Tag: Rick Santorum

Did Evelyn Waugh Write Brideshead Revisited to Transform Culture?

Published on by D. G. Hart31 Comments

In case anyone wondered what happened to Rick Santorum, the once rising-star of GOP politics from the virtuous commonwealth of Pennsylvania, a news story puts those questions to rest. He’s starting a movie company.

“For a long time, Christians have decided that the best way to fight the popular culture is to keep it at bay, to lock it out of their home. … That’s a losing battle,” Santorum said in an interview at America’s Center Convention Complex, where he was attending the International Christian Retail Show.

With “the pervasiveness of (media) right now, the content just seeps through. The only option is to go out into that arena and try to shape the culture, too.”

Santorum said one problem with Christian-themed films was that they’ve traditionally been aimed at just Christian audiences, rather than attempting to appeal to audiences that don’t necessarily share the movie’s messaging going in.

He blamed that limited appeal on what he said were often the “hokey” and “cheesy” feel of such films, with all the filmmakers’ attention focused on the message and not enough on artistic quality.

“Quality. Quality acting, quality directing, quality scriptwriting. That is going to be a watchword for me,” Santorum said at a news conference talking about the studio’s pending projects. He said the goal was to produce movies “that rival any good Hollywood film.”

Aside from the entertaining thought of inserting Santorum into Barton Fink, I am snickering at the proposition that the better way to respond to worldliness is by making the worldliness wholesome rather than fleeing it. I understand that the petri dish that produced Mrs. Hart and me, the fundamentalist mentality of not drinking, dancing, smoking, or going to movies, is a tough sell. It was tough even in the 1960s and it had limited success (obviously) since I became a film studies major. Major DOH! Still, even if the prescriptions weren’t air tight, we did have a sense that worldliness existed and that it was something to avoid. (Just as when it came to worship we had a sense that God could be offended and that we shouldn’t offend him — a sense seemingly lost on worship leaders and members of their bands.) And we also had productions that some believers thought could compete with mainstream culture. (Seriously.) Aside from Billy Graham’s production company, Ralph Carmichael‘s musicals, like “Tell it Like it Is” which Wikipedia describes as a “folk musical about God” (Laugh track, please) were the occasions for relief from not having to endure a sermon.

So I have serious doubts whether Santorum and company will figure out the right mix of piety and entertainment. A major reason is that producing quality rarely is so self-conscious. If you are committed to producing the best thing possible, you are not also calculating its broader effects on society. I can’t prove this but it does seem self-evident about most creative efforts. Only after finishing such a work do its wider consequences become evident. But if you start with the idea of influencing society, you’ll end up not with The Wire but The Restless Ones.

Better to stick with the catechism (especially one that comes in less than 140 questions — that way, there’s time for milk and cookies).

Wishing Evangelicals Would Leave Politics Alone

Published on by D. G. Hart48 Comments

Before all of the anti-dualists and despisers of otherworldliness get riled up, the point of this post is not for evangelicals or any kind of Christian to abdicate their duties as citizens. Instead, it is that injecting religion into politics has neither helped politics nor aided religion.

Two recent confirmations of this come from Mikelmann’s post on Rick Santorum’s appeal to evangelicals. He notes that Santorum, some kind of conservative Roman Catholic, has had more appeal to Protestants than those in his own communion. (Lyman Beecher and Josiah Strong are rolling in their graves.)

So, whereas John F. Kennedy seemed to put to rest the idea that a Catholic President would be subservient to the Pope, Santorum has made it an issue all over again. So he must be the choice of Catholics, right? Not according to the New York Times:

Many Catholics take issue with Mr. Santorum’s approach to their faith. Mr. Santorum, polls show, has lost the Catholic vote in every primary contest so far, some by wide margins.

Putting this all together, the Catholics don’t support a Catholic who won’t separate his church from the state, but the Politico-Evangelicals do. And that, my friends, is one more reason why politics is such a great spectator sport.

The second comes from an interview with Carl Trueman and Derek Thomas in which they were asked about the challenges of living in the United States as British citizens. Trueman replied in a way that should embarrass American Christians:

The challenge is often knowing who are the genuine Christians and who are the mere cultural ones. It is not so much the case in Philadelphia but in many parts of the South, church is still the place to go to be seen and to set up business deals after the service.

