Category: Novus Ordo Seclorum

Machen Had His Chance and Blew It

Published on by D. G. Hart57 Comments

Or so the neo-Calvinists and theonomists would have us believe. You see, in 1926 Machen testified before Congress as the representatives were deliberating on the formation of the Federal Department of Education. Machen’s testimony is here. What should be noted is that Machen appeared before Congress as a representative of the Sentinels of the Republic, a libertarian organization formed by Massachusetts small government types (this was no Christian Democratic Party). Even though identified as a minister in the Presbyterian Church and a professor of New Testament at Princeton, Machen avoided any attempt to make Christianity the norm for public education, especially when it came to teaching morality in schools. Here is an intriguing exchange:

SENATOR FERRIS: For my own information I wish to ask what you regard as the basic element or elements in moral conduct. Perhaps that is a foolish question.

DR. MACHEN: The basic elements in moral conduct?

SENATOR FERRIS: Yes, sir. What is the basis. I judge from your remarks that experience received minor consideration.

DR. MACHEN: Yes, sir — Well, I am an adherent of a certain religious group. We have our definite notion as to the basis of morality, and it is in my belief altogether a religious one. I intend to proclaim that basis of morality is the will of God as revealed by God, and I am interested in the right of all others to maintain that as the only basis of morality. I belong to what is often called a very strict sect, the Presbyterian Church, but it is a sect which has always been devoted to the principles of liberty; and I am unlike a great many of my fellow citizens — tolerance to me means not only tolerance for that with whichI am agreed, but it means also tolerance for that to which I am most violently opposed.

I was thoroughly opposed, for example, to the Lusk laws in the State of New York which were intended to bring about the closing of the Rand School in the city of New York. I cannot imagine anything more harmful than the Rand School; there is nothing to which I am more opposed, which I think more subversive of morality; and yet I was absolutely opposed to any such law as that. I believe in liberty, and, therefore, when I believe I have a right to proclaim the basis of morality which I think is only in the will of God, I also claim the right for other persons to proclaim whatever else they may hold with regard to it. But to proclaim in our public schools that morality is only the result of human experimentation — “this is the conduct which Uncle Sam has found in the course of American history to be right” — that, I think, is subversive of morality; and I do not believe that anyone can encourage moral conduct in others unless he has first in his own mind the notion of an absolute distinction and not a merely relative distinction between right and wrong.

I do not know whether that at all answers your question.

SENATOR FERRIS: I am just wondering whether there is any such thing as moral conduct in the United States Congress or among the citizens of the United States apart from a distinctively religious basis. I am just wondering whether the public schools have any function in the way of teaching morality which is not distinctively religious in its basic idea.

DR. MACHEN: I think that the solution lies not in a theoretic teaching in the public schools as to the basis of morality, because I do not think you can keep that free from religious questions; but I do hold that a teacher who himself or herself is imbued with the absolute distinction between right and wrong can maintain the moral standing, the moral temper of a public school.

SENATOR FERRIS: Is the ethical culturist ruled out from the consideration of morality in his views and conduct?

DR. MACHEN: I am not ruling out anybody at all, sir — the ethical culturist or anyone else.

SENATOR FERRIS: No; but if religion is the basic element in all morality, then can we have a morality that is not founded on a religious idea?

DR. MACHEN: I myself do not believe that you can have such a morality permanently, and that is exactly what I am interested in trying to get other people to believe; but I am not at all interested in trying to proclaim that view of mine by any measures that involve compulsion, and I am not interested in making the public school an agency for the proclamation of such a view; but I am interested in diminishing rather than increasing the function of the public school, in order to leave room for the opportunity of a propagation of the view that I hold in free conflict with all other views which may be held, in order that in that way the truth finally may prevail.

If Machen had wanted to take every thought captive, if he believed that the United States was founded on biblical teaching, why did he whiff on a softball that is right in a neo-Calvinist’s wheelhouse. Why nothing on no neutrality? Why nothing on the antithesis between the followers of Christ and the followers of Satan? Maybe he was a coward. Or maybe he distinguished between his duties as a churchman and those of a citizen in a republic that gave no preference to any religion.

I wonder if the transformationalists get goosebumps reading this Machen.

Religious Liberty in Geneva

Published on by D. G. Hart7 Comments

Okay, I know this is going to be anachronistic, to suggest that Calvin’s Geneva should conform to United Nations policy, but it may help to clarify differences between 1555 Geneva and 2013 United States.

First the eighteenth article from the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Then Tommy Kidd’s commentary on the Obama administration:

This statement is definitive because it is so specific. Religious liberty does not just entail the oft-criticized phrase “freedom of worship” that the Obama administration has often employed instead of the 1st amendment’s guarantee of “free exercise of religion.” Here religious liberty includes the freedom to convert to another religion, or to renounce religion altogether. This freedom is most obviously curtailed in the Muslim world, but also in places like China where many pay a steep political or legal price for openly professing faith.

It also entails the liberty to “manifest,” or to make public, one’s religion by expressing opinion, engaging in advocacy, and yes, attending worship services. This guarantee would also presumably include the freedom from government coercion requiring people of faith to engage in practices that violate conscience (such as military service or, more controversially, providing consumer wedding or church services to gay and lesbian couples, or offering contraceptive and abortifacient coverage to employees).

