Thanks to Jeffrey Polet over at Front Porch Republic.
But this isn’t as good as this classic from the BBC men who put sophistry into philosophy.
Category: Wilderness Wanderings
I'm Brilliant (at least religiously)
The new Pew Forum Poll on religious knowledge in the U.S. is out and generating comments at different blogs. The general theme is how ignorant Americans are. But any American can take a sample quiz and see whether they are that dumb. I took it and it turns out I am smart.
I can’t say that this will send me out in search of a beer to chug or a co-ed to kiss. The questions did not seem all that difficult.
What I do find interesting is the answers on which Americans stumbled the most. Coming in with only 11% (average) correct answers was: “Which one of these preachers participated in the period of religious activity known as the First Great Awakening?” Jonathan Edwards, Billy Graham, or Charles Finney. Surprisingly, those who identified themselves as evangelical only got the question right 15% of the time. (Hey, if evangelicals actually studied history would they still be evangelical?)
Next in difficulty was the following: ” According to rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court, is a public school teacher permitted to read from the Bible as an example of literature, or not?” Yes, permitted or No, not permitted. Americans gave correct answers only 23% of the time. (Evangelicals answered it correctly by a rate of 26%; Jewish Americans scored the best with 42%.) This would seem to indicate that the legal difference between teaching about religion and indoctrination is a distinction lost on many Americans.
Finally, the fifth most difficult question (one point behind a question on Job and two points behind another on Hinduism) was this: “Which of the following best describes the Catholic teaching about the bread and wine used for Communion?” The bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus Christ or
The bread and wine are symbols of the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Here evangelicals scored as well as Mormons (40%), with White Roman Catholics (59%) and Hispanic Roman Catholics (47%) pushing up the averages sufficiently so that 40% of all Americans answered the question correctly.
Rather than revealing how dumb Americans are, these questions suggest that Christians in the U.S. understand an important point of doctrine and practice much better than a fact from church history or the reasons behind a Supreme Court decision. Again, the questions are not on the order of rocket science, but I am somewhat heartened to see that a majority of Roman Catholics and Protestants in America are not ignorant of one of the major points of contention at the time of the Reformation. Maybe Protestantism still lives. (And who says Old Life is always negative?)
Make My Joy Complete?
After last night’s Phillies’ 1-0 victory over the Braves — their tenth in-a-row — it is hard not to feel down-right gleeful as a Phillies fan. Not only have the Phils seemed to work out many kinks from an injury ridden season and a poor first half, but they are doing this without Jimmy Rollins who was 2007 MVP of the National League. (Does Phil’s GM Reuben Amaro get enough credit for acquiring Wilson Valdez, even while receiving accolades for picking up Roy Oswald to make up for the indiscretion of giving up Cliff Lee?)
The problem with my joy is that it comes with knowledge of friends’ grief. Back in 2008 when the Phils won it all, they owed part of their success to the Met’s failure. Granted, the Metropolitans’ September ’08 performance was not as bad as 2007 when the Phils came from 7 1/2 games back to win the division (and then get crushed by the Rockies in the first round). But the Mets did have a 3 1/2 game lead in 2008 with three weeks to go. Normally, a Philadelphia fan gets a huge kick from seeing the home team win and any New York team lose — yes, Philadelphia does not always wear its inferiority complex with aplomb — who does? But in this case, my sidekick at Old Life is a Mets fan. So I couldn’t celebrate as heartily as I wanted because I could well imagine some of John Muether’s pain. By the way, one way I have found to like Mets fans — it is very hard, after all — is to remember that these are New Yorkers who decided not to root for the Yankees. That makes their value go way up.
This year the Metropolitans have not been a factor since the All-Star game, so my mirth could find outlets even in the company of Mr. Muether. But now comes my empathy for a friend who is a fairly strong Braves fan. He will remain nameless, but knowing his own hopes for the Braves and how the Phils may have seriously hurt Atlanta’s chance to make the playoffs, my step today has been a little heavier than it would be if say the Phils had just swept Blue Jays. (Does Canada even deserve a baseball franchise? Why not Canadian baseball with only 2 outs per inning and bases 100 meters apart?)
It may be a stretch, but I find an analogy here in the realm of debates about 2k. The opponents appear to be very quick and ready to celebrate apparent contradictions, failure to answer questions, and departures from Reformed worthies. The spirit that informs anti-modern 2k proponents is one of a Philadelphia fan after an Eagles defeat of the New York Football Giants — strident and ungracious. I am not one to play the 1 Cor. 13 card. Sometimes debate gets personal and feelings get hurt. It comes with the territory and certainly the blogosphere encourages bluster. But I cannot figure out why anti-2k folks feel the urge not only to win but to subject the other side to humiliation.
Of course, they haven’t won any more than another Phillies pennant will somehow make up for the losingest franchise in professional sports history.
