The Winter 2011 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.

Faith & Politics
Wilfred McClay on the Cities of God & Man
Russell Moore on the Politics of Dominion
Jordan Ballor on the Common Good
Robert George on Constitution & Creed

Features
Eric Teetsel on Capitalist Evangelism
Benjamin Domenech on the Untrained Grasshopper
Terrence Moore on Steve Jobs & Capitalism
Owen Strachan on the Charismatic Question
Paul D. Miller on The Lessons of Iraq

Books & Culture
Louis Markos on God and Morality
Richard Reinsch on Redeeming Democracy
R.J. Snell on Cormac McCarthy & Sloth
Peter Lawler on The Cloned Soul

A Republic of Letters
Hunter Baker

Poetry by Bill Coyle
The Word by Cotton Mather

From the Winter 2009 edition of The City, Eric O. Jacobsen writes on redeeming the commons.

Driving from Seattle to Steven’s Pass along Highway 2, takes you right through a small city called Monroe. Nestled near the base of the Cascade Mountains and skirting the meandering path of the Skykomish River, this town of 16,000 could very well be a compact oasis of civilization to rival anything one would find in Switzerland or in the Lake District of England. But Monroe is nothing of the sort. It is an ugly collection of strip malls, oversized signs, and utility wires. In short, it is pretty much indistinguishable from most places you are likely to see when driving from one destination to another in this country.

We’ve come to expect this kind of baseline ugliness in our small towns and even in many of our major cities as well. But why should the public realm in one of the richest and most advanced civilizations in the world look this way? Isn’t the public square where we are supposed to show the world and ourselves what we are capable of when we work together? What do such low expectations about the visual culture of our public realm tell us about ourselves and about our values? I think that this regrettable condition may very well be connected to two valuable words that have virtually dropped out of our national lexicon in the past few generations.

The words civic and commons represent important aspects of our shared life that have been badly obscured, undergoing subtle transformations from being concrete notions to abstractions. This fact is especially concerning because there seems to be so little awareness of how these important words atrophied in the recent past, and because in understanding the special case the commons, we can achieve in part a redemption of our civic life.

I’ll begin with the concept of civic, which is connected to the word city. The word city continues to be used as much today as it ever was, but what we call cities today represents a significant deviation from the way cities have been understood throughout much of history. This change can be best understood by seeing the city in relation to the neighborhood.

The architect Leon Krier uses the analogy of a pizza to demonstrate the difference between the traditional and contemporary way of understanding this relationship in his book, Architecture:  Choice or Fate. A traditional city, according to Krier, is like a pizza. There are lots of different sizes and types of pizza and they are generally well regarded. One feature of a pizza is that one slice of pizza is representative of the whole. That is to say, whatever kind of pizza you have, each slice will contain most of the ingredients that make it an enjoyable culinary experience. For example, if you have a Hawaiian pizza and receive a slice that doesn’t have any Canadian Bacon, you are justified in feeling cheated.

Krier claims that cities are like pizzas and slices of pizza are like neighborhoods. That is to say every neighborhood should contain most of what you love about the particular city which contains the neighborhood. You should be able to experience and enjoy the city at the level of your neighborhood.

Yet in the aftermath of World War II, planners decided that there was a more rational way to think about the city. Through a policy tool known as functional zoning, they began to separate the functions of the city into different geographical zones. Hence the emergence of a residential zone for houses, a retail zone for shopping, a commercial zone for working, and a recreational zone for playing.

This idea may have had some merit, but Krier is not alone in remaining unconvinced of its wisdom. In his mind, dividing up the city in this way makes about as much sense as dividing up the ingredients of a pizza and serving them separately. It may have the same nutritional value, but almost all of the enjoyment of the pizza gets lost in the translation. In the same way, our cities today have many of the same components of traditional cities, but because everything is separated by function, cities today are much less interesting and enjoyable than they were before. What we have now is a rationalized grouping of the functions of the city without a city in and of itself.

