Provocations: A Journal from the Trinity Forum

Steep Trajectory

2008-05-07T18:45:00Z

In the last six years the profits at Moody’s, the ninety-nine-year-old bond ratings firm, rose 375 percent and its stock price quintupled. Extraordinary. As Moody’s became a growth stock we must have known the final chapter of this credit explosion story would not be good. The synopsis: a staid bond ratings company with a history of prudence becomes the most sought after financial date at the mortgage ball and then . . .

As we have known for some time, the housing bubble’s enablers from the financial world somehow missed the chapter about intoxication. So now we are deep in the blame game. Mortgage brokers, all sorts of banks (retail, commercial, and investment), rating agencies, property flippers, and regulators have all made the list. Perhaps somebody should go upstream in a search for the real culprit. In the meantime, at the global level, central bankers work on liquidity; earlier liquidity mistakes should give us pause. And at the personal level we are learning once again a very old lesson: there is no free lunch.

My advice: be careful when you find steep trajectories. Today our minds should be concentrated on the ascendant path of deficit financing (public and private), trade imbalances, and unfunded liabilities at all levels of government. Free lunches writ large. In time each of these pernicious trajectories will result in jarring social, political, and economic dislocations.

We all have our own version of pernicious growth curves. My own is the growth of what I think about as “marginal dollar” irresponsibility—the inclination to push revenue or profit beyond moral limits. Avarice pushed the limits of sound home financing. Advertising is not infrequently avarice camouflaged in clever lines delivered by beautiful people.

Perhaps the most cynical revenue-growth game is state-sponsored gambling. In my formative years, the idea of the state sponsoring and then promoting gambling would have been unthinkable. The state stopped large-scale gambling, it didn’t own it. Yet, today the state is the principal owner and promoter of gambling, and profit levels pivot on the addicted—not the casual—gamer. The state, incapable of controlling or prioritizing its appetites, constantly looks for the next dollar. If that means destroying families’ lives, so be it.

Material good fortune is, well, good. But as materialism mutates into hedonistic behavior a virulent strain of moral hazard is exposed. Today commentators concern themselves with whether Bear Stearns stockholders or the owners of JPMorgan got too good a deal from the Federal Reserve. This moral hazard concern is a sidebar to the seminal issue of cultural restraints on greed.

Many writers have famously explored the conditions that destroy civilizations. Cormac McCarthy recently took on that subject in The Road. He writes chillingly of the barbarism that led to his novel’s post-apocalyptic world. Nightly the Middle East and Africa offer up catastrophes of civilization degraded by religious or tribal hatred. Film companies are drawn to prisons where they explore the tensions as autocrats take on those whose dignity in one way or another has been stripped away.

We read or watch from our comfortable chairs. Have they become too comfortable? Can what increasingly looks like an obsession with comfort—a concept now virtually synonymous with pleasure—co-exist with a healthy culture? Economics, like politics, is downstream from the culture and is increasingly degraded by it. McCarthy’s narrative strips away the veneer to reveal to us civilization’s foundations. What is the threshold beyond which the pursuit of wealth functions as an attack on civilization?

Wants have become needs and deferred gratification alien. All the economic strata are engaged. At the top, the media translates rich into famous; those celebrated lifestyles then exert a centripetal force. Martha Stewart’s talent makes her rich, but then to get richer she stumbles. How often is this story repeated? How high is up? And increasingly politicians, using the top-bracket taxpayers as a rhetorical foil, try to convince the electorate that there is a free lunch. Unfortunately they often succeed.

America’s business leaders are confronted each day with a choice. Products and services inevitably have moral content. “Consumers” are human beings, not some value-neutral black box in an economic equation. How often are products and services and associated marketing shaped by using a societal cost-benefit analysis?

Those who are privileged to work at the apex of a global business generally confront these decisions daily. To whom much is given, though, much should be expected. And this admonition means more than what we do with the money that is left over after we have funded our preferred lifestyle. It should go to the heart of every decision that implicates others—and in business and government few decisions are without such consequences.

Our nation’s economic affairs are in the danger zone. Global networks and appetites multiply risks. The sub-prime mess that has sullied Moody’s reputation has sent markets reeling across the globe. And underneath those market gyrations are millions of people who have been ill served by business and government leaders.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the current unrest comes at a time when the context in which we make decisions has been inexorably changed. Judeo-Christian values, not situational ethics as taught in business schools, have long been our society’s buffer. While not assuring faultless decision-making, they weighed on the minds of most of the nation’s leaders. However, as economic scorekeeping has moved closer to the center of gravity, short-term pragmatics have displaced these long-held values. Increasingly, what should be value-laden decisions are replaced by an exclusive concern for the bottom line.

So as we assess financial risk and our own stewardship, as we listen to the grab-bag promises of politicians on the make, we should keep our eyes upstream. A degraded culture will inevitably fall. Every generation should abhor the prospect of such failure being their legacy. Additionally—since we often find generational causes and effects too abstract to motivate us—we should all recognize our own ultimate accountability.

McClay at the White House

2008-05-06T17:18:01Z

Senior Fellow Wilfred M. McClay recently spoke at a reception in the East Room of the White House honoring the 265th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Jefferson. You can read a transcript of his talk here, courtesy of the Ethics & Public Policy Center.

So let it be for his ideas that we honor Jefferson, above all else. And for the cause of human freedom and human dignity that he so eloquently championed. His failings may weigh against the man, but not against the cause for which he labored so heroically. That should be a lesson to us today. Like Jefferson, we all are carriers of purposes far larger than we know. Purposes whose full realization cannot be achieved in our lifetime, or even be fully understood by us, but which we are called to carry forward as faithfully as we can—as charges to keep.

Johnston on Speaking of Faith

2008-05-06T17:16:00Z

Senior Fellow Douglas Johnston was featured on a recent edition of the public radio program, Speaking of Faith. The greatest threat in the post-Cold War world, he says, is the prospective marriage of religious extremism with weapons of mass destruction. Yet the U.S. spends most of its time, resources, and weapons fighting the symptoms of this threat, not the cause. The diplomacy of the future, he is showing, must engage religion as part of the strategic solution to global conflicts.

China, Tibet, and the Olympics

2008-05-05T17:40:00Z

When the French nobleman and historian Baron Philipe de Coubertin revived the idea of the Olympic Games in Paris in 1894, he was motivated by both nationalism and idealistic internationalism. He felt the French had lost their war with Prussia in 1870 because of their poor physical conditioning. But de Coubertin had also been inspired by an English physician, botanist, and magistrate, William Penny Brookes. Another eccentric idealist and philanthropist, Brookes had first organized an “Olympian Games” in 1850 in the English rural village of Much Wenlock, Shropshire. De Coubertin visited the Much Wenlock Olympics in 1890, and returned to France inspired.

Brookes, in his capacity as magistrate, had intended that the Wenlock Olympian Games would encourage members of the local working class to become physically fit and thus less attracted to crime than they otherwise would have been. He also felt that sports activities organized internationally might also alleviate international tensions. De Coubertin agreed.

A valiant, but vain hope. Ever since their modern revival in Athens in 1896, the Olympic Games have fallen prey again and again to the squabbles and jealousies regularly affecting world politics. The first Games that was crudely exploited for political propaganda purposes, of course, were the infamous “Nazi” Games held in Berlin in 1936. Adolf Hitler was infuriated that an African-American, Jesse Owens, had won four gold medals and thus demonstrated that German Aryans were not quite global athletic supermen. World Wars, of course, canceled the scheduled games of 1916 and 1940. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the most powerful nations of the West boycotted the Summer Olympics held in Moscow the following year, and in 1984 Moscow retaliated by not attending the Los Angeles Olympics. Between 1936 and 1984, other minor boycotts and incidents took place.

Securing from the International Olympic Committee the assignment of hosting is an honor that many countries have sought, but which most of the cities that have been tasked with the actual hosting have grumbled about. The huge financial outlays in Games preparations (new airports, subway and rail systems, roadways) are often not paid for by revenues from visitors to the Games themselves. In addition, there is always massive disruption of local life as homes and buildings are demolished, traffic re-routed, and ways of getting around irrevocably changed. Still, the lure of international prestige and attention acquired by the host country is huge. In the 2000 Games in Sydney, there were about 16,000 accredited journalists from hundreds of countries.

Beijing first tried to be host of the games in 1993, barely four years after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. “A more open China” greets the world, said Beijing billboards with self-conscious coyness, as hastily planted trees tried to promise a greener Beijing for the 2000 Olympics. When the games were eventually awarded to Beijing for 2008, International Olympic Committee officials gamely speculated that China might be made more democratic by hosting them.

