Our empathy President is now our theologian-in-chief. He has gone to Cairo like President Kennedy went to Berlin, to make a political point about human solidarity. Kennedy, of course, was expressing solidarity with West Germany shortly after the Soviet backed communist regime in East Germany erected the Berlin Wall. Years later President Reagan went to Berlin to tell the Soviets, “Tear down this wall!” Obama has gone to Cairo with something more like a civis Romanus sum in mind rather than a challenge to a repressive regime. The new Roman order, however, is not led by any one country. It is founded in tolerance and understanding, beginning with tolerance for Muslims and understanding for their way of life. Obama went to Cairo to console, not challenge. Under Obama, the son of a Muslim, we are all Muslims now.

The first step in this remarkable analysis is to blame tensions between the United States and Muslims on colonialism and the Cold War. “Tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.” That’s right, the colonial powers, which imported Western notions of equality and freedom into Muslim countries, denied Muslims their basic rights to pursue their own agendas. And the Cold War, which was an attempt to restrain the greatest ideological threat to the values of equality and freedom, also trampled on Muslim rights.

The second step in Obama’s analysis is to blame Americans for having a bad attitude toward the Muslim world. Why do we have a bad attitude toward Muslims? Well, let the President speak for himself: “The attacks of September 11, 2001 and the continued efforts of these extremists to engage in violence against civilians has led some in my country to view Islam as inevitably hostile not only to America and Western countries, but also to human rights. This has bred more fear and mistrust.” The lesson to be drawn from September 11 is that we Americans overreacted to the Muslim threat by thinking that Muslims do not support basic human rights, the very human rights that colonialists imported into Muslim countries and Cold Warriors tried to defend against the Communist threat.

The third step of Obama’s argument is to insist that we can define our relationship to the Muslim world by ignoring our differences. “So long as our relationship is defined by our differences, we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace.” Obama says that Muslims and Americans have overlapping values, which is certainly true. When two groups share overlapping values, they also have different values that do not overlap. Obama, however, thinks that these differences can be ignored, because we all “share common principles—principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.” To support this contention, Obama notes that Islam “carried the light of learning” in the Middle Ages, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment,” though he does not mention that Islam then turned its back on any possibility of Renaissance and Enlightenment. His only example of the potential for Muslim contribution to global Enlightenment is a quote from the Qur’an that we should “speak always the truth,” but what truth is that?

The fourth step of Obama’s argument is to “say openly the things we hold in our hearts.” Here he talks about his Muslim father, his early years in Indonesia, and the Muslim communities he worked with in Chicago. And he defines his office as the enforcer of empathy: “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”

The fifth and final step is to define America as a pluralistic country that can do justice to Islamic ambitions. Obama applauds the fact that the first Muslim-American elected to Congress took an oath on the Qur’an. He does defend American history, but only because what America means is diversity, tolerance, and openness to everyone. There is nothing uniquely Western or Christian about America, because we are “shaped by every culture, drawn from every end of the Earth,” including, evidently, Mecca. Obama brags about the seven million American Muslims who enjoy “incomes and education that are higher than average.” If you didn’t get that remark, he means that Muslims in American are doing better than the average Christian in America. Obama goes on to lift up the 12,000 mosques in America, and brags that “the U.S. government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab, and to punish those who would deny it.” Not only will we protect Muslim religious practices, but we will punish those who want to restrict Muslims from entering into the public square. Muslims can keep all their cultural customs and religious beliefs in America, and we will fight to make sure that happens.

There is more in this speech. Obama draws a moral equivalence between the Holocaust and Israeli discrimination against Palestinians. He announces the end of the era of American global dominance is over: “Any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail.” He promises to change American law to accommodate Muslim religious practices: “For instance, in the United States, rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation.”

The most frightening two lines in this speech, however, need to be read together. Obama says that America is already becoming Islamicized: “So let there be no doubt: Islam is a part of America.” And he says we should work even harder to make American more pluralistic. “We have the power to make the world we seek.” Obama has a vision for America, and that vision is to make America more like the rest of the world, and the first step in achieving that vision is to make America more welcoming to Muslims. Obama ends his speech with religious rhetoric about bringing the kingdom of heaven to earth. This was Obama’s Mecca moment. We are all Muslims now.

