Category: Notes on Books

Michael Polanyi (1891-1976), a distinguished Hungarian chemist who immigrated to England in the 1930s and devoted his mature years to philosophical inquiry, was one of the premier thinkers of the 20^th century.  His Personal Knowledge remains an epistemological classic, especially appealing to philosophical scientists such as John Polkinghorne.  Similarly significant is his The Logic of Liberty:  Reflections and Rejoinders (Chicago:  The University of Chicago Press, c. 1951), an eloquent defense of both personal and political freedom as necessary for reason and social well-being.  Appalled by the claims of reductionistic materialists—for whom thought is nothing more than mechanical or chemical reactions in brain—he proposed, in a series of essays, to demonstrate that the necessity of the freedom requisite in scientific inquiries is equally needed in other realms.  

Unfortunately, the advance of science during the past two centuries was too frequently accompanied by a philosophical Positivism that “believed implicitly in the mechanical explanation of all phenomena” (p. 11) and denied any non-empirically demonstrable truths.  Thus virtues such as courage and wisdom and standards regarding beauty and goodness were considered purely subjective preferences or social conventions.  Rightly understood, however:  “Science or scholarship can never be more than an affirmation of the things we believe in.  These beliefs will, by their very nature, be of a normative character, claiming universal validity; they must also be responsible beliefs, held in due consideration of evidence and of the fallibility of all beliefs; but eventually they are ultimate commitments, issued under the seal of our personal judgment.  To all further critical scruples we must at some point finally reply:  “‘for I believe so’” (p. 31).  Choosing what we believe to be true necessarily follows a process of the free inquiry best illustrated by the scientific community.  One person seeks to solve a problem or explain a phenomenon and, having satisfied his own mind, informs others of his discovery.  His thesis is then tested by qualified scholars and, if found true, accepted by them.  A creative thinker like Einstein set forth novel ideas—but he needed the assent of his peers to establish the truth of his position.  “This unity between personal creative passion and willingness to submit to tradition and discipline is a necessary consequence of the spiritual reality of science” (p. 40).  Only free thinkers, working within a free society, can effectively advance science, as its still-birth or demise in totalitarian societies clearly reveals.  

The same is true in economics, wherein it is clear that “the central planning of production” so celebrated in socialist circles “is strictly impossible” (p. 111).  This was evident when Soviet planners tried to collectivize Russian agriculture, dictating “the scope and the kind of cultivation to be practiced on every one of the twenty-five millions of peasant farms’” (p. 131).  Disastrous consequences followed—famines, rebellions, and the slaughter of recalcitrant Ukrainian kulaks.  “Lenin’s attempt to replace the functions of the market by a centrally directed economic system caused far greater devastation than he worst forms of laissez faire ever did” (p. 169).  There is in fact a “spontaneous order based on persuasion” basic to both scientific and economic development; any effort to dictate truths or policies cannot but fail in markedly  destructive ways.  Setting forth sophisticated mathematical reasons, especially emphasizing the importance of “polycentricity” profoundly evident in the “postural reflexes which keep us in equilibrium while sitting, standing or walking”, Polanyi shows why multitudes of free persons making decisions are always better than bureaucrats dictating policies (p. 176.)  This truth ultimately dawned on Trotsky, one of the leaders of the Bolsheviks, who “declared that it would require a Universal Mind as conceived by Laplace to make a success of such as system” (p. 126).  

Still more:  Polanyi was distressed by two 20^th century developments ultimately destructive to the good society—skepticism and utopianism, wherein “an utter disbelief in the spirit of man is coupled with extravagant moral demands” (p. 4).  Europe was ravaged by nihilistic, revolutionary humanitarians because a deep-seated “skepticism had destroyed popular belief in the reality of justice and reason” (p. 5).  Compassion became a political platform (“social justice”) rather than an individual virtue, and it “was turned into merciless hatred and the desire for brotherhood into deadly class-war” (p. 5).  This was evident in super-planners like Friedrich Engels, who declared “that men ‘with full consciousness will fashion their own history’ and ‘leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom,’” thereby showing “the megalomania of a mind rendered unimaginative by abandoning all faith in God.  When such men are eventually granted power to control the ultimate destinies of their fellow men, they reduce them to mere fodder for their unbridled enterprises” (p. 199).  

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While better known for his classic anti-socialist manifesto, The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich A. Hayek’s magnum opus is doubtless The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago:  The University of Chicago Press, c. 1960), judged by Henry Hazlitt in a Newsweek review as “one of the great political works of our time . . . the twentieth century successor to John Stuart Mill’s essay, ‘On Liberty,’”  While recognized and awarded a Nobel Prize as an economist, Hayek sought in The Constitution of Liberty to address “the pressing social questions of our time” and provide “a comprehensive restatement of the basic principles of a philosophy of freedom” (p. 3).  Citing John Stuart Mill, he wrote with this conviction:  “It is impossible to study history without becoming aware of ‘the lesson given to mankind by every age, and always disregarded—that speculative philosophy, which to the superficial appears a thing so remote from the business of life and the outward interest of men, is in reality the thing on earth which most influences them, and in the long run overbears any influences save those it must itself obey’” (p. 113).  

To provide a philosophical foundation for liberty is imperative, for “liberty is not merely one particular value but . . . the source and condition of most moral values” (p. 6).  He wrote with the tragic awareness that for nearly a century people around the world had been embracing “western ideals at a time when the West had become unsure of itself and had largely lost faith in the traditions that have made it what it is.  This was a time when the intellectuals of the West had to a great extent abandoned the very belief in freedom which, by enabling the West to make full use of those forces that are responsible for the growth of all civilization, had made its unprecedented quick growth possible” (p. 21).   

In the first of the book’s three parts, Hayek asserts “the value of freedom.”  Rightly defined, freedom is neither political nor metaphysical, neither the power to do things celebrated by political progressives nor the inner freedom of the will noted by theologians.  It is, quite simply, the “independence of the arbitrary will of another” (p. 12).  Individuals freely thinking and making decisions, freely cooperating with other individuals doing the same, enable civilization to develop and thrive.  Every individual is fallible and limited, so no one has the knowledge and wisdom necessary to dictate policies, but thinking and acting together we accomplish what is best for mankind.  “The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful means that human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from trying to do better” (p. 37).  It was aptly summarized by Cato, who Cicero says believed “the Roman constitution was superior to that of other states because it ‘was based upon the genius, not of one man, but of many; it was founded, not in one generation, but in a long period of several centuries and many ages of men.  For, said he, there never has lived a man possessed of so great a genius that nothing could escape him, nor could the combined powers of all men living at one time possibly make all the necessary provisions of the future without the aid of actual experience and the test of time’” (p. 57).  

The liberty Cato celebrated and Hayek defends developed in 18^th century England, rooted in “an interpretation of traditions and institutions which had spontaneously grown up and were but imperfectly understood” (p. 54).  Unlike the utopianism evident in Rousseau and spawned by the French Revolution, culminating in various Sparta-style totalitarian democracies, British thinkers such as Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and William Paley took an empirical, historical approach, locating “‘the essence of freedom in spontaneity and the absence of coercion’” rather than “‘in the pursuit and attainment of an absolute collective purpose’” (p. 56).  The French approach, however, implementing Rousseau’s reliance on the “general will,” promoted “popular sovereignty and even declared “the voice of the people is the voice of God,” British (and American thinkers such as Madison) sought to limit the power of passing majorities.   Thus, as Burke continually insisted, a respect for tradition safeguards freedom’s flourishing.  Unfortunately, during the 20^th century “the French tradition has everywhere progressively displaced the English” (p. 55).  Even in 19^th century England, as Benthamite Philosophical Radicals displaced the Whigs in shaping liberalism, the democratic (Fabian) socialism installed by Clement Atlee in 1940 gained ground.   

In socialist systems individuals cede to the state the responsibility for many things (employment, education, health care, etc.), whereas in free societies they take responsibility for their actions.  “Liberty and responsibility are inseparable” (p. 71).  Basic to liberty is “finding a sphere of usefulness, an appropriate job”—perhaps “the hardest discipline that a free society imposes on us.  It is, however, inseparable from freedom, since nobody can assure each man that his gifts will be properly used” (p. 80), and it is up to the individual person to discern and develop his talents.  Nothing we do outweighs the importance of finding and following one’s vocation, playing a productive role in the world.  Importantly:  “In a free society a man’s talents do not ‘entitle’ him to any particular position” (p. 82).  Nor does a free society insure him against failure or distress.  “All that a free society has to offer is an opportunity of searching for a suitable position, with all the attendant risk and uncertainty which such a search for a market for one’s gifts must involve” (p. 82).  

Taking responsibility for themselves, lovers of liberty resist any form of “equality” other than “equality before the law” (p. 85).  We are, as human beings, remarkably different in physique, intelligence, aptitude, ambition, inheritance, etc.  Endeavoring to eliminate such distinctions in the guise of establishing equality is to violate the natural order of things, for the “boundless variety of human nature—the wide range of differences in individual capacities and potentialities—is one of the most distinctive facts about the human species” (p. 86).  Egalitarians committed to abolishing such differences inevitably propose leveling everyone, through governmental mandates, to a common plane by redistributing the wealth, regulating behaviors, subsidizing failures, providing for old age, and excusing assorted deviancies.  “The modern tendency to gratify this passion is to disguise it in the respectable garment of social justice is developing into a serious threat to freedom” (p. 93), whereas a bona fide understanding of justice restricts it to the virtue of giving others what is due them.  “It is,” Hayek says, “one of the great tragedies of our time that the masses have come to believe that they have reached their high standard of material welfare as a result of having pulled down the wealthy, and to fear that the preservation or emergence of such a class would deprive them of something they would otherwise get and which they regard as their due” (p. 130).  

In part two of the book, “freedom and the law,” Hayek critiques all kinds of the coercion.  “True coercion occurs when armed bands of conquerors make the subject people toil for them, when organized gangsters extort a levy for ‘protection,’ when the knower of an evil secret blackmails his victim, and, of course, when the state threatens to inflict punishment and employ physical force to make us obey its commands” (p. 137).   Notably, there is a difference between commands and laws!  Whereas commands negate personal freedom, good laws preserve and enable it to thrive.  Commands (whether issued by Czars in Russia or the White House) privilege cronies and impair adversaries; laws (enforced by judges) insure the even-handed enforcement of policies and adjudication of disputes.  In his Second Treatise on Government John Locke said:  “The end of the law is, not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.  For in all the states of created beings capable of laws, where there is no law there is no freedom.  For liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others; which cannot be where there is no law:  and is not, as we are told, a liberty for every man to do what he lists.”  Embracing Locke’s understanding, Hayek says:  “The conception of freedom under the law that is the chief concern of this book rests on the contention that when we obey laws, in the sense of general abstract rules laid down irrespective of their application to us, we are not subject to another man’s will and are therefore free.  It is because the lawgiver does not know the particular cases to which his rules will apply, and it is because the judge who applies them has no choice in drawing the conclusions that follow from the existing body of rules and the particular facts of the case, that it can be said that laws and not men rule” (p. 153).  

Lex, Rex!  Law is King!  Locke and other English (Whig) thinkers insisted that the rule of law liberates individuals.  Still more:  a written constitution and the separation of powers guarantees their freedom.  Both distinguished the United States of America at its inception.  In his History of Freedom Lord Acton noted:  “Europe seemed incapable of becoming the home of free States.  It was from America that the plain ideas that men ought to mind their own business, and that the nation is responsible to Heaven for the acts of State . . . burst forth like a conqueror upon the world they were destined to transform, under the title of the Rights of Man.”  Unlike the English, the Revolutionary colonists acknowledged that we are “endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights” and inscribed their convictions on paper.  Thus no one (presidents and judges and passing congressional majorities included) can arbitrarily force free Americans to submit to governmental mandates.  No one reading America’s founding documents can avoid concluding that limiting governmental power was their objective.  “Thus the great discovery was made of which Lord Acton later said:  ‘Of all checks on democracy, federalism has been the most efficacious and the most congenial. . . .  The Federal system limits and restrains sovereign power by dividing it, and by assigning to Government only certain defined rights.  It is the only method of curbing not only the majority but the power of the whole people, and it affords the strongest basis for a second chamber, which has been found essential security for freedom in every genuine democracy’” (p. 184).  The Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution accentuated this commitment.  

These Amendments were blatantly ignored by the progressive architects of the Fair Deal, New Freedom, New Deal, and Great Society in the 20^th century.  In 1933, an “extraordinary” man, FDR—equipped with an “attractive voice and limited mind”—believed he knew what the country needed.  He “conceived it as the function of democracy in times of crisis to give unlimited powers to the man it trusted, even if this meant that it thereby ‘forged new instruments of power which in some hands would be dangerous’” (p. 190).  Constitutional principles were cast aside in order to “get the country moving.”  The “liberalism” of the Founding Fathers, which called for limited government, became the coercive democratic “Liberalism” of the Democrat Party.  Largely lost in that process was the liberty won in the American Revolution.  Thus 20^th century America slowly moved in the direction of European Continent, where “absolute” governments in France and Prussia had “destroyed the traditions of liberty” (p. 193) in favor of an administratively imposed socialistic “equality.” 

This process has been facilitated by intellectual developments designed to “discredit the rule of law” and support “a revival of arbitrary government” (p. 233).  Arguing the importance of “social” or “distributive” justice, posing as defenders of the “poor” and “disadvantaged,” progressives scoffed (in the words of Anatole France) “at ‘the majestic equality of the law that forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread’” (p. 235).  Influential jurists, especially in post-WWI Germany, crafted a “legal positivism” that supplanted the Natural Law (dismissed as a “metaphysical superstition”) and attributed individual rights to government rather than God.  The government can, for instance, either grant or withdraw the “right to life” from selected groups such as the unborn or disabled or unproductive.  The government can either guarantee or abolish property rights.  Bolsheviks, Fascists, and Nazis all embraced and implemented this “legal positivism.”  Less brutally, socialists in England and progressives in America promulgated the same philosophy, replacing the rule of law with majority rule.  Thus Dean Roscoe Pound, one of America’s finest legal scholars, noted the “paternalistic policies of the New Deal” and declared:  “‘Even if quite unintended, the majority are moving in the line of administrative absolutism which is a phase of the rising absolutism throughout the world’” (p. 247).  

Such absolutism cannot but characterize welfare states, leading Hayek to title part three of the book “Freedom in the Welfare State.”  Without question social reformers, throughout the West since 1848, have promoted various versions of socialism which, for a century or so generally “meant common ownership of the means of production and their ‘employment for use, not for profit’” (p. 254).  Discredited by disillusioning developments in Russia and Germany, however, reformers committed to “social justice” rephrased and redirected their agenda to establishing a “welfare state” that redistributes income.  Personal liberties must be restricted in order to promote the general welfare, and government must use “its coercive powers to insure that men are given what some expert thinks they need,” providing for their “health, employment, housing, and provision for old age” (p. 261).  Especially by monopolizing social security and medical care—highly effective means of income redistribution—welfare states become dictatorial.  

Redistribution through taxation (e.g. the graduated income tax proposed by Marx and Engels in 1848) further typifies welfare states and is “universally accepted as just” (p. 306).  Earlier thinkers, such as J.R. McCulloch had warned:  “‘The moment you abandon the cardinal principle of exacting from all individuals the same proportion of their income or of their property, you are at sea without rudder or compass, there is no amount of injustice and folly you may not commit’” (p. 308).  But zealous reformers saw it is a singularly effective means to achieve their vaunted “equality” and by the dawn of the 20^th century most nations had sanctioned it.  Though allegedly a way to make the wealthy bear their “fair share,” in fact it makes the “masses . . . accept a much heavier load than they would have done otherwise” (p. 311).  It effectively increases the power of the state, which is the real goal of socialists of all stripes.  

Inevitably these welfare state policies and monopolies prove inefficient and ease the slide toward bankruptcy, but that never deters the utopians promoting them.  Unfortunately, as Justice Lewis Brandeis warned, writing in Olmstead v. United States in 1927:  “Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent.  Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers.  The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.”  To understand Brandeis’ concern and to fully appreciate the importance of liberty as both a crucial ingredient of human nature and an ultimate good for human society, no better treatise exists than The Constitution of Liberty. 

 In The Gathering Storm (volume one of Winston Churchill’s account of the Second World War) the former prime minister penned these memorable words:  “It is my purpose, as one who lived and acted in these days, to show how easily the tragedy of the Second World War could have been prevented; how the malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous; how the structure and habits of democratic States, unless they are welded into larger organisms, lack those elements of persistence and conviction which can alone give security to humble masses; how, even in matters of self-preservation, no policy is pursued for even ten or fifteen years at a time.  We shall see how the counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger; how the middle course adopted form desires for safety and a quiet life may be found to lead direct to the bull’s-eye of disaster.”  And his martyred contemporary, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, further declared:  “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil.  God will not hold us guiltless.  Not to speak is to speak.  Not to act is to act “ (pp. 17-18).  

Few historical truths are more easily documented than this:  appeasing evil is evil!  So Bruce S. Thornton’s The Wages of Appeasement:  Ancient Athens, Munich, and Obama’s America (New York:  Encounter books, c. 2011) deserves careful reading and reflection.  A professor of classics and humanities at California State University as well as a fellow at the Hoover Institution, the author brings both erudition and acumen to his text, laying the groundwork for his discussion with an account of ancient Athens’ failure to resist the aggressions of Phillip II of Macedon.  The city’s civic virtues had decayed—as Demosthenes  so eloquently declared—and with the loss of courage to defend themselves came the loss of freedom so celebrated by Pericles a century earlier.   So Athens slowly slid into obscurity and irrelevance.  

Two millennia later the Athenian approach marked Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 attempt in Munich in to forge a “peace with honor” with Adolph Hitler.  For nearly two decades, disillusioned with the consequences of WWI, the resolve of men such as Chamberlain had softened as  increasing numbers of jaded intellectuals (e.g. Bertrand Russell) and cheerful clerics (e.g. the “Red” Dean of Canterbury) embraced self-abasement, disarmament, pacifism, and a naive faith in the efficacy of internationalism.  “The ‘sniggering of the intellectuals at patriotism and physical courage,’ as [George] Orwell put if of prewar English anti-patriotism, ‘the persistent effort to chip away English morale and spread a hedonistic, what-do-I-get-out-of-it attitude to life, has done nothing but harm’” (p. 279).  One of the “sniggering intellectuals” Orwell condemned was the historian G. M. Trevelyan, who said, “‘Dictatorship and democracy must live side by side in peace, or civilization is doomed’” (p. 107).  George Lansbury, a Labor Party leader, actually admitted “he would ‘close every recruiting station, disband the Army and disarm the Air Force.  I would abolish the whole dreadful equipment of war and say to the world “do your worst”’” (p. 94).   And the world did its worst in short order.  As Mussolini and Hitler flexed their muscles—invading Ethiopia and the Rhineland—few men of courage opposed them.  Sufficiently emboldened, Hitler pursued his designs, fearing little resistance from England and France.  “‘I saw them at Munich,’ he said.  ‘They are little worms’” (p. 118).  WWII, with all its horrors, inexorably followed.

“The spirit of Munich,” said Alexander Solzhenitsyn when accepting his Nobel Prize, “has by no means retreated into the past; it was not a brief episode.  I even venture to say that the spirit of Munich is dominant in the twentieth century.  The intimidated civilized world has found nothing to oppose the onslaught of suddenly resurgent fang-baring barbarism, except concessions and smiles.  The spirit of Munich is a disease of the will of prosperous people; it is the daily state of those who have given themselves over to a craving for prosperity in every way, to material well-being as the chief goal of life on earth.  Such people—and there are many of them in the world today—choose passivity and retreat, anything if only the life to which they are accustomed might go on, anything so as not to have to cross over to rough terrain today, because tomorrow, see, everything will be all right.  (But it never will!  The reckoning for cowardice will only be more cruel.  Courage and the power to overcome will be ours only when we dare to make sacrifices)” (pp. 24-25).    

To Solzhenitsyn, America’s retreat from Southeast Asia, abandoning Vietnam just as victory was immanent, revealed the collapse of courage most visible in this nation’s intellectual and political elite.  The spirit of Munich, Thornton says, spread throughout the burgeoning anti-war and anti-American community in the ‘60s ‘70s, seriously compromising our intelligence agencies as well as demoralizing our armed forces.  It saturated the Carter Administration, whose “appeasing response to the Iranian crisis” in 1979 opened the gates to Islamic Jihad around the world.  The architect of the Iranian revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini had set forth his objective in 1942:  “‘Those who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world.  All the countries conquered by Islam or to be conquered in the future will be marked for everlasting salvation’” (p. 166).  He pulled no punches, declaring:  “‘Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war.  Those [who say this] are witless.  Islam says:  Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you!’” (p. 166).  The Koran and the sword are welded together—the book guides the faithful; the sword slays the infidels.  When the Iranians took hostage 66 Americans and seized our Embassy, President Carter equivocated and pleaded, sending a “groveling” letter assuring Khomeini of his commitment to “good relations ‘based upon equality, mutual respect and friendship’” (p. 168).  Though the hostages were released when Ronald Reagan was elected, our world forever changed as radical Muslims embraced jihad.  Despite a series of attacks on American installations, neither Reagan nor Bill Clinton responded decisively, confirming Osama “bin Laden’s estimation that U.S. power was “‘built on foundations of straw’” (p. 190).  Clinton, who regularly “wilted” when faced with politically risky decisions, responded to al Qaeda’s attack on the U.S.S. Cole by ordering “all U.S. Navy vessels to head for the safety of open waters and to avoid using the Suez Canal” (p. 197).  

