between a rock and a hard place

The Sell-Out

2005-05-29T16:33:00.000-05:00

The original text of the judiciary voting deal struck between Democrats and moderate Republicans is awfully hard to find. (Ever notice that you never here about "moderate Democrats"? Does this mean they are all moderate, or they are all extreme?) I found a PDF of the original "Memorandum of Understanding" at National Review Online. Unfortunately, it is a photocopy and not a text document, and I really didn't want to type it into this post myself, so I guess I should give credit to Simply Appalling, where I was able to copy and paste from HTML. The only .gov site that had it was that of Colorado Senator Ken Salazar, as far as I could tell from Google and Yahoo! The few places you can find the text seem to be at the sites of conservatives who are howling about it. Makes you wonder how proud the liberals are of what they have done.

In any event, the following is the text of the deal, study materials and annotations supplied:

MEMORANDUM OF UNDERSTANDING ON JUDICIAL NOMINATIONS

We respect the diligent, conscientious efforts, to date, rendered to the Senate by Majority Leader Frist and Democratic Leader Reid. This memorandum confirms an understanding among the signatories, based upon mutual trust and confidence, related to pending and future judicial nominations in the 109th Congress.

And we're already in trouble. Dem Leader Reid's efforts have most assuredly been diligent. But "conscientious"?

This memorandum is in two parts. Part I relates to the currently pending judicial nominees; Part II relates to subsequent individual nominations to be made by the President and to be acted upon by the Senate's Judiciary Committee.

We have agreed to the following:

Part I: Commitments on Pending Judicial Nominations

1. Votes for Certain Nominees. We will vote to invoke cloture on the following judicial nominees: Janice Rogers Brown (D.C. Circuit), William Pryor (11th Circuit), and Priscilla Owen (5th Circuit).

2. Status of Other Nominees. Signatories make no commitment to vote for or against cloture on the following judicial nominees: William Myers (9th Circuit) and Henry Saad (6th Circuit).

Hey, what do you know? The ever-reasonable Democrats agreed to pass three out of five of President Bush's judicial nominations. Swell, right? Not really. They already succeeded in using their filibuster to drive away another five of Bush's nominees. So the efforts of the moderate Republicans garnered only three out of ten.

Part II: Commitments for Future Nominations

1. Future Nominations. Signatories will exercise their responsibilities under the Advice and Consent Clause of the United State [sic] Constitution in good faith. Nominees should only be filibustered under extraordinary circumstances, and each signatory must use his or her own discretion and judgment in determining whether such circumstances exist.

OK, silly me, but I thought it was already our general understanding that a filibuster was a tool that would be used only under "extraordinary circumstances." And weren't the Democrats saying this already? I mean, weren't they telling us that this filibuster was needed to keep "extremist" judges off the bench, judges who were "not in the mainstream"? So, doesn't this leave us pretty much where we already started: Democrats will consider the nomination by President Bush of a conservative to an appelate court to be an "extraordinary circumstance" and can be expected to filibuster again? Or can we take this promise as an implicit admission that they never really considered the situation so dire after all, that they were, in the end, playing politics just to get what they wanted? We might hope that Senator McCain and the other Republican "mavericks" were actually playing a Machiavellian game to get this admission out of the Democrats. But I doubt it. The point is too subtle to make a real difference in the polls, and they aren't doing any crowing about their rhetorical victory. (And of course, if it needs to be said again, this agreement hasn't kept the Democrats from filibustering the nomination of John Bolton to the position of U.N. Ambassador.)

2. Rules Changes. In light of the spirit and continuing commitments made in this agreement, we commit to oppose the rules changes in the 109th Congress, which we understand to be any amendment to or interpretation of the Rules of the Senate that would force a vote on a judicial nomination by means other than unanimous consent or Rule XXII.

It's obvious why the Democrats don't want that rule changed. The attitude of the Republicans completely mystifies me. The Dems are saying over and over that this filibuster is necessary to preserve the checks and balances of our government. The Republicans are saying it's awful that the Dems are abusing the power of the filibuster in an unprecedented fashion. It's really alot simpler than either side is willing to admit: The filibuster is not part of the Constitution. The rule that makes it so easy is a Senate rule, pure and simple, and can be changed by the Senate, pure and simple. The Dems are using the power they have in virtue of the law and their numbers to keep conservative justices off of the judicial benches. And that's it. Any hand wringing about preserving separation of powers is just so much blown smoke. The Reps, for their, simply need to use the power they have by virtue of the law and their numbers to put conservative justices on the bench. Any hand wringing about how mean the Dems are is just a failure of nerve and a waste of time.

We believe that, under Article II, Section 2, of the United States Constitution, the word "Advice" speaks to consultation between the Senate and the President with regard to the use of the President's power to make nominations. We encourage the Executive branch of government to consult with members of the Senate, both Democratic and Republican, prior to submitting a judicial nomination to the Senate for consideration.

Sorry, but no. Sure, for matters of expediency or whatever, it may be best for the President, whoever he may be, to take account of what nominees are likely to actually be approved. But, what? He is required, not only to consult with the Senate on the merits of his nominees, which is what the Senate vote is all about, but to consult with them on who he is going to nominate in the first place? No! The Constitution just doesn't ever say anything like that. Again, it's that simple. If you need proof, take a look at Hamilton's Federalist Papers No. 77 and 78, in particular: "In that [Constitutional] plan, the power of nomination is unequivocally vested in the Executive." Hamilton goes on to contrast the Consitutional plan with the nomination process of the state of New York at the time, where the governor was required to consult with a committee beforehand. Needless to say, Alex liked the Consitution better. The Dems are here following their time-honored tradition of injecting whatever meaning they like into the "Living" Constitution. What the Republicans are doing is a mystery in the league of the Kantian antinomies.

Such a return to the early practices of our government may well serve to reduce the rancor that unfortunately accompanies the advice and consent process in the Senate.
We firmly believe this agreement is consistent with the traditions of the United States Senate that we as Senators seek to uphold.

Whatever you say. This kind of Doublethink and Newspeak would make Orwell himself proud. Or terrified. Or whatever.

Why is this so important, in case the fact that we're talking about our nations judiciary isn't enough, I mean. Because everything good that has happened in American politics since Ronald Reagan took office twenty five years ago has been hanging by a thread this entire time. I court system that becomes once again firmly liberal could erase every accomplishment conservatives have made in that time in the course of a few short months. The only conservative victory that now matters is that of turning the Supreme Court conservative. It is almost certain that one Supreme Court justice will retire during Bush's term. The odds are that two will. If this little "understanding" that our Senators have cobbled together is a warm-up for the battle for the Supreme Court, then conservatives will have failed, will have failed America, for the next generation.

I have to hand it to the Dems, they know what this fight is about, and that's why they are willing to go to the mattresses and abuse the filibuster and who knows what other privileges the law gives them. If the Republicans were in the minority, I frankly would expect them to do all the same things. If our moderate Republicans don't wake up to the reality of the situation, they will lose the battle of the judiciary for us. Maybe in years to come, when looking at the mess a liberal judiciary makes of this country, they will be able to console themselves for their failure by remembering that at least they preserved the "comity" of the Senate. But that would be pretty cold comfort to me.

Ranting for Terri

2005-03-21T20:36:00.000-06:00

I've lost a couple of people to cancer. So, though I don't agree with much that comes out of the right-to-die discourse, I understand the emotions and passions that drives it in its more honest adherents. But what disgusts me about all that is happening to Terri Schiavo is that there is a big stinking elephant-sized pile of evidence indicating that this is not a right to die case at all, but a story about a sleeze bag husband trying to kill his wife for money and carnal freedom. Whether you are a right-to-dier or not, this looks for all the world like murder, plain and simple. But the right-to-diers and their allies in the courts and the media are so hypnotized by their own cause that they can't even bring themselves to call this what it is. No matter how unjust this is, if it can be used as one more brick to build the right to die wall, they will approve of it.

You folks fighting for the right to die: Wake up. Terri is already more awake than most of you. Put down your placards and stop yelling through your bull horns long enough to forget Terri Schiavo, conscripted poster girl for the right to die, and look at Terri Schiavo, human being who very much seems to want to live. A good place to start is at Blogs for Terri.

Ellis's His Excellency George Washington: A Great Close-Up, but No Context

2005-01-27T15:06:00.000-06:00

No, I'm not mad at Amazon.com, which you might think I am if you read my post on Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code a short while ago (thankyouthankyouthanyou). But the whole episode got me to thinking: I don't have time to post on my blog nearly as often as I like. And if I put a review on the Amazon.com site, I give them the rights to it (not that they are worth all that much anyway, but ....) So, I figured maybe if I have a review to write, I would be doing myself more good to out it on my blog. If I change my mind, I can always give it to Amazon later. So here is my review of Joseph Ellis's new bio of the Father of Our Country, His Excellency George Washington.

To write His Excellency, Joseph Ellis first sat down for two years and made himself the first historian to read through the thousands of Washington papers recently catalouged at The University of Virginia. The result of his labors is a biography that moves far beyond the George Washington we were given in grade school history. You know the one: as inaccessible and impenetrable as any of his marble images that grace the walls and halls of our civic spaces. But, thank goodness, the dead white male slaveholder Washington that the various postmoderns and deconstructionists would foist upon us is nowhere to be found in His Excellency either. I doubt that Ellis would claim complete objectivity with regard to his chosen subject. Indeed, it is clear that Washington is a hero to him, if not a perfect one. But Ellis's pen is not merely a surrogate for a grinding axe. Clearly, the desire to learn drove his research and the desire to inform drove his writing. Could we meet the Father of our Country in the flesh, I would not be surprised to find that he was very similar to the man Ellis shows us.

Ultimately, though, His Excellency disappoints. If we view His Excellency purely as the end result of an academic (in the best sense) effort to distil the essence of the recently catalogued Washington Papers at The University of Viriginia, we have to admit that Ellis has given the historian and the student of history a great gift. But His Excellency does not ultimately satisfy as a book for the educated general reader. Ellis concentrates too much on the Papers, as important as they are. He ignores other important sources that provide necessary context for truly appreciating what he wants to convey to us from the Papers themselves. And he gives short shrift to the story, both in the events of Washington's time and in Washington's own actions, that made Washington important to us in the first place.

The central question he wanted to answer was why did the other Founding Fathers, men as gifted and talented as Adams, Hamilton, and Jefferson, all consider Washington their superior? Unfortunately, Ellis fails to deliver the answer. He fails, not because his picture of Washington is unconvincing or incomplete, but for, in a sense, the exact opposite reason: His entire book is such a close up on Washington that there is no room left for us to get a glimpse of what sort of men his peers were, or what they accomplished. For example, Ellis informs us that Hamilton was a brilliant strategist in the Revolutionary War, but he gives us not one line of narrative telling what Hamilton actually did in battle. For another example, he shows Washington presiding over the Constitutional Convention, but Adams gets the barest mention. His role in actually drafting the document goes completely unmentioned.

This recurring lack of context makes His Excellency frustrating in other ways as well. For example, Ellis gives a good deal of detail regarding Washington's poor judgement in involving himself during his retirement with Hamilton's scheme of forming a standing army. He tells us that this scheme eventually killed the Federalist party. But Ellis never gives us even the barest outline of the fascinating death of the party.

The reader looking for an engaging narrative like David McCullogh's John Adams from a few years ago will be disappointed at the paucity of detail in His Excellency. We are told, for instance, that James Madison had high expectations when he took on Washington in his Congressional crusade against the Jay Treaty with England. But as the time for the vote approached, the votes he was counting on evaporated. Ellis tells us, "Madison experienced firsthand the humiliation of that befell anyone who went up against Washington in a battle he was determined to win." The concrete actions Washington took to in fact accomplish this most important of policy victories promise fascinating reading, but this one sentence is all Ellis gives us of the whole story. This lack of narrative, bordering on absence, is most frustating in Ellis's accounts of the Revolutionary War. We get only the barest details of the battles and of Washington's strategy. The reader will get a pretty accurate picture, insofar as I can judge, of Washington's state of mind throughout the ordeal, but will probably be left wondering, "Well, OK, but what exactly happened?"

So, in a roundabout way, Ellis unintentionally comes back around to another sort of George Washington statuary: a Washington who is present to us and fully three-dimensional, but who never really does anything.

In short, His Excellency will be a valuable addition to the library of the scholar or the history lover who "already knows the story" and wants to know more. But for the uninitiated, it just cannot stand alone as a biography of George Washington.

Blog Note: I get a comment or a traceback every blue moon or so, so I thought it might be worthwhile to mention that I won't be answering any comments for a couple of weeks. Following the recent news story about the folks that went without the internet for two weeks in a Yahoo! study, I have decided to take the Yahoo! test on my own and go cold turkey on the internet, except for job-related activities. Maybe this will be the subject of my next post! Thanks for your visit.

There Was Johnny

2005-01-25T17:05:00.000-06:00

In the mid-eighties, the NBC screenwriters went on strike for a lonnnng time. (For you Cheer's re-run watchers, this is why you'll never see an episode of Frasier and Lilith getting married.) Carson's writers were among them. After an enforced vacation of several weeks, the Great Carnac couldn't take sitting around the house anymore and went back to work, writing his own material. I was amazed at what he produced. I had come to think of Johnny as a pleasant sort of guy, but an aging has-been, past his prime, a master mainly at milking bad material for whatever scraps of humor it might provide. For the few weeks that he did his own jokes, he was hands down the funniest man on television. In retrospect, it might be because of that time that I miss him more than I thought I could miss anyone I have never met.

By the time I was old enough for late night TV, Letterman was already making a name for himself and the Entertainment Tonight types were already wondering what would happen to The Tonight Show if Carson retired and the End of Civilization did not immediately follow. Letterman always made me laugh more than Carson, to tell the truth. And yet, I have to admit that Dave has always been the root beer among the comedy sodas: You either love or him or hate him, depending on whether your comedic tastebuds are configured in the necessarily twisted fashion. Leno has sort of the opposite problem. His act is strictly lowest common denominator material with very little imagination. The funniest parts of his show come from other people like stupid criminals and the morons he finds for his "Man on the Street" interviews. Carson somehow managed to be both witty and accessible. His jokes didn't have punchlines that we could see "coming from a mile up 6th Avenue" as Letterman might say. He didn't mind asking the comedically challenged to make an effort to catch up. But neither did he ask the average man to figure out what was funny about, oh, I don't know, a list of the Top Ten minerals of the world, with bauxite at number five or whatever. He didn't just show us a mirror of the humor we could have come up with ourselves in seventh grade, and he didn't leave us saying, "What the heck was that?" He left us thinking, "I wish I had thought of that."

Carson was cool, in the best and most mature sense of the word. He was a genuinely human host, but he didn't mine his own neuroses for his material like Letterman seems to. ("I don't tell people my problems," he said once, "because ninety per cent of the people don't care and the other ten per cent are glad you have them.") He was passionate about the quality of his show, but he never let his passion lead him into fits like that of his predecessor Jack Paar. He indulged in no false humility, but he never took pains to draw attention to himself either because, of course, he never had to.There was plenty of off color double entendre in his material, for sure, but he didn't go for the shock value like Leno can at times. Johnny was the coolest because he was a rebel decidedly with a cause, a cause that is not the greatest of human history, but is surely in the top ten: good humor.