Mencken Day 2010
Tomorrow H. L Mencken would have turned 130. Today, to honor that anniversary, the folks at the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore and the Mencken Society put on a program that included Jonathan Yardley, book critic at that Washington Post, giving the annual Mencken Day Lecture. What follows is from the newly published set of Mencken’s Prejudices from the Library of America Series.
Almost the only thing I believe in with a childlike and unquestioning faith, in this world of doubts and delusions, is free speech; nevertheless, I find it increasingly difficult to sympathize with the pedagogues who, ever and anon, are heaved out of some fresh-water college for trying to exercise it. Why? Mainly, perhaps , because I can’t get rid of the suspicion that nothing a pedagogue ever says, as pedagogue, is worth hearing – that his avocation is as fatal to sense as that of an archbishop, a Federal judge, or one of the automata in Mr. Ford’s great squirrel cage at Detroit. But also, no doubt, because I am obsessed by the superstition that, assuming him miraculously to have sense, he is so much out of place in any ordinary American college as an archbishop would be in a bordello.
What ails all these bogus martyrs is a false theory of education. They seem to believe that its aim is to fill the pupil’s head with a mass of provocative and conflicting ideas, to arouse his curiosity to incandescence and inspire him to inquiry and speculation – in the common phrase, to teach him how to think. But this is surely nonsense. If education really had any such aim its inevitable effect would be to reduce nine-tenths of its victims to insanity, and to convert most of the rest into anarchists. What it seeks to do is something quite different – something, in fact, almost the opposite. It is financed by the state and by private philanthropists, not to make lunatics and anarchists, but to make good citizens – in other words, to make citizens who are nearly like all other citizens as possible. Its ideal product is not a boy or a girl full of novel ideas but one full of lawful and correct ideas – not one who thinks, but one who believes. If it actually graduated hordes of Platos and Nietzsches it would be closed by the Department of Justice, and quite properly. (“In the Rolling Mills,†Prejudices: Sixth Series [Library of America] vol. 2, p. 509.)
The New York Times: A Better Way?
Many conservative Presbyterians and Reformed believe – along with the idea that no neutrality exists – that secular America is intolerant of red-blooded Christianity. The current alarm over gay marriage and abortion on demand is evidence of the Reformed-sky-is-falling-world-and-life-view.
Could it be that consolation might come to these upset souls from the secularized (as opposed to hallowed) pages of the New York Times? It could if conservative Protestants would take a gander at the columns written by Ross Douthat. When the Times hired him away from the Atlantic Monthly, some conservatives worried that Douthat, a smart, Roman Catholic, and remarkably wise-for-his-age-writer, might succumb to temptation to fit with the liberal intelligentsia (as if Atlantic is Chronicles) in by soft pedaling his conservatism. But this has hardly been the case. Within the past month Douthat has posted at his Times blog (in addition to columns) a number of serious and thoughtful posts against gay marriage that conservative Protestants should well consider, both for encouragement in culture-war well doing and for learning how to make an argument with people who don’t share your faith (or any).
On August 9th, Douthat wrote in response to a post by Noah Millman who explained why he was supporting gay marriage:
What I would strongly dispute, though, is his suggestion that it’s possible to escape entirely from ideological conceptions of marriage, into a world where it’s all just people loving people, and the way we treat one another is the only thing that matters. This seems like an extremely naive view of how ideas intersect with human action, and how cultures shape behavior. Of course all ideals and ideologies are imperfect descriptions of reality, and semi-quixotic attempts to graft order onto the inherent messiness of human affairs. But you can’t escape them just by declaring that they’re “artificial,†because such artifice is itself natural to man, and inherent to culture-making and social order. Every society has its ideals and ideologies, about marriage as much as about any other institution. And the fact that wedlock was once somewhat more about property and somewhat less about love than it is today doesn’t mean that our ancestors didn’t have their own theories of marriage, and their own arguments about what the institution meant and ought to mean.
Read the Greeks and Romans; read the New Testament; read Shakespeare and The Book of Common Prayer. There was never a time when human beings weren’t building ideologies of marriage, and there was never a culture where those ideologies didn’t have an impact on how people wed and parented and loved.
This means that if the ideology that justifies defining marriage as lifelong heterosexual monogamy gets swept into history’s dustbin, we won’t suddenly be flung into a landscape where the only real things are people and the people they love. We’ll just get a different ideology of marriage in its place, one that makes a different set of assumptions and generalizations and invests the institution with a different kind of purpose. And we don’t need a judge’s ruling (though Judge Vaughn Walker’s analysis was certainly clarifying!) to know what that ideology will look like: It’s the increasingly commonplace theory that marriage exists to celebrate romantic love and provide public recognition for mutually-supportive couples, with no inherent connection of any kind to gender difference and/or procreation, and with only a rhetorical connection to the ideal of permanence.
