Innes and Harper at AEI

Friday was a big day. I took the Acela down to DC to speak at a luncheon event at the American Enterprise Institute. They invited me and my co-author, Lisa Sharon Harper of Sojourners, to speak about our book, Left, Right and Christ: Evangelical Faith in Politics. We each spoke for about 15 minutes and then took questions. AEI has released five clips from our remarks. Here are my two.

In this one I talk about God's purpose in establishing government.



In this one, I state that a more fully Christian view of government is that it must secure not only individuals, but families and the fabric of cummunities in general.



Here they catch Lisa in her astonishing Robin Hood view of the Republicans and the Democrats. When she was a girl in 1976, she followed her mother around campaigning for Jimmy Carter. "Why are we Democrats, Mom?," she asked. Mom said that whereas the Republicans take money from the poor and give it to the rich, the Democrats take back from the rich and give it to the poor. "It stuck," she said.



Yup. Apparently it's that simple. Politics is the practice of plunder and counter-plunder. That view is not unique to my co-author. It is the standard, Sojourners, left-wing Evangelical view. For this reason, I think that Left, Right and Christ is a valuable book for setting side-by-side the poilitical alternatives for the Evangelical community.

Update: Here is the whole hour! Jaw dropping moments here.



Here we are the same day on Fox's Lauren Green Show.

The Gospel Seen from the Left

Here is my co-author, Lisa Sharon Harper, answering the question, "What is an Evangelical?"


Lisa Sharon Harper: What's an Evangelical? from Sojourners on Vimeo.

I have entitled this post "The Gospel Seen from the Left." Should it read "The Left seen from the Gospel?" Any comments?

How Far Left is Evangelical Left?

Last week I wrote from a politically conservative Christian point of view on the missing Evangelical concern for a common biblical concern: oppression and the oppressed.

Well, lo and behold, the next day Jim Wallis writes on the same subject but from his politically leftist Christian point of view. ("What is 'biblical politics'?" is on his God's Politics blog, Sept. 15, 2011.) I call his position "leftist" rather than "liberal" because it seems to go well beyond anything that a liberal Democrat in Congress would say, Christian or otherwise. Notice also that he calls it "biblical politics" in general. To Wallis, that's all that politics is about. Or so it seems.

If Wallis is left of the left-wing Democrats, where is he? As a starting point, compare these two statements.

Wallis:

I was talking the other day to a Christian leader who has given his life to working with the poor. His approach is very grassroots — he lives in a poor, virtually all-minority community and provides basic services for low-income people. He said, “If you work with and for the poor, you inevitably run into injustice.” In other words, poverty isn’t caused by accident. There are unjust systems and structures that create and perpetuate poverty and human suffering. And service alone is never enough; working to change both the attitudes and institutional arrangements that cause poverty is required.

Here is Marxist liberation theologian, Gutavo Gutierrez:

Charity is today a ‘political charity’ . . . it means the transformation of a society structured to benefit a few who appropriate to themselves the value of the work of others. This transformation ought to be directed toward a radical change in the foundation of society, that is, the private ownership of the means of production. (A Theology of Liberation [Orbis, 1973]; p.202)

Granted, Wallis also says some biblical things, but mixes them with the same radicalism:

This is what the Bible teaches us. The scriptures reveal a God of justice, not merely a God of charity. Words such as oppression and justice fill the Bible. The most common objects of the prophets’ judgments are kings, rulers, judges, employers — the rich and the powerful in charge of the world’s governments, courts, economies, systems, and structures. When those who are in charge mistreat the poor and vulnerable, say the scriptures, it is not just unkind but also wrong and unjust, and it makes God angry. The subjects of the scriptures’ concern are always the widow and the orphan, the poor and oppressed, the victims of courts or unscrupulous employers, debtors whose debts need to be forgiven, strangers in the land who need to be welcomed. And the topics of the prophets’ messages to the powerful are things like land, labor, capital, judicial decisions, employer practices, rulers’ dictates, and the decisions of the powerful — all the stuff of politics.

But then later he comes back to the radicalism:

But biblical politics is never just about the candidates either, and some have made that mistake in recent elections. Putting one’s hopes in political candidates and parties has only led to disappointment, frustration, and dangerous cynicism. There are systems and structures that undergird and shape the limits of the political agenda, and challenging those limits to get to root causes and real solutions is always the prophetic task.

He also pours scorn on private charity. It leaves the powerful accountable. It's hopelessly inadequate to the task and it does not address the root of the problem: structures and systems, and nasty capitalist swine.

So is Jim Wallis a Marxist? A secret Marxist? That may be going to far. But what I can tell from these passages, there is more Karl Marx mixed in with his view of politics than he is willing to admit. The same thing happens on the political right, of course. Many Christian conservatives espouse elements of Enlightenment liberalism that I think are incompatible with a Christian view of the world. From what he says about me in the foreword to my book, Left, Right, and Christ: Evangelical Faith in Politics (a foreword for which I am grateful), Jim Wallis sees me as part of that philosophically compromised group. "At times in this book, Innes sounds much more like Ayn Rand, the Russian atheist and apostle of the virtue of selfishness, than he does Jesus Christ" (p.11). You can read the book and decide for yourself.

To read up on Wallis's history with Marxism, read Ronald Nash, Why the Left is Not Right (Zondervan, 1996). To read Wallis's account of politics and of his turn to what he claims is a third way that is neither left nor right, read The Soul of Politics (Mariner Press, 1995).

Modern Marriage and the Antithesis

Most Americans profess to be Christians (76% in 2008). So where is all this support coming from for same-sex marriage? While we're at it, where does the support come from for Family Guy, South Park, many other television shows and movies, advertising, no-fault divorce laws, internet pornography, aggressively secular public schools, and so on?

The answer is that many of those professing Christians are merely nominal in their affiliation (Protestant and Catholic), and they are fairly indistinguishable from their godless neighbors in how they think and live. But even most of the church-attending, religiously serious Christians are culturally compromised. Of course, we are all compromised to some extent or another. Deepening our adoption of the culture of Christ is called the process of sanctification, and it is lifelong. But too many Christians in America are scandalously and unconsciously conformed to the ways of the world that considers itself wise apart from and contrary to the wisdom of God.

The legalization of (or legislative invention of) same-sex marriage in New York State prompted me to call for the church to take it's counter-cultural calling more seriously, i.e., to understand and apply what Reformed theologians call "the antithesis" more widely, more conscientiously, and more rigorously ("A Call to Christian Counter-culture," Worldmag.com, July 6, 2011).

The legal establishment of same-sex marriage in New York state—not by a rogue court, mind you, but by legislative act—raises pressing questions for the Church. Will we stand for Christian principles in the face of this blindly egalitarian normalization of homosexuality, and the polygamy and incest that will logically follow? Will we stand firm when people call us bigots and compare us with unreconstructed racists? Will we continue to follow uncritically the principles of the world around us? Evangelicals have a history of cultural accommodation, after all. Will we join with our clearly anti-Christian society in this moral collapse, or will we present an alternative by clearly identifying, thoroughly rejecting, and firmly replacing those socially self-destructive principles? ...


