David and Collin, I think the connection between Calvinism and the Baptist heritage is more than just about historical overlap. The question of just how much those two categories really overlap in history is very hotly contested, but that’s not the only reason to bring other dimensions into the discussion.

To the question, “why Calvinist Baptists rather than Lutheran Baptists?” we might add the question “why Arminian Baptists rather than Lutheran Baptists?” You’re right that there is a lot of important overlap between Calvin’s soteriology and Luther’s—although the differences, such as how we account for the lost relative to God’s decree, are worth noting. But the Lutheran tradition did not maintain the robust Augustinianism of its founder; under the influence of Melanchthon and others it quickly became mostly what we now call Arminian. So why do we now speak of that view as the Arminian view rather than the Lutheran view, when in fact Melanchthon and other Lutherans reached it first? You could of course reply once again by tracing historical events, and that would be valid but I think there is more to the story.

I think there are specific things about the Calvinist version of Augustinian soteriology that made it more likely, and still make it more likely, than Lutheran or Anglican versions to find acceptance in Baptist or Free Church traditions. And I think this also explains why Baptists who are not Calvinists are Arminians—what distinguishes Arminianism from the Lutheran or Anglican versions of that soteriology is that it arose among a confessionally Calvinist church, as a specific response to Calvinism, and thus shares some of the methodological qualities of Calvinism even though it disagrees theologically.

(As a side note, but one with a lot of relevance here, the question “What is Calvinism?” is an old one and there has never been any consensus about it. Enough people use “Calvinism” to refer solely to the soteriology that has developed in the theological school that traces its roots through Calvin (and others, such as Augustine and Luther) that you can’t really call it wrong to use the term that way. But enough people use “Calvinism” to refer to the coherent whole of Reformed theology as it developed after Calvin (such as one finds in the Westminster standards) that you can’t really call that use wrong, either. And enough people use it to refer to the thought of John Calvin the individual, without reference to theological traditions either before or after, that this use is also in bounds. (more…)

Micah, I’m fascinated by this discussion of negative book reviews. I had taken it for granted that the reviewer’s task is to evaluate—making allowances for reasonable differences of opinion and taste, of course, and trying to be of service to a diverse population of book-buyers rather than only those who are very much like you, but still offering an opinion rather than a mere book report. One of the most important services the reviewer provides is to direct book-buyers to good books and away from bad ones. Joyce Carol Oates’ suggestion that reviewers must get their own opinions out of the way as much as possible in order to empower the reader to make his own decision strikes me as exactly backward; my job as a reviewer is indeed to help the reader decide whether he would get his money’s worth out of the book, but to do that I have to give my opinion. I really have nothing else to provide.

Oates’ position seems to me to follow from the whole 20th century aspiration for neutrality—that if something is to be shared across many people, it must strive to be “neutral” morally, culturally, religiously, etc. That which takes a firm stand (on anything) must by definition close off communication and ghettoize social life. Of course the truth is exactly the other way around. We only really communicate when we say what we think! It is the failure to argue and disagree that leads to social estrangement and conflict.

Particularly in this era of Google Books and Amazon previews, Oates’ position suggests the review is now obsolete—you’d do better just to read the easily (and legally) excerpts available on the web for virtually all newly published books.

My favorite comment on book reviewing comes from C.S. Lewis’ diatribe against liberal theology and higher criticism. Lewis takes it for granted that the function of the reviewer is criticism; “evaluation, praise, or censure, of the book actually written.” His complaint is that they don’t do their jobs:

All this sort of criticism attempts to reconstruct the genesis of the texts it studies; what vanished documents each author used, when and where he wrote, with what purposes, under what influences—the whole Sitz im Leben of the text….

What forearms me against all these reconstructions is the fact that I have seen it all from the other end of the stick. I have watched reviewers reconstructing the genesis of my own books in just this way.

Until you come to be reviewed yourself you would never believe how little of an ordinary review is taken up by criticism in the strict sense: by evaluation, praise, or censure, of the book actually written. Most of it is taken up with imaginary histories of the process by which you wrote it. The very terms which the reviewers use in praising or dispraising often imply such a history. They praise a passage as ‘spontaneous’ and censure another as ‘laboured’; that is, they think they know that you wrote the one currente calamo and the other invita Minerva.

What the value of such reconstructions is I learned very early in my career. I had published a book of essays; and the one into which I had put most of my heart, the one I really cared about and in which I discharged a keen enthusiasm, was on William Morris. And in almost the first review I was told that this was obviously the only one in the book in which I had felt no interest. Now don’t mistake. The critic was, I now believe, quite right in thinking it the worst essay in the book; at least everyone agreed with him. Where he was totally wrong was in his imaginary history of the causes which produced its dullness.

Well, this made me prick up my ears. Since then I have watched with some care similar imaginary histories both of my own books and of books by friends whose real history I knew. Reviewers, both friendly and hostile, will dash you off such histories with great confidence; will tell you what public events had directed the author’s mind to this or that, what other authors had influenced him, what his over-all intention was, what sort of audience he principally addressed, why — and when — he did everything.

