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Non-libertarian Matthew Yglesias weighs in on the running debate between interventionist and non-interventionist libertarians:

Making war is a massive deployment of the state’s coercive force, both against the target population and (in order to acquire the necessary warmaking resources) the warmaking nation’s home population. All ideological points-of-view represented in contemporary American society involve some skepticism about the advisability and/or morality of deployments of the state’s coercive force. Libertarianism (in all its varieties) is all about taking this skepticism rather further than do other points of view. Since libertarians are skeptics about the use of the state’s coercive force and war is a huge use of coercive force, libertarians ought to be skeptics about war.

That seems right to me, both from a libertarian and a non-libertarian point of view. I think anyone in their right mind should be skeptical about the deployment of the state’s coercive force. Since war is far and away the most destructive use of that force, it ought to be subject to particularly strict scrutiny and moral restraints. This is what just-war theory is essentially all about. There is a presumption against the use of force, a presumption which should be overturned only under strict conditions.

I blogged on the great libertarian foreign policy debate a bit here and here.

Well, someone has been blogging up a storm at the Japery. (Is “Father Jape” a collective nome de blog for various contributors? That’s my suspicion…)

Anyway, here we have a response to S. M. Huthchen’s piece on C. S. Lewis’ Protestantism (which I mentioned the other day). Fr. Jape notes the obsession many evangelicals and Catholics seem to have with discerning where Lewis would stand on the great issues of today:

In the end, the whole argument about Lewis is silly. He is yet again an imaginary proxy for the ideal learned evangelical and perhaps for Pearce, an almost ideal Catholic. What Would Jack Do? This, of course, is code for “what should we (orthodox, thinking Protestants) do–or at least strongly consider doing?”

Also, a pointed response to William Stuntz’s call for an evangelical/professorial axis on economic issues:

William J. Stuntz, an (ex?) “Evangelical” and Professor at Harvard Law School, thinks “there is a large, latent pro-redistribution evangelical vote, ready to get behind the first politician to tap into it. (Barack Obama, are you listening?).” Opines the Professor, “These men and women vote Republican not because they like the party’s policy toward poverty — cut taxes and hope for the best — but because poverty isn’t on the table anymore. In evangelical churches, elections are mostly about abortion. Neither party seems much concerned with giving a hand to those who most need it.”

If the Democrats would just lean further to the left and return to statist social welfare agendas… indeed, that is the ticket. This sort of thinking ought to be encouraged. Hillary and Obama is the way to go! And if this is their official campaign music, they are a shoe-in in 2008.

Yet, in all seriousness, there is probably more than a grain of truth to the Professor’s view of Evangelicals, who consistently lack the deeper insight and cultural resources on “values” issues that would fortify them against the temptation of the liberal statist salvation gospel and press them to define an authentic conservatism, or simply a politics of truth and justice, which is not on offer in any political party today.

Spoken like a true sectarian!

Keith at Among the Ruins meditates on how Christians should exercise power in the world:

…I tend to shy away from any blending of the church with political power because I believe that it is inherently dangerous and almost always corrupting for the church. But, at the same time, I am not ready to give up the idea that the church ideally can be and should be a political force to be reckoned with in the world: a power that can evoke change on behalf of those who are weak as it lives out its calling to be the kingdom of God on earth. So the question is raised: how should the church exercise power in the world?

For the Falwells and the Dobsons, the answer can be found in organization, motivation, and mobilization. But that’s just playing on the world’s turf, and while you may win sometimes, you will just as often lose; in the end, nothing much will change. So perhaps we should turn to something else—the sacraments. Those who seek to overthrow the status quo through votes or influence will likely scoff at the idea that the sharing of bread and the pouring of wine can influence something like a government, but I think they underestimate the power that these sacraments have for the church. The bread and the wine represent Christ’s death and burial, and the word that they preach is that, in the midst of the hopelessness that springs from seeing love resisted and annihilated, powerful and reinvigorating forces can spring forth, ones greater than any previously imagined. The sacraments preach to the nobodies of this world that there is someone for them and with them, and that someone has chosen them to help shake and confound the very foundations of power.

More here.

What slippery slope?

Via The Morning Retort I was directed to a stimulating exchange between two bloggers at ICTHUS debating the merits of “sectarian” and “transformist” Christian approaches to culture and society at large. (See here, here, and here for starters.)