Because Douthat is thoughtful and because he writes for the Times, lots of people pay attention to what he writes and so various bloggers and op-ed writers responded to his August 9 post. One of those came from Glenn Greenwald, who argued that whether or not the state supports heterosexual marriage, the ideal of one-man-and-one-woman marrying could still prevail without legal sanction. One example to which Grennwald appealed was racism. Nearly everyone believes racism is wrong even if the state protects the rights of racists to speak freely and associate voluntarily.
Douthat responds this way:
. . . take alcohol and cigarettes. Why are Marlboros more stigmatized than Budweisers in contemporary America? Well, in part, it’s because there’s been a government-sponsored war on tobacco for the last few decades, carried out through lawsuits and public health campaigns and smoking bans and so forth, that’s far eclipsed the more halting efforts to stigmatize alcohol consumption. Here again, public policy, rather than some deep empirical or philosophical truth about the relative harm of nicotine versus alcohol, has been a crucial factor in shaping cultural norms.
And the same is true, inevitably, of marriage law. Culture shapes law, of course: Judge Walker’s decision last week would be unimaginable without the cultural shift that’s made gay marriage seem first plausible and then necessary to many people. But law tends to turn around and shape culture right back. And this is particularly true when the law in question is constitutional law, because constitutional rights carry a distinctive legal weight and an even more distinctive cultural freight. (To take just one example, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the cultural space for making a moral critique of pornography has shrunk apace in the decades since the Supreme Court expanded First Amendment protections for pornographers, and limited the reach of obscenity laws.)
So if Anthony Kennedy follows Walker and finds that the traditional legal understanding of marriage is unconstitutional — and, by extension, that it’s irrational and bigoted to think otherwise — it’s just naive to say that this won’t have a ripple effect in the culture as a whole.
The point here is not to discuss the merits of Douthat’s arguments – though they are considerable. It is instead to take notice and see that people of faith do speak up in public secular life and do not lose their jobs for doing so, even at the New York friggin’ Times! I wonder if more of the anti-2k crowd were to take a page from Douthat the public debates over hotly contested issues would be not only more “fair and balanced†but also more people would “decide†to regard favorably (rather than as kooks) those who defend the way that Westerners have practiced the family lo these many years.
More Things You Learn From Christian Radio
Yesterday, in between the Billy Graham and Greg Laurie shows came a news feed from Focus on the Family. Among the three or four stories covered on the weekend edition was news about a Portland, Oregon seven year-old girl who had set up a lemonade stand at an arts fair only to be shut down by the big bad health inspectors from the county health department.
The girl’s plight prompted a local Portland radio station, through one of its morning disc jockeys, to intervene. The girl gained approval to set up the stand outside a tire store and sell what must have been some very good lemonade. She cleared $1,800.
The Focus on the Family report concluded with the all’s-well-that-ends-well news that the little girl was going to use her money. . .
to go to Disneyland.
Unbelievable.
Why? Back in the day, the evangelical happy spin to come out of such an episode would have been that the little girl decided to give the money to missionaries to China. Or, she gave half to the missionaries and saved half for her future college tuition. Now, the evangelical, family-friendly news editors at Focus think consumption and tourism is a laudable use of stick-to-itiveness and entrepreneurial spirit?
Granted, the subjects of the story may not have been Christian. The radio station involved, Portland’s KRSK, is apparently some version of a rock ‘n’ roll station — a SECULAR one. And the girl, who is taking her mother to Disneyland, has a different last name from her mother, suggesting divorce (especially since no father seems to be involved). So Focus may not have been reporting on exemplary evangelical behavior.
But wouldn’t you think they would want to report on exemplary family behavior? And while going to Disneyland is not wicked, did the entire project of engaging the culture and restoring family values really come to making the world safe for Donald Duck? Is this progress on the culture wars front from inside command central in Colorado Springs?
Maybe, if the Graham Crusade folks were not busy sponsoring “Rock the River†tours and greasing the skids for hipster Christianity, the editors at Family News in Focus could spot the difference between worldliness and self-sacrifice. Back in the day, the Graham Crusade officials knew the difference between George Beverly Shea and Larry Norman. But once again, when rock music becomes the cultural and musical norm, Christians seem to be incapable or making simple but important distinctions.
The Underbelly of Gay Marriage
The federal court decision on California’s Prop 8 legislation has prompted many responses. One significant theme is that conservative Protestants, who oppose gay marriage, whether from the pulpit or in ordination standards and hiring practices, should prepare for continued marginalization and even legislative harassment if they continue to publicly oppose gay marriage. In this vein, Carl Trueman writes:
Those evangelical leaders, academics and evangelical institutions that prize their place at the table and their invitations to appear on `serious’ television programs, and who enjoy being asked to offer their opinion to the wider culture had better be prepared to make a choice. As I have said before in this column, we are not far from the place where to oppose homosexuality will be regarded as in the same moral bracket as white supremacy. Those types only appear on Jerry Springer; and Jerry generally doesn’t typically ask them their opinion on the ethics of medical research, the solution to the national debt, or the importance of poetry to a rounded education.
