Normophobia by Mary Harrington | Articles | First Things

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2024/04/normophobia

Review: ‘The Case for Christian Nationalism’ by Stephen Wolfe

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/christian-nationalism-wolfe/

The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism by Aaron M. Renn | Articles | First Things

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2022/02/the-three-worlds-of-evangelicalism

Who exactly was “Nature’s God” to the American Founders?

From Professor Justin Dyer:

Full Article from Anchoring Truths

“Some of the Founders were Christians, some not so much, but nearly uniformly they believed God created the world and created nature, including human nature. They believed God exercised providence in human affairs, and one aspect of his providential care was in giving humanity natural knowledge of right and wrong. In short, they believed in a Natural Law and a natural lawgiver, something that Christians have long taught is presupposed by but not dependent on Christian revelation.”

19th Century Origins and the Power of the History of Ideas

“From Chapter 4 of Rosaria Butterfield’s “Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ” (Crown and Covenant Publications, 2015)

The concept of sexual orientation was first used by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), and its effect, if not intent, was to radically resituate sexuality from its biblical/creational context to something completely new: the foundational drive that determines and defines human identity. Nothing short of personhood was at stake. By defining humanity according to sexual desires and segregating it according to its gendered object, Freud was—intentionally or not—suppressing the biblical category of being made in God’s image, male and female, and replacing it with the psychoanalytic category of sexual identity. In both intent and language usage, Freud took aim at the Bible’s authority to diagnose gender and sexuality dysfunctions and prescribe solutions for them.”

Read the whole thing, from The Aquila Report.

Glenn Loury “Why do Racial Inequalities Persist?”

“

Over the last 40 years, I’ve explored why, notwithstanding the success of the civil rights movement, the subordinate status of African-Americans persists. Key to my thinking about this intractable problem has been the need to distinguish the role played by discrimination against black people from that played by counterproductive behavioral patterns among blacks.

This puts what is a very sensitive issue rather starkly. Many vocal advocates for racial equality have been loath to consider the possibility that problematic patterns of behavior could be an important factor contributing to our persisting disadvantaged status. Some observers on the right of American politics, meanwhile, take the position that discrimination against blacks is no longer an important determinant of unequal social outcomes. I have long tried to chart a middle course—acknowledging antiblack biases that should be remedied while insisting on addressing and reversing the patterns of behavior that impede black people from seizing newly opened opportunities to prosper. I still see this as the most sensible position.

These two positions can be recast as causal narratives. One is what I call the “bias narrative”: racism and white supremacy have done us wrong; we can’t get ahead until they relent; so we must continue urging the reform of white American society toward that end.

The other is what I call the “development narrative,” according to which it is essential to consider how a person comes to acquire those skills, traits, habits, and orientations that foster successful participation in American society. To the extent that African-American youngsters do not have the experiences, are not exposed to the influences, and do not benefit from the resources that foster and facilitate their human development, they fail to achieve their full human potential. This lack of development is what ultimately causes the persistent, stark racial disparities in income, wealth, education, family structure, and much else. (The charts and tables on this and the next several pages offer a glimpse of the magnitude of these disparities.)

In terms of prescribing intervention and remedy, these causal narratives point in very different directions. The bias narrative says that we need to have a “conversation” about race: white America must reform itself; racism must end; we need more of this or that, whatever the “this” or “that” is on the agenda of today’s race reformers. One hears this kind of talk, one reads these exhortations, in newspapers and other media every day.

The development narrative puts more onus on the responsibilities of African-Americans to develop our human potential. It is not satisfied with wishful thinking like: “If we could only double the budget for some social program, the homicide rate among young African-American men would be less atrocious.” Or, “If we can just get this police department investigated by the Department of Justice, then.…” The development narrative asks, Then what? Then it will be safe to walk on the south side of Chicago after midnight?

Meanwhile, the terms themselves—race and discrimination—are often bandied about without being rigorously defined. In a 2002 book, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, I sketched a theory of race applicable to the social and historical circumstances of the U.S., speculated about why racial inequalities persist, and advanced a conceptual framework for thinking about social justice in matters of race.[1] Because there remains so much confusion in today’s public discussions about race and racial inequality, I need to revisit that framework. Bear with me. The relevance of this conceptual excursion will be clear soon enough.”

Read the rest by getting the pdf below.

PDF of the Study Published by the Manhattan Institute.

The Peculiar Case of Liberalism in American Political History

How liberal were the founders?  Does the word “Lockean” capture it well?  What was the nature of any liberalism they embraced (or rejected)?  What had religion to do with any of it?  Insightful essay in Law and Liberty by James Patterson.  Excerpt:

Recently, political philosophers D. C. Schindler, Mark T. Mitchell, and Patrick Deneen have decided to assess the state of American liberalism and decide whether it is worth defending. In their view, it is not. In Freedom from Reality, Schindler argues that that liberalism has its foundation in the political philosophy of John Locke, and Locke’s philosophy is “diabolical” in its original Greek meaning of “divisive”—that Lockean liberty divides the individual from firm notions of the good, from other individuals, and from attachment to the created world. In The Limits of Liberalism, Mitchell laments how liberalism facilitates the abandonment of place and tradition, in which the autonomous individual senses no obligation to her homeland or even her family, but rather is a citizen of the world committed to personal consumption and identity politics. Finally, Deneen, in his sweeping Why Liberalism Failed, outlines how liberalism relies on pre-liberal institutions to further its ideological goals of technological, economic, and political liberation. Technological liberation frees the individual from physical limits of the body. Economic liberation frees the individual from constraints on satisfying any number of personal preferences or desires. Political liberation frees the individual from external authorities that condemn the improper use of technology or money.

Read together, the summary position would be this: the divisions inherent in Lockean liberty divided individuals from their world, giving them a false sense of freedom from their neighbors and compatriots, and directed them to dissolve communities for the sake of cosmopolitan ends of global capital and imperial redistribution.While Schindler, Mitchell, and Deneen have offered forceful critiques of liberalism, their arguments have shortcomings, and one of them will be the subject of this essay. The shortcoming is methodological. One problem with political philosophy is the tendency to overstate the importance of ideas and understate the importance of other factors, especially contingency and the role of political actors. As a result, liberalism becomes, as Samuel Goldman has argued, a Geist and critiques of liberalism become Geistgeschicten. In other words, liberalism becomes a kind of trans-historical political actor driving the behaviors and events in the world, which then requires describing all those behaviors and events in terms of the advancement of liberalism. While liberal ideas have had a powerful influence on contemporary politics, they are simply insufficient and too diverse to explain either individuals or their responses to contingencies. To provide some needful correction, therefore, I will put the three authors in conversation with the work of Philip Hamburger, who has chronicled the relationship between liberalism as its developed among leading individuals and institutions in the American context.

However, Deenan and other Catholic scholars make a mistake when they attribute either absolutism and liberalism to Protestant Reformers.  See Mark David Hall’s article here.

Read the rest here

Can political liberalism and religious liberty (accommodation) coexist?

Can political liberalism and religious liberty (accommodation) coexist?

Similar argument made in Smith’s game-changing book Pagan and Christian in the City: “The Supreme Court might soon address this issue. Four Supreme Court justices (led by Justice Samuel Alito) began 2019 by suggesting their willingness to revisit a landmark decision with stark views on this question. In the 1990 case Employment Division v. Smith, a five-justice majority (led by Justice Antonin Scalia) made it virtually impossible to secure, under the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause, religious-based exemptions to laws that apply to everyone and do not overtly or covertly discriminate against religion (what lawyers call “neutral laws of general applicability”). The Smith decision presumes a deep tension between religious exercise and the common good. In Smith’s view, the democratic process must almost always resolve that tension. Courts, therefore, almost always deny religious accommodation requests. Justice Alito and his colleagues, however, said Smith “drastically cut back on the protection provided by the Free Exercise Clause,” and effectively invited requests to reverse it.

Revisiting Smith possesses significant cultural salience. Many of today’s progressives, conservatives, and libertarians share — knowingly or not — Smith’s critical shortcoming: a failure to explain why religion in particular and religious exercise in particular should shape the common good, even when they go against the grain of secular visions adopted in law. Revisiting Smith provides an opening to address this shortcoming. The Court should take it, as this oversight puts the American tradition of self-government at stake.

Smith and many elements of the modern American left and right possess this shortcoming because they evaluate the social worth of religious pluralism against some set of liberal values that, in their view, should supersede religious duties. For Smith, the superseding value is majoritarianism: Religious pluralism is good when democratic majorities decide it is worth their solicitude. For progressives, religious pluralism is good to the extent it supports what law professor Mark Movsesian calls “equality as sameness.” Any religious practice, institution, or tradition that understands equality differently is publicly unacceptable. For some conservatives and libertarians, religious pluralism is good simply because self-expression is good. On this view, religious liberty deserves protection simply because self-expression deserves protection — nothing particular to religion here does any work. Finally, for other conservatives who dispute that the common good is served by diverse religious expression, religious liberty is part of the common good only to the extent it establishes a particular religion’s orthodoxy.

It is not surprising that what Stanford’s Michael McConnell called “the most thoroughly liberal political community in the history of the world” would strive to define even religion around liberal ideals — but it is problematic. Liberal democracy, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed, is “particularly liable to commit itself blindly and extravagantly to general ideas.” This is partly because liberalism is, as Samuel Huntington put it in Conservatism as an Ideology, an “ideational” ideology. It “approach[es] existing institutions with an ‘ought demand’ that the institutions be reshaped to embody the values of the ideology.” This “ought demand” is present in social-contract theory, and it poses a particular problem for religious liberty. More often than not, religious exercise is manifested in rituals and institutions that are prior to — and claim to outlast — political liberalism. Reshaping religious exercise around liberal values can therefore dilute religion.

The consequences of dilution are not limited to religion. As our founders recognized, diluting religious exercise poses a problem for political liberalism; self-government presupposes certain moral virtues that religion cultivates and liberalism does not. In a culture that does not appreciate a distinct contribution from religious exercise, engagement with religion, both personally and in public life will erode — along with the corresponding cultivation of religious exercise’s personal and public goods.”

Read the rest from National Affairs (and definitely read Smith’s book Pagan and the Christian in the City).  Smith argues that there has been and always will be a vying for supremacy between the transcendent religion of Christianity and the immanent religion of modern paganism.  Compromises in the name of political liberalism are at best short-lived and at worst preferential towards modern paganism.  Any worldview that finds meaning and purpose and epistemological grounding in this world rather than another will always marginalize the transcendent religionists to the outer periphery of society (it’s a logical necessity of sorts).

Bernie Sanders and American Laicite

Love this post from my fb friend David Koyzis, whose book Political Visions and Illusions (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001HL0E0M/ref=dp-kindle-redirect…) I continuously recommend to students. It touches directly on the subject matter of my own research with Mike Lavender on a church/state phenomena we think America is currently experiencing; a concept we call “American Laicite” (the tendency in American political and social institutions to depart from either a strict separation model, where religion is excluded from public life or accommodationist model, where religion is indiscriminately included in public life, towards a selective accommodationist model where religion is included, and can avoid chastisement or penalties, so long as it accommodates itself to a higher creed driven by an alternate secular, humanist, or progressive worldview or sorts.

During last year’s presidential election campaign, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a latecomer to the Democratic Party, positioned himself as a voice for the downtrodden against big moneyed interests, something that many Americans, especially the young, found deeply attractive. In so doing, Sanders drew on a deep tradition of social justice with biblical roots, as evidenced in his powerful address to Liberty University two years ago. Recognizing that “there is no justice when so few have so much and so many have so little,” he laudably demonstrated his concern for the economically disadvantaged in our society. However, judging from his questioning last week of Russell Vought, the President’s nominee for deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, Sanders appears not to understand that there is no justice where religious liberty lacks protection.

At issue was a blog post Vought had written as an alumnus of Wheaton College, a Christian university near Chicago, in response to a controversy involving one of its faculty members. The offending passage was this: “Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology. They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ his Son, and they stand condemned.” While it may sound harsh to a nonchristian, Vought was in no way suggesting that Muslims cannot be good citizens or should be treated severely by the governing authorities. He was simply reiterating what the vast majority of Christians have believed for two millennia: that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, and that no one comes to the Father except through him (John 14:7).

But this appears not to satisfy Sanders, who has shown himself in this respect to be a good student of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), the Genevan political philosopher who famously proposes an ostensibly tolerant civil religion at the end of Book IV of his Social Contract.