Then came September 11, 2001!  A very different president, George W. Bush, responded quite differently, committing American troops to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  But despite initial support, as the wars drug on President Bush had to deal with hoards of increasingly shrill critics—mainly Democrat luminaries such as Al Gore, Barbara Boxer, Jimmy Carter and Howard Dean, who in 2004 commandeered anti-war throngs by spouting “Marxist clichés about ‘imperialism’ and ‘colonialism’ and the evils of capitalism’” (p. 203).  Joining the anti-war brigade, Barack Obama “campaigned on a foreign policy predicated on moralizing internationalism, a preference for diplomacy and transnational institutions, a focus on human rights and foreign development, and the assumption that the United States was flawed and in need of some humility after the reckless aggression and oppressive practices of the Bush administration” (p. 214), signaling “a return to the Carter philosophy that had helped put in power an Islamist regime in Iran and ignited a Soviet global expansion” around the world (p. 216).  “Thus we rationalize away the jihadists’ careful justifications for their violence in the theology of Islam and seek to ameliorate what we think are the true causes—poverty, lack of political participation, or historical injustices—rather than realizing that those who believe they are divinely sanctioned to kill others will not be talked or bribed out of their beliefs, but can only be destroyed” (p. 280).  

So there is every reason to acknowledge that Obama, committed as he is to an “outreach” to Muslims, personifies the “spirit of Munich.”  He appeases the Islamists just as Chamberlain appeased the Nazis, even insisting that administrative officials—and journalists—sanitize their language in order to falsely portray Muslims (at home and abroad) as “peace-loving” and jihad as “spiritual improvement rather than violence against the enemies of Islam” (p. 255).    In his repeated laments for the sins of the West, he simply ignores the historical evidence that “over the centuries Muslims have conquered, killed, ravaged, plundered, and enslaved Christians and occupied their lands in vastly greater numbers than all the dead resulting from European colonial incursions of America’s recent wars in Muslim lands put together” (p. 263).   Facing such hostile world, Thornton insists, America must respond in ways atypical of the democracies led by men such as Chamberlain and Obama, which almost always make short-sighted, self-serving, emotionally-based decisions.  

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Markedly different from the spirit of Munich so evident in today’s progressive intelligentsia was the “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher!  As Claire Berlinski makes clear in “There is No Alternative:  Why Margaret Thatcher Matters” (New York:  Basic Books, c. 2011), appeasement was not in her genes!  Rather, she demonstrated the kind of courage which only comes from deeply-held convictions.  For her, these were established in her early years as she attended a Methodist church.  In contrast to those unprincipled politicians who forever float with the winds of popular opinion, Lady Thatcher refused to bend when principles such as freedom and justice were at stake.  To her there were never two sides to an issue—there was only one, the right side!  In a remarkable statement, responding to those who urged compromise and “consensus,” she declared:  “To me consensus seems to be:  the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead.  What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner ‘I stand for consensus’?” (Downing Street Years, p. 167).

In particular, she “was one of the most vigorous, determined, and successful enemies of socialism the world has known” (p. 5).  Living in a “weakly socialist nation” slowly shaped over the decades by the Labour Party following Fabian strategies, she smelled Britain’s festering decadence and refused to sanction the “basic immorality” of socialism, believing that “socialism itself—in all its incarnations, wherever and however it was applied—was morally corrupting.  Socialism turned good citizens into bad ones; it turned strong nations into weak ones; it promoted vice and discouraged virtue; and even when it did not lead directly to the Gulags, it transformed formerly hardworking and self-reliant men and women into whining, weak and flabby loafers.   Socialism was not a fine idea that had been misapplied; it was an inherently wicked idea” (pp. 7-8).  

She emerged as a political powerhouse with a speech to the Conservative Party in 1976, calling for a return to free enterprise economics, a repudiation of the Labour Party which was then “‘committed to a program which is frankly and unashamedly Marxist,’” a shift which would bring about “‘the rebirth of a nation, our nation—the British nation’” (p. 68).  She urged her party to launch a crusade by appealing “‘to all those men and women of goodwill who do not want a Marxist future for themselves or their children or their children’s children.  This is not just a fight about national solvency.  It is a fight about the very foundations of the social order.  It is a crusade not merely to put a temporary brake on socialism, but to stop its onward march once and for all’” (p. 69).  Citing Shakespeare’s rendition of King Henry V’s words before the pivotal Battle of Agincourt, she concluded:  “‘As was said before another famous battle:  “It is true that we are in great danger; the greater therefore should our courage be”’” (p. 69).  

And the courage of King Henry was needed when the Iron Lady came to power in 1979, for Britain was widely regarded as the Sick Man of Europe (a “disgrace,” in the opinion of Henry Kissinger), “sunk to begging, borrowing, stealing” (p. 10).  Little remained of the nation that a century earlier had proudly orchestrated the Pax Britannica, ruling one fourth of the world.  “It was the world’s undisputed premier naval power; it controlled the world’s raw materials and markets; it had long been the world’s leading scientific and intellectual power; it was the financial center of the world and the premier merchant carrier; it had invented the Common Law; it had invented modern parliamentary democracy” (p. 9).  Only faded remnants of such glory days remained.  To Thatcher, Britain’s decline was “a punishment for the sin of socialism” installed by her countrymen in 1945 when they elected Clement Atlee prime minister and established a enveloping welfare state.  Having defeated the Nazis in war, they surrendered to the socialists in peace!  She thought that “in 1945 the good and gifted men and women of Britain had chosen a wicked path.  They had ceased to be great because they had ceased to be virtuous.  In ridding Britain of socialism, she intimated, she would restore it to virtue.  She would make it once again worthy of greatness” (p. 13).  Consequently:  “Hatred of communism, hatred of Marxism, hatred of socialism—and an unflinching willingness to express that hatred in the clearest imaginable terms—was the core of Thatcherism” (p. 47).  

“Thatcherism,” Berlinski says, was rooted in the religiously devout, industriously middle class rearing that nurtured Margaret Thatcher.  Her father was a Wesleyan lay preacher whose influence and convictions shaped her.  As a child she began speaking publically by reading passages in church, sharing in her father’s ministry and resolving to follow his example, frequently citing the Scriptures in her political pronouncements.  Accordingly:  “She did what was right, she did what was right, she did what was right.  She did it because her father told her to” (p. 21).  Her education (a chemistry degree from Oxford, supplemented by a law degree earned while working as a research chemist) equipped her.  Her marriage, to a prosperous businessman, Denis Thatcher, sustained her.  But no external factors fully explain her!  She was, quite simply, a remarkable woman with sharply-honed political skills who guided Britain through her “longest sustained period” of “economic expansion of the postwar era” (p. xix).  Using extensive interviews with her allies and enemies, Berlinski enables us to better appreciate Thatcher’s genius and success.  

Early on, as Prime Minister, she refused to back down to Argentina and successfully waged a 1982 war to maintain British control of the Falkland Islands.  “Without this victory, it is unlikely that the Thatcher Revolution could have occurred” (p. 158).  Standing firm and winning the war greatly enhanced the prestige of both Thatcher and her country, building the popular support she needed to win “a massive victory in the 1983 general election” (p. 179) and subsequently to deal with domestic issues.  “‘We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands,’ she said.  ‘We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty’” (p. 183).  The foremost “enemy within,” by all odds, was the thoroughly Marxist trade unions, effectively strangling the British economy.  So Thatcher defied and denatured them, despite a long and bloody coal miners’ strike.  She did so by “stockpiling coal, training the military to drive trains in the event of a sympathy strike by the railway workers, accelerating the development of nuclear power, importing electricity by cable from France, and refurbishing coal-fired power stations to permit them to run on oil” (p. 208).  

Thatcher’s opposition to Marxism included a deep hostility to the USSR, which, when she became Britain’s prime minister in 1978, “appeared to be not only invincible, but ascendant” (p. 270).  In her 1976 speech to her party, she boldly announced her convictions, saying:  “‘I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up and my fair hair gently waved, the Iron Lady of the Western World.  A Cold War warrior, an Amazon philistine, even a Peking plotter.  Am I any of these things?  Well, yes, if that’s how they wish to interpret my defense of values and freedoms fundamental to our way of life’” (p. 263).  Undeterred by her critics, impervious to their poison darts, she gladly joined Ronald Reagan in doing whatever possible to throttle Communism wherever it appeared in the 1980s.  “Publicly, Thatcher—and only Thatcher, among the leaders of the world—supported Reagan unwaveringly, despite massive domestic and international pressure to do otherwise” (p. 273).  By doing so, she earned Reagan’s enduring gratitude and friendship.  Together they successfully dealt with a new kind of Communist, Mikhail Gorbachev, whom they both liked, and in short order the Soviet Union collapsed.  

Reviewing the book, Peter Schweizer, the author of Reagan’s War, concluded:  “Finally the Iron Lady gets her due.  Claire Berlinski brilliantly lays out how Margaret Thatcher’s strength and conviction changed the world.  Without a Prime Minister Thatcher there might not have been a President Ronald Reagan.  And Berlinksi reminds us how the whole world would benefit from a new Thatcher today.”  

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In Obama’s Globe:  A President’s Abandonment of U.S. Allies Around the World (New York:  Beaufort Books, c. 2012), Bruce Herschensohn places the nation’s foreign policy within the context of the past half-century, showing how the Carter and Obama administrations failed to rightly understand and handle challenges abroad.  Unlike FDR and JFK, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, all of whom boldly pressed for victory over our foes, presidents Carter and Obama tried to appease the nation’s enemies and in the process deserted our friends.  “Carter’s abandonment of El Salvador and Nicaragua,” for example, “ended with a fall of those two governments that cost over 70,000 deaths of Central Americans fighting against Soviet proxies who had taken advantage of the opportunity given to them” (p. 27).  He lacked what JFK called “the stuff of presidents,” envisioning himself as a purveyor of “human rights,” a peace-maker rather than a commander-in-chief.  

Following the Carter approach, President Obama annulled agreements with Poland and the Czech Republic in order to curry favor with Russia.  Distancing himself from Britain, Obama (through his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) proclaimed America’s neutrality regarding the on-going dispute between Argentina and the United Kingdom over the Falkland Islands.  In Tunisia and Egypt, Obama shunned long-term allies, opening the gates for Islamists (notably the Muslim Brotherhood) to take control of Arab nations.  To Herschensohn:  “The celebration of Mubarak’s fall was much more reminiscent of 1979’s fall of the Shah of Iran and the welcome of the Ayatollah Khomeini” (p. 60).  And in Iran, when millions took to the streets demanding liberty from the oppression imposed by Khomeini and his heirs, Obama refused to give even verbal support!  So too in Syria—Obama has feebly protested the genocidal regime of Bashar al-Assad but done nothing of substance to overthrow him.  His policy—termed “leading from behind” by a White House advisor—illustrates timidity and constant concern for his own political position.  Obama’s treatment of Israel further illustrates his abandonment of American allies around the globe.  By consistently referring to the West Bank and Gaza Strip as land “occupied by Israel,” and by announcing, on May 19, 2011, his desire to return to the 1967 boundaries between Israel and Palestine (a noon-existent state), he made “one of the worst, if not the very worst statement made by any U.S. President regarding a friendly nation that won a war” (p. 89), the president has egregiously distanced himself from our only allies in the Middle East.  

Wherever Herschensohn looks (and he deals with many more areas that I’ve indicated), President Obama seems committed to appeasing our enemies and abandoning our allies, hoping the world be safer without American leadership.  

 To St. Augustine:  “Prudence is love choosing wisely between the things that help and those that hinder” (De Morib. Eccl. xv).  Contrary to the Beatles’ message, love is not all you need, for many well-motivated acts do much harm.  So cautionary tales, such as Ross Douthat’s Bad Religoin:  How We Became a Nation of Heretics (New York:  Free Press, c. 2012), should provoke serious reflection on what we are actually doing in our religious life.  Douthat is the youngest-ever op-ed columnist for The New York Times as well as a practicing, traditional Catholic who writes with a deep concern for the current and future well being of Christianity in America.  He argues:   “America’s problem isn’t too much religion, as a growing chorus of atheists have argued; nor is it an intolerant secularism, as many on the Christian right believe.  Rather, it’s bad religion:  the slow-motion collapse of traditional faith and the rise of a variety of pseudo-Christianities” (p. 3).  Clearly “most Americans are still drawing some water from the Christian well.  But a growing number are inventing their own versions of what Christianity means, abandoning the nuances of traditional theology in favor of religions that stroke their egos and indulge or even celebrate their worst impulses” (p. 4).  Consequently, we are less a Christian nation than a nation of heretics!  

Knowing the word “heretic” is a loaded term, Douthat takes Alister McGrath’s definition for his own:  “‘a form of Christian belief that, more by accident than design, ultimately ends up subverting, destabilizing or even destroying the core of Christian faith’” (p. 9).  Its converse is the historic orthodoxy defined in ecumenical creeds that have distinguished conservative Christians (both Catholic and Protestant) for centuries.  During the past half-century, however, such orthodoxy has virtually disappeared.   Douthat documents the vigorous health of America’s churches following WWII—churches and seminaries overflowed; preachers such as Billy Graham and Fulton Sheen effectively reached millions with a soul-saving gospel; serious thinkers and writers such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Jacques Maritain, Walker Percy and C.S. Lewis provided compelling intellectual guidance.  It was, quite simply, an American age of faith.

“The crucial element” in this era, Douthat says, “was a deep and abiding confidence:  not just faith alone, but a kind of faith in Christian faith, and a sense that after decades of marginalization and division, orthodox Christians might actually be on the winning side of history.”  The churches “at midcentury offered believers a relatively secure position from which to engage with society as a whole—a foundation that had been rebuilt, as we have seen, rather than simply inherited, and that seemed the stronger for it” (p. 53).  “For a fleeting historical moment, it seemed as though the Christian churches might” in fact “become something more like what the Gospels suggested they should be:  the salt of the earth, a light to the nations, and a place where even modern man could find a home” (p. 54).  

With the rapidity of a punctured balloon, however, this burgeoning religious world deflated in “the locust years” of the ‘60s and ‘70s.  Despite desperate attempts to soften standards and accommodate cultural trends—especially  regarding sex and marriage, abortion, euthanasia, and women’s ordination—the  “Protestant Mainline’s membership stopped growing abruptly in the mid-1960s and then just as swiftly plunged” (p. 58).  As if sharing the same harness, the post-Vatican II Catholic Church dramatically lost priests, monks, nuns, schools, and mass-attendees.  “Only what Dean Kelley described as the ‘conservative churches’ bucked these trends” (p. 60), though in general “the heretics carried the day completely.  America in those years became more religious but less traditionally Christian; more supernaturally minded but less churched; more spiritual in its sentiments but less pious in its practices” (p. 64).  Reflecting this societal shift, a surging “dismissive attitude” triumphed in the nation’s elite institutions—universities, media, bureaucracies—so that by the century’s end “the tastemakers and power brokers and intellectual agenda setters” snidely dismissed orthodox Christianity as “completely declasse” (p. 82). 

Churches zealously accommodating to the culture—substituting a message of “social justice” for personal redemption, replacing theology with sociology, embracing Harvey Cox’s prescriptions in The Secular City—were the biggest losers as their seminaries and congregations quickly shrank.  They perfectly illustrated Dean Ralph Inge’s dictum:  “He who marries the spirit of the age is soon left a widower.”  Claiming to function “in the spirit of Vatican II,” accommodating Catholics (especially in universities, religious orders and liturgical committees) quickly distanced themselves from embarrassing vestiges of antiquity.  By the mid-‘80s, one scholar noted that “‘the dismantling of traditional Roman Catholic theology, by Catholics themselves, is by now a fait accompli” and seminarians were taught “‘that Jesus of Nazareth did not assert any of the divine or messianic claims the Gospels attribute to him and that he died without believing he was Christ or the Son of God, not to mention the founder of a new religion’” (p 100).  

Resisting the spirit of the age, of course, were believers who dared to be somewhat old-fashioned, and “it became increasingly clear that what vitality remained in American Christendom was being sustained by the unexpected alliance between Evangelicals and Catholics” (p. 115).  Their stance was visibly present in the mesmeric Pope John Paul II, who, George Weigel says, “‘did not propose to surrender to modernity.  He proposed to convert it’” (p. 119).  “In effect, John Paul made his pontificate a rallying point for the resistance to the redefinition of Christianity.  And rally many Catholics did” (p. 120).  They were joined in that endeavor by Evangelicals such as Francis Schaeffer, who early urged his readers to oppose the culture of death and deftly critiqued many of the threats posed by modernity.  

Turning from his historical assessment, Douthat points out various heresies now captivating Christianity in America.  There is, first, the effort to add various “gospels” to the New Testament canon.  Accomodationist scholars such as John Dominic Crossan, Bart Ehrman, and Elaine Pagels, employing historical criticism and generally discarding any notion of biblical inspiration, propose adding various “gospels” to the New Testament canon, reverting to variants on the Gnosticism early condemned by the Church.  Their views are invariably non-judgmental and tolerant of all sexual orientations, promoting self-esteem and the political agenda of the Democrat Party.  But ultimately, “whether we end up with Jesus the Gnostic mystic, the Cynic philosopher, the proto-feminist, or the apocalyptic prophet—the present-day theological implications of his ‘real’ identity usually turn out to look a lot like the accomodationist Christianity of the Protestant Mainline” (p. 161).  Traditional orthodoxy, rooted in the thought of St. Paul, is discarded by emulating rather than worshipping Christ, treating the crucifixion as an example of brotherly love, and reducing the resurrection to a psychological insight.  Equally attuned to the spirit of the age—and equally heretical—popular, entrepreneurial preachers such as Joel Osteen promote a God who “gives without demanding, forgives without threatening to judge, and hands out His rewards in this life rather than in the next” (p. 183).  The Houston megachurch pastor has effectively refashioned “Christianity to suit an age of abundance, in which the old war between monotheism and money seems to have ended, for many believers, in a marriage of God and Mammon” (p. 183).  Douthat cites a study “suggesting that 50 of the 260- largest churches in America now preach prosperity theology” (p. 192).    

Even less attached to historical Christianity are various New Age spokesmen, such as Elizabeth Gilbert, who promote a mystical, pantheistic “God within” who “‘dwells within you as you yourself, exactly the way you are’” (p. 230).  The author of the phenomenally successful Eat, Pray, Love, Gilbert felt inspired to leave her husband and travel the world in search of personal enlightenment, carving out for herself a satisfying religion.  “‘You have every right,’” she writes, “‘to cherry-pick when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in God’” (p. 214).  Whatever works for you must be true!  The God within  speaks to Gilbert in her own voice—the same message “preached by a cavalcade of contemporary gurus, teachers, and would-be holy men and women” as well as the same “theology that Elaine Pagels claims to have rediscovered in the lost gospels of the early Christian Church” (p. 215).  Fortuitously, “the greatest popularizer of God Within theology” is Oprah Winfrey, effectively (and profitably) using her TV empire to spread the message.  “It’s the church of the Oprah Winfrey Network, you might say:  religion as a path to constant self-affirmation, heresy as self-help, the quest for God as the ultimate form of therapy” (p. 230).  Needless to say, the God of the New Age resembles neither the Yahweh of the Jews nor the Holy Trinity of the Christians.    

To “recover” Christianity in America, Douthat urges and prays for revival—a return to the kind of good religion so brilliantly set forth in G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity.  He hopes “to persuade even the most skeptical reader that traditional Christian faith might have more to offer this country than either its flawed defenders or its fashionable enemies would lead one to believe” (p. 293).  It should be:  1) “political without being partisan;” 2) “ecumenical but also confessional;” 3) “moralistic but also holistic;” and, 4) “oriented toward sanctity and beauty.”  “We are waiting, not for another political savior or television personality, but for a Dominic or a Francis, an Ignatius or a Wesley, a Wilberforce or a Newman, a Bonhoeffer or a Solzhenitsyn.  Only sanctity can justify Christianity’s existence; only sanctity can make the case for faith; only sanctity, or the hope thereof, can ultimately redeem the world” (p. 292).  

