The City Fall 2012

THE CITY From The Tower, remarks by G.K. Chesterton, in Bruges, Belgium, across from the Belfry Tower, published in Tremendous Trifles in 1909.

This savagery even in stone is the expression of the special spirit in humanity. All the beasts of the field ar e respectable; it is only man who has broken loose. All animals are domestic animals; only man is ever undomestic . All animals are tame animals; it is only we who are wild . While this queer energy is common to all human art, it is also generally characteri stic of Christian art among the arts of the world. This is what people really mean when they say that Christianity is barbaric, and arose in ignorance.

As a matter of historic fact, it didn't; it arose in the most equably civilised period the world has eve r seen. But it is true that there is something in it that breaks the outline of perfect and conventional beauty ‌ Christianity is savage, in the sense that it is primeval . I remember a debate in which someone asked me if I could imagine Christ walking down the street before a brass band . I said I could imagine it with the greatest ease; for Christ definitely approved a natural noisiness at a great moment. When the street children shouted too loud, certain priggish disciples did begin to rebuke them in the na me of good taste. He said: "If these were silent the very stones would cry out.�

With these words He called up all the wealth of artistic creation that has been founded on this creed. With those words He founded Gothic architecture. For in a town like this, which seems to have grown Gothic as a wood grows leaves , anywhere and anyhow, any odd brick or moulding may be carved off into a shouting face. The front of vast buildings is thronged with open mouths, angels praising God, or devils defying Him. Rock its elf is racked and twisted, until it seems to scream. The miracle is accomplished; the very stones cry out.

A publication of Houston Baptist University

FALL 2012

THE CITY Publisher Robert Sloan Advisory Editors Franc is J. Beckwith Adam Bellow Paul J. Bonicelli Joseph Bottum Wilfred Mc Clay John Mark Reynol ds Editor in Chief Benjam in Domenech Books Editor Micah Mattix Writer at Large Hunter Baker Contributing Editors Matthew Lee Anderson Ryan T. Anderson Matthew Boyleston David Capes Victoria Gardner Coates Christopher Hammons Anthony Joseph Joseph M. Knippenberg Louis Markos Peter Meilaender Dan McLaughl in Paul D. Miller Matthew J. Mill iner Russell Moore Robert Stac ey Joshua Trevino THE C ITY Volume V, Issue 2 Copyright 2012 Houston Baptist University.

All rights reserved by original authors except as noted. Letters and submissions to this journal are welcomed. Cover photo by Katya Horner.

Email us at thecity@hbu.edu, and visit us online at civitate.org.

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B ad R el igion : A Sy mpo si um Susan McWilliams Owen Strachan Joseph Knippenberg Matthew Lee Anderson Ross Douthat Responds

4 9 13 22 26

F ea tu r es A Conversation with Richard Epstein 33 Louis Markos on Being a Christian Humanist 46 Matthew Milliner on Medieval Lessons for Universities 66

Boo k s & Cu l tur e Walter Russell Mead on Faith and the Elites Francis J. Beckwith on Religious Freedom Andrew Walker on Abraham Kuyper J. Matthew Boyleston on Dana Gioia

75 85 89 93

A R epub li c of L etter s Hunter Baker

97

Poetry by Aaron Belz & John Poch The Word by John Milton

31,45,96 110

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Susan McWilliams

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n my first day as a college professor, I told my freshfaced students gathered in Classical Political Theory that during the portion of the course in which we studied The Bible, I would be using the Revised Standard Version. Two days later, I got an e-mail from a freshman who would prove to be one of my most talented students: “I can’t seem to find the right copy of the Bible for class,” she wrote.

“I know that you said that we should get the Revised Standard Version, but all I can find is the Old Testament and the New Testament.”

I teach young people who are members of the meritocratic elite.

They are the kind of young people who are, and have always been, “going somewhere.” By the age of eighteen, most of them have lengthy resumes that testify to their capacities for leadership, sportsmanship, citizenship, and every other kind of impressive-ship you can think of. They are not just competent test-takers and multitaskers and application-filler-outers—although they are all of those things—but by and large they are legitimately intellectual, careful in their thinking and gifted in their writing. These are people who you can call, without exaggeration, the future leaders of America.

My students are also disproportionately unchurched (and unsynagogued and unmosqued). An astonishing number of them—15 out of 38 in the last class I asked—come to college having never set foot inside a house of worship. Despite the fact that they are extraordinarily well-read, many of them have never opened a Bible and are entirely ignorant of its contents. The story I told above is a relatively amusing manifestation of that generational ignorance, but often I encounter more troubling variations on the theme of biblical illitera4

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cy. Recently, one of my students reported that he was surprised to realize that the Bible wasn’t a thousand-page screed against Jews, abortions, and gay people.

For my students, many of whom have lived and studied abroad, church is the real foreign country. Quite a few will talk about their religious background with the detached manner of a genealogist, saying things like: “Oh, I think my grandmother grew up Presbyterian”, in the way you might say, “Oh, I think my great-grandparents came from Ireland”. Religious faith becomes a matter of historical curiosity, good for some conversational background color but largely irrelevant to life in the present day.

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ertain biblical scholars have argued that Moses had the Israelites walk in the desert for forty years because forty years was then about the lifespan of two human generations. After two generations, Moses knew, the habits of life in bondage would be a distant memory, and new habits would have taken their place— habits that he had helped teach them, habits that would better sustain the Israelites as a free people. The generation that made it to the Promised Land would be on a journey that started in Egypt, but Egypt would exist for them only as a distant idea, not as a real place.

This interpretation of the Exodus story suggests, among other things, that if a significant cultural shift happens, it only takes two generations for the lived memory of earlier ways to be lost. After two generations have marched through the wilderness, it becomes almost impossible to imagine going back to a previous state of being.

I kept thinking of that two-generation rule of thumb as I read Ross Douthat’s wonderful book, Bad Religion, since his account places the hereticization of American Christianity in the 1960s. For my students, the 1960s is almost precisely two generations in the past. While I know other reviewers have quibbled with Douthat’s emphasis on that decade as the moment in which orthodoxy began its steep decline, I’m not sure the finer details of that argument matter, since his story is essentially right. In the important ways, it accords with what I hear from so many of my students: that their grandparents were the last people in the family to grow up in a mainline church—or any church, for that matter.

Like Douthat, I am pessimistic about the possibilities for a return to orthodoxy, particularly Christian orthodoxy, in contemporary Ameri5

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ca. My students have no childhood memories associated with religious services or songs; they do not have congregations to turn back to or fall back on in times of trial, for they were never part of congregations in the first place. Neither were their parents.

When they are faced with suffering later in their lives, or when they have a crisis that they understand to be of the spiritual sort, the what’s-right-is-what-feels-right language of Eat Pray Love and Oprahstyle self-help is going to feel much more immediately familiar to them—and thus much more immediately comforting to them—than sitting on a church pew and listening to the kind of sermon they think their grandparents might have once heard. They are likely to default to the manners and morals of American culture at large, with its sirenic promises of material prosperity and unwavering individual happiness. If they engage with Jesus, it will likely be engagement with what the band Bad Religion titled one of their songs: an “American Jesus” who is more than a little less messy than the original.

My students may in the evident ways be America’s future leaders, but in matters of the spirit they are likely to be led on. Lacking a felt alternative to the prevalent beliefs of the present—to spiritual fads and popular movements—they are likely to defer to those they view as an authority on those beliefs. The great irony here may be that in a country which claims to celebrate religious freedom, the odds are probably against my students—and millions of their fellow citizens— developing any kind of complex and rooted religious faith.

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ear the beginning of Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville contends that the early settlers of New England exemplified the necessary balance between the “spirit of religion” and the “spirit of liberty.” For the early settlers, he explains, the experience of political and social liberty could be incredible, and almost overwhelming. “As they go forward, the barriers which imprisoned society and behind which they were born are lowered; old opinions, which for centuries had been controlling the world, vanish; a course almost without limits, a field without horizon, is revealed,” he writes. “The human spirit rushes forward and traverses them in every direction.”

Political liberty, as Tocqueville describes it, was in many ways energizing and exciting. But that excitement had its limits. The experi6

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ence of political liberty could also be unmooring and unnerving, vertiginous and strange.

The early settlers, he says, were only able to embrace political liberty, with its conditions of relative political boundlessness, because they had a strong sense of a bounded spiritual world. For the early New Englanders, the “spirit of liberty,” marked by a lack of certainty in the political world, depended on the presence of a certain kind of ethereal counterweight, the “spirit of religion.” The early settlers’ religious beliefs reassured them of ultimate borders and boundaries, allowing them to thrive in conditions where the political world did not seem as fixed.

There are many implications to be drawn from Tocqueville’s portrait of the first European settlers in America, but more than anything else I am struck by the teaching that liberal regimes may in particular depend on religious faith—especially those forms of religious faith that are grounded and enduring rather than facile and trendy— because living in a modern liberal regime takes a certain kind of psychological toll on people. Life in a liberal order derives its energy from a kind of “restlessness,” as Tocqueville put it, but by definition restlessness impedes feelings of contentment and security. There are few fixed mooring posts in a modern liberal regime, a fact which can lead to anxiety and distrust.

In that context, religion—especially in its orthodox forms— provides some sense of fixity. Religion is the counterpoint to liberty, serving as a relatively perpetual place for the preservation of what Robert Frost called “the truths we keep coming back and back to.”

Many of the most influential liberal theorists make some version of this argument. In his Letter Concerning Toleration, for instance, John Locke’s argument that atheists are not to be tolerated rests on the notion that in a modern liberal regime, where traditional forms of hierarchy and stability are absent, religion and its attendant fear of God are necessary if people are to believe that they can make promises and contracts that will bind. Religious faith, in Locke’s telling, mitigates the kind of recklessness that can expose the liberal state to chaos and decay.

Of course, in that same document Locke also set the terms for what sometimes gets called the “religion-killing” quality of the modern liberal regime. His brand of religious toleration is only toleration up to a point; Locke makes clear that religious believers are only allowed 7

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to express their beliefs within the limits of established law. Even if infanticide is central to a religion’s ritual practice, he says, that behavior cannot be tolerated because infanticide is not legally permissible for anyone. In all external matters, the state authority is the trumping authority. Over time, then, religious institutions in liberal societies tend to lose much of their contrapuntal character; they get remade, as did the Catholic Church in the twentieth century, in the image of the regime. Churches come to look less like distinct refuges from the world at large and more like everywhere else. This is literal as well as figurative; the designers of Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, to give one example, consulted with Disney “Imagineers” in order to create a campus that would feel familiar to people who spent more of their childhoods in malls than in churches—the Kingdom of God becomes the Magic Kingdom.

Here lies a paradox, one that I am hardly the first to note: that modern liberalism depends for its health on a religious and moral foundation, even as modern liberalism tends to undermine religious and moral order. But it is a paradox worth repeating, since it seems to underlie Douthat’s lamentation.

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he story of Christianity has always featured unexpected resurrections.” Douthat begins the final chapter of Bad Religion with that sentence, an affecting reminder that being pessimistic is not the same thing as being without hope. The evidence of our time may seem to signal the decline of Christian orthodoxy, but as the scripture teaches, “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

To be sure, Douthat’s own work is a work and sign of hope in its own right, an example of true intellectual leadership—true Christian intellectual leadership—in a time when such is very hard to find. I am glad that, at the very least, my students are now growing up in a world where there is his example to follow.

Susan McWilliams is is Associate Professor of Politics at Pomona College in Claremont, California .

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Owen Strachan

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y traverse through the Kentucky hinterlands was a long and windy drive through farmland and rolling hills. As I approached charming Danbury, home of Centre College, I listened, as any selfrespecting young white person would, to National Public Radio. It was time for Diane Rehm, but instead of one of her wonky panels featuring two liberals (one a journalist, one a policy analyst) and a conservative (invariably cranky, due to the 3-to-1 odds), she was hosting just one guest: Ross Douthat, the columnwriting wunderkind for the New York Times.

This was a most auspicious hosting, for my drive was indeed long, and I had time to kill. As I listened to Douthat banter ably with Rehm over his new book Bad Religion, I felt the stirrings of a Vulcan mindmeld across the radio airwaves. The two talkers got along well enough; though Rehm did not waste an opportunity to declare her own self-sculpted religious views, Douthat parried nicely as he skewered therapeutic religion and prosperity thinking.

As the conversation wore on, however, my NPR zen was interrupted. The vaunted hills of Kentucky made hash of my frequency, and I heard more static than commentary. Then another problem arose: treacly music tinkled out of my speakers. A soothing voice announced the dawn of a “family-friendly” listening period. A Bono wannabe sang of unconditional acceptance and sudsy divine love. It was as if my car radio had morphed into a microcosm of greater spiritual trends: trenchant religious commentary drowned out by the soothing sounds and narcissistic anthems of the local “spiritual” broadcasting studio. As the postmoderns say, it was all very meta.

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It was also my first dip into Douthat’s text. I have since tackled the book itself. Bad Religion is, by any estimation, a noteworthy offering.

It is a work of cultural and spiritual criticism, a foray into public theology, and nearly a lone entry today in the category “meaningful works on religion by respectful public intellectuals.” Douthat’s chops as a journalist come through repeatedly as he synthesizes historical, philosophical, and theological matters in often eloquent phrasing (e. g., evangelicals were “really just the Republican Party at prayer”).

Written self-consciously in the tradition of avowedly religious public thinkers like Reinhold Niebuhr and Jacques Maritain, it is a most welcome book, for it takes theology and spirituality seriously and offers both a diagnosis of our modern moment and a cure.

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irst, a weakness: in Bad Religion, Douthat decries what he calls our modern “heresies”—but Douthat does not offer a strong definition of this word, which has historically accrued to ideas that are explicitly anti-orthodox (meaning they are opposed to the four ecumenical creeds of the church). Furthermore, contrary to the subtitle (“How We Became a Nation of Heretics”) I am not sure that America is or was “a nation of heretics.” Whatever one’s conclusion on that point, we receive no extended historical justification for this idea. There are brief forays into such territory, but no real historical grounding or analysis for this rather bold claim.

I do think, though, that Douthat is right to read a large segment of modern American Christianity as sick and weakly, as he does in Part I. He believes that not too long ago it was quite strong. The period in which he finds great health is postwar America, the booming 1940s and 1950s. He is quite optimistic about this period; I share some of his enthusiasm for it, having written a dissertation in this very epoch on the ambitious (and under-studied) neo-evangelical intellect (again, a small quibble: Charles Fuller was not the first president of his seminary; Harold Ockenga was). I do not share Douthat’s strong disapproval of fundamentalists and their “self enclosure”. The fundamentalist hermeneutic has its weaknesses, but these Christians in many cases defended the faith at tremendous social cost. H. L. Mencken shaped the prevailing cultural image of the fundamentalists as much as they did, and his portrait was not even-handed but savage (see Mencken by Marion Rodgers). Furthermore, as Joel Carpenter has shown in Revive Us Again—a text that nicely rounds out the 10

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standard “defeated” reading of this movement—the fundamentalists used their marginalization to build an impressive underground empire that pulsed with life.

Douthat is surely right that the cultural revolution of the 1960s weakened American Christianity. I wonder if it did so, however, because the postwar evangelical (and Catholic) resurgence was in fact running on fumes. The 1940s and 50s were a tremendous time for building organizations, coalitions, and even churches. But as Lorne Dawson has shown in Comprehending Cults, the postwar period brokered intense growth not merely for the orthodox but the heterodox.

The soaring religiosity of the postwar period owed not to a massive spiritual uptick in America, in other words, but to a potential spike in religious interest due to an increasing desire for community and moral vision after two devastating wars and a terrible economic depression. To put it metaphorically, Americans enjoyed a happy day of grilling, swimming, and church in the 1950s but woke up in the ‘60s realizing that they weren’t really that religious after all. They enjoyed church so far as it took them, but for many, it never truly took hold.

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good test case for this bold little thesis is my own denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, which ballooned in the postwar years, adding millions to the church rolls who did not really commit themselves to the congregation. This scourge has a name: nominalism. It’s old as Aaron’s calf-worshippers but has found a home in America. Jonathan Edwards fought it like Ahab fought his whale, but he never could vanquish it. State-sponsored religion is a factory for faith “in name only”, along the lines of modern Europe—but American voluntarist tribes do little better. They swelled in the postwar period in large part because of “church growth” ideology that infiltrated seminaries as early as the 1920s and ‘30s (see the University of Maryland dissertation “Retailing Religion”

by John Hardin).

The Southern Baptists were the direct beneficiary of church growth practices, which minimized doctrine and self-sacrifice in order to draw as many adherents as possible. About half of the 15 million Southern Baptists on church rolls joined their congregations in the religious heyday in question. A good chunk of them have not been seen since.

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The postwar years, or what Douthat in one place calls the “neoorthodox epoch,” thus do not seem to deserve pride of place as any sort of halcyon days. Reinhold Niebuhr & his peers critiqued culture nicely, but they failed to offer a meaty theological program. They did public theology pretty well, but like the “serenity prayer” that Niebuhr authored, their work lacks the punch that the explicit biblical gospel provides. The generally tepid neo-orthodox project that Douthat likes is thus another reason for the lack of Christian attenuation in the culture in the later part of the twentieth century—and I’m not sure you can group C.S. Lewis so cleanly among the “neoorthodox”, as Douthat does.

It is true, however, that the West witnessed the debut of a number of powerful public Christian intellectuals in the early-to-midcentury period. Why this happened is an interesting question, and not one I’m sure can be answered. The rise of figures like Tolkien, Lewis, O’Connor, and others may not be due to a set of reproducible factors.

Some of our strongest cultural advocates and defenders arise in some of the oddest times and places. Calcifying Anglicanism produces Aslan’s creator? Strange times beget strange providences, it seems.

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art II of Bad Religion engages such worthy targets as revisionist gospels, prosperity theology, narcissistic spirituality, and deficient political theologies. The middlebrow nature of these heresies is, first of all, noteworthy. Common wisdom tells us that we’re in a post-Christian era, but clearly we find ourselves in something of a syncretistic cultural moment. Many of the popcorn bestsellers that grab headlines (and bestseller spots) are not, say, unconcerned with Christianity, but rather are very much reflavoring it to fit modern taste buds.

The “God Within” spirituality of Eat, Pray, Love, for example, replaces the inner nurture of the Holy Spirit for the spirituality of self.

This modern heresy offers, in Douthat’s words, “religion as a path to constant self-affirmation, heresy as self-help, the quest for God as the ultimate form of therapy”. I’ve seen no better literary summary of this eastern way of thought, which seems ironically to enfranchise distinctly western consumerism. How interesting that the lower- and middle-class are drawn to the same end from a different theological path: the prosperity gospel. For various reasons, the lower class isn’t free to aggrandize itself the way the upper class can. But for many 12

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poorer people, religion is still about the serving of the self and material ends. Faith tails upward, in other words; we want of all things not to be inwardly spiritual, but upwardly mobile. We have little time for a God-driven theology that is, as Douthat elegantly puts it, “at once grander and more humble”. The rich young ruler is still with us, but now he has a show on TBN, and many thousands of viewers.

Moving to politics, Douthat is correct that left and right alike are drawn to certain mindsets, whether of political messianism or apocalypticism. How strange that even in our so-called “post-partisan” moment, we hear many preachers call for evangelism—a great undertaking—not for the sake of individual salvation but for the goal of national revitalization. Many Christians, I think, would do well to heed Douthat’s rebuke and to examine whether America is their God. But there is another problematic line of thought today, and that is “post-partisanship” itself. I was surprised that Douthat did not critique this ideology, which is especially popular among today’s younger generation. Douthat has strong words for overly partyminded Christians, but little to say about how to formulate responsible partisanship.

Though it in no way deserves unquestioning allegiance, the Republican Party—and the conservative movement more broadly—is at least principally on the right side of many issues according to a biblical worldview. The “each party has its own major flaw” analysis is right to an extent, but politics involves parties, and factions, and necessarily choices must be made by the faithful within this framework. .

It’s good to be “political without being partisan” as Douthat says. But when one side consistently stands for life and permanent, Godordained institutions, while the other wants the legal right to crush the skulls of fetuses with forceps and tear down traditional marriage, even Christians who are not professional politicians will have to make some rather partisan decisions. Being labeled a “culture warrior” is the ultimate epithet today—but if defending biblical truth means being branded in these terms, then let those who love God and His image, mankind, not shrink back.

As for the solution offered in Bad Religion, Douthat ultimately quests for the “mere orthodoxy” mentioned earlier (he also approves of “radical orthodoxy,” which seems to me to have too little doctrinal attachment). He wants not merely Evangelicals and Catholics To13

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gether, but evangelicals and Catholics together. He does not flesh this program out in great detail, but it’s clear that while he rightly sees that the two major branches of so-called Christendom have major differences, he also believes—to borrow the phrase of Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom—that the reformation is over, at least to such an extent that Protestants and Catholics may unite in shared witness.

I support political and cultural cobelligerence and see partnerships like First Things and Touchstone as positive developments. But though I have the utmost respect for Douthat and my Catholic friends, I believe that justification by faith alone is still the article “by which the church stands or falls” as Luther, that retiring flower, put it. It is the difference, one might say, between being in and being out.

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am not nearly so confident as Douthat regarding the power of “mere orthodoxy” to sustain Christianity in our day. Such a coalition can work exceptionally well on matters of cultural and political import. Who among thinking evangelicals is not grateful that Robert George is on our side, after all? Who, for that matter, does not cheer Douthat as he practices intelligent conservatism in the pages of the Times? But I do not think a loose doctrinal alliance on para-church grounds can sustain the promotion and defense of the gospel. The neo-evangelicals learned this firsthand, and I hope we can learn from their mistakes.

