Intelligelicals

Last year Neuhaus raised a friendly caution about B&C editor John Wilson's playful self-distancing from populist Protestantism. "...we sip Starbucks and speak easily of Neruda and pretend that we believe in cause and effect," mused Wilson in response to the I-just-discovered-Christians-exist alarmism of Charles Simic in the New York Review of Books. Responds Neuhaus,

"Yes, there are redneck evangelicals, but then there is also the wine and Brie set that reads Books and Culture. Might one not infer from what Wilson says that Simic's hysterical generalizations about 'them' are fully warranted? Just asking, mind you" (10/05).

And though I wish I had thought of it, now, thanks to the Japery, we have a word for the self-conscious hipster academic evangelical on the make - intelligelical - and it's a warning rather than a compliment.

wash n' dri-pod

I suppose hell has frozen over because in this talk Peter Kreeft (pronounced Krayft) said he'd have a website when it did, and he does. The comparison of Percy and Lewis was interesting as well.

Whether they're Catholic, Baptist, or Anglican (and whether or not one always agrees), gotta love the free talks. It makes me glad I still don't have a dishwasher and that I do, it must be admitted, have an ipod.

Yuck

From today's NYT,

"Dr. Enoch Choi, 36, and his wife, Tania, 33, who have been married 10 years, both take laptops to bed to write their blogs. 'I suppose I started the trend,' said Dr. Choi, a physician in Palo Alto, Calif. 'But now my wife is just as much the nighty-night PowerBook key-banger, blogging away for her friends.'"

Rest assured dear reader, millinerd blogs from a desk.

Diversity may not be good for you

The "religious market" has long been identified as the reason that American religion, in contrast to the European variety, thrives. It also, according to Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow, may be a reason for its becoming anemic.

American faith has morphed from a dominant Protestantism into the situation famously described by Will Herberg and more recently Diana Eck, and we're quick to pat ourselves on the back for being so diverse. But costs of inclusion such as privatization and content dilution, explains Wuthnow, may be too high a price to pay. In a remark that might make him unpopular in the faculty lounge, Wuthnow explains that

"The trouble is not, as many academics seem to believe, that many advances to religious inclusiveness has been hindered by bigots on the religious right. Of course it is easy to identify groups with whom one disagrees as the enemy. But American religion has not just been a struggle in recent years between those who wanted to reinvent it and those who wanted to keep it the way it was. The difficulty in moving toward a more inclusive society in which democracy is actually informed by competing religious principles has been deeper and harder to identify because it is ingrained in our culture..."

A culture, he concludes, which can quickly transform religion into a mere subjective personal need ornamented with arbitrary customs. What then passes for "diversity" is in fact the effort to "expand our cultural borders, while encouraging everything within them to look the same."

This danger is of course something that serious adherents of their respective religions have been alert to for some time. Isn't it nice to know that such insight now also happens to be cutting-edge sociology?

Listen to his lecture here.

Madison or Marx?

Intentional Balance
Though ill considered attempts to mix faith and politics are enough to warrant serious embarrassment (not to mention histrionic reactions well summarized here), it's a good thing the man long proclaimed "Father of the Constitution" wasn't averse to the idea.

"The education that James Madison and his friends received at the College of New Jersey [i.e. Princeton] stimulated deep thinking... and encouraged - but never demanded - a personal commitment of the student to Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord... the curriculum was not narrow, but was taught from the Christian perspective which meant that learning was developed within a framework of absolutes... the Sovereignty of God.. His providence... the sinful nature of man which needs salvation, yet the great possibilities for good that man possesses when he is guided by his maker" (15).

When formation like that goes unrepudiated, it is inevitable that the instilled principles will find their way into one's work, and the U.S. Constitution was rather influential work. But the principles were not - and this is a very important point - explicit. I once watched with pity a (in this case it's fair to say) fundamentalist Christian broadcast where a frazzled preacher tried to make the case for a Christian Constitution by citing the phrase, "the year of our Lord 1887."

Disappointing as it may be to some, the mark of Christian faith in the Constitution is not literally spelled out, nor is the mark I'm referring to an exclusively Christian one. But it is systemic to the document, and it can be found in the idea that a balance of power that is necessary because of human inability to handle power well.

The idea is a practical corollary of the doctrine of sin. To repeat, human imperfection is (thankfully) not a doctrine exclusive to Christianity, but in Madison's case Christianity was what both preserved and successfully transmitted this essential truth. Mining deeper into Madison's education gives clues as to how the relay occurred.

"Since James Madison became one of the chief architects of our political democracy... his sojourn at Nassau Hall under the tutelage of the learned Dr. John Witherspoon was of incalculable importance to the destiny of the United States" (99).

And on government, Witherspoon had this to say:

"It must be complex, so that the one principle may check the other. It is of consequence to have as much virtue among the particular members of a community as possible; but it is folly to expect that a state should be upheld by integrity in all who have a share in managing it. They must be so balanced, that when everyone draws to his own interest or inclination there must be an even poise upon the whole."

