A particularly amusing book came across my desk recently. It’s Nonbeliever Nation: The Rise of Secular Americans by David Niose, a “secular activist” in Washington. This is not a book to turn to for nuance. Here’s a sample:

Anti-intellectualism, the disappearing middle class, the sorry state of participatory democracy, the low level of public dialogue — all these problems (and many others) trace back, directly or indirectly, to the exaltation of religion and marginalization of non-believers.

The “indirectly” is magnanimous, isn’t it?

Basically, Niose thinks the Religious Right is the root of all evil (directly or indirectly). But for religious believers butting into politics and speaking up in the public square, we could have a pretty good country. We’d be solving the problems of poverty, injustice, global warming (and many others!) in the mornings, and going to yoga classes in the afternoons.

What’s pathetic about this book is the pious posturing that punctuates the bitter denunciations. Here’s a sample: “Secular activism is not about bashing religion but about defending the rights of those who choose secularity as a personal identity and worldview.” We can all get along nicely if the rights of secularists are respected. Sounds very friendly and peaceful and tolerant, but like liberal tolerance more generally, it’s very fake. Niose presumes one very important “right” that secularists enjoy, which is to define what counts as reasonable, mainstream, and true. Funny how that might lead to conflict with religious people.

Nonbeliever Nation is one of those books that’s so bad that it’s useful. It exhibits a simple-minded mentality that would make any self-respecting fundamentalist blush. Is there anyone more comically parochial than a confident secular cosmopolitan who after watching Fox News can’t contain his outrage?

Enthusiasts of St. Thomas should know about the ambitious publication project being undertaken by the Aquinas Institute at Wyoming Catholic College.

It’s very good indeed to see that the Institute is launching Latin and English editions of the works of the Angelic Doctor.

Well, well, there’s tolerance, and then there’s tolerance. A recent interview of Martha Nussbaum in the Boston Review shows what at least one pillar of our liberal establishment has in mind when it comes to Catholicism.

The interview by Boston Review Web Editor David V. Johnson was prompted by Nussbaum’s new book, The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age. I skimmed the book when it came out. It’s Martha Nussbaum at her self-confident, insular, verbose worst, useful only as an efficient way to get up to date on the latest liberal pieties. (Nussbaum can be very sanctimonious.) And the same holds for the interview, which is shorter and thus to be preferred to the book.

Here is a telling exchange:

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I’ve been on a T. S. Eliot kick of late. Last week I reread The Idea of a Christian Society, and for the first time read through Eliot’s elusive After Strange Gods, a volume he never allowed to be reprinted (but which is of course available on Google books). I have always relished Eliot’s pungent attacks on Liberalism. And I thrill to his voice as a prose writer, a voice that makes authoritative statements on behalf of authority. This time was no different. Eliot is one of the twentieth century’s most articulate spokesmen on behalf of what is sometimes called “orthodoxy,” the cultural condition of settled judgments about truth and falsity, good and evil, beauty and ugliness. It’s orthodoxy that enriches our souls and give our native creativity genuine depth and profundity.

I was in this rapturous state of mind when I had a conversation with a rather more skeptical friend. He admires Eliot as a poet, but disregards his pronouncements about culture and politics. Moreover—and this took me up short—my friend insisted that Eliot’s role in the twentieth century was in any event more radical than conservative. He was after all one of the great literary modernists of the early twentieth century, and modernism was a kind of radicalism, because it a refused to remain within the frame of established orthodoxies. Eliot the poet was a very different man from Eliot the critic, and Eliot the theorist of culture, or so my friend claimed.
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The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the spreading efforts to combat obesity by reducing the consumption of sugary drinks.

The Richmond, California City Council put a measure on the November ballot that taxes businesses on the basis of how much Coke and Pepsi they sell. Although the proposal differs from Mayor Bloomberg’s more direct method of regulation, the goal is the same: to promote health by deterring bad behavior. Oops, did I say “bad”? I meant to say “unhealthy,” which for our secular elites is about as bad as bad gets. When it comes to sex, children are not to make “unhealthy” choices. Same with drugs. Same with the kinds of people they hang out with.