(BTW, Trueman adds that the older generation of conservative Protestants dropped the ball on this one and failed to produce an exegetical argument against homosexuality. He remembers that for his peers, “now in middle age, dislike of homosexuality . . . had more to do with our own cultural backgrounds than with any biblical argumentation.†He even admits that “we were basically bigots and we needed to change.†Trueman may be too young and too English to remember – if he is middle-aged, what does that make me? – that when John Boswell’s much read and discussed book came out, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality [1980], this geezer remembers any number of evangelicals responses to Boswell, all before the age of the Internet, peppered with important historical and exegetical arguments about biblical teaching on homosexuality.)
I may be as naive as I am old, but I do not agree with Trueman’s assessment that opposition to gay marriage will become synonymous with white supremacy and other crack pot ideas from the perspective of the cultural mainstream. At a deep level, Americans identify with the underdog. Homosexuals have used this to gain acceptance, even though people with the kind of access they appear to have to cultural elites are generally not eligible for the category of the oppressed.
Minority groups in the United States do oppose homosexuality and they do so without any noticeable threat. For instance, Muslims are not keen on gay marriage, nor are orthodox Jews, or African-American Protestants for that matter. And yet, the thought of the state threatening these groups with penalties for their stances on homosexuality seems far-fetched. If Andrew Sullivan were to come to a place in policy debates where he wound up on the other side of a dispute with Jesse Jackson, I bet Sullivan would have enough sense not to charge Jackson with bigotry – something that rarely sticks on minorities. And if Jackson were a spokesman for African-American ministers opposed to homosexual marriage, I doubt he would be banned from the Sunday morning talk shows for doing so. I could actually see lots of bookings (though I wouldn’t be at home to watch them).
The problem for evangelicals is that they are the minority who thinks like a majority. It would be one thing to look at the numbers, recognize you don’t have the votes, and look for ways to protect your own sideline institutions. This was the approach to public life in the United States by Roman Catholics and they found their political outlet in the multi-cultural Democratic Party. But evangelicals have readily identified as the mainstream tradition in the United States, with claims about the nation’s Christian founding, and an accompanying political theology that says God loves republics and freedom. Evangelicals have also tended to approve of the Republican Party’s efforts to impose cultural uniformity on the nation. In which case, evangelicals may like to think that they are a minority only seeking toleration for themselves what other minority groups want (or have). But they have a uniformity-by-majority disposition that seeks to establish their norms as those of the nation.
This is the main reason for quick and ready dismissals of evangelicals as bigoted and intolerant, not their actual views or practices on homosexuality. Gay marriage is an emblem of a deeper cultural divide that prevents white conservative Protestants from embracing some form of cultural diversity. If they could concede ground to homosexuals (I don’t know if it should be civil marriage), they might be able to gain concessions for their own churches, schools, and families. But for the better part of 200 years, evangelicals have approached public life as a zero-sum game.
Scott Clark is sensitive to the particular consequences that gay marriage would have for the entire culture, and not for a certain sector of it, and argues plausibly for considering the social consequences of gay marriage. Scott is particularly concerned about the fallout for the family:
By analogy it is not possible to re-define the fundamental units of society without a cost. Consider any society. Assuming a certain degree of natural liberty and mobility, if people are living together in a defined space, those people have consented voluntarily to live together. They have made a society. What is the basic unit of that society? It cannot be the isolated individual if only because no mere individual is capable of forming a society or of perpetuating a society. There must be a basic social unit. Historically that social unit has been understood to be a heterosexual family, a father, mother, a grandfather, a grandmother and their children and grandchildren because it is grounded in the nature of things.
I tend to agree with this but sense it is almost impossible to use this line of reasoning in a plausible way. For forty years our society has been experimenting with a host of new social forms. Some of those were surely welcome – racial integration, and redefining women’s roles. But the impetus to overturn unwanted hierarchies did not leave much room for recognizing the value of hierarchy more generally and the way that social order depends upon other kinds of order. And so along came sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll as the baby boomers’ favorite idioms for resisting cultural and moral conventions.
Evangelicals may have taken longer and been more selective in appropriating the cultural shifts of the 1960s and 1970s, but when it came to worship and sacred song they did so with abandon. Granted, it is a leap even to suggest – let alone argue – that Praise and Worship worship was a step on the path to gay marriage. But if Christian rock did to religious conventions what rock did to cultural conventions, it is possible to wonder where the bending of conventions ultimately leads.