I respect Stephen Barr’s writings on science and religion, but his response to my brief post is an exact example of the process that I was writing about, and that I called “Emma-ization,” after Darwin’s gentle and supportive wife. Notice the shape of his argument, which really is not much of an argument at all. His argument takes the form of, “Well, all my friends (or all those good people) seem to agree about something, so they can’t all be wrong.” Let’s put his argument in a more precise form: A. There are lots and lots of Emma’s out there, putting the best possible spin on Darwinism. B. Emma’s, by definition, are very nice people. Many of them are even Christians. C. Nice people don’t believe in bad things. D. So gee, they must all be right.

Let me answer his specific complaints:

1. I don’t agree that the idea that Darwinism has philosophical, moral, and theological implications is obvious and trivial. Perhaps we would need to debate about the differences among entailment, implication, deduction, and causation. There are many scientists and philosophers who think that Darwinism has implications, but those implications are not necessary (they are not logical implications, that is). In other words, Darwinism is a theory that rises above its various philosophical, cultural, and metaphysical consequences.

Now notice that Barr himself believes this: He says that the philosophical implications of a scientific theory depend on the philosophical implications you begin with. In other words, there are no philosophical implications of any scientific theory except the philosophy that is imported into the scientific theory. Barr thus abstracts scientific theories out of their social and moral context, which can be done with some degree of success for some scientific theories, but not Darwinism. I argue, albeit much more forcefully and carefully in my forthcoming book, The Dome of Eden: A New Theory of Creation and Evolution, that Darwinism is intimately connected to what is ordinarily called Social Darwinism, which makes many Darwinians of the Emma variety uncomfortable, and thus the argument that scientific theories do not have logical philosophical implications. The fact that Newton thought the stability of the solar system require God and Laplace a century later demonstrated that gravitational perturbations balance over time has nothing to do with the topic at hand.

2. Nonetheless, I am not saying there is a straight line from, say, Darwin to Hitler. The line, like all such cultural trajectories, is complex and crooked. In my forthcoming book, I talk about Good Darwinian Cops and Bad Darwinian Cops. The GDC’s say that Darwinism is a theory that doesn’t change anything, so don’t worry about it. They are the Emma’s of the world. The BDC’s think Darwinism changes everything. It is sometimes hard to argue with Darwinians because many of them can play both kinds of cops at the same time.

3. Third, natural selection does not cause anything. It is not an agent. At best, it is a process of elimination. I find that scientists often just do not see some of the fundamental problems with Darwinism, like the argument I was fed all throughout my schooling that biological change has no direction, no telos, and thus purposive terms have no place in biology. Let me just say here that Darwinism is a powerful theory, that in its orthodox form it overreaches descriptions of biological change and becomes a metaphysical system, and that in terms of science alone, it has so many conceptual as well as empirical problems (the causation problem I just mentioned is just one of them) that the debates over Darwinism are really just beginning. What we don’t need are more Emma’s assuring us that nice people wouldn’t believe in bad things. Keep a closer eye on your friends than your enemies.

Critics of orthodox Darwinism often argue that Darwin’s theory of evolution drains nature of purpose while projecting onto nature a ruthless view of the world. In response, Darwinian apologists are fond of telling stories about how kind and gentle Darwin was, as if his personal virtues mitigate the starkness of his theory. What if Darwin had not put the most positive spin on his ideas? What if he had drawn savage conclusions from his theory and framed it in terms of an explicit nihilism about the possibility of meaning after evolution?

Deborah Heiligman’s new book, Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith, credits the charming Emma Wedgwood with checking Darwin’s slide into religious doubt and pessimism. Darwin loved his wife and wanted to keep the peace in his household, which meant that he had at least to pay lip service to Christian ideals. As Heiligmam writes, “Most women were believers and wanted their husbands to be believers, too.” Emma was especially devoted to the belief in an afterlife, and she wanted more than anything to be assured that she would be reunited with her husband after death. Charles took his father’s advice: “Conceal your doubts!”

All of this is well known–Darwin’s compromise was to walk his family to church but not to enter, so at least he was trying to uphold the minimal standards of bourgeois respectability. What is not often considered is how much his love for Emma forced him to tone down the implications of his theory of natural selection.

Emma was his first reader, and Darwin knew what she would not tolerate. Heligmam makes it clear that Darwin would have written a very different kind of book had he not been so worried about her reaction. His wife was no fundamentalist, but she expected her husband to write in a tempered tone, drawing the best moral conclusions from his work. She did not want him to turn anyone against God or morality.