In any event, the Richmond, California initiative shows that Mayor Bloomberg’s plans for New York do not reflect the isolated mentality of a waistline obsessed billionaire. Richmond is a middle class town in the northeastern part of the Bay Area. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if voters approve the plan. It’s human to want to live in a community that disciplines our desires, and in our officially non-judgmental culture if the only thing we can get is discipline ordered toward the good of health, then we’ll take it.

There is an opening here. The sociological studies show the harms caused by divorce just as the epidemiological studies show the problems caused by obesity. Why not a tax on divorce? Or a tax on abortions? As the City Council in Richmond know, if you tax something, you get less of it.

Just a thought.

I recently had a very interesting conversation with Wheaton art historian and First Things writer Mathew Milliner. Matt has been trying to think about how to understand artistic creativity in relation to cultural authority. T.S. Eliot is an obvious place to start. His famous essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” outlines a view in which the constraining authority of tradition provides the most fruitful context for genuine creativity. As Eliot later put it, we need an “orthodoxy” if we are to thrive.

While reading the literature on Eliot, Matt discovered that in recent decades Eliot’s legacy, both as a poet and critic, has been diminished by charges of anti-Semitism. For example, Anthony Julius argues that anti-Semitism wasn’t just a moral flaw in Eliot, but instead is “an inseparable part of his greater literary undertaking.”
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Mark Anthony Signorelli and Nikos Salingaros are nothing if not clear and forceful: artistic modernism is a anti-tradition of anti-art oriented toward domination rather than beauty.

Here is a particularly trenchant set of observations about architectural modernism from “The Tyranny of Artistic Modernism,” a recent article in the New English Review:

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The ever useful Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has released a new survey. The focus falls on attitudes toward the recent push by the Catholic Bishops to highlight the threats posed to religious liberty.

Results aren’t too surprising. If you’re a Catholic and have heard about the concerns surrounding the HHS contraceptive mandate, you’re more likely to agree with the bishops (56%) than if you’re an atheist (8%). If you go to Mass frequently, you’re more likely to agree (68%) than if you don’t go frequently (49%). If you’re a Catholic who agrees with the bishops that there are threats to religious liberty in current policies, then you’re likely to support Romney (60% to 34% for Obama), and if you don’t you’re in Obama’s camp (78% to 19%).

In sum: if you’re going to church regularly, the bishops’ message resonates. This includes Evangelicals (55% of those who heard of the bishops’ protests agree, while 31% disagree). Meanwhile, if you don’t go to church or are a liberal Protestant—or if you’re inclined to support Obama in any case, you are much less likely to be troubled.

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The Catholic World Report has posted a wide-ranging interview with New Criterion editor Roger Kimball.

Kimball’s new book, The Fortunes of Permanence, collects his recent essays of literary, artistic, and cultural criticism. This interview reflects quite well what I’d call Kimball’s metaphysical concerns. He nicely diagnoses one of the consequences of moral relativism: boredom. I’m less and less convinced the “relativism” accurately describes the mentality that threatens us. Moral “minimalism” seems more accurate, because there remains a sense that some things are wrong and must be prohibited. But the robust view of morality as a system of honor and shame ordered toward disciplining our souls, and thus bringing our humanity to a richer, fuller perfection . . . well, that’s not just inoperative, it’s positively prohibited, because deemed “oppressive.”

And without this robust view, culture goes flat, and our souls go flat. Upshot: culture devolves into entertainment, distraction, and therapeutic policing of excesses and dysfunction.

In any event, read the interview and take in Kimball’s multifaceted take on our present age.

Professor Robert George at Princeton has been one of the most articulate spokesmen for the view of marriage as a union of one man and one woman. He has demonstrated the absurdity of liberal claims that there is no rational basis for objecting to same-sex marriage.

Today on Public Discourse he has an important reflection on the wishful thinking of some who imagine that we can strike a “grand bargain” with proponents of same-sex marriage. Here is the money paragraph.