In comments to this post, Jennifer defends her sectarian comrades against the assaults of Fr. Neuhaus:

I guess Neuhaus has never heard of Jennifer’s Rule: No One Criticizes the UMC But Me (Or A Fellow United Methodist Whom I Authorize To). So Neuhaus is criticizing Hauerwas (or Dan Bell, or any other Methodist theologian – or me, for that matter, since I was taught by all these sectarians) for not abandoning the UMC to the liberals, for not washing his hands of it, for not repudiating his vow to “uphold the United Methodist Church with your prayers, your presence, your gifts and your service?” Perhaps his insistence upon the primacy of the community of the Church leads him to actually take his commitment to the UMC seriously?

I think this is an excellent point. You don’t jump ship just because you don’t like the direction it’s going in. Of course, Neuhaus might argue that Protestant churches are incapable of being the kinds of communities Hauerwas, et al. want them to be, since they are committed to individual judgment. In other words, this may not just be the result of liberal capitalism and its worship of “choice” but a theological principle embedded pretty deeply in Protestantism. I’m not sure I’d endorse that argument, but there is enough rampant individualism in the history of Protestantism to give me pause.

Jennifer continues:

The Ekklesia Project – this organization of sectarian/emergent/whatever Christians – clearly states that we are to work “with, within, across, and beneath existing churches and structures.” Not to create another denomination! Is that what Neuhaus thinks we should do? Create a new denomination that so we have “actual membership in an ecclesial community that is in political tension or conflict with the culture of liberalism.” Cause where is that ecclesial community? Does he say it is the Catholic Church?

You are right to wonder where this is and what it looks like. But in denominations or churches that are practically throttled by liberalism, we’re not going to see it overnight. We all have to go back to the churches we already attend and start the change there. Also, the Ekklesia Project is starting a congregational formation initiative, to “develop creative and effective ways of supporting congregations that are committed to making lifelong formation and genuine discipleship central to their life together.”

As for asking the Church to be more than it’s supposed to – a political order – I want to say more about that but will need to get back to you later.

I hope she keeps her promise on this last point, cause this is where I’ve really been getting hung up in trying to wrap my head around what people like Hauerwas are saying. For a contrarian view on the sectarians’ idea of church as polis, see this essay by Robert Benne. He calls the desire for a parallel churchly order the “neo-Augustinian temptation.”

Excerpt:

The movement, if it is cohesive enough to be called that, is committed to the construction of an independent and distinct churchly culture based upon the full narrative of Israel and the Church as it has been carried through the ages by the Great Tradition. Theologically, the neo-Augustinians are anti-foundationalists who believe that a religious tradition like Christianity is a cultural-linguistic system that cannot and should not be compromised by any standards not its own. They learned that from Lindbeck.

Biblically, they argue that the early Christianity depicted in the Pauline letters was a churchly “public” or culture of its own, flourishing along side of but radically distinct from the Roman, Jewish, and Hellenistic cultures of the time. “Paul already regards the Church as a new public order in the midst of the nations with its own distinctive culture,” argues David Yeago. Christians who entered such a culture were “dying to the world” in the sense that they were entering a new ecclesial world.

Ethically, they contend that the practices of this distinct, living tradition form the Christian virtues that sustain such an ecclesial world. The Church’s worship, preaching, teaching, and communal life shape the virtues that maintain the practices of marriage and family life, charity, hospitality, governance, art, and thought that provide a real alternative to the dying world about us. The Church essentially needs no sources other than its own for the ethical task. Milbank asserts that the Church produces its own “ecclesial society,” with an attendant ontology, social theory, ethics, and economics.

However, says Benne:

As attractive as this neo-Augustinian vision is, it is finally more a temptation than a real option. The main reason is theological. If God is indeed the creator and sustainer of the larger world of economics, politics, and culture, then we as Christians are called to witness there. Our salvation is not in that witness, but our obedience is. And though we know that much of contemporary culture is debased, we also know that it is not beyond redemption. Indeed, reminding ourselves of the illusions of perfectionism, we might even grant that, relatively speaking, it is not all that bad. In any case, modernity’s own norms of procedural justice and individual rights offer openings for Christian witness.

From this theological perspective, it is better to side with those who are willing to struggle for a decent, common culture—even though success is by no means assured. The right-to-life groups, the Christian Coalition, Bread for the World, the American Family Association, and many others make a worthwhile difference in the struggle for America’s soul. And these religious groups have secular allies. The “principled pluralism” suggested by Os Guinness that aims at an overlapping moral consensus is not without prospects of success in the lively world of American politics. There is still much that is good—given and sustained by the Creator—in our common life outside the church.

