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!  

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

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).  

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

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.  

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

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.    

# # # 

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.  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

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.  

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

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.  

# # # 

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.”  

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

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).  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

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.  

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

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.    

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

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. 

In God and Ronald Reagan:  A Spiritual Life (New York:  ReganBooks, c. 2004), Paul Kengor, a professor of political science at Grove City College, sympathetically crafts a spiritual biography of the 40^th President of the United States.  Based upon a careful examination of his official papers, which reveal his “intense religious thinking” (p. viii), the author finds Reagan’s life an illustration of his presidential prayer  “‘that I can . . . perform the duties of this position so as to serve God,’” (p. vii).  

As a youngster Reagan was blessed with a fervently devout mother, routinely attended church, and was baptized in the Dixon, IL, Disciples of Christ church in 1922 at the age of eleven.  “When he arose from the water and heard the minister command him, ‘Arise and walk in newness of faith,’ he said he felt ‘called’—and that in that moment he had ‘a personal experience when I invited Christ into my life’” (p. 17).  He then became an active member of the congregation:  “Sunday school Sunday mornings, church Sunday morning, Christian Endeavor Sunday evening, church after Christian Endeavor, and prayer meeting on Wednesdays” (p. 28).   Good teachers and pastors and youth activities enriched and established his budding discipleship.

Financially helped by a football scholarship, Reagan joined some 250 students in 1928 at Eureka College, a Disciples of Christ institution.  He and the college were a perfect fit, and he looked back on those years with fondness for the “sound foundation” it provided him.  Drawn to the performing arts, he later landed a job as a radio broadcaster in Iowa and began to rapidly climb the career ladder that led him in five years to Hollywood.  A man who knew him well “in the early 1930s remembered him as a ‘deeply religious man’” who had “‘a strong inner faith’” (p. 43).  Signing with Warner Brothers, Reagan launched his movie career in 1938.  He also maintained his connection with the Disciples of Christ denomination by joining the Hollywood Beverly Christian Church, though his attendance would prove erratic as his acting career burgeoned.  Distressed by the Communist threat abroad (and within the Screen Actors Guild) he steadily shifted his political position.  “A Truman Democrat in the late 1940s, he was an Eisenhower Democrat by 1952, and a Nixon Republican by the early 1960s” (p. 52).    

In part this resulted from his growing awareness of—and opposition to—the threat of Communism and its war on religion.  Reagan read widely (e.g. Malcolm Muggeridge, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, William Roepke) and thought deeply about the nature of Soviet tyranny and the suffering Christians in the USSR.  “In the 1960s, he regularly assailed the ‘false god of Marx and his false prophet Lenin’” (p. 73).  He was especially influenced by Whittaker Chambers, who (in his classic anti-communist work, Witness) wrote that “‘in this century, within the next decades, will be decided for generations whether all mankind is to become Communist, whether the whole world is to become free, or whether, in the struggle, civilization as we know it is to be completely destroyed or completely changed.’  And Chambers challenged his readers to take the cause personally:  ‘It is our fate to live upon that turning point in history’” (p. 80).  As president, Reagan quoted these words in a stirring 1982 speech.    

Entering the political arena, Reagan was elected governor of California and served eight years in that capacity, assured that it was “‘part of God’s plan for me’” (p. 115).  In his first inaugural address, he gave witness to his faith by citing Benjamin Franklin’s dictum:  “‘He who introduces into public office the principles of primitive Christianity will change the face of the world’” (p. 115).  During this time he forged  a life-long bond with Rev. Donn Moomaw, pastor of the Bel Air Presbyterian church the Reagans attended.  “Moomaw called Reagan ‘a man without guile—one of the most principled men I know. . . .  In his decisions he tries to be morally right, use his common sense and seek the guidance of God.’  He prayed with Reagan often, and said that they two spent ‘many hours together on our knees’” (p. 120).  

Following his successful gubernatorial career, Reagan entered the national stage with an unsuccessful run for the Republican nomination for president in 1976.  Four years later, however, he succeeded and was elected to the nation’s highest office, bringing with him a lifetime of spiritual sensitivities and commitments.  Closing his first inaugural address (wholly written by himself) he said:  “‘We are a nation under God, and I believe God intended for us to be free.  It would be fitting and good, I think, if on each Inaugural Day in  future years it should be declared a day of prayer” (p. 160).  He not only called people to pray but prayed himself, “frequently invoking the image of Lincoln on his knees” (p. 173).  Surviving John Hinckley’s 1981 assassination attempt, he praised God, telling Terence Cardinal Cooke:    “‘I have decided that whatever time I have left is for Him. . . .  Whatever happens now I owe my life to God and will try to serve him every way I can’” (p. 197).  This conviction was deepened by a meeting with Mother Teresa, who told him she “stayed up for two straight nights praying for you after’” he was shot.  “‘We prayed very hard for you to live’” (p. 208).  More pointedly, she admonished him:  “‘You have suffered a passion of the cross and have received grace.  There is a purpose to this.  Because of your suffering and pain you will now understand the suffering and pain of the world.’” (p. 209).  

He was also convinced that God had spared him to speak and work, week after week, for the millions suffering under the curse of atheistic Communism.  As one of his closest advisors (William Clark) recalled, Reagan “‘did feel a calling, as I did, to this effort and the idea that truth would ultimately prevail.  Not that he would prevail, but the truth will prevail.’”  Clark remembered “‘that Reagan confidently told him and his staff, ‘several times both as governor and many times later as president,’ that ‘the wall around atheistic communism is destined to come down with the Divine Plan because it lives a lie’” (pp. 214-215).  God’s Plan for man, to Reagan, included the inalienable rights cited in the Declaration of Independence—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  “In a 1983 address in Atlanta, he quoted a theologian who said that these rights are ‘corollaries of the great proposition, at the heart of Western civilization, that every  . . . person is a ressacra, a sacred reality, and as such is entitled to the opportunity of fulfilling those great human potentials with which God has endowed man’” (p. 228).  

These potentials were frustrated throughout the communist world.  So in 1983, speaking to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, President Reagan shocked the world by calling the Soviet Union “an evil empire,” indeed “the focus of evil in the modern world.”  This was followed by a plea for prayer “‘for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness—pray they will discover the joy of knowing God’” (p. 238).  It was, Kengor says, “one of the most polarizing speeches Reagan ever gave” (p. 235) and keyed up a chorus of critics, including the noted historian Henry Steele Commager, who declared, “‘It was the worst presidential speech in American history, and I’ve read them all.’  He was particularly angered by what he saw as Reagan’s ‘gross appeal to religious prejudice’” (p. 249).  However, it effectively summarized  “a lifetime of Reagan’s thinking on the subject” (p. 240) and  dissidents behind the Iron Curtain found the words “evil empire” perfectly descriptive of their world.  

In his final year as President, Reagan became what Kengor calls a “missionary to Moscow,” attending his fourth “summit” with Mikhail Gorbachev.  “Eager to find every means possible to undermine Soviet communism, Reagan must have believed from the start in making God—and particularly biblical Christianity—a constant refrain during his 1988 trip to the USSR, he stood a real chance to weaken Soviet communism and even help change the country” (p. 283).  In speeches and interviews, private conversations and public broadcasts, Reagan appealed for religious freedom and faith in God.  Speaking in Gorbachev’s presence before a recently reopened monastery, “He called the restoration of the monastery a ‘first’ that he hoped would be followed by a ‘resurgent spring of religious liberty.’  He directly coaxed Gorbachev, this time on his home turf:  ‘We may hope that perestroika will be accompanied by a deeper restructuring, a deeper conversion, a metanoya, a change in heart, and that glasnost, which means giving voice, will also let loose a new chorus of belief, singing praise to the God that gave us life’” (p. 300).  

In both public and private, Kengor says, Ronald Reagan was a consistently committed Christian, and God and Ronald Reagan fully demonstrates that thesis.  

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

Providing a sequel to his study of President Reagan, Paul Kengor authored God and George W. Bush:  A Spiritual Life (Washington:  ReganBooks, c. 2004).  The book is dedicated to “Billy Graham, preacher to presidents” to indicate the great evangelist’s role in bringing George W. Bush to an active faith in Christ, on display in his first inaugural address, in January 2001, when he said:  “‘We are not this story’s author, who fills time and eternity with His purpose.  Yet His purpose is achieved in our duty’” (p. ix).

Blessed with loving parents, Bush was born in 1946 and reared (from age two) in Texas.  For eleven years he regularly attended a Presbyterian church in Midland, where his father taught Sunday school.  Moving to Houston, the family attended an Episcopal church, returning to George H.W. Bush’s religious roots.  Following his father’s path, he attended Phillips Academy, an exclusive college prep school, then on to Yale University, where he earned a degree in history in 1968 as well as a reputation as a partygoer and prankster.   Ever emulating his father, Bush then “joined the Texas Air National Guard and became an F-102 fighter pilot” (p. 14).  After taking various short-term jobs he entered Harvard’s Business School and graduated with an MBA in 1975.  

He then returned to Midland to seek success in the oil business, starting “at rock bottom” (p. 17).  He also met a delightful Midland girl named Laura Welch, whom he married in 1977.  Twin daughters arrived four years later.  After years of at best desultory church attendance, George joined Laura as a member of the first United Methodist Church.  Though involved in various church programs, he struggled with a drinking problem and sensed a deep spiritual need unsatisfied by mere church attendance.  In 1985, joining his extended family for a vacation in Kennebunkport, Maine, he fortuitously met a guest of the family, Billy Graham.  Hiking on the beach, the two men “had a heart-to-heart conversation.  ‘I knew I was in the presence of a great man,’ said Bush.  ‘He was like a magnet; I felt drawn to seek something different.  He didn’t lecture or admonish; he shared warmth and concern.  Billy Graham didn’t make you feel guilty; he made you feel loved’” (p. 22).  Though no “crisis experience” took place, in those moments “Graham ‘planted a mustard seed in my soul,’ Bush later wrote.  ‘He led me to the path, and I began walking’” (p. 23).  George W. Bush became a sincerely committed Christian.

Walking rightly in years ahead led him to stop drinking, study the Bible, and pray daily.  He also followed his father into public life and was elected Governor of Texas in 1994.  In his first inaugural address, “Bush promised fellow Texans:  ‘The duties that I assume can best be met with the guidance of One greater than ourselves I ask for God’s help’” (p. 31).  That involved developing a “compassionate conservatism” attuned to the needs of all people—somewhat akin to the messages preached in the relatively conservative Texas Methodist churches he attended.    Reelected in 1998, he began to envision (ever mindful of his father’s accomplishments) a presidential campaign in 2000, deeply persuaded (as he told a prominent evangelist, James Robison) that “‘God wants me to run for president’” (p. 62).  

