THE CITY From Willing Slaves of the Welfare State, a column by C.S. Lewis originally published in The Observer in London on July 20th, 1958. If we are to be mothered, mother must know best. This means they must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists, till in the end the politicians proper become merely the scientists’ puppets. Technocracy is the form to which a planned society must tend. I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside their subjects. Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price. Let the doctor tell me I shall die unless I do soand-so; but whether life is worth having on those terms is no more a question for him than for any other man... We have on the one hand a desperate need; hunger, sickness, the dread of war; on the other, the conception of something that might meet it: omnicompetent global technocracy. Are not these the ideal opportunity for enslavement? This is how it has entered before; a desperate need (real or apparent) in the one party, a power (real or apparent) to relieve it, in the other. All that can really happen is that some men will take charge of the destiny of the others. They will be simply men; none perfect; some greedy, cruel and dishonest. The more completely we are planned the more powerful they will be... Have we discovered some new reason why, this time, power should not corrupt as it has done before? Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
A publication of Houston Baptist University
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THE CITY Publisher Robert Sloan Advisory Editors Francis J. Beckwith Adam Bellow Paul J. Bonicelli Joseph Bottum Wilfred McClay Ramesh Ponnuru Editor in Chief Benjamin Domenech Reviews Editor Micah Mattix Writer at Large Hunter Baker Contributing Editors Matthew Lee Anderson Ryan T. Anderson Matthew Boyleston David Capes Victoria Gardner Coates Christopher Hammons Anthony Joseph Joseph M. Knippenberg Louis Markos Peter Meilaender Dan McLaughlin Paul D. Miller Matthew J. Milliner Russell Moore Robert Stacey Joshua Trevino THE CITY Volume IV, Issue 3 Copyright 2011 Houston Baptist University. All rights reserved by original authors except as noted. Letters and submissions to this journal are welcomed. Cover photo by Katya Horner. Email us at thecity@hbu.edu, and visit us online at civitate.org.
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4CONTENTS$ Faith & The Candidates Wilfred McClay on the Cities of God & Man Russell Moore on the Politics of Dominion Jordan Ballor on the Common Good A Conversation with Robert George
4 9 14 17
Features Eric Teetsel on Enterprise & Evangelism Benjamin Domenech on the Untrained Grasshopper Terrence O. Moore on Steve Jobs & Capitalism Owen Strachan on the Charismatic Question Paul D. Miller on the Lessons of Iraq
30 35 41 48 58
Books & Culture Louis Markos on God & Morality Richard Reinsch on Redeeming Democracy R.J. Snell on Cormac McCarthy & Sloth Peter Augustine Lawler on The Cloned Soul
68 77 83 92
A Republ ic of Letter s Hunter Baker
104
Poetry by Bill Coyle
28, 46
The Word by Cotton Mather
117 3
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T HE C ITIES OF G OD & M AN 4ON)THE)KINGDOM$ Wilfred McClay
I
t seems highly likely that issues relating to candidates’ reli‐ gious faith will play a significant role in the presidential race in 2012. In addition, it seems likely that the role will be largely negative, reflecting a visceral distrust of religion felt and ex‐ pressed in many respected and influential quarters of Ameri‐ can public life, notably the elite news media. Religious faith more often than not is presented as a political liability, a character flaw or sign of vulnerability, and candidates are routinely made the target of guilt by association with extreme figures, even if the association is remote and speculative. Already, months before the Republican primaries, we have seen spirited attacks directed at Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann for their alleged ties to “dominionist” Christians. These attacks may or may not be politically effective, but they have very little merit when it comes to the facts. Yet this has not stopped critics from pouncing on them, connecting fear with faith in the public square. As Newsweek’s Lisa Miller has pointed out, though, in a fairly dev‐ astating examination of the matter in the August 18th Washington Post, the actual number of theocrats or “dominionists” in the ranks of American evangelicals is minuscule, and their influence is even smaller. She quotes the evangelical leader Mark DeMoss as saying “You would be hard‐pressed to find one in 1,000 Christians in Amer‐ ica who could even wager a guess at what dominionism is.” Indeed, Miller rightly claimed that the word tends to “scare people” and “create a siege mentality”—and its being bandied about so freely is designed to do just that. It is a demagogic device precisely compara‐ ble to that used by ideologues of the right who try to discredit even 4
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the most honorable forms of liberalism by lumping them together with the fever‐swamp imaginings of violent far‐left extremists. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a smear tactic, unworthy of a nation that has long stood for the principle of religious liberty and whose Constitution forbids religious tests for political office. Still, democracy works in mysterious ways, and even unfair criti‐ cisms emanating from one’s enemies may serve as points of insight, if one knows how to listen to them rightly. For there is a problem here, a tension built into the very nature of the Christian faith as a univer‐ salistic and evangelistic religion, that begs to be talked about more often, more openly, and more cogently.
T
he claims of those who fear religion in public life are not en‐ tirely baseless. It is natural for Christian believers to wish to see their faith’s principles fully embodied in a humane, just, and peaceful civil order. Indeed, they are commanded by God to live righteous lives, and to seek the welfare of the city and the imperisha‐ ble good of others. How, then, could one wish for anything less than that all one’s neighbors would be able to live by the joyous light of what one believes to be the summum bonum, the highest good? Would this not seem to lead logically toward theocracy? But that conclusion greatly oversimplifies the complex problem Christians face in learning to think properly about their role in the polities to which they belong. The difficulty comes in adapting our wishes and hopes to the limitations of our fallen world and our fallen natures, and to the diversity of the very neighbors whom we are commanded to love. We cannot, and should not try to, impose the summum bonum coer‐ cively, for we thereby violate the deepest aspect of Christian love, which insists that we regard others as free beings with intrinsic dig‐ nity, stamped with God’s image, empowered to choose for them‐ selves the paths they will follow. God desires our love and our wor‐ ship, but He desires that they be offered freely, of our own accord, not at gunpoint. Thus, love binds us even to accept those who believe things that we find erroneous. But how then does one think Chris‐ tianly about the political order, and about how one rightly expresses and applies one’s faith in the public arena? How to balance the con‐ flicting demands I have described? 5
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There is no easy answer, and if there were, Christians would not be so notoriously of different minds about the matter. But there is much at stake, not only for the well‐being of the polity but also for the well‐ being of Christianity itself. Clearly, if one attempts to apply one’s faith too strenuously and severely, as theocrats and “dominionists” do, and makes Biblical Christianity the explicit legal standard for civil government, one betrays the faith. But one betrays it just as sure‐ ly by treating the faith as something entirely private and personal, the subjective artifact of one’s inner life, with no larger responsibili‐ ties to the public world. Indeed, one needs to stress the latter point, since there is a widely respected view of the matter that contends one should say as little as possible in public about either religion or politics. While there are times when this is good advice, and represents the acme of prudence, it will hardly do as a general principle. A form of “civility” that is achieved only by our remaining studiously silent about the things that matter to us most, and are most fundamental to the health of our civil society, is not really civility, but merely an uneasy and impover‐ ished social peace. Nor is this the kind of society that the American constitutional order envisioned. The very first item in our Bill of Rights proclaims religious liberty, and makes it clear that the Framers placed religion in a very high place—not only as the first and most fundamental of our freedoms, but as a mental and moral and social right whose “free exercise” we also are promised.
T
he achievement of a stable relationship between religion and politics constitutes one of the perennial tasks of social exist‐ ence. But in the West, the immense historical influence of Christianity has had a lot to say about the particular way the two have interacted over the centuries. From its inception, the Christian faith insisted upon separating the claims of Caesar and the claims of God—recognizing the legitimacy of both, though placing loyalty to God above loyalty to the state. The Christian was to be in the world but not of the world, living as a prudent, responsible, and law‐ abiding citizen in the City of Man while always reserving his ulti‐ mate loyalty for the City of God. Such a separation and hierarchy of loyalties, which sundered the unity that was characteristic of the clas‐ sical world, had the effect of marking out a distinctively secular realm, although at the same time confining its claims. 6
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For Americans, this dualism has often manifested itself as an even more decisive commitment to something called “the separation of Church and State,” a slogan that is taken by many to be the cardinal principle governing American politics and religion. Yet the persis‐ tence of an energetic American civil religion, and of other instances in which the boundaries between the two becomes blurred, suggests that the matter is not nearly so simple as that. There is, and always has been, considerable room in the American experiment for the conjunction of religion and state. This is a proposi‐ tion that committed religious believers and committed secularists alike find deeply worrisome—and understandably so, since it carries with it the risk that each of the respective realms can be contaminat‐ ed by the presence of its opposite number. But it is futile to imagine that the proper boundaries between religion and politics can be fixed in place once and for all, in all times and cultures, separated by an abstract fiat. Experience suggests that we would be well advised to steer be‐ tween two equally dangerous extremes, which can serve as negative landmarks in our deliberations about the proper relationship be‐ tween religion and the state in American life. First, we should avoid total identification of the two, which would in practice likely mean the complete domination of one by the other—a theocratic or ideo‐ logical totalitarianism in which religious believers completely subor‐ dinated themselves to the apparatus of the state, or vice versa. But second, and equally important, we should not aspire to a total segregation of the two, which would in practice bring about un‐ healthy estrangement between and among Americans, leading in turn to extreme forms of sectarianism, otherworldliness, cultural separatism, and gnosticism, a state of affairs in which religious be‐ lievers will regard the state with pure antagonism, or vice versa. Re‐ ligion and the nation are inevitably entwined, and some degree of entwining is a good thing. After all, the self‐regulative pluralism of American culture cannot work without the ballast of certain elements of deep commonality. But just how much, and when and why, are hard questions to answer categorically. This means the recovery of an insight that was apparent to most of the Founders of the American republic, but which most subsequent political philosophers have tended to miss and secular Europe has almost entirely lost‐‐‐that the health of democratic institutions de‐ 7
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pends as much on the free and vibrant public presence of the biblical religions, Judaism and Christianity, and their culture‐forming influ‐ ence, as it does on the constraints placed on that religion’s ability to exercise direct political power. Our choices should not be restricted—and in the end cannot be re‐ stricted—to either the complete privatization of religion or the com‐ plete integration of church and state. The separation of church and state is not, and cannot be, absolute, and it does not—and cannot— require the segregation of religion from public life. This is a compli‐ cated argument, and its working‐out in public policy is bound to be complicated too. But it is a direct challenge to the idea that a com‐ mitment to official secularism as national policy is the logical, nay inevitable, consequence of our commitment to liberal democracy. Indeed, liberal democracy itself, as well as the secularism it sup‐ ports, is inconceivable and unsustainable without a prior commit‐ ment to a certain conception of the human person—a belief that men and women are created in the image of God, that their dignity and their rights arise out of this condition, as endowments from their Creator, and therefore are not to be conferred upon them, or taken from them, by the state or by anything or anyone else, including themselves. There is no way of getting round the fact that this is a fundamentally religious assertion, for which no conceivable scientific basis could be adduced. And unless we have some fundamental and unshakeable reason for doing so, why should we accept the notion of inherent human dignity, let alone human rights and human equality? Thus even the secular perspective rests upon an assumption that it would not be able to generate or sustain by itself—another reason why the tension between religion and politics and the divide be‐ tween the cities, for all its resulting difficulty and complexity, is not a tension we should seek to resolve once and for all.
Wilfred McClay is the SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he is also Professor of History. 8
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T HE P OLITICS OF D OMINION [fear0and0faith{ Russell Moore
D
ominion is scary these days, and rightfully so. Within evangelical Christianity, a microscopic fringe is com‐ mitted to the idea of reconstructing society into the image of Mosaic Israel or a mythological covenant “Christian America.” Especially in the more politi‐ cized factions of evangelicalism, the separation of church and state is denounced as a secularist plot, and calls are made from the pulpit to “reclaim America for Christ” by taking over the structures of the so‐ cial and political order for Christianity. But the menace of this movement is routinely exaggerated by the media. All this is quite rare, a movement on the far fringes of faithful life. And the scare tactics are made worse by ignorance, particularly among those who don’t understand “dominion theology,” and as‐ sume the use of the word “dominion” itself is a call for theocracy or the consolidation of Christian political power—when the case is ex‐ actly the opposite. We can’t help but hear in “dominion” our Western idea of “domi‐ nation,” in the word “subdue” our idea of “subjugation.” And all of that, of course, is viewed through the prism of our brokenness, what we have seen in “kingdoms” and “dominions” around us and within us. The idea of human “dominion” is seen as inherently oppressive, exploitative, or destabilizing. For just one example, some have ar‐ gued that the Genesis concept of dominion is what has led to land misuse, pollution, and other ecological catastrophe. I can certainly see why this would be the case. Similar arguments have been ad‐ vanced concerning a husband holding dominion over his wife. 9
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Part of this is a fault of our ears. We mishear the kingdom of God in distinctly political terms, as having to do with a distant, overreach‐ ing coercive power. But the world into which the Bible spoke was one where kingship was tied more closely with tribe, family, and land. The kingdom of God is not a military or fascist dictatorship. In‐ stead, the kingdom of God is an economy, in the right sense of the word. The roots of the world “economy” are found in the idea of “household.” An economy is an ordering, a managing of resources by members of a common household. Think of the kind of labor for the common good that one would see in a family. A father and a mother work to feed the children, while a son mows the grass and a daughter takes out the garbage and so forth. When we say that humanity is head over the creation, we shouldn’t see that in terms of a modern corporate technocratic structure of “management” and “labor,” and we certainly shouldn’t see it in terms of “dictator” and “slave.” Instead we should see it in bodily and family terms—the relationship, for instance, between a person’s head and the rest of his body. This is a beautiful expression of organic unity, of common purpose. In the mystery of the kingdom, Christ is said to be “head” over his church. This is not raw power or grasping rapaciousness. Instead, Christ’s headship is seen in his self‐sacrificial giving up of his life for his church, his washing her with water (Eph. 5:25‐30).
T
he dominion over the creation, then, is less about power than about responsibility. Who is accountable for the best interest of the creation itself, in picturing and making visible the rule of God? This responsibility is godlike, rather than satanic, in character. And since it is based on the Fatherhood of God, it, like God’s Father‐ hood, is directed away from self and toward the other. The human kingdom then is about servanthood and stewardship, not dictator‐ ship. From the very beginning, the “subduing” that God commands is not subjugation but cultivation and protection. The man and the woman manage the animal order and the land as gifts of God and signs of his presence, not as raw “resources” for their arbitrary will. Dominion is not the power of the jackboot, but the grace of the out‐ stretched hand. This dominion and cultivation is in service of the creation and of the generations to come. God spoke of this kingship in terms of those 10
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who would come later, as the man and the woman multiply. This represents a long‐term attention to the natural order in the same way God gives such attention to his creation. “Dominion” likewise does not imply “development” in the way that we tend to think in the modern West of such terms. Some apply dominion in ways that would suggest technological advance or urbanization or commercial activity is, in and of itself, a sign of human dominion. But such is not the case. The final goal of God’s creation, after all, includes construc‐ tion, urbanization, agriculture, and the wild spaces of rivers (Revela‐ tions 21:9‐22:5). Human accountability means planning and purpose for what is best. Sometimes this means cultivation or construction, and sometimes it means an intentional, strategic lack of the same.
N
ot long ago, I traveled with a friend of mine to the Grand Canyon in Arizona, the first time for me to see this natural wonder. As we walked the edge of the canyon at night, we could see the canopy of stars, not obscured by neon signs and strings of electric streetlights. Is this because there is no market for commer‐ cial real estate there at the lip of the canyon? Of course not. Instead, it is because the area has been protected as a national park, zoned to maintain the integrity as a wild space. This is dominion, a cultivation of space according to its purpose and protection. In another place, a restaurant cooking food and feeding a neighborhood would be an example of dominion. In another, the tending of goats or the con‐ struction of a medical clinic or the building of a dam might be an aspect of dominion. Starving to death because you can’t cultivate land to provide food for yourself and your community is not domin‐ ion, but neither is overfishing a stream so that your grandchildren can’t feed from it, or paving over the land the next generation could use for growing grain, or wiping out the entire population of honey‐ bees so that future generations don’t see the glory of God in their flight, in the taste of honey. These are extreme examples. But this principle is seen in the way that God establishes human accountability not just for nature, but also for time. Humanity is to be active in labor for six days of the week. But a limitless activity isn’t dominion at all; it is slavery. God establishes that we follow his model not only in activity but also in inactivity, in Sabbath rest. In the cultivation of land and animals, likewise, we are to take into account the best interests not only of 11
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ourselves but also of nature and of the generations to come. We, then, give the land Sabbath rest. We do not mistreat animals. This is hus‐ bandry, not tyranny, and it isn’t a contradiction of kingship but an explanation of it. From the very beginning, lordship is defined not “like that of the Gentiles,” but in ways that will ultimately manifest themselves in a basin and a towel. Humans are designed to thrive as they express creativity and do‐ minion, in the image of their Heavenly Father. That will look differ‐ ent from person to person, but it does not change the fact that every human was designed to create and to steward.
T
he destiny of humanity is a kingdom, an expanding and bus‐ tling sphere of responsibility. In each stage of redemption, God has given a foretaste of what this blessing is to look like. God promised Abraham a people as vast as the stars of the heavens and the sands of the seas (Exodus 32:13; Hosea 1:10‐11), a promise tied explicitly to both the “fruitful and multiply” and “cultural man‐ date” language of Genesis (Genesis 17:6). The blessings God prom‐ ised were: “I will multiply on you man and beast, and they shall mul‐ tiply and be fruitful. And I will cause you to be inhabited as in your former times, and will do more good to you than ever before. Then you will know that I am the Lord” (Ezekial 36:11). These promises are fulfilled, as all promises are, in Jesus of Naza‐ reth. Israel foreshadows this blessing even in slavery when “the peo‐ ple of Israel were fruitful and increased greatly; they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong, so that the land was filled with them” (Ex‐ odus 1:7). The blessing was foreshadowed in the reign of Solomon when “Judah and Israel were as many as the sands of the sea” and they “ate and drank and were happy” (1 Kings 4:20). In the millennia after the human exile from Eden, God, through Is‐ rael, gave pictures of what human kingship looked like. The kings, anointed by the Holy Spirit and in submission to the prophetic word of God, demonstrated the wisdom and power needed to rule. But, in every case, the kingship eventually imploded. The wisdom was dimmed; the power was sapped. But the inheritance still stood. In the fullness of time, the wisdom of God and the power of God, that ordered the universe and that rested on the kings of old, walked among us in person. The Word that called the universe together took on human flesh. This king, like his ancestor monarchs before him, 12
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was pointed out by the announcement of a prophet, and then marked out by the anointing of the Spirit. The Spirit that hovered over the primeval waters sprang down to the waters where he emerged, as the firstborn of a new creation. The voice that called the galaxies into existence thundered from the skies: “You are my beloved Son, and with you I am well pleased.” Anyone paying attention would have heard an echo here from an old, old story about an inheritance re‐ gained by a king: “The Lord said to me, ‘You are my Son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your in‐ heritance, and the ends of the earth your possession” (Psalm 2:7‐8). These are fighting words. The kingdom of God is based in God’s sovereignty over all things. But that’s not the totality of what the kingdom means. The kingdom of God is the visible, palpable, cooperative, and acknowledged rule of God through his image‐bearing children. The kingdom of God is the good news that the right rule of God and the right rule of human‐ ity have come together in the right rule of the God‐man: Jesus of Nazareth. In his sin‐resisting life, his wisdom‐saturated teaching, his demon‐exorcising power, his substitutionary death, his triumphant resurrection, Christ is king. And he is everything it means to be a sovereign God, everything it means to be a reigning human. He is perfectly ruled by his Father, and perfectly rules his domain. The king, through his Spirit, invites all people to believe by faith what everyone will one day see by sight: Jesus is Lord. Jesus forgives. Jesus is king. And his reign will extend everywhere, forever. And so, into a kingless cosmos walked this Galilean heir. As he took on the dignity and the limits of our common humanity in Ad‐ am, something wicked coiled in the silences of this demon‐haunted universe. In this one, an ancient spirit recognized a threat, that the skull of this insurrectionist demon would be crushed by a human being, a son of Eve. Walking out of the waters of baptism, this one opened the Scriptures and called for the kingdom of God. That is dominion. It is scary, yes—but not in the way the pundits and com‐ mentators assume. It is scary, in the long term, to our real enemies: sin, death, and hell.
Russell Moore is Dean of the School of Theology and Senior Vice-President for Academic Administration at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. 13
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C H R I S T I A N S, C I T I Z E N S, A N D C I V I L I Z AT I O N ]the0common0good} Jordan Ballor
E
ach election cycle it seems that members of the main‐ stream media and political pundits discover anew that conservative Christians, and conservative evangelicals in particular, are deeply engaged in American politics. And each time commentators find a way to construe that en‐ gagement as problematic. As our nation heads into the presidential election of 2012, the role of Christians in politics is up for under ex‐ amination yet again. This should not be any real surprise. The experiment in American liberty has always been characteristically suspicious of deeply‐held convictions, particularly religious convictions, which might represent competition for a citizen’s loyalty. No less a figure than John Locke, for instance, declared that the Roman Catholic Church could not be tolerated in a modern free society because members of that church place themselves under the “protection and service of another prince.” Locke had in mind the pope in Rome, who was then and to this day remains the head of a sovereign state. It was just over fifty years ago that as a presidential candidate John F. Kennedy had to publicly affirm his faith in “an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant min‐ ister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote.” Modern democratic societies largely follow Locke’s lead and care not a whit for loyalty to “another prince,” so long as that prince 14
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makes no material or political demands from his subjects. A purely spiritual loyalty is entirely acceptable, as long as that loyalty remains expressed only in the spiritual realm and makes claims on the citi‐ zenry on Sunday mornings. If the rest of the week and the concerns of person and property can be left to the political state then this other prince can be tolerated. In the case of Christianity, then, a Jesus Christ whose kingdom is “not of this world” is welcome. A Jesus Christ to whom “every knee shall bow” is rather less so. This dynamic is the paradox of Christian‐ ity in modern life, and it has been essentially the same for the last two millennia. As Christians we understand ourselves to live in the tension between the “already” and the “not yet,” the time between the first and second comings of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
T
he basic implications of this for a modern secular state are rather easy to discern. So long as the exhortations from the pulpits and the practices of those in the pews adhere broadly to the dominant societal norms, then religious participation is in the worst case a harmless institution, and in the best case (from the point of view of the state, at least) a positive ally. But where a church pro‐ claims a counter‐cultural gospel, intellectuals and the cultural intelli‐ gentsia cast a suspicious eye, and if the proclamation becomes too troublesome, raise cry and hue of “theocracy” or “dominionism.” Rather than this alternative loyalty making Christians worse citi‐ zens, however, the opposite is actually the case. The Christian com‐ mitment to Jesus Christ as another prince, the “prince of Peace,” makes us better, not worse, citizens. Because our loyalties and desti‐ ny are ultimately beyond this fallen world order and the confines of this mortal coil, Christians are free to be radically engaged in the civi‐ lizational grind for daily bread. In his little book, Work: The Meaning of Your Life—A Christian Perspective, Lester DeKoster argues persua‐ sively that the Christian commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself” finds expression in the Christian’s daily work of service to others. “Civilization,” he writes, “is sharing in the work of others.” Each of the threads of an individual’s work are providentially woven together to form the fabric of civilization. Christians truly and deeply committed to serving others in love become the building blocks of a stable society. 15
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In many ways, today’s post‐modern world mirrors the days of the early church. Towards the end of the pagan Roman Empire there was widespread cynicism, doubt, and skepticism about civilization’s abil‐ ity to endure. Today, in the context of global instability, financial in‐ security, and pessimism about the existence of or the ability to know objective truth, we face similar civilizational challenges. In the days of the pagan emperors of Rome it was common to blame Christians for the ills of the empire. Those who decry faithful Christian participation in politics and culture today faintly echo these persecutors of the early church. Against these accusations the apolo‐ gist Tertullian defended the Christian church, showing that Chris‐ tians were indispensable members contributing to the Roman com‐ monwealth. “We sojourn with you in the world,” he wrote, “abjuring neither forum, nor shambles, nor bath, nor booth, nor workshop, nor inn, nor weekly market, nor any other places of commerce. We sail with you, and fight with you, and till the ground with you; and in like manner we unite with you in your traffickings—even in the vari‐ ous arts we make public property of our works for your benefit.” Likewise today Christians participate at every level of government and society and in so doing contribute toward the common good. The most important way that Christians engage the world, in all realms of culture, politics, and social life more broadly, is through their individual callings in these various spheres. In this way Chris‐ tians are called to live out their faith in the world as “salt and light,” or what James Davison Hunter has called “faithful presence.” With all this in mind, we should rather understand with Tertullian that “they deserve the name of faction who conspire to bring odium on good men and virtuous, who cry out against innocent blood, of‐ fering as the justification of their enmity the baseless plea, that they think the Christians the cause of every public disaster, of every afflic‐ tion with which the people are visited.” Those in our day who level the baseless charges of suspicion against Christians for undermining the public good deserve to be branded as the real dissemblers and enemies of common good.