Debates about our current president aside, this is a pretty tall standard set for religious liberty. It was not the view that Calvin or Luther for that matter advocated. It did not become a desirable outlook until the late eighteenth century with the American and French revolutions. It may have become universally desirable during the middle decades of the twentieth century.

That rough historical schema should prompt readjustments to those who would attribute the American founding to Calvinism.

Is Joseph Epstein Off Limits to a Christian?

Published on by D. G. Hart39 Comments

About a year ago, Joseph Epstein, one of (all about) my favorite writers, produced a piece on the value of liberal learning. It is smart and clever, as Epstein’s essays always are, and this one helps me try to convince freshmen in Western Heritage of the value of Greek philosophy (during a wee peek at the Epicureans and Stoics; truth be told, it also allows the philosophically challenged like me to find a network time killer in the third week of classes).

But it occurred to me this morning while preparing for class that Epstein is also useful for exposing the posturing of transformationalists as either theonomists, fundamentalists, or both.

Epstein talks about the value of a liberal education in ways that seem impermissible to many neo-Calvinists who employ the language of w-w:

The death of liberal arts education would constitute a serious subtraction. Without it, we shall no longer have a segment of the population that has a proper standard with which to judge true intellectual achievement. Without it, no one can have a genuine notion of what constitutes an educated man or woman, or why one work of art is superior to another, or what in life is serious and what is trivial. The loss of liberal arts education can only result in replacing authoritative judgment with rivaling expert opinions, the vaunting of the second- and third-rate in politics and art, the supremacy of the faddish and the fashionable in all of life. Without that glimpse of the best that liberal arts education conveys, a nation might wake up living in the worst, and never notice.

Notice that Epstein makes these assertions without any reference to God, special revelation, or regeneration. (Why would he? He is not pretending to be a Christian.) He is thinking entirely as a human being. Some might say he is doing so — gasp — autonomously. But can anyone who is serious about literature and learning (Christian or no) really take issue with Epstein’s notion of a liberal education and its value? Someone like Bill Smith has questioned the idea of Christian math or Christian pedagogy with all the sense that common sense yields. But when it comes to a liberal education, are Calvinists really supposed to say that Christians know a liberal education better than non-Christians? Even though the liberal arts and their derivation from classical languages and letters by Christians predated Reformed Protestantism, we are now supposed to conclude that only faculty with a biblical or Reformed w-w will be the ones to yield a genuinely liberal education?

This is complete nonsense and amazingly smug, as if regeneration somehow gives Christians insights into tragedy, epistemology, or historical contingency. I have been around lots of Christians where those awarenesses have never shown the slightest signs of presence. And that’s because an education comes through lots of long hours of reading and reflection, and even then doesn’t necessarily take hold. You need a certain natural acumen for such things; regeneration cannot make a Christian intelligent (only God can and he does it through nature, not supernature).

And yet, transformationalists continue to opine that 2kers are the ones who are rocking the boat and upsetting the consensus of Reformed churches, as if a hyper-antithesis is not far more radical than anything 2k advocates are saying. Just yesterday I heard a podcast which described the Christian scholar’s task as one of bringing secular universities into conformity with biblical truth. The reason is that secular learning is illegitimate since it denies the fountain of all truth. Well, if secular universities are illegitimate, then what of secular governments? And if secular governments are illegitimate, what of secular persons? Is there a place in this world between the advents of Christ for non-Christian learning, non-Christian governments, and non-Christian persons (like Joseph Epstein)? If Epstein is wrong about sound learning and informed aesthetic judgments, if persons can only know good from bad literature by reading the Bible first, or can only form valid political arrangements by having Christians perform the political founding, or persons are not worthy of reading or hearing unless they are first regenerate, then Christians are in the same position as some forms of political Islam.

But Reformed Protestantism has never insisted on such a construction of the antithesis because it never questioned the legitimacy of contributions from non-Christians. Once you accept that people who do not know Christ, along with the institutions they found, are legitimate and reflect in some measure of the image of God in man along with the truths of general revelation, then you can aspire to be learned the way that Epstein is, or try to follow constitutional republicanism the way the founders of the U.S. did, or even read Plato and Thucydides for profit the way most college students in the West for centuries have (if you were rich and smart enough). If you appeal to common grace to free you from the polarities of such hyper-antithesis, by all means, go right ahead. That means you have to stop bellyaching about secular learning, secular governments, and secular persons because common grace is a way of affirming that all of those institutions and people have a legitimate role in God’s gracious ends. It also means giving up transformationalism because common grace has already done what you seemed to think transforming the culture would do.

But if you draw a line between the regenerate and unregenerate and extend it to intellectual life, or institutions, whether political or educational, you have removed yourself from the history of the West and taken a harder line than even some popes were prepared to go. You have not gone to the Land of Chocolatebut to the Twilight Zone.

Could Keller Have Saved Detroit?

Published on by D. G. Hart69 Comments

I haven’t seen too many posts from the transformers about Detroit’s decline and bankruptcy. (I can’t say that I would be all that concerned with Detroit if I were not now a Michigander.) Detroit is not chic. Even when it was the Paris of the mid-West it was still in fly over country and didn’t have the ginormous buildings that made East Coast folks marvel at Chicago. Then there was the automobile industry. If Detroit had been the home of Mercedes or BMW maybe New Yorkers would have cared. Just as likely, New Yorkers (and Philadelphians) would have preferred Chevys and Fords if Detroit made Mercedes and BeeMers.

