“HUMANKIND CANNOT BEAR VERY MUCH REALITY”

That from T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets, his “answer” to the problems he raised in The Wasteland. Or at least I think it is.  I didn’t understand The Wasteland the first time I read it, and my comprehension hasn’t improved much since.

That’s the opening to a short essay I wrote for my new friend Steve Wood, who is the rector of St. Andrew’s Anglican Church in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina.

Of course, the whole theme needs expanding to account for the two biggest movies in the last twelve months–Inception and Avatar–but it’s a start.  Feel free to let me know in the comments what you think.

While rereading To Change the World, I came across this passage, where Hunter almost anticipates my remarks:

Some argue that what we need is a redefinition of politics, one that is more capacious and capable of absorbing actions, ideas, and initiatives that are independent of the State.  The idea here is to reclaim or restore a “proper” understanding of the political.  Such efforts would, in principle, accomplish the same end I am describing here.  This position is certainly worthy of serious debate but as a sociologist who is attentive to the power of institutions, I am inclined to think that all such efforts will be swallowed up by the current ways in which politics is thought of and used. It is why I continue to think that it is important to separate the public from the political and to think of new ways of thinking and speaking and acting in public that are not merely political.” (emphasis mine)

Yes, there is a danger that attempts at reform might lead to the perpetuation of the standard way of doing things.

But then, there’s a danger that any presence might cease to be faithful and be co-opted by the power structures of the institutions in which it exists.

If anything, Hunter’s reply seems to unfairly single out politics as particularly resistant to reform.  What if the institution in question were, say, the academy with its (ostensibly) liberal bias?  We might want to rethink the academy, but any attempts to institutionalize those reforms from within the system would be just as susceptible to co-option by “current ways in which [academia] is thought of and used.”  Yet is not doing so simply one way of being “faithfully present” as an academic administrator?  Why, then, can’t politicians play as well?

Which is to say, bad ideas and ways of doing thing have a way of wanting to stick around, regardless of which institution they exist in.

Milliner’s characteristically incisive remarks today include this graph from James Matthew Wilson:

The meaning of the world that we usually describe as constituting culture, or a culture… does not depend primarily upon our social conventions. Rather, the signs of a culture are founded on natural signs, and, indeed, are themselves natural signs in whose fashioning our intellects cooperate, and for whose knowledge and joy they exist. Given how destructive the wars and social changes of the last century have been—above all the change in thought that has tried to reduce even the human person to a fungible fact for exploitation—we should take great comfort in that fact.

Though Milliner’s dealing with the question in an artistic context, metaphysics comes in different forms.  I’m not in the same league as the fellow he mentions, but I’m trying.  The refrain–which was O’Donovan’s before it was mine– “there is an objective order of goods in creation” is simply Milliner’s point in different clothing.

Either a natural order exists, or we impose it.  Either the meaning is tied to the structure of things, or we make it up.

And if the order exists, our options are conformity or rebellion.  There is no middle ground here, despite the ambiguities and uncertainties that we experience in our confrontation with it.  But if we reject metaphysics, our only resource for ethics is our will, and God’s.

And we only need to read James Davison Hunter to see how that turned out.

(Apologies for simply repeating a point I’ve made before, and Milliner’s point.  However, I’m increasingly convinced that this is the notion on which Christianity in the modern world stands or falls.  Which means if I wear myself out trying to make it in different ways and places, well, count it as my attempt at establishing a faithful presence.)

“Are you going to be the Tina Fey of your field?”

That’s the question that was put to some of evangelicalism’s best and brightest, who gathered at Veritas Riff, the new program from the estimable Veritas Forum, to learn the weighty art of…improv theater.

You won’t hear me belittling the good that can come from learning improv.  I think it’s a fantastic training ground for all sorts of skills, not least of which is the ability to conduct meaningful conversations and discussions.

But the event seems to betray a populist approach to culture, as though the professor’s work won’t really be influential unless it is communicated to a popular audience.  As the article states, they want to equip “Christian thought leaders with the communication skills and peer support to become recognized and compelling cultural commentators.”

Maybe it’s my own skepticism about the good I’m doing in the world, but I tend to think that the real work isn’t being done by the nebulous “cultural commentators,” who seem to be a dime a dozen, but by real thinkers who are devoted to investing deeply in the next generation of Christian leaders and scholars.  If there’s a problem with “staid Christian scholars,” in other words, I suspect it’s less one of skill and more one of passion, drive, and connection to their student’s lives.