One could conclude from this story that Emma influenced only the rhetoric of Darwin’s presentation, not the core of his theory. At the very least, she saved Darwin from writing a ranting, anti-religious tract that few would have taken seriously. Critics of Darwinism, however, have long argued that his theory of evolution is inseparable from its moral and philosophical implications. Even many Darwinians admit that his theory provides the foundation for the modern secular view of the world.

If Darwin had come clean about how radically anti-religious his theory is, its history of reception would have been completely different. As it is, defenders are quick to draw a decisive line between the purity of his scientific theory and the “social Darwinism” that put that theory to all sorts of ugly use. Without Emma, Darwinism’s ugly side would have been more evident from the very beginning.

Social Darwinism is merely Darwinism minus Darwin’s scruples about his wife. By pleasing Emma, Darwin figured out how to market his theory to a wide audience. The Emma’s of the world continue to find in Darwinism what they want, rather than what Darwin says. The wishful fantasy that Darwin conjured to keep his marriage happy continues to guide the marketing of Darwinism to this day. Perhaps it is time to divorce Darwinism from the romanticizing of his wife.

What is the truth value of mourning? That is, what does mourning tell us about the truth? Mourning is one of the most powerful and universal emotions. It is such a basic, pre-reflective, and pervasive response to the loss of a loved one that it appears to be part of the hard wiring of human nature–regardless of whether one believes that evolution, God, or some combination or the two installed the cables. It surely must say something significant about what it means to be human.

We typically mourn over persons, not things. The Israelites sat down by the rivers of Babylon and wept over the destruction of Jerusalem (Psalm 137:1), but they were mourning the loss of their community, the body of people that God had called together at Mt. Sinai, not bricks and stones. Rachel, who refused to be consoled “because her children are no more,” is rightly counted as the Bible’s most striking exemplar of mourning (Jeremiah 31:15).

The example of Rachel shows us that mourning is a special kind of sorrow, unique in its terribleness. We can feel acute sadness at the loss of neighbors, acquaintances, even those who have died on the other side of the world, but we mourn those with whom we share a special bond. Mourning is made possible by our capacity to be so closely connected to others that we can hardly distinguish where our life begins and their life ends.

Perhaps that is why mourning is so visceral, immediate, and instinctive–it blurs the boundaries of spiritual, mental, and raw physical pain. Mourning is not regret. Regret has a cooler emotional tone. Regret is cognizant, deliberate, and imaginative. Regret leads us to reflect on what we can learn from past mistakes and missed opportunities, while mourning is simply a test of faith. Those in deep mourning can appear to be in a state of shock, as if they have been physically assaulted. They have. They have had a part of themselves removed and lost forever.

As a general rule, then, we mourn those who are so close to us as to be almost a part of our bodies. Pregnancy is the most explicit experience of this closeness, which makes losing a baby in the womb the paradigmatic occasion for mourning. Expecting a child is such an intensely joyful experience that we often call it just that–expecting. That simple word is enough to evoke the horizon of a future full of meaningful possibilities. Losing a baby, at any stage in the pregnancy, strikes at the emotional foundations of our very humanity. In a flash, what was sheer exuberant expectation becomes unspeakable grief. The magnitude of the loss is made even greater by its intimacy. Because the unborn baby had yet to be witnessed and acknowledged by a wider public, the immediate family’s heartache can be intensely private and lonely.

Our ability to mourn for a lost fetus is surely one of the strongest arguments against the practice of abortion. Abortion rights advocates locate the morality of the killing of the fetus in the intentionality of the woman’s decision. If the woman contracts for an abortion because she has freely decided she wants this medical procedure, then it is morally good (or at least morally permissible). If the woman kills her fetus by taking drugs, or if someone else kills her fetus by abusing her, then the death of the fetus is morally wrong. Mourning demonstrates just how narrow and eccentric this moral criterion is. Plenty of studies document how abortion does not avoid the problem of mourning. Indeed, abortion compounds mourning, because now the woman who chooses it must also deal with the fact that her loss is the product of her own free will. She has to live with mourning wrapped in regret. As a test of faith, mourning can be healed by the time it takes for faith to persevere, but when mourning becomes intermingled with regret, it can linger in destructive and overwhelming ways.

