Gregg Ten Elshof’s* recent book I Told Me So, which examines the role self-deception plays in the church and in our lives, suffers from an inherent marketing disadvantage. Recommending it to friends, colleagues, or other non-anonymous individuals carries with it the risk of creating enormously awkward situations:  “But what precisely did you mean by buying this as my birthday present?”  I suggest, for such occasions, something by Andrew Murray instead.

That disadvantage is a pity, as Ten Elshof’s book fills a wide gap in the recent literature on the spiritual life and so deserves a broad hearing. It is a model of clear, persuasive prose, but more importantly, I Told Me So is a deeply penetrating and highly convicting explication of a phenomenon that receives far too little attention. It is in this way a helpful companion to such works as Spirit of the Disciplines and The Lost Virtue of Happiness.

Ten Elshof is at his best, and most provocative, when articulating the relationship between self-deception and the truth. Writes Ten Elshof:

Knowing the truth is, in general, extremely important. But knowing the truth is not all-important. On occasion, we find that something else is more important. Terminal cancer wards are full of patients who believe things we all know to be radically improbable. They believe that they will be one of the very, very few who fight back and win-or that they’ll be the recipient of a miracle healing in response to the prayers of friends and family. It’s not just that they believe that they could get better-that God could perform a miracle on their behalf. In this they’re surely correct. No. They believe they will get better-that God will perform a miracle on their behalf. Nearly all of them are wrong. And anyone familiar with the statistics is well situated to see that they are. But-and this is the most salient part for our discussion-nobody corrects them. In fact, they are encouraged to persist in these highly improbable beliefs.

The excerpt exposes two fascinating aspects of self-deception that Ten Elshof highlights at various places: first, self-deception is often a social phenomenon. By not correcting the patient, those around him enable him to persist in his false belief. Second, self-deception is, as Ten Elshof put it, “an unexpected friend in time of need.” Again, Ten Elshof:

While the truth is often freeing, it is not always so. The truth can be utterly crippling and life-destroying for the person not positioned to receive it. Through discipleship to Jesus, we position ourselves over time to be capable of handling the truth-perhaps in time, even the whole truth. If we are disciples of Jesus, then, we position ourselves to be more and more acquainted with the truth-and to experience the truth as freeing. In the meantime, though, God has mercifully designed us with the capacity to avoid and resist truths that we can’t handle.

Ten Elshof’s proposal is as freeing as it is unique. By locating our growth in understanding the truth within the context of our relationship with Jesus, Ten Elshof manages to free us from the weighty responsibility of seeing our own sin. Ten Elshof isn’t denying introspection-he speaks elsewhere of having a plan for sanctification-but is establishing relational limits on our introspection. There is an appropriate time and place for our encounter with various truths, and that time and place may not always be of our own choosing.

In this way, Ten Elshof’s book is an important resource for both the non-introspective soul and the overly introspective soul. And by helping us understand the role self-deception plays in the Christian life (for good and ill), Ten Elshof opens his reader to a deeper understanding of the way grace manifests itself in the life of the Christian.

* I once had the opportunity to take a class from Ten Elshof, and that my wife maintains semi-regular correspondence with him. We both regard him as one of the most thoughtful and careful teachers we have ever met.

Cross posted at EvangelicalOutpost.com

“Last week, Joe Carter praised The Atlantic’s forthcoming (mammoth) article on health care as “one of the most sensible and pragmatic articles on the health care debate you’re likely to ever read.” I couldn’t agree more. Goldhill’s analysis is even-handed and thorough.

But what struck me most was his solution…”

That’s how the article begins, which you can read at First Things, where I am honored to be an occasional contributor to their blog First Thoughts.  Also, don’t miss Eric Chevelen’s piece, which I am still digesting.  It dovetails quite well with my own reflections.

