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Quebec After Catholicism

Tue, 01 Jun 1999 00:00:00 -0400

In July 1997 Quebec City unveiled a bronze statue of Charles de Gaulle outside its walls. Though the $150,000 price tag might have seemed exorbitant to Canadians whose cash-strapped governments have in recent years been compelled to cut social services, for Quebecois sovereigntists it was a small price to pay for the assurance that from now to forever the eminent general will preside over the Plains of Abraham, site of a definitive French defeat at the hands of the English in 1759, terrestrial source of perpetual French Canadian humiliation, historical souvenir of all that is wrong with the world.

It is of course fitting that de Gaulle should rule over the Plains, for few events in the history of Quebec’s sovereigntist movement can match the long-term influence of his cry “ Vive le Québec libre! ” from the balcony of Montreal’s city hall in July 1967 before a crowd of fifty thousand. “Whatever General de Gaulle’s ambiguous motives may have been,” wrote Canadian historian Ramsay Cook soon after the event, “there can be no doubt that his adventures in ‘la nouvelle France’ finally brought into focus the nature of the current Canadian crisis.”

If de Gaulle’s visit to Quebec in 1967 is remembered as having stirred a crisis among Canada’s federalists, to Quebec’s sovereigntists it stands as a signal event in their collective memory. The liberator of Paris was now their liberator. And even as a “quiet revolution” made radical changes in their own society, de Gaulle seemed to be saying that France was now eager to embrace her distant brood. “France sees you, she hears you, she loves you.”

So let us say that Quebec received de Gaulle as something of a savior––in the words of former Quebec premier René Levesque to the French National Assembly in 1977, de Gaulle’s declaration was heard like a prophetic shot around the world. Nineteen years later Premier Jacques Parizeau claimed that the general’s four small words lived on “in the life of a people.” And in his autobiography, current Quebec premier Lucien Bouchard effuses over the memory of a youthful handshake with de Gaulle in 1959: “He held out his hand. I grasped it eagerly. I couldn’t help noting how fine and smooth it was.”

Why this hero worship? What was so wrong that led French Canadians to turn to de Gaulle as a sort of Quebecois messiah? As a first step toward an answer, we might observe that from the 1850s until the early 1960s, Quebec’s French-speakers believed themselves to be actors in a drama of universal import. “What Christian,” asked the influential nineteenth-century French Canadian bishop L. F. R. Laflèche, “believing in the all-wise Providence controlling every event on earth, could fail to be struck by the resemblance between Abraham’s behavior when he took possession of the land God promised his descendants, and that of Jacques Cartier as he took possession of this Canadian territory to which... the same Providence had guided his footsteps?” It was obvious to Laflèche that French Canadians had, in his terms, a “providential mission”––to be a Catholic light and witness to North America and the world, to stand against liberalism and modernism.

It was in service to that mission that Quebec’s religious and political leaders worked to preserve the French language and culture that had grown up along the St. Lawrence River, not for their own sake, but because those goods were inextricably tied to the Catholic faith to which French Quebeckers owed their existence as a people. They believed, correctly as it turns out, that whereas the scattered and outnumbered French-speakers in New England, the Canadian West, and Louisiana were in large measure doomed to assimilation into North America’s predominant Protestant culture, Quebeckers who remained true to the Catholic faith and the French language and culture in which that faith was expressed could maintain a coherent society. Thus Quebec’s premier, the heavy-handed Maurice Duplessis, in 1946: “The province’s strength lies in the depth of its religious feeling.... [It] must be the citadel of Christian civilization in Canada and even the entire North American continent.”

Before Duplessis died in 1959 it seemed that life in Quebec would continue as ever. An article published in the Journal of Political Economy in 1960 observed that the nineteenth century had “passed lightly over the French Canadians.” Little did anyone know that within the next few years Quebec would undergo a most radical transformation.