Mourning is built into human nature, in the end, because the loss of any human life is a diminution of what all humans share, and nobody shares humanity with another as intimately as a woman with a baby in her womb. If we mourn persons, not things, and we mourn those persons who are part of us and yet have their separate identity, then mourning makes a conclusive case for the universal evil of abortion. Mourning is nature’s way of conferring infinite value onto the unborn as well as the born. Abortionists try to persuade us that our hearts are wrong, that
mourning is something we can control, and that it does not say anything universally valid about the value of human life. While it is probably true that effective arguments against abortion should not be overly emotional, in the case of mourning, the argument from emotion is as rational as this debate can get.

A guy walks into a job interview. The interviewer asks him about his qualifications. He says that he wants to be judged on the basis of the interview. He has no qualifications because he has very little experience, but he has been working on his interviewing skills over the past few years. The guy thinks he gives good interviews even though he hasn’t done much else besides practicing for interviews.

So the interviewer says fine, let’s see how good an interview you give. The interviewer asks tough questions and the guy does a great job. He never loses his cool and never says anything embarrassing or out of line. Besides, he looks great. He has a great suit, he smiles a lot, and he appears to be very likable. He is obviously very smart, but he is not arrogant or condescending. To top it all off, he is an African American, and the interviewer has been feeling guilty that his business has never hired a black person for this particular job. The interviewer feels really good about himself for thinking such great thoughts about this guy.

So he gets hired, even though nobody knows who he really is or if he can do the job or not. Sound familiar?

A cult can be defined as a tight knit group of people who devote themselves to a charismatic leader who promises to solve all their personal or social problems by the power of his personality. Given that definition, I would argue that the Obama campaign has all the marks of a cult.

First, Obama promises to solve the problem of politics. People attracted to his campaign think that he can transcend the ordinary negotiations and conflicts of the political realm just by the force of his powerful optimism. If the political itself is the problem, and not the various social problems that must be negotiated within the political arena, then Obama himself is the answer. Somehow, magically, he will create a new political space that will save us from having to fight or even disagree with each other. And a politician who promises to put an end to politics must be subjected to the most stringent skepticism. What they want to put an end to, of course, is the politics they disagree with, while wrapping their own politics in a rhetoric of consensus and optimism.

Second, Obama promises to save us from racial conflict. After all, he is unlike any other black politician that we have ever seen. He is not really all that black, having a white mother and having grown up in Hawaii and Indonesia. Obama is thus well placed to move us beyond race. Why? Because he is both black and white, an uncolored ink blot that can absorb and erase racial conflict. The problem is that Obama, who grew up without a father and without much of an American identity too, is able to have it all ways: he can play the race card while promising whites that he is above and beyond the color problem. His whole life has been a search for some kind of national and racial identity, and maybe he will find himself if he becomes President of the United States, but it is unlikely that he will help the rest of us find our way out of the thicket of political and racial correctness. Obama is the ultimate answer to white liberal guilt: a black man who makes people feel good for voting for him, regardless of whether they are doing anything about the very real problems of race in America.

Third, Obama promises to be the new JFK, which is absolutely fundamental to the revival of liberalism in America. Ted and Caroline have crowned him JFK’s second coming, thus completing the mythical cycle that began when liberals mourned JFK as the last great liberal. When JFK was assassinated by a quasi-communist nutcase, the left could not bear to think that their hero had been killed by one of their own. Liberals set out to mythologize JFK as the President who would have made America liberal if he had not been cut down in his prime. This is nonsense, of course, but this myth has laid the foundation for how liberals understand their own cultural and political demise. If only JFK had not been shot…but now he has returned, as a black man to boot! Never has fantasy been more important in driving a presidential campaign.

Just talk to anyone who supports Obama. They will say that he does have policy positions, but they will also say that he transcends all the typical policy options. Most importantly, they will talk about how Obama makes them feel. They will say that Obama represents the future, that he can heal the country, that he will create a new unity in America. And they will look a bit glassy eyed as they tell you all of this. Don’t argue with them. It is impossible to argue rationally with a member of a cult. Don’t even compare Hilary to Obama, because, like all cult members, they hate their rivals. Just be as clear eyed as you can, and pray that Obama does not get elected—not because he claims to transcend politics, which is merely empty rhetoric, but because, like all liberals, when he says he is transcending left vs. right, he is really being more leftist than ever. He wants to replace arguments over real differences with feelings of good will, and that is the real danger.