That’s the way it goes,
marching all in rows—
someone’s Waterloo.
That’s the way it goes.

That’s the way it goes,
the lily and the rose—
their bloom begins to fade.
That’s the way it goes.

An undiscerning nose
can smell the stink that grows—
everybody knows
that’s the way it goes.

—Paul Willis

The post The Way It Goes appeared first on First Things.

Here, academic and amateur sociologists rush in with glee. Reasons given for the decline of Christian attendance and identification include new avenues of social connectivity (civil, digital); priority given to individual choice that runs counter to parental ­influence; communal mobility; the desire for inclusive values (which deem religious commitment ­exclusivist); emphasis on diversity (in family, race, sexual preference). Some sociologically sensitive church spokesmen say, however, that we shouldn’t worry. We’re learning to adapt! And decline is for the best, because it spurs needed changes: digital worship, ­multi-faith teaching, getting beyond “­membership,” finding faith in social justice, and ­personal expression.

I’m a great fan of sociology. Had I not become a theologian, it might well have been my academic field. But from a theological perspective, sociology’s value is mostly negative. At its best, the discipline functions as a secular “hamartiology.” This clunky Hellenic neologism refers to the “science” that outlines the contours of human sin. When it comes to religious belief itself—let us call it “faith”—sociology has little to tell us except what it looks like when faith frays and unravels; that is, what happens when sin gets the upper hand, and Satan roams to and fro upon the earth.

Sociology does this very well, which is why religious people should pay attention, in the same way that they should pay attention to the Books of Samuel and Kings. Durkheim on anomie; H. Richard Niebuhr on the social “sources” of denominational diversity (and animosity); David Martin, Steve Bruce, Pippa Norris, and Ronald ­Inglehart on secularization (or whatever it is about modern societies that squeezes out our faith); Don Browning on families and fathers; and Robert Putnam on isolated individualism—these and other fascinating scrutinies of our common religious or unreligious lives are mirrors to our weakness, ignorance, stubborn self-regard, anger, and more. They help us see more clearly things we are rightly compelled to repent of, or for which we should pray for mercy. They press us to consider how we are to guard what is good and oppose what is evil. So we hope.

But what sociology cannot do is give or renew faith. It cannot even help us to recognize faith or show us how to encourage it. And for a simple reason: Faith is a gift of God, whose grace is not in our power to manipulate. We should pray for faith: “Increase our faith!” the disciples petition (Luke 17:5). “Help my unbelief!” cries out the desperate father (Mark 9:24). Sociology can only tell us that this may be a good time to pray. (Though, perhaps, any time is a good time in this respect.)

It has always puzzled, indeed, disturbed many, to see how Jesus—and before him, Isaiah, whom Jesus and Paul quote—spoke of unbelief as a divinely providential destiny at certain times: “Make the heart of this people fat, and their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed” (Isa. 6:10; Matt. 13:15; Acts 28:27). To be sure, the condition of unbelief is the product of earlier faithlessness, and to this extent is at least somewhat given over to the power of human decision. Even so, when it comes to our collective faith as a society, we will never discover the moment of our decision-making. For now, belief is simply grace: “To you it has been given to know . . . to them not” (Matt. 13:11). Why? The sociologists cannot say.

Perhaps at this juncture we are tempted to sit back and let the debate over free will and predestination ­unfold. But that is certainly not the discussion Jesus is encouraging in his statement about those to whom faith and faithlessness are given (as most proponents of divine election have recognized). His point is simply that we are to seize upon the gifts of God and to let go of the incessant drive to fix everybody, including ourselves. We are not given divine gifts for the sake of reversing social trends! Unbelief reflects a lack of thanks for, and faithful receipt of, the gifts that God has given; gifts like the written Word, the testimony of the prophets and saints, the sacraments of the Church, the praise of her children, the commands of God.

Sociology is perverted when it becomes a positive religious science. This happens when we get “missional” syllogisms. Here’s a contemporary one: If people have stopped going to church because they are more at ease with screens than people, then we need to offer them church on a screen. The idea is that if we get our sociology right, we can adapt—and then they will believe! Or, at least, “then we will have new church members.” In this way, unhelpful ­arguments unfold: if we speak in this language (and not that); if we offer these services; if we re-arrange these relationships; if we refashion this or that institutional context; if we talk about this and not about that—then unbelief will turn to faith. Or then at least unbelief will shed its filthy clothing and reveal itself as hidden religiosity.

I cringe as I think of the many clergy conferences, “missionary” workshops, and seminary faculty meetings I have attended where this line of argument has been superordinate. But the underlying assumption is false: Unbelief has no socially distinctive causation. “They will listen and not hear” (Jer. 6:10).

So how to speak of unbelief? It is a darkness: “­Darkness cast across the peoples” (Isa. 60:2). Canada and other countries in the West are becoming darker every day, and not only during the winter months. Sociology tells us as much; or at least it can describe the darkness from the outside, as it were. But only the gospel can describe how “the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light” (Matt. 4:16).

The gospel is an “effective” instrument of faith, and it is so only in its enunciation. “So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the preaching of Christ” (Rom. 10:17). The gospel must be proclaimed, given voice. But that enunciation produces effects that no sociology could ever make sense of. Consider the fact that the gospel’s articulation can have the odd effect of causing unbelief. Paul’s assertion that the folly of the Cross is the Wisdom of God marks out a mystery that sociology can never penetrate (1 Cor. 1:25). Even more so does Paul’s announcement that it is just this (sociologically bizarre) divine mystery of which he is not “ashamed” (2 Tim. 1:8).

Again, how are we to talk about unbelief? Let us be guided by the Scriptures. When it comes to belief and unbelief, Jesus chooses a very ­unscientific approach: He speaks in “parables” (Matt. 13:34), parables that the faithless are not able to understand, while those called somehow can. Those who come to faith are snared by the strangeness of Jesus, in whom are wrapped all the mysteries of God, including that great mystery of sin itself, the “mystery of iniquity,” which seems to stir up unbelief wherever it goes (Col. 2:3; 2 Thess. 2:7).

Unbelief, therefore, has a parabolic function. Faithlessness, growing and spreading in our midst, is a figure that takes us into the life of God through the breadth of the Word. For as we are thrust into an unbelieving world, we learn how divine punishment becomes, in God’s hands, a means to repentance; how rebellion becomes a place into which mercy pours; how the object of rejection is the very person of redemption. Read again the Passion of Christ and see how all around there is sin and unbelief, and yet the tremors of grace reshape the landscape and God’s conquering love drills its way to triumph.

Neither the study of history nor social analysis of the present can clarify the conditions of faith’s emergence and renewal. As the Scriptures tell it, human affairs are but one grand parable of God’s complete and comprehensive ordering of his creation (Heb. 9:9, 11:19; Matt. 13:35; Ps. 78:2). The Christian response to unbelief is thus not to manipulate social levers in the vain hope of conjuring belief in faithless times, but rather to follow the way of Christ, the Word who speaks the world. Simple obedience marks the great enunciation and untangling of God’s parables. “I have only done my duty” (Luke 17:10), says the servant who follows history’s Master to the parable’s mysterious end, where the light outlasts and banishes the darkness altogether (John 1:5). In the face of unbelief, we are called to one thing: “Stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter” (2 Thess. 2:15).

Ephraim Radner is professor of historical theology at Wycliffe College.

The post Speaking of Unbelief appeared first on First Things.

After Dobbs, we move to a new political, moral, and even spiritual situation. Roe was part of a decades-long usurpation of the democratic process. After World War II, liberal elites were imbued with confidence in social progress, and they were frustrated by the cultural immobility of the American public. Earl Warren was a California Republican with progressive commitments, a not uncommon species in mid-century American politics. His appointment as chief justice inaugurated a period of judicial activism that had bipartisan support among the Great and the Good.

In the signal instance of civil rights for black Americans, the activism was justified. (And yet not all agreed with the methods. Hannah Arendt famously criticized Brown v. Board of Education as a suspect venture in social engineering.) But the activism did not stop there. Supreme Court decisions in the early 1960s drove religion out of the public schools. By the end of the decade, women’s rights and then gay rights became elite concerns. Today, it’s transgender rights.

From Griswold (which struck down limitations on the sale of birth control) through Roe to Obergefell, a ­strategy of judicial activism, amplified by aggressive and creative implementation by the administrative state, was pursued to overcome popular opposition. As Darel Paul shows in his close study of the history of gay liberation (From Tolerance to Equality: How Elites Brought America to Same-Sex Marriage), elites embraced the sexual revolution far more enthusiastically than did the general public. The powerful were not about to make concessions, and activist organizations, law school legal clinics, and media allies used the courts to “bring the public along.”

The judiciary serves as the natural power base for elites. Matters of law turn on minute and complex arguments that draw upon detailed and extensive legal traditions, documents, and precedents. Only a highly trained and specialized class of people is competent to engage in judicial debates—exactly the class of people allied with elites in other domains of life. Therefore, those at the top of society, insofar as they control the judicial branch, have a natural wish to translate matters of political debate, which is open to democratic influence, into questions of legality, which fall under the purview of experts.

The advantage of turning political controversies into judicial concerns involves more than the control of outcomes. A progressive minority secured an open-ended right to abortion when Roe was decided in 1973. This outcome provided them with an important political advantage during the ensuing decades, for ownership of the legal status quo confers the presumption of legitimacy. In the aftermath of Roe, pro-life activists had to raise the issue of abortion explicitly. This opened them to charges of “extremism.” Proponents of the right to abortion could describe their political opponents as “­divisive” and blame them for political polarization.

The controlling opinion for Casey, which upheld Roe, not so subtly implied that those who continued to oppose the abortion license were bad citizens who undermine our constitutional system. Meanwhile, those who supported abortion could speak of “our settled constitutional law,” employ euphemisms such as “women’s health,” and otherwise avoid bringing the ugly reality of abortion to the attention of voters.

Now the terrain has shifted. One sees the ­consequences of the loss of control over the legal status quo in the minority opinion in Dobbs. Justices Kagan, ­Breyer, and Sotomayor speak of abortion as a “backstop.” By their reasoning, Roe secures an indispensable right, one that is necessary for safeguarding the full and equal participation of women in contemporary American ­society. It’s a striking claim: Women can thrive only if they have the right to take lives. Affirming this claim in such an explicit way is surely painful for anyone concerned about the well-being of women in modern society. What kind of ideal of justice for women (or any other class of citizens) requires a death-dealing “backstop”?

Other voices are less temperate than those of the dissenting justices. In recent years, defenders of the abortion license have shifted from Bill Clinton’s “safe, legal, and rare” to “shout your abortion” and other ­slogans meant to portray the taking of innocent life as a positive good. Now that the decision has been handed down, not a few are throwing temper tantrums in public.

And legislative measures have been extreme. In 2019, the New York legislature codified the Roe regime, which in practice means that abortion is permitted until the time of birth. New York Governor Kathy Hochul recently allocated $35 million to provide special assistance to abortion providers, and there is a proposal to subsidize women’s travel to New York to procure abortions. In New York City, homeless men urinate in doorways and drug addicts shoot up in public at midday. In the face of these realities, Hochul’s commitment of resources to ensure the wide availability of abortion services seems more than a little perverse. The contrasts are even starker in Illinois. As the death toll of gun violence ­increases on Chicago’s South Side, Governor J. B. Pritzker has called for a special legislative session to address, not the murder rate, but “reproductive rights.”

One need not believe that life begins at conception to recognize the ugliness of abortion. One need not think abortion immoral in order to acknowledge something deeply tragic about a woman’s terminating the new life in her womb, whatever the reasons, whatever the circumstances. After Dobbs, those who want to ensure the “right” to “choose” must be more visibly pro-­abortion. This change will unsettle the vast middle ground of opinion on the matter. Most people do not wish to confront the truth that Justice Alito repeats a number of times: Abortion requires the taking of a life. Under Roe, they could simply acquiesce in the legal regime. Dobbs removes this prop for the abortion license.

Going forward, pro-abortion forces must rally the median American voter to support their goals, and this will require speaking directly about what they want, namely a plenary right for women to terminate the life within them. This will make the activists who inveigh against Dobbs and conjure Handmaid’s Tale nightmares seem like “extremists.” They will bear the stigma of being “divisive.” The shoe is on the other foot. And I predict that, given the importance of the rule of law as a stabilizing center-­point for any political consensus, polling will show a decided shift in public opinion. As the pro-­abortion minority ­rages, today’s narrowly divided electorate will evolve toward one that is more solidly pro-life.

When a protest movement triumphs, it must pivot from opposition to governance. This holds for the pro-life movement. We need not accept the pinched notion that women are fulfilled only if they have advanced degrees and high-powered careers. But we do need to think about how to make our society more congenial to childbearing and ­childrearing—and pursue policies that have some promise of achieving that goal.

In “Sexual Counter-Revolution” (November 2021), Scott Yenor detailed the ways in which elite-sponsored changes in culture (many imposed by judicial power, as was the case with Roe) have disordered the lives of men and women. The harms done are becoming evident, not least in the effects of transgender ideology on adolescents. How we can make our way back to sanity is not evident, unfortunately. But dismantling the anti-­discrimination legal regime that empowers activists might be a good place to start. When it comes to sex, the well-funded anti-discrimination industry has done far more harm than good to women (with the exception of elite women) over the last fifty years. Even the elite cohort may face a bitter reckoning as the ranks of single and childless high-achieving women grow—and age.

Family policy offers a more congenial avenue for change. Some pro-life Republican senators, such as Mitt Romney and Josh Hawley, have proposed dramatic increases in government support for households with children. The merits of these proposals should be carefully weighed. But we cannot dither. The victory of Dobbs puts a burden on us to spearhead changes. Whether it is extended maternity leave, increased tax benefits, educational vouchers, or even enhanced benefits reserved for married parents, something needs to be done. To be pro-life necessarily means being pro-­family, which in turn means being pro-marriage.

In the months to come, First Things will be part of the pivot from protest to governance. We hope to publish essays that venture ambitious proposals, both for the sensible moral re-regulation of our society and for government measures to promote marriage and family life.

Signs of Restoration

Nicodemus was a Pharisee who was curious about Jesus. The signs and wonders were undeniable. But Nicodemus remained skeptical about some of the teachings of the rabbi from Nazareth. Aren’t we doomed to travel down the grooves set by our past? How can those who are old be born again?

We’re often more like Nicodemus than we’re willing to admit. Secularism seems our inevitable fate. The number of those professing no religious allegiance rises. The woke revolution crashes through many beloved institutions, like storm-driven waves breaking on the shore. Clerical abuse scandals demoralize. Church leaders are often paralyzed, unable to speak clearly and forcefully, even as ideologies such as transgenderism directly contradict natural and biblical truths.

It’s easy to fixate on the negative trends. They cause us to wonder: How can a faith that has grown old and feeble be born again? But Jesus warns Nicodemus not to presume that the principalities and powers that rule this world dictate the future. “The wind blows where it wills,” he observes. Beware the foolish conceit that we know what God can and cannot do, even with the unpromising material of fallen men. We do well to remind ourselves that the One who rules all things has definitively announced: “Behold, I make all things new.”

I don’t pretend to know what God has in store for the churches in America. But in my travels and conversations, I sense stirrings of life. Something is happening, something new, something renewing.

A small item: Young women are recovering the old practice of veiling their heads during worship. Those whom I observe are not eccentric “traditionalists” at furtive Tridentine Masses. They are university students and young professionals. I see them at parishes that have reputations for dignified worship and orthodox preaching. The numbers are not large. It’s a small minority. But to see even a few arrests my attention. It was only yesterday that there were none.

I know a few priests in university ministries. They report modest upticks in Mass attendance and significant increases in students asking to go to confession. One told me, “Millennials and Gen Xers tend to think they know all the answers. Gen Z kids aren’t so sure. They know that they have not been given anything solid and reliable.” The apostolic faith, embodied in the life and liturgy of the Church, promises a life-giving truth that can be trusted. Perhaps that is why the Harvard Catholic Center, a chaplaincy for undergraduate and graduate students at Harvard and nearby academic institutions, brought more than thirty people into the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil this past April.

Another priest reports that university students are ready to trust clergy. They don’t seem affected by the clerical abuse scandals. At the same time, they’re not in awe of the priesthood. They live amid the spiritual and emotional wreckage of today’s society. In an emergency room, there’s little time for elaborate formalities.

Younger priests are realistic as well. Few harbor the puerile desire, so common among the clerical cohort now sunsetting, to project an “anti-clerical” aura. (I’ve always found clerical anti-clericalism distasteful. It’s rather like a vain man boosting his ego by officiously insisting upon his humility.) Those ordained during the last twenty years have a keen sense of the hostility of secular society. And, again, unlike those now retiring, they are aware that the church has spent down a great deal of her moral and spiritual capital through negligent experimentation and widespread pusillanimity. And, of course, they know that the clerical old boy system (which in many dioceses continues to persecute younger orthodox priests) protected sexual abusers. Because of the resulting lawsuits, this smug, insular, and arrogant cabal has financially bankrupted the Church. And yet all of this seems not to daunt the younger cohort. They express the utmost confidence in the supernatural character of their vocation, which they hope to uphold and embody.

As I reflect on what I see in the Catholic Church, I have to laugh when I read about Pope Francis’s intemperate remarks concerning “restorationism” in America. This attitude, he says “has come to gag the [Second Vatican] Council.” Gag the Council? I sincerely doubt that any of the young people who entered the Catholic Church at Harvard have an opinion about the Second Vatican Council, pro or con. The same is true for those attending a Tridentine Mass. To be sure, many have a sense that things went very wrong after the Council. They’re not blind. And they’re attracted to ressourcement, the return to various aspects of traditional practice that give weight and substance to Catholic life. They’re not stupid. A young friend finds the Latin Mass appealing. He responded with bafflement when I asked about his views on Vatican II: “Good grief, my parents weren’t even born then.”

I have to wonder what the Holy Father could be thinking. Are we to suppose that the “spirit of Vatican II” opposes the always necessary, always ongoing restoration of the Church? The fall of man imposes a bitter law of entropy on all our endeavors, including our noblest ones. The Church is forever spending down her inheritance, neglecting her spiritual riches, forgetting her theological wisdom. It was not within the power of the Second Vatican Council to repeal this sad law of decay and dissolution. Only someone beholden to a religious ideology, rather than informed by a genuine theology, could look at the last fifty years and imagine that we don’t need a strong dose of “restorationism.”

WHILE WE’RE AT IT

♦ My friend Rabbi Yitzchok Adelstein passed along the following observations, penned by Rabbi J. David Bleich, an eminent Talmud scholar and legal authority:

Judaism owes a debt of gratitude to the Catholic Church for filling a lacuna we have allowed to develop. Rambam questioned why the Holy One, blessed be He, allows Christianity to flourish. His answer was that the Church has kept alive and given wide currency to belief in the Messiah. Were Rambam alive today, I am fully confident that he would acknowledge that such a role is now being fulfilled by others and would have offered a different answer to his question. Today, he would respond that the Church deserves accolades for preserving recognition of the sanctity of human life in all of its phases as manifest in categorization of feticide as homicide. Jews were charged with promulgating that teaching by deed and by word. To our eternal shame, Divine Providence found other ways to do so.

♦ A retired priest was in touch recently. “At Mass a week or two ago I heard the lector read from Acts about ‘uncircumcised people.’” He was referring to the first reading for the Monday of the fourth week of Easter, Acts 11:1–18, which begins with Peter getting a talking-to from the brethren in Jerusalem for sharing meals with Gentiles. “I was fuming, figuring [the reader] was a feminist. After Mass I checked the lectionary. She was innocent. The revised lectionary has ‘people’ where the 1970 lectionary has men.” Curious, my correspondent did some research: “I checked the Greek and the word used is for ‘men’ rather than human beings. The Vulgate is hilarious: homines habentes praeputium: men having foreskins. Can’t miss that.”

♦ A new venture, PublicSq.com, has been launched. Short for “public square,” the digital app aims to attract “liberty-minded Americans.” Of particular interest is The Marketplace, “a curated digital network of businesses that share your values and want to serve you.” It’s a useful resource in a time when woke corporations have become aggressive in imposing the progressive agenda.

♦ Gay Clark Jennings serves as president of the House of Deputies of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church. The leaked majority opinion in the Dobbs case put her on edge: “The cause for alarm goes far beyond abortion.” The republic is imperiled by “Christian extremists” who wish “to exercise theocratic control.” Jennings urges her fellow Episcopalians not to remain quiet: “We have an obligation to stand against Christians who seek to destroy our multicultural democracy and recast the United States as an idol to the cruel and distorted Christianity they advocate.” The moment is urgent: “Now—before this outrageous opinion becomes law—we must make our Christian witness to the dignity of every human being by insisting that we support the right to safe and legal reproductive healthcare because our faith in a compassionate God requires us to do so.” Apparently, the destruction of innocent life in the womb is not an offense to “the dignity of every human being,” nor is the taking of life something Jennings’s “compassionate God” cares about. In truth, I cannot muster outrage at this endorsement of abortion-on-demand. I’m simply mystified by the ­incoherence and moral blindness.

♦ It’s beginning to sound a lot like Little Rock in 1957, as the voice of nullification echoes throughout the land. Prosecutors in many big cities refuse to bring criminals to justice, deeming laws against drug possession, shoplifting, and other crimes illegitimate. The end to court protection of unlimited abortion is amplifying the ­lawlessness among those who swear to uphold the law. Steve Descano, a prosecutor in Fairfax County, Virginia, has announced that he will “never prosecute a woman for making her own health care decisions.”

♦ During its next term, the Supreme Court will take up the vexed question of racial “scoring” in elite university admissions. As the author of “Defeating the Equity Regime” (May 2022) observes, if the high court overturns Bakke and proscribes covert methods of racial discrimination in university admissions, the scope of nullification will make resistance to Brown v. Board of Education look modest.

♦ My colleague Mark Bauerlein did some research using the Modern Language Association Bibliography, a database of scholarly publications in the humanities. From 1970 to 1979, the word “transgression” popped up in the titles of books, essays, and dissertations only thirty-­three times. From 2000 to 2009, it occurred 1,138 times. Trans-talk to elementary school kids did not come out of nowhere. It had a long foreground in academia. Our universities have cultivated an environment in which the perverse is championed and the normal is condemned.

♦ Baby formula is in short supply. Washington Post columnist Alyssa Rosenberg regards this as typical: “Babies and their well-being have never been much of a priority in the United States. But the alarming shortage of infant formula—and the lack of a national mobilization to keep babies fed—provides a new measure of how deeply that indifference runs.” One doubts Rosenberg associates this “indifference” with support for abortion.

♦ In response to Roe’s reversal, Amazon (the second-­largest private employer in the United States) says it will pay up to $4,000 to fund abortion-seekers’ travel to states that retain abortion-on-demand. This pledge clarifies what it means to be a “progressive corporation.” You can seek monopoly control of retail, create inhumane working conditions in warehouses, and fight unionization at every step, but as long as you endorse the sexual revolution and do the bidding of organizations such as Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign (which represent the interests of the professional managerial class), you receive accolades from the left.

♦ Bishop Robert Barron writes, “Some apps offer Morning, Evening, and Night prayer from the Liturgy of the Hours.” Very convenient. “However, many who use these apps have recognized a desire to move away from screens during liturgical prayers.” May the many grow in number! “This is especially true when praying in churches and chapels. We instinctively know that phones are inappropriate in these sacred spaces, which is why we aim to have fewer screens in church, not more.” Bishop Barron’s Word on Fire ministry offers Word on Fire Liturgy of the Hours, a printed version of the Liturgy of the Hours, something tangible and ­material rather than virtual and disembodied. Rather like our Savior.

♦ Bishop Barron is right about allowing our heads to be bowed over iPhones. Along the same lines, I’ll register my pet peeve. The installation of large screens in churches undermines prayer and devotion. Count me opposed to Jumbotron worship.

♦ After the Dobbs decision overturning Roe was handed down, the editors at Commonweal penned an editorial that seemed more to regret the Supreme Court’s decision than to applaud it. They wrote, “People who believe in the sanctity of life, including the unborn, can recognize that abortion law is a particularly complicated matter because of the competing goods it must balance: the life of a child, the health and self-­determination of the mother.” Balancing competing goods? That’s exactly the moral reasoning that animates Roe and Casey.

♦ A Supreme Court majority has decided that football coaches can pray on the field after games without calling into question the constitutional order. The decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District contributes to the Court’s ongoing work to bring sanity to our religious freedom and non-establishment jurisprudence. In the 1950s and 1960s, judges participated in the elite consensus that middle-class America was too homogeneous and censorious. This consensus counseled the cabining of religion in order to loosen up society and promote greater freedom to define life as one saw fit. Thus we got the notorious “wall of separation.” Today, the American middle class is demoralized, tattooed, and indebted. Some—including, perhaps, a majority of Justices—are beginning to realize that high school students are imperiled by our crude popular culture, not by the piety of the occasional teacher or coach.

♦ In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor regretted that the majority failed to protect the rights of the students in the Bremerton School District, “who are required to attend school and who this court has long recognized as vulnerable and deserving of protection.” Yes, they certainly are vulnerable to pornography, transgender ­ideology, grooming by “sex positive” activists, mass culture, smart phone addiction, cyberbullying, social media shaming, family break-up, and more. But do they need protection from public displays of religious faith? One wonders in what universe Justice Sotomayor resides.

