In light of Rhett Smith’s interesting (and true!) thoughts on what novels do for us, I was intrigued to read Francis Watson’s rather critical comments of their form in western literature:

The assumption that ‘love’ (or ‘romantic love’) is the primary basis for marriage is often said to be an innovation of the modern West.  It is certainly a central preoccupation of the novel, the literary genre most characteristic of the modern West.  The novel holds up a mirror to what is held to be the reality of ‘love and marriage’; it is the image of a representation that arises from the reality and exercises an influence over it, although the reality is never reducible to the representation…

Even in the traditional novel, the link between love and marriage is in fact contingent.  Marriage is often an end (the end of the novel), and not a transition to a new beginning.  If marriage is the goal of love but not the context of its continuing development, is marriage tacitly presented as the end of love?

Where, at the beginning of the novel, marriage has already occurred, love may well be sought outside marriage; the rendering of a love that both issues in marriage and develops and matures within it is much less usual…The more recent convention that ‘love’ is the precondition not of marriage but of ’sex’ is a natural development of tradition rather than a reaction against it.  ’Modern’ and ‘traditional’ novels tend to display an ambivalence towards marriage combined with an unshakable faith in ‘love’ itself…

These novels are familiar with the assumption that marriage is the proper context and home of love, but, in declining to make this assumption narratively plausible, their tendency is to induce scepticism toward it.

Watson’s point could easily be made against Shakespeare as well as the modern novel.  But his association with the novel as the predominantly Western form of literature and the rise of romance in the West as the basis for marriage bears more reflection.

Certainly some literature stands out in contrast to Watson’s critique, but not a whole lot is coming to mind right now.

Are there novels that present marriage not only as the culmination of romantic love, but also as its context and home (that is, husbands and wives who are still ‘romantic’)?

Make your suggestions in the comments.  I’m interested to hear them.

One of the distinctive aspects of the Theology of the Body is its beautiful expression of the mutual relations of men and women, a mutuality that originates in and is best expressed by a sexual act which is constituted by self-giving.

It’s a position that I am sympathetic to. But Francis Watson’s takes dead aim in Agape, Eros, Gender at attempts to establish the sexual act as the grounds for the differences between men and women. He writes:

The belonging together of woman and man is not confined to the sexual relationship, nor is that even its primary expression.  The veil is interposed in order to confine eros to his limits, excluding him from the ekklesia, the place in which the belonging-together of man and woman is disclosed, and differentiating him from the agape which is the mode of that belonging together.

As he puts it later, “On what authority is it asserted that man and woman become two and one primarily, or even exclusively, in the sexual act?” The “two and one” refers to their differences, male and female, within the structure of the ‘one flesh’ union.

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Focusing on the practices of the church is all the rage these days. James K.A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation an excellent and thought provoking book is only the latest volley in a long list of theologians attempting to reorient the center of Christianity away from its doctrinal content.

Standing against the tide is Nicholas Healy, who offers some interesting cautions in his article, “Practices and the New Ecclesiology: Misplaced Concreteness?” Healy’s article is older—first published in 2003—but he does a nice job of highlighting some of the troubles that arise through viewing Christianity as constituted by its practices.

Healy’s leading critique is that the language of practices obscures the central role intentions play in both individual and communal actions. His central thrust is that the emphasis on practices fails to account for why they fail to shape us in the ways proponents claim they should.  In other words, the Mainline Protestantism problem.

But his more trenchant critique is the theological one: most accounts of practices (and specifically Stanley Hauerwas) fail to locate the practices of the church beneath the doctrine of God. He writes:
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I have always thought that every academic–or wannabe, like me–ought have one or two hypotheses that are held very loosely, are somewhat defensible but impossible to prove, and just fringe enough to make academic parties interesting.

One such hypothesis that I have occasionally advanced is that G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy is the most important work of the twenty-first century, even though it was written in the twentieth.

Though Chesterton attained more fame during his life than C.S. Lewis—he was greeted by massive crowds on his trips around the world—by the beginning of World War II his position as chief apologist and defender of the faith had been taken over by Lewis. In particular, Chesterton’s influence on American evangelicalism has been relatively non-existent compared to Lewis’s.

And no wonder: Lewis’s Mere Christianity, which has influenced numerous evangelical leaders over the past few decades, is a masterfully written apologetic. The discovery of Lewis helped many evangelicals in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s realize the importance of having a faith that was as intellectual as it was spiritual.