As I mentioned in my response to Christianity Today, one of the central failures of our discussion about Christendom was our conflation of the political and cultural aspects of Christendom.   This is, in many ways, understandable.  The political and the culture have a complex relationship, and drawing a clear line between them makes me suspicious that their relationship has been oversimplified.

Those who criticize Christendom, regardless of its formulation, often do so on grounds that the Church shouldn’t be in the business of seizing power.  And on this point, they are right.   But if Oliver O’Donovan’s explication is accurate, Christendom begins not when Christians seize control, but when the political authorities acknowledge the reality of Christ’s Lordship.   In Desire of the Nations, he states the relationship this way:

The rulers of this world have bowed before Christ’s throne.  The core-idea of Christendom is therefore intimately bound up with the church’s mission.  But the relationship between mission and Christian political order should not be misconstrued.  It is not, as is often suggested, that Christian political order is a project of the church’s mission, either as an end in itself or as a means to the further missionary end.  The church’s one project is to witness to the Kingdom of God.  Christendom is response to mission, and as such a sign that God has blessed it.  It is constituted not by the church’s seizing alien power, but by alien power’s becoming attentive to the church.

Yet (seemingly contrary to the above), O’Donovan goes on to say that the Church and State are to exist in a relationship of mutual service, where the state helps the church’s mission either by respecting its own limitations and maintaining, interestingly, a self-awareness that it is temporal and transient, or by a “willingness to listen to [the church’s leaders] as they explain the church’s task.”  In taking this latter route, the state neither coerces nor steps over its temporal boundary.  As O’Donovan points out elsewhere, this is the logic of 1 Timothy 2:1-4: 

First of all, then, I urge that entreaties and prayers, petitions and thanksgivings, be made on behalf of all men, for kings and all who are in authority, so that we may lead a quiet and tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and dignity.  This is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.

O’Donovan is rightly concerned that a confused implementation of Christendom can lead to the faulty view that the mission of the Church has come to an end.  But for Paul, the logic works the other direction:  the states humble acknowledgment of its own limits gives space for the Church to live out its mission. 

It is, I think, this articulation of Christendom to which I would tentatively ascribe.  Christendom is a Churchly reality first, but a Churchly reality that bears political fruit.

In 1954, C.S. Lewis was asked by the Milton Society of America to comment on his own life’s work. In his statement, Lewis insists that the explanation for such a span of genres, topics, and formats is found in the development of his own personality:

The imaginative man in me is older, more continuously operative, and in that sense more basic than either the religious writer or the critic…It was, of course, he who has brought me, in the last few years to write the series of Narnian stories for children; not asking what children want and then endeavoring to adapt myself (this was not needed) but because the fairy-tale was the genre best fitted for what I wanted to say.”

Two things are worth noting. First, at least with Narnia, Lewis began with identifying what he wanted to say, not to whom he wanted to say it. Second, his “message” was a story, because the story-telling part of him was the most fundamental part. In fact, the picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood was a product of Lewis’s sixteen-year-old imagination.

Lewis’s example is instructive for any Christian who aims to use her talents, whether for writing or something else. Lewis employed his imagination in the explicit defense of the Faith, in implicit promotion of the Faith, and in ways that had no clear connection with the Faith. To put it another way, Lewis was imaginative when he was in church, walking to church, and skipping church. There were, however, self-imposed limits to his work. Lewis best shows this in a letter to a priest who asked him to write an apologetics book for the working class. He first flatly refuses: “I can’t write a book for workers. I know nothing at all of the realities of factory life.” He then explains his deeper frustration:

People praise me as a ‘translator,’ but what I want is to be the founder of a school of ‘translation.’ I am nearly forty-seven. Where are my successors? Anyone can learn to do it if they wish…I feel I’m talking rather like a tutor—forgive me. But it is just a technique and I’m desperately anxious to see it widely learned.”

