating a checklist to judge how people should be treated in health care was wrong because it was to "play God as God plays God."39 Gilbert Meilaender, a theologian and ethicist who has been part of this struggle for decades, characterized the contest between Fletcher and Ramsey for the soul of bioethics as a three-decade war. Unfortunately, the war seems to have ended with a clear victor. Few of Ramsey's books remain in print, while most of Fletcher's books and articles are readily obtainable. In the end, it was Fletcher, not Ramsey, who became the "patriarch" of modern bioethics. Fletcher, not Ramsey, was the one who "articulated where bioethics was heading well before the more fainthearted were prepared to develop the full consequences of their views."40 Philosophy professor Courtney S. Campbell puts it succinctly: "Joseph Fletcher was a bit of a maverick for his time, but looking back from the 1990s, it is very clear that his approach has come to predominate in bioethics."41 Once someone like Fletcher secured a beachhead, it was only a matter of time before someone like Peter Singer would stage his much-publicized landing in bioethics. One of the world's most influential contemporary utilitarian bioethicists/moral philosophers, Singer takes Fletcher's original formula and extends it to even more radical ends. Whereas Fletcher sought to determine who had moral value strictly for the benefit of humans, Singer expands the "moral community" into the world of animals. Singer contends that being human, in and of itself, is irrelevant to moral status; what counts is whether a "being" is a "person." He reduced Fletcher's multipoint formula to "two crucial characteristics" of a "person": rationality and self-consciousness. 42 Species is irrelevant; Singer claims that by these criteria some animals are persons, including "whales, dolphins, monkeys, dogs, cats, pigs, seals, bears, cattle, sheep, and so on, perhaps even to the point where it may include all mammals."43 On the other hand, some humans would not be persons, including newborn human infants, whether disabled or not, and people with advanced Alzheimer's disease or other severe cognitive disabilities-people whom Singer claims are not self-conscious or rational. Singer makes an explicit moral comparison between these humans and fish or fowl, which unlike "higher" animals are not persons either: "Since neither a newborn infant nor a fish is a person the wrongness of killing such beings is not as great as the wrongness of killing a person."44 To someone unacquainted with the mindset of contemporary bioethics discourse, such ideas may simply sound weird and off the wall. But as I will later show, they actually are the foundation for Singer's claim that infanticide and involuntary euthanasia of cognitively disabled people can be justified while most human use of animals, whether for food, clothing, entertainment, or in medical research, should be prohibited. In another world and time, Peter Singer's advocacy would make him an intellectual outcast. He actually is in bad odor in Germany and Austria, where he cannot speak without generating angry protests from people who consider his opinions Nazi-like.45 But many in bioethics and academia embrace him. Far from being the fringe character that ideas like those mentioned above should make him, Singer is invited to present papers at seminars, symposia, and philosophy association conventions throughout the world. His 1979 book, Practical Ethics, which unabashedly advocates infanticide and euthanasia while decrying "discrimination" based on species (a bizarre notion Singer labels "speciesism"), has become a standard text in many college philosophy departments. Singer is so mainstream that he even wrote the essay on ethics for the Encyclopedia Britannica. Most disturbingly, in 1999 he became a permanent member of the Princeton University faculty, as the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, a prestigious tenured chair at the university's Center for Human Values. The person/nonperson distinction is generally accepted throughout bioethics and increasingly applied to animals, as Singer has advocated. The British academic John Harris, the Sir David Alliance Professor of Bioethics and director of the Institute of Medicine, Law, and Bioethics at the University of Manchester in England, defines a person as "a creature capable of valuing its own existence," which he believes could include people, animals, extraterrestrials and machines, but not some humans such as infants "during the neonatal period." To Harris, who has mastered Fletcher's casuistry, it is not wrong to kill nonpersons or fail to save their lives: [T]o kill or to fail to sustain the life of a person is to deprive that individual of something that they value. On the other hand, to kill or to fail to sustain the life of a nonperson, in that it cannot deprive that individual of anything that he, she, or it could conceivably value, does that individual no harm. It takes from such individuals nothing that they would prefer not to have taken from them... Nonpersons and potential persons cannot be wronged in this way [killing them against their will] because death would not deprive them of anything they can value. If they cannot wish to live, they cannot have that wish