Yes, there were two hosts of The Tonight Show before Carson came along. But it doesn't matter. Late night TV as a cultural phenomenon was truly his own creation. But the future of Carson's creation doesn't look promising. Letterman will keep giving belly laughs to the comedically twisted like myself for at least another decade, but he will never be the reigning late night host that Carson was. Leno has announced his retirement in five years or so and will ostensibly be replaced by Conan O'Brian. I find it just as likely, however, that before that time Conan will have put an end to his own career by leaping, in one of his moments of manic hyperactivity, headfirst into the lens of one of his studio cameras. And even if he does survive to host The Tonight Show, who wants to wind down before bed by watching an ADD talkshow host? Craig Kilborne has disappeared from late night TV, having vanished like the Cheshire Cat, with nothing left of him but his sneer. Does anyone even know who took his place?

The common cultural experience that Carson created for us was already cracking in his last years and was shattered on his retirement, with Letterman, Leno, and Arsenio Hall all competing for the audience that only Johnny could hold together in the palm of his hand. Now, with the proliferation of cable channels, probably no host, regardless of his talent, can ever reign like Carson again. And this should point us to why an ever widening range of choices is not always good: A wider range of choices is an unambiguous good only when people have the time and motivation to weigh their options, and the patience to give a chance to something that might not initially fit the taste of the little demographic province to which they belong. When these things are missing from the public life, viewers will run in all directions after whatever is new, or whatever mediocrity happens to tickle the right neurons in their brains, and they won't stick around to give the good stuff, which always requires a bit more effort to appreciate, a chance. And they will lose one more small brick in the wall of cultural cohesion, like Carson's Tonight Show.

No, Johnny Carson didn't save my life and he didn't give me any profound insights, spiritual or otherwise. But I think my life is at least one iota richer for having been able to watch him on The Tonight Show, and so I mourn his passing.

The Da Vinci Code: The Secret Review

2004-12-30T13:55:00.000-06:00

Well, the fine folks at Amazon.com just aren't going to publish my review of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. They told me

Your review ... was removed because your comments in large part focused on your personal opinions of the subject matter, rather than reviewing the title itself.

My inner culture warrior is begging me to write about how this is one more instance of the neo-pagan, New Age, reality-TV-watching, French-loving assault on traditional values and Christianity. But, I have to disappoint him because there are plenty of reviews already on Amazon's Da Vinci Code site that actually say pretty much all the same stuff I wanted to say, though they lack my scintillating style. So, this affront to my creativity is purely that and nothing else. And it's really not much of an affront either. My brief exchange with these guys over all this has been completely pleasant. They just have a little bit of inconsistency in the application of their editorial policies, in my opinion. So my inner culture warrior must wait to fight another day. My inner child, on the other hand, assures me that he is not crying, he just has the sniffles. Because he's allergic. To something. Anyway, I still want to see this thing on the internet, so here it is (sniff sniff):

Dan Brown's prose in The Da Vinci Code is pretty much on the level of what you would expect from Robert Ludlum. This would be just fine. I have really enjoyed Ludlum over the years. But there are critics out there who want us to think this guy is the next Hemingway or Fitzgerald. And he just ain't. He is really isn't even the next Robert Ludlum.

The research into the background of The Da Vinci Code is pretty much on the level of those Bermuda Triangle books that publishers were cranking out back in the seventies. This would be OK too. Those books gave me all the material I needed to write my best grade-school research paper ever. But Dan has to ruin it all by putting in that statement on the front page, and I quote: "All descriptions of art, architecture, religions, secret rituals, secret handshakes, and organizations of middle aged guys who wear funny hats and ride scooters in small town parades are all accurate." OK, not an exact quote, but you get the picture. If he hadn't gone and said that, he could get away with peddling his fantasies as entertainment. But he did say it. And then he said it again in front of the "Today Show" cameras not too long ago. So the "just a story" defense won't cut it.

He clearly knows nothing about Constantine. He apparently has never read any of the "secret gospels" that he seems to have discovered all by his lonesome. He knows nothing about Mary Magdalene, or, rather, he knows far too much, since none oof the sources he "quotes" know anything about her either.

Or maybe he does know about all these things, but he's just a big liar. This would explain a few things. Like how he can tell the world that Opus Dei is out to get anyone who reveals the truths that he has revealed, and then, instead of hiding out from O.D. like poor Rushdie from the Ayatollahs, he lives the good life in broad daylight.

Now let's not go to the "just a story" gambit. Dan has already ruled that out himself, remember?

Plenty of folks have written factual refutations of Dan Brown's "accurate descriptions." If you want one from a source with impeccable academic credentials, check out Prof. Bart Ehrman's Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code. If you want to know what a real writer and a real scholar can do with much of Brown's background material, check out Umberto Eco's excellent Foucault's Pendulum.

Red State/Blue State. Not Really.

2004-11-29T08:31:00.000-06:00

A few random thoughts on the election.

The Evangelical Vote. So the vanguard of the Enlightenment was defeated by the rearguard of religious zeal and bigotry, i.e. fundamentalists and Evangelicals. Not really. David Brooks and Kohut of the Pew Research Center both make the point that evangelical turnout, though a necessary part of W's win, was no larger this time than it was four years ago. Bush won by increasing his share of the vote in other demographics, one such being conservative Catholics, as discussed by Kate O'Beirne in the November National Review. O'Beirne tells us "... Massachusetts Catholics ... gave George Bush 49 percent of their vote to their former alter boy's 51 percent." No wonder the Dems are all taking vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

I don't know if I like this or not, honestly. When the mud first went flying and we were told the election was all the Evangelicals' fault, I kind of liked being part of the king-maker constituency. But, I guess it really is better to find out that the truth is, instead, that we Evangelicals are not as alone as we often like to think we are.

Kerry, Geraldo, and Usama.So Kerry actually said to Geraldo "It was that Usama tape -- it scared them." If I had seen this anywhere except on Fox News, I would think this had to be another one of Geraldo's "Al Capone's vault" moments. But it was real. Kerry actually said that Usama cost him the election. It's hard to believe Kerry paid no attention to his internal polls. Anyway, this writer and political junkie was mainlining tracking polls like the ones at Rasmussen and Real Clear Politics every day for two months before the election and it was pretty clear that the Big W was ahead, just barely, all the way. The only thing that might have made a bit of a difference was that shameless story from CBS and the New York Times. More specifically, that shameless story on the "missing" explosives at Al Qaqaa. And if it truly made a difference, it was in Kerry's favor, of course.

"The Message." And speaking of lame excuses and shameless reporting, we are told by several Democrats that they lost because they couldn't get their message out. This despite the megaphone CBS handed them, and the daily broadsheets the New York Times printed for them for free. And you would think that ABC's crusade against the "Bush campaign lies" that were "central" to Bush's campaign would have helped at least a little. And the built-in biases of CNN and NBC couldn't have hurt. Dan Rather would remind us here that liberal media bias is a myth, of course. But look at Dan, willing to risk his entire career and reputation to help the Dems get their message out. And last but not least, let's remember that the vast majority of national newspapers toed the Times's editorial line and endorsed Kerry. All this, and they still couldn't get their message out.

We were told the same thing in 2002 as well. "The Democrats were not able to articulate a distinct message," was, I believe, the Party Line then. And, as David Letterman said then, "You know you're in trouble when you can't out-articulate President Bush."

But speaking of W and the art of articulationism, someone seems to be giving the ol' cow poke some lessons in electrocutionsim. Whatever you might say about his debate performances, he never once misunderestimated anyone and his strategery was always right on target. Actually, I kind of miss the old W. You could always expectorate that he would add some entertainment value to the 6:00 news.

Red State/Blue State. Not really. California is blue and Alabama is red. New York is blue and Tennessee is red. The intellectuals of the east coast and the aesthetes of the west were drowned in a blood red sea of southern fundamentalism and midwestern provincialism. Not really. Look at how the vote breaks down by county, as you can with the map supplied by the fine folks at Real Clear Politics, and the picture isn't so clear anymore. If the denizens of the Big Apple drive an hour in any direction (maybe two, depending on traffic), they'll find themselves either in Red Country, or in the Atlantic Ocean (the CBS newsroom probably preferring the latter). The same can be said about Philadelphia. Illinois is looking awfully red except for that deep blue Daley Machine crescent threatening to jump into Lake Michigan. The inland regions of Washington, Oregon, and, yes, even California itself, are all red.

But Red Country isn't all red either. Kerry got the votes of Virginia's D.C. suburbs. In North Carolina, he got Charlotte and a big chunk of the Research Triangle. He got Atlanta, Alabama's old plantation belt, big swathes of the Mississippi and Rio Grande valleys, and Austin, Texas. (Of course, pervasive university and government workers have turned Austin into Texas's own little slice of the Pacific Northwest over the past couple of decades, so winning there is actually almost a given for the Democrats.)

The 2004 vote was not so much north versus south, or coasts versus "flyover." It was urban centers and regions of minority poor versus middle class small towns and rural areas. I don't know exactly what lesson to draw from this. Bill Maher certainly got it wrong when he looked at the first red/blue map back in 2000, and said something like, "The people who voted Democrat are in areas where they all have to live close to one another and talk to each other." Yeah, you've got to love those city folk. Always friendly and talking to each other. It does mean that Republicans have a greater challenge in "getting out the vote." Their potential constituents are much more spread out than the Democrat voters of the urban areas, making it harder for them to draw crowds to stump speeches and send vans and buses out to bring voters to the polls.

Post-Election Selection Trauma. Yes, it's true. Some Dems are actually getting counseling on their reactions to the election. As far as I can tell, the story first broke in the Boca Raton News. Actually, I don't want to make fun of these people. If Kerry had won, I might be spending a few hours curled up in a fetal position on a psychiatrist's couch myself. I know that I spent the four years after Clinton won his second term wondering if I could really be from the same planet as almost half of my fellow Americans. The counselors who are bilking these poor people out of their money should be brought up on malpractice charges, but the suffering is real. If you run into some of these poor folks, take a moment to show them that compassionate conservatism is real too.

2008. And speaking of going nuts, give us a break! A campaign season lasts the better part of two years, and there are only four years between elections, so almost half our lives are already taken up with mud slinging and baby kissing as it is. It's over! No one knows what is going to happen in four years! The only voting I want to know about is who gets voted off of Survivor!Stop it already!

Al Quaeda and Saddam: Actually, there were connections.

2004-10-03T19:46:00.000-05:00

Democrats have camped out on one sentence in The 9/11 Commission Report so often that they have surely denuded all the foliage and left it in danger of massive erosion:

Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.

This comes from the second chapter of the report, "The Foundation of the New Terrorism", which details how al Quaeda evolved after Bin Ladin left the Sudan and returned to Afghanistan in the nineties. What I have yet to hear from anyone, even from Republicans, is the three paragraphs that preceded this one sentence:

There is also evidence that around this time Bin Laden sent out a number of eelers to the Iraqi regime, offering some cooperations. None are reported to have received a significant response. According to one report, Saddam Hussien's efforts at this time to rebuild relations with the Saudis and other Middle Eatern regimes led him to stay clear of Bin Ladin.

In mid-1998, the situation reversed: it was Iraq that reportedly took the initiative. In March 1998 .... two al Quaeda members reportedly went to Iraq to meet with Iraqi intelligence. In July, an Iraqi delegation traveled to Afghanistan to meet first with the Taliban and then with Bin Laden. ...

... According to the reporting, Iraqi officials offered Bin Laden a safe haven in Iraq. Bin Laden declined, apparently judging that his circumstances were more favorable than the Iraqi alternative. The reports describe friendly contacts and indicae some common themes in both sides' hatred of the United States.

Just thought you would like to know.

The American Judiciary in Theory and in Practice

2004-08-15T08:36:00.000-05:00

Well, found some time to blog! but typing as fast as a spider monkey hopped up on a two liter bottle of Mountain Dew, so please forgive the typos. (Typoes?)

Talk long enough about the Federal Marriage Amendment and you know someone is going to say something like, "Marriage is something we can't let the courts decide because they never respect the will of the people." Then, like clockwork, like a mechanical consequence of Newton's third law (the one about equal and opposite forces), someone else will counter, "Well, the people have been wrong about plenty of things before." Then, like clockwork, like a cuckoo clock chiming midnight, the responder will recite a litany of injustices promulgated by the American Public: slavery, gender inequities, racial discrimination, nineteenth century sweeatshops, Japanese internment, and on and on. (Or, rather, merely "on and on", the injustices of American society being surely present but comparably small compared to those of most societies of similar power, size, and influence.) The implication, always present in the subtext like the whine of the mosquito in the living room that you never can quite see, but rarely stated is that the American public is at best a large collection of Cro Magnons who were just a couple of generations ago living in sod huts and, though some of them may mean well, they really do need the guidance of the wise and enlightened to lead them into the twentieth century.

Errr, twenty-first. I guess I'm showing my age. But I'm not old enough to have ever lived in a sod hut.

But where was I? American democracy left to itself is most likely to turn us into fascist, supersitious, pig farmers living in sod huts, who want be terribly different from their pigs. So thank goodness (even though goodness is merely a superstitious notion of fascist pig farmers) that we have the black-cloaked liberal uberminds to save us from ourselves. (By the way, nothing against pig farmers here. Don't know what I would do without my McDonald's sausage biscuits. I just tried to imagine an occupation that would be particularly objectionable to someone sipping a Starbuck's frappucino in between their morning "save the whales" protest and their afternoon "rights for gay parents" fundraiser, and pig farmer was what came to me.) This might surprise you, but I agree that American democracy simply can't go it alone. The American voters, after all, gave us forty years of a liberal congress, two terms of Bill Clinton, and top ratings for Jerry Springer and reality TV.

You may have occasionally heard (By the way, I'm being sarcastic.) one of my fellow right wingers say that the left wing elite doesn't respect the will of the common people. However, when you look at what a lot of common people want (Jerry Springer and reality TV), it's pretty clear that the right wing doesn't the will of the common people either. This is the dilemma on whose horns the right wing is caught and from which (must ... not ... end ... sentence ... in ...... preposition) it needs to extract itself.

More on that some other day. For now, I want to get back to the left and the Supreme Court. The left wing answer to the thickheadedness of the typical American voter has been, for well nigh fifty years now, the lucidity of thought and moral courage of the gavel wielding members of our judicial branch. The theory is that these guys are smart. These guys don't have to worry about being popular. Therefore, give them our decisions and they will make them for us, and make them right. Sounds good. Sounds like Plato, who was another smart guy. That's the theory. But let's see how this has worked out in practice.

The Great Sin of American history has surely been slavery. How could our nation, conceived in a yearning for liberty and born in rebellion, allow that institution to remain in place and to thrive? That's a rhetorical question, by the way, since I don't intend to answer it. (I think it's worth pointing out, though, that slavery in other parts of the world, like Africa and the Middle East, continued well into the twentieth century and has now made a comeback.) What I would like to do instead is ask a non-rhetorical question: What part did the Supreme Court play in ending slavery? Two words: Dred Scott. They made sure that slavery, already societally entrenched, became legally entrenched as well. They made certain that slaves and abolitionists would never have any legal recourse to ending slavery. They made sure that the only way to end it would be the American Civil War and the constituional amendments that followed.

And what did the Uberminds do about the sweatshops in New York and Chicago? (Being a Southerner by birth, I can't help pointing out that these things were instituted in the North while the North was in the middle of punishing the South for slavery.) They supported them. The State of New York passed a law prohibiting industrial bakeries from forcing employees to work more than sixty hours a week. The flour dust was causing the workers heart problems and the exhausted workers were burning themselves when they tripped and fell on the ovens. But that was all OK with the Supremes. In the famous Lochner decision of 1905 they "discovered a right", as the professional legalists like to say, in the Constitution to "freedom of contract," which the New York law was of course violating. Things weren't set right for a few more decades, while the bakers had to go on choosing between gainful employment and longevity. (Lochner, by the way, is one of a long list of reasons I have for being a conservative and not a libertarian.)

