Gene C. Fant Jr.'s Blog, page 6

Can There Be Ted Cruz Democrats?

Over on twitter, Sean Trende points out that since 2000, in forty-nine competitive Senate races, the Republican Senate candidate has run ahead of the Republican presidential candidate in only fourteen. The astute Dan McLaughlin wrote that this  was a “staggering indictment” of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. I’m not sure what to make of Trende’s number, but I think it gets at something real, and I think McLaughlin’s critique extends beyond the RSCC.

At the senatorial level (even more than the presidential level), 2012 revealed that Republicans have a an out-of-date agenda and media strategy to go along with a voting base that is in relative decline. This especially shows up in high-turnout presidential election years. 

Republicans lost twenty-five out of thirty-three Senate races in 2012. The self-immolations of Todd Akin and Mourdock have gotten much of the attention, but I don’t think those are the most revealing cases. Better to look at Wisconsin and Virginia. Both are purple states whose 2012 Republican Senate candidates were strong on paper. Tommy Thompson had been a four term governor of Wisconsin who was a national leader in welfare reform. George Allen was basically a cyborg built to win elections in 1990s Virginia. Thompson and Allen not only lost their Senate races, they finished slightly behind Romney in their home state. One can come up with excuses. Thompson got old. Allen never recovered from his infamous 2006 “macaca” comment—though Allen won a larger share of the vote in 2006 than in 2012. The excuses don’t quite satisfy. Romney, for all of his faults, was better at appealing to 2012 persuadable voters than Thompson and Allen.

Maybe it is because Thompson and Allen were washed up and foisted on the party by the establishment. What about Ted Cruz? He certainly wasn’t establishment. Cruz was also young, hyperarticulate, and had a strong ideological profile. He was also a winner. And he also ran slightly behind Romney in his home state of Texas.

There used to be this conventional wisdom that Republicans needed to go to the “center” to win. Those who believed this ended up being surprised by the political career of Ronald Reagan—who came from his party’s right-wing and won sweeping general election victories. Reagan showed that Republicans could both go right and win over persuadables. They even had a name for the phenomenon. There was a group called the “Reagan Democrats.”  

What voters would a Ted Cruz win that Romney lost? There are probably some strong conservative identifiers that stayed home because of Romney’s obvious opportunism, but probably not enough to make much of a difference by themselves. I don’t see the Ted Cruz of 2012 making many inroads among the mostly downscale “missing white voters” that Sean Trende identified, or reversing the Republican party’s continuing slide among Latinos and Asian-Americans. It is doubtful that Republican losses among any of those groups were because the Republican presidential candidate did not speak the language (however eloquently) of a Tea Party rally. It is tough to see how the Ted Cruz of 2012 produces many “Ted Cruz Democrats.”

The point isn’t to pick on Cruz. The point is we don’t know what kind of message will work best with persuadable voters. There isn’t much of a language or strategy (yet) for uniting Tea Party voters with Democrat-voting persuadables in federal-level issues.  This is where the RSCC and the rest of the Republican establishment are letting their candidates down. The institutional Republican party is failing to give its candidates the analytical tools and media best practices for reaching today’s electorate in today’s media environment. Learning what works best takes time, Republicans are behind, and individual campaigns have short time horizons. The institutional party is in the position to make the long-term investments to help its candidates communicate better with more voters. If they can do that, it increases the chances that talented right-of-center candidates will win over the next generation of “Fill-in-the-blank Democrats.” 

Marriage Policy Isn’t Enough

There’s plenty of talk in policy circles about the arrival of “reform conservatism” to the policy scene, most recently and notably in Ross Douthat’s excellent Sunday New York Times op-ed. A consistent feature of reform conservatism is its emphasis on marriage—its potential for social mobility, its ties to predicting social outcomes that liberals and conservatives alike can appreciate. But calls for recognizing marriage as a mobility-increasing mechanism are receiving criticism for the lack of broad-based policy proposals. 

For example New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait has a blistering critique of the Republican approach toward reforming marriage: That there is none.

