Category: Uncategorized

Reason‘s Tim Cavanaugh reports on the G.K. Chesterton Society and considers the virtues and vices of GKC as a writer.

Matthew Yglesias has two good posts that should both please and challenge Christians.

First:

Mark Schmitt is bored of all the Jesusland business and wants to ask the right question about religion, namely “why it is that the current flourishing of religious faith has, for the first time ever, virtually no element of social justice?”

I think the answer is that it does have a strong element of social justice. Who’s working to halt the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa? Who’s trying to help refugees in Darfur? Who’s trying to stop global trafficking in women? Why, that would be socially conservative religious movements. For that matter, who’s charged off on a neo-Wilsonian quest to spread democracy at gunpoint. The efficacy of the religious right’s preferred means of spreading liberty around the world can and should be questioned, as should the sincerity of at least some of the architects of the strategy, but there’s every reason to think that many — if not most — of the people who vote for George W. Bush and his forward strategy of freedom are perfectly sincere in their belief that this is what’s happening and that it’s a good idea.

Again, in response to comments from philosopher T. M. Scanlon:

The distinction between charity and social justice is important, and I shouldn’t have overlooked it. But the question of requiring “sacrifice” isn’t especially relevant to the distinction (though it is important in understanding the popularity of moral concern about gay rights and so forth, which amounts to self-righteousness rather than a requirement that anyone actually do anything) since charity and justice alike demand sacrifice from their adherent. The point about legitimacy, however, is spot-on. A true demand for social justice necessarily calls into question the legitimacy of the social order, the legitimacy of my having what I have, and does not just ask me to sacrifice some of my property and my position, but admit to myself that my possession of my property and position is, to some extent, unjustifiable and unjust. This is a hard thing to admit, and while it’s possible to conceptualize efforts to admit it and change the world as part of doing God’s will, I think it’s equally easy to reason that it can’t have been God’s will to erect an unjust system.

The point here is well-taken. The distinction between charity and justice is not just that the former depends primarily on private efforts while the latter is the result of government action. Justice, as Yglesias rightly points out, can require systematic changes to the social order. This is something that some conservative Christians, for all their admirable humanitarianism, have been reluctant to engage in.

This may be a legacy, at least as far as Protestants are concerned, of Luther’s “two-kingdom” schema which tended to see social structures as providentially ordered. The family, the state, the economy, etc. were the means through which God cared for his Creation and created a space for the Church to go about the business of spreading the Gospel. But this perspective tended to see those social structures as given and not amenable to substantial change.

Fellow Pennsylvanian Eric Miller on why he voted for Bush:

The next day the mood was low at the college where I teach, at least among the faculty; many were Kerry supporters, and, more to the point, Bush despisers. As we soaked in the day together, it hit me hard that I, like them, would have preferred (if often not by much) to see a Kerry administration taking the lead on many pivotal issues: race relations, the economy, environmental policy, the deficit, the war, health care, Iraq. […]

But I could not vote for your side, not this time. […]

I believe that all of life finds its source in the divine, and is sustained by the grace of a God who finds pleasure in our guarding and nurturing of this world, his world. He has filled the Earth with gifts beyond our capacity to imagine, gifts that merit our joyous, careful gratitude. Among these gifts are our very lives, and with them our individual and collective ability to respond freely to him and his world. We, his creatures, are free to make choices. But not all of our choices are equal; neither, within the structures of reality, may all choices be sanctioned, let alone celebrated.

Herein lies the heart of my quarrel with the Democratic Party. In the vast arena symbolized by the single word “abortion,” your party is not only permitting a category of choice that humans must not sanction, it is intent on enlarging that sphere to permit a kind of experimentation that will only further diminish our experience of being human. To be complicit in such conduct is not just to despise the gifts of the creator. It is to despise him.

(via the Japery)

Miller had a very good essay called “Alone in the Academy” in First Things a few months ago as well.

Leave it to me to throw my 1/300 millionth of the vote to a party on the verge of fizzling out.

From Jeffrey St. Clair:

The Green Party, notorious spoiler of Democratic aspirations in 2000, not only wasn’t a factor in this election; its very existence was scarcely mentioned by the press … or by anyone else.

This sorry state of play was hardly surprising since the Green Party’s presidential candidate, a mortician-like lawyer named David Cobb, told CounterPunch a few weeks ago that he wasn’t the least bit concerned about how many votes he might come his way on election day.

Well, Mission Accomplished, Commander Cobb. And, in case you missed it, you and your running mate, Pat LaMarche, only convinced a mere 106,264 voters nationwide to pull your lever or punch your chad.

By contrast, Ralph Nader, rejected by the Greens in favor of Cobb, vilified by the Democrats and denied ballot status in such key states as California, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Oregon, still pulled in 503,534 vote, nearly five times Cobb’s microscopic accumulation.