Clearly Lewis did not consider popular apologetics to be the exclusive domain of professional scholars, otherwise no one could meet his criterion for writing a book for the working class. He is confident anyone could learn his “technique,” which, while an exaggeration, displays appropriate humility. Taken in isolation, Lewis’s work in each particular genre is very good, but not world-class. What makes him so powerful is his ability to combine often disparate elements: analytical rigor with fantastic imagination, depth with clarity, pagan myths with Christian orthodoxy. Perhaps this generalist quality contributes something to Lewis’ far greater popularity in the US than in the UK, where the boundaries between vocations and expertise are more sharply defined. Whatever the case, Lewis shows how one can be a genuinely interdisciplinary thinker (some might prefer to say “balanced”) without abandoning one’s native talent. As Barfield put it:

There was something in the whole quality and structure of his thinking… If I were asked to expand on that, I could say only that somehow what he thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything.”

I am honored and humbled that Christianity Today’s Collin Hansen penned a synopsis of our discussion about evangelicalism at The City.   Hansen knows young evangelicals as well as anyone–his thorough and detailed treatment of the young Reformed left little more to be said, which was largely the reason why I left that specific demographic aside.

It is my hope that Hansen’s article will prompt people not only to read the first article, but the subsequent discussion.  But Hansen’s essay does reveal one flaw in our discussion that I think worth clarifying.

Hansen frames Reynolds’ proposal for evangelicalism (and my agreement) this way:  “Is it possible that Christendom, widely regarded as the depths of Christian captivity to politics, could offer the way of escape from today’s cultural morass?” 

This formulation, which focuses on the political aspect of Christendom, is largely due to our failure to distinguish between its social and political senses.  While I suspect Dr. Reynolds and I might think Christendom of the sort Oliver O’Donovan describes in Desire of the Nations appropriate in both ways, it was chiefly in the cultural sense that we used it.  I suspect we both think that the political order follows the cultural, and so Christendom must be a particular sort of society before it is a particular sort of political order.

That said, Hansen and I are in agreement that we should not be too quick to denigrate younger evangelicals.   There is (as I point out in my second essay) merit to many of their critiques.  I am sorry that Hansen (among others) took away the impression that I offered the critique as an outsider, as that was not my intention.  I count myself as an young evangelical, and share their struggle to understand and articulate an evangelicalism that is persuasive, attractive, and faithful to the Gospel.

I commend Hansen’s synposis to you as a fair and balanced reading of a long and intricate conversation.   My hope in writing them was simply to contribute, however poorly, to the important  ongoing discussion about the nature and future of evangelicalism.  It is enormously gratifying, humbling, and daunting to have a voice in that conversation, and I am grateful to ChristianityToday.com for magnifying it.

Matthew Milliner’s recent article for Public Discourse is a triumph that had me shouting ‘yes’ all the way through.  As a young conservative who remains hopeful that conservatism offers something deeper than tax cuts or strong defense, I found Milliner’s piece to be gratifyingly refreshing.  His is a conservatism that ends—or rather, starts—with culture, which he argues contemporary conservatism has largely ignored.  Writes Milliner:

To familiarize oneself with contemporary conservative ideas and publications often means choosing culture wars over culture. Conservatives are practiced in lionizing the classics and lamenting the decline of Western culture, but should one wish to fully engage the culture of our time, a Leftward drift is difficult to resist. For example, the editor of a successful journal devoted to religion and the arts, Image, recently announced his need to “walk away from the conservative movement,” for he found the “imposed abstractions” of contemporary conservatism less than conducive to the sponsorship of poetry, art and fiction. While I take issue with his decision, I admit it is understandable, for the arts and contemporary conservatism don’t quite go hand in hand.

Milliner argues that conservatives’ lack of attention they pay to culture stems from dividing culture and politics.  Again, Milliner:

Should conservatism wish to become a cultural force it will require consciously resisting the natural tendency to bifurcate culture and politics. Culture captures hearts and minds often so much more successfully than does an argument—something the Left knows well. Like some sort of artistic arms race, the side of our undeniable political gulf that first develops a winning strategy for the future cultivation of culture may very well win. Conservatism has the principles, dispositions, roots and resources to emerge as a powerful sponsor of the arts, but in comparison to the Left, it often seems to lack the will.