My wife recently remarked to me that, in the UK, we rarely knew how friends at church voted. Politics simply was not part of the conversation and nobody presumed to assume that you voted one way or the other. There is still a certain overlap here between politics and theology, some aggressive manifestations of which can make life uncomfortable for a foreigner. The ‘culture war’ aspect of the church is one of the strangest aspects of the church here from a foreigner’s perspective.

Again, none of this means that evangelicals should retreat from the public square, though it does suggest entering the public square as citizens rather than as believers would be a help. But it does mean that until we clear up confusions like evangelicals supporting Roman Catholic candidates on Christian grounds and non-American evangelicals feeling estranged from evangelicalism’s politicized atmosphere, the folks who insist on the value of religion for public life have some work to do.

Is the Gospel Sufficient to GOVERN Culture?

Published on by D. G. Hart58 Comments

John Frame’s book against the so-called Escondido theology (hereafter SCET) contains a chapter, “Is Natural Revelation Sufficient to Govern Culture?” It goes along with his bullet-point summary of the SCET’s political platform, which is as follows (edited by all about me):

POLITICS/ETHICS
• God’s principles for governing society are found, not in Scripture, but in natural law.
• Natural law is to be determined, not by Scripture, but by human reason and conscience.
• Only those who accept these principles can consistently believe in justification by faith alone.
• The Christian has no biblical mandate to seek changes in the social, cultural, or political order.
• To speak of a biblical worldview, or biblical principles for living, is to misuse the Bible.
• Scripture teaches about Christ, his atonement, and our redemption from sin, but not about how to apply that salvation to our current problems.

Just for starters, using the verb, GOVERN, with culture is a bit odd since culture develops in ways that hardly reflect human application of either general or special revelation to it. Think once again of language. Is anyone actually responsible for channeling definitions and grammatical constructions? Maybe the editors of dictionaries. But are they the ones responsible for the differences between Shakespeare’s usage and Updike’s? (Do the cultural transformers ever really think about what they are proposing? BTW, language is pretty basic to anything we meaningfully describe as culture. BTW squared, the Bible not only refuses to give a definition of revival. It also avoids a definition of culture. In which case, anyone trying to base his definition of culture on Scripture is simply offering his opinion of what the Bible teaches.)

Frame’s objections to these points, even if he garbles them, have a lot to do with his conviction that the Bible is a surer foundation for ethical reflection than general revelation. He writes:

. . . arguments actually developed from natural revelation premises . . . are rarely cogent. Roman Catholics, for example, often argue that birth control is forbidden, because of the natural connection between sexual intercourse and reproduction. That connection obviously exists [my comment – if it’s obvious, then isn’t there some cogency mo jo going on?], but the moral conclusion is not a necessary one. Indeed the argument is a naturalistic fallacy, an attempt to reason from fact to obligation, from “is” to “ought.”

Notice that Frame refuses to notice how the Bible has prevented Presbyterians like himself from rejecting the regulative principle of worship. The Bible of the Puritans is not cogent for Frame. And his observation that natural law argumentation fails a test of logic does not prove that the Bible is sufficient to GOVERN culture.

He continues:

Cogent and persuasive ethical reasoning presupposes a w-w and standards of judgment. [Edited for sensitive Old Life eyes.] It is not easy to argue these from nature alone. For Christians, these standards come from Scripture. So apart from Scripture ethical argument loses its cogency and often its persuasiveness. Nonbelievers, of course, won’t usually accept Scripture as authoritative. But they may at least respect an argument that is self-conscious about its epistemological and metaphysical presuppositions.

I doubt it. Actually, I know such respect won’t be forthcoming since heaps of ridicule have been directed at evangelicals for the last thirty years for trying such w-wish arguments. Maybe Frame thinks a graduate seminar in philosophy is the context for these disputes. If so, he forgets the verb GOVERN. And when unbelievers confront people who want the GOVERNORS to implement religious teaching in politics and cultural standards, they get a little testy.

But Frame recently received support for his argument about the insufficiency of general revelation from Peter Leithart in a column about Rick Santorum (who seems to be the darling these days of more Roman Catholics and evangelicals than Romney has accounts in Swiss banks). Leithart comments specifically on the ridicule that the Roman Catholic Santorum has received for criticizing Obama’s “phony theology.” Leithart admits that he is suspicious of politicians when they talk this way. But he also finds such speech “invigorating.” The reason is that natural revelation, as Frame also says, is insufficient.