Jordan Ballor is a research fellow at the Acton Institute, a visiting professor at Kuyper College, and executive editor of the Journal of Markets & Morality. 16
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CONSTITUTION & CREED [the0exceptional0nation{ A Conversation with Robert George Benjamin Domenech for The City: At the Palmetto Freedom Forum held in South Carolina in September, Princeton Professor Robert George posed a question to the Republican presidential candidates concerning the 14th Amendment which cuts to the core of the role of government and the ongoing debate concerning judicial supremacy. The question was simple: “Would you as president propose to Congress appropriate legislation pursu‐ ant to the Fourteenth Amendment to protect human life in all stages and conditions?” We spoke to Professor George about the question and his views on American exceptionalism in October. It is a rare opportunity, given the way the media works today, to ask ques‐ tions of a number of presidential candidates in a forum where a serious, thoughtful question could be considered. We’re so used to thirty second sound bites. What was that experience like, and how did you reach a decision about what question that you would pose?
Robert George: Like many Americans over the past several dec‐ ades, I’ve been unhappy with the quality of presidential debates, and political debates generally. Most debates are controlled by the media and almost all of them have media moderators. All‐too‐often, the moderators ask so‐called “gotcha questions”—questions designed to make the questioner look clever and the candidate look stupid. Those questions and the general tone they establish for the debates cause the candidates to be very cautious and, where possible, offer canned, “sound bite” answers. The answers are not very reflective because the questions don’t invite reflection. Moderators who successfully ask “gotcha” questions—that is, re‐ porters who embarrass candidates and cause them to falter—are re‐ 17
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warded for it. They suddenly become a little part of history. Their stature is elevated. There are people who want to interview them about the brilliant question they asked that brought down a candi‐ date. I find this appalling. So, my thought (and it’s hardly original with me) was to try to cre‐ ate a forum in which the questions would be deeper and more seri‐ ous—questions that would elicit reflection, thoughts, and responses from the candidates which would enable the American people watch‐ ing the debate to get a sense of the depth of the candidate’s under‐ standing, not only of the issue but of the principle or principles that ought to help to shape the policy in the area of the question. They would also be able to assess the strength of the candidate’s commit‐ ment to actually govern in accordance with those principles, if he or she is elected. And that’s what the Palmetto Freedom Forum was de‐ signed to do. It turned out that Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina had exact‐ ly the same complaint about what had become the standard type of debate. He too, quite independently, was looking for an alternative forum. So, when I got together with him we found ourselves very much in agreement, both as to the objectives and what needed to be done in order to reach them. First, we knew we needed to go around the media, creating a forum that the media would not control, and where the questions would not be put to the candidates by reporters. The Senator had already done some forums with Congressman Steve King of Iowa, so he felt that the three of us could make a good team to present these kinds of questions and elicit answers that would really tell us some things that we, as a people, need to know about the candidates. So, that’s how the whole thing happened.
The City: Your question cut to a very critical element of how these candi‐ dates would respond to a significant legal and moral situation, probing their decision process when it comes to conflict with the courts generally. And along with that, within your question, came a test of the level of dedication that each candidate has to the issue of human life—how far they’re willing to go in defense of it. I’m curious how you reacted to the different answers you heard and what you came away with in terms of an understanding of where the candidates were and how much thought they had put into this significant subject.
George: Even though our forum was designed to enable the candi‐ dates to give more reflective answers, we were still limited in the 18
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amount of time we had—quite sharply limited. Each of us had only 6 minutes and 25 seconds with each candidate, and that’s just not very much time. So, in thinking through how I would use my little quota of time, I considered the importance of various issues that might be raised and I wondered if there was a way to frame a question that would bring together several of those issues. The question I decided to ask goes to the substantive moral‐political question of what are our obligations in justice are to protect human life in all stages and conditions. Obviously this is a major issue and has been since Roe v. Wade for the Republican Party and for our country. But it also goes to the question of the respective roles of the nation‐ al government and the states under the 14th Amendment. Far too often, people think of that Amendment, and indeed almost all consti‐ tutional provisions, as principles that are meant to be exclusively enforced by the courts. The 14th Amendment is a very important provision of our Constitution, one of the three amendments ratified in the wake of the Civil War. If we look at that Amendment, there is no mention of the courts and we’re not even left to guess about who is supposed to enforce its guarantees: Section 5 of the 14th Amend‐ ment explicitly delegates a power to the Congress to enforce the guarantees of the Equal Protection and Due Process that are con‐ tained in the amendment’s first Section. Well, I wanted to know how each candidate viewed the authority and responsibilities of Congress under the 14th Amendment. That would tell me something important about the depth of each candi‐ date’s understanding of the constitutional division of powers be‐ tween the states and the national government and between the elect‐ ed branches of government and the courts.
The City: Let me just interject that I’m sure your question is probably the only one that will be asked publically this cycle of these candidates when it comes to direct confrontation on their understanding of the Constitution, and that includes either the court’s enforcement or human life as an issue. This says something, I would say an unfortunate something, about the whole process.
George: Yes, it does. It says something not only about the process, but also about our political culture. The political culture is one in which many people have been miseducated into believing in the doc‐ trine of judicial supremacy. Contrary to what many people suppose, this was not a doctrine embraced by the framers and ratifiers of our 19
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Constitution. It was explicitly rejected by Jefferson and by Lincoln. And so in a debate about America’s founding principles, which is what the Palmetto Freedom Forum was all about, what could be more appropriate than to ask the candidates whether they would simply accept or would challenge the doctrine of judicial supremacy? With some of the candidates it led me into a conversation about Lin‐ coln’s posture with respect to the Dred Scott decision (protecting the practice of slavery), which is an almost exactly parallel case to Roe v. Wade. So, the fault is not only with the political class. The fault is with the larger political and legal culture that has embraced quite uncritically, the doctrine of judicial supremacy. Now, this generated some criti‐ cism of me, as you know, from conservatives. But I think the con‐ servatives who made those criticisms themselves have quite uncriti‐ cally bought into a mistaken understanding of the Constitution’s division of powers between the legislative and judicial branches of government.
The City: This is particularly a shame in the case of some of those critics, such as the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, because she’s a lawyer.
George: She’s a terrific political commentator, but we all make mis‐ takes. She made one here, I believe. It’s hardly an unusual error, though. Law schools these days educate students into believing that a doctrine announced by the Court in 1958, and which to this day is rejected by several justices on the Court, somehow has the status of the position of the Founding Fathers or the ratifiers of the Constitu‐ tion. It’s high time that the doctrine was very publicly challenged. I was delighted to have the opportunity to do that. Of course, I expected my question to get some criticism from those who take judicial supremacy for granted. I also expected that it would be misunderstood by some of the candidates. I was gratified, however, that (perhaps with a little extra explaining) all the candi‐ dates got it and were willing to address it. Somewhat to my surprise, the first three candidates—Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and Newt Gingrich—unhesitatingly and unqualifiedly rejected the doctrine of judicial supremacy. They pledged to propose legislation to Congress pursuant to the delegated power in Section 5 of the 14th Amendment to protect the rights of the unborn as contained in Section 1. 20
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Here Newt Gingrich, I think, was really able to shine—perhaps be‐ cause he was educated as an historian rather than as a lawyer. He has a Ph.D. in history and he was able to point out to the audience and the viewing public that the doctrine of judicial supremacy is a mod‐ ern invention of the liberal activist Earl Warren court.
The City: When it came to your feelings about the candidates who said no, or said no but with qualifications, I have two questions. First, do you feel like, they understood the question? And second, do you feel like their answer is instructive about the way that they would theoretically govern if they held the office?
George: Absolutely. We learned something about every single one of the candidates from their engagement with the question, not just from their answer (yes or no), but from the way the handled the question. And I think that showed the advantage of having a forum like the Palmetto Freedom Forum and its superiority to the media‐ controlled debates with the gotcha questions and the canned stump speech answers. Ron Paul understood the judicial supremacy dimension of the question, but he didn’t reach it. And he didn’t reach it because there was something in the question to him that was much more funda‐ mental. So, this tells us something about Paul’s political outlook and his deep political convictions. What was the thing that was much more fundamental? It was (and is) the limitation of national power. Congressman Paul was fearful that an interpretation of the 14th Amendment like the one proposed in my question, would under‐ mine the delegated powers doctrine that is foundational to the Con‐ stitution and which is reinforced and restated in the 10th Amend‐ ment. And so he saw my interpretation of the 14th Amendment as a threat to the 10th Amendment idea of powers not delegated to the national government being reserved to the states respectively and to the people. Now, I understand Congressman Paul’s view. I get it. I see what he was saying, and it tells us something about his understand‐ ing of the Constitution. But in the end I don’t think it works, because the words of the 14th Amendment are what they are. The 14th Amendment is as much a part of the Constitution as the 10th Amendment. And in Section 5 of the 14th Amendment, in the most explicit and unequivocal terms, a new delegated power is given to the National Government to enforce against the states where necessary to secure the guarantees of due 21
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process and equal protection set forth in Section 1. Congressman Paul simply ignores that. And he ignores it because he is fearful that it would jeopardize the central constitutional principle of the National Government as a government of delegated and enumerated powers. But properly understood, the 14th Amendment doesn’t overturn the delegated powers understanding at all. What happens in the 14th Amendment is a specific power is dele‐ gated by the people to the Congress, one that the Congress did not have before the 14th Amendment or the Civil War. It is a power that Lincoln and the Republican Congress elected with him did not have and therefore could not constitutionally exercise, just like they didn’t have the 13th Amendment with the abolition of slavery. But now that the 14th Amendment is part of the Constitution, whether anybody likes it or not, so it must be given its due. So although I understand what motivates Congressman Paul’s posi‐ tion, I disagree with it. And I disagree with it because I don’t think it does justice to the full Constitution which includes not only the 10th Amendment but also the 14th.
The City: What about former governor Romney? George: In a way, Governor Romney’s answer was more interesting than Congressman Paul’s. That is because Romney was willing to engage all dimensions of the questions and give a nuanced answer. First, he reaffirmed his commitment to the sanctity of human life. So, he made very clear that although he was once in favor of legal abor‐ tion and even its public funding, he’s now opposed to those things— he has come to understand as a matter of scientific fact that the child in the womb is a living member of the species Homo sapiens, a human being, a member of the human family. He emphasized that his con‐ version on the issue is sincere and as President he would be faithful to it. Second, he seemed to understand that the 14th Amendment does give Congress power in this area, though its powers become relevant only if states fail in their duty to protect the life of the child. So that left the final dimension of the question, and here’s where the nuances came in. Governor Romney did not embrace the doctrine of judicial supremacy. He did not say “Well, look Robby, I wish we were free to legislate to protect innocent life, but we’re not, or at least we’re very limited, because we’ve got this Supreme Court case, and what the Supreme Court says the Constitution means is what it means. The Supreme Court’s word is law.” He did not do that. He 22
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did not embrace judicial supremacy. In fact, he went out of his way to say that he could imagine circumstances in which the prudent and right thing to do would be for a President and Congress to do what Lincoln did in the case of Dred Scott. What Lincoln did in Dred Scott was to refuse to treat its principles as binding on the other branches of government, beyond the parties to the particular case. That was Lincoln’s position. Romney said he could understand that it might come to that, and if it did, then the President and the Congress would have to do what Lincoln did. But he also said that to do it would be to bring on a constitutional crisis, because you would have a direct conflict of constitutional interpreta‐ tion between co‐equal branches of government. So his position is that it would be imprudent for a President and Congress to defy the Supreme Court in an effort to protect children in the womb—at least at this point. In part, this is because he believes it is unnecessary. As President, he says, he would nominate justices to the Supreme Court who would reverse Roe v. Wade and send the question of abortion back to the states. Now, I understand the Governor’s position. It is, as I say, a nuanced position. It accepts the idea that the President and Congress have the authority to challenge the Court. It does not embrace judicial su‐ premacy, but it says that whenever a President or the Congress chal‐ lenges the Court they create a constitutional crisis. They should only do that when there’s not another way to deal with the problem. That is scarcely an unreasonable position. On the other hand, if I would have been able to pursue the argu‐ ment I would have said well, Governor Romney, Republican presi‐ dents have been promising us constitutionalist judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade since 1976, the first election after Roe v. Wade in 1973. We have, it is true, gotten some very worthy justices—Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, and Chief Justice John Roberts. However, those Republican Presidents, including some of those we most admire, some of those most deeply committed to the pro‐life cause (such as Ronald Reagan), have given us the likes of Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter—justices who pro‐ tected Roe and prevented it from being reversed.
The City: Do you feel like this was a situation where a candidate had the opportunity to relate something deep about the way that they view their philosophy of government and judicial appointment? And do you think you 23
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could come away from this with a real understanding of the level to which they are willing to go, what they are willing to do not just in defense of hu‐ man life, but in defense of that philosophy of government?
George: I think we got a very clear sense of the candidates’ convic‐ tions. We also learned something about their temperaments when it came to engaging deep moral and constitutional questions—moral questions like abortion, constitutional questions like the respective powers of the states and the National Government, and the proper role of the courts in the constitutional system. Consider Governor Romney and Speaker Gingrich. They are very impressive men and both did very well at the Palmetto Forum. But there were clear differences of substance and temperament. Gingrich was straightforward. In his view, the courts have consistently usurped the authority of the legislative branch of government. Judg‐ es have set themselves up as “super legislators,” in defiance of their proper constitutional role. They’ve got to be brought into line and that’s going to require decisive action including refusal of the elected branches at the national level, to accept the worst of their abuses, such as Roe v. Wade. And so Gingrich, in effect, said: “I would treat Roe just as Lincoln treated Dred Scott. I would not treat its holding or principles as binding beyond the parties to the case.” In fact, Gin‐ grich went on to outline other steps he as President would take to bring out of control judges back under control. So this was a bold approach, a clear, straightforward rejection of judicial supremacy and an equally clear and straightforward state‐ ment of the obligation of the President to fight it directly. Compare and contrast that with Governor Romney’s nuanced position. (And by “nuance” here I don’t again mean to be commending or criticizing it. I’m just describing it. As I have said, I think both Romney and Gingrich did well.) Governor Romney is saying well, okay, we’ve got a problem here. A decision like Roe is outrageous. It’s an unconstitutional decision. The Court has exceeded its powers. It has interfered in the legislative process. It’s a bad thing. To directly defy it, however, would bring on a constitutional crisis. We should do that only if there’s no other way to deal with the problem. But there is another way: As President I would be so careful in my judicial appointments that we wouldn’t get more Souters, O’Connors, and Kennedys. We’d get more justices like Scalia and Thomas. And we’d actually get rid of Roe that way with‐ 24
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out generating the constitutional crisis that direct defiance would generate. If Gingrich is by temperament bold, one would describe Romney as by temperament more cautious. This is not to suggest that Gingrich is rash or Romney is indecisive. But it is to notice a difference in tem‐ perament—a difference that was brought very clearly into view at the Palmetto Forum.
The City: One of the other subjects which was raised at the Freedom Fo‐ rum was American exceptionalism, which a number of the candidates ad‐ dressed from the stage. This is a subject that again goes to the core of a phi‐ losophy of governance, something that again gets lost in this horrible sea of debates of 30 second responses from nine people on stage about their favorite kind of pizza. You had the opportunity, at the same event, to talk about the importance of America’s founding within a creed. It’s something that maybe not all the candidates themselves even understand, but I found to be very intriguing as a concept that needed to be brought into the forefront of these debates.
George: Consider the distinction between the question, “Is he an American?”, as a technical legal question—that is, Does he have American citizenship?—and “Is he an American?” in a more robust, meaningful sense. And then compare that with the question, is he a Frenchman? Or is he a Swede? Or is he Chinese? The technical, legal matter is: Does he have a certificate of citizenship (if he’s an immi‐ grant), or was he born here (if he’s not an immigrant)? And once we know the answer to that question we know whether he’s an Ameri‐ can, or a Frenchman, or a Swede, or Chinese under their rules of citi‐ zenship. But in America an immigrant, and the children of immigrants, and the grandchildren of immigrants, can become Americans not only in the sense that they can get their certificate of citizenship; they can also become Americans in a much more robust sense. And the same is not quite the case for people who become citizens of France, Swe‐ den, China, or most other places. Now, we can explain this when we think about how these nations came into being and have existed over the centuries. They came into being not by people integrating themselves around a system of be‐ liefs, a political creed with an underlying moral content. They came into existence organically with traditions, and ethnicity, and lan‐ guage, so forth. So, it’s really hard for someone who is Chinese to 25
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become not merely a citizen of Sweden, but in the most robust sense a Swede. And it’s equally hard for a Swede to become Chinese. He might be able to secure Chinese citizenship, get a Chinese passport, and the like, but he will not be linked by blood, or ethnicity, or com‐ mon history to that nation. America is a creedal nation. This nation began with people inte‐ grating themselves around a set of self‐evident truths. And we as a people continue to “hold these truths to be self‐evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with cer‐ tain unalienable rights and among these are life, liberty, and the pur‐ suit of happiness”; and we continue to believe that it is for the protec‐ tion of these rights governments are instituted among men. This really makes us a quite remarkable nation, a nation that is not built on blood, or soil, or even a common language. Now, I do think having a common language is an important support for any kind of shared identity, including a creedal one. But my grandfather who could not speak English very well was still fully American, he under‐ stood himself as fully American, and he was understood by most of his neighbors to be fully American. And in part that was because they knew that their grandparents were immigrants, or their great grandparents were immigrants, and that what made them Americans was this common creedal commitment. Historically, we’re exceptional not only because we’ve been a na‐ tion of immigrants (though that’s pretty exceptional in itself—there aren’t a lot of nations that are nations of immigrants), but more im‐ portantly because we as a creedal nation enable immigrants and the children of immigrants to become Americans in the fullest and most robust sense. I myself am a second generation American, yet I under‐ stand myself, and my fellow citizens understand me, to be as much an American as people whose ancestors came on the Mayflower. And what’s exceptional is that I’m not the exception. There’s nothing remarkable about my story. With the exception of African‐Americans, whose ancestors were brought here unjustly as slaves, and American Indians, it’s nearly every American’s story. Americans are Catholics, Protestants, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and members of other faiths. Their ancestors came from England and Poland; from Ireland, Italy, and Germany; from Russia, China, and Japan; from India, Indonesia and Nigeria; from every corner of the globe. 26
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How can anybody say this is not an exceptional nation? This is the most exceptional nation that’s ever existed on the face of the earth. There really is no country quite like it. We are not without our faults—beginning with the original sin of slavery. But we have be‐ come a beacon of freedom, and we have shown the world that a na‐ tion “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” can indeed “long endure.” It is this commit‐ ment to freedom and justice that gave us the moral strength to fight for freedom against Nazi and Soviet tyranny. In those struggles, the children of immigrants, and in some cases immigrants themselves, were very much “in the fight.” They fought as Americans for Ameri‐ ca—and for freedom. I read Michael Kinsley and others telling me about the “myth” of American exceptionalism. I hear people condemn the belief in Amer‐ ican exceptionalism as if it represented a kind of chauvinism or jingo‐ ism. It makes me want to ask them about their grandfathers. My grandparents on my father’s side arrived in this country from Syria with nothing, fleeing Ottoman oppression. My Italian grand‐ parents came from southern Italy fleeing poverty. None of my grandparents came here as English speakers. Both of my grandfa‐ thers worked on the railroads and in the coal mines. When they ar‐ rived, Woodrow Wilson was the McCormick Professor of Jurispru‐ dence at Princeton. Now, a little more than 100 years later, their grandson is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton, sitting in Woodrow Wilson’s chair. In what other nation would this kind of thing be as common as it is in the United States of America? Is this a great country or what?
Robert George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and the Herbert W. Vaughan senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. Benjamin Domenech is Editor in Chief of T H E C I T Y . 27
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Disaster Bill Coyle All do not all things well, and there are few things more thankless than trying to tell a friend he hasn’t got an ounce of talent for the work nearest his heart— which is why I was not straight with you from the start.
An asteroid on a course for earth, caught early enough could, with a hint of force (and a good dose of math) be steered fatefully off. Once, a word to you might have changed your path. Now what can I do?
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Now it is too late: now the course you’ve chosen has all the force of fate, and if I pointed out you’re bound for a collision with the reality of who you are, I doubt you’d hear me, or agree.
You are both asteroid and shadowed impact zone and neither can avoid the crash that’s on its way; and I, who might have known— who knew—how this would end am not about to say anything now, my friend.
Bill Coyle is an award-winning poet and translator whose work has been published in the Hudson Review, The New Criterion, The New Republic, Poetry, and elsewhere. He teaches in the English Department at Salem State College in Salem, Massachusetts.
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ENTERPRISE & E VA N G E L I S M ,missed0opportunities< Eric Teetsel
O
n October 7, I traveled to New York City to interview the “occupiers” protesting in Zuccotti Park. The next day, I attended the Values Voter Summit, the annual gathering of social conservatives hosted by the Family Research Council. In the space of thirty‐six hours, I experienced an ethnography of the ends of American political cul‐ ture. But the results were surprising: what I learned in New York left me enlivened and optimistic for the future. I walked away from the Values Voter Summit burdened by the dysfunction of a community of conservatives that is much smaller than it could be. As I descended the steps into Zuccotti Park, I reaffirmed my com‐ mitment to fairness. It would be easy to identify the most‐pierced or most homely looking for juicy quotes. I committed to try myself to learn and, perhaps, to share my own perspective, with a disposition of warmth and generosity. I made a point of interviewing those who had been involved from the beginning, were viewed as leaders, and weren’t bombastic—not the types to support defecating on police cars. I’ve experienced the frustration of media reports that stereotype Tea Partiers by the actions of the most radical, fringe members. Hon‐ esty and loving‐kindness required me to be more responsible. It quickly became clear that the protesters, or “occupiers,” are wrong about a lot. While the decentralized, diverse nature of their protest makes it impossible to criticize their demands, it is fair to characterize the general impetus of “their” preferred policies as far‐ Left progressivism. Protesters advocated higher, more redistribution‐ ist taxes, deep cuts in military spending, increased spending on big 30
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government programs for health care, education, and green energy, an increase in the minimum wage, free college education, and so on. The occupiers are long on conviction but short on sophisticated thinking. Contradictions abound: some oppose ‘crony capitalism’ but support preferential treatment of green energy firms like Solyndra. Others are concerned about the deficit and national debt, but want free college education for everyone. Some detest capitalism, but will‐ ingly accept and distribute donations purchased online from Ama‐ zon.com and delivered by FedEx. They eat pizza from the shop down the street and document their experiences with iPhones. The occupiers are blind with frustration. They lack job prospects, having been let down by the first president they ever voted for, a man who was supposed to change things. Many are the products of American higher education, the last stronghold of their hippie prede‐ cessors‐turned‐professors who continue to espouse ideas otherwise discarded on Ronald Reagan’s ash heap of history. All are wanderers, lost in the ever‐lengthening void between child‐ hood and maturity, unmoored and anxious. Twenty years ago, Chris‐ topher McCandless tramped his way to Alaska in a Kerouacian search for significance (chronicled in Jon Krakauer’s classic book Into the Wild). Twenty years later, these are his kids.
D
espite the ignorance and self‐evident hypocrisy, I found my‐ self drawn to the protesters. For all their faults, they are driven by a desire for justice, peace, freedom, fairness, and— yes—for prosperity. They are animated by the belief that we can be better than we currently are. In fact, their movement can be consid‐ ered a prime example of Hayekian spontaneous order. Here we see a few dozen strangers who descended on an empty plot of land and formed a community. Within a few days, as individuals began to see the unique contributions they were able to make, they had estab‐ lished a library, a post office, and a kitchen. Someone recognized the need to wash the dishes piling up in the kitchen, so they built an elaborate system of water filtration out of dirt, rocks, plastic barrels, and pvc pipe. Someone makes buttons. Another trades drawings for books, food, or anything else that might be useful. It’s a marketplace in its infancy, driven by the entrepreneurial spirit to contribute to the common good. 31
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Quickly, the protestors realized that if their community was going to work, they needed rules—and a system to encourage compliance. I met Sophie who described her role as a “community mediator.” “There were some disagreements about substance use in the park. So we have to work that stuff out,” she explains. Every so often, a protestor would yell out, “Mic check!” Those nearby would echo, “Mic check!” The process was repeated until everyone was listening. “Five volunteers are needed to sort the mail.” As I explored Zuccotti Park and interviewed its’ citizens I thought of Tocqueville. The occupiers are quintessentially American—and many are instinctively conservative. They just don’t realize it.
W
hen I first saw Ted, he was sitting Indian‐style on the ground next to another young man. He wore a camou‐ flage jacket, a beaded necklace, and rainbow‐colored spandex pants. They were singing what I later learned was an an‐ them of the Lakota nation. Ted’s outfit caught my eye, but the chorus he sang captured my curiosity: “I love you so, so, so, so much. I love you so, so, so, so much.”