If the Church continues to address individual issues as isolated challenges—abortion, divorce, teen rebellion, same-sex marriage—she will continue to plug holes in the dike while the rising waters come up through the ground to her knees, to her elbows, and then to her neck. The problem is not this-and-that hole where the water is leaking in, but where you are standing relative to the sea. Christians need a more thorough understanding of the culture and seek the high ground in the mind of Christ.


In the age of same-sex marriage, how radical a Reformation do we need if the Church is to remain distinct from the world? Remaining distinct is not about hemlines, how much you drink, nose studs, what entertains you, etc., though being distinct has consequences for these things. It means being transformed by the renewing of your mind (Romans 12:2). It means understanding the world in distinctly Christian categories of thought.

I then point readers to Abraham Kuyper's Lectures on Calvinism (1898) where he distinguishes between the Christian worldview and the modern one. Part of the modern has grown out of the Christian, but fundamental aspects merely mimic the Christian view but are fundamentally opposed to it. That is, they are idolatrous and corrosive of the Christian way of thinking.
We need a renewed understanding of the spiritual warfare involved in all of life, not just personal but corporate between the church and the world. We need a renewed appreciation of the distinction between what Augustine called the city of God and the city of man, an awareness of the antithesis at work in all of life, the kingdoms that are in conflict in every thought, word, and deed, and throughout the culture. We are what Stanley Hauerwas called "resident aliens."

Christians are at war. Christ is our king and champion. He is spreading his kingdom, reclaiming his world, and putting every enemy under his feet. We are glad captives and combatants in that war. The dramatic slide of our culture into moral vertigo is an opportunity for us ready our minds for battle and live faithfully and redemptively in this clash of cultures.

How Must I Help You?

Beggar in Tehran, Antoine-Khan Sevruguin, 1880



It is healthy for all of us that the Evangelical left has provoked the rest of us into a more careful and conscientious consideration of our moral obligations to the poor among us. But while they tend to think that what those moral obligations demand of us is obvious (perhaps just the most vocal among them), it strikes me as considerably more complex, like the human relationships and human souls that the question involves.

I briefly address this question in "The Least of These," Worldmag.com, October 6, 2010.

They are people for whom it is a challenge each day simply to feed themselves and their families. The Bible typically presents them as the widow, the orphan, and sometimes the sojourner. These are people who have lost their natural protectors and have little or no means of providing for themselves. They are exposed to the wolves of society, powerful and unscrupulous people of means who would devour them for selfish gain.

How people are to help such people depends on one's relationship to them, and position of authority. I don't have the same moral responsibility for people across town, much less across the world, as I do more people in my own community, or even my next door neighbor. This is not to say I have no responsibility, which of course increases with the development of technology that makes the world a smaller place.

I have heightened responsibility for brothers and sisters in Christ, and yet again for for own family.

There is also a giving that is inappropriate. If I were struggling to keep my family fed and clothed, and a wealthy person in my church took pleasure in decking out my children and wife in nice clothes, I would resent this. I would return the gifts, because he is supplanting me as provider. It's not his place to give these things, or at least not in that way.

Government welfare supplants in the same way. When it steps in and gives what private charity and family are supposed to give, while providing for real material needs it destroys or at least slackens important relationships in the process. This should come as no surprise because it is not government's place to provide this good. God appointed government to praise what is good, not do the good itself (Romans 3:1-7; 2 Peter 2:14).

Christians have no disagreement over the moral necessity of kindness to the poor. Our point of debate is what the legitimate and most beneficial means are for accomplishing this. But it is sheer political fantasy that in Matthew 25 Jesus was mandating a government engineered transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor in the form of direct payments and a broad array of social services and economic subsidies.

I don't mean to suggest that the Evangelical left discovered the poor and the moral obligation of mercy. Marvin Olasky has been encouraging the compassionate dimension of the Christian life at least since he published The Tragedy of American Compassion in 1992. But the history of Christian charity is a long one, and no generation has been without its chapter.

Wallis and the Tea Party Infidels

In account of a recent writing project, I have been forced to pay attention to left wing Evangelicalism. Others also have been giving them new attention, from the Emerging church movement to save-the-planet young born again greenies to the religiously oriented in the Obama White House.

But Jim Wallis, one of the grand old men of the movement, seems anxious that Christ's little lambs not wander into what he sees as the hellish Tea Party movement, especially now that the pearly gates of access to his Progressive Kingdom are now flung wide. He gave voice to his frustration in his Huffington Post article, "How Christian is Tea Party Libertarianism?" I examine it in my WORLDmag.com column, "The Tea Party According to Jim Wallis."

To what I say at WORLDmag, I will add that he attacks the rights-oriented thinking that is the basis of our constitution. “Libertarianism is a political philosophy that holds individual rights as its supreme value and considers government the major obstacle.” But, of course, that’s what rights are: limitations on government. “Congress shall make no law…”

Especially disturbing is his charge that Tea Party supporters are racists in general, and in particular people who simply cannot abide the fact that our president is black. In lieu of actually engaging in a substantive debate over the merits of big government versus private initiative, the left is scolding their opponents with the racist charge. But the charge is baseless. A month later, a USA Today/Gallup poll showed that 23% of Tea Party supporters are Asian, Hispanic, and African-American.

But what if they weren’t? The best argument he can lob at the Tea Party itself is an ad hominem one, i.e., not an argument at all. The red elephant in the room, however, the subject he completely ignores, is the Tea Party alarm over stratospheric federal deficit spending, a concern that is reasonable, arguably Christian (eighth commandment), and fundamental to the movement.

I conclude,

Despite Jim Wallis’s self-presentation as a man who has thought through Christian principles and found himself in prophetic stance against what most Evangelicals hold to be just, his condemnation of the Tea Party movement (disguised as a conversation starter) is a muddled-headed confusion of terms and a battle entirely with straw men. I was hoping to be challenged. I was not.

Additional material:

Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion and Democracy looks at the article here.

Timothy Dalrymple at Patheos gives us this.

Doug Wilson has not been silent. (That's a joke.) He weighs in here.

Prof. Craig Carter of Tyndale University in Toronto says this.

In a recent Washington Times article, "Netherlands Tragedy of State Compassion,"I argue that compassionate government (as if that were possible) makes people themselves less compassionate.

You might also consider Grover Norquist's book, Leave Us Alone: Getting the Government's Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives," (Harper Collins, 2008).

Also,

Anthony Bradley sees politically activist liberal Protestantism, with which leftist Evangelicalism seems to blend so easily, as understanding "one part of Christian engagement to be the whole of Christian identity," ("Progressive Christianity," WORLDmag.com, July 21, 2010).

Tea Party is No Moral Majority

The 1980 presidential election ended the way it did because Evangelical Christians got angry and got involved. In 2010, there is another very angry and highly organized movement that seems to be turning American politics on it's head: the Tea Party movement. Frantic liberals hate both of these popular revolts with such white-knuckled intensity that they easily identify them. (As in, "Oh, here come the backward, racist, Christian hillbillies again.") Jim Wallis, of Sojourners fame, seems particularly concerned that his secular leftist friends not get the idea that the Tea Party is Christian of any sort, so he tries to deep-six the idea in a Huffington Post article entitled, "How Christian is Tea Party Libertarianism?," (May 27, 2010).