Again, a valiant, but vain hope. China for more than a year has been busily arresting dissidents and rounding up and expelling foreigners suspected of planning to use the games as a platform to criticize China. The outburst of demonstrations and violence in Tibet that began in March 2008 only confirmed Chinese in their suspicions that malevolent foreigners would use any Chinese domestic problem to cast the country in a poor light. Chinese promises of greater press freedom for foreign reporters to travel widely in China have been withdrawn. It is now virtually impossible for foreign reporters to visit Tibet unless officially invited there by the Chinese foreign ministry.

The real problem with the Beijing Olympics is that foreign criticism of its handling of Tibet, not to mention mumbled threats of a boycott of the entire Games, has brought out the worst in both the Chinese government and the Chinese people. China, reported The Economist, has shown its “dark side” in facing down international protest, and has been “nervous, repressive, prickly, and stubborn.” Such qualities have been nowhere more visible than in China’s insistence in proceeding with the Olympic torch itinerary to several different countries, despite sometimes-violent opposition to the torch’s journey by pro-Tibetan activists. In London, the torch was nearly doused by a man who approached it with a fire extinguisher. In Paris the torch had to be quickly removed from the streets in a bus out of fears it might be seized by demonstrators. In San Francisco, the city had to provide a decoy route for the torch run after demonstrators unfurled the Tibetan snow-lion flag on the Golden Gate Bridge and threatened serious efforts to seize the torch.

But Chinese efforts to “protect” the torch with a ring of thuggish-looking Chinese men in white and blue track suits caused almost as much bad blood among some spectators of the torch run as the original Tibetan troubles. With a lack of tact bordering on insult, the Chinese are still planning to run the torch through Tibet itself in June. Meanwhile, Chinese students studying overseas have flocked to counter-demonstrations against pro-Tibetan activists, and a British reporter in Beijing who had covered the Tibetan troubles in a way unflattering to China received death threats. This is not an attractive view of Chinese culture.

An international boycott of the Beijing Games over the Tibetan issue, on the other hand, would do nothing to help the Tibetans. The real problem is that Chinese interpret foreign criticism of their Tibetan policies not as a legitimate criticism of Chinese domestic policy—i.e. human rights—but as an attempt to “split” China, to weaken it by encouraging ethnic separatist tendencies. After 150 years of humiliation at the hands of foreign nations, during which China very nearly was partitioned up among the great powers, the Chinese are not entirely unjustified in their paranoia. The Chinese also nurse a grievance that the Tibetans are not more “grateful” for the considerable economic investment Beijing has granted to Tibet, failing to comprehend that vast infrastructure projects like a new railroad into Lhasa does little to raise the income of most ordinary Tibetans.

Through its abilities, as an authoritarian regime, to deploy vast resources on organization, law and order, and social control, the Chinese government is likely to weather the current storm of international criticism over Tibet and pull off the Olympic games in an organized, and perhaps even impressive manner. But in the process it has learned a hard lesson: if you want the international recognition and attention that hosting the Games ensures, you had better be prepared for some unpleasant things in your country coming to light. China’s handling of the non-Han, alien culture of Buddhist Tibet has been one of them.

A Tale of Temptation for Our Times

2008-04-28T18:40:00Z

It was during the Second World War, when the prospects of a humane and democratic future for Europe looked dim, that C. S. Lewis wrote his diabolical classic, The Screwtape Letters. It might be supposed that the daily atrocities unleashed by that conflict provided fodder for the imagination of this Oxford don. Indeed, an early reviewer concluded that Lewis was “earnest in his belief in devils, and as anxious to unmask their strategy against souls as our intelligence department to detect the designs of Hitler.” Others assumed that his account of the psychology of temptation was the fruit of long years in the study of moral theology.

Characteristically, Lewis offered an explanation much closer to home. “They forget that there is an equally reliable, though less creditable, way of learning how temptation works,” he wrote. “‘My heart’—I need no other’s—‘showeth me the wickedness of the ungodly.’”

The book’s themes—the bond between faith and reason, the lust to dominate, the immeasurable worth of every human soul—not only invite our attention: Their recovery may be the tonic our own spiritually troubled age most requires.

Thus the stage version of The Screwtape Letters, fresh from a popular run in New York and now playing at the Lansburgh Theatre in Washington, D.C., is an especially welcome treat. Lewis’s imaginative work consists of thirty-one letters from Screwtape, a senior devil in Hell’s civil service, addressed to Wormwood, a devil-in-training. The apprentice is charged with tempting a young man—“the patient”—in order to secure his soul for Hell. The stage production stars Max McLean in the title role and Karen Eleanor Wight as Toadpipe, his doting, slithering servant-demon. Directed by Jeffrey Fiske, the play deftly captures the book’s chilling insights into the nature of spiritual corruption.

As Lewis was never shy in pointing out, Christianity is widely viewed as a hopelessly “puritan” religion, a belief system that regards all pleasures with suspicion, fear, or loathing. The church has confirmed this prejudice a thousand times over, from its medieval debasement of marriage to the fundamentalist campaigns against alcohol. It surely remains one of the most stubborn obstacles to faith in our own day. In a way that few theologians have achieved, Lewis the layman artfully exposes this error as nothing less than a distortion of the character of God.

“Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground,” warns Screwtape. “He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which he has forbidden.” Here is plain talk, informed by Scripture, about the human condition—the denial or perversion of which has produced untold human misery.

The theatrical version of Screwtape reprises another timely theme of Lewis’s work: the fact that, since at least the Enlightenment, critics of Christianity have falsely assumed that thinking and believing are mutually exclusive activities. People may “cling” to faith out of bitterness and economic hardship, for example, as presidential hopeful Barack Obama recently suggested. They assuredly do not arrive at a place of belief, or remain there for long, with the help of rational thought.

These assumptions have helped to produce massive confusion about the relationship between faith, facts, and reason—a state of affairs for which Screwtape and his co-conspirators take credit. Thanks to their calculated efforts, we are told, most people don’t think of religious doctrines as “true” or “false,” but rather as “outworn,” “conventional,” “ruthless,” or worse. “Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church,” advises Screwtape. “Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.”

The last thing these devils want, we learn, is to awaken the patient’s reason; for that might set him along the honest path, where fictions are exposed and facts may finally penetrate the heart.

“For this I came into the world, to testify to the truth,” Jesus told Pontius Pilate at his trial. “Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” A look at such atheist tracts as Sam Harris’s The End of Faith suggests that Hell’s strategy of sneering at the very concept of truth can always find willing dupes and demagogues.

Perhaps the most poignant aspect of Lewis’s drama, hauntingly portrayed on stage, is the dreadful contrast between the children of Light and the children of Darkness. Hell has a hunger that cannot be sated; it is bent on devouring every human soul. Screwtape’s sleepless ambition is to possess, consume, and feast upon the tortured spirits of his victims. This is the object of all his machinations. “To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense.” That’s a fair description, by the way, of the nature of al Qaeda and its terrorist allies. There is something deeply grotesque about the willingness to target children for assassination, to enlist mothers as suicide bombers, to videotape ritualistic beheadings. The intent, of course, is to establish control over the lives of millions. Yet for all the talk about the “root causes” of religious extremism—poverty, globalization, U.S. foreign policy, etc.—we hear little about the spiritual dimension to this threat.

Compare all that to the motives of “the Enemy,” as admitted by Screwtape. God wants individuals united to him, people remade in his image, yet distinct and fully themselves. They are not seized through force or deception, but rather they exercise the freedom to choose God and the joy of his presence. “He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of himself—creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like his own, not because he has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to his,” Screwtape complains. “We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons.”

Here is the deep mystery about God and his dealings with men and women, the secret that even angels long to look into. It is the “appalling truth” that bewilders Screwtape and all the inhabitants of Hell. It is the mystery of the cross. In the stage version, Screwtape stammers to confess it: “He . . . He . . . He . . . loves them!” It is too much to bear. The devil catches himself, vacillates, equivocates, and recants. “But what is he really up to?”

A reviewer, writing in 1943, called The Screwtape Letters “a spectacular and satisfactory nova in the bleak sky of satire.” Thanks to an intelligent script and fine performances, the nova has reappeared. The light it brings may yet confound the skeptics, who see the sorrows of everyday life as proof of divine indifference. They conclude that Screwtape’s lament—“what is he really up to?”—can have no rational answer.

But for those who call themselves Christians, who know something of the love of God, the answer is revealed in his Son. Such knowledge is neither complete nor free of grief or struggle. Yet it brings hope—real hope—that shakes the gates of Hell and claims, by grace, the promise of Heaven.

A Brief Chat with Screwtape

2008-04-28T18:37:00Z

My colleague Jeff Fiske, director of this production of The Screwtape Letters, first suggested I play Screwtape several years ago. I’m still not sure he meant it as a compliment!

Well, I told him that if we could secure the rights to the novel about how a senior demon instructs a bumbling apprentice demon on the fine art of tempting a young human into perdition, we would give it a go. We did, and now to date we have had two successful runs in New York City and one in Washington D.C.