The para-church and the public intellectual, valuable as they are, are not humanity’s best hope. It is the local church and the denominations to which they belong that are ground zero for the advancement of the gospel. Like Douthat, I covet more exquisite Christian writing, more beautiful art, more titanic Christian thinkers, and I would personally welcome a sustained discussion—perhaps in the very pages of this journal—that might ponder how such a movement could be stimulated. But while we should celebrate such gifts of God, they are not the engine of the kingdom. To use Douthat’s oft-repeated word, it is the dusty, old, but resiliently gospel-preaching church that truly offers a “numinous” experience. All the spiritual searching in Asia, all the flailing for lasting comfort and security, all the surety of the right cause—that which the modern “heretic” seeks from the famous and far-flung is actually found right around the corner, in nooks that the world overlooks but that God cherishes.

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I was reminded of this in my twisting drive through the Kentucky hills. Douthat and Rehm suffered their ultimate eclipse at the hands of a thrash-metal station, and I turned off the radio. For a long time, I rode in silence. I passed numerous church buildings as I went, Methodist and Baptist and non-denominational and everything in between. Some of them never featured the preaching of the gospel; others long ago lost their orientation, and now represent little more than a weekly gathering of the old and committed.

But in others, however unimpressive they may be in appearance, another world is found, an invisible kingdom that dawned on earth two millennia ago. In these settings, a risen Lord is celebrated and righteousness is the possession of those who do nothing but wholeheartedly trust Christ as their savior. Like the gospel in our era of “bad religion,” He was the Messiah that no one wanted. Like the embattled but thriving church, He was the voice from heaven that all the static and power and heresy could not drown out. In His day as in ours, He is strong to save. Nothing can prevail against Him.

Owen Strachan is assistant professor of Christian theology and c hurch history at Boyce College. A graduate of Bowdoin College, he has written for The Atlantic and First Things and is currently revising his doctoral dissertation, “Reenchanting the Evangelical Mind: Park Street Church’s Harold Ockenga, the Boston Scholars, and the Mid -century Intellectual Surge” (Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

2011) for publication.

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Joseph Knippenberg

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e tell ourselves with some frequency that ours is the most religious nation in the developed world.

Across the Atlantic, the sanctuaries are, for the most part, empty. Here at home, many are nearly full. Studies consistently show that slightly over 40% of Americans say they attend worship services almost every week. Roughly three-quarters are willing to affirm the importance of prayer in their daily lives, their belief in God’s final judgment, and— it goes without saying—God’s existence.

Given the march of secularism in our schools, the bad press (deserved or undeserved) many religious figures receive, and the various temptations and seductions of our wealthy commercial society, it’s easy to say that, when all is said and done, things look pretty good for religion in America. To be sure, more young people than ever before are unchurched, but (we can tell ourselves) they’ll grow out of that, returning to church when—or is it if?—they marry and have children.

Yet New York Times columnist Ross Douthat doesn’t want us to get too comfortable regarding the state of our faith. Too much of the religion being preached on Sundays is, as the title of his book puts it, Bad Religion. There’s the desiccated rationalism of the old Protestant mainline, where too many preachers can’t really bring themselves to affirm the resurrection or divinity of Christ, preferring (for whatever reason) the moralism of the New Testament to its theology. There’s the prosperity gospel preached from too many pulpits, blessing rather than combating materialist striving. And there are the nationalist heresies on both the Left and the Right, sanctifying either the liberal 16

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welfare state or the American Founding. Once we’ve left the churches behind, there are the “spiritual, but not religious” folks, worshipping the god within, deifying their own voices and desires. The Devil has many guises, you see—all too many of them involving a pulpit and a choir.

How did this come to this pass? The “unsophisticated” answer is human sinfulness. We proudly make idols of our desires, our reason, our attachments, and our judgments. That isn’t to say that we should simply deny our desires, reject our reason, abandon our attachments, and renounce our judgments. The inclinations and capacities we display are, after all, God-given and have their proper uses. But, time and again, sin leads us astray.

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his is my argument, not Douthat’s. He focuses on conditions that he regards as peculiar to our particular time and place.

His point of departure is what he calls “a kind of Indian summer for orthodox belief” in the aftermath of World War II. Among the factors he maintains contributed to the prominent place of apparently orthodox religion in American public life were the “disillusionment with the utopias of left and right, the sense of religion as a bulwark against totalitarianism, [and] the influence of a generation of brilliant apologists and theologians.” Church membership was on the upswing; the non-fiction best-seller lists were populated by religious titles; and everyone saw The Ten Commandments in theaters. But that’s not the half of it. Among intellectuals, there was “a mood of historical and philosophical reassessment, in which the Christian past was mined for insights into the present situation, and the religious vision of a fallen world was more respectable than it had been in decades.”

C.S. Lewis, John Courtney Murray, and Reinhold Niebuhr (among others) were at the height of their influence.

While he rightly refrains from calling this a golden age, Douthat clearly regards it as a good time for Christianity and America: For a fleeting historical moment, it seemed as though the Christian churches might not have to choose between becoming religious hermit kingdoms or the spiritual equivalents of Vichy France. Instead, they might become something more like what the Gospels suggested they should be: the salt of the earth, a light to the nations, and a place where even modern man could find a home.

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What came next, however, would seem to indicate as much as anything else the relative weakness of this particular accommodation between Christianity and culture: the dawn of the Sixties, a decade which saw the precipitous decline of the mainline Protestant and mainstream Catholic establishments.

Douthat points to five factors that contributed to this decline. First, rather than, as it were transcending the political divide, religious voices were enlisted on one side or the other of the great national debates. It was one thing comfortably to speak truth to power in the civil rights movement, but quite another altogether to engage “prophetically” on the details of national security policy, crime and punishment, or welfare reform. And Douthat is not the first observer to note that religion that attaches itself too closely to a political position tends to rise and (more often) to fall with the fortunes of that position. A second factor was the sexual revolution, which made it all too tempting to dismiss the traditional morality taught by the churches.

A third new consideration was introduced by our growing global awareness, which brought to our shores an increasing recognition of the religious options available to us, thereby feeding a longstanding temptation to adopt a relativist, individualist, and pluralist point of view. Fourthly, Douthat points to the religious consequences of prosperity, above all in the decline of the relative attractiveness of religious vocations and ministry and in the increasing mobility of a population that lost its ties to ancestral churches and denominations.

Rather than an obligation to which we’re born, Sunday worship was but one choice among many we could exercise on a Sunday morning, along with tennis, brunch, and reading the New York Times. Finally, he says, there’s just plain old snobbery: traditional religion just seemed to our new sophisticates to be déclassé.

According to Douthat’s account, the 1950s religious establishment fell victim to liberal modernity, to the apotheosis of individualism and freedom that was first articulated compellingly by the English philosopher John Locke. To be sure, Locke and his followers were careful not to make open war on 17th century Christian orthodoxy.

Rather, they subtly and not so subtly reinterpreted it, emphasizing freedom over obligation, sincerity of belief over orthodoxy, and reason over revelation. A most aggressive and optimistic version of this modernism was ascendant, as Douthat concedes, prior to World War II. In its aftermath, we rediscovered a certain humility. But that hu18

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mility was quickly overwhelmed by prosperity, technology, and rationalism (which I would distinguish from reason). We were too sinfully proud to stay humble for long.

This doesn’t mean, as Douthat emphasizes, that we have entered or reentered an age of reason or rationalism. Locke and his epigones (above all, his epigones) got that much wrong: finite beings don’t seek mere material satisfaction and security. The human condition doesn’t just demand political and economic solutions; we also want transcendence. But absent stable institutions and traditions that humble and educate us, we’ll go looking for that transcendence in all the wrong places. We’ll all too often embrace “bad religion.”

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eprecating various other responses to these circumstances— among them, the “radical orthodoxy” of John Milbank, the hipster evangelicalism of the “emerging church” movement, and the “Benedict option” of cloistered withdrawal or separatism— Douthat offers a number of suggestions that he hopes will help renew our Christian witness, “a renaissance [that] can be lived out Christian by Christian, congregation by congregation, day by day, without regard to whether it succeeds in changing the American way of religion as a whole.”

First, he proposes a separation of party and pulpit. Christians ought to recognize that while their faith surely has implications for our public life, those implications are mediated through particular practical judgments. There is no one Christian position, to be identified with that of either the right or the left. The Christian difference is not in identifying with one party or another, but rather in the way we articulate our positions and in the particular mix of practical stances we take. A religion not freighted with superfluous partisan baggage might be freer to call us to what’s truly important.

Second, Douthat argues for a religion that is “ecumenical but also confessional.” Faith derives its life from richly particularistic sources in doctrine, theology, tradition, and ecclesiology. While there are certainly occasions for finding common ground in “mere Christianity,” especially in the “wilderness” of the public square, the garden of each church needs to be distinctive in order to be spiritually rewarding. Calvinists, Arminians, and Catholics might find common ground in arguing with secular progressives over the reach of the state, but they have to remember that the real reason they wish to defend their 19

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common position is to protect their particular responses to revelation. Our religious life is in our sanctuaries, not in the halls of the legislature.

Thirdly, he argues that “a renewed Christianity should be moralistic but also holistic,” focusing not on just one of the seven deadly sins, but addressing them all. If we spend all our energy on homosexuality without similarly talking about gluttony, greed, and (hetero)sexual promiscuity, among other things, we Christians are too easily characterized as bigots and hypocrites, condemning the sins of the other without looking too closely at our own failings. This is hardly winsome.

Finally, Douthat calls us to orient ourselves to sanctity and beauty, quoting Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict) to the effect that “[t]he only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the Saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb.” In his own words, Douthat says that “[t]he future of American religion depends upon believers who can demonstrate in word and deed alike, that the possibilities of the Christian life are not exhausted by TV preachers and self-help gurus, utopians and demagogues.”

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he only antidote to bad religion is good religion. This doesn’t mean that, here and now, in our lifetimes, good religion will prevail. God only knows—more precisely, only God knows— when that will happen. For the short run, Douthat’s advice is reasonable and, so far as I can tell, there are lots of churches that and Christians who practice what he preaches without ever having read his book. They would profit from continuing to avoid the temptations he identifies.

But I think Douthat himself would profit from avoiding one particular temptation. He places a great deal of stock in holding the cultural and intellectual high ground, the same position he maintains Christians occupied in the 1950s. Given the pervasiveness of sin, it seems to me somewhat of a mistake to believe that his idealized picture of that era is accurate. Indeed, he himself concedes that a somewhat more sobering account is also possible. But further, it seems to me that the respectability, popularity, and influence he seems to seek, especially for Christian intellectuals and artists, might come at too high a price. Better to hew to integrity and fidelity, to seek the king20

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dom, than to pursue the accolades of the critics and other public arbiters of taste.

Stated another way, while I admire greatly the traditional institutional witness of Douthat’s Roman Catholic Church, I have learned from my Presbyterian pastors and from Saint Augustine a certain suspicion of any human institution. The institutions that would help Christians occupy the high ground of intellectual and cultural life are themselves highly problematical. They always have been and they always will be.

So let us thank Ross Douthat for reminding us of where some of the pitfalls are. And let’s be wary of the ones that he overlooks.

Joseph Knippenberg is Professor of Politics at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Matthew Lee Anderson

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ttempting sweeping cultural interpretation of the sort Ross Douthat gives us in Bad Religion takes a great deal of pluck on the part of the writer. A cultural history of mainline Protestantism in the twentieth century would be challenging enough—Douthat has given us that, and Roman Catholicism and evangelicalism too. Never mind that it serves merely as the backdrop for his examination of the various sub-Christian elements that shape the religious atmosphere of American life. Few writers among our current crop of public intellectuals could make the whole thing work, but Douthat somehow makes it look easy.

The centerpiece of Douthat’s book is a contrast in eras and confidence. The difference, he tells us, between the culturally ascendant Christianity of mid-century America and that of our own day is that the Christendom that produced Fulton Sheen, Reinhold Neibuhr, and Carl Henry was marked by “a deep and abiding confidence,” a “sense that after decades of marginalization and division, orthodox Christians might actually be on the winning side of history.”

“Confidence” is a rather tricky concept to prove, especially when splayed across three Christian traditions. Given the scope of the effort, there’s bound to be some slippage among the details, and Douthat has his critics who contend that his reading of history overstates Christianity’s ascent and its decline. Yet the fact that our current form of Christendom has generated the provisionally pessimistic account of Bad Religion—not to mention the glowing reviews by most conservative Christian readers, like those at the evangelical mecca The Gospel Coalition—might itself be a point in favor of his thesis.

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Of course, telling tales of Christianity’s glory days and its current malaise is something of an evangelical specialty. The frailty of institutionalized forms of Christianity has fueled many of the reformist impulses within evangelicalism, so Douthat’s story was bound to resonate. These days, peddling statistics and stories that prey upon and reinforce evangelicals’ anxieties about the erosion of their cultural influence and the weakness of their religious forms is something of a cottage industry. That Douthat writes from his seat at the New York Times gives the narrative a cultural legitimacy that no evangelical could gain on his own.

“Confidence,” in other words, has become one of evangelicalism’s most coveted forms of currency. Over the past twenty years, the work of apologetics has quietly become one of the main ways Christian leaders inject young people with the fortitude they will need to survive in a hostile world. The enterprise is often predicated upon an adversarial and minority stance. One need only look to the litany of books on how to survive as a Christian in college to see that folks are worried.

Yet this degree of concern hasn’t always been present in the evangelical water. After all, Summit Ministries, the oldest and most well known of the teen apologetics ministries, started back in 1962, only five years after Billy Graham’s Manhattan crusade, on which Douthat (rightly) focuses. But for 26 years, the program only graduated some 350 students a year. It wasn’t until James Dobson mentioned the effect it had on his son in 1989 that Summit’s stock rose on the national scene. The ministry now takes in some 2,000 students every summer, young people who are bound for evangelicalism’s best colleges, and it has spawned a number of competitors and imitators. A similar story could be told of the apologetic training efforts for adults as well, where multiple ministries and graduate programs solely devoted to increasing the ranks of Christians able to make the case in public have emerged the past twenty years.

It’s possible, of course, that the attempt to inculcate confidence in evangelicalism through the apologetic enterprise is a sign of the movement’s health and vitality. But that wouldn’t fill the conferences or sell books quite as often as evangelicals have done. It’s far more likely that the success of the apologetics enterprise has both stemmed from and fueled the sort of anxious doubt about Christianity’s future that Douthat has identified.

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The tricky thing with confidence, though, is that it cannot be gained head on, it cannot be found so long as it is the main object of pursuit. It is a byproduct of understanding Christian theology, rooted in the recognition that contemporary appearances notwithstanding, Christianity is on the right side of history because Christ has already triumphed. At its best, the apologetics enterprise finds its roots in this understanding, in the fertile ground of theology proper, such that the critical task of objecting to Christianity’s competitors is not motivated by the anxious uncertainty of doubt. It should be no surprise that the book Douthat describes as “one of the more lucid responses to the New Atheists,” Tim Keller’s The Reason for God, was written by someone whose profession is the pulpit, rather than the apologetics circuit.

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hen it comes to looking forward, though, I would add a corollary to Douthat’s suggestion that we ought be ecumenical while remaining confessional: we ought to be more interested in understanding and articulating “mere orthodoxy,” and only secondarily concerned to critique its foes.

Here I find a curious paradox at the heart of Douthat’s book.

Douthat’s recommendations for the sort of Christianity we should pursue are all aptly made. However, each of them could fit just as well with the “warmed-over accommodationism”, a continued obsession for many contemporary progressive Christians. Douthat’s clearly not a fan of that approach, and he’s right not to be. But the main reason he provides to reject it seems to be that accomodationism leads to institutional decline, rather than anything intrinsic to orthodoxy itself. We catch glimpses of “mere orthodoxy” throughout the book, but its contours stay mostly buried beneath Douthat’s cultural and intellectual observations.

Douthat, of course, states up front that the book isn’t an apologia for his own beliefs. He nods to G.K. Chesterton’s famous passage about how orthodoxy emerged in the early days of Christianity, “reeling but erect.” Douthat’s suggestion that, “[I]n America, Chesterton’s whirling adventure could become a real adventure again” is true enough, but he suggests that hope has run out. Instead, “twentyfirst-century America looks increasingly as if it’s replaying [the story of orthodoxy’s emergence] with a very different ending.”

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Maybe so. But part of Chesterton’s vision of orthodoxy is that to see and expound it in any generation means reliving that early adventure, and understanding how in every age the intellectual edifice will survive despite the weakness of its institutional context.

The task of continually rearticulating orthodoxy in positive ways that capture the sense of drama and mystery at its heart is essential to the vitalization of the institutions where mere orthodoxy must make its home. In this sense, Bad Religion isn’t wrong in what it does or what it prescribes: it simply is incomplete. As Mr. G.S. Street prodded Chesterton after he had finished Heretics by suggesting that he would worry about his philosophy when Chesterton stated his own, Douthat’s decision to focus on bad religion left me wondering whether their failure was enough of a reason to choose the good.

Perhaps like his journalist and intellectual predecessor, Douthat will take up the challenge and complete the task.

Matthew Lee Anderson is the author of Earthen Vessels: Why Our Bodies Matter to Our Faith , a graduate of Biola University, and the founder of MereOrtho doxy.com.

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Ross Douthat

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would like to thank the symposium’s contributors for their enormously kind attention to the arguments in Bad Religion.

Their engagement with my thesis—by turns generous, probing, and politely critical—is all that any author could hope for from his readers.

I am particularly grateful to Susan McWilliams for vividly illustrating a point that is central my thesis—namely, the extent to which basic aspects of Christian faith (biblical literacy, a rough-and-ready knowledge about theology and doctrine, and so on) have ceased to be basic aspects of the broader American cultural inheritence. The sketch of American religious history offered in my book—and by design, it’s no more than a sketch—does not presume that there was ever a moment when a kind of “mere orthodoxy” was ascendant or unchallenged in our culture. But my book does argue that in the American past, a doctrinally-serious Christianity was a large and permanent-seeming feature of the cultural landscape, taken for granted by orthodox believers, freethinkers and religious freelancers alike.

As McWilliams’ encounters with her unchurched students suggest, this is no longer the case. Americans are as spiritually-minded as ever, but for many millions Christian orthodoxy has become a foreign country rather than a familiar landmark. And for the book’s believing readers, this is perhaps the most important message I want to 26

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get across: That the current ebbing of institutional faith isn’t just part of the cycle of denominational growth and decline that we’ve seen across the last few hundred years, but a more serious challenge that strikes at the very roots of American Christianity.

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n terms of what sort of response Christians should muster to this challenge, I would like to set Owen Strachan’s mind at ease on two points. First, my suggestion that contemporary American Christian should strive to be “political without being partisan” was not intended as a brief for a Christian version of the insufferably pompous bipartisanship made infamous by professional Washingtonians like David Gergen, nor for a lukewarm approach toward grave evils like abortion. The model I had in mind was more a figure like the late Charles Colson, who didn’t shrink from identifying with the conservative movement and the Republican Party but whose postconversion activism also made room for causes—prison ministry and reform chief among them—that didn’t fit the stereotype of a rightwing partisan.

Of course Christians who engage seriously with politics will necessarily end up identifying with a particular party or faction. But their Christianity will seem all the more credible to the wavering and noncommitted if they are also willing to criticize their own side’s party line where appropriate.

Likewise, my admiration for the ecumenical engagement embodied by, among other groups, Evangelicals and Catholics Together in no way means that I disagree with Strachan’s point about the necessity of maintaining rather than blurring boundaries on crucial doctrinal points. In my conclusion I explicitly make the point that a “mere orthodoxy” is not a sufficient foundation for Christian renewal, and that the co-belligerency on culture war questions can’t substitute for the deeper confessional commitments that make a Catholic a Catholic and a Calvinist a Calvinist. (Indeed, maintaining such boundaries is another way that Christians active in the public square can witness to the priority of the gospel over politics.) Like Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom themselves—note the question mark in their book’s title—I am impressed by Protestant-Catholic convergence but unready to declare the Reformation over prematurely. And like Strachan, I think that both Protestants and Catholics will serve the broader cause of 27

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Christianity best by staying true to their deepest convictions rather than effacing them for the sake of the current culture war.

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agree wholeheartedly with Joseph Knippenberg about the perils of draping the Christian past in a nostalgic gauze, and I’m aware that my portrait of American Christianity’s mid-20th Century vitality walks a fine line between healthy admiration and unhealthy nostalgia. His point that the swiftness of institutional Christianity’s subsequent decline should temper our admiration for that period’s achievement is well-taken, as is his point that cultural influence comes with a set of temptations all its own—something that New York Times columnists, in particular, would do well to keep in mind! And he’s right, above all, that the basic dilemma of human sinfulness is common to all ages and all places, and that laying too much blame on particular, time-bound bogeys—the sexual revolution, consumer capitalism, and moral relativism—can obscure the deeper and more permanent truth about our predicament.

With all of that said, though, I also think that a desire not to be nostalgic can sometimes blind people to the reality of decline, and lead them to slightly overestimate the flaws and failings of a bygone era.

So I stand by my argument that for all its flaws and compromises, the American Christianity of mid-century was ultimately healthier than the Christianity of today, and that if we’re looking for past models for contemporary renewal, we could do worse than look to the period that gave us W.H. Auden and Reinhold Niebuhr, Fulton Sheen and Flannery O’Connor, Billy Graham and Martin Luther King.

What followed in the 1960s should complicate this perspective without invalidating it. A sudden period of decay is not always evidence that everything was rotten to begin with, and even a healthy body can succumb to the right combination of infections. We should be able to acknowledge the particular weaknesses of mid-century Christianity, and especially the extent to which it had acculturated and accomodated itself to the post-war idealization of the “American Way,” while also recognizing that the Christian churches faced challenges in the 1960s and 1970s that even the greatest saints and heroes of the Christian past would have found difficult to master. And we should be able to recognize what the failure to master those challenges has taken from us – not only the temptations associated with worldly power and influence, real as those are, but also the ability to 28

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preach the gospel in places and to populations where the Christian message currently falls deaf or disaffected ears.