Still, the woes of Detroit do put into perspective the hyperventilation that goes on in some neo-Calvinist circles when folks talk about the power of the gospel to redeem all of life. Cases like Detroit would certainly call for a bit of qualification to follow those inspirational claims since I am not sure that even having thirty full Reformed and Presbyterian congregations could have forestalled a constellation of circumstances that calls for David Simon’s genius. In other words, if you whet people’s appetites for transforming culture, then don’t they become disappointed when Detroits come along (as Geneva did not though its ecclesial fortunes have declined while its political and economic success has soured soared).

In which case, what the gospel does is not cultural but spiritual. And what works culturally are matters, still from God, but having little to do with what he sent his only begotten son to do.

And to help with this lesson in two-kingdom distinction-making, along comes an astute post by Matt Feeney on why the suburbs overwhelmed Detroit — because Detroit was a city that resembled a suburb:

For a long time I’ve thought an underappreciated factor in Detroit’s demise was this mix of housing, or, this lack of a mix of housing. The city is a virtual monoculture, residentially speaking, 140 square miles of detached, owner-occupied, single-family homes. Being a monoculture made it vulnerable to a particular pathogen that infected many large cities, but not so thoroughly as it did Detroit, the run on real estate known as white flight. If you were renting an apartment in a dense patch of, say, Chicago, in the 1950s or early 60s, the distant sound of whites fleeing areas to the south and west perhaps foretold a change in your neighborhood, which you may or may not have welcomed, but it didn’t make you panic that your biggest investment was heading for a collapse in value, because you were just renting. And so those who did own houses on the leafy back stretches of your cross-street could take your relative equanimity, and of the whole clot of other renters you’re part of, into account. Not everyone would be reacting to the same cues. Change would be slower and less total. It might be worth it to stay put.

Homeowners in Detroit had no such break on their panic. It was all houses, almost all owned by the families inside them. Maybe they were racists, the white people who owned and sold those houses, but it wouldn’t have mattered. You didn’t have to be a racist to flee whitely. You just had to suspect that some meaningful portion of your neighbors were, or that some meaningful portion of your non-racist neighbors were engaged in a slightly more anxious calculation than you were, for your market behavior to become identical to theirs: Sell! Racial fear and the endemic anxiety of homeowning fueled each other. The ’67 riots didn’t help, but those two factors were already spinning in a feedback loop.

This suggests another convenient, Jane Jacobs- and James Scott-inspired hypothesis I’ll just throw out there: Detroit’s stunning increase in violence, which made it the Murder Capitol in ’73, was not unrelated to this housing scheme. As in arid planned cities like Brasilia that turn sketchier than anyone imagined, life in the atomized residential blocks of Detroit is carried on less visibly, more amenably to crime, than in dense urban streets with 24-hour business happening under the streetlights of busy intersections. Crime obviously happens amid urban density, but maybe it’s easier for violence and fear to invade and conquer a place where so much less other life is visibly happening. And maybe this housing scheme heightened racial suspicion by making so much black-white interaction so private, comparatively, and high-stakes, subjectively, our property lines tending to be etched in vigilance already, if not yet fear: Why is that black man walking down our all-white street? Past our homes? Where our children live?

This non-mix of housing has of course made Detroit a less attractive target for repopulation and gentrification than pretty much any city of its original size, not to mention of its cultural prominence. (And this is the real issue in this conversation, not why Detroit went downhill – virtually all eastern cities lost jobs and people and saw crime rise after WWII – but why it kept going downhill and saw no revival as even humble rivals like Cleveland did.) Indeed, some of Detroit’s closer suburbs feel more like urban neighborhoods, by the light of the current urban BoBo revival, than most of Detroit does, or did, or, probably, could. By the 1980s middle-/working-class Royal Oak was already becoming a hip quasi-urban destination, with clubs and restaurants lining Woodward Avenue. More recently this role’s been taken up by Ferndale, right across blighted Eight Mile Road to the north, a humble old working-class suburb of little houses that used to be called “Fabulous Ferndale” ironically, because of its dilapidation under the care of poor whites, but which now bears that handle unironically, or in ironically self-canceling irony about the old irony – because it’s hip now, and because it’s where the gay people live and, perforce, fabulous. Buzzing right up against Detroit as it does, anchored in a strip of Nine Mile Road that probably has more vintage clothing stores than trees, peopled by hipsters living in its low-slung houses on its highly uninteresting streets, Ferndale feels like the gentrifying BoBo impulse throwing up its hands and saying, “Look, we’re really trying, but this is the best we can do.”

City planning in the name of Christ might help though it would likely add unnecessarily to too many meetings. But how about some basic city planning with or without Christ for all those pikers living this side of glory?

