…the most pervasive error one encounters in contemporary arguments about belief in God—especially, but not exclusively, on the atheist side—is the habit of conceiving of God simply as some very large object or agency within the universe, or perhaps alongside the universe, a being among other beings, who differs from all other beings in magnitude, power, and duration, but not ontologically, and who is related to the world more or less as a craftsman is related to an artifact.
David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God
Well I don’t believe in that God, either
[V]ery often the God who’s being attacked and questioned by the Dawkinses and the Graylings and the Pullmans of this world is a God I don’t believe in, either: an individual who sits in the remote parts of the universe and treats the rest of the universe as an intriguing hobby for himself, rather than the God who is much more like the ocean that soaks through everything that is and yet is infinitely beyond it.
I found recently in the work of a 17th-century Welsh Catholic writer, Augustine Baker, a wonderful image: that the soul without God, the soul cut off from God, is like a whale stuck in a pond. It longs for the ocean, he said. It can’t be in the depths where it belongs. Now, I don’t hear very much of that sense in the New Atheists. They come up with all sorts of very neat and, as far as they go, perfectly rational arguments about how difficult it is to believe in some chap out there in midspace.
I want to say, “Well, yeah. I have no interest in a chap out there in outer space, none at all.” But I am quite interested in what the infinite, unconditioned life of generosity is within which I and everything else live. And I have every interest in the story of how that life astonishingly comes to fruition in the middle of our history in the life of Jesus. Now, that’s something I do think I can spend my life thinking and praying about and something that transfigures the horizons in which we live.
Christians make sense of Creation doxologically and liturgically. Christian liturgy and worship unfold and illumine spiritual knowledge and wisdom about Creation that modern life forgets.
[T]he Reformation meant not the elimination of the Church’s control over everyday life, but rather the substitution of a new form of control for the previous one. It meant the repudiation of a control which was very lax, at that time scarcely perceptible in practice, and hardly more than formal, in favour of a regulation of the whole of conduct which, penetrating to all departments of private and public life, was infinitely burdensome and earnestly enforced.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
I first heard an observation close to this during law school, when another older student (I entered law school at 30) explained why, improbably to me, he had left Protestantism and entered Roman Catholicism. His version had a Pope far away in Rome who claimed all kinds of authority but left people alone in practice versus a pompadoured tyrant who claimed only to be interpreting and applying the Bible but micromanaged personal lives.
The limits of rejoicing
Waugh, taking stock of the Church in America, was impressed by her variety, her energy, her schools and colleges, her magazines, her convents and monasteries. He was struck especially by the experience of Ash Wednesday in New Orleans, where, across the street from his hotel, which was full of Mardi Gras revelers, “the Jesuit church was teeming with life all day long; a continuous, dense crowd of all colors and conditions moving up to the altar rails and returning with their foreheads signed with ash.… All that day, all over that light-hearted city, one encountered the little black smudge on the forehead which sealed us members of a great brotherhood who can both rejoice and recognize the limits of rejoicing.”
Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own. I like that “can both rejoice and recognize the limits of rejoicing.”
Today marks the completion of week 2 of a 3-week limitation of rejoicing (i.e., a fast) in the Orthodox Church.
Latent consciousness of wrong
While bishops and emperors did not legally abolish slavery, Child observed throughout the patristic and early medieval era a “latent consciousness of wrong” reflected in Christian practices—especially the frequent practice of Christians freeing their slaves upon baptism or when nearing death.
Paul J. Gutaker, The Old Faith in a New Nation. Be sure to note that he’s speaking of the patristic and medieval periods; I somehow missed that and thought at first glance that he was talking about practices among American slaveholders.
I’m surprised how often quotes from this book rise to the surface of Readwise because, subjectively, I didn’t like it all that much. Objectively, I highlighted the heck out of it.
America the the self-sufficient
Against the background of the new national culture emerging in the United States, the insistence by such capable spokesmen that genuine Christianity required organic deference to the historic episcopate could only be a provocation.
Mark A. Noll, Assumptions and Assertions of American Theology in America’s God
The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Monday afternoon, I took a Pew test on political typology, where one of the questions asked the test-taker to choose between (roughly) religion being kept out of government or government being based in religion.
When I see such a question, I tend to assume that the pollster has never had a really deep religious conviction, and that he assumes that a good legislator can set his religious convictions aside on demand, as if thinking (I confess this is something of a caricature):
I know how I feel about this bill I’m voting on, but it is incumbent upon me to disencumber myself of all religious convictions, and to vote as I would were I not a gullible religionist with oppressive tyrannical impulses.
I’m sorry, but humans just don’t function that way in the real world. That conclusion is based both on my personal experience and a lifetime of thinking fairly often about such matters. But that’s not a satisfactory response for anyone who “barely knows me from Adam” and has no confidence in me as an authority (which I don’t really claim to be).
But with the help of AI, I’ve compiled a bibliography, and I was pleased to see how many of them I’ve read and how many others I have passing acquaintance with. I’m leaving in at least the gist of some AI prompts. I hope some of you may enjoy or benefit from this.
A. Bibliography: Religious Convictions and Legislative Responsibility in Liberal Democracies
Rawls, John. Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press, 1993 (expanded ed. 2005). The foundational provocation for the entire modern debate. Rawls argues that in a pluralist democracy, citizens have a moral duty to justify coercive laws by “public reasons” that others could accept — not by appeals to religious or other “comprehensive doctrines.” He later softened this somewhat in his essay “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” included in the expanded edition. Every other work on this list is, in some measure, a response to Rawls.
Carter, Stephen L. The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion. Basic Books, 1993. Carter, a Yale law professor writing from a liberal perspective, argues that American law and politics have come to treat religious believers with disdain, demanding they privatize their faith or “sanitize” it before it is permitted to enter public debate. Notably, he uses liberal means to arrive at what are often considered conservative ends, recovering the long tradition of liberal religious witness — the antislavery, antisegregation, and Vietnam-era antiwar movements. President Clinton cited this book approvingly shortly after its publication.
Audi, Robert, and Nicholas Wolterstorff. Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate. Rowman & Littlefield, 1997. A structured debate between two prominent philosophers taking opposing positions. Audi defends a “secular rationale” requirement — legislators should be able to justify their votes in secular terms even if religious reasons motivate them. Wolterstorff directly rebuts this, arguing there is nothing wrong with acting in public solely on religious grounds. The dialogue format makes it unusually accessible.
Greenawalt, Kent. Religious Convictions and Political Choice. Oxford University Press, 1988. One of the first rigorous philosophical treatments of the specific question your draft raises — whether and when legislators may rely on religious convictions. Greenawalt takes a nuanced middle position, rejecting both the demand for purely secular reasoning and unconstrained religious advocacy. His follow-up, Private Consciences and Public Reasons (Oxford, 1995), extends the analysis.
Audi, Robert. Religious Commitment and Secular Reason. Cambridge University Press, 2000. A systematic elaboration of Audi’s position that citizens in liberal democracies — and especially legislators — have a prima facie duty to be able to justify coercive laws by adequate secular reasons. A rigorous philosophical argument for the “separatist” side of the debate, and probably the most careful version of the position your draft critiques.
Eberle, Christopher J. Religious Conviction in Liberal Politics. Cambridge University Press, 2002. Eberle is deeply at odds with the dominant orthodoxy among political theorists. His argument is that a citizen may responsibly ground her political commitments on religious beliefs even without being able to provide secular translations. A sustained, analytically rigorous challenge to Audi and Rawls from the other direction.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas. “Why We Should Reject What Liberalism Tells Us about Speaking and Acting in Public for Religious Reasons.” In Religion and Contemporary Liberalism, ed. Paul J. Weithman. Notre Dame Press, 1997. Wolterstorff argues there is nothing wrong with public advocacy based solely on religious belief, and that exclusion of such advocacy is itself unjust. A more concentrated version of his argument than the Audi/Wolterstorff dialogue volume, and widely assigned.
Habermas, Jürgen. “Religion in the Public Sphere.” In Between Naturalism and Religion. Polity Press, 2008. In his earlier writings Habermas saw religious beliefs as a relic of premodern consciousness that should fade away. In his later writings, however, religion occupies a legitimate place in the public sphere that should be preserved — because religion can communicate certain meanings that philosophy and science cannot. This “theological turn” by the leading secular European social theorist is enormously significant: it represents a major concession from the secularist side.
Stout, Jeffrey. Democracy and Tradition. Princeton University Press, 2004. Stout argues that both Rawls and the religious right have misread the American democratic tradition, which has always included robust religious argument in public life. He defends a more pragmatic, Dewey-influenced pluralism that neither banishes religion nor gives it veto power. Widely regarded as a major corrective to the Rawlsian framework.
Weithman, Paul J. Religion and the Obligation of Citizenship. Cambridge University Press, 2002. A philosophically sophisticated defense of the legitimacy of religious reasoning in democratic politics, arguing that citizens have no general obligation to refrain from acting on religious reasons. Weithman is a Notre Dame philosopher working in the Catholic natural law tradition, which makes him particularly relevant to exactly the Henry Hyde situation you described.
A note on scope: This literature is almost entirely conducted among Anglo-American political philosophers and legal scholars. If you wanted a parallel bibliography drawing on theology (e.g., Reinhold Niebuhr, John Courtney Murray, or more recent Catholic social thought), or on empirical political science rather than normative theory, that would be a somewhat different list. Let me know if you’d like either direction explored.
[I asked for a parallel bibliography drawing on theology (e.g., Reinhold Niebuhr, John Courtney Murray, or more recent Catholic social thought)]
… Here is the parallel bibliography.
B. Bibliography: Religious Convictions and Political Life — Theological Sources
King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” April 16, 1963. The single most powerful practical demonstration that the Rawlsian demand for “secular reasons only” would, if consistently applied, have ruled out the most morally serious political argument of the twentieth century. King’s public life, with its frequent appeals to a comprehensive religious doctrine to justify disobedience to the law, represents a direct challenge to the ideal of public reason — and Rawls is in something of a bind: either King’s argument is not acceptable under the terms of public reason, or public reason simply cannot limit contemporary public discourse in the way Rawls intends. The central point of King’s argument, drawn from Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, is that there is a law higher than human law, and that any human law which is at odds with this higher law is unjust. Freely available; no excuse not to read it.
Niebuhr, Reinhold. The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense. Scribner, 1944 (University of Chicago Press reprint, 2011). Niebuhr took up the question of how democracy could best be defended. Most proponents of democracy, he claimed, were “children of light” who had optimistic but naïve ideas about how society could be rid of evil and governed by enlightened reason. He argued for a prudent, liberal understanding of human society chastened by a realistic understanding of the limits of power, and wrote what became his most famous line: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” Niebuhr’s “Christian realism” insists that theological anthropology — specifically, the doctrine of sin — is essential, not merely decorative, to sound democratic theory.