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his brings me to Matthew Lee Anderson’s shrewd critique of my tendency to argue for institutional Christianity in somewhat pragmatic terms—linking the strength of the church to the strength of our communities and country, and defending the idea that Christian orthodoxy promotes human flourishing more plainly than I defend the idea that is is positively true. I do think that Christianity’s truth claims are more than implicitly defended in Bad Religion. (I doubt that many readers come away from my chapter on the quest for the historical Jesus, for instance, confused about my position on the reliability of the gospels). But Anderson is clearly right that I haven’t written a straightforward work of apologetics, and that I argue for orthodoxy indirectly (via critiques of the religious alternatives) and pragmatically (via appeals to Christianity’s impact on our common life) more often than I make the case for Christ straight-up.

It may be that I have a work of pure apologetics in me (check back once I’ve recovered from this project!), but for now I would simply submit that Christians engaged in public disputation should not disdain the kind of pragmatic arguments that Bad Religion makes. Yes, obviously the truth of a religious claim can’t be discerned just by looking at its influence on politics or culture. The glories of Augustan Rome don’t vindicate the cult of Jupiter, the impressive social indicators in Utah don’t prove that Joseph Smith was as true a prophet as Moses or Elijah, and I would join Martin Luther in vastly preferring the rule of a wise Turk to an incompetent Christian.

But nonetheless, if Christianity really is—in Richard John Neuhaus’s phrase—“the true story of the world,” then one would expect there to be some evidence of that truth in the way that Christian faith shapes human society, and in the way that those same human societies fare when that faith ebbs, weakens, or becomes corrupted. The beauty of Christian architecture, the wisdom of Christian novelists and intellectuals and theologians, the flourishing of human beings in the context of a Christian society… these are not incidental to the truth claims of the faith, even if they do not provide a dispositive case for every detail of the Nicene Creed.

There is a difficult balance here, because Christians do not seek to build the New Jerusalem on earth, and thus we should always be 29

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wary of making an idol of our own civilizational successes. But it isn’t idol-worship, I think, to suggest that a Christian society should contain more intimations of our ultimate destination than the heretical or pagan alternatives. Highlighting these intimations in the American past, and lamenting their eclipse in the American present, does not make a comprehensive case for Christianity. But I believe it is a decent place to start.

Ross Douthat is a columnist for the New York Times and the author of Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (Hyperion, 20 05) and co-author of Grand New Party (Doubleday, 2008) . His most recent book is Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (Free Press, 2012).

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Aaron Belz Books, you’ve had your day, it seems.

You’ve had your 1500 years or so, that is, to sit upon our shelves, fool us with your spines, intimidate with thickness and small type.

And yes, you have felt solid in our hands, as things of value. Opening you has brought sweet scents of paper and of libraries, or attic’s musk, while our eyes have scanned, perhaps,

Atticus Finch’s closing argument.

And maybe you, like he, feel that this case should never have come to trial, that there is not one iota of evidence against you

or your continued use, but books, you aren’t sustainable—at all. We have gone digital.

Your technology is out of date, and I would like to say I hate to break it to you, but I don’t,

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because as much as you’ve intrigued me, causing me to collect your rarer specimens, I’ve resented the authority you’ve implied, the way you’ve symbolized our human lives,

the way you’ve finished with “the end” so smugly, as if you knew for sure, the way you’ve trafficked in irony and wit as if you were appointed to do so.

But books, the joke is now on you— hoist, as they say, on your own petard— for now the texts you’ve guarded jealously have been set free on iPads and on Kindles,

unbound, unblurbed, unjacketed, cut loose to roam from screen to screen, unvalidated by your heft and texture, unaccompanied by your smell. This really is THE END.

Aaron Belz holds a Ph.D. in English from Saint Louis University and is the author of two books of poetry. He lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina.

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A Conversation with Richard Epstein Richard Epstein is one of the most prominent intellectuals of our age. He is currently the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at New York University Law School, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago. While the primary focus of his writing is law, he has written at length on matters of history, philosophy, economics and other matters. His most recent book is Design for Liberty: Private Property, Public Administration, and the Rule of Law (Harvard University Press, 2011). He spoke to THE CITY in an interview focused on issues of religious liberty and the relationship of the citizen to the government.

Professor Epstein, people across the country have become increasingly concerned about the relationship between a citizen and the government under the Constitution, particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court’s most recent decision on President Obama’s health care law, a decision of which you’ve been very critical. We’re at a point where many people feel that their relationship with the government has been changed fundamentally over the course of the past few decades, in terms of the decisions of the Court. Do you think that this is the case, and is the NFIB v. Sebelius decision an example of something that has pushed the power of government over the citizen even further from our original understanding of it?

This is a very difficult question to answer: how do you figure out the relationship of citizens to governments, and the relationships of courts to both? The first thing to understand about this is that much of American constitutional law, including much of the American constitutional law that was involved in the NFIB v.

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Sebelius case, is a question of federalism. Can Congress act in certain areas? Can states act in certain areas? That was the whole question associated with the individual mandate.

Now, on the other hand, when the federal government wanted to expand the coverage of Medicaid, the question was whether it could threaten states with what’s called “all funds under all existing programs”. Essentially, if they didn’t sign onto this bigger program for which they would have a certain financial responsibility. So, that’s not just a question of individual citizens. It’s a question of how it is that governments relate to governments.

The two issues become intertwined, because there’s no question when the ordinary person starts to think about the individual mandate, he or she does not think about this in connection with Federal power. The most ordinary people, it’s the State of New York or Illinois decided to say, either you get yourselves health care insurance or we’re going to fine you $1,000 for breathing inside our state, they would be duly offended. It would just be an individual autonomy issue. To what extent can governments make you do things?

But what happens under the Federal situation it gets tied into the commerce clause. That was the purpose of Justice Kennedy’s first and very pointed question, which was, “is somebody required to engage in commerce so that the government can turn out to regulate them?”

And the answer to many people seems to be, as we can enforce you to engage into conducts because we have to control against various kinds of abuses for so called “free rider” problem where somebody tries to take advantage of the benevolence of everybody else, it turns out that there are many non-free rider problems, or coercive problems, associated with this situation where the government tries to take advantage of people.

So, for example, if a young person wants to stay out of these mandates, they do so for two reasons arguably. One is they think they can get free healthcare if they get sick, or they want to freeload on the system. I don’t think that’s really the dominant motive. The more powerful situation is if they want to get themselves $1,000 worth of coverage, under the new rules they’re going to have to pay $1,500 in premiums because it is self-consciously designed under these programs that healthier citizens will subsidize less healthy citizens. So, on the one hand you call these people free riders and on another hand you ask them to subsidize everybody else. It’s no wonder that 34

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people start to feel completely confused about what’s going on because they don’t even understand who is wearing a white hat and who is wearing the black hat in these cases.

But I think that this is actually an expression of another type of situation—the older sort of attitude that people had with respect to individuals, particularly fellow citizens in the state. We’re more or less entitled to do what we want unless you can show that we’re doing something wrong with respect to the rest of the world. And from such a humble origin comes the law against murder or rape and everything else. Today it seems to me, you get all the old liberties through the free blessings and gifts of an omnipotent state. Essentially, you can only do the things that you want if they’re willing to let you do them.

The presumption is no longer set in favor of liberty. It seems to be set in favor of government regulation. This doctrine is difficult to trace because it’s not stated in so many words in our Constitution, nor in our constitutional cases, but it does come up in the following way. There is, under American constitutional law, something known as a rational basis test. And these words are completely misleading, because you’d actually think that something had to be rational in order to have a basis. But what it really means is that if I can give you a bad reason for a bad program, that’s enough to justify it in constitutional terms, no matter how unwise it is. The rational basis test makes it so easy to shift the burden to the individual to explain why it is he should be allowed to do something that the initial constitution grants of these rights is undermined by the rather casual way in which they can be overridden.

What you’re seeing here is not, I think, a peculiar response to the last few decades as you suggested. The constitutional shift took place before that, and was most pronounced in the 1930s, most importantly during the infamous 1936 term of the Supreme Court, where a lot of the more traditional doctrines gave way to a more progressive way of looking at things. The reason why the issue becomes more important today than it was then is less about constitutional law and more due to the fact that starting in 2000, to some respect with the Bush Administration, and certainly with respect to the Obama Administration, the political powers that be have been more and more willing to use the kinds of residual powers that they have under these constitutional interpretations.

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If you’re right now a Republican and you’ve got all sorts of things that you can do, you won’t do them anyhow because you really don’t want to. If you’re a Reagan Republican you’ll actually start pushing back against them. But if you’re an Obama Democrat, then you start lowering of the boom on those people who don’t want to play the game that you think ought to be playing, it’s perfectly okay whether you’re talking about lenders, employers, exporters, or importers. It just becomes much easier to see the problem because there’s so much more government regulation going on. What people ought to think about is that the size of the regulatory Federal budget these days is around 25% of GDP, up from 20% under George W. Bush at the end of his term. This represents a major expansion of Federal power. And what you see in the Supreme Court cases is just the tip of a very complicated iceberg.

You mentioned in the context of the Medicaid expansion the issues of federalism brought up by that. One of the concerns some of the people who live in states that have less expansive Medicaid programs is that we are in a troublesome time for federalism simply because states are functionally too big to fail. States can now make mistakes and then not pay the penalties for those mistakes, with the confidence that they can essentially appeal to the largesse of the Federal Government. You are very familiar with the terrible experiences of Illinois and everything that has gone wrong there along these lines. Do you think that states being “too big to fail”—with all their pension and entitlement obligations—is a valid concern for our economy and the future of federalism?

The answer is “yes” and “no”. And let’s look at it this way; there is certainly the question that states are too big to fail. They can’t go into bankruptcy and so forth. But what is happened is it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the strategy of trying to gorge yourself with respect to tax revenues and spitting them out in transfer payments costs you. Illinois, which is a very poorly governed state in many ways, is finding that its clock is getting cleaned in the short run because when they raise individual and corporate taxes at the eleventh hour just before the legislature changes, what happens is people pick up shop and go to Indiana, which advertises to get them.

If you look at the flows of people going across state lines, it’s remarkable as to what has happened to the population centers. Illinois 36

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loses its congressional seat like clockwork every 10 years. The same is true of Michigan. You look at Texas, they claimed four new seats last time in the census. What’s happening is people are voting with their feet and these states are becoming smaller. So, even if you expect to get a bailout, it’s not going to come quick enough and large enough in order to save the state.

The second point about these kinds of bailouts is that there’s now a real push back. I mean, if you’re somebody in Texas and you’ve managed to run your system relatively well, you’ve got a lot of problems but your government is relatively lean, why is it that you want to tax yourself 5% so that the folks in California can continue to spend more money than they raise when they have their taxes up to 12% or 13%?

The healthy states tend to be gaining the population. And with population they’re gaining political influence.

And the third factor on this point, I think is really very clear.

There’s no money in the mattress to save these guys from their own dereliction. We are running Federal deficits now at the level of $1.5 or $1.6 trillion a year. They’re not going to get smaller so long as we continue with our current policies. Every day we say “oh, look, there’s an improvement this week in the housing market” and then two days later “oh, there’s a disappointment in the housing market.”

We’re not in the depression; this is not people on bread lines in 1934.

But we are in a general stagflation where essentially the aggregate economy is going to have gross which is smaller than the increases in population, which means that there will be a steady decline. The states which are most profligate will be the ones that suffer the greatest. There is no debt capacity to bail out California, New York, Illinois, whatever states you wish to name on these things, because of the ways in which they have behaved in the past.

I think they’re going to have to try to rationalize this stuff and it clearly has to begin. These include Medicaid expenditures, which are highly inefficient in the way in which they are run. But you have to first and foremost deal with pensions for public employees and unions for public employees. Many non-union workers get too generous pensions, in a system that is completely out of whack, and there’s no way that you can solve the current problem trying to impose limitations on the pension benefits that you give to new workers. You have to do it for current retirees, otherwise the system goes bust and everybody loses everything. This is a very difficult kind of problem, 37

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but every government at every level has spent beyond its means, and there’s nobody there to do the bailing.

In terms of the economic crisis, there’s always a conversation about inequality which plays out politically in such times. You have been one of the few people out there who has consistently praised income inequality as something that is actually good for people and good for the marketplace. I wonder if you could share your argument on that front.

Basically there are two ways that you can start to measure social welfare functions. One of them is, you can look at the level of differences between top and bottom in any term, the sort of “genie coefficient”. And the more skewed that you are in income, the worse it is. But the difficulty with that is that suppose you have 90% of the people at 10 and 1% of 1,000, and it is maldistribution. What you can do is you can solve the inequality problem by driving the person at 1,000 down to 10. And then the other people will be no better off and you will be a lot worse off. If you just simply compress differences, the easiest way to compress them is to level down rather than up so that the egalitarian program in the first instance will start to produce an overall reduction in wealth. And the more you play this game the steeper those reductions are going to take place.

It’s not an accident, in my view, that if you check the current numbers the United States at this point, if you put it all together, it’s probably first in progressivity with respect to taxes given the way in which the income tax is so heavily skewed. And the transfer payments at the bottom are skewed in the opposite direction. At the same time we are seeing basically all the way up and down the spectrum a systematic decline in the standards of living so we’re back to where it was in 1996, well down from the levels of 2006 or 2007.

These huge transfer policies essentially don’t work.

The other path is to say, “we really want to encourage people to get rich by an honest means, and that means by entrepreneurial and business activities of one kind or another.” And what a contract does is it makes both sides better off, otherwise people don’t enter into it.

So, suppose you’ve got two people, one at 10 and one at 1,000. One way you can sort of get rid of the equality is to wipe out the guy at 1,000. Another thing you can do is say look, let this guy enter into the contract with a lot of people who are at 10, he goes from 1,000 to 38

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1,100 and each of these people, let’s say 100 of them to from 10 to 11.

There’s more inequality in the system, but there’s also more wealth in the system. And so if people start to worry about their own absolute values of wealth less than the relevant depravation they get, they’ll realize that markets in effect will do this.

If you look at any dynamic competitive equality, you can’t just look at a snapshot at one time and see the rich guy any richer. What happens is, so long as there’s new entry, new innovation, the workers become employers, the innovators rise up. It’s very difficult for the same people to remain on the top of the pile year, after year, after year. And so if you really look at the big earners, the thing about it is that most of them don’t make repeat appearances all that often. Lots of times people get on that list because they’re big corporate executives and they’ve had a single buyout, vested with pension rights for past and future services, they get this huge lump sum payment, and the next year they earn 10% as much. But every year there’s always the law of large numbers, which means that you have always some people coming up at the top.

So how do you think you can improve a society—by knocking down the top without being able to bring up the bottom? Or by simply encouraging open processes where you increase the total size of the pie and give everybody an incentive to enter into a market where the returns will be greatest?

The other point to mention about inequality is that some of it is created by government. The most famous illustration is a man named Carlos, a man who is said to be the richest person in the world, who makes his money because he gets corporate monopolies courtesy of the Mexican government. And a lot of that stuff happens in the United States as well. But the answer to that is not to tax all rich people more. It’s to say we’re going to get rid of the system of tariffs, and franchises, and monopolies that allow people to earn these outside things, so that competition will bring them down to size. The correct response to inequality in many cases is not a less market institutions but more market institutions.

People seem to think that the elites today are corrupt in a way in which they may not have been a half century ago. Well, I happen to remember those elites and many of us thought that they were corrupt at the time and we may have been wrong as well. But I think that what really happens is that when people do this they don’t see sys39

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tematically what rich people do. They find some person like Paris Hilton, they say “look at the way in which this women dissipates her particular wealth and fortune.” And they assume everybody who earns $1 million or two or three is like that, but that’s just not true.

Most of these people work very hard for what they earn and if you actually know anything about the whole system of charitable structures in the United States, it is completely dependent upon the wealth and the generosity of the top 1% of the people. That’s the way to get most of the big money to put up your hospitals, your laboratories, your schools, your scholarship programs, and all the rest of that stuff. They are very generous people, very charitable, and they put their pants on one leg at a time just like we do.

The single most conspicuous correlation with this dramatic rise in the level of concern within equality and the decline in overall standards of living is the increase of transfer payments from where they were a half century ago. This country is not in a great place today, and largely for that reason. There’s no question that the amount of transfer payments in the United States today really do create a dulling incentive for economic success. So if you keep up with the current policies, whether it’s the Democratic or Republican Administration, you can look forward to a steady decline in the real standard of living of about 1% or so a year. Technology will compensate to some extent for political stupidity, but generally it’s not strong enough to keep up the pace. In our government stupidity is much easier to come by than is technology and innovation.

You wrote something recently responding to Jeffery Sachs from Columbia University on the issue of whether liberty is in conflict with compassion in society. Sachs had said: “Compassion, justice, civic responsibility, honesty, decency, humility, respect and even survival of the poor, weak, and vulnerable all are to take a back seat” to liberty. We see a lot of particularly younger evangelicals seduced by the idea that to achieve social justice, you have to be opposed to liberty or to free markets. Why do you think that compassion is something that isn’t at war with liberty?

Have you ever noticed that when religious people defend their religious liberty, secular people start to see it as a kind of selfinterest? Somebody like myself—I am Jewish but not particularly 40

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devout—I defend religious liberty, but I’m definitely not trying to do it to advance my own interest.

One of the ways in which people like Jeffery Sachs try to make themselves feel more important is to denigrate the efforts of other individuals who are not working through large governments from getting any credit for the things they’ve done. In the context of religion, there is certain degree of social intolerance about behaviors that are different from your own, but there is also an enormous outpouring of concern for the poor and those adversely affected through no fault of their own. These are the voluntary organizations that can galvanize people in order to do something in order to care for them.

I think what’s wrong with people like Sachs is they give in to the temptation to find people whose spiritual and religious views are radically different from his own, and then to demonize them because they don’t behave exactly the way he would want them to behave, or do so for different reasons. This is just a form of holier-than-thou intolerance, though I am sure he would not admit it.

My view on charity has always been a classic liberal position—that is, I can’t tell anybody by force that they must give charity to anybody. I know what charity is, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to coerce it. On the other hand, as the private citizen, what I can do is pass negative judgments on those individuals whom I think are insensitive to the needs of those who are less fortunate. And lots of people feel that way. What happens is a combination of individual conscience and social pressures which encourage charity.

I’m not going to tell you whom you have to give to. You want to give only to your co-religionists, that’s fine by me. If you want to give only to the needy and sub-Saharan Africa, that’s fine by me as well. If you allow each institution, organization, or individual to give to the people whom they want, there’s a good chance that those dollars are going to be wisely spent. And then every time somebody is going to enter this market on the charitable side, people will sort themselves voluntarily. It turns out that the new entrants are likely to go to those areas which are underserved because they will perceive, and perceive correctly, they can make more of a difference being the first foundation to deal with a disease that’s completely neglected versus the fiftieth. If you don’t worry about the so-called distributional constraints in the individual case what will tend to happen is these 41

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things will organize themselves relatively benevolently when you start to look at things in the aggregate.

Generally speaking, quiet good deeds do as much if not more good than all of these huge self-promotional kinds of activities. There are many stories of Christian evangelicals trying to quietly get into place where they are kept out by government forces. Recall during Hurricane Katrina when you had all sorts of roadblocks against church groups getting in to help at the same time that the government managed to stick people into the New Orleans Superdome and then took away water, air, light, and everything else from those kinds of people. This is just another instance in which the only thing that governments can do is to create roadblocks. Even someone like Warren Buffet doesn’t disagree: if you have $1.00 and you could give it to a government agency to dispense or $1.00 and you can give it to some religious organization to spend, you will get a lot more out of the religious organization than you’ll get out of the government agency.

And you’ll get a lot more piety out of the people who don’t do things than the people who actually do.

You wrote a paper in 1990 for the William & Mary Law Review about religious liberty, “In constitutional discourse the demarcation between state, and church, and practice relies upon the same conceptions of property and liberty that once set the line between state and market. The parallel is even closer than might be expected because the line between church and state rests again upon the same subjective conception of value that once constitutionally justified the separation of state from the market.”

You’ve written more recently on the constitutional issues involved with the contraception mandate from the Administration and other things of that nature. Do you believe that this line has been crossed in recent years?

This turns out to be an extremely important issue. That article, the more I think about it the happier I am that I wrote it. I only wish that people would pay some attention to it! But here is the basic issue: if you have the small government libertarian world in which the primary function of the state is to render use of force and to control infrastructure and so forth, to get the free exercise of religion, you don’t have to do anything special. You’ve already achieved the basic protections through private property and voluntary contracts so people can own their own land and create their own institutions 42

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without government. They can’t commit crimes against their neighbors and they can hire whom they please so long as those people are willing to work for them. That’s pretty much what you want.

The point is that religious liberty is easy to protect in a world in which liberty is the first virtue. And by the same token, since you have a relatively small government which is only providing for infrastructure, it’s going to be very difficult in a libertarian world to establish one kind of liberty of an institution in preference to another. The moment you start having big government you can’t do that anymore.

Suddenly you can’t build what you want because there’s a zoning law. You can’t hire who you want, because there’s an antidiscrimination law.

So what happens is now when some organization says “look, I have to be able to organize my church as I see fit in terms of architecture and construction, I have to be able to control my membership and my employees, now they are asking for special privileges. And if they’re asking for special privileges, why is that not an establishment of religion?” Because they’re given something that everybody else doesn’t get, and since the new baseline is this heavily regulated state these guys are receiving an infamous little subsidy from everybody else. Suddenly it’s an establishment of religion—and suddenly free exercise of religion means “free exercise under all the constraints that we put on all other kinds of property.”

Figuring out what is or is not appropriate behavior is much more difficult when you have a big state. Consider the recent case of Hosanna-Tabor. The central question of the case revolves around whether or not the disability laws apply to teachers. The government argues that there’s no “ministerial exception to the disability laws” and the church argues that there is one. And then if you have one, the question is to whether or not this teacher is a lay teacher or is a religious teacher. Who gets to decide whether you’re within the ministerial exception or not—the government or the church?