But first, we can appreciate Chait’s admission that, yes, marriage actually matters:

The conservative analysis of marriage is not ridiculous. Marriage may in fact be the single issue where the conservative analysis has the most power. The rapid growth of divorce and unwed motherhood has produced a huge increase in the proportion of American children being raised by a single parent, a vast social experiment with measurably harmful effects on children.

But Chait then goes on:

Yet the question hovering over the conservative defense of marriage is, so what? If the roots of the decline in marriage lie in a cultural sea change, what role does public policy have in reversing it, save for speeches hectoring Murphy Brown and her descendants? Liberals have a policy agenda that tries to accommodate the decline of marriage. Policies like expanded family leave, child care, and pre-kindergarten education would make it easier for single parents to work while ensuring their children receive decent care.

Conservatives oppose those policies because they involve more government and accept the decline of the two-parent household. What they have in place is . . . very little.

Chait’s simply wants simply the following: policy and program. But this narrowness shows what’s lacking in Chait’s analysis. What’s needed isn’t solely or even primarily a policy agenda—it’s a paradigm. Part of restoring marriage to its cultural primacy really is talking about marriage’s value in itself, on its own terms—what folks like Paul Ryan, Mike Lee, and others are doing. No policy can make people desire marriage; but federal policy can remove obstacles that incentivize not marrying, like the marriage penalty. The conservative reform movement has its policies—but it also recognizes that no policy can fully address what is also and always a cultural issue. 

The February Issue

The February
issue of First Things has been up on our website for a little bit now, but you might have missed it in all the website changes. But since the February issue is very good, that would be a shame!

As is customary, we have three free articles for you to read: David and Amber Lapp’s
“Alone in the New America,” a piece on working-class families and communities (recommended for anybody who reads Pete Spiliakos’ columns); Jonathan Yudelman’s “The Christian Theologian of Zion,” a story of Fr. Marcel-Jacques Dubois’ fraught relationship with Israel; and Cassandra Nelson’s review of Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge.

Behind the paywall, you’ll also find Matthew Milliner’s beautiful piece about baptizing his daughter (we’ve been told it’s made at least one person cry, so read it at your own risk), Ralph C. Wood’s review of Flannery O’Connor’s Prayer Journal, a story by David Bentley Hart, and, of course, Helen Rittelmeyer’s anti-empiricism essay, “Bloodless Moralism,” which, in addition to earning many admiring reads, has already provoked at least one hate-buy. And these are just a few selections from a very strong issue . . . so click over there and read them for yourself.

We don’t allow comments on articles, but you can post any thoughts on these articles that you have over on this post—or, please write us a letter for possible publication in the magazine and send it to ft@firstthings.com. The due date for letters is February 3. They should not be longer than four hundred words. We do edit them (for length, mostly).

Happy reading!

The purpose of ecumenism

We’re currently in the Week of Prayer for Christian
Unity, which takes place January 18–25. It’s unsurprising, therefore, to see
Pope Francis, like his forbears, calling on Christians to pray for the restoration
of unity in Christendom. “In the face of those who no longer see the full,
visible unity of the Church as an achievable goal,” he said to a delegation of
Finnish Lutherans visiting Rome this past Friday, “we are invited not to give up our ecumenical efforts,
faithful to that which the Lord Jesus asked of the Father, ‘that they may be
one.’”

Note the implication in the first clause
there: There are “those who see the full, visible unity of the Church as
an achievable goal.” However encouraging the pope’s words are, they include an
acknowledgement that not all is well when it comes to the ecumenical project. In
the above linked article, Cardinal Kurt Koch (head of the Pontifical Council
for Promoting Christian Unity) explains that part of the problem is a fundamental
disagreement over what the purpose of ecumenism even is. The Catholic News
Agency quotes him as follows: “‘The main problem that we have today in the
ecumenical dialogue with all the Protestant’ communities . . . is the lack of ‘a
common vision of the goal of the ecumenical movement. We have two different
views. The Catholic view, (which) is also the Orthodox view, (is) that we will
re-find the unity in faith in the sacraments and in ministries.’” Conversely,
Cardinal Koch says, “the vision that I find today in the Protestant churches
and ecclesial communities (is that) of the mutual recognition of all ecclesial
communities as churches.”