♦ In this term, the Supreme Court decided that Maine cannot exclude religious schools from a state tuition assistance program. The decision no doubt turns on close reasoning about First Amendment jurisprudence. But it also reflects the sensible judgment that society benefits from religious schools and the piety they encourage, all the more so in a time when so many young people are atomized, alienated, and abandoned to ­disordered lives.

♦ In the last issue, Russell Berman noted that our ruling class has become addicted to the language of emergency. This language justifies forestalling the popular will and shifting power to elites. As if to provide proof of Berman’s claim, in advance of the Dobbs decision, the female members of the Congressional Black Caucus wrote to President Biden, urging him to declare a national emergency and “utilize additional flexibilities” to reverse the consequences of overturning Roe.

♦ In Return of the Strong Gods, I describe the governing imperative forged in the postwar decades as the open society consensus. It insists that all our problems stem from over-consolidation and a “conventional” outlook. The remedies include “diversity” and the regular shock therapy of transgression. Faithful to this consensus, while speaking at a civil rights conference in Lansing, Michigan, Attorney General Dana Nessel riffed on the benefits of drag queen story hour: “[You] know what is not a problem for kids who are seeking a good education? Drag queens.” Far from harmful, they offer great benefits. “Drag queens make everything better. Drag queens are fun.” Nessel’s policy proposal, made in the pride-parade spirit of the open society consensus: “A drag queen for every school.”

♦ This summer we were fortunate to have three outstanding summer college interns. Caleb Symons of ­Patrick Henry College has upgraded our media offerings, gently nudging us beyond our ink-stained, text-­only focus. Ian Paine of Berea College and Joseph DeReuil of Notre Dame have labored with good cheer beside our Junior Fellows, doing many of the indispensable tasks that keep the publishing machine running. I’d like to thank Berea College and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute for providing financial support for Ian and Joe’s time with us this summer. I’d also like to thank Jack Bauerlein and Elisenne Stoller for volunteering this summer. They were especially kind to Mabel, the office puppy, a hopelessly cute dachshund.

♦ At the end of July, Hunter McClure finishes a yearlong stint as a Junior Fellow, during which he combined efficiency in his work with a passion for philosophy. He returns to his native Alabama, where he will prepare for graduate study in the humanities. We will miss his Southern drawl and mordant observations about politics, both secular and ecclesiastical. I’m happy to report that his colleague, Elizabeth ­Bachmann, has signed on for a second year as Junior Fellow, which we will mark by raising her to the exalted rank of assistant editor.

♦ Not all the denizens of the publishing world regard the title of editor as honorable. Writers like to tell the following joke about editors: Mr. X, a much-lauded writer, came upon Mr. Y, a famous magazine editor, who at that moment was urinating in a clear mountain stream. “What,” asked Mr. X in horror, “do you imagine you’re doing?” “I’m making it better,” Mr. Y replied.

♦ We publish essays and reviews that stimulate reflection and conversation. So it’s not surprising that readers sometimes gather to discuss First Things. These gatherings, when they fall under the leadership of volunteers and meet regularly, are called ROFTERS (Readers of First Things groups. Three readers are stepping forward to form new groups.

In Washington, D.C., Genea Callahan wishes to form a group. To join, contact her at genea.callahan@gmail.com.

In Racine, WI, Fred Beuttler is starting a group. Contact him at fredbeuttler@gmail.com.

In Worcester, MA, John Edward Keough is forming a group. Contact him at jkeough@clarku.edu.

We also received notice that the ROFTERS group in Phoenix, AZ, is changing locations. For information, contact Andy Halaby at andy.halaby@gtlaw.com.

The Durham, NC group remains active, but a new organizer is coordinating. To join, contact Dale ­Steinacker at dlsteinacker@gmail.com.

♦  As I write, we are in the clubhouse stretch of our mid-year fundraising campaign. I would like to thank everyone who donated. First Things is blessed to have a devoted and generous readership.

The post Life Wins appeared first on First Things.

Not very long ago, an eminent British editor tweeted an article from his own publication showing (he said) that “in the Middle Ages, some 100,000 women over Europe were burned, hanged, drowned, or put to death in other ingenious ways on suspicion of being witches.” “Three centuries of madness,” he called it.

Which three centuries? The article in question tells us: 1450 to 1750. And the screenshot accompanying the tweet came with the year 1682, when three penniless women were hanged in Bideford, England. The Middle Ages, it seems, can be held, even by respected and intelligent authors, to have been in full flow around 250 years after the latest commonly accepted end date—still going when Bach died and Goya was born, when Louis XIV moved into Versailles and when Henry Fielding published Tom Jones. No wonder it is so easy to damn the medieval period, when it can be stretched, at least in the modern imagination, for as many additional centuries as our contempt and condemnation require.

The tweet was later amended, but it is emblematic. Commentators will leapfrog over centuries of historical phenomena analogous to contemporary crimes or outrages in order to find medieval precursors instead. The opening statement of the chief prosecutor in the trial of Slobodan ­Milošević spoke of “almost medieval savagery.” Responding to reports last year that the then–prime minister of Pakistan had linked rape to how women dress, a professor of economics accused Imran Khan of having a “medieval mindset.” A prominent English journalist declared the fact that leaders at the most recent G7 summit went unmasked, while staff were covered, to be (you guessed it) “medieval.” One way or another, it is the Middle Ages—and not, say, the first half of the twentieth ­century—that have become shorthand for “the opposite of what we want our modern world to be.”

This last phrase comes from The Bright Ages, a new history of medieval Europe co-authored by two academics based at American universities. Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry have observed the expectations that their students bring to medieval ­history classes. They arrive looking for “darkness and grit.” The movies that have formed these young minds imply that nothing is more authentically medieval than sexism, rape, and torture. Gabriele and Perry’s book hides none of the cruel excesses of the Middle Ages, which, like all eras of humankind, bear dark and awful stains. But, in a kind of magic carpet ride around the places, events, and personalities of medieval Europe, they attempt to show the myriad ways in which our civilization was also advancing into the light.

Ironically enough, The Bright ­Ages—which repeatedly parades the authors’ determination not to allow the Middle Ages to be captured by white supremacists—has itself been sucked into a social media–powered row about race, with one medievalist denouncing the authors for “[relying] on their whiteness for authority,” and complaining that “Europe, Christianity, and whiteness remain central themes.” But this shouldn’t blind us to a wider trend The Bright Ages represents: a desire among both popular and scholarly writers to get the reading public to rethink common assumptions about the Middle Ages, and to avoid an attitude of lazy dismissal.

This book comes on the heels of The Light Ages, published last year by the English historian Seb Falk. Despite their similar titles, the books take very different approaches. Chapter by chapter, Gabriele and Perry usher into view, from behind the curtain of the familiar grand narratives and from multiple locations, an eclectic cast of characters—many of them women—who exemplify, in a multitude of ways, a dazzling brightness where history has instructed us to see only gloom.

Falk, by contrast, devotes his book entirely to medieval science, and to the life and times of a single fourteenth-­century English monk named John Westwyk, author of a treatise called Equatorie of the Planetis, for whom studying the book of nature alongside the book of Scripture was “an integral part of praising God.” All our GPSs, all our online-­delivery slots, Falk reminds us, stem from the “clockwork revolution” that occurred around 1300, with the dawning of “reliable machines that could keep universally agreed time in equal hours.”

If the Middle Ages were more scientifically sophisticated than the caricature allows, they were also more cosmopolitan. As Falk observes, Latin, “the first pan-­European language of scholarship,” allowed masters to work freely “from Paris to Padua, Cambridge to Cologne.” New numerals from sixth-century India gradually replaced their Latin predecessors, thanks to both Muslim and Christian popularizers. A twelfth-­century Worcestershire abbot studied the moon through the work of Pedro Alfonso, a converted Jew from ­Aragon—himself indebted to Islamic scholarship, which he had picked up when his hometown was under Arab control. Monks borrowed the latest astronomical research from Iran, or arrived from Tunisia laden with medical textbooks, or traveled to Toledo to translate Arabic works. The sheer cosmopolitanism of the Middle Ages is perhaps the largest patch of common ground between The Light Ages and The Bright Ages.

Falk’s book is an encouragement to epistemic humility, prompting us to correct both what we think we know about the Middle Ages and what we think we know about ourselves as people of the early twenty-­first century. It conjures hope that future generations will not belittle us for failing to answer questions we couldn’t possibly have posed.

In Dominion, his panoramic 2019 account of the development of the Western mind, Tom ­Holland makes a compelling case that the Christian Middle Ages created the very assumptions that present-day secularists take for granted. “Where does this idea come from, the idea that inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person exist?” Holland asked in an interview around the time Dominion was published. “It doesn’t come from the Greeks. It doesn’t come from the Romans. Enlightenment philosophers didn’t invent it. If you think that human rights just magically exist in the air, then that is a massive faith position. And it still prompts the question, where did this idea that human rights just hover in the air come from? And the answer is that, specifically, the notion of human rights derived from the canon lawyers of the twelfth century.”

Elsewhere in this eclectic, burgeoning field of medieval revisionism can be found Rodney Stark, professor of sociology at Baylor University and author of a string of books taking apart the black legends about the Middle Ages and the Catholic Church; and Johannes Fried, retired professor of medieval history at the University of Frankfurt. In the stirring epilogue to his 2015 defense of the period, Fried lauds the restless, passionate curiosity of the medieval mind and exposes its Enlightenment and contemporary defamers, gathered on the shoulders of giants of whom, thanks to their prejudices, they know nothing.

The new turn in medieval studies can perhaps be traced to ­Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars, which marks its thirtieth anniversary this year. In his introduction to the new edition, Duffy explains the ­realization that inspired his landmark study. He came to see that the products and practices of late ­medieval Christianity were not “a meaningless mount of ­mumbo-­jumbo, culpably remote from the personality and teaching of Jesus, strong on magic, weak on ­personal responsibility,” but instead “the ritual building-­blocks of a ­coherent worldview” that privileged the spiritual health of the ­community over the individual’s search for ­authenticity.

The most remarkable thesis of all, though, may come from ­Joseph Henrich, Chair of Human Evolutionary Biology at ­Harvard. In The Weirdest People in the World (2020), Henrich posits that the ultimate explanation for the West’s preeminence—in education, industrialization, wealth, and democratization—can be found in the medieval Church’s restrictions on cousin marriage. According to Henrich, whose argument has been favorably covered in the Washington Post and Science, such restrictions seeded greater individualism, independence, and trust in strangers.

Watching this swelling wave, wondering where it might go next or whether it has peaked, is fascinating. And so too is tracing its deeper antecedents, those scholars who in times past fought for a more nuanced, appreciative understanding of the Middle Ages. Among the intellectual godparents of Duffy, Holland, and the rest can be found Charles Homer Haskins, whose 1927 classic, The Renaissance of the Twelfth ­Century, expressed, by means of its title alone, a desire to make readers think again about where the dividing lines of history could be softened or redrawn; and Kenneth Clark, who in the late 1960s, on the page and the television screen, explained how western Europe was, by the year 1000, already prepared for its first great age of civilization, and how the twelfth century in particular saw in “every branch of life—action, philosophy, organisation, technology— . . . an extraordinary outpouring of energy, an intensification of existence.”

One thinks also of the French historian Régine Pernoud, who in 1977 wrote Pour en finir avec le Moyen Age (available in English as Those Terrible Middle Ages!); and of Christopher Dawson (1889–1970), a man who thought in epochs and civilizations. Dawson saw that the early Middle Ages in Western Europe “­created not this or that manifestation of culture, but the very culture itself—the root and ground of all the subsequent cultural achievements.” One might even invoke Oscar ­Wilde, whose De Profundis laments that “Christ’s own renaissance”—which produced “the Cathedral at Chartres, the ­Arthurian cycle of legends, the life of St. Francis of Assisi, the art of Giotto, and Dante’s Divine Comedy—was

not allowed to develop on its own lines, but was interrupted and spoiled by the dreary classical Renaissance that gave us Petrarch, and Raphael’s frescoes, and Palladian architecture, and formal French tragedy, and St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Pope’s poetry, and everything that is made from without and by dead rules, and does not spring from within through some spirit informing it. But wherever there is a romantic movement in art there somehow, and under some form, is Christ, or the soul of Christ. He is in Romeo and Juliet, in the Winter’s Tale, in Provençal poetry, in the Ancient Mariner, in La Belle Dame sans Merci, and in Chatterton’s Ballad of Charity.

Gabriele and Perry’s twenty-­first-century evocation of the bright ages has a certain kinship with Wilde’s romantic nineteenth-century panorama, which, of course, had many antecedents of its own. The banner of the medieval defenders continues therefore to unfurl, in familiar and unfamiliar ways.

In the end, one must wonder whether this collective but ­uncoordinated effort to shift common opinion of the Middle Ages will ever bear fruit; whether the commentariat will ever be weaned from regarding everything that is “reprehensible, repellent, and brutal” in our times as a medieval relapse, rather than (in Johannes Fried’s words) “the outbreak of a newly minted kind of immaturity that has everything to do with current social failings.” It is, then, worth remembering the old truism: that for a complex and ­unpopular position to stand a chance of penetrating public consciousness, its advocates will have to grow truly sick of making their point, over and over and over.

John Duggan writes from Surrey, ­England.

The post The New Medievalism appeared first on First Things.

The Right:
The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism
by matthew continetti
basic books, 496 pages, $18.99

American conservatism has been a remarkably unstable thing since the end of the Cold War. Twenty years ago, the “compassionate conservatism” of George W. Bush and the hawkish foreign-policy views of the neoconservatives were ascendant. A little less than ten years ago, the right was supposedly in the midst of a “libertarian moment,” and the Tea Party’s only rival appeared to be a high-minded and technocratic “reform conservatism.”

Then came Donald Trump. He campaigned in 2016 as a right-wing populist, neither libertarian nor technocratic and certainly not what Bush Republicans would consider “compassionate.” Unlike Bush and the neoconservatives, who went to great lengths to brand themselves as faithful successors to Ronald Reagan, Trump cared little for the appearance of continuity. Conservative intellectual orthodoxy no longer mattered, so a number of politically unorthodox thinkers began to make arguments for a new right.

Yoram Hazony was one of them. His 2018 book, The Virtue of Nationalism, and a series of conferences he organized in the U.S. and Europe launched what he called “national conservatism.” Hazony championed the nation-state and generally took a nationalist line on trade, immigration, and foreign policy—which is to say, he has been skeptical of free trade, opposed to open borders, and critical of international institutions and idealistic military ventures overseas. Hazony’s new book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery, presents a complete case for what he understands Anglo-American conservatism to be: He offers an interpretation of history, a philosophical foundation, a discussion of policy, and—perhaps most important—an account of what this conservatism means at the personal level, in his own experience and for others.

A very different way of describing conservatism is found in Matthew Continetti’s The Right: The Hundred-­Year War for American Conservatism. Instead of directly advancing an argument for his preferred variety of conservatism, Continetti tells the story of right-wing politics and intellectual development over the course of a full century, from the time of Warren Harding and ­Calvin Coolidge to the end of Trump’s presidency. The book tries to do too much, yet does it surprisingly well. Continetti has captured at least the overall outline of the right’s contours since the 1920s. Readers who have wondered what “fusionism” is or where “neoconservatives” come from or how the Religious Right relates to the Jimmy Carter era will find answers here. The book’s fatal flaw is that those answers are typically presented in the context of conventional liberal assumptions about the perils of conservatism and the wickedness of right-wing populism.

These books illustrate opposing tendencies on the right today. One side, represented by Continetti, believes that American conservatism is a variety of liberalism and that right-wing populism is at best a necessary evil, at worst altogether foolish or evil. The other side believes that American conservatism has been crippled by its deference to liberal dogmas. Hazony’s book is intended to free conservatives from thinking of themselves as liberals. Although neither of these volumes is primarily concerned with policy or electoral politics, obvious practical implications ensue for the right, depending on which self-understanding prevails. Voters and politicians may pay scant attention to such books, but works like these define the horizons within which political action and policymaking take place.

Continetti and Hazony are both in some sense heirs to Irving Kristol, the self-­described “godfather” of neoconservatism. Continetti started his career at The Weekly Standard, a magazine founded by Irving’s son, William Kristol, and he later married ­into the Kristol family himself. As a student at Princeton in the 1980s, Hazony was inspired by reading ­Irving Kristol and received support from a nonprofit that Kristol ran for a campus magazine he started. But Hazony and Continetti have channeled the Kristol inheritance in different directions. Hazony emphasizes, among other things, Kristol’s critique of the American Founders: By failing to create a formal role for religion in the Constitution, they left the newborn republic to grow up into the troubled America that exists today. Conservatism, Hazony writes, needs men and women who lead “a conservative life,” including a life of religious practice. Yet Hazony notes regretfully that even Kristol, though he described himself as “a neo-­orthodox Jew,” was “non-practicing.”

Continetti converted to Judaism when he married into the Kristol family. Religion is hardly absent from the pages of The Right, and its author is concerned about Am­erica’s deepening secularism. But Continetti is a champion of the affirmative side of the Kristol legacy, a view of America’s original liberalism as, on the whole, successful and worth defending. If Continetti and Hazony recognize some of the same challenges facing the right, they approach them from different premises. The “rediscovery” in Hazony’s title is of a conservatism that is not predicated on liberalism, “classical” or otherwise. ­Continetti, by contrast, concludes The Right with quotations from George Will and Harvey Mansfield pointing to the liberal foundations of American conservatism.

In Continetti’s account, the history of the right over the last century has been a story of populism and elitism in dynamic tension. After a hundred years, Continetti argues, the right has come almost full circle. No one would mistake Donald Trump for Calvin Coolidge, but the Republican Party of our time is again, as in Coolidge’s day, in favor of immigration restriction, tariffs, and what Continetti calls a “disengaged nationalism” in foreign affairs.

Continetti’s narrative depicts the conservative movement that grew and flourished from the end of World War II to the George W. Bush administration as an overall failure, in that it did not redeem the right from its populist errors. Continetti credits the movement with success in the Cold War, to be sure. But the decades-long attempt to make the right more intellectually mainstream at home and more “engaged” with the world beyond our borders only wound up leading back to the ethos of Coolidge and Harding in the exaggerated form of Donald Trump.

Continetti wants a liberal conservatism that can command respect among America’s elite, and in his last pages he considers whether such a thing, “a new neoconservatism,” might not have better prospects in the Democratic Party than in Trump’s GOP. “The rise of liberal critics of ‘woke’ racial-equity politics may portend a new center,” he writes, “based in the classical liberal principles of individual freedom, personal responsibility, equal opportunity, merit-based achievement, and color blindness.”

What Continetti found in writing The Right, however, was that even the old neoconservatism represented a significant departure from earlier traditions of American conservatism, which in Continetti’s telling were hopelessly impractical and prone to ideological extremism. He has as little sympathy as any liberal for the pre–World War II “America First” right, for the red-hunting supporters of Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, or for the literary-philosophical tradition of Southern agrarianism, which he seems to conflate with any traditionalist critique of Wall Street.

Continetti depicts the postwar right as out of touch with the public and—even when conservatives were correct about certain issues, as they were about communist ­subversion—as overreacting in ways that discredited conservatism. The senators who were the standard-bearers for the political right in the first two decades after World War II, Robert A. Taft and Barry Goldwater, are treated here as losers whose political failures were indicative of their ­philosophical deficiencies.

The intellectual right of the early postwar era fares no better than the politicians in Continetti’s account. William F. Buckley Jr. and the brilliant writers he assembled in ­National Review were also susceptible to bad judgment and ideological exaggerations, and they initially found little purchase with the public. Continetti has elsewhere written sensitively about the work of such figures as Willmoore Kendall, James Burnham, and Russell Kirk. But in The Right he has little space to ­unfold the nuances of their thought. Readers instead get capsule summaries along with the verdict that most of their ideas had no consequences.

The best chapters are those on the neoconservatives, the figures with whom Continetti most sympathizes. He explains their migration from left to right very well. They started out in some cases as social democrats or anti-Stalinist Marxists—in the ideological line of succession from Leon Trotsky—and in other cases as Cold War liberals and Democrats. What ­reoriented them was the radicalism of the New Left that arose in the 1960s and ’70s. As the left became violent, anti-American, and culturally revolutionary, these journalists, scholars, and policymakers moved right, or at least into the pages of right-leaning magazines.

The neoconservatives exemplified a liberal conservatism that was not libertarian conservatism. They gave only “two cheers for capitalism,” but not because they believed in some other historical or philosophical economic ideal. They accepted the New Deal welfare state and subscribed to the foreign policy of anti-communist liberals like ­Harry Truman. At their best, as in some of the essays of Irving Kristol, they displayed a Tocquevillian sensibility and a keen awareness of the discontents of modern life. The neoconservatives also contributed a new emphasis on social science, as exemplified in the pages of The ­Public Interest, a journal Kristol ­created.

Continetti covers well-known neoconservatives like the Cold War hawks Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a Democratic senator, and the political scientist Jeane Kirkpatrick. His book is particularly helpful, however, in noting the contributions of some lesser-known neoconservatives, such as Erwin Glikes, the Basic Books editor who shepherded to press Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man.

The same era that gave rise to the neoconservatives also saw the emergence of a populist “New Right,” as it was known at the time. Christian conservatives troubled by the New Left’s hostility to the family and religious institutions became more active in politics. The organizational mastermind Paul Weyrich, who ­also helped to establish the Heritage Foundation, urged Jerry Falwell to launch the Moral Majority (whose name Weyrich supplied). Also connected to the New Right, and in direct opposition to the neoconservatives, were a set of right-wing intellectuals who adopted the label “paleoconservatives” in the 1980s.

Continetti does not look very closely into the New Right, Christian conservatism, and paleoconservatism, however. He says nothing about how a cantankerous populist braintrust formed around Chronicles magazine beginning in the mid-1980s. Richard John Neuhaus features in Continetti’s narrative, but the story of how First Things was born from an acrimonious split between Neuhaus and the Rockford Institute (the publisher of Chronicles) does not make the cut. And Continetti pays little attention to debates among Christian conservatives in the years after the Reagan administration: There is no mention here of the “End of Democracy?” controversy in the pages of this journal during the Bill Clinton era, and the cultural impact of Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option” likewise escapes his notice.

But then, the latter part of ­Continetti’s book is much less focused on ideas and intellectuals than earlier chapters had been. After The Closing of the American Mind in 1987, few books offering a big-picture social analysis or serious political ­theory appear in The Right’s narrative. This is not a result of authorial bias. Something that Continetti shows well is how the right after Reagan turned into a movement of media figures and policy wonks. The great thinkers of earlier decades were superfluous to the reconstituted movement’s political and polemical needs.

For Continetti, neither the theorists of the early post–World War II right nor the conservative pundits of the post–Cold War era struck the right balance. Though he acknowledges the policy success and popular influence of libertarian economists such as ­Milton Friedman, Continetti’s principal models for a conservatism that is neither too theoretical and removed from the public, as was the case with the early thinkers, nor too populist and inclined to pander, as are the right’s latter-day publicists, are the 1970s neoconservatives.

As a guide to the “who” and “what” of the American right over the past century, this book is very useful. But The Right is ultimately a liberal history of American conservatism and provides little insight into the “why” questions: why conservative thinkers invested their efforts in ideas that were unpopular and appeared extreme to outsiders; why conservative voters are so defiantly populist; and why the right coheres as well as it does, despite the seemingly profound division between its elite ­theorists and its grassroots base.

The answers to these questions lie deep in the religious and localist commitments of the right’s thinkers and voters.The religious conservative accepts liberalism only to the extent that it conforms to God’s law, and the conservative particularist patriot believes that the idea of America must be in the service of actual Americans. Liberals, by ­contrast—even liberal conservatives—either fail to see the tension between liberalism and these deeper commitments, or resolve the tension in favor of liberalism. Either way, liberals struggle to see the nonliberal right as anything other than misguided and futile, if not perverse, bizarre, and dangerous. Yet, as Continetti’s book—perhaps unintentionally—shows, it is hard-right thinkers and populists, not liberal conservatives, who have done the most to shape American conservatism.

Yoram Hazony works to vindicate the nonliberal right. Conservatism: A Rediscovery is a passionate, forcefully argued refutation of the claim that liberalism is America’s only tradition. On the contrary, the rationalism that is characteristic of what Hazony terms “Enlightenment liberalism” is corrosive of the traditions of politics, faith, and life on which the nation has always depended. Unchecked liberalism leads to the moral and institutional decay we see around us in the twenty-first century.

Yet many conservatives have accepted a liberal account of America’s origins. As a result, they either defend liberalism, without realizing how the very creed they defend is destroying the country they love, or they reject America along with liberalism in the belief that the country was founded on a false philosophy. Hazony dismisses the premise that lies behind both of those responses. He attempts to show that America was founded on a pre-liberal English tradition with a biblical concept of the nation. The Federalists among our republic’s Founding Fathers were also, according to ­Hazony, opponents of Enlightenment rationalism. They were conservatives, not liberals.

The sixty chapters of Hazony’s book are divided into four sections, the first of which covers the history of conservative thought in England and America. The second presents a general conservative philosophy, whose prime attributes are a rejection of wide-ranging applications of reason in favor of empiricism, and a certain understanding of the importance of honor in human society. The third part of the book considers a variety of recent conservative thinkers—many of the same writers touched upon in Continetti’s book. A final section grounds conservatism in the conduct of personal life, with illustrations drawn from the author’s life and the lives of men and women he has encountered.

