Peter Enns and the Crisis of Evangelical Higher Education

At the theology conferences in the UK which I occasionally attend, the sizeable cohort of American evangelical expats, postragraduates scattered amongst the universities of (mostly) northern Britain, can usually be found gathered in tight-knit coteries, deep in cynical though light-hearted conversation. And, along with the inevitable complaints about the bleakness of the British weather and the awfulness of the conference papers, one subject of conversation can usually be counted on to dominate: the grim prospect of the academic job market. This should surprise no one, of course, but on listening closer, you would hear grumblings not merely about the quantity of the jobs available, but their quality, especially when it came to those on offer within the fortresses of American evangelicalism. Beggars can’t be choosers, but many of these graduate students seem to look more kindly on the prospect of janitorial work than a job interview at an evangelical or Reformed college or seminary. Why this hostility to the alma maters that taught them, nourished them and dispatched them to the hallowed halls of Old World learning, waiting expectantly for their return as Dr. Evangelical? Is it mere snobbery, an infection with British academia’s contempt for American “fundamentalism”? Is it ambition, a desire for employment in a context with more scope for upward mobility? Occasionally, perhaps, but these would be unfair accusations to lodge at most members of this very down-to-earth cohort.

Evangelical black sheep Peter Enns has done a lot of ruminating (some might say ranting) on the subject over the past year, and one post, “If They Only Knew What I Thought,” is particularly illuminating (see also here and here). Of course, many within the evangelical and Reformed world may be indisposed to take seriously any words of complaint from Enns, given his dizzyingly fast trajectory out of evangelical orthodoxy and into the fuzzy theological no-mans land of the Church of the Disgruntled, and the self-fulfilling martyr complex he has cultivated. At first, it seems as if Enns’s complaint is merely against the restriction of academic freedom within evangelical institutions, the fact that professors must walk a fine and tortuous line between “institutional expectations” and “academic integrity.” We may at first be inclined to dismiss this lament, and that of restless evangelical graduate students, as “so 1960s”—the self-righteous tirades of the misunderstood rebel, longing for freedom of expression, against the repressive constraints of established institutions.

After all, regrettable though it may be, tension between academic integrity and institutional expectations is nothing new, and hardly unique to evangelicalism. Institutions have traditions and missions to uphold and must police certain boundaries in order to safeguard the integrity of those traditions, which means limiting to some extent the bounds of acceptable teaching within the institution. This is true no less at Harvard than at Fuller Seminary, and it was equally true at Princeton in the 19th century, Saumur in the 17th, Padua in the 14th, or the Athenian Academy in the 4th century BC. This is not to deny that such policing is often motivated by, or at least tainted by, petty factionalism, arrogance, envy, narrow dogmatism, or a host of other sins. But in life under the sun, the freedom of expression which an individual scholar longs for will always exceed the freedom which an academic institution, with a tradition and a common good to safeguard, can grant. There will always be tensions, and we who undertake the vocation of scholarship must bear them as manfully as we can.

Of course, one might go further and complain that while such tensions are unavoidable, many evangelical and Reformed institutions make them unbearable by their sheer narrow-mindedness and wilful contrarianism. And certainly it is true that the gates to many of our higher ed institutions are obstructed by thickets of shibboleths and sacred cows, from six-day creationism to certain construals of inerrancy to confessional clauses from a bygone age that few even understand the significance of anymore. Moreover, as Enns trenchantly observes, the whole posture of evangelical higher education, its whole raison d’etre, is defensive. So many of our institutions were founded in the wake of the “fundamentalist-modernist controversy,” as bulwarks to defend the faith against the seemingly inexorable tide of unbelief. The result is that we have little in the way of a positive vision to offer the culture but a very long list of epistemological “Thou shalt nots.” All this could and should be said; narratives of how we got into this rut and suggestions as to how we might get out are urgently needed. But complaints about intellectual failings of American evangelicalism, it must be said, are as clichéd as complaints about institutional repression, even if this is a conversation that remains urgently important. What interested me particularly about Enns’s post was the charges of moral failings that it laid at the door of evangelical institutions.

Enns’s complaint boiled down to charges of hypocrisy and cowardice. First, hypocrisy:

“Here’s the familiar scenario. The “best and brightest” students in Evangelical seminaries work hard and are encouraged and aided by their professors to pursue doctoral work. Many wind up going to some of the best research universities in the world.

This is a feather in everyone’s cap, and often they are hired back by their Evangelical school or elsewhere in the Evangelical system.

Sooner or later, these professors find out that their degree may be valued but their education is not.

During graduate school they begin to see issues from a different perspective–after all, this is what an education does. An education does not confirm what we already know, but exposes us to new things in order to broaden our horizons.

Once they start teaching, they bring with them the excitement of learning new things, some synthesis of old and new for their students, because they feel such conversations are necessary for intellectual and spiritual health.

But Evangelicalism does not exist to create these conversations, but to keep them from happening–or perhaps from getting out of hand. Decision makers are gatekeepers, and they rarely have the training or the inclination to walk the same intellectual and spiritual path. A strong response is inevitable.”

In other words, these institutions want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the prestige that comes from having Cambridge and Yale-educated faculty, but with the uniformity and predictability of Westminster-educated faculty. They don’t want those faculty to have actually learned anything from their experiences in “the mainstream academy.” They send them away, expecting them to keep their eyes and ears closed for a few years and come back unchanged, but with a sexy diploma. Mr. Littlejohn becomes Dr. Littlejohn, but otherwise, save for the dark circles under his eyes, no worse for the wear. Or perhaps, they hope that along with this education will come a capacity to offer bigger, better, stronger arguments for their predetermined conclusions; but bigger, better, stronger arguments don’t happen without a willingness to ask big questions, and asking questions implies a willingness to hear new answers. In short, evangelical and Reformed institutions need to work out what they really want. Either they need to embrace their inner caveman with gusto, be consistent fundamentalists, and say, “To heck with a degree from a respectable grad school,” or else they need to recognize that part of the reason that the degree has respectability, is because some very high-caliber thinking goes on at that grad school—thinking which should shape its students, and lead them to critically re-assess what they have been taught before.