It’s hard to argue with the cardinal’s assessment.
Some, indeed, many of the most prominent voices in mainline Protestantism seem
to have approached ecumenical dialogue this way in recent years. They want
merely for everyone to recognize everyone else as faithful Christians. “We’ll
keep our church; you keep yours. And we’ll all just get along together,
recognizing each other’s churches as acceptable alternatives.” There is a
danger that real doctrinal differences may be underplayed or ignored in such an
ecumenical framework, all in the effort to achieve “mutual recognition,” as the
cardinal says, of each other as equal manifestations of the Church.

But this is to seriously weaken the vision
of Christian unity evoked in Christ’s prayer in John 17. When Christ prayed
that all Christians would be one, he didn’t have in mind a unity in which doctrinal
differences remain—Protestants believing one thing and Catholics another, and
yet the two somehow assumed to be in fellowship with one another. Instead, he
prayed that all would be sanctified in the truth—truth which is found,
he says, only in the Father’s word. We must agree on this truth, then, in order
for our unity to be real. The goal of ecumenism cannot be unity in spite of
differences; it must instead be to come to a point where doctrinal differences
no longer exist, where doctrinal agreement has been achieved, and structural
unity can therefore be enacted as a result.

Regrettably, too few Protestants have
pursued this latter type of ecumenism. But some have. A recent example was seen
in November, when delegates of the International Lutheran Council (ILC) met
with Cardinal Koch and Monsignore Matthias Türk in Rome to discuss the possibility of opening up an international dialogue. At that
meeting, one of the things agreed on by all participants was the belief that
unity in doctrine was paramount; it is telling that ILC representatives praised
PCPCU representatives for making it clear that “that both unity and truth are a
priority for them.” The same ideals important to Catholics in ecumenical
relations are true then also for the ILC—namely, the belief that true unity
must be unity in the truth. Doctrinal agreement—on the sacraments and ministry,
as Cardinal Koch noted in The Catholic News Agency article above—is
essential to achieving true unity.

The goal of ecumenism will only be reached
when those on either side can look at the other and confess with the words of
Adam that this at last is “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” No
differences will then remain, and we can truly become one body—a visible unity
which will mirror the invisible unity which already exists in the Body of
Christ. The purpose of ecumenism must always be to seek an end to the divorce
that has, at least in our world, rendered the bride of Christ. And that is a
reunification that is possible only when doctrinal unity has first been
achieved.

Hearing the God of Job

Over the last twenty years, David Wells has established himself as the insider chronicler-in-chief of how the self-centered trivialization of life in wider Western culture has transformed conservative Protestantism in the United States and, by implication, elsewhere. His earlier books, from No Place for Truth onwards, have often been criticized for having plenty of bad news and few positive proposals. Yet there are those Christians like myself who have enough Christian absurdism in our souls to think that, humanly speaking, life is short, often darkly comic, and in the end really rather tragic. We are the ones who quite enjoy the pessimistic aspect of his work as confirming our basic convictions (or prejudices, as others would no doubt call them). Nevertheless, in his latest book, God in the Whirlwind, David goes some way to offering positive proposals against the backdrop of traditional Reformed theology and pertinent critiques of contemporary culture.

He take as his central motif the notion of God’s holy-love (the hyphen is important), arguing that many of Christianity’s woes derive from emphasizing one half of this term at the expense of the other. The first seven chapters serve as a fine survey statement of Reformed theology from the perspective of this guiding motif, with apposite comments about how contemporary cultural forces twist and distort the biblical teaching. This part of the book would serve as a great text for an adult Sunday School. The last two chapters—on worship and on calling respectively—show how Christianity has capitulated to the spirit of this present age in practical terms, i.e., in the ways in which Christians now express their worship when gathered together and in the manner in which they relate to the wider world. The solution as David sees it is to take seriously God’s holy-love and to make this a key guiding principle for all Christian thought and practice.

