Category: Faith & Ideology

Falls the Shadow

I’d rather not have to write about this, but a majority of the Electoral College has forced my hand.

1

I love that Trump gave us Judge Gorsuch on the Supreme Court. But there is nothing that he or any president could do for conservative Christians that would justify tolerating a president who is so cavalier and incompetent with national security.

(Rod Dreher)

In 1972, I voted for George McGovern. It wasn’t because I was a liberal, even as “a mere child” relatively, but because I had become convinced that Richard Nixon was a crook. (Mrs. Tipsy, as we left the polling place and I announced my final decision, smiled sweetly and announced that her voted had canceled mine.)

I don’t know if I ever came right out and said it outside a very small circle, but as November 8, 2016 approached, I was grateful to be spared the most difficult decision of my life as a voter.

I said several times during the election season that Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton “had God’s judgment written all over it.” I haven’t changed my mind.

If Indiana had been “in play”in the presidential election of 2016, I knew that I would have to consider voting for Hillary Rodham Clinton. I would have done so under no illusions about what it meant for religious liberty for conservative Christians, the lives of unborn children, and other issues of high concern. There was a time in my life when I would have described myself as a “single issue pro-life voter,” but as the country sinks deeper and deeper into manifestations of God’s judgment on us, I’ve encountered too many “pro-life” candidates whose unfitness (if not insanity) outweighs that issue.

Donald Trump was and remains clearly emotionally disturbed — hollow, resentful, insecure, and much, much more — as further items in today’s blog will underline. As in 1972 I could not vote for a crook, so in 2016 I could not, and did not, vote for a madman. I cast a symbolic vote for the American Solidarity Party’s candidate, but had Hillary won with my vote helping her, I’d have been in the reverse mirror image position of those  diehard Trump supporters whose response to every outrage from Trump reply “But but but but but but … Hillary!!!!“

May God have mercy on me, a sinner of imperfect judgment.

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I will occasionally miss David Brooks and Ross Douthat when my New York Time subscription expires next month. Brooks on Tuesday:

Trump seems to need perpetual outside approval to stabilize his sense of self, so he is perpetually desperate for approval, telling heroic fabulist tales about himself …

Trump is not only trying to deceive others. His falsehoods are attempts to build a world in which he can feel good for an instant and comfortably deceive himself.

He is thus the all-time record-holder of the Dunning-Kruger effect, the phenomenon in which the incompetent person is too incompetent to understand his own incompetence …

Trump seems to have not yet developed a theory of mind. Other people are black boxes that supply either affirmation or disapproval. As a result, he is weirdly transparent. He wants people to love him, so he is constantly telling interviewers that he is widely loved. In Trump’s telling, every meeting was scheduled for 15 minutes but his guests stayed two hours because they liked him so much.

Which brings us to the reports that Trump betrayed an intelligence source and leaked secrets to his Russian visitors. From all we know so far, Trump didn’t do it because he is a Russian agent, or for any malevolent intent. He did it because he is sloppy, because he lacks all impulse control, and above all because he is a 7-year-old boy desperate for the approval of those he admires.

The Russian leak story reveals one other thing, the dangerousness of a hollow man.

Our institutions depend on people who have enough engraved character traits to fulfill their assigned duties. But there is perpetually less to Trump than it appears. When we analyze a president’s utterances we tend to assume that there is some substantive process behind the words, that it’s part of some strategic intent.

But Trump’s statements don’t necessarily come from anywhere, lead anywhere or have a permanent reality beyond his wish to be liked at any given instant.

We’ve got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar …

“We badly want to understand Trump, to grasp him,” David Roberts writes in Vox. “It might give us some sense of control, or at least an ability to predict what he will do next. But what if there’s nothing to understand? What if there is no there there?

Hollow man. If that’s not part of it, then I’d better just close down this blog because my assessments are worthless.

A poet tell us where hollow men lead. And his description of feckless hollow men fits those in a position to do something about it but don’t:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom.