Yet the situation within evangelicalism (and without) has now changed, and Mere Christianity is an apologetic suited to its time. While evangelicals have made strides in recovering the life of the mind, it is now en vogue to criticize evangelical Christianity as too propositional. The new generation of post-modern evangelicals is moved more by the story of Christianity than its ideas, and more prone to appeal to the imagination than the intellect.

Such critics would do well to consider Orthodoxy.

Though it was written just over 100 years ago, Chesterton’s finest work is still relevant. In a First Things‘ article, Ralph Wood writes:

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Christopher Benson and Matthew Milliner have been doing the Lord’s work over at Evangel in agitating for the recovery of a non-pragmatic understanding of church architecture.

Of course, they’re swimming up stream among us evangelicals: one whole wing of our happy movement doesn’t think we should have buildings at all.

The irony, of course, is that the same Christians who tend to be suspicious about spending money on architecture tend to also have a robust appreciation for the arts. A stereotype, yes, but part of the emerging critique of traditional evangelicalism has been an aesthetic one: The Church has neglected artists and the arts, and so they set out to recover them.

And rightly so. May their numbers increase.

But the dichotomy between architecture and the rest of the arts simply isn’t sustainable. If the arts are somehow tied to culture, then how much more architecture?  As it turns out, a lot.

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If I ever write a book, I will be content if it is half as thoughtful, profound, and meditative as Gilbert Meilander’s Neither Beast Nor God.

I am tempted to stop with that sentence; but I won’t. And I won’t write a book that even comes close to half, try as I might.

Meilander’s work was forged in response to the conversations he had during his time on the (controversial) President’s Council on Bioethics. Neither Beast Nor God is an exploration of dignity, a concept which he thinks the Council left ambiguous.

Meilander contends that dignity needs to be understood in two senses.

The first is human dignity, which is characteristic of our status in between God and beasts: “Not simply body, but also not simply mind or spirit; rather, the place where body and spirit meet and are united (and reconciled?) in the life of each person.” He argues that birth, breeding, and death are the features of life that most offend this sense of dignity, and as such are the central battlegrounds for those attempting to help us become more than human. Human dignity is “to be found in the kind of life that honors and upholds the peculiar nature that is ours.”

But because this human life is shaped by human powers and capacities, it invites us to “think in terms of comparative degrees of human distinction or dignity—and of some as more dignified than others.” To offer a tendentious example, insofar as Dante’s powers of writing exceed my own (which is to say, by a lot), he attained a greater degree of distinction with respect to that power than I. The same could be said with respect to the intellect of Einstein or the wisdom of Solomon (not to mention that of my wife).

But beneath human dignity is personal dignity, which is an equality all humans share that is grounded:

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David Schaengold’s excellent observations about the modern skyscraper continue to draw well-deserved attention. Rod Dreher is the latest to chime in, touting the cathedral as the superior to the “cold and forbidding beauty” of the modern skyscraper:

Still, I think Schaengold is on the mark here, in the way he writes about the skyscraper and the observation deck. It’s only that I see it as a defeat for humanity, even though it’s a triumph for science and engineering. They can’t build churches that look worth a damn anymore either, not these days. If you live in New York and want to know how alien to any human thing a modern church can be, go by the small church of St. John the Evangelist in the Archdiocese of New York headquarters and poke your head in. It belongs in a skyscraper, or in Princess Leia’s palace.

To deploy a post-modern (or better, late-modern) line of inquiry, the difference between the medieval cathedral and the modern observation deck is not only what’s observed, but the perspective of the observer.

I’m a terrible student of architecture, so I’m overstepping my limitations here. But it strikes me that what’s at stake with the skyscraper is not the joy of observation per se, which we could gain just as easily from considering “the lilies of the field.” It’s the inherent sense of triumph of observing from 13,000 feet, and gaining a perspective on the world without effort that our ancestors only dreamed of.

For the warning about this perspective, though, I naturally turn to Chesterton, the last true medieval:

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Every theologian, wanna-be theologian, a-theologian, and otherwise thinking person has one.

Discuss a point of theology long enough, and you’ll inevitably see it played. Call it Anderson’s Law: As a theological conversation grows longer, the probability of seeing the mystery card approaches one.

You’ll learn to see it coming. The shoulders shrug just a little, a sympathetic smile starts slowly forms, slow-motion starts as the words hit you: ”Well, some things are a mystery . . .”