There is a good deal of truth in every part of the book, and even where Conservatism: A Rediscovery goes amiss, it does so in ways that are healthily provocative. Seen as the beginning of a conversation, this is a very valuable work. But it suffers from an appearance of having been written in haste, with each section susceptible to serious objections.

For instance, Hazony’s argument for a continuous Anglo-American political tradition depends on telling only half of the story. Though there certainly are continuities among medieval English constitutionalism, early modern English constitutionalism, and American constitutionalism, there are enormous changes and differences among the periods (and the ideas of individual thinkers across the ages) as well. What ­Hazony has in fact done in the name of de-emphasizing Lockean liberalism as the root of the American order is to recapitulate the mythology of Whig ­history: the belief, skillfully criticized by historians from David Hume onward, in an ancient constitution whose original principles and outlines have remained the principles and outlines of British (or, for Hazony, “Anglo-American”) government into modern times. ­Hazony winds up adopting one kind of liberalism (Whig history) in an effort to displace another (Lockean theory). This would be fair enough if not for the almost Manichean intensity with which Hazony insists that liberalism and conservatism are always distinct and opposed.

Notably, some of Hazony’s own sources disagree with him. Hazony includes in his honor roll of Anglo-­American conservative thinkers ­Josiah Tucker, an eighteenth-­century Englishman who argued at length and with great force that the American colonies were thoroughly Lockean—and for that reason he was glad to see them leave the British Empire.

Elsewhere Hazony cites Edmund Burke’s description of the colonists as “American English” as a point in favor of his argument for a single Anglo-American tradition. But the phrase appears only once in twelve volumes of Burke’s collected works. In general Burke, like the colonists themselves, recognized that America had developed into a nation unto itself. The Americans had distinct constitutional practices. Whereas England exhibited a high degree of ecclesiastical as well as political government, the American colonies had powerful traditions of local self-­government in church and state alike. Burke noted the profound political implications of the Northern colonies’ dissenting Protestant habits. And he argued that the prevalence of slavery in the Southern colonies made Southern whites acutely jealous of their own liberties, to an extent that seemed insane to most Englishmen. The different institutions of England and America, and the great distance that separated the lands, led to distinct constitutional evolutions.

Hazony traces ideas like a partisan rather than a historian: Every thinker is assigned to one camp or the other, as either a conservative or a liberal. Thus the tangled politics and legacy of the Federalists and Anti-­Federalists in the debates over ratification of the Constitution become, in Hazony’s book, a straightforward tale of Hazony-style conservatives versus rationalist liberal Jeffersonians. He treats the Declaration of Independence as if Jefferson had written the document to express his own idiosyncratic ideas, rather than those of the Continental Congress. (The final text of the Declaration, of course, was revised by many hands, including that of John Adams.) He likewise treats the Constitution not as a document that expressed the views of a wide coalition but as a manifesto for the later Federalist Party. In truth, the Declaration and the Constitution both enjoyed support from a combination of “liberals” and “conservatives,” and opponents of the Constitution’s ratification were a similarly eclectic mix.

Hazony’s treatment of Christian history and politics is also distorted. His prioritization of the Bible as a source of public authority and teaching sits uneasily with his preference for Anglican traditionalism over Puritanism as a benchmark of ­Anglo-American conservatism. His Toryism will not allow him to consider the Puritans ­conservatives—they were, after all, the revolutionary party in the English Civil War. Americans, however, owe a great deal of their political tradition, even in its secularized form, to the Puritan experience, while America’s most important branch of Anglicanism, the Episcopal Church, does not, it is fair to say, embrace anything like Hazony’s understanding of Bible-based politics.

Conservatism: A Rediscovery, like The Virtue of Nationalism, treats the Catholic Church as an international conspiracy that threatens Anglo-­American political independence and indeed the very principle of ­national independence. The ­existence of Catholic nation-states such as France, and the long record of professed Catholic political authorities defying—and even bullying—Rome does not seem to weigh in his ­considerations. His discomfort with Catholicism provides a backdrop to Hazony’s broad rejection of natural law as an attempt by man to know the mind of God—which is not, of course, how Christians (and hardly Catholics alone) have understood the relations among reason, nature, and God. The natural law is a thing that God has made, which man may discover through the exercise of the faculty of reason that God has ­given him. Man’s reason allows him to understand creation, not the mind of God himself.

Hazony is radically skeptical of what man’s reason can know. He ­accepts that reason allows us to reach practical conclusions through trial and error, and he considers ­himself an empiricist. There are strong traditions of empiricism and skepticism in Anglo-American conservatism. But the magnitude of ­Hazony’s skepticism leads him ­toward an anthropology and view of politics that bear striking parallels to the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and other rather Epicurean modern thinkers.

For example, Hazony describes human beings as if they were primarily motivated by honor and the esteem of others. (Machiavelli might say “glory.”) Human beings are naturally selfish; even our love of family, friends, and country is really a form of self-love, in which we have expanded our definition of self to include those with whom we have relationships. Because we are selfish, we are prone to conflict. Hazony nearly paraphrases Hobbes when he writes that before the rise of “standing government” and “professional armies,” “every household, clan, and tribe maintained a large measure of independence in matters of war, peace, crime, and punishment, and as a consequence they lived amid constant warfare and ­violence.” The competition becomes less violent but no less selfish once political government is established. Only an external threat brings about unity, as squabbling families unite against outsiders and feuding tribes rally to defend the nation against other nations.

Although Hazony is known for “national conservatism,” in Conservatism: A Rediscovery, “tribes” are almost as important as the nation. Hazony dismisses talk of “mediating institutions” as “odd jargon,” but he understands tribes as being essential intermediaries between families and the nation as a whole. (“Clans,” in turn, occupy a place between family and tribe.) Unfortunately, Hazony never gives a satisfactory explanation of what “tribes” are and are not. Sometimes he associates modern tribes with “parties.” Elsewhere he gives “trade associations” as an example of tribes. Yet when he introduces the concept it is clear that he has in mind something with hereditary force, as in an actual tribe of kinship and generations-old ritual.

The language of tribe is important to Hazony because he wants all societies to be able to conform to traditional hierarchical models, or specifically to the model of Israel in the Old Testament. But in a traditional society, any person can give a clear, definitive answer to the question of what tribe or clan he belongs to, just as today every normal person can give a clear and simple answer to “What’s your family name?” or “What’s your citizenship?” If Hazony were to ask a half dozen people on the street, “What’s your tribe?,” he would receive a cacophony of responses, the most common of which would almost certainly be, “What do you mean by ‘tribe’?” Certainly not everyone belongs to a party or a trade association.

In Hazony’s philosophical schematic of political order, family and nation are meant literally, while the intermediary levels of tribe and clan (which Hazony says can today be “congregations” or “­communities”) are so loosely figurative as to be meaningless. If someone were to try to apply Hazony’s terms consistently, the result would be either a hard ethno-nationalism, in which tribe and clan are as literal as family and nation, or an atomized liberalism in which family and nation are as easily redefined as tribe and clan. There is a sin of omission here as well: “Tribe” and “clan” occupy in his work the space that region and locality occupy in the genuine ­Anglo-American tradition. What is represented in the House and Senate is not a clan or a tribe but a place, all of whose inhabitants, even if they do not belong to the majority “tribe” or “congregation,” are entitled to a vote.

Regionalism is an inescapable historical and cultural fact of American political experience. Yet Hazony is critical of Russell Kirk for “defending the customs of the Midwest and South against American national conservatives such as Hamilton.” Though regionalism and local government can certainly impede good federal policies at times, they are indispensable to the legitimacy of the national government and the very self-conception of the United States. Even “national conservatism” must still be federal and regional if it is to be a form of American conservatism.

In his section on current affairs, Hazony observes that liberalism has proved incapable of resisting wokeism and other ­v­arieties of new revolutionary ­ideology. He is optimistic that some liberals, ­seeing this, will come to embrace ­conservatism. Over the last ­sixty years, “liberal democracy” has displaced what Hazony identifies as the “Christian ­democracy” that had prevailed in America from the age of the ­Federalists through the time of Franklin ­Roosevelt and ­Harry ­Truman. As liberalism crumbles, Hazony hopes to see a new “­conservative democracy,” bearing a strong resemblance to the old ­Christian democracy (not least in its public role for religion), ­eventually become the philosophy of government.

The final chapters of Conservatism: A Rediscovery make clear, however, that a change in governing philosophy is not sufficient. For conservatism to succeed, Americans will have to embrace a conservative way of life. Hazony poignantly describes how he and Julie, the woman who would become his wife, did so. As undergraduates at Princeton, he was Jewish but not yet Orthodox and she was an atheist with Presbyterian roots. Disgusted by the habitual drunkenness that filled the free time of other students, Yoram and Julie began to take their meals at the kosher Stevenson Hall, where they became increasingly interested in Jewish life. Yoram became Orthodox and Julie converted before marrying him. They now live in Jerusalem and have nine children.

They met in the Reagan era, and Hazony looks back on Reagan with fondness, as a leader who morally inspired the country. Hazony himself was also inspired by George Will’s Statecraft as Soulcraft and the essays of Irving Kristol. He relates in a footnote an extraordinary conversation he had with Kristol, which illustrates how seriously the older man took the connection between a nation and its faith. “Irving told me that as a matter of political theory, he thought only Christians should be able to vote in a Christian majority nation such as America, and that, by the same principle, only Jews should be able to vote in Israel. If someone wanted to be recognized as a member of a certain political community, they should adopt the public religion of the majority.”

Yet few of the other conservatives Hazony knew at Princeton followed the path he and Julie took. In his final chapter he asks what political conservatives who are not personally conservative, in the sense of having a large family and a devout faith, are actually conserving. Citing the examples of Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, and Kant, he observes that “Enlightenment rationalism was the construction of men who had no real experience of family life or what it takes to make it work.” A way of life, no less than a set of beliefs, separates right from left.

But here too Hazony glosses over the complications. Few of the heroes he hails in his chapters on Anglo-American conservatism led lives that fulfilled his criteria. The English jurist John Selden, whom Hazony calls “the greatest conservative,” lived with a widow whom he may never have married, and he never had children. George ­Washington was childless; Gouverneur Morris, whom Hazony treats as a true father of the Constitution, had one child from a late marriage after a long life of sexual dissipation. The degrees of religious orthodoxy among exemplary Anglo-American conservatives varied widely as well.

And would Yoram Hazony himself have the life of a conservative if he had not met Julie or a woman very much like her? One man, ­however virtuous, cannot make a family. A woman like Julie was rare in the 1980s and is rarer today. In a traditional society, women have different kinds and, in several respects, unequal degrees of dignity compared to men. In the modern world, women quite naturally want equal dignity in degree, which requires an education that leads toward equal dignity in kind, as workers and citizens rather than as a special class of mothers and wives. The moral component of that education tends to produce ambitions that cannot be fulfilled by an older way of life. To restore a life of tradition for more than just the lucky few would demand a change in both economic ­organization and the basic understanding of human equality in the West. That is much more than “conservatism” can ­possibly accomplish. It would be a double revolution, in morality and material provision.

A truly traditional ­society does not need “conservatism,” in the sense of some philosophy or strategy that is not already internalized in its habits. Conservatism is what is required when the foundations of society can no longer be taken for granted. This is why conservatism is so often a conspicuously novel defense of the ancient, and it is why conservatism is prone to heresies of surrender or solipsism. Continetti’s approach exemplifies how conservatism surrenders: by accepting liberalism as its master. Hazony’s conservatism has many admirable features, and his current “national conservative” project is a fine endeavor. But his book errs in the direction of solipsism when it fails to account for the limitations of the order under which we live today, limitations that are at least as deeply embedded in the ­Anglo-American tradition as any countervailing “­conservative” capacities are. Conservatism means making the best of a bad situation and preventing it from becoming worse. To aim beyond that, for an order that is comprehensively good, goes beyond anything dreamt of by Edmund Burke or ­Alexander ­Hamilton.

Yoram Hazony and Matthew Continetti are serious writers who have produced serious books with serious flaws. Yet those flaws are the flaws of conservatism itself, in either its liberalism-preserving mode or its attempt to maintain modernity’s constitutional traditions while escaping the constraints of modernity’s moral and economic conditions. These books are a call to think more seriously about what the political right wants and can achieve: It wants something more than Continetti endorses, but can achieve less than Hazony hopes.

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.

The post The Right Right appeared first on First Things.

This is an awkward position for a music critic. Our task is to describe the indescribable, and in the case of a new work, to listen, to assess, and to offer up a passably assured first draft of history. It’s a serious responsibility, and in fairness most of my colleagues treat it as such: examining scores, choosing appropriate comparisons, and (fun though it is to deliver a snarky slating) preferring to err on the side of generosity. But with time you develop a sixth sense. You know when you’re pleading slightly too hard. Far, far rarer is the sensation that you’ve just heard the real thing. That a composer has said something both wholly new and entirely true; that the notes you’ve just heard possess the originality, the vitality, and the certainty of a living artwork. The sensation can be so unexpected that your gut reaction, born in equal measure of wonder and disbelief, is simply to laugh.

Okay, so you probably had to be there. But you should certainly try to hear MacMillan’s Fifth Symphony. (There’s a fine recording, made by the performers who gave the premiere.) For now, you should know that it’s written for chorus and orchestra, that each of its three movements (true to MacMillan’s deeply held Catholic faith) depicts an aspect of the Holy Spirit, and that he called it Le grand Inconnu—“The Great Unknown.” A useful hint of vagueness there—opportunity to change the subject when confronting those who can’t or won’t understand. As a composer, ­MacMillan has spent his working life in a climate that is largely ignorant or actively contemptuous of his beliefs; and though he hasn’t compromised an inch, he’s become adept in choosing which battles to fight.

So the Fifth Symphony moves with the absolute certainty of a composer who knows exactly who he is, and who—from the whole teeming, unapologetic richness of the Western canon—stands with him. Like Tippett’s Fourth, the symphony opens with the sound of human breath; and the first climax resembles a speeded-up opening of ­Wagner’s Das Rheingold, rendered primal and strange by valveless horns. Piano and harp scatter glistening droplets about the water-themed central movement, and the third movement’s fire flashes brazenly over a Holst-like cortège (MacMillan sets the same Carolingian hymn, Veni Creator Spiritus, with which Mahler opened his Eighth Symphony). Amid this divine play, MacMillan reserves the right to withdraw into radiant unaccompanied choral sonority—and few living composers make it sound more meaningful. Somehow, everything old is new again. It can be done, and MacMillan knows that, if art is to endure, it must be done.

Meanwhile, deep beneath the surface—like a tectonic plate, or a Beethoven slow movement (MacMillan would see them as manifestations of the same universal principle)—something enormous is happening. The whole symphony pulls quietly toward consonance and a vast, cumulative sense of affirmation. And after the last climax fades and the words fall silent, the orchestra suddenly darts out from beneath the chorus and cartwheels madly, gleefully about in the sunlight. It’s a moment of supreme daring, a burst of lightheartedness reminiscent of Mozart—or Haydn, who, it’s worth remembering, began each of his own symphonies with a prayer and signed them off with the words Laus Deo. In an age as secular and as literal as ours, what composer would dare to risk puncturing his whole, mighty musical structure with a final fit of the giggles? Who’s going to throw caution to the winds and simply dance before the Lord? The answer, it seems, is a quiet, 63-year-old Scotsman from a working-class family, with a hard-won gift for showing you something entirely new—and making you realize you’ve known it your entire life.

The curious thing is that, looking back, I realize that I actually have known ­MacMillan’s music for most of my adult life. By some accident (my parents have a bulletproof skepticism about “modern music”), the TV at home was tuned to the BBC on the night in 1990 when they broadcast the world premiere of MacMillan’s symphonic ­poem The Confession of Isobel Gowdie. I didn’t fully understand what I was hearing, but I knew that those keening, yearning strings were not what I expected from a “modern” composition. I made a mental note of the composer’s name, but even without my going out of my way to hear it, MacMillan’s music just kept nudging its way into my life. It wasn’t deliberate, or consistent, and I claim no special expertise. But some pieces—and not always the obvious ones—seemed to seek me out of their own accord.

Jump forward to the Holywell Music Room in Oxford, sometime in autumn 1991, and a student performance of MacMillan’s then-new chamber suite . . . as others see us . . . (1990). Specifically, a ­tiny musical portrait of T. S. Eliot—a delicate, note-­perfect pastiche of a Tudor viol consort that suddenly, gracefully, slips into a smoky blues. It’s exquisite, it’s playful, somehow it’s intensely touching. Now scroll on another seven or eight years, and I’m working as an orchestra manager in Birmingham. I switch on a rehearsal monitor and suddenly hear an ancient chant, carried like a banner by blazing brass and surrounded by every conceivable crashing, tingling, and thundering at the climax of ­MacMillan’s percussion concerto Veni, Veni, ­Emmanuel. (I was late to the party on that one. Veni, Veni, ­Emmanuel achieved well over three hundred performances worldwide in the decade after its premiere in 1992: astronomical numbers for a contemporary orchestral composition.)

And so on: There was a performance of his Fourth Symphony (2015) in Manchester, where he employed that same Renaissance-to-­modern gambit (this time alluding to the music of the Scottish Renaissance composer Robert ­Carver) and created a colossal, searching span of orchestral music. Or the online premiere (this was early 2021, and peak Covid) of his Christmas Oratorio, a work as weird, as grand, and as ravishing as the Fifth ­Symphony, but with an added layer of gloriously eclectic abundance—a sonic banquet, from a composer who understands that Christmas is a celebration on a cosmic scale. And occasionally there were brief real-­life encounters (a podcast, a Twitter exchange, a backstage chat) with MacMillan himself: a soft-­spoken, intelligent man, with a core of fierce integrity. We’ve never been formally introduced, and I’ve shied away from a couple of opportunities. What could a mere hack—and a lukewarm agnostic to boot—say to MacMillan that wouldn’t trivialize his achievement, or indeed the experience behind it?

Besides, it seemed unnecessary. The facts of ­MacMillan’s life and career are well-­documented, not least in his autobiography A Scots Song. He grew up in Cumnock, Ayrshire—a coal town with a strong socialist tradition, where his grandfather played in the miners’ brass band and sang in the local (Catholic) church choir. “When I was nine, I was given a recorder, and something just clicked,” ­MacMillan recalls. “I wanted to write something for it, too: which I did, within days.” And so on, through musical training at the universities of ­Edinburgh and Durham, and that breakthrough moment with Isobel Gowdie. There’ve been concertos, two operas, five symphonies, and a continual, ever ­deeper and richer stream of sacred choral and vocal music, much of it ­intended for local churches such as the one he knew as a child in ­Cumnock. And there’s been a ­growing tide of recognition, in the UK and ­overseas, that here was a voice of ­distinctive energy and ­power—accompanied, on MacMillan’s part, by a realization that if he wanted to speak directly to a living ­audience, doctrinaire modernism simply wasn’t up to the job.

“When I attended the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik at Darmstadt in 1980, the Scandinavian music sounded very like the South American music, which sounded very like the Korean music . . . and on and on it went, round and round,” he says. “It made me wonder whether we can also talk about ‘somewhere’ composers and ‘anywhere’ composers.” MacMillan is unambiguously a “somewhere” composer, that “somewhere” being Ayrshire, whose grassroots musical traditions—from folk bands to church choirs—continue to inform his musical voice, and where in 2014 he launched an annual festival, The Cumnock Tryst, which brings international artists to perform alongside community groups. Music, for MacMillan, has the power to make the local universal. (Such an approach is not always encouraged in a Scotland whose politics is increasingly dominated by a toxic and divisive strain of ­nationalism.)

The result? MacMillan’s music has touched the lives of music-lovers in a way matched by few British composers since Benjamin Britten. As a sort of experiment, I put a question to a group of Facebook friends and colleagues: What’s your favorite piece by James MacMillan? The response was ­immediate, and kaleidoscopic. A Scottish composer chose the choral Seven Last Words; an organist declared that “Veni, Veni, Emmanuel is awesome.” The Little Mass got a mention, and a fellow critic was spoiled for choice: “Oh gosh, so many! Choral works like Miserere and O bone Jesu, and I’m sure the newish Vidi Aquam will become a favourite when I’ve heard it more often.”

The cantata Quickening, the haunted clarinet quintet Tuireadh (a response to the explosion of the Piper Alpha oil rig, which resulted in 167 deaths—a tragedy that struck at the heart of working-class Scotland), and the huge, Passion-inspired symphonic triptych Triduum all had their fans. Most strikingly, an amateur chorister and a music teacher both agreed on O Radiant Dawn, one of the series of Strathclyde Motets that MacMillan wrote between 2005 and 2010 for use by nonprofessional church choirs. “I only didn’t pick it as a favourite because I’ve heard it too often—which is extraordinary, really,” she remarked. Clearly, MacMillan is no one-hit wonder. He’s created a body of work that speaks to the time and the community in which he lives, and without a trace of stylistic hedging. Edward Elgar (another Catholic in a predominantly Protestant Britain) used to praise music he admired by saying that “if you cut it, it would bleed.” ­MacMillan’s work is every bit as alive.

And really, it might be best to leave it there: A hearing of any one of these ­pieces would make the point about James ­MacMillan better than any words. This is music that speaks; more importantly, it conveys the impression that it means what it says. How it does so is part of the mystery of great art, though it’s safe to say that though you might well find some of MacMillan’s music abrasive or intimidating, you’ll never be patronized. When he bases a piano concerto (The Berserking) on the raw tribal energy of a football crowd, you can be sure he’s been on the terraces himself, yelling himself hoarse. Overtones of Scottish folk song or Catholic chant aren’t a stylistic affectation; they’re his native language, and one he’s spoken since childhood. To borrow his own words (speaking of Poulenc), “there is no comfortable, airy-fairy, pick and mix spirituality here.”

This isn’t the place to reflect on the integrity of a man who was honest enough to admit that he’d outgrown the standard-issue leftism of many of his peers. (MacMillan was a teenage communist: “decades later, I still wake up in a sweaty lather of guilt and mortification that I might have given succour to one of the most evil movements in human history,” he says). Or indeed, to mention his public courage in affirming his allegiance to a broader, more generous tradition of national and cultural identity—British as well as Scottish; international as well as local—in the face of a politicized blood-and-soil Scottish nationalism. But there is one topic that’s certainly worth bearing in mind as you explore his music, and it’s there in the title of the Fifth Symphony: The Great Unknown. In our secular, modernist (and, worse, postmodernist) culture, we’re surrounded by art that echoes with the resounding hollowness left by an absent God. It can come as a shock to find a composer who actually does have some answers, and who expresses them with uncompromising conviction.

“Far from being a spent force, religion has proved to be a vibrant, animating principle in modern music,” says MacMillan. He likes to mention that Stravinsky and Schoenberg were both believers, that Tristan und Isolde can be read as an allegory of the Passion, and that the original title of John Cage’s 4’33” was Silent Prayer. When I managed a concert hall, we occasionally spoke of the “Messiaen effect”: If concertgoers with a professed dislike of musical modernism could be induced to sit through a live performance of Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps, they’d emerge, more often than not, transformed—sometimes even in tears. Poulenc’s opera Dialogues des Carmélites has been observed to have a similar effect. Messiaen and Poulenc were devout Catholics. At some point, even the most cocksure atheist has to ask himself whether there might be a causal link.

MacMillan’s music seems to have the same effect on a surprisingly broad range of listeners: a capacity, time and again, to convey a meaning, a purpose, and a sense of fulfillment that remains rare in the contemporary concert hall. “To a Scottish male, like me, brought up in a macho, working class culture in Ayrshire, I hardly ever heard the word ‘beauty’ being uttered in my formative years,” he has written. “And yet, beauty is at the heart of our Christian faith.” The struggle is not always easy, or even pleasant; least of all, you sense, for MacMillan himself. But he’s not out to proselytize—simply to tell the truth as he perceives it. The best course is simply to listen to his music, and see if it speaks to you. In my experience, there’s a better than even chance that you’ll find yourself moved to awe, terror, pity, and profound contemplation. And possibly even—most wonderful of all, in an age that’s almost forgotten what it is to believe without cynicism—to laugh out loud in pure, incredulous joy.

Richard Bratby writes from Lichfield, England.

Image by Mendhak via Creative Commons. Image cropped. 

The post A “Somewhere” Composer appeared first on First Things.

Parental authority has been an issue of lively and often bitter public debate over the past two centuries, and it seems likely to play a significant role in the 2022 elections and beyond. As I write, a lead story in the Washington Post features a new nationwide organization called “Moms for Liberty,” which insists, “We do NOT CO-­PARENT with the ­GOVERNMENT,” and objects to a variety of practices of local public schools, including mandatory masking and purported indoctrination of children in Critical Race Theory.

Rita Koganzon does not address these current controversies; she discusses how John Locke and other political theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries understood parental authority in relation to wider civic goals. For Thomas Hobbes, it was essential to minimize any threat the family posed to the authority of the sovereign. The child should learn “to appreciate the curbs that the sovereign’s law places on what would otherwise have been their fathers’ complete power over them and to anticipate the day they are freed from their fathers to be subject only to a distant and largely non-interfering master.”

Hobbes sought to delegitimize the family and other independent sources of formation, thereby creating a monopoly of authority within the state. This vision became public policy during the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution, during subsequent eras of nation-building in Europe and the Americas in the nineteenth century, and under authoritarian regimes worldwide in the twentieth.

