But is this an effect that Mark Twain would have celebrated? The prevailing assumption is that he would, and with devilish delight. But his life and work contain meanings that stand in contrast, if not opposition, to the common perception of his irreverence. A few years before his death in 1910, Twain reflected that “humor is only a fragrance, a decoration” in what he called his “sermons.” He ­attributed his success as a humorist to one thing: “I have always preached. That is the reason that I have lasted thirty years.” Twain was a harsh critic of superstition and institutional religion’s doctrinaire tendencies, but at the core of his literary sermons (especially those he wrote late in life) is an earnest, ever-evolving, often erratic quest to discern what he called “the Deity.”

Throughout his career, religion was a favorite satirical target of Twain’s. As early as the late 1860s, as Twain’s popularity was rising, his dispatches from Europe and the Holy Land drew the ire of pious readers. The humorist’s irreverent jabs at the “imaginary holy places created by the monks” so offended one minister that he condemned Twain as “a son of the devil.”

After Twain’s death in 1910, The Mysterious ­Stranger: A Romance magnified this reputation. Published in 1916, the bleak narrative focuses on a satanic stranger who convinces the young narrator, Theodor, that God does not exist and that life is a grotesque dream. Scholars cite the text as evidence of the humorist’s late-life descent into pessimism and nihilism. It certainly seemed to reflect the mind of a man who had suffered bankruptcy and the deaths of his wife, Livy, and two of his daughters, Susy and Jean, during his final decade and a half.

As Twain’s last important work of fiction, The Mysterious Stranger came to be seen as the key to his last years, “a kind of Nunc ­Dimittis,” in the words of the scholar William Gibson. The critic Bernard ­DeVoto includes it among the “symbols of despair” he believes Twain had crafted near the end. Though it is inferior to Twain’s earlier works, DeVoto saw The Mysterious ­Stranger as having prevented the author from crossing “the indefinable line between sanity and madness.” Even so, he sees the story’s nihilistic ending as Twain’s literary detonation of the universe, by means of which he sought to absolve himself of guilt and responsibility.

Until the early 1960s, this dour view of Twain and The Mysterious Stranger was the scholarly consensus. Roger Salomon concluded in 1961 that, although in The Mysterious Stranger Twain had failed “to develop a coherent imaginative response” to life’s absurdity, at least he had succeeded “in making this absurdity vivid.” Writing a year later, the literary scholar Henry Nash Smith asserted that Twain had found a refuge from life’s futility only by identifying with Satan, a “supernatural spectator for whom mankind is but a race of vermin, hardly worth ­contempt. And this,” Smith ­concluded, “marks the end of his career as a writer, for there is nothing more to say.”

But the groundbreaking discovery in 1962 that The ­Mysterious Stranger was not the narrative Twain intended proved Smith’s report premature, if not greatly exaggerated. The literary detective work of John Tuckey found that the version published in 1916 was actually a patchwork of three different drafts Twain had worked on between 1897 and 1908, along with a bridgework paragraph he had not written. ­Tuckey also noted the alteration of characters’ names and the addition of an astrologer figure. Two of Twain’s drafts were unfinished: “Chronicle of Young Satan” (1897–1900) and “Schoolhouse Hill” (1898). The other, No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, which Twain had worked from 1902 to 1908, was a longer work in multiple chapters and with a clearly marked conclusion.

In 1969, all three drafts were published for the first time in Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts, with William Gibson’s introduction untangling some of the mystery surrounding the 1916 publication. Gibson calls this version “an editorial fraud . . . that almost certainly would have enraged” Twain. The culprits? Albert Bigelow Paine, Twain’s literary executor, and Frederick A. Duneka, an editor with Harper & Brothers. Paine and ­Duneka had taken the bleak, unfinished “Chronicle of Young Satan” and added to it the concluding chapter of the arguably more theologically upbeat No. 44, thereby changing its meaning. In “Young Satan,” a malevolent stranger appears hellbent on destroying the moral sense of young Theodor (whose name means “gift of God”). In No. 44, Twain never identifies the mysterious stranger as satanic. If anything, this otherworldly visitor yearns to befriend its young ­narrator, August.

Among the many differences between the 1916 version and Twain’s No. 44, the most crucial disparity is theological. The concluding chapter in Paine and Duneka’s text leaves Theodor adrift in nihilistic despair. In No. 44, where the concluding chapter reflects Twain’s intended vision, it represents a more transcendent ending. The Stranger provides August with a surreal and apocalyptic experience beyond humanity’s “hysterically insane” religious fictions, one that empowers him to “dream other dreams, and better!”

And yet Paine and ­Duneka’s fraud continued to shape ­perceptions of the Stranger and of Twain. ­Tuckey declared as late as 1980 that “a false ‘Stranger’ has . . . been parading before the world while the real one has remained hidden and ­unknown.” Indeed, as Kevin Malone’s opera attests, the dark shadow cast over Twain’s religious outlook by the fraud endures into this century. Shortly before ­Dawkins and the other Horsemen of the New Atheism galloped onto the scene, an article in the Hartford Courant, the newspaper of the city where Twain lived with his family for two decades, dubbed him the “comic village atheist” who took “a one-way trip to the darkside” and became “a proto-existentialist bemoaning ­being and nothingness.”

Given the delight Twain evidently took in ridiculing religion while delivering increasingly angry invectives against the biblical God, does the convoluted history of The Mysterious Stranger even matter to our understanding of his religious sensibilities?

John Tuckey believed that in light of No. 44, Twain’s late writings and what they reveal about his frame of mind warranted reappraisal. At the very least, as he concluded in the 1960s, DeVoto’s “interpretation may now be seen to need some questioning.” Despite the conventional emphasis on “the ­despair-laden portion of Twain’s later work,” Tuckey argued in notes for an unfinished study that the late Twain “had his exuberances and enthusiasm” as well. These positive impulses, Tuckey asserts in notes from the late 1970s, culminated in No. 44’s transcendent concluding chapter, in which August “learns to extinguish time” and experiences “a remarkable breakthrough . . . [into] the void that non-exists before the creative act.” Tuckey came to see the “exuberances and enthusiasm” that informed this conclusion as “much more the result of normal and pervasive trends and movements and forces than has been appreciated.” In my view, Tuckey referred here to trends and movements that were part of the nineteenth century’s liberal religious ethos.

From his youth in Hannibal, Missouri, through his later years in Connecticut, Mark Twain engaged with many of the liberal religious trends and movements that were shaping his culture. Following the Enlightenment, religious liberalism emerged in the West as a way to preserve ancient faith claims in a world that was rapidly changing. Liberal Christians, hoping to sustain the vitality of their faith amid modernity, sought a middle path between atheistic rationalism and authority-based religious tradition.

Within America’s religious liberal spectrum were devout Christians, such as the controversial divine Horace Bushnell, who were open to what some saw as heretical reforms. Others, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, were religious radicals who wanted to liberate orthodox religion “from every sort of thraldom to irrational and merely traditional authority” (in the words of William Potter, founding member of the Free Religious Association). Contrary to the assumption that Twain’s criticisms of religion expressed mocking skepticism or hostile atheism, he possessed a religious sensibility that was deeply informed by these heterodox theologies.

During Twain’s boyhood in Hannibal, his father was a freethinker and his uncle a universalist. Though he attended a Presbyterian church as a boy, he read Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason as a cub riverboat pilot and joined a Masonic lodge in St. Louis. Perhaps most ­significantly, he confessed his “powerful” ambition as a youth to be “a preacher of the gospel.” What thwarted that ambition was the profession’s “stock in trade—i.e. religion.”

Though some scholars see this split between the gospel and religion as informing Twain’s sense of irony, it also happens to be a key tenet of religious liberalism. The influential Unitarian minister Theodore Parker drew a similar distinction in his 1841 sermon “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity.” Declaring that “real Christianity . . . is not a system of doctrines,” Parker distinguished the “Word of Jesus” from the institutional religion that had grown around it into what “men call Christianity.” Twain was likely familiar with this view, thanks to his friendships with leading Unitarian Christian ministers during the Civil War, including Thomas Starr King and Henry Bellows, both of whom were closely associated with Parker.

Though Twain was not to be ordained as a minister, he discerned his calling at this time as a humorist in religious terms. His vocation was not to shepherd souls to heaven; his calling, he said, alluding to the parable of the talents in Matthew 25:14–30, was to use his God-given talent “to excite the laughter of God’s creatures” in this earthly realm. His early writings were infused with liberal assumptions such as Starr King and Bellows would have preached in sermons against what “men call Christianity.” Defending himself against the pious minister who had condemned him as a “son of the devil,” Twain revealed his motive for ridiculing “imaginary holy places” in the Holy Land. He had wished to show

how much real harm is done to religion by the wholesale veneration lavished upon things that are mere excrescences upon it; which mar it; and which should be torn from it by reasoning or carved from it by ridicule. They provoke the sinner to scoff, when he ought to be considering the things about him that are really holy.

Around this time, Twain, commenting on the ephemerality of emotional revival conversions, observed that “a religion that comes of thought, and study, and deliberate conviction, sticks best.” In his breakthrough Innocents Abroad (1869), Twain wondered what kind of relationship Jesus had with his brothers when they were children, considering that Jesus “was only a brother to them, however much he might be to others a mysterious stranger who was a god and had stood face to face with God above the clouds.” While ridiculing the “clap-trap side-shows” he visited in the Holy Land, Twain nonetheless deemed the site of the Crucifixion as historically accurate, esteeming it as “grand, revered, venerable—for a god died there.”

Throughout the rest of his life, Twain befriended other liberal Christian clergy, including Horace Bushnell, whom he considered a “theological giant”; Thomas ­Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher’s ­unconventional brother; and ­Joseph Twichell, his closest friend and pastor. Even as he moved beyond Christianity, Twain’s friendship with the radical Emerson protégé and former Unitarian minister Moncure Conway led him to contemplate other paths, such as the esoteric Hinduism that Conway helped to popularize in the West.

In this regard, it is interesting to note the thematic similarity of Twain’s controversial conclusion in No. 44 to the insight of a Hindu ­g­uru he met in India in 1896. Twain’s Stranger declared that “nothing exists; all is a dream.” The guru likewise preached:

The world . . . is not real. It never existed, it does not exist, and it will not come into existence in future. We all dream. . . . We are sleeping in the lap of ignorance, and as soon as true knowledge will dawn on us we shall be able to know that the world is but a dream.

Twain likewise believed in an ultimate divine source beyond this world of illusion. As late as 1906, when he was still at work on No. 44, he dictated a meditation on “the real God, the genuine God, the great God, the sublime and supreme God, the authentic Creator of the real universe, whose remotenesses are visited by comets only,” over against the myriad false gods that infested the human imagination.

Few readers today are aware of the Mysterious Stranger documents, let alone of Twain’s thwarted ambition to be a gospel preacher or his close friendships with prominent liberal clergymen. Fewer still know of his extensive lifelong reading in theologically heterodox subjects, such as the apocryphal gospels and comparative religious assessments of Christ, Krishna, and Buddha. Even during his final decade, Twain’s library included W. H. Mallock’s Reconstruction of Religious Belief (which Harper’s Monthly recommended to “those who find in scientific truth an obstacle to religious faith”) and the esoteric Advanced Course in Yogi Philosophy and Oriental Occultism, a text derived from Vedantic Hinduism.

Mark Twain was hardly a grim harbinger of atheism. His surviving daughter Clara recalled that her father’s “natural inclination was always stronger toward more poetic and mystic subjects.” His last years were dark. Yet as Tuckey observes, a “time that is one of darkness, even of despair, may indeed lead on through to a new stage of enlightenment.” It’s a side of Mark Twain very relevant to our present dark and despairing times.

The post Mark Twain’s Religion appeared first on First Things.

Pope interviewed some attendees. One said, “I think my prime motive for coming is to defend Christmas against the Muslim hordes [that are] eroding our ­culture.” A young speaker testified to his salvation in Christ, adding, “And wouldn’t it be great to see this nation restored back to its ancestral roots?” One of the event organizers championed the revival of “masculine Christianity.”

In advance of the event, some Anglican bishops expressed “grave concern” that Christianity was being used to “justify racism and anti-migrant rhetoric.” A cleric in the crowd shouted that Jesus had been a migrant. The vicar of an Anglican church was handing out leaflets that featured an AI-generated nativity scene in which “black people, Muslim women and three white men wearing Union Jack T-shirts gaz[ed] at the baby ­Jesus in his crib.”

Both the “ancestral roots” and the “all are welcome” themes express political Christianity. Tommy ­Robinson may be a cynical opportunist, but undoubtedly there were sincere Christians among those marching to Whitehall. These “Tommy Robinson Christians” believe that national revival requires a return to the religious foundations of Albion. This is probably a correct assessment. The multicultural and inclusive Christians wish for contemporary Britain to realize the universal mission of Christianity: The gospel is for all of ­humanity—Great Britain must be open to all. 

It would be an abuse of the common usage of “­nationalism” to speak of the multicultural and inclusive Christians as nationalists. But they have a decidedly Christian vision of the nation, and indeed of Western civilization. For them, the open society realizes the inner truth of Christianity. It promises to heal ­societies fragmented by identity politics and demographic change. Their vision is akin to that of the Christians who advanced the Social Gospel more than a century ago. They held that progressive ­politics would Christianize the raw and often inhumane realities of modern economic life. In this regard, the “­post-nationalism” of Christians who oppose linking Jesus the King to a recovery of ancestral roots advances a vision for the future of the West.

Paul Kingsnorth has cautioned against the temptation to turn Christianity into a prop for Western civilization. It was the thrust of his 2024 Erasmus Lecture, “Against Christian Civilization” (­January 2025). Kingsnorth is right to issue this warning. As a friend of mine said many years ago after a speaker at a conference exhorted the Christians in attendance to “save” Europe: “Our Lord did not die on a cross to found Europe and establish Western civilization.”

But even those who are keen to emphasize that we are pilgrims in a strange land must harken to the counsel that Jeremiah offered to the Israelites in Babylon: “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (29:7). 

 Globalization, mass migration, and the weakening of solidarity are clear and present dangers. It’s fitting for Christians to propose ways forward amidst these challenges. How could it be otherwise? And in view of the growing polarization of politics, it’s not surprising that Christians offer divergent visions of the future, one keen to return to roots and the other seeking a new and more united world. It’s wrongheaded to accuse one side or the other of “politicizing” Christianity. Seeking the welfare of the city—that’s the intention of both Christian nationalists and Christian post-nationalists.

The Christian political enterprise can be done well—or poorly. Our tradition provides tools to purify our political judgments. The concept of an order of love helps to frame our duties to our near neighbors, as distinct from our far neighbors. Natural law can clarify moral issues. The history of Christian statesmanship offers useful instruction. The Sermon on the Mount unsettles our complacent consciences. 

Let’s not imagine that Christianity exists to sustain (or transform) Western civilization. The object of faith is not to renew (or transcend) our nation, or any other nation. But let’s also not ignore the truth that ­Christianity has a great deal to say about what kind of civilization we should seek to nurture. Our faith informs our ­citizenship.

Paul VI spoke of Christianity’s vocation to cultivate a “civilization of love.” As I survey the city to which God has sent me in exile, I’ve come to a conclusion: The open society, with its vision of a civilization of inclusion, encourages philanthropy but undermines love. This judgment makes me sympathetic to the St. George flags waved beside banners announcing the lordship of Christ, even as I recognize the dangers of nationalistic idolatry. I suppose that makes me a Christian nationalist. It’s a label I’m willing to accept. As I do so, I hope that, when I met my Maker, he will judge that I elevated the Christian above the nationalist.

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A controversial abortion case reaches the Supreme Court, and men in black robes impose their religious views on the country. Counter to the justices’ expectation, a diverse movement rises up in protest. Civil disobedience leads to tens of ­thousands of arrests. It may take many years, but the decision will be reversed.

This is a description not of some future American Gilead but of the past. Daniel K. Williams’s important history of abortion politics explains how Roe v. Wade enshrined liberal Protestant assumptions in American law. Far from being a bulwark of secularism (as many on the right and the left have supposed), Roe v. Wade was the expression of a religious establishment that overestimated its legitimacy and staying power.

Religious divides over abortion emerged in the first part of the twentieth century. Up to that point there had been a broad consensus in favor of American laws, which banned abortion except when it was necessary to save the life of the mother. But under the influence of the Social Gospel, which stressed societal reform over individual salvation, many mainline leaders came to see contraception and abortion not as individual vices but as potential solutions to overpopulation and poverty. Liberal Protestants also placed a high priority on individual freedom, which they sought to respect by loosening abortion laws.

At the same time, liberal Protestants continued to believe that the unborn child possessed moral worth, which had to be balanced against the value of individual choice. In 1961, the Christian Century called for the repeal of laws that compelled “women to bear ­unwanted children forced upon them in criminal acts.” But it also warned that complete ­liberalization “leaves to the unborn no rights at all.”

This attempt to balance individual freedom, social reform, and the rights of the unborn was distinct from the Catholic position, which prioritized unborn life while drawing on natural law. It also differed from the approach of conservative Protestants. Williams puts to rest the frequently repeated claim that evangelicals did not oppose abortion until they were led to do so by the post-Roe culture wars. In fact, conservative Protestants were generally opposed to abortion—and for distinctively evangelical reasons.

Whereas liberal Protestants stressed individual freedom, conservative Protestants exalted family life. Their belief in the importance of childbearing reinforced their moral objections to the taking of unborn life. The same was true of their focus on individual sin and salvation, which made them comfortable with calling the choice to abort a sin and a crime rather than a social problem for which no one in particular could be blamed. It is true, Williams notes, that ­evangelicals were willing to support the availability of abortion “for a few carefully defined medical reasons.” But they rejected elective abortion outright.