Love of Country

Published on by D. G. Hart63 Comments

I was glad to see Matt Holst challenge modestly Rick Phillips’ patriotic post about the need for Christians to love the United States. One of the best ways to register a 2k perspective is to ask whether Christianity has a special relationship with any particular nation, or whether Christians themselves have an obligation, no matter their citizenship, to the United States. Christians in the U.S. would not like instructions to love Mexico on the fifth day of May and would likely snicker at similar exhortations about a duty to love Canada on July 1. Why American Protestants don’t recognize the problem that Christian patriotism poses for Christians who are not citizens but reside LEGALLY in the U.S. is a riddle I am still trying to solve. But Charles Hodge’s argument in the context of the Civil War that the church supporting the Federal Government was akin to singing the Star Spangled Banner at the observance of the Lord’s Supper captures the 2k dynamic nicely. So does a Dutchman asking why a congregation has a U.S. flag at the front of its church.

Holst’s objection started with an acknowledgment that he is a “furr-ner,” an outsider:

It is always an interesting time of year for a foreigner to be in America. Every Fourth of July, I jest with our church members that the Sunday morning sermon closest to the Fourth will be on Romans 13 – submission to the civil magistrate. People laugh…usually. The obvious historical reasons aside, it is even more interesting for someone from Britain to be in the States on this date because Britain is a peculiarly unpatriotic place – nothing like America in that sense. I don’t recall ever seeing Union flags displayed on people’s houses, except in peculiar circumstances such as a royal birth or sporting achievement. The view of the armed forces in the UK has been nothing like that in America; it is much more low-key and much less admired, to be quite honest. To be clear, I am not saying that such is a good thing.

Moreover, Britain is itself a nation divided into four countries and four separate identities. When asked where I am from, my answer is Wales, not the UK. Speaking to most people over here, I inevitably have to explain where Wales is located. As an aside, I was once talking to a seminary student, who commented “You’re not from around here are you?”. I replied “No I’m from Wales”. To which he replied, in all seriousness, “Ah, a good Scotsman!” The conversation ended pretty quickly after that. My point is that the UK has multiple identities, with very few Welshmen being willing to accept the moniker “Scottish” and absolutely no Welshman willing to accept the label “English”. In spite of a rich and varied history, and maybe because of it, the UK does not have the same level or expressions of patriotism regularly evidenced on this side of the Atlantic.

In other words, Christianity transcends nations and so calling for Christian love of country only begins to make sense if you create space between country and faith, with patriotism being one form of affection, membership in the church another.

But Holst bring up some other matters that deserve comment, especially his contrast between the UK and the U.S. In fact, he touches on a subject that I am not sure Brits necessarily understand any better than Yanks, that is, the nature of British identity. Sports journalists needed to wrestle with this recently when Andrew Murray won at Wimbledon. Is Murray a Scot? A Brit? An Englishman? Some conjectured that whenever Murray lost he was a Scot, but when he won he was English. Indeed, among the three kingdoms that comprise the “United” Kingdom, national identity is anything but fixed, at least as J.C.D. Clark explains:

‘British” as a term in general usage has therefore had at least two senses. One was a spontaneous or encouraged Unionist identity allegedly felt equally by Scots, Irish, Welsh and English. This may indeed have been problematic. But another usage was more prevalent: as employed by the four groups, usually when abroad, ‘British’ was an official, political euphemism for one’s sectional identity, whether English, Welsh, Irish, or Scots: it was to a considerable degree synonymous with, and not a substitute for, sectional national identities. If so, it matters less that ‘British’ in the sense of the whig defenders of 1707 had shallow foundations: ‘Britishness’ in its prevalent sense rested in large part on the ancient and massive foundations of Englishness, and the equally ancient if differently formulated identities of England’s neighbours.

. . . . Britain was not invented; it developed. It was not devised by a small number of cultural entrepreneurs, acting like advertising executives to package and market a new product; it grew, the often unintended result of actions by men and women in many walks of life, often, too the result of conflicts and cross-purposes.

But contrary to Holst (and I am not criticizing as much as I am working out some of my own fascination with religious affiliations and national identities), a sense of Britishness did emerge, according to Clark, very much with the aid of Protestantism:

The ancient identity of the Ecclesia Anglicana meant that the Reformation did not at once create a unitary national identity. As a religious message of universal validity, Protestantism initially implied a reaction against the national subdivision of the universal church; only subsequently were some sections of ‘Protestantism’ identified with national churches and so with national identities. One strand of the Reformation stressed a pan-European solidarity between believers in the Reformed traditions, a shared sense of a supra-national destiny. Since the English had ‘a long-standing reputation for xenophobia’ even by 1500, it did not help that Protestant theology was originally associated with German reformers; not until the reign of Mary I (I553-8) were reformers ‘given the opportunity to sail for the first time under Protestant colours.’ Anti-popery, too, could be an international phenomenon, and not until Elizabeth’s reign did an assumption become prevalent that England had a special, or even the leading, role in that drama.125 The church in England only adopted the label ‘Protestant’ for itself in the first decade of the seventeenth century, and then in order to distinguish itself from both Rome and Geneva: Anglican Protestantism did not become pan-European. In Scotland and Northern Ireland the Reformation went much further: confessional differences have been basic to the emerging ‘three kingdoms’ explanation of the dynamics of state formation in the British Isles,” and when Wales acquired a distinct confessional identity from Protestant Dissent in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, that principality took its place as a fourth component in the model.

So it is not the case that Americans are the exceptions who link their faith to their patriotism. They learned it from the Brits, or English, or Scots, or Welsh, or Irish. For a popular rendition of English conflation of faith and patriotism, see the third season of Downton Abbey where Lord Grantham cannot tolerate the idea that his granddaughter, who is the child of an Irish Roman Catholic — chauffeur no less, will be baptized a Roman Catholic. The English national identity was very much bound up with the Protestantism of the Church of England.