Screwtape is a plum role—part Noel Coward . . . part Hannibal Lecter . . . part Iago. C. S. Lewis described the process of writing Screwtape as difficult, but playing him is a lot of fun. I remember hearing Malcolm Muggeridge speak of “fictional good” as dull and boring while “fictional evil” is fascinating and engaging. He also was clear to say that in life it is quite the other way around. Perhaps that is one reason film depicts so much violence and evil.

Screwtape is indeed a delicious role. Part of the joy is that the marvelous language I am privileged to speak must be played so it is fun to listen to. The second reason it’s so much fun is the inverted world Lewis creates, where good is bad, up is down, God is the “Enemy” and the devil is “Our Father Below.” The “patient” is a man in need of corrupting rather than healing. It really does strike the listening ear as both amusing and wickedly truthful.

Screwtape is a proud peacock. He loves his job. He loves ruining people’s lives. And he knows all the tricks of the trade. He also loves the way he looks, the sound of his own voice, and the way he dresses. He is the smartest guy in the room and knows it—all drama and glitz. In Screwtape, Lewis has created a creature of pure pride. And according to Lewis, pride is the “great sin.” Unlike other sins, pride is not an “over-desire” for a good thing, but rather, a sin that comes direct from hell. Pride, he says famously, is the complete anti-God state of mind—a flat-out rejection of God.

The arc of the play begins with the premise that human souls are part of the food chain for hell. The demon world is at the top of the food chain and their primary task is to hunt for tasty souls to bring to “Our Father Below,” who takes the best morsels himself and distributes the rest to his fallen angels. Most of the time the hunt is pretty easy. We are so naturally self-centered and egotistical that it requires very little effort on the part of the demons. A little suggestion toward laziness here, a little smugness there, and a “patient” will soon be ready to bake.

The first letter from Screwtape to Wormwood advises on a strategy to encourage the humans to avoid reasoning and thoughts on “universal issues” by keeping them occupied on “the stream of immediate sense experiences”—such as suggesting lunch when the patient is about to consider a profound idea about the meaning of his own existence. Another letter gives a few tactics on eliminating prayer. Still another provides some tricks to get the patient to see a housemate’s personal little ticks and habits—“tones of voice and expressions of face”—as “unendurably irritating to the other. Work on that.”

Screwtape’s great concern is to keep humans away from any real experiences of joy, for that will lead to a real change of heart and produce—Horrors!—humility. A real experience of grace, beauty, love, and truth will take a human out of his self-centeredness and help him see the world on a grander scale. Moments of pure joy make a man self-forgetful and able to focus on others. He becomes more aware of his duties in all situations. He is more considerate. He prays more.

In the novel, the patient is able to meet and fall in love with what Screwtape calls a “silly [read ‘devout’] Christian woman” who is “demure, monosyllabic, mouse-like, and virginal.” Screwtape is so threatened by her and the influence she will have on his patient that he says, “It drives me mad how the world has worsened. We would have had her in the arena in the old days.” The outward qualities the patient used to admire in his friends, who were “rich, smart, and superficially intellectual,” give way to those of new friends who are humble and earnest, who value time and silence, and who work to make the world a better place. To Lewis, humility is the sign of grace. To Screwtape that means his man is lost, lost, lost—and that Screwtape will have hell to pay for coming empty-handed to the infernal table.

Adapting the novel into a stage play was quite a challenge because the ideas are intense and often need time for contemplation. We had to enliven the play both physically and graphically. First of all, we have created through sound, lights, sets, and costume a scenic design that provides an eerily beautiful version of hell—not one you want to live in, but nevertheless fascinating enough to want to visit for the ninety-minute “traffic of our play.”

There is a second important character in our adaptation—Toadpipe, mentioned once in the novel as Screwtape’s secretary. We have expanded her role in the play to enliven the action. Toadpipe handles all the correspondence issues within the play, and also morphs (very easily, I might add) into many of the characters and temptation techniques being described by Screwtape, bringing them to life for the audience. This character, played in our production by Karen Eleanor Wight, is wonderfully effective.

Food is a major metaphor in the play. Lewis’s idea of hell is as selfish consumption on a grand scale. Screwtape regularly carps that today’s humans aren’t as tasty as they used to be a few centuries back, and that the overall quality is “very poor.” But he does say that the food supply is abundant and that “we are in no danger of famine.”

The Screwtape Letters is a metaphor for one of Lewis’s basic theological ideas. As described in Mere Christianity, this world is “enemy-occupied territory.” Screwtape may be the ruling demon in one district. He has ruled effectively for many centuries with “unbroken success.” By exposing him, Lewis hopes to free other would-be patients from his grasp by escaping into the loving arms of the demon’s “Enemy.”

Christ for Culture

2008-04-28T02:50:00Z

How can we explain the phenomenal success of television’s American Idol? As I see it, the show is so wildly popular because it represents the quintessential culture-shaping exercise for a generation with no higher standards than what they like at any particular moment. Transient taste rules the roost on American Idol. A contestant—who was the greatest thing since sliced bread last week—chooses the wrong song, dresses over the top, flubs a line, or otherwise offends Simon, and—zap!—end of the road. Then comes the feeding frenzy of the final couple of weeks, when callers from all over the country, flexing their personal preferences on the touch-tone phone, assert their individual cultural standards into a computer, and, Voilà! out pops the latest cultural icon. Contracts. Album. Commercials. Fifteen minutes of fame stretched out to a year or so. Then . . .

Do any of us remember the names of the last few “American idols”?

It’s the way of idols, isn’t it, that they must be regularly reinforced, added to, or replaced because they don’t have sufficient staying-power to satisfy the cultural hunger of their devotees. The idols we exalt are as fleeting as the standards we use to select and anoint them. And what is true for these “American idols” is true for much of contemporary culture. Little in the way of abiding beauty, goodness, or truth has emerged from America’s cultural forges in recent years. A few groups and stars, an occasional writer, and perhaps a handful of works of art or architecture manage to extend their time in the spotlight to something just short of a generation, but then they, too, go the way of the “American idols” as the fickle tastes of a mundane age, tethered to nothing more than momentary titillation—measured in terms of willingness to part with a buck—go searching like a snake’s tongue for the next meal.

Surely there is a better way to do culture?

Cultural confusion

American Idol illustrates the chaotic, democratic, and fleeting state of contemporary culture as a whole, which partakes of four dominant characteristics. There is first the profusion of culture: books and MP3 downloads by the millions, hundreds of TV channels, satellite radio, seasonal fashions, films, songs, cars, furniture, on and on and on, seemingly ad infinitum. We are awash in culture, overwhelmed and inundated by it.

This profusion of culture also features a far-flung diffusion. American culture is not concentrated in a few cultural hot zones; it’s everywhere. There is no escaping it, even if one wanted to. We head out to the woods to break away from the cultural drone only to have our ears assaulted by jet trails, the rumble of trucks on a highway, and noise leaks from other hikers’ headphones, and our view disturbed by trailside trash and signage marking our journey and telling us how far we have to go.

Moreover, we have become trapped in the suffusion of contemporary culture. We are so immersed in culture that we can’t begin to define ourselves apart from the culture to which we are addicted. We are what we do for a living, or how much we make, or where we live, or what kind of car we drive, or our favorite music, films, and TV shows. Thus culture begins to make us after its own image, and we give names to whole generations based on their identities as defined by the culture they imbibe: Boomers, Gen-Xers, Gen-Yers, and so forth.

All this indicates that ours is a time of cultural confusion. All culture is so jammed up, on, and in us that we scarcely know how to sort out the trash from the true. The only generally accepted standard guiding the cultural choices of our day is “Whatever!” We like what we like for the time that we like it, and we’re likely to like something else, like, whenever. This is no way to build a cultural legacy. It is not hard to imagine that future archeologists, unearthing the detritus of our mundane age, will conclude that the whole vast dig once known as America was just an enormous garbage dump.

A radical proposal

People who relish mindless mundanity may be quite content with the fleeting forms and self-referencing standards of contemporary culture, but those who inhabit the Kingdom not of this world aspire to something more permanent, certain, and sure. In all matters of life Christians are called to “judge with righteous judgment” (John 7:24). In the arena of culture we must learn to look beyond mere personal preference, corrupted as it is by the lingering effects of ignorance and sin, and past the spirit of the world, with its sensual and materialist agenda, to discover divine standards for beauty, goodness, and truth.

We find those standards outlined in the pages of Scripture, and represented in the great works of art, literature, and music that have come down to us from our Christian past. In this vast treasury even our contemporaries who do not share our faith can recognize abiding forms of cultural permanence to be preserved and shared. Christians engaged in culture matters may look to the Word of God and the accumulated heritage of their venerable past as they take up their culture-making activities in our mundane age.

