Civil War

I don’t yet know what I think about Civil War, Alex Garland’s latest. I’ve not read a word from others, though I have a vague sense that there are already battle lines drawn, strong readings offered, etc. I have nothing to say about that.

I do know that Garland is smart and makes smart films. I’m hesitant to trust either my or others’ knee-jerk reaction to a film that’s clearly got things on its mind, a film that is surely not what many of us supposed it would be based on trailers and ads.

I also care not one whit what Garland himself thinks about the film. He may have thought he was making a movie about X, intending to say Y, when in fact he made a movie about A, which happens to say B and C.

Like I said, I don’t have a strong take yet. I do have one possible interpretation, which may turn out to be a strong misreading. Here goes.

Civil War is not about American politics, American polarization, impending American secession, or even Trump. It’s not a post–January 6 fever dream/allegory/parable. It’s not a liberal fable or a conservative one.

Instead, Civil War is a film about the press—about the soul of the press, or rather, about what happens when the press loses its soul. In that sense it is about Trump, but not Trump per se. It’s about what happens to the press (what happened to the press) under someone like Trump; what the reaction to Trump does (did) to journalism; how the heart of a free polity turns to rot when it begins to mirror the heartless nihilism it purports to “cover.” Words become images; images become form without content; violence becomes a “story”; an assassination becomes a “scoop.”

It doesn’t matter what Nick Offerman’s president says seconds before he’s executed. It matters that he say something and that someone was there—first—to get “the quote.” The newsroom lifers and war-time photographers documenting propaganda, unable to listen to one more canned speech spouting lies on the radio, themselves become agents of propaganda. They become what they oppose, a photo negative of what they’re so desperate to capture for their audience. (What audience? Who’s watching? There’s no evidence anybody is reading, listening, or watching anymore. Outside of the soldiers and the press, everybody else appears to be pretending the war isn’t happening at all.)

The urban warfare Garland so expertly displays in the film—better than almost anything I’ve ever seen attempting to embed the viewer on the streets and in the cramped rooms of military units breaching fortified gates and buildings, made all the more surreal by its being set in downtown Washington, D.C.—is therefore not about itself, not about the images it seems to be showing, but is instead a Trojan horse for us to observe the “PRESS” who are along for the ride. And what happens between the three leads in the closing moments tells us all we need to know. One gets his quote. One gets her shot. And one loses her shot, as she does her life, having slowly awakened across the arc of the film to the intolerable inhumanity required of (or generated by) her profession. Another propagandist, though, rises to take her place. There’s always someone else waiting in the wings, ready to snap the picture that will make her name.

There, in the Oval Office, staring through a camera lens, a star is born.

My latest: how (not) to talk about Christian nationalism, in CT

This morning Christianity Today published my column. Titled “How (Not) to Talk About ‘Christian Nationalism,’” it argues we should retire the term entirely, because it has ceased to refer to anything concrete while functioning in our discourse as a slander term for “politics and people to my right I dislike.” It’s true, though, that there are things worth worrying about that go under the label, like racism and lawlessness; we should just talk about those things instead of a huge umbrella term that no longer picks out anything specific in the world (or picks out far too much). Here’s how the piece starts:

Some years ago, the Reformed philosopher Alvin Plantinga gave a useful definition of fundamentalist. He noted that, in academic settings, it served as little more than a smear word; he offered an expletive I can’t print here, so let’s just substitute son of a gun.

Where it retained any content beyond the smear, Plantinga argued that fundamentalist meant “considerably to the right, theologically speaking, of me and my enlightened friends.” Thus did academics, journalists, and many Christians come to deploy fundie to mean a “stupid [son of a gun] whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of” their own. And because there’s always someone to one’s right, the F-word is essentially relative: It has no stable reference, but it certainly can never refer to me.

These days we might say the same about Christian nationalism. The phrase has lost all substantive content. In nearly every conversation, it has little reference beyond those “stupid [sons of guns] whose political opinions are considerably to the right of mine.” Allegations of Christian nationalism can mean almost anything: Maybe the accused is a literal Nazi. Or maybe he’s just a lifelong Republican whose big issues are abortion and tax rates.

Click here to read the rest.

My latest: on Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels, in Hedgehog Review

I’m in the latest issue of The Hedgehog Review with an essay called “Beating Slow Horses.” It’s about Mick Herron’s spy novels, which have been adapted for TV on AppleTV+. Here’s how the essay opens:

The conceit at the heart of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels is simple. There is a house in London for misfit spies. When MI5 is unable, for one reason or another, to fire failed employees, it opts to send them there. The exile is permanent, though the losers who suffer it do their best to pretend it isn’t. It’s a win-win for the service, in any case. No one gets sued. HR is pacified. And banishment proves either so unbearably dull and humiliating that the misfit spies voluntarily quit, or they remain there forever, whiling away the hours without hope of redemption. It is said of the souls in Dante’s purgatorio that the unhappiest are happier than the happiest on earth. Conversely, the happiest in Herron’s inferno are unhappier than the unhappiest outside its walls.

After all, there is no garden atop this mount and certainly no Virgil or Beatrice. Only a hulking demon, pitchfork in hand, keeping the drudges circling beneath him. The paradiso of Regent’s Park is lost forever. Only after some time does it dawn on the damned that their perpetual expulsion means they’re in hell.

Hell’s name is Slough House.

Unfortunately, the essay is paywalled at present. I imagine it’ll unlock here in the next few weeks. All the more reason to subscribe to a wonderful magazine!

Conversions, Protestantism, and a new mainline

Why do people convert to Christianity? Why do intellectuals and other public figures convert so often to Catholicism (or Eastern Orthodoxy) and so rarely to Protestantism? And what is the fate of both Catholicism and Protestantism among American elites and their institutions, given the decimation of the liberal mainline? Could a new mainline arise to take its place, and if so, who would it be and what would it look like?

Dozens of writers have taken up these questions in recent weeks, some (not all) prompted by Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion and her written explanation for it. Here’s Douthat and Freddie and Tyler Cowen and Alan Jacobs (and Alan again). Here’s Justin Smith-Ruiu. Here are two reflections about why Catholicism instead of Protestantism. And here is a series of pieces by Jake Meador on both the “new mainline” question and the “why Catholicism” question—with a useful corrective by Onsi Kamel.

I’ve got some belated thoughts; in my mind they connect to all of the above.

1. It’s worth making clear at the outset that countless people defect annually from Catholicism and Orthodoxy, whether into unbelief or into some Protestant sect. So the question isn’t about who’s winning or which group people in general prefer or comparing overall numbers. The question is about public figures and intellectuals and their conversions, as adults, from unbelief to faith. Why does that type of person always seem to be joining “catholic” traditions (defined, for now, as Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and perhaps also the Anglican Communion)?

2. Summed up in a single sentence, the reason as I see it is that Catholicism is a living tradition embodied in a global institution that stretches back millennia, claims divine authority, and contains both a storehouse of intellectual resources and a panoply of powerful devotional and liturgical practices. Let’s unpack that.

3. Catholicism is a world. Protestantism is not. Protestantism is not anything particular at all. It’s an umbrella or genus term that encompasses numerous unconnected or at best half-related Christian traditions, the oldest of which goes back five hundred years and the newest of which is barely older than a generation. There are not “Protestants,” somewhere out there. No ordinary layperson says, “I’m Protestant.” What he or she says is, “I’m Presbyterian” or “I’m Methodist” or “I’m Pentecostal” or “I’m Evangelical” or “I’m Lutheran” or “I’m Church of Christ” or “I’m Moravian” or “I’m Calvinist” or “I’m Baptist” or some other name. And the thing about midlife conversions on the part of public intellectuals is that they aren’t looking for a sub-culture. They’re looking for a moral and spiritual universe. They don’t want a branch of the tree; they want the tree itself—the trunk, the very root. “Protestantism” makes no exclusive claims to be the trunk as such. Its trunkness is never even in view. The question, therefore, is almost always whether Catholicism East or West is, properly speaking, the Christian trunk. Folks already in the West typically, though far from always, opt for the West’s claim of primacy.

4. Note well that this observation isn’t per se a critique of Protestants or a presumption against them. The fundamental feature of Protestantism is an ecumenical evangelicalism in the strict sense: a Christian whole created and sustained and defined by nothing else than the gospel itself. So that second-order sub-gospel confessional identities are subsumed in and comprehended by God’s singular work in Christ, which is the sovereign word proclaimed by the good news. In this way, according to Protestants, any and all attempts to be, or searches to find, “the trunk” is a distortion of true catholicity.

5. Be that as it may, the catholicity of Catholicism tends to be what wayward, agnostic, restless public intellectuals are after. And so they find it elsewhere than in Protestantism.

6. There is a reason why so many evangelical and Protestant graduate students in theology move toward “higher church” traditions. Intellectually, they discover thinkers and writings their own “lower church” traditions either ignore or lack; liturgically, they discover practices handed down century after century that function like a lifeline in a storm. Reading Saint Ignatius or Saint Justin or Saint Irenaeus or Saint Augustine, it occurs to them that they don’t have to imagine what the church’s ancient liturgy looked and felt like; they can simply visit a church down the street.

7. Speaking only anecdotally, I have never known students of Christian theology to move “down” the ecclesial ladder. I have only known them (a) to move “up,” (b) to move “left,” or (c) to move “out.” That is, relative to where they started, they go catholic, they go liberal, or they go away, leaving the faith behind. This remains true even of those who do not shift from one tradition or denomination to another: Baptists start reading Aquinas, evangelicals start celebrating Ash Wednesday, non-denom-ers start reciting the Creed. Or, if the move is lateral instead of vertical, one retains inherited beliefs and practices but changes on moral and social questions. Either way, “down” is not an option in practice.

8. Once again this fact, or observation, need not mean anything in itself. The populist or evangelical criticism might well be apt: Theological education places obstacles between students and the plain gospel. A student of theology “classes up,” thereby rendered unable to join “lower” classes in the purity of normal believers’ unadorned worship. Perhaps, then, this is an argument against the sort of theological education dominant today!

9. All this applies, mutatis mutandis, to public intellectuals. Put another way, suppose you are an atheist or agnostic exposed, over time, to the desert fathers, or to the pro-Nicene fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries, or to Saint Maximus Confessor or Saint John of Damascus, or to Benedictine monks, or to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, or to Julian of Norwich, or to Saint Francis or Saint Bernard or Saint Anselm. It would simply never occur to you that what you find in these authors is what you’d find in the Methodist congregation on the corner, or the Baptist church around the block, or the non-denom start-up across town. Not only do the devotional and liturgical, spiritual and theological worlds conjured by these writers and texts not exist in such spaces. The traditions themselves do not claim the figures in question. You go, therefore, to the people and the places who are bold enough to say, “Those names are our names; those saints are our saints; those books are our books. We nurture and preserve and pass them on. Come learn them from us; indeed, come learn from us what they learned themselves, in their own time.”

10. In sum: What intellectuals, especially agnostic intellectuals in midlife, are restlessly searching for is something not man-made, but divine; not provisional, but final; not a question, but an answer. They are looking for rest, however penultimate in this life, not more open-ended restlessness. Something that lasts. Something that can plausibly make a claim both to antiquity and to permanency. A bulwark that will not fail. Something to defer to, submit to, bow one’s head in surrender to; something to embrace and be embraced by: a teacher but also a mother. And the truth is that Rome plausibly presents itself as both mater et magistra, the pillar and bulwark of the truth. Orthodoxy does as well. The plausibility explains why so many intellectuals find port of harbor with each of them. The reverse, in turn, explains why so few of those sorts of people convert from rudderless adult atheism to Protestantism with a capital-p.