In Appointment in Rome, his recently published account of the Synod for America in late 1997, Richard John Neuhaus considers, inter alia, the cultural and theological positions taken in recent years by Canada’s Catholic bishops. Being “finely attuned” to the preferences and whims of Canada’s elite culture, Neuhaus writes, Canada’s Catholic bishops seem to be committed to the rule that, above all, one must not give offense. This commandment has been in effect especially in Quebec, where in the 1960s the Catholic Church fell from its status as Quebec’s chief purveyor of culture to that of a lowly target of scorn. Neuhaus captures the measure of Quebec’s reconstruction, wrought by the convergence of a desire on the part of some elite Quebeckers to “catch up” with the modern world and the reforming spirit of Vatican II. “With stunning rapidity, paralleled only by the Netherlands,” he writes, “Quebec went from being one of the most religiously observant societies to one of the least observant. Schools, hospitals, and social services were rigorously secularized; priestly vocations evaporated; Mass attendance plummeted; the churches were emptied; and politicians and priests together declared the revolution a success.”

Neuhaus is right, though that last point needs nuancing. Throughout the 1960s Quebecois clerics were at the center of the very movement that would soon push them into irrelevancy. Proponents of “keeping up with the times” so as to “effectively engage in dialogue with the culture,” they believed that Quebeckers who had formerly gone to church out of a sense of mere cultural duty would now go for more high-minded reasons––the chance to share their spiritual journeys with nonjudgmental sisters and brothers, for example. But no sooner had Quebec’s “progressive” priests repudiated one conformity than they fell into line with another, working with the new cultural engineers to produce what is now one of the most militantly anti-Catholic and stultifyingly conformist of Western societies.

It’s not that the relationship between church and state in Quebec was not crying out for change. In Neuhaus’ words, “everyone agrees that the earlier concubinage between Church and government in Quebec was unhealthy.” Indeed, some of Quebec’s Catholic bishops had become so dependent on the state’s patronage by the late 1950s that Premier Duplessis could say, with some justice, that the bishops ate from his hands. And it is easy to understand how things could have come to that pass: Following the collapse of France’s North American empire in 1763 the only real authority that remained in Quebec was the Catholic Church. Were it not for the Church, Quebec’s French-speaking community would not have survived. By the 1960s, however, Quebec’s clerics had grown accustomed to wielding and acquiescing to political influence, and reform was necessary.

By the 1970s, many within Quebec’s Catholic Church were forced to recognize that what they had really signed on to was, so to speak, their own death warrant. “We did not realize how much would be destroyed, or how quickly,” Neuhaus records one old priest as saying. “We wanted to liberate [Quebeckers] from the oppression of the Church and we ended up liberating them from the Church.” Rarely in modern times has well-intentioned but misguided zeal cost so much.

So what filled the cultural space made vacant by the collapse of the Catholic Church in Quebec? A lot of things. Soon after he was elected leader of the Bloc Quebecois, Gille Duceppe reminded the Canadian press that “Before Duplessis died, we’d all go to church and make our sign [of the cross], and a year later we didn’t go to Mass any more. So we looked for another set of values, one that was all-enveloping, like the Church.” Like many, Duceppe first turned to communism. Then, as Montreal political scientist Denis Moniere has noted, there were those young Quebeckers who simply enjoyed their new-found liberty to embrace “the pleasures of immediate consumption” and to shatter “old taboos.” But more significant for Moniere and eventually for Duceppe and many others is that in the 1960s Quebecois separatism become a significant political force––just when Quebeckers were abandoning their churches en masse. For many, nationalism filled the void created by the Church’s collapse in Quebec.

And the way some French Quebeckers talk, you’d think that that was a pretty good trade. What’s clear, though, is that despite their newfound projects, in the 1960s a large number of French Quebeckers felt a sense of existential rootlessness for the first time.