In my WORLDmag.com column this week, "The Year of the Tea Party," I distinguish the Tea Party from the Moral Majority then show briefly that the Tea Party movement's much narrower agenda is arguably Christian at its core, or at least not unchristian.

The Moral Majority was intentionally a largely, but not necessarily, religious organization. It presented itself as a moral majority, not a Christian majority. Their concerns were threefold: family, foreign policy, and fiscal responsibility, if I may put it that way. Family issues included opposition to homosexuality, abortion, divorce, pornography, and feminism. Foreign policy concerns included standing effectively against world communism and supporting the state of Israel. To this they added a call for lower taxes and a balanced budget. The group’s agenda mirrored the GOP coalition of moral conservatives, foreign policy hawks, and fiscal conservatives, though the Moral Majority was chiefly concerned with family issues. There was an evangelical ministry called Focus on the Family, but nothing called Focus on Firepower or anything like that.

The Tea Party has a narrower agenda. It’s all about money. The movement was triggered by concerns over wild government spending, initially the implementation of TARP to stabilize the financial system, but then the group began to rally against various other stimulus packages, interventions, and pork barrel spending orgies that seemed to exploit the crisis to pillage several generations of taxpayers while the getting was good.

But money is not a dirty word. While balanced budgets are not the stuff of gospel preaching, financial responsibility is not an ungodly concern. In fact, concern for it is implied in the Eighth Commandment: “Thou shalt not steal!” Jim Wallis says, “[T]he Tea Party can legitimately be examined on the basis of Christian principles—and it should be,” then proceeds to attempt it. Yet he manages to overlook this feature that is arguably Christian and definitively Tea Party.

You can read more background on the Moral Majority in the WORLDmag.com column itself.

Entertaining Hauerwas

 Photo: WORLD magazine

Last Thursday night Stanley Hauerwas, the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School, addressed the student body of The King's College on the subject of avarice. He was the the keynote speaker for the 2010 Interregnum, the college's annual three day recess from classes when we explore a fruitful theme and a related great book.

Stanley Hauerwas is an odd man, but the sort of oddball that is good to know. He is an Anabaptist Anglican from Texas, now living in North Carolina. He is too conservative to be acceptable to liberals (he believes the Bible and thinks sodomy is sin), but he is too liberal for the comfort of conservatives (he's a pacifist and he's married to a Methodist minister). He is pleasant company, and a stimulating thinker.

Over the course of the day with Prof. Hauerwas, between a morning conversation, a lunch discussion, the evening address, and the question and answer time that followed, I gleaned these nuggets of insight and provocation. (These are either quotations, or, more likely, fairly reliable near-quotations.) For another brief exposure to the man, you can read Marvin Olasky's 2007 interview with him, "A Playful Mind."

*****************

Evangelicals know the Bible and they know today...and nothing in between.

Evangelicals are people who have a relationship with God, and attending church worship services is just how they express that. [If you don't see the point, the joke is on you.]

We don't hear sermons on greed (which is odd given that it's such a prominent theme in the New Testament.) We know what lust looks like--but greed?

There was an increase in attention to greed by theologians after the rise of the money economy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

America can never have enough power.

America runs on fear.

We cannot imagine anything but an endlessly growing economy--that says something about our greed.

People have always been greedy, but now we have made it into a moral quality necessary for economic growth.

Whether or not we are possessed by our possessions is measured by our willingness to give it away.

We want to be forgivers, not forgiven, because we want to remain in control. Learn to accept forgiveness without regret.

If in giving alms you think you are giving what's yours, you are possessed by greed.

Greed is a deadly sin because it prevents faith.

What would New York City look like if it were shaped by the virtue of temperance?

Another name for money is loneliness.

You should not have a personal relationship with Christ. You should share him.

No monasticism? No Christianity. The Protestant rejection of it explains why we have no resistance to being bourgeois.

Jesus never worked a day as far as we know. He must have begged. We need to learn how to beg. If you get money, you must always get it as a beggar. (He meant you must view it, even as you are making it, as a gift from God, from outside of your control. But he also spoke highly of actual begging.)

American democracy is a plutocracy. ...The middle class doesn't care who rules as long as they don't lose their stuff.

Every American has a sign around his neck that says, "Notice me!" (but I don't have to notice you). It's a form of greed.

********************

I was impressed by the breadth of his learning, and the fertility of his mind. (Why should I be impressed? He's a prominent theologian of high reputation.) His discussion of the moral management of prosperity, being possessed by our possessions, the ease with which we justify and even sanctify our avarice, and the many forms this sin can take when concealed within other sins as well as within virtues like generosity was a feast for reflection. But I was struck with how injudicious his judgments were in applying his learning.

Professor Hauerwas finds greed in all human business like dust in a rug, but he uses this exposure as a basis for condemning modern life itself. Of course modernity has serious problems. That's why it spawned post-modernity. But a more sober use of his considerable research and original insights would have been to recognize what good there is in modern liberty, and then caution us against the many and subtle forms of greed for which modern life gives such historically unprecedented opportunity. It is one of the blessings of modern political and economic liberty that the sons of bricklayers, people like Hauerwas, can become great theologians. Yet, necessarily alongside that and deceived by what our hands have done, we feel we are masters of our own fortune in the making of it, the spending of it, and the giving of it away. But Hauerwas seems angry that the eschaton has not come more quickly, and he seems to blame us for the delay.


It is true that we are all too comfortable in our wealth and all too blind to our greed and the extent to which we are possessed by our possessions. Hauerwas was good at exposing the finer roots of this sin in our hearts. But he went beyond that. His condemnation of all things modern and middle class was sweeping. It was irresponsible. He tossed an intellectual hand grenade into the crowd of people's thoughts to shatter their way of thinking about work, possessions, prosperity, and giving. But he put nothing in its place. At the end of the lecture, he seemed to prepare us for "an alternative to a world shaped by greed." But then he just said something vague about Jesus. When a student pressed him for a suggestion as to how then we should live, he threw up his hands and complained that we have no idea how to live any other way, and that this itself indicates how possessed by greed we are.

At the end of the question period, he eventually suggested that instead of walking around with a sign around our necks saying "Notice me!", as he said all Americans do and which is a form of greed, in its place we should learn how to live as friends. Lovely! Aside from being a hideously unjust caricature of American life--there is a great deal of friendship and community in America, and even fellow feeling toward strangers, even in New York City!--it is an almost comically unhelpful suggestion, both institutionally and theoretically. A healthy political community will be knit together by ties of affection among people that resemble those of friendship, and the more like friendship they are (remembering that you cannot be literally "friends" with 100,000 people), the healthier the community will be. Iraq in the aftermath of Saddam's fall and New York City in the 1970s and 1980s are notorious examples of political friendship deficits. But to suggest that friendship replace the market economy, perhaps along the lines of universalized monastic life or the separatistic Anabaptist communities of rural Pennsylvania, lies somewhere between philosophical fantasy and over-realized eschatology.

If he is genuinely flummoxed over how we might organize and conduct our life together in a way that is not fundamentally avaricious, he should be much gentler in his rebukes and humbler in his accusations.