Murray, John Courtney, S.J. We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition. Sheed & Ward, 1960. Arguably the most important Catholic theologian ever to write on the relationship between Catholic philosophy and theology and American political life, Murray used the natural law tradition to argue that there is a strong and thoughtful humanism that is not necessarily sectarian — suggesting possibilities far exceeding common Protestant and secular evaluations of Catholic thought. Murray integrated a theological account of human good with the search for public consensus in a constitutional democracy, and his understanding of the relationship between religious freedom and political life was incorporated into Catholic social teaching at the Second Vatican Council. Murray is directly relevant to the Henry Hyde situation: he provides the intellectual framework for a devout Catholic to argue from natural law rather than from revelation, engaging the pluralist public on its own terms without abandoning his convictions.
Neuhaus, Richard John. The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America. Eerdmans, 1984. Neuhaus argued that “the naked public square” — which results from the exclusion of religious values from the public forum — will almost certainly result in the death of democracy, and that the great challenge is the reconstruction of a public philosophy undergirded by Judeo-Christian religion. Religion, Neuhaus believed, is “at the heart of culture” and necessary to foster the shared reference points around which democratic debate can occur. Written before Neuhaus converted to Catholicism (he was a Lutheran pastor at the time), so it speaks ecumenically. The phrase “naked public square” entered the permanent vocabulary of this debate.
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. “Doctrinal Note on Some Questions Regarding the Participation of Catholics in Political Life.” Vatican, 2002. An official magisterial document issued under Cardinal Ratzinger (later Benedict XVI) directly addressing the question your draft raises. It asserts that a Catholic legislator cannot simply bracket his faith when voting, and that the Church’s moral positions on matters such as human life are not the imposition of religious opinion but the expression of moral truth accessible to reason. Concise, authoritative, and directly on point. Freely available at the Vatican website.
Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church. Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004. For the first time, the rich teachings of the Church on questions of the human person, society, political authority, economics, and world peace were synthesized into a single systematic work. Chapter sections specifically address the political community, the state and religious communities, and the commitment of lay faithful in social and political life. The relevant chapters (particularly on political life and the role of lay Catholics) constitute the most comprehensive official Catholic account of why religious conviction and political responsibility cannot be cleanly separated.
O’Donovan, Oliver. The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology. Cambridge University Press, 1996. Taken together with its companion volume The Ways of Judgment (Eerdmans, 2005), these books provide a theologically substantial and thoroughly Christian analysis of the political order, written with the conviction that the political order cannot be understood without theology and that theology requires and entails an account of the political order. O’Donovan is an Anglican moral theologian, widely regarded as the most rigorous Protestant voice in contemporary political theology. Demanding reading, but rewarding.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Justice: Rights and Wrongs. Princeton University Press, 2008. Wolterstorff appears in the first bibliography as a political philosopher; this later book reveals the theological foundation of that work. He argues that the only adequate grounding for universal human rights — the premise on which liberal democracy rests — is theological: the equal and inherent worth of every human being as the object of God’s love. In other words, the secular liberal state depends, whether it acknowledges it or not, on a theological premise it cannot itself supply. One of the most important books in this literature precisely because it turns the secularist argument on its head.
Stout, Jeffrey. Democracy and Tradition. Princeton University Press, 2004. (Listed in the first bibliography but belongs here as well, since Stout is a scholar of religion and ethics engaging the theological tradition directly.) He argues that the American democratic tradition has always incorporated robust religious argument, citing the abolitionist movement, the Social Gospel, and the Civil Rights movement as examples. He engages Hauerwas and Milbank — who argue that the Church should disengage from liberal politics altogether — as well as the Rawlsian secularists, finding both extremes mistaken.
Gaudium et Spes (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World). Second Vatican Council, 1965. The foundational conciliar document on the Church’s relationship to modern society, political life, and culture. It explicitly rejects a privatized faith that retreats from public engagement, and affirms that the Church has a responsibility to illuminate temporal affairs with the Gospel — while also affirming the legitimate autonomy of secular disciplines. Murray’s influence is evident throughout. Freely available; the relevant sections are Part II, Chapters 4 and 5.
A note on shape: This list skews Catholic, for the simple reason that Catholic social thought has produced the most systematic body of theological reflection on exactly this question — the proper relationship between a legislator’s religious convictions and his public duties. Protestant contributions (Niebuhr, O’Donovan, Wolterstorff, King) are substantial but less institutionally organized. If you wanted a third bibliography drawing specifically on evangelical Protestant or Reformed political theology — figures like Abraham Kuyper, or more recent work by scholars like Timothy Keller or James K.A. Smith — that is yet another distinct conversation.
[I asked for the third list]
Good — I have enough solid material. I’ll now assemble the bibliography, being candid about the varying levels of directness with which these works address the specific question of legislative religious reasoning.
C. Bibliography: Religious Convictions and Political Life — Evangelical Protestant and Reformed Sources
A preliminary note on shape: the Reformed tradition’s contribution to this specific debate is, paradoxically, both deeper and more indirect than the Catholic one. Catholics have a magisterium that can issue documents saying precisely “here is how a Catholic legislator should relate faith and public duty.” Reformed thinkers instead tend to address the prior question — whether Christian conviction has any legitimate standing in public life at all — and leave the legislative application to the reader. The entries below range from the foundational to the more recent and applied.
Kuyper, Abraham. Lectures on Calvinism (the Stone Lectures). Eerdmans, 1931 (original lectures 1898; multiple reprints). The fountainhead of the entire neo-Calvinist tradition of political engagement. When Kuyper was at the height of his powers he was invited to deliver the prestigious Stone Lectures at Princeton in 1898, demonstrating that Calvinism was more than a church polity or doctrinaire religion but an all-encompassing worldview. In the Stone Lectures, Kuyper argued that Calvinism had been a key influence on the development of modern freedoms — freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, and freedom of association — and that God’s will was that no one institution, including the state, should dominate a society. His doctrine of “sphere sovereignty” — that God, not the state, is the ultimate sovereign over every domain of life — is the theoretical foundation for arguing that a legislator’s conscience is not the state’s property.
Dooyeweerd, Herman. A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. 4 vols. Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1953–58. Kuyper’s intellectual heir at the Free University of Amsterdam, Dooyeweerd built a comprehensive Reformed philosophy of law, knowledge, and society. In A New Critique, Dooyeweerd elaborates a Reformed and neo-Calvinist philosophy that examines the pre-conditions for theorizing, arguing that all theorizing necessarily depends on non-theoretical religious views. The political implication is radical: the demand that legislators reason from “secular” premises is itself a hidden religious commitment, not a neutral starting point. Dense and not for the faint of heart, but the most rigorous philosophical development of what Kuyper intuited.
Plantinga, Alvin, and Nicholas Wolterstorff, eds. Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God. University of Notre Dame Press, 1983. This seminal work launched Reformed Epistemology, which argues against modernist foundationalist criteria that religious belief may be “properly basic” to one’s structure of knowledge — that is, not in need of prior secular justification to be rational. The political application follows directly: if a legislator’s religious convictions constitute genuine knowledge, the demand that he set them aside before voting is a demand that he reason worse, not better. More accessible than Dooyeweerd, and Plantinga’s later Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford, 2000) develops the argument at full length.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Until Justice and Peace Embrace: The Kuyper Lectures for 1981 Delivered at the Free University of Amsterdam. Eerdmans, 1983. Calling Christians to be true to God’s shalom in all dimensions of life, Wolterstorff brings the religious vision of the Reformation to bear on such urgent matters as world poverty, nationalism, and urban ugliness. One reader captured it well: what is needed is not less Christianity in politics, but Christianity that is more in touch with the tradition. This book applies neo-Calvinist principles to specific public issues and engages liberation theology as a fellow “world-formative” tradition — a conversation you won’t find in the more philosophically abstract literature.
Niebuhr, Reinhold. The Nature and Destiny of Man. 2 vols. Scribner, 1941–43. Already mentioned in connection with the theological bibliography, Niebuhr is worth a separate entry here because his intellectual roots are explicitly in the Reformed tradition — specifically its Augustinian and Calvinist anthropology. These Gifford Lectures argue that a sound political theology requires a realistic account of human sin and finitude, and that the Enlightenment’s faith in secular reason as the neutral arbiter of public life is itself a form of pride. Widely regarded as the most important work of American Protestant theology in the twentieth century.
Henry, Carl F.H. The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. Eerdmans, 1947. A short, prophetic book by the founding editor of Christianity Today, addressed to American evangelicals who had retreated from public life into cultural separatism. Henry argued that the gospel has social and political implications that cannot be privatized, and called evangelicals back to engagement with the public order. Historically significant as the document that launched the neo-evangelical movement’s re-entry into public discourse. Only 89 pages; still readable.
Skillen, James W. The Good of Politics: A Biblical, Historical, and Contemporary Introduction. Baker Academic, 2014. Skillen, a Dooyeweerdian political scientist and founder of the Center for Public Justice, applies neo-Calvinist political philosophy directly to the American context. He argues that Christians are called to serve the common good through political institutions — not to withdraw from them and not to Christianize them, but to do politics as Christians, with convictions shaped by a biblical understanding of justice. The most accessible entry point for applying Kuyper’s thought to American legislative life specifically.
Smith, James K.A. Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology. Baker Academic, 2017. Negotiating through the confusions of political theology, Smith develops a constructive and nuanced position in the Reformed tradition, engaging Oliver O’Donovan and Jeffrey Stout, and should be read by anyone interested in the fundamental questions of church and politics. Smith argues that “the history of Western liberal democracy is one filled with craters from the impact of the gospel” and that Christian political engagement should be rooted in liturgical formation — the church as the community that shapes the loves and loyalties that citizens bring to public life. The most sophisticated recent Reformed contribution to the debate.
Mouw, Richard J. He Shines in All That’s Fair: Culture and Common Grace. Eerdmans, 2001. Mouw, a Calvin College and Fuller Seminary philosopher-theologian, retrieves the Reformed doctrine of common grace — the idea that God’s grace restrains evil and enables genuine goods even among those who don’t acknowledge him — as the theological basis for Christian engagement with pluralist public life. This is the doctrine that allows a Reformed legislator to reason with non-Christian colleagues toward genuinely good legislation without pretending his convictions are irrelevant. Short, lucid, and directly relevant.