It all becomes a big mess because now what you have to do is to find out why this organization is different from any other. Where do you draw the line and why? And suppose somebody wants to say, but we are a complete institute and we want everybody to be a member of the same and to participate in the various kinds of services and prayers that we have. We believe in communal lunches and we want to say grace before every meal, and we don’t want to have a bunch of 43

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people standing aside being agnostic to what’s going on. No aggregate harm to the economy. We’re going to hire the same number of people. It’s going to be different people, and in fact, if you put these restrictions on us we may go out of business and the rest of the world will be worse off. It’s much harder to do that in a world that does not respect autonomy as a primary value.

And it’s not only with respect to religion—it’s with the Boy Scouts.

It’s with any organization that wants to have a point of view and to have all members share in that point of view. They will always be subject to an onslaught from an anti-discrimination law. The hard question that we have to face in all of these questions is why it is that we want to bring this regulatory apparatus to bear on, in effect, all of these religious institutions. And to me it has always been a sucker’s game. You can’t win from playing it, and you really ought not to try.

One final question: what advice do you have for current students who are studying today that they’ve gained through your own wealth of experience?

The single most important thing to do when you are young is to learn as much as you can about as many different things as you possibly can. Don’t have a very narrow definition of what is relevant to the things that you want to do, because if you exclude things, you’ll never be able to figure out how different fields get put together. The advantage of the success often goes to those people who have the largest set of tools in their tool kit, people who are comfortable with quantitative issues, moral issues, economic issues, religious issues, and so forth—so don’t close too many doors too soon in your life.

Richard Epstein is Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fe llow at the Hoover Institution, the Laurence A. Tisch Pr ofessor of Law at New York University Law School, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago. His most r ecent book is Design for Liberty: Private Property, Public Administr ation, and the Rule of Law (Harvard University Press, 2011).

Benjamin Domenech is Editor in Chief of T HE C IT Y .

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John Poch Identity is only ultimate.

Don’t wait until the blowflies interpose.

You live when you have reckoned yourself dead.

The wine-dark sea is peaceful violet and doesn’t seem a storm or carry foes.

Identity is only ultimate come undertows or tsunamis to bed.

Only when your heart starts to decompose you live. When you have reckoned yourself dead, you might rely on God to pay your debt.

At epic’s end we know Telemachos’ identity is only, ultimate -ly, the son within the father’s epithet.

A man of many turns must know (God knows) you live when you have reckoned yourself dead, when flesh at best can only altar it.

Our moving story’s coming to a close.

Identity is only ultimate.

You live when you have reckoned yourself dead.

John Poch is professor of English at Texas Tech Univers ity. His most recent collection of poems is Dolls (Orchises).

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Louis Markos

I

am a Christian. I believe in a divine Creator who exists outside of his creation and yet is actively involved in it. I believe this Creator, though he transcends historical time and space, is the prime mover of history—both sacred and secular. I believe this Creator created the first man and woman in his own image to live in a state of grace, but that they disobeyed the Creator and fell from grace. I believe that at a precise moment in time this Creator, out of his love for fallen humanity, entered into his creation in the form of a man. I believe this man, Jesus Christ, to be fully human and fully divine and believe that through his sacrificial death on the cross the reconciliation of God and man was effected. I believe Jesus resurrected bodily from the tomb, is alive today, and can be known personally and intimately by those who open their hearts to him. I believe the Creator and Jesus exist eternally in the relationship of Father and Son and yet share in the same God-head. I believe the Holy Spirit also shares in this God-head. I believe the Holy Spirit is active both in the Church and the life of each individual believer and that he endows each believer with gifts.

I believe history is moving unswervingly toward a telos (a purposeful end), at which time Christ will return to establish his kingdom and judge, finally and irrevocably, all of humanity. I believe both that the soul is immortal, and that, at the Final Judgment Day, we will be clothed in glorious Resurrection Bodies like the one that Christ wore when he ascended to the Father. I believe that, after the 46

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Final Judgment, those who have received unto themselves Christ's free gift of grace will spend eternity in the presence of God (heaven) while those who have closed their hearts to this gift will be cast forever out of the presence of God (hell). I believe the Bible is a faithful and wholly trustworthy account of God's interactions with and interventions in human history, that, like Jesus, it is fully human and fully divine, and that it holds absolute authority in the life of the believer.

I am a humanist. I believe man is a free and rational creature who possesses innate dignity and value, and whose life and achievements on this earth are of intrinsic and lasting worth. I believe in the power of human reason and creativity to shape and change the world, to delve into the mysteries of nature and of the human psyche, to order human society through the establishment of laws, institutions, and ethical codes, to perfect nature through the cultivation of the arts and sciences, and to preserve a record, in various mediums, of these accomplishments. I believe the proper study of man is man, and, as the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome constitute the root and first flowering of humanistic thought, I believe that Greco-Roman art, literature, history, philosophy, and religion must form the basis of any true education.

I believe it is the duty of every enlightened individual to seek to know and to participate in the flow of human ideas through a study of and a grappling with the major expressions of the human imagination. I believe such a study must lead in the end to the creation of good and noble citizens who seek both to enrich their society without and to fulfill within the Socratic mandate: Know Thyself.

What is a humanist Christian? I am a humanist Christian. In my mind, I imagine the Colossus of Rhodes, with its legs stretched out across two shores: its right foot stands poised atop Golgotha ( Jerusalem); its left upon the Acropolis (Athens). Although I yearn within for the day when those two colossal legs will be drawn together in a geographical consummation that will leave both planted firmly in the good soil of Zion (New Jerusalem), I do not perceive that the opposing shores of Jerusalem and Athens are either hostile or alien. I do not hear, as Matthew Arnold did, the sound of ignorant armies clashing by night. I hear rather the low rumble of deep calling out to deep, as though the Eastern shore were calling out to the Western like a lover wooing his beloved. And I sense, as even Arnold did in a moment of illumination, that the two shores are but torn halves of a 47

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single continent. Once unified, now divided, they are yet joined by two crisscrossing lights, two beams in darkness. The guiding light that flows from the one (Jerusalem) illuminates and dignifies the other (Athens), while the searching light that gropes outward from the other loses itself finally in the one.

I am a humanist Christian. Though I admit the euphonic superiority of the alternate phrase, Christian humanist, I must still insist on the grammatical precision of the former phrase. Christian is the substantive; humanist the descriptive. I am a humanist Christian in the same sense that I am a Greek American. I, like my parents, was born and raised in America. My self-identity, my allegiance, my very reason for being are linked to America. But my grandparents were born and raised in Greece, and there is a something in my soul that yet responds to this ancestry, that resonates with the legacy of three millennia. My firm citizenship in the one frees me to explore those elemental ties to the other that even now flow along my blood like the sound of Derwent water flowed along the dreams of the young Romantic poet, William Wordsworth. My participation in my Greek heritage individualizes and strengthens me, a strength and an individuality that I carry with me into my primary and fuller citizenship.

Christian is the substantive; humanist the descriptive. Of the two, Christian, and all that it implies, is the more real, the more concrete term. In my own experience, it is the “evidence of things not seen” that forms the firm foundation of my life and thought. The Trinity, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, these are my verities, the touchstones against which I measure all earthly manifestations. I am aware that I have just switched the poles. Like Plato, I have suggested that what we loosely term heaven is, in fact, the home of the real, the essential, the actual (the Forms) while this world is but the haunt of shadows: indeed, of the shadows of shadows. Like Descartes, I have suggested that I have more proof—more real proof—of the existence of God and the soul than I do of the physical world of matter. And to some extent I mean to suggest this. The final locus of reality must belong to the one who created reality, to the cause, not the effect, to the mover, not that which is moved.

The one who, though outside time, initiated, controls, and will bring to an end human history must be more truly historical than any mere facet of the historical process itself. The Incarnation is not a mere aesthetic expression of the human need for cosmic reconcilia48

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tion; it is the historical and meta-historical reality that is both the source of and the answer to the deepest needs, aesthetic or otherwise, of mankind. Christ incarnate, crucified, resurrected seizes the mind with the power of reality, not of myth. It is rather those sublime expressions of humanistic thought that resonate with mythic force and that point, forward and backward, to the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

I

agree with Descartes (Meditation III): “we must in the end reach a first idea, the cause of which is, as it were, the archetype in which all the reality or perfection that is in the idea only objectively, by way of representation, is contained formally [i.e., actually].”

But this is as far as I go in my agreement. I stop short of any Cartesian dualism that would divide body and soul. For the very essence of reality is the Incarnation, the two-in-one, the perfect fusion of spiritual and physical, soul and body, Christian and humanist. As a humanist Christian, I refuse to mortify, denigrate, or ignore the flesh. As Christ was (and still is) fully God and fully Man, so is mankind 100% spirit and 100% body. And we will continue, like our Risen Lord, to be so when we don our Resurrection Bodies in the New Jerusalem.

God's heaven is filled with purely spiritual beings; they are called angels. Man is not such. He is not an angel, but neither is he a beast.

He is a two-in-one, a fused double. As the Son of Man, Christ is the perfection of this fusion. Indeed, the controlling metaphor (and reality) of the humanist Christian vision is the Incarnation. To downplay or reject the spiritual nature of Christ—and by extension the spiritual nature of man—is to fall into stoicism, deism, and materialism. To downplay or reject the physical nature of Christ—and by extension the physical nature of man—is to fall into pantheism, gnosticism, and legalism.

Each of these six “isms” marks a breakdown in that spiritual/physical fusion that is the very essence of man's nature and that, revealed and perfectly effected in Christ, is God with us, the salvation of the world. They are symptoms of a malaise, a dis-ease that sickens mind and will when the elemental harmony of body and soul is lost. The first three offer examples of what happens when what purports to be true humanism is divorced from the Christian beliefs in a real and personal Creator who controls, enters into, and redeems history. The second three offer counter examples of what happens 49

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when what purports to be true Christianity is divorced from a humanistic faith in the innate dignity of man and the redemptive potential of the flesh and its pursuits. In both cases, we are left with a paltry, ineffectual philosophy/religion that can neither fully save nor fully dignify.

When carried out to its logically insane end, the former “isms” yield a frightening totalitarian world of Nazi death camps and Communist correctional facilities, a lowest-common-denominator world in which man is terrorized from without and within by what George Orwell called the Thought Police. When carried out to its insanely logical end, the latter yield an equally frightening world of inquisitions and witch hunts that kill from without and obsessive internalized feelings of guilt and self-hatred that kill from within.

As a humanist Christian, it has long been my belief that when either side of the spiritual/physical make-up of man is downplayed or ignored, when true humanism and true Christianity—phrases that are, in their highest sense, equivalent—are stripped of their full import and integrity, the result is neither an expansion of human autonomy nor an exaltation of man's capacity for spiritual growth, but a lessening, a shrinking both of humanity and the human project. Indeed, I would argue that an integrated humanist Christianity provides the only firm foundation for the assertion of human dignity, the assessment of human potential, and the achievement of human goals.

In what follows, I shall attempt to clarify such an integrated humanist Christianity by clearing the ground, in Socratic fashion, of all those “isms” that so often disguise themselves as true humanism or true Christianity. Like John the Baptist, I shall make bold to lift up the valleys and throw down the hills that a straight path might be laid for the coming, not of the Messiah, but of a vision of man and his universe that was made possible only by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

This fright, this night of the mind must be dispelled, Not by the rays of the sun, nor day's bright spears, but by the face of nature and her laws.

So writes Lucretius in his philosophical epic, De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things). These three lines form what is essentially the refrain of De Rerum Natura and appear in the opening passages of 50

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Books I, II, III, and VI. They are the impetus behind Lucretius' task: to found the nature of all things upon material grounds, and thus free all humanity from the irrational grip of superstition and empty ritual, the stifling fear of cruel priests and retributive deities, and the mind-benumbing terror of eternal torment in the afterlife. Lucretius, like his Greek predecessor, Epicurus, taught that all things in the universe were composed of either atoms or void. Modern technology has converted an entire symphony or epic film into a series of ones and zeros; Lucretius argued that everything—from music to mountains to the human soul—could be similarly reduced to a binary of atoms and void. On the basis of this atomic theory, Lucretius felt that he could explain the nature of all things and account for the variety and complexity of the universe. Like his evolutionist heirs, he believed that time + chance + the swerve of the atom was all that was needed to initiate and sustain life; like his empiricist heirs, he believed that whatever knowledge we might have of this process must come fully and solely from the senses.

T. H. Huxley, defender of Humean skepticism, popularizer of Darwin's theory of evolution, and grandfather of the great agnostic, Aldous Huxley, believed, like Lucretius, that all of life can be resolvable into material building blocks. Huxley called these building blocks “protoplasm, a term that, though it may be more scientifically precise than “atoms,” is philosophically and ontologically equivalent. In his 1868 lecture, “On the Physical Basis of Life,” Huxley agrees with Lucretius that “the order of Nature is ascertainable by our faculties” and urges his audience to eschew spiritualistic terminology that is “utterly barren” and that “leads to nothing but obscurity and confusion of ideas” and to adopt instead materialistic terminology that will “help us to exercise the same kind of control over the world of thought as we already possess in respect of the material world.”

For all confirmed evolutionists (from Huxley to Sagan to Gould to Dawkins), the theory of evolution performs the same function as the atomic theory did for Lucretius, namely, to provide a natural, concrete explanation for all phenomena and thus free us from dependence on any and all supernatural theories of existence. The laws and models of the atomists and evolutionists provide their adherents with a firm but illusory sense of control and autonomy, releasing them from any degree of obligation or accountability toward forces greater than themselves. This is not to say that all such theorists are 51

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atheists; it is to say, however, that the relative existence or nonexistence of the supernatural has no direct bearing on their calculations, their theorems, or their cosmologies. Thus, though the existence of a deity (or deities) may be allowed, this deity is most often reduced to an idea of the mind (skepticism), to a removed, impersonal, uncaring force (stoicism), to a divine watchmaker who set the universe in motion but neither involves himself in nor reveals himself to that universe (deism), or to a concept of which nothing can be known for certain (agnosticism).

As a group, these thinkers are generally disciplined people: believers in science, in order, in rationalism. Though they may attend religious services, they are, in their actions, more Hellenic than JudeoChristian; they are followers not of the golden rule but of the golden mean: nothing in excess; everything in moderation. They live, in short, like Chaucer's “Doctour of Physik”: Of his diete mesurable [moderate] was he, For it was of no superfluitee, But of greet norissing and digestible.

His study was but litel on the Bible.

They are generally decent chaps, propelled by simple, practical definitions of personal happiness and impelled, through the dissemination and/or implementation of these definitions, to expand personal contentment into societal well-being.

Thus, if they are a Stoic, like Seneca, they will judge human happiness as the ability to live in conformity with nature, and will then go out of their way to teach this “good news” to anyone who will listen.

If they are a Utilitarian, like Jeremy Bentham, they will judge human happiness as the ability to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, and will then go on to establish the rudiments of a societal plan for effecting the greatest good for the greatest number. If they are heirs of both, they may, like John Stuart Mill, devote their whole lives to the betterment of society and the spreading of liberty and equality.

They will lament, as did Mill, that Rome was converted to Christianity, not by the wise, gentle, stoic Marcus Aurelius, but by the cruel, rather barbaric Constantine; and they will do their best to ensure, through their research, their writing, and their public service, that 52

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their age, usually one of transition, will find the right leaders and the right systems to usher in a better, juster, more efficient state.

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o, I neither condemn nor despise these “half-humanists” (if I may coin an admittedly prejudicial phrase). Though I do accuse most of them of traces of moral cowardice in their refusal to deal fully with the claims of an omnipotent yet personal, transcendent yet incarnate deity, I cannot fault their twin desire for personal growth and societal development. They are committed to the apprehension and propagation of truth and justice, and they believe firmly that if man could only free himself from error, superstition, and ignorance, he could establish a utopia on earth. Considered as a generic group, all these thinkers are progressives; they put their faith in the future and in the perfectibility of man.

And therein lies the tragedy. For humanism without Christianity is finally a dead end; it can offer no final answer for the yearning within, at least no real, concrete, historical answer. To the Stoic (and his various heirs), Christianity rests on a series of myths. The truth, of course, is quite the opposite. Biblical, orthodox Christianity rests firmly on a real Eden and a real Fall, that, because of a fleshly Incarnation, a bloody Crucifixion, and a physical (“flesh and blood”) Resurrection that occurred in historical space and time, will one day give way, not to a pale, cerebral enlightenment, but to a glorious metamorphosis, a transfiguration of our present bodies that is as magical and real as the transformation of a chrysalis into a butterfly or a seed into a mighty oak tree. Next to these awesome realities, the myths of humanism without Christianity (the laws of nature, the inner light, the one world government, the perfectibility of man) fade like flowers beneath a hot, dry August sun.

I do not say these things with gloating and self-satisfaction, but with sadness and regret. Indeed, had Christ never come to this earth, I would myself be a Stoic like Marcus Aurelius, an Epicurean like Lucretius, or, like Virgil, a little bit of both. I would dull slightly my feelings, control my emotions, and temper my joy so as to bring it in line with the vast, unstoppable forces of history and the cosmos. I would seek, above all things, order and equilibrium; like a good Apollonian, I would turn up my nose at all manner of Dionysian revelries, with their irrational longings and ecstatic joys. My final goal would be to move forever beyond pleasure and pain, to spend eterni53

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ty discoursing philosophy in a chatty Elysian Fields. And, of course, I would end up in limbo, in that first circle of Dante’s Inferno wherein dwell the virtuous pagans, that long green field of asphodel that promises rest without peace, contentment without joy, and fulfillment without hope.

C.S. Lewis argued that it is often positive, constructive emotions (like patriotism and maternal love), rather than negative, destructive ones (like greed and lust) that keep us away from faith in Christ.

Those caught in the grip of greed and lust, like those addicted to alcohol, know that there must be more to life than these enslaving, selftormenting emotions, but those who devote themselves to patriotism and maternal love can easily come to believe that these emotions represent the pinnacle of humanity, that they are all-sufficient as the final goals of human existence. But, of course, they are not the pinnacle. They are attractive, socially-acceptable counterfeits to that fuller love and duty that beckon us into communion with our Creator and Redeemer. Worse yet, like the “isms” discussed above, they are impostors that do not know that they are impostors, false, dispassionate messiahs that dissuade and anaesthetize their followers from extending their search beyond the limited boundaries of the material world.

And indeed, at its lowest level, all the glories of stoicism wither and fade into the seared harvest of materialism, of which, in our postRomantic world, there have been two main crops: one futile and benign, the other rapacious and malevolent.

“As an explanation of the world,” writes Chesterton in the second chapter of Orthodoxy, “materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. . . . we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out... [The materialist] understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world.” As the true Christians (and true humanists) have long pointed out, materialism knows nothing of final causes; it deals only with the simple (efficient) causes and effects of an impersonal, clock-work universe.

In the beginning, this self-limitation was a method, a tool for reaching toward truths that the superstitious multitude were reluctant or afraid to pursue—in the hands of Francis Bacon, this approach came as close as it could to true humanism. Since the late nineteenth century it has itself become a superstition, an internalized taboo that most 54

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modern thinkers are psychologically incapable of violating. In the name of rationalism, they will (quite irrationally) begin and end their inductive, a posteriori researches into the nature of reality by asserting a priori that the supernatural does not exist. Anything that violates that groundless major premise, that suggests the possibility (if not necessity) of a final cause, is rejected out of hand. Even if that suggestion of a higher reality offers the only foundation for human dignity and purpose, it must be rejected in the name of “truth.” Of course, the irony here is two-fold, since all the “isms” discussed above, all those vain strivings after truth and justice, have led, in the end, to relativism.

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he pathos, the hollowness, the futility that is the upshot of this constrictive and finally anti-human approach to wisdom is perhaps best captured in the agonizing death-throes of Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich. In Tolstoy's story, Ilyich is a vain, self-satisfied judge who, despite youthful bouts of genteel hedonism, is at heart a stoic.

He lives a life of dispassionate equilibrium that manifests itself in his just but totally impersonal treatment of his clients: in the modern worlds of business, health, and academia we would call him, simply, a professional. As the tale progresses Ilyich falls prey to a painful, deteriorating disease which eventually cuts him off from his family and his society. Isolated in his sickness, Ilyich reflects back on his life, which now appears to him to be “trivial and often nasty.” In terror and despair, he begins to question how life can be so senseless and horrible: “Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done,” it suddenly occurred to him. “But how could that be, when I did everything properly?” he replied, and immediately dismissed from his mind this, the sole solution of all the riddles of life and death, as something quite impossible.

In its relatively benign form, materialism is a dismissal of the central riddles of humanity; it refuses even to acknowledge them. Like Ivan Ilyich, it declares both them and their solutions to be impossibilities, and, by so doing, robs humanity of its spiritual dimensions.

Then, having effected this spiritual amputation, it turns its focus to the physical world of measurable sense perceptions, to progress, to commerce, to technology.

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For materialism, in its benign form, does often lead to social reform and the amelioration of many of the physical ills of society. From Bentham and Mill to Comte and Dewey, “benign materialism” has fought hard to relieve the physical world of ignorance and inequality.

But it has nourished our bellies only to leave our spirits famished; it has fed our “efficient” yearnings but starved our “final” yearnings; given us happiness, health, and success at the expense of joy, integrity, and purpose. Despite my natural Christian bias, I must admit that liberal democracy and the free market, and all the progress and freedom they have brought, are in great part an offspring of the deistic enlightenment. Still, I have the right, if not the duty, to ask, along with Thomas Carlyle (Sartor Resartus): “Will the whole Finance Ministers and Upholsterers and Confectioners of modern Europe undertake, in joint stock company, to make one Shoeblack HAPPY? They cannot accomplish it, above an hour or two; for the Shoeblack also has a Soul quite other than his stomach.”

And so I am somewhat ambivalent toward this form of materialism. It offers neither answers nor guidance to those who would seek a wider vision for humanity, who would ask those “big” questions that truly define our existence: Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose? And yet, it refrains from persecuting such seekers or preventing them from pursuing, on a personal level, at least, their spiritual goals. Of course, it will often demean and humiliate the humanist Christian, by consigning him to the same level playing field with the vegetarians and the cultists and the yogis, but the true humanist Christian, knowing that the wisdom of God is foolishness to man, will refrain from taking it personally.

