Christians in politics
The lure of power
Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson, who had been Falwell’s chief lieutenants in the Moral Majority, published a book questioning not just the efficacy of political action but the righteousness of the enterprise. In Blinded by Might they argued that in the process of trying to win elections conservative Christians had been seduced by the lure of power. What had begun as an effort to restore Christian values to the nation had degenerated into an unbridled partisan struggle, creating an atmosphere in which it was assumed that Democrats could not be Christians and that Bill and Hillary Clinton were the Antichrist.
Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals
So far as I can tell, this continues in full force except that the “Christian” bona fides of the Christian right are becoming ever more dubious.
The need for limits
Localism is modest … and in its modesty it is largely indifferent to the divisions that animate citizens who may hate each other but otherwise share the first premise of the modern age, which is that limits are there to be broken. When the success of the economy depends on perpetual growth fueled by boundless consumption, and the legitimacy of the state depends on a receding horizon of social progress fueled by an ever-expanding list of rights, “modest hopes” are obscene. Simply living as you should, without lending your energies to the machinery of progress, can be a mortal threat to the way things are.
… [I]f there is any such thing as an “ideal regime” it is the peasant village, “a gathering of human families for the sake of endurance across the harsh terrain of mortal life”. But many kinds of actually existing regimes have room for such gatherings, and our proper aim as citizens is not to transform the empires of progress into the Shire. Our business is not with ideals. We have a basic interest in existing institutions that support material life and in their competent management; beyond this realm of “normal politics,” we need not concern ourselves.
… Radner mentions the book of Ecclesiastes as the “scriptural ballast” for his political theory, and calls it “that most political book of the Bible.”
Adam Smith, reviewing Ephraim Radner, Mortal Goods. My copy of Mortal Goods was delivered yesterday and is near the top of the stack to read.
American Christianity
False binary
Christianity as we see it in eighteenth-century Britain or twenty-first-century America is not Christianity as it has always been, and the more fundamental changes may not be those that the received history of religion narrates. The cultural formations of western Christianity, growing as they do in good part from binary, Protestant-Catholic debates, can be thrown into stark relief, for instance, when studied in comparison to that much neglected third term in Christendom: the Eastern Orthodox churches from which Rome severed itself nearly half a millennium before the Reformation, charting a course for Western Christianity wed to rationalism and enamored of individual authority, whether papal or personal.
Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity.
I don’t recall any other non-Orthodox (so far as I know) writer who doesn’t reflexively fall into the trap of treating the Eastern Orthodox as the schismatics, Rome as the orthodox continuation.
Cooties
“There never was a time when it was so much abused, when its simple narrations were so much perverted, and when its true and more important uses were so completely overlooked in following fanciful theories and false deductions; and such as seriously threaten the interests of Protestant Christianity.” [Professor David R. Kerr of the United Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Monmouth, Illinois] warned students to beware of two “fanciful theories”: the “Mercersburg theology” taught by Philip Schaff and John Williamson Nevin, which appeared to depart from traditional Reformed views of the sacraments and of church history, and the Oxford Movement, a group of High Church Anglicans whose writings in the 1830s and 1840s gave birth to Anglo-Catholicism. These errors could not be countered merely with scripture, Kerr argued, but required careful attention to church history, which alone could “correct the gross perversions and false glosses.”
Paul J. Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation
As a Protestant Calvinist, I loved the Mercerburg theologians, who translated the Church Fathers, and was fascinated by the Oxford Movement. Considering where I’ve ended up, I guess it is no surprise that my favorite 19th century protestants, those of catholic leanings, had cooties in the eyes of evangelical sectarians.
Secularizations
After he had twice visited the United States in the 1930s, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a perceptive essay contrasting Christian development in America with parallel developments in the parts of Europe most directly shaped by the Protestant Reformation. His assessment included an observation that was as shrewd in its comparative wisdom as it is relevant for the themes of this book: “The secularization of the church on the continent of Europe arises from the misinterpretation of the reformers’ distinction of the two realms [of church and society]; American secularization derives precisely from the imperfect distinction of the kingdoms and offices of church and state, from the enthusiastic claim of the church to universal influence in the world.” What Bonhoeffer saw has been described with other terms here: The key moves in the creation of evangelical America were also the key moves that created secular America.
Mark A. Noll, America’s God
Why smart atheists admit they’re cultural Christians
At the same time, you hold all sorts of Christian assumptions about the world, even if you do not believe in God. It is clear to you that there are such things as human rights, such that a certain level of dignity belongs to all people simply because they are members of the human race, and laws and customs should reflect this in practice. You reject polygamy. You believe in limitations on the power of the state and that the rule of law is essential to a healthy society, whereby the rex (king) is always subject to the lex (law). You think those with much should provide for those with little, whether this is expressed through a redistributive state, charitable giving, or both. You affirm the fundamental equality of all people before the law. You abhor slavery. You do not seek to justify inequalities in wealth or status seek to reduce them.
