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Huckabee is, however, very good under fire - affable, not very flappable, and humane. His response to the Ephesians question was disingenuous, however. The Scripture does not tell husbands to submit to wives. It tells them to love their wives in return for their wives’ obedience. ~Andrew Sullivan

More than that, it calls on husbands to sacrifice for their wives as Christ sacrificed Himself for the Church.  If that isn’t a call to devotion, I don’t know what is.  From what little I heard, Huckabee’s answer to this truly irrelevant question was the most impressive one of the night.

Ross commented on Noah Feldman’s article on Mormonism recently, which reminded me that I had also wanted to respond to one part of it and arguments like the following:

Still, even among those who respect Mormons personally, it is still common to hear Mormonism’s tenets dismissed as ridiculous. This attitude is logically indefensible insofar as Mormonism is being compared with other world religions. There is nothing inherently less plausible about God’s revealing himself to an upstate New York farmer in the early years of the Republic than to the pharaoh’s changeling grandson in ancient Egypt.

Put that way, Feldman might have a point, except that the claim of new revelation is actually the least “ridiculous” part of the story.  It is, and always has been, the content of that revelation that has drawn the most criticism, and so for the most part the majority dutifully ignores or downplays how the content of this or that religion is theologically untenable.  To do otherwise would begin us down the road to taking one set of theological claims more seriously than another, which might even (gasp!) lead us to assign different significance and measures of truth to different sets of claims.  The problem with this argument is that, for the sake of promoting toleration for minority religions, it essentially grants that every religion is just as inherently plausible as any other, which not only makes discussion of doctrine pointless, but actually impedes the possibility of religious dialogue and persuasion.  Granting this equality of religions paves the way for exactly the kind of arational sectarianism that skeptics believe is unavoidable with religion in public life.    

There is this very strange attitude about religion out there, and it is held by more than a few observant Christians as well as secular skeptics, that says that no revelation is more plausible than any other, which implies that revelation is entirely outside the realm of rational discouse and demonstration.  This is essentially fideism or a kind of neo-Barlaamism, which holds that believers should hold to their traditional faiths primarily because they are ancient–there is nothing that we can actually say rationally about a doctrine of God.  One of the reasons why this bizarre idea can gain such currency is the lack of respect people have for theology and dogma.  In our culture, if you want to dismiss someone’s position, you say that he is being dogmatic, and if you want to discredit an argument you refer to his worldview as a “theology,” preferably preceded by adjectives such as arcane. 

Such is the depth of our divorce from Christian intellectual tradition that many people do not recognise the substantive difference between an elaborately reasoned theological view and the ramblings of a science-fiction author.  Simply put, we lack discernment.  Militant atheists are at least consistent in the implications of holding such a disparaging view of revelation–for them, it is all made-up and undeserving of any respect.  Out of some misplaced sense of solidarity with other religious people against the Christopher Hitchenses and Dawkinses of the world, Christians seem to feel obliged to make general defenses of generic theism or the even more amorphous category of Religion, and woe betide the bishop who attempts, as Pope Benedict did, to illustrate the implications of radically different doctrines of God.  This then forces these Christians to argue that all these things are purely a matter of faith, where faith is defined not only as something inspired and the result of God’s grace (which it is), but also as something arational, rather than understanding that it is faith rightly understood that is the highest form of rationality.  Having conceded the high ground and having bought into a functionally extreme apophaticism, the Christian finds himself at a loss to make any argument from revelation, because he has already effectively granted that speaking kataphatically is impossible.  Trying to include everyone in a big tent of ecumenical anti-secularism eventually leads to being unable to say something about God and maintain that it is actually true, when there is nothing more fundamental to preaching and evangelising than speaking the truth about God in prayer and homilies. 

This brings me, oddly enough, to the question of evolution.  Fideistic understandings of religion and materialistic philosophies that seek to exploit evolutionary biology to their advantage enjoy a symbiotic relationship, since they both thrive on promoting mutual antagonism between reason and faith.  Tell the Christian that he must either endorse evolutionary theory or accept the Bible, and he will typically take the Bible, especially if he is not grounded in an authoritative teaching tradition that tells him that this choice is a false one.  Tell the average educated secular person that revealed religion is incompatible with scientific theory, and he may very well conclude that those who continue to adhere to revealed religion must be either ignorant, insane or up to no good.  Huckabee is someone who falls into the former category, of course, and declares himself agnostic on ”how” God works in creation, which is actually a far more honest view–and one that a majority of Americans would share–than affirming evolutionary theory because you know that it is socially unacceptable in certain circles to admit that you don’t understand or accept the theory.  As Rod has said before, evolution serves as a “cultural marker,” and it is deployed as a litmus test to see whether you belong to a certain kind of educated elite.  Ironically, the cultural bias against dogmatism and theology in religion has come around and struck science by making it permissible, even admirable, to doubt statements made with certainty.  Were it not for the tendency of many religious and secular Americans to oppose reason and faith, there would be no difficulty in affirming the truth of revelation and recognising the reasonable, albeit always provisional, nature of scientific inquiry.  Obviously, approaches to faith that prize doubt and uncertainty simply reinforce the tendency towards extreme apophaticism and fideism that make it impossible for believers and non-believers  to speak intelligibly to one another (to the extent that people working in two significantly different traditions can speak to one another). 

But without digging into the theological nitty gritty here, the bottom line is that however different the theology may be, Mormon morality is very much the same manichean [bold mine-DL], good vs. evil outlook as traditional Christianity. ~Mark Hemingway

In fairness, Hemingway clarifies in an update that he doesn’t use manichean here in a way that actually refers to, well, Manichean beliefs, and he certainly isn’t the only person who uses manichean in a very loose and inaccurate way, but it is notable that he uses this word in a post that is trying to explain and contextualise a heterodox idea in Mormonism.  In the Mormons’ defense, they do not have a Manichean understanding of the universe, and neither do Christians.  Manichees believe the created order is a prison for human souls that was created by an evil principle, and understand morality as a war of spirit and matter that is significantly different from the moral theology of both Mormons and Christians.  Since Manichee is one of the most overused heresiological tropes in history, it was an unusually unfortunate choice for someone who wanted to deflect criticisms of Mormonism.

P.S.  Hemingway’s update is itself unfortunate when he refers to the “dualistic notion of good vs. evil” in Christianity.  Christianity doesn’t have a dualistic notion of good vs. evil.  In the classic patristic formulations, whether of Augustine or the Greek Fathers, evil is the negation and absence of good.  A dualistic notion of good vs. evil would be…the Manichean understanding.

For a Byzantine angle on Huckabee’s remark about Mormon beliefs (”Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?”), I would note that the belief in the fraternity of Jesus and the devil has some loose similarities with the beliefs ascribed to the Bogomils, who allegedly taught something similar about Satan and Michael.  Aside from these associations, there is a more fundamental problem that this belief contradicts the understanding of Christ as the only-begotten (monogenes) Son, co-unoriginate with the Father.     

Update: In the “Huckabee is not running a sectarian campaign” file, you can add his apology to Romney for these entirely innocent remarks.

On a note more appropriate to our Advent season, I should mention that I have started reading Paul Gavrilyuk’s The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought.   So far, it seems an excellent study in the theological and historiographical problem of understanding the interpretation of God’s essential impassibility and His suffering in the flesh.  Gavrilyuk sets out to be the ultimate anti-Harnack, and has so far been entirely persuasive in his arguments (I am still only in chapter 3).  I recommend it to you all.