Scott points in the direction of his observation when he writes of the generational differences on opposition to homosexuality. The younger generation has:
been raised in a culture which not only tolerates homosexuality but celebrates it. Consider the contrast between the way homosexuality was regarded in popular culture in the first half of the 20th century. Liberace was openly effeminate and made only the thinnest of attempts to protest his heterosexuality. Homosexual movie stars regularly went out of their way to create a heterosexual image and especially when it was contrary to fact. Some movie studios had a policy requiring single male actors (e.g., Jimmy Stewart) to visit a studio-run bordello in order to demonstrate their heterosexuality.
In the second half of the 20th century the old conventions, which has lost their grounding in nature and creational law, were deconstructed. . . . All of this took decades but it happened. It’s a real change of culture, of attitude, of stance, of definition of what constitutes acceptable social and sexual behavior and norms.
If Scott is right, and I think he is about the gradual ways in which the culture has changed since 1960, then evangelicals may want to rethink why it is that their disregard for what the created order reveals as appropriate for Christian worship is okay but homosexual disregard for the created order of sexual reproduction is not. It could be that Trueman’s point about bigotry has a point: can you really sing Christian rock in praise of God and oppose gay marriage with a straight face?
Why I Love MY Communion (It's All About ME AGAIN!)
You inherit odd habits when you grow up in a fundamentalist Baptist home (the advantages should not be minimized either). In my case, my parents were devoted listeners to Christian radio, a practice that I keep alive as part of my Sabbath routine. Instead of listening about balls and babes on sports-talk radio while brewing coffee, on Sundays I turn on the local Christian station (and actually hear, depending on the hour, Hugh Hewitt summarize the weeks headlines, which is not what I want to hear when I’m preparing to enter the heavenlies).
Yesterday, I heard Cliff Barrows and his sidekick on the Hour of Decision make available Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps, the original source for the “What-Would-Jesus-Do†craze of fifteen years or so ago. For donations of – I can’t remember the level – contributors would receive a copy of Sheldon’s novel. What the folks at the BGEA failed to mention was that Sheldon was a Social Gospeler and a proto-liberal Congregationalist minister. I guess it would take too much time away from soul-winning to acquire the discernment necessary for refusing to promote Sheldon’s novel. But then again, if you are committed to spreading the good news of Jesus Christ you might want to warn people away from proclamations, no matter how much cloaked in the aura of Jesus, that were very influential in turning the mainline Protestant churches in the United States away from the very good news of Jesus Christ.
While I was listening to the radio promo, I couldn’t help but think of a book that the OPC is featuring as part of its effort to educate its members. Stuart Robinson is not nearly as popular as Sheldon, though without the WWJD bracelets Sheldon may not be much of a celebrity either. But the Louisville Presbyterian pastor wrote one of the best books on Presbyterian ecclesiology and he did so from a redemptive historical perspective even before Geerhardus Vos was a glint in his father’s eye. In 1858, four years before Vos’ birth, Robinson wrote The Church of God As An Essential Element of the Gospel, a book that combines two-kingdom, spirituality of the church, and jure divino Presbyterianism in a suprisingly compact and potent combination. To the OPC’s credit, its Committee on Christian Education has reprinted the book with a helpful introduction by pastor, A. Craig Troxel, and is selling it in hard cover for modest price.
I know many evangelicals think that conservative Reformed Protestant are mean, critical, and belong to denominations that do a lot of things wrong. But do these not so winsome and complaining evangelicals ever factor in the bad things that parachurch organizations do in the name of the gospel? This is not a rhetorical question.
Comity of Errors
A minor kerfuffle broke out last week at Reformed Forum thanks to remarks I made during an interview about the history of American Presbyterianism. This subject invariably leads to questions about the historical differences between the OPC and the PCA and how these factor into their current relationship. And discussion of current OPC-PCA relations inevitably brings up the potentially delicate subject of the comity agreement that determines how each denomination should consider the other when planting a congregation. The current policy that guides OPC and PCA church planting endeavors is as follows:
Comity has meant different things to different people. We representatives of the home missions agencies and committees or boards of our denominations resist territorial statements on comity in the light of the social and cultural complexity of North American society and the great spiritual need of our many countrymen who are apart from Jesus Christ. Out of a concern to build the church of Jesus Christ rather than our own denominations and to avoid the appearance of competition, we affirm the following courteous code of behavior to guide our church planting ministries in North America:
1. We will be sensitive to the presence of existing churches and mission ministries of other NAPARC churches and will refrain from enlisting members and take great care in receiving members of those existing ministries.
2. We will communicate with the equivalent or appropriate agency (denominational missions committee or board, presbytery missions or church extension committee, or session) before initiating church planting activities in a community where NAPARC churches or missions ministries exist.
