Throughout the past century a number of discerning thinkers have lamented the immanent demise of Western Civilization.  Thus when Jesse Jackson led Stanford University students in chanting “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Civ has got to go,” he merely described a fait accompli long in the making.  One of the clairvoyant critics discerning this cultural trajectory was C.S. Lewis, who in 1954 (after long being denied promotion at Oxford) accepted an appointment to a chair created for him at Cambridge University as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature.  Many of us know Lewis as a Christian apologist, penning such classics as Mere Christianity, or as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia.  But he devoted much of his life to research, writing, and teaching, and one cannot understand his popular works and worldview without appreciating his deep immersion in the Medieval world.  Nor can one understand the Christian Faith he embraced without seeing its Medieval background.  Thus, concluding his inaugural lecture—“De Descriptione Temporum”—he acknowledged he was “becoming, in such halting fashion as I can, the spokesman of Old Western Culture,” and he would treasure his historian’s role, for doing so “does indeed liberate us from the present, from the idols of our own market-place.  But I think it liberates us from the past too.  I think no class of men are less enslaved to the past than historians.  The unhistorical are usually, without knowing it, enslaved to a fairly recent past.”

Lewis then pointed out the great gap separating Cambridge undergrads from the Old Western Culture he represented.  “Wide as the chasm is,” however, “those who are native to different sides of it can still meet, are meeting in this room.”  He confessed to belonging “far more to that Old Western Order than to yours.”  Indeed, he rather resembled a dinosaur or a Neanderthaler!  Yet if one were interested in either species—and if one of them would mysteriously appear and could be tested or even talk—then, “should we not almost certainly learn from him some things about him which the best modem anthropologist could never have told us?  He would tell us without knowing he was telling.  One thing I know:  I would give a great deal to hear any ancient Athenian, even a stupid one, talking about Greek tragedy.  He would know in his bones so much that we seek in vain.  At any moment some chance phrase might, unknown to him, show us where modern scholarship had been on the wrong track for years.  Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you somewhat as that Athenian might stand.  I read as a native texts what you must read as foreigners.”  Yet  because he could speak as a native, he might “yet be useful as a specimen.  I would even dare to go further.  Speaking not only for myself but for all other Old Western men whom you may meet, I would say, use your specimens while you can. There are not going to be many more dinosaurs.”   Speaking thusly, C.S. Lewis clearly found much worth heeding in the Medieval World.

That position Lewis made clear in is first scholarly treatise, The Allegory of Love:  A Study in Medieval Tradition (published in 1936)—demonstrating, his biographer George Sayer says, that he “was a great literary critic” who was “without exception, highly praised by reviewers.”  He was subsequently asked to write a volume for The Oxford History of English Literature.  It took him a dozen years to research and write, but he had completed his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama when he moved to Cambridge.  This is a dense work of scholarship, of interest mainly to literary scholars, revealing Lewis’s amazing mastery of primary sources he discussed.  But his lengthy Introduction, “New Learning and New Ignorance,” detailed some of the reasons he found the Medieval World proffering perspectives worth recovering.  Certainly there was a “New Learning” evident in the 16th Century—preeminently the oft-celebrated turn to natural science.  But it was not a “new” turn to actually studying Nature, which had been widely done in the Middle Ages by men such as Roger Bacon and Albert the Great.  The “New Learning” was a philosophical turn from wondering at the majesty of Nature to controlling her!  Lewis especially stressed the “dreams of power which then haunted the European mind,” markedly evident in the work of Francis Bacon, who referred to her as “a spouse for fruit” rather than a “courtesan for pleasure.”   The “New Learning” was also distinguished by its humanistic, rather than scholastic, approach to learning.  Thus men such as Erasmus did not much concern themselves with propositional logic as with literary style, making “eloquence the sole test of learning” (p. 30).  Indeed, at Oxford in 1550 “the works of the [Medieval] scholastics were ‘cast of of college libraries’” and “publicly burned, along with mathematical books, which were suspected of being ‘Popish or diabolical’” (pp. 30-31). 

In their hatred of the Middle Ages the Humanists found allies in some English Puritans who adhered to the theology of John Calvin.  They also rejected both the Natural Law and the political philosophy espoused by Aristotle and Aquinas, preparing the soil for the Divine Right of Kings position so evident by the end of the century.  For Aquinas, kingly power “is never free and never originates.  Its business is to enforce something that is already there, something given in the divine reason or in the existing custom” (p. 48).  That view was rejected by William Tyndale, who insisted (in 1528) “that ‘The King is in this world without law and may at his own lust do right and wrong and shall give accounts to God only’” (p. 49).  Basic to the English Reformation, of course, was the autocratic exercise of power by Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth I.  In the next century Thomas Hobbes rationalized such autocracy in his Leviathan, a book totally at odds with the Ancient and Medieval Natural Law tradition, making “political power something inventive, creative.  Its seat is transferred from the reason which humbly and patiently discerns what is right to the will which decrees what shall be right.  And this means that we are already heading, via Rousseau, Hegel” and others to “the view that each society is totally free to create its own ‘ideology’ and that its members, receiving all their moral standards from it, can of course assert no moral claim against it” (p. 50).  It will be the deranged world powerfully depicted in Lewis’s dystopia, That Hideous Strength. 

Shortly before he died, Lewis collected his lectures on Medieval and Renaissance literature in a (posthumously published) text titled The Discarded Image (Cambridge:  Cambridge university Press, c. 1964).  In his lectures he tried to portray the Medieval Model of the Universe as a “supreme work of art,” rather like the soaring gothic cathedrals at Chartres or Cologne.  He admitted  to making “no serious effort to hide the fact that the old Model delights me as I believe it delighted our ancestors.  Few constructions of the imagination seem to me to have combined splendour, sobriety, and coherence in the same degree” (p. 216).   Obviously it had serious deficiencies, and there is no going back to that world.  But we may, if we rightly study, find in it wisdom for today.

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Recently Chris R. Armstrong, in Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians: Finding Authentic Faith in a Forgotten Age with C. S. Lewis (Grand Rapids:  Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition, c. 2016), takes seriously Lewis’s invitation to study the Medieval World.  Still more:  he shares G. K. Chesterton’s conviction that you could not “be a proper medievalist until you cared deeply enough about today to apply medieval insights to your own life and thinking.” We moderns actually live in a “tiny windowless universe,” brilliantly described by “G. K. Chesterton’s definition of insanity:  ‘The clean and well-lit prison of one idea.’  Our modern room is well lit by the bare bulb of science.  But of what lies beyond, we see nothing” (p. 66).  To go beyond modernity’s prison requires recovering pre-modernity! 

Providing some personal information, Armstrong (a church historian with a Ph.D. from Duke who edited Christian History for several years and now teaches at Wheaton College) tells of coming to Christ in a “wonderful” charismatic church in Nova Scotia 30 years ago.  It “was one of those modern suburban megachurches with an auditorium-like sanctuary,” and on “Sunday mornings, I would walk in and feel the palpable presence of the all-powerful and all-loving Lord.”  Yet his faith seemed a bit “precarious,” resting “on a foundation made up of the words of our favorite Bible passages (our ‘canon within the canon’), the sermons of our pastors, and a roster of approved visiting evangelists.  There was no sense at all of the whole mystical, historical massiveness of a church that had been around for two thousand years, no sense that our foundation actually stretched down and back through time, resting on such giants in the faith as John Wesley, Martin Luther, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Ignatius of Antioch . . . .   I now see that my early sense of the insecurity of the church stemmed from what J. I. Packer identifies as evangelicalism’s ‘stunted ecclesiology,’ rooted in our alienation from our own past.  Without a healthy engagement with our past, including historical definitions of ‘church,’ we are being true neither to Scripture nor to our theological identity as church!” (p. 46). 

In truth, Armstrong was discovering how the Protestant Reformation had effectively discarded much of “Medieval Wisdom.”  This was, in part, due to the “super-spiritualizing tendency” early evident in “the thought of Ulrich Zwingli,” who tended to denigrate “the ‘outer,’ physical life.  Only the inner and spiritual was to be trusted, not only in worship and devotion but also in the ethic of daily life:  ‘The outer, whether it meant Church-as-institution, the sacrament or ascetic practices was automatically reduced to the role of being no more than an expression (always suspect and dangerous at that) of the inner, or else was condemned outright as materialistic and idolatrous.’”  To refute Zwingli et al. Armstrong wrote this treatise!  For he wants to lead us to “what I have found to be the wisest piece of medieval wisdom:  creation and incarnation are not rote doctrines to be learned, committed to memory, and ignored in our daily practice, but rather are practical linchpins of what it means to lead a good human life in the light of the gospel” (p. 28).   He further believes, in accord with Lewis, that “the scientific revolution and its sequels—such as the Enlightenment—began to sap the material world of its spiritual and moral significance, and that this diminishment has only continued and intensified through today” p. 22).  

This diminishment was evident when 19th century American Evangelicals embraced the “immediatism” popularized by Phoebe Palmer’s The Way of Holiness.  “In it, she said about the traditional Methodist teaching of sanctification:  ‘Yes, brother, THERE IS A SHORTER WAY!’” (p. 7).  Subsequently, various preachers embraced her “optimistic creed,” declaring:  “No more would Christians have to pursue a fraught and painstaking path to holiness.”  Rather:  “By simply gathering their resolve, making a single act of consecration, and ‘standing on the promises’—certain Scripture texts that seem to hold out entire sanctification as an attainable reality—they can enjoy total freedom from sin.  This message galvanized a generation and set a tone for evangelicalism that continues to ring out today.  It may be fair to say that the teaching of a ‘shorter way to holiness,’ whether in Palmer’s more Wesleyan formulation or in the Reformed-influenced ‘higher life’ variations introduced later in the century, fueled the single most prominent and widespread movement among postbellum and Gilded Age evangelicals.  It swept across the nation’s West and South like a sanctified brushfire, birthed new denominations such as the Nazarenes and Christian & Missionary Alliance, fed the all-consuming fervor of temperance activism, and laid the groundwork for the Pentecostal movement of the following century” (p. 7).  

The roots of this message extended back to the emphasis on “heart religion” promoted by Puritan writers and illustrated in John Wesley’s Aldersgate experience, wherein he felt his “heart strangely warmed.”   It was celebrated in 19th century camp meetings.  Indeed, Palmer’s prescription of immediatism ties into the “syndrome of pressurized pragmatism, which Alasdair MacIntyre has identified as the chief cause of many American ills, militating as it does against careful reflection on accumulated wisdom.”  To Armstrong, Palmer’s formulation truncated the fullness of the Christian faith and fell short of the more demanding and authentic spirituality evident in the Medieval World.  Though a Methodist, Palmer unfortunately neglected some of Wesley’s repeated emphases, for he insisted “that those powerful moments of repentance and coming to faith are just the ‘porch’ or the ‘door’ into the Christian life.  The substance of the Christian life, which lasts as long as we live, is holiness.  Wesley has a favorite phrase to explain holiness.  He says it is ‘having the mind of Christ and walking as he walked.’  Achieving that steady character in ourselves requires, in the motto Eugene Peterson borrows from Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), ‘a long obedience in the same direction’” (p. 222). 

To correct serious deficits in this tradition, Armstrong urges us to return to “the Middle Ages with Lewis’s guidance” and recover the fullness of the Christian Faith.  To do so we must challenge “‘immediatism’ in two ways.  First, we must return the authoritative interpretation of Scripture to the Church, removing it from purely individual reason and experience.  To desire to learn from the cloud of witnesses or ‘church triumphant’—those on whose shoulders we stand—is to shift authority back to the older style, weighting Scripture-read-through-tradition more heavily than the dictates of our own freely exercised reason and experience” (p. 11).  Second, we must return to liturgical worship services conducted by a priestly clergy.   As Lewis aged, he increasingly “turned to the early and medieval catholic traditions revived and preserved in high-church Anglicanism.”  He began going to confession and found “the experience was like a tonic to his soul.”  He came to love the “liturgy, the 1662 Prayer Book, the Daily Office, and praying through the Psalter each month.”  He came to believe the Eucharist is more than a mere memorial and “‘found himself able to ‘experience Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament’” (p. 39).

Lewis was, obviously, immersed in and enamored by Tradition!  He loved the “old books” and urged people to read and re-read them.  He “wanted to stand in the gap of cataclysmic cultural loss, to bring “the tradition” back to the people” (p. 56).   He particularly treasured the Medieval emphasis on the Natural Law, as is evident to any reading Mere Christianity or The Abolition of Man, saying:  “‘Aristotle had assumed it, and Plato.  Cicero had spoken of it when he called it the law that is not written down.  When St. Paul wrote that even the Gentiles knew that certain kinds of behavior were wrong, he was appealing to natural law.  This same idea informed the thought of St. Augustine in the fourth century and St. Thomas in the thirteenth, and influenced Anglicanism at its origin through Richard Hooker’s [scholastically framed] Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity’” (p. 51).   Indeed, in the last essay he wrote for publication (“We Have No ‘Right to Happiness’”) Lewis declared the Natural Law “to be basic to civilization.” 

One of the things Lewis loved about Medieval Christian Culture was its celebration of Reason and the life of the mind and “‘could not [said his friend Owen Barfield] help trying to live by what he thought’” (p. 73).   As Lewis noted in his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, his “conversion” was almost “purely philosophical” in nature.  Deeply read in Medieval theology, he understood its grandeur and drank deeply from masters such as Thomas Aquinas.  Armstrong argues “that in everything he wrote, whether nonfiction or fiction, Lewis wrote first of all as a Christian moral philosopher.  And I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to add that he was a medieval Christian moral philosopher” (p. 98).  As he began his Christian journey, Armstrong learned that Luther and many Reformers had severed moral behavior and spiritual discipline from justification by faith alone.  “Luther taught ‘imputed righteousness’:  being covered by the blood of Christ, making up for our complete inability to be good.”  Subsequently “critics said this teaching led to ‘antinomianism,’ a fifty-dollar word for moral lawlessness.”  Four hundred years later Dietrich Bonhoeffer “identified in his Lutheran church this same suspicion of any Christian effort toward righteousness—he called it ‘cheap grace’” (p. 95)   Consequently a “conundrum” persists:  “how to train believers in moral good while also teaching a radical message of grace still plagues evangelical Protestantism.  Protestants have fallen so in love with the message of grace and have so spiritualized their faith that questions of morality—at least the morality of public, communal life—have receded from view.  As the late Dallas Willard described many modern believers, we are ‘not only saved by grace [but] paralyzed by it’” (p. 96).  Or, as Richard Lovelace says, there is a “sanctification gap” in evangelical ranks.  

Armstrong argues we need to recover the “sacramental spirituality” evident in 13th luminaries such as Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas and Dante, who all saw the world as theomorphic, or God-shaped.  “Sacramentalism is the concept that the outward and visible can convey the inward and spiritual.  Physical matters and actions can become transparent vehicles of divine activity and presence.  In short, material things can be God’s love made visible” (p. 143).  Sacramentalists think “all creation is in some sense a reflection of the Creator,” for He is everywhere, always present in His world.  Still more, in beholding the beauty of creation, Lewis said:  “‘We do not want merely to see beauty . . . .  We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it’” (p. 145).  

On the basis of his examination of Medieval Wisdom in C.S. Lewis, Armstrong concludes there is a tall wall separating “modern Protestants” from Medieval sacramentalism.  We have, he thinks lost much of our rightful heritage—the “incarnational faith” intrinsic to it.  “I’ve suggested,” he says, “one quite formidable aspect of that wall for evangelicals—our immediatism.  But the barrier stretches back much farther in history.  In a crucial (quite literally) sixteenth-century moment, a central symbol of the incarnation was removed forcibly from the church.  This was the point at which some zealous Reformers went beyond tearing down paintings and smashing statues to take the very body of Christ off of the crucifix—thus (they thought) defending the church against idolatrous images and defending the resurrection.  Left behind was (arguably) only an abstract symbol of a judicial transaction.  The difference between worshiping in a space where there is no body of Christ on the cross and worshiping in a space where there is a body of Christ on the cross is that in the latter space worshipers cannot ignore the humanity of Christ—nor, thus, of themselves.  In that space, our humanity—bodiliness, affectivity, rationality, community, society, culture—always stands (no, hangs) before us in the person of, the body of, the humanity of Jesus Christ the Lord. In a sense, this entire book tells the story of what happens when we lose our hold on the incarnation” (pp. 208-209). 

Could we regain our hold in the incarnation and put “the ‘body’ back into our understanding of Christ and his church,” we could “recapture the wisdom and truth” in both Tradition and Scripture.  “Tradition is nothing less than wisdom and truth passed down from generation to generation throughout history.  How apt is this?  Christianity is at its core not a list of timeless principles or abstract teachings.  It is uniquely a historical religion, based on a historical person and the words of two “testaments” that are full of historical accounts. Nineteenth-century liberal theologians liked to talk about the ‘essence of Christianity’—usually little more than a set of ethical teachings summarized under the rubric ‘the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man’—that needed to be extricated from the centuries of errant doctrines and practices of a church that never seemed to get it right.  . . . .  But there is no ‘essence’ that is not clothed in history, lived out bodily by God incarnate, and then lived out by ‘his body,’ the human beings whom he has constituted ever since as his church.  Christianity is all about the incarnation of God’s Second Person as a first-century Jew from Nazareth, and then the incarnation of his truth in his living, embodied disciples in all ages and places” (pp. 210-211). 

Armstrong’s treatise bears the stamp of a zealous convert, overemphasizing truths he finds crucial.  But in stating his case he helps us become more mindful of great treasures too often neglected by our tradition-less contemporary church culture.  And as always, works focused on Lewis are quite worthwhile! 

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In 1978, conference instigator Robert Webber began his groundbreaking Common Roots: A Call to Evangelical Maturity by throwing down the gauntlet: “My argument is that the era of the early church (AD 100–500), and particularly the second century, contains insights which evangelicals need to recover.”

Armstrong, Chris R.. Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians: Finding Authentic Faith in a Forgotten Age with C. S. Lewis (p. 44). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

He cited Aquinas repeatedly in The Allegory of Love and The Discarded Image and concludes his Letters to Malcolm by saying observes that the “most blessed result of prayer would be to rise thinking,” in accord with Aquinas, who said of all his own theology, ‘It reminds me of straw.’” (p. 40).  Yet we who read Aquinas—or Lewis—remain forever indebted to the rigor and clarity of their thought.

Lewis repeatedly critiqued distinctive Reformed positions regarding holiness and the freedom of the will, “a crucial part of Lewis’s anthropology and his case for hewing to the morality of the Western (Christian) tradition. . . .  The choices we make on earth have transcendent, cosmic, and divine (or infernal) consequences” (p. 195), a message wondrously illustrated in The Great Divorce.  “In his early spiritual autobiography, The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), Lewis shows a ‘Landlord’ (God) who makes rules not just for a particular religious tribe but for all people.  Christianity innovated morally only by teaching that the redemption purchased for us by Christ brings the Writer of the rules into our hearts, thus helping us to keep them”—  important “assumptions [that] thoroughly suffused ancient and medieval culture:  ‘Aristotle had assumed it, and Plato.  Cicero had spoken of it when he called it the law that is not written down. When St. Paul wrote that even the Gentiles knew that certain kinds of behavior were wrong, he was appealing to natural law.  This same idea informed the thought of St. Augustine in the fourth century and St. Thomas in the thirteenth’” (pp. 99-100).   His friend, Dorothy Sayers, translating Dante, endorsed the Medieval Wisdom Lewis promoted, “saying:  ‘We must also be prepared, while we are reading Dante, to abandon any idea that we are the slaves of chance, or environment, or our subconscious; any vague notion that good and evil are merely relative terms, or that conduct and opinion do not really matter; any comfortable persuasion that, however shiftlessly we muddle through life, it will somehow or other all come right.’  We must, in other words, truly believe in God’s gift to us of free will, for ‘The Divine Comedy is precisely the drama of the soul’s choice’” (p. 116). 

 Lewis “clearly recognized that the Christian warrant for traveling the Affirmative Way, encountering the material world as a place rich with sacramental meaning,” and “he very famously taught that our natural desires—our yearning, which is triggered by our experiences of what is good and beautiful in the world—can lead us toward God.  Indeed, he insisted that he came to God in this way, so that he called himself an ‘empirical theist’” (p. 163).  In his sermon “Transposition” he stressed that as physical beings we “finally have no other conduit to the divine besides our bodies and our senses” (p. 203). 

When driven to illustrate utter evil in history, many of us simply point to Adolph Hitler.  Then, trying explain why he was so depraved, we easily employ therapeutic terms, labeling him an irresponsible “madman” or a puppet dancing to sociological or economic machinations.  But in Hitler’s Ethic:  The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress (New York:  Palagrave Macmillan, c. 2009) Richard Weikart, a professor of history at California State University, Stanislaus, endeavors to demonstrate “the surprising conclusion that Hitler’s immorality was not the product of ignoring or rejecting ethics, but rather came from embracing a coherent—albeit pernicious—ethic.  Hitler was inspired by evolutionary ethics to pursue the utopian project of improving the human race.  He really was committed to deeply rooted convictions about ethics and morality that shaped his policies.  Evolutionary ethics underlay or influenced almost every major feature of Nazi policy:  eugenics (i.e., measures to improve human heredity, including compulsory sterilization), euthanasia, racism, population expansion, offensive warfare, and racial extermination.  The drive to foster evolutionary progress—and to avoid biological degeneration—was fundamental to Hitler’s ideology and policies” (p. 2).  Indeed, as Fritz Lenz (an influential geneticist favored by Hitler) explained:  Nazism was simply “applied biology.”  

