Until 1943, apologetics was required of Princeton Theological Seminary students. In 1944, as a result of the influence of Barthian and Dutch Reformed professors, apologetics was no longer offered! Falling in line with other mainline seminaries, Princeton embraced the position of Friedrich Schleiermacher, who renounced, nearly two centuries ago, “all attempts to prove the truth or necessity of Christianity,” relying solely “the inward certainty” believers feel in their hearts. In 1995, some Princeton seminarians formed the Charles Hodge Society, holding weekly meetings known as the Princeton Apologetics Seminar and reviving the Princeton Theological Review, a journal Charles Hodge had launched in the 19th century.

For their efforts to espouse classical orthodoxy–what St. Vincent of Lerins defined as: quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est (what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all–they “were threatened” with lawsuits “physical violence, accused of racism and sexism, denied funding that other campus groups readily received, had posted signs destroyed and removed, and were explicitly informed by faculty that membership in the Charles Hodge Society jeopardized their academic advancement” (p. 26). So much for the much celebrated “tolerance” of the modern academy!

Some of the seminarians’ essays appear in Unapologetic Apologetics: Meeting the Challenges of Theological Studies, edited by William A. Dembski and Jay Wesley Richards (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, c. 2001). “At stake in apologetics is the question whether Christianity is true–objectively true” (p. 12). Nothing matters more than ideas. As J. Gresham Machen, long a luminary at Princeton, said, in What Is Christianity, “False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the Gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.” Dembski and Richards believe Christianity contains true ideas which need champions. Thus this book.

William Dembski sets the stage for the volume in “The Task of Apologetics,” which is nothing less than the calling of Jude: “Contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints” (1:3). Refining and updating the Vincentian Canon, Dembski identifies the “core” of the faith as including: 1) physical content; 2) theoretical content; and 3) regulative principles. “Given that the Christian faith has a stable core, the general task of apologetics is now clear enough, to wit, defending that stable core” (p. 41). Having established his position, Dembski then critiques one of its main foes in “The Fallacy of Contextualism.” Widely espoused by legions of “postmodernists,” contextualism insists that truth and goodness are shaped by cultural contexts. Ironically, as a form of skepticism, “hardcore contextualism claims itself to be a universal truth. Hardcore contextualism tries to pass off as the universal truth that their are no universal truths. This is the fallacy of contextualism” (p. 47). As such it is guilty of what logicians call “self-referential incoherence” and deserves to be dismissed by careful thinkers.

Deconstructionists, following Derrida, also founder in the fallacy of contextualism. If consistently employed, there is no end to deconstruction, so in the process of deconstructing texts deconstructionists deconstruct their own position. Derrida, and his epigones, urge the deconstruction of texts such as Shakespeare’s tragedies or biblical passages. But, of course, they rarely invite others to “deconstruct” their own writings, which are apparently to be accepted as conveying certain truths.

Other essays deal with the history of apologetics at Princeton, the inspiration and authority of Scripture, Christology, Theology, science and religion. All-in-all, this is an impressive collection! “Every evangelical who attends seminary must read this book before he or she graduates,” writes J.P. Moreland of Talbot School of Theology. It certainly bears witness to the intellectual prowess of a young group of scholars who, as Peter Kreeft notes, “make more sense than their professors. Goliath cannot stand for long.”

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In 6 Modern Myths About Christianity & Western Civilization (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, c. 2001), a British scholar, Philip J. Sampson, brings historical data and a questioning stance to bear on some of the “truths” men live by. That well-educated people still refer to the “Dark Ages” when folks thought the earth was flat or “the war between science and religion” indicates how powerfully certain myths reign in the modern mind. Two popular books–John Draper’s History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science and Andrew White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom–still shape many people’s understanding of the past. Basic to both of them, and to most modern myths, Sampson argues, is “Naturalism, the belief that the supernatural is either nonexistent or powerless” (p. 23).

The first myth examined is that of Galileo, the oft-celebrated hero in the science versus religion story. “Armed only with a telescope and reason, plucky Galileo stood against the might of the church. He was tortured by the Inquisition, condemned as a heretic, and wasted away in a prison cell; Italian science floundered” (p. 29). But, Sampson adds, “The main drawback to this plot is that most of it is untrue” (p. 29). In fact, Copernicus’ heliocentric theory had been circulated and discussed for 70 years before Galileo. His astronomical studies and insights were widely applauded. His staunchest critics were Aristotelian university professors rather than biblical fundamentalists. Centuries earlier, Catholic scholars, such as Aquinas, had clearly explained how biblical language applied to ordinary men and their common sense understanding of the world, and Cardinal Baronius had declared that the “Holy Ghost intended to teach us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go” (p. 41). Galileo’s problems with the church came when he decided to interpret biblical passages in accord with his astronomical theories. He mocked and thus alienated Pope Urban VIII, who had earlier supported him, and suffered only mild reproof and restrictions following the church’s condemnation of his position.

The second myth Sampson scrutinizes is Darwin’s story of origins. Andrew Brown declares: “Evolutionary theory is now one of the main myths of our time. It has to bear the weight of most of our hopes and fears about what being human really means” (p. 47). The idea of evolution is, of course, ancient. Aristotle considered it and rejected it as implausible. Darwin’s success resulted not so much from a new idea as from the power of his metaphors, providing a naturalistic story of origins, a rival to the Christian story. His champions, T.H. Huxley in his debate with Samuel Wilberforce, and Clarence Darrow, in the Scopes trial, prevailed more through rhetoric than solid evidence. In fact, the theory has, from the beginning, had distinguished critics. Lord Kelvin found it doubtful, given his understanding of physics. Paleontologists have always wondered at the lack of evidence for the theory in the fossil record. Contemporary mathematicians and physicists, including Sir Fred Hoyle, find “that the probability of biological systems evolving according to a new-Darwinian model is ‘insensibly different from zero,’ making Darwinian evolution’ an uneasy combination of dogma and wishful thinking'” (p. 60). A distinguished biologist, Lynn Margulus, calls neo-Darwinism “‘a minor twentieth century religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon biology'” (p. 62). Nevertheless, the theory must be upheld by the faithful, so Darwinism remains entrenched within the modern mind.

The third myth considered is environmentalism. Lynn White’s 1966 essay on “the historic roots of our ecologic crisis” quickly attained canonical status in environmental circles, primarily because “it offered a way to preserve trust in science by pinning the responsibility for disaster on unpurged vestiges of the old enemy–religion” (p. 73). Ignoring mounting evidence cited by Sampson showing the strong emphasis on stewardship in Scripture and Christian tradition, environmentalists still propagate untruths so as to sustain their worldview.

The final three myths Sampson deals with are: the alleged oppression of Christian missionaries, contempt for the body in Christian thought, and persecution of witches in the 16th and 17th centuries. Granted their failures, Christian missionaries were the best emissaries of the West, and they in fact did much good wherever they went, as is evident in the testimony of indigenous peoples initially encountered. Neither the human body, nor the female body, were despised by Christians, and the largely feminist fulminations on this issue must be discarded as frivolous.

Witches were, of course, burned at the stake at times. But far fewer were persecuted than is often alleged. Human history abounds with accounts of massive killings. “The anthropologist Marvin Harris estimates that the pre-Columbian Aztecs sacrificed about fifteen thousand people each year from a far smaller population base than that of Europe. They would have exceeded the total number of witchcraft executions in less than a decade. The terror that followed the Enlightenment-inspired revolution in France resulted in some fifty thousand deaths in two years; witchcraft trials took hundreds of years to reach a comparable total” (p. 137). Still more, Sanders shows, it was usually the church which urged restraint in punishing them.

Sanders considers only six of the reigning “myths” of modernity. But he points us in a constructive direction. Historical facts, scholarly, documented, solidly demonstrated, are often the best apologetic tools.

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Robert W. Jenson is one of America’s premier (Lutheran) theologians. Looking back over his career, he collected, in chronological order, some of his essays and has released them as Essays in Theology of Culture (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, c. 1995). The essays are, he emphasizes, “essays in theology of culture” and “are specifically and brazenly trinitarian and churchly” (p. ix). Though they address diverse subjects, at least one theme recurrently appears: nihilism. Like a towering, threatening thunderhead, Nietzsche looms over the past century. Ever more clearly, Jenson says, he has realized that “the threat of nihilism’s advent has been the chief spiritual determinant of life in the West since the turn of the twentieth century, as it still remains” (p. x).

In “The Kingdom of America’s God,” Jenson adumbrates one of his central critiques. The civil religion espoused by the likes of Josiah Strong, in Our Country, “was simultaneously Christian and political. Whatever we may critique, that much at least was good” (p. 52). What was bad was the assumption, rooted in classic Reformed (Calvinistic) theology, that God’s Kingdom was coming into being in this nation. cannot but pervert the true faith. As is evident in the works of William Ames, who greatly influenced New England’s Puritans, God’s sovereignty is evident in His laws, which make possible the covenant between Himself and man. In New England, especially, civil authorities assumed the responsibility of implementing God’s laws and thus establishing a salvific covenant. “To ‘own’ the covenant with God is simultaneously to make socio-political covenant with other men” (p. 56). Reformed theology, with its focus on a thoroughly transcendent Sovereign God, easily slipped into Deism during the Enlightenment and “may be understood as the religion of Puritans who had lost their christological faith” (p. 58). The American Revolution, consequently, inculcated a sacred character to the secular system designed by the Founding Fathers. Subsequently, the eschatology of the Puritan’s descendents transformed the longing for a “holy commonwealth” into the progressivism of the Social Gospel and its postmillennial hopes. In this succinct essay, Jenson brings a theologically-informed mind into an interpretation of American history which is full of insight and truth.

A number of the essays ponder questions concerning Christian education. In “What Academic Difference Would the Gospel Make?” Jenson critiques the modern university for its lack of theological foundations. To a great extent, the social sciences have replaced philosophy and theology as sources for “wisdom” and guidance. “The laissez-faire university, in which students decide what is an educated many by voting with their feet for what already interests them, in which truth is supposed to be discovered by the competition of fixed ideas, is no accident. It is simply the university that has asked its own social scientists how to do things. Nor is it an accident that political science and economics departments are regularly so stodgily and obtusely mild-liberal or, if maverick, orthodox Marxist. Nor is it an accident that pop-psychological technique and bowdlerized Eastern religion cooperate so nicely” (p. 80).

Unlike the secular university (Jenson argues in “The Triunity of Truth”) with its disconcern for “the unity of truth,” Christian institutions, “churchly colleges” should devoutly pursue it. Indeed, for them, “the unity of truth must be the imperative joint concern” because it is, “inescapably a theological problem” (p. 85). Blending prayer and learning, in accord with the richest Christian teachings, aligns minds with Ultimate Reality. Anytime colleges divorce faith from learning, prayer from study, they lose their way. Indeed, Jenson says, “to put it as offensively as possible, the day we dropped required chapel and put nothing in its place–was the day we sold not our religious souls, but our scholarly and pedagogic souls. That was the day we condemned ourselves not to be communities of scholars and teachers but to be instead agencies of the state” (p. 87).

In “The Intellectual and the Church,” Jenson reminds us that to premodern thinkers “the created mind was not itself conceived as an agent, a doer of knowledge; the mind was rather a mirror or reality, or at most an eye, constituted in its knowing by what appears to and in it. Mirrors and eyes need light; to be mirrored or seen reality needs light. It was believed that God is the one who sheds that light” (p. 176). As is evident in Richard Rorty’s Mind as the Mirror of Nature, many modern thinkers have discarded this position. But Jenson would have us return to the wisdom of premodernity, knowing truth about God as we work in His world.

To do this, Christian scholars are called to labor in the “liberal arts,” which Jenson equates with “political arts” in “The Political Arts and Churchly Colleges.” No work is more important! According to Martin Luther, Satan seeks to “deprive us of the liberal arts. For both worldly rule and the preaching of the gospel depend on them, so that when the liberal arts fail, both the larger community and the church within it must become ‘a wild band . . . , a stall of swine, a rout of wild beasts'” (pp. 205-206). To distance us from the “liberal arts,” to damn us, Satan tempts us to pursue “my needs, my rights, my development and fulfillment” (p. 207). Christian scholars, however, must uphold the truth and help us seek God and His kingdom of righteousness.

This is best done, Jenson argues, in “God, the Liberal Arts, and the Integrity of Texts,” through rigorous attention to the great texts of the tradition. Importantly: “the existence of the liberal arts and so their teaching depends on texts. The liberal arts depend on the use of texts, on the use of certain texts, and on the subsistence of texts, that is on the possibility of distinguishing them from their interpretation” (p. 209). Postmodernists, of course, have launched an massive assault on both the texts themselves and their consensual interpretation in the Christian tradition. Jenson identifies such thinking as “Heidegger-by-the-way-of-the-French jargon in which it is usually couched” (p. 210). And it is, he insists, a grave threat. For without the texts, without the teaching of the texts, the Christian faith cannot survive!

Generally written for the general reader, concise and to-the-point, these essays richly reward the attentive reader.

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Curtis Chang supervises InterVarsity Christian Fellowship ministries at Harvard, MIT, and Tufts. Understandably, he wants to provide intellectual resources for some of the brightest students in America. Rather than finding such in modish moderns, he takes us back to Augustine and Aquinas in Engaging Unbelief: A Captivating Strategy from Augustine & Aquinas (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, c. 2000). Both theologians “faced questions as what to proclaim to a society that previously understood itself to be ‘Christian’ but now seems to be fragmenting, and what to say when truths previously held to be universal are under assault from a disorienting religious pluralism” (p. 9). Thinking with them, deriving wisdom from them, may well give us needed guidance as we wind our way through the century ahead.

Chang utilizes Augustine’s The City of God and Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles. He locates each in its historical era, indicating why an essentially evangelistic and missionary stance was required of them. They both adopted an approach Chang identifies as: “1. entering the challenger’s story; 2. retelling the story; 3; capturing that retold tale within the gospel metanarrative” (p. 26). Augustine addressed a disintegrating pagan world. Aquinas faced the challenge of Islamic ideas rooted in Aristotle. Both sought to fully understand their challengers. Then they found, primarily in Scripture, ways to reach out and introduce non-Christians to the eternal truth of the Christian Gospel.

This book is interesting because of its thesis. Chang’s actual reading of Augustine and Aquinas, and his application of their thought to the “postmodern” students he deals with, are less impressive than the fact that he finds help in arguably the two greatest theologians in Church history. Coming from an entirely different perspective, he argues what Thomas Oden has argued for some time: to make sense in our world we must recapture the truths which have sustained classical orthodoxy. And no better exponents of that position can be found than Augustine and Aquinas. Those of us who work with collegians, those of us concerned for reaching the “postmodern” mind, will find meat to chew on in Chang’s case.

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James Q. Wilson, a UCLA professor, hopes to “help people recover the confidence with which they once spoke about virtue and morality” (p. vii) by establishing a form of “natural law” ethics in The Moral Sense (New York: The Free Press, c. 1993). This is one of the more frequently-referenced ethical treatises of the past decade, and Wilson roots his case (almost exactly as C.S. Lewis had done 50 years earlier in Mere Christianity) in the fact that ordinary people routinely refer to morality, implicitly assuming its reality. He declares that everyone has a “moral sense” even though many seek to evade it. Avant-garde intellectuals such as Richard Rorty may win fame and fortune by touting “tolerance” and pretending that “everything is relative,” but Wilson calls such moves barbaric!

In fact, everyone distinguishes right from wrong. Everyone has a moral sense just as surely as he has a sense of touch or sight. Unlike most advocates of “natural law,” who root their position in a theistic metaphysics, Wilson is thoroughly naturalistic in his worldview, confident that an amoral process, “naturalistic evolution,” has somehow instilled it. Yet unlike most naturalistic thinkers who popularize a “cultural relativism” which encourages ethical relativism, Wilson consults the best scholarly literature– fact-filled anthropological and sociological studies which seek objective truth. Here he finds universal absolutes. Murder, for example, has always been condemned by everyone everywhere. So has incest. Allegedly “primitive” peoples often have deeply-held convictions concerning parental obligations which are identical to those held by highly-educated moderns. Children should be loved and cared for.

Unlike virtually all “natural law” advocates, however, Wilson locates ethical absolutes in human sentiment rather than any eternal law or transcendent reality. He openly sides with David Hume and Adam Smith–18th century advocates of an emotivist source for ethics. We cannot know what we should do, but we feel a certain bond with others. These feelings are derived from the social ties established with our parents and extended to others. The sentiments he thinks universal and absolute are four: sympathy; fairness; self-control; duty. Wilson’s “sentiments,” interestingly enough, rather resemble the “cardinal virtues” of the Christian tradition: prudence; justice; temperance; courage.

Growing up, as Adam Smith said, we want, “not only to be loved, but to be lovely” (p. 33). From our earliest hours, we want to be nurtured and rightly related to those near and dear us. We instinctively care for those who care for us. As we mature, we extend that care, that sympathy–that “feeling with”–to increasingly wider circles of people. Our environment certainly helps shape our sympathies. Folks in small towns more readily reach out to others than do city folks. Women usually help more readily than men. But everyone, Wilson, sympathizes with others and (to one degree or another) wants to help them.

So too with fairness! “Perhaps the first moral judgment uttered by a young child is, ‘That’s not fair!'” (p. 55). From that moment on, people meticulously keep score and weigh balances, demanding they be treated fairly. Equity (not to be confused equality), reciprocity, and impartiality blend together and constitute our understanding of what’s fair. (Charles Darwin described it all in terms of social instincts, programmed by evolution into species such as ours–thereby explaining it sufficiently for Wilson.)

Self-control also validates the moral sense. Aristotle saw it, naming it temperance, and it’s still essential! Children must learn to delay gratification if they become successful adults, so parents and cultural institutions rightly encourage self-control. “It is a remarkable characteristic of human society that most of the things that are best for us–that is, most likely to produce genuine and enduring happiness– require us to forgo some immediate pleasure” (p. 81). Finally, there’s duty, “the disposition to honor obligations even without hope of reward or fear of punishment” (p. 100). Fidelity! Rightly reared, we ultimately “acquire the disposition to judge our own behavior through the eyes of a disinterested spectator, what Adam Smith called ‘the man within the breast'” (p. 108). Inmates in Nazi concentration camps, rather than descending to a dog-eat-dog code of behavior, often risked much to keep their commitments. In Auschwitz, many of them observed this rule: “‘Do not harm your neighbor and, if at all possible, save him.’ The result was nothing grand, just ‘small, stubborn, and laughable daily heroism in the face of misery'” (p. 114). Kant’s deonto- logical ethics, the embodiment of the Enlightenment Wilson lauds, clearly finds affirmation at this point.