In 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided, it was still possible to imagine that liberal Protestant views could govern the country. Twenty-eight percent of Americans were members of mainline churches, the institutional home of liberal Protestantism. So were sixty-­five of the Senate’s one hundred members and eight of the nine justices on the Supreme Court. Today, by contrast, only 11 percent of Americans, twenty-seven members of the U.S. Senate, and one Supreme Court justice are mainline Protestants.

Only in retrospect is it ­possible to see how distinctive—and ­fragile—the liberal Protestant approach to abortion was. The court’s decision in Roe was drafted by Harry Blackmun, a liberal Methodist who regularly attended church and occasionally preached. During the first twelve weeks of pregnancy, he wrote, abortion could be undertaken at the discretion of the mother. In the next twelve weeks, the state could regulate the procedure in ways consistent with maternal health. In the last trimester, the state could prohibit abortion outright, except where it was necessary to protect the life of the mother. This framework sought to balance individual choice with the value of unborn life. But by stressing the medical reasons for abortion, it also assumed the authority of doctors—92 percent of whom were male.

This balancing act reflected liberal Protestant concerns and tracked with specific policies proposed by liberal Protestant bodies. In June 1968, the American Baptist Convention proposed a trimester framework that sought to honor “the freedom of persons and the sanctity of life.” The woman would be free to choose in the first trimester, but after that she could procure an abortion only with the approval of a medical professional. A similar approach was proposed by the United Church of Christ in 1971. The parallels were clear enough that in 1973, after Roe was decided, the writers Mary Ellen Haines and Helen Weber noted that the UCC’s statement was “virtually identical with the Supreme Court ruling.”

Because of the decision’s soft paternalism and qualified concern for unborn life, feminists had reservations about Roe. They preferred the approach championed by Congresswoman Bella Abzug, who proposed a law to repeal all restrictions on abortion nationwide. Feminists rallied to Roe, though, when they realized that a determined movement was seeking to undo it. Blackmun was surprised by the intensity of the response. “The mail has been voluminous and much of it critical and some of it abusive,” he told a friend. “I suspect, however, that the furor will die down before too long. At least I hope so.”

It was not to be. Catholics, joined by evangelicals, led the resistance to Roe. They were joined by a formidable body of dissenters within the Protestant mainline. Charismatic Christianity also played an important role. In 1986, Randall Terry, a Pentecostal minister, founded Operation Rescue. The group adopted sit-in tactics from the Civil Rights movements to dissuade women from seeking abortions and obstruct the operations of clinics. By 1992, 40,000 volunteers had been arrested in one of the greatest waves of civil disobedience in American history.

Far from settling the ­abortion question on liberal ­Protestant grounds, as Blackmun hoped, Roe  contributed to the decline of liberal Protestant hegemony. As Williams notes, it “set in motion a process that would polarize both national politics and Christianity in the United States.” Debates over abortion contributed to splits within mainline churches and powered the emergence of the religious right. It also led to the rise of a feminist movement that would, in time, win over the Democratic Party to an unambiguous defense of abortion as an act that should be not questioned but praised.

By tracing this history, Williams answers a question that has often troubled people with moderate instincts: Whatever happened to the idea that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare? The important thing to realize is that this formulation was not a compromise between the antithetical positions of pro-lifers and feminists. It was an expression of a distinctive viewpoint that enjoyed demographic and institutional backing within the Protestant mainline. As the mainline declined, so did this distinctive form of moderation—to be replaced by pro-abortion secularism on the one hand and a religiously conservative pro-life movement on the other.

Though the pro-life movement has succeeded in reversing Roe v. Wade, it has failed to achieve a new settlement that protects unborn life. Many abortion opponents, notably including the Catholic bishops of the United States, have sought to present opposition to abortion as part of a broader “ethic of life” or “seamless garment.” Their proposals seek to build a new center that protects the unborn by appealing to the political intuitions of the left as well as the right. They aspire to be nonpartisan, just as the drafters of Roe imagined they were being. But their success has not matched their ambition.

Indeed, over time, some of the most important advocates of the seamless garment have abandoned the cause. The evangelical Jim Wallis and his magazine, ­Sojourners, were important progressive voices for life. They cast the protection of the unborn as part of a broader liberal defense of the downtrodden. But sometime during ­Donald Trump’s first term in office, Williams notes, Sojourners began to defend abortion as a human right—succumbing to the process of polarization that had been working itself out since Roe v. Wade.

Williams’s history has implications beyond Roe v. Wade. If religious views inevitably inform court decisions in such sensitive cases, what views informed Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court ruling recognizing a constitutional right to same-sex ­marriage? A clue can be found in ­another recent book, ­Anthony ­Kennedy’s memoir, Life, Law & ­Liberty. Kennedy describes how his upbringing in the ­American West imparted to him a notion that each person is ­entitled to “basic dignity.” Dignity was to become the crucial concept in his jurisprudence. As Kennedy puts it, “Constant study . . . led me to a greater appreciation of the primacy of human dignity in constitutional analysis.”

Kennedy’s insistence on dignity marks him as part of a distinctively Catholic tradition of political reasoning. As the legal scholar ­Samuel Moyn argues in Christian Human Rights, the notion of individual dignity was first taken up in the early twentieth century by Catholics who sought a middle course between the secularist legacy of the French Revolution and anti-democratic forms of Christian politics. Recognizing individual dignity often meant placing limits on the state’s ability to coerce. As Moyn observes, the term’s eventual popularity was “essentially due” to Pope Pius XI’s employment of it in the anti-­communist encyclical Divini Redemptoris.

Catholics on the Supreme Court adopted this language. As Adeno Addis has noted, “Justices ­Kennedy, Brennan, and Frank Murphy, the three Justices for whom dignity has played an important role in understanding humanness and its vulnerability to debasement and humiliation, all adhered to the Catholic faith.” Kennedy used the notion of dignity to fashion a liberal Catholic jurisprudence that reached its culmination in ­Obergefell. Not unlike Harry Blackmun’s opinion in Roe v. Wade, Kennedy’s opinion in Obergefell advanced a progressive change while retaining certain conservative instincts—notably, a belief that recognition of the dignity of same-sex couples must be ­balanced against respect for religious liberty.

Today Catholics are as dominant on the Supreme Court as mainline Protestants once were. But most of these Catholics are political conservatives and textual originalists who have little use for the language of dignity. Kennedy’s liberal Catholic jurisprudence is likely to be subjected to the same crosscutting pressures that Blackmun’s liberal Protestant jurisprudence once was. If the fate of Roe is any indication, the compromise Kennedy struck in Obergefell will be looked back on as a temporary settlement. Either Obergefell will be reversed, or religious liberty for objectors will be stripped away.

The reversal of Obergefell would be an undoubted conservative victory. But its effect would be limited unless conservatives can articulate a religiously informed jurisprudence that commands broad assent. Anyone hoping to do this has much to learn from the liberal Protestant and Catholic attempts to shape our nation’s laws.

Image by Ted Eytan, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.

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Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) belongs at the head of a select company of writers renowned in their day—Alexandre ­Dumas, Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—who are no longer taken seriously, or for that matter read much, by most adults. However, the pleasures of reading adventure stories are not all guilty ones. The very best of such tales not only entertain but also teach—­reminding grown men and women of fundamental truths they took in when young.  

Stevenson relates swift-moving tales of high daring, with violent death narrowly averted by the ­herobut inescapable for the villains (and rendered with gruesome relish), profound male friendships forged in shared peril, and even the ­occasional—that is, really quite ­rare—first and only love for a young woman of exceptional mettle and bravery. 

In 1924 the Bloomsbury stalwart Leonard Woolf confessed to finding Treasure Island “a good story,” but in his estimation it was plainly kid stuff: “[Stevenson] appeals to the child or to the primitively childish in grown men and women.” Not just childish, but primitively so. That hardly sounds like the distinguished achievement of a well-spent artistic career, or even a worthy pastime for the bookish reader seeking unfamiliar literary territory. 

One is grateful, then, a century later, to see a scholar as accomplished as Leo Damrosch turn his attention to this neglected figure. Damrosch does not attempt to make more of Stevenson than he can legitimately bear, but this vivid biography helps one see what is essential in Stevenson’s life and perennially valuable in his art. 

Raised in Scottish Presbyterianism, Stevenson was subjected to Calvinist doctrinal severity at its most ­frightful—as he would later call it, the “dark and vehement religion,” with its ­forbidding mystery of predestination, which kindled “the great fire of horror and terror . . . in the hearts of the Scottish people.” A “very religious boy,” in the words of his nanny, who schooled him only too well in the grim basics of her own fervent belief, the child confronted nightly a merciless ogre of a God who dominated his awful dreams and made him fear life as much as he did death. In his nightmare world he would stand before “the Great White Throne”—the seat of the Godhead administering judgment and vengeance in Revelation—and when ordered to speak in defense of his soul would be stricken mute, and thereby condemned forever to the burning pit, which he saw with staggering clarity before he woke up screaming.

At twenty-two, a graduate of Edinburgh University trained in Scottish law, and convalescent from a serious lung illness that would return to plague him all his life, in the course of an ordinary conversation Stevenson answered too candidly a couple of his father’s questions about his faith. The young man instantly regretted his forthrightness, as his parents pronounced him a “horrible atheist” (which he was not) and a loathsome disgrace who had rendered their lives ­meaningless: Better his son had never been born or had died a spotless babe, his father wailed. The reciprocal shock would reverberate for years, but the deathly parental rage would abate in time—they loved their son too much to banish him from their hearts. After Stevenson married in 1880 an American divorcée ten years older than he, his parents welcomed his strikingly unconventional wife into the family. By then relations had thawed sufficiently that Stevenson could write to his mother, with affection and without fear, of Christ’s habitual joyous “affirmatives” as against the solemn prohibitions of the Ten Commandments. “It is much more important to do right than not to do wrong. Faith is, not to believe the Bible, but to believe in God.” 

It is obvious that Stevenson was never going to be an orthodox Christian of any denomination, but his early exposure to the divine “wrath and curse” visited ­upon fallen mankind, as the Scottish Presbyterian Shorter Catechism so memorably put it, and his growing belief in a loving Christ as the paragon of goodness, make themselves felt throughout his writings. His boyhood consciousness had been particularly seared by human ­depravity—principally the fear that his own would send him to hell—and his best-known works of fiction treat the eternal and elemental conflict between good and evil, as seen through the eyes of the innocent. At that time Nietzsche was declaring the Jewish and Christian standards of morality perverse and rightly obsolescent; Stevenson, by contrast, was reinforcing their ­inviolability, with an eye especially to the education of the young. Despite ­Stevenson’s renegade inclination to follow his own path, the uncharted territory that the atheist philosopher opened beyond good and evil was not for him. 

Treasure Island portrays an adolescent’s initiation into the depths of manly wickedness—and his boldness in fighting against it. The sinister forces that generally flee the daylight penetrate the peaceable life of young Jim Hawkins. A succession of seafaring ruffians, each more rotten than the previous—Billy Bones, Black Dog, Blind Pew—arrive at his father’s inn, and bring with them terror and bloodshed, as they pursue the notorious pirate Captain Flint’s buried treasure. Pelf, loot, plunder: That is what pirates live and die for. But this fascination with riches infects the good men whom Jim knows, and with Flint’s treasure map in their possession a select group of them heads out to sea in quest of a fortune. 

They are all innocents, with a lot to learn about the nature of evil. Squire Trelawney, the ringleader, unwittingly hires a crew of pirates who had sailed with Flint, among them Long John Silver, the peg-legged archvillain who has become the favorite buccaneer of popular legend. At first, they strike the Squire as virtuous men; but appearances can be fatefully deceiving, as Jim learns more quickly than his adult companions. Having climbed into a barrel on deck to get one of the few apples remaining there, Jim overhears Silver feverishly tell his fellow cutthroats of his plan to murder the good men—he imagines the most exquisite mutilations for the Squire—and take all the treasure for themselves. As Jim tells the story, “I would not have shown myself for all the world, but lay there, trembling and listening, in the ­extreme of fear and curiosity, for from these dozen words I understood that the lives of all the honest men aboard depended upon me alone.”

 One lesson after another in maintaining his composure will follow. The pirates and the honest men will go to war, and several will be killed. Perhaps the biggest excitement comes when Jim fights to the death with the malignant Israel Hands. In a tour de force of practical criticism, Damrosch captures perfectly, sentence by sentence, the intricate and unrelenting narrative movement that renders the violent action, right down to the killing blow. This tribute to Stevenson’s artistry also demonstrates the excellence of old-school close reading, a relic of Harvard’s glory days, before leftist politics had its way with elite literary education.

A long 1888 essay by ­Stevenson’s good friend Henry James (a Harvard man, albeit as a law school dropout) represents an even older school of criticism at its best. James catches the psychic interplay between the adult reader and the young one, which makes this “boy’s book” unique: The “weary mind of experience,” fascinated by the story, will “see in it . . . not only the ideal fable but, as part and parcel of that, as it were, the young reader himself and his state of mind: we seem to read it over his shoulder, with an arm around his neck.” Bloomsbury’s contempt for Stevenson’s primitive childishness seems fusty and churlish in light of this far subtler and more humane understanding. James recognizes the love this novel inspires the old to feel for the young—the protective tenderness for a soul yet unformed as it finds its difficult way through the thickets of the moral life. 

And for all that, it is a ripping good yarn, like Stevenson’s other most remarkable works of fiction. Each of these is singular in plot, but all are similar in their fundamental teaching: that righteous men must resist wrongdoers with all the courage they have, especially when the vicious have superior strength. 

In Kidnapped (1886), seventeen-­year-old David Balfour, another slow learner, narrowly escapes a murderous pitfall contrived by his malicious miserly uncle Ebenezer—yet still trusts the old reprobate enough to be suckered aboard a ship manned by evildoers, whom Ebenezer has paid to transport him into indentured servitude in the Carolinas. David, too, will have to fight for his life, and is fortunate to have at his side an expert ­swordsman who will become his fast friend. 

In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (also 1886), the scientific genius Dr. Jekyll’s experiment in the ecstatic release of the evil in his own being rings the death knell for Victorian hopes of moral ­perfectibility: Human wickedness is profound and ineradicable, and it will always have to be fought. 

And in The Master of Ballantrae (1889), James Durie, the titular villain, Stevenson was to say, embodies “all I know of the devil.” Charming, handsome, dashing, clever, he is the epitome of diabolical grace—the finest worldly gifts put to the foulest use, as he sows devastation wherever he goes. No one stands successfully against him.

Lest it appear that Stevenson was a cheerless scold, a font of ­unresolved Calvinist wretchedness, a look at some of his best essays dispels that supposition. (It is as an essayist—a brilliant and prolific one, as shown by a 2024 edition of his Complete Personal Essays, which is more than seven hundred pages long—that he currently enjoys a greater reputation than as a novelist. He does not write for boys here.) “Fontainebleau: Village Communities of Painters” identifies joyous pleasure as the root of all the best things. “No art, it may be said, was ever perfect, and not many noble, that has not been mirthfully conceived. And no man, it may be added, was ever anything but a wet blanket and a cross to his companions who boasted not a copious spirit of enjoyment.” “Pulvis et Umbra,” despite its dour title—Dust and Shadow, taken from a Horatian ode—and its reckoning with the shortcomings of religion on one hand and science on the other, closes with an energetic flourish of virile determination: “God forbid it should be man that wearies in well-doing, that despairs of unrewarded effort, or utters the language of complaint. Let it be enough for faith, that the whole creation groans in mortal frailty, strives with unconquerable ­constancy: Surely not all in vain.” It is a memorable summons to the morally rigorous life.

The post Stevenson’s Treasure  appeared first on First Things.

The reasons are many. Gay people are bourgeois. They are just like the rest of us, the boy next door, differing only in sexual preference. A rich white man can’t become black. But his son might be gay. Some women are lesbians; some homosexuals are black. Gay liberation is for everyone, rich and poor, black and white, male and female. It’s the all-­American enterprise.

Moreover, gay liberation promises far more than civil rights for blacks and women. The right to same-sex marriage is far more radical than the right to vote or the right to be free from discrimination in employment or housing. The Pride flag represents a new deal for Americans: Government grants what nature denies. We can invent new ways of life in defiance of the most ancient norms. Neither nature nor history can limit us. It’s a stunning view of freedom. It shines more brightly even than the words of the Declaration of Independence, which is why burning the Pride flag today elicits greater opprobrium than burning the stars and stripes.

According to legend, the initial gay rights movement began with a melee at the Stonewall Inn bar in Greenwich Village, when gay patrons fought the police officers who had been sent to round up “deviants.” Due to this episode, what we might call “first-wave queerness” crystallized and became prominent. The Stonewall riots highlighted the plain fact that an active homosexual life diverges from bourgeois values.

First-wave queers participated in the 1960s counterculture. They imagined that straight Americans would join them in fomenting a revolution. In Love’s Body (1966), Norman O. Brown argued that human fulfillment requires overcoming the male-female binary. He preached an “eschatological hermaphroditism” that would inaugurate the perfect freedom of “polymorphous perversity.” Brown’s lyrical book was influential. Its utopian pansexuality led first-wave gay activists to promote the queerest edges and most outrageous behaviors, precisely in order to offend bourgeois sensibilities, and thus hasten the advent of an entirely new social order.

Few leaders of the old queer coalition went as far as Carl Wittman, author of A Gay ­Manifesto (1970). Heterosexuality, Wittman said, “is a ­disease,” and “exclusive heterosexuality is fucked up.” ­Wittman counseled gays to drop the self-­hatred. He pushed boundaries. Sex “with animals may be the beginning of interspecies communication,” and “­sado-masochism, when consensual,” might be “a highly artistic endeavor.” Perversion must be celebrated!