Cobb was also trounced by Michael Badnarik, the California computer programmer who replaced Harry Browne at the head of the Libertarian ticket this year. On the ballot in 49 states, the vocally anti-war Badnarik got 360,000 votes. Cobb’s dismal showing now puts the Greens in the catacombs of third party politics, resting in a musty chamber beneath even the Constitutionalist Party, whose candidate Michael Allen Petrouka received 131,000 votes from 36 states.

More here.

From Alexander Cockburn[!]:

Moral values this brings us to the well-known fact (greeted with amazement on Wednesday morning by the pundits) that the United States is a Christian nation. Tocqueville noticed this some time ago, and anyone driving today down any county road or state highway will see a lot of churches, still well ahead of casinos which are facilities also predicated on a relationship with Providence. The 2002 edition of the University of Chicago’s regular surveys reported that the adult population of the homeland is 53 per cent Protestant, 25 per cent Catholic, 3 per cent Christians of some other stripe, 3 per cent other religions, 2 per cent Jewish and 14 per cent holding “no religion”. Of the Christians, 25 per cent go to church once a week or more.

Even though the highest reading on any chart of Intolerance is that nourished towards Christians by secular liberals (after all, Christians believe in forgiveness and the possibility of redemption) I suppose we’ll have to put up with much earnest journalism from sensitive liberal writers driving into the Christian heartland to inspect and commune with the natives. I read one patronizing prospectus from a Californian free-lancer that sounded like an application by an anthropologist in 1925 for funding to inspect an African tribe.

More here.

(Via Get Religion)

No, says Rod Dreher:

Forty years ago, the moral values – against abortion, and for traditional marriage exclusively – that motivated one out of five Americans last week to vote for George W. Bush were so mainstream as to be unremarkable. Gay marriage was unthinkable. Regarding abortion, a top Washington politician wrote this in 1971: “Human life, even at its earliest stages, has a certain right which must be recognized – the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old.”

The author of those words was not a Republican. It was Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts.

Yet merely a generation later, liberals are shrieking that unwashed hordes of Shi’ite Baptists and the Taliban Catholics have raised the curtain on a new Dark Age (no kidding, Garry Wills wrote exactly this in The New York Times). “Conversations yesterday suggested despondency among Democrats unequaled in contemporary times,” wrote Wall Street Journal liberal Al Hunt. A friend even wrote comparing this election to the 1933 burning of the Reichstag in Berlin, which brought in the era of Nazi dictatorship. …

This may come as a shock to liberals who don’t peer outside their cultural cocoon, but believing that marriage is something exclusively between one man and one woman is … normal. In fact, the opposite is radical by any historical or social measure.

It is also not a bizarre and reactionary act to vote for the presidential candidate who believes it is immoral to allow a form of abortion that sucks the brains out of partially born babies, instead of the presidential candidate who voted to keep that kind of thing legal.

Read the rest here.

If tyranny is to come in North America, it will come cozily and on cat’s feet. It will come with the denial of the rights of the unborn and of the aged, the denial of the rights of the mentally retarded, the insane, and the economically less-privileged. In fact, it will come with the denial of rights to all those who cannot defend themselves. It will come in the name of the cost-benefit analysis of human life.

—George Grant

Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation calls for a debate within the conservative movement:

The re-election of President George W. Bush is a victory for conservatives and for America. Senator John Kerry is the most liberal member of the United States Senate. Especially in view of likely Supreme Court vacancies, our country will be far better off with a President who represents what most Americans believe.

However, now that the election is over, it is time for a serious debate within the conservative movement. It is a fact that certain elements within the Bush Administration, the so-called neo-conservatives, have taken America’s foreign policy in directions that are very different from what conservatives have traditionally supported. …

The consequences of the neo-cons’ adventure in Iraq are now all too clear: America is stuck in a guerilla war with no end in sight, our military is stretched too thin to respond to other threats, and our real enemies, non-state organizations such al al-Qaeda, are benefiting from the Arab and Islamic backlash against our occupation of an Islamic country.

In coming months, I intend to work with other conservative leaders to bring about the debate over foreign policy and grand strategy that both our nation and the conservative movement clearly need. What should our foreign policy goals be if we are realists, not utopians? Should our grand strategy be offensive or defensive in a world where non-state, Fourth Generation war is spreading? Is our military oriented toward Fourth Generation war, or are we still focused on war with other states?

I think any new interventions are likely to face much more scrutiny from conservatives than the Iraq war did.

Get Religion has been doing a good job covering what I can only call the anti-Christian hysteria emanating from the grand poobahs of our high culture. See here, here and here.