Now don’t think I’m asking for some carte blanche, a Rob-Bell-ian freedom to ask whatever questions we want without being too picky about what answers we might dream up. I’m all for boundaries of orthodoxy. Heck, my own inner caveman is alive and well. But critical re-assessment doesn’t mean abandonment. If they’ve really taught their students well, and are confident that they’ve been teaching the truth, these evangelical institutions should have confidence that these students will be able to learn from mainstream scholarship, and critique their traditions on certain points, without abandoning those traditions. That they do not have such confidence betrays, it seems to me, a lack of confidence in the truth and strength of those traditions, a deep-seated insecurity. This is the second problem that Enns identifies—cowardice:

“They [evangelical graduate students] often feel–and I’ve heard this many times–that they have been lied to by their teachers. I’d like to relay one anecdote. In one seminary I know a former student, now professor, felt ill-prepared by his seminary at the initial stages of his doctoral work. He had gotten straight As in seminary and done stellar work in his language classes. But he was lost in negotiating the new ideas he was encountering and had to do a lot of catching up.

He asked his former professor, now colleague, why he was sent to graduate school with so many gaps in his learning. The answer: ‘Our job was to protect you from this information so as not to shipwreck your faith.’

I would replace ‘your faith’ with ‘our system’ and then I think we are closer to the truth.”

“Our job was to protect you from this information.” Whatever happened to the faith in the power of truth? If the evangelical understanding of the faith is genuinely true and strong and anchored in Scripture, then it shouldn’t need to protect people from exposure to dissenting ideas. Children, maybe, but grad students? See, I’m old-fashioned. I have so much faith in the power of truth, the power of orthodoxy, that I believe that strong, well-nourished, well-grounded faith, that clings to Jesus Christ and knows how to think critically, will not go far astray for long. Arm your students with the shield of faith and the sword of the Spirit, and then give them a long leash. They might charge off for a bit in some scary directions, but you should rest assured that whatever they bring back from their intellectual adventures will be fruitful new insights that nourish and strengthen the faith, rather than destroying it.

The cowardice that we find instead suggests that evangelical institutions don’t, deep down, think their teachings are rationally defensible. The only way they can be maintained is by hiding all alternative teachings from view. Again, this is a real problem. Usually, it’s not as self-conscious and up-front as it was with that one professor, but it is pervasive. Many evangelical institutions don’t bother to teach their students about many of the most significant rival viewpoints, and when they do, they only present a grotesquely distorted straw man, that looks self-evidently nonsensical. When we teach students in this cowardly way, we make it a self-fulfilling prophecy that “they’ll go off to a mainstream university and lose their faith.” Of course they’ll lose their faith, because they will realize that they were being coddled and deceived, and will assume that there must be no intellectual robustness in a tradition that was so fearful of engagement.

If we leave it here, though, we could find ourselves back at the 1960s critique of “the establishment,” “the institution,” laying all the blame at the door of university deans and gatekeeper bureaucrats. Bureaucrats are favorite scapegoats, but more often than not, they, like their faculty, are well-intentioned people trying to do their best in a difficult situation. They have their hands tied. Why? Because they have a lot of people to answer to, people with money without whom there wouldn’t be an institution to fight over. And the two main sources of money for these institutions—alumni and parents (who often are also alumni)—are notoriously conservative constituencies. Name almost any Reformed or evangelical institution of higher education, and I can bet you that most of its supporters and most of the parents who send their kids there are more prone to be reactionary than either its faculty or administration. Of course, to the extent that they find their hands tied by narrow-minded alumni, perhaps these institutions bear some of the blame themselves, and are reaping the fruits of poor teaching in years past. But in the case of parents, one can’t tread too carefully. To be a parent, as I can attest from personal experience, is to be instinctively defensive wherever one’s child is concerned, and such defensiveness does not often lend itself to an ability to carefully distinguish between “encouraging critical thinking” and “undermining my child’s faith.” Christian colleges are forever fielding angry calls and letters from alarmed parents about the crazy new ideas their children are being introduced to—I recall one time, when I was responsible for leading our school’s daily morning prayer using the BCP, and I had begun acknowledging saints’ days on the liturgical calendar, being called before the administration to answer charges from agitated parents that I was teaching students to pray to Mary.

But of course, if we want to move the burden of blame to parents, we will have to lay part of it on pastors, who ought to be working against the belligerent culture-war mentality in their flocks, and training them in the virtue of humility even while attempting to instill in them a firm confidence in the truths of their faith. What we have among so many Christians today is an unstable blend of insecurity and arrogance—on the one hand, sure that we have all the answers, and don’t need to ask hard questions, but on the other hands, a lack of confidence, deep down, that our faith can withstand such hard questions. But along with instilling such virtues of humility and courage, churches need to be actively educating their congregants in the actual complexities of many of the questions that we face—Christian faith and science, Christian faith and philosophy, Christian faith and biblical criticism, Christian faith and ethics.

