The City: Spring 2010

THE CITY On Seeking & Finding, from chapter 11 of Miracles, authored

by C.S. Lewis, then a fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, 1947.

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he Pantheist’s God does nothing, demands nothing. He is there if you wish for Him, like a book on a shelf. He will not pursue you. There is no danger that at any time heaven and earth should flee away at His glance. If He were the truth, then we could really say that all the Christian images of kingship were a historical accident of which our religion ought to be cleansed. It is with a shock that we discover them to be indispensable. You have had a shock like that before, in connection with smaller matters—when the line pulls at your hand, when something breathes beside you in the darkness. So here; the shock comes at the precise moment when the thrill of life is communicated to us along the clue we have been following. It is always shocking to meet life where we thought we were alone. “Look out!” we cry, “it’s alive.” And therefore this is the very point at which so many draw back—I would have done so myself if I could—and proceed no further with Christianity. An “impersonal God”? Well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads? Better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap? Best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed—the hunter, king, husband—that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (“Man’s search for God”!) suddenly draw back.

Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?

A publication of Houston Baptist University

SPRING 2010

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THE CITY Publisher Robert Sloan Advisory Editors Franc is J. Beckw ith Adam Bellow Paul J. Bonicelli Joseph Bottum Hugh Hew itt Ramesh Ponnuru Editor in Chief Benjam in Domenech Reviews Editor Micah Mattix Contributing Editors Matthew Lee Anderson Ryan T. Anderson Hunter Baker Matthew Boyleston David Capes Joe P. Carter Victoria C. Gardner Coates Christopher Hammons Anthony Joseph Joseph M. Knippenberg Louis Markos Wilfred Mc Clay Dan McLaughl in Russell Moore Robert Stac ey Joshua Trevino Pejman Yous efzadeh

THE C ITY Volume III, Issue 1 Copyright 2010 Houston Baptist University.

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

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

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in this issue

THE NEW WORLD Paul Bonicelli on Haiti & Ordered Liberty Eric Metaxas asks Does God Want Us to Change the World?

Arthur Brooks on the Future of American Enterprise Congressman Frank Wolf on Debt: The Test of a Moral Society

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

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BOOKS & CULTURE Matt Boyleston on Literature & Faith Kevin Walker on the Wages of Progress Daniel A. Siedell on Icons & Iconoclasm With Poetry by A.E. Stallings & John Updike And The Word by Jonathan Edwards

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Fairy Tale Logic A.E. Stallings Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks: Gather the chin hairs from a man-eating goat, Or cross a sulfuric lake in a leaky boat, Select the prince from a row of identical masks, Tiptoe up to a dragon where it basks And snatch its bone; count dust specks, mote by mote, Or learn a phone directory by rote.

Always it’s impossible what someone asks— You have to fight magic with magic. You have to believe That you have something impossible up your sleeve— The language of snakes, perhaps; an invisible cloak, An army of ants at your beck, or a lethal joke, The will to do whatever must be done: Marry a monster. Hand over your first-born son.

A.E. Stallings is an award-winning poet and translator.

Her latest book is The Nature of Things, a verse translation of Lucretius. She lives with her family in Athens, Greece.

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CULTIVATING ORDERED LIBERTY ]the0challenge0of0haiti}

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Paul Bonicelli

magine a country that is essentially an ecological disaster zone. There are no natural resources to speak of; it is so politically unstable that it has had as many coups, violent changes of government and uprisings in the last twenty-five years as peaceful transfers of power; where four out of five people live below the poverty line (on about $2 per day) and 54% live in abject poverty; a country that has racked up almost $2 billion in debt; and has been occupied, policed, and “aided” by foreigners – sometimes welcomed and sometimes not – for much of the last quarter century.

That is Haiti before the earthquake of January, which killed almost a quarter of a million people, razed a quarter of a million homes and left a wake of destruction measured in billions of dollars and millions of shattered lives. To describe the country and its conditions now staggers the mind and weakens the spirit, and to propose solutions to these problems is a daunting task. Yet it’s also a moment that demands we apply the lessons of history – both easy and hard – about what works and what does not in the field of global development.

Chile has just suffered a devastating earthquake, one of the strongest ever recorded, and severe aftershocks continue. Half a million homes are destroyed, and there is untold damage to infrastructure. Bodies are still being recovered at this time. Chile’s quake was stronger than Haiti’s, and it also hit in major metropolitan areas. But we can say with confidence, even in this dark time, that Chile will recover, hope will resurge and their prospects will brighten.

Why the difference in optimism? Because Chile is a stable and well-functioning democracy with a sound economy, even in this severe recession, built on transparency and private property rights. It has the capacity to restore, rebuild and endure a temporary time of 5

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martial law; importantly, it will not face ungovernability. It has lost much infrastructure and buildings, but they can be rebuilt in an economy that can rebound because it is so strong and corruptionfree. And perhaps most significantly, the loss of life remains under 1,000, a mere fraction of the deaths in Haiti.

Why did so few die relative to Haiti, even in the wake of a more powerful quake? Because building codes not only existed in Chile, but because of the transparency and application of clean government, they were enforced. While Chile shows us the benefits of social order and democracy, Haiti shows us that suffering from a lack of true democracy and cultural order can have wide ranging effects, well beyond the ramifications to economic and political freedom.

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brief history is in order. The story of Haiti starts well enough – it gained independence in a successful slave revolt in1804 from Napoleon’s France, becoming the second oldest republic in the hemisphere after the United States. Yet from the beginning, a cultural and political instability infected the nation. It was not until 1820 that Haiti actually established one sovereign government over the half of the island it shares with the Dominican Republic. From 1843 until 1915 (when the US Marines occupied and held Haiti for 19 years), there were 22 changes of government with the attendant political and economic turbulence such regime changes engender. For most of the period after that, Haiti endured the dictatorship of the Duvalier family. First the father, “Papa Doc” (a populist medical doctor who brought power to the black majority but ruled as a strongman) and then the son, Jean-Claude, “Baby Doc,” who was no different from his father in terms of his approach to governance.

Both the Duvaliers relied on a corrupt and highly politicized government, and secured their hold on power by a vast “volunteer security army” known as the Tonton Macoutes. They held power a total of 29 years, until 1986 when Baby Doc was deposed by a popular uprising. A series of provisional governments followed until a constitution was written and ratified. On paper, the constitution was actually rather democratic and republican. It called for a bicameral parliament, an elected president, a prime minister complete with cabinet and a supreme court appointed by the president and confirmed by the parliament, and the election of local governments.

Yet in practice, it failed miserably. Haiti continued to have what it had almost always had: horrible leaders who worked to divide and 6

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conquer for the sake of partisan interests rather than unite and make progress for all Haitians.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a defrocked radical Catholic priest of the liberation theology persuasion (a perversion of Christianity which turns the Gospel into a call for armed revolution on behalf of the poor), was elected in 1990 in the first successful national free and fair elections (the first elections in 1987 based on the new constitution were aborted due to violence from the still active Tonton Macoutes).

Given a chance to unite Haiti and govern democratically, Aristide chose the road of leftist/populism and used his power to persecute his political opponents. Granted, his victory did not sit well with them, especially the former ruling class which was used to privilege.

The watching world can accept and even appreciate an oppressed majority finally getting their say in an election, and elevating “one of their own” to the presidential palace. But responsible observers (and the major power in the region, the United States) will inevitably become concerned when that newly-elevated leader begins to call for revenge and persecution of his opponents; when he calls for something as horrific as “necklacing,” where a tire filled with fuel is placed around the neck of the alleged “enemy of the regime” and lit afire. Aristide did this when he feared his radicalism was going to incite a rebellion, and his supporters necklaced many—a modernized gruesome imitation of the radical phase of the French Revolution.

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eedless to say, Aristide created political problems for himself in addition to this incitement to rebellion of the former ruling class. His program of leftist populism and violence against his critics was sufficiently unpopular that his government lost a no-confidence vote in the parliament. He then tried to rule alone, and this resulted in a military coup in September of 1991, using the constitution as a justification for replacing Aristide with a Superior Court Justice, but the military ruled behind the scenes and the old elites effectively returned to power. The military was supposed to call elections; they did not, and continued to rule through a puppet.

The United States responded typically—first under George H. W Bush and then under Bill Clinton—with severe sanctions, economic and otherwise, that hammered the already weak Haitian economy.

But not everyone suffered, just the wrong people: US businesses received an exemption and leaders of the military government grew rich by controlling the smuggling of contraband. It also launched a 7

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terror campaign against Arisitde’s supporters who had not fled with him after he was deposed.

The Clinton Administration inherited this mess and determined the best path to stability was to return Aristide to power, arguing that the sanctity of free elections must be upheld. It was interesting, however, to see the Clinton Administration more outraged at the military’s violence against Aristide’s supporters than at Aristide’s own violence against his opponents. Many Clinton critics argued that while the coup was illegal and should be condemned, the answer was not to put back in power a man who had called for his own people to be necklaced.

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ut the Clinton Administration wasn’t swayed, and restored Aristide with the force of US troops. Aristide managed to finish his term, disgruntled that the US would not support the extension of his term to make up for the years he lost to the coup. The constitution did not allow him to succeed himself, so his ally and former prime minister, Rene Preval (who governs today) was elected president in 1996. But like a nightmare from which one cannot awaken, Aristide was re-elected in 2000 and his party of even more radicalized supporters, controlling the electoral machinery, took control of the legislature in elections that the opposition had boycotted and from which many voters abstained due to violence and apathy. Only 10% of the electorate voted.

Now with full control and hungry for revenge, Aristide governed as he had in his first presidency, with incompetence, corruption, intimidation and violence. His second presidency was not without positive accomplishments, especially for poor Haitians, but success was concentrated with those Haitians aligned with the regime. He grew rich from corruption and continued to persecute his opponents, leading to a second fall from power. Under him, the Haitian National Police became a textbook example of corruption and human rights violations. The political assassination of one of his opponents in 2004 sparked another rebellion, this time not from the military that he had disbanded and replaced with a national police force, but of armed groups from across the country. The rebels converged on the capital and Aristide fled to the US. Though the US government saved his life by getting him out of the country, he immediately began to claim that the US orchestrated his removal and armed the groups who deposed him.

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We can place a lot of blame for these circumstances on Haiti’s culture, which is not conducive to democracy and development, but we should not miss this truth: when Haiti finally had the opportunity to choose their leaders, the people they chose were horrible. They were no less corrupt and violent than the dictators of the previous two centuries.

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or whatever good Aristide did, and he did some for some poor Haitians, it was undone by his corruption, violence and incompetence. He was no George Washington, but he didn’t have to be – he could simply have eschewed violence and intimidation of his opponents and governed in the interest of all Haitians. He could have been more like Nelson Mandela, less like Hugo Chavez. He chose, for whatever reasons (radical ideology, revenge against the “betters”), to continue the Haitian pattern of government of some of the people, by some of the people and for some of the people.

After Aristide’s second fall, Preval eventually returned to power as elected president, and he continues as president today. His regime is shaky, the environment is destroyed (even before the quake) and the populace has grown jaded about democracy because it has not brought them what they hoped. I have met Preval personally; he is a decent enough man, and I believe he is a Christian (he, too, is a former Catholic priest). America been working with his government for several years, providing foreign assistance – we do so in league with Canada, the European Union and the United Nations, the latter continuing a mandate even today with 9,000 peacekeepers on the ground, and they are just about the only reason Haiti has not descended into civil war and more coups.

Preval’s government, which has been surviving on international aid and the too-small amount of money that comes from the diaspora, now faces the task of trying to operate when many of its ministers, legislators and bureaucrats were lost in the quake or are busy trying to help their families survive. But he has shown resolve and determination, and he has joined his country in prayer vigils that have drawn as many as a million for the three days of fasting and prayer that his government called for. This potential deepening of the Christian faith of many Haitians is, I believe, the best hope for a cultural change that can bring greater harmony and cooperation to the society. But some concrete steps are necessary if Haiti is to avoid sinking further into the abyss of poverty and disorder.

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o what is to be done? First let’s turn our attention to what Haitians must do. Above all, they must determine to strengthen democracy, free market economics and transparency. From the president on down to the town council members, they should be men and women of character whose interest is democratic and just governance. Civil society leaders, many of whom have such goals in mind, should support them, hold them accountable and teach their fellow citizens that help for Haiti “begins at home,� but in a meaningful way. That cannot be just a catch phrase, but it must reflect an embrace of the values of tolerance, justice and fair play.

Those who compete for offices, and the parties that support them, must embrace the concepts of a loyal opposition and compromise.

They should appreciate that the Haitian people generally have little experience with anything other than dictatorship and demagoguery.

It is up to those who have found a way out of poverty and backwardness to be true leaders with no goal but the improvement of Haiti and its people. Zero-sum politics has led to death and destruction. Self-serving and revenge-seeking office seekers have rendered democracy a cruel joke. I have sat with Haitian leaders over the years and tried to drive this message home: sometimes in politics, even when you are right, you will gain more from compromise than from steadfast adherence to party views.

Second, Haitians should decentralize their governance. The quake will aid in this effort, even if that is certainly a harsh way to come by it. Port-au-Prince is largely destroyed. Now is the time to begin to truly practice subsidiarity and rely more on mayors and town councils to organize society, inviting investment into their communities in order to put people to work and solve their own problems. Centralization and statist approaches, reminiscent of French practice, have demonstrated their complete inadequacy. Electing mayors and councils is a very good way to teach and embed the principles of democracy and make them regular occurrences and habits in the minds and hearts of the people.

There is no reason why Haitians cannot govern themselves democratically and justly, starting at the local level, if they are willing to do so. Taking charge of their own affairs and needs such as education and the provision of basic health services, with the many foreign and indigenous charities that are ready to help, will provide an excellent 10

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national classroom to incubate democracy and transparent and effective government.

A third thing that Haitian leaders can do is to make Haiti a bastion of private property rights and entrepreneurship. Hernando De Soto and others have documented that Haiti, like so many other poor countries, is poor in part because it has so many official and unofficial barriers in the way of property ownership. It is even difficult to lease land from the government, much less to buy it, in order to start an enterprise. This is the product of nothing more than foolishness and corruption. Clean title to land and property and minimal barriers to engage in commerce is the surest way to get the most out of the Haitian economy. As that proves fruitful, paired with a new democratic order, foreign investors will be more interested in partnering with Haitians for profit to the benefit of Haiti generally.

Finally, the Haitian diaspora can do more than it does. The money they send to family members in Haiti is more than the foreign aid total, but it is not comparable to what other diasporas do such as the Salvadorans and the Colombians. Perhaps that is because Haitians in the US, Canada and Europe see no reason to invest in chaos, but perhaps it is because they don’t have the same concern for their home country as do the others I mentioned. I suspect it is more the latter, but I cannot know that for sure. The wealthier among them seem more content to remain comfortable in Miami or Montreal and leave Haiti for the international community to deal with. To the degree that this is true, that is a problem of culture, the culture of the political leaders as well as civic leaders.

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e can criticize the political culture of Haiti generally as being not conducive to democracy, development and capitalism (the things Haiti must thrive in to improve itself) but only when the elected and civic leaders of the country make it their mission to fix their country will Haiti begin to overcome its problems. The Haitian diaspora must also take responsibility for encouraging democratic practices and free market principles in Haiti.

They enjoy these in their second “homes� and if they care about Haiti, they should seek them for Haiti itself rather than see Haiti simply as a place from which to avert their eyes or worse, a place to exploit.

And what can foreigners do? First, they can right now begin to require that Haitian leaders do what I discussed above. They can condition aid on true and deep reforms. They can make it clear that no 11

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aid is forthcoming to rebuild Haiti unless significant and lasting democratic and free market reforms are embraced in the law. No country is obligated to subsidize tyranny, corruption and incompetence. Aid should be conditioned, as is the US’s Millennium Challenge Account, on best practices of democracy and capitalism. No talk of debt relief is warranted without the proper reforms.

Second, foreigners should open their markets to Haitian goods. I should note that the history of the donor nations’ support for Haiti is not without blemish regarding a very important source of development: trade. We cannot encourage democratic capitalism in Haiti and at the same time refuse to provide a market for their goods. The donor nations, especially the US, Canada and France, should trade freely with Haiti without protectionism for every group who manages to lobby their legislatures for protection. Sugar and other commodities come to mind, as does the textile industry. If Haiti is willing to do its part, so should we all. Besides, Americans like to buy commodities and t-shirts at good prices – so why not have a policy that benefits all American consumers instead of a handful of producers.

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here is a third policy change that foreign governments can consider that has the potential to dramatically help Haiti: to increase the immigration of Haitians to the United States, Canada and France and thereby increase the remittances from the diaspora. Elliott Abrams, who was assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs in the Reagan administration and a deputy national security adviser to President George W. Bush, has recently written eloquently on this potential solution. His argument is that, since the Haitian diaspora’s remittances to the home country do not compare favorably to those of other diaspora’s in the hemisphere, one way to increase them is to allow more Haitians to come to the developed West. They can bring their skills and labor, and with their higher productivity in the First World be able to send home more “aid.” Canada has already adopted policy changes to increase Haitian immigration, but France and the US remain stubbornly committed to the levels they have been observing. It is a simple solution that portends great benefit to both the donor and the recipient nation.

Granted, in a recession such increases in the labor force are unlikely to be popular enough to pass congressional muster, but we know that the United States will help Haiti so we should at least be discussing this option.

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There are some other options that have been discussed in the past and are bound to be discussed again given the severe situation in Haiti now. They are rather draconian, unlikely to be adopted, and I imagine politicians will not want to consider them, but they are worth discussing here.

One is a form of development aid that has been used in several African countries as well as in the newly liberated Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition to poverty, disease, a degraded environment, corruption and many other ills, these countries lack skilled administrators and technicians who are willing and able to set up and run the infrastructure of governments. Without them, how does a country set up a network of basic services? Collect tax revenue and bill for services?

Manage natural resources for the good of the entire citizenry? Even if the government and society is committed to eradicating corruption, for example, how should they go about setting up a government and infrastructure that makes this possible with all the appropriate checks and balances? The answer in many cases has been to bring in foreign experts with relevant cultural and technical experience, often under the aegis of the UN or some other international organization.

This approach has worked for war-ravaged countries where the old regime has been eviscerated as well as for poor and undeveloped countries who reach the point that they need others to come and do for them what they cannot do for themselves. These experts spend months, sometimes years, not only doing the work of setting up and running ministries at all levels of government, providing training and apprenticeships for those nationals who will run the offices and agencies when the foreigners have left. Sometimes the diaspora can provide these experts, but sometimes they will come as paid employees of public and private sector entities around the world. Aid resources directed at this approach have more promise than simply hoping that the same people that have not been getting the job done will do so in the future if we really hope and wish for that.

Another form of help, far more difficult to contemplate, is a return to some form of trusteeship. This has been tried before at the beginning of the last century after WWI and again after WWII, to deal with territories and former colonies that were ungoverned and ungovernable and with all the attendant human disasters and threats to the peace that these circumstances entailed. The concept for today would be straightforward: when a country is a nation-state in name only 13

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because it is unable to self-govern; when its people are continually suffering extreme poverty, disease and civic unrest; when it cannot operate as an autonomous member of the international system, then it could be a candidate for trusteeship under the United Nations Charter. The UN would oversee the administration of the subject country by one or more other countries until such time as the latter are no longer needed. A “shadow government” would be formed from experts provided by the UN bureaucracy and technical experts from around the world. Such is now being discussed for Haiti and Zimbabwe; it was done for Bosnia and East Timor in the last decade.

There appears to be a point at which some in the international relations community are unwilling to let sovereignty trump basic human needs. I doubt very seriously the United States would consider this option or play a role in it should it come about, but things are bad enough that it is being talked about.

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aiti has never been in worse shape. Now is the time for some of the bold measures I have outlined above. Several are quite feasible and practical, others are politically risky and will not be very popular in either Haiti or the donor countries.

But to continue to treat Haiti as just another developing country after this devastating earthquake is immensely unhelpful. What we tried in the past has not worked, and it will not work any better now that the country has suffered this catastrophe. So why would I suggest that now is the time that the United States might actually be able to do something that works?

It is a political cliché to say that only Nixon could go to China. But perhaps it bears consideration that only a black American president can bring serious reform to the US’s foreign assistance policy to Haiti.

Perhaps only Barack Obama can offer a bold reform to our policy toward Haiti that includes consideration of everything from increased immigration and trade openness to temporary suspension of Haitian sovereignty in order to improve the lives of Haitians and stop the cycle of endless and wasted foreign assistance to Haiti. After all, we are always going to help Haiti, not to do so is politically a non-starter. We should do it better and maybe this president has the opportunity that no other president has ever had.

Paul Bonicelli is Provost of Houston Baptist University and a former Assistant Administrator of USAID. 14

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D O E S G O D WA N T US TO CHANGE THE WORLD? \reaching0the0elite|

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Eric Metaxas

oes God want us to change the world? And if so, how? If you’re in a hurry, let me cut to the chase: the answer to the first question is yes – and the answer to the second is by doing what the Clapham Circle did: proving their faith through works, mostly among the poor and powerless, and working among the rich and powerful.

Let me tell you about the night talkshow host Dick Cavett and I went to see Mickey Rooney perform. This is not a joke. Before the show I got to meet Mickey, along with the photographer Richard Avedon. It was a trip. But the point of this is what happened later that evening, in a Park Avenue bistro, where Cavett and I bumped into a Catholic priest friend of mine. Suddenly, as though it had been eating at him for years, Cavett asked the priest where the Golden Rule came from. The priest, knowing Cavett to be brilliant and welleducated, reached way back and came up with the actual Hebrew passage from the Old Testament, which Jesus would have been referring to when he so famously spoke it in the New Testament. But that’s not what Cavett was after. He didn’t know Jesus had given us the Golden Rule. That’s what he was asking!

It was an odd moment watching the priest and the pundit missing each other, and realizing that my favorite smartguy didn’t know what most American fifth-graders know. Why? Because for the last fifty years he had been living among the intellectual and cultural elites of Manhattan – folks like Woody Allen and Susan Sontag and Pauline Kael, people so secular when compared to the rest of the 15

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country that they wouldn’t have known it was Jesus either. And if they had, they wouldn’t have brought it up at George Plimpton’s cocktail party or at Paloma Picasso’s opening. Get it?

What does this have to do with changing the world? Everything.

Because, for good or for ill, it is the cultural elites who determine much of what goes on in the rest of the culture, who can set the tone and content of the cultural conversation. They can determine what we sneer at and what we ooh at and ahh at. Not that they are trying to do this. It’s just the way things are. They tend to have the TV pulpits and the Conde Nast photo spreads, and the folks in Topeka who watch them … don’t. You’ve heard of trickle-down economics? Let me introduce you to trickle-down culture.

This is nothing new. Two hundred years ago, when the great reformer and abolitionist William Wilberforce was alive, the situation was the same. In fact, it was worse. In our own country today, secularism is still generally confined to the cultural elites, who are few in number and mostly live in a few metropolitan areas. But the overwhelming percentage of Americans across the country – 84 percent by a recent Gallup poll – self-identify as Christians, with about half of them “serious” about their faith. So most of us still remember where the Golden Rule came from. Though the tide is rising, we have not yet been completely swamped by secularism.

But in Wilberforce’s England, they had. The secularism of the elites had over the course of the 18th century quite overrun the country, and though most people still went to church, almost no one really believed the Bible or the basic tenets of the faith. Most of the clergy didn’t believe it themselves, and from their pulpits were chirrupping mainly about Enlightenment deism and rationalism, and “preaching” a tepid status-quo moralism. And the culture, having drawn back from anything resembling a robust Christian faith, was suffering terribly. The elites set the extraordinarily low cultural standards, being as hedonistic and selfish as anything we can imagine outside Versailles; they gave nothing to the poor and did nothing to help them.

As far as they were concerned, the poor deserved to be poor, and they deserved to be rich. End of discussion. The effect of this was incalculable, and throughout the whole of the 18th century extreme poverty and social chaos held sway, complete with public displays of animal cruelty, epidemic alcoholism among all classes, and every other kind of social horror. One contemporary statistic paints the 16

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grim picture: 25 percent of all single women in London were prostitutes. Their average age was sixteen.

Still, despite these longest of odds Wilberforce and his devout friends – what we today call the Clapham Circle – somehow succeeded in radically changing the cultural conversation and climate over a few decades. By Wilberforce’s death in 1833, they had managed to bring a Christian worldview into the cultural mainstream for the first time in modern history. To say that it was miraculous is merely to know the details. And they did it, as we have said, by showing their faith through works, and by moving principally in culturally elite circles, as we shall see. But first some background.

