Lifelong ministry

People today are leaving ministry in droves. Churches, likewise, are shockingly under-staffed. As a colleague of mine recently wrote, “ministers are in short supply.” The pandemic is a major factor, but it exacerbated existing trends; it did not create the problem. The ministers I know—and for the purposes of this post I’m thinking exclusively of “low-church” traditions, not mainline or catholic—get calls on the regular from churches offering generous salaries and appealing jobs, and the churches in question are reasonably sized, in cities anyone would be happy to live in, and often have gone without a lead pastor for months, if not years. Whereas, on the flip side, many churches that once (pre-pandemic) had a budget for X number of ministers are now having to cut their staff down to size.

A few reflections on the dynamics at work, past and present.

Of the teenagers and college students I meet who (a) are believers, (b) go to church, and (c) are interested in pursuing formal ministry, none of them, with only the rarest exceptions, plans on becoming a “head” or “lead” pastor/preacher. What they want instead is a job with one of four modifiers affixed to the title of “minister”: children’s, youth, college/young adult, or worship.* There are many reasons for this shift. One is that the person who most influenced them in their faith was such a minister. Another is that the churches in which they were raised aren’t organized by and around a single visible head pastor, along the lines of the traditional parish or rural/neighborhood church model. Instead, these churches have ministry staffs, filled with specialties and sub-specialties (including evangelism, outreach, missions, poverty, rehab, media, sports, etc.). Naturally, young people being raised in such communities see modeled for them a specialized ministerial role, not the single (if capacious) traditional “office” of ordained pastor, whose principal task is the proclamation of the word and the administration of the sacraments in the context of public worship. To the extent that these young people’s churches do have a single visible “head” person, he is usually conceived (in their minds and in their experience) as a Public Speaker, whose primary job is, naturally enough, public speaking. Indeed, he is paid the highest salary to be the best possible weekly speaker he can be. Such a person is not necessarily (or uniquely) involved with pastoral tasks, the sacraments, and/or worship more generally. And because young people, like all people, fear public speaking as a fate worse than death, only rarely do any of them see in this Head Role a vocation to which they might aspire.

Thus, whatever the reasons—and there are surely others, not least the decline of seminary and of churches’ expectation that ministers have an MDiv—more and more young people who enter ministry today are doing so much differently than those who did so in the past. In my anecdotal observation, a majority of people who enter one of the “big four” ministry staff roles I mentioned above—children’s, youth, college/young adult, worship—exit full-time, formal ministry at some point between ages 30 and 45. I’m tempted to speculate that the percentage is far higher than a bare 51%, perhaps even as high as 75-85%. Such ministers serve, often ably, in the churches for (on average) a dozen years before returning to civilian life. Half of those remaining stick with their original titles; the other half climb the staff ladder (for there is unquestionably an internal hierarchy at work, even if it is never spoken outright) to administrative, pastoral, or preaching roles.

As I trust is obvious, there is a problem here. Not only are fewer and fewer young people seeking and entering lifelong pastoral (homiletical and sacramental) ministry. Those who do become ministers aren’t remaining ministers for long. Worse still, the process is compounded, thereby creating a negative feedback loop. I suppose the crisis isn’t more pronounced than it already is because churches are themselves declining in numbers and closing their doors at high rates. Which itself raises a chicken-and-egg problem for figuring out what’s going on here.

In any case, here’s one last thought prompted by these trend lines. It seems to me that there are two necessary conditions for a person to enter into, to undertake, and actually to accomplish a lifetime of formal ministry as a pastor in the local church:

1. Belief in and commitment to a concrete ecclesial tradition.

2. The socially embodied and transmitted principle and concept of being called to be a “ministry lifer”—whether explicitly, through the sacrament of holy orders, or implicitly, through a tacit but passionate understanding of and dedication to the pastoral vocation as divinely given, normatively irrevocable, and necessarily enacted at the parish or congregational level.

This, I think, is the deeper problem at issue. The young people I have in mind are “non-denominational,” down to the marrow, even when they belong to a specific denomination. The Baptists attend the local “community church,” the Reformed attend the local Church of Christ, the CoC-ers attend the local Baptist church. In other words, they’re all members of that ever-embattled, ever-thriving American family called evangelicalism. And because they have little to no deep-set, self-conscious membership in, much less identity as, this or that particular denomination or tradition, they swap churches without a second thought. It’s the gig economy applied to the church: a more or less comprehensive collapse in institutional durability and reliable ecclesial identity. So that, if and when a thoughtful, committed young Christian considers ministry, s/he does not do so with a mind toward serving this particular tradition but only “the church” in generic, non-denom terms.

Furthermore, such a person lacks any reason to believe that s/he is making a lifelong commitment, or that the church expects—much less that God commands!—ministerial service to be for life. That lifer status still applies by default to catholic traditions and, in an attenuated but real way, to mainline and confessional Protestant traditions that maintain official procedures and gatekeeping bodies for equipping, credentialing, and ordaining priests and pastors. Not so here. I’ve come to realize, though, that something like a wholly untheorized analogue to sacramental orders existed for quite a long time in the evangelical (and adjacent) communities I have in mind. That is the only explanation (along with the existence of sectarian and/or denominational identity) for why nineteenth- and twentieth-century ministers would spend their whole working lives slaving away in financially painful, psychologically grueling, and emotionally punishing congregations, sacrificing all that they had, moving twice a decade, and rarely considering the simplest option: namely, heading for the EXIT sign. Truth be told, there was no such sign, at least most of the time, since the two conditions I’ve named were met. Given, that is, thick ecclesial identity and thick pastoral vocation, to be a minister just was to be a minister for life, since that is what the call of God through the church entailed as a matter of course. Remove either or both of those conditions, however, and the EXIT sign lights up in bold, bright neon. Its flashing letters begin on the periphery then drift toward the center of one’s vision. At some point, ministry involves too much sacrifice for any but the most heroic to stay. Lacking the necessary conditions to hold them in place, to endure through the suffering that ministry invariably brings in its train, ministers head for the door. They may come back, but not as clergy. That door is closed for good.

Can you blame them?

*In case it’s necessary, allow me to add that my comments here in no way imply denigration of what I’m calling “specialized” forms of ministry. My first book is dedicated to my youth minister, who is the reason I earned a PhD in theology and am now a professor, and my second book is dedicated to my children’s minister, who is the reason why literally thousands of children who came through the doors of my home church first heard the name of Jesus. Nothing I’ve written here should be taken to mean that such ministers are either “less than” or an unwelcome development. It does mean, however, that their development raises new questions and challenges for modeling, communicating, and training young persons for lives of full-time, formal ministry. And that we ought to be identifying and addressing those questions and challenges now, for they are as urgent as any problem facing the church today.

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.

If not inerrancy or tradition … then what?

Earlier this year I wrote a couple of posts about what I call Post-Biblicism Biblicism, or PBB, a phenomenon I’ve observed among professors in theological higher ed. Briefly described, PBB is the view that (a) the Bible is the church’s sole source and authority (to the exclusion of creeds, dogmas, sacred tradition, formal confessions, etc.) and (b) the Bible is at once historically, morally, and theologically flawed, such that it is not entirely trustworthy as a book (sometimes so much so that to call it “God’s word” full stop would be a “fundamentalist” mistake). Yet persons who hold this view not only (c) remain Christian in (d) low-church, evangelical, or non-denominational ecclesial traditions, but (e) spend their entire lives studying, teaching, and attempting to “accurately” interpret every jot and tittle of the biblical text.

You can go read the original posts for my confusion about and critique of this phenomenon. It seems obvious to me that one of those five aspects has to give way for the sake of any kind of personal or theological coherence. Mostly I experience PBB as a source of befuddlement.

Recently a friend made an observation about a similar trend, only this time from the perspective of the pews. And I think he’s right. This phenomenon, moreover, is more than befuddling. It’s troubling, saddening, and urgent in its pastoral need.

Suppose you’re a normie biblicist Christian. You partake of what scholars call a “first naïveté” in relation to the Bible. It’s an open book. It’s crystal clear. Any sincere literate person could sit down with the Bible and understand it for himself. And either (a) all Christian communities do thus correctly understand it, at least in terms of the basics, or (b) your community (your denomination, your congregation) has got the goods—i.e., the proper understanding of the Bible’s essential teaching about God, Christ, the gospel, etc. Let’s call this general posture Perspicuous Inerrant Biblicism, or PIB for short.

Now let’s say your PIB-ness gets complicated, by honest means. Either (a) you come to believe that the Bible isn’t so clear as you once thought. Not that it’s unclear per se; but you realize that you, the individual layman, are not in a position to answer some of the most pressing—and contested—moral and theological questions about which Christians turn to the Bible for answers. Or (b) you come to believe that inerrancy, understood as factual-error-free, documentary-style verbatim historical reportage, isn’t plausible as an account of what the Bible is or how it works. In short, having lobbed off the P and the I, the B goes with them: no more biblicism for you.

It seems to me there are only three or four routes to go from here. One is to lose your faith: if it’s PIB or bust, then you’ve just read your way out of Christianity. Another is to DIY it: Christianity becomes whatever you say it is, because the meaning of your unclear-cum-imperfect Bible is up for grabs, and no one else is in a position to say you’re wrong. A third route is to glom onto a charismatic, entrepreneurial, but ultimately arbitrary pastor or personal figure who presents a version of Christian faith that you find appealing. (Now is this person, even if sincere, also DIY-ing it? Yes. So options two and three are variations on the same approach.)

The fourth and final option is to turn to the church. On this view, the church is both mater et magistra: mother and teacher of all the baptized. She, in the person of her ordained leaders, is authorized by Christ to speak on his behalf, vested with his authority. She it is who has passed on the gospel from the apostles to you, down through the centuries. She it is who has kept inviolate the faith once for all delivered to the saints. She it is who stands as mediator between you and the apostolic preaching of the good news. Indeed, she it is who stands as mediator between you and Christ. (She is, after all, his body and bride.) And when, not if, you or anyone else has questions about the faith or about the teaching of Scripture, she is there to answer them.

The term for this role is magisterium, or the teaching office of the church. To turn or submit to this fourth option, beyond biblicism, is to recognize that the church has the authority, by the power and guidance of the Spirit of Christ, to speak decisively and definitively on matters of faith and morals, particularly when these concern disputed interpretations of Scripture and/or pressing questions of the day. This understanding of ecclesial authority was axiomatic for the church before the sixteenth century, and since then then has remained the majority view of the global church.

Leave to the side whether it is true. Here is the point I want to make.

Is there any serious option for someone who no longer affirms Perspicuous Inerrant Biblicism, but who nevertheless wants to remain a morally and intellectually serious Christian, other than this last, fourth route—i.e., submitting to sacred tradition and entrusting oneself to the Spirit-derived and Spirit-led authority of the historic magisterial church?

I don’t see how there is. Because if biblicism isn’t true, and/or strict inerrancy isn’t true, and/or strong perspicuity isn’t true—and remember, we’re merely stipulating these as possibilities—then either Christianity isn’t true, or Christianity can be whatever you want it to be, or Christianity is already something solid, defined, and given, and where you find it is in the authoritative church of magisterial catholic tradition.

I’m trying to be as ecumenical as possible here; at the very least, not only Rome but Constantinople and (I think) Canterbury could affirm the account so far. Perhaps others. In any case, I’m looking in the other direction.