Slightly related to our modern theologically-inflected political controversies, my copy of Nicaea and its Legacy by Lewis Ayres arrived today.  I haven’t looked at it before, but I’ve heard many good things about it.  The fourth century controversies are fairly intimidating in their complexity even to those of us who spend our waking hours contemplating the significance of monotheletism.  We who work on the seventh century have the luxury, so to speak, of a paucity of sources and limited prosopographical information, so we are not simply inundated with information, and the fourth century looms so large and has been the focus of so many works that it quite an undertaking to put forward another general interpretation.  I look forward to reading it during vacation this month.

We’re going to keep on praising together. I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth. ~Barack Obama 

Establishing the kingdom of heaven on earth always means rendering more to Caesar than what was originally due. ~Nick Gillespie

 It is also, from the perspective of Christian orthodoxy, impossible to do and it is impious to believe that men can build the Kingdom.  Also, chiliasm has long been regarded as a dangerous heresy.  Christians are citizens of the civitas Dei, and we should live accordingly, but we cannot replace the earthly city.  Christians are called to be the leaven in the world.  They are not called to be utopians.

Here is a sentence from the introduction to the brand new Crisis of the Oikoumene:

Loyalty to the Empire that endured until the Monothelite crisis–involving a development on Monophysite Christology–prevented the [Three Chapters] schism from making a lasting mark on the African church.

Can I just tell you how troubling these lines about monotheletism are?  Every year there is some book that comes out about Orthodoxy, Christology, ecumenical councils or Byzantium and inevitably somewhere in such a book you will find a description of monotheletism like the one above.  It’s just not accurate, and yet it gets repeated on a regular basis.  I may have more to say about the book at Cliopatria in the coming weeks.  Christology buffs, stay tuned.  

Update: On the other hand, Richard Price’s chapter explaining the origins of the Three Chapters controversy is absolutely superb and definitely required reading for anyone interested in the question of the authority of Chalcedon and its supposed ‘Nestorianising’ tendencies on account of the reinstatements of Theodoret and Ibas.  I have rarely seen a scholarly treatment of this aspect of the controversy handled so carefully and thoughtfully.  Well worth the wait.

But McCain was precisely correct to say that Judeo-Christian values were a cornerstone of Enlightenment thinking that led men like Madison, Jefferson and Adams to believe in individual autonomy [bold mine-DL].

These men were critical of some aspects of Christianity. But to deny that Christian principles were a powerful force behind the founding of this nation, from the impulse to flee Europe to the justification for war to the guiding principles at the Constitutional Convention [bold mine-DL], is to deny historical reality. 

The political thinking of the Founders was profoundly shaped by Christian teaching. Pointing that out would hardly be controversial were not so many people irrationally afraid of religion in general and Christianity in particular. But as John Adams said, men “may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand.”  ~ New Hampshire Union-Leader

That first paragraph is remarkable.  Naturally, I don’t agree.  Far more overreaching than anything McCain said, which was ridiculous mostly because it was McCain saying it, the editorial maintains that “Judeo-Christian values were a cornerstone of Enlightenment thinking.”  To which I respond: “what part of the Enlightenment do we mean?”  I have been known to refer very broadly and negatively to “the Enlightenment,” when I am really objecting principally to political and social theories of Locke, Voltaire and Rousseau, and I have been reminded on a few occasions that it is worth keeping in mind the differences between Enlightenment thinkers.  Here this is especially worth doing. 

Leibniz, for example, was probably the closest to matching the image of an Aufklaerer who also respected what the editorial calls “Judeo-Christian values” (which is still pretty far removed from being “profoundly shaped by Christian teaching”), but he was an early figure and not representative of the kind of thought that influenced the Founding generation.  Algernon Sydney’s Discourse Concerning Government, which had a great influence on 18th century colonial political thought, is a weighty tome replete with references to Scripture, but it is not so much “profoundly influenced by Christian teaching” as it is Whig political philosophy trying to shield itself against Filmer with the Bible.  It is difficult to say that Harrington and Bolingbroke, significant for us because of their influence on Montesqieu and the later Country tradition, were “profoundly influenced by Christian teaching” beyond the reality that they belonged to Christian confessions and lived in a culture that was steeped in Christianity.  In my modern Greek history class, I could also say that Moisiodax and Korais were “profoundly influenced by Christian teaching”–profoundly influenced, that is, to run away from that teaching when it conflicted with their philosophical and political programs.  In general, wherever people have been ”profoundly influenced by Christian teaching” they have had no time for prattle about natural rights, the social contract and “individual autonomy.”  It seems right and good to me that they should respond in this way.  Understandably, Christians try to construct some preeminent place for Christianity in the story of “the Founding,” which has itself been given quasi-mystical status by nationalist historians and ideologues, because they have come to recognise that it is only through having a claim to being a key part of “the Founding” that they will be permitted to have any real role in a system dominated by Americanist/proposition nation ideology.  The problem lies not so much with attempts to baptise ”the Founding” as with the distorted and ideological treatment of the early republican period by later nationalist politicians and historians.  If Americanism and American identity itself are to be defined by political propositions, as the adherents of the proposition nation view would have it, it becomes necessary for people to interpret ”the Founding” in a such a way that their beliefs are discovered as the ultimate sources of those propositions.    

As a recent instructor of mine was fond of saying, let’s take this step by step.  It makes sense to describe America as a Christian nation in the following ways:

1) Anglo-American culture, what Russell Kirk referred to as our “British culture,” owes an enormous debt to European Christianity and is inconceivable without it.  North American colonial societies were and are derived from European and Christian civilisation and ultimately belong to that civilisation.  Christianity was a public religion and was, at the state level, an established religion in one form or another in many of the colonies, and this arrangement prevailed for many decades after independence.  Those who think they have found justification in the early republican period for their drive to push religion into the corner and isolate it from public life don’t know what they’re talking about.   

2) It is not possible to understand the evolution of America’s “language of liberty” without referring back to the 17th century religiously-charged constitutional struggles of the British Isles.  In this sense, our constitutional inheritance, which was at the heart of the War for Independence, depended on and derived from precedents that were set during a civil war that had both political and religious dimensions. 

However, the constitutional settlement that emerged out of these conflicts involved to a very large extent the complete abandonment of all political theology.  Any endorsement of ideas of “individual autonomy” would represent a significant departure from “Christian principles.”  “Judeo-Christian values,” fairly meaningless phrase that it is in this formulation, do not lead anyone to believe in individual autonomy.  On the contrary, whether in the Old Testament or the New, what we call individual autonomy is what Scripture defines as sin and pride.  Scripture is brimming with commands for social obligation, fraternity, charity, self-sacrifice and the corporate unity of the People of God.  Traditional Christian social teaching does not recognise an idea of “individual autonomy.”  Unity in the Body of Christ does not obliterate distinctions and personality, but it does preclude autonomy of any kind.  Enlightenment social theories along these lines were considered–and were–subversive because they contradicted the Christian teaching that allegedly so profoundly influenced the thought of Jefferson (!).  It should be enough that Jefferson was a great proponent of decentralism and liberty; we should not need to remake him into a crypto-theologian to appreciate his contribution to our country.  

It is correct to observe that Christian respect for the dignity and integrity of the human person and scholastic arguments on natural law paved the way for later applications of these reflections in political and legal reform.  It is true, as studies of the rhetoric of the Revolution have shown, that the use of originally religious language of covenants, which had already been introduced into political discourse during the English civil war, shaped broader popular understanding of the patriot cause more than did familiarity with Lockean contractual theory.  It is true that the broad mass of the population of the colonies was made up of professing Christians.  In this sense, the people constituted a nation of Christians.  To the extent that they still do, they may be called a Christian nation.  As Dr. Fleming said on this subject:

The United States was never a ‘Christian country’ in a confessional sense, though it was once a nation of mostly Christians.