Ted later explained to me that he had been arrested during the pro‐ tests and was harboring animosity towards the police. The song was an attempt at forgiveness. A little weird, sure, but also good. After a few minutes, Ted got to talking about healthcare. He sur‐ prised me by admitting that he didn’t think the federal government could do a very good job at managing it. He described a vision wherein each state was charged with providing care as it saw fit. Such a system would enable fifty laboratories of innovation that could experiment and share best practices. Dumbfounded, I said, “Ted, have you heard of Paul Ryan’s plan for Medicaid?” I explained that Ryan wanted to give states block grants of federal money and allow each to determine how to best spend the money. “What do you think?” I asked. “I’m all for that!” He exclaimed. It’s unlikely that Ted woke up the next morning, shaved his beard, and applied for a job at the Heritage Foundation. But our short con‐ versation planted a seed and showed Ted that maybe conservative ideas aren’t all bad. 32
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W
hatever hope I had for the natural conservative impulse I discovered at Occupy Wall Street in New York City was dashed the next day in Washington, D.C. The Values Voter Summit was tainted by ideologues and infighting among Christian conservatives, a fulfillment of every cliché about the political right being defined by antipathy. The disdain for our fellow citizens was surpassed only by the fearful prospect of four more years of Obama. The final event of my day was a break‐out session for young con‐ servative leaders, moderated by my friend Darin Miller and featuring prominent young activists Lila Rose and Jason Mattera, author of the New York Times bestseller Obama Zombies. After listening to Mattera mock liberals and congratulate himself for a series of guerrilla‐style ambush interviews of prominent politicians and activists, I left. Later, I wrote to ask him about his tactics on Twitter. “Do you worry about your style alienating potential conserva‐ tives?” I asked in part. “Your whole thing is education; why not ex‐ pect more of yourself? We need to be effective.” Mattera replied, “‘Occupiers’ have no reason for existence. They don’t even have the insight to know what ‘I’m just being me’ means.” He instructed me to “grow some balls.” Mattera is a product of a contemporary conservative movement that has lost any sense of the artfulness and humanity required if we are going to appeal to the majority of Americans who don’t align inalterably with the Right in American politics. His tutors were on the main stage. In eight hours at the Summit, not a single speaker articulated an argument about the moral justice inherent to free en‐ terprise. No one explained why conservative policies are the most fair. No one said a word about helping the poor. Conservatives complain that we are depicted as heartless, con‐ cerned more with tax rates and fidelity to the Constitution than the homeless and single working mothers. It isn’t true. I’m a conservative because my faith compels me to love my neighbor. I’m an advocate of the free market because I know that capitalism is the system that makes everyone wealthier, healthier, safer, and more educated. I rare‐ ly hear conservative rhetoric to match these values. It’s time for a new kind of conversation. Articulating the free enter‐ prise vision should be a romance. Conservatives can woo the unde‐ 33
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cided to our side and recapture the hearts of those whose fidelity to progressivism is shallow. Like dating, this will take work. We have to keep the end‐goal in mind. It’s a process, requiring patience and the portrayal of our best selves. This means demonstrating an ability to engage in roundabout, inefficient dialogue. It means affirming the other, gently and grace‐ fully offering alternatives (or not). It means putting out an attractive quality that compels the other to want to know more. The Occupiers are not our enemies, they are our fellow citizens— and correcting them, educating them, and winning them to our cause should be our aim. Not all of them will listen. But some of them will.
Eric Teetsel is the program manager of the Project on Values & Capitalism at the American Enterprise Institute. 34
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THE UNTRAINED GRASSHOPPER [a0generation0adrift{ Benjamin Domenech
T
he demonstrations and protests in New York City and across the nation in the Autumn of 2011 reveal a great deal about the divide which exists within American soci‐ ety today. The gulf is best identified by segmenting the traditional American understanding of existence and the increasingly European attitude taught within schools and by much of mass media. The inherent belief among most Americans is that you direct your destiny. Essentially, this boils down to the idea that with hard work and time and energy you can reach out and seize the future you want for yourself. If you pursue happiness, you can realize it. This contrasts strongly with the attitude of most of Europe and Asia, where destiny is not subject to individual pursuit. Instead, you live within a world outside your control, where you navigate be‐ tween social and economic barriers within your time. It creates a point of view where life is about navigating within a world outside of your control. You are powerless as the sailor is over the waves of the sea. Thus, the only response to bad situations is an appeal to the enshrined other, the powerbrokers and larger forces, for rescue, pro‐ tection, and fair treatment. This is an oversimplification perhaps. But in New York City and elsewhere, the Occupy gatherings seem to be an expression of this mindset. They are an inchoate appeal by the distressed, the unem‐ ployed, and the frustrated for help from higher powers. They are disgusted with what they perceive as the unfairness of life, by bailouts and corporate cronyism and a government that is not solv‐ ing the problems they face. 35
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This is not an inherently leftist movement, though many with leftist and anarchist politics are attempting to co‐opt it. Rather, it is a cry for help from an uninformed, frustrated America. Sadly, the attitude of many on the political right has been less than eager to respond to these movements with anything but ridicule. The Occupiers are not some latent conservative movement. But at their core, they are animated by disgust with many of the same things that drove Tea Partiers to the streets in 2009. They are responding to their circumstances the only way they know how, thanks to a flawed mindset ingrained in them by teachers and leaders. Too many of those who favor free enterprise are reacting not by advancing win‐ ning arguments, but by conceding them to the radical Left. It re‐ minds me of an essay by Thomas Sowell, a retelling of an old fable: Once upon a time, a grasshopper and an ant lived in a field. All summer long, the grasshopper romped and played, while the ant worked hard under the boiling sun to store up food for the winter. When winter came, the grasshopper was hungry. One cold and rainy day, he went to ask the ant for some food. “What are you, crazy?” the ant said. “I’ve been breaking my back all summer long while you ran around hopping and laughing at me for missing all the fun in life.” “Did I do that?” the grasshopper asked meekly. “Yes! You said I was one of those old-fashioned clods who missed the whole point of the modern self-realization philosophy.” “Gee, I’m sorry about that,” the grasshopper said. I didn’t realize you were so sensitive. But surely you are not going to hold that against me at a time like this.” “Well, I don’t hold a grudge... but I do have a long memory.” Just then, another ant came along. “Hi, Lefty,” the first ant said. “Hi, George.” “Lefty, do you know what this grasshopper wants me to do? He wants me to give him some of the food I worked for all summer, under the blazing sun.” “I would have thought you would already have volunteered to share with him, without being asked,” Lefty said. “What!!” “When we have disparate shares in the bounty of nature, the least we can do is try to correct the inequity.”
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“Nature’s bounty, my foot,” George said. “I had to tote this stuff uphill and cross a stream on a log... all the while looking out for ant-eaters. Why couldn’t this lazy bum gather his own food and store it?” ... Lefty looked pained. “I’m surprised at your callousness, George... your selfishness, your greed.” “Have you gone crazy, Lefty?” “No. On the contrary, I have become educated.” ... Lefty not only won the argument, he continued to expand his program of shelters for grasshoppers. As word spread, grasshoppers came from miles around. Eventually, some of the younger ants decided to adopt the grasshopper lifestyle. As the older generation of ants passed from the scene, more and more ants joined the grasshoppers, romping and playing in the fields. Finally all the ants and all the grasshoppers spent all their time enjoying the carefree lifestyle and lived happily ever after, all summer long. Then the winter came. Yes, a portion of these protesters are old guard hippies bent on drum circles and jazz hand assemblies, aimed at bending the naive and the uninformed to the vile lie of socialism. They laud the idols of free stuff and deviance. They play Lefty to the Grasshopper. But the response from those who believe in free enterprise is all too often not advancing an alternate argument, or convincing the Grasshopper that he would be better off with a paycheck instead of an unemploy‐ ment check. Instead, the response is ridicule and anger. For the generation facing this daunting economy and little in the way of answers, the desperation of protest is the only path they know to take, the only way to respond to being adrift on the high seas. “We did everything we were supposed to,” one 2009 graduate from Dartmouth recently told The New York Times. “What was the point of working so hard for 22 years if there was nothing out there?” Part of the problem is that these young men and women face is that many were promised, from the beginning, that everything would be great. A fascinating cover story in The Atlantic Monthly last March by Don Peck noted the difficulty this generation faces. Ron Alsop, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and the author of The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation Is Shaking Up the Workplace, says a combination of entitlement and highly structured childhood has resulted in a lack of independence and entrepreneurialism in 37
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many 20-somethings. They’re used to checklists, he says, and “don’t excel at leadership or independent problem solving.” Alsop interviewed dozens of employers for his book, and concluded that unlike previous generations, Millennials, as a group, “need almost constant direction” in the workplace. “Many flounder without precise guidelines but thrive in structured situations that provide clearly defined rules.” All of these characteristics are worrisome, given a harsh economic environment that requires perseverance, adaptability, humility, and entrepreneurialism. Perhaps most worrisome, though, is the fatalism and lack of agency… in today’s young adults. Trained throughout childhood to disconnect performance from reward, and told repeatedly that they are destined for great things, many are quick to place blame elsewhere when something goes wrong, and inclined to believe that bad situations will sort themselves out—or will be sorted out by parents or other helpers. Arguably no author understood this generation better, despite the inconvenience of being dead since before some of them were born, than Walker Percy, Christian existentialist and chronicler of Southern wayfarers and those adrift in a different age: “You live in a deranged age, more deranged that usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.” In 1985, he wrote: “The Christian notion of man as a wayfarer in search of his salvation no longer informs Western cul‐ ture. In its place, what most of us seem to be seeking are such famil‐ iar goals as maturity, creativity, autonomy, rewarding interpersonal relations, and so forth.” In Lost in the Cosmos, he wrote: “How it is possible for the man who designed Voyager 19, which arrived at Ti‐ tania, a satellite of Uranus, three seconds off schedule and a hundred yards off course after a flight of six years, to be one of the most screwed‐up creatures in California—or the Cosmos.” Or, more flip‐ pantly and more friendly to pessimistic valedictories: “You can get all A’s and still flunk life.” The Percy expression that applies best to the hordes in the Occupy movement is one of contrast, from The Last Gentleman, when protag‐ onist Will Barrett, transplanted Southerner, Princeton dropout, lost and adrift in New York City, catches a glimpse of a beautiful woman through a spyglass in Central Park, and has an epiphany: For until this moment he had lived in a state of pure possibility, not knowing what sort of man he was or what he must do, and supposing therefore that he must be all men and do everything. But after this morning’s inci38
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dent his life took a turn in a particular direction. Thereafter he came to see that he was not destined to do everything but only one or two things. Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him. This is the ironic truth about these young Americans adrift. Even in this downturn, their generational opportunities are unmatched. They have all the tools they need for success. The whole world is open to them. And it is too much for them to bear.
Y
ou may not have heard of British intellectual C.E.M. Joad, and this is a shame. He was a fascinating individual, a classic tran‐ sitional figure in public life. An anti‐capitalist New Party paci‐ fist agitator, Joad was the lead in arguably the most famous Oxford Union debate of all time—held on February 9, 1933, on the question: “That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.” Joad’s side won, and emphatically so. He traveled the country excoriating tradition and capitalism. He eventually reached out to the BBC, hosting a popular radio program called “The Brain’s Trust” with Julian Huxley and others (it would later have a brief re‐ vival with Richard Dawkins), which popularized philosophical dis‐ course for the average citizen. Joad became a celebrity philosopher of some note, despised by con‐ servatives but a prominent public figure (considered as popular, if not more so, as George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell). He sold books, and speeches, and pacifism, and agnosticism, and socialism. He had scores of mistresses. The opening of a 1944 BBC documentary about his life at home compared him, unironically, to Socrates. It all came crashing down in an odd, small scandal. In 1948, Joad was caught riding a Waterloo‐Exeter train without a ticket. Known to frequently boast about dodging his fare, Joad was convicted of the offense, and fined £2. It seems strange that so small a thing would be a national story, but it was an embarrassment to the point that Joad was fired by the BBC, publicly humiliated, his reputation destroyed. Privately, even prior to the scandal, Joad had come to seriously question his earlier beliefs. He drew away from pacifism, and then socialism, and eventually agnosticism. A key came when he was in‐ vited back to the Oxford Union by its president, C.S. Lewis, to speak to a group on faith and public life. Joad had read Lewis’s latest book, 39
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The Abolition of Man, and it had rocked him on a deeper level. He eventually wrote a book, The Recovery of Belief, making his restored faith public a year before his death from cancer. It is because… the religious view of the universe seems to me to cover more of the facts of experience than any other that I have been gradually led to embrace it. I now believe that the balance of reasonable considerations tells heavily in favor of the religious, even Christian view of the world. The comparison between Joad’s return to faith in God and the Oc‐ cupy Wall Street movement’s faith in freedom should not be lost. Joad was a man who came to grips with the mistakes of his youth and the overreach of his early ideals, his rejection of things which he should not have rejected, his acceptance of things he should not have accepted. The challenge for the agitators of today is this: if those who favor freedom ignore this opportunity, these people, desperate and frustrated and uncertain where to turn, will end up on the side that will do nothing but harm them. Will they, like Joad, eventually ma‐ ture in their viewpoint, and reconsider their beliefs? And if so, will there be a Lewis there to welcome them, and urge them on? The truth is that fairness and justice are not ideas at war with liber‐ ty and free enterprise—in fact, they are at its core. Equality of oppor‐ tunity is at the heart of our American system of government. As Cal‐ vin Coolidge said, “Democracy is not a tearing down; it is a building up. It is not denial of the divine right of kings; it asserts the divine right of all men.” The moral case for a meritocracy of earned success is not something these protesters should find unacceptable. Yet where there is no one to make this argument, it remains un‐ heard. A colleague of mine went down to the Occupy Chicago event intending to make a video mocking the protesters. They asked them why they hated capitalism. But instead of angry socialists, they found the frustrated and distraught unemployed. “We don’t hate capitalism,” one young woman said, “we just want it to work again.” Someone needs to tell her that it can.
Benjamin Domenech is Editor in Chief of T H E C I T Y . 40
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STEVE JOBS & SELFLESSNESS ]how0the0world0works} Terrence O. Moore
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ur political moment is replete with ironies both amus‐ ing and instructive. Witness the proclaimed anti‐ capitalist protesters on Wall Street used their iPhones to text, tweet, and e‐mail condolences to Apple head‐ quarters in Cupertino, California upon the death of tech icon Steve Jobs. That Mr. Jobs was a billionaire many times over; co‐founder and long‐time CEO of currently the most highly valued company in the world; and a master of product design, advertising, and raising his company’s stock price seems not to bother these haters of “the rich.” On paper, Jobs would appear to rank among the other robber‐barons—Carnegie, Ford, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Rockefel‐ ler—in the mind of the arch anti‐capitalist. But he doesn’t. Why not? Were Apple’s products just too “cool” to hate? Did Jobs’s black tur‐ tleneck and tennis shoes take off the bourgeois edge and make him look like he could hang out among the proletariat? It is far more likely that the high regard for the inventor of the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and more reveals a more fundamental truth about work, wealth, and human nature. While it is pretty easy to stoke some people up against “the rich” at a time when there are so many poor around, when we actually meet someone who is rich—and not through the luck of inheritance or winning the lottery—we can’t real‐ ly hate that person. The reason is that we recognize that the individual who has be‐ come rich has not done so by taking from others and thereby op‐ pressing them, but by giving to others and thereby improving their lives in some substantial way. That’s right: even before they leave half or more of their fortunes to some worthy charity, the “millionaires 41
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and billionaires” that the political Left is so keen on taxing these days are the greatest givers in our society. Of course, that is not what we are told by the political leaders in Washington or the cultural leaders in Hollywood. According to them, what motivates the capitalist, the inventor, or the entrepreneur is greed or at the very least raw self‐interest. He wants money above all things and will do almost anything to get it. In fact, his outsized de‐ sire for money must be regulated, lest he take even more from the common wealth of the society than he already does. This brings us Gordon Gekko and the liberal vision of the Reagan years, Wall Street (“greed is good”), with its countless modern equivalents. A television show my wife and I enjoy, Damages, has the rich villains each season planning the destruction of the country on golf courses and in dark, wood‐paneled rooms over bottles of expensive Scotch. You see, the poor work; the rich only plot.
I
s this the way the world really works? Steve Jobs shows us why it’s not. I am sure most every Apple user has their “story” about his products. (I have heard people say, for example, that the iPh‐ one has changed their lives.) But here is my story. We all know that Mr. Jobs was worth many billions of dollars. I personally contributed $2,059 to that fortune. Throughout college I did not buy a computer because I was slow to realize that you should or could do so. I used the Apples provided in the computer labs (paid for by the substantial tuition my father was shelling out) or borrowed the Apple of a friend of mine, who was too generous with his own IIc. Obviously, I could have graduated college by typing the sixty or seventy papers I wrote there. But it would have been much, much harder. So Steve Jobs improved substantially the quality of my life and work in college, and college has been the key to everything I have done since then, the gateway to a professional life. Throughout grad school I continued to use Apples borrowed from my department, still hanging onto my own money and not “giving” anything to Jobs. My 200‐page dissertation was written on an Ap‐ ple—and in very short order, as I had to get the thing finished over a two‐month period for various reasons. Had I been consigned to a typewriter, I would have had to do what graduate students did in the old days: hire a typist. But then I would have not had the benefits of 42
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“cutting and pasting,” and the whole project would have been a mess, as I kept changing parts of chapters until the last minute. When I became a professor I finally decided to buy a computer: an iBook that I still have and still use almost daily. Virtually everything I have written as a professor or as a principal running a K‐12 school has been composed on that computer. In fact, I just published a novel written on that computer. Insofar as so much of my life and work depends upon writing, my livelihood over this past decade has been improved by and is somewhat attributable to Steve Jobs. I am a broken‐down runner. In the last few years I have had to re‐ sort to an indoor spinning bike to stay in shape. At first it was deadly dull. Last Christmas, my wife bought me an iPod Shuffle. I won’t say it has changed my life, but it has definitely improved my workouts. Would I still be in shape without Steve Jobs? Sure. Would I enjoy staying in shape? Assuredly not. So how much have I been able to profit off the $2,059 I shelled out to Apple? I would not even know how to calculate my debt. Consider for a moment your relationship with technology or a product you use regularly. The truth is that the great inventors and producers and sellers of goods give us—we the consumers—far more than we give them. They work hard, and their work makes our lives better. Of course, we, too, are working in this world of exchange; so presumably we are enriching others’ lives in some similar way. For all the “tax the rich” demagogic politics we see in this world, we cannot lose sight of the fact that “the rich” are already giving us more than we could ever hope to repay.
T
his fundamental insight was, in fact, the moral underpinning of the Ronald Reagan economic plan. Although nowadays we hear Republicans trying to invoke the spirit of Reagan in de‐ claring the economic advantages of low taxes and free markets, rare‐ ly do they praise the moral value of the market; and least of all do they praise the moral qualities of “the rich” and successful. That is because the Right suffers from an inferiority complex when it comes to the Left’s alleged yet wholly false guise of selflessness and the de‐ sire to help others. For this reason, perhaps the best conservative classic to take down off the shelf these days is George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty. 43
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Just as Reagan was being swept into office in 1981 and people were starting to wrap their minds around supply‐side economics, Gilder provided the moral argument for the Laffer curve: capitalists don’t take; they give. Far from having designs on taking a much bigger share than he deserves out of some preordained pot of finite money and resources (a view as inaccurate and as long‐lasting as that of the old mercantilists that Adam Smith had to expose), the capitalist wants to offer something to the world that the world does not have: a service, an invention, a convenience, something that will in some way enrich life that no one else currently dreams of. The capitalist’s motivation is giving that thing to the world. He knows the world wants it or needs it because he knows people. He sympathizes with them (one of Smith’s favorite terms). To be sure, the world rewards the capitalist generously. But it does so simply because ordinary people’s sense of justice holds—in Christ’s words—that the laborer is worthy of his wages. Moral people would not take a person’s sweat and genius and leave him destitute. They return the capitalist’s sympathy with their needs resulting in a product with their own gratitude, admiration, and money. Com‐ merce, properly understood, is a moral exchange. Gilder writes: Under capitalism, the ventures of reason are launched into a world ruled by morality and Providence. The gifts will succeed only to the extent that they are altruistic and spring from an understanding of the needs of others. They depend on faith in an essentially fair and responsive humanity. In such a world, one can give without a contract of compensation. One can venture without the assurance of reward. One can seek the surprises of profit, rather than the more limited benefits of contractual pay. One can take initiative amid radical perils and uncertainties. When faith dies, so does enterprise. It is impossible to create a system of collective regulation and safety that does not finally deaden the moral sources of the willingness to face danger and fight, that does not dampen the spontaneous flow of gifts and experiments which extend the dimensions of the world and the circles of human sympathy. The creators of wealth are not just looking for lots of money, though they are looking for that. They are looking to make the world a better place, in ways large and small. They are the people most sen‐ sitive to the weal (the prosperity, happiness, welfare, and general good) of others. They are certainly more sensitive to the needs of 44
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others than is a government bureaucracy. They are even moreso than college‐age protesters denouncing a market they do not understand and yet which provides them with every convenience they have—to include most of the buildings on their campuses that were paid for with money donated by wealthy benefactors. In an interview, Steve Jobs once said two exceedingly revealing things, not only about himself but also about the selfless aspects of work and wealth. He said that Apple came up with the iPod because he and his top designers loved music. They loved music so much that they wanted to come up with a way to make a jukebox (meaning the ability to choose your own music) that you could carry around with you. He also said that he lived by the statement of Henry Ford, “If I would have just listened to what people wanted, I would have given them a faster horse.” The true inventors, the true creators, actually give people some‐ thing better than what they want. Giving people better than what they want—or deserve—doesn’t sound very selfish, because it isn’t. The rich aren’t out to get us. They’re out to understand us—to sell us things that make our lives better, knowing that this is the best way to keep us coming back for more. Whatever their motivations, you can‐ not argue with the results—that free enterprise empowers the indi‐ vidual and enables the pursuit of happiness. And this is a very good and noble endeavor.
Terrence O. Moore teaches history at Hillsdale College. He grew up in Texas, studied at the universities of Chicago and Edinburgh, and served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps. He is the author of The Perfect Game, a novel set in Texas during the Reagan years about boys, baseball, friendship, family, and faith 45
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Fallen Bill Coyle Crabapple blossoms, blown, fall and flutter down, littering like confetti the main street of our city. Confetti...the simile quickens, and you and I, walking sometime later amidst the drifted litter come to realize that we feel ill at ease in this belated beauty since, if it is confetti, it means that we have missed some great thing seen by most: Say that we did; what was it? Some dignitary’s visit?
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Some holiday parade or hometown hero’s ride? Something in us cautions against the kind of questions that now come welling up but which we cannot stop: If there was a celebration, what was the occasion, and why did we not know about it until now? We read the daily papers; we chatted with our neighbors and friends and relatives. We’ve lived here all our lives, but if we are no longer at home here, should we linger? Where can we turn, and to whom, if this is not our home?
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T HE C HARISMATIC Q UESTION ]fire0and0worship} Owen Strachan
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he rock star rolls his eyes heavenwards. For those who follow rock and its gods, the scene is familiar. The words that one hears next, however, are not: When the roll is called up yonder I hope you see me there
The lyrics, sung to a pulsing beat and soaring guitars, sound strange to secular ears. To those who grew up in traditional evangeli‐ calism, however, they are well‐worn. When I first heard Kings of Le‐ on lead singer Caleb Followill deliver the opening words to “Radio‐ active” in his mournful, southern‐fried tenor, I was transported back to my childhood church. In a small building on the Maine coast, we would sing “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder,” one of the more rousing hymns in the old Baptist songbook. Until the mega‐stars from Tennessee placed the song in the cultural stream just a few months ago, I had not heard it for years. The fact that a prominent secular band (their album Only by the Night sold 6.2 million copies worldwide) is incorporating revivalist hymnody is noteworthy, though by no means unprecedented (see the rewarding discussion of Bob Dylan’s music and faith in prior issues of THE CITY). Intrigued by this latest interplay between rock and reli‐ gion, I read a bit on the “Kings” and found that they had Christian roots. Three of the four band members are brothers bearing the last name Followill. Their father, Leon, was an itinerant Pentecostal min‐ ister who brought the boys with him on the road. After he ran into 48
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moral trouble, the Kings distanced themselves from organized Chris‐ tianity, plunging into a parallel but non‐intersecting road world of their own: the rock circuit. When fame came knocking, they plumbed the excesses of stardom. Their music blends the competing influences of their background. I wonder if in telling the story of a rock band we might find here a metaphor for another American institution, the ironically anti‐ institutional folk Christianity known as the charismatic movement. Like the haunted Christianity that pervades “Radioactive” and other songs of the Kings of Leon, charismatic faith is woven into the tex‐ ture of the American experience. Though wildly popular (to say nothing of its massive global influence), the charismatic movement has not represented mainstream American Christianity. Like the old hymn that weaves its way through a decidedly secular song, charis‐ matic Christianity is at once an essential part of the recent American past and a marginalized cultural element, familiar and unknown, widely believed but scarcely understood.