This is a dangerous card for the theologian to play, as it functions as a bit of a trump card.  Play it too early, and you short-circuit the difficult process of coming to a more robust understanding of the subject of inquiry. Don’t ever play it, and end up like Chesterton’s lunatic who tries to get the heavens into his head, only to have his head split.

With that said, here are a few of theological and a-theological frameworks  and the distinct places where the mystery card gets played:

• Calvinists:  the existence of human responsibility
• Arminians: the existence of divine sovereignty over salvation
• Roman Catholics: the simultaneous presence of Christ’ body in the Eucharist and in Heaven
• Anglo-Catholics: their relationship to the Reformation
• Naturalists: consciousness and the existence of free will
• Eastern Orthodox: I’m pretty sure this is the only card they play with.
• Lutherans: how (and that!) sanctification happens
• Weslyans: why sanctification doesn’t happen
• Baptists: the working of the Holy Spirit
• Pentecostals: the working of anything else
• Dispensationalists: the Old Testament

Yes, the list is a bit of a joke. But it’s a joke to tease out the difficulty of knowing where to place our mysteries, and how many we should admit.

But seriousness aside, this is a game we can all play. Add mystery cards in the comments and I’ll update the post accordingly. Bonus points for picking on your own tradition(s).

One of the main themes of the early days of First Things’ Evangel blog was evangelicals’ complex relationship to culture.

I recently came across Evangel contributor Russell Moore’s astute analysis on the question from 2007 in the pages of Touchstone, the other ecumenical magazine of record.

Dr. Moore’s piece really needs to be read in its entirety, as he manages to thoughtfully engage the question without degenerating into overreaction or hyperbole. He is in favor of evangelical engagement with culture, but cognizant of its limitations.

But what struck me was this bit near the end:

Often at the root of so much Christian “engagement” with pop culture lies an embarrassment about the oddity of the gospel. Even Christians feel that other people won’t resonate with this strange biblical world of talking snakes, parting seas, floating axe-heads, virgin conceptions, and emptied graves. It is easier to meet them “where they’re at,” by putting in a Gospel According to Andy Griffith DVD (for the less hip among us) or by growing a soul-patch and quoting Coldplay at the fair-trade coffeehouse (for the more hip among us).

Knowing Andy Griffith episodes or Coldplay lyrics might be important avenues for talking about kingdom matters, but let’s not kid ourselves. We connect with sinners in the same way Christians always have: by telling an awfully freakish-sounding story about a man who was dead, and isn’t anymore, but whom we’ll all meet face-to-face in judgment.

This is a crucial point, and similar to one I made while speaking to a group of homeschoolers. I argued that their unique experience as homeschoolers—a sometimes derided and disenfranchised population—would better prepare them for being comfortable in the discomfort that can come with believing and proclaiming the remarkable and surprising fact of the Gospel.

But for those of us who work in the church, Christian universities, or Christian non-profits, we tend to lose sight not only of the “freakishly bizarre” nature of the gospel, but also the weird nature of the lives that bear witness to it.

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Charlotte Allen has  a long piece in The Weekly Standard that highlights the contemporary dating game and the pathologies—there’s really no other word—that drive it.   From her conclusion:

The whole point of the sexual and feminist revolutions was to obliterate the sexual double standard that supposedly stood in the way of ultimate female freedom. The twin revolutions obliterated much more, but the double standard has reemerged in a harsher, crueler form: wreaking havoc on beta men and on beta women, too, who, as the declining marriage rate indicates, have trouble finding and securing long-term mates in a supply-saturated short-term sexual marketplace. Gorgeous alpha women fare fine—for a few years until the younger competition comes of age. But no woman, alpha or beta, seems able to escape the atavistic preference of men both alpha and beta for ladylike and virginal wives (the Darwinist explanation is that those traits are predictors of marital fidelity, assuring men that the offspring that their spouses bear are theirs, too). And every aspect of New Paleolithic mating culture discourages the sexual restraint once imposed on both sexes that constituted a firm foundation for both family life and civilization.

Allen’s basic point is that social Darwinism has triumphed in the urban dating scene: the beta men get left behind, while the alpha men get women and then teach others to do the same, deploying sales methods and psychological assumptions similar to the get-rich-quick movement (not to mention the pop-psychology, chicken-soup self-help movement).