Government policies in many countries have sought to use popular schooling to inculcate loyalty to the nation, and to overcome divisions that might arise from community traditions, religious convictions, and other differences among the population. The child belongs to the state, with parents enjoying a temporary guardianship subject to cancellation at any point if they are guilty of providing an understanding of life that is in tension with the state orthodoxy.

Koganzon goes on to discuss the very different role of the family in John Locke’s essays on education, society, and government. Unlike Hobbes, Locke had a pluralistic vision of society. He sought to weaken the role of authority in civic life. And he argued that doing so required emphasizing authority within the family. “It is precisely to provide a hedge against the power of fashion, custom, and opinion,” Koganzon writes, “that Locke re-introduces a narrow and strictly pedagogical form of authority over children into the family after he has delegitimized it everywhere else.”

Locke seeks to show how “the child can be trained to judge, sort, and reject his desires in an environment that is, at least in childhood, relatively insulated from the power of fashion, so that he may grow up better equipped to resist this power when he is no longer insulated from it.” Parental authority must be exercised to liberate children from the influence of peers. Only this will allow them to function effectively as free-standing adults in a liberal society of diffuse authority.

Koganzon describes such families as “authoritarian.” Her meaning would be better served by the word “authoritative,” which has long been used to describe the mean between too much and too little parental strictness. Laurence Steinberg, in his study of how peer influence affects school achievement, Beyond the Classroom (1997), argues that “growing up in an authoritative home makes youngsters more psychologically mature, especially when it comes to their willingness to work hard and to take pleasure in doing something well.” These are the qualities that, as Koganzon shows, John Locke sought to develop through the influence and example of the father rather than subjecting youth to the influence of peers.

The other major focus of Koganzon’s study is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. She concedes that parents are allowed no role in the education of Emile—he may indeed be an orphan—or in the formation of citizens described in The Social Contract. Koganzon suggests, however, that Rousseau’s ultimate prescription for education is consistent with that of Locke. She arrives at this original conclusion by focusing on the often neglected final section of Emile. It is Emile’s destined wife Sophie who receives an education, in her family, that prepares her for life in society. This education compensates for the ­unworldliness of her husband. ­Unlike Emile, who is raised in a way meant “to avert his dependence on others (and especially on women) until the latest possible moment,” Sophie—like other girls—is “taught from the outset to seek esteem and approval, to obey authority.” Sophie thus knows what Emile does not: the role that “deception, manipulation, and domination” play in social life. Koganzon concludes that the education Rousseau sees as proper for girls can and should be given to boys as well.

This is an interesting reading of Rousseau, and certainly contrary to that which has led educational ­theorists and many of their disciples, for more than two centuries, to call upon Rousseau to justify the hegemony of educators over the moral and intellectual formation of their pupils. Whereas The Social Contract offered a vision of state monopoly over the minds and loyalties of citizens, Emile provided a contrasting vision of youth free to choose, even to invent, their own identities, values, and attachments, free of any ties to family or tradition. In recent decades, the latter prescription (often called “comprehensive liberalism”) has largely replaced the former in fashionable theorizing about education. We can now see the results of comprehensive liberalism’s ­triumph. As ­Koganzon notes, children left to govern themselves “have not, on the whole, become happier, but rather lonelier, angrier, and sadder.”

Though Rousseau’s contrasting accounts of why families should be marginalized have in effect served as founding myths for countless influential theorists, from Pestalozzi (who actually practiced his theories on orphans) to the present, they have also been singled out as harmful by critics more comfortable with Locke’s validation of the primary role of the family in forming character. It is thus a remarkable achievement on Koganzon’s part to suggest that, for the practical purpose of life in society, the education provided to Sophie is superior to that provided to Emile and is, finally, very much what Locke recommended.

“The family,” Koganzon writes, “does prepare the child for citizenship, but not by having him rehearse civic principles from a young age. Rather it does so by inoculating him against the worst tendencies of liberalism—the tendencies to be ruled by fashion, custom, and the opinions of the majority.” This essential rootedness is in urgent demand today in a society tossed about by passions that make unbridled democracy a threat to the freedom not only of individuals, but also of families and religious communities.

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As a black man, I can report that defining ourselves as racial victims serves no good purpose. It encourages a negative self-image and an unduly mistrustful account of American society. If blacks have not reached socioeconomic parity with whites, this fact is treated as proof of “systemic racism.” This ­diagnosis precludes a more nuanced assessment, which would consider marriage rates, family structures, educational aspirations, and other cultural factors. With their talk of systemic racism, black activists and white allies may imagine they are promoting justice and black uplift. In truth, they are exacerbating an identity crisis.

As a cultural group whose history is rooted in slavery, then in second-class citizenship under segregation, American blacks understandably feel racial insecurity. As the saying goes, once burned, twice shy. Nor is it surprising that black Americans sometimes feel a lack of national belonging. As a result, blacks have repeatedly attempted to reinvent or redefine black identity to elevate in-group self-esteem. Again, this is understandable. But the intergenerational effort to redefine who we are, always in pursuit of pride, so emphasizes the evil of racism that too many blacks are left with little or no conception of who we are apart from our history of oppression.

The importance placed on racial identity, its basis in racial victimization, and the psychological consequences of a selfhood defined by victimization have given rise, I submit, to our identity crisis. This crisis is manifested in our politicized racial identity. Certain cultural traits, ideological preferences, and demands become obligatory; we are told that being black requires supporting a particular political party and voting as a bloc. Relentless focus on historical oppression and the cultivation of ­grievances creates a sense of entitlement, which prescribes waiting for others to remedy black problems. Our identity crisis is exacerbated by the insistence that people, groups, and institutions—or society in ­general—accord us a certain privilege, granting us dispensations as restitution for historical discrimination. Double standards are taken for granted: Because blacks suffered in the past, it is not only unfair but unreasonable to hold us to universal measures of character or the rigors of merit-based achievement. On this account, since blacks are still victimized by discrimination, anyone who judges us as equals is blaming the victim.

It is all too easy to imagine that this compassionate bigotry does blacks a favor. But lower standards not only diminish expectations and thus outcomes; they also cast suspicion on black achievement. When “everybody knows” that the bar is lower, doubt about the legitimacy of success will be widespread. It exists even among blacks, for whom self-doubt rooted in claims of oppression is compounded by the double-speak of affirmative action.

Self-doubt can harden into self-contempt, reinforced by a race essentialism that justifies societal interventions on our behalf—doing for us what our “patrons” think we can’t do for ourselves. This paternalism encourages and reinforces black disempowerment and black disability. Manufactured merit and glib talk of “equity” are enemies of black development. They create perverse incentives for blacks to trade on our presumed racial weakness rather than on our native abilities. It’s no wonder an identity crisis exists. What affirmative stance can a black man or woman take in twenty-­first-century America?

Patriotism is the beginning of an answer to that question. In my experience, most Americans, some in difficult circumstances, take a heartwarming pride in our country. That pride gives them an identity—a firm place to stand amid the trials and tribulations of life.

Unfortunately, many blacks lack a strong sense of national identity, a sense of belonging in America and of sharing in our accomplishments as Americans. Again, the legacy of racism makes this understandable. Yet our cultural elites have for too long persuaded too many blacks to decline full participation in American society. This elite, which profits from the race grievance industry, has convinced blacks that America remains stuck in the pre–civil rights era. They tell us that we are still persecuted by white supremacists bent on terrorizing black lives.

Rejecting this narrative and affirming our American heritage will require surrendering what many blacks hold dear: our hyper-­racialized identity as historically persecuted. We enjoy the ­advantages of life in America, but we hesitate to embrace the full integration that the civil rights movement began. By straddling the fence, we preserve our resentment, self-consciousness, and hostility. This part-American, perpetually oppressed attitude constrains our development and limits our autonomy. The endless emphasis on oppression prevents civic engagement with society at large. By requiring racial solidarity and ideological conformity, it compromises our ability to determine our own fates. It compels a collective mentality at the expense of the individual liberty that is our birthright as Americans. As Shelby Steele observes, it suppresses

individuals with the mark of race just as certainly as segregation did, by relentlessly telling them that their racial identity is the most important thing about them, that it opens to them an opportunism in society that is not available to them as individuals.

Preserving our cultural memories as descendants of slaves and celebrating the resilience and courage of black Americans as objects of past racial animus are not bad things. What’s unproductive is how we have chosen to define our identity. We’ve tried to increase our racial dignity at the expense of individuality, personal development, competition and achievement, and critical thinking, among other ­factors—all of which would give rise to a real and empowering sense of pride.

Until the civil rights victories of the 1960s, blacks identified as Negroes. Though more polite than terms such as “colored” or the n-word, “­Negro” came to connote the “passivity” of the nonviolent, integrationist ­ideals of the civil rights movement. It was therefore discarded in favor of “black”—a reclamation of a word whites had disparaged. For black power advocates, black was beautiful, full of pride and confidence, assertive rather than passive. Most importantly, being black now meant rejecting integration in favor of separatism. Although few went as far as the black nationalism of the Nation of Islam, a wedge was driven between being black and ­being American.

Cultural pride led blacks to identify as Afro-American. Eventually, this term, too, was dropped in favor of African-American, the hyphenated designation of one’s membership in two different locales and two different cultures. This evolved into African American (no hyphen)—a seemingly dignified proper identity, rather than a modified one. This term is now being splintered into the acronym ADOS: African descendent of slaves, denoting a nobility arising from oppression that is increasingly valued in today’s woke environment, where everyone competes to be the most put-upon. This splintering also branches out to the catchall term “people of color,” a throwback to “colored people,” the unpleasant appellation given to blacks during segregation. We’ve come full circle.

To solve our identity crisis, blacks must reject racial self-definition and define ourselves by our national identity. Rather than being black Americans, African Americans, “people of color,” or some other exaggerated construction of our racial identity, as blacks, we should see ourselves as American. Our national identity can transcend the reductionism of our race-based identity.

My parents were born and raised under segregation, so I know that America has not always been kind to us. I, too, have experienced discrimination. But I interpret those experiences as a part of America—a wicked part—that is dying. I find it more reasonable to think about the many good things the country has done, and attempted to do, to atone for its injustices. Otherwise we cannot celebrate the resiliency that has enabled the religious, cultural, economic, and political success of blacks as Americans. It’s time to say, we have overcome.

We must reject the separatist attitudes that nourish estrangement; we must embrace our national identity. We have a responsibility to our country, to which we have already contributed a great deal. Let us live not as exiles but as citizens. Martin Luther King Jr. said in his last speech that he had “been to the mountaintop,” that he had “seen the Promised Land,” and that “we, as a people, [would] get to the promised land.” King had faith in America and her potential. For some blacks, affirming our national identity before our racial identity will be an act of faith. But as one pastor put it, “Faith isn’t just about learning how to get to the promised land. Faith is learning how to live in the promised land.”

America is not perfect, but she is good. Despite our country’s contradictions, blacks who live in America enjoy a higher quality of life than do blacks in any other place in the world. We must dispense with recounting the sins of the past; people are tired of hearing it. No amount of anger, shame, or emotional manipulation can change history. Most white people will never feel shame or remorse commensurate with the evils of the past—and rightly so, for they were not the ones who enslaved and discriminated. Since white Americans do not embrace their racial identity, they do not see why they should draw a direct line from the deeds of white people in Mississippi in 1860 or 1960 to their own lives. What happened, happened. Black affirmation of national identity shows that the tribulations of the past don’t define who we are, nor do they determine our future.

The embrace of our national identity works against the coercive racialism and divisiveness of Black Lives Matter and the deceptions of the 1619 Project. It frustrates the fractionalized limitations of identity politics. It diminishes the feelings of victimization, anger, and manipulation that fuel calls for reparations.

Pride in who we are as Americans can produce a life less consumed with racial paranoia, anger, bitterness, and self-doubt. By affirming our national identity above our racial identity, blacks will send a clear message that we see and believe ourselves to be equally American. As equals, blacks will demand to be treated and judged by the standards that apply to all Americans. We will establish our equality on the basis of our self-^­determination—and achievement—rather than on the fabricated parity granted us by the benevolent chauvinism of our purported patrons. Courage, ­determination, and national pride should be the foundations upon which we establish who we are: ­Americans.

Derryck Green has completed graduate work at Fuller Seminary and Azusa Pacific University.

The post Black Nationalism appeared first on First Things.

The Spiritual Canticle of San Juan de la Cruz—Saint John of the Cross—is treasure drawn from the darkness of a Toledo cell. Its popularity, from the sixteenth century to the present, testifies to the enduring appeal of its graceful, erotic mysticism. In a new translation of this and San Juan’s other ­poems, poets María Baranda and Paul Hoover have prioritized fidelity to the original language, with Spanish on the facing page. The physical book has a spacious black and red design, and the result is beautiful to eye, hand, and heart.

This translation fares well by comparison to previous efforts. Despite making no attempt to reproduce San Juan’s rhyme scheme, it falls pleasantly on the ear while taking fewer liberties than most. To take the third stanza of the Spiritual Canticle as an example, John ­Frederick Nims gives us,

I’ll wander high and low
after the one I worship—til he’s found
not stop where daisies grow
nor shrink for beasts around;
bow to no bully and obey no bound.

Rhina ­Espaillat, whose lyrical translation of the Spiritual Canticle appeared in First Things in 2003, renders it thus:

To seek him, I shall scour
these trackless woods to where the
rivers flow—
not stop to pick a flower,
not run from beasts—but go
past every fort and border that I know.

Baranda and Hoover convey San Juan’s meaning more plainly:

Searching for my loves,
I will go among those mountains
and riverbanks,
nor will I pick the flowers,
nor fear the wild beasts,
and I will pass beyond the forts and frontiers.

They preserve both the alliteration of the Spanish flores / fieras / fuertes y fronteras and the idiomatic plural of the first line, Buscando mis amores.

They take the same conservative approach with San Juan’s other ­poems, which have received less critical appreciation. For instance, Baranda and Hoover opt to translate the theologically loaded term Verbo as “Verb” rather than the more typical “Word.” As poetry, these generally make for less compelling reading in either language than the Spiritual Canticle, but San Juan’s daring metaphors have not lost their freshness. Throughout, the translators have shown that San Juan can be well served by a humble and purposeful simplicity that mirrors the poet’s own profound spirituality.

—Rex Bradshaw

The post Briefly Noted — 8/22 appeared first on First Things.

These two trees have offered protection from the blazing sun of modernity to an academic ­coalition of Straussians and devout Roman Catholics, ­quietly at odds with each other over the God Question—not only because Jerusalem and Rome are in communion with the Holy One through different testaments, but because not a few Straussians, avowedly or secretly, are atheists, whereas devout Roman Catholics cannot be. The blazing sun of modernity, they both aver, has given us Luther, German idealism, Marx, Nietzsche, historicism, relativism, and progressivism. From these burning rays they together seek shelter, despite their uneasy alliance. The fruit they gather to nourish themselves is the fruit called human nature.

Yet here we are, buffeted by the winds of identity politics, which rip away fig leaves here but not there, which indict all members of certain groups but no members of other groups, by virtue of the stain of their descent. The indictment would be Christian if the stain arose by virtue of common descent from Adam; but this is identity politics, which divides people into groups, ranked in an apartheid scheme from which no Nelson Mandela can liberate us. This arrangement daily prompts many of our fellow citizens to seek relief from the social death to which their undischargeable guilt condemns them. Who among them finds nourishment from the fruit of human nature? What they think about, all they care about, is washing away or covering over their indelible stain. They do not place “Black Lives Matter” signs on their front lawns to affirm human nature; they do it so that, through imputation, they may count themselves among the pure and innocent, so that social death will pass them over—and often, so that they can continue to do nothing while wearing the robes of righteousness.

The recovery of “human nature” shielded conservatives against historicism, against relativism. With due respect to Allan Bloom, who in The Closing of the American Mind (1987) argued that relativism was the modern menace, our problem today is not relativism but identity politics, which seeks to transform all human relations, and all our actions, into a righteous crusade to purge the world of stain. The German Problem, our Europhilic political theorists and theologians claim, gave us relativism. We are not in Europe. We are in America—the exception, the new beginning. To what domains does American exceptionalism pertain? Politics alone? Social conditions? Religion? If the latter, was Tocqueville—the first to propose the American exceptionalism thesis in Democracy in America (1835)—right to associate the Puritans with that new beginning? If so, might, say, the First Great Awakening illuminate the contemporary identity politics crisis, more than do the writings of Strauss, MacIntyre, and Bloom, which focus on the crisis of modernity in Europe?

Today, a Puritanical yearning to work out the economy of innocence and transgression—what spiritual debt do transgressors owe, and to whom?—haunts the conscience of America. No nation escapes its origins. We are living through another Great American Awakening, this time without God, and without forgiveness. Identity politics is the unholy ghost of Puritanism, whose object of cathartic rage is the white heterosexual man, of whom the Puritan preachers of old are ­irredeemable instances.

From a God’s-eye view, pretending that racial and sexual distinctions matter fundamentally—that is to say, with respect to who is to be ­glorified—betrays a gross misunderstanding: In the barbaric spiritual economy constructed by identity politics, the line between things pure and impure is horizontal, between man and man, rather than vertical, between God and man (see Luke 22:24). We will someday again need a God’s-eye view to clarify who we are and who our neighbor is. In the interim, we must contend with a misunderstanding, on the basis of which identity politics claims that some groups are pure and others are not.

This spiritual eugenics—let us call it what it is—bears no resemblance to the historical relativism that the conservative movement of yesteryear taught us to fear. Relativism was a pretext for destroying the distinctions, the discriminations, necessary for man to live in truth. Conservatives rightly fought it. Identity politics seeks to destroy distinctions; but it does so with a view to building a New Israel based on group hierarchy, without reference to the God of Abraham. The remnant-elect and the reprobate: The social and political order must now reflect that distinction. This is not relativism, it is a Puritan distinction ripped from its Puritan context.

After more than half a century, what fruit has the “fusionism” of the political arm of the conservative movement yielded? The uneasy but workable truce among its coalition partners—economic liberals, cultural conservatives, and foreign-policy hawks—elected Ronald Reagan and rejuvenated America after the Carter malaise of the late 1970s. But in its dotage, the fusionist coalition elected George W. Bush, who presided over unwinnable land wars in the deserts and high mountains of the Middle East and Central Asia, and free-market policies that hollowed out America’s middle class. Americans found their hope for rejuvenation in Barack Obama, whose administration gave us the rudiments of the identity politics from which we now suffer as a nation. Though never fully articulated, it fumbled toward the following general formulation, now finally explicit: “What matters is not the economic debt that can be assessed in a ledger book, about which libertarians speak, nor the reverential debt we owe our forefathers, about which cultural conservatives speak. What matters is another economy altogether, the economy of innocence and transgression—the economy of spiritual debt, so to speak, which no economic balance sheet can measure, and to which cultural conservatives who see only the goodness of tradition are blind.”

So agonized was the American soul that it sought healing—atonement, really—of the sort that economic liberals and cultural conservatives could not provide, which explains their impotence, and the impotence of their candidates, McCain and ­Romney, during the Obama years. Republican Party chatter about lower taxes, free markets, the virtues of the Founding, the right to bear arms, and our venerable traditions fell on deaf ears. Obama, the half-black, half-white president, promised more than Republicans could offer. He was the one sufficient mediator between the two races, the great healer who would not only reconcile the ­races as neither economic liberalism nor cultural conservatism could, but who, by virtue of his ­anointed status, would heal creation itself and “save the planet.” Fusionism had battled communism abroad and progressivism at home—mere mortal enemies. Obama and the nascent identity politics movement enlisted citizens in a spiritual quest.

Conservatives have yet to understand fully that identity politics is a spiritual quest, which draws its tropes—the scapegoat, the voiceless innocent victim, irredeemable stain—from Christianity, while at the same time seeking to do away with ­Christianity as it has historically been understood. What need is there for the divine scapegoat, ­Jesus Christ, who takes away the sins of the world, when a mortal scapegoat can serve that purpose in an America still enthralled by Christian tropes but no longer really Christian? Purge the white heterosexual male and all he has wrought—­Westphalia, capitalism, fossil fuels, the American Constitution, the heteronormative family, the homophobic Church, scientific rationalism—and the Egyptian captivity will, without the long-­wandering preparation that makes man worthy of release from his bondage, give way to the New Israel.

Fusionism was crowded out, discredited by the religious need of identity politics to purge the stain associated with the world that Pharaoh—the white heterosexual man—built, and through which the pure remnant has been enslaved. Was fusionism not the fruit the white heterosexual male had grown, which now had to wither on the branch in proportion as the brilliant flower of identity politics blossomed? Having no real understanding of what they were up against, conservatives withered.

What of Trump, who would not ­wither? In so many ways a repudiation of the identity politics that began to blossom under Obama, he was never troubled by guilt. He was troubled by losing. In rare moments of humility, Obama cited the nominally Lutheran Reinhold Niebuhr as his guide. Trump cited the nominally Calvinist Norman Vincent Peale, whose The ­Power of Positive Thinking(1952) shrugged off the question of guilt and justification that haunts much of Protestant theology, and offered a mid-twentieth-­century consumerist doctrine of sanctification, of the sort that has distinguished Calvinists from other Protestants from the very beginning. “­Winning” was proof of sanctification. Guilt was for losers. If you are overwhelmed by guilt, then you are not yet sanctified. Calvin the Reformer could have said as much to Luther the Protestant. Disgusted with never-ending identity-politics attributions of guilt, and with marionette presidential candidates yanked to the right by economic globalists and to the left by identity-politics indictments, Republicans and independents voted in 2016 for a nationalist who was without guilt or remorse.

Far from putting out the fire of identity politics, Trump’s presidency poured kerosene on it. The arc of identity politics bent toward the end of whiteness, or at least the permanent requirement that if white heterosexual men do not disappear into the netherworld of pornography, drug addiction, video-gaming, and suicide, they must wallow in guilt and commit to unending DEI training sessions. Trump was, by this measure, the wrong kind of white man, an unapologetic figure who must have been conjured up by principalities and powers—Russians abroad, racists at home. Whites who grasped their standing in the identity-politics economy—guilty until proven “anti-racist”—had to loathe Trump so that social death would pass them over. Hence the descent into rage that became the prolegomenon to every civilized cocktail party, faculty meeting, and job talk for four long years. Trump Derangement Syndrome became the baptismal rite of The Church of the New American Awakening. “Do you renounce Satan?” “Yes, I do.”

Citizens in a liberal order will approve of some presidents and disapprove of others. That is as it should be. TDS, however, is not normal politics. It is evidence of the cathartic rage that lurks beneath the surface of that fragile thing called liberal politics, which is bound to re-emerge when we lose the Christian insight that only a divine scapegoat can take away the sins of the world. No divine scapegoat, no liberal politics. In his Essays and Notes on St. Paul’s Epistles, Locke, the first liberal, wrote that Christ was the scapegoat who takes away the sins of the world. No one today believes he meant it. After Christianity does not come secularism; after Christianity comes the return of the group scapegoating characteristic of pagan man, which makes liberal politics impossible.

Writing at the time of the collapse of Rome, ­Augustine saw clearly what we no longer see: Christianity is the supernatural overlay that, by the grace of God, covers over paganism, which is natural to man if he has yet to be staggered by the divine irruption we call revelation. With the gospel good news in view, Augustine wrote in City of God that into the pagan world, “[Christ] came to cleanse the heart by faith, turn the interests of men towards heaven . . . and free them from the oppressive dominion of demonic powers.” Without such an irruption, man appeases the gods of darkness, through payment and through purgation. In our time, when the West is on the brink of falling backward into paganism, Trump and the many wrong-kinds-of-white-men who voted for him were not mere political opponents; they were objects of cathartic rage, who had to be purged. In our time, Christ does not free the world from the oppressive dominion of demonic powers; identity politics scapegoating does.

There are others who are not like Trump, who are the right kind of white man. Joe Biden is among them. When his candidacy for the Democratic Party nomination was in grave doubt, Congressman James Clyburn delivered to him the South Carolina Democratic primary, signaling that the black vote in America would henceforth back Biden, and signaling to Biden that there was a race-debt to be paid: White elites must authorize further payments to—and a swath of black elites would enrich themselves from—the race grievance industry. All but one of the other candidates dropped out within a week. No black vote, no Democratic Party presidential prospects. Promising the return of adult politics, and wearing the moral mantle of black America, which in a staggering betrayal of the spirit of the civil rights movement now requires the penury of black America’s most vulnerable, Biden ran a successful campaign from the basement of his home in Wilmington, Delaware, and is now our sitting president.

His term has not gone well. In the current era, white men in America must not deviate from identity-politics talking points, or they are subject to social death. This is doubly true if they are political brokers of identity politics. If they do not wish to perish, they must orient themselves to the politics of innocence and transgression. Progressives once distinguished themselves from the Founders by asserting that expert competence, rather than citizen competence, was necessary if The Promise of American Life, to cite Herbert Croly’s famous 1909 book title, was to be fulfilled. Many Democrats still call themselves Progressives. Republicans pay them a compliment by accepting this self-description. But these Democrats are like new wine poured into an old bottle (Matt. 9:17)—the new wine of identity politics, poured into the old bottle of Progressivism.