11. As for motives, if what I’ve outlined so far is true, then it makes perfect emotional sense for restless brainy seekers whose spiritual midlife crisis is prompted by perceived civilizational decline, torpor, and decadence to turn to catholic Christianity, East or West, as a haven in a heartless, spiritless, lifeless world. They aren’t making a category error, nor are they (necessarily) joining the church in a merely instrumental sense. For all we know, their search for capital-t Truth in a culture that refuses the concept altogether may be wise rather than self-serving. As Alan remarked, “what matters is not where you start but where you end up.” Doubtless there are people who join Christianity as a cultural project; must they remain there forever? I see no reason why we must, as a matter of necessity, say yes, for all people, always, in every circumstance. No adult is baptized without a confession of faith; if a new convert makes an honest confession and receives the grace of Christ’s saving waters, then he or she is a new creation, God’s own child, whatever the mixed motives involved. To say this isn’t to worship the God-shaped hole in our hearts instead of God himself. It’s to acknowledge, from the side of faith, that the hole is real. Because the hole is real, different people will find themselves knocking on Christ’s door—which is to say, on the doors of the church—for every manner of reason in every manner of situation. What Christ promises is that, to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. He does not lay down conditions for what counts as a good reason for knocking. Nor should we.

12. See here the opening paragraph of Christian Wiman’s new book, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair (from entry 1, page 5):
    Thirty years ago, watching some television report about depression and religion—I forget the relationship but apparently there was one—a friend who was entirely secular asked me with genuine curiosity and concern: “Why do they believe in something that doesn’t make them happy?” I was an ambivalent atheist at that point, beset with an inchoate loneliness and endless anxieties, contemptuous of Christianity but addicted to its aspirations and art. I was also chained fast to the rock of poetry, having my liver pecked out by the bird of a harrowing and apparently absurd ambition—and thus had some sense of what to say. One doesn’t follow God in hope of happiness but because one senses—miserable flimsy little word for that beak in your bowels—a truth that renders ordinary contentment irrelevant. There are some hungers that only an endless commitment to emptiness can feed, and the only true antidote to the plague of modern despair is an absolute—and perhaps even annihilating—awe. “I prayed for wonders instead of happiness,” writes the great Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, “and You gave them to me.”

13. Now: Given this apparent movement among once-secular intellectuals toward faith, or at least a renewed openness toward the claims of faith, what about a parallel movement toward a kind of Christian establishment—and in America, a “new Protestant mainline”? Any answer here is always subject to the ironies of divine providence. Christ’s promise to Saint Peter stands, which means that the forces arrayed against Christ’s body will never finally succeed. That doesn’t mean all or even any of our local or parochial ecclesial projects will succeed. But some of them might, against the odds. That’s God’s business, though, not ours. For now, then, some earthbound comments and fallible predictions.

14. I can’t speak to the situation in Europe or Great Britain, though my two cents, for what little it’s worth, is that we will not be seeing anything like a renaissance of established religion among elites and their institutions in our or our children’s lifetimes. In the U.S., I likewise think anything like a renewed liberal mainline is impossible. The once-dominant mainline—mainly comprising Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Methodists—is on life support where it isn’t already dead and buried. As a coherent civic bloc, much less a motive force among elites, it is undeniably a thing of the past. I take that as read.

15. So the only viable question in the American context, if there were ever to be a “new” mainline, is whether it would be Catholic, magisterial Protestant, or evangelical. There was a moment, as many others have written, when American Catholicism was in process of making a bid to function like a new mainline. That period runs basically from the birth of Richard John Neuhaus in 1936 (the height of the Great Depression, the end of FDR’s first term, with World War II imminent) to his passing in 2009 (Bush in disgrace, Obama triumphant, the Great Recession, in the sixth year of the Iraq War). Catholics were well represented in elite universities, in think tanks, in D.C., in presidential administrations, in magazines that fed and fueled all of the above. But between the priest sex abuse scandals, Iraq, the divisiveness of abortion, and rolling political losses on social issues (above all gay marriage), the dream of an American Catholic Mainline proved not to be.

16. As for conservative Protestants and evangelicals, the former lack in numbers what the latter lack in everything else. Here’s what I mean. A genuine mainline or unofficially established church has to possess the following features: (a) so many millions of adherents that they’re “just there,” since some of them are invariably “around,” no matter one’s context; (b) powerful centralized institutions; (c) an internal logic that drives its laypeople to seek and acquire powerful roles in elite institutional contexts; (d) a strong emphasis on education in law, politics, and the liberal arts and their various expressions in careers and professions; (e) an investment in and sense of responsibility for the governing order, both its status quo and its ongoing reform; (f) a suspicion of populism and a rejection of revolution; (g) a taste for prestige, a desire for excellence, and an affinity for establishment; (h) wealth; (i) the ears of cultural and political elites; (j) networks of institutions, churches, and neighborhoods filled with civic-minded laypeople who can reliably be organized as a voting bloc or interest group; (k) groups of credentialed intellectuals who participate at the highest levels of their respective disciplines, whether religious or secular; (l) a loose but real shared moral and theological orthodoxy that is relatively stable and common across class and educational lines; (m) an ecclesial and spiritual culture of thick religious identity alongside popular tacit membership, such that not only “committed believers” but mediocre Christians and even finger-crossing public figures can say, with a straight face, that they are members in good standing of said established tradition.

17. If even part of my (surely incomplete) list here is accurate, it should be self-evident why neither evangelicals nor conservative Protestants could possibly compose a new American mainline. It’s hard to put into words just how tiny “traditional” or “orthodox” magisterial Protestantism is in the U.S. It would be unkind but not unfair to call it a rump. Its size has been demolished by a quadruple defection over the past three generations: to secularism, to liberalism, to evangelicalism, to Rome. It’s arguable whether there ever even was any meaningful presence of magisterial Protestantism in America of the sort one could find in Europe. The four-headed monster just mentioned is a ravenous beast, and old-school Lutherans and Wesleyans and Reformed have been the victims. You need numbers to have power, not to mention institutions and prestige, and the numbers just aren’t there; nor is there a path to reaching them. It’s not in the cards.

18. Evangelicals still have the numbers, even if they’re waning, but as I said before, they lack just about everything else: the institutionalism, the intellectualism, the elite ethos, the prestige and excellence, the allergy to populism—nearly all of it. Evangelicalism is Protestant populism. This is why evangelicals who enter elite spaces slowly, or sometimes not so slowly, lose the identifying marks of evangelicalism. It isn’t strange to learn that Prestigious Scholar X on the law/econ/poli-sci faculty at Ivy League School Y is Roman Catholic. It is a bit of a surprise to learn that he’s an evangelical. The moment you hear it, though, you wonder (or ask) whether he’s an evangelical Anglican or some such. Consider high-rank Protestant universities with large evangelical faculties, like Wheaton or Baylor or George Fox. Ask the religion, theology, and humanities professors where they go to church. Chances are it’s an Anglican parish. Chances are that not a few of them, if they left, or if the university permits it, have transitioned from evangelical to Anglican to Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. This is just the way of things in higher-ed as well as other elite institutions.

19. Here’s one way to think about it. An evangelical who climbs the elite ladder is more or less required, by the nature of the case, to shed vital elements of her evangelical identity. But a Catholic is not. And a Catholic is not for the same reason that, once upon a time, a liberal Protestant was not. A high-church Episcopalian wasn’t working against the grain by earning a law degree from Princeton or Yale a century ago. That’s what Episcopalians do. It’s what Episcopalianism is. Moreover, if said Episcopalian began as a wide-eyed conservative and ended a enlightened liberal, he would remain Episcopalian the whole time. There’d be no need to leave for some other tradition; the tradition encompassed both identities, indeed encouraged passage from one to the other. Whereas an evangelical who becomes liberal becomes a self-contradiction. A liberal evangelical is an oxymoron. He lacks any reason to exist. Evangelicalism isn’t liberal, in any sense. It is axiomatically and essentially illiberal. To become liberal, therefore, is to cease to be evangelical. That’s not what evangelicalism is for. Evangelicals who become liberal remain evangelical only for a time; they eventually exit faith, or swim the Tiber, or become actual liberal Protestants, where they feel right at home. Which means, for the purposes of this discussion, that every single time evangelicals send their best and brightest to elite institutions to be “faithfully present” there, only for them to become liberal in the process, evangelicalism loses one of its own. The same goes, obviously, for a rising-star evangelical who loses faith or becomes Catholic or Orthodox.

20. The other thing to note is that the “moral” part of “moral and theological orthodoxy” is absolutely up for grabs right now, in every single Christian tradition and denomination in America. No church has successfully avoided being roiled and split in two by arguments over gender and sexuality. Nor is there some happy middle ground where everybody agrees to disagree. One or another normative view is going to win out, in each and every local community and global communion. We just don’t know, at this point in time, where the cards are going to fall. In that light, any ambition for conservative Protestants (or Catholics, for that matter) to form an established religious backdrop for elite cultural and political organs in America is a pipe dream, given what “conservative” means regarding sexual ethics. Whoever is still standing, Christianly speaking, at the end of this century, the wider culture is not going to welcome new overlords who oppose the legality of abortion, same-sex marriage, no-fault divorce, and artificial contraception. I mean, come on. Most Protestants I know take for granted the legality (and usually the morality, too) of all but the first, and are politically ambivalent about the first as well. Protestants are in numerical decline anyway, a fact I’ve bracketed for these reflections. Put it all together, and the reasons why public intellectuals don’t convert to Protestantism are inseparable from, and sometimes identical to, the reasons why magisterial Protestantism is not poised to become a new American mainline. Do with that what you will.

“Name five things they got wrong”

When I first hear or meet scholars committed to a comprehensive intellectual system, usually named after a person, I like to ask them a simple question (sometimes I do actually ask it, sometimes it’s only in my head): “Name five things they got wrong.” In other words, if you’re a Thomist or an Augustinian, a Rawlsian or a Schmittian, before I hear anything else about what you think, much less how your system solves my problems and answers all my questions, I want to hear how its namesake was fallible. If no answer is forthcoming, then I’m going to have a hard time taking anything else you say seriously.

I once heard John Hare, a committed Kantian and distinguished professor of philosophy at Yale (and, full disclosure, one of my own teachers), give a talk at a conference in which he began by listing four serious ways in which Kant erred in his philosophy. The rhetorical effect was powerful. It put the audience in a particular place: no longer were we preparing, perhaps reluctantly or suspiciously, to hear a zealous prophet of the Master deliver a timeless Word from the Inerrant One; we were now eager to learn from a fellow co-seeker of the truth, who happened to have found in Kant a useful aid for the journey.

The practice isn’t only rhetorically useful; it helps devotees of systems more generally, I think. “Calvin didn’t get everything right” is a kind of spiritual and mental hygiene for Reformed theologians. Call it an epistemic cleanse. All thinkers and writers should agree to this basic practice, or principle, but certainly Christians who believe in original sin should be the first to sign up for it.

The principle applies elsewhere, too. A Christian who says “My politics are exactly those of the DNC/GOP, plus Jesus” should immediately arouse suspicion, all the more so if the party advocate argues either that such politics are coterminous with Christian ethics or that this fact is obvious (or both). Whenever I meet Christians who are committed members of an American political party, the first thing I want to hear out of their mouths is, “Granted, I disagree with the platform on X, Y, and Z,” followed by, “but on the whole, I think the common good would be served best with them in power rather than the other guys.” That’s a perfectly reasonable position and can be defended variously and coherently. What can’t be defended is, “The ever-evolving platform of my party lacks any flaws,” much less, “My party’s platform is God’s political will written—a fact that should plain as day to any open-eyed believer.”

Now that’s nonsense on stilts, and anybody who’s not already a political hack can admit it. Epistemic humility is a tonic in politics as it is everywhere else. And in terms of honesty with oneself as well as the capacity to persuade others, there’s no substitute for principled and explicit fallibilism.

Of boys and men

I recently read Richard V. Reeves’ book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. The book and its many proposals have been discussed endlessly over the last year (some good essays and responses here), so I want to make just four comments.

1. The book is superb. I almost didn’t read it because I assumed the public conversation, along with the excerpts and Reeves’ own Substack, made the book itself redundant. I was wrong. It’s a model of public policy analysis and prescription made accessible to the general public. And Reeves’ willingness to step out and say things he knows he will be censured for is admirable. There’s also a quiet moral engine humming beneath the book’s hood that propels the more wonkish bits along, forming a single continuous analytical argument that’s equal parts lucid, provocative, and commonsensical.