Having described four aspects of the moral sense, Wilson then turns, in the second part of his treatise, to its “sources.” He argues, with Aristotle, that man is a social animal. Consequently, he is socialized into certain forms of behavior which inculcate the virtues Wilson considers universal. Our prosocial behavior is simply instinctive–as much a part of our being as our languaging propensity. So we form families. Strong, healthy bonds between children and parents enable the children to develop a proper moral sense. This means mothers and fathers must marry and stay married, giving their children good guidance. Since men are generally more aggressive and less nurturing, “much less amenable to socialization than women” (p. 165), social controls must be instituted to corral and socialize them.

“A culture that does not succeed in inducing its males to care for their offspring,” Wilson says, “not only produce children that lack adequate care but also creates an environment that rewards predatory sexuality” (p. 175). Divorce and the dissolution of the family should alarm us. Boys especially need the strong hand of a father, for “the presence of a decent father helps a male child learn to control aggression; his absence impedes it” (p. 178). Wilson dismisses all utopian proposals (from Plato to the present) which discount parents’ importance in rearing children. Careful studies of Israel’s collective farms–the kibbutzes–reveal the impossibility of creating a classless, egalitarian society without sexual distinctions. Nature will have her way! Truly matriarchal societies have never existed, nor will they. Families need fathers. Without them mothers and children fail to function well.

Having described and explained, to his satisfaction, man’s moral sense, Wilson then proposes that we rely on it to develop good character. Given the nature of human nature, he insists we can develop good humans. “A proper understanding of human nature can rarely provide us with rules for action, but it can supply what Aristotle intended: a grasp of what is good in human life and a rough ranking of those goods” (p. 237). Learning good habits, the virtues, cultivates character. “A moral life is perfected by practice more than by precept; children are not taught so much as habituated. In this sense the schools inevitably teach morality, whether they intend to or not, by such behavior as they reward or punish” (p. 249).

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Norman Geisler and Frank Turek, in Legislating Morality: Is It Wise? Is It Legal? Is It Possible? (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, c. 1998) take an oft-trite statement–“you can’t legislate morality”–and argue that indeed you must. Their thesis is straight forward and twofold: “(1) Legislating morality is literally unavoidable (morality is always legislated), and (2) Americans should legislate the morality common to us all–the one expressed in our Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and, until recently, the laws of our land and decisions of the Supreme Court” (p. 8).

First, the authors ask if such legislation is constitutional. Examining foundational documents, such as the Declaration of Independence, demonstrates that Founding Fathers such as Jefferson assumed that by nature all men have unalienable rights such as life and liberty which should be legally secured. Unalienable rights are “derived from the Moral Law–the law not everyone obeys, but the law by which everyone expects to be treated” (p. 20). Interestingly enough, the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. inscribes these words of Jefferson: “God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?” (p. 115). Various constitutional amendments, including The Bill of Rights and Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, clearly enforced moral convictions with the weight of law. Significantly, James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” insisted: “We have staked the whole future of American Civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all our political institutions . . . upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves, according to the Ten Commandments of God” (p. 90).

So the real question’s not whether or not morality will be legislated–the real question is whose morality will be made law! More importantly: will the morality mandated rest upon parochial preferences or overarching absolutes? When zealous folks try to legislate such things as dress codes or the prohibition of alcoholic beverages, difficulties ensue. But when the weight of the state stands opposed to murder or child abuse, few protest. Certainly you cannot change people’s hearts by crafting laws. But you can encourage or discourage people’s behavior. As Martin Luther King, Jr., quipped: “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me. But it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important” (p. 23).

Beyond defending the right to legislate morality, uncontroversial when dealing with such things as murder, the authors tackle some tough issues–homosexuality, abortion, and euthanasia. Virtually all civilized peoples in the past condemned homosexuality as immoral. Geisler and Turek explain “why homosexual acts violate the Moral Law.” First, anatomical details, indicating “organ function and reproduction,” show that sodomy is unnatural. Second, the tragic consequences, most notably the astonishingly abbreviated life expectancy of active gay men, reveals its violation of the natural order. Third, that many involved in homosexual activities struggle with a lifetime of guilt indicates they act counter to conscience. Consequently, they argue, sodomy should be outlawed.

Turning to abortion, Judge Robert Bork summed it up: “Convenience is becoming the theme of our culture” (p. 153). Biologists know that life begins at conception, so there’s no reason to doubt that the unborn baby is a human being. Yet in this nation “Unborn eagles are protected by law. Unborn humans are not” (p. 174). Laws drafted to protect the life of the unborn child have been routinely invalidated by the Supreme Court. “Any country that accepts abortion,” said Mother Teresa, “is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want” (p. 177). She should have the “last word,” the authors suggest. And if we’d listen to Mother Teresa we’d outlaw abortion.

Euthanasia, like abortion, disposes of people who are unwanted by other people. Joseph Fletcher, author of Situation Ethics, accurately noted: “Abortion is prenatal euthanasia, and euthanasia is post-natal infanticide” (p. 181). Activists like Richard Lamm, former governor of Colorado, declare that the terminally ill have a “duty to die” in order to spare the rest of any anguish. “We’ve got a duty to die and get out of the way” (p. 179) to make the world conform to Lamm’s design. Standing strong against the Lamms and Kevorkians of the world, “candidates” for euthanasia such as Joni Eareckson Tada resolutely call us to defend folks such as herself. “We are now accepting a dangerous premise: that life lived in pain or in a wheelchair is not worth living, that you are better dead than disabled. . . . Instead of making it easier for people to die, let’s make it easier for them to live” (p. 197).

Having surveyed the scene and built their case, Geisler and Turek suggest ways for readers to join in the important task of legislating morality. Thinking clearly, arguing charitably, acting boldly, voting conscientiously, will help us fulfill our calling as citizens in this republic.

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Textbooks rarely remain relevant for more than a decade. Nor do they generally have value apart from a classroom. An exception to this is Austin Fagothey’s Right and Reason: Ethics in Theory and Practice ( 2d. ed.; Rockford, IL: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 2000). First written 50 years ago, it explains and applies the teachings of Aristotle and Aquinas–the philosophia perennis–and in so doing achieves a certain timelessness. Reading the book, independently of any classroom, provides one a masterful course in ethics. Fagothey begins with this guiding assumption: “There must be a right way and a wrong way of living, just as there is of hunting, fishing, and the rest; and the right way of living is the good life” (p. 19). By nature we’re designed to eat and drink; eating Nachos and drinking Pepsi make us “happy.” By nature we’re designed to attain goodness; being good makes us “happy.” To Aristotle and Thomas this roots us in an absolutist ethic. There’s only one end for which we are designed–and everyone is, by nature, oriented toward that same end. Once we realize and accept this, we can rationally do what’s truly good for us.

Various ends have been proposed. Some pursue goods of fortune such as wealth and power, which are below us. Things once possessed, of course, almost immediately lose their luster. Other folks (amply evident in our therapeutic culture) seek human goods–health, knowledge, pleasure, self-realization–which allegedly “satisfy” us. Inevitably, however, we’re never quite happy with ourselves, even when fully self-actualized. Finally, there are those who say only higher goods–superior realms of reality or God–finally satisfy man’s soul. Fagothey, of course, as a devout member of the Society of Jesus, argues we’re designed for God and nothing else is finally “good” for us.

Now the notion that we have an assigned end offends our apostlels of “relativism.” But “Relativism is as old as Protagoras the Sophist with his motto, ‘Man is the measure of all things,’ and as new as John Dewey with his slogan, ‘We learn by doing.’ It appeals especially to our day with its conviction that evolution is a fact but we do not know toward what we are evolving” (p. 36). Relativism is a childish philosophy, seeking to evade any fixed boundaries in order to enjoy the pleasures of the moment, taking “wandering itself for his last end by the very fact that he seeks nothing beyond” (p. 39).

Fagothey urges us to leave behind childish things, including childish ethics, and discover how we should actually live. We must intend the right end, consent to the right means to attain it, and do what’s necessary to move thereto. All this assumes we’re free moral agents, possessing an immortal soul, deriving our existence from an eternally existent God, thus capable of understanding truth and deciding to pursue it. This leads us to the “natural law” tradition exemplified by Thomas, who said: “The natural law is nothing else than the rational creature’s participation of the eternal law” (p. 173). Thus, Thomas says: “The precepts of the natural law are to the practical reason what the first principles of demonstrations are to the speculative reason, because both are self-evident principles.” We intuitively apprehend “being, the understanding of which is included in all things whatsoever a man apprehends.” So we know that the same thing cannot both be and not-be. That’s the principle of non-contradiction. We apprehend good, with the practical reason, in the same way–and as absolutely–as we apprehend being with the speculative reason.

“Consequently,” St Thomas says, “the first principle in the practical reason is one founded on the nature of good, namely, that good is that which all things seek after. Hence this is the first precept of law, that good is to be done and promoted, and evil is to be avoided” (p. 179). With this foundation, Fagothey addresses a multitude of issues which are forever central to the discipline of ethics. Rights and obligations gain clarity. We’re obliged, for example, to offer God the worship due him if we’re ethical persons! “By divine worship man gives to God the reverence, service, and love that is God’s due; thus divine worship is the duty that man owes to God” (p. 265). This goes for societies as well as individuals. A truly good society, in its laws and practices, owes God adoration and allegiance.

Man too has rights–rights to life, liberty, property–derived from the Natural Law. We must defend ourselves and others from those who would unjustly take persons’ lives. This leads us to oppose abortion and euthanasia. We one owe one another truthful words, justice, secure titles to property, honorable contracts, fair prices for goods and just wages for labor. In dealing with these, a many other issues, Fagothey provides clear definitions and helpful distinctions. He explains, for example, how the same principle which made “usury” immoral to Aristotle and Aquinas now allows for reasonable interest on investments simply because economic systems have radically changed. Right and Reason includes helpful footnotes, relevant readings for each of the 35 chapters, and a lengthy bibliography. It’s a text and a reference source worth adding to one’s library!

Thomas Howard, a respected Christian literary critic, gives high praise to Michael D. O’Brien’s first novel, Father Elijah: An Apocalypse (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, c. 1996): “Enthralling reading. This book deserves the very exalted tribute of being reminiscent of Tolstoy and Charles Williams. One is almost agog at the dexterity–the artistry really–with which O’Brien shapes enormously charged material into a narrative which exhibits the integrity one finds only in the very best fiction.” The novel’s subtitle and flyleaf suggests its theme: “Awake, and strengthen what remains and is on the point of death” (Rev. 3:2). As O’Brien explains in his Introduction, an apocalypse ponders the end of history. “The Greek word apocalypse means an uncovering, or revealing,” allowing one to search for “the key to his identity, in search of permanence and completion” (p. 11).

Taking seriously St John’s Revelation, O’Brien roots his story in an amillennial view, the “one favored by most of the Church Fathers, [which] holds that it is a theological vision of a vast spiritual landscape, containing descriptions of the situation of the Church in John’s own time, and also the events that are to unfold at the end of time. For John, the “end times” begin with the Incarnation of Christ into the world, and there remains only a last battle through which the Church must pass” (p. 12). Consequently “this book is a novel of ideas.” It’s not a TV thriller, “nor does it offer simplistic resolutions and false piety. It offers the Cross. It bears witness, I hope, to the ultimate victory of light” (p. 13). Toward the novel’s end, one of the godly cardinals–admitting that the world seemed about to collapse into a barbarian darkness, manipulated by architects of world power allegedly working for man’s “good”–noted that even in the face of insuperable odds the church must continue doing what she had always done. “‘Our task is to proclaim Jesus. We must strengthen the things that remain. It’s not for us to count the numbers who listen'” (pp. 439-440).

Given that background, the novel introduces us to Father Elijah, a converted Polish Jew, an archaeologist and Bible scholar living peacefully in a Carmelite monastery. He’s summoned to Rome for an interview with the Pope, who has an important assignment for him. On the plane, reading a newspaper, he’s reminded that the Church is in crisis. The Pope’s latest encyclical, On Freedom and the Human Person, had aroused the expected theological dissenters to proclaim their independence from Rome. Safely in Rome, he meets up with an old friend, Billy Stangsby, who briefs him on recent developments. Reflectively, Father Elijah wondered about his times: “Was there a missing component in all human beings? The rural masses seeking the metropolis; the urban young fleeing to the woods. Women pretending to be men; men becoming more like women; everyone aping divinity in his desperation to escape creaturehood? Western youths seeking the Orient; orientals seeking capitalism: Monks abandoning their monasteries; married men pining for solitude. Liberals seeking to demythologize the Scriptures in an attempt to flee the exigencies of biblical faith; fundamentalists seeking to fill the empty places in their religion by a return to the Old Testament, fleeing the tasks of the baptized intellect. Was the promise always to found elsewhere, always just beyond the next horizon?” (pp. 40-41).

Was the world finally at the end of its tether? So it seemed to the veteran cleric. Especially because the Church herself seemed so desperately troubled! Riddled by the cancerous profusion of heretical theologians, plagued by priests dreaming of utopias and plotting revolutions, the ancient foundations were shaking. Suitably troubled, Father Elijah kept his appointment with the Pope in his simple Vatican apartment. The Pope (clearly modeled after John Paul II), “one of the foremost philosophers of the century,” warmly greeted the priest and commended him for writing a fine “article on biblical spirituality” which had effectively challenged the voguish modernism of most biblical scholars. But he’d summoned Father Elijah not to praise his scholarship but to enlist him in what could be “‘the final confrontation between the Gospel and the anti-Gospel’ he said gravely, ‘between the Church and the anti-Church'” (p. 59). The enemies of the Church, the Pope said, were like “wolves” devouring the flock of God. “‘They are crying peace, peace, but there is no peace. Their hearts are full of murder. They hate the flock of God, and yet everywhere they are proclaimed as saviors'” (p. 63). External threats also existed, and one man in particular, the President of the European Parliament, a member of the Club of Rome, who was widely honored for his endeavors to “save mankind,” seemed to represent the gravest threat, and the Pope wanted Elijah to undertake a personal journey to warn him–to speak the truth to him–before he trespassed too far. Exciting adventures ensue. The reader encounters saints and scoundrels within the Church, seers who discern portents to come, figures from Father Elijah’s past.

All weave together as Elijah follows the Pope’s instructions, which leads to an inconsequential meeting (partially flawed by Elijah’s inability to remember and say what he’d intended) with the President in the villa he was reconstructing on the Isle of Capri, not far off the coast of Naples. Maintaining his facade of cordiality, the President sent the Pope a precious manuscript, allegedly a Syrian copy of one of Aristotle’s lost books. The pontiff spent a night reading it, presciently seeing it for what it truly was, a spiritual threat to the West. “‘It reintroduces the concept of the divine into the civic order, precisely at the moment of history when the mass of men have lost their bearings, have abandoned all hope that there is anything beyond this material world. More and more, they long for systemic solutions to “the problem of man”. They want totalitarianism without brutality. This book is a gentle, O, so very subtle, but powerful, nudge toward that world system, mixed with intoxications of the pagan East. Although there is no evidence in the text, its gnostic origins are obvious'” (pp. 167-168).

To engage the powers of evil, then, the Church must wage spiritual warfare. Father Elijah still needed to confront the President with the truth, but such proved quite difficult, given the insulation surrounding him. Thus the priest travels about Europe, revisits his Warsaw roots, attends scholarly meetings, gradually understands how deeply the Church herself has been infiltrated by the forces of evil. In the process he better understand both this century’s history and the nature of man. He especially delves into the truth that pride underlies man’s sins. The adulation which washed around the President was little more than an illustration of “the myth of the Great Man” which has pervaded human history. Yet the President, with his blending of pantheistic ecology and humanitarian sensitivity for the world’s cultures and (especially) its disadvantaged peoples, posed a radically new personification of that ancient evil.

As the struggle intensifies and moves toward its climax, the action shifts from Capri to Ephesus and the culmination of the saga–the details of which will go unmentioned lest I deprive a reader of enjoying the suspense. An engrossing story, skillfully written so as to elicit a page-turning anticipation whenever reading it, O’Brien’s apocalypse richly merits attention. One might consider the judgment of one of C.S. Lewis’s students, the author of A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken: “I’ve read thousands of books, and this is one of the great ones. I hope tens of thousands read it, and are shaken as I have been. It’s a novel that grip one like a thriller–indeed it is a thriller, but also something far deeper. There are love and friendship, interwoven with drama, but what is is essentially is faith, faith in the Christ.”

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In addition to Father Elijah, O’Brien has published a trilogy, set in his native Canada, with apocalyptic themes. In Strangers and Sojourners (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, c. 1997), he sets the stage, chronicling the four generations stories of settlers and residents in British Columbia a century ago.

Anna Kingsley Ashton, a refined, well-educated, “emancipated” woman who served as a nurse in WWI, seeking adventure and “new world” experiences, leaves the comfort of England to teach some “bush children” in the rugged world of Swiftcreek. She was warned that it was: “Wild. Not a place for a lady. One muddy street of boxcar houses along the rail and a few cabins out in the bush” (p. 44). Overcoming her initial revulsion, attracted by the children and their need for education, she decided to try it for a year. Then she met Stephen Delaney–an Irish homesteader, a trapper, a traditional Catholic, her opposite in almost every way. Responding to one of his neighbor’s pleas, she found herself nursing him back to health and, almost irresistibly, was drawn to him. He was, in her words, “a man of renowned physical courage and of some mysterious private fear!” (p. 115).

She also met the village pastor, Reverend Edwin Gunnalls, a typically “modern” cleric, skeptical of the “myths” central to Christianity, confident that “any intelligent modern person recognizes the need for something radical, something new that will break us out of our old habits” (p. 73). She enjoyed his company, affording as it did a level of educated discourse otherwise unavailable. Like the parsons and lawyers in her own family, he was “a decent man, willing to build a better society, to go to any lengths to alter basic human nature, whether or not it desired to be altered.” Her father had dabbled with spiritualism and supported the Fabian socialists so fashionable in Victorian England. But she’d reacted against his “religion,” and she smelled something similar about the young pastor Gunnalls. Even when he played the piano “His music, like his exercise of religion, was by rote, theoretical and possibly loveless” (p. 133).