frustrated by being killed.46 Similarly, Georgetown University's Tom L. Beauchamp, co-author with James F. Childress of Principles of Biomedical Ethics, an influential bioethics textbook, asserts that personhood and nonpersonhood designations may soon inform us whether we can use people as objects of exploitation: Many humans lack properties of personhood or are less than full persons, they are thereby rendered equal or inferior in moral standing to some nonhumans. If this conclusion is defensible, we will need to rethink our traditional view that these unlucky humans cannot be treated in the ways we treat relevantly similar nonhumans [emphasis added].47 To see how dehumanizing such thinking becomes, pay close attention to the following description of the dying process of a "nonperson" human written by Baruch A. Brody, the director of the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, in a bioethics book about how death should be redefined: Consider the organism that suffers damage to its brain so that it is no longer conscious and can no longer engage in responsive voluntary movement. At some later stage, it loses the capacity to breathe on its own so that its respiration must be supported artificially. At a later stage, its capacity to regulate hormonal levels stops. Somewhere during this time period, its auditory pathways stop functioning. Finally its heart stops beating. Is it really meaningful to suppose that the organism died at some specific point in the process? ... Isn't it more reasonable to say that the organism was fully alive before the chain of events began, is fully dead by the end of the chain of events, and is neither during the process.48 Such prose is not only disrespectful, it is dangerous. Once people are defined as "organisms," they have been utterly stripped of their humanity. Such objectification, as we shall see later in the book, is the key that opens the door to plans currently on the bioethics drawing board to exploit "nonperson" humans as if they weren't people but merely natural resources. Not all bioethicists are as candid as Fletcher, Singer, Harris and Beauchamp in their scorn for human equality and the sanctity-of-life ethic. The influential law professor and bioethics author Ronald Dworkin, whose affect on the Montana Supreme Court I mentioned earlier, argues in his book Life's Dominion that killing the weak and helpless can actually be a method of upholding the inherent value of all human life.49 Unlike the other bioethicists previously mentioned who disdain traditional Judeo-Christian morality, Dworkin claims that the argument between those who support practices such as abortion or euthanasia and those who oppose them isn't even an argument about whether the sanctity of life is a sound principle. Everyone agrees that it is, he claims: "We disagree so deeply because we all take so seriously a value that unites us as human beings — the sanctity or inviolability of every stage of every human life. Our sharp divisions signal the complexity of the value and markedly different ways that different cultures, different groups, and different people, equally committed to it, interpret its meaning.”50 Yet in Dworkin's hands, the exact meaning of "sanctity of life," much like the meaning of art, is left to each person to determine individually. Thus, Dworkin says having an abortion is not denying life's sanctity to the human fetus, but upholding life's sanctity for the woman who doesn't want it to become a baby. "It may be more frustrating to life's miracle when an adult's ambitions, talents, training and expectations are wasted because of an unforeseen or unwanted pregnancy than when a fetus dies before any significant investment of that kind has been made."51 Regardless of where one stands in the great pro-life/pro-choice cultural divide, to assert that having an abortion is somehow to embrace "the inviolability of every stage of every human life," as Dworkin does, is simply ludicrous. Dworkin similarly asserts that euthanasia is not actually a rejection of the sanctity of life, but an embrace of it. "People who want an early, peaceful death for themselves are not rejecting or denigrating the sanctity of life," he writes. "On the contrary, they believe that a quicker death shows more respect for life than a protracted one." Promoting active killing of ill people without a hint of irony as an embrace of life's sanctity has had some of the force of Bill Clinton's "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is." For Dworkin, the "sanctity of life" is not a principle but a mere contingency, defined essentially by where a person stands in his or her life at any given moment. Such a porous concept is incapable of protecting the weak and vulnerable from medical discrimination or killing; and that — as with the distinction between human beings based on personhood criteria — is exactly the point. Dworkin argues that since the deaths of some people cause more grief and a greater sense of tragedy than the deaths of other people, it is justifiable to view the inviolability of individual human lives in relative terms. He writes: Most people's sense of that [death-caused] tragedy, if it were rendered as a graph relating the degree of tragedy to the age at which death occurs, would slope upward from