3. We will provide information on at least an annual basis describing progress in our ministries and future plans.
4. We will encourage our regional home missions leadership to develop good working relationships.
I raised concerns about the failure of each side to abide by the terms of the comity agreement. I illustrated my worries by mentioning two cities where conservative Presbyterian churches already existed and the other denomination went ahead anyway with a plant of its own. I did not mention “sheep stealing,†but that was how some interpreted my remarks. Since the PCA is a lot bigger than the OPC, some may have also inferred that I was taking issue more with the PCA than the OPC. Taking members in good standing from another congregation is a legitimate reason to object to a church plant, but not really the one I had in mind when I more or less made an off hand remark about comity agreements and also illustrated the point with examples my fading memory scanned and found.
The difficulties surrounding comity agreements have less to do with the transfer of members between communions than with the state of church planting among conservative Presbyterians. One concern first has to do with the market mentality that seems to go with home missions in the United States, the second with the branding of churches that follows said mentality.
In the good old days, denominations planted churches when a group of families (usually from the home denomination) found themselves in a new setting without a congregation from their communion. If the families numbered as many as five, the home missions committee would designate funds and find a church planter to minister to the group in hopes of establishing a settled work. To be sure, and the OPC has some examples of this, home missions executives would think about “strategic†locations for new churches in order for the denomination to gain a reputation and presence among a larger section of the American public. But generally speaking, home missions leaders went where groups of people wanted their services. No core group, no church plant.
Today, the model appears to be different and more like a business. Certain locations are highly desirable, these places have no Presbyterian churches, and denominational leaders decide to start a work or two there. This mentality would appear (I know nothing about business and marketing) to follow the logic of companies who have a product and are looking for ways to increase patrons and profits. Granted, we live in a voluntary church setting, so every congregation needs to “market†itself to gain members who will then pay for the church “services.†At the same time, a strategic outlook has led conservative Reformed denominations to look more at the potential for growth and visibility as a reason for home missions than a duty to send pastors to those places where existing church members can find no church.
Another aspect of contemporary home missions logic is the idea that Presbyterians should be able to plant as many churches as there are Americans. I am not sure anyone actually has a manual of population density, roads, health of the local economy, zoning regulations, etc. before thinking about planting churches across the USA. But because home missions is in the business of evangelism, and because the logic of the Great Commission is to take the gospel everywhere, home missions types tend to equate church planting with evangelism and the mandate to leave no soul unturned.
The problem is that as much as every American (and resident of the earth, for that matter) needs to hear the gospel, not every place can sustain a Presbyterian church. Once the novelty of being missional, for instance, wears off, and once denominational funding runs out, a church plant finds itself in the surprising position of being a settled congregation in maintenance mode, no longer being cutting edge but adjusting to the routine if not the boredom of the same people, each Sunday, year after year. Maintenance is a good thing. After all, sheep in a flock need to be fed and prepared for slaughter (read: die a good death). Shepherds who run off to new flocks and abandon old ones are not what our Lord had in mind when he taught about the Good Shepherd.
So missional inevitably morphs into maintenance and then denominational leaders need to consider how many congregations a locale can sustain. Actually, they should have thought about this before thinking strategically about a city or region and planting missional churches. But it is a serious question. Can a city of 300,000 support seven Presbyterian congregations, all of them conservative? Does a city of 500,000 have enough unchurched who might come to four Presbyterian churches? I know this may sound like Finney, trying to calibrate the work of the Holy Spirit. At the same time, Calvinists have a pretty good sense that not everyone is elect, and know there are ordinarily limits to the sovereign working of the Spirit. They also have a sense of stewardship and recognize that pastors and their families need to eat, and that ordinarily the Holy Spirit does not do home delivery. In which case, church planters might do well to turn to sociologists at least to understand the dynamics of communities, churches, and their sustainability. Meanwhile, the agrarian in me says that if farmers should know what the carrying capacity of a certain kind of soil is, church planters need to consider a similar dynamic. If an area like New England, that has not had a history of supporting Presbyterian churches, becomes the strategic place for church planting, shouldn’t the denominational executives consider why the soil in the North East is harder than the mid-Atlantic region when it comes to Reformed seeds?
So if part of my concern about comity agreements is about what seems to be the naivete of “strategic†church planting (I put it in quotes because it doesn’t seem very strategic to be ignorant of a place’s capacity to sustain Presbyterian churches), the other goes to the techniques necessary to plant a “Presbyterian†church in an over saturated church market (I put it in quotes because often the methods are not Presbyterian).
