The Winter 2009 issue of The City has been posted in full via zmags, and is now available below. A list of contents follows – we hope you enjoy it.

FAITH & THE CITY

Jay W. Richards on Christianity & Capitalism

Paul Bonicelli on Man, The State & Your Neighbor

Eric O. Jacobsen on Redeeming the Commons

ETHICS & SOCIETY

Matthew Lee Anderson on Jon & Kate Plus Marriage

Joseph M. Knippenberg on Socrates & Health Care

Anthony Joseph on America’s Abortions

Owen Strachan on Manliness

BOOKS & CULTURE

Louis Markos on Biblical Translation

Harold K. Bush on Mark Twain

David Mahan on Demanding Poetry

Owen Coppenger on Knowing Christ

Christopher Benson on Atheism

With Two Poems by Bill Coyle

And The Word by Saint Ambrose

The Summer 2009 issue of The City has been posted in full via zmags, and is now available below. We hope you enjoy it.

In our second article shared from the latest issue — which we assure you will soon be posted in its entirety in a more readable format — Peter Augustine Lawler’s essay in the Summer 2009 edition of The City is a timely statement on technology and life.

The Russian novelist, historian, and essayist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who died in August of last year, was perhaps more responsible than any other man—and certainly any other writer—for the West’s great victory in the “ideological war” with communism. It was a war, as James Schall has written, that was “about what is a human being,” during which Solzhenitsyn demonstrated his “intellectual courage, the courage to tell the truth when the regime, any regime, is built on a lie.”

The Russian was even courageous enough not to hesitate to criticize the West—including our country. In a 1993 Address to the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein entitled “We Have Ceased to See the Purpose,” Solzhenitsyn said that the defeat of communism in many ways left the West worse off. There was no longer any “unifying purpose” to mask the deepening moral vacuum characteristic of modern, progressively more technological life as such. “All we had forgotten,” Solzhenitsyn contends, “was the human soul.” The prevailing answer to “what a human being is” remains far from complete. What we have been given, he explains, is “an extremely intricate trial of our free will” brought on by our technological success.

Solzhenitsyn readily admits what people gain when they come to think of themselves mainly as beings with interests. Today, the average person lives longer, more freely, and with more creature comforts than at nearly any point in the history of the world. There’s nothing wrong with being comfortable in freedom for a very long time. Our modern technological thinking certainly succeeded in correcting the other-worldly excesses of medieval spirituality. And it really is true that one responsibility given to free beings with bodies is to attend to one’s interests. Anyone who thinks he’s above or below really is mistaken about who he is. But modern human beings remain stuck with the trials Solzhenitsyn describes. We can’t and shouldn’t shirk from facing them. Rather, we should be grateful for having been given morally demanding lives, lives which require that we display our courage and make possible both human responsibility and human happiness.

Up until now, it seems that the cost of modern progress has been the neglect of our souls. “We have ceased to see the purpose” of particular human lives, Solzhenitsyn observes; we no longer know who or what we are living for. True progress is always individual or personal, moral, spiritual, and truthful. It depends upon the individual’s self-limitation with a purpose in mind he didn’t just make up for himself. It involves humble submission to a real authority higher than ourselves, an authority that calls us to personal responsibility. Anyone with eyes to see knows that he’s been given moral responsibility as a personal being that can’t help but know and love.

“There can be,” Solzhenitsyn wrote, “only one true Progress: the sum total of the spiritual progress of individuals, the degree of self-perfection over the course of their lives.” A truly progressive society would subordinate technological progress to personal progress. Technology would be good as one means among many for the responsible pursuit of personal perfection. But that subordination, Solzhenitsyn observes, has so far seemed to have been almost impossible. The characteristically modern view has become that all human experience should be reconfigured in a technological way. The modern slogan is, he says, “All is interests, we should not neglect our interests.” The being with interests and nothing more thinks he must devote every mo-ment of his life to securing his own being in a hostile environment. And he thinks he neglects his interests—his true self—every time he attends to his soul.

For Solzhenitsyn, what we’ve lost by thinking of ourselves as “beings with interests” overwhelms what we’ve gained. The “gifts” of our “technological civilization” have both enriched and enslaved us; we are in some ways materially more secure, but at the cost of “spiritual insecurity.” Even in the squalor of the Gulag, Solzhenitsyn knew his purpose, he knew why he was there. And, as his own example shows, people certain of the why part of their lives can live well with almost any how. No amount of how can replace the absence of why—of some idea of what we are living for.

Even with the advantages of technological advancement, people in our country are more lonely, worried, and disoriented than ever. Just beneath the surface of the happy-talk of our therapeutic pragmatism, Solzhenitsyn heard “the howl of existentialism”—the desperate expression of profound spiritual insecurity.

Beings with interests and nothing more think that words are nothing but weapons to pursue their freely chosen private goals. So they don’t have the words to express their social, personal longings—their loneli-ness in the absence of love and their inability to live well with the prospect of death. They howl because they’re so detached from other persons that they can’t truthfully communicate their experiences. They howl because they think that they are nothing but accidents in a world so hostile to their existence that they’re stuck with constantly securing themselves all by themselves. They howl when they think about their biological demise, which they think will be the end of being itself. For them—for us, “the thought of death becomes unbearable,” because “[i]t is the extinction of the entire universe in a stroke.”

Solzhenitsyn may exaggerate how much we’re stuck with howling, but all serious critics in our country are compelled to exaggerate in typically futile efforts to get our attention. Our philosopher-novelist physician Walker Percy wrote in Lost in the Cosmos that American writers suffer from “Solzhenitsyn envy.” In fact, Solzhenitsyn was taken so seriously by his government that he was thrown into prison for over a decade and later just kicked out of the country; the Soviet rulers knew that his truthful words were a fundamental threat to the future of their regime. But no American writer is considered so dangerous. From Solzhenitsyn’s viewpoint, we are more recalcitrant students or slower learners than were the Soviets. Even he was not really able, despite many attempts, to get our attention.

Solzhenitsyn is right to suggest that the narrative of our country’s historical progress that makes the most sense is that of the liberation of the individual. As the Supreme Court pointed out in Lawrence v. Texas, what seem like necessary and proper limits of individual liberty to one generation of Americans seems like despotism to the next. The very word “liberty” in the Constitution, the Court contends, has no definite meaning; it was placed there as a weapon to be used by individuals to increase their freedom over time. Free individuals have, over time, even detached the bonds of marriage from all biological imperatives. The modern experience is of “lifestyle options,” of rights detached from duties.

According to social critic Christopher Lasch, writing in The Culture of Narcissism, the increasingly common product of our effort to understand ourselves as free individuals with interests and nothing more is the narcissistic personality. To be narcissistic is to experience everyone and everything as existing for me—people experience themselves as more alone than ever.