Though Hitler was hardly a profound thinker, he read extensively and by 1923 began setting forth a coherent political agenda, studding his speeches with references to (and quotations from) significant German philosophers and scientists.  In 1934, at a Nuremburg Party rally he insisted that “National Socialism is a worldview [weltanschauung]” (p. 28).  (The New Cassell’s German Dictionary says the word Hitler used—weltanschauung—means “philosophy of life, world outlook, creed, ideology”).   He further “posed as a moral crusader gallantly battling the forces of iniquity, corruption, and even deceit” (p. 17).  And he never hesitated to extol traditional—and very Christian—virtues such as duty, loyalty, honesty, sexual purity, etc., when they suited his purposes.  As he garnered support in the 1920s he especially touted himself as a “truth-teller” exposing those whom Schopenhauer had called “the great masters in lying,” the Jews.  (In fact, as was evident in his skillful propaganda, Hitler was himself 9a masterful liar!)     To him, lying was justifiable if it helped establish his weltanschauung—especially his devotion  to evolutionary progress and the ultimate triumph of the German Volk.  Indeed, his “highest priority in life was to improve the human species, to advance evolution” (p. 83).  As Mein Kampf (the autobiography he wrote in prison) asserted, all of life is a biological battle, and only the fittest survive.  Therein he frequently cited some of Darwin’s phrases—“struggle for existence,” “struggle for life,” and “natural selection.”  Such phrases had regularly appeared in The Descent of Man, where Darwin asserted:  “‘Man, like every other animal, has no doubt advanced to his present high condition through a struggle for existence . . . and if he is to advance still higher he must remain subject to a severe struggle’” (p. 35).  In his Table Talks and speeches Hitler celebrated evolutionary theory and “presented biological struggle in the evolutionary process as a central tenet of Nazism” (p. 38).  This particularly applied to the “racial struggle” validating the superiority of Aryan or Nordic peoples.  “Helping Aryans win the struggle for existence against other races was crucial to achieving his vision.  Morality itself was measured by whether or not it benefitted the German people in their struggle” (p. 83).  Popular books such as the Comte de Gobineau’s The Inequality of the Human Races, praised by eminent biologists including Ernst Haeckel, undergirded Hitler’s racist agenda.  Though he certainly despised the Jews, Hitler equally scorned Africans, Asians and American Indians.  As he declared in Mein Kampf:  “‘All who are not of good race in this world are chaff’” (p. 69). 

Hitler’s racism shaped the “national socialism” he championed.  As a socialist he disdained the individualism of capitalist countries such as the United States, seeking to turn the “German Volk into a true socialist community’” (p. 104).  Thus, as soon as he took control of the country, he launched annual Winter Relief Drives designed to help poor Germans—but not “asocial” vagrants, prostitutes, criminals et al.  He envisioned and supervised extensive public works, including the celebrated autobahns, designed to help everyone.  The Nazis—the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—also endeavored to provide full employment for all Germans.  To Hitler, socialism meant “‘not the solution of the labor question, but rather the ordering of all German racial comrades into a genuine living community; it means the preservation and further evolution of the Volk on the basis of the species-specific laws of evolution’” (p. 111).  He shared the view of August Weismann, a famous Darwinian biologist, who believed that “‘only the interest of the species comes into consideration, not that of the individual’” (p. 114).  

Racist ideology obviously required the sexual ethic which Hitler carefully articulated.  In 1937 he declared:  “‘we are laying claim to leadership of the Volk, i.e. we alone are authorized to lead the Volk as such—that means every man and every woman.  The lifelong relationships between the sexes is something we will regulate.  We shall form the child!’” (p. 121-22).  Ever-more Aryan children were needed to populate an ever-expansive Reich!  Consequently, he said:  “‘there is only one holiest human right, and this right is at the same time the holiest obligation, to wit:  to see to it that the blood is preserved pure and, by preserving the best humanity, to create the possibility of a nobler evolution of these beings’” (p. 141).  So he opposed birth control and abortion, celebrated large families, and often portrayed himself as a staunch defender of traditional family values and morality.  Yet, paradoxically, he also approved extramarital sexual affairs and even toyed with the idea of polygamy if such activity birthed more (and genetically better) Germans.  When the war broke out in 1939, Himmler issued a Hitler-approved order which said:  “‘Beyond the boundaries of perhaps otherwise still necessary bourgeois laws and customs it will also outside of marriage be an important responsibility for German women and girls of good blood, not lightly, but rather in profound moral seriousness, to become the mothers of children of soldiers who are going to the front and of whom fate alone knows whether they will return or fall in battle for Germany’” (p. 133).  

Along with breeding more healthy Aryan children, the Nazis targeted the incurably sick and disabled for extermination.  They didn’t deserve to live longer—as, indeed, Karl Binding (a lawyer) and Alfred Hoche (a psychiatrist) had argued in their notorious, but widely-circulated 1920 treatise, Permitting the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life.  Learned physicians assured Hitler that infants were not fully human, for “‘when a child is born, it is not really fully matured . . .  But if that is so, then the infant does not actually take its place in human society until several months after its birth’” (p. 185).  Germany’s medical personnel ultimately killed 200,000 disabled “patients” in the nation’s care facilities.  Explaining this, the historian Hans-Walter Schmuhl said:  “‘The racial-hygiene paradigm constituted an ethic of a new type, which was ostensibly grounded scientifically in Darwinian biology.’”  By discarding the Judeo-Christian tradition and “‘giving up the conception of humans as the image of God through the Darwinian theory, human life was construed as a piece of property, that—contrary to the idea of a natural right to life—could be weighed against other pieces of property’” (p. 180). 

Killing Jews, though the best known aspect of Hitler’s racist agenda, actually began two years after the outbreak of WWII, in the final months of 1941.  Prior to that, deportation rather than extermination has been the official Nazi position.  “Hitler’s evolutionary ethic did not require killing.  He could have merely sterilized the disabled and deported the Jews.  This would have accomplished his goals of expanding the Germany population, strengthening the Aryan race by eliminating ‘inferior’ individuals and races, and expanding German living space.  However, even though killing may not have been required by Hitler’s evolutionary ethic, Darwinism contributed nonetheless to the death of the disabled and Jews.”  As Christopher Hutton, concluding his book on Nazi racism, said:   “‘All the key elements of this [Nazi] world-view had been constructed and repeatedly reaffirmed by linguists, racial anthropologists, evolutionary scientists and geneticists.  Ludwig Plate [a Darwinian biologist at the University of Jena] observed that “progress in evolution goes forward over millions of dead bodies” . . .  For Nazism, survival in evolution required the genocide of the Jews’” (pp. 194-195).    

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In Hitler’s Philosophers (New Haven:  Yale University Press, c. 2013), Yvonne Sherratt endeavors to unveil “the sinister past of many German philosophers” which has been effectively buried by their protégés.  Though the book “is a work of non-fiction, carefully researched, based upon archival material, [and] letters . . . which have all been meticulously referenced,” it “is written in a narrative style, which aims to transport the reader to a vivid and dangerous world of 1930s Germany” (p. xx).  

Philosophy occupies a prominent place in German culture, granting professional philosophers a celebrity status.  Thus Hitler liked to invoke legendary thinkers such as Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Fichte, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.  He even sought to portray himself, in Mein Kampf, as the “philosopher Fuhrer.”  For example, a well-known quotation from Schiller’s William Tell—“the strong man is mightiest alone”—served as a chapter title in Mein Kampf  and became his motto during his later years as the Fuhrer” (p. 21).    He especially claimed to embrace to the “critical philosophy” of Immanuel Kant, saying:  “‘Kant’s complete refutation of the teachings which were the heritage of the middle ages, and of the dogmatic philosophy of the church, is the greatest of the services which Kant has rendered to us’” (p. 20).  Though Kant certainly seems to be an implausible figure to indwell the Nazi pantheon, he represented for

Hitler a repudiation of the past, with its irrational superstitions and religious prejudices.  And, importantly,  Kant disparaged Judaism, “labeling Jews as a body superstitious, primitive and irrational.”  Indeed he declared Judaism was not even a bona fide religion “but merely a community of a mass of men of one tribe’” (p. 39).  Jews were innately dishonest and had “no right to an independent existence” (p. 40).   Following Kant, three 19^th century thinkers—Fichte, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche—became “the ‘philosophical triumvirate of national Socialism’” (p. 23).  Schopenhauer effectively extended Kant’s insights and, importantly, “glorified Will over Reason,” as would Nietzsche, the philosopher most frequently cited in Hitler’s speeches.  Hitler claimed he read Nietzsche’s works while in prison, and he “‘often visited the Nietzsche museum in Weimar . . . posing for photographs of himself staring in rapture at the bust of the great man’” (p. 236).  In 1934 he met Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth, who gave him “one of Nietzsche’s most personal possessions’—his last walking stick (p. 26).  “From that day on the Nietzsche catchphrases were everywhere, Wille zur Macht, Herrenvolk, Sklavenmoral—the fight for the heroic life, against formal deadweight education, against Christian ethics of compassion.” (p. 26).  

There’s no mystery as to why Hitler would be drawn to Nietzsche, for his most noted work was “Zarathustra, in which he had coined the idea of the ‘Superman.’”  During the First World War 150,000 copies of the book were “handed out to German soldiers at the front.  A London broadcaster even went so far as to dub the war the ‘Euro-Nietzschean War,’ and the best selling English novelist of the time, Thomas Hardy, claimed in a letter to the Daily Mail that there was ‘no instance since history began of a country being so demoralized by one single writer’” (p. 50).  Nietzsche’s sister selected and published passages from his works, including his “discussion on the possibilities of selective breeding and of educating a ruling caste, ‘the masters of the earth’, ‘tyrants who can work as artists on “man” himself” (p. 50).  When she met Hitler in 1934, she would likely have shown him such passages, and her portrayal of “Nietzsche seemed to supply just of the needs of the Third Reich—there was a zeal for war, a dash of anti-Semitism, the ‘Superman’ and nationalism” (p. 51).  

Hitler He claimed to have read “everything he could get hold of,” including Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, though it’s clear he mainly devoured and absorbed racialist and nationalist tomes composed by writers such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Heinrich von Treitschke, and Oswald Spengler.  Above all, he found in Charles Darwin one of his “most crucial influences” (p. 53).  Darwin’s evolutionary thought swept through Germany under the guidance of the “enormously influential zoologist and social philosopher

Ernst Haeckel,” whose books “vastly outsold Darwin’s” (p. 54).  “Nature is God” Haeckel declared, and Nature, through natural selection, had elevated the Aryan race.  Following Haeckel, scores of German scholars propounded his version of Social Darwinism, many of them serving as “collaborators” helping the Nazis gain control of universities and various cultural institutions in the ‘30s.  

The most prestigious philosopher actively lending his support to Hitler was Martin Heidegger, a Freiburg University professor.  That he was deeply influenced by Nietzsche must be noted, for the two of them have profoundly shaped 20^th century philosophical and literary thought.  To Sherratt, Heidegger was “Hitler’s Superman.”  He had studied with Edmund Husserl, the noted phenomenologist, and enjoyed his patronage as he established his reputation as a world-class philosopher.  Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and was named rector of the University of Freiberg soon thereafter.  Though he resigned as rector within a year, he maintained his Party membership until 1945, and his commitment to National Socialism seems inseparable from with his philosophy.  He “heralded the Third Reich as ‘the construction of a new intellectual and spiritual world for the German nation,’” adding that the “‘construction of National Socialism has now become the single most important task for the German universities’” (p. 106).  He thought no Christian should be appointed to a university lectureship, for traditional morality needed to be consigned to the trash bin of history.  Students were drawn to him and subsequently spread his version of atheistic existentialism, including a disdain for Christian and humanist ideas.

Though some Jewish (e.g. Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Hannah Arendt) and Christian (e.g. Dietrich von Hildebrand) philosophers fled Germany in the 1930s and opposed Hitler, very few who remained in the country did so.  The notable exception highlighted by Sherratt was Kurt Huber, a devout Roman Catholic and popular professor at Munich University, who taught musicology as well as philosophy. 

He had been appointed to a prestigious Chair for the Institute of Folk Music at the University of Berlin in 1938, but he refused to toe the Party line and was soon dismissed, though he regained his position in Munich.  He used his lectures on Kant, Spinoza, and Leibniz to subtly criticize der Fuhrer, and he ultimately joined a secret student group (the White Rose resistance society) dedicated to distributing subversive pamphlets.  In time he would be arrested and executed—a “martyr” in Sherratt’s view.  

 Almost as soon as the Allies conquered Germany they conducted the Nuremberg Trials and sought to bring leading Nazis to justice.  One of the “criminals” sentenced to death was Alfred Rosenberg, who had played a leading role in Hitler’s administration, largely because he had written the Myth of the Twentieth Century, which had been, “along with Mein Kampf, the ultimate Nazi bible” (p. 232).  But almost none of the scores of philosophers who had supported Hitler suffered anything more than transient disciplinary measures in their universities.  Though Martin Heidegger was investigated, he successfully “reconstructed his life and career from 1933 to 1945 as one of minimal involvement with the Third Reich” (p. 244).  He managed to reestablish himself as a leader in the European academic world and gained assistance from a most unlikely source—Hannah Arendt, his former student and lover.  Though she was Jewish and had fled to America during the war and had denounced him as a “murderous monster” for his Nazi views, she revisited him in 1950 and abruptly decided to champion his rehabilitation.  Similarly, Jean-Paul Sartre, deeply reliant upon Heidegger’s philosophical work, ignored his Nazi activities and “firmly helped to reestablish Heidegger on the post-war stage” (p. 248).  Subsequently Heidegger traveled widely, giving lectures, and greatly influenced many currents of contemporary thought, especially “post-modernism.”  In light of all this, Sherratt seriously questions the academy’s adulation of Nietzsche, Heidegger et al.  So too we should seriously doubt the value of much that passes as “Postmodernism.”   

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Robert Jay Lifton, in The Nazi Doctors:  Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York:  BasicBooks, c. 1986), probed, by conducting interviews with both doctors and survivors as well as researching thousands of documents, one of the true mysteries of iniquity—how highly trained and skilled medical doctors (allegedly committed to saving lives) cooperated with the Nazi’s genocidal policies.  Surprisingly, a number of “prisoner doctors” played an important role in running Auschwitz.  These were (generally Jewish and frequently female) medical doctors sent to the camps who assisted the SS doctors.  They often worked as orderlies or nurses, and many of them heroically sought to help other inmates as much as possible, appearing to collaborate while “actually using their position to save as many people as possible” (p. 218).  Still more:  they differentiated between the truly evil and somewhat “better” Nazis who tried to help inmates and were markedly sorrowful as they carried out their orders.  

As one expects from a psychiatrist, Lifton cites many “case studies” and crafts telling illustrations.  He is deeply concerned with medial ethics and confesses that “nothing is darker or more menacing, or harder to accept, that the participation of physicians in mass murder” (p. 3).  Amazingly enough, the doctors he interviewed tried to “present themselves to me as decent people who tried to make the best of a bad situation” and failed (or refused) to make any “clear ethical evaluation of what he had done” (p. 8).  To the extent they did so, it was to rationalize their activities, employing therapeutic language.  They immersed themselves in “medical science” as a “means of avoiding awareness of, and guilt over, their participation in a murderous project” (p. 61).  Thus Dr. Fritz Klein said:  “‘Of course I am a doctor and I want to preserve life.  And out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body.  The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind’” (p. 16).  

The program the Nazis designed to remove gangrenous people was called “euthanasia,” eliminating those deemed “unworthy” to live.  They first implemented the coercive sterilization of “defectives,” for “only the healthy” should procreate.  Then they began killing “impaired” children, for it initially seemed easier to eliminate newborns or young children than larger humans.  Next “impaired” adults, whether mentally or physically disabled, were “put to sleep.”  They also culled out undesirable or “morally inferior” inmates in concentration camps.  Finally came the mass killings in camps such as Auschwitz, whose “primary function” was to kill Jews.  Here the doctors were essential.  They decided, as prisoners were unloaded from the trains, which ones would be immediately sent to the killing centers.  They determined when inmates were not longer useful as laborers and ready to be gassed.  They selected, as did Dr Josef Mengele (doing “scientific” studies on twins), some who would be momentarily spared and used for medical experiments.  As one Auschwitz prisoner doctor remembered:  “‘They [the SS doctors] did their work just as someone who goes to an office goes about his work.  They were gentlemen who came and went, who supervised and were relaxed, sometimes smiling, sometimes joking, but never unhappy.  They were witty if they felt like it.  Personally I did not get the impression that they were much affected by what was going on—nor shocked.  It went on for years.  It was not just one day’” (p. 193).   

They were not monsters, nor even “sadists” as we understand the term.  They were, in fact, rather “normal” human beings.  But they did enormous evil, and what obviously guided and sustained them was their commitment to Nazi ideology—Hitler’s Ethic—with its racist components rooted in a naturalistic, evolutionary, Darwinian ethos.

As we witness the struggle surrounding President Trump’s recent Supreme Court nominee (Brett Kavanaugh) we’d be wise to remember what happened in 1987 when President Reagan similarly nominated Robert H. Bork.  As Bork noted in The Tempting of America:  The Political Seduction of the Law (NY:  The Free Press, c. 1990), that event revealed a deepening philosophical cleavage dividing the country.  He set forth a historical overview, describing how the Supreme Court has become increasingly politicized inasmuch as it has abandoning the more limited role assigned it by the Constitution.  He also discussed some of the great legal theorists who have influenced American jurisprudence.  For example, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Learned Hand, two great judges, sharply differed in their understanding of the judiciary.  After the two lunched together and Holmes got into his carriage, Hand ran after him, saying:  “Do justice, sir, do justice.”  Stopping the carriage, Holmes reproved his friend, saying:  “That is not my job.  It is my job to apply the law.”  Holmes’ commitment to simply apply the law, not to dispense “justice,” is the strict constructionism Bork endorsed.  

    Apart from the notorious 1856 Dred Scott decision, whereby Justice Roger Taney first enunciated the now popular notion of “substantive due process,” thereby imposing his own opinion on the Constitution and issuing a notoriously bad pro-slavery decision, the Supreme Court and leading theorists generally upheld a strict constructionist viewpoint throughout the 19th century.   At the beginning of the 20th century however, progressive tides altered the legal seashore.  Notable, if isolated, judicial decisions, espec­ially during the New Deal era, generated a tidal wave of revisionist judicial ac­tivism which characterized the Warren Court in the 1950s.  Soon thereafter (obviously legislating from the bench) Justice Berger and like-minded justices issued edicts such as Roe v. Wade (1973) which illustrated revisionism at its worst.  Without providing “an argument that even remotely begins to justify” the decision, the Court opened a deep division still affecting the nation.  

     The activism of the Court’s justices has been widely approved by professors in the nation’s law schools.  No doubt se­lecting one of the most egregious example, Bork wrote:  “Sanford Levinson, of the University Texas law school, advances an extremely skeptical, indeed nihilistic, theory of ‘constitutional’ interpreta­tion.  Levinson says that ‘The “death of con­stitutionalism” may be the central even of our time, just as the “death of God” was that of the past century.’  In a major law review article, Levinson explained that ‘for a Nietzschean reader of constitutions, there is no point in searching for a code that will produce “truthful” or “correct” interpretations; instead, the interpreter, in [phi­losopher] Richard Rorty’s words, “simply beats the text into a shape which will serve his own pur­pose”’” (p. 217).  

Given his opposition to such revisionism, Bork encountered a steamroller of hostility when he appeared before the Senate for his confirmation hearings.  As soon (45 minutes to be precise) as President Reagan nominated Bork, Senator Ted Kennedy launched a vicious attack, claiming that “‘Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters . . . and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy’” (p. 268).  Speaking through senators such as Kennedy and Joe Biden, a chorus of special interest groups—the ACLU, NOW, Planned Parenthood, et al.—mounted an anti-Bork crusade.  The charges made against him were virtually all false, deliber­ate lies employed to orchestrate the emotions of the masses.  

     For example, Gregory Peck, in an advertisement funded by People of the American Way, asserted Bork favored poll taxes and literacy tests, long used to bar blacks from voting in the South.  In fact, Bork had never favored such.  Ohio’s Senator Metzenbaum loudly bellowed that the nation’s women feared Bork, wresting out of context some decisions he had made as a federal judge.  Senator Joe Biden’s Biden Report assailed Bork for his judicial errors—but without citing a single case as evidence!  In Bork’s opinion, this campaign against him resulted from the fact that he had dared criti­cize the revisionist ideology which underlay sig­nificant decisions of the Warren and Berger courts.  The fact that he found Roe v. Wade judicially flawed further ignited the flames of opposition to his appointment.  And it is clear that today’s obsession with politi­cal correctness makes Supreme Court justice hear­ings an overly-politicized arena wherein senators and special interest groups secure a national pulpit for at least a passing moment.

     Though George Will may overstate a bit, I think his assessment still rings true:  “This is Robert Bork’s brilliant report from the front lines in an ongoing cultural war.  At stake is nothing less than constitutional government.  It is a sobering account of the extent to which judicial willfulness has degraded the elegant constitutional system we were given.”

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Fortunately for our “elegant constitutional system,” the year before Robert Bork was denied a seat on the Court another Reagan nominee, Antonin Scalia, sailed through the Senate with a 98-0 vote!  And reading some of his writings provides us important insights into the both the man and his contributions to American Jurisprudence.  In Scalia’s Court: A Legacy of Landmark Opinions and Dissents (Washington:  Regnery Publishing, c. 2004, Kindle Edition), Scalia made available some of his most important decisions, given context and perspective in “edits and comments” by Kevin Ring, who emphasizes that:  “One trait that nearly everyone praised was Scalia’s brilliant literary style.  His ‘gift for analysis and words,’ one progressive law professor said, made him ‘the best judicial stylist since Oliver Wendell Holmes. Through his opinions, he exerted gravitational pull on the law, even when he lost.  Indeed, during his nearly thirty years on the Court, Scalia was its premier conservative, intellectual gladiator, and wordsmith.  To be sure, many important and influential conservative jurists have served on the High Court, and there remain today others who share Scalia’s textualist and originalist philosophy.  Yet it was Scalia who gave life to Aristotle’s injunction that ‘it is not enough to know what to say—one must know how to say it’ (#54-61).  