Many liberals seem convinced that America is on the verge of a takeover by the forces of reaction, by “theocrats” and “religious fascists” whose fervid dream is to turn the US of A into a Christian version of Afghanistan under the Taliban. All this in part because people in a handful of states voted for measures that would forestall what, if we’re being honest, amounts to a revolutionary reconstruction of one of humanity’s oldest institutions. I’m not saying that’s the right position, but it is understandable. And it’s a position shared by vast numbers of ordinary people, not just the “religious right” (shudder).

But remember: no one in the mainstream of American life is seriously proposing the re-criminalization of gay relationships, or any other forms of consensual sex as far as I can tell. There is a difference between tolerance and official, public recognition. The denial of the latter doesn’t necessarily mean the former is in jeopardy.

And, yes, there are many people in America concerned about our easy acceptance of abortion on demand, an acceptance that has hardened into one of the Democrat Party’s most central dogmas. I admit to being one of them. Is this no longer a legitimate topic of public discussion?

It’s tiring to keep repeating the same point over and over again, but here goes: Christians, even evangelical, born-again conservative Christians, have just as much right to inject their voice into the public arena as anyone else. And sometimes they may even win. That’s democracy, folks.

No I certainly don’t agree with many of the positions taken by religious conservatives, but then again, I disagree with a lot of the positions taken by secular liberals too.

Yes I would like to see a party that was committed to the protection of all life, to a truly humble foreign policy, to a healthy environment, and to economic security for everyone. But that doesn’t mean I can dismiss those who disagree with me as ignorant, hateful zealots.

I grew up in a small industrial town in western Pennsylvania. Many of the people there fit the profile of your classic Reagan Democrat: socially conservative and economically liberal, hard-working, patriotic and neighborly. After college I lived in Pittsburgh for a year, then moved to the heartland midwest for graduate school. After that I lived for three years in the San Francisco Bay area, the bluest of all blue zones. Now I live in Philadelpia, a city that went overwhelmingly for Kerry in a state that did the same. So I feel like I’ve sampled life among a pretty healthy cross-section of “red-staters” and “blue-staters.” They aren’t that different in my experience. Some of my friends and family voted for Bush, some for Kerry, some for third parties. None of them are evil, thoughtless or cruel.

Democracy means accepting your fellow citizens on an equal footing, as people with just as much right to participate in the political process as you. It doesn’t mean agreeing with them. It may mean getting to know them and trying to understand them a little better.

Anthropologist Grant McCracken has some:

Democrats must understand several things about Republicans to beat them in 2008. (I am your devoted anthropological servant, without regard to party.)

First, Republicans (and the people who vote for them) must be understood to hold a moral and intellectual position. They are not, as some Democrats insist, “asleep,” “ignorant,” or developmentally challenged (as noted in yesterday’s post). They are not selfish. They are not mistaken. They are not 4 years away from “seeing the light.”

Republicans and TPWVFT have an idea of what the body politic is. That this is not the Liberal Left and the Democratic Party idea does not mean it is not an idea. It may not be dismissed as cavalier, craven, or some species of false consciousness. Ad hominem attacks feel good, but… they don’t get the political job done.

More here.

UPDATE: More sharp analysis from McCracken here:

What’s scary from an anthropological point of view is how completely counter paradigmatic these [Republican and Democrat] assumptions are. What you believe I can’t imagine thinking. What I declaim you find virtually unintellligable. Surely, its time to start the debate again with a careful eye to what the deeper differences are. They may not be any negotiating them, but the terrible din of mutual incomprehension has surely run its course.

One thought on the difference. If you stand way back, squint your eyes, and look for the forest, here’s one thing that leaps out. The Republicans dislike the Democrats’ presumption that “they know best.” And the Democrats, when they examines the argument of the Republicans, content that “they just don’t care.”

These are two notions of morality. The Democrats say morality means caring, sharing, and making an effort. From their point of point of view, the Republicans’ notion of less government and more marketplace looks like a refusal of morality, a declaration of indifference, a Darwinian brutality. They cannot see that this represents a moral position. They believe that it indexes an absense of morality.

The Republicans say morality means staying out of the way, letting individuals do, risk, engage as they will and collectivities to shape themselves accordingly. From their point of view, the Democrats’ notion of intervention looks like a bleeding hearted presumption that the Liberal Left must know better than the world. They cannot see that this represents a moral position. The believe it represents a self flattery, an addled refusal to respect the emergent will of the world.

This is bullshit, I’m sure. But you see what I am trying to get at. The fundamental terms of the disagreement to which Matt [Welch] refers. How is it that the two parties are now so utterly mutually exclusive in their assumptions? We need to get to the bottom of this. We need one set of terms that can encompass both points of view. How very pre post modern of me.

This is not that different from what I was trying to get at the other day. It’s not just that we come to different moral conclusions, it’s that we seem increasingly to speak different moral languages. This is postmodernism with a vengance (but I think postmodernism may just be the inevitable outcome of modernism).