Elected President in 2000, Bush brought a robust and public Christian faith to the White House.  This was evident in his first inaugural address, presidential appointments and pronouncements.  “His first official act was to make Inaugural Day a National Day of Prayer and Thanksgiving, ‘knowing that I cannot succeed in this task without the favor of God and the prayers of the people’” (p. 89).  He also did whatever  possible to protect unborn babies, reversing President Clinton’s unswerving promotion of abortion rights.  Just as importantly, behind the scenes—away from the cameras—he lived out his faith, as Kengor shows, giving ample illustrations of the many ways the president cared personally for various individuals.    

Barely into his presidency, George W. Bush had to deal with the September 11, 2001 Islamic terrorists’ attacks upon the nation.  It could not have been other than a defining moment for the nation’s commander-in-chief.  During those trying times, he not only issued public statements, calling people to pray and turn to God, but  he personally “leaned on the words of German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who during the darkest days of Nazi rule had said, ‘I believe that God can and wants to create good out of everything, even evil’” (p. 128).  This, of course, did not mean inaction!   Bush quickly authorized an attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan and (two years later) the invasion of Iraq.  

Bearing the burden of such decisions, Bush continually sought God’s guidance, beginning “each morning with prayer, and by reading his daily Bible devotional.  He often turns to a cabinet member to request a prayer before beginning a cabinet meeting’ (p. 161).  Indeed, Garry Wills said, the Bush White House was “‘honeycombed with prayer groups and Bible study cells, like a whited monastery’” (p. 159).  Their prayers helped secure a distinctive atmosphere, says David Frum, who noted that “the evangelicals in the Bush White House were ‘its gentlest souls, the most patient, the least argumentative.  They were numerous enough to set the tone of the White House, and the result was an office in which I seldom heard a voice raised in anger—never witnessed a single one of those finger-jabbing confrontation you see in movies about the White House’” (p. 171).  

The war with Iraq, increasingly unpopular as this book went to print, elicited increasing personal attacks on Bush and his religious beliefs.  Leftists (many of them churchmen) stridently attacked the president, and his faith was often subjected to ridicule.  Yet he persevered, confident he was doing the right thing, liberating the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship.  “‘Every nation has learned, or should have learned,’ Bush said, ‘an important lesson:  Freedom is worth fighting for, dying for, and standing for—and for the advance of freedom leads to peace’” (p. 316).  He also realized, that “‘the ways of Providence . . . are far from our understanding.’”  Finally:  “‘Events aren’t moved by blind change and chance.  Behind all of life and all of history, there’s a dedication and purpose, set by the hand of a just and faithful God. . . .  We pray for wisdom to know and do what is right’” (p. 326).  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Turning from presidents Reagan and George W. Bush to Hillary Clinton, Paul Kengor portrays a different kind of Christian in God and Hillary Clinton:  A Spiritual Life (New York:  Harper Perennial, c. 2007).  Whereas the two presidents gave witness as Christians to a personal relationship with God (mediated through Jesus Christ) and were committed to traditional doctrines, Hillary Clinton proclaims her faith primarily through social action.  Doing good, she believes, makes her Christian.  

Born in 1947, young Hillary followed her father’s example in most every realm, including a commitment to Methodism.  Though he rarely attended services, Hugh Rodham was almost bellicose in defending the denomination of his ancestors.  Attending the Park Ridge Methodist Church in Chicago, young Hillary took to heart “that ‘wonderful old saying’ of the church’s founder John Wesley,’” who said:  “‘Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as you ever can’” (p. 11).  Hillary’s willingness to embrace the social gospel was powerfully accelerated by the Reverend Don Jones, who came to her church as youth minister.  Fresh out of Drew Theological Seminary, Jones tried to radicalize his young charges without unduly antagonizing the relatively conservative older members of the congregation.  In particular, he urged the youngsters to support the civil rights movement and a politically mandated redistribution of wealth.  This involved taking them to meet Saul Alinsky, the “always irreverent Chicagoan” who worked to pull “down the ‘power structure’ throughout capitalist America” by “organizing demonstrations throughout the country” (p. 18).  

Off to Wellesley for her college years in the mid-1960s, she kept in touch with Don Jones and avidly read Motive (the Methodist youth magazine he gave her) which vigorously proclaimed both pacifism and the social gospel as proclaimed by the National Council of Churches.  She slowly discarded her father’s conservative political convictions for the liberalism of her Jones and her professors, opposing the Vietnam War and a espousing racial and economic justice.  Graduating from Wellesley, she seriously considered joining Saul Alinsky, who offered her a job in California, but decided instead to go to law school, entering Yale in the fall of 1969.  Here she met Bill Clinton and began the tumultuous and historically significant partnership that would largely impact Arkansas, America, and the world.  

In Arkansas, Hillary both supported her husband’s career and pursued her own ambitions as an attorney.  While he maintained his own religious ties, attending a large Baptist church in Little Rock, she found a church home in a liberal Methodist congregation and “traveled around the state giving a speech that explained why she was a Methodist” (p. 72).  Working with her husband, she inspired the establishment of the “Governor’s School,” a summer program in the ‘80s that brought 400 high school students together to study what seems to have been a Don Jones curriculum—social change through governmental action.  One of the young students “said that the goal of the program seemed to be to ‘deprogram’ young people away from the traditional values they had learned and to inculcate them into the brave new world of postmodernism, with special attentions to ‘feelings’ and so-called critical thinking” (p. 80).  

With Bill’s election to the presidency in 1992, Hillary envisioned the White House as a doorway to her own political ambitions, which included appealing to a certain swathe of Christians.  The first couple decided to join the same church and attended Foundry United Methodist, whose pastor Philip Wogaman, espoused an aggressively liberal agenda—even opening “his pulpit to fellow Methodist and author of Roe v. Wade, Harry Blackman” (p. 100).  On one core conviction the Clintons persevered:  abortion rights.  Despite encounters with and rebukes from Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa, Bill and Hillary resisted all pro-life appeals and initiatives, even opposing “a ban on the grim procedure of partial-birth abortion” (p. 212).  For her, it was not important “how Jesus felt about abortion, but how Jesus felt about the minimum wage” (p. 233), and the position of her Methodist church provided ample support for her views.  

Her religious convictions were tested by yet another escapade involving her husband and another young woman—Monica Lewinsky.  Subsequently, Bill was impeached and Hillary had to decide what to do.  For comfort and guidance she relied on counsel from a pastor, prayer and the Christian call to forgive those who harm you.  She also realized her husband and her political ambitions could not be severed!  Elected to the Senate in 2000, she spoke often in churches (particularly African-American congregations in New York City), and her convictions on such things as racial justice, same-sex unions, and abortion rights tacked closely with those of the Democrat Party.  

For Hillary Clinton, championing a variety of progressive political causes equates with being a Christian, whereas doctrinal orthodoxy, traditional ethics, and personal piety matter little.  

# # # 

In his dissent from a 1996 Supreme Court decision, Justice Antonin Scalia lamented:  “‘Day by day, case by case, [the Supreme Court] is busy designing a Constitution for a country I do not recognize’” (p. xi).  Robert H. Bork, one of his generation’s finest juridical minds, made Scalia’s lament the title of a collection of essays he edited—“A Country I Do Not Recognize”:  The Legal Assault on American Values (Stanford, CA:  Hoover Institution Press, c. 2005)—setting forth reasons for alarm regarding this nation’s trajectory.  Summing up its message, Bork says:  “There exists a fundamental contradiction between America’s most basic ordinance, its constitutional law, and the values by which Americans have lived and wish to continue to live” (p. ix).  This contradiction results from three “developments.  First, much constitutional law bears little or no relation to the Constitution.  Second, the Supreme Court’s departures from the Constitution are driven by ‘elites’ against the express wishes of a majority of the public.  The tendency of elite domination, moreover, is to press America ever more steadily toward the cultural left.  Finally, though this book concentrates on the role of judges, who constitute the most powerful single force in producing these effects, politicians and bureaucrats share a share of the responsibility” (p. ix).  It’s preeminently the Supreme Court, however, which has struck “at the basic institutions [e.g. private property; individual liberty; marriage; family; religion] that have undergirded the moral life of American society for almost four hundred years and of the West for millennia” (p. x).  So it receives the majority of attention in these essays, three of which I’ll summarize.  

Lino A. Graglia, a law professor at the University of Texas, assails “Constitutional Law without the Constitution:  The Supreme Court’s Remaking of America,” arguing that the Constitution no longer serves “as a guarantor of basic rights” but has instead “been made the means of depriving us of our most essential right, the right of self-government” (p. 2).  Judges issue opinions rooted in their own proclivities rather than in the written text in order to advance their privileged vision of an enlightened society.  Thus contraception, abortion, sodomy etc. are branded constitutional “rights” mysteriously resident in “penumbras, formed by emanations” from the Bill of Rights.  This has been done under the highly dubious rubric of judicial review, amplified by an illicit expansion of a single sentence in the 14^th Amendment (now “our second Constitution”), rationalizing the judicial activism that makes judges legislators.  Consequently:  “In the guise of enforcing the Constitution, the Court faithfully enacted the political program of the liberal cultural elite, working a thoroughgoing revolution in American law and life” (p. 32).  

Reflecting its commitment to the liberal cultural elite is the Court’s commitment to abortion-on-demand.  Elevating the killing of innocent human beings to a constitutionally protected right vividly illustrates its dedication to a Nietzschean  “transvaluation of all values.”  Thus there is, says Gary L. McDowell, a professor at the University of Richmond, “The Perverse Paradox of Privacy,” prompting Justice Byron White to insist in his dissent from Roe that it was “nothing more than ‘an exercise of raw judicial power . . . an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review’” (p. 75).  McDowell finds the core of the justices’ philosophical commitment in the oft-cited statement of Justice Anthony Kennedy in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992), who found  justification for “‘the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life’” (p. 59).  Discerning no limits to individual freedom, the justices in Casey “undertook to establish an understanding of judicial power and constitutional interpretation far more radical than what any earlier court had ever suggested” (p. 72) and in the process revealed an “utter disdain” for “the idea of popular government” (p. 73).  