There is therefore a purely civil profession of faith of which the Sovereign should fix the articles, not exactly as religious dogmas, but as social sentiments without which a man cannot be a good citizen or a faithful subject. While it can compel no one to believe them, it can banish from the State whoever does not believe them — it can banish him, not for impiety, but as an anti-social being, incapable of truly loving the laws and justice, and of sacrificing, at need, his life to his duty. If any one, after publicly recognising these dogmas, behaves as if he does not believe them, let him be punished by death: he has committed the worst of all crimes, that of lying before the law.

The dogmas of civil religion ought to be few, simple, and exactly worded, without explanation or commentary. The existence of a mighty, intelligent and beneficent Divinity, possessed of foresight and providence, the life to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked, the sanctity of the social contract and the laws: these are its positive dogmas. Its negative dogmas I confine to one, intolerance, which is a part of the cults we have rejected.

Those who distinguish civil from theological intolerance are, to my mind, mistaken. The two forms are inseparable. It is impossible to live at peace with those we regard as damned; to love them would be to hate God who punishes them: we positively must either reclaim or torment them. Wherever theological intolerance is admitted, it must inevitably have some civil effect; and as soon as it has such an effect, the Sovereign is no longer Sovereign even in the temporal sphere: thenceforce priests are the real masters, and kings only their ministers.

One needn’t dig too far beneath the surface to discern rather quickly that Rousseau’s offer of tolerance could scarcely be more intolerant. Anyone who believes that God has revealed himself in specific ways to specific people and that even the state derives its authority from God cannot be a good citizen of the republic.

Read the rest

On being a Southener

By Barton Swaim at New Criterion:

Two-thousand-eleven marked the 150th anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter, the Battle of Bull Run, and the beginning of America’s bloodiest war. In Charleston and in fields outside Manassas, Virginia, war re-enactors put on lavish displays of martial conflicts. Essays and articles on the War appeared in all the major newspapers, books on the conflict were widely reviewed, and PBS again ran Ken Burns’s documentary series The Civil War, provoking at least one observer to express irritation that the Confederacy lends itself so easily to romantic portrayal. Once again (or so I imagine) people found themselves asking, perhaps with the red and blue map of Electoral College results in the back of their minds: Who are these Southerners? Are they the racists and political reactionaries we’ve always suspected them to be? Are they Americans in the deepest, most genuine sense, or is the South some aberration about which we ought to be embarrassed?

Jacques Barzun once remarked that Darwin’s Origin of the Species is one of those books on which people have always felt free to discourse without having read it. That’s true of the American South, too, and has been for a long time. “In the Southern states, gaming, fox hunting and horse-racing are the height of ambition; industry is reserved for slaves”: so wrote a twenty-six-year-old Noah Webster who had never been further south than New York. Exactly that sort of confident ignorance has long animated the American entertainment industry. Every Southerner has a favorite complaint: the apparent inability of film and television producers to find actual Southerners to play the part of Southerners; the routine association of the South with incest and abject stupidity; the location of all forms of bigotry in the South, even those for which Southerners aren’t known; and of course the amazingly resilient idea that the Civil War was merely and exclusively about racism—a belief lampooned by Michael Scott (played by Steve Carell) in the television comedy “The Office.” Defending himself against imputations of racism, Michael remarks, “As Abraham Lincoln once said, ‘If you are a racist, I will invade you with the North.’”

Southerners themselves, or at least the writers and intellectuals among them, have long been preoccupied with defining Southern identity—often with results that confuse rather than clarify. Before the War, a number of influential Southern writers circulated the bogus notion that Southerners were descended from Cavaliers (mannerly, aristocratic, unmindful of money) and Northerners from Puritans (earnest, plain in habits, inclined to moneymaking pursuits). After the War, a disparate variety of journalists, industrialists, and politicians promoted something they called the “New South,” a region that would foster economic and cultural vibrancy without giving in to the worship of Mammon (or, for some, to racial equality). It was against this latter collection of hopes and ideas that the Agrarian intellectuals reacted in I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. The twelve authors of that book—among them Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Frank Owsley—inveighed against the project, as they felt it to be, to make the South more like the North: more vulnerable to the cultural volatility and spiritual shallowness of an unregulated economy, more hospitable to radical individualism.

Read the rest

Perhaps not all that was lost in the Lost Cause was a good riddance

Form Dr. Boyd Cathey:

it was a war between two ideas of government, and, in reality, two ideas of history and progress.  For the North, which now controlled the Federal government, it was a war to suppress what was seen as a rebellion against constituted national authority. For the states of the Southern Confederacy, it was a defense of their inherited and inherent rights under the old Constitution of 1787, rights that had never been ceded to the Federal government. And, more, it became for them a Second War for Independence against an arbitrary and overreaching government that had gravely violated that Constitution.

Thus, at Appomattox were set into motion momentous events in the future of the reconstituted American nation.  With the defeat of the South, the restraints on industrial, and, eventually, international capitalism were removed. The road to centralized government power was cleared. But even more significantly, there was a sea change in what we might call “the dominant American philosophy.”

In the old ante-bellum Union the South had acted as a kind of counter-weight to the North and a quickly developing progressivist vision of history. Certainly, there were notable Southerners who shared the growing economic and political liberalism of their fellow citizens north of the Mason-Dixon Line (e.g, DeBow’s Review). Yet, increasingly in the late ante-bellum period, the most significant voices in the Southland echoed a kind of traditionalism somewhat reminiscent of the serious critiques being made in Europe of “the Idea of Progress” and of the deleterious effects of 19th century liberalism.

Read the rest

Why I Became a Conservative – Scruton

From the British Political Philosopher Roger Scruton:

I as brought up at a time when half the English people voted Conservative at national elections and almost all English intellectuals regarded the term “conservative” as a term of abuse. To be a conservative, I was told, was to be on the side of age against youth, the past against the future, authority against innovation, the “structures” against spontaneity and life. It was enough to understand this, to recognize that one had no choice, as a free-thinking intellectual, save to reject conservatism. The choice remaining was between reform and revolution. Do we improve society bit by bit, or do we rub it out and start again? On the whole my contemporaries favored the second option, and it was when witnessing what this meant, in May 1968 in Paris, that I discovered my vocation.

In the narrow street below my window the students were shouting and smashing. The plate-glass windows of the shops appeared to step back, shudder for a second, and then give up the ghost, as the reflections suddenly left them and they slid in jagged fragments to the ground. Cars rose into the air and landed on their sides, their juices flowing from unseen wounds. The air was filled with triumphant shouts, as one by one lamp-posts and bollards were uprooted and piled on the tarmac, to form a barricade against the next van-load of policemen.

The van—known then as a panier de salade on account of the wire mesh that covered its windows—came cautiously round the corner from the Rue Descartes, jerked to a halt, and disgorged a score of frightened policemen. They were greeted by flying cobble-stones and several of them fell. One rolled over on the ground clutching his face, from which the blood streamed through tightly clenched fingers. There was an exultant shout, the injured policeman was helped into the van, and the students ran off down a side-street, sneering at the cochons and throwing Parthian cobbles as they went.

That evening a friend came round: she had been all day on the barricades with a troupe of theater people, under the captainship of Armand Gatti. She was very excited by the events, which Gatti, a follower of Antonin Artaud, had taught her to regard as the high point of situationist theater—the artistic transfiguration of an absurdity which is the day-to-day meaning of bourgeois life. Great victories had been scored: policemen injured, cars set alight, slogans chanted, graffiti daubed. The bourgeoisie were on the run and soon the Old Fascist and his régime would be begging for mercy.

Read the rest here from the New Criterion

Two Americas

Gertrude Himmelfarb in her book One Nation, Two Cultures (2010) argued that America is comprised of two distinct cultures.  A traditionalist one (conservative, Puritan heritage) and a dissident one (counterculture of the 1960s).  She wrote:

As a minority, the traditionalist culture labors under the disadvantage of being perennially on the defensive.  Its elite — gospel preachers, radio talk show hosts, some prominent columnists, and organizational leaders–cannot begin to match, in  numbers or influence, those who occupy the commanding heights of the dominant culture; professors presiding over the multitude of young people who attend their lectures, read their books, and have to pass their exams; journalists who determine what information, and what ‘spins’ on that information, come to the public; television and movie producers who provide the images and values that shape the popular culture; cultural entrepreneurs who are ingenious in creating and marketing ever more sensational and provocative products.  An occasional boycott by religious conservatives can hardly counteract the cumulative, pervasive effect of the dominant culture.

A Taxonomy of Conservatism

From Peter Lawler:

Americans today are understandably confused about what it means to be a conservative. The Republican nominee, for example, doesn’t seem to be one. And the conservative movement seems to be as fractured as our republic. After this election cycle, conservatives are going to have rethink who they are and what they’re supposed to do.

Who will be there to lead the rethinking and realigning? Here’s a list of nine conservative factions or modes of thought around today. Consider this your beginner’s guide to understanding the rivals on the right and the issues that animate them. It goes without saying that this list isn’t complete, and you might identify with more than one group. That issue of identity has become bigger than ever over the past year. The advantage of living through startling and unprecedented events is that we conservatives have no choice but to reflect deeply once again about who we are.

1. Growth Conservatives

They are associated with the Wall Street Journal and the so-called big donors. They think the main reform America needs today is to cut taxes and trim regulations that constrain “job creators.” On one hand, they think that America is on “the road to serfdom.” On the other hand, they often think this is a privileged moment in which conservative reform—such as the passing of right-to-work laws—is most likely to succeed.

2. Reform Conservatives

These conservatives think that growth is indispensable and that it’s unreasonable to believe America could return to a time when global economic dominance and lack of birth dearth made possible unions, a mixture of high taxes and unrivaled productivity, and a secure system of entitlements. So they’re for prudent entitlement reform. They’re also for a tax policy that treats Americans not only as free individuals but also as, for example, struggling parents who deserve tax credits. In our pessimistic time, reform conservatives are also characterized by a confidence that nobody should ever bet against America, that we’re up to the challenges we face. Their intellectual leader is the think-tanker Yuval Levin, and they have the ears of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senator Marco Rubio.

– See more at: https://home.isi.org/confused-students-guide-conservatism#.V7heLTic2Fx.twitter

Is America drifting away from its Virginian – New England founding?

From Peter Lawler:

There were the original settlements — one in Virginia and one in New England. And ever since that time, you’ve had two conflicting impulses in American political life. The Virginians are all about liberty, as in Mr. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. And the New Englanders — the Puritans or the Pilgrims — are all about participatory civic equality through the interdependence of the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty. America works best when the Americans harmonize by curbing the excesses of both Virginia and New England. That’s what the compromise that was the completed Declaration of Independence, as opposed to Jefferson’s rough draft Yo, did. You see that in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which dedicated our country to the proposition that all men are created equal. And you see that in the rhetoric of Martin Luther King Jr. at his best. The Puritans, in general, tend to be too moralistically intrusive, to turn every sin into a crime. They’re an important source of our history of taking sexual morality very seriously, and for believing that American liberty depends on Americans sharing a common religious morality. They’re also the source of some of our most ridiculous and meddlesome legislation, such as prohibition (and, in some indirect way, Mayor Bloomberg’s legal assault on our liberty to drink giant sodas in movie theaters). On the other hand, the individualism of American liberty sometimes morphs in the direction of cold indifference to the struggles of our fellow citizens. Mr. Jefferson spoke nobly against the injustice of slavery as a violation of our rights as free men and women. But he wasn’t ever moved to do much about it. And today members of our “cognitive elite” are amazingly out of touch with those not of their kind, living in a complacent bubble. Puritans, you might say, care too much about what other people are doing, and they say “there ought to be a law” way too to often. But they’re free from the corresponding excess in the other direction: the cruelty of indifference.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/439404/teaching-american-government-tocqueville-virginia-puritan-new-england-liberty-equality

To Christianity from China: conform or else. To Christianity from American government: conform or else?

Broadly speaking, in China there are two versions of Christianity. There is the one that is officially tolerated, accepted, celebrated, subordinated to, and accommodated by the State in public life. Then there is the one that is officially not tolerated, prohibited, discriminated against, and shunned by the State. Why the unequal treatment? In the former version, the State has determined that it poses no threat to national ideological and cultural orthodoxy and State power. It’s a version of Christianity that will comply with the reigning political elites and their ideological creed, even affirm them. As such, it is rewarded for good behavior with public accommodation. But the latter version, the underground version, has done what all authentic Christian communities have always done on their better days: bend the knee only to the Kingship of Jesus Christ and His Word. They fear God rather than men. It isn’t surprising that such a dichotomy in the 21st century, where a religion is accommodated only in so far as it conforms to a State sponsored creed, exists in communist China, where religious liberty and separation of church/state have never been a fundamental right/principle of the political system. We expect the State to maintain a “conform or else” attitude towards religious communities there. But in America?

Evidence?  Where to begin.  How about California Senate Bill 1146:

http://www.albertmohler.com/2016/08/03/briefing-08-03-16/

 

Do Christian colleges have a right to be Christian colleges?