Words truly matter.  Scalia often told his clerks that “terminology is destiny.”  So he wrote with great care.  One of Scalia’s sons, Christopher once asked his “father if writing was easy for him.  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s hard as hell.’”  Speaking to a group of legal writers (“Writing Well”), Scalia credited “time and sweat” with making the difference between “ordinary” and “good” writing—it’s largely a matter of “writing, revising, rethinking, and writing again.”  Still more, Scalia routinely “put complex arguments about fundamental principles in easy-to-understand terms” (#86).  And he could be quite plain-spoken, expressing “his outrage at the decisions reached and lack of judicial restraint demonstrated by his colleagues on the High Court.  Scalia concluded one opinion, ‘The Court must be living in another world.  Day by day, case by case, it is busy designing a Constitution for a country I do not recognize’” (#95).  Dissenting from the majority in Casey (Justice Kennedy’s convoluted rationale for upholding Roe), Scalia’s words could easily have been written with a word burner, searing the pages. 

Scalia emphasized “textualism”  and “originalism” in writing his opinions.  Differing from some “originalists,” who sought to discern the “intent” of the legislators, Scalia sought to find the “original meaning” of the law as written and understood in its day.  When judges interpret laws, they should do so “reasonably,” looking for the “ordinary meaning” of words as used by the legislators who passed them.   Unwilling to probe into anyone’s “original intent”— as if one could understand the inner thoughts of persons, legislators included, Scalia tried to restrict himself to the words actually written.  (Both positions were rather unique to him when he joined the Supreme Court in 1986, but increasing numbers of young, conservative lawyers and judges have followed his lead.)  We have legislators to implement the “will of the people,” to care for current concerns.  We have a Constitution to secure more permanent things, to establish durable guidelines needed to resist those momentarily fashionable currents so pronounced in democracies.  Thus the notion of a “living Constitution,” continually changing to suit public opinion, reducing the law to whatever judges approve, was an anathema!  

One proponent of the “living Constitution,” Justice William Brennan, “seemed to think the job of Supreme Court justice was similar to that of Senate majority leader.  Brennan famously remarked, ‘You can do anything around here with five votes.’ But Scalia did not want to do ‘anything,’ he wanted the Court to do the right thing” (#377).  “With bracing political incorrectness,” Ring says, “Scalia said he likes his Constitution ‘dead.  He argued that only a fixed and enduring charter could keep judges from reading new fads into the Constitution and less popular mandates out” (#207).  It was justices believing in the “living Constitution” who recently conjured up the right to same-sex marriage, whereas a textualist like Scalia insisted such a “right” should be instituted by a Constitutional amendment, not decreed by the Court.  Scalia also sought to preserve the federal system, the separation of powers set forth in the Constitution.  The federal government has three separate branches, and the states have important powers reserved to them.  He considered federalism “the most important bulwark against government tyranny, even more important than the Bill of Rights” (#742).  In one of his dissenting opinions he declared:  “While the separation of powers may prevent us from righting every wrong, it does so in order to ensure that we do not lose liberty” (#996). 

Turning to Scalia’s position on crucial social issues, we find him insisting that inasmuch as race prejudice is wrong it is wrong even when implemented for allegedly benevolent reasons, i.e. affirmative action.  Thus he disagreed with Justice O’Connor’s view “that, despite the Fourteenth Amendment, state and local governments may in some circumstances discriminate on the basis of race in order (in a broad sense) ‘to ameliorate the effects of past discrimination.’”  However “benign” such strategies appear, they “can no more be pursued by the illegitimate means of racial discrimination than can other assertedly benign purposes we have repeatedly rejected.  The difficulty of overcoming the effects of past discrimination is as nothing compared with the difficulty of eradicating from our society the source of those effects, which is the tendency—fatal to a Nation such as ours—to classify and judge men and women on the basis of their country of origin or the color of their skin.  A solution to the first problem that aggravates the second is no solution at all” (#1242). 

Throughout his tenure on the Court Scalia proved to be a consistent critic of abortion rights, for  nothing in the Constitution or in the American tradition provided for such.  In one crucial case, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989), he argued the Court should overturn Roe.  In Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992), wherein Justice Kennedy famously celebrated the “mystery of human life” and the freedom of everyone to manufacture his own morality, Scalia set forth “one of the most caustic opinions ever written by a justice of the Supreme Court” (#1623).  Reaffirming his constitutional stance, he said:  “The States may, if they wish, permit abortion on demand, but the Constitution does not require them to do so.  The permissibility of abortion, and the limitations upon it, are to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting” (#1639).  When the Court imposes its position on the public, as was done with Roe, “It is difficult to maintain the illusion that we are interpreting a Constitution rather than inventing one, when we amend its provisions so breezily” (#1751).  Sad to say:  “The Imperial Judiciary lives.  It is instructive to compare this Nietzschean vision of us unelected, life-tenured judges—leading a Volk who will be ‘tested by following,’ and whose very ‘belief in themselves’ is mystically bound up in their ‘understanding’ of a Court that ‘speak[s] before all others for their constitutional ideals’—with the somewhat more modest role envisioned for these lawyers by the Founders” (#1874). 

Throughout American history, the Supreme Court had never dealt clearly with the Second Amendment’s right to “keep and bear arms.”  But in 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller Justice Scalia successfully argued (citing definitive historical evidence) the case for an armed citizenry, individually entitled to self-defense.  Responding to those who insisted the Second Amendment applied only to a state-controlled “militia,” Scalia wrote:  “Nowhere else in the Constitution does a ‘right’ attributed to ‘the people’ refer to anything other than an individual right” (#2152).  Careful study of 18th century state constitutions shows that individuals were guaranteed the right to “bear arms,” and one of the Founding Fathers, Justice James Wilson, upheld a person’s right to defend himself or his home.  Scalia then supported his view with citations from both Blackstone’s Commentaries and St. George Tucker’s support of “the Blackstonian arms right as necessary for self-defense.”  Tucker insisted the Second Amendment “‘may be considered as the true palladium of liberty. . . . The right to self-defense is the first law of nature’” (#2446).  Justice Joseph Story, whose commentaries give us great insight into the ways the Founders understood the Constitution, “wrote:  ‘One of the ordinary modes, by which tyrants accomplish their purposes without resistance, is, by disarming the people, and making it an offense to keep arms, and by substituting a regular army in the stead of a resort to the militia” (#2483).

Scalia’s Court contains illuminating sections devoted to the death penalty, religious liberty, illegal immigration, homosexuality, Obamacare, free speech etc.  Though many of his opinions were dissents, they show a fine legal mind at work, shining light on topics at the heart of America’s current culture wars.  An editorial in the Wall Street Journal, commented, at his death:  “For some 29 years he defended the original meaning of the Constitution against the legal fads and inventions of more political Justices, bequeathing a judicial legacy even in dissent that will carry long into the future.  Justice Scalia may have been more consequential than any Justice whose jurisprudence so rarely carried a majority of the Court” (#8053).  

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Apart from his judicial work, Antonin Scalia gave speeches to various groups, ranging from his children’s high schools to learned legal societies, addressing topics as diverse as the arts, sports, hunting, education, and good writing as well as legal concerns.  Here we see the man so beloved my most everyone who knew him—witty, generous, self-deprecating.  In her forward to Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived (The Crown Publishing Group, c. 2017), Ruth Bader Ginsberg (a colleague with whom he continually disagreed) writes affectionately of his talent to make “even the most sober judge smile.”  Serving alongside him, she “occasionally pinched myself hard to avoid uncontrollable laughter in response to one of his quips.”  To her:  “This collection of speeches and writings captures the mind, heart, and faith of a Justice who has left an indelible stamp on the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence and on the teaching and practice of law.”  

In some of his speeches he focused on this nation’s citizens.  Though properly proud of his Italian heritage and encouraging other ethnics to embrace their own, to him:   “What makes an American is not the name or the blood or even the place of birth, but the belief in the principles of freedom and equality that this country stands for” (p. 14).  To Scalia, one of America’s strong suits, “one of the reasons we really are a symbol of light and of hope for the world, is the way in which people of different faiths, different races, different national origins, have come together and learned—not merely to tolerate one another, because I think that is too stingy a word for what we have achieved—but to respect and love one another” (p. 26).  This results from unique legal traditions, such as the Bill of Rights, but “it is the beginning of wisdom in this area to acknowledge that the Constitution says what it says.  And the fullness of wisdom is to recognize that the crowning achievement of America is not the Bill of Rights (every modern banana republic has one) but rather the structure of government and the democratic tradition that make a Bill of Rights enforceable according to its terms, and not according to the wishes of the ruler—be that ruler a generalissimo or a majority of the electorate” (p. 51).

Thus he was deeply committed to the Constitution as written!  “Unlike any other nation in the world,” he said, “we consider ourselves bound together, not by genealogy or residence but by belief in certain principles; and the most important of those principles are set forth in the Constitution of the United States” (p. 158).  In one of his speeches he quoted a long passage from Benjamin Franklin’s final message to the Constitutional Convention.  Though Franklin confessed he did not fully endorse all its provisions, he noted that “there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered” and doubted “whether any other Convention we can obtain may be able to make a better Constitution.”   In fact, he was amazed that the proposed document approached as “near to perfection as it does.”  America is indeed blessed, for its founding documents enabled it to become a very special place.  That clearly means that “a judge must be, above all else, a servant of the law—and not an enforcer of his personal predilections” (p. 170).  Thus Scalia strongly objected to the notion of a “living constitution” that would allegedly adjust to what one Court justice labeled “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”  With incisive wit, he concluded:   “The living constitutionalist is a happy fella, because it turns out that the Constitution always means precisely what he thinks it ought to mean” (p. 212).

Scalia never hesitated to defend his deeply-ingrained Christian faith in a culture increasingly hostile to such.  “As one who believes in God, and who believes that those nations who love or at least fear Him, and do His will, will by and large prosper,” he said, “I regret this secularization of our country, or at least of our intellectual classes” (p. 130).  In one of the speeches he gave dozens of times (titled “Not to the Wise:  The Christian as Cretin”), he explained that “‘The Christian as Cretin,’ is meant, of course, to be a play on words.  And it is a wordplay that has some etymological basis. The English word cretin, meaning ‘a person of deficient mental capacity,’ in fact derives from the French word chrétien, meaning ‘Christian,’ which was used in the Middle Ages to refer to the short, often grotesque, severely retarded people who were to be found in some remote valleys of the Alps—perhaps the result of excessive inbreeding.”  Thinking about this, Scalia suggested that “the equivalence of the words Christian and cretin makes a lot of sense.  To be honest about it, that is the view of Christians—or at least of traditional Christians—taken by sophisticated society in modern times” (pp. 107-108).  But in that respect, little has changed since the days of St. Paul, who acknowledged that the world’s elites would generally brand Christians “fools.”  Christians simply are—and ought to be—different from the world!  Such differences clearly appear when sexual questions arise, for “the worldly ideal is not chastity, but safe sex” (p. 121).

While defending his faith, Scalia staunchly upheld the American commitment to the separation of church and state.  “In the last analysis the most important objectives of human existence—goodness, virtue, godliness, salvation—are not achieved through the state; and those who seek them there are doomed to disappointment” (p. 137).  And what his speeches reveal is this:  Scalia modeled not only first-rate jurisprudence but a good man fully aware of higher principles found not on laws but in permanent things. 

“Our society,” said Leon Kass two decades ago, “is dangerously close to losing its grip on the meaning of some fundamental aspects of human existence.” Seventy years ago (when he and I were young), he says, Americans enjoyed a stable culture affording youngsters “authoritative guidance for how to live. Religious traditions and inherited customs and mores pointed the way to a good life. Adults, quite comfortable with their moral authority, were not stingy with their praise and blame, reward and punishment, nor did they neglect the effort to model decent conduct for the young to follow. In the post–World War II years of my boyhood,” he recalls in Leading a Worthy Life: Finding Meaning in Modern Times (New York: Encounter Books, Kindle Edition, c. 2018), “the prevailing culture took pains to turn children into grown-ups. It offered guidance for finding work and vocation, customs of courtship for finding a suitable spouse, and a plethora of vibrant local institutions and associations – religious, fraternal, social, political, charitable, cultural – for finding meaningful participation in civic and communal life. The institutions of higher learning proudly believed in light and truth, and were pleased to initiate the next generation into the intellectual and artistic treasures of the West” (#50-58).

That world has vanished! “Young people are now at sea – regarding work, family, and civic identity. Authority is out to lunch. Courtship has disappeared. No one talks about work as vocation. The true, the good, and the beautiful have few defenders. Irony is in the saddle, and the higher cynicism mocks any innocent love of wisdom or love of country. The things we used to take for granted have become, at best, open questions. The persons and institutions to which we once looked for guidance have ceased to offer it successfully” (#65). Socrates’ probing questions regarding how we should live are rarely addressed, much less answered. We’ve mastered complex computer technologies but failed to find good reasons to live, and this deficit “is perhaps the deepest curse of living in our interesting time” (#67).

Kass has been teaching for half-a-century, mainly dealing with ethics. Reared in a secular Jewish home, primarily distinguished by it socialistic ideology, he has, as an adult, slowly returned to some of Judaism’s the ancient wisdom, without becoming a devout practitioner. Following his undergraduate schooling at the University of Chicago Kass earned an M.D., then completed a Ph.D. in biochemistry and briefly spent time doing research. But his heart was in liberal education, so he returned to his alma mater and was for decades a professor in the Committee on Social Thought, flourishing within that institutions’s humanities program. “Although formally trained in medicine and biochemistry – fields in which I no longer teach or practice – I have been engaged with liberal education for forty-five years, teaching philosophical and literary texts as an untrained amateur, practicing the humanities without a license” (#4869). In 2001 President George W. Bush appointed him to chair the President’s Council on Bioethics, and he is widely respected for his expertise and wisdom (quite evident in his commentary on Genesis, titled The Beginning of Wisdom). “In my own case,” he recalls, “it was first the prospect of human genetic manipulation that led me to question my onetime conviction that the progress of science and technology would necessarily go hand in hand with an improvement in morals and society, and second, reflection on my activities as a scientist that led me to doubt the claims of some of my colleagues that the activities of living organisms, including man, could be fully understood in terms of nonliving matter and the laws of physics and chemistry, or even in terms of behaviorist psychology and neuroscience” (#4679).

Such convictions were evident when, in the midst of his tenure as chairman of the President’s Council, he published a collection of essays: Life Liberty and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics (San Francisco: Encounter Books, c. 2002). He was then deeply concerned that “our society has overcome longstanding taboos and aversions to accept test-tube fertilization, commercial sperm banking, surrogate motherhood, abortion on demand, exploitation of fetal tissue, creation of human embryos solely for experimentation, patenting of living human tissue, gender-change surgery, liposuction and body shops, the widespread shuttling of human parts, assisted suicide practiced by doctors and the deliberate generation of human beings to serve as transplant donors—not to speak about massive changes in the culture regarding shame, privacy and exposure.” But beyond his burden for bioethics, Kass stressed: “Perhaps more worrisome than the changes themselves is the coarsening of sensibilities and attitudes, and the irreversible effects on our imaginations and the way we come to conceive of ourselves” (p. 197).

We have unfortunately embraced a “technological way” that finds fuel in “the utopian promises of modern thought” which will ultimately “doom” us to destruction (p. 49). The great issue we face is this: “Everything depends on whether the technological disposition is allowed to proceed to its self-augmenting limits, or whether it can be resisted, spiritually, morally, politically” (p. 49). We must recover our moral compass! We face a grave moral crisis with apparently no notion of what’s at stake. “We are in turbulent seas without a landmark precisely because we adhere more and more to a view of human life that both gives us enormous powers, and, at the same time, denies every possibility of non-arbitrary standards for guiding its use. Though well equipped, we know not who we are or where we re going. We triumph over nature’s unpredictability only to subject ourselves, tragically, to the still greater unpredictability of our capricious wills and fickle opinions” (p. 138).

Still concerned with such issues, in his most recent publication (Leading a Worthy Life,) Kass has collected some papers he’s written during the past two decades, hoping they will “shine fresh light on several fundamental and irreplaceable aspects of the good life, as well as on the specific threats they face today and tomorrow: love, family, and friendship; human achievement, human excellence, and human dignity; learning and teaching in search of understanding and wisdom; and fulfilling the enduring human aspirations for the true, the good, and the beautiful, for the righteous and the holy, and for freedom, equality, and self-government.” He begins by citing an essay by Irving Kristol 25 years ago that illustrated how “succeeding waves of elitist opposition to our inherited moral, aesthetic, and spiritual norms and sensibilities had issued in a nihilistic anticulture, hostile not only to religion, family, patriotism, and traditional morality, but even to the promise of Enlightenment reason itself” (#393). He examines selected “secular realms,” including “work; love and family; community and country;” and the pursuit of truth,” realms connected to “our deepest aspirations: to live a life that makes sense, a life that is worthy of the unmerited gift of our own existence” (#342).

Take first our engagement in work. “That work should be central to life’s fulfillment is a very old idea, and it persists because it is rooted in human nature. Aristotle argued that human flourishing is a life of virtuous or excellent activity, where “activity” translates a word of Aristotle’s own coinage, built from a root meaning “work”: energeia, literally, ‘being-at-work’” (#366). “We need to consider work, as Dorothy Sayers put it, ‘not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do.’ Work enables us to utilize and to most fully express our God-given talents, gaining meaning for our lives from fulfilling our nature, from seeing our work well done, and from delighting in the gifts our work provides to a world that needs and appreciates them” (#352).

Then consider conjugal love and family, issues to which he devotes several chapters, thereby indicating their importance. Admittedly, Kass says, “eros can be notoriously fickle in its choice of objects,” but “when disciplined – especially by the vows and practice of a solid marriage – it can provide for a private life whose satisfactions are among the most enduring blessings life has to offer. Living life under a promise, husband and wife enjoy the practice of mutually giving and receiving love, one to the other. Through devotion and care, informed by the pledge and practice of fidelity, everyday life takes on the character of a sacrament” (#387). Such a life seems quite foreign to 21st century youngsters. “Sexually active – indeed, hyperactive – they flop about from one relationship to another.” Too many “young men, nervous predators, act as if any woman were equally good; they are given not to falling in love with one, but to scoring in bed with many. And in this sporting attitude they are now matched by some female trophy hunters. But most young women strike me as sad, lonely, and confused” (#588).

They’re sad and lonely, Kass thinks, because they have lost something essential for women: modesty. “The supreme virtue of the virtuous woman was modesty, a form of sexual self-control, manifested not only in chastity but in decorous dress and manner, speech and deed, and in reticence in the display of her well-banked affections. A virtue, as it were, made for courtship, it served simultaneously (for a man) as a source of attraction and a spur to manly ardor, and (for a woman) as a guard against a woman’s own desires and as a defense against unworthy suitors. A fine woman understood that giving her body (in earlier times, even her kiss) meant giving her heart, which was too precious to be bestowed on anyone who would not prove himself worthy, at the very least by pledging himself in marriage to be her defender and lover forever. Once female modesty became a first casualty of the sexual revolution, even women eager for marriage lost their greatest power to hold and to discipline their prospective mates” (#640).

Years ago Kass and his late wife Amy, distressed by the myriads of failing marriages, began offering a seminar at the University of Chicago to focus on courting and marrying. It occurred to them that universities encouraged many kinds of studies, but rarely focused on the truly central “activities of everyday life” which deeply concerned earlier thinkers such as Aristotle (p. x). “Absent especially is the devoted search for moral wisdom regarding the conduct of life—philosophy’s original meaning and goal, and a central focus of all religious thought and practice—a search that takes help from wherever it may be found and that gives direction to a life seriously lived” (p. ix). Students warmly responded to the course, and the assigned readings have been collected into a sourcebook edited by the Kasses, Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, c. 2000). They sought to reverse their students’ apparent disinterest in getting married and having children, for relatively few had thought seriously about the importance of sharing a lifetime with someone. Since the Kasses had found their marriage right at the heart of what makes life meaningful, they unapologetically took a “pro-marriage” stance and wondered why youngsters failed to crave to discover such a good life! In part, they concluded, the demise of “courtship” helped explain it. As they define it, “courting” means “to pay amorous attention to, to woo, with a view of marriage” (p. 5).

Unfortunately, such “courting and marrying” have nearly disappeared in modern America. In part, they believed, the proliferation of “gender studies” and the influence of militant feminism have deliberately sought to “redefine and recreate the meaning of being man or woman,” alleging that “gender” is little more than a “cultural construction” subject to continuous change. An egalitarian ideology has subverted “the authority of religion, tradition, and custom within families, of husbands over wives and fathers over sons” (p. 13). Against such, the professors Kass urge us to simply study our navels! They unequivocally show we were born of a woman! “Moreover, absent a miracle, each of us owes our living existence to exactly one man and one woman—no more, no less, no other—and thus to one act of heterosexual union. This is no social construction, it is natural fact” (p. 7). So let’s be honest and talk about two sexes, not multiplied genders! Doing so leads us to wonder at the beauty of courtship and marriage.