So she pondered the intermingled meaning of life and romance. She wondered: “What is human life? Is it designed? Is it accidental?” (p. 99). Similarly: “What is it exactly that draws me to the opposite sex?” (p. 99). Reality beckoned! And she struggled with inner fears: “My soul is becoming thin and gray.” Still more: “I am not afraid of being unloved. But I am terrified of never learning to love” (p. 136). In time, inexplicably to some, she married Stephen Delaney, joined him in his cabin, and began bearing his children, finding that he “has begun to make me whole but does so with gentleness, with silence” (p. 155). Yet despite her happiness she was not quite happy. Something remained undone. “We are starved for the unknown God” she concluded (p. 190). Her husband found Him in the Eucharist and his elemental Catholic faith. She felt “him hidden in the deepest currents of life, flowing beneath verse, lovemaking, the smile of a child, the cycle of the seasons” (p. 190), but somehow she really didn’t know Him.

In time, as WWII approached, Anne began to write articles for the local newspaper, The Swiftcreek Echo. They proved controversial and made her something of a celebrity in the area. With an inheritance from her father’s estate, she then bought the paper, sensing that the world needs truth more than anything else. “I am allowed one weapon only–truth,” she said (p. 343). Her son Ashley went to war and returned to teach school, shattered by the ordeal, rejecting the faith of his father. Anne found herself defending her husband’s ancient faith. Ashley had a son, Nathaniel, with his Indian wife. Anne tried to teach her grandson some of the abiding truths his father rejected.

Then she got involved in trying to protect the people and the land from an increasingly dictatorial government, seizing property to build dams to make electricity. Speaking to one of the government agents, Maurice L’Oraison, one of her neighbor’s boys, she said, in 1961: “the seeds of tyranny are in every democracy. You mustn’t fool yourself. Anyone, any one of us can be seduced into trading away freedom to defend whatever we think the common good is at the time” (p. 460). But the architects of “progress” prevailed, and Anne sadly watched the transformation of her beloved valley. And she took sick. As death approached, she recognized that faith alone equipped one to meet her Maker. A priest, Father Andrei, came and talked with her. She confessed and was forgiven. And she radiantly told her husband: “I want you to know that the shadows went away. They’ve gone forever. I’m not afraid anymore” (p. 545).

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Plague Journal (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, c. 1999) continues O’Brien’s trilogy. The journal is Nathaniel Delaney’s. He analyzes political events in Canada and reflects on daily developments in Swiftcreek. He composes the editorials he’ll publish in The Swiftcreek Echo. He records debates he has with his thoroughly secularized father, Ashley, the schoolteacher who supports ever brave-new-world proposal, every “new quality of life law” set forth by political left-wingers such as himself. Ashley even conjures up a justification for the new “civilian internment camps” the government established for dissenters of various sorts. Despite his resolutely anti-religious rhetoric, Ashley’s liberalism was in fact his religion, a dogmatism of the strictest sort.

But Nathaniel could not rest easy, knowing what he knows about his society. His honesty, during the past two decades, had pushed him to the right politically. He also examines his conscience and probes theology and philosophy for understanding of his times. He wonders at the impact of TV, noting that his grandfather Stephen’s cabin, though without electricity or central heating, had exuded a light and warmth which modern homes lacked. He worries about the public school his children attend, where they “were being indoctrinated against ‘value judgments’, against homophobia and witchophobia” etc. (p. 79). He struggles against the constant encroachments of the “statism” which spread its tentacles everywhere.

Subtly but effectively the world had changed. As he noted in one of his editorials: “The most effective revolution is the one that appears as liberation. The culture of negation, which took forty years to germinate and produce its fruit under the severe pressure of dictators, has evolved smoothly and efficiently in the democracies, where there has been little public violence to alert us to the fact that the worst is indeed happening. The enemy, we find to our surprise and disbelief, is not so much this or that tyranny as it is a concept of man that has become well-nigh universal” (p. 95).

That new notion empowered a new class–the “social engineering class.” “Counselors, therapists, social workers, psychologists, and facilitators of one sort or another sprouted everywhere” (p. 162). They enabled folks to forever embark on “continuously shifting programs of self-improvement. Relationships are conducted with a psychological puritanism far more oppressive than the old moralism. ‘Dysfunction’ has replaced sin” (p. 162). Nathaniel wondered: “Why did we not understand what was happening when the family began to disintegrate? Why did we not resist it? Why did we not fight against the corruption of our culture? Why did we no pray as we ought? Did we defend the little ones from the ravages of wolves? And now, lo these many years later, do we any longer cherish the very old and the very sick? Do we tolerate the young in noisy, demanding numbers? Do we bear with dignity the pain of existence (and the beauty of it), or avoid it at any cost? (p. 181).

Discerning developments which would take his children from him, he bundles them up and successfully journeys (much like the heroes in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings which his children so loved) through the mountains to the home of his mother’s father, an old Indian named Thaddeus Tobac, who lived in a remote region of the North Thompson Valley. Thaddeus represents all the modern world has rejected. But he and his world were both real and good. While there, Nathaniel senses an awakening religious impulse, and one senses he will soon find his grandfather Stephen’s faith. But the story ends as he is betrayed by a friend and hauled away by the security police, setting the stage for the final volume in the trilogy.

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O’Brien’s saga involving the Delaney family concludes with Eclipse of the Sun (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, c. 1998). The velvet-gloved tyranny described in Plague Journal has crept over Canada. “Hate speech” has been outlawed–making dissent concerning government policies a crime. Guns have been confiscated–rendering ordinary citizens helpless in the hands of a police state. Religious freedom has been curtailed–driving the true Faith underground. Opposition to abortion and euthanasia now elicit coercive governmental response.

Amidst degenerating conditions, Nathaniel Delaney, editing the newspaper his grandmother had bought, The Swiftcreek Echo, courageously spoke the truth, including the truth that abortion and euthanasia are murder. Just before he’s arrested (and ultimately killed) killed in a government plot, he sent two of his children to a mountain refuge and asked Father Andrei to rescue another child, “Arrow,” from a hippie commune where he lived with his mother. A series of adventures (punctuated by dark, death-dispensing government helicopters on search-and-destroy missions) ensue as Father Andrei guides Arrow to safety. The commune is attacked and the people liquidated. A nearby monastery suffered the same fate. Father Andrei is apprehended and subjected to interrogation (orchestrated by Maurice L’Oraison, now a highly-placed bureaucrat) which reminded him of similar sufferings he’d endured at the hands of the Gestapo half-a-century earlier.

Embedded in the narrative is O’Brien’s apocalyptic vision of a country–and of the world itself–slipping into Satan’s clasp. Goodness, especially Christian goodness, is oppressed, while the forces of evil run rampant. And it’s all in the name of tolerance, pluralism, building a “good society” where everyone’s equal and well-cared for. And in the Church there’s a battle for truth–the truth necessary for the souls of men and women. As one of the admirable parish priests, discovers, “The Lord wanted trust, above all trust. And this trusting was the foundation of the personal holiness from which right action flowed” (p. 732). Furthermore, “at some point every soul was put to some ultimate test, each must turn and face its eternal foe in a definitive struggle between radical terror and radical faith” (p. 733). The times demand, from all of us, radical faith! At the end of time, will we be found faithful? Such is the true meaning of apocalyptic literature such as O’Brien’s.

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In 1998, when Mike Huckabee was Governor of Arkansas, two boys (aged 11 and 13) in Jonesboro took rifles and killed a teacher and four of their schoolmates. That tragedy prompted Huckabee to write Kids Who Kill: Confronting Our Culture of Violence (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1998). Since 1960, violence, sadly enough, has dramatically increased in the United States, but juvenile violence has skyrocketed. The killings at Columbine High School in Colorado, the killings at Santana High School in Santee, California, reflect our children’s increasing penchant for aggressive outbursts.

Underlying all the data, Huckabee says, we find “the demoralization of America.” Samuel Johnson once said: “In political as well as natural disorders, the great error of those who commonly undertake either cure or preservation is that they rest in second causes, without extending their search to the remote and original sources of evil.” One of the “second causes” is the role of guns in school shootings. None of the the pieties of anti-gun advocates can overcome the evidence which nullifies their pleas. One analyst, Daniel Polsby, notes that “‘guns don’t increase national rates of crime and violence–but the continued proliferation of gun control laws almost certainly does'” (p. 143).

The “original sources” responsible for youth violence include a growing “depersonalization” in contemporary culture. We’ve dehumanized targeted peoples and in the process desensitized ourselves to their deaths. Most obviously, a nation which aborts unborn children easily develops calluses to the killing of older children. Worldwide, nearly 50 million unborn babies are aborted each year, “making it the most frequently performed surgical operation. In the United States today, four out of every ten children conceived are aborted, which amounts to approximately 4,000 abortions every day” (p. 45). School children early learn that Planned Parenthood clinics dispose of unwanted babies, and to a degree that fact dims their reverence for life.

This is encouraged by another original source of the problem–“a pattern of disrespect” which has passed, like a conveyer belt of garbage, from adults to our youth culture. No longer fearful of teachers, students openly defy and even curse them. Profanity pervades the air of award-winning films and popular music as well as public school playgrounds. A Scottish diplomat, John Buchan, lauded, 50 years ago, “‘the common courtesy of Americans” which made them “‘invariably considerate, polite, respectful, and mannerly'” (p. 51). They still upheld the standard of Patrick Henry, who insisted: “‘The manners of a gentleman are an outgrowth of his due respect for the life and integrity of others; likewise a breach of courtesy is emblematic not so much of barbarism as of utter and complete self-absorption. A rude man is but a callous egotist'” (p. 54).

Jonathan Lasker, in Profanity in America, links verbal violence with more deadly acts. To verbally assault a person, especially when you are weaker or have less authority, may seem harmless. Words shred no flesh, but they do open the door to more serious violence. Lasker says that profanity is “a hallmark of a frustrated society where ordinary people must give vent to their anger in inarticulate fashion. Historically, mass profanity has always been a harbinger of mass violence'” (p. 55). On America’s roads, angry people scream and make obscene gestures. “Road rage” routinely erupts, and in one year some 17,000 people were “injured in automobile accidents caused by drivers’ temper tantrums” (p. 56).

Encouraging all this is the much-maligned media–which is rightly maligned! Our alleged “entertainment” industry is, in fact, “conditioning kids to kill” (p. 83). Video games, especially alluring for boys, immerse them in violence. One study notes that teenage boys play video games 28 hours a week–“killing, maiming, and destroying–as well as punching, shooting, and stabbing” (p. 71). Bored with video games, they turn to TV, or the movies, or rap music. Incessantly their minds are awash in the most brutal kinds of violence. One study evaluated “the lyrics of the top twenty best-selling alternative rock, hip hop, and rap disks.” The researchers “found that 100 percent of the disks feature songs that celebrated illicit sex or drug abuse. Almost 89 percent openly portray suicide as a viable option. About 77 percent mock authority figures. Almost 61 percent profile violent acts, including murder, rape, and molestation. Nearly 42 percent advocate anarchy. And 28 percent denigrated traditional religion” (p. 81). Though difficult to prove a causaltity, we must know that “in virtually every case of violent teen crime there is evidence of heavy involvement in–and even deliberate imitation of–depraved lyrics in music, violent films, brutal video games, or decadent television programming” (p. 83).

Adding to the problems our children face, their families frequently provide them neither security nor guidance. Patrick Henry, again, said it well: “‘For good or for ill, the estate of the family will most assuredly predetermine the estate of all of the rest of the culture'” (p. 103). In a culture of divorce, children are casualties. Women’s liberation, for all its trumpeted successes, has impoverished women, often leaving them alone and unable to rightly rear children. One third of female-headed families live in poverty. Children sense an absolute vacuum without a father at home. So they too slide into delinquency. “More than 80 percent of all violent juvenile offenders are the products of broken homes. Nearly 70 percent live in single-parent households. As many as 90 percent have suffered some sort of physical, sexual, or emotional abuse” (p. 103).

Given this analysis, Huckabee calls parents and churches to restore what’s been lost in the U.S. “‘We are perpetually being told that what is wanted is a strong man who will do things,’ said G.K. Chesterton. ‘What is really wanted is a strong man who will undo things; and that will be the real test of strength'” (p. 141). Churches must recover a deep concern for personal integrity, character, moral standards. People of faith make strong families.

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Isabelle Fox, a practicing psychotherapist who for 10 years served as a senior mental health consultant for Operation Head Start, proposes ways to build strong families in her solidly-researched Being There: The Benefits of a Stay-at-Home Parent (Hauppauge, NY: Baron’s, c. 1996). Her experience, especially during the decade preceding the book’s publication, prompted her to sound an alarm concerning the “caregiver roulette” which proves “emotionally devastating, with life-long negative results, because it affects the ability of children to trust their important primary caregivers. This in turn affects their ability to relate to others, to learn, to develop an optimistic approach to life, and even to abide by the rules of society” (p. ix).

Alarmingly, T. Berry Brazelton, a respected child-care scholar, laments: “‘Never before has one generation been less healthy, less cared for, less prepared for life than their parents were at the same age'” (p. 60). The equally respected researchers Magid and McKelvey declare: “‘With so many mothers working, just who is taking care of the children? Proper bonding attachment cannot occur when the infant’s significant caregiver isn’t around and the baby has no reliable, consistent, or loving substitute caregiver. Without suitable answers, these problems could result in a national attachment crisis, thus putting a future generation at high risk'” (p. 84). Few parents realize, Fox says, how a pre-verbal infant suffers when left with someone other than his parents. Bonding with very specific persons is crucial for a baby’s development. An infant naturally bonds with his “primary caregiver” (preferably his nursing mother) and he feels abandoned when separated from her.

A child’s “ability to trust is established mainly in the preverbal years” (p. 11), and a steady succession of caregivers–inevitable in day care centers where various employees may hold a baby during a single day– engenders fear, distrust and hostility. When a child is separated from his primary caregiver for several weeks, he first turns angry, then “cold, aloof, and unresponsive” (p. 56). In time such “detached children will have problems with trust, thereby preventing close and intimate relationships from developing and being sustained. They feel that they must rely only on themselves, that they must be completely self-sufficient and reject their need for comfort and support. At times that simmering rage will unpredictably erupt, causing an increased alienation of those individuals in their immediate environment” (p. 56). In the judgment of Magid aned McKelvey, “‘Infants who do not receive a warm welcome into the world will seek their revenge'” (p. 75).

Insofar as most of us highly value love, and insofar as children need love, parents who truly treasure their children must pay a price to love them. In the first two or three years of life, a child feels loved simply because a familiar figure is always at hand. By leaving babies in day care centers, we run the risk of crippling their capacity to love! They need loving moms and dads who are there, constantly attentive to their needs. A child’s conscience also develops during this early time. Still more: children need quantity time–not some conscience-easing quality time. Given such loving attention, babies develop cognitive and language skills. Preverbal children benefit from hearing their parents talking to them. Once they learn words, they profit from hearing books read to them. Family meals, something of an abandoned ritual in many homes, are truly essential for children to develop well. Discussions, good manners, respect for others, sharing life, all come with daily meals.

When asked what children truly need, John Bowlby, one of the past century’s most thoughtful psychologists, said: “‘They need a mother figure who will care for them. She doesn’t have to be on duty day in, day out. If she can get some assistance from her own mother, her husband, or one of her own sisters, the more help she gets, the better. But they should be responsible for their own children. They should be the principal caregiver. And if they are not the principal caregiver, then they must try and find someone else who will be. Someone who plays that major role through the child’s childhood'” (p. 183).

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Children off to college could glean wisdom from Gilbert Meilaender’s Letters to Ellen (Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, c. 1996). A compilation of letters written for The Christian Century (imaginatively from “Mom” to her daughter in college) they offer gentle advice as to “what it means to live as a Christian” (p. 1). The Decalog provides a structure, for it has generally guided believers “when thinking about the contours of the moral life” (p. ix). Living rightly means following through on “a task, not an exercise in self- expression” (p. 67).

To get a good start in college and ultimately to live well, one must “Find something you care about and devote yourself to it with a whole heart” (p. 7). This means studying! Responding to Ellen’s reference to “community service” at her school, Meilaender replies: “I admit to a good bit of suspicion about such community service emphases. In the first place, it’s an emphasis many students are all too eager to embrace. Academic work is hard and often grueling” (p. 13). It’s easier, quite simply, to leave the books on the desk and join your friends dishing out food at the rescue mission. Such activities are admirable, to be sure, but they too easily divert one from a student’s true taskt. So Ellen’s urged to remember a stanza from a hymn which says: “Take my intellect and use / Every power as thou shalt choose” (p. 14). God is Light. The Word became flesh. The mind matters! Nothing else, other than study, should consume one’s time and effort in college. This also means that the nostrum frequently bandied about on campus–asserting that questioning answers is better than answering questions–must be rejected. Finding answers, like finding the right route to a mountian top, is the only reason to study hard! “On this point,” Meilaender says, “I am with Chesterton: ‘The purpose of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to close it on something solid'” (p. 76).

And yet there should be leisure, rest, time to pray and reflect as well. Here Meilaeinder writes some vital words all collegians should hear: “If you want to be less rushed and frantic, stop doing any of your work on Sunday. I know that sounds crazy, since you say there’s not enough time as it is to get work done. But perhaps what you need is a reminder that the work isn’t just yours–that we can call nothing simply ‘ours.’ Not even our time. You need to learn again what you surely know intellectually–that life is a trust from God and must be lived in trust” (p. 17). So too one should learn to daily read and pray. “Short readings are best” (p. 19). Bits of the Bible– especially the Psalms–nourish the soul. Prayers–often written prayers by saints of the Church–help the mind stay focused and provide meaty language appropriate for adoration. Lenten disciplines, so deeply embedded in the tradition of the Church, deserve respect and embodiment. Disciplines, whether spiritual or scholarly, loom largely in shaping good character.

Reflecting on some comments concerning unmarried youngsters having babies–and knowing how “tolerance” is virtually mandated by contemporary culture–Meilaender questions the alleged compassion expressed by “affirming” such youngsters. “If we’re so busy ‘affirming’ these young girls and boys with their babies, we lose the capacity to distinguish right from wrong, the ideal from the flawed” (p. 36). Though one pastor stressed “forgiveness” and “affirmation” in such cases, Meilaender remained unpersuaded. Moral pabulum is still pabulum, however sweet to the tongue. Rather, “Genuine forgiveness never paralyzes the capacity for moral judgment, since it forgives what is acknowledged as wrong and repented. That’s a far cry from the affirmation talk that is clogging so many Christian arteries” (p. 36).