2. Reeves constantly adverts to the old nostrum that “we can’t turn back the clock.” He trots out this maxim whenever he turns to his right (he’s constantly turning to his metaphorical right and left in order to stake out ground in the center), from which direction he hears the suggestion that if only we went back in time—say, to the 1950s—then the challenges facing the family today would be resolved. The first thing to say here is that there just aren’t that many people seriously suggesting this. The second thing to say is what Chesterton and Lewis said almost a century ago. And the third thing to say is this. It is a very odd thing, in a book about one of the most rapid, comprehensive, and unexpected social and political transformations in human history—namely, the entrance of women “out” of the home and “into” the workforce, as well as the various ways that men, once dominant, are now sliding into isolated, lonely, meandering, and unproductive lives—to insist that another transformation along those lines is quite literally impossible. Wouldn’t the same sort of author have said that in 1780 or 1870 or 1960? But then the impossible happened, and retrospectively it’s seen to have been possible all along. What one needs, instead of declarations of metaphysical impossibility, is a moral case for why “turning back the clock” ought not to occur, even if it were feasible. There are no laws of nature here. It’s not at all hard to conceive of conditions in the near, middle, or distant future that would conduce to a sort of revival of the Leave It To Beaver household. Reeves and others need to stop relying on the crutch of its supposed inconceivability and make the case instead for its undesirability (and not exclusively from their political vantage point, I might add).

3. On one hand, Reeves allows that, given real differences between the sexes, there will inevitably be reflections of those differences in the real world, for example in choice of professions, and that these differences are morally neutral. On the other hand, Reeves argues quite forcefully for public policy that would funnel boys and men into professions in which girls and women predominate, such as preschool daycare, early elementary teaching, nursing, and so on. My question here is not about his policy preferences or whether it would be good, say, for boys’ flourishing to have more Kindergarten teachers be men. My question is second-order. By what principle or criterion does Reeves decide which highly sex-differentiated professions ought to be leveled out by government and which ought not to be? How does one know, that is, when gender parity is desirable and when it is not? I’m stipulating that, given a particular profession, we have ruled out any injustice or coercion. Again, Reeves admits this; I’m not arguing against him here. My worry is that his honest answer is this: “just those professions that I, Reeves, believe should approximate greater gender parity (as opposed to those that I do not).” But what about people—women, men, or both—who don’t share Reeves’ view? It seems to me that he needs additional reasons to justify his interventions beyond the ones he gives (at most, that soft pressure to get men into “HEAL” professions would provide jobs for jobless men and/or benefit young boys without thereby disadvantaging young girls). If he doesn’t have such reasons, or a more general and widely shared principle of discrimination, then it becomes little more than personal preference, or perhaps a sort of intuitive Goldilocks rule.

4. This point leads to me to my last comment. Reading Reeves’ book solidified for me the truth of postliberal critiques of liberalism as a political philosophy. Namely, there is always a vision of the good operative in a given society, including liberal ones. What’s more, this liberal vision of the good takes precedence over democratic preferences. As evidence, consider that Reeves simply takes for granted that the vision of gender he is promoting is one that the liberal state exists to protect, promote, and advance via law and public policy. He does not believe this vision requires consent or advocacy on the part of voters; their views are quite beside the point. The government ought right now to be enacting policy that will lead to the world envisioned by Reeves’ book, which is to say, will employ both the soft and the hard power of the state to nudge society’s common life ever closer toward a particular normative vision of the common good. This is just what any state and its government exists to do, after all. It is not and could never be neutral, or feign to be. Yet the question never arises for Reeves whether the populace as a whole wants to live in his world. His argument doesn’t take democratic citizens into account. What he does is argue, morally and concretely, for what counts as the objective common good, and proposes what policy levers would create conditions for achieving it. In this he’s acting like every statesman, politician, minister, president, and monarch who has ever lived, at least those who took their duties seriously. In doing so, however, he gives the lie both to liberalism’s neutrality and to liberalism’s deference to democracy. That’s quite a thing. I don’t fault him for it. I appreciate his honesty. I wish everyone were so forthright. But I wish, too, that we could stop having conversations in which we pretend this isn’t the case—for everyone, for every society, of every kind, always, everywhere, and without exception.

I’m in Mere O on church and culture

I’ve got an essay in the latest issue of the print edition of Mere Orthodoxy, and Jake has just posted it online this morning. It’s titled “Once More, Church and Culture.” Here’s the opening paragraph:

Christendom is the name we give to Christian civilization, when society, culture, law, art, family, politics, and worship are saturated by the church’s influence and informed by its authority. Christendom traces its beginnings to the fourth century after Christ; it began to ebb, in fits and starts, sometime during the transition from the late middle ages to the early modern period. It is tempting to plot its demise with the American and French revolutions, though in truth it outlasted both in many places. It came to a more or less definitive end with the world wars (in Europe) and the Cold War (in America). Even those who lament Christendom’s passing and hope for its reestablishment have no doubt that the West is post-Christian in this sense. The West will always carry within it its Christian past — whether as a living wellspring, a lingering shadow, a haunting ghost, or an exorcised demon — but it is indisputable that whatever the West has become, it is not what it once was. Christendom is no more.

Re-reading what I’ve written there (drafted last summer, I think), I’m inclined to say the opening seven paragraphs make for some of my better writing. It’s a potted history of Christendom before and in America, and how it continues to haunt Protestant reflection about “church and culture.” Part two of the essay takes up H. Richard Niebuhr’s typology and James Davison Hunter’s “faithful presence.” Part three takes a stab at an alternative framework—but not one more single-label option that captures all contexts and circumstances. Read on to see more.

And once you’ve read it, go subscribe to the Mere O print magazine. It’s great!

Two further thoughts. First, some version of this essay has been rattling around in the back of my mind since January 2017, when I first taught a week-long intensive course called “Christianity and Culture.” I’ve taught it now every single January since. That’s seven total! Didn’t even miss for Covid. The texts have varied, but I’ve consistently had students read Hauerwas, Jenson, JDH (excerpts), JKAS (You Are What You Love), THW (Liturgy of the Ordinary), TIB (Strange Rites), Douthat (Bad Religion), Dreher (the old pre-book FAQ), Wilkinson/Joustra, Tisby, Cone, and Crouch. It always goes so well. And every Friday of the course, I conclude with, basically, what I’ve written in this essay: a set of typologies; a critique of them; and my own proposal. I’m grateful to Jake for letting me finally put it down in black and white.

Second, this essay has brought home to me how much this topic has dominated my thoughts, and therefore my writing, since I finished my dissertation six years ago. Specifically, the topic of the church in relation to society, which brings in its wake questions about Christendom, America, liberalism, and integralism, not to mention missiology, culture, technology, liturgy, and even anti-Judaism. Everything, in other words! For those who may be interested, here is an incomplete list of publications that bear on these matters and thus supplement this particular essay:

• Theologians Were Arguing About the Benedict Options 35 Years Ago” Mere Orthodoxy | 13 March 2017

• Public Theology in Retreat Los Angeles Review of Books | 20 September 2017

• Holy Ambivalence Los Angeles Review of Books | 1 March 2018

• The Church and the Common Good Comment | 17 January 2019

• The Specter of Marcion Commonweal | 13 February 2019

• A Better Country Plough | 4 August 2019

• Sacraments, Technology, and Streaming Worship in a Pandemic Mere Orthodoxy | 2 April 2020

• The Circumcision of Abraham’s God First Things | 1 January 2021

• When Losing Is Likely The Point | 18 June 2021

• Market Apocalypse Mere Orthodoxy | 25 August 2021

• Statistics as Storytelling The New Atlantis | 1 October 2021

• Still Supersessionist? Commonweal | 29 October 2021

• Jewish Jesus, Black Christ The Christian Century | 25 January 2022

• Unlearning Machines Comment | 24 March 2022

• Can We Be Human in Meatspace? The New Atlantis | 2 May 2022

• Another Option for Christian Politics, Front Porch Republic | 4 July 2022

• The Ruins of Christendom, Los Angeles Review of Books | 10 July 2022

• The Church in the Immanent Frame First Things | 14 July 2022

• The Bible in America (forthcoming in The Christian Century)

Christians and politics

My friend and colleague Richard Beck did me the honor of writing a seven-part series in response to a post I’d written last May, itself a reply to a previous post of his a few days prior. I told him I’d find the time to write about the new series, but I haven’t found it until now.

There’s much to say. As it turns out, Richard and I are not far apart here, but our instincts lead us in slightly divergent directions. Let me see if I can summarize his own views before laying out my own.

Richard begins by taking my point: In a liberal democracy, it can be an all-or-nothing proposition for Christians; namely, electing (or not) to be politically active and engaged. He allows that perhaps his hope for a kind of holy ambivalence, to use Jamie Smith’s phrase, is unrealistic. Democracy saps the energies of the electorate, Christian or otherwise. Be that as it may, Richard wants a certain baseline for Christian thought and practice with respect to political witness, in this or in any context. In ten theses:

1. The powers that be are always already at war with the kingdom of God.

2. The church, therefore, ought always to be on the side of God’s kingdom over against the kingdoms of this world.

3. It follows that the first and enduring political vocation of the church is prophetic criticism. Whatever else the church does, it begins and ends with the prophetic task.

4. Because the powers are fallen, our view of both the state and the arc of history should be deeply Augustinian: not tragic, but pessimistic. We are not going to bring heaven to earth, or establish God’s kingdom here and now, or proclaim peace in our time. Utopian dreams, including the Christian variety, are false and dangerous.

5. Because the powers are created, though, Christian pessimism need not write off the state altogether. This isn’t pure Anabaptism. Not only does the state have a divinely ordained role to maintain a modicum of peace and relative justice; Christians may—within limits, with modesty and caution—participate in and contribute to governance and other forms of political action in the wider society.

6. Such modest involvement does not lead to Christendom, however. Christendom is a dead end, precisely because it is not pessimistic enough about either the powers or the perduring sinfulness of Christian communities, projects, and institutions.

7. Together, these commitments repudiate any and all nostalgia for or attempts to “reclaim” a lost Christian past, pristine in innocence or even supposedly preferable to the present. Whatever one thinks of the middle ages, they aren’t coming back and Christians in America should not try to resuscitate an erstwhile medieval order. Stop working toward your imagined American Christian Commonwealth. Not only is it not happening (being a fool’s errand), it’s not worth the effort: it’ll blow up in your face like all the other attempts.

8. In a word, Christian politics should begin wherever we are, not in some other time or place where we most decidedly are not. Given the Augustinianism (or Pascalianism) of the foregoing, then, there is no One Right Way for Christians to approach politics. It’s piecemeal personal discernment all the way down, based on context, temperament, local conditions, prayer, opportunity, and other similar factors. Some Christians in the U.S. will “get involved”; others won’t. Realists will vote, march, and advocate, thereby getting their hands dirty; radicals will find themselves unable to do so. Neither is right or wrong. It’s a matter of prudence. We should stop duking it out to see who’s the victor between the Augustine of Niebuhr and the Yoder of Hauerwas.

9. The political challenge for American Christians today is thus an odd one: emotional disengagement via recalibration. American Christians have to find a way to stop caring so much, to stop finding their identity in politics, to stop investing the totality of themselves in winning or losing the latest (existential) political fight. Even if this borders on the impossible, it’s what’s called for in our situation.

10. To illustrate the point, suppose Christians in America stepped away from politics entirely for the next decade. From 2023 to 2033, no one in this country heard from a single Christian about political matters. A ten-year silence from the church. Christians kept living their lives, going about their business, seeking to be faithful, following the Lord—but without commentary of any kind (personal, public, digital, media, pulpit) on political affairs. Richard asks: “Do you think this ten year season would improve the church? Would this season improve the church internally, helping us conform more fully to the image of Jesus and more deeply into the kingdom of God, and externally, in how the world might perceive us?” He believes the answer is yes. The church needs a political detox, and it would be good for all involved.