Two small quibbles: first, Milliner’s point that conservatives have bifurcated culture and politics strikes me as bordering on inaccurately charitable.  The stronger thesis that conservatives have surrendered to an understanding of politics that is totalizing could just as easily have been defended, and probably would have been more accurate.

Second, the relationship between culture and politics presents a particularly tricky one for those who wish to make their social lives truly evangelical.  It is a bifurcation that is, I suspect, not natural (as Milliner puts it) but rather grounded in the long tradition that is “Christendom.”  To make the point, I lean on Oliver O’Donovan in The Desire of the Nations:

We distinguish two frontiers within the Gentile mission:  the church addressed society, and it addressed rulers. Its success with the first was the basis of its great confidence in confronting the second. The logic of this distinction is given in the very idea of God’s rule in Christ.  Society and rulers have different destinies:  the former is to be transformed, shaped in conformity to God’s purpose; the latter are to disappear, renouncing their sovereignty in the face of his.  The distinction must, then, be reflected in our systematic thinking about the political content of the Gospel.  Political theology must have something to say about society and something to say about rule, and the two must be coordinated.

If O’Donovan is right, and the bifurcation rests upon different ends for society and politics, then it must not be resisted, but embraced.

But this is where Milliner’s example (Byzantium) is interesting, as it was precisely the rejection of the two cities hypothesis as articulated by Augustine that allowed it to flourish those thousand years (or so goes my understanding).  Contrast that with Augustine, who wrote City of God while Rome fell.

Milliner’s suggestion that conservatives need to forgo the culture wars in favor of culture is exactly right.  But articulating the principles and dispositions to ground such a project without establishing a secularized divinity or establishing art as a project to be pursued outside of a broader metaphysical framework (as, it seems, the left so often has done) is a difficult chore.  I remain confident, though, that if anyone can do it, Matthew Milliner will.

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) wrote a book that had the alternative title How to Philosophize With a Hammer.  I’m reminded of this when I read Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who could have just as easily written a book with the alternative title How to Theologize with a Pneumatic Drill. Maybe it has to do with being German. Whatever the case, Bonhoeffer can take apart half-baked speculation and flimsy Christianity in half a paragraph.

In my church small group we have been reading Life Together, a work Bonhoeffer completed while teaching at a clandestine seminary in Nazi-dominated Germany. Early in the short book Bonhoeffer considers the pre-conceived ideal we each fabricate of what community ought to look like. He says these “wish dreams” stand in the way of real fellowship for two reasons. First, such dreams puff their dreamers up. Second, these dreams cause us to enter common life as demanders instead of as thankful recipients. Bonhoeffer is quite clear of what needs to happen:

“Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves.”

What strikes me about this quote is the sequence of disillusionment: first with other people, then Christians in general, then, if we are fortunate, ourselves. I have a deep concern about my and many others’ honesty in facing disillusionment with ourselves. As Bonhoeffer later notes, however, there is a risk of not completing the cycle of disillusionment. If we do not become utterly convinced that our own pictures of community are destined for total failure, we will not embrace God’s. The reorientation that occurs, from demanding to thankfully receiving, changes the way we think about the hassles of real fellowship. And here, before one can silently assuage the sting of hard duty with token gestures or self-glorify in a kind of suffering martrydom, Bonhoeffer explains:

“Is not the sinning brother still a brother? … Will not his sin be a constant occasion for me to give thanks that both of us may live in the forgiving love of God in Jesus Christ? Thus the very hour of disillusionment with my brother becomes incomparably salutary, because it so thoroughly teaches me that neither of us can ever live by our own words and deeds, but only by that one Word and Deep which really binds us together—the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ.”