Conor Friedersdorf takes on Allen for her hasty adoption of the “pseudo science” of the pickup artists. And while he’s probably right to do so, his rejoinder ignores Allen’s references to evolutionary psychology and to Rossie’s mentor, F. Roger Devlin. While she derides the form it takes among the pick-up artists, her basic argument seems to be that evolutionary psychology explains the behavior of those involved in the culture, even if it doesn’t work.

And contra Conor, I think the rising marriage age supports her case more than he is willing to grant.  We don’t have to think that there was a golden age of marriage (as the marriage movement is sometimes thought to believe in) to see that something significant has gone on in how men and women relate to each other.  Even if we decide that pickup artists are a fringe community, they are a more liberal fringe than that of fifty years ago.  And while there could be other reasons for the rising marrying age (economic reasons, especially), people aren’t exactly remaining celibate while they wait to tie the knot—not to mention that our current concept of marriage is profoundly different that fifty years ago.

At any rate, Allen’s piece is largely descriptive of the current dating situation, and it’s illuminating insofar as it goes.  But inasmuch as it stops there, it doesn’t go nearly far enough.

Heather MacDonald’s latest piece at National Review explores some of the questions surrounding gay marriage, and the difficulties that arise when parental status and identity is established solely by intent, rather than by biology–as it is in the case of homosexual marriage.

The question, of course, that MacDonald has to answer is why this separation matters at all.  She answers:

The institutionalized severing of biology from parenthood affirms a growing trend in our society, that of men abandoning their biological children. Too many men now act like sperm donors: they conceive a children then largely disappear, becoming at best intermittent presences in their children’s lives.

If parental status is a matter of intent, however, not of genes, absent fathers can say: “I never intended to take on the role of that child’s parent; therefore I’m not morally bound to act as a parent.”

The separation of biology and parenthood, then, has two problematic effects:  on the one hand, it undercuts the argument that fathers have obligations to any offspring they do not conceive intentionally, further perpetuating the social problems absenteeism has caused.  On the other hand, it undercuts the complementarity that men and women have in raising children, a complementarity that MacDonald thinks can be established even at a biological level.

MacDonald realizes the muted force of her argument, as she hedges her position on the final page. But it is still an interesting line of thought.

And if it’s right, it might have significant repercussions for younger Christians who want to claim that they are pro-life while still allowing homosexual marriage.  The force of MacDonald’s piece is that she establishes a link between the technological subordination of procreation (as expressed through making procreation only valid when it is intentional) with marriage practices, arguing that, “The primary challenge to traditional notions of parenthood comes from gay conception, not gay marriage.”

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“This is not the golden age of virtue.” So opens Professor J. Budziszewski’s “Vicious Circles, Virtuous Circles, and Getting from One to the Other,” one of the afternoon lectures at the Summons of Freedom Conference.

Budziszewski is interested in decline, and that of two sorts: personal moral decline, and (the related, but not necessarily attendant) social decline. He considers several ways of describing the process of change before settling on the intractable problem of circles. Parents fail to raise their children to be virtuous, those children (not knowing how to be virtuous) do the same, and the perpetual cycle continues. Budziszewski examines the nature of the virtues and their interdependence to more precisely understand this process.

Of course, it was precisely on the question of how we escape vicious circles–socially and personally–and become virtuous that Budziszewski declined to give an answer, musing instead that outside of special grace the process of moral and social change didn’t seem possible. But Budziszewski’s presentation critiqued those strategies that attempt to solve this dilemma through utilizing bad motives to keep worse ones down.

Consider, for instance, the classical notion of the pursuit of glory. Budziszewski pointed out that it had been deployed to motivate people to seek a higher and more virtuous way of life. Closer to our own time, Adam Smith might be said to foster a love of gain, and to subordinate and utilize morality to that end.

But such strategies of using glory, or gain, as motivations toward virtue have multiple problems: for one, they are incomplete insofar as they are not able to account for what merits glory. More importantly, as Augustine points out, by using these bad motives we eventually destroy the vestiges of virtue that we attempted to preserve. While they may offer a sense of stability or permanence, they are not structurally sound. As Budziszewski puts it, if you use dragons to keep wolves under control, you eventually have to reward the dragons. And eventually they get so large that they do what they want.

Budziszewski’s warning is worth bearing in mind. Insofar as the social order is not founded on the transformative grace of Jesus Christ—and hence has the perfection of virtue–it is faulty. And the virtuous circles that we attempt to build will inevitably be proximate.

I’m attending the Summons of Freedom conference this morning at Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture. Attending conferences such as this is always a tad bittersweet—too many helpful and interesting papers to attend with not nearly enough time.

