Tag: faith

After 5 days’ reflection

Charlie Kirk

I have not read anyone rejoicing at the assassination of Charlie Kirk except second-hand, from folks who are trying to show how terrible “they” are. Of course, I’ve been off Facebook for years and I ignore my X.com and Bluesky accounts because they’re disgusting time-sucks. (I prefer having my time sucked by dwelling too long on the innumerable writers who are still sane, decent, and somewhat thoughtful.)

I’ll rephrase what I hinted before about the murder: anyone my age who knew all about Charlie Kirk (1) is way too political or (2) has a Peter Pan complex.

That said, I have read the news and a lot of the commentary from center-left to center-right sources since the murder, and I offer these brief thoughts:

  1. Drop the hagiography, please. Just drop it. Charlie Kirk was not a saint. He wasn’t just a guy who tried to engage with students in good faith argumentation. He was a bit of a troll or provocateur. He tried to punish speech he didn’t like: his first notable TPUSA act was setting up a right-coded cancel-culture website that’s still up today. I won’t go on, though I could (whereas last Wednesday, I could not have). But see point 3.
  2. Stop rushing ahead of the evidence. I just belatedly listened to a podcast from First Things that knew so very, very much about the assassin and the significance of the shooting being on a campus — before anybody knew who the assassin was (beyond that he was nimble enough to jump from a roof to flee the scene). The decline of First Things proceeds apace. But from what I read, it wasn’t the worst example of that.
  3. Charlie Kirk was young and was changing, arguably for the better: “Charlie Kirk might have been developing into the kind of figure we now lack. Like William F. Buckley in his youth, he began as a rabble-rouser. Yet over time Buckley cultivated himself into the erudite thought leader familiar to Firing Line viewers. Kirk seemed to be walking a similar road.” (Jeffrey Bilbro, The Last Lesson of Charlie Kirk) Sadly, we’ll never know.
  4. Pray for a pandemic of repentance in the USA. Though my personality type is melancholic, I have tended to see major events (9/11, January 6) thus: “Maybe this one will wake America up and drive it to its knees” (instead of “Oh, boy! This is it! It’s war!”). I’m still praying for national repentance, though my soul is getting weary.

Coinage of the year, maybe of the decade: “conflict entrepreneur”

On CNN, [Utah Governor Spencer] Cox labelled the War Room host [Steve Bannon] a “conflict entrepreneur” and encouraged Americans not to listen to voices that profit off of division.

“Look, there are conflict entrepreneurs out there who benefit from radicalizing us. And I’m not one of those. I don’t know that that’s particularly helpful,” he said.

John Bowden.

Speaking of which …

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.

Rahm Emanuel.

Trump on Wednesday night pantomimed high-mindedness: “It’s long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree.”

President, edit thyself. “Demonic forces” are actual words Trump used at a rally in 2023 to smear his political opponents. That year or the next, he also described them as the “enemy from within,” “Marxist, fascist and communist tyrants who want to smash our Judeo-Christian heritage,” “a sick nest of people,” “thugs, horrible people, fascists, Marxists, sick people,” “vermin” and “radical left lunatics.” Those are highlights from just the past two and a half years. He was whipping up hatred long before then, and he whips up hatred still.

Frank Bruni, The ‘Demonic’ Hypocrisy of Trump’s Plea for Peace.

It was hard to decide what representative quote to pull from the Bruni column, so I’m using one of my gift links so you can read it all. Of particular note is Bruni’s list of recent lethal violence against Democrats, and a welcome note about how hard it is to decipher motives (which is one reason why I didn’t say “lethal violence against Democrats by radical-Right MAGA types”).

Finally:

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?”

Jonah Goldberg.

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio

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 social medium.

Sunday, 8/10/25

No nonsense

A veteran Orthodox Priest recalls some wedding planning:

Three occasions stand out in my memory.

In the first, the mother of the bride arrived for the wedding rehearsal fifty minutes late, carrying aloft one of those rather tedious middle-class books of wedding etiquette, exclaiming that she wanted the wedding to be just “like this.” It wasn’t.

On another occasion, I was telephoned by another bride’s mother, a woman I had never met. It was quite obvious that she regarded the church as a sort of wedding shop at which she simply ordered the things she wanted and skipped things that did not look attractive. She didn’t want crowns at her daughter’s wedding, though I cannot now remember why. We had crowns.

On a third occasion, a marriage consultant had been hired to look after the wedding. When we met in the church, she told me that she was going to put in a rose bower right over where the couple would stand, and that she wanted piped music from various show tunes to “set the mood.” She got neither wish.

One of the great blessings in the Orthodox Church is that we do not have to create occasions. The Orthodox wedding service is so powerful, so profound, that we do not have to dress it up, give it atmosphere, or otherwise make it other than it already is. This allows people to relax. They may have problems at the wedding reception—crowds and alcohol are always a bit risky, and banquet food is rarely worth the money—but the marriage service of the Orthodox Church is a glimpse of heaven without making any particular fuss or effort at all.

Fr. Meletios Webber, Bread & Water, Wine & Oil.

My wife and I were fortunate in the early 70s when my then-pastor, of New England Congregationalist stock, effectively decreed that we would follow the Book of Common prayer pretty closely. It wasn’t Orthodox, but it wasn’t kitsch, either.

Life in the monastery

All my bad habits, disinfected, it is true, of formal sin, had sneaked into the monastery with me and had received the religious vesture along with me: spiritual gluttony, spiritual sensuality, spiritual pride. . . .

Thomas Merton, The Seven-Story Mountain

The reprobate in heaven

I will venture to say more than this; – it is fearful, but it is right to say it; – that if we wished to imagine a punishment for an unholy, reprobate soul, we perhaps could not fancy a greater than to summon it to heaven. Heaven would be hell to an irreligious man… He would find no one like himself; he would see in every direction the marks of God’s holiness, and these would make him shudder. He would feel himself always in His presence. He could no longer turn his thoughts another way, as he does now, when conscience reproaches him. He would know that the Eternal Eye was ever upon him; and that Eye of holiness, which is joy and life to holy creatures, would seem to him an Eye of wrath and punishment. God cannot change His nature. Holy He must ever be. But while He is holy, no unholy soul can be happy in heaven.

John Henry Newman via Addison Hodges Hart.

It is common in Orthodox Christianity to suggest that the presence of God is light to the righteous, searing heat to the unrighteous. Neither that nor Newman’s sermon is systematic theology; both are analogies to address a question that people have about God’s justice, heaven and hell.

The opposite of war

The opposite of war is not peace, but liturgy – the cognitive, bodily, totalizing act that steadily increases communion, instead of cutting it. Liturgy is an act that purifies and knits the character together, whereas trauma unravels our character. In liturgy, I give my life for my brother and sister, I renounce retaliation, and I give my very body and blood for the life of the entire world.

Timothy Patitsas, The Ethics of Beauty

Not much of a stretch

If Christianity is the one, true religion, is it that much of a stretch to believe that there is one, true expression of Christianity?

Carlton, Clark, The Way, 1998 Edition

That one true expression builds on the one foundation with gold, silver and precious stones, not wood, hay and straw.

Well-being declining

Since the 1960s we have adopted values that are more secular, more individualistic and more oriented around self-expression than the values that prevail in the Eastern Orthodox European countries such as Serbia, the Confucian countries like South Korea and the mostly Catholic Latin countries like Mexico.

The countries that made this values shift are seeing their well-being decline, according to that Gallup thriving survey. The countries that resisted this shift are seeing their well-being improve. The master trend in recent Western culture has been to emancipate the individual from the group, and now we are paying the social and spiritual price.

David Brooks, Why More People in the World Are Feeling Hopeful (Except Us) (gift link).

The Culture Wars: cui bono?

While at Brookings, [Os Guinness] helped to draft a public document that could have had the domestic impact of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights if events had only unfolded differently. Aided by the likes of Richard John Neuhaus and George Weigel, Guinness led the drafting of the Williamsburg Charter for the bicentennial celebration of the First Amendment in 1988. The document called for a “reaffirmation and reappraisal of its vision and guiding principles.” Signed by a broad coalition of religious faiths and politicians across the aisle (including presidents, chief justices, and members of Congress), the charter spelled out the importance of the First Amendment’s twin guarantees of religious liberty: the No Establishment and the Free Exercise clauses. Both clauses work together to protect religious liberty, not limit it.