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

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Those who might be understandably confused by the current state of evangelicalism should understand a few things:

First, evangelicals don’t have a body of social teaching equivalent, say, to Catholic social doctrine. Catholics are taught, in essence, that if you want to call yourself pro-life on abortion, you also have to support greater access to health care and oppose the dehumanization of migrants. And vice versa. There is a doctrinal whole that requires a broad and consistent view of social justice. Evangelicals have nothing of the sort. Their agenda often seems indistinguishable from the political movement that currently defends and deploys them, be it Reaganism or Trumpism.

Second, evangelicalism is racially and ethnically homogeneous, which leaves certain views and assumptions unchallenged. The American Catholic Church, in contrast, is one-third Hispanic, which changes the church’s perception of immigrants and their struggles. (Successful evangelical churches in urban areas are now experiencing the same diversity and broadening their social concern.)

Third, without really knowing it, Trump has presented a secular version of evangelical eschatology …

(Michael Gerson, Trump is evangelicals’ “dream president.” Here’s why.)

Those confused by the current state of evangelicalism might also want to read Frances FitzGerald’s The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America. Albert Mohler’s extended podcast interview with her persuades me that she is a very knowledgeable outsider.

* * * * *

Men are men before they are lawyers or physicians or manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers and physicians. (John Stuart Mill, Inaugural Address at St. Andrew’s, 1867)

“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Evangelical schism?

Denny Burk and Andrew T. Walker on one side, David Gushee on the other, agree that there is no bridge to span the gap between their sides. The chasm is sexual. More specifically, in the euphemism du jour, it’s “LGBTQ inclusion.”

Gushee:

[Jonathan Merritt] referred to my own work, an October 2014 book called Changing Our Mind. In that book, which Jonathan helped make (in)famous with this interview upon its release, I argued step by step that it was possible (and, finally, imperative) for evangelical Christians to change our mind on many aspects of “the LGBTQ issue.”

…

A highlight of this epilogue includes my acknowledgment that common “evangelical” modes of reading scripture and undertaking moral discernment will never lead to a fully inclusive posture toward LGBTQ persons. But I then go on to make the case for why I believe those common evangelical modes are inadequate ways both of reading scripture and discerning moral truth.

…

I now believe that incommensurable differences in understanding the very meaning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the interpretation of the Bible, and the sources and methods of moral discernment, separate many of us from our former brethren — and that it is best to name these differences clearly and without acrimony, on the way out the door.

I also believe that attempting to keep the dialogue going is mainly fruitless. The differences are unbridgeable. They are articulated daily in endless social media loops.

Still, in Changing Our Mind, 3rd edition, to discharge my scholarly debts and to be fair to those who have sought to engage my thinking, I attempt one last foray into dialogue with my critics on the LGBTQ inclusion front.

There is nothing nasty in Gushee’s mode of expression, but read it carefully. He acknowledges differences over “the very meaning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” If he’s a sound Christian, his adversaries are not. Accordingly, he acknowledges that he left Evangelicalism 30 months ago for some unnamed other place, presumably “mainline” Protestant.

If an Evangelical had said this of Gushee first, in exactly the same tone, that substance would have been ipso facto “hate speech.” But all they need to do now is agree and elaborate Gushee’s point.

I’ll not quote Burk and Walker quite so extensively, but they do agree and elaborate. Burk:

It is time for folks on both sides of this debate to come to terms with just how much of a watershed this issue is. The evangelical movement is facing a moment of crisis over this issue. We are about to find out who is for real and who isn’t. We shouldn’t relish this moment as it reveals so much that is unhealthy in our movement. But neither should we shrink from it. We must contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3). That is what the true church has always done. And that is what she must now do again.

Walker:

Gushee will no doubt disagree with my framing of the situation, but whereas he thinks he’s leaving evangelicalism, I believe he is abandoning the faith once and for all delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3). He is abandoning the very words of Jesus who upholds the sexual binary in Matthew 19:4-6. Those are not words haphazardly written or thrown around intended to score cheap internet points. But Gushee’s own words bear witness to the claim that he views his affirmation of LGBT relationships as constitutive to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He views this issue as a dividing line in biblical interpretation, moral discernment, with the result that we — those who stand within two thousand years of teaching — are “former brethren.” I agree and reach the same conclusion as him, though with the opposite position.