But Mary Keys’ paper had me at the title: “Why Justice is Not Enough: Aquinas and Wilberforce on Mercy, Love, and the Common Good.”

Putting the patron saint of Catholic philosophy in dialog with a self-described Protestant evangelical politician? Yes, please.

There is a principle in the Western tradition of political theory that justice is a sufficient virtue for the proper operation of the political order. Keys however, develops Aquinas’ thought that justice is not sufficient, but that mercy and love are essential for political action and behavior. I won’t recount the full argument here, but found it interesting that for Aquinas, justice (in an absolute sense) exists because of a prior sense of mercy.

As contingent creatures, we exist only by virtue of a prior act of goodness. We are not ultimately owed our own being, yet once created, and so the first movement of the universe is one of mercy and caritas. Justice and its pursuit in this context, then, is at least logically dependent upon this prior working.

Keys wants to defend mercy and justice as necessary for the proper functioning of the political order. And occasionally it is recognized as such, as when India gave Mother Theresa a state funeral for her work in Calcutta.

In some ways—and these reflections are my own—the fact that mercy and caritas precede justice protects the transcendent basis of justice, and preserves justice from being “de-natured” and subordinated to the state. Keys, in holding up Wilberforce as an exemplar of someone who pursues justice through mercy and caritas, argues that Wilberforce realized that he needed to pursue cultural change prior to the political change.

In this way, Keys seemed to be an ally against the politicization of every aspect of human life. Mercy and caritas are crucial for the political order because the human is a transcendent creature, created in the image of God—which mercy and caritas point toward.

Just a quick note that I will be attending the Summons of Freedom Conference this coming weekend. If there are any other First Thoughts readers attending, do make sure you let me know in the comments, as I’d love to meet you.

The annual gathering, which is put on by excellent Center for Ethics and Culture at Notre Dame, is now in its tenth year. This years theme is “Virtue, Sacrifice, and the Common Good.” Conferees will “reflect upon political and legal questions having to do with the very nature of the political common good, the particular conflicts that arise in trying to achieve it, and the precarious situation of freedom in the democracies of advanced modernity.”

The Front Porchers will be there talking about Front-Porchy type things, which promises to be stimulating. Frank Beckwith, J. Budziszewski, Robert Sloan, and a whole host of other intellectual lights will be on hand as well.

It promises to be an enormously thought-provoking conference, and I plan to offer reflections throughout the weekend here at First Thoughts.

No recent essay I have read captures the potential intrusion on natural human life by political borders better than Joshua Treviño’s recent piece for The New Ledger. It is not a policy proposal, or even a philosophical defense of any particular position on border enforcement. Instead, Treviño provides an intimate account of life on a particular section of the US-Mexico border. As such, it functions as the datum which philosophical and political conversation seeks to understand and integrate.

Treviño’s central theme is the absurd treatment of American citizens by border patrol agents and the infringement upon civil liberties that routinely occurs. Such behavior rejects in principle the presumption of innocence by American citizens. Trevino alludes to the rationale for these restrictions—heavy protection at the borders leads to freedom of travel and freedom from harm within—but is worried about the loss of the cultural unity of the region. Writes Treviño, “All this is prelude: the Rio Grande Valley from which half my family hails has always been a communal and cultural unity, regardless of its political division. Now, terribly, senselessly, that political division threatens to override all else.”

It is important to properly constrain Treviño’s worry. He is not troubled by the existence of the border per se. In fact, he opens with the interesting argument that the border has played a unifying function and has shaped the culture of that region. Instead, it is the “regime of fear, control, and interdiction” that is Treviño’s concern, and rightly so. Treviño’s concern is not to articulate all that proper border enforcement entails, but rather to specify what it does not entail.

Of course, many conservatives have anxieties over the existence of the border out of a lurking fear that progressives would undo it, and that in doing so, would undo America as we know it. It is possible that this fear is based on some sort of xenophobia, but the desire to preserve a border might have deeper and better grounding than race. In Ways of Judgment, Oliver O’Donovan writes:

What is it that gives unity to these various focal points of social tradition? They are likely to have certain things in common: the use of a language, the observance of religion, beliefs that are accepted as premises for discussion among strangers, a mythology, a literature . . . and economic interaction. All peoples have some such cultural features that unify them internally, though there are great diffferences in what carries most weight . . . yet a people is more than an ensemble of its cultural features. These are simply the precondition, the channels worn by habits of communication that have brought the people to birth. To be a people is to put these culturally unifying features to the service of collaborative action, and that is what makes the difference between a group of homogeneous tribes and a viable political entity.