Drunk on this new wine, America enters the third stage of its history: the first, the Founding period, based on citizen competence; the second, the Progressive era, based on expert competence; the third, now upon us in the form of the Biden administration, based on the politics of innocence and transgression. Progressivism as a rallying cry lives on, but expert competence is waning as the real justification for Democratic Party governance. The Biden administration’s three great first-year failings—the collapse of Afghanistan, the termination of the Keystone XL pipeline project, and the national border crisis—have in common that they were the results not of expert competence but of prioritizing the politics of innocence and transgression. In Afghanistan, the American embassy posted a picture of the pride flag—that was the important thing. In terminating the Keystone XL pipeline project, the Democratic Party shut down the future flow of “dirty” fossil fuels—that was the important thing. As for the border crisis, the Democratic Party does not believe in national borders, which are a Westphalian anachronism. To these three examples may be added a fourth: the nomination of the right kind of black woman to the Supreme Court. Janice Rogers Brown did not make the short list; Biden long ago blocked her path to the Court.

The future of the Biden presidency looks grim. COVID-19 has strengthened the resolve of parents across the country who, in the course of the last two years, have witnessed the self-loathing their sons and daughters are compelled to internalize under the pretense of public education. Asians and Hispanics are increasingly disgusted by a Democratic Party that weaponizes guilt about black slavery and its aftermath to empower the one-party state it runs, which seems unfriendly or hostile to the mediating institutions that poor and middle-class Americans of all races need in order to prosper. If “systemic racism” plagues America, the problem is so overwhelming that only the state can save us. Is that not the real takeaway of the 1619 Project? Asians and Hispanics do not believe it, because their experience tells them otherwise.

The portion of black America that is not the direct recipient of the spoils of the race grievance industry has had enough, too. Sylvia Bennett-Stone of Voices of Black Mothers United does not get a hearing at the White House. The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and the big three networks ignore her. But much of black America does hear her, or knows of the agony that brings grieving mothers of children killed by street violence together throughout the country. The so-called “people of color” coalition is a grotesque delusion, held most dear by guilty white liberals who aspire to lead a multi-racial crusade to humiliate the wrong kind of white man (whose middle-class profile turns out to be identical to the aspirational profile of black America and every assimilating immigrant group).

Like the wrong kind of white man, black Americans and immigrant groups believe in home-ownership, want safe neighborhoods, perhaps imagine a John Deere to mow the back quarter-acre, take for granted the generative family that only a man and a woman together can form and sustain without the intervention of the state, desire freedom to worship in peace, and want an education about America that soberly acknowledges the gruesomeness of our history—of all history—without losing hope in our nation’s promise. Identity politics has promulgated a racial Cold War that few in America dare acknowledge. This Cold War is not between black and white, but between white and white and between black and black—between the wrong kind of white man and the right kind of white man, between Sylvia Bennett-Stone and Nikole Hannah-­Jones.

Fomenting this intra-racial Cold War has brought the Democratic Party to a precipice. Republicans in 2022 and 2024 will probably benefit from a Democratic Party in political freefall. We should not underestimate the likelihood that the Republican Party and its candidates will misread the moment. Philosophers and theologians are ­illuminated by ideas; partisans hold fast to slogans, often outdated and puerile. The issues of the moment require more wisdom, more hope, than the slogans of either political party can now provide.

An explanation is overdue about the title of this essay, “By the Sweat of Your Brow You Shall Labor.” Adam and Eve were evicted from the Garden of Eden for their transgression. Thereafter, they were cast into a hostile world of thorns, in which they labored, by the sweat of their brow, for their daily bread (Gen. 3:19-24). Sin preceded scarcity. Someday, some of their descendants are promised, the new heaven and earth will succeed scarcity (Rev. 21:1). Meanwhile, there is never-ending labor. Marxism distorts this sequence of innocence, competent labor, and reunification in one way; identity politics distorts it in another. In Marx’s account, scarcity precedes, and is the cause of, the sinfulness of man. We await the new heaven and earth—the end of oppression and alienation—that will arrive when man’s productive competence is able to overcome scarcity. Man is not born a sinner; he becomes a sinner under conditions of scarcity and will cease to be one when scarcity is no more. History is the account of this long-suffering, wholly mortal achievement. God plays no part in this theodicy.

In the identity-politics variant, history chronicles the steady accretion of debt added to the ledger of transgressor groups (the wolves) and the compound interest accrued by victim groups (the lambs), which now, at the end of history, the latter are entitled to collect. In Isaiah 11:6-9, the wolves and the lambs are reconciled; in identity politics, the lambs receive “equity.” The painstakingly slow yet undeniable development of human competence amid the struggle of history is of no consequence in identity politics. What matters is that the final reckoning has arrived.

That the wolves may have been largely responsible for the development of the fields of physics, chemistry, and biology; may have developed a theory of market commerce through which the wealth of the world has been magnified and standards of living elevated; may have developed the understanding of politics through which a modicum of justice for the many is even imaginable; may have developed a body of philosophical reflection, of artistic grandeur, of literary genius that is perhaps unrivaled; may have been the first on the world-historical stage to challenge slavery on moral grounds, and shed blood so that it might be ­undone—none of these facts matters, none attenuates the case against them.

For Marx, man’s suffering was the necessary cost of developing the competence that finally brings suffering to an end. Suffering is justified by the developing competence that attends it. Identity politics recognizes no such competence; calling the transgressors to account is the singular political task. Its final judgment is that the American constitutional experiment and our mediating institutions are implicated in the suffering of the innocents, and therefore must be destroyed. Identity politics is not an agonizing theodicy involving an intermixed legacy of suffering and the development of competence; it is a child-like moral reckoning, whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light (Matt. 11:30). To this, the Christian must say, the mystery of human suffering and injustice is deeper than man can understand; it is folly to pretend that “equity” balances the scales on which there are weights that exceed man’s ability to quantify. “Where were you,” God asks the pleading and suffering Job, “when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 38:4).

Under what conditions, really, can competence be ignored? This is not a trivial question, for identity politics is thinkable only within this lacuna. Immanuel Kant, the font of Rawlsian liberalism and of Hegel and Marx, wrote that Providence cares not a jot about man’s happiness, only that through painful struggle, mankind develop competence. That that demand could be suspended never occurred to him. At the moment we are living in a dreamy historical and social interlude, which apparently has suspended this demand.

Since 1989, America has had no geopolitical rival compelling her to put competence first. The Apollo program put two men on the moon in July 1969. From scribbles on a notepad to landing the LEM on the Sea of Tranquility and returning three American astronauts safely to Earth, the most advanced feat of engineering in human history required eight years to accomplish. The Saturn V rocket that took them to the moon was 363 feet tall, weighed 6 million pounds, and had more than a million parts. At NASA, the engineers were in charge. Sputnik will prompt that sort of thing. A half century later, the engineers are not in charge. When there is no urgent need to push the envelope of national competence, why should they be? Living in a “post-war” world will prompt that sort of thinking.

The current innocence-signaling administrators at NASA plan to spend thirty billion dollars on the Artemis program, so that a woman can be the first to step off the ladder of some twenty-first-­century LEM, and signal by her very appearance that “the future is female.” If China launched manned rockets to Mars, Europa, Titan, and Ganymede tomorrow morning, with a view to exploring, colonizing, and declaring them its sovereign territory, the Artemis program would be aborted tomorrow afternoon. The sober work ahead would require a focus on competence alone. Early risk analysis of the Apollo program gave it a five percent chance of success. The purpose of the Artemis program is not to develop life-risking technological advances that keep us one step ahead of our enemies, but to achieve equity in the aftermath of that patriarchal embarrassment, the manned Apollo program.

National competition produced the competence necessary for the success of the Apollo program. Become a unipolar power, a hegemon, and you can delude yourself that history is over, that you can squander your national treasure on Artemis ­programs—in the military, in the universities, in our corporations—so that equity is achieved and you can sleep well at night. We have lived in this historical interlude since 1989. The end of history was supposed to bring liberal triumphalism; instead it brought innocence-signaling and intersectional scorekeeping. China has already brought our post–1989 delusion to a close. We just do not know it yet.

The second interlude that has made identity politics possible is social. I call it an interlude but fear it may be a perennial threat. Kant thought that competence would be developed by competition among citizens who wanted to lead the isolated life of an Arcadian shepherd, but who at the same time needed each other to live. Man’s “asocial ­sociability,” he called it. But what if Kant got that wrong, as Tocqueville seemed to suggest a half-century later, in Democracy in America? What if, in the democratic age, man could really live the life of the Arcadian shepherd?

Aristocracy links everyone, from peasant to king, in one long chain. Democracy breaks the chain and frees each link. . . . Not only does democracy make men forget their ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is forever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.

How does this democratic solitude allow identity-­politics parishioners to ignore the ongoing need for competence? Imagine a group of college students, who live in a dormitory designated for “women and transgender persons.” The radiators must be replaced if the students are to stay warm through the winter. The work is successfully performed, and outrage erupts among the students, who feel that cisgender workmen have violated their safe space. “They should have performed this service over the summer, when we were away,” the students declare.

This need not be imagined; it happened on the Oberlin campus this past October, and it is not an isolated incident. Segregation in America today is not racial; it is imposed along new lines, which a twenty-first-century Ralph Ellison has yet to lay bare. Nineteen out of twenty dirty jobs in ­America—infrastructure building and ­maintenance—are performed by cisgender Invisible Men, who construct the dis-inclusionary social spaces within which identity-politics parishioners convince themselves that intersectional scores matter and competence does not. Safe spaces from cisgender men are built almost entirely by cisgender men. Toxic masculinity underlies every detoxified space identity-politics parishioners occupy. There never has been and never will be a pure and innocent world; parishioners on the left occupy theirs through excision, forgetfulness, and power. Just as American political hegemony created an interlude in which it could be pretended that competence no longer mattered, so social hegemony in America today allows one class of people to ignore the fact that their daily bread is provided, and the thorns in the recalcitrant world of things are daily cleared away, by another class altogether.

It is true, “man does not live by bread alone” (Matt. 4:4). Christians struggle to trust that the gifts of God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost will truly feed them. The ascendant elect class have unwavering faith in the gifts of FAANG—­Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google—which, with a few keystrokes, provide digital nourishment and release from, or control over, the recalcitrant world of things. “Do not Amazon Prime packages arrive to service my every need and whim? Do not the dark people of DoorDash, appropriately masked for my protection, present to me the meals I order on my smartphone?” Amid and in the aftermath of the Wuhan Flu, the social chasm in America and elsewhere has widened and been starkly clarified.

The FAANG elect class have inoculated themselves against filth, poison, and death, while the reprobate have served them without complaint. No, we were not “all in this together.” Reacting to the Freedom Convoy, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau laid bare the inner sentiments of the FAANG elect class: Those across the social divide, who bring them their stuff, are Nazis and racists—that is, toxins that the elect have a right and obligation to purge and ruin financially. Yet now, suddenly, the unthinkable has become thinkable: The politics of innocence and transgression, built on this New American Segregation, could collapse at any moment if those cisgender reprobates lock their brakes and stop delivering the goods.

Marcuse worried that Marxism would never take hold if capitalism kept producing the goods. The identity-politics Awakening will falter when truckers refuse to deliver them. The digital world in which the FAANG elect class thinks it lives is a supplement to the analogue world of things, not a substitute for it. The Freedom Convoy is a stark reminder of this invariant fact of human life. Supplements cannot become substitutes. The notion that they can be is the fatal conceit of the FAANG elect class, whose next grand building project is the metaverse.

I have distinguished between the politics of innocence and transgression and the politics of competence. Why invoke politics here? Why not distinguish between innocence and transgression on the one hand, and competence on the other? The answer is that each has a distinctive associated politics, which Tocqueville’s thinking in Democracy in America helps us clarify. Tocqueville anticipated two possible democratic futures, one of which culminated with equality in freedom and the other with equality in servitude. In the former, citizen competence would be developed in and through the mediating institutions of family, religion, civic associations, commerce, and municipal government, and the formidable but modest government envisioned by the Founders would flourish. That was Tocqueville’s formula—the American formula. In the latter, mediating institutions would be weak or absent, citizen competence would remain undeveloped, and the state would grow ever larger in order to compensate.

The former arrangement presupposes adult responsibility; the latter presupposes childlike dependence on the state. The Founders presumed the former; Progressives presumed the latter. Progressives thought that democracy would be vindicated through expert competence rather than through citizen competence. Tocqueville anticipated what would happen if we abandoned the difficult but necessary project of developing and maintaining citizen competence. We would get not a vibrant democracy presided over by experts, but a kinder and gentler tyranny at the end of history:

I see an innumerable multitude of men, alike and equal, constantly circling around in pursuit of the petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their souls. Each of them, withdrawn into himself, is almost unaware of the fate of the rest. Mankind, for him, consists in his children and his personal friends. . . . Over this kind of man stands an immense, protective power which is alone responsible for securing their enjoyment and watching over their fate. That power is absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentle. It would resemble paternal authority if, father-like, it tried to prepare its charges for a man’s life, but on the contrary, it only tries to keep them in perpetual childhood. It likes to see the citizens enjoy themselves, provided that they think of nothing but enjoyment. . . . Thus, it daily makes the exercise of free choice less useful and rarer, restricts the activity of free will within a narrower compass, and little by little robs each citizen of the proper use of his own faculties.

Progressives did not see this coming. They were, by and large, an optimistic, forward-looking lot, who dreamed of secular fulfillment, not gentle tyranny. What has emerged in Progressivism’s wake was not anticipated either, namely the usurpation by identity-politics parishioners of the bureaucracies, agencies, and institutions that once housed and produced expert competence. These parishioners intend to use their political power to destroy America’s mediating institutions rather than to bypass them. It is one thing to say that they are no longer necessary, as Progressives did; it is quite another to say that they must be eradicated, as identity-­politics parishioners now do.

It is not difficult to see why the one position easily leads to the other—why Progressivism is an ­unstable intermediate whose animating insight leads not to a fuller elucidation of the American promise but to the destruction of America altogether. In The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856), Tocqueville noted that hatred of the aristocratic class increased as the power of the state increased, because that class could no longer serve its original purpose of mediating between king and peasant. Substitute “mediating institutions in America” for “the aristocratic class in France,” and we can see the historical rhyme. Citizen competence in America was once produced in and through the mediation of our families, religious institutions, civic associations, commercial enterprises, and municipal governments. The intermediate stage of Progressivism in America strengthened the state and weakened those mediating institutions, no less than the consolidation of state power in France under the reign of Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715) weakened the aristocratic class. Identity-politics parishioners in America conceive of doing away with those institutions altogether, on the grounds that they are “systemically racist,” “misogynist,” “homophobic,” “transphobic,” and so on. Our identity-politics parishioners rhyme with the French Revolutionaries, who conceived of doing away with the aristocratic class altogether. The Founders believed in mediating institutions; Progressives let them go fallow; identity-politics parishioners want to extinguish what remains. The power of the state, they aver, must be engaged to complete this purging.

If the rhyme holds true, we can also expect an American Napoleon Bonaparte in the near future. Destroy mediating institutions and you do not get liberation, you get delinked citizens—think “social distancing”—without a manner of being gathered together, and a tyrant who rules over them. “A despot will lightly forgive his subjects for not loving him,” Tocqueville wrote, “provided they do not love each other.” The politics of innocence and transgression will not deliver us from evil; it will set one infantilized citizen against another and concentrate evil in the hands of one man, who promises liberation through state-enforced diversity, equity, and inclusion, yet delivers tyranny. Progressivism was not the definitive repudiation of the Founders’ belief in citizen competence; it was an unstable intermediate, predicated on the belief in expert competence, which prepared the way for the identity-politics onslaught against competence itself. Only a recovery of citizen competence will save us now.

How should we think about this thing called competence, which we recognize, even if we seldom can specify what it is? It is, importantly, not something we can create by recipe, precisely because our knowledge of it exceeds what we can say about it. The competent chef can write out his recipes and give them to others, but his competence is not captured by or contained in those recipes. They are of real use only to those who possess some measure of competence already.

There is no method we can follow to generate competence ex nihilo. Competence is learned, if at all, through long apprenticeships of the sort that mediating institutions facilitate. There, daily practice yields competences that are at once commonplace and invaluable—commonplace, because no higher education formula can generate them; invaluable, because without them, the cost to the state of maintaining incompetent citizens exceeds the wealth of King Midas. That is why Tocqueville wrote: “A central power, however enlightened and wise one imagines it to be, can never alone see to all the details of the life of a great nation. It cannot do so because such a task exceeds human strength.”

This distinction between method-knowledge and apprenticeship-knowledge is as ancient as ­Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Tocqueville sought to elucidate it in the opening chapter of the second volume of Democracy in America. There, he worried that “the American philosophical method” would undermine the competence that mediating institutions fostered. Democratic man, he thought, was always in a hurry, and would look for shortcuts that bypassed the need to develop competence. Method-knowledge was just such a shortcut.

We may follow Tocqueville’s lead, and point toward what competence is by illuminating the shortcuts that seek to bypass it, by revisiting the distinction between supplements and substitutes. This distinction was first worked out in Plato’s­ Republic. Rousseau invoked it in his First Discourse. It is implicit in several sections of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Even Marx toys with it in his 1844 Manuscripts. I invoke the distinction with a view to saying something about human health and illness in our time.

Proceeding in this way returns us to the question of human nature, about which I have raised doubts. I concede, with Strauss and MacIntyre, that in the absence of an understanding of human nature, relativism will be a temptation. When all things are possible, all things will be tried. But by what authority shall our understanding of human nature be established, so that we may be saved? The Bible? How well has that worked out? The Roman Catholic Church? Same question. Philosophy? In the long aftermath of the Enlightenment, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and Derrida have declared for us that philosophy is and always was but a pretext masking dark motivations that must now be exposed: class consciousness, the animal in man who is man, the id, ontological ­evasion, logocentrism.

To these we can now add identity politics, for which philosophy is a pretext for white transgression. I do not contest that flickers of light belie the dark times in which we live; but I do say that it is not certain they can endure, let alone rekindle a civilization on the verge of abandoning the idea of human nature altogether. A lost civilization, like a lost soul, is seldom drawn to what will heal it; it is repulsed by the medicine it most needs. ­Plato’s Republic is the first, and second-best, account of this paradox: The medicine we most need—­philosophy—is the medicine we will roundly reject. With the death of Socrates in mind, Plato wrote that nothing compares to the cruelty with which society treats its wisest men.

So too Christ: Given to heal man’s illness, he met with betrayal, abandonment, humiliation, torture, and crucifixion. We live in a time when the old ­authorities—the Bible, the Roman Catholic Church, philosophy—have no authority among those whose only authority is themselves. ­Tocqueville saw this coming: Homo sapiens is devolving into Selfie Man; and it is therefore to the manner of his falling into illness that we must attend, and to his experience of illness that we must appeal. I cannot prove it, but I suspect this is the path Selfie Man must take to recover an understanding of human nature. The Prodigal Son returns home only after he realizes the husks of corn on which he has been feasting nourish him not (Luke 15:11–32).

I propose that we have succumbed to several variants of a single illness; that in many cases they seem to be not illnesses at all, but promising stimulants; that they seem unrelated, but in fact are species within a genus; that being on the political left is a good predictor of having succumbed to them, but that being on the political right grants no immunity; that they all are shortcuts leading to dead ends; that these dead ends are expensive; that they involve turning supplements into substitutes; that singly and as a whole, they alert us to a trail we can retrace to recover our health; that in each and every case, health lies in a competence that no method-knowledge can teach; and that this competence can be developed only in the apprentice-like setting our mediating ­institutions provide.

In American Awakening, I named this illness “Substitutism,” and identified opioid addiction, plastic water bottle consumption, fast-food mania, declining birthrates amid growing sexual fixations, social media obsession, online shopping madness, the rapid push to virtual education, infantile dependence on Google Maps, digital entrancement, governmental overreach, immigration confusion, and the crisis of fiat currency as instances of this illness. I would now add that having pets is increasingly a substitute for having children.

More provocatively, because it has implications for how we have organized society since Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), the division of labor has become a substitute for apprenticeship-­knowledge rather than a supplement to it. Together, these instances seem to have little in common. With a few exceptions, they are not expressly partisan. They are all cases in which a supplement to a hard-won competence has become a substitute that promises to bypass the need for competence altogether, but cannot. If Jeopardy! questions were composed pertaining to the competences whose supplements have been turned into substitutes, they would read: What is the right use of medicine? What is home? What is preparing and having a meal? What is marriage and its pleasures? What is friendship? What is shopping? What is a classroom? What is navigation? What are building and maintenance? What are mediating institutions? What are justice and mercy, and how are they intertwined? What is wealth and its storehouse? What are children? What is stewardship?

It will be useful to focus on that competence called friendship, with a view to illuminating the broader illness from which we suffer. Friendship requires apprenticeship-knowledge, not method-knowledge, to develop and be sustained. No book can teach it—though if we already know something about friendship, through apprenticeship, books may help us understand it more deeply. Books can be a helpful supplement. To state this relationship precisely: The information books provide is informative only if we already know something that cannot be rendered as information—namely, what friendship is. Social media can supplement our existing friendships; they can be a stimulant, which help us “keep in touch” with old friends when we are not able to confirm, through a handshake, a pat on the back, or an embrace, that we are indeed friends. We feel the “presence” of our friends through this supplement; but the supplement by itself, without the preexisting competence of friendship, cannot produce the feeling of presence.

That is why we are comfortable having Skype or Zoom calls with friends and family members who are far away, but not with strangers. I use the word “presence,” because it is on the minds of ­many of our Tech Overlords these days. ­Facebook has changed its name to Meta, and Mark ­Zuckerburg and his “metamates,” formerly known as “­employees,” are betting that the future lies in the metaverse, a digital platform that, he acknowledges, can work only if it is able to deliver the experience of “presence.” Today, billions of dollars are being spent on this project, by Meta and other digital media companies, with a view to building a Tower of Babel with digital bricks (Gen. 11:3–4) that will obviate the need for apprenticeship-­knowledge altogether.

They want to recreate the presence we feel through the social media supplement to friendship, but in the form of a substitute for the hard and patient labor—on the playground, in school, after school, in our families, in our churches and synagogues, in our civic groups, and in and through our local political affiliations—that friendship takes to develop and flourish. The mediating institutions through which we form friendships need no longer trouble us, they proclaim. The age of apprenticeship-­knowledge has passed.

Friendship once had to be formed in institutional settings where noise and signal could not be disentangled, where filth and festering wounds were always near. Places; always places—places of institutional and bodily regeneration, where man and women were sexed, not gendered; places where we had to labor, by the sweat of our brow, to develop competences, or die. The metaverse will relieve us of a double burden: the burden of long labor in a place, and the burden of the transgressions that attended those labors. Digital Substitutism promises release from both.

Is this a violation of the very order of things? Yes, it is. When supplements are turned into substitutes, they make us ill. The competences that apprenticeship-knowledge develops can be supplemented, but there is no substitute for them. Early forays into the metaverse have yielded the high that was promised—but also lows, such as ­virtual rape, virtual violence, and verbal cruelty—in short, all the horrible things the world offers, but now without the competences we learn through mediating institutions, which alone can attenuate those horrors.

Just as the highs of opioid addiction go with the lows when a drug becomes a substitute rather than a supplement, so too the metaverse will bring soul-crushing lows if it becomes a substitute for competences that we can develop only through apprentice-knowledge. In the metaverse, rape, ­violence, and cruelty seem to be ruled out because we have purportedly left behind the world of filth and festering wounds where that sort of thing does happen. In truth, the only way to attenuate rape, violence, and cruelty is to develop the competences that humanize man. We will get rid of toxic masculinity not by purging masculinity through a de-sexed digital alternative, but by assuring that a healthy masculinity is around to quash pernicious versions. Healthy men keep unhealthy men in check. Those healthy men are formed through the apprenticeship-knowledge we develop in our mediating institutions.

If we were to formulate this problem in terms of evolutionary biology, we would say that ­mediating institutions humanize the primitive, reptilian impulses in man. The metaverse promises transhuman man, but in bypassing the apprenticeship-­knowledge that humanizes the reptile in us all, it will result in the high of transhumanism and the low of prehuman barbarism. That is what happens when supplements are turned into substitutes. There are no shortcuts; everywhere we look, we and our fellow-citizens are trying to find them, and discovering the terrible cost associated with the drug-like highs that attend them.

The competence called friendship forms locally, in mediating institutions. Extend the range and the “presence” of friendship with social media, and, eureka, our friendships seem to have no limits. But if we lose sight of the apprenticeship-­knowledge called friendship, a loneliness that Digital Substitutism causes and cannot cure will become a central feature of our life, as it has throughout America. Our Tech Wizards seek now to give us the ultimate drug to lift us from the stupor of loneliness that they themselves have manufactured: the metaverse, the high that never crashes. This will not end well.

I have surveyed the inhospitable terrain around us and noted our inability to see it clearly. The political left, I have suggested, is caught up in an American Awakening, without God and without forgiveness. The longstanding conservative distinction between nature and history gives those who see its dangers no way to resist it. The Christian heresy that is identity politics will not abate by our recurring to human nature alone, but rather by Christian renewal. Christ, the divine scapegoat, not a mortal one, takes away the sins of the world. Fusionism cannot help us either, because it has nothing to say about the spiritual economy of debt that now haunts the American soul. Properly modulated, however, it can begin to tame the tempest.