American ex-pat Nora Jacobson, who describes herself as “a bluestocking blue-stater,” has lived in Toronto since 2000, but it hasn’t been everything she expected:

Although I enjoy my work and have made good friends here, I’ve found life as an American expatriate in Canada difficult, frustrating and even painful in ways that have surprised me. As attractive as living here may be in theory, the reality’s something else. For me, it’s been one of almost daily confrontation with a powerful anti-Americanism that pervades many aspects of life. When I’ve mentioned this phenomenon to Canadian friends, they’ve furrowed their brows sympathetically and said, “Yes, Canadian anti-Americanism can be very subtle.” My response is, there’s nothing subtle about it.

An interesting perspective. Read the rest here.

As part of my job, I was able to travel to San Antonio the weekend before Thanksgiving to attend the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature. This is easily the largest yearly gathering of academics in the fields of religious studies, theology, biblical studies and comparative religion. Lots of interesting people as you can imagine.

I work for a book publisher, so most of my time was spent manning our booth in the exhibition hall along with all the other publishers. One of the perks of these meetings, as anyone who’s attended will tell you, is that the publishers usually sell their books at deep discounts. Brazos Press, one of my favorite publishers, had a big display and they were selling everything at 50% off!

This was too much for your humble servant to pass up, so I picked up The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society by Murray Jardine and Anxious About Empire, edited by Wes Avram.

The Jardine book is nothing less than a sustained critique of liberal society, specifically its inability to articulate moral constraints on our technological power. According to Jardine, the most pressing problem facing modern Western societies is that we have attained this immense power to alter our environment (and increasingly ourselves), but the liberal political tradition, with its emphasis on neutrality and tolerance, has no coherent grounds for determining which uses of technology are good and which are bad.

Jardine traces the development of liberalism through three phases. First is classical liberalism, which he associates with John Locke and Adam Smith. Classical liberalism was concerned primarily with establishing a free market and a society based on the rule of law and free contractual exchange. The moral underpinnings of classical liberalism Jardine describes as a “secularized Protestant work ethic.” Thus the bourgeois virtues of thrift, sobriety, hard work, etc. become paramount.

The second phase of liberalism is “reform liberalism” or social democracy, New Deal liberalism, etc. In other words, what most of us mean by “liberalism” in the contemporary American political context. Reform liberalism has two major thrusts according to Jardine. The first is to stabilize and reform capitalism through regulation of the market and modest redistributionary policies. By the early 20th century it had become clear to nearly everyone that the laissez-faire capitalism of the 19th century had resulted in large concentrations of unaccountable power in the form of corporate monopolies as well as staggering inequalities between the rich and poor. Thus a modified form of liberalism was needed to stabilize the system and stave off revolutionary movements like communism.

The other prong of reform liberalism, however, was a more thoroughgoing critique of the remnants of the old Protestant-bourgeois work ethic. Reform liberals of the second half of the 20th century pointed out (cogently, according to Jardine) that liberalism’s claims to creating a neutral public square were incompatible with publicly upholding the old bourgeois virtues. Those virtues, far from being neutral, actually favored the middle-class entrepeneurs and businessmen who were the ascendant class in the early phases of capitalism. So we get the counterculture and the attempt to sweep all remnants of traditional quasi-Christian/bourgeois morality from the public square. A truly “neutral” state cannot “privilege” any particular understanding of morality and the good life.

The third phase of liberalism Jardine christens “neoclassical liberalism.” This form of liberalism he associates with the rise of modern conservatism, but it is actually a form of liberalism in that it combines the moral liberalism of “second wave” or reform liberalism with the desire to return to the laissez-faire economic policies of classical liberalism. This is essentially Reaganism-Thatcherism or moderate libertarianism.

Jardine argues that the present-day “conservative” movement is actually a coalition between classical and neoclassical liberals. Both want less economic regulation than reform liberals, but the classical liberals still want to uphold the traditional bourgeois virtues while the neoclassical liberals (libertarians) tend to embrace a variety of moral relativism that treats all values as subjective. While classical liberals like Locke and Smith defended the market as the system that best rewards hard work and rationality, neoclassical liberals like Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek argue that the market system is to be preferred simply because it allows for the maximum exercise of freedom, not because it rewards certain virtues. Since values are subjective, any infringement on choice constitutes an imposition of one person’s (or group’s) values on another. Here the neoclassical liberals join forces with modern liberals in embracing a moral skepticism that enshrines “tolerance” as the highest (only?) virtue.

The culture of this late stage of liberalism is what Jardine calls “expressive” individualism or consumerism. While the earlier phases of liberalism extolled production with their emphasis on hard work and thrift, expressive individualism sees each of us primarily as a consumer of goods, services and experiences, through which we express ourselves and fashion our own unique “lifestyle.”

