I see the signs for DC Vote all over the place.
Is there a compelling reason why residents of the District shouldn’t have congressional representation?
For those of a more radical bent there’s also the DC Statehood Party (which merged with the Greens).
You can also get yourself the (quite popular) “Taxation without Representation” license plate.
Philosopher Roger Scruton has a pretty good piece on conservatives and the environment in the latest American Conservative. He mostly avoids the ususal conservative pitfalls when talking about the environment, namely snarky dismissal or ad hominem attacks against Al Gore and dirty hippies.
Scruton does make some solid points about the dangers of any “movement”: how it can take on crusade-like qualities. He contrasts this with a genuinely political approach to environmental problems that assume the legitimacy of various interests and try to reach a reasonable accomodation among them.
He also emphasizes conservative distrust of centralized statist solutions but also points out that it is a cardinal conservative principle that one should take responsibility for the consequences of ones actions. In other words, costs should be internalized wherever possible. He also thinks that a specific contribution that Anglo-American conservatives can make is the idea of our environmental inheritance as a “trust” – something that we received from earlier generations and will pass on to the generations after us.
One criticism I have is that Scruton seems to underestimate the degree to which legal remedies are a necessary part of environmental stewardship. He’s certainly right that popular grassroot initiatives are preferable to the heavy hand of centralized top-down control other things being equal, but regulation has acheived a lot, especially in terms of clean air and water. If the state has a role in ensuring that people don’t foist the cost of their actions off on others, then this applies to the environment as well. And if climate change is as serious a problem as we’re led to believe, it will likely require government action and coordination between nations, even though Scruton is rightly skeptical about some of the proposed approaches.
I couldn’t help but notice that blog-friend Graham at Leaving Muenster is sporting an ad for the “Family Values” tour on his site!
Now, I could be going out on a limb here, but I’m going to bet that Graham is probably not a fan of Korn, Evanescence, Atreyu, Hellyeah, or Trivium.
Gotta be careful what you write about there, Graham! One minute you’re critiquing the Religious Right’s distorted view of what constitutes “family values,” the next you’re shilling for Korn!
By the way, Hellyeah is the new project of former Pantera drummer Vinnie Paul.
Here’s a video of Vinnie buying $1000 worth of Jagermeister – it doesn’t get much more metal than that, friends (n.b. some bad language):
Here’s Trivium, “Entrance of the Conflagration”:
We’ve been in DC now for over two weeks, and in that time have visited two different churches. Last week we went to a nearby ELCA congregation. It seemed like a nice place – the service was pretty straightforward Lutheran, if a bit low church (very little liturgical singing/chanting, e.g.). The folks we met were friendly, the sermon was decent, etc. Yesterday we attended a small historic Episcopal parish that was also quite low church (is this a DC thing?) and as far as I could tell, quite liberal (not that there’s anything wrong with that!). I’m not sure we really “clicked” with either one, though we’ll probably go back to the Lutheran church again. I think we’re also going to visit St Paul’s on K Street, which is a well-regarded Anglo-Catholic parish in the Episcopal Church.
Having moved several times in the last few years, it’s always daunting to try to find a new church home. Summer in particular seems like a tough time, because most churches don’t seem to be in full swing in terms of programs and ministries, a lot of people are on vacation, etc., making it somewhat more difficult to get a feel for the life of the congregation.
But beyond this you face the problem of “church shopping” – you try and identify a list of desiderata and then find the church that best approximates what you’re looking for. I have only a few “deal-breakers”: that there be communion offered every week, that the sermons not be out-and-out heretical (e.g. denying the resurrection), and that it not be too overt or heavy-handed about pushing a political agenda, whether of the Left or the Right. Second tier considerations include things like liturgy, the diversity of the congregation (age, race, class), the size of the congregation, the programs and ministries, etc. And, one of the more important, but also more intangible, considerations is the general “vibe” you get from the people.
Obviously this raises the specter of a consumerist approach to finding a church. In the olden days you went to whatever church was geographically closest to you. And even after the advent of Protestantism most people probably attended the local church of whatever denomination they identified with. But in our age of greater mobility and diminished denominational loyalty these can no longer be taken for granted. Other things being equal I’d like to attend a church in our neighborhood, but I’m not prepared to rule out going somewhere farther away. And while I still have a loyalty to Lutheranism I could just as easily see us attending an Episcopal parish (as we did for the past year in Boston). So, church-shopping becomes somewhat inevitable.