With respect to fusionism’s first pillar: Conservatives should defend market commerce and price discovery, but they must remember that this world of payments is not enough to hold society together. Philanthropy, and charity to those in need—in short, gifts and mercy—are necessary supplements to market commerce. Front and center in identity politics is a distorted understanding of mercy: free college, no borders, everyone gets a trophy. Mercy is properly understood as a supplement to, not a substitute for, the world of payment. Conservative defenders of market commerce can demonstrate this understanding in their actions and in their words. Defend market commerce—and in your next breath insist that philanthropy and charity are the forms of mercy that market commerce makes possible.

With respect to the second pillar: Yes, we owe a debt to our forefathers. The invocation of “tradition,” however, does not go far enough. We must talk about our mediating institutions and the competences they facilitate. And we must emphasize that it is the least among us, especially, who need them. It was through its families and churches that black America attenuated the evil of slavery and emerged from it. The Founders, in turn, could conceive of modest national government only because their fellow citizens had developed competences in those mediating institutions. Talk about the grandeur of tradition—and in your next breath, remind yourself and others that our mediating institutions are most needed by the least among us, and that by making our lives larger, they make the need for government smaller. That, among other reasons, is why they must be defended.

Identity-politics parishioners have our mediating institutions in their sights. These institutions harbor stain and corruption, they aver, and must be jettisoned or modified beyond recognition. That is one formidable threat. The other threat, which I take to be no less grievous, is that almost all of us, irrespective of our political persuasion, are sidestepping the difficult and laborious task of developing competences in the apprenticeships that our mediating institutions provide. In fleeting moments of lucidity, we recognize that we are called to labor by the sweat of our brow to achieve competence. Then we again forget, and resume the addictive search for a shortcut. The digital substitution of the metaverse for the difficult labor of friendship is a particularly virulent form of Substitutism. Make laws that curtail the FAANG Tech Overlords if you wish, and boldly proclaim a second antitrust moment in America. Your laws will be of no avail until we are no longer susceptible to the disease itself, until we resolve, perhaps after many painful trials, that though we are keen to adopt supplements to our apprenticeship-­knowledge, we will soberly refuse the addictive highs and lows that are the predictable consequence of turning supplements into substitutes. All signs indicate that we are not remotely ready to do so.

As we approach the 2022 and 2024 political seasons, amid the noise of partisanship, we would do well to remember that identity politics is a ­spiritual crisis within Christianity, and that Substitutism is a disease whose cure man, restless and always in a ­hurry, will be reluctant to adopt. Both afflictions may manifest themselves in politics, but their cure requires a medicine that politics cannot offer. Therein lies the truly difficult labor ahead.

Joshua Mitchell is professor of political theory at Georgetown University and a fellow of the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. This was delivered as the 2022 First Things Lecture in Washington, D.C.

The post By the Sweat of Our Brow appeared first on First Things.

When I became a man, I put away childish things.
—St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 13

Most Christians misunderstand the relationship of poetry to their faith. They consider it an admirable but minor aspect of religious practice—elegant verbal decoration in honor of the divine. They recognize poetry’s place in worship. Congregations need hymns, and the Psalms should be recited. A few cultured believers even advocate the spiritual benefits of reading religious verse. But most Christians have a more practical and morally urgent sense of their faith. Who has time for ­poetry when so many important things need to be ­done? Art is a luxury, perhaps even a distraction, not a necessity. Gird up thy loins like a grown-up and put away childish things, including the charming frippery of verse. Such attitudes misconstrue both poetry and worship. Christianity may be ­many things, but it is not prosaic.

Poetry is not merely important to Christianity. It is an essential, inextricable, and necessary aspect of religious faith and practice. The fact that most Christians would consider that assertion absurd does not invalidate it. Their disagreement only demonstrates how remote the contemporary Church has become from its own origins. It also suggests that sacred poetry is so interwoven into the fabric of Scripture and worship as to become invisible. At the risk of offending most believers, it is necessary to state a simple but ­unacknowledged truth: It is impossible to understand the full glory of Christianity without understanding its poetry.

Why should anyone believe such a claim? Let’s start with Scripture, the universal foundation of Christianity. No believer can ignore the curious fact that one-third of the Bible is written in verse. Sacred poetry is not confined to the Psalms, the Song of Songs, and Lamentations. The prophetic books are written mostly in verse. The wisdom books—­Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes—are all poems, each in a different genre. There are also poetic passages in the five books of Moses and the later histories. Prose passages suddenly break into lyric celebrations or lamentations to mark important events.

When David, triumphant in battle, learns that Saul and Jonathan have perished, he mourns his beloved opponents and cries out, “The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: How are the mighty fallen!” His lament unfolds into one of the great elegies in the Western canon. The Old Testament is full of such lyric moments, often spoken by women who use poetry to voice their deepest feelings. When the widowed Ruth begs to stay with her mother-in-law Naomi, she expresses herself in words that transform the emotional nature of the narrative. Until now the two women have just been figures in an old story; suddenly they come alive as loving and suffering human beings:

For whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge;
Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God:
Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be ­buried:
The Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.

These ancient Hebrew and Aramaic poems remain vividly present in English—and not only for Christians—because the King James Bible had the good fortune to be translated in the age of Shakespeare. Commissioned by James I for the Church of England, the so-called “Authorized Version” was published in 1611. The translators took special care to convey the poetic power of the verse passages. The English Renaissance was not an age of prose. No book has had a more profound effect on English-language poetry, and it still shapes the Christian liturgy, even for Catholics, though they tried to deny it.

There are no books of verse in the New Testament, but poetry is woven into the fabric of both the Gospels and the Epistles. What are the Beatitudes but a poem carefully shaped in the tradition of prophetic verse? The Book of Apocalypse (or Revelation in the Protestant Bible) is a prose poem, full of sound and symbol. Some scholars believe that the original Aramaic version of the Lord’s Prayer was in verse. In Philippians (2:5–11), when Paul presents Christ as the model for humility and obedience, the Apostle quotes a Greek poem about the Incarnation and Crucifixion.

Given the low esteem in which most Christians hold poetry, we might wonder why there is so much of it in sacred Scripture. Its ubiquity must confuse no-nonsense believers studying the Bible. Why not say things in plain prose? (Certainly most of the New American Bible translators think so; they render the poetic passages as flatly as prose.) After all, Scripture exists to guide the lives of the faithful. Doesn’t poetry make Holy Writ harder to understand? Should we assume that God and his prophets had poor editorial judgment? Did Jesus not know how to give a sermon? The questions may be blasphemous, but they probably express the unspoken frustration that many believers feel.

II

O taste and see that the Lord is good.

—Psalm 34

To consider the question of poetry’s relation to Christianity, let’s look at one of the most important episodes in the Gospels—the moment when Mary first shares the news of the Incarnation. Informed by Gabriel that she will be, indeed already is, the mother of the Messiah, Mary visits her cousin Elizabeth. This “Visitation” is the first time the mystery of the Incarnation is shared with the world. Mary does not report the news in factual terms. She speaks the words of a poem. Her lyric utterance has come to be called the “Magnificat.” In the Book of Common Prayer (1662) it begins:

My soul doth magnify the Lord.
And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
For he hath regarded the lowliness of his ­
handmaiden:
For behold, from henceforth: all generations shall
call me blessed.
For he that is mighty hath magnified me:
And holy is his Name.
And his mercy is on them that fear him: throughout
all generations.
He hath shewed strength with his arm:
He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of
their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat:
And hath exalted the humble and meek.
He hath filled the hungry with good things:
And the rich he hath sent empty away.

This passage needs to be considered, and not only for its stately beauty. In the Gospel of Luke, when Mary announces the news of Christ to humanity, she speaks in poetry, not prose. Why do the Virgin—and Luke—do something so preposterous when they could just speak plainly? Because they both know that ordinary language will not suffice. Prose cannot express the extent of Mary’s wonder, joy, and gratitude. Plain statement will not evoke the unique miracle of God’s becoming man. The Incarnation requires an ode, not an email.

Poetry is the most concise, expressive, and memorable way of using words. It is a special way of speaking that shapes the sound and rhythm of words. In the ancient world, most poems were sung or chanted. That musical identity remains central to the art. A poem is speech raised to the level of song; it casts a momentary spell over the listener. People hear it differently from ordinary talk. They become more alert to every level of meaning. Poetry is, to borrow a phrase from Ezra Pound, “language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.”

Mary, Luke, and the prophets spoke in poetry because they understood that some truths require the utmost power of language to carry the full weight of their meaning. It isn’t just intellectual meaning at stake but also emotional, imaginative, and experiential meaning—all of the ways in which humans understand this world and imagine the next. To stir faith in things unseen, poetry evokes a deeper response than do abstract ideas. Angels may be content to speak in prose, but incarnate beings like us require the physicality of poetry.

Sacred poetry is a human universal. Every culture has felt the need to invoke and describe the divine in the most potent language possible. Poetry itself seems to have originated in sacred ritual. Only gradually did the art expand into secular uses. Since the development of poetry as an art predates the invention of writing, the genealogy of sacred verse is lost in prehistory. It is always hard to assign an exact date or occasion to surviving ancient texts. Even the dating of the Old Testament is difficult to establish; the books were composed and compiled across a millennium.

For Christian poetry, however, it is possible to assign its emergence to a specific moment: Mary’s announcement of the Incarnation. Christian poetry begins—quite literally—at the first moment in which Christ is announced to humanity. That origin demonstrates the supreme and inextricable importance of poetry to Christian experience. In Scripture, verse is the idiom for the revelation of mystery.

For most believers, the truths of their faith have become platitudes taught in catechism or Sunday school. The mysteries of faith—those strange events such as the Incarnation, Transfiguration, and Resurrection—have lost their awe and wonder and become replaced by sensible morality and proper reverence. There is nothing wrong with morality or reverence, but pious propriety is a starvation diet for the soul. Modern versions of the Bible, which translate verse passages into prosaic language for the supposed sake of clarity, are mistranslations, since they change the effect of the text.

Christianity is not animated by rules or reverence; it is inspired by supernatural mystery. “­Certum est quia impossibile,” said the Church Father ­Tertullian about Christ’s resurrection. He believed it not because it made sense, but just the opposite: “It is certain because it is impossible.” The truths of Christianity, from the Incarnation to the Resurrection, are mysteries beyond rational explanation. The Trinity is both three and one. Christ is both human and divine. A virgin gave birth to a son. We don’t apprehend the realities of faith through rational arguments; we feel them intuitively through vision and imagination. Faith comes first, reason much later. Theology is necessarily an afterthought; it reasons from the certainties of faith, not toward them.

When Jesus preached, he told stories, spoke ­poems, and offered proverbs. The Beatitudes are a poem about the merciful Kingdom of God in contrast to the selfish world of mankind. Jesus was not much concerned with theology. He left that to posterity. He did not ask his listeners to think their way to salvation; he wanted them to taste and see the goodness of God. He told them stories in which they could see themselves. He spoke to people as creatures with both a body and soul. He addressed them in the fullness of their fallen humanity, driven by contradictory appetites, emotions, and imagination.

Jesus did not offer a creed composed of ideas. He mostly offered a vision: the Kingdom of God, a divine father who loves his children. In this new covenant, God rules not by laws but by love. Laws are ideas written in prose. (The oldest surviving examples of Near Eastern prose are inevitably ­legalistic—regulations, financial accounts, political appointments, dispositions of property.) Love is an emotion­—the traditional venue of poetry. Theologians still argue about exactly what the “Kingdom” means in conceptual terms, but the appeal of ­Jesus’s proclamation was to the primal emotions and experience of familial love, not to schoolmaster’s logic. All of the sacraments engage the body and imagination with physical symbols that represent spiritual transformation. They communicate, as poems do, to the full human intelligence—body, mind, and soul—without asking the recipients to divide themselves into anything less than their total identity.The explanation of a sacrament is not only less than the experience of it; the act of explaining, however clarifying, confers no grace.

The early Church understood the necessity of incorporating poetry into worship. The text of the Mass was interwoven with quotations from Hebrew sacred poetry, especially the Psalms. In the Middle Ages, the Church felt that major feast days deserved special celebration beyond the standard order of the Mass. The great Latin ­sequences—long poems recited or chanted only once a year—were created to help the congregation contemplate the mysteries of faith. These ­sequences are among the finest poems of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. They were never obligatory parts of the Mass, but they were so popular they became traditional. Pentecost heard Veni, Sancte Spiritus (“Come, Holy Spirit”), considered so beautiful it was called the “golden sequence.” The feast of Corpus Christi had Lauda Sion (“Praise Sion”), written by Thomas Aquinas. All Souls’ Day had the apocalyptic poem Dies Irae (“Day of Wrath”), which described the Last Judgment. The Stabat ­Mater, which depicts Mary witnessing the Crucifixion, was chanted or sung on both Good Friday and the Feast of Our ­Lady of Sorrows. These sequences and others were set to music by countless composers.

When the Second Vatican Council dropped these sequences from the Catholic missal, it demonstrated how remote the Church had become from its own traditions. The new Church wanted to ­reengage the broader world and get rid of the musty traditions of the past. Vatican II wanted to be practical, positive, and modern; its motto was aggiornamento, Italian for “bringing things up to date.” The poetic sequences, which had seemed so splendid to the old Church—rapturous artistic vehicles for the contemplation of divine mysteries—felt too pious, formal, and elaborate for modern worship.

The Vatican II vision, the notion that the future could be created by stripping away the past, is still prevalent in many Christian churches. It resembled the modern architectural theories of the German Bauhaus school, which stripped buildings of all decoration, reducing them to streamlined squares and rectangles made of glass, stone, and steel. “Form follows function,” the Bauhaus architects proclaimed. Their geometric monuments line the business districts of modern cities—massive, anonymous, and inhuman. Beauty proved more difficult to calculate than occupancy and square footage, especially by architects who didn’t understand that its function was not decorative but foundational. Beauty would have integrated humans into the buildings.

Bishops and cardinals are as bad as economists at predicting the future. The aggiornamento of the Catholic Church decided that a good way to embrace the future was to end the requirements for fasting and abstinence from meat on Fridays. That gesture proved an ironic bid for popular approval as the general culture turned toward dieting and vegetarianism. In the same way, the Church was embarrassed by the dire vision of the Dies Irae. No one wants to hear about Judgment Day and the Apocalypse. Keep the message positive.

Meanwhile, contemporary popular culture became obsessed with apocalyptic visions of the future. Thousands of movies, video games, television series, graphic novels, and songs depicted the horrors waiting at the end of time. The new generation became fascinated with watching the dead rise, especially in what came to be called the Zombie Apocalypse. Medieval poets, it seems, knew more about the dark corners of the human imagination than did the trendy prelates of the 1960s. Promise of perpetual sunshine does not relieve anxieties about nightfall. Relaxing the rules is not as attractive as having the right rules. You can’t envision eternal happiness without understanding the alternative. Old rules and even old poems have their purpose.

III

This Humanist whom no beliefs constrained
Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained.

—J. V. Cunningham

What is Christian poetry? No two critics or editors seem to agree. Pick up half a dozen anthologies of Christian verse, and you will find almost entirely different definitions of what belongs in them. This confusion ­arises from the anxiety even intelligent writers have about the relationship between religion and literature. They wonder whether there is any common ground between faith and poetry.

No one doubts that sacred literature qualifies as Christian poetry. The verse found in Scripture, especially the Old Testament, forms the foundation of Christian literature. Likewise, no one questions the place of devotional verse—hymns, prayers, meditations, and other poems created to inspire spirituality and bring the reader closer to the divine. There has been a continual tradition of devotional verse since Apostolic days. In English it has attracted some of the finest poets in the language, including John Donne, George Herbert, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The problems arise when one considers poetry that is not so explicitly religious in subject and style. Literary historians sometimes make the case that any poet who wrote from a predominantly Christian culture should be included. When scholars speak about Islamic poetry, for example, they use the term in a general way to cover all verse written by Muslims, since they assume that even poems on secular subjects will reflect Islamic values and beliefs. Under this definition ­virtually all English poetry written before 1700 would qualify, since the society in which the poets lived was overwhelmingly Christian in both public and private life. Poetry was written by Christians for their fellow believers. The authors might be ­notorious sinners and their audience no better, but their world­view and spiritual values were shaped by their common faith. Even the occasional atheist, such as ­Christopher Marlowe, could dissent only within the existing categories of Christian thought; The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, designed to be shocking and blasphemous, was nonetheless a theologically orthodox play.

The problem with this sociological definition is that we are no longer living in the seventeenth century. Our society, even in the West, is no longer predominantly Christian; contemporary religious practice and opinion are diverse beyond reckoning. Without clear extrinsic criteria, we need to look at qualities intrinsic to each work or the author’s identity.

This situation leaves us with three possible criteria—all of which have been used by modern anthologists and scholars. The first is identity-based: Christian poetry is verse written by professing Christian authors. This theory holds that writers will naturally express their religious visions, overtly or implicitly, in their work. Some critics even claim that any author who was raised Christian qualifies as a Christian author, no matter what his or her current beliefs. There is much to be said for this definition; poets often express their beliefs and values indirectly, and authors are not fully conscious of all the meanings their works contain. This identity-based criterion, however, nonetheless feels extraneous or peripheral, since it focuses on the writer rather than the work. Surely an author’s creed matters, but only insofar as it is reflected in the poems themselves. Shouldn’t the poem itself matter more than its author?

A second theory focuses on the religious content of the poetry. This approach states that Christian poetry is verse that expresses Church dogma or doctrine from the point of view of a believer. The subject must be explicitly religious and its framework orthodox. The tone may vary from reverent to rebellious as long as the work itself is anchored in what Donald Davie in his New Oxford Book of Christian Verse (1981) called “the distinctive doctrines of the Christian Church.” He listed these as the Incarnation, Redemption, Judgment, the Holy Trinity, the Fall. This definition is clear, relevant, and consistent. The problem is that it feels restrictive. Is a Christian author Christian only when speaking about matters of doctrine? Are poets with unorthodox views, such as William Blake or Emily Dickinson, to be excluded?

A third definition stands in gentle opposition to the orthodox view. This theory holds that Christian poetry is verse that addresses any spiritual theme or religious subject. The author’s views need not be orthodox as long as the topics are treated with authentic engagement. Even the topics don’t need to be specifically Christian as long as they are spiritual. This criterion is the most common position today; it reflects the inclusive and tolerant tendencies of modern Christianity. This is also the approach that Davie rebuffed in his anthology—perhaps ­because it was the editorial philosophy of his predecessor, Lord David Cecil. In the first Oxford Book of Christian Verse (1940), Cecil didn’t care much about doctrine or dogma; he wanted the sublime expression of “­religious emotion.” ­Piety mattered not at all, though he didn’t object to it. Religious doubt was fine as long as it generated creative energy. Cecil desired literary quality and spiritual vigor.

Such an inclusive and nondoctrinaire approach is attractive. It doesn’t define Christian poetry ­only as devotional verse. It understands that religious poetry communicates differently than does doctrinal prose; it acknowledges that emotion and evocation are more important than assertion and argumentation. Literary quality matters more than doctrinal purity. What’s not to like? The trouble is that without some boundary this definition becomes so expansive that it can include anything vaguely spiritual.

Each of these theories provides some insight into the idea of Christian verse, but no single approach is satisfactory. An ­adequate theory needs to be responsive to both the literary and the religious nature of the tradition. Poetic merit and Christian identity are separate qualities, but a meaningful definition of Christian poetry must include both. Without literary quality, religious verse is merely didactic writing. However uplifting to the faithful, verse sermons and moral exhortation are a second-class branch of literature. As T. S. Eliot remarked in “Religion and Literature” (1935), “The last thing I would wish for would be the existence of two literatures, one for Christian consumption and the other for the pagan world.”

If we combine the best features of the various approaches, we might define Christian poetry as verse that explicitly or implicitly addresses religious subjects, written by authors who view existence from a Christian perspective. The poets may demonstrate firm faith, gnawing doubt, or even lapsed childhood practice, but they write from within a shared system of belief. Christian poetry is not a matter of subject matter or personal sanctity. It is the work of writers whose imagination is shaped by the tenets, symbols, and traditions of the faith.

A common religious identity does not make ­poets artistically constrained or homogeneous. In her historical survey, Christian Poetry (1965), ­Elizabeth Jennings observed how much artistic diversity and innovation she found in the lineage of Christian poets: “They are all very individual and also possessed of a great sense of liberty.” Reading Donne, Herbert, Milton, Blake, and Hopkins, no one would conclude that faith extinguished their individuality; faith ignited it. The same is true of modern authors. T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and the underrated Jennings do not sound alike. Each has a different sense of the art.

Whether they are devout or skeptical, Christian authors tend to see the world in characteristic ways. This is especially true of the Anglo-­Catholic traditions that have been the mainstream of English religious poetry. Christian poets see humanity struggling in a fallen world. They recognize humanity’s imperfection and the temptations of both the flesh and the spirit. Mankind is in need of grace and redemption. Evil exists, but the physical world is not evil. All creation is charged with divine glory, though God himself remains invisible. Jesus has redeemed humanity through his incarnation, death, and resurrection. Salvation is available to all who follow Christ’s way. The individual life finds meaning in its journey toward death and eternity. Finally, these poets have a double sense of reality; behind the material world, they feel another realm of existence—invisible, eternal, and divine—to which they also belong. One purpose of religious poetry is to make that hidden world tangible.

IV

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.

—W. B. Yeats

Christianity has been a powerful force in shaping English-language poetry. Although the nature of its influence has changed over time, it has played a significant role in every period, even in the secular modern age. If one compares the canon of English poetry to that of France or Germany—or even to that of Italy after the age of Dante and Petrarch—its Christian character becomes striking. Religious themes and preoccupations have greater importance and continuity. Only Spain has an equally rich and deep tradition. Christianity was not incidental to ­English poetry; the history of its Christian verse is also a history of its spiritual consciousness. Even when its writers abandoned religious ­practice, they professed secular versions of Christian ideals.

In the medieval period, nearly all poetry reflected the Catholic culture of England. There were overtly religious poems such as The Dream of the Rood, an Anglo-Saxon work from the eighth century in which the speaker recounts his dream vision of Christ’s cross. Even secular medieval poems express a Catholic worldview. Geoffrey ­Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1400), the greatest work of the English Middle Ages, presents twenty-­four poetic tales told by a group of pilgrims on their way to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury. The stories range across different genres, from ribald sketches (“The Miller’s Tale”) to devout fables (“The Parson’s Tale”), but the ­poem’s religious framework leaves no doubt about the author’s spiritual worldview. Even pagan poems, such as Beowulf, were revised by scribes to incorporate Christian themes.

English Renaissance poetry reflects the ­influence of Christian humanism from continental authors such as Petrarch and Erasmus, who sought to combine classical wisdom with modern knowledge. As British society grew more commercial, urban, and complex, the literature became more secular in its concerns without losing its underlying religious worldview. “Poetry never, when it is healthy, works in isolation,” observed ­Elizabeth Jennings. “It always reacts to what is going on around it.”

England’s literature, like its burgeoning maritime economy, grew more international. Aristocratic poets, such as Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry ­Howard, the Earl of Surrey, borrowed the sonnet from Italian and put the old Sicilian form to new uses. But even their love poems, like those of ­Petrarch and Dante, had a theological ­framework. Meanwhile religion itself became politically divisive, and sometimes violent, as ­Henry VIII broke from Rome to establish the Church of England. Catholics survived as a persecuted ­minority, but they soon had little public voice. Some Papists plotted in secret to restore the old order; most worshipped covertly and avoided Anglican services.

William Shakespeare, whose own religious affiliation remains obscure, was nevertheless the product of a recusant milieu. But, if he was a Papist, the Bard of Avon saw no advantage in advertising his dissent. Several of his contemporaries who had participated in religious controversies ended up dead or imprisoned. Shakespeare’s personal goals were not spiritual but artistic and practical; he wanted literary fame and financial success—hardly unusual objectives for an ambitious writer. When he retired from the theater in 1611 at the age of forty-seven, he was recognized as the greatest playwright in England; he was also the most successful theatrical producer in Europe.

Shakespeare kept silent on religion. Yet one finds Christian themes and symbols in his plays. Hamlet is a revenge tragedy, the most popular action genre of Elizabethan theater, but the hero’s vengeance is curbed by his religious qualms and moral values. Shakespeare’s comedies include the raucous humor of his age, but they also celebrate the transformative power of love and ­reconciliation. Most significant in this respect are his final plays, the romances: The Tempest, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and Pericles. These fabulous tales of adventure present mysterious dramas of forgiveness and redemption. Indeed, Shakespeare’s notion of romance represents a Christian transfiguration of tragedy. Potentially tragic plots end not in death and violence but in clemency, compassion, and reconciliation—often accomplished by the surprising resurrection of a character presumed dead. The full implication of these magical plays would not be realized until the modern era when Eliot, Auden, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal revived poetic drama.

Shakespeare’s sonnets are more secular in their concerns since they dramatize a complicated romantic triangle, the poet’s anxiety at approaching middle age, and his hunger for literary immortality. Nonetheless they mark a turning point in religious verse. The author’s emotional candor, his acknowledgment of contradictory impulses, his meticulous introspection, and his confession of shameful motivations represent an innovation in lyric poetry beyond anything found in Petrarch or Sidney. Like Hamlet, the sonnets display a level of psychological realism and self-analysis new to European literature. This tendency would develop in British literature, eventually culminating in what F. R. Leavis called the “Great Tradition” of the novel, in the works of Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Henry James.

