Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 543

Is Crime Spiking?

There have been two major developments in criminal justice policy over the last year. First, bipartisan support for some kind of criminal justice reform peaked, with a coalition of civil-rights-conscious liberals, conservative evangelicals, and budget-conscious libertarians coming together to support an overhaul of the nation’s incarceration policies. Second, several American cities experienced a highly publicized uptick in crime. The latter development made the emerging criminal justice reform consensus look more tenuous, as conservative commentators (like Heather MacDonald) and politicians (like Ted Cruz) started to rehabilitate the language of tough-on-crime politics, citing possible evidence of an emerging crime wave. Criminal justice reformers, sensing accurately that a real and sustained increase in the crime rate could imperil efforts to reduce incarceration rates, have aggressively questioned such claims.

The Brennan Center, a liberal-leaning law and public policy think tank, has now waded into this politically fraught debate with a new report on crime rates in major U.S. cities over the past year. The conclusion: “Although headlines suggesting a coming crime wave make good copy, a look at the available data shows there is no evidence to support that claim.” Many outlets sympathetic to criminal justice reform, from the Atlantic  to  Slate to  Mother Jones , are treating the Brennan Center’s findings as the final word on this question.A careful reading of the Brennan statistics on crime in the 30 largest U.S. cities, however, suggests that neither side should be claiming vindication just yet. The researchers found that the overall murder rate in 2015 is likely to tick up 11 percent from 2014. This is not necessarily significant—the report highlights that it is typical for the murder rate to vary from year to year—but it is still noteworthy, seeing as the overall murder rate in these cities has declined for 19 of the last 25 years. In fact, based on the Brennan Center’s graph, 11 percent seems to be among the steepest, if not the steepest, single-year increase in the murder rate in these cities since 1990. Moreover, because the rate remained roughly constant in 2014, a crime increase in 2015 would represent the first time since 1990 that the country went two consecutive years without a reduction in the murder rate in its 30 largest cities.If the United States were at the beginning of a new crime, we wouldn’t expect to see murder rates triple to 1990s levels in a single year. Rather, we would expect to see persistent annual increases, as was the case in the 1970s. So it seems unfair to suggest that conservative “crime wave” rhetoric is all smoke and mirrors cooked up for political reasons.At the same time, the Brennan Center researchers found that overall crime is expected to fall 1.5 percent in 2015. Moreover, the murder rate increase is concentrated in certain cities—especially Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Baltimore. At least 11 of the 30 cities surveyed have seen their murder rates fall. So claims that America is certainly in the midst of a nationwide crime wave and ought to put all criminal justice reform efforts on hold to prevent a repeat of the 1970s are similarly unfounded.As with most social science data on politically charged issues, the best takeaway from the Brennan report is: it’s complicated. The much-reported crime uptick may turn out to be mostly a localized phenomenon, and the 11 percent murder rate increase in 2015 could be reversed next year. Or it could be a sign of something more troubling. The only thing that seems clear is that partisans on both sides are drawing premature conclusions from the data that is available so far.

The Grey Lady Wrings Her Hands over Public Pensions

The NYT editorial board has come as close as it can to the devastating realization that blue model governance is breaking down. In a recent editorial, the Grey Lady notes that hedge funds chosen by public managers often underperform relative to expectations. As the industry has grown, the hedge funds continue to charge extremely high fees, but their returns increasingly don’t justify what they charge, and the mangers who have listened to the siren songs of slick hedge funds haven’t done well:

A recent report in The Times by Gretchen Morgenson cited the latest research on pensions and hedge funds. One study, by researchers for the American Federation of Teachers, looked at hedge fund holdings in 11 large public pensions between 2002 and 2015, and found that hedge funds lagged overall plan performance in most years, costing the pensions an estimated $8 billion in lost investment revenue. The hedge funds, meanwhile, collected some $7.1 billion in fees, which averages out to 57 cents for every dollar the pensions kept on their hedge fund investments. In effect, the pensions were looted.

One obvious question is why pension managers keep investing in hedge funds. A common explanation is that pension trustees are naïve and desperate and easily outfoxed by Wall Street salespeople. There are also signs, however, of willful blindness.

The editorial contains the inevitable slash at the greed and deceptiveness of Wall Street, but that part feels tired and pro forma. Even the NYT can’t fail to observe that this dynamic involves failures of governance on the part of the trustees of public pension funds. Either the trustees are stupid and credulous, or they are “willfully blind”—they choose to ignore the risks and odds because they need to throw Hail Marys to get the kind of returns they need to meet their unrealistically aggressive growth targets.