While David does not explicitly make the connection, the biblical resonances of the book’s title are surely apposite. It is significant that when God makes his entrance onto the stage that is the wreckage of Job’s life in the book that bears his name, he comes in the whirlwind. Even after his first speech has induced Job to take a vow of silence, God comes again in the whirlwind. That is a sign of judgment and, in a book already filled with mystery, it adds perhaps the greatest mystery of all: Why does God address this man’s suffering in a way that speaks rather of judgment than comfort? In this present age, such a god seems rather harsh, unfeeling, and a touch too capricious and judgmental. Yet the answer would appear to be simple in an unfathomably complicated way: God is not human, his ways are not human ways, and thus human ways are not to be criteria for thinking of him. That is surely a key insight possessed by all the greatest theologians, from Paul to Luther and beyond. The history of humankind shows that that has always been a hard teaching to grasp. It is peculiarly problematic for a generation for whom external, given authority of any kind—even that of our X and Y chromosomes—is something to be ignored or overcome. 

This is where David’s chapter on worship is so key and, indeed, the hinge of the book. What he highlights is the casual tendency for the forms of Christian worship to be separated from the content of Christianity in a manner that often divests the act of corporate worship of its very purpose. The dramatic themes and movement of the Bible and of the gospel (sin, cross, redemption, forgiveness, future hope) should shape what the church does when she gathers together and should thereby strengthen Christians for their everyday lives by giving them an understanding of who they are, where they, and whence they are going. The world in all its forms, from billboard aesthetics to news broadcasts to video games, preaches other forms of life to us every day of the week. Worship is to be a reality check which re-calibrates our minds so that we might live as aliens in a foreign land. Too often, however, it merely apes the tastes of the world outside.

Further, while he does not use this precise language, he also points to what I would argue is the lethal use of the aesthetics of power to present the Christian gospel in the context of corporate worship. While he does not directly engage the current revival of Calvinistic soteriology among otherwise generically Evangelical churches, one might comment that numerous representatives of this movement have successfully harnessed the aesthetics of power to market a theology whose content thus stands in contradiction to its packaging and is thus rendered highly volatile: The weakness of the cross and the dependent fragility of a redeemed but still fallen humanity cannot be expressed with the idioms of power drawn from the culture without fundamentally changing their real significance. And yet this extraordinary marketing feat is what we now witness in the swagger of certain leaders and their followers, in their lack of accountability, in the cults of celebrity, in the massive influence wielded by media savvy organizations, in the plethora of lucrative personal ministries, and in the various other expensive products and pyrotechnics of the movement.

These may appear at first glance to be merely practical problems, but there is already evidence that in the long term they might well prove to be symptomatic of moral and theological ones too. That is certainly the conclusion to which an application of David’s analysis to the latest neo-Calvinist movement would lead. Indeed, Evangelicalism as a business does not place a very high premium on the kind of things for which David longs and which he believes are possible if we are intentional in pursuing them: Finely-tooled theology rooted in historic confessions; sober-minded worship; thoughtful pastoral care; and deep commitment to the church as church. How could it? These things are a minority interest and could never attract the capital necessary to sustain the big Evangelical industry over even a short period of time. The reformation for which David calls is thus not one which requires a mere shift in doctrinal belief, something with which Evangelical leaders seem too often too easily satisfied; it also involves the transformation of a whole form of church life, one which he sees as starting in what happens in gathered worship on a Sunday and leads to a reorientation of thinking and living throughout the week. Perhaps it also involves the transformation of the received Evangelical vision of a kind of Manifest Destiny into something much more modest and narrowly focused.

For David, as one hopes for all Christians, the church’s worship is a response to God’s grace, and thus what happens in the worship service is a good indicator of how grace is theologically and practically understood. The convenient and specious separation of form and content in worship often lies at the heart of the broader Evangelical movement as a means of facilitating inter-church alliances and building consensus has, I suspect, spilled over into other Christian traditions too. David is not so concerned with the hackneyed debate about contemporary music versus traditional; rather, he is interested in the role, priorities, logic, and structure of the worship service. A separation of form and content in this sense is something which David clearly sees as lethal to biblical Christianity in the long term. Such a separation always ends up favoring the form, rather than the content and tends over time to make the religious marketplace king and theology really quite negotiable. We should not underestimate that sobering reality when we reflect upon our worship practices. 