I hope I’ve done Richard justice. Let me make one major point before I try to unpack a few more minute ones.

I take my original challenge to be this: Democracy is a genuinely new challenge for Christian political thought, because democratic involvement makes comprehensive demands of citizens. Self-governance is an exacting affair. Even prior to matters of identity, democratic action has the potential to be all-consuming. Because it is the business of life, our common life, it soaks up the whole of one’s attention, energy, and emotion. The most successful democratic movements in American history never could have happened if their adherents had been half-invested. Richard makes this observation a premise of his response, rather than a point of disagreement. The upshot as I see it, then, is twofold.

On one hand, it seems to be the case that democracy is a problem for Christian discipleship. Democracy wants your soul. But no servant can serve two masters. So how can politically engaged Christians also be disciples of Christ alone? I’m far from the first person to ask this question. Roman Catholic political thought has had anxieties on this score for two centuries and more. But it’s worth highlighting outright because it’s something of a taboo for American Christians to see democracy per se as a problem. To say it is a problem is not to say it should be dismantled or replaced. Only that it shouldn’t be assumed to be unproblematic from a Christian perspective.

On the other hand, Richard’s series left me thinking that we find ourselves where we started (or so it feels to me): that is, with the BenOp. Or in Richard’s words, from a post written six years ago, a progressive version of the Benedict Option. But the overall picture is the same. The American imperium is at odds with Christian witness. Don’t make the error of shoring up the imperium, much less mistaking shoring it up for the mission of the church. Instead, withdraw your heart, mind, voice, and labor to what is before you: the local congregation in its surrounding community. Attend to that. Think little, as Wendell Berry puts it. Stop thinking big; stop selling your soul to politics, only to be shown a fool for the umpteenth time.

In my view, this is where Richard lands: at a theologically orthodox, socially progressive version of the Benedict Option. A soft Anabaptism that doesn’t scream Nein! to politics so much as ignore it with a shrug before turning to love one’s neighbor—whose face and name one knows, living as one does in a flesh-and-blood neighborhood, not on Fox News or CNN or Twitter or TikTok.

I think this is wise counsel. For individual believers, I think it’s good advice, and especially for those most in need of a detox, i.e., folks who can tell you in detail what happened yesterday in D.C. but not the names of a neighbor in any direction, or the problems facing the city they actually live in.

So that’s that. Now let me turn to some larger thematic or architectonic matters that Richard’s series raised and about which I think we disagree.

First, while the “ten years of silence” proposition is an instructive thought experiment, I don’t think it works on its own terms. What it reveals, after reflection, is how it is impossible to live as a Christian without doing politics. For example, there are a lot of school-age children in Abilene (where Richard and I live) who are homeless. Christians here rightly see this as a pressing problem that calls for their involvement. But issues like family breakdown, poverty, nutrition, abuse, schooling, and homelessness are all political matters. Christians can’t be part of the solution if they forswear politics. Moreover, the call for silence overlooks the fact that speech is a part of action, indeed is a form of action. “I have a dream” is far more than a set of words. It’s a public political performance. It’s a world-shaping deed, expressed verbally. Words get things done. We know this from the Bible. That’s what prophecy is! Words that do things, words that make things happen. In short, Christians can’t follow Christ without doing or speaking about politics. That means ten years of silence is a nonstarter—even if we all (as I do) understand what Richard has in mind.

Second, I am very wary of framing the question of Christians and/in politics by present conditions and possibilities. Doing so results in ahistorical assumptions and parochial answers. Twenty-first century American liberalism sets the terms of the debate. But why should we let it? The church has two millennia of reflection and practice on these matters. If we allow ourselves to listen to it, not only will we expand the horizons of our imagination (the proverbial Overton window); we will see that the status quo to which we are so accustomed is far from necessary or immutable. It is contingent, like all social and political arrangements. We need not take it for granted.

Third, I am equally wary of issuing judgments in the present that entail wholesale indictment or repudiation of past Christian teaching and practice. It may well be true that American believers need not advocate for Christendom in 2023. That is not the same as saying Christendom is and always was an error. Whatever seems given in the moment appears inevitable and right to those living in it. I don’t want to fall for that temptation. To see all past political forms endorsed by Christians as fundamentally wrong, because they had not yet arrived at what we, now, endorse and inhabit, seems to me undeniably myopic, anachronistic, and uncharitable. To be clear, I doubt Richard would endorse that view, but it is all too common in modern Christian political thought. I want to avoid it at all costs.

Fourth, some political questions are existential. Granted, most political questions are prudential and still others can be disagreed about by reasonable people (Christians included). But some are matters of life and death, or of ultimate, or at least penultimate, significance. Chattel slavery is one example from our history. Civil rights is another. War and capital punishment are perennial. Abortion and euthanasia are relatively newer, in terms of laws and technology. If, for example, prenatal life is human life created and beloved by God, then it would seem to follow that political regimes should protect it and, to the extent that they do not, Christians should work to persuade them to do so. If the vulnerable, the poor, the unhappy, the lonely are finding themselves ushered by a medical bureaucracy to allow themselves to be killed rather than to be cared for, then Christians’ obedience to the command of Jesus would seem to require their active political involvement, precisely for the sake of the least of these. “Lord, when did we see you a victim of MAID and intervene…?”

Fifth, we should not presume to be more Augustinian than Saint Augustine himself. Augustine saw that, all things being equal, a polity that pays homage to Christ as Lord and seeks to do justice in accord with Christ’s teaching is a polity to be desired, to be sought, and to be received with gratitude. Personally, I want to live in a city and a state whose laws and social norms run with and not against the grain of the Word made flesh. Now, is that easier said than done? Yes. Does it open up leaders, of the church as well as the state, to abuse, corruption, hypocrisy, and dissimulation? Yes. Has such an approach failed before? Yes. All granted. I fail to see, though, that these admissions automatically and in all circumstances render the question moot. Christianity has never taught that one form of polity is ordained of God: empires, city-states, nation-states, monarchies, republics, democracies, and others have been led and supported by Christians. All I want to add is that I see no reason to rule out, on principle, the possibility of a genuine Christian commonwealth, whether in the past, the present, or the future, here or elsewhere.

Sixth and finally, there is no way banish God from politics. That’s true for Jews and Muslims as well as Christians, because God is one, and his claim to allegiance is total. That allegiance cuts against the claims of the state but also makes inroads on the state. For example, if the state is grinding the faces of the poor, followers of Christ know this is wrong. More, they know whose side God is on in the struggle. And they therefore know what to say to the state as the word of the Lord. This is exactly when prophetic criticism enters into the equation. My only point is that prophetic criticism is not a distancing mechanism; not a way to keep church and state separate. It’s a way of holding the state’s feet to the fire—that is, the consuming fire of God’s judgment. And if God is both the judge and the desire of the nations, then we are never going to be free of the entanglement of faith and politics, church and state, discipleship and governance, prophecy and law.

That indefinite entanglement suggests to me, in conclusion, that the sort of emotional and psychological disengagement (and recalibration) for which Richard is calling is a dead end. I too want Christians in America to call cease-fire in the infinite culture war and to stop letting tribal identities overwrite their baptismal identity in Christ. I too want Christians to worship God and love their neighbors and to worry less about Washington. In general, arguing over Christendom and Commonwealths and Integralism and Christian Nationalism (Lord help us) can easily become a distraction from the command of Christ to me, here and now, to do his will within the limits and opportunities of my life, not another.

Nevertheless, the command of Christ also, as we’ve seen, necessarily includes the realm of politics, a realm from which Christ is by no means absent. Finding him there, following him there, obeying his will there is not for the faint of heart. It takes much wisdom. It usually ends in one form of failure or another. But it can’t be avoided. And Christians are right to want to succeed there, and to care about the results. For the results bear on the lives of their neighbors—lives of great concern to the Lord.

Publication promiscuity

Every writer has to make decisions about where to publish. Not just where she would like to be published, but also where she would be willing to be published. All publications have a certain flavor or character, a back catalogue of writers, an ideological bent, an editorial slant, a reputation with readers and other writers.

I often get asked about why I publish with X or Y. I’m not nearly as well or as widely published as others, but here’s what I say in reply.

I am utterly promiscuous in my publishing habits. I would allow something I’d written—taking for granted that I wrote it, I was happy with it, and nothing more than the usual editorial oversight and revising was involved—to be published just about anywhere.

“Just about” rules out a tiny sliver of obviously objectionable venues: nothing, say, that calls or stands for armed rebellion, or racial supremacy, or some philosophy or politics so worthy of contempt that one could not possibly be associated with it or its adherents, much less aid and abet its cause. So if there’s a local chapter of some terrorist militia group with in-house literature, then no, I won’t answer any of their calls.

But beyond that, I’m very likely to say yes, and not with a tortured conscience but with a shrug. Moreover, even my definition begs for clarification. Because whether or not a viewpoint is contemptible is itself baked into the question of where to publish.

For precisely that reason, though, I think writers (and academics and journalists more broadly) shouldn’t worry so much about publication purity. Here’s why.

First, because there is no publication free of error. There’s always going to be some argument or position on offer in the venue with which you would take issue—perhaps serious issue. That’s just called writing in public.

Second, because every publication has skeletons in the closet. No magazine or journal has a blameless, infallible history. They’ve all issued corrections, errata, and apologies. Every one. (Those that haven’t, if they exist, should have; and the episode of their not having done so probably remains a stain on their reputation.)

Third, because no publication knows the future of any writer it publishes at the time of publishing him. So he goes on to be a wicked public personage, infamous for this opinion or that behavior. Editors don’t see the future. All they have to go on is the past in making judgments for the present.

Fourth, because writers are all wicked anyway. My tongue is in cheek, yes, but the claim also happens to be true, in more ways than one. Great writers are often awful people. More to the point, we Christians know that anyone you’ve ever read was a sinner. Every beautiful poem or essay or novel you’ve loved came from a wretched and damnable mind and heart. This doesn’t make the artifact any less lovely, nor does it excuse anyone’s actual sins (great or small). But it puts things into perspective.

Fifth, because publications don’t have cooties. Writing for X won’t infect you; reading Y isn’t contagious. You don’t contract uncleanness by reading or writing for a certain magazine. That’s not the way reading and writing work. Such a mindset is all too common among writers and intellectuals, but it’s childish and unwarranted. It’s the high school cafeteria all over again. Don’t fall for it.

Sixth, because writing for a given venue is not an endorsement, either of the venue’s usual views or of the particular views of any one of its writers or editors. I have no idea why anyone would suppose this, but many do, although typically only selectively—that is, with the “bad” outlets, whichever those may be. Such unthinking (often unreading) guilt by association isn’t worth a second’s thought.

Seventh, because great writers are themselves promiscuous. Some of my favorite writers today are fantastically diverse in where and with whom they will publish, including the most successful and respected. Off hand, I’m thinking of folks like Eve Tushnet and Phil Christman, Christopher Caldwell and David Bentley Hart, George Scialabba and Samuel Moyn, B. D. McClay and Paul Griffiths, or Wendell Berry and Christopher Hitchens in their younger days. Part of the discipline of publishing promiscuity is that it requires you, the writer, to be interesting enough and independent enough that editors at a bewildering variety of venues would kill to feature you, even though you “might not quite fit” with the norm there. Well done then. That means you’re doing something right.

Eighth and last, because writing wants to be free. It wants to get out. If someone wants to publish you, take them up on it. It’s unlikely you’ll regret it. Nor, if you do regret it, do you have to do it again; look elsewhere. But you’ll never be a writer if you don’t get your writing out in the world. Take some chances and don’t be picky, certainly not with active suitors.

In fact, go ahead and consider this post as good as giving you my card: if you want to publish me, you already know my answer.

Once more, negative world

I sometimes think of what I write on this blog as mostly just drafting off two other, far superior blogs: Richard Beck’s and Alan Jacobs’. Both are friends whose work I’ve been reading for more than a decade, and who have been kind enough, more than once, to link to my own work or to respond to it in some way.

