Contents

• Jews for Jesus, Established A.D. 32
• The Real Threat to Religious Freedom
• Protestant Regress the Formula for Catholic Progress
• Beyond Suspicion
• While We're At It

Jews for Jesus, Established A.D. 32

The same question is again agitating our British cousins. "We're Jews, we don't have to apologize for the Holocaust," says David Brickner, international president of Jews for Jesus. His group had put up advertisements in the London Underground: "Jews for Jesus-why not? After all, Jesus is for Jews." This elicited a strong reaction from the Council of Christians and Jews (CCJ), which issued a press release reporting that it "has threatened to expel any of its three thousand members who attempt missionary activity." The Archbishop of Canterbury approved, insisting that Christians "respect the integrity of other faiths." Paul Mendel, director of CCJ, declared, "You have to be either Jewish or Christian. If you try being both it doesn't go down well."

Richard Harvey, the U.K. director of Jews for Jesus, disagrees. "If you had been there at the first Easter event and had been saying the same sort of thing to the disciples, 'Hold on chaps, you must respect the integrity of Judaism as a living religion,' then the Church would never have got started in the first place." The liberal Tablet comments: "Shame and silence should overcome every Gentile at the memory of how centuries of Christian anti-Semitism finally led to the genocide of the concentration camps. But what blame can be attached to those Jews who wish, with sensitivity, to speak to their own people of their belief that Jesus (whom they call Y'shua) is indeed the longed- for Messiah?"

At the international headquarters in San Francisco, David Brickner has a plaque that reads: "Jews for Jesus, established a.d. 32, give or take a year." He defends his organization against the charge of employing offensive methods. "We don't want to be offensive, but people take offense at the message, and that we can't help. I'm controversial as soon as I say: I'm a Jew and I believe in Jesus." Brickner says the organization contacts Jews through the mail, offering a course on Christianity that takes people step by step, depending upon their interest. It is, he says, tactful, sensitive, and nonthreatening, giving people "a chance to say yes or no at each stage." The Tablet comment concludes: "Is this a mission with a hard-sell evangelical edge? Or is it responsible and respectful evangelism?"

Of course the Southern Baptist resolution is not limited to Jews evangelizing other Jews. Like the 1994 declaration "Evangelicals and Catholics Together," it assumes that Christians are to be evangelizing one another, and everybody else. There are different readings of the connections between Christian anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, but it is doubtful that Christian Gentiles, who may rightly be overcome by "shame," should also be overcome by "silence." The Jewish-Christian dialogue of the last thirty years, in which some of us have been strongly engaged, must be counted as an enormous blessing that is unprecedented in the two thousand years of tortured history shared by Jews and Christians. But such dialogue is shallow and dishonest if it is premised upon a protocol of silence about the most important difference between us, namely, our answer to the question, Who is Jesus?

Most disappointing in the reactions of some Jews and Christians to the Southern Baptist action was the claim that it violated the American understanding of religious pluralism. This is to elevate civil religion above the divine covenant that, however ambiguously, binds Jews and Christians to one another. We need always to be reminded that genuine pluralism does not mean pretending that our deepest differences make no difference. Rather, pluralism is engaging our deepest differences within the bond of civility and, above all, love. The Archbishop is right to say that Christians must "respect the integrity of other faiths." It is precisely the integrity-that is to say, the truth-of Judaism that is foundational to Christianity. In Jesus the Jew, as Pius XI declared against the Nazis, "We are all Semites." The question is whether, as Christians believe, it is through Jesus the Christ that the promise is fulfilled that Israel is to become "a light to the nations." St. Paul reflects in Romans 9-11 that this argument may go on until the End Time. It must go on-with sensitivity, with intelligence, with respect, with love. No matter how great the sense of shame or how strong the temptation to silence, faithful children of the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus have not the right to terminate the argument prematurely. We cannot casually agree to disagree, for it is in the honest exploration of both our agreement and disagreement that we are most securely bound to one another.

The Real Threat to Religious Freedom

In a powerfully argued article in the Minnesota Law Review, Laycock endorses the first answer, and analyzes why so many contemporary jurists assume the rightness of the second answer. He traces thought about religious freedom from the wars of religion during the Reformation era up to the present. He allows that there is some truth in both of the above answers, but the basic reality is that the threat to religious freedom was and is posed by the state. "But there is far more truth in the first account; it was the state that had the power to persecute. Religious pronouncements had no effect without the temporal power of the state. Interdicts and excommunication had no effect on those who had already repudiated the interdicting or excommunicating authority. Even under the various Inquisitions, where the church may have been most culpable, power to inflict temporal punishment was reserved to the state. This reservation of state power was often a bare formality, but it left ultimate authority in the state, so that the Inquisition was effective where the secular ruler proved cooperative. The form and vigor of the Inquisitions varied sharply over time and place, often in response to local law and politics. Sometimes the state took the lead and the restraining influence came from the church. For example, it was Ferdinand and Isabella, and not a pope, bishop, or religious order, who invigorated the Spanish Inquisition and appointed Tomas de Torquemada, the most infamous of the Inquisitors General. The Spanish Inquisition was always subject to the Crown, and only secondarily to the Pope; the Kings of Spain always appointed the Inquisitors General and had effective power to secure their resignation."

The state, Laycock notes, often engaged in religious persecution for reasons that were secular rather than religious. He draws a parallel with the reasoning of jurists today who say that it is not a persecution of religion if the burden imposed upon religionists is incidental rather than intended, as when the governmental measure in question is the result of "neutral and generally applicable laws"-laws enacted for secular reasons but with the effect of suppressing a religious practice. "One of the most famous Reformation examples might itself be described as a neutral and generally applicable law if adjudicated today under the Free Exercise Clause. In Henry's England, it was treason to question the validity of his second marriage. This prohibition was based on the strongest reason of national security. If his second marriage were invalid, the children of that marriage would be illegitimate; the claim of illegitimacy would challenge their right to the throne and threaten civil war over the succession. This particular form of treason was committed by stating a core Catholic belief, but the law applied to everyone and was stated in religiously neutral terms."

Any straightforward reading of the Religion Clause leaves no doubt that it, like the entire Bill of Rights, is intended to protect the people from the government, not the other way around. And yet so many persist in the belief that the purpose of the Religion Clause is to protect the government from citizens who are religious. Why should this be? Laycock's answer is, in my view, convincing: "In part it is because those who hold that view have misread history. They have blamed too much on the church and too little on the state. In part it is because they have thought that their preferred secular ideologies were inherently different from religion, and that religion is uniquely susceptible to the temptation to intolerance and absolutism. I think that they are wrong on each of these points. The First Amendment constrains Congress, not churches, and this is no accident. The amendment was aimed squarely at the problem the Founders sought to solve. During the Reformation and today, it was and is governments that punish people for religious beliefs and practices. The most common motives have changed, the alignment of factions has changed, but the central evil has remained the same." The Constitution was written and ratified by people who believed that the concentration of powers is necessary to effective government, and, at the same time, were keenly aware that such a concentration threatened human liberty. Therefore those powers must be divided and constrained. Therefore the Bill of Rights, and therefore, most specifically, the Religion Clause.

Protestant Regress the Formula for Catholic Progress

The book's viewpoint, writes Steinfels, also "informs Call to Action, We Are Church, the Association for the Rights of Catholics, Catholics Speak Out, Corpus, and any number of other groups on the Church's left." It is also the outlook "that ripples through the American news media's approach to Catholicism." The authors of the book think things are going swimmingly for the "progressive" cause. Problems such as the pope's claim to doctrinal authority are "in tension with the American temper and the very thing the U.S. Constitution was written to restrict," but such problems, the book suggests, are passing remnants from the bad old days of Catholicism. Steinfels describes the book as "naive history in a triumphalist mode, without shadow or irony."

He is surprised that one of the authors is Dean R. Hoge, a Presbyterian sociologist at Catholic University, who has written insightfully-also in our pages-about the dramatic decline of oldline Protestantism. What Hoge sees as causes of Protestant decline he here seems to hail as signs of Catholic renewal. The study of mainline Protestants, and adult Presbyterians in particular, concludes that it is "likely that their children will be even less committed to Christianity or to the church than they themselves. . . . Few of their children will rebel, for there is little to rebel against; they are more likely to be marginally involved in church life or to drift away." Steinfels notes that the Protestants studied are in "a church that ordains married men and women; does not condemn contraception, abortion, or remarriage after divorce; is inclusive in its criteria for membership; prides itself on affirming American values; and emphasizes democratic decision making and the laity's right to participate in congregational spending, selecting pastors, and determining official church positions. In other words, a church that has long since institutionalized the kinds of concerns that Laity, American and Catholic highlights as crucial to American Catholicism's future."