Since publishing Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar, Kass thinks the “beauty of courtship and marriage” has further decayed. In Leading a Worthy Life he underscores his earlier concerns, setting forth “a partial list of the recent changes in our society and culture that hamper courtship and marriage: the sexual revolution, made possible especially by effective female contraception; the ideology of feminism and the changing educational and occupational status of women; the destigmatization of bastardy, divorce, infidelity, and abortion; the general erosion of shame and awe regarding sexual matters, exemplified most vividly in the ubiquitous and voyeuristic presentation of sexual activity in movies and on television; widespread morally neutral sex education in schools; the explosive increase in the numbers of young people whose parents have been divorced (and in those born out of wedlock who have never known their father); great increases in geographic mobility, with a resulting loosening of ties to place and extended family of origin; and, harder to describe precisely, a popular culture that celebrates youth and independence not as a transient stage en route to adulthood but as ‘the time of our lives,’ imitable at all ages, and an ethos that lacks transcendent aspirations and asks of us no devotion to family, God, or country, encouraging us simply to soak up the pleasures of the present. The change most immediately devastating to wooing is probably the sexual revolution” (#628).

Preeminent among the many harmful aspects of the sexual revolution is divorce, American style. “Countless students” have told Kass “that the divorce of their parents has been the most devastating and life-shaping event of their lives” (#685). Fearing long-term commitments, youngsters now choose to “live together,” getting to “know” each other without going through the process of dating, courtship and marraige. “But such arrangements,” Kass says, “even when they eventuate in matrimony, are, precisely because they are a trial, not a trial of marriage. Marriage is not something one tries on for size, and then decides whether to keep; it is rather something one decides with a promise, and then bends every effort to keep. Lacking the formalized and public ritual, and especially the vows or promises of permanence (or “commitment”) that subtly but surely shape all aspects of genuine marital life, cohabitation is an arrangement of convenience, with each partner taken on approval and returnable at will” (#698). Though often angry at their parents for divorcing, cohabiting couples that marry will likely follow their example! “Given that they have more or less drifted into marriage, it should come as no great surprise that couples who have lived together before marriage have a higher rate of divorce than those who have not” (#704).

Whether or not it is possible, Kass calls for a return to earlier models for courtship and marriage as the only practice suitable for our species. “Real reform in the direction of sanity would require a restoration of cultural gravity about sex, marriage, and the life cycle. The restigmatization of illegitimacy and promiscuity would help. A reversal of recent antinatalist prejudices, implicit in the practice of abortion, and a correction of current antigenerative sex education would also help, as would the revalorization of marriage as both a personal and a cultural ideal” (#917).

His commitment to revitalizing marriage is part of Kass’s broader concern for human dignity, something he has extensively dealt with in his bioethical writings, early evident in Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity. Medical researchers, once committed to enabling patients to recover from diseases, now envision genetic manipulation and computer-chip implants which will improve human nature. “Human nature itself lies on the operating table, ready for alteration, for eugenic and neuropsychic ‘enhancement,’ for wholesale redesign. Inn leading laboratories, academic and industrial, new creators are confidently amassing their powers anthill on the street their evangelists are zealously prophesying a posthuman future. For anyone who cares about preserving our humanity, the time has come to pay attention” (p. 4). Reminding us of C.S. Lewis’s warnings in The Abolition of Man and Aldous Huxley’s prophetic Brave New World (two books fundamental to his intellectual development) he worries that we “are not yet aware of the gravity” of powerful anti-human movements seeking to “transform” the natural world we’ve been given. Around the globe we see folks infatuated with utopian aspirations, enamored of technologies, all singing “loudly the Baconian anthem, ‘Conquer nature, relieve man’s estate’” (p. 4).

From his current vantage point, Kass says: “As I look back over the decades since I left the world of science to reflect on its human meaning, three distinct but related pursuits stand out: First, addressing the conceptual danger (stressed by Lewis) of a soulless science of life, I sought a more natural science, one that is truer to life as lived. Second, addressing the practical danger (stressed by Huxley) of dehumanization resulting from the relief of man’s estate and the sacrifice of the high to the urgent, I sought a richer picture of human dignity and human flourishing. And third, addressing the social and political dangers (stressed by Rousseau) of cultural decay and enfeeblement, I sought cultural teachings that could keep us strong in heart and soul, no less than in body and bank account” (Leading a Worthy Life, #5027).

We simply must think more deeply about such things, and such thinking must be philosophical rather than scientific, discerning and seeking to preserve human dignity. “Both historically and linguistically, ‘dignity’ has always implied something elevated, something deserving of respect. The central notion etymologically, in English as in the Latin root dignitas, is worthiness, elevation, honor, nobility – in brief, excellence or virtue. In all its meanings it has been a term of distinction; dignity is not something to be expected or found in every human being, like a nose or a navel” (#2914). Today, he warns, there is a “new field of ‘transhumanist’ science is rallying thought and research for the wholesale redesign of human nature, employing genetic and neurological engineering and man-machine hybrids, en route to what has been blithely called a ‘posthuman’ future” (#2825). What should most concern us is the fact that the real threat we face is not merely technologies such as cloning but “the underlying scientific thought” that sustains them. During the past several centuries, biologists have “reconceived the nature of the organic body, representing it not as something animated, purposive and striving, but as dead matter-in-motion. This reductive science has given us enormous power, but it offers us no standards to guide its use. Worse, it challenges our self-understanding as creatures of dignity, rendering us incapable of recognizing dangers to our humanity that arise from the very triumphs biology has made. What is urgently needed is a richer, more natural biology and anthropology, one that does full justice to the meaning of our peculiarly human union of soul and body in which low neediness and divine-seeking aspiration are concretely joined” (p. 20).

To rediscover Aristotle and the Bible would significantly help us in this endeavor. The wisdom contained in such classic sources far surpasses the reductionistic and frequently irrational pronouncements being uttered by today’s scientists and politicians. So Genesis can tell us “what it means that the earth’s most godlike creature is a concretion combining ruddy earth and rousing breath” (p. 20). Should we be dissatisfied with the reigning mechanistic dogma we could turn to Goethe, “a connoisseur of morphology who . . . explored the immanent creative powers of life and who understood, perhaps better than anyone else, how the purposive yet innovative mind of man might both mirror and emory the purposiveness and creativity of nature itself. And hiding off-stage, but still accessible to us, is that first biologist of nature-in-its-ordinary-course, Aristotle, who emphasized questions of being over becoming, form over matter, purposiveness over moving causes, and wholes over parts; for whom the soul was not an ethereal spirit or a goest-in-the-machine but an immanent and embodies principle of all vital activity; and for whom science was a refined and ever deepening reflection on the natures and the causes of the beings manifest to us in ordinary experience” (p. 294).

Only thereby will we recover our true sense of human dignity.

Following his 2013 inauguration, Pope Francis I enjoyed widespread adulation, especially in the more progressive circles of the Catholic Church.  The secular media too proved notably fawning inasmuch as he seemed open to modernity and willing to abandon some of the Church’s traditional positions—particularly regarding sexual behavior.  Thus Actress Jane Fonda said:  “‘Gotta love new Pope.  He cares about the poor, hates dogma.’ Actress Salma Hayek, a supporter of abortion rights and gay marriage, asserted, ‘Pope Francis is the best pope that has ever existed.’  Fonda’s ex-husband, the late Tom Hayden, spoke for fellow 1960s radicals when he called the election of Pope Francis ‘the greatest moment in empowering spiritual progressives in decades.’  ‘Francis is on the side of liberation theology, working from within, towards his moment,’ he wrote. ‘His choice is more miraculous, if you will, than the rise of Barack Obama in 2008’” (George Neumayr, Political Pope, p. 25). 

Within a few years, however, conservative Catholics grew concerned with Francis’s off-the-cuff comments, spontaneous phone calls, interviews, and publications.  To understand such concerns, one of the best recent studies is To Change the Church:  Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism  (New York:  Simon & Schuster; Kindle Edition, c. 2018), by Ross Douthat, a columnist for the New York Times.  “This is a book,” he says, “about the most important religious story of our time: the fate of the world’s largest religious institution under a pope who believes that Catholicism can change in ways that his predecessors rejected, and who faces resistance from Catholics who believe the changes he seeks risk breaking faith with Jesus Christ” (#32).  Douthat thinks we face “a hinge moment in the history of Catholicism, a period of theological crisis that’s larger than just the Francis pontificate but whose particular peak under this pope will be remembered, studied, and argued over for as long as the Catholic Church endures—and, if Catholics are right about their church, for as long as this world endures as well” (#113).  

During the past two centuries liberalizing currents have transformed Western Civilization by reshaping its political, economic, and cultural institutions, moulded by an ever-changing “adaptationist, evolutionist spirit.”  Protestant Liberals and Catholic Modernists have insisted Christians should “adapt or die” and proposed a multitude of changes designed to update the ancient faith by constantly revising and transforming its doctrines, making them “into the equivalent of a party’s platform or a republic’s constitution—which is to say, binding for the moment but constantly open to revision based on democratic debate” (p. 10).  It’s no accident that the most liberal segments within the Church are from Germany, still influenced by the Hegelian notion “that God’s revelation was perpetually unfolding in history, and that therefore it was a mistake to consider Catholicism a closed system in which questions were settled permanently. The liberal Protestant line, ‘Never put a period where God has put a comma,’ was the basic presupposition for this liberal Catholicism as well.  Nothing, save Christ’s divinity and not necessarily even that, could be closed to debate, and the message that the church was called to preach in one era might be very different in the next” (pp. 151-152).  As the decades rolled by virtually all the popes (most notably Pius IX and Benedict XV) have battled such currents, determined to conserve the “faith once delivered to the saints.”  But there has always been a determined faction within the Church working to modernize her—to essentially embrace the Liberalism emergent in mainline Protestant denominations.  To them, invoking “the Spirit of Vatican II,” getting a progressive pope would at last bring the Church into the modern age.  And with the current Pope Francis they may well have found, Dothan believes, the right man “to change the church.”  

Devotees of changing the Church constantly invoke the “spirit of Vatican II.”  Since both John Paul II and Benedict XVI sought to diplomatically implement their understanding of the council’s declarations, they avoided waging “a comprehensive war on modernism,” preferring to exhort the faithful and modestly reform the bureaucracy.  But liberals, waiting in the wings, saw their “era as a kind of temporary conservative coup, in which they had lost the levers of power but hadn’t lost anything permanent. After all, what one coup could accomplish another could eventually undo” (p. 25).  They blithely ignored the obvious:  “In the heartland of ‘spirit of Vatican II’ Catholicism, the Northern European nations whose theologians contributed so much to the council’s liberal voice, the church’s collapse was swift, steep, and stunning” (p. 27).  Scheming to overhaul the Church in modernist ways, they’ve engineered her suicide!  

Their opportunity came when Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation in 2013.  “That night, by interesting coincidence, a bolt of lightning struck the Vatican” (p. 45).  A small group of progressive German and Belgium clerics (known as the “St. Gallen mafia”) looked for a candidate who would be amenable to their designs.  They found “a plausible candidate” in Jorge Bergoglio, the Jesuit archbishop of Buenos Aires.  Coming of age when liberation theology infatuated many Latin Americans, Bergoglio seemed to share the cabal’s commitment to “a synthesis between gospel faith and political activism, with Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount as a blueprint for social revolution instead of Das Kapital.”  As Pope, Francis, granted Gustavo Gutiérrez, “one of the godfathers of liberation theology,” a private audience and later featured him “as a key speaker at a Vatican event” (p. 68).  Alleviating poverty, not salvation from sin, became the Gospel!  Unlike Benedict XVI, Bergoglio was an activist.  “‘Hagan lío!’” he liked to say to young people.  It was a colloquial phrase—translated as ‘Shake things up!’  ‘Make noise!’ or ‘Make a mess!’ or even ‘Raise hell!’”  His St. Gallen supporters saw in him “hints of their own worldview in his focus on poverty and social justice, his seeming weariness with certain culture war battles, and his decentralizing instincts” (p. 60).

Following his election, Bergoglio certainly sought to “shake things up.”  He discarded some of the dress, residence, formality and symbolism of the papacy, portraying himself as an accessible, transparent man of the people.   He also sought to transform the image of the Church, frequently saying “that he wanted the church to resemble ‘a field hospital after battle,’ in which the most important thing is to bind up open wounds, to use mercy as a medicine, before offering the patient a meticulous blueprint for full health” (p. 66).  Such mercy was especially needed, he thought, in dealing with sex and marriage, as was evident in the prominence he gave to one of the St. Gallen mafia, Cardinal Walter Kasper, “Ratzinger’s old intellectual rival,” who had “recently written a book on the theology of mercy.”  Though Kasper reinforced many of the Church’s traditional teachings, “in the crucial passages” he proposed a novel “penitential path,” opening the way for “divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion” (p. 82). 

To consider this issue, Pope Francis called for a synod on “the vocation and mission of the family in the Church and in the contemporary world.”  A preliminary, “extraordinary” synod met in 2014 beginning with an address by Cardinal Kasper.  Discussions ensued which were summarized in an unofficial relatio that gained considerable attention.  “Gone was the language of mortal sin and moral absolutes; gone were phrases like ‘adultery’ and ‘living in sin.’  It seemed to suggest that “the twenty-first-century church would recognize and celebrate the virtues of second marriages and second unions and cohabitation even as it continued to teach that they fell short of Catholicism’s official marital ideal” (p. 107).  The 2015 Ordinary Synod considered the positions advanced in the earlier synod, leading to the publication of the pope’s official teaching in Amoris Laetitia, “The Joy of Love.”  It generally reasserted traditional Church teaching, but   in the section devoted to “Catholics in irregular relationships” it was not at all clear where the pope stood. 

What was clear was Francis’s apparently intentional ambiguity.  Whereas John Paul II had strongly opposed situational ethics, Francis seemed to invoke hard cases calling for relaxation of behavioral rules.  So he “piled up lists of mitigating factors that could make an apparent mortal sin less serious.  Where John Paul II had insisted that even in difficult circumstances the moral law is never impossible to follow, Francis discussed all the ways in which family turmoil and personal psychology and the exigencies of modern life could make the moral law seem either too hard to comprehend or too difficult to obey.”  To turn from John Paul’s Veritatus Splendor to Francis’s Amoris Laetitia, one conclude “that Francis wasn’t so much developing John Paul’s thought as arguing with it” (p. 130).  

Apparently Francis is reviving the “contextual” or “situation ethics” that John Paul II so sharply repudiated.  (Illustrating this a Twitter comment posted by one of the pope’s closes advisors, Cardinal Spader, who declared: “Theology is no Mathematics.  2 + 2 in Theology can make 5.  Because it has to do with God and real life of people.”)  It all depends!  Who’s to judge?  The controversial sections in Francis’s papal exhortation sometimes read a bit like the pop psychology of the ‘60s.  “Situation ethics is back,” says Thomas Pauken, author of The Thirty Years War.  “Francis was infected by the virus of 1960s liberalism.”  Thus, almost immediately bishops around the world interpreted the document differently.  Some, such as Robert McElroy in San Diego, authorized remarried Catholics to take communion, leaving the decision on the hands of individuals or priests.  Other bishops invited “to communion any remarried Catholics who felt “‘at peace with God’” (p. 136).  More conservative bishops, such as Charles Chaput in Baltimore, staunchly upheld the Church’s traditional ban.  Given such uncertainty, four prominent, retired cardinals wrote the pope a private letter asking for clarification.  Their letter set four dubia—simple questions—primarily asking “whether Veritatis Splendor’s declaration that ‘circumstances or intentions can never transform an act intrinsically evil . . . into an act “subjectively” good’ had been superseded, and whether the church now taught, as it had not before, that individual consciences could discern ‘legitimate exceptions to absolute moral norms’” (p. 143). 

Such sharp disagreements regarding marriage and divorce reveal deep fissions within the Church under Pope Francis.  Whether ruptures or schisms develop only time will tell.  “Other communions have divided very recently over precisely the issues that the pope has pressed to the front of Catholic debates.  And for good reason:  Because these issues, while superficially ‘just’ about sexuality or church discipline, actually cut very deep—to the very bones of Christianity, the very words of Jesus Christ” (p. 182).  The pope is also working to permanently establish his progressive position by eliminating conservatives who dare oppose him.  Thus cardinals George Pell, Gerhard Muller, Robert Sarah and Raymond Burke have been demoted and shunted aside, to be replaced by Francis’s devotees.  

In multifarious ways Francis has indeed changed the Church—most probably for the worse.  Douthat concludes his treatise with a statement in a “sympathetic papal biography” detailing Bergoglio’s Argentine years.  The Jesuit writing the book said:  “As provincial [of the Society of Jesus] he generated divided loyalties:  some groups almost worshipped him, while others would have nothing to do with him, and he would hardly speak to them.  It was an absurd situation.  He is well-trained and very capable, but is surrounded by this personality cult which is extremely divisive.  He has an aura of spirituality which he uses to obtain power.  It will be a catastrophe for the Church to have someone like him in the Apostolic See.  He left the Society of Jesus in Argentina destroyed with Jesuits divided and institutions destroyed and financially broken.  We have spent two decades trying to fix the chaos that the man left us.  ‘Hagan lío!’ Francis likes to say. ‘Make a mess!’ In that much he has succeeded” (p. 207-208).

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

In  Lost Shepherd: How Pope Francis is Misleading His Flock (Washington:  Regnery Publishing, Kindle Edition, c. 2018) Philip Lawler, a seasoned Catholic journalist specializing in Church affairs, duplicates much of the material found in Douthat’s To Change the Church.  But he is more personally distraught, for “every day (I am exaggerating, but only slightly), the pope issues another reminder that he does not approve of Catholics like me” (p. 43).  Though initially excited by the prospects of a fresh face in the Vatican, it quickly became evident that he was a divisive figure.  This is due to both his “autocratic style of governance and the radical nature of the program that he is relentlessly advancing” (#57).  

The very name Bergoglio chose—Francis—suggested his intent to differentiate himself from his predecessors.  Ironically, for a Jesuit, he chose a name best associated with the beloved Francis of Assisi, famed for his “commitment to simplicity, humility, and wholehearted love for all of God’s creation.  At the same time, it called to mind the message that the great saint had received from God in the church of San Damiano:  ‘Francis, go, rebuild my house, which as you see is in ruins.’”  For more than 1000 years popes selected a name used by a prior popes.  “So when he chose an entirely new name, Pope Francis indicated that he was prepared to strike out in a new direction” (#262).  Determined to discard some of the regalia associated with the papacy, when an “an aide tried to place the traditional mozzetta across his shoulders before his first appearance on the loggia of St. Peter’s, Francis brushed him away testily, declaring that ‘the carnival is over’” (#301).  As such “brash,” ad lib comments proliferated it was initially difficult to discern precisely who he was or what he stood for.  

He publicly presents himself as “kind, soft-spoken, avuncular, uniting rather than dividing. Yet even a cursory reading of the pope’s daily homilies reveals harsh rhetoric, stinging rebukes, and angry denunciations such as we have not heard from a Roman pontiff for generations” (#2578).  He routinely assails  “the ‘Pharisees,’ the ‘doctors of the law,’ and all who were ‘rigid’ in their interpretation of Church teaching. In language that no one expected from a Roman pontiff, he denounced the ‘careerist bishop,’ the ‘sourpuss,’ the ‘smarmy, idolater priest,’ the ‘moralistic quibbler,’ and the ‘people without light: real downers.’  Some members of the flock, it became clear, particularly get under the papal skin—the ‘starched Christian,’ the ‘bubble Christian,’ the ‘long-faced, mournful funeral Christian,’ and the ‘parrot Christian.’  In a particularly vivid rebuke, he accused journalists who report on conflicts and scandals of ‘coprophilia (an ‘abnormal interest in fecal matter’).  Rarely did the pope identify the objects of his ire by name, but from the frequency of his attacks on ‘rigid’ Christians, it seemed clear that he was talking about those who did not accept his calls for change in the Church” (#2547).  Though many of the cardinals who elected him thought he would initiate needed administrative reforms—e.g. ending the “Vatileaks,” cleaning up the Vatican’s financial problems, confronting the sexual-abuse scandals—Francis did little meow than denounce evil-doers.  His words are often impassioned, garnering favorable media coverage, but little action follows.   Indeed he seems to promote and maintain in office some of the very clerics (so long as they are his allies) associated with financial corruption and sexual abuse!  

And as he settled into his office “a pattern emerged of support for causes usually associated with the political Left—environmentalism, disarmament, unrestricted immigration, income redistribution” (#359).  “The Vatican began to organize conferences on immigration reform and climate change.  Twice Francis hosted meetings of ‘popular movements,’ with invitations going out to environmental activists, ethnic separatists, militant feminists, and community organizers—but not to pro-life leaders or defenders of traditional marriage” (#2764).  Throughout the synods on the family, Francis seemed (by virtue of the speakers he chose and the critics he dismissed) to support allowing allowing divorced Catholics to receive communion—though as ever it was hard to know precisely where he stands.  Nevertheless, when bishops in Buenos Aires embraced the liberal position, the pope sent them a private letter, congratulating “his countrymen on their interpretation of his apostolic exhortation, writing that it ‘fully captures the meaning’ of his work. ‘There are no other interpretations,’ he added” (#2071).

Just as there are “no other interpretations” allowed, so too Francis clearly seeks to permanently change the Church.  He has surrounded himself with liberal Jesuits such as Antonio Spader and often meets with Adolfo Nicolas, who was for many years the superior general of the Society of Jesus.  Much of his agenda seems designed to placate “the solidly left-leaning majority” in his order.  “For a pope bent on change, the Jesuits would be a bulwark. And Francis was bent on change” (#2535).