And then there are civil rights for minorities. If Dred Scott isn't enough for you here, consider that the Fourteenth Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act were all products of American representational democracy. The courts had nothing to do with them. Apparently, even the Troglodytes can get one right every once in a while. OK OK OK, there was Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Fine. The Uberminds finally caught up with the public and joined the civil rights bandwagon. But, once on the wagon, it was only a decade or two before they determined to drive the whole thing right over a cliff. In the seventies, they followed up their performance in Brown v. Board with school busing, consigning by edict thousands of six year olds to two hour bus rides, occasionally with National Guardsmen riding shotgun (literally). Perhaps as in movie franchises, so in judicial decisions: the sequel never measures up to the original.

How about state-sponsored eugenics, which made more than a little frightening headway in this country in the early twentieth century? Oliver Wendell Holmes granted the state of Virginia the right to sterilize a hereditarily "feebleminded" woman on the grounds that, "Three generations of imbeciles is enough."

Japanese internment camps? Michelle Malkin has recently and controversially pointed out some usually unnoticed complexities in this unfortunate episode of recent American history. But, if you still think that it really was a huge injustice, ask yourself what the courts did to stop it. Not one thing.

The upshot is that the courts haven't been on the side of truth and justice much more often than the American people at large have been. And, when they have taken it upon themselves to take up the slack in American democracy, they have almost always gotten things completely wrong. Justice Robert Bork has laid all this out in much more detail than I could ever hope to in is book The Tempting of America. I also ought to give credit to Robert P. George's excellent article "High Courts and Misdemeanors" in the October 2004 Touchstone. His article saved me a couple of hours of research time, especially on the Lochner case.

So we can't trust the American people to do the right thing, and we can't trust the courts. So who do we trust? Congress! (By the way, I'm being sarcastic.)

Adam Smith: Closet Marxist?

2004-08-05T19:30:00.000-05:00

Of course not. But now that I have your attention, I thought I might share a little reading I've been doing from the chief bricklayer of the theoretical foundations of modern capitalism. Smith is generally reviled by liberals and worshipped by libertarians as the high priest of laissez-faire. He taught us, or hypnotized us, to see that the only role a government had in economics was to keep itself as far away form it as possible. He educated us, or fooled us, to see that any two people who want to make any kind of contract should be allowed to do so. He informed us so that we could see, or he bedazzled us so that we could blindly believe, that slum lords and pimps and moonshiners and crack dealers could existed for the sole reason that they provided wanted products and services and that they should be left alone to ply their trades just like the butcher, the brewer, or the baker.

Libertarians, many of whom eschew any hint of religious faith, have found a prophet in Smith, while liberals have found evil incarnate. Conservatives like me, have sort of just felt guilty for falling away from the Gospel According to Adam.

I don't have to feel guilty anymore. My journey out of false bondage began with reading Arthur Herman's excellent book How the Scots Invented the Modern World. He spends a good chunk of his words on Smith, and describes a thinker who, like Yogi Bera, really didn't say everything he said.

After reading Herman's book, I figured I would give The Wealth of Nations a looksee for myself. Being a largely undisciplined sort, I couldn't help finally flipping to the last page. (I'm still working my way through the book. Maybe I'll have something interesting (HAH!) to say about it from time to time.) There I read:

According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to ....: first, the duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies;

So far so good, alot of libertarians might say, although some of the more staunch ones should already see trouble here, since this kind of protection is realistically impossible without some government expenditure and a draft, if only a war time draft, as well. But, to carry on:

[S]econdly, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every
member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member
of it;

As long as Smith is talking just about things like murder and armed robbery, we can all agree with him. But why didn't he say that? Why did he use those words "injustice" and "oppression" that we hear on the lips of collectivist types all the time? I am not enough of a Smith expert to pretend that I have an answer to that question; I just thought it was worth asking. So the
libertarian is still sort of safe. But the we move on to the final duty of the sovereign:

and, thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certian public institutions which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to
a great society.

And there you have it. Smith does see a positive role for a government, even one that probably involves taxation somewhere along the way. I imagine that he would heartily approve of a government outlawing at least the stronger recreational drugs, and upholding beloved institutions like marriage. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to believe that he would approve of the U.S. Interstate Highway program. Shoot, he might even like the space program. There's a lesson for liberals here too: There are other forms of capitalism besides laissez-faire.

Now, I criticized the libertarians for treating Adam Smith like a prophet, so I'm not going to do the same thing myself. Alot of economists have come and gome over the years. Adam Smith hasn't had the last word. But the point is that alot of people over the years have simply said, "Well, there was this really smart Scotsman named Adam Smith who proved that anything-goes capitalism is the way to go, so that's what I'm going to believe," when they haven't even read what the man wrote. Further, if we still think he was "a really smart Scotsman", then if it was OK to slavishly worship him when we thought we agreed with him, we're at least a bit obligated to give his ideas a hearing, even though we find them uncomfortable.

Blog Note: I complain alot about my lack of time for this blog. In fact, this whole thing is basically done on my lunch hour. Well, no more. The Fortune 500 company I work for is doing some lawyer-proofing and their new internet policy prohibits using their hardware to view or contribute to sites that engage in religious proselytizing or politics, such things being "potentially offensive." I really don't know what will come of this blog. I will keep making occasional posts as my very limited time allows, but it won't be very often. This also means I can't view any of the blogs out there that I find truly interesting. For those of you who are checking in to see why I haven't commented on your blogs, well, now you know.
Well, the good news is that this has been a pretty small circulation thing, so this isn't exactly like the Beatles breaking up. Thanks for stopping by. I hope you can come by in the future every couple of months or so. And, since this is my last post for a while, let me leave you with the most imortant thing I can say: "For God so loved the world that He sent His only Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish but have everlasting life." (John 3:16)

This and That

2004-08-02T13:03:00.000-05:00

Not much time for writing this week. Just wanted to draw attention to an opinion piece by one of my personal heroes Robert the Bork in First Things on the Federal Marriage Amendment. The paper and ink version is still on the newsstands, so the on-line version won't be available for a month or so, but bookmark it and be ready to point and click when the time comes. The Borkmeister makes many of the same points I have made here (Man, I must be smart!), and with almost as much eloquence and eruditeness .... umm, erudity .... umm, erudicity .... whatever.

Also wanted to call attention to a recent exchange at the Truth Laid Bear over Ted Kennedy's comment to the Democrat National Convention:

If dedication to the common good were hardwired into human nature, we would never have needed a revolution.

Staunch conservative and blogger extraordinaire N.Z. Bear took issue with this: "The good Senator expresses a rather grim view of human nature, doesn't he? If you truly believe that each of us has no interest in the common good ... I guess some of the nanny-state policies so dear to the hearts of Democrats actually do start to make some sense." While some of his left wing readers offered rejoinders such as, "While Kennedy did go overboard, he does have a valid debating point.... [I]t's easy for resources to be unfairly exploited to the point of no return if some sort of controlling mechanism (whether by government, peer pressure or some other device) is not in place."

In the face of this discussion, I have to wonder if we see here some political equivalent of DNA recombination going on. Since when does a liberal like Kennedy actually even hint that men are basically less than good and innocent? Isn't that the whole point to traditional liberalism, that man is basically good, and that is exactly why certain individuals can be and should be trusted with the power to create the immense "nanny-state" that N.Z. Bear decries? And wasn't the whole point of conservatism that men form a mixed bag at best, "neither brutes nor angels" and all that, and that, therefore, it's best if none of them get too much power over their fellows? And how can both sides here switch presuppositions without swapping conclusions as well? And how on Earth did I ever wind up agreeing with Ted Kennedy on anything? (By the way, don't take any of this as an endorsement of his succeeding ridiculous remarks about Enron and corporate greed, made all the more ridiculous by the fact that most of Enron's shenanigans happened during the Clinton administraction. And I certainly don't mean this post as a criticism of N.Z. Bear's otherwise fine work, either.) I wonder more and more just how much our cherished philosophical presuppositions really affect our political views.

For my part, the best modern expression of the conservative view of man -- Scratch that. For my part, the best modern expression of what man is was given by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago:

If only there were evil men somewhere doing evil things and all that was necessary was to separate them from the rest of mankind. But the line dividing good and evil runs through the heart of every man. And who is willing to tear out a piece of his own heart?

Out to Lunch

2004-07-23T16:56:00.000-05:00

The long lag time between my posts is going to get a little longer for a while. I will be traveling all of next week. Thanks to those of you who keep stopping by.

If You Don't Mind Me Playing Ground-Pounder for Blogs4Bush ...

2004-07-21T13:04:00.000-05:00

.... here is an article on an alleged money connection between Teresa Hienz-Kerry and those lovable scamps who are planning on disrupting the GOP convention in NYC. Gun powder to confuse bomb squad dogs, marbles to throw under the hoofs of police horses. (And I'll bet they're all animal rights activists too!) I tell you, the Li'l Rascals don't have anything on these fun loving kids!

Eugenics with a Positive Attitude

2004-07-17T13:38:00.000-05:00

I would like to highly recommend Naomi Schaefer's article in The New Atlantis: The Legacy of Nazi Medicine. If you want something to keep you up at night, put away The Shining and take a look at this. Stephen King wishes he could write horror like this. Ms. Schaefer takes a look at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's exhibit on German eugenics, "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race." This exhibit traces the rise of eugenics in Nazi Germany from the "public health" campaigns of the 1930's to the Final Solution of the 1940's.

Schaefer remarks on how the eugenics bill of goods was sold to the Germans as an obligation to society:

Other posters from the time emphasize the burden that the mentally and physically disabled place upon society as a whole. A picture from a Nazi-era high school biology textbook shows a German man struggling under the weight of a barbell, with a smallish Neanderthal-looking creature on each side. “You Are Sharing the Load,” reads the title. “A hereditarily ill person costs 50,000 reichsmarks on average up to the age of sixty.”

Schaefer doesn't draw the parallels between such thinking and the calcuations of some of our modern day sociologists who add up, with all the obsessive rigor of Ebenezer Scrooge monitoring Bob Cratchit's consumption of coal, the cost to society of our "unwanted" children. But such comparisons are obvious enough, I guess. I myself mentioned it just in case. The irony I don't want to go unnoticed, however, is that these beans counters are marching in the same ranks with, and often simply are, the very people who call pro-lifers "Nazis." (BTW -- Speaking of calculating the cost of unwanted children, a particularly pernicious example of this sort of "billing" made a splash in the news in the past year or two. Would be grateful to anone who can point me to it.)

Eugenics, of course, was not merely a Teutonic phenomenon. Even the good ol' U.S. of A. under the leadership of Justice Holmes ("Justice Holmes" -- There's an oxymoron for you.) got into the act:

Another panel in the exhibit displays Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous majority opinion in the 1927 case Buck v. Bell, upholding a forced sterilization law in Virginia. Holmes famously concluded that Carrie Buck, who was deemed the “feebleminded” product of a mother who was not of very hearty stock, could be sterilized along with her daughter. As the opinion famously declared, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

(For what it's worth, our good friend Alan Dershowitz recently took part in a panel debate at Pat Robertson's Regent University, the topic of which was whether the Supreme Court has too much power. You probably already know that Prof. Dershowitz likes a rather strong court. He scored a couple of points by pointing to a later court decision that struck down eugenics in the U.S. when the democratic process had sadly failed to do so. No one on either side of the debate mentioned this little jewel of legal compassion from Justice Holmes. By the way, turns out that Prof. Dershowitz thinks that Roe v. Wade was incorrectly decided, and that abortion priveleges should be left up to the states. Who would have thunk?)

Clarence Darrow, of all people, strongly opposed eugenics:

But there was also opposition from public intellectuals like Clarence Darrow, whose article, “The Eugenics Cult,” appears next to Holmes’s words in the exhibit. Despite the faith in science he demonstrated at the Scopes Trial a few years earlier, Darrow clearly understood the dangers of eugenics. “Those in power would inevitably direct human breeding in their own interests,” he wrote. “It would mean that big business would create a race in its own image.... [I]t would mean with men, as it does with animals, that breeding would be controlled for the use and purpose of the powerful and unintelligent.”

Another irony here is that John Scopes, whom Darrow defending for teaching evolution, had actually been teaching from a book that seemed to be more of a propaganda piece for eugenics than a scientific text book on biology. You can read more about this in Edward Sisson's article in Touchstone once it becomes available on ther website in a month or so. There's a lawyer for you.

The Nazis are famous for killing Jews and Gypsies, but the culled they culled their own herd as well:

In a small, darkened room of the exhibit, there are pictures of some of the 5,000 boys and girls who were euthanized between 1939 and 1945. ... These were German children, too. Even if the doctors and nurses were convinced that Jews or gypsies or blacks were animals, how could they justify the murder of these “Nordic” youth?

One factor was the method of killing. Since Luminal is a sedative that was often administered in small doses to unruly children at the time—there was no other way to treat epilepsy, for instance—nurses often had no way of knowing who was administering the fatal dose. Nor could they tell whether a child was sleeping or entering into a comatose state. The more people who were in on the killing, the less culpability any one individual felt.

Something to think about: The attempt to mitigate responsibility by diffusion of the same is going to be an increasing problem in our society, where everyone is doing more and more specialized tasks in bigger and bigger organizations. And, by the way, did I mention ritalin?

Schaefer puts off making explicit comparisons with our own society until a few paragraphs at the end of her essay (which is fine, the parallels being obvious enough). She offers a clear warning without falling into the hysteria that many writers might indulge in at this point:

While it is perverse to compare our own baby-making practices to the German programs of sterilization and euthanasia, the exhibit could not have come at a better time.

Our tools for predicting the likelihood of certain genetic illnesses are much more accurate today, and perhaps even more widely used. Couples with family histories of hereditary disease often consult with geneticists to see whether they should try to have children together. Women who decide to keep a baby with Down syndrome rather than abort it are considered by many to be downright irresponsible. And there are even more extreme voices, like Peter Singer, who believe the mentally or physically handicapped should be killed before they become a burden on the rest of society.

Reading Schafer's article, we find that Nazi eugenics was not sold to the Germans under the rubric of what is generally called "hate" these days. I would say, and this is my take, not Schaefer's, that it was sold on love: love for the future of the race; love for greater good of society in general, and the parents in particular; who couldn't be expected to bear the unjust burden of the unfit; love for the unfit themselves, whose lives could never be worth living. This is just the kind of sales pitch that a decade or two of indulgence has made us ready for. Eugenics with a positive attitude. Read Schaefer's article and say prayer or two.

Blog note: I don't generally like the kind of piece I have just written -- highly derivative, someone's comments on someone's review of someone's book on someone's controversy over someone's theory as to why someone else wrote what they wrote ... I wouldn't make a good deconstructionist, I guess. But, anyway, I wanted to write something (As I have said before, Blog, I must!) and I think it's worthwhile to recommend The New Atlantis to anyone who will listen.

And, honestly, this is the best I can do alot of the time. I don't have alot of time for this blog and I am a slow writer in the first place, so I need to pick things I can write as fast as possible. Hence, also, the generally big lag between posts on this blog. Thanks to those of you who keep checking back with me.

One question: Back around June 20, the readership of this thing really climbed. I am about as close to being the next Instapundit as Richard Simmons is to being the lead in the next Batman movie, but I have alot more readers now than I did a month ago. If you found this site about that time, I would appreciate hearing how. I would like to know what I did right, or who I have to thank. Thanks.

This Week the U.S. Senate Votes on the Federal Marriage Admendment! Send Your E-mails!

2004-07-12T22:40:00.000-05:00

This week, the Senate of these Fifty Great States will vote on the Federal Marriage Amendment, which reads

Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution, nor the constitution of any State, shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman.

(Available at the great politics-junkie site Thomas, by the way.)