I know countless books, together with countless friends, neighbors, pastors, and family members who’ve read said books, that suppose what I’ve outlined here so far is untrue. That is, they not only recognize but actively engender the loss of ordinary believers’ first naïveté in relation to the Bible. They want to rid lay Christians of their commitments to inerrancy and perspicuity. And yet, for reasons I cannot discern, they appear to continue to be bound by a sort of persistent or lingering biblicism—even though they have explicitly kicked out the legs of the biblicist stool. For biblicism doesn’t work if the Bible is not radically perspicuous and absolutely inerrant. Yet these writers offer their books for the edification of the faithful, only (apparently) to be surprised when their readers understand them perfectly well, and accordingly leave the faith.

Christians, in order to be Christians, have to put their trust in something. And that “something” must include what is intermediate and not only what is immediate. Obviously our ultimate hope and faith are in God alone. But we only have God through the work of mediation, and thus through concrete mediators. PIB-ers insist on that mediator being the Bible alone. Absent that extreme form of sola scriptura, the church is the only other candidate for such trust. That is, on this latter view, the baptized trust that the community to which they belong is the divinely appointed and preserved vehicle of the truth of Jesus Christ, kept and carried through the vicissitudes of history by the Holy Spirit. That is where the gospel is found, together with the scriptures, the sacraments, the saints, and all the rest.

I see no alternative. Further, apart from these two paths I see no way forward for the transmission of the faith across the generations. Either a biblicist church faithfully communicates a biblicist faith to its members and children (and it’s straightforward to see how laypeople might participate in that process); or a magisterial church faithfully communicates the teaching of sacred tradition to its members and children (and it’s likewise plain to see how such a process might work). But how is a typical Christian adult supposed to train up his children in the faith if his church simultaneously rejects sacred tradition and repudiates Perspicuous Inerrant Biblicism? He lacks tradition to hand down, and he lacks the-Bible-alone to hand down. He’s also hip to the fact that the-Bible-alone just isn’t going to get the job done for him, because he’s brim-full of vertiginous confusion regarding how to interpret the Bible in the first place—in other words, he needs someone to answer his questions. But his pastor is just one more dude; he claims no special authority. And normal-adult-Christian-parent here knows that even if he likes Pastor 1’s answer, Pastor 2 at the church next door will give a substantially different answer. So, again, he’s left to his own devices. What’s he supposed to do?

He knows one thing at least. Those pop-evangelical books hawking post-biblicism biblicism aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. Whichever way is right, they’re not it.

Kim, breaking bad

You heard it here first. To be specific, on March 3, 2020, here’s what I wrote:

A brief comment on Better Call Saul, prompted by Alan Jacobs' post this morning:

I think the show rightly understands that Kim is, or has become, the covert protagonist of the show, and by the end, we (with the writers) will similarly come to understand that the story the show has been telling has always been about her fall. No escape, no extraction, no pull-back before the cliff: she, like Jimmy, like Mike, like Nacho, like Walter, like Jesse, like Skyler, lacks the will ultimately and decisively to will the good. They're all fallen; and in a way, they were all fallen even before the time came to choose.

In this way the so-called expanded Breaking Bad universe has made itself (unwittingly?) into a dramatic parable of original sin. Not that there is no good; not that characters do not want to do good. But they're all trapped in quicksand, and the more they struggle, the deeper they sink.

This was only three episodes into season 5; the closing moments of the eventual season finale—in which Kim not only initiated an unnecessary, risky revenge-scheme (now being played out in season 6) but also wryly double-barreled Jimmy just the way he had done in the closing moments of season 4 (“It’s all good, man!”)—signaled that the writers have known this was the destination, and the overriding theme of the show, for some time.

The present two-part final season is stretching out that slow burn to the breaking point, in peerless, masterly form as usual. In Gilligan and Gould we trust.

Pseudo-Scorsese

It’s come to my attention that there are discrepancies in the filmography of American director Martin Scorsese. To be precise, certain films attributed to him evidently qualify as pseudirectoria (pseudokinemagraphia? pseudeikonzon?)—that is, instances of unnamed others claiming his name as director of a cinematic artifact, although the evidence suggests otherwise.

Consider three films, released across more than two decades’ time: The Age of Innocence (1993), Kundun (1997), and Silence (2016). Their subject matter, respectively: a historical romantic drama set in the 1870s among the upper class; the life of the Dalai Lama, set in Tibet in the middle of the twentieth century; and the plight of Catholic converts and their missionary priests in seventeenth century Japan.

Are we really supposed to believe that the director responsible for these films is the same man behind the camera—during the same time span!—for Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995), and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)? Not to mention Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), and Raging Bull (1980)? It beggars belief.

The visual grammar; the composition and editing; the characters, time periods, settings, and cultures; the dialogue; the feel—it’s all off. Someone else has been posing as Martin Scorsese in plain sight. Any honest comparison between the two groups of films will render the same result; any protest to the contrary is clearly a matter of special pleading.

The upshot: We have a Pseudo-Scorsese on our hands. The time has come to weigh the evidence and thence to sort the “official” or “received” Scorsese oeuvre into those films that are “authentic” or “undisputed” and those that are “inauthentic” or “disputed.” Historical and artistic integrity demands no less.

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.

*

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.

*

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.

One long thought on Wood v. Keller

It seems to me that there is a single pressing issue raised by James Wood’s essay (and follow-up) on Tim Keller: namely, the social and political fortunes of evangelical churches under social and political conditions that are truly post-Christendom.

For seventeen centuries Christianity in the main has not been averse to seeking, maintaining, and deploying political power in the name of and in the service of explicitly Christian convictions, purposes, and interests. Even those offshoots of Christianity, beginning some five centuries ago, that to some degree expressed concerns or hesitancy about the Christian exercise of political power—and these have always been minority traditions in any case—have continued, broadly speaking, to operate under the conditions laid down by Christendom, and even to presuppose certain fundamental features of a Christian or semi-Christian regime. Even when, in the last two centuries or so, the overt Christian elements of “Western” political regimes have dried up, it is unquestionable that most of those elements remained, covertly, in one form or another. It is only in the last century, and in the U.S. in the last half-century, that the lineaments of a genuinely and comprehensively post-Christian political order have come into view and begun to be implemented. Whether or not that order has fully arrived in certain European nations, it has not yet here in the States. It is coming, though, and about that there should be no illusions.

Here is the point. Magisterial Protestantism was never anti–political power. It retained a vision, rooted in Christendom, for what it means for a nation (or state) to “be” Christian. That vision concerned both the character of leaders and the content of laws. As forms of populist, non-magisterial Protestantism grew, developed, and expanded—let’s just call these groups “evangelical” for lack of a better word—even where the magisterial political vision went unclaimed or repudiated, the political order created and maintained by it remained in place. In other words, evangelicalism in all its varieties knows no other regime in the West other than Christendom, semi-Christendom, or covert-Christendom. Post-Christendom is a new beast altogether.

(To be sure, evangelical churches have existed and do exist in other parts of the world, where Christendom never took root; some of these places are actively hostile to the faith. I leave to the side all the very interesting issues that attend this intersection of evangelicalism and non-Christian or anti-Christian contexts.)

The question posed by this confluence of factors is the following: How is evangelicalism supposed to operate politically in a truly post-Christian civilization? I take this to be the fundamental issue Wood is raising for us; bracket all that he says about Keller, and how you might feel about that. The heart of the matter is how both (evangelical) Christians and the (evangelical) church ought to comport themselves politically in relation to a full-bore, actually realized post-Christian culture.

Here’s the problem I think he’s putting his finger on. Historically, Christians have not had an ideal-typical, above-the-fray political program for society. Their program has been actionable, and they have acted upon it. They have commended it to the wider society; they have executed it in the courts of kings and magistrates; they have expanded on it in legal and theological texts. In no sense was the Christian vision for political order a “trans-partisan” affair. It was partisan all the way down. It could not help but be so if it would be concrete, which every political platform must be.

Roman Catholicism has not abandoned this approach to politics, though the reception of the Christendom vision is a matter of enormous debate since Vatican II. In principle, though, Rome rejects the wholesale privatization of religion and does not renounce its having a role in public affairs, even (at times, past or present or future) being established as the faith of the land.

Likewise, magisterial Protestantism has not abandoned a modified version of the Christendom project. Yet—and I don’t mean this to be as harsh as it sounds—magisterial Protestantism is, for all intents and purposes, dead. Those Protestants who seek to maintain or to recover the magisterial and confessional traditions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may well be performing admirable and good work; but as a living institution with either ecclesial or political power, it’s a thing of the past. Whether they like it or not, they’re all evangelicals now.

Which brings us back to where we started. I understand the ecclesio-political program criticized by Wood to be one that keeps the (evangelical ) church qua church apolitical, while encouraging individual Christians to be faithfully engaged in democratic politics, where “faithful engagement” means (a) keeping political activity penultimate by (b) permitting Christians to be on both sides of most/all political questions, which in turn requires (c) avoiding partisanship, because (d) the gospel stands above and in judgment upon all political endeavors, inasmuch as (e) neither the gospel nor the church is fully aligned with any political party, platform, or policy. The upshot is a modest, even ambivalent, investment in political activity, characterized by gentleness, civility, and the self-critical admission of a general fallibility.

Many of us may find this picture of Christian participation in politics to be an attractive one. What Wood wants us to see, however, is three things.

First, it has little precedent in Christian history. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. But we should realize just how new it is. Its newness should caution our sense that it’s self-evidently “the” “Christian” approach to politics; it is certainly a such approach. Prima facie we can’t say much more than that. In historical perspective, it’s something of a novelty.

In part that’s because, second, our circumstances are radically new—and, again, without precedent in the church’s past. The church once found itself in a pagan world that judged it worthy, at best, of benign neglect and, at worst, of legal and social punishment. But the church has never faced a post-Christian legal-cultural regime. So even those politics-reticent ecclesial traditions that have arisen since the mid–sixteenth century have no previous experience of what we are (currently or imminently) facing.

Third, Wood believes this picture of winsome, faithful presence is bound to fail—that is, as a social and political program. That doesn’t prejudge whether it’s what Christ demands of us. Nor does it amount to a suggestion that the tasks of Christian discipleship are measured by (likelihood of) sociopolitical success. Instead, it’s meant to draw attention to the fact that “faithful discipleship” and “faithful political engagement as outlined in this particular proposal” are not synonymous. The latter is a contingent suggestion that may or may not be (a) good in the merits and/or (b) apt to specific material conditions. I take Wood’s bedrock claim to be that, as a concrete but intrinsically contestable proposal, this vision of political engagement is good on the merits and was apt to the conditions of its time and place when it was proposed. But, given a change in social and political conditions on the ground—being an at least partly empirical question subject to all manner of analysis—the practical question of what faithful discipleship requires of American Christians today, in terms of active political engagement, calls for a rethinking of said proposal in favor of a revised or even altogether new vision. Not, I repeat, because the former was or is ineffective, but because, given certain cultural mutations, it is inapt (unfitting, unresponsive) to the needs and demands of Christian life and witness in this moment, in our context as it stands.

If this is granted, then the question is not whether (what Wood takes to be) Keller’s project is “good” or “faithful” or “worth defending.” The question is whether, as a contingent proposal for how Christians in a particular time and place ought to comport themselves politically, it continues to be properly responsive to the social, political, and missional challenges facing the American church today. Perhaps it does; perhaps it doesn’t. Much of one’s answer will turn on the logically prior question regarding the state of those challenges and whether, across the last four decades, they have changed, or are currently in process of changing, as substantially as Wood believes.