Interestingly, there’s a bit of a tension in contemporary Christian approaches to this. On the one hand, most Christians have welcomed, or at least accepted, the demise of the “Christendom” model that simply assumed that everyone with a particular geographic boundary was a member of the local church. Our alleged postmodern condition has highlighted the importance of a more intentional approach to church membership and discipleship. On the other hand, there is also a strong backlash against the consumerist model of choosing a church, rooted partly in a criticism of the encroachment of market forces into the religious sphere and a wariness of a certain idea of liberal individualism that valorizes the autonomous chooser. The new fashion in a lot of theology emphasizes the importance of being rooted in community and the “tradition-constituted” nature of our capicity for reasoning and choosing. How this avoids falling back into the discredited Christendom model of the organic church isn’t entirely clear to me.
Anyway, my sense remains that there’s something a little troubling about shopping around for a church that seems to fit my preconceived needs or desires. Maybe the right course of action is simply to attach oneself to one’s local congregation. On the other hand, why should geographic proximity be elevated to the highest importance? It may be that any ranking of criteria inevitable involves individual preference and personal judgment, so best just to get on with it and muddle through the best you can.
On Fridays lot of bloggers like to post lists of a random shuffle of whatever music is on their iPod or computer or what not.
I, by contrast, am still partly living out of boxes, having just moved. Consequently, I’m grabbing random CDs to listen to from the one open box of CDs near my desk.
So my recent listening has consisted of:
Hanks Williams, 20 Greatest Hits
Dwight Yoakam, A Long Way Home
Sleater-Kinney, Dig Me Out
Van Halen, Van Halen
Bruce Springsteen, Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ
Soundtrack from the movie Singles
U2, Zooropa
Run DMC, Raising Hell
Killswitch Engage, Alive or Just Breathing
Shadows Fall, Threads of Life
In Part I of his The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society (see previous post), Murray Jardine traces the trajectory of modern liberalism from its beginnings with Locke and Hobbes to the present. His argument is that liberalism embodies the contradictions of the technological society in that it recognizes humanity’s capacity to alter its physical and social environment but lacks a moral framework for limiting and directing that capacity. This is intimately related to liberalism’s quest for a “neutral” public sphere that prescinds from making judgments about the relative worth and value of different types of human life.
Early modern liberalism, or “classical” liberalism, Jardine argues, combined a new sense of individual freedom to be secured by limited government and the free market with the remnants of a natural law ethic. This ethic encouraged thrift, rationality, and productivity – the classic Protestant work ethic. It was believed that a society of productive rational individuals trained in the habits of this ethic were necessary to build up wealth and create a peaceful and harmonious society. Far from being “neutral” about the good life, this early modern version of liberalism reflected in many ways the outlook of the rising merchant and manufacturing class. This version of liberalism was dominant up through the 19th century.
The next stage of liberalism is “reform” liberalism, or what we would identifiy as New Deal/Great Society liberalism. Liberals in this era no longer saw overweening government as the only, or chief, threat to individual freedom, but saw concentrations of corporate power along with economic deprivation and inequality as social ills that could only be remedied by using government to check the workings of the market. While giving rise to needed reforms, this version of liberalism expressed the outlook of a managerial or technocratic elite which saw social problems as tasks to be tackled by accredited experts working in the massive institutional beauracracies that dominated the middle part of the 20th century (big business, big government, big labor, etc.).
Finally, with the economic stagnation that appeared to face western nations at the end of the 1970s we see the rise of what Jardine calls “neoclassical” liberalism, or what I would call “libertarianism lite.” This differs from reform liberalism in wanting to set the market free as an engine of wealth creation, but also differs from classical liberalism in rejecting the old bourgeois ethic in favor of a more thoroughgoing subjectivism about values. Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek were both subjectivists about value and denied that government could legitimately judge between the prefrences expressed by individuals or that the distribution of rewards in the market was a matter of justice. Essentially this is the “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” consensus that is more or less shared in varying degrees by the elites in both our parties.
In Jardine’s view, neoclassical liberalism shows the ultimate failure of liberalism in providing any kind of check on or direction for human creative capacities. As an objective moral order has receded, the market has taken over more areas of life to the point where the model of freely contracting individuals becomes normative for practically everything, including marriage, family, and community. The removal of restraints on the market has resulted in a culture of work and competitiveness that leaves little time or energy for pursuits outside the sphere of commerce.