Now I must first record my impression; then distinct from it, what I can say with certainty. My impression is that in the whole of my experience not one of these guesses has on any one point been right; that the method shows a record of 100 per cent failure. You would expect that by mere chance they would hit as often as they miss. But it is my impression that they do no such thing. I can’t remember a single hit. But as I have not kept a careful record my mere impression may be mistaken. What I think I can say with certainty is that they are usually wrong.

Robert, one of the most important things about that excellent Charles Capps article you point us to is that it reminds us of the possibility of a stable compromise in the marriage debate. This need not be a war to the death where one side or the other gets everything it wants. Capps is showing the opportunity-seeking mindset we need to find a better way forward.

Capps argues that we should develop separate social institutions to handle two things which heretofore have both been handled by marriage: the social needs of the natural family, and the social needs of groups (whether in a sexual relationship or not) who cohabit and share assets. We seem to be entering a period of history where, in contrast to the previous period, significant numbers of people will cohabit and share assets without forming natural families. Mere justice, Capps argues, demands that we develop social institutions to serve the legitimate needs of these non-familial cohabiters (that’s my term, not Capps’; let’s call them NFCs for lack of something better).

I see three issues that will need to be tackled for this to become a viable way forward. One is that NFCs who are in a sexual relationship may have social needs different from those who are not. I’m not sure this problem is big enough to need to be addressed, but at the least we need to think about it. Sexuality has social consequences other than babies, and one traditional function of marriage has been to channel sexual behavior for legitimate social reasons other than childrearing. Capps argues that one reason redefining marriage to include gay couples fails to do justice to NFCs is that it doesn’t provide for the legitimate social needs of NFCs who are not in a sexual relationship; this is true, but developing a social institution that lumps all NFCs together may fail to provide for all of society’s necessary interests in channeling sexuality.

A bigger issue is what we call the proposed new social institution. The real value of Capps’ idea as a way forward is that it names reality in a new way to accommodate the changing needs of justice. But one of the key sticking points in the marriage debate is that advocates of gay marriage believe that gay people need marriage to participate in society on equal terms as first-class citizens. They don’t want a two-tier system where their unions are a “silver medal” for those who don’t choose the natural family. So this new name for the reality of NFCs cannot be something that suggests it’s a sort of secondary appendage to marriage.

This leads me to what is perhaps the most important issue: how natural families would be treated under the new system Capps is proposing. As I see it, his proposal is a lot more likely to be adopted if it handles all cohabiting and asset-sharing through one institution, which natural families and NFCs would all participate in on the same terms. Then marriage would be an additional institution which, legally, would exist solely to handle the unique needs of childrearing. Of course, outside the legal realm we would continue to view marriage more holistically, as a metaphysical union that expresses the love of Christ and his people; I’m only talking about changing what marriage involves legally. I would not see this as a “redefinition” of marriage, but as a constructive reform that brings our legal arrangements more fully into alignment with the reality of 1) which aspects of marriage must involve the law and which need not, and 2) which aspects of marriage involve the law in ways unique to marriage, as opposed to claims on the law that marriage shares in common with non-marital social needs.

Capps’ proposal may not be likely to resolve our marriage debate in the short term. But it may be the seed of an idea that could grow into a viable social compromise for our children’s time.

Perhaps you’ve heard about the MSNBC promo—part of its “Lean Forward” series—in which Melissa Harris-Perry asserts that “we have to break through our, kind of, private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families.” Commenting on the promo in his e-mail newsletter the G-File , Jonah Goldberg makes a fascinating point: Where are all these “no such thing as someone else’s child” people in the Kermit Gosnell case?

The most remarkable thing no one has remarked upon, as far as I can tell, is the disconnect between the Melissa Harris-Perry view about socializing children and what I think we can call the Melissa Harris-Perry view about privatization of snipping the spines of babies. If we all own everyone else’s children, then Kermit Gosnell killed—barbarically slaughtered, actually—Harris-Perry’s babies. Why isn’t she angry about that?

Elsewhere on NRO, Peter Kirsanow demolishes the idea that the media blackout in the Gosnell case might be partly excused as a symptom of excessive racial sensitivity:

To this, most may be prompted to repeat Hillary Clinton’s infamous response, “What difference, at this point, does it make?” Scores of babies were allegedly slaughtered and women horribly brutalized. The race of the victims is, or should be, irrelevant.

One point Kirsanow doesn’t make, but could have: Some white people support abortion rights precisely because it disproportionately affects minorities. Ruth Bader Ginsburg edged toward this view in an interview with the New York Times in 2009:

Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.

“That we don’t want to have too many of.” Just a quick reminder, in case you’ve forgotten: Ruth Bader Ginsberg is a sitting justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Far from being an excuse, the race factor, if anything, makes the media all the more culpable.

