As I sit staring at a monitor and clicking away, I can feel time slipping away and my attention becoming less and less focused as I browse, browse, browse hopping quickly from place to place with one part of my conscious mind trying to generate ideas for the next skip.

Confronted with this sense of things more frequently, lately, I found myself suddenly vulnerable to an offer from Time which I would normally throw away. A year’s worth of Time (weekly!) for about $20. My typical reaction would be, “Great! The doctor’s office can have it.” But not on this occasion. Instead, I thought about how nice might it be to have one magazine broadly covering the news. I can easily take it to bed (or to the bathroom . . .), read through the articles, and feel like a reasonably informed person. It helped that I’d recently been on a radio show where the host stumped me by asking a question about the START treaty. My clicking had deftly avoided it. If I were to read Time, cover to cover, a small embarrassment of the sort would be less likely to happen.

So, now, I am two issues into the subscription. I don’t get up-to-the-second information, but I do get a publication of manageable size (rather than the near infinity of the net) and the coverage is comprehensive enough.

As far as one of the reasons I’d stopped reading magazines like Time, such as my perception of harsh media bias, I can report I have read little to put me on the defensive or to feel as though my point of view is being treated unfairly. Indeed, the only thing objectionable about these two issues has been an ad on the rear cover for the atheist version of The 700 Club, which is also known as Real Time with Bill Maher. There may be a reason Time has survived the black hole of failure that took hold of Newsweek.

To this point, I have to say the experiment is a success. If you are suffering with the sensation your soul is being sucked slowly into the machine, I recommend you give it a try.

As we talked, it occurred to me that President Obama ran as an Aristotelian in this sense. HE would be the one to lift us beyond our petty, individualistic concerns toward a higher vision of community justice. WE, upon joining him, would become the ones WE have been waiting for. Candidate Obama successfully pleaded his case for a left-of-center version of civic friendship.  President Obama has had a tough go of implementing it as the consequences become manifest.

All the way around the table, the students were skeptical of the possibility that a government can move from our current pluralism to unity around some vision. Instead, they seemed to prefer the idea that government sets fair rules and conditions for people to pursue their individual ends. Because my students are mostly Christians, I moved the example away from President Obama to a Christian republic in which people aren’t forced to be Christians but where Christian moral norms hold sway. They didn’t have much hope or enthusiasm for that, either. Or, at least, they thought it was equally impossible in our current culture.

I wonder if there is a clue here indicating to us the limits of an instrumentality like the state and pointing toward the possibilities of the church.

Neither of these volumes is Kirk’s best seller.

The all-time champion of the Kirk canon, supposedly outselling all the rest combined, is The Old House of Fear.  Quite a few conservatives know that Kirk wrote some ghost stories, but haven’t read them.  I took the plunge several months back and read Ancestral Shadows, which is a fantastic collection of his stories offered by Eerdmans.  You can read that review here.

The publisher recently sent me The Old House of Fear so I could read Kirk’s novel length entry in the supernatural story genre.  Having finished the book, I can again express satisfaction with Kirk’s handiwork.  The novel features a good plot and a excellent character study.  A wealthy old man wants to buy land on a semi-inaccessible Scottish Isle, but has a terrible time pulling it off despite his fantastic means.  He hires a military veteran turned lawyer to travel there and find a way to make the purchase happen.  Events unfold in an exciting manner from that point.  The veteran/lawyer character is wonderfully drawn.  He is in his late 30′s, single, physically sturdy, resourceful and somewhat wasted in legal practice.  Part of what makes the book work is our desire to see what this complex man will do as he encounters obstacles.  The villains are well established, too.  And fairly creepy.

When you have that open weekend when you want to spend time in your favorite chair reading a good book, the kind you can just enjoy instead of alertly marking up and taking notes, I highly recommend The Old House of Fear and Ancestral Shadows.

What motivates this post is the point in the narrative where the German state church is confronted by the Aryan Paragraph designed to prohibit Jews (Christian Jews!) from membership in the German church. The point of the exercise was to sharpen the contrast between Jewishness and Germanness.  Bonhoeffer and others, aghast at this turn of events, begin to develop an interest in the concept of a free church. The free church is the idea of the church as a regenerate body (voluntary) instead of a comprehensive one (coextensive with the political community).

This part of the book caught my interest because it perfectly captures the theme I’ve been pushing for a while now which is that Christians should aggressively push for separation of church and state while drawing a sharp line between separation and secularism. Separation means the state does not fund the church nor does it control the church. Separation does not mean the church refrains from engaging in advocacy or organization (political or otherwise). One of the primary features of separation is that it should free the church to criticize or applaud the state depending on the degree to which it pursues an unholy agenda or a more righteous one.