For many conservatives, natural law provides the secular grammar we need for debating moral issues in a pluralistic society. . . . I don’t think so. Natural law theory remains too entangled with the particularities of theology to do everything natural lawyers want it to do. That is the thrust of Nicholas Bamforth and David A.J. Richards’ Patriarchal Religion, Sexuality, and Gender (2007). Bamforth and Richards argue that “the new natural lawyers’ arguments about sexuality, gender, and the law are religious.” Natural law theorists “meld” secular and religious motivations and norms and are “unlikely . . . to be able to draw a clean distinction between that which is knowable through revelation and that which is graspable by reason alone.” . . .

On the plus side, the fact that natural lawyers don’t actually put revelation and the gospel to the side is much to their credit. In practice, they resist the pressure to erect a wall between their faith and their public philosophy. On the down side, this “melding” of secular and religious arguments undermines their claim that natural law provides a theologically neutral grammar for a pluralistic society.

Natural law theory has many uses. Using its categories, we explore the contours of creation to uncover the pathways the Creator has laid out for us. Natural law reasoning can demonstrate the “fit” between creation and revelation. The fact that women, not men, bear babies is ethically significant, as is the fact that human beings talk but animals don’t. Natural law is rhetorically useful for advancing arguments and purposes that would be rejected out of hand if stated in overtly religious terms.

But despite all that value, natural law comes up short:

The fundamental Christian political claim is “Jesus is Lord,” a truth that lies beyond natural reason. Christians can’t finally talk about politics without talking about Jesus, and, yes, Satan and the Bible too. We can’t talk politics without sounding like Rick Santorum, and we shouldn’t try to.

This is a very strange conclusion if not for the place of publication, First Things. A Protestant talking about Jesus as Lord would never have endorsed the religious views of a Roman Catholic in submission to a bishop whom Protestants have believed to be in competition with Jesus for the rule over his church. So if we are going to bring the Bible into the public square, poof! there goes Santorum discourse as a model for Protestants.

But, let’s go back to GOVERNANCE and what book of revelation is sufficient for rulers in society. Frame and Leithart claim to take the high ground of explicit Christian affirmation and implicitly (or not so implicitly) criticize advocates of natural law for failures of courage, for not speaking frankly and openly about explicitly Christian convictions. Again, the problem they identify is one of argument. They spot a weakness and conclude that theirs must be better, though I am still waiting for a solid exegetical case that is not theonomic and that does justice to the cultural program of Jesus and the apostles for transformation and establishing Christ’s Lordship. No fair appealing to the Arian sympathizer, Constantine.

But Frame and Leithart are not actually dealing with the real world of a society that admits believers from all faiths as well as unbelievers to citizenship and allows them to run for public office. BTW, that same society includes no provisions about making special revelation the basis for how believers or non-believers will GOVERN the culture. In fact, this society excludes special revelation as the basis for national life. Maybe that’s a bad thing. But that’s where we are in the greatest nation on God’s green earth.

So how sufficient is the Bible to govern a society composed of diverse religious adherents and non-believers? We already know that the Bible has not been sufficient to yield a unified church. Now it’s supposed to give us a platform for cultural and political cogency and coherence in a diverse and religiously free society?

The objections to Frame and Leithart are not simply empirical or based on United States law. They are also theological. Appealing to the Bible as a norm for non-believers places those who don’t believe in an odd situation, at least according to theology that stresses the anti-thesis. How are those hostile to God going to submit to GOVERNMENT based on the Bible? I have asked this many times and I’m still lacking a decent answer, one that actually does justice to the Bible’s prohibitions against idolatry and the United States’ legal toleration of what some of its citizens consider idolatry. Another question is this: doesn’t a proposal for the Bible’s sufficiency as a rule for culture and society mean ultimately that only believers will GOVERN? After all, if fallen human beings cannot understand the Bible aright without the illumination of the Spirit, then only the regenerate may GOVERN because they alone have the discernment to apply Scripture to society and culture.