From Adam Macleod:

Gordon College is still under attack for being an intentionally Christian college. For nearly two years, cultural elites in Massachusetts, led by The Boston Globe, have been waging a sustained campaign of accusation and coercion in an effort to force the college to abandon the self-consciously Christian identity expressed in its life and conduct statement.

The attack appeared existential at one time, when the New England Association of Schools and Colleges announced that it would review Gordon’s accreditation. Yet to its lasting credit, the college has remained steadfast in its witness. After a well-organized and vocal objection by the college’s supportersand other friends of conscience, the NEASC quietly backed down.

Still the attacks continue. Most recently, a former Gordon philosophy professor, Lauren Barthold, has filed suit against Gordon alleging unlawful discrimination. Her complaint is signed by lawyers of the American Civil Liberties Union. The college denies her allegations, explaining that she was disciplined by her colleagues on the faculty not on a legally prohibited basis but because she wrote in a newspaper calling for outsiders to impose economic sanctions on the college. She encouraged others to pressure the college to abandon its Christian moral ideals.

The ACLU’s complaint does not contradict that account. And if recent history is any indication, the full facts will vindicate Gordon College once they surface. None of the accusations leveled against Gordon over the last two years has turned out to be true, except the charge that members of the Gordon College community choose to live biblically. Gordon has not discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation. Indeed, Professor Barthold acknowledges the “many . . . LGBTQ-identified students who have found deep friendships, intellectual growth and spiritual support [at Gordon].”

So, this case is not about Gordon discriminating. This case is about Gordon’s right to be excellent in ways that other Massachusetts colleges and universities are not. The issue is whether Massachusetts courts will preserve the liberty of Gordon’s faculty, staff, and students to maintain an educational community that is unique in its moral commitments. On this point Gordon College can claim an unlikely ally. If the judges of Massachusetts read the writings of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then they will learn that Gordon College has the right to be differently excellent.

The Constitutional Right to Exclude

In its 2010 decision in the case Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, the Supreme Court of the United States declared and upheld the right of a state university to discriminate against unwanted student groups by excluding them from campus life. The unwanted student groups in Martinez were (who else?) religious groups that require members to live according to moral truths.

Read the rest

WSJ: Campus Unicorns: Conservative Professors

From Shields and Dunn at the WSJ:

Everyone knows that academia is predominantly liberal: Only 6.6% of professors in the social sciences are Republicans, according to a 2007 study. But what is life like for the pioneering conservatives who slip through the ivory tower’s gates? We decided to find out by interviewing 153 of them.

Many conservative professors said they felt socially isolated. A political scientist told us that he became a local pariah for defending the Iraq war in his New England college town, which he called “Cuba with bad weather.” One sociologist stated the problem well: “To say a strong conservative political opinion with conviction in an academic gathering is analogous to uttering an obscenity.” A prominent social scientist at a major research university spoke of the strain of concealing his political views from his colleagues—of “lying to people all the time.”

Some even said that bias had complicated their career advancement. A historian of Latin America told us that he suffered professionally after writing a dissertation on “middle-class white guys” when it was fashionable to focus on the “agency of subaltern peoples.” Though he doesn’t think the work branded him as a conservative, it certainly didn’t excite the intellectual interest of his peers.

A similarly retrograde literature professor sought advice from a colleague after struggling to land a tenure-track job. He was told that he had “a nice resume for 1940.” As Neil Gross has shown, liberal professors often believe that conservatives are closed-minded. If you got to choose your colleagues, would you hire someone you thought fit that description?

Yet the professors we spoke to were surprisingly sympathetic toward their liberal colleagues. “The majority always thinks it’s treating the minority well,” said the tormented social scientist mentioned above. “That’s a basic psychological trick we all play on ourselves.” Reflecting on bias in the peer-review process, a sociologist told us: “I don’t think there is conscious bad faith going on. I think when people read things they wish to politically sympathize with, it adds brightness points.”

Some professors suggested that there are compensating benefits to being out of place. For one, it’s easier to make innovative contributions. “I really do feel sorry for your absolutely conventional liberal scholar,” a political scientist told us. He imagined that it must be difficult to discover something new from “within the framework of their thinking.” Another made the point by posing a rhetorical question: “I mean, how many ways can you talk about inequality?” Other conservatives appreciated being held to a higher standard. “You can’t be lazy. You can’t—you’re not going to be cut any slack,” a philosopher said. “I think that’s a real advantage insofar as it makes the work better.”

That underlines an important point: Political bias expresses an intellectual orientation—one that inclines us to find some questions more important and some explanations more plausible. Because of this, none of us can rely on our fellow partisans to identify flaws in our thinking. Building an academic community with varied biases, then, is essential to the very health of the social sciences. Political uniformity makes it difficult to converge on the best approximation of the truth.

It’s true that in some happy cases social science is self-correcting. But it can take a very long time. Sociologists spent decades playing down the importance of two-parent households before finally admitting that family structure matters. As a conservative in the field told us: “Basically, sociology had to be dragged kicking and screaming until it recognized that broken families aren’t a good thing. It’s like, if you have to spend decades and millions of dollars in [National Science Foundation] grants to convince astronomers that the sun rises in the east.”

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Conservative Professors’ Experiences in Left-Leaning Universities

From the WSJ:

Everyone knows that academia is predominantly liberal: Only 6.6% of professors in the social sciences are Republicans, according to a 2007 study. But what is life like for the pioneering conservatives who slip through the ivory tower’s gates? We decided to find out by interviewing 153 of them.

Many conservative professors said they felt socially isolated. A political scientist told us that he became a local pariah for defending the Iraq war in his New England college town, which he called “Cuba with bad weather.” One sociologist stated the problem well: “To say a strong conservative political opinion with conviction in an academic gathering is analogous to uttering an obscenity.” A prominent social scientist at a major research university spoke of the strain of concealing his political views from his colleagues—of “lying to people all the time.”

Some even said that bias had complicated their career advancement. A historian of Latin America told us that he suffered professionally after writing a dissertation on “middle-class white guys” when it was fashionable to focus on the “agency of subaltern peoples.” Though he doesn’t think the work branded him as a conservative, it certainly didn’t excite the intellectual interest of his peers.

A similarly retrograde literature professor sought advice from a colleague after struggling to land a tenure-track job. He was told that he had “a nice resume for 1940.” As Neil Gross has shown, liberal professors often believe that conservatives are closed-minded. If you got to choose your colleagues, would you hire someone you thought fit that description?

Yet the professors we spoke to were surprisingly sympathetic toward their liberal colleagues. “The majority always thinks it’s treating the minority well,” said the tormented social scientist mentioned above. “That’s a basic psychological trick we all play on ourselves.” Reflecting on bias in the peer-review process, a sociologist told us: “I don’t think there is conscious bad faith going on. I think when people read things they wish to politically sympathize with, it adds brightness points.”

….It’s true that in some happy cases social science is self-correcting. But it can take a very long time. Sociologists spent decades playing down the importance of two-parent households before finally admitting that family structure matters. As a conservative in the field told us: “Basically, sociology had to be dragged kicking and screaming until it recognized that broken families aren’t a good thing. It’s like, if you have to spend decades and millions of dollars in [National Science Foundation] grants to convince astronomers that the sun rises in the east.”

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How have the parties changed?

From the WSJ:

Partisanship is up. Voting by independents, less so. Those and other insights come from a look at the primary-election voter pools of the two parties in the states that have held contests through March 15. The data also show that the Democratic electorate is substantially more female than male, whereas the GOP electorate shows more gender balance. Democratic comparisons are to 2008, the party’s last competitive primary season.

ENLARGE

What are the pillars of conservative political thought?

From Alfred Regnery:

Over the past half century, conservatism has become the dominant political philosophy in the United States. Newspaper and television political news stories more often than not will mention the word conservative. Almost every Republican running for office—whether for school board or U.S. senator—will try to establish his place on the political spectrum based on how conservative he is. Even Democrats sometimes distinguish among members of their own party in terms of conservatism.

Although conservatism as we know it today is a relatively new movement—it emerged after World War II and only became a political force in the 1960s—it is based on ideas that are as old as Western civilization itself. The intellectual foundations on which this movement has been built stretch back to antiquity, were further developed during the Middle Ages and in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, and were ultimately formulated into a coherent political philosophy at the time of the founding of the United States. In a real sense, conservatism is Western civilization.

The basic foundations of American conservatism can be boiled down to four fundamental concepts. We might call them the four pillars of modern conservatism:

The first pillar of conservatism is liberty, or freedom. Conservatives believe that individuals possess the right to life, liberty, and property, and freedom from the restrictions of arbitrary force. They exercise these rights through the use of their natural free will. That means the ability to follow your own dreams, to do what you want to (so long as you don’t harm others) and reap the rewards (or face the penalties). Above all, it means freedom from oppression by government—and the protection of government against oppression. It means political liberty, the freedom to speak your mind on matters of public policy. It means religious liberty—to worship as you please, or not to worship at all. It also means economic liberty, the freedom to own property and to allocate your own resources in a free market.

Conservatism is based on the idea that the pursuit of virtue is the purpose of our existence and that liberty is an essential component of the pursuit of virtue. Adherence to virtue is also a necessary condition of the pursuit of freedom. In other words, freedom must be pursued for the common good, and when it is abused for the benefit of one group at the expense of others, such abuse must be checked. Still, confronted with a choice of more security or more liberty, conservatives will usually opt for more liberty.

– See more at: https://home.isi.org/node/59819#sthash.TxWUg3gN.dpuf

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The Disenfranchisement of Rural America; the politics of place in the new empire

The Disenfranchisement of Rural America

by James Huffman

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Anyone who pays even passing attention to American politics is familiar with the map (Figure 1) of the United States showing states in which a majority of voters favored President Obama (colored blue) and those where Romney garnered the most votes (in red). This map conveys three dominant messages: first, that states can be meaningfully described as either red or blue; second, that the West Coast, the upper Midwest, and the Northeast are solidly blue, and the rest of the country is mostly red; and third, that, geographically speaking, more of the country is red than blue.

      Figure 1

Those concerned about how Romney lost in what appears to be a mostly red country should refer themselves to Figure 2, in which the states are distorted to reflect their populations. More populous states have more votes in the Electoral College than do sparsely populated states.

      Figure 2

But a third map (Figure 3) showing the nation’s 3,035 counties in the same color scheme reveals that portraying states as either blue or red obscures much of what we might want to know about the states and the voters who inhabit them. On this map, we see that most of the blue states are in fact mostly red. The reality of vast expanses of red in some of the bluest of states should concern us if we truly care about self-governance.

      Figure 3

The Fate of Self-Governance

With each passing election, rural and small town Americans have ever less influence on their state and national governments and ever declining control over the governance of their own communities. Their lives are increasingly controlled from distant state capitals and from the even more distant Washington, D.C., by politicians with little incentive to pay attention to their country cousins. To some extent, their disenfranchisement is the inevitable result of a century of urbanization and economic centralization. But the erosion of self-governance in rural America is also the result of a generally well intentioned but simplistic understanding of democracy and the associated elimination of institutional protections of local democratic governance.

Two ideas have been central to this effective disenfranchisement of rural America. First, that one person/one vote is an inviolable principle of democratic government under the United States Constitution. Second, that the winners of elections owe allegiance only to those who voted for them, no matter how close the margin of victory.

Consider the claim made by supporters of President Obama’s call for higher taxes on the wealthy in response to those wishing to preserve all of the tax rates enacted under President Bush. “The people have spoken. We won the election. You lost. Case closed.” Had Mitt Romney won the election, Republicans would have offered a similar response to opponents of spending cuts and entitlement reform.

For some, this glib argument is like spiking the ball in the end zone—an ill-mannered, in-your-face celebration of points scored in an ongoing contest. Notwithstanding the sometimes wildly fluctuating views of the electorate, as evidenced by pre- and post-election polls, elections have increasingly come to justify claims of total victory for the winner. The winner sees no need for compromise, making it the loser’s role to obstruct such triumphalism in every way possible, and hope to prevail in the next election. Little wonder that bipartisan solutions have become elusive, and that those willing to compromise are condemned by their partisan peers as unprincipled, and unworthy of public office.

Of course, anyone with even a cursory understanding of American politics understands that elections seldom, if ever, settle matters in dispute. What we learn when the people speak at the ballot box is that the electorate is often narrowly divided on the candidates and issues. President Obama’s 51.4 percent of the popular vote is considered a convincing victory. But the fact is that 48.6 percent of the voters (59,134,475 individuals) preferred someone else.