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hey changed the world! It’s a phrase we’ve heard so often that it’s lost all meaning, as anything does when worn down by overhandling to the bald nub of cliché. But if anyone ever changed the world, Wilberforce and the Clapham Circle did. Wilberforce is, of course, most famous for leading the Parliamentary battle to end the slave trade in the British Empire. That alone was an utterly heroic effort of twenty years, culminating in the great victory of 1807, whose bicentennial we celebrate this year. But what few know is that what Wilberforce and the Clapham Circle accomplished went far beyond that historic triumph of 1807. For one thing, Wilberforce’s efforts led to the British abolition of slavery itself 26 years later, and inspired the abolitionist cause across Europe and in the United States, too. Years later, Lincoln and Frederick Douglas hailed him as their hero.

But more amazing, and harder to fathom, was that far beyond abolition, Wilberforce and his friends had a monumental impact on the wider British culture, and on the world beyond Britain, because they succeeded not only in ending the slave trade and slavery, but in changing the entire mindset of the culture. What had been an effectively pagan worldview, where slavery and the abuse of human beings was accepted as inevitable and normative, became an effectively biblical worldview, in which human beings were seen as created in the image of God. The idea that one should love one’s neighbor was brought into the cultural mainstream for the first time in history, and the world has never been the same.

What began as a war against the slave trade became a war against every other social ill: from the treatment of prisoners, to child labor, to caring for orphans, to epidemic alcoholism, to prostitution, to illiteracy among the poor, to public spectacles of animal cruelty, and 17

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everything in between. When Wilberforce began his career in Parliament, the idea of helping the poor was virtually unheard of, but a few decades later he and his friends had effectively launched the Victorian era, a time when helping the poor and fighting social injustice were the cultural norm, as they are today. By the time he died in 1833, Wilberforce’s goal “to make goodness fashionable” had succeeded beyond anything he could have dreamt. The fashion leapt across the Atlantic, too, and just as in Britain, societies to do good bloomed across America and have flourished ever since. To do: Change the world. Check.

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s we have said, the first aspect of their success has to do with their theological view that one must prove one’s faith though one’s works, that the two cannot be separated. Wilberforce and his friends lived at a time when there was no false division between faith and works, or between evangelism and social outreach.

These were simply two sides of the coin that was the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The great 17th century evangelist George Whitfield spent as much time establishing orphanages as preaching – and he preached 18,000 sermons. Caring for widows and orphans, feeding the hungry, and helping the poor were all explicitly and exclusively Christian ideas, so atheists, agnostics, and nominal Christians were neither involved in them, nor in abolition. The idea of a social conscience simply didn’t exist in that culture, except among serious Christians, who were scorned by the wider culture as “Methodists”, because many had been converted through the “Methodist” movement of Charles and John Wesley.

Today, of course, thanks to Wilberforce and his friends, most everyone has a social conscience. The idea of “making goodness fashionable” had so succeeded that Christian morality became the standard in public life throughout the 19th century, so much so that we laugh at “Victorian values” today. But because doing good to one’s fellow man had become so popular, it eventually became unmoored from its explicitly Christian roots. Something called the “Social Gospel” came into being, where some jettisoned the theology of Jesus’ divinity and miracles, and decided that “doing good” was all the Christianity they needed. In reaction to this – tragically – many Christians decided, around 1920, to focus almost exclusively on evangelism and on theological fundamentals, calling themselves “Fundamentalists”. Since then, many Christians have inherited this strange, ironic situation, 18

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where those behind social outreach in the first place stepped back and let non-Christians take the lead. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Suffice it to say that Wilberforce and the people of the Clapham Circle existed before this strange and tragic split. For them, as we have said, working to alleviate suffering and to fight social injustices went hand in hand with evangelism and a high view of Scripture.

They fought hard to win souls to Christ, and just as hard to fight suffering and poverty and injustice in Christ’s name. And they realized that to be successful in either of these, they needed to be deeply devoted to Christ as well as fully engaged in the culture around them.

In a way we’ve not seen since, they were remarkably successful in striking the balance that is meant by the phrase “in the world, but not of it”. While they spent much time together and prayed much, they knew God had not called them only to fellowship and endless prayer meetings, but to go out and to do His work outside those meetings, in the marketplace. That was the model and the mandate of the One who had sent them out, and they took it very seriously. Who was it who said: I come not to heal those that are well, but the sick? Hint: it wasn’t Dorothy Parker.

The people of Clapham also evinced an extraordinary ecumenism.

Suffering and injustice were their real enemies, not other Christians who differed with them on some minor points of theology. Most in the Clapham Circle were members of the Church of England, but among their number were “Dissenters” such as Quakers, Moravians, and Baptists. They welcomed any serious Christians to work with them on abolition of the slave trade or the other cause to which they gave themselves. To work together in a culture hostile to their faith they were obliged to renounce denominational squabbles and turf wars. Religious pride was deflated, and the Gospel flourished. More extraordinary was their canny willingness to work with non- Christians, if possible. For example, Wilberforce made common cause with Charles Fox, another member of Parliament who was one of the most publicly immoral men of his day. But Wilberforce didn’t do this to be seen as “bipartisan” or to lessen criticisms of himself as a prude or religious fanatic, for that itself would have been prideful. He did it because he reckoned ending the slave trade more important than taking a public stand against the dizzying debaucheries of Mr. Fox. 19

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When their fellow citizens saw that the efforts of these Christians were improving society in general – crime was reduced, for one thing – attitudes changed, giving their evangelistic efforts greater credibility too. Advocates of Enlightenment ideas such as atheism and Deism were writing angry pamphlets, but the men and women of Clapham were rolling up their sleeves and actually doing good to and for their fellow man. So perhaps this serious Christianity of Mr. Wilberforce was not so terrible after all. Wilberforce became the “moral conscience” of the nation, and he and his Clapham friends slowly but surely called the nation back to its Christian roots, reminding Britons that if they called themselves Christians, they must help the poor and suffering.

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ike Wilberforce, most of those in the Clapham Circle occupied high positions in society and were wealthy, so they had great influence and leverage, and the means to do much with that influence and leverage. Babington, Macauley, Charles Grant, and others – like Wilberforce – were members of Parliament. Hannah More was one of the chief literary figures of her day, being close friends with the famous Dr. Johnson, the actor David Garrick, and the artist Joshua Reynolds. Her friends, Lord and Lady Middleton, were also well-connected in the London world of Arts and Letters, and Lord Middleton eventually became First Lord of the Admiralty.

James Stephen and Granville Sharp were lawyers; Isaac Milner was a world-class academic; Henry Venn and Thomas Gisborne were wealthy clergymen. The list goes on. They were a veritable pantheon of bigshots, all connected in their evangelical faith and their zeal to improve the culture of their nation. But without their societal stature, the causes they championed simply could not have succeeded.

But the Clapham Circle were not mere culture warriors, trying to climb over the ramparts to take control, but rather were already insiders who knew how to behave like insiders, and who would do their best to change things from within. They knew how to move in their high circles of influence; knew the unspoken language of those circles; and knew when to push and when not to push and whom to ask about this or that, and whom not to ask. They looked and behaved like everyone else, except for their deep faith, so they were simultaneously insiders and outsiders. As we have said, they may well be the most “in the world, but not of it” network of people who ever lived. As “not-of-the-world” outsiders, it was vital they spend 20

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time together, encouraging and praying with each other. They were aware that they were also God’s ambassadors and missionaries within the elite culture of their day, much as Joseph and Daniel in theirs.

The Clapham Circle did all they could to maintain their places of power and influence, so long as it advanced the Gospel, because their ultimate allegiances were not to the “world” in which they moved, but to the “notof- the-world” Kingdom, whose King they served.

The Clapham Circle were so named because many of them lived in Clapham, then an idyllic village in the “country”, four miles from Parliament. A few of them, including Wilberforce, lived in three adjoining Georgian mansions on Clapham Common, but many others lived in London, Bath, Cambridge, and elsewhere, visiting from time to time as schedules permitted, or occasion demanded. But Clapham was their center. The historic concentration of elite evangelicals there did not occur by happenstance. It was the brainchild of Henry Thornton, a tremendously wealthy man who was Wilberforce’s closest friend. He thought coaxing Wilberforce to join him in his twelvebedroom mansion in Clapham might attract others of serious Christian faith to the neighborhood, and perhaps something good would come of it. The house soon became a magnet for like-minded friends, who visited and stayed for days or weeks at a time, as was the custom in those days among the wealthy. Thornton soon added two wings, bringing the number of bedrooms to thirty-four, then built another home next door, and another. Before you could say “birds of a feather” Clapham had become a buzzing community of Christians in the highest branches of society, all passionately intent on using their resources of money, influence, talents, and social connections to improve things in British society, and around the world.

Wilberforce and his network of friends are a model of how Christians can and should engage culture. But since his time, serious Christians have fallen far from that high-water mark of cultural engagement. So how has this happened? And how might we return?

First of all, how we got to where we are today has everything to do with the split that we have already mentioned, when the fed-up and embattled Christian “Fundamentalists” of the 1920s split from those who were advocates of the theologically liberal “Social Gospel”. Since then, tragically, the rift has grown, further feeding the unbiblical tendency of serious Christians to be anti-cultural, antiintellectual, and anti-elitist.

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hristians have always struggled with how much they should be separate from the wider culture. It’s a crucial balance to strike. It’s tempting to mock those who today or in the past have separated themselves entirely, but often they’ve done so with good reasons, such as a desire to preserve their faith, to keep the secular or pagan culture from destroying it. Of course that’s why God called the Israelites to be separate from the pagan cultures around them. Another good reason has to do with wanting to protect one’s children from harm. Nonetheless, in the last century, Christians on the whole have pulled back too much from the wider culture, retreating when they ought to have advanced, or at the least, held their ground and fought.

As we’ve said, Wilberforce struck the balance between engaging culture and being separate from it particularly well. He was ardently evangelistic, always thinking of ways to bring those he knew to think about the state of their souls, and he wrote a bestselling book whose sole purpose was evangelistic. He spent endless hours reading Scriptures and praying, and led his family in devotions twice daily. But he never came across as a dour moralist; all who met him thought him winsome and full of joy. There was a great wit behind his eyes, as his friends knew best, and a creative engagement with people that did not reduce those people to ciphers, nor their eternal salvation to a dull project. Madame de Stael, who was probably the most esteemed society hostess of her time wanted desperately to meet Wilberforce and worked hard at finally getting him to accept an invitation to one of her parties. Afterward she reckoned him not only the most religious man in all of Europe, but the wittiest. But Wilberforce was not indiscriminate in mixing socially, and shortly after he came to faith he resigned – in one day – from his five social clubs. And he spent most of his time with Claphamite friends.

It would be wise to look to him as a model, because the similarities between his world and ours today are striking. Wilberforce shows us that we mustn’t buy into the silly Hobson’s choice of being either “in the world” or “not of the world”. Christians with integrity need to figure out how to be both simultaneously. We cannot escape God’s command that we be holy, even as He is holy. Being hip may not by itself lead those we meet closer to Jesus. We may have to be authentic and courageous, too, and may have to take stands against things in our culture, risking unpopularity. Striking the right balance 22

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may be even more difficult than deciding whether to shave our heads or use mousse.

Of course in recent decades we’ve seen plenty of the opposite problem, of serious Christians – sometimes with hideous haircuts – being overly anti-cultural. Often we have engaged the culture – if it can be called that – only for the purposes of evangelism. We’ve sometimes acted as though “getting everyone saved” was the only real project we should be involved in, as though that would solve all of the other, larger cultural issues. Perhaps if we led enough people to faith – the upsidedown McCulture, like a flipped kayak, would at some point suddenly right itself with a single Super-sized McSplash.

But often we have not even cared about the culture at all. Many of us have thought that since the Lord would be returning around the year 1994–2000 at the latest – what did it matter if everything was going to Sheol in a handbasket? This is the standard Dude-it’s-all-gonna-burn theology, which permits complaining about the culture, but not doing anything about it – besides, of course, rescuing people from it before it all burns.

This tack has the double disadvantage of being unbiblical and not working. Indeed, it has backfired badly, because without Christians involved in it, the culture only got worse. We demonized Jerry Lee Lewis and then watched him morph into Mick Jagger and then Johnny Rotten and then Marilyn Manson, who made us wish for the quaint days of Jerry Lee Lewis again. But at some point – perhaps just after the Rapture failed to occur on schedule in 2000! – some Christians got to thinking that maybe we should be involved in the culture, instead of, say, breeding red heifers, or trying to figure out the Hebrew spelling of Ahmadinejad. So there is hope.

Tim Keller, the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian in Manhattan where I live has long preached that New York Christians should love the city and its culture – because they are a part of it. They ought to be good stewards of it, citizens who make it a better place. Wilberforce and his friends had this attitude toward London. They knew it was not their true home, but they did what good they could there because ignoring their culture meant ignoring those trapped within it, including the suffering and the poor. God’s commands to them wouldn’t permit that. And somehow, by being a part of the mainstream culture of their day, and by being forced to live and work cheek-by-jowl with those who did not share their faith, their faith 23

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itself became more robust, relevant, and real. It had to be so, since the reforms they were trying to effect depended on their making their case in the public sphere. They had to be able to effectively communicate with those who didn’t initially share their views. If they had come across as merely odd religious fanatics, their success would have been seriously hurt.

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t’s usually the case that Christians somehow become better Christians when they are engaged with the culture around them. We are forced to see ourselves as others see us, and to care about how others see us, since they are people to whom we wish to share the Gospel, among other things. But when we hide in a separate Christian subculture, with its own celebrities and music and “literature” and “Paintings of Light,” we often lose the ability to communicate effectively with those who are outside. We begin speaking to ourselves, often with kitschy inside-the-camp aphorisms (“Commission: Possible!”) – and become less and less able to speak to those who are different from us. That, of course, is the enemy of evangelism. We grow more and more fearful and suspicious of those outside the camp, until we slowly begin to think of them as a hostile “other” whom we must destroy, rather than broken and exiled parts of our own selves, whom we are commanded by God to heal and restore.

Within the plastic palisades of Fort Churchianity™, we will care little if the world outside perishes. We’ve put in our stock of Slim Jims and water purification tablets, and are content to wait for what we know will come, perhaps even gleefully wondering what all those fools who didn’t listen to us will say once they realize we were right and they were wrong.

But what is that but a nerd’s revenge fantasy cast in religious imagery? Schadenfreude and love don’t mix. Could Jesus be gleeful to lose those he created to be with him for eternity? If we live among the lost, it’s harder for us to think of them cavalierly. It’s harder to demonize them, because if we live in the same culture that they do, they will look an awful lot like us. They will talk like us and dress like us, and but for God’s grace, they are us.

Finally, having an us vs. them attitude toward the wider culture is unbiblical. Paul quoted pagan poets and philosophers to put his points across. He didn’t advocate their worldviews, but he took from them what was valuable, what was universally true, and he used it to point to the one who is Truth. And of course missionaries do the 24

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same, humbling themselves to learn languages and cultural folkways and customs, all that they might communicate the love of Jesus more effectively.

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n the last century, many serious Christians have fallen into the trap of striking an anti-elitist attitude, and often an antiintellectual attitude, too. We can see how this happened; after all, it was the educated elites who, in the late 19th century, undermined the Scriptures, embraced Darwin, and soon thereafter came to champion a social Gospel at the expense of true biblical theology. Many Christians felt themselves besieged and, in reaction, retreated into a kind of defiant, populist stance, one that had its dukes up, as it were, and was often prideful, rather than humble. In this process, many of the most theologically serious Christians abandoned the mainstream culture to the secular elites, who were now alone on the cultural field, with no real opposition. So, of course, the culture got worse, as we have said, and the unchallenged secular ideas of the elites and intellectuals came to dominate more and more, flowering, one might say, in the Sixties, in whose secular and socially liberal “Boomer” shadow we all still live. All this made serious Christians even more hostile to the mainstream culture and the elites and intellectuals who dominate it.

One result of this hostility to mainstream culture, and to the secular elites who dominated it, is that Christians more and more abandoned “worldly” centers of cultural influence, taking their salt and light with them like peeved children taking their marbles and going home. So the cultural centers like New York City only slid farther into secularism, and farther from the values of the rest of the country.

And because of the rise of the media culture in the last fifty years, the influence of these increasingly secular cultural centers only increased. People who thought they could hide in small towns far from places like New York – found that their children were going upstairs to watch their own televisions, and getting the values of New York and Hollywood elites anyway.

So Christians have become particularly hostile to cultural elites, whose unchallenged ideas were destroying the culture. And we have often behaved as though we somehow had God’s permission to hate these elites, because not only were they especially wicked, but also wealthy and powerful and famous. We have little difficulty bringing the love of the Gospel to exotic people groups, but elites are some25

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thing else. Whom does Jesus love less? Which deserves hell more? Or is it that, like the Prodigal son’s elder brother, and like Jonah, it is God’s grace that we most fear? Have we seen the Pharisee, and is he us? If that’s true, then it turns out we are sinners, too, in need of God’s grace. Or did we think we could get to heaven simply by not watching HBO? Of course Christians aren’t alone in their anti-elitism. Hating elites is as American as George Washington. The idea that they might hold the ideological keys to our culture is as distasteful as paying taxes to King George III. But scholars like James Hunter at the University of Virginia have shown it to be true, and the example of Wilberforce has proven it true at least once. But saying it’s true today is lonely and difficult, something like being a westbound ibex trapped in an endless herd of eastbound sheep. “The little people of history have been forgotten and stepped on and overlooked,” they bleat, “and it is their voice that must be heard! History has been written by the powerful few, and that must be changed!” And so we applaud Ben Franklin, the precocious candlestickmaker’s son who through sheer Yankee ingenuity rose to become an international celebrity and helped found this country. But we forget that only after he had risen was he able to help those who had not risen along with him.

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ur history of anti-elitism explains much of why we’ve had little difficulty ministering to down-and-outers – or our own social equals – via evangelism, but have sneered at the elites who sneer at us, and at engaging the culture over which they have so much sway. But we should stop and ask ourselves what the world would be like if Wilberforce had done that. Among the most crucial moments in history was when Wilberforce, newly converted, went to talk with his old friend, John Newton, the slave trader turned pastor.

Wilberforce was sure that becoming a Christian necessitated retreating from the world, and his elite circles. He knew that his friends in high society and politics would now mock him and his beliefs, and he knew that the temptations of the world were powerful, too, and would be easier to avoid if he retreated from the world. But Newton famously told him not to do this. Newton suggested that perhaps God would use him in politics and high society. Perhaps God had given him his talents and position for that reason. Wilberforce’s assent to Newton’s advice led to all that followed, led to the Clapham Circle, and to the end of the slave trade and slavery, and to the im26

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provement of life among the poor, not just in Britain, but around the world. The social conscience we think of as a given among most people in Western societies can be traced back, in large part, to that conversation and that decision.

To reprise our cultural trickle-down theory, the worst thing about the anti-elitist approach is that it most hurts those at the bottom of the social ladder. By giving in to our pride and abandoning the elite culture of places like New York City Christians have hurt the rest of the culture by allowing a secular worldview to dominate the whole culture, just as it did in England before. Surely a God who would have us humble ourselves and pray for demon-worshiping cannibals would have us humble ourselves and reach out to pro-choice television anchors, too.

That is simply good missiology and would further the Gospel. In their way, the cultural elites of Manhattan and Hollywood are an untouched people group no less in need of hearing the Gospel than the cannibals of Irian-Jaya or the Auca Indians of Ecuador were just a few decades ago. As brave and diligent souls have over the last two millennia risked their lives and lost their lives, and have studied obscure grammars and translated the Gospel of John into the dialects of these and other vanishing tribes, so too we today ought to humbly set ourselves to the noble task of bringing the Gospel to these elites.

We should think and pray about moving to those places where they gather, and we should try to communicate with them and learn their folkways and cultural shibboleths with the same diligence we have applied to obscure tribes. And if the Lord has not called us to live in those places, or to work in those industries, which are the front-lines in the struggle for the heart and soul of our culture, then we should pray about whether we ought to send money to help the ministries of those who have been called. And we all should know that we have certainly been called to support them in prayer.

Finally, we cannot delude ourselves into thinking that, simply because they live in America and speak English, these cultural elites have heard the Gospel already, and have rejected it. If the Gospel has not been translated into a language that they understand, and if it has not been brought to them by people with whom they have some cultural affinity, they have not heard it. These people do not speak the same language as thatched-haired evangelists on tv, nor do they know anyone who knows anyone who speaks that language. It is a 27

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foreign tongue, and they are deaf to it. Incredibly, some of them are even unaware of the Golden Rule and Who spoke it. But we cannot, like Jonah, decide they are not worth our trouble. That is not our call to make. What they do and what they know and don’t know affects our culture, affects us and our families and neighbors. We are part of that culture, like it or not, so let’s not escape it – since we cannot escape it anyway – but let us love it and help it as best we can.

Eric Metaxas is the New York Times best-selling author of Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery, and the host and founder of Socrates in the City, a speakers series in Manhattan, where he lives with his wife and daughter. His most recent book is Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy - A Righteous Gentile vs. the Third Reich. For more information, please visit www.ericmetaxas.com.

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THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN ENTERPRISE [values0and0capitalism{ A Conversation with Arthur Brooks Ben Domenech for The City: We’re talking today with Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. As someone who is not just a think tank leader, but an academic with a long record of working with students, let me ask: Why do you think young people today, particularly young evangelicals, give little indication of sharing your positive view of free enterprise?

Arthur Brooks: The burden that we’re under is the burden from having won. I mean, young people in the evangelical world – or in any world for that matter, in the United States – have grown up since the time of Ronald Reagan. If you’re pre-Reagan or you’re postReagan, it’s two different mindsets. I wasn’t conscious about policy that much before Reagan either, but I can tell you that there was a significant difference. I mean, Reagan was elected when I was 16 – Reagan was elected before you were born. So this is actually a generational difference. It is the smallest generational difference you can get, between you and me, but it is a generational difference.

So the key is, if you fought the Reagan fights, and you won, then you’ll have an anthropological proclivity toward wanting to fight those fights again and again, when you see the same threats that lead to those fights – right? So you see Obama coming along, and you think Jimmy Carter and you fight the Reagan fights. Now, you talk to a whole generation of guys like you who say, “Wait a minute. What do you mean? What do you mean we need free trade? We have free trade.” The trouble is not that it’s wrong – it doesn’t make sense. And 29

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so weird things that you’ll hear a generation of people older than me saying to people, your age and younger, that we need to be talking about issues like prayer in schools. There’s a language gap. It’s like, “What are you talking about prayer in schools? What do you mean?

You want to go back to 1800?” You know, it’s actually 1968 – but the point is that it’s just a different world.

We can’t respond to the whole global warming thing by just saying “it’s just a hoax.” It becomes the old guy commenting on the newfangled, not understanding – not taking the time and energy to say, “Look, we understand the concern, but there’s a problem with the execution. Statism is a natural answer to your concern, but it is not going to get you where you want to go. There’s nothing wrong with where you want to go, which is proper stewardship of the environment of our planet. That’s actually a good thing – it’s good Christianity. It’s proper theology. It’s well-ordered thinking.”

But the problem is that the statist approach to fixing it probably won’t fix it, and it will have consequences. The wrong way to talk about that is to say: “They’re just trying to pull the wool over your eyes.” Which, in a way, denigrates the entire basis of the next generation’s concerns.

The City: How much of this problem is about that language gap, a gap

in shared knowledge of understanding history?

Brooks: Yes, that’s significant. There’s this inability to talk about those issues, but there’s the whole idea that we’re on the cusp of socialism. Well, that doesn’t comport with the observations that a lot of young people have, because we won. And we had monetary and fiscal policies under Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Sr., that largely continued through Bill Clinton, which is the first Democrat you guys ever knew. And it’s like, come on, he was a free marketer.

So you see somebody like Obama and old guys saying, “Ooh.” And you say, “I don’t know. I’ve never seen a socialist. The only socialists I knew were the guys with glasses and beards who taught my college seminars.” Those are the only real ones they know. “The Soviets? Who?” We need to be sensitive to the fact that it’s a different set of experiences that people have had, and that we have to celebrate the fact that we won, and then we have to work to talk in the terms that 30

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people have experienced and not let the edge come off the victories that we’ve enjoyed.

The City: What about how young people have reacted to Barack Obama?

