Speaking of Hollywood, the Mrs. and I were also in range of cable television last week and so had access to a documentary on Woody Allen that aired on PBS. I understand that many film goers may have grown tired with Woody’s recent productions (not to mention his love life), though his using European cities as opposed to his beloved Manhattan seems to have energized the seventy-five year old. But what younger viewers don’t understand — myself included — is how remarkable his career has been. For my wife and I, Annie Hall and Manhattan were the beginning of a new era in American cinematography, analogous to what micro-breweries did for beer in the United States. But what I had not realized was how Woody had a different career for twenty years before working on films. He started as a joke writer, eventually working on the “Sid Caesar Show.” Working as a stand up comic came later and with much reluctance from Allen. And that happened largely at the cajoling of Woody’s handlers, Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe. One of the most memorable old clips from the documentary was from the Perry Como Show which featured Woody doing a song and dance number with leggy, busty dancers. Woody was dressed in top hat and tails and hamming it up with the best of variety show schmalzt. It was the kind of television that Woody would later ridicule over and over again in his film directing and writing.

Woody Allen’s career as a movie maker only came at the end of these other phases. No one would have ever predicted that he would wind up as a cinematographer and make (arguably) more movies than even Ingmar Bergman and Frederico Fellini. It’s as if Jerry Seinfeld had gone from doing stand-up to his situation comedy and then decided he wanted to get in to the film business. And that does not even begin to describe Allen because Woody did not use Hollywood as a stepping stone to another form of entertainment — say an HBO series or two. Instead, Woody found the medium in which he would thrive and sometimes only survive. averaging one film per year for four decades (and still counting). But to think of American cinema without putting Woody Allen high on the list of American screenplay writers, directors, and actors is impossible.

Even so, I’d rather watch Kenneth Branagh on the big screen.

Bloom and I were once employed by the same academic department. I hasten to add, lest there be a question of bias, that my decade at Yale left me feeling little toward him one way or the other. I never even met the man. Having fulfilled the dream of academics everywhere by renouncing as many obligations toward his home department as practicably possible—meetings, committee assignments, duties in the graduate program, every responsibility except undergraduate teaching—Bloom had long since become, as he likes to put it, “a department of one.” I think I only saw him about three times.

Which is not to say he wasn’t sometimes on my mind. At a certain point during my sojourn at the institution, I started to develop the Heart of Darkness theory of the Yale English department. Conrad’s novel is about colonialism and racism and the shadowed reaches of the human heart, but it is also a dissection of bureaucracy. My first clue came when I realized that my chairman was a perfect double for the manager of the Central Station, that creepy functionary who has “no genius for organizing, for initiative, or for order even,” who “could keep the routine going—that’s all.” But what clinched it was the recognition of the role that Bloom played in the paradigm. Bloom was Mr. Kurtz. (Marlow, broken by his African ordeal, was any number of my senior colleagues, their souls crushed by the tenure process. The “pilgrims”—that pack of hopeful fools who set off into the jungle in pursuit of a chimerical fortune—were the graduate students.)

Since I have of late been defending celebrity academics (or their athletic coaches) from easy put downs, let me explain that the appeal of this depiction is what it says about American higher education. If folks believe that Division One athletics is a problem, they may also want to consider a system that employs professors not to assume normal faculty responsibilities.

But the point of this post is to call attention to the wonderful description of the moral perplexities that confronted the United Kingdom at the time of the Civil War in the United States. The following from a review of Amanda Foreman’s book, A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War (Random House, 2011), proves to this 2k equivocator that people in power seldom have an easy time determining the “right” thing to do:

FREEDOM is a rangy, broad-shouldered value, capable of heavy rhetorical lifting. Liberals had coalesced around another form of freedom: free trade, the bedrock of British industrialization. Abolitionism had taken root in the partly protectionist, largely rural soil of late eighteenth-century Britain. Now panting, shrieking trains ripped through a land studded by smokestacks and mines; conurbations crawled over hillsides like great black snakes. Touring the factory towns spawned by late industrialization, Friedrich Engels described the socially deadening grind of workers who toiled interminable shifts at the steam-powered looms, trudged home to fetid slums, supped on potato parings, and nursed their babies on gin.