The second word I want to highlight is the word commons, which typically refers to “a piece of open land for public use.” Although “the commons” was a central aspect of community life in the first American towns, the idea embodied in this word has almost disappeared from our imagination as a result of our changing conception of the functions that buildings and other structures play in the town fabric. According to Daniel Solomon in his book Global City Blues, town fabric has traditionally served three functions:

1. It houses people and provides places for work and their private needs.

2. It creates settings for monuments.

3. It shapes and defines the outdoor public spaces of a town.

Solomon holds that contemporary building practices have reduced the functions of buildings to just the first of these purposes. Most buildings today exist to enclose space for certain activities. Buildings are valued chiefly from an interior perspective for the amount of square footage that they enclose. The outside of a building is only considered insofar as it can facilitate bringing people into the building. That is to say, the outside space is used for parking and signage.

In some cases, contemporary buildings are built for monumental purposes, but what is forgotten is that the monuments depend on the fabric of buildings that allow them to stand out in the cityscape. What is almost completely off the radar is the notion that buildings shape the public realm. The architect Colin Rowe in his book Collage City helped to bring this to light—he used ground figure renderings to draw our attention not to the shapes of the buildings themselves, but to the shapes created by the space between the buildings.

Traditionally, good urbanism sought to make the public realm a pleasant place to enjoy and to interact with ones fellow neighbors. A well conceived outdoor space creates a kind of hallway along which it is pleasant to walk and rooms that invite people to stop and relax. Contemporary cities, by way of contrast, tend to have amorphous spaces that are not good for much except for parking. If we compare the way buildings are sited in the context of pre and post-war neighborhoods we see this difference dramatically. It should come as no surprise then that the commons, understood as a piece of open land for public use, has almost disappeared from our contemporary lexicon. However, when people encounter a space functioning as a commons, they tend to respond positively to it and gather there.

I highlight these two areas so that we can begin to focus our attention as Christians on the redemption of civic life. The classic text to begin thinking about our relationship with our geographic setting is Jeremiah 29:7. “Seek the welfare of the city into which you have been called, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” The context here is the Jewish exiles from Jerusalem who are living in Babylon. They’ve just been told that they will have to remain in exile for another 70 years and the verse we read is Jeremiah’s advice for coping with living in a foreign country. He tells them to seek the welfare—or shalom—of the city.

Shalom can be translated as peace, but it is a form of the word meaning more than just absence of conflict. Peace here means wholeness and justice—a community that is thriving. So shalom describes God’s expectation for the cities in which we find ourselves. It is a word of specific content.

The other aspect of shalom that I want to point out is its locus. Jeremiah first tells them to get married, have kids, plant gardens. We can picture him directing his comments to individual households at that point. And then he turns his attention outward—outside of the walls of their individual houses and comments on what the city should be like. The locus for Jeremiah’s specific command to shalom is not the individual household, but the commons and other more public places in between the houses. Whatever shalom means by way of specific characteristics, we must first acknowledge that it is a public or shared vision for life together.

This is important for us to consider given the consequences of fifty years of functional zoning, which have been twofold with regards to this passage. On the one hand our cities have become less shalom-like. And on the other hand, while geographic separation of activities according to function may or may not be a good idea for the purpose of those specific activities, it certainly has a detrimental effect on the space between: the public square.

In order to find a way forward towards a redeemed vision of shared life of shalom in the city, we are going to need to go back a bit into the origins of functional zoning in order to get a glimpse of the values embedded in this planning practice.

Zoning in this country technically began in New York City in 1916, but by the end of World War II it had become the dominant mode of land use regulation in just about every city in the United States. A watershed event for functional zoning was a Supreme Court case argued in 1926 that decided cities did have rights to restrict land uses according to functional zones.

Prior to this decision, land use was regulated by municipalities, but it was done primarily through nuisance laws. If someone was planning to build something next door to your house that would have been dangerous, noisy, or smelly for your family; the city could have deemed that project incompatible with residential character of neighborhood and prohibited it.