But maybe Frame and Leithart don’t want to go that far. Maybe they believe that people can appeal to the ethical parts of the Bible without needing to be regenerate. And then they walk over the cliff of liberalism and deny that the Bible is first and foremost not a book of ethics but of redemption. That was the basis for Machen’s opposition to reading the Bible and saying prayers in public schools. The great-grandaddy of children militia wrote:

The reading of selected passages from the Bible, in which Jews and Catholics and Protestants and others can presumably agree, should not be encouraged, and still less should be required by law. The real center of the Bible is redemption; and to create the impression that other things in the Bible contain any hope for humanity apart from that is to contradict the Bible at its root. . . .

If the mere reading of Scripture could lead to such a conclusion, imagine appealing to the Bible for running a society that includes believers and non-believers.

The lesson is that 2k (aka SCET) is really more faithful to Reformed teachings (which are biblical) than are 2k critics’ constant charges of infidelity and deficiency. Those who think the Bible sufficient to GOVERN culture or society must either form a political body comprised only of church members or they must cut and paste biblical teachings to make it fit a religiously mixed society. Either way (Massachusetts Bay or liberal Protestantism), we’ve been there and done that. Time for 2k’s critics to come up with their own proposals for GOVERNING and transforming culture that are not blinded to their own insufficiencies.

Santorum, W— V—, and the Michigan Primary

Published on by D. G. Hart67 Comments

Is it a coincidence that Rick Santorum, the former Senator from the virtuous commonwealth of Pennsylvania, has started to drop “w— v—” into his remarks this past week, a time when Grand Rapidians are deciding for whom to vote among the Republican contestants? First, Santorum questioned Obama’s w— v—. Then he attacked Obama’s plans to increase college enrollments because of the hostile w— v— students receive at college. The timing is striking.

But the appeal to w— v— has its limits and this video suggests what they are. It is of course biased toward Ron Paul and mocks Santorum. But it does remind me of how invoking w— v— often reassures and inspires instead of supplying answers to a society’s difficult questions. The key phrase is, “I like my w— v— a lot. It makes me happy” and can be found around the 3:15 mark in this video.

Can We Get a Little Moral Clarity Here?

Published on by D. G. Hart35 Comments

In the light of Newt Gingrich’s recent surge in the polls, let’s see how the fortunes of the Religious Right are developing:

A weak week ago Mitt Romney was leading in the polls and some even talked about his sowing up the nomination after South Carolina and Florida.

Newt Gingrich’s ex-wife did an interview this week in which details of Newt’s infidelities were in full view.

South Carolina may be the most evangelical state in the union, prompting some to call for Christians to migrate to the Palmetto State.

Today, pundits are calling the South Carolina Republican primary a toss-up between Gingrich and Romney, despite Romney’s obvious practice of family values and Gingrich’s marital past.

So where does this lead? First, evangelicals rally behind Tim Tebow who disregards the fourth commandment. Second, evangelical leaders tried to identify Rick Santorum, a Roman Catholic who doesn’t even number the Ten Commandments (let alone interpret them) as evangelicals do (or used to). Now, apparently some evangelicals are willing to overlook the seventh commandment in favor of a conservative Republican.

I personally don’t care how evangelicals vote. Voting is not an act of devotion and is a matter of Christian liberty. But I do grow weary of the constant refrain of faith’s importance for politics when it is so obviously untrue, when a paucity of political ideas forces believers to wrap politics in Christian language. All of us are hypocrites. But not all of us make such a big deal of calling attention to our hypocrisy. If the Religious Right wants the rest of America to take them seriously, they need to acknowledge and explain their selectivity. I have advice — adopt 2k theology which means that you recognize the fallenness of the world and its politicians and so make the best of a bad situation. But if you’re going to insist that religion forms the only adequate basis for morality, and if you’re going to demand political candidates who have a faith that produces the kind of character needed for holding public office, then you better have a ready explanation for your vote for candidates who openly violate the Ten Commandments.

And it would also be good to explain how your identification of political acts with Christian devotion is not a violation of the First Commandment. Admittedly, Karl Barth had his problems as an interpreter of the Reformed tradition. But he certainly recognized the damnable error of investing political parties with religious significance (beyond the indefinite meanings supplied by providence).

Can We Get A Little Love-the-Law Street Cred Here?