This Easter I’m reflecting on how much ground we Evangelicals still have to recover in connecting our faith to the institutions of human civilization. We make this connection in a few isolated cases, especially marriage (as recent headlines have reminded us). But the empty tomb and the series of events that followed it—the appearances of the resurrected Christ, the Great Commission, the Ascension, Pentecost—stand in my mind as a marker of just how far we have to go. The full reality of the resurrected Christ demands a full transformation of every aspect of our lives, and that cannot happen apart from participation in the social order and even efforts to reform that order itself. The reflections below were generated in the context of my work as part of the “faith and work” movement, reconnecting Christianity to our daily work and to the economy as a whole, but they’re generalizable to other kinds of social institutions as well.

The empty tomb—a new life of victory. If the text of the New Testament says anything at all, it says Christians are not only to repent from sin, but enter into a new and Spirit-transformed life. It seems to me that the resurrection provides the Christological basis for this imperative; it carries us beyond the atonement for sin into the new life of victory over sin. Another way of saying this is that the empty tomb proves sin is not only atoned for but also defeated. This is why Paul says our faith is worthless if we deny the resurrection. In the last century, too many of us Evangelicals have been content to offer a “fire insurance” faith; make your decision for Christ and receive your Get Out of Hell Free card. This problem is not only about achieving an ethical standard in our own lives (“personal holiness”) but also about our influence in society. When we don’t live out the resurrection victory, we don’t manifest the Spirit in the way we live our lives in human civilization. Today it has become commonplace for Evangelical leaders to bemoan this “cheap grace,” but the chorus of voices bemoaning it has not yet translated into an effective solution to the problem.

The appearances—Incarnation as permanent reality. Living out our redemption means overcoming the dualistic thinking that keeps the gospel in a box labeled “church activities, missions, social programs, etc.” The rest of life—our daily work in homes, workplaces and neighborhoods—gets cut off from the gospel. Evangelicals love to challenge “dualism.” We use that term like it’s a swear word. And rightly so! (more…)

Matthew, what I find most fascinating about those Randinalia is how they reveal her irrationality. Her responses are not even remotely tracking the actual content of Lewis’ argument; they’re more like conditioned reflexes than reasoning. It’s clear that she perceives how Lewis’ argument is a deadly threat to all she holds dear (Victor Reppert called it “C.S. Lewis’ Dangerous Idea”). This perception cannot possibly be irrelevant to the fact that she so willfully misconstrues what he says, distorting it out of all recognition in her own mind. It’s the argumentative equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and shouting, “la la la, can’t hear you!”

Even on the points where Lewis’ argument is weakest (such as his association of modern science with demonology), in her eagerness to make Lewis out to be a fiend Rand throws away all the really useful argumentative weapons she might have deployed against him. If she had only had the self-discipline to track his argument accurately, she could have demolished it. It reminds me of a line from Pascal: The habitual liar cannot tell the truth even when doing so would be to his advantage.

The title of your post was well chosen. She didn’t hate the argument because she thought it was false; she thought it was false because she hated it. Alas, this was all too characteristic.

I have to question Alister McGrath’s insistence (linked in this morning’s First Links) that the date of C.S. Lewis’ conversion “clearly needs review.” Lewis recounted in his autobiography Surprised by Joy that he converted to theism—not Christianity, yet—during “Trinity Term 1929,” that is, between April 28 and June 22. McGrath’s four reasons for demanding Lewis’ recollection must be challenged are as follows:

1. There was “no sign of a significant change in tone or mood” of his works at the time.
2. His correspondence at the time of his father’s death in September “makes no reference at all to any impact of a belief in God.”
3. Lewis wrote to Owen Barfield in a state of spiritual crisis, sounding like he was coming up upon a conversion but not yet converted, on Feb. 3, 1930.
4. The changes in behavior Lewis attributes to his conversion (such as attending chapel) suddenly start showing up in his letters in October 1930.

There are several problems with this. A conversion does not always translate into speech and action immediately. Even when Lewis identifies changes that followed his conversion, he doesn’t say they happened right away. Such a gap may be particularly likely to be present in this particular conversion. Most important, this was an intellectual conversion. He changed from believing in the pantheistic god of English Hegelianism to the transcendent god of Berkeley (a figure he identifies in Surprised by Joy as representing the view he changed to and the reasons for it) but not yet to the revealed God of the Scriptures or the history-changing God of G.K. Chesterton or the heart-transforming God of George MacDonald.

Also, he writes in Surprised by Joy that he was relationally estranged from his father and ashamed to admit to his friends and academic colleagues the truth about his selfish life; this may have slowed the process of communication. Plus, we know that in general the pre-conversion C.S. Lewis was (how shall we put this delicately?) a man who knew how to compartmentalize his emotions. Moreover, I beileve (under correction from McGrath or any other scholars who know this better than I do) that we do not have reliable information about the dates of Lewis’ progress from theism to Christianity. Who is to say the conversion he was beginning to experience in 1930 wasn’t this latter conversion? That would make sense of the evidence.

Granted, Lewis wrote Surprised by Joy two decades after the fact and had confessed to difficulty with dates, so the presumption in favor of his recollection is not especially strong. Still, the very fact that he usually doesn’t give dates for these movements and does give a date in this case adds some strength to it.