In short, then, there is plenty of blame to go around, and trying to apportion it strictly is probably not too productive. After all, I would suggest that much of our problem is systemic, rooted in the rift between church and academy. Where Enns seems to worry that the problem with our evangelical higher ed institutions is that they remain too tied to the church’s apron-strings and are unable to step boldly forward into the academy proper, I suspect that the problem is the opposite. Having cooperated with the gradual exodus of theology from its proper ecclesial setting, evangelical institutions have been unable to exorcise the deep-seated suspicion of “the academy” to be found in most of our pews, which has hardened in many quarters into a settled posture of anti-intellectualism. So long as our young theologians are spending more time publishing abstruse articles in prestigious journals than teaching Sunday school classes in their local congregation, suspicion of learning and hostility to open-minded inquiry are likely to predominate in many of our churches. (It is worth noting in passing that the new generation of Rob-Bell-ian evangelicals, forever questioning and never coming to the knowledge of the truth, is only superficially different from their parents in this respect despite its pretensions to sophistication; both generations harbor an anti-intellectualist bias that is wary of sustained critical reflection.) And as long as that is the case, our colleges and seminaries will remain pulled in two directions, and their faculty members condemned to a schizophrenic and hunted existence.

The problems evangelical education faces are manifold, then, and the solutions are likely to be as well. But I would like to propose, at the top of the list, a concerted attempt to break down barriers between church and academy, by providing ecclesial homes for serious theological work, and by marshalling the ranks of our graduate students for the much-needed task of lay theological education in our churches. Pastors, students, and college/seminary administrators all need to take the initiative in making such programs possible, with creative determination to put the gifts of each member at the service of the whole body.

(If I may be permitted a plug, I would commend to your attention the early efforts in this direction of the “Partnership for Theological Education in Edinburgh” which I’ve helped launch over the past year, as a fledgling example of what such church-academy engagement might look like.)

The Possibility of Persuasion in a Fragmented Age

Anne Snyder has a long column on persuasion over at Comment that is worth considering closely, especially in light of recent posts about gay marriage. She’s interested in moving beyond the pablum of “civility” for a more substantive, thoroughly Christian approach to talking with each other. As she puts it:

[Christians'] abiding interest must be in the good of individuals created in the same image that we were, in improving the systems in which they live, in granting the tools for their navigation. This requires an insatiable curiosity about the human subjects at the mercy of any debate’s winner, and the energy to keep that curiosity fed and updated. It requires empirical knowledge of the issues and the options, not just folksy winks sugar-coating ideologically driven generalizations. It requires savvy marketing, when marketing draws on beauty and empathy. And it requires a hospitable, humble posture, one that welcomes potentially uncomfortable revelations of counter-evidence and logic, one that is even willing, on some issues, to be persuaded.

This sort of thoroughly Christian approach leads, Snyder contends, to emphasizing the interlocking concerns of understanding particular, granular contexts and hospitality. Throughout her piece is also the subcurrent that Christians primary posture should increasingly be one of listening and receiving, rather than giving and speaking. Like I said, the whole thing deserves a read.

The bit that really grabbed me, though, was her suggestion that older Christians have been afflicted by a weary resignation:

Some of the insular arrogance, I think, is a defensive mechanism triggered by feelings of victimization, though most factions would never admit this. Culturally conservative Christians, for instance, have lived for years feeling besieged by a social consensus that undercuts a moral framework that they by creed cannot dilute. Despite political recourse during the ascendancy of the religious right, the overarching sentiment among older Christians is one of abandonment and weary resignation. “The culture left us sometime in the last sixty years and now shoves everything we oppose down our throats,” they all but say. “Why should we not retreat for some peace?”

I should note that the form of the essay doesn’t lend itself to footnotes or expansion. I wrote a piece for the last issue, so I know that all too well. But I do wonder who she has in mind here. There is doubtlessly a weary set out there, but it seems if anything the older crowd of “culturally conservative Christians” has kept up the sorta-good fight, while their children are mostly weary of hearing about it (though for different reasons, I suspect, than that the culture has proved hostile).

Christian Right (Photo credit: lukexmartin)

Still, there’s no doubt that the sense of victimization and defensiveness has often fueled conservative rhetoric and dispositions. And it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Anne’s point proves right: ressentiment can only take us so far, it seems, and after that the only possibility is disillusionment–if not by those who were fueled by it, then by their children.

Regardless of the means they pursue, Christians have an obligation not to let go of the possibility of persuasion. Hope admits of no less and while hope is primarily our orientation toward the redemptive work of Christ it also has a political dimension. If we functionally relinquish our commitment to our neighbors’ life as those made in the image of God on account of their recalcitrance, we (ironically) shut ourselves off from the grounds on which persuasion is possible. The only path forward for conservative Christians is to relearn the tools Anne is commending and to be more savvy in how we interact with our neighbors.

Think Like Progressives: Marriage and the Pro-Life Movement

Faced with declining social and political support for traditional marriage, conservative evangelicals have started wrestling with the possibility that the time has come to let go of their opposition to gay marriage. It’s forever-ago in internet time, but I was asked to address the question last year at the evangelical Leadership Journal. Somewhat more recently, the brilliant Tim Dalyrmple took up the question in his pointedly titled post “Is it time for evangelicals to stop opposing gay marriage?” The discussion has only picked up steam since then.

For politically conservative Christians, it’s somewhat dispiriting that the question is even being asked. This isn’t the healthy, robust self-criticism of a flourishing movement. The question is oriented toward negotiating the terms of “surrender,” so to speak, on grounds that it will be the only way to keep a “seat at the table” long term. If anything, that so many people are seriously considering such a strategy means that the evangelical pro-marriage movement is already over and now we’re all circling to preserve what scraps we can.

I understand the impulse, of course, to take up the inquiry. The demographic case for the future of marriage looks bleak. Even while many people are still willing to tell a pollster they’ll support traditional marriage and even pull the lever in a voting booth for it, young people are clearly moving in a different direction. Anxieties about marriage’s future are not groundless.