Clearly they’ve been excited by him – including young evangelicals – but his opposition to free market policies seems very apparent. What can those who favor enterprise do to respond?

Brooks: There are all kinds of reasons to be uncomfortable with the economic policies of Barack Obama, but they don’t have to do with the fact that we’re going to become a 1935-era socialist nation. It has to do with the fact that they’re going to make it harder for your generation to succeed. They’re going to make it harder for you to have the same kind of opportunities that people have had in the past.

The reason that this situation exists is because the left and right have conspired to talk in materialistic language about the free enterprise nation – the left because it’s largely hostile to the free enterprise system, and because the left truly is materialistic. The left believes that the human heart can be healed through income redistribution, and the reason is because the left’s fundamental concept of fairness has to do with income equality. Income equality is a purely materialistic phenomenon. Now that doesn’t comport at all with the dynamics of the human soul as we understand it, but it sort of makes sense, mathematically. The cold calculus of the green eye-shades of society – the people who actually believe in the fundamental goodness of the government, and all this, to fix problems – arises because they don’t understand culture, they’re fundamentally materialistic.

Since they’re the materialists, they’re going to talk about the free enterprise system as simply and economic alternative. You can expect that. The real problem is that the right has agreed.

The right talks about it as if it were another economic alternative for two reasons: one is it’s easier to say, “Yeah, money is about the money. So let’s count up the green pieces of paper.” In an already rich country, that does not move the soul, and in a generation that’s grown up in an already rich country with pretty free trade, and pretty free enterprise, it’s not going to move anybody. It’s not going to move you emotionally to talk about your dough – right? And it shouldn’t, because that’s not how our soul is wired.

But number two is that the right has been shamed into ceding the fairness and the compassion ground to the left. So people on the right 31

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will say, “Look, I know that socialism is better for poor people,” but in reality it’s so inefficient it’s not better for poor people. It’s horrible for poor people. It cuts off their opportunities. It puts them in a culture of dependency. It wires them into the dole. It makes them depressed. I have data that clearly shows the more unearned income you have, the worse you’re going to feel about your life.

The key to happiness is earned success, and earned success can never come from a lottery ticket, or an inheritance, or a welfare check. This is in black and white – I’ve got the data. Every day that the free enterprise right cedes those points of fairness and compassion to the left is a day that we consign poor people and middle class people and rich people to a materialistic life that’s not satisfying.

In other words, it’s uncompassionate, and it’s un-Christian to do that, in my view. And that means that if we really want to live the apostolate, of free people in a free society, we have to talk about free enterprise, about what it’s really about, which is culture and morality.

And if we can’t do that, shame on us, we deserve the loose the culture war. My job is not to fire up the base of people who already believe in free enterprise. My job is to reach out to people who basically share our values, but don’t know how they can be executed.

The City: So what do you do in your position to convince and make

your case? What can those who agree with you do?

Brooks: There are three things that we do, that we have to do in the ideal world. The first is to make the moral case for our point of view – for our worldview, the moral case for our values. Our values at AEI are: expanding liberty, increasing individual opportunity, and strengthening the free enterprise system. We have to make the moral case for those things, and that’s not the money case, it’s the moral case – much harder to do. And if you don’t that, then you don’t have troops and you don’t deserve troops.

Number two is demolition of bad ideas that actually hurt people – right. That means open inquiry, honest debate, respectful discourse, tolerance of opposing viewpoints – all the stuff that we’re not very good at in Washington, D.C., but we absolutely have to do. The true demolition of bad ideas does not mean the demonization and the destruction of other people, but taking on ideas on their merits, engaging them with facts.

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Number three is finding the ideas to replace the bad ideas with – actual positive solutions. And that’s when we come in. We believe because we have the data that free people are happier people, so free enterprise is a profoundly moral thing to do. Number two, the traditional social welfare solutions – the Lyndon B. Johnson solutions on the war on poverty – don’t work. I have the data that it increased the poverty rate – it increased the dependency, and therefore it decreased human flourishing. Which is what brings it back to the moral dimension—we’ve got to blow up the idea, but then you have to have something to be put in its place. How do you enable people to avail themselves of the true promises of entrepreneurship, which leads to the most satisfying life? That’s an empirical proposition for any secularist, entrepreneurs are the happiest people. But from the perspective of Evangelical Christians, if you honestly believe that we’re made in God’s image, and God is fundamentally creative, how are you going to live that in the grubby prosaic details of your economic life?

You’re going to do that by getting a welfare check? I don’t think so.

So, you have to have the – and we do, and you must have – the better ideas or the programs that actually will bring people to their highest selves; the things that you could bring online immediately.

Everything from why does the government now favor people who work for the government and their student loans, as opposed to entrepreneurs? Your students forgiven ten years earlier under Obama’s plan if you work for the IRS, than if you start your own software business. Why do we have double the corporate tax rate for entrepreneurs than any other competitive country in the OACD has?

Why? What’s up with that?

I mean, these are all realistic policies that – once again – we could put in place that would be substitutes for the policies that we can see clearly don’t work, but most importantly that they track back to the moral reason for doing them in the first place. Those are the three things that we need to do, and if we can’t go all the way through that process, we’re not going to get your generation, and we don’t deserve your generation.

The City: Some thinkers say America’s in a crisis, not just in economic terms, but a moral crisis as well. Do you think we face a crisis, and are you optimistic about our future?

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Brooks: I think we’re at the beginning of the best time in our history. I think we’re at the beginning of a great time. I think we’re going to look back on this period of social dislocation and indecision, and we’re going to say, “That was the beginning of the renewal, of the understanding of the American system.” We’re going to look back and we’re going to say, “We needed this.”

What lead up to the problems? It had to do with the fact that we had years – nearly ten years of people who said they believed in free enterprise but did something different. They managed with respect to power as opposed to principle, and they traded away adherence to free enterprise principles on an emotional level. In exchange, we got somebody who talked about principle and governed according to the principles, which were really contrary to free enterprise, and people didn’t like. What did we get from there? We got renewal, with respect to our core American principles. We remembered what we defined as the American dream. We remembered what makes us different as a people, and what, indeed, should be our gift to the world.

Our gift to the world is democratic free enterprise system, where skills and passions can come together, not just for us, but for everybody. And we haven’t been able to execute that very well. When we were kind of drifting toward a funny statism during the Bush Administration, and then diving headlong toward it during the Obama Administration. But we needed that – we needed the pain to clarify our values. We needed to get to the point where people my age could actually start talking clearly to people your age.

Now, is there risk? Yeah, the thing could go south. I don’t think it will. I think it will win, but it could go south, and if it does, that’s a huge risk – really dangerous.

The City: We’ve run pieces in THE CITY recently dealing with the decline in marriage and birth rates, and other problems facing the next generation. Do you think those are significant, or not?

Brooks: Those things are important. It has a very large part to do

with the fact that people are attaining higher and higher levels of education, especially women. And when people get more formal education they put off their childbearing, they put off their marriage.

It has to do with urbanization. It has to do, frankly, with abortion. It has a lot to do with a lot of different things, some of which alarm us, 34

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and some of which are sort of side effects of things we like a lot – or looking for their career, and tangentially related to the workforce.

But it’s also a classic grouchy old person argument. I’m very sanguine, I have to say. I mean, I see more entrepreneurial spirit from young people than in past generations. And I see better-educated people. I see people who really care more about their values, certainly, than people did when I was in my 20’s – a lot more than people my parents’ age, when they were in their 20’s. I mean, you guys are so much better than baby-boomer. I mean, it’s just unambiguous. If the world were left to you, you know, the whole idea of social consciousness, you could have averted so much pain. As opposed to the baby boom, which was just overrun with massive irresponsibility.

The City: So much of this seems to be about the value we place on things. How should young evangelicals define success in their lives, in terms of the marketplace?

Brooks: So I’m not really worried about this too terribly much, but here’s the real concern: We have – because of the materialism – the shared materialism over the past two decades – three decades, maybe more – we have had a tendency to denigrate earned success measured in any way besides money. And when we do that we make it much harder for people to understand the nature of earned success, which is the elixir of joy – I mean, empirically speaking the data are clear. If you believe you’ve earned your success in life, you’re going to be a happy person. If you don’t believe you’ve earned success in life, you’re going to be an unhappy person.

How do you earn success? The answers come many ways. You don’t do it by earning money, that’s just a symbol. You do it by actually creating value in your life and the lives of others, and that means that we should be assiduous in America, about finding ways to help people earn their success. And that means being as respectful of staying home and taking care of your children, as it is about volunteer work, as it is about being an ethical, moral, investment banker who picks up a great big check.

We should be all about earned success, not all about money. And if we do that, you know, that’s the traditional American promise.

That’s the nature of localism, of a bespoke life. That’s what it’s all about to be your own man, is to figure out what your earned success is about, and say, “I don’t care. I don’t care what other people tell 35

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me.” But, I mean, we’re sheep. We’re not taking that seriously. Where your generation can save this country is by bringing us back to understand what earned success can and should mean for every individual. Yeah, it’s going to hurt. You’re not going to ever get any Social Security benefits.

But that doesn’t really matter. I don’t care about that; I care about your opportunity to build your life. And if you really have the opportunity to build your life and build your business, and build your family, and build your community, and build your church, you don’t need a Social Security check. You’re not going to need it. I mean, poor people are, and poor people are going to get it, and that’s appropriate because for all kinds of good public policy reasons.

But the point is, what we’re talking about really – what people are really lamenting (people in their 40’s, and 50’s, and 60’s right now, who share free enterprise values) are really lamenting, is the fact that future generations are not going to get back their investment – all right. Sorry, that doesn’t animate me. What really animates me is that they’re not going to get the opportunities that they deserve, and that’s something that we can protect against, and I think that’s a battle that we’ll ultimately win.

If we can make it easier for you to be the entrepreneur that you should be, you don’t need – and if you’re an upper-middle class person, you won’t need a social security check to pay your greens fees when you’re retired. What I really want is I want you to be able to build your life, and if you’re too poor, then we’ll talk about the public policies that are appropriate to make sure that we have a minimum basic standard of living, and that’s not that expensive.

The City: What projects are you undertaking here at AEI to reach out to young evangelicals?

Brooks: We have a whole project on what we call, “Values in Capitalism,” but that’s geared toward young people – and particularly evangelicals – and it starts with actually listening to you, as opposed to talking at you. It’s a funny thing. This is always a problem that you see in the worlds of ideas and faith, is that older people have a lot of wisdom and have really, really good hearts, they’ll talk at younger people using the language of battles that are past – of experiences that are not shared – and they won’t actually seek input.

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So a big part of this program that we have specifically to reach out to you and people your age, is saying: what keeps you up at night?

We honestly believe – because we’ve been at this for a while – that you want freedom, opportunity, and enterprise, and entrepreneurship just like we do. What seems to be the real barriers to you being able to express your skills and passion? I’m not going to tell you, but you should think, “I want to know what you’re worried about,” and then we’re going to be able to make some progress. And so far, I have to say, so good. A lot of our work is based on the real concerns that people are telling us.

If you were going to market corn flakes, you wouldn’t go out and yell at consumers and say, “Here are the corn flakes that you should want!” because you’d be out of business in like ten minutes. Yet the leaders in the worlds of faith and ideas have a tendency to market their product that way, and the reason it’s not successful is because it shouldn’t be – it shouldn’t be successful, necessarily, and we need to have a better approach. We need to learn from you.

The City: So you’re listening. What are you hearing?

Brooks: One of the things that we’re hearing is an uncomfortable level of acquiescence to the notion that statism is just here to stay.

This is really uncomfortable for people who were around during the time of Reagan, that young people say, “Look the government is” – there’s kind of an ameliorism about government. We shouldn’t be that worried about that, and part of the reason is because young people have always been more comfortable with the state, and so that’s not a generational issue, that’s an age issue, and that’ll take care of itself – largely – as long as we do truly provide good policies and good opportunity that match with peoples’ values.

One of the things that we hear is a lack of sensitivity toward the issues that have emerged, that are truly the issues of Christian stewardship. The idea that we should be good environmental stewards is not stupid, it’s actually legitimate. The idea that we should be worried about the poor without talking only about their lack of merit, is not stupid, it’s actually compassionate – it’s correct, and we need to take that seriously. The idea that we should be – the innate skepticism of private sector institutions as much as public sector institutions, it’s not stupid, it’s wise. And the idea of ideologically saying that the government is always bad and business is always good, it’s just nutty.

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It’s just absolutely nutty, and we should say, “Wait a minute. So why do 49 percent of young people, why do they say they absolutely don’t trust big business?” Because they shouldn’t! Because their eyes are open, but mine are closed! You know, ideologically I want the private sector to be good and just, and young people are observing that it’s not all the time. Okay, what am I going to do from there?

Those are some of the examples of the things that we’re hearing that we have to take head on, and quite frankly that could give us a better agenda than we’ve had. It’s going to be much, much harder. It’s actually the easiest way to learn a lesson is by – I mean, the best lesson you can learn about fascism is by living through Hitler, but I don’t want that.

But let’s be honest, the most deeply understood and satisfying lessons have been accompanied with their acquisition by sacrifice and suffering. The people I know who understand socialism best lived under socialist regimes. Thank God your generation is not going to see the subjugation of Soviet socialism. The Soviet Union was truly evil. It was massive evil on a massive scale, with suffering of hundreds of millions of people – death and destruction of the soul, 75 years of public sector enforced atheism. I mean, you just don’t get worse than that.

Your generation isn’t going to see it in the same way that people – mostly older than me – did. That’s good! It’s easy for me to say, “Yeah, but that’ll make you complacent.” Well, then it’s really up to us to figure out how we can make up for the fact that the moral lessons are not going to be taught by watching great adversity. Can we do it otherwise? Yeah, but it’s a tougher road to hoe, and it’s more fraught with danger for people to acquiesce – to print their collectivist redistributive status principles, because they haven’t really truly at a massive, worldwide scale, seen the consequences.

That’s a call not to me to scream louder, that’s a call for leaders in your generation to step up. That’s really a call to action to you, more than it is to me. The people who, like you, say, “Like you, I don’t remember the Soviet Union. I’ve heard about it. My dad’s talked about it.” And I believe that these things are true, but some of the most profound leaders in history are those who understand history from before their own time, and can interpret it in a transcendental way for their own generation. As opposed to if you had to rely on somebody who lived through it, we would not be able to have any of the bene38

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fits of things that happened 1,000 years ago – or 2,000 years ago.

That’s not true. We’ve actually learned. There’s been distributed knowledge and collective wisdom that’s come from even things that were happening at the time of Christ. Why? Because we have people that are able to interpret the events.

This is up to the next generation, to young evangelicals in it who are thinking seriously about this. You have the opportunity to help your generation understand the perils of falling into socialist traps much better than I can, and people a lot older than me.

Arthur Brooks is the president of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. An acclaimed social scientist, he was until 2009 the Louis A. Bantle Professor of Business and Government Policy at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. He is the author of several books, including the newly released The Battle: How the Fight between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America’s Future (Basic Books).

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D EBT AND THE T EST OF A M ORAL S OCIETY ,america0at0risk.<

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Congressman Frank Wolf

ietrich Bonhoeffer, the heroic Lutheran pastor executed for his efforts in the Nazi-resistance during World War II, once said, “The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.” These words resonate deeply today as our nation struggles to confront our growing national debt. The recent release of President Barack Obama’s FY 2011 budget projects a deficit of nearly $1.6 trillion, equivalent to 10.6 percent of economic output.

I am convinced that addressing ballooning debt is not only an economic issue, but there also is a moral component to this issue that goes to the heart of who we are as Americans, and as men and women of faith. Further, this issue has a direct bearing on our foreign policy and on the role America plays around the world. In short there is an unmistakable interconnectivity between our runaway domestic spending, and our long-term global standing and influence.

My concern is that America’s political leaders have lost the will to make the tough decisions necessary – decisions that could well require sacrifice.

The generation of Americans who came of age during the era of Dietrich Bonhoeffer has been affectionately called the “Greatest Generation.” Many of them made unimaginable sacrifices, including their very lives, for their children and their children’s children.

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If we remember the legacy we have inherited, the giants on whose shoulders we stand, I believe we, too, can be moved to do our duty.

However, if Washington fails to address the financial tsunami approaching our shores, it will be judged by history as having done a great disservice to future generations of Americans.

Today, we are on that precipice.

Nearly four years ago I proposed an independent bipartisan commission to address unsustainable federal spending. The SAFE Commission – short for Securing America’s Future Economy – would operate in an authentic and transparent way, holding a series of public meetings across the country to hear from the American people. It would put everything on the table – entitlements, all other spending and tax policy. Its recommendations would not be made in vacuum or over a weekend locked up at Andrews Air Force Base. At the time of introduction, and still today, it is the only debt reduction commission legislation in play that mandates public engagement on this scale. It is also the only commission plan that would force Congress to vote up-or-down on a legislative package borne from the commission’s work. There would be no avoiding the hard choices.

When I first introduced the bill in the spring of 2006, I discussed the looming financial crisis facing our country and said that the longer we put off fixing the problem, the more bitter the medicine required to fix it would be.

Consider that from 2011 to 2020, the Congressional Budget Office projects staggering cumulative deficits of $6 trillion. Our nation is broke. The national debt is now over $12 trillion and growing at rates that haven’t been matched since World War II. Amazingly, the House recently followed Senate action to increase the federal debt limit to a staggering $14.294 trillion. Significantly, these deficits are not first and foremost wartime deficits. Rather we have amassed enormous unfunded obligations to ensure future entitlement benefits that, when added with liabilities like the debt, total nearly $57 trillion.

That means every man, woman and child in America owes over $184,000.

Legitimate credit rating agencies have threatened in recent weeks to downgrade the United States from its current AAA bond rating.

One of the latest warnings came from Moody’s, a top Wall Street credit agency reacting to the president’s budget. Moody’s issued a report saying, “Unless further measures are taken to reduce the budget def41

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icit further or the economy rebounds more vigorously than expected, the federal financial picture as presented in [President Obama’s Feb. 1 budget] will at some point put pressure on the AAA-government bond rating.”

This news comes on the heels of Spain, Greece and Dubai all seeing their credit ratings downgraded. Losing this “gold standard” would make it even more difficult to borrow money, shake confidence in the dollar and could lead to a situation where the dollar is no longer the primary international reserve currency. If that were to happen, prices for everything traded internationally, including food and oil, would go up.

Columnist Anne Applebaum opened a recent piece in the Washington Post with the following prediction: “I have seen America’s future and it is Greece … I mean that the ongoing Greek financial crisis is the kind of crisis the United States might face in a few years, if we continue to make the kinds of mistakes that the Greeks have made over the past decade.”

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he American people understand the depth of the country’s spending problems, and are leaps and bounds ahead of Congress in acknowledging the need to deal with this issue. A national survey taken in November revealed that 70 percent of those polled said a bipartisan commission is the best way to tackle the growing budget deficit and national debt. Seventy percent is a pretty convincing number, and every member of Congress knows how serious the federal government’s spending problem is. But where are those willing to deal with it? The lyrics in Simon and Garfunkel’s song “The Boxer” – “Man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest” – aptly describe the mood on Capitol Hill when it comes to addressing federal spending.

Every day that passes without action is a day that entitlement spending continues to diminish vital discretionary dollars, currently being used for domestic and foreign priorities. If we do not begin to rein in spending, every penny of the federal budget will go to interest on the debt and entitlement spending by 2028.

What does that mean in real terms? Well, do you care about national defense and homeland security in a post-9/11 world? Do you care about improving our nation’s crumbling transportation infrastructure? Do you care about returning a man to the moon? Do you care about this country leading the way in scientific innovation and 42

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technological advancement? Do you care about finding a cure for cancer, Alzheimer’s, autism or Lyme disease? There won’t be any money left. Do you care about helping vulnerable populations around the world, the orphan, the widow, the HIV/AIDS patient? Do you care about sending aid to countries devastated by natural disasters like Haiti after the earthquake?

In all of these cases, I have news for you: there won’t be any money left. Every penny of the federal budget will go to interest on the debt and entitlement spending.

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merica is a generous nation. We have pledged billions of dollars to worthy programs like the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). While this is good news for millions hurting around the world, it also places America in the position of fulfilling a moral obligation to help keep these vulnerable populations alive. Yet where will the money to help come from if America’s foreign assistance dollars continue to shrink because mandatory spending is taking a growing piece of the pie. Ecclesiastes 5:5 says: “It is better not to vow than to make a vow and not fulfill it.” I fear we have made a “vow” but will be unable to fulfill it. The sheer size of the federal deficit and national debt are astounding, but the narrative that will accompany these numbers if Congress continues to do nothing will be even more devastating. Its implications are not just economic, but also encompass our national security.

Wall Street Journal columnist Gerald Seib recently made this very point. He wrote, “The federal budget deficit has long since graduated from nuisance to headache to pressing national concern. Now, however, it has become so large and persistent that it is time to start thinking of it as something else entirely: a national-security threat.”

Foreign lenders already own nearly 40 percent of our domestic economy. Our biggest “bankers” are Japan, China and oil-exporting countries such as Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia was home to the 9/11 terrorists. Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi brand of Islam is taught in some of the most radical mosques and madrassas around the world, including along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border. Saudi Arabia continues to view flogging and beheadings with a sword as legitimate means of punishment. The government represses women and persecutes Christians and Jews.

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Their textbooks are filled with hateful messages about minority faiths. Is this a country we want to be beholden to?

Or what about communist China, which routinely violates the basic human rights and religious freedom of its own people?

In the last several months alone, numerous high-profile abuses have occurred. China recently sentenced one of the leading dissidents, Liu Xiabo, to 11 years in prison for the “crime” of “inciting subversion to state power” due to his role with the Charter 08 petition, a historic document advocating human rights and free speech.

Charter 08 was modeled after Charter 77, the anti-Communist manifesto launched by former dissident Vaclav Havel who himself showed up at the Chinese embassy in Prague recently to protest the ruling against Liu. Liu’s trial reportedly lasted less than three hours, and the judge limited the speaking time of his attorneys to less than 15 minutes, according to one of his brothers. Journalists and foreign diplomats were forbidden from attending.

On December 28, a Chinese court sentenced a Tibetan film-maker to six-years in prison for making a documentary, “Leaving Fear Behind,” which featured interviews with Tibetans who talked of their love for the Dalai Lama and their concern for the preservation of their culture which has been systematically targeted by the Chinese government. The filmmaker had no access to outside legal help, and the government barred a lawyer hired by his family from representing him. In the words of the filmmaker’s wife, “My children and I feel desperate about the prospect of not being able to see him for so many years. We call on the Chinese authorities to show humanity by releasing him. My husband is not a criminal – he just tried to show the truth."

On November 19, Christian human rights attorney Jiang Tianyong was taken away by four policemen, detained and reportedly locked in the basement of the local police station. He had been on the way to take his daughter to school. Among Jiang’s “crimes”…requesting a meeting with President Obama during his visit to Beijing. Just weeks earlier, Jiang had travelled to D.C. to testify before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission which I co-chair.

News broke recently that the Internet giant Google had experienced a targeted attack on its corporate infrastructure and email service originating from China. Google reported that it had evidence that “a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail ac44

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counts of human rights activists.” A Hong-Kong based human rights group announced recently that Jiang Tianyong was among those brave activists whose Gmail accounts had been compromised.

These specific cases are indicative of broader downward trends in China when it comes to respect for human rights. The book of Hebrews enjoins us to “Remember those in prison as if you were their fellow prisoners, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.” According to the recently released State Department Human Rights Report, “Harassment of unregistered Catholic bishops, priests, and laypersons continued, including government surveillance and detentions. On March 31, Bishop Jia Zhiguo was arrested again. At year’s end his whereabouts were unknown.”

His case is not an anomaly. Protestant house church pastors are routinely intimidated and imprisoned. Their congregations worship in secret fearful of government harassment or worse. According to the Congressional Executive Commission on China’s Political Prisoner Database, as of July 2009, there were 689 Tibetan prisoners of conscience, 439 of whom were monks or nuns. Uyghur Muslims face persecution by the Chinese government as well. Renowned human rights advocate and Uyghur Muslim Rebiya Kadeer has watched from exile as the Chinese government arrests and beats her family members in her homeland.

China maintains an extensive system of gulags – slave labor camps, also known as the laogai – as large as those which existed under the former Soviet Union. China’s horrific one-child-per-couple policy has been in place since 1978. Apart from the obvious human rights violation that this policy represents, it is also having the unintended consequence of creating a lopsided gender imbalance. According to a recent Washington Times report, “the government-backed Chinese Academy of Social Services (CASS) predicted that 24 million Chinese men might not be able to find brides in 2020. However, previous estimates put that number in the 30 million to 50 million range.” The absence of marriage-age Chinese women is creating a magnet for sex-trafficking. Among the most vulnerable are North Korean women fleeing the horrors of life in their own country.