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here is, however, a more malevolent face to materialism, a dark side that, rather than simply ignore the deeper aspects of man's humanity, sets out, like O'Brien in Orwell’s 1984, to crush and remake them. And, ironically, this malevolent materialism is founded not on a gloomy pessimism but on a skewed (indeed, perverse) optimism. One of the beliefs common to most of the “isms” discussed above is that man is by nature good, a belief that did not reach full philosophical and socio-political development until the eighteenth century. Jean Jacques Rousseau, out of whose single mind, it can be argued, modernism was born, was the first thinker to proclaim openly and unapologetically that man in nature is a free and 56

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noble creature, but that society corrupts him. The troubles of society, he argued, are not to be traced to sin, to the fact that mankind has fallen from grace, but to ignorance, to a lack of proper education.

While reformers like Mill set out to rectify these ills through tolerance and the freedom of ideas, others, most notably Karl Marx, turned to social planning. Society must be re-educated and returned to a state of nature in which all goods are held communally. In the case of Marx, this mistaken view of nature and man was amplified further by his materialist “faith” in the presence of an impersonal, deterministic, evolutionary force that was moving history toward this inevitable state of pure communism.

It has often been held that the philosophies of Karl Marx are noble and true, but that they were corrupted and ill-administered by Stalin and Mao and the Khmer Rouge. I am not of this opinion. Stalin and Mao and the Khmer Rouge understood well the essence of Marxism: the proletariat is naturally good but is stifled and repressed by the bourgeoisie. So far, so good; one need only, it seems, overthrow the bourgeoisie and all will be well. Unfortunately, as these disciples of Marx knew well, the overthrow of the power structure was not enough. The bourgeoisie—including, ironically, many of the intellectuals who championed socialistic ideals—was not just repressive, it was corrupt; it had lost its natural goodness and so was an impediment to the restoration of that primal communist state once populated by Rousseau's noble savages. For the Marxist project to succeed, the bourgeoisie must be purged of their corruption: either through physical labor and re-education, or, if they proved irremediably corrupt, through the firing squad. It's that simple, and, yes, that vulgar.

Chesterton was not being facetious when he argued, in the final chapter of Orthodoxy, that if “we wish to pull down the prosperous oppressor we cannot do it with the new doctrine of human perfectibility; we can do it with the old doctrine of Original Sin.” All utopian socialist plans to create a perfect world are doomed either to failure or to horror, for man is neither amenable nor adaptable to such a place. We had our tryst in the Garden, and, like Voltaire’s Candide, we quickly rejected it. Of course, at the end, a new and better Garden (a Garden that is also a Utopian City) awaits us, but we will live there only after the one who created us has supernaturally perfected us.

For now, we noble but fallen creatures (“fiery dust” as Byron called us) can only find limited happiness and rest in a state that acknowl57

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edges both the angel and the beast in man, that, in honor of our Godbreathed dignity, gives us political and economic freedom but that, knowing full well that “men are not angels,� institutes laws, customs, and checks and balances to keep us in order.

For the trouble, finally, with stoicism and its heirs, is that they hold, at once, too low and too high an opinion of man. Either, like Lucretius and the evolutionists, they, in the hope of freeing man from his religious and superstitious fears, deny his divine origins and thus leave him stranded and stifled in a meaningless, uncaring world; or, like Marx and the social reformers, they, in hopes of raising man above the beasts, create a repressive, anti-human state in which man is little more than a beast of burden. Most of the thinkers discussed above were truly inspired, people of courage and conviction, but their humanism is only half-humanism, their visions only halfvisions. They can only take us so far. Like the Ulysses of Inferno, they can, by power of reason and tenacity alone, give us a glimpse of Purgatory (atop which, according to Dante, lies Eden). But that is all.

Having caught sight of our primal home, Ulysses is at once shrouded in darkness; the rain descends, the floods come, the winds blow, and Ulysses, along with his entire rationalistic project, is pulled down to a watery tomb.

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ut it is not only by exalting the flesh over the spirit that humanity has left itself, stranded and bruised, in a meaningless and distinctly unnatural world. By too radically switching the poles, by exalting spirit over flesh, we have just as destructively cut ourselves off from our true human nature. Though pantheism, gnosticism, and legalism are diametrically opposed to stoicism, deism, and materialism, they lead, in the end, to the same barren grave.

In a section from his esoteric masterpiece, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake succinctly and efficiently sums up the nature and inter-relationship of pantheism, gnosticism, and legalism: The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.

And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity.

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Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects; thus began Priesthood.

Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.

And at length they pronounced that the Gods had ordered such things.

Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.

Now, in this passage, Blake clearly desires to drive a wedge between pantheism on the one hand, and legalism on the other. But he is too clever for his own good. For, what he actually does is to show how pantheism, when it is filtered through the philosophies of gnosticism, yields legalism. That is to say, he traces a natural progression from a system that rejects the physical in nature to a system that rejects the physical in man.

Unlike polytheism (the belief in many gods), pantheism teaches that all of nature is alive, animated by the spirit of God (or of the gods). Pantheists, especially those associated with nineteenth-century romanticism, are often said to be nature lovers, but this is an odd claim, since what they love is not so much nature as the spirit that pervades and moves through nature. For them, the physical matter of life is as much of an impediment to truth as it is to any neo-Platonic initiate. It is for this reason that those grand old pagan orgies often ended with the mutilation of the self or of others. Ecstatic rites are a means of leading us beyond the physical, not of carrying the physical up into the spiritual. The world of matter, physical nature, possesses no real integrity; it can be discarded when and if it ceases to cloak the divine. Just so, in the pantheistic free-love theories of Shelley, the individual, physical woman ceases to please or even to hold his attention once the “Spirit of Intellectual Beauty” is perceived to have left her and moved on to some other individual, physical woman.

To return to the passage from Blake, we begin to see now how the human institution of Priesthood—which flows out of gnosticism and into legalism—is not a violation of the tenets of pantheism, but an extension of them. Since the Gods and Geniuses of which Blake speaks are not, like Christ, incarnate (they are merely clothed by the woods, rivers, and mountains), they may just as well dwell in laws and theorems as in cities and nations. Indeed, as the final nature of reality is pure spirit, what better receptacle than an abstract idea to 59

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house that reality. After all, there was never really an incarnational relationship between the mental deity and its object.

Of course, as Blake so well realized, once this conversion from animate tree to abstract law was made, gnosticism—the belief, in part, that truth can be known, understood, and therefore possessed only by a small, elite band of gnostics (Greek for “knowers”)—was the natural result. The vulgar mass, who responded well to idolatry (worshipping god in and through a tree), couldn't be expected to fathom this new idolatry (worshipping god in and through a code of laws and/or gnostic sayings), and so the tyranny of the many-whodo-not-comprehend by a coterie of the those-in-the-know (Priests) was let loose on the earth. This, in turn, leads to legalism in two forms: one for the masses; one for the elite.

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he vulgar form of legalism manifests itself in a divided (today we might say compartmentalized) spiritual life. The ignorant laymen, cut off from the inner mysteries of faith, abandon themselves to a bodily form of existence. Yet, even here, they are not allowed, as perhaps the pagans were, to fool themselves into believing that their bestial life is in any way a return to innocence: to Eden or the Golden Age. Legalistic law codes (whether “Christian” or otherwise) tell them that their bodily pleasures are intrinsically evil, that they should mortify, not indulge the flesh. And yet, at the same time, the codes, and the “knowers” who enforce them, let it be known that the vulgar are incapable of even approaching such a state of ascetic devotion. Hence, the divided life: periods of strict fasting, penance, and prayers to saints—performed with little to no understanding of the spiritual nature of these acts—alternate with bouts of physical excess. The flesh is first hated, then pandered to; feelings of guilt, paranoia, and self-disgust prevent any real peace or rest, yielding only anger, despair, and, finally, apathy. In such an environment, inquisitions and witch hunts naturally thrive.

The effects of legalism on the elite are no less soul-crushing. The “knower” also lives a divided life. If he is an extreme ascetic like Simeon Stylites (who spent decades living atop a tall, narrow pillar) he will so despise and mortify his flesh that his fleshly “triumphs” and his physical pain are all he will dwell on for most of the day. If he is a Manichean (as Augustine was before his conversion) he will view the flesh as something into which the spirit has fallen and been 60

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trapped and will believe that by eating certain foods, he can free pieces of this divine spirit. He will take a vow of chastity, not, like Paul, that he may devote his full time to the ministry of Christ, but because he thinks the flesh worthless; and then, for the same reason, he will often violate his vow to engage in orgiastic behavior devoid of all love and commitment.

Finally, if he is a modern gnostic, like William Blake or Thomas Carlyle, he will call for the death of individual selfhood while, simultaneously, becoming himself an irascible, almost maniacal egocentrist. Thus, though Carlyle (Sartor Resartus) defines the “first preliminary moral Act” as the “Annihilation of Self,” and though Blake (Milton) has his hero cry out that he must “put off / In Self annihilation all that is not of God alone: / To put off Self & all I have ever & ever Amen,” they both spent their mature years developing their own obscure, highly-personalized, finally incomprehensible systems of salvation. Like so many other gnostics, Blake and Carlyle set out to counter and attack the Christ-less humanism of Enlightenment deism and Victorian positivism; unfortunately, rather than do so from a humanist Christian perspective—as would Coleridge in philosophy, Newman in theology, and Browning in poetry—they chose to go to the other extreme of a hollow Christianity stripped of its humanistic roots. It is no surprise, then, that just as the Man they worshipped was more a vital force, a power of instinct and imagination than a flesh-and-blood self, so the Christ they worshipped was a Spirit Christ who had little to do with the very historical, very physical God-Man born in a manger at Bethlehem.

Beneath gnosticism's low view of the body/self, there has always lurked a belief that the flesh is an unfit receptacle for divine meaning or presence, a view that must, in the end, lead to a rejection of the Incarnation. Thus, in Book V, Chapter 10 of his Confessions, Augustine explains, clearly and directly, how the Manichean’s teaching that the flesh is irredeemably corrupt made any orthodox notion of the Incarnation seem untenable: “I did not believe that a nature such as his [Christ's] could have taken birth from the Virgin Mary unless it were mingled with her flesh; and, if it were such as I imagined it to be, I could not see how it could be mingled with her flesh without being defiled. So I dared not believe in the incarnation, for fear that I should be compelled to believe that the flesh had defiled him.” Here, in a nutshell, Augustine defines the heresy of docetism, the belief that 61

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Christ was divine but not human, a heresy that lies at the heart of all post-Christian gnosticism, just as Arianism, the belief that Christ was human but not divine, lies at the heart of deism.

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ut perhaps the most destructive element of gnosticism is not its legalistic view of the flesh but its final rejection of the integrity of the individual. Many, though not all, believers who champion soul over body, who strip humanism away from Christianity, end up believing, in one form or another, in the transmigration of souls. In modern-day America, where this belief has come into vogue, there have been novels and films touting romantic tales of reincarnation. Of course, reincarnation is about as unromantic a teaching as possible. Love in its highest sense marks a moving out of oneself towards another, but that movement presupposes two fixed identities that maintain their integrity even as they move toward each other. Such a high view of love is profoundly and essentially incarnational; it parallels closely the core Christian belief that when God initiated his greatest act of love by moving out of himself to become fully the man Jesus, he yet continued to be fully God. But if reincarnation is true, then this foundational integrity is just a passing, ephemeral thing. For, in the final analysis, reincarnation not only teaches that the body will, in the end, be “shuffled off,” but that the personality, the selfhood, will also be discarded at death. The “doctrine” of reincarnation, whether explicitly or not, depicts the soul as a sort of pitcher filled with water. At death, this water—which represents the personality, hopes, dreams, and memories of the deceased individual—is poured out, and new water (a new personality) is poured in. Indeed, in the Platonic version of reincarnation, those souls designated to return to the earth must drink of the water of Lethe (the river of forgetfulness) before they can receive their new bodies and be reborn as new individuals. Of course, many reincarnationists believe that some drops of memory persist into the next life (hence the phenomenon of déjà vu), but, as the core of the personality has been effaced, these drops have little final meaning, and offer no real hope for the preservation of personhood after death.

This leads us, finally, to a belief that is at once the equivalent and the obverse of reincarnation, a belief that, significantly, appears both in stoicism and gnosticism: the one soul. In this teaching, the departed soul, rather than being emptied and refilled, is taken out of the 62

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human world altogether to be merged into a formless conglomerate of souls. This belief, which is essentially monistic, can be adhered to both by those who, like stoics, see nature and her laws as the single unifying principle in the cosmos (such people speak of the dead as having become one with the universe), and those who, like gnostics, view God as that principle (and speak of the dead as having returned to that divine but impersonal force that flows through all things).

Thus, both the stoic Marcus Aurelius and the modern New-Age gnostic speak of a one soul into which we all will be assimilated.

That is why the Transcendentalist-Unitarian Emerson, whose view of body and soul is imbalanced in both directions, is one of the great champions and popularizers of the one soul. And, indeed, Emerson is more to the point, since he is a double heir of both humanism without Christianity and Christianity without humanism. Only such a thinker could (in “The American Scholar”) make the fine sounding yet absurd statement that Know Thyself and Study Nature are finally the same dictum: a statement which can only be true if one overspiritualizes (and personalizes) nature or over-naturalizes (and objectifies) man. Either way, man loses his integrity as a unique individual whose distinct personality and memories and dreams will be preserved for eternity, not in the form of a disembodied spirit wellsuited to conglomeration, but in the form of a glorious Resurrection Body, a body that will allow us, at least those of us in heaven, to relate perfectly and intimately with all of the universe while yet retaining our God-given and God-valued personhood.

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he central and wholly unique Christian teaching of the Resurrection Body is a glorious one indeed, and yet, as I have tried to show, it—along with the wider humanist Christian vision— is incompatible with numerous ideals that have exerted great force in the west. These ideals, as we have seen, include the following: any doctrine that denies the full divinity or full humanity of Christ; any related doctrine that denies either the special creation of man in the image of God or the integrity of physical reality; any teaching that either eliminates original sin or claims that the flesh is irredeemably corrupt; any belief that, directly or indirectly, makes God inconsequential to the creation of the universe and/or the movement of history; any flirtation with reincarnation or the one soul; any system that forces all men to conform to the same ideal or to perform the 63

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same legalistic actions. All of these beliefs, in one way or another, prevent us from growing fully into the men and women that God created us to be. They either retard our growth, making us less than human, or they pervert our growth, making us something other than human. And they all spring from an impulse that drives a wedge between the physical and spiritual sides of our being.

Throughout this essay, I have, rather loosely, labeled these two impulses as humanism without Christianity and Christianity without humanism; however, as I prepare to close, I would suggest two alternate labels for these misguided (or, better, half-true) impulses: Hellenism and Hebraism. In the final section of Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold draws a well-known distinction between two historical and philosophical forces to which he gives the names Hellenism and Hebraism. Hellenism, which prefers thinking to doing, strives always to “see things as they really are,” and to foster within a “spontaneity of consciousness.” Hebraism, on the other hand, prefers doing to thinking, and, through legalistic “conduct and obedience,” seeks to develop a “strictness of conscience.” To the Hellenist (for whom ignorance is the main obstacle), man is a “gentle and simple being, showing the traces of a noble and divine nature”; to the Hebraist (for whom sin is the obstacle), he is “an unhappy chained captive, labouring with groanings that cannot be uttered to free himself from the body of this death.”

It is clear by the end of his discourse that Arnold prefers Hellenism to Hebraism, and hopes to see it achieve the ascendancy in England, but for the humanist Christian neither of these forces alone will raise up man to the high state of dignity for which he was created. Unless we come to view ourselves as both noble and chained (made in God's image but fallen), we will either underestimate or overestimate our potential. Neither the Hellenist nor the Hebraist really wants God to take an active role in his life—one is too busy thinking, the other too busy working—and neither will ever fully accept his grace: for the former doesn't think he needs it, and the latter thinks he can earn it on his own. But the truth is that neither clear thought nor hard work, if we trust only to those things, will draw us to the higher truths of Christ. Arnold argues that Hellenism reached its zenith in the Renaissance while Hebraism reached its zenith in Christianity. He would have done better to say that the two forces can only reach true fulfillment when they merge to form a Renaissance (humanist) Chris64

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tianity with the power to understand and accept a Savior who must suffer in his body the penalty of sin that our souls may be cleansed and that we may see the kingdom of God. For the Hellenist seeks wisdom (if Christ is to be heeded, he better show us his clarity of vision) and the Hebraist seeks a miracle (if Christ is to be obeyed, he better have the power to demand it), but the humanist Christian looks to Christ crucified, foolishness to the Hellenist and a stumbling block to the Hebraist. The Hebraic “strictness of conscience” results, finally, in a letter-legalism that kills; the Hellenic “spontaneity of consciousness” yields, finally, a nonincarnate spirit that fritters itself away in unrealized and unrealizable utopias. Neither can fully save nor fully dignify. They can only leave their followers to wander, like the Arnold of “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” “between two worlds, one dead / The other powerless to be born.”

Louis Markos (www.Loumarkos.com), Professor in En glish and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist Univers ity, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities; his books include From Achilles to Christ (IVP), Apologetics for the 21st Ce ntury (Crossway), and Literature: A Student’s Guide (Crossway).

His On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to Vi rtue with Tolkien and Lewis is due out from Moody in October 2012.

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Matthew Milliner

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ummarizing the latest round of complaints about higher education in The New York Review of Books, Peter Brooks describes an “indiscriminate flailing about in criticism of the university, some of it justified, much of it misdirected, and some pernicious.” Certain authors appear to be shocked that education doesn’t automatically make one a moral person. Others are bewildered that the effects of a liberal arts degree can’t be quantified like in any other industry, as if students were products on an assembly line. Indeed, in the last half-decade, observers of American academia have identified two equally lamentable pitfalls: expecting too much from a university education, and not expecting enough. But while critiques of both romanticism and shortsightedness in education need to be made, rarely do commentators on higher education appear to grasp the full contour of what has been lost. It remains strange that universities, inhabited by a disproportionate number of historians, usually limit themselves to seriously investigating the last century or so when diagnosing their malaise.

Medieval wisdom on education can provide some missing perspective, regarding both what learning is, how it happens, and the setting in which it best occurs.

In Book VII of The Republic, Socrates defended knowledge as sought after “with a view to the beautiful and good,” contrasting someone who deals with numbers for the sake of buying and selling with one who contemplates the mystery of numbers themselves. Ar66

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istotle perpetuated this liberal tradition (as opposed to servile tradition), defining ‘liberal’ as “that which tends to enjoyment… where nothing accrues of consequence beyond the using.”

Education’s end, for Aristotle, was the pleasure of knowing itself.

Cicero agreed, adding that the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake was “a condition of our happiness.” Such truth, he suggested, is the first thing pursued “as soon as we escape from the pressure of necessary cares.” This enterprise, as systematized by Marcus Varro and fortified by Augustine and Boethius, generated Western civilization’s curricular DNA, which we know as the liberal arts. Probably the best modern articulation of this tradition came with John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University (1854), which—I am sorry to report— have made no appearance at all in the most prominent harping about the humanities. Newman, without requiring religious commitment, articulated the Socratic inheritance exquisitely: Truth has two attributes—beauty and power; while Useful Knowledge is the possession of truth as powerful, Liberal Knowledge is the apprehension of it as beautiful… That alone is liberal knowledge, which stands on its own pretension, which is independent of sequel, expects no complement, refuses to be informed (as it is called) by any end, or absorbed into any art, in order duly to present itself to our contemplation.

If Newman is right, then to justify the liberal arts, which would now include what we call the humanities, as instrumentally useful, is also to betray them.

Should this principle—knowledge for its own sake—be understood, the amount of time it takes to obtain a degree in the humanities comes into focus. In his book on higher education, The Marketplace of Ideas (2010), Louis Menand complains, “You can become a lawyer in three years, an M.D. in four years, and an M.D.-Ph.D. in six years, but the median time to a doctoral degree in the humanities disciplines is nine years.” But it is here that the medieval perspective illuminates, making nearly a decade of study seem not ridiculous, but just about right. Culled from Marcia Colish’s essay, “Teaching and Learning in Medieval Paris”, here is what it took to get a degree at that institution which Newman called “the glory of the middle ages,” the University of Paris:

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The theologian’s training… involved a two-part course following the arts degree, lasting at least eight years and deferring his theological license to his thirty-fifth year at the earliest—an education more grueling and protracted than that of any other learned professional. First came four years of [extremely rigorous] Bible study… On completion of his biblical course, the young theologian taught Scripture for two years, alternating lectures on Old Testament and New Testament books… Next came a two-year course in systematic theology based on the Sentences of Peter Lombard… After his course on the Sentences, the candidate taught them for two years… Then came three or four more years as a regular participant in theological disputation and preaching, his final oral examination, the award of doctorate, and his admission to the theological faculty as a licensed master.

Menand points out that ABD (all-but-dissertation) teaching in American universities today is a co-dependent, potentially exploitative arrangement that benefits both the University, because graduate students come cheaply, and the graduate students, because there are not many jobs. But according to Colish, the twelfth century was not so different. Learning and teaching mixed then as they do today, if for no other reason than that the two skills are closely related partners in the enterprise of contemplation.

So what’s the rush? If—as the Parisians once believed—examining the created order (to say nothing of its Creator) is an ennobling venture worth pursuing for its own sake, then the enterprise demands time. To be sure, a stipend-dispensing University need not formally sponsor all such contemplative activity, and Menand’s call for shortening our contemporary degree-granting process is worth consideration. But extended study of the humanities may not work within the anti-metaphysical framework that has been advanced in select quarters of academia for the last several decades. If the music of the spheres is not music, but unending dissonance, then even the Britishstyle three-year Ph.D. is far too long.

In regard to the pressing issue of employment, Marcia Colish’s medieval comparanda are illuminating. Having obtained his license, the University of Paris’s new doctor “proceeded to deliver an inaugural lecture, and taught for at least two years at that level. Whether or not he acquired a coveted chair, he often moved on with startling rapidity to ecclesiastical preferment or administrative work in a religious order; theologians rarely grew old in the schools.” Turns out that in twelfth-century Paris, it was hard to find that tenure-track job as well.