Enshrining these at the heart of the Constitution as America’s “first liberty” was necessary, as the document spells out, because

[our] form of government depends upon ultimate beliefs, for otherwise we have no right to the rights by which it thrives, yet rejects any official formulation of them… The result is neither a naked public square where all religion is excluded, nor a sacred public square with any religion established or semi-established. The result, rather, is a civil public square in which citizens of all religious faiths, or none, engage one another in the continuing democratic discourse. … The Framers’ intention is indisputably ignored when public policy debates can appeal to the theses of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, or Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud but not to the Western religious tradition in general and the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures in particular.

The document was commemorated with a signing ceremony in the Hall of the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg, and many smaller events, including a conference that featured papers from intellectual luminaries like James Davison Hunter, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, and Peter Berger. Even still, it never made quite the impact it could have in reframing the conversation about the place of religion in society (a shame especially in light of recent controversies: e.g., Christian groups being kicked off campus, religious monuments being stripped from public locations, and the debated ‘failures’ of classical liberalism).

The Williamsburg Charter’s failure came down to the absence of a single signature: that of the sitting president, “whose backing was crucial to the practical rollout of the Charter.” At the end of the day, “strong opposition from the Religious Right blocked the participation of President Reagan.” “The culture wars are in the interests of Republicans so you will only get to the president over my dead body,” one of Reagan’s cabinet secretaries told Guinness. This destroyed any opportunity to articulate why Americans needed to bring their faith with them into the public square. While Guinness’ campaign has continued on in the work of John Inazu and that of others, the cultural capital it once had within arm’s reach is spent.

John Shelton, Os Guinness: The Christian Public Intellectual After Jacques Maritain (bold added).

Limits of redemptionist theology

The inadequacy of this theology was brilliantly deconstructed by Vladimir Lossky, whose analysis reveals why this opinion results in other problems that manifest themselves in Western Christian theology:

Christian horizons are limited by the drama played between God, who is infinitely offended by sin, and man, who is unable to satisfy the impossible demands of vindictive justice. The drama finds its resolution in the death of Christ, the Son of God who has become man in order to substitute Himself for us and pay our debt to divine justice. What becomes of the dispensation of the Holy Spirit here? His part is reduced to that of an auxiliary, an assistant in redemption, causing us to receive Christ’s expiated merit. . . . The price of our redemption having been paid in the death of Christ, the resurrection and the ascension are only a glorious happy end of his work, a kind of apotheosis without direct relationship to our human destiny. This redemptionist theology, placing all the emphasis on the passion, seems to take no interest in the triumph of Christ over death. The very work of the Christ-Redeemer, to which this theology is confined, seems to be truncated, impoverished, reduced to a change of the divine attitude toward fallen men, unrelated to the nature of humanity.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Sunday, 7/13/25

Our unchurchy churchiness

The confusion of confessions at these revivals dismayed Joseph Smith (d. 1844), a recent settler in western New York. Caught up with his parents in the wildfire of emotions, he had a conversion experience in which all Christian confessions were revealed to be false. He then encountered a spiritual being who told him he would be the founder of the only true religion on earth. Like many Protestants since the time of Luther, Smith saw his work as an act of restoration.

John Strickland, The Age of Utopia (italics added).

I don’t remember whether I’ve said this out loud before, but the deeper I get into the Orthodox Christian faith, the more arbitrary do I find Protestant line-drawing that tries to distinguish “denominations” and the tens of thousands of non-denominational evangelical churches (including Joel Osteen) from “cults” like the Latter Day Saints — cults that came out of the selfsame time, places and democratic impulses.

Oh, I’ve read my Walter Martin back in the day, but it just doesn’t linger persuasively after one gets deeper into Christian history.

Chesterton was half-right: America is a “nation with the soul of a church.” The other half of the truth is that many of our churches lack basic features of historic churchiness: sacraments, liturgical forms, settled creeds, authority. Like America itself, the American church seems a novus ordo seclorum. Our churchy national soul weirdly inhabits a body of peculiar, borderline-heretical actual churches.

In some respects, our unchurchy churchiness is no surprise. We’re Protestant, and Protestants have always been, as Alec Ryrie writes, radicals, lovers, and fighters, restlessly carrying on a centuries-long “open-ended, ill-disciplined argument,” churning out new ideas and rehabilitating old ones with “a certain generic restlessness, an itchy instability.” A “self-perpetuating dynamo of dissatisfaction and yearning,” the Protestant churches have been “one of the engines driving modern history.”

America was founded as a post-Christendom Christian nation. Christian, yes, profoundly so, but never Christian in the way Europe was Christian. Europe became Christian century after plodding century. We started out Christian. The Reformation battered and splintered European Christendom. Colonists brought their European splits with them, and proceeded to split even more. The church was the unifying reality of medieval Europe; after the Reformation, most European nations established one or another variety of national church. Free church Christianity was a late development in Europe. Free church Christianity is American Christianity. States retained established churches into the early nineteenth century, but that was a long time ago. Our default ecclesiology is Lockean and Baptist.

Peter Leithart, The Genius of American Christianity. Leithart keenly recognizes the problem, but (IMHO) misapplies it:

Without revivalist Christianity, America would have rolled over and succumbed to secularism long ago.

But because we did have revivalism, we call “Churches” our “borderline-heretical”, crypto-secularist bacchanalia.

Heretics all

Alas, we are heretics all, and the one we subscribe to is not love any more than the kingdom for the sake of which we are fools is the kingdom of heaven.

R.S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems 1988-2000

I.R.S. Says Churches Can Endorse Candidates From the Pulpit

The agency said that if a house of worship endorsed a candidate to its congregants, the I.R.S. would view that not as campaigning but as a private matter, like “a family discussion concerning candidates.”

David A. Fahrenthold, I.R.S. Says Churches Can Endorse Candidates From the Pulpit.

I don’t consider this good news except insofar as it should clear away any chill on free speech when a pastor is preparing remarks on moral issues (i.e., “Can I say that from the pulpit? Could it be considered a violation of the 1950s’ ‘Johnson Rule’ and cost my church its tax exemption?”).

Even then, I’m not much enthused, because I’m mindful that “Christ did not come to make bad men good, but to make dead men live.” (Fr. Stephen Freeman, paraphrased from memory.) There is such a thing as too much preaching on “moral issues.”

Neither did he come to make Republicans out of Democrats or vice-versa.

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Fanatics and others

Fanaticism

The Minnesota Assassin

The Minnesota political assassin (who I won’t name) had some red flags in initial biographical information. From my perspective (Eastern Orthodox, formerly Evangelical and Calvinist, always active in my faith and never “charismatic”), the biggest one was his invocation of new apostles and prophets as what America needs spiritually — an indication of New Apostolic Reformation beliefs or something adjacent.

(Surprisingly few NAR advocates will own up to it; either it’s so loosely structured that adherence is ambiguous – which I suspect is the case – or they’re told to lie, or something.)

Now Stephanie McCrummen at the Atlantic has dug a little deeper and confirmed my suspicions.

Now comes the hard part: Assuming his guilt (which I’m allowed to do because I’m not a criminal court), dare we blame his assassinations, and the apparent intention to assassinate as many as 70 others, on his NAR ideas, or do we hold open the possibility of insanity or some other explanation?

Blaming NAR is tempting for me because I so detest it. But I have seen no information that NAR actually encourages physical violence, and not just vehement rhetoric. (Their “violent prayer” talk seems, preliminarily, to be a red herring.) The theory of stochastic terrorism has always struck me as plausible, but it’s hard to imagine any forcefully-expressed opinion that has zero chance of pushing some random person over some edge.

So I’m glad Stephanie McCrummen withheld judgment about causation. It’s still the extremely early days in the criminal proceedings, and more, if not all, will be revealed eventually.

Christianity is not an instrument of political power

David French comes closer than McCrummen to linking the assassination effect to the N.A.R. cause, and also had this observation:

Last election cycle I helped create a new Christian curriculum for political engagement …

As I talked about the curriculum in gatherings across the country, I was struck by the extent to which I was asked the same question time and again. “Sure,” people would say, “we need to be kind, but what if that doesn’t work?”