But then there’s Peter Marten’s take-down in the letters to the editor:

VF’s diagnosis of the problem is that the reason evangelical academics have a disproportionately small influence on their students and American society at large is that they lack media and theatrical training. I wonder if it is not more likely that the cause of low influence is that evangelicals as a group have a disproportionately low interest in pursuing academic careers…

I have a more effective proposal for the founders of VR. If you want to shape the academic world outside of the evangelical enclave, leave Ms. Fey to do her own thing (a craft which, by the way, took her more than four days of intensive training to hone). Evangelical leaders should instead heed the well-established strategies of other religious movements in this country. Establish endowed chairs for their outstanding scholars at nonevangelical institutions. This will ensure a solid sphere of influence outside of the evangelical subculture.

In wrestling, that’d be two points.

In the Q&A at the AEI event with Dr. Hunter, he casually remarked that if you really wanted to know where a culture is going, follow its academics, a principle that I have argued for in the past and wholeheartedly endorse.  Somehow, I don’t think this was precisely what he had in mind.

It’s an odd topic, but one that I find fascinating.  Like all matters of practical wisdom, the question of cremation highlights the presuppositions we have and how those shape our intuitions.

The latest Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society has a piece on the topic by David Jones, which JT calls “a model of careful Christian ethical analysis and application.”  That praise is a bit too strong for my blood.  Jones’ piece is good, but weak at crucial points.

I mention two such points here.

First, when turning to the theological implications of the Resurrection, Jones writes:

“After reviewing some of the key historical, biblical, and theological considerations that have been a part of the moral discussion of cremation within the Judeo-Christian tradition, ultimately the practice must be viewed as an adiaphora [i.e. Scripture is indifferent] issue.”

Here Jones is a little too careful.  Immediately after he says that Scripture’s indifferent on the matter, he suggests the trajectory is “pro-burial” and that we ought to way the “act and imagery” of burial practices carefully because of Scripture’s high view of the body.

But how is it that the anthropology of Scripture can work to undercut a particular practice, while simultaneously being indifferent toward it?  In this case, it seems like a great example of an overreliance on a clear command in Scripture in order to make normative claims.

But my real worry is the second:

“Certainly not all deaths will afford loved ones an opportunity to choose the method of interment. Indeed, factors such as the location and manner of death, nation-specific legal parameters, as well as the resources of the surviving family will bear upon funerary practices and decisions.Yet, if given a choice, those left behind ought to consider carefully what is being communicated in their handling of the body of a decedent.”

Again, true enough.  But notice where responsibility for the dead lies?  On the family, not upon the church.  The church lives together, but apparently leaves its dead alone.  I get financial hardship.  But I don’t understand families having to take sole responsibility for the care of those members of the church who die.

Additionally, there’s a presumption here that because Scripture doesn’t offer a definitive word on the morality of burial practices that they are, in fact, indifferent.  Hence, we have the responsibility to think about burial only if we have the funds for it.  The notion, though, that burial is a witness only for those who are financially able to pursue it undercuts any notion that it is a witness to the Christian gospel. Leaving individuals out to bear witness to the Christian gospel if they can afford it undercuts the whole premise that we live, die, and bear witness within the community of the church.

There may be some reason to cremate folks that is consistent with the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, and that takes into account the role of the community, but I can’t for the life of me think what it is.

There is an enormous amount that I have to be grateful for.  One year ago, I left my employment as a financial planner in order to pursue a crazy dream of becoming a writer.  It just sounds so pretentious when I say it, I can barely stand myself.

That’s actually false.  I love calling myself a writer.  It sounds infinitely better than a “blogger.”

But still, it was a crazy decision.  And I am grateful that my wife supported it. My confidence in my writing has grown exponentially in the past year, in large part due to her support. 95% of that has been she finally started reading what I had to say.

I’m also grateful for the friends I’ve made since then, like Christopher Benson and Jake Meador.  Both of them heroically picked up some of the slack around here while I was traipsing around Europe like a college kid. Keep your eye on both of those guys, as they’re going to do remarkable things.   I suspect you haven’t seen the last of them around here, either.

I am enormously grateful to my publisher and editor, Andy McGuire of Bethany House, who has believed in me, encouraged me, and supported me through this process.  Did I think I would have a book contract six months after quitting my job to pursue this as a vocation?  Not. At. All.

And how do I say this?  Our readers.  Readers. It’s a remarkable reality, a fact worth enormous rejoicing, that such a category of people exist.  And they do exist–I met one this past Monday in Washington D.C., which was without a doubt the highlight of my trip.  I am so grateful to her and to the many other folks who have emailed, questioned, and spread the word about our growing corner of the world.