birth to some point in late child-hood or early adolescence, then follow a flat line until at least very early middle age, and then slope down again toward extreme old age ... [Thus] the death of an adolescent girl is worse than the death of an infant girl because the adolescent's death frustrates the investments she and others have made in her life.52 Determining the value of life with such an emotional yardstick is a quixotic enterprise. One could just as easily argue that the newborn's life is more valuable because it is all potential — a blank slate — while the adolescent has already acquired a character and experiences that limit her range. Such arguments are, at best, an underwriter's version of morality, and not worth the time it takes to make them. Euthanizing Hippocrates "To regard life as sacred," Leon Kass has written, "means that it should not be violated, opposed, or destroyed, and that positively, it should be protected, defended and preserved."53 These precepts are especially important in medicine, considering the power accorded physicians to cut, poke, drug, and manipulate the bodies of their patients. Gilbert Meilaender summarizes the obligation of physicians as "to be committed to the bodily life of their patients.”54 A robust belief in the sanctity of life takes these prescriptions one step farther by positing the obligation of physicians to view each of their patients as having equal moral worth. In such an ethical framework, physicians are not free to pick and choose among their patients those to whom they will give optimal care. Every patient deserves the same level of dedication, excellence, loyalty, and fidelity from his or her doctor, regardless of their physical or cognitive condition. These worthy concepts are famously embodied in the Hippocratic tradition. Indeed, medicine may actually have been the first field in which the underlying principles of the equality-of-life ethic were recognized as applying generally rather than parochially. The oath bearing the name of Hippocrates (ca 470-360 BCE) was created hundreds of years before the advent of Christianity. It required physicians, among other obligations, to "apply dietetic measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment" and to "keep them from harm and injustice," and "to give no deadly medicine to any one if asked.55 The life- and dignity-affirming doctrines of the Hippocratic Oath are generally summarized by the familiar phrase "do no harm." These principles were and are upheld by physicians in a myriad of ways, by rendering optimum care to each patient, promoting bodily healing, alleviating pain and suffering, respecting a patient's dignity, refusing to disclose a patient's confidences even in a court of law, and refusing to kill a patient even if so requested. As the twenty-first century dawns, the Hippocratic tradition is ailing. According to the physician and ethicist Edmund D. Pellegrino of Georgetown University, it remains "the moral backdrop against which most American and British physicians made, and still make, their ethical choices."56 However, the tradition has been under sustained attack for more than twenty years and is in acute danger of collapse. "It was when bioethics came on the scene that the Hippocratic tradition of the physician/patient relationship started to fall apart," philosopher Dianne N. Irving told me. "Once it was weakened, bioethics began to replace it with medicine practiced for the greater good of the society rather than for the individual patient. That threatens patient welfare and denigrates medicine into a business rather than a profession."57 What Irving intends as a criticism is embraced as an accurate description by many bioethicists who celebrate their calling as "post-professional."58 A recent study of physician oath-taking published in the Journal of Clinical Ethics illustrated how far modern medicine has strayed from the traditional values of the Hippocratic Oath.59 The authors analyzed contemporary medical oaths and compared them to the Hippocratic original. In light of Roe v. Wade, it is not surprising that only 8 percent of doctors pledge to forswear abortion; it is surprising that only 14 percent promise not to commit euthanasia. When I tell my lecture audiences that most doctors no longer take the Hippocratic Oath upon becoming physicians and that many no longer see it as relevant to their profession, they are shocked and disturbed. They believe, quite correctly, that the oath exists for their protection. They want their doctors to practice a "do no harm" style of medicine. "Why have they abandoned a tradition that has served medicine so well?" they ask. The answer to this important question is complex, having much to do with who we are as a culture and a people. According to Edmund Pellegrino, who has spent a long career as a professor of medical ethics, the Hippocratic system came under attack both from without and from within the medical profession. "These constructs first came into question in the mid 1960s as part of the general upheaval of moral values that occurred in the United States," he writes. "Concomitantly, the character of medicine was being altered by the specialization, fragmentation, institutionalization, and depersonalization of health care. At the same time, the number