This is another way of saying that public sector unions—and state and municipal governments—have made promises to workers about their pensions without setting aside enough money to fulfill those promises when they came due. As a result, pension managers are forced into the casinos to make risky bets. But because they tend to be among the stupidest players in the financial market, they all too often end up getting hosed.This is a diagnosis that readers have read in these pages, and it is good to see that Times editorial board agrees. What we wish the board would do is to press that analysis a little bit further to the wider conclusions. Why would cities and states have made such unsustainable promises for so long to so many workers? And why haven’t the unions been crying bloody murder about the systematic underfunding of their members’ pension programs?These questions drive you to confront the deep political and moral failures at the heart of the blue governance model. The leadership of public service unions needs to show its members that it gets results, but cities and states increasingly do not have the money to pay the big salary increases that the unions want, at least not without raising taxes to ruinous (and, for politicians, ruinously unpopular) levels on the one hand or without cutting services and programs to the bone on the other. But the unions still want something to show to the members. What’s the answer?Over and over again, the answer is large but unfunded pension promises. Union leaders can posture to their members about all the lovely bacon they are bringing home, and politicians can posture to the taxpayers about how fiscally prudent they have been. The game depends on the unions shutting up about the underfunding of the pensions. If the politicians had to fund the pensions at the real level of these promises, they couldn’t make the promises.And so it goes. The Ponzi scheme at the heart of state and local governance, requiring deliberate deceit of both voters and public employees, continues.The Gray Lady, to her credit, realizes that something terrible has happened, and she is doing what she does best: sounding the alarm. But she is still doing her utmost to pretend that there is no real cause for this terrible, multi-trillion dollar hole in the pension system. She sees no systemic flaw in the way that the modern progressive city and state are both designed, no structural defect that produces these terrible consequences in cities as different as Houston, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and in states ranging from tiny Rhode Island to giant California, New York, and Illinois.The ship is sinking, but the Times is only prepared to deplore bad behavior without drawing any wider conclusions. And there is something else that the Times hasn’t fully taken on board: the consequences of the pension meltdown for the balance of power in American politics. For the next few decades, cities like Chicago and states like Illinois will be coming, à la Puerto Rico, cap in hand to Washington, asking for national taxpayers to fill the gap that their own bad choices and poor planning created. Much of blue America (including many blue cities in red states) is going to be asking red America for bailouts. That is likely to lead to a shift in political power and political initiative.Scott Walker’s presidential bid was a flop. But the kind of wrenching political changes that he brought to Wisconsin are likely to be happening in more and more places. As the fiscal consequences of the collusive union politics in blue cities and states become harder to ignore, the demand for deep reform is going to grow. These painful but, so far as one can see, inescapable realities that the editorial page of the Times is not ready to acknowledge today will drive the news in the rest of the paper tomorrow. The blue social model is running out of safe space.

Saudi Statement Sets off Oil Price Spike

It’s been an up and down day for oil markets, with Brent crude trading up more than 1 percent today after spiking, crashing, and then edging up once again. What has traders so busy, then? As the Wall Street Journal reports, the Saudis are behind the volatility after the country’s cabinet said it would be willing to cooperate with non-OPEC producers to, well, stabilize prices (how’s that for irony?):

Saudi Arabia’s official press agency Monday quoted the cabinet in a statement as saying it was ready to cooperate with countries within and outside the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to maintain the stability of the market.

Some investors interpreted this as a sign that Saudi Arabia, the most influential member of OPEC, could push the oil cartel to curb its output and increase prices at its coming meeting Dec. 4. OPEC has produced above its target of 30 million barrels a day for months.

This isn’t a new position for Riyadh, however. As one analyst told Bloomberg, “[the Saudis] have always said they would cooperate if non-OPEC joins.” And that makes obvious sense: Saudi Arabia would be more than happy to consolidate control of the global market by colluding with non-OPEC producers to keep prices high. The problem is, unlike OPEC’s members, those producers include private companies unwilling to artificially set prices by cutting production.

From the start of this latest price plunge, the Saudi strategy has centered on valuing a share of an increasingly crowded global oil market more than sustained higher prices. But while prices ticked upwards today perhaps on the belief that the Saudis are mulling a production cut, doing so “would surrender all their efforts, or any success they had achieved so far in the last 12 months and any pain would have been for nothing”, Commerzbank strategist Carsten Fritsch told Reuters.We’re seeing little sign of the global supply waning enough to offset the current glut, and similarly little enough movement on the demand side to soak up this copious crude. For now, low prices seem here to stay, despite today’s volatility.

A New Stage for Argentina?

Capping off a surprisingly strong performance in first-round voting, center-right opposition candidate Mauricio Macri won Argentina’s presidential election last night. Macri’s victory is good news—but his problems are just beginning and the country isn’t out of the woods. Bloomberg reports on the election:

The candidate of the ruling party, Daniel Scioli, conceded defeat and called Macri to congratulate him. With more than 98 percent of the ballots counted, Macri had 51.5 percent, while Scioli followed with 48.5 percent, according to the National Electoral Council.

At Macri’s headquarters late on Sunday, cumbia music boomed, balloons were released and supporters danced and cheered for “Macri Presidente.” Ernesto Sanz, a lawmaker and ally, said, “Argentina won’t be the same starting tonight.”

“A wonderful new stage begins for Argentina,” Macri told his supporters in his victory speech.

The 56-year-old mayor of Buenos Aires is a wealthy businessman and former head of one of the country’s most popular soccer teams. He has promised to lift currency controls and negotiate with hedge fund creditors to boost investor confidence amid the lowest reserves in nine years. He will also focus on cutting inflation, fixing the largest fiscal deficit in 30 years and luring back international investment dollars.

For much of the past seventy years, Argentina has been cursed by its seventy-year fixation with a deeply corrupt, anti-liberal Peronist movement. Since 2001, the country has been ruled by the Peronist Kirchner dynasty—first husband and then wife. Macri’s win, which represents a shift away from the ineffective populism that afflicts many Latin American states, is a promising development.