This is a book all Christians should read. And, while generally positive in its proposals, it has sufficient pessimism (though David, as a good fellow pessimist, will no doubt tell me he is not such a one) that this Englishman still enjoyed it. Christianity in the West is shifting to the status of an annoying, perhaps even unwelcome, sect. The future is, humanly speaking, bleak. David’s books in general are a good argument for seeing ourselves as a large part of our current problem and this book in particular offers helpful thoughts on what must now be done.

Leo Strauss and Postmodern Conservatism

One difference between postmodern conservatives and other contributors to First Thoughts has to do with being influenced by Leo Strauss.

Each pomoncon can speak for himself (or herself). But I would say that we all regard that influence as making us better and especially more astute thinkers and readers of first-rate books than we would otherwise be. So we can’t help but think that conservatives who don’t know Strauss would be better off if they did. And those conservatives plagued by what Peter Minowitz calls Straussophobia should seek out some kind of expert help.

One allegation against Strauss is that he was an atheist. Strauss himself, I think, is to blame for that reputation. For one thing, he wrote that philosophers have typically employed “the art of writing” to fend off that charge. They wrote exoterically—or with an edifying affirmation of God and the reigning morality—as believers, but esoterically or secretly or subtextually as thinkers free from the thrall of any dogma, including the hearsay of revelation. Strauss distinguished himself, he thought, by being the first philosopher to put the truth about writing in esotericism in neon letters, to be exoteric about being esoteric. That created the widespread impression that certainly many “Straussians” share that Strauss held that to be a first-rate thinker is to be an atheist all the way down.

Philosophers wrote esoterically to avoid persecution by religious and political authorities, and to protect decent opinion from a vain skepticism that would be, in most cases, a rationalization for indifference and injustice. Philosophers also wrote esoterically as a way of teaching. To really own the truth depends on not skipping any steps on the way to genuine enlightenment. The wisdom of Socrates is miles distant, for example, from Woody Allen’s whining about death and meaninglessness and all that.

We have to wonder, to begin with, why Strauss might have been so open about his closet atheism. For one thing, outing philosophers as atheists—for example, our founding philosopher John Locke—makes them more attractive in a time when most sophisticates in some existentialist or scientistic way equate  atheism with enlightenment. For another, as an American professor he didn’t have all that much reason to fear persecution or even lose tenure. In one sense, he surely was a tenured radical, but he only suffered the indignity of being somewhat marginalized by the disciplines of political science and philosophy. So Strauss decided to make himself seem more dangerous than he really was.

Strauss turns our attention away from the dogmatic “new atheists” to the wiser or far more self-conscious “old atheists.” And the old atheists, it turns out, didn’t really think they knew enough to refute the best claims for revelation or even to displace the decent and responsible life of moral virtue with something better. It’s even the case, we can learn from Strauss,  that Locke was only ambiguously an atheist. He thought the free human person—personal identity—was quite real and could not be accounted for by the laws that govern the wholly natural world. In that respect, he had a debt to St. Augustine’s truthful objection to the natural and civil theologies of the Greeks and Romans. Strauss has what he regards as a Socratic objection to Locke’s philosophic view of irreducible individuality, but that means Strauss didn’t really think that all the philosophers were the same brand of disbelievers. In final analysis, Strauss really thought Locke was too Christian. He even thought Nietzsche and Heidegger were too Christian! And we have to give him credit for showing us how Locke and Nietzsche and Heidegger would answer back, as philosophers.

For lots of postmodern and conservative or faith-based or semi ex-Straussians I know, the movement from the smugness of new atheism—the word on the intellectual street in our allegedly enlightened democracy—was back to the old atheism. But even that wasn’t good enough, because Strauss shows those with eyes to see that even Socrates—the philosopher who is all about learning how to die or getting over himself—can’t account for the irreducible particularity or unique irreplaceability of every human life that’s the only possible foundation of modern liberal democracy. Lincoln’s dedication of our nation to the proposition that all men are created equal is both Christian and modern—and so, properly understood, almost Thomistic. It’s based on the truth, as Chesterton wrote, that there’s a center of significance in the cosmos that gives each of us significance, a significance that’s not a political construction. That’s why, as Chesterton went on, true citizenship is “a home for the homeless,” of beings not created to be fully at home in any particular “city of man.”