In 1895 the American expatriate and arch-nationalist Jules-Paul Tardivel opined that “God has planted in the heart of every French Canadian patriot a ‘flower of hope’”; and for all contemporary Quebec’s secularity, one suspects that something of the hopefulness Tardivel detected in the cities and towns along the St. Lawrence somehow lives on. To be sure, Quebec’s sovereigntists no longer embrace the aspiration, pronounced by Tardivel, “that there be established, on the banks of the St. Lawrence, a New France whose mission shall be to continue in this American land the work of Christian civilization.” Rather, they look to the fulfillment of the promise of the Quiet Revolution: a patrie of their own. But at the heart of both aspirations is hope––in times past, a hope that righteous endurance could transform the French Canadians’ piece of earth into a city on a hill; in the present, a hope that political independence will somehow wash away existential despair. “We’ll have our country!” Jacques Parizeau told his dejected supporters on the night of the defeat of the October 1995 referendum on sovereignty. “ Vive l’espoir, vive le Quebec! ”

Which brings us back to the statue of General de Gaulle outside Quebec City, just a few hundred yards from where Parizeau called on his partisans to keep hope alive––where, despite setbacks and failed referenda, the cry for a free Quebec arises, like incense, night and day. And we recognize that what Quebecois nationalists seek in that graven image is a final answer to the question that has been at the heart of French Canadian public life for some two centuries: What is Quebec for?

Nowadays not very many among Quebec’s dwindling Catholic faithful would want to say, as did their ancestors, that their people constitute a New Israel. They wouldn’t want to say that the Quebecois are a uniquely chosen people. But what they could say is that for all the things Quebeckers regret, or think they regret, in their history, the Catholic faith provided their forebears with an answer to the one great question they have always had in common. Whether Quebec’s Catholics will be able to muster up the courage to say such a thing is another matter.

”Ours,” one Quebecois priest told Father Neuhaus, “must be the quiet generation.” But as the standard life expectancy and average age of Quebec’s Catholic clergy converge, one wonders if that ostensibly prudent wariness isn’t really a betrayal. Dead men don’t speak; the number of young men entering the ministry is minimal; churches are closing their doors; religious ignorance continues to skyrocket; Quebec’s suicide rate and other manifestations of social despair make the American condition seem rosy in comparison. All the while, Quebec’s Christian leaders mutter faint platitudes behind closed doors.

Preston Jones , a doctoral candidate at the University of Ottawa and fellow of the Pew Program in Religion and American History, is currently finishing a Ph.D. thesis on the Bible in late nineteenth century Canadian public life.

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More Scandals of the Evangelical Mind

Mon, 01 Jun 1998 00:00:00 -0400

When I was a kid the closest thing to smutty literature I was able to get my hands on was a book by Tim and Beverly Lahaye called The Marriage Act. There were, of course, occasional, if red-faced, glances at issues of National Geographic to be had, but, as it was my plight to have been raised in a sober fundamentalist home, Tim and Bev’s commentary was my primary source. I read it often.

It isn’t that I ever took the Lahayes’ advice all that seriously, even in the abstract visions my laddish mind could conjure. Take, for instance, their suggestion that before honeymooners do anything important they should kneel beside the marriage bed and invoke God’s blessing. Sure, one can understand the rationale behind this suggestion; it’s just that, like the annual “Merry Christmas, you’re going to hell” sermon each December 24th at the Southern Baptist church of my youth, there is something inappropriate about it. The wedding service is for praying, after all; the honeymoon is for, well, something else.

I was born again at 12:10 p.m. on September 13, 1981. That is, I was born again at 12:10 p.m. on September 13, 1981, while sitting on the left end of the next to the last pew on the left-hand side of the sanctuary attached to Immanuel Baptist Church in San Bernardino, California, which has, since the mid-1980s, become a mega-church. I’m not sure how my conversion came about, really. One minute I was having a drug-induced paranoid delusion centered on the police helicopters that for some reason were always following me; the next I was praying. And that was that. Martha, children’s minister at Immanuel, says that as early as 12:15 she could tell something great had happened to me, which came as no surprise to her since she, with others, had had me on her prayer list for quite some time. (I later discovered that Martha was a “prayer warrior.”)