If your Senators are planning on voting for it, write them and tell them what a great job they are doing. If they are sitting on this fence, write them and ask them what they think they are being paid for. Don't know how to contact them? Well, here you go! So hop to it!

But wait, am I forgetting something? Oh yeah. Some of you might be expecting me to give you reasons to be as enthusiastic about the FMA as I am. Fair enough. But I don't think I have the time and stamina to change the minds of any of you who actually think gay marriage is a good idea. So, if you don't mind, I will direct my remarks to those conservative folks who don't like the idea of gay marriage, but don't like the amendment either.

Maybe you want to allow gay marriage out of a kindhearted desire to live and let live, to let others enjoy the personal freedom life in the U.S. of A. has afforded you. I wrote on this at grrrrreat length in an earlier post and I can't go into it all again, but here's the condensed verison of my thoughts: Let's say that we agree (concede, grudgingly admit, whatever) that government really isn't competent to manage the relationships and liaisons of consenting adults, and that government should keep its hands off of such relationships. Does it then follow that we should require our government to get involved in such relationships and shore up some of them by enforcing marriage contracts? No! It does not! If you think homosexuality is wrong, you have every right to tell your government not to support it.

If you are still reading this and not writing your Senator yet, you are probably worried about what the FMA will mean for American Federalism. This concern is legitimate. But keep in mind a few things. First, ask yourself why left wing stalwarts like John Kerry and Geraldine Ferarro on "Hannity and Colmes" the other night, who have spent entire careers attempting to foist a Uniform Code of Conduct on the Fifty States, are now flocking to Federalism like a bunch of ten year olds to a sneak preview of a Harry Potter movie. I think I know why: Because, when they say, "I think the states should decide," what they really mean is, "I am going to try to stop anyone from deciding anything until the courts have had time to force gay marriage on every state in the Union, whether they want it or not." Folks, I'm sad to say it, but Federalism is just not going to be allowed to runs its course in this matter, neither for good nor ill. I can't say it any better than Fr. Neuhaus over at First Things:"[W]e should be wary of putting social policies into the Constitution ... The question, however, is whether same-sex marriage will be put into the Constitution by court rulings or will be precluded by the ... amendment process. The Constitution will be amended one way or another, either by the people or by their robed masters."

From another perspective, the Constitution never gave us complete Federalism. If it had, it would have been no different from the Articles of Confederation that it was meant to improve on. So, yes, it most certainly is a bad thing when laws and court decisions and executive orders come down that take away Federalism as provided in the Constitution, but restricting Federalism to some degree by amending that Constitution is an entirely different matter. Federalism is a great idea. It helps a naturally cantankerous bunch of people (namely, us Americans) cooperate and get along, and still make room for the sorts of local communitites we want. But it is not a moral imperative. Protecting marriage is.

Should we look to the Federal Defense of Marriage Act to protect marriage? It will be declared unconstitutional. We might argue that the only reason this is a national issue, instead of a an issue for the states in particular, is that gay marriage activists misunderstand the Full Faith and Credit clause in the Bill of Rights, that all we have to do is interpret it correctly. I hate to be rude, but all I can say to that is, Where have you been for the last forty years?!?!?!?

Excuse while I think about a calm, blue ocean for a moment ... OK. Neither voting the FMA in or voting it out is a slam dunk at this point. Your letter can make a difference. Head back up to that link at the top of this post; find your Senators; go to their home pages; fill out the e-mail forms that they all have, and let them know what you think.

Beyond Parody ....

2004-06-30T11:20:00.000-05:00

....but I'll give it my best shot.

Fox News relates the following recent activities of those fun loving ACLU guys and gals:

RICHMOND, Va. — A lawsuit filed Tuesday challenges a new state law that effectively bans nude summer camps for teenagers, saying it violates the constitutional right to privacy.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued in federal court to keep the state from shutting down a no-clothing camp for juveniles in late July at the White Tail Park nudist camp in Ivor.

OK, so you have to let people -- and kids in particular -- run around buck naked because otherwise they don't have enough privacy? And speaking of buck naked, what genius decided to name this place "White Tail"?????

Anyway, the ACLU tells us "Our job is to conserve America’s original civic values - the Constitution and the Bill of Rights." "America’s original civic values". So, if we had been a fly on the wall in John and Abigail Adams's house, we might have heard a fireside chat something like,

"What think ye, then, wife? Is young John Quincy of age for his first naturalistick frolicking in the wilds of Virginie this heyah summah?"

"Ayah, I'd expect so, Mr. Adams. The both of us had already done our first frolicking by the time we were of his age. And now that yon Redcoats aren't a-standin' in the way, I say why not indeed?"

The ACLU also advises us, "If the rights of society’s most vulnerable members are denied, everybody’s rights are imperiled." Well, yes, I guess we are talking here about the rights of some pretty vulnerable people: teenagers whose parents honestly think it's fine and dandy for them to spend a summer away from home this way. But it just seems to my stodgy old-fashioned mind that their rights will be more secure if instead we put the little tykes in foster homes and the camp counselors in the big house.

But since the ACLU is so concerned with "society's most vulnerable members" I wonder if they might some day take up this abortion issue and .... Oh, never mind.

The Gipper once said, "The Democrats have gone so far left that they have left America." It looks like the ACLU has decided to leave the planet.

Dial-A-Pope

2004-06-24T14:12:00.000-05:00

"I.m not making this up." -- Dave Barry

In its Spring 2004 edition, that worthy new journal of technology and society The New Atlantis relates that Verizon Wireless has cut a deal with the Vatican, establishing a service that allows subscribers to receive daily messages from the Pope on their mobile phones for 30 cents a day.

You know, I don't have a joke here. I just like typing "Dial-A-Pope."

Chalk One Up for that Eminent Tribunal

2004-06-17T15:45:00.000-05:00

That Eminent Tribunal. Lincoln was being just a bit sarcastic when he gave that appelation to the Supreme Court in his first Inaugural Address:

The candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court . . . the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.

But last week's Supreme Court decision on the Pledge of Allegience makes me just a smidgen less inclined to be sarcastic about them myself. You can actually read the entire decision for yourself . (If you have the time, it being a rather lengthy tome. In fact, all the recent Supreme Court decisions are available online.)

Five justices ruled that Michael Newdow, the doctor, lawyer, and clergyman bringing suit on "behalf" of his little girl, actually had no standing as her legal representative because he does not have custody of her. The case, they decided, was sour from the get-go; the question of the "under God" phrase in the Pledge couldn't be decided; and the students of the Elk Grove Unified School District, where the little girl had been quite happily saying the Pledge complete with "under God" all long, could continue on as before. Three justices actually opined that the case could be decided and that, furthermore, there was nothing wrong with "under God." Justice Scalia had recused himself from the decision because of some flap over some public comments he had made on the Pledge issue. (I should confess that I really don't know what "recused" means, but it sounds painful and we should all be grateful to Justice Scalia in his heroism in the cause of justice.)

I am, of course, not at all displeased with the three minority Justices, but I actually find myself on the side of the court's left wingers for once. As much as we conservatives would love to see a firm ruling in favor of "under God", Michael Newdow's doubtful status as legal representative for his daughter would have been a gorilla-sized monkey wrench in the works of the decision and it would have come back to haunt us. He had no business bringing this suit to court, and the Supremes were right to say so. We still want the court to come down firmly on the side of truth, justice, and the American Way here, but this was not the time.

Nevertheless, I like Chief Justice Rehnquist's opinion, and I hope we see his reasoning again when the time is right:

The Constitution only requires that schoolchildren be entitled to abstain from the ceremony if they chose to do so. To give the parent of such a child a sort of “heckler’s veto” over a patriotic ceremony willingly participated in by other students, simply because the Pledge of Allegiance contains the descriptive phrase “under God,” is an unwarranted extension of the Establishment Clause, an extension which would have the unfortunate effect of prohibiting a commendable patriotic observance.

Rehnquist's phrase "heckler's veto" is a true gold nugget of rhetoric. In two words he sums up exactly how we ("we" being me and Rehnquist, at least) think and feel about the privileges that have been granted to a small number to cast wet blankets on everybody else's good time.

Alot of goodhearted folks won't agree with me there, but I think it's all about the story that pops into your mind when you hear that someone somewhere wants a scool to cut out the pledge, or school prayer, or moments of silence, or what have you. The story the media genrally tries to tell is of the principled individual of strong conscience and independent mind who decides to shrug off the oppressive yoke of the small-minded religious bigots around him. I tend to think that the real story is more often about the ACLU preying on an unsuspecting village atheist who doesn't need to obtain protection from "enforced religion" nearly as much as he needs to switch to decaf.

Justice O'Connor continues to surprise, not merely deciding that the suit is illegitimate, but actually agreeing with Rehnquist that the suit could have been settled and that "under God" is just fine. It ticks off alot of conservatives, like Ramesh Ponnuru writing for National Review (June 30 last year) that she has been the justice in the last decade that has wound up most often in the majority. That in itself doesn't bother me so much. Someone has to be number one, and as long as the court is somewhat evenly divided along ideological lines, that someone won't be someone like, for instance, Justice Thomas.

So give credit where credit is due and score one for that Eminent Tribunal!

Yet Another Tribute to The Man

2004-06-14T10:37:00.000-05:00

I don't have anything to say here that alot of other people haven't said, often more eloquently, over the past couple of weeks. But this is one time where, nevertheless, blog I must!

I am struck over and over again at how the world we now live in is, in many real ways, the world Ronald Reagan bequeathed to us. All blessings ultimately come from above, and the Bible warns not to "put our hope in princes." Nevertheless, in bestowing His blessings, God usually works through intermediaries -- mothers and fathers, friends, even enemies -- and most of those intermediaries have a choice in whether they will play the part assigned them. Ronald Reagan, as far as I can tell, chose to play that part. And so, in that limited sense, the world we live in is the world he bequeathed to us.

When Reagan took office in 1981, the prospect of a choice between nuclear holocaust and communist domination looked very real to many people. In the blinded eyes of some, the dingy gray evil of communism looked like the "moral equivalent" of the American dream. The "Doomsday Clock" of the "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" had moved from 12 minutes to midnight in 1974 to seven minutes in 1980. A well-publicized psychologists' survey showed that a large percentage of five year olds were having dreams about nuclear disaster. By the time that Reagan's Vice President George H.W. Bush left office, the Soviet Union was no more. The back of communism was broken and the prospect of civilized nations going to war with nuclear arsenals was relegated to the annals of science fiction. While the left was talking about "understanding" our enemies, and the right was talking about "containing" them, Reagan wanted to defeat them. And he did.

Drug use was at an all time high and was still riding when Reagan took office. His war on drugs, carried on by Bush, cut drug usage by huge percentages.

Double digit inflation and massive unemployment are gone, thanks largely to Reagan. Because he cut the ropes holding back the economy the savings of those who were middle aged workers when he took office could outpace inflation, and more Americans could go to work. I hope someone in a university eceonomics department has counted, or someday will count, the number of workers who are retiring today who might have been working until the last day of their lives otherwise, or the number of our nation's poor who climbed out of the ghetto or the shack by the side of the state highway, because of the jobs that were created by the economy that Reagan freed.

He left the job uncompleted, of course, as did Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt. This will never be a perfect world. Drug use climbed again during the Clinton years. But the thing is that Reagan showed that the problem could be beaten. It's just a matter of resolve. The economy has had its further ups and downs, but no one is talking about our best days being behind us anymore. China is a problem looming more ominous than ever, but Reagan taught us that massive, powerful dictatorships can be beaten.

To find a man who changed the course of our nation's history to the extent that Reagan did, we would have to go back to FDR.

Well, like I said, I don't have anything very unique to say here, just a bunch of stuff I wanted to say. The world we live in now is just a better place than the world of 1980 thanks largely to Ronald Reagan.

Of Templates, PowerPoint and Otherwise

2004-06-03T11:55:00.000-05:00

I don't have anything really profound to say here. (yeah, I know, what else is new ...) This is going to be the kind of rant you hear from miffed Christians about once a week when we think our faith has gotten short shrift. But, I'm ticked, and more importantly, I think I can do this fast, which is the only kind of blog I have time for these days.

So here goes: A guide for American businessmen in Japan came across my desk the other day. It has the usual stuff about culture shock and the remedies thereof. One section is on the religions that have influenced Japan. Each religion gets one page of large-type print, with several PowerPoint-style bullets. Maybe what I should really complain about is the modern American PowerPoint mindset: that all truth, including the religious variety, can be reduced to a set of bullets that can fit nicely on a PowerPoint slide. But that would keep me going forever, so back to the matter at hand....

The Buddhism bullets say things like "Self Sacrifice", "Group benefit vs. self benefit", "Long office hours", "Group identity". The regular text tells us "Buddhism focuses on self-denial, sacrifice, and virtuous living."

(Side note: Before I lose you, this is not going to be a rant about Japan, or even about Buddhism. My rhetorical poison will be spewed at some very American, secular attitudes.)

The Christianity bullets say things like "Pressure to choose one religion over the others; make the 'right' decision", "Little tolerance for shades of gray", "Universalistic ... If it works for me, it will work for you." The regular text tells us, "It focuses on an interior ethic oriented to the individual who stands alone in the presence of God instead of the group-oriented ethic." We are also informed that, "There are fewer Christians in Japan now than in the 16th century."

The odd thing about the Christianity bullets is that they aren't exactly wrong. But they are right in that partial way that a PowerPoint bullet would have to be. "Little tolerance for shades of gray?" Yes, in an ultimate sense. But I think that recognizing the fallenness of this world and the ensuing need to cut people some slack is also a part of Christianity. Universalitic? Of course. That's what the "catholic" in the Apostle's Creed means, after all. But, given the mutations of the English language in the past couple of decades, "If it works for you, it will work for me" will conjure up in most minds images of book burnings, blue laws, and over-dressed families watching Lawrence Welk on black and white TV.

You just can't boil a religion -- or anything else of any importance -- down to a half page of bullets.

But the thing that really ticks me off is that seemingly innocuous statement, "There are fewer Christians in Japan now than in the 16th century." One reason Christianity hasn't fared too well is that Nagasaki was the center of Japanese Christianity prior to WWII. But, more importantly, a few tens of thousands of Christians were killed by Japanese Buddhists in the 17th century. Before that time, Christianity was catching on like wildfire.

(Side note again: This is not a complaint against Buddhism or Japan. There is no need to remind me that my ancestors, spiritual and biological, also did some nasty things over the years.)

So why not point this out? Templates. Not of the PowerPoint variety, but of the intellectual variety. The kind of template that is also called a bias. We all know Christianity is intolerant, and Buddhism is peaceful. We all know that Christianty doesn't fit into the "eastern mindset." So if Christianity is smaller now than then, it's obvious why. No further research into the subject (no matter how easy) need be done. So, I'm not mad at Buddhism, but I am truly cheesed off at American attitudes that daily take Christianity to task for the Inquisition but never call Buddhism to account for things like the extermination of Japanese Christians.

One more thing: This little guide that got me so ticked off was prepared by an American private consulting firm and has been used by at least a few Big American Companies. As this Republican writer will say often in this blog, Christians should always be on guard against confusing the Republican party with the will of God. In the end, the Fortune 500 is no more "gosel-friendly" than the ACLU.