People's understanding of property has profound political implications, and gifted thinkers should be cautious in what they say about these things. One is quick to remember the degrading and bitter sting of near universal poverty before what Hauerwas reminds us was the rise of the money economy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But we should also call to mind what politics looked like at that time, i.e., how power was distributed and used. Hauerwas told us that American democracy is plutocracy--the rule of wealth--in which the middle class doesn't care who rules as long as they don't lose their stuff. But a populace of beggars and the materially indifferent would soon be once again under arbitrary government. It would soon return to the government of men in their unrestrained, unmediated greed and glorious domination, rather than the government of laws that is the limited, constitutional government of a commercial republic like ours. Yes, a commercial republic, with all its attendant spiritual pitfalls. Anyone who thinks that poverty under tyranny is the better choice because it is better for our souls should move to North Korea or Zimbabwe. They are still taking applications.

But Prof. Hauerwas was not suggesting that we revert to medieval peasant life under the indifferent hand of hereditary lords because it would free us from such culturally pervasive and institutionalized avarice. Actually, it's not clear that he wasn't. He celebrated begging. As he pointed out, the Franciscans begged. The Franciscans begged and so should we. He even claimed that we have no evidence that Jesus ever worked, so he must have begged. Thus, Christians should follow in his steps. The experience cultivates in us a recognition of our poverty and of our material dependence on God. To round out the judgment, he criticized Adam Smith for redirecting our economy, and with it our hearts, in a way that would clear the beggars from our midst. A rising tide lifts all paupers. But he says we need beggars for our sakes, i.e., to give us occasion to give. The beggars might consider that an overly selfish view, perhaps even greedy, and opt for Adam Smith. Nonetheless, there will always be helpless people among us, the disabled for example, who give us occasion to give.

Hauerwas went far beyond suggesting that Christians pick up the habit of quitting their jobs and adopting the mendicant ways of Franciscan monks. He condemned the very foundations of the modern economy. "We cannot imagine anything but an endlessly growing economy--that says something about our greed." "People have always been greedy, but now we have made it into a moral quality necessary for economic growth." But you cannot separate the modern hope of prosperity, both personal and shared, from modern economic liberty. And you cannot separate economic liberty from property rights. And you cannot separate security in one's property from security against arbitrary government, which is political liberty. To desire one without the other is like saying you want modern life, but without the invention of nuclear weapons. The one entails the other. You cannot maintain a society-wide medieval attitude toward possessions and acquisition in isolation from an otherwise modern attitude toward nature (conquerable), one another (equal politically), and political power (accountable to the people). These attitudes are all part of a civilizational package.

If Hauerwas wants all the benefits that come with widespread begging, he has to take filth, plague, crib death, famine, and oppression along with it. You cannot have the conquest of nature by science (consider penicillin) and the attitudes of personal assertion over fortune that underpin it, without also the ambitious creation of wealth by countless entrepreneurs, great and small. In other words, you cannot have Francis Bacon's New Organon without his essays "Of Riches," "Of Usury," and "Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates."

It's easy to get well meaning Christians stirred up with calls for a purer heart with respect to riches. Following through on the implications of your revolutionary call for a society of friends and an economy of temperance would surely expose, however, both the impossibility and the horror of your brave new world. It would also sober your audience into considering a more temperate critique of modernity and a less monkish view of prosperity.

Wise Public Policy Frees the American Spirit

During a recession, there is much less money in circulation than there was before. That's what a shrinking economy means. Fewer people have jobs. People spend less. Governments have revenue shortfalls. But non-profit organizations, everything from local churches (which depend entirely on giving) to big universities (which have large endowments to carry them), also suffer a decrease in contributions.

These circumstances make it all the more useful to learn what three sociologists from Rice and Notre Dame universities have discovered regarding American giving patterns, particularly among churchgoers. In Passing the Plate: Why American Christians Don't Give Away More Money (Oxford UP, 2008), Michael O. Emerson (sociology professor at Rice University), Christian Smith (sociology professor at the University of Notre Dame), and Patricia Snell (Notre Dame religion and sociology researcher) have that, "When it comes to sharing their money, most contemporary American Christians are remarkably ungenerous."

Fifty percent of American who do not attend church give nothing to charity.

Twenty percent of American Christians give nothing to charity.

Regular churchgoers give two percent.

Nine percent of self-identified Christians give ten percent or more of their after-tax income to charity.

Twenty-three percent of active Protestant church attenders give ten percent or more.

As real income have risen in the last one hundred years, giving as a percentage of income has declined.

The poor are more generous in their giving than the rich.

Compare these two figures: "Regular churchgoers give two percent" and "Twenty-three percent of active Protestant church attenders give ten percent or more." This appears to indicate a significant difference between Protestant and Catholic giving. I suspect that most of the giving in those Protestant churches is from Evangelicals, including Evangelicals in the old mainline churches.

Clearly, there are many people who simply will not give to charity, regardless of how much money they have. I recall that when Al Gore's tax statements were released during the 2000 campaign, we discovered that he gave a miniscule amount to charity out of his ample income. Liberals, it seems, don't believe in private giving. They believe in establishing generous though inefficient and generally ineffective government programs. People with lower incomes are more generous in their giving, as these reports confirm.

The last fact calls to mind the 2006 book, Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism, by Arthur C. Brooks, the Louis A. Bantle Professor of Business and Government Policy at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and Whitman School of Management, and president of the American Enterprise Institute.

But there are others who give regardless of their income, but who would give more if their income weren't so squeezed under the burden of having to pay for bloated government programs, including government schools. If taxes were lower, including property taxes (on Long Island, you can pay $10,000 a year on a middle to lower middle class home), people would give more money to private charities which are far more responsive to what I would call "neighbor needs" and far more effective at bringing remedies. Marvin Olasky's The Tragedy of American Compassion is the classic study on this point.

John Fund, when he spoke here at The King's College the other day, told us that occasionally he will ask a liberal audience the following question. If you received a million dollars for some reason, and you wanted to give away ten percent to a worthy charitable work, raise your hand if you would give it to your local welfare office. In all the years he has been asking this question, only three people have raised their hands. One person was just hard of hearing, and otherwise would not have raised her hand. One person was Swedish. The third person worked in a local welfare office.

Freeing the world-transforming energy of the American spirit, which is powerfully informed by the Spirit of Christ in many of those Americans, entails lowering taxes not only to spur business enterprise and technological innovation, but also to release the imaginative and vigorous charitable giving and labors of a citizenry already inclined to serve one another directly, personally, and sacrificially.

Christian Culture War in the Age of Obama

In his April 2009 farewell speech to the Focus on the Family staff, Dr. James Dobson surveyed what his more than thirty year defense of the Christian American family had accomplished. Far from triumphalist, he described the work of his mammoth organization on behalf of the unborn child and the dignity of the family as "a holding action." He seemed to concede defeat, but if so it was only for the present. "We are awash in evil and the battle is still to be waged. We are right now in the most discouraging period of that long conflict. Humanly speaking, we can say that we have lost all those battles, but God is in control and we are not going to give up now, right?"

It does look bad on the culture front. Thirty-six years after Roe v. Wade, abortion is still legal. All manner of depravity is broadcast over the airwaves, taught and tolerated in the public schools, and pressed into our souls from every direction. It is more difficult than ever to raise godly or even just polite children without sealing one's family off from the world. Like Dobson, I do not think that the war is over. It cannot be. As God has not rescinded the cultural mandate to "take dominion over the earth" (Gen. 1:26), neither has Christ told his people to be anything other than salt and light in the world (Matt. 5:13-14), taking captive every thought for him (II Cor. 10:5).