Terry Eastland, editor of The Weekly Standard, shows, in “A Court Tilting against Religious Liberty,” how consistently the Supreme Court has misconstrued the First Amendment’s provisions, doing “serious damage to the country” (p. 86).  Launching this process in a landmark decision, Everson v. Board of Education (1947), Justice Hugo Black culled a phrase from one of Thomas Jefferson’s letters regarding the “wall of separation” between the state and religion, and subsequent decisions moved to ban religion from public life.  Consequently the courts prohibit even moments of silence in public schools, student prayers at commencements and football games, Christmas displays in court houses, etc.  In Stone v. Graham (1980), the Court banned the posting of the Commandments in public schools, concerned that “students might read, even ‘meditate upon, perhaps . . . venerate and obey’ the Ten Commandments” (p. 95).  These decisions clearly repudiate the positions of Founding Fathers such as George Washington, who declared, in his Farewell Address, “that religion and morality are ‘indispensable’ to ‘political prosperity’ and cautioned against indulging ‘the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion’” (p. 111).  Clearly the Court finds Washington’s position out-dated, and we are, Eastland concludes, “embarked in a new direction, destination unknown” (p. 111).  

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

In The Dirty Dozen:  How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom (Washington, D.C.:  Cato Institute, c. 2009) Robert A. Levy and William Mellor carefully critique judicial decrees that have reconfigured our republic.  As Richard Epstein (a distinguished law professor at the University of Chicago) notes, “the Court has too often taken the plain wording of the Constitution and interpreted it to mean exactly the opposite of what the Founding Fathers intended.  By that process the Court profoundly altered the American legal, political, and economic landscape” (p. xxv).  This is especially evident in the Court’s taking the Constitution’s General Welfare Clause, which limits government power, to justify its virtually limitless expansion.   Consequently, all realms of life may be regulated by assorted commissars.  “Whether it is political speech, economic liberties, property rights, welfare, racial preferences, gun owners’ rights, or imprisonment without charge, the U.S. Supreme Court has behaved in a manner that would have stunned , mystified, and outraged our Founding Fathers” (p. 2).  

As staunch advocates of limited government, Levy and Mellor insist “that programs such as Social Security, which collect money from some taxpayers and redistribute the money to other taxpayers, are unconstitutional” (p. 19).  This results from misconstruing the General Welfare Clause of the Constitution (Article I, Section 8).  Though presented to the public as “personal savings for old age,” Social Security “is a Ponzi scheme that redistributes money from workers to retirees.  Like other Ponzi schemes it works only as long as current participants are willing to rely for their benefits on an ever-increasing flow of money from future participants” (p. 21).  Upholding the program in Helvering v. Davis (1937), the Court (wilting in the face of FDR’s threat to pack the Court) took to interpreting the Constitution as a “living document” and opened “the floodgates for the redistributive state” (p. 24), taking money from one group and giving it to another and effectively re-writing the nation’s founding document.  

This is glaringly evident in the Court’s expansion of federal powers under the guise of rightly enforcing the Interstate Commerce Clause (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3), “the primary source of federal power” (p. 45).  Beginning in 1937, in National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., the Court quickly began intruding into virtually “all manner of human conduct,” including “divorce, child custody, driver’s licenses, local zoning, public schools” (p. 40).  For example, a subsistence farmer in Ohio, selling a small bit of wheat within the state, was told “how much wheat he could grow on his own farm for his own use” (p. 44).  If (to bring the issue up to date) under Obamacare, individuals are forced to purchase health insurance it will be under the assumed power of the commerce clause.  

Though any legitimate rule of law upholds contracts and secures property rights, FDR’s Court—justifying decisions on the basis of economic emergency—began to systematically dissolve “the rights of property owners as if they never existed” (p. 51), following the lead of Chief Justice Charles Evan Hughes, who said:  “‘We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is’” (p. 51).  Consequently, financially distressed debtors were freed from contractual obligations such as mortgages, upholding a Minnesota Mortgage Moratorium act in 1934.  “The resultant moral and legal dilemma had been crystallized pithily by Marcus Tullius Cicero nearly two thousand years earlier.  What is the meaning, Cicero had asked, of an ‘abolition of debts, except that you buy a farm with my money; that you have the farm, and I have not my money’”? (p. 54).  This is precisely what took place when FDR took the nation off the gold standard at the inception of the New Deal.     

Further devaluing the Constitution are unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats who assume lawmaking powers.  Far more than Congress, these federal agencies have devised thousands of rules and regulations shaping our lives.  “Virtually no human activity is excempt from the federal regulatory juggernaut” (p. 69).  Once again the New Deal Court helped transform the law in accord with FDR’s agenda and “not a single post-New Deal statutory program has been invalidated as an unconstitutional delegation of  legislative power to the executive branch” (p. 72).  Legislation (whether dealing with endangered species or racial quotas or food or drugs or automobiles) apparently designed to deal with a few issues takes on a complicated life of its own as various agencies implement and expand it.  

Having looked at decisions expanding governmental powers, Levy and Mellor, in the second section of the book, turn to judicial decisions “eroding freedom.”  Campaign finance laws, when upheld by the courts, deny the very free speech secured by the First Amendment.  Gun control laws, when upheld, dissolve the Second Amendment.  Laws designed to protect national security (e.g. internment camps for Japanese-Americans during WWII) frequently compromise the civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution.  Confiscatory acts passed during the Civil War, upheld by the Supreme Court, “worked ‘a revolution in forfeiture law that persists to this day’” (p. 144), justifying the seizure of criminals’ property.  Though taking property through the power of eminent domain and giving it to favored parties (e.g. developers promising tax revenues) violates the Fifth Amendment, it has gained Supreme Court sanction.  Earning a living through such simple tasks as braiding hair now faces licensing laws making it egregiously difficult and expensive—defying the clear intent of the Ninth Amendment, which insisted “that only those rights specifically enumerated in the Constitution” be “judicially enforced” (p. 193).  Racial preferences in university admissions are now justified as in accord with the 14^th Amendment, which clearly forbids such, insisting “that every individual is entitled to equal protection of the law, regardless of skin color” (p. 201).  

In view of all this it’s clear that the Supreme Court has “rewritten major parts of our Constitution, including the General Welfare Clause, Commerce Clause, Contracts Clause, Non-Delegation Doctrine, and the First, Second, Fourth, fifth, and fourteenth Amendments” (p. 215).  Apologists for this endeavor argue we must understand it as a healthy implementation of a “living Constitution.”  So The Dirty Dozen was written to encourage a thoughtful and persuasive counteraction on the part of “textualists” such as Justice Scalia, who construe the text “leniently” without severing all meaningful connection to it.  

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

In Schools for Misrule:  Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America (New York:  Encounter Books, c. 2011), Walter Olson discovers what he believes to be the real source of what Raoul Berger (one of this century’s most distinguished constitutional scholars) described as Government by Judiciary.  Berger believed “that the Supreme Court is not empowered to rewrite the Constitution, that in its transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment it has demonstrably done so. Thereby the Justices, who are virtually unaccountable, irremovable, and irreversible, have taken from the people control of their own destiny, an awesome exercise of power.”  A coup de etat—a revolution led by Earl Warren in the 1950’s—has transformed this nation.  Though the Warren Court initially requested briefs detailing the amendment’s “original intent,” it brushed aside demonstrable historical facts and replaced history with sociology.  More disturbingly, as Alfred H. Kelly, wrote:  “‘The present use of history by the Court is a Marxist-type perversion of the relation between truth and utility.  It assumes that history can be written to serve the interests of libertarian idealism’” (p. 342).   This is precisely what President George Washington envisioned and decried in his Farewell Address:  “If in the opinion of the People, the distribution or modification of the Constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way in which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. The precedent must always greatly overbalance in permanent evil any partial or transient benefit which the use can at any time yield.”   

This destructive usurpation has been led by law schools which channeled the ethos of the ‘60s into the nation’s institutions through legal theories such  as “Critical Race Theory,” legal feminism, animal rights, social justice, international law, etc.  “The problem, this book will argue,” Olson says, “is not just that law schools generate so many bad ideas—mistaken and benighted ideas, impractical and socially destructive ideas—but that these ideas follow a predictable pattern.  They confer power on legal intellectuals and their allies—at least the power to prescribe, often the power to litigate.  The movement that results—whether couched as public interest law, as minority empowerment law, or as international human rights law—is in fact a bid for power, whether naked or clearly disguised” (pp. 10-11).     

The conviction that law schools should play a prominent part in shaping the society shines forth in comments recently made by Dean Harold Koh when he welcomed incoming students to Yale Law School, saying:  “‘there is only one Yale Law School and it is us.  We are not just a law school of professional excellence, we are an intellectual community of high moral purpose.’”  Mastering the skills of drafting contracts and arguing cases is less lofty than crafting the nation’s polity.  More portentously, he welcomed them as “Citizens of the republic of conscience’” (p. 14), apparently endowed with the rights of the enlightened to chart the nation’s course.  When studying constitutional law, their mission is clear, Olson concludes, for “‘every casebook, treatise, and handbook used to teach constitutional law in American law schools is the product of Democrats writing from Democratic perspectives’” (p. 16).  

This Democrat bias was embedded in law schools as Progressives in the ‘30s made them bastions of support for FDR and the New Deal, champions of central planning and social justice.  Lawyers (and most especially law school professors) were to be policy-makers, following the injunction of Yale dean Charles Clark, who said that “‘the corporation lawyer of the past decade must give way to the public counsel of the next’” (p. 41).  Thus at Yale in the ‘50s students were no longer eve required to study property law, heretofore considered “a cornerstone of the bar exam.”  They could master the subject on their own, it seems, while devoting class time to “truly stimulating and interesting things” that might change the world.  With each passing decade law professors ventured forth into all sorts of fascinating philosophies, most recently deconstructionism, leading Harvard’s Mary Ann Glendon to decry what she saw “‘a growing disdain for the practical aspects of law, a zany passion for novelty, a confusion of advocacy with scholarship, and a mistrust of majoritarian institutions’” (p. 49).  

Product liability and class action lawsuits exemplify modern law school convictions.  As companies have become liable in court for injuries (including “emotional distress”) suffered rather than negligence demonstrated in manufacturing a defective product, a financial cornucopia has opened for trial lawyers.  A pivotal decision, Greenman v. Yuba Power (1963), written by Roger Traynor, reflected lessons on social engineering he’d learned from Berkeley law dean William Prosser, the celebrated author of Prosser on Torts.  Professor Prosser turned the legal realm of torts into a “thrilling ‘battlefield of social theory’; laissez-faire versus progressivism, individual versus collective responsibility” (p. 58).  He particularly discounted “the venerable old defense known as assumption of risk, which worked to disfavor lawsuits by persons who had chosen to undertake hazardous activities” and insisted that skiers or iPod owners who understood potential risks could still sue for any damages suffered therein.  Most dramatically, class action suits against the tobacco industry have shoveled billions of dollars into lawyers’ coffers.  