Steinfels concludes his devastating critique on a note not untouched by defensiveness: "One of the drawbacks of the stark, good-guys-versus-bad- guys framework informing this book is that it encourages an atmosphere where merely to raise these qualms immediately qualifies one as a 'restorationist.' That is positively silly-and intellectually counterproductive. The historian who looks back may shake her head in wonder at how the ideological commitments that made these scholars highlight one set of very real issues became blinders that kept them-and many others in their camp-from examining so much else."

Ah, that very conservative fear of being called a conservative. A future historian may shake his (male or female) head in wonder at how a very thoughtful reporter feels it necessary to insist, in the midst of the shambles, that he is against restoration. It all depends on what is to be restored. Recall that the driving force of renewal at Vatican Council II was ressourcement, which is undoubtedly a kind of restoration. Despite the limping conclusion (he is writing for Commonweal, after all), Steinfels has nailed the mindlessness of a progressive insouciance that thinks it a good thing that, in the words of one author, younger Catholics "place a higher priority on being good Christians than they do on being good Catholics," when "good Christian" is indistinguishable from the cultural liberalism promoted by, for instance, the National Catholic Reporter.

Beyond Suspicion

In those days, Freud was for almost all intellectuals and those who aspired to being intellectuals an untouchable icon of a world come of age. Today one might argue that Bishop Sheen was just a bit ahead of time. Until recently, the establishment of the allegedly avant-garde rested on the three pillars of Marx, Darwin, and Freud. Outside the cult-like corners of the prestige academy, Marx is in ruins, Freud is crumbling, and Darwin is beginning to totter. The entire modern sensibility that was built upon the "hermeneutics of suspicion" (Paul Ricoeur) is now collapsing in the face of a relentless suspicion of suspicion as the key to whatever truth is available to us mortals.

Many thinkers have contributed to the demolition of Freud and Freudianism in the past decade. Paul Vitz, a psychologist at New York University, has not received the credit he deserves for a number of studies demonstrating Freud's dependence upon, and perversion of, Christian narratives in constructing his ersatz religion. Deservedly celebrated is Frederick Crews of the University of California who, in the New York Review of Books and in his book Skeptical Engagements, has been smiting Freudians hip and thigh, no doubt putting many psychoanalysts back on the couch to dream of the days when their declining business was viewed as a science. But now comes what may be the definitive tour de force by John Farrell of Claremont McKenna College. Freud's Paranoid Quest (New York University Press, 275 pp., $34.95) is, quite simply, one of the most intellectually scintillating, persuasive, and elegantly argued books that I have read in a long time.

The book is about much more than Freud. Farrell begins with Francis Bacon and Descartes and works his way up (or down) through all the mental benchmarks of modernity, from Hume and Rousseau through Nietzsche, exposing the essentially paranoid structure of the methodology of suspicion. For many moderns, Kant was a place of refuge, but Freud, the "master of suspicion," invaded that sanctuary as well. Farrell writes, "The aim of Kant's transcendental turn was to sacrifice immediacy of knowledge of the external world for certainty within the domain of the subject. Within this transcendental domain, the subject gives its own law to nature and to its own will. It was an inward migration intended to establish an unshakable autonomy. Freud upsets this intention by introducing within the enclosed kingdom of the Kantian subject the same division and distance that separate it from the outside world. Opening this new and ungovernable territory, the unconscious, Freud established an internal Other which, as he stated, showed reason that it was not the master of its own house."

Bacon created the role of the scientist as hero, the bold adventurer who, abandoning the comforts of tradition, mythology, and, above all, religion, dared to face the naked truth. It is in that tradition of scientific heroism that Farrell locates Freud. "With the revelation of the Oedipal code, Freud becomes the final hero, the hero who could unmask himself, asserting a paranoid version of psychology in order to display his own 'narcissistic' character and to enjoy the triumph of that attractively disturbing irony. The effect was not solely one of destruction: Freud's aim was to complete the transition to modernity by reintegrating the broken fragments of tradition in a comprehensive psychological myth, with himself at the center. Freud thus gave a most convincing performance in a role which, since Rousseau, has dominated the scene of modernity: the role of the first honest man. The division between heroic analyst and pathetic analysand is fully prefigured in Rousseau: pathetic in the doing and heroic in the telling seems to be the motto of the paranoid intellectual. Freud even claimed to believe that the discovery of psychoanalysis had deprived him of his ability to lie."

In Goethe's Faust, the epitome of the modern hero declares, "In the Beginning was the Deed." In Freud's mythology, the deed was the primal crime in which the sons of the primal father liberated themselves from the idealism of narcissistic enthrallment in order to attain the reality of action. All must be destroyed and cursed in order to be free from destruction and the curse that rests upon lesser mortals. In Act One of Faust, just before entering his pact with Mephistopheles, Faust declares:

My curse I hurl on all that spangles
The mind with dazzling make-belief,
With lies and blandishments entangles
The soul within this cave of grief!
Accursed, to start, the smug delusion
Whereby the mind itself ensnares!
Cursed, brash phenomenal intrusion
That blinds the senses unawares!
Cursed, what in lying dreams assures us
Of name and glory past the grave!
Cursed, pride of ownership that lures us
Through wife and children, plow and slave!
Accursed by Mammon, when his treasure
To deeds of daring eggs us on,
For idle self-indulgent leisure
Spreads a luxurious divan!
Cursed by the balsam of the grape!
Cursed, highest prize of lovers' thrall!
A curse on faith! A curse on hope!
A curse on patience, above all!

But I must stop. The problem with a book like this is that you want to quote the whole thing. Farrell's argument is the more effective because he regularly pauses to state, with generosity and fairness, the objections that might be raised to his thesis, and then proceeds to answer such objections in a way that is almost always convincing. Freud's Paranoid Quest is a remarkable achievement. The question raised is whether the entirety of the "modernity project" did not get off on the wrong foot by assuming that suspicion is the key to knowledge. The modern premise was that nothing can be accepted as true if it can reasonably be doubted. And of course everything, including the reason that doubts, can reasonably be doubted, if one is determined to doubt.

As Farrell trenchantly argues, all such reductive logic turns upon itself. The relentlessly suspicious cannot sustain their trust in suspicion. Paranoia is, among other things, a stratagem for avoiding that self-destruction by designing oneself as the grandiose hero who, against a hostile world, possesses the explanation of explanations that survives every doubt and denial. The great modern exemplar of this all- encompassing ploy is Cervante's Quixote, whom Farrell employs to brilliant effect. This paraphrase and a few quotes do not do justice to the intricacy and elegance of the argument. The only thing for it is to read the book, which, as you might have surmised by now, I warmly recommend.