This is where the historical backdrop I offered above is meant to give some credence to Wood’s argument—which is, recall, about Protestant evangelicalism in America. There is no one-size-fits-all “Christian relation to politics.” (And if there were, it would be of the Christendom variety, not the belated liberal-democratic variety.) Christians have always adjusted, with impressive flexibility, to countless regimes and types thereof. In our case, this means (on one hand) that what has “worked” in the recent past will not necessarily be what works in the present or the future; and (on the other) that we ought to hold before us a far greater variety of Christian approaches to politics than what we are lately used to. If we are truly entering a post-Christian period, we’re going to need all the help we can get. Some of that help, therefore, may turn out to come from the distant rather than the recent past. Some of it may look wholly unfamiliar to us. We cannot know in advance what may prove useful or apt to the moment. Everyone is agreed that no proposal is licit that contradicts the teaching or authority of Christ. Granting that criterion, the floor is wide open. The moment is unprecedented, the terrain uncertain. Only by hearing from everyone and taking into consideration what surprises or even confounds us can we move forward, together, into the unknown.

Deflating tech catastrophism

There’s no better way to deflate my proclivities for catastrophism—a lifelong project of my long-suffering wife—than writers I respect appealing to authorities like St. Augustine and Wendell Berry. And that’s just what my friends Jeff Bilbro and Alan Jacobs have done in two pieces this week responding to my despairing reflections on digital technology, prompted by Andy Crouch’s wonderful new book, The Life We’re Looking For.

I’m honored by their lovely, invigorating, and stimulating correctives. I think both of them are largely right, and what anyone reading Crouch-on-tech, East-on-Crouch, Bilbro-on-East-on-Crouch, East-on-tech, Jacobs-on-East-on-tech, etc., will see quickly is how much this conversation is a matter of minor disagreements rendered intelligible in light of shared first principles. How rare it is to have more light than heat in online (“bloggy”) disputations!

So thanks to them both. I don’t want to add another meandering torrent of words, as I’m wont to do, so let me aim for clarity (I would say concision, but then we all know that’s not in play): first in what we agree about, second in what we perhaps don’t.

Agreements:

1. Andy’s book is fantastic! Everyone should buy it and do their utmost to implement its wisdom in their lives and the lives of their households.

2. The measure of a vision of the good life or even its enactment is not found in its likelihood either (a) to effect massive political transformation or (b) to elicit agreement and adoption in a high percentage of people’s lives.

3. Digital is not the problem per se; Mammon is. (Both Jeff and Alan make this point, but I’ll quote Alan here: “the Digital is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mammon.” I’ll be pocketing that line for later use, thank you very much.)

4. We cannot expect anything like perfection or wholesale “health”—of the technological or any other kind—in this life. Our attempts at flourishing will always be imperfect, fallible, and riddled with sin.

5. Christians are called to live in a manner distinct from the world, so the task of resisting Mammon’s uses of Digital falls to us as a matter of discipleship to Christ regardless of the prospects of our success.

6. Actual non-metaphorical revolutionary political change, whether bottom-up or top-down, is not in the cards, and (almost?) certainly would bring about an equally unjust or even worse state of affairs. Swapping one politico-technological regime for another turns out to mean little more than: meet the new boss, same as the old boss. A difference in degree, not in kind.

7. What we need is hope, and Christians have good grounds for hope—though not for optimism, short of the Kingdom.

8. What is possible, in faith and hope, here and now, is a reorientation (even a revolution) of the heart, following Augustine. That is possible in this life, because Christ makes it possible. Jeff, Alan, and Andy are therefore asking: Which way are we facing? And what would it take to start putting one foot in front of the other in the right direction? Yes. Those are the correct questions, and they can be answered. And though I (I think defensibly) use the language principalities and powers with respect to Digital, I do not disagree that it is not impossible—check out those negatives piling up one on another—for our digital technologies to be bent in the direction of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Which is to say, toward Christ’s Kingdom.

Now to disagreements, which may not amount to disagreements; so let us call them lingering queries for further pondering:

1. For whom is this vision—the one outlined above and found in Andy’s book—meant? That is, is it meant for Christians or for society as a whole? I can buy that it is meant for the church, for some of the theological premises and commitments I’ve already mentioned. I’m less persuaded, or perhaps need persuading, that it is one that “fits” a globalized secular liberal democracy, or at least ours, as it stands at the moment.

2. Stipulate that it is not impossible for this vision to be implemented by certain ordinary folks (granting, with Jeff, that Christians are called not to be normies but to be saints: touché!). I raised questions of class in my review and my blog posts, but I didn’t see class come up in Jeff or Alan’s responses. My worry, plainly stated, is that middle-to-upper-middle-class Americans with college degrees, together with all the familial and social and financial capital that comes along with that status, are indeed capable of exercising prudence and discipline in their use of digital technology—and that everyone else is not. This is what I meant in the last post when I drew attention to the material conditions of Digital. It seems to me that the digital architecture of our lives, which in turn generates the social scripts in which and by which we understand and “author” our lives, has proven most disastrous for poor and working class folks, especially families. They aren’t the only people I mean by “normies,” but they certainly fall into that category. It isn’t Andy et al’s job to have a fix for this problem. But I do wonder whether they agree with me here, that it is not inaccurate to describe one’s ability to extricate oneself even somewhat from Digital’s reach as being a function of a certain class and/or educational privilege.

3. In which case, I want to ask the practical question: How might we expand our vision of the good life under Mammon’s Digital reign to include poor and working class families?—a vision, in other words, that such people would find both attractive and achievable.

4. If pursuing the good life is not impossible, and if it begins with a reorientation of the heart to the God we find revealed in Christ, then it seems to me that—as I believe Jeff, Alan, and Andy all agree—we cannot do this alone. On one hand, as we’ve already seen, we require certain material conditions. On the other hand, we need a community. But that word is too weak. What we need is the church. This is where my despairing mood comes in the back door. As I’ve written elsewhere, the church is in tatters. I do not look around and see a church capable of producing or sustaining, much less leading, prudent wisdom in managing the temptations of Digital. I see, or at least I feel, abject capitulation. Churches might be the last place I’d look for leadership or help here. Not because they’re especially bad, but because they’re the same as everyone else. I mean this question sincerely: Is your local church different, in terms of its use of and reliance on and presumptions about technology, than your local public schools, your local gyms, your local coffee shops? Likewise, are your church’s leaders or its members different, in terms of their relationship to Digital, than your non-Christian neighbors? If so, blessings upon you. That’s not my experience. And in any case, I don’t mean this as some sort of trump card. If our churches are failing (and they are), then it’s up to us to care for them, to love them, and to do what we can to fix what’s ailing them, under God. Moreover, the promise of Christ stands, whatever the disrepair of the church in America: the gates of hell shall not prevail against his people. That is as true now as it ever was, and it will remain true till the end of time. Which means, I imagine my friendly interlocutors would agree, that we not only may have hope, but may trust that God’s grace will be sufficient to the tasks he’s given us—in this case, the task of being faithful in a digital age. Yes and amen to all of that. The point I want to close with is more practical, more a matter of lived experience. If we need (a) the spiritual precondition of a reasonably healthy church community on top of (b) the material precondition of affluence-plus-college in order (c) to adopt modest, though real, habits of resistance to Mammon-cum-Digital … that’s a tall order! I hereby drop my claim that it is not doable, along with my wistful musings about a Butlerian Jihad from above. Nevertheless. It is profoundly dispiriting to face the full height of this particular mountain. Yes, we must climb it. Yes, it’s good know I’ve got brothers in arms ready to do it together; we don’t have to go it alone. But man, right now, if I’m honest, all I see is how high the summit reaches. So high you can’t see to the top of it.

“X is not in the Bible”

In an annual course I teach on moral philosophy I assign a textbook that contains a chapter on X. The author of the textbook is an ethicist, and the ethics he seeks to present to his readers (imagined as college students) is general or universal ethics; though he doesn’t out himself as a Kantian, those with ears to hear spy it from the opening pages. In the chapter on X the author has a sidebar dedicated to religious, by which he means Christian, arguments about X. He observes blithely that the Bible doesn’t mention X, though he allow that one or two passages have sometimes been trotted out as containing implicit commentary on X. Accordingly, he deploys a few perfunctory historical-critical tropes (without citation, naturally) to show how and why the original canonical authors in their original cultural context could never have meant what contemporary readers of the text sometimes take them to mean with respect to X.

I always dedicate time in class to discuss this sidebar with students. It is a perfect encapsulation of the naive inanity of non-theological scholars commenting on Christian thought. So far as I can tell the author is utterly sincere. He really seems to think that Christian thought, whether moral or doctrinal, is reducible to explicit assertions in the Bible, double-checked and confirmed by historical critics to have been what the putative author(s) could have or likely would have meant by the words found in a given pericope.

I used to think this sort of stupidity was willful and malicious; I’ve come to see, however, that it is honest ignorance, albeit culpable in the extreme.

A few days ago I was reminded of this annual classroom discussion because I read an essay by a scholar I otherwise enjoy and regularly profit from, who used the exact same argument, almost identically formulated. And he really seems to have meant what he wrote. That is, he really seems to believe that if he—neither a Christian nor a theologian nor a scholar of religion not a religious person at all—cannot find mention of X in the Bible, then it follows as a matter of course that:

1. Christians have no convictions about X;

2. Christians are permitted no convictions about X, that is, convictions with a plausible claim to be Christian;

3. no Christian teaching about X exists, past or present; and

4. Christianity as such neither has, nor has ever had, nor is it possible in principle that Christianity might have (or have had), authoritative doctrinal teaching on X.

All this, because he, the erudite rando, finds zero results when he does a word search for “X” on Biblegateway.com.

So far as I can tell, this ignorance-cum-stupidity—wedded to an eager willingness to write in public on such matters with casual authority—is widespread among folks of his ilk. They are true believers, and what they truly believe in is their own uninformed ineptitude.

The answer to the riddle of what’s going on here is not complicated. Anti- or post-Christian scholars, writers, and intellectuals in this country who spurn theological (not to mention historical) learning—after all, we don’t offer college courses in alchemy or astrology either—are sincerely unaware that American evangelicalism in its populist form is not representative of historic Christianity. They don’t realize that the modernist–fundamentalist debate is itself a uniquely modern phenomenon, and thus bears little relationship either to what Christianity is or to what one would find in Christian writings from any period from the second century to the seventeenth. They don’t know what they don’t know, and they’re too incurious to find out.

Were they to look, they would discover that Christianity has a living body of teaching on any range of topics. They would discover that over the centuries Christianity has had a teaching office, whose ordained leaders speak with varying degrees of authority on matters of pressing interest, including moral questions. They would discover that, in its acute American form, radical biblicism—the notion that Christians have beliefs only about things the Bible addresses directly and clearly—is one or two centuries old at most. They would discover that, even then, said biblicism describes a vanishingly small minority of global Christianity today. They would discover that the modernism on offer in Protestant liberalism is but the mirror image of fundamentalism, and therefore that to ape claims like “X isn’t even in the Bible—QED,” even intended as secular critique of conservative Christians, is merely an own goal: all it reveals is one’s own historical and cultural parochialism and basic theological incomprehension. They would discover that the church has never read the Bible the way either fundamentalists or historical critics do, in which case the word-search proof-text slam-dunk operation is not only irrelevant; in light of exegetical and theological tradition, it is liable to induce little more than a suppressed snort laugh.

They would discover, in a word, that the Bible does contain teaching about X, because the Bible contains teaching about all things (you just have to know where to look, that is, how to read); that the church’s tradition likewise contains considerable and consistent teaching about X, as any afternoon in a library or quick Google search would reveal; that Christianity is a living, not a dead thing; that Christian moral doctrine did not fossilize with the final breath of the last apostle; that postwar American evangelicalism is not the center of any universe, much less the Christian church’s.

They would discover—rather than learning the hard way—that asking someone in a position to know before writing about something of which one is wholly ignorant is a wise and generally admirable habit. But then, owning the fundies is a lot harder to do if you treat them as adults worthy of respect. This way is much more fun.