Professor Prosser’s commitment to progressivism reechoes throughout the nation’s law schools, whose professors serve as advocates for social change, frequently appearing as litigators in trials and lobbyists for legislation.  (Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz, for example, claimed he’d been promised, but not paid, $34 million for working 118 hours, helping a team of lawyers in a tobacco case!)  They support, and help establish and staff legal clinics (e.g. the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund; the Women’s Rights Project and National Women’s Law center; the Environmental Defense Fund) devoted to “public interest law.”  Frequently funded by powerful foundations such as Ford and Carnegie, these organizations seek to advance progressive causes (welfare rights; abortion rights; labor unions) through the courts.  Ironically, they rarely provide pro bono services for needy individuals, preferring to seize upon individual cases that advance their commitments to social change.   

The social change envisioned by students in the ‘60s marked a “bestselling 1970 daydream of liberation, The Greening of America” (p. 118) by Yale professor Charles Reich.  Six years earlier, however, he wrote a less celebrated but enormously more influential law review article entitled “The New Property,” wherein he argued that an expansive government, by financially subsidizing millions of people, endowed them with legal rights to these benefits.  Once granted, the benefits become entitlements that could not be cancelled—they must be considered “rights.”  Soon “the article came to stand for an even broader proposition:  due process aside, courts should start enforcing more positive rights to have government do things on one’s behalf, as distinct from negative rights to be left alone by it” (p. 122).  In short order the Supreme Court embraced Reich’s notion, discovering “an entirely new Constitutional right not to be cut off from welfare payments without notice and a more than perfunctory hearing” (p. 121).   Consequently, public interest lawyers successfully won cases “extending welfare to college students, . . . forcing counties to participate in the federal food stamp program, and generally compelling local governments to make the rules of that program more generous, more uniform, and more centrally coordinated” (p. 121).  

Government control—ever benevolent, of course—almost always finds advocates in the law schools.   Ultimate world government—implemented through international law—is further desired as “the crowing and ultimate expression of the legal academy’s longstanding taste for access to centralized power” (p. 234).    Reining in the professors, restoring the law schools to their rightfully restricted role in society, would be an important step, Olson says, to preserve our freedom as Americans.

# # #   

No 20^th century theologian elicits more admiration than Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for whom Eric Metaxas’s recent biography, Bonhoeffer:  Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, a Righteous Gentile vs. the Third Reich (Nashville:  Thomas Nelson, c. 2010) provides us an engaging and insightful introduction.  As the eminent Israeli physicist Gerald Schroeder says:  “Metaxas has the rare skill of taking the mundane but crucial details of life and weaving them into a history that flows like a novel.  For anyone interested in what the strength of belief and conviction can accomplish, Bonhoeffer is an essential read.”  Though other works (especially those by Bonhoeffer’s closet friend, Edward Bethge) are more detailed and ultimately definitive, this biography is a wonderful fusion of scholarly accuracy and scintillating style.    

In 1906 Bonhoeffer was born into the highest echelon of the German aristocracy, tracing his ancestry through centuries of illustrious physicians, judges, professors and statesmen.  His father was a renowned psychiatrist, a professor at the University of Berlin, his mother a teacher whose “parents and family were closely connected to the emperor’s court at Potsdam” (p. 6).  He received the finest possible education, both at home and school, where he excelled in most everything (including music, which ever remained a major avocation for him).  Profoundly affected by the turmoil of WWI—and especially by the death of an older brother—he determined at the age of 13 to study theology.  After a term at Tubingen University, he returned to Berlin to live at home and complete his university studies under the tutelage of the famed Church historian and devotee of the theological Liberalism, Adolf von Harnack.  While studying under (and ever respectful of) Harnack, however, young Bonhoeffer was drawn to the insurgent Neo-Orthodoxy of Karl Barth that would sustain the Confessing Church in its struggle with National Socialism.  

Following his university years, Bonhoeffer served briefly as a youth pastor for a German congregation in Barcelona, Spain, refining his preaching skills and Christological concerns in the process.  “‘Understanding Christ means taking Christ seriously,’” he insisted.  Doing so requires “‘for us to clarify the seriousness of this matter and to extricate Christ from the secularization process in which he has been incorporated since the Enlightenment’” (p. 83).  Determined to finish his theological training he returned to Berlin, writing a dissertation (Act and Being) that qualified him as a university lecturer in 1930.  An opportunity to further his studies at Union Theological Seminary in New York led him to spend a year in America, where he quickly became disillusioned with the superficiality of students who “‘are unfamiliar with even the most basic questions.  They become intoxicated with liberal and humanistic phrases, laugh at the fundamentalists, and yet basically are not even up to their level’” (p. 99).  In nearby  churches he heard messages delivered by the likes of Harry Emerson Fosdick (presiding over the recently built and prestigious Riverside Church) devoted to most everything but the main thing, “‘namely the gospel of Jesus Christ, the cross, sin and forgiveness, death and life’” (p. 99).  

He did, however, find the gospel proclaimed in the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem by Dr. Adam Clayton Powell Sr., the son of former slaves who “brought an outsized vision of faith to the pulpit,” combining “the fire of a revivalist preacher with great intellect and social vision” (p. 108).  Consequently, Bonhoeffer regularly attended and taught Sunday school at Abyssinian.   Years later, shortly before WWII erupted, Bonhoeffer briefly returned to New York and delighted in attending Broadway Presbyterian Church to hear messages delivered by a fundamentalist pastor (Dr. McComb) who unapologetically preached God’s Word.  To Bonhoeffer, American Fundamentalists were quite akin to the Confessing Church, staying true to the Bible rather than accommodating secular powers.  Siding with the Fundamentalists, in opposition to the Liberals at Riverside Church and Union Theological Seminary, he said:  “‘This will one day be a center of resistance when Riverside Church has long since become a temple of Baal’” (p. 334).  

Though offered a position at Harvard, Bonhoeffer felt led to return to Germany and serve his own people amidst the turbulence of Hitler’s rise to power.  At a crucial moment, he wrote, “‘something happened, something that has changed and transformed my life to the present day.  For the first time I discovered the Bible’” (p. 123).  It alone, he discovered, “‘is the answer to all our questions’” (p. 136).  He’d obviously read and preached from it for years, but suddenly the Bible became a living Word, a Way to live.  He began lecturing at the University of Berlin, insisting that Jesus Christ, not Adolf Hitler, was the only Savior.  As the Nazis tightened their control over all the institutions of society, Bonhoeffer early joined the opposition, especially working to establish the Confessing Church within the state-run  Lutheran Church, which was controlled by the “German Christians” who accommodated Hitler by repudiating the Old Testament and generally promoting Der Fuhrer’s “Nietzschean social Darwinism” (p. 173).  

Metaxas details Bonhoeffer’s valiant struggle to restore an authentic faith and discipleship within the established Lutheran church, noting his conviction that:  “‘The question at stake in the German church is no longer an internal issue but is the question of the existence of Christianity in Europe’” (p. 204).  “‘For me,” he declared, “‘the fight against National Socialism is essentially a fight in defense of the Christian conception of the world.  Whereas Hitler wants to revive the Old Germanic paganism, I want to revive the Christian Middle Ages’” (p. 232).  This led him to engage in various activities:  making international appeals, establishing an underground seminary, and—as WWII erupted and the Nazi’s genocidal policies against the Jews became clear—joining plots against Hitler.  

Bonhoeffer’s family and social ties linked him to the highest echelon of Germany’s military caste—including an anti-Hitler cadre of officers such as Count Helmuth von Moltke and Admiral Canaris—who early sensed the necessity of removing Der Fuhrer for the good of both Germany and mankind.  In 1941, “Bonhoeffer famously said that, if necessary, he would be willing to kill Hitler” (p. 388).  For a pastor who had espoused virtually pacifist positions a decade earlier, this was quite a change!  Several conspiracies almost succeeded, but Hitler seemed to live a curiously charmed life.  Failed assassination attempts led to arrests and executions of those involved and in time the Gestapo apprehended and imprisoned Bonhoeffer.  

Imprisoned for the last two years of his life, Bonhoeffer continued to write and minister to those around him.  Fortunately, his uncle, Paul von Hase, was the military commandment of Berlin and buffered  some of the regime’s strictures on his nephew.  He was thus able to receive visits from his family, friends and fiancée as well as continue his theological study and writing.  The failure of yet another attempt to kill Hitler in 1944, however, led to harsher treatment, as everyone remotely connected to the conspiracy was targeted.  Many, including Paul von Hase, were summarily executed.   One of these officers, shortly before he died, said:  “‘The whole world will vilify us now, but I am still totally convinced that we did the right thing.  Hitler is the archenemy not only of Germany but of the world.  When, in a few hours’ time, I go before God to account for what I have done and left undone, I know I will be able to justify in good conscience what I did in the struggle against Hitler’” (p. 487).  

While his regime was collapsing, Hitler still sought to destroy those who had dared oppose him, personally approving their executions.  So Bonhoeffer and 17 others were taken from his cell in Berlin and sent to Buchenwald, a notorious death camp.  Here, an English prisoner, Payne “Best described Bonhoeffer as ‘all humility and sweetness, he always seemed to me to diffuse an atmosphere of happiness, of joy in every smallest event in life, and of deep gratitude for the mere fact that he was alive. . . .   He was one of the very few men that I have ever met to whom his God was real and ever close to him’” (p. 314).   From Buchenwald he was sent to a smaller camp, Flossenburg, where he was hanged on April 8, 1945, two weeks before the Allies liberated the camp, three weeks before Hitler killed himself.  

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

Admirers of the late Pope John Paul II frequently call him “The Great,” appraising him the equal of a handful of thusly-titled pontiffs such as Leo I and Gregory I.  They regard him the most significant successor of St. Peter in 500 years.  George Weigel clearly shares this high evaluation in his two-volume (1500 pp) biography, a richly detailed model of scholarship, “the culmination of twenty years of studying and writing” (p. 14).  The first volume is titled Witness to Hope:  The Biography of Pope John Paul II (New York:  HarperCollins Publishers, c. 1999).  

Karol Wojtyla (pronounced Voy-TEE-wah) was born in Wadowice, Poland, in 1920.  His mother died while he was young, but his father, a notably “just man,” an army officer known as “‘the captain,’ was a gentleman of the old school and a man of granite integrity whose army career . . . was based on a combination of intelligence, diligence, dependability, and above all, honesty” (p. 29).  Young Wojtyla flourished in school, mastering his studies and standing out as an athlete.  He and his father moved to Krakow in order for him to enter the Jagiellonian University the year before the Germany invaded Poland and ignited WWII.  In short order the Nazis arrested and deported many Polish leaders, including university professors.  Young Wojtyla, though forced to work as a quarryman, quickly engaged in underground cultural activities (mainly theatrical performances), subtly resisting the occupying forces.  He also sensed and obeyed a call to the priestly ministry, especially as a result of reading the works of St. John of the Cross with their call to total surrender to God’s will, and studied in the university’s “underground” seminary.  