While We're At It

• "We Are Church" is the conglomeration of leftist Catholic groups set on getting a million signatures to protest the oppression of a sexist, racist, phallocentric, eurocentric, authoritarian, etc. etc. church. Sister Maureen Fiedler is the national coordinator of the effort. (I take perverse pleasure in one reporter's comment on an encounter I had with Sr. Maureen on a network television program: "Neuhaus Romed while Fiedler burned.") She has sent a letter to Catholic schools suggesting that teachers enlist their students to get signatures for the protest, asking each signer to contribute one dollar. "Local groups that do the work receive 60 percent of the funds they collect!" For the mathematically challenged, she adds: "Collecting 1,000 signatures and $1,000, for example, means that your student group will earn $600 for local programs!" Apart from the unseemliness of exploiting children for her partisan games, this ploy does little to enhance the credibility of a signature campaign that is supposed to demonstrate massive discontent with church leadership. "So the kids in your school are really mad at the Church?" "Shucks no, we just needed new basketball jerseys."
• To those of us not reared on computers, "http://www.firstthings.com" mostly looks like what happens to our copy after the printers take a long lunch at the local rathskeller. But the junior editors here at the journal-who were fed bits and bytes with their baby food-insist that I mention it, as it is apparently the Internet address for our new First Things web site. Put together by Christian Leadership Ministries, the site has a very attractive design and seems quite simple to use. It already contains the complete text of the last four years of the journal, and we're working on setting up the first two or three years. (Back in those days, before the flood, we used "dedicated typesetting machines," which seems to make difficult translation into formats Internet users can access.) The site offers an easy search engine, an issue-by-issue browser, and lots of opportunities to subscribe to the journal. You can even submit letters to the editor by following the on-screen menus. First Things is not about to become some sort of on-line hypertext. Our primary aim remains putting out as fine a magazine as we can manage, and the web site will run a month behind: an issue's text not appearing on-line until that issue has been replaced on the newstands by the next issue. But easy electronic access to the many fine articles we've published over the years is a service we're glad to provide for our readers.
• This might have been an interesting idea. Taking note of the end of the century, the New York Times Magazine asked a passel of notables to speculate on what the world will be like a hundred years from now. Richard Rorty, the country's number one celebrity philosopher, is apparently the only one who thinks religion might still be around. In his scenario, the country fell under a military dictatorship early in the twenty-first century and the Dark Years continued until 2044 when the Democratic Vistas Party, a "coalition of trade unions and churches," toppled the regime and ushered in an era of egalitarian fraternity (or, as some insisted, "siblinghood"). Writing in the year 2096, Rorty says: "In the churches, the 'social gospel' theology of the early twentieth century has been rediscovered. Walter Rauschenbusch's 'Prayer against the servants of Mammon' ('Behold the servants of Mammon, who defy thee and drain their fellow-men of gain . . . who have made us ashamed of our dear country by their defilements and have turned our holy freedom into a hollow name . . .') is familiar to most churchgoers." While socialism as the state ownership of the means of production was discredited in the twentieth century, the egalitarianism of Rorty's utopia is maintained by fellow-feeling and a pervasive altruism. While America is much reduced in power and prosperity, "our chastened mood, our lately learned humility, may have made us better able to realize that everything depends on keeping our fragile sense of American fraternity intact." There is something touchingly conservative about Rorty's vision. Walter Rauschenbusch was the father of Rorty's mother. Grandpa saw the future and it works! Rorty is a famous josher and I expect he is having us on. Or maybe not.
• The toy doberman snaps again. Frank Rich of the Times witnessed the thirty-five thousand Promise Keepers gathered at Shea Stadium and did his homework by reading the Nation, which featured PK as its hysteria of the week. "Particularly ominous," says Mr. Rich in tones most ominous, "are the many ideological and financial links between the PK hierarchy and organizations that are pushing the full religious-right agenda of outlawing abortion, demonizing homosexuals, and bringing prayer and the teaching of creationism to public schools." In short, PK is conservative! He notes that PK is supported by "James Dobson's Focus on the Family, the powerful, radio- driven theocratic crusade that is to the right of the Christian Coalition and has twice its membership." The article in the Nation that Mr. Rich has been inhaling in the course of his investigative journalism notes that PK has thousands of "cells" in local communities, just like you-know-who used to have cells. The article concludes: "Now, mobilizing hundreds of thousands of men into a disciplined, hierarchical, nationwide, grassroots formation with significant military connections but a subtle presentation, Promise Keepers poses a new challenge. Its promise may be our peril." "An army PK most certainly is," writes Mr. Rich. "Its preachers sound more like generals and hard- charging motivational cheerleaders than clergy." The toy doberman is all aquiver with the frisson of another anticipated assault. The fascists are coming! The fascists are coming!
• I won't go into detail, but if I don't mention it I'm sure to be asked why not. For the detail, see Michael Fumento's "Politics and Church Burnings" in the October Commentary or, if you really want the full story, write the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) at 1521 16th Street NW, Washington D.C. 20036. The long and short of it is that the big to-do last spring about the rash of black church burnings turns out to have been pretty much of a hoax. "Terror in the Night Down South," screamed Newsweek, along with countless other media. Now the sources mentioned above-plus the Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, USA Today, and others-have looked into the facts and found that the crisis was made up by folks who parlayed white guilt about racism into a very profitable thing. In the lead, once again, was the National Council of Churches (NCC), which established a Burned Churches Fund that has reportedly taken in more than ten million dollars and is still counting. Readers may remember an item in these pages some while back that described the sorry plight of the racial justice office of the NCC, which lost its director because there was no money for basics such as travel expenses. The office was, for all practical purposes, closed down. Happy days are here again, thanks to the Burned Churches Fund, and the NCC can't hire staff fast enough. Since the money isn't needed for rebuilding churches, and since money is so wondrously fungible, the NCC has embarked on an ambitious program to educate Americans about their racism. Other groups, including the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Christian Coalition, and the American Jewish Committee, did not distinguish themselves by rushing to join the NCC-led panic. Moreover, the Institute on Religion and Democracy is worried about some of the people who headed the NCC effort and are now in charge of the loot. Don Rojas, for instance, is the administrator of the Burned Churches Fund. Mr. Rojas has over the years worked as a propaganda officer for Marxist-Leninist dictatorships in Grenada, Czechoslovakia, and Cuba, and is a great supporter of Minister Louis Farrakhan and the notorious anti-Semite Leonard Jeffries of City College in New York. (IRD, as you might expect from its name, is awfully stubborn in its belief that churches should not promote the enemies of religion and democracy.) Hundreds of churches, black and white, burn or are burned every year. It's a very bad thing. The good news is that many thousands of Americans responded generously to the appeal for funds, as usual. The bad news is that some religious leaders are not above setting off false alarms and exploiting fear and guilt in order to raise big money. Also as usual. The devilishly delicious twist in this case is that the money raised by exploiting white guilt feelings will be used to generate more white guilt feelings. When you're on to a good thing, why stop?
• Thirty years ago, the late and indisputably great Paul Ramsey wrote a little book titled Who Speaks for the Church? It was a critique of the presumption of the World Council of Churches that it represents the Christian voice in the public square. Under the title was the author's name, "Paul Ramsey." Paul enjoyed pointing out that one had only to read the cover to get the answer to the question posed by the title. Now Delacorte Press, in advertising Jim Wallis' The Soul of Politics, has gone Ramsey one better. At the top of the ad: "Who Speaks for God?" Directly underneath: "Jim Wallis." Now that's reaching. Wallis is the editor of Sojourners magazine, a leftist publication that has recently joined the "Beyondist" movement so brilliantly launched by Dick Morris and exemplified by Bill Clinton ("beyond left and right, beyond liberal and conservative," etc.). The ad describes Wallis as "probably the most prominent, controversial evangelical pastor today." Considering that he speaks for God, it is no more than his due.
• It is, all in all, a remarkable achievement. The six-part PBS series, With God On Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right, is an unusually fair and informative account of the history of conservative religious activism from the emergence of the "neo- evangelical" movement following World War II to today's insurgency led by groups such as the Christian Coalition and the Family Research Council. Viewers of a certain age will enjoy meeting again such anti- Communist crusaders as Fred Schwartz and Billy James Hargis, once such prominent figures on the far right. Produced by Calvin Skaggs, the series has a perhaps unprecedented ideological range of philanthropic sponsorship, from the Bradley Foundation on the right to the John D. MacArthur Foundation on the left. One might infer from this that the country is not so polarized as some think, but the opposite conclusion is probably closer to the mark: Both right and left assume that a fair presentation of the facts will obviously serve their ends. The series can be faulted on several scores. The fundamentalist-evangelical story line is not so self-contained as the series suggests. More attention should have been paid the crosscutting influences of what was happening in other parts of the religious world, notably oldline Protestantism and Catholicism. Largely absent also are the several transmogrifications of what is meant by "conservatism"-from Taft Republicanism to the several worlds of neoconservatism and the part played by conflicting attitudes toward Israel. And it is not at all clear why Michael Horton, noted foe of "Evangelicals and Catholics Together," is pertinent to the story. But let me not quibble. Only so much can be covered even in six hours. With God On Our Side is probably the best thing television has ever done on the conservative Christian insurgency in the political arena. The series leaves it to the viewer to decide whether "the religious right" is a frightening invasion of the aliens or an instance of citizens seeking redress of just grievances and, along the way, rejuvenating the American democratic experiment.