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In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Russell Jacoby has some reflections on the state of conservative intellectual life, which he regards as moribund. No news here. It’s long been a conceit of the Left that conservatives are dumb, and if not dumb, then deranged, or paranoid, or racist, or self-interested—take your pick.

Jacoby’s occasion for recycling this tired truism is David Gelernter’s new book, America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats), which he thinks is short on arguments and full of shrill right-wing clichés about tenured radicals and rootless intellectuals. I can understand the response. America-Lite is an angry book, too bitter for my taste. But Gelernter is a intuitive, associative thinker, someone who makes striking and sometimes penetrating observations. It’s a shame that Jacoby lacks the desire or interest to search out the deeper thesis in America-Lite.

Gelernter is interested in the social formation of American elites. This is a very important topic, because elites provide political and cultural leadership, and in so doing set the direction for society as a whole. His arresting claim is that universities have become “imperial,” by which he means singularly influential in the formation of contemporary elites. Places like Harvard and Yale now credential and to a large degree define what it means to be a member of America’s elite.

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What is it about our elite culture that is so fixated on contraception? Over at Public Discourse, Greg Pfundstein and Meghan Grizzle report on the latest decision by the Gates Foundation to put more than $4 billion behind efforts to expand the use of contraceptives worldwide.

As they point out, increases in general education and economic development are strongly correlated to family planning, not the availability of contraceptive technology. But our age loves the idea that life’s difficulties can be solved by technology. Democracy? The internet and cell phones will provide it. Women’s health and empowerment? The Pill will do the trick.

In his column in the New York Times, Ross Douthat chronicles the decline of liberal Protestantism.

The Episcopal Church and other mainline denominations were once pillars of the WASP establishment, providing religious leadership and inspiration in nation-defining events such as the civil rights movement. Now? Well, these Christian churches have so thoroughly embraced the social mores of our secular elites that they’ve lost a great deal of their distinctive purpose. Why go to church when you can get what you need by reading the editorial pages of the New York Times?

The self-destruction of mainline Protestantism is an often told story. But Douthat makes an important observation.

If liberals need to come to terms with these failures, religious conservatives should not be smug about them. The defining idea of liberal Christianity—that faith should spur social reform as well as personal conversion—has been an immensely positive force in our national life. No one should wish for its extinction, or for a world where Christianity becomes the exclusive property of the political right.

I would go a step further. The decline of liberal Protestantism has played an important role in the political polarization of America. By and large, the secular Left has come to dominate the Democratic Party. One effect has been to drive religious voters toward the Republican Party, turning our political life into one of the primary places for working out a struggle to define the future of American culture. It’s because institutions like the Episcopal Church have become irrelevant that there are few moderating forces at work on the Left today.

The decline of mainline Protestantism has meant the decline of Christian influence over American elite culture. No Christian (or Jew or Muslim, for that matter) ought to celebrate the end of liberal Christianity. It hasn’t meant the end of liberalism, only the end of a religiously and morally serious liberalism. That’s been bad for America, and bad for religious Americans.

Adam Kirsch has a charming essay marking the 100 birthday of literary critic M. H. Abrams over at the Tablet, one well worth reading.

I may have read Abrams’ most famous work of criticism, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), as an undergraduate or graduate student. But it was his other big book, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (1971), that I remember best. I read it while working on a large project about “transcendence.” (Granted, that sounds grandiose, but I was theology professor at the time.) The Romantic movement in art and literature reflected a rebellion against the cold, mechanical universe of modern science. With our worldview challenged by modern science, modern Christians have long been tempted to think the Romantics allies are crypto-Christians. If your enemy is my enemy, then you’re my friend.
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Dear Readers,

First Things is a non-profit. For more than twenty years readers have provided donations that have sustained the journal. Now the electronic age presents new challenges. I’ve written to our subscribers, who have responded with generosity. Now I’m writing to you directly on the web. We need our web readers to step up and provide support as well.

