Tag: Aaron Sorkin

Has Aaron Sorkin been Reading John Calvin?

Published on by D. G. Hart60 Comments

The Hart home has a problem. The missus and I are about 2/3 of the way through season four of The Wire (for at least the third time for the whole series), and we are also making our way pleasantly through West Wing thanks to being smitten by Newsroom. As I’ve tried to explain elsewhere, you can’t have two more diametrical views of political life in the United States than Simon’s sober portrait of the state of nature (Hobbesian) with a veneer of civilization or Sorkin’s inspiring depiction of large, national institutions like the executive branch of the federal government or the reporting of network news organizations. The conflict within this hyphenated blogger is thoroughly appreciating the self-interest that pervades all walks of life in Simon’s Baltimore and the genuine love of country that steers both West Wing’s president, Josiah Bartlet, Newsroom’s anchor, Will McAvoy. So powerful have Sorkin’s series been that I have found myself rooting for President Obama and (finally) recognizing how destructive (even if entertaining) conservative talk radio is. (I am still enough of an Augustinian and Madisonian to understand that people in power need to be questioned and checked.)

And thanks to the life of Martin O’Malley serving as the basis for the white city-councilman who becomes mayor in Simon’s Baltimore, I’m especially hoping that O’Malley beats Hillary in the Democratic primaries and becomes president. Then maybe Simon and Sorkin can co-produce a series on an O’Malley administration.

Another Aaron, the one who blogs for Ref21, has a few remarks about Calvin on civil government that help me justify my new-found patriotism and the shows that inspired it:

In Calvin’s estimation, the Christian life is properly one of constant gratitude. Gratitude bears fruit in holiness — we can and should say “thank you” to God with our lives as well as our lips. The root of gratitude is constant and careful attention to God’s remarkable gifts to us in spite of our creaturely finitude and culpability both for Adam’s sin and our own. God’s greatest gift to us, of course, is Jesus Christ, to whom we are joined by the power of the Spirit as the basis of our forgiveness, renewal in the divine image, and restoration to fellowship with the Triune God. But God has given other gifts to us — gifts that are common to believers and unbelievers alike, but should no less be noted and appreciated. Government is one such gift. Any reflection upon civil government which does not ultimately lead to gratitude (and therefore greater holiness) is faulty by Calvin’s standard. Thus he introduces the subject of human government in his Institutes by observing: “It is of no slight importance to us to know how lovingly God has provided in this respect for mankind, that greater zeal for piety may flourish in us to attest our gratefulness.”

It is, importantly, not government in abstracto that should lead us to “gratefulness” but government in concreto. To put a finer edge on this point: it is this government — this president, this congress, this parliament, this prime minister, this monarch, this mayor, etc. — that should properly catapult us into a posture of prayerful gratitude before God. Calvin has little interest, in fact, in government in the abstract. Thus he dismisses debates/conversations about the “best kind of government” (whether monarchy, oligarchy, or democracy) as an “idle pastime” for persons who have no real influence upon the particular form of government where they live. He proceeds, ironically, to spend some time considering the advantages and disadvantages (and there are both) of each “kind” of government, but concludes the matter by highlighting the superfluity of even his own words: “All these things are needlessly spoken to those for whom the will of the Lord is enough. For if it has seemed good to him to set kings over kingdoms, senates or municipal officers over free cities, it is our duty to show ourselves compliant and obedient to whomever he sets over the places where we live” (emphasis mine). What really matters, in other words, is not what government would be best, but what government you’ve been given. That is the government to which you must submit; that, by the same token, is the government for which you should offer thanks, with both your lips and your life, to God.

It may even be that for Calvin, gratitude is the basis for the Christian life.

The Numbers Don't Lie

Published on by D. G. Hart86 Comments

Actually, they may. But Rod Dreher uses them to introduce some other observations that will continue to miss the brain matter of the Roman Catholic interlocutors who hand around Old Life.