Recently Alan wrote a follow-up to his blistering rejection of Aaron Renn’s “Three Worlds” framework for understanding Christians’ social status in the United States. In the follow-up, Alan mentions both Derek Rishmawy’s and my respective attempts to interpret and commend a version of Renn’s framework. Gently but firmly, he rebukes these attempts and underscores why he finds the whole business—the whole conversation—a misdirect: a futile, self-regarding failure to attend to the main thing, namely following Christ irrespective of our surroundings and their purported (in)hospitality to the gospel. We do not, Alan argues, need detailed plans in order to fulfill this charge. Nor do we need an ostensibly (or fantastically) friendlier society in order to succeed. We just need the will, the resolve, the obedience to Christ requisite to set one foot in front of the other, answering the call of the Lord whatever it may be, wherever it may lead, whenever it may come.

I see that Derek has written his own response to Alan (though I haven’t yet read it). I’m going to attempt my own here, with the aim both of understanding what Alan is concerned about and of clarifying my own position.

The simplest way to put my view is in the form of two broad questions:

1. Do different societies, in different times and different places, treat an individual’s or a community’s public identification as Christian in different ways?

2. If yes, does knowledge of those differences make some relevant difference for how Christians should understand, approach, engage, and inhabit their societies?

I take the answer to the first question as read: yes, obviously. I take the answer to the second to be yes as well.

To me, that settles the matter—at least at the formal level.

The third question descends from the heights of history and missiology, respectively, to applied sociology: Is it accurate to say, all things being equal, that being known publicly as a Christian in the U.S. is less likely to enhance one’s social status than at any time since World War II? Or, to put it differently, that public identification as Christian is more likely to downgrade one’s social status that at any point in living memory? Or, to put it more weakly and less comparatively, that in general “being identified as Christian” is not something a non-Christian would, in our society today, be tempted to pursue nominally for the sole reason of trying to enhance his or her social status?

Granted, the U.S. is a big country. I live in a town of 120,000 in west Texas. Having a nominal membership at a local church one doesn’t actually attend or care much about might still grant a certain cache here. (Though, in most circles, I doubt it.) Any comment, then, about “the U.S. today” is going to be an “in general, on balance, all things being equal, thinking about the country as a whole” comment. If you don’t think such comments can be meaningful, fair enough. But if you do, then this sort of comment is permissible like any other.

Region and subculture are one element here. Institutions and professions are another. Some organizations and careers will be neutral as regards religious identity; others, far from it. Also granted.

The upshot, all qualifications made, is simply that something has changed in the last century regarding how self-identifying as a Christian orients oneself to the wider culture; how one is perceived as a result. And apart from claims about this as a change, the point about the present moment is that, whether or not there ever was such a time (in this society or another) when being seen to be a Christian was something that might raise one’s prospects—marital, educational, financial, professional, political—this time, in this society, is not one of them. We can haggle over whether it’s preferable to say “it is not” one of them versus “it is no longer” one of them. But either way, it’s not.

Suppose Alan agrees with me (though, if I’m reading him correctly, I don’t think he does). Does it matter?

I think it does. But let me say how I don’t think it matters before I say how I think it does.

It does not matter “because America is no longer a Christian nation.” It does not matter, that is, as if this analysis were at heart a declension narrative, according to which things have been getting worse and worse and now, at this moment, we’ve reached the nadir; or at least have crept up to the edge of the cliff. No. The social status of being-seen-as-Christian is simply one among many sociological variables relevant to Christian consideration of the church’s mission.

I also don’t think it matters “because things are really bad out there.” They’re not. It’s bad when Christians get thrown to the lions. It’s bad when Christians can’t vote. It’s bad when certain Christians aren’t afforded basic rights and privileges common to civic society. It’s bad when it is against the law for Christians to gather on Sunday mornings, to pray and celebrate the Eucharist, to read their Bibles and worship without fear, to share the gospel with whomever will listen.

American society does not fit these descriptions, and it isn’t close to any of them. Christians in America are remarkably free; our privileges are innumerable. Words like “persecution” are inapt to our context, and unwise to use—not least since we have sisters and brothers elsewhere in the world who suffer actual persecution at this very moment.

How, then, is the social status of public identification as Christian relevant? In this respect:

The church cannot bear faithful witness to Christ in a given context if she lacks awareness of the particular features that constitute that context, that make it what it is.

Think about different locations and cultures today. Does Christian witness look the same in Riyadh, Nairobi, Beijing, St. Petersburg, Buenos Aires, Miami, Milan? Does it look the same in 2022, 1722, 1422, 1122, 822, 522, 222? Surely not. And surely all Christians would agree that differences of context in each time and place call for different forms of response to those differences? Such that the specific contours of Christian witness actually and rightly look different based on when and where one lives, and how a culture or society in question responds to—welcomes, rejects, shrugs, punishes—public identification as Christian?

Perhaps, again, Alan would agree with this. Let me try to say a bit more, then, to get enough meat on these bones to prompt a meaningful disagreement.

Consider the difference between life under Diocletian, about half a century before St. Augustine’s birth, and life under Honorius, when Augustine was bishop of Hippo. The former was a time when the imperial authorities were your enemy, if you were known as a Christian; the latter was a time when claiming to be a Nicene Christian might enhance one’s political or financial prospects (though not necessarily). How should the church navigate each setting? This was a real question faced by bishops, monks, priests, and laypersons around the Mediterranean. The first was, in Renn’s language, a “negative world”; the second, a (more) “positive world.” I see no reason to declare a priori that such labels, and the analysis underlying and following from them, an inadmissible distraction.

Now for an example closer to home. I teach undergraduate students of all kinds, but every semester I have a class all to myself composed only of Bible and ministry majors: i.e., young persons preparing for a life of formal service to the church in the form of teaching, preaching, pastoring, and so on. These students largely come from the Bible Belt, and many of them come from big churches in big cities where being Christian and attending such churches doesn’t feel abnormal. This experience in turn nurtures in a good number of them a sense of their context, present and future, as either neutrally or favorably disposed toward Christianity. A world of megachurches and popular pastors and celebrity Christians and spiritual influencers is just “the world”: yesterday, today, and forever. The churches they one day will lead will be large, healthy, full, and financially stable. The folks in the pews will lead lives as middle-class American Christians long have (so they imagine): unthreatened and tacitly buoyed by the surrounding culture.

Not for all of them, but for quite a few, it is something of a shock to learn about the declining rates of identification as Christian in America; about the decades-long decreasing numbers of church attendance; about how many churches are closing their doors each month; about some of the modest but real social, political, and professional challenges facing folks known to be Christian in what once were considered mainstream careers and institutions in this country.

In a word, most of my students believe they live in Renn’s Positive World. They really do. Others suppose it’s a Neutral World for Christians. Few to none see it as a Negative World. And I’m telling you, it makes a difference for how they understand their faith, their future, and their eventual ministry in the church.

This is one reason, in my view, why we keep seeing so many pastors quitting formal ministry in their 20s and 30s. It’s hard out there. And many of them are unprepared for what’s awaiting them. As I see it, part of that lack of preparation is a gap between the “World” they expect to inhabit as ministers and the actual “World” they find. And the gap is perpetuated if and when professors and writers like me fail to help them see—clearly, soberly, and accurately. I want them to see the world as it is. Not to scare them. Not to lament the supposed loss of a prior world. Not to remake the world in our desired image, in the image of what it “should” be. Not to be fatalist about the future or to forsake the challenge of persuasion or to give up on faithful witness until the world is nicer to us. By no means. The world owes us nothing, and as the apostle teaches, friendship with the world is enmity toward God.

What I want, rather, is for them to be equipped to minister in the real world, not the cloistered world of their childhoods, or the 1990s/2000s, or a fictional 1950s, or any other time and place. In that sense and to that extent, I find the “Three Worlds” heuristic to be useful. As a starting point. As a conversation starter. As an initial sociological, historical, and missiological framework, by which to help normie Christians and ministers to begin thinking about the particular challenges facing the mission of the church today—here and now, in our setting, not our parents’, not someone else’s: ours.

Maybe Renn’s “Three Worlds” comes with social or political baggage not worth onboarding in this particular conversation. Maybe it’s overdetermined by the uses to which various of its adherents want to put it. Maybe it’s wrong in certain key details, not least its laser focus on the last few decades and specific public events that occurred during them; a myopic legal and juridical cultural frame. Maybe its examples are wrong, such as offering the rhetorical style of Tim Keller as an artifact of a now-past “World,” no longer relevant. Maybe the “pre-1994” timeframe of “Positive World” is far too open-ended, and needs bracketing closer to the World Wars than to the Founding Fathers. Maybe the emphasis on elite institutions combined with a blurring of the lines between “public profession of Christian faith” and “actual discipleship to Christ” renders the framework finally useless at the practical level.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. With the qualifications I make above, I find it useful enough. More broadly, analysis like it seems to me self-evidently helpful, even needful. Not because Alan is wrong, but because he is right: The content of Christian witness is always and without exception the same: the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. But what does imitation of and conformity to those life and teachings require in this time, in this place, by comparison to other times, other places?

That’s the question I want to answer. And I’ll take all the help I can get.

I’m in LARB on Hauerwas, Barth, and Christendom

This morning Los Angeles Review of Books published an essay review of mine on Stanley Hauerwas’s latest book, which came out earlier this year, titled Fully Alive: The Apocalyptic Humanism of Karl Barth. Here is the opening paragraph:

THIS YEAR STANLEY Hauerwas turns 82 years old. To mark the occasion, he has published a book on Karl Barth, who died at the same age in 1968. The timing as well as the pairing is fitting. Barth is the greatest Protestant theologian of the 20th century, and probably the most widely read of any theologian over the last 100 years. As for Hauerwas, since the passing of Reinhold Niebuhr in 1971, he has been the most prolific, influential, and recognizable Christian theological thinker in American public life. Barth somehow graced the cover of Time magazine in 1962, even though he was a Swiss Calvinist whose books on technical theology are so thick they could stop bullets. Hauerwas has never made the cover, but in 2001 Time did call him “America’s best theologian.” That fall, Oprah even invited him onto her show. In short, given Hauerwas’s age and stature, Fully Alive: The Apocalyptic Humanism of Karl Barth has the inevitable feel of a valediction.

Click here for the rest.

This is now my fifth time writing for LARB; the first came in the fall of 2017. It is never not a pleasure. It’s a challenge writing about Christian theology for a highbrow audience that is neither religious nor academic—but one I’ve learned to relish. Usually my essays there come in between 4,000 and 5,000 words, but this one is shorter, at about 2,000. I hope it does both Hauerwas and Barth honor; I try to use the occasion to raise some important issues. Enjoy.

Prudence policing

There is principle and there is prudence. Principle is what’s right, what you believe to be true and good, no matter what. Prudence is what to say and do about it, when, and how.

In online and social commentary, the prudence policing is as ubiquitous as it is nauseating. Writer X claims that, if writer Y really believed in principle Z, then Y, like X, would go about addressing Z in precisely the same way X believes best. But that’s just a category mistake. There may be any number of legitimate reasons to disagree about what prudence calls for, whether in deed or in word—that is, with respect to public (or private) action or with respect to public (or private) speech.

It is silly and unserious to constantly police others’ prudential judgments, not least when the persons in question are strangers whom one knows only from the internet, their writing, or their profession. It’s tacky, more than anything. It treats the discipline of seeking to understand and elaborate our common life in all its detail and complexity as, if not a game, then a species of yellow journalism: Did you hear what happened ten seconds ago? Care to comment?

It’s perfectly reasonable to say no in reply. To assume otherwise is to reduce writing in all its forms to propaganda, sound bites, and the perpetual reinforcement of tribal identities. Which, come to think of it, is not a bad description of Twitter.

I’m in FPR on Christian politics

Happy Fourth! This morning I’m in Front Porch Republic with an essay called “Another Option for Christian Politics.” I’ve been meaning to write up a little piece like this one on St. Ignatius of Antioch for three or four years; I don’t know why it took me so long. The thesis would have had one sort of resonance circa 2018; another circa 2021; another now, in July of 2022. So be it. The thesis is true regardless of time or circumstances.