Remarking on this passage, Roger Kimball explains that

"Here we have in ovo Madison's famous prescription for controlling or neutralizing the effect of conflicting 'factions' or interests in society by balancing them one against the other."

That Witherspoon's influence was more than ephemeral is documented in the fact that Madison continually consulted with his former professor up through the Constitutional Convention itself.

Unintentional Imbalance
But the fact that, via Witherspoon's Calvinism, the doctrine of sin found its way into one of, if not the most successful state-comprising document in history is more fully appreciated when one observes what happens when such necessary balances are removed.

Explains Daniel Mahoney in an exceptionally illuminating passage,

"Marx was so preoccupied with the economic question, with uprooting all forms of economic exploitation, that he forgot the crucial importance of restricting political power. He dogmatically treated political authority as a simple byproduct of economic relations and thus summarily dismissed the protections against despotism that were the glories of the West. He lived in a civilized Europe that respected basic human liberties - liberties he took more or less for granted" (170).

Thus the unjustly neglected political theorist Bertrand de Jouvenel would write,

"'Some will say Marx had not wished this [totalitarian state]; and without doubt they are right. Others will say Marx's works lead there logically and I believe they are not wrong. It opens the road to despotic regimes, involuntarily but logically'"(ibid).

Marx was well intended, but he had no Dr. Witherspoon to inculcate into him a healthy suspicion of human nature. Thus when Marx's ideas were acted upon, we got a Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. When Madison's were, we get, it is true, a mess. But one organized in such a way that power cannot so easily flare to the level of mass murder; Churchill's "worst form of government there is, except for all the others."

"If men were angels, no government would be necessary," Madison famously wrote in Federalist 51. And we who are not angels need our checks. Conversely, by ignoring such restraints, those who claimed the heritage of Marxism fulfilled Pascal's dictum that "He who would act the angel, becomes the beast."

Ah, but what is "love"?

Below was suggested, as a means of artistic renewal, advancing the only truly trangressive possibilities in a culture where transgression is the norm, i.e. those things once transgressed against like piety and love. Not "piety" and "love" mind you, but piety and love.

To give an idea of how this might be received in some cells of Art's ivory tower, behold one of the calls for papers in the 2007 annual conference of the College Art Association:

What's Love Got to Do with It? The Myth and Politics of Love in Art and Art History

This session examines the concept of "love" as mythologized fiction and rhetorical tool in art, as the notion has disguised the reality of power, whether that of men or women over their own or the opposite sex, the church over the faithful, or the state over its citizens. What social and political agendas have been masked by types of love - romantic love, maternal love, filial love, brotherly love, spiritual love, and the like? What is the concept of love meant to distract us from? Whose interests does "love" represent, and how does art support those interests? We invite papers that uncover new readings of works of art - Western or non-Western and from any chronological period - in which cultural norms and/or the overlay of art-historical interpretation have naturalized the social and political uses of this ubiquitous theme.

It's not that I think love has never been so abused, nor that this session would be uninteresting. But what better way to expose the counterfeits than by examining them in the light of the real McCoy?

"I am convinced that the avant-garde today is to be found in piety and love."

-R.R. Reno

UPDATE: And speaking of Reno quotes:

"When I was a young man, the most powerful people in America tended to tell themselves a lie: Our great and increasing power was an unequivocal blessing for the world. Now, I observe that Ned Lamont types tell themselves a lie that is simply an inversion of the old lie: Our even greater and still increasing power is an unmitigated source of evil in the world.

There is a big difference between Henry Luce (a great propagandist of the old lie) and George Soros (a financer of the propaganda machine of the new lie), but on one score they are very similar. Both pay themselves the compliment of thinking that the country in which they exercise the most power holds the magical key to good and evil" (FT).

Though I should confess my astonishment that a woman who is comfortable exchanging "inner-Christ" with "inner-Buddha" terminology would self-identify as "evangelical," to my surprise, this program was rather balanced. Richard Mouw brings some much needed light to a perpetually overheated debate.

What part of "holy, holy, holy" don't you understand?

Speaking of the need to safeguard transcendence against the encroachments of various disciplines (be they among the humanities or sciences), Columbia U. professor of behavioral medicine Richard P. Sloan has this to say in the latest issue of Christianity Today:

"Trying to quantify religious experience is like trying to measure a sunbeam with a ruler... [or] like trying to quantify the aesthetic experience of a Beethoven symphony by counting the number of times a listener smiles."

This in contrast to U. Penn scientists in the budding field of neurotheology who wonder whether images of brain activity captured during Buddhist meditation and Christian prayer were "photographs of God."

Sloan's debunking book is in the oven. For an example of one of many right ways to explore the intersection of faith and mental health, this one by Kathryn Greene-McCreight comes highly acclaimed and is already out.