The Spring 2010 issue of The City has been posted in full via Issuu, and is now available below. A list of contents follows – we hope you enjoy it.

THE NEW WORLD
Paul Bonicelli on Haiti & Ordered Liberty
Eric Metaxas asks Does God Want Us to Change the World?
Arthur Brooks on the Future of American Enterprise
Congressman Frank Wolf on Debt: The Test of a Moral Society

ETHICS & SOCIETY
Edward Feser on F.A. Hayek & Scientism
Francis J. Beckwith on Death & Society
Hunter Baker on Martin Buber & Walker Percy
Louis Markos on Why We Still Need Plato
Thomas G. West on the Great Separation

BOOKS & CULTURE
Matt Boyleston on Literature & Faith
Kevin Walker on the Wages of Progress
Daniel A. Siedell on Icons & Iconoclasm

With Poetry by A.E. Stallings & John Updike
And The Word by Jonathan Edwards

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Today we’re happy to reprint a piece on “End Times for Christian America” by HBU’s own Hunter Baker, an assistant professor of government, who is the author of the forthcoming The End of Secularism which is being published by Crossway Books this August.

Christian America is busy dying again.

If you believe some partisan historians, it was dead before the American Revolution, or at least, nobody important was a Christian by then. The Founders had all moved on to deism. Then again, maybe Christian America died at the Scopes Trial during the 1920s when Clarence Darrow pinned down the non-theologian, non-scientist politician William Jennings Bryan with the power of hostile cross-examination. If it wasn’t dead by then, it was really dead by the late 1960s when every other religion book seemed to be about either the death of God movement or “secular” Christianity. The most memorable volume of the period was Harvey Cox’s The Secular City, which put a happy face of the death of public Christianity and heralded a new, more mature age of secular community.

Meanwhile, a host of prominent sociologists of religion sagely assured the public (and each other) that public faith simply could not co-exist with a world full of technological wonders like conveyor belts, cathode ray tubes, and time and motion studies. The great sociologist Peter Berger imagined tiny groups of believers huddled together against the coming of the 21st century.

In the years following Cox’s book, Christian America exploded back into the American consciousness. Evangelists popped up all over television (just as they had on radio earlier). The former Nixon hatchet man Chuck Colson (who once said he’d run over his own grandmother to help Richard Nixon) experienced a religious conversion and turned Born Again into a household expression with his mega-selling book. America followed Nixon by electing Jimmy Carter, an outspoken evangelical enthusiastically backed by\…wait for it…Pat Robertson! Disappointed with Carter, Christian conservatives became part of the coalition that elected Ronald Reagan to two terms in the White House.

Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club began selling Christian books in huge numbers and better metrics often put religious titles at the top of the bestseller list (Prayer of Jabez, anyone?). Along the way, many sociologists of religion, like Berger and Rodney Stark, turned on the old secularization thesis and began to proclaim the theory more ideologically-loaded than truly descriptive. Cox, looking back on his once-important book, would eventually note apologetically that he had relied on what the sociologists were claiming at the time. Christian America, it seemed, was not actually dead at all. Not even close.

Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek, is in line to become the new Harvey Cox. In a recent issue of the magazine, he wrote a major piece on the end of Christian America. Meacham relies on a longitudinal survey of the American public (the ARIS study) which shows a 10 percent drop in the number of self-identified Christians and a 7 percent increase in the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation to suggest religious decline. Triumphant secularists and worried Christians alike are chattering away about the decline of Christianity in America.

The meme will make for good newsprint (or maybe I should say newspixels as the papers are dying much more rapidly than Christian America ever could), but it is all severely premature. Consider the work done in 2006 by Baylor University with funding from the Templeton Foundation and fieldwork by Gallup. Their findings countered the secularization narrative and tellingly showed that even among the religiously unaffiliated, nearly two-thirds believe in God or some higher power. That study got a lot less attention, in part because it did not play into the persistent story of religious decline pushed by those anxious for it to occur.

“Christianity is important in America!” is no more a story than “dog bites man.” “The death of Christianity,” on the other hand, grabs eyeballs. Secularists are joined by many Christians who assume religious decline will precede an eschatological event in which God removes his church from the earth. Thus, they expect to hear this kind of story. The narratives of ideological secularists on one hand and end-times theorists like Hal Lindsey (The Late Great Planet Earth) or Tim LaHaye (Left Behind) are not as different as one might assume.

The wise observer will be more cautious. It was less than five years ago that Garry Wills, flustered by the re-election of George W. Bush, wrote histrionically for The New York Times about “The Day the Enlightenment Went Out.” He bemoaned the power of Christianity over the American people and expressed his own disbelief that his fellow citizens endorsed the Virgin Birth more readily than Darwin’s theory. Bush’s victory, a substantial improvement over his performance in 2000, was largely credited to an unusually heavy turn-out among Catholics and Evangelicals in his favor. Does anyone really think that things have changed so much in five years?