But if that little hiccup of British civil religion is so obvious to American viewers of Downton Abbey, why aren’t similar conflations of faith and nationalism obvious to Christians in the U.S.? One reason may be the very notion of love of country. Holst makes the useful point that such love is not commanded in Scripture:

. . . when I read that a Christian is to love his country, I’m left a little bit confused. What exactly am I to love? Presidents? Congressmen? Hills, valleys streams, lakes (I have no difficulty loving them)? The people? The armed forces? Government? I wonder if Rick’s advice, which I regularly find beneficial and prudent, has, on this matter, slipped into an amorphous Americanity – a more subtle form of “God and Country” which is so prevalent in certain areas of the church. Such is the kind of Christianity which has the American flag on one side of the pulpit and the Christian flag (wherever that came from?) on the other. America, like every other Western nation has had a remarkable yet chequered history – morally, economically and militarily. What are we to love, and what kind of love are we to show?

Holst may be confused because most modern citizens of nation-states are confused. A colleague tells me that the proper way to love the United States is to think of it as a people and a place. Loving the American people can be a challenge since it would mean having to love Alex Rodgriguez along with Phil Hendrie. But loving a place may be easier if we took a greater delight in the locales where we live. Certainly, though, if we identify the United States with its government (and a chief part of that government’s expenditure — the military and all those damned wars), we will have a different kind of love than the older variety of love of country.

I myself do not think it is wrong to love country as long as it is a love qualified by higher and holier affections (no, not those kind). I love my wife, for instance. The Bible tells me I have to. But I also love our surviving cat. The Bible doesn’t tell me to do that. Nor does it prohibit such love, which is one of those key points bound up with Christian liberty and two-kingdom theology. We are free to love a country (I think) and we are free not to love a country. We are not free to identify a country with the kingdom of Christ.

All Down Hill After John Witherspoon?

Published on by D. G. Hart22 Comments

Anthony Bradley wonders (again) what has happened to Presbyterians and why they lost their momentum. First it was as popular voices among evangelicals, now it’s as dispensers of wisdom about the world:

I am wondering, then, for those who are raising their children in the Presbyterian tradition what resources exists for forming Presbyterian identity in terms of an understanding marriage & family (i.e., the relationship between covenant marriage & covenant baptism in America’s marriage debate), issues related to social & political power & federal political theory (which is derivative of federal theology), divorce and remarriage, war and social conflict, apologetics, and so on? How does a covenantal world-and-life view, and Presbyterian understandings of power structures, unlock the implications for a theology of work & economics when applied to international third world development, and so on?

By extension, I am also wondering what happened to Presbyterians as known and normative leaders of culturally leveraged institutions in American society and culture? Mark Twain and William Faulkner were Presbyterian. More Vice-Presidents of the United States have been Presbyterian more than any other denomination (Presbyterians rank 2nd for the US Presidency). Presbyterians rank 2nd in terms of placement on the Supreme Court in US History. I could go on. . . .

An initial thought is to wonder why Presbyterians need to go to another Presbyterian for instruction on the federal government. Isn’t reading the Federalists and Anti-Federalists (Presbyterian or not?) good enough?

Another wonder is whether Presbyterians have ever been all that influential as Bradley’s post assumes. To meet his criteria — “what Presbyterians are speaking to these issues or leading institutions that are (like think tanks or colleges and universities” — at least three sets of circumstances need to be in play. First, a person needs to be Presbyterian (what kind — Old Side, New Life, Neo-Calvinist — is another question)? Second, such a person needs to be writing on a vast number of public policy type subjects. So far Tim and David Bayly suffice. But then, third, and this is the kicker, the person needs to be sufficiently well known for folks in the pew to consult him or her (sorry, Tim and David). As it stands, lots of Presbyterians have lots of thoughts on all sorts of subjects and publish them (on the interweb). But no one of them stands out with Francis Schaeffer notoriety.

The problem, then, may have less to do with Presbyterian decline than with the diversification of communication technology and the formation of diverse pockets of affinity.

At the same time, Presbyterians need not feel so bad, at least if misery loves company. Bradley’s question applies just as much to Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians, and — boy does it ever — to Congregationalists (nee Puritans). Among Western Christians, Rome stands out as distinctly different in this regard since Roman Catholics have an endless supply of public intellectuals who are doing their best imitations of popes, who speak constantly to a host of issues below their pay grade. This may explain much of Rome’s contemporary appeal to converts. If you want a church with all the answers to life’s pressing questions — don’t go to Guy Noir but to the Vatican. But if you believe in the spirituality of the church and the sufficiency of Scripture, you don’t need a Presbyterian pontiff to tell you how to live. You go to church, say your prayers, work dutifully at your callings, and take your lumps.

One last thought about Anthony’s question comes from a period I know relatively well. During the first half of the twentieth century we did have Presbyterians who spoke on any number of issues, were well known and so had pretty large followings. These were William Jennings Bryan, Billy Sunday, J. Gresham Machen, and Carl McIntire. Maybe 1 in 4 isn’t bad. But if that’s going to be the percentage of Presbyterians we should heed when they start to pontificate about all of life, I’ll take my chances with guys who write for American Conservative.