The greatest living student of political philosophy is the French Catholic Pierre Manent. Strauss provided much of the road by which Manent traveled from the socialist atheism of his parents to the truth about God and his good. Manent is now maybe our leading critic of Strauss, but from a perspective full of wisdom he learned from Strauss. Another, somewhat different, example is the Mormon postmodern conservative Ralph Hancock, who learned, from Strauss, how to criticize the equation of philosophy with atheism or even atheistic determinism found in the thought of  some “high Straussians.” For Hancock, Strauss was helpful not so much in challenging but in deepening his faith by helping him discover the true relationship between reason and personal, relational responsibility. Catholic Straussian or Mormon Straussian aren’t oxymoronic, even if it is true that a Catholic or Mormon can’t be a “whole hog” Straussian. Philosophy, in truth, can’t define a whole human life or the whole human good.

Strauss, it’s true, denied that the logos that governs the cosmos could be personal. But he certainly helped us postmodern conservatives understand how questionable that impersonal philosophic (or scientific) view is. After all, he restored the study of political philosophy—or the attempt to think about the universal in light of the particular. We postmodern conservatives, following the lead of our philosopher-pope emeritus,  say that the access to the universal truth can only be found in particular persons.

And we have to remember, as Daniel McCarthy reminds us, that Strauss deliberately wrote as a conservative, and even as a Jew. That wasn’t some kind of noble lie to trick the American empire into invading Iraq, as some conservatives claim. Anyone who’s really read Socrates’ presentation of the noble lie in the Republic realizes that it contains a lot of truth, the truth about the relationship between human excellence and the fraternity that makes real political community possible. Sure, it’s about making citizenship more natural or less of problem that it really is. But the truth is that for justice to be a real force in the world, being a citizen of particular political community under God and devoted to virtue has to be real.

No Religion Please, We’re Americans

In my historical linguistics class, we talk about the influence of culture on circumlocutions, the strategy of saying something indirect so as not to offend.  One of the classic examples is that of the refusal of some Victorians to say the word “bull” because it referred to that most virile of creatures.  One circumlocution was “gentleman cow.” 

The same linguistic impulse of avoiding offense was extended even to furniture making, it seems, where some Victorians on our side of the Atlantic developed little skirts to attach to chairs to hide the upper parts of the chair legs, lest someone become tantalized by the carved shapes.  While this fashion artifact has come to some argument, there is ample attestation that the word “leg” was verboten, while the word “limb” was acceptable.  This quirky anxiety toward things carnal led to the rather infamous title of a BBC comedy in the 70’s, “No Sex Please, We’re British,” which has become a snowclone for loads of other cultural riffs.

The new anxiety over religion in the U.S. has reached a number of points of absurdity thanks to the new Victorianism of the secularists, who are afraid of the temptations that might strike the unwitting.  This is, at least partially, behind the rationale of a couple to change their surname  to “ChristIsLord,” because folks might be offended.  Worse yet, some persons might accidentally utter their name and find themselves among the redeemed; I am fairly certain that the afterlife will not be littered with miserable, unsuspecting folks who accidentally uttered such a phrase as mere appellation.

More disturbing, however, is LSU’s scrubbing of photos that included small crosses.   The editors, apparently, did not want to offend people by mixing sports and religion.  This is dumbfounding, of course, since LSU plays in the SEC and SEC football is easily the most followed sabbatarian religion of the American South.    Then again, big-time higher education has used Photoshop before in ways that reflect other anxieties in academe.

Trying to rid our culture of all references to religion out of deference to the secularists would fulfill the wildest fantasies of Orwellian NewSpeak I suppose, but it would be hopelessly invasive.  I am mindful of one of my graduate school professors, a Northerner who sniffed at all things religious in my home state of Mississippi.  Noting the presence of the town of Philadelphia in Neshoba County, he once asked me with a perfectly genuine curiosity about when and for what purpose Greek immigrants had arrived in Neshoba County.  I replied, dumbfounded, that the state was settled by Christians, not Greeks, and that he might wish to consult a New Testament to answer his own question. Scrubbing the map of all references to religion would leave us with an impoverished map indeed, but it would be the same sort of cultural cleansing that would be unthinkable for place names in Native American tongues.