It also forms a complement to two pieces I’ve written for Mere Orthodoxy: one, more than five years ago, about the roots of the Benedict Option in the work of the Yale School theological postliberals (before that sort of “postliberal” was a thing!”); another, due later this year (in the print edition), on H. Richard Niebuhr, James Davison Hunter, and the question of coordinating “church and culture.”

I suppose, too, all of these connect with my long review essay of Deneen and Smith in LARB four years ago. (And, too, that review essay about MBD, TNC, and nationalism . . . and that essay in Comment on the mission of the church in relation to politics . . . . ) Clearly, these things have been on my mind.

In any case, here’s the new one. Go check it out.

Algorithm writing

Too often, I read something online and have the unpleasant sensation that the piece in question could have been written by an algorithm. The tell is always the repeated use of a term or phrase or concept so beaten around by our cultural discourse that it’s long past dead; less a corpse than the decaying bones of one. The bones in question usually serve as a signal flare to fellow solders in the culture war: IT’S ME! I’M ONE OF YOU! I’M NOT THEM!

The result is writing that is simultaneously inane, vacuous, boring, and predictable. It partakes of the same vices as those so memorably diagnosed by Orwell more than 75 years ago. Everything he wrote then still applies. Here is a small sample of the most egregious instances that come to mind.

*

“Right-wing/left-wing.” If you encounter this term once in an essay or op-ed, prepare yourself for an onslaught. Writers who advert to “right-/left-wing” are propagandists to a person. The term is not meant to describe. It is meant to be decoded by the right kind of readers, who will see that it means “evil.” This is why it is repeated so often in such brief spans. The evil people lately did X; having done evil action X, they are now planning further evil deeds; remember, they’re evil, and the evil is spreading. It’s gibberish, an open and happy willingness to substitute sloganeering for thinking.

“Socialist/communist.” These terms should be used exclusively in historical and economic discursive contexts, with precisely stated referents, except in those cases where a person, entity, idea, or policy claims the moniker or, substantive analysis and argument provided, is shown to be. Otherwise, again, it’s just slander, guilt by ideological association.

“Nationalist.” I don’t know that I’ve ever read a piece of punditry featuring this word that could define it consistently and coherently, not to mention in continuity with its history of usage. One thing it doesn’t mean, past or present, is “hazy thing I disapprove of.” Given its malleability, the term has characterized, or been appropriated by, persons, policies, and movements all along the political spectrum. The work of historian John Lukacs is a good place to start for anyone genuinely curious about the term’s history and ranges of meaning. (The misuses and abuses of “nationalist” increase exponentially when the word is tied to religion. It may be that “Christian nationalist” not only has an extratextual referent out there in the world but also means something concrete, definable, and historical—which, further, the author would consistently repudiate in all epochs and circumstances and not only some. As yet, though, I’ve not come across an instance of it.)

“Extreme.” This is not solely a term of disapprobation, though you wouldn’t know it by political and cultural discourse. John is extremely attractive; Jane is extremely intelligent; Jamal is extreme in his commitment to justice; Jalen’s love for public education is extreme. The only relevant question is what one is extreme with respect to, and how that extremity is manifested. A man willing to lay down his life for his friends is extreme—but then, that is to be expected, since there is no greater love than this. That is just what it means to be extreme.

“Radical.” Likewise, but conversely, this is not solely a term of approbation. “Radical” does not mean “good” or “praiseworthy” or “admirably totally committed.” Its etymology concerns the root of things. In plain English someone might use it neutrally, approvingly, or disparagingly. But by itself it means none of these things; not only its intended meaning but the justification for its use as a modifier must come from the speaker or writer who deploys it. Standing alone, it means less than nothing. (In writing on the Left “radical” tends to be synonymous with “Leftist.” This habit isn’t helpful, though, since it piles up words that appear to be different but mean the same thing while rhetorically glossing neutrally-described Left policies or persons as “radical” and thus, in some sense, “excellently intense.” It’s a crutch and a cheat, in other words.)

“Fringe.” Writers who revert to this word as though it bore free-standing significance are being especially lazy. Abolitionists in 1775 were on the fringe. That’s just to say that they were on the very edge of permissible public opinion. The description speaks not at all to the truth or quality of their beliefs. As it turns out, their beliefs were right, and won the day. Abolition is no longer on the fringe. The same goes for atheism. A thousand years ago atheism wasn’t even on the fringe; it more or less didn’t exist, certainly not in the West, in the form we’re familiar with. It was absolutely on the fringe even a hundred years ago in America. Do secular writers believe this means that atheists once were or remain “crazy”—the implied meaning of pundit-usage of “fringe” today? No, they don’t. Which means we ought to strike through this word whenever we see it. It doesn’t mean a damn thing except, per usual, “thing I, a reasonable person, find disreputable, and by rhetorical influence hope you, dear reader, will too.”

“Moderate/centrist.” Except for self-identified moderates who can tell you in detail what they mean by their position (I’m thinking of Damon Linker—who may be the only intellectually serious moderate around), neither “moderate” nor “centrist” means anything in popular writing except, perhaps, “whatever can pass in a polarized Congress.” It also, by the transitive property, ends up applying to pragmatic, non-ideological, or deal-making politicians. But this is no reason to stuff the empty suit of this term with false virtue. Just as “fringe” depends on context, so does “centrist.” Sometimes the most vicious person or proposal in a room is the most moderate or balanced of two opposing sides. It is, as Jesus himself says, lukewarm; and being “neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.”

*

There are many more where these came from. These are just the ones that have been bugging me lately. I may make this a running post with many ongoing updates. We’ll see.

The other thing to say is that of all sinners I am chief. I’ve no doubt I’ve used most of these words in my own writing from time to time. I try not to. Consider this post a redoubled commitment to resisting the temptation. We all succumb, however. This is a reminder, then, first of all to myself, to write like a human being and not an algorithm. It’s hard work but it’s worth it.

Beliefs of the post-Christian West

Early on in Mark Sayers’ 2016 book Disappearing Church he outlines, in the form of propositions, the social imaginary or set of presuppositions that suffuse and animate the contemporary post-Christian context in the West. Sayers is sophisticated; he doesn’t suppose that millions of people wake up in the morning, sign a form with these beliefs outlined in black and white, then go through their day consciously attempting to put them into practice. Rather, they form the tacit backdrop of our common life, the largely (though far from entirely) unquestioned and presumed fabric of society. It’s the water we swim in, the are we breathe. We are certainly able to recognize, articulate, revise, and/or reject them. But they’re there, in us, whether we like it or not.

Here they are:

1. The highest good is individual freedom, happiness, self-definition, and self-expression.

2. Traditions, religions, received wisdom, regulations, and social ties that restrict individual freedom, happiness, self-definition, and self-expression must be reshaped, deconstructed, or destroyed.

3. The world will inevitably improve as the scope of individual freedom grows. Technology—in particular the Internet—will motor this progression toward utopia.

4. The primary social ethic is tolerance of everyone’s self-defined quest for individual freedom and self-expression. Any deviation from this ethic of tolerance is dangerous and must not be tolerated. Therefore social justice is less about economic or class inequality, and more about issues of equality relating to individual identity, self-expression, and personal autonomy.

5. Humans are inherently good.

6. Large-scale structures and institutions are suspicious at best and evil at worst.

7. Forms of external authority are rejected and personal authenticity is lauded.

This seems basically right to me, with three amendments: (a) I would make the comment about technology its own separate thesis; (b) I would nix the faith in the internet and leave it more broadly as a comment about technology as such; (c) I would rewrite #6. The pervading spirit of the age is suspicion about structures and institutions, yet a sizable percentage of the population hopes not to abolish their sheer existence, but to seize, conquer, colonize, and control them from within. That’s violent language, to be sure, but the vision underlying the aim is sincere and, for its adherents, benign: if the institutions that guide and govern society are doing so poorly, then we ought to reform them (whether modestly or radically) so as to administer justice rather than injustice, righteousness rather than corruption, flourishing rather than oppression.

With those minor changes, I’d readily sign off on this list as a reliable description of the Zeitgeist. Nor are spheres of life defined by the contrary of this list immune to the beliefs it comprises. Churches imbibe and embody these views as much as and sometimes more than other institutions. This list’s name is Legion, and the exorcisms it calls forth are never a completed task but a daily necessity.

Having said all that, I do wonder to what extent the smoothness with which this list goes down as a diagnosis of our social context is a sign of living in an echo chamber—or at least, reading and writing among like-minded folks, especially Christians of a certain sort. Yet it seems to me that even secular (classical) liberals, non-religious folks, and members of the Left could and, in many cases, would and do agree with this list, granting that they might use different words or strike a different tone than Sayers (or, as the case may be, offer different solutions to the problems it presents). That’s the appeal, I think, of the work of scholars like Bellah, Berger, Lasch, MacIntyre, Taylor, Milbank, Stout, Casanova, Asad, Mahmood, Žižek, and so many others. Sayers is attempting to summarize, synthesize, and render in plain English, for a lay Christian audience, an account of what the church is facing in the West that is not merely, and preferably not at all, a defensive reaction from a newly embattled minority. (He’s writing from Australia, it’s worth noting.) Yet how would others respond to this list? What would they add? The book has me curious to know.

UPDATE: A friend writes to add a fourth amendment: Strike through “tolerance” in #4 and substitute “recognition.” Checks out.

The take temptation

There is an ongoing series of essays being slowly published in successive issues of The New Atlantis I want to commend to you. They’re by Jon Askonas, a friend who teaches politics at Catholic University of America. The title for the series as a whole is “Reality: A Post-Mortem.” The essays are a bit hard to describe, but they make for essential reading. They are an attempt to diagnose the root causes of, and the essential character of, the new state of unreality we find ourselves inhabiting today. The first, brief essay lays out the vision for the series. The second treats the gamified nature of our common life, in particular its analogues in novels, role-playing games, and alternate reality games (ARGs). The latest essay, which just arrived in my mailbox, is called “How Stewart Made Tucker.” Go read them all! (And subscribe to TNA, naturally. I’ve got an essay in the latest issue too.)

For now, I want to make one observation, drawing on something found in essay #2.

Jon writes (in one of a sequence of interludes that interrupt the main flow of the argument):

Several weeks have gone by since you picked your rabbit hole [that is, a specific topic about which there is much chatter but also much nonsense in public discourse and social media]. You have done the research, found a newsletter dedicated to unraveling the story, subscribed to a terrific outlet or podcast, and have learned to recognize widespread falsehoods on the subject. If your uncle happens to mention the subject next Thanksgiving, there is so much you could tell him that he wasn’t aware of.

 You check your feed and see that a prominent influencer has posted something that seems revealingly dishonest about your subject of choice. You have, at the tip of your fingers, the hottest and funniest take you have ever taken.

1. What do you do?

a. Post with such fervor that your followers shower you with shares before calling Internet 911 to report an online murder.

b. Draft your post, decide to “check” the “facts,” realize the controversy is more complex than you thought, and lose track of real work while trying to shoehorn your original take into the realm of objectivity.

c. Private-message your take, without checking its veracity, to close friends for the laughs or catharsis.

d. Consign your glorious take to the post trash can.

2. How many seconds did it take you to decide?

3. In however small a way, did your action nudge the world toward or away from a shared reality?

Let’s call this gamified reinforcement mechanism “the take temptation.” It amounts to the meme-ification of our common life and, therefore, of the common good itself. Jon writes earlier in the essay, redescribing the problem behind the problem:

We hear that online life has fragmented our “information ecosystem,” that this breakup has been accelerated by social division, and vice versa. We hear that alienation drives young men to become radicalized on Gab and 4chan. We hear that people who feel that society has left them behind find consolation in QAnon or in anti-vax Facebook groups. We hear about the alone-togetherness of this all.

What we haven’t figured out how to make sense of yet is the fun that many Americans act like they’re having with the national fracture.