But there will be a lot of resistance to any reforms that Macri hopes to pursue. The deep state and the inner structure of many of the country’s most powerful institutions — labor unions (both public and private sector), state-owned enterprises, the bureaucracies, political parties, and so on — remain staunchly Peronist. These organizations depend on the corrupt, clientalist politics and influence peddling that constitute the backbone of Peronist politics, and they will surely fight a war of attrition against Macri. Peronist ideas—reflexive anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism, for example—are deeply embedded in Argentine psychology and culture. That’s going to make it hard for Macri to succeed; he will be fighting his own state much of the time. That the majority of both houses in the country’s Congress remain Peronist only makes Macri’s agenda even more difficult to pursue (at least until the next elections in 2017).And as if that balance of power challenge isn’t enough, the economic mess that propelled Macri’s victory will also—eventually—become his responsibility. Low commodity prices mean Argentina’s oil and agricultural exports can’t bring in enough money to drive a recovery on their own. Macri will surely try to resolve disputes with creditors and introduce more transparent rules that encourage foreign investment, but, as in Greece, much of the country will fight the measures that creditors impose. The trick will be to develop a reform agenda that works, but that isn’t so threatening to vested interests that it drives the Peronist Congressional majority into a united opposition. Macri will have to build bridges to moderates and reformers (and there are some) in Peronist ranks.However great the challenge, success would be enormously consequential. If he can make reforms work and if ordinary Argentines see their living standards rise under his leadership, Macri has a chance to open a new chapter in Argentine history. At long last, the country could begin to put the disasters and the horrors of a lost century behind it. But it won’t be easy. His electoral majority, though real, was slender. The world economy is looking a little shaky. His enemies will continue the fight against him.The United States government should care about his success. A turn for the better in Argentina would send a powerful signal across Latin America, where one Leftist regime after another is sinking into the mire of failed populism. Helping Macri succeed is a way to help the western hemisphere become a wealthier and happier place. That’s important in a world as shaky and dangerous as the one we live in today.

German Jewish Leader Calls for Migrant Limits

The head of the German Jewish community has called for a quota cap to be placed on the country’s refugee intake. The Financial Times reports:

“Sooner or later we will not be able to avoid [setting] upper limits,” Dr Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, told Welt newspaper.

“Many refugees are fleeing the terror of the Islamic State and want to live in peace and freedom, but at the same time they come from cultures in which hate towards Jews and intolerance are fixed components. Don’t only think about the Jews, think about equal rights for women and the treatment of homosexuals.”If the inflows continued at the current rates it would become “increasingly difficult” to integrate migrants and “pass on our values”.

Last year, anti-Semitic attacks rose by 25 percent in Germany, though many came from the German far right. As elsewhere in Europe, the German far left has also become more notably anti-Semitic in recent years. And as the FT notes, this comment comes amid calls from within Chancellor Merkel’s own party for caps.

Dr. Schuster’s comments also mark something of a split within the international Jewish community on the question. In the U.S., as Nicholas M. Gallagher noted this weekend, the President of the Anti-Defamation League has lobbied for increased American acceptance of Syrian refugees. But in Germany—where the refugees are higher in number and more concentrated, and tensions are already more fraught—Jewish leaders seem to be thinking different thoughts.

Ten Things That Won’t Be on the Agenda in Tehran

Russian President Vladimir Putin is in Tehran today for a one-day gathering of gas-exporting nations, where he was set to meet with both Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani. Plans for Syria and the future of Bashar al-Assad are likely atop the agenda, but the larger backdrop for the trip will be deepening economic ties between Russia and Iran. In honor of the increased cooperation between the two nations, we’ve drawn up a list of ten subjects they won’t be discussing:

1. Rueful acknowledgement of President Obama’s foreign policy genius.2. Chagrin that President Obama has taken the lead on the climate change talks, relegating both Russia and Iran to a runner-up role in this vital international conversation.3. Sorrowful contemplation of their own helplessness: “We’re just a couple of 19th-century potentates in a world of 21st-century moral heroes.”4. Careful enumeration of all of President Obama’s red lines in the region, with earnest promises to each other not to infringe on any of them, given the certainty of swift retaliation if they do.5. Envious speculation about how President Obama is able to dominate global affairs simply by his earnest pursuit of the moral high ground.6. Putin lamenting to the Supreme Leader that the swift and certain American response to his invasion of Ukraine has “destroyed Russia’s credibility” and marginalized it in Europe.7. The Supreme Leader complaining to Putin that America’s deft alliance politics has left Iran flatfooted in the Middle East, with nowhere to turn.8. Earnest mutual congratulations that, since the U.S. Constitution forbids President Obama a third term, they will soon face a much weakened and less formidable United States.9. Mournful calculations of just what concessions it will take to escape the unbearable pressure that the United States is imposing on both countries.10. Discouraged listing of the enormous accomplishments of American statecraft in the last seven years: President Obama’s successes in bridging the gap between the U.S. and Islam, in making such irresistible progress on nuclear disarmament that global denuclearization is just a matter of time, in closing Guantanamo (thereby making the U.S. the moral envy of the world), in forcing both Russia and Iran to drop their hostility to the U.S. by courageously pursuing resets and negotiations until they have no choice but to give up, in elevating Turkish President Erdogan to the leadership of the rising forces of Islamic democracy, in establishing democratic stability in Libya, in pursuing a brilliant series of Afghanistan strategies….the list goes on.Blind and obtuse as these backward leaders are, hopelessly trapped in the obsolete 19th century, they won’t be discussing these and other triumphs of American strategy and statesmanship under President Obama.