All of these examples are a snap-shot of what can only be described as a grim human rights situation in China. Given our debt obligations to China, it’s not difficult to imagine our voice on behalf of the voiceless being silenced.

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President Ronald Reagan once spoke of the U.S. constitution as a covenant “we have made not only with ourselves, but with all of mankind.” America was, of course, founded on the premise that liberty is a birthright, individual human life is sacred, and the freedom to worship according to the dictates of your conscience is paramount.

We risk breaking the covenant that President Reagan spoke of when we do not advocate for those around the world whose basic liberties are being violated by their own government.

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uring the heated debate in the 1990’s over granting China permanent normal trade relations status, proponents argued that economic liberalization would lead to political liberalization in China, that exposing China to the West’s values would lead them to play a more constructive role in the international community, and that the U.S. and other industrialized nations could influence China through economic activity to better respect the rights of its citizens to fundamental human rights and the unfettered practice of their faith.

Instead, we have seen that the Chinese government is unmoved.

In fact, as Chinese dissidents are themselves quick to point out, it is emboldened in its ongoing repression, while at the same time experiencing explosive economic growth. We have seen the tragic flaw in de-linking the “export” of democracy and freedom, including religious freedom, from unbridled capitalism. We have seen our own short-sightedness in making the protection of basic liberties secondary to the unfettered access to markets.

This approach has also hurt American companies and workers. A government that does not respect the basic rights of its own people will not respect intellectual property rights of foreign companies. A government that does not allow its citizens to freely voice their opinions will not hesitate to restrict the free flow of information and make western companies complicit in their censorship. According to the Congressional Research Service, “China’s failure to live up to many of its World Trade Organization (WTO) commitments to protect intellectual property rights (IPR) has become one of the most important issues in U.S.-China bilateral trade. According to calculations from U.S. industry sources, IPR piracy cost U.S. firms $3 billion in lost sales in 2007.”

It is important to recall that despite China’s booming economy, they have not embraced purely market-driven growth. In fact the 46

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U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission reports that “China’s economic reforms were not based on traditional free market principles. China’s policy during the past 30 years has instead relied on a government-directed industrial policy to promote certain segments of the economy over others and to bolster export-led growth.”

Workers in China are not guaranteed either in law or in practice full worker rights in accordance with international standards. This creates an unfair advantage for government-subsidized operations in China and violates basic human rights.

An additional area of contention in U.S.-China trade policy is the undervaluation of China’s currency, the RMB. The Chinese government has kept its currency at an artificially low rate thereby giving them an advantage on world markets. Consider the sobering words of Robert Samuelson who wrote this grim assessment in a recent Newsweek column: [W]hat’s good for China may not be good for the rest of the world, including the United States. It’s not simply a redirection of economic power but a question of how that power will be used to shape the global economic order. Already, China’s huge reserves—invested in U.S. bonds—are cited as one reason for the low interest rates that brought on the financial crisis. The artificially low RMB hurts exports from other developing countries and not just the United States, Europe, and Japan. The manipulation of trade subverts support elsewhere for open trading policies. For now, China has no desire to substitute the RMB for the dollar as the primary global currency. Its ambition is more sweeping: to create a world economy that serves China’s interests and, only as an afterthought, anyone else’s.

Google’s principled announcement that they will no longer tolerate censorship of their search engine in China came on the heels of Google’s revelation of a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack" on its corporate infrastructure and e-mail service originating in China.

The attack on Google is just the tip of the iceberg—part of a much larger political and corporate espionage effort. Among the 34 other companies reportedly affected by China’s cyber spies, who have stolen intellectual property from American organizations valued at an estimated $50 billion each year, repeatedly targeting companies in strategic industries.

The U.S. intelligence community notes that China’s attempts to penetrate U.S. agencies are the most aggressive of all foreign intelli47

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gence organizations. According to the FBI, Chinese intelligence services “pose a significant threat both to the national security and to the compromise of U.S. critical national assets.” Weapons that entities of the People’s Republic of China supplied to Iran were transferred to terrorist organizations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and China is a significant arms supplier and source of economic strength to the regime in Sudan. Our efforts to exert diplomatic pressure against Iran’s nuclear weapons program have been thwarted by China’s opposition to U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iran. And of course, they’ve been the major obstacle to ending the genocide in Darfur.

Even Congress has not been immune. China’s oppressive reach has long extended beyond its own shores. In August 2006, four of the computers in my personal office were compromised by an outside source. On these computers was information about all of the work I have done on behalf of political dissidents and human rights activists around the world. The FBI revealed that the outside sources responsible for this attack came from within the People’s Republic of China.

Samuelson sums it up this way: “China’s worldview threatens America’s geopolitical and economic interests.” The government of China is no friend to the people of China. Why should we think they would suddenly become a responsible actor on the world stage?

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he fact that both China and Saudi Arabia are countries with vastly different aims than our own could end up negatively influencing U.S. foreign policy if they threaten to dump our currency in the world market. Such actions would not be an historical anomaly: recall 1956 and the Suez Canal crisis, which some believe signaled the end of Britain and France as world powers. Egypt announced that it was going to nationalize the canal, which outraged the British and French who then devised a plan to use military force to keep control. The U.S. wanted to avert conflict at any cost. President Eisenhower threatened to sell the U.S. reserves of the British pound which would essentially result in the collapse of the British currency. The British changed course.

Is it conceivable to imagine the Saudis threatening to dump our currency if we don’t withdraw from the region? Is it conceivable to imagine China threatening to dump our currency if we don’t stop pressing nuclear-armed North Korea?

Do we really want either nation to be our banker?

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Simply put, we are presently borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars from countries which pursue aims that are at odds with our national interest and values both directly and indirectly.

Which brings us back to our fiscal crisis – in February, after years of effort, the bipartisan commission finally got its day of debate on the Senate floor and we came as close as we’ve gotten to creating this bipartisan panel legislatively. The Senate considered a measure put forward by Senators Conrad and Gregg, in many ways companion legislation to the SAFE Commission. During debate, Senator Conrad pointed to a recent Newsweek cover story, “How Great Powers Fall: Steep Debt, Slow Growth, and High Spending Kill Empires – and America Could be Next.” He quoted from the article: This is how empires decline. It begins with a debt explosion. It ends with inexorable reduction in the resources available for the Army, Navy and Air Force . . . If the United States doesn’t come up soon with a credible plan to restore the federal budget to balance over the next five to 10 years, the danger is very real that a debt crisis could lead to a major weakening of American power.

These are sobering words, but hardly alarmist. Last year, the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress published a report titled, “Saving America’s Future.” It paints a stark and troubling picture of our nation’s challenges. One of its recommendations was to create a bipartisan commission to deal with the looming financial crisis. At the press conference unveiling the report, the study panel’s co-chairman, Norm Augustine, the former chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin, voiced a similar warning: In the technology-driven economy in which we live, Americans have come to accept leadership as the natural and enduring state of affairs. But leadership is highly perishable. It must be constantly reearned. In the 16th century the citizens of Spain no doubt thought they would remain the world leader. In the 17th century it was France; in the 19th century, Great Britain; and in the 20th century it was the United States. Unless we do things dramatically different, including strengthening our investments in research and education, the 21st century will belong to China and India.

Despite the alarm bells these statements set off, the Senate failed to approve the Conrad-Gregg amendment. The vote was close. A majority was on board, but the final tally came up seven votes short of the 60 needed.

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In the aftermath of that defeat, the president, who only at the 11th hour had endorsed Conrad-Gregg, proposed in his State of the Union address the creation of a “fiscal commission” by executive order which he announced formally today.

When I first heard that he was considering such a plan, I came to the floor of the House to voice my skepticism about a commission without congressional approval. Those concerns are still undiminished, as we’ve seen how this executive commission will operate.

One of the most authentic provisions of the SAFE Commission is its mandate for an up-or-down vote in Congress. The establishment of a “fiscal commission” by executive order without requiring Congress to vote on its findings is all hat, no cattle – a big hat used for political cover for elected officials who aren’t willing to make tough choices in an election year. A commission established through executive order will make it look like Washington is finally doing something to address runaway spending, but without the teeth to require action, it will amount to nothing more than another report collecting dust on the bookshelf. It won’t make a difference.

A real commission must be authentic, accountable and transparent. It must involve the American people. It must require legislative action. A commission through executive order fails on all those counts. And if by some miracle Congress were forced to vote on the recommendations of such a “fiscal commission,” it would be after November, with a lame duck Congress filled with members who are retiring and may have already secured a new job or those who were defeated. Where would the accountability be to the constituents they represent?

I have repeatedly challenged colleagues on both sides of the aisle who question the SAFE Commission to come up with another solution to the deficit and debt crisis that can pass Congress. Without a special process like the SAFE Commission, which is based on the successful federal base closing process, I am convinced that Congress will never put a mechanism in place to get control of spending. Quite frankly, both parties have failed to face up to the entitlement challenge in recent years.

Given the enormity of the country’s financial turmoil, I remain convinced that the bold steps needed to control deficit spending will never be taken through regular order in a Congress that is so political and controlled by special interests. Our entire political system is now 50

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so polarized that that many only think in terms of “red” or “blue” ideology at the expense of our shared national interests. Time is growing short. The people of this country deserve an honest assessment about our future savings account and checkbook – a discussion driven not by politics, but by statesmanship. Americans deserve a discussion which elevates the nation’s sights.

The consequences of inaction are simply too great to put this issue on hold and rely on a faux commission. We need a process that will produce measurable results – a process that will allow us to honestly tell our children that the foundation of the America they are inheriting is just as strong and promising as the America that our parents left to us. I long to be able to make that promise to my five children and 15 grandchildren.

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early four years ago I visited the site of George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River in anticipation of the Battle of Trenton. This iconic scene is depicted in a painting which hangs in the West Wing of the White House. Washington was down to only 3,000 soldiers, and the cause of liberty looked to be headed for defeat. Yet in an effort of great courage – and sacrifice – Washington and his forces were successful in changing the direction of the American Revolution, and therefore the course of history.

Their legacy is a rich one, and it is ours.

If we are mindful of this legacy, of the sacrifices of so many previous generations of Americans, I believe we will be moved to take action. I believe we will make the sacrifices necessary for the betterment of the country, for our children and grandchildren. I believe there will arise in our midst profiles in courage such that we will remain the “shining city on a hill” envisioned by our founders. I believe this will have positive ripple effects the world over— including for the millions in China who long for freedom and basic human rights and look to America to be their champion.

Frank Wolf is a Congressman from the 10th District of Virginia, which he has represented for thirty years. He is the co-chairman of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, a bipartisan organization made up of more than 200 Members of Congress who work together to raise awareness about international human rights issues.

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Seven Stanzas at Easter John Updike Make no mistake: if He rose at all it was as His body; if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers, each soft Spring recurrent; it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the eleven apostles; it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes, the same valved heart that – pierced – died, withered, paused, and then regathered out of enduring Might new strength to enclose.

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Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping transcendence; making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages: let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache, not a stone in a story, but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will eclipse for each of us the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb, make it a real angel, weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.

John Updike was an award-winning author, essayist and poet. “Steven Stanzas at Easter,” from Telephone Poles & Other Poems by John Updike, copyright © 1959 by John Updike.

Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. 53

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H AYEK AND S CIENTISM

,a0return0to0philosophy.<

S

Edward Feser

cientism is the view that all real knowledge is scientific knowledge—that there is no rational, objective form of inquiry that is not a branch of science. There is at least a whiff of scientism in the thinking of those who dismiss ethical objections to cloning or embryonic stem cell research as inherently “anti-science.” There is considerably more than a whiff of it in the work of New Atheist writers like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who allege that because religion has no scientific foundation (or so they claim) it “therefore” has no rational foundation at all. It is evident even in secular conservative writers like John Derbyshire and Heather MacDonald, whose criticisms of their religious fellow right-wingers are only slightly less condescending than those of Dawkins and co. Indeed, the culture at large seems beholden to an inchoate scientism—”faith” is often pitted against “science” (even by those friendly to the former) as if “science” were synonymous with “reason.”

Despite its adherents’ pose of rationality, scientism has a serious problem: it is either self-refuting or trivial. Take the first horn of this dilemma. The claim that scientism is true is not itself a scientific claim, not something that can be established using scientific methods.

Indeed, that science is even a rational form of inquiry (let alone the only rational form of inquiry) is not something that can be established scientifically. For scientific inquiry itself rests on a number of philosophical assumptions: that there is an objective world external to the minds of scientists; that this world is governed by causal regularities; that the human intellect can uncover and accurately describe these regularities; and so forth.

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Since science presupposes these things, it cannot attempt to justify them without arguing in a circle. And if it cannot even establish that it is a reliable form of inquiry, it can hardly establish that it is the only reliable form. Both tasks would require “getting outside” science altogether and discovering from that extra-scientific vantage point that science conveys an accurate picture of reality—and in the case of scientism, that only science does so.

The rational investigation of the philosophical presuppositions of science has, naturally, traditionally been regarded as the province of philosophy. Nor is it these presuppositions alone that philosophy examines. There is also the question of how to interpret what science tells us about the world. For example, is the world fundamentally comprised of substances or events? What is it to be a “cause”? Is there only one kind? (Aristotle held that there are at least four.) What is the nature of the universals referred to in scientific laws—concepts like quark, electron, atom, and so on—and indeed in language in general? Do they exist over and above the particular things that instantiate them?

Scientific findings can shed light on such metaphysical questions, but can never fully answer them. Yet if science must depend upon philosophy both to justify its presuppositions and to interpret its results, the falsity of scientism seems doubly assured. As the conservative philosopher John Kekes (himself a confirmed secularist like Derbyshire and MacDonald) concludes: “Hence philosophy, and not science, is a stronger candidate for being the very paradigm of rationality.”

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ere we come to the second horn of the dilemma facing scientism. Its advocate may now insist: if philosophy has this status, it must really be a part of science, since (he continues to maintain, digging in his heels) all rational inquiry is scientific inquiry. The trouble now is that scientism becomes completely trivial, arbitrarily redefining “science” so that it includes anything that could be put forward as evidence against it. Worse, it makes scientism consistent with views that are supposed to be incompatible with it. For example, a line of thought deriving from Aristotle and developed with great sophistication by Thomas Aquinas holds that when we work out what it is for one thing to be the cause of another, we are inexorably led to the existence of an Uncaused Cause outside time and space which continually sustains the causal regularities 55

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studied by science, and apart from which they could not in principle exist even for a moment.

If “scientism” is defined so broadly that it includes (at least in principle) philosophical theology of this kind, then the view becomes completely vacuous. For the whole point of scientism—or so it would seem given the rhetoric of its loudest adherents—was supposed to be to provide a weapon by which fields of inquiry like theology might be dismissed as inherently unscientific and irrational. (Obviously the Uncaused Cause argument for God’s existence is controversial, but it has had, and continues to have, prominent defenders to the present day. For readers who are interested, I explain and defend the argument at length—and show how very badly Dawkins and co. misunderstand it—in my recent books The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism and Aquinas.)

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onservatives, more than anyone else, should be wary of the pretensions of scientism, a Procrustean ideology whose pretensions were exposed with particular insight by F. A. Hayek, one of the great heroes of contemporary conservatives (including, perhaps especially, secular conservatives—Hayek himself was an agnostic with no religious ax to grind). In his three-part essay “Scientism and the Study of Society” (reprinted in his book The CounterRevolution of Science) and his book The Sensory Order, Hayek shows that the project of re-conceiving human nature in particular entirely in terms of the categories of natural science is impossible in principle.

The reason has to do with what Hayek calls the “objectivism” inherent in scientism. Modern science arose in large part out of a practical, political concern—to make men “masters and possessors of nature” (as Descartes put it), and enhance “human utility and power” through the “mechanical arts” or technology (in the words of Francis Bacon). This goal could be realized only by focusing on those aspects of the natural world susceptible of strict prediction and control, and this in turn required a quantitative methodology, so that mathematics would come to be regarded as the language in which the “book of nature” was written (in Galileo’s well-known phrase).

And yet our ordinary, everyday experience of the world is qualitative through and through—we perceive colors, sounds, warmth and coolness, purposes and meanings.

How are we to reconcile this commonsense “manifest image” of the world with the quantitative “scientific image” (to borrow philo56

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sopher Wilfrid Sellars’ famous distinction)? The answer is that they cannot be reconciled. Thus the commonsense, qualitative “manifest image” came to be regarded as a world of mere “appearance,” with the new quantitative “scientific image” alone conveying “reality.”

The former would be re-defined as “subjective” – color, sound, heat, cold, meaning, purpose, and the like, as common sense understands them, exist in the mind alone. “Objective” reality, revealed by science and described in the language of mathematics, was held to comprise a world of colorless, soundless, meaningless particles in motion. Or rather, if color, temperature, sound and the like are to be regarded as existing in objective reality, they must be redefined – heat and cold reconceived in terms of molecular motion, color in terms of the reflecting of photons at certain wavelengths, sound in terms of compression waves, and so forth. What common sense means by “heat,” “cold,” “red,” “green,” “loud,” etc. – the way things feel, look, sound, and so forth in conscious experience – drops out as a mere projection of the mind.

The new method thus ensured that the natural world as studied by science would be quantifiable, predictable, and controllable – precisely by redefining “science” so that nothing that did not fit the method would be allowed to count as “physical,” “material,” or “natural.”

All recalcitrant phenomena would simply be “swept under the rug” of the mind, reinterpreted as part of the mental lens through which we perceive external reality rather than part of external reality itself.

Hayek’s view was that the very nature of objectivism precludes its coherently being applied across –the board to the human mind itself.

Since the mind just is the “subjective” realm of so-called “appearances”—the rug under which everything that does not fit the “objectivist” method has been swept—it cannot even in theory be assimilated via quantificational modeling to the material world, as that world has been characterized by physical science. The very nature of scientific understanding, at least as the moderns have defined it, thus entails what Hayek calls a “practical dualism” of mind and matter—a dualism that the objectivist method itself foists upon us, even if we want to deny (as Hayek himself did) that it reflects any genuine metaphysical cleavage between the mental and material worlds.

Any attempt to redefine the mind in “objectivist” terms, characterizing its elements in terms of quantifiable structural relations—an approach Hayek himself sketched out in The Sensory Order—would 57

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only open the same problem up again at a higher level, as whatever aspects of the mind that fail to fit this objectivist redefinition simply get kicked up to a second-order realm of mere “appearance” (and to further levels still if the method is applied to the second-order realm). Scientism’s attempt to apply the objectivistic method to the human mind itself thus entails in Hayek’s view a vicious regress, a methodological “chasing of one’s own tail” on to infinity. The result may provide certain insights—Hayek thought so—but it cannot hope to provide complete understanding.

The irony is that the very practice of science itself, which involves the formulation of hypotheses, the weighing of evidence, the invention of technical concepts and vocabularies, the construction of chains of reasoning, and so forth—all mental activities saturated with meaning and purpose—falls on the “subjective,” “manifest image” side of scientism’s divide rather than the “objective,” “scientific image” side. Human thought and action, including the thoughts and actions of scientists, is of its nature irreducible to the meaningless, purposeless motions of particles and the like.

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ome thinkers committed to scientism realize this, but conclude that the lesson to draw is not that scientism is mistaken, but that human thought and action are themselves fictions. According to this radical position—known as “eliminative materialism” since it entails eliminating the very concept of the mind altogether instead of trying to reduce mind to matter—what is true of human beings is only what can be put in the technical jargon of physics, chemistry, neuroscience and the like. There is no such thing as “thinking,” “believing,” “desiring,” “meaning,” etc.; there is only the firing of neurons, the secretion of hormones, the twitching of muscles, and other such physiological events.

While this is definitely a minority position even among materialists, there are those who acknowledge it to be the inevitable consequence of a consistent scientism, and endorse it on that basis. But as Hayek would have predicted, the very attempt to state the position necessarily, but incoherently, makes use of concepts—”science,” “rationality,” “evidence,” “truth,” and so forth—that presuppose exactly what the position denies, viz. the reality of meaning and mind.

Why would anyone be attracted to such a bizarre and muddleheaded view? The answer—to paraphrase a remark made by Ludwig Wittgenstein in another context—is that “a picture holds us captive.”

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Hypnotized by the unparalleled predictive and technological successes of modern science, contemporary intellectuals infer that scientism must be true, so that anything that follows from it—however fantastic or seemingly incoherent—must be true as well. But this is sheer sophistry. If a certain method of studying nature affords us a high degree of predictive and technological power, all that shows is that the method is useful for dealing with those aspects of nature that are predictable and controllable. It does not show us that those aspects exhaust nature, that there is nothing more to the natural world than what the method reveals. Neither does it show that there are no rational means of investigating reality other than those involving empirical prediction and control. To assume otherwise is fallaciously to let one’s method dictate what counts as reality rather than letting reality determine what methods are appropriate for studying it. If wearing infrared night vision goggles allows me to perceive a certain part of the world remarkably well, it doesn’t follow that there is no more to the world than what I can perceive through the goggles, or that only goggle-wearing methods of investigating reality are rational ones.

That there is indeed more to the world than scientism would allow is evident from what has been said already. But it is evident too even from the deliverances of science itself. Consider this passage from Bertrand Russell (yet another secularist thinker, entirely unmotivated by sympathy for religion): It is not always realised how exceedingly abstract is the information that theoretical physics has to give. It lays down certain fundamental equations which enable it to deal with the logical structure of events, while leaving it completely unknown what is the intrinsic character of the events that have the structure. We only know the intrinsic character of events when they happen to us. Nothing whatever in theoretical physics enables us to say anything about the intrinsic character of events elsewhere. They may be just like the events that happen to us, or they may be totally different in strictly unimaginable ways. All that physics gives us is certain equations giving abstract properties of their changes. But as to what it is that changes, and what it changes from and to—as to this, physics is silent. (My Philosophical Development, p. 13) By “the intrinsic character of events when they happen to us,” what Russell means is the “subjective” world of “appearances” that 59

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makes up our conscious experience. That world—the world which (as we saw in part I) the “objectivist” approach of scientism regards as an embarrassment, and which the eliminative materialist accordingly seeks to banish entirely—that is what we know most fully, for Russell.

By comparison, the knowledge physics gives us is so “exceedingly abstract”—that is to say, physics goes so far in the direction of abstracting away from the objects of its inquiries whatever does not fit its quantificational methods—that it leaves it “completely unknown” what the inner nature of those objects, apart from their mathematically definable properties, really is. And yet since the physical world is not a mere abstraction—physics itself presupposes that it is not an invention of the mind, and that we can know about it via perception of concrete reality—they must indeed have some inner nature.

If we are to know what that inner nature is, and to know of anything else about which empirical science is silent, we must go beyond science—to philosophy, the true “paradigm of rationality,” as John Kekes puts it.

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ut can philosophy really tell us anything? Don’t philosophers notoriously disagree among themselves? Even if it is conceded that there is more to the world than science tells us, mightn’t we nevertheless be justified in throwing up our hands and concluding that whatever this “more” might be, it is simply unknowable— that scientism is a reasonable attitude to take in practice, even if problematic in theory?

The trouble is that this is itself a philosophical claim, subject to philosophical criticism and requiring philosophical argumentation in its defense. The very attempt to avoid philosophy implicates one in practicing it. As the philosopher and historian of science E. A. Burtt stated in his classic The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science: Even the attempt to escape metaphysics is no sooner put in the form of a proposition than it is seen to involve highly significant metaphysical postulates. For this reason there is an exceedingly subtle and insidious danger in positivism [i.e. scientism]. If you cannot avoid metaphysics, what kind of metaphysics are you likely to cherish when you sturdily suppose yourself to be free from the abomination? Of course it goes without saying that in this case your metaphysics will be held uncritically because it is unconscious; moreover, it will be passed on to others far more readily than your other notions inasmuch as it will be propagated by insinuation 60

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rather than by direct argument… Now the history of mind reveals pretty clearly that the thinker who decries metaphysics… if he be a man engaged in any important inquiry, he must have a method, and he will be under a strong and constant temptation to make a metaphysics out of his method, that is, to suppose the universe ultimately of such a sort that his method must be appropriate and successful… But inasmuch as the positivist mind has failed to school itself in careful metaphysical thinking, its ventures at such points will be apt to appear pitiful, inadequate, or even fantastic.