Similarly, moral standards must be cultivated and woven into one’s heart. “Train yourself to think of conscience in a different way–not as an inner feeling but as a judgment. When you deliberate about a problem, you finally come to a point where your mind is made up. At that point you might say: ‘If I didn’t do this, I would be going against my conscience.’ That conscience is simply the end product of your deliberation–your last and best judgment about what you should do” (p. 51).

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“Nothing I said or did during the four years I served as Vice President of the United States,” says Dan Quayle, in The American Family: Discovering the Values That Make Us Strong (New York: HarperCollins, c. 1996), generated more protest, anger, or ridicule than a few comments I made about a popular TV sitcom in a speech to the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco in May 1992″ (p. 1). Despite the outrage from Liberal elites however, Quayle’s point has been soundly validated by various scholars, and his book, written with Diane Medved (herself the author of The Case Against Divorce as well as the wife of film critic Michael Medved), seeks to illustrate family success stories in this nation.

To begin the study, the authors collected a questionnaire which identified eight important aspects of healthy families: “1) Religion, 38 percent; 2) teaching morals, 38 percent; 3) Family unity, 36 percent; 4) Communication, 26 percent; 5) Love and affection, 24 percent; 6) Respect, 24 percent; 7) Time together, 21 percent; 8) Responsibility, 16 percent” (p. 6). Then they selected five families–healthy families–and sought to see how fully they inculcated such values. The De La Rosas of East L.A. exemplify a traditional Hispanic family, tightly knit and deeply committed to their Faith. The Wallaces of Indianapolis, the only family headed by a divorced mom, have stayed together through difficult times because of the mother’s extraordinary perseverance and her kids’ support. They too have found vital support in their church. The Burnses of Honolulu, also quite religious, have prospered financially and, unable to conceive children, adopted two multi-racial daughters. The Cowdens of Virginia live on a farm and have involved their children in its operation. The Cowdens are the only family in the book without evident religious faith, though one of the daughters became deeply involved in a church with her parents’ encouragement. The Burtins of Chicago, an African-American family living in the inner city, have created a fortress of strength and guidance, contravening many of the tendencies of the world which swirls around them. By looking at different kinds of people, living in different areas of the nation, Quayle and Medved show that internal rather than external conditions make for good families.

After interviewing each of the families, often spending several days with them, the authors set forth their success “secrets.” Concluding their study, they sum up (pp. 270-277) their findings under ten headings: 1) Respect; 2) Discipline; 3) Attentiveness; 4) Education; 5) Media Curtailment; 6) Financial Prudence; 7) Self-Sacrifice; 8) Commitment of Faith; 9) A Sense of Place; 10) Optimism and Gratitude. To teach children respect, discipline and attentiveness in a culture which encourages the opposite demands constant parental effort. So education, both in the schools and at home, proves essential. Kids just don’t grow up without guidance! None of the five families watched much TV, choosing to devote their time to family and church activities, getting outside and seeing the world as well as playing together in significant ways. Parents (even the relatively well-to-do Burnses) live frugally and encourage their children to appreciate the basic goods of life without becoming addicted to the gadgets and frills of our consumer society. All of the families treasure their communities–the De La Rosas and Burtins could have afforded to make upscale moves, but they chose to stay immersed in their network of family and church. And in the midst of it all, these families encourage one another, praise to God for life’s many blessings, and radiate a joy which comes from living life as it should be lived!

Quayle and Medved tell their families’ stories with empathy and clarity. The things which make healthy families certainly shine through their stories. The book reminds us of what it takes to rear the kinds of kids who don’t killl!

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“Justice,” C.S. Lewis said, “is giving equal things to equals, and unequal things to unequals.” How to give each person what he deserves has elicited discussions from antiquity to today, and nothing more deserves careful consideration. Thomas Sowell, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University–an economist by training and one of the most prolific scholars in America– addresses the issue in The Quest for Cosmic Justice (New York: The Free Press, c. 1999). Traditionally, justice has been defined as giving to another person what is due him, with the focus on fair processes which are limited to particular interactions between actual persons. To establish the rule of law was one of the main objectives of the American Revolution and was established in the Constitution, which decrees that no one shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.” In a court of law, one’s entitled to an impartial process, symbolized by a blindfolded Lady Justice holding balanced scales. A “fair fight” wherein a referee makes sure the boxers follow the rules, a “level playing field” which insures opportunities for competitors, typify traditional notions of justice.

“Cosmic justice,” on the other hand–frequently labeled “social justice”–“is a fundamentally different concept” (p. 8) which has become one of the dogmas of modernity, a totalizing vision which brooks no rivals. Cosmic justice seeks to eliminate competitive inequities, to eliminate disadvantages which might hamper certain individuals or groups. It seeks to redesign society so as to guarantee equality in generations to come–or to secure reparations for harms done in centuries past. John Rawls’ influential treatise, A Theory of Justice, informs us that “‘undeserved inequalities call for redress,’ in order to produce ‘genuine equality of opportunity'” (p. 12). If all men are by nature equal, any inequality of wealth or position suggests injustice as its source. Laws, then, are less important than the consequences of judicial decisions. So Chief Justice Earl Warren routinely “interrupted lawyers presenting legal arguments before the Supreme Court to ask ‘But is it right? Is it good?'” (p. 185), revealing his self-appointed role as a social reformer. He was a man on a mission rather than a judge entrusted with the preservation of “government of laws not of men.” Warren sought to enthrone nine judges–one of various tyrannies which have “now become part of Western democratic nations themselves. Indeed, the drive to impose that tyranny ever more widely in the United States has led to trends which can only be called the quiet repeal of the American revolution” (p. 141). In truth, once the facade of “social justice” is removed it’s little more than an updated version of an ancient vice, envy.

“Social justice” metamorphoses into “redistributive justice” and various state-imposed strategies to equalize wealth. Traditional distinctions between the “respectable poor and the disreputable poor” (p. 89) disappear; the poor simply shouldn’t be poor in a just world. Poverty reveals society’s failure. Economic quality must be imposed through taxation. Harvard Law School’s Professor Laurence Tribe criticizes the Constitution’s unjust “‘built-in bias against redistribution of wealth’ as a benefit to ‘entrenched wealth'” (p. 167). Advocates of a “good society” such as Ronald Dworkin insist that “‘a more equal society is a better society even if its citizens prefer inequality'” (p. 74). Sowell acknowledges that “no vision underlies more social and economic theories than the vision of the rich robbing the poor, whether in a given society or among nations. The belief that the poor are poor because the rich are rich is reflected in such expressions as ‘the dispossessed’ or ‘the exploited,’ as well as in more elaborate theories ranging from Marxism and Lenin’s theory of imperialism to modern ‘dependency theory'” (p. 119). Data such as Sowell presents to refute such theories apparently do little to diminish their emotional appeal. “As an economist described someone who passionately advocated particular economic policies, without the most elementary knowledge of economic analysis and with little or no concern for empirical consequences, ‘he asks not whether it is water or gasoline he is tossing on the economic fire–he asks only whether it is a well-intended act'” (p. 137).

Cosmic justice pervades modern liberalism and filters through the welfare state, pacifism, the acquittal of suspects such as O.J. Simpson, and the outcome-based education celebrated in public schools. The SAT exam is now under sustained attack because of its alleged unfairness, since different ethnic groups score differently. “Social justice” somehow dictates that everyone score the same on exams since everyone is, of course, equal. “A member of a national commission on teaching mathematics,” Sowell notes, “opposed teaching computational skills because that means ‘anointing the few’ who master these skills readily and ‘casting out the many’ who do not, and urged that we throw off ‘the discriminatory shackles of computational algorithms'” (p. 85).

To restore such objective truths as algorithms, to discourage radical reformers’ proposals to establish perfection on earth, Sowell urges us to tune out the temptations of cosmic justice.

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In The Vision of the Anointed (New York: HarperCollinsPublishers, c. 1995), Sowell argued that “Dangers to a society may be mortal without being immediate. One such danger is the prevailing social vision of our time–and the dogmatism with which the ideas, assumptions, and attitudes behind the vision are held” (p. 1). Ideologies have ravaged our century. They’re been more lethal than any plagues in the past. In The Flight from Truth: The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information, Jean-Francois Revel declared: “‘ideology . . . is an instrument of power; a defense mechanism against information; a pretext for eluding moral constraints in doing or approving evil with a clean conscience; and finally, a way of banning the criterion of experience, that is, of completely eliminating or indefinitely postponing the pragmatic criteria of success and failure'” (p. 241). Such visions are often spurious and toxic, but they offer great consolation to true believers, much akin to a religious state of grace. Social visions insulate their advocates with asbestos suits, much like Medieval knights’ suits of armor, but of a spiritual sort. “It is a vision of differential rectitude” (p. 5).

And their number is legion: advocates of eugenics, such as Margaret Sanger; socialists such as John Dewey; welfare state proponents like Lyndon B. Johnson; environmentalists such as Paul Ehrlich; contemporary “liberals” such as John Rawls. They all share a sense of being anointed, of being morally superior to lesser folks, and thus entitled to impose their views through legislation or bureaucratic dicta. However different, they agree on “several key elements,” including: 1) warnings of grave threats to society understood only by the anointed; 2) calls for radical action to avert the catastrophe; 3) insistence that only government can implement the designs of the experts; 4) contempt for “arguments to the contrary as either uninformed, irresponsible, or motivated by unworthy purposes” (p. 5). Then, inexorably, whenever the vision of the anointed is implemented, the four-step endeavor collapses into a four-stage pattern of failure. The crisis is wildly exaggerated or mis-diagnosed; the solution, however faulty, is tried; the policies enacted fail to accomplish their goals; the failure is explained away or blamed on the policies’ critics. Sowell illustrates this four-stage process by examining various “social justice” crusades of the recent past, including LBJ’s “war on poverty,” celebrated “sex education” programs, and non-punitive crime-reduction schemes.

The “war on poverty,” proposed by JFK and launched by LBJ, proposed to “give a hand, not a handout.” Actually, when the “war” was declared, poverty was declining. In 1960, only half as many people were below the poverty line as there were in 1950. Nevertheless, a crisis was declared, and a plethora of poverty programs opened the federal treasury to millions of people. Then the numbers of poverty-stricken people escalated. More spending made more folks poor! Millions more became wards of the state, dependent upon “poverty programs.” Faced with the failure of their vision, the anointed ones, however, simply declared they needed more money. To justify their views, they massaged statistics and selected media-friendly anecdotes, concocting stories such as a CBS Evening News broadcast which claimed one in eight American children would go to bed hungry. They deliberately distorted the truth, for they knew “if they told the truth, they wouldn’t get the money” (p. 33).

Sex education, designed to encourage responsible sexual behavior, followed the same pattern. Though fertility rates among teenage girls and venereal diseases were declining in the decade before 1957, Planned Parenthood et al. declared the nation faced grave crises which demanded sex education in the public schools. “In New Zealand,” for example, “a whole campaign of scare advertisements during the 1980s promoted the claim that one out of eight fathers sexually abused their own daughters, when in fact research showed that not eve one out of a hundred did so” (p. 62). But the anointed ones prevailed, and millions of dollars flowed to “family planning” clinics and schools. Accompanying the classes, pregnancy rates and venereal diseases soared like inflated condoms! Sex education encouraged the very behavior which it allegedly discouraged. Sex education did, however, succeed in one way: it effectively transformed students’ attitudes toward sex, replacing their parents’ restrictions with the permissiveness championed by the anointed devotees of sexual pleasure.

What deeply disturbs Sowell in all this is the “irrelevance of evidence.” Economists such as John Kenneth Galbraith enjoyed an infallibility in elite circles which allowed them to make sweeping generalizations, in works such as The Affluent Society, which the masses absorbed. In fact, Galbraith’s pronouncements have been factually disproven, but “None of this has made a dent in Galbraith’s reputation, his self-confidence, or his book sales. For no one has been more in tune with the vision of the anointed or more dismissive of ‘the conventional wisdom’–another term he popularized as a designation for traditional values” (p. 66). Ditto for Paul Ehrlich! For decades the Stanford scholar–author of The Population Bomb–has issued foreboding predictions, virtually none of which has proven true. Ditto for Ralph Nader! His influential publications, Sowell shows, are little more than propaganda, powerfully impacting folks who rely on emotions rather than evidence.

The anointed elite frequently claims to revere “the people,” to serve the masses. But they don’t really respect them. Indeed, they’re often condescending in their approach to folks they consider “benighted”–uneducated, religious, traditional, patriotic. “One of the high priorities of the anointed is to destroy the myths and illusions which they presume to abound among the public. Patriotism is a prime target” (p. 121). Anna Quindlen, a windchime for the anointed ones, cavalierly dismissed patriotism as “Amerimania” (p. 121). Even the folks to be “helped”–the homeless, the criminals, the disease carriers–are often reduced to serving as “mascots of the anointed, whether or not that ultimately works out to the benefit of those groups themselves” (p. 143). The villains, targets for the disdain of the anointed, include businesses and families, churches and organizations such as the Boy Scouts.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the anointed elite seeks to project an “optional reality.” Indeed, they inhabit “a world where reality itself is ‘socially constructed’ and can therefore be ‘deconstructed’ and then reassembled to one’s heart’s desire” (p. 245). Reality resides in one’s mind and can be endlessly redesigned. Human nature can be changed at will. “Those with the vision of the anointed are especially reluctant to see human nature as a source of the evils they wish to eradicate” (p. 250), so they focus on specific evils which they try to correct, thereby hoping create a new kind of man. The world itself has no given limits. Name it and claim it! Create your own reality! Imagine you can endlessly tax productive folks, the “doers,” so as to subsidize the inactivity of the “do-nots.”

The vision of the anointed, implemented in various realms of the nation’s life, is demonstrably untrue, Sowell thinks. He certainly marshals impressive, carefully documented evidence, to argue his case. “Seldom,” he says, “have so few cost so much to so many.” It’s time to tune out the rhetorical sirens which beckon us to shipwreck, to hear again Orpheus and the wisdom of her song.

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Sowell’s more recent publications build upon work done earlier in studies such as A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles (New York: William Morrow, c. 1987). “A vision is our sense of how the world works” (p. 14), a worldview. As Walter Lippman said, in Public Opinion: “At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a version of history. To human nature (of the sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history (so understood), the rules of the code apply.”

Some visions, such as those of Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton, and Edmund Burke, are “constrained,” limited by the givens of an objectively real world. Other visions, evident in the Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Condorcet, and William Godwin, are “unconstrained,” dreaming of “the perfectibility of man” and unending human progress. “Much of what the unconstrained vision sees as morally imperative to do, the constrained vision sees man as incapable of doing” (p. 201). The American Revolution, and the Constitution which followed, reveal a constrained vision, realistically appraising the fallenness of human nature. The French Revolution, and the successive revolutions which have troubled the world, sought to realize unconstrained visions, alluring if unattainable utopias. Thus Jefferson praised the French Revolution, despite its violent excesses, for “‘rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated'” (p. 34).

Thinkers like Burke trust tradition, custom, and common sense; they distrust abstract reason, particularly that of eccentric geniuses such as Rousseau. Given the nature of man, little genuine “progress” is possible. To folks like Rousseau, however, reason alone suffices to guide human conduct. Those with superior intellects, such as himself, should be entrusted with governing the masses who, Rousseau declared are like “‘a stupid, pusillanimous invalid'” (p. 136). Superior minds can engineer ever more perfect social and political systems. This unconstrained vision wends its way through thinkers such as George Bernard Shaw and the English Fabians, Edward Bellamy’s influential utopia, Looking Backward, John Kenneth Galbraith’s economic essays, and the legal treatises of professors Ronald Dworkin and Laurence Tribe.

“Social justice,” the effort to coerce humane efforts to help the needy, superceding the “formal justice” basic to the rule of law, looms large in the unconstrained vision. First celebrated by William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice in 1793, it remains a major plank in the platform of philosophers such as John Rawls. To advocates of the constrained vision such as F.S. Hayek, however, “it is ‘absurd,’ a ‘mirage,’ ‘a hollow incantation,’ ‘a quasi-religious superstition,’ and a concept that ‘does not belong to the category of error but to that of nonsense'” (p. 191). Hayek explains that “‘the phrase “social justice” is not, as most people probably feel, an innocent expression of good will towards the less fortunate,’ but has become in practice ‘a dishonest insinuation that one ought to agree to a demand of some special interest which can given no real reason for it.’ The dangerous aspect, in Hayek’s view, is that ‘the concept of “social justice” . . . has been the Trojan Horse through which totalitarianism has entered’–Nazi Germany being just one example” (p. 195).

Folks operating within the constrained vision understand “equality” as a process, whereas the unconstrained folks focus on results. “In Burke’s words, ‘all men have equal rights; but not to equal things'” (p. 121). To William Godwin and John Rawls, however, what counts is the “equalized probabilities of achieving given results, whether in education, employment, or the courtroom” (p. 123). Grades in school must be leveled or eliminated; wages must be equalized through taxation if not central dictates; criminal defendants’ race, sex, and economic class must enter into judicial decisions. Godwin denied our right “‘to do what we will with our own,'” asserting that “‘We have in reality nothing that is strictly speaking our own'” (p. 190). Similarly, Dworkin dismisses “‘the supposed natural right to the use of property'” as well as “‘the liberty of an employer to hire workers on such terms as he wishes'” (p. 163). And Laurence Tribe “criticized court rulings which upheld the legality of applying certain physical standards to particular job applicants” since they might militate against the equality of the sexes (p. 184).

While explaining the conflict of visions, Sowell obviously advocates the constrained position compatible with his basically libertarian perspective. He writes clearly, cogently, and certainly provides categories which enable one to better grasp the way the ideas shape our world.

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Then there are the “fictitious histories” designed to shape current policies for ethnic groups.

“Few histories have been rewritten,” Sowell says, “so completely and so soon as the history of the Reagan administration. [The revision, incidentally, was clearly evident in the response of Democratic politicians to President Bush’s recent address to Congress.] From innumerable outlets of the anointed–the media, academia, and the lecture platform–poured the new revised history” of the 1980s, with its alleged “tax cuts for the rich. “Yet this revisionist history the 1980s is easily refuted with widely available official statistics on the federal government’s tax receipts, spending , and deficits during the eight years of the Reagan administration” (p. 82).