The simple truth of the matter is that America turns on the margins. A movement gets the right politician, finds the right message, and builds a coalition that can command the levers of power. Suddenly, it seems the losers have been cast out and the winners are ascendant. But it is never as simple as that. Nor is it ever really over. Barack Obama is the president. To many, particularly to many social elites, he appears to be the avatar of secular enlightenment. But don’t tell that to the overwhelming majority of his ethnic fan base or to the young, white evangelicals his campaign actively courted. Ronald Reagan was president, too. His rise seemed to augur a new era for religion in the public square. Yet that was not the reason many libertarians and corporate interests supported him.

America is a complicated place. We are a dynamic society because we are a free society. From our birth as a republic, we have been a quasi-stable partnership of enlightenment modernism and vigorous Christian belief working together for the preservation of ordered liberty. There will be more proclamations of the death of Christian America. It is as good a story as the “war” between science and religion, which gets a makeover every time we have a slow news day.

The smart money is on Christianity to be around and relevant for as long as the American republic endures. The even smarter money says the faith will outlast the republic just as it did the empire into which it was born.

By Hunter Baker. “End Times for Christian America?” Acton Institute (May 13, 2009). Reprinted with permission of the Acton Institute.

While there is much in the world to love, it is best loved in relation to the One who made it. The world is beautiful, but much fairer is the One who fashioned it. The world is glorious, but more delightful is the One by whom the world was established. Therefore, let us labor as much as we can, beloved, that love of the world as such may not overwhelm us, and that we may not love the creature more than the creator. God has given us earthly possession in order that we may love him with our whole heart and soul. But sometimes we provoke God’s displeasure against us when we love his gifts more than God himself. The same thing happens in human relationships. Suppose someone gives a special gift to his protégé. But the protégé then begins to despise the giver, and loves the gift more than the one who gave. Suppose he comes to think of the giver no longer as friend but enemy. Just so it is with our relationship with God. We love more those who love us for ourselves rather than our gifts. So God is known to love those who love him more than the earthly gifts he gives.

Caesarius of Arles
Sermons

• A new study from BARNA highlights the technology gap within generations, and within the Church.
• Books & Culture features an interesting article by Michael McConnell on reformed theology and America’s founding.
• This weekend, author and fatherhood expert David Blankenhorn (who wrote a piece for our most recent issue) had a controversial but interesting column in the New York Times written with Jonathan Rauch, proposing a compromise position on same-sex marriage intended to protect churches.
• The EPPC’s Yuval Levin has a piece in the March edition of First Things describing the coming ethical issues in the biotech arena.
• Over at First Principles, you can find an excerpt of David Novak’s upcoming book, In Defense of Religious Liberty. It’s worth reading, and will be published by ISI Books later this year.

Turn, rather, to these teachings, my very dear friend: take up your cross and follow the Lord. For, when I noticed that you were being slowed down in your divine purpose by your preoccupation with domestic cares, I felt that you were being carried and dragged by your cross rather than that you were carrying it ahead of you. That cross of ours which the Lord commands us to carry, that we may be as well armed as possible in following Him, what else does it mean but the mortality of this flesh? It makes us suffer now until death is swallowed up in victory. Therefore, this cross must itself be crucified and pierced with the nails of the fear of God, for we should not be able to carry it if it resisted us with free and unfettered limbs. There is no other way for you to follow the Lord except by carrying it, for how can you follow Him if you are not His?

Saint Augustine of Hippo
Letter to Laetus

• Gary Hartenburg responds to Matthew Lee Anderson’s piece on The New Evangelical Scandal (Winter 2008) at Mere Orthodoxy.
• At the First Things blog, Jordan Hylden writes on Anglicans in Africa.
• The Barna Group offers a fascinating survey on spiritual gifts.
• Marking the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, the Claremont Institute collects an impressive series of writings on the president.

Struck with grief you were, though only four,
The day your mother cut her mermaid hair
And stood, a stranger, smiling at the door.
They frowned, tsk-tsked your willful, cruel despair,
When you slunk beneath the long piano strings
And sobbed until your lungs hiccupped for air,
Unbribable with curses, cake, playthings.
You mourned a mother now herself no more,
But brave and fashionable. The golden rings
That fringed her naked neck, whom were they for?
Not you, but for the world, now in your place,
A full eclipse. You wept down on the floor;
She wept up in her room. They told you this:
That she could grow it back, and just as long,
They told you, lying always about loss,
For you know she never did. And they were wrong.

© A. E. Stallings. From Archaic Smile, University of Evansville Press; originally printed in the Formalist; reprinted by permission of the author.

When you have to listen to abuse, that means you are being buffeted by the wind. When your anger is aroused, you are being tossed by the waves. So when the winds blow and the waves mount high, the boat is in danger, your heart is imperilled, your heart is taking a battering. On hearing yourself insulted, you long to retaliate; but the joy of revenge brings with it another kind of misfortune shipwreck.

Why is this? Because Christ is asleep in you. What do I mean? I mean you have forgotten his presence.

Rouse him, then; remember him, let him keep watch within you, pay heed to him … A temptation arises: it is the wind. It disturbs you: it is the surging of the sea. This is the moment to awaken Christ and let him remind you of these words: “Who can this be? Even the winds and the sea obey him.”