But above all we may discover the abiding cultural norms we seek in the One who is himself the great creator and source of all beauty, goodness, and truth. Jesus Christ is the supreme standard for all of life, including all culture. In him we may discern norms of abiding value to help us in learning to create and appreciate works of culture that possess lasting appeal.

While it may seem a radical proposal to argue that in the contemplation of Christ we can discover lasting norms for culture, it is not a new one. He himself, as we shall see, declared himself to be the proper judge and embodiment of abiding standards of righteousness and truth for every area of life. We may expect, therefore, that more careful and consistent contemplation of Christ, in all his manifestations, will yield guidelines for thinking about culture that can enable us to produce works of lasting beauty, goodness, and truth.

This is not the place for anything like an exhaustive treatment of such a broad claim. Instead, I hope to illustrate, from three facets of Jesus’ life and ministry, that looking at Christ from the vantage point of creating and judging culture can yield fruitful insights into how we may discern true beauty, goodness, and truth amid the confusion of culture that currently obtains in our mundane age. We look first at the question of beauty.

Christ for culture: beauty

In our day the understanding of beauty has been taken captive by the democratic and individualistic temper of the times.1 Beauty has become primarily a subjective element of culture-making and we make little attempt to define any objective or universal aesthetic standards by which any cultural artifact may be judged. Now more than ever before, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But when anyone may be considered a proper judge of beauty, and any object, be it ever so repulsive to some, may be considered beautiful by others, hope of knowing anything like true beauty begins to wane.

Yet in one episode from his earthly ministry we find our Lord Jesus pronouncing on a dramatic act, using the term “beautiful” (in Greek, kalos) to register his impression. Jesus’ anointing at the hands of Mary2 drew from him the assessment of her work in this somewhat peculiar form. While he might have chosen the more readily understandable word “good” (agathos), Jesus preferred instead to describe Mary’s actions with this aesthetic term that has as its primary meaning reference to an outward appearance free of defects, worthy of praise, and excellent. Others present only had contempt for what they regarded as a wasteful act, showing that what Soloviev observed about beauty was as true in Jesus’ day as in ours: “Formal beauty always shows itself as pure uselessness, whatever its material elements. However, this pure uselessness is valued highly by man and . . . not only by man.”3 Clearly Jesus meant to say that the little impromptu drama Mary played out before him was beautiful in the most aesthetic sense of the word. What could he have meant by that, and how does his observation instruct us in thinking about the nature of true beauty?

Let’s observe four features of Mary’s anointing of Jesus that may well have qualified this act as beautiful in his mind. First, this work was accomplished at great sacrifice. It cost Mary something to perform this work. Little of lasting beauty is created in a few moments. Long preparation, thoughtful planning, and careful execution are required, at great cost of time, resources, attention, and strength. As Jesus observed this playing-out of Mary’s sacrifice, it immediately struck him as an act worthy of being described as beautiful.

Second, Mary’s action brought delight to those who experienced it. There can be no doubt but that the overall atmosphere of that house was strongly affected, both by the sudden fragrance of expensive perfume and the shocking drama of this familiar friend administering her gift over the head of her Lord. The sweetness, tenderness, boldness, and olfactory pleasure of it all made this an event to be remembered, as three of the four evangelists prove by including it in their accounts of the life and ministry of our Lord. And the story continues to bring delight today, as Jesus predicted it would. There can be little of real beauty in any artifact of culture where only a few people, and only from a given moment of time, concur in its aesthetic worth. Beauty, to be true, must stand the test of time and bring delight to generations.

Third, Jesus shows us that one need not be an accomplished master artist to produce a work of true and lasting beauty. Beauty is accomplished with simplicity, in humble as well as magisterial ways. Mary is described as doing what she could. Beauty is not a cultural category reserved only to great works of art. Even the humblest everyday work of sacrifice, which brings delight to others and points us to the love of God in Christ, can be a work of true beauty.

A final element of Mary’s act qualifies it as one of true beauty. Mary’s work was fraught with transcendent significance. Her shocking, sacrificial, tender act, which filled the house with such wonder and delight, pointed beyond itself, and its creator, to the larger reality of Christ and his coming death, as Jesus told those present. Thus we have not discovered the true beauty of any work of art until we have brought to light its eternal implications, which may be present even apart from the intentions of the work’s creator. That work is surely more beautiful in which those transcendent references are intended; however, God has given gifts of culture-making even to those who rebel against him,4 and he intends to make himself known even in the works of those who despise him.

These four features—sacrifice, enduring delight, simplicity, and transcendence—hardly exhaust the elements of true beauty. But they outline a field within which we may work to bring more such elements to light. And, we can believe that by contemplating Christ as pre-incarnate Wisdom, incarnate as sacrificial love, risen and exalted in glory, and returning in splendor, majesty, and might, we may begin to recover something of the sense of beauty that informed the works of such great Christian masters of the past as Ephraem, Bach, Rembrandt, Hopkins, and countless others.5

Christ for culture: goodness

As in the realm of aesthetics so also in the cultural arena of ethics Christ provides a standard more reliable than the flux and flow of mundane ethical theory and practice. The arbiters of ethical conduct in our day are making every effort to institutionalize a kind of absolute relativism as the norm for ethical decision-making. School systems teach children from kindergarten to high school to determine acceptable sexual conduct on the basis of what educators refer to as “good touch, bad touch.” Even the Supreme Court, in the famous “mystery clause” of their 1992 decision, Casey v. Planned Parenthood, have declared it to be the very essence of Americanism to be able to choose one’s own worldview and course in life, without outside interference. Pop culture in all its forms celebrates but one universal norm for ethical conduct: tolerance. Anything and everything goes, and no one must judge or impede anyone else in his ethical choices, so long as the freedom of others to choose their way in life is not infringed.

But, again, in a world where one man’s goodness is another man’s bane, where only the narrowest standard of tolerance is to be applied in matters of ethical conduct, we may not hope to create a glorious and harmonious ethical landscape of diverse colors and forms. By insisting that every color and form of ethical choice must be allowed free expression, we instead paint the canvas of American ethical life a kind of dingy grey, all the way to the edges.

Christ provides an unchanging standard of goodness to help us make sense of the best ways of living in community and building a just and caring society. He described himself as the very embodiment of goodness,6 was recognized as such by his contemporaries,7 and clearly indicated that he expected his followers to live good lives, after his example.8 One episode from his ministry in particular can help us focus on the broad outlines of Christ’s standard of goodness.

In the story of Zacchaeus9 we may discern four criteria at work that mark out the broad parameters of a Christ-centered standard for goodness in ethical matters. First is the observation of Christ that good is what conforms to the requirements of God’s Law.10 Zacchaeus had been guilty of stealing from his neighbors through his participation in the Roman government of Judea as a tax collector. His neighbors regarded him as a sinner. When, in repentance for his transgressions, Zacchaeus vowed to repay his neighbors and then some, as required in God’s Law,11 Jesus immediately acknowledged his work as one characteristic of salvation and worthy of praise.

A second aspect of ethical goodness may also be observed, which is that Zacchaeus’s determined course of retribution was designed to restore wholeness and justice to his community. He himself would be made whole by his penitential act, his neighbors would be compensated for their losses, and the fellowship and wholeness of that little community would be restored.

Third, Jesus saw in Zacchaeus’ determined course a work of goodness that would set him on a course beyond what it is reasonable to expect in his responsibilities as a neighbor. Like Jesus’ teaching on the widow’s mite, going the extra mile, loving one’s enemies, and praying for those who persecute us, Zacchaeus showed, in repaying his thefts fourfold and giving half his goods to the poor, that good works are extraordinary and so flow from abundant grace rather than a mere sense of duty or obligation.

Finally, works are good when they refer us to the transcendent God.12 Jesus saw in Zacchaeus’ work the very embodiment of God’s covenant, the outworking of promises motivated and fulfilled by grace, which recalled the grace and abundance of God toward men.

Of course, much more must be said about the nature of goodness, but in this story of a redeemed sinner the Lord Jesus marks out the field of thinking and action for the ethical arena of moral living and cultural endeavor. Contemplating Jesus and studying his teachings can only help us to improve our ability to identify the abiding norms of goodness he embodied and taught. When Jesus becomes the preeminent focus of our lives, it is safe to say that he will begin to form us into his own character, and lead us in his path of righteousness and good works, so that Christ becomes “the hub who orders and integrates every spoke of life.”13

Christ for culture: truth

As in the areas of aesthetics and ethics, where Jesus Christ outlines reliable standards for cultural endeavor, so in the field of epistemology, the foundation of all moral and cultural action,14 he serves to guide us through the morass of relativism and uncertainty to the solid banks of reliable truth.