Take a moment to reflect on the feeling you get when you see a headline, factoid, or meme that is so perfect, that so neatly addresses some burning controversy or narrative, that you feel compelled to share it. If it seems too good to be true, maybe you’ll pull up Snopes and check it first. But you probably won’t. And even if you do, how much will it really help? Everyone else will spread it anyway. Whether you retweet it or just email it to a friend, the end effect on your network of like-minded contacts — on who believes what — will be the same.

“Confirmation bias” names the idea that people are more likely to believe things that confirm what they already believe. But it does not explain the emotional relish we feel, the sheer delight when something in line with our deepest feelings about the state of the world, something so perfect, comes before us. Those feelings have a lot in common with how we feel when our sports team scores a point or when a dice roll goes our way in a board game.

It’s the relish of the meme, the fun of the hot take—all while the world burns—that Jon wants us to see so that he, in turn, can explain it. I leave the explanation to him. For my part, I’m going to do a bit of moralizing, aimed at myself first but offered here as a bit of stern encouragement to anyone who’s apt to listen.

The moral is simple: The take temptation is to be resisted at all costs, full stop. The take-industrial complex is not a bit of fun at the expense of others. It’s not a victimless joke. It is nothing less than your or my small but willing participation in unraveling the social fabric. It is the false catharsis that comes from treating the goods in common we hope to share as a game, to be won or lost by cheap jokes and glib asides. Nor does it matter if you reserve the take or meme for like-minded friends. In a sense that’s worse. The tribe is thereby reinforced and the Other thereby rendered further, stranger, more alien than before. You’re still perpetuating the habit to which we’re all addicted and from which we all need deliverance. You’re still feeding the beast. You’re still heeding the sly voice of the tempter, whose every word is a lie.

The only alternative to the take temptation is the absolutely uncool, unrewarding, and unremunerative practice of charity for enemies, generosity of spirit, plainness of prose, and perfect earnestness in argument. The lack of irony is painful, I know; the lack of sarcasm, boring; the lack of grievance, pitiful. So be it. Begin to heal the earth by refusing to litter; don’t wish the world rid of litter while tossing a Coke can out the window.

This means not reveling in the losses of your enemies, which is to say, those friends and neighbors for whom Christ died with whom you disagree. It means not joking about that denomination’s woes. It means not exaggerating or misrepresenting the views of another person, no matter what they believe, no matter their character, no matter who they are. It means not pretending that anyone is beyond the pale. It means not ridiculing anyone, ever, for any reason. It means, practically speaking, not posting a single word to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or any other instrument of our digital commons’ escalating fracture. It means practicing what you already know to be true, which is that ninety-nine times out of one hundred, the world doesn’t need to know what you think, when you think it, by online means.

The task feels nigh impossible. But resistance isn’t futile in this case. Every minor success counts. Start today. You won’t be sorry. Nor will the world.

One note on “negative world”

I’ve written twice on the minor internet dust-up over James Wood’s essay last month on the political witness of the church, an essay that contains some modest criticisms of Tim Keller. There Wood uses a framework taken from an essay published last February by Aaron Renn, which was an expanded version of a piece he originally proposed a full five years ago. Many folks have written about Renn’s framework, including (to my mind) most incisively and critically by Jake Meador a few weeks ago.

A simplified version of the framework is that there are three dominant modes of Christian experience in any given social and political context, in this case the American context. These are positive, neutral, and negative. Each concerns the public profession of Christian identity. The question is: On balance, do the nation’s elite institutions together with the persons who lead and occupy them reward, ignore, or penalize the public profession of Christian identity? If the first, then this makes for a “positive world”; if the second, then a “neutral world”; if the third, then a “negative world.”

Renn has a timeline, relatively compressed, whereby before the mid-1990s, America was—again, in the aggregate, on balance, and concerning the mainstream culture as influenced and governed by elite spheres, professions, persons, and institutions—a “positive world.” Then this ambient context shifted into a “neutral world” for a couple of decades before, sometime in the last decade, another shift occurred and we entered a “negative world” for public profession of Christian identity.

In my view, this proposal should not be controversial. The reasons why it has been taken to be controversial are numerous; here’s a guess at a few of them.

First, the focus seems overdetermined by recent history, in particular the fortunes of white evangelicals. Second, the issues that signal loss of status are culture-war fodder like gender and sexuality rather than, say, racism, poverty, and immigration. Third, the framework is liable to being interpreted as one more American-Christian decline narrative: once things we great (because “we” were on top), now they aren’t (because “we” no longer are). Fourth, some of the examples of writers and pastors held up for critique are beloved or perhaps not worthy of it, as with Keller. Fifth, the descriptive nature of the framework is taken to be normative in character, thereby implying that Renn and Wood want to argue that it is harder to be a faithful Christian today than it ever was before in America.

As I said above, I don’t take Renn’s framework to be especially controversial, because if you don’t worry about haggling over the details, it’s self-evidently true; indeed, unless I’m seriously misunderstanding and therefore misrepresenting it, something like it is taken for granted in all sociology and history of American religion published in the last century.

The framework has nothing—I repeat, nothing—to do with the challenge of living faithfully as a Christian, now or at any time in the past. Likewise it has nothing to do with the nature of the gospel or the demands of Christian discipleship. It is not and does not involve any substantive moral or theological claim whatsoever. It is a purely sociological observation about the public status of Christian identity in American life. What it says is simply this:

• Once, it was reasonable to suppose that, broadly speaking, if you claimed in America to be a Christian (or church-affiliated), then that public claim was more likely than not to enhance your reputation and/or social status and/or professional-political-familial-marital-financial prospects;

• now, it is reasonable to suppose the opposite;

• some complex set of factors led from the first situation to the second;

• doubtless a sort of intermediate period covered the time of transition.

That’s it. That’s the framework. Is it false? I confess I’m not even sure what it would mean to say that it could be false.

Note that the proposal as summarized here has nothing at all to do with the substance of Christian faith and morals—nothing to do with orthodoxy. It makes no claim to the “Christianness” of the American republic (or its antecedent colonies) at any point in its history. It’s not about anyone’s heart, mind, feelings, or sincerity. It’s not about a golden age. It’s not about a time we ought to recover or reestablish. It doesn’t even entail that those matters of traditional teaching for which one might be socially or legally disciplined today are either true or of first order importance relative to prior contested issues in American church history.

(It’s worth observing that theological liberalism a century ago would have entailed denial of creedal doctrines—bodily resurrection, virginal conception, divinity of Christ—alongside affirmation of moral doctrines regarding marriage, sexual ethics, and divorce, whereas today the reverse is the case. In other words, the transition from “positive” to “negative” world isn’t per se a transition from “conservative” or “traditional” to “liberal” or “progressive” theology. That particular fight, or dialectic, has been a live one for a full two hundred years, with no signs of abating. For that reason it doesn’t map onto the Renn framework under discussion.)

To take a concrete example, one offered by Alan Jacobs, it was damn hard to be a faithful Christian in the Jim Crow South. A lot harder by comparison to today, with far harsher penalties for following Christ (whatever one’s race) than nearly anyone faces at present. I take that as read. Nevertheless it remains true at the descriptive level, as a sociological fact that publicly professing to be a Christian in the 1950s was—on balance, no matter who you were or where you lived, with relatively minor exceptions—more likely than not to enhance your reputation and/or social status and/or professional-political-familial-marital-financial prospects.

Consider, finally, that this claim does not of itself require approbation (nostalgic, reactionary, or otherwise) of the erstwhile “positive world.” Plenty of Christians might suppose the “positive world” was, on the whole, a bad bet for Christians and/or a raw deal for Jews, Muslims, agnostics, and other non-Christians. Perhaps it created pressure for countless businessmen and politicians to voice aloud a fake faith or a merely civil religion all the while living as pagans in their personal lives. Perhaps this sullied the church’s witness. Perhaps Christians should be grateful to inhabit a “neutral” or “negative” world. Perhaps!

My only point is that it doesn’t matter what one makes of these shifts, nor how one might revise the minor details (dates, epochal events, how hostile contemporary “negative world” really is, and so on). The shifts are real. I’d go so far as to say they’re undeniable. It’s only once we agree about that that we can hold a meaningful conversation—or argument—about the significance, implications, challenges, and opportunities created by the shifts in question.

I’m on another podcast!

When it rains, it pours.

Matthew Dagher-Margosian reached out to me after reading my essay last year in The Point on the “conservative radicalism” of Wendell Berry. Matthew is an activist on the Left and committed to various forms of advocacy, especially related to the environment. He was intrigued by my defense of Berry against George Scialabba’s socialist criticism as well as the role of Christian faith in Berry’s (and my) approach to politics, culture, and social change. So he invited me on his podcast.

I confess to feeling a bit out of my element in this conversation, though I hope I acquitted myself well enough. Matthew was gracious both in having someone like me on and in giving me a wide berth in which to share reflections from another perspective.

You can listen to the interview on Spotify or Apple. I’ll have at least one more link soon to another podcast interview I did, about my new book. Though I’m not much of a listener anymore, I do appreciate the opportunity to share about my work and to talk to interesting people I’d never otherwise meet or converse with.

Politics cathexis

I’m of two minds about the suggestion that my friend and colleague, Richard Beck, made last week regarding Christians and/in politics. Here’s what he wrote:

Coined by Freud, the word "cathexis" comes from the psychodynamic tradition in psychology. A cathexis is an unhealthy concentration of mental energy on a person, idea or object. The word "fixation" is a related concept, as we become "fixated," to an unhealthy degree, where there is a concentration of mental energy and investment. Along with "fixation," "obsession" is another word that points to a cathexis. 

You can think of a cathexis as a "hot spot" in the psyche, a "gravity well" that creates a mental orbit, even a kind of "black hole" that sucks up available energy. And that's a key notion in psychodynamic thinking, how our mental energy is a finite resource. Our various cathexes, fixations and obsessions hurt us because they suck up mental energy, leaving us less energy to allocate, devote and invest in other areas of our lives. Like the pull of a large gravitational mass in space, a strong cathexis warps and distorts the psyche causing it to become twisted and imbalanced.  

Given that, let me restate my concern. Politics has become a cathexis in the Christian psyche. Like a psychic black hole, the power of this cathexis is warping and distorting the Christian mind, heart and soul. Worse, the cathexis of politics is sucking up all the available mental and emotional energy, energy that needs to be directed toward other pressing endeavors and concerns.

As a diagnosis, this seems right. I’m temperamentally inclined to agree with him, moreover, and on the merits I’m in agreement at least every other day, maybe two out of every three days.

Richard is responding to the minor hubbub surrounding James Woods’s reflections on Tim Keller (about which I myself have written a bit). He goes on to say:

To be clear, I think it's perfectly appropriate for Christians to be involved in democratic politics. Feel free to vote and be politically engaged. The issue involves the cathexis of politics in the Christian psyche, the unhealthy concentration of psychic energy being devoted to the state and electoral politics. Psychic energy is a precious and limited resource, and every bit of energy sucked up by the cathexis of politics is energy that could be devoted to your family, your friendships, your church, your creativity, your spiritual formation, and your works of mercy in the local community.

In a post the next day, Richard quotes the Epistle to Diognetus before commenting:

This, it seems to me, is a healthy and proper emotional relationship to the state and politics. As citizens we "play our full role." We pay taxes. We vote. And yet, the nation in which we live is not our homeland, we dwell here as if living in a foreign country. Christians live in their nation as if we are only passing through.

Again, as I say, more often than not, I’m on board with this vision. Over the years, however, my reading in both the Christian tradition and in political philosophy has chastened my intellectual commitment to this approach. In other words, I’m open to being wrong. Not, to be sure, that I’m in doubt about the relativization of politics, the priority of discipleship, the centrality of the church, the provisionality and passing nature of temporal concerns. This world is not our home: that is the first principle of Christian politics. But more must be said.

So here are a few ideas and questions to ponder on this matter. (And, as it happens, this will be my last post for the next two weeks. See you in June.)

1. What is the status of the governing authorities under God? May they conduct themselves, precisely as holders of specific offices, in accordance with the will and authority of Christ? Ought they?