A
brief walking tour of charismatic Christianity is needed. As we travel, note this blanket term for both Pentecostalism and charismatics, a term I concede some may challenge is need‐ ed. The subject in question has many sources. In recent years, study of Pentecostalism and other continuationist groups has exploded in the American academy. The early roots of the movement are in places shrouded in mystery, but the portraiture that has emerged is rich, showing an untamed movement with many branches. Though it has not always enjoyed concrete ties to evangelicalism, charismatic Christianity is a historic subset of it. As historian Douglas Sweeney has argued, evangelicalism emerged out of the Reformation but took its specific shape from the “eighteenth‐century twist” that was the First Great Awakening, the epoch when figures like Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and John Wesley, influenced by both Moravians and Puritans, evangelized across regional and denomina‐ tional borders. The movement pulsed with life as the gospel slipped institutional bonds, creating new religious identities—loosely co‐ hered around “pro‐revival” and “anti‐revival—and spurring the de‐ velopment of the nineteenth century missions initiative. Evangelicalism was a wild and woolly affair, filled with iconic leaders, frothy battles, and explosive growth. Nathan Hatch has ar‐ 49
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gued that the spread of the gospel changed the face of religion in this country, “democratizing” it and releasing it from historic strictures such that Baptists and Methodists exploded in numbers (a point cor‐ roborated by Roger Finke and Rodney Starke in The Churching of America). The roots of the Pentecostal movement grew in verdant evangelical soil just outside the denominational forest. As noted by Allan Anderson, controversial figures like Charles Finney claimed unusual power in preaching given them by the Holy Ghost. Phoebe Palmer taught in the latter part of the century that holiness was akin to a “second baptism of the holy ghost,” a notion that some shunned but that others found electrifying. Eschewing the mortified liberalism of once‐fresh groups in this period, Holiness and Methodist Chris‐ tians sought a fresh encounter with the living God. When Charles Boardman’s Keswick teaching on a “higher life” caught on in Eng‐ land and D. L. Moody and R. A. Torrey began seeking the power of a “second blessing” in Chicago, the tree really began to sprout. It would soon reach a height none of its early advocates could have imagined, promoted by personalities straight out of a Hollywood script. Charles Parham from Kansas was the first to connect the pow‐ er of Holy Spirit baptism with physical healing. A selection from his preaching on Matthew 8:16‐17 shows the force of his style and the firmness of his conclusions: Infirmities are the weaknesses that come with age, while sickness is acquired; if He bare them, we have no more right to bear them, or continue in them, than we have in sin. No fighter of the truths of Divine Healing can find any more forcible passage, or one whose worth is any more age-lasting, in reference to the forgiveness of sins, or cleansing from all sin, than this is for healing. Who took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses. Training students at his Bethel Gospel School of Topeka in exactly one sourcebook—the Bible—Parham urged his students to seek a second Pentecost (the origin of the group’s general moniker). The teaching did not exactly take, but when a blind African American holiness preacher named William Seymour attended another school set up by Parham in Houston, the resulting events looked to some like Parham’s prayers were answered. Seymour led the movement after Parham fell into disgrace, preach‐ ing on Azusa Street in Los Angeles in spring 1906 to throngs of lis‐ 50
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teners. The dean of historians of Pentecostalism, Grant Wacker, has noted that from this point forward “the movement acquired a con‐ spicuously multi‐ethnic face.” Seymour’s teaching, including the call for revival, Spirit baptism, and tongues‐speech, sparked such groups as the Assemblies of God, the Church of God in Christ, the Church of God, and the Pentecostal Holiness Church, each explored profitably by Randall Stephens in The Fire Spreads. If Parham and Seymour were not unique enough, Aimee Semple McPherson broke the mold. Made for the stage, McPherson opened her Angelus Temple in 1923 and preached her “Four‐square gospel” to thousands, urging her hearers to accept four key theological views of the Son of God: Jesus is the Savior, Jesus is the Healer, Jesus is the Baptizer with the Holy Spirit, and Jesus is the Soon‐Coming King. Matthew Avery Sutton has surveyed the paradox of McPherson, not‐ ing her abilities to preach vividly, market herself as a personality, and use the latest technology to spread her message. Though she is some‐ times passed over by historians today, Sutton notes that “Crowds by the thousands streamed down the sawdust trail to her altars” in faith and repentance. “Sister Aimee” and her four‐square gospel was just one innovation of the period that drew controversy; the “Oneness Pentecostals” that came out of the Assemblies of God caused an up‐ roar with their teaching that God was not a Trinity but one person. A number of the major Pentecostal denominations took on formal structure as the twentieth century rolled on. Interest in charismata, “spiritual gifts” as outlined in 1 Corinthians 12 and Romans 12, caught on mid‐century as Christians from a wide array of traditions began seeking the experience of speaking in tongues. Many of these adherents, however, did not join Pentecostal churches. They came to constitute what has been called a “charismatic renewal,” the “second wave” following the first at the turn of the century. In the 1960s and 70s, groups like Calvary Chapel, begun by Chuck Smith, the Jesus People, associated with Lonnie Frisbee, and Oral Roberts University, endowed with the name of its leader, merged bold evangelistic wit‐ ness with belief in the spiritual gifts and watched as hundreds of thousands flocked to their preaching. Through the efforts of Smith and Frisbee, the counter‐culture now had an in‐road to the church; through Roberts’s realized vision, Pentecostals saw the extent of their institutional strength. According to Wacker, by the end of the twenti‐
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eth century, the AOG and the COGIC claimed millions of members apiece for a total of perhaps ten million Pentecostals in America. Over the course of the century, the movement spread abroad, win‐ ning millions upon millions of converts by many estimates. In Africa, where estimates of Christians range up to 150 million at present, pro‐ fessing Christians are often charismatic Christians, as Philip Jenkins has noted. The same is true of China, which according to some re‐ search may house well over 100 million Christians, a good portion of whom are said to be charismatic. Lamin Sanneh has led scholars in identifying a “global shift” in the balance of Christianity. According to Sanneh, “The communities of the North Atlantic are fast becoming the church’s arid land or at least its shrinking base; meanwhile, the societies of the Southern Hemisphere are emerging as new Christian strongholds.” Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity are on the bleeding edge of this trend due in part to the unfettered promotion, equalizing influence, and enlivening nature of “Holy Ghost” theolo‐ gy. In the eyes of many, this is the dominant story of contemporary Christianity. If charismatic Christianity may be likened to a tree, then one can only conclude that it has blossomed.
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entecostals and charismatics have enjoyed a unique relation‐ ship with the broader evangelical movement. Before looking into the present state of affairs, it is helpful to look at several historical touchpoints that fill out the rapprochement between these groups. The adoption by D. L. Moody and others of a form of Pente‐ costal theology at the turn of the twentieth century lended the movement significant credibility. A similar benchmark occurred in the 1940s when Harold John Ockenga, pastor of Park Street Church and president of the National Association of Evangelicals, reached out to various Pentecostal denominations to include them in the NAE, his trans‐denominational coalition designed to agitate for a place at the cultural table. The NAE has continued to be a gathering point for diverse Christian groups, though several of the largest char‐ ismatic denominations do not belong to it. The movement received an unexpected and controversial en‐ dorsement when Puritanesque preacher D. Martyn Lloyd‐Jones pro‐ fessed a nuanced belief in baptism of the Spirit. In Spiritual Blessing, Lloyd‐Jones wrote the following on the topic: 52
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[W]hen we come on to the Book of Acts, we read that the Spirit was poured out on the Day of Pentecost. That is the term that is used ‘poured out’. Nothing is ever said about this except we get this impression of profusion. It is overwhelming; it is a baptism; it is a shower coming upon us and it is unmistakable. So we are told that on the Day of Pentecost the believers were all ‘filled with the Holy Ghost’ (Acts 2:4). Filled! And we find the same term in Acts 4:31, and in many other places. “The Doctor” rejected the popular view that tongues‐speech wit‐ nessed to Spirit baptism, and he took pains to distance himself from what he saw as excesses of the movement. But his endorsement cre‐ ated new receptivity in reformed circles to charismatic theology. The 1980s witnessed the rise of the “Religious Right,” a group of evangelical power‐brokers that included Pentecostal leader Pat Rob‐ ertson and Roberts. The machinations of these and other members of the coalition played a major role in the presidential elections of the 1980s, and to a lesser extent the ascendancy of a Republican congress in the 1990s. David John Marley has noted the dual significance of this success in Robertson’s life: “as he helped bring Charismatics into wider acceptance theologically, he has [also] helped conservative Christians claim their place in the sun.” Our Lord pitted secular and spiritual power against one another; for Robertson and others, the attainment of one only seemed to enhance the other. A key part of the narrative linking charismatics and mainstream evangelicals is the role of “worship music,” a staple of groups like the Vineyard Movement. Led initially by John Wimber, this thread of charismatic Christianity began in the late 1970s and early 80s and soon gained thousands of members in part because of its laid‐back style and immersive musical worship. Many of the leading “worship artists” of recent decades have had some association with Vineyard churches; essentially, if one has become a known entity in Contempo‐ rary Christian Music (CCM), one has enjoyed some connection with this movement. Vineyard acquired increased theological heft when Wayne Grudem, perhaps the most prominent conservative Christian theologian, publicized his embrace of the charismatic position on spiritual gifts. The reformed resurgence, profiled by Collin Hansen and subse‐ quently recognized in publications like Time and the Christian Post, includes several widely respected charismatic leaders and has led some to wonder whether cessationism is “out” and qualified ac‐ 53
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ceptance of the spiritual gifts is “in,” if one can be forgiven for using the language of teen‐magazines for theological discussion. C. J. Ma‐ haney and Joshua Harris of the Sovereign Grace churches are per‐ haps the best known of this ilk. Mahaney, author of such modern‐day spiritual classics as Humility and The Cross‐Centered Life, is a core member of Together for the Gospel, the conference built on unity in the gospel that in 2010 drew over 7,000 people to Louisville, KY. Har‐ ris, one of evangelicalism’s best‐selling authors on the strength of Why I Kissed Dating Goodbye and other works, is a member of the Gospel Coalition, a network of leading pastors that grounds its iden‐ tity in gospel centrality and cultural contextualization. Still other ventures have linked the two groups. Much Christian media is pro‐ duced by continuationists. Trinity Broadcasting Network, GodTV, Relevant magazine, Charisma magazine, Vineyard Music, the Hillsong media and more are products of Pentecostals and charismatics (sev‐ eral of these productions feature such controversial speakers as Ben‐ ny Hinn, Kenneth Copeland, T.D. Jakes) yet these ventures regularly blend teaching and engagement from a spectrum of commentators.
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or all of this interaction there is still considerable distance be‐ tween many evangelicals and Pentecostals and charismatics. There are myriad reasons for this reality, the most prominent being the divergent backgrounds of the two movements (if we can indeed slice and dice in this way). The causes for this divergence are also diverse. In the nineteenth century and the first half of the twenti‐ eth, Pentecostalism was to some extent a marginalized movement, at least in terms of evangelical cultural influence. Moody and others helped to change this situation, but until Ockenga unveiled his big‐ tent plans for the NAE, many fundamentalists and conservative Christians had little contact with Pentecostals. One factor in this separation is surely race and class. Wacker and others have done careful work to overturn certain half‐truths on the‐ se points, but nonetheless, the fact that Pentecostal views caught on amongst otherwise marginalized peoples cannot be overlooked. This reality has received much challenge in ways that we have examined, but it is no easy matter to bridge gaps more than a century old. While social analysis has a significant role in analyzing this story, theology is likely the most important factor in the gap between con‐ servative evangelicals, who have not historically incorporated the 54
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gifts into their theology, and charismatics. Many evangelicals do not believe that the gifts are active today, at least not in an evangelized context. These camps take different views of 1 Corinthians 12 and 14 and Romans 12. Contrary to what some social historians and com‐ mentators might argue, the primary reason for the divergence is exe‐ getical and theological. In discussing this gap, both sides would bring other claims to the table. Evangelicals would argue that there are and have been serious theological deficiencies in sectors of the charismatic movement. John MacArthur’s rigorous Charismatic Chaos outlined the concerns of some in this camp, though MacArthur has a very public and cordial friendship with Mahaney. Events like the Toronto Blessing and even the recent Lakeland Revival have raised major concerns among evangelicals (concerns shared by many charismatics), as the experi‐ entialism, loose exegesis, and promotion of the abhorrent “prosperity gospel” of some groups that emphasize the spiritual gifts. How, some query, are we to view “prophecy?” If the Spirit inspires an insight or prediction and it is not correct, what has happened—has God erred? When church members speak at the “prophecy mic” and give a poor interpretation or application of Scripture, what has happened—does the Spirit sometimes slip up? If divine healing happens regularly at conferences and events, why does there seem so little tangible proof? Certainly, charismatics can provide answers to these and other ques‐ tions, but the state of the contemporary conversation suggests that further discussion is needed. Pentecostals and charismatics would suggest to evangelicals that they consider afresh their approach to Scripture. The danger of quenching and silencing the Spirit is real (1 Thessalonians 5:19), and all Christians should be open to this danger. Reports from other countries—China and Africa—suggest at least the possibility of the continuation of the spiritual gifts and should be carefully parsed and considered by evangelicals. Furthermore, it is certainly true that evangelicals have not always treated Pentecostals and charismatics fairly. Where we can spot examples of this today, we should work for equality in Christ and be mindful of the way we approach gospel‐ believing brothers and sisters in Christ. Lastly and significantly, there is a certain amount of humility that evangelicals owe continuationists. Much as we might think that we and our direct forebears might be responsible for the major share of 55
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kingdom treasure in recent centuries, it would do us well to recon‐ sider this portentous claim. This is no hog contest; we are not simply urging fairness in counting. Christians of varying groups and de‐ nominations are united through Christocentric faith. The point, ra‐ ther, is that in a good number of cases, the margins have led the mainstream in evangelizing, missions work, social justice involve‐ ment, and even discipling. Donald Dayton has pointed out that, in contrast to what many Christian academics argue, historic evangelical Christianity has a noteworthy “Pentecostal” flavor to it. In combating what he calls the “Presbyterian” paradigm of origins and influence, Dayton over‐ reaches, but his words are instructive. When we consider the sheer number of Pentecostals and charismatics and the booming industries they self‐sustain—publishing (Strang Book Group, Charisma, one of the top five digital magazines), conferences (Ignite, Mighty Men), and television (GodTV claims half a billion viewers a year), our un‐ derstanding of our own size is chastened. Evangelicalism is a mixed, rambunctious, and sprawling reality, in‐ cluding diverse traditions and influences. While the reformed and conservative wing has been unusually influential in formulating the dominant creeds and theological positions of the movement, Chris‐ tians of all types and places have contributed in myriad ways to the theology, missiology, devotion, faith, and upbuilding of the church. One need not cling to a minimalist piety to believe this; it is merely good history and due charity. One need not agree with everyone to recognize that many contribute to the work of advancing the king‐ dom and its gospel. Paul said this many years before us in Philippi‐ ans 1:15‐18: Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from good will. The latter do it out of love, knowing that I am put here for the defense of the gospel. The former proclaim Christ out of rivalry, not sincerely but thinking to afflict me in my imprisonment. What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice. Coupled with careful reading of Scripture, a growing awareness of this reality will only strengthen the church as it testifies to the su‐ premacy of its Lord in a fallen world. 56
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he question before us—how do charismatics relate to broader evangelicalism?—will not recede. Careful thinking is required on many fronts to address it. True doctrinal unity between all members of God’s church, though a worthy goal, will not prove pos‐ sible in this world. Christians will likely continue to read different texts related to continuationist theology along different lines. This will have implications for the shape of fellowship and membership. The realities of the past do bear on the present. In sum, there are sig‐ nificant textual, theological, and social divides between charismatics and evangelicals. Yet there is a greater reality than this. Though the charismatic movement grew on the margin of evangelicalism, yet it drew its life and nourishment from evangelical soil. Pentecostals and charismatics who embrace biblical Christianity and the supremacy of Christ the Savior are as much a part of actual evangelicalism—contrasted with social or organizational evangelicalism—as any other group. The evangelical experiment is grounded most foundationally, after all, not in denomination, class, or region, but in the saving news of Christ disclosed by God and shed abroad in our hearts through the Spirit. We wonder, then, if the “charismatic question” as posed here and elsewhere already has its answer. This world, beautiful in design yet obstinate in heart, cannot stop its ears. Diverse voices, whether drunken rock stars or backwoods Pentecostal preachers, testify to the reality of Christʹs return. The God who draws people from every tribe and tongue is not far off or silent. He will soon call the roll, and everyone, including those who know not of what they sing, will see him with their own eyes.
Owen Strachan teaches theology and church history at Boyce College in Louisville, Kentucky, and is the coauthor of The Essential Edwards Collection. He holds a PhD from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and is an AB graduate of Bowdoin College. 57
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T HE L ESSONS OF I RAQ ]right0and0wrong} Paul D. Miller
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he United States invaded Iraq and overthrew its gov‐ ernment in 2003. Over the next seven and a half years, it spent $709 billion and lost over 4,400 soldiers fighting an insurgency and attempting to rebuild the Iraqi govern‐ ment and economy. In August 2010, President Obama announced the United States had ended its combat mission in Iraq and has withdrawn more than two‐thirds of the U.S. forces deployed there. He recently announced a drawdown which would return the vast majority of forces home by the end of 2011. What are the lessons of Iraq? That question will fill volumes and occupy careers in coming years. The war will cast a long shadow over a generation of scholars and policymakers who wrangle over how our experience in Iraq ought to shape our understanding of the United States’ role in the world. It is a difficult question to talk about in polite company because it requires some kind of moral judgment, the foundations for which our contemporary political culture is ill‐ equipped to provide. It is also a difficult story to tell because the con‐ ventional narratives, both liberal and conservative, are simplistic and wrong. It is not true that Bush lied and manipulated America into an un‐ necessary war, that the war was never connected to al‐Qaida, that he was secretly motivated to secure Middle Eastern oil supplies, or that the U.S. military was ultimately defeated by the superior will of the noble Iraqi resistance. But it is equally untrue that that United States effortlessly liberated and spread democracy to a blighted land, that our soldiers were greeted with flowers and parades, or that the war, when all was said and done, ended up as a straightforward victory. 58
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The truth is far more ambiguous. The United States, motivated by a legitimate, though overstated, concern over Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and record of aggression, launched a war to overthrow the Iraqi regime and end its proliferation activities. That war was essentially over in a matter of weeks. However, the United States failed to plan adequately for postwar reconstruction, partly because the U.S. has under‐invested in its own peacebuilding capabilities for decades. The resulting power vacuum invited various groups, in‐ cluding Ba’athists, al‐Qaida, Sunni tribes, and Shia militias, to launch an insurgency against American forces—to which the U.S. initially responded ineptly, exacerbating the problem. These groups also competed for power, erupting into open civil war in 2006. The surge of American forces to Iraq in 2007 was a courageous and necessary last‐ditch attempt to live up to our responsibilities. It succeeded in averting the worst‐possible outcome for Iraq and the world, but Iraq will certainly be a much worse place for years to come than if the United States had intervened more carefully and with better fore‐ thought for Iraq’s peace and reconstruction in the first place.
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nvoking “our responsibilities” and “forethought for Iraq’s peace” suggests the primary ethical lesson of the Iraq War for Christians: just war aims at peace. The true aim of a just war is the fostering of a more just and lasting peace than what previously existed. As Saint Augustine argued in The City of God, “Peace is the end sought for by war. For every man seeks peace by waging war, but no man seeks war by making peace. For even they who intentionally inter‐ rupt the peace in which they are living have no hatred of peace, but only wish it changed into a peace that suits them better. They do not, therefore, wish to have no peace, but only one more to their mind.” War should not aim at revenge, honor, or profit. It should not even aim at self‐interest, if self‐interest is understood narrowly to mean my own state’s immediate and provincial needs to the exclusion or detriment of other’s needs. Rather, war aims at the construction of security and a better approximation of justice for everyone—for our enemies as well as for ourselves. That is the necessary consequence of following a Savior who commands us to love our enemies. Daniel Bell echoed Augustine in his recent book, Just War As Chris‐ tian Discipleship. “If one’s intent in waging war is indeed just, if one really loves one’s enemies and intends to bring the benefits of peace 59
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and justice to them, then one will not abandon them when the shoot‐ ing stops but will be involved in the restoration of a just peace. If one truly desires justice, then one will stay the course and see justice through to completion,” he argued, “which may include a financial commitment, devoting adequate civil affairs and police personnel, as well as perhaps coordinating with nongovernmental organizations in the work of reconstruction.” Some of the lessons from Iraq are mundane lessons of manage‐ ment. The occupation was characterized by poor coordination and the absence of unity of command or unity of effort. Policy decisions from the President and the National Security Council, including a decision to keep the Iraqi Army intact and on the U.S. payroll, were overridden by subordinates in the field and went unenforced without consequences. Routine policy implementation operated with little accountability or oversight. There is little to say about these lessons other than to pray that bureaucrats in the future have studied history and management and know how to do better. It is worth focusing on the primary ethical lesson—that just war rightly aims at peace—because a large part of what went wrong in Iraq was that U.S. policymakers lost sight of the true aim and end of war. When U.S. officials lost sight of the peace at which war should aim—for example, by failing to plan adequately for postwar Iraq, or by the Army’s failure to understand its responsibilities to help with reconstruction and stabilization—Iraq suffered and the war wors‐ ened. When American officials belatedly remembered their responsi‐ bility to work for peace (embodied in the surge strategy), it was pre‐ cisely when the United States began to reverse the slide towards chaos and defeat. Consider the record of post‐war planning. According to most ac‐ counts, what planning there was for a post‐war Iraq was rushed, shallow, and inadequate. Central Command, the military’s headquar‐ ters in the Middle East, produced planning so poor that U.S. officials just ignored it, according to Tom Ricks’ account in his book, Fiasco. The President created the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, according to Bob Woodward, in January 2003, just two months prior to the invasion. Jay Garner, the director of the new or‐ ganization, convened a conference of experts from across the gov‐ ernment to review the reconstruction of Iraq in February, just weeks before the war started. One of the conference’s main conclusions was 60
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that there had been inadequate planning for post‐war operations. The Defense Department initially planned to withdraw most U.S. troops within six months of the fall of the Ba’athist regime. American soldiers in Baghdad shortly after the Ba’athist regime fell from power literally did not have orders about what to do next. “It wasn’t that there was no planning,” Ricks wrote, who did exten‐ sive research on the issue. “To the contrary, there was a lot, with at least three groups inside the military and one at the State Depart‐ ment working on postwar issues and producing thousands of pages of documents. But much of that planning was shoddy, there was no one really in charge of it, and there was little coordination between the various groups.” This view showed almost no concern at all for Iraqis, excused sometimes by a flippant and naïve belief that the Iraqis would be able to care for their own needs as soon as they were liberated from Ba’ath tyranny. Nothing in history suggests such a belief was justified. The absence of serious planning for post‐war Iraq suggested a lack of concern for peace in Iraq among U.S. war planners. War plans that do not describe how we get to justice and peace are not simply incom‐ plete. They are unjust.
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onsider as well the military’s initial choices and actions after the fall of Baghdad. The U.S. military was left without a plan for what to do next. In the power vacuum that followed, an insurgency developed against American forces. The U.S. Army’s ini‐ tial response to that insurgency—heavy‐handed and careless—was another of the United States’ major mistakes of the war, and another example of a failure to fight for peace. Counterinsurgency is one of the most challenging of all military operations because it requires militaries to use force mixed with oth‐ er tools of national power, like reconstruction and development assis‐ tance. The United States has fought counterinsurgencies before, in‐ cluding a 14‐year campaign in the Philippines (1899‐1913) and, of course, in Vietnam. The problem is that the United States lost the Vietnam War and as a result, the U.S. Army became allergic to coun‐ terinsurgency. The Army learned the wrong lesson, viewing counter‐ insurgency as messy and unproductive, and discarding knowledge that could’ve been gained from the Vietnam experience. The tools of reconstruction, stabilization, and peacebuilding rusted with age. 61
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As a result, the U.S. Army in Iraq in 2003 was untrained and un‐ ready to assume the responsibilities of administering postwar Iraq, to interact with Iraqi civilians, or to respond in an effective, proportion‐ al, calibrated way to the small acts of violence that cumulatively make up an insurgency. The Army had specialized for decades in one thing: the delivery of awe‐inspiring amounts of firepower with tech‐ nological exactitude against people, equipment, and buildings it wants to annihilate. The Army was trained to destroy. It did not know how to fight for peace. Ricks recounts how the Army resorted to massive sweeps by large conventional forces to round up all military‐aged males in a region; how soldiers burst into houses, breaking furniture and house wares, to arrest men in front of their families; how convoys tore up Iraqi streets and cars with aggressive driving to deter ambushes and avoid bombs; how the Army called in artillery and airstrikes against insur‐ gents that also destroyed buildings and infrastructure. These kinds of operations make sense if your main goal is to kill enemies. They are counterproductive if your goal is to build peace. A crucial part of counterinsurgency is upholding order and sup‐ porting a legitimate government—i.e., working for peace. One anec‐ dote in Bob Woodward’s book State of Denial captures the military’s early disregard for these goals well. According to Woodward, a sub‐ ordinate told General McKiernan, the commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq in 2003, that U.S. forces needed to stop the looting that had erupted after the fall of the Ba’athist government. “Our mission is to reestablish the government, and we can’t do it if everything’s being destroyed,” he said. “I don’t ever want to hear that from your lips again,” McKiernan replied, “That is not my job.” That is a surprising statement: McKiernan reportedly believed that it was not his job to restore order to a country he had just invaded and occupied. If just war aims at peace, McKiernan’s response was morally incompetent. When U.S. forces did not stop the looting, “The message sent to Iraqis…was that the U.S. government didn’t care,” according to Ricks.