Tolkien, Harry Potter, and Magic

2004-05-18T16:50:00.000-05:00

I haven't read the Harry Potter books. I haven't seen the movies. I hope I never do. Not that I object to them. I don't know whether I object to them or not, and that's the way I want to keep it, because I just don't wnat to get drawn into either side of the unabating Evangelical Harry Potter arguments. Actually, if I suspected that Rowling's books were written with the grand style and emotional range of Tolkien's work, or with the deceptively simple but powerful prose of C.S. Lewis's, I would probably brave the fire and jump right in. But I suspect they aren't. My suspicions have two roots: First, Rowling just came on the scene too late to live in the cultural milieu (I wish I had a spell checker here.) that produced Tolkien and Lewis. (I am here close to committing the atrocity C.S. Lewis himself detested of dismissing a work or idea simply because of the time period it came from. Oh well.) Second, I can't believe an artist as high minded as a Tolkien or Lewis would have to be would sign off on all the merchandising that Rowling has endorsed.

But anyway, even though I don't want to get into these Harry Potter arguments, I can't help but overhear them. And it bothers me that alot of Evangelicals judge Harry Potter to be beyond the pale simply because the stories are magical fantasy. And so, they must make the same judgements, implicitly or explicitly, about Lewis and Tolkien. It still seems to me that you can't just condemn a book solely on the demerit of its having magic in the plotline. But, in mulling all this over, I started wondering just what Tolkien thought about magic.

Of course, The Lord of the Rings had dwarves and wizards and elves and goblins and, of course, his own creation of hobbits. So it's pretty easy to say Tolkien must have loved magic. But think further. The case has been made over and over again, especially since the advent of Peter Jackson's dreadful silver screen manglings of Tolkiens' work, that Frodo's quest was actually an anti-quest. It was not a journey to seek an object of magical power, but a journey to destroy such an object that had already been found. When Frodo's task is complete, the Ring of Power drops into the fire of Mt. Moriah and its power comes to an end, along with all magical power. It is the beginning of the age of men, and age of free beings who must live by their brawn, their wits, and their determination, with no magic left to either fear or rely on.

But even beyond this central theme, I notice that there are very few characters in The Lord of the Rings that profit from the use, or even the proximity, of magic. Gollum, of course, started out as a just a merely not very nice hobbit, and wound up alone, slimy, and green. We remember what finally happened to poor Boromir. The Ring became a burden even to Bilbo Baggins over the years, and it was clear that, long life aside, he was quite damaged by it. Frodo could not, in the end, escape its grip on his mind. And of course, the ancient king of men, after defeating Sauron, died because of it. Denethor, Steward of Gondor, played around with the Palantir and lost all hope and, eventually, his mind. Gandalf, of course, used magic to full benefit. But a careful reading of The Lord of the Rings reveals that he was not human at all. Rather, he belonged to a higher order of being. And even then, he knew that even he had his limitations, a lesson which even his superior Saruman, never learned, to his disgrace and demise. The nine ancient kings of men put Sauron's rings on and became his mindless servants. We might be tempted to say that the Elves were magic users. But here we should remember the Lady of Lothlorien saying that much of what they did was not magic at all, but the product of arts refined over centuries. They did, of course, build grandeur with the Elven rings, but only to find that all their efforts would either fall to the power of Sauron when he found the One Ring, or pass away into oblivion when the Ring was destroyed.

Except for Gandalf, I can only think of three instances in the whole story where the use of magic actually promoted the cause of good. First, Aragorn pretends to use the Palantir to throw Sauron off the track. But pretending to use magic doesn't seem to be quite the same as actually using it. Second, he rides through the mountains and draws behind him the spirits of the dead who walk there, calling them to fight with him against the forces of Sauron. But even here, it is he alone, rightful King of Gondor who has the right -- not the power, but the right -- to call them. And his hold on them is not magical, but moral. Lastly, Samwise Gamgee puts on the ring to hide from the Orcs of Minas Morgul. Honestly, I don't know what to do with that one.

Anyway, I don't think you can a priori throw out a work of fiction just because its heroes use magic. There has to be more information for me to say that it has to go. But, I wonder if Tolkien was more ally than foe to those who would want to throw him out.

Gay Marriage: Why Conservatives Should Care. Why the Left Shouldn't.

2004-05-10T13:18:00.000-05:00

I'm not going to argue here that gay marriage is wrong. Neither am I going to argue that it is not real marriage. I am going to assume these things, or at least one of them, though I'm not sure which. That's a topic for another day. I will argue toward much more limited purposes: If you really dislike the idea of gay marriage and don't mind saying so, I hope I can better enable you, by at least a smidgen or two, to say why. If you don't like gay marriage but you don't want to oppose it because you charitably don't want to limit the freedom of others, I hope I can convince you that freedom is not the issue. If you think gay marriage is a great idea, I hope I can convince you that we more conservative types can at least articulate reasons for why we oppose it. If instead I only give you cannon fodder for your attempt to prove that the conservative metanarrative is inherently fascio-patriarchal ... or however it's said these days ... oh well, I tried.

Let's start with what I think we can all agree on: There are dimensions of marriage where the government's watchful eyes just don't belong. There's the "I love you" dimension, the "Take out the trash, please" dimension, the football widow dimension, the honey-do dimension, and on and on and on. Given the number of divorces occuring among the ranks of the Washington Rich and Famous, it's pretty clear that in the most intimate dimensions of our marriages, government will not be much help to us and we are, and should be, on our own.

Now here's where I am supposed to say, "So you see, marriage is a private affair. Government should stay out of it. So let's let everyone marry who wants to." But before we take that Grand Canyon-sized leap, let's remember what this whole controversy is about: Same-sex couples are not merely asking "to be left alone", they are seeking pieces of paper with government seals and official signatures that positively proclaim them to be married. They are not seeking government neutrality, but government recognition. So I think something else we can all agree on is that some aspects of marriage are inescapably public.

OK. Now maybe I'm about to get into territory where we can't all agree, but here goes: The public aspects of marriage are much simpler than the private ones. They can be classified pretty directly as spiritual, social, and civil.

Now, what can proponents of same-sex marriage hope to obtain in the spiritual dimension? Not much. This is basically a matter for the nuptially intendeds and God Himself. (Oh dear. I actually said "him", and I even capitalized it. Well, it's not like you didn't already know where this was going.) There might be a few folks out there who think the government should require priests and pastors to mutter the incantation necessary to procure divine favor on their union. But I think most people are sophisticated enough to either: A) realize that God wouldn't look very favorably on such government-mandated incantations or B) not really care about the spiritual in the first place. If your union if spiritually lacking, invalid, sinful, whatever, you can't expect the government to do what only the Almighty can. (Note that this isolated point is perfectly valid, no matter what you might think about the legitimacy of same-sex marriage.)

We might want to say that there is more to the spiritual: fellowship and support from fellow believers, church or synagogue recognition, and so forth. These things are important, but I think we can subsume them under the social dimension of marriage just as well, and that's where we're headed next.

So, the social dimension of marriage: By this I mean things like inviting friends and family to the wedding, sending postcards from the honeymoon, having your neighbors over for the housewarming, Christmas card lists, Superbowl parties, barbecues, neighborhood kids playing softball in the back yard .... or "Final Fantasy V" on the TV in the rec room, or whatever it is that the fat little lazy things do these days .... but I digress. I'm talking about the ways, intentional and unintentional, in which the married couple invites friends and family to celebrate and help them shore up their marriage vows, and responds as a couple to similar invitations from others.

I suspect that it is pictures like these that tug at the heart strings of those who are distressed at the plight of gays who can't marry. After all, why should such blessings be denied to any two people willing to commit to one another? Shouldn't the government see to it that no one is excluded from such an important aspect of human existence?

But actually, there's not much the government can do in this regard that it hasn't already done. Whoever you are in America, if you and your partner are legally competent and of age, you can gather up your friends and family and a minister, head on down to the nearest Congregational church, say your vows, exchange the rings, and go to the reception hall and eat deviled eggs and pigs in a blanket till the cows come home, just like everyone else, and no one can stop you. Send the postcards. Send the Christmas cards. Have the backyard barbecues. If your good, liberal friends consider you to be truly married, they can do all the same things to help celebrate and shore up your marriage vows. (Whether good liberal friends will do such things is a question we will return to shortly.) In some locales, gay couples can even adopt. (And allowing them to marry won't make it a bit easier for them to adopt in the other locales.)

There might be alot of Baptists and Catholics and such who turn their righteous noses up at gay couples, but, face it, right or wrong, they will continue to do so whether gay marriage is ever legal or no.

So legalized gay marriage won't help anybody out on the social front either.

And this brings us to the civil dimension of marriage. Right here, I am tempted to go follow a rabbit off into the social theory brush and talk about the relationship between the standards of a society and the laws of a government, and how laws operate best when they simply codify existing standards and on and on, but this thing has gotten too long already.

So, on the immediate topic: In the civil dimension of marriage, government expands individuals' freedoms in certain ways, and restricts them in others. Expanded freedoms include inheritance, common property, power of attorney, maybe shared health insurance, a really sweet tax break (since social conservatives KOed the marriage penalty, or at least put it in a standing ten count), and so on. Know what? Again, there's just not a whole lot that legalized same-sex marriage can do here. Two people can put one another in their wills, give one another power of attorney, be co-owners of a house, and on and on. Same-sex couples could gain spousal insurance benefits and that sweet tax break (as long as the same liberals who push for same-sex marriage don't succeed in re-imposing the marriage penalty -- but more on this below), but that's about it. And in many locales, married couples can't be forced to testify against one another in court.

Now here's a couple of things good-hearted conservatives out there who are tempted to support same-sex marriage in the interest of freedom really need to ask: Is all this brouhaha really over saving a few bucks on insurance and taxes, and not having to accept subpeonas? Mull that one over a while and I will move on to ....

... the freedoms that government restricts in a marriage. These boil down to, well, not to put too fine a point on it, the freedom to leave and the freedom to cheat. Before the marriage, your decision to cheat on or leave your significant other boils down to you, your conscience, and the Justice o' the Peace Upstairs. (Unless you're not very attractive. Then it can be harder to cheat. But you can still leave.) But after the ring goes on the finger, the government takes it upon itself to expend tax payer resources to see to it that you can't leave or cheat any more easily than your partner will allow.

And this is exactly where we see that same-sex marriage is not just about the freedom of two people to do what they want. The marriage contract involves government recognition and enforcement, and therefore it involves many people beyond the two who are getting married. And it is right here that the conservative has every right, and even duty, to say, "Whoa Nelly!", or hopefully some more eloquent negative imperative, but "Whoa Nelly!" at the very least. So what if some people aren't getting the tax breaks they want? If we consider same-sex relationships to be immoral from the get-go, we have every right to tell our government that it cannot spend one red cent of our taxes in shoring up those relationships.

The enforcement of same-sex marriage contracts should be doubly problematic for the religious conservatives, be they Christian like myself, or Jewish, or Muslim, or what have you. If you come from one of these faiths, you probably believe that homosexual behavior is not only wrong, but is inherently spiritually damaging to the persons involved. From our perspective, no one should dare make it harder for someone to stop living the homosexual life, especially our own government enforcing a "marriage" contract. So, from our perspective, not only is it not about the freedom of two people to enter into a relationship, it must be about the freedom of either of them to be quit of the whole thing.

And that's why conservatives should care, and care deeply, about same-sex marriage.

But speaking of the freedom to be quit of the whole thing, starting with the advent of no-fault divorce and moving on to the left's championing of Bill and Monica, what else has the left been pushing for since the 1960's? If I have argued correctly so far here, the one big thing the government can do for same-sex couples is constrain their freedom so it becomes much harder for one partner to walk out on or cheat on the other. But when has the left ever wanted to be constrained by anything, especially in sex? Most recently, during the Bill and Monica fracas, how many times were we treated to whiny spoutings of slogans like, "Who says marriage is sacred?" and "A marriage is what the married couple defines it to be." The upshot is that the people who are now telling us that gays have an inalienable right to the bliss of marriage are the very same ones who have been trying to convince us that marriage is no more valuable than any other liaison.

So why fight for something that you see no value in? I see no Constitutional restriction against owning -- oh, I don't know -- Chia Pets. But if the good people of Terra Haute, Indiana, for instance, pass a law outlawing Chia Pets within city limits, I'm just not going to raise a finger to help the frustrated Chia Pet owners. Maybe if we had cured cancer and stamped out injustice by now, I might be tempted to help out in the Chia cause. But for now, I just simply have bigger fish to fry. (This, by the way, is why I will never join the conservative chorus crying for the inalienable right to drive SUVs. But that's another story for another day.) Who wants to fight for the right of someone else to do something stupid or irrelevant? Why will someone who sees no value in marriage fight for someone's right to partake of it?

And that is why the left need not concern itself with same-sex marriage. Of course, this raises the question of why they indeed do. We conservatives often suspect ulterior motives here: that this whole same-sex marriage thing is just part of a larger attack on the institution of marriage in general. I think there is some of this going on, particularly among the left-wing leadership. But, based on my (too) many years' experience with the intricacies of human stupidity (my own included) I suspect that what is going on here on the grassroots level is just one big spasm of the American political left knee. Most of these people just honestly don't remember all the negative views they have had of marriage and all the glowing endorsements of co-habbing or whatever they have given. And about ten news cycles from now, when another left-wing politician has been caught with his pants down, they won't remember how they condsidered marriage so important that it was criminal to deny it to anyone.

In short, the one thing the government can do for same-sex couples that it can't do already is use its resources to legally bind them together. That's why the issue is not about freedom. That's why conservatives should care and why the left shouldn't bother.

I'm Still Here ....

2004-04-27T14:48:00.000-05:00

... and hope to get back to blogging soon. But I wouldn't have even bothered with this post, were it not that a few kind bloggers have actually added me to their blogrolls. When I saw this, I was even more excited than Steve Martin was in The Jerk when he saw his name in the phone book for the first time ever. ("Do you know what this kind of publicity can mean?!?!?!") So thanks to Utter Foolishness and Inklings. These places looked to be pretty cool sites, so I have returned the favor and added them to my blogroll. (Other bloggers: HINT.)

Right now, adult life is out of hand so I don't have much time for blogging. I am trying to put together some ideas on several topics. Hopefully my socially conservative take on gay marriage will appear before week's end. (Yes, I actually flatter myself that I have something to say that hasn't been said before, at least, not quite the way I want to say it.)

Thanks for visiting!

Shifting Faultlines: California and Elsewhere

2004-04-01T16:47:00.000-06:00

On the left coast, Ahhnold is Republican and favoring tax cuts, but is also favoring gun control, is lukewarm about border control, and is pretty much leftward on most social issues. (Is he the Governator or is he Conan the Libertarian?) Meanwhile, in Atlanta, a group of 30 or so black clergy, Democrats, I imagine, are telling the nation that the attempt by gay marriage proponents to cloak themselves in the mantle of the Civil Rights movement is just an illegitimate appropriation of the heroism of the original marchers and, oh, by the way, that gay marriage is wrong.

We hear every once in a while that the old liberal/conservative dichotomy doesn't have much meaning anymore. The person usually saying this is a frustrated liberal trying to recast himself as an "independent." Surprisingly, his newly independent mind, like a butterfly stretching its gossamer wings on the breezes of freedom, will believe exactly the way his old chrysalis liberal mind used to. Go figure. So maybe conservative is conservative and liberal is liberal and you just have to decide which one you are. But I think maybe the liberals -- or independents or whoever they are -- are on to something. Like my pappy says, "Even a blind hog finds an acorn every once in a while." (Maybe I should say "a visually impaired hog," since we're talking about liberals here. Sorry.)

On the right, I think it's pretty clear by now that current conservatism is made up of two distinct groups: pro-business tax cutters and social conservatives. Historically, there hasn't been too much conflict between the two groups, but there hasn't always been strong reason for them to cooperate either. The two haven't disagreed so much as they have just had different concerns. The big business folks have generally gotten spitting mad over things like not being able to put a factory in a "wetland" field even though the area wouldn't be wet at all if the county farmers weren't irrigating. Social conservatives generally blow their tops over things like, of course, abortion.