Wojtyla was completing his theological studies as Russians replaced Germans occupying Poland in 1945.  Ordained in 1946 and obviously gifted, he was then sent to further his studies in Rome’s famed Pontifical Athenaeum of St. Thomas Aquinas, where he excelled in every way, writing (in Latin) a doctoral thesis on St. John of the Cross under the direction of the famed Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange.  Returning to his native land he creatively engaged in pastoral ministry, notably honing strategies that included skiing and kayaking expeditions to reach young people who became life-long friends.  His intellectual gifts could not be wasted, however, and he was soon given an academic assignment, becoming an ethics professor at the University of Lublin.  While teaching he sustained a “hard-won conviction about the ‘objective’ reality of the world” which “disclosed important things about the virtues, about the pursuit of happiness, and about our moral duties in life” (p. 126).  

Named auxiliary bishop of Krakow by Pope Pius XII in 1958, Wojtyla joined fellow bishops at the Second Vatican Council, where he took an unexpectedly (for such a young bishop) active role, especially emphasizing the Christian’s call to holiness, which  “was nothing less than a ‘sublime sharing in the very holiness of the Holy Trinity,’ of God himself” (p. 162).    Back in Poland he was installed as Archbishop of Krakow and later named a cardinal.  As a bishop he “governed his diocese (and did his philosophy and theology) ‘on his knees’—or at a desk in the sacramental presence of his Lord” (p. 188).   He also continued to vigorously preach and write as well as represent the Church in her continuous struggle with the country’s Communist authorities who were conducting “the assault on human dignity he had described to Henri de Lubac as ‘the evil of our times’” (p. 227).   

In 1978, following the brief pontificate of John Paul I, Karol Wojtyla was elected Pope and soon uttered his signature call:  “Be not afraid!”  He subsequently launched a series of initiatives designed to promote the Gospel around the world, continually traveling (taking scores of what he called “pilgrimages”),  preaching to vast throngs (personally addressing more people than anyone in human history), presiding over unexpectedly momentous “youth days,” teaching through weekly audiences and a steady stream of encyclicals and papal letters, issuing the momentous Catechism of the Catholic Church to clearly define orthodox positions, defending both the rights of the unborn and the freedoms of people enchained by totalitarian regimes, appointing bishops and cardinals and curial officials (most notably the man who would succeed him, Joseph Ratzinger) designed to implement his vision for the Church.   

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

The second volume of George Weigel’s biography of John Paul II is entitled The End and the Beginning:  Pope John Paul II—The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy (New York:  Doubleday, c. 2010).  Inasmuch as one third of the book revisits Karol Wojtyla’s life-long struggle with Communism, it is rightly described as an “amplification and completion” of Witness to Hope, the first volume of the study.  This is largely due to the availability of documents recently made public that reveal the machinations of Communist authorities in various countries to discredit and if possible destroy Wojtyla.  Rightly perceiving him as a signal threat to the iron fist crushing the peoples of Russia and Eastern Europe, Poland’s secret police and Russia’s KGB diligently recruited agents to infiltrate priestly circles in both Poland and Rome, determined to both gain information regarding Wojtyla and craft strategies to undermine him.  As Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (the exiled Russian novelist then living in Vermont) declared when Wojtyla was elected Pope, “‘It’s a miracle!  It’s the first positive event since World War I and it’s going to change the face of the world!’” (p. 101).  And indeed—beginning with his epochal nine day pilgrimage to Poland in 1979—he would!  Within a decade the Communist world was collapsing, and Pope John Paul II (along with his ally Ronald Reagan) played a formidable role in its demise.  

Concluding his discussion of Wojtyla’s struggle with Communism, Weigel turns, in part two, to the Pope’s final five years, entitling his presentation “Kenosis.”   Physically vigorous when he became Pope, he had suffered an assassination attempt in 1981 and Parkinson’s disease further weakened him in his final years, but through it all he allowed nothing to compromise his commitment to serving in the place God assigned.  He orchestrated an unexpectedly successful Great Jubilee in 2000, drawing millions of pilgrims to Rome, and despite his infirmities he continued his own pilgrimages to various nations, most notably Israel.  He continued his ambitious project of canonizing saints—especially 20^th century martyrs dying at the hands of despots.  

On the basis of three decades of interviews and scholarly studies, Weigel ends his biography with an assessment of his subject.  To do so he begins with an appreciation of Wojtyla’s inner life, organized in terms of faith, hope, and love—the supernatural virtues clearly evident to the Pope’s closest observers.  Still more, the cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, courage, temperance) were equally apparent.  By any standard, his pontificate (despite certain disappointments, including the clerical scandals in America and academic dissidents’ unfaithfulness) was momentously ambitious and successful.  Especially important is the “legacy of ideas,” set forth in the vast corpus of his writings, setting forth doctrinal and moral positions rooted in tradition but attuned to modernity.  

To understand John Paul II—as well as the world he both indwelt and influenced—Weigel’s definitive work is, quite simply, indispensable.  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Among the 20^th century’s “great men” are eminent thinkers who have transformed our understanding the world.  Among these are John Polkinghorne, whose story is told by Dean Nelson (a journalist) and Karl Giberson (a physicist) in Quantum Leap:  How John Polkinghorne Found God in Science and Religion (Grand Rapids:  Monarch Books, c. 2011).  The authors make no pretense of offering a definitive “conventional biography,” though their work rests upon in-depth interviews and careful reading of their subject’s works.  Rather they seek to “tell the story of Polkinghorne, and along the way, we also unfold some bigger issues.  How do we know what ‘Truth’ is?  How does a leading scientist think about the more mysterious aspects of faith—prayer, miracles, life after death, resurrection?” (p. 7).  Furthermore, they want to reach a broad public, rather than an elite corps of physicists and theologians, providing us a warmly written and engaging work, a wonderful introduction to the man and his ideas.  

Polkinghorne’s work on quark theory, as one of an elite group of physicists at Cambridge University, “earned him countless recognitions,” including membership in Britain’s Royal Society, being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, serving as president of Queen’s College, and delivering the prestigious Gifford Lecture Series (p. 13).  In the midst of his scientific work, however, he sensed a call to the Christian ministry and devoted several years to theological study and pastoral work in an Anglican parish, finding time there to write “one of his most successful books, One World:  The Interaction of Science and Theology” (p. 85).  In his judgment, “‘Christianity affords a coherent insight into the strange way the world is’” (p. 159).  Rejecting some scientists’ contentions that the cosmos has no meaning or purpose, that it’s all “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” he insists we can discover meaning:  “‘In fact the world has a meaning that extends beyond us’” (p. 31).  He envisions God as “a ‘Divine Mind’, and Cosmic Mathematician’, but who also cares for the individual” (p. 48).  

In time he returned to Cambridge University, where he set his mind to the task of synthesizing the two great (and at times paradoxical) concerns of his life:  science and religion.  As a physicist he accepted “the idea that light is both a wave and a particle, two fundamentally contradictory viewpoints.  Acceptance that the simple reality of something as familiar as light required deep paradox serves as a preparation for wrestling with the central Christian belief that Jesus is both human and divine, that he lived and died and lives again” (p. 89).  Science, no less than theology, deals with unseen, transcendent realities.  Thus the Resurrection of Jesus, to Polkinghorne, elicits faith:  “On the truth or falsehood of that belief turns the whole Christian understanding of God and God’s purposes in Jesus of Nazareth’” (p. 90).  So too miracles may well be credible as “‘perceptions of a deeper rationality than that which we encounter in the very day, occasions which make visible a more profound level of divine activity.  They are transparent moments in which the Kingdom is found to be manifestly present’” (p. 95).  They do not contradict the “laws of nature, which themselves are expressions of God’s will, but are revelations of the character of the divine relationship to creation” (p. 95).  

His unique training and perspective led to appointments to prestigious committees, including “the Human Genetics Commission, which evaluated the ethical consequences of recent advances inhuman genetic research” (p. 123).   Accepting such appointments demanded insight and judgment as well as skill in working with others (one of Polkinghorne’s strengths).  He also joined distinguished theologians such as N.T. Wright on a fifteen-member Doctrine Commission established to provide direction for the Church of England.  His views on some items (stem cell research, the ordination of women, etc.) cannot be aligned with those of traditional Catholics or conservative Evangelicals, but they are rather middle-road positions in his church.  And amidst it all he exuded a gentle, gracious spirit bearing witness to his Savior.  

 

Plato’s dialogues persistently probe the essence of the good society, and his final treatise, The Laws, insists cosmology and theology serve as the necessary “prelude” to it.  Should a people embrace the “heresy” that the cosmos has “been framed, not by any action of mind, but by nature and chance only,” Plato said, social chaos inevitably ensues.  Thus the history of philosophy reveals an unending struggle for goodness, truth, and beauty—truly a “cosmic struggle” pitting theists (e.g. Plato) against atheists (e.g. Epicurus), shaping and setting forth divergent worldviews.  There are big questions to address:   Where did I come from?  Why am I here?  Where am I going?  Does life have any meaning and purpose?  Is there any Design to Reality or is all there is a random collection of subatomic bits of matter?  

The most vile characters in C.S. Lewis’s space fiction trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet; Perelandra; That Hideous Strength) consistently espoused what he labeled “scientism,” the philosophical commitment to empiricism (holding that all knowledge comes from the physical senses) as the only valid epistemological strategy, reducing all kinds of inquiry—literature, history, philosophy, et al.—to rigorously material means.  Regarding his first story, Lewis noted that it was clearly “an attack, if not on scientists, yet on something which might be called ‘scientism’—a certain outlook on the world which is usually connected with the popularization of the sciences” (Of Other Worlds).  Consequently, reviewing That Hideous Strength in the New York Times, Orville Prescott judged it “a parable (concerning) the degeneration of man which inevitably follows a gross and slavish scientific materialism which excludes all idealistic, ethical and religious values.”  

Still more, insisting that our minds can be reduced to material brains typified the stance of scientists like Lewis’s fictional physicist Weston, who shared the view of an atheistic Marxist Professor, J.B.S. Haldane, necessarily assuming that:  “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true . . . and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms” (Possible Worlds).  Such scientism, furthermore, assumed a metaphysical materialism that Lewis often labeled “Naturalism.”  Addressing this phenomenon, Lewis made a simple generalization that was neither simplistic nor hasty, differentiating Naturalism from Supernaturalism.  He insisted (in Miracles) that thinkers like Carl Sagan, who declared that “the cosmos is all there is or ever will be” and take the philosophical position that only Nature exists (ontological materialism) and irrationally restrict the realm of Reality to atoms in space.    Consequently, it makes sense to believe in a Supernatural Reality, namely God.  Apart from and above matter there must be Mind.  