In the democratic selection of public officials, there is no practical alternative to election by simple majority, or even by plurality. Someone must fill each office, and that cannot be accomplished reliably with supermajority requirements. Representative bodies can, and occasionally do, require a supermajority for enactment of legislation. But, as a general rule, little is accomplished if more than a simple majority is required. (Witness the United States Senate, where the filibuster, as now employed, effectively requires a 3/5 supermajority and little is accomplished.)

Constitutional Controls on the Tyranny of the Majority

As political scientist Martin Diamond once observed, democracy is the least worst form of government yet designed by man. The designers of America’s democratic republic well understood the shortcomings of direct democracy, notably the risk of majoritarian tyranny. Among their constitutional protections against the tyranny of the majority was the creation of a federal system that recognized multiple majorities as legitimate law makers, majorities that would also moderate the selection of the president and the enactment of laws by Congress.

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Manners R.I.P. and what it means

From Steven Klugewicz:

On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee met General Ulysses S. Grant at the McLean House in Appomattox, Virginia, for the purpose of surrendering the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee had asked for the meeting and had prepared by putting on his finest uniform: a new, long dress coat with a high collar buttoned to the top, a bejeweled long sword at his side, a pair of high-topped boots with spurs. Grant appeared in his typical attire, the simple uniform of a common soldier: a short coat and plain, spur-less boots, both much spattered with mud.

The contrast in attire matched the contrast in the men themselves: Lee was tall, straight in his bearing and solemn in his manner; the silvery-white hair and beard that ringed his visage befitted a king. The younger Grant was four inches shorter, somewhat stoop-shouldered, with a close-cropped brown beard. He was clearly ill at ease in the presence of Lee and nervously attempted some small talk. Grant offered that he still remembered Lee well from their one meeting during the Mexican War, almost two decades earlier. Lee confessed he could not recall anything about the occasion. Hearing Lee’s response must have been an awkward moment for Grant.

This climactic scene of the American Civil War has often been cited as emblematic of a watershed moment in history, the allegorical surrender of the Old World with its regal personalities, chivalric bonds, and inherited wealth to the New World embodied by Grant, a man of humble origins who had failed repeatedly in business and who finally made himself by making war (albeit with overwhelming advantages of men and material on his side). And it was indeed this.

But it was more. Less often noted is Grant’s careless disrespect to Lee in failing to dress properly for this meeting. Excuses have been made that Grant hurried to the meeting preoccupied with its impending business, that he was suffering from a days-long headache that morning and that consequently such “trivialities” as proper dress were the furthest thing from his mind. Grant’s admirers even point to his crude attire as a badge of honor: here was the real rough-and-tumble American of the frontier, the true democrat, whose worth was to be found in his inner fortitude, his stick-to-it-tiveness, and not in the superficiality of his dress, the foppish concerns of an effete and decaying era.

But appearances do matter. As a student, the young George Washington once performed a copy exercise, titled “Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation,” based on a 16^th-century Jesuit text. At the top of this list of 110 rules was this guiding admonition: “Every Action done in Company, ought to be with Some Sign of Respect, to those that are Present.” This maxim had presided over Western culture since the Middle Ages, and it was exemplified in the courtly manners of the upper classes everywhere and at all times, from the knights of the Frankish kingdom to the nobles of the Elizabethan Age to the American Southern aristocratic class represented by Washington and Lee. Where the upper classes led, the lower classes followed. Manners trickled down, so that even the common laborer of nineteenth-century London attempted, when wearing his Sunday best, to emulate the attire of his betters. His top hat and waistcoat may have been worn and of inferior quality, but he wore them proudly nonetheless.

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The Vision of Wilhelm Roepke

From the Imaginative Conservative:

June 20th, 1998, marked the fiftieth anniversary of the German “economic miracle.” Of course, there was nothing miraculous about it. Germany’s success was not due to the hard-working character of her people, or to foreign aid, or to any other special reason. It was the natural outcome of a market economy and currency reform. And yet it was originally intended as something more than that by the men who helped shape this policy, not least of whom was the outstanding economist, Wilhelm Roepke. Instead of a return to nineteenth-century capitalism and its laissez-faire ideology, he wanted a socially responsible economy which avoided and corrected past abuses. His ideas had been well­ articulated in his earlier books which, though banned by the Nazis, were read surreptitiously, even by the later finance minister, Ludwig Erhard, whose contents he said he “devoured like the desert the life-giving water.”[1]

But it is for more than his influence on policy-makers and German recovery that Roepke commands our attention today. His writings deal with the deeper issues that continue to afflict the West and his policy prescriptions are correspondingly rich and complex—a situation in which it is easy to misunderstand him. For example, his view of the good economy was at once conservative and radical. It combined liberal (in the older, honorable sense) elements of free markets, private property, and limited government with radical proposals to jettison those developments and trends of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that had been undermining the traditional family, local communities, and basic values, clearly an approach confounding classification by those who insist that the world has only two pigeonholes, laissez-faire or communism. It is an approach that assumes the market system can have more than one form which we are free to shape within certain limits indicated by economic science. Roepke’s question is: What form is most congenial to the flowering of human personality but which still yields needed material benefits? It was a delicate problem of balance and integration, and yet it is precisely this aspect that is often overlooked—or denied—by some “conservative” writers today who choose to emphasize other aspects of his thought, or who dismiss his social concerns as mere sentimentalism. To avoid the same mistake as well as to grasp the real, the essential, Wilhelm Roepke without analyzing his over 800 articles and books,[2] it is helpful not merely to sample his representative work but to divide it into two sections and consider Roepke first as a technical and then as a social economist; naturally, both aspects overlap in his writings.

I

For his technical economic work, we may identify such books as Crises and Cycles (1936), Economics of the Free Society (1937), International Economic Disintegration (1942), and International Order and Economic Integration (1959), plus numerous professional papers. In these volumes, Roepke affirms the importance of maintaining private property, the free operation of prices, and economic competition, and he vigorously defends multilateral trade as opposed to systematic protectionism and various forms of collectivism.

But of these, perhaps his most interesting, if not also his most important book, is his Crises and Cycles,published in 1936, the same year as John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory, and within a year of Hayek’s Prices and Production (1935). It deals with the problem of business cycles, the boom-and-bust tendency in an industrialized economy. His key contribution which distinguishes him from both Hayek and Keynes is his over­ capitalization/monetary model of the business cycle. The issue is not a disparity, says Roepke, between the relative rates of saving and investment, the former stable and the latter volatile, the way Keynes thought. Nor is it a problem of undersaving relative to investments the way Hayek thought. Nor is it a strictly monetary problem the way some Austrian economists such as Mises were inclined to think. Most fundamentally, it is the nature of the industrialized economy itself. The same specialization and division of labor that powers a modern economy and economic growth is also the property that causes economic booms and depressions. The problem originates in the difficulties of coordination that such a division of labor brings about.[3] A slight increase in demand at the retail level, say, for shoes, will become accelerated as the demand signal extends upstream to the foreproducts of production in something of a geometric proportion. Ultimately, such production will be out of proportion to the original demand. Inevitably, the boom must turn into a recession or depression. Of course, this expansion is financed through loose credit policies as Austrians, including Hayek, emphasize and with which Roepke basically agrees, but adds: “In our view, it is the steep rise of the absolute amount of investments which matters, not the fact that our economic system must rely on credit expansion to make this rise possible.”[4] This is important not only because it is essential for understanding Roepke’s technical contribution, but also because it leads to an understanding of Roepke as social economist, and his corresponding policy recommendations.

Roepke also explained that in the instant case, the Great Depression had gone beyond the economy’s ability to initiate a functionally corrective downswing that would restore a healthy balance. Instead, it had turned into a “secondary depression” where economic activity stalled out at the bottom more or less permanently, and the usual “self­-correcting” market forces were not operative. The problem, then, was a lack of confidence, a failure to spend, a pervasive pessimism so that demand was simply too low. In such an extreme case, Roepke reluctantly recommended, as did many other economists at the time, including Keynes, the need for the famous pump-priming, the need for government to run a deficit to stimulate demand. But he was painfully aware that this was a dangerous course, and he spent some time elaborating its pitfalls.[5]

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Lincoln vs the founders?

 

From Joseph Sobran

Harry Jaffa says Jack Kemp and I have been conducting an “uncivil war” over Abraham Lincoln’s character. Well, for my part, I deny it. Kemp called me one of the current “assassins of Lincoln’s character,” which I thought was a little rabid, inasmuch as I had given Lincoln praise as well as criticism in the speech Kemp referred to (without having heard or read it, naturally). Jaffa doesn’t say how I was “uncivil” in defending myself by quoting Lincoln. I don’t consider it character assassination to distinguish the real Lincoln from the Mythic Lincoln. (A Reply to Harry Jaffa’s In Re Jack Kemp v. Joe Sobran.)

But before I get into details, let me go right to the real point. In the book I’m now writing about Lincoln, I argue for the right of secession. And I also argue that if there is a right of secession, it follows that Lincoln had no authority to suppress secession by force.

Jaffa thinks that he and Lincoln have, between them, demolished the case for secession. Far from it. To make their case, both of them have had to misread the American founding documents, especially theDeclaration of Independence.

What, exactly, did the Declaration of Independence declare to be independent? Thirteen states — “free and independent states.” Now in 1776 and long afterward, a state was by definition free, independent, and sovereign. If it formed a confederacy with other states, it could withdraw — secede — reassert its independence — at any time, because a confederacy was, again by definition, a voluntary association of sovereigns. And the Declaration said nothing about a “Union,” or as Lincoln later put it, “a new nation.”

In order to get around these inconvenient facts, Lincoln said falsely that the Union was older than theConstitution, older even than the states. How could a union of things be older than the very things it was a union of? Isn’t that a bit like saying that a marriage is older than either spouse?

Well, said Lincoln, the Union had been formed while the future states were still colonies — then they declared their independence of Britain — but not of each other, mind you — then the Union was “further matured” in the Articles of Confederation — then it was matured still further in the Constitution; but at every stage, the states had had no existence outside the Union, so the Union was indissoluble. At least no state could withdraw without the consent of the rest of the Union. (This contradicted Lincoln’s own ringing affirmation of the right of secession during the Mexican War, but never mind. He came up with a fine and convenient distinction between a “revolutionary” and a “constitutional” right of secession.)

Oddly enough, the states of 1776 thought they were states, plural, not provinces of a sovereign “Union.” N.B.: They did not declare themselves a single “free and independent state,” which is what Lincoln (followed by Jaffa, of course) in essence said they were.

Let’s pause briefly on one point here. A state can secede from a confederation any time it wants to. It needs no justification beyond its own sovereignty. Lincoln, in denying that the states were sovereign, was denying that they were really states at all. All the rest is secondary — whether slavery was good or bad, whether it was endangered, whether the Southerners were acting like sore losers over the 1860 election, and so forth.

Now for the Articles of Confederation. As their name implies, they defined the Union as a confederation of the states, not as a sovereign power over the member states. In fact their second article says plainly: “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence,” et cetera. Each state, if I understand these words correctly, “retains,” among other things, its “independence.” This would seem to imply that each state already enjoyed its independence — not only of Britain, but of the other states.

So the Articles of Confederation were a second Declaration of Independence. Even as the states were still fighting together to secure their independence of Britain, they asserted their independence of each other as well! They were loosely united in a confederation, or, as they also put it, “a firm league of friendship.” But they retained severally their “sovereignty, freedom, and independence,” which I interpret to mean their sovereignty, freedom, and independence.

In the 1783 Treaty of Paris, Britain recognized, and listed by name, the 13 “free, sovereign, and independent states.” Evidently the states were sticklers for acknowledgment of their separate statehood. They didn’t settle for recognition of “the United States” in the aggregate.

Note that the Constitution always speaks of the United States in the plural. There is a reason for that; it isn’t just a quaint detail of linguistic usage.

Perhaps a Straussian analysis will demonstrate that the “inner meaning” of these documents flatly contradicts their ostensible meaning. Meanwhile, we may be pardoned for taking them literally.

We may also note that President Thomas Jefferson, chief author of the Declaration, said, when some states talked of secession, that they should be permitted to go in peace.

The Constitution says nothing about secession, either way. But it doesn’t equate secession with “rebellion” or “insurrection,” as Lincoln did. It says the federal government may aid a state in suppressing “domestic violence” — if the state requests its help. It doesn’t suggest that the federal government may invade a state against its will for any reason.