Cover of "The Case for Marriage: Why Marr...

Cover via Amazon

Even so, the question is one that I have no opinion on other than that it is the wrong question altogether. The way conservative evangelicals frame this moment will determine not only how we proceed in the future, but is determined by what we have done in the past. And in that sense, the question of whether we should continue to defend traditional marriage signifies a fundamental weakness in the evangelical attitude about marriage and culture.

The Wrong Messages from the Right Parallel

Over the past few years, evangelical conservatives engaged in the public debate about marriage have pointed to the pro-life’s success in shifting attitudes for comfort. One of the best examples of this was my friends Andrew Walker and Ryan Anderson’s analysis at National Review. Given that the public’s mindset has shifted on abortion, the argument goes, then we should learn its lessons and maintain a similar sort of optimistic resolve.

There is something to the point. Christians are never to be taken by either fatalism or despair; the course of history never did run smooth. It is possible that what is celebrated in one generation is laughed at by the next. The falseness of fatalism that stands beneath the “wrong side of history” claim stands beneath the temptation to despair as well.

But it is important to learn the right lessons from the pro-life movement and on this point I am not convinced that we have. The differences between the issues are considerable. For one, the pro-life movement has been helped by the advent of ultrasound technologies, while the steady decoupling of sex and procreation by techniques like sperm donation and IVF have weakened the link between heterosesual marriage and biological childbirth. What’s more, Hollywood has by and large demonstrated something of an aversion to presenting abortion in a positive light—there seems to be some intuitive appeal to the idea that a mother keeping a child is a noble sacrifice and a better story—but on homosexuality has clearly taken a different approach. And the “harm argument” by pro-lifers has a good deal more persuasive force than the somewhat more nebulous, further removed case of the marriage movement. “Babies are killed in the womb” is an easier claim to defend than the institutional erosion argument that marriage advocates must make.

Perhaps more importantly, though, from a political and social standpoint the central difference between the two is that the pro-life case has gone forward within a progressive social temperament while evangelicals have largely framed their support of marriage in terms of “defense” and “conservatism”—which Jon Shields points out in his excellent book The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right. The pro-life movement is not attempting to protect an institution so much as subvert and replace one. They have developed networks of care and support for pregnant mothers to provide alternative means of support for those in danger of choosing abortion. And as Shields notes, many of their most effective grassroots efforts to persuade others have emphasized tone and presentation beside the effectiveness of their arguments. Even the energy around the legal strategy has had a progressive bent: the sense of disenfranchisement created by Roe versus Wade motivated activists to overturn the fundamental injustices within our legal code, rather than more deeply inscribing the status quo.[1]

On marriage, though, evangelicals have mostly thought in conservative and defensive terms. When the marriage movement started, the immediate cause was undermining the no-fault divorce regime. The first book I read on marriage policy, Maggie Gallagher and Linda Waite’s influential The Case for Marriage, barely mentioned gay marriage. But when that question came to the forefront, the marriage movement seemed to lose its progressive edge. Rather than replacing unjust laws, marriage advocates instead focused on further entrenching in American law the traditional definition of marriage while expanding the social benefits that go along with it. The law may be a tutor, but it is not strong enough to stitch back together a fraying social fabric.

Unless the pro-marriage movement takes on a progressive mentality and orients itself around pursuing social and legal changes rather than reinscribing and holding on to a particular order, then the pro-life parallel simply will not hold. It is difficult these days to win support for a position simply on grounds that it is true. The truth must be made urgent and, it seems, made clear over and against a sense of fundamental injustices.

The Wrong Question

Should evangelicals continue to defend traditional marriage? Continue reading →

The Morality of the Story

Alasdair MacIntyre is widely credited with restoring the category of ‘story’ or ‘narrative’ to the forefront of the discussion in meta-ethics. In his influential work After Virtue (1981) he set out his argument for the bankruptcy of most modern ethical theories such as utilarianism and Rawlsian contractarianism and the necessity of recovering an Aristotelian-Thomistic virtue-ethics set within a narrative framework. Among other things, MacIntyre argues that the virtues, those moral practices and habits that characterize the just person, only make sense within a narrative framework because all human action is essentially historical in character–it is historically-enacted and historically-motivated. That is an inescapable feature of human life–whether pagan, post-Enlightenment liberal, or orthodox Christian, we live out of the stories and narratives we tell ourselves. Even the most postmodern among us, suspicious of the various master narratives told to us by modernity, are still living in the sort of story that includes moderns trying to control us through master narratives. Indeed, it is commonly suggested by philosophers and sociologists that instead of the idea of the “worldview”, a narrative-identity is a more useful conception for understanding the comprehensive perspective through which we approach moral action in the world.

Now, none of this is all that new. Why bring it up? Simply to introduce a few loosely-connected notes on the importance of narrative for Christian reflection on the moral life that ought to be kept in mind. One is cautionary, the other couple are complementary and, after thinking on them, can be classified under the rubric of Creation, Sin, and Redemption.