 

Even worse, “advocacy journalism” endorses “lying for justice,” according to one writer (p. 259), so, Paul Weaver says, today’s “‘media are less a window on reality than a stage on which official and journalists perform self-scripted, self-serving fictions'” (p. 259).

Alan Wolfe is one of the nation’s most highly regarded sociologists. In One Nation, After All (New York: Penguin Books, c. 1998) he surveys “what middle-class Americans really think about God, country, family, racism, welfare, immigration, homosexuality, work, the right, the left, and each other.” The middle-class, Wolfe asserts, constitutes America, so middle-class morality defines its culture. Despite extremists’ warnings about the “culture war,” despite the laments of various “discontents,” this nation is, according to ordinary folks, united in its most important convictions. The book’s data comes from 200 two-hour intensive interviews with suburbanites living in four cities: Boston; Atlanta; Tulsa; San Diego. In Wolfe’s opinion, these four regions accurately sample the nation’s populace, though he acknowledges the small number of subjects make his study less than statistically sound. But since he wants to draw a more impressionistic picture of the “middle-class,” which he thinks to be suburban rather than urban or rural, he defends the validity of his presentation.

America’s middle-class has a “quiet faith,” a private faith rarely discussed only loosely aligned with traditional theology or established churches. Personal experience, and little else, shapes folks’ faith and ethics. One woman believes that “‘everyone inside has their own persona of God,'” so “‘You don’t have to accept anybody’s dogma whole. Live with the concept of God as your perceive it'” (p. 51). Another woman declared that God doesn’t tell us what’s right or wrong, because “‘You know in your gut that something is wrong, so you have to listen to what’s inside'” (p. 82). Since everyone is free to devise his own concept of God, to design his own morality, middle-class Americans strongly endorse “an Eleventh Commandment: ‘Thou shalt not judge.'” Refusing to judge others or to condemn even their most egregious acts, qualifies one as a good person. Consequently, few of the folks interviewed “used words like ‘sin,’ ‘moral rot,’ ‘decay,’ or ‘Satan,’ terms that” one often associates with conservative Christianity” (p. 49). Wolfe’s study confirmed other sociological surveys which indicate “that Americans are among the most faithful people in the world” (p. 44)–though they are highly selective when it comes to precisely what they believe. Summing up the “quiet faith” of his subjects, Wolfe says: “they put their faith in people. A deep-seated belief in people’s goodness enables middle-class Americans to accept the principle that people should be free to choose their God, or even not to choose God at all, without worrying that the consequence will be anarchy, for good people will always make the right kinds of choices” (p. 85).

After examining America’s attitudes toward family, country, and community concerns, Wolfe concludes his study with a glance at “morality writ small: not only should our circles of moral obligation never become so large that they lose their coherence, but morality should also be modest in its ambitions and quiet in its proclamations, not seeking to transform the entire world but to make a difference where it can” (p. 290). Accordingly: “If one is giving advice, one should do so tentatively; although it is a term of derision among Christian conservatives, the idea of the ‘Ten Suggestions’ rather than the ‘Ten Commandments’ is exactly the tone in which most middle-class American believe we ought to establish moral rules” (p. 291). Still more: “middle-class American have never let God command them in ways seriously in conflict with modern beliefs” (p. 298).

To Wolfe all this bodes well for America. He’s encouraged to think that “religious” people expect very little from themselves or one another. Yet one suspects that’s because the folks interviewed bolstered Wolfe’s own admittedly “liberal” convictions, justifying a secular society, highly tolerant in most every way, but still committed to a democratic society. In an earlier book, entitled Whose Keeper, he discounted the worth of religion, calling for people to follow social scientists (such as himself) for moral guidance. Religious conservatives, especially, Wolfe argued, should not be trusted. Thus the value of One Nation, After All, in my judgment, lies in its anecdotal evidence, which surely proffers snapshots of this nation’s character. For more solid sociological data, however, works such The Death of Character, by John Davidson Hunter, are more trustworthy.

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Gertrude Himmelfarb, like Wolfe, is a Jewish intellectual. She, however, represents the Right rather than the Left and is a historian rather than a sociologist. She also takes a thoroughly different take on American culture in One Nation, Two Cultures (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999). She shares Adam Smith’s view that in every society two moral systems compete: that of the common people versus that of “people of fashion.” Fashionable elites indulgently condone vices such as “‘luxury, wanton and even disorderly mirth, the pursuit of pleasure to some degree of intemperance, the breach of chastity, at least in one of the two sexes, etc'” (p. 3). Common people, manifestly evident in the Victorian Era, which Himmelfarb has thoroughly researched, generally follow religious convictions, condemn personal vices and uphold the moral standards they believe necessary for their good.

The Victorian Era, of course, ended early in this century. By 1950, Pitrim Sorokin at Harvard was lamenting the “‘sexualization of American culture’ and ‘sham-Nietzschean amorality’ that were engulfing the country. ‘What used to be considered morally reprehensible is now recommended as a positive value; what was once called demoralization is now styled moral progress and a new freedom'” (p. 14). Soon thereafter the counterculture of the 1960s intoxicated America, setting in place what Roger Shattuck labels “the morality of the cool” (p. 25). Declaring independence from despised “bourgeois values,” the counterculture “also liberated a good many people from those values–virtues, as they were once called–that had a stabilizing, socializing, and moralizing effect on society” (p. 18).

What’s been lost, Himmelfarb believes, is the “civil society” which generally reigned in the United States until WWII, rooted in self-sacrifice and nurturing healthy families. “Today, unfortunately, many parents are as ineffectual in promoting and enforcing social order as are other authorities, and that miniature system is as weak and unreliable as the larger social system of which it is part” (p. 45). Primarily this is due to the demise of the “ethic of sacrifice” which sustains a good family. Various social planners, however, with their preference for state-controlled institutions, have deliberately sought to minimize traditional marriage, blurring the distinction between marriage and cohabitation, between heterosexual and homosexual unions. The traditional family has been sidelined by the sexual revolution which brands children a burden, bringing us to the point where Italian demographers predict that soon “almost three-fifths of that nation’s children will have ‘no siblings, cousins, aunts, or uncles; they will have only parents, grandparents, and perhaps great-grandparents'” (p. 56).

Beyond the details of the cultural revolution which has transformed the West, Himmelfarb prescribes ways to counter it. Since by nature we are political animals, as Aristotle rightly saw, we must act effectively in the political realm. Laws cannot but legislate morality, so we must work to exert influence in that area. But culture, shaped by religion, necessarily undergirds a politics capable of legislating morality. “Republican government means self-government–self-discipline, self-restraint, self-control, self-reliance–‘republican virtue,’ in short” (p. 85). Reflecting a consensus of the Founding Fathers, George Washington, in his Farewell Address, urged Americans not to “‘indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion’: ‘Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports'” (p. 86). Though often celebrated as the architect of the “wall” between church and state, even Thomas Jefferson supported a Christian America. Once asked why he attended church when he doubted Christian dogma, Jefferson replied: “‘no nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Or can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has been given to man and I as chief Magistrate of this nation am bound to give it the sanction of my example'” (p. 86).

Today, of course, Christians struggle to make their case for Christian ethics in the public square. “Having been spared the class revolution that Marx predicted, we have succumbed to the cultural revolution” (p. 118). There is a militantly anti-Christian bigotry in America. The media and intelligentsia belittle and assail the “Gospel Lobby” for its ignorance and intolerance. “Indeed, the very language of morality has been transformed, so that once honorific words are now pejorative. To pass moral judgments is to be ‘judgmental’ and ‘moralistic’; to engage in moral discourse is to ‘preach’ and ‘moralize’; to pronounce upon moral affairs is to wage of ‘moral crusade,’ or, worse, a ‘religious crusade.’ With the disparagement of the moral vocabulary comes a trivilization of morality itself'” (p. 118). So we find the anomaly of anti-smoking zealots, in Hollywood and Congress, who promote fornication and sodomy! The schools piously ban even pictures of guns while passing out condoms and procuring abortions!

Further complicating the picture, many sectors of the church world have failed to inculcate traditional moral precepts. “George Gallup, who has done extensive polling on the subject, speaks of ‘an ethics gap’ between ‘the way we think of ourselves and the way we actually are’–between, in effect, religious faith and moral practices. The sociologist James Davison Hunter dates this gap to the late 1950’s and early ’60s, when liberal Protestant theology was being redefined in ‘secular, humanistic terms,’ accommodating itself to the ‘worldview and “life-styles” of modernity.’ This process of accommodation has since gone on apace, so that today many mainline churches offer little or no resistance to the prevailing culture. On the contrary, some are very much part of it, priding themselves on being cosmopolitan and sophisticated, undogmatic and uncensorious. Thus they carefully avoid, in their sermons and public declarations, the old language of morality– ‘sin,’ ‘shame,’ ‘evil’–preferring the new language of sociability–‘inappropriate,’ ‘unseemly,’ ‘improper'” (p. 98).

Sound in its sources, judicious in its evaluation, persuasive in its argumentation, Himmelfarb’s study is both readable and worth reading if one wants to understand where we now stand in America.

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“What the soul is the body,” according to one of the earliest documents in Church History, “Christians are to the world” (Letter to Diognetus, 6.1). And that, George Weigel argues, in Soul of the World: Notes on the Future of Public Catholicism (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, c. 1996), is our current calling and challenge. Weigel, the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., recently finished a definitive biography of John Paul II and certainly represents a vital segment of the Catholic Church.

“What the Church most urgently needs to teach the world is that the world’s fulfillment lies beyond history, and that the nature of that fulfillment has been disclosed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the ‘first-born among many brethren’ (Rom. 8:29, RSV)” (p. 2). Christians proclaim and live according to the great truth that “Jesus is Lord.” Given that commitment, “our first institutional or corporate commitment is to his Body, the Church” (p. 16). Unlike the World Council of Churches, which declares that “The World Sets the Agenda for the Church,” the Church of Jesus Christ ever sets her own agenda in accord with the mandates of her Head. Consequently: “The first thing the Church asks of the world is space–social, legal, apolitical, even psychological–in order to carry out its distinctive ministry of word and sacrament” (p. 37). Rather than consult the world for her agenda, “The Church asks the world to let the Church be the Church.” Indeed, at times the simply “demands that it be allowed to be what it is: a reality ‘in the nature of a sacrament–a sign and instrument . . . of communion with God and unity among all men.’ The first thing the Church asks the world is that the Church be allowed to be itself” (p. 37).

Given that commitment, the Church in America must ever struggle to maintain a healthy balance in her relationship with the democratic state. Certain Christian values, such as a high regard for the individual person, lend themselves easily to a democratic polity. Yet as things now stand, Christians may well need to engage in “uncompromising confrontation rather than polite dialogue. When unborn human beings have less legal standing than an endangered species of bird in a national forest; when any configuration of ‘committed’ adults is considered in enlightened circles to constitute a ‘marriage’; when senior senators bloviate about ‘sexual harassment’ in kindergarten while national illegitimacy rates approach 30 percent of all births: well, one is reminded of Orwell’s observation, to generations ago, that ‘we have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men'” (pp. 68-69).

This leads Weigel to bring John Paul II forward as an inspired guide for our day. His carefully thought out and articulated positions blend the evangelism of the Gospel with the moral backbone of discipleship. In saying “yes” to the personal freedom basic to democracy, John Paul also warns against the totalitarian implications of unlimited democracy, wherein “rights” become license to kill the unborn, the weak, the unneeded. “Because human beings, as persons, have an innate capacity for thinking and choosing and an innate drive for truth and goodness, freedom to pursue that quest for the true and the good, without coercion, is a basic human good” (p. 112). In every man’s conscience, a dialogue takes place with God, providing the basis for his freedom. As John Paul II insisted, in Veritatis Splendor, “there is a moral logic built into the world and into us. That is, there is a universal human nature, and human reason, through reflection on that nature, can discern certain fundamental truths that are the foundation of the moral life” (p. 158).

Americans, John Paul says, rightly treasure their freedom. But not all freedom is good. Only an “ordered freedom,” disciplined to serve man’s ultimate good, can rightly be considered worthy of man. Real freedom is being able to do what you ought to do, to make decisions and take steps which enable one to attain one’s end. America’s Founding Fathers wisely averred: “only a virtuous people can be free.” Professor Rocco Buttiglione, an advisor to John Paul, says: “‘Nothing good can be done without freedom, but freedom is not the highest value in itself. Freedom is given to man in order to make possible the free obedience to truth and the free gift of oneself in love'” (p. 126). Tragically, too many in our day define freedom as doing whatever one desires at the moment. Thus, John Paul says, we see “choices ‘against life’ are being described as ‘legitimate expressions of individual freedom, to be acknowledged and protected as actual rights.’ Wrongs have become rights” (p. 123).

The “ordered freedom” the pope endorses flourishes in the “free economy” he supports in one of his finest encyclicals, Centesimus Annus. Unlike certain forms of ruthless, laisser faire capitalism, John Paul contends that wealth creation today derives from “human creativity and imagination, and with political and economic systems capable of unleashing that creativity and imagination, than with ‘resources’ per se” (p. 139). Neither socialism, which he rigorously condemns, nor the Welfare State rightly suits the nature of man. To truly help people means to treat them with dignity. We help the poor, we extend a “preferential option for the poor,” when we empower them, liberate them from all that oppresses or constricts their lives. “What works best for the poor is democratic politics and properly regulated market economies” (p. 140). What John Paul calls “the Social Assistance State,” widely evident in “social democratic” nations, easily robs folks of their stature as persons. “By intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility, the Social Assistance State leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies, which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients, and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending'” (pp. 132-43).

As the “soul of the world,” Christians–and the Church–must preach the Gospel and call the world to its principles. Contemporary politics, so democratic in nature, can be brought under the lordship of Jesus. Contemporary economics, so clearly capitalistic in much of the world, can be rightly synthesized with a Christian view of human nature. The world, so long as it is never considered as an end in itself, can be made right for man when its structures closely resemble the principles of Christ’s Kingdom.

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While finishing his Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford University, Paul Vitz settled into a comfortable, confirmed atheism–as much for its fashionability as its demonstrability, for the great “taboo” academicians studious respected was “any reference to God” (p. xii). Immersed in a pervasively atheistic academic culture, he simply embraced it. Years later, teaching psychology at New York University, he abandoned his atheism to embrace what he considers a more coherent and meaningful Christian theism. His own journey enables him to evaluate thinkers such as Freud and Nietzsche, Russell and Sartre in Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism (Dallas: Spence Publishing Company, 1999).

Vitz upends the “projection” theories of prominent atheists, beginning with Feuerbach, arguing “that atheism of the strong or intense type is to a substantial degree generated by the peculiar psychological needs of its advocates” (p. 3). If theism might be a projection of inner longings, of pie-in-the-sky fantasies, so too might atheism. Indeed, one of Freud’s most celebrated ideas, the “Oedipus complex,” provides Vitz a tool whereby one may understand “the wish-fulfilling origin of the rejection of God. After all, the Oedipus complex is unconscious, it is established in childhood, and above all its dominant motive is hated of the father (God) and the desire for him not to exist, something represented by the boy’s desire to overthrow or kill the father. Freud regularly described God as a psychological equivalent to the father, and so a natural expression of Oedipal motivation would be powerful, unconscious desires for the nonexistence of God. Therefore, in the Freudian framework, atheism is an illusion caused by the Oedipal desire to kill the father (God) and replace him with oneself. To act as though God does not exist reveals a wish to kill Him, much in the same way as in a dream the image of a parent going away or disappearing can represent such as wish. the belief that ‘God is dead,’ therefore, is simply an Oedipal wish-fulfillment–the sign of seriously unresolved unconscious motivation” (p. 13).

Fathers alienate their children in multitudinous ways. Some die, as did the fathers of Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus. Others desert their families. Some collapse in cowardice, frequently allowing their wives to dominate the household. Thomas Hobbes, Jean Meslier, Voltaire, Ludwig Feuerbach, Sigmund Freud, and H.G. Wells, had abusive and weak fathers. Vitz labels “these proposed determinants of atheism, taken together, the ‘defective father’ hypothesis” (p. 16), and he explores the biographies of eminent atheists to see if they share this paradigm.

Though most of the thinkers Vitz examined are men, atheistic women such as Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand, Madeline Murray O’Hare, and Kate Millett seem similarly affected. There are sexual differences, however. “For men, God seems to function primarily as a principle of justice and order in the world–and only secondarily as a person with whom one has a relationship” (p. 109). Women, on the other hand, primarily treasure relationships, so a poor father debilitates their relationship with God. “We can predict,” Vitz says, “that women will find interpersonal abuse, betrayal, or abandonment by male religious figures (ranging from their fathers, to teachers, ministers, priests, and rabbis) far more disturbing on the average than would men. By contrast, men would be more disturbed at fathers who are weak or unprincipled, at religious or church hypocrisy–at the failure of principle. Thus, theological controversies should be, relatively speaking, more of a masculine preoccupation, while controversies over church policies as they affect lives directly should have a stronger impact on women” (pp. 111-112).

One of modernity’s most influential atheists, Friedrich Nietzsche, lost his father (a Lutheran pastor) shortly before he reached his fifth birthday. Young Nietzsche was deeply attached to his father and was devastated by his death, later lamenting that he “‘missed the strict and superior guidance of a male intellect'” (p. 22). Yet he also despised his father’s physical weakness, tied in his mind with his Christianity. “It is therefore not hard to view Nietzsche’s rejection of God and Christianity as a rejection of the weakness of his father” (p. 23). He thus compensated by celebrating the “will-to-power” and hardness of the “blond beast”–the Ubermensch–illustrating his longing for the strong father he never knew.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s father died which he was 15 months old. Like Nietzsche, he grew up in a largely feminine household. When his mother re-married, when Sartre was 12, he was devastated–and he almost immediately declared that God did not exist. His atheistic existentialism flows from his acknowledgment that: “‘If one discards God the father, there has to be someone to invent values. . . . To say that we invent values means nothing else but this: life has no meaning a priori. Before you come alive, life is nothing; it’s up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing else but the meaning you choose'” (p. 28). So central was this to Sartre that one of his biographers, Robert Havery, titled his study Search for a Father: Sartre, Paternity and the Question of Ethics.