The narcissistic person, Lasch observed, aims to be protectively shallow, so as not to lose himself or his interests in other people, in deep thought or in love. He also has a fear of binding commitments and a willingness to pull up roots, to maximize his emotional independence and keep his options open. He wants to free himself to judge every moment of his life according to his interests, or according to what’s best for securing his own being. Most of all, the narcissistic person is repulsed by an experience of dependence—on other people, on nature, and even on his own body. He opposes himself—his free existence—to any attempt to limit his freedom. Because he can’t acknowledge his dependence, he’s incapable of feeling or expressing loyalty or gratitude. He is aware of his reality, but also his emptiness, of existence as a collection of pixels, disconnected in every respect from the world around him. He insists on defining himself by himself for himself.

Consider the incoherent way sophisticated Americans understand themselves today. They are, more than anything, proud of their autonomy, and they favor choice in nearly all areas of life. Since Darwin teaches the whole truth, they know they are qualitatively no different from animals—just chimps with cars, cell phones, and bigger brains.

If you look at the behavior of these self-defined autonomous chimps, it’s clear who they really think they are. They work to maximize their personal autonomy. They don’t really believe they’re stuck with what nature gave them—they refuse to act like chimps. They labor against nature, refusing to spread their genes by having little chimps, and rebelling more insistently against nature’s indifference to their particular existences. They act like they don’t like being chimps and have freely chosen to do something about it—and many look down at those non-narcissist evangelical and orthodox religious believers, doing their natural social duty of reproducing, going through life not nearly as upset by their contingent and ephemeral biological existences.

According to the great thinkers of the pre-modern world, human beings are political, familial, and religious animals. Their mixture of reason, love, freedom, and embodiment leads them to give institutional content and communal form to the lives together. But the contemporary narcissist hates any formal limitation or direction to his freedom. So he does what he can to live without politics, family, and church. He tries to live nowhere in particular, because he experiences himself as being nowhere in particular.

Sociobiologists tell us that the narcissist is somehow deluded into thinking that he’s better off cut off from the natural, social sources of the happiness of human animals. Christians say that his protective withdrawal is based on the mistaken judgment that love is more trouble and more dangerous than it’s worth. Today it sometimes seems as if people have to choose between either living happily by being suckered by others and subjecting themselves unnecessarily to various risk factors or living more securely for a long, free, comfortable, and miserable time. With the help of their family physicians, many Americans seek ways to escape the burden of that choice through artificial happiness provided by Prozac and similar drugs. Chemically-engineered happiness promises to be free from both the dangerous unreliability of others and having to give even a moment’s thought to one’s soul—it is merely a transaction with a desired output.

There is, of course, a tension between the technology of mood control and the progress of real technology—what really promises to sustain the free being indefinitely. If my mood becomes too “Don’t worry, be happy,” then I might stop working really hard to secure my real self. I might neglect to take my Statin or scientifically work out or even take action to divert the asteroid about to pulverize our planet. What we really seem to want are “designer moods” that reconcile happiness with productivity. We want to be, as David Brooks observes, “bourgeois bohemians,” to be both hyperproductive and enjoyably self-fulfilled. Yet bourgeois always trumps bohemian, because the truth is the narcissist knows of no standard higher than his own productivity. Whatever the hard working “bobos” might say, the bohemian part of his life is always just around the corner.

A perfectly technological world would be one in which every natu-ral resource was harnessed to maximize the productivity of free be-ings. The philosopher of narcissism John Locke said my body is my property—a natural resource that I might exploit at will. Because I am not my body (or the chemical reactions that produce my moods), I am free to use my body like all my other property. From some undisclosed location, I’m free to give orders to and about my body.

That technological insight is the source of our enthusiasm today for cosmetic surgery and cosmetic neurology. Thanks to high-tech medicine, I can—by nipping, tucking, botoxing, and so forth—make my body seem younger, more pretty and more pleasing—or more marketable. I can also, with the right drugs, make myself smarter, have a better memory, be more attentive, be less moody, and even have more physical endurance. From the traditional standards of medicine, sure-ly the physician shouldn’t turn a healthy person into a patient just to make him more productive. And any responsible physician should have some qualms about the inevitably perverse psychological result of turning a perfectly normal memory or mood into an enhanced one. But those concerns are now trumped by the patient’s autonomy—or freedom from, and for, bodily determination.

Society still says we shouldn’t do anything chemical or artificial to boost the performance of athletes. We want natural gifts to be combined with real self-discipline to produce authentic excellence. The home-run hitter who takes steroids increases his own value as a player, and so in a sense his productivity. But the money he gets comes from entertaining an audience, and the customer is going to be right when it comes to what sort of display of excellence will please him the most. Steroids or not, the customer is always right.

Yet the choice for nature over technological artificiality has little relevance for areas of life where the standard of productivity is less ambiguous. It’s easy to say the athlete shouldn’t “cheat” in a game—it’s much harder to say, for example, that physicians should turn down safe and reliable enhancements that greatly improve their medical judgment and reduce medical errors. Nobody’s going to say let’s stick with the natural way at the cost of significant suffering and loss of life. Athletes just play games according to basically arbitrary rules; medicine is about really keeping free beings going. Somebody might say that the physician, as an autonomous being, shouldn’t be compelled to use a drug that improves his memory or judgment or endurance. But it seems to me that productivity in the service of health and safety will eventually trump personal autonomy, even just as a consequence of the marketplace. Physicians who fall short of the expected performance standards won’t be kept on the job out of respect for their conscientious objection to enhancement or their personal flourishing. With the possibility of artificially enhanced performance a fact of medical life, and the selfless sacrifice of one’s autonomy for the good of the patient will be expected as part of the professionalism.

Productivity will, in fact, trump autonomy in most areas of work, whether for the businessman who must work ridiculous hours in the global marketplace, the VIP worker who can’t keep the smile going on a double shift, or even the notoriously unproductive and autonomy-obsessed college professor, who drove some students off and never got it together enough to publish much. Soon enough, none of them will be able to claim a right to their so-called natural moods if they can easily go down to drugstore and get brightened up. From a technological view, moods are just collections of chemicals, and, if possible, we should choose the ones that are of the most use to us. Because I am not my moods, I should give orders to them with my productivity in mind.

The same sort of thinking will probably determine the outcome of another important bioethical issue we now face, along with an economic downturn: Should I be able to sell my allegedly redundant second kidney, or should a woman be able to sell her eggs? Some say that it’s undignified to reduce human beings to commodities, but the free individual responds: I am not my body. My kidneys or my eggs are a commodity, to be used by me or sold as I see fit. It will be a new birth of freedom, the narcissist believes, when I can count my body as part of my net worth in dollars, and other people are free to do the same. It’s my business if my doctor has turned me—a healthy person with a top-notch kidney—into a patient to dispose of my resource as I please. In doing so, after all, I benefit not only myself, I preserve the life—the very being—of another free being, without having him become in any way dependent on me. Entering the kidney market is one way among many I can find to enhance my productivity. There are already some serious ethicists who say that, given the plight of the poor in our unjust society, we should free them up to improve themselves by marketing what is a very valuable—and until now an untapped—resource. How easily we forget that if we allow people to sell their kidneys, we might end up expecting them to.