Engels likened factory labor to enslavement, but Lancashire textile workers in fact owed their livelihood to American slaves. Rhymed Punch:

Though with the North we sympathize,

It must not be forgotten,

That with the South we’ve stronger ties,

Which are composed of cotton.

Textiles were Britain’s biggest business, and cotton from the deep South was its biggest source. The Union blockade of Southern ports snipped the supply line to millions of Britons reliant on the industry. The resulting “cotton famine” hit hard and fast: within a year, 400,000 British workers were unemployed or nearly so, putting their 1.5 million dependents at risk. State welfare cases quadrupled in months. Even the staunchest abolitionists, Prime Minister Palmerston included, had to see the crisis in Lancashire as a more pressing humanitarian problem for the government than the plight of far-off slaves. Recognizing the Confederacy, or at least evading the blockade, could restore the cotton supply, while joining the Union might deepen and prolong the suffering at home.

Then there was the political freedom that Liberals championed abroad: the freedom of people to govern themselves. Palmerston—whose “attitudes,” Foreman nicely observes, “had been formed in the age when wigs and rouge were worn by men as well as women”—had made his reputation as a defender of national self-determination, in Belgium, Greece, Italy, and Hungary. (Never mind that he also sent in gunboats to assert British power in the Middle East and China.) Why not the Confederate States of America? “The South fight for independence; what do the North fight for except to gratify passion or pride?” asked the home secretary. The rising Liberal star William Ewart Gladstone fancied he saw shades of Garibaldi in Jefferson Davis. “We may have our own opinions about slavery,” Gladstone declared the day after the Emancipation Proclamation ran in the Times, “we may be for or against the South, but there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders … have made a nation.” (Gladstone, later revered as the “People’s William,” had delivered his maiden speech defending his plantation-owning father’s treatment of slaves.) Give the Confederacy political freedom, these men assumed, and freedom from slavery would follow.

An additional wrinkle in this discussion is how some evangelicals bend and twist in order to attach works to faith, sanctification to justification, word to deed, in order to add social justice to the proclamation of the gospel. Not to sound like Glenn Beck, but social justice is not only threatening the United States, but it’s also doing a number on evangelical Protestantism (and so many thought born-again Protestants were conservative; have I got a book for them?)

So to add a little clarity (as our mid-western correspondent reminded me this morning), I bring to mind the views of the modernist Harry Emerson Fosdick and the fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan on the task of the church (and the problem of doctrinal divisions) in alleviating social problems. Important to see is that both sides want a relevant faith and castigate denominational or theological differences. I don’t know how born-again infatuation with social justice will work out any differently for evangelicals than it did for their grandparents in mainline Protestantism. Another bad ending to a religious story.

Fosdick, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” (1922)

The second element which is needed if we are to reach a happy solution of this problem is a clear insight into the main issues of modern Christianity and a sense of penitent shame that the Christian Church should be quarreling over little matters when the world is dying of great needs. If, during the war, when the nations were wrestling upon the very brink of hell and at times all seemed lost, you chanced to hear two men in an altercation about some minor matter of sectarian denominationalism, could you restrain your indignation? You said, “What can you do with folks like this who, in the face of colossal issues, play with the tiddledywinks and peccadillos of religion?” So, now, when from the terrific questions of this generation one is called away by the noise of this Fundamentalist controversy, he thinks it almost unforgivable that men should tithe mint and anise and cummin, and quarrel over them, when the world is perishing for the lack of the weightier matters of the law, justice, and mercy, and faith. . . .

The present world situation smells to heaven! And now, in the presence of colossal problems, which must be solved in Christ’s name and for Christ’s sake, the Fundamentalists propose to drive out from the Christian churches all the consecrated souls who do not agree with their theory of inspiration. What immeasurable folly!

William Jennings Bryan, “Freedom of Religion and the Ku Klux Klan” (1924)

The world is coming out of the war, the bloodiest ever known. Thirty millions of human lives were lost, three hundred billions of property was destroyed, and the debts of the world are more than six times as greate as they were when the first fun was fired.