Prominent theists, on the other hand, enjoyed healthy relationships with admirable fathers, though they lived in precisely the same eras as did their atheistic counterparts. Apparently the times do not dictate metaphysics! Blaise Pascal, home-schooled by his father, astounded both his contemporaries and subsequent generations with his genius. In Pascal one finds one of the most articulate and perennially persuasive presentations of theism. So too George Berkeley! Alexander Pope declared that Berkeley possessed “‘every virtue under heaven'” (p. 61), and no one can question his intellectual prowess. A long list of English theists, including Berkeley, Joseph Butler, Thomas Reid, Edmund Burke, William Paley, William Wilberforce, John Henry Newman, and G.K. Chesterton not only shaped their worlds but enjoyed warm relationships with their fathers.

Neither theists nor atheists, of course, are totally shaped by their fathers! A variety of other factors must be considered, not the least being free choice. But Vitz’s thesis, amply illustrated, certainly helps explain part of the atheist syndrome.

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Though not acknowledged by Vitz (who’s probably blissfully unaware of evangelical scholarship!), R.C. Sproul argued essentially the same thesis 25 years earlier in The Psychology of Atheism (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany Fellowship, Inc., c. 1974). “The central thesis of this book,” he says, “is this: The ‘attractive features of the Christian God that might incline a person to project His existence as a bromide or narcotic to help him face the threatening character of life are not only equalized and neutralized by the threatening features of God but are overwhelmingly outweighed by the traumatic experience of encountering God. Though man may desire and create for himself a deity who meets his needs and provides him with innumerable benefits, he will not desire a God who is holy, omniscient, and sovereign” (p. 10).

After providing a helpful overview of the development of modern atheism, Sproul builds his case upon the classic logical “law of contradiction,” insisting (in accord with Aristotle) that “A cannot be A and non-A at the same time. That is to say “there cannot be God and no God at the same time” (p. 28). At this point, it’s either/or! If God be not, He’s a projection of the human psyche, as Feuerbach and Freud declared. If He truly IS, as theists believe, He exists as the one, ultimate, objective Reality. Atheists who deny God’s reality often project (via subtle theories) their desire to live free from His requirements. For the Christian God, far from resembling a kindly, always affirming grandfather, “is repugnant to man and is not the focus of desire or wish-projection” (p. 57). To avoid this righteous God, sinners repress their natural knowledge of Him and resist revealed truths concerning Him. St Paul asserted that “what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them” (Rom 1:19), but sinners ignore and look away from what’s plainly evident.

Sproul examines the arguments of Feuerbach, Freud, and Neitzsche, persuasively arguing that the very psychological processes of repression and substitution which they use to discount theism apply with even greater weight to atheism. We’d rather explain away God than submit to Him. We suffer a fundamental “trauma of holiness,” a fearful blow to our pride and self-esteem, when we encounter the God of the Bible. “Absolute holiness, purity, and innocence cannot be tolerated because they are dangerous and destructive” (p. 100). So, with Adam, we turn away from Him, try to hide from Him, deny His authority, flaunting an American Revolutionary War slogan, “We Serve No Sovereign Here!” (p. 137). Free from a Sovereign Lord, we’re free to do as we please! We swallow “the serpentine promise–the promise of blessing that goes with autonomy–sicut erat dei, ‘you will be as god’! This is the essence of the primordial temptation–to be like God–to have no restraints, no limits, no crowding of self-desire by the rule of another. To be autonomous–that’s the temptation” (p. 148).

As Dostoevsky understood, if there is no God all we desire is permitted. If God’s not Sovereign, we’re autonomous, self-sovereign lords of our own lives. “Paul Roubiczek [in Existentialism For and Against. p. 32] comments: ‘In The Possessed, Kirillov is convinced that there is no God, and concludes: “If God exists, all is His will and from His will I cannot escape. If not, it’s all my will and I am bound to show self-will. . . . If there is not God, the I am God.” Or, as Nietzsche puts it: “If there were gods, how could I bear it to be no god myself? Therefore, there are no gods. . . .” Man, deprived of the divine, is bound to reach out for powers once considered divine'” (p. 140). Nietzsche’s Ubermensch necessarily follows his denial of God’s existence.

Contradicting all such claims to human autonomy, Christians ever set forth an “ethic of theonomy” (p. 142). They acknowledge, with Jonathan Edwards, that “Men Are Naturally God’s Enemies.” In truth, men “‘have an inbred distaste and disrelish of God’s perfections'” (p. 153). They don’t want to admit that He is “an infinitely holy, pure, and righteous Being, and they do not like him upon this account; they have no relish of such kind of qualifications; they take no delight in contemplating them'” (p. 154). Rather than submit to such a God, sinners simply deny His existence. “In a word,” Sproul says, agreeing with Edwards, “natural man suffers from prejudice. He operates within a framework of insufferable bias against the God of Christianity” (p. 154).

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Whereas Sproul provides a critique of modern atheism, Merold Westphal, in Suspicion & Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (New York: Fordham University Press, c. 1998) urges us to use Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud for a “Lenten penance.” Great atheists’ insights and critiques, Westphal argues, breed a healthy humility in believers who rightly read them, for they help us plumb the subterranean pathways of original sin. Freud, like great Christian theologians, “locates original sin in our innermost self,” the Id–an amoral “‘cauldron full of seething excitations'” (p. 79). “Perhaps,” Westphal writes, “we need to see Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, along with Luther and Barth, as expressing a Promethean protest against all the zeuses of instrumental religion, the piety that reduces God to a means or instrument for achieving our own human purposes with professedly divine power and sanction” (p. 6). Importantly, Westphal says, linking up with postmodernist thought, suspicion must be distinguished from skepticism. Skepticism discounts “facts, while suspicion seeks to uncover the duplicity of persons” (p. 13). Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud help us do the latter, so Christians must first make no effort “to refute or discredit them. It is to acknowledge that their critique is all too true too much of the time and to seek to discover just where the shoe fits, not ‘them’ but ourselves” (p. 16). Insofar as any religion, Christianity included, portrays God as a powerful Being dedicated to insuring our own success and happiness, it must be deconstructed.

Freud’s trenchant suspicions, powerfully illustrated by the illusions he discerned in man’s religions, ever remind us, Westphal says, of how easily “We represent God to ourselves, no in accordance with the evidence available to us but in accordance with our wishes; in other words, we create God in our own image, or at least in the image of our desires. Now we have three things to ashamed of: (1) the desires that govern this operation, (2) our willingness to subordinate truth to happiness, and (3) our hybris in making ourselves their creator and God the creature” (p. 62). Westphal finds equally valuable material in Marx and Nietzsche, though his analysis of them is significantly slimmer. Nevertheless, as Calvin College philosopher Kelly James Clark says, in the book’s Forword, “Westphal’s book is quite simply the best exposition and critical discussion of Marx’s, Freud’s and Nietzsche’s views on religious belief available. And it is one of the best expositions and critical discussions of these thinkers, period” (p. ix). Clearly there is much to be learned from these thinkers, and from Westphal’s sympathetic discussion of them.

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Taking a distinctively different approach, in The Atheist Syndrome (Brentwood, TN: Wolgemuth & Hyatt, Publishers, c. 1989), John P. Koster seeks “to show why Darwin, Huxley, Nietzsche, Freud, and their followers twisted science into an attack on religion; why they concocted the theory of scientific atheism to begin with; why they ignored all available evidence that contradicted their dead-end materialism in their own era; and why their worshipers continue to ignore this information today” (p. 8). Binding it all together, Koster argues, is a remarkably “lovelessness.” Their experiences in life, their biographies, rather than their theorizing, give us important clues as to their passionate atheism.

Militant atheists generally illustrate a “son-victim” status. First, “as a child and student, he tended to be weak, submissive, an under-achiever, and unsure of his goals and desires” (p. 17). Next, “As an adolescent and a young adult, the picture of the son-victim changed dramatically. As soon as an opportunity arose, he attempted to flee, to put as much distance as possible between himself and the family he hated and wanted to escape from” (p. 17). Third, at about the age of 40, he discovers himself resembling his detested father, leading to self-hatred and psychosomatic illnesses. Finally, he finds relief from “symptoms of depression by one sure-fire method: raving against Christianity” (p. 18).

To develop his case, Koster devotes substantial chapters to the “big four”: Darwin, Huxley, Nietzsche, and Freud. Darwin’s physician father was both physically and psychologically powerful. Young Charles seemed weak and unremarkable, so his free-thinking father sent him to Cambridge to study for the ministry–a safe refuge from the realities of life! At Cambridge, Charles developed his interest in biology, which led in time to his journey on the HMS Beagle, where his ideas of evolution took form. While robust and strong during his great sea-faring adventure, when he returned home, at the age of 30, he began suffering immobilizing health problems which rendered him a semi-invalid, able to work only three hours a day. No organic basis for disease was ever discovered, and evidence suggests he suffered a severe, debilitating depression which underlay his progressively dismal condemnations of Christianity.

“Darwin’s Bulldog,” Thomas Henry Huxley, found a career defending his mentor and coined the term “agnostic” to describe his religious position. Like Darwin, he disliked his father and found little love in his home. He became a physician but disliked dealing with sick patients, so he volunteered to serve as assistant surgeon on HMS Rattlesnake and explored the South Pacific, meeting his future wife while in Australia. Back in England by 1850, he wrote a scientific paper which established his reputation as a scientist. Reading Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 confirmed many of his own notions, and he lept to the defense of the theory of evolution when controversy concerning it erupted, gaining fame for his debate with Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in 1860. That very year Huxley’s son, Noel, died of scarlet fever. Huxley was devastated, and in his anger jettisoned any faith in a good, loving God. “For the rest of Huxley’s career–he lived until 1895 and traveled and lectured widely–he defended Darwin’s ideas, and the godless universe Darwin came to believe in during the forty-year bout of clinical depression, as the only worldview worthy of a free man and a scientist” (p. 73), a fervent footsoldier in the “Crusade against Christianity.” Yet throughout this time, he suffered constant ill-health, suffering “from the same collection of maladies that had afflicted Darwin” (p. 74).

Nietzsche and Freud, Koster says, largely duplicate the biographical details of Darwin and Huxley: disturbed childhood; energizing flight and subsequent creativity; final physical or psychological collapse. Their atheism developed less as a reasoned conclusion than as an emotional, psychological rationalization–the “atheist syndrome.” Subsequently, a host of influential atheists illustrate the same phenomenon. In the United States, Robert Ingersoll and Clarence Darrow proclaimed it. In Germany, Adolf Hitler absorbed and implemented it. Marx, Lenin, and Stalin incarnated it within their communist endeavors. Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus gave it literary power. In various ways, they enable us to “understand the atheist syndrome as hostility toward hard fathers and a brutal pattern of childhood that turned into hostility toward God and toward belief in immortality” (p. 188).

Koster’s work provides a readable overview of the subject, rich with biographical data and hypotheses. Typical of such a wide-ranging work, it lacks depth and subtilty, and his efforts to shove various atheists into a tidy “syndrome” can easily be challenged and, at points, refuted. Nevertheless, joined to the other works I’ve considered, The Atheist Syndrome provides historical, personal details which suggest a certain consensus concerning they personalities and perspectives of the atheists studied.

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“It’s a bad time to be a boy in America” (p. 13) writes Christina Hoff Sommers in The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming our Young Men (New York: Simon & Schuster, c. 2000). She writes to document “how it became fashionable to attribute pathology to millions of healthy male children” while ignoring the positive contributions normal men have made to our world (p. 14). Militant feminists, armed with inaccuracies and untruths, have successfully shaped a culture profoundly hostile to men. Many of them want to abolish the “masculinizing” influences in boys’ lives so as to make them “less competitive, more emotionally expressive, more nurturing–more, in short, like girls. Gloria Steinem summarizes the views of many in the boys-should-be-changed camp when she says, ‘We need to raise boys like we raise girls'” (p. 44).

Some, conveniently ignoring the growing evidence that, as Lionel Tiger said, “‘Biology is not destiny, but it is good statistical probability'” (p. 89) even seek to deny any biological basis for significant differences between boys and girls. Egalitarianism will not tolerate such! Children, the argument says, are born without “gender” and are simply shaped by their environment. Just teach boys to play with dolls they’ll be gentle and nurturing. Same sex play should be discouraged, for boys must be shaped in accord with the unisex model. One feminist philosopher, Sandra Lee Bartky claims we’re “bisexual” at birth but, in our patriarchal society, we’re “‘transformed into male and female gender personalities, the one destined to command the other to obey'” (p. 86). To eliminate such inequities, gender feminists say, demands revolutionary social action.

The central figure in the war against boys is Harvard University’s Professor Carol Gilligan, the first professor of gender studies at Harvard, “the matron saint of the girl crisis movement” (p. 17). Since publishing In a Different Voice in 1982, she has assumed a celebrity’s role in the feminist movement. Gilligan and her chorus of “gender free” advocates claim that girls suffer various forms of discrimination in modern America. They say girls suffer the loss of self-esteem and fare poorly in schools. They then argue that various remedial strategies be adopted to rectify the hostile environments girls face in the schools and society at large. That neither Gilligan nor her followers have presented credible evidence has not discredited their stance in the educational and political establishments. Gilligan’s “research” is largely anecdotal, and her “data” has never been published so as to be tested. Indeed, some of the most frequently cited studies (used to persuade Congress to enact feminist-sponsored legislation) conducted by the American Association of University Women and the Wellesley Center, has been exposed by Judith Kleifeld as “‘politics dressed up as science'” (p. 41).

But, to tell the truth, Sommers shows how “by the early 1990s American girls were flourishing in unprecedented ways” (p. 20). Data provided by the U.S. Department of Education and peer-reviewed scholarly studies all prove “that far from being shy and demoralized, today’s girls outshine boys. Girls get better grades. They have higher educational aspirations” (p. 24). They take harder courses and more advance placement exams. They read more and do better in art and music. “Conversely, more boys than girls are suspended from school. More are held back and more drop out” (p. 25). One scholarly study of 99,000 students’ assets showed girls doing better than boys in 34 of 40 identifiable areas.

More than mere disadvantages, boys increasingly encounter overt hostility in the schools! We now have such things as “girls-only holidays.” Recemt “harassment” definitions now include teasing and typically boyish behavior such as a six year old kissing a classmate. Games like tag are now forbidden, and activities stressing equality are praised in many schools. Consequently, boys are quickly falling behind in the schools. But boys need strict discipline, structured classrooms, competition–the very things progressive educators dislike. Knowledge-based classes, not emotion-laden self-esteem strategies, motivate boys. Schools in England have recently revamped their programs to target boys, and the success is dramatic. Such needs to be done in America, Sommers says, to stop the steep decline we’re witnessing in our young males.

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The War Against Boys follows up Sommers’ earlier treatise, Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (New York: Simon & Schuster, c. 1994). While she supports “equity feminism,” the movement to attain “equal pay for equal work,” educational opportunities and basic human rights, she contends “gender feminism” represents a militant minority which distorts data and pursues a power-hungry political agenda ultimately harmful to women. “Noble lies,” such as the one told in 1993 by Lenore Walker, the author of The Battered Woman, concerning the increase of violence against women on Super Bowl Sundays, are justified “for the good of the cause.”

Sommers specifically attacks some of the outlandish claims which have fueled gender feminism. Gloria Steinem, for example, in Revolution from Within, claimed that 150,000 women die each year because of anorexia. Naomi Wolf, in Beauty Myth, wove the word “holocaust” into her outcry over this. Checking the claims, Sommers found that 150,000 American women yearly suffer from anorexias nervosa–but less than a hundred actually die from the disorder! Yet the Steinem assertion appears in Ann Landers’ columns and college textbooks. Fed a constant diet of distortions in women’s studies programs and media myths, “young feminist ideologues coming out of our nation’s colleges are even angrier, more resentful, and more indifferent to the truth than their mentors” (p. 18).

Equally dishonest is the assertion that girls suffer more “self-esteem” problems than boys. An oft-cited study by the American Association of University Women made this claim and it has entered the public consciousness and from there to laws and public policies. Yet no article in any refereed journal substantiates it. Similarly, the 1992 “The Wellesley Report” charged that our “schools shortchange girls.” In fact, girls excel in virtually every aspect of schooling. Only in math and science do boys score higher. The Wellesley Report also noted that girls try to commit suicide more often than boys–but it neglected to mention that far more boys actually take their lives.

Central to this feminist agenda is victimization. A litany of female sufferings pervades the writings and conferences orchestrated by the likes of Steinem and Wolfe. To mobilize an empathetic public, women must be portrayed “at risk” in various areas. Particularly powerful is the portrait of battered women, victims of “domestic violence” which pervades the media. To rectify things, they advocate “a utopian ideal of social transformation” (p. 51). Just as Marx urged the oppressed workers of the world to unite and shed their chains, so too his feminist progeny call on women (abused and oppressed in patriarchal societies) to rebel and create a wondrous world shaped by feminine virtues.

When the facts don’t support the “violence” message, militant feminists simply ignore them. Richard Gelles and Murray Strauss, probably the finest students of domestic violence, have devoted decades to their research. Once favored by feminists because of their knowledge, Gelles and Strauss fell from grace once when their data contradicted feminism’s “patriarchal” thesis. Violence in families is certainly a problem. But women as frequently as men, and siblings more frequently than parents, initiate it. And most “violence” is minor–less than one percent of the violent acts actually do serious harm to the victim. Importantly, “more than 84 percent of families are not violent, and among the 16 percent who are, nearly half the violence (though not half the injuries) is perpetrated by women” (p. 195). Yet The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence brazenly, dishonestly claims that 50 percent of all women will suffer violence from their spouses!

To implement their designs, radical feminists have found public schools and universities fertile fields. History textbooks have been re-written, exaggerating the role of women–at times portraying “Herstory” as the real story. When challenged to provide evidence for certain claims, one woman argued that since the actual evidence had been suppressed the story must be manufactured to tell what women want told! Male authors such as Melville and Henry James have been replaced by Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Alice Walker! Logic and rationality, forms of “vertical thinking,” have been disparaged as “phallocentric” and thus banished from the classrooms. One feminist philosopher, Joyce Trebilcot rejects such male constructs as “truth,” “knowledge,” and “science.” Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia has been branded “Newton’s Rape Manual” by Sandra Harding (p. 66).

Sommers also addresses such issues as “rape research,” “the backlash myth,” and “gender wardens.” Needless to say, she incessantly looks for the truth and finds feminist “scholarship” riddled with error and manipulation. There are legitimate female concerns, problems which need serious research and reform. Unfortunately, Sommers shows, these are not what interest the militant feminists who dominate both the academy and the dominant media. For her efforts (as you might expect) Sommers has been savagely attacked by the National Organization of Women. Yet they have learned not to appear with her in a debate or public forum, for her logic and evidence have proved too daunting.