In my recent reflections on the question of legalizing homosexual marriage, it has become clear that the disagreements between those who oppose it and those who are in favor of it are grounded upon competing anthropologies.  For defenders of traditional marriage, the human person, his sexuality, and his body are inextricably related, and any attempt to render them apart nullifies the structure of the (created) natural order.  It is, after all, by virtue of the union of male and female persons that the species propogates.

Yet this line of thought, however fruitful, is often confused and badly stated by its conservative proponents (including this one).  Not so, however, for Robert George, who in last month’s First Things offered a defense of traditional marriage that pursued this thread.  Writes George:

The alternate view of what persons are is the one embodied in both the historic law of marriage and what Isaiah Berlin once referred to as the central tradition of Western thought. According to this view, human beings are bodily persons, not consciousnesses, or minds, or spirits inhabiting and using nonpersonal bodies. A human person is a dynamic unity of body, mind, and spirit. Far from being a mere instrument of the person, the body is intrinsically part of the personal reality of the human being. Bodily union is thus personal union, and comprehensive personal union—marital union—is founded on bodily union.

The bodily unity of spouses is possible because human males and females, like other mammals, unite organically when they mate—they form a single reproductive principle. Although reproduction is a single act, in humans (and other mammals) the reproductive act is performed not by individual members of the species but by a mated pair as an organic unit.

It is precisely upon this point that the debate hangs.  It is not the reproductive principle per se that defenders of traditional marriage must articulate, but rather a particular view of the human person and his sexuality.  Namely, the possibility of distinctively one-flesh communion of persons.  Again, George:

In fact, however, at the bottom of the contemporary debate over marriage is a possibility that defenders of conjugal marriage affirm and its critics deny: the possibility of marriage as a one-flesh communion of persons. If acts that fulfill the behavioral conditions of procreation (whether or not the nonbehavioral conditions happen to obtain) are, in fact, capable of uniting spouses interpersonally—thus providing the biological matrix of the multilevel union and sharing of life that marriage is, according to the traditional understanding long embodied in Western law, philosophy, and culture—then truly marital acts differ fundamentally in meaning, value, and significance from intrinsically nonmarital sex acts (such as acts of sodomy and mutual masturbation).

On such an account, sexual union is not for some end that is extrinsic to it, like pleasure or even procreation (an argument, I think, that I have fallen into in the not-so-distant past).  Instead, its end is intrinsic to its action.  Sexual union occurs for the good of the marriage, and not for the sake of anything else, even though pleasure and procreation inevitably accompany it.  It is on this grounds that he rejects the counterargument that infertile heterosexual couples are illegitimate.  The act of sex retains both its unitive and reproductive character, even when the reproductive organs are no longer functioning.

Ironically, if George is right, then most defenders of traditional marriage (including this one) have been unwittingly harming their cause by grounding their understanding of marriage in goods that are extrinsic to–a particular sort of– bodily union.  Additionally, George’s article raises questions for me as to whether Protestant evangelical defenders of traditional marriage have access to the same anthropological resources as him.  Our particular covenental understanding of marriage tends to remove the sexually unitive features to the background.

George’s article, though, is a welcome addition to the ongoing conversation about marriage in America.  By attempting to move the conversation to its core–to competing anthropologies and philosophies of law–George has made a worthy and important contribution.

During my time blogging, I’ve had the opportunity to build up a small but loyal audience (yup, that’s you).  Over time, we’ve had other contributors come and go.  We went through a phase where a number of contributors left, paring us down to just three writers who wrote with varying degrees of frequency, and now we are entering a phase where that number is going back up.

Which leads me to introduce Mere-O’s newest contributor, Jeremy Mann.  His formal bio:

Jeremy Mann teaches math to students with special needs at a middle school in Los Angeles through Teach For America. In 2008 he graduated with a degree in philosophy from Biola University and the Torrey Honors Institute. Jeremy has presented or published on the history of philosophy, ethics, G.K. Chesterton, and globalization. He likes to read, trek, and homemake in Echo Park with his wife, a nurse at UCLA Medical Center. Jeremy hopes to one day be the president of a Christian college. Email him at Jeremyrmann at gmail dot com.