As Sheldon and Davy Van Auken would say on their anniversary, “If it’s half as good as the half that’s been, here’s ‘hail!’ to the rest of the road.”

Of late, one of the current topics I’ve spent the most time thinking about has been the debate surrounding the plan to build a Mosque near Ground Zero. Below is a video which has garnered significant attention on YouTube. I would like you, the dazzling readers of Mere-O, to watch this video and share your thoughts about it—whether negative, positive, the outlandish, etc.. In the next day or so, I’ll plan to further this discussion on how Christians ought to navigate the desire for religious liberty while simultaneously upholding the virtues of Western Civilization.

What say you?

Should we put capitalism and traditional views of marriage back on the table?

That’s the claim that James Davison Hunter made in the question and answer period.  It was obviously a direct reply to my remarks, even though he didn’t say so.   In fact, he said it as though he expected me to disagree.

I don’t.

Of course we should question capitalism and how the structure of traditional marriage.  And while we’re at it, let’s question the reliability of Scripture, the possibility of God’s goodness existing along with horrendous evils in this world, and whether the Heat are going to win 70 games next year.

As far as I’m concerned, we oughta question it all, if only because it’s the only possible way to dignify the ideas and ourselves.  And those ideas that are the closest to the center of our understanding of the world are the ideas that demand the hardest questions.

Which is to say, we ought to think.  And to the extent that we do that, we need to be open to revising our opinions on capitalism, the family, and God in light of what we discover.

Look, social conservatives have found themselves in the difficult position have having almost all the right conclusions (I think), but without decent reasons for those conclusions.  That’s certainly true of “normal” social conservatives.  But I sometimes wonder how much the leadership even thinks about the philosophical and theological issues that undergird their political action.  It’s tempting to get caught up in strategy all the time, a temptation I’m told pro-lifers in Congress succumb tooften.  If that’s accurate–and I don’t much care either way–a dose of solid questioning would do them a world of good.

I’m no skeptic, nor do I think “question everything” is much of a slogan to live by.  But we ought to occasionally pull the assumptions of our personal and political action up from beneath the surfaces of our lives and consider whether they are true, lest we waste our time chasing leprechauns.

I think that’s what we do here at Mere-O.  That’s what we want to do.  And if we fail at that, I trust you’ll let us know.

What was perpetrated this week by a particular brand of conservatism was neither conservative nor amenable to any type of Christianity seeking to align itself with the Right. I am, of course, referring to the Breitbartian tactics employed against Shirley Sherrod. As you’re all well aware of by now, a video of Sherrod was circuited by Breitbart which implicated Sherrod in a past racist action in her position as a government employee. What failed to be considered at the time the story broke was the failure of Breitbart to divulge the full content of Sherrod’s speech to the NAACP, a speech in which she lamented her own racist attitudes and overcame them through economic solidarity with the white farmer she was assigned to assist, rather than racial polarity as Andrew Breitbart would have us believe.

Thankfully, respectable conservative journalists have succeeded in labeling this tactic as it truly is: a pernicious attempt to use the highly charged issue of racism in what amounts to race-baiting.

Whereas I hoped I would encounter a mainstream, populist conservatism which would have soundly condemned Breitbart’s malicious actions, there’s been silence. Hannity and Beck, rather than condemn this type of maneuvering, have no less used this situation to highlight seemingly absurd actions of the Left and NAACAP, omitting any possibility that they may have been complicit in contributing to the fallout the story precipitated.

For readers of Mere-O tempted to endorse, carte blanche, the motives and actions resonant with movements associated with Andrew Breitbart, take a step back and recognize that the Christian faith bluntly puts a halt on deceptive actions meant to inject unnecessary emotion to an already delicate and volatile situation. Let’s be able to call a lie for what it is. Let’s be able to call out, prophetically, the actions of those supposedly representing our values with humble temerity. Any attempt on the part of Christian conservatives and conservative Christians to somehow present a defense of this week’s action is not only wrong, but blithely falling prey to a political culture aimed towards the destruction of one’s opponent.

Milliner’s synopsis about my reply to James Davison Hunter is accurate, even if his praise is overstated. And make no mistake–it is.

But because a few folks have asked, I am posting my full remarks to Hunter here.  I’ll have a few more thoughts on the exchange (which you can also watch online) and on Hunter’s book later, but in the meantime, if you’ve read it or were at the event, I’d love to hear your feedback.