My friends, how are you going to stop war? . . . There is only one thing that can bring peace to the world, and that is the Prince of Peace. That is, my friends, the One who, when He came upon the earth, the angels said, “On earth, good will toward men. . . . Is it possible that now, when Jesus is more needed, I say the hope of the world — is it possible that at this time, in this great land, we are to have a religious discussion and a religious warfare? Are you going my friends, to start a blaze that may cause you innumerable lives, sacrificed on the altar of religious liberty? I cannot believe it.

(P.S. Bryan’s speech was to the Democratic National Convention and in response to a report that proposed to exclude the KKK. The double irony is that the Democratic Party was a place where Christian appeals prevailed, and that such a faith as Bryan’s “conservative Presbyterianism” could embrace white supremacists for the sake of a civil religion that sought to apply Christ to social problems. In which case, it’s another proof of the errors both religious and secular that follow when you mix faith and politics — you get social gospel.)

The same goes for conservatism. If you slip in an extra syllable, as in “conservativism,” then you are likely unfamiliar with the discussions about what it means to be a conservative. But if you say the real word, “conservatism,” then you’re in the ball park of knowing something about the American Right even if you are not a card-carrier.

A twist on correct pronunciation came for me as my wife and I were driving to Washington, D.C. last week for the Round Table on the future of evangelical politics hosted by Brian Lee and the saints at Christ Reformed Church (URC). Scanning the dial in hopes of finding a voice different from Sean’s, we stumbled upon the local affiliate of the EWTN radio network which broadcasts the Al Kresta show weekdays at 4:00. This particular day found the host away at a conference and the show re-airing the “best of” Al Kresta. Imagine my (all about me) surprise when my wife and I heard Al introduce the hour-long interview I did about From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin on September 20, live in the Ann Arbor studio. Imagine my (all about me) further surprise to hear me babble on like a surfer dude. Which raises the question, if you sound goofy, can you really call yourself a confessional Protestant or a political conservative?

But misgivings about my voice and diction did not prevent a thoroughly enjoyable event with Michael Gerson and Terry Eastland thanks to the great hospitality and event planning of Brian and Sara Lee. The audio for the event is here (though you will need Quick Time to listen). Future events still include David VanDrunen this Thursday night (October 20), and Dave Coffin preaching(Sunday, October 23).

I believe the biggest difference to surface between Mike Gerson and me was his willingness to appeal to higher law (justice and human dignity) in thinking about a Christian understanding of politics and my reluctance to jump over existing laws, institutions, and powers for the sake of a higher good. I also believe this is one of the most profound difference between evangelicals and confessional Protestants in the sphere of religion, and between evangelicals and conservatives in matters political.

Consider, for instance, the willingness of revivalists to circumvent ordained clergy in order to bring the gospel to people (some of whom are already church members). George Whitefield and Gilbert Tennent did this. The Gospel Coalition is still doing it. Think too of the way that evangelicals will appeal to the Bible to circumvent the authority of creeds or confessions with Scripture functioning as a higher law above man-made doctrines.

In politics evangelicals will appeal to Christian morality usually without considering such matters of state sovereignty. This happens when evangelicals look to the federal government to implement laws that state or local governments have not adopted, or when born-again Protestants seek to intervene internationally without doing justice to the existing governments in place. I know, I know, these matters are difficult and the complexity of the situation can lead to pacifism or even indifference. I also concede that folks like Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King, Jr., neither of whom used a long e when saying the word evangelical, also appealed to the higher law for the Declaration of Independence and Civil Rights. Still, evangelicals appear to me to be largely indifferent to existing governmental structures and laws when political forms get in the way of eternal truths. And every conservative (both religious and political) knows that this is a recipe for revolution.

This is not to say that Gerson espouses such radicalism, but only to point out that implicit in the appeal to a higher law is an impulse that makes evangelicals insufficiently aware of the restraint and stability that conservatives hope to preserve.