Holy Nation: America, Born Again

To outsiders, at least, the evangelical transformation of America has been one of the most startling and significant of all modern social changes. Millions of Baby Boomers were “born again” during what may fairly be called the “third Great Awakening”, a spiritual revival that extended from the 1960s until the 1980s and that appealed to presidential candidates, Bay Area “Jesus freaks”, and just about every kind of person in between. This mass religious movement was driven by a hunger for community and for moral certainty in a world that suddenly seemed to lack both; the Cold War crises of mid-century fueled fears of global apocalypse, while the collapsing social consensus of the 1950s and 1960s mirrored changing attitudes to privacy, race, family, and reproductive rights. At the same time, the political scandals of the 1970s raised questions about the integrity of trusted institutions.

Evangelicals responded to this multifaceted cultural change with a heady cocktail of condemnation and self-confidence. Drawing on the lessons of Scripture and American history, they sought to understand the significance of what seemed to them the self-evident crisis of contemporary American civilization. Their most prominent preachers and best-selling prophecy writers convinced believers that the sudden social changes could be explained. Audiences of hundreds of thousands attended sermons in sports stadia, while tens of millions of readers consumed popular prophecy books like The Late Great Planet Earth (1970). As their minority print culture expanded into a burgeoning and occasionally scandalous media empire, evangelicals honed the interpretive tools to offer moral and political certainty to millions of Americans.The new evangelical movement transformed the lives of its adherents and shaped the social and political condition of the nation, helping to fuel the electoral successes of almost every U.S. president from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush. It provided an almost universal language of political aspiration and national exception at the same time as it drove the bifurcation of American ideals and values between believers and, presumably, everyone else. It provided the cadences of hope in the speechmaking of Presidents Clinton and Obama, while offering their critics a powerful and often implicit vocabulary of protest. But the character of evangelicalism changed as its influence extended, and as a newer focus on sentiment overtook the older emphasis on dogma. The movement’s impact can be measured in the paradox that its success was made possible by its failure: Evangelicalism divided and weakened as America itself was born again.Some recently published books chart the re-sacralization of American culture and the difficulties it has presented to the movement that made it possible. Taking a cue from a growing body of scholarship on the history and culture of American religion, these accounts offer rich explanations for the transformations both of popular Protestantism and of American culture. Molly Worthen’s Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (2013) develops a complex but compelling intellectual history of evangelicalism over the course of the past century. The narrative outline is familiar, but Worthen offers new subtleties and greater depth to the accounts offered by D.G. Hart’s From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism (2011) and Steven P. Miller’s The Age of Evangelicalism: America’s Born-Again Years (2014). Worthen illustrates the growing tension between the movement’s political Right and Left, and illuminates the populism that first fueled and then resisted the leadership of charismatic individuals.One minor character in Worthen’s history is the subject of Michael J. McVicar’s Christian Reconstruction: R. J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism (2015). Rushdoony (1916-2001), the son of immigrants fleeing the Armenian massacres of the World War I era, was an ordained Presbyterian minister who sought to fashion a world-affirming program of social, cultural, and political renewal. But his views morphed into extreme Cold War anti-communism through a series of strategic alliances with ultra-conservative groups. Rushdoony reprogrammed traditional Calvinism even as he contributed to new trends in American conservatism. His lectures and publications encouraged the development of anti-statist ideology, most obviously reflected in the exponential growth of homeschooling, and facilitated a new political confidence among believers.Rushdoony’s small but noisy group of “Christian Reconstructionists” generated fears that large sections of the political Right were being hijacked by highly intolerant theocrats. The fears were outsized, but Rushdoony’s movement has always punched above its weight. Its growth and diversification is illuminated in Julie J. Ingersoll’s enthography and intellectual history, Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction (2015). Explaining her experience within the movement and her gradual disillusionment with its strongly patriarchal and patriotic mores, Ingersoll moves beyond the legacy of Rushdoony to consider the movement’s recent ideologues and institutions. She worries about their impact upon Tea Party conservatives and warns of the potential for violence perpetrated by radicalized evangelicals (for which, it must be said, there is very little evidence).Not all of the recent work on American religious history has been driven by alarm or a penchant for studying the relatively obscure. Within this expanding scholarship, three recently published books may rise to dominate the field.The first of these, Matthew Stewart’s Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic (2014), sets out, among other aims, to critique that large body of popular historical writing that represents the Founders as being driven by Christian purpose, and to explain why “a reputedly godly country came to be founded by so many ungodly leaders.” The first Tea Party, Stewart contends, represented not the ideals and aspirations of an emerging Christian republic, but those of a small but significant group of “heretics”—deists, freethinkers, and atheists whose reading of political ideas and possibilities was made possible by their rejection of supernatural religion.Nature’s God offers a new and lively account of the religious transformation of early America. Like some other recent writing on the subject, Stewart’s work emerges from a specific biographical context—in his case, the chance rediscovery of Ethan Allen’s Oracles of Reason (1784) as well as a new awareness of the importance of the “forgotten founding father” Thomas Young. Stewart awoke “from a dogmatic slumber”, he explains, to realize that “much of what I thought I knew about the people and the ideas that guided the American Revolution wasn’t quite right.” He distilled what “wasn’t quite right” into a quest: to explain the relationship between revolutionary politics and Enlightenment philosophy.Of course, the American Revolution was a watershed moment in American intellectual history. In the early 17th century, many of the New World colonies were founded to provide freedom for religion. By the middle of the 18th century, in Stewart’s account at least, leading citizens in these colonies wished to secure freedom from religion. These enlightened thinkers continued to use the language of national exception, but their deployment of familiar tropes disguised a paradigm shift in political and religious intention. America was still to be a city on a hill, but its terms of reference had changed. Preachers and philosophers understood its significance in very different ways, and the perspectives of both seem to differ from those of modern historians. After all, Stewart explains, “When we look back to the New England of the historical imagination, we sometimes like to see a city upon a hill, where everyone prayed to the same God and all were united under the cope of the same heaven. When Jonathan Edwards looked around, he saw a people slouching toward Gomorrah.” For better or worse, in the minds of 18th-century religious leaders, America could not