The case that we will be examining came about when the town of Euclid (which is a suburb of Cleveland) passed a zoning law prohibiting commercial buildings and apartment buildings in a particular residential zone of the town. A local real estate company who owned land in the newly designated residential section had planned to develop that land for commercial purposes, and felt that the creation of a residential zone made their land less valuable and therefore constituted an unfair intrusion on their land rights.

The case of Euclid vs. Ambler Realty then became a watershed case in land use law and we will be using it to provide some insights into the values embedded in contemporary zoning . I am not a legal scholar and I am not trying to argue that the Supreme Court got it wrong. One could disagree with the premise of functional zoning, but still believe that it is not a constitutional issue and that the federal government has no business getting involved in this discussion. My point in looking at this case, is simply to get a glimpse into the values that shaped the direction that land use patterns took in the post-war years. We will use these implicit values as a jumping off point for evaluating how shalom-like our contemporary neighborhoods actually are.

The first thing that we will observe is the assumptions about children and families embedded into functional zoning. The well-being of children is used as a justification for the need for functional zoning. This particular passage is one of many references to children:

Some of the grounds for this conclusion are promotion of the health and security from injury of children and others by separating dwelling houses from territory devoted to trade and industry.

Now what we picture when we read this is the notion of protecting children from the dangers of a particular kind of trade and industry. One could think of a slaughterhouse or a smelter. But I want you to think more broadly about trade and industry—what about a coffee shop or a corner grocery, or a barbershop?  Do children need protection from these kinds of places?

If we think about the broad scope of zoning regulation, we realize that what is intended here is to protect children not from butchers knives and burning sulfur, but rather the intent is to protect children from society at large. This law when implemented would protect a ten-year old boy from walking to a corner store to buy orange juice for his family or to the barbershop to deliver a message to his dad.

The implicit value expressed in this legislation with regard to children is what Delores Hayden refers to as the “home as refuge” model. The home is a place where children are protected from the larger society. Children are kept in the home safe from society until they are old enough to form their own families. At that time they will protect their families from public life.

This ideal, interestingly enough, is a holdover from the Victorian era and can be linked to Christian (specifically Evangelical) thinking. The home within that community was considered to be a spiritually nurturing place, while society was understood as mostly evil. Christian men steel themselves each day to go out and do battle in the public realm, but come home each night to a haven of spirituality. A major figure that actually helped to perpetuate this ideal for evangelicals was William Wilberforce. Robert Fishman documents his influence in Bourgeoisie Utopias:

This contradiction between the city and the Evangelical ideal of the family provided the final impetus for the unprecedented separation of the citizen’s home from the city that is the essence of the suburban idea. The city was not just crowded, dirty, and unhealthy; it was immoral. Salvation itself depended on separating the women’s sacred world of family and children from the profane metropolis. Yet this separation could not jeopardize a man’s constant attendance at his business—for hard work and success were also Evangelical virtues—and business life required rapid personal access to that great beehive of information which was London. This was the problem, and suburbia was to be the ultimate solution.

This ideal, which became prevalent among Americans in general and Evangelicals in particular, is quite a bit different from at least one image of shalom in the Scriptures:

Thus says the LORD of hosts: Old men and old women shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with staff in hand because of their great age. And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets. (Zech. 8:4—5)

Here we have both young and old interacting, not in private households, but in the streets or the common spaces of the city.

I’m not opposed to the “home as refuge” notion as one aspect of domestic life. We all need a safe place to share intimacy and to be able to relax. What I am suggesting is that if we take Jeremiah’s mandate seriously, we may also want to see home as a place from which children can begin to practice participation in public life and a place where children are trained in public involvement.

A second justification for separating different kinds of land uses into different geographical zones had to do with a general understanding about what the rich and poor deserve. In explaining why it is acceptable to prohibit apartment buildings from existing on the same block as detached single-family homes, Justice Southerland provides the following rationale:

… very often the apartment house is a mere parasite, constructed in order to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of the district. Moreover, the coming of one apartment house is followed by others, interfering by their height and bulk with the free circulation of air and monopolizing the rays of the sun which otherwise would fall upon the smaller homes.