————–

When I mentioned to a senior member of the Christian community here in Washington D.C. that I was going to be responding to Dr. Hunter tonight, he graciously advised me that I would do well to simply agree with him and take my seat. Whether that was a comment on the accuracy of Professor Hunter’s ideas or my own intellectual acumen I leave to you to decide. But given that I am not prone to using exclamation points, much less acting as one, I will foolishly demure from my elder’s sagacious advice and blaze—as I have often attempted to do—my own way.

I am grateful for Professor Hunter’s remarks, and even more for his remarkable book. There are few works that articulate many of the core frustrations that I have felt as patiently as his did. As a son of an evangelical pastor, a student at an evangelical university, a teacher of evangelical homeschoolers, and a staff member at a young-evangelical church, I have known well the emptiness of the evangelical community and have been a participant in attempts to revive it. I speak , in other words, the language of world-changing fluently.

Not only that, but as a conservative evangelical—an oddity in my circles—I have fought bouts of the nostalgia that Dr. Hunter ably describes, and have spoken passionately about the evils of secularism and the decline of American culture. In my writing, I have attempted to play a minor role in the clash of orthodoxies, agitating for a conservative political position that is motivated by a robust doctrine of creation.

Which is simply to say, I have no little appreciation for Dr. Hunter’s critique of evangelical’s attenuated understanding of how culture’s change. St. Paul may have been correct when writing to the Corinthians that our warfare consists of “destroying arguments and lofty opinions,” but he is silent on precisely where and how those battles take place. Dr. Hunter has filled that gap admirably.

Allow me to risk the exclamation point and praise a bit further. Dr. Hunter’s diagnosis that evangelicals have reduced the church’s public witness to the political is perceptive. This reduction is, in Dr. Hunter’s words, an “accommodation to the spirit of our age,” an age characterized by the death of a common culture and the rise of the state in its place. All other institutions—church, family, etc.—derive their self-understanding and identity in response to the state, which inevitably makes the state not simply the object of evangelicalism’s witness, but an instrument by which evangelicals impose their collective will on the world.

As a result of this totalization of politics, the evangelical imagination about how to change the world has been sorely stunted. This was most evident in the recent health care debate, where the only question that was pursued by evangelicals of all ages was which statist solution we should implement to the problems that we face.

What’s more, rather than being motivated by a vision of the good and by care for the world, evangelical politics, left and right, has—according to Dr. Hunter—been fueled by ressentiment, or a strong sense of injury. So conservative evangelicals are held captive by stories of secular institutions who refuse to allow the Christian worldview into their discourse about the nature of the world, stories which are used well to raise funds, but which reinforce a culture of negation and hostility toward those with whom we differ.

As a descriptive account of evangelical political culture, this is hard to disagree with. Indeed, the purported leftward shift among my peers away from issues like gay marriage, abortion, and other traditional social conservative issues has been fueled in my estimation less by a serious and substantive disagreement over policy and philosophical issues, and more by the distaste we have at this sort of political world.

And yet.

There is a danger in describing the political culture of evangelicalism to relativize the political theories that motivate evangelical political action. In other words, because conservative and liberal evangelicals are both driven by anger and a sense of injury, which option we choose is irrelevant for solving the problem of a totalizing politics. Though I don’t think Dr. Hunter would agree with this, it’s not hard to interpret his book that way.

Dr. Hunter’s own case for navigating this morass is to decouple politics and the public. He writes that “for politics to be about more than power, it depends on a realm that is independent of the political sphere.” His suggestion for how to bring this about, or “faithful presences,” is an evocative and compelling image of what he terms “post-political” engagement with the world.

But at the risk of being too curmudgeonly, allow me to speak one word in defense of not simply political engagement, but a political engagement that is deeply conservative in its principles, even if it rejects the politics of ressentiment and the will to power, as one way of decoupling the public and the political. Here I confess I have a polemic point to make against my peers who are moving leftward in their politics because they are disenchanted by the perceived problems on the political right. That point is this: When Dr. Hunter suggests that “for politics to be about more than power, it depends on a realm that is independent of the political sphere,” he describes the very essence of political conservativism, even if it is an essence that has been forgotten or neglected in recent years.

I’ll choose two examples, both of which are near to the conservative heart: capitalism and gay marriage. As a theory, the former wants to maintain an independent realm of commerce. Historically, capitalism has been tempered by forms of life that were oriented toward local communities, and by educational methods that were oriented toward the production of virtue, both of which mitigated its excesses. Whether it is sustainable without these is debatable. Even if it is not, evangelicals disaffected by capitalism who turn toward statist solutions simply highlights the loss of our imaginative vision for solving problems in non-statist ways.