I continue to be amazed to find that the so-called defenders of artistic and ideological transgressions are so onion-skinned when it comes to matters of faith.  Perhaps they are afraid that they cannot stand up to truth.  Or light.

An Egological Army of One?

When the U. S. Army started employing a marketing motto “An Army of One” in 2001, my friends in the military howled that such a slogan was antithetical to the entire concept of martial teamwork.  An officer noted that an army of one was more like a vigilante than a soldier.

I thought of that when I read about last spring’s meeting of the Jesus Seminar (yes, apparently they still meet), which discussed whether or not Jesus was literate.  The logical gymnastics they enjoyed while arriving at the decision that he was not are interesting in their own right, but what caught my eye was this nugget about re-imagining almost everything theological or scriptural: a leader, Bernard Scott of Phillips Theological Seminary,

at one point suggested to the audience of 40 mostly elderly participants to “make up your own canon” of scripture.  “I would trade the book of Revelation for Hamlet any day,” Scott announced, adding that he would swap the Pastoral Epistles for any two Emily Dickinson poems.  “We’d be way better off.”

As a literary critic myself, I tried to re-imagine myself standing before a Shakespeare Seminar and saying, “Re-imagine Shakespeare!  I would trade two Faulkner novels for Hamlet any day and I would swap the sonnets for a sheaf of Browning poems without hesitation.”  I suppose my comments would be thought a bit on the odd side and few would join me in such a quest.

According to the Jesus Seminar story, though, the leaders complained about the predominance of evangelical thought that held to the text and “the failure of liberal religious thought to gain widespread traction.”

I suppose it’s hard to gain such traction, however, when we pander to our own idiosyncratic imaginations and inclinations.  How do we create a movement of “one” when we have created theological vigilantes who stand not merely apart from but contrary to broader conversations and communities of faith that are defined by scriptural or doctrinal coherence?  How do we create a respectable theological movement when we have deleted “theo” and substituted “ego”, along with exchanging divine “logos” for literature?  It seems like it would be hard to get much momentum behind an egological literary movement.

Perhaps a reading of Romans 1:25 might be in order: “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served something created instead of the Creator, who is praised forever.  Amen.”  But such a view would subordinate human “logic” to divine revelation, and most of us at our hearts share the viewpoint of the infamous Duke in Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess”: “I choose never to stoop” (line 42).

An Infertility Cult: The Integration of Sex and Learning

Public Discourse has posted Michael Hannon’s review  of Nathan Harden’s book “God and Sex and God at Yale,” which explores academe’s obsession with the glorification of sex in Ivy League settings.  The essay, like the book, is frank, so be forewarned.  The descriptions of not only behaviors but also the material culture of a campus life that has been overtaken by bacchanalia is hardly exceptional; unfortunately, there is little that is groundbreaking here other than the documentation of obsessions that continue to roll apace.  For parents of older teenagers, it is sobering stuff.  Certainly Clark Kerr, the legendary chancellor of the University of California a half century ago, was understated in his observation that “the three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni and parking for the faculty.”

I took a number of archeology courses in my undergraduate days (Indiana Jones being all the rage at the time), and I was trained to think about culture in terms of its material artifacts.  We learn a lot about people by what remains well after they are gone.  On the first day of class in the introductory course, our professor showed us a replica of the very ancient Venus of Willendorf.  The Venus is a classic archeological piece, a rotund female shape that is all bosom and thighs.

He asked us, “What is this?”

Classmates offered all sorts of ideas, including one cheeky fellow who said, “It’s the earliest piece of pornography known to man.  It’s pocket porn!”

The professor finally said, somewhat dismissively, “It’s a goddess.  We believe it’s a fertility totem based on the parts of the body that are emphasized.  Look at the way the female form has been objectified.  Male forms are common too in these cultures, by the way.  It was all about reproduction: children meant new workers and a new generation for the culture.  Agricultural success meant reproductive success.  Totems like this help us to know what was valued by this culture.  They worshipped through sex and their culture was sustained by sex.”

Something like that, anyway; we all nodded with “deep” understanding, ignoring, as freshmen, the fact that there was no way to corroborate the professor’s theological claim since the Willendorfian folks are all long-since dead.  Perhaps it really was merely a piece of pornography fashioned by a lonely huntsman.