• Predictably, not everyone was so taken with the series. Writing in the Nation, Alyssa Katz says, "The historical perspective the series offers is invaluable, but its parade of evidence amounts to media junk food, best consumed for the guilty pleasure of staring a fearsome beast in the eye from the safety of invisibility." At the same time, she learned that "evangelical Christians consider themselves a minority oppressed in a nation that was founded to provide religious freedom." She adds, "It's a view well worth listening to. . . . When secular America openly broke away from traditional Christian values in the sixties and seventies, political involvement by conservative Christians became, in retrospect, inevitable." That's the Nation, mind you.
• If you like what you're reading, do not selfishly keep it to yourself. Please send us a list of family members, friends, and associates who should be reading FT, and we'll send them a sample issue. Giving you full credit, of course. Why not do it soon? Like right now.
• Attention is turned to Christmas, and to Christmas shopping. Brace yourself for the usual rush of articles and editorials deploring the "commercialization" of Christmas. Of course anything can get out of hand, but, all in all, I think the commercialization of Christmas an excellent thing. People are giving gifts, permitting themselves to be generous, even a bit extravagant. It is hard to think the world would be a nicer place in the absence of this flurry of friendliness. Despite the catechetical deficit in contemporary Christianity, I expect most people are more or less aware that it all has to do with God's extravagant gift of the Redeemer. Except for the people who put out the major mail order catalogues. I shop regularly from the catalogues sent by the Metropolitan Museum, the Smithsonian, and the major museums in places such as Boston and Chicago. In recent years I've been struck that they are almost all devoid of art or other gifts that are explicitly Christian. There is a lot of Jewish, and quite a bit of Egyptian, Chinese, and Inca stuff, but very little that is Christian. Yet these catalogues are clearly designed for Christmas giving in a country that is over 94 percent Christian. I am sorry, but it has to be a very deliberate decision on the part of those who manage the museum art business. I know it is not because there is not a great demand for Christian art. The Metropolitan Museum gift shop has over the years had some fine medieval Christian reproductions. They do not appear in its catalogue, and on at least two occasions when I have asked at the shop the answer was that such items were so popular they could not keep up with the demand. But of course all they have to do is order more. Most remarkable is the catalogue of the Collections of the Vatican Museum, sent out from Roanoke, Virginia. If there is anywhere in the world where one might expect to find fine reproductions of Christian art, it is the Vatican Museum. In fact, this elegant catalogue offers, among many other items, Etruscan jars, tapestry fireplace screens, Roman coins, crystal vases designed by Raphael, and a head of Apollo, but Christian art is conspicuously absent. Call it a conspiracy or call it a coincidence, but the clear result is to keep Christ out of Christmas. It appears these big museums, too, have a perverse inhibition about commercializing Christmas, so their catalogues pretend it is simply a "holiday season" that, for some reason or another, happens to come toward the end of December each year. It is dumb business and leaves one wishing that people would get serious about commercializing Christmas.
• It really is an encouragement. Wherever I go, as well as in letters, people tell me how much FT means to them, how they use articles in discussion groups, send them to friends, and goodness knows what else. (Again, feel free to copy away, as long as no money changes hands.) I am also impressed by the number of people who say they save back issues for reference. In that connection, you might want to look at the ad for the neat little back-issue organizer (see page 44). Each one holds a year or more of issues and, let's face it, that stack of FT on the coffee table is getting to be a bit much, or so a reader in Cleveland has been complaining to his wife for at least a couple of years.
• The politicizing of everything is the bane of this unhappy age. David Norbrook of Magdalen College, Oxford, reviews a new slew of books that aim at "contextualizing" and "historicizing" Milton's Paradise Lost. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, Norbrook is not unsympathetic to the argument that Milton's work was importantly influenced by his republican propensities and his hostility to the restored monarchy. But there is ever so much more to it than that, says Norbrook: "And there are possible dangers in restricting Paradise Lost too exclusively to Restoration contexts. For Milton, it would have dignified the banality of the restored monarchy far too much to equate it with the fall of man; rather, recalling the genuine tragedy of the Fall would prevent a shrunken pessimism from reading a particular disaster as the end of all responsibility. That universalism certainly contrasts with the celebration of difference in recent cultural politics. For Milton and other republicans, it was courtly society that nurtured a destructive, competitive individuality, with the 'naked majesty' of a common humanity becoming alienatingly 'besmeared with gold.' Paradise Lost worries at the origins of humanity as a species. Its sublimity centers on its ability to wrench us out of a human perspective so that we can view ourselves from the outside, and ask with the stupefied serpent: what on earth has God wrought?"
• The curmudgeonly but kind Dr. Theodore Dalrymple relates his encounters with the dregs of society in his column, "If symptoms persist . . . ," in the London Spectator. "I see quite a number of patients whose character undergoes a regular change, mainly for the better, as they enter my room and for the worse when they return to the bosom of their family. There are not a few of them who suffer an irresistible urge to strangle their wives, especially when no one who could stop them is looking: though, as their wives invariably point out, 'they don't do it all the time, doctor.' Continuous strangulation is rather difficult to conceptualize." Dalrymple is bothered by the growing number of people who say they can't help doing what they do, and deplores the fact that this is now "official medical doctrine." He cites an article on "myths about the treatment of addiction" in Lancet, the British medical journal, written by two researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. "One reason why many physicians are unsympathetic towards the addict is that addiction is perceived as being self-afflicted," they write. "However, there are numerous involuntary components in the addictive process. Whether the drug is taken can be influenced by external factors such as peer pressure, price, and, in particular, availability." But of course, now that they mention it, almost nobody takes drugs that are not available. Dalrymple comments: "Mind you, I don't blame the authors for this: after all, the pressure upon academics to publish in reputable journals nowadays is as irresistible as the urge of husbands to strangle their wives."
• The opinion of the moment, or maybe of the last ten years, is that H. Richard Niebuhr was a deeper thinker than his more famous brother Reinhold. It's a subject that comes up from time to time in the talk of intellectuals of a certain training (and certain age), and I go back and forth on it. Certainly Reinhold had a greater influence on my early formation, but I confess that I reflect more often on arguments made by H. Richard, and his lapidary summaries of whole schools of moral and theological thought stick stubbornly in the mind. Maybe he was lapidary to a fault, refining things so elegantly that the rough edges of truth got lost. More often his elegance served incisiveness. For instance, the well-known description of the religious liberalism that gained ascendancy in the late nineteenth century and ruled so long. It was, he said, centered in a belief that "a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross." For several years I used his Christ and Culture as the text in a moral theology course at St. Joseph's Seminary here in New York. It provides a wonderfully neat typology of different approaches to the church-and-society question, much like the "models" approach developed by Father Avery Dulles on other questions. But I finally realized I was spending so much class time arguing with the typology that I was neglecting the subject at hand, so this year I dropped Christ and Culture, reluctantly. So what, the impatient reader asks, got Neuhaus off on H. Richard Niebuhr? The answer is the welcome appearance of H. Richard Niebuhr: Theology, History, and Culture , edited by William Stacy Johnson and published by Yale University Press. The book is 230 pages of previously unpublished essays, lectures, and sermons, an unexpected feast for those who have a cultivated taste for Niebuhr. Included is a little reflection he wrote shortly before his death in 1962. Maybe you, too, will find it a graceful provocation: "Sometimes everyone who has taught through spoken and written words needs to look back on his activity with the question, What has been the intention of my work? Not, What did I intend? I always intended something very specific-to gain clarity or give some clarity about this point or that-to satisfy my curiosity about some puzzle-to understand some relationship. I have had and have intentions but what does all the work taken together intend? This is Kierkegaard's question in Point of View for my Work as an Author. . . . What was the intention behind all my intentions, the fundamental intention which I represented rather than willed, the thing to which I was committed rather than committed myself? In unbelief I call that intention fate- what was I fated to do-in confidence I call it divine governance."