It’s all just a game anyway, right?

Personal tech update

It’s been an unplanned, unofficial Tech Week here at the blog. I’ve been meaning to write a mini-update on my tech use—continuing previous reflections like these—so now seems as good a time as any.

–I deactivated my Twitter account on Ash Wednesday, and I couldn’t be happier about the decision. It was a long time coming, but every time I came close to pulling the trigger I froze. There was always a reason to stay. Even Lent provided an escape hatch: my second book was being published right after Easter! How could I possibly hawk my wares—sorry, “promote my work in the public sphere”—if I wasn’t on Twitter? More to the point, does a writer even exist if he doesn’t have a Twitter profile? Well, it turns out he does, and is much the healthier for it. I got out pre–Elon Musk, too, which means I’ve been spared so much nonsense on the proverbial feed. For now, in any case, I’m keeping the account by reactivating then immediately deactivating it every 30 days; that may just be a sort of digital security blanket, though. Life without Twitter is good for the soul. Kempis and Bonhoeffer are right. Drop it like the bad habit that it is. Know freedom.

–I deleted my Facebook account two or three years ago, and I’ve never looked back. Good riddance.

–I’ve never had Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, or any of the other nasty social media timesucks folks devote themselves to.

–For the last 3-4 years I’ve been part of a Slack for some like-minded/like-hearted Christian writers, and while the experience has been uniformly positive, I realized that it was colonizing my mind and thus my attention during the day, whether at work or at home. So, first, I set up two-factor authentication with my wife’s phone, which means I need her to give me access if I’m signed out; and, second, I began limiting my sign-ins to two or three Saturdays per month. After a few months the itch to be on and participate constantly in conversations has mostly dribbled away. Now I might jump on to answer someone’s question, but only for a few minutes, and not to “stay on” or keep up with all the conversations. I know folks for whom this isn’t an issue, but I’ve learned about myself, especially online, that it’s all or nothing. As with Twitter, I had to turn off the spout, or I would just keep on drinking until it made me sick.

–I don’t play video games, unless it’s a Mario Kart grand prix with my kiddos.

–I only occasionally use YouTube; nine times out of ten it’s to watch a movie trailer. I cannot relate to people, whether friends and students, who spend hours and hours on YouTube. I can barely watch a Zoom conversation for five minutes before needing to do something else with my time.

–I subscribe to Spotify, because it’s quality bang for your buck. I’d love to divest from it—as my friend Chris Krycho constantly abjures me to do—but I’m not sure how, should I want to have affordable, legal access to music (for myself as well as my family).

–I subscribe to Audible (along with Libby), because I gave up podcasts for audiobooks last September, a decision about which I remain ecstatic, and Audible is reasonably priced and well-stocked and convenient. If only it didn’t feed the Beast!

–I happily use Instapaper, which is the greatest app ever created. Hat tip to Alan Jacobs, from whom I learned about it in, I believe, his book Reading for Pleasure in an Age of Distraction. I’ve even paid to use the advanced version, and will do so again in the future if the company needs money to survive.

–I’ve dumbed down my iPhone as much as is in my power to do. I’ve turned off location services, the screen is in grayscale, and I’m unable to access my email (nor do I have my password memorized, so I can’t get to my inbox even if I’m tempted). I can call or text via Messages or WhatsApp. I have Audible, Spotify, and Instapaper downloaded. I use Marco Polo for friends and family who live far away. And that’s it. I aim to keep my daily phone usage to 45 minutes or so, but this year it’s been closer to 55-75 minutes on average.

–I use a MacBook Pro for work, writing, and other purposes; I don’t have an iPad or tablet of any kind. My laptop needs are minimal. I use the frumpy, clunky Office standbys: Word, Excel, PowerPoint. I’ve occasionally sampled or listened to pitches regarding the glories of alternatives to Word for writing, but honestly, for my needs, my habits, and my convenience, Word is adequate. As for internet browsing, I use Firefox and have only a few plug-ins: Feedly for an RSS reader, Instapaper, and Freedom (the second greatest app ever)—though I’ve found that I use Freedom less and less. Only when (a) I’m writing for 2-4 or more hours straight and (b) I’m finding myself distracted by the internet (but don’t need access to it); I pay to use it but may end up quitting if I find eventually that I’ve developed the ability to write without distraction for sustained periods of time.

–I’ve had a Gmail account since 2007; I daydream about deleting my Google account and signing up for some super-encrypted unsurveiled actually-private email service (again, Krycho has the recs), but so far I can’t find it within me to start from scratch and leave Gmail. We’ll see.

–I have the same dream about Amazon, which I use almost every day, order all my books from, have a Prime account with, and generally resent with secret pleasure (or enjoy with secret resentment). Divesting from Amazon seems more realistic than doing so from either Apple or Google, but then, how does anyone with a modest budget who needs oodles of books (or whatever) for their daily work purchase said books (or whatever) from any source but Amazon? That’s not a nut I’ve managed to crack just yet.

–I don’t have an Alexa or an Echo or an Apple Watch or, so far as I know, any species of the horrid genus “the internet of things.”

–In terms of TV and streaming services, currently my wife and I pay for subscriptions with … no platforms, unless I’m mistaken. At least, we are the sole proprietors of none. On our Roku we have available Netflix, Prime, Hulu, Disney+, Apple+, HBO Max, and YouTubeTV. But one of these is free with our cellular service (Hulu), two of them are someone else’s account (Apple+ and YouTubeTV), and another is a byproduct of free shipping (Prime). We pay a nominal fee as part of extended family/friend groups for Netflix and HBO, and honestly we could stop tomorrow and we’d barely notice. We paid a tiny fee up front for three years of Disney+, and if we could have only one streaming service going forward, that’s what we’d keep: it has the best combination of kids, family, classic, and grown-up selections, and you can always borrow a friend’s password or pay one month’s cost to watch a favorite/new series/season before canceling once it’s over. As for time spent, across a semester I probably average 3-7 hours of TV per week. I’ve stopped watching sports altogether, and I limit shows to either (a) hands-down excellence (Better Call Saul, Atlanta, Mare of Easttown), (b) family entertainment (basically, Marvel and Star Wars), or (c) undemanding spouse-friendly fare (Superstore, Brooklyn 99, Top Chef). With less time during the school year, I actually end up watching more TV, because I’m usually wiped by the daily grind; whereas during the summer, with much more leisure time, I end up reading or doing other more meaningful things. I will watch the NBA playoffs once grades are submitted, but then, that’s nice to put on in the background, and the kids enjoy having it on, too.

–Per Andy C.’s tech-wise advice, we turn screens off on Sundays as a general rule. We keep an eye on screen time for the kids Monday through Thursday, and don’t worry about it as much on Friday and Saturday, especially since outdoor and family and friend activities should be happening on those days anyway.

–Oddly enough, I made it a goal in January of this year to watch more movies in 2022. Not only am I persuaded that, my comparison to television, film is the superior art form, and that the so-called golden age of peak TV is mostly a misnomer, I regret having lost the time—what with bustling kids and being gainfully employed—to keep up with quality movies. What time I do have to watch stuff I usually give to TV, being the less demanding medium: it’s bite size, it always resolves (or ends on a cliffhanger), and it doesn’t require committing to 2-3 hours up front. I’ve mostly not been successful this year, but I’m hoping the summer can kickstart my hopes in that area.

–If I’m honest, I find that I’ve mostly found a tolerable equilibrium with big-picture technology decisions, at least on an individual level. If you told me that, in two years, I no longer used Amazon, watched even less TV, and traded in my iPhone for a flip phone, I’d be elated. Otherwise, my goals are modest. Mainly it has to do with time allocation and distraction at work. If I begin my day with a devotional and 2-4 hours of sustained reading all prior to opening my laptop to check email, then it’s a good day. If the laptop is opened and unread mail awaits in the inbox, it’s usually a waste of a day. The screen sucks me in and the “deep work” I’d hoped to accomplish goes down the drain. That may not be how it goes for others, but that’s how it is with me.

–The only other tech-related facet of my life I’m pondering is purchasing a Kobo Elipsa (again, on the recommendation of Krycho and some other tech-wise readerly types). I’m not an especially good reader of PDFs; usually I print them out and physically annotate them. But it would be nice to have a reliable workflow with digital files, digital annotations, and searchable digital organization thereof. It would also help with e-reading—I own a 10-year old Kindle but basically never use it—not only PDFs for work but writings in the public domain, ePub versions of new books I don’t need a physical copy of (or perhaps can only get a digital version of, for example, via the library), and Instapaper-saved articles from online sources. I’ve never wanted a normal tablet for this purpose because I know I’d just be duped into browsing the web or checking Twitter or my inbox. But if Kobo is an ideal balance between a Kindle and an iPad, designed for the sole purpose for which I need it, then I may end up investing in it here in the next year or two.

Tech for normies

On Monday The New Atlantis published my review essay of Andy Crouch’s new book, The Life We’re Looking For. The next day I wrote up a longish blog post responding to my friend Jeff Bilbro’s comment about the review, which saw a discrepancy between some of the critical questions I closed the essay with and an essay I wrote last year on Wendell Berry. Yesterday I wrote a seemingly unrelated post about the difference between radical churches (urban monastics, intentional communities, house churches, all to varying degrees partaking of the Hauerwasian or Yoderian style of ecclesiology) and what I called “church for normies.”

That last post was of a piece with the first two, however, and provides some deep background to where I was coming from in answering some of Jeff and Andy’s questions. For readers who haven’t been keeping up with this torrent of words, my review of Andy’s book was extremely positive. The primary question it left me with, though, was (a) whether his beautiful vision of humane life in a technological world is possible, (b) whether, if it is possible, it is possible for any but the few, and (c) whether, however many it turns out to be possible for, it is liable to make a difference to any but those who take up the costly but life-giving challenge of enacting said vision—that is, whether it is likely or even possible to be an agent of change (slow or fast) in our common social and political and ecclesial life.

I admit that my stance evinces a despairing tone or even perspective. But let’s call it pessimistic for now. I’m pessimistic about the chances, here and now, for many or even any to embody the vision Andy lays out in his book—a vision I find heartening, inspiring, and apt to our needs and desires if we are to flourish as human beings in community.

Given my comments about church for normies yesterday, I thought I would write up one final post (“Ha! Final!” his readers, numbered in the dozens, exclaimed) summing up my thoughts on the topic and putting a pinch of nuance on some of my claims—not to say the rhetoric or metaphors will be any less feisty.

Here’s a stab at that summing up, in fourteen theses.

*

1. Digital technology is misunderstood if it is categorized as merely one more species of the larger genus “technology,” to which belong categories or terms like “tool,” “fire,” “wheel,” “writing,” “language,” “boat,” “airplane,” etc. It is a beast of its own, a whole new animal.

2. Digital technology is absolutely and almost ineffably pervasive in our lives. It is omnipresent. It has found its way into every nook and cranny of our homes and workplaces and spheres of leisure.

3. The ubiquity of Digital (hereafter capitalized as a power unto itself) is not limited to this or that sort of person, much less this or that class. It’s everywhere and pertains to everyone, certainly in our society but, now or very soon, in all societies.

4. Digital’s hegemony is neither neutral nor a matter of choice. It constitutes the warp and woof of the material conditions that make our lives possible. Daycares deploy it. Public schools feature it. Colleges make it essential. Rare is the job that does not depend on it. One does not choose to belong to the Domain of Digital. One belongs to it, today, by being born.