Jardine sees the development of an expressivist culture as partly the result of the bounty of capitalism. In the older “utilitarian-individualist” culture, goods and services were advertised primarily with respect to how they would meet some preexisting need. But as production threatened to outstrip demand, advertisers shifted to a strategy of inculcating new needs in customers. This was done by promoting products in terms of how they would enable the consumer to attain a certain staus or image:

Early in the development of the consumer culture, advertisers realized that the best way to encourage consumption was to get people to think of themselves and others in terms of what they consumed or, more specifically, in terms of the personal image they projected through their consumption. Stated somewhat differently, advertising began to encourage what might bet be described as an aesthetic orientation, that is, an orientation where beauty becomes the most important aspect of human existence. People were encouraged to think of themselves adn others in terms of how aesthetically appealing they were. Whereas in premodern societies, people were judged on the basis of moral character, and in early liberal society people were judged on the basis of how productive they were (this standard of judgment itself being a distortion of Protestant conceptions of moral character), in a consumer culture people are judged on the basis of the aesthetic image they project. “Personality” becomes more important than character. If in early liberal society one was expected to be a productive person, in later liberal consumer society one is expected to be a beautiful person. (p. 90)

One has only to look at our near-worship of celebrities to see the truth in this statement. Jardine contends that both liberals and conservatives have made peace with the expressive-individualist culture. Both reform liberals and neoclassical liberals accept, at least in practice, the subjectivity of values and the foundational importance of self-expression and “choice.”

This also helps to explain why conservatives and liberals can both feel like the other side is winning. The liberals (and libertarians) have essentially won the battle for unfettered self-expression in the personal moral realm on such “lifestyle” issues as homosexuality, abortion, pornography, etc. So the conservatives perceive the country as on its way to hell in a handbasket. But the conservatives have essentially won the battle for a relatively unregulated competitive market economy, what liberals fear as the ascendance of big business and dog-eat-dog capitalism. What neither side realizes, Jardine says, is that these phenomena are the logical corollaries of each other and of the liberal expressivist culture. “Freedom of choice” has all but triumphed in both the economic and moral spheres.

In fact, this expressivist culture is what drives the movement for greater and greater tolerance:

[M]ost people in present-day Western societies are convinced that the status of moral ideas as subjective opinions does iimply one overarching moral standard, which is tolerance. If all values are relative, we should tolerate all actions except those that impose values. Again, as we have seen, this conclusion is logically incorrect adn indeed meaningless. Why, then, do som many people draw this conclusion? The answer lies in the aesthetic orientation of the consumer culture. If one understands the world in aesthetic terms, then tolerance becomes of the utmost importance, because tolerance allows maximum flourishing of aesthetic self-expression. (p. 97)

The problem with “tolerance” based on moral relativism is that, once we accept the subjectivity of values, there is no logical reason for preferring tolerance to intolerance! We are on the slippery slope to moral nihilism, which is as likely to lead to tyranny as to universal freedom.

Moreover, consumerism as a way of life is ultimately unsustainable. This is true not only for ecological reasons, but more importantly on the level of human relations. An expressivist-individualist consumer culture will inevitably, Jardine thinks, have three disastrous results. It will result in a general loss of competence as people are more concerned with consumption than with developing skills and virtues. It will lead to an increasingly competitive “winner-take-all” society as everyone strives to be one of the “beautiful people.” And, perhaps most destructively, it will make us literally incapable of replacing ourselves:

When the fundamental goal of human existence is aesthetic self-expression, children are likely to get in the way. Or, perhaps even worse, children may themselves be regarded as a form of self-expression, as we mentioned above. Leaving aside the possibility of “designer children,” less drastic manifestations of this mentality can be seen in the way many North American parents relentlessly push their children toward high achievement…. In either case, a complete lack of interest in children or an obsession with creating perfect children is not likely to result in large families. (p. 128)

The fundamental problem is that moral nihilism is implicit in liberalism’s DNA, so to speak. It is the inexorable outcome of a system that enshrines individual freedom as its foundational value:

Liberalism attempts to avoid the central question of premodern moral reasoning, that is, the question of how people should live, by taking as its basic principle individual freedom, and stating that every individual should be free to do as he or she wants, within certain limits, which themselves would be neutral in the sense that they did not favor any particular social group or impose any particular belief system or way of life on society. In attempting to establish those neutral limits, however, liberalism initially simply used remnants of premodern natural law formulations, which, when examined more carefully, clearly favored some people–the bourgeoisie–over others, and clearly promoted both a particular belief system and a particular way of life, which I have termed a secularized Protestantsim. In attempting to eliminate these biases and create a truly neutral system, liberal theorists eventually destroyed any conceivable moral standard. (p. 133)