In other words, a regenerate church is not a private church. It is rather like a volunteer army. Members enlist for a mission to the world.

Because I value his opinion so highly, I feel I must take a moment to correct what I think is a misperception on his part.  In his short review of the book over at The New Ledger, he essentially defends First Amendment religion clause jurisprudence from my historical attack.  At the root, because I argue the clause did not mean at the founding what it has come to mean today, he thinks I am saying the current construction has no basis.   I want to be clear that I am not going that far.

Instead, I simply argue that the debate over whether the founding was Christian, deist, secular, or whatever is not relevant to the interpretation of the religion clauses because  they do not set forth a substantive theory of religious freedom.  My point is that we have so much trouble divining a substantive theory from the clauses because they were not written to accomplish what they use them to achieve.  Steven D. Smith has written more and better than me on that point.  And he is simply correct.  I don’t think there is much getting around it.

Certainly, you can argue that there is another way to read the constitution to reach the result we currently have, but it does not rise directly from the text of the First Amendment if you have any interest in original intent at all.

The article is now available.  Somewhat to my chagrin, it is primarily about how great secularism is with a couple of statements by me and Herb London, president of the Hudson Institute, suggesting the self-congratulation is not warranted.

Happily, I saved our full email exchange so that those who would like to read the whole thing can do so.  Here it is:

-What exactly is secularism about?  Why have so many people turned to this idea/ideology in the last few decades?

Secularism is about removing religion/consideration of God from public life.  The desire to do so does not have to be invidious.  Those who embrace secularism, including many Christians, often do so because they believe it is a good answer to the problem of religious difference among people in a political community.  They think that if they can remove differences among people, especially religious differences, our community will grow stronger.  At the same time, secularists tend to see religion as something human beings once needed, but no longer do.  They think religion is irrational and extraneous to the things that really matter in life.

On the other hand, some types of secularists are less well intentioned in their efforts to remove religious faith from public life.  Secular totalitarians (such as Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others) have the desire to marginalize religious belief and institutions because they are potential roadblocks to enforcing the will of the state.  They would prefer there be no intermediary institutions between the state and the individual.

-Many secularists seem to fear that we are headed toward an “American theocracy.”  In your opinion, how valid is this fear?

It is not a valid concern in the United States.  Our national identity, formed and shaped by both devout Christians and Enlightenment philosophers, fully embraces religious liberty and the separation of church and state.  In fact, there is a powerful religious argument (well delivered by Martin Luther, by John Locke in his Letter Concerning Toleration, by the Baptists, and by others) that coerced religion is actually offensive to God and merely causes people to sin by lying about their convictions.

You hear conservative Christians complaining about the separation of church and state, but they are actually failing to voice their real concern.  In fact, they object to secularization of the public square which they feel goes too far.  As an example, it would be silly to argue that the Ten Commandments are not a hugely important part of western culture.  They are part of who we are even if we don’t all embrace them in their fullness.  Some Americans see monuments of that nature taken down and feel that secularists have gone too far.  And indeed, they have.  Separation of church and state, properly understood, means that the two entities are institutionally separate.  It doesn’t mean religious faith can’t be part of our identity as a public community or that the church has nothing to say to the state about politics.

With regard to concerns about theocracy, I think this is an area where men and women of the left have been inconsistent.  They loved having liberal clergy “speak truth to power” or “speak prophetically” in the 1960’s.  But when conservative pastors and priests entered the fray on the part of unborn children in the 1970’s and 1980’s, they were never given credit for “speaking truth to power”.  Instead, they were accused of being theocrats, despite the fact that you can argue in good faith that they were challenging structures of power on behalf of a vulnerable population.  In addition, I recall a situation in Alabama several years ago where a female law professor convinced the Republican governor to make the tax code more progressive because that is how Christ would have it.  Her argument was pretty persuasive and highly religious.  I never heard the ACLU or People for the American Way complaining about the threat of theocracy then, even though the tax code is the very heart of government policy.

-You argue that the assertions made by secularists routinely fail.  Would you be able to provide an “executive summary” of what you see as the principal assertions made by secularists, and why exactly each one fails?

Sure, this is the heart of my book, The End of Secularism, so I encourage people to read it and engage the arguments in fullness.  But there are two prongs of argument that I think are very important.

The first is that secularists argue religion should be kept in the private domain because our society will be more socially harmonious as a result.  This is an admirable hope, but I think it discounts how important religion is to people.  Individuals bring their religious beliefs to the public square because they have integrity.  They want to provide their real basis for a stand they take rather than formulate a false one that meets some secular language requirement.  And we already have a built-in limit on religious language and philosophical stands.  They must be persuasive or they will fail.  If someone comes in quoting obscure sections of scripture without building any connection to reason on a public issue, they won’t be much listened to.  I suspect many secularists think pro-lifers are guilty of doing that, but in fact, they are relentlessly rational in making their argument.  You may agree or disagree with it, but it is not some kind of inaccessible argument that you could never understand if you weren’t religious.