These are the best times ever to be young, smart, pretty, and industrious. Productivity is the standard in our increasingly meritocratic society—but the pressure is on like never before to be young, smart, pretty, and industrious. The preferential options inaugurated in the Sixties turn out to have technological justifications. The young are the most flexible and techno-savvy among us. We go to the youngest member of the family—certainly not grandpa—to find out how to use own iPhones, iPods, and various other iThings. What do the old know that we need to know now? Technology obliterates the need for traditions, for guarding and passing on. More generally, we’re now stuck with the question of “What are old people for?” We tell them it’s time for them to enjoy, but human life, to be either dignified or happy, has to be for more than enjoyment. As Solzhenitsyn says, technology is an undeniable cause of a “rift” between the generations, often “dooming” the old to loneliness and abandonment and depriving them of “the joy of passing on their experience to the young.”

Our technological standard of productivity increasingly favors the young. But our technological success is causing our population to age. Sophisticated Americans benefit from constant medical breakthroughs and attentive responses to every newly discovered risk factor. We are living longer than ever. And (except for religiously observant Americans and certain immigrants) people in the Western world are having fewer and fewer children, partly because they don’t want to limit their options by thinking of themselves as parents. Insofar as I identify being itself with my being, I see no need to generate replacements.

It’s very good news that people are living longer. There seems to be a new birth of freedom in the growing period between parenting and productivity, and debility and death. That freedom, for prosperous Americans, seems to be for whatever purpose the individual chooses. But, from another view, the individual is productive for a small part of his life, and a dependent for longer, as a child and as an old person. If freedom and dignity are intertwined with productivity, then it may not be so great after all to live a very long time. Will the shrinking number of productive young people be willing or even able to support the increasing number of the unproductive old? “The gift of heightened life expectancy,” Solzhenitsyn observes, “has, as one of its conquences, made the elder generation into a burden for its children.”

Certainly both the young and the old are aware of the individualistic, meritoratic principle that nobody owes anyone else a living. As Locke himself told us, in an individualistic society the only reliable hold the old have on the young is money. It’s more important than ever to be rich if you’re going to get very old, as almost all of us hope to do. But pension systems are collapsing, Medicare is demographically untenable, health care and caregiving costs are skyrocketing, and our economic future is in question. It’s tougher than ever to have confidence that your money is going to last as long as you are.

I tell my students I want to enroll them in my two-point program for saving Medicare. First, they need to start smoking and really stick with it. Second, they need to start making babies, and I mean right now, this week. So far I haven’t been persuasive enough to get them with the program. But members of the Greatest Generation, in effect, did. They had lots of kids and gave very little thought to risk factors. They often smoked like chimneys, enjoyed multiple martinis, and only exercised for fun. The excellent TV series Mad Men, featuring advertising executives in 1960, displays the unhealthy habits of highly successful Americans for our horror. Don’t you idiots know you’re killing yourselves! They really did drop dead much earlier and more often, without drawing a dime of Social Security or (after 1962) Medicare, but not before generating several replacements to fund those programs for the future. Our whole medical safety net is premised on demographics that have disappeared and aren’t likely to return, and that’s because, for good and bad, we’re more narcissistic than people used to be.

One downside of thinking of oneself as a self-sufficient individual is the inevitability of becoming old and frail. Nobody, it turns out, is stuck—out of love or at least familial loyalty—with taking care of you. The fastest growing demographic category is men over 65 with no children or spouse, and even having a child might not help you much in our mobile and increasingly duty-free society. We’re persistently pushing heart disease and cancer back, but more people seem destined to die of Alzheimer’s. Imagine what Alzheimer’s must be like for someone who has no one to rely upon who loved them prior to their getting the disease. The number of old and frail, debilitating and slowly dying wards of the state, are only going to increase. And the care they’re going to get, because they’re really on their own, isn’t likely to be good. As a nation, we have no idea how we’re going to afford it.

Then there is caregiving. Thinking in terms of productivity and caregiving are two very different ways of looking at the world, and at the purposes of human beings. Productivity is a measurable metric of dollars and cents, and its benefits are diminished if shared. It turns friendship into networking, and creates a standard that’s tough on those more motivated by love. Caregiving is unproductive, can’t be measured by money, is all about loving solicitude, and usually seems boring and easy to people obsessed with productivity.

We Americans used to have a rough division of labor based on the traditional distinction between productivity and caregiving, a division between men and women. Men took care of politics and business and women the home and the children. Roughly speaking, men were about the money and women the love. Men were about the pursuit of happiness and women happiness itself. And I’m not only thinking of married women—the legendary Sisters of Mercy were tough, intelligent, and adventurous women who devoted their lives to the sick and the dying out of love.

The American view, as Alexis de Tocqueville famously described it in Democracy in America, was that what men and women did was separate but equal—really incommensurable. People need both to be productive and to be cared for, and it’s impossible to rank one human good over the other. There’s no denying, Tocqueville added, that American men often didn’t really think that what women did was as important as what they did, just as they were reluctant to admit how indispensable caregiving was to their happiness. The division of labor was, in fact, unjust. Men had all the public power, and the option of contributing to caregiving, which they rarely exercised. The more productive ways of living were denied to most women. This injustice, Tocqueville reports, was willingly endured by the most intelligent and admirable American women, because they knew better than American men the true purpose of human life. They knew better than men the true purpose of human life. Because they knew the “why,” they found themselves remarkably able to live with any “how.” American men, by comparison, were prone to bragging, quite unrealistically, that everything they did could be comprehended by the doctrine of self-interest rightly understood. Tocqueville couldn’t help but subtly give his judgment that American women are superior to American men.

Women eventually demanded their liberation in the name of justice. But, for the most part, they were liberated to be productive—to be wage slaves—just like men. Men and women are now supposed to share equally in being productive and in being caregivers, but nobody really denies that women took to the men’s traditional role far more readily than men did to the women’s. Women flooded the labor market and significantly enhanced our country’s productivity, but real wages dropped. The family wage became an increasingly distant ideal. Families increasingly seemed to need to work more hours than one person reasonably could to live well. Women who wanted to remain “unproductive” out of love have had a hard time defending their choice or being honored for it. As people become more unreliable and narcissistic, any wife and mom who can’t pay her own way has a very risky existence. While close to 80% of longterm caregiving is still done voluntarily by women, the amount of voluntary caregiving seems bound to continue to decline.

Today, more and more caregiving is done for money, by workers. We have healthcare workers for the sick and disabled, daycare workers for children, and so forth. Insofar as such workers save and prolong lives with their technical skill, they’re clearly being productive. What gives caregiving incommensurable value is loving solicitude or what makes life most worth living. But we can’t expect someone we hire to feel that love. When caregiving is reduced to what we can measure with money, it seems like much less than it really is. For the same reason some would rather pay for a kidney than be given one—once money changes hands, they owe the provider nothing more.