Watch McCain pander:

I just have to say in all candor that since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles, that’s a decision the American people would have to make, but personally, I prefer someone who I know who has a solid grounding in my faith.

Watch him completely abase himself:

I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation.

Whenever I hear the claim that “this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles,” much less that the Constitution “established the United States of America as a Christian nation,” I have to wonder what people are thinking when they say these things.  In McCain’s case, it’s easy: he’s repeating what he thinks primary voters want to hear.  Never in his entire career, so far as I know, has McCain ever held forth on America as a Christian nation.  It would never have occurred to him.  The people who champion this or related ideas have been his adversaries within the GOP. 

It is true that America derives her religious culture from European Christianity, and it is true that Americans have been overwhelmingly Christian all along.  I think this religious heritage should be defended and extolled.  It is an integral part of American cultural identity.  What I really don’t understand is the need to make up these myths that the Republic is founded on “Christian principles” or that you can somehow find this claim in the Constitution.  First of all, these myths are unnecessary.  Second, it is an example of the mistaken drive to locate national and cultural identity in our political institutions and key political texts, when those identities really must be defined in other ways if we are not going to reduce them to ciphers or subordinates part of some political creedalism.   

At APSA, Prof. Patrick Deneen had a critique of Prof. Dienstag’s Pessimism, which I have discussed many times before, and of philosophical pessimism itself.   He said:

Memory and hope, Christopher Lasch argued – and not pessimism – are the proper antidotes to optimism.

I agree with this, or at least I almost agree.  Pessimism seems to me to be the antidote to the poison of optimism, and then memory and hope function as the proper nourishment that human nature needs to flourish.  Even if undiluted pessimism is a poison of its own, and I might grant that it is in its most extreme despair of any meaning in life, St. John of Damascus said of his heresiological work that it is necessary to make use of poisons to create antidotes. 

I have said many times that the virtue of hope has nothing to do with optimism, and Christians who routinely mistake hope for optimism are very badly confused about what hope is and what they are supposed to be hoping for in this life.  Indeed, to hope for salvation in Christ is almost the opposite of the optimist’s view.  The optimist says, “I will be saved, and I can save myself.”  The Christian says, “I may yet be saved, if it be God’s will.”  Hope and optimism are in fact antithetical, which reinforces my sense that optimism is as vicious as hope is virtuous.  Optimism is as demonic as hope is divine.

My own view is that the pessimists are as close to being right as secular philosophers are likely to be, but that in their denial even of the hope of salvation and their denial of all meaning they have missed the heart of why they are right about so many of their other observations.  They have seen clearly through the vanity of this world and the promises of those who would seek to realise some kind of salvation here below, and we would all be better off if there were more people inclined to see these promises as the hollow deceptions that they are.  However, the only possible pessimism that escapes the ultimate emptiness of this secular pessimism (the pessimists would see it not as emptiness, but as possibility) is a Christian pessimism that understands that redemption is still possible, but it is not one that can be fulfilled in this world.

A friend of mine has just given me a boatload of Armenian books and books about Armenian history and literature, including the Matyan Voghbergutyan (Book of Lamentation), often known simply as Narek after the monastery where its author, the late tenth and early eleventh century churchman Grigor Narekatsi, one of the great Armenian medieval writers, resided.  I also received a copy of the English translation.  Narekatsi’s poem is one of the greatest written works of Armenian Christian spirituality, a work of repentance and profound sorrow over sin.  Consider these lines from the second lament:

I am the forsaken tabernacle on the verge of collapse;
The broken lock on a door;
The voiced edifice soiled anew;
The forlorn fitting inheritance;
The forgotten house built by God,
As foretold by Moses, David and Jeremiah. 

Until now, I had not looked closely at the original.  I will certainly try to make some time to work on this. 

In the course of giving his devastating reply to Derbyshire’s review of his book Religion of Peace?, Robert Spencer reminds us once again of a crucial point regarding Christianity and immigration:

In reality, Christianity has no inherent connection at all with open-borders insanity and globalization. No less prominent a Christian than St. Thomas Aquinas expressed the mainstream Christian view when he said that “after his duties towards God, man owes most to his parents and his country. One’s duties towards one’s parents include one’s obligations towards one’s relatives, because these latter have sprung from [or are connected by ties of blood with] one’s parents…and the services due to one’s country have for their object all one’s fellow-countrymen and all the friends of one’s fatherland.” An open-borders globalist? Not quite.

It is telling that many of those who either cite the Gospel as the source for rejecting national loyalties and/or supporting immigration or invoke the Lord to justify the importation and exploitation of poor labourers are not themselves professing Christians.  Of course, the absurdity of justifying the exploitation of labourers in the name of Christian fraternity ought to be obvious, but we live in dark times where even the simplest things are obscured.  This quote also brings us back to the question of the relationship between Christianity and patriotism.

It has also never been clear to me where anyone came across the idea that orthodox Christianity endorses or encourages egalitarianism or rootless cosmopolitanism.  (There have been many modern Christians who have understood their religion in this way, but their egalitarian and cosmopolitan views are typically matched by their departure from orthodoxy more generally.)  The teachings in the Gospels and Epistles presuppose social hierarchy and patriarchal authority, and their authors literally cannot conceive of a world in which civic and family obligations are weak or non-existent, much less do they advocate for such a view.  If Christianity is “universal” in that it is for the salvation of all, it nonetheless does not obliterate natural loyalties and affinities to particular places and peoples.  Being willing to leave all your earthly relations for the sake of following God is a measure of the devotion the believer has and his desire to put God first–it does not abrogate his obligations to his kith and kin.  Indeed, to be a good and faithful servant, the Christian must not only show mercy to those who seek it from him, but he must also discharge his duties to those to whom he is obliged and related.  The Apostle exhorts: “But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.” (I Tim. 5:8) 

For more on this, I recommend Dr. Fleming’s The Morality of Everyday Life.  

Cross-posted at WWWTW

I had a response to this all worked out, but I will hold my fire this time.  Instead, I will point you all to my colleagues Paul and Zippy at WWWTW, who offer their much more even-tempered responses to recent critics.  They make the right points, and I agree with their remarks entirely.

Following on Zippy’s remarks, I would just include this one section from my unpublished post:

There is, of course, a legitimate hierarchy of loyalties that a professing Christian can and should respect.  One no less than Aquinas has laid out how natural loyalties to kindred, friends, neighbours and fellow citizens appropriately take precedence over loyalties to other, more remotely related people.  Loyalty and obligation to fellow citizens would take precedence over duties owed to foreign citizens, but the duty to treat all men justly in wartime is something owed to God.  As my colleague Zippy is a very serious Catholic (and it is this, I think, that is really what bothers his critics), he would probably have no difficulty acknowledging and affirming such an idea.

Via Pithlord, I see that Prof. Bainbridge has commented on this story about a Dutch bishop proposing that Dutch Catholic churches use the name Allah in their services “to ease tensions between Muslims and Christians.”  Pithlord is, of course, right that the concession, such as it is, is actually only a linguistic one.  Allah does mean God, or literally “the God” in Arabic.  As far as it goes, the change is fairly innocuous as a matter of literal meaning, but therefore all the more unnecessary and symbolically discouraging in that it is another example of Dutch natives accommodating and assimilating themselves to the immigrant communities rather than vice-versa.  The Islamic understanding of God is obviously quite different and opposed to that of Christians, but the bishop was not proposing introductions of Qur’anic passages, such as Ma qataau-hu wa ma salabu-hu during Communion and La taqu thaalatha during the Sanctus.  It is a trivial proposal in a way, but this makes it all the more foolish and pointless.  It is the ultimate in condescending tokenism while also managing to introduce a pointless change into the liturgical life of the bishop’s flock.  Should Anglicans begin saying Khuda Hafiz to make their Muslim neighbours feel more at home? 