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A far more critical treatise is George Neumayr’s The Political Pope: How Pope Francis Is Delighting the Liberal Left and Abandoning Conservatives (New York:  Center  Street, c. 2017).  “The election of Jorge Bergoglio,” he says, “marked the culmination of the left’s long march through the Church.”  Determined to liberalize the Church, Catholic Leftists are generally labeled Modernists.  A century ago Pope Pius X (in his 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis) branded their position heretical, warning that they wished retool the faith, making it suitable “to the times in which we live” rather than historical orthodoxy.  “He foresaw a Church that would chase after elite fads, defer to the spurious claims of modern science, bow down to the secularism of the state, treat all religions as equal, cast Jesus Christ as a mere human political activist, reduce priests to social workers, and Protestantize its worship and doctrine” (p. 41).  His fears seem to have come to pass, for they are now manifest in Pope Francis.  

Neumayr begins by reminding readers that both popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI strongly opposed “‘liberation theology,’ a Marxist-inspired ideology disguised as concern for the poor that the Soviet Union’s KGB spies had helped smuggle into Latin America’s Catholic Church in the 1950s.  The movement was born in the KGB, and it had a KGB-invented name:  ‘liberation theology,’ according to Ion Mihai Pacepa, who served as a spymaster for Romania’s secret police in the 1950s and 1960s” (p. 1).  Having suffered Communist oppression in Poland, John Paul II had no illusions regarding its toxicity.  Thus one of his first significant gestures took place when he met Latin American clerics, many of them favoring liberation theology, in Nicaragua in1983.  Seeing Ernesto Cardenal, “a Catholic priest turned Marxist activist” who had violated his vows by joining the “Sandinista government in Nicaragua,” the pope rebuked him, saying:  “‘You must straighten out your position with the Church’”(p. 1).  

Thirty years later, shortly before leaving office in 2013, Pope Benedict XVI warned against “the destructive liberalism that spread within the Church after the council of Vatican II.”  He lamented liberalism’s impact, producing “‘so many problems, so much misery, in reality:  seminaries closed, convents closed, the liturgy was trivialized’” (p. 14)  He could hardly have anticipated that his successor would, in fact, would champion “the very liberal Church he feared” and embody “the very ‘hermeneutic of politics’ he decried” (p. 14).  Thus the current pope—an Argentinian favoring socialism who has declared that “inequality is the root of all evil”— Bergoglio “has generated headlines not for scolding Marxists but for supporting them, not for rebuking liberation theologians but for honoring them.”  He has named “an open socialist,” a Honduran, chairman of the Council of Cardinals.  Francis has said “that liberation theologians have a ‘high concept of humanity’” and publicly praised radicals such as Brazil’s Leonardo Boff and “the founding father of liberation theology, the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez” (p. 3).  When, in 2016, the Jesuits selected, as their general superior they chose (garnering Pope Francis’s blessing) “a Venezuelan, Fr. Arturo Sosa, whose communist sympathies have long been known” and who endorses a “Marxist mediation of the Christian Faith” focused on transforming “the capitalist society into a socialist society” (p. 62).  

In short:  Pope Francis “has emerged as one of the most political popes in the history of the Church.  His left-wing activism is relentless, ranging across causes from the promotion of global warming theory to support for amnesty and open borders to the abolition of lifetime imprisonment.”  And “he is not only championing the radical political agenda of the global left but also subverting centuries-old Catholic teaching on faith and morals” (p. 6). 

Centuries ago the prophet Jeremiah asked a probing question:   “Are they ashamed of their loathsome conduct?  No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush” (Jeremiah 8:12).  Taking that text as her guide, Karen Booth details her experience in—and evaluation of—the growing sexual permissiveness, particularly regarding homosexuality, within her denomination in Forgetting How to Blush: United Methodism’s Compromise with the Sexual Revolution (Wheaton:  Bristol House, LTD., c. 2012).   Booth herself confesses to earlier moving through a broken marriage and “a wasteland of relational brokenness and serial promiscuity” (#212).  She also supported, as a part of her concern for “social justice,” the “gay rights” agenda—as she was urged to do while attending a liberal United Methodist seminary in the 1980s.  A decade later, however, saddened by both her personal struggles and the stories of individuals suffering from the permissiveness of her denomination, she began to oppose the pro-homosexual movement.  

Importantly, “the roots of our long struggle” may be traced back “at least to the late 1950s and early 1960s when several strategic educational and programmatic decisions were made.”  Prominent denominational leaders then  “adopted and promoted a value neutral approach to sexual ethics called ‘the new morality’—a decision that laid the groundwork for the sexual confusion and compromise that would follow” (Kindle #187).  To dolorously document her church’s “foolish and sometimes evil” Booth wrote this treatise.  A century ago progressive thinkers rebelled against what they portrayed as Victorian prudery.  Promoting the “social hygiene movement,” they called for a healthier attitude towards sex, including the abolition of the “double standard” treating men and women differently.   Half-a-century later came the Kinsey reports, alleging Americans routinely indulged in various sexual activities and arguing that all forms of sexual expression were  “natural” and thus permissible.  To Kinsey, deeply committed to Darwin’s evolutionary paradigm, humans are simply animals needing to satisfy their biological urges.  “So-called ‘perversions’ are rooted in primate behavior and in that sense are ‘natural.’”  Denying one’s sexual urges needlessly frustrates a person and leads to both individual and social problems.   And to Kinsey:  “The Christian church is to blame for this situation; it is the main culprit behind sexual ignorance, repression and dysfunction” (#373).  

Though we now know how seriously (indeed, intentionally) flawed was Kinsey’s “research,” it profoundly impacted post-WWII culture—especially the nation’s intellectual elites.  Not only were his “reports” widely read, but he lectured in prestigious law schools and testified before a variety of legislative committees.  Hitherto illegal, non-marital sexual practices, such as adultery, pornography, and sodomy, were quickly decriminalized.  Sex education courses, subtly supporting more permissive sexual standards, were soon introduced into the public schools.  Kinsey sought to change the nation’s ethos, and he succeeded.  As Kristin Luker, professor professor of law and sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, concluded:  “‘Men and women of a certain age have lived through a [sexual] revolution as disorienting and historically important as any of the revolutions we routinely recognize as such. . . .   That revolution questioned a whole set of assumptions about what were the right ways for men and women to relate to one another sexually, how sex was and should be related to maleness and femaleness, and how and where marriage and sex should coincide.  The opening up of what had been taken-for-granted truths has changed the world’” (#694). 

Swept up in this revolution were many (if not all) of the nation’s Christian churches, including the United Methodist Church.  However they may have tried to resist the “new morality” in the 1960s, churches (many following the lead of the National Council of Churches) quickly accommodated themselves to the more permissive sexual standards of the secular world.  As Booth researched the subject, sifting “through the historical records of a number of Methodist and United Methodist Boards and Agencies,” she “discovered that deliberate curriculum and program choices made in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s and 1970s laid the foundation for the moral revisionism that would follow and spread” (#1328).  Thus in 1972, sex education was added to the Methodist Book of Discipline, and one spokesman was encouraged by what he saw as the “the church’s response to ‘the new sexuality,’ including: —a shift from ‘rigid rules’ to situational ethics —an emphasis on individual freedom and toleration of private, consensual acts —a redefinition of pornography that allowed for the explicit depiction of ‘various kinds of sexual behavior’—an understanding of homosexual behavior as ‘variant’ rather than as ‘deviant.’”  It was all, of course, based on “‘a deeper understanding of the Bible’” (#1465-72).  

Such materials were prepared by denominational leaders such as C. Kilmer (Kim)  Myers, who infused his messages “with substantial amounts of Tillich and Buber, a few revisionist twists and a dollop of Jungian psychology for good measure.  Myers taught that truth is not static but a “continuing revelation”; that church teaching should therefore “readjust itself” to the insights of modern psychology and sociology; that justification is not, as traditionally understood, being made right with God, but is  “accepting the fact that I am accepted”; that in the ultimate union of masculinity and femininity man’s “wholeness,” including his homosexuality, emerges and, therefore, that all relationships are equally “valid” if they are loving, committed and “responsible” (#1700).  

One denominational activist, Ted McIlvenna, who had earlier served on the MNC’s national staff, was especially active in arranging conferences, workshops, and publications that advanced the “new morality.”  Following efforts to minister to gay men in San Francisco, he worked assiduously to normalize their behavior, along with virtually all forms of sexual activity.  Featured in a 1979 article in Hustler—“The Reverend Ted McIlvenna:  Apostle for Sexual Rights”—he said his mission was to “free people from sexual restrictions” (#1970).   “Just consider,” Booth says, “McIlvenna’s pronouncements about God and hardcore pornography:  ‘I think the Spirit of the Lord may have been in Hustler before Larry Flynt consciously tried to put it there.’”  Indeed, “the ‘Spirit of the Lord moves where it will, and my job as a missionary is to identify it where I find it.  And I perceive God at the place where people are being set free.  That’s why I perceive God in Hustler’” (# 2032-2037).  Throughout it all, McIlvenna—the “missionary” for sexual license—retained his credentials for 40 years in the United Methodist Church!

Given the influence of clergymen such as McIlvenna, no one should wonder at the success of pro-gay agitation with Methodism.  Activists insisted, in various venues, that  the church change its historic stance. They often disrupted denominational meetings and slowly gained ground as “studies” and “reports” supported their position.  Things came to a head in 1992 when The General Conference—“the only official decision-making body for The United Methodist Church—had the opportunity to speak a clear and unambiguous word about sexual morality.  Instead, it compromised” (#2350).   A decade later, meeting in Pittsburgh in 2004, “presiding Bishop Janice Huie ‘welcomed” hundreds of bused-in demonstrators onto the plenary floor.  Activists marched around, beat drums and chanted for several minutes before placing a rainbow candle on the altar.  Conservative observers in the visitor’s gallery thought the candle bore remarkable resemblance to a modern-day ‘asherah pole’” (#2378).  Unable to gain all their objectives, activists have formed a Church Within a Church (CWAC) and begun ordaining ministers defying denominational standards.  They dubbed their behavior as a “loyal” resistance, justifying  “covert acts of subterfuge—for example, taking an ordination pledge of sexual purity with fingers crossed or ‘protecting’ a pastor or church official who is sexually active but doesn’t choose to ‘come out of the closet.’  Indeed, one influential activist defended ‘lying, deception, and operating under false pretenses’ as long as pro-gay objectives are achieved” (#2885).

Consequently, homosexuals have orchestrated the collapse of traditional Methodist discipline.  They succeeded, Booth thinks, because the denomination lost its commitment to Scripture.  An elderly man, supporting the gay agenda, simply explained it:  “‘You know, we could resolve our conflict quite easily,’ he told me, ‘if we could just agree to get rid of the first five books of the Old Testament.  If we could just eliminate the doctrine of original sin, we wouldn’t have this problem’” (#1316).  While not exactly getting rid of the Pentateuch, biblical scholars within the denomination provided “nuanced” ways to attain the same end, explaining away certain clear prohibitions as “ignorant” and merely prejudices of an unenlightened era.    Thus one scholar, Victor Paul Furnish, “‘declares that “homosexuality, as we have come to understand it and to use the word, is not a biblical topic,’” and ultimately faulted “‘every one of the specific moral rules and teachings of Scripture’ for being ‘time bound and culturally conditioned’” (#2769).  

Casting away the timeless authority of Scripture, today’s United Methodist Church has truly forgotten how to blush!

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In Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics (New York:  Basic Books, c.  2017), R. Marie Griffith seeks to show how sexual concerns have effectively “split” Christianity “into two virtually non-overlapping religions” (p. ix).  The split first began a century ago as women mobilized to assert their right to vote.   Thereafter, a divide widened between “Christians embracing new ideas regarding women’s rights and roles and others redoubling their efforts to preserve the old sexual order” (p. x).  Chapter by chapter—though endeavoring to set forth a scholarly historical work and providing richly-researched and detailed information—Griffith continually lauds the progressives who worked to transform the nation’s ethos.  To her, those opposing “sexual relationships and behavior outside traditional marriage” were mainly driven by “fear” (p. xi).  Those supporting “tradition” feared change whereas “progressives” embraced new ways of behaving, especially for “persons once excluded, marginalized, or stigmatized for behaving outside the norm” (p. xi).  As she tells the story, compassionate, inclusive progressives prevailed and ushered in a better world, especially for women such as herself!

Griffith begins her treatise by recounting “the battle over birth control in the roaring twenties.”  Following to the work of Margaret Sanger, “the signature leader of the birth control movement,” many Christians (ignoring one of the most ancient traditions in the Christian Church, both Catholic and Protestant) began supporting contraception in the 1930s “as morally acceptable and, crucially, as perfectly consonant with American liberty” (p. 1).  Sanger effectively courted Protestant supporters by claiming opposition to birth control was simply a Catholic superstition irrelevant to progressives determined to be on the right side of history.  Stressing how a child’s right “to be desired” as well as the “racial uplift” for the nation would be bolstered by birth control, she enlisted sympathetic “Protestant clergy, underscoring the fact that Protestants no longer spoke with one voice regarding contraception” (p. 11).  

The campaign for contraception rapidly gained momentum when the Church of England, in the 1930 Lambeth Conference, cautiously embraced birth control for married couples facing unusual situations.  In response, Pope Pius XI reaffirmed the Church’s traditional condemnation of contraception in Casti Connubia, sharply rebuking Anglicans for departing from centuries of Christian teaching.  But as the “Red” Anglican Dean William R. “Inge suggested, the Protestant position on birth control followed an internal modernist logic consistent with a progressive position on a number of other issues in American society, including the teaching of Darwinian evolution and the publication of literature formerly deemed obscene” (p. 31).  Consequently, support for birth control rapidly spread in the United States—a 1938 poll showed nearly 80% of the women approved it.  

Changes in attitudes towards contraception were equally evident in other areas, such as censoring salacious publications and films.  Progressives generally opposed censorship and warmly endorsed more explicit sexual materials, such as typified the writings of D.H Lawrence (whose Lady Chatterly’s Lover was frequently censored).  Joining traditionalists who opposed such laxity, T.S. Eliot “described Lawrence as a ‘great genius’ sickened by ‘a distinct sexual morbidity.’  Denouncing ‘the deplorable religious upbringing which gave Lawrence his lust for intellectual independence,’ Eliot scoffed, ‘like most people who do not know what orthodoxy is, he hated it.’  He damned Lawrence’s lack of ‘tradition’ and analyzed him as having had ‘no guidance except the Inner Light, the most untrustworthy and deceitful guide that ever offered itself to wandering humanity.’” (p. 77).  

That T.S. Eliot and the traditionalists were losing the cultural struggle became even more evident with the reception given the Kinsey reports immediately following WWII.  Rather surprisingly, they fomented a “revolution . . . in religious thinking about sexuality” (p. 123).  This was quite evident in the career of Seward Hiltner, a prominent figure in the National Council of Churches who taught at the University of Chicago divinity school and Princeton Theological Seminary and “would prove an important figure in altering mainline Protestant attitudes regarding sexual morality” (p. 123).  Rather rapidly, the Christian community, as well “as the broader public culture grew more tolerant of explicit sexual themes and imagery” (p. 155).  Hollywood films and popular novels treated sex more openly, and when, in 1960, the FDA approved the birth control pill, “many college students were openly questioning the strict sexual standards and taboos of their parents, including disapproval of premarital sex.  Helen Gurley Brown’s racy best seller Sex and the Single Girl came out in 1962, exuberantly advocating women’s sexual freedom before and outside marriage, and Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking manifesto about unfulfilled homemakers and “the problem that has no name,” The Feminine Mystique, was published the following year” (p. 155).  

More liberal sexual standard led to an openness regarding (and often an approval of) abortion as a last resort form of birth control.  Though denounced throughout the history of the Christian Church, liberal Protestants early enlisted in support of it.  One New York City Baptist clergyman, Howard R. Moody, organized the Clergy Consultation Service, an advocacy group to push for its acceptance.  His group was supported by such pro-abortion advocates as Lawrence Lader, whom Betty Frieden called “the father of abortion rights,”  who became persuaded, while writing a biography of Margaret Sanger, that “reproductive freedom for women’s full equality” included access to abortion.  Believing the 1965 Supreme Court’s Griswold decision secured “privacy” rights, he reasoned:  “If contraception fell under this right to privacy, why not abortion?” (p. 215).  

Anti-abortion Christians simply embraced the historic Catholic position set forth by Pope Pius XII in 1951:  “Every human being, even a child in the mother’s womb, has a right to life directly from God’” (p. 210).  American evangelicals, however, did not immediately embrace the pope’s position.  Indeed, many of them, including the Southern Baptist Convention thought “family welfare” concerns could justify aborting the baby.  Thus W.A. Criswell “praised the court’s decision and publicly stated his belief that abortion was not murder and that ‘what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed’” (p. 202).  Within a decade, however, evangelicals such as Jerry Falwell, with his “Moral Majority,” joined conservative Catholics in adamantly opposing abortion.  As Griffith sees it, “these resolutely conservative Christians and their innumerable allies and followers, feminism and abortion were twin evils, two sides of the same dirty coin” (p. 228).  

In her final chapters Griffith discusses sexual harassment, same sex marriage and LGBT rights.  Though earlier issues had certainly divided Christians into two camps, “Nowhere were national divisions over homosexuality deeper than in the church” (p. 274).   But “a momentous event in the global Anglican Communion and also in American Christianity writ large” occurred when V. Gene Robinson, the “first openly gay and partnered man,” was made a bishop in the Episcopal Church.  Robinson, serves as a symbol marking the triumph of the sexual revolution.  He became such a celebrity that he was invited to speak at an event as part of Barack Obama’s first inauguration, and Griffith has nothing but praise for Robinson’s role in bringing about change in the churches.  “For LGBT people and their allies, Robinson acquired something of the status of a saint, the very embodiment of grace in the face of prejudice, and of prejudice overcome.  His outspoken feminism further endeared him to feminists as well, for he linked hatred of women to these other prejudices, repeatedly maintaining, “At their root, heterosexism and homophobia are expressions of misogyny” (p. 301).  

In Griffith’s Epilogue she unleashes a furious denunciation of Donald Trump, who stands for everything she detests.  Therein, ironically, one finds the heart of the book, for oversimplify, the message of Moral Combat is this:  for a century righteous progressives, committed to compassion and ever-expanding inclusiveness, have slowly triumphed over assorted traditionalists who remain locked into out-dated perspectives.  

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 The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia described, in A Matter of Interpretation, a case dealing with the sexual abuse of a young girl wherein she was allowed to privately testify in the presence of the judge and attorneys, with her account transmitted via closed-circuit TV to the courtroom.  It was ruled she was too frightened to face the man accused of molesting her.  The Court held the procedure to be constitutional, but Scalia dissented, because the Sixth Amendment provides that “[i]n all criminal prosecutions the accused shall enjoy the right . . . to be confronted with the witnesses against him.”  This clearly means a face-to-face testimony, because:  “It is difficult to accuse someone to his face, particularly when you are lying.”  His position upholds an ancient precept set forth in Scripture:  “One witness shall not rise against a man concerning any iniquity or any sin that he committed; by the mouth of two or three witnesses the matter shall be established” (Dt 19:15), and “Do not receive an accusation against an elder except from two or three witnesses” (I Tim 5:19).  

That a person should be considered “innocent until proven guilty” is one of the bedrock principles of our justice system.  Unfortunately, that principle has eroded, as is evident in Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson’s well-researched and highly readable journalistic work, Until Proven Innocent:  Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case (New York:  Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, c. 2007).   Though less well known than Duke’s basketball team, the university’s (virtually all-white) men’s lacrosse team was a nationally-ranked powerhouse.  During spring break in 2006, the team’s captains hosted a stripper party—an event not all that unusual at a famed “party school” such as depicted by Tom Wolfe’s acclaimed novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons.   

One of the two dancers they hired, Crystal Magnum, was a black woman who worked as an “exotic dancer” and also scheduled private performances.  When she arrived, however, she was too intoxicated to dance, and in time she and Kim Roberts (the other dancer) departed.  Roberts, concerned about Magnum’s condition, stopped at a Kroger store and asked a security guard to call 911.  The responding police judged her “passed out drunk” and took her to a hospital.  She said nothing about being raped to either her companion or the police, nor did the hospital staff find any physical evidence of assault.   However, she talked with one nurse, “a strong feminist who had played a part in a Vagina Monologues production and who saw herself an advocate for rape victims” (p. 33), and she looked notes recording Magnum’s accusations of gang rape.  Subsequently this nurse became a primary figure in the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case.

Though Magnum’s companion, Kim Roberts, called the rape accusations “a crock” and the police on the scene scoffed at Magnum’s accusations, a zealous Durham detective, with a history of animosity towards Duke students, determined to open an investigation.  Soon thereafter the district attorney, Michael Nifong, with an eye to burnishing his reputation in the black community, determined to prosecute three of the  players for rape and began to orchestrate a deeply dishonest process, including a “media barrage unheard of for a prosecutor” (p. 85).  He regularly appeared on national TV networks and received fawning praise from the New York Times.   Once the accusations were made, the local media and Duke’s administrators and faculty rushed to judgment and loudly condemned the athletes.  The local NAACP joined the chorus, broadcasting accusations of rampant “racism” in Durham.  Leading the charge was Houston A. Baker Jr., a black professor who insisted all coaches and players on “this white male athletic team” be dismissed.  Scores of other professors—most notably the “Group of 88”—condemned the team, often using their classrooms to incite animosities.  President Richard Brodhead fired the lacrosse coach (an outstanding man as well as coach), though he was not even remotely connected with anything relevant to the case.  Only one lonely chemistry professor dared to withhold judgment until all the evidence was in.   