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In Toxic Charity:  How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse It) (New York:  HarperOne, c. 2012), Robert D. Lupton offers invaluable advice regarding compassionate ministries.  Having worked for more than 40 years in inner-city Atlanta and studied projects around the world, he is determined to discover how best to help the needy.  Early in his work he joined a group of sincere believers giving Christmas gifts to a needy family.  While the gifts were being opened he noticed the father of the family quietly slipping away, obviously humiliated by the fact he was unable to buy toys and clothes for his own family.  To Lupton that incident provided a key to ministry:  giving care without providing a cure cannot be right.  Providing momentary assistance without orchestrating lasting development cannot be wise.  

Unfortunately, though we Americans are quite charitable, “much of that money is either wasted or actually harms the people it is targeted to help” (p. 1).  “Take Haiti, for example.  No other country in the Western Hemisphere has received more charitable aid and services from governments and nonprofits.  Yet its poverty and dysfunction continue to deepen” (p. 36).  So too in America:  “For all our efforts to eliminate poverty—our entitlements, our programs, our charities—we have succeeded only in creating a permanent underclass, dismantling their family structures, and eroding their ethic of work.  And our poor continue to become poorer” (p. 3) as we promote “disempowering charity through our kindhearted giving.  And religiously motivated charity is often the most irresponsible” (p. 4).  

This is particularly evident in many “mission trips,” sending groups of teenagers or young adults to impoverished areas around the globe.  In 2006, 1.6 American Christians took such trips, spending $2.4 billion.  However:  “The money spent by one campus ministry to cover the costs of their Central American mission trip to repaint an orphanage would have been sufficient to hire two local painters and two new full-time teachers and purchase new uniforms for every student in the school” (p. 5).  Clearly  these folks sought to uplift the impoverished.  Without question they learned something from their endeavor.  But the ultimate, too often unasked and unanswered question is this:  did they actually help the people they “helped”?  Lupton insists they do not.  They effectively harm the poor, discouraging their work ethic, and promote a demeaning dependency.  In fact, they do little more than polish the self-image of the helpers!  Too easily we forget this axiom:  “Little affirms human dignity more than honest work.  One of the surest ways to destroy self-worth is subsidizing the idleness of able-bodied people” (p. 151).  

Lupton records a conversation with Juan, the Nicaraguan director of Opportunity International, who lamented that “entrepreneurship declines as dollars and free resources flood in, how people become conditioned to wait for the next mission group to arrive instead of building their businesses through their own efforts.  He talked about how dignity is eroded as people come to view themselves as charity cases for wealthy visitors, how they pose with smiling faces for pictures to be taken back for the marketing of the next group.  ‘They are turning my people into beggars,’ Juan said’” (p. 21).  He discovered what Jacques Ellul declared, in Money and Power:  “‘It is important that giving be truly free.  It must never degenerate into charity, in the pejorative sense.  Almsgiving is Mammon’s perversion of giving.  It affirms the superiority of the giver, who thus gains a point on the recipient, binds him, demands gratitude, humiliates him and reduces him to a lower state than he had before’” (p. 34).  

The same occurs in poverty-stricken neighborhoods in America.  In 1991, Jimmy Carter launched the Atlanta Project, “the largest private antipoverty initiative in Atlanta and the boldest effort of its kind in the country” (p. 87).  A massive organization, relying on the best the brightest scholars, promised to transform the city.  Hundreds of folks were hired and dozens of offices were opened, offering various kinds of training and financial aid.  But in a few years little remained of the Carter initiative.  Its “greatest achievement,” a Stanford University analysis concluded, was ‘‘consolidating application forms for social services from sixty-four pages to eight.  All of this for $33.6 million’” (p. 92).  An alternate approach was taken by some entrepreneurs who bought an aging golf course adjacent to an impoverished section of Atlanta.  Investing wisely and rebuilding shrewdly they developed a world-class course, attracting well-heeled competitors.  In the process, small businesses opened in the adjoining neighborhood and scores of jobs were afforded residents.  A thriving eddy of prosperity spread its goodness in dramatic contrast to the Carter project.  

Given the problem of toxic charity, Lupton suggests benevolent organization take “The Oath for Compassionate Service:  

• Never do for the poor what they have (or could have) the capacity to do for themselves.
• Limit one-way giving to emergency situations.
• Strive to empower the poor through employment, lending, and investing, using grants sparingly to reinforce achievements.
• Subordinate self-interests to the needs of those being served.
• Listen closely to those you seek to help, especially to what is not being said—unspoken feelings may contain essential clues to effective service.
• Above all, do no harm” (p. 9).  

As is evident in this oath, Lupton consistently concentrates on practical, common sense solutions to poverty.  Anyone concerned to wisely invest either time or money in charitable endeavors will profit from a careful study of this book.  

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In Dead Aid:  Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa (New York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, c. 2009), Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian economist with an earned doctorate from Oxford, demonstrates the deadening influence of the massive amounts of “aid” given African nations.  Whether distributed by international organizations (e.g. the World Bank), nations (e.g. the U.S.), or humanitarians (such as the rock star Bono), billions of dollars have harmed their recipients.  “Aid has been, and continues to be,” she says, “an unmitigated political, economic, and humanitarian disaster for most parts of the developing world” (p. #85 in Kindle edition).  In the five decades following the demise of European colonialism, more than US$2 trillion has been showered on “developing” nations, primarily in Africa, reflecting the desire of the rich to help the poor.  And what has happened?  “Aid has helped make the poor poorer and growth slower” (#218).  It “has been, and continues to be, an unmitigated political, economic, and humanitarian disaster for most parts of the developing world” (#224).  This is not true of  “emergency” or “charity-based aid” sent by organizations such as World Vision to alleviate a famine or provide clean water for villages!  Her criticism is directed at the “billions transferred each year directly to poor countries’ governments” (p. 8) through grants and loans.  

Moyo provides a succinct history of post-WWII efforts to lift impoverished peoples into prosperity.  Decade by decade, a variety of strategies, mediated through multitudinous organizations, have been tried and proven unsuccessful, basically because they propped up “client regimes” controlled by corrupt dictators and while rendering dependent and dispirited the alleged recipients of this largesse.  “Vast sums of aid not only foster corruption—they breed it” (p. 52).  Sadly enough:  “One of the most depressing aspects of the whole aid fiasco is that donors, policymakers, governments, academicians, economists and development specialists know, in their heart of hearts, that aid doesn’t work, hasn’t worked and won’t work.  Commenting on at least one aid donor, the Chief Economist at the British Department of Trade and Industry remarked that ‘they know it’s crap, but it sells the T-shirts’” (p. 46).  

The few African exceptions to this pattern, such as Botswana, “succeeded by ceasing to depend on aid” (p. 38).  And the model for helping impoverished nations shines forth in places such as India and Chile, where an emerging middle class practicing self-reliance and encouraging free markets have replaced aid-dependency.  Amazingly, representatives from China, making investments and building roads and seeking raw materials and establishing profitable industries have done far more good for Africa than Western aid!  “The mistake the West made was giving something for nothing.  The secret of China’s success is that its foray into Africa is all business.  The West sent aid to Africa and ultimately did not care about the outcome; this created a coterie of elites and, because the vast majority of people were excluded from wealth, political instability has ensued” (p. 152).  “China, on the other hand, sends cash to Africa and demands returns.  With returns Africans get jobs, get roads, get food, making more Africans better off, and (at least in the interim) the promise of some semblance of political stability.  It is the economy that matters” (p. 152).  

Consequently, Moyo proposes market-based solutions for Africa’s problems.  As “Senegal’s President Wade remarked in 2002:  ‘I’ve never seen a country develop itself through aid or credit.  Countries that have developed—in Europe, America, Japan, Asian countries like Taiwan, Korea and Singapore—have all believed in free markets.  There is no mystery there.  Africa took the wrong road after independence’” (p. 149).  And multiplied millions of people have suffered the consequences.  

   A recent issue of Newsweek featured a cover story by a distinguished Harvard historian, Niall Ferguson, titled “Hit the Road, Barack,” setting forth a substantial argument for the current president’s speedy retirement.  I share Ferguson’s position, largely as a result of reading, during the past four years, 40 plus books by and about President Barack Obama (cf. the appended sources).  Most of them, like prosecutors’ briefs, seek to critique the president for various reasons and are generally polemical in nature.  It’s important to remember, however, that a prosecutor’s brief, despite its imbalance, may be eminently accurate and trustworthy.  A passionate polemic, despite its extreme wording, may very well present accurate information and highlight wrongful behavior.  For example, in 1964 J. Evetts Haley, a distinguished Texas Historian with considerable personal experience in state politics, published A Texan Looks at Lyndon:  A Study in Illegitimate Power.  Many urbane reviewers cavalierly dismissed its intensely negative portrait of President Johnson.  Fifty years later, however, in light of Robert Caro’s exhaustive multi-volume biographical work (detailing Lyndon Johnson’s power-pursuits and machinations), much that Haley said seems accurate and spot-on.  Had voters in 1964 believed Haley and repudiated LBJ the nation would have been spared much agony, most particularly the trauma resulting from his Vietnam War strategies and the trillions of wasted dollars concurrently poured into his Great Society boondoggles.    

So I take many of Barack Obama’s critics seriously, particularly when there appears to be a clear consensus among them regarding the evidence regarding his background and philosophy, his maneuvers and accomplishments.  In this essay I will note several areas wherein I join Obama’s critics in finding him unworthy of re-election.   

1.  AN ILL-PREPARED AND INCOMPETENT CHIEF EXECUTIVE 

Doubts regarding Obama’s lack of executive experience have been amply affirmed during the past four years.  Not only had he never run a business—he hadn’t even chaired an academic department or legislative committee before entering the White House!  His role as a community organizer was limited to  orchestrating protests without establishing effective structures or lasting solutions.  He is, as former President Bill Clinton allegedly declared, an inept “amateur”—the title of a book by Edward Klein, the one-time foreign affairs editor of Newsweek and former editor-in-chief of the New York Times Magazine.  Hillary Clinton too has apparently found Obama frustrating to work with, according to some sources, and is “fed up with ‘a president who can’t make up his mind.’” After hundreds of interviews and wide-ranging research, Klein concluded Obama is “at bottom temperamentally unsuited to be the chief executive and commander in chief of the United States.”  Similar illustrations revealing a president frequently “indecisive and dilatory” appear in Richard Miniter’s persuasive case in Leading from Behind:  The Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide for Him.  

In Debacle:  Obama’s War on Jobs and Grown and What We  Can Do Now to Regain Our Future, Grover G. Norquist (president of American for Tax Reform) and John R. Lott, Jr. (a distinguished economist who has taught at some of the nation’s elite universities), massively and minutely document the president’s failure to deal with what’s often called the Great Recession.  Shortly before Obama’s inauguration, Democrat Senator Byron Dorgan, evaluating the new economic team, warned:  “You’ve picked the wrong people!”  Thus Obama made promises impossible to deliver regarding job creation and economic recovery, rammed through a stimulus bill that subsidized his allies while ultimately harming the nation, and plunged us into almost unfathomable debt.  Rather than helping America recover from the recession, Barack Obama (duplicating FDR’s failures in the 1930s) has aggravated and prolonged it.  

Truth to tell, “the man we have elected president of the United States doesn’t know what he’s doing,” says David Gelernter, a Yale computer professor and Orthodox Jew who portrays Obama as the personification of the educational failures amply evident in the ignorance now plaguing the schools shaped by the ‘60s generation.  Writing in America-Lite:  How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats), Gelertner insists the president speaks for the mindless “adversary culture” incubated in the elite universities (Occidental; Columbia; Harvard) he attended, absorbing the views of PORGIs (post-religious, global intellectuals).  Obama is, consequently, “merely a mouth for garden-variety left-liberal ideas—a mouth of distinction, a mouth in a million, but a mere mouth just the same.  He is important not as a statesman but as a symptom, a dreadful warning.  He is important not because he is exceptional but because he is typical.  He is the new establishment; he represents the post-cultural revolutionary PORGI elite.”  By temperament and training an able agitator, the president lacks those statesmanlike skills needed to lead this nation.    

2.  AN IDEOLOGICAL LEFTIST 

Mounting evidence points to Barack Obama’s leftist convictions and agendas.  In his formative years virtually every influential person in his life promoted such notions.  As Dinesh D’Souza shows, he deeply admires his Kenyan father, Barack Sr., who was an anti-colonial socialist.  His mother, something of a poster girl for the atheistic anti-American countercultural ethos of the ‘60s, embraced various left-wing, anti-American, utopian causes throughout her life.  His primary philosophical mentor in Hawaii, Frank Marshall Davis (as Paul Kengor recently demonstrated in The Communist) was an avid Stalinist.  The books he read and the professors he admired at Occidental and Columbia were frequently Marxists.  The radical circles (e.g. unrepentant Weathermen terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn) within which he moved in Chicago were markedly shaped by Saul Alinski, the noted socialist organizer who wrote Rules for Radicals.  Jeremiah Wright, the pastor he frequently lauded, was a fiery advocate of a Marxist-rooted liberation theology.  His chief political guru, David Axelrod, was mentored by Harry and David Canter; the   elder, Harry, spent time in the ‘30s in Moscow, translating Lenin’s works.  Thus Axelrod has deep roots in radical Chicago circles, consistently espouses leftist ideals and exemplifies their strategies.   

Though muted and disguised with rhetorical skill, Obama’s leftist agenda became evident during his first administration as he sought to centralize power and expand the welfare state, today’s vehicle for attaining traditionally socialist objectives.  Through legislation (Obamacare; Dodd-Frank) and regulation (EPA edicts; NLRB policies) he has dramatically departed from the clear federalism of the Constitution.  Vowing, upon his inauguration, to “fundamentally transform” this nation, the president has consistently worked to establish a European-style social democracy and “spread the wealth around.”  Consummating a century of progressivism, running through Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, Barack Obama presides over what Mark R. Levin describes (in Ameritopia) as “a post-constitutional, democratic utopia of sorts.  It exists behind a Potemken-like image of constitutional republicanism.” Manifestly, warns Daniel Hannon, a British member of the European Parliament, the United States “is Europeanizing its health system, its tax take, its day care, its welfare rules, its approach to global warming, its foreign policy, its federal structure, its unemployment rate.”  

Obama’s ideology informs his commitment to an environmentalism clarified in important administrative appointments.  Obama’s secretary of transportation, Ray LaHood, wants to “coerce people out of their cars” into trains and bicycles; so billions of dollars from the “stimulus package” went to light rail projects, despite their well-documented economic infeasibility.  His secretary of energy, Steven Chu, hoped higher gas prices would make Americans more like Europeans; facing $8 a gallon at the pump they would be forced to buy better cars and use public transportation.  His Science and Technology advisor, John Holdren, a one-time close associate of Paul Ehrlich, seeks to implement the vision etched in extremist ‘60s manifestoes such as The Population Bomb.   His special advisor for green jobs, Van Jones, forced to resign after it was revealed he identified his communist commitments, openly acknowledges using environmentalism as a popular vehicle to establish racial and social justice, in his words “spreading the wealth” and “changing the whole system.”   

His “mania for green energy,” says David Limbaugh in The Great Destroyer, “exceeds all bounds of reason or prudence.  He has dedicated tens of billions of dollars to a wide assortment of fantastic green projects, often falsely advertising them as being geared toward creating jobs and sparking economic growth.”  Philosophically opposed to using or developing the enormous resources of fossil fuels in the United States and Canada, he manipulated the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 to impose a moratorium on exploratory drilling off all the nation’s coasts.  When a federal judge blocked him, he defied the judge and issued an analogous order restricting leases (speaking through his spokesman Ken Salazar, who as a senator from Colorado had said he would oppose all offshore drilling, even if gas prices soared to $10 a gallon).  He effectively cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to Texas, alleging environmental concerns when in fact hundreds of similar pipelines safely and efficiently transport oil throughout the nation.  

Enamored with the illusion that “green energy” will create jobs and make America self-sufficient, Obama authorized dozens of “investments” from the Recovery Act in companies such as the now bankrupt Solyndra (repeatedly celebrated by the president as a perfect example of his aspirations).  Amply illustrating the “crony capitalism” endemic to this regime, Solyndra demonstrated the president’s version of environmentalism.  In Throw Them All Out, Peter Schweizer notes that 80 percent of the renewable energy companies subsidized by the Department of Energy are either owned or run by Obama donors!  “This is,” Schweizer asserts, precisely the same as “Boss Tweed’s financial payoffs writ large,” since the folks who worked for and donated millions of dollars to Obama’s election campaign soon “received billions in government-backed loans and outright grants.”  One of Obama’s staunchest financial supporters, Pat Stryker, a Colorado billionaire, rejoiced to see one of her companies, Abound Solar, awarded $400 million in federal grants as well as $4.7 billion in loan guarantees.  Right in the middle of disbursing these quid pro quod deals one finds lobbyists such as Deana Perlmutter, then-wife of the fabulously-wealthy Colorado Democrat Congressman Ed Perlmutter.    

Compounding this corrupt cronyism, hundreds of “green” projects have abjectly failed.  Proving the folly of most of Obama’s “green energy” investments, the DeSoto Solar Center in Florida, touted by the president as the “largest solar power plant in the United States” and given $150,000 of stimulus money, hired 400 construction workers to build the facility and ended up employing a grand total of two permanent workers.  Further illustrating this pattern, the city of Seattle received $20 million by promising to weatherize homes in needy neighborhoods, creating 2,000 jobs and retrofitting 2,000 homes; ultimately a splendid total of 14 (mainly administrative) jobs and three better-insulated homes bore witness to the efficacy of federal largesse!  

3.  INDIFFERENT TO OUR INALIENABLE NATURAL RIGHTS 

Working out his progressive philosophy, Barack Obama holds the rights enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights are granted by government rather than God.  He adamantly supports abortion-rights, unconcerned about our most basic human right, life.  While running for president, he made every effort to obfuscate the issue, but facts prove him to be the most pro-abortion chief executive in the nation’s history.  He supports partial birth abortion and promised (when speaking to Planned Parenthood’s Action Fund in 2007):  “The first thing I’d do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act,” thereby annulling all efforts to regulate or reduce the number of abortions in the nation.  He wants tax monies to subsidize abortions—thus increasing the millions of dollars Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers rake in from public coffers and then lavishly support him and his “party of death.”  He is, furthermore, one of the few Democrats to oppose saving the lives of babies who survive abortions.  When an effort was made in Illinois to enact legislation, identical to the federal “Born Alive Infants Protection Act,” Obama spoke and voted against it.  

Still more:  he has strongly, if often subtly, moved to infringe upon and deny the “free exercise” of religion guaranteed by the First Amendment.  Early on his spokesmen crafted a linguistic shift from “freedom of religion” to “freedom to worship.”  What you do within your own mind, or within the walls of an approved facility, will be tolerated.  But there is no guaranteed freedom to actually live out your religious beliefs regarding such things as abortion or same-sex marriage.  Inevitably, as his Department of Health and Human Services bureaucrats began implementing Obamacare, they required religious organizations to provide “contraceptive care,” abortifacient drugs and sterilization.   

Shirking his constitutional duty to enforce federal laws, Obama simply announced (through his justice department) he would not defend the Defense of Marriage Act.  Indeed, Attorney-General Eric Holder and his subordinates in the justice department were soon in court arguing against it!  Awakened by this, New York Archbishop Timothy Cardinal Dolan warned the president that his “campaign against DOMA, the institution of marriage it protects, and religious freedom,” would “precipitate a national conflict between church and state of enormous proportions.”  But when the political winds favored it, the president re-embraced his deeply-held determination, announced in the 1996, to support same-sex marriage and evident in his early decision to annul the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in the nation’s armed forces.   Responding to such visible political currents, numerous organizations have endorsed homosexual rights and activities, and gay-rights activists have effectively worked through the media to brand as bigots individuals and institutions who support traditional marriage.  

Obama’s disdain for the Second Amendment and our right to self-defense, verbally expressed at various times in his career, has been carefully documented by the NRA and scholars such as John Lott who are concerned with a free people’s right to self-defense.  Lott, the distinguished legal scholar who wrote More Guns, Less Crime, taught with Barack Obama at the University of Chicago Law School in the 1990s.  When they met, Obama said to Lott:  “Oh, you’re the gun guy.”  When Lott affirmed the statement, Obama said:  “I don’t believe that people should be able to own guns.”  When Lott suggested they might meet and discuss the issue, Obama simply “grimaced and turned away, ending the conversation.” It is thus evident that he revealed his convictions when addressing a group of supporters in San Francisco in 2008, disdaining backward folks in “small towns” who “get bitter” and “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them . . . as a way to explain their frustrations.”  