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ust war aims at peace. War that does not aim at peace is horribly destructive, as was vividly on display in Iraq. The collective result of inadequate planning plus the Army’s initial rejection of counter‐ insurgency warfare led to catastrophe. The litany of American follies 62
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is long and famous: American forces permitted law and order in Iraq to collapse after the fall of the Ba’athist regime. The Coalition Provi‐ sional Authority (CPA) disbanded the Iraqi Army, immediately creat‐ ing tens of thousands of young, armed, unemployed, and angry Iraqi men. Most U.S. generals continued to use a heavy‐handed conven‐ tional‐war approach for years after the emergence of the Iraqi insur‐ gency when there are entire textbooks describing why that is stupid. Billions of dollars meant to help reconstruct Iraq were lost to waste, fraud, and abuse. And some U.S. soldiers mistreated, abused, and humiliated Iraqi prisoners. These were the natural consequence of waging war without thought for the peace at which war is supposed to aim. Some of the United States’ mistakes created a vacuum of power in which the in‐ surgency thrived; other mistakes directly fueled the insurgency by embittering Iraqis. Despite the U.S. military’s vaunted professional‐ ism, training, and excellence, it was very nearly defeated while Iraq plunged into chaos and civil war. It is this—the manifest failure of the U.S. government to follow through on its commitments—that is hardest to face by supporters of the war, and casts the most doubt on the justice of the war. A just war must be prosecuted with right intention. According to Augustine, the only right intention in war is the love of our neighbor, including our enemy neighbor, by desiring to bring the blessings of peace and jus‐ tice to them. That is exactly what we failed to do for the Iraqis after we overthrew their government. No doubt many individual supporters of the war were sincere in their idealistic intentions, but the question is of the intentions of the U.S. government as a whole. America’s record of stupidity, conceit, and inattention in Iraq did not bespeak love for Iraqis. Had those idealistic intentions been backed up by the programs, policies, and budgets necessary to become a reality, had they been embraced with enthusiasm and can‐do gusto by the Departments of State and Defense from the senior leadership to the desk officer and the footsoldier, had they been articulated, defended, and implement‐ ed with clarity, competence, and humility by the President and the Congress, the American intervention in Iraq might well have made the world a more just and peaceful place. From 2003 to 2006, they were not. 63
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ut the Iraq War has one more lesson to teach, or one more way of teaching that just war rightly aims at peace. In the midst of the Iraqi Civil War of 2006, as U.S. forces were on the brink of being overrun and defeated, President Bush fired his Secretary of Defense, appointed a new commanding general, adopted a new counterinsurgency strategy, and ordered 30,000 more soldiers into the breach. He did so in the face of overwhelming opposition from the U.S. Congress, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, most of the uniformed military, the international community, and the American public. One poll at the time showed that only 17 percent of Americans supported it. To critics, it was a staggering display of stubborn hubris. To his few remaining supporters, it was an astonishing act of political cour‐ age. I suspect history will side with the supporters. President Bush ordered the surge because he was convinced too much was at stake to withdraw and leave Iraq to sectarian conflict. He came to believe that the United States was losing the war. But that led him to the opposite conclusion of his critics, like Democratic Congressman Jack Murtha, who believed losing meant we should withdraw. Instead, Bush doubled down. The surge was the United States’ last swing at achieving some kind of peace in Iraq, having neglected that goal for three and a half years. Critics maintained that because the insurgency did not exist before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and actually formed largely in response to it, U.S. efforts to fight it were somehow illegitimate or futile. Of course that is silly: the moral responsibility for the insurgency was first and foremost with the insurgents. But secondly, even granting that the U.S. helped create the opportunity for the insurgency through negligence and folly does not excuse us from responsibility to rectify the situation. In fact, the opposite is true. We bore even more responsibility to stay in Iraq and help Iraqis escape the violence that we had, indirectly and inadvertently, allowed to be unleashed on their country. If you rush into a burning building to save someone and accidentally tip over a can of gasoline and make the fire worse, you don’t sneak out the back in shame. You stay and try to undo the damage, and at least try to save the people trapped in flames. The surge was an act of belated but necessary wisdom, a corrective to our earlier negligence of the true aim of war. Bush rightly saw that the U.S. intervention in Iraq was not achieving peace, but that with‐ drawal also would not achieve peace. The surge was the only option 64
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that still had peace as its goal and purpose. It was the only just choice. And it was only when the United States reoriented its war effort in Iraq to aim at peace that we began to make at least some progress towards a more stable order in that country.
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ynicism, withdrawal, and isolationism are not the right lesson of the Iraq War. Benjamin Friedman of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, argued in 2008 that “What Iraq demon‐ strates is a need for a new national security strategy, not better tactics and tools to serve the current one. By insisting that there was a right way to remake Iraq, we ignore the limits on our power that the en‐ terprise has exposed and we risk repeating our mistake.” He contin‐ ued, “Maybe the United States can improve its ability to manage oc‐ cupations, but the principal lesson Iraq teaches is to avoid them. Not all state‐building missions pose the challenges Iraq does, but most of these missions are extremely costly, most of them fail, and most of them corrode American power.” Friedman’s analysis is echoed by Republican presidential candi‐ dates Ron Paul, a Republican Congressman from Texas, and Jon Huntsman, former governor of Utah. Paul and Huntsman have both called for the U.S. to withdraw troops from overseas and focus on issues at home. Similarly, Republicans in Congress have repeatedly sought to cut foreign aid. Paul, Huntsman, and Congressional Re‐ publicans are responding to what they are hearing from the public. Americans are showing widespread and increasing skepticism of foreign aid, and reconstruction and stabilization operations. Most people seem to believe, as Friedman said, that such missions are too expensive, too hard, and not our business. They are wrong. Reconstruction and stabilization operations are not a dispensable exercise in charity: they are sometimes a necessary component of our national security, as they were in Germany and Japan after World War II, when rebuilding those countries was part of our containment strategy against the Soviet Union. Since the end of the Cold War we’ve generally outsourced these kinds of opera‐ tions to the United Nations when they are not vital to our interests (as in Namibia, Mozambique, and elsewhere), and only taken a more direct role when they are closer to our interests (as in the Balkans). In Iraq and Afghanistan reconstruction and stabilization are simply the names for the civilian side of counterinsurgency. Finally, these opera‐ 65
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tions can be comparatively cheaper than the alternative. Rebuilding Germany was fantastically expensive, but it was cheaper than keep‐ ing it on life support for a generation or simply ceding it to the Sovi‐ ets. Rebuilding Afghanistan is costly, but not as costly as its reversion to anarchy. The lesson of Iraq is not that we should never attempt an occupa‐ tion or a reconstruction and stabilization operation again. It is that we should choose carefully when and where we do so; that we en‐ sure such efforts are strategically necessary; that we focus on build‐ ing peace; and that when we go, we go “all in,” we surge from day one. The lesson of Iraq is not that idealism is dangerous, or that fos‐ tering democracy is a fool’s errand. The opposite is true. War must always be motivated by ideals: a concern for justice, a desire to create peace, and a love for our neighbors, including our enemy neighbors. The alternative is to live in a world where war is simply a matter of cold, cynical calculation about whose death is most beneficial for us. There is little distinction between statecraft and murder in that world, and no Christian’s conscience, realist or neoconservative, should be able to condone that. But in pursuing ideals, we absolutely must do so with as much pragmatism, competence, and realistic appreciation for the limits of this fallen world as possible. Naïve crusading in the name of a pious ideal is dangerously foolish foreign policy. Some will argue that avoiding crusades is the real lesson of the Iraq War, but that is an unfair cheap shot. The Iraq War was never a pure exercise in idealis‐ tic humanitarian war (look to Libya for that). Besides, few people today need reminding about the dangers of military adventurism. Judging from the mood of voters and politicians in the post‐Iraq world, it seems far more likely that for the next decade we will be too hesitant, not too eager, to act abroad in defense of our interests and in pursuit of a just peace. That would be a tragedy and a defeat.
Paul D. Miller is assistant professor of international security studies at the National Defense University. Previously, he served as director for Afghanistan on the National Security Council staff and a political analyst in the U.S. intelligence community. The views in this article are the author's, not those of the U.S. government. 66
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Books & Culture
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C OMMAND P ERFORMANCE \god0and0morality| Louis A. Markos Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality, by David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls. Oxford, 2011.
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s our political debates become less and less logical and irenic, as they rely more and more on spin, name calling, and a refusal to concede any points to the opposition, Thomas Aquinas’s method of argumenta‐ tion appears increasingly attractive. In his Summa, Aquinas begins each section by listing the reasons against the propo‐ sition he will defend. He even does this for the proposition that God exists (Part I, Question 2, Article 3)—though, significantly, he is only able to identify two rational reasons for denying God’s existence: the ubiquitous presence of pain and suffering and the belief that every‐ thing can be explained by natural processes.
The ever‐mounting controversy over Intelligent Design attests to the latter argument’s still being alive and well. Meanwhile, the prob‐ lem of pain—the argument that human suffering suggests that God is either too powerless to stop it or too apathetic to care to—continues to be the strongest and most frequently‐used argument against the existence of the all‐powerful, all‐loving God of the Bible. New athe‐ ists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have made par‐ ticularly effective use of it in their anti‐theistic crusade. Indeed, they, along with other critics of God (that is, the Judeo‐Christian God), have aggressively pushed the problem of pain from its negative for‐ mulation into its positive. The problem is not just that God allows evil; he actively promotes it when, for example, he commands Abra‐ ham to sacrifice his son Isaac or orders the Israelites to wipe out the Canaanites from the Holy Land. 68
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Behind this positive formulation lies a much deeper critique of the‐ ism that goes back at least as far as Plato’s Euthyphro. In the dialogue, Socrates engages his titular interlocutor in a debate over the founda‐ tion of morality. Is a thing moral because the gods say it is? If so, what if the gods command something impious? The debate is better known to us today in terms of a question often asked by the medie‐ val scholastics: Is a thing just because God does it, or does God do a thing because it is just? This may at first sound like a frivolous question, like asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but the dilemma it raises is far from frivolous. If we say that a thing is just because God says it is, then we are saying that whatever God commands is thereby just, moral, and good. But what if God commanded us to do something morally repugnant: like performing medical experiments on unwill‐ ing patients (as Hitler commanded the Nazis to do to “undesira‐ bles”), or murdering the members of a socio‐economic class (as Stalin commanded the Soviets to do to the Kulaks). Would the mere fact that God commanded such actions make them good? If so, then we risk worshipping an arbitrary, tyrannical deity and giving up the possibility of fixed moral standards. If, on the other hand, we say that God does a thing because it is just, we run into the problem of making God irrelevant to morality. True, God may take on the role of enforcer of morality, but his sover‐ eignty is thereby severely compromised. God becomes answerable to something outside of himself over which he has no control. Indeed, if we press the issue further, we risk falling into a scenario where mo‐ rality becomes an eternal, transcendent standard separate from God: a violation of the biblical doctrine of creation ex nihilo (“out of noth‐ ing”). “In the beginning,” Genesis 1:1 tells us, “God”—period! That is why the Nicene Creed asserts that God is the maker of “all things visible and invisible.” And that “all” includes any and all standards of goodness, truth, and beauty. In a sense, the Euthyphro dilemma throws us back on to the horns of the problem of pain. Either God is not intrinsically loving and just and merciful (morality is only what he says it is), or he lacks the power, primacy, and sovereignty that define him as God (he is only, as it were, a divine policeman).
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nter David Baggett, professor of philosophy at Liberty Univer‐ sity in Lynchburg, Virginia, and Jerry Walls, a former Re‐ search Fellow in the Center for Philosophy of Religion at Notre Dame who (I am proud to say) just joined my university as a visiting professor in philosophy. In their well written and powerfully argued book, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality, Baggett and Walls take on the Euthyphro dilemma in all its dimensions. In the process, they not only resolve the dilemma, but demonstrate effec‐ tively that the God revealed in the Bible best accounts for morality.
Rather than overwhelm their readers with philosophical jargon, Baggett and Walls adopt a conversational, but still formal tone, slow‐ ly incorporating, and carefully defining, the necessary terminology as they go. To say that a thing is just because God does it is to adopt a voluntarist (or divine command) theory, because God is free to give moral commands. The opposing position, which limits God to fol‐ lowing standards of morality, is called the nonvoluntarist (or guided will) theory. The strongest statement of divine command theory, they explain, is ascribed to William of Ockham who argued that “God’s sovereign choice fills in the content of morality... If God were to command, say, cruelty for cruelty’s sake ... then such acts would be rendered morally appropriate. Ockham, of course, felt God never would issue abhorrent commands, but that he could.” The authors of Good God take upon themselves the burden of de‐ fending a modified version of voluntarism that preserves God’s abso‐ lute sovereignty while not falling into the moral abyss of Ockham‐ ism. Their method for doing so is to agree that fixed, transcendent moral standards exist (rather like the Form of the Good posited by Plato) but then, along with Augustine, place those Forms into the Mind of God. If we accept that God himself is the Platonic standard of Goodness, then we preserve God’s sovereignty (he is not answera‐ ble to standards outside of himself) while making God’s essential goodness a trustworthy bulwark against God issuing an arbitrary or immoral command. Baggett and Walls develop this vital distinction further with help from Alvin Plantinga’s Does God Have a Nature? (1980). Building on Plantinga’s path‐breaking work, they adopt a simple but profound way of absolving God from charges of arbitrariness while preserving his sovereignty: “God believes a proposition because it is true, but the proposition exists because God thinks it.” In other words truth 70
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depends fully on God, but is not subject to a kind of divine control that could potentially become tyrannical. The reason that this seem‐ ing paradox is possible for God but not for us is that whereas truth is independent of our minds, it is not independent from God’s absolute consciousness. Critics of Plato have long held that an eternal, trans‐ cendent Form of Goodness could not exist because there is no one to think it. By responding that Goodness exists because it exists in the thoughts of an eternal, transcendent God (I AM), Plantinga simulta‐ neously silences critics of absolute moral standards and resolves the Euthyphro dilemma. Having factored Plantinga’s insights into their argument, Baggett and Walls proceed to take a further cue from Robert Adams’s Finite and Infinite Goods (1999). Not only does God’s mind contain Good‐ ness; God is himself the “exemplar, perfect standard, ultimate para‐ digm, and final source” of Goodness. Or to put it another way: “Good isn’t merely a property of God, but God himself.” But Adams does not stop here, and Baggett and Walls show themselves willing to follow him: “The sublime, the beautiful, the intrinsically excellent, all represent the ultimate Good that Adams thinks is a role best ful‐ filled by God himself.” Though a growing number of evangelical theologians and philosophers have (mostly wrongly, I think) dis‐ tanced themselves from Plato, Baggett and Walls are willing to find a greater theistic truth in the Platonic desire to bring together the Good, the True, and the Beautiful and to link them to the Beatific Vision that awaits the philosopher at the end of his journey. Post‐ modernism has pushed both secular and Christian philosophers to‐ ward a fragmentation of the Good, True, and Beautiful. Baggett and Walls show that Christians, rather than rejecting the absolute moral standards of Plato, can take them up into the full conscious person‐ hood of a loving God. Indeed, they argue that we cannot understand divine commands in the Old Testament that appear abhorrent to our moral sensibilities until we recognize that the “locus of authority for morality . . . is not an impersonal law but a personal God.” As a personal God, Yahweh allows moral latitude between “perfect duties” that impose a clear obligation (the divine injunction against adultery) and “imperfect duties” that allow for exceptions (the manner in which we will help the poor). Further latitude is found in the distinction between general moral commands and individual (or group) vocations. Yahweh, the 71
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personal God who called Israel into a special covenantal relationship, acts differently through Israel than through other nations, just as he acts differently through specially chosen individuals like Abraham, Moses, and David. Thus, in trying to reconcile the conquest of Canaan with accepted codes of morality, Baggett and Walls suggest that God may have known “that unless he were to command the Israelites to wipe out their enemies, they themselves would be wiped out.” As for the bind‐ ing of Isaac, they remind us that God’s purpose was to test his chosen vessel Abraham, not to receive unto himself (like Baal) the sacrifice of a child: “For the reader, the dramatic tension is not the content of the command, but whether Abraham will fully trust God, and what God will do to stop it. Including Abraham’s story in the history of revela‐ tion was a much more powerful way to show that God does not, in fact, want child sacrifice than just to say so.” Though most of Good God is written in such a way as to appeal to theists who don’t necessarily accept the full Christian revelation, Baggett and Walls do, in their final chapter, consider the deeper un‐ derstanding of morality that becomes accessible when we take into account the central Christian doctrines of the Trinity, Incarnation, Atonement, and Resurrection. Because Christianity teaches that our bodies and our world are not only good creations of God but will someday be redeemed, Christian morality is able to surpass that of the Stoics. Stoic courage and temperance generally rest on a world‐ and body‐despising ethos; Christians, in contrast, who reject worldly things for the sake of God’s higher call give up things that they con‐ sider good. The sacrifice is therefore greater, even as the vision— which looks to the perfection of the things renounced—is more won‐ derful and profound. Christianity means far more than following a law code: it means trusting in God and his promises; it means losing our lives that we might save them; it means enjoying forever the God who redeemed us.
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ood God delivers on its dual promise to resolve the Euthyphro dilemma and champion Christian theism as the best system for accounting for morality. But it does something else that, though it may not carry much resonance in wider philosophical cir‐ cles, will help spark a much‐needed debate within evangelical (espe‐ cially Baptist) circles. Over the last decade, there has been much dis‐ 72
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cussion as to whether evangelicalism is (or should be) more Calvinist or Arminian in its nature and self‐identity. Baggett and Walls boldly define themselves as Reformed Arminians who fully embrace salva‐ tion by grace through faith and the sovereignty of God but deny the U (unconditional election), L (limited atonement), and I (irresistible grace) of TULIP. Whereas they strive heroically, and effectively, to reconcile the Conquest and the binding of Isaac with morality, they reject as in‐ compatible with God’s nature the belief that before we were born and apart from any choices we would make in our lives, God chose our eternal destiny and set us on an unstoppable road to heaven or hell. They reject as well the belief that those who are members of the elect cannot refuse God’s grace. Their reason for doing so is based in part on their understanding of the love relationship that exists be‐ tween God and man. Such relationships, they explain, are “by their nature and logic . . . two‐way relationships. God’s irresistible grace, if it necessarily culminates in reconciliation and fellowship with God, seems like a divine love potion that, once administered, created eter‐ nal infatuation in the beloved, but no genuine love. . . The logic of love requires a more substantial element of volition.” While I find Baggett and Walls’s arguments compelling and well worth considering, it must be admitted that the approach taken by Baggett and Walls could easily lead to an acceptance of annihilation‐ alism—the belief that the damned will not spend eternity in hell but will be destroyed by God and cease to exist. The authors do not adopt this position, but their method risks leading theistic philoso‐ phers in that direction. Since our human understanding of morality cannot possibly fathom an eternal hell—especially when we stand it up against the choices made over a period of less than a century—we must find some way to disassociate the loving God of the Bible from this abhorrent teaching. Hence, we are driven by necessity to adopt annihilationalism.
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t could, of course, be fairly argued that such issues lie outside the scope of Good God. Baggett and Walls are not duty‐bound to take on all challenges to God’s character. There is, however, a deeper issue that lies behind not only questions of the Conquest and the binding of Isaac but of the eternal nature of hell that does need to be 73
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tackled more directly in the book. And that is the debate that sur‐ rounds the T of TULIP: total depravity. Both Baggett and Walls are C. S. Lewis scholars, and they make ex‐ cellent use in their book of ideas that are proposed or summarized in Lewis’s apologetical works. It is therefore puzzling that they never reference a series of passages from The Problem of Pain that lie at the very heart of the thesis of their book. First, in Chapter 6, Lewis direct‐ ly responds to the Euthyphro dilemma: It has sometimes been asked whether God commands certain things because they are right, or whether certain things are right because God commands them. With Hooker, and against Dr. Johnson, I emphatically embrace the first alternative. The second might lead to the abominable conclusion (reached, I think, by Paley) that charity is good only because God arbitrarily commanded it—that He might equally well have commanded us to hate Him and one another and that hatred would then have been right. Lewis here clearly adopts the nonvoluntarist position; yet, in all other ways, Lewis and the authors of Good God agree that the proper way to reconcile the dilemma is by making God himself the standard of morality. How can this be? The reason for the discrepancy is that Lewis’s trouble with volunta‐ rism is directly tied to his rejection of total depravity (as opposed to original sin, which he fully embraces). Lewis makes the connection clear in the opening of Chapter 3: . . . if God’s moral judgement differs from ours so that our “black” may be His “white,” we can mean nothing by calling Him good; for to say “God is good,” while asserting that His goodness is wholly other than ours, is really only to say “God is we know not what.” And an utterly unknown quality in God cannot give us moral grounds for loving or obeying Him. If He is not (in our sense) “good” we shall obey, if at all, only through fear—and should be equally ready to obey an omnipotent Fiend. The doctrine of Total Depravity—when the consequence is drawn that, since we are totally depraved, our idea of good is worth simply nothing—may thus turn Christianity into a form of devil-worship. Lewis here offers a critique of Calvinism that Baggett and Walls do not make. It is the T of TULIP, Lewis argues, that perpetuates the 74
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Euthyphro dilemma. If we are so utterly depraved as to have no un‐ derstanding of the basic tenets of morality (those fixed, transcendent standards that Baggett and Walls so ably defend), then we are left incapable of evaluating any of the commands given by God— whether in the Bible or in our own lives. In Chapter 4, Lewis returns to this issue one more time to state, un‐ equivocally: “I disbelieve that doctrine [total depravity], partly on the logical ground that if our depravity were total we should not know ourselves to be depraved, and partly because experience shows us much goodness in human nature.” Along with Baggett and Walls, Lewis relies on simple observation and common sense to tell him that human beings are capable of understanding the rudiments of good and evil, and of choosing good over evil on many occasions. Why then is there a seeming disconnect between Lewis and the au‐ thors of Good God on this point? The disconnect comes, I believe, from ambiguity surrounding the definition of total depravity. Most Calvinists today would define it as the belief that all aspects of our being—from our reason to our passions to our wills—have been sub‐ jected to the Fall. I firmly believe that if C. S. Lewis had been offered such a definition, he would have accepted it. Alas, even if this is the more or less official definition of total depravity used by Calvinists today, I would argue that in common parlance it takes on a far dark‐ er hue—that it means exactly the kind of thing that Lewis so ada‐ mantly rejects in The Problem of Pain. Baggett and Walls, who in all other departments show an admira‐ ble thoroughness in addressing all the dimensions of the Euthyphro dilemma, really needed to devote a chapter (or at least a section of a chapter) to defining what exactly is meant by total depravity. Such a discussion is particularly needed today when evangelicals are finally moving forward to embrace natural law theories that were previous‐ ly dominated by Catholic theologians. Though it is hard to prove, I would propose that evangelical resistance to natural law theory has been driven (at least unconsciously) by our preference for “total de‐ pravity” over “original sin.” Most of the arguments in Good God rest on a belief that we, even in our unregenerate state, possess active consciences able to discern good from evil. A hyper‐reading of the doctrine of total depravity must not be allowed to obliterate our status as moral agents or to turn the God of the Bible into someone so wholly other that we are 75
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powerless to understand his actions within the framework of fixed, transcendent moral standards. A vigorous discussion of this issue would have made the already excellent Good God into an even more timely and seminal book.
Louis Markos (www.Loumarkos.com), Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities. His two newest books are Apologetics for the 21st Century (Crossway) and Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C. S. Lewis (Biblica). 76
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D EMOCRACY ’ S D EFICIT ,liberty0and0virtue< Richard M. Reinsch II The Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order: Defending Democracy Against its Modern Enemies and Immoderate Friends, by Daniel J. Mahoney. ISI, 2010.