The implication was clear — victory was the imperative, and while kindness was desirable, it was the contingent value, to be discarded when it failed to deliver the desired political results.

David French

A “Christian” who thinks political victory is more important than living as Christ taught (let’s say, in the Beatitudes for instance) is a sorely confused Christian.

I’ve probably said it before, but I’ll say it again. One of the countless blessings I’ve received in Orthodox Christianity is the company of martyrs, many of whom died because they knew that gaining the world wasn’t worth losing one’s soul. If you’re in a “Christian” tradition where leaders or laity act as if that’s a good trade (none of them are wicked enough to actually teach it), get out before it’s too late.

Who are the fanatics?

We know now that the FBI’s infamous Richmond Memo, targeting traditional Catholics as potential terrorists and comparing them with Islamists, was not merely the product of a few rogues in a single field office, as the agency had claimed.  Multiple offices were involved in drafting it, and it was distributed to over a thousand employees.

This post is not going to be a rant against the Biden administration.  What interests me is what was going on in the analysts’ heads.  I credit them with sincerity.  But why did they think traditional Catholicism is comparable to the ideology of radical Islam?

The most generous interpretation which can be placed on the memo is that the analysts thought of fanaticism simply as strong belief, and assumed that any strong belief is potentially violent.

But a sensible definition of fanaticism would emphasize the content of belief, not its strength.  You aren’t a fanatic for believing very strongly that you should “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.”  The more strongly you believe that, the less likely you are to be a terrorist.

On the other hand, you really are a fanatic for believing that you should “kill them wherever you find them,” meaning Jews and infidels.  The more strongly you believe that, the more likely you are to be a terrorist.

The content of belief did come into the analysts’ definition in one way.  They plainly believed strongly in their own ideology, yet it seems never to have occurred to them to view themselves as fanatics.  It seems, then, that in their view, the term “fanatic” must have meant not just “anyone who believes strongly,” but rather something like “Anyone who believes strongly enough in God, rather than in progressive dogma, for his belief to influence the rest of his life” – and the full force of the federal government must be used to surveil and suppress all such people.

So by their definition, yes, traditional Catholics are fanatics.  But by a more sensible definition, which ideology is a better candidate for being called by that label?

J Budziszewski

Evangelical Religion

I return to the subject of Evangelicalism so often, I think, because there is some stubborn something within me that believes, against so much journalistic “evidence” (thousands of profiles of self-identified Evangelicals doing bizarre things), that a significant number of Evangelicals are acting and believing in perfect good faith, and that I simply need to find the magic words to help them see what I can’t un-see.

There is some tenderness mixed with my frustration at 28 years of almost complete failure in that regard. And there is some perversity in my rejection of the wisdom of Orthodoxy, which really does not encourage trying to argue people into the Orthodox faith. “Acquire the Holy Spirit and thousands around you will be saved,” said Saint Seraphim of Sarov, but something there is about an American ex-Evangelical that still loves a short-cut.

Over the years, I have cast a lot of shade on the concept of “religion.” I’m starting to think I should have self-critically cast similar shade under the concept of “Evangelicalism.”

Here’s what I think I’ve been doing that’s sorely mistaken:

  1. The “good faith” Evangelicals I’m trying to persuade are basically wealthy white church-going Evangelicals in, or in orbit around, Wheaton, Illinois (and maybe Grand Rapids, Michigan). The former are the kind of people I hung out with for roughly 6 years of my life (five years in school plus one year in my young adulthood), the latter for 15 years. They are the kind of people I see at my Wheaton Academy homecomings every five years. I like them; no, I love them. We don’t talk politics when we get together. I fancy they’re not Trump fans, but I really don’t know and I fear I’d be disappointed if I found out.
  2. The evangelicals I’m yelling about are random self-identified Evangelicals or flakes identified as Evangelical by journalists in mainstream media, who may or may not attend church and who may have adopted the Evangelical label simply because they’re Trump supporters. I have little experience of them. The “good faith” Evangelicals may be as baffled by them as I am.

My impression, which I’ve had but suppressed for rather a long time, is that “Evangelicalism” isn’t coherent, though we seem not to be able to live without it. So when I shout at Evangelicals, it’s like shaking my fist and cursing at the clouds.

It has always been notoriously difficult to define what an Evangelical is. Probably the most widely-accepted attempt is the Bebbington Quadrilateral. But my favorite is from Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio Journal. I’m not going to take the time to dig it up verbatim, but the gist was that Evangelicals recognize one another not by right doctrine, orthodoxy, but by “right feeling,” orthopathos. They sing the same songs, and pray similar extemporaneous prayers, supported Billy Graham Crusades, and so forth.

I don’t know whether that is even true today of the motley crew that journalists identify as Evangelical.

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows: You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well … Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the ‘wet streets cause rain’ stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story—and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

Michael Crichton (via ChatGPT because I couldn’t remember “Gell-Mann Amnesia effect”).

The press tends to garble Eastern Orthodoxy, so why should I believe them about Evangelicalism?

Many of them probably labeled the Minnesota assassin “evangelical.” Was he? Is the evidence that he wasn’t a No True Scotsman fallacy?

I know Orthodoxy; I just really don’t know Evangelicalism or its outer boundaries any more, if ever I did.

So you have my permission to go back to everything I’ve written about Evangelicals and Evangelicalism and say “he doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” because much of the time I’ve been Gell-Mann-ing it.

I’ll try to do better, but old habits die hard.

Sanity (a/k/a The Gospel for people battered by bad religion)

Having dwelt long on some pretty sorry stuff, a very long but infinitely more positive note:

I know that what I’m about to talk about is something I’ve talked about probably even fairly recently on the show, but I find myself in real life — meaning as a priest dealing with a group of parishioners, and trying to help them and guide them and just family members and everybody in general — I find myself having to say this over and over and over again, which tells me that probably if I say it over this microphone to people, there’s probably at least some folks out there who need to hear it again, even if I have talked about it recently.

The Christianity that those of us, at least in the United States — and I can only speak about that experience because I haven’t had any others — the Christianity we grew up around came from one of two categories largely. And people who want to defend those types of Christianity will call this a caricature. I don’t care anymore. But what I’m about to say, even if you think it’s a caricature of what they’re trying to teach, this is what a lot of the people within these traditions have actually received. Right? So it’s very easy to defend some tradition based on what’s in the books, and what we would mean to say, right? But I’m talking about what the people who I encounter, the people who talk to me about spiritual things. come to me and give confessions, what they’ve received from the Christianity they’ve grew up around, how that has shaped them, how they think because of it. And if people, representatives of those groups want to say that’s not what they meant to teach, cool, but maybe some introspection on why that’s not what people are receiving.

Anyway, what people have received comes in two categories. One is sort of the smilin’ Bob Shuler School of, “God loves you just the way you are and you don’t have to do anything. Just don’t worry about it. Just smile and be happy and listen to the hymns of your choice that you enjoy.” … That worked really well with boomers. That seemed to answer something they needed to hear. Maybe they’re a generation who grew up with very dissatisfied perfectionist parents, and so just hearing you’re fine just the way you are was what they needed, right? But that doesn’t work on subsequent generations, because subsequent generations are more realistic or nihilistic depending on your point of view, and know there’s something deeply wrong with themselves and with the world around them. So just telling them over again, “No, no, you’re fine, everything’s fine, it doesn’t work.” That’s why those kind of churches are all empty now.

The other school of thought is pretty much the exact opposite. It’s God doesn’t really love you. Right. In fact He’s pretty angry with you and He’s getting ready to send you to hell. Right? And the only way to avoid that is, depending on your tradition, right, is, for you to love him nonetheless, really sincerely — and there’s a rabbit hole to go down. How sincere am I ever really? — and do that plus live your life at a certain way and follow certain rules. Which will differ based on tradition, and which you will inevitably fail at.

That second one is most of the people who I interact with on spiritual matters, and it’s almost like they’ve been taught and they’ve internalized that. Their life in this world is this sort of really horrible reality show, almost like Squid Games, and like God is about weeding out contestants and narrowing it down to this faithful few and everybody else goes to hell, goes to eternal punishment except for this faithful few who, again, depending on your tradition, he may just pick. Or, you know, they’re the ones who really did it right. They’re the ones who really loved him sincerely, or they’re the ones who really lived their life the right way.