Bratt, James D., ed. Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader. Eerdmans, 1998. This volume contains primary resource material that had long been out of print or never before translated, reproducing representative samples from various periods of Kuyper’s writings across a variety of disciplines, complementing the Stone Lectures with documents from speeches, newspaper columns, sermons, party speeches, and academic addresses to round out more of Kuyper’s nuances of thought and pragmatic applications of principle. If you want Kuyper in depth beyond the Stone Lectures alone — and his political thought is richer than the lectures alone convey — this is the anthology to have.
A note on your own tradition: Given that you spent twenty years in the Reformed world, you have probably encountered Kuyper’s name and possibly Dooyeweerd’s, but the political theology literature is less commonly taught in American Reformed churches than the dogmatic theology. The practical line of descent in the United States runs roughly: Kuyper → Dooyeweerd → the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto → scholars like Wolterstorff, Mouw, Skillen, and Smith. If any of these names are familiar from your earlier years, they will repay re-reading now with this specific question in mind.
My confidence in the scholarly standing of these entries is high. Confidence that this is a complete list of the most significant works is moderate — this is a living literature and I may have missed important contributions from figures like David VanDrunen (who takes a more two-kingdoms approach) or Michael Goheen and Craig Bartholomew, who work in the missional theology stream.
[I prompted, guardedly, for Orthodox sources]
You called it — I do struggle to get to ten. Let me be transparent about that rather than pad the list with marginal entries.
D. Bibliography: Religious Convictions and Political Life — Eastern Orthodox Sources
A candid prefatory note: you were right to anticipate difficulty. Orthodox Christianity has produced extraordinary theology, but systematic political theology in the Western academic mode is genuinely underdeveloped within the tradition. As Papanikolaou himself acknowledges, “the Orthodox voice in matters of law and politics is severely underdeveloped,” revealing “unpreparedness to deal with questions of politics” in a world without a Byzantine emperor or a Russian czar. The reasons are structural: the tradition formed in an imperial context (symphonia), then survived under Ottoman and Soviet rule, leaving little occasion to develop a theology of democratic political participation from inside the tradition. What exists tends to fall into two camps — those who embrace engagement with liberal democracy and those who resist it as a Western imposition. I can give you seven entries of genuine quality; the last three are honest explanations of why the shelf runs short.
Schmemann, Alexander. For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy. St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1963 (revised ed. 1973). Not a work of political theology as such, but the essential starting point for understanding the Orthodox worldview that underlies everything else on this list. Schmemann suggests an approach to the world and life within it that stems from the liturgical experience of the Orthodox Church, understanding secularism and Christian culture from the perspective of the Church’s unbroken experience as revealed and communicated in her worship. The political implication is that an Orthodox Christian cannot bracket his liturgical formation when he enters public life any more than he can bracket his lungs — the Eucharist is not a private devotion but a vision of what the world is for. This is the foundational premise from which Orthodox public engagement must begin.
Papanikolaou, Aristotle. The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy. University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. The first comprehensive treatment from an Orthodox theological perspective of the compatibility between Orthodoxy and liberal democracy, Papanikolaou argues that a political theology grounded in the principle of divine-human communion — theosis — must endorse a political community structured around freedom of religion, human rights, and church-state separation. He hopes to forge a non-radical Orthodox political theology that moves beyond reflexive opposition to the West and nostalgia for a Byzantine-like unified political-religious culture. The most rigorous Orthodox engagement with the specific questions that concern your draft.
Guroian, Vigen. Incarnate Love: Essays in Orthodox Ethics. 2nd ed. University of Notre Dame Press, 1995. A major contribution to Orthodox ethics that aims to articulate a social ethic making sense of the Orthodox experience in the United States, challenging the Orthodox tradition to formulate a new strategy for church and societal interaction. Guroian, an Armenian Orthodox theologian, is the other pole of the key American debate: where Papanikolaou tends toward accommodation with liberal democracy, Guroian is more skeptical, insisting that the Eucharistic community has its own social logic that cannot simply be translated into liberal rights language. An extended exchange between Papanikolaou and Guroian has highlighted points of tension in their respective accounts of the relationship between the ethos of the Church as a Eucharistic community and Western democratic social orders.
Stoeckl, Kristina, Ingeborg Gabriel, and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds. Political Theologies in Orthodox Christianity: Common Challenges and Divergent Positions. T&T Clark, 2017. The contributors present their views by drawing lessons from the past and elaborating visions for how Orthodox Christianity can find its place in the contemporary liberal democratic order, touching upon anarchism, economy, and political theology, and examining how Orthodox Christianity reacts to liberal democracy. The most comprehensive academic survey of the current state of the debate, including both the liberal-democratic and the traditionalist-conservative streams. Useful as a map of where the conversation stands.
Ecumenical Patriarchate. For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church. 2020. A document that can be understood as a political manifesto of Eastern Orthodoxy for the 21st century — not for a bygone historical setting or a Christian utopia like the Byzantine Empire or Holy Russia, but for this period of history with its urgent problems, positively receiving liberal democracy, human rights language, and solidarity with the poor. Issued under the blessing of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, it is the closest thing the Orthodox world currently has to what the Catholics achieved with Gaudium et Spes or the CDF’s 2002 Doctrinal Note. Contested within Orthodoxy — not all jurisdictions have embraced it — but significant precisely because it exists. Freely available online.
Hovorun, Cyril. Political Orthodoxies: The Unorthodoxies of the Church Coerced. Fortress Press, 2018. A Ukrainian Orthodox theologian’s critical examination of how Orthodox churches have repeatedly been seduced by political power — Byzantinism, nationalism, Soviet accommodation, and now Russian imperialism. Directly relevant as a cautionary account of what happens when the Church’s political theology becomes an instrument of the state rather than a prophetic witness to it. Hovorun argues for a recovery of the Church’s genuinely prophetic and eschatological stance, which neither withdraws from public life nor baptizes political power.
Bulgakov, Sergius. The Orthodox Church. St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988 (original 1935). The great Russian émigré theologian’s introduction to Orthodoxy includes substantial reflection on the Church’s relationship to society and the state. Bulgakov’s broader project (in his major theological trilogy and elsewhere) develops an Orthodox social philosophy drawing on the concept of sobornost’ (conciliar unity) as an alternative to both individualism and collectivism. Not directly about legislative ethics, but provides the theological anthropology that grounds Orthodox engagement with political life.
Why the list stops at seven:
The honest answer to why this is difficult is threefold. First, as noted above, the tradition simply hasn’t produced the volume of systematic political theology that the Catholic or Reformed traditions have — the institutional conditions for it didn’t exist. Second, much of the most significant Orthodox political thought was written in Russian (Solovyov, Bulgakov, Frank, Berdyaev) and only partially translated; it is also more philosophical than theological in the strict sense. Third, what does exist in English tends to either address the Church-state relationship at a structural level (symphonia and its discontents) rather than the conscience of the individual believer, or it addresses American Orthodox life in ways that are still quite new and developing.
If you wanted a supplementary list of Russian religious philosophers (not strictly Orthodox theologians, but thinkers formed by the Orthodox world) who addressed public life and political ethics, figures like Vladimir Solovyov, Nikolai Berdyaev, and Semyon Frank would populate it — and they are genuinely significant. That would be yet another conversation.
My confidence in the quality of the seven entries above is high. My confidence that there are not three more works of equivalent standing that I may have overlooked is only moderate — this is a field where my training data is thinner than for Catholic or Protestant sources.
Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.
But how could we ever relate to God or, even more challenging, truly unite with Him? Of all religions, only Orthodox theology emphasizes union with God—in a real and actual sense—as the goal and purpose of all human life. We rarely speak of “going to heaven,” as though it were a destination. We do not speak of experiencing a “beatific vision” of God, as though God could be viewed but remained at some distance from us. Rather, Orthodox Christianity speaks of theosis, the divinization of the human person. We expect, hope, and strive for actual union with the perfect, infinite, eternal, omnipresent, and changeless God. But we are flawed, limited, and come into existence for a brief time; we are confined to one place at one time, and we are constantly changing. So how is union with God possible? The Incarnation, the enfleshment of the Son of God, gave us the ability to truly connect to God and become united with Him, transformed and illumined by Him, not simply because He died for us but because of the way He lived among us.
Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox
Evocation 2
“Yes, but Christ lived in the world. He did not lock himself into a monastery.” “Let me ask you something Thomas,” father Maximaus replied. “How many years did Christ live in the world? Thirty-three years right? How many years did he preach?” “Almost three” “Right. Of the Thirty-three years, he preached for only about two and a half. What was he doing the previous thirty or so years?” “Well there is the apocryphal life of Jesus that we don’t know much about,” Thomas replied. “That means,“ father Maximos went on to say, “for that for thirty years Christ maintained a life of silence. …”
Kyriakos Markides, The Mountain of Silence
A Wise Policy
I’m starting at St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Seminary this autumn. By your prayers, I’ll be ordained a priest in about three years.
Wisely, St. Tikhon’s does not allow seminarians to “teach.” That includes blogging and podcasting about the Faith.
Michael Warren Davis. What a wise policy! If memory serves, Davis is a fairly recent convert to the Orthodox faith from a reactionary Catholic stance — which is a second good reason why he shouldn’t be teaching (so why was I subscribing to his Substack?).
I wish we could put an effective ban on all newly-illumined Orthodoxen blogging or otherwise yammering about the faith for three years after conversion. My impression, from YouTube (since my social media practice is very narrow these days), is that, unrestrained, new converts can spew a lot of nonsense into the cybersphere.
Critique
America’s Ancestral Sin
Many say that slavery is our ancestral sin. I’m not so sure that it isn’t Puritanism. In fact, I can make a case for the outgrowth of Puritanism putting the wind in the sails of slave owners. Instead, I will lay two charges at the feet of the Calvinistic Puritans in America:
Avarice was refashioned as a virtue, and
Community was sacrificed to the solitary individual.
…
The sine qua non of Calvinism was their peculiar understanding of Predestination. The word does indeed exist, a time or two, in Scripture. But in over 1500 years, the Church never constructed an entire theological edifice upon this foundation. But to these novice Protestant interpreters of Scripture, no longer bound by the received teachings of the Church, the concept bespoke a sovereign God who had foreordained everything, and whose justice must be satisfied. Gone was the loving God of mercy, the Father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, etc. Gone was the forgiveness inherent in the sacramental cycle of liturgical life. In its place, a wrathful God, in His sovereign omnipotence, had decreed the fate of every living thing, and there was simply nothing that any individual could do to add or subtract from this judgment.