I
n defending the European nation‐state from being wholly in‐ gested by the European Union’s super‐state appetite, contem‐ porary French political theorist Pierre Manent has counseled that “to love democracy well, it is necessary to love it moder‐ ately.” For many, this may seem a strange observation. After all, Francis Fukuyama’s proclamation at the end of the Cold War that no significant challenge can be made to the superiority of liberal de‐ mocracy still holds true, more or less. Indeed, those contesting this proposition lead the pariah regimes of our world, and no one is or really should listen to the remaining Middle‐Eastern autocrats, or the far‐flung communist remnants of North Korea and Cuba, and their heartfelt admirer in Caracas, Hugo Chavez. While China’s Beijing Consensus has apparently moved the heart of Thomas Friedman, those less‐inclined to his deterministic understanding of trade and politics observe that the economic autonomy of China’s growing middle‐class should lead to a commensurate level of political partici‐ pation—hopefully. The only real political drama, seemingly, is to usher this democratic state of affairs into a universal conclusion for humanity. We might say that enthusiasm in an ongoing attempt to promote the democrat‐ ic project and secure its blessings for new lands, peoples, tribes, and religions should define us in late‐modernity. History, however, if not returning in its full splendor, has definitely made forays into the lib‐ 77
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eral democracies of the West during the last decade. September 11, 2001 shattered the Fukuyamian myth of the certainty of democratic futurity. America’s reflexive devotion to democracy building as the solution to radical Islam, and the practical failure of this policy, rat‐ tled the belief that the human heart desires both liberty and democ‐ racy. Every human heart may desire freedom, as President George W. Bush proclaimed, but that does not necessarily entail that these hearts understand or are committed to the foundational elements of a democratic polity. The domestic front is even worse. The grand postwar experiment of removing risk, even the need for heroic energy, through an all‐ encompassing welfare state has now run its own course. In the Euro‐ pean democracies, no less than in the United States, the future of citizenship, the notion that the citizen is really a client demanding services and programs from the sovereign, is expiring. While this should be seen as a salutary event, the end will be painful, as is al‐ ready evident on the streets of Athens and London. This is to say little of the academic and judicial classes’ powerful belief that unbounded individual autonomy and a relativistic under‐ standing of moral norms is the highest evolved form of democratic life. Moreover, democracy’s central animating idea, that is, the equali‐ ty and liberty of the human person, as interpreted under this new dispensation, seems to have left many of these same democracies flat‐ footed in responding to the military, financial, and entitlements crises of the past decade. This is not to deny human equality or man’s de‐ sire for liberty, but honest reflection on the content of democracy— and in particular, American democracy—must begin anew given that the old sureties of ever‐increasing autonomy, material prosperity, and easy, harmonious living seem to be gradually fading away as inevita‐ ble, future realities. This period of reflection should begin with Daniel J. Mahoney’s The Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order: Defending Democracy Against Its Modern Enemies and Immoderate Friends. Chairman and professor of political science at Assumption College, a leading schol‐ ar of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and of the conservative‐liberal French theorists Alexis de Tocqueville, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Raymond Aron, and Pierre Manent, Mahoney delivers in his latest work a deci‐ sive contribution towards understanding the continuing political drama in the western democracies. Underlying Mahoney’s analysis, 78
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which ranges widely on the American Founders, Edmund Burke, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, and Solzhenitsyn, among oth‐ ers, complemented with insightful essays on American foreign poli‐ cy, the Parisian riots of 1968, and secularist absolutism, is the teach‐ ing that democracy requires a thicket of spiritual and moral resources if it is to be the ordering principle of a free and dignified political realm. Mahoney’s thesis bears repeating: “Democracy is prone to corruption when its principle—the liberty and equality of human beings—becomes an unreflective dogma eroding the traditions, au‐ thoritative institutions, and spiritual presuppositions that allow hu‐ man beings to live free, civilized, and decent lives.”
M
ahoney’s reflections on democracy and statesmanship re‐ present for the reader and democratic citizen ideas that are embedded in the biblical understanding of man and in classical political philosophy. A restricted, if not flat spirit, Mahoney observes, characterizes contemporary democratic life. Bereft of civic vigor and religion and its horizon expanding traditions, modern man struggles mightily to escape the bonds of his will. If he is to endure, Mahoney argues, then democratic man must learn to “navigate the dangerous waters of postmodern, relativistic democracy,” by calling on the primary foundations of the western tradition. The book’s penetrating essay “Beyond Nihilism: Religion, Liberty, and the Art of Mediation” focuses on the quality of soul nurtured by religion and the ways it resists the flatness of soul that closes man in upon himself, which is fatal to both liberty and self‐government. In response to contemporary secularist arguments that would greatly reduce religion’s public role, Mahoney argues that democracy’s salu‐ tary work of affording the individual the space to order his life in a free government is imperiled when provision for man’s spirit and pride is not made. These are not contradictory notions but lie at the heart of a democracy properly understood. Recalling Tocqueville’s analysis in the second volume of Democracy in America, Mahoney observes that religion is crucial to navigating the Scylla and Charybdis of democracy: materialism and individual‐ ism. Democracy tempts man to see only his interests and to compete mightily for them. Thus material benefit and individual interest come to form the path of a man’s life. Materialism conditions man to ignore 79
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his soul in favor of pragmatic pursuits. Easily lost is man’s belief in the exceptional qualities of his soul and the beneficence of God. The incipient danger of democratic individualism is that man unre‐ flectively adopts the dominant opinions of the time. The pride and vigor of character necessary to achieve self‐government are eschewed in favor of an almost imperceptible passivity. The pervasive character of such equality is that even the pursuit of interest becomes both tire‐ some and threatening to the egalitarian dialectic of individualism. This is the form of Tocqueville’s much feared soft despotism that emerges when man has lost touch with God and neighbor and com‐ munes only with the self. The only power left standing is the central government—the soft despot—which exercises a firm but careful ministration of its citizens’ lives. One antidote to such flattening conditions is the pride and fierce‐ ness of the statesman who invokes the pre‐democratic foundational elements of the democratic regime as the surest rationale for its de‐ fense. Of course, the difficulty that must be squared by such leaders is democracy’s aversion to greatness, Mahoney argues. This is not to say that the citizen despises obvious men of greatness, but that he struggles to grasp why the democratic regime needs them for its de‐ fense. Democracy seems to condition the citizen to prefer a middling security and comfort. But do such habits of thought and action enable man to understand reality in its full, uncompromising light? To answer this troubling question Mahoney recalls the perilous campaign Winston Churchill waged in the 1930s against his democracy’s complacency towards an obviously rising Nazi Germany. The ground of Churchill’s oratory, rooted in England’s history of daring and triumph as the spur to fighting alone against Nazism, is Mahoney’s focus, both for what Churchill said about England, and for what he said about greatness in a modern democratic age. Civilization was no final achievement, Churchill repeatedly argued, and must be renewed and defended. Accordingly, British democracy, if it was to continue its career of lib‐ eral government, had to be led by “traditional moral and civic re‐ sources” and not “the rights of man.” The Churchillian understanding of democracy poses problems for the American citizen, for he has no predemocratic virtues to reflect on and instill into contemporary practice. From whence does his help come? This question now becomes enormously important given the 80
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fixation on the sexual revolution, feminism, civil rights cum racial preferences and grievance politics, and overarching secularism as the true form of democracy. Despite the fact that immediate political con‐ sequences did not materialize from the global 1968 riots, Mahoney places 1968 as the inflection point for western democracies. The au‐ thor states: Collectively, the events of that year inaugurated and reinforced a bold cultural and political project to sever democracy from the traditional sources of Western civilization. As a result, the noble modern aspiration to uphold the liberty and dignity of all human beings was increasingly disconnected from those goods that gave it substance and moral and spiritual depth. If the democratic principles of consent and individual liberty are devoid of dialogue with the deeper wellsprings of the western tradi‐ tion, the public space is inevitably filled by the unencumbered indi‐ vidual, Mahoney argues. No longer informed by biblical religion, classical philosophical and political thought, and the heritage of common‐law reasoning, the comforted modern individual now melds into a form of deracinated humanism in his familial, social, and political commitments. In many respects, the unencumbered individual is now leading a return to the state of nature. The abstract thought experiment of early liberal theorists may, in fact, become reality through the obsessive focus on autonomy and equality as totalizing principles in the politi‐ cal order. Everything must be cleared away to make room for the giant suck of self. Thus, the state of nature, consisting of atomized persons increasingly disconnected from one another except by naked interests, believing and hoping in nothing substantive or transcend‐ ent, becomes our destiny by default. When individuals believe that their liberty as democratic citizens exists in the law they give themselves, “unbeholden to ends or pur‐ poses outside the human will itself,” the political order diminishes human dignity. It is then that democracy forgets that its greatness must be seen in its deficit. We must defend the space of liberty it af‐ fords us, but we must understand such liberality in terms of the de‐ votions and virtues that make democratic freedom lovely. Mahoney concludes that “unencumbered choice can never be the sole criterion for judging the thought and action of human beings. 81
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Liberty understood as pure freedom unconnected to larger ends and purposes fatally undermines the dialectics of truth and liberty, and liberty and virtue that define truly human existence.” For the Ameri‐ can democrat, this is the author’s answer. Modern political liberty was advanced by Publius, but the dialogue must always be with the touchstone of the western tradition for a fulsome comprehension of representative democracy and the virtues it presupposes.
Richard M. Reinsch II is a Fellow at Liberty Fund, Inc., and the author of Whittaker Chambers: The Spirit of a Counterrevolutionary (ISI Books, 2010). 82
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THE COVENANT OF SLOTH ]lust0to0annihilate} R.J. Snell
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know of no depictions of violence more horrifying than those given by the novelist Cormac McCarthy, now most famous for No Country for Old Men and The Road. And of all his terrors, I know of none more awful than the depravity unveiled in Blood Meridian through the character of Judge Holden, one of the most satanic figures ever concocted. Accurately understood as a type for strife and war, I find the judge guilty also of a vice the Christian tradition labels acedia, or sloth. What’s most disturbing is how com‐ pellingly a character of fiction exposes our current cultural reality. The basic underlying disease of the judge—revolt against the grace of creation—infects the West deeply now. Not just a mythic character of American fiction, the judge, i.e., sloth, tries to embrace us all, seeking to place each of us under his terrible covenant. As we become like him, rejecting the thickness of the created order, our freedom be‐ comes unbearably light and we bleach out the dignity of the real in a fit of violence; we embrace a culture of death. In Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West McCarthy re‐ counts the episodes of John Joel Glanton’s nihilistic and overwhelm‐ ingly violent gang of bounty‐hunters as they slaughter, rape, scalp, maim, and desecrate their way across the Southwest. Just reading the book leaves one feeling assaulted, so relentless are the depictions of meaningless violence played out in an equally endless and harsh desert. Brutality pervades as any hope for salvation is quickly extin‐ guished. “War endures,” and any other pattern or order is ground into dust before that “ultimate trade.” Looking to Blood Meridian helps us grasp a particular trajectory of our culture; fiction puts us in stark relief, perhaps fully recognizable for the first time. 83
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Early in the novel, the nameless protagonist, “the kid,” running away from his drunken father, a man enraged at the son whose mother “did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off,” is drawn into the revival meeting of a Reverend Green. Any chance for salvation is thwarted, however, by the arrival of an enormous, hairless man proclaiming that the reverend is an illiterate fraud, an atheist, and a known pedophile who sometimes resorts to bestiality. Women faint, men prepare a lynching, and gunfire rings out as the tent collapses leaving “folk trampled underfoot in the mud.” The source of the chaos, “the judge,” departs for drinks, cheer‐ fully admitting he has lied, that he knows nothing of Reverend Green, an admission prompting widespread admiration and revelry. The judge appears to have destroyed a religious leader and the community made possible by religion for no other reason than he could. An act of sheer choice, of pure will, using sexual mores and norms to spark violence. The breakdown of social control is contagious. The kid gets into several vicious fights, fleeing town, to the smiling delight of the judge, with dying men and a burning hotel in his wake. Thus infect‐ ed, it is no surprise that the kid joins the gang of Captain Glanton to take Apache scalps for bounty. The gang is without mercy or order, killing randomly anyone they happen to meet. To the kid’s surprise, Judge Holden is also a member of the gang, although he seems to have some unique authority or jurisdiction over everyone in the group. Indeed, every man in the gang claims, just like the kid, to have come under the judge’s influence prior to joining up with Glan‐ ton, an uncanny improbability. The judge has authority, like some perverse Moses leading his peo‐ ple through the desert. At some point prior to his membership, the gang runs out of gunpowder and helplessly flees from pursuing Apaches: “there was no place to run and no place to hide.” As they flee, they “come upon the judge on his rock there in that wilderness by his single self.” There is only one rock in the wasteland, an oddity causing some in the gang to suspect that “he’d brung it with him … to mark him out of nothing at all.” Appearing in the vastness without apparent cause, “you couldn’t tell where he’d come from,” he is without horse or canteen, just sitting on this rock “like he’d been ex‐ pectin us.” When Glanton informs him of their situation, Judge Holden takes charge, calmly leading the men “behind him like the 84
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disciples of a new faith” to refine their own gunpowder. The Apaches close in, but “it was a butchery,” with “that queer powder” bestow‐ ing a kind of power: “it was sharp shooting all around and not a mis‐ fire in the batch.” From that point on, Holden and Glanton have a “secret commerce,” a “terrible covenant,” confirming the judge’s uni‐ fying force. All under Glanton’s charge are now covenanted to the judge who lays claim to them all. Just as odd as his appearance in the desert, the entire history of Judge Holden is quite strange; in fact, he seems to not have a past so much as to endlessly recur: he “never sleeps … he will never die.” At one point the gang returns to Chihuahua to receive payment for their trophies of war. As each goes to the public baths to wash away the gory remnants of their exploits, they descend “one by one into the waters … all tattooed, branded, sutured … some deformed, fingers missing, eyes, their foreheads and arms stamped with letters and numbers as if they were articles requiring inventory.” Each and every member of the gang bears history in some visible and bodily way— except for the judge. Not only is he “strangely childlike” and com‐ pletely hairless, but as he disrobes to enter the “thin gruel of blood and filth” he reveals no marks at all, no traces of any past reality. He is bare and pink, baby‐like. He seems to belong to no one except him‐ self, bound to no customs, laws, or ways of being other than those he has given to himself. He is judge, never judged. Judge Holden, whose actual historical reality is dubious, is por‐ trayed as the most educated man in the territory, with immense eru‐ dition and knowledge of geology, geography, natural history, myth and literature, languages, indigenous peoples, and human history. He discourses frequently and eloquently on a variety of subjects, and his authority over his interlocutors is absolute, even uncanny. He carries a notebook in which he sketches plant and animal life, geolog‐ ical finds, landscapes, and artifacts from early cultures. Oddly, how‐ ever, he often destroys what he captures in his notebook—after sketching some ancient cave drawings he scratches the originals off the cave wall and out of existence. Another time he sketches various pieces of armor and weaponry left centuries before by the Spanish and then destroys the artifacts: “he took up the little footguard and turned it in his hand and studied it again and then he crushed it into a ball of foil and pitched it into the fire. 85
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He gathered up the other artifacts and cast them also into the fire … and he seemed much satisfied with the world, as if his counsel had been sought at its creation.” For the judge, knowledge is a kind of hunt; he captures reality in his notes, and in doing so snuffs out being. All being, personal and impersonal, is treated this way, as some‐ thing to possess and discard. While the judge had accused Reverend Green of sexual deviancy, the judge is the pedophile, collecting small children as playthings before murdering them, taking their scalps for trophies and dumping their lifeless bodies to rot in the desert heat. McCarthy, mercifully, only hints at the violations, but they occur nonetheless. At another point, the judge makes a pet of a mentally handicapped man, seemingly for no other reason than to best Glan‐ ton who had claimed power to tame any animal which eats. The “id‐ iot” had been exploited by his own brother in a kind of circus before being liberated by the judge, who leads him on a leash, feeding him by hand, until discarding him as useless human detritus. Judge Holden explains himself at one point, articulating a reason for capturing and erasing any reality not under his direct control. He had been showing enormous interest in animal and plant life, press‐ ing leaves and plants into his notebook, studying butterflies, shoot‐ ing and dressing a virtual aviary of mountain birds, until asked his purpose. His response is haunting: Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.… These anonymous creatures … may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men’s knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth. Asked the definition of a suzerain, he answers that it is a special kind of ruler, one ruling “even where there are other rulers,” one whose authority “countermands” other judgments. The judge’s au‐ thority is such that no other autonomous life is permitted—”nothing must be permitted to occur … save by my dispensation ,” even if that means killing or molesting everything under his rule. The freedom of birds, for example, “is an insult.” 86
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In the very end, the kid resists the judge. Perhaps it was the memory of his drunken father’s reading of “poets whose names are now lost,” but the kid’s early susceptibility to the judge at the revival appears to weaken over time. All the other members of the gang ap‐ pear joined in their “terrible covenant,” but the kid alone, despite his atrocities, offers some help and mercy to his fellows, even refusing at one point to murder Holden. The judge knows of the kid’s flickering remainder of decency, stating, “I’d have loved you like a son,” except “you alone were mutinous. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency.” In keeping some clemency, the kid loses the judge’s permission to kill and maim and violate and so is actually guilty for his acts. He is a “witness against” himself, claims the judge, for he “sat in judgment on [his] own deeds” and did not give in en‐ tirely to the way of war. Holden simply cannot abide this, must reas‐ sert his status as suzerain, and murders the kid in an outhouse; “he rose up smiling and gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh” before proclaiming his victory over the world— ”He says that he will never die.” The judge of fiction serves as a diabolical revelation of much our actual malaise, one held captive to the madness of acedia, or sloth. Having rejected any norms given in creation, freedom is under no authority other than the awful lightness of the will, and we are free to do as we wish, including violence against all being.
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cedia, the “noon day demon,” so called since it strikes in the tedium of the afternoon, receives a surprising amount of attention in early monastic literature. Evagrius of Ponticus, a fourth‐century Egyptian monk, considers it the most troublesome of the demonic thoughts, describing the demon as follows: he causes the monk continuously to look at the windows and forces him to step out of his cell and to gaze at the sun to see how far it still is from the ninth hour, and to look around, here and there, whether any of his brethren is near. Moreover, the demon sends him hatred against the place, against life itself, and against the work of his hands.… Sloth is not laziness, although the term in time does come to mean mere inactivity. Rather it reveals frustration and hate, a disgust at place and “life itself.” In acedia the monk abhors what God has giv‐ 87
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en, namely, reality and the limits of order, especially the limits of one’s own selfhood. Thomas Aquinas describes sloth as a sad rejection of God’s friend‐ ship. Loving, intimate union with the Creator is refused. Since such union, according to Aquinas, is our ultimate happiness and joy, sloth rejects happiness and chooses sorrow instead. We are made for God, but sloth hates our telos; in fact, the slothful considers our purpose distasteful, even repellent, detesting the personhood God has given. Jean‐Charles Nault describes this as a collapse into self: Acedia … is a profound withdrawal into self. Action is no longer perceived as a gift of oneself, as the response to a prior love that calls us, enables our action, and makes it possible. It is seen instead as an uninhibited seeking of personal satisfaction in the fear of “losing” something. The desire to save one’s “freedom” at any price reveals, in reality, a deeper enslavement to the “self.” There is no longer any room for an abandonment of the self to the other or for the joy of gift; what remains is sadness or bitterness within the one who distances himself from the community and who, being separated from others, finds himself likewise separated from God. It is a mistake to think that sloth is laziness. The slothful might very well be busy doing things. Evagrius claims, in fact, that the slothful are often in a frenzy of pointless action—now this, now that—in their disgust for the actual work given to them by God. We might antici‐ pate the slothful to be very busy, and as the purposelessness of their lives is revealed to be increasingly distracted and destructive. More than indolence, sloth rejects the burden of order, choosing instead the breezy lightness of freedom. Loving self more than relation, autono‐ my more than the good, in sloth one refuses the weight and density of living in an ordered creation. Addiction to freedom is a revolt of self against any thick construc‐ tion of the world which might demand our respect or piety. The weight of reality is viewed as an insufferable demand, as oppression, an illegitimate restriction of freedom. The best remedy against sloth, at least according to Evagrius, is a remedy our freedom would find disgusting, for the remedy is hypomonè, “the act of remaining under the yoke.” Keeping yoked, that is, fidelity, is unbearable to those who are unbearably light, those suzerains of the world. In The Malaise of Modernity, Charles Taylor proposes that moral space, the framework by which we orient our lives and values, is 88
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inescapable to personhood. Moral space is “ontologically basic,” and without it we could not exist as persons, losing capacity for rational action. But as Taylor writes, “it is now commonplace about the mod‐ ern world that it has made these frameworks problematic … tradi‐ tional frameworks are discredited or downgraded to the status of personal predilection.” We’re not so sure about frameworks any‐ more; they have all become unhooked from any fixed point. We have become like Judge Holden, free from moral space, as if we simply appeared in the desert without history, custom, and mores. Modern freedom occurred when older moral horizons were up‐ rooted, when we freed ourselves from the captivity of divine order. Free, yes, but the world also seems to have lost its story, and we suf‐ fer “a sense of malaise, emptiness.” As Taylor explains in A Secular Age, our freedom is disembedded from reality, with a resulting “ter‐ rible flatness in the everyday,” the “utter flatness, emptiness of the ordinary.” Our freedom came at a cost, the loss of anything worth living for, and the only remainder is a “centering on the self.” And since the world is devoid of thickness, of purpose or story, everything becomes a plaything, something to tame, toy with, lead about on a leash, and discard when we have drained its temporary pleasure.
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story positing the status of creatures allows us to recognize the value of these things. Not simply the products of world force or chance but of God’s loving and reasonable choice, all things are recipients of generosity, receiving themselves as a gift. They are graced, and their freedom is borrowed since they cannot maintain their own existence without the sustaining work of God, in whom we live and move and have our being. Dependency does not reduce value but rather grants dignity, a notion fundamentally coun‐ ter to those for whom the freedom of birds is insulting. God’s glory does not diminish ours, and our dignity is not a threat to God, for God’s own glory, in part, is us. Since things are maintained by the outpouring gift of God, God is most present to things, so present as to be the condition of their own presence to themselves. The glory of God is present to things as the graciousness of their being; things are never just themselves, they carry the weight of God along with them. Things are not light, but unbearably heavy. A repugnance of order—Judge Holden’s acedia—demands the vio‐ lation of things as an act of final emancipation. By refusing to 89
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acknowledge the weight of God’s glory, things lose density and be‐ come thin, bleached out. The freedom of birds may be an insult, and the height of revolt against God is to scratch them out, destroy them. Dependence on God disgusts the slothful, and the weight and digni‐ ty given by God insults the lords of the desert.
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e’re tempted, now, to consider the world as what Heidegger termed “standing reserve,” an undifferentiated set of resources awaiting our use. Rather than having the status of creatures full of God’s weight, things are just there, standing at attention before our desires, waiting to be led around on a leash. Things of the world become objects distanced and alienated from us, problems to overcome with some sort of method or technique. For a medieval a thing known, a tree or cat, say, was a subject of being, it held its own act of existence, whereas for the modern mind things are objects. As subjects, creatures had thick interiority, a form or nature or essence, which we did not create. Things are now objects under our judgment, waiting to be captured in a sketch and then cast aside. If we are not bound by the things, but they by us, what limits our use other than our own will? In what way can our desires be ordered so as to respect the integrity of things when their meaning is deter‐ mined by our whims? John Paul II warned repeatedly against an irrational account of freedom and the violence lurking behind it, teaching that “crimes against life” would be justified “in the name of the rights of individ‐ ual freedom.” We’re not so different from Judge Holden when our system of enshrined crime destroys itself, and becomes a factor leading to the destruction of others, when it no longer recognizes and respects its essential link with the truth … out of a desire to emancipate itself from all forms of tradition and authority … the person ends up by no longer taking as the sole and indisputable point of reference for his own choices the truth about good and evil, but only his subjective and changeable opinion or, indeed, his selfish interest and whim. When misunderstood, autonomy governs our life, it is inevitable that the dignity of others must be rejected, for everyone else, like the kid, is a competitor to our unchecked sovereignty. This terrible cove‐ 90
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nant is especially acute given the new power of technology. Not only have we freed ourselves from the bonds and bounds of creation but we have alienated ourselves from them, declaring them enemy, and have found ways of exercising our superiority with technology. Not only against the physical world, although that too, but also other persons and ourselves, for everything is bleached out and without resistance to our frightful autonomy. Finding the world as nought, and ourselves as unchecked, we consume ourselves and all other creatures. To be free as we wish requires hatred of being, even hating life itself, just as Evagrius warned. As John Paul II recognized, this “encourages the ‘culture of death’ creating and consolidating actual ‘structures of sin’ which go against life. The moral conscience, both individual and social, is today subjected … to an extremely serious and mortal danger.” Judge Holden insists on his jurisdiction, finding every creature an object of his terrible judgment. Nothing is allowed freedom or integ‐ rity, and no creature is acknowledged as having worth because sus‐ tained by God’s love. The kid’s resistance against the covenant is fu‐ tile; the judge hunts him, embraces him in a grasp of death, and scratches him out, like so many creatures before. We live in a time of open revolt against God’s law, a time of sloth. Rather than causing delight and comfort, the story God tells of crea‐ tion is thought repugnant to our autonomy, and we insist that we are suzerains, those rulers countermanding all other laws, even the rule of God. Limits of body, sexuality, death, life, all are thought obstacles to overcome rather than considered the graciousness of being. At war with God, we scratch out his creation, especially the weak and frag‐ ile, fearing that anything outside our control threatens our freedom. We cannot avoid the culture of death now; it hunts us, asserting its control, seeking our embrace, claiming covenant over all things. Some resist the judge, just a few it seems, attempting fidelity, guard‐ ing clemency in some corner of their souls. And they are being stalked.
R.J. Snell is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy Program at Eastern University. He is the author of Through a Glass Darkly: Bernard Lonergan and Richard Rorty on Knowing without a God’s Eye View (Marquette). 91
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L OVE , D EATH , & P ERSONAL I DENTITY [the0cloned0soul{ Peter Augustine Lawler
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ark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go is one of the most thoughtful pieces of science fiction ever created. The film is a superb adaptation of the 2005 novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. A labor of love full of wisdom, it deserves a much wider audience and better criti‐ cal reception. What I’m going to say is based on both the film and the novel, but I’m moved to write it by having just seen the film.