The result is a consumer economy and a consumer culture characterized by the ethos of expressive or aesthetic individualism. The purpose of life becomes one of self-expression through consumption, cultivating a particular “lifestyle.” This is true for “high” culture as for “low.” Jardine points out that critiques of American “consumerism” often contrast it with the supposedly superior lifestyle enjoyed in Europe, but he points out that what we have there is just a different form of consumerism:
North American and western European socieities are in fact both consumer cultures; the patterns of consumption just differ slightly. North Americans tend to consume things: their homes are cluttered with electronic gadgets, and their garages are filled with gas-guzzling SUVs. Western Europeans, on the other hand, tend to consume experiences: they spend their money on expensive food and elaborate vacations. European consumerism may be, in some sense, slightly more sophisticated, but it is nevertheless consumerism. (p. 124)
The deepest problem with the consumer culture of late liberalism and the “postindustrial” economy is that it is unsustainable. The ruthless competitiveness of the market and the exhausting demands of the culture of work, combined with self-expressive individualism create social anomie and atomism. This in turn is a breeding ground for tyranny because atomized individuals are more easily controlled by governments (see, e.g. Robert Nisbet’s The Quest for Community) and a threat to the sheer physical perpetuation of society, since having children makes less sense in a consumerist society. Children threaten to become, at best, another consumer product. Add to this the possible ecological consequences of an ever-expanding consumer economy, and you have something that can’t, in Jardine’s view, go on.
The deep paradox of liberalism, then, is that, while it recognizes human creative potential, it both underestimates and and doesn’t know how to direct it. It underestimates in that it can’t see an alternative to the ever-expanding consumer economy as a way of meeting human needs. And its moral subjectivism disallows any judgment of value about the ends to which that creative capacity is put. The result is an ultimately unsustainable consumer culture.
In the next part Jardine goes on to articulate how Christianity can provide an alternative moral framework that holds out the hope of a better approach to human creativity.
In a comment to this post bs asks:
Having followed the blog and its comments for a while, I’ve noticed that Pelagianism is taken (by Lee and commenters) to be a dirty word. Embarassingly, I didn’t know what it was and googled it. While I can’t say that I necessarily agree with Pelagius, I admit that his theory, at least superficially, does not strike me as all that bad. Has rigorous analysis revealed it to be half-baked?
This is a good question in part because I think a lot of modern Christians do accept views (not without good reason) that are similar to those embraced by Pelagius. However, there are other components of Pelagianism (and its cousin, semi-Pelagianism) that continue to be rejected by mainstream Chrstianity. It would be presumptuous of me to try and cover the entire Pelagian controversy in a blog post even if I had the ability, but I’ll talk a little bit about why I think modern Christians might be attracted to some of Pelagius’s views, but also why I don’t think they have the implications that Pelagius himself seemed to think.
Pelagianism
First of all, a caveat: my understanding of the “historical Pelagius” is highly imperfect and it’s probably misleading to talk about “Pelagianism” as though it were a timeless set of doctines. Still, it’s probably fair to speak of Pelagianism as a tendency within Christianity, one that comes to the fore whenever we are tempted to emphasize human potential at the expense of divine grace. Consequently, “liberal” Christians have often been accused of being closet Pelagians, as have some conservative evangelicals, though hardly anyone that I’m aware of actually claims the label.
Pelagius was a British theologian of the fifth century whose views were condemned for (to simplify greatly) two reasons: he denied original sin as understood by the church at the time and he denied the need for divine grace to attain salvation. He’s probably known to us now chiefly on account of Augustine’s polemic against Pelagian views on these matters, over against which Augustine developed his own views which obviously have been highly influential in Western Christianity.
Original sin
It’s in Pelagius’s denial of Original Sin, at least in its Western-Augustinian form, that I think many modern Christians are likely to be sympathetic to his views. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, Pelagianism denies that 1. Death entered the world as a result of Adam’s sin. 2. That Adam’s sin (and accompanying guilt) was passed down to succeeding generations in a quasi-biological fashion. 3. That newborn children are in a state of sin, both in being prone to sin and in being actually guilty on account of Adam’s sin. 4. That the entire human race dies “in Adam” or as a result of his sin.
What’s striking here is that I think it’s fair to say that many present-day Christians would want to deny, or at least significantly modify, these tenets of the traditional formulation of Original Sin too. Given the perspective of evolution and the questionableness of interpreting the Genesis story in a literal fashion, we no longer think that death entered the world only as a result of human sin, or that guilt and sin can be transmitted biologically, or that newborn children are guilty of sin, or that we die only because Adam sinned. Death seems to be part of the warp and woof of creation, a necessary condition for the ongoing development of life, at least under present conditions. Likewise, we have trouble making sense of gulit as something that can be passed down physically from parents to child. And it seems morally questionable, to say the least, to suggest that newborn infants are guilty of sin and deserving of (possibly everlasting) punishment, or even the “mild limbo” of some traditional theology.