We have no choice but to engage in philosophy. The only question is whether we will do it well or badly. Those committed to scientism pretend not to do it at all, but what they have really done is (as Burtt puts it) “made a metaphysics out of their method.” And as we have seen, it is a very bad metaphysics indeed. Only those who do not eschew philosophy—and especially those who do not engage in it while pretending not to—are going to do it well.

What of the disagreements among philosophers? Many of the socalled “traditional problems” of philosophy are in fact no older than the scientific revolution. In particular, they are a consequence of an increasing tendency over the last few centuries unjustifiably to privilege what Hayek calls the “objectivistic” method of empirical science (described in part I) and to apply it to areas in which it is inappropriate, such as ethics and the analysis of human thought and action.

Redefining the natural world in exclusively objectivistic terms has made an affirmation of moral values, irreducibly mental phenomena, and free will seem mysteriously “dualistic.”

Denying the reality of these things seems to lead to nihilism and even (as we saw in part I) incoherence. Disagreement within modern philosophy is largely an artifact of this impasse, as thinkers dispute precisely which version of these two unhappy extremes is the best— or the least bad, anyway. Beholden as intellectuals in general are to the scientistic spirit of the age, too few think to question the assumptions that led to the impasse in the first place. Far from being a point in favor of scientism, the disagreement that plagues contemporary philosophy is largely a consequence of scientism, or at least of a methodological bias that scientism has raised to the level of an ideology.

What happens when we do reject this bias? The right answer, in my view, is a return to the philosophical wisdom of the ancients and medievals. Their physics, as Galileo, Newton, Einstein and co. have shown us, was indeed sorely lacking. But their metaphysics has never 61

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been surpassed. And while they certainly had disagreements of their own, there is a common core to the tradition they founded—a tradition extending from Plato and Aristotle to the High Scholasticism of Aquinas and down to its descendents today—that sets them apart from the decadent philosophical systems of the moderns. This core constitutes a “perennial philosophy” apart from which the harmony of common sense and science, and indeed even the coherence of science itself, cannot be understood. And it is also in this perennial philosophy that the rational foundations of theology and ethics are to be found.

That, needless to say, is a long story. But what has been said here should suffice to show that it is only those who know something about philosophy and its history, and who have grappled seriously with its questions, who have earned the right to pronounce on the rational credentials of theology and traditional morality. And that most definitely does not include those blinded by scientism.

Edward Feser is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College in Pasadena, CA. His webpage can be found at edwardfeser.com. This article originally appeared in The Public Discourse, an online journal of the Witherspoon Institute, at thepublicdiscourse.com.

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N OTHING TO K ILL OR D IE , N O R ELIGION T OO ]our0new0societal0ethic}

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Francis J. Beckwith

ne of the many bad habits of the modern mind is its proclivity to answer moral questions with social science answers. So, for example, it is not unusual to hear a political activist assess a policy’s success or failure at confronting the moral problem of out of wedlock teenage fornication by examining whether there are fewer bastards sired and borne by teenyboppers this year compared to last year (or the year before). If the numbers go up, the activist will likely argue that the schools should start distributing prophylactics as well as abortion gift certificates redeemable at your local Planned Parenthood. But just as you don’t erradicate illiteracy by burning all the books, you don’t solve a moral problem by redefining it as exclusively one of unpleasant consequences. After all, a promiscuous teenage girl, who while copulating with the entire high school football team remains prophlyicatically conscientious, does not cease to have a soul that is being formed by her judgments and experiences simply because her body has not exhibited the ordinary physical consequences of recreational sex.

As far as I know, Trojan, with its well-funded and creative research and development team, as yet to develop a metaphysically reliable condom that can protect the soul.

In a recent column in the Washington Post during the height of the health care reform debate, T. R. Reid argued that universal health care coverage reduces the number of abortions. Reid employed this 63

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argument in order to counter American prolifers who oppose President Barack Obama’s health care reform. As evidence of his thesis, he offers United Nations statistics that “measure the number of abortions for women ages 15 to 44. They show that Canada, for example, has 15.2 abortions per 1,000 women; Denmark, 14.3; Germany, 7.8; Japan, 12.3; Britain, 17.0; and the United States, 20.8. When it comes to abortion rates in the developed world, we’re No. 1.”

M

y experience in this area of abortion research is that these statistical claims–or at least the inferences based on them– are rarely what they appear to be. Consider just this. In all the countries listed by Reid, they are all nations that have some of the lowest birth-rates in the Western World. But according to Reid they have fewer abortions as well. What’s going on? Is there a wave of celibacy in Denmark? No. What is going on in these nations is a shared understanding among its citizenry about the nature of its culture and its progeny: our civilization’s future and the generations required to people it are not worth perpetuating. It is practical nihilism, for each nation believes that its traditions, customs, and what remains of its faith are not worthy of being preserved, developed, and shared outside of the populace that presently occuppies its border. In practical terms, this means, for one thing, that the present generation of Europeans older than 55 will not have enough future workers to sustain their own health care needs when they are elderly.

So, as we have seen in the Netherlands, involuntary, nonvoluntary, and voluntary euthanasia will certainly become the great cost-containers (or as they say more candidly in Alaska, “death panels”). There is no reason to doubt that there are fewer abortions performed in the Netherlands than were performed 30 years ago, but then again, that nation has fewer women who can procure abortions, and those women, like their mothers and grandmothers, are fully contracepted so their lives and the lives of their male partners are not disrupted by the ultimate party crashers, “unplanned” children.

The truth, however, is that the prolife position is not merely about “reducing the number of abortions,” though that is certainly a consequence that all prolifers should welcome. Rather, the prolife position is the moral and political belief that all members of the human community are intrinsically valuable and thus are entitled to the protection of the laws. “Reducing the number of abortions” may occur in a regime in which this belief is denied, and that is the regime that the 64

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libreral supporters of universal health coverage want to preserve and want prolifers to help subsidize. It is a regime in which the continued existence of the unborn is always at the absolute discretion of the postnatal. Reducing the number of these discretionary acts by trying to pacify and accommodate the needs of those who want to procure abortions—physicians, mothers, and fathers—only reinforces the idea that the unborn are objects whose value depends exclusively on our wanting them.

A culture that has fewer abortions because its citizens have, in the words of John Lennon, “nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too,” is a sad, dying, empty culture. Mr. Reid seems to think being prolife is just about instituting policies that result in fewer abortions.

But it’s not. It’s about loving children, life, and the importance of passing on one’s heritage to one’s legacy. Europe, sadly, embraces none of these virtues.

Francis J. Beckwith is Professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies, and Resident Scholar in the Institute for the Studies of Religion, at Baylor University. His most recent book is Politics for Christians: Statecraft as Soulcraft (InterVarsity Press).

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O F H USKS AND A RMOUR ]0buber0and0percy0}

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Hunter Baker

hilosopher Martin Buber tells a story about a man who has inspiration from God. He wanders out into “the creaturely realms” located in “the vast waste.” After traveling what we may assume to be was a great distance, he arrives at “the gates of mystery.” The inspired man knocks at the gate. A ghostly cry issues forth from inside asking what the man wants. Like a prophet of Israel, he informs the spirit inside the gates that he has proclaimed the greatness of God to his fellow mortals and has not been well-received. Instead of receiving ultimate satisfaction, the man is instructed to leave the gate and return to his life among his peers. “Here is no ear for you. I have sunk my hearing in the deafness of mortals.”

In his novel, The Second Coming, Walker Percy spins a remarkably similar tale, albeit over several more pages. His story is set in a realistic North Carolina, where a man desperately wants to meet God, either meet him or die in the process. His plan is to wander into an old cave rumored to hold the remains of a prehistoric tiger. There, he would make his stand waiting for God to answer. If not, then he would not leave. He would die instead, seeing no purpose in continuing to live as he was. This man is no prophet, as the hero of Buber’s story seems to be, but he, too, wants to hear from God. The similarity between the two characters is in the answer they receive from the Lord. When Percy’s protagonist Will Barrett fails to receive an answer from God, a combination of illness and the desire to be found for insurance purposes lead him to wander further in the cave. Near death, he falls through the vent leading from the cave into a naturally air-conditioned greenhouse. Inside the greenhouse, is a very special 66

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young woman. It is through her that Barrett will have a chance to communicate with God. In these tales told by Buber and Percy, men are redirected from their attempt to meet God in his glory. Both are sent back to their fellow human beings. If they are to meet God, He is going to meet them in that way. The inquiry highlighted by these stories is a brilliant one. Why do we embark on quests to meet God separately when he has surrounded us with a teeming mass of fellow God image bearers? Is it not the case that we stand a chance of finding out something about him or communicating something about him simply by living in real relationship with our brothers and sisters who are members of the one species out of millions with apparent selfawareness and conscience? In frustration, we may choose like Buber’s inspired man or Percy’s Barrett to push for a personal hearing with God, but God has put a different path before us and it runs through the life of community with others.

What we find with Martin Buber (the Jew, separated from the Synagogue) and Walker Percy (a devout Catholic, although selfdescribed as a bad one) are two great minds pushing out to the frontiers of the mysterious realm of language, communication, religion, God, and “real” reality. They both know that man finds himself in a unique position and they accordingly seek to explain his situation and perhaps offer solutions for his alienation and increasingly atomized existence. Both men seem to point away from a direct Job-like encounter with God and toward a meeting with him made available through other men and women. It is here that we may find meaning.

It is here that inchoate longings may find some fulfillment. It is here where man may well find God, for indeed, he may have “sunk his hearing in the deafness of mortals.”

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ercy and Buber reject Sartre, who believes one person could never really communicate meaningfully with another person and was therefore trapped in his own small world of concerns.

Percy points out that Sartre says so and we understand him, so he refutes himself. Instead, Buber and Percy identify the link between man and man as the in-between zone where the real can be found and perhaps God as well. The relentless push to overcome Sartre-ian despair with emotional, spiritual, and mental investigations into closeness is what unites the pair.

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Having identified encounters with our fellow human beings as the locus of reality, Buber and Percy point to our avoidance of those encounters as a major source of modern alienation and despair. Buber reports that “Each of us is encased in an armour whose task is to ward off signs.” Percy relates the notion that we are trapped in a “husk of the commonplace” that is difficult to penetrate. This husk or armour keeps us in a place where nothing has significance. Percy writes of such a problem in his journal of only two entries: The only thing notable is that nothing is notable. I wonder if any writer has ever recorded the observation that most time passes and most events occur without notable significance. I am sitting here looking out the window at a tree and wondering why it is that though it is a splendid tree, it is not of much account. It is no good to me. Is it the nature of the human condition or the nature of the age that things are devalued?

The answer, as both Percy and Buber know, is both. Buber doesn’t necessarily tell us how to penetrate the armour other than by increased sensitivity, intention, and insistence. Percy indicates that the occurrence of natural disasters and the imminence of one’s own death may act as catalysts for breaking down self-constructed barriers. For example, a recurring theme of Percy’s novels is the interaction between people during a tremendous storm. As the world flies apart around them, they relate to each other with a sincerity and ease that would be incomprehensible on a typical day. A husband and wife who have been sharply emotionally isolated from each other find that they can speak for the first time in years. They are even able to make love. The armour has been breached. They are once again able to answer one another’s unspoken questions and the spoken ones as well. The idea fits nicely with Buber’s notion of the primal man’s sense of encounter. His sense of causality is punctuated by natural upheavals, like flashes of lightning and volcanic eruptions.

His encounters may be violent, but they are real and are far removed from the detached statistical approach of the modern man.

The sense one gets from reading Buber is that at all times there is a low hum of communication and real relationship extending itself to the community of humankind. “The waves of the aether roar on always, but for most of the time, we have turned off our receivers.”

Percy’s husk and Buber’s armour actively block signals. We are like telepaths seeking frontal lobotomies in the hope that our sixth sense 68

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will disappear. We do not wish to be continually confronted by the other. In Buber’s words, we are constantly being addressed. Words demanding answers descend upon us, but we turn off our receivers or retreat within our armour and try desperately to avoid the questions. The problem may be getting worse. With our cell phones and portable music players we listen to only what we wish to hear and avoid the spontaneous encounters. Our reality becomes more and more self-constructed and self-insulated. We only wish to be addressed in a way of our choosing. Buber would say we sterilize the “world-happenings” around us and remove the seed of address.

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ercy perceives the crisis Buber so aptly identifies and works assiduously at somehow solving the problem. As the son and grandson of men who committed suicide, he views the crisis as a literally life-threatening one. Buber, too, realizes that life and death may be the stakes. Buber writes movingly of having spent a morning in rapturous contemplation of God prior to meeting with a young man. Though he was attentive and answered questions, Buber knew he was not fully present at the meeting. In other words, his sensitive receiver was turned off. He later heard that the young man had died. Buber lived under a degree of reproach for not having given himself to the encounter. From that point on, he would not miss a similar opportunity.

Percy may well have been a lot like Buber’s young man who died before his time. He didn’t seem to have a mentor to whom he could turn and thus, had to look for a way out, for some path to an authentic life. He writes with genuine dread about the arrival of four o’clock on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon. For Percy, the way out of such a predicament is to move toward some more primal state or at least a starting over of sorts.

The ex-pathologist Percy offers the solution of becoming an exsuicide. The ex-suicide is a man who legitimately considers killing himself, reviews the bidding, and chooses life. The pressure is off. He could be dead, but he is alive. He is like a castaway on a beach who rejoices in being alive and is able to reassess virtually everything as though all things are new. This is true of objects, situations, and human beings. Many years earlier, Buber wrote of such a basic existence: “A newly-created concrete reality has been laid in our arms; we answer for it. A dog has looked at you, you answer for its glance, a child has clutched your hand, you answer for its touch, a host of 69

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men moves about you, you answer for their need.” Percy’s exsuicide is similarly dispensed. He has shed his cocoon of modern personhood and has begun with a renewed simplicity and sincerity.

His receiver is on and he is capable of knowing what to do.

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n The Second Coming, Walker Percy describes the thoughts of Allie, a young woman who has spent time in mental institutions and has received shock treatment on multiple occasions. After she escapes, she takes up residence in an abandoned greenhouse that uses cave air for ventilation and temperature control. She has control of the situation until a man falls through the air vent and into her life.

She tends to him, but finds: It was no trouble handling him until he came to and looked at her.

She could do anything if nobody watched her. But the moment a pair of eyes focused on her, she was a beetle stuck on a pin, arms and legs beating the air. There was no purchase. It was an impalement and a derailment.

Allie is a victim of Buber’s “It-ification.” As an individual perceived to have psychiatric problems, her life has been subject to a dehumanizing analysis and summing up by scientists. Instead of human encounter, she has become fearful of multiple “I’s” treating her as a malfunctioning “it,” something that must be fixed as opposed to understood. Within the context of her treatment history, her reaction to another human presence is understandable. Rather than encounter, she expects diminution and probing for weak spots.

Martin Buber completely understands the source of Allie’s anxiety.

In fact, his work anticipates her situation: In our time, there predominates an analytical, reductive, and deriving look between man and man. This look is analytical, or rather pseudo analytical, since it treats the whole being as put together and therefore able to be taken apart – not only the socalled unconscious which is accessible to relative objectification, but also the psychic stream itself, which can never, in fact, be grasped as an object. This look is a reductive one because it tries to contract the manifold person, who is nourished by the microcosmic richness of the possible, and to some schematically surveyable and recurrent structures. And this look is a deriving one because it supposes it can grasp what a man has become, or even is becoming, in genetic formulae. And it thinks that even the dynamic central principle of the individual in this becoming can be represented by a general concept. An effort is being made today radically to destroy the mystery between man and man. The personal life, the ever near 70

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mystery, once the source of the stillest enthusiasms, is leveled down.

It is exactly in this sense that Allie perceives the “looks” she receives from others to be “an impalement and a derailment.” They have nothing to do with who she really is or what she really wants to say.

They are completely uninterested in the mystery she would share with another human being.

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hat Allie doesn’t realize is that the man who has literally fallen into her life knows something of the claims of science and its inability to answer the most important questions. In Percy’s earlier novel, the same character Will Barrett ended three years of psychoanalysis after figuring out the analyst couldn’t give him the answers he really wanted. Before he figured out the psychoanalyst couldn’t help him, he would sometimes disquiet the man by spontaneously asking him to just tell him what he should really be doing. Barrett is a man whose receiver is unusually sensitive and makes him a compassionate person. Those who encounter him feel known and listened to, but another consequence of his sensitivity is that he suffers from fugues and spells of falling down. The total effect is that he is not able to function as his friends and relatives expect. Their answer is to give his condition a name, treat it, and push him out onto the golf course. Just like Allie, his true self begins to emerge when he forgets his treatment.

Disappointment with and opposition to the totalizing effect of science is a persistent theme in Percy’s work. His education was scientific in nature. Although he appreciates what could be discovered about distant stars or the composition of the body, he is also struck by the failure of the scientific method to deal with the unique situation of men and women living an apparently unique existence in a world full of other creatures.

Buber shares Percy’s perspective. In his eyes, those who would cast their work in scientific terms often fall prey to an epistemological pride that is unjustified by their actual achievements (though he gratefully acknowledges what science can do). As a result, they end up seeing human beings as mere subjects and fail to recognize their true signficance and calling. Buber seems to feel a righteous anger about the situation:

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Wouldn’t their world come crashing down upon them if they refused to add up He + He + He to get an It, and tried instead to determine the sum of You and You and You, which can never be anything else than You? What would this come to if not an exchange of form-giving mastery for a puttering dilettantism, and of lucid, powerful reason for murky enthusiasm? And when we turn our eyes from the leaders to the led and consider the fashion of modern work and possession, don’t we find that modern developments have expunged almost every trace of a life in which human beings confront each other and have meaningful relationships?

He knows that a purely empirical view of the world leaves no room for the reality he perceives beneath the surface.

With all deference to the world continuum of space and time I know as a living truth only concrete world reality which is constantly, in every moment, reached out to me. I can separate it into its component parts, I can compare them and distribute them into groups of similar phenomena; and when I have done all this I have not touched my concrete world reality.

In other words, the scientific approach is inherently limited. It can give us significant insights into means, but not ends and all human beings are ends in themselves. In Buber’s words, they are “categorically different from all things and all beings.”

Besides the limitedness of science as a tool for understanding Buber’s “concrete world reality,” there is another problem. Those who see the world through a purely scientific lens are robbed of the chance to live a meaningful life. Percy saw that as a possible trap for himself, but rejected the call of science because: This life is far too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and have to answer “Scientific humanism.” That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore, I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact, I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less.

Percy even speculates that the move toward a totalizing view from nowhere afforded by a scientific outlook results in a mental/spiritual disorder he refers to as “angelism.” Instead of actually living in and being part of the world, an individual afflicted with angelism merely hovers above the earth and observes it. When such a person is called upon to interact with other human beings, it may well be on a “bes72

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tial” level. Percy recounts a report he once read in which an astronomer came home each night like a God descending from Olympus. He ate ravenously, watched television, had frequent intercourse with his wife, and said nary a word to the members of his family.

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artin Buber was not uniformly hostile to politics. At the personal level, he thought a reasoned discourse about the nature of the good is both positive and necessary, particularly if done with respect and without resort to false charm, fearmongering, or theatrics. However, he was profoundly skeptical of politics performed at the level of the mass man. “The collective aims at holding in check the inclination to personal life,” he wrote. He was particularly critical of propaganda. The propagandist has no interest in real encounter. He is not concerned with the object of his art. The personal is only considered “in respect of the specific use to which it can be put.” The politics of sloganeering and manipulation only exist in an effort to win power “over the other by depersonalizing him.”

At their worst, such political methods “mean the effective abolition of the human factor.”

Unsurprisingly, Walker Percy appears to have shared Buber’s sentiments with regard to the political and its tendency toward manipulation and depersonalization. His novel The Thanatos Syndrome most clearly expresses his view. The main plot involves Dr. Tom More, a notoriously bad Catholic who is also a psychiatrist/sometimes patient at the local hospital. More begins to notice that some of the people he knows either personally or as former patients are beginning to exhibit less than human attributes. After a bit of investigation, the good doctor with a suspect reputation discovers that some of his acquaintances with a scientific and political bent are engaged in mass social engineering. They are doctoring the region’s water supply. The effects are not all for ill. His wife has become a champion bridge player. The local football team is winning every game. Students are well-behaved in school. The crime rate has gone down to nil and everyone is happy with their place in the social structure.

More, a scientifically-trained fellow, is both intrigued and horrified. One senses the antagonists might have a shot at winning him over and convincing him not to reveal their activities. However, he is also mindful of his Catholic faith and his legacy as the rather undistinguished descendant of the original Thomas More, who gave his life for his unwillingness to give his approval to wrongdoing. In the 73

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novel’s background, More visits with his alcoholic local priest who remembers his extended visit to Hitler’s Germany as a child. His stories draw a parallel between the social engineering and manipulation of that period and the one More fights in the present.

The clear feeling of both writers is that politics, like science, has a tendency to reduce people to mere units to be moved from classification to classification via the appropriate methods. Although the same problem persists today, it was in the twentieth century when “scientific” approaches to politics were in vogue.

“I hate to talk about having any one particular thesis, but I guess I’m interested in decline and fall, and what are the options.” –WALKER PERCY

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hat Percy refers to as decline and fall, Buber calls a theory of an inevitable running down. Just as Percy is interested in discovering what options exist, Buber rejects a fatalistic understanding of history in favor of recovering or uncovering the type of encounters that will change the world. In his view, the only way we can definitively lose the battle is to adopt some sociohistorical theory that causes us to believe that defeat is certain.

During his famed self-interview, Percy admitted to sometimes giving in to the impulse to take a certain pleasure in the feeling that the world was collapsing around him. Buber identified the phenomenon and counseled not giving in when he wrote: Whoever is overpowered by the It-world must consider the dogma of an ineluctable running down as a truth that creates a clearing in the jungle. In truth, this dogma only leads him deeper into the slavery of the It-world. But the world of the You is not locked up.

Whoever proceeds toward it, concentrating his whole being, with his power to relate resurrected, beholds his freedom. And to gain freedom from the belief in unfreedom is to gain freedom.

The better course, then, is to turn one’s back on fatalism and embrace “returning.” He who returns, “tears the web of drives,” “stirs up,” “rejuvenates,” and “changes the secure historical forms.” Great theories of history and anthropology give us reason to remain in our comfortable prisons as the “running down occurs.” Inevitability is the greatest destroyer of positive thought and action. Instead of accepting that checkmate is already spelled out in the arrangement of the pieces, Buber urges knocking over “the men on the board.”

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What exactly does “returning” look like? At a minimum, it would mean removing our armour and setting personal receivers to the “on” position. Instead of hustling through life indifferent to the constant message being broadcast by those we meet, we would look for genuine moments of encounter. We would try to perceive and acknowledge those moments when we are being addressed.

In The Second Coming, Percy portrays a relationship between two people that seems to capture the Buberian sense of returning and what it would look like in a triangular relation between the two and the Eternal Thou. The relationship between the pair begins when Will Barrett falls through the vent in the greenhouse Allie occupies as a squatter of sorts. When he awakes, it is his gaze she fears as a potential “impalement and derailment.” But she also notices that he smells “like the grave.” He has emerged from a combined suicide attempt/mission to meet God and she is an escapee from a mental facility. In their unlikely relationship, one can observe a model of real encounter.

Before examining the relationship between Percy’s characters, consider a brief statement by Buber describing real communication between persons: But where the dialogue is fulfilled in its being, between partners who have turned to one another in truth, who express themselves without reserve and are free of the desire for semblance, there is brought into being a memorable common fruitfulness which is to be found nowhere else.

Percy envisioned the “common fruitfulness” as occurring both simply and deeply. For example, he often expressed an interest in communication that addresses the most basic needs without any concern for pretense: We could speak simply. ‘Are you hungry?’ ‘Are you cold?’ Perhaps we could take a walk on the levee. In the new world, it will be possible to enjoy simple things once again.

For a more complex message rendered in truth and sincerity, consider this statement from Will to Allie: Now, you’ve done a great deal for me. I would thank you for it but won’t, for fear of upsetting your balance sheet of debits and credits.

I know you are particular about owing somebody something, but maybe you will learn that’s not so bad. I don’t mind being in your debt. You won’t mind my saying that I would do the same for you, 75

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and take pleasure in it, and furthermore can easily see our positions reversed. What I wish to tell you is that I accept what you’ve done for me and that I have other things to ask of you. I don’t mind asking you. There are things that need to be done and only you can do them. Will you?