On the left, the Democrat party is a veritable hydra sporting heads of all size and shapes, but they all seem to grow out of one of two necks: the old-style Democrats who ask that age-old question "Who's watching out for the little guy?" and social libertarians. You might say that I should also include unions, environmentalists and minority supporters. Maybe, but I would contend that the unions, at their best, are part of the "little guy" wing. That's also where the old-fashioned Teddy Roosevelt "conservationists" have always belonged, while the modern day environ mental cases are closer kin to the social libertarians. I think the minority movements have been split in a similar way.

As with the two right-wing groups, these two groups haven't had all that much in common historically. They even manage to come into bitter conflict quite often. A couple of quick examples: There is no telling how many union jobs have been lost to enivornmental regulations. And there are no telling how many of our poor who could have made it out of the ghetto have wound up imprisoned, still impoverished, or just plain dead because of the drugs and social dysfunction foisted upon them by the social libertarians. (Oops. Anyone seen my objectivity lying around somewhere?)

Conflicts exist on the right as well, though they have generally been more muted, being not so much over conflicting goals as over how to divvy up finite resources to accomplish different goals. Social conservatives, for instance, have gotten perennially angry at tax cutters for not going to bat for them on abortion, border control, and conservative judicial appointments. Tax cutters generally haven't been very enthusiastic about these issues. I remember a socially conservative friend of mine who has worked in government for years once remarking, "You know, the tax cutters just hate us for what we force them to do."

If I haven't convinced you that the current conservative and liberal alignments are more accidents of history than "just the way things are," here are a couple of more points to consider: William Jennings Bryan, probably the most misunderstood political figure of the twentieth century, was, during his long and influential political career, a leading exponent of both social conservatism and little guy liberalism. More recently, take another look at that red state/blue state map. (By the way, is it just me, or didn't the Republican states used to always be blue?) Ask yourself where most of the big stock holders, CEOs, media moguls, and so on live. There are plenty in Texas. Maybe a few in Atlanta. But the bulk of them are eating three martini lunches in blue state restaurants and driving their SUVs around on blue state highways. Oh yeah, and don't forget Ahhnold and the black pastors in Atlanta.

So, here's my prediction for the trend to watch over the next couple of decades: the tax cutters and social libertarians making common cause against the social conservatives and the "little guy" liberals, and vice versa. I think this could happen not only because of current cracks in the two parties' foundations, but also because the members of the new alliances might actually have more in common with each other than they do with their current allies. Social libertarians, on the one hand, should love the tax cutters because you have to have a fair bit of money and leisure to partake of every pleasure your unrestrained, narcotic-expanded imagination can picture. Social conservatives, on the other hand, might come to realize that the sort of life they preach is exactly the life that most little guy liberals want to lead. Which pair comes out on top will depend on who can complete their realignment first. If the tax cutters, for instance, can bring social libbers into the Republican party while keeping the social conservatives hypnotized with the mantra of "no government interference," the conservatives will someday wake up to find themselves living in one big coast-to-coast tax-free bacchanalia. And if the social conservatives can woo the little guy liberals away from the socialibs before the socialibs start counting up all the votes they're losing, the liberals will soon be living in a Puritan Purgatory.

On the other hand, here's something that could prevent all this from happening indefinitely: power lust. The socialibs and the tax cutters actually resonate pretty well with each other. But their problem is that the socialibs have controlled the Democrat party ever since 1972, while the tax cutters are largely, though not completely, calling the shots in the Republican party. (I blame Reagan for this. Even a fully sighted hog fails to find an acorn every once in a while.) Will the members of either side be willing to give up their big frog status, even for life in a pond more to their liking? I think we can count on both sides to give up their respective reins only as a last resort.

The liberal/conservative dichotomy won't go away, however, at least not in name. There will always be someone trying to identify themselves with the original liberals who suffered for and won equal rights for women and minorities, and with the real conservatives, who kept the world safe, staring down and ultimately defeating political monstrosities like the Soviet Union.

The Church According to C.M. Kornbluth

2004-03-22T18:16:00.000-06:00

One of the true classics from the golden age of science fiction is a short story by C.M. Kornbluth called "The Marching Morons." It has nothing to do with Christianity or the church. Or, at least, not intentionally. The premise of the story is that the uneducated and not terribly bright among us have continued to multiply while the smartest and best-informed have not. Which ought to make us wonder just how smart they are, but that's a story for another day. Anyway, the world is now a place where being able to tie your own shoes makes you a genius. Has the world then regressed to pure agriculture or even hunting and gathering? No! These activities require a fair bit on intellect, while our population of lunk heads consider it intellectual exertion to remember which button on the remote control changes the volume on the TV. So the population is addicted to a technology that does everything for them.

But, of course, only a rocket scientist could build and do the upkeep on all this technology. And that's why the few bright folks left in the world have to run everything from behind the scenes. They have a secret base somewhere in Antarctica where they can study hyperdimensional geometry and whatnot in their spare time, but they have to spend a good deal of their lives walking anonymously among the morons, checking up on things and deciding which resources need to be distributed where before some town somewhere decides it would be a good idea to march like lemmings into the sea. (Which lemmings have never done, by the way. Again, another story.) They dare not make themselves known, lest the angry masses revolt. They are often despised and detested by the morons with whom they deal, since they just don't fit in. So the morons continue along their merry way, thinking that their permanent nursery room of a world is just the world plain and simple, and thinking that they are succeeding in this world by pulling themselves up ever higher by their own bootstraps.

My thesis is that the church is pretty much the Marching Morons. There are so many preachers out there right now thinking, "Boy, it's a good thing the Lord brought me along when he did so I could preach the word of God to these folks. Another Sunday without a baptism, this whole place would have gone straight to peridition." And somewhere there is some chairman of a board of deacons thinking, "Boy, it sure is a good thing the Lord put me here when he did so I could steer these folks into expanding the fellowship center. I don't know how we could really reach our community for the kingdom without the room for those 200 extra folding chairs." And some worship leader is thinking, "Sure is a good thing God brought me here to convert these people to PowerPoint and praise choruses when he did. One more verse of some old gas bag hymn like 'Be Thou My Vision' and this place would have dried up and blown away."

And the entire time, the weight of the church has been borne by the prayers of the almost anonymous hairdressers, postal workers, and shoe salesmen who sit in the pews every Sunday, make what contributions to the church coffers they can, teach a Sunday school class when the preacher lets them, and visit their brothers and sisters in the hospital and at the funeral home.

Mega Churches and Mega Complaining

2004-03-15T11:35:00.000-06:00

I really dislike megachurches. I would rather have a root canal with no anesthetic other than Zamphir's Greatest Hits playing on a cheap boom box than to listen to a fully miked "praise team" crooning on a jumbotron the forty fifth iteration of a praise chorus that sounds like it came from, hmmm, Zamphir's Greatest Hits. Watching the empty tomb scene portrayed by ten middle aged suburbanites, none of whom could convincingly play the part of a vicitm of sleeping sickness, but whose thespian talent is really beside the point anyway since they are on stage just to give the church an excuse to display its two million dollar costume and set budget -- that's not my idea of fun or inspiration either.

But I've never had the nerve to spell out the thing about megachurches that has always really gotten my theological goat -- or sheep, or whatever. I've figured that I wouldn't be able to come out and say it without sounding like an elitist of some sort. (Why that should bother me, I don't know, since elitism is what the Megum Ecclesium is all about.) And I didn't figure I have the eloquence to rise above my passions in this matter and present a coherent thesis, especially in view of all the spitting and choking that I would have to perform while expounding.

But, thankfully, Rev. Francis Gardom's excellent article "The Passing of Richard Roe -- A Primer for Effective Evangelism" in the March 2004 Touchstone makes my point much more civilly and convincingly than I ever could. Though he isn't talking specifically about megachurches, I think he has still put his finger right on the center of the problem with the whole thing. He says:

"The truth is that we have been brought up on a gigantic half-truth: the the Christian faith will and should always be attractive.

"It is attractive, surely, to the person who is weighed down by his circumstances .... with a sense of sin or failure. It is attractive to the cultured, sensitive person who has .... a modicum of imagination. It is atractive to the wise man who ... knows he doesn't know everything. It is attractive to the simple man .... who is willing to learn. It is attractive to a certain sort of hearty extrovert.

"But what possible attraction can it have for the uncultured, secular-minded, self-centered Philistine...? Or for the envious, the slothful, the dishonest, or the lustful?"

We have to be careful here. Inside all of us are envyings, sloth, deceipts, and lusts. And we dare not equate someone's education or aesthetic sensibilities with their level of, for lack of a better term at the tip of my fingers, spiritual development. See. I'm not such an elitist after all. I would put a little bit of different spin on Rev. Gardom's words: The Christian faith might indeed be attractive to everyone, but it will never be attractive to every aspect of anyone's spirit. It will never be attractive to that part of a person that wants to associate with the "right kind" of people, to that part of a person who wants to live in the "right kind" of neighborhood, and be seen driving the "right kind" of car. It will never be attractive to that part of a preson that wants to be passively entertained and not actively engaged. It will never be attractive to that part of a person who wants to run always on adrenaline and never on reflection. The faith, in short, will never be attractive to those parts of a person that the meagchurch is intentionally designed to attract.

There. I said it.

Of course, this automatically raises the question of how a megachurch can ever become mega in the first place, since it must be so unattractive. More on that later, once I get my blood pressure back down.

I'm trying, really I am ....

2004-03-12T14:52:00.000-06:00

.... but no more empty promises. I have no idea when I will be done with this things and, from now on, I'm just going to write.

So: We say we need "nothin' but the Bible" but we act like the Bible can be overridden at any moment by whoever has written this month's bestseller from Zondervan. Now, at last, how does this relate to all those other problems I've been griping about? We listen to some "leader" or "man of God" telling us all about the word of God. How he got to be the person on the TV or on the stage of the megachurch or in the book we are reading is something we don't even think to ask. It's not a relevant question since, because he is an Evangelical, he is only preaching the word of God, not some watered down or corrupted version of the same that he got from some "authority" or from his own imagination. And we are all Evangelicals, and we only listen to the word of God, so we are, by definition, never swallowing somebody's spiritual patent medicine. So if he tells us we have to be Calvinist then, dadburnit, that's what we have to be. And if he tells us that postmillers are agents of Satan then, dadburnit, that's what they are. And thus we have fragmentation.

As for our aging leadership, I suggest that it goes something like this: We love our preachers and our authors and the heads of our various institutions. But at the same time we are convinced that we don't really need authorities. So we simultaneously make authorities out of our leaders and completely fail to do anything to assure the continuation of authority after they are gone. And then, one day, we are sheep without a shepherd. (I don't mean that in the strictly spiritual sense, of course.)

OK, I'll admit it. I haven't worked out how this applies to the gentrification problem I've been griping about. But two out of three ain't bad.

So, to sum up: Maybe a big part of our problems stem from the fact that we never have bothered to think through our own attitudes toward spiritual authority.

Here's one more thought as to why Evangelicalism is facing the problems I have mentioned, and it's really depressing: The whole enterprise was doomed to fail from the start. Think about it. We're going to start a religious movement founded on the .... foundation but leaving room for plenty of discussion about controversial issues like speaking in tongues and the doctrines of grace. Well, if the discussion is truly free, isn't it a matter of time before some folks discover the truth of the matter in these issues? And then, isn't it a matter of time before they start trying to convert everyone else to the truth they have found? On the other hand, given human nature and the lack of authority in our little coffe klatch, some folks are going to fall into the most grievous of theological error and they, undoubtedly, will be even more stubborn than the ones who have found truth. And, given good old human nature, even among the redeemed, is it any wonder that greed, unrestrained by any sort of external control, will eventually take over and put the richest folks in the command chair? And, as for our leadership not being replaced, isn't it a given that, eventually, some generation is going to come that just isn't going to "get it"?

Well, I hope not, but I thought I might just throw that out there to round things off. Even if Evangelicalism was doomed to fail, though, there is always reason for hope. The entire history of the church might be read as a history of failures followed by revivals. Wesley's revivals eventually "failed," as did Luther's and Calvin's, though they took a couple of centuries. The Catholic church in the Middle Ages went from one failure to another, followed by revival. Even the early church eventually "failed" in a sense, though, again, after a few centuries. But God always pulled another phoenix out of the ashes. Maybe any human institution will eventually pass away. But we can always count on God to usher in something else to fill the gap it left behind.

Hey, what do you know? I'm done!

Wrapping up -- trying again

2004-03-11T13:01:00.000-06:00

OK, here I am playing Beat the Clock again. Let's see if I can wrap up this time.

If you read my last post, you may be thinking that I am arguing for a Rousseau French Revolution approach to Christian spirituality, where everyone talks directly to the Holy Spirit and no one bothers to talk to anyone else and everyone does what they want to. No. I am not. My aim is much more limited: I am merely pointing out the contradiction between much Evangelical ecclesiology and most Evangelical ecclesial practice (ecclesiopraxis?): We talk as if every one of us had a direct line to God and we don't need "nothin' but the Bible", but we act as if the Bible itself can be overruled by Tim LaHaye or Chuck Colson. And we just can't have it both ways. We love to believe that we have no "magesterium" or "authority structure", but we just simply do. And whether you think the whole of Christendom should be guided by the whims of a benign dictator sitting in Rome or in Wheaton or whether you think we should all be free-wheelin' it with no one but our own hearts in charge, Evangelicals are in fact laboring under a contradiction between thoughts and actions, and this contradiction is bound to eventually get us into trouble. Now, how we solve the dilemma of the freedom of individual conscience before God versus the need for cooperation, fellowship, and doing everything "decently and in order", I do not propose to solve here. My thoughts on this matter are about as well defined as the lyrics of "Louie Louie." But I know a contradiction when I see one.

You know what? I just lost in Beat the Clock. More later.

Evangelical Crises -- The Home Stretch

2004-03-10T12:22:00.000-06:00

This is it. I promise. The end of my rantings on Evangelical fears and failings. Until the next time I pick the topic up again. And as long as I can finish typing before my lunch hour is up. Otherwise, I can't promise anything.

So here goes, a couple of last attempts to get to the Root Causes of the problems I think Evangelicalism had better face pretty quickly: fragmentation, gentrification, and a looming lack of leadership.

Maybe leadership is the key here or, more precisely, our attitude toward leadership. Evangelicals have always (Well, since I've been born anyway. I'm at the age where that is starting to feel like "always".) had kind of a confusion about leadership or "spiritual authority." I first noticed it in the campus ministry I was involved in back in my college days when we wore raccoon coats and danced the Charleston. Well, no, but we were limited to monochrome, text-only computer monitors. AND WE WERE GLAD TO HAVE THEM!!! But that's another story .... Back to the point at hand: Our campus director would drive into us constantly how no one stood between us and God, how we could go to the Bible ourselves, how we didn't need any saints in heaven to intercede on our behalf, how our own reading of the Bible (with a little help from the Holy Spirit) was always going to be more reliable than the self-deluded ramblings of some priest or bishop, and on and on and on. Fine and good, except that we were also told that our "disciplers" and the campus staff of this organization were our "spiritual authorities", and we were to follow their edicts chapter and verse unless, of course, they were in conflict with scripture. And, if you chose not to, well, if you had accepted Jesus as your personal savior, you were still going to heaven, but you were still pretty much not good enough to stay in the ministry. Wouldn't you know it? Through the four years that I was there, not once did any staff member of discipler ever ask anyone to do anything that was in conflict with scripture! What a great bunch of guys, eh?