Published on by D. G. Hart24 Comments

The shelf life on Tim Tebow is rapidly decreasing now that the Broncos ran into the Patriots’ capacity for cheating. So before Ricky Gervais completely eclipses Tebow in water-cooler banter, a point needs to be made about the charges of antinomianism that two-kingdom theology continues to receive. (The latest comes in a post about Martin Luther King, Jr. that uses the Civil Rights leader to cast aspersions on your humble — all about me — blogger; on the eve of MLK Day no less. The lack of charity among the lovers of the law continues to dumbfound.)

I have been rooting for the Broncos’ QB even if Tebow’s wear-it-on-your-cheek piety is not an Old Lifer’s preferred demeanor. Tebow appears to be genuine in his devotion even if he could benefit from the oversight of a Reformed pastor. But how can he possibly be a poster boy for evangelicals and the Religious Right when he flagrantly violates one of the Ten Commandments that many born-again Protestants want posted in court rooms and public school classrooms? I get it. How to interpret OT law is something that divides many Christians — and boy can theonomists be divisive about it. But Tebow’s actions are hard to square with any traditional reading of the Decalogue. In fact, U.S. Protestants used to be Sabbatarians through and through, and the NFL had to clear all sorts of Blue Laws in order to get its franchises off the ground (Saturday was already taken by college football, which was, and still is in some parts of the country, more popular than professional gridiron play.

Evangelicals may be inconsistent — which of us is not (except of course for the epistemologically self-conscious)? But the disparity between public statements and actions goes beyond the hobgobblin that afflicts small minds. The Religious Right lauds traditional Christian morality and seeks it for the nation at large. This is partly the rationale behind arriving at Rick Santorum as the evangelical alternative to Mitt Romney. Never mind that Roman Catholics like Santorum were the object of some of those Protestant Blue Laws governing the Lord’s Day. A recent column in the Washington Post (touted by the Baylys) attempted to put a positive spin on the evangelical notion that righteousness exalts a nation. It tried to extend the appeal of Tebow to his opposing QB last weekend — Ben Roethlisberger — who appears to be on the mend morally after recovering his evangelical roots. The piece also argued that evangelical piety is much more important than evangelical politics.

Tebow and Roethlisberger point to the essential aspects of evangelicalism, the ones that make it persist — its missionary, proclamatory character on the one hand, and its private, searching piety on the other. The former wants to appeal to the whole world, which is why Tebow’s family raised him not only to preach, but to persuade others with a winning demeanor. The latter wants a changed life; Roethlisberger, in evangelical parlance, rededicated his life to Jesus after a period of backsliding, because he knew no other way to break his pattern of misbehavior.

In Iowa, Santorum’s evangelical “surge” grossed him about 30,000 votes. That may constitute an evangelical moment, and it may inspire some observers to define evangelicals by their political behavior. But it is not a particularly large group from which to draw conclusions about the movement as a whole. Most evangelicals, like most Americans, don’t show up to the voting booth at all. Their political commitments are not nearly as strong as their faith commitments.

Odd that this column says nothing about forgiveness of sins through the work of Christ as being crucial to evangelical piety. Instead, it points to evangelicalism’s life-changing character and how its adherents lead moral lives. If that is so — and there is some obvious truth to this — what about the elephant in the room of the way that evangelicals (in worship and on Sunday) seem to disregard the first table of the law?

What does this have to do with 2k? Well, the critics of 2k never seem to notice that 2k advocates do care about the law and have defended especially the first table. 2kers are invariably Sabbatarian, defend the regulative principle of worship (derived from the Second Commandment), condemn the creation of images of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and fear the ways in which informality in worship may breach the Third Commandment’s call for avoiding profanity. Meanwhile, the critics of 2k, who invariably want the entire nation to follow God’s law, look the other way when it comes to the church following all of God’s law. Some of 2k’s biggest critics are advocates of contemporary worship and praise Christian football players who profane the Sabbath.

So it is false to say that 2k leads to or promotes antinomianism. 2kers follow God’s law and defend it — all of it. What seems to be 2kers problem is that we don’t apply the law selectively to public life. That selectivity may not qualify as antinomian. But it hardly constitutes the love of God’s law that 2kers allegedly lack or qualifies as honest.