help but be exemplary (even if that era’s historians must allude to Old World writers to make the point).Stewart’s book is a long analysis of the literary culture of late 18th-century religious radicalism. Drawing on a broad range of evidence, he concludes that the reference to the “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” in the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence, so commonly cited as evidence of the orthodox piety of the Founders, instead invoked a rationalism that promoted both skepticism and intellectual freedom, and that amounted to “an emancipation of the political order from God.” America was to become a republic of religious communities, tolerating but never formally establishing the “servitude” that Stewart sees in adherence to revealed religion.Moreover, he argues that many of these religious communities were themselves supportive of this enlightened critique of traditional orthodoxy. The American captivity of the church allowed congregations to maintain traditional routines of spiritual “servitude” while their leaders dabbled in advanced thought. Men from a wide variety of backgrounds came together around radical ideas that remained unrepresentative of the country at large. They took part in an international conversation, sharing ideas and ideals with revolutionaries in France, until the changing articulation of liberty, equality, and fraternity made such connections impolitic. And, Stewart insists, evangelicalism was complicit in this religious change. Revivalism clarified the processes through which Christianity was democratized, as within the church “sovereignty over religion [passed] from the pulpit to the pews”, and as outside the church philosophers who advocated for “freedom of religion” ended up in essence achieving a “religion of freedom.” Evangelicals were a cause and consequence of religious modernity; “wandering infidels flourished alongside itinerant preachers”, Stewart writes, “because both were a species of infidelity.” And this, Stewart argues, is why “the Enlightenment, not the Reformation, was the axis on which human history turned.”As this intellectual energy suggests, Stewart’s argument is deeply personal, and represents a calculated intervention in debates about the public expression of private religious faith. The “persistence in modern America of supernatural religion and the reactionary nationalism with which it is so regularly accompanied” demonstrates that the American revolution still has “unfinished business.” The solution he proposes is an almost Hobbesian establishment in which the state should more critically oversee the spiritual life of its people.Stewart argues that the Enlightenment separation of church and state does not require that government should be neutral with respect to the religious life of its people. Instead, “this separation at least implicitly involves the creation of a certain kind of public religion. This new, public religion is indeed tolerant of every religious belief—but only insofar as that belief is understood to be intrinsically private.” That is because, he avers, the religion that his subjects had “hoped to bring to America…was that which measures piety in terms of doing good rather than believing rightly; that which imposes a duty on oneself, as opposed to one’s neighbors; and that which builds the bonds of community even while robbing the priesthood of its corrupting influence.” This was, in short, the religion of “popular deism.” And, Stewart argues, “it is only to the degree that religion is not what it once was…that we can and ought to tolerate it, and may hope to find in it some limited utility for modern society.” Happily, he concludes, “America’s mainstream religion is at bottom one form or another of popular deism”—an argument with which some conservative evangelicals are beginning ruefully to agree.If Nature’s God considers the religious politics of the First Great Awakening, other books consider those of the Third. Matthew Avery Sutton’s American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (2014) is a comprehensive, lucid, and detailed account of the political commitments of born-again Americans through the course of the 20th century. Sutton views his subject through the lens of biblical prophecy, demonstrating the wide range of uses to which believers put their millennial beliefs. His narrative begins in the run-up to World War I, as American evangelicals were coming to terms with the fact that they could no longer make confident assumptions about broader cultural values. Evolving into a series of special interest groups, these believers developed their understanding of biblical prophecy to establish paradigms by which they could explain rapid changes in church and state. Evangelicals in the early 20th century fashioned themselves as the embattled legatees of the American Christian tradition, abandoning anti-Catholicism and Democratic Party politics as they moved toward ecumenism and Republican Party ideals.Sutton’s work confirms the value of the history-of-ideas approach that has come to typify work on evangelicalism. His focus is on elite white males; the narrative regularly reaches out to engage with the African-American experience, but black evangelicals are presented as a rather static bloc. Across denominations and across decades, black evangelicals’ positions stayed largely unmoved, as they remained perplexed and angered by the racialist assumptions of white fundamentalist leaders. Still, Sutton does hint that black evangelicals were gradually developing a more radical reading of their situation. That this new approach was never formalized is perhaps best explained by the sudden social changes of mid-century, which led to the civil rights revolution and the formal end of Jim Crow. The mainstreaming of apocalyptic fear, and its ubiquity in the popular culture of the 1960s and 1970s, then fed into a narrative of impending global destruction that, when combined with slowly arriving civil rights for African Americans, pulled evangelicals across the races into a coalition of interests that found common purpose in the polls.One of the key weaknesses of the recent focus on “the evangelical mind” is that we have yet to see how these intellectual changes affected ordinary evangelicals. The history-of-ideas approach, that is, has its downsides as well as its benefits: It suffers generically from being cut off from less abstract social change—one does not have to be a Marxist to appreciate that ideas do not always, or regularly, circulate only in the ether. Future writing in this field will need to consider how the new strategies of evangelical leaders were received and resisted by their followers who, whether they realized it or not, were tasked with linking substructure to superstructure as they also tried to make a living. Someone, after all, had to iron out the ambiguities: Sutton’s argument describes an apocalypse that was constantly being invoked, but which was pushed ever further into the distance.Of course, no one has become more emblematic of the changes in American evangelicalism than its undisputable “star”: Billy Graham. Grant Wacker’s America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation (2014) is a valuable addition to the already-crowded market of Graham biographies. As the subtitle suggests, the intention of this book is two-fold: to chart Graham’s changing identities and to match those identities against those of the nation he called to faith. Wacker focuses on three key questions: Why does Graham matter? Why did the religious movement with which he was identified become so popular? And what do the answers to these questions tell us about the relationship between religion and mainstream American culture?Like Stewart, Wacker is honest about the presuppositions that shape his work, describing himself as a “partisan of the same evangelical tradition Graham represented, especially the irenic inclusive, pragmatic form of it that he came to symbolize in the later years of his public ministry.” But this is no uncritical eulogy. Wacker is alert to Graham’s political flip-flopping, his careful crafting of public image, his bold tactics and uncertain