Fortunately for the three accused athletes, they came from rather wealthy families, well-connected with skilled defense attorneys, who carefully interviewed witnesses and collected evidence—including reports showing that “‘DNA was not present in her [Magnum’s] body, not present the surface of her body, and not on any of her belongings or articles of clothing’” (p. 162).  Though fully aware of this evidence, Nifong declared:  “‘The absence of DNA doesn’t prove anything’” (p. 163).  The national media and Duke professors supported him, insisting evidence was irrelevant since the lacrosse players simply had to be guilty.  But when the case finally came to trial, things fell apart for the prosecution.  The “defense attorneys unveiled the staggeringly conclusive evidence of innocence, and of probable Nifong misconduct . . . found hidden in the nearly two thousand pages of complex and highly technical data” (p. 303).  DNA evidence revealed Magnum’s sexual activity with a variety of men, none of them lacrosse players.  This was followed by equally devastating details regarding “Mangum’s rigged identifications of the three defendants” (p. 304) and the impossibility of getting a fair trial in Durham.  Skilled cross-examination of Nifong’s witnesses devastated his case.  In the final analysis:  “It was only because the Duke defendants had extraordinarily talented, hardworking and expensive lawyers that the Nifong-Meehan DNA cover-up conspiracy was ever cracked” (p. 313).  

As the case collapsed Nifong dropped the charges!  The tables turned and he became the target of serious accusations.  He later resigned as DA and was disbarred.  But even then the Duke professors and the NAACP refused to apologize or backtrack, insisting the incident (even if it didn’t happen) revealed Duke’s pervasive racism!  The authors conclude their story by solemnly declaring:  “Never in recent memory has misconduct on this scale been exposed while the pretrial phase of a big case was still under way:  demonizing innocent suspects in the medias a rapists, racists, and hooligans; whipping up racial hatred against them to win an election; rigging a lineup to implicate them in a crime that never occurred; lying to the public, to the defense, to the court, and to the State Bar; hiding DNA test results that conclusively proved innocence; seeking (unsuccessfully) to bully and threaten defense lawyers and letting their clients be railroaded.”  That “Duke faculty activists, media organizations led by The New York Times, the NAACP, and others” supported Nifong’s agenda, even when the evidence against it was overwhelmingly persuasive, is equally reprehensible (p. 356).  

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A decade after publishing their expose of the denial of due process for Duke’s lacrosse team, KC Johnson and Sturt Taylor Jr. widened their lens in Until Proven Innocent, The Campus Rape Frenzy:  The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities (New York:  Encounter Books, c. 2017).  This book seeks to bring “readers inside a system on our nation’s campuses in which accused students effectively have to prove their innocence, often under procedures that deny them any meaningful opportunity to do so” (Kindle #56).  Rather than become more cautious when dealing with sexual assault complaints, universities doubled down in denying due process to any male accused of wrongdoing.  President Obama’s administration weighed in on the issue in 2011, issuing a “Dear Colleague” letter (recently rescinded by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos), and taking  an “unprecedented initiative” designed to deny accused students a fair hearing by ordering “almost all universities to institute revolutionary changes in their disciplinary policies in order to counter” what was “described as an epidemic of rape and other sexual assaults on college campuses.  . . . .  These change dramatically weakened accused student’s rights to fair proceedings”  (p. 2).

 “‘Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants,’” Justice Louis Brandeis wrote more than a century ago.  But colleges go to great lengths, even beyond the dictates of federal privacy law, to keep their sexual assault proceedings in the dark.”  After examining four dozen or so cases on elite campuses and studying “tens of thousands of pages of legal documents (many of which have not previously been publicly disseminated), along with information gleaned from university handbooks, statistical studies, and confidential “training” material created for colleges and universities nationwide” (p. 11), the authors describe “how most colleges handle sexual assault allegations these days.  Start with an alcohol-soaked set of facts that no state’s criminal law would consider sexual assault.  Add an incomplete ‘investigation,’ unfair procedures, and a disciplinary panel uninterested in evidence of innocence.  Stir in a de facto presumption of guilt based on misguided Obama administration dictates, ideological zeal, and fear of bad publicity.  It’s a formula for judging innocent male students to be sex offenders.”  In the opinion of a Harvard Law professor, Janet Halley, “‘The procedures that are being adopted are taking us back to pre–Magna Carta, pre-due-process procedures’” (pp. 8-9).  Or, as U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor concluded, after examining one case:  ‘It’s closer to Salem, 1692 than Boston, 2015.’”(p. 12). 

For the 20,000 to 25,000 students accused of sexual assault since the Obama directive was put in place, “the federal government, joined by virtually all colleges and universities, has mounted a systematic attack on bedrock American principles including the presumption of innocence, access to exculpatory evidence, the right to cross-examine one’s accuser, and due process.  Allegations of sexual assault have “received unprecedented attention from politicians, academics, and the media.”  Generally the “narrative goes something like this:  An astonishing 20 to 25 percent of female undergraduates will be sexually assaulted before they graduate.  This epidemic has been sustained by a ‘rape culture’ that permeates university administrations as well as fraternities and other groups of male students.  “Women are at a greater risk of sexual assault as soon as they step onto a college campus,” asserts New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand (the foremost congressional opponent of campus due process).  Ignoring this emergency, colleges have been indifferent and even hostile to the millions of sexual assault victims in their student bodies.  The federal government thus ordered almost all universities to change their disciplinary rules in order to ferret out more sex criminals.  Complaints about the presumption of innocence and due process should be disregarded because the crisis is so urgent and because 90 to 98 percent of accused males are guilty.  The few falsely accused innocents will suffer no great injustice or harm, because campus tribunals have no prisons; if expelled, these students can move on to other colleges.”  Despite this oft-repeated narrative, such “claims are all untrue or unsubstantiated” (pp. 13-14).  Nevertheless, they are repeated, as incessantly as a drumbeat, in progressive circles.  

By mandating its understanding of Title IX, the Obama administration’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) prescribed a “single investigator-adjudicator system” whereby “a single person effectively serves as not only detective and prosecutor but also judge and jury.  An alleged perpetrator cannot see all the evidence to be used against him, defend himself before a panel of peers or faculty members, have a lawyer meaningfully represent him in the process, or cross-examine his accuser or any other witness” (p. 18).  Still more, in accord with this system, universities discarded “what the Supreme Court has called ‘beyond any doubt the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth’:  direct cross-examination of accusers” (p. 37).  In fine, universities effectively implemented one of radical feminism’s pieties—Catharine MacKinnon’s 1981 declaration:  “‘Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated’” (p. 40).  

Thus, to get desired “statistics,” surveys were designed “at the behest of participating universities” to deliberately avoid explicitly “asking about ‘rape’ or ‘sexual assault.’  Instead,  they asked about “‘forced kissing’?  Unwanted sexual ‘touching,’ which could include attempted close dancing while fully clothed?  ‘Promised rewards’ for sex?” (pp. 50-51).  Such encounters would be listed as “rape” or “sexual assault”!  A journalist examining these materials “identified four key tenets behind the “rape culture” concept: “1) Women almost never lie when they report a sex crime, and to doubt them is to perpetuate rape culture; 2) rape is any sexual act in which the woman feels violated—unless she suffers from false consciousness and needs to be educated about her violation; 3) rape includes situations in which the woman agrees to sex because of persistent advances, ‘emotional coercion,’ or intoxication—or because she doesn’t have the nerve to say no; 4) no matter how willing the woman appears to be, it is the man’s responsibility to ensure explicit consent—or he may be guilty of rape” (pp. 67-68).  

Utterly undeterred by the scandal of falsely accusing the lacrosse players in 2006,  Duke University officials subsequently decreed:  “‘Real or perceived power differentials between individuals may create an unintentional atmosphere of coercion,’ and ‘that condition alone could turn consensual sex into rape, regardless of anyone’s intent.’ Thus a man could be guilty ‘if a woman with whom he had consensual sex later complained that she went along with it only because he was a big man on campus.’  Even a woman’s ‘enthusiastic agreement to have sex was not “consent” if she was “intoxicated,” and all intercourse was classified as rape unless both parties had given ‘affirmative’ consent ‘in each instance of sexual activity.’  While giving lip service to the presumption of innocence, the new policy denied to accused students any rights to have a lawyer present, to confront their accuser, or to examine witnesses” (p. 79).  “Sheila Broderick, Duke’s gender violence intervention services coordinator,” insisted on “condemning all alleged perpetrators of sexual assault, regardless of the evidence.  If campus disciplinary panels ‘say he’s not responsible,’ even under Duke’s guilt-presuming rules, asserted Broderick, ‘you and I know that he’s responsible, and that’s at the end of the day what really matters.’  That’s worth reading twice.  This high-ranking Duke bureaucrat declared that all students accused of sexual misconduct are guilty.  Period”  (p. 80),    

As journalists, Johnson and Taylor are distressed by the media’s “malpractice,” joining the universities in denying due process to men accused of sexual misconduct.  Consider the case of Erica Kinsman accusing James Winston (a celebrated Florida State University quarterback) of raping her.  A film (The Hunting Ground), supporting her accusations was praised by The New York Times despite ample evidence provided by an expose showing how “the film made a hash of the facts and ignored the copious evidence that Kinsman was not telling the truth about how she ended up in Winston’s bedroom.  While pursuing her public campaign against Winston, Kinsman also sued Florida State University under Title IX.  The case ended in a January 2016 settlement that some portrayed as an admission of fault by FSU.  The university said that it cost less to settle—$950,000, of which $700,000 was designated for legal fees and $250,000 for Kinsman—than it would have cost to litigate and win.  In addition, FSU was on notice that settling with Kinsman was the only way to appease OCR, which was investigating her Title IX complaint.  By settling her lawsuit by January 25, Kinsman avoided giving sworn deposition testimony the next day.  Had she gone forward and repeated any of her past stories, Winston’s lawyers would no doubt have accused her of perjury” (p. 131).  

One independent-minded journalist, the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, examined the case of an Auburn University student, Joshua Strange.  He provides us with “the first detailed look inside a secret campus hearing since OCR revolutionized discipline for alleged sexual assault in 2011.  ‘The most striking quality of the 99-minute proceeding is its abject lack of professionalism,’ Taranto wrote.  A de facto presumption of guilt hung over the whole process.  Not only was Strange barred from cross-examining his accuser, he was separated from her by a curtain.  The presiding officer, an Auburn librarian, seemed uncertain of the rules.  She deferred to assembled Auburn administrators such as Susan McCallister, who pronounced the accuser credible based on a previous discussion discussion with her’” though she “‘admitted in testimony that “I really don’t need to know a lot of details, and so I didn’t ask her to go into great detail.  I don’t really want survivors to have to tell their story over and over again.”  Auburn’s way of testing the accuser’s credibility was to disregard evidence casting doubt on it.  Sexual assault victims ‘frequently cry,’ and their ‘storytelling is sometimes disjointed, sometimes not,’ and ‘there’s often a lot of emotion inserted into the story that is about being very upset or in disbelief or unsure what to do next, petrified,’ Title IX administrator Kelley Taylor told the panel.  Since the latter two conditions apply to virtually any circumstance, true or false, Taranto recognized that Auburn’s standards ‘amounted to a claim that in principle a woman’s tears are sufficient to establish a man’s guilt—an inane stereotype that infantilizes women in the interest of vilifying men” (p. 137).  

Some of the sternest critics of the campus rape frenzy are distinguished female Harvard Law School professors.  “Nancy Gertner wrote in a long article in the liberal American Prospect that OCR’s demand that colleges use a ‘more probable than not’ standard—coupled with the fact that many colleges concealed relevant evidence while restricting accused students’ lawyers—had created ‘the worst of both worlds, the lowest standard of proof, coupled with the least protective procedures.’  She feared that the new system ‘effectively creates a presumption in favor of the woman complainant.’  Gertner cautioned fellow feminists to ‘be concerned about fair process, even in private institutions where the law does not require it, because we should be concerned about reliable findings of responsibility. We put our decades-long efforts to stop sexual violence at risk when men come forward and credibly claim they were wrongly accused’”  (p. 166).    

Supporting Gertner’s positoin, the nation’s oldest law journal, The Legal Intelligencer, described the mandates in the Dear Colleague letter as “‘both unconstitutional and unfair’” (p. 193).  Long-standing rape victims’ organizations have protested university policies, urging “the federal government ‘to de-emphasize colleges’ internal judicial boards,’ adding that ‘it would never occur to anyone to leave the adjudication of a murder in the hands of a school’s internal judicial process.  Why, then, is it not only common, but expected, for them to do so when it comes to sexual assault?’  College disciplinary processes, it added, ‘were  designed to adjudicate charges like plagiarism, not violent felonies.  The crime of rape just does not fit the capabilities of such boards’” (pp. 205-206).  “Although attempted murder, armed robbery, and felony assault violate the values of every community, nobody claims to believe—as they do in the case of sexual assault—that if the accused and the accuser happen to be students at the same school, such cases should be handled by academics rather than by law enforcement” (p. 208).  But the Obama administration ignored such advice, and campus “witch hunts” demonstrably intensified.  

Such developments may well have dire consequences as we move “from campus to criminal law,” for “the affirmative-consent movement had spread from the activist fringe to the legislatures of deep-blue states” such as California.  For example, a California Assemblyman, Kevin de Leon (who is currently challenging Senator Diane Feinstein for her senate seat), sought to dissolve the “rape culture” pervading college campuses by passing legislation requiring “all universities in California to find a student accused of sexual assault guilty in disciplinary proceedings unless he can prove his accuser gave ‘affirmative consent,’ on an ongoing basis, during intercourse” even adopting the “more likely than not” standard of proof followed by Title IX folks (pp. 220-221).  

“The 17th-century English jurist Sir Matthew Hale wrote that rape ‘is an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused, tho never so innocent.”  This dictum, though much deplored by accusers’ rights activists, reflects a genuine dilemma for rape victims, men falsely accused of rape, and the criminal process alike: In a large percentage of “she said, he said” cases, judges, jurors, and other outsiders can never be confident that the accuser is truly the victim of a horrible crime” (p. 238). 

In subsequent years, as the authors document in a later treatise, The Campus Rape Frenzy, members of the “Group of 88” professors who most militantly and dishonestly attacked the lacrosse players prospered.  “None of its members was penalized, and some were seemingly rewarded for leading the rush-to-judgment mob.”  Paula McClain, “an outspoken member of the Group of 88, was elected chairperson of Duke’s Academic Council, the highest-ranking elected position for faculty at Duke; in 2012, she was named dean of the Duke Graduate School and vice provost for graduate education, the university’s second highest-ranking academic position.  Duke hailed her as an ‘outstanding university citizen’ and praised ‘her concern for the well-being of individual students’ (p. 77).  Unless, apparently, they were men on the lacrosse team!  

Early in his life as a Christian, Augustine wrote a short work, the Soliloquies, wherein he prayed:  “I desire to know God and the soul.” In response, the Lord said:  “And nothing more?”  To which Augustine replied:  “Nothing whatever.”   Augustine’s ultimate concerns have recurrently prodded gifted thinkers to examine exactly what can be known about such things, and Edward Feser, in Five Proofs of the Existence of God (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, c. 2017), encourages us to explore with him some of classic arguments for God’s existence and nature.   Now a philosophy professor at Pasadena City College, Feser moved beyond his “brash young atheist phase” when his studies of Aristotle and Aquinas drew him to embrace theism and recover his Catholic  faith.  To his amazement, their ancient “arguments are right after all!”  Though very much a Thomist, the “five proofs” Feser sets forth in this book are not the celebrated “five ways” of Aquinas.  Rather they are five approaches, taken by some of the most brilliant thinkers in history, designed to demonstrate the existence of God.  “And once you have allowed yourself to see the truth that reason leads you to,” Feser writes on his blog, “what reason apprehends is . . . as good and beautiful as it is real.  If you find yourself intellectually convinced that there is a divine Uncaused Cause who sustains the world and you in being at every instant, and don’t find this conclusion extremely strange and moving, something that leads you to a kind of reverence, then I daresay you haven’t understood it.” 

Turning first to Aristotle, we begin with the very common sense observation that “change occurs.” Potentiality becomes actuality—a wood stove heats up or cools down; an acorn falls; a lake expands following rainfall.  It’s further obvious that “change requires a changer.”  When anything changes we detect causation—a baseball moves because it has been thrown or hit; thunder roars following a lightning strike; a lit match ignites kindling, making a fire.  Whenever we see things changing we cannot avoid asking “why?”  What caused something to be what it is?  Things don’t just aimlessly happen.  Accordingly, we know there must something (or someone) actually existing that underlies and explains the reality of change.  

Sometimes we discern a linear series of changes leading back to an initial event, such as an earthquake triggering a tidal wave.  But sometimes we see an hierarchical organization of things, such as a swing hanging from a tree, that demonstrates dependence rather than sequence.  Such dependence has nothing to do with time—however long the swing stays suspended it’s held up by a tree limb, which is joined to the tree trunk, which is anchored in the ground by roots, etc.  So however we frame the discussion (thinking in terms of sequence or status), we cannot escape concluding that there must be a “first cause” responsible for all that exists.  There there must be an underlying existent being sustaining all that is.  This being is God.  To Feser, the real force of Aristotle’s argument lies in the fact “that for things to exist here and now and at any moment at which they exist, they must be here and now sustained in existence by God” (#553).  “To argue for the existence of God, you don’t need to start from the claim that the universe had a beginning, and you don’t need to start with any other claim about the universe as a whole either.  You can start with any old trivial object existing here and now—a stone, a cup of coffee, whatever—because even for that one thing to exist, even for a moment, there must be a purely actual cause actualizing it at that moment” (#559).  

Next, Feser embraces Plotinus’s Neo-Platonic Proof for God’s existence.  Here we begin with the simple apprehension we have of composites.  Things are composed of other things—molecules are made up of atoms, paintings require both canvas and oil.  Such things’ combined parts are needed, but there is also a very real one-ness, a form, making them what they are.  Consequently:  “For any of the composite things in our experience to exist at all here and now, then, there must also exist here and now a non-composite or utterly simple ultimate cause of their existence, a cause which following the neo-platonic philosopher Plotinus, we might call the One” (#1149).  Yet another Platonic thinker, St Augustine, shared with Plotinus an appreciation for the “universals” that enable us to refer to trees and waterfalls, to numbers and geometric shapes and ethical verities—all non-material “forms” giving structure to the more elementary material components in particular things.  “Universals like triangularity, redness, and roundness exist at least as objects of thought” (#1373) and enable us to form the propositions without which we cannot think.  And we can think thusly, St Augustine held, because there is “an infinite, eternal, divine intellect” (#1639) underlying and providing the logos making the cosmos comprehensible.  In short:  “realism about abstract objects entails the existence of a necessarily existing intellect which is one, omniscient, omnipotent, fully god, immutable, immaterial, incorporeal, and eternal.  In short, it entails the existence of God” (#1710).  

The fourth proof Feser cites is “the Thomistic proof,” anchored in the thought of St Thomas Aquinas.  Basic to Aquinas’ philosophy is the distinction between “a thing’s essence and its existence, between what it is and the fact that it is” (#1894).  Thus I can understand the essence of something such as a black hole, whether or not it exists.  And I can see an existent object, such as a silhouette on the horizon, without knowing exactly what it is.  For anything to be (i.e. to exist) there must be a fundamental realm of reality that enables it to be.  Something more deeply existent than the trees and tomcats in my world must sustain them in existence.  What Thomas called “subsistent existence itself” underlies all that is, causing “everything other than itself” to exist.  “Hence, that which is subsistent existence itself must be one, necessarily existing, the uncaused cause of everything other than itself, purely actual, immutable, eternal, immaterial, incorporeal, perfect, omnipotent, full good, intelligent, and omniscient.  It is, in short, God” (#2087).

Fifthly, there is the “rationalist proof” associated with G.W. Leibniz—the principle of sufficient reason (PSR).  To Feser, PSR resembles classic Thomistic formulations such as “everything which is, has a sufficient reason for existing” and “everything is intelligible.”  Einstein famously said:  “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.”  Deep-down we know this, demanding reasonable explanations for events.  An earthquake occurs and we want to know why moving tectonic plates explain it.  A body is found and we want to find the killer.  Examining the evidence, right reason leads us to trustworthy conclusions.  And given that the world is filled with obviously contingent beings, it makes sense to conclude (as sufficiently reasonable) there is a necessary Being giving them existence.  Existent beings subsist, sustained in their being by what simply and eternally exists:  the One Who IS.  

Having probed and approved these “proofs” for God’s existence, Feser then provides a lengthly examination of His attributes, the logical correlates of His Being.  Just as you can think persuasively in geometry and logic, you can (once you have demonstrated His existence) rationally infer certain things about Him.  Indeed:  “We can make literal, positive statements about God and his nature by applying the analogy of attribution and the analogy of proper proportionality” (#3023).  Thereby the traditional divine “attributes”—e.g.  unity, simplicity, immutability, immateriality, eternity, omnipotence, ominscience, goodness—can be understood and explained.  

Five Proofs for the Existence of God is written for serious thinkers with some background in philosophy.  Yet for anyone who might imagine there are no first-rate Christian thinkers—demonstrably superior to the “New Atheists”—following Edmund Feser’s presentation is a fulfilling endeavor.

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Pick up any public school or university textbook, and you’ll find religion explained in an evolutionary manner:  early humans were supposedly animists, imagining spirits in rocks and trees; then, as cultures advanced, polytheism flourished, as in ancient Greece and Rome; much later some religionists (notably the Hebrews) devised the notion of monotheism.  That this “just so” textbook story may in fact be false is declared in Winfried Corduan’s In the Beginning God:  A Fresh Look at the Case for Original Monotheism (Nashville:  B&H Academic, c. 2013), providing considerable insight into the earliest evidences of man’s religious practices.  Corduan follows the groundbreaking anthropological work of Wilhelm Schmidt’s 12 volume Der Unsprung der Gottesidee, which “is the centerpiece of the story of this book,” for “no one advocated original monotheism as strongly and effectively as he” (#75).  Corduan insists:  “Regardless of how one explains the origin of human beings, one cannot get around the fact that the first religion of human beings was monotheism, the recognition and worship of one God” (#166).  