and complexity of medical ethical issues expanded as the power of medical technology presented new challenges to traditional values.”60 These challenges could have been met without destroying the "do no harm" tradition. However, medical professionals, perhaps having lost confidence in their own ethical instincts, turned to bioethicists for guidance. Unfortunately, by this time the most influential practitioners had enlisted in the relativist branch of the field epitomized by Joseph Fletcher, rather than the more traditional equality-of-life approach espoused by Paul Ramsey. In a philosophical milieu in which the most helpless patients were already widely viewed as less than fully human, the Hippocratic tradition didn't stand a chance. This sad fact is illustrated by the treatment given the tradition in Principles of Biomedical Ethics, first published in 1979, in which bioethics pioneers Tom Beauchamp and James Childress blithely dismiss it as "a limited and unreliable basis for medical ethics."61 As for the "do no harm" ethic that the oath nurtured, readers are informed that it is merely a "strained translation of a single Hippocratic passage.”62 Bioethics and Religion The antipathy of relativist bioethics to religion emerged early. It is not coincidental that Joseph Fletcher, "patriarch" of the movement, insisted on forming his views upon the premise that "man is not a worshipper."63 In recounting the reasons why he believed that bioethics became so influential in such a short time, Daniel Callahan wrote, "The first thing that ... bioethics had to do — though I don't believe anyone set this as a conscious agenda — was to push religion aside."64 Dan Brock, a prominent philosopher and member of the bioethics elite, was similarly blunt in an article urging the legalization of euthanasia: "In a pluralistic society like our own, with a strong commitment to freedom of religion, public policy should not be grounded in religious beliefs which many in that society reject.”65 After welcoming theologians in its formative years (ironically, Fletcher himself was once an Episcopal priest although he left the faith prior to his death), bioethics now stresses that morality and proper behavior are best determined through "rational analysis" based on secular philosophical precepts. Theology, religious values, spirituality, faith — these are considered "external" and thus "unconvincing" in determining wrong from right.66 Moreover, unlike most of the general population that bioethics supposedly serves, many (although certainly not all) modern bioethicists are agnostic or atheistic, a factor that colors their entire approach to issues of life and death as assuredly as the Pope's Catholicism does his. Indeed, some bioethicists view religion as mere "mumbo jumbo," to use Peter Singer's pejorative term.67 Even those who maintain strong spiritual beliefs — including some Catholic priests — are so anxiety-ridden about imposing their religion upon secular society that they leave their personal, faith-inspired values at the door when discussing public health policies. This near-absolute rejection of religious values as a moral framework for debating and creating secular public policies is what isolates bioethics today from the suffering and uncertainty of those it is supposed to serve. If it is true, as Lorna Linda University professor of ethical studies James W. Walters writes, that "ninety percent of the population identifies with the Judeo-Christian tradition,”68 then bioethics is not reflecting an evolving ethic to meet changing times, but imposing one on a population that profoundly disagrees with its most basic assumptions. That is not to say that religion in the public square does not bring problems. (Murdering doctors in the name of "life" is one of them that comes readily to mind.) But it is also true that religion played an indispensable role in creating an ethic of humanity that gentles the savage injustices of life. Consider the modern hospice movement, which owes its origin to the dedication and compassion, rooted in deeply held religious values, of its founder, Dame Cicely Saunders. Dame Cicely was a nurse and devout Anglican who was working as a medical social worker in a London hospital in the years immediately following World War II. She met a Jewish emigre named David Tasma, who had escaped the Warsaw ghetto, only to lie dying in a London hospital at the age of forty. Tasma was alone in the world and Saunders made a special point to visit with him every day. Their friendship changed our world. As Saunders and Tasma spoke of his impending death, she began to comprehend "what he needed — and what all of the other dying patients and their families needed." She told me, "I realized that we needed not only better pain control but better overall care. People needed the space to be themselves. I coined the term 'total pain,' from my understanding that dying people have physical, spiritual, psychological, and social pain that must be treated. I have been working on that ever since." (Tasma left Saunders Ł500 to begin her work, telling her, "I will be a window in your home." Saunders said to me, "It took me nineteen years to build the home around that window.")69 Dame Cicely Saunders' epiphany was not "rational," but spiritual, coming from a