Lewis’s concerns permeate The Nature of Nature:  Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science, ed. Bruce L. Gordon and William A. Dembski (Wilmington, DE, c. 2011), a 1000 page collection of 41 essays by noted scholars (both atheists such as Francis Crick and theists such as William Lane Craig, philosophers such as Alvin Plantinga and scientists such as Steven Weinberg) who attended a conference at Baylor University in 2000.  What Lewis sensed, as Steve Fuller writes in his Foreword to this volume, is “the inadequacy of an unreflexive naturalism to explain the aspirations” of science itself.  In particular, the hard-line, reductionistic materialism so espoused by many in the past has increasingly proved “problematic” (p. xiii), for “it is clear that we have moved a long way from the idea that nature can be understood as if it were the product of no intelligence at all” (p. xiv).     

Leading off the book’s essays, Bruce Gordon provides, in “The Rise of Naturalism and Its Problematic Role in Science and Culture,” 60 pages of extensively documented historical details needed to understand the subject.  “Philosophical naturalism,” he argues, “undermines knowledge and rationality altogether, ultimately leading to the instrumentalization of belief and the fragmentation of culture” (p. 1).  He emphasizes—as have Richard Weaver and other noted historians—the influence of Medieval nominalism (which rejected logical realism) in shaping modern science, giving impetus “to empiricism and an explanational preoccupation with material mechanism” (p. 7).  William of Ockham, subordinating God’s intellect to His will, denied He “has an essential nature, and opened the door to divine arbitrariness and universal possibilism, the view that there are no necessary truths, not even logical ones, constraining divine action” (p. 7).  Nominalism also supported empiricism’s attention to particulars rather than universals, leading to an anti-essentialism which incubated philosophical naturalism and the many varieties of relativism that now dominate the intellectual scene.   

This need not have happened, Gordon says, if scientists had retained the transcendent basis for their inquiries that characterized many of the great Christian scientists who reverently read the book of nature.  Contrary to many popular presentations which dismiss (in accord with Edward Gibbon and Carl Sagan) the “Dark Ages” and conjure up a millennium of conflict between religion and science, diligent historians such as Rodney Stark insist we understand and celebrate the remarkable achievements of Medieval Christians, who “provided fertile metaphysics, epistemic, sociocultural, and economic ground for scientific theorizing and experimentation” (p. 20).  The highly vaunted “scientific revolution” of the 17th century was less a revolution than a “continuous logical outworking—derived from developments in scholastic philosophical theology and medieval technological invention—that reached its consummation in this historical period” (p. 22).  

The “problematic” aspects of these developments clearly appear, Gordon argues, in Darwin’s “theory of universal common descent, which purports to explain speciation in the history of life solely by means of natural selection acting on random variation in populations.  ‘Random,’ of course, means exactly that:  objectively undirected and therefore without discernible purpose” (p. 24).  Thus Richard Dawkins rejoices “that ‘although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist’” and “Daniel Dennett describes Darwinism as a ‘universal acid’ that ‘eats through just about ever traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world view’” (p. 25).  Rightly evaluated, Gordon insists:  “Darwinism—as an expression of metaphysical purposelessness—has been an indispensable contributor to the spread of secularism in Western society, an undeniable force in our sense of cultural and existential arbitrariness, a logical antecedent to our inevitable embrace of moral relativism, hedonism, and utilitarianism, and a prodigious catalyst for the broader cultural experience of meaninglessness, especially among the younger generations” (p. 26).  If true, quite an indictment!

Gordon’s essay clearly draws important distinctions separating the contributors to this volume.  Some (e.g. Christian de Duve and Francis Crick) are devoted to the scientism and reductionistic naturalism C.S. Lewis attacked.  Others, notably David Berlinski, espouse an agnosticism open to the possibility of a Cosmic Mind.  Still others, including the book’s editors (Gordon and Dembski), Stephen Meyer, J.P. Moreland, Dallas Willard, and William Lane Craig, make the case for Intelligent Design as a viable way to understand the totality of Reality as eminently understandable (Mind-Designed) to rational minds.  

Christian de Duve, a Nobel Prize winner, declares there is no ultimate immaterial “mystery” beyond empirical calculation.   “Science is based on naturalism, the notion that all manifestations in the universe are explainable in terms of the known laws of physics and chemistry.”  This is the “cornerstone of the scientific enterprise,” without which there can be no real scientific research (p. 346).  Scientists such as he have made incredible progress explaining the world in accord with rigidly naturalistic presuppositions.  “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that we have come to understand the fundamental mechanisms of life” (p. 347), and though there remains work to be done “nothing so far has been revealed that is not explainable.”  Consequently:  “There is no justification for the view that living organisms are made of matter ‘animated’ by ‘something else’” (p. 347).  Admittedly there is as yet no explanation for the origin of life.  Perhaps organisms drifted in from outer space (“directed panspermia”)—or perhaps “spontaneous chemical processes” in primeval slime spit out living cells.  But never fear, says de Duve, keep the faith—in time researchers will explain it all in strictly “naturalistic terms.  The fact that the details of this long history have not yet been unveiled is hardly proof that it could not have happened” (p. 350).  So long as it is not at all supernatural, any conjecture is allowed!  

David Berlinski, however, finds dogmatic positions such as de Duve’s less than persuasive.  One of the most gifted advocates of Intelligent Design, Berlinsky, a Princeton-educated mathematician, is an unobservant “secular Jew.”  His genial agnosticism extends to both theology and science, and he espouses a sustained commitment to evidence and reason.  Above all he detests illogic and has deftly defused assorted atheistic arguments in The Devil’s Delusion:  Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions.  An astute scientist, he acknowledges his discipline’s limitations and thinks atheists who declare their religious faith under the pretense of scientific certainty demonstrate little more than their own confusions.  His essay, “On the Origins of Life,” recounts the various failing proposals advanced during the past two centuries (most notably the Miller-Urey hypothesis), to explain how life began on planet earth.  Recent developments, unveiling the mysterious roles of DNA and RNA in producing proteins and transcribing information, have injected novel perspectives into the discussion.  

In sum, Berlinski says:  “On the level of intuition and experience, these facts suggest nothing more mysterious than the longstanding truism that life comes only from life.  Omnia viva ex vivo, as Latin writers said.  It is only when they are embedded in various theories about the origins of life that the facts engender a paradox, or at least a question:  in the receding molecular spiral, which came first—the chicken in the form of DNA, or its egg in the form of various proteins?  And if neither came first, how could life have begun?” (P. 281).  Indeed, one of the co-discoverers of DNA, Francis Crick, despite his atheism, grants that “‘an honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that, in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle’” (p. 281).  Earlier “conjectures about the pre-biotic atmosphere were seriously in error” (p. 283), and speculations concerning how various inorganic elements could combine to form organic life-forms remain precisely that—speculations akin to invoking magic or the “evolutionary biologist’s finest friend:  sheer dumb luck” (p. 286).    

Dumb luck, however, looks most improbable to Berlinski, whose mathematical mind grasps the odds against a chance-ruled universe.  As of now, no laboratory has produced a self-replicating RNA ribozyme, basic to life.  We know, however, as geochemist Gustaf Arrhenius explains, that “the minimum length or ‘sequence’ that is needed for a contemporary ribozyme” involves some 100 nucleotides.  Consequently, “Arrhenius notes, there are 4¹⁰⁰ or roughly 10⁶⁰ nucleotide sequences that are 100 nucleotides in length.  This is an unfathomably large number.  It exceeds the number of atoms contained in the universe, as well as the age of the universe in seconds.  If the odds in favor of self-replication are 1 in 10⁶⁰,  no betting man would take them, no matter how attractive the payoff, and neither presumably would nature” (p. 286).  In short, the “just so” stories told by all too many scientists are rooted in unsubstantiated assumptions and most likely untrue!  

Stephen C. Meyer, in “DNA:  The Signature in the Cell” (recently expanded into a book entitled Signature in the Cell:  DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design), shares Berlinski’s critique of the “just so” stories pervading mainstream biology and sets forth a meticulous argument for Intelligent Design as the best explanation for the mystery of life.  He points out that though “the most common popular naturalistic view about the origin of life is that it happened exclusively by chance,” most “all serious origin-of-life researchers now consider ‘chance’ an inadequate casual explanation for the origin of biological information” (p. 304).  The more we understand the amazing, information-laden complexity of living organisms the more doubtful it appears that they could be the simple result of chance chemical reactions.  “The odds of getting a functional protein of modest length (150 amino acids) by drawing a compound of that size from a pre-biotic soup is no better than once chance in 10¹⁶⁴.   In other words, the probability of constructing a rather short functional protein at random becomesso small . . . as to appear absurd on the chance hypothesis” (p. 307).   Given the astronomical odds, it takes truly astronomical (or blind) faith to believe in an accidental world.  Importantly, Meyer insists, there’s information embedded in all that lives, and we inevitably attribute information to conscious, intelligent minds, and “what philosophers call ‘agent causation,’ now stands as the only cause known to be capable of generating large amounts of information starting from a nonliving state.  As a result, the presence of specified information-rich sequences in even the simplest living systems would seem to imply intelligent design” (p. 323).  

The philosophical differences between the contributors to The Nature of Nature stand revealed in a section devoted to ethics and religion.  Michael Ruse is an amiable philosopher who was reared as a Quaker but turned agnostic in his 20s.  He appeared as a major witness arguing against allowing “creation science” to be taught in public schools in the 1981 case (McLean v. Arkansas), leading the federal judge to declare it unconstitutional.  In 2001 he joined other scholars in delivering the Gifford Lectures (published in The Nature and Limits of Human Understanding), applying Darwinism to epistemology and ethics.  He finds much to admire in Christian ethics but rejects all theological claims and deplores any notion of Intelligent Design.  Above all he devoutly believes in Evolution and endeavors to apply it to ethics.      

In “Evolution and Ethics” Ruse argues:  “Ethics is an illusion put in place by natural selection to make us good cooperators” (p. 855).  He admires much of the “normative ethics” espoused by theists but insists they can be justified along the purely naturalistic lines he assumes without supporting it with any metaphysical or theological “substantive ethics” (p. 855).  Rejecting the “Social Darwinism” of earlier evolutionists such as Herbert Spencer, he embraces such maxims as “love your neighbor as yourself” as “precisely” what he would “expect natural selection to have promoted” (p. 856).  “Morality is an adaptation like hands and teeth and penises and vaginas” (p. 858).  All we can actually say about morality is it is what it is!   Rather than the “selfish gene” famously celebrated by Richard Dawkins, Ruse gratuitously postulates an “altruistic gene” driving the evolutionary process.  We can hardly refrain from loving our neighbor since it’s the natural thing to do.  Any higher source for our ethical convictions, any “substantive morality is a kind of illusion” genetically ordered to facilitate our social needs (p. 858).  