It is not exactly an embrace of relativism, as Prof. Bainbridge fears, but it is fairly stupid all the same.  It is an example of the embrace of rather pointless symbolic gestures that are intended to foster ecumenical dialogue and such, but which routinely backfire and are viewed either as insults, attempts to muddy the waters or even aggressive attempts at appropriating someone else’s beliefs.  Do you suppose that a Muslim in the Netherlands will have a better view of non-Arabic-speaking Christians if they begin using the name Allah?  Would this not, in fact, inspire some resentment against those using this name to refer to the Trinity or to Christ Himself, when Muslims recognise neither the existence of the former nor the divinity of the latter?  At best, it would not achieve the intended goal, but would become one more episode in European Christianity’s own self-marginalisation.  

Update: On the other side of the world, there is apparently no small controversy over the changing usages from Khuda Hafiz to Allah Hafiz, as this older article also relates.  I had noticed that Allah Hafiz had been cropping up in more and more Bollywood movies over the past few years, but I suppose I had not realised that this reflected such significant changes in South Asian Islam.

The notion that this kind of politics has no victims, has not led to evil, has not at times led to absolute insanity (like Prohibition), and is not still a constant threat - is preposterously complacent. ~Andrew Sullivan

Sullivan is replying to Ross, who obviously never said any of the things being attributed to him in this sentence and who adds his rebuttal here.  Ross also made the best point of this exchange so far in noting that the description of Mother Theresa’s original quote as “vulgar but legitimate” displays “snobbish overtones and arm’s-length distaste for Mother Teresa (!)”. 

Since Sam Brownback, Dangerous Christianist, started all of this, perhaps he can have something to say in making certain basic but necessary points:

The separation of church and state does not mean the removal of faith from the public square.  I think you should have a robust public square that celebrates faith, that draws faith into it.

For a leader of “Christianists,” Brownback says the strangest things in this video.  Indeed, if I were someone who believed that Christianists existed and that they were infiltrating and destroying our public life with insidious references to Jesus, I would still not spend a lot of time vilifying Sam Brownback.  The original context of the quote ”All for Jesus” had Brownback making the point that it was “faith that powered her [Mother Theresa] to help millions.”  This is pretty banal and garden-variety “faith makes us better people” banter.  Presumably what Mother Theresa did falls under Sullivan’s arbitrary category of “good Christianism,” but Brownback’s reference to her statement about living for Christ is an example of the “bad Christianism.”  In Sullivan’s world, Mother Theresa could have said these words to a U.S. Senator and it was legitimate, but Brownback could not repeat them in an anecdote while running for President.  When Brownback repeats the “vulgar but legitimate” phrase, it becomes toxic.  This wouldn’t even make sense if Brownback were not one of the most reformist Catholic conservative politicians who has made prison reform, anti-poverty, “comprehensive immigration reform” and Darfur into his signature issues outside of his pro-life work.  I happen to think that his policy views and priorities here are mostly mistaken on the merits, but of all the politicians to attack with this line of criticism I can hardly think of one less appropriate than Brownback.  Sullivan seems to be channeling Marcotte.

Sullivan’s argument depends on simultaneously holding the view that introducing unduly “sectarian” religious language into political discourse (i.e., mentioning Jesus in a speech in a positive way) is a “toxin” while also holding that it is the purpose for which the Name of Christ is invoked that ultimately matters.  Thus he can speak about the “good” Christianism, which also happens to be the kind that is more in line with his general political views, and deplore the “bad” Christianism, which is not.  Sullivan does not deplore the latter because it is bringing Christianity or sectarianism or religion into politics, but because it does not interpret and practice Christianity in the way that Sullivan thinks that it should be practiced.  A liberal Christianity that does not bother itself too much with talking explicitly about Christ is acceptable in his scheme and can play a role in political reform, especially if it waters down the religious inspiration behind the reform drive and reduces it to platitudes about human rights, while any traditional Christianity that cannot conceive of speaking about moral or spiritual truths without referring to the Lord must keep out of politics.  Any attempt to rectify this arbitrary and one-sided arrangement by speaking forthrightly about Christ in a political context is supposedly an attempt to inaugurate sectarian bloodletting and to want to reenact the sack of Magdeburg.  That is Sullivan’s view, as his own words make clear.       

In a religious context, it is a vulgar but completely legitimate expression of faith. In a political context in a secular society, it is a toxin that will eventually corrode civil discourse into sectarian warfare. Which is, of course, what the Christianists want. They have the biggest sect, after all. ~Andrew Sullivan

If they existed, Christianists would be interesting people.  They would have to believe at one and the same time that they must make God’s will into the law of the land and enforce Christian doctrine throughout society and be convinced that the best instrument for this goal was the utterly secular, Mammon-serving Republican Party.  They would have to be completely fanatical and at the same time completely indifferent that their chosen vehicle of political power was basically hostile to everything they sought to achieve (which is one of the reasons why, despite decades of trying, they have achieved next to nothing).  They would have to be able to turn their fanaticism on and off with a readily available switch, which makes them rather less worrisome as the founders of the future theocratic nightmare to come.    

Sullivan’s larger point is worth keeping in mind: so long as it remains nicely separated from anything involving real life, confined to an irrelevant private sphere of “religion” that need never include venturing outside beyond the front door, religious faith is fine, albeit a bit crude for the high-minded doubt-filled pundit, but once it moves into the public sphere it is poisonous and vile.  Devotion to the Lord, once it escapes the safe environs of the closet, becomes an acid that destroys the bonds of the political community.  That is what Sullivan and other such “skeptical” conservatives believe about religion.  Religious conservatives would do well to remember this whenever they are tempted to entertain sympathy for the appeals of the “skeptics” to reason and moderation.     

Faith is a good thing, not a bad thing. ~Sen. Sam Brownback

Andrew Sullivan disagrees.

“All for Jesus. All for Jesus. All for Jesus. All for Jesus,” - Sam Brownback’s stump speech in Iowa.  And some say I exaggerate the sectarian nature of the GOP base. ~Andrew Sullivan

Since Brownback won all of 15% in an unrepresentative straw poll in a state with a fairly sizeable population of very activist evangelicals, you could argue that even if Brownback were the embodiment of the ”sectarian” and “fundamentalist” stereotype that Sullivan has laid out in his book and on his blog the significance of such supposedly fundamentalist sectaries for understanding the politics of the “GOP base” is minimal.  Against Brownback’s 15%, you have 31% who voted for a Mormon (the bete noire of the sectarians among us), almost 10% who voted for the decidedly non-sectarian, non-fundamentalist Ron Paul, 13% for Tancredo and 7% for Tommy Thompson–that’s 61% of poll voters who did not join up with the two most explicitly religious conservative candidates at Ames.  In this straw poll, it is fair to assume that the people who respond to Brownback’s rhetorical style are considerably overrepresented when compared with the party at large.  Given that Brownback is one of the least effective and weakest candidates in the field beyond his natural base of support, fundamentalist sectarianism is probably not on the verge of dominating the GOP.