And any way you slice those things, most people again are realistic enough that when they look at their life, they don’t see a lot of evidence in their life and their actions that they’re one of the people God picked, or they don’t see a lot of evidence of their life that they’re really sincere about following God, or they don’t see a lot of evidence of their life that they’re really toeing the line and living the life they know they should be living, meaning most people are walking around — like religious people — walking around thinking they’re probably going to end up in hell. That God is probably mad at the most of the time, and that He’s looking for them to make some missteps so, boom!, they can get nailed.

Also most atheists are walking around doing the same thing they’re protesting constantly that there is no God because they can’t deal with that guilt and stuff that they’ve internalized. They can’t live like that. No one can live like that their route to trying to live like that and deal with the cognitive dissonance is just to deny that any of it’s true, over and over and over again publicly, loudly to everyone who will listen. Right.

Whereas the religious people are just in this kind of quiet desperation of how do I figure this out. Right.

So let me reiterate again, right, and Penal Substitution plays a big part in this. That’s why I’m bringing it up in this context:

God loves you. Jesus said so. St. John’s Gospel, the Father Himself loves you. He is not angry at you. He does not want to destroy you for your sins. There is no power of justice that commands him to do so. No one commands him to do anything. He loves you. He wants you to find salvation, but salvation is a thing you have to actually do. He wants you to do it. The Bible says so. God wills that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. But you have to do it. He empowers you to do it. He forgives you when you mess up trying to do it. He heals you when you damage yourself trying to do it and failing. He is entirely on your side. The God who created the universe is entirely on your side and the saints are on your side and the church is on your side. Everyone is on your side. Christ is advocating for you. Everything is set up for us.

When Saint Paul says to us, continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling. You don’t stop them like Kierkegaard did. Read the next verse because it is God who is working in you to will and to do according to his pleasure. We continue on and we work out our salvation because we know that God is on our side and empowering us to do it and loving us and loving other people through us. We need to pray about that. We need to pray it. We need to repeat it. We need to kind of imitate what the atheists are doing. We need to say it out loud. We need to say it to each other. We need to say it to everyone who will listen right? That God loves you and wants you to find salvation, wants you to be healed, wants you to be set free from sin. He wants all these things for you. It doesn’t mean you have nothing to do. That doesn’t mean you’re fine just the way you are. You know you’re not fine just the way you are, right? But it means that He is there to help you to grow to be transformed into the person who you need to be and want to be. The person he created you to be for eternity. That’s the actual message of Christianity. Don’t accept any substitutes for that, ever at all for any reason.

Fr. Stephen De Young.

I probably will publish this from time to time for the rest of my blogging life.

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Sunday, May 11, 2025

Christians in politics

The lure of power

Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson, who had been Falwell’s chief lieutenants in the Moral Majority, published a book questioning not just the efficacy of political action but the righteousness of the enterprise. In Blinded by Might they argued that in the process of trying to win elections conservative Christians had been seduced by the lure of power. What had begun as an effort to restore Christian values to the nation had degenerated into an unbridled partisan struggle, creating an atmosphere in which it was assumed that Democrats could not be Christians and that Bill and Hillary Clinton were the Antichrist.

Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals

So far as I can tell, this continues in full force except that the “Christian” bona fides of the Christian right are becoming ever more dubious.

The need for limits

Localism is modest … and in its modesty it is largely indifferent to the divisions that animate citizens who may hate each other but otherwise share the first premise of the modern age, which is that limits are there to be broken. When the success of the economy depends on perpetual growth fueled by boundless consumption, and the legitimacy of the state depends on a receding horizon of social progress fueled by an ever-expanding list of rights, “modest hopes” are obscene. Simply living as you should, without lending your energies to the machinery of progress, can be a mortal threat to the way things are.

… [I]f there is any such thing as an “ideal regime” it is the peasant village, “a gathering of human families for the sake of endurance across the harsh terrain of mortal life”. But many kinds of actually existing regimes have room for such gatherings, and our proper aim as citizens is not to transform the empires of progress into the Shire. Our business is not with ideals. We have a basic interest in existing institutions that support material life and in their competent management; beyond this realm of “normal politics,” we need not concern ourselves.

… Radner mentions the book of Ecclesiastes as the “scriptural ballast” for his political theory, and calls it “that most political book of the Bible.”

Adam Smith, reviewing Ephraim Radner, Mortal Goods. My copy of Mortal Goods was delivered yesterday and is near the top of the stack to read.

American Christianity

False binary

Christianity as we see it in eighteenth-century Britain or twenty-first-century America is not Christianity as it has always been, and the more fundamental changes may not be those that the received history of religion narrates. The cultural formations of western Christianity, growing as they do in good part from binary, Protestant-Catholic debates, can be thrown into stark relief, for instance, when studied in comparison to that much neglected third term in Christendom: the Eastern Orthodox churches from which Rome severed itself nearly half a millennium before the Reformation, charting a course for Western Christianity wed to rationalism and enamored of individual authority, whether papal or personal.

Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity.

I don’t recall any other non-Orthodox (so far as I know) writer who doesn’t reflexively fall into the trap of treating the Eastern Orthodox as the schismatics, Rome as the orthodox continuation.

Cooties

“There never was a time when it was so much abused, when its simple narrations were so much perverted, and when its true and more important uses were so completely overlooked in following fanciful theories and false deductions; and such as seriously threaten the interests of Protestant Christianity.” [Professor David R. Kerr of the United Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Monmouth, Illinois] warned students to beware of two “fanciful theories”: the “Mercersburg theology” taught by Philip Schaff and John Williamson Nevin, which appeared to depart from traditional Reformed views of the sacraments and of church history, and the Oxford Movement, a group of High Church Anglicans whose writings in the 1830s and 1840s gave birth to Anglo-Catholicism. These errors could not be countered merely with scripture, Kerr argued, but required careful attention to church history, which alone could “correct the gross perversions and false glosses.”

Paul J. Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation

As a Protestant Calvinist, I loved the Mercerburg theologians, who translated the Church Fathers, and was fascinated by the Oxford Movement. Considering where I’ve ended up, I guess it is no surprise that my favorite 19th century protestants, those of catholic leanings, had cooties in the eyes of evangelical sectarians.

Secularizations

After he had twice visited the United States in the 1930s, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a perceptive essay contrasting Christian development in America with parallel developments in the parts of Europe most directly shaped by the Protestant Reformation. His assessment included an observation that was as shrewd in its comparative wisdom as it is relevant for the themes of this book: “The secularization of the church on the continent of Europe arises from the misinterpretation of the reformers’ distinction of the two realms [of church and society]; American secularization derives precisely from the imperfect distinction of the kingdoms and offices of church and state, from the enthusiastic claim of the church to universal influence in the world.” What Bonhoeffer saw has been described with other terms here: The key moves in the creation of evangelical America were also the key moves that created secular America.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

Why smart atheists admit they’re cultural Christians

At the same time, you hold all sorts of Christian assumptions about the world, even if you do not believe in God. It is clear to you that there are such things as human rights, such that a certain level of dignity belongs to all people simply because they are members of the human race, and laws and customs should reflect this in practice. You reject polygamy. You believe in limitations on the power of the state and that the rule of law is essential to a healthy society, whereby the rex (king) is always subject to the lex (law). You think those with much should provide for those with little, whether this is expressed through a redistributive state, charitable giving, or both. You affirm the fundamental equality of all people before the law. You abhor slavery. You do not seek to justify inequalities in wealth or status seek to reduce them.

You think the central unit in human relations is the self, the sovereign individual, rather than the group to which the self belongs. You think all people are equally endowed with free will, reason, and moral agency. Humility in others is more attractive to you than pride. Love is more appealing to you than honor. You think colonialism is morally problematic, and that those who have benefited from it have obligations (however defined) to those who did not. You think of time as an arrow rather than a wheel: you believe that we are gradually making progress toward a better world rather than declining from a previous Golden Age or recurring in an endless series of cycles, and as such you would think “behind the times” is an insult and “ahead of her time” is a compliment. You admire people who forgive their enemies. You long for transcendence and are likely to describe yourself as spiritual, open to the supernatural, and even as praying sometimes. Even if the God of Abraham is dead to you, your language, legal framework, moral imagination, and sense of self are all haunted by his ghost.