This cuts to the heart of our inability to sustain our health care system, even as technology advances. It continues to get tougher for increasingly productive and narcissistic individuals to identify themselves—especially lovingly—with anything but themselves. They think of themselves less and less as basically parents or children, creatures, citizens, friends, or even parts of nature and think of themselves more and more as free individuals. Our time is characterized, Tocqueville first noticed, by the “heart disease” of individualistic withdrawal. The narcissistic individual is both certain that he’s not a biological being, and that there’s nothing real about him that survives his biological death. Death, for him, is meaningless total extinction, and that’s why Solzhenitsyn observes that what people in the West lack, most of all, is “a clear and calm attitude toward death.”

People are more concerned than ever with doing what’s required to stay alive, even as they do everything they can to divert themselves from real thoughts about love and death. They’re increasingly convinced that they’re stuck with securing their free or contingent beings on their own. So they’re sure to be increasingly anxious consumers of the biotechnology that aims to break ever more completely the natural life cycle, to achieve indefinite longevity for each particular individual. Those who claim we should do as nature intends and not make a big effort to keep people alive beyond a certain age—say, 75 or 80—aren’t facing the fact that there’s no natural limit that free individuals can’t challenge with considerable success. There’s no reason why I should rest content with the thought that my being has definite biological limits. I have the right to more and more, as the technological means become available. We’re going to end up living as long as we can. Even the Bible seems to be in favor of people living a very long time, if they can. That Book also explains why we’re the beings who aren’t limited by nature like the others.

Being so death-haunted explains our birth dearth to some extent; we get little solace from thinking about the children who will live on after us. Nor do we get much satisfaction from producing any accomplishments that will stand the test of time much better than we can as biological beings, and that’s why there’s so little building or writing for the ages these days. Being so death-haunted also helps to explain the extreme measures taken by the old to look young, not to remind us that they’re dying It’s one reason why the old are increasingly separated from the rest of society, and their care turned over to workers. It might even have something to do with why physicians have less time for their dying patients, and why the best and the brightest medical students are choosing dermatology—which, as medical specialties go, has very little do with either birth or death. Is death God’s will, or an unexpected accident? Today, we are reluctant to answer.

America’s health care crisis also has to do with productivity trumping caregiving. The system of health insurance largely being a benefit of employment is a vestige of the past. One problem, of course, is that too many people—those un- and under-employed are uncovered. A bigger one is that this system, supported by tax deductions for employers and employees, is incompatible with the requirements of a dynamic and competitive global economy, as well as with the increasing pressure on ordinary people to be productive. Employers, saddled with rapidly escalating health costs driven by medical malpractice, the demands of technological innovation, and millions of uninsured Americans, can no longer offer that benefit and remain competitive. Employees fear losing their coverage, while employers fear being stuck with an unproductive employee with an expensively sick child.

Our present health care system depends on the paternalistic employer being an intermediary between the individual and government. But in an economy where employer and employee cannot afford the price of loyalty to each other, the last vestiges of social paternalism are fading away. Health care has to devolve either to the individual or to government. Some say that the government has a duty to provide the best possible health care for every dignified human being. That conclusion might be supported by Christian or Kantian morality. It might even flow from the Lockean view that people consent to government to have their right to life protected. That might mean that government has the duty to employ all means available to keep me alive as long as possible. A thoroughgoing narcissist wouldn’t hesitate to claim that every possible resource should be thrown into the technological project of indefinitely delaying his death—a providential government should assume the burden of sustaining isolated individuals. But as we’ve seen, the European idea of a paternalistic government caring for the health of everyone as a common good undermines the personal caregiving indispensable for sustaining our system. And American demographic realities prevent government from fulfilling even a modest view of that responsibility indefinitely.

Today, public bureaucracies are far more likely than private concerns to be infused with the self-indulgent, narcissistic cultural excesses of our intellectuals. These same bureaucracies would decide about rationing, compelling abortions, and make the hard calls about the profoundly disabled or those very near death. We wouldn’t want to turn health care decisions over to those most contemptuous of the moral choices of the least narcissistic Americans.

Nevertheless, health care shouldn’t devolve to individuals left simply to their own ingenuity and resources either. Repeated attempts to “socialize medicine” have failed, and I believe the fears of Hayek and Tocqueville were mistaken. We’re not slouching toward some soft despotism full of dependents who have surrendered concern for their futures to the nanny state. Instead, people are more on their own than ever. Their safety nets are collapsing; they’re stuck with securing their own futures in an increasingly indifferent world, and one that inevitably penalizes the most vulnerable among us—the old and the infirm.

Curbing the narcissism of our time begins by enabling and encouraging people to act out of love. Programs that help parents, children, friends, citizens, and creatures do what they’re inclined to do in terms of voluntary caregiving borrow principles from the European Christian Democratic parties calling for care to be given in the most personal way possible. A sustainable health care system is possible only insofar as productivity is balanced with love, or by the thought that each human being is more than a being with interests.

One example of such a program, in my hometown of Rome, Georgia, is an outpost of a hospital still run by the Sisters of Mercy. Old and very frail people—many with early stage Alzheimer’s—can spend the day at a center staffed by a nurse and caregivers. The center is mission-driven and personal enough that the staff members, although paid, think of themselves as a lot more than workers. And this “daycare” allows old people to stay at home with their families—or “deinstitutionalized”—without impossible or unreasonable sacrifices of productivity and ambition. It is a program premised on assisting people in being as self-reliant as they can reasonably be. Yes, we want as little caregiving as possible to be done by government, which can’t help but treat people as isolated individuals or needy dependents. At the same time, we want people, especially the vulnerable among us, not be all on their own in navigating our technological future. We want to keep the lonely howling down to a minimum.

Today’s challenges aside, we must remember that we are not in the thrall of some impersonal technological process bound to deprive of us of our humanity. Technological civilization really is a trial of our free will, and we can still think and act as if human beings are more than beings with interests. We really have been given distinctive purposes, and we really still can live in love with what and who we really know. We certainly live in demanding times, with anxious insecurity and profound loneliness making happiness difficult to find, but far from impossible. As Solzhenitsyn wrote, the result of neglecting our souls is a “nagging sadness of the heart” in the midst of plenty. But our souls are still there, and if we do not care for them, there is still one who does.

The most immediate intended audience for Solzhenitsyn’s speech on our vacuum of purpose was those individuals, in the early 1990s, who bought into the “naïve fable of the happy arrival at ‘the end of history,’ of the overflowing triumph of an all-democratic bliss.” That fable or lullaby, we now know, failed to produce either human happiness or human “tranquility.” At the end of history, we would be freed from trials of free will and living in peaceful contentment in the present. But the truth is that the trials of the twentieth century have been replaced by new ones. We see, more clearly than ever, that modern progress has not been humanly satisfying, and so we should be more open than ever to coming to terms with the distorted incompleteness of the modern or allegedly “progressive” understanding of who we are.

Solzhenitsyn, in his 1978 Harvard Address, reminded us, that “if man were born only to be happy, he would not have been born to die.” That’s not to say that he wasn’t born to be happy, but that his happiness comes from fulfilling the purpose he has been given—“his task on earth,” one that “evidently must be more spiritual” than “a total engrossment in everyday life.” Thank God, that total engrossment is impossible for beings born to die, and we have no choice but “to rise a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled on, as in the Modern Era.”