In the week following my conversion I took after many of the good fundamentalist teenagers I knew and invested in a stack of Christian t-shirts. My favorite one exclaimed, “True peace begins when Jesus comes in.” And then there was another that advertised the Rapture, though I don’t remember its exact wording. Indeed, I can’t recall most of the slogans I carried about on my body in my teenage years, but I know I prayed fervently that God would use those t-shirts to touch hearts and lives.

And so it went. “Lord, please help me to drive correctly so that people will see my bumper sticker which praises you; and may your spirit lead them to faith.” “Lord, as I sit here in class just reading my Bible”—I was supposed to be practicing algebra—“I pray that I would shine your love and that the people here would come to you.” And all the while I wondered if Amy Grant, who according to rumor had stopped giving altar calls at her concerts, was backsliding.

Then came the year I hoped to head off to Africa where I could be martyred. Before that I played guitar in a Christian rock band. Before that I barely graduated from high school; I didn’t think that my non-Christian teachers ever said anything worth listening to. “Lord, as I sit here while this teacher tells lies about evolution, please help me to take a stand for your Word.” ( Pastor Bill, I just want to praise the Lord that he gave me the strength to take a stand for him at school last Thursday. No one said that they wanted to get saved but I think that a lot of seeds were planted and that the Lord will cash in on them later.)

After it became clear that I wasn’t going to be able to achieve martyrdom in Africa-I couldn’t actually bring myself to raise “support” due to a “spirit of pride,” according to one fellow-I joined the United States Navy. That was in 1986.

Four years later I met a very nice young woman at a Christian concert. She was a typically confused teenager, which, since I was a cradle-robber, was no problem. I paid her way to summer Bible camp. She got saved, and three years later got engaged to me. We were married in an Anglican church. That was five Christian calendars ago.

In the course of these five years and the two that preceded them, my wife and I have learned a lot about the Christian tradition. We have learned that rituals aren’t really all that bad, and that to the extent that they can stand in faith’s stead when faith itself grows dim, they are precious. We have also concluded that the Pope isn’t the Antichrist.

Of course, a large number of fundamentalists still think that the Vatican is the Great Whore foretold in the Apocalypse, which is why some of them perceive that the cooperation fostered between evangelicals and Catholics by this journal is yet one more proof that the Great Apostasy is underway. Bill Bright and Chuck Colson are undoubtedly on prayer lists throughout the land, thousands being burdened by the thought that these chieftains have fallen under a deceptive spell.

Thus at a recent Bible study I heard one woman request a prayer for her neighbor’s salvation. “She’s a serious Catholic,” the supplicant observed, “and she doesn’t know anything about Christianity.” That a Protestant would think Catholics misguided is one thing; that a Protestant would think a devout Catholic ignorant of Christian tradition is just plain scandalous.

A great deal has been said in recent years about what Mark Noll has called the “scandal of the evangelical mind.” “The scandal of the evangelical mind,” writes Noll, “is that there is not much of an evangelical mind”—and particularly disastrous in his view has been the advent of such pseudo-intellectual disciplines as “creation science” and premillenialist prophecy studies on the order of Hal Lindsay’s best-selling and oft-reissued Late Great Planet Earth. Meanwhile, Noll observes, the “whole spectrum of modern learning, including economics and political science, literary criticism and imaginative writing, historical inquiry and philosophical studies, linguistics and the history of science, social theory and the arts,” is largely ignored by evangelicals. Noll’s intention was not to rail against fundamentalists; he noted that his book was a cri de coeur from a “wounded lover.” He sincerely hopes to see the scandal of the evangelical mind removed.

Much of the widespread conversation spurred by Noll’s book has undoubtedly been beneficial. Probably more than ever, aspiring evangelical scholars intend to bring their work to the secular world beyond their comfortable religious spheres; they aim to have their work published by prestigious secular presses; they want, as is often said, to love God with their minds. But if the discussions in which thoughtful evangelicals have recently engaged have contributed to these happy trends, so have they sometimes veered into less fruitful territory.