Andrew Wilson, Remaking the World.

Penitence

The prayer of penitence leads us to reflect critically on our own lives. If it is uttered sincerely, it leads us to repent in humility, not just of particular wrongs we have done, but of our whole shameful and degraded state of being. The paradox is that, far from leading to lethargy or despair, such penitence brings a new kind of strength. Sexual sin is never merely sexual, but always has motives that are rooted in the passions—whether the need to be loved, or the lust for domination, or the desire to prove oneself attractive, or any of a dozen other motives that come readily to mind.

Healing Humanity

What fundamentalists and higher critics share

I’ve quoted this before, probably multiple times, but it’s so very perceptive:

Both the fundamentalist and the higher critic assume that it is possible to understand the biblical text without training, without moral transformation, without the confession and forgiveness that come about within the church. Unconsciously, both means of interpretation try to make everyone religious (that is, able to understand and appropriate scripture) without everyone’s being a member of the community for which the Bible is Scripture.

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens.

I’ve also echoed it when I’ve noted that people who don’t like Christianity cherry-pick hard passages, read them like fundamentalist literalists, and then object at how absurd the Scriptures are.

Cosmologies

The Copernican/Galilean worldview, that is the heliocentric worldview and its further development into our modern cosmology of galaxies and nebulas and black holes has two important aspects. It is an artificial vision and it is an alienating vision. It is artificial in the strictest sense of “art” or “techne”. It is a technical vision because we cannot experience this vision without technology, without telescopes and other apparatuses …

[T]he telescope and microscope are self-effacing artifices, they attempt to replace the eye, to convince us that they are not artificial but are more real than the eye. It is not only the physical gesture of looking at the world through a machine that demonstrates the radical change, though this is symbolic enough, but it is the very fact that people would do that and come to the conclusion that what they saw through these machines was truer than how they experienced the world without them. Yet the great revolution is not simply a technical rectification as it is presented by some today, it is not only that technically speaking we used to believe the earth to be a flat disk at the centre of the cosmos, and now we know the earth to be a big ball of water and dirt swirling around a giant nuclear reactor at the centre of our planetary system. The change happens in the very core of what Truth is, it is a change in the priority of knowledge, a change in what is important to us as human beings. That is the change. In a traditional world, all of reality is understood and expressed in an integrated manner. We describe phenomena in the manner we experience it because what is important is not so much the making of big mechanically precise machines that will increase our physical power, but rather the forming of human beings that have wisdom and virtue. The resistance to the heliocentric model was a desire to “save the phenomena”, the desire to express the world as we experience it because this expression must remain connected to how human beings live their lives and interact with God and their fellow men. So by projecting ourselves out through our machines into an physically augmented world, we “fall” into that materiality, we inevitably live in a more material and materialist world. And this is modern history itself.

What proceeds from this is my second point, which is that modern cosmology is not only artificial, but it is alienating, it moves Man away from himself. Once Man accepted that what he saw through his telescopes and microscopes is more real than his natural experience, he made inevitable the artificial world, he made inevitable as its end the plastic, synthetic, genetically modified, photoshopped, pornographic, social-networked reality we live in.

Jonathan Pageau, Most of The Time The Earth Is Flat.

I enjoyed re-reading this after eleven years and am enjoying (not quite as much) the three other articles Pageau wrote defending ancient cosmology (over “scientific” cosmology).

More:

In 1922 fr. Pavel Florensky wrote an article in his “Imaginary Values in Geometry” in which he attempted to use the general theory of relativity to show that considering the relativity of motion, one could develop a perfectly coherent mathematical model in which the Earth is the reference of motion. This model would in fact correspond to Ptolemy’s cosmological descriptions. This article was one of the reasons the Communist State gave for his trial and execution, a dark irony considering the usual “violent religion” vs. “enlightening science” rhetoric we are taught in primary school regarding Galileo’s censorship.

Jonathan Pageau, Where is Heaven?.

Ah! A kindred spirit! I long thought that Copernicus had the scientific advantage over Ptolemy because his scheme was more parsimonious, but that Ptolemy was coherent, too. The way it gets taught, though, is that Ptolemy was wrong and we know better now.

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Balm for Those Battered and Bruised by Bad Religion

From early adolescence to age forty-nine, my life as a Christian (which started when I was very young) was very American, in Evangelical and Calvinist modes. I got into it pretty deeply, as I have a compulsion to figure things out, and that involved reading lots of stern explanations (“theology”).

Then, twenty-eight or so years ago, I stumbled into an Orthodox Christian Church:

Having settled in for a few decades, what have I found uniquely true about the Orthodox Church?

It’s hard to put into words. That’s why Orthodox evangelism tends to consist of “come and see.”

Harder still for me personally, I need to find words for feelings and tendencies that an intellectualoid has trouble trusting — things that may be true but approach ineffability. I have a Dostoyevsky “Beauty Will Save the World” sticker on my office window, but long habit and self-image keep pulling me back toward “Spock-like logic … will save the world.”

(A life in a string of epiphanies)

Yesterday, though, I heard something that can serve as a decent summary that I suspect that a lot of American Christians need to hear:

God loves you. Jesus said so. St. John’s Gospel, the Father Himself loves you. He is not angry at you. He does not want to destroy you for your sins. There is no power of justice that commands Him to do so. No one commands Him to do anything. He loves you. He wants you to find salvation, but salvation is a thing you have to actually do. He wants you to do it. The Bible says so. God wills that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. But you have to do it. He empowers you to do it. He forgives you when you mess up trying to do it. He heals you when you damage yourself trying to do it and failing. He is entirely on your side. The God who created the universe is entirely on your side and the saints are on your side and the church is on your side. Everyone is on your side. Christ is advocating for you. Everything is set up for us.

When Saint Paul says to us, “continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling,” you don’t stop there like Kierkegaard did. Read the next verse because it is God who is working in you to will and to do according to His pleasure. We continue on and we work out our salvation because we know that God is on our side and empowering us to do it and loving us and loving other people through us. We need to pray about that. We need to pray it. We need to repeat it. … We need to say it out loud. We need to say it to each other. We need to say it to everyone who will listen right? That God loves you and wants you to find salvation, wants you to be healed, wants you to be set free from sin. He wants all these things for you. It doesn’t mean you have nothing to do. That doesn’t mean you’re fine just the way you are. You know you’re not fine just the way you are, right? But it means that He is there to help you to grow to be transformed into the person who you need to be and want to be. The person He created you to be for eternity. That’s the actual message of Christianity. Don’t accept any substitutes for that, ever at all, for any reason.

Fr. Stephen De Young

This Great and Holy Friday, I would add that the Son loves us, too, and is entirely on our side. We die with Him, and are raised with Him.

Presentation in the Temple

Today, the Orthodox Christian world celebrates Christ’s presentation in the Temple on the 40th day after His birth. And after 76 years on earth, I notice for the first time that “the righteous Simeon” who received Him and prayed the Nunc dimittis was not a priest in the Temple, but a righteous man who was there frequently and was led there by the spirit that day.

UPDATE: One of the hymns in Matins calls him a Priest, though that fact doesn’t appear in Luke 2. So I stand corrected.

Nondenominationalism and crypto-baptists

I stand corrected: not every non-denominational church is functionally Baptist.

Oh, I could quibble and say the LARPing Anglicanism without a bishop is sort of Baptist-adjacent. But when it includes an organized vestry and infant baptism, I wave the white flag.

Dechurching

[T]here are more people who dechurch into a kind of right-wing political religion than into a left-wing political religion.