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Ann Douglas provides important historical perspectives in The Feminization of American Culture (New York: The Noonday Press, c. 1977, 1998). She’s mainly interested in the 19th century’s transformation of New England’s religion. She documents “the vitiation of Calvinist theology at the hands of a group of proto-feminist white middle-class women writers intent on bringing themselves into new positions of power, and a cadre of liberal Protestant ministers anxious to shore up their own fast-eroding status” (p. xi). William James, Sr. noted that “‘religion in the old virile sense has disappeared, and been replaced by a feeble Unitarian sentimentality'” (p. 17). The doctrinal rigors of Calvinism–with its emphases on sin, salvation, and self-sacrifice–dissolved, James thought, into an emasculated tenderness which surfaced in the liberal clergy’s pacifism during the Civil War.

Reducing “faith” to feelings of dependency or good-will or whatever, “the Protestant minister became the only professional other than the housewife who ceased to overtly command, much less monopolize, any special body of knowledge” (p. 165). God, to Noah Webster, was an “Indulgent Parent.” As American preachers, such as William Ellery Channing, embraced liberal theology, they simultaneously cultivated their inner feelings and captivated female parishioners who, like Mary Baker Eddy, sought to “feed the famished affections” (p. xii). Unlike lawyers and doctors, who mastered important disciplines respected by men, “the minister increasingly fell back upon an inner parish of women and those men who had been reduced to playing the woman’s role; his congregation consisted of those who were feeling rather than thinking” (p. 204). Such ministers (unfortunately in Douglas’ view) lost that admirable masculine toughness which the Church needs to be the Church.

Theology shifted. Jonathan Edwards’ thought lost out to the “New Divinity” position, thus shifting from a “basically paternal (or gubernatorial) and authoritarian view to a fundamentally maternal and affective one” (p. 124). Horace Bushnell personified the new view, singularly celebrating God’s love and revering Christ for “meeting men on mortal terrain, shaping himself to human needs, offering himself as a model not as a governor” (p. 130). Bushnell thought “‘forgiveness is man’s deepest need and highest achievement'” (p. 140) and that self-forgiveness is one’s primary task. “Man’s conversion experience is no longer an acceptance of God so much as an acceptance of himself, and Bushnell understood this as a function of happiness, of nurture, and of process” (p. 140).

To understand our world, such historical studies prove invaluable. Though Douglas’s focus is rather restricted–and her analyses often problematic–she provides a rich narrative which illuminates some significant developments in this nation’s history.

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Taking the whole of Christian history as his subject, Leon J. Podles portrays The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity (Dallas: Spence Publishing Company, c. 1999). He begins with the demonstrable observation that in the West Christian churches appeal more to women than men. Negating feminist complaints concerning “the patriarchal tendencies of Christianity, men are largely absent from the Christian churches of the modern Western world. Women go to church; men go to football games” (p. 3). “The Methodist Church,” he quips, “is a women’s club at prayer” (p. xv). Women prefer a heart-felt faith, whereas men relish logic and discipline. To the degree that Christian churches cater to feminine preferences, they attract women and alienate men. Men generally eschew the soft, nurturing, non-combative message and culture of today’s churches. Yet “men do not show this same aversion to all churches and religions. The Orthodox seem to have a balance, and Islam and Judaism have a predominantly male membership. Something is creating a barrier between Western Christianity and men, and that something is the subject of this book” (p. ix).

Women often envision God as loving, forgiving, nurturing. To a degree at least, women “constructed an image of Jesus as they wished men would be: sensitive, willing to reveal themselves in speech, always ready to talk about their relationship. Such men are irritating to other men and strike them as effeminate. The masculine objection is not to love, but to self-revelation through words rather than actions” (p. 124). Men envision God as righteous and powerful. A man “seeks out dangers and tests of his courage and wears the scars of his adventures proudly” (p. 43). He readily risks his life for the good of those he loves, for the safety of his community. He’s motivated to save others! “[O]f the twenty most dangerous civilian occupations, all but one are almost entirely male” (p. 44). Men desire a religion which appeals to their hunger for heroism, opportunities to face danger and thereby prove oneself manly. Discipline and pain, however costly, validate one’s efforts and provide meaning for the competitor. In America, revivalist preaching, with its condemnation of sin and call to repentance– combined with its promise of “death and rebirth” as a pathway to virtue and holy masculinity–strongly appeals to men. Crisis experiences, conversions, are far more important to men than to women.

The Old Testament reveals a thoroughly masculine Yahweh, a God who freely loves, guides and disciplines His people. “Only in the Hebrew Scriptures do we find an all-powerful and all-good Father-God” (p. 67). Under the OT’s patriarchal system, “fathers care for their families and find their emotional centers in their offspring. In ancient Israel, ‘the image of father was not primarily one of authority and power, but one of adoptive love, covenant bonding, tenderness, and compassion.’ Patriarchy, we can easily forget, was and is a great achievement in the face of the male tendency to promiscuity and alienation from children and the women who bear them” (p. 67). Hardly a cross for women to bear, patriarchy is one of the graceful gifts granted them by a loving Father. This pattern was sustained in Christian circles for more than a millenium. Martyrs and monks, valiant warriors of the Lord, were celebrated, and the portrait of God as Father, Son and Spirit provided a rich nexus for a proper appreciation of both masculine and feminine traits.

In his concluding chapter, “The Future of Men in the Church,” Podles ventures some suggestions. “The crisis of the Church,” he says, “in every age is a crisis of saints. There is no modern, accessible model of saintly lay masculinity in Western culture. A man can be holy, or he can be masculine, but he cannot be both” (p. 207). Importantly, he says, “Feminism and homosexual propaganda dominate the liberal churches, and both drive men even further away” (p. 196). On the other hand, some conservative Evangelicals, such as Promise Keepers, seem to recognize what men crave and how to reach them with the Gospel. “The holy is a masculine category: men develop their masculine identity by a pattern of separation, both biological and cultural, and to be holy means to be separated. The more transcendent God is, the holier he is and the more masculine he is” (p. 197).

Today’s feminist theologians, consequently, pose a threat to the Faith akin to ancient Gnosticism, for they seem determined to eliminate all vestiges of the masculine in God, are deconstructing the Trinity. Liturgies celebrating “Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier” replace those devoted to “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” To the extent they succeed, to the extent women take control of the Church, men will simply depart. For they are not interested in a “Church Impotent.”

If you’re wondering “what’s happening now,” David Frum’s How We Got Here: The ’70s: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse) (New York: Basic Books, c. 2000) provides valuable clues. “This book,” he says, attempts “to describe the most total social transformation that the United States has lived through since the coming of industrialism, a transformation (a revolution!) that has not ended yet” (p. xxiv). Certainly times have changed. As a cultural windsock look at crime. In 1960 the United States was a reasonably safe society. Even in New York few apartments had chain locks on their doors. But suddenly “the safety and civility of mid-century America crumbled. One’s chance of being robbed, raped, assaulted, or murdered nearly tripled between 1960 and 1980” (p. 12). Public and private corruption (remember Watergate and Spiro Agnew!) savaged society. Ironically, we also “made a quiet, collective decision in the 1950s and early 1960s to view crime more indulgently” (p. 15).

Duty too has lost its lustre. The nation’s traditional work ethic no longer works. Earlier generations had worked and saved, doing without things to secure a better future for their children. In the 70s, however, “something astonishing happened. Sometime after 1969, millions of ordinary Americans decided that they would no longer live this way” (p. 57). Instead, they placed themselves at the center of their special cosmos. Looking Out for Number One defined the decade. Absorbed in themselves, millions of folks dissolved their marriages. During the first two-thirds of the 20th century only “one American marriage in twenty ended in divorce. Since 1980, more than two marriages out of every five–nearly half–have ended in divorce” (p. 73). The hit movie, Kramer vs, Kramer subtly endorsed the decision of Mrs. Kramer, who abandoned her husband and young son, prompting one of her friends to explain: “You may not want to hear this, but it took a lot of courage for her to walk out of here.” Ignoring children, communities, or the moral standards which knit the social fabric, men and women created a divorce culture both sentimental about and dangerous for children.

Still more: reason, for many, slipped into an emotional swamp. “Trust your feelings, Luke,” said Obi-Wan Kenobi in the fabulously successful Star Wars. So Skywalker closed his eyes and trusted “the Force.” Emotion surged to the foreground, even in traditionally male circles. Men, prior to 1970, emulated Gary Cooper and John Wayne–strong, silent types. They accepted Sir Walter Scott’s view that “Woe awaits a country when / She sees the tears of bearded men” (p. xviii). They expected their women to be chaste and defended, even to death, their honor. Today’s leading men, however, weep and hug, like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, while disdaining traditional sexual mores–and, all the while, emotionally appealing to “save the children” in every possible venue.

Churches prospered to the degree they embraced Emotivism, Frum says. “The United States in 1980 was, as it had been in 1960, the most religious industrial country on earth. But the form of its religiosity had been dramatically altered. The post-1980 American faith was more emotional, more forgiving, more individualistic, more variegated, and often more bizarre. It was less obedient, less ritualistic, less intellectual. It concerned itself more with self-fulfillment and less with social reform. Americans yearned as fervently as ever for a direct encounter with the transcendent, but they chafed against the authority that had once guided them toward that encounter. They hungered for religion’s sweets, but rejected religion’s discipline; wanted its help in trouble, but not the strictures that might have kept them out of trouble; expected its ecstasy, but rejected its ethics; demanded salvation, but rejected the harsh, antique dichotomy of right and wrong” (p. 158).

Desires, in the 1970s, became imperatives. “Are we having fun yet?” was more than rhetorical! It was a mandate–we must have fun! In the main, fun meant sex. Traditional inhibitions and prohibitions lost their power, especially among the women liberated by their newfound faith in feminism. “Feminists like Germaine Greer championed promiscuity as a means to break women’s “doglike” devotion to men, and the young women of the 1970s listened and obeyed” (p. 191). “In 1967, 85 percent of the parents of college-age young people condemned premarital sex as morally wrong; by 1979, only 37 percent of parents still held out against the trend of the times” (p. 191).

Frum also examines America’s decision to abandon South Vietnam to the Communists, the fiscal decisions of JFK and LBJ to breed inflation in order to secure political goals, and the problems schools have suffered as a result of social engineering strategies. There’s lots in How We Got Here, presented in an altogether engaging manner. And it certainly helps us understand why we’re here!

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Roger Kimball is one of America’s most astute social analysts. He shares Frum’s concerns and agrees with many of his conclusions, but he focuses on a different decade to explain how this nation changed. In The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America (San Francisco: Encounter Books, c. 2000), he argues that America, primarily in the ’60s, suffered an upheaval of dramatic proportions, leaving us amidst the debris of a tattered civilization. A “momentous social and moral assault” has especially triumphed in “our educational and cultural institutions, and in the degraded pop culture that permeates our lives like a corrosive fog” (p. 5).

America’s historic ethos has collapsed. And we’ve also lost our ability to engage in rational discourse. Following logical arguments, weighing evidence, ascertaining truth, rarely matter in a culture ruled by powerful feelings. The young rebels of the ’60s, having failed to overthrow the American political and economic system, followed the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s admonition to make a “long march through the institutions.” So too Herbert Marcuse’s advice, “working against the established institutions while working in them,” became the modus operandi of leftists intent on remaking their world.

The revolution began in the 1950’s, when “a gospel of emancipation” was first preached by the “Beats” in San Francisco. The icons of the emergent counterculture– Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs–spouted nihilistic paeans to drugs, sex, and unfettered personal freedom. In Kimball’s judgment, the Beats’ philosophy permeated the 1960s with its “ultimate institutionalization of immoralist radicalism: the institutionalization of drugs, pseudo-spirituality, promiscuous sex, virulent anti-Americanism, naive anti-capitalism, and the precipitous decline of artistic and intellectual standards” (p. 41). By any reasonable standard, the “literary works” of Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs lack merit. But they glorified drugs, promiscuous sex, pornography, madness and criminality, themes which found a ready reception in the Dionysian culture emergent in the ’60s. Norman Mailer graphically illustrated such, regaling his readers with celebrations of violence and mayhem, of “hipsters” who indulged in “absolute sexual freedom.” Indeed, “The only Hip morality,” Mailer asserted, “is to do what one feels whenever and wherever it is possible” (p. 79).

The influential literary critic, Susan Sontag, shared Mailer’s stance, cultivating what Tom Wolfe rightly labeled “radical chic.” Her contempt for America, joined with her adoration of Cuba, North Vietnam, and China, granted her special status in New York’s counter-cultural circles. Her adroit rhetorical abilities enabled her to find no flaws in communist regimes, while she declared, in 1966, that America “deserves” to have its wealth expropriated by Third World peoples. “The white race,” she said, “is the cancer of human history” (p. 97).

Following the lead of literary leaders, elite universities largely capitulated to the counter-culture. In truth, nothing “more vividly epitomizes the long march of America’s cultural revolution than the student uprisings that swept across college and university campuses from the mid-1960s through the early 1970s” (p. 102). Overtly, students protested the war, racism, university policies. More profoundly, however, they sustained a cultural “revolution that brought together radical politics, drug abuse, sexual libertinage, an obsession with rock music, exotic forms of spiritual titillation, a generalized antibourgeois animus, and an attack on the intellectual and moral foundations of the entire humanistic enterprise” (p. 102). Cornell University President James A. Perkins, a “liberal president of a liberal institution,” perfectly symbolizes the capitulation of the professorate. He collapsed when facing gun-toting students (some of whom now preside over major American institutions such as TIAA-CREF!). His cowardice, Walter Berns says, “made it easier for those who came after him to surrender to students armed only with epithets (‘racists,’ ‘sexists,’ ‘elitists,’ ‘homophobes’),” (p. 119) leading to the egregious examples of “political correctness” on America’s campuses.

The intellectuals shaping students’ minds in the ’60s were Marx, Freud, and William Reich, mediated through the likes of Paul Goodman, Norman O. Brown, and Herbert Marcuse. “It would be difficult,” Kimball insists, to overestimate their influence” (p. 157). Brown and Marcuse “were fantasists. Their world proceeds from the assumption that human nature can be repealed” (p. 168). As avid utopians, they built air castles and inspired their devotees to imagine they could incarnate their dreams. Importantly, as philosopher Leszek Kolakowski says, “Utopians, once they attempt to convert their visions into practical proposals, come up with the most malignant project ever devised: they want to institutionalize fraternity, which is the surest way to totalitarian despotism” (p. 128). So we see, from all sides, proposals made, laws enacted, which impose an egalitarian halter on all of us.

Kimball shows how Charles Reich’s The Greening of America, Timothy Leary’s enthusiasm for LSD and drugs in general, Eldridge Cleaver’s career with the Black Panthers and popularity as the author of Soul on Ice, and the New York Review of Books (perceptively labeled by Tom Wolfe as “the chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic”) firmly established radical views in elite intellectual circles. Consequently, we now live in a radically different nation than existed in 1960. The “long march” has triumphed. Its foes have largely fallen. “It is both ironical and dispiriting,” writes Kimball in his final paragraph, “to realize that the counterculture may have won its most insidious victories not among its natural sympathizers on the Left but, on the contrary, among those putatively conservative opponents who can no longer distinguish between material affluence and the moral good. In other words, it may be that what the Sixties have wrought above all is widespread spiritual anesthesia. To a degree frightening to contemplate, we have lost that sixth sense that allows us to discriminate firmly between civilization and its discontents” (p. 282).

Kimball’s The Long March builds upon his earlier work, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, c. 1990, 1998), “an unhappy tale of intellectual chicanery, pedagogical dereliction, and moral irresponsibility” (p. xix). Many of today’s academics, following the lead of Jacques Derrida and others, deny there are “truths” to be found through the “liberal arts.” Everything is “socially constructed” and thus subject to everyone’s will-to-power. Sadly enough, Kimball reminds us, “behind any cavalier dismissal of truth lies a disdain for empirical reality that can easily be enlisted by tyranny” (p. 58).

Occupying prestigious positions in major universities, tenured radicals such as Duke University’s Fredric Jameson declare that everything “is, ‘in the last analysis’ political” (p. 2). To change the nation, to change the world, to design the “new man” that Marcuse desired, today’s academic leftists have secured academic posts which enable them to sally forth in the war against Western Civilization. With Jesse Jackson at Stanford, they chant “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture’s got to go.” All this may be judged a “new sophistry” akin to that espoused by Plato’s Thrasymachus, who declared: “What I say is that ‘just’ or ‘right’ means nothing but what is to be interest of the stronger party.” So we find Professor Stanley Fish professing, in the title of one of his books, that There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech . . . and It’s a Good Thing Too. There are no such things, says Fish with penultimate Sophist skill, as truth, justice, intrinsic merit, or facts. Everything’s rhetorical–whatever we want it to be or can manipulate others to believe. “It is first and last,” Fish writes, “a question of power in relation to the putting of constraints.” In their general contempt for “foundationalism,” Fish and his followers propose Doing What Comes Naturally without concern for truthfulness, reason, or other constraints on one’s dreams and desires.

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Louis Dupre, a Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Yale University, brilliantly exegetes intellectual history in Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, c. 1973). Modernity stems from a fateful turning away from universals, in the late Middle Ages, toward the nominalism now raging triumphant in Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. So doing, it lost some of the ancient world’s most priceless insights.

Plato, above all, bequeathed to Western culture a rootage in the logos, which structures an intelligible kosmos. We can know it by mentally participating in its universal truths. It’s a good world–a eucosmia. And it “entails eunomia,” a good ordering of cosmic laws which “run parallel with the laws of the mind and of the city” (p. 24). While taking a different approach from his teacher, Aristotle sustained Plato’s deepest insight, “an ontotheological vision of the real. No less than Plato, he supports his metaphysics by the assumption that beings owe their intrinsic meaningfulness to the divine quality of the kosmos” (p. 27).

Magisterial thinkers in the High Middle Ages, St Bernard and St Bonaventure and preeminently St Thomas Aquinas, sustained and deepened the wisdom of the ancients. A truly high culture blossomed in the 13th century. But then the Franciscan John Duns Scotus took a new turn and “developed the primacy of the individual into a wholly new philosophy” (p. 38). Thenceforth, thinkers in the West abandoned the “universal concept of form” (p. 39). William of Ockham speeded up the disintegrative process, driving a wedge between man’s mind and the real world surrounding us. The world itself, Ockham thought, lacks any real essence. All that is is what it is simply because God, at the moment, wills it to be so. Voluntarism, adumbrated by the nominalists, shifted attention from man’s mind to his will. Modernity was born.