Some readers may consider the passage above unremarkable, but a close examination shows that nothing has been unsaid. There is no private agenda left undisclosed. All motives are stated. A request is made without any attempt at manipulation, exaggeration, or appeal to anything other than an honest relationship. Notice that even though Will is asking for something on top of everything Allie has done for him so far, he feels no need to engage in flattery. Here we see a man expressing his honest feelings and real need to another person.

After his initial encounters with Allie, Will begins to notice a new level of communication opening up before him. He announces that he is leaving to a couple of men in a retirement home where he has been placed by mostly well-meaning friends and relatives. To his surprise, they respond as though he has decided to leave for good.

After thinking about it, he realizes they have heard him more truly than he intended or even knew. Has he been missing something all this time?

Stooping, he looked into their faces. Who said anything about leaving for good? How did they know when he had not quite known it himself?

He stood for a moment gazing at a tarantula in Deborah Kerr’s tent.

Was there a whole world of meaning, of talking and listening, which took place everywhere and all the time and which no one paid attention to, at least not he?

It is in this portion of the text that we can see a powerful resemblance to Buber’s thought. This “world of meaning, of talking and listening” which is taking place at all times and places is exactly what Buber called us to attune ourselves to instead of living in our own “IIt” bubbles. There is an entire world we miss when we refuse to step out of our armour of self-concern and disregard for the other. What’s more is that this undiscovered world, is the real world or Buber’s “concrete world reality.” If Buber had ever written a novel, he might have included a character asking exactly the question Will Barrett asks above.

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In this real world, the ability to analyze and appraise instrumental realities remains, but people like Allie and Will will no longer wrestle pitifully like beetles pinned on specimen boards. Rather than being subjected in their sensitivity to shock treatments and special medications, they will first experience real understanding. The opportunity to be truly understood and to understand even just one other person, may be all they need to open up the rest of the world. Eyes that once impaled and derailed, will now simply meet the eyes of the other.

“Eyes examining are different from eyes meeting eyes.”

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pon review of the many similarities in the thought of Martin Buber and Walker Percy, a person familiar with the work of both men might think religion is where the two would reach a real impasse. After all, Buber refused to set foot in the synagogue, while Percy was a regular mass attender who wrote about the happy dispensation of having eaten Christ’s body. Although Percy sometimes called himself a bad Catholic, he appears to have maintained to the end of his life a belief in the Roman church’s supernatural claims.

Nevertheless, a closer examination of the words of Buber and Percy will reveal some similarity even in the area where they should be farthest apart.

Buber is not particularly sympathetic to traditional expressions of religious belief. Tradition can suppress vital prophetic voices, which are desperately needed in the pursuit of justice and to remind us of our obligation to understand the other rather than to categorize and dismiss them. For him, the traditional church or synagogue is the result of an incompleteness man feels: The life structure of the pure relation, the “lonesomeness” of the I before the You, the law that man, however he may include the world in his encounter, can still go forth only as a person to encounter God – all this also does not satisfy man’s thirst for continuity. He thirsts for something spread out in space, for the representation in which the community of the faithful is united with its God. Thus, God becomes a cult object.

This desire to have something “spread out in space” leads us away from real relation and into something like idolatry. Instead of focusing on the relation to God, we focus on the representation of relation to God.

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Instead of giving in to the desire for continuity represented by a “cult object” God, Buber believes we must ever more insistently focus on our actions and encounters with others in the world: Man can do justice to the relation to God that has been given to him only by actualizing God in the world in accordance with his ability and the measure of each day, daily.

In the course of doing justice to the relation of God, we will put down the “dictionary” we use to define our faith and recognize that the psychic stream addressing us “has never been said before” and is not “composed of sounds that have ever been said.” The mysterious nature of what addresses us: . . .can neither be interpreted nor translated, I can have it neither explained nor displayed; it is not a what at all, it is said unto my very life; it is no experience that can be remembered independently of the situation, it remains the address of that moment and cannot be isolated, it remains the question of a questioner and will have its answer.

To the cynically-minded, Buber’s approach to spirituality could be taken as a variation of the Star Wars’ Jedi Knight exhortations to “feel the force,” but he is not necessarily after something utterly formless and self-defining. In reality, Buber envisioned a connection with God that will create very clear obligations and answers: It is the night of an expectation – not of a vague hope, but of an expectation. We expect a theophany of which we know nothing but the place, and the place is called community. In the public catacombs of this expectation there is no single God’s Word which can be clearly known and advocated, but the words delivered are clarified for us in our human situation of being turned to one another. There is no obedience to the coming one without loyalty to his creature. To have experienced this is our way.

In the process of becoming fully present and attentive to the previously unknown world of communication constantly occurring around us, we will discover our real responsibility to others, which constitutes our responsibility to God. What should occur, according to Buber, is an exchange of dogma, which blocks real revelation, for true revelation, which is found in the awareness of being addressed.

On Buber’s path lies a new kind of ecumenism. There is not some natural law or claimed “identical content of faith which is alleged to be found in all religions” at the center of this unifying belief, though.

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Instead, “genuine dialogue” dealing in certainty will draw “openhearted” persons together. Within their conversation a “common life” will appear. If even one person will insistently make this type of genuine encounter his cause, the scoffers will eventually be overwhelmed by what becomes possible.

The relationship between Will and Allie in The Second Coming augurs the type of “common life” to which Buber alluded. Toward the end of the novel, Will makes a sharp break from the therapeutic life being pressed upon him and decides to make a new life with Allie. He chooses not to use his inherited wealth from his deceased wife and will make a new life in a new way with both Allie and his community.

As the novel comes to a close, Will sets forth a personal manifesto of how he will and will not live going forward. It is worth quoting nearly in full: Death in the guise of Christianity is not going to prevail over me. If Christ brought life, why do churches smell of death?

Death in the guise of old Christendom in Carolina is not going to prevail over me. The old churches are houses of death.

Death in the form of New Christendom in Carolina is not going to prevail over me. If the born-again are the twice born, I’m holding out for a third go-round.

Death in the guise of God and America and the happy life of home and family and friends is not going to prevail over me. America is in fact almost as dead as Europe. . .

Death in the guise of belief is not going to prevail over me, for believers now believe anything and everything and do not love the truth, are in fact in despair of the truth, and that is death.

Death in the guise of unbelief is not going to prevail over me, for unbelievers believe nothing, not because truth does not exist, but because they have already chosen not to believe, and would not believe, cannot believe, even if the living truth stood before them, and that is death. . .

Death in the form of -isms and -asms shall not prevail over me, orgasm, enthusiasm, liberalism, conservatism, Communism, Buddhism, Americanism, for an -ism is only another way of despairing of the truth.

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God may be good, family and marriage and children and home may be good, grandma and grandpa may act wise, the Thanksgiving table may be groaning with God’s goodness and bounty, all the folks healthy and happy, but something is missing. What is this sadness here? Why do the folks put up with it? The truth seeker does not.

Instead of joining hands with the folks and bowing his head in prayer, the truth seeker sits in an empty chair as invisible as Banquo’s ghost, yelling at the top of his voice: Where is it? What is missing? Where did it go? I won’t have it! Why this sadness here?

Don’t stand for it. Get up! Leave! Let the boat people sit down! Go live in a cave until you’ve found the thief who is robbing you. But at least protest. Stop, thief! What is missing? God? Find him!”

Just as Percy captures Buber’s thought when he writes about the unknown world of communication occurring at all times and places, but perhaps not noticed, he also does so with this remarkable stream of consciousness. Within the space of a couple of pages, Percy joins Buber in denouncing the unfaithfulness of the traditional religious culture, the reductionism of the skeptical scientific point of view, and the excessive zeal of politics. All will prevent the true seeker from finding what he is looking for, which is real revelation.

Though it seems Percy's hero is rejecting Christianity, that is not the case. Instead, he is writing during televangelism's heyday and insisting on the abandonment of the kind of cheap and easy religion which proposes to solve problems and to erase a bad conscience with the ease of uttering an incantation. Real commitment in the form of a faith that actualizes itself in the world will be required. "Find him!"

Hunter Baker is Associate Provost and Assistant Professor of Government at Houston Baptist University. He is the author of The End of Secularism (Crossway Books), about which you can read more at his website, endofsecularism.com.

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Louis Markos

long with a growing number of my fellow evangelicals, I have learned to qualify the Reformation cry of sola scriptura by asserting the foundational authority of the ecumenical councils that formed the creeds. I have learned too to drink deeply at the patristic well: not raising Sacred Tradition to the same level as the Bible, but according a greater weight of authority to the sermons and treatises of Church Fathers from Irenaeus to Athanasius to Chrysostom to Augustine. Though it is probably too early to speak of an official Protestant Resourcement, I have been cheered by the enthusiasm with which evangelical colleges, presses, and scholars have reconnected with our ancient Christian heritage. And that reconnection has been taking place as well in the more theologically orthodox sectors of the mainline.

This Protestant rehabilitation of the Fathers of the Church is, I believe, a good and healthy thing that promises to strengthen the Body of Christ and to build a much-needed bulwark around the central doctrines of the faith. Nevertheless, despite these promising signs, I sense a subtle but pervasive danger in this movement that could compromise and even pervert the very good it hopes to accomplish.

For the last two centuries, theological liberals have made an art of blaming St. Paul for all those aspects of Christianity that they find distasteful or anti-modern. In parallel fashion, many neo-orthodox Protestants have been far too eager to blame Plato for what they donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t like in the Early Church.

Now it must be admitted at the outset that any Christian, ancient or modern, who would learn from Plato must do so with caution and 81

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discernment. The gnostic Neo-Platonists harbored a low view of the body and of the physical world in general that is incompatible not only with the Incarnation and Resurrection of Christ but with our own status as enfleshed souls. Plato was too quick to view human beings as souls trapped inside of bodies, and the Gnostics who followed him were unwilling to accept that the Word truly and fully became flesh. Christ, they believed, only appeared to be a man; he merely wore the flesh as a man might wear a shirt that he later discards. Our imperfect physical world of becoming, Plato taught, is but a shadow or imitation of the perfect spiritual world of the Forms. For the Greek Plato the notion that a perfect God would take on flesh and become a man was the height of foolishness.

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n sum, Platonic philosophy in its purest form renders not only the Incarnation of Christ but the incarnational nature of man an absurdity. But then no orthodox Christian apologist for Plato would advocate a simple acceptance of Platonism. The point at issue is not whether Plato was a Christian (of course he wasn’t), but whether or not he was a pre-Christian (who got many things partially right that would later be revealed in their fullness in Christ) and a proto-Christian (one whom God used to prepare the pagan world for the coming of Christ). Though only the Gospel of John could teach pre-conversion Augustine that the Word (Logos) was made flesh, he did learn from such Neo-Platonists as Plotinus—so he tells us in his Confessions—that the Word was with God and was God. God, that is to say, prepared Augustine’s heart for the truth of the Incarnation (Word made Flesh) by first opening his mind, via the Neo-Platonists, to the possibility that the Word existed and was with God. Augustine the convert surely remembered the vital role that Plato’s teachings played in his spiritual journey, for when he matured into Augustine the philosopher and theologian, he did not dismiss Plato’s theory of the Forms as a satanic deception, but placed those Forms (correctly, I believe) in the Mind of God. Augustine consciously reworks Plato in his writings. The Platonic vision that appears in Hebrews, in contrast, seems to be totally unconscious. The author of Hebrews writes and argues within a Hebraic, rather than Hellenic, context; yet, Chapter 9 works out a distinction between the heavenly and earthly Temple that reads like a passage out of Plato. According to verses 23 and 24, the Most Holy Place, where dwelt the Ark of the Covenant, is but a copy or imita82

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tion of the eternal Temple which is in heaven. The temporal, imperfect blood sacrifices of the Old Testament were performed to cleanse the copies, but only the eternal, perfect sacrifice of Christ could sanctify the original sanctuary which is the Throne Room of God. The author of Hebrews is not reworking Plato’s Theory of the Forms (as Augustine is), but revealing a great truth that Plato the pre-Christian somehow managed to catch sight of. Though Plato most likely did not glimpse the Throne Room directly (as the prophets do in Isaiah 6, Ezekiel 1, and Revelation 4), he did glimpse the truth behind it—that the things of our world are, in comparison to heaven, mere phantoms and shadows.

And it is with that assertion of the relative insubstantiality of our world that I begin my list of four reasons why Protestant, and to a lesser extent Catholic and Orthodox, Christians still need Plato today.

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es, and twice and thrice yes, our world is real and substantial.

It was made good by God the Creator—not poorly and by a lesser God as the Gnostics and Neo-Platonists believed—and it will be redeemed when Christ returns. Still, in comparison to the Absolute Reality of heaven, our world is a rather thin and murky affair. That is why at the end of The Last Battle (the final novel of the Chronicles of Narnia) the highly orthodox and highly Platonic C. S. Lewis refers to our present world as the “Shadow-lands.” When Jesus tells his would-be followers that they must hate their fathers and mothers (Luke 14:26), he does not mean us literally to hate them; rather, in comparison to our absolute love for and allegiance to God, our feelings to our parents will seem almost to be hatred (see Matthew 10:37, where the intent of Jesus’ hyperbolic language is made clear).

Lewis complains in Miracles that our modern world is given to speaking of God and heaven in negative terms. We are corporeal, bodily; God is non-corporeal and non-bodily. Earth is substantial and physical; heaven is insubstantial and non-physical. If anything, Lewis argues, God and heaven are trans-corporeal and trans-physical. God is not less than man, but more. Heaven is not earth with all the “stuff” taken out, but a reality that transcends and surpasses our own as the original transcends the copy or the substance surpasses the shadow. Despite the influence of The Da Vinci Code and the Gnostic Gospels, the characteristic sin of our modern age is not to make 83

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the earth nothing, but to make it everything. We need Plato to help us put things back into their proper perspective.

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ike those guilty of avarice in Dante’s Purgatorio, we moderns are inveterate earth-gazers, forever looking down when we should be looking up. This downward orientation is in great part responsible for perpetuating the heaven-is-insubstantial myth described above; but it has also led to the insubstantialization of such key Platonic (and Christian) concepts as the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. One of the most deceptive and dangerous heresies of the Middle Ages was known as nominalism. Its followers claimed that absolutes like Goodness, Truth, and Beauty had no real existence or substance but were merely names. The nominalists saw themselves as living in a world of particulars divorced from universals, of temporal, changing concepts that neither proceeded out of nor were anchored by eternal, unchanging truths. The postmodern nominalists of today would say that we live in a world of signifiers cut off from any fixed or final signifieds; or, more simply, they would repeat the mantra of the last three generations of academics and teenagers: everything is relative.

I think it significant and revealing that the more orthodox, Platoinspired Medievals who resisted nominalism called themselves “realists.” How strange it sounds to the modern ear, whether that ear belong to a secular humanist or an evangelical Protestant, to refer to someone as a realist because he believes that the heavenly (invisible) Idea/Form of Beauty or Truth is not only more universal but more substantial than an earthly (visible) manifestation of beauty or truth.

But we would do well to struggle with that strangeness. A nascent but growing discomfort with doctrine has been slowly spreading within the evangelical world, particularly in the “emergent” church, that threatens to revive nominalism. Though the historical truth of the Incarnation and Resurrection is affirmed, adherence to such central doctrines as the Trinity and the Atonement has gotten slightly more hazy. Perhaps, thinks the Christian mind that has lost its moorings in the pre/proto-Christian truths of Plato, the Trinity is a theological concept (or name) that has come to be believed in as a reality.

In fact, according to orthodox Christian belief, which, in this area, is consonant with the worldview of Plato, the Trinity is a universal, eternal Reality that has always existed and that contains its essence in its existence—the theological word “Trinity” is a name we use to ex84

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press that Reality in human language. The same holds for the Atonement, though in a slightly different way. The Atonement can, and has been, defined in a variety of ways, but our definitions are not the origin of the Reality. The Atonement exists apart from our language about it, not just as a historic/cosmic event in the salvation narrative but as an essential part of the eternal relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

A healthy, corrective dose of Plato can help us not only to preserve the purity of Christian doctrine but to think properly about that doctrine. And it can help us as well in two areas in which Protestantism in particular—at first, only within the mainline, but increasingly today in scattered pockets of evangelicalism—has become unglued from the Good, True, and Beautiful: morality and gender. The growing acceptance, and even normalizing, of sexual immorality within the church is not only a result of the sexual revolution. Once words like morality, family, and sexuality become untethered from Absolute Standards (become merely names), individual Christians become free to define them as they see fit—and then to demand that the churches and denominations they attend accept their personal definitions. This redefining has been pursued most aggressively in the area of gender.

Genesis clearly teaches that God created us male and female. Until quite recently, it was universally understood within the Church—if not, indeed, within the world—that men and woman do not merely possess male and female genitalia, but that they are male and female.

Feminists, whether they be secular or Christian, who claim that masculinity and femininity do not define real, essential differences but are simply social constructs are, at heart, nominalists. And, as nominalists, they must reject any Platonic notion that our essence as Masculine and Feminine precedes our physical existence as men and women.

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do not mean to imply that Plato possessed a full Christian understanding of the essential complementarity of the sexes, but his theory of the Forms and his essentialist-realist worldview do provide a powerful bulwark against any type of radical egalitarianism that would break down all distinctions between the sexes in particular and people in general. Among the greatest dangers facing the Western church today (again, I speak with specific reference to Protestantism though the danger is there as well in Catholicism) is the 85

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notion that all of Jesus’ teachings and actions can be summed up in a single word: inclusivism.

Though it is quite true that Christ broke down the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile, and that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female (Galatians 3:28), that does not mean that Christ has abolished all distinctions. The Bible refers to a married couple as one flesh, but that does not mean that husband and wife lose their distinctiveness. A time will come when Christ and his Bride (the Church, or Body of Christ) will be joined in marriage, but that does not mean that our personalities will be emptied into an amorphous One Soul: in heaven we will continue to exist as separate, distinct beings clothed in Resurrection Bodies. The oneness that Paul celebrates in Galatians is a oneness of dignity, for in Christ, we all gain our full intrinsic value and worth. But equal dignity does not mean sameness, nor does equal value and worth imply the breaking down of all difference and distinction.

Plato did not create the Christian understanding of unity within diversity, of servanthood within hierarchy, or of humility within giftedness, but his teachings help to elucidate these vital truths that modern egalitarianism threatens to pervert or abolish. Our roles within the family, the state, and the church are not merely social constructs but rise up from our essential natures and giftedness. Justice in Plato’s Republic ultimately means each person fulfilling his proper role, just as true harmony within the church is found when each member of the Body of Christ serves—and is affirmed and celebrated for serving—its proper function. In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the philosopher who escapes from the Cave and gazes upon the truth, upon the Good, the True, and the Beautiful that lie outside, is duty bound to return to the Cave and teach others what he has seen. He does not return to the Cave so he can be taught that he is just the same as everyone else, but so that he can teach the Truth to others who have not yet perceived it. He will not hide the Truth he has seen for fear that he may harm the self-esteem of the lazy and the foolish or give offense to the more sensitive inhabitants of the Cave, but will proclaim boldly the Truth—and with that Truth, the Goodness and the Beauty that are inseparable from it.

In the final chapter of Mere Christianity, Lewis reminds us that salt and light are things that reveal, rather than conceal, the distinctions between things and people. The role of salt (as a flavoring, not as a 86

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preservative) is to bring out and enhance the natural flavor of a given food. But that analogy is not perfect, admits Lewis, since if too much salt is added to the food, it will obliterate its distinctive taste. That’s why Lewis, like the Bible and Plato before him, prefers the analogy of light. If a hundred people are huddled together in a pitch black room, and then a bright light is turned on in the room, the light will reveal that they are not all the same, as they appeared to be in the dark, but are each individually distinct. Dante’s Divine Comedy is essentially a journey into light, and as the light increases, Dante understands more and more clearly how each of us inhabits a unique position within the sublimely complex hierarchy of God’s universe. Our modern world, in its mania to deconstruct all clerical, political, and intellectual hierarchies and to level all distinctions of essence or merit has tried to eliminate these twin truths from Christianity and the Church.

It has been most effective in eliminating the first by blaming it on Constantine’s decision to make Christianity the official religion of the Empire; it has done the same for the second by blaming it on Plato.

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ut what if Plato was right, or, to be more precise, what if the most central and most orthodox of the early and medieval Church Fathers were right in considering Plato to be right? If they were right, then all Christians are called, as the Platonic philosopher is called, to journey into the light. Yes, we are saved by the grace of Christ and not by our own merit, but the central doctrine of salvation by grace through faith must not be used as a cover to stifle the spiritual importance (though not the salvific necessity) of at least beginning that journey. The Platonic philosopher who knew only in part—who saw very dimly in a dirty mirror—strove to gain sight of eternal, but impersonal Forms; the Christian who knows considerably more because so much more has been revealed to him, seeks to commune with the Triune God—but both heed the call to seek after the Beatific (or blessed) Vision.

Our modern fixation on earthly things, our postmodern denial of absolute essences, and our “democratic” championing of egalitarianism as an absolute good has dissuaded generations of believers from even desiring to pursue the Beatific Vision. It has also deluded us into believing that no one is closer than we are to that Vision, and taught us to become irate, if not downright ugly, when such a suggestion is made.

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As an Evangelical, I do not offer prayers to the saints; I have, however, been able (with a little help from Plato) to get myself past the inbred Protestant resistance to a belief that was held strongly by most of the early and medieval Church Fathers: namely, that some Christians, through grace as well as merit, draw closer to God and, by so doing, gain a deeper understanding of the Good, the True, and/or the Beautiful. Granted, the New Testament calls all believers saints, but that does not mean that all Christians stand at the same distance from Christ or that a hierarchy of holiness is ruled out by the Atonement. The fact that a large percentage of devout Evangelicals, myself included, look upon missionaries with a reverence similar to that accorded to the saints by devout Catholics offers powerful evidence that we as a species have been hardwired by our Creator with a natural, as opposed to sociological, regard for hierarchy.

According to Statius, a pagan poet converted to Christ whom Dante meets in purgatory, it was the pre/proto-Christian Virgil who, without knowing it, pointed him to the True Messiah. For a neopagan age that has lost its moorings in the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, Plato may just be the guide we need to revive in us a desire for the Beatific Vision.

Louis Markos, (www.Loumarkos.com) Professor in English at Houston Baptist University and Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities/Scholar in Residence, is the author of From Achilles to Christ, Lewis Agonistes, and Pressing Forward: Tennyson and the Victorian Age. 88

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T H E G R E AT S E PA R AT I O N 4CHURCH)AND)STATE$

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hould government support religion? For Americans, the answer to that question requires consideration of three questions. First, is government support constitutionally permitted, or does the “establishment of religion” clause of the First Amendment forbid it? Second, even if it is constitutionally permissible, is it right for government to support religion?

In the Founders’ language, is the natural right to free exercise of religion abridged when government officials support religion? More precisely, are some forms of support permissible (support of “religion in general,” for example, as some would say) and others not? And third, considering the religious and political landscape in our time, is it good policy for government to support religion? Which kinds of support would be least divisive or inflammatory? Is there a danger that expansion of government support of religion today would lead to the promotion of religious views that are incompatible with the principles and moral convictions necessary for a free society?

In this brief essay, I will focus on an early example of government support of religion—the Declaration of Independence, and the representation of its theology in the Great Seal of the United States—and draw some tentative conclusions from that. As for the third question, a larger one, I leave that to those currently active in politics.

In general, liberals believe that the American principle of religious liberty requires not only the separation of church and state, but also the separation of religion from politics. They argue that a prohibited “establishment of religion” exists whenever government promotes religion at all.

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Some conservatives agree that government should be neutral between religion and its opponents, but they point out that neutrality is hardly served by excluding religious expression and views from public life, while allowing non-religious and anti-religious expression.

Other conservatives say that government may support religion, as long as it supports “religion in general,” but not any particular religious doctrine or opinion.

These current views of religious liberty are opposed to the understanding of the Founders. For example, Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, and Adams would all have gladly endorsed this prayer, clearly inspired by the Bible, delivered by a Jewish rabbi at a Rhode Island high school graduation. It was outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1992: “God of the Free, Hope of the Brave. . . . For the liberty of America, we thank you. May these graduates grow up to guard it. . . .

We must each strive to fulfill what you require of us all: To do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly.”

Conservatives often believe they are defending the Founders’ understanding of religious liberty when they argue that government may aid religion, as long as it does so nonpreferentially. They seem not to realize the pitfalls, indeed the impossibility, of this approach.