Of course, Jesus claimed to be truth;15 it stands to reason, therefore, that we should be able to discern from his actions at least the broad outlines of what constitutes truth as a foundation for moral or cultural action. One passage that sheds clear light on this area of culture matters is the account of Jesus’ encounter with the religious leaders of his day.16 Jesus had been casting out demons, and the religious leaders who opposed him were at pains to describe for themselves and the always-astonished crowds an explanation for what they were seeing. They needed, in other words, to persuade themselves and others of a position respecting Jesus which they wanted to insist on as the truth of the matter. Their attempt to set forth the truth about Jesus held that he was in league with the devil and that this explained why he was able to cast out demons. Jesus’ response is a lucid tour de force of the requirements of truth in this or any situation. We may discern four benchmarks outlining Jesus’ interpretation of truth.

First, Jesus insisted, truth must be agreeable to sound reason. Jesus’ challenge to the religious leaders can be succinctly summarized: Does your explanation make sense? Would reasonable people find your account of truth to be believable, according to the most fundamental tenets of reason? Jesus demonstrated that the view of the religious leaders could not cohere—it was not logically consistent and was thus offensive to reason and plain sense—because their view required a contradictory proposition: if Satan opposes himself, he is doomed to fail. Does it make sense that Satan would send Jesus to fight against Satan, hoping to defeat Jesus?

Second, Jesus showed that the religious leaders’ account could not be true because it was not congruent with reality. It did not account for all similar facts in a consistent and believable manner. Would these leaders, who claimed that the truth about Jesus was that he was in league with the devil because he cast out demons, be willing to apply that explanation to their own disciples? Had these men, who also cast out demons, and who had learned from Jesus’ opponents, been instructed by the devil and joined his ranks along with Jesus? Their explanation could not be relied upon as true because it failed to give an explanation that was congruent with and made sense of all the available evidence and facts.

Third, the religious leaders’ claim to truth was not sufficiently comprehensive to explain everything else Jesus was doing—healing the sick, raising the dead, giving sight to the blind, teaching of the glories of God’s Kingdom, and so forth. How could one who was in league with the devil in this matter of casting out demons be so plainly a man of abundant good works in so many other areas (as even his enemies acknowledged)? Their “truth” did not fit well with the larger picture of things; it did not lead clearly to a larger and all-comprehending explanation of truth that provided a reasonable and coherent account of all things.

Finally, while the account proffered by the religious leaders led to the conclusion of a Satanic plot, Jesus insisted that his explanation meant that the Spirit of God was at work among men in a new way, the Kingdom of God had come, Satan had been bound, and those who follow in the way of Jesus were now about the business of plundering the “strong man’s” holdings. Truth as Jesus lived and taught it always redounds to the glory of God in the final analysis, acknowledging his sovereignty and rule and seeking his praise and glory in all things.

So once again we may expect that by a more careful contemplation of Jesus, and earnest communion with him, we shall be able to discern standards for truth to undergird and guide all our thinking and actions in the epistemological arena of culture, as in the aesthetic and the ethical.

The barest outline

I have only attempted in this brief essay the barest outline of a project for articulating standards of beauty, goodness, and truth, focused on Jesus. It is, however, one that can help to re-align our cultural activities according to a divinely directed agenda. There is more to be done in elaborating this outline, but the direction of that elaboration is indicated, I think by these few points. I believe that in each of the arenas of culture—aesthetics, ethics, and epistemology—we can see that Jesus stands in the spotlight, declaring himself to be the focus of all standards of beauty, goodness, and truth. Christ is a powerful standard and guide for all kinds of cultural activity. By looking more earnestly and consistently to him, we should be able to discover the day-to-day details of cultural life.

The screen on my PDA consists of a great many dots and points. It occasionally falls out of alignment, and then the cursor fails to perform as it should, documents and schedules become confused, and the whole falls into an increasing mode of chaos and uncertainty. To bring it back to proper alignment I need not spell out in detail where every dot must be assigned. I just have to go to the program for screen alignment aligning and press down the stylus on four primary benchmarks. Everything else falls into place as if by a miracle.

So it is with Christ as a standard for culture. The more we invest our energies in contemplating Jesus, communing with him through Scripture and prayer, preaching and teaching him, talking with one another about him, and proclaiming him to the lost around us, the more his power as a standard for culture will begin to be evident. When Christ is more consistently and intensely the focus of our minds, then the mind of Christ, which we possess,17 will begin to exert more of its power to make all things new, including all of culture in all its forms.

Notes

1. For a more complete treatment of this subject, see my article, “The Hope of Beauty in an Age of Ugliness and Death,” in Theology Today, July 2004.

2. Mark 14:1-9, cf. John 12:1-8.

3. V. S. Soloviev, The Heart of Reality, Vladimir Wozniuk, ed. and tr. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), p. 33.

4. Psalm 68.18, LXX: cf. Ephesians 4:8.

5. Cf. Francesca Aran Murphy, Christ the Form of Beauty (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1995): “To envisage the person of Christ in the light of imagination is to comprehend him as transcendental beauty” (emphasis in original), p. 9.

6. John 10:11, 31-33.

7. cf. Luke 18:18, 19; John 10:31-33; Acts 10:37, 38

8. Matthew 5:13-16; Mathew 7:15-20

9. Luke 19:1-11.

10. vv. 8, 9.

11. v. 8, cf. Leviticus 6:1-5.

12. cf. Matthew 5:16.

13. Kenneth Boa, Conformed to His Image (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001), p. 221.

14. See David L. Wolfe’s argument in Epistemology: The Justification of Belief (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1982), pp. 14-16.

15. John 14:6.

16. in Matthew 12:22-29.

17. 1 Corinthians 2:16.

Obama’s ‘Bitter’ Comments

2008-04-28T01:54:00Z

Every presidential campaign cycle has its landmark moments. Television viewers watching the debate in 1960 between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy were shocked by how unattractive Nixon’s five-o’clock shadow appeared. He lost the debate on television, even though those who heard the debate on the radio thought Nixon had scored more points. Then there was the moment when Ronald Reagan seized the microphone during a 1980 Republican primary debate in New Hampshire and announced that he had “paid” for the microphone and was going to hold onto it. And who can forget Michael Dukakis, George Bush’s opponent in the 1988 election, trying, by driving a tank on camera, to look manly and in-charge and to demonstrate he was commander-in-chief material? Unfortunately, he simply looked absurd.

Future historians might seize on many moments of the current election cycle as having “landmark” qualities. Obama’s eloquent speech on race after the Rev. Jeremiah Wright story broke comes to mind, as does Rudy Guiliani’s eccentric (and unsuccessful) focus on Florida to the neglect of states where his rivals were scoring primary victories. But Senator Obama’s “bitter” comments on small-town America at a San Francisco Democratic fundraiser certainly is a recent incident with potential “landmark” dimensions that may come to haunt him if he becomes the Democratic nominee.

First, a disclaimer. Neither in this Musings column nor in any other am I offering partisan advice on America’s choice for the president to be elected in November, 2008. Provocations never has been, nor ever should be, a partisan political forum. I have written that I think this is one of the most interesting presidential races in several years and that the three leading Democratic and Republican candidate are all people of remarkable intelligence, talent, and courage. Americans have every right to be proud of what their system has served up as choices this election season.

Election campaigns, however, are unforgiving venues for public statements. Candidates feel pressured, rushed, tired. They sometimes make gaffes on factual issues and they say things with unintentional clumsiness for which they later have to apologize. At the San Francisco Democratic fundraiser in early April, Senator Obama spoke just in this way. He was speaking broadly about the mood of the electorate in small-town communities of the Rust Belt, of which Pennsylvania has several. The people who lived in these communities, he said, were hurting and were disillusioned about politicians in Washington. He added, “So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

If the comment had been made privately among Democratic financial contributors, it would not have attracted much attention. After all, Obama is a “blue state” liberal who might be expected to sport some of the prejudices present in “blue states” towards “red state” communities. But in presidential election campaigns, very few things remain private for long. After the Internet’s Huffington Post made his remarks public, there was an avalanche of critical comment, not just from Republican candidate Senator McCain, but from Obama’s own Democratic rival, Senator Clinton. Though Obama was undoubtedly correct in saying that several economically deteriorating communities in the Rust Belt were “bitter” about politicians’ failure to address their plight, his throwaway comments about “religion” and “guns” sounded like a typical stereotyping of “red state” working-class communities by “blue state” urban liberals. Not surprisingly, both Clinton and McCain immediately pounced on the comment as an indication that Obama was an elitist.