Why Is it Godly Patriotism When We Do It, and Jihad When They Do It?

Published on by D. G. Hart52 Comments

Making the world safe for Julia Ward Howe (thanks to our Iowa correspondent):

Holy war can seem like something that happened long ago or that happens far away — the Crusades of medieval Europe, for example, or jihadists fighting secular forces today. But since their country’s founding, Americans have often thought of their wars as sacred, even when the primary objectives have been political.

This began with the American Revolution. When colonists declared their independence on July 4, 1776, religious conviction inspired them. Because they believed that their cause had divine support, many patriots’ ardor was both political and religious. They saw the conflict as a just, secular war, but they fought it with religious resolve, believing that God endorsed the cause. As Connecticut minister Samuel Sherwood preached in 1776: “God Almighty, with all the powers of heaven, are on our side. Great numbers of angels, no doubt, are encamping round our coast, for our defense and protection.”

Several founding fathers were more theologically liberal than the typical evangelical Protestant of their day. Still, few were anti-religious, and the nation’s architects often stated that religion supported virtue, which was essential to patriotism. “A true patriot must be a religious man,” wrote Abigail Adams, wife of America’s second president.

George Washington believed so strongly in the religious case for patriotism that he demanded chaplains for the Continental Army. He appealed to the Continental Congress for higher pay for chaplains, and when one chaplain impressed the general, Washington went to great lengths to retain him.

That chaplain was Abiel Leonard, of Woodstock, Conn. Washington wrote letters to the governor of Connecticut and to Leonard’s church, hoping they would support the pastor’s extended service in the Army. In his letter to the governor, Washington wrote that Leonard had proved to be “a warm and steady friend to his country and taken great pains to animate the soldiers, and impress them with a knowledge of the important rights we are contending for.”

For Washington, chaplains not only supplied moral guidance but appealed for God’s support in battle, which was vital. He believed that the war’s outcome rested in God’s hands, and he ordered his soldiers to attend “divine service, to implore the blessings of heaven upon the means used for our safety and defense.”

We cannot fully understand the revolution without recognizing such appeals for God’s favor on the battlefield. Both the founders and ministers understood these ideas because they knew scripture, one of the major sources of American patriotism.

No problem here, though, because it’s a wonderful day in the neighborhood:

Talk of glorious causes has persisted from the revolution through the war on terror. Some Americans think of the United States as “God’s New Israel,” a nation on a divine mission, its wars blessed by God. Sometimes rhetoric makes this view obvious: Soon after Sept. 11, 2001, for example, the White House apologized after President George W. Bush used the word “crusade” to describe the battle against terrorism.

But references to religion can be subtler, or even obligatory, in political speeches. Consider President Obama’s July 4 speech from last year, in which he praised military sacrifices and ended with: “God bless you. God bless your families. And God bless these United States of America.”

We pass over such niceties as commonplace, almost dutiful, in political speech, but they are religious statements. Their roots go back to the revolution, when colonists — from evangelical preachers to founders such as Washington — asked for God’s blessing. Whatever century it is, our leaders often include some suggestion of the same biblical themes that filled revolutionary-era sermons, including sacrifice, courage for the fight and appeals for God’s providential blessings on America. We are, it seems, one nation under God after all.

Perhaps the reason American Christians permit blasphemy in their worship services is that the idolatry of U.S. civil religion has made them immune to it.

No peace, no justice.

American Pretty Goodness

Published on by D. G. Hart68 Comments

I suppose Joe Carter thinks this finding is a positive attribute about American evangelicalism, but a 2ker can always spot the forest. USA Today indicates that white evangelicals are the most patriotic (since this excludes African-American evangelicals, correlating evangelicalism and U.S. nationalism is a question in search of an answer):

When it comes to God and country, white evangelicals report the most intense patriotic feelings in a new poll, with more than two-thirds (68 percent) saying they are extremely proud to be an American.

That figure was markedly higher than for white mainline Protestants (56 percent), minority Christians (49 percent), Catholics (48 percent) and religiously unaffiliated Americans (39 percent), according to the study, conducted by the Washington-based Public Religion Research Institute in partnership with Religion News Service.

White evangelicals are also more likely than any other religious group surveyed to believe that God has granted the U.S. a special role in history (84 percent) and to say they will likely attend a public July 4th celebration (62 percent).

On the other end of the spectrum, relatively few religiously unaffiliated Americans believe in a God-given American exceptionalism, (40 percent) or plan to attend a public Independence Day celebration (48 percent).

Eric Metaxas, the popular Christian author and speaker, said evangelicals “are not patriotic and pro-American in a tribalistic, nationalistic, or jingoistic sense.

“But they do tend to be pro-America because they believe that the ideas of the Founders — religious liberty at the head of them — have been a huge blessing to those on our shores — and to those beyond them.”

I have often wondered why the evangelical laity and evangelical academics are so keen to insist on a Christian basis for the United States. One theory is that evangelicals, without the help of confessional Protestantism and its teaching about general revelation (something the neo-Cals have not helped with in their insistence that special revelation must interpret general revelation), have no middle category. Something is either good or it is bad. Evangelicals lack the category of common. Better, they lack the notion of good in contrast to holy and profane. As I have said before, the logic of the Lord’s Day is that common activities, like plumbing, are profane if performed on the Sabbath (without the warrant of an emergency). So plumbing is neither sacred, nor profane. It is simply good (because of the goodness of creation).