So none of us in that ministry needed any authority other than God and the Bible, but we all had to toe the line drawn by the disciplers and the staff members. By the time I had graduated, I had spent so much time trying to wrap my mind around this conundrum that my psyche was pretty much pretzel shaped. How the guys "in authority" managed it, I don't know. Gee, I wonder if they ever tried. But that's yet another story for another time.

The same thing happens, with less immediately deleterious effects, in Evangelicalism at large. We don't have to rely on the Pope to explain the word of God. We don't have to take our marching orders from a priest. We just have to study the Bible. But, somehow, it always turns out that we rely for our Bible studies on materials published by Zondervan or Lifeway and written, or at least recommended, by the recognized Evangelical leaders who have the big radio and TV ministries.

And woudn't you know it, there goes the plant whistle. Out of time again, so I will have to take advantage of that little loophole I gave myself in that promise and finish this up later. Stay tuned.

The Passion of the Christ -- Where's John Hagee?

2004-03-08T17:14:00.000-06:00

Taking a break from my usual rantings for a quick post on The Passion of the Christ, I can't help notice that the fundamentalists -- LaHaye, Hagee, Falwell, and so on -- who usually are more than willing to give their opinion on anything, have been, intentionally or no, under the radar since the flack started flying about The Passion. I probably shouldn't say this but I can't help thinking it: My guess is that at least one of these guys is waiting for the film to finally disappear from the movie houses before he comes out and says something like, "My heart is absolutely dismayed to see so many Evangelicals hoodwinked into watching and celebrating this piece of Catholic P.R." Anyone wants to take a guess as to who is going to be the first to say this? Anyone want to tell me I am full of it? Comments welcome.

Addendum to my original post: Rev. Jerry Falwell has actually come out swinging for Mel Gibson and his movie. Ecumenism rides again!

Putting It All Together: Take 3

2004-03-06T12:18:00.000-06:00

Our story so far: Our Hero waxes eloquent on three difficulties rapidly approaching the Evangelical community: fragmentation, gentrification, and ageing leadership. He intrepidly pushes forward to expound on the root cause of these three ominous effects. He realizes he has no more wisdom here than an average turnip. Must Our Hero blog no more? No! says he, and presses on. In a moment of inspiration, he comes to understand that he can plit the difference and, instead of offering a once and for all explanation of the woes of evangelicalism, he can make a several tenetative suggestions. The blog continues. Peace returns to the land. Amercian Evangelicals as a subset of America at alrge is considered briefly, then discarded. Our Hero turns his attention to more spiritual accounts of Evangelicalism's grief.

Our story continues: Well, if a sociological explanation of the current state of Evangelicalism is wanting maybe we should for one a bit more of a spiritual and moral nature. After all, we can be quite sure that, whatever the final answer here will be, some moral failing in Evangelicalism must be a major part of it. Why? Because I'm completely ticked off, that's why! But if the emotional state of my own superior heart and mind isn't enough evidence for you, try this: Fragmentation and gentrification are real problems arising, not from changing circumstances, but from within Evangelicalism itself. And even if they spring from some contact weith our cultural surroundings, problems like this can always be hadled with a bit of the old sackcloth and ashes. I see no sackcloth, just probelms.

So here's another suggestion for the pickle we find ourselves in: the biggest, sourest dill of all, PRIDE.

Look at fragmentation. Pride, pure and simple: "I thank thee O Lord that I am not as other Evangelicals. Pentecostals. Fundamentalists. Or even that sublapsarian amillenialist over there. I preach only supralapsarianism and pre-tribulationism."

How about gentrification? Need I say more? Pride, pure and simple.

And the ageing leadership? OK, not so pure and simple. But think about it. Why have there been no young spiritual hot shots groomed over the years to take the place of our leaders who are now about ready to hit the road in their retiement Winnebagoes? Could it be that the big shots couldn't bear to hand over the reins to the hot shots? Even your hero and mine, John Stott, said a few years ago that there was a bit too much empire building going on in the evangelical world.

Then again, maybe the fault is with the rank and file. Imagine back when James Dobson was still on the lecture circuit. (How many of our leaders can you really imagine giving up the lecture cicuit, by the way?) A minister from a big megachurch calls him up and says, "Hey Dr. Dobson, can you come speak at our Harmony in the Home conference in a couple of months?" But the good doctor says, "Well, actually what I would like to do is send our guy John Doe. He has alot of potential to do some great things for the kingdom once I'm out of the way, and I want to see that he' prepared for it, so I give him a few of these assignements every so often." Can't you hear the megaminister now:"Hey, Jimmy! What gives? Don't you remember that our church gave your ministry a million big ones last year? We didn't do that because we want some second stringer! We did it because we want to hear you! Now we've got some homes here that need some harmony, so get with it and put us in your Daytimer right now!"

Pride, pure and simple.

Well, I have not exhausted the possiblities by any means, but they have just about exhausted me. I will have a few more posts on this and then on to other topics soon. Thanks for reading.

Putting It All Together, cont'd.

2004-03-02T12:10:00.000-06:00

Picking up from yesterday, yes, it is tempting to view American Evangelicalism as a microcosm of America. Two problems with this: First, we are, hopefully, enough of a Christian community that the Holy Spirit is seeing to it that we are not a mere bunch of cogs in a complex social machine. Second: Just exactly who says what America is? Social scientists and psychologists with reams of data just waiting to be tabulated? I think some rigorous data gathering and reflection are necessary to get any sort of understanding of a society as mammoth as the U.S. But I doubt that a real understanding of the U.S. can be reached unless that reflection contains an important spiritual perspective. So maybe religious America, Evangelicals included, have more to say about AMerica at large than the other way around.

But even if we limit ourselves to the data at hand, there are still difficulties in seeing Evangelicalism as just America on a smaller canvas. Consider the fragmentation probelm again. Yes, it has come quickly behind the secular problems of university balkanization and societal victim group politics. But the university balkanizers get their inspiration from the writings of Jacques Derrida and the victim groups take their cues from the likes of Al Sharpton. Not too many Evangelicals are reading the one or voting for the other. Positing a connection between Evangelical disunity and American disunity at large is tantalizing, but anyone who wants to find a similar cause for these two similar results has a tough row to hoe.

And as for the increasing price of living as an Evangelical, yes, we Americans, Christian and non, spend lots of money on things that serve no purpose except to convince our neighbors and ourselves that we know all the "in" things that "in" people should be buying. But look at the last few years. Generally speaking, when the economy is bad prices stay low while fancy, expensive nick-nacks can't proliferate quite as quickly. In the Evangelical world, however, my own very unscientific observations indicate that the books and CDs and kitsch artwork have continued to multiply like there was no tomorrow (The sound you just heard was the fundamentalists saying, "Aha!") and their prices never come down. Again, two phenomena that are similar, but not related in any obvious causal way.

In short (phew!) we can't just reduce Evangelical America to America per se. But, we have gone wrong somewhere. And it only makes sense that we would most likely go wrong in ways similar to our cultural milieu (did I spell that right)?

Again, I have reached the end of my time. More thoughts later.

Evangelical Fragmentation and Whatnot: Putting It All Together

2004-03-01T19:47:00.000-06:00

It's been a week or so since my last post. A bad cold can do that. That, and suddenly realizing you've come to the end of where you knew what you were talking about. I've gone on (and on and on) about three problems that Evangelicaldom in America is going to have to solve if it is to continue to thrive: no leaders to lead Evangelicals into the future in the way that past leaders led them into the present, fragmentation, and the increasing cost of living in the Evangelical world. Fear of my own arrogance does not keep me from saying that I am substantially right in saying that all three of these issues present, or soon will present, major obstacles to the growth and viability of Evangelicaldom. But I wanted to say something about the root cause of these three problems. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I don't have any more of an idea about the root cause than I do the root cause of the neutrino deficit in solar radiation. (Dont' have any idea what I'm talking about? Well, neither do I, so Imagine how I must feel!)

But blog I must! I must! So what do I do? Well, I figure I'll try this: I'll split the difference and offer a few tentative suggestions.

It often escapes notice, but upon reflection it might seem of supreme importance that American Evangelicals are American. It's tempting to say that what we are going through is just a mini-version of changes that have been shaping the nation for the past couple of decades. Take leadership, for example. The country as a whole seems to now take its leaders more and more from the Baby Boom and less and less from (as Tom Brokaw aptly called them) the "Greatest Generation." It had to happen eventually. This might be OK for corporate America, which needed a kinder, gentler reputation, and it's probably great for the Democratic party. But, except for a few Jesus children who became stock brokers two decades ago, the Boomers have never been in any danger of religious fanatacism. Maybe the Boomers just don't have enough applicants to fill the open positions in the Evangelical world. And fragmentation? It is following hard on the heels of the rise of victim group politics and what the pundits have taught us to call "the balkanization" of American society in general and the universities in particular. Perhaps as America goes, so goes American Evangelicalism. And the rising monetary cost of the Evangelical lifestyle? It's just Americans doing what they do best: shelling out the cash and keeping up with the Joneses.

But there are some problems with the view of Evangelicalism. First and foremost is the idea that Evangelicalism can be explained in purely sociological terms. If the Holy Spirit isn't in there somewhere, then there's no wonder we're having problems. (That noise you just heard was the Pentecostals shouting "Amen.")

Well, I wish I could do this full time, but alas, I have a responsible adult life to live, so I will sign off for now. More to come later.

2004-02-20T15:25:00.000-06:00

OK, I was probably a little harsh. I shouldn't have said that we Evangelicals just don't care about the poor. I know too many of us who have served too many hours ladling stew in a soup kitchen or crawling around in the blazing Sun on the roof of a Habitat for Humanity house. My bad. Mea culpa. Me sorry.

But my main point still remains: Turning the Evangelical subculture into an upper middle class thing is still going to cause problems for those believers who can't make the climb up the economic ladder. And why we don't realize this needs addressing. Suffice it to say for now that we Evangelicals have never been ones to overthink an issue. Throughout our short history, we have rarely made much of an attempt to think through the larger implications of the things we are doing and the directions we are taking. You might guess that I am sorely tempted to go into another diatribe here, but I will save it for another day. Those who want to know what I think about our "juggernaut" way of doing things can read Mark Noll's excellent work The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.

Anyway, moving right along, I still want to say one more thing about the consequences of an ever-increasingly exspensive Evangelicalism. It will hurt the poor, the farmers, and the blue collar families. It will hurt America at large. And it will hurt even the Evangelical movement. The idea that a church can be built for the "community leaders" and that all the serfs and peasants will follow them in through the doors hasn't flown in three hundred years. It worked fine back in Merrie Olde England when the Anglican church had the backing of the crown and the peasants were tied to the lands of the lords and ladies their entire lives long. They pretty much just went to the one church that their masters would allow on the land. Things don't work that way anymore.

Even after the laws were changed, the established churches could expect, for a while, that mere geography itself could hold at least some their audience captive. And then came the automobile. Now a family can make a Sunday morning drive in fifteen minutes that would have taken half a day for wagon riding farmers a hundred years ago.

The point being that people have choices now. And the people aren't really led all that strongly by the folks we have learned to call "community leaders." We might occasionally get all hysterical about some honest to goodness national celebrity, but bankers and local politicians aren't held in all that high esteem by all that many people in the working and middle classes. The farmers and the factory workers aren't going to hang around long in a church waiting for crumbs of bread (counseling, fellowship, ministry, leadership opportunities, etc.) to fall off the table of those who already have the bread (cash). They can go elsewhere, and so they will.

And, in case I need to drive this point home any further, this is a real problem for Evangelicalism because we Evangelicals just simply aren't rich. The social science data is pretty clear. We are not the poor, ignorant slobs the New York Times op-ed page would lead us to believe we are, but we are somewhat poorer on average than the typical American. So, the Evangelical "church growth" folks and book publishers and music industry magnates need to think twice before they ratchet up the cost of their wares (err ... ministries ... sorry) any further. There will come a point where the bulk of Evangelicals will realize that they just can't ante up any further, and they will get in their automobiles and drive elsewhere.

2004-02-19T10:36:00.000-06:00

OK, one more post on megahurches and megabucks, and I am done (until next blog -- heh heh).

Like I said before, the gentrification of the Evangelical movement flies in the face of God's will that we treat one another equally, without regard to what our 1040 says our adjusted gross income is. But, the gentrification proceeds post-haste and, not just occasionally, quite consciously. So, I figure, if we really cared that much about our blue collar, dirt farmer, and dirt poor brethren, we wouldn't be trying to upscale in the first place.

So let's ask what this trend is going to do, not to the less wealthy among us, but to the nation at large. The gilding of the Evangelical movement is going to be a real probelm for American society at large because, not to put to fine a point on it, we just don't have any class. To see what I mean, look for contrast at a denomination that has money and class: Episcopalians. Look at their churches, for example. Whatever you might want to say about these folks, you have to hand it to them, they know how to build church buildings. We might not like their theology (as practiced contemporarily, anyway. Too bad they have exchanged the 39 Articles of the faith for a 31 Flavors mentality.) but they have been salt in the Earth in bringing beauty to our public places. They have dotted the city squares and country lanes of our nation with edifices whose esthetic values range from the quaint to the sublime.

Rich Evangelicals, on the other hand, are busy blighting our nation's highways and interstates with post-modern monstrosities that look more like Wagnerian outlet malls than churches. And every time we put up another one of these concrete-in-a-jello-mold structures, we make our nation just a little bit uglier and give our nation's drivers one more eyesore to avoid on the exit ramp. We just don't understand the difference between glitz and glory, between monstrous and magnificent. In a word, we just don't have any class.

And don't get me started on today's church music. Gyaaah!

Well, I'm out of time again, so I'm going to have to break my promise and give one more post on monied Evagelicalism. Then it will be over. I promise. Adn you can take that to the bank.

2004-02-18T10:46:00.000-06:00

More on the gentrification of Evangelicalism.

So, to continue, it's getting harder and harder to be a blue-collar Evangelical. I don't think I should have to ask why this matters, but if we Evangelicals understood why it matters, it wouldn't be a problem in the first place. So let me ask you to indulge me in a little sermonizing. I take as my text James 2:1-4. Now generally, I would never quote James. Infact, if I had my 'druthers I would never read James. I can't make it past the first ten verses in James before I feel like I'm going straight to Perdition. But I will gladly take an oppotunity to use James to make someone else feel the same way, so here goes: "My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect of persons. For if there come unto your assembly a man with a gold ring, in goodly apparel, and there come in also a poor man in vile raiment; And ye have respect to him that weareth the gay clothing, and say unto him, Sit thou here in a good place; and say to the poor, Stand thou there, or sit here under my footstool: Are ye not then partial in yourselves, and are become judges of evil thoughts?" (I just love the way the King James roles off my fingers onto the keyboard. [Actually, I lied. I just copied and pasted from Bible Gateway.])

Now, we don't have to think like a bunch of communists and consign everyone driving an SUV to the lake of fire. But let's face it, if we transform our religious community into an organization that requires a minimum income of $70000 a year for full membership, we simply violate God's command.

What really gets my theological goat are the Evangelicals who are pushing this transformation quite consciously. Think about the "church growth" folks. Part of the explicit "church growth" strategy is to target neighborhoods full of the young and upwardly mobile. A church growth "church planting team" wouldn't open up a new church in a union neighborhood if the Apostle Paul himself was making tents there. Protestations about how "we need to concentrate on reaching the leadership of our communities" is just so much self-serving blather that flies right in the face of the passage from James that you just read above. We love to get on the Catholics' case about how they have played power politics and hoarded wealth so many times through the ages. How do you think they justified all that intrigue and greed? My guess is that the parties involved always relied on a standard line something like, "We need to concentrate on reaching the leadership of our communities."