It’s unlikely that the “elitist” label will stick. Obama is preeminently a populist, and though he went to private school in Hawaii and later to Columbia University and Harvard Law School, his early political career organizing at the precinct level in rundown areas of Chicago do not support assertions of elitism. But if he was not elitist in his “bitter” comments, he was certainly being condescending, not to mention guilty of stereotyping. It is more than probable that as he rose in the progressive, well-educated Democratic circles of Hyde Park in Chicago, he acquired some of the “blue state” disdain for rural white working people who have a distressing habit of voting Republican in general elections. He was, probably, speaking of the tightly knit, churchgoing crowd illustrated in the Vietnam War movie, The Deer Hunter. These are indeed rural, working-class men who enjoy hunting, go to church, and who today are often angry at the plight of the declining economies of their communities.

So far, so good. But by then attributing to this group of Americans “antipathy to people who are not like them or anti-immigrant sentiment,” Obama was essentially implying that the Rust Belt’s rural working class had to “cling” to religion, to guns, or to “anti-immigration” sentiment as a way of dealing with their anger.

He should know better than this. More than any of the leading presidential candidates, Obama has publicly defended the right of people to express religious conviction in the public square when discussing public policy issues. As columnist Michael Gerson pointed out in The Washington Post, Obama has cited not just African-American activists Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr., but Abraham Lincoln and William Jennings Bryan in this connection. Whether from the carelessness generated by fatigue or casual familiarity with urban stereotypes of rural America, Obama managed to conflate two stereotypes; working-class rural whites and red-neck Southern “good ole boys,” who sometimes mix racial prejudice with their own penchant for hunting and churchgoing. That might resonate with San Francisco liberals, but it may come back to haunt him in the country at large.

Much of Obama’s political success hitherto has derived from his ability to convey to white as well as black voters that he is a “post-racial” candidate, someone who thinks in terms of national solutions to national problems, not solutions based on any racial assumptions. There is no need to question his sincerity in projecting that image. What is troubling is that he seems to possess at the same time some attitudes that are not “post-racial” at all. His tenacious—some would say stubborn—defense of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his description of his grandmother as a “typical white person,” and his comments about people who “cling to guns and religion” do not sound “post-racial”; they sound more like the casual bigotry of East Coast urban intellectuals speaking of the South or the Midwest.

The irony is that Obama, if he is consistent with much of what he has said on the issue of religion and politics in the past two years, knows that his own careless stereotyping is not even factually true. Rural, working-class whites were religious and indeed they hunted long before their communities began to go into decline. Obama certainly understands this. It would be sad and ironic if the one Democratic candidate in recent years who really seems to “get” religion were tripped up by the careless and bigoted condescension he has doubtless heard in conversation among liberal whites. As Obama himself has said, “words matter.”

Firm Foundations?

2008-04-28T01:04:00Z

The next steps in the eventual building of One World Trade Center were taken last month in a desolate patch of the New Mexico desert about ninety miles south of Albuquerque with little media fanfare, but a large bang. There, the building’s architects from Skidmore, Owings & Merrill witnessed the explosion of a three-story replica of the structure’s aluminum and glass casing. The test was a success as only few of the glass panels were smashed in the blast.

In a post–9/11 world, that’s how we must design and build the skyscrapers of the future: capable of withstanding acts of God and man. Here in California, earthquake-testing our tall buildings has been a mandated practice for decades, and in other regions of the country, formalized tests for withstanding high wind and rain are not only well-known, but are a required part of architectural education.

This new type of architectural evaluation, called “dynamic testing,” has been around for only a decade. It has already been used to gauge the strength of vulnerable government buildings, like the American embassy in Beijing. Recently, though, dynamic testing has been used on more mundane structures like office buildings in American cities. The 1,776-foot-tall structure to be built at Ground Zero is not the only office building to be so tested. Other teams of architects have made the trek out to New Mexico’s desert to blow up their designs for structures (identities kept secret) that will soon grace the Manhattan skyline.

So now architecture as a field—that great melding of art and science—has fallen under terrorism’s specter. Today’s artisans must consider the possible impacts of man’s inhumanity to man in their designs, and one wonders how the beauty of tomorrow’s monoliths will be affected. I’m no expert on the subject, but I find it difficult to believe that only the most awe-inspiring buildings can sustain a bomb blast. Logically, not many of our great structures could—from the Empire State Building to the Taj Mahal to the Royal Sydney Opera House. Could such be built under these new restrictions? I doubt it.

In a certain sense, of course, these developments could be expected. I was a salesman working in Manhattan on 9/11, and I distinctly remember the progressive changes to the office buildings on which I used to call in the months following the tragedy. First, there was the heightened security at the front desk—no longer could one breeze over to the elevators for an eventual cold call. Many a nervous-looking security guard in that first year after the tragedy demanded “name, rank, and serial number,” and all appointments were verified. Shortly after this appeared the built-in barricades of various heights and shapes, making each saunter up to an office building into a mini-obstacle course. Aesthetically, some of these magnificent structures took on the look of armed compounds.

And now deference to terrorism has moved from the perimeters to the very skeletons of tomorrow’s buildings. Ironically, even One World Trade Center, previously known as the “Freedom Tower,” will have to accommodate terrorism once again, built in to its very foundation. Like traces of an antibacterial drug, which remain in the body forever, these architectural decisions assure that there will always be a regard for man’s corrupted nature and its sustaining ideologies. Some may call this prudent preparedness for life in the post–9/11 world. I believe it is another step of acquiescence.

Barack Obama and Rev. Jeremiah Wright

2008-04-01T14:41:00Z

By many observers’ reckoning, Senator Barack Obama’s major speech on race in the U.S. at Philadelphia’s Constitution Center March 18 was one of the rhetorical highlights of the 2008 presidential election season. Obama’s 5,000-word address was skillfully crafted, eloquent, and a powerful attempt to bring balance—and the views of both blacks and whites—into discussion of “America’s original sin” of racial injustice over the centuries. As the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya (which raises the question why people of mixed race with one black parent and one white parent are almost always deemed to be black and not white), Obama is certainly in a good position to shed light on this often poorly illustrated topic.

Shed light in the speech, he did. He conjured up great patriotic themes of the past with phrases like “a more perfect union.” He was certainly right to note that there hasn’t been a cogent conversation about race in the public sphere in the U.S. for many years. He was sensible in appealing to whites for more understanding of the bitterness that is often felt in the black community about the black experience in America. He at least acknowledged that hard feelings among the two main races that comprise the U.S. flow in both directions; citing, for example, white blue collar resentment over the perception that affirmative action has provided unfair advantages to some blacks and has penalized whites unjustly for, well, being white. Obama’s speech was probably the most honest, vulnerable, and moving address on race in the current election year.

And yet, in many ways, it uncovered new problems even as it attempted to solve old ones. In his speech Obama confessed that even his white grandmother sometimes referred to African-Americans with derogatory stereotypes that “made him cringe.” A day or so later, he tried to allay worries that his grandmother might have been genuinely racist, but in doing so, he raised questions about his own proneness to racial stereotyping. He said that he had merely meant to say that his grandmother was “a typical white person” who might have a racially influenced reaction if approached in the street by someone (presumably black) she didn’t know. Critics of Obama immediately pounced on this phrase, denouncing it as stereotyping all whites of a particular generation. If a white politician spoke of a “typical black person,” some commentators noted, he or she would immediately be denounced for evil racial stereotyping.

Many observers, even though complimenting Obama’s speech, wondered why it had taken so long for him to address the racial issue in the first place. In a sense, it is a reflection of Obama’s political and rhetorical skills in appearing to “transcend” race, to be a Democratic politician who just “happened” to be black—partially black, at any rate—that race was never a serious issue in the campaign until March of this year. Obama’s appeal all along has been to whites as well as blacks. Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Shelby Steele, an African-American with deep—and sometimes controversial—insights into black-white relations in the U.S., suggested in a Wall Street Journal editorial column that Obama was popular with whites because, as an African-American, he was a “bargainer,” someone who made “the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America’s history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer’s race against them.” Steele added that “whites love this bargain, because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist.”

If this had been Obama’s way of avoiding the discussion of race for several months of the primary season, it was blown sky-high in mid-March by endlessly repeated sound-bites of his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, thundering anti-American phrases from his pulpit. And by “former,” we do not mean “sometime.” Obama spent twenty years in Wright’s church, was married there and had his children baptized there. In DVDs openly sold on the church’s website—and not clandestinely videotaped by some enemy of the church—Wright could be seen and heard shouting “God damn America,” asserting that the U.S. was a terrorist nation because it had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, deserved the 911 terrorist attacks because of its own global behavior, and had invented HIV-AIDS to enslave or eliminate African-Americans. The U.S., Wright said in one sermon, ought to be called “the K.K.K. of America.” The extreme offensiveness—not to mention the sheer mendacity—of these comments forced Obama into a series of interviews in which he denounced the views of Wright. Yet in the end, in his Philadelphia speech, Obama did not “disown” Wright so much as attempt to contextualize Wright’s most hate-filled comments as the product of a particular generation of black activists confronted by the reality of white dominance in America.