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f government sponsors prayers of the sort just quoted, evenhandedness would require that Wiccan priestesses and worshipers of Gaia be invited to pray as well. But this was not the Founders’ view. In his letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport, Rhode Island, Washington called the free exercise of religion an “inherent natural right.” But in the founding, that right was generally understood to mean that government may not molest or injure anyone for holding religious views different from the ones it wishes to promote.

It did not mean that government must hold its tongue on all matters theological or religious. Therefore Washington concluded his letter to the Hebrews with a prayer: “May the Father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here and, in His own due time and way, everlastingly happy.”

The First Amendment requires a separation between church and state: Congress must not establish a religion. It may not designate any denomination or sect as the official religion of the nation or as supported as such at taxpayer expense. But the Amendment does not require a separation between God or religion and state. How could it, 90

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when the Declaration of Independence declares that God is the source of the rights that government is bound to secure and protect?

Without what Hamilton called “established rules of morality and justice . . . , there is an end of all distinct ideas of right or wrong, justice or injustice, in relation to society or government. There can be no such thing as rights—no such thing as property or liberty. . . . Everything must float on the variable and vague opinion of the governing party of whomsoever composed.” For Hamilton and other Founders, the “established rules of morality and justice” are the same as the “laws of nature and of nature’s God” mentioned in the Declaration of Independence.

Many today believe that Jefferson would have supported the current liberal view of religious liberty. This is not true. Jefferson issued a number of public prayers in his official capacity as president. In his famous letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, he wrote that the First Amendment builds “a wall of separation between Church and State.” This letter has been used for over sixty years to denounce any presence of religion in American public life, including government-sponsored prayer and the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in the classroom. Yet the letter itself concludes with a governmentsponsored prayer: “I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection and blessing of the common Father and Creator of man.” Jefferson, of course, composed this prayer on government time at taxpayers’ expense, and he delivered it in his official capacity as president. If the liberal view of religious liberty were correct, Jefferson would have breached the wall of separation at the very moment he proclaimed it.

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he Declaration of Independence is a striking example of government promotion of a particular theology—i.e., not just “religion in general.” The Declaration contains four distinct references to God. He is the author of the “laws of nature and of nature’s God.” He is the “Creator” who “endowed” us with our inalienable rights. He is “the Supreme Judge of the world.” And he provides “the protection of Divine Providence.”

The Supreme Court ruled in the 1947 Everson case that government may not “teach or practice religion.” It ruled in 1992 (Lee v. Weisman) that government may not exert “subtle coercive pressure” on students by allowing prayers at public school ceremonies. If the Declaration were taught in a public school as the truth, the teacher would “teach religion.” She would be exercising “subtle coercive pressure” 91

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on students. She would be teaching them that God is our lawgiver, creator, judge, and providential protector. By the logic of the Court’s view of religious liberty, teaching the Declaration of Independence in public school is an unconstitutional establishment of religion.

It is true that teaching the Declaration has not yet been declared unconstitutional, but that is only because the Court has been unwilling to admit the logical consequences of its view of the “establishment of religion” forbidden by the First Amendment. To avoid the public outrage that would follow if the Declaration were banned from the classroom, the Court falsely assumes that that document is not really religious. Reading the Declaration in school, asserted Justice Brennan, “no longer ha[s] a religious purpose or meaning. The reference to divinity in the revised pledge of allegiance, for example, may merely recognize the historical fact that our nation was believed to have been founded ‘under God.’” In other words, if Brennan is right, the theology of the Declaration may be taught in the classroom as long as it is understood that it belongs to a world that is dead and gone, that it has nothing to do with the world that we live in here and now, that it is not a living faith that holds God to be the source of our rights, the author of the laws of nature, and the providential protector and Supreme Judge of America.

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he Great Seal of the United States is the most obvious example of the Founders’ conviction that the government should “teach religion.” The Seal, adopted by Congress in 1782, is still printed today on the dollar bill. The pyramid side of the Seal is a memorable representation of the theology of the Declaration of Independence. This fact is not widely recognized, in part because practically everyone believes that the symbols of the pyramid and eye are Masonic in origin.

The definitive history of the Seal—Patterson and Dougall’s The Eagle and the Shield— finds no evidence to support the claim of its Masonic inspiration or meaning. As far as we know, none of the Seal’s designers were Masons. Founding-era Masons did use the eye to represent God (but not in a triangle). However, Patterson and Dougall report that this symbolism was well established outside of Masonic circles.

The persistent if unfounded rumors of the Great Seal’s supposed Masonic origins have distracted us from the most obvious and relia92

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ble way to understand the Seal’s meaning—by observation and reflection. Particularly helpful is the report of the Seal’s co-designer, Charles Thomson—a document that accompanied the 1782 law officially approving the Seal.

The reverse side of the Great Seal consists of two parts: a heavenly eye and an earthly pyramid. Each part is labeled with a Latin motto.

In the earthly part, an unfinished pyramid rises toward the heaven.

Thomson’s report explains that “The pyramid signifies strength and duration.” On the base of the pyramid is the Roman number MDCCLXXVI (1776), the date, as Thomson’s report remarks, of the Declaration of Independence. The pyramid has thirteen rows of bricks, signifying the thirteen original states. (The number of rows is not specified in the law, but there are thirteen in co-designer William Barton’s original drawing, and on the 1778 fifty-dollar bill from which the pyramid idea was originally taken.) The pyramid represents the United States, a solid structure of freedom, built on the foundation of the Declaration. It is unfinished because America is a work in progress. More states will be added later.

“In the zenith” above the unfinished pyramid, the 1782 law calls for “an eye in a triangle, surrounded with a glory.” This design and placement of God’s eye suggests that America is connected to the divine in three ways.

First, the eye keeps watch over America, protecting her from her enemies. Thomson explains: “The eye over it and the motto allude to the many signal interventions of providence in favor of the American cause.” The motto, annuit coeptis (“He approves what has been started”), alludes to God’s providential help in winning the War of Independence, which had all but ended with Cornwallis’s surrender of British troops at Yorktown a few months before the Seal was adopted. The providential divine eye on the Seal has its parallel in the theology of the Declaration of Independence, which had expressed “a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence.”

Second, the complete triangle enclosing God’s eye is a model for the incomplete or imperfect triangular shape of the pyramid below. The perfect divine shape symbolizes God’s perfection, the divine standard for imperfect human beings. God’s shape, in turn, guides and governs the construction of the earthly pyramid, which, built as it is upon “1776,” seeks to achieve the perfect shape of the divine triangle hovering above.

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The Declaration of Independence had proclaimed that Americans, accepting the authority of “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” consider it a self-evident truth that the purpose of government is “to secure these rights”—the inalienable rights with which the Creator has endowed all human beings. The incompletely triangular pyramid, in contrast to the perfect triangle representing God, suggests that America is a work in progress in a deeper sense than its number of states. No matter how many rows of bricks (new states) are added to the pyramid, America must always look to the perfection of the Supreme Being as, and at, her “zenith,” to be true to what she is and aspires to be.

In the spirit of this understanding of God, Lincoln said in an 1858 Chicago speech: It is said in one of the admonitions of the Lord, “As your Father in Heaven is perfect, be ye also perfect.” The Savior, I suppose, did not expect that any human creature could be perfect as the Father in Heaven. . . . He set that up as a standard, and he who did most towards reaching that standard, attained the highest degree of moral perfection. So I say that in relation to the principle that all men are created equal, let it be as nearly reached as we can.

For Lincoln, as for the Founders, “all men are created equal” meant that every person is endowed by God and nature with the rights to life, liberty, and the acquisition and protection of property, and that no adult human being may be ruled by another person without his consent.

Third, the divine eye is not only America’s protector and ruling guide. God is also her judge. This theme is not as obvious as the first two, but it is implied by the motto annuit coeptis, “He approves (or has approved) what has been started.” Those words imply not only that God has approved and therefore has helped America in its struggle for independence, but also that he will no longer approve if America strays too far from the right path. He “approves the beginnings.” Whether that approval will continue depends on the choices America will make in the future.

Similarly, the signers of the Declaration of Independence “appeal[ed] to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions.” As America’s judge, God will aid or abandon her, in accordance with her intentions and her deeds.

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This question of divine judgment was sometimes explicitly mentioned in connection with slavery. As Jefferson famously wrote, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.”

In sum, the Declaration of Independence, and the Great Seal, teach that America is a nation “under God” in three ways. God protects America; God is America’s guide and goal; and God judges America.

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he Seal has two Latin mottoes, one on top for the heavenly part, the other on the bottom for the earthly. The mottoes are taken from the great Roman poet Vergil. The pyramid is labeled novus ordo seclorum, “a new order of the ages.” Thomson’s report explains, “the words under it signify the beginning of the New American Era, which commences from that date [1776].”

The phrase is a variant of a line in Vergil’s fourth Eclogue: “a great order of the ages is born anew.” This Eclogue describes the return of the golden age, an age of peace and plenty. The change of words is significant. America is a novus ordo, a “new order,” not just the return of a magnus ordo, a “great order” that existed in the past. Vergil’s golden age has come before and will come again, but nothing like the American founding has ever happened. No nation has ever grounded itself on a universal principle, discovered by reason, affirmed by God, and shared by all human beings everywhere: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The words over the eye, annuit coeptis, literally translated, mean: “he has nodded [or nods] to the things that have been started”— namely, in assent to the pyramid under construction, the “new order of the ages.” These words are taken from book 11 of Vergil’s Aeneid.

Aeneas has led a remnant of men from conquered Troy over the sea to a land far to the west. After they arrive in Italy, the natives mount a ferocious attack against them. In the midst of the battle, Aeneas’s son Ascanius prays to Jupiter, asking him to “nod to [i.e., approve] the daring things that have been started.” Jupiter answers the prayer.

Ascanius shoots, and his arrow pierces the enemy’s head. The victory that follows enables the small band of Trojan warriors to stay in Italy.

Romulus and Remus, descendants of Aeneas and Ascanius, will become the founders of Rome, the greatest empire in world history.

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The two Latin mottoes point to the founding of Rome (the Aeneid) and the golden age (Eclogue 4). Taken together, they suggest that America, with divine approval and support, will become a new Rome, combining the glory of the old Rome with the freedom, prosperity, and peace of the golden age. America’s foundation, like Rome’s, had to be laid in violence. The enemies of liberty had to be killed, and they will always have to be killed. But unlike Rome, the New Order of the Ages will grow to greatness not through warfare and conquest, but through the arts of peace. On the front of the Great Seal, the eagle’s head is pointed toward the olive branch in his right talon, not the arrows of war in his left. As Washington wrote in his letter to the Hebrew Congregation (paraphrasing Micah 4:4), in America, if all goes as planned, “everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

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he example of the Declaration and the Seal shows us that the Founders’ understanding of religious liberty does not prohibit, but in fact encourages, government promotion of religion, as long as no one is deprived of life, liberty, or property because of his religious beliefs or practice. But we have not yet said why should government care about the religious convictions of the people. Washington explains in his Farewell Address: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. . . . [T]hey [are the] firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man ought to respect and to cherish them.” Washington means that even a “mere politician,” someone who is not a religious believer, should appreciate the importance of religious belief, because religion is probably an indispensable support of the morality that sustains a free society. Washington’s evidence is that the integrity of the judicial process for the protection of the natural rights of life, liberty, and property depends on the belief that it is a violation of a divine commandment to lie in court: “Let it simply be asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. . . . [R]eason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

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But of course Washington does not mean that any religion at all will do. His point was that government should support a religion or religions that properly instruct people in the duties of citizens of a free and decent society.

The state constitutions, and federal law, agree with Washington.

The 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights affirms that “no free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.”

This formulation was repeated, with minor variations, in the constitutions of four other states. The Northwest Ordinance, passed by Congress in 1787, affirmed the same point: “religion, morality, and knowledge [are] necessary for good government and the happiness of mankind.”

Nor did Jefferson disagree with this conclusion. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, he writes, “can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?”

The religious convictions promoted by government should accord with “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” For these divine and natural laws are at once the foundation and the aspiration of America at its best.

Thomas G. West is a Professor of Politics at the University of Dallas, a Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute, and the author of Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America (Rowman & Littlefield). You can read more at his website, vindicatingthefounders.com.

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T HE L ANGUAGE OF P ARADOX ]literature0and0faith} Matt Boyleston Believing Again: Doubt and Faith in a Secular Age, by Roger Lundin. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009.

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alt Whitman’s naughty barbaric yawp, “the scent of these armpits aroma finer than prayer,” hardly begs us to search the great Romantic writers of the nineteenth century for a Christian vision. Or consider Emerson’s proclamation in his Essays: “As men’s prayers are a disease of the will so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.” Yet Roger Lundin’s new study, Believing Again: Doubt and Faith in a Secular Age, delves deep into the nineteenth century, a century of seismic change, searching for literary responses to the spiritual tensions of the times. Please allow me the liberty to sound my own barbaric yawp: Read this book, read the authors and critics it discusses, recommend it to friends, and assign it to your classes.

The nineteenth century could well be called the gestation period of the –isms: full-throated capitalism, industrialism, Marxism, Freudianism, and, of course, Darwinism. Each of these either began as an idea or grew into its full maturity in the nineteenth century. The storm surge of the nineteenth century’s waves of ideological and technological change broke hard against the twentieth century. We still feel the effects of these paradigm shifts today, and, in an important sense, we remain in the age of Romanticism. Lundin rightly stretches this century from the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789 until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. For those who 99

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think the Great War introduced all our woe into the world, Lundin offers the deep spiritual anxiety of poets and novelists such as Emily Dickinson and Fyodor Dostoevsky as examples of earlier writers who wrestled with the religious implications of the Darwinian revolution and the German Higher Criticism of Scripture. Lundin’s study is important in two ways: he treats the spiritual anxiety of these writers seriously, and he seriously interprets the answers they gave.

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ven though Lundin analyzes a few Roman Catholic and Orthodox authors, to a great extent this is a Protestant book.

Lundin recognizes that many of the ideological changes in the nineteenth century are the logical extensions of ideas released in the Reformation. The Romantic concern for emotion and individualism is a product of the Reformed focus on the spiritual sanctity of individual Christians, the priesthood of all believers. The Freudian turn to introspection results from a Puritanical inwardness. Marxism is a response to the unrestrained energies of capitalism released through Weber’s famous Protestant work-ethic, the natural conclusion of the sanctity of all vocations. The Protestant focus on individual education so that one could read the word of God culminates in the scientific revolution. Not for nothing was Cambridge University in England the university of the Puritans and, later, home to the Newtonian transformations in physics and math.

Israe-el colloquially means to wrestle with God (el). Lundin discerns a particularly Protestant answer to these anxieties, one that derives out of the individual’s particular wrestling with a confounding God in a confounding world. Believing Again makes continual reference to the great theologians and Christian thinkers of the twentieth century who react to the effects of Romanticism, especially those identified with the Theology of Crisis, Karl Barth, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as the Roman Catholic aestheticist Hans Urs von Balthasar. Lundin works towards an interdisciplinary unity between theology, philosophy, social criticism and literature, and, as such, he references influential thinkers of all genres, from the philosopher Charles Taylor to the literary theorist Mikhail Bahktin. Lundin maturely grapples with the heavy-weights of modernity, and his approach shows strength of perspective as well as a grounded Christian vision. The study is organized according to the issues of the times that changed most fully in the Romantic age, such as “History,” “Science,” and “Belief.” In each chapter we watch the drama of 100

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change slowly unfold. In each is a complex dialogue among writers and thinkers as they confront and digest the implications of this change. For example, consider Emily Dickinson’s response to the perceived absence of God in a letter included in Believing Again: “Audacity of Bliss, said Jacob to the Angel ‘I will not let thee go except I bless thee’—Pugilist and Poet, Jacob was correct –.”

Jacob provides Dickinson a model by which one can truly address the Almighty in this time of conflict—even in His absence.

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s a poet I firmly agree with Lundin’s thesis that, in light of the crisis of modernity that began in the Romantic age, literature offers the best and most compelling avenue to bring those in doubt and anxiety to believe again. To believe again, one must find a way to re-embrace the truths of the faith in the light of modern complexities, not in spite of them. Because poetry is the language of paradox, as Cleanth Brooks reminds us, literature is uniquely equipped to deal with the disintegration of traditional world views. In one of the strongest sections of his study, Lundin reminds us of Bonhoeffer’s religionless Christianity and his insistence that to be returned to a pre-modern understanding of the world would essentially be an infantilizing act. Rather, we, as individuals, must go through the difficult and often painful process of learning to believe again those truths we knew as children. We become like children as Christ commands.

One of Lundin’s strengths seems self-evident, but it is not: he has read all the right books. Each of the books Lundin references, either literary or theoretical, is a major study that also is accessible and familiar. Classics such as M. H. Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism, Barth’s Church Dogmatics and Paul Ricoeur’s The Conflict of Interpretation are treated seriously and, in many cases, reinterpreted in fresh and interesting ways. This is a particularly useful quality if one is wishing to assign this study to undergraduates. Lundin’s book gives students a comprehensive view of where we are today and how we got here that no other single book provides. In this sense, Lundin is in the tradition of M. H. Abrams and Charles Taylor and, in a different way, Northrup Frye.

If there is one serious criticism of his study, it is this: Believing Again is bound by its Protestant perspective. If Protestantism is Lear being devoured and abandoned by the children he sired, then Lun101

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din’s answer may be the only one available to us. But his study seriously misses its Catholic brothers and sisters, Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy among many others. A stronger book would have placed the Protestant answer within the greater context of the Catholic answer to the problems of modernity: a reaffirmation of the eternal truths that the church claims to protect. This is the answer of John Henry, Cardinal Newman, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden, whose own phrase, “believing again,” sparked the flame of Lundin’s explorations. But perhaps this is too much to ask of any one book. After all, Auden himself famously remarks: “The truth is Catholic, but the search for it is Protestant.”

Ultimately, Lundin treats literature as it should be treated: as play.

When we are children, our play entertains and amuses us, but it also prepares us to handle the challenges and opportunities of adulthood.

It teaches us of ourselves. One cannot underestimate the importance of play, yet one also cannot take it too seriously. If our life on earth is as children in relation to our full life as adults in heaven, then our grownup play, art, poetry, theology, and love, prepare us for our future life, our real life. Lundin reminds us that we are all children poetically playing on the front porch of the house of the Lord.

Matt Boyleston is Assistant Professor of English and Writing at Houston Baptist University.

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T HE WAGES OF P ROGRESS ]tradition0and0liberty} Kevin Walker Living Constitution, Dying Faith, by Bradley C.S. Watson, ISI Books, 2009.

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n the day the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, legend has it that Justice Anthony Kennedy was a bit of a wreck. Reporters saw him pace around his chamber, glare out the window at the mixed mob of protestors, review his notes, and consult his law reviews. His clerks found him anxious, irritable, and apparently a bit frightened. Such is the effect of placing the whole weight of History on a single man.

Kennedy was, of course, expected to cast the vote on a 5-4 ruling that would either uphold or overturn Roe v. Wade (1973). It was thought that he was going to vote with the justices who would bring an end to the legally embattled Roe; but at the last minute, he changed his vote, and the “constitutional” right to abortion remained.

What is remarkable, though, is how the plurality opinion in Casey featured none of Kennedy’s indecisiveness, nor was there any lack of confidence about the Casey precedent in his later opinions. The opening line of the opinion reminded America that “liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt.” Kennedy’s own doubt was overcome with the belief that his vote was not tainted at all by his personal values; his opinion was instead based on his view of the development of freedom – a more fundamental thing than the Constitution itself. As he explained in his Lawrence v. Texas (2003) opinion, tradition can “blind us to certain truths and later generations can see 103

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that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress.” But thanks to the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the living Constitution, “persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.”

Bradley C.S. Watson’s new book, Living Constitution, Dying Faith, shows the inevitable consequence of Kennedy’s claims: while it may give legal protection to a broad range of private freedoms, it is necessarily devastating to political liberty. This is, of course, an easy thing to say, and conservative critics of the Court may summon a variety of modern cases to prove it. But Watson goes much deeper than that by tracing the origins of living constitutionalism back to the Progressive Era in the early twentieth century.

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udicial scholars, not to mention busy judges, tend to underestimate the importance of that period. It is usually identified as the “age of reform,” when Theodore Roosevelt struggled to resolve class warfare, intellectual-turned-president Woodrow Wilson pursued his League of Nations, and social gospelers sought to connect faith with social action. But Watson argues that there was far more to the progressives than that: their influence marked a radical turning point in the history of American thought; that was in complete discontinuity it was not a new development in national growth, but a complete departure from the principles of with the American Founding. With a mixture of neo-Darwinian philosophies, progressives emphasized “growth” and “development” over the ancient Western view of permanent moral truths. They looked to History rather than nature. They placed an assumption firmly in the American mind that “[d]ignity is not fixed,” and that “it has no principles or laws beyond those governing its internal evolutionary dynamic,” Watson writes.

“In fact, the very act of looking for fixed principles or laws is regressive, for in so acting we cast a glance toward a past wherein dignity was, always and everywhere, less developed and more stultified.”

There was only one major obstacle to this new way of ordering society: the U.S. Constitution. Progressives like Wilson, as well as Herbert Croly, Frank Goodnow and Charles Beard took dead aim at the fundamental law and convinced many Americans that it was in fact the source of most social and economic problems. It protected the capitalist classes by limiting the power of government to regulate them; it prohibited even the noblest leaders from bringing desired social reforms. The Constitution was framed, after all, in a pre104

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Darwinian age. The Founders simply could not have anticipated the conditions of modern industrial life. Moreover, even the most brilliant minds of eighteenth century were unaware of how government could evolve, and how it might grow with society through an expansive administrative state. The Constitution’s checks and balances once served as a strong safety net for human depravity. Now, those careful precautions limit all of the wonderful things the noble State might do.

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atson reminds us that the Founders’ Constitution was actually quite “progressive” in its own way. The Founders were pragmatic in achieving their desired end and experimented with a variety of institutional means. More importantly, they established a system that would allow future Americans to do the same through the course of national life, albeit within the constraints of good government. They never lost sight of the end itself, and for all their experimentation, “the Founders’ belief in eternal truths – either stated abstractly or revealed in history – never wavered,” Watson writes. “While truth might be incrementally revealed in history, it was not created in or by History or beholden to it.”

In contrast, progressives looked to History itself as the fundamental truth of all things. Justice, rights, and human dignity are not “natural,” they taught, but the outcome of organic social constructions.

This went well beyond flexibility and pragmatism in achieving a certain end. The new orthodoxy was that “we can posit our own ends – centered on egalitarian social growth – and then use the new scientific method to achieve what we posit.”

The Supreme Court in this era is best known for its tendency to resist these trends, especially in its famous cases Lochner v. New York (1905) and Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923). In truth, though, it was under tremendous pressure to become equally progressive with the policy-making branches of government. Watson chronicles the development of legal thought in the law schools and journals, from its tendency to maintain classic natural right in the Gilded Age, to its almost unconscious transition into a more progressive approach to judicial review. The Court “alternated between a narrow and broad conception of judicial review” in that era, “but it by no means proved a consistent opponent of the progressive legislation emanating from Congress.”

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In all, the common thread in their judicial philosophies is clear: “it is a disposition to step outside the bounds of Madisonian constitutionalism for the sake of a faith in the future rather than the past.”

The outcome of that transition appeared, of course, in the Court’s abandonment of economic rights, and its new role in protecting civil rights and liberties since the 1950s – the last phase of which appeared in the “right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” according to the Casey opinion.

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hat shift from democratic action to judicial review as the means to “social change” is no oddity. Progressivism, whether a century ago or today, does not have a single method for achieving its aims; it simply employs whatever works to move History forward – the New Deal in one generation, and the Supreme Court in the next. “Progressives failed to perceive any irony because judicial restraint was never essential to their enterprise, but rather a mere tactical consideration in pursuit of a Constitution supporting social and individual change, experimentation, and growth,” Watson writes. Tactics are all that matter when History itself is the goal.

The causes of this transition, though, were present early on. Justice Louis Brandeis, for instance, despite his “hands off” approach to judicial review when it came to reform legislation, really did believe that the judiciary was the true bringer of “social change,” which was apparent in his elaborate “Brandeis Briefs.” They were always conclusions which Brandies might have easily arrived at on constitutional grounds: reforming laws might stand on the simple fact “that the Court does not deal in trifles, or that the Constitution is simply, and obviously, silent on such matters.” But Brandeis saw the need to interject, and it was a view of the judiciary that would grow in radical new ways in coming decades.