With respect to gay marriage, conservatives have sometimes argued that marriage is an institution only inasmuch as it is tied to the procreation of children, an unambiguously pre-political act that points to our status as political animals. The notion of traditional marriage suggests that the basic unit of society is not the individual and his rights, but the family—a concept that also might mitigate the dangers of capitalism. If they are right, then conservatives aren’t seeking to simply impose their will on the world capriciously. Rather, they are trying to protect the space around this pre-political institution from being reshaped by the state, an argument made best by Seana Sugrue in her essay “Soft Despotism and Same Sex Marriage.”

Additionally, the central problem for religious conservatives with respect to gay marriage is that the state will inevitably encroach on the church. As long as the argument for gay marriage assumes the discourse of “rights,” then regardless of whether the state sanctions any marriages at all, churches could be subject to lawsuit or punishment for infringement of political rights if they refuse to marry gay people.

Which is to say conservative politics—and more precisely, social conservative politics—might be uniquely devoted to the distinction between the political and the public in a way that no other tradition is. If as the Anabaptists are prone to say, that the state is an idol, we just might consider defunding it.

All this puts me in the somewhat odd position of agreeing with traditional evangelical theological and political conclusions, while disagreeing with them on their reasons for those conclusions and the way they present them in the public square. While many of my peers have been turned off by the political culture, I have peered beneath to see some of the good work that is being done, despite the inflammatory rhetoric.

The real question, then, is whether conservative evangelical politics are possible without being motivated by the sense of personal injury.

Over the past ten years, conservative evangelicals have begun to retrieve a robust doctrine of creation. It is no accident that Dr. Hunter begins with this, and that Andy Crouch’s Culture Making features it prominently in the first few pages. This emphasis on creation is one of my generation’s distinct contributions to evangelical discourse, and we are better off for it. But we have not gone far enough. Our notion of creation has been limited to two realms: the environment, or what is sometimes called “creation care,” and culture.

Both may fall under the doctrine of creation. But they are insufficient on their own, nor should either be the starting point for the doctrine, for neither are able to specify the set of normative goods that guide our world-making and our environmental practices. For evangelicals to recover a doctrine of creation, they must begin to appreciate—though not necessarily adopt—the work of natural law philosophers like John Finnis, Robert George. Though I have significant differences with them, they are right to point to an objective order of goods that is discernible and that can guide both ethical and policy decision making, and in so doing, establish limits on the state and its activity.

I contend that it is the loss of this grounding for ethics that has made evangelicals particularly susceptible to the Nietschean instrumentalization of the whole world, and the totalization of politics—and that younger evangelicals, despite their attempts to move beyond politics to culture, have not escaped the madman’s specter. Because evangelical cultural engagement is often motivated by a sense of ‘missionality’ or ‘social justice’ that doesn’t include the sense of creation I included above, it often results in an accommodation to contemporary ways of doing things. So in my own field of technology, “engaging the tools” inevitably turns evangelical worship services into rock concerts with speeches. This is, of course, a Nietschean accommodation to the spirit of our age—even if it wears much cooler clothing.

But as Dr. Hunter points out, the notion of creation (and incarnation) means that the first and last movement of the Christian toward the world is one of affirmation, not negation. A doctrine of creation properly orders our minds and hearts so that we are able to find the good and praise it, wherever it is. A politics that takes this doctrine seriously cannot be rooted in negation or injury, but must be motivated by the affirmation of all that is true and beautiful within the created realm.

My goal in reflecting upon Dr. Hunter’s book has been to attempt to say one thing that he didn’t quite say in full, and to ground it in my own experience as a young evangelical. The young evangelical emphasis on the doctrine of creation is a step in a good direction, but one that does not go far enough. And while I think I am more optimistic about the prospects for an evangelical political witness than Dr. Hunter, his critique demands a careful hearing by all evangelicals, young and old. That it has started this conversation is an enormous gift to the church and the world, and I am grateful for his “faithful presence” as an academic.

One final word: there is a tendency among conservatives to move from crisis to crisis, declare the end of the world at each of them, and then raise funds accordingly. Like Elijah, we have watched the wind, the earthquake , and the fire. Unlike Elijah, we have been outside the cave trying to stop every one of them. Meanwhile, the Lord whose providence governs creation and shows through history speaks with gentle whisper that all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. It is a whisper that I hope shapes our politics as much as our spirituality.