Truth be told, the book devotes a lot more attention to evangelical reflection about the United States and its government than to electoral politics. In fact, one of my frustrations with the interviews I have been doing — most of them pleasant and welcome — is that I have yet to talk about any of the figures in the narrative, such as Richard Mouw, Carl Henry, Ralph Reed, Jim Skillen, or Michael Gerson. I understand the appeal of talking about a race. That’s why people go to the track and play the ponies. But the problem for evangelicals is not simply the possible thinness of the political candidates they produce, but the way that even the smartest evangelicals reflect on American politics, which is a combination of biblicism and moral idealism.

In which case, Sarah’s decision may actually help out the long term sales of the book since she will continue to be a voice that illustrates the weaknesses of the evangelical mind and From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin will be a guide to those defects.

[Taken from CRC's press release]
The full schedule follows (speaker bios below):

Sunday, October 9th,11:00 am — Michael Horton, “Evangelism and Social Justice”

Thursday, October 13th, 7:00 pm — Michael Gerson, Darryl Hart, Terry Eastland, “The Future of Evangelicals in Politics”

Sunday, October 16th, 11:00 am — Brian Lee, “Govern Well, or Be Governed?”

Thursday, October 20th, 7:00 pm — David VanDrunen, “Natural Law and Christian Politics”

Sunday, October 23rd, 11:00 am — David Coffin, “The Spirituality of the Church”

Events will be held at Christ Reformed Church’s new Logan Circle home, historic Grace Reformed Church (the church home of President Theodore Roosevelt), located at 1405 15th Street NW, Washington, DC. Reception to follow. Free parking is available (with validation) at the Colonial Parking Lot at 1616 P Street NW, one block west of the church. Call 202.656.1611 for more information or visit our website at www.ChristReformedDC.org.

Speakers:

Dr. Michael Horton, J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California, Host of the White Horse Inn radio program and Editor-in-Chief of Modern Reformation magazine. He has written The Gospel Commission and Where in the World is the Church, as well as The Christian Faith, a new highly-acclaimed one-volume systematic theology. He is a minister in the United Reformed Church.

Michael Gerson, opinion writer for the Washington Post and former head speech writer and senior policy advisor to President George W. Bush. He is the author of City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era, and Heroic Conservatism: Why Republicans Need to Embrace America’s Ideals (And Why They Deserve to Fail if They Don’t).

Terry Eastland, Publisher of The Weekly Standard and is ordained as an elder at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Bethesda, Maryland.

Dr. Darryl Hart, visiting professor of History at Hillsdale College in the area of American Religious history and the author of numerous books on Christianity and Politics, including From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism and A Secular Faith: Why Christianity Favors the Separation of Church and State, and blogs on religion and public life at oldlife.org.

Dr. Brian Lee, founding pastor of Christ Reformed Church, Washington, DC, and holds degrees from Stanford University, Westminster Seminary California, and Calvin Theological Seminary. Prior to becoming a pastor Dr. Lee also worked in Washington on Capitol Hill, at the National Endowment for the Humanities, and at the Department of Defense. He studied Dutch Calvinism as a Fulbright Scholar in the Netherlands in 2001.

Dr. David VanDrunen, Robert B. Strimple Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics at Westminster Seminary California. He has written Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms: A Study in the Development of Reformed Social Thought and Living in God’s Two Kingdoms. He is a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and holds a Law Degree from Northwestern University School of Law.

Rev. David Coffin, Senior Pastor at New Hope Presbyterian Church in Fairfax, Virginia.