Viewed another way, the quote has nothing to do with so-called ”Christianism.”  What should Brownback have said?  “Nothing for Jesus”?  “A tiny bit for Jesus, provided that it falls within the safely defined parameters of the Wall of Separation”?  “Some for Jesus, the rest for me”?  “Jesus is all right, but I am entirely secular and therefore will say nothing unduly religious during this stump speech”?  Perhaps Brownback’s remarks here, like so many things the man says, need some qualification or elaboration, but what do Christians believe except that we should, as one of the prayers in the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom says, dedicate ourselves and “all our lives unto Christ our God”?  For Brownback to say this makes him as “sectarian” as any believing Christian, which is to say that he actually believes Christ’s teachings to be true and compelling.  I generally have no time for Brownback on many policy questions, but this criticism, like Sullivan’s entire categorisation of the Republicans as a “religious party,” is excessive and unfounded.  Perhaps if the GOP actually were something like a religious party, it would not, as an organisation, tolerate nearly so many atrocious policies.  On the contrary, we have something of the worst of both worlds: a thin patina of religiosity masking an agenda of corruption and violence.  This is not the fault of any “Christianism,” but the result of thoroughly secular operatives understanding how to play on the fears and hopes of conservative Christians to win their support and who then proceed to abandon everything these Christians hope to achieve in the political realm.  The proper criticism to be leveled at many Christian conservative leaders and politicians today is not so much that they are grasping or willing to compromise the Faith for power (although some may), but that they are incorrigibly gullible and willing to put their trust in princes who have no use for what Christian conservatives believe except in an election year.

In an otherwise superb piece on the (often cynical) political and lobbying battle over the Armenian genocide resolution, Michael Crowley has this unfortunate line:

Most Armenian-Americans are descended from survivors of the slaughter and grew up listening to stories about how the Turks, suspecting the Orthodox Christian Armenians of collaborating with their fellow Orthodox Christian Russians [bold mine-DL] during World War I, led their grandparents on death marches, massacred entire villages, and, in one signature tactic, nailed horseshoes to their victims’ feet.

This is almost entirely right, which makes the mistake all the more glaring.  Diasporan Armenians often do talk of nothing else when it comes to politics, and the official Turkish line is that Armenian collaboration with the Russians was the “justification” for the deportation of Armenians “away from” the front lines.  However, the main descriptive error here is obvious, or should be, since Armenian Apostolic Christians are of a different confession from the Russians and have been for a very, very long time.  Ironically, this allowed the Armenians inside Russia to enjoy relatively greater ecclesiastical independence as a non-Orthodox church than other non-Russian Orthodox churches, such as the Georgian, but that is a different matter.  The difference here is crucial because the genocide occurred against the “loyal” millet, the one Christian community that could not be directly implicated in the designs of Russian or Greek or some other Orthodox state’s foreign policy, because they were not Eastern Orthodox and were under their own religious authority that had no ties to Moscow or any other center of Orthodoxy.  There were some Armenian revolutionaries who sided against the Central Powers in the war, but they were not representative of Armenians in general, much less could the entire community be reasonably held responsible for the actions of a relative few.  This is what made the genocide that much more shocking and terrible to the Armenians–unlike the other Christian minorities, they had by and large remained loyal and law-abiding subjects.  For the ideologues of the CUP, however, one Christian minority was as much of a threat as any other.  To do full justice to the history of the genocide, it is exactly the difference between Armenian and Orthodox Christians that must be kept in mind.   

It occurs to me that I should probably be doing something else right now other than blogging (a class syllabus doesn’t write itself), but my recent criticism of Bush’s liberation theology, which joined a chorus of negative responses from Ross, Rod, David Kuo, and Sullivan, has met with some skepticism from a blogger who issues the inevitable challenge:

There’s a common theme in all these, that because the religious is much more important than the political and worldly, that the political and worldly essentially doesn’t matter and that the religious shouldn’t influence the political and worldly. I strongly disagree with this.

Taken in isolation, the quotes from Ross, David Kuo and myself might seem to match this description, but this would be to misunderstand a great deal about how we think religion and politics should intersect.   

To apply this charge against Ross and myself would have to strike anyone familiar with our published statements on religion and politics as fairly bizarre.  Where Ross and I may differ on policy prescriptions or on the degree to which religion, more specifically a traditional Christianity (Catholicism for him, Orthodoxy for me), ought to influence politics, we are essentially on the same page in believing that religion not only should have an influence but that this influence is absolutely inevitable in any society that has a large number of religious people in it.  Particularly in a regime that is supposed to be democratic, religion and religious questions will play a role in political debate, and I think Ross and I would again be in agreement that they should probably play a larger role than they do and should do so in more explicitly religious language.  Besides the theological confusion in the idea, there are three things that bother me about Bush’s liberation theology.  First, it takes an ideology and then claims that this ideology has theological roots–you cannot disagree with the assumptions of the ideology, lest you declare yourself against the promises of God!  This is clever enough, but fairly transparent.  A second, related matter is that it takes what is otherwise unremarkable liberal revolutionary dogmatism and seeks to baptise it with invocations of the Deity.  Far from having “religion” influencing politics, it subordinates religion to the role of providing justification and being a sort of moral escape hatch when things go awry.  Mr. Bush’s use of this religious language, however sincere and deeply felt it might be, manages at once to enlist the name of God in a purely secular and, as it happens, rather bad cause, and to fulfill the worst stereotype about the political danger of religion in politics (as I have said, the Iraq war is a prime exhibit not of excessive religiosity in government, but rather a decided lack of it).  It has the ring of cynicism, even if it is not intended as cynical, while somehow also giving off the whiff of zealotry, though nothing could be further from the truth than to see in Mr. Bush the religious fanatic.  There may be some fanaticism there, but it is not actually religious.  Finally, nothing could be worse for a properly robust role for religion in public life than taking Mr. Bush’s badly disordered version of it as an expression of religious influence on politics.  This liberation theology, not unlike Marxist liberation theology before it, is a perfect example of how Christians twist and distort the Faith to suit the supposed political needs of the moment.   

My impression has been that Mr. Kuo does not believe that religion, specifically Christianity, should not influence politics, but that Christians should not make political success a greater priority than the calling of the Faith (as he believed was happening with conservative Christians, the modern GOP and the current administration).  You can dispute whether or not Mr. Kuo is right about this confusion of priorities in our own time (to my mind, he is more right than not), but you should not mistake this for a desire to separate religion and politics.  Rather, the goal for him would seem to be that Christians work as a leaven in the body politic, but that they do not allow themselves to be consumed by causes that are more partisan, narrow and limited and instead retain a more balanced sense of the lines between advancing and applying Christian witness in the realm of public policy and becoming servants of the political operation through which that witness is to be carried out.  It is not an appeal to quietism and indifference to political action as such–it is, as Mr. Kuo has said many times, a call for a “fast” from politics.

Then there is this business about whether God “cares” about the state of affairs on earth.  This sets things up nicely for the defenders of elements of the liberation theology, since it implies that anyone who would reject the gnostic and chiliastic deviations of liberation theology thinks that God is indifferent to the organisation of human society and human suffering.  This is not correct.  On the contrary, the charge might readily be made that Ross and I take the claim of a God Who “cares” about such things too far and that we think He “cares” about all manner of behaviour that has been deemed off limits to scrutiny by worshipers of privacy and money and, yes, liberty.  No one has ever exactly confused either one of us for great enthusiasts for a really severe application of the “wall of separation”!  That said, it does not mean that we are going to believe fairy tales that God wants everyone to become good liberal democrats, which is the ultimate conclusion of Mr. Bush’s sort of thinking. 

There is no evidence in Scripture or tradition that this is true.  No relevant religious authority teaches such a thing.  It is an odd view indeed that identifies the longings of fallen man with divine will.  Suppose, despite evidence to the contrary, that all men do long for political freedom–do Christians normally credit every desire of fallen humanity with such a high and noble origin as the Creator Himself?  Most people in different ways desire many things they ought not to desire, at least according to the teachings of Scripture, and they do this in defiance of God’s will–we do not attribute lusts of the heart or the pride of knowledge to some ”heavenly plan.”  We recognise them as excesses and flaws.  It is at least possible that a desire for political liberty may contain the seeds of similar spiritual disorders.  Even if every man declared that he wanted political liberty, it is still conceivable that this desire derives not from inspiration of the Holy Spirit, but from another spirit entirely. 