Another way of trying to account for evangelical beliefs about American greatness is the analogy of marriage. Christians are not supposed to marry unbelievers. Fine. But what happens with love for a country that is unbelieving? Evangelicals can’t love it. That would be a mixed patriotism. So evangelicals need to have a Christian United States in order to justify their love of country.(This may also be related to the language of “Great” as opposed to “Pretty Good” Awakenings.)

I am still learning about romantic nationalism from learned colleagues and fellow elders, but American greatness seems to hang on the notion that the United States is greatest nation on God’s green earth — sort of like the blond-bomb shell who wins Miss America, has a Masters in financial planning, and cooks a mean meatloaf. The perfect wife and the great nation can have no flaws. Any wife knows better than this (both about wives and husbands).

So why can’t evangelicals follow the heeding of Scripture, put no hope in princes (or republics), and simply love their country the way they love the old drunk uncle who shows up uncomfortably at July 4th picnics and makes the youngsters have to whisper questions to their parents?

What if We Thought about Marriage the Way We Think about Driving?

Published on by D. G. Hart75 Comments

The fallout from the Supreme Court’s ruling on DOMA and California’s Proposition 8 continues to pile up. But even before the justices tallied their votes and wrote contrary opinions, some could see that the debate over gay marriage had lost its way and that marriage in the United States was in bad shape. For instance, in the same issue of The New Republic came two pieces that indicate why the current debates over marriage are missing the civil (as opposed to religious) point.

Michael Kinsley, who edited the magazine when Andrew Sullivan first tried the idea of gay marriage (1989), believes that Ben Carson’s remarks about homosexuality (on Hannity and Andrea Mitchell) revealed an orthodoxy on the left every bit as powerful (probably more) than most Christian communions:

There are those who would have you think that gays and liberals are conducting some sort of jihad against organized Christianity and that gay marriage is one of the battlefields. That is a tremendous exaggeration. But it’s not a complete fantasy. And for every mouth that opens, a dozen stay clamped shut. In the state of Washington, a florist refused to do the wedding of a long-time customer “because of my relationship with Jesus Christ.” Note that “long-time customer.” This woman had been happily selling flowers to the groom. She just didn’t want to be associated with the wedding. Now she is being sued by the state attorney general. DC Comics dropped writer Orson Scott Card’s planned Superman book when thousands signed a petition demanding it because of his many homophobic remarks.

Thought experiment: If you were up for tenure at a top university, or up for a starring role in a big movie, or running for office in large swaths of the country, would it hurt your chances more to announce that you are gay or to announce that you’ve become head of an anti-gay organization? The answer seems obvious. So the good guys have won. Why do they now want to become the bad guys?

In other words, gay marriage advocates are no more tolerant than their opponents who don’t tolerate gay marriage.

But what would the debate look like if we lowered the stakes from “I’m right, you’re a cretin,” to what is actually good for the righteous and cretins who have to live together and increasingly support each other through government programs, insurance, and other forms of imposed solidarity? In the same issue of TNR, for instance, came a story about the consequences of loneliness and an implicit brief for more and stronger marriages:

If we now know that loneliness, a social emotion, can reach into our bodies and rearrange our cells and genes, what should we do about it? We should change the way we think about health. James Heckman, a Nobel Prize–winning economist at the University of Chicago who tabulates the costs of early childhood deprivation, speaks bitterly of “silos” in health policy, meaning that we see crime and low educational achievement as distinct from medical problems like obesity or heart disease. As far as he’s concerned, these are, in too many cases, symptoms of the same social disorder: the failure to help families raise their children. . . . As nearly half of all marriages continue to end in divorce, as marriage itself floats further out of reach for the undereducated and financially strapped, childhood has become a more solitary and chaotic experience. Single mothers don’t have a lot of time to spend with their children, nor, in most cases, money for emotionally enriching social activities.

“As inequality has increased, childhood inequality has increased,” Heckman said, “So has inequality of parenting.” For the first time in 30 years, mental health disabilities such as ADHD outrank physical ones among American children. Heckman doesn’t think that’s only because parents seek out attention-deficit diagnoses when their children don’t come home with A’s. He thinks it’s also because emotional impoverishment embeds itself in the body. “Mothers matter,” he says, “and mothering is in short supply.”

Heckman has been analyzing data from two famous early-childhood intervention programs, the Abecedarian Project of the ’70s and the Perry Preschool project of the ’60s. Both have furnished ample evidence that, if you enroll very young children from poor families in programs that give both them and their parents an extra boost, then they grow up to be wealthier and healthier than their counterparts—less fat, less sick, better educated, and, for men, more likely to hold down a job. In the case of the Perry Preschool, Heckman estimated that each dollar invested yielded $7 to $12 in savings over the span of decades. One of the most effective economic and social policies, he told me, would be “supplementing the parenting environment of disadvantaged young children.”

I suspect that the author, Judith Shulevitz, TNR’s science editor, is in favor of gay marriage, given her status at TNR. But aside from the politics of homosexuality, folks who live in the United States actually care about the health of marriages and families. And I suppose that if people like Ms. Shulevitz understood that anti-gay marriage folks also care about the health of marriages and families and the well-being of their society, they might have a profitable conversation about what kind of policies states and the feds should have to bolster the family.