Consequently, during the Renaissance, influential thinkers increasingly turned to “man as the measure of all things,” a central tenet of humanism which expanded during the Age of Reason. One knows himself and through that knowledge knows the world around him. Then Descartes, the “father of modern philosophy,” determined to doubt everything not inwardly clear and self-evident to him. So he abandoned “the ancient concept of truth as participation in being and instead concentrated on the nature of representation and its internal criteria. Philosophy has mostly remained on this epistemological track ever since” (p. 86). Descartes’ most penetrating critic, Pascal, noted clearly that Descartes’ rejection of Aristotle’s common sense wisdom portended disaster. “One must know when it is right to doubt, to affirm, to submit. Anyone who does otherwise does not understand the force of reason” (p. 85).

Descartes, of course, eclipsed Pascal and presided over subsequent philosophical developments. Modernity sees the world through the mind of man, and nature stands malleable before his desires and thoughts. There’s no logos in the world, so we impose our own ideas upon it. There’s no given reality, no limit, to man’s freedom of choice. Without a natural law to discern and embrace, issuing laws becomes a matter of humanly posited edicts. We’re free to shape ourselves in accord with our inner aspirations. “Life itself increasingly came to be viewed as a project through which the person shapes his or her own selfhood” (p. 126). Consequently, Dupre concludes, “Around 1660, the last comprehensive integration of our culture began to break down into the fragmentary syntheses of a mechanist world picture, a classicist aesthetics, and a theological scholasticism. Soon a flat utilitarianism would be ready to serve as midwife to the birth of what Nietzsche called modern man’s small soul” (p. 248).

Passage to Modernity is one of the finest intellectual histories I’ve ever read. Dupre knows the material, addresses the major issues, and enables the reader too fathom the powerful currents which have shaped the modern mind. Worth reading and re-reading!

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In his postscript, Kimball urges academics to recover a commitment to classic sources. Popular culture should not provide curricular materials. “One should look to the past, not to the streets, for the substance of the liberal arts curriculum” (p. 232). The choice is momentous: barbarism or civilization! Education, as Hannah Arendt knew, is primarily a conserving endeavor. We face a “crisis of authority” in many areas, including that of education. “The crisis of authority in education,” Arendt said, “is most closely connected with the crisis of tradition, that is with the crisis in our attitude toward the realm of the past . . . . The problem of education in the modern world lies in the fact that by its very nature it cannot forego either authority or tradition, and yet it must proceed in a world that is neither structured by authority nor held together by tradition” (p. 93).

  David Schippers, under Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early ’60s, led the Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Unit, successfully prosecuting mobsters such as Sam Giancana. A lifelong Democrat, who twice voted for Bill Clinton, he was renowned for his skills as a prosecutor and trial attorney. Still more: he was known as a man of integrity. As The House of Representatives began its inquiries which led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, Congressman Henry Hyde brought Shippers to Washington to lead an oversight investigation of the Justice Department and to ultimately become Chief Counsel of the House Managers entrusted with pursuing the impeachment trial.

In Sellout: The Inside Story of President Clinton’s Impeachment (Washington: Regnery Publishing, Inc., c. 2000), Shippers provides us his “insider’s account” of what happened. Given the overwhelming evidence he found. President Clinton deserved to be impeached and removed from his office by the Senate for his “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Though Clinton claims to be “proud of what we did” during the impeachment process, actually claiming to have “saved the Constitution,” Schippers asserts that impeachment was the only suitable recourse to deal with “some of the most outrageous conduct ever engaged in by a president of the United States” (p. 3). Shippers is disgusted by the Senate’s refusal to seriously try the President, but he is even more outraged that “the President of the United States of America and his White House water boys sold out the American people–not just in a one-time spasm of political expedience, but in a deliberate snarl of sophistry and cynical manipulation of public opinion, the singular aim of which was political self-preservation. In the process, he soiled not just himself, but the Constitution, the public trust, and the Presidency itself” (p. 6). President Nixon resigned in 1974 rather than suffer impeachment. In Shippers’ judgment, however, “what Nixon did–and it was bad–did not remotely approach the abuses of office perpetrated by Clinton and his cronies. Nor did President Nixon attack the constitutional rights of private citizens the way Clinton did” (p. 175).

On first coming to Washington in 1998, Schippers supervised an investigation of the Immigration and Naturalization Service which, during the months prior to the 1996 election, had naturalized thousands of citizens in key election states (with 181 electoral votes), including California, New York, and Florida. Vice President Al Gore led the administration’s efforts to make sure 1,000,000 pro-Democratic “citizens” would be ready to vote in time to keep the Clinton-Gore team in office. Strong-arm tactics were used, laws regarding checking on criminal records were broken, and the goal was attained. Shippers and his staff poured over the documents and found reason to make criminal charges but had to turn to more urgent matters: the Starr Report.

As soon as the House began the impeachment procedures, Schippers discovered the Clinton modus operandi: do anything to avoid the truth. The most honorable of men, Henry Hyde, who bent over backwards to insure fairness in the procedure, received nothing but vilification from the Clinton crowd. When it was decided to make public the videotape of the President’s grand jury testimony, for example, the White House spinmasters “leaked” information to the press concerning Clinton’s angry behavior. When people saw the tape, they found him remarkably poised and thus wondered at all the hoopla. What they failed to see was his obvious lies, obvious to skilled lawyers but too subtle for ordinary folks. To the House Managers, and to Shippers, of course, the real “high crimes and misdemeanors” were perjury and obstruction of justice. “The President encouraged Lewinsky to lie,” Shippers asserts, “which is a felony” (p. 63). Clinton and his media accomplices, however, successfully reduced the whole inquiry to questions of “sex” with Monica Lewinsky. “The White House never ceased to astound and dismay me in the extent to which it demonstrated its utter contempt for the Judicial Branch, the Legislative Branch, and the American people” (p. 171).

As the House of Representatives began to consider the evidence (in 17 large boxes) against the President, Shippers found that the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee took their task quite seriously. They came to the room which contained the evidence, studied it, and asked good questions. As Jim Rogan said, “We have to be prepared to lose our seats if that results from doing our duty” (p. 108). The same was not true of the Democrats. Five of them, including Barney Frank of Massachusetts, didn’t even enter the room! Readers of Sellout, however, can read many pages of pertinent documents, detailing the data which Shippers finds so persuasive. The rape of Juanita Broaddrick, the harassment of Kathleen Willey and other women, the “obstruction, perjury, and witness tampering” in their cases, seem indubitable to Shippers.

When the Judiciary Committee brought its charges before the House of Representatives, once again it became clear to Shippers that Democrats cared little for the truth. During the four days when the evidence room was open for them, some 65 Republicans investigated the materials. “Not one Democrat saw fit to examine the evidence” (p. 254). The House did, of course, impeach Clinton on two counts, and the Senate was then entrusted to consider the charges. Here Shippers encountered perhaps his most disillusioning moments. Before the “trial” began, prominent Senators guaranteed it would be a sellout. “It was a flat-out rigged ball game, what we in Chicago would refer to as a First Ward election” (p. 7). Trent Lott, the Senate Majority Leader, was mainly interested in “bipartisanship” and popular opinion. Unlike the House Managers, Republican Senate leaders sought above all else to make sure they looked good and stayed in office!

Alaska’s Republican Senator Stevens actually told Henry Hyde: “Henry, I don’t care if you prove he raped a woman and then stood up and shot her dead–you are not going to get sixty-seven votes” (p. 23). Joe Biden, of Delaware, curtly informed them that Senators “make our own rules” and cared not for truth and justice. As the trial began, of course, all 100 Senators marched to the front and solemnly swore to conduct a fair trial. Sadly enough, Schippers says, for many “the oath had meant nothing to them, absolutely nothing” (p. 24). That not a single senator even bothered to look at the evidence assembled by Shippers and his staff reveals the disinterest which pervaded this august body! The alleged trial was anything but a trial. No witnesses! No cross-examination! No detailed presentation of evidence! It was all a show orchestrated by the Clinton clique. “Lies, cowardice, hypocrisy, cynicism, amorality, butt-covering–these were the squalid political body parts that, squeezed through the political processor, combined to make a mockery of the impeachment process” (pp. 1-2).

Fortunately Shippers reveres the law, and the truth which preserves it. That the highest officials of this nation have little concern for a “nation under law” or for leaders who tell the truth, distresses him. In a moving section, he writes:

“I do not care what you are lying about. If you’re the President of the United States and you lie under oath, you should be removed from office.

“But my fellow Democrats voted unanimously to put the President above the law.

“They affirmed that a Democratic president can get away with lying, obstructing justice, and doing anything necessary to stay in office, even if it means destroying the legal underpinning of our political system.

“They treated the legal rights of a citizen–Paula Jones–as a trifle to be brushed aside.

“They treated Lady Justice as though she were a harlot.

“And they should be accountable where it hurts–at the ballot box–by Americans who believe that truth matters, that we live by the rule of law, and that justice should be done” (p. 97).

This is a powerful book, written in anger–the righteous anger which seeks to do good for others. Schippers wants us to know the truth because he really cares about this republic, a nation under law. He warns us that “the integrity of our public officers mirrors that of the citizens” (p. 283). How insiders of the Clinton administration, notably Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, fare in the coming election, Schippers says, will reveal much about this nation’s character and destiny.

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A closely related treatise, by Susan Schmidt and Michael Weisskopf, Truth at Any Cost: Ken Starr and the Unmaking of Bill Clinton (New York: HarperCollins, c. 2000), provides a journalistic account of President Clinton’s impeachment. The authors were investigative reporters for the Washington Post before Weisskopf signed on with Time. They portray Starr as an honorable, disciplined lawyer who sought to do what he was assigned to do as special prosecutor (a position he ironically had long opposed as legally dubious). He and his staff–the Office of the Independent Counsel–successfully prosecuted numbers of folks associated with the Clintons and submitted to Congress a referral that they considered sufficient for impeaching the President. Though the same age as Clinton, in many ways Starr is his antithesis: they are the “tortoise and the hare,” according to Schmidt and Weisskopf. Starr almost religiously revered the law and lived uprightly, a model of temperance and marital fidelity. While Clinton “got through Yale Law School borrowing notes and cramming for exams, Starr never missed a class at Duke Law School, taking exquisitely organized notes and freely lending them to less dedicated students” (p. 113). Clinton dealt and played with the law, as with life, in a “pragmatic, compromising” way (p. 6).

Clinton’s cronies, such as Webb Hubbell, were the same. Hubbell plea bargained and promised to provide the OIC important evidence, but he slickly “suckered” Starr and used his immunity to avoid revealing damaging information concerning the Clintons. Amazingly, for remaining silent he managed to make $600,000 during one year when he was largely unemployed! As a result of their investigations, “The OIC lawyers also came to believe that the Clintons were ruthless. They operated like a crime family, expecting friends and aides to protect them even against their own best interests” (p. 11). Still more: “By the end of 1997, Starr had arrived at the view that Clinton’s conduct was lawless, his presidency a colossal moral failure” (p. 11). When the Jones and Lewinsky cases intersected to detail the President’s misdeeds, the OIC decided to draft a referral to the House of Representatives justifying his impeachment.

To counter Starr’s investigation, the Clintons orchestrated an all-out assault on Starr. Harold Ickes served as field marshall of the operations, and he promised to raise sufficient funds to equip his underlings with everything needed to relentlessly attack the OIC. “Everything is fair game,” he said, and anything which might harm Starr and his staff was encouraged. The Clintons almost always lost when dealing with evidence before a grand jury or in a court of law, where facts and logic and truth were prized. But in the media circus where they excelled, they could sway public opinion and make sure their leader stayed in power. Ridiculing Starr’s religious life, lying about his personal life, leaking misleading information to the press, manipulating opinion-makers such as the New York Times, distorting the data–anything to distract the public’s attention from the truth concerning the Royal Twosome! White House lawyers determined to attack Starr “with every weapon they could master. Starr had to be demonized. They had to make the investigation a referendum on Ken Starr instead of Bill Clinton” (p. 92). “Clinton’s team went after Starr with an intensity usually reserved for political enemies in a must-win election, not for government officials duly appointed by a panel of federal judges” (p. 96).

In the midst of it all, the nation’s Attorney General, who should have supported the Office of the Independent Counsel, betrayed it. To Ken Starr, Janet Reno “was a modern-day Pontius Pilate, allowing the crucifixion of innocents. She had compromised the grand traditions of the Justice Department, he said. She had forsaken her fidelity to the rule of law and turned his beloved institution into a mouthpiece for the White House” (p. 131). She supported the Secret Service’s refusal to cooperate with the OIC, leading to a highly-successful media-blitz by the Clintons, portraying the agents as loyal men forced by Starr to spy on the President. Private sessions with Reno’s staff, it now seems, were conduits alerting the White House to the OIC’s plans, enabling them to dissemble and manipulate and defuse any public outcry. One of the appellate judges who heard some of the legal arguments, Laurence Silberman, a Reagan appointee, overturned some of the White House staff’s claims for “executive privilege” and rebuked Reno and her staff, excoriating her for “the terrible political pressures and strains of conscience that bear upon senior political appointees of the Justice Department.” He solemnly asserted “that ‘The president’s agents literally and figuratively “declared war” on the independent counsel,’ and that Reno had been ‘acting as the president’s counsel under the false guise of representing the United States'” (p. 197).

Step-by-step, blow-by-blow, Truth at Any Cost details the developments which led to the President’s impeachment. We follow the events, the phone calls, the memos, which made Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp and William Bennett and James Carville so center-stage for so many months. We learn that Paula Jones’ lawyers subpoenaed Clinton for all documents in his possession concerning Kathleen Willey, who had accused him of improper behavior in the Oval Office. He replied, through his lawyers, that he had none. Then, the morning after she appeared on “60 Minutes,” they suddenly found and (illegally) published some of her personal papers, hoarded in the White house for just such a moment. The convolutions of Clinton’s denials, and admissions, concerning his affair with Lewinsky, are clearly covered in the book, and no one can doubt the President’s devious duplicity throughout.

Despite difficulties, however, the Starr inquiry went reasonably well until he made a monumental mistake. He actually trusted a journalist, Steven Brill, a legal writer who had 20 years earlier done a balanced report on the judge in The American Lawyer. This time, however, Brill manipulated the interview with Starr to make it appear (in the inaugural edition of Brill’s Content) that he had leaked information which should be known only to the grand jury. Doing so, Brill said, Starr had used the press and abused the power of his office as Special Prosecutor. “‘There is a lot more evidence of Starr and some of his deputies committing this felony,” Brill wrote, ‘than there is of the president or Vernon Jordan committing a felony'” (p. 173). Forget the fact that Brill’s charges were groundless, utterly untrue. Almost immediately Clinton allies in the New York Times and the Sunday TV talk shows repeated Brill’s accusations.

Once the story broke, Starr took all the blame. “I have no excuses,” he said. On cue, Clinton’s lawyers flamboyantly charged to Judge Norma Johnson’s courtroom, determined to make the most of Brill’s charges. Johnson, a Democrat named by President Jimmy Carter, had generally supported Starr in the many legal disputes he’d waged with the White House lawyers. But she responded favorably to the Clintons on this charge, insisting that the OIC prove its innocence or be cited for contempt. It was a serious accusation, a pivotal moment in the investigation. Starr’s lawyers were quite devastated. Suddenly attention which had been devoted to the investigation itself had to be diverted to defending themselves. “The controversy highlighted what many of Starr’s aides considered his greatest weakness: his lack of street smarts” (p. 184). In a court room, dealing with legal briefs, he was peerless. But he was so old-fashioned that he trusted people; he expected them to be as honorable as himself. In time the issue was resolved and the investigation recovered some its momentum, but it was an almost crippling blow, apparently lending credence to the rabid rhetoric of James Carville and other Clintonistas.

The crescendo of events moved ever onward, however, and Starr’s legal skills, using indisputable data, such as stains on Lewinsky’s blue dress, led toward a showdown between himself and the President. Clinton’s lawyers finessed an agreement whereby he could avoid a subpoena, with all its legal entailments, and provide a “voluntary statement” which promised to provide the information Starr wanted. Going the subpoena route, he knew, would drag on endlessly as Clinton’s legal machine utilized every delaying tactic imaginable. Believing that the President would have to speak honestly in such a deposition, Starr risked it. On August 17, 1999, Clinton appeared (by video) before the grand jury. “At last, the president and his accuser would confront each other over the issue of truth. Starr saw it as black or white; Clinton perceived a spectrum of grays. It was the central question, the fundamentally different way of seeing the world that had always divided them” (p. 235). However, Clinton insisted that he need not respond to certain questions! In fact, he came into the room and read a prepared statement, admitting to “inappropriate intimate contact” with Lewinsky. He admitted sexual improprieties but not to lying under oath, the truly serious charge.

After dealing with Monica Lewinsky’s false statements in her affidavit, denying sexual contact with the President, to which Clinton had earlier asserted was “absolutely true,” one of the OIC lawyers asked him why he had allowed his lawyer, Bob Bennett, to tell a federal judge that “there is absolutely no sex of any kind.” Responding, in what David Schippers says (in Sellout) is probably the penultimate clue to his character, Clinton hedged: “Well, in the present tense that is an accurate statement.” Dancing with semantics, he later responded to a direct question concerning the “completely false” nature of his statement: “It depends on what the meaning of the word is is” (p. 238). To his way of thinking, “If is means is and never has been, that is not–that is one thing. If means there is none, that is a completely true statement” (p. 238).

Ever able to play to the camera, even Clinton’s interrogation seemed to help him! He played to the folks in the grand jury. And he played with the sympathies of the American people, turning his “mea culpa” admission on TV into an attack on his evil enemies. Wife Hillary joined in the chorus, as did the full force of his loyal Party. Ken Starr and his staff, dogged as usual, persevered and delivered the evidence they’d compiled to the House of Representatives. At this point, Truth at Any Cost concludes. The book makes clear, however, that Starr is an admirable man, deeply committed to the truth. He lost the battle for public opinion, in part because he never knew how to massage and manipulate it. But in the ultimate scales of justice, he may well be vindicated and a shining example of all that Bill Clinton is not.