The vast literature on religion and politics summons up Qoheleth’s oft-quoted remark, “Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body” (Eccl. 12:12). Remarkable indeed is the amount of published material on questions surrounding church and state, at least in the United States. For instance, in 1960, when despite strong anti-Catholic prejudice John F. Kennedy prevailed over Richard Nixon as the first Roman Catholic president, the number of books published on church and state ran to eighteen, up from five titles during the previous year. Figures returned to 1950s levels until 1976 when the bicentennial primed the pump of scholarly output. In 1976 publishers produced seventeen books. The presidency of Ronald Reagan and the presence of the Moral Majority would help to sustain the market: in 1980 eighteen and in 1981 fifteen books were devoted to church and state themes. By 1984 when the critique of secularism was taking hold, the number of books rose to thirty. Since then the numbers have only escalated: forty-seven in 1990, seventy-four in 1996; forty-four in 2000; eighty-one in 2004, and 188 in 2008. Obviously, if dinner conversations unravel when interlocutors introduce religion and politics, and if controversy sells, then publishers hoping to generate a return on their investment in an author, paper, cover art, and advertizing might look to religion and politics as a valuable topic. Still, doesn’t Qoheleth have a point? Hasn’t all this publishing wearied the subject, if not the readers?

The good news is that the titles under review demonstrate that more can be said, even if readers debate whether it needed to be. (For what it’s worth, these were two of sixty books published in 2010 on religion and politics.) Wayne Grudem’s Politics According to the Bible is textbook in size and arrangement of material, running from basic principles (about one-quarter of the book), to specific issues (about two-thirds) ranging from American foreign relations with Israel to farm subsidies, and concluding observations (one-eighth). Peter Leithart’s Defending Constantine is part biography of the first Christian emperor, assessment of his policies, and apology for Constantinianism (more below). Leithart is specifically intent to defend Constantine from the sort of criticisms leveled and made popular by John Howard Yoder, the Anabaptist ethicist who coined the term Constantinianism to highlight the ways in which the church’s entanglement with the state leads to unfaithfulness and even apostasy.

The cover art for each book is revealing. For Leithart’s the image from a reproduction of Constantine in an act of worship tells readers where the book is headed—a portrait of the emperor as a Christian one. Grudem’s book features the dome of the U.S. Capital building with a U.S. flag flying in front. What each author ends up doing is baptizing his subject. In Leithart’s case, Constantine is a model for Christian politics. For Grudem, the United States and its ideals of freedom and democracy are fundamentally Christian versions of civil polity; he even includes the full text of the Declaration of Independence in the chapter on biblical principles of government. The result is two books, published in the same year, written by two white men of conservative Protestant backgrounds in the United States, equipped with biblical and theological arguments, both making a case for Christian politics from wildly different political orders—one a Roman emperor, the other a federal republic. Readers may reasonably wonder if these authors are letting their subjects—the United States and Constantine’s empire—determine Christian politics or are basing their arguments on biblical teaching and theological reflection.

For this reason, I returned to steady spirits (as opposed to distilled ones) when I found a review of FBG2SP in yesterday’s Washington Times by William Murchison. It was even positive as the following excerpt attests:

[Hart]e does so much more, which is really the point here. He probes deep below the surface of evangelicalism to identify, with intelligence and grace, elements that conservatives might have examined with more detail back when Mr. Falwell and others came to shopping around for allies to fight the “secular humanism” they viewed with alarm. Conservatives, for one thing, might have thought more about how voters in general would view the evangelical quest, sublimated at first as Republican politics, for increasing Christianity’s political profile.

That would have started arguments about whether America was or wasn’t a Christian nation, as the evangelicals of the day sometimes alleged. Besides, their votes were wanted. Yet when Barry Goldwater, the grandest political conservative of them all back in his day, offered to kick Jerry Falwell in the place where he sat down, conservatives should have figured out that there might be some problems coming down the road. They didn’t, and now the piper demands his pay.

This all too brief tour of the first seventy-five years of other Reformed communions is a good reminder of the dangers that lurk in church history. If Machen thought the history of western Europe circa 1933 was depressing, one reason was his own struggles in the ecclesiastical part of the West’s history. The OPC’s own history is further evidence of the difficulties that Reformed churches have experienced since the Reformation. The question is whether these difficulties are part and parcel of Reformed history or an aberration. If part of being the church militant means always experiencing contention, disloyalty, and departure, then the OPC’s own struggles are no worse than those that Reformed Protestants have experienced before.