Much of this book surveys and critiques the work of various distinguished anthropologists and ethnologists, such as Mircea Eliade, Max Muller, E.B Tyler, and Emile Durkheim, who generally adopted the “conventional wisdom that ‘primitive’ people were only capable of ‘primitive’ thoughts, and, thus, their religions could only be ‘primitive,’ viz. childish and magical without having a rational distinction between the natural and the supernatural” (#723).  However, when “primitive” peoples were carefully studied by Andrew Lang, for example, it appears:  “(1) certain people on the simplest level of material culture had some of the highest moral standards found anywhere in the world and that (2) those standards were based on their belief in a single God who created them,watched over them, gave them his laws, and enforced them” (#1169).   Lang based his position on data received from Australia, where the Aborigines living in the interior had no prior contact with Europeans.  The first information concerning their religion showed that their “gods could not have evolved out of any prior phases of the religious cultures for the simple reason that there weren’t any discernible prior phases.”  Lang concluded that the Aborigines’  “conceptions of a god could not conceivably have arisen out of animism since, where the belief in this god was purest, there was no animism. In his own words, “‘The more animism, the less theism, is the general rule’” (#1247).  

Wilhelm Schmidt and his Vienna associates found Lang’s insights confirmed by copious records coming in from missionaries around the world.  Rather than imagine what might have happened in the distant past, Schmidt took seriously the testimony of “primitive” peoples who had retained their traditions, despite been shunted aside and despised by more “civilized” folks who now occupied their lands.  He rejected the evolutionary dogma “that human cultures progress according to fundamental laws of development” and “claimed that the story of nonliterate people is ultimately not dissimilar from the story of literate people, except that they left no written records” (#2400).  These cultures were patrilineal, monogamous, and lived “by a solid moral code.”  And they were monotheists!  There is a Supreme Being, the Aborigines thought, who “is the good creator of the world, omnipotent, omniscient, and eternal, the author of moral obligations, who expects human beings to live by them” (#3091)  

So too the most primitive American Indian tribes, such as the coastal Yuki in California, “show the clearest evidence of a truly monotheistic religion.  Not only do they recognize a single God, but they pray to him and worship him regularly.”  Though surviving by hunting and gathering, it was “precisely among these three oldest primitive peoples of North America that we find a clear and firmly established belief in a High God, a belief which . . . is of quite a particular character by virtue of the high importance attributed to the idea of creation. . . . Quite a number of them have reached the highest summit of the idea of creation, denied even to Aristotle, viz. the belief in creatio ex nihilo, only by the will of the all-powerful Creator’” (#3330-33).  “The most important line in the Yuki story is reminiscent of Genesis:  ‘He spoke a word, and the earth appeared’” (#3343).  Elsewhere the Lakota (Sioux) had a deep veneration for wakan, which “is not an impersonal force that pervades nature, as some scholars have claimed, but … it is always associated with personal beings.  Who is at the top of the spirit world for the Oglala Lakota?  Is it the “Great Spirit” of the sky, the sky itself, or is it the sun?”  Not really!  According to one informant, “ the “Great Spirit” is a “powerful wakan being,” as is the sun.  However, when people pray . . . they should pray to Wakan Tanka, the totality of the wakan beings conceived as a singular unity” (#5084).  

Corduan strongly affirms Schmidt’s position and shows how it properly synthesizes the evidence and retains its persuasiveness.  “It still remains true,” he says, “that the Primitive cultures represent the ones that most closely resemble what may have been the original human culture.  Furthermore, regardless of where one places the pastoral nomads, they, in general, maintained the original monotheism most clearly” (#4200).  In sum:  “Let us not lose sight of the point of this whole enterprise.  What we see in these cultures, which have qualified on the basis of the culture-historical method, is that each of the supreme beings, regardless of surrounding mythology, bears the essential attributes of deity.  They have personhood.  They created the world and are now overseeing a moral code.  They are all-powerful, all-knowing, eternal, and all good, to mention just some of the most outstanding attributes, which certainly puts them all into the same rubric labeled ‘supreme being.’” (#5871) 

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“And we, who are we anyhow?” asked Plotinus in his Enneads.  Addressing this question, Michael Augros has written The Immortal in You: How Human Nature Is More Than Science Can Say (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, c. 2017).   “The overarching question of this book is, what are you?  It is not a trivial question, but one of the deepest we can ask” (p. 15).  Too many of us, intimidated by “scientific experts” have meekly assented to thinkers such as Bertrand Russell, who declared that man’s “‘origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; . . . that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins’” (p. 10)  Augros is perplexed as to “why people allow themselves to be talked out of many things they really do know about themselves simply because they mistakenly believe that science—that formidable authority—says otherwise” (p. 270).

We need to recover confidence in common sense philosophy—thinking rightly and thereby “unraveling of some of the deeply hidden implications of our ordinary experience of ourselves and the world” (p. 262).  “The chief foundations of philosophy, in contrast to empirical science, are interior certainties, such as your interior experience of being a single being, and your conceptual certainty that no exact statement can be both true and false at once” (p. 270).  Natural science has its place, but “philosophy brings us a wealth of universal, certain, and stable truths.  Where modern science can place the reins of nature in our hands, philosophy can discern the ends that must govern our use of nature if we are to better ourselves rather than self-destruct.  Where purely empirical methods must fall silent before the greatest questions about ourselves—about god, our mortality and immortality, our ultimate origin and destiny—philosophy has things to say” (p. 284).

Rather than trust “outsiders” like Russell, Augros urges us to take an “insiderer’s view” and rely upon our “own treasury of experience” as a basis for understanding who we are.  “I have in mind ordinary, natural, human abilities.  Nothing extraordinary, supernatural, or superhuman” (p. 40).  We sense things, such as warm water in a shower, but we also know we are someone sensing it.  There’s a very real me understanding and organizing the thousands of sensations I constantly feel, leading me to believe there is “another sense power, one that listens to what all your five senses have to say, and weaves their reports back into a single world of experience, keeping distinct things distinct and perceiving the sameness of things that are the same” (p. 49).  This inner power is my mind, my intellect, and it enables me to not only know specific things but to craft concepts and see universal truths regarding my world.   “What power in you is responsible for the formation of universal ideas?” Augros asks.  “If the word intellect names your power to understand truths, and especially conceptual truths, then we must attribute the work of universal formation to your intellect, since universals are the foundation of your ability to grasp such truths” (p. 69).

This power was self-evident to Cicero, who said:  “Reason and speech bring men together and unite them in a kind of natural society.  Nor in anything else are we further removed from the nature of wild beasts” (On Duties).  Though we are indeed animals, we differ from them in radical ways, most importantly in our ability to speak.  As we talk, we verbalize “what we conceive in our minds, and it is our minds that give us our special edge over the animals” (p. 78)  We are, prima facie, rational animals.  “Capacity for true speech demands the power to grasp universals, something that is absent in animals.  Every word we speak, with the sole exceptions of proper nouns such as Paris, Led Zeppelin, and Walker Percy, are expressions of universal ideas.”  We can indeed think of cities, singers, and novelists—and it this ability to grasp universals that distinguishes us as humans.  “This is a difference of kind, not of degree, between human beings and other animals”  (pp.  88-89).

Our intellect distinguishes us as a species, and it cannot be understood as a purely material entity.  Indeed it points to an immortal aspect of human nature.  Though the organic “brain” is composed of matter, we have a more powerful non-organic “mind” using it to formulate concepts.  Thus, for example:  “Your intellect can receive ‘what a circle is’ without turning it into an individual circle.  Nothing that has dimensions can do that.  Your intellect, therefore, is not a thing that has dimensions. That means it is neither an organ in your body, nor a power distributed through the parts of some organ of your body. It is a nonbodily, nonmaterial power.  Unlike all your other knowing powers, your intellect is not a property of your brain at all” (p. 110).  Noting this leads us “to one of the most beautiful conclusions of philosophy.”

This intellectual power resides in what common sense thinkers such as Aquinas deemed the “rational soul” which is the form, the life-giving cause of what we are.  “The facts force us to say something like this:  the primary cause of life in you is a form of your body that is more basic than its organization” (p. 135).  “The technical term used in philosophy to name such a first-class being, an owner of properties as opposed to a property, is substance.”  Though scientists usually talk a material substances, philosophers use the word “in quite a different sense” defining “substance” as a “single entity that has properties and is not itself a property of some more fundamental thing” (p. 142).  Our substance, our rational soul, “has no parts, no shape and size, which is why it can grasp universals and why its ideas even of spatial objects bear no spatial relationships to one another” (p. 159).

“It is as certain as anything can be,” said Socrates, “that the soul is immortal and imperishable, and that our souls will really exist in the next world” (Phaedo).  Our soul, giving form to our body, surely survives the death of the body.  It’s a non-material form, and forms cannot be destroyed since they are non-material.  “Although it gives existence to your body, it does not depend on your body in order to exist, since it is not only the form and life of your body, but also has a life of its own apart from your body.  . . . .  This conclusion ranks among the most magnificent in all philosophy:  your soul cannot be destroyed” (p. 180).  “Your body is to your soul somewhat as your arm is to you.  You can live without your arm.  And so long as your arm is a part of you, it possesses no life or being of its own, but only yours. It is you who live and exist in that arm. That is how your soul is related to your body. It can live and be without your body” (p. 180).  While in the womb we could not see, but our eyes were forming and opened to us the world once we were born.  “Our lives inside our mothers prepare us for life outside them. In similar fashion, our lives within matter prepare us for life outside it. (It is no accident that the word matter is so similar to mater, the Latin word for mother)” (p. 287).  

To Peter Kreeft, a noted thinker in his own right:  “This is far and away the best book I have ever read about the nature of mankind as far as natural reason can know it. On a scale of 1 to 10, I have to give it a 12.”  High praise for a worthy work! 

One of the recurrent refrains in Plato’s dialogues appears in his Gorgias, where Socrates says a person should submit to anything—prison, pain, exile, even death—in order to “be freed from the greatest of evils, from injustice.”   The Preamble to the Constitution of the United States calls us to “form a more perfect union” and “establish justice.”  On the west pediment of the Supreme Court building we read:  “EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW.”  Dedicated to such precepts, Sidney Powell served as a prosecutor within the Department of Justice for a decade, confident that hers was a righteousness endeavor.  Then she established a private practice and in time was asked to join a defense team endeavoring to help a falsely accused and convicted man (Jim Brown) caught up in the broadcast net thrown by federal prosecutors determined to punish everyone loosely associated with the Enron scandal.  In a related incident, says Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge for the Ninth Circuit Court of appeals, when the “venerable accounting firm of Arthur Anderson [considered the “gold standard” of accounting firms and employed by Enron during its glory days] was destroyed by a prosecutorial decision to charge the firm, not merely individual partners, with criminal conduct.  While the Supreme eventually held that the ‘crime’ of which Anderson was convicted was no crime at all—in other words, that Anderson had acted lawfully—the exoneration came too late to save the business or the 85,000 job it provided in its various offices world-wide” (#57).  

As was evident in the Anderson case, federal prosecutors too often pursue personal ambitions—e.g. advancing in the department or burnishing their credentials for a judicial appointment or garnering glowing press citations—rather than doing what’s right.  Such disregard for justice was demonstrably evident in the case against Ted Stevens, a Republican senator from Alaska.  Following Attorney General Eric Holder’s directives, Stevens was accused of “failing to report alleged gifts on senate forms.”  Federal prosecutors, by violating ethical rules, ignoring court orders, concealing evidence and lying about it in court, triumphed in a celebrated trial.  In time, however, their misconduct was exposed and his conviction vacated.  Federal District Judge Emmet Sullivan delivered a stinging rebuke to the prosecution, declaring:  “‘The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all, and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done’” (#191).  Senator Stevens had been maliciously attacked by self-serving prosecutors.  However, since the lengthy federal investigation and trial began while Stephens was running for reelection, he lost his seat, expended enormous sums of money defending himself, and saw his reputation smeared.  

To Sidney Powell’s dismay, such cases are hardly rare!  She found the attorneys at the top of the Department of Justice too little concerned with justice!  Illustrating this was Andrew Weissman, the main man driving the Arthur Anderson indictment (and currently part of Robert Mueller’s the team of prosecutors probing Donald Trump’s Russia ties), who “had developed special tactics in these prosecutions where he was convinced the end justified the means” (#35).   To expose their misconduct she wrote Licensed to Lie:  Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice (Dallas:  Brown Books Publishing Group, c. 2014). Weissman and his associates, pursuant to their Enron success, sought to demolish Merrill Lynch as well as Anderson Accounting by alleging a “conspiracy” involving “wire fraud.”  Jim Brown was one of the Merrill Lynch employees found guilty and sentenced to prison, but Powell, who “had seen hundreds of indictments” while working for the Department of justice, “immediately recognized that the charges in the indictment of Jim Brown and his codefendants were absurd” (#52).   Importantly, she found that the prosecutors had failed (as required by the Supreme Court in what is known as the Brady rule) to share with the defense attorneys the evidence to be presented in the trial.  Reading the record of the trial, many “clear errors of law” stood out.  Compounding the injustice, the presiding judge (Ewing Werlein) had made many questionable decisions, inevitably favoring the prosecution.  Innocent men had been effectively railroaded by prosecutors intent on getting convictions rather than securing justice.  

Brown had been sentenced to four years in prison, so Powell appealed his conviction before the Fifth Circuit Court, which ordered him released and re-sentenced.  Then it was back to Houston and Judge Werlein, who bounced the case back to the Fifth Circuit, which sent it back to Werlein!  An appeal to the Supreme Court received no hearing.  Finally Werlein reduced Brown’s sentence to “time served,” leaving him a convicted felon.  Through it all:  “No court ever required the politically powerful former prosecutors to answer for their conduct.  No court cared that they capitalized on their misconduct repeatedly.  It didn’t matter that they had told the contrary a hundred times to the jury and multiple courts, solicited testimony from multiple witnesses that the hidden evidence contradicted, and took advantage of having hidden the evidence even more than did the prosecutors in Stevens.  While they contrived a crime and concealed the truth to obtain these wrongful conviction, four Merrill executives went to prison” (#3393).  

Only a few readers will be fascinated by the many pages devoted to the intricacies of the judicial process, but those of us concerned with preserving a “nation under law” should carefully consider Sidney Powell’s presentation.  She herself was left wondering if she should even continue to practice law!  Her faith in prosecutors and judges had been seriously shaken.  “If one can be heartbroken by a court, I am” (#414).  She had seen, from the inside of the system, how “misguided, ignorant, overzealous, ambitious, narcissistic, or dishonest current and former prosecutors, some of whom destroyed innocent people while they deliberately withheld evidence they knew contradicted their cases, are making daily decisions that affect all of our lives and the very future of this country” (#414).  

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At the dawn of the 21st century, Conrad Black was one of the wealthiest and most influential men in the world.  A Canadian by birth, he’d put together a publishing empire, composed of dozens of newspapers in the United States and Canada.  In 1986 he purchased and revived the London Daily Telegraph, making making it one of the nation’s primary papers.  He also settled down in England and enjoyed “access to Cabinet ministers and historians, academics from the best British universities, and thinkers from that extraordinary seam of British intellectual life” (p. 44).  He routinely met with the world’s movers and shakers at G-7 summits as well as the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland.  He counted as friends notables such as Henry Kissinger and Margaret Thatcher, Donald Trump and Bill Clinton.   He was inducted into the House of Lords in 2001, knighted by the Queen, and fully enjoyed his many successes. 

Then, beginning in 2003, everything quickly collapsed!  A handful of disgruntled shareholders in his Chicago-based Hollinger International corporation lodged complaints—primarily because of what they considered the overly generous (if “standard for the industry”) compensation Black received.  They further asked for a special committee to investigate their charges.  Pursuant to federal laws regarding “corporate governance” this led to a federal investigation, followed by supervisory mandates and criminal charges that rather quickly destroyed his business and ultimately led to his incarceration in 2008.  Leading the assault was Richard Breeden, the former chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission who “appeared to see corporate governance as a profit centre” (p. 186) and garnered some $25 million for his services.  He would (along with various cohorts of other lawyers) profit enormously while dismantling Black’s corporation. 

Breeden’s Special Committee report was titled “A Corporate Kleptocracy.”  Though filled with “misinformation and error,” it appeared to be “fully researched and notated” (p. 214).  The media, particularly those owned by Black’s old foe Rupert Murdock and led by the New York Times, rejoiced at the opportunity of igniting a firestorm and gave credence to the most exaggerated of the report’s allegations.  Black says he “endured the most comprehensive international defamation I can recall in over four decades of close acquaintance with the media, and the special committee report was the tidal crest of it” p. 562).   (In time, Black would successfully pursue a “colossal libel suit” against Breeden in Canada.)  Aligned with Breeden were federal prosecutors who sought to enhance furbishing their reputation by going after such a prominent, wealthy man.  “Mine was the fate many people enjoy seeing inflicted on apparently overconfident, powerful, even glamorous people who seem to be too much enjoying themselves” (p. 154).  

Black was brought to trial in Chicago, largely because prosecutors have learned to manipulate “plea bargaining in order to pursue the biggest fish, regardless of the facts” (p. 267).  One of his long-term business partners, David Radler, gave an “‘allocution,’ confessing criminality, lies, and cowardice” (p. 301), falsely accusing and betraying Black in exchange for a six-month jail term.  Though Black’s attorneys effectively cross-examined and discounted Radler’s testimony, though many observers thought the trial would result in an acquittal, and though in other U.S. circuit courts s he would probably have been acquitted, the prosecutors persuaded the jury to follow the judge’s instructions and find Black guilty of violating the “Honest Services Statute.”  The judge then sentenced him to four years in prison.  

Black adjusted reasonably well to prison and providwa a number of fascinating vignettes of and insights into his fellow inmates.  His attorneys pursued various appeals and persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to consider his case in 2009.  The high court vacated his conviction and he was released on bail  awaiting a further resolution of it all before the Circuit Court in Chicago.  There he had to deal with Judge Richard Posner, and though Black’s team cogently argued the law and the facts, they were “dealing with a judge who seemed determined to send me back to prison for as long as possible” (p. 488), so Black would return to prison to serve the remainder of his four year term.  While in prison, Black wrote A Matter of Principle (New York:  Encounter Books, c. 2012), a well-written (if inevitably self-serving) account of judicial abuse.  Insofar as it is a truthful narrative (and various journalists and attorneys confirm it), the book contains an alarming indictment of the American justice system.  For the general reader there are, without question, far too many intricate details regarding complicated corporate structures and legal processes, but the book is well worth reading and pondering inasmuch as it reveals distressing dimensions to America’s legal system.  As Alan Dershowitz says:  “When a great writer is falsely imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit and decides to write a tell-all non-defensive account, the result is likely to be riveting.  Conrad Black’s memoir does not disappoint.”  

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In Geoff Shepard’s The Real Watergate Scandal:  Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down (Washington:  Regnery History, c. 2015) we encounter a truly revisionist historical work.  A graduate of Harvard Law School, Shepard was accepted as a White House Fellow in Nixon’s administration and soon became “the youngest policy-making lawyer on the White House staff” (#122).  While there he worked with H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Gordon Liddy, Chuck Colson, and John Dean—all the major figures in the Watergate scandal.  He personally “transcribed all of the White House tapes that were included in the Blue Book released to the public at the end of April 1974” and officially represented the White House at the Supreme Court when oral arguments were made regarding a subpoena for the tapes (#140).  While most of his former friends and colleagues had either resigned or been imprisoned, Shepard remained “relatively unscathed” and stayed on through the transition to President Ford, leaving in 1975.  Thenceforth he has hosted annual reunions of Nixon’s White House staff and produced “a series of Nixon Legacy Forums highlighting many off the public policy initiatives of our administration” (#165).   Since no one else seemed inclined to “write about their experiences,” Shepard embraced the task, spending hundreds of hours in the National Archives and scoured the private papers of Judge John Sirica, special prosecutor Leon Jaworski, et al.  Some of the most important documents have just recently been made available—thanks to the Freedom of Information Act.  (Many of these documents are fully reproduced in the book’s appendices.)   “But for Watergate,” Shepard says, “Richard Nixon would have gone down in history as one of America’s greatest presidents” (#182).   

“There is no question,” he says, “that the original Watergate break-in and ensuing cover-up entailed extensive criminal wrongdoing.  The essential question, then as now, is whether this criminal activity was confined” to the likes of Gordon Liddy and John Dean, or whether they were following the orders of men close to President Nixon (#4226).  In fact, John Dean recently said that neither President Nixon nor his close advisors had any “intent” to “break the law and that Nixon had little idea of Watergate’s implications” in the early days of the scandal” (#880).   Still more, the celebrated “smoking gun” tape was not even about Watergate!  It was, instead, “‘an effort by Haldeman to stop the FBI from investigating an anonymous campaign contribution from Mexico that the Justice Department prosecutors had already agreed was outside the scope of the Watergate investigation’” (#940).  Thus Nixon was driven from office because of a misinterpretation of a recorded conversation that had nothing to do with the crimes of Watergate.