The profound interiority and moral framework of the sonnets are deeply Christian, though ­Shakespeare presents himself as a compassionate and charming sinner. Nevertheless, he worries about the spiritual consequences of his actions. He depicts his sexual imbroglio in the traditional religious tableau of a soul caught between a guardian angel and tempting devil:

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still;
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colored ill.

Occasionally, the poet breaks out in terror and despair. “Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,” Shakespeare exclaims as he contemplates death and judgment. The painful candor and introspective passion of these poems had an enormous impact on the more devout generation of writers that followed him.

By the time Shakespeare died in 1616, the situation of English culture had changed. The Puritans he had satirized in his plays had grown in number and influence. Fierce divisions emerged in the new Church of England. Traditional Protestants struggled to preserve a modified version of Catholic practices, but ­Puritan reformists sought to cleanse the Anglican Church and the country itself from its Roman past. By 1642 the debate had erupted into a long civil war that eventually led to the execution of Charles I and the foundation of the short-lived ­Commonwealth ruled by Oliver Cromwell. (The Puritans also closed the theaters as dens of vice in 1642, thereby ending the greatest age of ­English drama.) The religious battles in the political sphere transformed the country’s literature. The same fervor that fueled the English Civil War ignited the imagination of its writers. To a ­considerable degree, religious identity became personal ­identity.

The seventeenth century is the greatest period of religious poetry in English. Indeed, it equals any period of Christian verse in any language. The explosive intellectual energy of the Protestant Reformation found expression in the English poetic imagination. The measure of its spiritual stature is demonstrated not only by the quality and diversity of its major poets—John Donne, George ­Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Traherne, Andrew ­Marvell, John Milton, and John Dryden (as well as English-born Anne Bradstreet); it is also evident in their passionate interest in spiritual matters. As Jennings has observed, “Without exaggeration, one can say that all the best verse of this time is religious in spirit.” The poetry is also innovative in its introspective intensity.

The new generation took the interiority of Shakespeare’s sonnets one step further. It cultivated a mystical sensibility—a spiritual ability to merge human consciousness into the divine, to push beyond the physical senses into a ­spiritual or metaphysical realm. Donne and Herbert address God in intimate terms. Donne implores, ­challenges, and quarrels with God. Herbert converses with the Deity as if he were physically present. Vaughan, the purest mystic of them all, loses himself in visions of eternity.

Samuel Johnson nicknamed these writers the “metaphysical poets.” It was not meant as a compliment. Johnson found their style complicated and pretentious, but his label was truer than he intended. These poets actually had a metaphysical sense of reality in which time and eternity, matter and spirit existed side by side, and the diligent soul could catch glimpses of the infinite. Vaughan required no elaborate rhetoric to report the vision afforded by his prayers.

I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driven by the spheres
Like a vast shadow moved . . .

Neither the mystical age of English verse nor the Commonwealth of Lord Protector Cromwell lasted very long. When the Puritan leader died in 1658, his son lost control of the government. The monarchy was restored, and for three years England, Scotland, and Ireland had a Catholic king, James II. It was an untenable political solution. James soon fled to France and was replaced by a Protestant, William III, the ruler of the Dutch Republic. Thereafter the monarchy has remained securely Protestant.

As religious and political fervor cooled, so did British poetry. The eighteenth century is best remembered for its satiric and philosophical poetry. The major figures—John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Thomas Gray—were all practicing Christians. (Swift was an ordained minister.) For the most part, however, religious concerns were secondary in their sophisticated and polished work. The ardent religious impulse of the age emerged in poets who wrote hymns. Whereas the previous century had explored the private and mystical side of religious experience, the new age celebrated the public and communal aspects of faith.

The three greatest hymnists of English literature appeared in quick succession: Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, and William Cowper. Although their ­theology was consistent with that of Herbert and Vaughan, their style was radically different. They were not concerned with articulating their private sensibilities; they sought to voice the common aspirations of Christians gathered in worship.

A hymn is no less poetic than a sonnet, but it avoids complex soliloquy. If poetry is language raised to the level of song, a hymn is a poem to be sung in chorus. Great hymns are rarer than great poems because their transparent simplicity reveals any flaw. They must be direct in both meaning and emotion and yet deliver musical and memorable language. Hymns are not meant to survive as texts alone; they live in their musical settings. Nonetheless a few make a joyful noise even on the silent page:

God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants His footsteps in the sea
And rides upon the storm.
Deep in unfathomable mines
Of never-failing skill
He treasures up His bright designs
And works His sovereign will.

Mystical poets seek to extinguish their individual consciousness by merging with the divine. Few manage this difficult ascent. Hymnists allow the members of a congregation to merge their separate souls into a united body of the gathered church. Mystical poets appear a few times a century; the miracle of hymns occurs each time the faithful gather.

It is only a few steps from William Cowper’s divine mineshaft to the celestial blacksmith shop of William Blake’s “The Tyger.” Blake is the transitional figure from the Augustan into the Romantic age. A vibrant and visionary Christian, he developed an idiosyncratic creed that bore little relation to any orthodoxy. He went so far as to write his own sacred and prophetic books. His singular genius, however, found its strongest expression in short poems of apocalyptic power such as “­London,” “Holy Thursday,” and “The Tyger.” England had not seen such a visionary poet since the Middle Ages:

When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

“The Tyger” has been repeatedly ranked as the most popular poem in English—a statistic that puts to rest the notion that readers enjoy only simple and sentimental poems. Readers are drawn to genuine mystery and wonder.

As the Romantic age progressed, many poets lost interest in religion as a subject. They were more preoccupied with the political, scientific, and philosophical concerns of the Napoleonic age. John Keats was a Platonist and Deist, Percy Bysshe ­Shelley an outspoken atheist. Lord Byron was orthodox in his beliefs, which were seldom reflected in his verse (or his behavior). William Wordsworth was a religious man who saw the poet’s role as prophetic, but his Christianity expressed itself most eloquently in pantheistic Deism. He grew more devout and conventional in middle age, to the detriment of his verse. His pious Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1822) marked the lowest point of his career. Read any page of it outdoors—the stupefied bees will stop buzzing and the birds fall senseless from the trees.

Victorian poets made a grand drama of their religious doubt, especially Alfred Tennyson and ­Matthew Arnold. Tennyson ultimately came down on the side of belief and Arnold chose doubt, but in both cases their emotional and intellectual struggles feel more credible than their conclusions. When Victorian poets write about Christianity, their characteristic tone is elegiac. The Sea of Faith is slipping away while the teary-eyed bard stands helpless on the shore.

America had been the destination of the dissenting sects, unwilling to join the Church of England. Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, Quakers, Presbyterians, and Anglicans set up their churches in a free market of religious belief. They were joined by German Lutherans, Dutch Reformed, Catholics, and Jews. This situation gave the American colonies exceptional religious diversity. There was neither an established church nor an accepted orthodoxy. The freedom was reflected in the individuality of the major poets.

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow followed the Transcendentalist Zeitgeist into Unitarianism. Longfellow (like ­Tennyson) kept a residual reverence for Christ; but for Emerson, Jesus was no more divine than any other person. “Dare to love God without a ­mediator,” he declared. Jesus still had reality for Emily Dickinson, but he was a comforter of her own making, in no way central to the pantheism and deism that animated her poetry. Other writers left Christianity entirely. Edgar Allan Poe professed an aesthetic idealism. Walt Whitman found divinity in every human being and nearly everything else in the world. The Protestant literary imagination had fragmented Christianity into the individual consciences of its believers and its doubters. In the process, Christ had mostly disappeared.

Orthodoxy returned with the theologically confident Catholic poets who emerged in the mid-nineteenth century with the Oxford Movement, led by the charismatic John Henry Newman, a theologian and poet. Newman had left the Church of England in 1845 to become a Roman Catholic. He attracted many followers among the Anglican intelligentsia. After three centuries of marginalization, the revival of English Catholic letters unfolded slowly—­initially through highly educated converts rather than the working poor who populated the new British parishes. These writers still faced social and professional discrimination, but they made faith central to their literary vision. The Victorian literary converts included Coventry Patmore, Ernest Dowson, Oscar Wilde, and preeminently Gerard Manley Hopkins, though his remarkably original poetry remained unknown until the twentieth century.

In the early twentieth century another convert appeared—G. K. Chesterton, who became the chief apologist and provocateur for the Roman literary revival. He was joined by Hilaire Belloc, an Anglo-French cradle Catholic. Minor poets with major minds, Chesterton and Belloc were smart, brash, and wickedly funny. ­Unintimidated by their intellectual foes, they swaggered when others would have taken cover. For the first time since the Elizabethan Age, there was an outspoken Catholic presence in English verse. The revival was soon felt in Ireland, still under British rule, but it took another fifty years to manifest itself in America. The U.S. Catholic population mostly consisted of poor immigrants, many of whom did not speak English as a native language. Only in the aftermath of World War II did a new generation of American Catholics, the first to receive advanced education, become an influential part of the literary world.

Although the Modernist period is usually characterized as a secular age, it is more accurately seen as a divided one. Many poets embraced a scientific or materialistic worldview. Others adopted politics as a substitute for faith. In both cases Christianity was seen as an anachronism. Nonetheless ­Christianity continued and its poetry enjoyed a surprising resurgence. For the new religious writers, so many of them converts, faith was not a passive inheritance; it was a new spiritual identity. Modern Christian poets are too numerous to list, but two major poets—T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden—serve as representative figures.

Eliot was raised as a Unitarian, Auden as an ­Anglo-Catholic; both lapsed. Then in early middle age, both poets returned to Christianity. (Though Auden’s homosexuality could have complicated his return, he refused to see it as an impediment.) Each poet articulated a nuanced, existential Anglo-Catholicism, informed by modern philosophical perspectives. Their ideas resonated in a newly revitalized religious culture guided by persuasive critics such as C. S. Lewis, Allen Tate, ­Helen Gardner, Jacques Maritain, and Kathleen Raine. Eliot and Auden no longer wrote for a coherent Christian society, as had Donne and Herbert, but they helped validate faith as a legitimate response to the modern situation, the task that had seemed impossible to so many Victorian intellectuals.

This brief and inadequate historical survey is offered to demonstrate the powerful continuity of Christian poetry in English. Our literary canon is suffused with religious consciousness, which has expressed itself in ways beyond the imagination of theology and apologetics. Milton boasted that his Paradise Lost would “justify the ways of God to men,” but his masterpiece was only one of countless poems that engaged, enlarged, and refined the spirituality of the English-­speaking world. Christianity went so deeply into the collective soul of the culture that its impact continues even in our secular age.

This poetry also continues to have cultural presence. Every poet mentioned in this account is still read, studied, and quoted—even ones you think you don’t know, such as Ernest Dowson. Meanwhile the inspirational prose of the same periods has been mostly forgotten, even by ­specialists. If that seems unfair, remember that the goddess Memory was the mother of the Muses. Poetry is language designed to be remembered. As Robert Frost observed, “it is a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget.” Christians are enriched by studying their own past, especially poetry that allows them to see and feel it from the inside.

V

I gotta use words when I talk to you.

—T. S. Eliot, Sweeney Agonistes

Christianity has survived into the twenty-first century, but it has not come through unscathed. It has kept its head and its heart—the clarity of its beliefs and its compassionate mission. The problem is that it has lost its senses, all five of them. Great is the harvest, and greater still the hunger it must feed, but its call into the world has become faint and abstract. Contemporary Christianity speaks mostly in ideas. Potent ideas, to be sure, but colorless and hackneyed in their expression. Christian principles are validated by the living example of millions dedicated to service and good works, though those works are often ignored or misrepresented by the secular world. The head and the heart are strong, but they don’t constitute a complete language or engage the fullness of human intelligence.

A major challenge of Christianity today is to recover the language of the senses and to recapture faith’s natural relationship with beauty. There is much conversation nowadays about beauty among theologians and clergy. They seem to consider it a philosophical problem to be solved by analysis and apologetics. Those are the tools they have. Their relation to beauty is passive rather than creative. Even the clearest thinking can’t close the gap between how people experience their existence—a holistic mix of sensory data, emotions, memories, ideas, and imagination—and how the Church explains it—moral and spiritual concepts organized in a rational system. The theology isn’t wrong; it’s just not right for most occasions. It offers a laser when a lamp is what’s needed.

These things matter because we are incarnate beings. We see the shape and feel the texture of things. We instinctively know that the form of a thing is part of its meaning. We are drawn to beauty, not logic. Our experience of the divine is not primarily intellectual. We feel it with our bodies. We picture it in our imaginations. We hear it as a voice inside us. We are grateful for an explanation, but we crave inspiration, communion, rapture, epiphany.

Christianity has lost its traditional connection to the arts. It no longer understands at a visceral level that beauty is the most direct and potent way to communicate the divine. Whatever commitment there is to art is mostly retrospective—to preserve what the Church inherited from the past. No one is likely to turn St. Peter’s into a shopping mall or make Chartres into time-shares. But there is almost no meaningful creative engagement with the arts and artists of today. Christians and atheists agree on at least one thing: No one now associates the Church with the arts.

The reasons for the detachment of Christianity from artistic culture are too complicated to examine here. There are huge cultural, sociological, and economic barriers. No one has a solution for renewing faith’s relationship with the arts, except perhaps to pray. There is, however, a reasonable case for restoring the presence of poetry in the Church. The project will not seem important to many. “Why would it matter?” the practical believer might ask. It matters because we use words to worship, preach, and pray. It matters because Christianity is based on the words of Scripture. Words have more than mundane meaning in a faith that celebrates the Word-made-flesh.

It takes a century and several fortunes to build a cathedral; by comparison, poetry is cheap, quick, and—unlike St. John the Divine—it’s portable. It doesn’t require blocks of marble or a construction crew. Schoolchildren can manage it (and until recently they did). It’s even eco-friendly—a renewable resource that can be recycled from speaker to listener. It leaves no carbon footprint; the only feet are metrical.

All that is necessary to revive Christian poetry is a change in attitude—a conviction that perfunctory and platitudinous language will not suffice, an awareness that the goal of liturgy, homily, and education is not to condescend but to enliven and elevate. We need to recognize the power of language and use it in ways that engage both the sense and the senses of believers.

This change in attitude will require a sort of Great Awakening. If we lose the capacity to articulate our faith, we are diminished both individually and collectively. We will have no living language commensurate with our feelings and experience, no words to describe the glory of creation. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” Let’s not describe it with bromides and clichés that barely suffice as slogans on the church marquee.

There is another reason why Christian poetry can be easily revived: It never entirely went away. Although its role in worship and education was curtailed and its music flattened by well-­meaning but tone-deaf translators, there was simply too much of it to vanish. Poetry is too intimately connected to Christian identity. The words of old hymns still stir the hearts of congregations, especially coming after mouthing the banalities of pop worship tunes. The poetry of Job still electrifies readers, even in prosaic translation. They still hear the voice in the whirlwind command, “Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.”

We may not be able to give the horse his strength and clothe his neck with thunder, give goodly wings unto the peacock or number the clouds in wisdom. Such divine endowments are beyond human skill. But we can try to employ language that participates in that glory. We can use it in liturgy, weave it into homilies, strengthen our hymnody, and teach it in our schools. We might even craft new poems and songs that can stand beside the old. Ancient truths do not require worn-out language. Let the heathen rage and say vain things in workaday prose. We need language as radiant as our miracles and mysteries. We have to use words to speak to one another, to ourselves, and to God. Why not speak our truths with joy and splendor?

The post Christianity and Poetry appeared first on First Things.

I should begin by congratulating Frank Resartus on his excellent essay “Defeating the Equity ­Regime” (May). Resartus believes “conventional right-wing jurisprudence” on “just a handful of constitutional questions” could “defeat the [­equity] regime altogether.” The idea that the Supreme Court could deal a deathblow to wokeness is ­exciting—even more so now that ­Alito’s leaked draft opinion on the ­overturning of Roe shows that conservative justices are willing to make the tough decisions. Nevertheless, I expect it will be much more difficult to excise wokeism from our institutions.

Although the courts are a necessary weapon in beheading the woke hydra, they can’t be the only one. Take, for example, the history of affirmative action rulings by the courts. Even when conservatives have notched judicial victories, bureaucrats have found ways to work around the decisions. Consider Hopwood v. Texas (1996), in which a federal court ruled that race couldn’t be used as a basis for college admissions. In reaction, Texas passed House Bill 588, which granted automatic admission to all public universities for every student who graduated in the top 10 percent of his high school class. This allowed schools to achieve their diversity preferences without any official consideration of race.

In a recent blogpost, commentator N. S. Lyons gave twenty reasons why the advance of wokeness will continue despite public resistance. The first reason: “One does not simply walk away from religious beliefs.” Wokeism is a religion. It has churches (human resource departments, the faculty lounge, etc.). They are inhabited by a clerisy. These bureaucrats’ sole professional function is to implement woke ideas in society at large. The court rulings imagined by Resartus would not result in mass layoffs among the priestly caste. The faithful would simply devote their energies to ­creatively circumventing the spirit (if not the letter) of those decisions.

Still, Resartus rightly notes that legal losses could be “a massive embarrassment” for woke ideologues. Here, he locates another critical weapon in the fight. Shame. Humiliation. Embarrassment. The woke take themselves very seriously. They pride themselves as intellectuals. They want to be feared and respected. Treating their ideas with open irreverence, mockery, and contempt will undermine their confidence. They might not relinquish their beliefs, but they will be more reticent to speak them. This would be a huge rhetorical victory on the field of public discourse. The woke should be ashamed of themselves. We need to remind them. Incessantly.

Adam Ellwanger
university of houston-­downtown
houston, texas

Frank Resartus is correct to point out that law underpins ­wokeness, and that the most relevant legal doctrines in this area rest on shaky constitutional and statutory grounds. It’s been strange in recent years to see conservatives, upset at the triumph of identity politics, assume that old methods and theories have failed, and that new doctrines are needed—like Professor Adrian Vermeule’s “common good constitutionalism.” For decades, conservative justices, namely Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas, following the plain text of the law and applying conventional legal theories, have in their dissents shown themselves ready and willing to strike down affirmative action and push back against doctrines like “disparate impact.” They have simply been outnumbered by liberals and moderates on the Court. This is in part the fault of elected officials. George H. W. Bush not only signed the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the Civil Rights Act of 1991, but appointed David Souter to the Supreme Court.

Yet the conservative movement has been learning. It was one of its finest moments when a decade and a half later activists and intellectuals on the right prevented the second Bush from giving us Harriet Miers, clearly unqualified and ideologically risky, and forced him to instead appoint Justice Alito. While Trump was in office, the Senate confirmed judges at a faster rate than during any time since the 1970s, including three that now sit on the Supreme Court. They haven’t all been perfect, but there won’t be any more Souters. It is probably far from ideal to have a system that depends so much on convincing five out of nine justices what the correct interpretation of the law is. Nonetheless, this is the system we have. Instead of navel gazing and inventing new theories of constitutional law, conservatives should pressure the Court to apply the principles that the majority of justices already hold to start delivering the fruits of decades of activism and electoral victories.

Richard Hanania
los angeles, california

Frank Resartus replies:

I thank Adam Ellwanger for his kind words. He is correct that wokeness has so pervaded American institutions that it will not vanish overnight once the laws that animate it are gone. Yet abolishing those laws, while not sufficient to defeat wokeness, is surely necessary. Take, for example, Mr. Ellwanger’s own exhortation to treat the woke with the contempt they deserve. Derision would indeed go a long way, if it were legal. But right now, as a matter of law, no employer can afford to tolerate anti-woke speech without inviting costly complaints and lawsuits. Nor can anyone who hopes to keep a job get away with vocal opposition to wokeness. The woke have advanced not because of some inscrutable process of cultural change or shift in the climate of opinion, but because the legal regime empowers them. We simply do not know what America would look like once the regime is dismantled, but until it is, there is no hope that wokeness will retreat.

I am likewise grateful to ­Richard Hanania—perhaps the most trenchant analyst of wokeness writing today—for his comments. The American right takes a strange pride in its intramural ­theoretical squabbles, as if thumbsucking essays and whither–conservatism panels were signs of intellectual vitality. Meanwhile, the right keeps losing. Hanania shows that it is no mystery why. Civil rights law—to which conservatives have until now for the most part meekly ­acquiesced—amounts to a Marxian regime demanding an equality that is contrary to nature. The only real test today of whether a particular politician or intellectual actually wants to conserve American liberty is whether he will cut the legal garrotte that has been strangling it to death.

Happiness

Ronald W. Dworkin’s recent article, “The Politics of Unhappiness” (May), helpfully identifies a major problem in clinical medicine. He observes that unhappiness with no direct cause is often tethered to something external, making it “artificial.” His argument that opioids, alcohol, and antidepressants are all a part of what he terms “stupefaction” as treatment for unhappiness is ­also very compelling. (I suspect that many who use opioids for chronic pain may be treating general unhappiness, especially since there is no clear evidence that ­opioids improve chronic pain scores).

Beyond this, I have serious concerns about the section of his piece addressing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. CBT is a process that helps to break cycles of non-­productive thinking with rational counter-­statements. There is no reason the rational counter-statements need to be as grotesque as those Dworkin portrays. His examples assume that the individual is applying CBT to justify his or her deserved failures, but one could just as easily use the opportunity to provide Scripture as the rational counter-statement. I do not know if Dworkin would consider that stupefaction; Karl Marx certainly did. I was even more shocked with his negative view of the quotation “We can’t control what arrives in our life, but we can control how we respond to what arrives in our life” as a sign of shutting down the mind. I have been strongly encouraged by Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, and I might choose that very line to summarize his work. I do not believe it can be argued that his Stoicism prevented him from rendering reasoned judgment on his life. I would even argue that what Dworkin sees as lowering standards (justifying lack of economic success by recognizing other virtues) could just as well be done properly as the ordering of affections (recognize success as being a good father and husband instead of a part of the technocratic elite).

Timothy Bass
potosi, missouri

Dworkin’s essay raises important concerns regarding the “stupefaction” of the masses, though I wonder if Dworkin’s position, tinged with a little of the extremeness he eschews, may represent the sort of pendulum swing that keeps us from finding central truths in our current woke climate.

For all his talk of “causes,” the author misses an opportunity to refer us back to the Four Causes that have grounded rational thought for thousands of years and would grant us now a more noble compass with which to navigate the current state of society. We can pursue science to develop our understanding of the body—neurotransmitters and all—(Material Cause), while also reverencing the unity of our spiritual nature (Formal Cause) embedded in a created objective order (Efficient Cause) for a purpose (Final Cause).

If we accept reduction of suffering in the service of healing and growth (as the use of anesthesia, for example, demands), we need to question not the instruments of pain reduction (which don’t always represent “stupefaction,” as in the case of anesthetization), but the intention behind their use. Even if opioids are widely abused, should we write them off as the source of the problem?

We could also go a step further into the personalist thought of St. John Paul II, who understood that the objective human faculties and the person as a subject with consciousness together form an integrated whole. Rather than simply rejecting psychopharmacology, psychotherapy, and technology, there’s more use in recognizing that certain subconscious factors, such as a history of trauma or even deeply held narratives from one’s family of origin, limit our free actus humanus, and that our dignity rests in the capacity to be freed from these limitations. St. John Paul II went so far as to call this one of the “primary tasks of morality and education”—to bring that which is locked in the darkness of our ­unconscious to the light of conscious awareness for the purpose of greater freedom and self-determination.

It is God’s providence and grace that help us in that task. Yes, by perseverance through suffering, possibly also with the aid of medication or mindfulness, informed professional accompaniment, technological advancement, or any other means he ordains. We should be more careful not to throw out the freedom with the Freudwater.

Gregory Bottaro
fairfield, connecticut

Ronald W. Dworkin replies:

Regarding Mr. Bottaro’s letter, I make a distinction in all my work between everyday unhappiness and clinical depression. Are antidepressants stupefying agents? Yes, in the sense that they keep a person’s conscience from seeing what it doesn’t want to see. But anti­depressant stupefaction is vital in clinical depression—a real disease that can be fatal. My concern is with the far greater numbers of people who take antidepressants for everyday unhappiness. In the same spirit, I make a distinction between people getting opioids for anesthesia and those self-injecting to escape their troubles. Both are forms of stupefaction, but I am no extremist (or fool); of course there is a difference between the two events. I do not simply write off all antidepressants and opioids, as Mr. Bottaro implies.

Moreover, rather than ignore the “darkness” that creates “limitations” for people (to use Mr. Bottaro’s words), I do just the opposite. When unhappy people take antidepressants, they sometimes stay in the darkness. The drugs can arrest their impulse to change their lives when their lives need changing. And the drugs are often prescribed with no exit strategy; people just stay on them. Mr. Bottaro’s excessive sympathy for psychopharmacology (and entertainment technologies) risks keeping people mired in darkness. It risks keeping unhappy people stupefied and in a rut.

Mr. Bass makes a good point about CBT that also applies to philosophy and religion. But I have never disagreed with his point. Certainly I do not view all forms of advice designed to help people think differently as stupefaction.

People would never do anything if they considered only their weaknesses. To act, people must think in terms of action, and to do so people must sometimes change how they think and ignore their weaknesses. Timidity in life is a great obstacle, and often the only obstacle. If new thinking enables strong and positive action, that is certainly not stupefaction.