This is, Ruse admits, “just a statement rather than a proof” (p. 859).  But it is a statement that squares with his commitment to “Darwinian metaethics,” rooted in the conviction that “evolution is a directionless process, going nowhere rather slowly” (p. 860).  Consequently, just as there is no Cosmic Designer there is no ultimate reason (no Logos) that we should love our neighbor rather than abuse him other than the fact that we have evolved with altruism rather than vindictiveness in our genes.  “In other words, my position is that, if you stay with naturalism, then there is no foundation, and in this sense substantive ethics is an illusion” (p. 862), a matter of psychology (as David Hume insisted) rather than metaphysics.  In sum:  “I regard my position as that of David Hume—brought up to date via the science of Charles Darwin” (p. 862).  

On the contrary, Dallas Willard, a philosophy professor at the University of Southern California, insists, in “Naturalism’s Incapacity to Capture the Good Will,” that without an Ultimate Supernatural Source there can be no ethical standards.  Philosophical “naturalism as a worldview lives today on promises,” assuring us that in time scientists will “show how all personal phenomena, including the moral, emerges from the chemistry (brain, DNA) of the human body” (p. 876).  “But after three hundred years or so of promises to ‘explain everything,’ the grand promises become a little tiresome, and the strain begins to show” (p. 876).  Carefully analyzed, naturalistic positions that insist only physical entities are real cannot be philosophically justified.  Indeed, “even if we regard naturalism as merely a human proposal” (such as, I would add, adumbrated by Michael Ruse), “we must still raise the issue of whether straightforward physicalism (the only version of naturalism that makes sense) can deal with ethical phenomena or provide an adequate interpretation of the moral life and moral principles” (p. 869).  Manifestly, says Willard, it cannot!

What’s needed instead is a robust recovery of the great ethical tradition of Western Civilization, imbued with both classical and Christian perspectives and marking the works of “late nineteenth-century thinkers such as Sidgwick, Bradley, and especially T.H. Green” (p. 873).  Sadly enough, during the 20^th century, as Alasdair MacIntyre said in After Virtue, “‘we have—very largely, if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality’” (p. 872).  Due to the intellectual coup of Hume and Darwin, Ruse and Crick, we now live in a society “where there is no moral knowledge that is publicly accessible in our culture, i.e., that could be taught to individuals by our public institutions as a basis for their development into morally admirable human beings who can be counted on to do the ‘right thing’ when it matters” (p. 877).  To cultivate such persons, only a return to Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas will suffice.  

The final essay in The Nature of Nature is William Lane Craig’s “Theism Defended.”   One of the most erudite evangelical scholars now writing, Craig has focused his studies on the intersection of science and theology.  He begins by noting a recent, remarkable intellectual transformation—“a veritable revolution in Anglo-American philosophy that has transformed the face of their discipline” (p. 901).  It became clear, in Quantum physics especially, that “physics is filled with metaphysical statements that cannot be empirically verified.  As philosopher of science Bas van Fraassen nicely puts it:  ‘Do the concepts of the Trinity [and] the soul . . . baffle you?  They pale beside the unimaginable otherness” of such purely postulated realities as quarks and strings and dark matter (p. 902).    Metaphysics, consigned to the dustbin of history by logical positivists, suddenly sprang to life, accompanied by “a renaissance in Christian philosophy” (p. 902).  Academically respectable Theists stepped forth in major universities and publications.  As an atheistic philosopher, Quentin Smith, lamented:  “‘God is not “dead” in academia; he returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments’” (p. 903).  Such philosophers (including Craig) have reconsidered, rephrased and revived traditional arguments for the existence of God.  

Craig then leads readers through these traditional arguments—contingency, cosmological, teleological, moral, and ontological—and explains why they are as valid as ever.  Though natural science has radically changed since the 13^th century, the philosophy of that century’s greatest thinker, St Thomas Aquinas, remains amazingly astute and Supernaturalism remains an eminently viable Weltgeist.   Adding a healthy component to modern science, Plato and C.S. Lewis, Dallas Willard and William Lane Craig stand comfortably positioned as persuasive witnesses to what’s really Real.  And it’s more than mere matter!

One of this nation’s most eminent playwrights, David Mamet, occupies an elevated position in contemporary culture.  Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for such plays as American Buffalo, responsible for such films as The Verdict and Wag the Dog (both nominated for an Academy Award), he easily embraced, early on, the regnant liberal ethos of his peers.  As a young writer, he “never questioned my tribal assumption that Capitalism was bad, although I, simultaneously, never acted upon these feelings,” earning a good living because of a nicely-functioning free market.  In time, however, he encountered challenges to his blithe assumptions in works such as Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.  “The great wickedness of Liberalism, I saw, was that those who devise the ever new State Utopias, whether crooks or fools, set out to bankrupt and restrict not themselves, but others” (p. 9).  He then wrote a “political play” that subtly reflected his shifting convictions, and that led to an invitation from the Village Voice to write an article on it.  He titled his article “Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal,” which led to an invitation to expand upon the theme.  Consequently Mamet wrote The Secret Knowledge:  On the Dismantling of American Culture (New York:  Sentinel, c. 2011). 

Composed of 39 short chapters, The Secret Knowledge is more a compilation of thoughts than a carefully constructed treatise.   He touches on subjects ranging from environmentalism to Israel, from literature to sex, that I’ll not address.  But let me illustrate, in this review, Mamet’s concern with Liberalism’s socialistic schema.  Though it only dawned on him lately, he has awakened to the fact that the Nazis and Italian Fascists and Russian Bolsheviks all “believed, in their beginnings, in Social Justice, and the Fair distribution of goods.  But these sweet ideas are encumbered in execution by the realization that someone, finally, has to do the work; their adamant practice will quite soon reveal this:  ‘Oh.  We will need slaves’” (p. 32).  The American Left, though quick to disavow the havoc done by earlier Leftists (Nazis, Fascists, Bolsheviks) cannot escape the link that binds them together:  socialism, which has become a religion, “the largest myth of modern times” (p. 41).  “Liberalism is a religion.  Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated.  But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost” (p. 81).  In accord with Liberal dogma, “the prime purpose of Government is to expand Equality, which may also be stated thus:  to expand its own powers” (p. 92).  

Furthermore:  “The baby boomer generation, my own, is content, if of the Left, to live out our remaining years upon the work and upon the entitlements created by our parents, and to entail the costs upon our children—to tax industry out of the country, to tax wealth away from its historical role and use as the funder of innovation” (p. 43).  These aging boomers still dream of the perfect Commune, a Return to Nature, the abolition of property and marriage, a world of untrammeled self-expression wherein no one “works” but “shares” the surfeit of society.  “It is,” Manet insists, “only in a summer camp (College or the hippie commune) that the enlightened live on the American Plan—room and board included prepaid—and one is free to frolic all day in the unspoiled woods” (p. 141).  Indeed, “Liberalism is a parlor game, where one, for a small stipend, is allowed to think he is aiding starving children in X or exploited workers in Y, when he is merely, in the capitalist tradition, paying a premium, tacked onto his goods, or subtracted from his income, for the illusion that he is behaving laudably (cf. bottled water)” (p. 141).  In short, the “Socialist vision” is, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, “a trick” (p. 172).  

Rather than magicians the Socialists have demagogic politicians.  “Demagoguery is the attempt to convince the People that they can be led into the Promised Land—it is the trick of the snake oil salesmen, the ‘energy therapists,’ the purveyors of ‘health water,’ and on the other side of the spectrum, the politician and that dictator into which he will evolve absent a vigilant electorate willing to admit its errors” (p. 193).  Did we think rightly, we’d detect “the similarities between ‘Lose Weight Without Dieting,’ and ‘Hope.’  The magicians say the more intelligent the viewer is, the easier he can be fooled.  To put it differently, the more educated a person, the easier it is to engage him in an abstraction” (p. 193).  For Mamet:  “It has taken me rather an effort of will to wrench myself free from various abstractions regarding human interaction.  A sample of these would include:  that poverty can be eradicated, that greed is the cause of poverty, that poverty is the cause of crime, that Government, given enough money, can cure all ills, and that, thus, it should be so engaged” (p. 193).  

The path the leftist boomers (such as Mamet in his youth) follow was identified by Hayek as “The Road to Serfdom.  And we see it in operation here, as we are in the process of choosing, as a society, between Liberty—the freedom from the State to pursue happiness, and a supposed but impossible Equality, which, as it could only be brought about by a State capable and empowered to function in all facets of life, means totalitarianism and eventual dictatorship” (p. 61).  Egalitarian Liberals constantly stress the importance of sympathy and compassion, of caring for others.  Translated into political action, however, these feelings frequently prove destructive, fully evident when Big Government imposes its agenda.  “The judge who forgot the admonition in Proverbs, ‘Do not favor the rich, neither favor the poor, but do Justice,’ who set aside the laws, or who ‘interpreted’ them in a way he considered ‘more fair,’ was, for all his good intentions, robbing the populace of an actual possession (the predictability of the legal codes).  He was graciously giving away something which was not his” (p. 151).   Good intentions can never suffice!  But they “can lead to evil—vide Busing, Urban Renewal, Affirmative Action, Welfare, et cetera, to name the more immediately apparent, and not to mention the, literally, tens of thousands of Federal and Sate statutes limiting freedom of trade, which is to say, of the right of the individual to make a living, and, so earn that wealth which would in its necessary expenditure, allow him to provide a living to others” (p. 151).  

Much that’s wrong with today’s Left, Mamet thinks, stems from a decision to ignore traditional canons of “justice” so as to impose a newly-exalted “social justice,” which can only mean, as Hayek wrote, ‘State Justice’” (p. 46).  Mamet acknowledges “that though, as a lifelong Liberal, I endorsed and paid lip service to ‘social justice,’ which is to say, to equality of result, I actually based the important decisions of my life—those in which I was personally going to be affected by the outcome—upon the principle of equality of opportunity; and, further, that so did everyone I knew” (p. 154).  Inevitably, “social justice” leads to “redistributive justice,” whereby the State “confiscates wealth accumulated under existing laws and redistributes it to those it deems worthy” (p. 46).  