Our thought and public policy must be informed by postmodernism rightly understood, by what we can now see with our own eyes about the truth about who we are. Our social and political vision that guides us toward “progress” of a political level needs to be based on the ideal of true progress—the genuinely moral drama of the good’s truthful, courageous, and happy struggle against the evil of lies—that should constitute every human life. “In the end,” as James Schall explained it, “ultimate things have to be rediscovered in each of our souls.”

Peter Augustine Lawler, a former member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, is Dana Professor of Government and International Studies at Berry College.

Due to the outpouring of response to Matthew Lee Anderson’s article on the New Evangelical Scandal in last year’s Winter issue, we chose to follow this article up with responses from John Mark Reynolds of Biola and Francis Beckwith of Baylor, as well as an essay from Mr. Anderson responding to his critics. We shall be posting the entirety of our Summer 2009 issue shortly, but in the meantime, here is the text of Prof. Reynolds’ essay to tide you over.

Matthew Lee Anderson, a rising new media public intellectual, has written an article worthy of time and attention. He wishes to inform us in his recent piece “The New Evangelical Scandal” (appearing in the Winter 2008 issue of THE CITY) that the Evangelical youth are not, in fact, okay. This is a thankless task that opens up the writer, even one as bright as Anderson, to immediate scorn, especially if he is young. The tired will respond that the youth are fine, that people are always worrying about them, and that Mr. Anderson will understand all of this when he is older.

This dismissal is very dangerous. If Christian theology is true, then the youth are never alright and it takes someone to worry about them to avoid the situation becoming permanent. It is true that many people in the past have warned us about the young, but this does not show that their warnings were wrong. In fact, it strongly suggests that they were effective. Anderson, like President George W. Bush in the War on Terror, will, if he is successful, cause people to doubt the very existence of the original danger.

Anderson correctly warns against perennial mainstream media narratives that claim youth are rejecting the “religious right” and the faith of their fathers. Anderson brings to mind the stories that claimed that my own generation, now the most conservative in American history, was also supposed to reject traditional Evangelical concerns. The repeated announcements of the end of the pro-life movement as a political concern have been made all my life.

Anderson also lists several problems often overlooked in Evangelical youth. For one, they accept a facile bipartisanship, which may doom them to political impotence. Secularists should stop worrying about a theocracy: Anderson finds young Evangelicals to be like young Mark Studdock in the C.S. Lewis novel That Hideous Strength—more spaniel than pit bull in their desire to charm rather than snub those that despise them. In fact, Anderson’s article essentially accuses young Evangelicals of being just like the characters Mark and Jane Studdock. Like Mark, young Evangelicals desire admission to the “inner ring” of the culture more than any other temptation. Like Jane, they are lightly educated, but take their thoughts very seriously. Unlike Mark and Jane, young American Evangelicals are given Blue Like Jazz rather than Taliesin through Logres.

Anderson does not, however, identify the bad guys, today’s version of the Progressive Element at Bracton College. This is really too bad. Anderson’s article is rather like reading the story of a dread illness with not a word about the first cause or how to cure it. He has catalogued the symptoms without diagnosing the disease. He has with rather too much prudence refused to give much advice, and his modesty threatens the health of the patient.

Still, Anderson is wise to try to help the young people of his country and perhaps he is wiser still to be careful and chary in his prescriptions. Perhaps he is remembering what Socrates said in describing the young man Meletus:

What sort [of person is he]? No mean one, it seems to me; for the fact that, young as he is, he has apprehended so important a matter reflects no small credit upon him. For he says he knows how the youth are corrupted and who those are who corrupt them. He must be a wise man; who, seeing my lack of wisdom and that I am corrupting his fellows, comes to the State, as a boy runs to his mother, to accuse me. And he seems to me to be the only one of the public men who begins in the right way; for the right way is to take care of the young men first, to make them as good as possible, just as a good husbandman will naturally take care of the young plants first and afterwards of the rest.

Socrates praises Meletus for worrying about the youth, but was concerned about Meletus’ diagnosis of the problem. Meletus believed Socrates was the problem and his death the cure for what ailed Athenian youth. The disastrous impact of Meletus’ wrong diagnosis often obscures the fact that the youth of Athens were in trouble. Athenian independence was in peril and would soon vanish under the weight of a wicked educational system and hedonism.

As Socrates points out, Meletus was trying to do something vital and important. Anderson has pointed out that Evangelical youth are being corrupted, but, perhaps overly fearful of becoming Meletus, has told us too little about who is responsible. Sometimes the youths of the city are being corrupted and fixing the blame correctly is of utmost importance.

Being, perhaps, not overly burdened with the modesty or the prudence of youth, I shall give both diagnosis and prescription. After all, curmudgeons will rush in where bright young men fear to tread.

Evangelical youth are being corrupted and Evangelical scholars and leaders are at least partly to blame. Why? The church and the Evangelical academy have, by and large and for various reasons, rejected Christendom and left Evangelical youth to create their own inadequate pseudo-culture on the fly.

What is Christendom? Christendom is the culture created by the happy fusion of Greek and Roman philosophy with Jewish and Christian thought. This culture, this city of God, has had many citizens. Many of those citizens have made mistakes, but it is also responsible for most of the glorious achievements of Western culture. I describe the birth of Christendom in my recent When Athens Met Jerusalem, but Pope Benedict has defended it far more ably. Christendom has become a dirty word amongst smart, young Evangelical scholars.

There is no good theological reason for this abandonment of Christ’s kingdom by Evangelicals. Evangelical icons like John Wesley were educated in that great tradition and did great deeds as citizens of Christendom. As “mere Christians,” Evangelicals certainly are a voice in the great conversation that has shaped the public policy of Christendom. Excellent journals like Touchstone and Salvo prove this point monthly. Evangelical groups with even a very low-church background, such as Baptists, have a good historic connection to the broader heritage of Christendom. Schools such as Houston Baptist University and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary have leadership that make the connection between Christendom and Baptist theology plain while advocating for the corrections to historic errors and a distinctive theology that they believe God has given them.

Oddly, this attack on Christendom is often made in the name of breaking down barriers to the poor or to people groups outside the Evangelical subculture. Christendom, of course, embraces over a billion of the world’s citizens and has done so for centuries. The rejection of Christendom can lead to tiny churches made up only of intellectualists entranced with Stanley Hauerwas, while the rest of the neighbor-hood goes to the large Pentecostal Holiness group down the street.

Evangelical academics, young as well as old, are becoming cut off from the groups they hope to serve, especially Evangelicals. One weakness of the Anderson article is that it says almost nothing about the two-thirds of Evangelical youth who will not even get an undergraduate degree. In my experience, Evangelical academics decry the anti-intellectualism of Evangelical subculture as the main reason for the gap, but do not consider that to the extent that it exists it is a reaction to their intellectualism.

Intellectualism, in the sense I am using it, is not merely valuing the life of the mind, an unmitigated good. It is confusing intellectual activity, which is good, with the attitudes, beliefs, and social characteristics of one’s peers who went to the school you attended. The intellectualist is socialized into a peer group, but confuses his choices in music, clothes, and beverages with intelligence. He or she reads the right books and knows how to talk about them properly, to feed the proper perceptions.