strategies in relation to racial justice, and his public support for and (as White House wiretaps recently revealed) private criticism of American Jewish elites.Graham’s career was one of constant change. His own position changed from a zealous fundamentalism to a more irenic pragmatism. Concurrently, he helped to reposition the evangelical movement, establishing its premier journal, Christianity Today, and lending his support to a range of institutions, as well as to individuals whose ministries pushed popular Protestantism ever further from the reactionary positions with which its century had begun. Within his religious community, Graham liked to lead from the front on some issues, including his surprisingly early reconsideration of whether he might be able to work with Catholics, Jews, and Mormons. Nationally, he seemed to lag behind on numerous key issues, not least on finding himself out of step with the public in continuing to support President Nixon (even as Nixon’s aides were secretly recording conversations that Graham would later find embarrassing).Graham was chastened in his political maneuvering, despite his surprisingly close relationship with the famously ungodly Lyndon B. Johnson (they skinny dipped together in the White House pool), but his influence was always extending. He courted power in the 1950s, and was courted by power in the following decades. Graham participated in eight presidential inaugurations and spoke at most presidential prayer breakfasts. No other person in any other field, as Time journalist Nancy Gibbs once noted, “enjoyed such access to the pinnacle of American power.” But America’s pastor changed with the nation he served. As his influence grew, as his “star” quality was created, Billy Graham led evangelicals in their conquest of America even as he helped to redefine what being evangelical really meant.These recent accounts suggest how—not for the first time—America has been born again. The aspiration for religious freedom that drove the hope for a “city on a hill” was undermined by Enlightenment secular values. But the aspiration for freedom from religion that drove the revolution similarly failed to be sustained. The sequence of religious revivals that extended throughout the 18th and 19th centuries crafted a powerful new justification for American exceptionalism. By the beginning of the 20th century, popular Protestantism provided Americans with the basic tropes of their dominant public and political culture and the staple motifs of civic faith. And as the century unfolded, the political and cultural power of evangelical religion steadily increased.But many evangelicals preferred not to recognize this (and many historians of their movement took that refusal at face value). Time and time again throughout the 20th century, prominent preachers rewrote the history of the movement to emphasize failure and marginality. Their apocalyptic theory could not explain their growing power, and so they chose to deny the existence of that power. The “Third Great Awakening” proved inimical to the theories of those believers who expected to experience powerlessness and persecution, and whose identity as a godly remnant depended upon the realization of these fears.Taken together, Stewart, Sutton, and Wacker offer important new perspectives on the means by which America was born again. America has become a holy nation, but those who are most responsible for it so often refuse to recognize it. But these books also suggest the extent to which evangelicalism itself has been born again. In the course of the past century, even as its cultural power steadily increased, the “old-time religion” has been revolutionized. Across the board, the doctrinal and political specifics that once shaped popular Protestantism have given way to what evangelical-turned-Catholic sociologist Christian Smith has described as a “moralistic therapeutic deism.” This religious style mimics the structure of evangelical theology while advancing only a few of its ethical demands.Investigating this trend, Todd M. Brenneman’s Homespun Gospel: The Triumph of Sentimentality in Contemporary American Evangelicalism (2014) analyses the rhetorical and media strategies of several best-selling evangelical ministers. Despite some differences, Brenneman argues, Max Lucado, Joel Osteen, Rick Warren, Joyce Meyer, and other celebrity preachers share a common exhortative style. Their pitch mixes ideas that are often atypical of the evangelical theological heritage in a mélange of unreason and sentiment. In their presentations, theology is reduced to clichés that reiterate the image of a “fatherly God desperately in love with his children…a God who is infatuated with human beings.”Recognizing the significance of his subjects within the broader evangelical media culture, Brenneman argues that too much recent scholarship has focused on the evangelical mind, “not recognizing that most evangelicals have abandoned the life of the mind in favor of a religious life of emotion.” This astute observation’s startling quality can be explained by the relative strength of the well-established history-of-ideas approach over relatively recent emphases on the history of the emotions, but also by the fact that so many of the historians who write about evangelicalism do so as a form of self-justifying autobiography (the present author not entirely excluded). And with the abandonment of the life of the mind came a theological shift; Brenneman argues that the most prominent heirs of Billy Graham have pushed his movement away from the theological claims he recognized.These new evangelical leaders have plenty of followers. Those who offer the most radical critique of evangelicalism’s “logocentric” norms are associated with the “emergent church” described by Gerardo Marti and Gladys Ganiel in their The Deconstructed Church: Understanding Emerging Christianity (2014). “Emergents” have turned away from the traditional institutions of church and state. They offer a radically individualized spirituality in which traditional emphases on ethics have been replaced by an affirmation of ritual aesthetics, and in which new forms of community are explored in a liturgical bricolage that supports a profound skepticism of the old certainties of evangelical religion. “Emergent” Christianity, which often disavows the evangelical label, resonates with the concerns of former fundamentalists and recruits strongly from their ranks, critiquing the top-down social trajectory of the religious right and the bottom-up agendas of the Reconstructionists to focus on issues of social justice, community, and creativity. It experiments with spirituality and liturgy even while borrowing styles from those parts of the evangelical movement it critiques.Of course, in posing as newly born, and in dismissing the longer history of the church, the “emergent church” follows in the well-trodden path of evangelical innovation, and brings together without any attempt at systemization a large number of the anti-formal ideas that are changing the movement it has abandoned. As such, it is relativist “emergents,” rather than absolutist theocrats, that may best represent the evangelical future. While critics may worry about the impact on the Tea Party of theocratic politics, the “emergent church” may yet turn out to be the more significant turn within recent American religious history.As the recent books discussed here suggest, the religious and political divisions that have so often beset born-again Protestants have become increasingly pronounced. In this era of “designer” religion, as believers become increasingly divided in their religious and political convictions, their moments of common purpose become ever more difficult to identify. Evangelical religion has won America at the price of its own evisceration. Contemporary evangelicals might have much more in common with those associated with “the heretical origins of the American republic” than they could ever have imagined. They tried to change the nation by re-inhabiting the zeitgeist, but the zeitgeist swallowed them in mid-transformation. For the evangelicals who made it all possible, the redemption of America has come at enormous cost.