Jake Meador, The Rise of the Right-Wing Exvangelical, citing The Great Dechurching

Race and the Bible

The problem with race and the Bible was far more profound than the interpretation of any one text. It was a problem brought about by the intuitive character of the reigning American hermeneutic. This hermeneutic merged three positions: (1) The Bible was a plain book whose meanings could be reliably ascertained through the exercise of an ordinary person’s intelligence; (2) a main reason for trusting the Bible as true was an intuitive sense, sealed by the Holy Spirit; (3) the same intelligence that through ordinary means and intuitions could trust the Bible as true also gained much additional truth about the world through intuitive processes that were also deliverances of universal common sense. The first position was a traditional Protestant teaching intensified by the American environment; the second was historically Protestant and Reformed; the third was simply a function of the American hermeneutic.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

“Religion”

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’.26 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

Belonging nowhere

Yesterday my family and I went to a wedding in Dublin. We got up in the dark, lit the candles, heated water on a gas stove I’d set up in the garden and washed in a plastic tub in the bath. Then we put our best duds on and drove out of the darkness. [They were in a storm-caused power outage of several days’ duration.] There was light in the city, of course. The wedding was beautiful. I’d never been to an Orthodox wedding before. Our friend, the groom, was lit up from within.

After the ceremony I got talking to another guest, a Romanian woman now living in Ireland. ‘When I go home now’, she said, ‘I feel like a stranger. It doesn’t feel like home, really. But I am not Irish either. I don’t belong anywhere.’ It could have been the familiar lament of the immigrant, but it was not that. ‘Except here,’ she went on, gesturing about her. ‘In the Church, there are people from all sorts of countries, but we all come together and everything makes sense. Nothing seems to make sense outside it any more.’

I nodded my head and agreed. I feel the same these days. My secular friends, my atheist relatives: I love them, but some of them think I’ve gone mad, or already was. This journey of prayer takes you away from the world, lifts your feet slightly above the ground, away from the electric spectacle, with its currents that drag you down. They can’t see that. How could they? It can’t be accessed through argument. It’s nobody’s fault, but the river that runs between us is real.

Later, my wife and I got talking to a priest we know around the dinner table. Here we were, an English Christian convert to the Eastern Church, a British-Indian Sikh, a Romanian Orthodox priest, all of us talking about religion in the capital of Ireland, and all of us agreeing on one thing: that we could understand and connect much better, on some deep level, with each other, and with other religious people, whatever their faith, than we could with people from our own culture who had no religion at all.

The English, said the priest, seem to be a very irreligious people. I told him he was right. It makes me sad, but there it is. I could talk more easily now, I think, to an African Christian, an Indonesian Muslim or an Indian Hindu than I could to a secular British atheist immersed in what passes for culture in my homeland. I’m not judging. I’m just laying it out.

You can aim towards God, I think now, or you can aim somewhere else. You can open up all of your inner rooms and say, come on in, Father, clear out all the crap I have stored in here, and fill these rooms with light. You can say that in a lot of different languages, in a lot of different dialects, with a lot of different approaches. Or you can keep the doors closed.

Paul Kingsnorth

We shall not cease from exploration

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in,” Richard Dawkins has argued. “Some of us just go one god further.” The idea behind this aphorism is that every serious religious worldview is a closed system and that to really practice and believe in one is to necessarily reject all the rest as incredible and false.

…

Dawkins is simply wrong about the requirement for believers to disbelieve in every other faith. The bookstore of all religions isn’t necessarily a library of total falsehoods with one lonely truth hidden somewhere on the shelves, and embracing one revelation doesn’t require believing that every other religion is made up.

…

Consider the story of religious pilgrimage offered recently by the British novelist Paul Kingsnorth. Raised to experience his isle’s Christianity as a hopeless antiquarianism, he found that spiritual interests grew naturally out of his environmentalism, which led into a commitment to Zen Buddhism, which lasted years but felt insufficient, lacking (he felt) a mode of true worship.

He found that worship in actual paganism, and he went so far as to become a priest of Wicca, a practitioner of what he took to be white magic. At which point, and only at that point, he began to feel impelled toward Christianity — by coincidence and dreams, ideas and arguments and some stark mystical experiences as well.

But it would have been unimaginable to him at the start of the journey that the Christian faith imparted to him weakly in his childhood — that “ancient, tired religion” as he put it — could have possibly been his destination in the end. Only the act of questing delivered him back to the initial place, no longer old and tired but fresh and new.

“We shall not cease from exploration,” wrote T.S. Eliot in “Four Quartets.” “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” That’s a nice encapsulation for Kingsnorth’s journey. But for the general obligation imposed upon us all, as time-bound creatures in a world shot through with intimations of transcendence, a different Eliot line is apt: “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

Ross Douthat, excerpted from his forthcoming book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Sunday before Theophany

Myth and Truth

A man who disbelieved the Christian story as fact but continually fed on it as myth would, perhaps, be more spiritually alive than one who assented and did not think much about it.” So claimed C. S. Lewis in his 1944 essay “Myth Became Fact.” Lewis insisted that myth lies at the heart of the faith—even if it embarrasses those moderns who would cover over the mythic imagery of Scripture with the whitewash of literalism, replacing lively stories with morals, principles, and ideas. The similarities between the Christian faith and the myths of the pagans need not occasion unease, Lewis argued; rather, they manifest a “mythical radiance” that should be preserved within our theology.

…

Jordan Peterson is an especially vivid example of one who feeds upon the Christian story as myth, while not believing it as fact. He is far from alone, and though We Who Wrestle with God is not a true Christian reading of Holy Scripture, it represents an encouraging trend of serious thinkers recognizing the vital cultural significance of the Bible. This trend may be a much-needed beachhead for the evangelization of righteous pagans—and a spur to Christians to return to a spiritual reading of Holy Scripture. In myth, as Lewis recognized, meaning is encountered neither as abstract nor as bound to the particular, but as reality. And in the Incarnation, myth and fact are joined.

Alastair Roberts, Jordan Peterson’s “God”.

My attitude toward Jordan Peterson is vexed. I pray for him as a very important Christian-adjacent “influencer” — that he will lead his (mostly young, or so I hear) followers to good places and that he himself will embrace the Orthodox Christian faith to which he is is multiple ways very close. On the other hand, I don’t have time for his logorrhea and circumlocution.

Ritual

The genius of ritual is that it allows us not to articulate our feelings. It allows us to express our faith through an act.

Andrew Sullivan via Peter Savodnik

Why so much doctrine in catechesis?

Frs. Andrew and Stephen, in an un-transcribed asynchronous Q&A podcast, observed that although catechesis ideally should be more about how to live an Orthodox life, less about what the Orthodox Church believes (90% of that can be gotten from Kallistos Ware’s The Orthodox Church), nonetheless people come to Orthodoxy thinking, for instance, “St. Paul taught X, Y and Z in Romans” when in fact he did not so teach. Leaving that Protestant artifact unaddressed will lead some people to a place where they feel that the Church is contradicting St. Paul. So we’ve got to do some doctrine in catechesis.

My comment: One of the doctrines we need to emphasize with converts coming from a left-brain culture is that praxis may be more important than doctrine.

Caveat Zeitgeist

These passions are worth careful examination, particularly as they have long been married to America’s many denominational Christianities. I think it is noteworthy that one of the most prominent 19th century American inventions was Mormonism. There, we have the case of a religious inventor (Joseph Smith) literally writing America into the Scriptures and creating an alternative, specifically American, account of Christ and salvation. It was not an accident. He was, in fact, drawing on the spirit of the Age, only more blatantly and heretically. But there are many Christians whose Christianity is no less suffused with the same sentiments.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Golden Rule, misapplied

“Why do you defame us?” asks the former president. “Why concentrate on the negative? We give you the Alumnus of the Year award, and you turn around and lambaste us in your writing every chance you get.” Blindsided, I don’t reply right away. Finally, I say, “I don’t intend to demean anyone. I guess I’m still trying to sort through the mixed messages I got here.” He doesn’t back off. “I know all sorts of juicy stories about people in Christian ministry,” he says. “But I would never write about them because of the pain it would cause. I go by the Golden Rule: Do unto others as I would have them do to me.” Later, as his comment sinks in, I realize that is the very reason I probe my past, even though it may cause others pain. My brother’s question plagues me still: What is real, and what is fake? I know of no more real or honest book than the Bible, which hides none of its characters’ flaws. If I’ve distorted reality or misrepresented myself, I would hope someone would call me out.

Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell.

Yancey’s interlocutor wants to be left alone, and thinks that’s the meaning of the “Golden Rule.” Yancey won’t leave him alone because he wouldn’t want to be left alone if he strayed.