There are genuine benefits to intellectualism in mainstream culture. If an intellectualist bluffs about the “Bush doctrine,” he will get a pass, but if anybody else tries a bluff in this area she will be called on it. President Bush read a great deal, but as he was not an intellectualist, he got little or no credit for it. The intellectualist will always get the presumption of intelligence. A good case can be made that Dwight Eisenhower was at least as smart as Adlai Stevenson, but Stevenson was an intellectualist, so he got the benefits and liabilities that come with the territory.

Of course, there are liabilities in being perceived as an intellectualist, a group ripe for parody, though these liabilities have declined in recent years. It can be disheartening for an active intellectual to find herself part of a group whose members are less noted for an actual devotion to intellectual activity than the appearance of being cultured, rather like Lizzie Greystock in Trollope’s magnificent novel The Eustace Diamonds. Poor Lizzie was fond of reading poetry in settings that would highlight her tragic beauty for the romantic appearance without much knowledge or real love for poetry. A modern Trollope would have no problem putting a modern Lizzie in the right jazz club, drinking the right drink, while clutching a copy of the right misunderstood novel.

As recently as the mid-eighties being called an “intellectual” (when what was meant was an “intellectualist”) could be a fatal political charge. Obviously, the election of President Obama marks a shift in public opinion. The rise of technology jobs, growth in the number of college graduates, and positive portrayals of intellectualists in films (the romantic college grad has utterly supplanted the cowboy), have all contributed to this change.

Anderson’s article describes an intellectualist with perfect accuracy. He notes that his generation often despises the Republican Party of their parents. The reasons Anderson cites are the product of college or university consensus about the politics of the 1980s and have little to do with facts. Evangelical youth “know” that Reagan era was the dec-ade of greed—and that Reagan himself hated the poor, gay people, and smart people—without knowing much at all about Reagan or the details of his administration. Most know nothing of Reagan’s rise from poverty, his actual intelligence, or social tolerance. Their history of the 1980s is missing any reference to the late Jack Kemp, the happy warrior of the GOP for inclusion, and a major figure in the Reagan Revolution. It entirely glosses over the depths of Carter era America. In fact, like most intellectualist attitudes, it is nearly fact free.

Intellectualist culture despises Christendom, so Evangelical intellectualists do as well. What made some sense for secular intellectuals, however, makes almost no sense for Christian thinkers. Intellectualists appropriate the attitude and then do some of their real thinking, trying to make it fit with Christian history. Cornel West, who strongly rejects Evangelical theology and social policies, can get a standing ovation at Gordon College for denouncing Christendom, even though Christendom created most of the colleges in which he goes about denouncing. Poor Saint Constantine is blamed for things he did not do, like putting the state in charge of the Church, and given no credit for the obviously good things he did, like ending the persecution of Christians.

The attack on patriotism is a part of this assault on Christendom. “Christendom” in the mythology of the academy is about power and politics. Patriotism is a simple trick to get the rubes to turn over power to politicians. Evidently the solution to this problem is to either to abandon politics altogether or to “speak prophetically to power,” though generally only to Republican power. Of course, Christian intellectualists ignore the ties of prophets like Nathan or Isaiah to the royal house of David since this would spoil their pristine idea of the non-partisan Biblical prophet.

A great positive of the last two generations of white Evangelicals has been the utter rejection of open racism. Successful rainbow coalitions, like the one in California that helped pass Proposition 8 and defend traditional marriage, are a good model of real diversity, but too often the Evangelical intellectualist ignores or despises those examples. They fit too neatly with old concerns and stereotypes that are too often a hidden motive behind his concern for diversity. Continued legitimate concerns about diversity and racism are sometimes hi-jacked to undermine traditional Evangelical moral and theological causes. Instead of linking arms with like-minded theologically conservative churches from a different social or ethnic background, groups easy to find, the intellectualist seeks groups that are theologically left-of-center.

If you doubt this, try to find an interracial conference of Christian scholars devoted to defending the error-free Bible as the common ground between them. There is relatively easy common ground amongst traditional American Christians on this issue, but this is not the common ground the intellectualist seeks. In fact, it supports values he would really rather dismiss or deemphasize, even if he works for institutions that were built to defend those doctrines. He does not seek out the scholar who is to his theological right, but almost always looks for one to his theological left.

Announcements that God is not a Republican or a Democrat are not usually made for the benefit of the demographic of Evangelicals that vote in the highest percentage and the most consistently for one of the political parties: African-Americans and the Democratic Party. They are made for white Evangelicals that vote for the Republican Party.

Anderson is right that this generation is remarkably post-patriotic. Of course, disdain for patriotism contradicts another value of intellectualists: the love of authentic community. Isn’t “a strong love for your folks” just another way of describing patriotism? The solution in many Christian colleges has been to allow everyone in the world to love and take pride in their people group except for Americans. Americans who visit a country and expect it to cater to their cultural whims are (rightly) considered “ugly,” or at least boors. Non-American nationals who visit American Christian colleges have a right to demand cultural accommodation or the Christian college is “ugly” and boorish. The only inauthentic culture and community in the world, it turns out, is American, particularly Evangelical American, culture. Anyone who works in Christian academia has heard some form of this very argument made.

Anderson is right that his intellectualist friends have trouble with traditional Evangelical doctrine and standards of holiness, but it is part of the cure for the self-loathing gained from exposure to secular intellectualism. Recently a friend of mine was interviewed for a job at an Evangelical Christian college and was asked about his view on Scripture. When my friend replied he believed in inerrancy, the college administrator was shocked to the point of jumping out of his chair and letting loose a profanity. He asked if the upper administration knew of this shocking fact and was only calmed by the fact that my friend was not a member of an Evangelical denomination. Evidently, the very part of his views that made him love and respect Evangelicals and assume agreement with them was only tolerable to these college Evangelicals because he was not one.

The group Anderson describes are more horrified by the strong, traditional Protestants than by Catholic or Orthodox beliefs, but this is no real sign of an ecumenical spirit. Too often the Evangelical young adult merely uses Catholic and Orthodox thinkers to tear down those parts of Evangelicalism they do not like while ignoring those parts that that challenge their assumptions. They are cafeteria ecumenicists. Roman Catholic teaching on birth control and sexuality are not quoted or applauded, though nothing is a greater challenge to the norms of Evangelical sub-culture. Evangelical intellectualists tend to ignore those writings by John Paul the Great or the brilliant Benedict XVI that attack post-modern or pop culture views of sexuality or scholarship. John Paul certainly spoke truth to power and helped liberate millions from murderous tyranny, but the tyranny was a leftist one and Evangelical parents admired him, so he is not the kind of Catholic they admire.

Anderson is also exactly right in his analysis about the desire for Evangelical intellectualists to fit in on the media and popular culture front. This is driven by the lack of cultural confidence that comes from picking up “intellectualist” attitudes.