deep empathy inspired by her religious faith. Her work was a "personal calling, underpinned by a powerful religious commitment,"70 wrote David Clark, an English medical school professor of palliative care and Saunders' biographer. So strong was Saunders' faith in what she perceived as her divine call, she began volunteering as a nurse at homes for the dying after work.71 Urged on by her deep desire to help dying people, she went to medical school at the age of thirty-three, at a time when there were few female doctors, not to mention medical students her age. Saunders focused her medical practice on helping dying people and alleviating pain. She obtained a fellowship in palliative research and began work in a hospice run by nuns, where pain control was unevenly applied, a nearly universal problem at the time, causing much unnecessary misery. Saunders conceived of putting patients on a regular pain control schedule, which, in her words, "was like waving a wand over the situation."72 Saunders' faith pushed her toward founding a hospice based on her concept of treating the total patient. Believing firmly that "the St. Christopher's project [was] divinely guided and inspired,"73 she became an activist, energetically raising money for the new project, and in the process, raising the consciousness of the medical establishment. Saunders' initial idea was for St. Christopher's hospice to be a "sequestered religious community solely concerned with caring for the dying." But the idea soon expanded from a strictly religious vision into a broader secular application, in biographer Clark's words, a "full-blown medical project acting in the world."74 Saunders succeeded beyond even her own wildest hopes. St. Christopher's opened in a London suburb in 1967 and jumpstarted the modern hospice movement. In 1971, Saunders sent one of her team doctors to New Haven, Connecticut, to help found the first modern hospice in the United States, whence the movement spread nationwide. Hospice has been a certified medical specialty in Britain since 1987.75 There is a direct line of compassion, succor, and love from David Tasma in 1948 to the millions of others who have benefited from hospice care since 1967. None of this would have happened without religious values manifesting in the secular milieu of medicine through Dame Saunders: specifically, the belief that no matter what our state of health, no matter our age, no matter how much help we need, no matter how we look or smell, we all have equal moral worth. To promote such values is not to support theocracy. It does not divide a pluralistic society by imposing religion on an unwilling public. Rather, it is a secular application of a religiously based view of the inherent worth of all human life. How sterile and harsh the world would be if the values that inspired Dame Cicely were barred from the public square, as many bioethicists wish, simply because they are founded in religious faith. How dangerous to approach issues of public health policy and clinical medical ethics solely from the perspective of amoral "moral philosophy." It is true that religion untempered by secular restraint and rationalism can lead to tyranny. But it is also true that secularism unenriched by the values of spirituality will lead to the creation of "hierarchies of human worth," which are really nothing more than the building blocks for a culture of death.76 Brave New Bioethics Having rejected the core values of Western civilization as a basis for determining what is moral and good, relativistic bioethics turned to secular moral and analytical philosophy for the answers. This approach accepts no moral standard or ethical rule, no matter how deeply valued, as a self-evident truth. Every moral principle must be reassessed and deemed "rational" if it is to pass muster. Not surprisingly, the people bioethicists deem best able to perform this exercise are themselves, especially those trained in the arcane schools of secular philosophy. Ironically, mainstream bioethics, which explicitly eschews religious values in public policy and medical ethics discourse and proudly proclaims itself the epitome of rationality, has itself become something of a secular faith among its adherents. As Renee Fox notes, "Bioethics uses medicine as a metaphor for discussing with each other issues of ultimate values and belief, questions that are as religious as they are ethical."77 And Leon Kass adds, "While bioethics is not formally a religion, it is absolutely faith-based and is equally indemonstrable. They purport to grapple with First Principles. Yet, they step into the public square with no greater claim to wisdom than does someone who believes in the Resurrection or in the revelation of the Law at Sinai."78 Bioethicist Daniel Callahan clearly perceives his calling in quasi-metaphysical terms. "Above all," he wrote in 1994, "bioethics needs to develop the capacity to help individuals make good moral decisions in their own lives and to do so in the context of the most basic moral questions: how ought I to live my life? The health of the soul (as they might have put it in an earlier day) is even more important than the health of the body."79 Thus, it seems that bioethics didn't actually "push religion aside," as Callahan wrote elsewhere, it merely changed