I understand that marriage is more basic or primal than car driving, but I do wonder if the Christian approach to gay marriage debates should have been more akin to the kind of reaction that would greet a proposal to allow drivers to use both the left and right side of the road. We could marshal statistics about the dangers of auto-driving that exist now when everyone already drives on the right side of the road. That might be enough to say, “you know, we have enough accidents already without throwing another wrinkle into navigating big pieces of machinery on wheels around our fair land.” We could also project what kind of fatalities and injuries might result from allowing driving on both sides of the road. This would likely close the debate. No reason to get huffy about the sin of driving on the left side (since the Brits already do). Just think about the temporal realities of driving and how to make it as safe as possible. Why not do the same with marriage as a civil (not religious) institution?

Consistency is the Hobgoblin of Christianity

Published on by D. G. Hart14 Comments

Anthony Esolen has a usually provocative post about the inconsistencies of our times. He calls this the Contradictory Values Syndrome.

. . . on Monday, the harridans of the National Organization for Women announce their great discovery that it is a bad thing for men to beat women black and blue. We wonder what took them so long to discover it. APPLES FALL TO THE GROUND, runs the headline, with the helpful addition, Effects on Agriculture Undetermined. So terrible a thing it is for women to be beaten that they must promote a national law, the Violence Against Women Act, to ensure the safety of women against the fist of a brawling boyfriend.

Then on Tuesday, the same harridans announce the great discovery that it is a good thing for women to join the infantry, to confront not boyfriends, but enemy men who will be at the peak of their physical prowess, armed to the teeth, and filled with the rage of killing and plunder and rape. The chivalry or plain common decency that once protected a woman against brawling—or war—is derided as a masculine plot to keep women in subjection. . . .

On Wednesday, the keepers of our national morality inveigh against a priest or a coach who entices a teenage boy into sodomy. On Thursday, the same keepers inveigh against the Boy Scouts, for shying away from scoutmasters who might do the same.

I am not about to take on Esolen, especially since the flip-flops he notices would be hard even for Ethan Coen to script. At the same time, I am a tad sensitive about consistency. One reason is that being a Protestant and belonging to conservative circles appears to be contradictory. Another is that practically every post the Baylys or Rabbi Bret writes in derision of 2k contains a huff about how inconsistent 2kers are who oppose homosexuality in the church but not in the public square.

At the same time, I wonder what the advocates of consistency make of the consequences of their quest (or if they notice that Roman Catholics and neo-Calvinists, both forged in the fires of the French Revolution, pursue the same end of a society rooted in Christian convictions — as opposed to the other kind [read secular]). The way I figure, consistency between faith and politics or church and the public square lands you in one of two places. The first makes society Christian (as in theonomy) and leaves no room for the un-Christian (read Jew, Protestant or Roman Catholic, Mormon, Muslim). Here society must conform to God’s law, a demand that is seriously at odds with the United States’ founding as well as the experience of Jesus and the apostles. The second makes Christianity conform to society (as in liberal Christianity) and regards non-Christians as Christian as long as they conform to Christian behavior. Both places feature the Christian moral code as essential to Christianity, though the theonomic morality is more tough minded than the liberal Christian (think adultery as a capital offense). Another difference is that the theonomist may actually acknowledge that a member of a Christian society needs to be regenerate to have any chance of observing God’s law. The liberal Christian generally conceives of human nature as sufficiently good to comply with the demands of biblical or ecclesiastical standards.

Since most moderns don’t want to exclude people from their societies (with the exception of undocumented aliens), theonomy is a tough sell. But the liberal Christian response is so common that even the pope can sound like he is giving into it.

The takeaway here is that the gospel cannot be applied “consistently” to society. Grace, mercy, and forgiveness are not the goals that motivate foreign or domestic policy (though the Amish may be giving it a run). Now, of course, someone may want to say that grace, mercy, and forgiveness are not of the essence of Christianity. Instead, the law is, and so making a society conform to Christian law is how we arrive at a Christian society. The problem with that logic, aside from Protestantism and all that material-principle-of-the-Reformation-business, is that it completely ignores what happened to the Israelites where the law did not lead to human “flourishing” but to human diaspora.

The other takeaway is that morality does exist without Christianity. We used to call this civic as opposed to spiritual (or true) goodness. Whatever the reasons for such goodness, it exists, whether in Sweden or at a street corner where a tatted and severely pierced twenty-something waits for a light to signal he can cross the street. Calvinists generally want to encourage the civic virtues for the sake of social order and the safety of the church. But the orthodox ones have always been careful to distinguish civic from Christian virtue.

Works done by unregenerate men, although for the matter of them they may be things which God commands; and of good use both to themselves and others: yet, because they proceed not from an heart purified by faith; nor are done in a right manner, according to the Word; nor to a right end, the glory of God, they are therefore sinful, and cannot please God, or make a man meet to receive grace from God: and yet, their neglect of them is more sinful and displeasing unto God. (WCF 16.7)

Without that distinction you lose the fall, regeneration, salvation, and the third-use of the law (for starters). So the next time someone objects to the inconsistencies of 2k advocates, say “bless those 2kers for their gospel inconsistency.”