How could Lincoln be so wrong? Well, he was a product of a later generation of rising nationalism, typified by Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, that was out of touch with the Founders and the Framers of the Constitution. As a matter of fact, the longer I study Lincoln, the more I am convinced that he was simply ignorant of the greatest body of American political thought; I seriously doubt that he ever read even The Federalist Papers. If he did, he never assimilated their thinking about the problems of “confederation,” “consolidation,” “usurpation,” and the like. Jefferson Davis was steeped in these ideas and completely mastered them, as his memoirs show. Lincoln, however, couldn’t have carried on an intelligent conversation with Madison, Hamilton, or his hero Jefferson (whose Kentucky Resolutions he also seems ignorant of).

Jaffa may be surprised to learn that much of my critique of Lincoln, as I will present it in my book, King Lincoln, is drawn from the evidence of his own recent book, A New Birth of Freedom. He doesn’t realize how damning to Lincoln his own words are. For example, he says Lincoln thought that “the Union stood in the same relationship to a state as a state to a county.” Could Lincoln (or Jaffa) really hold such a naive view? The states were not formed by counties delegating powers to them; the counties had no sovereignty, but were mere subdivisions of the states. The states were not mere subdivisions, or inferior parts, of the Union. Lincoln’s simple hierarchical view of the Union is a far cry from federalism. Again we see Lincoln’s simplistic nationalist ideology.

Jaffa tries to make Lincoln sound like an avatar of the Founding Fathers, but about all he took from them was a set of snippets — “All men are created equal,” “consent of the governed,” et cetera — from which he wrung inferences they would have rejected. Jefferson in particular would have disowned Lincoln as a disciple.

Lincoln’s lack of learning was a serious defect, and it cost all Americans dearly. I’m not just defending the Confederacy; I think it was foolish to secede when it did, though it was fully within its rights. The point is that Lincoln’s war deprived all the states of their ultimate defense against federal tyranny and usurpation. Since 1865 the federal government has had little to fear from the states, and it has steadily usurped their reserved powers without much opposition and with total impunity.

To my mind, the most egregious case was the U.S. Supreme Court’s wholly arbitrary 1973 ruling that the states could not constitutionally protect unborn children from violent death by abortion. This was not only morally outrageous, but constitutionally absurd. But by then the states were helpless. Lincoln made that possible.

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The Anti-Federalist Contributions

Assessing the Anti-Federalists

by John C. Pinheiro

A free society needs both liberty and order. As Russell Kirk once put it, “order is the first need for any society—only then can liberty and justice be reasonably secure.” From September 1787 through July 1788, this principle of ordered liberty shaped Federalist arguments for, and anti-Federalist arguments against, the ratification of the Constitution. Contemporary Americans might be tempted to assume that the opposition does not deserve to be counted among the Founding Fathers and Framers. But not only do many anti-Federalists belong in both categories, their works need to be read alongside the more famous Federalist Papers and James Wilson’s oratory, if Americans hope to restore a sane balance between state and federal power.

Recent experience with tyranny shaped the Articles of Confederation, the United States’ constitution from 1781-1787. In an effort to avoid everything that had become instruments of tyranny in British hands, the Articles contained no national army, no executive branch, no national judiciary, and States had to vote unanimously for any tax. A unicameral Congress, with members elected by State legislatures and in which each State had one collective vote, oversaw all national matters via committees. In this highly decentralized Union, ensuring State sovereignty trumped concerns about individual liberty. Almost immediately, restrictions in the Articles, along with regionalism and factionalism, hampered commerce, foreign trade, and debt repayment. In May 1787, 55 delegates from every State but Rhode Island met in Philadelphia. Rather than amend the Articles, they instead began to draft a new constitution, starting with the Virginia Plan, co-authored by Edmund Randolph and James Madison. This plan was decidedly in favor of order through centralization. It called for proportional representation in a bicameral congress, and gave Congress a veto over State laws and the power to appoint the nation’s president and judges. By mid-September, delegates finally reached a compromise, which among other things, included equal representation for States in the upper house and proportional representation in the lower house. Madison opposed this, but was voted down. Following final approval of the Constitution on September 17, 1787, delegates presented it to the United States. Federalists and anti-Federalists went to work trying to influence the composition of the State ratifying conventions.

Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts summed up anti-Federalist concerns when he predicted that the new Constitution would “produce a monarchy, or a corrupt, tyrannical aristocracy.” Other prominent anti- Federalists included George Clinton of New York, Virginians Richard Henry Lee and Patrick Henry, and Luther Martin of Maryland. Yet for reasons that will become apparent, the less famous Robert Yates of Pennsylvania and Samuel Bryan of New York also deserve a place on this list of important anti-Federalists. Bryan attacked the Constitution’s checks and balances, saying these would not protect liberty but only serve to obfuscate federal corruption. Bryan also argued that one representative in the House for 30,000 inhabitants was “too few to communicate the . . . local circumstances and sentiments of so extensive” a country. Like George Mason and other anti-Federalists, Bryan especially lamented the absence of a Bill of Rights. The people, Bryan said, had cried out for order amid the chaos of 1787 and the Confederation’s perceived “impotency.” The “wealthy and ambitious” had preyed on these fears, which Bryan thought were exaggerated, “not for the welfare of the country” but for “power and aggrandisement.” Bryan feared a congressional oligarchy more than a presidential monarchy: “a permanent aristocracy” unaccountable to “the great body of the people” because it was so far removed from them.

Although Bryan claimed that the United States’ size would produce tyranny while preventing Congress from understanding local needs, he still believed a decentralized republic could maintain the order needed to keep liberty secure. But New York Supreme Court judge Robert Yates disagreed, noting that only two countries in 1787 were as large as the United States: Russia and China. As Yates pointed out, autocrats ruled both. Historically, large territorial republics actually endangered liberty because there was no way other than coercion to balance their many regional and factional interests. “In so extensive a republic” as the United States, Yates said, “the great officers of government would soon become above the control of the people and abuse their power for the purpose of aggrandizing themselves.”

Yates singled out Congress’ taxation power and the Supreme Court as the most likely avenues to despotism. Since Congress could approve taxes to “provide for the common safety, and the general welfare,” taxation would be unlimited. “The government,” warned Yates, “would always say their measures were designed and calculated to promote the public good; there being no judge between them and the people, the rulers themselves must, and would always, judge for themselves.” Meanwhile, the Supreme Court, as constructed, would not to be guided at all by Natural Law, precedent, or any other law, just by its own whims and whatever precedents it might set.

Federalists posed counter-arguments to all these accusations. They claimed the “general welfare” clause actually limited the government’s range of power. Where anti- Federalists saw a future consolidated nation-state inherent in the Constitution, Federalists beheld a firm grounding for a lasting federal union that balanced liberty with order. This is exactly what Madison argued in Federalist #10 and #51, in which he flipped on its head the maxim that factionalism in large republics breeds disorder, followed either by tyranny or disunion. In a nod to what G.K. Chesterton later called that most provable Christian dogma, Original Sin, Madison acknowledged that the “causes of faction are sown in the nature of man.” Since the causes of faction cannot be removed, Madison noted realistically, to be free Americans required a polity founded on the principle of ordered liberty to control its effects.

Federalists claimed the Constitution would restrain factionalism far better than had the Articles. How? Certainly not through coercion, Madison said. Nor would it depend on enlightened aristocrats, for “enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” Madison predicted that the country’s diversity would prevent any majority from stepping on minority rights even as it mitigated Congressional attempts to pass unwise laws. In the same way a representative government was superior to a purely democratic one because of its greater ability to field temperate, prudent leaders, so would a large republic be superior to a small one. The difficulty for Madison was that his acknowledgement of American plurality conceivably could support anti-Federalist warnings about heterogeneous republics. Yet how diverse really was the United States? John Jay in Federalist #2 had already given the answer for this: Not so much, in the way that multi-ethnic, multireligious, and multi-lingual Russia and China were. In an overstatement even for 1787 (although not too much of one), Jay described Americans as “one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in manners and customs.” Put simply, when it comes to republics, the Federalists seemed to be saying that as long as citizens share common foundational attributes, “bigger is better.” Faction would balance faction. The government’s primary role in such a system was to be little more than a “dispassionate umpire,” Madison privately told Washington.

The U.S. Constitution won ratification on June 21, 1788, mainly because of promises to anti-Federalists that a Bill of Rights would be added as soon as possible. (Federalists had opposed the addition of a Bill of Rights on the grounds that listing Americans’ liberties in amendments might unintentionally limit them.) Another comforting thought was that George Washington, who had proven trustworthy with power, would be the first president.

There would be no violent counter-revolution in America, only a working out of anti-Federalist principles under the new U.S. government. In the 1790s, Lee, Yates, and Henry even became Federalists: Yates ran as a Federalist for New York governor against Clinton and Lee, as a senator from Virginia, fought to pass Hamilton’s economic program.

Having now taken into account both sides in the ratification debate, how should those who promote a free and virtuous society evaluate the anti-Federalists? Were their fears based on the Constitution itself, with its alleged inability to balance liberty and order and prevent the consolidation of power at the national level? They clearly believed this to be the case. Yet their fears about consolidated state power are those that anyone protective of liberty ought to have about any government, for they are rooted in an anthropology revealed both by Nature and by Revelation; namely, that the human person is fallible and capable of choosing evil over good. Given an analysis of past and present–the continued growth of the “nanny state” comes to mind–the likelihood is not small that some will choose safety, comfort, and a leveling equality over freedom and the life that is worth living. Still, anti-Federalists did correctly predict that the U.S. Constitution would become a much-abused instrument in the hands of those who wished to build a muscular, far-reaching government. They also foresaw that the judiciary might endanger liberty more than a quasi-monarchical president. Yates’ warnings about the Supreme Court and Congress certainly ring true today, as do Bryan’s predictions about politicians taking advantage of crises to pursue ideological or partisan ends. These processes tend to limit Americans’ liberties while chipping away at their virtue via government-constructed moral hazards. Indeed, as J. Budziszweski notes in The Line through the Heart, Yates’ “arguments seem even stronger today than they did at the time they were written.”

Does this mean, then, that the anti-Federalists ought to have succeeded in stopping the Constitution’s ratification? Far from it. The Federalists correctly criticized the Confederation for being unable to provide the minimum order needed so that Americans could flourish as a free people. Their arguments show they understood better than anti-Federalists the necessary balance between liberty and order. Had the anti-Federalists defeated the Constitution, the Union would have soon split into multiple confederations or divided into highly separate States. The consequences for liberty and human flourishing under these scenarios would have been worse than the most dismal anti-Federalist prediction about life under the Constitution.

This does not mean, however, that Federalists believed any governmental formula could, of itself, maintain a polity in which liberty and justice would be secure. They, like their anti- Federalist opponents, recognized the need for virtue in a free society. But while both acknowledged virtue as a precondition for republican government, Federalists were far less likely to expect it. “The few . . . who act upon principles of disinterestedness,” wrote Washington, “are, comparatively speaking, no more than a drop in the Ocean.” A rational Constitution, prudently drawing on Enlightenment liberalism and based on Americans’ own experience as a free people, would help bridge the gaps.

The anti-Federalists, though perceptive when identifying problems, tended to permit the perfect to be the enemy of the good. There was nothing inherent in the Constitution relative to a penchant for disorder and illiberality that is not present in the human person. The Federalists realized this; the anti-Federalists did not. Yet to understand the degree to which the American founders understood the balance between liberty and order necessary for a free people, one must not neglect the anti-Federalists. They were responsible for modifying what would have been a highly centralized government from the very beginning, had the Virginia Plan succeeded in toto, and had anti-Federalists like George Mason failed to secure a Bill of Rights.

Dr. Pinheiro is associate professor of history at Aquinas College in Michigan, and author of Manifest Ambition: James K. Polk and Civil-Military Relations during the Mexican War.

Nisbet on why the family isn’t working

The following is excerpted from Robert Nisbet’s prescient book, The Quest for Community.

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Nowhere is the concern with the problem of community in Western society more intense than with respect to the family. The contemporary family, as countless books, articles, college courses, and marital clinics make plain, has become an obsessive problem. The family inspires a curious dualism of thought. We tend to regard it uneasily as a final manifestation of tribal society, somehow inappropriate to a democratic, industrial age, but, at the same time, we have become ever more aware of its possibilities as an instrument of social reconstruction.

The intensity of theoretical interest in the family has curiously enough risen in direct proportion to the decline of the family’s basic institutional importance to our culture. The present “problem” of the family is dramatized by the fact that its abstract importance to the moralist or psychologist has grown all the while that its tangible institutional significance to the layman and its functional importance to economy and State have diminished.

It is doubtless one more manifestation of the contemporary quest for security that students of the family increasingly see its main “function” to be that of conferring “adjustment” upon the individual, and, for the most part, they find no difficulty at all in supposing that this psychological function can be carried on by the family in what is otherwise a functional vacuum. Contemporary social psychology has become so singlemindedly aware of the psychological gratification provided by the group for individual needs of security and recognition that there is an increasing tendency to suppose that such a function is primary and can maintain itself autonomously, impervious to changes in institutional functions which normally give a group importance in culture. For many reasons the contemporary family is made to carry a conscious symbolic importance that is greater than ever, but it must do this with a structure much smaller in size and of manifestly diminishing relevance to the larger economic, religious, and political ends of contemporary society.