Don’t let a secular mentality dominate our culture. More than twenty years ago Richard John Neuhaus and his colleagues founded First Things to project a confident, informed, engaged, and religious voice into the Public Square. It was necessary then, and it remains so today. Donate now and help us become even stronger. Your support keeps First Things a vital voice in public debate.

First Things depends on all her supporters, large and small. Over the years countless readers have given, some $50, some $500, and some $1,000 and more. These gifts have made the difference. Yours will as well.

With gratitude for your support,

R. R. Reno
Editor

Dear Readers,

First Things is a non-profit. For more than twenty years readers have provided donations that have sustained the journal. Now the electronic age presents new challenges. I’ve written to our subscribers, who have responded with generosity. Now I’m writing to you directly on the web. We need our web readers to step up and provide support as well.

Don’t let a secular mentality dominate our culture. More than twenty years ago Richard John Neuhaus and his colleagues founded First Things to project a confident, informed, engaged, and religious voice into the Public Square. It was necessary then, and it remains so today. Donate now and help us become even stronger. Your support keeps First Things a vital voice in public debate.

First Things depends on all her supporters, large and small. Over the years countless readers have given, some $50, some $500, and some $1,000 and more. These gifts have made the difference. Yours will as well.

With gratitude for your support,

R. R. Reno
Editor

Dear Readers,

First Things is a non-profit. For more than twenty years readers have provided donations that have sustained the journal. Now the electronic age presents new challenges. I’ve written to our subscribers, who have responded with generosity. Now I’m writing to you directly on the web. We need our web readers to step up and provide support as well.

Don’t let a secular mentality dominate our culture. More than twenty years ago Richard John Neuhaus and his colleagues founded First Things to project a confident, informed, engaged, and religious voice into the Public Square. It was necessary then, and it remains so today. Donate now and help us become even stronger. Your support keeps First Things a vital voice in public debate.

First Things depends on all her supporters, large and small. Over the years countless readers have given, some $50, some $500, and some $1,000 and more. These gifts have made the difference. Yours will as well.

With gratitude for your support,

R. R. Reno
Editor

Dear Readers,

First Things is a non-profit. For more than twenty years readers have provided donations that have sustained the journal. Now the electronic age presents new challenges. I’ve written to our subscribers, who have responded with generosity. Now I’m writing to you directly on the web. We need our web readers to step up and provide support as well.

Don’t let a secular mentality dominate our culture. More than twenty years ago Richard John Neuhaus and his colleagues founded First Things to project a confident, informed, engaged, and religious voice into the Public Square. It was necessary then, and it remains so today. Donate now and help us become even stronger. Your support keeps First Things a vital voice in public debate.

First Things depends on all her supporters, large and small. Over the years countless readers have given, some $50, some $500, and some $1,000 and more. These gifts have made the difference. Yours will as well.

With gratitude for your support,

R. R. Reno
Editor

Some decades ago Peter Berger became convinced that secularization theory isn’t true. Science, technology, and modernity do not necessarily lead to the decline of religion. Secularization is the exception—a parochial western and central European phenomenon that is also characteristic of what Berger calls “an international secular intelligensia.”

Now Berger is revising his views. In “Further Thoughts on Religion and Modernity” he writes, “ I held the misleading notion of some sort of unified consciousness, religious or secular. I had overlooked the (in retrospect obvious) possibility that an individual may be both religious and secular.”

Berger is surely right. We’re complex animals, fully capable of operating in different ways at different levels, which explains why an Evangelical minister can tweet gospel passages without somehow experiencing a conflict between his use of modern technology and his biblical faith. We live in plural worlds.

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Dear Readers,

First Things is a non-profit. For more than twenty years readers have provided donations that have sustained the journal. Now the electronic age presents new challenges. I’ve written to our subscribers, who have responded with generosity. Now I’m writing to you directly on the web. We need our web readers to step up and provide support as well.

Don’t let a secular mentality dominate our culture. More than twenty years ago Richard John Neuhaus and his colleagues founded First Things to project a confident, informed, engaged, and religious voice into the Public Square. It was necessary then, and it remains so today. Donate now and help us become even stronger. Your support keeps First Things a vital voice in public debate.