The problem for Obama, even after his masterful speech, is that many people will wonder why he continued to attend Wright’s church for twenty years despite, presumably, at least knowing about Wright’s most outrageous views, even if he hadn’t actually heard the offensive sermons. His attempt to let Wright at least partially off the hook by referring to his own grandmother’s alleged offensive remarks about blacks didn’t convince many people. Some bloggers pointed out that Obama’s grandmother’s offensive comments were said in private, with no intention of stirring up prejudice against blacks. Wright’s comments, however, sneering and full of hatred towards whites, were made publicly and loudly before a congregation that was estimated at numbering more than 8,000 people. Wright, moreover, had championed in his church magazine none other than Louis Farrakhan, acting director of the Nation of Islam. Farrakhan has long been considered one of the most virulently anti-Jewish public figures on the American scene.

It is too early to tell whether Obama’s speech in Philadelphia will overcome serious doubts among voters that he has really “transcended” race. Obama is a talented, serious politician who has stirred up a greater interest in politics among young people than any other politician in recent years. His voice deserves to be heard. But his own stereotypical attitudes on race—witness the “typical white person” comment—make it clear that, though a “good” man—Senator John McCain’s description—he still has quite a long way to go before reaching the semi-Messianic status his most ardent admirers claim for him.

The Bigger Picture

2008-03-31T21:19:00Z

During the early nineties, the media, both secular and religious, convinced a large percentage of Americans that our $5 trillion federal debt was of earth-shaking proportions. (They did much the same in the late nineties during Y2K.) As Americans were living on about $25,000 on average in 1990, it is easy to see how that $5 trillion number could look like a giant in the promised land. And most people were quite surprised when I told them the White House had actually estimated that America’s net worth, after subtracting all debts owed to foreigners, was $66.4 trillion in 1990.

Today, media headlines are telling Americans the sub-prime debacle will cost Wall Street firms around $400 billion. While that is a huge number to companies like Bear Stearns who specialized in sub-prime mortgages, it is roughly 2 percent of the value of American stocks, a value that seems to come and go each day on Wall Street as a matter of course.

The most credible economist among the pessimists seems to be Professor Nouriel Roubini of New York University’s Stern School of Business. He has teamed up with UBS to tell us that residential housing values might fall as much as 40 percent, resulting in mortgage losses of up to $2 trillion. He believes there could be $700 billion of other losses during this credit crunch, suggesting losses to the financial system could reach up to $3 trillion. While that is less than the $5 trillion federal debt number back in the nineties, it is still enough to cause some pain to our banks, as well as some terrorizing headlines. The last might actually cause more harm to the real economy than the first. So it might be good to again put such large numbers into perspective.

In its 2009 budget, recently released, the Office of Management and Budget in the White House estimated the total assets of America to be $120.4 trillion at the end of 2007. We owed foreigners $8.3 trillion. That means our “net wealth” was $112.1 trillion. (Even after adjusting for inflation, Americans’ incomes had risen to over $38,000 on average at the end of 2007.) So if Professor Roubini’s gloomiest estimate of $3 trillion in losses to the financial system proves correct, it would be less than 3 percent of America’s net wealth as estimated by the White House.

Moral? Like the ancient Hebrews, we have two options: 1) We can listen to gloomy spies who have surveyed the promised land and turn toward forty years of wandering in the desert, or 2) we can “number” our assets—or count our blessings—as Moses did when he was headed for that promised land. It’s largely a matter of choice . . . and leadership.

Confessions of a Small Business Fanatic

2008-03-24T19:12:00Z

It started with flowers. Roses really, the color of cherry tomatoes, delivered fresh from the truck to living rooms or offices throughout my neighborhood. Veld Kamp Florist had been around, it seemed, since forever, and my mom always called them whenever we had to go to a funeral or an anniversary party. I went to school with a couple of Veld Kamp kids, but I sort of felt sorry for them: they never could go out for the basketball team or attend the winter dances. Christmas and Valentine’s Day were just too important for florists. I guess those Veld Kamp kids were helping with the roses.

Flowers turned to root beer. My friend’s mom owned and operated one of the last existing A&W Root Beer drive-ins in our city and one summer in high school I needed a job. So I car-hopped. I took orders and poured root beer. I watched my friend’s mom flip burgers, scoop ice cream, and count money at the end of every day, hoping to take home enough to pay her light bills, after she paid us. It wasn’t easy work, but it was hers.

Throughout college and a short career in public education, I followed my nose in and out of bakeries owned by three generations of Millers, delis run by Italian immigrants, and hair salons operated by Millie or Jessica or CarolAnn. I liked going into these small places; they were homey and real and familiar. I liked seeing family photos taped to the counter next to the cash register, or handwritten message boards outlining the day’s choices when I walked in.

They were different from the shops at the malls, the ones that always felt like a hospital ward, only with fancy names.

So the habit stuck. Through most of my adult life, I’ve remained a faithful fan of the small business. While some friends cheer the Giants or applaud the latest techno-gadget thing, I’ve been a sucker for the underdogs around the block.

Which is why, I suppose, I can’t forget the literary Irish couple who ran a copy center and typing service because they loved words and each other enough to work together 24/7. Or Tony’s Laundromat where Charlie, the owner, would polish the dryers and scold the teenagers who made too much noise. Or the manager of the single-screen cinema who mortgaged his house to make sure the “monster-plexes” didn’t destroy the joy of going to the movies. Or the Brown Brothers, who inherited their father’s bicycle shop sixty years ago and admitted “the first fifty-nine were tough.”

I can’t forget the dozens of other heroic characters who’ve dug their heels into the corner of their community to keep their business—hardware, drugstore, cleaners, whatever—going. No matter what. No matter how many chain restaurants or Wal-marts popped up around them. After all, their lives and their futures, their messy offices and accounting books are as much a part of the spirit of commerce as any billboard or television commercial. In the process, they’ve made these places as sacred as any church or temple, spaces where faith still struggles beside economic reality. Where dignity isn’t lost on a price tag. Where conversations aren’t reduced to a sales strategy.

Call me a hippie or a quack, but I like buying local. In our world of Internet shopping and conglomerate addictions, buying local helps me remember the real people, families, and neighbors who still run their small businesses on principle and passion, even when cash is low. I guess they keep something alive that the bullies of capitalism can’t kill, no matter how they’ve tried. And they have. These little guys, though, remind me that attached to every purchase is a story, a breathing testimony that lines my jackets and connects me to the sheer tenacity that makes us human. They remind me that I—that we—belong. That our give and take culture doesn’t have to be as greedy or as chilly as it seems.

After all, we’ll always need flowers to send.

Death in a Jerusalem Yeshiva

2008-03-24T16:42:00Z

The murder in early March of eight Jewish students at the Mercaz Harav yeshiva in Jerusalem established some disturbing precedents. To begin with, it was the first major outbreak of violence in Jerusalem since 2004 and the first in Israel as a whole since a suicide-bomb blast in Tel Aviv in 2006. Second, it was committed by an Arab resident of East Jerusalem with no previously known ties to terrorist groups. That shook the nerves not only of Jewish residents of West Jerusalem, in which the murders took place, but of Arab East Jerusalemites worried about potential reprisals against them. Whatever their views on Israeli-Palestinian relations in general, East Jerusalemites have not usually been involved in major violence between Jews and Arabs. Third, an official daily newspaper of the Palestinian Authority, with which Israel is attempting to negotiate a peaceful settlement of issues leading to a Palestinian state, praised the murder without reservation. Al Hayat al Jadida placed a picture of the shooter, Alaa Abu D’heim, on its front page, proclaiming him to be a shahid—that is, as a fighter who had given his life in jihad, he had earned instant placement in the Muslim version of paradise, complete with access to seventy-two virgins.

In one sense, the Jerusalem yeshiva murders were part of what has been rather lazily dubbed by the media the “cycle of violence” between Israel and the Palestinians. They were claimed by more than one Palestinian terrorist group as a response to Israel’s recent incursions into Gaza that left at least 120 people dead. Yet the IDF Gaza incursions were themselves prompted by the relentless rain of rockets fired from Gaza onto the Israeli city of Sderot—not a “settlement” in “occupied territory”—barely a mile from the border with Gaza. Despite this flare-up, neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis have walked away from the negotiations between them midwifed by the US. To underline the continuing importance of American diplomatic efforts, yet another American envoy was in the Middle East to engage in talks with the region’s various leaders, especially those of Israel and the Palestinians. He is Vice President Dick Cheney.