Religion can incite such healthy thinking. CBT can too. Both can help people create the “inner space” in their minds needed to detach themselves from difficult life events, and to more readily endure them and persevere. But then there is advice meant to help people escape life (and reality) altogether, and not just to create a little distance from it. People perversely invert the value system or shut their minds down altogether—a self-poisoning of the mind. Sometimes CBT encourages this, on a mass scale.

Revangelicalism

Justin Lee’s “Holy Fear” (May) takes me back to my college days, when I remember Mad Max as an open-air preacher on campus at Indiana University. It’s easy to look back at the fundamentalism and “­legalism” of our youth and see their defects. It’s harder to ­appreciate their virtues, and more difficult still to appreciate how tomorrow’s generations will look back on us with the same skeptical eye we now cast at our forebears. A sanitized, “gospel centered,” moral therapeutic evangelicalism—an indicative stripped of any inconvenient imperatives, without the “Christ of High Strangeness” as Lee puts it, will itself one day be subjected to the judgment of its successors.

It strikes me that those who most complain of fundamentalism and legalism are often those who left those movements behind to join the educated classes, and who more or less have their lives “put together” by the standards of middle-class society. I grew up in a working-class, fundamentalist Pentecostal environment, in a church serving people with serious problems. The formerly incarcerated and the drug addict, for example, are people who not only understand their need for the power of the Holy Spirit to break the hold of sin in their lives, but ­also viscerally know what too many Christians only comprehend theoretically and abstractly: Sin kills. He who does not want to fall into destruction should treat it with the seriousness it deserves.

Aaron M. Renn
indianapolis, indiana

What Aaron Renn explained in his February 2022 article, “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism,” Justin Lee illustrates by personal experience in “Holy Fear.” Namely, that as we have shifted from the “Positive World” of Christianity as status enhancement to the “Negative World” of Christianity as social stigma, the seeker-sensitive approach of modern evangelicalism has failed miserably. Lee’s call for a return to a “Holy Fear,” a robust “moral order,” and greater “structure” amid a culture awash in a “sea of undifferentiated possibilities” is to be commended, as is his emphasis on fear of the Lord and the goodness of God’s moral law.

But in contrast to the moralistic therapeutic deism that the “Nones” and #Exvangelicals are rejecting in droves, Reformed Christianity strikes the right balance. In place of Luther’s Law-Gospel paradigm (over-simplistically understood as grace is good, law is bad), Reformed Christianity has historically communicated a threefold understanding of God’s moral law. As Calvin explains in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, the law convicts of sin, constrains moral evil, and instructs the Christian in holy living. This final, positive role, often referred to as the “third use of the law,” is often lacking in modern evangelical parlance and is in urgent need of recovery.

Salvation comes to the Christian, according to Calvin, as a duplex ­gratia: a double grace of justification and sanctification. The two are distinct but inseparable. So important was this point to Calvin that when he published his Institutes, he placed the section on sanctification before the section on justification. How far we have fallen from a robust understanding of the goodness of God’s law.

The answer to the modern truncated gospel of cosmic affirmation is not white-knuckled moralism or discipline for the sake of discipline. The answer is the Cross. The Cross is where love and justice meet. The Cross is where our rightly wrathful and holy God poured out the punishment due our sins on his only son. And the Cross is where our obedience to God’s law was purchased at the price of Christ’s own blood (1 Peter 1:14–19).

The answer is not dampening the thunder of Sinai, or brushing over the anguish of the cross, but sitting in silent wonder at the holy love of our holy God. And then picking up our cross and following him.

Caleb Morell
washington, d.c.

Justin Lee replies:

The “negative world” is not merely hostile. It is cold, atomized, isolating. It wields loneliness as a weapon. Naturally, I am grateful to Aaron Renn and Caleb Morell for their letters; intellectual fellowship, across whatever distances, is a balm. And I’m pleased to hear that Mad Max is still circuiting the wastes of Midwestern memory.

Renn observes that fundamentalism’s loudest critics often abandoned the movement “to join the educated classes.” This is the key to understanding the divisions within American evangelicalism. From its inception—for both good and ill—evangelicalism has been a populist movement. But the professionalization of church leadership, which has kept pace with the world’s shallow meritocracy and phony credentialism, has alienated large swaths of the Body of Christ. On this score, the admonition of Scripture is rather straightforward: “Have you not then made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?” (James 2:4). The pity is that so many evangelical leaders have little else than credentials to show for their efforts. Seminaries increasingly devalue, or even abandon, the study of biblical languages. Today’s ministers are handy with organizational flowcharts but couldn’t diagram a Greek sentence to save their souls.

Nearly three decades have passed since Mark Noll published The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, and the movement is as scandalously anti-­intellectual as it has ever been, with the important difference that its midwit elites are all-in on the philistinism. If American evangelicalism is to survive as more than a chaplaincy to partisan politics, it must rediscover its unruly democratic underpinnings and direct populist energy toward restoring its institutions, never losing sight of how integral the life of the mind is to discipleship.

After reading Morell’s brief for Reformed Christianity, I revisited Marilynne Robinson’s essays on John Calvin’s influence on the American founding. I used to dismiss Calvin for his incoherent ontology, but Robinson taught me to admire his moral, sociological, and political genius, which gave us such innovations as: “The idealization of marriage; an economics based on asceticism and a sense of vocation, that is, of sanctified calling; a kind of personality formed around self-scrutiny and concern for the state of one’s soul.” Calvin’s ­influence can be felt in much of what is best about America.

“We tend to imagine that political culture must in effect be inherited, passively received,” writes Robinson. “This assumption has as a corollary the notion that the social order will sustain itself if we do not think and theorize about it, and in any case will not benefit if we do.” Morell recommends Calvin for his insights into holy living. I would add that as evangelicalism struggles to overcome its own decadence, it has much to learn from the work of a man who led a successful experiment in civic restoration, and whose social thought is uniquely fitted to republican ­institutions.

The post Letters appeared first on First Things.

What is a human person? The question runs through all of recorded history, a puzzle for philosophers and poets, a challenge that each society has answered in its own distinctive way. Are we spirits or animals or somehow both? Are we mortal or immortal? Are we free, rational, choosing beings, responsible for our own actions? Or are we ruled by the stars, spirits, humors, genes, upbringing, instincts, passions beyond our control? Are we atoms, bouncing off each other, ­creating our own values, rivals seeking our own will, as some libertarians have believed? Or are we, as in the left-wing imagination, best defined as parts of some greater whole—our class, our race? To call the human being just an animal, or a rational animal, a speaking-­promising animal, a social-political being, or a religious being, is to take a position not just on what we are, but on what our purpose is, what makes us happy, how we should behave, how we should be organized and treated, and more.

For more than half a century, the arena where the nature of the human person has been most hotly contested is sexuality. Most recently the debate has turned to the meaning and significance of male and female. A cardinal recently told me of a meeting he attended, where the contemporary positions of the Church and society on gender were being disputed. Looking to turn down the temperature and find some common ground, he asked: “Can we all at least agree—­whatever our gender identity and sexual attractions, backgrounds and beliefs, affiliations and ­agendas—can we all at least agree that we were all born of a woman?” In any other age it would have been an uncontroversial question; for St. Paul, this common origin was definitional of our common humanity with Christ (Galatians 4:4). But my eminent friend met, first, a stunned, silent incomprehension (what was he ­getting at?), and then outrage. In many ears today, even the most irenic suggestion sounds like an assertion of bigotry.

Laudably, John S. Grabow­ski’s Unraveling Gender maintains a patient, reasoned posture. There is no sloganeering or ridicule in his account, nor any scorn toward individuals suffering from gender confusion. Instead, Grabowski’s target is an ­ideology—one he is convinced hurts such ­individuals—and his response is to point a better way to human flourishing: the beauty and rationality of the Catholic Church’s teaching on sexual difference.

The term “gender ideology,” first used by the Church in the Relatio ­Finalis of the 2015 Synod on the ­Family, refers to the sundering of personal gender identity from biological sex. Having removed the ­biological foundation for male-female difference, it grounds its understanding of gender in social convention and personal will. Gender becomes something optional, changeable, and esoteric. Responding to that synod in his exhortation Amoris Laetitia (2016), Pope Francis warned against a way of thinking that “denies the difference and reciprocity in nature of a man and a woman,” “promotes a personal identity and emotional intimacy radically separated from the biological difference between male and female,” and “envisages a society without sexual differences, thereby eliminating the anthropological basis of the family.” New technologies, laws, and educational programs are all co-opted for the purpose of promoting this ideology.

Pope Francis has addressed the matter on many other occasions. He told a 2015 meeting of Equipes Notre-Dame that a missionary commitment to promoting conjugal spirituality “is all the more important inasmuch as the image of the family—as God wills it, composed of one man and one woman in view of the good of the spouses and also of the procreation and upbringing of children—is deformed through powerful adverse projects supported by ideological trends.” In a general audience the same year he reflected: “I ask myself if the so-called gender theory is not, at the same time, an expression of frustration and resignation, which seeks to cancel out sexual difference because it no longer knows how to confront it.” Western civilization once exulted in the human person, a perspective summed up in Hamlet’s celebrated speech: “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!” Now, like Hamlet in his fit of depression, postmodernity looks at the human person as just so much dust: “man delights not me; no, nor woman neither.” 

As Grabowski notes, the Church anticipated the errors of gender ­ideology—in John Paul II’s emphasis on the complementarity of the ­sexes and the disastrous consequences of reducing masculinity and femininity to social inventions, and in Benedict XVI’s warnings about the promethean impulse to liberate ourselves from all authorities, traditions, nature, and God, making us into our own creators. Such an impulse ultimately dissolves our understanding of what it is to be human, denigrates our physical bodies, and weakens our relationships, especially within the family. It also, as Grabowski demonstrates, contradicts the Christocentric notion of personhood at the heart of the Catholic faith.

First, however, ­Grabowski outlines the origin story of gender ideology—a necessary step, since beneath any worldview there are always philosophical premises and a unique grammar. The book makes the case that, far from being sui generis to postmodern culture, gender ideology in fact resembles (or is a mutation of) the Gnosticism that challenged the early Church and lived on in medieval Catharism. The Gnostics and their successors judged the body inferior to the spirit—and ultimately, the body could be overcome by the spirit. Gender ideology, although it borrows from this dualism, does not see the discordance as something to be solved by the victory of spirit over body. Rather—here Grabowski traces the influence of existentialism, Marxism, materialism, and certain schools of feminism—the conflict is solved by individual choice. Self-expression takes first place, unrestrained by nature, tradition, morality, or logic.

Sex organs and the whole human body are just vehicles for achieving desires; where they are experienced as unsatisfactory, medical and other technologies allow for their manipulation or transformation. The now-common usage “sex assigned at birth” demonstrates precisely this type of thinking: that there is no more to being male or female than someone’s identifying a person as such, at first a doctor or guardian, but ultimately the subject himself.

The erasure of any substantive content to sexual difference has had many ill effects. Grabowski provides some worrying statistics regarding the use of “gender-affirming” medical treatments and their impacts on health and well-being. For ­post-­operative transgender people, the rate of psychiatric ­hospitalization is three times higher than for control groups; rates of mortality and criminal conviction are also significantly higher; suicide attempts nearly five times higher, and likelihood of death by suicide nineteen times higher. Particularly troubling has been the use of cross-hormone therapy in teenagers to block the onset of ­puberty and/or to bring on ­secondary sex characteristics of the opposite sex. The negative impacts of these chemical, surgical, and ­psycho-social interventions on personal identity, psychological health, and future fertility have been, in many cases, disastrous.

A more compassionate approach, Grabowski argues, is to treat gender dysphoria like other psychological disorders, and to offer counseling and therapy to its sufferers. However, in order for such an approach to be accepted as best practice, gender ideology itself must first be out-­narrated.

Grabowski shows that the Church offers a better understanding: one that reads sexual difference through the lens of biological, personal, and spiritual complementarity. The basis of this, of course, is a Christian cosmology: a belief that God, as the source of all, creates out of nothing; that the human being is a result of more than mindless chemical and biological processes; that God in fact made a creature after his own heart and mind, his “image and likeness.” Thus bodily life is part of the essence of the creature God made, including human sexuality, which, as John Paul II articulated, enables the reciprocal self-gift of the spouses in marriage and family, and enables marriage and family to be icons of both Christ and the Church and the Trinitarian God.

There could be no greater confirmation of the sheer goodness of human bodily life than that God himself, in becoming incarnate, took on that life. Grabowski notes that the doctrine of the Incarnation unites us all—whether male or female, or differentiated in any other way—as of the self-same nature as the God-made-man, so that there can be no “second-class humans,” no “second-class sex.” The human body is good and ordered toward goodness; sexual differences exist as distinct modes of a single human nature that constitutes personhood, enabling the person to give uniquely of himself in a manner patterned after Christ’s self-giving, and, God willing, even to cooperate in the creation of another bodily human person.

It is tempting to flee from today’s ideological battles—or, conversely, to add to the indignation and polarization. Grabowski wisely counsels the reader to rely only on the weapons of “truth, love and the grace of the Holy Spirit wielded through humility and self-sacrifice.” Above all, we must demonstrate that virtue that Pope Francis, following St. Thomas ­Aquinas, tells us is this most perfect manifestation of God: mercy. For mercy has become living and visible in Jesus of Nazareth—a bouncing baby boy, born of a woman. 

Anthony Fisher, O.P., is the Archbishop of Sydney, Australia.

The post Made by God appeared first on First Things.

Twenty years ­after publishing his first ­novel—years he spent establishing himself, in incisive, often fearsome essays and reviews and nonfiction books, as a leading literary–cultural critic—Pankaj Mishra had a Damascene moment of sorts. He describes it in a recent essay for the London ­Review of Books:

I didn’t have faith in the ability of long-form reporting or op-ed commentary to convey complexity and nuance, as I had long been susceptible to D.H. Lawrence’s boast that the novelist is “superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog.” Much of what I knew of history, sociology and political psychology had originally been gleaned from novels. The splintering of society into a mêlée of self-seeking individuals; economic exploitation and material inequality; the corruptions of politics and the press; the inadequacies of liberal gradualism; the thwarting of revolutionary hopes; the impotent resentments of the low-born and socially insecure: all of these enduring pathologies, the staple of academic and journalistic work, were first anatomised in the novels of Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev.

In fact, a few weeks earlier, Mishra published his second novel, Run and Hide, which is very much concerned with these same ­pathologies—in particular, the “splintering of society” and the plight of individuals who seek to close the distance between the circumstances of their birth and the promises held out by twenty-­first-century globalized life.

That distance feels especially vast in Mishra’s novel: His main characters are three young men who meet at university in the 1990s, having gained admission to the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology from positions of grinding poverty in rural and village India. At IIT, they endure academic pressures and social humiliations that make the mythic monstrosities of British boarding schools feel positively paradisal. At the far end of their studies, now credentialed and connected, they join the ranks of India’s rising classes. Aseem, a bombastic cultural impresario, and Virendra, a louche hedge fund billionaire, quickly move into the elite enclaves of global metropolitan culture, wealthy enough to travel the world for work and play. Arun, the narrator, is a diffident figure, a translator and book critic who visits his old friends now and then.

Each of them enjoys security and standing. But they do so, as Arun notes, at considerable cost:

in our attempts to remake ourselves, to become “real men” simply by pursuing our strongest impulses and desires, with no guidance from family, religion or philosophy, our self-­awareness would go unnoticed, until the day we awaken with horror at the people we had become.

All three now look with disdain on their families, notwithstanding their parents’ maniacal, desperate efforts to ensure such success for their children in the first place. At the same time, each is stuck, as the narrator notes early on, with “the peculiar panic and incoherence of self-made men; [that] they spend their lives fearing breakdown and exposure.” The major part of the story is the creation of the conditions, and revelation of the consequences, of this peculiar panic among these three self-made men.

The entire novel is written in the first person: Arun addresses his onetime lover Alia, a secular-­progressive Muslim journalist of considerable privilege herself, who has made her name by writing an explosive book exposing Virendra’s financial and sexual malfeasances. Arun also has to deal with Aseem’s entitled awfulness: Suffice it to say he’s the sort of man who brays loudly about respecting women while behaving like an ass with them.

But wait, you must be thinking, this is a new work of literary fiction set in contemporary India! Where are the whizbang wordplay and madcap capers with mangos and many-armed gods? North American expectations for contemporary Indian writing remain overdetermined by the outsized influence of Salman ­Rushdie’s fiction. At their best, Rushdie’s novels have made something new from the fusions of subcontinental and Anglosphere literary, cultural, and religious traditions. Out of this postmodern chutney, Rushdie ­reliably writes books that are big, brash, funny, playfully encyclopedic, and politically provoking, as do many of the writers he has influenced over the years. On the evidence of Run and Hide, Mishra is definitely not one of them—a statement he would, I’m fairly certain, regard as a compliment. Indeed, the writers he listed as influences in his LRB essay, quoted above, suggest as much. The modern European and Russian literary traditions —“­Stendhal, ­Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant, ­Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev”—aren’t big on laughs, whether scandalous or silly. These writers were instead relentlessly focused on the interplay of ordinary and ultimate demands on people’s lives, normally with emphases on crushing family burdens, fixed social strata, mounting temptations to spiritual anomie or fatalism, and sometimes the victory of fatalism itself.

In tone and feeling, Mishra’s new novel is in keeping with this dark Euro-Russian sense of ­human purpose and possibility, a fact that is all the more noticeable since the novel’s premise and settings—a trio of nobodies rising from the nowhere of poor Indian villages to international publishing junkets and Wall Street wolfing and A-list parties in the Hamptons—might invite aggressive and satirical treatment. ­At times, I wouldn’t have minded a little more such verve in the novel. Arun is melancholic, self-aware, and equally articulate about everything, whether the signals you give by your views of Naipaul’s fiction or (Mishra’s bite as a social critic comes in here) the ludicrousness of “organic” eating in the twenty-first century: Only the extremely poor and the comfortably wealthy do it by default. Indeed, everything Arun thinks about and describes tends to be flawed and troubling, primarily because—in Mishra’s persuasive arrangement of these elements in a contemporary Indian context—the ways out of material poverty and intergenerational degradation tend to lead to spiritual poverty and personal degradation.

It’s all nicely conceived and very convincing—at times too much so. Put differently, this is a novel that sometimes has more in common with Lionel ­Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey than with the works of Stendhal. Trilling’s 1947 novel, an account of 1930s left-wing intellectuals betraying either their ideals or each other, is beautifully written, the fruit of careful observation and deep reading, well in keeping with Trilling’s profile as a magis­terial literary critic. All of this holds for Mishra’s Run and Hide, as does another feature of Trilling’s book: a lack of felt risk-taking, whether imaginative or intellectual. From the start, you have a sense that ­Mishra’s approximate stand-in, Arun, fully controls the account he gives to Alia.

By the novel’s end, Virendra and Aseem have ended in scandal and public failure, while Arun reads and writes far from the wide loud world, in a monastery in Tibet. This is Arun’s ­comparatively valorous and ­virtuous lot, and his self-­critique is offered with such candor that it provides him with rhetorical armor. When the armor occasionally slips, the result can be illuminating, as when Virendra proudly welcomes his old university friends to his place in the Hamptons. Giving them the obligatory tour, at one point “he touched the fern-draped walls and said, ‘They are a foot and a half deep!’” His buddies say nothing, and for once, Arun doesn’t tell us what he thought about it, either. That gave me some welcome space to do so, instead.

Randy Boyagoda is a professor of English at the University of Toronto. His latest novel is Dante’s Indiana.

The post Melancholic Verses appeared first on First Things.

If you have never been to a SoulCycle class, all of this may strike you as a bit of bobo nonsense. Why rub your perspiring elbows with malodorous strangers while paying nearly a dollar a minute for the sort of workout you could get for far less simply by picking up a used Schwinn on eBay? But to think in terms of cost effectiveness or comfort is to miss the point. SoulCycle, and the many copycat high-end workout classes that have sprung alongside it—CrossFit, CorePower Yoga, and Pure Barre, to name but a few—promise much more than exercise. They invite you to attend a place of significance at set times while wearing special garments and communing with other people who share your most intimate desires. They are, in short, a lot like church.

Admittedly, this observation is neither new nor original. Our self-appointed moral and intellectual betters have been huffing about the boutique exercise industry for years. They interpret its wild popularity—some surveys have it growing by hundreds of percentage points over the last decade alone, taking business away from traditional gyms and accounting now for a full third of the workout market—as a sure sign of social decline. One millennial philosopher, for example, took to the pages of TheAtlantic to argue that ventures like ­SoulCycle only further prove that America is a soulless den of all-consuming capitalism. They proclaim overwork and exhaustion as virtues while taking in a handsome profit.

This line of denunciation received a new rush of life last month when SoulCycle’s co-­founders, Julie Rice and Elizabeth Cutler, announced the launch of a new business venture. They call it “­Peoplehood,” and it involves sitting around a circle with a moderator who facilitates conversations about fears, hopes, beliefs, and other matters. These are “workouts for the self” that your local priest or pastor or imam would be only too happy and perfectly qualified to discuss, although these old-fashioned clergymen are, bless them, more interested in virtue than in market ­valuation.

Those who find this new brand of spiritually infused workout culture distasteful are missing the point. Sure, classes are all too expensive, merchandise all too prevalent, and the messages of empowerment dispensed by instructors too facile to pass for anything approaching real wisdom. But the first law of thermodynamics applies to spiritual energy as well—it can be neither created nor destroyed. It can simply be transferred from one form to another. Those who yesterday prayed the rosary are now looking for a soul workout with spinning ­classes and a towel. As a permanent exchange, this one is lamentable. As a way station, it’s a blessing.

Consider the evidence. As any committed believer will tell you, faith isn’t just felt; it must be practiced. It’s not enough to subscribe to a few articles of belief and call them a religion. To live a life of observance is to strive to embody the principles passed on to us from on high in deed rather than just in word. That’s why Catholics tithe and fast and attend Mass, why Muslims make the hajj to Mecca, why Jews observe the Sabbath and abstain from eating pork. Take away the actions, and you’re left with atomized ideas floating in the ether, which is an enervating condition. For at least six decades now, we’ve been taught by the proponents of moral relativism that disembodying various ideas with caustic tools of “critical thinking,” a state of ­solipsistic self-indulgence, is the paramount peak of human intelligence.

How, then, might we reorient ourselves toward ideas-in-action? Doing, after all, requires using a set of muscles radically different from those toned by universities, newsrooms, and social media platforms. A life of consistent deeds requires more than just the occasional burst of inspiration or outrage, more than typing a few words into a smart phone and then hitting send, more than grandstanding in a classroom. It requires getting up, getting dressed, and getting going. It requires engaging with other human beings on a regular basis, not as pseudonymous avatars or ideologically driven abstractions, but as real people with real bodies and real flaws and real needs. It requires, in short, precisely the qualities currently cultivated and celebrated by our thriving exercise culture, however partially and imperfectly.

Where else in America these days are you told that practice makes perfect? Where are you encouraged to push against the barriers of comfort and adopt a routine of committed discipline? Where are you asked to bear down and give more of yourself? Not in schools, where children’s feelings are coddled at all costs. And not on the airwaves, where pundits either preach self-love—not duty or excellence—or market partisan soundbites that reassure us that we’re on the right side. Step into an airless workout studio and you’ll get a very different vibe. You’re expected to labor with attention and intention. And all this is meant to be done cheerfully alongside others, with words of encouragement and high fives.

Which, as far as religious training goes, isn’t a bad start. Sure, it would be infinitely preferable if we all found our ways back to the parishes that once sustained our ancestors, back to the old shuls, back to the old-time religion. But you cannot undo half a century of arid and astringent secularization overnight. Ask the denizens of New York to let Christ into their hearts or to trust in Hashem and they ignore you; tell them to put more truth on the wheel and burn a few more calories and, lo and behold, they do.

Count me encouraged. As every religion figured out in its infancy, the body is the soul’s essential partner in practice. We’re told to restrict what we eat and to consume particular foods at particular times, or to apply aromatics or prostrate ourselves or perform any other physical action. That’s because we are not merely ephemeral essences floating ever upward toward the heavens. We’ve eyes and noses, limbs and spleens, and a mess of other organs through which—and only through which—we experience the world. The ancient rabbis instructed their charges to sway as they prayed; talking to God, they said, requires every bit of you, from your head down to your toes.

SoulCycle, then, has it more right than wrong. If you’re not trained from youth in the fine art of worship, a sensory total-body experience, you’re more likely to feel something like a spiritual awakening while working out rather than while reading a book or having a conversation. And ushering you into a cavernous, candle­lit world that looks and smells and feels like something very different from your home or office is not a bad way to begin reenchanting the world. Yes, spin classes and other gourmet workouts are just exercise with adornments. But that’s not nothing. They introduce their devotees to the essential difference between the earthly and the holy, the profane and the sacred, the workaday and the exalted.

Anyone serious about faith, then, should take heart. A growing number of our fellow Americans are seeking precisely this kind of experience. On stationary bikes, yoga mats, and Pilates machines, we are being retooled with religious imaginations, taught anew to know the world by training body and mind toward purposes higher than our lower appetites and more noble than our gnawing anxieties. We may think we’re there to lose a few pounds, or to flatten our stomachs, but we commune and we work and we sweat together because we know there’s more to life than the blinking screens that demand our endless attention. Our muscles, corporeal and spiritual alike, grow stronger with every session. And we’ve only just begun.

Liel Leibovitz is editor at large for Tablet Magazine and the cohost of its popular podcast, Unorthodox.

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