The difference between the theological and the pornographic might be hard to discern in a fertility cult, where the two may merge into a strange sort of blurred reality.  After all, such a cult was obsessed with the notion that culture genuinely was extended through the passing on of that culture via childbirth and agricultural success.  Even human sacrifice, oddly, was typically viewed as a form of fertility.

When I teach excerpts from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, I remind my students that “WWJD” would mean something entirely different if the “J” were “Jove” instead of “Jesus.”  When my campus (we’re an evangelical college that takes our mission quite seriously) ponders ways to improve our careful integration of faith and learning, it is quite different than the way that a campus in Ovid’s times might have thought of it.  For them, the integration of “sex and learning” might have been quite interchangeable terms for “faith and learning.”

Which brings me back to Hannon’s essay.  For the better part of academe, the emphasis is on the integration of sex and learning, from Freud to the various “liberated” viewpoints that detach behaviors from consequences.  In fact, higher education seems to have created an infertility cult, something history has not seen previously in large numbers, and for good reason.  Cults of infertility, such as the Shakers, ultimately extinguish themselves; it’s a classic failure to understand how the real world works.

The sewers of cultic temples in Roman culture were filled with the bones of infants, usually boys who were flushed because they were less valuable as cultic prostitutes.  The early Christian church, in fact, made a name for itself by adopting many of these children who were doomed for death; this was an incredibly powerful counter-cultural act that defied the objectification and commodification of human beings.  Now we have technologies for prevention, methodologies for remediation, and moral sensibilities that place us above any sort of reproach.  Indeed, we are significantly higher, morally, than either the fertility cults that objectified the female form or repressive cultures that closeted it.

At least that’s what we’d like to think.

Ideas, like actions, have consequences, regardless of what we might think.

The Bible’s Influence on Art and Culture

The non-believing intelligentsia’s obsession with scripture seems sadly comical.  Watching and listening to the so-called New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris makes one think that these public intellectuals are convinced of the utter lack of substance of the Bible and biblical thought.  Many of these New Atheists, though, have found fame and fortune in their attacks on Christianity.

As Christian apologists have noted, though, an entire library could be built that would be filled with the treatises, lectures, and books that attack the veracity of the Bible.  We would fill shelf after shelf, cabinet after cabinet, row after row, wing after wing, all radiating out from the central podium that could prop up the single book that has generated so much antagonism, all of the texts as a group seeking to overturn the truthfulness of that one rather slim text that stands alone in the central part of the library.

And still it stands.

For a group of thinkers who like to position themselves as intellectual elephants to the gnat of Christianity, their bazooka blasts never seem to hit much of a mark in terms of history.

And perhaps we could invert this image a bit.  If we began to build a library of books that were influenced by the Bible, and in the English tradition by the King James Bible, well, to quote what John 21:25 says about the life of Christ, “I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.”  An argument could be made, in fact, that virtually the entire Library of Congress is a collection of works inspired by, or reacting against, God’s revelation of Himself through the Scriptures and the created world.  We could say the same for the majority of drama, art, music, and other artistic expressions that transcend the literality of the material world and explore all of Creation and its relationship with both the human and the divine.

In some ways, secular writers and artists are like the bird that steals a thread of pure gold and weaves it into her nest, failing to distinguish between the richness of the gold and the commonness of the pine straw.  Or the biologist who reduces the value of the human body to a few dollars of protoplasm.  Or the botanist who studies the structures of a flower under a microscope but never sees the beauty of the entire blossom.  It is, perhaps, a uniquely human impulse that attempts to reduce things to their basest minutia, but in the process we end up circumscribing the transcendence that may be found in the things that the Creator not merely inspired but also created.  Like Simon the Magician, they demand that they also receive the power that is derived from the Holy Ghost, and in the process they miss out on the opportunity to admit the utterly awesome, supernatural nature of the Scriptures, and of the God of the Scriptures.

–Excerpted from my forthcoming essay, “Give Me Also This Power: Secular Writers’ Simultaneous Fascination with and Denial of the Power of the King James Bible,” in KJV 400: Legacy and Impact, ed. Ray Van Neste (Borderstone, exp. Fall 2012).