The best example in my own experience to illustrate Anderson’s point was changing attitudes toward the Mel Gibson film The Passion of the Christ amongst Evangelical film students. Early on I heard them moan about how the subculture would reject the film because it was subtitled, too violent, and too Catholic. Film students bemoaned the fact that here was an artistically excellent film and the idiots in the pews would reject it because of their prejudice. Soon it became obvious that in fact they had (as intellectualists often do) underestimated the people in the pews and that they were willing to go see the film and give it a chance, R-rating and all. The film also became “politically incorrect,” as its orthodoxy disturbed Hollywood elite. Almost immediately the opinions I encountered in many Evangelical young adults changed from advocacy and excitement to antipathy toward the film. I had been arguing that film students should cheer up and that a positive reception of Gibson’s difficult and complex film was a sign of maturation in Evangelicals. Perhaps, after all, if they made good films they would be watched, and that the major problem with their previous art films had been that they were not very good. After all, Evangelicals bought scads of books by Frankie Schaeffer in an earlier era telling them how stupid and boorish they were—so we knew there was a market in the community for hard truths.

Instead of being encouraged, it became routine for me to hear mockery of the Passion and Gibson. I heard more than one student say, in a voice dripping with disdain, “Well, look at that. Christians only turn up to see a movie about Jesus.” Of course, there is no evidence that Evangelicals only go to movies about Jesus—quite the contrary—though it would be odd to find an Evangelical uninterested in his story. Instead, a false belief about how boorish the community is helps one become the ‘good Evangelical’ in secular meetings (“I am not like one of those Evangelicals.”) and also provides a built in excuse when one’s creation fails to sell. (“I broke too many barriers. I was too daring. I was too witty.”) The fact that it also cut you off from the majority of Evangelicals is an added bonus, because it gives you the benefits of a bloodless martyrdom from people you wanted to despise anyway.

Anderson is right that young Evangelicals are intent on outer signs, and that they are not culturally clueless or “fundamentalists.” What he is wrong to think is that there is anything new in this. It is hard to ex-pect much different when the head of an Evangelical arts program, about my age but dressing younger, can tell me that a goal of his pro-gram is to let the “kids know it is o.k. for Christians to say ‘bastard.’” I remember thinking at the time that it might be more useful to have a program in the arts reminding students that it was o.k. for a Christian not to say ‘bastard.’

Anyone who loves dialectic, art, and culture can only mourn the lost opportunity such a statement represents. All who put great hope in the promise of Christian higher education must pause to guard against such groupthink. Intellectualism in our midst is a call to return to the examined life of Socrates and of the Lord Jesus Christ. Christians believe all are sinners and that sinners cannot be saved by reason alone.

In fact, an easy explanation for much of intellectualism is that it is an elaborate justification for what my grandfather would have called sin. Anderson comes close to saying it. However, as Anderson recognizes, that is too simple an explanation. There is real and ugly opposition to intellectualism in the Evangelical subculture that does much to pro-mote the opposite vice. Anderson sees all of this, but he forgets the two-thirds of Evangelicals who have never been exposed to intellectualism or given an opportunity to accept or embrace it. When traditional Christians celebrate the mental mediocrity of a candidate as a virtue, or act as if not reading a book is praiseworthy, it is an equally serious problem. There is an anti-intellectual streak to American life, and some Evangelicals have fallen for it.

Patriotism is a noble “lesser love” that trains the mind for heaven, but some have made a god of it. Products like The Patriot’s Bible really are grotesque. I have talked to some Christians who were less con-cerned about my doctrine, where we had important disagreements, than about my blog posts expressing caution about Rush Limbaugh. I didn’t vote for President Obama, but I only need to look at the online comments section, or listen to some very popular talk radio voices, to read and hear things that make me sympathize with him. My students regularly meet Christians who will pass on any slander about the Pres-ident. It does not help that the left is equally annoying, because these young adults are reacting to the toxic attitudes they see, not the ones they do not see. In fact, Evangelicals who waste time on Obama’s birth certificate and nutty leftists who want to know the real mother of Trigg Palin turn off young Evangelicals to both parties.

Intellectualism in Evangelical young adults is at least partially the product of anti-intellectualism that has been tolerated for far too long amongst people with views like my own. People often have less toler-ance for the first sinful attitude they experience, than for one met later. The tendency is to say, “This other group is just overreacting to the first group.” Evangelical young adults are too often burned out on patriotism, conservatism, and traditional theology by a first exposure to folk who do it badly. This works both ways as I have met many very anti-intellectual Christians who were reacting to the intellectualism of their early life. Anti-intellectualism and intellectualism are really just types of the same error.

Evangelical anti-intellectualism leads to a rejection of Christendom just like Evangelical intellectualism. Badly written, inaccurate, and poorly argued Christian fundamentalist textbooks (used in many Evangelical schools) are skeptical of Christian philosophy, Christian civilization, and almost all Christian scholars. Poor Constantine is slandered in these books as well. There are entire home-school curriculums written who overtly reject any contributions from Greek philosophy, logic, or classical education to Christianity. Some fringe groups, fearful of radi-cal feminism, do a greater evil and forbid their daughters to go to col-lege! Anybody “educated” in such an intellectual prison would be profoundly grateful for any idea that liberated him from this.

It is the rejection of Christendom that must be reversed at almost any cost. Christendom has a place for the Joe the Plumber and Joseph the professor, but it must be in the great tradition of Christendom. Our present situation would be enough to make a man despair, if it were not for articles like those of Anderson. If Anderson is too hard on his own class, he at least is not tempted to join the anti-intellectualists. He demonstrates in his essay a desire to adopt positions not in reaction to other positions, but through critical examination.

Fortunately, I have met Anderson and thousands others like him. They wish to love God with their whole heart, soul, and mind. They don’t emphasize any one part of that list over the other. If there is hope for the future, then it will be found in thoughtful, open-minded younger Evangelicals like Matthew Lee Anderson. He and his friends are in truth, the very model for modern Evangelicals.

John Mark Reynolds is the founder and director of the Torrey Honors Institute and Professor of Philosophy at Biola University. His most recent book, When Athens Met Jerusalem: An Introduction to Classical and Christian Thought, was published this year by IVP Academic.

But oh! thy Wisdom, Lord! thy Grace! thy Praise!
Open mine Eyes to see the same aright.
Take off their film, my Sins, and let the Rayes
Of thy bright Glory on my peepholes light.
I fain would love and better love thee should,
If ‘fore me thou thy Loveliness unfold.

Edward Taylor
Meditation 35

• Micah Watson on religion, reason and the common good at the Making Men Moral conference at Union University earlier this year.
• A problem for today’s atheist intellectuals: how do they keep God away from the kids?
• A new book by Bethany Moreton, with the attention grabbing title of To Serve God and Wal-Mart, is reviewed at PopMatters.
• An embryo is a human: Maureen Condic, Patrick Lee, and Robert P. George.
• An essay by editor of The City Ben Domenech on marriage, population, and social change inspired a few responses at First Things, The Atlantic, and Mere Orthodoxy. A followup piece that gets deeper into the statistics is here.
• Matthew Milliner, who has a piece on contemporary art in our forthcoming issue, has a post on Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts’ Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto exhibit. Read it here.
• Last, an excellent sermon on humility from Jeremy Begbie, the new Thomas A. Langford Research Professor of Theology at Duke Divinity School.