In framing the possibilities of common action, one feature has come to assume a special significance: a defined territory. The more complex the content of the tradition, the more varied culturally and racially it has grown, the more depends on this formal mode of demarcation. There was a “king of the French” before France had defined borders; but today we depend on the borders to know who the French are. Territory gives objective form to the infinitely varied cultural elements that comprise the people’s communications. This point is illustrated by the conquest-traditions of Israel. It was not through the promised land that Isreal became a people; it was a people already, by descent from the patriarchs, by the common experience of Egyptian bondage and miraculous delivery, by the shared nomadic existence in the desert, and supremely by the law. Territorial existence was an enhancement of Israel’s identity, one which the prophets never forgot could be reversed if it were abused. It offered opportunities for growth and maturity, for establishing a civilization with internal disciplines of cultural transmission and ordered relations to surrounding peoples. Territorial boundaries mark the division between the domestic and the foreign. But the effect of the division is not merely to set a limit. It is to form a horizon which will stimulate neighborly relations between the people and other peoples. It defines a “You” in relation to which the people acts as a corporate “I.”

O’Donovan highlights, I think, the difficulty that Treviño’s essay so ably teases out:  The pre-political community that exists on the border has been severed by the loss of neighborly relations between the United States and Mexico, but the border also preserves the continuity of the American experience. Because America has always been so culturally diverse and pluriform, it has needed a stronger sense of borders than other cultures for its self-identity. Conservative anxieties about illegal immigration and border enforcement are grounded in this desire not for a uniform culture, but rather the communication of distinctly American traditions to continue.

But Treviño’s point should be heeded: The manner in which we conduct border enforcement is intrinsically connected to our self-identity as Americans, for our identity has always been shaped by our relationships to other countries. Our loss of neighborliness, then, is more than procedurally tied to the infringement of the civil liberties. They are substantially connected. As our internal communication of American traditions weakens, anxiety about the public symbols will increase, and the state’s role will inevitably expand.

In this regard, despite Treviño’s initial caveat that he differs from conservatives on this point, his essay ends up being deeply conservative, for it defends the pre-political communities that shape life and that legitimize our political institutions. These pre-political communities are precisely what conservatives have attempted to preserve and ground public policy in, with varying degrees of success. And they are what conservatives must promote and defend if the growth of government is to be slowed.

The editors of Patrol Magazine, an online journal for hipster evangelicals, recently offered a broadside against those evangelicals like Brett McCracken and the Southern Baptists who remain cautious about throwing off their prudish heritage and embracing the liberating and enlightened state of those Christians who engage in . . . profanity.

There’s no doubt that those suddenly addressing the “issue” of Christian swearing have missed the cultural train. What David Bazan arguably started with his potty-mouthed lyrics has been fully realized as younger Christians have thrown off the church’s traditional linguistic taboos with nearly as much fervor as they have embraced alcohol and rejected partisan politics. Considering how widespread and essentially non-controversial Christian swearing has become in the past decade, even in the Bible Belt, it is surprising that a Christian musician only now had to battle with a record label over a lyrical obscenity.

The irony of their critique is that McCracken’s piece was published by Relevant Magazine, the editor of which was originally tapped to pray at Barack Obama’s inauguration and has openly rejected partisan politics. If there is one evangelical magazine that has not missed the cultural train, it’s Relevant.

The editorial continues:

No, the obscenities now uttered by young Christians have transcended the milquetoast rebellion of the “emergent” movement and are likely here to stay. They have arisen as peripheral indicators of a whole new level of intellectual openness, and an almost masochistic devotion to honestly sorting through the horrors of our time. With young Christians in unblinking pursuit of the big questions, it’s hardly a surprise to find them uninterested in who is saying [s**t] or what corporate behemoth is gifting funds to gay rights. In an adult world of strong ideas and strong language, puerile fixations on “bad words” and partisan allegiances are no longer even part of their consciousness.

The attempt to justify swearing on grounds that we have ascended to “big questions” is both facile and pretentious. It ignores the fact that somehow the Victorians—not to mention many of our parents—managed to ask big questions without stooping to use profanity. And while Patrol thinks that critiquing corporate behemoths for funding gay rights is beneath them, their suppression of piracy is worthy of judgment. Never mind that disparaging traditional evangelical efforts to vote with their dollars undermines the case for ‘protest stealing’ that Sessions argues for in the case of piracy. Intellectual consistency be—dare I say it?—damned.