The Story is About Something (Creation) - First the caution. Oliver O’Donovan alerts us against the sort of historicisms which take this emphasis on narrative and history to the point of forgetting that the story is about something. These types of approaches take MacIntyre’s point and run with it to a degree that essentially denies the category of ‘nature’ or creation as a relevant one for moral reflection at all. One thinks either of Hegelian historicisms, or even the biblical theology movement with its emphasis on the history God’s mighty acts, as opposed to the pagan gods of nature. Of such schools O’Donovan writes:

We cannot object to the idea that history should be taken seriously. A Christian response to historicism will wish to make precisely the opposite point: when history is made the categorical matrix for all meaning and value, it cannot be then taken seriously as history. A story has to be a story about something; but when everything is a story there is nothing for the story to be about. -Resurrection and the Moral Order: An Outline For Evangelical Ethics, 2^nd Ed. pg. 60

O’Donovan points us to the reality that creation, as a whole and in human natures as created, is the necessary pre-requisite for history as the stage of moral action–it is the set-up. Unless the human being is a certain sort of thing before the action, and the world is a certain kind of place, the things that happen within it lose their meaning. Without creation as the “theater of God’s glory”, to use Calvin’s phrase, there can be no drama of redemption. In other words, protology matters for eschatological ethics. Observed from a different angle, we must not forget that part of the story that the Scripture tells begins with a good Creator God, whose first ‘mighty act’ was to sovereignly make the world, and those things in it, in a particular way, for good reasons. The defacing effects of sin aside, moral reflection needs to attend to that fact before running ahead to the second or third acts of the drama and drawing our ethics entirely from the NT. It also means we know enough to say something substantial about the moral nature of things before the final act is concluded.

You Are Not the Only, or Main, Author/Character (Sin) Continue reading →

The Frame for Watching Mad Men: When Joan sells Johnny

Brian R. Gumm is a licensed minister in the Church of the Brethren, worshiping and periodically ministering in a United Methodist parish in rural Iowa. His telecommuting day job is Distance Learning Technology Analyst for Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, which is where he received an Mdiv and MA in Conflict Transformation in 2012. Brian blogs regularly at Restorative Theology and can be found on Twitter.

The exchange between Nick Olson and Jake Meador on Christian engagement with the hit AMC drama, Mad Men, was helpful reading for watching the premier. I especially resonate with Olson’s sentiment of no longer feeling a desire to have a drink while watching the show. In the early seasons, the show’s aesthetics exuded a certain aura of coolness around drinking hard liquor and smoking cigarettes. But last season, that aura started to fade, laying bare the nihilism and selfishness of the show’s primary characters. Don Draper’s cool, composed gaze morphed into a cold, dead gaze.

*Spoiler alerts*

With respect to Don, this seems to be bearing itself out in the narrative that season six started. Before the premier, Olson’s assertion held up, that “(w)hen Don Draper gets in a boardroom to sell a product, he sells you on his ability to sell.” But that didn’t happen in the first episode.

The show opens with Don’s and Megan’s trip to Hawaii, which was “field work” for a potential client of the firm, a Hawaiian resort company. Upon returning to a wintry Manhattan, Don designs the creative strategy for the ad campaign, during which he’s characteristically tight-lipped, to the chagrin of Peter Campbell. When the potential clients see the proofs, Don slides into his born-salesman character and pitches them his vision for the ad campaign. The viewer expects yet another home run, but the clients don’t buy it. The copy he and his team produced strikes them as dark and morbid, even suicidal. When the potential clients leave the boardroom, Pete is exasperated while Don stares in disbelief at the copy, seemingly unable to comprehend how on earth they could have mistaken his creative vision. By the end of the episode it’s clear that Don, who through season five seemed one of the more sane characters, has started sliding back into the moral black hole from which he had crawled out of after the first few seasons.

But something else struck me about this latest episode that wasn’t mentioned in Olson’s and Meador’s conversation, namely “the frame” within which Mad Men is experienced. Their conversation focused on the show itself, which is all right and good. What I noticed happened around the edges of the show, just beyond its green curtain. In one of the commercials that played during the show,the voluptuous Joan Harris walks toward you/the camera. She picks up a glass of whiskey while describing its virtues of being “classic” and “bold,” then says as she looks you/the camera straight in the eye, “It’s Johnny Walker, and you ordered it.” You then get the company logo and the signature of Christina Hendricks, the actress who portrays Joan in Mad Men.

Here is a show that has done a fairly good job of showing the lack of any moral center that lies beneath the gloss of the world of advertising and consumerism, and now one of its actors is pitching real products during the commercial break. Not that celebrity ad pitches are new by any stretch. Far from it; the irony in this case is that it somewhat deflates the power of the show’s critical edge, however subtle it may be. When Joan sells Johnny, the bad medicine described by the show’s narrative is being prescribed to us just outside the narrative’s frame. If it doesn’t go down smooth there, why should it here?

Now, one can rightly argue, “Yes, but that’s the name of the game/necessary evil” and so forth. In a range of senses the show about advertising couldn’t exist without advertising. But treating that as inevitable and given should give Christians pause. I strongly affirm Olson’s point that “(a)esthetics and ethics are inevitably bound together,” but would add narrative to that set. And the nihilistic narrative ethics of Mad Men does a sort of deconstruction on the very frame which makes it possible in the first place, and that frame is just as “storied” as the story it brings us in the show.

It’s like philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s joke about chocolate ex-lax: Mad Men is the tasty thing which undoes itself. It’s this sort of nested auto-deconstruction which I think is brilliant about the show, and why it’s disappointing to see Joan selling Johnny. But the question has begun to dawn on me: When is enough enough?

If our (American Christians’) social imagination is coterminous with capitalism and consumer culture, then we need to learn to break open the frame of that imaginary, however briefly. And perhaps Mad Men is a site where such interventions can take place. But the renewing of our minds and disciplining of our bodies which produces the critical vision to perform such critique doesn’t come from within the world which makes Mad Men possible; it comes from the gifts of the Holy Spirit conferred upon the body of Christ through its own liturgies. Perhaps six seasons of Mad Men is giving too much, even when its fangs have supposedly been pulled.

The Gay Marriage Debate: Tactical Withdrawal or a New Paradigm?