If Katie Pavlich’s well-documented and disturbing Fast and Furious:  Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and Its Shameless Cover-Up and Richard Miniter’s Leading From Behind are substantially true, the president and his attorney-general are possibly responsible for a scheme to advance their anti-gun agenda by funneling guns to Mexican drug cartels under the direction of the ATF.  “Emails released under congressional subpoena” Pavlich says, “suggest that Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and their senior lieutenants were involved in devising and approving the program in 2009.”  Some critics even believe “that Operation Fast and Furious was built to fail, from a straight law enforcement point of view, and built to succeed in promoting gun control.  Certainly that has been its net effect, helping to justify the administration’s new regulations on long guns.”  Things backfired badly, however, when hundreds of innocents, including border agent Brian Terry were killed the rifles.  The newly-empowered Republicans in Congress launched an investigation into the operation, but it has been stifled by the president’s placing the whole endeavor under the protection of his “executive privilege.”  

4.  A CHICAGO-STYLE POLITIAN

In The Case Against Barack Obama David Fredosso evaluated Obama’s claim to be a “new” kind of politician, a reformer intent on constructive change.  His speeches certainly move the multitudes, but his activities replay an old Chicago script.  He never supported reform or supported change in Chicago.  He has always worked, hand-in-glove, with the entrenched political machine there, supporting the notoriously corrupt Strogers (father and son) who helped run Cook County’s political machine.  The inner circle of Obama’s campaign staff are veteran Chicago operatives and Mayor Daley’s hand deftly massaged the Obama presidential campaign via his veteran publicist, David Axelrod.   

Much the same must be said of Obama’s years in Springfield as a state senator where he linked up with Emil Jones, the senate president who quickly envisioned for Obama a route to the U.S. Senate.  Jones incarnates the patronage system that distinguishes Chicago politics—using tax money to distribute grants and subsidize all sorts of programs (and relatives) to perpetuate one’s career.  When he entered the U.S. Senate Obama repaid his benefactor by earmarking millions of dollars for some of Jones’ pet projects—as well an important one of his own by designating $1 million for the University of Chicago Medical Center where his wife Michelle was a vice president; her $200,000 salary conveniently doubled just as her husband entered the U.S. Senate!  Soon thereafter she changed the center’s bidding process so as to give the Blackwell Consulting firm a package deal worth $600,000, a nice remuneration for a long-time political ally and friend, Robert Blackwell.  

Barack Obama was barely into the first year of his presidency when Michelle Malkin published Culture of Corruption:  Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies.  Researching the records of various associates and appointees Malkin found “a dysfunctional and dangerous conglomerate of business-as-usual cronies” including Rahm Emanuel, Valerie Jarrett, Joe Biden, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, and Eric Holder.  Vice President Biden, while hardly as wealthy as many senators, has placed his children in cushy positions as lobbyists and hedge funds operatives and early profited from the services of the now-imprisoned ponzi-fund Texas financier R. Allen Stanford.  While publically decrying lobbyists, Biden earmarked more than $3.4 million for clients his son represented.  One of Obama’s confidantes, Jim Johnson, named to his pre-inaugural transition team, headed Fannie Mae from 1991 to 1998, despite having “accepted more than $7 million in below-market-rate loans from Countrywide,” and his successor,  Franklin Raines, quickly netted a sweet $1 million loan from Countrywide before retiring with a golden parachute worth $240 before both Fannie and Countrywide collapsed, helping  trigger the Great Recession.  

David Fredosso, in Gangster Government:  Barack Obama and the New Washington Thugocracy, takes his title from an article by Michael Barone, one of the nation’s most respected political analysts; it is an apt summation of the president’s penchant for rewarding his political allies with financial windfalls.  And it is, it seems, the reliably tested-and-tried Chicago way that’s become the Obama-way.   

SOURCES 

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Brooks, Arthur C.  The Battle:  How the Fight Between FREE ENTERPRISE and BIG GOVERNMENT   Will Shape America’s Future.  New York:  Basic Books, c. 2010.

_____.    The Road to Freedom:  How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise.  New York:  Basic Books, c. 2010.  

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_____.  Obama’s America:  Unmaking the American Dream.  Washington:  Regnery Publishing, Inc., c. 2012.  

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Hewitt, Hugh.  The Brief Against Obama:  The Rise, Fall & Epic Fail of the Hope & Change Presidency.  New York:  Center Street, c. 2012.  

Higgs, Robert.  Crisis and Leviathan:  Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government.  New York:  Oxford University Press, c. 1987.  

Horowitz, David, & Jamie Glazov, eds.  The Hate America Left.  N.D., N.P.  

Horowitz, David, & Jacob Laksin.  The New Leviathan:  How the Left-Wing Money Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America’s Future.  New York:  Crown Forum, c. 2012.  

Horowitz, David, & Richard Poe.  The Shadow Party:  How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party.  Nashville:  Thomas Nelson, c. 2006.  

Kengor, Paul.  The Communist:  Frank Marshall Davis:  The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor.   New York:  Threshold Editions, c. 2012.  

Kerpen, Phil.  Democracy Denied:  How Obama is Ignoring You and Bypassing Congreess to Radically Transform America—and How to Stop Him.  Dallas:  BenBella Books, Inc., c. 2011.  

Kibbe, Matt.  Hostile Takeover:  Resisting Centralized Government’s Stranglehold on America.  New York:  HarperCollins, c. 2012.  

Klein, Aaron.  Fool Me Twice:  Obama’s Schocking Plans for the Next Four Years Exposed.  New York:  WorldNetDaily Books, c. 2012.  

_____.   The Manchurian President.  New York:  WorldNetDaily Books, c. 2010.  

_____.   Red Army:  The Radical Network That Must Be Defeated to Save America.  New York:  HarperCollins, c. 2011.  

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Levine, Mark.  Ameritopia:  The Unmaking of America.  New York:  Threshold Editions, c. 2010.  

_____.    Liberty and Tyranny:  A Conservative Manifesto.  New York:  Simon & Schuster , Threshold Editions, c. 2009.  

Limbaugh, David.  Crimes Against Liberty:  An Indictment of President Barack Obama.  Washington:  Regnery Publishing, Inc., c. 2010.  

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During his long and prolific (41 books) academic career Stanley L. Jaki, an Hungarian-born Benedictine priest, received many of the prestigious honors bestowed upon eminent scholars—e.g. the Lecomte du Nouy Prize, the Templeton Prize, the Gifford Lectureship.  In A Mind’s Matter:  An Intellectual Autobiography (Grand Rapids:  William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, c. 2002), he charted the significant events and accomplishments in his life as a physicist-theologian with earned doctorates in both disciplines.  This is not a conventional, chronological life-story, however, since Jaki wrote “for those who, because they have found the message of my books instructive, would like to see its development through the eyes of their author” (p. vii).  He also wrote to counter thinkers who are “systematically shredding the last bits of its Christian cultural inheritance.  This is what weighs most heavily on my mind” (p. 217).  This volume provides a handy précis of his thought  (though extensive reading in the corpus of books would of course provide deeper insight into his positions). 

  As a 20^th century Christian intellectual, Jaki sought to offset the secular humanism birthed half-a-millennium ago in the Renaissance, an epoch wherein it “was not man added to God, but man minus God, the God of the supernatural dispensation.  The Renaissance wanted to dispense man of any concern about that God” (p. x).  In subsequent centuries an army of secularists endeavored “to deny any tie, factual or possible, between Christianity and science” (p. x), repudiating any Supernatural dimension to Reality.  “For most in academe the basic dogma is that science is the savior of mankind, and is already liberating mankind from that highest form of superstition, which is Christian belief in the supernatural” (p. 57).  Thus there is a mighty battle being waged for man’s mind, a battle Jaki resolutely joined whenever possible, fully aware of “the great contestatation which has taken on a frightening vigor for the past two or three decades and got into high gear during the 1990s.  It is a wholesale attack by the champions of naturalism and secularism on the supernatural as mainly represented by the Catholic Church” (p. xii).  This rejection of God has, however, been accompanied by a growing ennui, a general malaise of meaninglessness.  To Jaki:  “All our cultural ills and woes, the disintegration of Western culture unfolding before our very eyes, are due to a growing loss of the sense of purpose” (p. 171).  

Jaki began his scholarly work with a doctoral dissertation on ecclesiology, a treatise that occupies a “place of honor” in the library of Pope Benedict XVI due to the fact that Jaki early discerned some of the devastation that would follow liturgical and theological innovations in the wake of Vatican II—“the greatest self-inflicted wounds which theologians have ever inflicted on the Church in the shortest conceivable time” (p. 17).  Following the Second World War he came to the United States and, while teaching theology, found himself drawn to graduate studies in physics with a special interest in the history of science.  To his dismay, he found that scientists, “who in their own field demanded utmost carefulness with data, were shown to act in a cavalier manner with respect to historical facts relating to their topics” (p. 32).  So he devoted himself to rectifying the record, exploring archives rather than experimenting in laboratories.  His theological concerns “led me first into the deep waters of modern physics, and from there to the even deeper currents of the history and philosophy of science.  The work I have done in that field was dedicated to the defense of certain theses—the existence of mind as distinct from matter; the fundamental importance for scientific method of an epistemology embodied in the classical proofs of the existence of God; the limited validity or relevance of exact science or physics; the crucial importance of Christian belief in creation for the unique rise of science” (p. 120).  

He especially discovered—and sought to make known—that the allegations of Enlightenment intellectuals such as Voltaire regarding the “alleged darkness of the Christian Middle Ages” was basically “the work of those who write intellectual history from the dark recesses of their prejudices” (p. 40).  This was definitively proven by the great French scholar, Pierre Duhem, a “kindred mind” whose insights (in Systeme du monde) provided Jaki exhaustive evidence regarding the scientific accomplishments of Medieval Christian scholars.  In truth:   “The only viable birth of science took place in a culture [Christendom] steeped in a vision wherein history, cosmic and human, appeared to be subject to a single one-directional movement, for which a straight arrow may be the most appropriate symbol” (p. 51).  In addition to rehabilitating the Middle Ages, Jaki sought to demonstrate the errors of naturalistic biology, flowering in the soil of Darwin, whose inner core stands revealed in some letters he wrote responding to the inquiries of a young German who wondered “whether evolutionary theory is compatible with belief in biblical revelation in general and in Christ in particular” (p. 64).  With uncustomary frankness Darwin acknowledged “that he did not think that there ever was a revelation.” (p. 64).  This statement led Jaki to compose some lectures published as The Savior of Science wherein he “set forth for the first time the scientific impact of the Logos doctrine” inscribed in the Nicene Creed (p. 66).  The saint responsible for much of the creed’s formulation, “Saint Athanasius clearly perceived an all-important implication:  The divinity of the Logos demanded that the universe created by the Father in the Son be fully logical, that is, fully ordered as befitted a truly divine Logos” (p. 66).  The universe is logical, not chaotic; ordered, not chance-driven.  “At any rate, the evidence of design, indicative of some purpose, is overwhelming everywhere in nature” (p. 174).  

Invited to deliver the 1976-1977 Gifford Lectures (the most prestigious award granted natural philosophers), Jaki wrote The Road of Science and the Ways to God, meticulously detailing significant developments in the history of science, showing how the greatest minds—Newton, “Galileo, Copernicus, Oresme, and Buridan, all endorsed natural theology insofar as they held that reflection on the natural world could propel the mind to recognize the Creator” (p. 95).  He especially stressed their common commitment to methodical realism, with its assumption of a rationally-ordered cosmos.  Indeed, “the gradual de-Christianization of the West logically brought about a progressive turning away from the objectively real to the subjectively perceived” (p. 183).  With this established, he turned to a defense of classical arguments for the existence of God.  

In addition to his scientific studies, Jaki devoted considerable attention to John Henry Newman, one of the 19^th century intellectual giants who “again and again predicted the coming collapse of the liberal Western world’s intellectual and moral fabric” (p. 202).  Newman “characterized his entire life as a struggle against the principle of liberalism.  He specified it as the natural man’s standard that all religions are equally good, that there had been no supernatural revelation, that man never experienced a Fall and therefore stood in no need of a supernatural salvation” (p. 203).  Newman perceptively diagnosed the deadly threat of naturalism (with its scientific trappings) posing as mankind’s savior.  Nor was he ever a “Darwinist, not even an evolutionist,” primarily because the word “‘evolution’ eventually became synonymous with randomness and chance and therefore with discontinuity.  Evolution no longer means that something evolves because it has been there at least in embryo on the first place” (p. 214).  Still more:  “Newman’s mind was immune to the illogicalities of Darwin’s arguments” (p. 214).  Thus, while touring London’s Botanical Garden in 1876, he delighted in the wonders of the flora and exclaimed:  “But what argument could the Evolutionists bring against this as evidence of the work of Mind?’” (p. 215).  

The evidence of Mind in nature (and the functioning of mind within man) reverberates throughout  Jaki’s Mind’s Matter, reminding one of one of his finest treatises, Brain, Mind and Computers, wherein he persuasively demonstrated the long succession of failing endeavors to reduce man’s mind to any kind of mechanical device, computers included.  The mystery of the human mind simply cannot be dispelled by scientific means.  Nor can the ultimate Mystery of a Mind-designed Universe be reduced to atoms-in-motion or the chance-and-necessity of natural selection.  While a prior appreciation for his works enables one to more fully absorb this book, anyone concerned for the intersections of science and theology in the past century will profit from perusing it.  

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

Though most of Jaki’s works focus on the history of science, in Means to Message:  A Treatise on Truth (Grand Rapids:  Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Col., c. 1999) he developed some of the guiding philosophical themes basic to his endeavors.  Much of his work was devoted to the history of science, and he always “considered the study of history to be a branch of philosophy” which “teaches by examples, which are such only if they serve as so many mirrors in which one can take a proper measure of oneself and of society” (p. 4), and “to write history is to do philosophy” (p. 199).  His historical perspective frequently enables him to remain nonplussed by sensational and inevitably transient “scientific” claims or alleged discoveries or end-of-discussion theories.  For him: “Philosophy has to be the love of reality all across the spectrum, which is, however, complexity incarnate” (p. 2).  There are neither simple answers nor demonstrable encyclopedic theories available suitable for the love of wisdom.   

In response to question “What is Truth?  The answer, ‘adaequatio rei ad intellectum,’ [correspondence of a thing to the intellect] is Aquinas’ definition of truth” (p. 10).  The thing exists, and the mind can know it.  Philosophy, rightly done, begins with the reality of objects.  The failure to begin with an objectively given reality “is responsible for the fact that the history of philosophy may appear to be a chain of errors” (p. 17).  Beginning with one’s own mind, reducing truth to subjectivity, following the lead of thinkers such as Descartes and Spinoza, Kant and Kierkegaard, sabotages the real task of philosophy, founded on “Chesterton’s great philosophical and linguistic tour de force:  “‘There is an is!’” (p. 23).  “The reality of objects should be a truth clearer than daylight” (p. 27).  Yet modern philosophers “want clear ideas,” whether or not they stand anchored in existent things.  

Though deeply interested in science, Jaki insists that it provides no foundation for philosophy.  “The road that connects philosophy and exact science is a one-way road.  One can travel from philosophy to science, but not from science to philosophy, unless one confuses science with the philosophy which scientists through around their science” (p. 54).   Unfortunately, great scientists such as Einstein, ignoring his own confession that “the man of science is a poor philosopher’” (p. 43) frequently make seriously flawed philosophical pronouncements.  In truth, science is “a superb tool for handling things, because they all have quantitative properties, but is of no help in understanding anything else about things, let alone what things are” (p. 63).  As a primary example Jaki cites Werner Heisenberg, who tried to expand his discoveries in quantum mechanics to a philosophical principle of uncertainty (rejecting causality) regarding everything and sinking into demonstrably fallacious reasoning.  

The failure of science to truly understand human nature stands revealed in the denial of free will often asserted under the rubric of “brain science,” earlier explored in Jaki’s Brain, Mind, and Computers.  “In a sense,” he says, “the philosophy of free will amounts to a declaration similar to the immediacy of kicking a stone, or Samuel Johnson’s famed demonstration of external reality.  The one-liner, ‘Sir (said he), we know our will is free, and there’s an end on’t’ . . . capsulized all that can be said in essence about free will as a reality” (p. 65).  Philosophers like Spinoza and the Enlightenment thinkers who followed him denied free will by reducing the mind to a machine—a practice still widely evident in evolutionary psychology manifestoes.  As formulated by Fichte:  “‘In my immediate consciousness I appear to myself to be free, but through reflection upon the whole of nature I find that freedom is utterly impossible’” (p. 69).  Despite their assertions, however, those who deny the reality of free will inevitably  employ it in their denials!  No intellectual writes a book persuaded he cannot refrain from doing so!  “Poincare’s now century-old dictum, ‘no determinist argues deterministically,’ sums up it all” (p. 70).   As a Christian, Jaki makes the significant point that God “created man to be free so that man’s service may have that merit which only a freely performed act can have.  God therefore has to remain a subtly hidden God, lest man should find himself ‘constrained’ to obey Him” (p. 78).   

We are free because we can think rationally, we know we are conscious and can understand ourselves and our surroundings.  Our minds function much differently from the mechanical process of the material world.  “Unlike bodies, thoughts are not extended.  Unlike bodies that move necessarily, mental operations are often performed with an explicit sense of freedom and for a purpose at that” (p. 127).  Our ability to formulate and use words—the “incredibly strange faculty which is language” (p. 130)—especially illustrates a non-material depth to our minds.  “What, however, can be known (it had been pointed out in 1927 and by an unabashed materialist) is a frightful conundrum:  If one’s mental processes are the equivalent to actions of atoms, one can have no reason to assume that one’s beliefs are true.  Those beliefs may be sound chemically, but not intellectually.  Hence there remains no reason for even supposing that one’s brain (or one’s computer) is composed of atoms” (p. 133).  “All this appears especially baffling when seen from Darwin’s evolutionary perspective, in which material needs and use precede all developments, including the development of intellectual faculties.  Already Wallace pointed out to Darwin that his explanation of the evolution of the mind was equivalent to putting the cart before the horse.  . . . .  The only answer Darwin could give was an imperious No!, which he wrote on the margin of a reprint of an essay which Wallace sent him.  This reply may have satisfied Darwin’s resolve to fight tooth and nail anything indicative of something non-material in man, but if left the problem fully intact” (pp. 129-130).  

That there is purpose in the cosmos seems manifestly evident to Jaki, though denied by the 18^th century Enlightenment thinkers who reduced man, as Carl Becker approvingly wrote, to “‘little more than a chance deposit on the surface of the world, carelessly thrown up between two ice ages by the same forces that rust iron and ripen corn, a sentient organism endowed by some happy or unhappy accident with intelligence indeed, but with an intelligence that is conditioned by the very forces which it seeks to understand and control’” (p. 84).  Add Darwin’s 19^th century theory of natural selection to the mix wherein, Jaki says:   “The comedy of philosophical myopia was crowned by the matter-of-fact acceptance of the view that an evolutionary process, which is seemingly and allegedly purposeless, could produce a being whose very nature is to act for a purpose.  The view implies a monumental non-sequitur, which remains the Achilles’ heel of an evolutionary science turned into an ideology of evolutionism.  The latter has not better foundation than the miscegenation of chance and necessity.  Of these two, chance remains a glorious cover-up for necessity.  As to necessity, it is refuted by the very freedom whereby it is posited” (p. 82).  

As in creation, there is a moral end or purpose to life.  The lack of such is revealed in Captain Ahab in Melville’s  Moby Dick, where he says, “All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.” Thus Jaki asks, “Was this merely madness or was it a sin?  By trying to cover up with a psychiatric label something essentially unethical, that is, sinful, Captain Ahab anticipated modern man’s desperate footwork to obliterate the categories of moral good and moral evil so that he might escape the profoundly moral predicament of human existence, steeped, to put it bluntly, in sin” (p. 155).  Many efforts to destroy ethical distinctions wrap themselves in “scientific” theories (e.g. relativity, natural selection, and sociobiology).  “In fact,” Jaki notes, “science, when left to itself, invites the opposite to moral probity.  On the basis of science alone, mankind is but another animal species, locked in a grim struggle for survival” (p. 163).  As Darwin himself admitted, “‘A man who has no assured and no present belief in the existence of a personal God or a future existence with retribution and rewards, can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones’” (p. 163).  Consequently:  “For the first time in history man is experimenting with one-parent families, taken for a normal alternative to old-fashioned monogamous unions.  Same-sex unions are receiving legal protection to the extent of their being granted the right of adoption.  Advocates of polygamy have begun to raise their voice, and they need no other arguments than the ones used with success on behalf of same-sex unions” (p. 156).  Such developments stem from reducing “the categories of the ethically good and ethically evil” rooted in Transcendent Reality to “the categories of legally permissible and legally prohibited” subjectively determined by human beings (p. 157).  There is, therefore, nothing absolutely forbidden.  