Given all of the other language about protecting children, one commentator quipped: “does Justice Southerland realize that children live in apartment buildings as well?” Frankly, I’m not sure whether he did realize this fact—yet the point of this justification comes across loud and clear. Zoning, from its inception, can be seen as a tool for protecting the home as a setting for private consumption for middle and upper income members of the community.

Now as Christians, this issue should at least get our attention given all that the Bible says about our obligation to not neglect the poor:

They who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and push the afflicted out of the way; father and son go in to the same girl, so that my holy name is profaned (Amos 2:7)

The question can be articulated in this way, is the idea of income-exclusive neighborhoods consistent with the Biblical notion of shalom? While we have stricken down most political mechanisms by which neighborhoods can be racially exclusive, during the era of zoning economic mechanisms have caused neighborhoods to become increasingly income exclusive.

This is an issue that can easily divide the Christian community into those who feel that income inequality is justified and those who feel it is not. Without tackling that controversy head on, I wonder if our particular topic can allow us to articulate a slightly more nuanced answer. We can begin with one representative passage concerning our obligation to the poor:

You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the LORD your God. (Lev. 19:10)

The owner of the vineyard is not being instructed to sell his property and distribute it to the poor, but rather he is told leave the boundaries and liminal spaces of his vineyard alone so that the poor can derive some spillover benefit from his wealth.

What I am suggesting here is that if we accept some degree of diversity with regards to different people’s private domicile, we might at the same time think of the neighborhood or the spaces in between the houses as the gleanings from which those with less personal resources could benefit. The question of justice for the poor with regards to land use is so often expressed simply as a demand for more affordable housing. What I am suggesting is that we widen our scope just a bit and think about access to a good neighborhood for everyone as a requirement of justice.

So if I had to stick my neck out and try to derive a justice imperative with regards to neighborhoods, what I might suggest is an end to housing type exclusive zones where we have one zone for big houses and another zone for condos and apartments, but rather mix them all on the same block. I would also question the justice of gated neighborhoods as well as homes on 5-acre lots (unless people are growing crops on them) because they fail to leave any kind of common space for those who can’t afford to live on a large house.

Another value embedded into functional zoning has to do with the place of strangers in society. We have already suggested why a slaughterhouse or a foundry might not be a good fit in a mostly residential neighborhood, but the zoning code of the town of Euclid excluded all commercial activity—including the coffee shop and corner grocery. The rationale for this kind of a move was the following:

A place of business in a residence neighborhood furnishes an excuse for any criminal to go into the neighborhood, where, otherwise, a stranger would be under the ban of suspicion.

The logic here is that a coffee shop is a dangerous place in your neighborhood because it provides a safe place for a stranger to hang out when strangers ought to feel ostracized. Note also how the language implies that a stranger is likely to also be a criminal.

There are a couple of issues here that need to be highlighted. The first is that as Christians we should be a bit concerned about legislation that is targeted against people for being strangers. Treating strangers at least with respect is a mainstay of Biblical justice:

You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Duet. 10:19)

Not only does this command require us to treat strangers well it is a reminder of how we all benefit when strangers are treated well. When we speak about strangers we forget that it is a geographically fluid term.

We are all strangers somewhere. One of unsettling characteristics of post war subdivisions is how easy it is to get lost in them if you don’t happen to live there. All of the houses are oriented to the back yard, so you don’t usually see a lot of life in the front. And there are no commercial establishments so you can’t ask anyone for directions.

The other issue that is of concern with this justification is that it assumes a certain relational rigidity in the categories. There are two kinds of people, it seems to imply: strangers and friends. Those who are friends have always been and will always be friends, and those who are strangers have always been and will always be strangers. It doesn’t allow for the fact that most people we encounter begin as strangers to us and then can move along a continuum of acquaintance, friend, soul mate, and even family.