Consider, for instance, the self-deprecation that seems to have become fashionable in some evangelical quarters. Surely the discussions of the scandal of the evangelical mind were not intended to make a virtue of casting aspersions on unenlightened Christians. Yet it seems to have in some cases come to that. Thus in 1996 a prominent Canadian press published a book that holds all evangelicaldom in the American South in outright contempt. Indeed, one point of the book is to distinguish Canadian evangelicalism “from the more extreme evangelicalism in the southern United States,” though readers are never informed how to distinguish “the more extreme” forms from generic southern evangelicalism, since the author himself claims to be “furious with the entire southern evangelical world.” And fretting that “the South Carolina religious reality” might become “the Canadian evangelical destiny,” he paints all southern evangelicals as hate-mongers. One would not of course be surprised if it was a secularist who held up an entire population of Christian people to derision, but these regrettable words were written by a Christian who, borrowing casually from Noll, also called his ruminations a cri de coeur. A particularly sad aspect of this spectacle was that this book was endorsed by prominent Canadian evangelicals.

In a recent edition of Books & Culture , Doug Frank of Houghton College also uses The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind as an occasion to chide those in spiritual charge of his childhood for having somehow failed him. He wishes his fundamentalist forebears had been “better equipped, theologically and personally, to see how the life vest that holds us up in the storm can become a straitjacket that keeps us from exploring what lies below the waves”; he wonders if the Sunday School jingles he was taught as a child “snatched away my freedom to think.” Indeed, “I wonder if those happy little jingles, representing and reinforcing a closed universe of evangelical rhetoric, snatched away my freedom to inhabit fully the complicated human world inside me where terror and joy, loss and recovery, oscillate capriciously.” Frank says that these days he wants less assurance and dogmatism than fundamentalists offer; he wants more intellectual vigor; and he wants, in his words, truer “discipleship to the slaughtered lamb.”

One wonders what the people who devoted themselves to ensuring that Mr. Frank received a decent upbringing would do in the face of such allegations. My guess is that they would put him on a prayer list. Or maybe they would ask him to just leave them alone, since they had given him the best education they could.

Not that they had all that much to give in the first place. Robert Wuthnow has observed that evangelicals “seldom understand the Bible very well, know little about theology, buy heavily into the therapeutic culture of feel-goodism, and are caught up in a cycle of overspending and consumption like everyone else.” But in an increasingly illiterate age isn’t it something that at least modestly attentive fundamentalist young people have some familiarity with the Bible? One cannot expect many students to be able to appreciate, say, Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” these days, but one can expect, or at least hope, that one’s evangelical students will recognize its biblical allusions. And however facile fundamentalist theology may be, is it not nevertheless something ? There is certainly more to life than the fact that God loves us and has a wonderful plan for our lives, but those who cannot go far beyond this single profundity should not be scorned. And while it is true that this country’s evangelicals consume as much as their non-evangelical peers, it is also true that, generally speaking, they give more away. And isn’t it something that were it not for concerned evangelicals the pro-life cause would be in more desperate straits than it is? And that American family life would be an even greater disaster than it is?

The point is that it is one thing to maintain, as Noll does, that thoughtful evangelicals have a lot of work to do toward improving their collective intellectual life, and it is quite another thing to disparage Christian people who are simply not interested in intellectual things. Put another way, few would say that evangelicals should not honestly and forthrightly criticize themselves and their forebears. But castigating the perceived simple-mindedness of Christian people who have not had and will not have the slightest interest in the life of the mind is wrong.

Writing to the Philippians, St. Paul states his emphatic disapproval of some who preached Christ in a spirit of “envy and strife,” but they nevertheless preached Christ, says Paul, “and therein I rejoice.”