I’m with Yancey, but it seems like the world around me, including purported Christians, is almost unanimously with his interlocutor.

A most kingly Reformation

Predictably, secular authorities convinced by the reformers’ truth claims liked the distinction drawn between the necessity of obedience to them and of disobedience to Rome. They liked hearing “the Gospel” accompanied by such “good news”—it would allow them, for starters, to appropriate for themselves all ecclesiastical property, including the many buildings and lands that belonged to religious orders, and to use it or the money from its sale in whatever ways they saw fit. In two stages during the late 1530s, seizing for himself the vast holdings of all the hundreds of English monasteries and friaries, Henry VIII would demonstrate how thoroughly a ruler could learn this lesson without even having to accept Lutheran or Reformed Protestant doctrines about grace, faith, salvation, or worship.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

That God-shaped hole

“There is a God-shaped hole in every human heart, and I believe it was put there by evolution,” [Jonathan Haidt] said. He was alluding to the seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, who wrote extensively on the nature of faith.

“We evolved in a long period of group versus group conflict and violence, and we evolved a capacity to make a sacred circle and then bind ourselves to others in a way that creates a strong community,” Haidt told me.

Ferguson added that “you can’t organize a society on the basis of atheism.”

“It’s fine for a small group of people to say, ‘We’re atheist, we’re opting out,’ ” he said, “but, in effect, that depends on everyone else carrying on. If everyone else says, ‘We’re out,’ then you quickly descend into a maelstrom like Raskolnikov’s nightmare”—in which Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, envisions a world consumed by nihilism and atomism tearing itself apart. “The fascinating thing about the nightmare is that it reads, to anyone who has been through the twentieth century, like a kind of prophecy.”

Peter Savodnik again.

The emergent culture

In the emergent culture, a wider range of people will have “spiritual” concerns and engage in “spiritual” pursuits. There will be more singing and more listening. People will continue to genuflect and read the Bible, which has long achieved the status of great literature; but no prophet will denounce the rich attire or stop the dancing. There will be more theater, not less, and no Puritan will denounce the stage and draw its curtains. On the contrary, I expect that modern society will mount psychodramas far more frequently than its ancestors mounted miracle plays.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

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). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Sunday before Nativity, 2024

David Brooks

I have long admired David Brooks, and a few years ago I heard fairly detailed rumors about his embrace of Christian faith — without ceasing to identify as Jewish.

This week, he wrote at some length about his pilgrimage (unlocked article). So far as I know, this is his public “coming out”:

When I was an agnostic, I thought faith was primarily about belief. Being religious was about having a settled conviction that God existed and knowing that the stories in the Bible were true. I looked for books and arguments that would convince me that God was either real or not real.

Some people are spiritual but not religious; during that time, you could say I was religious but not spiritual.

…

When faith finally tiptoed into my life it didn’t come through information or persuasion but, at least at first, through numinous experiences …

…

Sometimes people hear about my religious journey and ask me about my “conversion,” but that word is a relic from the rationalist mentality — as if I traded one belief system for another. The process felt more like an inspiration, like someone had breathed life into those old biblical stories so that they now appeared true.

Today, I feel more Jewish than ever, but as I once told some friends, I can’t unread Matthew. For me, the Beatitudes are the part of the Bible where the celestial grandeur most dazzlingly shines through. So these days I’m enchanted by both Judaism and Christianity. I assent to the whole shebang. My Jewish friends, who have been universally generous and forbearing, point out that when you believe in both the Old and New Testaments, you’ve crossed over to Team Christian, which is a fair point.

…

We religious people talk about virtue so much you’d think we’d behave better than nonreligious people. But that’s not been my experience. Over the past decade, especially in the American church, I’ve seen religious people behaving more viciously, more dishonestly and, in some ways, more tolerant of sexual abuse. I sometimes joke that entering the church in 2013 was like investing in the stock market in 1929. My timing could have been better.

Still, I’ve been grateful to live in an enchanted world, to live toward someone I can seek and serve. I’ve been grateful to have to learn and relearn yet another startling truth, that faith is about yearning but it’s not about striving. You can’t earn God’s love with good behavior and lofty thoughts, because he’s already given it to you as the lavish gift that you don’t deserve. “I prayed for wonders instead of happiness, Lord,” Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “and you gave them to me.”

Three decades ago, I might have snorted and said “this guy is no Christian!” Or maybe I wouldn’t have. It’s hard to remember all of my past attitudes, and tempting to caricature them. But I’m confident that I would at least have felt that this account was alien and challenging to my then-understanding of Christian faith. Today, I find his account quite sympathetic, as, I think, the late Bishop Kallistos Ware would have as well:

Faith is not the supposition that something might be true, but the assurance that someone is there.

And I have it on reasonably good authority that most uses of “faith” in English-language Bibles would better be rendered as “faithfulness,” which is especially salient this morning as the gospel reading (on the Orthodox “new calendar”) is much of Hebrews chapter 11.

Chistianities: thin, sharp, thick

Jonathan Rauch, in conversation with David French (unlocked), divides Christianity in the US into thin, sharp, and thick versions. It’s of concern to him — gay, atheist and Jewish — because he has come to see that Christianity is congruent with liberal democracy and our liberal democracy may need it for survival.

I’ve rejected untold times the idea that Christianity is only important in publicly instrumental ways, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important in those ways. And I thought Rauch’s descriptions of thin and sharp Christianities are pretty well on target.

It seems to me, though, that Rauch’s example of what constitutes thick (i.e., useful) Christianity is off-base:

This is what’s been missing. Christians have a teaching about how individuals should relate to the world around them. If there’s a hurricane in Asheville, the stories of what the church is doing are fantastic. But they don’t have a teaching about how to engage politics as Christians. And that leads me to realize what the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is actually modeling is a whole civic theology, and that’s what Christianity needs more of: teachings about how would Jesus approach politics.

I think my concern arises because Rauch is seeing Christianity largely in instrumental terms. Or maybe it’s because I’m having trouble figuring out how a Church stays thick while diverting attention to thinning civics (“teaching about how to engage politics as Christians”). Or maybe I recoil at the thought that anything good could come out of Salt Lake City.

The inevitability of ritual

In England, the two kinds of churches I do still see filling appear rather different. In a local baptist church the pews are crammed with young families having powerful, intimate encounters with their faith. Something immediate is being accommodated. I remember seeing a guy fresh from a building site, dusty with a high viz jacket. Family with him, arms outstretched, tears on his cheeks. It would bring a lump to your throat.

Then I see my own parish, hushed and seemingly antique, but with more young people than ever before. In both I see people who look spiritually fed. Then out there in the wider audit of emptying churches there seems often to be a sense of weariness, or simple lack of oomph. There will be exceptions to this last sentence, I have no sneer in writing it. I sometimes go sit in those congregations simply out of love for the yards they’ve put in as parishioners. Solidarity, a hand held across the fence to a fellow worker bee.

It seems, from a distance, the two churches are very different, and I am well aware of the theological wrestles that create distance. What I don’t go along with is the notion that one is completely improvisational and unencumbered by tradition, and the other set-and-only-set in a kind of endless, ancient theatre or lifeless ceremony. Dame Mary Douglas, a cultural anthropologist, encapsulates something she calls the ‘anti-ritualist’ approach:

The confirmed anti-ritualist mistrusts external expression. He values a man’s inner convictions. Spontaneous speech that flows from the heart, unpremeditated, irregular in form, even somewhat incoherent, is good because it bears witness to the speaker’s real intentions.

I think actually, ritual is inevitable, even when tacit. We are ceremony people, no matter how spontaneous we think we may be. There will be a loved formula, a linguistic groove long established, a shared initiatory language in common for any community that lasts. It’s about the dynamic counterpoints of tradition and innovation. We may have done away with the candles, offerings and holy smoke, but simply to feel safe repetition will always have value.

Martin Shaw.

Don’t forget the Christian East

It is noteworthy that no institutional form of religious persecution was ever introduced in the Christian East. Because of Western historiographical ignorance of the Orthodox Church, however, the inquisition would come to represent, for secular intellectuals in modern times, the illegitimacy of any civilization grounded in Christianity, whether Western or Eastern.