• Among endangered species in need of protection is the village atheist. Society magazine serves the intellectual ecology by publishing Allan Mazur, a specialist in "biosociology" at Syracuse University. His article, "Science Three, Religion Zero," asserts with a confidence wondrously uninhibited by learning that religion has been done in by the Copernican revolution, evolutionary theory, and historical-critical consciousness. The end of religion, says Mr. Mazur, is also evident in the fact that clergy engage in an "ecumenicalism" that acknowledges "that their neighbors' religions have their own validity." Religion may have some vestigial influence in pressing "smallish disputes" in the public arena, but it is irrelevant to the big questions. "Religious groups sometimes win when they engage in everyday politics, but science persistently wins the major wars." I guess we might as well pack it in.
• I reviewed Paul Johnson's latest offering, The Quest for God: A Personal Pilgrimage (HarperCollins), for a daily and was generally favorable to his idiosyncratic but intriguing account of his Christian, and very Catholic, faith. Other reviews have run the gamut from raves (Norman Podhoretz in Commentary) to scathing ridicule (I-forget-who in the Spectator). One of the more curious is Ian Buruma's treatment in the New Yorker, which is basically an exposé of Johnson's political and ideological gyrations over the decades. Buruma concludes with this: "But what I find particularly irritating is that these yearnings for discipline are presented as calls for freedom and democracy. In the conclusion to his book Johnson tells us what the love and worship of God is all about: 'to turn our minds, and if possible our bodies too, away from earthliness to perfection, from doubt to certitude, from the self to goodness, and from the flesh to the spirit.' Perhaps this is true of the worship of God. But if it is democracy and freedom we want we would do better to turn those propositions precisely the other way around." Now if I got this right, Mr. Buruma believes that democracy and freedom are advanced by turning our minds, and if possible our bodies too, away from perfection to earthliness, from certitude to doubt, from goodness to the self, and from the spirit to the flesh. There are no doubt many people who believe that, which helps account for the currently unhappy state of democracy and freedom.
• St. Ann's was a nice little parish church, says Helen Hull Hitchcock, and then it had the misfortunate of being renovated. For Catholic churches, being renovated usually means running into the demolition program set forth in Environment and Art in Catholic Worship, a 1978 tract of doubtful authority that is treated by some liturgical experts as magisterial teaching far outranking papal encyclicals. Statues, stained glass, kneelers, and tabernacles-all must go in order to "facilitate interactive worship." This presupposes the interaction is between us very splendid people rather than between God and human beings in all their neediness. Father Avery Dulles once mentioned that he spoke in one of these renovated spaces and noted a big banner on the front wall, "God Is Other People." He said he very much wished that he had a magic marker with which to put a strong comma after "Other." As for St. Ann, Mrs. Hitchcock says it "has been expensively gutted, stripped, and transformed from a place of distinctively Catholic worship to a 'communal gathering space'-a multifunctional meeting room." She continues: "The justification for the literal iconoclasm in Catholic churches could hardly have been more clearly expressed by Cromwell's Roundheads after they had systematically beheaded every image in the Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral or smashed all the stained glass windows at Canterbury, although Cromwell's soldiers were undoubtedly responsible for destroying far fewer sacred images than the liturgical 'experts' who imposed their views of renewal on the Catholic churches across America." Now it must be admitted that Catholic, and not only Catholic, churches frequently had an awful lot of schlock. "Environment and art in worship" is a very important subject. Critics of the liturgical and aesthetic experts sometimes confuse sacred space with cluttered space, and popular piety with vulgarity expressed in artistic trash. At the same time, Mrs. Hitchcock is right about the stripping of the altars that aims not at a cleaner or purer form but at a radically different understanding of worship itself. Among clergy the question is asked, What's the difference between a liturgist and a terrorist? Answer: You can negotiate with a terrorist. Having given up on negotiating, many are now in revolt against the alleged experts. One voice of intelligent revolt is Adoremus Bulletin, published by a new liturgical society that can be reached at P.O. Box 5858, Arlington, VA 22205 (703-241- 5858).
• Some consider him one of the most learned men and probably the greatest theologian of the century, and I am not disposed to argue the point. Shortly before his death, Hans Urs von Balthasar was made a cardinal by John Paul II. "One evening during Balthasar's final days on earth, he remarked to a few friends who, having overcome his natural shyness, were holding a party in his honor, 'If you, my friends, are happy, then I must be happy too.' He said this without design and without affectation. I was struck by the extraordinary simplicity of faith in a man endowed with such a vast and astute intelligence and a heart capable of receiving and mitigating the most searing anguish." That is from Hans Urs von Balthasar: A Theological Style (Eerdmans), written by his friend Angelo Scola. I do not have a terribly long list of people from this century whom I eagerly look forward to meeting in the inn at the end of life's road, there to engage in theological conversation over a leisurely dinner and good cigar, but Balthasar is near the top of it. I expect, though, that he and Karl Barth are already hard at it, and won't mind if I just listen in.
• From Ecumenical News International: "For the first time in history, Swiss churches, including the Roman Catholic Church and Switzerland's main Protestant churches, have joined forces with environmental groups to launch a petition calling on the Swiss government to take urgent action to combat global warming." Of notable firsts there is no end.
• He has a dream. Reinhard Frieling is director of the Institute for Inter-Confessional Research and billed as one of Germany's leading Protestant ecumenists. The following is also from Ecumenical News International, reporting on a talk by Frieling at Paderborn University: "'Peter was no pope, and the Pope is not the only Peter,' Frieling said, referring to the claim of the Roman Catholic Church that the popes are the successors of St. Peter, one of the disciples of Jesus." (Ah, that St. Peter.) Of the pope, Frieling said, "My dream is of a servant of unity who, perhaps as president of a council, recognizes a reconciled diversity of the churches, who promotes dialogue and reconciliation rather than giving audiences and reaching final decisions. I dream of a pope who allows open communion and tells Catholics that they have fulfilled their Sunday duty by taking part in a Protestant or ecumenical service." In his dream, Catholics are allowed to be Protestants, but apparently they would still have a Sunday duty. There are no doubt those who think that might be an improvement on the current state of Catholic discipline.
• "Out of the Whirlwind: Claiming a Vision of Progressive Christianity." We had mentioned earlier this national conference at Trinity Cathedral (Episcopal) in Columbia, South Carolina. According to news reports, "nearly one hundred" people showed up. Progressive is today's word for liberal, and it appears that participants huffed and puffed mightily to put some life into the poor thing. James Adams, for thirty years rector of St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., presided, as inegalitarian as that sounds. "Here we are, a group of ninety people, gathered to talk about transforming an institution, the Church, that has a 1,900-year history of oppression and exclusion," announced Adams. It sounds like the kind of thing that should be killed, not transformed. But, considering the transformation the group had in mind, that may be a distinction without a difference. In the opening sermon, the retired Episcopal bishop of Atlanta, Bennett Sims, preached on Mark's account of Jesus healing a blind man. "We know that it was not the faith of the Nicene Creed that made him well. That fourth-century formulation actually may make some people ill," Sims said to laughter. "This is not to despise the Nicene Creed," he added. Of course not. "Though there are better ways to frame it without sacrificing orthodoxy," the bishop added. And this is just the group to do it. Dr. Frederica Harris Thompsett, academic dean of Episcopal Divinity School, asked, "How do you speak out in a post-Nicean way in a Nicean church? It probably means asking questions. The biblical prophets did." The prophets were famous for asking questions. That's no doubt why the symbol for Jeremiah is a question mark. Andrew Getman of Washington, D.C. urged participants not to be nasty to conservatives. "Unless we can hear a conservative brother as someone who needs an arm around his shoulder and to be listened to, then that hurt can turn to violence." Which, being translated, means, Don't provoke the animals. Not everybody was happy with the meeting. Gene Robinson, assistant to the New Hampshire bishop, said, "I'm not so sure that the $500 or so we each spent getting here might not have been better sent to the Lambda Legal Defense Fund, which is fighting for us on gay and lesbian marriages." On the final afternoon, after extended small-group discussions, chair Adams offered a rousing call to arms: "I don't even want to identify what we have in common, because that would be divisive." One is reminded, for some reason, of the old question: What do you get when you cross a Jehovah's Witness and a Unitarian? Answer: Someone who goes around knocking on doors with nothing particular in mind. "Out of the Whirlwind: The Still, Small Sound of Expiring Air." But a measure of sympathy is in order. The basic mistake of the convenors was to think that people would pay their way to a conference promoting "progressive Christianity" when expenses are covered for attending denominational meetings that do much the same thing.