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Part of the reason for the academy’s present acridity is that many have treated doctoral programs as glorified vocational institutes— getting the degree to get the job. When the job becomes unavailable, the degree, and the years spent acquiring it, become retroactively pointless.

To be sure, many who complain about academia are fully justified: They’ve been given a raw deal. Talent does not always rise to the top.

The latest fusion of fashion and mediocrity gets tenure, while superior minds get shattering disappointment. Yet if Plato’s intimations were sound, time spent in the self-justifying humanities is time well spent, whether or not it results in sustained employment.

It is said that Euclid once demonstrated a beautiful mathematical theorem, after which a young man asked, “But what do I get by learning these things?” Euclid famously replied, “Toss that man a coin since he must make a gain out of what he learns.” Like that young man, many critics of American higher education want their coin, and they want it now.

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or a less instrumental learning alternative, consider Augustine’s perspective in De Magistro, a dialogue in the form of a conversation between him and his son. De Magistro is a surprising treatise. For starters, we find a fourth-century thinker accurately diagnosing the modern/postmodern trajectory that has paralyzed so many educators today: For just as it is proper to assent to things well explored and perused, so it is perilous to consider things known which are not known. Because there is a danger, when those things are often upset which we supposed would stand firmly and endure, lest we fall into such distrust and hatred of reason that it might seem that confidence in evident truth itself is not warranted.

Following modernity’s epistemic avarice, contemporary thought has indeed fallen, at points, into a “distrust and hatred of reason.”

But Augustine not only diagnoses this intellectual condition, he provides a way forward as well.

Charles Murray disparages what he calls educational romanticism, the assumption that all students are potential savants. But one of the reasons it has had such a grip in American schooling is that it con69

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tains an element of truth. Indeed, student-centered, “you can do it” approaches have some value, and Augustine agrees. “Who is so stupidly curious,” he asks, “as to send his son to school in order that he may learn what the teacher thinks?”

Those who are called pupils consider within themselves whether what has been explained has been said truly… Thus they learn, and when the interior truth makes known to them that true things have been said, they applaud, but without knowing that instead of applauding teachers they are applauding learners.

The difference between Augustine and educational romanticism, however, is that the “inner oracle” for Augustine is not the latent power of the unaided student. Instead, this power comes from God: “He who is said to reside in the interior man is Christ, that is, the unchangeable excellence of God and His everlasting wisdom, which every rational soul does indeed consult.” While unquestionably Christian, Augustine’s view is not strictly sectarian—he refers to every rational soul—and combines skepticism in the power of mere words with confidence in a power higher than any human teacher.

Nearly a millennium later, in a treatise also entitled De Magistro, Thomas Aquinas concretized Augustine’s teaching philosophy with two illustrations. First, Aquinas uses a horticultural analogy to caution against Augustine’s Platonism. “Knowledge does preexist in the student,” Aquinas admits, though “not completely but in a seminal state.” Aquinas broadens the role of a good teacher, who is actively to foster an environment where such “seeds” of knowledge can grow: “Now while it is true that no created power has implanted these knowledge ‘seeds’ in us, still the action of a created power [i.e., a teacher] can realize the potential of those seeds.”

Aquinas’ second analogy is a medical one. A physician, according to Aquinas, cannot heal the body. Instead, a physician creates the stimulants and conditions for the body’s healing itself. In the same way, the teacher cannot inspire, illuminate, or impart genuine knowledge—but diligent teachers can greatly improve the conditions for such illumination. For Aquinas, the teacher plays a somewhat larger role within Augustine’s nearly mystical view of studentcentered learning.

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In our time, Stanley Fish (Save the World on Your Own Time, 2008) chastised modern professors for attempting a “character transplant” in students who had “signed on for something more modest, to wit, a course of instruction,” and Anthony Kronman (Education’s End, 2007), laments, “I have watched the question of life’s meaning lose its status as a subject of organized academic instruction.” But in their focus on the individual student within the larger horizons permitted by faith, Augustine and Aquinas navigate between the Scylla of romanticism and the Charybdis of shortsightedness in our contemporary educational debates.

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ut it is one thing to expound upon the mystery of learning, and another to discuss the practical conditions necessary for such learning to occur. It is here that ancient and contemporary educational practices may seem most disparate. In an essay titled “Alexandria: A School for Training in Virtue”, Robert Louis Wilken relates that the first-century teacher Apollonius of Tyana gave up on lecturing to large audiences, insisting, “No discourse can be really useful, unless it is delivered to a single individual.” Plutarch agreed, adding, “Admonitions to specific persons produce the most useful fruit.”

The Catechetical school of Alexandria, which drew on Apollonius and Plutarch, understood this well. Learning had to be intimate, because only in this way could a “character transplant” (so distasteful to Stanley Fish) occur. In The Tutor, for example, Clement of Alexandria argued that the role of the teacher was to better students’ souls, not just their minds. Intellectual training certainly followed, but the Alexandrians understood that if knowledge were not planted in the seedbed of wisdom, it would either never take root, or—far worse— grow into something dangerous. From Alexandria we learn that ethics was never a sub-discipline of the educational curriculum, but was, in a way, its entirety.

What’s more, the primary medium for such instruction was not a course, but friendship. Origen, Alexandria’s greatest teacher, understood friendship to be that “affable and affectionate disposition which is shown in the [teacher’s] words and his associations.” A chief metaphor used by Origen’s students to describe their teacher’s legendary effectiveness was the friendship of David and Jonathan described in the Bible. That very scene holds an honored place in the 71

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finest visual manifesto for liberal arts renewal that I am aware of— the window scheme of the Princeton University Chapel.

Pursuing the ideal of friendship in education returns us to John Henry Newman, who lived it for two decades as a tutor at Oriel College, where the University of Oxford contracted to a human scale.

Christopher Olaf Blum’s essay Newman’s Collegiate Ideal explains that Newman’s focus on friendship enabled the university to be “not a chance collection of individuals building their careers, but a kind of fellowship, even a friendship, whose characteristic activity was to ‘rejoice in the truth’ (gaudium de veritate).” Common meals were the soil where acquaintanceship grew into friendship, which Aristotle understood to be among the highest of life’s rewards. Genuine learning without the “pure and clear atmosphere of thought” fostered by true friendship was difficult to achieve. Like Origen, Newman understood that “personal influence… was the means of propagating the truth.”

In an age of unmanageable class sizes and overworked (and out of work) professors, advocating such an intimate scale of virtue-based learning may seem naive. Yet such ideals are probably closer to most of our own learning histories than we might think. If a given class distilled more than mere information, but instead positively altered the trajectory of our lives, some kind of friendship probably played a role. Wherever our own education occurred, or is occurring, transformative learning continues to happen as it always has—through communities of friendships upheld by some measure of mutual virtue. Even within oversized, impersonal institutions, such communities tend to arise spontaneously.

The bloated modern educational system, what Russell Kirk called “Behemoth State University,” may be due for collapse. But so far as I am aware, there is no university where learning has been instrumentalized without remainder, or where the mystery of learning as described by Augustine and Aquinas has been successfully prohibited, or where the Alexandrian ideal of communities of virtue seeking truth through friendships has been effectively proscribed. Whether in the form of a well-managed classroom, a religious fellowship, an Honors College, or one of the university’s increasing numbers of satellite institutions, communities of renewal in higher education have either recovered these principles, or never lost them in the first place.

We can wait for massive top-down reforms to one day fix our trou72

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bled universities, or we can continue practicing such ideals wherever we are today. We can wait for massive top-down reforms to one day fix our troubled universities, or we can continue practicing such medieval—and surprisingly modern—ideals wherever we are today.

Matthew Milliner earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University and is Assistant Professor of art history at Wheaton College. He blogs at millinerd.com .

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Walter Russell Mead Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocra cy,

by Christopher Hayes, Crown, 2012.

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hristopher Hayes has written an interesting book which represents an effort by a talented and thoughtful left thinker to grapple with the nature of contemporary American populism. Hayes is an interesting guy and his perspective a few steps to the left of the center-left technocratic consensus of the mainstream media allows him to make some interesting observations about where things stand in the United States today. I get the impression he’s still in the group that thinks we could preserve the blue social model if we just willed hard enough; that was my view for maybe fifteen or even twenty years after I first started writing about the unraveling of post-war American liberalism and what I now call the blue social model back in the 1980s. The old system worked so well for so many people that it seemed to a great many people who cared about progress and democracy that we just needed to keep tweaking this model to approach an almost ideal society through a smooth and gradual process of incremental social change.

The failure of that social democratic future to materialize, and the set of changes which have made capitalist society much more competitive and riskier, pose a huge set of challenges that the left is still 75

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trying to master. Intellectually it is looking for a theory and programatically it is looking for a workable political program. So far in my view there is no real sign of progress on this front; rather than trying to resuscitate a political vision whose economic, historic and moral foundations are irretrievably lost, the left (like everybody else) has to come to take on a much more difficult task. We all need to understand how the new global information economy works, and think our way through to some kind of understanding of what kind of free, just and sustainable social organization can be raised on these still-emerging and still poorly understood foundations. That has to happen, in my view, before either the left or the right can offer meaningful political ideas about how the new society and new world should be governed.

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hat Hayes does in Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy that is so useful and valuable is bring some good old fashioned left skepticism to the McNamara-Obama vision of a technocratic, meritocratic society run by the “best and the brightest.” What we loosely call American liberalism today is made up of several quite distinct strands; two of the most important are social populism and technocratic progressivism. The social populism side of the left comes out of the agrarian and labor protests of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This was a mix of traditional American individualism and populism with a sense that the “little people” had to band together to bring down the big beasts of the capitalist jungle: the Carnegies, the Morgans, the Rockefellers and so on. The monopolists and the big capitalists were such a danger to the freedom, dignity and economic well being of ordinary Americans that the little guys were going to have to band together and act through politics before the trusts and the corporate elites crushed the life out of the American dream.

The technocratic progressives were a very different group of people, culturally and socially. They were (and are) upper middle class and upper class reformers: good government types. They saw their role as to curb the excesses of both the big beasts in the capitalist jungle and the unwashed masses of the populist movements. People like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (who hated each other on a personal level but whose social visions had much in common) thought that most of society’s problems were technical rather than 76

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ideological. Good administration and effective, non-political management by well educated technocrats could solve society’s most important social and economic problems by finding a middle way between the angry left and the greedy kingpins of capitalism.

There was always a tension here. The technocrats sold themselves to the populists as the means through which the populist dreams could be achieved, but the society the technocrats wanted—and want—was very different from the one populists thought they were building. For the populists, equality was the point. They wanted an America in which ordinary people ran their own lives in their own way—as much as this was possible in a modern industrial society with all its complex dependencies.

But the technocrats were—and are—committed to the concept of rule by the best and the brightest. This is not a temporary stage on the road to a higher and ultimately more equal stage of society to gentry liberals. It is a natural division of power and responsibility based on innate differences in human beings. Gentry liberals believe that people who score high on SATs, do well in college, and get through the Ph.D. process are, well, smarter than people who don’t do those things and that society will be better off if the dumb people get out of the way and let the smart ones make the important decisions. (And the unimportant ones too—like New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg telling us how big a Slurpee should be.)

This is, sort of, what Thomas Jefferson meant by a natural aristocracy. The meritocratic social ideal is that there should be an open competition to determine who is best. There should be good schools that ensure that the children of non-elite families get real educational opportunity. Alumni privilege and other extraneous factors should not affect admissions decisions at the best schools. From this process will emerge the cadre of talented, public spirited and able leaders who, to put it in the blunt, nasty way that liberal technocrats think is horribly tactless but actually true, can best make the decisions that the average person is too stupid to understand.

The “open meritocracy” paradigm is very powerful in America today and, to some degree, we couldn’t live without it. William F. Buckley (and I) might rather be governed by names selected at random from the phone book than by the Harvard faculty, but nobody wants their airplane piloted or their kidney operation performed on that basis.

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But, and this is what Hayes is pointing out, there are a couple of problems with meritocracy in practice. The first is, evidently, that it doesn’t always work as advertised. The “best and the brightest” organized the financial market reforms of the Clinton years that led to the Bush bubbles and the Obama doldrums, and neither the wars in Vietnam by the Kennedy-era Great Meritocrats nor the Bush and Obama-era wars were triumphs of social engineering.

The second problem is that in the end, meritocracy doesn’t promote democracy. The meritocrats may have won their positions through an open competition and their kids (with some advantages to be sure) are still going to have to struggle to make it into top colleges and so on, but once they win—they’re an elite. And their perceptions about how hard they competed and how fair the competition was makes them more smug and more entitled than the old elites ever were.

The new elites don’t feel guilty about their power; they didn’t inherit it. They earned it. They are smarter than everybody else and they deserve to rule—and in their own minds at least, they also deserve the perks that power brings. Money, fame, access: bring it on.

Wealth and entitlement corrupts the meritocratic elite. Members of this elite can no longer see society easily from the perspective of ordinary people and so their decisions increasingly reflect their own interests rather than those of the people they are supposed to represent. They lose the ability and perhaps also the will to be impartial arbiters between the masses and power; they identify with power and start to use their own influence to tilt the system farther and farther away from the populists and toward the old power centers.

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his critique of the meritocratic ideal from the left speaks also to the populism of the right; indeed, while Hayes loathes what he understands of the ideology and political program of the Tea Party as much as any left intellectual in America, he has far more emotional sympathy for its hatred of the überclass than many writers on his side of the spectrum. There’s much to be said about this subject. But rather than get into all that, there’s another point I’d like to make. This has to do with another dimension of today’s American meritocracy that I think is deeply problematic: atheism.

I’m not about to argue that all religious people are nicer or better than all atheists. And there are many atheists who avoid some or all 78

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of the pitfalls I’m about to explore. There are lots of atheistic meritocrats in America today who I consider friends and for whose achievements and character I have both admiration and respect. And let me also point out that I’m talking much more about atheism in an American context than in a European one. The dynamic Whiggish optimism that is such a deep element of American culture needs the kind of balance that, classically, comes from a theologically grounded sense both of Original Sin and of God’s transcendence of all human history and thought.

But caveats and cautions aside, there are certain consequences of success in a meritocracy that put people, and especially American people, without a strong religious faith at great risk. We can see today in American life some of the consequences that come when a powerful but to some degree godless social elite lacks the spiritual resources and vocabulary that would better equip it for its role.

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he first problem is arrogance. A practicing and committed as opposed to a theoretical Christian (and I talk about Christians rather than Jews, Muslims or Hindus or other people because this is what I know best, not because I’m trying to say that only Christians derive these kinds of benefits from their faith) who succeeds in a meritocratic structure has all kinds of inner convictions and reflections that can keep his or her arrogance within limits. This doesn’t always work; the case of Woodrow Wilson is one that we should all study.

For a Christian, the belief in the equal value of all people in God’s eyes is a bedrock belief. Every human being is created directly by God; every human soul is beloved by God. Human beings are not all alike, and we have different gifts and different abilities. But each of us was created to be exactly who and what we are by the Author of the Universe, and we believe that God loves and values the child with Downs’ syndrome as much as he loves and values the Nobelprize winning economist.

That’s right. God thinks Trig Palin is just as marvelous and wonderful and adorable as Paul Krugman. The homeless old guy with the shakes down by the subway is as important to God’s vision for the world as the Rhodes Scholar passing him by.

For the Christian, what matters about you isn’t, in the last analysis, your gifts or your talents. God uses our gifts, but he doesn’t need 79

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them. He can raise up a million children smarter than you, faster than you, and more ambitious than you, should he so choose. He’s made you an intellectual, an artist, or an entrepreneur because his love wants you to join him in co-creating the world, not because the world wouldn’t be rich and beautiful (and efficiently governed) without you.

Moreover, God’s knowledge, his “talents”, are so much infinitely greater than your own that the intellectual distance between a Newton and a mentally retarded child is, quite seriously, insignificant in his eyes. St. Thomas Aquinas, widely considered to be one of the greatest intellects who ever lived, said that in the light of God’s presence, everything he had ever written was like so much straw. And that’s about right: God doesn’t think any of us are particularly smart, though he does, I suspect, sometimes think we’re cute when we start spouting off.

The kind of arrogance, vanity and inflamed self-esteem that flatters the imagination and corrupts the spirit of the successful meritocrat needs to be checked and humbled. Being constantly reminded on the one hand of the infinite gap between one’s own limited talents and vision and the perspective of Almighty God, and on the other of the radical equality with which God judges and loves the human race is a healthy counterweight to the flattery of the world and the smugness that comes with success.

But there’s more. Serious Christians have to struggle continually against the temptation to view “merit” uncritically. To begin with, any gifts that you have are just that—gifts. Your ability to score 800 on the math section of the SAT is something for which you can personally take no credit whatever. It’s like a pretty face or perfect pitch: it’s very nice to have, but it’s God’s sovereign choice, not your sublime inner nature, that is responsible for this. And of course, he doesn’t give his gifts without a purpose.

And guess what: the reason God made you smart wasn’t to make you rich and to make you special and to allow you to swank around in the White House or at Davos. He made you smart so that you could serve—and the people he wants you to serve are exactly all those people you feel so arrogantly superior to. At the end of the day, they aren’t going to be judged on how much they deferred to you, respected you, and handed over to you all those rewards you felt you deserved. God isn’t particularly interested in what the Paul 80

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Krugmans of this world think though he wants us all to do our best to get things right; he’s interested in how much Paul Krugman and the rest of us loved and sought to serve one another.

You are going to be judged on how much you did for the “ordinary folks.” Were those Downs’ syndrome kids any better off because of the way you used your mathematical and reasoning gifts? Were the poor better fed and better housed because of the use you made of the talents God trusted to your care? Did you use your power and the freedom that came with it to help others live freer and more dignified lives, or did you parade your superiority around like a pompous and egotistical ass, oppressing and alienating the world when you should have been enlightening it?

The serious Christian meritocrat is going to spend a lifetime being haunted by the warnings of Jesus. God actually judges the gifted and the successful by a tougher standard than he uses with the “ordinary” and the poor. The popular pundit on the television talk show needs to go home and tremble on his knees when he or she reflects on the judgment that is in store. The corporate CEO needs to lie awake at night wondering whether his business dealings have been fair; God will demand an accounting for the wages he offered to his janitors and his employees overseas. As you sit at the five star restaurant with the celebrity chef, enjoying a convivial dinner with congenial, intelligent people, you need to be haunted by the specter of the homeless outside on the street; God not only cares as much about what they eat as he cares about your dinner—he is going to ask you one fine day just what you did to make sure they were served.

Are you speaking the conventional wisdom to applause and esteem? Then know that God warns you of the judgment to come: the dreadful words of the Gospel of Luke (chapter 6, verses 24-26) must always echo in your ears: But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation.

Woe unto you that are full ! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep. Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets.

Finally, the Christian meritocrat must live in the light of the doctrine of Original Sin. Often seen as some dark, dismal dogma of the bigoted and the misanthropic, this idea may be the single most nec81

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essary piece of mental equipment a successful person needs to lead a genuinely constructive life in America today.

Original Sin is the idea that human beings, despite all their talents and capacities, are deeply and hopelessly flawed. Like water flows downhill, we are constantly turning toward our own selfish goals.

We are vain, jealous, petty, self-seeking. Our judgement twists away from what’s right to what benefits us and our side. We can’t keep our fingers off the scales. It’s not just our moral choices that go awry. Our thinking isn’t straight. What we think is logic is often self interest.

When our interests and our passions are engaged, we lose all mental clarity just when we need it most.

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t the collective level, this explains why meritocracy cannot in itself be an answer to the political problems of the human race. There are no Platonic philosopher kings, no unmoved movers, who will judge all things and all men clear and true. And the problem isn’t simply our ignorance and partial knowledge; it’s the flaw in our natures that means that our intellects are often the least dependable when we need them most.

At the individual level, for the successful American who has gone through the right schools, won the merit badges and made it through to a position of power, influence and either affluence or great wealth, a lively sense of original sin helps protect you from the evils and temptations to which you exposed.

First, you must acknowledge and remember your own sin. Original sin is not just an abstraction; every human being has done sad and shameful things. We all have weak and shaky bits of our character.

We all fall short of what we could have done and should have done; we have all wasted and misused the gifts intrusted to us. A serious Christian life keeps these truths before you as in daily prayer and meditation you weigh your thoughts and deeds by God’s standard and tremble at what you see.

Success makes you smug and self satisfied, and this makes you less fit for any useful purpose in the world. Christians today understand that the Pharisees as depicted in the New Testament do not reflect the insight and wisdom of the Jewish religious tradition that developed from the Biblical era, but without projecting this picture onto our Jewish friends and associates, the picture of the Biblical Pharisee is one to keep before us always. Legends of righteousness in their 82

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own minds, revered by the ignorant multitude, teachers of the law who applied intellectual discipline to difficult social and moral questions: what is the Pharisee but the meritocrat of an earlier day?

Think of the one who stood in the synagogue to pray, “God, I thank you that I am not like other men–robbers, evildoers, adulterers–or even like this tax collector.” (Luke 18:11) Is this not a picture of the smug meritocrat who drives a Prius, eats locally sourced organic foods, has impeccably progressive views, is effortlessly brilliant in the practice of a complex profession and for every occasion knows the right attitude to take and the right thing to say?

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rom the standpoint of the Gospels, much of Jesus’ public career was a struggle against the meritocratic social and intellectual elites of his day. Yet his attitude wasn’t simple demagogic populism. Over and over again he speaks of his respect for the knowledge that they have, but insists repeatedly that while it is indispensable, it is also worthless unless your heart is right. And you can’t make your heart right by study or achievement. For your heart to be right, you must be born again. You must look outside yourself, your education, your offices and your honors. Your “merit” on its own doesn’t stand. Only the merit of another can give life and meaning to who you are and what you do.