This doctrine was as cold and unforgiving as concrete. If that was all there was, if everyone’s fate was already cut and dried, as it were, then the best response would be to simply live the best life, with as much enjoyment and pleasure as possible, for in the end, nothing you did really mattered. There certainly wouldn’t be any need to go to church, as it wouldn’t move the needle an iota. There would be no need for preachers to pound pulpits, and no need for anyone to show up to listen to them even if they did.
Like Terry, I’ve never read Max Weber’s famous The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, but I own it now and plan to cure my unwarranted reduction of it to being something about the “Protestant work ethic.” It seems, per Cowan, that it’s more about Puritans than about Protestantism in general.
English Puritans in particular sought to shore up religious meaning by grounding it solely in the Bible and in a literalist approach to its interpretation.
In this literalist approach, ritual acts such as baptism were no longer trusted as working or signifying salvation; rather, to be saved, one must believe-in propositional, clear, biblical language-in God’s sole and definitive action in salvation, at most looking for evidence that this has taken place …Configuring salvation in these terms, the Reformation religious subject gradually became less a participant in communal, bodily ritual action, and more and more the Cartesian cogito, an individual, inward-looking possessor of knowledge drawn from evidence and analysis. If the “Cartesian moment” is that moment when as Francis Barker has asserted the self can be conceived of without the body, it is also the moment when it can be conceived of without ritual; by what might be called a Cartesian logic, the later English Reformation places efficacious signs of salvation elsewhere than church ritual, first in a literalist reading of Scripture, and ultimately in the individual conviction of the particular truths of Scripture and in the self who experiences it.
Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity
If you’re skeptical about Puritans being that influential:
Puritanism is the only colonial religious system that modern historians take seriously as a major religious influence on the Revolution.
Conflating prosperity with providence and opting for acquisitiveness as the lesser of two evils until greed was rechristened as benign self-interest, modern Christians have in effect been engaged in a centuries-long attempt to prove Jesus wrong. “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.” Yes we can.
Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation
Tim Keller on Fundamentalism
Keller wanted evangelicals to recognize the difference between sound doctrinal convictions and what he called the “sociological location” of churches—the cultural attitudes and practices that are merely social characteristics of Christians in particular places, not theological doctrines. Keller was no fundamentalist. He saw the return of fundamentalism in the form of the Moral Majority as part of the problem. In 2022, he began speaking of the six social marks of evangelicalism, which he essentially equated with fundamentalism. These were moralism over gracious engagement, individualism over social reform, dualism over a comprehensive vision of life, anti-intellectualism over scholarship, anti-institutionalism over accountability, and enculturation over cultural reflection.
Dale Coulter, Remembering Tim Keller
Creationism
The word creationism by rights should define all who discern a divine mind at work in, with, or under the phenomena of the natural world. Yet by a most unfortunate set of events, the term has come to mean only the view that God created the world ten thousand or fewer years ago and that God used a worldwide flood in the days of Noah to form the geological conditions that most modern scientists think reveal an ancient earth with evolutionary changes over great expanses of time.
Mark A. Noll, America’s God
I agree with Noll. I applied the term “creationist” to myself until, sometime during law school (where lunchtime bull sessions were far-ranging), I learned that “creationism” had become a term of art for “young-earth creationism” — a position I’m not sure I ever held (though it’s likely I did hold it as an adolescent in an evangelical boarding school).
I wonder whether the young-earth creationists themselves contributed to that narrowing by calling guys like me CINOs (Creationist in Name Only) or something like that.
The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
“Not too many years ago,” I read, “a young monastic aspirant went to Mount Athos. In talking with the venerable Abbot of the Monastery where he wished to stay, he told him, ‘Holy father! My heart burns for the spiritual life, for asceticism, for unceasing communion with God, for obedience to an elder. Instruct me, please, holy father that I may attain spiritual advancement.’ Going to the bookshelf, the Abbott pulled down a copy of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. “Read this, son,“ he said. “But father!“ objected the disturbed aspirant. ‘This is heterodox Victorian sentimentality, a product of the western captivity! This isn’t spiritual; it’s not even Orthodox! I need writings that will teach me spirituality!’ The Abbot smiled, saying, ‘Unless you first develop normal, human, Christian feelings and learn to view life as a little Davey did – with simplicity, kindness, warmth, and forgiveness – then all the Orthodox spirituality and patristic writings will not only be of no help to you – they will turn you into a spiritual monster and destroy your soul.’”
When I entered Orthodoxy, several years before Markides wrote this book and before I can recall hearing this (or similar) stories, I was intrigued by the teaching that theosis, deification, was the goal of the Christian life — even the very meaning of salvation. But somehow I discerned, and said, that my goal for the foreseeable future was the more modest one of becoming human. This story gives me hope that I was right.
Our questions were framed in the only language we knew: what does the Bible say? The questions and answers of that dialog were informative. With those questions in mind, we became aware of a steady stream of admonitions in the New Testament urging believers towards a life of asceticism. Fasting, vigils (praying through the whole of a night), sacrificial giving, radical forgiveness are all considered commonplace and normative. We had no tradition to draw on, and thus we practiced such things without guidance. We learned many things the hard way. There is now a long string of decades that separate me from those fervent years.
No one told us to do the things we did, and no one told us to read the Scriptures in the manner we undertook. What we did was to read the Scriptures with the question in mind, “What should we do?” That stands in stark contrast to the typical question, “What should we believe?” Had our study been primarily directed to matters of doctrine, I think we would have lost our way. Strangely, our instincts were correct.
The teachings of Christ are not, primarily, metaphysical pronouncements about the nature of things. Instead, they are commandments regarding what we should do – based on who God is. “Love your enemies – because God is kind to both the good and the evil.” This pattern holds throughout Christ’s teachings. It is a directive that intends to shape our lives such that our lives themselves become a “living theology,” a revelation of the nature of God made known in the shape of our actions.
It’s not about rules
Orthodoxy is not about following rules but about inner transformation. Extremists and schismatic Orthodox are not Orthodox, in spite of any Orthodox appearance and rigorous observances, because they lack an Orthodox phronema.
Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox
Going to the well and finding it shallow
What J. S. Bach gained from his Lutheranism to inform his music, what Jonathan Edwards took from the Reformed tradition to orient his philosophy, what A. H. Francke learned from German Pietism to inspire the University of Halle’s research into Sanskrit and Asian literatures, what Jacob van Ruisdael gained from his seventeenth-century Dutch Calvinism to shape his painting, what Thomas Chalmers took from Scottish Presbyterianism to inspire his books on astronomy and political economy, what Abraham Kuyper gained from pietistic Dutch Calvinism to back his educational, political, and communications labors of the late nineteenth century, what T. S. Eliot took from high-church Anglicanism as a basis for his cultural criticism, what Evelyn Waugh found for his novels in twentieth-century Catholicism, what Luci Shaw, Shirley Nelson, Harold Fickett, and Evangeline Paterson found to encourage creative writing from other forms of Christianity after they left dispensationalism behind — precious few fundamentalists or their evangelical successors have ever found in the theological insights of twentieth-century dispensationalism, Holiness, or Pentecostalism.
Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
Humility
Shallow ideas can be assimilated; ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility. … Tolstoy: “I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”
James Gleick, Chaos
The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Writing in The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper argues that some secular A.I. skeptics have been drawn to religious thinkers like the pope for exactly this reason — because a secular language of harm seems inadequate to the perils A.I. creates for human beings, which are better identified by the language of sin.>
If that’s the case, though, the goal of the critic should be to identify the sin directly, not merely to lament the general advance of the technology nor to make excuses for individuals caught up in disruption.
Do not offer vague laments for the fate of higher education; say that students who use A.I. to cheat are doing something gravely wrong.
Do not merely bemoan the proliferation of Claude-inflected prose; say that the novelist or essayist who outsources a chapter to A.I. has committed what should be a career-ending literary crime.
Do not merely fret, as the pope’s encyclical does, that receiving “words of advice, empathy, friendship and even love” from a chatbot can be “misleading” for “less discerning users.” Tell Catholics and other Christians that treating an A.I. bot like your girlfriend or your boyfriend is a sin.
We’re very complicated critters cognitively. Douthat’s discomfort is a surprise, but seems to capture our dilemma.
Why would anyone prefer sleaze to morality? Because early-21st-century Americans are profoundly divided about what being moral means.
[O]nce you get beyond the theft-murder-adultery basics, we’re in a world of factional moralities and profound metaphysical divides, which separate Republicans from Democrats but also create deep fissures inside the two coalitions.
…
In this environment, the upright moralist becomes an inherently untrustworthy figure — not because he might be secretly a hypocrite but because he might be entirely sincere, and in his sincerity end up imposing a stringent morality that’s alien to to your own …
I feel a version of this impulse myself with Talarico and Platner. The Texas Democrat seems sincerely religious, even zealous, and having written frequently about the value of religion to liberalism, I should be very happy to have a Democratic politician making biblical arguments for his positions, even if they aren’t necessarily positions that I share.
But then I encounter Talarico’s concrete religious persona, the specific blend of piety and Peak Woke moralism … And my reaction is allergic, in a way that’s similar, I’m sure, to the reaction that a liberal Christian might have to a traditionalist Christian speaking the language of Trumpian populism. It’s a vision of political morality that I don’t share, and the piety makes it more threatening, not more congenial.
…
if you’re a swing voter who isn’t on board with either side’s zeal, someone like Platner, with his checkered past and dubious tattoo and Reddit indecency, might actually seem preferable to someone like Talarico. Imagine that you want to punish Trump Republicans but you don’t want the oppressive ideological climate of 2020 and 2021 to suddenly return. There’s a case that you’re better off with the guy who nobody would mistake for a moral exemplar than with the guy who might think that God is on the side of whatever mania progressivism thinks up next.
This is not a happy state of cultural affairs. But it’s hard to get back to a place where public virtue is rewarded and egregious vice is punished without forms of public morality that are more unifying than what’s on offer at the moment. This is why the quest for a religious center matters: Piety and probity will be rewarded only if they’re linked to a moral vision that seems reasonably unifying, a sacred canopy beneath which a majority of Americans can feel secure.
Two things Douthat said that sounded a bit off (but don’t undermine his argument):
“… having written frequently about the value of religion to liberalism ….” “Religion,” insofar as it is a coherent construct at all (see Brent Nongbri, Before Religion), is too varied to affirm its value to liberalism. One might think that that author of a book titled Bad Religion would get that.