• Evelyn Smith was minding her own business. It is a very small business, that of renting her two duplex apartments. A devout Presbyterian, she refused to lease to unmarried couples. The ever vigilant state charged her with illegal discrimination and took her to court, where the California Supreme Court ruled against her appeal to the free exercise of her religion. To rub in the point, Ms. Smith was fined $454 and ordered to inform prospective tenants about (a) her run- in with the state housing commission, (b) how her claim of religious freedom was rejected, and (c) how she now pays homage to the government's policy of "equal housing opportunity." Writes Timothy Lynch in the Washington-based Legal Times, "One can almost see the smug bureaucratic smiles as the court upheld this bizarre form of secular contrition. . . . Leaving aside the court's narrow conception of religious liberty (and property rights), whatever happened to the idea of free speech? It is one thing to order a person to open her doors to unmarried couples, but forcing Smith to give a mini-speech about her so- called rehabilitation smacks of thought control." But how else to ensure that she does not incite others to the insurrectionary thought that marriage is to be preferred over living in sin? You can just imagine the kind of society we'd be living in were such ideas not forcefully controlled.
• Of honorary doctorates I have a bunch, including some from Catholic universities, bestowed before I became controversial by becoming a Catholic. Now there appears the British edition of Evangelicals and Catholics Together, edited by "Charles Colson and Richard Neuhaus, S.J." It is an honor, I think, but I expect it is not authorized by the Society of Jesus. This plain diocesan priest did enjoy the foreword to the new edition by Member of Parliament David Alton in which he underscores the importance of ECT for sectarian strife in Northern Ireland and for evangelization in England, where less than 10 percent of the population attends church. So that more than makes up for the imputed "S.J."
• God, A Biography got rave reviews from people who agree with author Jack Miles' depiction of a biblical God whom nobody could possibly trust or love. With such a God, it is little wonder that the churches have to gussy up Bible stories for popular consumption. Mr. Miles reportedly approves of Episcopal Church guidelines for teaching the flood in Sunday School. Harold O. J. Brown is of a different view: "Because children love pets, it could be extremely disagreeable to them to hear that God destroyed all of the animals (not to mention the people, of course). For this reason, this destructive, vengeful aspect is to be played down, and the totally unrelated Twenty-third Psalm, with God as the Good Shepherd, is to be introduced as a kind of counterpoint. The rainbow after the Flood, rather than the destructive Deluge itself, is to be emphasized, and each child given a card with a little rainbow on it. The message, of course, is that God is Very Nice and would not do anything mean or nasty. This is all quite sweet, of course, but it does totally obfuscate one essential part of the Deluge account, namely, that God is not willing to tolerate human depravity indefinitely and that human evil will bring destruction upon nature and upon innocent bystanders as well as on the evildoers themselves-a message that might seem particularly appropriate in an age of terrorism and environmental pollution."
• I love Canada. My dog loves Canada. We spend part of every summer there, and it's beautiful. I was born there. My ninety-four-year-old mother lives there. In addition, FT has many Canadian subscribers and we treasure all of them. That having been said, there is this incessant discussion of "Canadian identity" that can be both amusing and tiresome. In the amusing category are two recent items. In a poll conducted by sociologist Reginald Bibby, 76 percent of those asked to name Canada's greatest living person either responded "no one comes to mind" or declined to answer. Maclean's, a national magazine published in Toronto, has concluded that Canada's most famous person is Pamela Anderson, who plays in the U.S. television program Baywatch. Believe me, Canada deserves better than that.
• Doctor-assisted suicide and other forms of euthanasia are seductively appealing to many Americans. The Christian Medical and Dental Society has put together a resource kit that includes a video, leader's manual, popular handouts, bulletin inserts, and a slew of other materials to alert people to the temptation and how to resist it. We haven't reviewed all these items, but judging from the description, the kit (which retails for $30) might be of interest to readers. Write Dr. David Stevens, director of the society, at 501 Fifth Street, P.O. Box 5, Bristol, TN 37621.
• Brace yourself for some good news. It was a close vote but the European Parliament has ruled that member states cannot provide funds to organizations or developing countries that use abortion or forced sterilization in birth control programs. This is a major vindication of the Holy See's position at the 1994 UN population conference in Cairo. Moreover, a proposed convention to be voted on by the Parliament would ban the production of human embryos for research purposes. (It also rejects the ideological, rather than medical, category of "pre-embryo.") Yet more: Italy's national bioethics committee issued a document stating that the human embryo is indeed a human being. "The embryo is one of us," said the committee's president. This is thought to be an important step in preparing the way for new legislation protecting the unborn. (The foregoing report is in response to the reader who complained this section has become a virtual Book of Lamentations.)
• It's a crazy society that promotes same-sex marriage while at the same time prohibiting same-sex education, at least when the sex is male. As the alert reader knows, it is not society that is doing these things but the courts, which have declared obsolete the old-fashioned notion of government by the consent of the governed. All the more reason to welcome the straightforward statement of the Catholic bishops conference: "The Roman Catholic Church believes that marriage is a faithful, exclusive, and lifelong union between one man and one woman, joined as husband and wife in an intimate partnership of life and love." The institution of marriage, the bishops say, "must be preserved, protected, and promoted in both private and public realms. . . . Thus, we oppose attempts to grant the legal status of marriage to a relationship between persons of the same sex." The statement is superb both in its clear articulation of Christian teaching and its argument for the common good. A conservative pundit criticizes the statement because it also affirms that "the Catholic Church teaches emphatically that individuals and society must respect the basic human dignity of all persons, including those with a homosexual orientation." Such criticism is monumentally dumb. It is only in light of the God-given human dignity of all that we can understand the great sadness and tragedy of the gay lifestyle and the homosexualist agenda, including same-sex marriage.
• In an understated but powerful review of The Godless Constitution by Isaac Kramnick and
  R. Laurence Moore (a book to which we have referred previously), Scott Idleman of Marquette University Law School counters their argument that groups such as the Christian Coalition are beyond the pale of this constitutional order. Writing in the Notre Dame Law Review, Idleman allows that one might claim that "the religious right" is a threat to the political order, "But it is not a claim that derives from the Constitution, and the authors err when they attempt to augment it with the 'spirit' of our political covenant. It is not difficult to think of particular groups or viewpoints that each of us believes to be out of place, or out of bounds, in the political process. So it has been since the beginning of the Republic. The Constitution, however, is indifferent to such antipathies. Indeed it virtually guarantees that the unwelcome, the impolitic, and the intrusive will always have a seat at the political table. That religious groups or viewpoints, especially those mobilized on a national scale like the Religious Right, may pose peculiar dangers to our political order is an important concern, but it does not rise to the level of a constitutional concern. The Constitution ultimately entrusts We the People, whether directly or by our representatives, with the final responsibility of judging the propriety and merit of religious activism in the political sphere, no matter how unseemly or unwarranted that activism may be." The same must be said of the propriety and merit of books such as The Godless Constitution.
• "I am a Palestinian," Elias Chacour, a Catholic priest from Galilee, told thousands of Methodists gathered in world conference in Rio de Janeiro. Opening his suit coat, he said, "See, I have no bombs, despite what your media have portrayed me for four decades. I am an Arab Christian, a citizen of Israel. All these facets of my identity are not at peace together. I am crucified." Chacour declared that the Holy Land is being emptied of Christians, and Christians elsewhere seem not to care. Christian pilgrims to Israel ignore the indigenous Christians there. "Living stones are more important than holy shrines. Travelers visit the sand and stones, but don't want to share the faith with their brothers and sisters."
• Separatism breaks out in unlikely places. A Black Ministry Convocation in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, not one of the country's more radical bodies, has voted overwhelmingly for a separate black district (a district is an LCMS diocese, so to speak) because of the "institutional racism" blacks have experienced in the church. Observers say that the resolution was prompted by pique at the LCMS failure to appoint a black as head of the Africa missions desk and doesn't have much chance of approval by the national body. Nonetheless, it is perhaps worth a footnote in somebody's dissertation on the continuingly turbulent state of religion and race relations in America.
• The Journal of the American Medical Association usually has on its cover a reproduction of a work of fine art, with a commentary by Dr. M. Therese Southgate. The cover of the July issue was blank. That, says Dr. Southgate, is because the issue is focused on HIV/AIDS, and she asks readers to consider the "incalculable loss" from the disease-"the loss to all those whose lives would have been touched, even changed, but were not, by books not read because they were never written, by paintings not seen because they were never painted, by performances never heard because the song was not sung." The same issue contains a laudatory review of a book about abortionists, Doctors of Conscience: The Struggle to Provide Abortion Before and After Roe v. Wade. Indeed let us consider the incalculable loss to all those whose lives would have been touched, even changed, but were not, by . . .
• "Common ground" seems to be the in thing these days. It's the title of a little theological (sort of) quarterly that bears the epigraph from Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639), Disputandi pruritus ecclesiarum scabies. Since some parents leave this journal lying around the house where children may see it, we will not translate that. Aimed mainly at readers of the Disciples persuasion, the quarterly bears this warning (or, as the case may be, assurance): "common ground is not affiliated with any reputable agency of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)." Readers touched by the scabies of curiosity can get more information by writing P.O. Box 96, Harrodsburg, KY 40330.