John Barber and David Brooks have separate responses to the state of the Christian culture war in the age of Obama.

In a conference address at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church this spring entitled "Have Christians Lost the Culture-War? ," John Barber challenged the way Christians assess success and failure in our efforts to transform culture by comparing it to our view of evangelism.

What is successful evangelism? Is it successful only when you share the gospel with someone and that person becomes a Christian? What if no one comes to Christ? Are we to say that we failed? Isaiah preached for nearly fifty years and hardly anyone responded positively. Was he a failure? I think of Bill Bright’s helpful definition of successful evangelism. Bright often said, “Successful evangelism is witnessing in the power of the Holy Spirit and leaving the results to God.” Now apply what Bright said in reference to the Great Commission to the cultural mandate, and let’s define the cultural mandate. “Successful Christian activism is laboring in culture in the power of the Holy Spirit and leaving the results to God.” You see, if we looked at evangelism the way some look at the culture-war, we’d look at all the people we’ve witnessed to, and see how few have come to Christ, and [following Dr. Dobson] say, “We are awash in evil and the battle is still to be waged. We are right now in the most discouraging period of that long conflict. Humanly speaking, we can say we have lost all those battles.” But no one who is biblically informed thinks this way regarding evangelism. So we ought not to think this way regarding the cultural mandate.

David Brooks, whether or not he thinks that these old battles (are they so old?) over abortion and the normalization of homosexuality are obsolete, is certainly convinced that we have missed one of the great battle fronts of the age. He has a point.

In "The Next Culture War" (New York Times, September 28, 2009), he writes:

[D]espite the country’s notorious materialism, there has always been a countervailing stream of sound economic values. The early settlers believed in Calvinist restraint. The pioneers volunteered for brutal hardship during their treks out west. Waves of immigrant parents worked hard and practiced self-denial so their children could succeed. Government was limited and did not protect people from the consequences of their actions, thus enforcing discipline and restraint. ...

Over the past few years, however, there clearly has been an erosion in the country’s financial values. This erosion has happened at a time when the country’s cultural monitors were busy with other things. They were off fighting a culture war about prayer in schools, ... and the theory of evolution. They were arguing about sex and the separation of church and state, oblivious to the large erosion of economic values happening under their feet.

He cites widespread and government sponsored gambling and the avarice it incites, scandalously huge executive compensation packages, supersized restaurant meals, a sharp rise in personal consumption as percentage of GDP, the explosion of personal debt (133% of national income vs 55% in 1960), and runaway government spending.

Our current cultural politics are organized by the obsolete culture war, which has put secular liberals on one side and religious conservatives on the other. But the slide in economic morality afflicted Red and Blue America equally.

Brooks calls for a “moral revival” in the form of a “crusade for economic self-restraint.”

He sent the same message in his June 10, 2008 column, “The Great Seduction.”

The people who created this country built a moral structure around money. The Puritan legacy inhibited luxury and self-indulgence. Benjamin Franklin spread a practical gospel that emphasized hard work, temperance and frugality....The United States has been an affluent nation since its founding. But the country was, by and large, not corrupted by wealth. For centuries, it remained industrious, ambitious and frugal.

Over the past 30 years, much of that has been shredded. The social norms and institutions that encouraged frugality and spending what you earn have been undermined. The institutions that encourage debt and living for the moment have been strengthened. The country’s moral guardians are forever looking for decadence out of Hollywood and reality TV. But the most rampant decadence today is financial decadence, the trampling of decent norms about how to use and harness money.

Evangelical Christians have had to mount counter-offensives on seemingly innumerable fronts as the culture has been unraveling, hastened on by the ubiquitous and (yes) demonic efforts of the nihilistic left. We have rallied to the defense of babies in the womb. Murder is a bloody and obvious evil. We have stood against public acceptance of the horror and perversity of homosexuality alongside its wholesome and natural counterpart. Prompted by these conflicts, evangelicals have thought seriously about the nature of healthy family life and have developed helpful resources to support people in their marriages and child rearing.

But the seductions of wealth and comfort and self-indulgence were harder to discern, and they so went largely unopposed. The megachurches went as far as embracing them. Why should I not sit in my own theater-quality chair? Why should I not be entertained on Sunday morning the way I was on Saturday night? Why should I not enjoy a Starbucks coffee after or before church, and why should I not be able to buy it in the church lobby? But Christians in small churches too went heavily into debt and voted for governments that did the same, and also supersized their drinks.

The Institute for American Values has initiated the sort of moral reform movement that Brooks has advocated. Indeed, Brooks praises them for this in his 2008 column. David Blankenhorn, the institute's founder and president, has written Thrift: A Cyclopedia, as well as “There is No Paradox of Thrift” (The Weekly Standard, June, 15, 2009). You can learn about the organization's Thrift Initiative here: http://www.newthrift.org/.

The Commercial Captivity of the Church

What if coffee shops were like churches? Or rather, what if churches were even more like coffee shops than they are already?



It appears that this video is making fun of the contemporary megachurch, not because it has been commercialized, but because it has been insufficiently commercialized. Do you think I have that right?

They seem to be saying, "Look at the cheap signs and banners and community bulletin board. See how they try welcoming those two into a community, when the hapless couple only wants some coffee. How ridiculous it all is. Ha, ha, ha. We laugh at them. But here's the answer: we should treat Christ even more like a commodity, responding uncritically to people's "consumer preferences," and then the church will see more customers, and even return customers! Then money! Power! Prestige! Entertainers won't laugh at us when we're trying to be serious. The church will succeed!

Were the makers of this video just having some laughs? Highly unlikely. It's satire. It's designed to change attitudes about how the church does its work of worship, mutual love, and evangelism. It's made by "BeyondRelevance.com (what does that mean?), for a culturally strategic church." So it appears to be concerned about strategy for the church in our culture.

Ask yourself: Did God send his Son to suffer, die, and rise again...for this?

Those Outrageous Evangelicals

Wow. Meacham has a fit. And in public.

In this week's Editor's Desk in Newsweek, Jon Meacham takes Evangelical Christians out to the woodshed to lick some sense into them. Actually is more like a stern, disapproving frown that is supposed to shame Evangelicals into adopting a liberal view of the Bible if they want to have any hope joining the serious conversation among the most influential people on public affairs.

No matter what one thinks about gay rights – for, against or somewhere in between – this conservative resort to biblical authority is the worst kind of fundamentalism. Given the history of the making of the Scriptures and the millennia of critical attention scholars and others have given to the stories and injunctions that come to us in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, to argue that something is so because it is in the Bible is more than intellectually bankrupt – it is unserious, and unworthy of the great Judeo-Christian tradition.

In his spluttering rage, he mentions "millennia of critical attention," even though the "critical" approach to the Bible goes back only as far as Spinoza in the seventeeth century, or perhaps back to Hobbes. That's only centuries, not millennia, and it only really got going a hundred and fifty years ago.

And he seems to be saying that any appeal to the Bible for an authoritative word from God is fundamentalism, and thus "the worst kind of fundamentalism."

But surely I have taken his words out of context. Perhaps he just doing a Harry Emerson Fosdick impersonation for the entertainment of his readers, giving us a parody of "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?"