The other problem with the social harmony argument, which is well-exposed by postmodernism, is that secularists are human beings and human beings have all kinds of orthodoxies (religious or not) to which they cling.  Secularists are a team on the field of public debate who want to don striped jerseys and call penalties, as well.  They can’t be neutral even though they claim to be.

The other key assertion is that secularists think they have a corner on the use of reason.  Secularists sidle up next to science and say, “We’re the natural allies of science.  Religious people are the enemies of scientific rationality.”  That’s a publicity campaign, not the truth.  Christians, for example, want scientific knowledge everywhere they can get it.  It’s the best kind of knowledge we can have in many areas of life and we would be foolish not to rely upon it.  Augustine made that argument many centuries ago.  Too often religious opposition to some use of science (such as embryonic stem cell research) is confused with an opposition to science, itself, as a way of knowing.  The reason for the somewhat insincere publicity campaign is that it is an effective way of marginalizing religious people.  If an audience can be made to believe that Christians reject science, then they must not be rational people.  And if people aren’t rational, then there is no need to listen to them.  In fact, they may need their children taken from them, as some secularists have semi-seriously suggested.

There’s another critical point to think about.  Secularism mostly has to do with separating politics and religion.  I’ve already suggested that the separation of church and state is adequate and that separating politics and religion goes too far.  Part of why secularists are wrong to attempt this isolation of politics from religion is because we cannot justify our basic political commitments without going beyond pure scientific rationality.  For example, consider the idea of equality.  How are we equal?  The Federalist Papers point out that we could drag everyone back to the starting line of life and eventually people would sort back out in low, middle, and high because they have different gifts, talents, interests, etc.  But we are committed to equality.  In the western world, where we value equality more highly, the basis of this idea is equality before God.  You can try to create another foundation for it, but I think even John Rawls’ version sounds like a conversation in heaven at the beginning of the world.

-More broadly, why do you believe that people need, and will ultimately never move away from, religious faith?  (Explanations that I’ve run across range from “because God created us with faith,” to “because in our evolutionary past, it was useful for survival to ascribe causality to things like tree branches falling on us,” to “because we are terrified of death”…)

I think religious faith will remain viable because, contrary to what many think, it is about the search for truth.  That is why religious liberty is so important.  We all know we are going to die and yet we feel some connection to eternity.  Why are we here?  Who created us, if we were created?  What will happen when we die?  It may be the end, but maybe not.  We discover things all the time that we never knew existed before.  Maybe there is a whole new reality waiting to be discovered that we lack the instruments to detect.  We want to know if there are first things and last things.  Religion is about that quest and we won’t tire of that.

-If secularism actually damaging to the culture/the individual (as opposed to merely unpersuasive and/or unsustainable)?

I think the small threat of secularism is that it marginalizes religious people and groups and causes them to feel resentment.  Thebigger threat of secularism is that it removes the church as an effective counter to the state.  Rousseau complained that the church caused people to have a conflict between two masters which are the church and the state.  But he failed to consider that having a counter to the government can be freedom-enhancing and protect against the development of totalitarianism.  That is why Hitler was so keen to gain control of the church in Germany.  He knew it could stand in his way.  Of course, the part of the church that did, people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, were killed.  Karol Wojtyla, who became Pope John Paul II, was part of a Polish church which worked for the freedom of the Polish people against the secular Soviet-sponsored state.

-Do you think that the secularist movement has in fact accomplished anything useful, either ideologically or in the realm of policy/social issues?

Yes, I do.  They certainly raise awareness of the fact that, hey, not everybody on this bus feels like the people in the dominant faith do.  Their difference has to be accounted for and that is a good thing to check excessive confidence and ambition on the part of the church.  Madison hoped factions would check factions and thus help protect freedom.  I think that kind of thing is healthy in American society.

-And similarly, are there any lessons from the secular “side of the fence” that religious people and institutions could learn from?

The answer here is similar.  Secularists deliver a nice, heaping dose of skepticism which is very good for religious people to have to deal with.  Without that, people get lazy and just kind of assume things are true without thinking about it.  I do wish, though, that secularists would differentiate better between religions.  There are a number of critical differences.  When Paul spoke to the men of Athens (the philosophers) at the Areopagus, he defended Christianity on the basis of the resurrection of Christ as a public event in time, space, and history.  He said God furnished evidence.  That’s a different from pure revelation.  So, there’s the issue of different levels of credibility between religions.  And secondly, of course, they have different track records.  I am often shocked that many American secularists resort to the type of hyperbole where they compare conservative Christians to members of the Taliban.  How can I take someone who says something like that seriously?