The educated and fashionable have long held the great unwashed in contempt. It is a temptation that critically minded evangelicals should resist. Like many contemporary evangelicals, I am not the fundamentalist I once was. But I will forever thank God for September 13, 1981.

Preston Jones is a graduate student in history at the University of Ottawa, Canada.

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The Jogger’s Wave

Sun, 01 Mar 1998 00:00:00 -0500

Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased,” says the author of the Book of Daniel, and well does he describe late-twentieth-century North America. For not only are we in the midst of an ongoing explosion and expansion of knowledge (so-called), but more people than ever have taken up jogging. These are not entirely unrelated phenomena: a good bit of recent intellectual endeavor has been devoted to the study of jogging. Shoe manufacturers, for example, expend untold millions of dollars in their efforts to design the perfect jogging shoe. Yet to my knowledge the unique way that joggers address one another-what I have termed the “jogger’s wave”-has heretofore been neglected both in the academy and in the media.

I should state at the outset that I do not pretend to a detailed knowledge of joggers’ habits or of the psychology of jogging. Nor do I feel competent to contribute to the intense, longstanding, and emotionally charged debates waged between “joggers” and “runners.” I nevertheless write with some confidence, for since 1986 I have observed waving joggers on the East Coast (Manhattan and Virginia Beach), the West Coast (Orange County, San Bernardino County, and Santa Rosa, California) and in eastern Canada (Ottawa, Ontario, and several cities in Quebec). I have observed joggers’ waves dispensed in primarily Spanish-speaking communities and in multicultural cities. At present I live in Quebec where, of course, I jog in French. This study celebrates diversity.

One crucial thing readers must keep in mind is that the jogger’s wave is distinct from other waves that are more familiar to the general public. We are all able to distinguish, for example, the “taxi hailer” and the “phony Miss America” from the polite, gently sweeping gesticulation employed by neighbors who would rather wave than speak to one another.

There is also the well-known “gosh-I-haven’t-seen-you-for-a-long-time-and-actually-I-had-just-about-forgotten-you-existed” wave that occurs primarily in shopping venues, most especially in clothing and grocery stores. One thing that makes this wave difficult for researchers to study is that it is utilized only when its employers are startled and have been placed under instant stress-that is, they are forced to come up with small talk for at least several seconds. Unlike some other waves, this one amounts to much more than a simple physical maneuver or polite convention. For even as these wavers exclaim, “Ohhh . . . hiii,” their waves send a silent message that goes something like this: “I would much rather not stand here in the cereal section and ask you perfunctory questions but . . . ” The odd thing is that even though both participants would rather forgo the experience, they nonetheless involve themselves in it, albeit usually briefly.

Like the “gosh-I-haven’t-seen-you-for-a-long-time-and-actually-I-had-just-about-forgotten-you-existed” wave, the jogger’s wave sends a clear unspoken message-actually, several messages. It says, “We both know that we are too busy to jog but we find time to do so anyway”; and “Yes, I have suffered from shin splints too”; and “I agree-joggers are superior.” Thus, in addition to being a social nicety, the jogger’s wave conveys deeply held sentiments and beliefs shared by most participants.

Fortunately, the jogger’s wave is easily described. Joggers approaching one another will usually begin preparing their waves when they are between seventy-five and fifty yards apart, at which point both joggers will drop their eyes to the ground. When the space between them is down to twenty-five yards they will look up and into one another’s eyes or sunglasses. At fifteen yards the right or left forearm, depending on which side the other jogger is approaching, will be held momentarily horizontal. At about the six or seven yard mark, both joggers will rapidly flash their right or left palms at each other, with fingers usually held together. This wave is sometimes accompanied by a gentle “hoomph,” a “hey,” a “how ya doin’?”, one head nod, or, in July and August, a sweaty sputter. It is generally considered indecorous to add anything more boisterous that these salutations to the jogger’s wave.