Historically the family’s importance has come from the fact of intimate social cohesion united with institutional significance in society, not from its sex or blood relationships. In earlier ages, kinship was inextricably involved in the processes of getting a living, providing education, supporting the infirm, caring for the aged, and maintaining religious values. In vast rural areas, until quite recently, the family was the actual agency of economic production, distribution, and consumption. Even in towns and cities, the family long retained its close relation to these obviously crucial activities. Organized living was simply inconceivable, for the most part, outside of the context provided by kinship. Few individuals were either too young or too old to find a place of importance within the group, a fact which enhanced immeasurably the family’s capacity for winning allegiance and providing symbolic integration for the individual.

The interpersonal and psychological aspects of kinship were never made to rest upon personal romance alone or even upon pure standards of individual rectitude. Doubtless, deviations from the moral code and disillusionment with romance were as common then as now. But they did not interfere with the cultural significance of the family simply because the family was far more than an interpersonal relationship based upon affection and moral probity. It was an indispensable institution.

But in ever-enlarging areas of population in modern times, the economic, legal, educational, religious, and recreational functions of the family have declined or diminished. Politically, membership in the family is superfluous; economically, it is regarded by many as an outright hindrance to success. The family, as someone has put it, is now the accident of the worker rather than his essence. His competitive position may be more favorable without it. Our systems of law and education and all the manifold recreational activities of individuals engaged in their pursuit of happiness have come to rest upon, and to be directed to, the individual, not the family. On all sides we continue to celebrate from pulpit and rostrum the indispensability to economy and the State of the family. But, in plain fact, the family is indispensable to neither of these at the present time. The major processes of economy and political administration have become increasingly independent of the symbolism and integrative activities of kinship.

There is an optimistic apologetics that sees in this waning of the family’s institutional importance only the beneficent hand of Progress. We are told by certain psychologists and sociologists that, with its loss of economic and legal functions, the family has been freed of all that is basically irrelevant to its “real” nature; that the true function of the family—the cultivation of affection, the shaping of personality, above all, the manufacture of “adjustment”—is now in a position to flourish illimitably, to the greater glory of man and society. In a highly popular statement, we are told that the family has progressed from institution to companionship.

But, as Ortega y Gasset has written, “people do not live together merely to be together. They live together to do something together.” To suppose that the present family, or any other group, can perpetually vitalize itself through some indwelling affectional tie, in the absence of concrete, perceived functions, is like supposing that the comradely ties of mutual aid which grow up incidentally in a military unit will long outlast a condition in which war is plainly and irrevocably banished. Applied to the family, the argument suggests that affection and personality cultivation can somehow exist in a social vacuum, unsupported by the determining goals and ideals of economic and political society. But in hard fact no social group will long survive the disappearance of its chief reasons for being, and these reasons are not, primarily, biological but institutional. Unless new institutional functions are performed by a group—family, trade union, or church—its psychological influence will become minimal.

No amount of veneration for the psychological functions of a social group, for the capacity of the group to gratify cravings for security and recognition, will offset the fact that, however important these functions may be in any given individual’s life, he does not join the group essentially for them. He joins the group if and when its larger institutional or intellectual functions have relevance both to his own life organization and to what he can see of the group’s relation to the larger society. The individual may indeed derive vast psychic support and integration from the pure fact of group membership, but he will not long derive this when he becomes in some way aware of the gulf between the moral claims of a group and its actual institutional importance in the social order.

All of this has special relevance to the family, with its major function now generally reduced by psychologists to that of conferring adjustment upon individuals. Yet in any objective view the family is probably now less effective in this regard than it has ever been. It is plain that the family is no longer the main object of personal loyalty in ever larger sections of our population, and it is an overstrain on the imagination to suppose that it will regain a position of psychological importance through pamphlets, clinics, and high-school courses on courtship and marriage. How quaint now seems that whole literature on sexual adjustment in marriage with its implicit argument that sexual incompatibility is the basic cause of the reduced significance of marriage. Some of the solemn preoccupations with “family tensions” which now hold the field of clinical practice will one day no doubt seem equally quaint.

The current problem of the family, like the problem of any social group, cannot be reduced to simple sets of psychological complexes which exist universally in man’s nature, or to an ignorance of sexual techniques, or to a lack of Christian morality. The family is a major problem in our culture simply because we are attempting to make it perform psychological and symbolic functions with a structure that has become fragile and an institutional importance that is almost totally unrelated to the economic and political realities of our society. Moreover, the growing impersonality and the accumulating demands of ever larger sections of our world of business and government tend to throw an extraordinary psychological strain upon the family. In this now small and fragile group we seek the security and affection denied everywhere else. It is hardly strange that timeless incompatibilities and emotional strains should, in the present age, assume an unwonted importance—their meaning has changed with respect to the larger context of men’s lives. We thus find ourselves increasingly in the position of attempting to correct, through psychiatric or spiritual techniques, problems which, although assuredly emotional, derive basically from a set of historically given institutional circumstances.

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Robert Nisbet (1913-1996) was a professor at Columbia University and the author of The Sociological Tradition, The Social Bond, The Present Age, and other books. 

Original LInk

Reviewing trajectory of current case law regarding religious vs ‘erotic’ liberty

Very helpful episode of the “The Briefing” (Al Mohler) today on the current legal landscape (cases and rulings) regarding the ‘collision’ between religious liberty and ‘erotic’ liberty (his word). Basically, current cases indicate a significant narrowing of the ‘religious exemption’ and ‘ministerial exception” language. As you move away from the pulpit, religious organizations are losing their 1st amendment cover and ability to receive these waivers, exemptions, and exceptions to anti-discrimination laws and/or judicial decisions.

 

 

Samuel Gregg on Tocqueville on Bernie

Since a self-described democratic socialist, Sen. Bernie Sanders, is a major contender for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, and polls suggest one-third of American millennials and over 40 percent of self-described Democrats view socialism favorably, perhaps it’s time to be attentive to great nineteenth-century French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville’s highly critical opinion of socialism.

Most Americans who express positive opinions of socialism, I expect, have some type of European social democracy in mind. Generally speaking, that seems to be what Sanders proposed in his November 19 speech at Georgetown University, in which he defined what he means by democratic socialism.

Sanders made clear that he did not favor government control of the means of production à la Marxism-Leninism. Sanders also specified that he supported private businesses (as long as they don’t shift assets and jobs off-shore) and thinks innovation and entrepreneurship should be rewarded. Picking up on widespread and legitimate frustration with crony capitalism, Sanders underscored his opposition to bailouts and corporate welfare more generally.

Read the Rest

Is Europe in decline by taking up roots?

From Samuel Gregg:

In his Mémoires d’Espoir, the leader of Free France during World War II and the founder of the Fifth Republic, General Charles de Gaulle, wrote at length about a subject on many people’s minds today—Europe. Though often portrayed as passionately French to the point of incorrigibility, de Gaulle was, in his own way, quintessentially European.

For de Gaulle, however, Europe wasn’t primarily about supranational institutions like the European Commission or the European Central Bank, let alone what some European politicians vaguely call “democratic values.” To de Gaulle’s mind, Europe was essentially a spiritual and cultural heritage, one worthy of emulation by others. Europe’s nations, de Gaulle wrote, had “the same Christian origins and the same way of life, linked to one another since time immemorial by countless ties of thought, art, science, politics and trade.”

On this basis, de Gaulle considered it “natural” that these nations “should come together to form a whole, with its own character and organization in relation to the rest of the world.” However, de Gaulle also believed that without clear acknowledgment and a deep appreciation of these common civilizational foundations, any pan-European integration would run aground.

Today’s European crisis reflects the enduring relevance of de Gaulle’s insight. This is true not only regarding the quasi-religious faith that some Europeans place in the type of supranational bureaucracies that drew de Gaulle’s ire. It also applies to the inadequacies of the vision that informs their trust in such institutions. Until Europe’s leaders recognize this problem, it is difficult to see how the continent can avoid further decline, whether as a player on the global stage or as societies that offer something distinctly enriching to the rest of the world.

Read the rest

On being Intellectually Honest in the Political Islam discussion

Shadi Hamid, Muslim and scholar of Political Islam at Brookings, writes a good piece on the discussion surrounding Islam, democracy, and groups like ISIS.  In a day where even asking the question about whether Islam is compatible at its core with democracy and whether ISIS can be quickly dismissed simply as a departure from Islam, his article is poignant.

I’m not a scholar of Political Islam, but in my own area (Christianity and Political Theory), I know it to be intellectually dishonest for me to say that liberal democracy arose in the West despite orthodox Christianity and in no way because of it.  From what I know of political Islam and what we observe in history, it is not implausible to say that liberal democracy will arise in the Middle East despite orthodox Islam and not because of it.  That is an intellectually honest statement on my part, but it invites charges of bigotry.  I will have to live with that.

The reason why the charge of bigotry is sure to follow a statement like that is because of the postmodern liberal fallacy that all religions are the same.  They are all equally compatible with liberal democracy or they are all irrelevant to it.  Religions are infinitely malleable and can be molded into whatever shape we want.  In other words, religions are like cars.  They are basically the same, take you to the same places (in this life or the next), and only differ really in furnishings and brand names.  But when we buy into this fallacy, we analyze religion and politics using only half our brains.

No, it can be the case, and it isn’t bigotry saying so, that some religions are more or less compatible with liberal democracy than others.  It can be the case, and it isn’t bigotry saying so, that some religions require little adjustment for the teachings of their core central figures, sacred texts, to accommodate liberal democracy than others.  It can be the case, and it isn’t bigotry to say so, that some religions will need to recover its orthodoxy in order to embrace liberal democracy (I think this is what the Reformation did in church history) while others will need to depart from that orthodoxy and invent something radically new in order to do so.

Hamdi writes:

Every time the Islamic State commits yet another attack or atrocity, Muslims, particularly Western Muslims, shudder. Attacks like the ones in Paris mean another round of demands that Muslims condemn the acts, as if we should presume guilt, or perhaps some indirect taint.

The impulse to separate Islam from the sins and crimes of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, is understandable, and it often includes statements such as ISIS has “nothing to do with Islam” or that ISIS is merely “using Islam” as a pretext. The sentiment is usually well-intentioned. We live in an age of growing anti-Muslim bigotry, where mainstream politicians now feel license to say things that might have once been unimaginable.

To protect Islam – and, by extension, Muslims – from any association with extremists and extremism is a worthy cause.

But saying something for the right reasons doesn’t necessarily make it right. An overwhelming majority of Muslims oppose ISIS and its ideology. But that’s not quite the same as saying that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam, when it very clearly has something to do with it.

If you actually look at ISIS’s approach to governance, it would be difficult – impossible, really – to conclude that it is just making things up as it goes along and then giving it an Islamic luster only after the fact.

It is tempting, for example, to look at the role of former Saddam-era Baathist party officers in the organization’s senior ranks and leap to the conclusion that religion can’t matter all that much. Yet many younger Baathists came up through Saddam Hussein’s late-period Islamization initiative, and, in any case, just because someone starts as a Baathist – or any other kind of secular nationalist – doesn’t mean they can’t, at some later point, “get” religion.

There is a role for Islamic apologetics – if defending Islam rather than analyzing it is your objective. I am a Muslim myself, and it’s impossible for me to believe that a just God could ever sanction the behavior of groups like ISIS.

But if the goal is to understand ISIS, then I, and other analysts who happen to be Muslim, would be better served by cordoning off our personal assumptions and preferences. What Islam should be and what Islam is actually understood to be by Muslims (including extremist Muslims) are very different things.

For scholars of Islamist movements and Islam’s role in politics, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, there should be one overarching objective: to understand and to explain, rather than to make judgments about which interpretations of Islam are correct, or who is or isn’t a “true” Muslim.

In addition to being a Muslim, I am an American, as well as a small-l liberal. I have written about how, even if we personally believe liberalism is the best available ideological framework for ordering society, that should not be allowed to distort our understanding of mainstream Islamist movements such as, say, the Muslim Brotherhood and its analogues across the region.

It makes little sense to compare Islamists to some liberal ideal, when they are a product of very different contexts than our own.

The “is ISIS Islamic?” debate can seem circular and exhausting. But it’s an important one nonetheless. Islamic apologetics lead us down a path of diminishing the role of religion in politics. If the past few years of Middle Eastern turmoil have made anything clear, it’s that, for Islamists of various stripes – mainstream or extremist – religion matters.