First-wave queers were united in rejecting the “fantasy of the gay liberals,” as Edmund White wrote in his 1980 book States of Desire: Travels in Gay ­America. That “fantasy” held that “all homosexuals are the same as everyone else.” White reveled in the hallucinogens, acid trips, alcohol, cocaine, orgies, and anonymous sex that were common in gay scenes around the country. Sexual compulsiveness, he claimed, was a virtue, not a vice. The violation of youthful beauty was an act of benevolence, not a crime. The young would learn the blessings of uninhibited sex.

Not every writer of that period was utopian. As youthful beauty fades, life in the hedonistic utopia gets hard. The greatest gay novel of the era, ­Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, ends with ­Sutherland, an aging protagonist, apparently committing suicide—exhausted, drugged out, and no longer attracting sex partners.

But Holleran’s grim realism did not set the agenda. Gay literature from the first wave championed the randomness and promiscuity of gay lives. Larry Kramer’s 1978 novel Faggots shows gay men targeting “fresh meat” (teenagers) and committing acts of sexual violence. The protagonist, screenwriter Fred Lemish, has sex with more than a dozen men in the novel’s first few pages—all in the pursuit of true love, or so he says.

Raunchy first-wave gays believed that the gay life was superior to humdrum bourgeois life, with its workaday concerns about children, paying the bills, and pleasing a demanding spouse. This sensibility was supported by thinkers who sought to normalize the sexual ­revolution—not only Brown, but also Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault, Wilhelm Reich, and others. Human beings thrived, they insisted, when freed of all social constraints or constructs. Moral discipline served the oppressive capitalist order, they argued. Rebellion, especially sexual rebellion, fostered a liberating socialism. In this critical ­theory, promiscuous sodomy became a political act, the more public the better.

First-wave queers flouted gender norms in dress and speech. It was during this period that “butch” became stylish for lesbians, and the gay lisp came into fashion. Raunchy subcultures emerged in neighborhoods like Greenwich Village. The queer scene flourished in gay bars, public parks, and public bathrooms. Orgies were institutions. A gay press was built.

Gays relished their difference, manifest in their embrace of the heretofore derisive word “queer.” And they lived that difference. Alan Bell and ­Martin Weinberg, authors of Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women (1978), found that 26 percent of gay men had one thousand or more sex partners in a lifetime, while 41 percent had a more modest fifty to five hundred partners. Around three-quarters estimated that the majority of their sexual encounters were with strangers. A 1984 study found that only 4.5 percent of male homosexuals practiced sexual fidelity. First-wave queers saw these statistics as signs of achievement: Gays were in the vanguard of a new way of living!

Gay groups in the 1970s and ’80s included the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, Gay Liberation Front, Radicalesbians, The Daughters of Bilitis, and, after AIDS came on the scene, ACT UP. Popular sentiment was negative, however. During the 1970s, former Miss America Anita Bryant led a successful campaign, “Save our Children,” to allow private discrimination against gays. At about the same time, Canadian authorities raided a gay newspaper that was sympathetic to “boy-love.” Some gays owned the insult. The North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) was founded in 1978 to confront bourgeois morality. The Village People (referring to Greenwich Village) memorialized macho-gay fantasies. Their classic song “Y.M.C.A.” valorized older men’s preying on the young.

Embracing raunch was central to first-wave gay activism. If gays were intransigent and loud, Americans would be forced to accept their bathhouses and orgies and learn to live with them. The mainstream would become much, much queerer and politically radical. As a gay activist writes in Kramer’s Faggots, “we shall make our presence known!, felt!, seen!, respected!, admired!, loved!” Queer Nation, founded in 1990, was the last great raunchy gay group in the first wave. It promoted the slogans “We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it,” and “Out of the closets and into the Streets.” Queer Nation compared itself to an army, and its manifesto was a model of anti-bourgeois contempt: “Every time we fuck, we win.”

As a strategy, however, raunch contained ­serious ambiguities. On one hand, raunchy gays refused to lie about their lifestyles. They ­contrasted their deviance with a supposedly stultifying mainstream. They saw themselves as subversive shock troops, agents of revolution. On the other hand, they wanted, somehow, respect from a new, queerer American mainstream. Their complaints about discrimination and demands for acceptance sat uneasily with their self-image as bold subversives. Their existence as “the Other” presupposed the continued dominance of the mainstream, and yet they wanted a mainstream that welcomed drag queens, pedophiles, bull dykes, and every other weirdo, not as “normal” people who happened to have gay sex, but as weirdos.

First-wave gay liberation failed. America did not become queerer. Gay activists were compelled to shift their strategy. They began to portray homosexuality as a slight deviation from bourgeois life. Thus was born second-wave gay liberation, which downplayed queerness.

Gilbert Baker, an artist and gay activist, sewed the first Pride flag in the late 1970s at the behest of Harvey Milk, who wanted a symbol of hope and confidence that would encourage militancy among gays. Later gay rights advocates reframed the Pride flag as a symbol of safe, sound, and beneficent diversity. In 1999, Bill ­Clinton designated June as Pride Month to commemorate the Stonewall riots. Clinton’s decree gave official sanction to a new founding myth for the gay movement: The pervasive repression and homophobic intolerance of American society were being justly defeated by the noble struggle of gays for respect, pride, and recognition. Gay liberation became gay rights. It sought inclusion rather than revolution and promised to fulfill mainstream America’s self-image.

The morality tale was created in the early 1990s by gay activists who were facing setbacks. Americans are trained to believe that the arc of history always bends toward social tolerance. But this is not the case. The ways in which minorities present themselves will affect political judgments and legal constructs. As gays came out of the closet after Stonewall and Americans became aware of gay sexual practices, public opinion ­tilted against gay liberation. In 1990, polling indicated that more Americans thought sexual relations between two adults of the same sex were always wrong (73 percent) than had been the case in 1973 (70 percent). “The gay revolution has failed.” So begins Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen’s 1989 manifesto After the Ball: How America Will Conquer its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 1990s. A new gay image was needed.

Kirk and Madsen saw gay rights in terms of coalition politics. The gay issue presented a puzzle: how to get Americans to accept the gay coalition, which consisted of gay men and lesbians, as well as exhibitionists, pedophiles, drag queens, cross-dressers, sadomasochists, orgy-lovers, zoophiles, and countless others.

Kirk and Madsen observed that first-wave gay revolutionaries had put forward “screamers, stompers, gender-benders, sadomasochists, and pederasts.” This approach confirmed “America’s worst fears” about the excesses and dangers of gay liberation. Mass pro-gay demonstrations and militant Pride parades turned into “ghastly freak shows” during the 1970s. These realities disgusted American sensibilities.

For the gay coalition to succeed, a new approach was needed. Kirk and Madsen argued for platforming “normal” gays while hiding the weirdos. Gays should be depicted “in the least offensive fashion possible.” With handsome, non-threatening, and normal-looking gays as the face of the coalition, the “homo-hating beliefs and actions” would “look so nasty that average Americans will want to dissociate themselves from them.” Kirk and Madsen advised a canny strategy: “The public should not be shocked and repelled by premature exposure to homosexual behavior itself. Instead, the imagery of sex per se should be downplayed, and the issue of gay rights reduced, as far as possible, to an abstract social question.” Being gay had to become boring. Partner benefits, hospital visitation privileges, dignity, and affirmation were to be presented as the essential concerns of gay life.

The second-wave strategy was adopted. The Queer Liberation Front, with its Marxist overtones, was sidelined. Gone was the Pink Triangle, which implied that American society was akin to a Nazi concentration camp. The North American Man-Boy Love Association must “play no part at all,” Kirk and Madsen write, in this new movement. Indeed, one tactic was to accuse opponents of gay rights with unjustly equating the “love that dare not speak its name” with pedophilia.

As the raunchy image of first-wave gay activism was suppressed, the Human Rights Campaign became the leading voice for gay rights. It was portrayed as a natural extension of the nation’s commitment to civil rights. The battle was as American as apple pie.

It worked. Weirdos stayed in the shadows, while normie gays defined the movement. Hollywood gave us Philadelphia in 1993, a movie hewing to Kirk and Madsen’s script. Homophobes in the film are cruel, bigoted liars, perhaps suppressing their own homosexual longings. Tom Hanks, whose character has AIDS, never kisses his lover, played by ­Antonio Banderas. The couple is made to suffer and attract the audience’s sympathy.

In the second-wave script, gays have high tastes, obey the law, and practice monogamy (sort of). They are competent and honest boys next door. In response to this portrayal, which was widely adopted, the number of Americans who thought sexual intimacy between two people of the same sex was always wrong dropped from 73 percent in 1990 to 62 percent in 1993. It sank to below 50 percent in 2008 and hovers around 33 percent today. (It registers in the single digits in Sweden and the Netherlands and below 20 percent in much of Western Europe.)

Second-wave gay rights advocates aimed at stopping all denunciations of gays, lesbians, and allies. To notice any sign of degeneracy within the gay scene made one a homophobe. Gays who pointed out the degeneracy within their own scene were denounced for abetting critics of the movement. In the 2000s and 2010s, the policing of criticism intensified. Accusations of homophobia could end or compromise careers. Opposition to same-sex marriage was stigmatized. Those who violated the new prohibitions, such as Brendan Eich of ­Mozilla, were released from their jobs or, in the case of people like Mark Regnerus, were investigated at the universities where they taught.

The second-wave strategy has been stunningly successful. Few on the right whispered about overturning Obergefell in the years immediately following that closely contested decision. Think tanks that had opposed gay rights and same-sex marriage switched to abortion, religious liberty, or the ill effects of technology. Safer topics. Scholars made prudent decisions to avoid topics that might gain the ire of gay activists. As a result, objective studies of gay distinctives are difficult to find—and respectable scholars hardly ask questions about gay fidelity, mental health, or life expectancy.

But for all its success, second-wave gay activism contained ambiguities. Was it urging propaganda in order to win acceptance? Was the old queer ambition to be out and loud still operating under the surface? Or did second-wave gay activism seek moral reform among gays? Was the presentation of “normie” gays meant to set a standard in the gay community, rather than just shift public opinion? The answer: Yes.

“Straights hate gays not just for what their myths and lies say we are,” Kirk and Madsen write, “but also for what we really are.” Kirk and Madsen advocated better propaganda, but they also called for behavior modification among gays. Reformed gays would be less sexually compulsive, narcissistic, nihilistic, self-indulgent. Their interest in having sex with minors would lessen, and fewer would have sex in public parks, bathhouses, gay bars. Gays would be less obsessed with finding youthful, handsome sex partners, and would cease their cruel shunning of the old and ugly. Gay men with AIDS and other communicable diseases would desist from unprotected sex with other men. Fidelity and enduring relationships would come to be honored among gays. Andrew Sullivan made a contribution to this vision of acceptance combined with reform. His 1995 book Virtually Normal sought to convince straights to embrace same-sex marriage while arguing that bourgeois marriage would tame gays.

But second-wave gay activism never could bring itself to embrace “normal” homosexuality. Kirk and Madsen were of two minds. They saw the public necessity of emphasizing “safe” homosexuality. “Gays must, at this moment, prefer reveille to ­reverie”—which is to say, suppress the impulse toward debauchery for the sake of message discipline. The gay revolution, they promised, would revolutionize public opinion. First gain respect for “monogamous” gays and lesbians, then extend bourgeois approval to those still in the closet—the drag queens, ­cross-dressers, butch dykes, and, perhaps, pedophiles. “In time, as hostilities subside and stereotypes weaken, we see no reason why more and more diversity should not be introduced into the protected image.” After victory for “normal” gays was secured, the weirdos could venture out of the closet.

Kirk and Madsen bet that when same-sex marriage won the day, it would be because Americans had conquered their fear and hatred of the full spectrum of the gay coalition. A people accepting same-sex marriage would not be interested in drawing moral lines of any sort when it came to sex, they thought.

Whether or not Kirk and Madsen correctly predicted the long-term consequences of the gay rights victories of recent decades, the second wave of gay liberation is giving way to a third wave, one that aims to license the full panoply of sexual deviance. Cross-dressers have come out of the closet. Academics have tried to mainstream minor-attracted persons. Queer pedagogy has flooded into elementary school, and drag queens read to children in public libraries.

Players from the old and confrontational gay rights revolution had been sidelined while public opinion was being transformed. Now, in the third wave, they believe the coast is clear. They are ­going public and celebrating sexual weirdness. In this way, they echo the first-wave queers and their affirmation of the most extreme forms of ­deviance. But the third wave also wants to follow the playbook that led to Obergefell. It emphasizes the liberal language of consent, affirmation, and human dignity, not the old vision of anti-bourgeois revolution. “Minor-attracted persons” are trying to win acceptance for an orientation, not a psychological disorder—a rhetoric that copies exactly the second-wave playbook. Transgender youth are innocent and vulnerable, and they must be supported and affirmed so that America can fulfill its vocation as an inclusive nation. Drag queens are just being their authentic selves (as Darel Paul has shown in these pages).

Weirdos act like it’s 1975, but they talk the language of 2015. Drag queens, pedophiles, and gender-benders demand respect, dignity, and affirmation. Transing kids and promoting gay sex to youngsters are now included in comprehensive sex education under the banner of “best practices” for promoting the mental health of children and encouraging tolerance.

But third-wave gay activism has its ambiguities as well. It embraces the second wave’s achievements, especially the successful capture of the language and prestige of civil rights. But because the third wave pushes acceptance of “out and proud” deviance, it inevitably becomes revolutionary, as the first wave recognized. And revolution means an assault on mainstream American sensibilities, which, perhaps, prepares the ground for a reaction or “backlash.”

This ambiguity is evident in the T that has been added to LGB. Transpeople are gender benders whose appearances and behaviors do not fit ­society’s expectations for their biological sex. Third-wave activism insists that they are different, yes, but “normal.” They need to “transition,” but otherwise are just like everybody else. The imperative is acceptance and inclusion.

But unlike gays at a sex party, transpeople are transgressive in public. Everyone must pretend that the man playing women’s volleyball is a woman—or commit a civil rights violation. Misgendering is likewise a civil rights violation in several states. Trans propaganda of normality is coupled with a fervent need to denounce and cancel transphobes. Birth certificates and government IDs must be changed. Euphemisms such as “child-bearing persons” must be employed.

The trans movement is a freak show with totalitarian impulses. The same-sex movement got ­many Americans, including a majority of the Supreme Court justices, to pretend to believe that marriage only incidentally concerned the having and raising of children. The trans movement demands that people forget that there are only two sexes—an even more fundamental human truth. And that kind of forgetting entails a revolution more far-reaching than anything first-wave queers imagined.

Third-wave gay activism even threatens second-wave achievements. Americans were sold same-sex marriage with abstract appeals to lifestyle and dignity. The appeal for acceptance becomes more difficult when Americans learn about “married” gay men who adopt young boys or see lesbians holding hands or gay men necking in public places. Just as ultrasounds brought home to many Americans the reality of unborn children, Instagram posts of manly gay people celebrating the fruits of surrogacy bring the reality of gay marriage home. Kirk and Madsen wanted to keep the reality of gay sex and same-sex marriage hidden, but eventually people notice—and judge. Few television shows depict gay sex, despite the fact that polls say that the majority of Americans support the right of gays to be depicted on television. The “conservative” actions of entertainment producers speak more loudly than polls. It’s not clear that the “wins” of recent decades are as deep and secure as Kirk and Madsen had hoped.

Stretching the category of respectability to cover the raunchy and weird hollows out the whole concept. In 2015, when the arc of history seemed to bend toward limitless inclusion, proceeding from same-sex marriage to the trans cause looked like a winning approach. The Human Rights Campaign went all in. Corporations sold tucking underwear for children. Trans propaganda was everywhere. Today, the same-sex marriage brand is tarnished by its connection with the transing of kids, the platforming of drag queens, and the grooming of children with comprehensive sex education. Pride parades seem passé, and some sponsors have backed away from them.

To be sure, supermajorities continue to support same-sex marriage. But the trends are not favorable to third-wave gay activism. According to Gallup, from 2022 to 2024, Republican support for same-sex marriage dipped from 55 percent to 46 percent, while Democratic support fell from 87 percent to 83 percent. An AEI poll shows an astounding 11-point drop in support for same-sex marriage among Gen Z between 2021 and 2014 (from 80 percent to 69 percent). Ipsos, a French marketing firm, found that in the past three years, support for same-sex marriage had dropped in eighteen of the twenty-six countries surveyed. In 2014, near the height of the “after the ball” strategy, nearly two-thirds of Americans supported the right of same-sex couples to adopt children. The number increased to 75 percent in 2019. Future polling will, I predict, show declines in support.

The question we need to ask is how to accelerate these trends. During the same-sex marriage debate, it was taken as self-evident that the first side that talks about sodomy loses. The left knew it had to hide reality; the right feared looking intolerant. As a result, neither side brought up anal sex. Both sides stuck to abstract notions of rights, dignity, and the proper definition of marriage.

The public’s uneasiness with the realities ­unleashed by gay liberation suggests a new strategy, or a return to an older one. As the third wave becomes more frank and open about what it seeks to make mainstream, social conservatives must become more frank and open about what they seek to promote and censure.  Trimming off the ­excesses of the gay revolution is a containment strategy that does not work. Yesterday’s sexual revolution is institutionalized and awaits its next revolutionary moment. More boldness is needed.

The first step involves exposing the second-wave strategy. That strategy foregrounded the ­virtually normal, and it did so knowing that it would thereby empower the abnormal. The plan was to queer the mainstream. The public needs to understand the connection between same-sex marriage and trans ideology.