If part of the basis for a comity agreement is the notion that the communions entering the agreement are “of like faith and practice,†it does not make a lot of sense to establish a church in a community with an abundance of churches if it is going to offer the same goods and services as the existing congregation. Of course, this is not a problem for Starbucks or McDonald’s where consistency of product is precisely what makes a franchise work. Someone back at headquarters needs to calculate how many frappucinos can be sold in a day within a city of 350,000 potential drinkers, but once the math is complete, the companies’ engines are finely tuned up to deliver the same fructose, burnt coffee, and whipped cream to every single Starbucks store.
The demands of franchising and the consistency of brand, however, do not appear to apply to Presbyterian churches. One congregation may be traditional (read: 1950s United States), another neo-Puritan, another contemporary, and still another blended (read: incoherent). In which case, a town may support a new Presbyterian home missions work if it offers a liturgical recipe different from the existing church. This is even true for congregations within the same denomination. Within the metropolitan Philadelhpia area, the OPC has almost as many flavors (the high-church topping is somewhat beyond the finances of the average Orthodox Presbyteiran) as the PCA.
The variety of approaches to being and worshiping as a Presbyterian is likely the greatest challenge to comity agreements. Many a church plant can justify its existence by saying that its product and delivery will reach a demographic different from an established work. As true as this may be (although the cultural diversity of OPC and PCA churches would strike a modern-day Tocqueville as extraordinarily thin), this diversity seriously undermines claims to be “of like faith and practice.†John Frame and I swatted this one around almost fifteen years ago and I am still convinced that Reformed theology and ministry normally assumes an appropriate form that should prevail in all churches claiming to be Presbyterian. I am also convinced that congregations that vary greatly from the sobriety, decency, orderliness – not to mention the reverence – implied and explicitly stated in the Reformed creeds and catechisms are letting their practices alter their faith.
These reflections may explain the comments made during the interview at Reformed Forum. The latter were the tip of an iceberg that may be responsible for sinking the good ship Conservative Presbyterian, U.S.A. The worship wars and church growth theories – from McGavren to McLaren are sucking the vitals from Reformed confessionalism in North America. But I need to live with it because the current flavors of Presbyterianism – like the menus of Applebees and Cheese Cake Factory (why would anyone eat at a factory?) – are what the Reformed market place will bear.
Ideas Have Consequences for Genes
The following was originally intended to appear in the next issue of the Nicotine Theological Journal. But when my father died on April 28th, the timing for tributes changed. Since today is the birthday of Ellen Marie Hart (nee Jones), it seems a fitting day on which to run it.
Within thirty-six hours of my mother’s death on March 26th, 2010, I was responsible for teaching a lesson in Sunday school on J. Gresham Machen. Since this was the second of a thirteen-week series, I needed to cover his upbringing, education, and church background. This meant that I was going to be talking about Machen’s relationship to his mother, Mary Gresham Machen, aka Minnie. In turn this involved talking about her background as a native of Macon, Georgia, her father’s business and political activities, the townhouse of the Greshams, now a four-star Bed and Breakfast – the 1842 Inn – that still features photographs of young J. Gresham Machen attired in a dress (the custom of the day), and Minnie’s own literary pursuits; she wrote The Bible in Browning and was published by MacMillan – the same company that published her son’s Christianity and Liberalism two decades later.
As I prepared and taught I became aware of a major problem in my own existence, namely, that I know more about Machen’s mother and family than I actually do about mine. This reality became all the more glaring on the day of my mother’s burial when one of her sisters and one sister-in-law traveled to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, from Green County, North Carolina for the service. I had not seen these aunts for almost four decades. They seemed to revel in catching my brother, wife and me up on family news. And through it all they let us know, not in a didactic way, but simply as part of the ordinary quality of their lives, that all of my mother’s siblings had remained in North Carolina, reared their families there, and that most of their grandchildren were still in the Tar Heel state. Not only was I jealous of this side of my humanity – after all I am as much a Jones as a Hart. But the Jones and the Crawfords and the Murphys and the Sullivans and the Pridgeons – the other families with whom they had bonded in marriage – were practically the embodiment of the localism, agrarianism, and family ways that I have come to admire and be haunted by in the writings of Wendell Berry.
One of the most pressing questions I have had about my mother which bears directly on my growing up in the suburbs of Philadelphia rather than in the land of Jesse Helmes, is why she decided after graduating from high school in 1941 to move to Washington, D.C. and work first as a telephone operator and then for the federal government in the accounting office. It made no sense that a woman, the oldest of ten children, would leave a farm and nine young siblings to work in the “big†city. Since she was a born-again Christian, it made even less sense, given the fears that evangelicals generally have of cities, combined with the unwritten code governing a young single woman’s opportunities. My aunts, however, made some sense of the move by explaining that mother had moved to Washington with her oldest sister, and that they lived with one of their future aunts. So it was not a career move but a family connection that brought my mother to the nation’s capital during wartime.