First, Rod tracks Leah Libresco’s further dissecting of Pew’s numbers on Christianity in the U.S.:

If conversions went on as they do today and all other factors were held steady, America would wind up with the religious demographics of the stable distribution.

Unaffiliateds would wind up modestly gaining ground (from 23 percent at present to 29 percent).1 And Christian denominations would drop a little (from 69 percent at present to 62 percent at equilibrium).2

But there would be substantial redistribution among Christian groups, with evangelical Protestants gaining (26 percent at present to 32 percent) and Catholics losing more than half their current share of the population (21 percent to 8 percent).

Why do evangelicals wind up ahead of other Christian sects in this model? They’re better at holding on to the people born into their tradition (65 percent retention compared to 59 percent for Catholics and 45 percent for Mainline Protestants), and they’re a stronger attractor for people leaving other faiths. According to Pew’s data on conversion rates, 10 percent of people raised Catholic wind up as evangelicals. Just 2 percent of people born as evangelicals wind up Catholic. The flow between mainline and evangelical Protestants is also tilted in evangelicals’ favor. Twelve percent of those raised evangelical wind up in mainline congregations, but 19 percent of mainline Protestants wind up becoming evangelical.

Oh, great. A country of pious Republicans and atheistic Democrats. Let the search for Aaron Sorkin’s America continue.

That demographic reality prompts Rod to ask what Roman Catholics are doing wrong. First, he notes parish life:

In Catholicism, the ethos at the parish level is, in general, more like a sacrament factory. The worship experience is a lot like Mainline Protestantism, actually, and if you’re going to do Protestantism, the Evangelicals are much, much better at it. Some intellectual Catholics of an orthodox orientation, conceding the flaws in worship, liturgical and otherwise, stand firm on the intellectual arguments for Catholicism. Despite its problems, they will say, the Roman church remains the church that Christ founded, and unlike all other churches (except the Orthodox, who are negligible in an Americn context) it has the Real Presence of the Eucharist at its center. I spoke to a frustrated but faithful Catholic recently who said that despite all the problems at the local level, he keeps going to mass because he believes that is the only place to truly experience Jesus in the Eucharist.

As an ex-Catholic turned Orthodox, I obviously don’t agree with that analysis, but it does make sense. The problem with it is that it does not make sense to most dissatisfied Catholics, as the dramatic Pew numbers show.

Hello (vd,t, Susan, Mrs. W.)!! But it does make sense of the Roman Catholic apologetic strategy. Point to the logic, the history, the paradigm, the writers like Flannery O’Connor and Evelyn Waugh. But whatever you do, don’t look at life on the ground in this incarnated world.

And then Rod reflects on the conundrum that updating the church presented to post-Vatican II bishops:

The leadership class of the Catholic Church — bishops, theologians, and so forth — “gave themselves up to modernity just as the real avant-garde was beginning to critique it. They came out of their bunkers with their hands in the air as the enemy was departing for a new battlefield. The Catholic elite of this generation was left to look effete and irrelevant.” In an effort to be relevant to modernity, they surrendered the Catholic distinctives that stood in contradiction to the currents of modernity. Thus while Catholic theology remains intact, the transmission of that theology in the lived experience of the parish — both in worship and in catechetics — has badly broken down. Paradoxically, in many parishes, a worshiper in this most sacramentally-oriented of the major American Christian churches may find himself having to hold on to the truths of his faith by exercising his will and his imagination to an extraordinary degree, because what he sees happening around him does not convey what the Church proclaims to be true.

So? Protestants are divided. All’s well.

Would the Benedict Option Allow for Gay Abbots?