 Original Link from the Washington Post

A new civil religion, not secular humanism, is being imposed

From Bruce Frohen:

In court at least, one no longer hears the argument that federal policies are establishing a “religion of secular humanism.” The reason for this is simple: raising the issue is a guaranteed way of losing, immediately and with extreme prejudice, the suit in which the claim is made. This does not necessarily mean that criticizing decisions interpreting the First Amendment’s prohibition against a national, established religion for promoting their own kind of religion is clearly wrong, only that it violates judicial self-conceptions. Judges find it insulting to have their precepts, which they have been told since law school are rooted in the only enlightened, democratic vision of law possible, actually bespeak something so “irrational” and “superstitious” as faith. These decisions are rooted in faith. But it is a political, not a properly religious, faith.

The claim that judges are imposing on us a secular humanist religion is inaccurate. But its inaccuracy does not stem from its entirely valid charge that post–World War II religion clause jurisprudence is rooted in a specific conception of the human person and his relationship to God. Rather, the inaccuracy of the secular humanism argument comes from its failure to make the distinction between religion qua religion and its political doppelganger, civil religion.

Read the rest

Is America beginning to operate under the “image of liberty”?

From Steven Smith:

As the celebration of Constitution Day attests, Americans still honor our Constitution. But is it alive and well and with us still, actively guiding our decisions and shaping our law? Or is it something that we gratefully acknowledge for its historical significance but then ignore—like the Mayflower Compact, for instance, or maybe the Magna Carta?

It is surely true that we continue to invoke and talk about the Constitution as ifit were our currently governing law. And at least some of what happens in modern governance does seem to conform to what the document prescribes. For example, every state is still represented in Congress by two senators, even though some people think it is unfair that Wyoming and Nevada get as much representation in the Senate as New York and California do. Those senators are directly elected by the people, which is not what the original Constitution provided, but that change was formally and explicitly authorized by the adoption, in the constitutionally prescribed manner, of the Seventeenth Amendment. So, in this case, we seem to be adhering to the Constitution in a plausible, straightforward sense.

In other areas, though, our laws seem only distantly related to, or even incompatible with, what the Constitution prescribes. In these areas, the Constitution exercises a kind of ceremonial or perhaps diversionary function; it provides a venerable facade that covers or disguises the real workings of government. This sort of situation is hardly without precedent; a look back at the disintegration of republicanism in the Roman Empire yields important lessons for contemporary American government.

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How comprehensive does God intend gender complementarity to be? Cherney: “Are Women Real?”

Most evangelicals are gender complementarians (equal but different). But some limit that complementarity to the church and home. But how comprehensive does God intend gender complimentarity to be? Thorny issue on which reasonable Christians disagree. Here is one take.

“From Lily Cherney (Are Women Real?):

Growing up as a secular person, as a materialist, I didn’t have any category in my world for the existence of real categories, of “natures.” All was one, or all was bits and pieces, or whatever—it was all just matter in motion. The idea that there is some real thing called human nature, and moreover that it gets even more complicated than that and there is a feminine nature and a masculine nature—those were supernatural ideas, as floridly and extravagantly supernatural as unicorns or resurrections or Narnia. That they also, strangely, matched my actual experience of the world more accurately than the materialist story—that they seemed to come with better evidence—was… spooky.”

Read it all

Nietzche’s restless heart, and ours

From RR Reno (clip):

Nietzsche’s almost unwilling final affirmation of the ascetic impulse echoes St. Augustine’s basic insight into the human condition. Our hearts are restless. The human animal wishes to give itself to something higher. It is a need more basic than our instinctual urges. It is a nature more fundamental than everything our age wishes us to affirm as natural.

Our restless hearts suggest that the real dangers of the present age are not to be found in an open-ended, nihilistic non-judgmentalism that encourages us to imagine our world devoid of compelling truths. Such possibilities are abroad, but, as anyone who has been exposed to our educational establishment knows, it requires the constant infusion of disciplinary energy to keep young people from actually believing something.

Instead, if Nietzsche is right, the danger we face may be idolatry. Deprived of a God worth worshiping, we will find substitutes, even to the point of ­prostrating ourselves before birds or animals or reptiles that our modern minds have transformed from graven images into shrill moral imperatives and brittle political causes.

The last century’s graveyards testify to the reality of this danger. Turned away from something truly greater than ourselves, we do not come to rest in a modest ­loyalty to humanity. Instead, as Nietzsche’s and Augustine’s insights into the human condition warn us, we fall into a devotion to subhuman primal powers that reward our service with debasement.

Read it all

The Secularization of the Christian Mind

An original goal among the secular social reformers of education was not only to provide public education (uniformity of method) but also secular education (uniformity of secular thought).  That is, they sought to capture the minds of the public school classroom to see to it that the next generation only thinks, explains, analyzes, critiques, understands using secular or naturalistic categories.  Most secular reformers were perfectly content to leave God on the walls of public school classrooms (10 commandments) so long as He was no longer the foundation of the public school classroom (the standard and foundation for knowledge).  I’ve noticed this among students today, even Christian students.  They are thoroughly socialized and secularized to explain all things in the world by interpreting them through purely secular or naturalistic grid.  This is what Nietzsche meant by God is Dead.  Not that no one believes in Him, but that modern man no longer uses Him (revelation) to make the world intelligible any more.

Consider Political Theory.  If you ask students where government gets its power or where government comes from, you will see the evidence of secularization even among the Christians. If they provide any answer at all it will likely be a secular theory of government, not a Christian one.

Theologian Robert Lewis Dabney in presenting the Christian view of human government could not be accused of being unfamiliar with the secular view.

Dabney on the Civil Magistrate:

According to Enlightenment philosophers, “one traces [the powers of the civil magistrate] to a supposed social contract. Men are to be at first apprehended, they say, as insulated individuals, separate human integers, all naturally equal, and each by nature absolutely free, having a natural liberty to exercise his whole will, as a “Lord of Creation.” But the experience of the exposure, inconveniences, and mutual violences of so many independent wills, led them, in time, to be willing to surrender a part of their independence, in order to secure the enjoyment of the rest of their rights. To do this, they are supposed to have conferred, and to have entered into a compact with each other, binding themselves to each other to submit to certain rules and restraints upon their natural rights, and to obey certain ones selected to rule, in order that the power thus delegated to their hands might be used for the protection of the remaining rights of all. Subsequent citizens have given an assent, express or implied, to this compact. The terms of it form the organic law, or constitution of the commonwealth. And the reason why men are bound to obey the legitimate commands of the magistrate is, that they have thus bargained with their fellow-citizens to obey, for the sake of mutual benefits…
The other theory may be called the Christian. It traces civil government to the will and providence of God, who, from the first, created man with social instincts and placed him under social relations (when men were few, the patriarchical, as they increased, the commonwealth). It teaches that some form of social government is as original as man himself. If asked, whence the obligation to obey the civil magistrate, it answers: from the will of God, which is the great source of all obligation. The fact that such obedience is greatly promotive of human convenience, well-being and order, confirms and illustrates the obligation, but did not originate it. Hence, civil government is an ordinance of God; magistrates rule by His providence and by His command, and are His agents and ministers. Obedience to them, in the Lord, is a religious duty, and rebellion against them is not only injustice to our fellow-men, but disobedience to God. This is the theory plainly asserted by Paul in Roman 13, 1 Peter 2…. [However] while we emphatically ascribe the fact of civil government and obligation to obey it, to the will of God, we also assert that in the secondary sense, the government is, potentially, the people. The original source of power, the authority and the obligation to obey it, is God, the human source is not an irresponsible Ruler, but the body of the ruled themselves, that is, the sovereignty, so far as it is human, resides in the people, and is held by the rulers, by delegation from them…
[The secular social contract theory] is atheistic, utterly ignoring man’s relation to his Creator, the right of that Creator to determine under what obligations man shall live; and the great Bible fact, that God has determined he shall live under civic obligations.

From his Systematic Theology (pp. 862-866)

Progressive, Conservative, and Neo-Conservative interpretations of the Declaration of Independence

From Bruce Frohen:

Russell Kirk at his typewriter.

American conservatives must constantly confront the myth that our nation was founded on the basis of a radical ideology, creating the world’s “first new nation.” As with most myths, there is a smattering of truth to the view that the American Revolution was a full-fledged “revolution” in the sense of overturning the old order. The Framers of our Constitution themselves spoke in terms of establishing a “new order of the ages” as stated on the back of the Great Seal of the United States (in Latin, of course—after all, the new order was not yet the uneducated order). More important than the rhetoric, there were certain clearly “new” aspects to the revolution and subsequent Constitution—principally the firm grounding of political legitimacy on the consent of the governed. The theory of consent, as has been shown by historian Brian Tierney, actually goes back to the Christian Middle Ages. But the United States was rare for its era in being a country of substantial size and population founded without recourse to some inherited set of rulers.

Alas, the “modernity” of our revolution has caused some Christian thinkers in particular to question its very legitimacy, deeming it too rooted in individualism, materialism, and a subjective understanding of the good as what happens to satisfy people’s desires of the moment. But there has been another side to this debate. A number of historians have pointed to the influence of conservatives in the American founding era. I am not referring, here, to historians like Russell Kirk who took an explicitly conservative view of the era, emphasizing the contrast between the American Revolution, which brought independence from Great Britain but no great social upheaval or radical changes to our form of government, with the utopian and extremely bloody French Revolution that sought to make society and human nature anew. I refer instead to a varied group of liberal historians who emphasize the caution of at least some American founders, who as it were “hit the brakes” to slow down what might have become a more truly revolutionary movement, perhaps bringing a form of Jacobinism to America before it infected France.

Perhaps conservatives are expected to be grateful to be mentioned at all in relation to the founding era. After all, most historians seem oblivious to their existence. But the dominant historical view of “conservative” founders such as John Dickinson, Gouvernor Morris, and others, makes of them something far less than important thinkers or, in the end, conservatives in any meaningful sense. Essentially, contemporary historians read into the founding era their prejudices about conservatives and conservatism, which is to say, they see both as lacking in serious thought.

Some of these historians, such as Gordon Wood, have decried the conservative tendencies of important revolutionary figures, who in his view turned back the egalitarian republicanism of the revolution in defense of their own power, wealth, and status. Others, including David Lefer, have sought to present figures like John Dickinson as steadying, prudent statesmen who did the nation and the cause of freedom a service by seeing that it did not move too quickly and spin out of control. What each holds in common is a thin view of conservatism according to which that body of thought has no real principles or content, but rather is summed up as a disposition to move slowly in whatever direction events (or liberals) are pushing it.

There is a false choice presented to most students of American history, between reading the American Revolution as a radical event, with all good Americans on the side of progress toward ever greater individual liberty and equality, and rejection of that revolution (and, seemingly, the entire “project” of American self-government) for the same reasons. The notion of conservatives as stand-patters (to use Clinton Rossiter’s somewhat patronizing phrase) opposed to swift change of any kind may make of those conservatives something almost heroic (Lefer) if intrinsically quite limited, or something almost demonic (Wood). But such a view does nothing to change the fundamentally liberal interpretation of America as, from its immaculate conception in the minds of a few philosophically adept statesmen, liberal. Utterly absent from any of these narratives is the possibility of an American conservatism. For how can one “conserve” an intrinsically liberal project other than as a mere, semimindless “stand-patter?”

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What of a society as “sexless as the bees”?