But that move was decisive for her and me because she met a man in a Marine’s dress-blue uniform at a Baptist church (Mark Dever’s, by the way) and fell in love. That man, my father, hailed from southeastern Pennsylvania and after he served in the Pacific and then attended college at Bob Jones University, thanks to the G.I. Bill, they bypassed North Carolina on the way to “go†in Levittown, Pennsylvania, the armpit of Bucks County and the horror of post-war suburban development. But much like my Jones relatives in the South, my parents didn’t know any better. They hadn’t read Jane Jacobs or Howard Kunstler or Wendell Berry or Russell Kirk. They simply did the best they could to rear a family. For the Harts that meant finding affordable housing near a good church and close to kin; for the Jones that meant rearing families and supporting them in the opportunities provided by ditch digging, tobacco farming, auto sales, and real estate brokering.
Unlike my kinfolk, I am a deracinated academic who knows how to find literature on family ties or who devoted a good portion of his life to the life and writings of one man and became so enamored of those ideas that he found out more about Machen than about either of his grandfathers, Robert Jones or Clyde Hart. I suspect that this is a problem that afflicts many aspiring intellectuals – the lure of some author or thinker from the past whose writing has changed their outlook on the big questions. In turn object of intellectual desire directs and guides the student more than the pupil’s own parents and family. Ideas do have consequences. They help to define our understanding of ourselves, and our situations, and become the motive for action. They even tempt us to discount the influence of parents and the legacy of families.
In my own case, I continue to regard Baltimore as more of a home than either Levittown or Greenville, North Carolina. Part of that owes to spending six years there while in graduate school. But a good chunk of it also stems from the subject of my studies during that time – Machen, whose family residence was four blocks from our first apartment, not to mention the reading and writing I did on H. L. Mencken, the bard of Baltimore whose home was only two blocks away from our grad school dwelling. Some of us eggheads get so caught up in a historical figure’s life that we actually place ourselves in their narrative. Meanwhile, the real story to which we belong lies strewn across the informal conversations and fading memories of aging aunts, uncles, cousins, and grand parents.
One way to try to justify this identity confusion is to portray myself as the victim of declining family ties. Whatever the legitimate reasons my parents may have had for moving to Levittown, they did not choose a place that would sustain links to kin (for starters). Again, they were not in the habit of considering pedestrian-friendly streets, interconnected street grid networks, mixed-use zoning, increased density, or “green†transportation when looking for a place to live. They had experienced a depression and a war. Having survived Iwo Jima my father had freedom to buy a home where he darned well (humanly speaking) wanted. He and mother didn’t need some guilt-ridden baby boomer historian of a son to come along and claim his rights as a victim of poor parental housing choices and the accompanying industrial military complex.
That said, as soon as I saw the city I knew I wanted to get out of Levittown as fast as I could because it had none of the interest or energy that people living together in one relatively self-sustaining polity had. And once that switch flicked on, gone were circumstances that would sustain identification at least with the Harts, not to mention the Jones.
Then again, maybe my loss of roots stems from my mother’s own decision to leave the farm in Green County where her grandmother Jones (nee Crawford) was born and move to Washington. Is it too tidy to think that she passed on to me through her egg the appeal of urban life and the dislocation that cities yield? After all, when she moved to D.C. her life would not be the same as her siblings. (The one sister who moved with her married a soldier from North Carolina, thus making easier a return to her native state.)
And what of my mother’s temperament and interests that might have predicted my interest in Machen? Mother’s disposition was toward stubbornness and contrariness, attributes that many have attributed to the Presbyterian “bad boy of Baltimore.†Mother was also militant about the Christian faith in modest ways that resemble Machen. At the same time, she was generous to a fault, something that she also shared with Machen. As difficult as my relationship could be with her – she was the bad cop always telling me to cut my hair, wear a tie to church, and hang around more with Christian friends while my dad was the good cop (except for the execution of corporal punishment, a decidedly male activity), always telling my mother to relax and not be overbearing – she was always sending me back to college stocked with food, clean clothes, and a couple of extra ten dollar bills shoved in my coat pocket.
Of course, it is a stretch of cosmopolitan proportions to attribute my intellectual interests to my genetic inheritance. Too easy is it to let myself off the hook for following ideas more than family. But from the perspective of providence, the gap between ideas and genes is not terribly great. If God could take a privileged, smart, and indecisive son of an urbane and hospitable southern lady from Baltimore and turn him into one of the giants of American Presbyterianism, he can also take the shy, sports-absorbed and sometimes bookish son of a southern exile in the Philadelphia suburbs and turn his life around through studying the kid from Baltimore.
God works in mysterious ways, his wonders and horrors to perform.
P.S. Mother’s birthday is actually June 15th. Having been in Maine for an OPC affair, the sense of the heavenlies caused me to lose track of time on planet earth.
Old Life 