Research into and reporting on the reality of gay life was suppressed under second-wave gay activism. We need to reverse this. Funding must be provided for scholarly studies of gay adoption, gay life expectancy, and other features of gay life. Stories should be written about the gay scene in various cities. Gay activists who adopted the second-wave strategy worked hard to shut down this work in the past, because they knew that scholarly research and journalistic exposés would hurt their cause. The right complied, for a variety of reasons.

Such compliance must end. We need to know what proportion of male-male marriages remain monogamous, in comparison with male-female marriages. It is easy to find up-to-date data on the number of sexual partners for straight men and women, but difficult to find the same data for gay men. The CDC should collect those numbers, too. Studies must be done on the mental health and life outcomes of children raised in same-sex households.

Edmund White’s States of Desire surveyed the gay scene in seven American cities. Gays celebrated their deviance in 1980 through gay journalism and literature. Opponents of the gay revolution took the same evidence and systematically presented it to the public, to good effect. Both the deviants and their opponents were silenced by second-wave gay activism.

The frankness and ambition of third-wave activism constitute an opportunity. Well-reported stories can expose surrogacy as a practice that allows doctors to become rich by peddling children to gay couples. We need profiles of discarded surrogates and accounts of the experience of children who lack opposite-sex parents, to say nothing of children adopted and then sexually abused.

The second-wave dignity revolution was always an unstable gambit, meant to hide reality and suppress judgment. Now the unpleasant reality of raunch is coming into the open, not least because of the misjudgment about the trans movement. This reality is creating a vibe shift among many Americans. The arc of history need not bend toward acceptance of sexual deviance. Today, it is possible to imagine the rollback of the gay rights revolution.

The post The Rise and Fall of Gay Activism appeared first on First Things.

When we admire, we are freed from thoughts of ourselves. The better we are at admiring, the less our egos intrude. And the more we know about the world, the more we find to admire. We can then look with pleasure not only on natural and human beauty, but also on more complex things, such as painting, poetry, philosophy, even moral ­conduct. The excellence of particular human beings is often the most affecting beauty of all.

I love to watch others at their best: the brilliant philosopher at work, the pianist who makes playing look effortless, the mother who patiently handles constant requests for her attention. I want to be like these people, unlikely as that may be. “Whatever is done skillfully,” wrote Samuel Johnson, “appears to be done with ease; and art, when it is once matured to habit, vanishes from observation. We are therefore more powerfully excited to emulation, by those who have attained the highest degree of excellence, and whom we can therefore with least reason hope to equal.”

Admiration is countercultural, especially in the academy. We are taught to be “critical” thinkers—always finding fault, identifying problems, exposing deficiencies. The academy is obsessed with status and ranking: Do professors publish in top-tier journals? Can our institutions keep up with their “aspirant peers”? It’s certainly true that most people are inclined to take pleasure in the faults of others. As Hazlitt observed, failure is consoling: At least I’m not as badly off as that guy. Insecurity and pride combine in judgments such as these.

I think, though, that it’s more valuable to admire. Everyone wants to be seen and understood; paying attention is a kind of care for another person. Learning to appreciate beauty and excellence is also the essence of liberal education. A liberal education isn’t so much character-building, but a cultivation of the receptive consciousness, a disposition of ­appreciation.

Admiration calls for at least three things. The first is candid self-examination. What talents and inclinations do I possess, and how might they be developed? I may be forced to admit, in my mental and moral stocktaking, that I’m not good at very many things, or that other people are more gifted than I. Others may have better memories, a subtler grasp of philosophical argument, greater insight into ­literature and life. I must tell myself the truth about these matters, and only then turn to admiration. Otherwise, the excellence of others feels like a threat.

This truth-telling isn’t all darkness and failure. It may become pleasanter as we age, for in taking stock of ourselves we mark our successes, too. Many human capacities can be changed, developed, ­perfected through effort.

This brings us to a second quality that is necessary for admiring well: Admiration requires us to become connoisseurs of a sort. Connoisseurship—whether of wine, art, movies, pop music, or a thousand other things—doesn’t emerge all at once. Becoming a master sommelier, for example, takes at least five years of intensive training, and usually many more. Sometimes connoisseurship comes unbidden. After eight years of living with one breed of dog, I immediately recognize its distinctive ways of jumping and running when I see the breed on the street. I can’t quite articulate it, but I know it when I see it. Something like this half-conscious expertise must characterize the highest levels of literary or artistic criticism, though to reach those levels would take a lifetime.

I recently became friends with the owner and curator of an art gallery. Alan is not a visual artist, but he is a gifted connoisseur—an admirer of other people and the works they produce. He has a finely honed vision of artistic excellence and a capacity to judge quality. Sometimes he will position a monotonal abstract painting next to a vibrant, colorful landscape, for contrast. Or he’ll group a set of works in some unexpected way. Or he might display a piece alone, starkly, on a white wall. The gallery is itself a work of art, which, to borrow words from Adam Smith, exemplifies “the acute and delicate discernment of the man of taste, who distinguishes the minute, and scarce perceptible differences of beauty and deformity.”

Alan admires his artists, and I admire his gallery. Admiration requires a degree of mutual understanding, a common standard of value, a sense that I can judge the quality of what I see, hear, or read. Understanding is the more necessary because many objects of admiration don’t reside on the surface of life. Physical beauty is easy enough to see, though it won’t be seen the same way by everyone—and thank goodness, or it would be bad news for the perpetuation of the human race. But admiration of another person’s intellect or character requires connoisseurship. It is a “coming to know” what is valuable, a seeing how a person embodies artistic excellence, or kindness, or humility, or any other good or beautiful quality. It constitutes the very pleasant task of becoming educated, in multiple realms of experience.

At least one more characteristic is essential for the admirer: a recognition of fallibility—both our own and that of others. If we are waiting for perfection, then we will find nobody at all to admire. I have noticed that my admiration of other people isn’t blind; it usually coexists with an awareness of imperfections, flaws, and deficiencies. I can observe a person’s brilliance while knowing that he is short-tempered and prone to criticism, or perceive that a friend is insightful in politics but tone-deaf to literature, or vice versa. This disposition may be indulgent, but it isn’t naive.

In the same way, if we wait for our own insecurities to disappear, then we’ll never be able to admire anyone. Excessive self-criticism is devastating for our sense of ourselves; it also prevents us from ­looking up to see the people around us. We coil ourselves up into balls of anxiety.

Many things are worthy of admiration, from art to literature to athletic excellence. But lately I’ve come to think that the most admirable qualities of all are excellences of character: the kindness, humility, piety, humor, and genuine goodness of people who may not be intellectually or artistically sophisticated. These people often go unadmired because they are not interested in—­indeed, have never given a moment’s thought to—their public image. They aren’t engaged in the kinds of things that garner widespread approval or praise.

Instead they are taking care of the church, cleaning up the service leaflets that accumulate at the end of Sunday services, or making the coffee early every morning. They are investing in the lives of others, quietly and unobtrusively. They talk and listen. They are ­introspective and extroverted by turns, but they possess a generosity of spirit that everyone can admire, if only we will open our eyes. The man of perfect virtue, wrote Smith, “the man whom we naturally love and revere the most, is he who joins, to the most perfect command of his own original and selfish feelings, the most exquisite sensibility both to the original and sympathetic feelings of others.”

In the Nicomachean Ethics, ­Aristotle notes that the great-souled or magnanimous man is “not given to admiration because nothing is great to him.” In other words, only less-than-great souls admire others. But how lonely this exalted ­position would be! A person who is so gifted or highly placed that he cannot admire others is missing out on one of life’s great pleasures: the self-forgetfulness of wonder and admiration, which may sometimes lead toward a profound Christian caritas.

In America we’re told that independence, self-sufficiency, and dogged hard work are among the greatest virtues. I would much prefer to throw in my lot with the admirers. Openness to the beauty of the world, and to the people around me, means that I can be receptive to the unmerited grace that may sometimes, surprisingly, appear. When it does, it is a great blessing—something not to be missed.

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The “it” in question is advanced artificial intelligence. Although the book’s authors, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, present a serious and nuanced argument worth contemplating in full, their bottom line is simple enough. The machines, they argue, have reached the point at which, like anything flirting with cognition, they wish to maximize their performance. Sooner or later, this will mean eliminating those obtuse meat puppets that take way too long to complete basic computations and consume way too much electricity—namely, all of us paltry humans.

Judging by the book’s ecstatic blurbs—everyone from Nobel Laureate Ben Bernanke to Mark Ruffalo, best known for portraying the Hulk in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, lined up to sing its praises—we paltry humans seem to buy the argument. Read about AI these days, and the views on offer would likely range from dark to bleak to apocalyptic. The Cassandras predict the total annihilation of the species, while the optimists settle for a cheerier vision in which the machines take over every job and render Homo sapiens obsolete.

I’m sorry to spoil the pity party with a dose of old-fashioned optimism, but I feel compelled to note that everyone is not dying just yet. In fact, there are many reasons to believe that AI will usher in an era not only of great economic flourishing and innovation, but also of faith and spiritual growth.

For more on the former, you can listen to Alex Karp or observe the inspiring success of his company, ­Palantir, which uses AI to make America greater and keep Americans safe. The latter, however, is trickier: What reason have we to believe that an abundance of AI will send us straight to church or the synagogue?

To answer the question, it may be useful to turn to a term nearly three-quarters of a century old. 

In 1958, the British sociologist Michael Young was looking for a word to describe a new phenomenon he was observing. It was so strange, he felt he needed to coin an original word to get it right. He mashed Latin and Greek together to give us one of the most ascendant terms of the last half-century: meritocracy. 

On the surface, he argued, the idea sounds unassailable. Who in their right mind would object to a system that promoted and rewarded the smartest and most skillful? But take a closer look, and you’ll notice a deep and fatal flaw. Meritocracy, Young argued, sanctified success as a stand-alone virtue, which made a society dominated by meritocracy not only empty but also ­pernicious.

Many members of the merit-certified elite, Young mused,

came from homes in which there was no tradition of culture. Their parents, without a good education themselves, were not able to augment the influence exercised by the teacher. These clever people were in a sense only half-­educated, in school but not home. When they graduated they had not the same self-assurance as those who had the support and stimulus of their families from the beginning. They were often driven by this lack of self-confidence to compulsive conformity, thus weakening the power of innovation which it is one of the chief functions of the elite to wield. They were often intolerant, even more competitive in their striving for ascent than was necessary, and yet too cautious to succeed.

Over time, reliance on meritocracy further exacerbates this negative dynamic. The sons and daughters of the highly educated and richly rewarded these days are likely to grow up and assess their self-worth in terms of accomplishment. Made it into Harvard? Snagged that six-figure job? Moved into that corner office? You’re a success. Anything less? Disaster.

Now, imagine these meritocrats in the age of the machines. Think of the young woman who understands herself primarily as a graduate of an Ivy League medical school, say, encountering software that could glance at an MRI scan, compare it to every other similar case on record, and produce an accurate diagnosis in the time it takes her to put on her doctor’s coat. Or consider the young man who takes great pride in his career at a white shoe law firm, only to discover one morning that AI can inhale millions of pages per minute, ingest every existing precedent on the books, and deliver a sophisticated analysis before the budding lawyer can finish his morning espresso. 

It’s very likely that these meritocrats will soon find themselves, if not altogether out of a job, then at least in possession of one that is far less radiant and ­remunerating. 

What happens then? To hear Moshe Koppel tell it, only good things. Writing recently in Tablet Magazine, the Israeli computer scientist posed the question on everyone’s mind: “If automation hollows out jobs, what will people do all day that feels meaningful?”

Simple, he responded: They will do what humans have done since time immemorial, which is look to faith for answers and a sense of purpose.

Religion, Koppel reminded us, works because it offers “scheduled repetitions of doing what you said you’d do even when you don’t feel like it.” It’s a commitment, not a preference, and it offers “a class of goods [that] sits outside the market by design,” like reading Scripture, praying to God, and spending Saturday or Sunday with your friends and neighbors. Your job, in other words, may be disrupted by some clever computer that can do it twice as well in half the time, but your relationship with your maker and with your community is something you alone can navigate, and only by showing up and being fully present. “The boundary,” Koppel concluded, “protects the thing from the optimization pressure that dissolves it.”

To keep things biblical for a moment, think of AI not as the flood but as the dove, informing us that the deluge is over and that it’s now time to rebuild. For decades, we’ve been in a competitive frenzy of work, work, work that has scrubbed our existence of every trace of truth and beauty. We have measured out our lives with coffee spoons, obsessed with having just a little bit more: more money, more power, more respect. We asked only what we could do, rarely what we should. We generated immense wealth and progress, and then wondered why they brought with them so much misery. 

The coming of very smart machines may be just the chance we need to start over. 

True, like all technological upheavals, this one will bring profound changes we can’t even begin to predict, not all of them rosy. But also like all technological upheavals, this one offers us an opportunity to return to first principles and ask ourselves what being human is all about. 

“AI,” Koppel writes, “can fetch sources and summarize moves, but it cannot give you the reflex that keeps moral talk from devolving into sentiment.” The machines, in other words, may take some of our jobs, but they could never satisfy our desire for justice, for compassion, for truth, for transcendence—basic human instincts that have thrust us forward for millennia. We may lose some of the prestige that once came with ­being meritocratic high achievers, but we’ll gain something more valuable in return: the gift of being fully present and realizing, as so many of our ancestors have, that we matter because we were created in God’s image, not because we are on the receiving end of a ­gilded diploma or a padded paycheck. 

Ask any AI agent to sum up the Law of Conservation of Energy, and it will tell you that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed from one form to another. The same is true of emotional and spiritual energy as well. The singular human genius that for too long has lashed itself to spreadsheets is about to be set free to contemplate not just the price of things but, finally, their value. With a little luck, we may be looking at a new great awakening, with artificial intelligence not replacing but liberating our much more precious, irreplaceable, and all-too-human intelligence. 

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Last year the United Nations Population Division predicted that global population will peak in approximately sixty years, at around 10.3 billion people. After that, the number of human beings will begin to fall. Population decline has already begun in sixty-three countries, including China and Russia. The cause is persistent low fertility. At the world scale, the number of children being born is already below the levels required for a stable population, generally considered to be 2.2 per woman in rich nations and a bit more in poor ones. More than half of all countries today have sub-replacement fertility rates. Japan, Canada, and most Western European countries have been below replacement for fifty years. Today, not only rich countries but even middle-income ones such as Mexico, the Philippines, and Iran are below the levels required to stave off future population decline.

And these are the optimistic forecasts. UN population predictions typically overshoot reality. A 2020 paper published in The Lancet forecast that global population would peak in the 2060s at around 9.7 billion, twenty years sooner and 600 million people fewer than the UN proposed. Population decline will only accelerate after this peak. By the end of the century, countries such as China, Japan, Thailand, and Spain are expected to be reduced to half their present size. The result will be some combination of rapid societal aging, the abandonment of rural areas and small towns, and perpetual mass migration, the implications of which are only now beginning to be contemplated.

Conservatives have been writing about this topic for decades. Phillip Longman published The Empty Cradle in 2004, and Jonathan Last’s What to Expect When No One’s Expecting came out in 2013. Liberals, by contrast, have been wary of admitting that low fertility and population decline exist, much less that they are problems. They fear that simply discussing population will normalize racist and patriarchal ideas. Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, two economists at the University of Texas at Austin, aim to break the silence. In After the Spike, the authors advance what they call “the case for people” from a perspective rooted in economic, political, and philosophical ­liberalism.

In that After the Spike is of, by, and for liberals, this approach is a good thing. After all, it is liberals who need to be convinced that global depopulation rather than overpopulation is coming, that low fertility is a social problem, and that human existence is good. And if Spears and Geruso can convince liberals to support political, social, and cultural changes that encourage increased fertility, more power to them. Outside the liberal bubble, however, After the Spike falls well short of a convincing analysis of the population problem. Yet it fails in an interesting way that tells us a good deal about liberalism, why contemporary Western liberals have such a difficult time becoming pronatalist, and why liberal prescriptions for the problem are unlikely to succeed.

This is not to say that conservative pronatalism is guaranteed to work either. The headwinds of global low fertility are strong. As Spears and Geruso inadvertently show their readers, history gives little cause to believe a major fertility turnaround is possible, especially an engineered one. Though fertility policy can tweak the margins of human population, and every little bit helps, it will almost certainly fail to stabilize global population levels. Instead, the youngest readers of this book will live to see the first global decline in human population since the Black Death nearly seven centuries ago. The case for people should be made. At the same time, we must prepare for that case to fail.

After the Spike has two central goals. The first is to convince the reader that global population decline is coming. On this score, the book is a clear success. Spears and Geruso show that every country in the world today has either declining or sub-replacement fertility; even India and China, which together make up more than one-third of the world population, are, respectively, below and well below replacement. There are no “automatic stabilizers” guaranteed to keep fertility rates up and the global population stable. What produced the “population bomb” of the twentieth century is wholly incapable of producing similar growth in the twenty-first.

The book’s second goal is to convince the reader that global population decline is bad. Here simple demography will not suffice. To make the “case for people,” Spears and Geruso must choose economic, political, and philosophical arguments that they believe in and expect will resonate with the reader. Their arguments are rooted in core liberal values: equality, choice, progress, humanity. If the reader doesn’t agree to privilege these values, or finds the authors’ unwavering commitment to them impractical or ­naive, he will quickly tire of this book. After the Spike makes a lengthy and serious effort, however, to sway the liberal reader. Fully half its ­pages are devoted to convincing liberals that there is no contradiction between reversing fertility decline and contemporary liberal commitments.

The authors argue, for instance, that depopulation will do nothing to help the climate. On development, they show that the quality of life in poor countries has improved despite tremendous population growth. They also argue persuasively that past technological, economic, and social progress has been dependent on population growth. As “progress comes from people,” a future of population decline will be a future without progress.