5. Digital is best understood, for Christians, as a principality and power. It is a seductive and agential force that lures and attracts, subdues and coopts the will. It makes us want what it wants. It addicts us. It redirects our desires. It captures and controls our attention. It wants, in a word, to eat us alive.

6. If the foregoing description is even partially true, then finding our way through the Age of Digital, as Christians or just as decent human beings, is not only an epochal and heretofore unfaced challenge. It entails the transformation of the very material conditions in which our lives consist. It is a matter, to repeat the word I use in my TNA review, of revolution. Anything short of that, so far as I can tell, is not rising to the level of the problem we face.

7. At least three implications follow. First, technological health is not and cannot be merely an individual choice. The individual, plainly put, is not strong enough. She will be overwhelmed. She will be defeated. (And even if she is not—if we imagine the proverbial saint moving to the desert with a few other hermits—then the exception proves the rule.)

8. Second, modest changes aren’t going to cut it. Sure, you can put your phone in grayscale; you can limit your “screen time” as you’re able; you can ask Freedom to block certain websites; you can discipline your social media usage or even deactivate your accounts. But we’re talking world-historical dominance here. Nor should we kid ourselves. Digital is still ruling my life whether or not I subscribe to two instead of six streaming platforms, whether or not I’m on my phone two hours instead of four every day, whether or not my kids play Nintendo Switch on the TV but not in handheld mode. Whenever we feel a measure of pride in these minor decisions, we should think of this scene:

Do we feel in charge? We are not.

9. Third, our households are not the world, and we live in the world, even if we hope not to be of it. Even if my household manages some kind of truce with the Prince of this Age—I refer to the titans of Silicon Valley—every member of my household departs daily from it and enters the world. We know who’s in charge there. In fact, if you don’t count time sleeping, the members of my own house live, week to week, more outside the home than they do inside it. Digital awaits them. It’s patient. It’ll do its work. Its bleak liturgies have all the time in the world. We just have to submit. And submit we do, every day.

10. But the truth is that the line between household and world runs through every home. We bring the world in with us through the front door. How could it be otherwise? Amazon’s listening ears and Netflix’s latest streamer and Google’s newest unread email and Spotify’s perfect algorithm—they’re all there, at home, in your pocket or on the mantle or in the living room, staring you down, calling your name, summoning and inquiring and inviting, even teaching. Their formative power is not out there. It’s in here. Every home I’ve ever entered, It was there, whose name is Legion, the household gods duly honored and made welcome.

11. Jeff rightly pushed back on this “everyone” and “everywhere” line in my earlier post. I should be clear that I’m not exaggerating: while I have read of folks who don’t have TVs or video games or tablets or smartphones or wireless internet, I haven’t personally met any. But I allow that some exist. This means that, to some extent, tech-wise living is possible. But for whom? For how many? That’s the question.

12. The fundamental issue, then, is tech for normies. By which I mean: Is tech-wise living possible for ordinary people? People who don’t belong to intentional communities? People without college or graduate degrees? People who aren’t married or aren’t in healthy marriages, or who are parents but unmarried? It is possible for working-class families? For families whose parents work double shifts, or households with a single parent who works? For kids who go to daycare or public school? For folks who attend churches that themselves encourage and even require constant active smartphone use? (“Please read along on your Bible app”; “Please register your child at this kiosk, we’ll send a text if we need you to come pick her up.”) From the bottom of my heart, with unfeigned sincerity, I do not believe that it is. And if it is not, what are we left with?

13. This is what I mean when I refer to matching the scale of the problem. Ordinary people live according to antecedent material conditions and social scripts, both of which precede and set the terms for what individuals and families tacitly perceive to characterize “a normal life.” But the material conditions and the social scripts that define our life today are funded, overwritten, and determined by Digital. That is why, for example, the child of friends of mine here in little ol’ Abilene, Texas, was one of exactly two high school freshmen in our local public high school who did not have a smartphone—and why, before fall semester was done, they bought him one. Not because the peer pressure was too intense. Because the pressure from teachers and administrators and coaches was insurmountable. Assignments weren’t being turned in, grades were falling, rehearsals and practices were being missed, all because the educational ecosystem had begun, sometime in the previous decade, to presuppose the presence of a smartphone in the hand, pocket, purse, or backpack of every single student and adult in the school. It is now the center around which all else orbits. The pull, the need, to buy a smartphone proves, in the end, irresistible. It doesn’t matter what you, the individual, or y’all, the household, want. Resistance is futile.

14. Now. Must this lead to despair? Does this imply that resistance to evil is impossible? That there is nothing to be done? That we are at the end of history? No. Those conclusions need not follow necessarily. I don’t think that digital technology as such or in every respect is pure evil. This isn’t the triumph of darkness over light. My children watching Encanto or playing Mario Kart is not the abomination of desolation, nor is my writing these words on a laptop. My point concerns the role and influence and ubiquity of Digital as a power and force in our lives and, more broadly, in our common life. It is that that is diabolical. And it is that that is a wicked problem. Which means it is not a problem that individuals or families have the resources or wherewithal to address on their own—any more than, if the water supply in the state of Texas dried up, this or that person or household could “choose” to resolve the issue on their own. This is why I insisted in my original review that there is something inescapably political, even top-down, about a comprehensive or potentially successful response to Digital’s reign over us. Yes, by all means we should begin trying to rewrite some of the social scripts, so far as our time and ability permit. (I’m less sanguine even here, but I grant that it’s possible in small though important ways.) Nevertheless the material conditions must change for any such minor measures to take hold, not just at wider scale but in the lives of ordinary people. If you’re willing to accept the metaphor of addiction—and I think it’s more than a metaphor in this case—then what we need is for the authorities to turn off the supply, to clamp down on the free flow of the drug we all woke up one day to realize we were hooked on. The thing about a drug is that it feels good. We’re all jonesing for one more hit, click by click, swipe by swipe, like by like. What we need is rehab. But few people check themselves in voluntarily. What most addicts need, most of the time, is what most of us, today, need above all.

An intervention.

Church for normies

In his book Hauerwas: A (Very) Critical Introduction, Nicholas Healy raises an objection with Hauerwas’s ecclesiology. He argues that Hauerwas’s rhetoric and sometimes his arguments present the reader with a church fit only for faithful Christians—that is, for heroes and saints, for super-disciples, for the extraordinarily obedient, the successful, the satisfactory. By contrast, Healy argues that the church ought to be a home and a haven for “unsatisfactory Christians,” and that our doctrine of the church ought to reflect that.

That phrase, “unsatisfactory Christians,” has stuck with me ever since I first read it. It’s often what I have in mind when I refer to “normie” Christians: ordinary believers most of whose days are filled with the mundane tasks of remaining decent while doing what’s necessary to survive in a hard world: working a boring job, feeding the kids, getting enough sleep, paying the bills, not getting too much into debt, occasionally seeing friends, fixing household or familial problems, maybe taking an annual vacation. Into this all-hands-on-deck eking-out-a-survival life, “being a Christian” is somehow supposed to fit, not only seamlessly but in a transformative way. So you go to church, share in the sacraments, say your prayers, raise your kids in the faith, and generally try to fulfill the duties and roles to which you understand God to have called you.

I used to be Hauerwasian (or Yoderian, before that moniker assumed other connotations) in my ecclesiology, but over the years I’ve come to think of that style of construing Christian discipleship as a well-intended error, though an error all the same. To be clear, I’m not talking about Hauerwas himself—who defends himself against Healy’s critique in a later book—but about the sort of ecclesiology associated with him and with those who have developed his thought over the decades. I’m thinking, that is, of an approach to church that sees it as a small band of deeply committed disciples whose life together is aptly described as an “intentional community.” These are people who know their Bibles, who have strong and well-informed theological opinions, who are readers and thinkers, who have college degrees, who are white collar and/or middle-/upper-middle class, who make common cause to found or form or join a local community defined by a Rule of Life and thick expectations and rich, shared daily practices. Often as not they meet in homes or move into the same neighborhood or even purchase a plot of land for all to live on together.

I would never knock such communities. Extending the monastic vision to include lay people in all walks of life is a lovely development. Though I do worry that such communities are usually short-term arrangements lacking longevity, and that they are typically idealized and overly romantic, nonetheless they represent a healthy response to the vision of the church in the New Testament and sometimes even work out. Nothing but kudos and blessings upon them.

My disagreement is with the view that this vision of church just is what any and every church ought to be, as though all other versions of church must therefore be (1) pale imitations of the real thing, (2) tolerable but incomplete attempts at church, or even simply (3) failed churches. That’s wrong. It’s wrong for many reasons, including exegetical, historical, and theological reasons. But let me give one closer to the ground, rooted in human experience.

The radical church is not a church for normies. To use Healy’s terminology, it’s not a community meant for unsatisfactory Christians. It’s for Christians who have their you-know-what together: Christians who are both able and willing, given their background, education, financial status, temperament, moral and intellectual aptitude, and personal desire, to enter the monastic life, only here as laypersons. It’s certainly possible to make a case, based on the Gospels and the teaching of Christ, that the church exists solely for such Christians, since the condition for faith is discipleship to Christ, and discipleship to Christ is costly. I believe this to be a profound misunderstanding, however, not least because the rest of the New Testament exists. Just read St. Paul. He’ll disabuse you rather quickly of the notion that the church consists of satisfactory Christians. It turns out the church is nothing but unsatisfactory Christians. And if your Christian community is such that no normie would ever dream of visiting or joining it, because it’s clear that he or she is not and would never be up to snuff, then—allow me to suggest—you’re doing it wrong.

The church has to make room for the unsatisfactory, exactly in the manner I described above: the just-getting-by, the I’m-barely-paying-the-bills, the it-took-all-I-had-to-show-up-this-morning, the I’m-doing-my-best, the just-give-me-a-break folks. The holly-ivy Christians, who begrudgingly show up twice a year. The Kichijiros and Simon Peters and doubting Thomases. The addicts who relapse, the gamblers in debt, the porn-addled who can’t quit, the foreclosed-on and laid-off, the perennially fired and out of work, the ex-cons and adulterers and fathers of five kids by three different moms. Is the church not for such as these? “Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.”

Our churches may not, must not, fall prey to the temptation that such people have no place in them, because if we believe that, then we will make them such places. Worse, we will inadvertently make them havens for a different kind of person: neither “the least of these” (whom Jesus loves) nor the radical types who flock to intentional communities, but the sort of credentialed professionals who want that sweet, sweet upper-middle-class life alongside others who look and talk and live just like them. Such folks are all unsatisfactory to a person—that’s just to say they’re human—but they present the opposite on the outside. Either way, the undisguised unsatisfactory have nowhere to lay their heads: the well-to-do don’t want them and the radicals can’t receive them.

Does this mean our churches should expect less of their members? Does it mean our churches should restructure their common life? Does it mean churches should function to permit and even welcome the straggler, the good-for-nothing, the failed disciple, the I’m-just-here-to-take-the-Eucharist-and-run type?

Yes. That is exactly what I’m saying. Radicals hate the medieval distinction between the evangelical counsels of perfection and the “lower” universal teachings of Jesus meant for all Christians. But the distinction arose for a reason, and it’s an essential one. Further, it’s why the church, especially in patristic and medieval periods, developed such a strong account of the sacraments as the heart of lay Christian life. The sacraments are pure reception, pure gift: grace upon grace. That’s what a sacrament is, the material sign and instrument of God’s grace, and it’s what the Blessed Sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood enacts and encapsulates. God willing, the Spirit so moves in the regular, daily and weekly, reception of Holy Communion that a believer is drawn into a lifelong journey of sanctification, what is unsatisfactory (this plain and unimpressive water) being transformed into that which pleases the Lord and edifies his body (the miraculous wine saved best for last). But that’s up to God, and it begins, it does not end, with initiation into and partaking of the liturgical and sacramental life of God’s people.