McGrath has done a great deal of historical study that I haven’t done, so I’m perfectly ready to be convinced by him. But he’ll have to come up with better evidence than he has so far presented.

Anna, I appreciate this exchange on income inequality and executive pay. I agree with you that “the rise in executive pay is due to many factors, not merely to an increase in their productivity or abilities.” My point was that the increase in their abilities has been so dramatic that it was going to confront us with this question of long-term income inequalities regardless of the impact of other factors.

Based on what you write, I would identify two main points of disagreement. (I would also quibble with some of the factual assertions you quote from outside sources in your post, but that’s not really worth getting into.)

1) Your whole post is predicated on the assumption that to whatever extent you can show a failure of rationality on the part of the buyer (in this case, the company, which is purchasing the executive’s work), to that extent you have demonstrated that the price is not rationally related to the real value of the thing being purchased. This assumption comes through clearly in the hinge of your argument, which is your statement that “if that rise is not merely the result of executive talent or the natural move of the free market, then we could try to rein in CEOs’ compensation without suffering dire economic consequences.”

The assumption is false. It stems from a conflation of the subjective rationality of the buyer with the objective operation of the price system (more…)

Anna, as a general matter, changes in social stigmas tend to be the results of changes in underlying social conditions more than their causes. The vanishing stigma on divorce, illegitimacy, etc., which you mention, is one case in point. To some extent a reduction in the stigma preceded the change in policy (redefining marriage in law from a permanent bond to a meaningless piece of paper) and facilitated it. However, the causation in the other direction was much more powerful. The stigma against divorce declined much more after divorce was redefined in law (as a result of that redefinition) than it did before it (as a cause).

The topic of income disparities is another example. If you want to understand this phenomenon, you have to start with the fact that the aggregate inequality numbers everyone’s freaked out about are really driven by an explosive growth in incomes for a tiny number of people. A combination of very long-term structural and cultural changes (most of them good, such as greater freedom to choose marriage partners and greater educational opportunities) is coming together to dramatically increase both the development and the economic deployment of certain highly specialized human abilities. Most of these gifts fall into one of two categories: various forms of the ability to create and use systems of symbols (such as images, words and mathematical formulae) and various forms of the ability to predict and influence human decisionmaking. A small portion of the population possesses these gifts in extreme measure, and our civilization is getting better and better at helping this population nurture their gifts and put them to good use in ways that (in most cases) bring incalculable benefit to all of us.

No force on earth is going to prevent those people from making very large sums of money. It’s quite simple: The number of people in the world who are capable of doing a good job running Apple or Exxon or Wal-Mart is extremely small; the consequences of those companies being poorly run would be catastrophic for millions of people; therefore the tiny group of people capable of running those companies well is going to command extreme salaries. This would be true regardless of our economic system, law, policy, or what set of moral values predominated in the culture.

While Lindsey is right that hatred of the social outsider did create some stigmatization (more…)

R.R. Reno’s article about the culture war today—that the Democrats are becoming the party of culture war, a transition confirmed by the decreasing power of economic interests in the party—is further confirmed by this observation: The Republicans are becoming the party of economics. They’re not going to drop their social conservatism, but if you’ve been keeping track of the conversations about the future of conservatism and the Republican party (which are two distinct but not entirely separate conversations), maybe you’ve noticed that the conversation is all around reframing the movement’s and the party’s economic message in various ways. To the extent that social issues are discussed at all, it hasn’t really gotten beyond “don’t say stupid things about rape.” The usual chorus of libertarians complaining that the social conservatives have to be kicked out of the movement/the party, while present, has been surprisingly marginal. All the real conversation is about how to deliver a message of economic hope that resonates with people who haven’t made it yet—as Ted Cruz famously put it, to counter “you didn’t build that” not with “you built that” but with “you can build that.” Or as Henry Olsen put it, to stop talking about free enterprise in ways that sound like it empowers management at the expense of labor.

The big question to my mind is whether the GOP follows the pattern of the Democrats in the last generation and becomes a party of economic interests, or manages to find a voice for an economic ideal that can at least partially subordinate those interests. That, in turn, will probably be settled by the outcome of the distinct-but-not-separate conversation going on in the conservative movement.

David and Rusty, I think you’re exactly right about the new IAV manifesto. Because of what you point out—the manifesto says good things but will nonetheless have negative rather than positive consequences for marriage—this could be a fruitful dialogue opportunity. The manifesto demands “a new conversation,” and a conversation implies two sides. The IAV support-marriage-but-surrender-on-gay-marriage caucus is one side. Who’s the other? They seem to think it’s people who dislike marriage in general. What if their dialogue partner was us—people who share their desire to combat divorce but don’t want to surrender our consciences on gay marriage, as their manifesto seems to ask us to do?