Here Spears and Geruso run into a contradiction that troubles their entire book. They admit that progress has been driving down fertility rates “for several hundred years”—for at least as long as we have reliable records—because “a better world, with better options, makes parenting worse by comparison.” Children increasingly compete against careers and consumption and leisure and self-actualization for space in adults’ definition of the good life. This is economists’ now-standard “opportunity cost” explanation of low and declining fertility. As much in India as in the U.S., today there are just too many ways to spend time and money other than on children. Because Spears and Geruso are so dedicated to the value of free choice, they shrink from any suggestion of changing people’s preferences. So they present no case for nudging behavior by increasing the benefits of having children or the costs of not having them. The only thing to do, in their view, is to keep reducing the “burden” of having children among people who currently want them, in a constant race against (and yet for) progress.

One is led to wonder how low both actual and opportunity costs can go. Can they go so low that “enough” children will be born to stabilize global population? The authors have nothing to say on this point, because they don’t take the social contradictions between fertility and progress seriously. The book faces this problem especially in its discussion of fertility and feminism. Spears and Geruso insist that gender egalitarianism is perfectly compatible with replacement-level fertility. In fact, they venture that gender “fairness might be the only way to stabilize the population.” Yet their evidence is spare and unconvincing. The authors offer the United States between 1975 and 2010 as a “proof of concept.” During this period both gender equality and the fertility rate rose together. Rising female employment, a falling gender wage gap, more female education, more female professionals and leaders, more legal equality, and more babies! Yet Spears and Geruso conveniently ignore the preceding and following periods. Rising gender egalitarianism in the 1960s and early 1970s coincided with the steepest fertility fall in U.S. history. Progress in gender egalitarianism since 2010, whether in wages or educational attainment or seats on the Supreme Court, is likewise concurrent with falling fertility.

The authors also ignore the key question of population stabilization and how to reach it. Over the thirty-­five years in question, only two (2006 and 2007) saw above-replacement fertility rates—and that was due less to feminism than to unusually high fertility among young Hispanic women, particularly recent immigrants. “Fairness” also has a poor fertility track record internationally. The four large Nordic countries, the most gender-­egalitarian in the world, now have total fertility rates in the “very low” range, below 1.5. Excepting two years in the early 1990s in Sweden, they have not been above replacement rate in more than fifty years.

Though progress and gender egalitarianism are values Spears and Geruso are keen to defend, the authors’ most basic commitment is to individual choice. Not only is it their supreme value; in their view, it is also the fundamental cause of human fertility. The authors demonstrate, with good evidence, that “population control has never controlled the population,” at least not significantly over the long run. Neither communist China’s attempts to drive fertility rates down nor communist Romania’s attempts to drive them up accomplished anything more than short-term effects, at the cost of tremendous human suffering. Thanks to universal “socioeconomic development,” from urbanization to modernity to the waning of patriarchy, no power can change population at mass scale against the combined choices of billions of individual women. The authors are so careful not to tread upon free choice that they repeatedly affirm the freedom not to have children as much as the freedom to have them. Thus, all we can—and, in their view, should—do is “make it easier to choose children.”

Who will do this work of easing? According to Spears and Geruso, “humanity” will. Throughout After the Spike there are only two actors: the individual, who chooses; and humanity, which is tasked with enabling individual choice. Not even states—much less families, schools, clubs, religious organizations, neighborhoods, voluntary organizations, the media, or political parties—are tapped for a meaningful role. There is only “humanity,” the great “we” who hold “shared responsibility” for the future, because “responding to global depopulation is going to have to be something that people do together.”

This is a deeply unsatisfying answer. Humanity is not an actor. There is no global polity with an ability to aggregate and express the collective will of the entire human population. Of course, it may be that the appeal to “humanity” is not meant to be persuasive. It allows the authors to cultivate an aura of doing something, without engaging in a discussion of politics. They thus avoid questions of the exercise of power through strong cultural norms, taxation, regulation, or law—all of which would entail a violation of free choice. At the end of the book the authors cannot even muster a call for a personal commitment to reversing population decline by getting married, starting a family, or adding one more child. Instead the reader is offered vaguely social-policy-oriented slogans to “aspire bigger,” “join the conversation,” and “get started.”

But can the bearing and raising of children be made cheaper than all the possible low-fertility adult lifestyles that, thanks to progress, are now on offer? What if driving down the opportunity cost of having children simply isn’t enough? After all, Spears and Geruso have given us good reason to believe it isn’t. Fertility rates have been declining for centuries, and there is no invisible hand guiding human populations to a stable equilibrium. Being liberals, the authors simply assume that nature and tradition will drive the reproduction of society. But as the sociologist Anthony Giddens has argued, contemporary Western societies live after nature and after tradition. We no longer accept either necessity or fate. We refuse to believe we are the subjects of any power beyond the reach of individual or collective human choice. From a liberal perspective, of course, this is progress, born of our technologies, from airplanes to genetic engineering to birth control. As such technologies spread across the globe, all people come to live with the same autonomy from nature and tradition. And with nothing compelling us to choose children, the evidence strongly indicates that we won’t. At least, we won’t choose enough of them to stop the global population from running down the steep slope of the spike as rapidly as we ran up it.

The way in which humanity addresses low fertility and population decline will be much the same as the way we have already addressed climate change. The great projects to stop atmospheric CO₂ concentrations at 350 parts per million or limit temperature increases to +1.5°C from pre-industrial levels have already failed. Instead, individual governments and industries have pursued their own divergent interests while working at the margins to develop “green” alternatives—even as global fossil fuel consumption, thanks to technological progress, continues to increase. As low birth rates persist, some governments will lean heavily on immigration, while others will choose capital investments to compensate for labor shortages. Many policies for radically lowering the cost of bearing and raising children will be tried. Some will succeed on the margins, but most will not. Societies will adapt to their own distinctive combinations of rapid aging, mass immigration, urban population concentration, and peripheral area depopulation.

This process won’t continue forever. Our future is not extinction. Low fertility and population decline contain the seeds of their own destruction. Spears and Geruso show that “progress comes from people.” A future of fewer people will therefore produce a future of less progress. If population decline is steep enough, progress will halt, thus eliminating the force that undermines human fertility. Five billion humans—half the number at the top of the spike—won’t build lunar bases, use room-temperature superconductivity, reverse aging, or merge with AI. We might even lose many technologies, institutions, and cultural practices that are dependent on complex global systems. Then nature and tradition will return, and with them the individual motivation and social organization necessary for human reproduction.

No one can say when it will occur. All we can know is that that world will be quite different from our own. It will likely be a world that sees its own future not in the advancement of individual autonomy, but in the fruitfulness of its people. 

Image by theodoritsis, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.

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The Catholic Church never condemned the theory of evolution nor came close to doing so. One might have expected otherwise: Many of the factors that had led to the Galileo fiasco two centuries earlier were present again. Darwin, like Galileo, was proposing a radical theory that struck many people as absurd—and that seemed contrary to the “plain meaning” of certain scriptural verses as they had generally been construed. Both theories were at first controversial even among scientists and faced weighty scientific objections, both observational and theoretical, which could not be resolved until decades later. Both theories contradicted aspects of the Aristotelianism that prevailed among Catholic theologians. Finally, both Galileo and Darwin promulgated their theories at times when the Church faced powerful challenges to her credibility and authority, as a result of which her doctrinal defense mechanisms were on high alert. Even if the Vatican’s condemnation of Galileo did not formally and irrevocably commit the Church doctrinally, it put the Church, for a time, on the wrong side of a scientific issue. The same could easily have happened with On the Origin of Species.

Indeed, in some ways, the circumstances facing the theory of evolution were even less auspicious than those Galileo contended with. Galileo’s offending ideas, after all, concerned astronomy, which ­Cardinal Bellarmine admitted at the time pertained to the faith only “incidentally,” whereas the theory of evolution, as applied to human beings, concerned matters of the highest theological importance, such as the nature of man and the doctrine of original sin. And whereas in Galileo’s day no one was using heliocentrism to attack Christianity and virtually all scientists were Christians, by the late nineteenth century religious skepticism and scientific materialism had gained many adherents, and evolution was being used as a cudgel against religion. As a result, many Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, were disposed to be deeply suspicious of the new ideas and the people who advocated them.

And yet, no condemnation by the Catholic Church ever came. In fact, the universal magisterium of the Church said nothing about evolution until 1950, more than ninety years after Darwin published his Origin of Species. Part of the reason for this caution, no doubt, was that Church authorities were keenly aware that science had long since vindicated heliocentrism and they had no desire to repeat past mistakes. Moreover, discoveries in geology and paleontology in the preceding century had shown that both the planet and the life upon it were of much greater antiquity than a literal reading of Genesis would suggest. This had a strong impact, since it was an accepted principle in the Catholic Church, at least since St. Augustine, that Scripture should not be read in a way contrary to what is known with certainty from reason and experience. Even so, the Church’s forbearance with regard to evolution is remarkable.

The full story of how the Church did react to the theory of evolution is told in a fine new book by Kenneth W. Kemp, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. The Origins of Catholic Evolutionism, 1831–1950 is a monumental work of scholarship: massively researched, comprehensive, nuanced, restrained in judgment, and clearly written. Its focus is on the ideas of the many Catholic scientists, theologians, and philosophers who either advocated evolutionism in some form or at least defended its ­compatibility with Catholic belief, and on how their ideas were received within the Catholic Church and by her magisterium. Kemp seems intimately familiar with the vast body of primary sources, from the writings of the Catholic evolutionists and compatibilists themselves to discussions of their ideas in ­contemporary Catholic periodicals, encyclopedias, theological textbooks, and internal Vatican deliberations.

If there was one key factor in the Church’s restraint, it would seem to be the prudence of the popes of that era with regard to natural science. The reigning pope when Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859 and The Descent of Man in 1871 was Pius IX, who famously denounced eighty errors of the modern world in his 1864 Syllabus Errorum, and yet not one of the eighty concerned evolution. Nor was evolution mentioned, directly or indirectly, in the decrees of the First Vatican Council, which Pius IX convoked in 1869.

The next four popes, including the fiercely anti-Modernist Pius X, likewise made no pronouncements about evolution. In the case of Pius IX’s immediate successor, Leo XIII, the reason can be guessed from a comment made in a private letter in 1892, quoted by Kemp:

There are restless and peevish spirits who press the Roman Congregations to pronounce on matters that are still uncertain. I am opposed to that; I will stop them because it is not necessary to prevent scholars from doing their work. One must give them the time to suspend judgment or even to make a mistake. Religious truth can only gain from that. The Church will always be in time to put them on the right road.

Though there was no shortage of “peevish spirits” in the Church who wanted to see evolution condemned root and branch, they were by no means predominant. There was a wide spectrum of attitudes within the Church at all levels, with regard both to evolution as a scientific ­theory and to the philosophical and theological issues that it raised.

Some (under the influence of Aristotelian biology and metaphysics) thought the evolution of species was impossible. Others thought the scientific evidence for some evolutionary change was strong but doubted whether it could have produced the great qualitative differences that exist between plants and animals or among kinds of animals. Still others were open to the idea of the common ancestry of all living things on earth but drew the line at man himself, either because they found the idea of an animal ancestry for man “repugnant” or because they thought Genesis 2:7 taught that God had formed the first human body directly from the dust of the earth. And finally, there were many who had no such reservations but agreed with the English biologist and Catholic convert St. George Mivart (“St. George” being his given name), who in On the Genesis of Species (1871) defended the idea of a natural evolution of species, all the way up to and including the human body, as “perfectly consistent with the strictest and most orthodox Christian theology.” Here the distinction between the human body and soul is crucial. No Catholics, whether scientists or theologians, were arguing that evolution, or any purely material process, could produce the human spiritual soul, with its powers of intellect and will. All agreed on the metaphysical impossibility of that, and on the Catholic teaching that the spiritual soul is directly created by a supernatural act, not only in the first human beings, but in every human being.

Though many Catholics denied or doubted Darwin’s theory, or aspects of it, on ­scientific, philosophical, or theological grounds, few theologians thought that the idea of evolution of species was per se contrary to Scripture. Writing in the influential Catholic journal the Dublin Review in 1896, Fr. David Fleming, OFM (later to be secretary to the Pontifical Biblical Commission), wrote, “the great majority of Catholic theologians hold . . . that evolution in itself is not excluded by the text of Genesis.” Nor was it considered by most ­theologians to be contrary to the Catholic faith. As early as 1868, we find St. John Henry Newman writing in a letter:

We do not deny or circumscribe the Creator . . . if we hold that He gave matter such laws as by their blind instrumentality moulded and constructed through innumerable ages the world as we see it. If Mr Darwin in this or that point of his theory comes into collision with revealed truth, that is another matter—but I do not see that the principle of development, or what I have called construction, does.

Among theologians and Church authorities, doctrinal concerns were focused primarily on the origin of man, and in particular how the bodies of the first humans came to be. Some theologians argued that it was authoritative Church teaching (even if not de fide) that Adam’s body was created directly and ­immediately from the dust of the earth. For example, in a review of Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) in the Dublin Review, Fr. John Cuthbert Hedley, OSB (who was later made bishop), wrote:

It is not contrary to Faith to suppose that all living things, up to man exclusively, were evolved by natural law out of minute life-germs primarily created, or even out of inorganic matter. On the other hand, it is heretical to deny the separate and special creation of the human soul; and to question the immediate and instantaneous (or quasi-instantaneous) formation by God of the bodies of Adam and Eve—the former out of inorganic matter, the latter out of the rib of Adam—is, at least, rash, and, perhaps, proximate to heresy.

On the other hand, Newman wrote in a letter to Edward Pusey in 1870:

‘All are dust’—Eccles iii, 20—yet we never were dust—we are from fathers, why may not the same be the case with Adam? I don’t say that it is so but if the sun does not go round the earth and the earth stand still, as Scripture seems to say, I don’t know why Adam needs to be immediately out of dust.

Many theologians were willing to concede that natural processes, including evolution, may have played a large role in the formation of the first human bodies, but some of them thought that direct divine intervention would also have been required to make those bodies capable of receiving a spiritual soul.

The numerous complex issues concerning evolution and the contending views about them were vigorously, but civilly, debated in many Catholic fora, both popular and scholarly, over many decades. Kemp quotes a passage from H. L. Mencken that gives an interesting glimpse of this. In commenting on the Scopes Trial of 1925, Mencken, no friend of any religion, wrote:

The current discussion of the Tennessee buffoonery, in the Catholic and other authoritarian press, is immensely more free and intelligent than it is in the evangelical Protestant press. In such journals as the [Commonweal], the new Catholic weekly, both sides were set forth, and the varying contentions are subjected to frank and untrammeled criticism. Canon de Dorlodot whoops for Evolution; Dr. O’Toole denounces it as nonsense. . . . The [Commonweal] itself takes no sides, but argues that Evolution ought to be taught in the schools—not as an incontrovertible fact but as a hypothesis accepted by the overwhelming majority of enlightened men. The objections to it, theological and evidential, should be noted, but not represented as unanswerable.

Of course, limits on freedom of discussion among Catholics could be placed by the Roman Congregations, specifically the Congregation of the Index of Prohibited Books (which existed in one form or another from 1559 to 1966), the Pontifical Biblical Commission (founded in 1902), and the Holy Office (called the Sacred Roman and Universal Inquisition from 1542 until 1908, and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith after 1965). It was the Congregation of the Index that was most active with regard to evolution, especially in the 1890s, when it leaned decidedly against ­evolutionary ideas. However, unlike the Holy Office, it was not empowered to issue doctrinal pronouncements or condemnations, but only to act against specific books, generally by listing them on the Index without publicly stating its reason for doing so.

Though some books written by advocates of evolution were placed on the Index, it was generally for reasons other than the author’s advocacy of evolution: Some of these books were either explicitly anti-religious or atheistic and ­materialistic in outlook; others were reductive in their philosophical anthropology or gave inadequate accounts of the difference between human beings and lower animals; still others proposed ­unacceptable theories about the inspiration of Scripture.

There were, however, two important cases in which the Congregation of the Index did restrict books for their views on evolution: L’Évolution restreinte aux espèces organiques (second edition, 1891) by Dalmace Leroy, OP, and Evolution and ­Dogma (1896) by John A. Zahm, CSC. What offended the Congregation about these two books was primarily their position on the origin of the human body, which was essentially that of Mivart, namely that a Catholic could hold that the first human bodies (though not the soul) had arisen through evolution without any direct supernatural intervention. (It should be noted that Mivart’s own book was never censured, and ­Mivart was awarded an honorary doctorate in philosophy by Pope Pius IX after its publication.) In a key passage, Leroy wrote:

The human body is composed of matter and form. And the soul, its substantial form, comes directly from God, of course. But the matter, where does it come from? It comes from the slime of the earth, that is also certain, as the Church and tradition clearly teach. But was the human soul infused immediately into this slime, that is to say, without any preparation? And if it underwent preparation, as Genesis indicates, could it not have been evolution which effected it? That is the question that may still be asked.

Unfortunately, the Congregation thought otherwise, persuaded by a few “peevish spirits,” especially a Dominican theologian bitterly opposed to evolution named ­Buonpensiere (which, ironically enough, means “good thought”). Even in the cases of Leroy and Zahm, however, the Congregation decided not to put books on the Index but to command the ­authors—priests under religious obedience—to ­disavow them publicly and do what they could to remove them from circulation.