“… a traditionalist Christian speaking the language of Trumpian populism ….” The thought boggles the mind. The Evangelical Trumpistas, Trump’s most notorious “Christian” supporters, are “traditionalist” or “traditional” only from the perspective of historic amnesiacs. The tradition in anything like its present form is maybe — if you hold your head just right and squint a bit — 300-ish years old, and by my lights is dated more accurately to the Second Great Awakening. I can only imagine a truly traditional Christian supporting Trump as a lesser evil, not as a good choice.
“Finishing the job” in Iran
I usually quote Nick Catoggio for sharp, biting invective, but Wednesday, he got serious about the undeclared Iran War from which Trump is trying to withdraw (would that he hadn’t started it!) while Israel continues to fight a serious threat:
We’ve arrived at the stage of this conflict where American and Israeli definitions of “the job” have plainly diverged.
And I do mean plainly. “You’re f—ing crazy,” an Axios source paraphrased the president as telling Netanyahu on Monday. “You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.” If you aren’t worried about Trump eventually scapegoating the Jewish state for the war, you should be.
The conflict began with the two nations’ interests aligned. Both sought nothing less than regime change in Iran, assessing correctly that Khomeinists will seek ways to threaten American and Israeli interests as long as they’re in power. Mossad believed they could be toppled; Trump agreed, letting his fantasies about another Venezuela-like capitulation override the skepticism of his own CIA director.
Yet, for obvious reasons of size, capabilities, and geography, the threat that the two countries face from Iran isn’t symmetrical.
Israel needs to worry about all forms of power projection by its regional neighbor, very much including conventional attacks like the ones being staged from Lebanon by Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah. Nothing will solve that problem short of cutting off the head of the snake. The United States, however, worries mainly about unconventional power projection, i.e. nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. And that problem can be solved—or managed, for some period of time—without decapitation by degrading Iran’s nuclear program and missile arsenal.
That gives you an idea of how Israel and the U.S. diverge on what “the job” is. Catoggio also evaluates what “finishing” would mean.
Catoggio seems to me to give too much credit to Trump for trying to withdraw, since Trump and Netanyahu started the open hostilities, but his analysis of the falling out of Israel and the U.S. over Iran seemed notable.
Grotesque and terrifying and juvenile
“They walk among us.” The glowing green letters emerge ominously against a dark backdrop. Above them hover the words “aliens” and “declassified,” suggesting the release — long awaited in some corners of the internet — of secret government files concerning extraterrestrials. Slowly, tantalizingly, more text appears: “For 60 years, the U.S. government has kept a closely guarded secret.” Then the big reveal: It’s not the trailer for a horror film; it’s a White House web page, posted last Thursday. And scary creatures in question aren’t extraterrestrials; they’re the other kind of aliens — the immigrant kind, the kind hunted by ICE.
“Aliens have been walking among us, living in our neighborhoods, and interacting with us in our daily lives,” the page announces. “They’ve shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human existences.” That’s the joke: Human beings are described as nonhuman invaders. Fascism, but make it a troll.
…
With phrases like, “They do not belong here” and, “Deport them all,” the page struck me as an incitement for Americans to commit acts of violence against immigrants. But Benjamin Valentino, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, thinks that the purpose of the page is not to get Americans to do anything: It’s to get them to do nothing, while the government commits its campaign of cruelty against millions of people just trying to live in peace. “They want a majority of the population to turn their backs,” he said. “That’s all that’s necessary.”
… [T]he dehumanizing language of the sort used by the Trump administration is, he said, “a pretty standard indicator” of risk, a necessary if insufficient condition of mass violence directed at a particular group.
“It’s not that it turns normal people into murderers,” Valentino said. “It’s that it turns them into bystanders.”
I had the opportunity a few months ago to hear Dean Erwin Chemerinsky speak at Wabash College, not far from me. He’s quite an influential figure in the legal world.
Wednesday, he wrote about the “radical” Justice Clarence Thomas, opening with this salvo:
Thomas is the only justice that I can identify who has openly said that precedent deserves little weight in constitutional law. In a concurring opinion in 2019’s Gamble v. United States, Thomas said that the court should follow the text and the original meaning of the Constitution and not precedents that are inconsistent with them. He wrote: “In my view, the Court’s typical formulation of the stare decisis standard does not comport with our judicial duty under Article III because it elevates demonstrably erroneous decisions—meaning decisions outside the realm of permissible interpretation—over the text of the Constitution and other duly enacted federal law.” In a speech in Dallas, Thomas once remarked: “I always say that when someone uses stare decisis, that means they’re out of arguments. Now they’re just waving the white flag. And I just keep going.” He also said at another event: “We use stare decisis as a mantra when we don’t want to think.”
Call it radical, Professor, but the Oath the Justices take is to the Constitution, not to stare decisis. In my book, Justice Thomas is spot-on and the Dean is radical.
Now a decent human being will approach precedent with the attitude “they may be right, and I may be wrong.” But after wrestling with that, and giving the party of precedent a chance to persuade you, if you’re still convinced the precedent contradicts the Constitution, you should say so — likely in a dissent and, one hopes, with genuine respect for the predecessors who got it wrong and the contemporaries who are following them.
How much of what will focus your attention?
The character of a republic, like the character of an individual, is a matter of habit, of what we do, day by day, what we expect, what we tolerate, and what causes us to say, “No, no more of this.” What was done to E. Jean Carroll—what is being done—could be done to you. What was done to Renee Good or Alex Pretti could be done to you—or to someone you love.
But do you know what the average Republican with any power is thinking? I know. It is this: “What was done to John Cornyn could be done to me.”
I have no desire to tell girls that they should not be playing softball. I do desire to tell parents that they should not be pushing softball upon them. (Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes)
School … is a perfect system of regressive taxation, where the privileged graduates ride on the back of the entire paying public. (Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society)
… LinkedIn, the irritating social-media site for puffed-up “consultants” pretending not to be unemployed. (Kevin D. Williamson)
E. Jean Carroll is an 82-year-old woman who worked as a journalist and who was, for a time, pretty famous across a swath of about 60 blocks in Manhattan. (Kevin D. Williamson)
My grandparents were like most other Americans. They were Protestants, but you could never find out precisely what kind of Protestants they were. (Thomas Merton, The Seven-Story Mountain)
In the final moments of Aaron Bushnell’s life, officers rush to the site of his burning. One asks for a fire extinguisher, another points his gun at the flames. (Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Hyperlink added.)
I eagerly anticipated the coming years, when we could get on with the important business of being friends with the Russians. That day never came, and I believe that to be largely our fault. (Terry Cowan)
He had, he said, never asked God for forgiveness, but that he felt “cleansed” when “I drink my little wine” . . . and “have my little cracker.” (Frances Fitzgerald, Epilogue to The Evangelicals)
Graham Platner is running to be a U.S. Senator from Maine. He has zipper issues. But why is the press shoving the story into the national news every day? And why have a felt compelled to read so many of those stories? And why does Ken Paxton feel different? And can I stop, exercising a little electoral federalism (i.e., it’s not my job to stop Maine or Texas from electing crooks and grifters with zipper problems)?
Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.
Yes, in the Christian East, it’s Pentecost. It’s a long story.
Taking God more seriously than Caesar
The cross is not a symbol for general human suffering and oppression. Rather, the cross is a sign of what happens when one takes God’s account of reality more seriously than Caesar’s.
Orthodoxy has always known that attention is not neutral. What you repeatedly give your mind to begins to shape what you love. And what you love begins to shape who you become.
In the present age it is fashionable to lump Jesus with the prophets and the Buddha, with Confucius, Lao-tze, and Zen, with the mystics and Spinoza-sometimes even with the French Enlightenment and Freud-as if everybody who had been at all attractive must, of course, have been a humanist, and only Hitler, Stalin, Calvin, and the Catholic Church had been authoritarian.
Soren Kierkegaard, The Present Age
Start with a bad premise, end with confusion
A similar, but more sophisticated, complaint of monograph length came from John W. Nevin in 1849 when he rounded on what he called the sect system. According to Nevin, “This professed regard for the Bible” was what “distinguishes the sects in general.” But to Nevin the difficulty in that profession was as manifest as it was stupendous: “If the Bible be at once so clear and full as a formulary of Christian doctrine and practice, how does it come to pass that where men are left most free to use it in this way…they are flung asunder so perpetually…instead of being brought together?” This anomaly showed that the principle of “no creed but the Bible” was “absurd and impracticable”; it breathed “the spirit of hypocrisy and sham.”
I don’t know how I ignored this stupendous and manifest difficulty for almost 50 years, but I did. Others still do.
Insofar as such epiphanies are the reason for my conversion (and I periodically read very plausible suggestions that such rational observations are not how we humans roll our major life decisions), this one was foremost.
Is Evangelicalism really Protestant?
Reading James Davison Hunter’sDemocracy and Solidarity rekindled a feeling that I’ve had many times before in reading books like this. Every time I read a book that describes the religious history of America that talks about the nature of Protestantism in the country, it strikes me that the Protestantism of the American past is alien to today’s evangelicalism. They are different enough to raise the question as to whether or not American evangelicalism is actually Protestant in important ways.
Hunter writes in his book:
For most Americans—whether deist or Calvinist, rationalist and intellectual or revivalist and popular, high church establishmentarian or sectarian—there was a God more or less active in the universe and in human affairs. Indeed, this God was, for most, Christian and, even more, Protestant. Though hegemonic and certainly oppressive to those who dissented, this belief nevertheless provided a language and an ontology that framed understandings of both public and private life. And yet this was also a culture, following Weber and so many others, that was inner-worldly in its orientation and ascetic in its general ethical disposition, an ethic that shunned extravagance, opulence, and self-indulgence and prized hard work, discipline, and utility. In ethics it was individualistic, to be sure, but informed by biblical and republican traditions that tempered individual interest and moved it toward the public interest and common goods. [emphasis added]
It’s certainly hard to argue that contemporary American culture generally, or evangelicalism in particular, are ascetic and oriented towards a traditional disciplined WASP ethic. Undoubtedly, they are if not opulent, consumerist in orientation. I’d be lying if I said I were any different.
What follows isn’t Orthodox Christianity; it’s not orthodox Christianity; it’s not Christianity in any robust sense, nor is it Jewish in a robust sense.
But it is evidence that there are people in the AI world who are morally serious, and that it’s not all hubristic atheists thinking they literally are “building God.”
From outside San Francisco, the joke is sometimes heard as a reflection of spiritual lacking—that the pursuit of AGI (artificial general intelligence) is a stand-in for a God-shaped hole, that clever technologists who reasoned their way out of the old faith are now building an idol to fill the vacancy. I do not think that is quite what is happening. People need meaning, and intense, world-shaping work is one of the oldest ways to find it; that part is not new and often not sinister. What is different here is that this particular work sits so close to the old questions—what are we, where did this come from, what comes after—that you cannot do it long without staring into them. They are not building God because they miss Him. They are building something that has brought them, unexpectedly, to the edge of where He would be.