From Dr. Susan Hanssen Alexis de Tocqueville called “the strength of American women” the great secret of the strength of the American republic. Likewise, strong women were the backbone of the Adams family and its contribution to the political integrity of the American republic. The letters of John and Abigail Adams were first published by their grandson, Charles Francis Adams (President Abraham Lincoln’s ambassador to Britain). The diaries and letters of John Quincy Adams’s wife, Louisa, have just been published this year, a project explored by their grandson, Henry Adams. Henry Adams—who called Tocqueville’s Democracy in America the “bible of my own private religion”—worried that American men and women were losing their appreciation for the complementary strengths and gifts of men and women. He thought the best remedy was to hold up for Americans the image of his grandmother. Part of the charm of John and Abigail Adams’s letters (which are frequently addressed with terms such as “Dear Miss Adorable” and “My Dearest Friend”) is the way that the two weave a life-long conversation about universal human virtue into their ongoing inquiry into their complementary contributions to mothering and fathering their “little flock” of children. Louisa Adams had a hard act to follow in such a renowned mother-in-law, but her journals reveal a woman of profound reflection—on the meaning of piety (filial, patriotic, and religious) and her role as daughter, wife, and mother. The Only Perfectly Balanced Mind in the Adams Family Louisa Adams is the only American First Lady to have been born in a foreign country. Her American parents were living in London when she was born, and during the Revolution she was educated in a French convent school. She married John Quincy Adams during his diplomatic work, and the two immediately set off for Prussia, where he was stationed. She had already endured a number of difficult miscarriages and given birth to her three sons—little George Washington, John II, and Charles Francis—before she made her first visit to her “native” land. She was soon called on to leave her two oldest sons behind and accompany her husband to Russia with her youngest child. In Tsarist Russia, she endured a very personal “winter”: painfully separated from her older children, she lost her only infant daughter, received news of her own mother’s death, and had to travel alone from St. Petersburg to Paris in the midst of the Napoleonic wars. Late in life, she bitterly reproached herself for having left her oldest sons behind while she accompanied her husband on his diplomatic mission to Russia. Both of those sons were deeply troubled youths, impregnating women before wedlock, and dying young from drink or suicide. Only the son whom she had kept close to her carried on the family tradition of public service, political integrity, and a lifelong happy marriage with many children. In fact, his sons marveled at Charles Francis Adams as a man “singular for mental poise.” It seemed to them that it was the influence of his mother who had balanced the analytical tendencies of his father, which often led members of the Adams family to deep depression, bitterness, and drink. With a good dose of both mothering and fathering, he struck his sons as “the only perfectly balanced mind that ever existed in the name.” Sexless as the Bees When her grandson Henry Adams read Louisa’s diary, he was inspired to compare Russia to Woman, Woman to Russia—the two conservative forces at the beginning of the twentieth century. Russia acted as a conservative political force in Europe comparable to Woman as a conservative social force in America. Perhaps with the help of Russia the threat of an imperial Germany could be contained. Perhaps with the help of Woman the threat of a corroding materialism might be contained. Each was powerful, but each powerfully directed its forces internally. Russia, he argued, had its axis of rotation around the Church and around agricultural production to feed its enormous population. It had not yet turned its forces toward industrialization and modernization. If Russia’s forces were ever to be ripped from its axis by, let’s say, an atheistic modernizing revolutionary regime, Adams wrote in 1905, it might destroy all of Europe. But if Woman were to be torn from her axis of rotation around the cradle, it wouldn’t just destroy Europe—it could destroy human society. In his wide-ranging third-person autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, Adams observed: The woman’s force had counted as inertia of rotation, and her axis of rotation had been the cradle and the family. The idea that she was weak revolted all history; it was a palæontological falsehood that even an Eocene female monkey would have laughed at; but it was surely true that, if her force were to be diverted from its axis, it must find a new field, and the family must pay for it. So far as she succeeded, she must become sexless like the bees, and must leave the old energy of inertia to carry on the race. In this context of a Tocquevillean fear of whether Russian absolutism or American freedom would triumph in the coming century and whether the American triumph would indeed be a victory for liberty or for the incessant pursuit of petty and paltry pleasures that “enervate the soul and noiselessly unbend its springs of action,” Adams held up, at the beginning of The Education, the image of his grandmother. Education by Grandmothers Henry Adams recalled his grandmother as the very portrait of religious peace. She was “a peaceful vision of silver gray” presiding over her old president, her china tea set, and her box walks. She was refined, gentle, fragile, delicate, and remote. As a boy, Adams “knew nothing of her interior life” but he sensed that she was “exotic”—that she did not belong wholly to the political world of Boston, with its confidence that a political utopia could be achieved on earth. After “being beaten about a stormy world” and enduring a life of “severe stress and little pure satisfaction,” it was clear that she placed her hopes in eternity. The political world believed that absolute democracy, state education, and total freedom of speech would usher in the end times of history. The political creed was that “Human nature works for the good and three instruments are all she asks—Suffrage, Common Schools, and the Press.” All doubts of this creed were political heresy. From his grandmother, Henry Adams gleaned his sense that there were values beyond the negotiable values of politics. Without her, his education would have been all Mars and no Venus—a purely political education with no religion—all war and no contemplation of beauty, all work and no genuine leisure. In the “Boston” chapter of the Education, Adams wrote: The children reached manhood without knowing religion, and with the certainty that dogma, metaphysics, and abstract philosophy were not worth knowing. So one-sided an education could have been possible in no other country or time, but it became, almost of necessity, the more literary and political. As the children grew up, they exaggerated the literary and the political interests. Without religion, the poetic imagination became utopian, and the political imagination became utilitarian. Americans worshipped “the Dynamo”—of the physical and mental energy of man—and were utterly lacking the cult of “the Virgin”—the contemplation of the laws of Nature and Nature’s God, and openness to the grace needed to fulfill them. Louisa Adams always felt herself a fish out of water in a culture that gave more attention to the virtues of equality than to the virtues of piety and pity. She saw her role as wife and mother as that of an educator in the refined art of deference and condescension—the discernment and acknowledgment of realities of inequality, weakness, strength, power and infirmity, and a careful attunement to the unequal duties such differences gave rise to. She considered a culture that saw nothing but equal duties, equal rights, and relations of convenience and mutual interest as a tyranny against her own nature. “My temper is so harassed and I am I fear so imbued with strange and singular opinions, and surrounded by persons with whom it is decidedly impossible for me to agree,” she exclaimed. “I feel that I have strange exaggerated ideas on most subjects which must be utterly incomprehensible but are utterly impossible for me to eradicate.” One of her most ineradicable ideas was the sacredness of the bond between parents and children, the most palpable bond of piety and pity. She wrote: It has been the fashion to say that as Children were not born to please themselves, no real ties bind them to their parents; and that blood relationship, should exact neither affection or gratitude—To my mind there is no truth whatever in such an assertion . . . From the moment of the birth, we incur a vast debt of gratitude which a life cannot repay . . . There must be a great dereliction in that mind which could for a moment shrink from the acknowledgement of so vast a debt: founded in the weakest of all vanities, self idolatry! Louisa Adams herself attributed the deepening of her sense of piety and pity to her experience of motherhood. She wrote that her religious opinions and sentiments had “‘grown with my growth, and strengthened with my strength’ though until I became a Mother; perhaps not properly weighed and considered; one more of precept, habit, and example than of meditated reflection.” Adams worried that as Americans pursued a culture that was “sexless as the bees,” the complementarity that had produced the remarkable personal poise of his father—the balanced judgment, the eye for both contractual duties, and the more delicate bonds of affection—would be lost. To his mind, the proper education of the young American required both father and mother, grandfathers and grandmothers. Susan Hanssen is an associate professor of history at the University of Dallas.

Copyright © 2015 The Witherspoon Institute, all rights reserved.

Does Christianity, particularly reformed theology, imply a kind of conservative social hierarchy or radical liberal democracy?

A subject of much interest to me.  Reformed folks like to credit Reformational theology with playing a major role in the rationale behind and formation of liberal democracy.  But how far?  Does it promote the great leveling revolutions (Rousseau thought it might) or is it more conservative than that (Burke thought it was).

Good exchange here on the subject:

Reformed Christian ethics has taken a social egalitarian turn. Recently, a few Reformed bloggers have criticized Christians for failing to support the “radical and inclusive social ethics” of the New Testament. Matthew Tuininga, in a couple interesting and well-written posts on the Presbyterian role in racial segregation (see here andhere),[1] has condemned the southern Presbyterians for their “communitarian” social ethics and spiritualized,”neo-platonic” understanding of the Gospel. For them, “the spiritual kingdom of God does not take concrete social expression.” He writes,

I would submit that the real problem with the way in which southern Presbyterians used the doctrine of the spirituality of the church was not the insistence that the Church should only proclaim what God’s Word teaches. The real problem was the interpretation of the concept of ‘spirituality’ through the lens of an underrealized eschatology. By stressing that the Gospel does not affect social structures of nation, race, gender and class southern Presbyterians were bound to have a bias towards the status quo, and they were bound to turn to the Old Testament as an alternative source for guidance about the nature of a godly society. They did not have trouble admitting that the Old Testament did not say anything specifically about race because that was not the point. The point was that the Old Testament clearly justified an exclusive kind of politics, a politics that highlighted division over unity and judgment over grace.

Now, I do not dispute that the southern Presbyterians sinned in failing to see or act against the injustice of the South’s racial segregation, but I want to point out, however, that Southern Presbyterians were following a racialized (and unjust) version of the standard Christian (catholic) position on social hierarchy. The ideas that the Gospel does not significantly affect social structures of nation, gender, and class and that social hierarchy isnatural are standard positions in the Christian tradition. Major figures in the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Calvinist traditions are in agreement on this.

It is important to recognize that Tuininga’s argument does not merely condemn the racialized hierarchical system of the South, but also, and primarily, the idea of social hierarchy in general. In this, he joins Michael Walzer and Nichols Wolterstorff, who both argue not only that Calvinism was politically radical from the beginning and always has been, but also that it, given its theological principles, ought to be radical. Wolterstorff insists that Calvinism was and is a “world-formative” religion. [2]

This post provides evidence from major figures in the Christian tradition that social hierarchy (though not its racialized form) is a standard position in the Christian tradition. To be clear, I am not defending racial segregation or anything of that sort. I am simply pointing out that Tuininga’s rejection of social hierarchy and a “spiritualized” Gospel is a rejection of a standard position in the Christian tradition.

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We know of right-wing atrocities, but Marxist historian Eugene Genovese famously asked his fellow leftists, “What did you know and when?”

Make no mistake, conservatism has protected and rationalized all sorts of injustices in history. Indeed, the total amount of human suffering that has resulted from a stubborn political and cultural conservatism has perhaps only been eclipsed by the enormous human suffering lying in the wake of radical revolutions marching to the left-wing drums of liberty, equality, fraternity, and scientific progress. Years ago, before a Harvard crowd of left-wing professors, fellow Marxist Eugene Genovese called his colleagues out on it in this scathing speech. In “The Question,” he asks, since right-wing (‘imperial’) injustices are routinely and rightfully castigated, when it comes to the atrocities committed on the left in the name of liberation, equality, and progress, “What did you know and when did you know it?”

Simply a mic-dropping read: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/…/1353953160genovesethequest…

Highlights:

Many of my old comrades and almost all of
those ostensibly independent radicals and
high-minded liberals remain unruffled. After
all, did we not often protest against some
outrage or other in the Soviet Union or China,
signing an indignant petition or open letter? I
know I did. And does not that change
everything? I am afraid not, but I have nothing
to offer as critique other than that which may
be found in Galatians 6:7

Perhaps knowledge of the record of imperialist
atrocities leads our liberal colleagues to
refuse to single us out by asking The Question.
But I am afraid not. After all, they never stop
asking southern whites about their crimes, real
and imagined, against blacks. And let’s face it:
all the combined crimes of white southerners, at least if we restrict ourselves to the period since emancipation, would be worth no more
than a footnote in a casebook that starred us.

A few years ago, there was a successful
effort to get the Organization of American
Historians (OAH) to condemn apartheid in
South Africa. In the OAH and other professional
associations, Professor Wilborne Washburne
resolutely opposed this politicization,
and attempted to expose its hypocrisy by
offering an amendment to condemn the “necklacing”
of black South Africans, including
children, by the militants of the African
National Congress. (For those who have
forgotten, “necklacing” was execution by
burning the victims alive.) The ANC subsequently
repudiated necklacing as not only
wrong but barbarous. The OAH has yet to
endorse that repudiation.
I laughed. Those bloody South African
whites did kill a lot of blacks and ought to
answer for it, but throughout their whole
history they probably never equaled the numbers
we put up in one of our more spirited
month’s work. I laughed even harder when our
liberal colleagues poured out their wrath on the
ghastly racists in South Africa while they
remained silent about the immeasurably greater
slaughters occasioned by the periodic ethnic
cleansing that was—and is—going on in black
Africa and every other part of the globe. The
New York Times recently announced that the
death toll in the latest round of ethnic cleansing
in Burundi has reached 150,000, with the fate
of a half million or so refugees in doubt. The
historical associations have not been heard
from. Nor should anyone expect that they will
be.

No one should be surprised that none of our
leading historical associations have thought it
intellectually challenging to devote sessions at
their enormous annual meetings to frank
discussions of the socialist debacle. We of the
left are regularly invited to give papers on just
about any subject except this one. We are not
asked to assess the achievements as well as the
disasters, the heroism as well as the crimes,
and the lessons we ourselves have learned from
a tragic experience. No one need be surprised
that we have never been called upon to explain
ourselves. The pezzonovanti of our profession
have more important things on their minds.
When they can take time away from their
primary concern (the distribution of jobs,
prizes, and other forms of patronage), they are
immersed in grave condemnations of the
appalling violations of human rights by Christopher
Columbus. I know that it is in bad taste
to laugh, but I laugh anyway. I would rather be
judged boorish than seen throwing up