The issue came to a head in the 1920s and ’30s, when the Holy Office (which had not previously involved itself in evolution cases, but had recently been given responsibility for the Index of Prohibited Books) became concerned about the views on the evolution of the human body of the theologians Henry de Dorlodot, who died in 1929, and Ernest Messenger, whose 1931 book carried on Dorlodot’s work. After consultations that dragged on for several years, the Holy Office on June 10, 1936, voted eight to two that Messenger should be enjoined to withdraw his own book from sale. The next day, however, Pope Pius XI decided to accept the minority’s recommendation that the book be ignored for the time ­being; he also requested “an authoritative account of the scientific data of ­anthropological paleontology.” That report, which he received a year later, concluded that “our best attitude with regard to the question of the descent of man, so far as his bodily form is concerned, must be a patiently expectant one, with an evenly balanced mind, waiting till further discoveries and ­researches give us . . . a decisive result.” In the end no action was taken with regard to Messenger or Dorlodot. At no point did the Holy Office consider issuing condemnations of propositions connected with ­evolution.

The watershed for Catholic evolutionism came on August 12, 1950, when Pope Pius XII issued the encyclical Humani Generis, in which he wrote:

The Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred ­theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter—for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God.

Clearly implied is the position that Mivart put forward in 1871: that a natural, evolutionary origin of man at the bodily level is not contrary to the Catholic faith.

Humani Generis did not, of course, resolve the numerous important theological and philosophical questions surrounding evolution that have been discussed in the Church from Darwin’s day till now. Indeed, there has been relatively little official guidance for the ordinary Catholic concerning how to navigate these questions. Evolution is not explicitly mentioned, for example, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. And antagonism to the idea of evolution—even the evolution of plants and animals—has begun to seep into some corners of the Catholic Church.

An excellent new book by Daniel Kuebler, professor of biology at Franciscan University of Steubenville, titled Darwin and Doctrine: The Compatibility of Evolution and Catholicism, is therefore timely. In the first five chapters, Kuebler (who I should note is a fellow officer of the Society of Catholic Scientists) reviews the Church’s understanding of the relation between faith and reason, the history of her engagement with evolution, the ­theology of creation, and the ­science of evolution, helpfully clearing up common misconceptions along the way. Each of the remaining chapters addresses an important theological or philosophical issue raised by ­evolution.

Chapter 6 is about the role of “chance,” which many see as opposed to God’s providence. Kuebler notes that this is hardly a new issue or one that arose only in relation to evolution: “Any cursory glance at our individual histories reveals a ­staggering number of chance events upon which our existence is predicated.” But, whether in evolution or in everyday life, chance in no way detracts from divine providence, since 

a God who sustains creation at every moment, [and] who allows created things to act as causes in their own right, also sustains all the chance encounters that occur among created causes during the evolutionary process. Those chance events that we actually observe in evolution are his plan, although from God’s atemporal perspective, it’s hard to call such events “chance” at all.

Others think that chance undercuts arguments for design or purpose in nature, as if it rendered everything in nature adventitious. Kuebler notes, however, that the role of chance is greatly overemphasized in most discussions of evolution, which in reality is an interplay of chance and order. For biological or evolutionary processes to occur at all requires a great deal of order at the level of physics and chemistry, as Kuebler illustrates with many examples.He discusses the order in the properties of atoms, reflected in the Periodic Table, which allows them readily and spontaneously to form amino acids and the other building blocks of life. He shows how much of the structure of proteins follows from strong physical constraints on how they fold up into “alpha helices” and “beta sheets.” At a deeper level, the fundamental laws of physics appear to have many fortuitous features, called “anthropic coincidences” by physicists, that seem designed to make the existence of living things possible. All of this underlying order powerfully shapes evolutionary outcomes.

Kuebler argues that in evolution “it is the order that exists in nature that is primary, and it is the chance aspects of the process that are secondary. In fact, the chance aspects of evolution, by and large, operate in such a manner as to uncover” all the biological possibilities allowed by this order. This thesis is dramatically illustrated by the ubiquitous phenomenon of “convergent evolution,” in which evolution keeps stumbling upon the same designs and innovations over and over again. “It turns out that there is hardly a structure or behavior that one can find in living organisms that is not convergent.” The camera-like eye, for instance, has evolved independently “at least seven different times, including in vertebrates, cephalopods, marine annelids, gastropods and even jellyfish.” Meanwhile, “Ovoviviparity, in which the egg is retained within the female reproductive track prior to a live birth, has evolved over one hundred times [independently] in lineages as diverse as amphibians, reptiles, and fish.”

The next chapter deals with objections perennially raised by some Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophers against even the metaphysical possibility of species’ evolving. Such discussions can hardly avoid arcana, but Kuebler does a good job of explaining why these objections are not insuperable, making use of the insights of modern Thomists ranging from Jacques Maritain to Mariusz Tabaczek, OP. Indeed, he shows how evolution can be seen as a process by which the potencies inherent in the material world are actualized.

The next two chapters deal with the many complex questions relating to human origins and original sin. In chapter 8, ­Kuebler reviews both Catholic theological anthropology and the current state of our rapidly increasing knowledge of extinct hominins and early man. He introduces the crucial distinction between “biological humans,” that is, those who are human according to some physiological criteria, and what some authors have called “theological humans” or “true humans,” that is, those endowed with immortal rational souls. Whereas Homo sapiens as a biological species arose (as all species do) in a gradual way by the spread of new traits within populations, the appearance of beings who were theologically human must have been sudden, logically speaking, as one either has an immortal soul or hasn’t. And though genetic evidence clearly indicates that the ancestral population of biological humans was never less than many thousands, that does not necessarily imply that the first theologically human beings—those who “fell”—had to be more than two in number. Various authors, both Catholic and Protestant, have speculated that God might have conferred a rational soul initially upon just one pair out of an ancestral population of biological humans, as well as upon the descendants of that pair. There could be scientific as well as theological reasons to entertain this possibility. It would dovetail, for instance, with the suggestion of Noam Chomsky and Robert C. Berwick in their 2015 book Why Only Us that the neurological basis for the human language capacity might have appeared at first in just a few individuals.

In other words, the biological polygenism implied by the scientific evidence does not logically preclude the theological monogenism—the one pair of original “true humans”—taught in Humani Generis. It should be noted, however, that many theologians have suggested that Pius XII did not intend definitively to condemn theological polygenism. Rather than saying that Catholics must reject it, he said that they must not “embrace” it, a formulation that allows for suspension of judgment. And he gave as the grounds for not embracing it the fact that “it is in no way apparent” how a multiplicity of first true humans could be reconciled with the Church’s teachings on the fall of man and original sin; but he did not rule out its becoming apparent at some later time. The idea that Pius XII intentionally left the door open to further development is supported by Kemp’s recent study in the Vatican Archives of the preliminary drafts of that encyclical, which have only recently been made available to scholars. The preliminary drafts were more definitive in their rejection of theological polygenism than the final text.

Many Catholic theologians have acted as though the door that Pius XII left slightly ajar were wide open and rushed through it to embrace theological polygenism. Though doing so might help in resolving certain issues, such as whom the children of Adam and Eve could have married, it creates others, such as how to understand St. Paul’s statement that “by one man sin entered into the world.” Some caution seems still to be justified.

In chapter 9, Kuebler masterfully treats the subtle questions evolution raises about original sin and its consequences. He notes that some theologians have suggested that original sin is just the fact that humans have inherited from our hominin forebears the natural drives and impulses that often lead to aggression, lust, and selfishness. However, as Kuebler explains, those drives and impulses are not in themselves faults, nor the result of the fall of man. Rather, what resulted from the fall was the loss of those “preternatural gifts that allowed [the first true humans] to live in a state in which these drives were perfectly ordered [by reason] toward the good.” Similarly, he dispels some misconceptions about the sense in which death is a consequence of the fall. The human bodies that arose through evolution were just as naturally mortal as those of our animal ancestors but were conditionally granted immunity from death as a preternatural gift. Kuebler quotes St. Augustine: “It is one thing . . . not to be able to die, like [the angelic] natures which God created immortal, while it is quite another to be able not to die; and this is the way the first man was created immortal, something to be granted him . . . not by his natural constitution.”

Many have wondered how original sin can be inherited (or, in the words of the Council of Trent, acquired by “propagation, not by imitation”). It is surely not a physiological trait passed on genetically. But if it is a spiritual trait, how can it be propagated, given that the spiritual soul of a child is not produced by the parents but created directly by God? Kuebler helpfully explains that the fallenness we inherit is not a positively existing thing, susceptible of transmission, but a lack. What is passed on to us biologically is an animal nature with all its evolved drives and urges, raised indeed to the level of rationality by God, but without the gift of sanctifying grace and the preternatural gifts that were bestowed on the first humans and forfeited by them. “This is the state in which we find ourselves, saddled with the burden of attempting to order our desires without the aid of [those original gifts].”

At the end of his book, Kuebler presents a number of very interesting theological observations, which include some striking parallels between evolutionary history and salvation history. In neither history, for example, do we find a smooth triumphal progression, but rather vicissitudes, reversals, and even disasters that throw what had seemed to be the divine plan far off course. In evolutionary history, there were dead ends, environmental catastrophes, and mass extinctions. In salvation history, there were the sin of Adam, the Israelites’ lapses into idolatry, the Babylonian captivity, the destruction of the First Temple, and Judas’s betrayal. And yet, from failure, destruction, and death, new life arose.

Many Catholics and other Christians are just as unsure what to make of evolution theologically and how to integrate it into an orthodox Christian view of the world as were their predecessors in the nineteenth century. They will be helped immensely by these two excellent new books and the many fascinating discussions and analyses that they contain.

The post True Humans appeared first on First Things.

By the time we traveled to Washington, this painful preoccupation had faded. Georgetown was a disappointment, but we visited the museums and monuments, including the Lincoln Memorial on our last night in the city. It was late when we visited, the grounds were deserted, and the solemn grandeur of the perpetually illuminated memorial was a revelation. But even more revelatory was my reaction to the chiseled writing on the limestone wall. With my sensitivity to the problem of schism seemingly behind me, I was unprepared for the devastation I felt when I read the dedication—IN THIS TEMPLE / AS IN THE HEARTS OF THE ­PEOPLE / FOR WHOM HE SAVED THE UNION—and realized there had been no comparable person in Christendom.

In the year 1500, in Stourton Castle in Staffordshire, England, a third son was born to Sir Richard Pole and his wife, Margaret. A Plantagenet like his mother, and cousin to the reigning Henry VIII, young Reginald stood almost as close to the throne as the king himself, a double-edged privilege that would prove fatal to the Poles in the future. But in the early years of Henry’s reign, which augured stability and peace, the two families were bound by strong ties of affection. ­Reginald’s mother was a close confidante of the queen, as well as Princess Mary’s godmother and governess, and Reginald, whose father died when he was five, regarded his vigorous cousin with something like hero-worship. As for the king, he treated his young kinsman with indulgent affection, subsidizing his education at Oxford and later in Italy.

From an early age, Reginald was intended for the Church, but though he showed aptitude in that direction, he was a long time committing himself. His was a prolonged adolescence, underwritten by royal patronage and prestige. Despite the strong influence in his early life of men like John Colet and Thomas More, and despite the ominous contemporary challenges to the unity of the Church in Germany, Pole in his twenties was the kind of young Italian dilettante Erasmus dismissed as “more interested in literature than piety.” This began to change, however, when Henry, having showered his young protégé with the usual ecclesiastical preferments, looked for payback in the form of support for his divorce.

Playing for time, or perhaps genuinely unsure, Pole acceded to the king’s initial demands. In ­Paris, he was part of a successful diplomatic effort to enlist the faculty of the Sorbonne on the side of the king’s “great matter.” But Henry wanted more. In 1530, having recalled Pole to England, he offered him the archbishopric of York on condition that he declare his support for the divorce. A decisive meeting followed, during which Pole found himself literally speechless—an impediment he later attributed to divine Providence—and then, contrary to his intention to propose a compromise, he blurted out his opposition to the whole affair. Both men were shocked—the intensity of their shock testifying to the strength of their bond—and the king quit the room in a cold rage, leaving Pole in tears.

A few years earlier, testing the pliancy of the aristocracy, Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s ­notorious enforcer, asked Pole what he considered the most important quality in a statesman, to which Pole earnestly replied: concern for his sovereign’s honor. Ridiculing Pole’s idealism, Cromwell told him to read Machiavelli, which Pole did and pronounced the author of The Prince “an enemy of the human race.”

Now Pole put his idealism to work. He wrote a long, carefully reasoned letter to the king, explaining his opposition and buttressing his concern for Henry’s honor with politically astute observations and predictions. The letter was eloquent enough that Thomas Cranmer, when he read it, said that if it were shared with the people, “it were not possible to persuade them to the contrary.” In the same letter, Pole asked permission to resume his studies in Italy, but the king, uncertain how best to neutralize Pole’s influence (keep him close, or send him away?), delayed his decision for almost a year. In the end, he let Pole go, and even reinstated his allowance, perhaps with an idea of buying his silence.

So Pole returned to Italy, to Padua where he had been happy in his youth, and eventually to Venice. He would not set foot in England again for more than twenty years.

In Italy, in the 1530s, Pole was increasingly drawn into the great theological debates of the age, including the controversy over justification, or the right relationship between faith and good works. It is important to remember that ­Martin Luther was not an anomaly in his generation, but only an extreme interpreter of a question that was preoccupying the whole of Christendom. If, in the history of the Church, there have always been individuals who suffer from scruples, agonize over moral choices, and even despair of their salvation, in sixteenth-century Europe this was a collective condition, a general crisis of spiritual anxiety set in motion by a Church that for too long had emphasized works at the expense of faith—the agency of the individual at the expense of an interior dependence on God—as if men had not only to earn but in some cases even to buy their salvation. The pressure this distorted theology placed on the individual Christian, a pressure aggravated by the same Church’s catastrophic dereliction of her pastoral duties, triggered across Europe a determined search for reassurance, and effectively opened the door to Protestantism. But committed Catholics, too, suffered the same anxieties and sought out the same remedies. Encouraged by John Colet and ­Erasmus, Lefèvre d’Étaples in Paris and Juan de Valdés in Spain, concerned individuals gravitated to small groups to pray and read the Scriptures together, with a special emphasis on the letters of St. Paul.

When Pole moved to Venice, he became part of just such a small group, a circle of ­reform-minded Catholics which included Gasparo Contarini, the Venetian statesman who would become the point man for Catholic reform in Italy; Gian Pietro ­Carafa, the future Pope Paul IV; and the abbot of the Benedictine monastery in whose gardens the group gathered. The intellectual stature of these clerics and laymen notwithstanding—picture a small, contemporary Bible study, half of whose members would shortly be made cardinals of the Church—the goals of the group were less intellectual than spiritual. Fundamentally, what Pole and his contemporaries were seeking was personal assurance of the saving mercy of Jesus Christ, the one sure solvent for the anxieties of the age. In the case of Contarini, who had undergone a crisis comparable to Luther’s, relief had come at the hands of a sensitive priest in a confessional, a resolution that explains Contarini’s unshakeable devotion to the sacraments, and his firm conviction that the Church could be reformed from within.

Pole’s breakthrough experience was less obviously ecclesial. A monk known to us only as Mark facilitated “a release from bondage,” “nurtured [Pole] in Christ,” and “[separated] human works from divine, redirecting everything to its one source.” If one wishes to make sense of Pole’s approach to Church reform in the future—his idealism or naivete, depending on one’s point of view—one has only to refer back to these watershed, charismatic experiences. From this point on, the ­Holy Spirit was never an abstraction for Pole, but a living, breathing Person capable of reinvigorating and redirecting an entire life.

Meanwhile, in England, Henry had annulled his marriage to Katherine, married Anne Boleyn, and broken with Rome, setting himself up as head of the English church. Never rash in his judgments, and concerned for the safety of his family, Pole remained silent on these developments. But privately, it was impossible for him not to compare the so-called reformation in England—a cynical power grab motivated by lust and greed—with the idealistic, soul-searching movements he was familiar with in Italy. Whether the men he now spent time with were committed to reforming the Church or tempted to leave her, all seemed to him motivated by genuine consternation over her condition, as well as by sincere, urgent questions about salvation and the true means of obtaining it.

It probably didn’t hurt either, as Pole’s disillusionment with Henry intensified, that Contarini and Carafa, both of whom were old enough to be Pole’s father, were filling a place in his emotional life that had long been occupied by Henry himself.

But if Pole, in his thirties, was finally growing away from the king, the king was not done with Pole. Maddened by his silence, Henry demanded again, through intermediaries, Pole’s approval of his affairs, and again Pole delayed, until the news came that changed everything: the beheadings of John Fisher and Thomas More. In the aftermath of the murders, Pole’s temporizing came to an end. Horrified by Henry’s butchery (“You have destroyed the best men of your kingdom, not like a human being, but like a wild beast”), he wrote a letter to the king that turned into a three-hundred-page book, charging Henry with his crimes, urging him to repent, and, if he should not repent, threatening to petition the pope to excommunicate him and the English nobility to rebel.

But the letter was not only a personal attack on the king. It was also a trenchant analysis of Henry’s politics and a passionate defense of papal primacy, issues Pole had been turning over in his mind for a long time. It is no accident that the common title of the missive is De Unitate, or De Unitate Ecclesiae (On the Unity of the Church), given that, from this point on, concern for the unity of Christendom would become the defining passion of Pole’s life. Whether or not he was familiar with the patristic adage that schism leads to heresy—an adage borne out in England when Henry’s son, Edward, succeeded him—Pole would have agreed with it. The Church, he now believed, needed to be ­united as well as reformed, and indeed, only in unity would real reform be possible. The dedication in the Lincoln Memorial makes the same case, ­prioritizing Lincoln’s preservation of national unity over his opposition to slavery. Because if the American South had successfully seceded, by what authority could the North have prohibited slavery in her territories? Similarly, if men leave the Church, how can she preserve them in truth? Once schism has been accomplished, the time for persuasion is past. When Henry separated his people from the Church, even before outright heresy came to power in his country, he opened the door to every kind of lawlessness, from the plundering of the monasteries to the undermining of the succession itself. The truth of these matters, Pole insisted, had been manifested by the deaths of Fisher and More. Martyrs to Church unity and the papal authority that guarantees it, they were God’s letter to England: “Writings from the finger of God . . . written not with ink but with blood.”