Still, making the case that the OPC is a worthy successor to Reformed history requires being clear about the nature of Calvinism and the Reformation’s significance. For the better part of two hundred years the Corinthian temptation has been to regard Reformed Protestantism’s importance in cultural and political terms. This was a perspective held not only by Reformed believers. Think of Max Weber and his theory about Calvinism and capitalism, or of Alexis de Tocqueville and Calvinism’s contribution to democracy, or of Robert Merton on Calvinism and the rise of modern science. These older arguments do not have the force they once did, but even a couple of years ago at the academic conference in Geneva that marked the five hundredth anniversary of Calvin’s birth, most of the scholarly presentations explored not the sorts of ecclesiastical reforms that characterized Reformed Protestantism but the way that Calvinism shaped the modern world. Such assessments have prompted Reformed believers to think of Calvinism less as a churchly movement than as a religiously-based source for social transformation. Of course, the rise of neo-Calvinism and the inspiring words of Abraham Kuyper have contributed mightily to this estimate of Reformed Protestantism.

But even before Kuyper, the temptation to regard Reformed Protestantism for its political and cultural significance was constant for Presbyterians. How could it not be since the rise of Reformed Protestantism was bound up with European politics. Indeed, the division of Western Christianity that split the Reformed, Lutheran, and Anglican communions from the Roman Catholic Church was also part of the confessionalization of western Europe. After 1600 individual nations could be identified by the kind of church and confession they sponsored. This process helped to secure the creation of the nation-state, a form of government that greatly centralized the economic, legal, educational, administrative, and even linguistic features of territories that had previously been decentralized and diverse. However we estimate the size, scope, and power of the modern nation-state, the reality is that Reformed Protestantism was on the ground floor of the construction of modern Europe and its colonial proliferation, a period that ran from 1600 at least to World War II. No wonder, then, that conservative Reformed believers pine for the days when their faith mattered to the mission of a particular nation. Scottish Presbyterians still long for the days of the National Covenant. Abraham Kuyper endeared himself to Reformed believers by evoking a golden age of Dutch history. Meanwhile, American Presbyterians have their own version of this nostalgia and attempt to construct a Christian founding of the United States even though the very point of the new nation was to bring an end to the pattern of confessionalization that had torn apart Europe (and especially England) during the seventeenth century.

Yet, the question remains whether Reformed Protestants were hoping to remake Europe or reform the church. Thanks to a host of Holy Roman Emperors, from Constantine and Charlemagne to Charles V, thinking about Europe apart from the church was impossible. Even so, the reforms that the original Protestants initiated were overwhelmingly ecclesial and bore directly on doctrine, liturgy, and church polity. Only because the church was part of the established political order did church reform translate into broader social and political developments. The Reformation was first and foremost a religious effort and only secondarily did it affect politics and culture.

If Reformed Protestantism was chiefly an instance of ecclesiastical reform and renewal, then against that measure the OPC may be a worthy heir to the mantle of Reformed Protestantism, even meriting a celebratory toast. To be sure, the history of the OPC is strewn with believers who still want the church to be more than the church, to be at the forefront of maintaining and promoting social righteousness. But just as important to the OPC’s history has been a growing contentment with the church as simply the church. The word “simply,” of course, understates this sense because the church’s mission is hardly simple or ordinary. But to recognize that the church has a responsibility that no other institution does, and that God has instituted the church uniquely for his redemptive purposes, is the start of a broader sense of restraint and resolve that the OPC, while lacking many of the attributes and features that impress the Corinthian minded, is doing a good and important work no matter how quiet or routine.

But to my surprise, Janet was unbelievably positive about From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin, even to the point of insisting that evangelicals need a megadose of Augustine’s two cities for their considerations about public life. For anyone interested in the interview they may go here.

I also conducted a couple of other pleasant interviews recently, one with Scott Oakland at ReformedCast.com, and one with Matt Lewis at DailyCaller.com.

And to fill out this shameless post of self-promotion (my publicist makes me be all about me), Oldlifers may want to check out the interviews available through Office Hours from Westminster California. Unfortunately for me, the interviews at Office Hours for Season Three do not include me. That’s why I’ll be listening to Seasons One and Two.