First Things depends on all her supporters, large and small. Over the years countless readers have given, some $50, some $500, and some $1,000 and more. These gifts have made the difference. Yours will as well.

With gratitude for your support,

R. R. Reno
Editor

Dear Readers,

First Things is a non-profit. For more than twenty years readers have provided donations that have sustained the journal. Now the electronic age presents new challenges. I’ve written to our subscribers, who have responded with generosity. Now I’m writing to you directly on the web. We need our web readers to step up and provide support as well.

Don’t let a secular mentality dominate our culture. More than twenty years ago Richard John Neuhaus and his colleagues founded First Things to project a confident, informed, engaged, and religious voice into the Public Square. It was necessary then, and it remains so today. Donate now and help us become even stronger. Your support keeps First Things a vital voice in public debate.

First Things depends on all her supporters, large and small. Over the years countless readers have given, some $50, some $500, and some $1,000 and more. These gifts have made the difference. Yours will as well.

With gratitude for your support,

R. R. Reno
Editor

Dear Readers,

First Things is a non-profit. For more than twenty years readers have provided donations that have sustained the journal. Now the electronic age presents new challenges. I’ve written to our subscribers, who have responded with generosity. Now I’m writing to you directly on the web. We need our web readers to step up and provide support as well.

Don’t let a secular mentality dominate our culture. More than twenty years ago Richard John Neuhaus and his colleagues founded First Things to project a confident, informed, engaged, and religious voice into the Public Square. It was necessary then, and it remains so today. Donate now and help us become even stronger. Your support keeps First Things a vital voice in public debate.

First Things depends on all her supporters, large and small. Over the years countless readers have given, some $50, some $500, and some $1,000 and more. These gifts have made the difference. Yours will as well.

With gratitude for your support,

R. R. Reno
Editor

The current issue of The Atlantic has an interesting article by Anne-Marie Slaughter, former Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, and most recently director of policy planning at the State Department.

Her title, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” pretty much says it all. Slaughter recently left the State Department to return to Princeton. The University has rules about giving up tenure if away for more than two years, but as Slaughter admits, that wasn’t her main concern. She wanted to get back home, because she felt that she was short-changing her twelve and fourteen-year-old sons.

Her honesty about her motives has sparked a great deal of appreciation from younger women she has talked to. They don’t believe the “women can have it all” line that they have been fed by feminists of an older generation. Climbing the greasy pole to the top of competitive professions conflicts with having a family and being a mother. Slaughter’s article itemizes the many dimensions of this conflict, even to the point of allowing women have a stronger desire to be present for their children than men.
(more…)

Dear Readers,

First Things is a non-profit. For more than twenty years readers have provided donations that have sustained the journal. Now the electronic age presents new challenges. I’ve written to our subscribers, who have responded with generosity. Now I’m writing to you directly on the web. We need our web readers to step up and provide support as well.

Don’t let a secular mentality dominate our culture. More than twenty years ago Richard John Neuhaus and his colleagues founded First Things to project a confident, informed, engaged, and religious voice into the Public Square. It was necessary then, and it remains so today. Donate now and help us become even stronger. Your support keeps First Things a vital voice in public debate.

First Things depends on all her supporters, large and small. Over the years countless readers have given, some $50, some $500, and some $1,000 and more. These gifts have made the difference. Yours will as well.

With gratitude for your support,

R. R. Reno
Editor

In the May issue I discussed the dangers of the Selma analogy, the approach to gay rights that seeks to adopt the strong and often coercive measures that were developed to fight against racial discrimination.

Well, it seems that the Canadians are well ahead of us. The province of Quebec has launched a state funded registry that will collect reports of “homophobic” acts, which includes “any negative word or act toward a homosexual or homosexuality in general: physical abuse, verbal abuse, intimidation, harassment, offensive graffiti, abuse, injurious mockery, inappropriate media coverage and discrimination.”

There is the unpleasant aroma of the police state in this.