You think the central unit in human relations is the self, the sovereign individual, rather than the group to which the self belongs. You think all people are equally endowed with free will, reason, and moral agency. Humility in others is more attractive to you than pride. Love is more appealing to you than honor. You think colonialism is morally problematic, and that those who have benefited from it have obligations (however defined) to those who did not. You think of time as an arrow rather than a wheel: you believe that we are gradually making progress toward a better world rather than declining from a previous Golden Age or recurring in an endless series of cycles, and as such you would think “behind the times” is an insult and “ahead of her time” is a compliment. You admire people who forgive their enemies. You long for transcendence and are likely to describe yourself as spiritual, open to the supernatural, and even as praying sometimes. Even if the God of Abraham is dead to you, your language, legal framework, moral imagination, and sense of self are all haunted by his ghost.
Andrew Wilson, Remaking the World.
Penitence
The prayer of penitence leads us to reflect critically on our own lives. If it is uttered sincerely, it leads us to repent in humility, not just of particular wrongs we have done, but of our whole shameful and degraded state of being. The paradox is that, far from leading to lethargy or despair, such penitence brings a new kind of strength. Sexual sin is never merely sexual, but always has motives that are rooted in the passions—whether the need to be loved, or the lust for domination, or the desire to prove oneself attractive, or any of a dozen other motives that come readily to mind.
What fundamentalists and higher critics share
I’ve quoted this before, probably multiple times, but it’s so very perceptive:
Both the fundamentalist and the higher critic assume that it is possible to understand the biblical text without training, without moral transformation, without the confession and forgiveness that come about within the church. Unconsciously, both means of interpretation try to make everyone religious (that is, able to understand and appropriate scripture) without everyone’s being a member of the community for which the Bible is Scripture.
Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens.
I’ve also echoed it when I’ve noted that people who don’t like Christianity cherry-pick hard passages, read them like fundamentalist literalists, and then object at how absurd the Scriptures are.
Cosmologies
The Copernican/Galilean worldview, that is the heliocentric worldview and its further development into our modern cosmology of galaxies and nebulas and black holes has two important aspects. It is an artificial vision and it is an alienating vision. It is artificial in the strictest sense of “art” or “techne”. It is a technical vision because we cannot experience this vision without technology, without telescopes and other apparatuses …
[T]he telescope and microscope are self-effacing artifices, they attempt to replace the eye, to convince us that they are not artificial but are more real than the eye. It is not only the physical gesture of looking at the world through a machine that demonstrates the radical change, though this is symbolic enough, but it is the very fact that people would do that and come to the conclusion that what they saw through these machines was truer than how they experienced the world without them. Yet the great revolution is not simply a technical rectification as it is presented by some today, it is not only that technically speaking we used to believe the earth to be a flat disk at the centre of the cosmos, and now we know the earth to be a big ball of water and dirt swirling around a giant nuclear reactor at the centre of our planetary system. The change happens in the very core of what Truth is, it is a change in the priority of knowledge, a change in what is important to us as human beings. That is the change. In a traditional world, all of reality is understood and expressed in an integrated manner. We describe phenomena in the manner we experience it because what is important is not so much the making of big mechanically precise machines that will increase our physical power, but rather the forming of human beings that have wisdom and virtue. The resistance to the heliocentric model was a desire to “save the phenomena”, the desire to express the world as we experience it because this expression must remain connected to how human beings live their lives and interact with God and their fellow men. So by projecting ourselves out through our machines into an physically augmented world, we “fall” into that materiality, we inevitably live in a more material and materialist world. And this is modern history itself.
What proceeds from this is my second point, which is that modern cosmology is not only artificial, but it is alienating, it moves Man away from himself. Once Man accepted that what he saw through his telescopes and microscopes is more real than his natural experience, he made inevitable the artificial world, he made inevitable as its end the plastic, synthetic, genetically modified, photoshopped, pornographic, social-networked reality we live in.
Jonathan Pageau, Most of The Time The Earth Is Flat.
I enjoyed re-reading this after eleven years and am enjoying (not quite as much) the three other articles Pageau wrote defending ancient cosmology (over “scientific” cosmology).
More:
In 1922 fr. Pavel Florensky wrote an article in his “Imaginary Values in Geometry” in which he attempted to use the general theory of relativity to show that considering the relativity of motion, one could develop a perfectly coherent mathematical model in which the Earth is the reference of motion. This model would in fact correspond to Ptolemy’s cosmological descriptions. This article was one of the reasons the Communist State gave for his trial and execution, a dark irony considering the usual “violent religion” vs. “enlightening science” rhetoric we are taught in primary school regarding Galileo’s censorship.
Jonathan Pageau, Where is Heaven?.
Ah! A kindred spirit! I long thought that Copernicus had the scientific advantage over Ptolemy because his scheme was more parsimonious, but that Ptolemy was coherent, too. The way it gets taught, though, is that Ptolemy was wrong and we know better now.
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.
Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 