2004-02-17T15:12:00.000-06:00

I was reminded by blogger Davie D that I was egregiously remiss in failing to note that the true Evangelical, in addition to buying the Book of the Month to stay in the flock, also has to shell out 6 to 10 bucks to watch the movie of the week. Heaven help you if you didn't see "Left Behind" and "Left Behind II," preferably on each of their opening nights, and pre-order the DVDs. (Together with study guides and journals.) Davie D also opines that "The Passion" will be the next Evangelical have-to-see movie. After Mel Gibson's heartfelt testimony to Dianne Sawyer last night, and after the reviews I have heard from people whose taste and values I trust, I am loathe to discourage anyone from seeing it, but the point still stands. Actually, it will be a tragedy and disgrace if "The Passion" really does turn out to possess the artistry and inspiration it seems to possess in the previews but is seen by folks who just figure they had better be at the movie that their Bible study leader said they had better be at.

Unfortunately, time does not permit a thorough discussion of the committed Evangelical's need to attend the retreat of the quarter and the National Conference of the year.

More complaining coming your way soon!

2004-02-16T15:53:00.000-06:00

OK, back to the matter at hand: What morries me about the future prospects for Americna Evangelicalism. Another problem I see looming, and one that I haven't heard anyone else talking about, is that it is getting harder and harder to be an Evangelical if you're not rich. I think many reders will immediately want to say that Evangelicalism is about faith in Christ and in the essentials of Christian doctrine, and that sort of faith can't possibly have anything to do with money.

Get real.

Being a Christian is all about faith in Christ. But being an Evangelical (or a Calvinist or a Pentecsotal or a Catholic or whatever) necessarily involves regular interaction with like-minded (like-spirited?) believers. Ministering together. Ministering to one another. Eating together at the same pot-luck dinners. And on and on and on. It means what we learned to call, a few years back, being part of a community. And it is just getting harder and harder to being a blue-collar Evangelical.

To really be in on all the Evangelical conversations, for starters, you have to stay current with the Book of the Month, whatever it may be. (I've mentioned this in a previous post.) To know what your friends are talking about, and what your pastor is preaching about, you just have to know what Tim LaHaye or Rick Warren or whoever has come out with most recently. And then, once you've bought the Book of the Month, you have to buy the Book of the Month Study Guide so you can stay active in your Tuesday night small group Bible study. Then you have to buy the Book of the Month Journal so you can show everyone that you're really serious about all the stuff you're studying the Bible study, and so you can write down all your really juicy thoughts during the week so you can have something interesting to share. Then you have to buy the Book of the Month for the Godly Man/Woman for you husband/wife. And the you have to buy the True Love Waits Book of the Month for your teen. And the X-treme Kid's Book of the Month for you per-teen. And the Book of the Month Plush Toy for your toddler. And the Book of the Month Chew Toy for your cocker spaniel. All with associated study guides and journals sold separately. (OK, actually, the plush toy and the chew toy don't have study guides. Or journals. And, in point of fact, I don't think they actually exist. But I am sure that someone at Zondervan or LifeWay is only a month away discovering the untapped chew toy market.)

And have you noticed how much just one of these books can cost? Christian publishers must be making a killing!

Then there's the mega churches. The bigger a church gets, the more it has to be run like a business. And that means the more the pastor and the senior staff have to push secondary things like counseling and funerals to the back burner and concentrate more and on the important things like getting the pyrotechnics for the next Sunday morning service just right or doing the third take on the latest TV commercial. Pretty soon, the staff can't really minister to anyone in the church except THOSE WHO CAN RELLY IMPACT OUR SOCIETY FOR THE KINGDOM. Which might not be so bad were it recognized that the society impacters are people like public school teachers and beat cops. But let's face it. The way to really impact society, to impact it in a MEGA way, is to give MEGA bucks to the MEGA church. So, before long, the senior minister is spending most of his day playing golf with the town bankers and politicians, the local plant manager, maybe a few doctors and lawyers, and, if he's feeling particularly generous with his time, a college professor or two. Eventually, the bulk of the members in these congregations are going to realize they are getting shafted. And then the mega churches will quickly become mere kilo churches, or less.

More later. Got to go.

2004-02-14T17:17:00.000-06:00

Wow. I have come rather far afield here.

I started out just trying to list a few worries I have about the modern Evangelical movement, and I wound up spending three posts griping about Fundmentalists and other Protestant persuaisions instead. The dangers of the blog, perhaps.

So let me wrap this one little topic up a bit quicker than I would like. (If the Lord tarries, I can always write another post later, I suppse.) I was about to explain why my diatribe amounted to more than preaching to the choir. OK: If everyone on Earth made their decisions in a purely rational manner, there would be nothing for me to worry about. If good Evangelicals were merely reading some good books by, a Fundamentalist, say, and were simply convinced by their pre-Trib or what have you arguments, and turned Fundamentalist, well, Evangelicalism would simply be withering away because of its own weaknesses and I would ahve nothing to complain about.

but when was the last time you actually met a person who was all that rational?

We Evangelicals have a real "Book of the Month" mentatlity: What ever is the new book this month that everyone is reading, we take to be the gospel truth. (See my first post for a little more on this.) So, I just want to encourage my Evangelical siblings to "test the spirits." When you read a book (like one that's sitting on my desk, but shall remain nameless [for now!!!!]) that strongly suggests that post- or mid-Tribulationism is a lie of Satan, taught by false teachers, don't just swallow that line hook and sinker. Ask yourself something like, "Is my post-Trib friend or that mid-Trib writer that I know really bad enough to be an agent of Satan? 'By their fruits ye shall know them,' right? Have they been producing bad fruit, as far as I can tell?"

And the same thing goes when you're reading a Calvinist, a Pentacostal, a Baptist, and on and on. And even if you become convinced that one of the pet doctrines of one of these branches of the faith is true (Hey, I have a few pet doctrines myself!), don't forget to ask, "OK, I think this is true. But is it part of the gospel? Do I really have to call someone a heretic, or withdraw fellowship from another Christian, or cease cooperation with them in ministry because they take a different view on [...the doctrines of grace ... baptism in the Spirirt ... whatever]? This doctrine is true, and maybe even important, but is it really that important?"

And with that, I am done with my bashing. (For now. And I don't think it was really bashing. If you disagree, feel free to let me know. I like comments!)

NOTE;
One reader (thank you thank you) thought I generalized too mcuh about Pentecostals a couple of posts back. Let me clarify: First, I do indeed know many Pentecostals who will say that 1) you have to be filled with the Spirit to have the full gospel and 2) you will to speak in tongues if you have the Spirit. So you had better speak in tongues. But as my reader pointed out, this doctrine is not at all universally held among Pentecostals. Apologies for any inaccurate impressions I may have left or resentments I may have caused. And let me be clear again, my complaints have not been directed at Pentecostals per se but Pentecostals who (and there are a few, at least) do not see validity in other Protestant forms of the expression of the Christian faith.

2004-02-13T10:36:00.000-06:00

OK, once again, where was I? I have problems with a few strains of conservative Protestantism. I have been picking on mainly Calvinism, Pentacostalism, and Fundamentalism. And why do they give me the theological heebie-jeebies? (Here's a reason to keep checking my blog. Did you ever think you would here the words "theological" and "heebie-jeebies" in the same sentence?) Because they add things to "Mere Christianity" that don't need to be there, and make life harder for potential converts who might be willing take the leap from the dock of the world to the deck of faith, if they weren't afraid of finding themselves tangled in the cables of sublapsarianism or the ropes of pre-tribulationism.

Allow me a moment to recover from metaphorical overload (literally speaking).

But, of course, the Calvinist can just as easily say, "But wait, dude. Sublapsarianism is a part of 'Mere Christianity'." And the Fundamnetalist can just as easily say, "Hold on, son. Pre-tribulationism is a part of 'Mere Christianity'. You can't leave Earth without it!" The bottom line being that no one really wants anything less or more than "Mere Christianity". We're just arguing over what goes into it. And my worries are founded only if post-war neo-Evangelicalism actually has the right take on "Mere Christianity" in the first place.

And, you know what? That is exactly right. To complete my case, I would have to give an argument for why the neo-Evangelical perspective is superior to the others. And, as you might guess, that would keep us all very busy for a long time. So, for present purposes, I admit it: My concerns have weight only among people of theological persuasions similar to my own.

But I need not merely preach to my own choir here. There is a point to all this. Unfortunately, you guessed it, I'm out of time and will have to wait to continue in another entry.

2004-02-12T18:00:00.000-06:00

Where was I? Oh yeah. So the Evangelical herd is splitting up and going to graze in four or five different pastures. But why is that such a bad thing? Grass is grass, after all. Or rather, forgetting the metaphor and getting back to the point, the Christian "basics" are still going to be the Christian "basics", wherever you find them. This should be especially true from an Evangelical perspective. So, of all people, an Evangelical should be the last to worry about Evangelicals going elsewhere. So what's the problem?

OK, here's one problem: The Word of Faith movement. It's not Christian. Which isn't to say that there are no Christians inside the WOF. That's the great (and sometimes maddening) thing about Christianity: it is primarily a trust in a person, Jesus Christ, and only secondarily an assent to certian doctrines. Thank goodness Jesus saves us in spite of our theology as well as through it. But the WOF is still not Christian. It is the newest variant on the health and wealth gospel, led by people who can't even get basics like the Trinity right. Evangelicals who slide from green pastures into this dark bog of emotivism will not lose their souls, but they will be devoting their lives to a movement that is preaching, not the gospel, but a montrous mutation of it. So there.

But what about the Evangelicals wandering off in the other directions I was worried about: Calvinism, Fundamentalism, Pentacostalism. Let me get a couple of things striaght here. First, I gladly grant that none of these communities are nearly as problematic as the WOF movement. As much as I might disagree with, for instance, someone who tells me I have to speak in tongues, I have still have to say that Pentacostalism is Christian. Mistaken, but Christian. Like all the rest of us. Second, given the "large tent" character of Evangelicalism, it is completely possible to be Evangelical and, say, Calvinist. J.I. Packer, whom I mentioned in my last blog, is a sterling example of such an Evanglical.

So what am I worried about? Evangleicalism was an attempt to build a network or community or what have you of believers who held to "Mere Christianity", who might debate all sorts of things, but who would really squabble only over the basics, the basics being that Jesus is the Son of God, who died for out sins and rose on the third day, that we can have forgiveness and eternal life if we just ask him for them, etc. Fundamentalism comes along and adds requirements like believing in six days' creation and pre-tribulationism and the Dallas Cowboys (at least, in Texas). Pentacostalism adds requirements like having to speak in tongues. Calvinism adds, ummm, Calvinism.

And now, here's my point: The Christian message seems hard enough for people to accept already ("foolishness to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews", as Paul said). Why make things harder on people by adding things to it that don't have to be there?

Of course, the automatic repsonse is, well, the Calvinist does think Calvinism is part of "Mere Christianity". That's what makes him a Calvinist. The Fundamentalist does believe that pre-tribbing is "Merely Christian". That's part of what makes him a Fundamentalist. In truth, everyone wants "Mere Christianity", there is just a difference of opinion in what constitutes it. And so, my worries about Evangelicalism are justified only if Evangelicalism has the right take on what "Mere Christianity" is in the first place.

Funny how I always run out of time just as I get to a good question.

2004-02-12T17:17:00.000-06:00

testing again. Life is hard.

2004-02-12T16:14:00.000-06:00

The spat between D. James Kennedy and Hank Hanegraaf brings puts me in mind of another problem on the horizon for Evangelicals: fragmentation. The whole post-war movement was started as an attempt, in part, to establish a body of believers who held to a sort of C.S. Lewis "Mere Christianity," putting aside secondary doctrinal issues and emphasizing the central tenets of the Faith for the sake of spreading the gospel. (Yes, I know, C.S. Lewis never had any contact with the American post-war evangelical leaders like Billy Graham or Ockenga. Nevertheless, they were both similarly concerned with encouraging believers to hold on to the basics and to be agreeable, even when not in agreement, on the secondaries.)

So, for instance, Calvinists in previous generations, like the justly revered J.I. Packer, were content to be Christians and Evangelicals first, and Calvinists second. But today we have instead R.C. Sproul and John Piper. You don't have to read them long before you find instances where they preach Calvinism, not merely as a particularly beneficial way to understand the gospel, but as the gospel itself. Calvinists like Sproul and Piper (and Bruce Ware and others) are no longer content to be "Mere Christians." Or, perhaps more accurately, they are no longer willing to leave Calvinism outside of the bounds of "Mere Christianity."

Into the middle of this brewing fight comes the "Openness Theism" debate. Of course, this new Hyper-Arminianism makes the Calvinists madder than anybody else. That's fair enough. But look at the arguments they use against it and you'll find pretty quickly that most of the disagreements they have with Openness Theism, disagreements that lead them to call it a heresy, they will also have with traditional Arminianism. I don't know how long it will take, but the Arminians among us are bound to pick up on this sooner or later. What's going to happen then?

Evangelicalism is being pulled in several other directions as well. The line between Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism is being blurred again, thanks in large part to the pre-tribbers like Tim LaHaye and the six-days creationists like Ken Ham. Pentacostalism and the Pentacostalism mutation Word of Faith movement are also making inroads.

Of course, the question immediately arises, if "Mere Christianity" is what really matters, then why does it matter that Evangelicals might leave the old neighborhood and set up housekeeping elsewhere? They're still Christians, right? And maybe these others groups have a few wierd ideas, but they still have the basics in there somewhere, right? Good question. I think I have a few good answers, but I'm out of time for today.

2004-02-12T14:50:00.000-06:00

I worry about where evangelicals in America are going to be ten years from now. Well, they'll still be in America presumably, but I wonder what state they'll be in. Well, Alabama, presumably, but I mean .... Never mind. I'll get to the point.

The movement gives several causes for concern. One big whopper of a cause is that the leadership just doesn't have alot of life left to it. Billy Graham, the Man himself, won't be around much longer. His son Franklin is a gutsy guy who will do alot of good with Samaritan's Purse. He won't be the Man himself, though. Not that we should expect him to be. We shouldn't expect anyone to be Billy. Franklin is who he is and, like I said, he will do alot of good. But evangelicals are still losing Billy Graham.

James Dobson is getting on up in years as well. "Focus on the Family" would not have succeeded without the work of alot of dedicated, talented people but, let's face it, it's credibility among evangelicals mainly comes from James Dobson's lengthened shadow. Does the organization have an heir apparent ready to take the reins?

I could go on. Chuck Swindoll, Chuck Colson, Tim LaHaye. Senior citizens all, with no one ready and *recognizable* to take their place. Bill Bright is already gone.

Who will we have with us for a while? D. James Kennedy, I suppose. And Hank Hanegraaf. But they had better settle their Zodaiacal tiff pretty quick. (I'm pretty much on Hank's side in this one. but it's an unfortunate conflict, no matter which dog in the fight is yours.) And then there's Benny Hinn. Uhhh.... Forget I said that.

We might hope that the fervent evangelical belief that each man stands before God with no intermediary but Jesus will allow the movement to survive, and even flourish without "big name" leaders. But this seems doubtful. Evangelicals, to their credit, have indeed always preached that we all stand before God without the need of internediaries. The problem is we have *preached* this so much that we have blinded ourselves to the fact that we don't *believe* it. Evangelicals for at least the past two decades have always turned to established speakers, writers, and publishers to tell them what this or that Bible passage means, or what the Biblical perspective is on this or that issue. Maybe doing this is not such a bad thing in and of itself. But we have been telling ourselves that we *never* do this for a long time now, and I am afraid we are about to get a rude awakening to just who and what we are.

2004-02-02T18:04:00.000-06:00

testing testing