Right now, the position staked out by IAV is the one most likely to find a positive reception in the halls of cultural power. The future terms of discussion about marriage will probably depend on who engages with that caucus and how they do it. Could we build a cross-ideological movement to combat divorce that brought together people like the IAV caucus and people like ourselves? Such coalitions are not uncommon—just look at how an issue like immigration scrambles all the usual ideological alignments. Suppose divorce became a similar cross-cutting, ideology-scrambling issue? That would redraw the battle lines in our favor, I think – even on the gay marriage issue. The marriage movement needs some entrepreneurial thinking.

Joe, as a ten-year-and-counting member of the school choice movement, I appreciate your defense of tax-credit scholarships. But I don’t think the “it’s my money until Uncle Sam touches it” argument works. If government can give tax credits at all, it must have the right to set bounds on their use. That gives it all the authority it needs to impose regulations. Such regulations must be rational, nondiscriminatory, etc., but that’s also the case for voucher regulations so “it’s my money” makes no difference. Ultimately you can’t defend the program except on the same old First Amendment grounds we’ve always used for vouchers.

U.S. education law is so favorable to the state that I doubt the courts will be of much use in preventing overregulation of school choice programs regardless of design. Thankfully, to date they have not been much needed. We’ve had school choice for twenty-three years (actually, Maine and Vernont have had vouchers in small towns for almost 150 years) and regulatory encroachment has been at most a minor problem. We tend to win those battles in the legislature.

Matthew, thanks for your thoughtful critique of my defense of George Bailey. Here’s what I would say:

1) This goose is happy to meet the gander: You ask, “why the implicit confidence that this process, which ‘liberated’ the nuclear family from a number of wider ties, should (or can) cease its sledgehammering with this accomplishment?” I didn’t think such a confidence was implicit in anything I wrote, but if it was, I’m glad to take this opportunity to repudiate it. As I wrote in my piece, all ways of life become dysfunctional over time. The suburban way of life celebrated in It’s a Wonderful Life seemed morally ordered and liberating to Capra, and to millions of mid-century Americans. If it no longer seems so today—if it has become merely a cynical shell of its former self, and the George Baileys of the 1940s have grown over time into a new cadre of Mr. Potters—then my hope and expectation is that a new generation of George Baileys will arise to smash it to bits. One thing I’m confident of: There will be no return to Bedford Falls as it was. That social world, like all social worlds, was the product of historically specific forces that cannot be restored.

Cultural vitality is a matter of infusing eternal truths into constantly changing ways of life; Deneen’s mistake was to identify the (necessarily temporary) way of life with the (permanent) moral truths. Why, just today in On the Square, Steven Greydanus implicitly makes this very point: “Indeed, the one clear effect of George’s actions on downtown Bedford Falls is to prevent it from becoming Pottersville. To that extent, clearly George has not ‘destroyed’ Bedford Falls, but saved it.”

You see? He had to destroy Bedford Falls in order to save it. That’s no joke—it’s the central point. It’s the same in all times and places: The entrepreneur destroys the old forms in order to rescue and renew the eternal truths they once embodied but no longer do.

2) Yes, I am Protestant—guilty as charged: (more…)

During the Christmas break, Patrick Deneen published a bill of indictment against George Bailey here at FT. The defendant stands accused of destroying Bedford Falls and its tradition-bound, permanence-seeking culture with his soulless suburbs. My brief for the defense appears over on TPD this morning. I emphasize the way entrepreneurs like George re-infuse morality into our culture by building new, morally ordered social structures after the old ones get taken over by cynics like Mr. Potter.

I emphasize especially the link between economic modernization and the family. If George’s suburbs stand for anything, they stand for the liberation of the household as a self-governing unit. I identify a number of moral principles that marriage and entrepreneurship share in common; I’m particularly proud of this passage:

Like marriage, entrepreneurship is essentially self-giving and generous. George is very much a typical entrepreneur in his desire to make the world a better place, and his disdain for people who prioritize making money. Fans of Ayn Rand will find nothing to like in George, just as they find nothing to like in most real entrepreneurs. (That’s why they need Rand’s fictional heroes as a substitute; the real entrepreneurs usually disappoint them.)

It’s telling that you could plausibly interpret Mr. Potter either as a Randian egoist or as one of the power brokers of the New Deal progressive project. Socialism and Randianism are basically the same worldview, differing only over the secondary question of the role of government. Entrepreneurship is the rejoinder to their materialism.

Also, here’s a First Thoughts exclusive – a paragraph that had to be cut from the TPD article for lack of space:

One of Deneen’s points requires a separate comment. Deneen’s fanciful suggestion that Bailey Park is built atop a graveyard presupposes a level of artistic subtlety that would be difficult to attribute even to the most avant-garde of 1940s filmmakers. Attributing such subtlety to Frank Capra—of all people!—is beyond implausible. No doubt Capra chose a graveyard for the scene where George is unable to locate Bailey Park because he wanted stress the desolation and deathlike atmosphere of the
social world without the life-giving generative power of George’s entrepreneurship. If he gave any thought to this question at all, he undoubtedly expected us to assume there was no graveyard there in the original timeline.