Divine Grace
The second part of Pelagius’s condemned views seem to flow from his views on original sin. If Adam’s role is primarily one of setting a bad example for us, but our faculties remain uncorrupted, it seems, in principle, that we should be capable of attaining blessedness and moral perfection under our own steam. This is where Pelagius really runs up against orthodoxy since, if we’re capable of being good on our own, what need is there for a Savior? Jesus is then reduced to an example of the virtuous life which we are fully capable of imitating.
Leaving aside the question of original sin for a minute, I think it’s worth pointing out that this purely exemplarist view of Christ simply doesn’t fit with the experience of Christians throughout the ages. We get this at least as early as Paul’s lament that “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Rom. 7.15). This idea that evil is a power within us over which we don’t have complete control, and from which we need to be delivered, is part and parcel of the Christian experience of Jesus as Savior. Jesus is the one who breaks the power that sin has over us. Pelagius, by contrast, takes the view of Stoicism – that by the sheer power of our will we are capable of doing right.
So orthodoxy was right, it seems to me, in seeing Pelagianism as a heresy that strikes at the heart of the gospel. Still, given the difficulties with the traditional doctrine of original sin, aren’t we forced back into a kind of Pelagianism? I don’t think so, because I don’t think Pelagius’ conclusions about divine grace follow from his account of sin. Or, to put it another way, I think we can give at least a partial account of sin that doesn’t fall afoul of the problems with the traditional Augustinian view, but which also gives us a more realistic picture of human life and its need for grace than that offered by Pelagius.
A revised view of Original Sin
In light of our knowledge of evolutionary biology, a lot of Christians have felt a need to revise the Augustinian account of original sin. One such account that I’ve discussed before has been offered by Keith Ward. Ward accepts that death existed long before human beings came on the secne, but he still thinks we can talk about a historical “fall” of sorts. What he means by this is that there was a point at which human beings chose self-interest over the obligations of morality and what he calls a “tacit” knowledge of God. Thus our primal sense of unity with the ground of our being was ruptured.
This primal choice reinforces our preexisting tendencies toward lust and aggression which are legacies of our evolutionary development. Severing our fellowship with the divine renders us impotent to choose the good in the face of these competing drives. Thus the result is a “spiritual death.” And this tendency is propagated and reinforced through the social environment created by this rejection of God. So, human beings aren’t born, in Ward’s view, with original sin strictly speaking, but they are born into a world where it is virtually impossible to consistently choose the good due to the combined factors of our innate tendencies and the social and cultural environment that has been corrupted by the choices of our ancestors.
Though he rejects Original Sin understood as a hereditary transmission of guilt or an innate corruption, Ward parts ways from Pelagianism in holding that the compounded sin of humanity has put each one of us in a situation where we can neither consistently choose the good nor repair the ruptured relationship with God. This is why divine grace is needed: to restore us to fellowship with God and heal our distorted tendencies toward self-centeredness.
God’s restoration of fellowship and healing presence are mediated, Ward says, by the Incarnation. In Jesus “God acts to show the life that is required of us, to establish a community in which such a life can be begun, to show that the human goal of divine-human fellowship is possible, and to draw people into such fellowship” (Ward, Religion and Human Nature, p. 223). This goes beyond Pelagian exemplarism in that our restoration to fellowship with God relies entirely on God’s gracious initiative, and the healing of our disposition to sin is a gift of the Spirit. There is no suggestion that human beings, under their own power, can restore what was lost through the fall.
This is just one possible revisionist account of original sin, and I’m not saying it’s correct in all its particulars. But it does offer a view that takes seriously our need for grace even while questioning the traditional way that the doctrine of original sin has been framed.
The God of Grace: The Heart of the Gospel
The reason that so many Christians find Pelagianism to be wrong, then, may not be necessarily because it rejects a particular account of Original Sin, but that it seems to eliminate the need for divine grace, which is the very heart of the Christian message. Christianity is all about a God who helps those who can’t help themselves. Indeed, setting ourselves up as independent of God’s help is pretty much the definition of sin in traditional Christianity. So, my contention is that what we may find attractive about Pelagius’s rejection of a hard Augustinian view of original sin doesn’t entail the optimistic conclusions he drew about human beings’ capacities for self-perfection. We can still affirm with the tradition that we’re in need of God’s grace to be delivered from our condition.
Hope that helps somewhat. Of course, I could’ve completely missed the point of the question.
A Thinking Reed 