No. He's serious.

What is truly amazing is that despite editorials like this from no less than Newsweek magazine, the kingdom of God advances.

For intellectually serious defenses of the Bible as the Word of God, and thus as the ultimate authority on any matter it intends to address, see...

B. B. Warfield, The Inspirsation and Authority of the Bible (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1948);

J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Eerdmans, 1923);

J. I. Packer, "Fundamentalism" and the Word of God (Eerdmans, 1958).

The Implosion of the American Conservative Mind

David Brooks has stirred a lot of discussion with his column lamenting Sarah Palin's candidacy for vice-president as the "conservative" pick ("The Class War Before Palin," New York Times, October 10, 2008).

He looks back to the conservative movement that Bill Buckley started, and that liberated American conservatism from the lunatic fringe. "Modern conservatism began as a movement of dissident intellectuals."

Lately, it has become increasingly an anti-intellectual, populist movement. "What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole."

Here is Sarah Palin trying not to let on to Katie Couric that she has never read a newspaper or serious opinion magazine in her life, i.e. that politically she receives no intellectual input in any form. Warning: this is painful to watch.




Brooks does not mention it, but the takeover of academia by the New Left has played an important role in this anti-intellectual conservative reaction. In the 1970s, university departments welcomed into their ranks the graduating Ph.D.s who were formed academically in the intellectual and political upheavals of the 1960s. These established academics understood that this generation of scholars represented a school of thought that would take its place in the larger conversation. Once in, however, the New Left shut everyone else out. That has produced the leftward skew of colleges and universities that we suffer today. As the New Left sees it, academia is not a conversation, but a revolution. It's not the power of ideas. It's just power. As a result, Brooks can say, "The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment." So Republicans have been positioning themselves not only against pointy-headed northeastern liberals and Marxists, but against the life of the mind and the finer strains of human culture generally.

Recently, other professions have been abandoning the GOP too. Brooks cites some arresting figures. "The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community."

I wonder how much of this stems from the party's embrace of stupid populism, how much of it is a widespread reaction to the current president's utter failure to lead in his second term (the surge in Iraq notwithstanding), and how much is traceable to the party's association with Evangelical Christians, especially under this Evangelical president. If it is in any way the latter, how much is attributable to the scandal of the cross, how much to what Mark Noll calls "the scandal of the Evangelical mind" (read the book here), and how much to the Evangelical tin ear for how they appear to people outside their subculture. (How can people who are so expert at contextualizing their evangelism be so inept at presenting themselves politically in the public square?)

These reflections on the new Republican anti-intellectualism come a couple of weeks after an equally provocative column on the role of prudence, and the experience it requires, in political leadership, especially the presidency ("Why Experience Matters," New York Times, Sept. 16, 2008). I recommend it to all of my students as a glimpse into the issue.

Prudence, says Brooks, is "the ability to grasp the unique pattern of a specific situation. It is the ability to absorb the vast flow of information and still discern the essential current of events — the things that go together and the things that will never go together. It is the ability to engage in complex deliberations and feel which arguments have the most weight." Prudence stands in contrast to both ideology and mere textbook learning which are doctrinaire and inflexible.

Of course, it requires intelligence of some sort, but it is not a calculation so much as it is a mental grasp or the right course of action, an intuiting of the answer. But that prudent judgment must be informed, and so it is impossible without experience, both personal and vicarious, by reading history. "The prudent leader possesses a repertoire of events, through personal involvement or the study of history, and can apply those models to current circumstances to judge what is important and what is not, who can be persuaded and who can’t, what has worked and what hasn’t."

This experience is especially important in the executive branch. Though a president may avail himself of many counselors, responsibility for executive decisions, unlike in Congress, is concentrated in one man. His most consequential decisions, moreover, pertain to international affairs and war, where events are the most unpredictable and the cost of mistaken judgment is most catastrophic.


Some conservatives have been calling Brooks an "elitist." Does that simply charge him with wanting to be governed by wisdom and with recognizing that most people are not wise? We live in a democratic country. We look to ordinary people without distinction for the selection of our leaders. But we do not select our leaders by lot. We elect those whom we think are most wise in public affairs. "Democracy is not average people selecting average leaders. It is average people with the wisdom to select the best prepared" ("Why Experience Matters"). We elect what we hope is an elite. Sarah Palin offers herself not as someone who is wise, but as someone who is ordinary, someone who is just like me. That is at best how the House of Representatives was intended to function, if that. But the genius of the American Founding is far more than that. We expect liberals to forget that. Conservatives should know better.

Footnote: The Intercollegiate Studies Institute is has been doing marvelous work cultivating a high and thoughtful regard for the Founding on college campuses. Along with ISI, Liberty Fund has been in the forefront of disseminating classic literature on "the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals." Further resources for cultivating an active, conservative mind...

Acton Institute - to promote a free and virtuous society characterized by individual liberty and sustained by religious principles.

American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) - to research and education on issues of government, politics, economics, and social welfare.

The Claremont Institute - to restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life.

Ethics and Public Policy Center - to clarify and reinforce the bond between the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the public debate over domestic and foreign policy issues.

Heritage Foundation - to formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.

Institute on Religion and Public Life - to advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society.
_____________________________________
Harold adds:

I feel compelled to point out a couple of things. David Brooks would be on the fringes of any gathering sponsored by any of the six sterling conservative groups listed above, and probably considers all of them within the orbit, or near it, of the conservative philistinism he is so worried about. Who would the members of any of these groups meet an address by with more interest and enthusiasm--Sarah Palin or David Brooks?


Second, Ronald Reagan--the humble-origins conservative that actually did stand athwart history, was no intellectual in the David Brooks style, but rather a member of Jefferson's "natural aristocracy" of talent and intelligence that occasionally bubbles up from below. Sarah Palin may need to catch up on her reading, and the populist strain--partly forced on her by the geniuses in the McCain campaign--is obscuring the essentially wholesome conservative inclinations and intuitions that have caught the attention of the base looking for the next Reagan. Is Sarah Palin a Ronald Reagan? Probably not, but then again, no one is. But I'll stand with Bill Buckley and declare categorically that I would rather be ruled by the first 2000 names in any phone book than the faculty of any college, the editorial board of any newspaper, or the curation staff of any museum. Taste and intelligence are fine qualities--but they don't trump character, humility, common sense--and a connectedness with the vastness of middle America.

In a rare divergence, my sense of this is at variance with my friend, the good Dr Innes. From my perch in deepest, darkest New Jersey, Brooks looks like a Bourgeois Bohemian in taste and temperament, the house republican at the liberal plantation there in NYC. His conservative instincts have been enervated.

Market Identifies Which States are "Christian"

The free market cannot do everything, but it can supply us with some information quite accurately. Is America a Christian nation? Well, some states are more Christian in character and sentiment than others, and the market may have identified which of the fifty states are "Christian."

A film about Billy Graham, Billy: the Early Years of Billy Graham, opens on October 10 in select states, not necessarily near you. They are: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. That is 12 out of 50 states.

So much for "Jesusland."