As always, I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

During the fiscal cliff negotiations, DC-area Starbucks stores wrote “Come Together” on their drink cups. Mickey Kaus worries that this anodyne gesture was a violation of the moral rights of Starbucks workers; Joe Barista ought to have the liberty to punch the clock for a paycheck without being asked to affirm even the most bland of moral statements. Allow this, and before long you’ll see major corporations practicing religion! Kaus asks: “Is Starbucks a Cult?”

Did Schultz take a poll of his employees–sorry, “partners,” he calls them–before ordering pressuring asking them to join in this lobbying effort? What  if he were, say, the CEO of Chick-fil-A and he “asked” his “partners” to  write “Preserve the Family” on the outside of cups and containers?

Heaven forfend! (Or can we say that?)

This determination to protect people’s right to live in an amoral system of economic work is directly connected to the current threat to religious liberty. The basic idea is that only individuals have conscience rights; institutions like businesses are expected to be morally and even culturally neutral. This seems to be easily accomplished by giving every individual employee a veto power over the firm’s ability to say or do anything morally or culturally significant. However, in reality all human action is moral and cultural; this system doesn’t actually remove moral and cultural formation from business, it just requires businesses to conform to whatever beliefs are so socially predominant that the majority don’t even recognize them as beliefs, or see that anything significant is at stake in requiring companies to affirm them. Business is culture making, and we should let culture makers be culture makers.

Several commenters on this post object to my characterization of C.S. Lewis’s views of modern science in The Abolition of Man. I wrote that Lewis “explicitly compared modern science to demonology” and then, at the end, reduced this to the more streamlined statement “science is demonic.” I seem to have struck a nerve.

Here is what Lewis wrote: (more…)

Joe, no doubt you’re right about Lewis, who explicitly compared modern science to demonology. However, I think you misread Locke, whose views of labor and property are deeply scriptural and well within the mainstream of historic theology—especially the mainstream Anglicanism of the day.

Yes, Locke says that God puts the raw materials of nature into our hands “almost worthless,” awaiting the value-creating transformation of human work. This is exactly how the Bible describes things, and from Irenaeus to Calvin to the present day (read Tim Keller’s new book) it has been an important theme in Christian theology.

As only one example, consider the description of the creation order outside Eden in Genesis 2:5:

No bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground.

A vast, barren wasteland, awaiting cultural-mandate-bearing humanity “to work the ground.” We cannot here consider the question of whether this passage describes the state of the world outside Eden pre-fall or immediately post-fall, but for present purposes it doesn’t matter. The point is that humanity, leaving Eden, enters a world of “almost worthless” raw material that it is his job to transform. (more…)

Matthew, the greatest part about that Rand quote is how it shows how Randians and Keynsians basically agree in endorsing the central fallacy of twentieth-century economics: that the core drive of economic activity is the desire to consume, to gratify desires.

She even praises Christmas because it’s a “stimulus”! Leave it to Christianity to come up with the one thing Ayn Rand and John Maynard Keynes can agree is good. There is no Jew or Greek, no bond or free, no maker or taker, for we are all one in Christ Jesus.

Jonathan Rauch has turned a lot of heads with this article on the economic challenges of the working class. One of his major themes is how those challenges relate to the breakdown of marriage among that population. Three cheers to him for owning that issue, and sounding the alarm about what a disaster the breakdown of marriage is, especially for the most vulnerable! Unfortunately, his understanding of the economic side of the picture is flawed, so his policy proposals amount to little. He thinks there’s a breakdown in the relationship between productivity and wages, but the evidence he produces doesn’t establish this—and there is much evidence to the contrary. A loss of the sense that productive work has religious and moral value is a greater concern—and is thankfully one that we can actually do something about. More at Hang Together.

Matthew, if the apportionment requirement is an insuperable obstacle to direct federal property taxes, then perhaps it is not so “idiotic” after all—and its “historical origins” are not necessarily “obscure,” n’est-ce pas?

On a more serious note, if your suspicions are misplaced and R. R. Reno is in fact serious, the key objection to his reasoning is this: it’s technically true that growth comes from productivity and productivity comes from work and investment rather than the mere ownership of wealth, but a wealth tax undermines the social institutions and environments necessary to foster productive work and investment—and it’s especially detrimental to the cultivation of institutions whose purposes are non-economic. The maintenance of extra-economic cultural institutions (schools, churches, charitable foundations) is generally dependent upon large accumulations of wealth. Taxing wealth rather than exchange would incentivize us to invest more of our wealth back into economic activity rather than withdrawing it from the economy for other purposes.

Austin, I don’t want them “banned in schools,” I just don’t want them taught in government monopoly schools where parents are virtually compelled by law to send their kids. If we had school choice, all parents could send their children to schools that aligned with their consciences. Isn’t that the best of the American way?