There are circumstances in which faithful Christians can, indeed, must resist unjust, tyrannical government, as Christians are meant to defer to legitimate authority and not simply lawless power.  That is a vital distinction.  The Anglo-American idea of the right to rebel has certain medieval precedents and theological defenses.  Even so, this means that God wills that every society and government be well-ordered according to prudence, justice, charity, moderation.  To the extent that a liberal democratic government can realise these virtues or allows people to realise them, we can say that it does not stand in opposition to what God wills.  It might even be argued (though I would not necessarily argue this) that this is the regime best suited for cultivating such virtues.  Even so, it remains only one means, an instrument, to the true end that God wills, which is man’s perfection in the virtues and the cultivation of God’s likeness unto full sanctification.  However, in certain ways, such a regime can be antithetical to these virtues and stands in need of reform.  Declaring that a particular political order is ordained by God for the entire world opens the door to abuse at home (since questioning the assumptions and goals of the regime could then be taken as resistance to God’s will) and aggression abroad (since the faithful must not tolerate the thwarting of God’s will in the form of different political regimes).  As it happens, this is exactly what has issued forth from the administration for which this idea has been a motivating force. 

When Mr. Bush says that “freedom is God’s gift to mankind,” he isn’t simply praising God for a providential order in which such things as political liberty are possible (which has rather more decent precedents that do not involve Woodrow Wilson or The Battle Hymn of the Republic), but he is saying quite clearly that the development of political liberty is itself integral to God’s providential plan and that God wills that all of the world be brought into a certain political state.  Against this, there is the weight of at least 1,700-odd years of Christian theologians who rarely, if ever, ventured the view that there was any particular regime, political principle or political arrangement that was absolutely favoured by God (and in the last three hundred years, Catholics and Orthodox are still taught to believe that no single form of government has any special endorsement from on high, and that all legitimate government must be obeyed).  Those who gave it much thought routinely came down, of course, in favour of monarchy, and one could be as theologically libertarian (that is, a proponent of man’s free will) as one wished without reaching any similar conclusion that there should be guarantees against arbitrary government written into law.  The thing that may trouble any small-government Theonomists among us is the recognition that political liberty was a primarily secular accomplishment resulting from contestation between different centers of power; strong arguments can be made that it required a Christian culture for the right conceptions of person and human dignity to command broad acceptance, and that Christianity with its recognition of two kinds of authority made political liberty possible in a way that it was not in other religions, but that is a very different kind of argument. 

Within Christendom, early English and Dutch liberal ideas were aberrations and happened to coincide with what most of the Christian world would have then and still does regard as heresy.  European liberalism elsewhere largely came into existence in the teeth of fierce opposition from the Catholic Church, not least because the liberals sought to attack and undermine the authority of the Catholic Church.  These are significant stumblingblocks for any belief in a liberation theology of the kind Mr. Bush espouses.  If God wills political liberation, this means two things.  First, it means that most centuries in the history of Christendom were almost entirely filled with Christians who did not know this part of the will of God and egregiously failed to obey Him (which conveniently elevates the modern liberal Christian to a much higher status in the divine economy–this is just a coincidence, I’m sure).  The other thing that it means is that God’s will was effectively frustrated for almost the entirety of human history, and it has only been in the last two to three hundred years that His plan has made any headway at all.  God is shown to be strangely diffident about His own supposed high purposes, or else most of His servants, including almost all of those whom Catholics and Orthodox today venerate as saints, were engaged in persistent rebellion against God’s will.  Both thoughts are impious and unacceptable.  Very simply, either Mr. Bush’s understanding of divine providence is correct and the broad sweep of Christian tradition has missed something vitally important about God’s will, or Mr. Bush is wrong and the tradition right. 

In the Orthodox world, of course, not only is there virtually no tradition of thinking as Mr. Bush does, but most instances where Orthodox theologians and philosophers have started speaking in terms of freedom have come after intense periods of post-1789 Westernisation.  It is in the very modernity and newness of such talk that distinguishes it from the overwhelming witness of Christian tradition.  Against the sweep of that tradition, the liberation theologians have on their side the Declaration of Independence and the occasional passage from Algernon Sydney.  How could it be that I remain convinced that liberation theology is bunk? 

Ross gets feisty:

In fact, I think Andrew lets Bush off too easily when he says “as a very abstract theological principle, it’s hard for a fellow Christian to disagree” with the President’s contention that “a gift of that Almighty to all is freedom.” On the one hand, there’s nothing “abstract” about that particular Christian principle: The gift of freedom that Christ promises is far more real than anything else in this world, if Christian teaching on the matter is correct. On the other hand, there’s nothing that’s political about that promise, and the attempt to transform God’s promise of freedom through Jesus Christ into a this-world promise of universal democracy is the worst kind of “immanentizing the eschaton” utopian bullshit.

Naturally, I couldn’t agree with Ross’ response to these items more, and I have objected to this Bushian-Gersonian liberation theology last year and again in a different form in my column (not online) in the July 16 TAC.  It is exceedingly easy for a Christian to disagree with Mr. Bush’s “theological perspective,” especially when that perspective seems to require spreading the good news of liberty by way of airstrikes and invasions.  It is amazing how much mischief results when you try to square Christian revelation with often antithetical revolutionary principles. 

Immanentist ideologies and substitute religions stand in opposition to the Gospel.  Compared to the liberation from sin and death that Christ has accomplished, how insignificant is political liberty!  This does not mean that the latter is itself undesirable, but that it is hardly the chief priority of God’s salvific plan for man, and it is precisely for the salvation of men from sin and death and not their amelioration of their political status that God became man.  I can think of no worse kind of militant quasi-religiosity than the sort that preaches secular revolution, actively works in such a way as to worsen the situation of the militant’s own co-religionists and justifies the bloodletting that follows by saying, “Deus vult!”   

The Vatican text, which restates the controversial document Dominus Iesus issued by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 2000, says the Church wants to stress the point because some Catholic theologians continue to misunderstand it. ~ABC News (via Rod)

Leave it to the press to take something very simple and almost routine and turn it into a scandal.  I suppose the potential for conflict and controversy makes for a better headline than “Vatican Says Catholic Christianity Is True…Yet Again,” but there is no real potential for that, as there is nothing new being contested. 

Was Dominus Iesus really all that “controversial”?  I have read it, and I found in it the same position towards other Christian confessions that the Catholic Church has stated quite explicitly since Vatican II, which is normally interpreted by otherwise unfriendly Vatican-watchers as a positive, “liberalising” interpretation.  This new document mostly reiterates some of the basic points and makes plain why confessions that lack apostolic succession are not, well, properly apostolic and therefore do not possess all of the proper marks that would make a church a church.  There is nothing in any of this that a non-Catholic should find at all shocking or disturbing.  If he didn’t already know that the Vatican does not believe him to be fully a part of the Church, he hasn’t been paying enough attention to care about it now.  If I did not have an interest in theology, I would say that it is almost a non-story. 

As an Orthodox Christian, I continue to be puzzled by an ecclesiology that says that the Orthodox Church at once has valid sacraments and apostolic succession, but lacks in the fullness of the truth.  This puzzlement is a case of sharply different understandings of catholicity and ecclesiology generally.  As noted here in the past, as I understand the Orthodox teaching, catholicity requires oneness of mind in doctrine, and unity requires unity of faith, bishop and Eucharist.  Catholics and Orthodox share none of these things.  How the Vatican understands the Orthodox to be in communion (but not full communion) with the Catholic Church at the present time will probably never make sense to me. 