Jeremy is, frankly, one of the brightest and most creative graduates the Torrey Honors Institute has ever put out.  I also know him to be a young man of earnest devotion and deep sensitivity to the things of God.  I have sometimes said, in seriousness, that if I could emulate anyone, it would be Jeremy Mann.

I am excited, then, to introduce him here at Mere-O. You can expect to hear more from him in the coming months.

If there is a leftward shift in young (urban, white, college-educated) evangelicalism, perhaps one of the most prominent signs is our disposition toward food.  It is common among hipster evangelicals to hear conversations about ’sustainable farming,’ free range meat, and organic vegetables.  We are the Trader Joes demographic, until we leave it for the greener pastures of Whole Foods.

Don’t take me the wrong way:  my wife and I don’t shop anywhere except Trader Joes.  And I think there’s a lot to be said for conservative’s approaching questions of agri-industry with a more localized mindset (John Schwenkler has shown us the way).

But in an enlightening and amusing piece for The American, Blake Hurst offers a helpful qualification to the conversation about agri-industry.  A long-time farmer, Hurst isn’t short on qualifications–he knows his subject intimately.  Nor is he short on wit:

Lynn Niemann was a neighbor of my family’s, a farmer with a vision. He began raising turkeys on a field near his house around 1956. They were, I suppose, what we would now call “free range” turkeys. Turkeys raised in a natural manner, with no roof over their heads, just gamboling around in the pasture, as God surely intended. Free to eat grasshoppers, and grass, and scratch for grubs and worms. And also free to serve as prey for weasels, who kill turkeys by slitting their necks and practicing exsanguination. Weasels were a problem, but not as much a threat as one of our typically violent early summer thunderstorms. It seems that turkeys, at least young ones, are not smart enough to come in out of the rain, and will stand outside in a downpour, with beaks open and eyes skyward, until they drown. One night Niemann lost 4,000 turkeys to drowning, along with his dream, and his farm.

Both conservatives and liberals go wrong, I would argue, when they ignore the original reasons for our current social reality.  While those reasons may or may not be good, the conversation about how to best interact with the world in a moral fashion is impoverished if they are ignored.   And this conversation, it seems, is just one place where a healthy understanding of the reasons behind agri-industry–and, perhaps, even some charity toward our industrial farming neighbors–is needed.

Hurst is at his best when talking about how farming works, but he is quite insightful on the intellectual difficulties most critics of agri-industry (unwittingly) face.  He writes:

Critics of “industrial farming” spend most of their time concerned with the processes by which food is raised. This is because the results of organic production are so, well, troublesome. With the subtraction of every “unnatural” additive, molds, fungus, and bugs increase. Since it is difficult to sell a religion with so many readily quantifiable bad results, the trusty family farmer has to be thrown into the breach, saving the whole organic movement by his saintly presence, chewing on his straw, plodding along, at one with his environment, his community, his neighborhood. Except that some of the largest farms in the country are organic—and are giant organizations dependent upon lots of hired stoop labor doing the most backbreaking of tasks in order to save the sensitive conscience of my fellow passenger the merest whiff of pesticide contamination. They do not spend much time talking about that at the Whole Foods store.

The most delicious irony is this: the parts of farming that are the most “industrial” are the most likely to be owned by the kind of family farmers that elicit such a positive response from the consumer. Corn farms are almost all owned and managed by small family farmers. But corn farmers salivate at the thought of one more biotech breakthrough, use vast amounts of energy to increase production, and raise large quantities of an indistinguishable commodity to sell to huge corporations that turn that corn into thousands of industrial products.