“One can bemoan the fact,” says Jaki, “that the Ten Commandments have turned in public perception into the Ten Counsels, or something much less, but the process is undeniable and logical.  If man, as he actually exists, is believed to do the good by natural inclination, there remains no barrier against viewing any and all inclination of man as something naturally good and thereby entitled to legal protection.  The latter, as is well known, is ultimately a function of counting the votes cast at regularly repeated elections” (p. 158).  This democratic way of setting moral standards was, however, decisively rejected by Moses, who declared:  “Neither shall you allege the example of the many as an excuse for doing wrong, nor shall you, when testifying in a lawsuit, side with the many in perverting justice” (Ex. 23:2).  

In citing Moses, of course, Jaki make clear his conviction that morality must be derived from a Higher Authority than man’s reason or experience.  That God is Real ever remains central to his thought; that His existence is demonstrable remains his informed conviction, for the very limits of our own reality necessarily suggests the limitless Reality underlying our existence.  “The explanation can only be found in a being which is self-explaining in the sense that it possesses all perfection in an absolutely perfect way, and above all the perfection to exist and do so without any limitation” (p. 165).  Such an elucidation is deeply philosophical and theological rather than scientific, for scientific methods simply cannot probe intangible realities.  Demonstrating the existence of God or the soul requires thinking that is “radically inferential” inasmuch as it “has for its object something which is no longer material but strictly spiritual” (p. 176).   

This was the approach of Medieval Scholastics such as Thomas Aquinas, whom Jaki cheerfully follows.  And he shares the commendation given them by Condorcet, himself a hostile witness:  “‘We owe to the Schoolmen,’ Condorcet wrote, ‘more precise notions concerning the ideas that can be entertained about the supreme Being and his attributes; the distinction between the first cause and the universe which it is supposed to govern; the distinction between spirit and matter; the different meanings that can be given to the word liberty; what was meant by creation; the manner of distinguishing the various operations of the human mind; and the correct way of classifying such ideas as it can form of real objects and their properties’” (p. 179).  

# # # 

While working as a psychiatrist at UCLA, Miriam Grossman, M.D., grew distressed by the fact that various ideological mandates from her profession and university seriously endangered the youngsters she sought to serve.  So she wrote Unprotected:   A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student (New York:  Sentinel, c. 2006, 2007).  Fearing her career would be compromised, she first published the book anonymously!  This was because, as Robert Perloff, a former president of the American Psychiatric  Association, confessed in 2004:  “‘I lived through the McCarthy era and the Hollywood witch hunts and, as abominable as these were, there was not the insidious sense of intellectual intimidation that currently exists under political correctness’” (p. xxi).  In short order, however, Dr. Laura Schlesinger discerned Grossman’s authorial stamp and urged her to publically acknowledge it.  With Dr. Laura and her vast radio audience supporting her, emboldened by favorable reviews in numerous publications, Grossman found her message resonating with important segments of the population and began energetically promoting it.  That’s because:  “You see, I’m a woman with a mission, and one of my goals is the large-scale revision of sexual health education” (p. xii).  “Unprotected,” she says, “tells the stories of college students who are casualties of the radical activism in my profession” (p. xxviii).  

On today’s university campuses there’s “a tacit approval of promiscuity and experimentation” (p. xvii) with virtually no recognition of the grave damage such behavior causes.  This was on display in one of the women who came to Grossman’s office deeply confused and depressed.  Probed to evaluate events in her past, she acknowledged that her relationship with a “friend with benefits” had left her puzzled and sad, wanting more than transient sexual encounters.  She sensed, deep in her being, that “we are designed to bond” (p. 8).  Another woman asked the doctor why (given all the sexual instruction available on campus) “‘do they tell you how to protect your body—from herpes and pregnancy—but they don’t tell what it does to your heart?’” (p. 3).  Nothing was said because it would violate a primary plank of the feminist agenda.  “To acknowledge the negative consequences of the anything-goes, hooking-up culture would challenge the notion that women are just like men, and undermine the premise of ‘safer sex.’  And in our ultra-secular campuses, no belief comes so close as these to being sacred” (p. 5).  In addition to the damage done to the heart, there’s “self-injurious behavior—and there’s loads of it on campus” (p. 13).  Young women, especially, are cutting themselves, often as a result of discovering they’ve contracted a STD such as HPV, now virtually an epidemic on campus.  They’re rarely told that chlamydia may very well render them incapable of bearing children.  Gay men rarely receive accurate information regarding the risks they run when engaging in homosexual activities.  Many admonitions stream from health centers regarding the dangers of tobacco, but warnings regarding sexual activity rarely materialize.   

Similarly absent in campus health centers is any recognition of the importance of religion.  When one of Grossman’s patients discovered her willing to encourage prayer and spiritual endeavors, he was both surprised and relieved.  It’s demonstrable that “students who are highly involved in religion report better mental health” (p. 34), but psychiatrists routinely ignore such evidence.  There will be professional representatives of various ethnic groups on campus, but students “will not find a therapist at the student counseling center with their social values” (p. 39).  Personally agnostic or atheistic, mental health specialists often have little regard for traditional religious belief and experience.  Thus there is, Grossman declares, an “irrational antagonism that psychology has for religion:  theophobia” (p. 45).  

Equally politically incorrect on campus is any criticism of abortion.  Planned Parenthood activists routinely tell young women there are no psychological consequences to “the removal of ‘tissue’ or of ‘uterine contents’” (p. 101).  Yet many of them do in fact feel deeply that they’ve taken the life of their babies, and one of Planned Parenthood’s own studies reveals “that after two years 28 percent of women reported more harm from the abortion than benefit, 19 percent would not make the same decision under the same circumstances, 20 percent were depressed” (p. 83).  Feminists may deny there’s trauma in aborting one’s baby, but Grossman deals daily with collegians (men as well as women) refuting the regnant ideology.  Abortion, however, receives no serious attention in psychiatric journals or meetings, and virtually all mental health centers uphold the “entrenched dogma:  the experience is just not a big deal” (p. 91.  To this Grossman asks:  “why does psychology, in its quest to identify and counsel every victim of possible child abuse, sexual harassment, or hurricanes, leave no stone unturned, and then go berserk at the suggestion that maybe, maybe, some—not all but some—women and men hurt for a long, long time after abortion, and they too need our help?” (p. 101).  

Most of the students Grossman examined deeply desired to marry and establish families.  But Planned Parenthood and its on-campus surrogates neither celebrate nor tell young people anything about marriage and family!  In truth, Planned Parenthood has nothing to do with parenthood!  Regarding “how a young woman can preserve her fertility and maximize her chances of becoming a mother, Planned Parenthood is silent” (p. 134).  Instead, they urge unfettered sexual activities while avoiding pregnancy, fundamentally misleading our young.  In sum, Grossman has “one question:  Shouldn’t our daughters be warned?” (p. 140).  And she’s written a powerful book packed with multiple warnings!  

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In Unhooked:  How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both (New York:  Riverhead Books, c. 2007), Laura Sessions Stepp assembles a journalistic montage of sexual activities on high school and elite university (e.g. Duke and George Washington) campuses.  Today’s collegians, she says, “have virtually abandoned dating and replaced it with group get-togethers and sexual behaviors that are detached from love or commitment,” engaging in “casual sexual encounters known as hookups” (p. 4).  Rather than actually uniting two persons as the word “hook up” implies, the “hook-up” culture studiously avoids any meaningful personal bonds!  This distresses the author, who believes that our “need to be connected intimately to others is as central to our well-being as food and shelter.  In my view, if we don’t get it right, we’re probably not going to get anything else in life right” (p. 8).  So she writes with a sense of sadness for the young women (three Washington D.C. high school girls and six college students) she interviewed, fearing that for all their professional successes they will surely attain they will fail to find what they most deeply crave, becoming the women they’re designed to be.  

Seeking to define “hooking up,” Stepp discovered that for many it means generally unplanned, alcohol-fueled, “random oral sex” (p. 29)—though intercourse is of course inevitably part of the scene.  “Of the hundreds of young women I interviewed about hookup experiences, less than a half-dozen said they were sober at the time” (p. 115).  Conversation is minimal, love is never mentioned, and no subsequent interactions are promised.  Unfortunately, these young women were not prepared for the truth that “women always remember in great detail the first time they had sex, even women who take so many men to bed that they forget the other names and faces.  I suspect that it’s not just lost maidenhood that etches that one time in their minds, but also the first-time union of the physical and the emotional—a powerful reaction that young women often aren’t expecting” (p. 110).  Recent research points to a biological basis for this:  “When female mammals engage in intercourse, the hormone oxytocin is released in large amounts.  Oxytocin, usually associated with the release of breast milk during childbirth, stimulates a caring instinct during or after intercourse, apparently more in women than in men.  Though the research is still new, there’s a good chance that, as one scientist put it, ‘you’re specific to a man as soon as you have sex.’  Severing that bond can be emotionally difficult” (p. 121).  

Curious as to “how we got here,” Stepp sketches the context for hooking-up.  Front and center is Feminism, with its call for female empowerment, which “is undeniably a driving force behind the phenomenon of hooking-up” (p. 143).  Being in control, at least as they understand it, fuels the transient liaisons young women contract.  Then permissive parents add the lack of adult guidance to this mix.  Preaching “self-sufficiency and independence,” frequently failing to provide models of marital fidelity and bliss, too many moms and dads simply set their daughters loose on the high seas of youth culture without any “vision of what good love, good sex and meaningful work looked like in combination” (p. 170).  Ever vigilant in prescribing nutritional advice and securing a quality education for their daughters, always adamant regarding their limitless vocational opportunities, parents foolishly entrust their daughters’ sexual instruction to TV, magazines, and peers. Finally, today’s college environment incubates the hookup lifestyle.  Apart from momentary and generally impersonal contacts with professors, students live almost entirely with their peers and try to participate in a campus life which is utterly unregulated.  No adults seem to care what transpires in university dorms and fraternity houses.  “It is safe to say that dating would not have vanished completely, nor hooking up become as common as a cold, were it not for coed dorms and unrestricted visiting hours” (p. 202).  To stand apart from the hookup campus culture requires an inner fortitude rarely found in adolescents!  

Evaluating the evidence she’s presented, Stepp concludes by insisting it really matters.  Young women fare poorly in the hookup world.  Impersonal sexual escapades provide short-term pleasure without long-term fulfillment.  “A girl can tuck a Trojan into her purse on a Saturday night, but there is no such device to protect her heart” (p. 225).  Thus there is, says Richard Kadison, a psychiatrist and chief of mental health services at Harvard University, “‘an epidemic of depression’ on campus” (p. 228).   Virtually all young women want to marry and have children some day.  What they fail to understand, however, is how seriously the hookup culture negates that prospect, for “the traits that characterize good marriages are firmly established and include trust, respect, admiration, honesty, selflessness, communication, caring and, perhaps more than anything else, commitment.  Hookups are about anything but these qualities” (p. 237).  Thus at the very time they should be cultivating and nourishing these qualities today’s young women are acting out the converse.  Sexually active, they rarely actually enjoy it.  Attracted to men, they frequently find them unattractive.  Wanting children, they increasingly find single parenthood alluring.  In short, the consequences of the sexual revolution reveal its bankruptcy.

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

Nearly a century ago, in A Preface to Morals, Walter Lippmann labeled artificial contraception “the most revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals.”  He doubtless discerned, Mary Eberstadt says, “the movement of many Protestant denominations away from the sexual morality agreed upon by the previous millennia of Christendom.  The Anglican abandonment in 1930 of the longstanding prohibition against artificial contraception is a special case in point, undermining as it subsequently did for many believers the very idea that any church could tell people what to do with their bodies, ever again” (p. 97).  Decades later, assessing the record, Albert Mohler Jr., an eminent Southern Baptist theologian, noted:  “‘I cannot imagine any development in human history, after the Fall, that has had a greater impact on human beings than the Pill. . . .  The entire horizon of the sexual act changes’” (p. 151).   In retrospect, perhaps the Anglicans in 1930 should have paid closer attention to some of the “pronouncements of the founding fathers of Protestantism.”  For example:  “Martin Luther in a commentary on the Book of Genesis declared contraception to be worse than incest or adultery.  John Calvin called it an ‘unforgivable crime’” (p. 156).  

Consequently, Eberstadt, in Adam and Eve After the Pill:  Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, c. 2012) declares:  “Modern contraception is not only a fact of our time; it may even be the central fact, in the sense that it is hard to think of any other whose demographic, social, behavioral, and personal fallout have been as profound” (p. 11).  Still more:  “The technological revolution of modern contraception has in turn furled the equally widely noted ‘sexual revolution’—defined here and elsewhere as the ongoing destigmatization of all varieties of nonmarital sexual activity, accompanied by a sharp rising such sexual activity” (p. 12).  If anything amply illustrates the “law of unintended consequences” it’s the flawed expectations of the sexual revolution provoked by the Pill.  Consequently,  she says:  “It is the contention of this book that such benign renditions of the story of the sexual revolution are wrong” (p. 15).  

One of the 20^th centuries philosophical giants, Elizabeth Anscombe (a devout Roman Catholic who famously sparred with C.S. Lewis at Oxford University’s Socratic Club) saw the issue clearly:  “‘If contraceptive intercourse is permissible, then what objection” can one make to various other forms of sexual activity?  If sensual pleasure is all that matters, certainly there are various ways of attaining it.  “‘It can’t be the mere pattern of bodily behavior in which the stimulation is procured that makes all the difference.  But if such things are all right, it becomes perfectly impossible to see anything wrong with homosexual intercourse, for example.  I am not saying:  if you think contraception [is] all right you will do these other things; not at all.  The habit of respectability persists and old prejudices die hard.  But I am saying:  you will have no solid reason against these things’” (p. 150).  Once the first phase of the sexual revolution has been embraced, there hardly any way to arrest or even modify it.  

Providing an important “intellectual backdrop” to the revolution is, Eberstadt insists, “the will to disbelieve,” a “profound and systematic resistance to the empirical facts” (p. 24).  Evidence abounds regarding the harms caused by unrestrained sexual freedom.  But just as devout Marxists refused to recognize any evils in the Soviet Union or Cuba (odes to Che Guevara still resound around the world!), so too celebrants of uninhibited genital pleasure tout it as nothing but a boon to mankind.  “This resolute refusal to recognize that the revolution falls heaviest on the youngest and most vulnerable shoulders—beginning with the fetus and proceeding up through children and adolescents—is perhaps the most vivid example of the denial surrounding the fallout of the sexual revolution.  In no other realm of human life do ordinary Americans seem so indifferent to the particular suffering of the smallest and weakest” (p. 29).  

Along with our youngsters, our women (contrary to feminist dogma) are also suffering.  While freeing them to behave as freely as men, they have in the process freed men from the obligations that nurture women.  Consequently, as Kay Hymowitz says, women must deal with “‘an unintended set of medical, economic, and social consequences, including more child-men, single mothers, and fatherless homes’” (p. 37).  Young women in the ‘60s thought they were freed to have more fun.  In time, however, they found themselves saddled with onerous liabilities while the men expanded their pleasures.  Consequently, “Over the past thirty-five years, ‘women’s happiness has fallen both absolutely and relative to men’s in a pervasive way among groups, such that women no longer report being happier than men and, in many instances, now report happiness that is below that of men’” (p. 47). 

This certainly repudiates the feminist gospel, early proclaimed by the likes of Betty Frieden, which promised utopian delights in the garden of liberation.  For what we find in the nonstop stream of subsequent feminist publications, is, Eberstadt says, this:  “If feminists married and had children, they lamented it.  If they failed to marry or have children, they lamented that, too.  If they worked outside the home and also tended their children, they complained about how hard that was.  If they worked outside the home and didn’t tend their children, they excoriated anyone who thought they should.  And running through all this literature is more or less constant invective about the unreliability and disrespect of men” (p. 146).  “As the peerless Midge Decter once noted, the real truth about the sexual revolution is that it has made of sex an almost chaotically limitless and therefore unmanageable realm in the life of women’” (p. 44).  Sadly, Eberstadt  concludes:  “In the postrevolutionary world, sex is easier had than ever before; but the opposite appears true for romance.  This is perhaps the central enigma that modern men and women are up against:  romantic want in a time of sexual plenty” (p. 53).  

Men too have been adversely affected by the sexual revolution, especially inasmuch as it renders them perpetual adolescents playing videogames rather than shouldering the responsibilities of marriage and children.  Doing so they affirm the old adage:  “Adults don’t make babies; babies make adults.”  Of particular concern to Eberstadt is the growing influence of pornography on young men, providing sexual satisfactions deliberately detached from personal commitments.  Academics and feminists may dismiss the problem—it is, after all, they say, only one any number of tolerable sexual activities—but reality presents us with “the marriages lost or in tatters; the sexual problems among the addicted; the constant slide, on account of higher tolerance, into ever edgier circles of this hell; the children and teenagers lured into participating in the various ways in this awful world in the effort to please romantic partners or exploitive adults” (p. 60).  In Roger Scruton’s perceptive analysis:  “‘This, it seems to me, is the real risk attached to pornography.  Those who become addicted to this risk-free form of sex run a risk of another and greater kind.  They risk the loss of love, in a world where only love brings happiness’” (pp. 63-64).  

Graver still is the emergent “pedophilia chic” evident in certain quarters of the new morality.  Though sexually exploiting children generally remains one of the few remaining taboos in our culture, some liberationists find nothing to condemn in sex with minors—or “intergenerational sex”—especially if it’s pursued by celebrities such as Roman Polanski or his defenders, e.g. Frederic Mitterand, France’s minister of culture, has been exposed “as a sex tourist whose autobiographical novel speaks frankly of his use of boy prostitutes in Thailand” (p. 76).  Eberstadt provides examples of academics, publishing in prestigious journals such as the APA’s  Psychological Bulletin, who seek to soften opposition to adult-child sex.  (The scandals of priestly abuse of minors in the Catholic Church, however, elicited such outrage on all sides that for the moment the taboo endures.)  

Amazingly, as Eberstadt concludes in her final chapter, “The Vindication of Humanae Vitae,” Pope Paul VI was prophetic and right in his 1968 encyclical sustaining the Catholic Church’s opposition to artificial birth control!  In truth, “the most unfashionable, unwanted, and ubiquitously deplored moral teaching on earth is also the most thoroughly vindicated by the accumulation of secular, empirical, postrevolutionary fact” (p. 134).  As “Archbishop [Charles] Chaput has explained:  ‘If Paul VI was right about so many of the consequences deriving from contraception, it is because he was right about contraception itself’” (p. 157).  Rereading the Pope’s warnings—declining moral standards, lowering respect for women, rampant infidelity, government edicts regarding reproduction—no one can evade his  prescience!  Embracing contraceptive technologies cannot but facilitate certain behaviors revealed as toxic in scores of scholarly studies validating the unexpected harms in the wake of the waves of sexual liberation.  

Evangelicals in America have generally divided (notwithstanding myriad subdivisions) into two contending camps:  Calvinists and Arminians.   During the last several decades some young, aggressive Calvinists have been building a theological case for the classic Calvinism now proclaimed in growing numbers of pulpits and seminary classrooms.  Indeed, in 2009 Time magazine identified “‘The New Calvinism’ as the third of ten trends shaping the world today.”  Reflecting this development, Michael Horton’s For Calvinism (Grand Rapids:  Zondervan) sets forth an emphatic argument in an irenic manner, emphasizing that good people take both sides of the argument.  He insists that Calvinists such as himself are hardly the stereotypical “frozen chosen” but rather the true heirs and exponents of the Protestant Reformation and its familiar solas—scriptura, gratia, Christo, fide, Deo Gloria.  And he urges all thoughtful Christians to reject the “moralistic, therapeutic deism” of contemporary culture and seek to better understand the intellectual substance of their faith.  

While abjuring any hyper-Calvinism that seems indistinguishable from fatalism, Horton (a theologian teaching at Westminister Theological Seminary in Escondido, California) enthusiastically embraces and structures his book in accord with the five points of confessional Calvinism:  TULIP—Total depravity; Unconditional election, Limited atonement; Irresistible grace; Perseverance of the saints.  He reaffirms them all as the “doctrines of grace” basic to his position and rephrases two of the five points—substituting “particular redemption” for unconditional election, “effectual grace” for irresistible grace.  Arminian objections to these positions, he emphasizes, flow naturally from their commitment to “synergism (i.e. ‘working-together,’ or cooperation between God’s grace and human willing activity), while Calvinists affirm monergism (i.e., ‘one-working,’ or God’s grace as the effectual source of election, redemption, faith, and perseverance” (#95—I’ll be using my Kindle reference sites).   

Beginning with “the human condition,” Horton says “Calvinism teaches that human beings are basically good in their intrinsic nature, endowed with free will, beauty of body and soul, reason and moral excellence.  In short, we are created in God’s image” (#463).   Tragically, in Adam’s fall all this goodness was corrupted (though not utterly lost, as in Luther’s declarations) and man is thus totally depraved.  “The ‘total’ in total depravity refers to its extensiveness, not intensiveness:  that is, to the all-encompassing scope of our fallenness.  It does not mean that we are as bad as we can possibly be, but that we are all guilty and corrupt to such an extent that there is no hope of pulling ourselves together, brushing ourselves off, and striving (with the help of grace) to overcome God’s judgment and our own rebellion” (#588).  