The story is about human clones raised at an English boarding school (not that different from the one you see in Harry Potter) as sources of organs for the un‐cloned human beings who made them. They’ve been created as donors, and, in this alternative version of 20th century history, they’re indispensable for perpetuating medical science’s achievement in pushing the average human lifespan beyond 100. They aren’t taught any of the skills required to make a living. They won’t need them. They’ll die as young adults, and their produc‐ tivity depends only on their health. Accordingly, the school is partic‐ ularly strict when it comes to prohibiting smoking, but otherwise quite easygoing. (Just like residential schools these days!) Certainly there’s little point in encouraging chastity as a virtue. The donor clones won’t become (and don’t have!) parents, and the one physical difference we can see between them and “normals” is that they’re incapable of reproducing. But they aren’t encouraged to lose themselves in mindless orgies or random one‐night stands, nor is their self‐consciousness dulled by a mood‐enhancing drug, such as 92
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the soma people use in Brave New World. They soon enough connect something like sexual exclusivity and personal love on their own, and that’s neither encouraged nor discouraged. Freed from social and biological necessity yet fully self‐conscious, they enjoy what we might regard as an unrealistically high level of sexual freedom. The donor‐clones’ sexual lives are unregulated, because there’s no need to regulate them for them to perform their social function. They show us, then, what human life might be like if we continue down to the end of the road of detaching sex from reproduction. It won’t be a world full of unobsessive enjoyment; jealousy and intimacy will re‐ main, but it will also be a melancholic world of displaced or undi‐ rected and misunderstood longing. Sex separated from reproduction remains haunted by death and the personal longings associated by reproduction. The clones in school are close to regular kids, having all the virtues and vices of highly self‐conscious and relational (and so polymor‐ phously erotic) persons. It seems, at first, that they’re very short on the various human longings for personal greatness or even political freedom, but the undirected anger—sometimes literally howling—of one of the boys shows that he knows he’s been deprived of a purpose to channel his spiritedness. He manages to take a kind of perverse pride—when half‐dead—in being a particularly hardy and so pro‐ ductive donor. The girls know they’ve been deprived of being and having chil‐ dren. They especially long for parents, and they sometimes obses‐ sively search for the persons on whom they were modeled—one girl pages through porn magazines looking for a woman with her body. They are haunted by the truth that they’ve been modeled on “trash” to be less than trash, even less than slaves (who, even in our South, couldn’t be used this way). They know they live in a world in which no one can care for them but themselves, but that doesn’t mean they live without personal love. The donor‐clones care about their “status” or personal significance in each others’ eyes, but they’re imperfectly yet genuinely resigned to the fact that they have no status—and so no recognition of who they really are—with anyone else. It’s not clear for most of the film why they’re educated not only to read but to create art and poetry in an environment where they can cultivate personal attachments as social beings. We eventually learn that this is the first and last school devoted to the ethical raising of 93
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spare‐part children. Their “guardians” wanted to prove that clones have souls, too. As unique and irreplaceable persons displaying their inward lives, those guardians hoped to show, human clones can’t be regarded as resources to be exploited—mutilated and eventually killed—for the benefit of others. One of the clones asks with indignant entitlement why they can’t have souls. There’s no reason at all, it turns out. There are two con‐ troversial claims here: The first is that all persons have souls (or per‐ sonal identities that distinguish them from each other and all the other animals), and that clones—manufactured persons—would have souls, too. Our scientific sophisticates, of course, don’t believe in the real existence of souls, and they’re often excited about the prospect of the cloning of human beings as more evidence for nothing being spe‐ cial or deeply personal about any of us. Cloning will show that what we imagined the Creator does, we can do for ourselves. Our religious believers, meanwhile, fear cloning too much. If hu‐ man beings are successfully cloned, they’ll be just like us, full of irre‐ ducibly mysterious and wonderful individuality. They’ll be more evidence still of the presence of God in the world through beings made in His image. The human beings made by men won’t really be fully under their control, and, as copies of natural beings, they won’t really be their products. Almost everyone, the film shows us, over‐ rates the ontological and theological significance of cloning.
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he boarding school we see might be regarded as a privileged moment in the history of donor‐clones. Their strangely benev‐ olent guardians gave themselves the tricky task of raising them as “special” in two ways. They had to be educated not to rebel against the special function they’ve been given, meaning that they’re taught to be afraid to escape into the world outside and to accept who they are. That means they can’t be told too much, too soon, about what their special function is. But they’re also, of course, edu‐ cated to be special in the sense of unique and irreplaceable persons, who are made for more than for serving some social function. There’s no question of the donor‐clones rebelling successfully against the fate or end they’ve been given, but badly educated they would become needlessly anxious or agitated and so both needlessly miserable and unable to perform their social function well. In some basic ways, they’re educated the way we all are. 94
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Every film ever made about little kids in English boarding schools has the “subtext” of homelessness and abandonment; they all want to go home. The cloned kids, it’s true, don’t have memories of some particular home, but they still have the human longings for home— for even “regression to the womb” they never experienced—and so to live decently, they have to find out slowly how radically homeless they are. We’re reminded in the educational process of “turning around” in the Cave or the comprehensive process of political social‐ ization described in Plato’s Republic. They’re certainly liberated from the comfortable illusions of tradition, culture, country, and family, and they’re not even offered the solace of religion. Those two views of “being special” that guide the donor‐clones’ education are, of course, incompatible, and one would, soon enough, have to give way to the other. So the school was closed as a failed experiment of misguided reformers, and the social utility—the bene‐ fit to other free persons—of the special function trumped the intense‐ ly personal or inward. We learn, from this extreme case, that it’s al‐ ways monstrous to educate persons merely to be part of some whole, and that it’s equally monstrous to deny persons some satisfaction of their social desires to be parts of natural human wholes—beginning with the family. This special school’s guardians were different from those in Plato’s Republic in not consistently preparing children for the task in service to their society for which they are fitted. But the idea of justice in Socrates’ city depended on a thorough examination of each child to determine what he or she is best at by nature. The donor‐clones, in fact, are much more than mere bodies, and so not best fit by nature for the function they’ve been given. The political decision was made to take no real interest in who they really are. Nature, it would seem, disappears as a standard when it comes to clones; their purpose is given to them, not by God or nature, but by those who created them. The children are done a monstrous injustice by a human standard willfully trumping the natural (or divine) one, by willful blindness to what we can see with our own eyes about others. We Americans would readily say these kids are being denied their inalienable natural rights. They are, by nature, free persons, and so they are radically different from the domestic animals we legiti‐ mately breed for destruction. Their “nature”—or who or what they are—was not, in fact, determined by those who made them. 95
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In the Republic, we have to add, citizens are socialized to be of lov‐ ing, friendly service to their fellow citizens. But the clones, of course, aren’t citizens, and those they serve are socialized not to be their friends. The clones aren’t even made to improve the quality of the English citizenry, because the English don’t think of themselves as citizens either. They are, instead, for the indefinite perpetuation of free persons who refuse to think of themselves as parts of any whole greater than themselves. The clones are made to be bodies used to keep other bodies alive as long as possible. The clones aren’t nobly serving some common good. If there were some such good, they would be excluded from it as non‐citizens. But there is, in a highly individualistic, high‐tech time, no such good. There’s no public view of what citizens share as beings with souls. That’s one reason why we’ve increasingly become all about keeping bodies alive right now as long as possible, as if their perpetuation is the point of all existence. Each of us knows we’re not nothing, but we know nothing certain beyond non‐nonexistence that we share with others. Regarding even our own bodies as our property, it would be hard for us not to regard bodies we make for our benefit as our prop‐ erty—no matter what claims they make for themselves. There was a rumor among the clones that the real purpose of the gallery of their art and poetry was to provide evidence for their ca‐ pacity for personal love. Clones who could prove they were in love— in the traditional, monogamous, intimate, personal sense—might qualify for a deferral for a few years from becoming donors. The clones, of course, were capable of such love (despite being unable to have children) but it turns out that the rumor was untrue and no‐ body in power cared.
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o the effort at ethical education failed. The undeniable evidence that clones could be fine artists and poets (unlike even the chimps and the dolphins) was ignored. Cloning didn’t stop, but their “humane” education did. The schools became factories, where the clones, apparently, were treated as brutally as agri‐business chickens. To abandon the production of spare‐part clones, after all, would be to abandon medical progress and return to a dark time of incurable diseases, terrible suffering, and early death. This “alterna‐ tive history,” after all, is better than the real history of the 20th centu‐ ry, during which millions and millions of people were slaughtered 96
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for no purpose at all, people clearly not made to be History fodder or fatherland fodder or ideology fodder. The good news is that the new factory schools probably prepared them better for the special function for which they were made; the bad is that the persons, as Aristotle says, can’t become who they are by nature without social habituation or cultivation. The evidence that clones have souls, we learn, withered away. The privileged moment of enlightened donor‐clones could only be for a moment, because it seemed to do nobody any good for them to be open to the truth about love and death. We might have a moment’s chill here as we think about what’s go‐ ing to happen as biotechnology eradicates the distinction between procreation and manufacturing. If we morph into conscious robots capable of manufacturing other conscious robots, as the transhuman‐ ists predict, why wouldn’t all the robots be regarded by the other robots as resources to be used? We won’t believe that all robots are created equal, and we don’t really believe that robots, even if con‐ scious in some sense, will be capable of personal love. But the manu‐ factured clones have real bodies, and even a body that includes artifi‐ cial parts is still a body. We aren’t now—contrary to what our scientists sometimes suggest—and will never be conscious machines, although it is the idea of conscious machines that drives the produc‐ tion of clones for spare parts. We will never become simply manufac‐ tured beings, even if we perversely deny ourselves the joys of procre‐ ation.
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he donor‐clones seemed indispensable to fulfilling the prom‐ ise of what we call regenerative medicine. We can live, so to speak, as indefinitely long as classic cars. Every part can be replaced or regenerated, even the heart. The exception is the brain, which is clearly irreplaceable, but maybe, if properly maintained, it can be kept from deteriorating. Regenerative medicine at this point is mainly about therapies to restore the functioning of the organs we already have, and so spare parts don’t seem as important as they once did. But that doesn’t mean we’ll not need them at all, which is why we’re still working on developing artificial organs, and why we still need kidneys from live human beings to have some people around for as long as possible. Even with regenerative medicine combined with genetic therapies (that, for example, take out diseas‐ 97
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es), we know we won’t live forever. It’s just that we won’t experience ourselves as having to die at any particular time, as no longer deter‐ mined or shaped or haunted by the necessity of death. Death will no longer be viewed as inevitable, but as an accident to be prudently avoided. So Socrates’ courage on the day of his trial—a reflection of the wisdom he acquired through learning how to die—would have seemed like self‐destructive anger if the regenerative doctor had just promised him another seventy years. In thinking about the progres‐ sive logic of the science that needs the parts of donor‐clones, we think about the real ontological difference that might concern us. The huge difference is between those shaped by the real promise of indefinite longevity and those condemned to an early death. It’s easy to see that the latter will usually live more admirable and truthful lives, while admitting that it’s probably unreasonable to choose death if science can offer each of us a way out. The philosopher of the future who teaches us to live well with the indefinite longevity that’s not to be confused with immortality has a huge job. He’s not going to have much of an audience if he shouts the truth about the donor‐clones, for example. We can now say that all men are created equal because they’re all self‐conscious and equally mortal. But our scientific progress is now based on our refusal to be defined by our mortality, and that includes our refusal to be moved by the thought that the difference between living 50 and 500 years is nothing in light of eternity. The philosophers of the past taught something like people are real‐ ly angry because they know how contingent and ephemeral personal existence is. But they have the compensation in personal love, which gives personal significance to particular lives. It’s love that’s the main evidence that we’re somehow more than merely biological beings, or just like the insignificant members of the other species. And we love because we’re open to the truth about who we are, and that includes an openness to the real existence of other “who’s” in a world full of “what’s.” It’s easy to show that the quest of indefinite longevity is at the expense of distortion and destruction of the various relational dimensions of who we are. It’s bad for love by detaching love from the reality of shared responsibilities in, for example, marriage and the family. But the promise is, to the extent we’re unmoved by death, we won’t need love to live well. And we won’t be moved by anger and hatred either. So religion and politics, the two big sources of angry, 98
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personal destruction, will just wither away. It’s easy to respond that people might be more angry than ever. Death, seeming almost com‐ pletely unnecessary and so almost completely accidental, would de‐ mand our constant attention as we fend off the various risk factors that threaten us, and our beings will be objectively more secure and subjectively more contingent than ever. The resulting “howl of exis‐ tentialism” —or inarticulate rage—might generate all kinds of tyran‐ nical policies directed to freeing us from our personal contingency. We can also see, of course, why so many people serious about souls, rights, and human dignity dig in against even cloning or man‐ ufacturing embryos to be destroyed in pursuit of the progress of medical science. The bodies of human persons can’t ever be regarded as just another natural resource. Our bodies are indispensable parts of personal identity, sources of what makes personal life worth liv‐ ing. It’s love that limits our anger at having bodies, at being stuck with existences that elude our control. The world defined by “ration‐ al control” would be completely unerotic and so eerily empty. Re‐ flecting on the impulse behind spare‐parts cloning shows us why that world is impossible for us to make and undesirable for us to at least too single‐mindedly pursue.
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renegade teacher tells the students at the school straight out, much earlier than they were supposed to know, what their purpose in life is, claiming that knowing what one’s life is for is the only way to live decently. Unlike the free persons of Britain, she tells the cloned kids, they won’t be able to choose for themselves how to live, to work in a supermarket or move to America in search of fame and fortune. Their unprecedented social determination contrib‐ utes to free persons’ unprecedented determination to live as they please for a long, long time. The clones we see do live as decently as people in their circum‐ stances could live; they display the virtues appropriate to their real situation. But their decency doesn’t come, as it did for British serv‐ ants in aristocratic times, from finding honor in serving great men. Ishiguro also wrote the psychological masterpiece The Remains of the Day, which is about the crippling disillusionment experienced by a loyal, capable, and rather erudite servant coming to learn that the aristocrat he serves is a self‐indulgent appeaser of Hitler. 99
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The clones’ servitude is particularly touching because it’s so free of illusions and disillusionment; both master and slave, in this case, have to live with the fact of naked exploitation. The cloned persons are deeply detached from the persons for whom they were made. So they are much more free than the servants of old to live for them‐ selves as relational beings, for what they really know and love about persons. They are allowed, sort of accidentally, the best possible life available to them, arguably one better than the free persons for whom they were made. The film ends with the central character—a cloned woman (Kathy H.)—sharing her hard‐won wisdom. She’s spent most of her life read‐ ing and daydreaming to a romantic tune (“Never Let Me Go”), full of what she imagined was unrequited love. (She eventually finds out it was requited, soon before the man who always loved her makes his final donation.) Her period of donation was deferred by volunteering to be “carer,” a clone assigned with caring for clones in “the recovery center” as donors—sometimes for the third or fourth time. Non‐ clones have to not know clones well enough to care for them. But clones still need care (as do we are all)—both physical and emotion‐ al—to stay alive as long as possible and so to be put to maximum possible use. Kathy found that work more enjoyable than not, and she rather stoically, but sensitively, did what she could to ease the suffering of the doomed. She was able to identify, to a limited extent, with people whom she didn’t know well enough to love. That’s not to say, of course, that her caring was exactly voluntary. Unproductive personal love is no cause for deferral, but giving care that enhances the performance of the donor’s function is. Nature, in effect, gives members of our species a deferral from early death to be caring moms and dads, without whom our species would have no future. Kathy has been denied that natural deferral, but the one given her by her makers was judged to be almost as indispensable. Kathy, in fact, took a perverse pride in caring well enough that her donors did better or gave more donations than most, while remaining unu‐ sually unagitated about what was happening to them. She was assist‐ ing “the state” in its murderous tyranny, but she was also helping the donors live as long and as happily as possible. A clone that dies as a result of his or her final donation is said to “complete.” That, of course, makes a kind of sense. A complete life, even Aristotle says, is one in which one has fulfilled one’s proper 100
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function in the most excellent way possible. A being without a func‐ tion, Aristotle adds, is a good‐for‐nothing, and he encourages us to believe that it would make no sense to say only human beings are free in that negative way. Aristotle denies that there’s such a being as a free person who can live without a purpose or even with a purpose that’s merely a “preference.” The clone’s life ends because he or she has fulfilled as well as possi‐ ble the function he or she has been given—not by nature, as Aristotle would say, but by other men. In that sense, a citizen has led a com‐ plete life when he dies in battle of years of service to his country. And contemporary Darwinians are about restoring the idea of a complete life by nature; we should think in terms of doing our duty as social beings, by falling in love, having kids, raising them properly, and then accepting nature’s impersonal intention that each of us step aside—disappear as persons or particular beings—for the good of the species. From a Darwinian view, in fact, the clone’s life completes relatively early because he or she has done a kind of manmade or conscious and volitional duty to the species. Other lives last longer, because they make their contribution to the species in the slower, more purely natural way. But at some rather definite point, those lives are super‐ fluous, too. In either case, the idea of completion is a pitiless affront to the real longing of persons to stay around. Whether the function we allegedly complete comes from other persons or nature or our country, we know it’s not our own. Free persons, if given the choice, would rather live incompletely or for an indefinitely long time. For the Darwinian, as for the Aristotelian, one piece of evidence for the goodness of nature is that it doesn’t offer us that choice. So today’s best Darwinians deny that indefinite longevity is possible, because the indefinite complexity of nature guarantees its triumph over all our efforts to thwart her mission to take out each and every one of us. Given the techno‐choice against death, no Darwinian or Aristotelian doctrine about our true function as social or political animals could possibly cause us to choose for death or natural completeness. The truth is that we don’t know how much conscious and volitional—or personal—evolution can supplant impersonal evolution, but there’s no denying that there’s been a wonderful amount of success already. Still, it turns out, as Kathy says, that everyone loves and everyone dies. Everyone “completes” and nobody in love ever has enough 101
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time. So those who “complete” (die) and are genuinely self‐conscious (or possess self‐knowledge) don’t really believe that some experience of completion is some kind of decisive compensation for personal extinction. We persons don’t leave consciousness for good with our deepest thought being “my work here is done.” I know I wasn’t here mainly to work. So I’d rather stay around, for example, to love my children then merely “live on,” in a not really personal way, in them and their fading memories. The idea of completion is based on purposes that are less than per‐ sonal. And so the difference between a relatively short life and a rela‐ tively long one is insignificant, although at any particular moment we’d rather have more time. That’s the main reason why it’s so mon‐ strous, we can see, for the personal donor to be killed just to keep some other persons around a bit longer. But Kathy knows she’s being harmed less than those who made her think. The free persons of Britain don’t think they have some function that completes their lives; they work to escape the imperatives of completion altogether. But it turns out that personal love is the main reason to wish for—but not one that can be the source of—some kind of significant “deferral” from one’s natural destiny. Every genuinely self‐conscious person knows himself (or herself) to be a momentary speck between the two abysses of eternity in this world—a speck of infinite value because of who he or she is as a knower or a lover.
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veryone dies, no conscious life ever really completes, and there’s no escaping from the incompletely requited longings connected with who we are and whom we love. It’s under‐ standable why the free persons of Britain work so hard to escape completion. To the extent escape really seems possible through our own progressive, scientific efforts, who can deny that we might well exploit unto death those we don’t really know and love? Still, the undeluded awareness of Kathy, the “carer,” that those who created her don’t care for her at all (she’s in the very opposite situa‐ tion of just about anyone who has parents or who has believed in the personal Creator) doesn’t morph into anger. Her compensations are her real knowledge that their injustice can’t get them what they think they want, and her real gratitude for the life she’s been given (and not really by them). 102
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There seems to be almost no place for religion in this story. Had there been a lot of real Christians in England, surely there would have been big resistance—a pro‐life moment—clamoring for justice for the clones. But personal freedom—in some respects at least a Christian inheritance—had been freedom from any dependence on the loving judgment of a personal God. The guardians who devised the special education to display the souls of the donor‐clones were, in fact, moved by the Christian thought that every person is unique and irreplaceable. But their “humane” intention disappeared with the closing of their school. And so too, it would seem, did any evi‐ dence—at least satisfactory to skeptics—for the proposition that the clones are real persons, too. Both the book and film do show us, however, that people are given souls or the capability for inward lives and personal love. It also shows us the monstrous futility of trying to do for ourselves as free persons what the Christian God promised us. Finally, it shows us that, while philosophy is, in a way, learning how to die, it can’t really show us that free, loving persons are ever really reconciled with the idea that a complete human life is necessarily a mortal one. Our long‐ ings point beyond our biological being, and both the donor‐clones and the free persons of England seem cruelly deprived of any faith in a personal Creator. Ultimately, nothing they experience in life through the progress of science is evidence of their nonexistence— quite the opposite.
Peter Augustine Lawler is Dana Professor of Government and former chair of the department of Government and International Studies at Berry College. His most recent book is Modern and American Dignity (ISI, 2010). 103
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A R EPUBLIC OF L ET TERS ]thoughts0on0the0age} Hunter Baker
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ichelle Goldberg wrote a column for the aptly named Daily Beast recently letting us all know that we really need to worry about something called “Dominionism” which supposedly prevails among Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, and folks who support their campaigns. Reinhold Niebuhr once warned of the dan‐ gers of religious illiteracy—here we have exhibit A. Goldberg claims Bachmann and Perry are “deeply associated” with this “theocratic strain” of Christian fundamentalism. Yes, they are probably so deeply associated with it that neither one of them has ever heard of R.J. Rushdoony (whom Goldberg tags as the father of this theocratic movement).
I have been part of organizations of Christian conservatives for many years and can assure Ms. Goldberg that Rushdoony and Chris‐ tian Reconstructionism (making Hebraic law obligatory upon the broader society) exert very little influence. In fact, I think I can prob‐ ably argue empirically that Rushdoony has captured the attention of many more liberal reporters with an axe to grind than it has evangel‐ icals. For those of us who spend so much time thinking about politi‐ cal theology as to even have heard of CR, it is primarily a novelty. To view standard issue evangelicals in the same light as Christian Re‐ constructionists would be like taking rank and file Democrats and comparing them to the most extreme and exotic atheistic socialists. The overwhelming majority position of Christians around the world is that forced religion is a stench in the nostrils of a holy God. Instead, Christians give their money to sustain people called mis‐ sionaries. We support their efforts to persuade those who don’t be‐ 104
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lieve in Jesus Christ that he is the son of God and that they should enter into a relationship with him. If those people subsequently re‐ fuse to believe in Jesus, missionaries pray for them and move on to other people. Those engaged by missionaries join churches or just keep on doing what they were doing before. It’s actually a pretty non‐threatening business. This is the Christian idea Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann would endorse, not some fever dream of journal‐ ists hoping to bring down candidates for office. Now, is it true that Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann would like to get elected and attempt to pass some of their aspirations for the good society into law? Certainly. This is a process called politics. It is a feature of democracies. And I suspect what Perry and Bachmann would like to do is reduce the size of government, which, incidental‐ ly, is not all that great a danger to individual freedom. Of course, both are pro‐life and would like to protect unborn chil‐ dren from being killed in the womb. If that position is so extreme as to warrant exclusion from the political process and raving condem‐ nations in print... well, in that case I’m afraid I can’t do much to help. Sometimes I wonder whether the keening over Dominionism is not some kind of tar baby sort of trap in which evangelicals are supposed to come out of their corner talking very seriously about Christian Reconstructionism and Dominionism, thus giving legitimacy to those who have tried to raise it as an issue. There is a simpler way to get at this thing. I’ll go ahead and con‐ cede to Michelle Goldberg and Ryan Lizza that they are correct in their assumption that it inspires nervousness to have someone with different ideas and values than one’s own running for political office. This raises the spectre of having that person gain power and perhaps making policies with which one would disagree. But the simple truth is that we are all in this position all the time. The University of Texas law professor Douglas Laycock once noted that he had some concerns about the Christian Coalition gaining po‐ litical power. He quickly added that he would be equally concerned about any group with an ideological agenda (such as certain types of feminists or environmentalists) gaining power. The simple fact is that power is a feature of politics and it is unpleasant to lose and have someone else use power to impose upon you. This is very much the situation many have been through in the past two years. A great many people feel that a nationalized health care system would have 105
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disastrous effects upon our society. Nevertheless, they have had to suffer through it because the side that wanted to enact such legisla‐ tion won the election convincingly. And here’s the thing. It doesn’t matter what Barack Obama’s motive was in pushing for national health care. It doesn’t matter if he had a religious conviction, a secular principle, a sentimental attachment to the idea, or a desire to be the first Democrat to ever achieve such a thing. He gained power through politics and enacted his agenda. There is no difference in anything Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, or any other American officeholder might do. Indeed, the likelihood is great that any laws they might enact would be far less intrusive than one mandating that every American purchase health insurance.