Published on by D. G. Hart7 Comments

Not to be a mean Calvinist jerk, but the discussion of Christians leaving the cultural mainstream for a Christian enclave — the so-called Benedict Option — strikes me increasingly as just one more way that modern Christians can think of themselves either as superior or victim while paying not much heed to the idea of living quite and peaceful lives in the existing world. Rod Dreher compiles a number of quotations among Roman Catholics and Episcopalians about the Benedict Option and has extensive quotations from Ken Myers. Among them are the following, which includes first a brief against modernity:

The “counter” in counterculture sounds, as I’ve suggested, a prophetically constructive note. It is a necessary note because of the disorder of the modern West, and I think any effort to define and embody a counterculture for the common good has to work to understand the nature of that disorder. In a chapter called “The redemption of society,” in his book The Desire of the Nations, moral philosopher Oliver O’Donovan observes that many thinkers from diverse intellectual disciplines and philosophical or theological points of view have converged on a critique of “modernity.” They disagree about many finer points and some larger ones, but they all agree that the social and cultural phenomena of our times need to be understood as “part of a greater historical totality — one which they date variously, but always in centuries rather than in decades. What makes life in the late modern period different — its high level of technologisation, its sexual permissiveness, its voluntarisations of birth and death, its concept of politics as economic management — can all be traced back to seed-thoughts that were present at the beginning of the modern era, and are aspects of a necessitating web of mutual implication.”

I agree that modern life poses challenges for Christians (as it does for Bunk and Jimmy — ahem). But weren’t things pretty bad going all the way back to the fall? Think Cain and Abel. Well, maybe the medieval era of Christendom was better. What about Pope Alexander VI? I don’t mean to suggest that all cultures are equal and that the current moment is no better or worse than any other. I for one think that our society has declined since the 1970s. But can we really blame modernity? Don’t Christians have to blame sinners? Democracy?

To the idea that Christians should promote the common good, Ken responds:

Actively, systematically, and consistently promoting the common good will produce enemies and possibly invite persecution in modern America because our society is deeply committed to the premise that we should share no goods in common other than the belief that there are no goods in common. The American understanding of freedom — an understanding shared by many professing Christians — was articulated by Supreme Court Justice Kennedy in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” This so-called “mystery passage” has received a lot of mockery from conservatives of various stripes, but I think it is profoundly accurate statement of the flowering of a seed-thought central to the character of modern culture. This radical privatizing of all metaphysical commitment is not the tyrannical expression of an elitist court, but the precious conviction of a majority of Americans.

Is it true that our society is “deeply” committed to this premise that we share no goods in common? We may live that way de facto. But are Americans deeply committed to this the way that the Gospel Coalition is deeply committed to avoiding the question of baptism? Aaron Sorkin in his popular television shows like West Wing and Newsroom actually seems to portray an understand of America that underscores and longs for a shared understanding of national greatness and his main characters, whether presidents or news anchors, seem to operate as if such a shared vision is still possible (except for the baleful influence of the Tea Party). Ken’s description of America strikes me as a form of overstatement that you might hear from the meaner sectors of Protestantism but not within the Episcopal Church.

And speaking of the Episcopal Church, which does ordain gay bishops, is what Ken says about liberal democracies also true of liberal Protestant communions?

The orthodoxy of all liberal democracies requires that religious convictions — or any beliefs that even appear religious — be segregated from private life. Religious convictions cannot be regarded as having public consequence. As John Milbank has noted, “in principle, a state can adopt any ideology it chooses, except a religious one.” And yet, a Christian understanding of human flourishing and the common good must be founded on the affirmation of our creation by God.

So when Christians do hunker down in the separated fortresses, will Christian orthodoxy prevail? I know, having just attended my first international presbytery meeting (The Presbytery of Michigan and Ontario), that even disciplining Orthodox Presbyterians, who are generally a pretty Bible revering bunch, can be a challenge. So when the Eastern Orthodox, or Roman Catholics, or mainline Protestants withdraw into their separated spaces and ghettos of virtue, will the lack of discipline that afflicts those communions also show up? That’s another way of asking which Christian group has the chops to produce a rule as strict as Benedict’s? (And let’s not forget about reproduction and what happened to the Shakers.)

To be sure, having a society that doesn’t undermine what parents try to pass on to their kids (but which parents and which kids) is appealing. But Christianity came into the world in such a social setting. Why should we expect more than the original followers of Jesus?