After two very lengthy overviews of the recent blogosphere debates on natural law and gay marriage (see here and here), I am at last going to offer some of my own thoughts and constructive proposals for the debate. Of course, such postponement as I have here twice indulged in runs the risk of generating too much anticipation for the promised “constructive proposals.” I fear that if you are expecting any brilliant new solutions to our current quandaries of cultural engagement, or a breakthrough synthesis on the subject of natural law, you will be sorely disappointed. My aim in this post will remain quite modest, summarizing and developing what I take to be the most helpful proposals made by others and reiterating some points that are perhaps just good common sense. I lay no claim to originality in what follows.

A Tactical Withdrawal?

In surveying the recent debate, I have suggested that one can dispute the “retreat to commitment” of those prepared to forfeit the claims of the natural law tradition while conceding that they are by and large correct in their diagnosis of its impotence as a contribution to contemporary political debate—on issues such as gay marriage, at any rate. Does this mean that we ought, while not permanently surrendering the field, to contemplate a tactical withdrawal from the public debate? After all, the handwriting is on the wall, isn’t it? The gay marriage agenda, most of our commentators seem to concede, will win the day in the near future, and given that most of our arguments against it seem unintelligible to the wider society, perhaps we might as well conserve our political capital by quieting down on this question and living to fight another day. I understand those who would reach such a conclusion, and although Christians are always responsible to bear witness against the sins of their societies, it does not follow that they need always be actively agitating on every issue of moral concern to them. Conservative Christians in the far more secularized societies of Western Europe have learned the need to choose their battles carefully, and perhaps we have reached the point in America where evangelicals have spent so much of their political capital that we must be similarly judicious in the future.

Indeed, there are several reasons to contemplate such a withdrawal. For one, perhaps we need to get the log out of our own eye first. Greg Forster rightly observes that within many evangelical churches today, the favorite accusation of “homophobia” often sticks. For all our rhetoric of “hating the sin and loving the sinner,” many among us have trouble getting beyond an “Ick!” response to homosexuality, and many evangelical leaders persist in using “sodomy” as the only category for describing and understanding homosexuals. The very concept of a “gay Christian” is often met with incredulity and contempt. Until we in evangelical churches can learn to show authentic love and hospitality to those of homosexual orientation, we will be unable to convincingly rebut the charges of Pharisaism that our opponents in the gay marriage debate will throw at us.

For another, we often forget that the crafting of a pluralist and liberal political order was in large part the creation of Christian statesmanship. Perhaps some of us will want to contest some of the moves in political theology that have been made in the past several centuries that have given us the current arrangement, but if we really want to challenge the liberal order, we’re going to have to be a lot more thoughtful and thoroughgoing than most of us are prepared to be; most of us remain quite happy to benefit from many of the fruits of pluralism. That being the case, we should remember that our current political order often requires us to learn to co-exist with practices we find repugnant. If same-sex marriage becomes established law, we will have to learn the exercise of the political virtue of toleration, so we may as well start learning now. Coexistence, it bears emphasizing, does not require condonement; toleration does not require apathy. Is is a painful and difficult discipline to hold together conviction and forbearance, but this is a tension we are increasingly called upon to navigate. Such a posture requires patience, a sense of the penultimacy of the political and a confidence in the lordship of Christ that can accept the loss of a battle today in the knowledge that one is on what will finally be the winning side.

Withdrawal from the current debate also appears attractive because of the unfortunate corner into which we seem to have backed ourselves. Christians are increasingly seen as the “No” people, the killjoys, the people whose only contribution to public debate is to tell everyone what they can’t do. This is often undeserved, the inevitable reacting that any normative standards will receive in a libertarian society, but sometimes we bring it upon ourselves. Any critique of same-sex marriage belongs only in the context of rich positive Christian vision of sexuality and marriage, and one might reasonably suggest that evangelicals need to take some time off from the political conflict in order to dedicate ourselves to developing such a positive vision.

Such a tactical withdrawal, however, cannot be quite as complete as all that. Continue reading →

Is the Use of Drones Morally Permissible?

Rand Paul’s dramatic filibuster before the Senate generated a great deal of public debate in recent weeks, and for good reason. Paul has drawn attention to an egregious expansion of the drone program rationale to include targeting of American citizens on American soil, which believed to stretch the already wildly stretched parameters of the Patriot Act. The current policy circumvents the normal rules of judicial arraignment, thinks Paul. His concern corresponds to a wider public worry over the terrific escalation of the drone program, an anxiety that has not been at all assuaged by the Attorney General’s repeated demand for freedom to strike any “immanent threat,” even if domestic. The report of a new base to support drone activities in North Africa is but another telling indicator of the program’s ambition.

The president relented to demands from senators to disclose 11 classified legal memos in which his administration argues that it has the authority to use drone strikes to kill terror suspects who are US citizens; Photo: REUTERS

Important as Paul’s argument is for public debate, it grasps the moral problems surrounding the drone program only partially. In truth the entire drone program, including its foreign activities, is premised on the acceptance of distinct moral compromises. We are told that unmanned drone tactics present two new opportunities in the war on terror, both desirable and without precedent: reduced risk of pilot casualties and increased targeting precision. On the face of it, admittedly, these opportunities appear attractive. But their attractiveness ought not distract the opportunistic character of these ends. So far, all rationale offered by officials have appealed to superior outcomes achievable through unmanned drone targeting when compared to traditional means of war. Appeals to demonstrable “results” of the targeting program are meant to reassure the public that any moral concerns we might have not real. Only the self-deceived argue with results!