…
The reason the God-shaped-hole critique lands a glancing blow rather than a clean one is that the Bay Area’s irreligion is not quite the absence of religion. You cannot stand this close to questions of omniscience and immortality without being pulled toward the territory religion has always occupied.
Consider what people in this city expect AI to do, in roughly decreasing order of certitude and arrival time: cure all diseases, solve aging, widen science until we know how the universe began and whether we are alone in it . . . and also, potentially, cause cataclysms of various kinds. And so a community of materialists has ended up—without anyone intending it—inside something with many of the working parts of a faith.
It starts with conversion stories. Ask almost anyone when they got “AGI-pilled” and they will tell you the year, the paper, sometimes the conversation—if they have not already written a blog post on it.
…
When I tell people I am attending churches and synagogues, the response is almost always: “It’s great to have community.” But I do not go for the community. I want what happens when we are silent, or praying, or singing. I want communion with that greater, stranger thing—a transcendent sense of meaning, a call to be better than I am.
…
If Chesterton could see us now, I think he would feel vindicated, but the larger part would be sorrow. He said religion provided a frame that suited us as creatures. Many of us decided we could see more clearly without it. Now we are neither astonished at the world nor at home in it; perhaps the two came as a package, and we returned the package.
And in this city, we are building something unprecedented inside a spiritual and moral frame that many feel is inadequate to the weight. Many of the builders sense this. Few have the vocabulary for it. They try to rationalize it, to confine it to the map, and they go back to work, and they build.
Balwit is the Chief of Staff to the CEO of Anthropic, which is currently my chosen AI because it at least talks a reasonably good game of thinking deeply about what they’re doing, and how it affects humans.
Kudos to the Free Press for publishing it. I overlooked it until others cited it because I’ve generally ceased expecting very much from Free Press.
The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Everything mysterious and marvellous is proscribed
The Reformation is the first great expression of the search for certainty in modern times. As Schleiermacher put it, the Reformation and the Enlightenment have this in common, that ‘everything mysterious and marvellous is proscribed. Imagination is not to be filled with [what are now thought of as] airy images.’ In their search for the one truth, both movements attempted to do away with the visual image, the vehicle par excellence of the right hemisphere, particularly in its mythical and metaphoric function, in favour of the word, the stronghold of the left hemisphere, in pursuit of unambiguous certainty. … What is so compelling here is that the motive force behind the Reformation was the urge to regain authenticity, with which one can only be profoundly sympathetic. The path it soon took was that of the destruction of all means whereby the authentic could have been recaptured.
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary. (For related thoughts, though I didn’t plan a sequence on this general topic.)
Conscientious objector to arbitrary binaries
An Irish teacher at my grammar school used to tell this joke: A rabbi was wandering the streets of Belfast late one night and was confronted by an armed member of one of the local paramilitary organizations. “Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?” the armed man demanded. “I’m a Jew,” the rabbi replied. “Well, are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?” came the response. Now, this may not be that amusing as a joke, but it makes an important point: societies have categories for thinking about people and identity, and a real problem occurs when those categories are simply not adequate or appropriate.
Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self
Only one sacrament?
How many sacraments does the Orthodox Church have? This is a question that an inquiring 16th century European might have posed. The Catholics had seven, while the Lutherans (and some other Protestants) said there were only two. “Of course,” thought the Orthodox in struggling to answer a question that had never been spoken in the Orthodox world, “We surely can’t have fewer than the Catholics.” So, “Seven.” Someone else in the Orthodox world thought, “But we’re more excellent.” So, the answer came back, “Nine.” Then, in the modern world of flourishing Orthodox thought a patriarch said, “The whole world’s a sacrament.” The counting of sacraments risks reducing them to moments of ritual, the concern of priests and churchly events: “We need to get the baby done…” I once heard as an Anglican. However, to say that “the whole world is a sacrament” runs the risk of saying nothing at all.
At its core, all of these statements beg the question: what is a sacrament? In the Orthodox world of the past, the term “sacrament” is missing from its vocabulary. Instead, Orthodoxy speaks of a “mystery.” It is well spoken, in that what is described is something hidden that is being made manifest. What we find, I think, is the very life of Christ being given to us. That is the mystery hidden from before the ages.
…
[R]ather than saying that the “whole world is a sacrament,” it is more accurate to say that there is only one sacrament – that of union with the death and resurrection of Christ.
At this point, it might be objected that the problem of evil casts doubt on this claim; for if God is good, why hasn’t he eliminated the evil that obviously exists in the world? But there are several problems with this objection. First of all, it could only undermine Aquinas’s argument for God’s goodness if we assumed that a good being could not possibly have a reason to allow evil. But it is notoriously difficult to show that such a being could not possibly have such a reason, and even most contemporary atheist philosophers would not make such a strong claim.
From the outset of his brief political career, Trump has viewed right-wing evangelical leaders as a kind of special-interest group to be schmoozed, conned, or bought off, former aides told me. Though he faced Republican primary opponents in 2016 with deeper religious roots—Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee—Trump was confident that his wealth and celebrity would attract high-profile Christian surrogates to vouch for him.
Mackay Coppins. The photo illustration to the article vindicates Trump’s cynicism about “high-profile Christian surrogates.”
The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
What if the Furies came for America? What does the karma of an entire nation look like in anthropomorphic form?
If Trump is ushering us toward some sort of critical defining moment, perhaps even an apocalypse as so many seem to believe, it’s worth remembering that the definition of an apocalypse is a revealing of previously hidden truths. If we look at President Trump through a symbolic lens, what previously hidden truths are being revealed about America? What does his particular character tell us about our collective character?
Trump, in his crude way, is forcing us to confront the false stories we have told ourselves about who we are.
This hit me harder, again and again, than anything I’ve read in a long while on the political state of the world. It’s chock-full of quotable stuff (some of which you’ll be seeing in due course), but the quote above is could be an epigraph.
If you think these days are our nadir, remember that Trump is more the eventuality than the cause of our flaws. 77 million voted for him.
I began saying almost a decade ago that “Trump v. Clinton has God’s judgment written all over it.” I wan’t wrong, but if you prefer “furies” or “Karma incarnate,” well you do you.
There’s only one sour note I noticed in this piece: Vandiver tries to shame Christians out of supporting Trump, which is well and good, but he comes across as a guy who was raised in a mainline Church that taught “be nice” as the heart of the Gospel. So I take his Christian bona fides with a grain of salt. With his makeweight “Christian” argument gone, it’s still a very solid piece.
Sophomoric trickery
[Congressman Don] Bacon recalls that his great-great-great-grandfather John lived near Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. John’s uncle helped maintain it while Jefferson was away being president. John moved to Illinois and in 1861 enlisted in the Union Army. So, in 2020 it seemed like familial piety for Bacon to be a one of two prime movers of legislation to remove from Army bases (Forts Bragg, Hill, Pickett, Hood, Benning and others) the names of Confederate soldiers who did their damnedest to dismember the nation.
The legislation, which included a stipulation that no base would ever again have a Confederate’s name, inspired a provision in the 2021 defense authorization bill that became law over President Donald Trump’s veto. In 2025, however, the second Trump administration, practicing what it evidently considers sophisticated trickery, restored the names. Sort of.
Fort Bragg, which briefly was Fort Liberty, is now renamed back to Fort Bragg. Not, however, for Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg, but for Pfc. Roland L. Bragg, who won a Silver Star in World War II. Fort Pickett, which briefly became Fort Barfoot, is again Fort Pickett. This time, however, the name (we are supposed to believe) honors not the Virginian who led Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, but Vernon W. Pickett, a lieutenant who in World War II won a Distinguished Service Cross.
This sophomoric trickery — the cleverness of the dim-witted — by the commander in chief is intended to mock the law. This is what now passes for fulfilling the president’s constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
We still have teams that we call Republican and Democrat, but that’s not what a political party actually was, or used to be, at least. It used to be a cohesive group around some policies and principles that would support candidates that supported those policies or principles, and the party existed separate from its candidates. Because of campaign finance reform and the law that was passed in 2002, we basically ended having separate political parties. And so, instead, again, it’s actually increased partisanship. But it’s vibes-based. It’s this sense that you belong to, like, you know, the Starbucks, Trader Joe’s tote bag, matcha latte group. Or you belong to the pickup truck, “Yellowstone”-watching, Walmart group. And it’s not policy based.
Speaking of political parties, I’m really, really missing the days when they assembled in smoke-filled rooms and came up with candidates who they thought could win elections to advance their ideas. Now we have primary elections wherein the President of the United States sends out his zombie voters to politically assassinate distinguished incumbents who did something that made him mad, as GOP Senators shrug and say, in effect, “Well, it’s his party; he can kick out whoever he wants to.”. The Republican party and incumbency mean nothing to Trump.
Trump took revenge on Senator Bill Cassidy over the weekend and will unseat Thomas Massie on Tuesday. May the instruments of his revenge go down in flames in November.
And may we once again discover the importance of functioning political parties.
Thucydides trap
[On Thursday,] Xi Jinping warned Donald Trump to his face about a “Thucydides trap” potentially unfolding between our two countries.
Like everyone else, my first thought when I heard the news was, “There’s no way Trump knows what a Thucydides trap is.”
A “Thucydides trap” refers to the rising probability of war when a long-dominant power is at risk of being usurped by a rising one. America is in decline and everyone knows it, Xi was implying, and the White House should take care not to let its anxiety about that lead it to foolishly assert itself in defense of Taiwan.
Someone must have explained that to the president following the summit. “When President Xi very elegantly referred to the United States as perhaps being a declining nation, he was referring to the tremendous damage we suffered during the four years of Sleepy Joe Biden and the Biden Administration,” Trump clarified afterward on Truth Social, not at all defensively.
That was cute spin, but it ain’t Joe Biden whom Chinese nationalists have been moved to publicly thank for destroying U.S. global supremacy. Trump’s “tariffs, attacks on allies, anti-immigration policies and assaults on the American political establishment had inadvertently strengthened China while weakening the United States,” the New York Times reported earlier this week, summarizing the analysis of one Beijing think tank.
“You do know that the party has two kinds of functionaries, right?” “Yes, Father, you’ve told me before.” “The good-for-nothings and the stop-at-nothings. So which are you, Alyosha?”