At every opportunity, they’ve told evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design. ~Barack Obama

And at every opportunity, the Democrats and their allies have obliged by disrespecting Christian “values” and disliking traditional Christian churches, and have made a point of demonising and belittling conservative Christians because they care about, among many other things, abortion, gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design.

As if to confirm my earlier, mocking references to the similarities between the piety of Evan Almighty and Obama’s speeches, Obama also said:

But somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and faith started being used to drive us apart.

He even managed to figure that out without building a boat by hand.  It’s a miracle!

Tony Blair’s hard line on Iraq alienated three Roman Catholics who worked for him in Downing Street. All three, who were experts in foreign affairs, were deeply worried by what they saw as the rush to war in 2003, The Independent has learnt. ~The Independent

There is something strangely depressing about this news.  It is somehow less surprising that the unreflective and incurious Mr. Bush went ahead with the invasion of Iraq, when he was surrounded by either secular careerists or fellow evangelicals with no great grounding in ideas derived from the thought of the Fathers, and further encouraged by Catholic neoconservatives who provided the moral and intellectual fig leafs to assuage any doubts.  Likewise, while it seemed to be especially misguided that the then-head of the Union in Germany, Angela Merkel, backed the war despite the Vatican’s clear objections to the conflict, Merkel’s own East German Protestant background made some sense of her indifference to these objections.  There is something a bit more disturbing about Blair, who should hardly have been entirely ignorant of or completely indifferent to the words of Pope John Paul II or then-Cardinal Ratzinger on these matters given the background of his wife, the upbringing of his children and so on, and who had the advice of such skeptical Catholic foreign policy experts, nonetheless leading the way for the invasion.  It is no less disturbing that he is now apparently coming to Rome as if it were the most normal thing, while an aggressive war that he has helped to wage has been destroying the Catholic and other Christian communities of Iraq.  (There was also his endorsement of the Israeli campaign in Lebanon last year, which is another post in its own right.)  See, for instance, the fate of Fr. Ragheed Ganni and three of his deacons, who were slain in Mosul by Muslims.  Their story is described by Pat Buchanan and discussed in multiple posts by Andrea Kirk Assaf.  There you can learn more about one episode of the new Christian martyrs of Iraq.  The blood of martyrs is indeed the seed of the Church, but there is something just a little unseemly about a man who has helped to unleash the slaughter against his Christian brethren convert to a given confession when he is at least indrectly responsible for inflicting suffering and martyrdom on that confession’s members.  It would be almost as bizarre as Bill Clinton becoming Orthodox. 

Now, I’m no great religious scholar, but it doesn’t take Pope Benedict to see that the Noah story is not a charming little tale about familial love, but a terrifying lesson about our dependence on God: a warning that we are alone in the world and always at the mercy of a wrathful and demanding Lord. ~David Plotz

Just so.  Well, that and a warning not to breed with the Nephilim (who were all wiped out, I suppose, which makes it a moot point).  It is also the main scriptural counterargument against all secular and atheist whingeing (that one’s for you, Mr. Massie) in the area of theodicy.  If God willed the annihilation of all life on earth, save those in the Ark, who can take seriously complaints against God based on “bad things happening to good people”?  First of all, it throws into doubt the “good people” part of the equation, since the righteous folks were on the boat.  The story of the Flood teaches that when calamities strike the world, the world as a whole may very well deserve what it is getting and God may even have willed these things for the chastisement of man for his edification.  What’s more, that this is an expression of God’s love, not the absence of it.  This is a hard saying, but it is true.   

This is why Evan Almighty is not really an ”appalling effort to pander to religious moviegoers,” in that it isn’t pandering to religious people to get them to come see the movie, but rather tries to appeal to people already going to the movies with some minimally religious message.  It sounds like an appalling effort to milk the vague sentimental Herrgott piety of the broad middle of barely religious Americans for some money, while teaching that the “family that dwells on a large wooden boat together stays together, because it is surrounded by floodwaters.” 

Religious moviegoers of the sort Mr. Plotz is imagining are the people who went to see The Passion not in spite of the sufferings of Christ depicted therein but because of them, because they do not want to see their religion stripped of its most powerful and terrifying moments.  Those are the moments that strengthen faith.  If you want campy feel-good stories about togetherness, you can go watch The Smurfs.  Evan Almighty may bring in a lot of money, but if it does my guess is that it won’t primarily be busloads of evangelicals who put it there.  It will be people who would like to have some nice nods towards religion in their entertainment and would like a religion that doesn’t demand too much, provided that we are all really nice people who are concerned about all the little furry creatures.  As an Orthodox priest once said to us one Sunday, “We are not called to be nice.  We are called to be perfect.”  Anything that confuses niceness with perfection is, in my view, a stumblingblock to real faith.  But perhaps Mr. Plotz and I are actually in agreement about this, since he says:

If I were a believing man, movies like Evan would make me long for the days when Hollywood just ignored God.  

From all descriptions I have read, it sounds as if it is moved by the same spirit that inspires Democratic “outreach” efforts to evangelicals and has many of the same characteristics: clumsy, embarrassing and painful to watch.  Evan Almighty sounds like a movie that would satisfy a fairly mildly religious Episcopalian who thinks that if only religion could be about the love and the togetherness and the via media (always the via media) there would be no more problems, at least not with religion.  Let there be nothing severe or harsh or (Heaven forefend!) judgemental in religion–that would seem to be the shlocky religiosity to which Evan Almighty may be appealing.  Maybe that describes more Christians in this country than I would like to think.  For all our sakes, I hope not. 

I said that Linker sometimes seems to oppose both political action based on religious conviction and non-political attempts to Catholicize (or Rortyize, or whatever) the culture through proselytization and persuasion. I also said, as I’ve said many times before, that I disagree on both counts: I think that Americans should be free to proselytize privately and that they should feel comfortable using “the levers of politics” (I love how Andrew makes the democratic process sound sinister) to promote policies that spring from religious convictions. And obviously Richard John Neuhaus is interested in doing both; only an idiot would claim otherwise, and I don’t know why Andrew is mistaking me for one. ~Ross Douthat

I am not really qualified to speak about Rorty or the “burning” question (should liberals prefer Rorty or Rawls?) that initially sparked this discussion, but since I have waded into a previous Douthat-Linker exchange I will now offer, unbidden, my probably unwanted comments on this Douthat-Sullivan argument.

I think Ross is probably being too generous here, since I think he might be able to guess why Sullivan is tendentiously attributing the wrong position to him on a question touching on Neuhaus and the intersection of religion and politics.  This has nothing to do with Ross’ earlier statement.  Whenever Neuhaus is mentioned, even in passing, Sullivan’s “theocon” alarm goes off and he begins warning about the heavy yoke of dogmatism.  When someone has spent as much time as Sullivan has in constructing an elaborate web around the myth that “theocons” have helped to turn the Republicans into a “religious party” and a haven for “fundamentalists” (you know, like Bill Kristol), and the central objection he has to “theocons” is that they seek to influence policy (gasp!) according to the lights of their understanding of natural law and revelation (shriek!), no occasion is too small to restate the description of sinister plan {voice quavering with anxiety}: Christians are attempting to…participate in the political process and…direct policies in the direction of their preferences!  Who will save us from this madness? 

A large part of the trouble comes from some of the more slippery definitions that secular critics of the “theocons” use.  We find an example of this in the quote from The Theocons that Ross cites:

The privatization of piety creates social space for every American to worship God as he or she wishes, without state interference. In return for this freedom, believers are expected only to give up the ambition to political rule in the name of their faith - that is, the ambition to bring the whole of social life into conformity with their own inevitably partial and sectarian theological convictions [bold mine-DL].