By setting up neighborhoods that shun strangers, we have created a residential setting that actually accentuates the problems associated with strangers. Because there are no good public spaces, we rarely get a chance to get to know those who are strangers to us, and people who live next door to each other may remain strangers because they have no good place in which to interact.

Now again, we have to be nuanced as to how we might apply this notion of welcoming strangers in a contemporary setting. Our communities have become socially fragmented, which leaves everyone more vulnerable to the dangers associated with strangers. And over the past few decades it seems that a growing number of individuals have become significantly estranged from mainstream society and may have a much harder time making a positive contribution to the social capital of a particular neighborhood even in the best of circumstances.

Within the Bible, there was an expectation among God’s people that strangers would be welcomed into our homes. But this was in a context of a tighter knit community with a tradition of elders at the gate. Elders at the gate would be the first to meet a stranger and would act as a kind of screening mechanism against danger and potential threats to the community. Now if after that screen someone in the community decided to take a stranger into their home, their neighbors would be aware of this arrangement and would look out for the safety of the one who took the stranger in.

Since we don’t have tight knit communities, nor do we have elders at the gate, we need to find liminal places where we can get to know strangers in a more secure environment. I’ll make two suggestions in this regard: third places and defensible space. Third place is a term coined by Ray Oldenburg in a book entitled The Great Good Place. Oldenburg’s thesis is that everyone needs a third place that is not home and is not work where they can drop by and stay as long as they want.

Third places are important for socialization and as a non-threatening place to meet people. Oldenburg claims that inviting a person into one’s home represents a significant risk for both the host and the guest. Because it is a risk, we tend to want to screen people before we extend or accept an invitation into a home. And because even for people we know, a home visit requires a lot of coordination of schedules and cleanup—inviting our friends to our homes can be a rare occurrence.

Third places are important in helping us get to know people that we may not yet feel comfortable inviting into our homes. And third places can help increase the frequency with which we interact with those we do know. If estrangement and familiarity are seen not as fixed categories, but in continuum, we can come to think of third places as catalysts of familiarity. One problem with functional zoning is that it often eliminates the legality of third places.

Another related concept is defensibility. This is a concept that I learned from James Rojas, who conducted an interesting study of socialization patterns in East L.A. Rojas points out that the typical middle class American front yard exists to send a message of respectability to the neighbors and is not a social space. In order to interact with the homeowner in such settings, one would have to cross this dead space of front yard and then approach the main threshold of the house at the front door. When the door is opened, it will quickly be determined whether you know the homeowner and will be invited in or whether you are a stranger and will be kept out. If you are deemed a stranger, the conversation at the door will be strained and brief. It is not a setting in which people will tend to move towards a stronger relationship.

In East L.A., Rojas observes that there is a tendency to put a low fence around the front yard (chain link or wrought iron) with a gate in the middle. Now normally we think of a fence as pushing people away. But what Rojas helps us to see is that in this context, the fence is actually creating a more social space by pushing the threshold out towards the sidewalk. The homeowner in this context has a defensible space where they can stand and interact with people on the sidewalk. They can actually position themselves in their front yard in such a way as to indicate what kind of interaction they are open to. They can orient themselves towards the sides of their fence for more familiar conversation with a neighbor, or they can rest their arms on the gate to chat with people as they pass by. Rojas points out that this can be such a comfortable setting that it can sustain a long pause in the conversation without anyone feeling uncomfortable.

Let me qualify everything else that I will say about the church in the neighborhood by first saying that the church’s primary role is the proclamation of the Gospel for the salvation of humankind. Yet we should acknowledge that the church can play multiple other roles, and some of those secondary roles can have a positive impact on the neighborhood.

I think that one of the most important secondary roles that the church plays in the neighborhood is to help redeem the notion of community. Whatever else I’ve already said about the specific attributes of shalom, underlying all of them is an implicit commitment to some aspect of a common life that is lived out in the common spaces of the community. It is getting increasingly difficult for members of society to articulate on what basis this common life exists.