The website describes the film:

Most of us know Billy Graham as the self-assured and charismatic preacher who became one of the most important figures of 20th Century Christianity. Now, with the release of Billy: The Early Years, we meet Billy as the earnest and promising young man at the crossroads of faith and doubt, ultimately facing the moment of decision that launched one of history’s most powerful evangelistic careers.

Most compellingly, Billy: The Early Years paints its portrait of Graham against the backdrop of his relationship with Charles Templeton, another gifted young preacher who’s faith could not withstand the onslaught of scientific skepticism. He and Graham parted ways and in the film, Templeton comes to personify the rising tide of disbelief into which Graham launched his crusades.

Filmed in Tennessee, Billy: The Early Years captures the feel of the Depression-era tent revival where Graham heeded the altar call, and follows him through the doubt and resolution of the next decade. The film was directed by the versatile actor/director Robby Benson – the voice of The Beast in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. The movie’s power lays in its honest portrayal of Billy’s struggle with the ideas represented in Templeton’s eventual unbelief and shows how Billy’s faith, so dramatically portrayed in the film, goes on to change the face of modern evangelism.

Now that this movie is out, it strikes me as odd that Hollywood didn't get to it first. It is a compelling story that would draw a large audience and make a lot of money. Instead, they make Milk, the story of San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk, the country's first openly homosexual elected official, starring Sean Penn and due for release in December. But, as Michael Medved has shown, the ideological left in America is moved less by the profit motive than by their moral priorities. Yes, aggressive moral agendas are not solely the province of the Christian political right.

Political Counsel for Soft-Hearted Evangelicals

A friend passed along this letter from an Evangelical Christian man whose politics are shifting leftward as he follows what he thinks are the practical implications of his faith.

He writes:

The biggest thing pushing me to Obama (or the Democratic Party as a whole) is a political paradigm shift I've had with regard to a solution to help me "love my enemy." I am willing for my taxes to go to help those less fortunate...those my church and other private organizations may not be able to reach. And while the Republican party tries really hard to protect life inside the womb, once you're out of the womb they could care less about you. Don't abort that baby born into a life of crime and poverty, but sure don't help him get out of that!

Well, where does one start? Vote Democrat, and kill the baby before he even has a chance? Barack Obama voted against a bill (3x!) that would protect babies born alive who were supposed to be killed by abortion. That IS a paradigm shift.

The Democratic approach is to treat people as though they were helpless children and do as much as possible for them. The Republican approach (when Republicans are true to their principles) is to treat people as adults and to help them help themselves. That is not saying, "You're on your own." Effective prosecution of crime (a Republican priority) and policies that promote broad prosperity through healthy free markets (oh, another Republican priority) will help that boy more than Democratic efforts to give him ever more entitlement programs, ensuring that he and the generations that follow him are reduced to being wards of the state. And where are the kids this confused brother describes? They are in cities the Democrats have controlled for the last 50 years.

The difference between the parties is the difference between liberty and paternalism. Liberty frees you to serve God; paternalism offers itself in place of God. The Biblically stated purpose of government is to "punish evil and praise what is good" (I Peter 2:14). That is to say, it is to secure the governed in their liberty so that they can live peaceful and quiet lives in godliness and holiness (I Tim. 2:2). It is to provide a secure environment so that they can go about their business providing for themselves and one another.

Having said that, even if it were the government's place to provide for people in that situation, Democrats want all power concentrated at the highest level, furthest away from the people where it is least responsive to the people and least responsible to them, instead of at the local and state levels. Democrats don't like the people getting in the way of the government "helping" them, for example when poor inner city parents want to be able to choose what school they use for educating their children. Foolish parents, thinking that they have a better understanding of what’s best for their children than the wise Democrats in the government school system.

Lastly, if this brother wants to spend his money helping specifically situated people in specific ways, there are private organizations to which he can give his money (whose effectiveness he vastly underestimates). What he should not do is use the coercive power of government to force others to make the same judgments.

(Never mind the fact that what he and those organizations do is charity, i.e., loving service perhaps even in Jesus’ name, whereas what the government does is entitlement. On that point, he must read how entitlements morally corrupt both the recipients and those who otherwise would be givers in Tocqueville’s "Memoir On Pauperism."* While he’s at it, he should read Tocqueville’s Speech on the Right to Work. I know of nothing better than these two writings to cure a kind-hearted man of his socialist confusions.)

*www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/Tocqueville_rr2.pdf (This links to a pdf file, and does not work directly from the blog.)

Creation Law, Moral Law and Economic Liberty

The Evangelical political left is coming into a prominence it has never seen before. A surprising number of Evangelicals are open to supporting Barack Obama in the coming election, and Democrats are open to returning the embrace. Consider Nicholas Kristof's recent column, "Evangelicals a Liberal Can Love" (New York Times, Feb. 3, 2008).

So it is timely to consider the relationship between Biblical principles and the political principles of the American political left and right, as one of my students is doing currently in his senior thesis. One of my earlier posts, "The Evangelical Left's Rejection of Reality," grew out of comments that I offered that student. In response to that post, not here but over on WORLD on the Web/Academy, Alisa asked this:

Maybe I’m not getting it, but this seems circular to me. Are we supposed to figure out what works based on our understanding of creation law, or are we supposed to deduce creation law based on what works?

I responded with this explanation. (I also refer to "RDean," an atheist who for some reason is a regular reader over there, but who does not trouble himself to understand what he criticizes.)

Alisa, good question. Of course economics is unlike chemistry in that it pertains essentially to human relations which are always moral in character. That is, it is governed by God's moral law. At the same time there is a strictly technical aspect to it. (I am a political scientist, not an economist, but I have had a healthy exposure to it.) When people do business, what are they doing? They are creating wealth, seeking prosperity. With a view to that end, some economic systems work better than others. In that respect, you can discern God's "creation law" by what "works" (i.e. creates wealth). Of course, as in all human decisions, the moral laws governs how we use those economic principles. We are stressed because we ignore God's command to rest on the Sabbath. We are stressed because people treat one another as "human resources" comparable to "mineral resources," i.e. as means rather than ends. These attitudes are entirely separable from the system of economic liberty called "capitalism." We are stressed because there are increasingly more people among us with RDean's understanding of reality [atheist materialism] (nothing personal RDean; perhaps your behavior is better than what your worldview justifies) than with the love-your-neighbor and walk-humbly-with-your-God Christian understanding that is our ever dwindling social heritage.

Of course, there is much more that needs to be said. I recommend again that anyone who is interested in the question reads Albert Wolters' book, Creation Regained. This is a book every Christian should read who wants to think Biblically and coherently about serving Christ in this world.

The Evangelical Left's Rejection of Reality

The candidacy of Barack Obama has brought the presence and appeals of left wing Evangelicals to greater public prominence. The public association with Democratic Party politics is nothing new, of course. People like Jim Wallis, Ron Sider and Tony Campolo have a history of advising Democrats in general and the Clinton administration in particular. (For example, see "The Message Thing" by Jim Wallis, NYT, August 5, 2005.) The so called "emerging church" movement has picked up this approach to the Bible and to public life and is giving it an ecclesiastical home.

It is always helpful to look at the part in light of the whole, and I find that Albert Wolters (Redeemer University College in Ancaster, Ontario) in his book Creation Regained gives students of politics an excellent view of the theological big picture in which to understand politics, culture and all of life. For this reason, I assign it at the beginning of my Introduction to Politics course.