Given our depravity, God elects to save whomever He chooses in accord with His own inscrutable will.  “Everyone who takes the Bible seriously must believe in election in some sense,” Horton says.  “The real difference (especially between Arminianism and Calvinism) emerges over whether the elect are chosen into faith or in view of their faith.  In other words, is election unconditional or conditional?  Does God choose who will be saved, apart from their decision and effort, or does He choose those whom he knows will trust and obey?” (#832).   Exegeting a litany of biblical texts, Horton argues that since we lack any ability to trust and obey God there is no way He could elect us to salvation weighing that possibility.  Rather, He softens the hearts of those He elects and allows the rest to remain in the hardness of their natural sinfulness.  All men, because of Adam’s sin, deserve eternal death, so it’s not unfair (Calvinists hold) for God to save a select company to enjoy life everlasting with Him.  To Horton:  “The amazing thing is that God chooses to save anybody, especially when he knows that the people he has chosen would not choose him apart from his grace” (#1022).   Why He chooses some and not others only He knows.  

Since God unilaterally elects those who are saved, Jesus necessarily died only for them.  Though often defined as “limited atonement (the “L” in TULIP), Horton prefers to explain this aspect of Calvinism as “particular redemption.”  Responding to the Arminian Remonstrants at the Synod of Dort in 1619, Dutch Calvinists reaffirmed “a common formula, ‘sufficient for the whole world but efficient for the elect alone.’  This formula is found in various medieval systems, including the writings of Aquinas . . . and Luther’s mentor, Johann von Staupitz” (#1639).  The elect are saved when God regenerates and gives them faith.  “Chosen in Christ from all eternity, we are called effectually to Christ in time.  Through faith, which itself is God’s gracious gift, we receive Christ and all his benefits” (#1776).   Since God does it all (monergism), His grace is necessarily irresistible.  And finally, inasmuch as our salvation depends solely upon God it follows that those who are saved are eternally secure—in the TULIP scheme, it’s called the perseverance of the saints.  Only the predestined are saved, and only the saved persevere.  Horton grants that large segments of historic, orthodox Christianity (Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, Arminianism) differ from Calvinism and insist on man’s role (synergism) in responding to God’s initiatives and granting the possibility of apostasy.  But he maintains the consistency of Calvinism, committed to the proposition that salvation is, from first to last, solely the work of God. 

Having explained its core convictions, Horton describes “Calvinism and the Christian life.”  Since all is of God and individuals play no role in their salvation, we might logically expect them to do nothing in living as a Christian.  But, NO!  Horton insists Calvinists ought energetically engage in sanctifying activities, bearing witness to the activating presence of the Spirit within them.  “There is no justification without sanctification; although we are justified through faith alone, that faith that clings to Christ immediately begins to bear the fruit of the Spirit” (#2304).  If we’re truly saved we cannot but want to glorify God by doing whatever He requires.  Similarly, we will want to engage in missions, taking the Gospel to the ends of the earth (fully cognizant, of course, that nothing we do matters unless God enkindles saving faith in a person’s heart—only one born again can believe).  “In fact, we are able to proclaim to sinners not that Christ has made them savable or possible, but that he has actually accomplished the salvation of all who trust in him” (#3136).  

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In Against Calvinism (Grand Rapids:  Zondervan, 2010) Roger E. Olson, an evangelical Baptist theology professor at Baylor University’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary, explains and takes issue with the cardinal tenets of the Reformed theology propounded by “New Calvinists” such as Michael Horton, John Piper and R.C. Sproul.  According to a journalist, Collin Hansen (in Young Restless, Reformed) this corps of “New Calvinists” rejects the “feel good theology” flowing from many “seeker-friendly” evangelical pulpits.   They hunger for a more rational, intellectually grounded faith.  While Olson  shares their hunger for an intellectually robust position, he fears their zeal for celebrating the absolute sovereignty of God too easily leads to “making God the author of sin and evil—which is something few Calvinists admit to but which follows from what they teach as a ‘good and necessary consequence’” of their view (p. 22).  Thus “John Piper famously published a sermon a few days after the Twin Towers terrorist events of September 11, 2001, declaring that God did not merely permit them but caused them.  He has since published other statements similarly attributing natural disasters and horrific calamities to God” (p. 22).  Deeply persuaded that such assertions cannot be reconciled with the Bible’s fundamental truth about God (that His Sovereignty is subordinate to His is Love), Olson has written this treatise, taking its authority and argument from the Wesleyan Quadrilateral (Scripture; Tradition; Reason; Experience).    

Olson first seeks to historically trace and define Calvinism, noting that a wide diversity of thinkers and churches fall into this category.  It’s clear that the New Calvinists (with their strong commitment to Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and the Perseverance of Saints) represent the older, classical Reformed tradition.  But all bona fide Calvinists do affirm “the total, absolute, meticulous sovereignty of God in providence by which God governs the entire course of human history down to the minutest details and renders everything certain so that no event is fortuitous or accidental but fits into God’s overall plan and purpose” (p. 40).  Calvin declared, “‘No wind ever arises or increases except by God’s express command’” (p. 73).  And R.C. Sproul echoes Calvin today, writing:  “The movement of every molecule, the actions of every plant, the falling of ever star, the choices of ever volitional creature [creatures who choose], all of these are subject to his sovereign will.  No maverick molecules run loose in the universe, beyond the control of the Creator.  If one such molecule existed, it could be the critical fly in the eternal ointment” (p. 78).  

This sovereign control of all creation (predestination) is particularly true of salvation, where God saves (and inevitably damns) whomsoever He chooses to maximize His glory.  We may imagine we act freely, but in fact we automatically follow whatever desires God implants within us (the “compatibilist” version of free will).  As Olson explains and critiques (point by point) the TULIP paradigm as set forth by a variety of Reformed thinkers, he continually insists he does so simply to reaffirm the basic biblical teaching that God is Love and a loving God simply would not operate in a Calvinist fashion.  In brief:  “Only a moral monster would refuse to save persons when salvation is absolutely unconditional and solely an act of God that does not depend on free will” (p. 62).  

Rejecting Calvinism, Olson (in accord with General Baptists and Wesleyans) affirms Arminianism, a position routinely pilloried and rejected by the New Calvinists.  Rightly understood, he argues, thoughtful Arminians fully embrace important truths such as the Sovereignty of God and the primacy of Grace without slipping into the quicksand of determinism.  Thus they say “yes to election; no to double predestination.”  Despite some Calvinists’ efforts to evade the conclusion, it is logically impossible to affirm “unconditional election” (the singular predestination of the saints to salvation) without endorsing the double predestination of the lost to damnation.  One defensible way to escape the dilemma, evident in the work of revisionist Reformed Theologian James Daane, is to insist that “unconditional election” refers to God’s “election of Jesus Christ and his people, Israel and the church.  It is not God’s unconditional acceptance of some individual human persons to salvation and corresponding rejection of others to damnation.  ‘The Bible knows nothing of an isolated, individualistic doctrine of election.’  And it has nothing to do with historical determinism” (p.  125).   Thus Daane interprets (as do many Arminians) the crucial texts in Romans 9-11 and Ephesians 1 as commentaries “‘on the fact of the inviolability of God’s election of Israel as a nation.’  Election to what?  To service in blessing the nations with producing Jesus Christ—the real subject and object of God’s electing grace” (p. 125).   This understanding of election would enable one to evade the “limited atonement” established in classic Calvinism which argues Christ’s atoning work was “sufficient” to save everyone but not “efficient” in so doing.  It also makes room for an alternative to the monergistic “irresistible” grace espoused by today’s New Calvinists.  

Yet such efforts to revise Calvinism cannot but fail, Olson says, because it is riddled with inescapable and “profound conundrums that have no apparent solutions” (p. 175).  There is the problem of evil, for example.  If God determines everything (such as the terrorists’ attacks on 9/11 or the sexual abuse of children or the Holocaust), He is clearly the author of what most of us judge evil.  But if He is good, as most Calvinists say they believe, how can this be?  There’s simply no good answer!   Nor are the good answers to various other questions.  But, most importantly, “the greatest conundrum of them all has to do with God’s character” (p. 178).  The God who is Holy Love cannot fit easily into the TULIP schema.  

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In Arminian Theology:  Myths and Realities (Downers Grove, IL:  InterVarsity Press, c. 2006), Roger E. Olson explains and defends the position he thinks best attuned to Christian revelation.  Though now a Baptist, he was reared in a “Pentecostal preacher’s home” and has always been “proudly Arminian” (p. 7).  During his formative years, the theological works of two Nazarenes  (H. Orton Wiley, who set forth “a particularly pure form of classical Arminianism with the addition of Wesleyan perfectionism” and Mildred Bangs Wynkoop) enabled him to fully understand and appreciate what it meant to be an Arminian.  Subsequently, as he studied and worked in evangelical settings he found his position frequently pilloried and denounced.  Consequently:  “This book was born out of a burning desire to clear the good Arminian name of false accusations and charges of heresy or heterodoxy.  Much of what is said about Arminianism within evangelical theological circles, including local congregations with strong Calvinist voices, is simply false” (p. 9).    

To Olson, Arminianism means “that form of Protestant theology that rejects unconditional election (and especially unconditional reprobation), limited atonement, and irresistible grace because it affirms the character of God as compassionate, having universal love for the whole world and everyone in it, and extending grace-restored free will to accept or resist the grace of God, which leads to either eternal life or spiritual destruction” (p. 16).  He first places the position’s founder, Jacob Arminius (1560-1609) in proper context.  A prominent Reformed pastor and theologian in Holland, Arminius set forth a biblically-based evangelical synergism rather close to the position of Desiderius Erasmus (a Catholic) and Philip Melanchthon (the great architect of Lutheran theology) and explicitly developed by a wide variety of later Methodist and Baptist thinkers in America.  Arminius himself, while teaching at the University of Leyden, became a controversial figure as he challenged certain Calvinistic propositions.  At the heart of his thinking was a rejection of  “nominalistic voluntarism.” He opposed the philosophical nominalism (evident in William of Occam and embedded in the theology of Luther and many Calvinists) that “denies any intrinsic, eternal divine nature that controls the exercise of God’s power” (p. 103).  Importantly:  “Arminius based his whole theology on metaphysical realism in which ‘God is not “freely” good because God is good by nature’” (p. 89).   His commitment to God’s goodness manifestly flows from his Christocentric thinking:  “Jesus Christ is our best clue to the character of God, and in him God is revealed as compassionate, merciful, loving and just” (p. 102).  

Significantly, Arminians are neither Pelagian nor semi-Pelagian, though many New Calvinists, such as Michael Horton, brand them such!  Such may well be true of influential preachers, including Charles G. Finney (whose influence Olson laments).  With the Reformers, however, they insist on sola gratia—we are saved by grace alone, and “every movement of the soul toward God is initiated by divine grace—but Arminians recognize also that the cooperation of the human will is necessary because in the last stage the free agent decides whether the grace proffered is accepted or rejected” (p. 36).  Accordingly, “predestination is simply God’s determination (decree) to save through Christ all who freely respond to God’s offer of free grace by repenting of sin and believing (trusting) in Christ.  It includes God’s foreknowledge of who will so respond.  It does not include a selection of certain people to salvation, let alone to damnation” (p. 36).  

Olson stresses the many commonalities uniting Calvinists and Arminians within the Reformed tradition.  He takes care to trace the constant Arminian position during the past 400 years—particularly citing great (if oft-ignored by modern American evangelicals) 19^th century theologians such as William Burton Pope and Richard Watson, who carefully constructed a Wesleyan schema.  Though some partisans on both sides hurl epithets such as “heretic,” both positions represent orthodox Protestantism.  “Even such a conservative and venerable Arminian theologian as H. Orton Wiley regarded Arminius and Arminianism as a correction of Reformed theology rather than a total departure from it:  ‘In its purest and best forms, Arminianism preserves the truth found in the Reformed teachings without accepting its errors’” (p. 51).  Commonalities, however, cannot be synthesized into a hybrid “Calminianism”!  Some basic differences are deep and irreconcilable, particularly when one examines doctrines such as unconditional election, limited atonement, and irresistible grace.  Both sides have ample biblical texts and erudite exegetes, so turning to Scripture cannot resolve the differences.  In fact, preliminary assumptions of a philosophical nature dictate diverse conclusions.  Concerning God:  “Both believe God is supremely great and good.  But one side starts with God’s greatness and conditions God’s goodness in that light; the other side starts with God’s goodness and conditions God’s greatness in that light.  Each side has its ‘blik,’ which largely determines how it interprets Scripture” (p. 73).  

The two sides clearly differ regarding man’s free will.  Calvinists generally employ versions of “compatibilism”—we “freely” choose what we desire, but our desires are pre-programmed for us by God.  Conversely, “all classical Arminians believe in libertarian free will, which is self-determining choice; it is incompatible with determination of any kind” (p. 71).   “Arminianism does not object to the idea that God directs human choices and actions through the power of persuasion.  Arminianism embraces the idea that God directs human choices and actions by making them fit into his master plan for history.  The only thing Arminianism rejects, in this specific area, is that God controls all human choices and actions” (p. 98).  

In granting free will, however, Arminians do not formulate a man-centered theology.  As robustly as any Calvinist, the Arminian theologian declares man fallen and inexorably bent toward evil.  “The free will of human beings in Arminius’s theology and in classical Arminianism is more properly denoted freed will.  Grace frees the will from bondage to sin and evil, and gives it ability to cooperate with saving grace by not resisting it” (p. 142).  Prevenient Grace awakens within a sinner’s heart a longing for God and salvation.  Grace-enabled, we believe and repent, surrendering ourselves to the redeeming work of Christ.  All glory to God!   “Arminians believe that if a person is saved, it is because God initiated the relationship and enabled the person to respond freely with repentance and faith.  This prevenient grace includes at least four aspects or elements:  calling, convicting, illuminating, and enabling” (p. 159).  

Admittedly, there have been thinkers within the Arminian fold who drifted away from classical orthodoxy.  But the same is true of Calvinism—Schleiermacher, the “father of Protestant liberalism,” was, after all, at least originally a Calvinist!  But the semi-Pelagian, humanistic preaching found in all too many “evangelical” churches these days can be traced back to Charles G. Finney rather than Wesley or Arminius.  (Parenthetically, Finney’s pernicious role is frequently stressed by Olson!)  What’s needed in the Calvinist-Arminian debate is not more anathemas but more honest research and writing.  And learning what Arminians truly believe could easily begin with this fine volume.    

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In Real Education:  Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality (New York:  Three Rivers Press, c. 2008), Charles Murray proposes “a transformation of American education—a transformation not just of means, but of ends.  We need to change the way the schools do business” (p. 11).  Murray, a distinguished social scientist, believes we are enthralled to an “educational romanticism” that is in fact a lie:  “The lie is that every child can be anything he or she wants to be” (p. 11).  Without question the lie is benevolent, promulgated by folks (educators in particular) who want to help children.  But like most lies, in time “its effects play out in the lives of young people in devastating ways” (p. 12).  

Dismantling our educational romanticism begins by recognizing the simplest of all truths:  ability varies.  For example, there are, as Harvard’s Howard Gardner famously argued, “seven intelligences:  bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, spatial, linguistic, and logical-mathematical” (p. 17).  Gifted athletes are rarely theoretical physicists and great musicians easily fail as politicians.  Evidence shows that virtually all students who academically succeed excel in spatial, linguistic, and logical-mathematical ability.  Consequently, “educators who proceed on the assumption that they can find some ability in which every child is above average are kidding themselves” (p. 29).  

Self-evident truth number two is this:  Half of the Children Are Below Average.  It’s as inescapably true as the law of gravity.   Most parents and teachers learn to accept the fact that their children may be less than excellent in athletics or music, but they resolutely insist linguistic and logical-mathematical skills can be mastered by anyone (namely, their own children).  In fact some of us are just not smart enough to fathom Einstein or follow Aquinas.  This is because our IQ is as hardwired into our being as our height and hair color.  We may develop our latent abilities, but only in terms of their given potentiality.  Nor do schools much matter!  As the celebrated Coleman Report definitively demonstrated, “the quality of schools explains almost nothing about differences in academic achievement.  Measures such as the credentials of the teachers, the curriculum, the extensiveness and newness of physical facilities, money spent per student—none of the things that people assumed were important in explaining educational achievement were important in fact.  Family background was far and away the most important factor in determining student achievement” (p. 58).  

Equally discomfiting to progressive politicians and educational romantics is Murray’s truth number three:  “Too Many People Are Going to College.”  No doubt influenced by parents and teachers,  “more than 90 percent of high school seniors expect to go to college, and more than 70 percent of them expect to work in professional jobs” (p. 104).  Many who enroll fail to graduate and all too many who finish fail to actually learn much.  While presidents and pundits trumpet the importance and possibility of everyone getting a college degree, we must face the fact that not nearly everyone has the ability to do college work (especially in the traditional liberal arts).  “How smart do you have to be to cope with genuine college-level material?  No more than 20 percent of students have that level of academic ability, and 10 percent is a more realistic estimate” (p. 67).  Without an IQ of 115 it is difficult to benefit from higher education simply because “real college-level material is hard” (p. 70).  Cognizant of this, colleges and universities have minimized the liberal arts curriculum, enabling students to sample a cafeteria of courses and graduate without significant mental exertion.  “In this environment, the opportunities for learning of all kinds have diminished.  Students learn less in the way of subject matter, but also less in the way of hard work, self-discipline, self-restraint, and respect for superior knowledge” (p. 100).  They may very well enjoy their years on campus and develop valuable social contacts but “college life throughout much of he American system is not designed to midwife maturity but to prolong adolescence” (p. 101).  

Finally, “America’s Future Depends on How We Educate the Academically Gifted.”  Contrary to egalitarian, feel-good rhetoric, the nation’s “future does depend on an elite that runs the country” and this elite will come “overwhelmingly from among the academically gifted” (p. 107).   Members of our elite are, however, demonstrably smart but often foolish—indeed many are “ethically illiterate” (p. 126).  In fact:  “A large proportion of the academically gifted students who will run the country in the next generation” will probably enter their careers “ignorant in some of the most important ways—sloppy in their verbal expression, unschooled in tools that they will need to make good decisions, innocent of any systematic thought about the meaning of a human life, oblivious to all of these shortcomings in their education, and oblivious to their own intellectual limits” (p. 162).  So we urgently need to recover a classical liberal-arts approach to education, designed to inculcate the cardinal virtues, rooted in the classical philosophical and theological heritage of the West, focused on sound judgment and responsible citizenship.  Educating for “wisdom requires extended study of philosophy, because it is not enough that gifted children grow up to be nice.  They must know what it means to be good” (p. 113).  Still more:  they must learn humility, acknowledging “their own intellectual limits and fallibilities” (p. 113).  

Having established his four essential truths, Murray suggests some ways to improve the nation’s schools, primarily by establishing meaningful discipline and order in the classroom and disabling the progressive educational establishment which has reigned for a century.  If students were early assessed for their abilities and properly directed into appropriate paths, required to work diligently, and allowed to progress as quickly as possible, the academically gifted would move on to college while average youngsters (at least two-thirds of high school students) would enter the work force.  

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Christians often ponder the trajectory of higher education in America whereby scores of religious schools drifted from centers of pious orthodoxy into bastions of secularist infidelity.  To understand this process, Julie A. Reuben’s The Making of the Modern University:  Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago:  The University of Chicago Press, c. 1996) proves most instructive.  It is, she says, above all a story of the shift “from the nineteenth-century broad conception of truth to the twentieth-century division between facts and values” (p. 2).  Intellectuals in the 19^th century “assumed that truth had spiritual, moral, and cognitive dimensions.  By 1930, however, intellectuals had abandoned this broad conception of truth and embraced, instead, a view of knowledge that drew a sharp distinction between ‘facts’ and ‘values.’  They associated cognitive truth with empirically verified knowledge and maintained that by this standard moral values could not be validated as ‘true.’  In the nomenclature of the twentieth century, only ‘science’ constituted true knowledge.  Moral and spiritual values could be ‘true’ in an emotional or nonliteral sense, but not on terms of cognitively verifiable knowledge.  The term truth no longer comfortably encompassed factual knowledge and moral values” (p. 2).  

To verify her thesis, Reuben documents “the unity of truth” everywhere assumed by 19^th century college and university professors.  “The unity of truth entailed two important propositions.  First, it supposed that all truths agreed and ultimately could be related to one another in a single system.  Second, it assumed that knowledge had a moral dimension.  To know the ‘true,’ according to this ideal, was to know the ‘good’” (p. 17).  In fact:  All truth is God’s truth!  What’s learned in biology classes harmonizes with biblical revelation; what’s studied in history seminars illustrates divine providence; what’s espoused by philosophy professors squares with the Logos incarnate in Christ Jesus.   