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ately with all the talk of “Dominionism” and the scary reli‐ gious right and Frank Schaeffer chiming in, I feel the need to draw attention to a portrait of Francis Schaeffer that I think portrayed him fairly and without the usual political histrionics. I wrote the following review (which originally appeared in Themelios) of Colin Duriez’s Francis Schaeffer: An Authentic Life (Crossway, 2008) back in 2009. As a PhD student, I provided research assistance to the Baylor his‐ torian Barry Hankins as he wrote his biography of Schaeffer, Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America (Grand Rapids: Eerd‐ mans, 2008). At the time, I remember asking Professor Hankins if the family had been cooperative. They had not. Having read Colin Duriez’s treatment of Schaeffer, I think I know why. The family was cooperating with him, so much so that this book could be considered an authorized biography. Duriez’s portrayal is very powerfully per‐ sonal, more so than anything I have read save Schaeffer’s own books, which are self‐revelatory to some degree. An Authentic Life features a number of unforgettable scenes from Schaeffer’s life. The reader who has a jaundiced view of Schaeffer as some kind of plastic‐mold religious right stereotype will encounter a complex man who had a powerful instinct for justice. As a teenager, young Fran had a job with RCA Victor where he worked in the facto‐ ry. The women posted along the production line were mistreated and overworked. One day, a woman stopped her work and began calling for a strike. She was soon joined by Schaeffer, who jumped up on a 106
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counter, yelling in his piercing voice, “Strike, Strike.” This was, after all, the same man who would one day criticize comfortable American Christians for their addiction to personal peace and affluence and their non‐compassionate use of wealth. The pioneer of Christian worldview had a hard road to ministry. His father asked to speak to him at 5:30 a.m. on the morning he was to leave for college and pre‐ministerial studies. When they met, his father bluntly told Schaeffer that he did not want a minister for a son and did not want him to go. The young man asked to go pray about it. Tearfully, he tossed a coin three times with each outcome landing in favor of going on to college at Hampden‐Sydney. He informed his father, “I’ve got to go.” Just before slamming the door on his way out, his father promised to pay for the “first half year.” Time would bring the father to share his son’s beliefs. Duriez’s book is full of similar interesting vignettes from Schaeffer’s life. One theme stands out very clearly: Francis Schaeffer was a man filled with love for the so‐called “little people” who were not valued by the world. While he was still a young minister, he tu‐ tored a young boy with Down Syndrome twice each week and took great delight in every increment of progress. He felt the boy’s for‐ ward steps were just as important, in his wife Edith’s words, “as talk‐ ing to any university student about his intellectual problems.” This event perfectly foreshadows his later powerful insistence upon the importance of the sanctity of life, an area in which he was far ahead of the main body of evangelicals and fundamentalists. Connecting the young Schaeffer to the more famous, older man is a great strength of Colin Duriez’s book. It has become well‐accepted to break Schaeffer’s life up into segments and to characterize him as three different people. There is the young, fire breathing fundamen‐ talist eager to “be ye separate” from the impure compromisers; the artsy, compassionate, bohemian founder of L’abri in Switzerland; and then the old man, brushing off his best instincts and returning to his fundamentalist roots to fight for the doctrine of inerrancy and “Christian America.” While it is possible to reach such a conclusion by looking at his early career and then considering the chronological development of his publications, this book rejects that approach by portraying Schaeffer as a consistent personality throughout. The man who cared enough to tutor a little boy with Down Syn‐ drome is also the man who told his church in St. Louis that he would 107
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resign if a black person ever came to his church and felt unwelcome. The budding intellectual who answered the existential questions of college students in Europe is also the agitator who took up the cause of the unborn and became arguably the finest shaper of and advocate for a potent evangelical critique of modern culture. Two sentences in the book make this point about Schaeffer brilliantly: “It was not a new Schaeffer that was emerging. His theology, honed over many decades since the passionate articles of the later forties and early fif‐ ties, was that of the lordship of Christ over every area of life—the womb as well as the university seminar room.” If one could ask for anything more from this book, it would be on the subject of Frank (AKA Franky). As Francis Schaeffer’s son has aged, he has increasingly distanced himself from his father’s legacy. First, Frank converted to the Eastern Orthodox Church. More signifi‐ cantly, he wrote thinly disguised novels about his family life that were unflattering to his father and then made a massive turn left po‐ litically, ultimately supporting Barack Obama despite his laissez faire policies on abortion. One suspects this topic was left alone for two reasons. The first is that, as I wrote above, this book feels like an au‐ thorized biography with the family’s full cooperation. They probably did not want this story to include the later years of Frank Schaeffer. The second is that the book very likely neared completion during the time of Frank’s increasing heterodoxy. Regardless, readers hungry for more on this front should look to Os Guinness’s powerful rejoinder to Frank in Books and Culture (March 1, 2008). Duriez’s book is an important contribution to Schaeffer scholarship and will challenge those who have portrayed an interesting Schaeffer with a unique voice who morphs into a conventional Christian right‐ ist over time. Francis Schaeffer: An Authentic Life deserves a wide read‐ ership and may well be the standard in the field for some time to come.
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uffering from information overload and tired of the sessions in which I would find myself exhausted from surfing too many sources on the web, I made a retro‐style decision. I subscribed to Time.
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Newsweek was gone, but Time was still standing. I assumed it was because Time was still Time. Besides, I’d read a biography of Henry Luce (Time’s founder) and was sentimental for his greatest creation. Here, in one place, I would have an overview of the news fit to print. It would be fairly objective and would adequately cover the bases. The experiment has been a failure. I have not especially enjoyed my subscription. I do not feel better informed than I was. What I have basically achieved is a greater sense of the opinions of Fareed Zakar‐ ia, Rana Foroohar, Joe Klein, and Mark Halperin. Thanks to Time, I recently learned from a “constitutional expert” that we shouldn’t worry about the health insurance mandate because the states have been mandating auto insurance for decades. (Federal‐ ism, anyone? Not a key feature of the document, I suppose.) It has also come to my attention that the Tea Party was responsible for the troubled debt deal because they wouldn’t tolerate tax increas‐ es. (Neither did the president when he controlled both chambers of Congress and could have had his way.) Finally, I have discovered that the debt compromise has actually legislated inequality because it will reduce government jobs and enti‐ tlements. (I had not realized the government was supposed to make us equal through the rewarding of government jobs and entitle‐ ments.) No, I don’t think I have time for Time, anymore. And whatever you do, please don’t go back and look at past issues such as those from the 1950′s. It’s just too depressing.
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became a Christian in college. My faith has always been very much a New Testament faith. Though people mistake me for a theologian because I study religion and politics, I am far from seminary‐qualified. The Old Testament has often been a stumbling block for me. I delved into it on occasion and walked away shaken. My attitude became that I can accept all the wildness of the Old Tes‐ tament because I have Jesus, who brings it along in his wake. For the past several months, I have returned to the Old Testament. This time something seems to have changed. I have been able to stay with it night after night and reading straight through. I have just fin‐ ished the long, sad story of Israel’s kings. It is fascinating to see how 109
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God warned the people about kings, but acceded to their request. At one point, I calculated the number of kings of Israel or Judah whom God judged righteous. The percentage was low. Though David was the best, even he failed significantly and spec‐ tacularly. Most of the good things that happened in David’s life oc‐ curred before he became king. My conclusion upon reading all of Kings and Chronicles is that God gave Israel its kings, but the whole sad history was only a prelude to an unexpected fulfillment. Israel’s kings failed. But God would give them a true king who could and would bear the real cost of ruling. The true king is Jesus. I’m not a theologian, but this story arc helps me understand what the Reform‐ ers meant when they insisted on reading the Old Testament with Jesus in mind.
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grew up reading both comic books and stories about various pulp fiction heroes. My favorite in the pulp genre as a kid was Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze. He traveled with his group of highly capable friends and resolved various terrible threats to hu‐ manity. I recently picked one of the Doc Savage stories up in a thrift store and found that, despite the sentimental value, it didn’t hold up all that well. Other notable entries in that publishing space include The Shadow, The Spider, Sherlock Holmes, John Carter of Mars, Tar‐ zan, and Zorro.
Despite my disappointing return to Doc Savage (maybe I just got one that was subpar), I have enthusiastically continued to read in the genre. The Amazon Kindle has facilitated the habit marvelously as I now download the stories very inexpensively. First, I downloaded Sherlock Holmes (to discover a character somewhat more interesting than the one I’d seen on television as a child). Next, I stumbled upon Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane. Jackpot. Howard is much better known for creating his most popular char‐ acter, Conan the Barbarian (and his Atlantean predecessor Kull the Conqueror), but his first big success was Kane. For reasons no one is sure about, Howard killed himself at a tragically young age upon hearing of his mother’s death. We lost many years of exciting stories 110
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and characters as a result, but what he wrote during his short life was highly memorable. Solomon Kane, to my knowledge, is the only great Christian su‐ perhero ever to exist in the popular market. I call him a superhero, though he theoretically has no super powers, because his strength borders on the superhuman as does his courage, raw toughness, de‐ termination, and skill with weapons. He is a tall man, dressed in simple Puritan black, wears two heavy pistols (single shot), a rapier, and a dirk. Kane also carries a musket, with which he is deadly. The dour Puritan is almost never without his slouch hat, which rests above his stern face characterized by a pallor almost like a corpse. His people face religious persecution in England. Persecution plays a part in Kane’s choice to live the life of a “landless wanderer” drawn into many mysterious adventures as though pulled on a line by supernatural force. As with most great popular entertainments, there is a formula. Kane typically happens upon some awful injustice and pledges him‐ self to visit vengeance (he feels he is the instrument of God’s justice) upon the perpetrators. At one point, he reassures a frightened wom‐ an that “in times past hath God made me a great vessel of wrath and a sword of deliverance. And, I trust, shall do so again.” Finding a girl dying in the woods and hearing her story, he comforts her until she passes and simply promises, “Men shall die for this.” Part of what makes him so appealing is his single‐minded devotion to justice: A hunger in his soul drove him on and on, an urge to right all wrongs, protect all weaker things, avenge all crimes against right and justice. Way‐ ward and restless as the wind, he was consistent in only one respect – he was true to his ideals of justice and right. Such was Solomon Kane. Wandering through the jungles of Africa, he encounters slave trad‐ ers callously marching natives to ships on the shore. Observing their mistreatment, he is almost turned inside out with rage: The fury Solomon Kane felt would have been enough at any time and in any place to shake a man to his foundation; now it assumed monstrous pro‐ portions, so that Kane shivered as if with a chill, iron claws scratched at his brain and he saw the slaves and the slavers through a crimson mist. Kane is a complex character. Though he is relentless in his pursuit of evil, he is confounded by the means he is provided to conquer it. In several adventures, he makes good use of a “ju‐ju stave” given 111
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him by an African medicine man. Though he disdains it as a Puritan, he is often forced to employ its power. Intriguingly, he comes to be‐ lieve it may once have belonged to the great King Solomon in the remote past. He is also often left feeling ambiguous after having sated his need to dispense justice. Upon dispatching one vile villain, he remarks: God grant all our deaths be as easy. But my heart is heavy within me, for he was little more than a youth, albeit an evil one, and was not my equal with the steel. Well, the Lord judge between him and me on the Judgment Day. One must make obligatory remarks about insufficient enlighten‐ ment on Howard’s part. Africa is often the setting for Kane’s adven‐ tures. It is a dark place where many horrors of the world have been driven by the “growing light of the western world.” While Kane unfailingly treats the natives as human beings deserving of justice and protection, the narrative description often relies upon the type of evolutionary thinking which might place different races at higher and lower points on the scale of advancement. Kane’s own reflection upon one African adventure provides a suitable endpoint and helps give the reader a sense of his own good intentions: The light of God’s morning enters even into dark and lonesome lands,” said Solomon Kane somberly. “Evil rules in the waste lands of the earth, but even evil may come to an end. Dawn follows midnight and even in this lost land the shadows shrink. Strange are Thy ways, oh God of my people, and who am I to question Thy wisdom? My feet have fallen in evil ways but Thou hast brought me forth scatheless and hast made me a scourge for the Powers of Evil. Over the souls of men spread the condor wings of colossal monsters and all manner of evil things prey upon the heart and soul and body of Man. Yet it may be in some far day the shadows shall fade and the Prince of Darkness be chained forever in his hell. And till then mankind can but stand up stoutly to the monsters in his own heart and without, and with the aid of God he may yet triumph.
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atthew Lee Anderson (author of Earthen Vessels and a con‐ tributor to THE CITY) visited Union University recently. He talked about young people and the pro‐life cause. Matthew noted that this generation polls as more pro‐life than prior genera‐ 112
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tions, but there is a difference. This generation is more likely to hold the life issue as one among many for use in comparison as they make political decisions. He was concerned about the potential change in priorities and so am I. It would probably be too far to tell young people they should only think and act politically on the basis of the life issue, but I think there is danger in a way of thinking which would hold that favoring “creation care” is morally equivalent to endorsing pro‐life policies. The danger is this: Young people who embrace “creation care” do so with the nodding approval of the entire modern me‐ dia/Hollywood/academic/political establishment. It doesn’t take a lot of courage to hold that position. Being pro‐life (if one is serious about it) is still a countercultural position.
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t is sometimes said that the type of relationship a person has with his father will have an effect on his perception of God. I suspect the same is true of how one views authority more generally.
When I entered Florida State University in 1988, one of my first courses was an honors section in American literature. For the first time in my relatively sheltered life, I absorbed the liberal jeremiad against the white male. Regardless of the collective merit of that case (I suspect the prob‐ lem has much to do with human beings and power and less to do with white males specifically), I kept thinking of my own father. Did what I was hearing square with my own experience of the white male who had authority over me? It did not. As a professor today, I realize that what I did in class was a bit silly, but one day I’d had enough and held up my hand to be recognized. When called upon, I explained that my father was one heck of a great guy and defied the constant negative stereotype I was hearing. I’m sure I convinced no one as the reasoning from the specif‐ ic to defy the general is not always meaningful. But the greater point is this. My father’s love and leading in my life caused me to respect him and to want to defend him and others like him. He was (and is) a hard working man, a tremendous solver of problems, an extraordinarily smart individual, and a patient person. In addition, he gave generously of his time. How many hours did he 113
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spend catching balls I threw as hard as I could? How many of those did he catch on a ricochet to the chin which bounced up from the ground as I pitched to him crouched in the catcher’s position? What good thing did I ever ask for that he withheld? Do you know what may have been my favorite times with him? There were occasionally nights when I’d been sent to bed and would wander back out to the den to find him settling in for a late movie on CBS or a night of agonizing together over the awfulness of the Atlan‐ ta Braves in the late 1970′s and early 80′s. He’d invite me to join him on the sofa. Was a boy ever happier than those times? When it came time for me to have a relationship with God the fa‐ ther, my earthly father was no impediment at all. It was easy for me to believe that I could have a heavenly father who loves me.
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y daughter Grace (age 6) is the only native Texan in our family. We were playing on the beach a few months ago. She wanted to build a sand castle. While she worked on building the structure (a large pile), she urged her brother Andrew (9) and me to protect the castle. I asked her for the name of this land we were protecting. She answered, “TEXAS!” Daddy and Andrew built a wall and then dug several moats until we were tired. The princess demanded that we continue. She was able to keep Andrew on board by naming him Sir Andrew the knight and then promising him a reward. Daddy remained satisfied with his status as the engineer of Texas. Confident that Texas was suitably fortified, the princess allowed us to play in the waves. She rode on my hip in the surf. I felt a little like a horse. It was a good day. Especially since Mommy woke up from her nap and came out to the beach to find her husband serving the cause of parenthood rather than reading a novel.
Hunter Baker is Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences and Associate Professor of Political Science at Union University. He is the author of The End of Secularism (Crossway Books). You can read more at his website, endofsecularism.com. 114
The Word
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THE CITY
4THE`WORD`SPOKEN$ Cotton Mather In each volume of T HE C I T Y , we reprint a passage or remarks from great leaders of the faith. In 1710, Cotton Mather published a pamphlet: “Bonifacius: An Essay Upon the Good, that is to be Devised and Designed, by those Who Desire to Answer the Great End of Life, and to Do Good While They Live.” Here is an excerpt from Mather’s fiery call for men of faith to rededicate themselves to doing good for others.
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Capacity to Do Good, not only gives a Title to it, but also makes the doing of it a Duty. Ink were too vile a Liquor to Write that Passage. Letters of Gold were too Mean, to be the Preservers of it. Paper of Amyanthus would not be Precious and Perennous enough, to perpetuate it. To be brief, Reader, The Book now in thy Hands, is nothing but an Illustration, and a Prosecution of that Memorable Sentence. As Gold is capable of a Wonderful Distillation; Experiment has told us, it may be so dilated, that the Hundred thousandth part of a Grain, may be visible without a Microscope: This Golden Sentence may be as much Extended; no man can say how much. This Book is but a Beating upon it. And at the same time, ‘tis a Commentary on that Inspired Maxim, Gal. VI. 10. As we have Opportunity, let us do Good unto all men: Every PROPOSAL here made upon it hopes to be able to say, When I am tried, I shall come forth as Gold. O have not been left altogether Uninformed, That all the Rules of Discretion and Behaviour, are embryo’d in that One Word, MODES‐ TY. But it will be no breach of Modesty, to be very Positive in assert‐ ing, That the only Wisdom of Man, lies in Conversing with the Great GOD, and His Glorious CHRIST; and in Engaging as many others as we can, to joyn with us in this our Blessedness; thereby Promoting His Kingdom among the Children of Men; and in Studying to Do Good unto all about us; to be Blessings in our several Relations; to heal the Disorders, and help the Distresses of a Miserable World, as far as ever we can Extend our Influences. It will be no Trespass upon the Rules of Modesty, with all possible Assurance to assert, That no man begins to be Wise, till he come to make this the Main Purpose and Pleasure of his Life. 116
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Millions of Man, in all Ranks, besides those whose Dying Thoughts are collected in, The Fair Warnings to a careless World, have at length declared their Conviction of it. The Man who is not Satisfying of the Wisdom in making it the Work of his Life to Do Good, is alwayes to be beheld with the Pity due to an Ideot. None but a Good Man, is really a Living Man; And the more Good any Man dos, the more he really Lives. All the rest is Death; or belongs to it. Yea, you must Ex‐ cuse me, if I say, The Mahometan also shall condemn the Man, who comes not into the Principles of this Book. For I think, it occurs no less than Three Times in the Alcoran; God Loves those that are in‐ clined to do Good. Sirs, An Unfainting Resolution to Do Good, and an Unwearied well‐doing, is the Thing, that is now urged upon you. And may this Little Book now be so Happy, as herein to do the part of a Monitor, unto the Readers of it!
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UCH Glorious Things are Spoken in the Oracles of our Good God, concerning them who Devise Good, that, A BOOK of GOOD DEVICES, may very reasonably demand Attention & Acceptance from them that have any Impressions of the most Rea‐ sonable Religion upon them. I am Devising Such a BOOK; but at the same time Offering a Sorrowful Demonstration, That if men would Set themselves to Devise Good, a world of Good might be done, more than there is, in this Present Evil World. It is very sure, The World had Need Enough. There Needs abundance to be done, That the Great GOD and His CHRIST may be more Known and Serv’d in the World; and that the Errors which are Impediments to the Acknowledgements wherewith men ought to Glorify their Creator and Redeemer, may be Rectified. There needs abundance to be done, That the Evil Manners of the World, by which men are drowned in Perdition, may be Reformed; and mankind rescued from the Epidemical Corruption and Slavery which has overwhelmed it. There needs abundance to be done, That the Miseries of the World may have Remedies and Abatements pro‐ vided for them; and that miserable people may be Relieved and Comforted. The world has according to the Computation of Some, above Seven hundred millions of people now Living in it. What an ample Field among all these, to Do Good upon! In a word, The King‐ dom of God in the World, Calls for Innumerable Services from us. To 117
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Do SUCH THINGS is to DO GOOD. Those men DEVISE GOOD, who Shape any DEVICES to do Things of Such a Tendency; whether the Things be of a Spiritual Importance, or of a Temporal. You see, Sirs, the General matter, appearing as Yet, but as a Chaos, which is to be wrought upon. Oh! that the Good Spirit of God may now fall up‐ on us, and carry on the Glorious work which lies before us! I Won’t yet propose the Reward of Well‐doing, and the glorious Things which the Mercy and Truth of God will do, for them who De‐ vise Good; Because I would have to do with such, as will esteem it, a Sufficient Reward unto it self. I will imagine that Generous Ingenuity, in my Readers, which will dispose them to count themselves well‐ Rewarded in the Thing itself, if God will Accept them to Do Good in the World. It is an Invaluable Honour To Do Good; It is an Incompa‐ rable Pleasure. A Man must Look upon himself a Digifyed and Grati‐ fyed by GOD, when an Opportunity to Do Good is put into his Hands. He must Embrace it with Rapture, as enabling him directly to answer the Great END of his Being. He must manage it with Raptur‐ ous Delight, as a most Suitable Business, as a most Precious Privi‐ ledge. He must Sing in those Wayes of the Lord, wherein he cannot but find himself, while he is Doing of Good. . . . Thus ought we to be Glad, when any Opportunity to Do Good, is offered unto us. We should need no Arguments, to make us Entertain the Offer; but we should Naturally fly into the Matter, as most agreeable to the Divine Nature whereof we are made Partakers. It should Oblige us wonder‐ fully! An Ingot of Gold presented unto us, not more Obliging! Think, Sirs, Now I Enjoy what I am for! Now I Attain what I wish for! . . . Certainly, To Do Good, is a thing that brings its own Recompence, in the Opinion of those, who reckon a kind Information of a Point wherein they may Do Good, worthy to be by them requited with a Recompence to the Informer. I will only Say; If any of you are Strangers unto such a Disposition as this, to Look upon an Oppor‐ tunity to Do Good, as a thing that Enriches you, and to Look upon your selves as Enriched, and Favored of God, when He does employ you to Do Good. Tho’ the Assertion fly never so much like a Chain‐Shot among us, and Rake down all before it, I will again, and again Assert it; That we might every One of us do more Good than we do. And therefore, This is the FIRST PROPOSAL, to be made unto us; To be Exceedingly Humbled, that we have done so Little Good in the World. I am not 118
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Uncharitable, in saying; I know not that Assembly of Christians upon Earth which ought not be a Eochim, in this consideration. Oh! Tell me, what Utopia, I shall find it in! Sirs, Let us begin to bring forth some Good Fruit, by Lamenting our own Great Unfruitfulness. Veri‐ ly, Sins of Omission must be Confessed & Bewayled; else we add unto the Number of them.
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he most Useful Men in the World have gone out of it crying to God, Lord, Let my Sins of Omission be Forgiven to me! Men that have made more than ordinary Conscience about well‐ Spending of their Time, have had their Death‐bed made uneasy by this Reflection; The Loss of Time now Sits heavy upon me. Be sure, All Unregenerate Persons, are, as our Bible has told us, Unprofitable Persons. . . . An Unrenewed Sinner, alas, he never did One Good Work in all his Life! In all his Life, did I Say! You must give me that word again! He is Dead while he Lives; he is Dead in Sins; he has never yet begun to Live unto God: and, as is he, so are all the Works of his Hands; They are Dead Works. Ah! Wretched Good‐fornothing. Wonder, Wonder at the Patience of Heaven, which yet forebears Cutting‐down, such a Cumberer of the Ground. The best, and the first Advice, to be given unto such Persons, is, Immediately to do their best, that they get out of their woeful Unregeneracy. Let them Immediately Acknowledge the Necessity of their Turning to God, but how Unable they are to do it, and how Unworthy that God should make them Able. . . . The very First‐born of all Devices to Do Good, is in being Born again, and in Devising Means, that a Banished Soul may no longer be Expelled from the presence of God. . . . Sirs, A True, Right, Evangelical Prodceedure to Do Good, must have this Repent‐ ance laid in the foundation of it! It is to be fear’d that we too seldom Enquire after our OPPORTU‐ NITIES TO DO GOOD. Our Opportunities to Do Good are our TAL‐ ENTS. An awful Account must be rendered unto the Great GOD, concerning our Use of the TALENTS, wherewith He has entrusted us, in these Precious Opportunities. We do not Use our Opportuni‐ ties, many times because we do not Know what they are; and many times, the Reason why we do not Know, is because we do not Think. Our Opportunities to do Goodly by Unregarded, and Un‐improved; and so ‘tis but a mean Account that can be given of them. We Read of a thing, which we Deride as often as we behold; There is, that maketh 119
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himself Poor, and yet has great Riches. It is a good thing too too fre‐ quently Exemplified, in our Opportunities to Do Good, which are some of our most Valuable Riches. Many a man seems to reckon him‐ self destitute of those Talents; as if there were Nothing for him to do: He pretends he is not in a condition to Do any Good. Alas! Poor Man; what can he do? My Friend, Think again; Think often. Enquire what your Opportunities are. You will doubtless find them, to be more than you were Aware of. Plain Men dwelling in Tents, Persons of a very Ordinary Character, may in a way of bright Piety, prove Persons of Extraordinary Usefulness... This then is the Next PROPOSAL. Without abridging your selves of your Occasional Thoughts on the Question, often every Day, What Good may I do? State a Time now and then for more Deliberate Thoughts upon it. Can’t you find a Time, (Suppose, once a Week, yea, and how agreeably, on the Lord’s Day,) to take that Question into your Consideration; WHAT IS THERE THAT I MAY DO, FOR THE SERVICE OF THE GLORIOUS LORD, AND FOR THE WELFARE OF THOSE FOR WHOM I OUGHT TO BE CONCERNED?
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