Normally, one would resort to some great Christian master or other purveyor of natural law arguments to dispel the haze.

But I came across something from Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian and opponent of natural law, that caught my attention. In chapter XII of his Principles of Legislation, he argued (much to my surprise) that law and morality are part of the same whole.

Run your eyes over this:

Morality commands each individual to do all that is advantageous to the community, his own personal advantages included.  But there are many acts useful to the community which legislation ought not to command.  There are also many injurious actions which it ought not to forbid, although morality does so.  In a word, legislation has the same centre with morals, but not the same circumference.

In other words, some morality can and should be legislated, for morality and law share the same center. I doubt St. Thomas would have disagreed.

Coming out of it, I think Avatar is more complex than that. Whether or not Cameron intended that complexity, I don’t know, but I saw more than I expected to see.

Yes, the humans from their “dead planet” are on a paradise planet attempting to rape it for its natural resources. I suppose many people will see this, and have seen it, as westerners technologizing the world and expending so much fuel that they have to steal it from poorer humans around the globe. Cameron may have been thinking NO BLOOD FOR OIL. 

For the most part, the humans are completely uninterested in the religious beliefs of the people they are exploiting and appear to have none of their own. That was something that stuck out to me. The humans of the future, the ones exploiting another planet for corporate wealth, appear to be resolutely secular. The military contractors are even worse. They are secular and tribal. You are with them or against them.  Right and wrong don’t enter the picture.  What is right is what the chain of command says is right.

Cameron may be the kind of western liberal who doesn’t recognize the influence of Christianity on his own thought. The human being who inhabits an avatar and becomes one of the alien Na’vi caused me to think about the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. The avatar in the film is sent to deliver one message, one of power and oppression, but ends up being a mythic, savior figure who somehow connects with the “real” god of the planet and turns the tide in battle. 

Another point that I found compelling is the insistence of Sigourney Weaver’s scientist character that the religion of the Na’vi is a real religion. What she means is that elements of the physical existence of the planet bear out the religious attitudes of the alien people who live there. In other words, they are connecting with (apologies to Francis Schaeffer) a “god who is there.” Again, I thought of Christianity because the church has always insisted that the things that make the faith matter are real things that happened in time and space. For instance, the resurrection is a physical resurrection. Christ is not an attitude or a collective spirit of his followers who remember him well. He is real and because of his unique ability to triumph over death, his authority can be trusted.

These things I’ve picked up are far from the dominant notes in the film. What I noticed more than anything is that Cameron seemed to set out to make the ultimate film in the genre of primitive peoples who are better than those who exploit them. Billy Jack is a well-known example. Dancing with Wolves has been the reigning champion.  Avatar contends for that throne.

The question is whether Nature actually deserves a religious response. Traditional theism has to wrestle with the problem of evil: if God is good, why does he allow suffering and death? But Nature is suffering and death. Its harmonies require violence. Its “circle of life” is really a cycle of mortality. And the human societies that hew closest to the natural order aren’t the shining Edens of James Cameron’s fond imaginings. They’re places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish and short.

Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms. We stand half inside the natural world and half outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality.

This is an agonized position, and if there’s no escape upward — or no God to take on flesh and come among us, as the Christmas story has it — a deeply tragic one.

Pantheism offers a different sort of solution: a downward exit, an abandonment of our tragic self-consciousness, a re-merger with the natural world our ancestors half-escaped millennia ago.

But except as dust and ashes, Nature cannot take us back.

When, when, besides this, are the readers of the New York Times going to get a more true characterization of the Christian hope for mankind?

You can read the full column here.

William Donohue (thank you, sir and bless you, sir) recently made the point (one I spent an entire chapter on in The End of Secularism) that American secularist liberals have not exactly been consistent in their opposition to religious participation in the formation of public policy:

The following is a partial list of religious groups that want abortion coverage in the health care bill: Rabbinical Assembly, Women’s League for Conservative Judaism, Episcopal Church, Society for Humanistic Judaism, Jewish Reconstructionist Federation, Union for Reform Judaism, Central Conference of American Rabbis, North American Federation of Temple Youth, United Church of Christ, United Methodist Church, Unitarian Universalist, Presbyterian Church (USA), Women of Reform Judaism, Society for Humanistic Judaism, Church of the Brethren Women’s Caucus, Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, Lutheran Women’s Caucus, Christian Lesbians Out, YWCA.

Stephen Carter has said it. Richard John Neuhaus has said it. Religion from the left “speaks truth to power” while religion on the right is nothing but ugly “theocracy.” The double standard continues. It’s been running strong for at least four to five decades.