It might be thought, then, that the solution involves a return to a robust pre-modern natural law ethic such as that of Aristotle. But this is impossible, Jardine says, because traditional natural law ethics presuppose a static natural order to which human beings should conform. The problem with this is that our technological power has given us the ability to alter the natural order (and with the advent of genetic engineering, possibly human nature itself). We no longer find the idea of an unchanging natural order credible, and so it can’t be a source of moral norms for us.

What is needed is a moral framework that can account for our creative powers, but also gives us a sense of limits on how we use those powers. This ethic Jardine claims to find in the biblical narrative and its cosmology and anthropology.

This is as far as I’ve gotten, but I’m looking forward to seeing how Jardine is going to try to show that the practices of Christian communities can offer a response to the moral crisis he finds at the heart of Western liberal capitalist democracies.

More to come…

Harvard Law professor and evangelical Christian William J. Stuntz thinks secular academics and evangelicals have more in common than they might like to admit, and even thinks a political alliance might be feasible:

True, university faculties are heavily Democratic, and evangelical churches are thick with Republicans. But that red-blue polarization is mostly a consequence of which issues are on the table — and which ones aren’t. Change the issue menu, and those electoral maps may look very different. Imagine a presidential campaign in which the two candidates seriously debated how a loving society should treat its poorest members. Helping the poor is supposed to be the left’s central commitment, going back to the days of FDR and the New Deal. In practice, the commitment has all but disappeared from national politics. Judging by the speeches of liberal Democratic politicians, what poor people need most is free abortions. Anti-poverty programs tend to help middle-class government employees; the poor end up with a few scraps from the table. Teachers’ unions have a stranglehold on failed urban school systems, even though fixing those schools would be the best anti-poverty program imaginable.

I don’t think my liberal Democratic professor friends like this state of affairs. And — here’s a news flash — neither do most evangelicals, who regard helping the poor as both a passion and a spiritual obligation, not just a political preference. (This may be even more true of theologically conservative Catholics.) These men and women vote Republican not because they like the party’s policy toward poverty — cut taxes and hope for the best — but because poverty isn’t on the table anymore. In evangelical churches, elections are mostly about abortion. Neither party seems much concerned with giving a hand to those who most need it.

That could change. I can’t prove it, but I think there is a large, latent pro-redistribution evangelical vote, ready to get behind the first politician to tap into it. (Barack Obama, are you listening?) If liberal Democratic academics believe the things they say they believe — and I think they do — there is an alliance here just waiting to happen.

From S. M. Hutchens at Christianity Today’s Books & Culture:

For many Catholics C. S. Lewis is an enigma that needs explaining. This is especially true for those who are strongly attracted to his writings, and most particularly those for whom he has been of aid in their own pilgrimages from Protestantism to Rome. How can it be that this man with such deep understanding of Christian life and faith, a master of so many masters, never converted? Why did he who gave so much light to others never himself lay hold of the fullness of the faith? Why in so many matters—the Church, the papacy, the sacraments, the Mother of our Lord, the priesthood, the doctrines of grace, the veneration of the saints, Purgatory, auricular confession, and Creed of which Catholic teaching is the best explication—did the brilliant and perceptive Lewis go so far and understand so much, yet not carry through to the reasonable end? Why was he content to remain an Anglican, in a church that at its best is a poor reflection of the Church of Rome?

Read the rest here.

UPDATE: I think Hutchens’ puts his finger on some of the major difficulties many Protestants have with Roman Catholic ecclesiology:

Lewis was a very typical Protestant in that he saw an absolute division between the claims of the Roman Church and her reality, the reality belonging only to a Church that is precisely not the Roman (or any other) particular church, and which while it touches upon and runs through this and other churches, is greater than them all. […]

One could envisage Lewis breaking communion with Canterbury, but not joining communion with Rome. He was, as Thomas Howard accurately notes in his introduction to Pearce’s book, a mere Protestant, and ferociously so—not because he thought the Christian Church did not exist in the Roman communion, but because he believed it could not subsist in her, the Church being something Other.

Apparently by not shopping on the day after Thanksgiving I was engaging in an innovative form of social protest! And here I thought it was just an aversion to crowds. Who knew?

Max Sawicky has some interesting thoughts on anti-consumerism, work and leisure here.