All this reminds me of Biola professor John Mark Reynolds’ response to an essay I wrote about the new evangelicalism that Patrol Magazine exemplifies.  Writes Reynolds:

Anderson is right that young Evangelicals are intent on outer signs, and that they are not culturally clueless or “fundamentalists.”  What he is wrong to think is that there is anything new in this. It is hard to expect much different when the head of an Evangelical arts program, about my age but dressing younger, can tell me that a goal of his program is to let the “kids know it is o.k. for Christians to say ‘bastard.’”  I remember thinking at the time that it might be more useful to have a program in the arts reminding students that it was okay for a Christian not to say ‘bastard.’

I suspect that Reynolds would agree that jumping on the “cultural train” is a sure way toward cultural captivity, popularity, and Christian impotence.  Regardless, the editors attempt to justify swearing as grounded in a better way of intellectual life (ironically) undercuts the possibility of thinking about swearing and its implications, which I suppose is why the article is suspiciously light on arguments. Some “weighty” reasons for swearing are mentioned, but never articulated or even linked to. But then, that’s not Patrol’s point: Patrol wants us to ignore the question of swearing altogether and simply accept the fact that all the kids are doing it. This is, however, a rather impoverished view on Christianity’s offering the world on the question of language and its appropriate uses.

Despite Patrol’s  best efforts, I suspect that swearing will (rightly) remain a question worth considering along all the other questions of evangelical ethics, for it is a question of our speech to each other and to the world. I will make no attempt to answer it one way or another here, but will instead close with Karl Barth’s devastating critique of Christian freedom for its own sake:

The strength of the strong is confronted by an iron barrier. We now stand before the krisis of what we think to be our freedom, of the freedom in which we rejoice as our good. But it is good only when it is the freedom of the Kingdom of God. Do we understand this? Is our freedom nothing but the freedom which God takes to Himself in our doing or in our not doing? Or is it a freedom which we take to ourselves in His name? Or do we perceive that our freedom is important only when it demonstrates His freedom? Or do we suppose our freedom to be in itself important? In displaying our strength, are we anxious that—righteousness and peace and joy should be made known unto men? Or are we, in fact, in the end concerned with—eating and drinking?

In the latest issue of Commentary, Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner have offered the latest volley in the ongoing war to define conservatism’s future.  While less comprehensive than the path offered by Dreher or Salam/Douthat, Gerson and Wehner offer their own distinct blend of foci as a cure for the Republican intellectual and political malaise.

Which is why this foundation is a tad surprising: “Any serious attempt to revivify the GOP might begin with a full-throated stand for a strong national defense.” I’m supportive of including national defense as one among many Republican policy positions. But to remain belligerently focused on it in the face of enormous fiscal challenges strikes me as (at best) tone-deaf. While I’m sympathetic to their attempt to frame foreign policy around global issues like “global issues like genocide, poverty, women’s rights, religious liberty, malaria, and HIV/AIDS,” I suspect that any presentation of conservatism that leads with national defense will quickly be identified with traditional formulations.

What follows is a relatively mixed bag of proposals that includes winners like making the tax code simpler and more family friendly, and losers like picking out the “Religious Right” for the “anger, personal attack, and extreme language” of the Republican party.  As best I can tell, it was not the Religious Right who gave the world Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, or Rush Limbaugh. And while we agree on the substance of the point, it’s curious to see tone listed alongside national defense, the economy, and other such matters of social import.

The most hopeful suggestion is this one:

In this last connection, and again with an eye toward immigrants and the poor, the GOP would be wise to strengthen its reputation as the party of community and order. Republican rhetoric can sound intensely individualistic, as if to suggest that once government impediments were cleared away, all persons and all families would thrive as a matter of course. Individual freedom is indeed central to conservatism but so is the belief that individual freedom is given purpose and direction in the context of strong communities. It is a staple of conservatism that strong social bonds are essential to human flourishing.

While it’s precisely this sort of understanding that can help ground traditional social conservative arguments, Wehner and Gerson refuse to go there.  In this, Wehner and Gerson are provocative in what they don’t say as much as in what they say. That they thought such proposals would be appealing without any mention of traditional social conservative causes suggest that they think such causes expendable, and that they would pick on the “Religious Right” suggests they are too eager to chasten them.