We need churches that offer and embody and invite people to that, making clear all the while that the summons is for all—especially normies.

Tech-wise BenOp

My friend Jeff Bilbro has raised a question about my review essay in The New Atlantis of Andy Crouch’s new book, The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World. He sees a real tension between the critical questions I pose for Crouch at the end of the review and my essay last year for The Point, in which I defend Wendell Berry against the charge of quietism or apolitical inaction (lodged, in this case, by critic George Scialabba). If, that is, I argue that Berry is right to insist that living well is worth it even when losing is likely—in other words, when the causes in which one believes and for which one advocates are unlikely to win the day—am I not being inconsistent in criticizing Crouch’s proposal for failing to match the scale of the problem facing us in digital technology? Am I not taking up the role of Scialabba and saying, in so many words, “Lovely prose; bad advice”?

I don’t believe I am, but the question is a sharp one, and I’m on the hook for it. Let me see if I can explain myself.

First, note well that my review is overwhelmingly positive and that I say repeatedly in the closing sections of the essay that Crouch’s proposal is a sensible one; that it may, in fact, be the best on offer; and that it is worth attempting to implement whether or not there is a more scalable alternative to be preferred.

Second, my initial criticism concerns audience. In effect I am asking: Who can put this vision into practice? Who is capable of doing it? Whom is it for? With respect to Berry/Scialabba, that question is immaterial. Scialabba isn’t frustrated or confused by Berry’s intended audience; he actively does not want Berry to be successful in persuading others to adopt his views, because doing so would drain the resources necessary for mass political activism to be effective. Put differently, the Berryan vision is possible, though strenuous. Whereas it isn’t clear to me that Crouch’s vision is possible at all—or at least the question of for whom it may be possible is unclear to me.

Third, then, I want to up the ante on the Crouchian project by comparing its scale to the scale of the problem facing us, on one hand, and by asking after its purpose, on the other. It seems to me that The Life We’re Looking For does believe, or presuppose, that the Tech-Wise BenOp (or, if we want to uncouple Crouch from Dreher, the Pauline Option) has the power to effect, or is ordered to, the transformation of our common life, our culture, etc. Granted that such transformation may take decades or centuries, transformation is clearly in view. But this, too, is distinct from Berry’s stance. Berry does not believe his vision of the good life is a recipe for transformation. He does believe that large-scale transformation is impossible apart from local and even personal transformation. That, however, is a different matter than proposing a means for change. In sum, Berry believes that (1) the good life is worth living whatever the future may hold, (2) the good life is not a plan for change, and (3) the possibility of change requires the integration of national and local, cultural and personal, theoretical and practical. I affirm all this. But these points are distinct from (though not opposed to) Crouch’s proposal.

Returning to scale helps to clarify the difference. I admit in the review that it may genuinely be impossible to match the scale of the problem of digital technology without grave injustice. Nonetheless I hold that, given that scale, I cannot see how Crouch’s Pauline Option is a live possibility for any but saints. And as I say there, salvation from the tyranny of tech “must be for normies, not heroes.”

Let me make this more personal. Across my entire life I have not known a single household or family that fits the vision of being “tech wise” as laid out in either this book or Crouch’s previous book. Whether the folks in question were single, married, or parents, whether they were Christians or not, whether they were affluent or not, whether they were Texan or not, whether they were suburban or not, whether they were educated or not—the inside of the home and the habits of the household were all more or less the same, granting minor differences. Everyone has multiple TVs. Everyone has laptops and tablets. Everyone has video games. Everyone has smart phones. Everyone subscribes to streaming services. Everyone watches sports. Everyone is on social media. Everyone, everyone, everyone. No exceptions. The only differences concern which poison one prefers and how much time one gives to it.

I’m not throwing stones. This description includes me. I assume it includes you, too. The hegemony of the screen is ubiquitous, an octopus whose tentacles encircle and invade every one of our homes. No one, not one is excluded.

Some folks are more intentional than others; some of them even succeed in certain practices of moderation. But does it really make a difference? Is it really anything to write home about? Does it mark these homes off from their neighbors? Not at all. I repeat: Not once have I entered a single home that even somewhat resembles the (already non-extreme!) vision of tech-wisdom on offer in the pages of Crouch’s books.

This is what I mean by scale. It’s like we’re all on the bottom of the ocean, but some of us are a few yards above the rest. Are such persons technically closer to the surface? Sure. Are they still going to drown like the rest of us? Absolutely.

*

I hope all this makes clear that I’m not contesting the wisdom or goodness or beauty of Crouch’s vision of households nurturing a technological revolution in nuce. I want to join such a resistance movement. But does it exist? More to the point, is it possible?

What I’ve come to believe is that, more or less full stop, it is not possible—so long, that is, as our households remain occupied territory. The flag of Silicon Valley waves publicly and proudly in all of our homes. I see it everywhere I go. It’s like the face of Big Brother. It just keeps on flapping and waving, waving and smiling, world without end, amen.

Perhaps “scale” is a misleading term. More than scale the challenge is how deep the roots of the problem lie. Truly to get a handle on it, truly to begin the revolution, an EMP would have to be detonated in my neighborhood. We’d have to throw our screens in a great glorious bonfire, turn off our wi-fi, and rid our homes of every “smart” device (falsely so called) and every member in that dubious, diabolical category: “the internet of things.” We’d have to delete Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok from our phones. We’d have to cancel our subscriptions to Netflix, Disney, Apple, HBO, Hulu, and Amazon. We’d have to say goodbye to it all, and start over.

I don’t mean we have to live in a post-digital world to live sane lives. (Though some days I do wonder whether that may be true: viva la Butlerian Jihad!) I mean our lives are already so integrated with digital as to qualify as transhuman. We must face that fact squarely: If we are already cyborgs in practice, then disconnecting a few of the tubes while remaining otherwise hooked up to the Collective isn’t going to cut it.

Nor—and this is a buried lede—is any of this possible, if it is possible, for any but the hyper-educated or hyper-affluent. Most people, as I comment in the review, are just trying to survive:

We are too beholden to the economic and digital realities of modern life — too dependent on credit, too anxious about paying the rent, too distracted by Twitter, too reliant on Amazon, too deadened by Pornhub — to be in a position to opt for an alternative vision, much less to realize that one exists. We’ve got ends to meet. And at the end of the day, binging Netflix numbs the stress with far fewer consequences than opioids.

Yet all the hyper-educated and hyper-affluent people I now are just as plugged-in as those with fewer degrees and less money. Put most starkly, I read Crouch’s book as if it were a sermon preached by an ex-Borg to the Borg Hive. But individual Borg aren’t capable of disconnecting themselves. That’s what makes them the Borg.

As they say, resistance is futile.

*

My metaphors and rhetoric are outstripping themselves here, so let me pull it back a bit, not least because the point of this post isn’t to criticize Crouch’s book but to show that my (modestly!) critical questions aren’t at odds with my defense of Berry.

Let me summarize my main points, before I add one final word about scale, that word I keep using but not quite defining or addressing.

1. Crouch’s book is an excellent and beautiful vision of what it means to be human, at all times and especially today, in a world beset by digital technology.

2. I don’t know whether Crouch envisions that vision to be achievable by just anyone at all; and, if not, then by whom in particular.

3. I don’t know whether Crouch’s vision is possible in principle, at least for normal people with normal jobs and normal lives.

4. Even if it were possible in principle for the few saints and heroes among us, I don’t know whether it would make a difference except to themselves.

5. This last observation is not a criticism in itself, but it becomes a criticism if Crouch believes that cultural transformation occurs from the ground up through the patient faithfulness of a tiny minority of persons leavening society by their witness, eventuating in radical social transformation.

6. Points two through five are not in tension with my defense of Berry against Scialabba, because (a) Berry’s vision is livable, (b) it is livable by normies, (c) it is not designed or proposed in order to effectuate mass change, and (d) he knows this and believes it is worth doing anyway.

Clearly, I have set myself up here to be disproved: If Crouch’s vision is not only possible to be lived in general but is being lived right now, as we speak, by normies, then he’s off the hook and I’ve got pie on my face. More, if he doesn’t believe that—or is not invested in the likelihood that—this vision, put into practice by normal folks, will or should lead to social, cultural, economic, and political transformation, then that’s a second pie on top of the first, and I hereby pledge to repent in digital dust and ashes.

Nothing would make me happier than being shown to be wrong here. I want Crouch to be right, because I want nothing more than for my life and the lives of my friends and neighbors (and, above all, those of my children) to be free of the derelictions and defacements of digital. Not only that, but there’s no one I trust more on this issue than Crouch. I assign The Tech-Wise Family to my students every year, and practices he commends there have made their way into my home. I owe him many debts.

But I just can’t shake the feeling that the problem is even bigger, even nastier, even deeper and more threatening than he or any of us can find it within us to admit. That’s what I mean when I refer to “scale.” Permit me to advert to one last overwrought analogy. Berry wants us (among other things) to live within limits, on a plot of land that we work by our own hands to bring forth some allotment of food for us, our household, our neighbors, our animals. He doesn’t ask us to breathe unpolluted oxygen, to live on a planet without air pollution. That’s now, regrettably, a fact of life; it encompasses us all. By contrast, reading The Life We’re Looking For I get one of two feelings: either that unpolluted oxygen is available, you just have to know where to find it; or that the pollution isn’t so bad after all. Maybe there really are folks who’ve fashioned or found oxygen masks here and there around the globe. Maybe I’ve just been unfortunate not to have spotted any. But I fear there are none, or there aren’t nearly enough to go around.

In brief, the Hive isn’t somewhere else or other than us; we are the Hive, and the Hive is us. It’s just this once-blue planet spinning in space, now overtaken by the tunnels and tubes, the darkness and silence of the Cube. If there’s a way out of this digital labyrinth, I’m all ears. All day long I’m looking for that crimson thread, showing the way out. If someone—Bilbro, Berry, Crouch, whoever—can lead the way, I’ll follow. The worry that keeps me up nights, though, is that there is no exit, and we’re deceiving ourselves imagining there is.

Creatura verbi divini

On the Mere Fi podcast earlier this week, both Derek and Alastair pressed me on the question of whether the church is “the creature of God’s Word.” The theological worry here is that if one affirms, with catholic tradition, that the church creates the canon, then the proper order between the two has been inverted, since the people of God is the creatura verbi divini, not the other way around. How, after all, could it be otherwise?

You can listen to my answer on the pod. My reply was simple, though I can’t speak to how well I articulated it there. Here, at least, is what I would say in expanded form.

The word of God creates the church; but the church creates the canon. This is not a contradiction because, even though Holy Scripture mediates and thus is the word of the living God to his people, the canon of texts that Scripture comprises is wholly (though not only) human, historical, and just so a product of the church. Moreover, the canon as such does not exist at the church’s founding, traditionally identified with Pentecost. No apostolic writing is extant at that moment. Apostolic writings begin to be written a decade or two following; they are not completed for at least a half century hence (maybe more); and the canon or formal collection or list of apostolic writings received as authoritative divine Scripture on the part of the church does not exist in any official way for some centuries. And even once the canon is explicit, unanimity and universality of its acceptance take even more centuries to arrive. (If one agrees with the Protestant reformers regarding the excision from the canon of such deuterocanonical books as the Wisdom of Solomon and Tobit, then in point of fact the canon takes a full fifteen centuries to come into its final, public form.)