Individualism a longstanding feature of American life, but in the past few decades it has taken a more radical turn. Now it seems that for a lot of people, the individual is the basic and even exclusive unit of society. People express a longing for community and even join communities, but those communities always remain extra-curricular.

When I join a community, I don’t allow that community to become part of who I am. I remain an individual who has voluntarily associated himself with a particular community because it can give me something that I think I need. When I feel as if that community no longer can give me what I need, I see no particular problem with leaving that community.

So what we call community is often just a coalition of individuals who obtain some temporal advantage in meeting together. We see this radical individualism wreaking havoc on marriages and families. People often get married as individuals and remain individuals in their marriage. When the marriage is no longer “fulfilling,” they see no issue with getting out.

Roberto Goizueta notes this difference between his Mexican American community and what he sees among middle class Americans:

When two U.S. Hispanics meet each other, the initial discussion after the introductions will likely involve family and relationships:  who are your parents?  What town is your family from?  I knew your mother’s second cousin twice removed!  I had a friend who must have known your sister. It is thus quite disconcerting for Hispanics to meet an Anglo whose initial discussion will, instead likely involve career and work:  what do you do for a living?  Oh, that must be very interesting work!  Where did you do your training?  These later questions, reflecting an emphasis on individual “achieved” and chosen identity over organic, received identity, are often perceived by U.S. Hispanics as insultingly dismissive of these relationships.

The church—especially those with a vigorous covenant theology—can be a place to witness to a recovered notion of community. The image of the church as the body of Christ with a strong sense of interdependence can be a powerful witness in the neighborhood. For this reason I think that it is important for the church to be as demographically mixed as it can be. I know that the racial mixing has been difficult for the church, but with regard to this issue, I am equally if not more concerned with churches that seem to be intentionally targeting a certain age.

A second way that a church might directly impact a neighborhood has to do with the redemption of space. Wendell Berry develops this wonderful notion of local culture through observing an old rusted out bucket nailed to a tree. This bucket collects leaves and what not over the years and then over time the fibers break down and these things, in the bucket turn into soil that can return to the earth and allow things to grow. Berry sees in this bucket an analogy for how human community is supposed to develop:

A human community, too, must collect leaves and stories, and turn them to account. It must build soil, and build that memory of itself—in lore and story and song—that will be its culture. These two kinds of accumulation, of local soil and local culture, are intimately related.

Berry claims that in order to do this kind of work, a community must exert a kind of centripetal force on its residents. It must draw residents toward the center of community life, and it must encourage the next generation to return and make their contribution to the local culture.

The schools have failed, according to Berry, to inculcate love for and knowledge of the local culture and instead are focusing training children toward the future—toward the development of a career. This oversight is not only (literally) unsettling for our children; it is also a kind of irresponsible stewardship of the local environment.

I think that the church in the neighborhood could exert this kind of centripetal force on a neighborhood if it was cognizant of the value of this role. In order to do this, a church would have to have a pretty strong sense of its physical connection to its neighborhood. This perspective would have been taken for granted when there was a stronger sense of church parish in the community.

Unfortunately, many churches have completely lost any sense for how to do this. Many churches have adopted the suburban campus model that places its buildings in the middle of a large parking lot and is completely cut off from the fabric of the neighborhood. Or older churches that are more embedded in a neighborhood often develop a kind of fortress mentality toward the neighborhood in which they are located.

Lastly, at risk of coming off as a bit too ethereal, I want to think about ways that the church can redeem time for a neighborhood. Colin Gunton in The One the Three and the Many has made the insightful observation that in the West, despite all of our labor saving technologies, we seem more pressed for time than other more simple cultures. Gunton sees as part of the problem our attempts to seize time and commodify it. With our technological innovations and our scheduling tricks we think that we can save time and then later spend it again. But as Gunton observes, the core of the problem is that we have forgotten how to live graciously in time and to receive it as a gift.