. . . is the title of a propaganda video being shown in some public elementary schools. It bills itself as a general exploration of the many varieties of what a family can consist of—you know, cross-racial couples, adoption and guardianship, families that speak Spanish at home. And of course it goes without saying that gay couples are families too, and anyone who doubts that is on par with people who doubt that cross-racial couples are families. NRO’s Kevin Williamson discovered the video being shown in a town he used to live in and comments:

As a fellow practitioner of the occult arts of persuasion, I must confess my admiration. . . . That’s a Family! is not about tolerance or treating people decently. It is about indoctrination, a fact that its enthusiasts make little attempt to hide. It lists among its endorsers such Democratic worthies as Senator Barbara Boxer, who declares that the film can be used to “break down” attitudes she finds disagreeable. Loret Peterson, a fourth-grade teacher in (of course) San Francisco, wrote that the film provides “a gentle starting point to reach elementary age children with a message of respect for all differences before biases become entrenched and the pressures of middle school set in. . . . We have the opportunity to take an active, moral approach to deflating the power of stereotypes by addressing them in the classroom.”

An active moral approach. I am not at all sure that the government schools are the proper venue for an active moral approach to anything touching fourth-graders and homosexuality. But if children are to have moral instruction in the schools, rather than at home or in the church, then we should probably have a much longer and more detailed conversation than we have thus far about what will be included in that moral curriculum. Is circumspection regarding the situation of a child who identifies four parents consisting of two homosexual couples as his “moms” and “dads” an uncomplicated moral imperative? Hardly. When a child declares, “My two moms are Marilyn and Adrian, and my two dads are Michael and Barry,” that opens up a discussion about which an entire doctoral dissertation in moral theory could be written. Chasnoff and her partisans claim to be driven in part by a desire to prevent bullying, but bullying is precisely what they are engaged in, using the power of the schools to force their political views onto children.

It is interesting to note that the use of the government school monopoly to destroy orthodox Christian commitments (Protestant as well as Catholic!) through the indoctrination of children is nothing new. Horace Mann, the father of the government school monopoly, was a militant Boston unitarian who fiercely hated the traditional Calvinism of the Massachussetts countryside; destroying his state’s Puritan heritage was not his only goal in creating the school monopoly, but it was one important goal. Once the engine of destruction was up and running, Catholics became its target in other parts of the country where Protestant orthodoxy was less contested. Ultimately, however, all orthodox Christianity came under assault. Now the Obama administration is driving to create a national curriculum that will drive schools all the more deeply into the arms of the culture war.

I don’t want schools used as a tool of power on either side of our moral and religious divide. School choice is growing fast, but not nearly fast enough.

His views on marriage are misguided, but Kevin Williamson’s lengthy and delightful look at homeschooling in the new National Review is delightful. Here are a few tastes:

“People forget that some of the first homeschoolers were hippies,” says Bob Wiesner, a counselor at the Seton Home Study School, a Catholic educational apostolate reporting to the bishop of Arlington, Va…He relishes the story of a number of graduates of his program who attended a top-tier Catholic university and enrolled together in theology classes taught by the school’s most notorious liberals. They were of course more conversant with church orthodoxy than were many of their instructors. “The professors hated them. But the kids had fun.”…

Nine-tenths of American children attend government schools, and most of the remaining tenth attend government-approved private schools. The political class wants as many of that remaining tenth in government schools as possible; teachers’ unions have money on the line, and ideologues do not want any young skull beyond their curricular reach. A political class that does not trust people with a Big Gulp is not going to trust them with the minds of children.

My dear friend and intellectual collaborator Dan Kelly argues today that “marriage is dead.” I respect Dan as a man who says what he thinks without fear or favor; that’s why I value both his friendship and his co-labor. He’s not going to start pretending liberalized divorce is a good idea just because he sees its continued dominance as inevitable. But I feel a need to register my dissent from his forensic diagnosis.

As I have written in this space before, I think marriage is gravely threatened but the battle to save it is winnable. That hasn’t always come through to some people, because I’ve challenged the marriage movement’s strategy and language on some issues. But I do think marriage can be saved. Without the time to go into a lengthy discourse, here are my reasons for dissenting from my good friend and intellectual comrade.

Firstly, I agree with Dan that homosexuality is a distraction; the root cause of our problem is liberalized divorce laws. Liberalized divorce establishes fully and indisputably that marriage is a meaningless piece of paper. (This was the transformative insight I got from Maggie Gallagher’s The Abolition of Marriage, of which I’ve written before.) In my opinion, it is only because liberalized divorce has established that marriage is a meaningless piece of paper that gay marriage makes deep intuitive sense to people, while opposition to gay marriage seems like it could have no cause but irrational hatred. I take it from his comments Dan would more or less agree. Kevin Williamson’s famous comments about gay marriage from earlier this year include some mistaken thinking and conclusions, but he was right to argue that liberalized divorce is the only issue that ultimately matters:

I might be more interested in the politics of [gay] marriage if the legal standing of the institution were not already degraded to the point of triviality. Here is an experiment: Imagine that you have a marriage that you wish to escape and $50,000 of credit-card debt that you do not wish to pay — which claim do you imagine will prove more enduring? Or try unilaterally canceling a contract with an employee, without showing any fault on his part, simply because he no longer suits your taste. Your contract with your cell-phone provider is legally enforceable, and your marriage vows — “forsaking all others until death do us part” and all that — are not. Our present-day defenders of the sanctity of marriage aren’t exactly Thomas More standing up to Henry VIII; they are huddled around the husk of an institution long debased.