In my view, magisterial Protestant doctrines of Scripture elide this crucial distinction in their claim that the church is created by the word of God and, thus, that Scripture creates the church. The word of God does indeed found the church, both (1) in the primary sense that the risen incarnate Logos from heaven pours out the Spirit of the Father on his apostles and (2) in the secondary sense that the apostles’ proclamation of the word of the gospel convicts and converts sinners to Christ wherever they travel, bearing witness to the good news. This is the running theme of the book of Acts. Nevertheless it remains the case that, within the very narrative of Acts, no canon of Scripture exists. Recall that St. Luke does not record the writing of any canonical text! Those texts he does record, such as the letter of St. James and the Jerusalem council to gentile believers, are not found elsewhere in the canon, but only here, as reported speech.

In our conversation, Alastair pressed a different point, an important one with which I agree but which, I think, I understand differently than he does. He observed that what doctrines of Scripture often overlook is the manifold and altogether material ways in which the production and dissemination of graphai influenced and shaped the early messianic assemblies dotting the shoreline of the Mediterranean basin. Apart from and prior to any theological redescription, that is, we can see just how letter-centric and letter-formed the early Christian communities were, evident in the extraordinary literary production of St. Paul alone. Letters (and homilies, and histories, and apocalypses, and …) are written, copied, distributed, shared, read aloud in worship, studied by the saints, transmitted and republished, so on and so forth, and this diverse and fascinating process is up and running, at the absolute latest, by the end of the second decade of the church’s existence.

As I say, I agree wholeheartedly with this observation. And it certainly bears on our theological and not only our historical understanding of the church’s origins. But, so far as I can tell, it doesn’t bear on the specific point raised by the question of whether the canon creates the church or vice versa.

That is to say: Granting the existence and influence of Pauline and other literatures in the first century of the church’s life (and on, indefinitely, into the future), this phenomenon seems to me to confirm rather than to contradict or even to complicate my original answer offered above. Yes, God’s word founds the church, both from heaven and through the spoken and, later, written words of the apostles. But from this undeniable fact we may not draw the conclusion that the canon—or even the apostolic writings eventually canonized—“create” the church, and for the same reasons. The canon does not exist in the time of the apostles. And although, intermittently and somewhat haphazardly, written apostolic documents begin circulating in the second half of the first century AD, these are far from universally shared by ekklesiai around the known world. There are churches in Africa and India and Spain and elsewhere that simply lack all or most of the apostolic writings later canonized until the second and even sometimes into the third or fourth centuries. The church simply cannot be said to be a creature of the canon or even of the apostolic texts subsequently included in the canon. The church predates both by decades, even centuries. Certain churches do receive and benefit from certain texts authored or commissioned by apostles. But for some time they are in the minority, and even they (i.e., the churches in question) preexisted their reception of any apostolic text whatsoever. Not that they preexisted apostolic teaching—but then, this question concerns graphai, not oral doctrina.

I hope this clarification is responsive to both Derek’s and Alastair’s questions and concerns. I hope especially that it is cogent. I look forward to hearing from them or others regarding where I might be wrong.

I’m on Mere Fidelity

Did I say quit podcasts? I meant all of them except one.

I’m on the latest episode of Mere Fidelity, talking about my book The Doctrine of Scripture and, well, the doctrine of Scripture. (Links: Google, Spotify, Apple, Soundcloud.) It was a pleasure to chat with Derek and Alastair and (surprise!) Timothy. Matt had to bail last minute. I can only assume he was nervous.

No joke, it was an honor to be on. For the last decade, I have lived by the mantra, “No podcasts before tenure.” I’ve turned down every invitation. In 2020–21 I participated in three podcasts as a member of The Liberating Arts, the first two as the interviewer (of Alan Noble and Jon Baskin, respectively) and the third as interviewee, speaking on behalf of the project (this was 11 months ago, but the podcast just posted this week, as it happens). In other words, this experience with Mere Fi was for all intents and purposes my first true podcast experience, in full and on the receiving end.

It was fun! I hope I didn’t flub too many answers. I tend to speak in winding paragraphs, not in discrete and manageable sentences. Besides, it’s hard to compete with Alastair’s erudition—and that accent!

Check it out. And the Patreon, where there’s a +1 segment. Thanks again to the Mere Fi crew. I give all of you dear readers a big glorious exception to go and listen to them. They’ve got the best theology pod around. What a gift to be included on the fun.

The Church’s Book is here!

It’s here!

Or if you want a snazzy wrap-around image of the whole front and back matter…

The book is ready for order anywhere books are sold: Amazon, Bookshop, Eerdmans, elsewhere. Some websites may say that the publication date is May 24, but it’s available to be shipped at this moment—folks I know who pre-ordered it have already received a copy or are getting theirs by mail in a matter of days. And the Kindle edition will be available Tuesday next week, the 26th.

Here’s the book description:

What role do varied understandings of the church play in the doctrine and interpretation of Scripture? 

In The Church’s Book, Brad East explores recent accounts of the Bible and its exegesis in modern theology and traces the differences made by divergent, and sometimes opposed, theological accounts of the church. Surveying first the work of Karl Barth, then that of John Webster, Robert Jenson, and John Howard Yoder (following an excursus on interpreting Yoder’s work in light of his abuse), East delineates the distinct understandings of Scripture embedded in the different traditions that these notable scholars represent. In doing so, he offers new insight into the current impasse between Christians in their understandings of Scripture—one determined far less by hermeneutical approaches than by ecclesiological disagreements. 

East’s study is especially significant amid the current prominence of the theological interpretation of Scripture, which broadly assumes that the Bible ought to be read in a way that foregrounds confessional convictions and interests. As East discusses in the introduction to his book, that approach to Scripture cannot be separated from questions of ecclesiology—in other words, how we interpret the Bible theologically is dependent upon the context in which we interpret it.

Here are the blurbs:

“How we understand the church determines how we understand Scripture. Brad East grounds this basic claim in a detailed examination of three key heirs of Barthian theology—Robert Jenson, John Webster, and John Howard Yoder. The corresponding threefold typology that results —church as deputy (catholic), church as beneficiary (reformed), and church as vanguard (believers’ church)—offers much more than a description of the ecclesial divides that undergird different views of Scripture. East also presents a sustained and well-argued defense of the catholic position: church precedes canon. At the same time, East’s respectful treatment of each of his theological discussion partners gives the reader a wealth of insight into the various positions. Future discussions about church and canon will turn to The Church’s Book for years to come.”
— Hans Boersma, Nashotah House Theological Seminary

“Theologically informed, church-oriented ways of reading Scripture are given wonderfully sustained attention in Brad East’s new book. Focusing on Karl Barth and subsequent theologians influenced by him, East uncovers how differences in the theology of Scripture reflect differences in the understanding of church. Ecclesiology, East shows, has a major unacknowledged influence on remaining controversies among theologians interested in revitalizing theological approaches to Scripture. With this analysis in hand, East pushes the conversation forward, beyond current impasses and in directions that remedy deficiencies in the work of each of the theologians he discusses.”
— Kathryn Tanner, Yale Divinity School

“In this clear and lively volume, Brad East provides acute close readings of three theologians—John Webster, Robert W. Jenson, and John Howard Yoder—who have all tied biblical interpretation to a doctrine of the church. Building on their work, he proposes his own take on how the church constitutes the social location of biblical interpretation. In both his analytical work and his constructive case, East makes a major contribution to theological reading of Scripture.”
— Darren Sarisky, Australian Catholic University

“If previous generations of students and practitioners of a Protestant Christian doctrine of Holy Scripture looked to books by David Kelsey, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Kevin Vanhoozer as touchstones, future ones will look back on this book by Brad East as another. But there is no ecclesially partisan polemic here. This book displays an ecumenical vision of Scripture—one acutely incisive in its criticism, minutely attentive in its exposition, and truly catholic and visionary in its constructive proposals. It has the potential to advance theological discussion among dogmaticians, historians of dogma, and guild biblical exegetes alike. It is a deeply insightful treatment of its theme that will shape scholarly—and, more insistently and inspiringly, ecclesial—discussion for many years to come.”
— Wesley Hill, Western Theological Seminary

“In the past I’ve argued that determining the right relationship between God, Scripture, and hermeneutics comprises the right preliminary question for systematic theology: its ‘first theology.’ Brad East’s The Church’s Book has convinced me that ecclesiology too belongs in first theology. In weaving his cord of three strands (insights gleaned from a probing analysis of John Webster, Robert Jenson, and John Howard Yoder), East offers not a way out but a nevertheless welcome clarification of where the conflict of biblical interpretations really lies: divergent understandings of the church. This is an important interruption of and contribution to a longstanding conversation about theological prolegomena.”
— Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

“For some theologians, it is Scripture that must guide any theological description of the church. For others, the church’s doctrines are normative for interpreting Scripture. Consequently, theologians have long tended to talk past one another. With unusual brilliance, clarity, and depth, Brad East has resolved this aporia by arguing that the locus of authority lay originally within the people of God, and thus prior to the development of both doctrine and Scripture. And so it is we, the people of God, who are prior, and who undergird both, and thereby offer the possibility of rapprochement on that basis. East’s proposal is convincing, fresh, and original: a genuinely new treatment that clarifies the real issues and may well prepare for more substantive ecumenical progress, as well as more substantive theologies. This is a necessary book—vital reading for any theologian.”
— Nicholas M. Healy, St. John’s University

“All of the discussions in this book display East’s analytical rigor and theological sophistication. As one of the subjects under discussion in this book, I will speak for all of us and say that there are many times East is able to do more for and with our work than we did ourselves. . . . I look forward to seeing how future theological interpreters take these advances and work with them to push theological interpretation in new and promising directions.”
— Stephen E. Fowl, from the foreword

This book has been more than a decade in the making, being a major revision of my doctoral dissertation at Yale. It’s a pleasure and a relief to hold it in my hands. I’m so eager to see what others make of it. I’m especially grateful for it to be coming out so soon after the release last fall of The Doctrine of Scripture, my first book. The two are complementary volumes: one provides scholarly, theoretical, genealogical, and ecclesiological scaffolding; the other builds a constructive proposal on that basis. The sequence of their release reverses the order in which they were written, but that’s neither here nor there. Together, they comprise about 250,000 words on Christian theology of Holy Scripture and its interpretation. Add in my journal articles and you’ve got 300K words. That’s a lot, y’all. I hope a few folks find something worthwhile in them. Always in service to the church and, ultimately, to the glory of God.

What a joy it is to do this job. Very thankful this evening. Blessings.

Inoculation

Over the last year I’ve noticed something of a theme emerging on this blog. The theme is what people, especially Christians, and most of all well-educated Christians, feel permitted or pressured to believe (or not). I think a good deal of my experience of this phenomenon is a function of having lived for eight years outside of Texas or even the Bible belt—three years in Atlanta (technically the South but not exactly a small rural town in Louisiana) then five years in New Haven, Connecticut. At least weekly and sometimes daily a friend, a colleague, a pastor, or a student will remark in my presence about some topic, and invariably the remark reveals that s/he understands it to be outdated, unenlightened, or outlandish. As I wrote yesterday, usually the topic is one I care about and, indeed, the belief presumed to call for nothing so much as an eye-roll is one I myself hold.

I wrote last year about the existence of angels as a case study. At the very moment that certain aspirationally progressive (in west Texas “progressive” means “moderate-to-slightly-left-of-center on certain issues”) seminarians and pastors unburden themselves of belief in superstitious follies like angels—having belatedly received the decades-old message from third-rate demythologizers that celestial beings belong to a mythological age—at this moment, as I say, angels and demons are sexy again in academic scholarship. I could walk through the hallways of the most liberal seminaries in the country holding a sign that read “I believe in angels!” and from most professors it would elicit no more than a shrug. One more reminder that being intellectually in vogue is a moving target; best not to make the attempt in the first place.