the venue of belief. We have seen what the new secular faith of bioethics rejects; what, then, does it embrace? Again, it is important to concede that the field is not monolithic. Not everyone who claims to be a bioethicist necessarily accepts all or even some of the concepts I will discuss below, just as not every Christian adheres to the same tenets of faith. That being duly noted, I think it is fair to say that most prominent contemporary bioethicists adhere to a general belief system whose dominant features are as follows. Utilitarianism: Whether explicit or implicit, utilitarianism is one of the primary themes of the ideology. "All [leading] bioethicists," claims author and bioethics critic Anne Maclean, accept "some version of utilitarianism."80 John Keown of Cambridge University told me similarly, "Much of modern bioethics is largely utilitarian. Utilitarianism is fast establishing itself as the new orthodoxy.”81 Renee Fox and coauthor Judith P. Swazey write in a book about bioethics that since the mid-1970s, "moral philosophy has had the greatest molding influence on the field," especially "analytic philosophy — with its emphasis on theory ... and its utilitarian outlook."82 Generally stated, utilitarians hold that "what people want is the ultimate measure of right and wrong."83 Joseph Fletcher, a doctrinaire utilitarian, wrote that" a moral agent's business is to maximize good," which he defined as "happiness." He went on to say, "Whatever increases human happiness is good; whatever reduces human happiness is evil.”84 Peter Singer, one of the world's foremost contemporary utilitarians, is less concerned with happiness than with whether the "interests" of those affected (which in his view includes animals) are furthered or hindered.85 Singer himself admits that "ethical ideals, like individual rights, the sanctity of life, justice, purity, are incompatible with utilitarianism."86 Thus, to the utilitarian, there is neither objective right nor objective wrong: actions are measured subjectively based on desired or actual outcomes and on ends that justify means. Lacking a firm commitment to the sanctity of human life, utilitarians may justify profoundly dangerous and immoral schemes and not even blush. As described by Anne MacLean in her book The Elimination of Morality, the British bioethicist John Harris proposed eliminating the shortage of transplant organs by a scheme in which the few would be murdered to benefit the many: [E]veryone [shall] be given a sort of lottery number. Whenever doctors have two or more dying patients who could be saved by transplants, and no suitable organs have come to hand through 'natural deaths,' they can ask a central computer to supply a suitable donor. The computer will then pick the number of a suitable donor at random and he will be killed so that the lives of two or more others may be saved.87 To the radical utilitarian Harris, saving two or more lives at the expense of one murder would bring greater overall happiness than the suffering caused by the killing of one man or woman. And since under utilitarianism, no individual possesses human rights per se, why not go ahead and perform the human sacrifice? Obviously, this proposal will never become public policy. Nor, I hope, will most bioethicists secretly applaud Harris's "audacious" ideas. Still, the fact that such ideas could be presented as a respectable point of view in an important philosophy primer (Applied Ethics, edited, not surprisingly, by Peter Singer) illustrates much of what has gone so dreadfully wrong in bioethics discourse. The Quality of Life Ethic: If bioethicists are skeptical about "sanctity/equality of life," they certainly have no such doubts about "quality of life." What do they mean by this phrase as applied to health policy and medical practice? In Clinical Ethics, a bioethics book designed for everyday clinical use by working medical professionals, Albert Jonsen and his coauthors write, "In general, the phrase expresses a value judgment: the experience of living, as a whole or in some aspect, is judged to be 'good' or 'bad,' 'better' or 'worse.”88 Such issues are, of course, a proper part of medical decision making. For example, several years ago I snapped a knee ligament while skiing. My orthopedist told me that I could have it repaired surgically, but that it would be a delicate and painful process that would take more than a year to heal. My other option was simply to quit skiing and avoid other sports requiring quick lateral movements. I decided to give up the slopes because I believed that choice best protected my life's quality, although I probably would have made a different decision if I had been in constant pain. The same kind of cost/benefit analysis goes into more serious medical decisions, such as whether to accept a last-ditch round of chemotherapy or ask for medical technology to extend life. The problem with the concept of quality of life arises when it ceases to be a factor in medical decision making and instead becomes the factor. The "quality of life" ethic is described by Peter Singer, in his book Rethinking Life and Death, as follows: We should treat human beings in accordance with their ethically relevant characteristics. Some of these are inherent in the nature of being. They include