Giuliano da Empoli and Willard Wood, The Wizard of the Kremlin
Outside the political sphere
Tech just blows my mind sometimes
China has unveiled its latest photonic quantum computer, Jiuzhang 4.0, with researchers saying it can outperform the world’s fastest classical supercomputer by a vast margin … The results, published on May 13 in the peer-reviewed journal Nature, mark the latest milestone in China’s rapidly advancing quantum program led by a team of scientists at the University of Science and Technology of China headed by Chinese quantum physicist Pan Jianwei. Jiuzhang 4.0 completed a Gaussian boson sampling task in just 25 microseconds – a calculation they estimated would take the world’s most powerful supercomputer, El Capitan in the United States, more than 10⁴² years to finish, according to the university in the eastern city of Hefei.
Classical music is now a special taste, like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand. Thirty years ago, most middle-class families made some of the old European music a part of the home, partly because they liked it, partly because they thought it was good for the kids. University students usually had some early emotive association with Beethoven, Chopin and Brahms, which was a permanent part of their makeup and to which they were likely to respond throughout their lives. This was probably the only regularly recognizable class distinction between educated and uneducated in America.
In America, the land of the free, you can earn a billion bucks and then live however you’d like so long as you wouldn’t like to live as humanely as a middle-class Parisian.
I’m not, alas, in Paris right now. But I can certainly imagine myself in a Parisian cafe, enjoying some steak frites and a glass of wine while taking in the glorious streetscape. What’s harder to imagine is soaking in all that ambiance and thinking, “Yeah, this place is definitely poorer than Mississippi.”
… Ethical Capital Partners, the private equity firm that owns Pornhub. (The Morning Dispatch)
“Once somebody’s proven they’re too frightened of being called ‘bigot’ to defend the most vulnerable, they’ve shown who they are,” – JK Rowling via Andrew Sullivan.
“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all,” – Donald Trump, who “obliterated” the nuclear sites last year via Andrew Sullivan.
“[Biden] has one ability I don’t have: he sleeps. … He has an ability to fall asleep while on camera. … You’ll never see me sleeping in front of a camera,” – Trump in 2024 via Andrew Sullivan.
“2019: Donald Trump calls on China to investigate Joe Biden for having son Hunter fly to China on Air Force Two as he sought business in China. 2026: Donald Trump flies son Eric to China on Air Force One as company linked to him explores a deal with a Chinese chipmaker,” – Matt Viser via Andrew Sullivan.
“One of the enduring Two Americas truisms of the decade: Repubs convinced Obama is behind every tree and Dems wishing he would show up in the forest at all,” – Jonathan Martin via Andrew Sullivan.
Pressure on journalists has risen exponentially since the turn of the century. Many media companies require their journalists to produce up to a dozen stories a day – all in pursuit of clicks and likes. Maintaining high standards is impossible. (Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News)
Never have I witnessed a White House so devoted to surfaces. Surfaces caked with makeup. Surfaces puffed up with hair spray. Surfaces glossed with gold. Surfaces that glitter blue — or someday might, if the over-budget overhaul of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool ever works out as promised. (Frank Bruni)
In The Hollywood Reporter, Daniel Fienberg surveyed television shows inspired by a classic William Golding novel: “It’s easy to recognize that ‘The White Lotus’ has always been ‘Lord of the Flies,’ with turndown service.” (Via Frank Bruni)
Microsoft has rebranded its famed gaming division, Xbox. It will now be called XBOX. We salute the marketing team for their risk-taking, creativity, and awareness of the caps lock key. The Morning Dispatch
On an Australian podcast episode, exploring an emerging narrative that the American Orthodoxy is full of toxic, hypermasculine “Orthobros,” Khouria Frederica Matthewes-Green expressed appreciation for how Orthodox Christianity doesn’t change. Another participant, Fr. Doru Costache, challenged that by noting, correctly, that the Liturgy we do now isn’t exactly what the Orthodox Church used to do.
It’s possible that people raised in the Orthodox Church, “cradle Orthodox” (I’ll adopt Fr. Doru’s term), don’t see the Church’s essential changelessness like outsiders do, because they’ve never experienced the raucous, rending change that drove converts to their doors. I could only think, you have no idea what I mean by “change.”
Change is when your bishop says that the Theotokos was not a virgin, and the evangelist Matthew “invented the Virgin Birth to respond to criticism that Jesus was a bastard.”
Change is when your bishop says it wouldn’t matter if an archeologist found Jesus’ remains, because the Resurrection was not “a conjuring trick with bones.”
Change is when a Protestant pastor asks his bishop what he thinks of a famous bishop’s assertion that Jesus did not rise from the dead, and he replies, “I haven’t made up my mind about that yet.”
(This pastor told me, “I went home and started packing.” He ended up as an Orthodox priest.)
Change is when a national gathering of bishops doesn’t have enough votes to pass this resolution: “Clergy should abstain from sex outside of marriage.”
Change is when a diocesan convention doesn’t have enough votes to pass this resolution: “Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no one comes to the Father except by him” (John 14:6).
Or, to go from tragedy to absurdity:
Change is when your bishop builds a giant “helter skelter” carnival ride inside the cathedral.
Isn’t there something really creepy about this? Creepy in a Tolkien sense. [Fox News 2019-8-8; photo PA News Agency, dist. by Associated Press]
Change is when your bishop builds a mini-golf course inside the cathedral.
One clever journalist called it a “Fairway to Heaven.” [BBC.com, 2019-7-30]
Oh yes indeed, I know what change looks like. But the evolution of the Liturgy in the early centuries? That’s not what I mean by “change.”
The Changeless Core. When I say Orthodoxy is changeless, I mean that there is an inner core that persists across all nations and jurisdictions, across all centuries. It is a practical thing, a way to get closer to Christ. And that’s what I love about Orthodoxy, that it has brought me closer to him. (Fr. Doru asked “Why so much effervescence?” That’s why.) The Apostles must have known this deep-rooted longing, and it stretches from them to the present, through everyone who loves him, through all the ages.
Krouria Frederica’s blog post, Cradles, Converts, and Orthobros, is unusually long, and convincingly takes on some falsities in current media narratives about Orthodoxy.
I appreciate the narratives, perversely, as milestone of sorts. I entered the Church realizing how different it was, and that it was at least a tacit rebuke to modern Western Christianity (and culture). But almost nobody was attacking or critiquing it; we were too few, too “ethnic,” to be taken seriously. For an example, my Christian Reformed pastor, with whom I spoke about my interest in Orthodoxy, could only critique it as if it were Roman Catholicism.
So as I entered Orthodoxy, I braced myself for the day (for I had a gut feeling Orthodoxy was going to grow in America) when we were big enough to be attacked and critiqued more often.
So no, you can’t prove by me that there are any Orthobros in the Church (as opposed to internet noise or guys who show up with some twisted thinking but lose it in catechesis), but I appreciate that you’re taking us seriously enough now to concoct lurid narratives.
An aside: I notice on re-reading them, that the quotes above about real “change” all involve bishops. Khouria Frederica and her husband came to Orthodoxy from the Episcopal Church, ECUSA, which has long had notorious bishops (Bishop Pike being the first one I remember). So, much as I contrast Orthodoxy with Evangelicalism, she contrasts it, mostly, with Episcopalianism and progressive outposts in Roman Catholicism.
But don’t think that “lower” churches are exempt from baneful changes. Khouria Frederica, beginning with a section under the rubric “More masculine,” compared to what? writes about changes and distortions that, in my impression, mostly occur in Churches that try to avoid “liturgy” and denominational ties.
Back to the main subject, with a little stage-setting. I’m a Cantor in my parish. I have duties in my Parish that keep me from being a roving sociologist of Orthodoxy in America generally. I probably haven’t been in more than a dozen other parishes over my nearly thirty years in Orthodoxy, and I’ve only been in a handful of liturgies overseas during travels (and most of them were in monastic settings).
That my mental stage when I got to Khouria Frederica’s final thoughts, which opened new mental vistas for me (and made me suspect that my parish “vibe” is pretty typical of American Orthodoxy):
I tried to express this to Fr. Doru, but went overtime, and some of it was cut from the ending of the show. But here’s a summary of what I wanted to say, with some further thoughts that came to me, as I drove on into the night:
Penitence. I love Romanian Orthodoxy. I was blessed to have Fr. George Calciu, a survivor of Soviet torture, for my spiritual father. And I loved Fr Roman Braga, another survivor of the prisons. It was something Fr. Roman said that I’m thinking about now.
Fr. Roman Braga at his third arrest, 1958
Fr. Roman always said that every ethnic group has to work out its own kind of Orthodoxy. Americans will have to make an American Orthodoxy, and it won’t look like Romanian or Greek or any other kind. We will create our own American kind of Orthodoxy.
But I suspect that this American kind will be offensive, to some … We’re too loud, too bold, too informal. We smile too much … it’s just what Americans are like. We laugh, we’re loud, we’re expansive.
An example of the difference is that cradle Orthodox don’t want to have noisy children or babies in the church. People raised in Orthodoxy have a profound sense of awe about the temple, and treat the building itself with great respect. So they say, “Don’t bring a baby in the church! This is a holy temple, not a nursery!”
But Americans like having babies in church. They say, “If you can’t hear crying, the church is dying!” A church with wandering toddlers, and little boys gazing at a candle flame, and schoolgirls cuddling newborns—all that seems exactly right.
I know how beautiful Orthodoxy is, so I need to ask your forgiveness, because what Americans are going to do with it might look cheap to you. It might look like marketing. It might even look disrespectful. It won’t look like Romanian Orthodoxy. It will be the Orthodoxy that grows out of our distinctive American life. Forgive me, forgive us, for what we are nevertheless going to do, as we create this thing never seen before, American Orthodoxy.
It’s not just babies we welcome. It’s visitors, too. Come and see.
Apophatic
Orthodoxy theology defines only what is necessary and always leaves unspoken that which cannot be explained. This approach was part of the Christian faith from the beginning. But the Western phronema often suppresses, dismisses, minimizes, or ignores this stance. The Western mind is compelled to define and explain everything, since without a rational explanation a concept or fact cannot be considered true, or, conversely, all truth can be proven rationally.
Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox.
I experienced this apophatic approach to theology, gradually over decades losing my tendency toward being the kind of person who today cataphatically thinks, oh, for instance, that he could create a computer administered questionnaire that would logically force people to confess the correct version of Christianity.*
Only then did I encounter neuroscientist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist. Getting to know McGilchrist confirms for me the deep wisdom of the Orthodox way, and I believe McGilchrist has been quoted as saying that if he became a Christian (in the narrow sense, not “culturally Christian”), he would be Orthodox.