The Biblical doctrine of creation provides a kind of cadence of daily life and the rhythm of the week that is instructional for human living. The church is one of the primary means by which these rhythms are counted out and help to shape the community. The rhythm of weekly worship provides a kind of foundation for common life. This can also be true of the yearly rhythms of advent to Christmas and lent to Easter followed by a stretch of ordinary time. And even life rhythms can be marked and noted by the church as babies get baptized, people get married, and people die.

Our society must begin its recovery of civic common life in the city by thinking about the form of the spaces that we share together. I believe that Christians in their various roles within local communities can model as well as advocate this type of thinking. And Christians can enrich the conversation about our shared life by bringing a coherent vision of shalom as a coherent image of the good life. Institutional churches are not the only place from which Christians can advocate for these things, but churches can play a unique role in the redemption of common life if they are willing to play this role. Churches specifically can bear witness to the reality of community life and play a role in the redemption of both space and of time.

This is important work because our civic health depends on it. Civic health is essential for us to fully become the image-bearing creatures that God created us to be. And civic health is what towns like Monroe need to be the healthful and redemptive places that God desires us to inhabit.

Eric O. Jacobsen is the author of Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism and the Christian Faith (2003) and has a doctorate from Fuller Theological Seminary. He is the Senior Pastor of the First Presbyerian Church in Tacoma, Washington, where he lives with his wife and four children.

The Summer 2011 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.

Renewing the Liberal Arts
Louis Markos, Brad Green, & John Mark Reynolds

The Path Ahead
A Conversation with Donald Rumsfeld
Paul D. Miller on How We Engage the World
Peter Lawler on What We Learn from Tocqueville
D.C. Innes on Who We Trust in Politics

Books & Culture
Maureen Mullarkey on the Fallacy of Art Appreciation
Nathan Finn on God’s Country
Ryan T. Anderson on Redeeming Economics
David J. Davis on Secularism
Micah Mattix on the Politicized Bard

Poetry
Geoffrey Brock

A Republic of Letters
Hunter Baker

The Word
John Henry Newman

The Spring 2011 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.

PUBLIC POLICY & THE CHURCH
Mark Amstutz & Peter Meilaender

EXCEPTIONALISM & AUTHORITY
Wilfred McClay on Public Policy & Mastery
Elliott Abrams on the Future of Foreign Policy
Ted Bromund on the Exceptional Battleground
Paul J. Bonicelli on Capitalism & Chile
Erick-Woods Erickson on The Tea Party’s Future
Samuel Gregg on Solidarity & Socialism

BOOKS & CULTURE
Paul D. Miller on Christopher Nolan
Julie Ponzi on Fatherhood
Paul Cella on Whittaker Chambers
Andrew Walker on Constantine
Louis Markos on The Sacred Narrative

With Poetry by Dorothy L. Sayers
A Republic of Letters by Hunter Baker
And The Word by John Knox

The Fall 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.

ART & SOCIETY
Matthew Milliner on Two Art Worlds
Matt Boyleston on Literature & Irony
A Discourse on Bob Dylan & America

A NEW AGE
Samuel Gregg on Deficits & The Devil
Dean M. Riley on The Age of Information
Mollie Hemingway on Marriage & Bigotry
Joseph Knippenberg on Faith & Obama
Jay Richards on Christian Socialism

BOOKS & CULTURE
R. Albert Mohler Jr. on The Emerging Adults
Micah Mattix on Ayn Rand’s World
Jordan Ballor on Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Lou Markos on Evangelism & the Jews
With Poetry by Catherine Tufariello
The Republic of Letters by Hunter Baker
And The Word by Cyril of Alexandria

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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The Winter 2009 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.

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

Louis Markos on Biblical Translation

BOOKS & CULTURE

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 Issuu, and is now available below. We hope you enjoy it.

Contents:

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
On Marriage + Jonathan Rauch & Joseph Knippenberg
Christ in the Classroom + Louis Markos

Books & Culture
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

Poetry
Lovejoy Street by A.E. Stallings

The Word
St. John Chrysostom on Faith and Politics

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.