In the National Archives Shepard found documents demonstrating “that as the Watergate scandal unfolded, federal judges hearing the Watergate cases held secret meetings with persons whose interests were adverse to President Nixon’s and his top aides’.  The most outrageous of these confidential gatherings were the ex parte meetings between judges and Watergate prosecutors.  . . . .  As Leon Jaworski, the second Watergate special prosecutor, later confided to the reporter Bob Woodward, ‘there were a lot of one-on-one conversations that nobody knows about except [me] and the other party’” (#427).  Jaworski was referring to his meetings with federal District Court Judge John Sirica, an “arrogant jurist” who “became convinced that he alone could thwart the cover-up and bring Nixon and his top aides to justice—his justice and in his courtroom” (#589).   In one such meeting, for example, the prosecutors sought to “lobby Sirica in advance of the forthcoming grand jury report and to gain his concurrence on how it should be handled, but without tipping off the other side” (#1185).  In another instance, “Jaworski slipped into Sirica’s chambers a half hour before the hearing for yet another private, off-the-record meeting to go over the judge’s and the prosecutor’s respective roles” (##1278).  “Documents uncovered to date confirm at least nine secret face-to-face meetings between Judge Sirica and Watergate prosecutors” (#1311).  Most probably there were many more!  Pursuing his own ends, Sirica disregarded the defendants’ constitutional rights and “acted as an arm of the prosecution.”  Such collusion, Shepard says, is simply “breathtaking.”   

Shepard argues that “Nixon was unfairly hounded from office and that the public has been misled about the Watergate scandal” (#174).  In particular, “judges and lawyers who should have known better, committed gross violations of legal propriety, cutting ethical and legal corners, and making a mockery of the rule of law.”  Sadly enough, “Nixon was done in by officers of the court, the very people sworn to uphold the law and the Constitution—federal judges and federal prosecutors, who met in secret and reached back-room deals on how best to take him down and secure convictions of his senior aides.  That is the real Watergate scandal, a story told for the first time in this book” (#418).  When prosecutors and judges collude, nothing fair can result!  Amazingly, Judge Sirica “cross-examined witnesses in front of the jury, urging them to provide a fuller story and to implicate others.  He publicly criticized the prosecution for not aggressively pursuing other possible defendants.  At the trial’s conclusion, he announced his frustration at not having uncovered the real story, the ‘truth’ as he characterized it, and called for a Senate investigation.  He even went so far as to demand that the prosecution bring before the grand jury a list of persons who he believed must know more about the scandal than had come out in his courtroom.  His provisional sentences of up to thirty-five years for first time burglary convictions [issued, following an ex parte meeting with Sam Dash, the chief counsel of the Senate committee investigating Watgergate] to coerce confessions needed to indict White House figures] remain a classic example of judicial excess” (#1974)  

Federal prosecutors were determined to “get Nixon,” whatever the cost.  The first special prosecutor heading the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, Archibald Cox, was quite close to all the Kennedy brothers and had worked with Teddy in trying to defeat Nixon’s Supreme Court nominees.  Of the eight top WSPF lawyers, seven had worked in Robert Kennedy’s Department of Justice and were ardent Democrats.   Cox also replaced seasoned career prosecutors with political partisans.  The second special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, thought “‘such a person’” as Nixon “‘should not in the national interest continue to lead the country.’”  To him, “‘seeing Richard Nixon out of the White House was the most important achievement he could render the country as Special Prosecutor’” (#1569).   Jaworski and his team “were supremely confident that they and they alone were in the best position to arbitrate what the House Judiciary Committee should know and act upon” (#1609).  Thus they often violated the Brady rule by withholding from the defense information they would use when bringing suspects to trial.  Such behavior subverts the due process procedures guaranteed by the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the Constitution and undermines our judicial system.

Inasmuch as a jury trial is basic to America’s judicial system, selecting jurors is highly important.  Unfortunately for the Watergate defendants, Washington D.C., was an overwhelmingly Democratic town.  Pretrial publicity, fueled by lots of “leaks,” doubtlessly prejudiced great numbers of potential jurors.  The Washington Post and other D.C. media almost unanimously assailed Nixon and his administration.  Judge Sirica and the senators on the Ervin Committee craved media attention—and Sirica was in fact rewarded by being named “Man of the Year” by Time magazine in 1973.  Though a change of venue would have been appropriate, Sirica was determined to preside over the trial and keep in in his D.C. courtroom.  But Judge George MacKinnon of the D.C. Circuit Court says:  “‘If ever in the history of our country there was a criminal case which by law had to be transferred to another place for trial because of prejudicial pretrial publicity alone, this is that case’” (#3611).  In Shepard’s opinion, Sirica got the jury he wanted; “the dice were loaded, and the verdict was a foregone conclusion” (#3598).  

Concluding his treatise, Shepard insists that President Nixon was forced to resign and his senior aides were convicted and imprisoned not only because of false charges but because of the “collusion between judges and prosecutors who had convinced themselves that their desired ends justified any means” (#4131).  “The Watergate defendants—particularly Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman—were systematically and deliberately denied a fair trial.  They faced a hanging judge whose numerous secret ex parte meetings with interested parties and prosecutors would appall anyone acquainted with the standards of judicial conduct and whose temporary sentencing policy underscores his lack of objectivity.  They were pursued by highly partisan prosecutors who favored their friends and punished their enemies.  They were tried by jurors drawn from a hopelessly tainted and biased pool, a disadvantage the responsible judges refused to ameliorate.  Finally, they had recourse only to a partisan appellate court that had been corrupted by an ex parte meeting between its chief judge and the special prosecutor” (#4148).  

# # # 

Over the years I’ve repeatedly reviewed books detailing debates about the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution through natural selection.  I’ve done so not because of any special competence in biological science but because (following C.S. Lewis) I understand the importance of the atheistic, naturalistic philosophy undergirding it.  As Arthur Koestler observed half-a-century ago, neo-Darwinism gets its “inspiration” from “the  zeitgeist of reductionist philosophy which prevailed during the first half of our [20th] century,” and it seems clear, as the acclaimed philosopher of science Karl Popper concluded,in his autobiography (Unended Quest), that “Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research program.”  Still more, I think it’s important to appreciate how many of the “settled science” assertions upholding naturalistic evolution are hotly debated within highly-respected scientific circles.  For example, in November 2016 the Royal Society in London “convened a group of scientists to discuss ‘calls for revision of the standard theory of evolution,’ acknowledging that ‘the issues involved remain hotly contested.”

One of the more interesting—and eminently readable, delightfully illustrated, historically informed—evolutionary biologists dissenting from the Darwinian hypothesis is J. Scott Turner, a professor of biology and physiology at State University of New York.  In Purpose & Desire:  What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It (New York:  HarperOne, c. 2017), he dissociates himself from the “Darwinian thickets” within which most evolutionists (e.g. Francis Crick and Richard Dawkins) are entangled, resulting in the “grumbling nihilism and meaninglessness” that Turner finds unwarranted.  Rather than insist things appear to be designed, Turner argues they are in fact shaped by “life” itself and clearly manifest “intentionality, purposefulness, . . . wants and desires” (#301).  Thus, instead of a random process of natural selection, he thinks there is a certain intelligent agency at work within all living things intentionally shaping them.  

Modern Darwinism, Turner says, cannot answer some of the most important biological questions, such as the origin of life, the origin of the gene, or “even what an organism is.”  In fact, right at the heart of Darwinism—as logicians have long recognized—is a meaningless tautology (setting forth a conclusion that is included in the premise of the argument).  Central to the notion of natural selection is adaptation.  “What is adaptation?” you ask?  “The product of natural selection!” you’re told.  “What is natural selection?  The outcome of adaptation!”  Saying this is patent, circular nonsense!  It’s what Turner calls “The Problem.”  So for a better explanation than natural selection, Turner invokes homeostasis, defined as “‘a state of internal constancy that is maintained as a result of active regulatory processes’” (#541).  For example, our bodies, unlike our automobiles, maintain a constant temperature because of this wonderful self-regulating process.  Homeostasis was celebrated by Darwin’s contemporary, the great physiologist Claude Bernard, who noted that ‘“The constancy of the internal environment [a milieu interieur] is the condition for a free and independent life’” (#576).  Living beings radically differ from non-living beings, and mechanistic theories such as Darwin’s fail to explain why.  So Bernard invoked a venerable vitalistic tradition, finding something immanent in all that lives, giving it intelligibility and purpose.  In earlier centuries, this position was called “essentialism:  life is special because it is imbued with a special vital essence, or vis essentialis.  Life exists because this vis essentialis infuses and animates otherwise inanimate matter” (#739).  

In Darwin’s day many influential scientists shared Bernard’s perspective.  To a degree they all followed Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, one of the 19th century’s greatest biologists, who “proposed that living systems are uniquely imbued with at least two vital forces.  One is the pouvoir de la vie (life power), which is more accurately, or more cumbersomely, rendered in French as la force qui tend sans cesse a composer l’organisation (the force that tends perpetually to make order,’ or perpetual order-producing force)” (#1454).  The second force is an “adaptive force” attuning the organism to its environment.  Bernard’s views closely paralleled Lamark’s, and Turner proposes that we revive their perspective, acknowledging that purpose and desire are genetically encoded and thus embodied in all that lives.  Even bacteria and termites, he argues, are “agents” with certain “cognitive” capacities.  

In the final analysis, “something beyond mere chance seems to have drawn life into being, helping it up from the dead world.  But what could that something be?” (#3516).  That, indeed, is The Question!  Theists have an answer:  God is that Something!  Unwilling to embrace such a straight-forward theistic explanation, Turner posits an elusive creativity in the energy-flow of the universe that has spun out creatures endowed with cognition and intentionality.  “A deep intelligences is at work in life, its operations and its history, and it cannot be denied.  Yet that is precisely what modern Darwinism asks us to do” (#4272).  So it’s time to recognize the failure of Darwinism and look for better theories.  

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The critique of Neo-Darwinism J. Scott Turner sets forth in Purpose and Desire was earlier enunciated in his The Tinkerer’s Accomplice:  How Design Emerges from Life Itself (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, c. 2007) wherein he endeavored to show “why organisms work well, or to put it another way, why they seem to be ‘designed’” (#10).  To disassociate himself from the “Intelligent Design” movement, he stresses he finds intelligence indwelling the material world whereas the ID folks locate it apart from, superintending creation.  In philosophical terms, he is pantheistic rather than theistic.  But he does in fact insist the world makes sense only when understood as something designed by the mysterious power of homeostasis.  

To most folks it’s generally easy to discern the difference between design and chance.  For example:  both a stick and a crowbar may be used to pry things, but the crowbar is clearly designed to do so efficiently.  Thus most of us see the natural world as manifestly designed.  The process of “natural selection” obviously explains much about evolution and deserves its rightful place in biological science.  But it cannot explain everything, much less the most important things, because there are “agents of homeostasis” at work designing the living world.  These agents—“Bernard machines”—are fully teleological in nature and make physiological realities such as fibroblasts laying down collagen to heal wounds understandable.  In fascinating chapters Turner shows why blood vessels, bones, embryos, guts, retinas, minds, etc. all illustrate intricate intentionality and intelligence.  

In profound ways Plato saw the truth long ago, positing “a powerful omnipresent intelligence that structured and set in motion the universe as we experience it.  Eventually, Christian theologians came to identify the Master Craftsman of Timaeus with the God described in the Gospel of John:  the logos, the Word, predating the universe, time, and eternity itself” (#1653).  Rather than speculating with Plato about invisible realities, his pupil Aristotle focused on the very visible physis, finding intentionality within the material world rather than above it.  And though Turner thinks these ancient Greeks failed to fully provide final answers to modern questions they do illustrate important ways whereby we should include intentionality in biology (i.e. the study of life).  More than reductionistic natural science is required.  

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In Dance to the Tune of Life:  Biological Relativity (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, c. 2017), Denis Noble—an emeritus professor of biology at Oxford University,  former President of the International Union of Physiological Sciences as well as a Fellow of the Royal Society— provides an “holistic” alternative to the prevailing gene-centered dogma of Neo-Darwinism, the “Modern Synthesis” which asserts that “natural selection working on chance variations in genetic material” fully explains “all evolutionary change” (#2946).  On the contrary, says Noble:  “The central message of this book is that living organisms are open systems” within which genes are passive rather than active, “used” rather than obeyed (#201).  Cells control their DNA rather than enacting its prescriptions.  “The chromosomes are literally like puppets on strings, dancing to the tune of the cell” (#2599).  In one of his earlier books, The Music of Life, he said “Music as a metaphor for the processes of life,” likening the genome to a vast pipe organ, a passive instrument mysteriously played by a higher, more intelligent power.  Noble’s point is not particularly novel, for:  “As Barbara McClintock wrote in 1984 after receiving her Nobel Prize, the genome is an ‘organ of the cell’, not the other way round” (#3357).  To biologists such as McClintock and Noble, much Neo-Darwinian rhetoric, such as Richard Dawkin’s talk of “selfish genes,” is clever nonsense!   

Noble conducts a fascinating survey of modern science, illustrating the complexity and deep mysteriousness as well as purposefulness of the natural world.  Think, for example, about the processes of heat and cold, of air currents and jet streams, responsible for the weather!  The better we understand it—or the heart’s circadian rhythm or the body’s immune system or brain waves or even amoeba behavior—the more the purposeful it seems.  Then think seriously about the “miracle of co-operation” evident in the process of symbiogenesis identified by Lynn Margulis.  Or consider recent research into epigenetics.  Through illustration piled on illustration, evidence added to evidence, Noble prods us to see orchestrated, purposeful behavior everywhere we look.  “People who tell us that there is no meaning or purpose in the universe are wrong.  They can only maintain this view by atomizing the universe, as though its components and their behavior can be seen as isolated” (#1965).  In fact, all the organisms we study seem demonstrably “endowed with a natural purposiveness, however that may have arisen.  The organism can use that natural purposiveness to seek non-random changes in response to an environmental stimulus” (#4490).  

Thus the microscopic “how” details of biology must be harmonized with the macroscopic “why” perspective of Einsteinian relativity and natural philosophy.  Everything is connected and nothing can be fully understood in itself.  Thus “living organisms are multi-level open stochastic systems in which the behavior at any level depends on higher and lower levels and cannot befall understood in isolation” (#3750).  Years ago, beginning his scientific studies, Nobel was a dogmatic materialist, reducing all that is to matter-in-motion.  But he had an interest in physics and philosophy, sharing the view of Henre Poincare, the great physicist who “pointed out, in connection with eh relativity principle in physics, that the worst philosophical errors are made by those who claim they are not philosophers.  They do so because they don’t even recognise the existence of the conceptual holes they fall into” (#5394).  So when a professor suggested he read Spinoza he opened his mind to non-Darwinian perspectives.  He discovered in Spinoza the clue to it all, for in one of his letters Spinoza wrote:  “‘every part of nature agrees with the whole, and is associated with all other parts’ and ‘by the association of parts, then, I merely mean that the laws or nature of one part adapt themselves to the laws or nature of another part, so as to cause the least possible inconsistency’” (#3886).  This statement succinctly anticipated the “Biological Relativity” Nobel endorses.  Still more:  we should embrace Aristotle’s prescient and still relevant analysis of causation—to understand anything we must fully consider its material, formal, efficient, and final causes.    

As was evident to Aristotle and Spinoza and now to Denis Noble, we cannot, as humans, avoid asking the “why” questions that seem intrinsic to both our “religious” and “scientific instincts,” and the Neo-Darwinian fixation on the genome as the “book of life” has turned out to be a “blind alley” for anyone seeking truth.  To help us understand why some of the most acclaimed contemporary biologists doubt the “dogmas” of many in their peers, reading this book proves enlightening.  

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For an up-to-date, readable assessment of current biology I commend Tom Bethell’s Darwin’s House of Cards:  A Journalist’s Odyssey Through the Darwin Debates (Seattle:  Discovery Institute, c. 1917).   Bethell studied at Oxford University half-a-century ago and early-on questioned many of the main Darwinian theses.   He finds his youthful suspicions still confirmed inasmuch as it’s clear that Enlightenment-rooted evolutionary thinkers such as Darwin took Progress to be inevitable, something programmed into the sinews of the material world.  (As an Audi commercial puts it:  “Progress is an unstoppable force.” )   When Darwin concluded The Origin of Species he opined “that ‘all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection’” (#4156), clearing the way for a host of his successors, such as the astronomer Carl Sagan, who (his biographer Kay Davidson says) “believed uncritically in Progress.”  This was “obviously in harmony with the revolutionary and romantic temper” of the 18th and 19th centuries, as C.S. Lewis said, and to Bethell “Darwinian evolution can be seen as a way of looking at the history of life through the distorting end of Progress” (#4191).  

Yet, as Bob Dylan says, “the times, they are a changing.”  Convinced the time has come to cogently critique Darwinism, Bethell endeavors to show that “the science of neo-Darwinism was poor all along, and supported by very few facts” (Kindle #261).  The cardinal plank in the Darwinian platform is “natural selection,” and as soon as On the Origin of Species was published in 1859 learned critics discounted it.  Louis Agassiz, then the world’s acknowledged authority on fossils, said Darwin had made “‘a scientific mistake, untrue in its facts, unscientific in its methods, and mischievous in its tendency’” (#3990).  The noted English biologist St. George Jackson Mivart doubted that natural selection alone could have resulted in such complex phenomena as the eye, and his doubts have been frequently repeated.  Decades later the geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1933 and famed for his work with fruit flies, concluded that natural selection “has not produced anything new, but only more of certain kinds of individuals.  Evolution, however, means producing new things, not more of what already exists” (#1301).  More recently Harvard’s Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology, Richard Lewontin, declared that “‘Darwin’s whole theory of evolution by natural selection bears an uncanny resemblance to the political economy of early capitalism as developed by the Scottish economists’” who celebrated the “survival of the fittest” in the marketplace.  “‘What Darwin did,’” Lewontin said, was take early nineteenth century political economy and expand it to include all of natural economy’” (#1026).  Evolution through natural selection, it seems, is more a philosophical premise than a scientific demonstration.     

Neo-Darwinism has proven especially poor in explaining the origin of life, the most fundamental of all biological questions.  Darwin hoped subsequent research would show how life could have emerged from a “warm little pond,” but the mystery remains.  Researchers “‘still do not have even a plausible coherent model, let alone a validated scenario for the emergence of life on Earth,’ says Eugene Koonin, a senior investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information.”  In fact, Bethell says:  “No non-living thing has ever been able to reproduce itself without assistance from an intelligent (human) agent” (#305).  So too Darwin hoped subsequent geological research would find definitive fossil proof for his theory by showing a “finely graduated organic chain” of species evolving into other species.  But an astounding number of “gaps” still remain.  Virtually out of nowhere, within a 10 million-year epoch and without known progenitors, “almost all the animal phyla appear abruptly in the fossil record of the Cambrian” (#2184).  

Yet another pillar of the Darwinian theory is the “common descent” of all creatures, which means all creatures great and small derive their being from a singular entity!  As long as one looked superficially about the world, as did Darwin in 1859, such belief seemed plausible.  But now, in the light of increasingly sophisticated genetic studies, it looks less likely.  Thus J. Craig Venter, one the leaders in sequencing the human genome, recently denied “that the genetic code is universal” or that “all organisms on Earth share a common ancestor” (#842).  The popular “tree of life” still celebrated in biology textbooks, Venter says ,“‘is an artifact of some early scientific studies that aren’t really holding up.’”  “‘So there is not a tree of life”” (#859).  So too the “homology” stressed in the textbooks—showing, for example, the resemblance of forelimbs of bats, horses, and humans—seems less and less persuasive as a proof of common descent.  Modern geneticists have found that “structures that are not homologous are sometimes produced by organisms with similar genes, while, as Michael Denton pointed out, ‘apparently homologous structures are specified by quite different genes in different organisms’” (#1803).  

In a series of chapters Bethell describes a variety of non-demonstrable Darwinian assertions.   The biological reality of “convergence,” for example, runs counter to the standard evolutionary narrative.  Simon Conway Morris, the world’s preeminent scholar dealing with this phenomenon, notes that within “‘the tapestry of evolution you see the same patterns emerging over and over again,’” something that “‘means that life is not only predictable at a basic level, it also has direction’” (#1979).  If directed, it cannot be random or aimless!  If so, one of the main Darwinian beliefs—the denial of teleology—cannot be sustained.  In the purely materialistic universe taken for granted by Darwinists, nothing exists apart from atoms randomly circulating through space that happen to come together in remarkable ways.  Matter alone exists and makes whatever is, and our “mind” is nothing more than a matter-in-motion brain exuding thoughts.  To Francis Crick, “your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. . .  You’re nothing but a pack of neurons’” (#2279).  

Darwin plotted this position, for he himself espoused a “full-blown materialism, encompassing what he termed ‘the citadel itself.’  That was the human mind” (#2704).  In one of his notebooks, written 20 years before The Origin, Darwin declared:  “‘Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy [of] the interposition of a deity.  More humble & I believe truer to consider him created from animals’” (#3553).  Accordingly, decades later in The Descent of Man he said he wanted “‘to shew that there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties’” (#3562).  Consequently—and inescapably for committed Darwinists—we now witness a fashionable misanthropy widely expressed.  Inasmuch as man is viewed as “exeptional” it is because he is exceptionally bad (indeed cancerous) for the environment!  

To Professor John Searle, a distinguished U.C. Berkeley philosopher who is no friend of theism:  “‘There is a sense in which materialism is the religion of our time, at least among most of the professional experts in the fields of philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and other disciplines that study the mind.  Like more traditional religions, it is accepted without question and it provides the framework within which other questions can be posed, addressed and answered’” (#2735).  Darwinian “science” is, consequently, “little more than a deduction from a philosophy.  The science is redundant” (#2742).  The oft-quoted confession of Harvard’s Richard Lewontin merits repeating:  “‘We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. . .   Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door’” (#2741).  

To “allow a Divine Foot in the door” is certainly one of Bethell’s objectives in House of Cards.  Rather than revere “Evolution” or “Progress,” he suggests considering the Reality of a Divine Designer in accord with the Intelligent Design thinkers associated with the Discovery Institute which published this treatise.