What to make of this? Not much. If social conservatives can win back the philosophical ground by striking at the heart of an unrestrained liberalism through reintroducing the concept of human communities, their generation, and continuation as meaningful and relevant categories, then they shall inevitably make progress in their social agenda. Meanwhile, Wehner and Gerson can continue to strum the tune of national defense to an audience that isn’t listening.

Conservative anxieties about embracing and entering culture—by which we mostly mean Hollywood—seem to have subsided in recent years. Emboldened by film successes like The Passion of the Christ, conservatives seem to be waking up to the possibility of a Tinsletown that is more amenable to its ideology.

For Conor Freidersdorf, however, the talk radio disposition toward Hollywood and journalism—exemplified by Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood—derives its energy from an unhealthy paranoia and a latent sense of victimization. Friedersdorf’s counsel to conservatives seeking careers in Hollywood or newsrooms is to consistently produce excellent work and maintain a reasonable level of respectability.

All well and good, so far. But where Friedersdorf contends that conservatives are being scared away from “the very cultural institutions that most need their presence,” he ignores the deeper questions about those institutions’ legitimacy. Consider the case of Walden Media; while unabashedly conservative in orientation (and defiantly owned by an evangelical), it has come to success not within Hollywood proper, but largely as an independent alternative. The talk radio that Freidersdorf disdains is an alternative cultural medium that the left ignored—and later attempted to imitate. The conservative political strategy, for good or ill, has not been to ignore Hollywood, but to sidestep it.

Additionally, the conservative anxiety about Hollywood is—ironically—grounded in the acknowledgment of culture’s formative influence. Conservatives are not worried that people will be tempted to turn their back on the conservatism that had formerly defined them. That would be too conscious a rejection for most. Instead, the deeper temptation is that living and breathing liberal air exclusively—which is often what such professions demand—will slowly cause conservatives to confuse the distinctiveness of their own ideas or relegate them to the background in their pursuit of legitimization.  A conservative alone, the worry goes, in a liberal culture will not long a conservative remain. Better to establish independent channels of distribution and offer an alternative that wins on its merits, rather than its adherents.

Of course, none of this addresses the deepest problem of Friedersdorf’s piece: He has not escaped the trajectory which he is criticizing. At bottom, the conservative complaint against Hollywood and the news media is not that there are liberals there, but rather that in order to succeed, one must pass a political litmus test. True or false, this politicization of cultural institutions is precisely what Friedersdorf’s advice depends upon and ultimately reinforces.

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

But what struck me most was his solution: Goldhill suggests that people finance noncatostrophic health care the way they finance cars, through saving and (if necessary) borrowing. Goldhill wants to restore the consumer to the center of the health care system, which he persuasively argues would reduce costs and increase the possibility of coverage for everyone.

All this I tentatively agree with. But Goldhill’s solution includes government contributions to health savings accounts for those who are incapable of making their own contributions. Yet what happens if such individuals use those funds for lifestyle, for things outside of health care? Goldhill’s answer is that they would pay for health care costs with credit, borrowing against future contributions to their health savings accounts.

This answer is limited by the dissolution of social structures surrounding the family and the church. The inability to pay for health care by some can, and doubtlessly would, be offset by contributions and donations from churches and extended family. Such contributions, for those who are willing to receive them, would presumably be more efficient at eliminating poverty than increasing the debt of America’s poorest class.

It is also limited by its ultimate dependence upon the concept of rights. The assistance of the poor and disadvantaged by the church and by extended communities is a pre-political solution to health care reform, a solution that situates our health in the complex web of human relationships. And as such, it is a solution that can not be implemented as long as the language of rights remains the dominant framework for our discourse about health care. Despite its long Christian heritage, the notion of rights has been stripped of its pre-political meanings and has been reduced to signify that which exists only in a political context. For this reason, the question of whether health care is a right can only be answered in terms of the government’s involvement or lack of involvement in it.

Goldhill’s imaginative vision, then, is constrained on the one hand by his consumerism—which understands health care as something to be bought and sold—and on the other by his implicit understanding that health care is a right. Whether real health care reform can be built on this foundation is an open question. While I am more sympathetic to Goldhill’s proposals than those being discussed in our halls of government, I remain duly wary.

See also: Eric Chevlen’s article today on “Confessions of a Health Care Rationer.”

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

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

Milliner argues the lack of attention conservatives’ pay to culture stems from a false division between culture and politics. Again, Milliner:

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

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

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