Tag: Ross Douthat

Is Tony Soprano in Hell?

Published on by D. G. Hart10 Comments

That is the question that Ross Douthat uses to respond to Rob Bell’s query about whether Christians must believe that Ghandi is in hell for being Hindu (probably not the best way of putting it since the eternal destiny of any human, aside from Christ, has not been part of Protestant church dogma).

Here is part of Douthat’s reasoning:

Atheists have license to scoff at damnation, but to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices. If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either. They’re like home runs or strikeouts in a children’s game where nobody’s keeping score.

In this sense, a doctrine of universal salvation turns out to be as deterministic as the more strident forms of scientific materialism. Instead of making us prisoners of our glands and genes, it makes us prisoners of God himself. We can check out any time we want, but we can never really leave.

The doctrine of hell, by contrast, assumes that our choices are real, and, indeed, that we are the choices that we make. The miser can become his greed, the murderer can lose himself inside his violence, and their freedom to turn and be forgiven is inseparable from their freedom not to do so.

As Anthony Esolen writes, in the introduction to his translation of Dante’s “Inferno,” the idea of hell is crucial to Western humanism. It’s a way of asserting that “things have meaning” — that earthly life is more than just a series of unimportant events, and that “the use of one man’s free will, at one moment, can mean life or death … salvation or damnation.”

If there’s a modern-day analogue to the “Inferno,” a work of art that illustrates the humanist case for hell, it’s David Chase’s “The Sopranos.” The HBO hit is a portrait of damnation freely chosen: Chase made audiences love Tony Soprano, and then made us watch as the mob boss traveled so deep into iniquity — refusing every opportunity to turn back — that it was hard to imagine him ever coming out. “The Sopranos” never suggested that Tony was beyond forgiveness. But, by the end, it suggested that he was beyond ever genuinely asking for it.

The entire piece is worth reading not only for its explicit point but also to show that as supposedly debased and secular as American society is, it still permits arguments like Douthat’s – at the New York Times no less. Way to go, Ross. Way to go, light of nature.

Why Conservatism Beats Biblicism

Published on by D. G. Hart93 Comments

An earlier reference to Ross Douthat’s blog posts on gay marriage was intended to show that people in the mainstream secular media can hear an argument that is laced with Christian norms and not go running to the Supreme Court for an injunction to shut said arguer down. Douthat concluded his series of posts (defending his column in the New York Times) with a lengthy response to Andrew Sullivan, one of gay marriage’s most provocative and intelligent advocates.

The entire post is worth reading, just to see the wider implications of what might seem like a straightforwardly up or down moral matter — whether marriage is for one man and one woman or not. But he ends with an appeal to the nature of conservatism that Protestants who think of themselves as conservative should well consider. The reason has to do with the nature of conservatism, which is not about defending morality and opposing wickedness (the Bayly version) but rather concerns conserving as much as possible what humans (whether Christian or not) have learned and benefited from the past. Douthat writes:

The benefits of gay marriage, to the couples involved and to their families, are front-loaded and obvious, whereas any harm to the overall culture of marriage and childrearing in America will be diffuse and difficult to measure. I suspect that the formal shift away from any legal association between marriage and fertility will eventually lead to further declines in the marriage rate and a further rise in the out-of-wedlock birth rate (though not necessarily the divorce rate, because if few enough people are getting married to begin with, the resulting unions will presumably be somewhat more stable). But these shifts will probably happen anyway, to some extent, because of what straights have already made of marriage. Or maybe the institution’s long decline is already basically complete, and the formal recognition of gay unions may just ratify a new reality, rather than pushing us further toward a post-marital society. Either way, there won’t come a moment when the conservative argument, with all its talk about institutional definitions and marginal effects and the mysteries of culture, will be able to claim vindication against those who read it (as I know many of my readers do) as a last-ditch defense of bigotry.

But this is what conservatism is, in the end: The belief that there’s more to a flourishing society than just the claims of autonomous individuals, the conviction that existing prohibitions and taboos may have a purpose that escapes the liberal mind, the sense that cultural ideals can be as important to human affairs as constitutional rights. Marriage is the kind of institution that the conservative mind is supposed to treasure and defend: Complicated and mysterious; legal and cultural; political and pre-political; ancient and modern; half-evolved and half-created. And given its steady decline across the last few decades, it would be a poor conservatism that did not worry at the blithe confidence with which we’re about to redefine it.

The New York Times: A Better Way?

Published on by D. G. Hart69 Comments

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.