If the jogger’s wave is simple to describe, it is, in practice, among the more complex waves North Americans employ. First of all, it is rarely dispensed in the presence of automobiles. This is why, for example, the jogger’s wave is not employed on the streets of Manhattan, but one can see it exercised in Central Park. Another point is that the jogger’s wave is used most frequently near bodies of water. This can be observed in Ottawa, Ontario, where joggers’ waves are distributed most liberally on the bicycle paths that follow the Rideau Canal and the Ottawa River. Exceptions to this general rule are areas where paths that are contiguous with bodies of water are crowded. Orange County’s Balboa Island, for instance, is, of course, surrounded by water. Yet because its main sidewalk-which comprises the island’s perimeter-is often packed with walkers, tourists, and so on, joggers usually refrain from waving there. (As this essay does not pretend to be an exhaustive study of the jogger’s wave, but only an introduction to it, I shall not surmise here as to why joggers usually restrict their waves to relatively uncrowded spaces.)

Another important thing to understand about the jogger’s wave is that it is not administered to all joggers. Indeed, it is reserved for competent, highly skilled joggers. The long-standing consensus among accomplished joggers is that slothful pseudo-joggers who barely get their feet off the ground-those whom I call “huffpuffers”-are unworthy of the wave. (Young children, the elderly, and persons on the high end of “middle age” are exempted from huffpuffer status.) Instead of dispensing waves to huffpuffers, seasoned joggers will usually adjust their sunglasses or walkman headphones or take a sudden interest in some peripheral event when approaching and passing them.

Other than proficient joggers, the only others who are sometimes awarded a jogger’s wave are obviously serious bicyclists. For bicyclists to receive the wave they must be fully uniformed in bicycle-racer’s gear and they should be grimacing. Studies have shown that most joggers respect power-walkers, but not highly enough, generally speaking, to honor them with a wave. Vulgarians such as roller-bladers are beneath notice.

It should be noted that joggers who, for whatever reason, do not dispense waves to others worthy of them are socially deficient. Like line-cutters, talkative theater-goers, and church ladies who promise to supervise coffee hour but fail to show up, non-waving joggers are, quite properly, held in low esteem in the serious jogging community.

If my account of the jogger’s wave is accurate, it seems that Bible-believing joggers should be concerned about it, for it is doubtful whether the ethos that surrounds the wave can be squared with Scripture. In his Sermon on the Mount Jesus says, “And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? Do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as the your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” The Phillips translation puts it like this: “And if you exchange greetings with your own circle, are you doing anything exceptional? Even the pagans do that much. No, you must be perfect, like your Heavenly Father.” It seems, then, that Jesus would probably disapprove of the jogger’s wave.

The question is whether any Scripture passages can be cited in support of the jogger’s wave. The Bible has a good bit to say about jogging (or “running”). We are told in First Kings, for example, that “the hand of the Lord was on Elijah; and he girded up his loins, and ran before Ahab to the entrance of Jezreel.” Unfortunately the writer does not tell us if the prophet waved to anyone in the course of his jog.

The Scriptures clearly allow Bible-believing joggers to be competitive. “Know ye not,” queries St. Paul, “that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run that ye may obtain.” Indeed, foot racing is something to rejoice in, as Psalm 19:5 makes clear.

In Isaiah we read that “they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk and not faint.” And from Psalm 147 we learn that God “delighteth not in the legs of a man.” So it is probably safe to assume that huffpuffers are probably unspiritual or backslidden and, perhaps, that Bible-believing joggers are not obligated to approve of other joggers’ gaits.

Clearly the Bible has some important things to say about jogging, but none of the Scripture passages I have consulted mitigate Jesus’ injunction. Joggers are, as far as can presently be told, still constrained by Jesus’ command to salute those outside their own “circle”-in this case, huffpuffers. In fact, if Jesus’ words are taken to their logical conclusion, Bible-believing joggers might be obligated to dispense waves to casual bicyclists, walkers, roller-bladers, and, heaven help us, even skate-boarders.

Preston Jones is a graduate student in history at the University of Ottawa, Canada.

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