• "The seedbed of our policy-making is a culture that values individualism over community and the accumulation of goods over the common good." From that debatable generalization, Roger Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles moves to an attack on California's Proposition 209, which would eliminate state affirmative action programs. Citing the standard arguments in support of quotas, he contends that the passage of 209 "would mark a major setback to our nation's tenuous commitment to creating a discrimination-free society." There is no acknowledgment that, in the view of many, a discrimination-free society is one that does not discriminate for or against people on the basis of their race or gender, as quotas certainly do. Cardinal Mahony's statement is hardly unique, but it is a particularly unfortunate instance of political propaganda in the guise of pastoral guidance, the kind of thing that gives religion in public life a bad reputation.
• With funding from the U.S. Catholic Conference, Hallel Communications of Sparkill, New York, has produced a series of videos on the Catholic experience in America. One is titled JFK:RC, and focuses on Kennedy's 1960 address to the Protestant clergy of Houston. The speech, drafted by Theodore Sorenson, is conventionally credited with countering the then-powerful fear of the prospect of a Catholic president. Readers of a certain age will remember some of the key sentences: "I believe in an America where no public official either requests or accepts instruction from the Pope, the National Council of Churches, or any other ecclesiastical source. . . . I believe I'm stating the view of American Catholics from one end of the country to another about the happy relations between church and state." Sheldon Stern, a historian at the JFK Library, says of that speech that Kennedy "didn't overcome the religious issue so much as he was able to project his own attractive personality." That is one way of putting it. In the view of many-a view reinforced by subsequent revelations about his personal life-Kennedy was telling the Houston ministers and the nation that he was not a terribly serious Catholic. The added implication was that religion is a purely private matter that must not be permitted to impinge upon what one does in public office. A case can be made that, for a Catholic to be elected President, that line was necessary at the time. Today, however, those sectors of Protestantism where anti-Catholic bias has traditionally been strongest would likely respond in a very different way. Given the priority of the moral and cultural questions that have redefined contemporary politics, most conservative Protestants might welcome the assurance that a Catholic candidate would take inspiration, if not "instruction," from the pope. As it is said, history has many ironies in the fire.
• Relations between evangelicals and Catholics are perhaps most tense in Latin America, and within Hispanic communities in this country. So that is where we need to get out the message of "Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium." For a copy of ECT in Spanish, which can be freely reproduced, please write Ms. Davida Goldman here at FT ($2 for postage and handling).
• Forbes magazine calls it the "National Extortion Association." That may be going a bit far, but the National Education Association (NEA), together with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), used teachers' dues to bankroll the Democratic Party to the tune of around $35 million this year. The 30 percent of NEA members who report they are Republicans have no say in the matter. In the recent election cycle, 99.1 percent of NEA political action committee funding and 98.6 percent of AFT PAC monies went to Democrats. The Detroit News editorializes: "The teachers unions' partisanship is so pronounced they make the much-vilified Tobacco Institute and the National Rifle Association-which have given 78.3 percent and 80.1 percent of their PAC funds, respectively, to Republican candidates-look wildly bipartisan." What the unions get in return is political protection of their monopoly on government education dollars, a monopoly threatened by the prospect of parental choice. Parental choice in general, and Catholic schools in particular, got a big boost when Mayor Giuliani of New York took Cardinal O'Connor up on his long-standing offer to accept a thousand of the poorest and most problem-ridden children in the public schools, those performing in the bottom five percentile. The Mayor was frustrated in his hope of using government money for the experiment, but corporations and individuals came to the rescue. Union defenders of the status quo complained that the money should be given to the public schools, but almost nobody has confidence that even billions of additional dollars could remedy the catastrophically dysfunctional public system. In fact, it is more likely that more money would only deepen the rot. We're talking big time stakes here. New York State alone spends $25 billion per year on the government schools. The desperation of the unions is understandable. With respect to the teachers and their dues, "National Extortion Association" may be right, but even greater sympathy is warranted for the parents, and especially the children, who suffer under the present system. Education used to be the way out of poverty. In our big cities today, it is one of the chief factors locking children into poverty. Which is one very sensible reason why the majority of teachers in the big city systems do not send their own children to the public schools. I'm editorially prejudiced, of course, but I think one of the very best things ever written on this subject is John Coons' "School Choice as Simple Justice" (FT, April 1992). You might think about suggesting it for the next meeting of your discussion group.
• Oh, what a tangled web we weave. In Racine County, Wisconsin, Deborah Zimmerman is charged with attempted homicide because she tried to kill her baby by alcohol poisoning. Two days before labor was to be induced, she went out and got stone cold absolutely dead drunk. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "What makes the case so unusual is that if Zimmerman's baby had been stillborn, she could not have been charged with attempted homicide because it would have been considered an abortion, said Racine County Assistant District Attorney Joan Korb." Ms. Zimmerman just had the legal misfortune of giving birth to a healthy baby. Defense attorney Sally Hoelzel takes a different line: "My contention is that at the time of the alleged acts of my client, the fetus was not a human being and could not be a victim." Prosecutor Korb observes, "People will want to look at it as a woman's right to do with her body as she pleases prior to the birth of the child. But our position is that it has consequences to the child if it's born alive." The article does not address the legalities of killing a child as it is being born, as in partial-birth abortion. In the 220th year of the independence of this great nation, that is countenanced by what is known as the rule of law.
• A concurrent resolution of Congress, even when unanimously adopted, does not have the force of law. But it is very good that the House and Senate did it. The resolution was introduced September 17 by Senator John McCain of Arizona, and is titled "Condemning Human Rights Abuses and Denials of Religious Liberty." While affirming the rights of all believers, it focuses on the persecution of Christians who are "victimized by a 'religious apartheid' that subjects them to inhumane, humiliating treatment, and, in certain cases, are imprisoned, tortured, enslaved, or killed." The resolution cites John Paul II on "the most fundamental human freedom, that of practicing one's faith openly," which is a person's "reason for living." Among the countries named in the Senate resolution are Sudan, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, China, Pakistan, North Korea, Egypt, Laos, and Vietnam. The Clinton State Department has been notoriously lax in pressing the question of religious persecution, especially where Christians are involved, and the resolution calls on the President to "expand and invigorate" this country's advocacy of religious freedom and to "initiate a thorough examination of all U.S. policies that affect persecuted Christians." While a unanimous resolution is not law, we are told that pertinent legislation is in the works. Persecuted Christians around the world are puzzled and disheartened by what they perceive, with good reason, as the indifference of American Christians to their suffering brothers and sisters. Many people are to be credited for recent efforts to challenge this scandalous indifference, but we note especially the relentless labor of Michael Horowitz of the Hudson Institute and Nina Shea of the Puebla Institute, plus the splendid "Statement of Conscience and Call to Action" adopted earlier this year by the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). We confess to being somewhat puzzled that other institutions, including the National Council of Churches and the Catholic bishops conference, have not publicly joined in the NAE initiative. It surely cannot be that the U.S. Congress is more concerned about the persecution of Christians than are some churches.
• Please, I take it back. Some months ago a comment on plagiarism was titled, "He who steals my words . . ." In response to a reader who complained that the title itself was semi-plagiarized, I rather snippily said that anyone who didn't recognize the Shakespeare reference shouldn't be reading the journal. We now have a bundle of letters from readers who said they didn't recognize it and ask whether I'm saying that they should stop reading. No, no, no. It was written toward the end of a difficult day. Even Homer nods (as Horace said of a much worthier scribe).