 “To the Left it is the State which should distribute place, wealth, and status.  This is called ‘correcting structural error,’ or redressing ‘the legacy of Slavery,’ or Affirmative Action, or constraining unfair Executive Compensation; it is and can only be that Spoils System which is decried at the ward level as ‘cronyism,’ and lauded at the national level as ‘social justice’” (pp. 46-47).    “Government programs of confiscation and redistribution are called the War on Poverty, or the New Deal, or Hope and Change, but that these programs are given lofty names” (p. 153) guarantees nothing.  Still more:  States striving to insure social justice becomes dictatorial, for it is assumed “that there is a supergovernmental, superlegal responsibility upon the right-thinking to implement their visions” (p. 153).  “This progression, from Social Justice to Judicial Activism and control of means of production and distribution, can be seen . . . wherever the Socialists took power and brought terror and yet the Left, longing for the campfire, votes for collectivism, for better and more powerful and more ‘feeling’ Government” (p. 93).  

Rather than “social justice,” Mamet urges us to recover a commitment to the rule of law, for “The awe and majesty of the Law are our basic inheritance of freedom.  Without these nothing can exist in Freedom:  here is the bright line, stay to the correct side and the community will protect you, venture across, and you will be at the mercy of its other name, the State” (p. 219).  

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

During the past two decades no journalist, says George Will, “has produced a body of work matching that of Heather Mac Donald.”  With degrees in literature from Yale and Cambridge universities, plus a law degree from Stanford, she brings unique credentials and scholarly depth to her essays, generally dealing with poverty and education and published in New York’s City Journal.  In a collection of some of her essays—The Burden of Bad Ideas:  How Modern Intellectuals Misshape Our Society (Chicago:  Ivan R. Dee, c. 2000)—she documents the harm done to the recipients of social engineering.   “These essays record,” Mac Donald says, “my travels through institutions that have been perverted by today’s elite intellectual orthodoxy, from an inner city high school that teaches graffiti-writing for academic credit . . . to the Smithsonian Institution, now in thrall to a crude academic multiculturalism; from New York’s Dantean foster care system to Ivy League law schools that produce ‘scholarship’ urging blacks to view shoplifting, and pilfering from an employer, as political expression” (p. xi).  

In “The Billions of Dollars That Made Things Worse” Mac Donald explores the impact of philanthropic foundations such as Carnegie and Ford which long ago abandoned their founders’ aspirations (e.g. Carnegie libraries) and now see themselves as agents of social change, funding radical “community activists” around the country, seeking to transform “a deeply flawed American society” (p. 4).  “When,” for example, “McGeorge Bundy, former White House national security advisor, became Ford’s president in 1966, the foundation’s activism switched into high gear.  Bundy reallocated Ford’s resources from education to minority rights” and “created a host of new advocacy groups, such as the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund” and “the Native American Rights Fund, that still wreak havoc on public policy today” (p. 9).  The foundations have routinely provided the funds to establish social justice centers on university campuses devoted to race, class, and gender.  They also have subsidized public interest litigation, enabling legions of lawyers to push for bilingual education, voter rights, racial quotas, sexual equality, prisoners’ rights, etc., all designed to  “establish in court rights that democratically elected legislatures have rejected” (p. 20).  

Paralleling the changes in powerful foundations have come similar changes in powerful media, preeminently evident in the New York Times.  Whereas the paper Adolph Ochs bought in 1896 was devoted to sound money, low taxes, and ‘no more government than is absolutely necessary to protect society, maintain individual and vested rights, and assure the free exercise of a sound conscience’” (p. 39), a century later it championed precisely the opposite positions.  Charting the ways poverty has been portrayed in the Times, Mac Donald shows how appeals for individual charity early in the 20^th century shifted to demands for an ever-expanding welfare state.  With the passing decades, “elite opinion came to see the cause of poverty not in individual character and behavior but in vast, impersonal social and economic forces that supposedly determined individual fate” (p. 26).  No longer were individuals (including the poor) held accountable to moral standards, which were discarded in favor of a psychoanalytic model.  Distinctions between the “undeserving” and “deserving” poor disappeared from the Time’s pages.  Bad luck rather than bad character explained the plight of the city’s burgeoning welfare recipients.  In her judgment, one of the paper’s editorials cogently summarized the cultural elite’s agenda:  “first, to deny that welfare had become a trap and that conditions in the inner city reflected a moral, as much as an economic, decline; second, to disparage as greedy, unfeeling, and possibly even racist those who questioned the welfare status quo; and third, to insist that individuals acted not of their own free will but because of environmental conditions beyond their control” (p. 36).  None of these ideas, Mac Donald insists, is true.  Yet, sadly enough, as they have been imposed on the poor they have brought much misery.  

Some of the most trenchant essays in The Burden of Bad Ideas deal with one of Mac Donald’s main concerns:  education.  In “Law School Humbug” she dissects the current mission of elite institutions—to purge all racism, sexism, and classism from American society.  Teasing out the implications of the pragmatic jurisprudence of Oliver Wendell Holmes, numbers of law professors espoused varieties of Legal Realism and Critical Legal Studies, producing law review articles devoted to race and feminist theory that “have dispensed with the conventions of legal scholarship—case analysis, statement of legal problem followed by suggestions for its resolution—in favor of personal anecdotes telling of the author’s oppression” (p. 68).  Turning to graduate programs in education in “Why Johnny’s Teacher Can’t Teach,” she probes the mysterious innards of teacher education, which “has been in the grip of an immutable dogma, responsible for endless educational nonsense.  That dogma may be summed up in the phrase:  Anything But Knowledge” (p. 82).  A series of hot items—be it self-esteem or community-building or social justice or saving the planet—quickly becomes the educrats’ theme of the day.  Confidently committed to inducing “critical thinking,” teachers embrace “the central educational fallacy of our time:  that one can think without having anything to think about” (p. 85).  

The titles of other essays—“Compassion Gone Mad,” “Foster Care’s Underworld,” and “Homeless Advocates in Outer Space”—indicate the scope of Mac Donald’s authorial lens, and she successfully pillories many of the conventional liberal ideas that so shape public policy not only in New York but throughout the country.  Refuting the “bad ideas” of the intelligentsia are the realities of a world wherein three things seem clear.  “First was the depth of the dysfunction that I often saw—the self-destruction wrought by drugs and alcohol and promiscuity, the damage inflicted on children by a world from which the traditional family had largely disappeared (though throughout the most troubled neighborhoods I found individuals of extraordinary moral strength fighting for order).  Second was the extent to which government programs shaped life in the ghetto, influencing the choices that individuals made and distorting the forms the social interaction took.  Finally, I was continually amazed by the trenchancy with which those I interviewed could judge their situations and the policies that had gone into making them.  If you want to know how well social policies are working, I learned, ask the poor—when their advocates weren’t around” (pp. vii-viii).  

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

Two decades ago, in The Dream and the Nightmare:  The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass (San Francisco:  Encounter Books, 2000, c. 1993), Myron Magnet, the editor of the City Journal, identified “culture, not racism or lack of jobs or the welfare system” as the source of the ominous social crisis we now face.  Slogans from the Sixties (e.g. “if it feels good, do it”) turned toxic when absorbed by the underclass (p. 1).   Eminent baby boomers with their “new morality,” and ambitious cultural elites—the Bill Clintons and John Kerrys, the Bill Ayers and Al Gores—the “Haves” in Magnet’s presentation, “radically remade American culture, turning it inside out and upside down to accomplish a cultural revolution whose most mangled victims turned out to be the Have-nots” (p. 14).  

These privileged Haves have presided over a Nietzchean transvaluation of all values—“letting it all hang out” and “doing it” without any commitment to delayed gratification—that have locked millions in poverty.  Now empowered, this cultural elite—professors and journalists, judges and movie moguls, armed with such texts as Michael Harrington’s The Other America and John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice—vainly wants to “help” the poor!  They mistakenly believe that economic inequities are the “root causes” of all social problems.  However, Magnet asserts:  “The bitter paradox that is so hard to face is that most of what the Haves have already done to help the poor—out of decent and generous motives—is part of the problem.  Like gas pumped into a flooded engine, the more help they bestow, the less able do the poor become to help themselves.   The problem isn’t that the Haves haven’t done enough but that they’ve done the diametrically wrong thing” (p. 21).  “In particular, one belief central to the new culture of the Haves has wreaked incalculable mischief:  the idea that the poor are victims, that poverty is in itself evidence of victimization” (p. 121).  William Blake, two centuries ago, “spoke of ‘mind-forg’d manacles’—the ideas engendered from within one’s own imagination that one invests with power enough to enslave oneself.  Victimization is one such idea” (p. 157).  

The “underclass” that concerns Magnet is worse than poor, for many folks slip in and out of the “poverty” category.  The underclass he considers represents perhaps 2 percent of the population; it “didn’t begin to crystallize as a major American problem until the mid-1960s,” and in the next decade “it tripled in size” (p. 41).  Inexplicably, during economic prosperous times and in conjunction with the many successes of the civil rights movement, “black men suddenly, startlingly, and in ever-increasing numbers began to drop out” of the labor force, and within a decade, “when the underclass had emerged as an obdurate fact, black participation was 8.4 percentage points lower than white participation, a difference that statisticians find colossal” (p. 44).  They also cast aside family responsibilities, sparking a soaring rate of female-headed households that testifies to a massive cultural collapse, sinking into an expanding welfare system—food stamps, Medicaid, AFDC, etc.—which “has been a particularly insidious snare” (p. 57).  “Nothing tells these young women that getting pregnant without being married and having illegitimate babies they can’t support and aren’t equipped to nurture well is wrong.  The culture they live in, both the larger culture and the culture of the underclass, tells them that a life on welfare is perfectly acceptable and, arguably, just as good as the other kind of life” (p. 60).  

The presence of the homeless in our “streets, parks, and train stations in the heart of our cities,” Magnet argues, illustrates “the most extreme and catastrophic failure of the cultural revolution of the Haves and the social policies that resulted from it” (p. 83).  All too many of the homeless are criminals or mentally ill folks who ought to be institutionalized.  In 1963 President Kennedy naively “persuaded Congress to establish community mental health centers for the seriously mentally ill,” and within a decade distributing Thorazine and enrolling clients in various Great Society programs replaced the “insane asylums” of earlier years.   Sad to say:  “advanced ideas about personal liberation came together with advanced ideas about political enfranchisement to create a climate of opinion and a body of social policy that harmed those at the bottom of society in the name of doing them good” (p. 85).  The freedom that sounded so sweet in boomers’ seminars led to a toxic free-for-all chaos on the streets.  

Significantly, such lawless now enjoys legal protection as advocates of the “Living Constitution” as lawyers and judges follow the rationale of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision to implement “the new culture’s vision of change and liberation” (p. 184).  Superficially admirable, the judiciary’s rulings regarding “nondiscrimination by race would have to give way to discrimination by race” (p. 192) and counterproductive plans such as busing and affirmative action.