Michael Walzer’s The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions (2015) struggles with the fact that secular revolutions—in India, Algeria, and Israel—were eventually overtaken to some significant degree by the religious traditions they were meant to supplant. If so, perhaps Stewart’s account qualifies late 18th-century America as another example of the same phenomenon: the philosophical secularists ultimately being undone by the traditional believers in supernatural cosmologies.

The City of the Whited Sepulchres

The city of the whited sepulchers is what Joseph Conrad called Brussels in his haunting novella, Heart of Darkness. The phrase comes from the New Testament: Jesus said that the hypocritical religious and community leaders of his time were like whited (whitewashed) tombs. The outside was bright and shiny, but the inside was full of rot and decay.

Conrad made that point about Belgium under the evil King Leopold II, who ran a genocidal empire in what is now the Congo. By participating in Leopold’s criminally exploitative and viciously murderous regime, Brussels’ commercial, political, and cultural elites, were the worst kind of hypocrites. But in a different sense, the phrase is equally true of Brussels today: it is a city that holds up a glittering facade of international institutions and high ideas to the outside world, while its insides fester with societal breakdown and with the murderous death cults that exploded into the world’s awareness in Paris last week.No city is more identified with out postmodern, post-historical ideals of cosmopolitan governance. NATO and the EU are both headquartered in Brussels. From here go the edicts to benighted countries and leaders in Europe and beyond. Here thousands of Eurocrats toil for the post-historical future, here the values and aspirations of the West are expressed in concrete institutions. This is, in many ways, the capital of Europe.It is also the capital of the post-historical world. Back in 1990, I visited the city and a friend took me to its beautiful Grande Place, the center of governance in the traditional city. On one side he called my attention to a lovely, high-end restaurant. That, he said, was a seedy workingman’s bar in the nineteenth century. It’s where Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx came together to work on the draft of the Communist Manifesto. And on the other side of the square, he pointed to a Godiva chocolate shop. That, he said, was here the SS Charlemagne Brigade recruited ‘Aryan’ Belgians to help Hitler win the war against the Soviet Union.This was post-history made concrete. No communism, no fascism, only luxury shopping. That is the world much of the West thought it was building; it isn’t the world we are living in now.The tourist mecca of the Grande Place, the institutions of the EU and NATO: they comprise the slick outside, the impressive exterior of the contemporary city; the inside seethes with hate and fanaticism, made more effective and virulent by chronic failures of governance. The decades-long uneasy standoff between Dutch-speaking Flemings and French speaking Walloons has made Belgium and, especially Brussels, a mess. Each community insists on being governed in its own way and Brussels, historically a French-speaking city in the midst of a Dutch-speaking countryside, has been a particularly thorny issue in Belgian politics. One compromise has been to divide power down to tiny districts and communities; as this NYT piece notes, 19 municipal zones are divided into six police ‘zones’ cover a city of one million people. The result is that many parts of the capital are hardly policed at all. Meanwhile, despite the famously high social aspirations and exalted rhetoric about integration and opportunity that one hears from Europeans lavishly praising their social model, somehow generation after generation of immigrants stagnates in a toxic atmosphere of exclusion, unemployment, and crime.Brussels’ failures are emblematic of Europe’s failings. The city that hopes to govern a post-national Europe has been made impotent by the petty jealousies and nasty rivalries of two ethnic groups barely large enough to qualify as tribes in much of the world. Brussels is in some ways a satire of the European project: committed to transnational goals, hobbled by unresolved ethnic spats. A city dedicated to universal secular human values is now threatened by fanatical death cults that have grown up in its miserable, insecure slums.The West as a whole these days is cursed by moral grandiosity and failing performance. Our self-esteem has seldom been more robust, or our performance more pitiable. We busy ourselves with what we think is the last unfinished work of implementing universal egalitarianism, by for example tending to high school students who identify with a gender other than that into which they were born, ensuring that they can use the restrooms toward which their aspirations lead them. We see ourselves as courageous warriors even as the foundations of our world are beginning to crack. We claim that tolerance and diversity are the touchstones of our civilization, and have raised a generation of weaklings who cannot bear to be exposed to unorthodox ideas or to the bustle and collisions that life in a diverse society inevitably brings. To cite another of Jesus’ condemnations of hypocrisy, we ‘tithe mint and dill and cumin, and neglect the weightier matters of the law.’ That is, we busy ourselves obsessively over small bore issues, and ignore the graver challenges that face us on every side.Brussels this week has been paralyzed by its failures. The metro isn’t running; the city is in a complete security lockdown, including the glittering Grande Place; schools will remain shut tomorrow. Its citizens, cowering at home, uneasily contemplate the enemy within that European policy failure and Belgian paralysis have allowed to grow. Brussels today is the West’s tomorrow; unless we change course we will find ourselves more and more living in a world in which reality mocks our aspirations and the whitewash on our institutions can no longer conceal the rot within.None of this is to single out the people of Brussels for exceptional censure. All of us should be standing with them in this time of fear; our thoughts and prayers are with the security forces working to keep the citizens safe. We have shared in their errors, and the dangers that threaten them threaten us as well.As Jesus preached, he came across a place that had the kind of moral grandiosity so prevalent in the Western world today: The flourishing village apparently thought of itself as having some kind of special destiny. Jesus wasn’t impressed: “And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell.” Brussels is getting a little taste of what that feels like this weekend; the rest of us should take heed.