St. Augustine of Hippo
Sermons on Mark

• Dr. Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary has an interesting post at his blog on the life and writing of John Updike.
• At The Scriptorium, Biola’s John Mark Reynolds has an insightful essay on Islam and the way we converse.
• From the New Liturgical Movement, a report on some amazing developments for Anglicans and Catholics.
• The Washington Times profiles Sister Dede, a nun who does work on the front lines of war.
• Prof. Michael J. New writes at Public Discourse on parental notification and abortion.

Typically, we would allow an author to respond in the event of a letter or comment from a reader – however, with the passing of Father Neuhaus, we will just allow his comment (published in his final edition of The Public Square) on Christopher Badeaux’s review in our Summer issue to stand, until such time as they can discuss it personally.

Poor Anne Rice. Recognizing that she does not claim to be a theologian, I had some kind words for her Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Christopher Badeaux, writing in the Baptist magazine The City, is not prepared to let her off so easily. He allows that she obviously wants to be an orthodox Catholic, but she gets the two natures in Christ, human and divine, into a terrible muddle. He writes: “Indeed, the divine nature seems like a hectoring scold, a lumbering brute, always on the edge of breaking down poor Yeshua and destroying his psyche and his world. (Again, his terrified, weary reaction to this is what makes the human Yeshua so ­compelling.) This Jesus does not merely laugh, he all but lusts (chastely, to be sure). His humanity is not remotely in doubt. His divinity is. Yet over the course of the book, Jesus transforms into the Christ, like an evolving caterpillar without a real need for the cocoon before becoming a butterfly.” She has not, he says, escaped from the literary genres that made her famous. “To anyone trying to grapple with the mystery of the Incarnation, it seems oddly abrupt, and at least as importantly, clearly a reflection of Rice’s thirty-year immersion in modern American science fiction and fantasy. The story of the young man thrust into an impossible world who rapidly grows superpowers and rises to the fore in the space of mere months is a peculiarly twentieth-century twist on an old archetype, and Rice’s Yeshua is such a protagonist.” The outcome is predictable: “As a result, after the baptism in the Jordan, her Christ swings almost 180 degrees and becomes an Eutychianist Monophysite Christ almost instantaneously, his human nature extinguished in all but name. That humanity becomes mere window dressing for his suddenly undeniably divine existence. Rice tries to, but cannot, salvage the man from the overbearing divine. All of the talk of hunger, of pangs of love, of regret, even of affection for his mother, seem like window dressing for a God who walks among men, who condescends to stand in time with his creation before leaving it.” You will remember that Monophysites contended that Christ really had only one nature, and Eutyches was a fifth-century heretic who said Christ’s human nature was not consubstantial with ours. These confusions were addressed by the Council of Chalcedon in 451. If Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana was presented as a doctrinal treatise on Christology, Badeaux’s strictures would be entirely in order. But please, Rice is doing something quite different. Hers is an exercise of the devout imagination, more along the lines of the spirituality of Ignatius Loyola and others who encourage us to enter into the biblical narrative, composing and reconstructing events as though we were there. Of course nobody can adequately describe the experienced reality of being both God and man since nobody else is true God and true man as Christ was and is. To ponder, explore, meditate upon, and in some small way attempt to penetrate the mystery of the Incarnation is not to be confused with explaining the mystery. Nicea and Chalcedon do not claim to explain the mystery but only to provide the language appropriate to thinking about it. Attempting, with difficulty, to remain within that “rule of faith,” Anne Rice offers a suggestive narrative of a truth that surpasses understanding and she should, I think, be cut considerable slack. She does not presume to have done adequately what cannot be done, but she is to be credited with provoking her readers to think their way more deeply into the bottomless truth of what we will really know only when we know as we are known (1 Cor. 13).

If you have not already received it, you will soon find in your mailbox the latest issue of The City for Winter 2008. It features many interesting articles, focusing in large part on American politics and the recent historic presidential election. There are also some excellent pieces on what it means to be a young evangelical, and the undercurrent of faith in the works of Cormac McCarthy.

The contents are as follows – we’ll be posting some of these here over the coming weeks:

where do we go from here: a forum
Joseph Knippenberg + David Blankenhorn
Francis Cianfrocca + Susan McWilliams
Peter Lawler + Ryan T. Anderson
Frederica Matthewes-Green

on faith
The New Evangelical Scandal + Matthew Lee Anderson
The Muslim Other + Louis Markos
God’s Love & Life’s Storms + Tony Woodlief

on books
Faith, Fear & Cormac McCarthy : Christopher Badeaux
Grand New Party? : Jon D. Schaff
Schama’s America : Joshua Trevino
The Poetry of Salvation : Micah Mattix

With two poems by the award-winning Catherine Tufariello and the Word Spoken by John Witherspoon.

Hello and welcome to Civitate: The City Online, the ongoing internet-based conversation around Houston Baptist University’s The City. As our publication only comes to you thrice-annually, Civitate.org will give you the opportunity to read and consider the writings and thoughts of our contributors in between issues, providing you with topical articles from prior volumes, links to other fascinating content around the web, and new material from our contributors in podcast form!

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Regards,

The Editors