John Strickland, The Age of Division

Fully God, fully man

And from this we draw a refutation of Eutyches: since Christ is declared to be the fruit of the womb. And all fruit is of the same nature as the parent plant: so it follows that the Virgin also was of the same nature as the Second Adam, Who takes away the sins of the world. And let those be ashamed at the true child-bearing of the Mother of God, who have invented some fantastic notion concerning Christ’s Body; for the fruit proceeds from the very substance of the tree. And what of those who say that Christ passed through Mary as water through a channel? Let them hearken to the words of Elizabeth, who was filled with the Holy Ghost; saying that Christ was the fruit of the womb.

Severus (of Antioch) via Jonah (of micro.blog). Emphasis added because I heard somebody on WMBI say exactly that (actually, she said “pipe” rather than “channel”).

If Christ passed through Mary as water through a pipe, where did He get His humanity, which all Christians now confess? How do you get to “fully God and fully man” if Mary was just a pipe?

Denying Christ’s humanity is a pretty high price to pay for dodging her whose “fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum” is a crucial element in the story of our salvation.

A terrible choice

Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Sometimes this whole 2000-year-old faith seems like a living koan. Chew on this until you are enlightened. Keep walking.

Paul Kingsnorth

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). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Hal Lindsey, Nihilist Cathedral (and more)

Hal Lindsey

… it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment …

Hebrews 9:27

Hal Lindsey’s appointed time came November 25.

Lindsey was the author of the notorious 1970 The Late Great Planet Earth.

Lindsey seemingly came by his kookery honestly, having studied at the feet of “Colonel” R.B. Thieme, Jr. (I once heard Thieme say that “the ovum is the only sinless cell in the human body”) and then pursuing a degree at Dallas Theological Seminary, a hotbed of dispensational premillenialism that was inordinately esteemed by Evangelicals back in the beforetimes.

Lindsey’s influence was such that his eschatology, or understanding of the Last Days, virtually became a part of accepted Christian orthodoxy for much of the church. Christians who did not understand the Trinity or know the Nicene Creed knew a lot about Lindsey’s End Times scenarios.

Mark Tooley, Juicy Ecumenism.

Tooley is correct — and though I had been heavily exposed to that genre of eschatological flakiness starting around 1964, Lindsey dialed it up to 11 in the Evangelical world.

By the end of the ’70s, having providentially discovered that dispensationalism was the worst and most novel of four basic Protestant eschatological schemes, I could bear its imposition as Evangelical dogma no longer. I left frank Evangelicalism for the Christian Reformed Church, which at least locally turned out to be Evangelical-adjacent in the pews because Lindseyist preoccupations were so contagious. It took even me a long time to realize that I, though born in 1948, was not particularly unlikely to celebrate my 40th birthday in the land of the living.

Well, apparently the novelty wore off while I wasn’t looking any more:

In the midst of his professional success, Lindsey’s personal life suffered. His first marriage failed around the time of his conversion. He got divorced and remarried to Jan Houghton, who worked alongside him at Campus Crusade and appeared with Lindsey in author photos until the mid-1980s, when an updated edition of Late Great Planet Earth used a different picture and removed her name from the dedication.

Lindsey’s second divorce—and subsequent third and fourth marriages—raised questions about his character for many evangelicals. But the biggest blow to his reputation was his failed predictions.

In his early books, Lindsey said all of the Bible’s prophecy would likely be fulfilled “within forty years or so of 1948,” when the nation of Israel was founded, based on his typological reading of Matthew 24. He qualified his prediction, giving himself an escape hatch with phrases like “or so.” But few readers came away with the impression that Lindsey was unsure whether Christ would return by 1988.

…

When 1988 came and went and the Soviet Union, one of the main objects of dispensational analyses, ultimately collapsed, Lindsey was forced to defend himself and his end times speculation. He directed his book The Road to Holocaust at evangelicals and fellow conservatives in 1989, making the case for the continued relevance of dispensationalist interpretations of Scripture and current events. 

While he was dismissed and marginalized by many evangelicals, Lindsey continued to see commercial success. Retooling his analysis for a post–Cold War geopolitics, he returned to bestseller lists with Planet Earth Two Thousand AD: Will Mankind Survive? in 1994.

That Hal Lindsey did not repent and shut up after 1988 came and went without a “Rapture” is one of life’s least vexing mysteries: he made beaucoups bucks off his spiritual thalidomide.

I hate dispensational premillenialism with a passion. I’d be more relieved at learning that it now is a bit passé were the Evangelical world in North American not running after political power instead now.

His appointed time having come, I strain to pray mercy on his soul at the judgment, but I do so anyway, as I would wish others to do for me.

One more thing

Here’s a suggestion about the influence of Hal Lindsey that had not occurred to me:

In retrospective (sic), Hal Lindsey’s popularity was a major harbinger of the decline of denominations. No longer were they the definitive teaching source for their flocks. Emerging new post denominational evangelicalism, with its own books, radio stations, television and entrepreneurial personalities displaced the old denominations and their traditional teachings.

…

The most favorable interpretation of Lindsey’s work is that hopefully many who read him or were influenced by him at least were drawn closer to God, even if amid much confusion and foreboding. It’s tempting to find in the Bible a direct explanation for disturbing events. It’s harder to live in the mystery of trusting God without knowing all His plans.

Mark Tooley, Juicy Ecumenism.

A place for perverse prayer

Continuing my drumbeat of dread and decline, the dead German Roman Catholic Church has a new Cathedral in Berlin — a whited sepulchre signaling fealty to something nihilistic:

Rod Dreher, writing for the European Conservative, is duly appalled:

There is scarcely anything visibly Christian about the space. Aesthetically and symbolically, it invites visitors to worship the sacred Nothing. It is a “clean, well-lighted place,” in the nihilistic sense of Ernest Hemingway’s 1933 short story of the same name. It is a hauntingly spare tale about an elderly, suicidal Spanish man who frequents a certain café, described in the story’s title, seeking refuge from nihilism. In the tale, an older waiter in the café reflects on why the clean, well-lighted café drew men like the suicidal customer:

What did he fear? It was not a fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was a nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.

This is the perverse prayer one imagines visitors to the bleached-out St. Hedwig’s will pray, if they pray at all.

Devolution

It is not an exaggeration to claim that this nineteenth-century Protestant evangelicalism differed from the religion of the Protestant Reformation as much as sixteenth-century Reformation Protestantism differed from the Roman Catholic theology from which it emerged.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

How many times can such devolutionary leaps happen before the result is not authentically Christian?

Spontaneity is the new requirement

Speaking of which:

I laughed out loud, paused the podcast where I heard the phrase, and wrote down Rituals of Spontaneity, which now sits in my book queue to complement America’s God and The Democratization of American Christianity. Although none of them writes as well as Kevin D. Williamson, I’m more interested in the religious aspects than in the prospect of President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho in 2028.

Elastic “religion”

Taylor is not unaware that the term “religion” is fraught, but, as we have seen, he thinks the reason it defies definition is that its different manifestations are so diverse. But how do we know that these different manifestations are all “religion” to begin with? Taylor says “the phenomena we are tempted to call religious are so tremendously varied in human life.”175 But why are we “tempted” to call them all religious if they are so varied? More to the point, why do we want to call some things religious and some other, very similar things nonreligious? What makes nontheistic Buddhist rituals “religious,” by Taylor own reckoning, but rituals surrounding the proper treatment of the American flag—very precise rules for folding, displaying, venerating, and keeping it from touching the ground or being otherwise “desecrated”—are not? Taylor uses “religion” broadly when he wants to include Buddhism, but narrowly when he wants to exclude nationalism.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

Migration of the Holy

After only a few years, America’s religious population, with Protestant evangelicals in the forefront, began in similar fashion to tailor their religious projects to fit the language of republicanism. The implications for both politics and religion from this tailoring were momentous. In the immediate context, the argument against Parliament acquired the emotive force of revival. In the longer term, religious values migrated along with religious terms into the political speech and so changed political values. But the migration also moved the other way: a religious language put to political use took on political values that altered the substance of religion.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

Sometimes this whole 2000-year-old faith seems like a living koan. Chew on this until you are enlightened. Keep walking.

Paul Kingsnorth

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). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.