Nevertheless, the rapidly-expanding cohort of progressivist scientists embracing the Darwinian paradigm rejected both the historic Baconian commitment to common-sense empiricism and the philosophical tradition of natural law.  Since everything is evolving, there are no intrinsic essences in things and, as William James concluded, “scientific theories were instrumental rather than descriptive” (p. 46).  Imbued with this conviction, prominent academics such as Cornel University’s president, Andrew Dickson White, celebrated the victory of science in his History of the Welfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.  They further insisted that educators devise curricula appropriate for the “new knowledge” and institute electives (consistent with the view that scientific “truths,” whether biological or sociological, anthropological or psychological, constantly change) as a substitute for the prescribed classical studies (e.g. Latin and Greek) ingrained in the liberal arts.  This better suited professors increasingly devoid of  “faith in the ideal of the unity of truth” (p. 241).  

Easily the most influential of the devotees to the “new knowledge,” Charles Norton Eliot, “began his administration with plans to promote science and decrease the presence of religion at Harvard” (p. 77).  Conciliating constituents distressed by his agenda, he found he could promote the “scientific” study of religion as long as all forms of dogmatic theology were eschewed.  In short order the Harvard strategy prevailed, and hitherto “Christian” universities such as Yale charted a secular course.  As a result, Reuben says:  “In 1870 religious instruction in colleges consisted of required courses in moral philosophy, often supplemented by lectures on natural theology or the evidences of Christianity.  By 1890 these courses had disappeared from the university curriculum.  In their stead, faculty advanced a variety of electives related to religion” (p. 88).  This move was applauded by liberal clergymen such as Henry Ward Beecher, who declared:  “‘To admit the truth of evolution is to yield up the reigning theology.  It is to change the whole notion of man’s origin, his nature, the problem of human life, the philosophy of morality, the theory of sin, the structure of moral government as taught in the dominant theologies of the Christian world’” (p. 96).  The time had come to reformulate the Christian faith in terms prescribed by Science, reducing it to what people “felt and did, not what they thought” (p. 112).  Religion on campus was shifted from the classroom to the chapel (increasingly voluntary) and extracurricular activities. 

With religion effectively sidelined at the dawn of the 20^th century, university educators looked for scientific substitutes to replace it.  They still believed in progressive moral development and prescribed courses designed to encourage it.  So newly empowered “social sciences” instituted courses in social hygiene, eugenics, economics, psychology and sociology, all promoted as verifiable vehicles for ethical improvement.  Representing the ethos of the day, John Dewey and James Tufts published their Ethics in 1908 and saw it adopted by scores of colleges and universities.  The authors dogmatically rejected any Supernatural Source of morality and reduced to a purely naturalistic prescription.  Yet even this effort floundered as younger “scholars thought that eliminating ethical concerns was the key to achieving scientific rigor and intellectual consensus.  These scholars viewed morality as a matter of personal preference” (p. 188).   Subsequently ethics as well as religion was banished from prestigious university classrooms.  “By the 1920s,” Reuben concludes, “most natural and social scientists defined their academic role in terms of specialized instruction and the advancement of scientific knowledge, effectively undermining plans to make their disciplines the basis of a new secular moral education” (p. 210).   

Given the assumption that morality lacks scientific justification, some university educators shifted their hopes for moral instruction to the humanities.  Perhaps, following the admonitions of Matthew Arnold, an aesthetically-attuned “culture” might replace religion in perfecting “humanity through the ‘harmonious expansion of those gifts of thought and feeling, which make the peculiar dignity, wealth, and happiness of human nature’” (p. 215).  A cohort of “New Humanists,” following Irving Babbitt, insisted that great literature and art, rather than science, contained the wisdom needed for modernity.  To Edwin Greenlaw, “‘the service of literature, rightly conceived, is akin to the service of religion. . . .  Our materials are human lives, instruments to be played upon by spirits of the dead, by living spirits incarnate in poetry and music and art, by the deeper music of humanity’” (p. 218).  But art and literature failed to bear the burden of inculcating morality—as did the assorted and ambitious programs promoting “student life.”  Consequently:  “Over the twentieth century leaders of research universities strengthened their institutions’ commitment to the advancement of knowledge, but they were never able to recapture university reformers’ faith in the power of knowledge to elevate individuals and the world” (p. 265).  

The Making of the Modern University successfully blends the depth of a Ph.D. dissertation with the accessibility and readability of a treatise targeting a general audience.  To better understand why America’s universities have become such bastions of secularism Reuben’s work proves essential.  

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Joe Kernen co-anchors CNBC’s Squawk Box, a morning business show.  Distressed by what his daughter, Blake, was learning (or not learning) the fifth grade, he and she co-wrote Your Teacher Said WHAT?!  Defending Our Kids from the Liberal Assault on Capitalism (New York:  Sentinel, c. 2011).  Like lots of parents, Kernen and his wife “wanted our kids to believe in God, love the country, and respect the principles of hard work and fairness.   We wanted them to value honesty, courage, and kindness, to be polite and respectful” (pp. x-xi).   In addition, they wanted them to understand and appreciate the freedoms (economic and religious) America affords.  But they discovered that their kids’ teachers, rigorously implementing their Progressive ideology, often contradicted parental convictions.  

Fifth-graders easily embrace Progressive positions because, Kernen finds, “ten-year-olds are natural Progressives” (p. 9).  They’ve been taught that good people share their goods with other, that it’s bad to be selfish.  Cutting a pie “fairly” means giving the same size slice to each person, for there is only one pie to divide.  Caring for animals (and thus the environment) easily becomes a moral imperative.  Kids also live in a world governed by lots of imposed rules—food choices, bedtimes, leisure activities.  And, of course, they’re constantly cared for by watchful parents.  “Progressivism, at its core, isn’t really anything but the idea that the government ought to act like a parent” (p. 10).  But whereas the Kernens hope their children actually grow up and assume adult responsibilities, freely functioning in the market economy, the “Obamacrats in the White House, the Senate, and the House and a dizzying number of bureaucrats, obedient to their Progressive instincts, want to keep the American people children forever” (p. 10).  

To help his daughter prepare for adulthood, Kernen decided to teach her the basics of the free market—defining terms, illustrating processes, defending the right of a free people to make a living and control their properties.  He particularly explained and stressed how millions of individuals, making decisions about things they fully understand, are far better informed and prudential than a handful of experts engaged in central planning.  He furthermore endeavored to demonstrate the media’s dishonesty in portraying businessmen and multinational corporations as villains.  Sadly enough, Hollywood continually adds “to America’s (and the world’s) economic illiteracy” (p. 101).   Aligned with the Hollywood elite, Blake Kernen’s teachers seem to despise business and denigrate America.  Her “teachers are uncomfortable even describing the American way, much less defending it” (p. 106).  They often celebrate Europe, with its generous welfare programs, entrenched in nations such as Germany for more than a century, while condemning America’s free enterprise system as benefiting the rich rather than providing for the poor.  But when honestly evaluated, Europe cannot compare with America on a whole variety of items.  What’s evident is this:  “When you build a nanny state, you turn a decent-sized chunk of the populace into the sort of people who depend on nannies:  infants.  Or at least into the ten-year-olds who make the best Progressives and liberals” (p. 111).  Such dependency, however comfy, hardly befits a healthy, mature person.  Unfortunately, the USA, under Barack Obama, seems determined to emulate the European way.  

President Obama is as committed as any European social democrat to regulating every aspect of American life!  “The desire to regulate economic life,” Kernen says, “might be the defining characteristic of Progressive philosophy” (p. 127).  Without a doubt, “Regulation is progressivism” (p. 127).  And, since kids crave set structures, ten-year-olds such as Blake easily support all kinds of rules.  Her father, however, wants to show her why many rules and regulations (such as those requiring cosmetology licenses) are designed to favor a select few (generally union) workers.  Carefully investigated, it becomes clear that most economic regulations rarely “ever accomplish what they were intended to do, and almost always have some genuinely bad unintended consequences” (p. 132).  Kernen then illustrates “the sheer idiocy of most regulations” that was abundantly evident in the massive stimulus bill—the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009—that “put so many regulatory strings on its money” that the funds sunk into the quicksand of endless bureaucratic maneuvers needed to comply with assorted mandates (p. 136).   

Most of these rules and regulations are, furthermore, designed not simply to protect us from evil but to make us better people.  Progressives like the Obamas “are determined to make everyone else just as virtuous as they are” (p. 150).  For example, when buying coffee, we’re lectured on the propriety of purchasing more expensive “fair-trade” brands.  (During my final years teaching at a university, some of my colleagues pushed to mandate such “fair-trade” coffee for the department!)  In fact, as Kernen shows, “the difference between the fair-trade price and the market price is nothing more than charity” given to farmers who refuse to use the machinery and pesticides necessary to compete in the free market.  Still more:  “even as charity, it’s not exactly a success story.  Only about 5 percent—5 percent—of the fair trade price actually makes it back to the producers anyway” (p. 154).  At the pinnacle of the Progressive agenda to help us all is, of course, universal health care.  This “effort to make the national government responsible for the nation’s health care (or at least its health insurance) is as old as Progressivism itself; it was one of the promises on which Theodore Roosevelt rand for president on the original Progressive Party ticket.  He lost.  His cousin, FDR, attempted to make the federal responsibility a part of the original Social Security legislation.  He lost, too.  Harry Truman in 1949; Richard Nixon in 1972; Bill Clinton in 1993.  Lost, lost, Lost” (p. 205).  

In 2010, however, Barack Obama succeeded!  Consequently, unless Obamacare is overturned by Court or Congress allegedly free Americans will actually be forced to purchase health insurance.  During the first two years of the Obama administration, it looked as if the “Progressive nirvana” had at last arrived—“a government takeover of health care; management of virtually the entire financial industry; ownership of more than half of the domestic automobile business; and, of course, close to a trillion dollars in ‘stimulus’ spending that most amounted to a gigantic subsidy of the country’s public employee unions while increasing the nation’s unemployment rate” (p. 213).  All of this, Kernen thinks, bodes ill for us all.  So to help us (as well as his children) understand—and, more importantly, resist—this Progressive onslaught, Kernen wrote Your Teacher said WHAT?!  Whether or not it matters will be determined as voters decide, in 2012, what kind of a nation we prefer.  

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The reality of “Evangelicals and Catholics together”—what Baptist theologian Timothy George calls “the ecumenism of the trenches”—stands evident in Indivisible:  Restoring Faith, Family, and Freedom Before It’s Too Late (New York :  Faith Words, c. 2012), by James Robison (a noted Baptist evangelist who is the founder and  president of LIFE Outreach International, providing various kinds of relief around the world) and Jay W. Richards (a Catholic scholar currently a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute).  The two teamed up to write Indivisible because they believe Americans’ “freedom, our way of life, and our future are in peril”—largely because of “corrosive” ideas and policies now regnant in our nation (p. xvi).  Commending this treatise, Mike Huckabee says:  “INDIVISIBLE can change forever how you see the world.  Grasp the wisdom shared in this book, and the scripture ‘My people perish for lack of knowledge’ will no longer apply.  This can prove to be the much needed game-changer for America.”  What Indivisible makes clear is less a revelation than a reminder—a reminder of the basic moral and political truths our species has ever found the best prescription for living well.  

Robison and Richards seek to remind Christians in America of both their heritage and responsibilities.  As believers they are distressed that a nation which historically enabled Christians to prosper has turned hostile, banishing their convictions from the public square under the banner of the “separation of church and state.”  Sadly, much evidence suggests that we now live in a land where militant secularists have established what Archbishop Charles Chaput calls an “‘unofficial state atheism’” (p. 36).  This was recently (even as this book was published) made clear as the Obama Administration moved to impose on Christian institutions its commitment to contraception, abortion (the morning-after pill), and sterilization.  Our modern Caesar will allow no religious freedom that challenges its authority.   It is becoming “a secularist atheocracy that tolerates no dissent” (p. 45).  Nothing should concern us more than the incessant encroachments on our religious liberties, clearly protected by the very first provision in the Bill of Rights.  

What’s needed, first of all, the authors argue, is a recovery of the “first things” traditionally understood as the “natural law,” including the right to freely worship and serve God.    Citing C.S. Lewis, Robison and Richards insist:  “‘The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike.  Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish’” (p. 19).  This is the law known to the Gentiles that St. Paul described as “written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness” (Ro 2:14-16).  And this is the law Thomas Jefferson invoked by declaring, in The Declaration of Independence:  “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among those are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  

Unfortunately, America’s roots in the Natural Law have been severed by multitudes of leftist Progressives who contend all law is man-made and infinitely malleable.  Consequently, what rights we enjoy come from an all-powerful State rather than a righteous Creator.  This view was stated categorically by one of the nation’s premier progressive presidents, Woodrow Wilson:  “In fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same.  They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members’” (p. 313).  Wilson’s words, uttered a century ago, largely explain the trajectory this nation has since taken under presidents FDR, LBJ, and Barack Obama as the federal government has imposed increasingly socialistic agendas while enlarging the franchise and courting favored constituencies.  

Thus we now face and must engage in a variety of battles that will determine the fate of faith, family, and freedom in America, beginning with the most basic of all rights—the right to life.  As George W. Bush, in accord with the Declaration of Independence, declared, the “‘right to life cannot be granted or denied by government because it does not come from government, it comes from the Creator of life’” (p. 88).  Thus Christians through the centuries have steadfastly opposed abortion.  “‘The unborn child,” said John Calvin, ‘though enclosed in the womb of its mother, is already a human being . . . and should not be robbed of the life which has not yet begun to enjoy.  If it seems more horrible to kill a man in his own house than in a field, because a man’s house is his place of most secure refuge, it ought surely be deemed more atrocious to destroy an unborn child in the womb before it has come to light’” (p. 90).  Conservative Evangelicals and Catholics have united in opposing abortion—and their endeavor has helped nudge the American public slowly in pro-life directions.  So we must persevere in the effort to legally protect all persons, no matter how small.  (To Robison this is a deeply personal issue, for he is “the product of rape.”  His mother, a single woman, chose to sustain his life and subsequently released him to a foster family, and he remains forever grateful to the mother who sustained his life in the womb.)  

The rights to marry and procreate are—as John Finnis explains in Natural Law and Natural Rights—rooted in the inalienable right to life.  The family is, in a profound way, the most primary of our natural institutions.  Thus Robison and Richards devote several chapters to issues regarding it:  “A Man Shall Cling to His Wife,” “It takes a Family,” “Train Up A Child in the Way He Should Go.”  Only a life-long, monogamous, heterosexual, conjugal union—i.e. marriage—is truly good for mankind, but we are now witnessing   (through adultery, divorce, same-sex unions, etc.) a powerful offensive against it that must be resisted.  So too we must insist that children need mothers and fathers!  They may survive in other societal structures, but they only really thrive in families.  Tragically, all the evidence indicates that the socialistic Welfare State, displacing and replacing moms and dads, educating youngsters in godless schools, does permanent harm to the most vulnerable among us, our children.  

For families to thrive, folks need homes—“a place to call our own.”  Such a place is necessarily a bit of real estate—private property.  Accordingly, to John Adams:  “‘The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not the force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence’” (p. 191).  Founders like Adams “understood that our right to property is an extension of ourselves and our liberty” (p. 195).  Property rights, secured by law, are basic to the flourishing of both families and communities.  Still more, as Pope Leo XIII wrote, “in his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, ‘The first and most fundamental principle . . . if one would undertake to alleviate the condition of the masses, must be the inviolability of private property’” (p. 196).  

Private property has been under assault for more than a century as Socialists and Progressives have sought to implement the ideology of the French Revolution (liberty, equality, fraternity) and establish social and economic equality—imposing affirmative action quotas in universities, unions and corporations; mandating risky loans for homes, in accord with the Community Investment Act; and “spreading the wealth around” through progressive taxation, to cite Barack Obama.  The United States took a fateful turn when President Lyndon Johnson launched his Great Society in the ‘60s, determined that “we seek not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result’” (pp. 311-312).   He illustrated the fact that for more than a century “the left flank of our culture has been feeding us the lie that justice means sameness or equality in everything.  Although this has the patina of morality, it just reinforcing a sinful impulse called envy” (p. 247).  

Resisting that ideology, Robison and Richards support “freedom economics,” allowing ordinary individuals (remarkably different in their interests and abilities) to determine how to earn a living and invest their assets.  Richards, the author of Money, Greed, and God, recounts a vital lesson he learned in the sixth grade, playing a game which enabled all the students to freely trade toys their teacher gave them; in the end, everyone had traded up (in terms of what was most desirable) and a “win-win” status was established.  Contrary to the Marxists’ “labor theory,” the “economic value of something is determined not by its cost of production but by how much someone is willing to give up freely to get it” (p. 217).   As is historically evident in the past two centuries, freedom economics maximizes human potential.  

The grandeur of this freedom is that it enables us to “be fruitful and multiply” and “till the earth” in accord with the ancient biblical injunctions given our first parents.  “‘When God fashions man from the dust of the earth, and breathes into him the breath of life, and speaks those first words of vocation to the human family,’ says Rev. Robert Sirico, ‘He, in effect is inviting the human family to be co-creators with Him, . . . “working with Him” in the continuation of the creation of the world’” (p. 263).  Perfectly illustrating this is Norman Borlaug, the agronomist “father of the Green Revolution” whose hybrid seeds and farming strategies now enable billions of people to escape the threat of starvation.  He alone, arguably, did more to alleviate world hunger than all the governmental and non-governmental aid organizations allegedly addressing the problem!

Importantly:  wealth—such as the prolific harvests now possible as a result of Borlaug’s work—is created, not captured.  The world’s great natural resource is knowledge and imagination, not silver and gold, coal and oil.  Though we obviously need earth’s “natural resources” to work with, John Paul II rightly said, “‘man’s principal resource is man himself.  His intelligence enables him to discover the earth’s productive potential and the many different ways in which human needs can be satisfied’” (p. 305). Unfortunately, many thinkers (ranging from Harvard professors and Washington politicians to denominational bureaucrats and “occupy Wall street” protestors) cling to the old, easily-discredited mercantilist image of the world’s wealth as a pie with everyone struggling to get a larger piece.   Thus in the name of “fairness” socialist and progressive governments insist they must step in and make sure that no one gets too much of the pie.  Robison and Richards warn that such efforts cannot but enslave and diminish men and women designed to freely work with God in having “dominion” on this good earth.  

Though one must always take book endorsements with a grain of salt, I cannot improve on the recommendation of Indivisible by Eric Metaxas, the author of the majestic biography, Bonhoeffer:  “James Robison and Jay Richards have given America a tremendous gift.  INDIVISIBLE is a stunning synthesis and super-clear explanation of the most important issues facing us today, full of wisdom and grace and truth.  It should give all who read it real hope that god has not forsaken this nation and that there is indeed a way forward.  I pray that book groups will study this book and use it to become part of the solution, so that American might again fulfill God’s call upon her, to be a beacon of hope and freedom for the world.”  

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In Resurgent:  How Constitutional Conservatism Can Save America (New York:  Threshold Editions, c. 2011), Ken Blackwell and Ken Klukowski expand upon ideas and injunctions set forth in a prior treatise, The Blueprint.  Blackwell served a term as Ohio’s Secretary of State and is one of the more prominent African-Americans active in the Republican Party.  Klukowski is a lawyer who played a role in some significant recent cases (e.g. challenging Obamacare) in federal courts.  Both men are associated with Liberty University Law School and make no secret of their commitment to the Christian faith and worldview.  They summarize the book’s argument in its first two sentences:  “The democratic republic created by the Framers of our Constitution—and designed with the hope of enduring forever—is hanging by a thread.  Are you willing to do your part to save it?” (p. 1).  Though the text often oozes with anguish, they find reason to hope in the fact that “ultimately, the best way to describe what’s going on in America today is that the Constitution is resurgent” (p. 18).  

The United States, as originally established by the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, was a profoundly “promised land,” a “city set on a hill.”  “Our Founders understood they were doing something unprecedented.  For the first time in human history, a nation-sized body of people with a preexisting economic system and shared legal philosophy and basic religious faith were seeking to learn from all the lessons of human experience over the centuries to design the best governmental system ever created” (p. 131).  To recover this nation’s promise, doing our part means recalling the Republican Party to constitutional conservatism (as well as, importantly, not supporting any divisive third party movement), for while both parties share responsibility for the nation’s plight only the Republicans indicate any openness to fiscal and cultural conservatism.  