The City: Summer 2009

a very model of a modern evangelical
John Mark Reynolds + Francis J. Beckwith
Matthew Lee Anderson

featuring
The Soul & The City + Wilfred McClay
Who Owns Science? + Hunter Baker
Solzhenitsyn & The Future + Peter Augustine Lawler
Obama & Abortion + Robert P. George
A Debate on Marriage + Jonathan Rauch & Joseph Knippenberg
Christ in the Classroom + Louis Markos

books
Russell D. Moore on Updike’s Run
Matthew J. Milliner on Gore Walk
Jordan Ballor on The Media’s Blind Spot
Paul Bonicelli on Aid For Africa

with poetry by A.E. Stallings and the word spoken by St. John Chrysostom

The sweetest joys and delights I have experienced, have not been those that have arisen from a hope of my own good estate; but in a direct view of the glorious things of the gospel. When I enjoy this sweetness, it seems to carry me above the thoughts of my own safe estate. It seems at such times a loss that I cannot bear, to take off my eye from the glorious, pleasant object I behold without me, to turn my eye in upon myself, and my own good estate.

Jonathan Edwards
Personal Narrative

• Some reactions to the protests in Iran (and President Obama’s decision not to get involved) here, here and here.
• David Novak writes at Public Discourse on why we should oppose same-sex marriage. We will have pieces on the possibility of reconciliation on this issue from Jonathan Rauch and Joseph Knippenberg in the issue soon to appear on your doorstep.
• Jordan J. Ballor, who will be reviewing a book on religion and the media for us in that same summer issue, discusses Protestant approaches to law at First Things.
• And Peter Lawler, who will have a piece on Solzhenitsyn in this thrice mentioned issue (which, you can tell, is on our minds) has a piece on his dismissal from the President’s bioethics council over the weekend.
• Finally, Patrick Kavanaugh writes on the real obstacle to creativity: too many possibilities.

There were some who dared in the opinion of the multitude to immortalize themselves; and notwithstanding that the very sense of sight bore witness to their mortality, were ambitious to be called gods, and were honoured as such; to what a length of impiety would not many men have proceeded, if death had not gone on teaching all men the mortality and corruptibility of our nature? Hear, for instance, what the prophet says of a barbarian king, when seized with this frenzy. “I will exalt,” says he, “my throne above the stars of heaven; and I will be like unto the Most High.”

Afterwards, deriding him, and speaking of his death, he says, “Corruption is under you, and the worm is your covering;” but his meaning is, “Do you dare, O man, whom such an end is awaiting, to entertain such imaginations?” Again, of another, I mean the king of the Tyrians, when he conceived the like aims, and was ambitious to be considered as a God, he says, “You are not a God, but a man, and they that pierce you shall say so.” Thus God, in making this body of ours as it is, has from the beginning utterly taken away all occasion of idolatry.

Chrysostom
Homilies Concerning the Statues

• At the newly redesigned First Things online, Elizabeth Scalia responds to the death of George Tiller: “The Pauline paradox “when I am weak, then I am strong” carries a flipside: “When I am strong, then I am weak.” Relativism is dangerous because we can too easily slip into the belief that we so well comprehend God’s will that we can confuse our own will for God’s, and thereby do terrible damage to one another. God’s rain falls on “the just and the unjust,” and it is one of the challenges of the life of faith that we must leave to God the rendering of his Justice.”
• At GetReligion, Mollie Ziegler Hemingway asks “How Muslim Are We?” in response to President Obama’s statement that the United States also could be considered as “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.” This is a bit of a stretch in the numbers department, but could he mean philosophically? An interesting question.
• A piece on “Competitive Altruism” — otherwise known as what your grandmother called “being a showoff” — reminds us of the benefit of anonymous giving: “Traditionally, economists have presumed that if people are seeking status, they will simply buy the most luxurious product they can afford. But Griskevicius and his colleagues — Joshua Taylor of the University of New Mexico and Bram Van den Bergh of the Rotterdam School of Management — theorized that when given an eco-friendly alternative, competitive altruism would compel people to forgo luxury for environmental status. To test the theory, they conducted several experiments.”
• The always entertaining P.J. O’Rourke reflects on the end of our love affair with the car (and GM) in the weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal.
• Julie Vermeer Elliot is concerned by the belated discernment exhibited by evangelical viewers of Jon and Kate Plus Eight. She writes: “It was not until the recent allegations of sexual impropriety arose that a significant number of Christians began to question whether Jon and Kate were indeed the examples of faithful living that we had imagined. Somehow most of us missed the long trajectory that was, day by day, moving them farther from a life of Christian virtue. Sexual immorality—whether actual or merely suspected—caught our attention, but the materialism, narcissism, and exploitation of children that preceded it was largely overlooked.” Read the rest here.

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.

Wilt thou love God as he thee? then digest,
My soul, this wholesome meditation,
How God the Spirit, by angels waited on
In heaven, doth make His temple in thy breast.
The Father having begot a Son most blest,
And still begetting—for he ne’er begun—
Hath deign’d to choose thee by adoption,
Co-heir to His glory, and Sabbath’ endless rest.
And as a robb’d man, which by search doth find
His stolen stuff sold, must lose or buy it again,
The Sun of glory came down, and was slain,
Us whom He had made, and Satan stole, to unbind.
‘Twas much, that man was made like God before,
But, that God should be made like man, much more.

John Donne
Holy Sonnet XV

• Patrick Deneen, who will have another article in our upcoming issue, has a challenging essay at the Manhattan Institute’s Center for the American University on the Dysfunctional American Campus: “Our current universities no longer undertake what they were designed to achieve, and hence have become largely dysfunctional institutions whose activity – classical liberal education – exists in profound tension with their role – conveyors in the global meritocratic marketplace. It should be recognized that a vast chasm has arisen between what today’s colleges and universities are for – the bestowal of credentials – and what they were designed to achieve – a liberal education.”
• In the latest issue of Themelios, D.A. Carson reflects briefly on the distinction between the gospel and the consequences of the gospel for how we approach culture. Over at First Things, Charles J. Chaput has some timely remarks on what some of those consequences might be.
• HBU’s own Hunter Baker comments at Touchstone on the Great Commission Resurgence–a new initiative spearheaded by Johnny Hunt, the current president of the Southern Baptist Convention.
• Donald A. Yerxa reflects on the pleasures — yes, the pleasures — of getting rid of books.
• Following up on a previous post, Matthew Milliner shares more thoughts on theology, personality and Catholicism.
• In the Wall Street Journal, Megan Basham had a provocative response to journalists and administrative officials who hope that the current economic downturn will push more wives and mothers into the workforce as their husbands continue to lose the majority of the jobs: “If our media and our government really want to show support to mothers” she writes, “they might consider actually listening to them.” Read the rest here.

Our next issue is coming together already — we shall have an update on it within the next few weeks.