Pigeons Prove Skilled at Detecting Cancer

Policymakers with an eye on reducing healthcare costs, take heed! Researchers at the University of Iowa may have uncovered a low-cost alternative to radiological oncologists. The Beeb reports:

Pigeons, with training, did just as well as humans in a study testing their ability to distinguish cancerous from healthy breast tissue samples.

The pigeons were able to generalise what they learned, correctly spotting tumours in unseen microscope images. […]After two weeks of training, the pigeons reached a level of 85% accuracy. Because they successfully identified cancerous tissue from images they had not seen before, the researchers ruled out rote-learning of the images as an explanation.“The birds were remarkably adept at discriminating between benign and malignant breast cancer slides,” said lead author Prof Richard Levenson, from the University of California, Davis.

The researchers used operant conditioning to teach the pigeons how to spot cancerous tissue, providing rewards for each correctly identified image. Both the experimental design and the choice to use pigeons harken back to the work of B.F. Skinner, who famously developed the method of positive and negative reinforcement in an attempt to show that human behavior is dictated by social conditioning rather than free will. Skinner also somewhat infamously tried to harness the ability that pigeons have for image recognition and sensory processing to help in the fight against Hitler. During the Second World War, he received $25,000 from the NRDC to study how successful pigeons may be as pilots for guided bombs. The plan was, alas, ultimately passed on in favor of newly developed electronic guidance systems.

Ultimately, the same logic holds here: if pigeons can do this, computers certainly can, too. We are not experts in the field, but it appears that machine learning techniques are making significant strides in this direction. We desperately need a way to cut health care costs, and an aggressive move to shift as much of the work as possible to smarter machines—or even pigeons who will probably work for chickenfeed—needs to be part of our national strategy.

White House Understands Land Use Problems

An important piece in the Wall Street Journal describes a growing body of research and literature supporting the perception that land use regulation is meaningfully making housing less affordable, which is in turn reducing job growth and reducing the ability of people to move to places where the job market is hot. White House economists and President Obama himself are worried about how this overregulation increases income inequality and decreases mobility. And they are right to be worried.

What the piece fails to mentioned is how these policies help skew wealth distribution. The housing ‘haves’—people who already own homes in areas that have tight regulations—are likely to see the price of their real estate grow faster than would happen without restrictions that prevent new housing from being built. Housing ‘have-nots’, however, will find it harder to get their feet on the first rung of the housing ladder: starter homes become so expensive that young people and people of modest means are completely shut out of the market.This is America, so race and class are a big part of the story. Tight regulations on land use are one of the favorite goals of the predominantly white upper middle class professionals who constitute an important base for the Democrats. For some, it’s about the environment. For some it’s about NIMBYism and protecting their real estate investments. For some its an ideological/cultural preference for ‘density’: the new urbanist goal to have everyone live in expensive, small apartments and take mass transit to work.The people shut out of the market, however, tend to be lower income families, including minorities. And the construction jobs that come when new housing units are being built are a mainstay of good jobs at decent pay for both skilled and unskilled non-college educated workers.President Obama, to his credit, has departed from Democratic orthodoxy on some issues during his time in the White House. He has, on the whole, sided with inner city kids against teacher unions more than many Democrats dared to do, and seems to understand the importance of school choice. He’s recently challenged students and left activists to embrace the cause of free speech, even when it means listening to arguments which you find ugly and disagreeable. For this White House to provide leadership against the over-zealous land use restrictions that choke growth, reduce opportunity, and increase economic polarization would be an important step forward.As the WSJ piece notes, many land use regulations are matters for state and local governments (and properly so), so the President can only exhort and recommend on some of these. But there are other places where overzealous federal regulators make significant contributions to the problem—think the notorious overreach of EPA wetlands regulations. Shifting federal land use policy toward a pro-growth, pro-housing model would be a solid accomplishment for this President in the closing months of his tenure.