But Hurst’s opening lines are,  I think, some of his most intriguing:

I’m so tired of people who wouldn’t visit a doctor who used a stethoscope instead of an MRI demanding that farmers like me use 1930s technology to raise food. Farming has always been messy and painful, and bloody and dirty. It still is.

I wonder–and it is only a query–about the accuracy Hurst’s intuition that the fundamental criticism of agri-industry is that it’s dirty. All evangelicals have a deep tendency toward gnosticism, and I suspect that this is one manifestation of that tendency in the younger generations.  We envision the natural processes as somehow cleaner and less messy than those that humans have cultivated–a thought that is completely abstracted from the realities of embodied farming life.  When this occurs, it becomes all too tempting to have an ‘angel ethic’–a series of ethical judgements that are divorced from the facts of the case.  As such, I suspect that Hurst’s rhetorical slice cuts deeper than he knows.

Regardless, Hurst’s piece is an entertaining and provocative challenge to those who have adopted a posture of criticism toward agri-industry.  And such a challenge is–if only for the sake of reasoned conversation–very welcome indeed.*

*For the record, I came up with this title independent of Owen Strachan’s humorous and insightful series, which I had (shamefully) forgotten about until he resurrected it…today.  And even so, I had to keep the title, as it was Just. Too. Perfect.

The latest issue of The City has been posted in full online, and in rather nifty format.  For people interested, it features responses to my article on the new evangelical scandal by Francis Beckwith and Dr. John Mark Reynolds.  Both essays are worth reading, and left me in the unenviable position of having to respond to essays with which I largely agreed.  Simple affirmation does not make for very interesting reading.

But don’t miss out on the other gems as well:  Wilfred McClay’s outstanding analysis of urbanism and its relationship to conservatism is an insightful correction to the idea that urbanism must be progressive and so, I think, fits well with the ongoing conversation about young evangelicals, many of whom are urban in their mindset.

Additionally, the prolific Hunter Baker–who happens to write precisely everywhere in the conservative sphere–has an excerpt of his excellent looking, The End of Secularism.  Baker takes up an issue closely related to those which we have been discussing lately here at Mere-O:  whether, and when, religious reasons should be admissible in the public square.

And not to be missed is Peter Lawler’s sprawling, fascinating dialogue with Solzhenitsyn, during which he weaves together technology, the body, narcissism…and much more.  It also includes this mildly amusing, yet pentrating suggestion:

I tell my students I want to enroll them in my two-point program for saving Medicare. First, they need to start smoking and really stick with it. Second, they need to start making babies, and I mean right now, this week. So far I haven’t been persuasive enough to get them with the program. But members of the Greatest Generation, in effect, did. They had lots of kids and gave very little thought to risk factors. They often smoked like chimneys, enjoyed multiple martinis, and only exercised for fun. The excellent TV series Mad Men, featuring advertising executives in 1960, displays the unhealthy habits of highly successful Americans for our horror. Don’t you idiots know you’re killing yourselves! They really did drop dead much earlier and more often, without drawing a dime of Social Security or (after 1962) Medicare, but not before generating several replacements to fund those programs for the future. Our whole medical safety net is premised on demographics that have disappeared and aren’t likely to return, and that’s because, for good and bad, we’re more narcissistic than people used to be.

And, of course, there is blog neighbor Milliner’s review of Gore Walk, in which he muses that yes, the art world has officially reached its nadir, which includes this understated line:

“‘Arts in education stimulate children to engage in really deep conversations about all sorts of things.’  I had little doubt that this was a promise on which P.S.1 could deliver.”

For the context, you’ll just have to read the article.

As such, the issue is enormously entertaining and deeply enlightening, and worthy of its name.  It has quickly become a center of intellectual discourse and an important voice in the ongoing conversation about Christianity’s role and future in the public square.

Martha Nussbaum’s recent defense of homosexual marriage in Dissent Magazine is one of the better defenses of homosexual marriage that I have read, and I suggest slogging through the whole thing.  But it is, perhaps, most valuable for revealing that the debate turns upon whether marriage is fundamentally constituted by the volitional agreement of two individuals or something deeper.