There was a change in method, but there was also a shift in progressive ends: John Dewey’s radical communitarian vision or Theodore Roosevelt’s Nationalism have been largely displaced by the cult of personal autonomy and the right to make choices that create “the self.” Progress toward a tangible historical goal no longer matters; the “hope” for liberal “change” is the thing – and this admits of no goal at all, aside from what some people believe everyone ought to prefer.

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Progress is not an administrative or social engineering method: it is now linguistic. In this, Watson writes, we have “entered a brave new world in which major legal arguments are not so much about statutes, the constitutions of various states, or the federal Constitution, but about the contents of the Oxford English Dictionary.” “Person,” “marriage,” “speech” – all of these notions are now subject to judicial definition, and all political discourse must proceed on the terms the judiciary says are legitimate.

The influence of progressivism is self-fulfilling: if all things evolve, as we tend to believe today, then earlier ways of thinking do not command much respect – not even that of the progressives themselves. The face of progressivism “now seems barnacle-encrusted from its triumphal march of a hundred years’ duration,” Watson writes. “Its success is marked by the fact that it no longer seeks victory, only legitimating in a constitutional system that is still at odds with it.”

Human beings have always forgotten the origins of things, but progressivism calls for a deliberate rejection of them – and we have rejected, again and again, any basis for the “values” we believe are so important. Hence, the value of Watson’s work: he revives the history of progressivism and shows precisely what the consequences of “living constitutionalism” are. These become clear when we “explicate it on its own terms,” he writes; we see “why and how such jurisprudence is destined to be destructive of any and all claims of fixed moral and political truth.”

A leaf is alive only so long as it is connected to the tree. Break it off, and it dies. So too with freedom: when it is no longer rooted in “the laws of nature and nature’s God” – or at least some timeless principle of justice – then we cannot expect it to endure for long.

Kevin Walker is a doctoral student at Claremont Graduate University.

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I C ONOCLASM ,god0and0images< Daniel A. Siedell Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion & Art, by Bruno Latour & Peter Weibel. MIT, 2002.

Iconoclasm in Aesthetics, by Michael Kelly. Cambridge Press, 2003.

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he iconoclastic controversy that tore Christendom apart in the eighth and ninth centuries was the final revenge of previous Christological heresies that the Church had defeated in the first six ecumenical councils. In addition to the return of these heresies, the emergence of Islam as a political force and its radical iconoclasm and convoluted imperial politics in Constantinople combined for a dogmatic Armageddon waged on the battlefield of images. In the midst of this bloody and violent controversy came Nicaea II in 787, the seventh and final ecumenical council, which declared that the veneration of icons was a necessary practice that preserved the true humanity of Christ, who, by allowing Himself to be “circumscribed” by a human body, can now be—and should be—depicted in paint and wood. The icons preserve the cosmic fullness of the Incarnation, in which, as David Bentley Hart so evocatively observed, echoing the mind of the Church Fathers, the Son brings creation itself into the “motion of begetting and procession, wisdom and love between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

The council, however, did little initially to stem the tide of iconoclastic violence in the East. It required the profound theological elaborations of St. John of Damascus and St. Theodore the Studite in Constantinople to accomplish the task and tip the scales toward 108

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Orthodoxy in the ninth century. Wrought from intense persecution, these theological insights have bequeathed to the Eastern Church a rich and robust theory of the icon.

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his cannot be said for the West, which did not experience such violent iconoclasm and so did not need to dig deep into its theological resources for a defense. The reception of Nicaea II in the West is nothing if not complex. Although from the start the Latin Church consistently condemned iconoclasm, it never really understood what all the commotion in the East was about. In the West, icons were never touched, kissed, and venerated as they were in the East. Nor were they despised as dangerous and idolatrous as they were by the iconoclasts in the East, who were influenced by both Jewish and Islamic iconoclasm. They were simply thought of as useful teaching tools. The Latin West reserved its veneration for the Cross, the Host, and the relics. It was the East that carried the heavy theological burden of demonstrating the iconâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s participation in and preservation of Nicene Christology. This is why Nicaea II has not achieved a theological stronghold in the West. Although it is one of the so-called "Ecumenical Councils," it remains ambiguously and ambivalently so.

Although the Latin West was relatively free from violent iconoclasm in the first millennium, this changed in the sixteenth century with the Reformation, which regarded all icons, sacred images, relics, the Host, the Cross, and even Holy Tradition itself to be material distractions and impediments to communion with Christ. The Reformers revealed the weakness of the Western Churchâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s theology of the image. While the war between Rome and the Reformers on the Continent was being waged theologically through the definition of doctrines and articulation of confessions, it was also fought aesthetically through the destruction of images, crucifixes, icons, and other holy relics that allegedly expressed the idolatry and superstition of the Roman Catholic Church. Yet both Rome and the Reformers shared a doctrine of images that was developed outside the doctrinal purview of Nicaea II. Furthermore, in addition to destroying images, the Reformers, ironically, produced their own images, their own icons of iconoclasm, such as the naturalistic images of Jesus painted by Warner Sallman that today decorate most Protestant church bulletins. The Reformation tore the image from its dogmatic foundation in the Church. An iconoclast came to be known as someone who under109

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mines the cherished beliefs, received traditions, venerated institutions, and empty rituals of the status quo. And since the Enlightenment, iconoclasm has become an intellectual virtue. In all its various manifestations and iterations, iconoclasm strikes at enchantment, mystery, tradition, ritual—the alleged enemies of reason and rationality. Iconoclasm in the West has therefore become one of the more powerful weapons of modernity. Yet it is full of contradiction and paradox, in large part because it had cut itself off from the intellectual resources of the East.

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number of recent books have explored the artistic, sociocultural, and philosophical complexities of iconoclasm as a purely secular phenomenon. But iconoclasm cannot be separated from its theological and dogmatic foundation in Christ and the Church. Jean-Luc Marion has rightly suggested that what he calls "the contemporary crisis of the image" can only be resolved by Nicaea II. Therefore, any discussion of iconoclasm must begin with and eventually return to Nicaea II. And any “ancient-future” rapprochement within evangelical Protestant Christianity will remain compromised and incomplete if it cannot account for this often overlooked council. Two of the more provocative and useful books for a reappraisal of iconoclasm and its implications are Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel’s Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art (MIT, 2002) and Michael Kelly’s Iconoclasm in Aesthetics (Cambridge, 2003).

Iconoclash is a colossal and vertiginous visual celebration of images and image-breakers after the Reformation. Edited by sociologists Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, this publication accompanies an equally colossal exhibition at the Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany in 2002, curated in part by art historian Joseph Leo Koerner. It consists of dozens of contributions, including a fascinating essay by Koerner, entitled “Icon as Iconoclash,” which traces the various and varied acts of iconoclasm during the Reformation. It also features texts by artists, sociologists, philosophers, linguists, art historians, and philosophers of science, although curiously, it contains no contributions by religious believers, a fact that was observed by art historian James Elkins in his review of the book. The central thesis of Iconoclash is that we are all simultaneously image-lovers and image-breakers, that iconoclasm gives birth to new icons, generating ever new images for veneration, and that this process of creat110

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ing and destroying images saturates our Western culture. An analysis of Bruno Latour’s introductory essay, “What is Iconoclash? Or Is There a World Beyond the Image Wars?” reveals the main contours of this project. According to Latour, “iconoclash,” in contrast to iconoclasm, is “when one does not know, one hesitates, one is troubled by an action for which there is no way to know, without further inquiry, whether it is destructive or constructive.” Iconoclash therefore operates somewhere ambivalently and ambiguously between iconoclasm and iconophilia, between hatred and veneration of images. It is an “archaeology of hatred and fanaticism” and its goal is to transform a culture “where being an iconoclast seems the highest virtue, the highest piety in intellectual circles.” Iconoclasm thrives in the strict dichotomy, inherited from Plato, between pure spirit and pure mind, as Latour puts it, “a disgusting world composed of impure but fascinating human-made mediators.”

Whether they are perceived as merely seductive shadows reflected dimly on a cave wall or golden calves, non-linguistic mediations have often been perceived not as divine gifts that enable communion with the divine or with the experience of Truth, but as impediments.

Latour observes, rightly to my mind, that iconoclasm is found when a culture desires “pure” and unmediated, direct spirit and truth, disembodied and liberated from the rotting and lifeless corpse of the material. “The image warriors,” Latour observes, “always make the same mistake: they naively believe in naïve belief.” The subject of naïve belief is very important. Koerner observed that the Wittenberg iconoclasts of the Lutheran Reformation, led by Andreas Kronstadt, refused to believe that Catholics could differentiate between the image and the prototype, or between the icon of Christ and Christ Himself. The “idolaters’” belief is always perceived to be “naïve,” in large part because they do not articulate their beliefs. But there is another form of naïve belief, one held by the iconoclasts: that there does indeed exist an unmediated world of spirit and truth, against which this world is a deception. Image-breaking is never merely about tearing down crucifixes, cleaning out relics, or of abandoning traditional practices. It always has effects, unintended even by the iconoclasts themselves. Latour asks, “Why have iconoclasts’ hammers always seemed to strike sideways, destroying something else that seems, after the fact, to matter immensely”? As Christians indebted to Protestant iconoclasm, we live daily with the unintended consequences of 111

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the residue of sixteenth century iconoclastic polemics that have shaped not only the form but the content of our belief. For us, belief is now defined almost exclusively through communication rather than communion. It makes one question who possesses the more “naïve belief,” the suburban twenty-first century evangelical “actively” picking through the ecumenical councils and taking an ascetic practice here, a liturgical practice there, that serves his needs or the sixteenth-century Catholic “passively” attending Mass, resting assured that her salvation comes from the mediation of the Church of which Christ is the head. The hammer has indeed been swung sideways, and we might very well be the poorer because of it. No doubt Luther himself seemed to have recognized this, which is one of the reasons why intellectual historian Philip Cary has called him “not quite Protestant.”

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atour asks yet another profound question, “If images are so dangerous, why do we have so many of them? If they are innocent, why do they trigger so many and such enduring passions.” As art historian David Morgan has discovered, Protestants have been responsible for as many images, pictures, icons, and other artifacts as their Orthodox and Catholic opponents (for a wordbased faith community, it is ironic that a trip to the local Family Christian bookstore finds as many artifacts, objects, and devotional images as any Catholic supply store). Latour claims, “The second commandment is all the more terrifying since there is no way to obey it.” But for us evangelicals, it might even be more terrifying because we arrogantly and naively believe that we can so easily obey it. We forget that our belief is mediated, it is not pure or direct, and that our battles with other communities that confess Christ, are often fought at the level of “representations” of belief.

Koerner’s study shows that the Reformation was fought not merely at the level of “beliefs,” but at the level of their “representation.”

Latour’s thesis, affirmed by Koerner’s study, is that belief itself is mediated, it is always a “representation of belief,” that iconoclasm flourishes in that space between “I believe” and “I believe that…” How much our beliefs are structured in and through images is the truth that Iconoclash demonstrates. Scientific images, artistic images, photographic images, and religious images, like charts and graphs, diagrams that represent the universe, outline the books of Daniel and Revelation, and other images mediate how and what we believe. La112

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tour is right, “Images do count; they are not mere tokens, and not because they are prototypes of something away, above, beneath; they count because they allow one to move to another image, exactly as frail and as modest as the former one—but different.” This is no mere celebration of the endless play of signifiers, of images that produce more images, ad infinitum. It suggests the omnipresence of mediators, visual and otherwise, that form our existence, whether we like it or not. And like quicksand, we become even more entangled in them when we struggle to escape. The correct response to this situation in which we find ourselves on this side of God’s new creation is humility, “redirecting attention to the weakness and fragility of the mediators that allow us to pray, to know, to vote, to enjoy living together…” We must remember that the triune God, which through the Incarnation of the Son, has brought creation itself into the triune relationship, spans any and all mediation, spans the spaces and gaps between belief and skepticism, between “I believe” and “help me overcome my unbelief” (Mark 9:24).

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s iconoclasm manifest only in those who hate art, hate the power of images, or can it be present in the work of those who seem to be devoted to art? Can the hammer of iconoclasm be swung through rhetoric, through interpretation, through explanation?

Michael Kelly’s Iconoclasm in Aesthetics offers a surprising answer. By iconoclasm, Kelly means something slightly other than the destruction of icons, art, and images. It is “a combination of disinterest and distrust in art that stems from a tendency to inscribe a deficiency into the very conception (or ontology) of art” (xi). Simply put, art is an inferior form of knowledge and therefore needs explanation and philosophical elaboration. Art needs philosophers to speak for it through the language of aesthetics. Kelly suggests, however, that this failure on the part of art is in reality philosophy’s own deficiency, which has been transferred to art.

What is surprising is that the philosophers on which Kelly focuses are, at face value, nothing if not committed to art, to writing about it, looking at it, and regarding it as a key component of their philosophical thought. How can Theodore Adorno, Arthur Danto, Jacques Derrida, and Martin Heidegger be understood as iconoclasts? How can Danto, who is the art critic for The Nation and one of the more prolific and influential art critics of the last twenty years, share iconoclasm with the likes of Kronstadt and his minions in Wittenberg? But, as 113

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contemporary art critic Donald B. Kuspit has observed, philosophy often overlooks the “practice” of art and thus it “exaggerates the artwork into an epistemological problem, into the problem of epistemology itself.” Philosophy thus ignores the “concreteness that is the source of the artwork’s intense particularity.” Kelly argues, “I am analyzing iconoclasm first and foremost on the level of theory, not on the level of actual engagement with the arts; that is, my focus is on how these four philosophers conceive of art, not on whether or not they are appreciatively involved with the art they so conceive…” In the end, for most aestheticians and philosophers of art, it is philosophy not art that motivates them, shapes their thinking, and the categories into which art is forced, which for Kelly are the twin concepts of “autonomy” and “universality,” which he argues are ultimately philosophical not aesthetic categories.

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he structure of Kelly’s study is unusual but effective. He pairs each philosopher with an art historian and an artist with whom both writers engage—Heidegger and Meyer Schapiro are coupled with Vincent van Gogh, Adorno and Benjamin Buchloch with Gerhard Richter, Derrida and Danto (as an art critic) with Mark Tansey, and finally, Danto (as a philosopher) and Rosalind Krauss with Cindy Sherman. Kelly’s goal is to offer an alternative model for thinking about art: “I propose that we reconfigure the relationship between aesthetics and art history. For I do not think it is merely a coincidence that the four conceptions of art I claim are iconoclastic all systematically involve the abstraction of art from history…” Kelly’s reconfiguration, which could remove “the shadow of iconoclasm” that “looms over philosophical aesthetics” consists of two parts. First, to reconfigure the aesthetics-art relationship that can “develop a conception of philosophical reflection on art that is immanent to the historical practice of art.”

Second, to reconfigure the aesthetics-art history relationship in order “to integrate the historical and philosophical dimension of art on the model of art theory.” Iconoclasm in Aesthetics argues that philosophical aesthetics with its desire to extract art from history and art theory from the process of art making, has distorted the knowledge that art embodies. Kelly’s response, to which I give strong assent, is to assert the importance of art history.

What can one learn from a work of art? Does experiencing a work of art have any impact on us, shape our belief, mold our thinking, 114

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affect our behavior? Or does it function as merely a visual illustration of an idea or meaning generated by philosophy, theology, history, or politics. If it is the latter, it ignores the cosmic implications of the Incarnation, which has enabled material to function as a mediator of divine grace, blessing, and presence for all through Common Grace, not merely for the redeemed, in which all humankind enjoys the benefits of the Incarnation. Aesthetic iconoclasm, as Kelly calls it, is not limited to philosophers, aestheticians, and other art writers; it is rife in the art museums and art history classrooms, where texts, explanations, marketing, education, and other interpretations and “glosses” (including slides and reproductions in textbooks) are used to package and define art into safe, consumable, digestible units. The experience of art is less important than “education” and learning something about the art or the artist, and so aesthetic experience is de-emphasized in an effort to “educate.”

Despite the importance of these publications, both Iconoclash and Iconoclasm in Aesthetics reveal the weaknesses of reflection on iconoclasm and the image separated from Nicaea II. Far from being a defense of "art," Nicaea II begins first with the fundamental reality of Christ, who is the "image" (ikon) of the invisible God (Col. 1: 15) whose face we see in the child, the poor, the foreigner, and the ill (Matt. 25: 35-36). It is in the icon that shines forth the union of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in Christ. And, as St. Paul tells us, it is in Christ that "all things hold together," even works of art (Col. 1: 17). When we as Protestants shaped by evangelicalism gleefully assume the role of iconoclasts—either degrading the veneration of visual images, ritual, and tradition in faith and practice or condemning modern and contemporary art—are we working out our faith in Nicene Christianity or serving a disenchanted modern secularism?

The iconoclast’s hammer does indeed swing sideways.

Daniel A. Siedell is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, a Fellow at the Center for the Theology of Cultural Engagement, and the author of God in the Gallery (Baker Academic, 2009).

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THE WORD

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4THE`WORD`SPOKEN$ Jonathan Edwards In each volume of T H E C I TY , we reprint a passage or remarks from great leaders of the faith. Here is an excerpt from the Personal Narrative of Jonathan Edwards, the famed preacher and theologian, inscribed in his notebook while he was a student at Yale University at age thirteen.

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he sweetest joys and delights I have experienced, have not been those that have arisen from a hope of my own good estate; but in a direct view of the glorious things of the gospel.

When I enjoy this sweetness, it seems to carry me above the thoughts of my own safe estate. It seems at such times a loss that I cannot bear, to take off my eye from the glorious, pleasant object I behold without me, to turn my eye in upon myself, and my own good estate.

My heart has been much on the advancement of Christ’s kingdom in the world. The histories of the past advancement of Christ’s kingdom have been sweet to me. When I have read histories of past ages, the pleasantest thing in all my reading has been, to read of the kingdom of Christ being promoted. And when I have expected in my reading, to come to any such thing, I have lotted upon it all the way as I read. And my mind has been much entertained and delighted, with the Scripture promises and prophecies, of the future glorious advancement of Christ’s kingdom on earth.

I have sometimes had a sense of the excellent fullness of Christ, and his meetness and suitableness as a savior; whereby he has appeared to me, far above all, the chief of ten thousands. And his blood and atonement has appeared sweet, and his righteousness sweet; which is always accompanied with an ardency of spirit, and inward strugglings and breathings and groanings, that cannot be uttered, to be emptied of myself, and swallowed up in Christ.

Once, as I rid out into the woods for my health, and having lit from my horse in a retired place, as my manner commonly has been, to walk for divine contemplation and prayer; I had a view, that for me was extraordinary, of the glory of the Son of God; as mediator between God and man; and his wonderful, great, full, pure and sweet grace and love, and meek and gentle condescension. This grace, that appeared to me so calm and sweet, appeared great above the hea117

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vens. The person of Christ appeared ineffably excellent, with an excellency great enough to swallow up all thought and conception.

Which continued, as near as I can judge, about an hour; which kept me, the bigger part of the time, in a flood of tears, and weeping aloud. I felt withal, an ardency of soul to be, what I know not otherwise how to express, than to be emptied and annihilated; to lie in the dust, and to be full of Christ alone; to love him with a holy and pure love; to trust in him; to live upon him; to serve and follow him, and to be totally wrapt up in the fullness of Christ; and to be perfectly sanctified and made pure, with a divine and heavenly purity. I have several other times, had views very much of the same nature, and that have had the same effects.

I have many times had a sense of the glory of the third person in the Trinity, in his office of Sanctifier; in his holy operations communicating divine light and life to the soul. God in the communications of his Holy Spirit, has appeared as an infinite fountain of divine glory and sweetness; being full and sufficient to fill and satisfy the soul: pouring forth itself in sweet communications, like the sun in its glory, sweetly and pleasantly diffusing light and life.

I have sometimes had an affecting sense of the excellency of the word of God, as a word of life; as the light of life; a sweet, excellent, life-giving word: accompanied with a thirsting after that word, that it might dwell richly in my heart.

I have often since I lived in this town, had very affecting views of my own sinfulness and vileness; very frequently so as to hold me in a kind of loud weeping, sometimes for a considerable time together: so that I have often been forced to shut myself up. I have had a vastly greater sense of my own wickedness, and the badness of my heart, since my conversion, than ever I had before. It has often appeared to me, that if God should mark iniquity against me, I should appear the very worst of all mankind; of all that have been since the beginning of the world to this time: and that I should have by far the lowest place in hell. When others that have come to talk with me about their soul concerns, have expressed the sense they have had of their own wickedness, by saying that it seemed to them, that they were as bad as the devil himself; I thought their expressions seemed exceeding faint and feeble, to represent my wickedness. I thought I should wonder, that they should content themselves with such expressions as these, if I had any reason to imagine, that their sin bore any pro118

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portion to mine. It seemed to me, I should wonder at myself, if I should express my wickedness in such feeble terms as they did.

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y wickedness, as I am in myself, has long appeared to me perfectly ineffable, and infinitely swallowing up all thought and imagination; like an infinite deluge, or infinite mountains over my head. I know not how to express better, what my sins appear to me to be, than by heaping infinite upon infinite, and multiplying infinite by infinite. I go about very often, for this many years, with these expressions in my mind, and in my mouth, “Infinite upon infinite. Infinite upon infinite!”

When I look into my heart, and take a view of my wickedness, it looks like an abyss infinitely deeper than hell. And it appears to me, that were it not for free grace, exalted and raised up to the infinite height of all the fullness and glory of the great Jehovah, and the arm of his power and grace stretched forth, in all the majesty of his power, and in all the glory of his sovereignty; I should appear sunk down in my sins infinitely below hell itself, far beyond sight of everything, but the piercing eye of God’s grace, that can pierce even down to such a depth, and to the bottom of such an abyss.

And yet, I ben’t in the least inclined to think, that I have a greater conviction of sin than ordinary. It seems to me, my conviction of sin is exceeding small, and faint. It appears to me enough to amaze me, that I have no more sense of my sin. I know certainly, that I have very little sense of my sinfulness. That my sins appear to me so great, don’t seem to me to be, because I have so much more conviction of sin than other Christians, but because I am so much worse, and have so much more wickedness to be convinced of. When I have had these turns of weeping and crying for my sins, I thought I knew in the time of it, that my repentance was nothing to my sin.

I have greatly longed of late, for a broken heart, and to lie low before God. And when I ask for humility of God, I can’t bear the thoughts of being no more humble than other Christians. It seems to me, that though their degrees of humility may be suitable for them; yet it would be a vile self-exaltation in me, not to be the lowest in humility of all mankind. Others speak of their longing to be humbled to the dust. Though that may be a proper expression for them, I always think for myself, that I ought to be humbled down below hell.

‘Tis an expression that it has long been natural for me to use in prayer to God. I ought to lie infinitely low before God. 119

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It is affecting to me to think, how ignorant I was, when I was a young Christian, of the bottomless, infinite depths of wickedness, pride, hypocrisy and deceit left in my heart. I have vastly a greater sense, of my universal, exceeding dependence on God’s grace and strength, and mere good pleasure, of late, than I used formerly to have; and have experienced more of an abhorrence of my own righteousness. The thought of any comfort or joy, arising in me, on any consideration, or reflection on my own amiableness, or any of my performances or experiences, or any goodness of heart or life, is nauseous and detestable to me. And yet I am greatly afflicted with a proud and self-righteous spirit; much more sensibly, than I used to be formerly. I see that serpent rising and putting forth its head, continually, everywhere, all around me.

Though it seems to me that in some respects I was a far better Christian, for two or three years after my first conversion, than I am now; and lived in a more constant delight and pleasure: yet of late years, I have had a more full and constant sense of the absolute sovereignty of God, and a delight in that sovereignty; and have had more of a sense of the glory of Christ, as a mediator, as revealed in the gospel… It appeared to me to be sweet beyond all expression, to follow Christ, and to be taught and enlightened and instructed by him; to learn of him, and live to him.

Another Saturday night, January 1738/9, I had such a sense, how sweet and blessed a thing it was, to walk in the way of duty, to do that which was right and meet to be done, and agreeable to the holy mind of God; that it caused me to break forth into a kind of a loud weeping, which held me some time; so that I was forced to shut myself up, and fasten the doors. I could not but as it were cry out, “How happy are they which do that which is right in the sight of God! They are blessed indeed, they are the happy ones!” I had at the same time, a very affecting sense, how meet and suitable it was that God should govern the world, and order all things according to his own pleasure; and I rejoiced in it, that God reigned, and that his will was done.

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