Once the letter was sent, ­consequences swiftly followed. Within three months, Pole and his Venetian companions were called to Rome, where the newly minted Cardinal Contarini charged them with producing a seminal document on Church reform. A month later, with the pope overriding his objections, Pole himself was made a cardinal and a legate to England, where a serious challenge to Henry’s schism was gathering momentum in the North.

The legation, for the time being, turned out to be a dead letter, as the Northern rebellion was put down and Pole tried and failed to return home, prevented by European politics and the necessity of eluding Henry’s kidnappers and cutthroats. When Cromwell read De Unitate, he swore he would make its author “eat his own heart,” and when he failed to lay hands on Pole himself, he and Henry took their revenge on Pole’s family. Pole’s oldest brother and a brother-in-law were beheaded, accused of plotting to marry Reginald to Princess Mary and put Mary on the throne. Pole’s mother survived Cromwell, whom Henry executed 1540, but in 1541 she, too, was beheaded, accused of the same intrigue as her son. Short of a martyrdom like More’s, the price Pole paid for his principled stand could hardly have been higher. An orphan now as well as an exile, he was also, so long as Henry lived, a hunted man.

Increasingly, in the years that followed, the Church was Pole’s home. In 1541, he was made governor of a papal state and moved to Viterbo, where he and his circle became known as the spirituali, a group that saw no contradiction between loyalty to the institutional Church and a radical, Pauline understanding of grace. The outcome the spirituali prayed for and worked toward was the integration of the orthodox elements of Lutheranism into the life and teaching of a purified Church, an eminently reasonable outcome in their view, given that, in Pole’s succinct phrase, “heretics be not in all things heretics,” or as Contarini had written as far back as 1537, many vehement Catholics, “­believing that they . . . contradict Luther, actually contradict St. Augustine, Anselm, Bernard [and] St. Thomas.”

When Contarini died in 1542, Pole became the group’s de facto leader and a spiritual counselor to many, including wavering individuals whom he persuaded to remain in the Church. A conciliator by nature, whose mind worked in syntheses (fides in caritate, “faith expressing itself in good works,” was a favorite phrase), in the years leading up to the Council of Trent he came up with his own mediating formulae. He counseled one troubled mentee, for example, “to believe that she could only be saved by faith, but to act as if she could only be saved by works.” Ploughed up by his own sufferings, and all too familiar with the tragic consequences of schism, Pole was both a respecter of consciences and a loyal son of the Church. But though he was beloved by those closest to him, and revered by many at a distance for his integrity and virtue, he was also, as positions hardened and the rupture in Christendom deepened, regarded with suspicion by a potent few, a minority that eventually included his friend and mentor, Carafa.

It was in Viterbo that Pole’s leniency first came under attack, with some in the College of Cardinals accusing him of harboring heretics and others muttering that too few people had been put to death during his governorship. In the verdict of one historian, it was Pole’s misfortune to be a conciliator in an age increasingly uninterested in conciliation. But to be fair to his detractors, by the 1540s in Europe there were strong reasons for concluding that a reunion of Christians was no longer possible. At an ecumenical colloquy in Regensburg in 1541, Catholic and Protestant delegates actually came to an accommodation about justification, but then failed to agree about everything else: the priesthood and the sacraments, the saints and the contemplative life. To an observer capable of reading the writing on the wall, it was not doctrine per se but the Church herself that was the real sticking point—the question “of whom this doctrine should be learned.” Here, Pole lamented in ­hindsight, “begins the greater trouble and dissension in religion.”

A year after Regensburg, the spirituali suffered an even more devastating blow: the apostasy of two of their own, popular preachers whom they had trusted to hold the line against heresy in ­Italy. When Peter Martyr Vermigli and ­Bernardino ­Ochino abruptly fled over the Alps, anyone less idealistic than Pole would have been forced to reconsider his position. But Pole, still committed to the soft ­power of patience, refused to relinquish his dream of unity. The Inquisition may have been reestablished, with Carafa as its head, but until the Church officially decided the disputed issues, surely the question of heresy remained open? Between hardline Catholics and rebellious Protestants, with individuals on both sides suspecting him of disingenuousness, Pole remained noncommittal. Unwilling to back a solution that excluded the Lutherans, he was waiting for the Church to speak, on the record, at a General Council.

The wait was long. Not until December 1545 did the first session of the council on which Pole had fastened all his hopes finally assemble at Trent, and when it did, simply getting there posed the usual challenges for Pole. With Henry’s assassins still on his trail, he had to send a decoy ahead, disguised as a cardinal, while he himself took an alternate route.

On arriving, Pole was disheartened by the size of the gathering. Trent was supposed to be an assembly of the universal Church, to speak on momentous matters, yet here were only four cardinals, four archbishops, and twenty-six bishops! More to the point, where were the Lutherans? In Pole’s view, to address the issue of justification without first listening to the Lutherans was to court catastrophe. But in the meantime there was an even more fundamental problem he was determined to address. As one of the three papal legates in charge of the council, Pole presided over its opening, and in January a speech he had written was read aloud by a secretary, a speech that deserves to be as famous as ­Campion’s Brag.

The council’s first order of business, Pole had written, must be repentance, “an unveiling of our sins,” with the assembled leadership taking responsibility for “the very evils we have been summoned to mend.” All of the evils in question—the spread of heresy in the untilled fields of the Church, her scandalous pastoral failures, and even the endless, futile wars between the emperor and the French king—Pole laid at the hierarchy’s feet, blaming all on “our ambition, our avarice, and our cupidity.” Judgment had begun with the house of God, he warned, and without heartfelt repentance, the council would end in failure. Why? Because only on a penitent Church would the Holy Spirit descend, and bring about the reforms and reunion they were incapable of bringing about by ­themselves . . .

Expecting the usual platitudes and blandishments, and certainly not expecting such a passionate exhortation from the usually reticent Pole, the council was transfixed. There was silence, and then all stood and began to sing Veni Sancte ­S­piritus (Come, Holy Spirit), and for a brief moment, Pole must have allowed himself to hope that his warning had been heard. But the moment passed, business as usual resumed, and his appeal went unanswered.

In the weeks that followed, Pole persevered in the council’s business, influencing an important early decision on the interdependence of Scripture and tradition. But as the time approached for the question of justification to be taken up, with the Lutherans still absent, his health broke down. He carried on a little longer, imploring the council in June to consider the issues impartially, to listen to the Lutherans or at least read some of their works, and to pray ever more earnestly for the guidance of the Holy Spirit. But after this last, desperate appeal, having received from the Vatican permission to withdraw on account of his health, he left Trent and did not return.

Some historians, treating of Pole’s illness, have taken it at face value. Others have accused him of feigning and peevishness. Still others, while acknowledging the reality of his collapse, have used words like “psychosomatic” and “nervous breakdown.” But if Pole’s illness was psychosomatic, it was psychosomatic not only in the usual sense of the term. In Pole’s sensitive constitution, larger disturbances than personal disappointment were clearly at work. It might be most accurate to say that what was happening in Christendom was expressing itself in Pole’s person, even as the sin of schism­—in Christ’s words to St. Faustina describing his suffering on the cross­—“tore at [Christ’s] Body and Heart.” Whether Pole and his circle were right about the possibility of reunion is beside the point. Undoubtedly they were wrong, and things had gone too far to be retrieved—even if the Lutherans had been invited to the council, they would probably not have attended—but that would not have made the inevitable outcome any less devastating. Whatever was making Pole sick, it affected his heart, and left one side of his body—his left eye, shoulder, and arm—virtually paralyzed.

Interestingly, Pole’s close friend Alvise Priuli ­also suffered a breakdown at this time, leading one to wonder whether there were others who were similarly afflicted. Were there many ordinary Christians, in other words, caught between men like Carafa and Luther, who suffered, in their unrecorded lives, the traumatic disintegration of Christendom? One of the many reasons for becoming acquainted with Pole and his circle is the visceral reminder they afford us of the momentousness of schism: what it was like to live through it and, for some, like the spirituali, to have to find a way to go on living, on its other side.

The years following the council were difficult for Pole. His health improved but was never the same. Always obedient to the Church, he submitted to her decrees and ­eventually embraced them wholeheartedly, but the process of interior reconciliation cannot have been easy. Meanwhile, close friends died and opponents flourished. At the conclusion of a papal conclave in 1549—a conclave during which Pole came within one vote of the papacy and could have accepted the office by acclamation if he had not, characteristically, refused “to come in by the back door”—Carafa violently attacked him for his supposedly heretical opinions, an attack Pole easily refuted, but that left him shaken and depressed. His essential loneliness, he wrote later, was strongly brought home to him during that conclave, where he found himself surrounded by men with whom he had little in common, “neither country nor kindred.” Henry had died in 1547, but with Edward on the throne, a militant Protestantism was in power in England, and in any case, an attainder for treason and a warrant for Pole’s arrest were still in force. Relieved of the Viterbo governorship in 1551, and increasingly distant from the Curia, he disappeared for a time, only to turn up eventually at a Benedictine monastery on Lake Garda, where he is believed to have been discerning a vocation.

Only then, when his worldly career seemed to be coming to an end, did the unthinkable happen: Edward died, and Mary came to the throne. It was an outcome so improbable that Pole and many others judged it inexplicable apart from God’s will. After Edward’s death, his circle in London controlled the Tower, the Armory, the Treasury, and the Great Seal. They had put the Protestant Jane Grey on the throne and had the resources to defend her, while Mary, fearing for her life, had fled north with a few household servants. She was essentially alone in East Anglia, as the central government assembled an armed force of more the six thousand men to apprehend her.

Only the English people, at this point, could have put Mary on the throne, which they did, in a breathtaking reversal. At a time when the crime of sedition was punishable by the cruelest of deaths, gentry and commons alike rallied to her cause. The details of the shift in fortunes make for exhilarating reading, but for our purposes, the point is that Catholicism was not dead in England. On the contrary, in the country at large, Protestantism had failed to take root, and the joy that greeted Mary’s accession—the crowds that followed her to London, the feasting and the bonfires in the streets—were “hardly credible,” in the words of one ambassador. “From a distance the earth must have looked like Mount Etna,” another wrote. “I am unable to describe to you, nor would you believe, the exultation of all men.”

It was a joy that embraced Pole, too, when he finally made his way home. When he landed at Dover, more than a year after he was reappointed legate to England—the emperor was orchestrating Mary’s marriage to his son and feared Pole’s ­interference—his progress to London resembled a triumphal procession. As he traveled, Parliament repealed the Act of Attainder against him, and within days of his arrival a delegation representing “the whole body of the realm” declared the country “repentant of the schism” and asked to be received again “into the bosom and unity of Christ’s Church.” Accordingly, on the feast of St. Andrew, with the new king and queen and a representative assembly kneeling before him, Pole formally absolved England of “all heresy and schism . . . in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”

This happened at night, by torchlight, and again, the surging crowds in the streets, the tears and the joy, strained credulity. For Pole personally, the ceremony was undoubtedly the high point of his life. Not only had his country returned to the Church, he himself had been the instrument of her return. Moreover, his very instrumentality was the kind of ecclesial, sacramental charism he had sacrificed home and family to defend. If he had died that night, he would surely have died a happy man.

Instead, with the sacrament of reconciliation behind them, Mary’s and Pole’s real work began: the work of reversing the damage ­done to the Church under Edward. In his six years in power, in one of the largest government confiscations of private property in English history, churches and cathedrals had been stripped, altars pulled down, statuary and stained glass shattered, crucifixes and books ritually burned. The entire repertoire of sacred music had been swept away, vestments and consecrated vessels destroyed. The task of ­reconstructing the ­material world of Catholic worship was overwhelming, but there were political challenges as well—what to do, for example, about Church properties that had passed into private hands under Henry—and spiritual challenges above all, especially the need to educate and rehabilitate a demoralized clergy. Ever mindful of the scandalous capitulation of the episcopate under Henry, Pole wanted a new kind of bishop—­resident, pastoral, loyal to the pope, and orthodox—and a new kind of priest. He wanted sound preaching and ­effective catechesis, ­especially on issues dividing ­Catholics and Protestants. He wanted seminaries and vocations, and a return of tithes and First Fruits to the Church. Most of all, he wanted England’s return to orthodoxy to be an inspiration to a Christendom in disarray. If he had failed to prevent the breakup of the Church as a whole, he hoped to reverse the effects of schism in his own country. This was the opportunity England had been given, he exhorted Parliament in his first address: to be an example to other nations and a beacon of hope in discouraging times.

Indeed, what he and Mary accomplished in four years—with her Spanish husband often abroad, Mary met daily with Pole—was nothing short of astonishing. By the end of the reign, all of Pole’s projects were in hand: seminaries established and universities recalled to the faith, new bishops appointed and Catholic worship everywhere restored. The material restoration alone—the ­refashioning of crucifixes and books, vestments and sacred ­vessels—was an impressive achievement, if ­largely concealed from us by subsequent iconoclasm. Even the public burnings of outspoken heretics, the one horrifying stain on the regime, were effective, viewed as part of a larger, multi-pronged campaign to discourage dissent. In his revisionist history, Fires of Faith, which refutes dismissive assessments of Mary’s reign, Eamon Duffy goes so far as to call the burnings inevitable, since, with good reason, the regime identified hardline Protestantism with sedition.

But then why, if everything was going their way—hardcore heresy in retreat and vocations to the priesthood surging—did Pole and Mary fail? The simple answer is that Mary died, and ­Elizabeth reversed the restoration. But if Mary alone had died, Elizabeth, when she attempted to overturn what Mary had done, would have faced a formidable opponent in Pole, a man of sterling virtue who enjoyed widespread support, and in 1556 had been made archbishop of Canterbury. Not even Mary’s poor health and childlessness discouraged Catholics in those days, with Pole regarded as a strong defense against future reversals. It was not simply Mary’s death, in other words, but Pole’s death, coinciding with hers, that spelled the end of the Catholic restoration in England.

But there is more to say on the subject, because not only did Pole and Mary both die, they died on the same day. Secular historians pass over the ­startling coincidence as a curiosity, but for the Christian, believing as he does that God’s providence is the true driver of history—“All times belong to him and all the ages”—it is impossible to avoid an impression of divine judgment. Those burnings, in other words, that we are sometimes encouraged to excuse—280 all told, in less than four years—are we really to suppose that God approved of them? And even if it is true that no ruler of the time countenanced competing religions in his realm, and no pastor doubted that his first duty was to protect his flock from contagion, might not Reginald Pole have turned out to be the exception to those rules? Pole, after all, had resigned from the Inquisition because he could not approve of its methods. He was ­famous—notorious in some circles—for his patience and gentleness. He was a man who knew how to keep his own counsel and resist the pressure of his peers—a man of sorrows, accustomed to loneliness and misunderstanding. Moreover, like the Protestants whose strengths he appreciated, he was a man of the Scriptures, his thought permeated by the Bible, who might have countered the conventional wisdom that one brazen heretic can pollute a whole polity with the parable of the yeast in the dough, which proposes an opposite, if slowly fermenting, triumph of orthodoxy. He would have been familiar, too, with the parable of the wheat and the tares, which forbids premature uprootings and assigns the burning of the tares—the burning!—to the angels at the end of the age. Alone among his contemporaries, Pole had qualities that might have enabled him to rise above the brutal exigencies of the age, and when he did not, it is as though God simply said, No, not in this way will my Church be restored. Indeed God, who always takes the long view, was content to wait three hundred years for Catholicism to return to England, and then only as a minority religion.

Some early commentators, beginning with John Foxe, portrayed Pole as a bystander and blamed the burnings on Mary alone, but subsequent scholarship rendered that position untenable. More recent historians, while acknowledging Pole’s complicity, insist that there is no real contradiction between early and late Pole, and attribute the apparent discontinuity to the different responsibilities assumed by Pole along with hard power. Others have pointed out that the heretics Pole confronted in England were very different from the anguished waverers he had been accustomed to counseling in Italy. By the time he came home, English Protestantism was organized and defiant, publicly blasphemous and often violent: Animals dressed as priests were strung up in the streets, a preacher was knifed at Paul’s Cross and a priest attacked with a machete during Mass, and there were widespread outrages against the Eucharist. Horrified by the violence, and the belligerence that seemed to him devoid of all humility and charity, Pole may have judged his earlier self naive, and so resigned himself to the harsh measures the times prescribed.

But there are other possible explanations, which are part of a larger story. In the years following the first session of Trent, as the Inquisition gained strength, it turned its attention to the remnant of the spirituali. Ever since Viterbo, Pole had been suspected by certain clerics. But once the Church had officially spoken on the issues, at a time when “development of doctrine” was a formula far in the future, individuals who had come to the council with views the council subsequently condemned, found themselves subject to a retroactive, intensifying persecution. Rumors about Pole multiplied and spread, malicious fictions probably fanned by Carafa. On the advice of the pope, Pole chose not to defend himself, until, one Lenten evening in 1553, he and Carafa unexpectedly crossed paths in a church in Rome. A two-hour conversation followed, at the end of which Carafa declared himself convinced and confessed that he had been mistaken. Afterwards he assured his colleagues on the Inquisition that Pole was blameless.