This particular mode of practical reasoning about war tactics is morally insufficient. To better interrogate the moral shape of the drone program I propose holding the actual practice of using unmanned aerial vehicles to target terror suspects up to a few traditional principles of just war. The long and informative tradition of just-war theory is a distinctly Christian arrangement of rules for ordering martial affairs toward rightful ends. These rules are intended to govern the planning and activities of war. The Obama administration’s frantic attempt to devise ad-hoc rules for drone targeting in the days leading up to last year’s election reveals that the traditional rules of war were either unknown or entirely overlooked.

In what follows we’ll consider only one of the rules, discrimination, and ask whether the current configuration of the drone program successfully upholds it. Continue reading →

Should Christians Watch Mad Men? A Rejoinder

Editor’s Note: This guest post is by Nick Olson, who writes film reviews at a host of places including Filmwell and Christ and Pop Culture.

I have a confession: when watching seasons 1 through 4 of Mad Men a couple of years ago, I often had the overwhelming desire to have a drink to go along with the madness. And I don’t think I’m alone. My friend and colleague Josh Larsen seems to have had the exact same response. As he put it, “How do I know that Mad Men has reached a new level of artistic maturity in its fourth season? I no longer want to have a drink while watching it.” I’m not sure if my timeline runs parallel with Josh’s, but I can attest that by the end of season 5, when the general tone of has been captured in the image of Don looking down the abyss of an elevator shaft, a glass of bourbon with Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Campbell and company has grown less enticing.

Mad Men (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This confession might seem like confirmation of Jake Meador’s recent post on the ethics of watching Mad Men, in which he says that the show has lost him because, “[u]ltimately, Mad Men follows the standard narrative of our ad-addled culture, which says that if you dress something up enough, people will buy anything–even things that are morally depraved and terrifying.” But I don’t think my initial anecdote is quite a confirmation. Rather, I think Mad Men itself is like an enticing drink that doesn’t go down smoothly. And the series, while playing up the alluring shape that deceit often takes, clearly emphasizes the destructive aftermath.

But before offering a few friendly counterpoints to Jake’s article, I want to establish a few points of agreement which, on scale, seem as important here as my disagreement with some of his assertions regarding the ethics of watching Mad Men.

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First, I agree with Jake when he suggests that Mad Men is “a horse of a different color” than a show like Breaking Bad. When asked which of the two shows I prefer, I’ve often said that I’d choose the latter because I do think Breaking Bad is a show more intentionally concerned with moral deterioration—or, with a person who has known the goodness of self-restraint and is steadily losing it. The difference between the two shows is evident in their titles. Greg Wolfe probably put it best during a podcast when he said that Breaking Bad, unlike Mad Men, seems to have a more distinct sense of a “moral center.” But it’s important to recognize that the absence of a moral center is also precisely the point. It’s the nature of their madness qua madness that they have no moral center. Their insanity is qualified by their inability to have judicious self-restraint.

Further, I think Jake is right to suggest that perhaps some Christians have overreacted to the cultural legalism that might have characterized their upbringing. I’m all for an article which carefully and humbly questions the cultural artifacts that we enjoy (some indignation may even be appropriate in some cases); Jake’s article is like a Gardnerian analysis brought to bear on television. Christ and Pop Culture had a relatively similar article assessing whether Game of Thrones is a worthwhile cultural artifact. I like Gardner, but I also disagree with his assessment of Updike and Percy. Speaking of Updike, I’ve often thought that Don Draper is basically “Mr. Death” himself, Rabbit Angstrom. There just aren’t many Kruppenbach’s on Madison Avenue in the ‘60’s.

So I agree with the shape of Jake’s argument. I think it’s important that we negotiate enjoying art with discernment, and moral discrimination can undoubtedly be part of that discernment without descending into a kind of legalistic moralism. I’m a film columnist and I often make these sorts of discretionary choices. A recent example was my decision to forego Spring Breakers. Several critics have suggested that it’s a film which subverts spring break culture, but after doing some reading and interacting with some film critic communities regarding their impressions of Mr. Korine, I decided not to see and review it for my audience. Christian critics should both do a kind of direct diagnostic work, but also occasionally (as necessary) provide some discretionary warning. For example, I respect Jeffrey Overstreet for his willingness to not only be transparent about the fact that he walked out of Compliance, but then present his reasons for doing so instead of just ditching the review altogether. These warnings and discretionary moves don’t even necessarily have to be conclusive declarations.

So, in short, I’m glad that Jake has started this conversation on the ethics of watching Mad Men; even in my disagreement with his conclusion, I recognize the benefits of having the conversation. It pushes me—a person who enjoys and plans to continue watching Mad Men—to more carefully evaluate my position.

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Frankly, it’s not my intention or desire here to go into a long-winded analysis of the show. Continue reading →

The Ethics of Watching Mad Men

In a recent Comment piece, Jamie Smith argued that one of the foremost challenges facing Christians today is not whether or not we ought to engage popular culture–that battle has been won. The new question we have to face is what the shape of our engagement will be. We’re no longer wondering “Is it OK for Christians to watch R rated movies?” or “Is it OK for Christians to work in politics?” Those questions have been definitively answered in the affirmative. Now the questions are “how do Christians watch movies?” and “what sort of political presence should Christians pursue?”

This weekend Christians will have an excellent chance to put this thinking into practice as we consider AMC’s returning hit Mad Men, which opens season six on Sunday evening. In years past, evangelicals would brush the show aside, put off by its libertine sexual ethics, the colorful language used by some of the characters, and the general moral free-for-all that defines the show. Today’s evangelicals, reacting against the legalism (real or perceived) of their childhood faith, have often instead embraced the show, citing its exquisite settings and costumes, excellent writing, and tremendously complex characters.