Two phrases, “political rule in the name of their faith” and “the whole of social life,” do all the work here, but it is never clear what constitutes “political rule” or where privatised piety ends and social life-conforming behaviour begins.  Does political rule here simply refer to established religion, or does it mean any exercise of political influence or power by religious believers?  My impression is that Linker means the latter.  He takes arrangements that most people, religious conservatives included, accept as given (no established religion, religious pluralism and freedom of religion) and then invests this surrender of “ambition to political rule” with a much more restrictive meaning.  Once you have ceded that we should not arrest people for heresy, you must also supposedly cede the right to every other attempt to influence political life.  Once you have yielded an inch on the potentially totalising claims of religion, you are supposed to give up all claims with a social or political dimension.  If you won’t stone the adulteress, don’t bother trying to ”impose” your beliefs on anyone with respect to abortion–you threaten the liberal order if you attempt the latter, because it must inevitably lead to full-on theocracy in the end.   

In Linker’s liberalism, how much “social space” do you get?  Is it a bit like zoning regulations, where you can build up to a certain point but cannot come to close to municipal property?  What is worship?  Is it simply liturgy on Sundays and bedtime prayers, or does man’s religious obligations to God and his fellow men require something in addition to that?  Does the bare minimum of religious life require more than that?  Obviously, any remotely traditional religion requires much more.  Linker’s definition of the proper sphere for religion in a liberal order seems to suggest that most of what traditional religion requires simply in terms of religious obligations is incompatible with that order.  If I understand him correctly, it isn’t simply that religion should stay out of the public square, but that the liberalism of the public square should enter into the religious groups of the society and liberalise them as well, if only to ensure that they stay out of the public square. 

God is sovereign over all, and it is the role of Christianity, for example, to be concerned with the whole man and the whole of society, and this for Linker seems to be the major problem.  Any political role is, of course, entirely out of the question, and this would eventually proscribe even proselytising, since proselytism is simply the imposition of the “inevitably partial” and “sectarian” convictions of one religion on adherents of another partial view.  If everyone has his privatised piety sealed off from all attempts to change society, it seems to me that even conversions would be a potential source of trouble, since religious conversions will generate social change.  (Ross says that Linker rejects going this far.)   

In Linker’s privatised piety, if taken to an extreme, Christians would presumably not even live according to the tenets of their faith, because this would be an attempt to bring the whole of their lives, which take place in political society, into conformity with their sectarian convictions.  This could have troubling second and third-order effects, such as “disturbing” patriarchal notions of marriage or veritably “medieval” attitudes towards homosexuality.  It is as if revealed religion were concerned with the whole of life!  It is as if Christianity required men to commit themselves and “all their lives” to Christ God.  Clearly, this is dangerous and subversive stuff–before you know it, they might want to start talking about it in the schools! 

A less extreme form of Linkerian privatised piety would have an allowance for consenting adults to practice their religion, provided that it never went outside the home and did not interfere with the proper, “rational” upbringing of children.  You wouldn’t want to inculcate all sorts of “anti-social” attitudes into your children by teaching them regressive ideas about traditional gender roles or sexual morality.  Christopher Hitchens’ dream of a bureaucrat rescuing children from the “child abuse” of religious education is not far away here.

The suspicion of metaphysics would be more persuasive if, for another example, we imagine that religiously informed governments follow a pattern that invariably ends in some form of the Inquisition, granting civil police powers to religious authorities. ~Joseph Bottum

Mr. Bottum’s entire essay would be more persuasive if he didn’t pepper it with bizarre phrases like “the Counter-Enlightenment of the Left” and bizarre statements like the one quoted above.  The punishments meted out in “the Spanish Inquisition” were carried out by the secular arm.  Religious authorities were never vested with “civil police powers.”  The Inquisition investigated into whether people were heretics, infidels and the like, whereupon it fell to the secular authorities to carry out whatever sentences the law required for profession of heresy or apostasy, and so on.  The ecclesiastical office itself did not carry out any of the punishments that followed from these investigations.  This may seem like a minor point, but Bottum’s essay is riddled with these sorts of lazy claims. 

Even free will, however, is only one more suggestive part of death’s relation to politics. Think of all this in terms of the violence praised by a surprisingly large range of modern political theories. Why does death manifest itself—a sudden, miraculous, culture-forming power—whenever a thinker turns against the Enlightenment? What logic compels political philosophers, from the most radical right to the most radical left, to embrace murder when they renounce the poverty and weightlessness of modern culture? And why does literature show us again and again characters who imagine they can resolve the anxieties of modernity by drenching it in blood? ~Joseph Bottum

In my biased estimation, it occurs to me that a great many people were very enthusiastic about violence and killing and sacrificing human lives for the sake of goals inspired by the thought of the Enlightenment and its derivatives.  Something about “trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored” comes to mind.  Mr. Bottum’s question about political philosophers and murder gives the impression that there have been a great many anti-modernist, anti-Enlightenment people openly calling for murder, but he does not give any examples and seems to take a number of things for granted that may not be true at all.  For instance, I suspect that he thinks fascism is opposed to the Enlightenment, when it is one of the latter’s outgrowths; he probably thinks that the liberal belief in the perfectibility of man is significantly different from the fascist and communist efforts to create a “new man.”  I am not sure that he assumes these things, but that is what I would have to guess.  His argument here is unclear, but there seems to be no other way for him to make his claim about philosophers and murder hold up unless he attributes an anti-Enlightenment position to the moral insanity of various sympathisers with what Niemeyer called ’total critique’.  Read the rest of this entry »

Later in this essay, I take up what may be the largest piece—the fact that, at a very abstract level of logic, freedom of the will is closely tied to a world with death in it: If nothing really dies, then we have no freedom of choice; if we lack significant freedom of choice, then death will prove unreal. ~Joseph Bottum

Via Ross

This sounds like pretty heady stuff, and at first it gives you the impression that this is a deep and powerful claim about the nature of existence.  Then you realise that it is utterly and in all ways wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

If the Church were to start transforming herself into a directly political subject, she would do less, not more, for the poor and for justice, because she would lose her independence and her moral authority, identifying herself with a single political path and with debatable partisan positions. The Church is the advocate of justice and of the poor, precisely because she does not identify with politicians nor with partisan interests. Only by remaining independent can she teach the great criteria and inalienable values, guide consciences and offer a life choice that goes beyond the political sphere. To form consciences, to be the advocate of justice and truth, to educate in individual and political virtues: that is the fundamental vocation of the Church in this area. And lay Catholics must be aware of their responsibilities in public life; they must be present in the formation of the necessary consensus and in opposition to injustice. ~Pope Benedict XVI

In 1988, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger published a collection of essays under the title of Church, Ecumenism and Politics. In it, he argued that capitalism is little better than national socialism or communism, in that all three propose false idols (prosperity, the Volk, and the state, respectively). Ratzinger said that to build a humane civilization, the West must rediscover two elements of its past: its classical Greek heritage and its common Christian identity.

From the classical era, Ratzinger wrote, Europe should rediscover objective and eternal values that stand above politics, putting limits to power. Ratzinger used the Greek term eunomia to describe this concept of the good. In that sense, one could say that Ratzinger proposed a eunomic, rather than capitalist, model of Western culture.

Over the years, Ratzinger has been close to the Communio school within Catholic theology, which stresses the need for cultures to take their point of departure from the Christian gospel rather than secular ideologies. Its primary exponents have repeatedly criticized capitalism for promoting an ethos of individualism and “survival of the fittest” that is at odds with the communitarian thrust of Catholic social teaching. ~John Allen

Via Bettnet.com

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