It is, sadly, a fair bet that Vice President Cheney’s trip, though it may underline the fact that Washington really, really wants results, will not pull any rabbits out of the Palestinian-Israeli hat. Why not? For two reasons. First, the Palestinian authority, which does not control Gaza, is unable to pressure Hamas, the political party that does, to restrain the young men who fire the rockets at Israeli civilians. Second, the Palestinian Authority itself is conflicted to the point of schizophrenia about what it wants to see happen to Israel. On the one hand, it negotiates as though it accepted the Israeli and U.S. premise of a two-state solution for Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. On the other hand, with messages similar to the one in Al Hayat al Jadida, it continually winks to its own people that it doesn’t really want to live side-by-side with Israel. It would actually like to see the state of Israel disappear. If you don’t believe this, look at the geography textbooks in Palestinian schools from the first grade upwards; Israel simply doesn’t exist on Palestinian maps.

About the time of the funerals of the yeshiva students, at a hotel on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem the Fifth Jerusalem Conference was taking place. This annual event brings together major Israeli politicians, academic experts, and foreign visitors to ensure that Israel’s claim to sovereignty over Jerusalem is kept at the center of public attention. This year, participants heard among other speakers from Israeli archeologist Eilat Mazar, who displayed slides of coins excavated from the site of King David’s city in Jerusalem engraved with Jewish names specifically mentioned in the history section of the Hebrew Bible.

Why is archeology important? Ever since the Camp David negotiations between Palestinian Authority Chairman Yassir Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in the summer of 2000, Palestinian Authority leaders have been claiming that there is no evidence that the Jews in historic times ever controlled Jerusalem, much less had a Temple there. This assertion, of course, conflicts with Palestinian statements going back several decades. It also begs the much larger question: if Jerusalem was never an important Jewish city, why was the first qibla, the direction of prayer for faithful Muslims, towards Jerusalem and not Mecca? Mohammed based his “apostleship” on the assumption that he was the “seal” of the prophets whose first exemplars had come to the fore in the Holy Land of the Jews. He only changed the qibla to Mecca because the Jews of Arabia did not consider him an authentic Biblical prophet.

Two interesting ideas came out of the Jerusalem Conference on how to break out of the “cycle of violence.” One was from former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the other was from former U.S. presidential contender Sam Brownback of Kansas. Neither idea was new, and both are highly controversial, but for that reason they are topical.

Netanyahu proposed the very opposite to the Gaza rocket barrage of “proportionate response” espoused by Just War theorists, and indeed recently by the UN itself. His own proposal: “disproportional response,” which, he said, constituted “the very nature of deterrence.” What was happening in Gaza, he said, was “a war of attrition . . . gradually habituating the other side to the ability that they will engage in the daily bloodletting and terrorizing of our cities, and they will suffer a certain price.” He said that this was unsustainable. What was needed, he added, was that Israel “up the ante” of military reprisal disproportionately to such an extent that the value of true deterrence was recovered. As for Jerusalem, he said it was vital that Israel not negotiate its way out of the city. “If we walk out, then they come in,” he said. “Militant Islam comes into Jerusalem, Jerusalem becomes, forgive the expression, a Mecca for all the world’s terrorists.” Then, in an interesting reference to Jerusalem’s ideological symbology, he warned that if Israel left Jerusalem, the Islamists would attack a symbol “of the West’s symbolic religious power, the nexus of Judeo–Christianity . . . unleashing a global religious war.”

Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) gave a strongly pro-Israel speech that revived the notion of a confederation of Palestine and Jordan, a proposal, he said, that had gained the support of 42 percent of the Palestinians in a 2007 poll. The reason for such a radical proposal, he said to loud applause, was the current path to peace “isn’t working, wasn’t working, and will never work.” He added, “After fifteen years, billions of dollars in aid, massive international attention, and unlimited diplomatic support,” he asked rhetorically, “what do the Palestinians have to show for it? Nothing.”

Why mention the Netanyahu and the Brownback ideas? Because, quite possibly, according to the latest polls, Netanyahu may become Israel’s next prime minister. As for Brownback, he is quite a close friend of Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain. If McCain were elected, not only might Brownback play a significant role in the new administration, but Washington might be then trying to midwife quite new and different between Israel and the Palestinians: an Israel-Jordan-Palestine solution.

A Life Worth Emulating

2008-03-07T20:05:00Z

Jonathan Aitken, a skilled biographer and author of the award-winning Nixon: A Life and, more recently, Charles W. Colson: A Life Redeemed, has produced a valuable biography of John Newton illumined by important, unpublished letters and diary entries. He embellishes a compelling narrative by inserting thoughtful assessments of Newton’s life and ministry at appropriate points.

A flurry of books, articles, and films about William Wilberforce have been published recently in celebration of the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. Appropriately so, for in addition to his pivotal role in Parliament leading to decisive action against the slave trade, Wilberforce was an extraordinary figure of great influence in England.

The attention to Wilberforce justifies the timing of this volume because, as Aitken argues, Newton’s role in Wilberforce’s life “as a mentor, confidant, co-campaigner, and close friend has often been underestimated” and now deserves reassessment. As is generally recognized, it was Newton who persuaded Wilberforce not to abandon his career in politics to pursue ministry in the church. It was also Newton who provided vivid descriptions of the slave trade from his experience as the captain of a slave ship.

In addition to the usual material about Newton, Aitken depicts Newton as a different kind of clergyman—one with a common touch—who was able to identify with and relate to his parishioners personally and thus far more effectively than the typical clergy of his time. Moreover, although it was extremely difficult for him to achieve acceptance from the Church of England, once he did so Newton proved to be a remarkably effective networker; the importance of this to his career and influence becomes clear.

The hymn “Amazing Grace,” undoubtedly his most famous legacy, was originally written as a teaching aid for his congregation. It received scant attention elsewhere until William Walker of South Carolina linked the words to a tune called, “New Britain” and included it in The Southern Harmony, which sold an astonishing 600,000 copies during the first ten years after it was published in 1835. Aitken traces the fascinating story of “Amazing Grace” into the twenty-first century.

Aitken observes that the great strengths at the heart of Newton’s ministry were “a happy marriage and a close relationship with God.” A spiritual sage with secular wisdom, Newton came to exemplify, as Aitken notes, several important lessons: 1) spiritual growth is a long, difficult process; 2) God’s timing is not always our timing; and 3) good teachers are critical to one’s spiritual journey. Aitken also helpfully shows how Newton's life offers practical insights on how to authenticate one’s vocational calling.

Newton: a man worth remembering, a life worth emulating. From disgrace to Amazing Grace.

America’s Religious Supermarket

2008-03-07T13:51:00Z

If anyone doubted that America has become a national supermarket of different world religions, with people changing brands at a dizzying pace, they need doubt no more. A new survey by one of the country’s most prestigious research organizations, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, shows how rapidly and dramatically the religious scene in the U.S. is changing. The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey was conducted during the spring and summer months in 2007, and involved interviews with no fewer than 35,000 Americans.

The basic outline of the landscape is not so new to those who have studied the American religious scene in the recent past. Though 78.4 percent of adult Americans (according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, in late February 2008 the total estimated U.S. population was 303.5 million people) describe themselves as Christian in some category or other, Protestants, the majority religion of Americans for most of our history, may soon be a minority. Today, they hold onto a narrow majority of 51.3 percent. Catholics comprise 23.9 percent and Evangelicals, a sub-category of Protestants, a robust 26.3 percent of American adults.

So far, no great surprises. But what the Landscape Survey makes starkly clear is how rapidly Americans are changing their religious affiliations. An amazing 28 percent have abandoned the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion, or even of secularism. Though the total percentage of Americans describing themselves as “atheist” or “agnostic” is only 4 percent, an amazing 44 percent of all adults say they had switched their religious affiliation as adults, either dropping out of religion altogether, or changing their faiths. A solid 12.1 percent of the adult population described their religion as “nothing in particular.” Presumably, in the American religious supermarket, they haven’t made up their minds whether to forage in the meat aisle or the breakfast cereal one.

The biggest decline in Christian denominations was experienced by the Catholic Church. Though one in three Americans was raised as a Catholic, only one in four today identifies himself or herself as a Catholic. Jews remain 1.7 percent of the adult population but Muslims still number barely half of one percent—in fact, 0.6 percent. As many previous studies have noted, Jews are much more likely to have a post-graduate degree and to earn more than the general American population, but their achievement is actually overshadowed by that of American Hindus. Nearly half of all Hindus in the U.S. have obtained advanced degrees, compared with one third of Jews and only one tenth of the general population. There are even fewer Hindus than Muslims, only 0.4 percent of adults. Interestingly, Buddhists, who at 0.7 percent of the population are more numerous than Hindus and Muslims, are primarily made up not of immigrants, as might be supposed, but are home-grown.

Political analysts of both major parties are sure to pore over this survey for clues how to present their political candidates most effectively to this faith supermarket. They had better decide soon how to proceed. The faith landscape itself is changing in front of our eyes.