consciousness, the capacity for physical, social, and mental interaction with other beings, having conscious preferences for continued life, and having enjoyable experiences. Other relevant aspects depend on the relationship of the being to others, having relatives for example who will grieve over your death, or being so situated in a group that if you are killed, others will fear for their own lives. All of these things make a difference to the regard and respect we should have for such a being.89 The danger of Singer's approach should be obvious to every reader. The standards Singer uses to measure human worth are his standards based on what he considers important and "relevant." And therein lies the heart of the problem. Subjective notions of human wor Understanding Traditionalist Conservatism by Mark C. Henrie A shorter version of this essay appeared in Varieties of Conservatism in America, Peter Berkowitz, Ed. (Hoover Press, 2004) ISBN: 4572-5; 167 pages. $15.00 Individual chapters can be downloaded as PDFs from Hoover Press. In the years following the Second World War, a group of writers emerged who became known as America's "New Conservatives," prominently including Richard M. Weaver, Peter Viereck, Robert Nisbet, and Russell Kirk. In this case, "new" did not merely indicate a generational transition; these thinkers did not represent a simple return to the conservatism of the 1930s following the emergency of world war. Instead, the New Conservatives articulated ideas and concepts that were unprecedented in American intellectual history. They took their political bearings from a quite novel set of intellectual authorities. Most striking of all, at the very moment of America's historic victory over the most potent totalitarian threat of the century, their writings were redolent with sometimes sweeping doubts about the "progress" of the Modern Project -- and about the individualism at the heart of liberalism's liberty. Central to the conservatism of the 1930s had been intransigent opposition to the "socialism" of Roosevelt's New Deal on the part of various Republican-leaning social groups: East Coast financiers, Midwestern manufacturers, Chamber of Commerce types, the more prosperous farmers. Centralized bureaucratic administration of the economy was resisted by the possessing classes in the name of an older form of liberal capitalist social order. Among intellectuals, articulate conservatism in the 1930s had been represented by such men as H. L. Mencken, George Santayana, Irving Babbitt, and Albert Jay Nock. With the partial exception of Santayana, each may be said to have subscribed to some version or another of classical liberalism or libertarianism, emphasizing something resembling Mill's individuality as against social conformity. Without exception, their worldviews were markedly elitist and sharpened by a waspish religious skepticism. This last could be seen in Santayana's genteel atheism, in Mencken's noisy contempt for American Bible thumpers, in Nock's preference for the most coldly rationalist of French freethinkers, and in Babbitt's quest for wisdom in Hinduism, having dismissed his Puritan ancestry. In other words, these pre-war conservatives connected not at all with the lived traditions of the vast majority of the American people, except on the single point of the tradition of liberal individualism, whether rugged or not. Kirk, of course, quickly became the leading figure of the New Conservatism -- a position which later received the appellation of "traditionalism" or "traditionalist conservatism." While he himself was influenced by some of the currents of thought in the 1930s, and while The Conservative Mind purported to be a "recovery" of a pre-existing Burkean tradition in American political and social thought, it is difficult to deny that there was also a large element of invention in Kirk's account of the conservative tradition. Kirk's "canons" of conservatism begin with an orientation to "transcendent order" or "natural law," a view that political problems are at bottom religious and moral problems rather than the other way around: whereas the libertarian conservatives of the 1930s usually understood themselves as heirs of various enlightenment dissenters from Europe's Christian civilization, Kirk is a dissenter from dissent, striving to learn from the sidelined champions of orthodox religion. Kirk therefore rejects rationalism, utilitarianism, and egalitarianism. He ties freedom to property-holding, but there is no discussion of the "magic of the marketplace" or interest in economic efficiency. He is hostile to the experimentalism of the social scientific mind, and he defends the latent reasonableness of evolved social forms. The three evils which emerge as antagonists throughout The Conservative Mind are the French Revolution, the industrial revolution, and the bureaucratic-managerial revolution of the first half of the twentieth century. Communism is mentioned hardly at all. Focusing on the French Revolution, Kirk states emphatically that the overarching evil of the age is "ideology," and he claims that conservatism properly understood is "the negation of ideology." As such, conservatism prescribes a "politics of prudence," a cautious statesmanship founded upon a sensitive understanding of the complexities