The old gospel song “Denomination Blues” says it best, perhaps: “You can go to your college, you can go to your school/But if you ain’t got Jesus you’re an educated fool.” There are crackpots and know nothings who sing that song meaning that nobody should go to school and college. “Jesus” is all you need. And there are those who think that the right school and the right college will teach you all you need to know. But there are a great many people running around today who studied for years in top colleges and top schools without ever learning what it’s all about. In many cases, nobody ever even offered to teach them.

In any case, a serious Christian commitment serves as a moral and psychological anchor for members of the elite. Your life circumstances may be different from those of hoi polloi, you may have power and freedom that most people don’t, but if you are a serious Christian wrestling daily with your inadequacies before God and your need for God’s grace, you are living an inner life that is very similar to the lives of millions of your fellow citizens. The spiritual life is the ulti83

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mate democracy: every human being approaches God on the same terms. A Nobel economic laureate or a Fortune 500 CEO who spends time on his or her knees in honest prayer and spiritual struggle every day is keeping it green; for those few minutes that person isn’t a successful meritocrat whose meteoric career streaks across the sky.

Christopher Hayes is not wrong that American meritocracy as it exists today is both a symptom and a cause of a society losing its footing and in danger of a real fall. And I do not say that a “Christian” or theistic meritocracy would work where a secular one must fail. (We had a Christian meritocracy in Puritan New England. The best, brightest and godliest hanged Quakers and witches.) And I repeat what I wrote earlier, to avoid misunderstanding: Christianity is not the only religious or other source of the kind of moral insight and spiritual depth that can mitigate the problems of a meritocratic society. It is the one I understand best and the one that, historically, has played the most important role in American life. I leave to others the task of describing other resources and traditions by which other Americans whose talents have brought them into important and powerful positions in our society can be guided and checked.

But with those appropriate reservations appropriately taken, I do say that the fading of serious Christian commitment in the sleek and successful ranks of America’s meritocracy plays a significant and damaging role in our national life. The renewal of Christian commitment among a significant sector of America’s elite is, I think, a necessary condition of continued American progress and success. If we get this, we will still need social reforms and social change— much of it, I suspect, not what Hayes wants, but that is another story.

But if we don’t get that kind of renewal and commitment, no program of reform, however wisely engineered, can keep our liberty, our prosperity and our democracy safe, much less transform them into something richer, deeper, greater and more widely and fairly shared than anything we have yet seen.

Walter Russell Mead is James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and Editor-at-Large of The American Interest magazine. One of the foremost voices on foreign policy in America, h e blogs at “Via Meadia” at the-american-interest.com, from which this piece is adapted.

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Francis J. Beckwith Religious Liberty, Why Now?: Defending an E mbattled Human Right, by The Task Force on International Religious Freedom of the Witherspoon Inst itute (Princeton, NJ: The Witherspoon Institute 2012)

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n a class I teach at Baylor University, “Law and Religion in the United States,” I begin the semester by asking my students this question: If you were writing the Constitution from scratch in this day and age, would you include the religious free exercise and dis-establishment clauses? As you would guess, the students enthusiastically affirm their commitment to these principles. But then I follow up with these queries, “But why? What is so special about religion, its beliefs, and its practices, that require that your Constitution protect those of its citizens that embrace them? On the other hand, if religion, its beliefs, and its practices are of such importance to the political community, why would your Constitution at the same time prohibit the establishment of religion?”

That’s when the fun begins. For the students now have to provide a justification for what they want their new Constitution to include.

They cannot merely appeal to our present Constitution to ground their claims, since the whole point of the exercise is to force them to provide an account of why our present Constitution’s religion clauses are justified.

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would defend these principles if we were asked by skeptics, theocrats, or secularists to provide an account of them.

Most skeptics and secularists, for instance, do not believe that religious belief is rational. So for them, religious liberty must be subsumed under a citizen’s more general right to hold private beliefs that are akin to personal preferences and matters of taste. Under this account, religious belief is no more entitled to be singled out for special protection than is the right to attend a Rolling Stones concert, consume pornography, believe in the tooth fairy, or play chess, though all these activities are permissible under a general right to acquire satisfaction for one’s preferences. So, for the skeptic or secularist, a religious group that is engaged in what the state declares as “secular” activities, such as owning and running a university, hospital, or charitable organization, has no right to withhold from its employees and clients whatever the state requires that it must provide to them, even if the requirement violates the moral beliefs of the religious group.

Consistent with this understanding, in 2012 the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), while claiming to uphold religious liberty, issued a mandate as part of the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) that requires all employers, even Catholic ones, to provide contraceptive and abortifacient services in their employee health plans. Because religion is private, like other preferences and tastes, and has only to do with liturgy and ecclesiology, the skeptic and the secularist see nothing untoward in this arrangement.

The theocrat, on the other hand, diminishes religious liberty as well, but for entirely different reasons. Because he believes that one religion is true, that particular faith should be the state’s established religion, and thus disbelievers in that faith should not be accorded the same liberties and privileges as those who practice the true faith.

Consequently, the state may, without violating any principles of justice, punish and persecute those who dissent from the state’s religious orthodoxy.

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he difficulty in defending religious liberty is two-fold. On the one hand, if religion and religious belief is a special activity integral to the human condition and human happiness, then, like other unique activities, like speech, intellectual flourishing, friendship, etc., there are good and bad versions of it. That is, some 86

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religions are truer than others. On the other hand, if that is the case, then why shouldn’t the government give pride of place, if not its imprimatur, to that (or those) religion (or religions) that is (or are) good?

Religious Liberty, Why Now?: Defending an Embattled Human Right convincingly shows that this two-fold difficulty is not merely a theoretical exercise for legal philosophers and undergraduates studying Constitutional Law. How this difficulty is resolved has real-world implications. If the “religious liberty” of skeptics and secularists wins out, then religion and its deliverances—moral, doctrinal, philosophical, ecclesial, and social— are marginalized as sub-rational and unworthy of serious respect, without regard for whether the individual religious believer has epistemic warrant in holding his beliefs. “Religious liberty,” therefore, becomes a metaphysical exclusionary rule that cannot be waived without a secular warrant. Hence, we have seen over the past decade in many Western nations a notable increase of government hostility toward religious beliefs as they are manifested in a variety of public issues, such as the HHS mandate, the right to speak critically of homosexual conduct, and child adoption policy.

If the “religious liberty” of the theocrat is victorious, then the right of the individual citizen to sincerely and conscientiously pursue questions of ultimate concern is not honored as a basic good. We see this, for example, in many nations throughout the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Jordan, and Afghanistan, which are, not coincidentally, the places in which many prospective terrorists are recruited and trained.

Religious Liberty, Why Now? is authored by the Task Force on International Religious Freedom of the Witherspoon Institute, a Princeton, New Jersey based think-tank. The Task Force consists of several scholars with differing specialties. Led by its Chairman, Thomas F. Farr (Georgetown University), along with Timothy Samuel Shah (Georgetown University) and Matthew Franck (Witherspoon Institute), the book’s principal author and editor-in-chief respectively, the Task Force offers in this book a brief, though powerful, case for religious liberty. It provides a convincing answer to the two-fold difficulty that arises from the positions of the skeptics, the secularists, and the theocrats.

In May 2011 the Task Force invited more than thirty scholars from a wider range of academic disciplines to discuss, evaluate, and offer 87

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policy recommendations concerning the diminishing of religious liberty both at home and abroad. This book is the fruit of that labor.

It is divided into two parts. Part One concerns the ground of religious freedom. The Task Force provides anthropological (chapter 1), political (chapter 2), moral (chapter 3), religious (chapter 4), and legal (chapter 5) cases for religious freedom. Chapter 4 includes individual essays by scholars representing the Jewish (David Novak), Christian (Nicholas Wolterstorff), and Islamic (Abdullah Saeed) traditions. Part Two concerns religious freedom and international affairs. Here the Task Force makes a strategic case for religious freedom (chapter 6) and then offers several policy recommendations (chapter 7).

Although it is a small book (86 pages) produced by a committee, it is not what I expected. What I found was a rigorous argument rich with insights and practical suggestions. Instead of starting with some highly theoretical understanding of what constitutes religion or the human good, the Task Force begins with the “facts on the ground.” This is why its first chapters concern anthropology, politics, and morality, discussing what in fact religion is and its place in the life of the individual and his community. It does not begin with some artificial and caricatured view of religion, such as the one offered by the University of Chicago law professor Brian Leiter (emphasis his): “[B]eliefs that conjoin categorical commands with insulation from evidence.” It takes religion and the personal and corporate search for religious truth seriously as it actually takes place in real religious traditions practiced and believed by real people.

The threats to religious freedom are real and growing. Many in the West are having second thoughts about its meaning and importance.

In other parts of the world, many who reside in theocratic regimes are beginning to have their first thoughts. This book answers the doubts of the first and provides a blueprint for the longings of the second.

Francis J. Beckwith is Professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies at Baylor University. His most r ecent book is (edited with Robert P. George and Susan McWilliams) A Second Look at First Things: A Case for Conservative Politics (St. Augustine Press) .

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Andrew Walker Wisdom & Wonder: Common Grace in Science & Art, by Abraham Kuyper. Christian’s Library Press, 2011.

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utch polymath Abraham Kuyper has undergone a sort of renaissance in the past decade. While his works have long been found in the corridors of the Reformed tradition, his influence on Christian worldview thinking has allowed Kuyper to emerge as the figurehead of what is now called—rather affectionately, or unaffectionately—as Kuyperian Neo-Calvinism.

With an emphasis on sphere sovereignty, Kuyper’s widening influence has become the cause célèbre of a socially engaged Christianity that aims to bring Christian witness and reflection to bear on every square inch of creation. Kuyperians stress both public engagement and intellectual rigor in bringing about a distinct Christian social and public witness.

Thanks to the efforts of the Acton Institute and Kuyper College, English translations have begun of Kuyper’s seminal work Common Grace. Wisdom & Wonder represents the inaugural publication of this project, though the volume itself is but a compendium of separate essays that make up the larger work of Common Grace. Common grace as Kuyper understood it is the grace that God imparts to humanity that, unlike saving grace, serves as a restraint against the passions of man that allows for cultural cooperation and the maintenance of order.

In this volume, Kuyper brings Christian reflection upon the disciplines of science and art. Non-technical though serious in depth, 89

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each chapter reads as a reflection in the vein of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity so that the book itself becomes a theology or philosophy of a sub-discipline of art or science.

It is important to remember that for Kuyper, reflection upon these disciplines is not for the sake of their own merit, but instead, in an attempt to bring a coherent understanding of how, as the foreword states, “the gospel, and thereby the practice of Christian faith, relates to every single area of society.”

By “science,” it is important to allow Kuyper’s usage of the term speak for itself. Here, he refers to “science” in a more broad, generalized understanding and less so as a modern convention focused on the particulars of the scientific method. Science encompasses such disciplines as the humanities as much as it does biology and is ultimately aimed at interpreting reality Christianly. Science, as Kuyper interprets it, is human reflection and interaction with God’s creation as he designed it. In what will inform Kuyper’s understanding of both disciplines, his emphasis on conversion as epistemological regeneration results in Christians bequeathed an understanding of reality transformed and renewed by God-centeredness. There, the idea of antithesis arises, or as Kuyper calls it, “false science” versus “true science,” which in Kuyper’s view forges a divide in how Christians and non-Christians understand the scientific task. God either is or he is not at the center of scientific reflection, and displacing God from the center of reflection is a “façade without any essence.”

Science is also an outworking of God’s decree to create: If, therefore, God’s thinking is primary, and if all of creation is to be understood simply as the outflow of that thinking of God, such that all things have come into existence and continue to exist through the Logos, that is, through divine reason, or more particularly, through the Word, then it must be the case that the divine thinking must be embedded in all created things. Thus there can be nothing in the universe that fails to express, in incarnate, the revelation of the thought of God […] The whole creation is nothing but the visible curtain behind which radiates the exalted working of this divine thinking.

Kuyper believes that science is done with the assumption of metaphysical first principles. Creation, he observes, is intelligible and orderly. The chief end of the scientific task is a plausibility structure that seeks to discern God’s blueprint for creation.

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Art, according to Kuyper, is a base form of natural theology and located within the realm of worship. Art and religion are intricately bound, according to Kuyper, because for civilizations past, pagans often sought divine revelation through nature. It is in this beauty— this common grace—“Sun, moon, and stars beckon people to worship the Creator—until people lose sight of the living God and begin to worship the sun, moon, and stars themselves.”

Recalling the history of civilizations, pagan cultures sought to manifest art by “idolatrous religion.” As cultures developed a pattern of beauty away from spiritual revelation, the obvious result was to create a paganized form of art in visible forms—what Kuyper remarks as the origin of idols. According to Kuyper, “[A] religion fed in its idolatrous form only exclusively by nature or by human megalomania can seek its glory nowhere else than in external pageantry. This explains why the marriage between art and religion in its essential nature belongs to every kind of idolatry.”

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ecause spiritual revelation reached its pinnacle in Christ, Christians are liberated from the need for symbolic worship and now worship in spirit and truth. Yet, Kuyper discourages Christians from abandoning art. Art is problematic when art attaches itself only to the church for its growth. Here, Kuyper is concerned about driving spiritual worship to the background. At the same time, art must be put in proper perspective and be self-limiting. According to Kuyper, “In our human life there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that eventually does not misuse for sinful purposes the freedom it acquires.” Art requires perspective. Kuyper, like all other disciplines, wants art to be ordered to its proper end and discourages art from being used as a spiritual add-on.

Art is ordered toward beauty. And beauty, and the human response to beauty, originated in the mind of God. Kuyper helpfully notes that nowhere in Scripture is the devil attributed any creative capacity. It is the absolute innateness of beauty that Kuyper grounds the beauty of objects or creation in the creative decree of God. Beauty exists because God invented beauty and triggered human impulse to respond to it.

Finally, Kuyper believes that current beauty awaits consummate beauty. Art triggers grandeur and eternity. “The motive of art comes to us not from what exists, but from the notion that there is some91

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thing higher, something nobler, something richer, and that what exists corresponds only partially to this.” We await a kingdom of glory.

Vincent Bacote, himself a Kuyper expert, captured the essence of Kuyper as he writes that, for Kuyper, “Christianity was not only reserved for the internal chambers of the heart but also determinative for the various social dimensions of life humans encounter as they participate in the realms of culture, politics, and economics.” Add to the list, science and art, subjects which Kuyper writes of with eloquence and passion.

Many who profess an interest in Kuyper have often become Kuyperians by reading about Kuyper instead of reading him. For many, Kuyper’s influence is mediated through second-hand sources.

Wisdom & Wonder is an important step in bringing Kuyper’s cultural theology to bear on new audiences. There may be little “new” in this volume insofar as some segments of Christianity have opened themselves up to thoughtful dialogue on the importance of art and science as Christians. But, remember, Kuyper wrote about these subjects at a time when there was little such discussion taking place. In many ways, what we have in this volume is the catalyst that birthed a renewal movement within Christianity, a volume newly available for readers who have long admired Kuyper from afar.

Andrew Walker (M.Div., The Southern Baptist Theolog ical Seminary) works as a policy analyst for The Family Foundation, a conservative advocacy group. He is currently working on a Master of Theology in Christian Ethics at Southern Seminary.

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J. Matthew Boyleston Pity the Beautiful , by Dana Gioia . Greywolf Press , 2012.

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ana Gioia’s long-awaited collection of poems, Pity the Beautiful, is haunted by regret and loss. These poems of quiet clarity and desire speak directly and with precision to life’s mysteries, its foibles, failures, and its transient moments of grace. In reading these poems, one gets the sense that Gioia shares the exclamation his angel speaks in the poem, “The Angel with the Broken Wing”: “There are so many things I must tell God! These poems capture the momentary beauty and confusion of life. Wisdom is recognition of both. It seems natural that he could proclaim as a rule of life, in a poignant phrase from the poem “Prophecy”: “It’s not so much what’s spoken as what’s heard— / and recognized, of course.”

Some writers seem to write out of compulsion, filling massive tomes of collected poems no reader will ever brave to the end. Others write in the service of poetry, writing only those few, perfect poems that poetry itself seems to demand and commission. Gioia is of the second kind. Pity the Beautiful is only his fourth volume in twenty-six years. In this work, as in much else, he resembles his former teacher Elizabeth Bishop. The poems in Pity the Beautiful benefit from his restraint. Where the poems are haunted, it is from regret, not fear.

And where it is regret, it is from the passing of life’s beauty, rather than a confession in search of absolution.

Pity the Beautiful is an apt title for this collection. The poems, as a whole, seem to be a lament for those things we once found beautiful before we grew up. Gioia lists these items in the title poem: “the dolls, and the dishes, . . .the hotties, the knock-outs. . .the gods, / no 93

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longer divine.” In the poem “The Present,” Gioia explores the wise reflection, bought, perhaps painfully, with age, that sometimes the beautiful wrappings of a gift, the mystery it hides, are more valuable than “the costly secret waiting still inside.”

The long narrative poem that centers the book, “Haunting,” is, to my mind, the collection’s primary achievement. The speaker is a monk who makes the seemingly bizarre choice to retreat to a monastery after encountering a ghost in a California mansion he had been visiting with his difficult girlfriend. The ghost gives him the cryptic yet clear message: “You don’t belong here. No, you don’t belong here.” The speaker flees the house, his girlfriend, and his former life: Don’t tell his Grace, but I still doubt there is an afterlife. That’s not why I stay there.

This is the life I didn’t want to waste.

This poem strikes me as a metaphor of what poetry can do at its best: clarify our judgment, cleanse our motivations, and call us to not waste those moments of real beauty and purpose in life.

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t is also this restraint, this choice for formality and reflection, that allows readers to see the beauty of our lives in hindsight—that which we could not see while living through it. The monk seemingly only understands his own story once he lives in monastic order, “the drill-- / Poverty Chastity, and Growing Grapes.” In his poem, “Prayer at Winter Solstice” Gioia proclaims: “Blessed is the shortest day that makes us long for light. / Blessed is the love that in losing we discover.”

Sadly though, Gioia does not shy away from confronting actual ghosts, more real and present than the beautiful regrets and desires he recounts in other poems. There is real loss—human loss. In the poem, “Special Treatments Ward,” Gioia explores the hospitals “where the children come to die, / hidden on the hospital’s highest floor.” The most telling, indicting word here is “hidden.” The poet himself has trouble facing the truth and reality of this loss: I put this poem aside twelve years ago because I could not bear remembering the faces it evoked, and every line 94

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seemed—still seems—so inadequate and grim.

Gioia’s final exploration of loss and grief is the poem “Majority”, written on the occasion of the would-be 21st birthday of his son who died in infancy. Where we may have the silver privilege to pity the beautiful ghosts and mysteries of this life, Gioia’s son is in altogether a different a relationship to the things of this world: Now you are twenty-one.

Finally, it makes sense that you have moved away into your own afterlife.

We pity the beautiful because they are our children. They may be all we have.

J. Matthew Boyleston is Chair of the Department of English and Assistant Professor in English and Writing at Houston Baptist University .

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John Poch They ate of the tree of knowledge, then they fell toward labor, labor, and the existential.

The good I want I do not do, as well.

And worse, I do the same old raising hell, and repetition loves the consequential.

They ate of the tree of knowledge, then they fell.

For this then that: I sob in each blood cell.

I aim to love but wax self-referential.

The good I want I do not do as, well, gracefully as a swell-tossed buoy bell.

The fruitless floats and calls with dark potential.

They ate of the tree of knowledge, then we fell

for it, the lie and the fact we most retell because we need to get at the essential The Good. I want. I do not do as well as Eve. It’s me, St. Paul, but not my fall.

Come, second Adam, mercy exponential, for they ate of the tree of knowledge, then they fell, and the good I want I do not do, as well.

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Hunter Baker

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n an attempt to cut down on the expense of college, I navigated the curriculum efficiently and managed to graduate in three and a half years. As a result, about 20 years ago I went home to live with my parents for nine months before starting a graduate program in public administration. Starting over with a new program meant that I needed to save up some money for an apartment deposit and other expenses. For reasons I can’t recall, I visited a neighborhood drug store called the Brunton Drug Company. The proprietor, Bob Brunton, hired me to make deliveries and work the cash register as needed.

I almost quit the job before it began. Bob showed me the truck I would use to make deliveries. It was a Mitsubishi Mighty Max with a stick shift. I did not know how to drive a stick shift. I went home, downcast, planning to find a non-humiliating time to leave a note under the door explaining why I couldn’t start the job. Instead, I talked with my dad. He and I went out to a big parking lot at Point Mallard and worked on my technique. I reported for work the next day. It’s a good thing Bob didn’t ride along to see me driving his truck. It wasn’t pretty. But I learned and eventually became proficient at getting the job done.

My job with the Brunton Drug Company lasted several months. I worked right up until it was time to go to the University of Georgia.

It was a great experience. I have always liked to ask questions of people with whom I work so I can learn. Bob taught me a lot about his operation.

When I heard President Obama’s recent comments about people who start businesses, how they didn’t do it by themselves, how they 97

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aren’t smarter, and how they don’t work harder, I thought about Bob Brunton. When he started his drug store, Bob had to take all the financial risk of failure. He had to stay open long hours each day and worked weekends, too, for years until he had a solid client base and could afford to work fewer hours. But even when I was there, Bob was putting in a lot of time. He didn’t take off for lunch. He just heated a little container in the microwave and kept going.

Over time, he extended his business to include a local branch of the Roche medical labs. Bob managed his drugstore and the medical lab at the same time. Each day, some of the medical lab work would come over to the pharmacy and we’d stop and pitch in on labeling containers and sorting. He was very shrewd that way. He knew the big drug stores would continue to cut into his business and took steps to protect himself.

Bob Brunton worked hard. Bob Brunton took financial risks. And Bob Brunton was smart about the way he conducted his business. I’m sorry to say that Bob didn’t live all that long after he retired. He had given a lot of himself to his work.

The president talked about how we can’t take credit because somebody helped us along the way. I think he was thinking mostly about the state when he made the remark. I can tell you that Bob Brunton helped me. He made a big impression both in his work ethic and in how he treated me. On my final day, it was time to close the store.