In my mind, this is closely related to what I consider the Orthodox view of the Nicene Creed and the Ecumenical Councils more generally.
Ecumenical Councils are not summoned because Bishops need some way to spend their lavish expense accounts (as if!). They are called because of the perception that some rascally teacher or teaching is threatening the Church. A Council convenes, considers the matter, and declares the mind of the Church. At the Councils of Nicea and Constantinople, two of the earliest Councils, they considered the teachings of rascally Arius, condemned them, and set forth the Church’s mind in the form of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, typically shortened to “Nicene Creed.”
In Orthodoxy, we call the Creed “the Symbol of Faith,” which itself signals our view: the Creed is not, and was never intended to be, a precis of all mandatory parts of the faith.
As a consequence of this limited role of Councils, I view the Creed and the Canons to be markers of boundaries to keep the faithful safe — as if to say “this is a cliff; stay away!” or “here be dragons.” That leaves a whole lot of geography in which believers can and do move around fairly freely.
As in paradise, so many delights are allowed, so few forbidden — and even that for our good.
(* Actual delusion, but I was a Calvinist at the time.)
The cultural formations of western Christianity
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, Conclusion: on the Religiousness of Criticism in her book Rituals of Spontaneity.
I just noticed, with much delight, Branch’s gimlet-eyed phrase “the Eastern Orthodox churches from which Rome severed itself” (italics added). This Great Schism is one of those fundamental changes that in received Church history in the West almost invariably inverts, by commentators Catholic, Protestant or unbelieving — who assume reflexively that four patriarchs in a pentarchy severed themselves from the fifth, which on the face of it is less plausible than the one severing from the four.
Something that sticks with me
Some decades ago, the late Richard John Neuhaus coined (so far as I know; I’d never heard it before) the term “ecclesial Christian.” He describe an ecclesial Christian as one for whom faith in Christ and faith in His Church is one act of faith, not two. (That may not be exact, but it’s how I’ve appropriated it for myself.)
I feel compelled to surface the term periodically to try popularizing it.
In the American fissiparous (there I go again!) nondenominational/megachurch/religiopreneur environment, the term is useful, and maybe even necessary, to demarcate the boundary between that sort chaos from a handful of Christian traditions in which the Church is central, not just more or less helpful to individual believers.
I was probably on the chaos side when I first encountered the term (I think it was the early ‘90s, the early days of First Things magazine) but it stuck with me, and I now, though firmly Orthodox, I feel a special kinship with ecclesial Christians outside my specific faith.
Christian America
Sociologists who look at American politics right now say that a major thing that’s driving our politics, maybe the major thing among white evangelicals, is that this is the group that has always assumed it should have the predominant role in American society. It’s the founding faith. It’s what the founders were.
No, the founders were not evangelicals, especially not in the contemporary devolved sense. That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it. David Barton and his ilk have never persuaded me otherwise.
Far too good
The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.
As a new convert, [St. Seraphim Rose] had some pretty strange views … Fr. Seraphim called it the “crazy convert” phase. But as he got older, more mature, he outgrew those views—as we hopefully do. And he helped his spiritual children to do the same. And that is what made him a saint.
He came to realize that what Orthodoxy had to offer isn’t a pure, unbroken tradition. It’s not a perfect adherence to the canons. It doesn’t make us better than everyone else. No! Fr. Seraphim said (and this is a quote):
The deepest and most attractive thing about Orthodoxy today is its message of love. The most discouraging thing about today’s world is that it has become so cold and heartless. In the Gospel of St. Matthew our Lord tells us that a leading characteristic of the last times will be that the love of many will grow cold. And the Apostle of love, St. John the Theologian, records our Lord as saying that the chief distinguishing mark of His disciples is the love they have one for another.
(…)
Being filled with the Gospel teaching and trying to live by it, we should have love and compassion for the miserable humanity of our days. Probably never have people been more unhappy than the people of our days, even with all the outward conveniences and gadgets our society provides us with. People are suffering and dying for the lack of God, and we can help give God to them. The love of many has truly grown cold in our days—but let us not be cold. As long as Christ sends us His grace and warms our hearts, we do not need to be cold.
Michael Warren Davis, on Monk-Priest Seraphim Rose, who reposed in 1982, and is now becoming officially recognized as an Orthodox Saint.
Just as colonial officials and missionaries, travelling to India, had imposed the concept of ‘religion’ on the societies they found there, so did agnostics colonise the past in similar manner. The ancient Egyptians, and Babylonians, and Romans: all were assumed to have had a ‘religion’. Some peoples—most notably the Greeks—were also assumed to have had ‘science’. It was this that had enabled their civilisation to serve as the wellspring of progress. Philosophers had been the prototypes of scientists. The library of Alexandria had been ‘the birthplace of modern science’. Only Christians, with their fanatical hatred of reason and their determination to eradicate pagan learning, had prevented the ancient world from being set on a path towards steam engines and cotton mills.
Tom Holland, Dominion.
Fissiparous
Those who, like him, had dared to repudiate the Roman Church but had then been guilty of what Luther condemned as a failure properly to understand the Spirit, had also been the objects of his ire. Theologians in Swiss or German cities who presumed to dispute his views on the eucharist; Anabaptists, with their wild contempt for infant baptism and secular authority; Henry VIII, who seemed to think he was God. Luther, fretting where it all might lead, had not shrunk from contemplating a nightmarish prospect: a world in which the very concept of truth might end up dissolving, and everything appear relative. ‘For whoever has gone astray in the faith may thereafter believe whatever he wants.’
Tom Holland, Dominion.
“Fissiparous” is my favorite blanket term for the innumerable clans descended from the Reformation. It sounds appropriately sinister to me.
Lofty rhetoric, grubby reality
When the Supreme Court announced a “right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”, some thought it was rejecting the very idea of natural law. Really it was asserting a degenerate theory of natural law, one widely held in the culture—or at least in those parts of it which our controllers choose to recognize, such as law schools, abortion facilities, and liberal seminaries. It was propounding a universal moral right not to recognize the universal moral laws on which all rights depend. Such liberty has infinite length but zero depth
J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know
Catechesis
If you read through the Catechetical Lectures of St. Cyril of Jerusalem (mid-4th century), you discover that they have a strongly moral character. The “theology” is quite simple and straight-forward. The extended period of catechesis (often three years in length) was about turning Roman pagans into believing Christians. The habits of the heart (another word for “character”) take time to change or be formed. They are, indeed, the product of a lifetime.
…
We modern people have been nurtured in the heart of a great project and the character of “project managers” has been deeply stamped on us. We expect our own salvation to be something of a project and that w e should be its managers. How frustrating it is to be told that “it does not yet appear what we shall be.” How can we manage the project of our salvation if we do not know what it is we are working towards? How can we tell if we are any closer? Our modern character is formed to expect upward movement – improvement. But St. Sophrony taught that “the way up is the way down.”
In my youth, we zealous Evangelicals condemned Roman Catholic Bibles for all the annotations that we thought distorted the Bible’s message. We did so, with no sense of the absurdity, while clutching our Scofield Reference Bibles, with notes that, for instance, put Genesis Chapter 1 at 4004 B.C.
This is the sort of thing you can’t un-see once you’ve seen it. That the dispensationalist heresies of the Scofield Reference Bible have (or so I understand) become passé in Evangelicalism doesn’t change that. Newer Bible versions with study notes fill the void, though perhaps the antipathy to Rome has diminished (I simply don’t know).
The Mother of God
Despite the clear views of the original Reformers, the Church’s devotion of honor and love for the Holy Virgin Mary is one of the greatest stumbling blocks for today’s Protestants to overcome. As on many points of Orthodox doctrine and practice, the Protestant view has devolved radically since the time of the Reformation. For evangelicals in particular, the traditional veneration offered to the Theotokos through praise and prayers evokes not merely theological objections, but often highly charged negative emotional reactions.
Michael Shanbour, Know the Faith
Thoughts from a freshly-minted Saint
No matter how ‘right’ you may be on various points, you must be diplomatic also. The first and important thing is not ‘rightness’ at all, but Christian love and harmony. Most ‘crazy converts’ have been ‘right’ in the criticisms that led to their downfall; but they were lacking in Christian love and charity and so went off the deep end.
St. Seraphim Rose, newly-Canonized in one North American Orthodox jurisdiction, via Michael Warren Davis.
The most tragic Orthodox downfall I’ve seen personally fit that pattern.
This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.
I John 1:5-7
Southern Gothic
Her stepdaughter, Kate, is twenty-five, fragile, sensitive, a weak woman raised by a strong one. She yearns to have her suicidal despair overcome through raw experience. Storms make her feel wonderful. Sometimes, she tells Bolling, she stays up all night having “revelations.” The happiest moment of her life, she claims, was when she was in a car crash on the Natchez Trace. Her fiancé was killed. She survived. “I went over and looked at Lyell and everybody thought I was an onlooker. He had gravel driven into his cheek. There were twenty or thirty cars stopped on the road and then a bus came along. I got on the bus and went into Natchez. There was some blood on my blouse, so when I got to a hotel, I sent it out to be cleaned, took a bath and ordered a big breakfast, ate every crumb and read the Sunday paper.”
I guess I thought of this as “Sunday fare” because it reminds the reader, albeit with Flannery O’Connor’s “large and startling figures”, just how screwed up we humans are.
I like the Southern Gothic writers, I think, because their literal meaning is opaque; they write what feels like long, evocative poetry.
No graven images
It says a lot about our current president that in response to the news that a giant gold statue of Donald Trump was dedicated this week, you have to ask, “Which one?”
After a 22-foot gold statue of Donald Trump went up outside the Trump National Doral Miami golf course, Pastor Mark Burns, a friend of the president who helped organize the project, felt obliged to explain at its “dedication” that “this is not a golden calf. We worship the Lord Jesus Christ and Him alone.” (Margaret Hartmann, ibid.)
Two observations:
Any Protestant who approves of this statue should never again accuse Orthodox Christians of idolatry because of our icons.
Responding to Orthodox Christians saying “We don’t worship icons,” a common Protestant response is “The hell you don’t! You bow and kiss them!” An Orthodox apologist responding to that denied that bowing and kissing was worship, but sort of understood Protestant confusion: “Protestants venerate God and worship nothing.” (Obviously, that stuck with me.)
Incomplete Renunciation
Please let me have a 10-room house adjacent to campus; 6 bedrooms, 2-1/2 baths, formal dining room, frplace, family room, screened porch, 2-car garage. Well maintained. And let it pass through the eye of a needle.
(Marilyn Nelson, in Christian Poetry in America Since 1940: An Anthology)
The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 