Now we come to disagreements. Dan argues that “marriage is dead” because “there is a broad and deep consensus that we are well rid of it, and we don’t want it to come back.” I take him to mean, not that the culture never affirms marriage in the abstract as a value, but that there is a “broad and deep consensus” for liberalized divorce laws.

I agree that there is a broad consensus for liberalized divorce laws, but I do not think it is “deep.” Indeed, I think it is shallow and fragile. It can be broken, if we have the wisdom to redirect our efforts toward breaking it.

The forces at the top of the culture are already waking up on these issues. They have recognized that the breakdown of marriage threatens all their most cherished values: equality of opportunity for all and especially for the poor, equality of dignity across social strata (what some call “social equality”), and protection of the interests of women and children. This has been growing for some time and to my view (these things are subjective) it looks ready to reach a tipping point.

Admittedly, the dominant cultural forces are not yet willing to take that final, Rubicon-crossing step and retract their support for liberalized divorce. But that step is “final” in two senses. It is final in the sense that it is the step that ultimately matters, which is why their failure to take it looks so irreversable in Dan’s eyes; but it is also final in the sense that it comes at the end of a long journey. They have been moving toward it for a generation. Ten years ago, who would have expected the New York Times to run a long think piece about how the breakdown of marriage inevitably creates a two-class society? So who is to say the momentum can’t continue?

They have not yet taken the only step that matters, but they can be made to take that step. That’s why I say the broad consensus for liberalized divorce is fragile. And there is a logical path to breaking it.

It’s to rub their noses in the failure of their preferred solutions. They’ve admitted this is a big problem – indeed, a dire one. But their solutions don’t work. The next step is to offer a solution that manifestly does work and then demand to know: “if not this, what?” There are challenges to doing this effectively – you have to do it in such a way that they don’t feel like they have to sacrifice their position at the top of the culture, their credibility as cultural leaders, by adopting your solutions. We don’t want to displace them from the top of the culture, we want to force them to co-opt our preferred solution and pretend it was their idea all along. That can be done. Numerous social movements have done it on other issues in the past. This is where my concern to “deinstitutionalizing enmity” comes in – we want to defeat liberalized divorce, not conquer our unbelieving neighbors and subjugate them to Christianity.

I also think Dan – characteristically – overestimates the relative importance of the law’s coercive function and underestimates its teaching and formative function. Dan argues marriage has been hollowed out legally because we changed our conception of what it was. I think the causation runs just as much the other way – the hollowing out of our conception of what marriage is has been driven to a large extent by raising several generations successively in a country where marriage’s status as a meaningless piece of paper is not a mere cultural idea floating out there in the ether but an incontrovertable institutionalized fact. Obviously there have always been forces outside the law involved in forming moral expectations, but the change in the law was a huge factor. This implies victories against liberalized divorce, if we won them, would help move the ball back in the direction of marriage not only in terms of institutional arrangements but in terms of what makes deep sense to people and what is seen as irrational and bigoted.

Not having time or space to write a lengthy treatise, that’s my piece for now. I’m sure Dan will continue the dialogue over on Hang Together and we’ll both have much to say.

Amidst all the flap over Romney’s “47% remarks,” Sam Gregg momentarily (and blessedly) draws our attention from the relatively less important issue of the ballot box to the more important issue of what kind of people the American people want to be:

I doubt that thick books are in vogue at MSNBC these days, but if the liberal commentariat deigned to pick up a copy of the second volume of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and read the chapter entitled “What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear,” they’d find the link between creating tame citizens and a state that generously volunteers to do everything on their behalf spelt out quite gracefully . . . More than one commentator has observed that Tocqueville’s words seem to foreshadow some of the cultural and political effects of the regulatory and welfare state in the conditions of modern democracy. Many people find themselves lulled into a type of dependency upon the government. The “softness” of this despotism consists of people voluntarily yielding up their freedom in return for the comforts provided by their oh-so-kind masters.

Why, then, do we not see very strong correlations between dependency and voting patterns, as Ramesh Ponnuru has pointed out (and many, many others have discussed at The Corner and here on First Thoughts)? Among the many theories that have been offered, let me add one factor I haven’t seen addressed yet: in a two-party system, the parties have a strong incentive to chase the center. That is part of the special value and glory of the two-party system, which is one of the best and most effective means of sustaining justice in a democracy. However, one of its consequences is that, as the center shifts away from republican self-reliance to socialist servility, both parties will chase it in that direction. This is part of the reason elections exercise less control over the behavior of the state than we would be comfortable admitting.

Dependency may or may not help elect Democrats. But it will make slaves of the American people just as effectively either way.