Bob and I were the only people still on the premises. He gave me my final paycheck. Then, he pulled out a second check. Before he gave it to me, he said, “This is not a gift. This is not a loan. This is an obligation. When you are successful someday and you can help a young person, I expect you to do it.” He handed me a check for an additional $500. At that time, my pay for the part-time job was $120.

The president can build up the role of government all he wants. I concede that it is important. But he really should not downplay the contribution of the small businessmen and women who do so much to make our country great. But if that is the case the president wants to make, he’s got a long way to go to convince me, because I worked for Bob Brunton of Decatur, Alabama who ran a drug store.

I wrote about Bob Brunton’s story because I felt the president was downplaying the contributions of entrepreneurs. In the wake of the 98

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furor over his comments, the president is saying that he just meant that small businesspeople didn’t build roads and bridges. I am convinced that he was implying more than that in the remarks he made.

There are two paragraphs that really matter here. The second one is the one that has gotten all of the attention because of the “you didn’t build that” phrasing. But the preceding paragraph is the one that bothers me. Here it is: There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.

You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

With this bit of rhetoric, I think the president made a demagogic appeal to the masses. In essence, he is arguing that there isn’t anything all that special about the people who build successful businesses. There are a lot of people who are smart and who work hard, he is saying. And they aren’t all successful. In other words, the implication goes, things just worked out for the folks who think they made it on merit. “Why should they benefit from their success? Things just worked out in their favor.” This is a common appeal to the masses by the demagogue. “Those who have succeeded won their rewards through luck or some other sleight of hand. Why do they deserve what they have?” The subtext is obvious. “Why shouldn’t you have some of what they have?”

The reason I wanted to highlight Bob Brunton is that I think he is typical of many small business owners. He took risks with his own money, worked very hard for a long time, accepted the pressure of making payroll each week for his employees, contended with competition, and managed to earn a good living. There is something special about someone who can do it. I am especially sensitive to the contributions of these people because I’ve never had to stand in their shoes.

Every one of us who has been able to count on a paycheck for a week’s work should be grateful to the people who did what was necessary to give us the opportunity to have a job.

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Sure, there are a lot of smart and hard-working people in the world. Not all of them have built businesses. The ones who have ARE special. They had the drive, the vision, and the sheer grittiness to tough it out and see something through. These people should not be viewed as some kind of honeypot from which we can extract revenues for income redistribution. They should be honored, encouraged, and protected from excessive taxation and regulation. If we kill the drive they have to build something from the ground up, we’ll kill our country.

Young people everywhere are attracted to the idea of doing good as they consume products and services. Tom’s Shoes appear on the feet of students all over my campus. The shoes come with a promise that a pair will be distributed in the underdeveloped world each time a pair is purchased. The same is true of Warby Parker glasses. I own a pair, though I bought them for affordability and quality rather than because I wanted to see a pair distributed. Young people are also busy buying “fair trade” coffee, t-shirts, and other goods. The idea is that through our buying habits, we can achieve a greater good than the one that comes from a straightforward exchange of money for products and services.

This concern for those who are less well-off or who live at a disadvantage to ourselves is, of course, nothing new. Certainly, the desire to aid the poor, the widow, and the orphan is a core element of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In my own generation (and really a generation or two before me), Francis Schaeffer criticized Americans (comfortable Christians included) for their addiction to “personal peace and affluence” and their “noncompassionate use of wealth.”

The buying practices I have mentioned are aimed at curbing the tendency of well-off westerners to consume too casually and perhaps too enthusiastically. There is an attempt to encourage thoughtfulness about the way one acquires consumer items. Buy the shoe that results in a pair being delivered to a poor person in Africa at the same time.

Purchase the goods that have been produced in a more humane fashion than the ones that belch forth from a sweatshop. Good ideas.

However, I would suggest another consideration in the way we consume. Instead of merely thinking more carefully about things like the production ethics of things we purchase, maybe we should re100

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consider our list of things we buy. At any given time, we may have items such as tablet computer, smartphone, new car, bigger flatscreen television, new pair of shoes that accomodates each toe separately, new earphones, new trendy jacket, etc. on our list of wants. What if we reconceived our list to include such things as helping someone pay for their car to be repaired, paying money into a scholarship fund for needy families at a local private school or college, giving a Target or Walmart gift card to a young single mother whom you know is having trouble with her bills, assisting a family with the costs of an adoption, and giving a used car to someone who could really use it instead of trading the car in? The list could be as long as one’s imagination, but the point is really to be sensitive to the opportunities as they occur.

The picture I am trying to paint here is one of a new model for consuming. Rather than thinking about the things we would like to buy (even the ones that will be replicated through a buy one, give one model), why not expand the list to include buying things that other people need? In the same way that one saves up money to purchase an iPod, it would be possible to save up a couple hundred dollars and then to ask the Lord to show you what to do with it. I think that this way of living, call it a new Christian consumerism, would go far in building up the church, the spiritual strength of the people in it, and the bonds of friendship between people..

In the process of trying to follow the conversation about higher education and its potential transformation, I came across a discussion between Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, Sal Khan of Khan Academy, and John Hennessy, the president of Stanford University.

One of the interesting moments was when Khan (if memory serves) said something about students coming to college to learn a skill or to prepare for a job. John Hennessy immediately jumped in and said that what the universities offer is “an enriching experience” that is greater than just professional training. Khan quickly countered that parents and students should understand what is really being offered.

Mossberg noted the disconnect in expectations.

The discussion goes to the core of the crisis we are in. The price of education is high. As it has grown, the customers are getting cagier about asking, “Just what exactly am I getting here?” In the process, 101

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the people who work in admissions emphasize the great jobs students will get and the salaries they will be paid. The overall impression tilts more to the side of professional training and less to the side of an enriching experience. This situation helps explain why we are having trouble maintaining strong core curricula in our schools. Every professional training program wants to claim more hours. And their students expect mostly to learn from their professional programs. The broader sense of the college is being lost.

So, let me take a shot at arguing for “the enriching experience” of college rather than the professional training aspect. I’ll use the core curriculum as the foundation of my argument.

Let’s say we have a student who just wants to study corporate finance and can’t understand why he needs to take courses in English, history, social science, biology, and other fields. What is the value of that first couple of years of courses other than to extract extra tuition from him and his parents?

My answer is that the courses in the core curriculum are extremely useful in developing the knowledge and abilities of the student. The courses in English composition and literature, alone, have the potential to make or break a career. Writing is the engine of the expression of learning. It is how we communicate. Even when we speak, we are essentially writing. The reason these courses are perceived to be of low value is because our non-English major student tends to view them as mere requirements that must be satisfied. Students think they must bow before some idol they do not understand in order to please bearded professors who are caught up in old rituals. The truth is that excellence in courses in English contributes greatly to further success. How many times have I read term papers and wished that the student had retained anything useful from his/her English classes? The same will be true of some corporate boss up the line. The organizational superior will read a white paper or a research memo and wonder why the staff member couldn’t communicate more efficiently, effectively, and persuasively.

We could work our way through similar examples in other disciplines to great effect. Actually taking the time to become a welleducated person and gaining mastery of at least entry level knowledge in a variety of fundamental areas will improve one’s ability to identify problems, analyze them, compare analogous situations, and apply useful context in the course of determining a solu102

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tion. Studying history seems like a useless exercise in studying irrelevant and dead civilizations. In truth, it is the next best thing to first hand experience.

We need to decide whether or not we expect our colleges to become something more like trade schools for the white collar set. If we do make that decision, I think we will have lost something important and become poorer as a result. The first step in avoiding that outcome will be to figure out how to convince students that they need to flourish in the core rather than merely outlasting it.

I put Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys on my car stereo and drove down the road feeling very happy with my purchase.

My son, Andrew, said, “I don’t like country music.”

I manfully restrained myself from slaying him.

I have recently become a listener to the Harvard Business Review Ideacast. In one recent episode, the hosts focused on a list of 12 “audacious ideas” with the potential to change the world. One of the ideas featured was by the columnist Ellen Goodman. She proposed that everyone (really, everyone) be sure to talk with a loved one about their wishes regarding health care as they approach death. By so doing, she suggested, we could create a greater sense of trust and make better decisions at the end of life.

The idea is a fine one, but what struck me was that creating a social norm could make the list of audacious ideas. Henceforth, I propose a new social norm of my own. I admit it is a bit retro. We should create a social expectation that no one will have sexual intercourse outside of marriage before the age of 21.

Let’s think this through. Is it not true that if the government, social elites, the media, and public schools were to get behind this new norm, we could probably radically reduce unwed pregnancy, numbers of children without present fathers, sexually transmitted diseases, and abortions?

Let me be clear (to use the president’s favorite phrase), I am not proposing a law to be enforced by the police. I am simply arguing that it would be highly prudent and compassionate to create a social 103

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norm around the idea that intercourse is for adults. We have an age at which young people can drive. Why not have an age (a higher one) at which they can/should engage in another activity that can be far more consequential?

One of the interesting parts of the debate over the Health and Human services mandate on employers to cover contraceptive and abortifacient drugs has been the focus on the question of how serious Catholics are about their beliefs and whether their institutions are entitled to act upon those beliefs. I heard commenters in favor of the mandate proclaim that 97% of Catholic women use contraception. I have doubts about the validity of that study. Certainly, it ignores the question of abortion and abortifacient products.

But with regard to the Bible and church doctrine, I can tell you this: 100% of Protestants sin. I suspect the same figure holds for Catholics.

Guess what? We’re still against sin. It doesn’t mean we don’t believe in God. It doesn’t mean we have abandoned our faith. It doesn’t mean we don’t care when the government oversteps its bounds and tries to push the churches out of community life. We don’t need the government to tell us what church doctrine is and what we believe or don’t believe. Religious liberty and the separation of church and state means that it is up to us and the churches with which we voluntarily associate to determine those matters.

The bottom line is that there are certain things that belong to the state and others that don’t. The state is an instrument, not some kind of ultimacy. It is a tool. It is temporary. It is designed to solve a simple problem, which is the problem of restraining evil. The state is designed to serve persons. We are not designed to serve the state. The great French Catholic scholar Jacques Maritain said it best: “The state is made for man, not man for the state.”

The United States, traditionally, has been one of the nations that most clearly understands the proper role of the government. We have welcomed the existence and development of many institutions of civil society performing tasks that need not belong to the state. But Rousseau saw a society with two powers of church and state as a liability, something that needed to be destroyed. And the French Revolution accordingly attempted to destroy it. What Rousseau 104

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missed that Locke understood is that when government attempts to rule over too much of life, then there are too many areas in which disagreement can only be settled with the exercise of coercive power, including things such as civil penalties and imprisonment. We should only resort to those things when the stakes are very high.

Why would we subject more things to that official (and ultimately punitive) sphere than we must?

Having strong institutions in the society other than the government actually improves the prospects for freedom. The family, the church, the private school, charitable organizations... all of these represent alternative allegiances for people. Alternative allegiances help limit the power of the state and to curb its ambitions. A totalitarian state prefers to have only two entities in society: the individual and the state. In that situation, the vision of the state will always be supreme.

I finally took the dive into Downton Abbey. I have been amazed to see English society of that time presented in a well thought out way.

You really see life from the point of view of a maid, a butler, a man of the middle class, etc.

But the one that really got my attention was the Earl of Grantham, played by Hugh Bonneville. The Earl is in the unusual position of having lost two heirs in the Titanic. His American wife’s huge fortune merged with his own when they married. They have produced no sons. Now, the estate (including her money) will go (by English law) to a distant cousin. No one really approves of this result. But when the Earl is encouraged to find some way to smash the entailment, he refuses. Why would he not seek some device to benefit his wife and daughters at the expense of a cousin? It makes all the sense in the world. But he does not.

His explanation for his lack of combativeness on behalf of his nuclear family and their rights is informative with regard to classic conservatism. He will not try to defeat the ancestral entailment because he views himself as a custodian of the estate, not as its owner. He knows that someone else conceived and built Downton Abbey. The simple fact that he is the current possessor does not entitle him to tear down their intent in favor of his own. In short, the Earl of Grantham is connected to his ancestors and to those who come after him.

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He has duties and obligations to both. He may not view himself as a disconnected atom capable of doing whatever he can conceive, especially when he acts in a setting in which he stands on the shoulders of those who came before.

If you want to know what authentic conservatism is, that is it.

Since the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of the constitutionality of the president’s health care plan, conservatives have been alternatively angry and despondent. To many observers, this reaction may appear to have its roots in hatred of the president, racism, an inability to understand the constitution, a lack of compassion, or excessive partisanship. None of those reasons explain the depth of the feelings of protest that exist and appear to be building.

The United States constitution sets out a unique form of government. In the wake of revolution, the former British colonies became classic states with inherent power to govern with the consent of the people. The United States of America emerged in the form we know as a new and special type of entity. This national government would only have certain powers the states deemed necessary. Thus, this national government would be a limited government of delegated powers. This distinction helps explain why it has been uncontroversial for the states to require people to buy auto insurance, while it is a very big deal to see the national government attempting to act in the same way. The United States government is acting as though it is a government of inherent powers rather than one of delegated powers.

Now, for many people this transformation of the national government from limited to omni-capable makes perfect sense. In the modern age, they believe, a central government must have wide authority to act. It must be able to tackle big problems. Conservatives, they charge, are attached to an antiquated system.

But conservatives do not approve the federal system merely because it is old. There are older systems. Power under one head is older. Conservatives approve the system of states with broad power to govern and a central government with limited, delegated powers because it guarantees that most of the laws one lives under will be laws enacted close to home. Under a truly federal system, government is predominantly local. People who live in our states and in our 106

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communities should be the ones to work out the laws under which we live because of their familiarity with our local strengths, resources, traditions, threats, and challenges.

People may be surprised that Justice Kennedy worked unceasingly for a month to try to keep Justice Roberts from siding with the liberals, but his position on the case should not have been a surprise. Justice Kennedy has written clearly about his admiration for federalism as the great American contribution to governing. When he has gone against it, it has been to protect personal liberties he deemed of vital importance. In this case, the question was whether we would continue to have a truly federal system. It was perfectly in character for him to try to maintain our special contribution.

For decades, conservatives have waited to see the Supreme Court cut back on the broad license of power granted to the central government as part of the New Deal (under the threat of court-packing).

There have been signs that power was being cut back (such as the Lopez decision in 1995). We believed this case would finally end the ultra-expansive view of the commerce power and would restore a sense of limits to the central government’s power. Our hopes were sharply disappointed because the court ruled that we were correct about the commerce power, but then extended the power of the United States government through a broad construction of its power to tax. If this power to tax is as broad as the court says it is, then it is difficult to see where the reach of the central government ends.

From the conservative viewpoint, we have lost federalism. Most people don’t know what federalism is and don’t care. But we do. The loss of government close to home is a great loss. It means the individual is more at the mercy of the mass than ever. And the best means of limiting the power of the central government is gone.

Every American student of civics is taught that the constitution has checks and balances in which the legislative, executive, and judicial branches rein each other in. What they have learned too rarely is that the best limit on the power of national governments is for some powers not to be granted to them at all. Article I, Section 8 of the constitution lists out the powers of the U.S. government. That was once a clear guide to what the government could and could not do. After the court’s ruling, one wonders why the framers of the document felt the need to include a list at all as it is apparently superfluous.

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On a recent evening I took in the mild, early summer weather and watched a group of twenty or so children play baseball. Some of them sat in wheelchairs or had braces on their legs. Others needed help because of mental ailments, deafness, or blindness. Adults and teenagers mixed in with the kids on the field giving both assistance and encouragement. A man with a microphone sat behind home plate and announced the children’s names as they came up to bat and rounded the bases. It is always a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours, watching people love those who need it most, seeing young people with special needs being supported.

On this occasion, I noticed a conversation happening in sign language off to my left. A middle-aged mom signed and spoke to her daughter who was waiting in line for a turn at bat. The girl had Down Syndrome. She displayed a fun-loving personality as she bantered with her mother, signing rapidly. Her mother kept telling her to be sure to use a particular bat when she got to the plate. The girl made a sign back at her mother that clearly meant something like, “Yak, yak, yak.” It was impish and funny.

As my wife and I watched the exchange, I said to her, “It’s a terrible crime, you know.”

She responded, “You mean about the genetic screening and the abortions?”

“Yes,” I said.

Hunter Baker serves as Dean of Instruction and a ssociate professor of political science at Union University . He is the author of two books, The End of Sec ularism and Political Thought: A Student’s Guide . You can read more at his website, endofsecularism.com .

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John Milton In each volume of T H E C I TY , we reprint a passage from great leaders of the faith. In 1660, at the close of his lengthy public career, John Milton (1608-1674), now completely blind, had published “The Readie & Easie Way to establish a Free Commonwealth, and The excellence th erof Compar’d with The inconveniences and dangers of readmitting kin gship in this nation”, a small quarto urging England’s citizens to reject the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, making the case for a free Commonwealth as the method of governance most faithful to scri pture.

Here are a few excerpts from his essay.

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f we return to kingship, and soon repent, as undoubtedly we shall, when we begin to find the old encroachments coming on by little and little upon our consciences, which must necessarily proceed from king and bishop united inseparably in one interest, we may be forced perhaps to fight over again all that we have fought, and spend over again all that we have spent , but are never like to attain thus far as we are now advanced, to the recovery of our freedom, never likely to have it in possession, as we now have it, never to be vouchsafed hereafter the like mercies and signal assistances from heaven in our cause, if by our ingrateful backsliding we make these fruitless to our selves, all his gracious condescensions and answers; flying now to regal concessions from his divine condescensions and gracious answers to our once importuning prayers against the tyranny which we then groaned under to become now of no effect, by returning of our own foolish accord, nay running headlong again with full stream willfully and obstinately into the same bondage: making vain and viler then dirt the blood of so many thousand faithful and valiant English men, who left us in this liberty, bought with their lives; losing by a strange aftergame of folly, all the battles we have won… treading back again with lost labour all our happy steps in the progress of reformation, and most pitifully depriving ourselves the instant fruition of that free government which we have so dearly purchased, a free Commonwealth, not only held by wisest men in all ages the noblest, the manliest, the equallest, the justest government, the most agreeable to all due liberty and proportioned equality, both humane, civil and Christian, most cherishing to virtue and true religion , but also (I may say it with greatest probabil110

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ity) plainly commended or rather enjoined by our Saviour himself, to all Christians, not without remarkable disallowance and the brand of Gentilism upon kingship.

God in much displeasure gave a king to the Israelites, and imputed it a sin to them that they sought one: but Christ apparently forbids his disciples to admit of any such heathenish government: the kings of the gentiles, saith he, exercise lordship over them; and they that exercise authority upon them are called benefactors. But ye shall not be so: but he that is greatest among you, let him be as the younger; and he that is chief, as he that serveth. The occasion of these his words, was the ambitious desire of Zebedee’s two sons to be exalted above their brethren in his kingdom, which they thought was to be ere long upon earth. That he speaks of civil government, is manifest by the former part of the comparison, which infers the other part to be always in the same kind. And what government comes nearer to this precept of Christ then a free Commonwealth, wherein they who are greatest, are perpetual servants and drudges to the public at their own cost and charges, neglect their own affairs; yet are not elevated above their brethren, live soberly in their families, walk the streets as other men, may be spoken to freely, familiarly, friendly, without adoration.

Whereas a king must be adored like a Demigod, with a dissolute and haughty court about him, of vast expence and luxury, masks and revels, to the debauching of our prime gentry both male and female; not in their pastimes only, but in earnest, by the loose employments of court service, which will be then thought honorable‌ As to the burden of expense, to our cost we shall soon know it; for any good to us, deserving to be termed no better than the vast and lavish price of our subjection and their debauchery; which we are now so greedily cheapening, and would so fain be paying most inconsiderately to a single person; who for anything wherein the public really needs him, will have little else to do, but to bestow the eating and drinking of excessive dainties, to set a pompous face upon the superficial actings of State, to pageant himself up and down in progress among the perpetual bowings and cringings of an abject people, on either side deifying and adoring him who for the most part deserves none of this by any good done to the people for nothing done that can deserve it (for what can he more then another man?). But who even in the expression of a late court-poet, sits only like a great cypher set to no purpose before a long row of other significant figures. Nay it is well and 111

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happy for the people if their king be but a cypher, being oft times a mischief, a pest, a scourge of the nation, and which is worse, not to be removed, not to be controlled, much less accused or brought to punishment, without the danger of a common ruin, without the shaking and almost subversion of the whole land. Whereas in a free Commonwealth, any governour or chief counselour offending may be removed and punished without the least commotion. Certainly then that people must needs be mad or strangely infatuated that build the chief hope of their common happiness or safety on a single person, who if he happen to be good, can do no more than another man; if to be bad, hath in his hands to do more evil without check then millions of other men.

The happiness of a nation must needs be firmest and certainest in full and free council of their own electing, where no single person, but reason only, sways. And what madness is it for them who might manage nobly their own affairs themselves, sluggishly and weakly to devolve all on a single person; and more like boys under age than men, to commit all to his patronage and disposal, who neither can perform what he undertakes, and yet for undertaking it, though royally paid, will not be their servant, but their lord! How unmanly must it needs be, to count such a one the breath of our nostrils, to hang all our felicity on him, all our safety, our well-being, for which if we were aught else but sluggards or babies, we need depend on none but God and our own counsels, our own active virtue and industry!

“Go to the ant, thou sluggard,” saith Solomon; “consider her ways, and be wise; which having no prince, ruler, or lord, provides her meat in the summer, and gathers her food in the harvest”, which evidently shows us that they who think the nation undone without a king, though they look grave or haughty, have not so much true spirit and understanding in them as a pismire: neither are these diligent creatures hence concluded to live in lawless anarchy, or that commended, but are set the examples to imprudent and ungoverned men, of a frugal and selfgoverning democracy or commonwealth; safer and more thriving in the joint providence and counsel of many industrious equals, than under the single domination of one imperious lord.

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