• There is always the question of fairness. When you criticize others, are you accurately representing their views? One is grateful, therefore, when they themselves state their position with unmistakable candor. Kevin M. Cathcart is one of the head honchos of the formidably well-orchestrated legal campaign to advance the homosexual agenda. As executive director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, he offers in the New York Times a concise statement of his understanding of democracy. "Democracy is not supposed to depend on opinion polls or legislative approval," he writes. "Strategic concerns are critical for the lesbian and gay civil rights movement, but they include choosing where as well as what battles are fought." In getting the Supreme Court to overrule the people of Colorado on homosexual rights, and in pressing for same-sex marriage in Hawaii, Lambda "is using the courts and the Constitution to expand and protect our rights." "Strategically, gay people have found far more success in the courts than in Congress." There you have it. Democracy is government by judges rather than by the people through their elected representatives. Is that a fair presentation of Lambda's position? Its leader says so. In the same statement he says that "the Supreme Court struck down Colorado's anti-gay Amendment 2 in Romer v. Evans, and ruled that under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, homophobia cannot be made into law," and he observes that "that principle may be used to challenge the misnamed Defense of Marriage Act, should it become law." In signaling Lambda's legal strategy in challenging the effort by Congress to deny federal recognition to same-sex marriage, Mr. Cathcart takes a small liberty in his interpretation of the Romer decision, but it is a very small liberty. The Supreme Court did not explicitly say that "homophobia" cannot be made into law. It did say that disapproval of homosexuality reflects an irrational animus, and disapproval of homosexuality in any form whatever is what gay activists mean by homophobia. So Lambda and its allies are quite right to believe that, in getting the government to declare that millennia of classical, Jewish, and Christian teaching on homosexuality is nothing more than prejudice, "gay people have found far more success in the courts than in Congress"-or in any other institution with a measure of accountability to the American people. Those who are surprised that this position is presented as a defense of democracy have perhaps not been paying close attention to the judiciary's now long-standing repeal of the principle, "government by the consent of the governed."
• Reviewing a batch of evangelical books on dogmatic theology (May), Carl Braaten, a Lutheran, didn't like at all Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology. He said, "Grudem completely ignores the post-Enlightenment tradition" and exhibits "a blithe indifference to critical scholarship" in his use of Scripture. Dr. Grudem of Trinity Divinity School, Deerfield, Ill., takes strong exception. He notes that his book has hundreds of references to post-Enlightenment authors, albeit evangelical authors who reject the Enlightenment. As for indifference to critical scholarship, he admits to giving "scant attention to scholars whose anti-supernatural presuppositions and entrenched historical skepticism make them poor guides to understanding a Bible that is both thoroughly supernatural and absolutely reliable." So it turns out that his indifference, far from being blithe, is most determined.
• 1998 is the fiftieth anniversary of the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the big assembly was scheduled for Harare, Zimbabwe. Then it was pointed out that Zimbabwe's laws are not kindly disposed toward sodomy and related sexual activities. President Robert Mugabe has gone so far as to compare homosexual acts with animal behavior. There was some agitation in the WCC to find a new site for the assembly, but general secretary Konrad Raiser says that a change "would mean almost total loss of credibility" for the WCC among African churches (over seventy member churches are in Africa). The WCC and Zimbabwe have signed a "memorandum of understanding" that commits the WCC to advising its participants "not to indulge in any act that is in contravention of the laws of Zimbabwe." The implication is that the government, in turn, will not look too closely at what WCC participants are doing in their bedrooms. Not everyone is happy with the memorandum. For instance, Paul Sherry of the United Church of Christ in the USA notes that "some of us" might want to engage in nonviolent acts of protest in keeping with church tradition. One can hear it now: "Would you like to engage in a nonviolent act of protest?"
• The line between the careful and the craven is not always clear. But clearly a recent directive from the United States Catholic Conference (USCC) crawls across the line toward the craven. In September the USCC put out "voter education" material listing the responses of Clinton and Dole to a wide range of questions on subjects as various as abortion, environment, land mines, foreign aid, and labor relations. The material comes with an ever-so-cautious introduction from USCC legal counsel indicating that it "meets IRS criteria" for literature that "avoids violation of the Section 501(c)(3) prohibition against political campaign activity." So bishops and priests are directed that the material must be distributed in its entirety; there must be no editorial comment regarding candidates or their responses; and there must be "no discussion of the questions presented in the questionnaire or of any position of the church on such questions," etc. The answers given by Dole and Clinton (Perot didn't respond) are familiar, so the questionnaire contained nothing that the reasonably well-informed citizen would not already know. The interesting thing is that a hyper- nervous legal counsel tries to gag church leaders who just might want to point out that a candidate's position on, say, abortion or school choice is somewhat more determinative than his position on family farms or the minimum wage. Why on earth should the Catholic Church spinelessly conform its educational efforts to "meet IRS criteria"? With respect to the free exercise of religion, the Church should be pushing the envelope, not safely hunkering down to stay within government dictates. Most humiliating to the Church is the prohibition on discussing church teachings in connection with the questionnaire. The Church to the state, hat in hand and tugging its forelock: "Is there anything else we should not do, Sire, in order to stay in your good graces?" Paul to Timothy: "For God did not give us a spirit of timidity but a spirit of power and love and self-control." But of course Paul only faced the prospect of martyrdom and knew nothing of the terror of threatened tax exemption. The leadership of apostles gives way to the rule of lawyers. We would like to think that bishops had the good sense to junk the worthless questionnaire in favor of proclaiming the Church's message "in season and out of season"-no matter whether it ruffled the feathers of the IRS or gave an ulcer to USCC experts on the legal niceties of ecclesiastical pusillanimity.
• Why do you ask? Of course we'll be carrying a major review of His Holiness: John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Time by Marco Politi and Carl Bernstein (the latter, with Bob Woodward, of "deep throat" fame). The Oliver Stoning of history is not only of interest to the stoned. Politi is a leader of the journalistic horde of Italian vatacanisti or professional Pope-watchers. These are the wonderful people who brought you the news, at least eighty-seven times in the last eighteen years, that John Paul II is on his death bed. One of these years they will be right about that, but, on the basis of my own observation, that is likely a long time off. More on the book later, however. For the moment, I note an interview with Politi in which he laments that this Pope is not as progressive as he and his colleagues would like. For the Church, he said, "the issues are the same as 20 years ago." I should certainly hope so, although the sentence is missing two zeros.
• "We all live in such rigid confines of male and female, like there's a great divide that separates us. Men who are feminine and women who are masculine suffer because of it. I'm really sorry that this is an issue in this day and time." The speaker is Erin Swenson, a man who was a Presbyterian minister in Atlanta. He divorced his wife of twenty-seven years and underwent what the Atlanta paper calls "sex-reassignment surgery." An intriguing idea, sex as assignment. Erin insisted on his/her right to play in the women's tennis league. The dispute was settled when the head of the tennis association determined that Erin had a driver's license that indicated she/he is female. "Officials concluded that a person the State of Georgia recognizes as a woman is eligible for its women's leagues." Denied recognition as a minister by the Atlanta presbytery, Erin now works as "a psychotherapist in private practice specializing in gender-identity issues." Confused about your gender identity? Just check your driver's license. Unless you subscribe to the "rigid confines of male and female" and think you need a new assignment. We should all be really sorry that "this is an issue in this day and time." Really sorry.
• "Tacky." That was one editor's response to the idea that FT should carry classified ads. Being as how we're a very democratic outfit, the Editor-in-Chief cast the majority vote against him. Many FT readers, we expect, would welcome an economical and convenient way to let other readers know about job openings, conferences, research projects, things to sell, or whatever. (No "personals," please. This isn't the New York Review of Books.) For information on how to place your ad, contact Richard Vaughan at Publishing Management Associates, 129 Phelps Avenue, Suite 312, Rockford, IL 61108. Phone: (815) 398-8569; Fax: (815) 398-8579.
• Of the many books and tracts now appearing on how to replace our catastrophic welfare system, a little book edited by James L. Payne is worthy of note, The Befriending Leader: Social Assistance Without Dependency (Lytton Publishing, Sandpoint, Ohio). The book is composed of essays by Octavia Hill, a remarkable social worker in Victorian England whose methods were widely imitated in this country. But even very good books have their distracting moments. In the introduction, we are told that Ms. Hill operated not by rules and regulations but by befriending those who needed help. "She conversed with them, read poetry to them, led them in singing, took them on outings, taught them to prepare nutritious lunches (with white tablecloth and proper manners). Before long, the children were eating out of her hand." Table manners were different in those days.
• If you read the back of the journal first, you might send us that list of potential subscribers before moving on to the main articles. Just a thought.
• Already the editorials and sermons are upon us bemoaning the commercialization of Christmas. But, once again, what is commercialization except giving and receiving in exchanges of generosity and conviviality? To be sure, anything can be done to excess, but one should not protest too much when excess is on the side of good intentions-or at least of intentions that we feel obliged to construe as good. Finally, however, the so-called spirit of the season does come down to the truth of the matter. John Betjeman got it right:

And is it true? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant.

No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare -
That God was Man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.

A blessed Christmas, and may the new year be filled with grace and glory for you and yours.

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