While it is certainly good that evangelicals can recognize and appreciate good art when they see it (it was not always so), I do feel some trepidation all the same about our embrace of shows like Mad Men. Churchill famously said that first we shape our buildings and then our buildings shape us. I suspect that something similar happens when we’re talking about stories.

In older stories, what Chesterton would likely call the great fairy tales, we hear a story of a great hero who we come to love. We cheer for him in his triumphs and grieve his failings and above all we hope for him to come to a good end. So we cheer when Frodo destroys the ring or when Orlando and Rosalind are finally brought together.

Of course, other stories create a different sort of hero or, more properly, an anti-hero–a protagonist that we initially admire and support but who becomes a loathsome villain as the story is told. Dorian Gray, Macbeth, and Walter White all come to mind as good examples of anti-heroes.

The important commonality both types of stories share is that there’s a real moral universe standing behind the story and the story takes place in that predefined world. So Frodo is an heroic figure and if we grow to love him we will have done well. Likewise we ought to learn to despise Walter White, even while perhaps holding out hope that something might get through his pride and ego deep enough to remind him of the man he once was.

But there is another way to tell a story, which begins by blowing up that moral backdrop and replacing it with an aimless, purposeless, utterly silent universe. (Here Matt would say that we’re simply talking about the old Greek debate between the chaos of Homer and the order of Plato.) In chaotic stories, we can’t really judge characters as being good or evil, but simply as being effective or ineffective at doing what they want to do. Think of Albert Camus’ The Stranger or the recent film There Will Be Blood. In a chaotic story, all that ultimately exists is the individual. And the individuals in the story are either strong enough to act as free beings unencumbered by limitation (think of Camus’ narrator who kills a man on the beach and feels no remorse) or they’re too weak and are crushed by rival characters more willing to do what’s needed (think of Daniel Plainview killing Eli Sunday in There Will Be Blood or Francis Underwood’s manipulation of Congressman Russo in House of Cards). Oftentimes, these chaotic stories may be compelling narratives, but the universe in which they take place is so bleak and terrifying that we can’t feel any attraction to it. (Game of Thrones would be another good example of this, I think.) “Life’s a bitch” may make for an interesting story, but it doesn’t make for much of a world. And when we see the bleak chaos of Sartre’s Nausea or the 2007 film No Country for Old Men, we are rightly horrified and come away from it hoping for something to bring order to the chaos.

And this brings us back to AMC’s Mad Men. Continue reading →

The Late Great Natural Law Debate: Synopses and Reflections, Pt. 2

Last week, I sought to offer an extended summary, with a few reflections of my own, on the barrage of posts and counter-posts prompted by David Bentley Hart’s “Is, Ought, and Nature’s Laws.” Although Hart’s essay had addressed the problem of natural law’s persuasiveness generally, the particular context for it was of course the debates over gay marriage, and when Peter Leithart reflected at First Things on the gay marriage problem specifically, it touched off what could be considered a second round of the natural law debate. I have reserved consideration of that second round to this installment, which Matt Anderson has graciously invited me to post here.

In Part I, I worked to distinguish the pragmatic and the principled arguments against natural law, which had been mixed together in some of the discussions. The first, while not disputing the formal validity of natural law arguments, worried that they simply would not gain any traction in our current culture, and so should be set aside. The second deduced from the present ineffectiveness of natural law that it was not formally valid in any time and place, and we must resort to specifically theological arguments. However, as I arrived at the conclusion of Part I, I pointed out that the pragmatic and the principled are not quite so easy to separate. For if, in point of fact, natural law is valid, but our culture cannot see it as such, that means our culture is willfully blind or irrational. And if we are to say that, are we not left with a condition of incommensurable beliefs and resulting culture war, part of the problem that the turn to natural law among contemporary evangelicals was meant to address? Instead of telling our opponents, “You couldn’t possibly understand because you don’t know God,” we’re reduced to telling them, “You couldn’t possibly understand because you’re irrational,” which is, if anything, even more insulting. In either case, we’re left with no real means of rationally persuading the opposition, and with quite considerable challenges to living together peacefully in a pluralist society. I promised at the end of that post to work to “explore and perhaps even address these questions” in this second installment. Whether I get beyond “exploring” at all remains doubtful, but let’s begin by briefly considering Leithart’s First Things post that kicked all this off.

Leithart’s starting point was not the failure of natural law arguments against gay marriage, but of biblical arguments, as observed in a recent debate on the subject between Doug Wilson and Andrew Sullivan. Wilson’s arguments, said Leithart, were predominantly pragmatic, attempting to demonstrate the negative consequences of gay marriage, or else Biblical. Sullivan considered the former unconvincing, the latter frankly irrelevant. To be sure, Wilson sought to emphasize not the negative prohibitions of Scripture on the subject of homosexuality, but its positive vision of the genders and marriage, and the rich Biblical typology surrounding these themes. Nonetheless, “in order for that to carry any weight,” observed Leithart, “people have to be convinced that social institutions should participate in and reflect some sort of cosmic order. Who believes that these days? Wilson tells a cute story, many will say, but what does it have to do with public policy?”

To anyone familiar with the recent discussions, it might appear that Leithart is headed at this point toward an endorsement of more robust, natural-law arguments on the subject, but instead, he throws up his hands in resignation: “Perhaps Christians are called to do no more than speak the truth without worrying about persuasiveness. Perhaps we have entered a phase in which God has closed ears, so that whatever we say sounds like so much gibberish.” Our only hope, he concludes, lies in “a renaissance of Christian imagination. Because the only arguments we have are theological ones, and only people whose imaginations are formed by Scripture will find them cogent.”

Writing at The Calvinist International, Alastair Roberts expressed incredulity over this “loss of nerve”: Continue reading →