Wolters describes what he calls the “creation law,” what one might otherwise call natural law. The Lord made the world, by its very structure, to work in certain ways, whether physically, morally, psychologically, economically, etc. He explains this on pp. 13-20, followed by his account of the creation mandate in relation to it. On p.27, he defines it as, “the totality of God’s sovereign activity toward the created cosmos.” On p.62, he says that “ignoring the law of creation is impossible.” If you set government policy based on bad economics, i.e. policies based on false economic principles, i.e. principles that do not correspond to the way God has created the world to operate, they will be counterproductive and bring unhappy results. They won’t “work.” The question for the Evangelical left and right is: what is the creation law in the various spheres of dispute?

The left accuses the right of bowing to secular conservative notions that are not found in the Bible. But by common grace, non-Christians are able to discern these creation laws, often better than Christians can. The question is: have they discerned accurately? The left tends to focus only on the moral law (which they may or may not have right) and understand that as the exhaustive expression of God’s will. Thus, they determine their economics, for example, based entirely on the moral principles that they cull from the Bible. But of course the laws inherent in God’s creation, whether moral, political, economic or chemical, are fully consistent with one another. God is not incoherent. He speaks with one voice. So if their moral theology entails an impoverishing and politically enslaving economic theory, it is a good indication that their moral reading of the Bible is defective.

For example, Wolters writes, “Any theory that somehow sanctions the existence of evil in God’s good creation fails to do justice to sin’s fundamentally outrageous and blasphemous character” (pp. 58-59). An Evangelical on the political left would point out that the free market economic system (“capitalism”) employs and legitimizes selfishness, and thus is ungodly and inherently sinful. But lo, it works! It not only makes a few people rich, but it raises the tide and lifts all boats. In fact, the rising tide of prosperity in free market American lifts boats all over the world!

So how do we square the dependence on sinful selfish gain with the evident correspondence of economic liberty with natural principles in God’s created order? The answer, I think, is in examining the moral premise more closely. What our hypothetical leftist called sinful selfishness is actually just reasonable self-concern. My desire to prosper is not inherently sinful. My desire to get the best product for the lowest price is not inherently sinful. These things can take sinful forms, but that does not entail an indictment of the system itself which like all things, in order to function properly, needs to be set within the broader context of a charitable Christian society.

The Rebelution: Godliness From Below

On the subject of the unintended political consequences of godliness, there is an interesting movement among Evangelical youth being led by 19 year old twins Alex and Brett Harris. They call it The Rebelution, "a teenage rebellion against the low expectations of an ungodly culture," and the call to their generation is, "Do Hard Things." In adition to the website and a conference tour, they have a book titled with the words of the call, Do Hard Things.

Their blog has posts on "The Myth of Adolescence," "The Importance of Character," The Rise of the Kidult" the freedom to be found in modesty, and "Modern Day Chivalry." And it's all cool.

Check out this 16 year old, Zachary Hunter, who is fighting modern day slavery through an effort called "Loose Change to Loose Chains," and who has written a book entitled Be The Change.

But despite the obvious social benefits of movements like this, they nonetheless scare the Chablis and brie out of secular liberals because they promote a culture of moral self-restraint, which secular liberals identify with tyranny, and they inevitably result in Republican political majorities which are unacceptable evils to be avoided at all costs. For an interesting booklength statement of that fear, see Lauren Sander's Righteous: Dispatches From The Evangelical Youth Movement (Penguin, 2007).

On Evangelical youth, see my previous posts, "America's Evangelical Future" and "America's Unstable Evangelicals."

Would You Buy A Car From This Candidiate?

I read someone recently say that while he would vote for Mike Huckabee if he were running for a church office, he would not support him for president. Quite frankly, I would not even go that far. Rich Lowry, in "Huck Hoax: Why He Won't Break Out," gives even more evidence that the man "slippery and laughably unserious."

Huckabee's campaign has been run on, to invoke two of his favorite substances, duct tape and WD-40. When reporters asked who his foreign-policy advisers were, he cited former ambassador to the UN John Bolton as someone with whom he has "spoken or will continue to speak." But he never had. His advisers then said he had e-mailed Bolton, which he had - once, without ever following up. It was vintage Huckabee - slippery and laughably unserious.

Now Huckabee has gone from supporting the Bush amnesty plan on immigration and righteously declaring in a debate that children of illegals shouldn't be punished for the sins of their parents, to promising to chase them all - man, woman and child - from the country. It might be the most nakedly political turnabout any GOP candidate has made in the race.

The tragedy of Huckabee's campaign is that if he'd sat down two years ago and thought seriously about what it would take to become the next president, he might have been able to make much more of his winsome ways. Instead, he ran on a kind of lark, without carefully considered policy, without fund-raising, without organization. His warm persona and religious rhetoric have won evangelicals, but left other voters cold, despite the fanciful theories spun around his candidacy.

The especially sad part of this is that his popularity among Evangelicals as a presidential contender has confirmed for many of our fellow citizens that we are intellectually uncritical, easily duped sentimentalists. "His warm persona and religious rhetoric have won evangelicals, but left other voters cold."

The Unintended Political Consequences of Godliness

"What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his own soul?" (Mark 8:36) Similarly, what does it profit Christ's church if she gains low taxes, renewed federalism, secure gun rights, an end to abortion and an array of family friendly laws, if she looses her Christ-centeredness and, as such, her godliness in the process?

Where is the pursuit of godliness among evangelical Christians today? On the one hand, we have political Baptists (et al.) focused on electoral outcomes and public policy. On the other hand, we have megachurches absorbed in rock and roll sentimentality. (See "Megachurches Found to be a Megabust.") Who is discipling the saints in personal godliness? Some churches are. Many more should be.

If we were to focus less on politics, and more on repentance, reformation, revival and a return to Christ-centeredness, many of the social problems of our day that people are attempting to remedy by political means of one sort or another would find a more profound solution. This would come through the back door, as it were, as an unintended political consequence of godliness cultivated for reasons that are trans-political. On account of the great number of evangelical Christians in the country and the effect they have on their families, neighbors and associates, these happy effects on social and economic issues would accrue quite naturally through the market and the democratic process. Furthermore, the benefits would be realized more securely (though far from indefinitely) because they would come as a result of change that is primarily spiritual, not merely political.

Isn't this in the spirit of what Jesus said in his sermon on the mount? "Therefore do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you." (Matthew 6:31-33)

Nonetheless, the practical citizen duty of selecting a president is before us, and Christians are called to be good citizens. But we are not to exercise that citizenship in neglect of, or to the detriment of, our heavenly citizenship in Christ.

For a previous reflection along these lines, go to, "The Attributes of Christian Political Involvement."

For further reading on the cultivation of godliness, consider the following.

My post on "Spiritual Classics," an expansion on my sidebar of the same title.

Three excellent books by Jerry Bridges: The Pursuit of Holiness, The Practice of Godliness, and The Discipline of Grace.

For men, Disciplines of a Godly Man by R. Kent Hughes.

For women, Keep a Quiet Heart by Elisabeth Elliot, and Stepping Heavenward by Elizabeth Prentiss.

For parents cultivating godliness in their children, Shepherding a Child's Heart by Tedd Tripp.