My sympathies in this internecine Protestant quarrel are, of course, with Burk and Walker. But while I’m happy at where they’ve drawn the line, I’m honestly puzzled at why they drew it there and not elsewhere (other than aligning with the mutable center of Southern Baptist gravity).

Burk again:

The Side A/Side B approach wants to convince people that differences over these issues shouldn’t really divide us. Some Christians will affirm sexual immorality and some will not. In terms of doctrinal priority, the issue is more like baptism than the deity of Christ. No big deal. We are all Christians after all. Why can’t we all just get along?

There are a number of problems with this kind of reasoning, but I will mention just two:

(1) The scripture casts sexual immorality as a first-order issue. In fact, it treats all unrepented sin as a first order issue that prevents people from entering the Kingdom of God (1 Cor. 6:9-11). No matter what side you come down on in this debate, there can be no question that our conclusions will define how we understand the boundaries of the church. This is not a debate about adiaphora but about the essence of our faith. A church can no more accommodate both points of view than it can accommodate both light and darkness (2 Cor. 6:14-16) ….

Why is baptism “no big deal”? Why is sex “about the essence of our faith” a “first-order issue”? Is all unrepented sin a first-order issue? Then what does “first-order” issue ad to the argument that “unrepented sin” doesn’t cover? Why doesn’t Jonathan Merritt’s test of consistency with the Apostle’s Creed suffice? (Albert Mohler’s Call for Theological Triage, linked by Burk, is helpful, but Mohler doesn’t even rank sex in his taxonomy.)

Walker:

This is not a debate about eldership versus congregational authority, or internecine squabbles on how the end times will occur. This is about what the true church confesses. This is about truth and error. This is about eternal destiny.

Why are Church polity and eschatology not part of “what the true church confesses … about truth and error”?

My Protestant adiaphora detector is getting very old, and appears incapable of detecting these answers. Burk’s and Walker’s assertions seem like conclusions rather than premises even though they’re the right conclusions.

I just don’t know how they got there (or how Gushee got to where he is — not to mention how Jonathan Merritt, Rachel Held Evans and Jen Hatmaker came to substantially Gushee’s posiiton), because their explanations just lead to more questions.

I think I pretty well understand Robert A. J. Gagnon, Protestant though he be, but he’s not so much ranking truth as discerning it. (See here, too.)

This may signal a major Evangelical schism. The LGBTQ-affirming have got the cultural wind at their backs, whether or not they’ve decided that they’re not evangelical any more. Burk, Walker and their tribe are facing a tough slog. There will be great attrition in their ranks, I predict, precisely because the line between essentials and adiaphora can seem arbitrary.

I’ve beaten up my former tribe too many times already. I’m really worried that they, who in various ways have positioned themselves as the American paradigm of what it means to be a Protestant Christian, will not hold firm.

I’m not even going to suggest … well, that thing I’m not going to suggest about where there’s firmer ground.

UPDATE: On May 10, I made a few edits that don’t alter my meaning. I will now add one that does expand on what I was getting at:

The Burk/Walker side will experience attrition because the line between essentials and adiaphora can seem arbitrary and the spirit of the age, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, says the greatest commandment is “Be Nice,” the spirit’s debased substitute for “love your neighbor as you love yourself.”

* * * * *

Men are men before they are lawyers or physicians or manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers and physicians. (John Stuart Mill, Inaugural Address at St. Andrew’s, 1867)

“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

You’ve been had

UPDATE:
ACLU Will Not Sue Over Religious Freedom Executive Order

The ACLU announced yesterday that after careful review of President Trump’s new Executive Order on Free Speech and Religious Liberty, it has decided not to file suit. It said in part:

Today’s executive order signing was an elaborate photo-op with no discernible policy outcome. After careful review of the order’s text we have determined that the order does not meaningfully alter the ability of religious institutions or individuals to intervene in the political process. The order portends but does not yet do harm to the provision of reproductive health services.

President Trump’s prior assertion that he wished to ‘totally destroy’ the Johnson Amendment with this order has proven to be a textbook case of ‘fake news.’

* * * * *

“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.