But that’s not my point at present. I’ve already written about all that. Here’s my point.

I understand why people feel pressure to believe, or to cease to believe, in this or that old-fashioned thing. Likewise I understand why they assume that I—returning from a half-decade sojourn among the coastal elites, having pitched my tent in the Acela corridor, now with an Ivy doctorate in hand—not only share their up-to-date beliefs but will do them a solid by confirming them in their up-to-date-ness. I get it.

But the secret about having gotten my PhD at Yale isn’t that I learned the cutting edge and now live my life teetering on it. The opposite is the case. I didn’t journey to the Ivy League only to be disabused of all those silly beliefs I came in the door with—about God, Christ, Scripture, resurrection, and the rest. What I received was far better, if wholly unexpected.

What I received was inoculation.

What do I mean? I mean that I learned the invaluable intellectual lesson that knowledge, intelligence, and education are not a function of fads. I learned that substituting social trends for reasoned conviction is foolish. I learned that no one else can do your thinking for you. I learned that coordinating one’s own beliefs to the beliefs of an ever-changing and amorphous elite is a fool’s errand and a recipe for spiritual aimlessness. I learned that smart people are often wicked, and that sometimes even smart people are stupid—in the sense that raw intelligence is no match for wisdom, prudence, and practical reason.

Most of all, I learned that there are no “outdated” beliefs in Christian theology. As Hauerwas might put it, passé is not a theological category. Think of any doctrine or conviction that is particularly unhip today, or rarely spoken of, or even that you might be embarrassed to admit you believe in mixed company. At Yale, and in the circles of folks who criss-cross Ivy campuses and circuits and conferences, I met people who believed in every single one of those unfashionable doctrines, and they were the smartest, most well-read people I’ve ever met in my life. Certainly smarter and better read than I’ll ever be. To be clear, that fact alone doesn’t make them right: their frumpy beliefs may be erroneous. But the lesson isn’t that prestige or scholarly caliber validate theological ideas. The lesson, rather, is that the notion of some threshold of intelligence or erudition beyond which certain beliefs simply cannot across is a lie. Such a threshold does not exist.

In short, if what you want is for folks with an IQ above X or a PhD from Y to tell you what you’re allowed to believe while remaining a reasonable person, I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that you can be a reasonable person and believe just about anything. No one above your rank is going to set the terms for what you’re permitted to suppose to be true about God, the world, and everything else. The good news is just a reiteration of these same truths, only in a different register: No one gets to make you feel bad for believing what you do. That’s not a license to believe untrue or foolish or evil things. It’s a liberation from feeling like personal conviction is a matter of not being made fun of by the Great and the Good peering over your shoulder, looking down their noses at you. Truth is not a popularity contest. Right belief does not follow from peer pressure. Be free. Be inoculated, as I was. Ever since leaving I’ve found myself blessedly rid of that low gnawing anxiety that someone is going to find me out, and what they’re going to find is that I’m a deplorable—not because what I believe is actually risible or indefensible, but because for about fifteen seconds of cultural time something I’d be willing to stake my life on (as I have, however falteringly) has become intellectually unstylish.

Style is deceptive, and the approval of the world is fleeting; but the one who fears the Lord will be praised. Fear God, not unpopularity. Your life as a whole will be happier, for one, but more than anything your intellectual life will benefit. Seek the truth for its own sake, and the rest will take care of itself.

The uses of conservatism

In the Wall Street Journal a couple weeks back Barton Swaim wrote a thoughtful review of two new books on political conservatism, one by Yoram Hazony and one by Matthew Continetti. The first is an argument for recovering what conservatism ought to be; the second, a history of what American conservatism has in fact been across the last century.

Swaim is appreciative of Hazony’s manifesto but is far more sympathetic to Continetti’s more pragmatic approach. Here are the two money paragraphs:

The essential thing to understand about American conservatism is that it is a minority persuasion, and always has been. Hence the term “the conservative movement”; nobody talks of a “liberal movement” in American politics, for the excellent reason that liberals dominated the universities, the media and the entertainment industry long before Bill Buckley thought to start a magazine. Mr. Continetti captures beautifully the ad hoc, rearguard nature of American conservatism. Not until the end of the book does he make explicit what becomes clearer as the narrative moves forward: “Over the course of the past century, conservatism has risen up to defend the essential moderation of the American political system against liberal excess. Conservatism has been there to save liberalism from weakness, woolly-headedness, and radicalism.”

American conservatism exists, if I could put it in my own words, to clean up the messes created by the country’s dominant class of liberal elites. The Reagan Revolution wasn’t a proper “revolution” at all but a series of conservative repairs, chief among them reforming a crippling tax code and revivifying the American economy. The great triumph of neoconservatism in the 1970s and ’80s was not the formulation of some original philosophy but the demonstration that liberal policies had ruined our cities. Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968 and again in 1972 not by vowing to remake the world but by vowing to clean up the havoc created by Lyndon Johnson when he tried to remake Southeast Asia. George W. Bush would draw on a form of liberal idealism when he incorporated the democracy agenda into an otherwise defensible foreign policy—a rare instance of conservatives experimenting with big ideas, and look where it got them.

The three sentences in bold are, I think, the heart of Swaim’s point. Here’s my comment on his claim there.

At the descriptive level, I don’t doubt that it’s correct, if incomplete. At the normative level, however, it seems to me to prove, rather than confound, Hazony’s argument. For Hazony represents the conservative post-liberal critique of American conservatism, and that critique is this: American conservatism is a losing bet. It has no positive governing philosophy. It knows only what it stands against. Which is to say, the only word in its political vocabulary is “STOP!” (Along with, to be sure, Trilling’s “irritable mental gestures.”) Yet the truth is that it never stops anything. It merely delays the inevitable. In which case, American conservatism is good for nothing. For if progressives have a vision for what makes society good and that vision is irresistible, then it doesn’t matter whether that vision becomes reality today versus tomorrow. If all the conservative movement can do is make “tomorrow” more likely than “today,” might as well quit all the organizing and activism. Minor deferral isn’t much to write home about if you’re always going to lose eventually.

Besides, in the name of what exactly should such delay tactics be deployed? Surely there must be a positive vision grounding and informing such energetic protest? And if so, shouldn’t that be the philosophy—positive, not only negative; constructive, not only critical; explicit, not only implicit—the conservative movement rallies around, articulates, celebrates, and commends to the electorate?

Swaim is a prolific and insightful writer on these issues; not only does he have an answer to these questions, I’m sure he’s on the record somewhere. Nevertheless in this review there’s an odd mismatch between critique (of Hazony) and affirmation (of Continetti). If all the American conservative movement has got to offer is the pragmatism of the latter, then the philosophical reshuffling of the former is warranted—at least as a promissory note, in service of an ongoing intellectual project. That project is an imperfect and an unfinished one, but it’s far more interesting than the alternative. Whether we’re talking politics or ideas, we should always prefer the living to the walking dead.

“As we all know”

I have a friend who once told me of a professor he had in seminary. She instructed the class at the outset of the semester that, when they wrote their papers, she wanted them to imagine her peering over their shoulder. At every sentence featuring a claim, an assertion, or an assumption, they should imagine her asking them, “How do you know that?”

This bit of imaginative pedagogy might be a recipe for paper-writing anxiety, but it’s a good bit of writing advice. It’s a strong but necessary dose of epistemic humility. So little of what we take for granted is actually something we know, or at least can claim to know with some confidence, much less provide cogent reasons for knowing it. That’s not a problem in daily life most of the time. It’s rightly a matter for conscious attention in the academy, though.

I think of this anecdote regularly, for the following reason. In my experience, people consistently take for granted that they know in advance what I believe, including about the most important or controverted of matters. I don’t mean, say, that non-Christians assume I believe in God. That would be a reasonable assumption to make, given who I am and what I do. I mean fellow Christians who, because of my education or my profession or my reading habits or some other set of factors, project onto me beliefs regarding topics about which they have never heard me speak and about which I have never written.

It’s become a recurring phenomenon. Before commenting on a subject, a friend or acquaintance or colleague or person I’ve just met will either say aloud or imply, “As we all know…” or “As I’m sure you, like me, believe…” or “As any reasonable person would suppose…” or “Obviously…” or “We, unlike they, think…” or some similar formulation. I’ve come to learn that the phrase, spoken or unspoken, is a social cue. The other person is marking off the fearsome or foolish They from the wise or educated Us. Whatever the issue—usually moral, political, or theological—there is one self-evident Right Answer for People Like Us; but People Unlike Us (the dummies, the fundies, the voters or church folk who can’t be trusted) think otherwise, for some inexplicable reason. Typically the implication is that They are bad people; or, even more condescendingly, They would surely agree with Us if only They had (Our) education. Bless Their hearts, if only They knew better!

What’s remarkable is that, nine times out of town, the belief my interlocutor is attributing to Them is in fact my own. If I were inclined to take offense, I could do so with justice. I’m not so inclined, however, for the simple reason that I’m secure in my own convictions. I don’t need to roll my eyes at those I disagree with in order to feel confident in what I believe to be true. Nor do I need to whisper about Them in mock-conspiratorial or patronizing tones. After all, one thing all my education has done for me is show me how far from obvious any answer to any question is, certainly those questions that animate and roil our common life. People who think I’m wrong aren’t stupid; nor are they ignorant. They’ve merely come to a different judgment about a complex question than the one I have. Logically, I think they’re wrong just as they think I’m wrong; one of us is right (unless both of us are wrong and someone else is right), and this calls for humility, because it’s difficult to say in the moment, from the midst of one’s all-too-parochial life, whether one’s reasons for one’s beliefs are strong, weak, or just post hoc justifications for what one wishes were true or was raised to believe.

In any case, what most fascinates me here is the social phenomenon of presumptive projection onto others of what they must believe, given their intelligence, education, career, or what have you. I’m struck by the sheer lack of curiosity on display. People rarely ask me, directly, what I think about X or Y. Not that they don’t want to talk about it (whatever it is). Usually, though, they dance around the issue; or they assume they know what I think, and take the trouble to inform me of it. I sometimes wonder what would happen if I began, however so gently, to commit the faux pas of pausing the conversation in order to clarify, in no uncertain terms, that the Bad Belief my interlocutor has so passionately forced onto a Benighted They is actually my own. I almost always avoid doing so, since it would likely embarrass the other person, make him feel defensive, ruin the chat we were having , etc. On the other hand, it might actually make for a deeper and richer encounter, not least because here, in the flesh, would be a member of Team Stupid—ask me anything! A real education might ensue, in which it would become evident (using the same word in a different vein) that the world isn’t divided into stupid and smart groups, the latter tolerating the former with magnanimous mercy. This might also encourage avoiding such presumption in the future, and seeking to learn and to understand what other people believe and why.

Then again, maybe not. Regardless, the experience is a lesson in itself. Don’t assume you know what others think, and don’t carve up your neighbors into Good and Evil. Allow yourself to be surprised. People you love and respect have different beliefs than you. Formal education is not a one-way ticket to enlightenment, where “enlightenment” means “believe the same things as you.” Be curious. Ask away. You might learn a thing or two. You might even find one day that your mind has been changed. Imagine that.

Webinar: God’s Living Word

Earlier this week I was honored to participate in a live webinar hosted by the Siburt Institute for Church Ministry, which is a part of the College of Biblical Studies here at ACU. The webinar was in a series called Intersection; the topic was Scripture, using my book published last year as a point of departure. The conversation was hosted by Carson Reed and Randy Harris and lasted about an hour. It was a pleasure to participate. I’ve embedded the video below, but you can also find it here and here. Enjoy.