When articulating the meanings of marriage, she points out that in each–the civil rights aspect, the expressive aspect, and the religious aspect–the state plays a pivotal role, and that in its current form it is rather unconcerned with the quality of the individuals to whom it grants the ability to marry, so long as they are male and female.  As she argues later in the piece, because the state recognizes the expressive aspects of one class of people’s unions–males and females–then it is obligated to recognize everyone’s expressive aspects of marriage (homosexual marriage) 0r “get out of the marriage business” and simply adopt civil unions for everyone.

This is, not surprisingly, the route Jon Rowe takes as well.  He writes:

However, libertarianism offers probably what is closest to true neutrality in a pluralistic world where we disagree over concepts of “the good.” All laws impose morality. And libertarianism stands for the least amount of government, and consequently the least amount of government imposed morality. Moreover, the legally imposed moral rules that libertarians endorse — that government should outlaw force, fraud and do little more — also form a lowest common denominator of agreement among all sane people (that is liberals, conservatives and libertarians).

Contrast all of this with Robert George’s recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:

Of course, marital intercourse often does produce babies, and marriage is the form of relationship that is uniquely apt for childrearing (which is why, unlike baptisms and bar mitzvahs, it is a matter of vital public concern). But as a comprehensive sharing of life—an emotional and biological union—marriage has value in itself and not merely as a means to procreation. This explains why our law has historically permitted annulment of marriage for non-consummation, but not for infertility; and why acts of sodomy, even between legally wed spouses, have never been recognized as consummating marriages.

Only this understanding makes sense of all the norms—annulability for non-consummation, the pledge of permanence, monogamy, sexual exclusivity—that shape marriage as we know it and that our law reflects. And only this view can explain why the state should regulate marriage (as opposed to ordinary friendships) at all—to make it more likely that, wherever possible, children are reared in the context of the bond between the parents whose sexual union gave them life.

If marriage is redefined, its connection to organic bodily union—and thus to procreation—will be undermined. It will increasingly be understood as an emotional union for the sake of adult satisfaction that is served by mutually agreeable sexual play. But there is no reason that primarily emotional unions like friendships should be permanent, exclusive, limited to two, or legally regulated at all. Thus, there will remain no principled basis for upholding marital norms like monogamy.

Yet it is precisely the loss of government sanction for marriage at all that Nussbaum and Rowe would be content with, and I suspect George’s statement of his worry will do nothing to persuade the opposition.  And no wonder.  For Nussbaum, marriage is constituted without any connection to any particular bodily union, which is why her only defense against incestuous marriages is that the state has a countervailing interest (health risks) and so is obligated to outlaw them.  But once this health risk is overcome, Nussbaum’s position has no such defense.

But I have worries about the ‘minimalist’ solution Rowe suggests, as it’s not clear why we should adopt it with respect to marriage but retain the freedom of intervention on other matters.  The state, after all, is often called on to make moral judgements, even on religious matters.  As O’Donovan writes in Desire of the Nations, “Are sacred ancestral lands protected against plans for mining or other developments?  Is drug-taking, or sex with child prostitutes, a valid religious activity? …Must those in quest of unemployment benefit be prepared to accept work on Saturdays or Sundays?”  These, among others, are questions that such a ostensibly neutral state would have to answer, yet in order to answer them it must make some reference to a theory of ‘the good.’

The minimalist theory of the state, then, seems to be neutral only in theory.  In reality, the minimalist theory cedes power to the government to make moral decisions outside of any normative framework (i.e. ‘the good’).  As such, itis highly likely that the state and the church (by virtue of their competing authorities) will come into irreconcilable conflict, and what begins as a defense of religious freedom transform into persecution.  As such, the subversive nature of political liberalism is hidden by its ostensibly neutral character.  This is, at least, my worry.