In the aftermath of the reconciliation, it is Pole’s emotional reaction that is revealing. From the ­poignant intensity of his joy and relief—relief at being exonerated, and joy at being received again into the good graces of Carafa’s friendship—we can infer how great his suffering had been. Clearly, years of defamation and loneliness had taken their toll. In England a year later, when he found himself in an unaccustomed position of power, there may have been many reasons for his pursuing the policies he did, but psychological and emotional reasons were surely among them.

Pole was no coward. He had lived for years under a sentence of physical death. But after a lifetime devoted to promoting the unity of the Church, his own unity with her was now seriously imperiled. In 1557, after Carafa had become Pope Paul IV, he turned on Pole again, in a half-crazed, murderous frenzy reminiscent of Henry VIII. Revoking Pole’s legation, he tried to extradite him from England in order to feed him to the Inquisition, and failed only because Mary refused to let Pole go.

For Pole, the situation would have been unbearably familiar. (“Two men,” he wrote incredulously, in a long letter to Carafa, “I worshipped . . .”) But this time the sordid drama was playing out in the Church itself, with the reigning pope—the earthly father above all earthly fathers—determined to excommunicate him. And how did he defend himself? In the same letter to Carafa in which he compared him to Henry (a letter he never sent, because “Thou shalt not reveal the nakedness of thy father”), Pole defended his orthodoxy by pointing to his campaign against heresy in England, a campaign, in his words, entirely devoted to the protection of the faithful.

No longer, in other words, was Pole the person standing in the breach, trying to mediate antagonisms, accused by Protestants of being a Nicodemus (one who acknowledges the truth only by night) and by Catholics of being a secret Protestant. After long years in exile, he was home, with his own people: a late-life experience of belonging that may have affected him, and his decision-making, more than he knew. Certainly, in England, he became more like everyone else, not by choosing sides exactly, because in fact he had always chosen the Church, but by pursuing policies that made it perfectly clear which side he was on.

The irony is that when he became more like everyone else—when he set limits to what would be tolerated and pursued the worldly strategy of the burnings—he died. In this conclusion, there is something reminiscent of Moses, who, for a far less significant failure of fidelity—yet a failure of the same kind, a failure to manifest God’s holiness to the people in his charge—was prevented from entering the Promised Land. Pole, too, in England, died on the near side of a metaphorical Jordan, prevented from seeing any of the fruits of his labors.

He did not live to see, for example, the exemplary fidelity of his bishops, who, at the price of their freedom, exactly reversed the arithmetic of the episcopacy under Henry. When Henry ­demanded fealty, all but one bishop apostatized; under ­Elizabeth, all but one stood firm.

Nor did he live to see the influence of his reforms in England on the future of the Church as a whole. Ideas that were first entertained in a small Bible study in Venice ended by inspiring the final sessions at Trent. So many of the hallmarks of post-Tridentine Catholicism that we take for granted—seminaries above all, but also a strong papalism and an anchoring reverence for the ­Eucharist—were nurtured under Pole, in a country Eamon Duffy called “a laboratory for counter-­reformation experimentation.”

From subsequent generations, too, Pole’s achievements have been concealed. Compared with the posthumous notoriety of Henry VIII—a main character in an endless churn of Tudor ­entertainments—Pole’s posthumous reputation resembles an unmarked grave.

In fact, he is buried in Canterbury Cathedral, in the chapel of Thomas Becket, another saint like Thomas More who, for speaking hard truths to power, went out in a remembered blaze of ­martyred glory. Though he spoke truth with the best of them, Pole was not martyred. His ­assassins having missed their mark, he had to live on and on in the very different, fractured world his king bequeathed him. If he had been murdered, he would probably be counted a saint, having been spared the difficult decisions he faced in England.

But if he died an apparent failure, his legendary charity compromised and his dream of a Catholic England indefinitely postponed, he died at peace. Not even the news of Mary’s death and all it portended disturbed the tranquil resignation of his departure. In the anonymity of his afterlife—the quiet obscurity to which he has been consigned—there is something like the contemplative life he might have chosen, had the choice been his. Instead, in obedience, he tried to do what was asked of him. Now, at leisure, he contemplates what followed, in the strong light of the just judgments of God.

The post The Lonely Passion of Reginald Pole appeared first on First Things.

It dates to my time 
Of adolescence, 
And has the same near 

Emptiness, the same 
Lightness in the hand,
As those eclectic

Years do in my mind.
Still inside the box
(A gift, probably),

It appears never
To have lost the shape
That it was made in,

Never to have been
Broken in beyond
That first unfolding.

Deciding it’s mine,
Maybe the one thing,
Of all the jumbled

Things left behind here,
Still of some use, I
Take it down, empty

Out my overstuffed,
Ten-year-old trifold,
And begin the quick,

Unexpectedly
Mood-changing transfer,
Like a New Year’s kiss,

Of all its contents, 
Leaving out as much

As I can bear to.

I like the way it
Feels on my person,
Or, more precisely,

How it doesn’t feel—
Cramped, inflexible,
Full of so many

Unused bits that it’s
Constantly trying
To undo itself

In the dark—and how
Everything it holds
Flips open and shut

Softly, with a light
Flapping of its one
Leather wing, and fits

Easily inside
Any old pocket:
So pleasant a weight,

And of such softness,
That you feel it might
Simply slip away,

That you could lose it,
Having forgotten
It was ever there. 

The post The Wallet appeared first on First Things.

We would only work it all out much later:
that the glimmer of thin glaze over everything
was intended to represent her veiled vision;
to suggest the confusion creeping into her
consciousness, as she lowered her head, trying
to understand what must have been difficult—
almost impossible—to comprehend: this sudden
onset of the miraculous and how it would
come to such a glorious end—so unlike that
of the trapped rabbit, who had no way out.

The post Another Madonna appeared first on First Things.

We welcome letters to the­ editor. Letters appear two issues after the article to which they are responding. Letters under three hundred words are preferred, and they may be edited for length and clarity.

Letters responding to ­articles published in this issue should be received by February 2 for publication in the April issue. Send them to submissions@firstthings.com.

Sneer-Free History

As a forty-eight-year-old who graduated from high school in 1995, Trevin Wax’s “We Were Jesus Freaks” (December 2025) was pure nostalgia. Reading the article, I was struck with the impression that Wax and I grew up in the exact same evangelical subculture. What I appreciated most was Wax’s ­evident affection and gratitude for his 1990s evangelical upbringing. 

Further, it was refreshing to read an article about the culture and era that wasn’t full of sneers—we live in a world of C. S. Lewis’s chronological snobbery. We struggle to look at the past with gratitude. Criticism is the currency of our discussions of the past. I was waiting for the cynical, sneering ball to drop in the article, and it never did. As a recent convert to the Roman Catholic Church, I am deeply concerned about my own attitude toward my evangelical upbringing. I want my little Baptist church—where I was first exposed to CCM, mission trips in vans, and heavy doses of purity talk—to know how deeply grateful I am. It was that little church that showed me Christ. 

One note, I am not abandoning my evangelical upbringing. In fact, it was my evangelical upbringing that brought me to a fuller understanding of Jesus. As Wax put it: “that world shaped a resilient faith among young believers in a secular age, and many of us have benefited greatly.” Indeed.

Joe Gerber
meridian, idaho

Rationalizing Suicide

Thank you for publishing J. Mark Mutz’s probing inquiry (“The Death of Daniel Kahneman,” December 2025) of one man’s choice for assisted suicide in the face of the “pain and indignities of old age.” His analysis exposed the unreasonableness of such a decision, which is sometimes sought on the grounds that we want to leave for our posterity an image of us as happy and hale, “free from the deterioration associated with aging.” 

I would like to offer an ­experience that may help encourage us to withstand those pains and indignities. My grandmother was born in the early 1920s and taught me history from her many first-hand impressions. But she also taught me, from her deathbed in the mid-2010s, a philosophical truth that haunted me and shaped my attitude as a young man. On my last visit, soon before her death, she could no longer speak but could look knowingly at whoever was with her. She could not respond to what we told her, but she clearly received what we had to say and had a silent appreciation. In her quiet suffering, she bore witness to the fact that the quality of one’s interior life is one’s only sure property. I doubt I am unique in having such an experience, but my point is that the image we leave behind and the things we teach others are often beyond our conscious control. This fact is both humbling and relieving. Those in the last moments of life are still in God’s hands and can unconsciously teach us many valuable lessons. I share this experience because I think that in the face of normalizing euthanasia, more Americans will have to be vocally grateful about the great lessons those with little control over their image have taught them.

Michael DeFelice
stamford, connecticut

J. Mark Mutz wonders how Daniel Kahneman, who committed suicide, could have reasonably stated that his life was complete: “This is a perplexing statement. Can a life be judged complete before it is over? . . . This judgment is especially perplexing given that [Kahneman] purported to believe that his life was meaningless. . . . If Kahneman’s life was meaningless, how could it be complete? Completion assumes a whole: a story with a beginning, middle, and end . . . Yet Kahneman believed his life was somehow both meaningless and complete.” 

Let’s assume that meaningfulness is multidimensional insofar as it is concerned with the following three questions: What, if anything, makes life worth living? For what, if any, purpose am I created? How, if at all, does my life ultimately make sense? 

Given these three questions, Kahneman might have reasoned as follows before committing ­suicide: Within the finite temporal framework of this life, my life is complete and meaningful because it has contained sufficient happiness from my life’s work, marriage, and friends that made it worth living. Nevertheless, because there is no God and unending afterlife, my life is incomplete and meaningless because it lacks the purposeful and sense-making created framework that is required for the fulfillment of my desire for everlasting happiness. In short, Kahneman could have reasoned that it was the impossibility of continuing (and perfecting) the happiness that made his life in this world complete that ultimately made his life incomplete and meaningless.

Stewart Goetz
st. peter’s college
oxford, united kingdom

J. Mark Mutz’s sympathetic ­analysis of Daniel Kahneman’s suicide misses a crucial issue: Kahneman’s decision to kill himself, motivated by a desire to avoid the suffering that comes with old age, sets a terrible example for those who admired him and rely on his moral thinking to determine how to respond to challenges in their own lives. Human suffering is not restricted to the elderly but is part of the human condition itself. By offing himself, Kahneman set a nihilistic and hopeless example that others will be tempted to follow in the face of their own suffering, regardless of its source.

Kahneman’s suicide was a ­public act regardless of his intentions, which is why Mutz’s corrective—­secreted away in the last ­paragraph—was necessary. Mutz expressed the hope that his readers “will have the courage to withstand the pain and indignities of aging.” Life itself brings with it pains and indignities of all sorts that we must endure with courage for the sake of others who come after us.

Dexter Van Zile
boston, massachusetts

Living Evangelistically

I was thrilled to read Peco and Ruth ­Gaskovski’s review of my book, The Tech Exit (“Become A Low-Tech Family,” December 2025). I’m encouraged every time I hear of a family who has lived out a Tech Exit lifestyle themselves, testifying to the fact that it is realistic and possible. 

They are right to point out that if anything is unrealistic, it is the conventions of contemporary parenting. It’s true that I don’t get into addressing these deeper cultural shifts in parenting, which certainly impact how parents approach technology for their kids. And while I understand that a low-tech lifestyle will resonate more with parents who are more traditional or authoritative, as the Gaskovskis suggest, I didn’t want to let “gentle parents” off the hook either. All parents, regardless of parenting style, have non-negotiables, and the book aims to persuade every kind of parent that cutting out interactive screens and smartphones should be added to their list of non-negotiables. 

As a Christian myself, I deeply respect and agree with how the Gaskovskis are looking to ground The Tech Exit in a worldview that gives primacy to the domains I am recommending, namely, real relationships and pursuits in the real world. And I wholeheartedly agree that the primary imperatives to love God and love others are what should motivate Christians to reject technological innovations that interfere with these imperatives. When I speak to religious ­audiences, I always conclude by saying, the “Tech Exit is not the end goal in itself. It is a means to pursuing true human flourishing, the end which is ultimately found in a relationship with God and with others. We were made to know and love God and to love others made in his image. This is our highest calling. Reclaiming true human flourishing is the far greater task ahead of us, of which the Tech Exit is just one critical step on this path to true joy and ­fulfillment.” 

Why, then, did I not explicitly write that statement in the book? Because while the Tech Exit is an opportunity for Christian people to exhibit a different way of life evangelistically, we must also remember that people of other faiths are no less suspicious of this new technology. In one sense, the technology is against any faith in the transcendent. I ­wanted to speak to people of all faiths and even no faith, while at the same time hoping that ­Christians would be able to fill in for themselves how The Tech Exit helps them live out the primary imperatives of their faith. The ­Gaskovskis’ review models perfectly just what I was hoping Christians would conclude and apply from my book. 

Clare Morell
washington, d.c.

México Superficial

As I read through Todd Hartch’s recount of the conflict between Mexico’s liberal and Catholic elements (“México Profundo,” December 2025), I was continually struck by the notion that the past is a foreign country. This was perhaps exacerbated by having spent almost my whole life in the Yucatán ­peninsula—perhaps the least Mexican part of Mexico—so in a way, even my country in the present feels foreign.

Back to Hartch. What triggered this notion of foreignness was the stark contrast in intensity between the history retold in the article and Mexico’s current condition. While the narrative that “good liberals beat bad Church” may be found in public textbooks to this day, and with more emphasized as of late, one can barely discern any true animosity from politicians or the secular public toward the Church. (A sorry sort of “white pill” for those who fear the liberal takeover of public schools is how bad those liberals are at teaching anything and having it stick.) At the same time, I have a hard time finding any kind of religious fervor in the Catholic population that compares to the past. There are always the old ladies that help handle church matters and organize prayers, and youth organizations seem to be booming, but you don’t have to scratch too deep to get past the religious veneer that covers the social dynamics really fueling the interest of the people involved.

A stark example of this lack of intensity came during the COVID shutdowns. Churches were lumped together with “non-essential” business as venues that had to shut down for months or have drastically reduced capacity. The government didn’t prepare for a religious blowback, there was no reason to expect one. I remember being sinfully relieved that I wouldn’t have to get up early on Sundays for a while, but at the same time I felt a profound sense of discouragement from watching the Church willingly comply with the mandates of liberal science and liberal public policy. It seems to me that, paradoxically, the history of the persecution of the Church by the Mexican state may have been a source of health and even growth for the former. However misguided the motivation, if I had known of a local church refusing to close its doors in direct confrontation with the state, I know I would have been there every Sunday.

Álvaro Molina
merida, mexico

Lost in Ideology

R. R. Reno, in his excellent essay “Rome and Immigration” (December 2025), points out that the Catholic Church, and ­specifically Pope Leo XIV—taking his lead from Pope Francis and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB)—is lost in progressive ­ideology. The Catholic Church regularly fails to condemn the lawbreaking of illegal border crossings. 

The Church’s milquetoast response to lawbreaking originated with Pope Francis’s statement, which was reiterated by Pope Leo, that “our response to the challenges posed by contemporary migration can be summed up in four verbs: welcome, protect, promote and integrate.” In other words, illegal aliens who broke the law, many of whom committed and were convicted of crimes in the countries from which they came, must be received and allowed to take the jobs of legal citizens and given the respect that is due most appropriately to the country’s current citizens.

Recently, the USCCB repeated similarly ideological statements that support illegal aliens over hardworking and law-abiding citizens. The USCCB tempered the Vatican’s ideology with a more informed approach, indicating that border security and human dignity are not mutually exclusive and can coexist. But why must the focus be on the country that is the target of migration of illegal aliens? Taking the ­USCCB’s approach allows addressing the symptoms, signs, and results of a problem without even mentioning the problem itself! Pope Leo and the USCCB need to get their heads out of the ideological ether and address the root causes of the migrant and illegal alien problem, rather than writing prescriptions on how to treat illegal aliens. The source of mass migration is from where the migrants come and not the country where they ultimately go.

John A. Budny
redding, california

Fear and Trembling

I appreciated R. R. Reno’s “While We’re At It” comments regarding fearing God (December 2025). One of the consequences of the modern age has been the tragic loss of this sacred fear. The word has been either lost in interpretation or neglected altogether, which is ironic given all the phobias that beleaguer us. We seem to be drowning in so many worldly fears that neither money, power, nor science can eternally remove. We can’t bring ourselves to fear God, the only power in all of creation that can save us with his mercy.
Fear of the Lord should shock us with trembling, not with a passive awe as it is so often interpreted. It has to wake us up and align our very being with our creator. Nor is it a relic of the Old Testament; as Mary exclaimed, “His mercy is on those who fear him from generation to generation” (Luke 1:50).

Fear of the Lord is a gift of the Holy Spirit, like the other six: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, and piety. These gifts help us put God first in our lives, so we can love him with all our heart, soul and mind. What stronger gravitational force to this total love is there than the fear of the Lord?

Andrew Dymek
daniel island, south carolina

The post Letters appeared first on First Things.

warblers and sparrows, cranes and jays and gannets
cuckoos, grebes, and larks, waxwings, kinglets;

their tales of crouching, waiting, all their dense
conversations mostly made of silence.

The stories they like best, the ones they tell
and retell, are of failure: the common yellow-

throat whose scratchy song scared off the rare
woodcock, the white-tailed kite always elsewhere.

Truth is, I find it dull, and I despise
myself for that. How is it they can prize

so highly what’s not there, shape their lives
to welcome something that never arrives?

What grace is theirs, to know what silence means,
and see because of things they have not seen? 

The post Birdwatching appeared first on First Things.

Like shuffled paper or a ticket stub,
               the day should be unstuck from what’s around
                            it, loose and small, a button in a chest.

No pomp for one who’s walked this way since birth.
               It must be in the ordinary ground,
                            in simple clay and rock spill left undressed,
in ground the raw-boned face of winter earth,
                            yet blessed. 

The post The Burial of the Faithful  appeared first on First Things.