2. What is the relationship between the divine Rule of the risen and ascended Christ and the human rule of governing authorities, of whatever kind? And what is the relationship between the proclamation of the former by the church in the midst of and before the face of the latter?

3. As Peter Leithart once put it: What if they ask? That is, what if governing authorities look to the gospel of Christ proclaimed by his church for wisdom, guidance, or authority? And then: What if they listen?

4. Is the church essentially apolitical in the sense that its entanglement, communally or in the persons of its members, with politics is intrinsically secondary to and derivative of its principal mission? Or is it (could it be) the case that such entanglement belongs, properly and inwardly, to the mission?—if, for example, the mission is to announce and embody the truth of the Rule of the One Lord Christ to and among the nations, and some of those nations, like Ninevah, repent and believe the good news qua nations, even qua rulers? (Think: Constantine in Rome; Ezana in Ethiopia; Tiridates III in Armenia; Vladimir the Great of the Rus’.)

5. Put differently, is an established or national church ruled out ipso facto on this view? Or is disestablishment merely a contingent feature of the present time, a parochial fact of our cultural context neither (necessarily) superior to past regimes nor (per se) predictive of future just arrangements?

6. Is it possible genuinely to participate in active democratic politics without comprehensive (not to say ultimate) engagement? Has anyone ever won an election or passed a measure or successfully promoted a law or policy who went about it half-heartedly? It seems to me that passionate partisanship to a cause, a law, an issue, a policy, a candidate, a party, or what have you is actually a precondition of democratic success—that is, winning.

7. You might say: But that’s precisely it; Christians shouldn’t be in the business of winning, but of being faithful. Fine. Tell that to the abolitionists of the nineteenth century, though. Their engagement in democratic politics wasn’t penultimate. It wasn’t half-hearted. It wasn’t patient. It was all-in. It was win or go home. The same goes for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. Doubtless an eschatological horizon controlled their non-utopian activism, at least some of them, some of the time. Nevertheless they expected, even demanded, and worked tirelessly to bring about conditions of justice that seemed, to many of their contemporaries, including some of their allies, impossible in this world. And they won. I’m glad they won. But I don’t know that I (we) are in a position to be grateful for the ends of their labors if we repudiate their means.

8. Let me put it this way: If Christians believe that justice matters, not just for us but for our neighbors, above all the most vulnerable and marginal among them; and if we do not believe that participation in political affairs—governance, authority, law, etc., whether or not it is democratic—is inimical to faithful discipleship; then it follows that active, engaged, even full-throated partisan participation in law and public policy, at every level, is a logical upshot of Christian mission. And that’s going to require constant debate, disputation, perseveration, indeed a certain fixation, if there would be any chance of actually succeeding. Movements, institutions, organizing, activism, policy writing, popular messaging, getting out the votes: these take time, energy, money, and passion. In a democratic society, they require such things at a mass level.

9. The full-circle objection that might arise here is anti-democratic: namely, that because this is all true, then the ideal sociopolitical arrangement is not democratic, since the ineluctable result is the irresistible hoovering-up of everyone’s, including Christians’, energy, interests, time, and focus. Better, on this view, to leave the arts of governance to those few to whom the duty falls, whether they belong to a certain family, are born to a certain class, or are simply chosen at random. This perspective isn’t exactly mainstream in American politics or in Christian political theology, though it’s not not mainstream in the tradition; either way, it’s worth mentioning, though I’m going to assume for the purposes of this discussion that it’s not the direction the folks I’m talking to (Richard or others) want to go.

10. So where does that leave us? It seems to me that the full implications of Richard’s position are finally quietist, apolitical, and/or Anabaptist in scope and substance. To which Richard might justly respond: Well, yes; that’s the whole point. My counterpoint has to do with clarity, though. Historically, full-bore sectarian, Anabaptist, or retreatist ecclesiologies have not endorsed either democratic politics (from the top down) or participation therein (from the bottom up). The Lord’s providence would superintend the affairs of history; the church’s job was to be faithful, as a radical minority community, in the midst of the evil age passing away before our very eyes. From which it does not follow that the church or its members ought to participate in politics. Yet my sense is that, for many today who have been influenced by this line of thought, this sense of withdrawal or non-participation has been weakened, which generates a sort of “two cheers for democratic engagement!” position. Is that viable? I don’t see how. In a democracy, anything but three cheers means, at a practical level, no cheers at all. Furthermore (as any Anabaptist would agree) it entails a strong rejection of church establishment, of Christendom as such, and of traditions of theopolitical reflection and participation that hail from the patristic, medieval, and modern periods, for such traditions teach that political power and authority may and ought to be used by Christians and for Christian interests. Granted, these interests have sometimes included wicked things. But they have also included things like abolition and civil rights. To pick and choose—to say, We’ll seek and use power only for good things, not for bad—is already to be pot-committed, that is, committed to the just exercise of power. To be so committed is thus to have abandoned the Anabaptist M.O. By the same token, to refuse to pick and choose is to accept the all-or-nothing of political participation, and thereby to opt for “nothing.” Simply stated, if you’re in at all, you’re all in.

Ethics primer

There are two sets of fundamental distinctions in ethics. The first concerns the kind of ethics in view. By my count, there are four such:

First is descriptive ethics. This is, as the name suggests, ethics in a descriptive mode: it does not propose what is good or evil, what actions to pursue or avoid, but rather offers an account, meant to be accurate but not evaluative, of what individuals, groups, religions, or philosophies believe to be good or evil, etc.

Second is metaethics. This is a philosophical approach to ethics that takes a bird’s-eye view of the very task and concept of ethics, asking what is going on when we “do” ethics. If first-order ethics is the exercise of practical reason in real time on a daily basis by ordinary people, and if second-order ethics is critical rational reflection on the reasoning processes and resulting behaviors embodied in those daily habits of moral living, then metaethics is third-order ethics: critical rational reflection on what we’re up to when we engage in second-order reasoning about first-order living. Metaethics asks questions like, “What does the word ‘good’ have in common as between its use in, e.g., Thomist and Kantian discourses?” Or: “Is all second-order ethics ineluctably teleological?” So on and so forth.

Third is normative ethics. This is the second-order ethics mentioned above: critical rational reflection on what the good life consists in and what behaviors conduce to it. Put differently, normative ethics is prescriptive; it wants, at the end of its labors, to arrive at how you and I should live if we would be good persons. The mood or mode of normative ethics is the imperative (though not only the imperative): Thou shalt not murder, steal, lie, covet, and what not. Only rarely does anyone but academics do metaethics or descriptive ethics. More or less everyone does normative ethics, at least in terms of making appeals to concrete traditions of normative ethics on appropriate occasions: faced with a hard decision; helping a friend work through a problem; teaching a child how to behave; etc.

Fourth is professional ethics. This is the code of conduct or statute of behaviors proper to a particular profession, institution, job, business, or guild. It is a contingent set of recommendations for what makes a fitting or excellent member of said sphere: If you would practice law/medicine/whatever, then you may (not) do X, Y, Z … It is important to see that professional ethics is a derivative, secondary, and belated species of ethics. It is derivative because its principles stem from but are not synonymous with normative ethics. It is secondary because, when and where it requires actions that are (normatively) wrong or forbids actions that are (normatively) right, a person “bound” by professional ethics not only may but must transgress the lines drawn by his or her professional ethics, in service to the higher good required by normative ethics. By the same token, much of professional ethics consists of “best practices” that are neither moral nor immoral, but amoral. They aren’t, that is, about right or wrong in themselves, only about what it means to belong to this or that career or organization. Finally, professional ethics is belated in the sense that late modern capitalism generates byzantine bureaucracies beholden to professional ethics not as a useful, if loosely held, revolving definition of membership in a guild, but instead as hidebound labyrinths by which to protect said members from legal liability. In this way professional ethics partakes of a certain mystification, insofar as it suggests, by its language, that persons formed by its rules and principles will be good or virtuous in character, whereas in truth such persons are submitting to a form of ideological discipline that bears little, if any, relationship to the good in itself or what makes for virtuous character.

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Having made these distinctions, we are in a position to move to a second set. The following distinctions concern the difference between morality (which is what ethics proper, or normative ethics, is about) and other terms or concepts we are prone to confuse with morality. By my count there are five such:

1. Morality and legality. This is the difference between what one ought to do and what one is permitted by law to do. So, e.g., it is morally wrong to cheat on your spouse, but in this country, at this time, adultery is not illegal. Or consider Jim Crow: “separate but equal” was legal for a time, but it was never moral. If a black person jumped into a public swimming pool full of white people, he did nothing wrong, even if the police had a legal pretext by which to apprehend or punish him.

2. Morality and freedom. This is the difference between what one ought to do and what one is capable of doing. E.g., when I ask student X whether it is morally permissible (or “ethical”) for student Y to cheat on an exam, eight times out of ten the answer is: “He can what he wants.” But that’s not the question. No one disputes that he, student Y, “can do what he wants.” I’m asking whether, if what he wants is to cheat on an exam, that action is a moral one, i.e., whether it is right or wrong.

3. Morality and convention. This is the difference between what one ought to do and what one’s community (family, culture, religion) presupposes one ought to do. If I ask, “Is it right for person A to perform action B?” and someone answers, “Well, that’s the sort of thing that’s done in the community to which person A belongs,” the question has not yet been answered. Cultural assumptions are just that: assumptions. They may or may not be right. Ancient Rome permitted the paterfamilias of a household to expose a newborn infant who was unwanted or somehow deemed to be defective. But infanticide is morally wrong, regardless of whether or not a particular culture has permitted, encouraged, and/or legalized it. That is why we are justified in judging the ancient Roman practice of exposure to be morally wrong, even though they could well have responded, “But that’s the sort of thing that’s done here by and among us.”

4. Morality and beliefs-about-morality. This is the difference between what one ought to do and what people think one ought to do. In other words, no one is morally infallible; each of us, at any one time, has and has had erroneous ethical beliefs. This is why, from childhood through adulthood and onward, to be human is to undergo a lifelong moral education. It is likewise why it is intelligible for someone, even in midlife or older, to say, “You know, I used to believe that [moral claim] too; but recently my mind was changed.” This distinction also makes clear that relativism is false. It is not morally right for a serial killer to murder, even if he genuinely believes it is good for him, the serial killer, to do so. It is wrong whatever he believes, because murder is objectively wrong. The truth of murder’s wrongness is independent of his, your, or my beliefs about murder. If it is wrong, it is wrong prior to and apart from your and my agreement with its wrongness—though it is certainly desirable for you and I to come to see that murder is objectively wrong, and not merely wrong if/because we believe it to be wrong.

5. Morality and behavior. This is the difference between what one ought to do and what people actually do. No one believes human beings to be morally perfect; further, no one believes human beings to be perfectly consistent in the application of their moral convictions. E.g., whether or not you would lie in such-and-such a situation does not (yet) answer whether or not it would be right to do so. My students regularly trip up on this distinction. I ask: “Would it be morally justified for you knowingly to kill an innocent person in order to save five innocent persons?” They say: “I guess I would, if I were in that situation.” But as we have seen, that isn’t an answer to my question. The question is not whether you or I would do anything at all, only whether the behavior in question is morally right/wrong. Jews, Christians, and Muslims are doubly committed to the importance of this distinction, between we believe that all human beings are sinners. Our moral compass is broken, and although we may do good deeds, our proclivity runs the other direction: to vanity, pride, selfishness, sloth, self-loathing, lust, envy, deceit, self-justification. If that belief about human sinfulness is true (and it is), then on principle we should never suppose that what anyone would do in a given situation, real or hypothetical, reveals the truth of what one ought to do. The latter question must be answered on other grounds entirely.

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In my experience, these two sets of distinctions, if imbibed thoroughly or taught consistently, make a world of difference for students, Christians, and other persons of good will who are interested in understanding, pursuing, and deliberating on what makes for good, ethical, or moral human living. If we agreed on them in advance, we might even be able to have a meaningful conversation about contested ethical matters! Imagine that.