of human nature, the limitations of human history, and the capaciousness of the human good. Of course, liberalism's ancient boast has always been that it founds itself upon, and best adequates to, human nature -- once that nature is shorn of illusions and superstition. To the liberal mind, one might even say that if ideology is defined as a project to achieve a utopian intellectual abstraction, then it is liberalism that is the negation of an ideology. From Kirk's perspective, there is a partial truth in liberalism's claim -- which is why Kirk could find significant areas of common ground with classical liberals such as Hayek (while forcefully eschewing more doctrinaire libertarians) and later with the chastened liberals we know as neoconservatives, up to a point. But to Kirk and to the American traditionalists he inspired, liberals ultimately fail to understand the partiality of their principle. Their account of human nature excludes too much of what can be known, and is known, about the human good. Because their principle is "simple" or "reductionist," liberals possess no "other" principle which can authoritatively limit the eventual application of their principle to all spheres of human life -- this, despite their proud boast that liberalism differs in kind from all other political theories in refusing for itself a "comprehensive conception of the good." Because, for liberalism, the public sphere is limited only by rights, which are the possession only of those great abstractions, "individuals," the public sphere in fact extends to all human relations. The homogenization of the whole of the human world on the basis of the contract theory is the dehumanizing threat we ultimately face, made all the more dangerous by the fact that America's political discourse has lacked any terms which would enable us to recognize the ideological or dogmatic character of liberalism. Consequently, Kirk's other great theme, repeated throughout his life, was an appeal to revivify the "moral imagination" through a serious engagement with poetry and imaginative literature. Such "romanticism" would seem to have little to do with the politics of prudence. But this appeal was a recognition of, and a response to, the enveloping character of liberal presumptions in the thinking of all Americans. Tocqueville had observed that censorship was unnecessary in America, because no American could imagine writing a book that would challenge the democratic regime. Kirk recognized the essential truth of Tocqueville's observation, but considered this a stumbling block in the search for the whole truth about man rather than an indication that America was "the regime according to nature." Kirk's prophetic call for the cultivation of moral imagination was an attempt to free Americans from liberal ideology so that they could begin to name those "other" elements of the human good which are obscured in the liberal dispensation. Reaction to the New Conservatism Kirk's traditionalism quickly met with, and has long labored under, the accusation that it is, in effect, "un-American." The American tradition of political thought has always proceeded within the terms of the Constitution and the Federalist papers -- evidently liberal documents. As Louis Hartz so famously argued, America is the Lockean country par excellence, with an aboriginal condition (or original position) closely resembling Locke's state of nature, and a founding compact reflecting Lockean principles. Consequently, there never has been, nor ever could be, a genuinely conservative party -- in the European sense -- in American life. Of course, in order to make such an historical claim, Hartz found it necessary to exclude the South, and the Civil War, from American history. But as the South was particularly embarrassing to non-Southern Americans in the mid-1950s, no one, certainly no one on the Harvard faculty, was much bothered by such an omission. Another important academic response to the New Conservatives was a 1957 article in the American Political Science Review by a young Samuel P. Huntington. In attempting to come to terms with the quite unexpected emergence of a post-war American conservatism, Huntington engaged in an exercise in definition, considering three possible ways in which conservatism might be understood. The first alternative would be to follow the Marxist critique of ideologies. From such a perspective, ideologies are superstructural rationalizations of the political power exercised in the basic struggle of socio-economic classes. Emerging after the French Revolution's destruction of Europe's ancien regime, conservatism would then be the apologia for the rule of the feudal nobility. Since there was no feudal class in America's thoroughly bourgeois history, yet there were self-described American conservatives in the 1950s, an "aristocratic" account of American conservatism was unpersuasive. Second, Huntington considered whether conservatism might be understood as an "autonomous" body of ideas, in some sense a political theory on a par with liberalism or socialism or Marxism. Kirk's list of conservative canons was duly noted, but Huntington dismissed these, for he believed the range of ideas brought together in The Conservative Mind was too diverse to form a coherent philosophy in any way a