Our republic will certainly collapse if it continues its prodigal ways, thereby illustrating Thomas Jefferson’s lament that the “natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”  Demonstrating this loss of liberty, under Obamacare a person is actually required to buy health insurance.  Thus the government can “tell you how to spend your own money” (p. 244).  Aptly, Ronald Reagan once said:  “Government is not the solution to our problems.  Government is the problem.”  Employing a nautical metaphor Blackwell and Klukowski say:  “The USS America has been hit by a missile—an economic and governmental missile.  Unless all citizens muster to general quarters, our ship of state will go down” (p. 3).  This missile carried three explosive war-heads:  “economic mismanagement, trillions of dollars of deficit spending, and massive entitlements that cannot possibly pay what they’ve promised.  The 111^th Congress (2009 and 2010) amassed more debt—$3.22 trillion—in just two years than the first one hundred Congresses combined over a period of two hundred years.  That’s $10,429 per person—including each child—in the United States, just in the past two years.  And that number doesn’t even touch our other $11 trillion in debt, or $88 trillion in unfunded entitlements” (p. 3).  We face a literal “tsunami” of entitlement spending that will surely swamp us unless we quickly take action to avoid it.  

Structuring the book’s argument is an appeal to three basic strains of conservatism:  “economic, social, and national security” (p. 76)—the ECons, SoCons, and SafeCons.  However they may differ in their convictions and priorities, they share a basic commitment to constitutional principles and the underlying belief in a “Sovereign Society,” wherein “individual Americans are truly sovereign in their own lives” (p. 99).   All three groups, the authors insist, must forget or at least forego their differences and support the one, great, overarching cause of our day:  constitutionalism.  These groups really do need each other, since not even a united two of the three movements can prevail in modern America.  In fact, their causes overlap in significant ways, and, as Benjamin Franklin quipped during the Revolutionary War, “We must, indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”   

The ECons stress the need for jobs, balanced budgets, and private property.  SoCons plead for the restoration of the traditional family and the role of faith in both individuals and the public square.  As Ronald Reagan insisted, “‘politics and morality are inseparable.  And as morality’s foundation is religion, religion and politics are necessarily related.  We need religion as a guide’” (p. 114).  Thus a “family flat tax” replacing the income tax would, Blackman and Klukowski argue, help both the nation’s economy and traditional families.  “The single most egregious failure of both the Democrats and the Republicans is that they’ve failed to protect the American family.”  Still more:  “Restoring the family is more than a social values argument; it is an economic prosperity argument” (p. 25).  As Congressman Mike Pence, a leading SoCon, noted:  “‘We must realize there’s a direct correlation between the stability of families and the stability of our economy’” (p. 85).  SafeCons demand that government enforce the laws and protect the nation—police and courts, soldiers and arms that make us secure.  

Beyond these concerns, there are two important philosophical positions essential for conservative constitutionalism:  1) federalism, allowing what Justice Louis Brandeis described as 50 creative “laboratories of democracy,” and 2) judicial restraint and originalism in the courts.  Given the authors’ background, it is understandable that they devote significant sections of the book to judicial matters.  Since the New Deal’s triumphant reshaping of this nation the Left has found “that an activist judiciary was essential to their agenda” (p. 149).  Lawyers and judges committed to an ever-evolving, “living constitution,” threaten the very foundations of this nation, for justices seeking to implement their own visions of “social justice” become activists rather than guardians of the constitution.  “In their left-wing world, it’s absurd to think that the Constitution actually limits the power of the federal government.  They think government should do anything it wants” (p. 227).  

Resisting such leftist trends are members of the Federalist Society, now numbering “almost fifty thousand judges, lawyers, law professors, and law students” who champion judicial restraint and originalism.  Should originalists come to dominate the federal court system healthy changes would quickly take place in America.  One sign of this possibility came in 2008 (D.C. v. Heller) and 2010 (McDonald v. Chicago) when the Supreme Court upheld the Second Amendment, securing gun rights for individual Americans.  These decisions were informed by two decades of vigorous scholarship, providing evidence employed by the Court when rendering its decisions.  Though these two decisions are only the beginning of a larger struggle regarding gun rights, the authors firmly believe that from any legal vantage point  “we are at the beginning of a new era of constitutional law” (p. 294).  

Though filled with warnings and laments, this book is basically a hopeful call to arms, an appeal for conservative Americans of all stripes to speak out and vote and bring this nation back to its original principles.  While the book’s length and intricate legal arguments may tax the general reader’s patience, it certainly provides both information and analyses important for citizens concerned about the nation’s prospect.  Thus an ECon, Steve Forbes, says:  “We need leaders advocating policies that will reverse our economic decline, balance our budget, and bring sanity to our tax system and ruinous spending.  This book makes the case for how the Constitution can return America to prosperity.”  A SoCon, Tony Perkins, writes:  “America’s families are in crisis.  Without apologies, Ken and Ken make a compelling case of why our economy cannot reach its full potential, or America face our most pressing needs, unless we protect and rebuild the family as the basic unit of our society.  Their book is a must read.”  And a SafeCon, Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin (Ret.) says:  “The United States faces deadly threats to our citizens and our way of live.  Our Constitution was written for trying times such as today.  This book explains how and what we as a country must do about it.”  Could all the Americans who share the concerns of Steve Forbes, Tony Perkins, and Jerry Boykin come together and energetically engage in the political process, this nation can be restored to its Founders’ vision.  

# # # 

In The Search for Christian America (Colorado Springs:  Helmers & Howard, c. 1989), three eminent evangelical historians—Mark Noll, George Marsden, and Nathan Hatch—examined the evidence for claiming that this nation is (or ever has been) actually Christian.  The question is as old as the republic itself, and the answer hinges upon both a definition—what makes a nation “Christian”—and the disposition of the historians looking for evidence.  These three authors believe that though the people have been generally religious “a careful study of the facts of history shows that early America does not deserve to be considered uniquely, distinctly or even predominately Christian, if we mean by the word ‘Christian’ a state of society reflecting the ideals presented in Scripture” (p. 17).  Still more:  they find the very idea “of a ‘Christian nation’ is a very ambiguous concept which is usually harmful to effective Christian action in society” (p. 17).  The authors demand more than a generic label easily applied to “Western Christian Culture” or large groups of believers engaged in admirable activities.  

Though they claim not to “expect perfection,” they “would expect that a ‘Christian’ society in this sense would generally distinguish itself from most other societies in the commendability of both its ideals and its practices.  Family, churches, and state would on the whole be properly formed.  Justice and charity would normally be shown toward minorities and toward the poor and other unfortunate people.  The society would be predominantly peaceful and law-abiding.  Proper moral standards would generally prevail.  Cultural activities such as learning, business, or the subduing of nature would be pursued basically in accord with God’s will.  In short, such as society would be a proper model for us to imitate” (p. 31).  

The authors apparently share the repudiation of the “myth of American innocence” etched in the works of their academic peers.  “Young Historians,” Hatch says, “taking a fresh look at the American past, have discovered a saga of injustice, exploitation, greed, and self-righteousness.  As C. Vann Woodward recently noted, the vocabulary of early America now is completely reversed:  ‘discover’ of the New World has become ‘invasion’; ‘settlement’ is now ‘conquest’; and what was once the ‘Virgin Land’ is now called a ‘Widowed Land.’  The advancement of the Western frontier is sometimes pictured as genocide of the Indians, and the achievements of the Revolution are considered in terms of their excessive cost for the underprivileged and those in bondage.  The ‘glorious experiment’ which called for adoration has given way to a tale of infamy which demands repentance” (p. 121).  Could bona fide “Christians” have orchestrated all these abominations?  Obviously not!  And since the authors of The Search for Christian America  accept the consensus of the “young historians,” they could obviously find little or nothing “Christian” in American history.  Still more:  given such definitions and standards, it seems obvious that no nation could ever qualify as Christian and false claims to such status prove deleterious.  If no nation could ever, realistically, be Christian, it follows that America was never really Christian.  

Each of the three writers contributed chapters rooted in his historical specialization, and the project begins with George Marsden looking at “America’s ‘Christian’ Origins:  Puritan New England as a Case Study.”  Though the Puritans clearly sought to establish a “city on a hill,” working out their covenant theology, they just as clearly failed, mistreating dissidents and massacring Indians, transgressing biblical precepts and rather quickly sliding into both a works-righteous moralism and theological Unitarianism.  “Puritan culture, then, for all its merits, can hardly qualify as a model Christian culture” (p. 45).  Nor, Mark Noll argues, were the American Revolutionaries particularly Christian.  Though he acknowledges the powerful transformations resulting from the First Great Awakening led by Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, he disagrees with those historians who connect the spiritual revival of the 1740s with the political upheaval of the 1770s.  

Though preachers and patriots routinely used religious language in the Revolutionary Era, Noll insists we “should be appalled at the way in which the Bible, and Christian categories generally, were abused” thereby (p. 64).  Indeed, he asserts, this era was rather abysmal, for “the gospel was prostituted, the church was damaged, and, finally, the spread of the Christian faith itself was hindered” (p. 65).  He insists America’s Founders such as Washington “were at once genuinely religious but not specifically Christian” (p. 72).  In sum:  “The Revolution was not Christian, but it stood for many things compatible with the Christian faith.  It was not biblical, though many of hits leaders respected Scripture.  It did not establish the United States on a Christian foundation, even if it created many commendable precedents” (p. 100).  Emphatically, says Noll:  “America is not a Christian country, nor has it ever been one” (p. 102).  

During the 80 years separating the War for Independence and the Civil War millions of Americans, especially in the West, embraced a fervent and uniquely American form of evangelical Christianity personified by Charles G. Finney.  Repudiating classic Calvinism, Nathan Hatch says, these believers trumpeted the importance of individual liberty in religion as well as politics.  Minimally educated Methodist and Baptist revivalists enraptured the masses, with the consequence that “traditional theology itself, along with the riches of the Christian heritage, had been largely set aside by 1830” (p. 119).  And though many of these believers, swept up in the Second Great Awakening, were personally devout, they failed to fundamentally transform the nature of the nation, leaving it less than authentically Christian.

In light of all this, there is, naturally, no possibility of any “return” to a Christian America that never existed!  All the calls for political renewal and a recovery of pristine religiously republican virtues must go for naught.  However, though “the American heritage is not ‘Christian’ or biblical in any strict sense, the generically Judeo-Christian aspects of this heritage may be relatively the best available for the health of the civilization” (p. 138).  

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Countering those historians who discount any distinctively Christian basis to this nation’s past, Michael Novak, a distinguished Catholic philosopher and public intellectual, argues—in On Two Wings:  Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding (San Francisco:  Encounter Books, c. 2002)—that America was established as an explicitly Judeo-Christian nation.  Reaching this conclusion, however,  took him years of study to discover that “the way the story of the United States has been told for the past one hundred years is wrong.  It has cut off one of the two wings by which the American eagle flies, her compact with the God of the Jews” (p. 5).  The story of the Enlightenment (personified by Locke and Montesquieu, Jefferson and Franklin) and its role in shaping the nation has been effectively told.  Sadly neglected is the role of the Bible!  In fact, fully one-third of all citations in the works of the founders were taken from Scripture, whereas only ten percent cited Montesquieu, the most influential of all secular writers; even the most secular of the founders, Thomas Jefferson, suggested the Seal of the United States depict “‘the children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.’  He later concluded his second inaugural address with this same image:  ‘I shall need . . . the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life’” (p. 8).  

Jefferson incarnated what Alexis de Tocqueville celebrated, in his magisterial Democracy in America:  “‘There is no country in the world in which the boldest political theories of the eighteenth-century philosophers are put so effectively into practice as in America.  Only their anti-religious doctrines have never made any headway in that country.’  Indeed, Tocqueville went further:  ‘For the Americans the ideas of Christianity and liberty are so completely mingled that it is almost impossible to get them to conceive of the one without the other’” (p. 31).  At this point, Novak repeatedly emphasizes the statement of one of the most influential of the founders, Benjamin Rush:  “‘A Christian cannot fail of being a Republican’” (p. 35).   “A Christian cannot fail of being a Republican!”  Sharing Rush’s position in a 1807 letter addressed to him, John Adams declared:  “‘The Bible contains the most profound philosophy, the most perfect morality, and the most refined policy, that ever was conceived upon earth.  It is the most republican book in the world’” (p. 37).  Accordingly, Adams and his colleagues asserted their understanding of “rights” in religious rather than secular terms.  They were original rights, rooted “‘in the frame of human nature, in the constitution of the intellectual and moral world,’” not granted by kings or parliaments (p. 78).  So Alexander Hamilton insisted:  “‘The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records.  They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power’” (p. 132).  

Having established his position, Novak devotes the final sections of his book to answering “ten questions about the founding” and providing biographical vignettes of some of the “forgotten founders” (men who were both deeply religious and major 18^th revolutionary leaders) such as George Mason and James Wilson, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay.  Today’s overwhelmingly secular historians generally imply that all of the 100 founders were akin to the least religious of them—Franklin, Jefferson and Madison.   But, in truth:  “Virtually all the signers of the Declaration and Constitution were churchgoing men” (p. 129).  Hamilton, for example, routinely knelt by his bed and prayed before retiring and asked to take Communion while on his deathbed.  John Witherspoon, Princeton’s Presbyterian president, exercised enormous influence in both the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention.   Digging into the original sources one finds persuasive evidence that this nation’s founders were, in fact, deeply Christian men who openly relied upon their faith while establishing the United States of America.  

Novak’s skill in assembling the evidence—amply evident in his extensive citations—and setting forth cogent arguments makes this treatise both scintillating and persuasive.  

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Thomas S. Kidd, a history professor at Baylor University, roots his God of Liberty:  A Religious History of the American Revolution (New York:  Basic Books, c. 2010) in a meticulous, in-depth study of primary sources.  Consequently, his assertions are highly credible—though his presentation targets a scholarly rather than popular audience.  At its inception, he argues, this nation’s “religion was both diverse and thriving,” sustaining a “public spirituality shared by the revolutionary era’s evangelicals, mainstream Christians, liberal rationalists, and deists [who] established many of America’s most cherished freedoms” (p. 10).  Though they clearly differed doctrinally, they were all equally committed to and fought for the establishment of a “religious republic” committed to religious liberty.  

Kidd sees the Revolution as a political outgrowth of the remarkable mid-18^th century spiritual movement he earlier portrayed in The Great Awakening:  A Brief History with Documents.  In a chapter titled “‘No King but King Jesus’:  The Great Awakening and the First American Revolution’” he shows how the preaching of Jonathan  Edwards and George Whitefield (and the churches springing up along the western frontier) incubated a “spiritual democracy” that helped fuel the drive for independence from Great Britain.  As Pastor Nathanial Whitaker declared, delivering a eulogy for Whitefield, the great evangelist “‘was greatly concerned for the liberties of America, and under God it was in no small measure owing to him, that the Stamp Act, that first attack upon our liberties in these colonies was repealed’” (p. 34).  Just as preachers in the Great Awakening challenged the authority (the “spiritual tyranny”) of the established churches so too their hearers easily challenged the “tyrannical” authority of the Crown.  

When the Quebec Act (assuring Catholics in Canada that they would enjoy protection as England assumed control of that region and shifted Quebec’s border south to the Ohio River) was passed in 1774, many Colonists (New Englanders in particular) were alarmed.  Alexander Hamilton, just beginning his studies at King’s College in New York, assailed the act “as an ‘atrocious infraction’ on Christian liberty and the rights of Englishmen” (p. 69).  Anti-Catholic alarms easily turned into anti-Episcopal agitations as back-country Baptists in the South demanded an end to the established Anglican Church.  “General Gage, who had become the martial-law governor of Massachusetts in May 1774, wrote that the Quebec Act unfortunately ended hope of limiting the crisis to Boston.  In the hinterlands of the province, where ‘sedition flows copiously from the pulpits,’ a patriotic ‘flame blazed out in all parts at once beyond the conception of every body,’ Gage remarked” (p. 71).  

Evangelicals, Kidd insists, cleared the way for the American Revolution.  For example, Patrick Henry (who derived both his beliefs and speaking style from the Great Awakening) believed that the Virginians’ battle with Britain was “a ‘holy cause of liberty’” and that “‘God would fight on their behalf’” (p. 76).  For 30 years evangelicals had been asserting “groundbreaking notions of limited government, the sacred right of conscience, and the people’s duty to resist ungodly laws and governments” (p. 78).  Though they easily employed the language and thought of John Locke (as did Jonathan Edwards in his theology), their deepest convictions and insights came from Scripture and the Natural Law.  Even Thomas Paine—despite his growing theological skepticism—chose to rely on “religiously inspired language and arguments in Common Sense,” the most significant political pamphlet of the revolutionary era, resplendent with the “rhetoric of evangelical dissent” (p. 88).    

Founders such as Samuel Adams hoped the revolution would inaugurate in Boston a “Christian Sparta”—a virtuous city sustained by strong moral standards manifestly lacking in London.  “‘Will men never be free!’ he exclaimed.  ‘They will be free no longer than while they remain virtuous’” (p. 98).  Adams was, Kidd says, “articulating a new philosophy of the Patriot cause:  Christian republicanism” (p. 98).  He was joined in this by scores of pastors and Patriot leaders, including John Witherspoon (who synthesized both vocations and stands out as one of the most influential revolutionary figures) and John Jay, who “proclaimed that if ‘virtue, honor, the love of liberty and of science’ were to remain at the heart of the Republic, then rising generations had to be taught to be free” (p. 111).  Summing it all up, George Washington, in his 1796 Farewell Address, said:  “‘Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.  In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness—these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens’” Warning against any weakening of religion and morality, any supposition that humanistic education could replace them, he insisted that “‘religion and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle’” (p. 112).  

As was evident when Washington freed his slaves at his death, religious and moral principles were challenged during this time by the problematic status of slavery in the colonies.  A few decades earlier almost no Christians questioned the legitimacy of owning slaves—both George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards, the great leaders of the Great Awakening, owned slaves.  Yet as evangelical thinkers such as Patrick Henry mused on the notion that all me are created equal they could not avoid wondering at the enormity of some men owning others.  In a 1773 letter, Henry (a slave-owner who never freed his slaves) wondered why “‘that at a time, when the rights of humanity are defined and understood with precision, in a country, above all others fond of liberty, that in such an age and in such a country, we find men professing a religion the most human, mild, gentle and generous, adopting a principle [slavery] as repugnant to humanity, as it is inconsistent with the Bible, and destructive to liberty?’” (p. 147).  

The Declaration of Independence famously declared that “all men are created equal” and many of the founders (Benjamin Rush, John Jay, George Mason) clearly saw the need to end the repugnant institution of slavery.   Prominent Baptist preachers in the South denounced it, longing (in the words of John Poindexter) “‘for the happy time to come, when the church of Christ shall loose the bands of wickedness, undo the heavy burdens, and let the oppressed go free’” (p. 157).  Methodists in the 1780s united in opposing it.  And as increasing numbers of slaves embraced evangelical Christianity a religiously-based anti-slave movement made headway.  In time, of course, compromises (both theological and political) postponed for half-a-century a resolution to the controversy, but the seeds for emancipation were clearly sown during the revolutionary era.  

Kidd insists that what emerged from the America Revolution was a religious republic—not narrowly Christian but certainly aligned with the “Hebrew metaphysics” celebrated in Michael Novak’s On Two Wings.    

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While reading a derogatory and condescending discussion of David Barton in The Anointed (by Randall Stephens and Karl Giberson) I noticed that they rarely referred to Barton’s basic text, titled Original Intent:  The Courts, the Constitution, & Religion (Aledo, TX:  WallBuilder Press, 2010)–instead  relying on internet materials and statements from his critics.  So I determined to see exactly what’s presented in Original Intent and found it more a compilation of original sources (quotations, biographical vignettes, references) than a historical treatise.  

Basically, Barton argues that recent judicial decisions regarding “the separation of church and state” violate the Constitution and ignore the precedents set by the nation’s founders that were followed for 150 years.  The prescription was set forth by James Wilson, an original Justice on the Supreme Court and one of only six Founders who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution:  “‘The first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statute is to discover the meaning of those who made it’” (p. 28).  The men who wrote and adopted the First Amendment, with its guarantee of religious freedom, clearly supported a Judeo-Christian metaphysic and presence in the public square.  The “separation of church and state,” so rigorously enforced by today’s judiciary, is (as Justice William Rehnquist said) “‘a misleading metaphor’” (p. 49).  The phrase was lifted from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to assure some Baptists that they need not fear for their freedom to follow their religious convictions, for the government would never intrude on them.  Barton then summarizes 21 court decisions upholding this position.  

Presenting historical evidence supporting claims that America is a “Christian nation,” Barton cites a collage of colonial documents—the Mayflower Compact, colonial charters, college constitutions, Patriots’ statements, Continental Congress’s calls for days of prayer and fasting,  the Declaration of Independence, etc.—to demonstrate this case.  He then records a multitude of statements by the nation’s founders that indicate this was, at its inception, a deeply “Christian” country.   That secular historians and jurists now seek to deny this reveals their personal prejudice rather than any openness to evidence.