EPSA has seen the length of its days

The Evangelical Political Scholars Association is no longer an active organization.  The idea of an online, great ideas oriented political conversation amongst thinking professionals did not succeed. That’s life in the start-up world. But the Internet is forever, so these posts will endure for electronic archeologists to discover for as long as the earth and WordPress endure and the Lord tarries. Enjoy as you please.

McLuhan’s Political Thought

EPSA member, Grant Havers, was interviewed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in their exploration of Marshall McLuhan’s not irretrievably buried political philosophy. McLuhan was Roman Catholic, and a philosophy professor at St Michael’s College at the University of Toronto, where a few EPSA members have studied.

On the page where you can access the audio interview, “The Conservative Marshall McLuhan,” we read:

Since the 1960s, McLuhan famously avoided taking what he called a ‘moralistic’ stance on the goodness or badness of electric media. But close readers of his major writings are in for a surprise. What emerges is distinctively conservative: tribalistic, stringently moralistic and opposed to the liberal, modernist, individualist age of modernity. This week, The Philosopher’s Zone investigates McLuhan the right-wing moralist.

Grant Havers is professor of philosophy and politics at Trinity Western University in British Columbia, Canada.

Havers on James Burnham and the Anti-elite Conservative

EPSA member Grant Havers writes for Telos 154 (Spring 2011), considering James Burnham and how the right is inherently as anti-elite as the left. Havers considers Burnham’s conservatism especially through Burnham’s reading of Machiavelli. See here.

Idolatry in Our Politics

In the recent issue of The City, a fine little (free!) journal published by Houston Baptist University, Joe Knippenberg gives us “Faith in the Age of Obama” (fall 2010).

Where for President Obama, love leads to government action, for President Bush, government has to leave room for love. The former emphasizes his hope for the efficacy of government action, the latter his respect for its limits.

In concluding, he writes,

For me, it is both a matter of fact and an article of faith that government cannot do all that some of us expect of it. But it is also a matter of fact that finite, fallen, and fallible human beings will continue to worship idols.

David Innes has his own thoughts on political idolatry at Worldmag.com as we approach the midterm elections (“Victory and Idolatry,” October 20, 2010).

Politics is good because God gave us government for our good. But He did not give it for our sufficient good, or to provide for every good. Christians, more than anyone else, should tailor their hopes accordingly.

Excessive and misplaced hope takes two forms in times like these. One is almost millenarian in what it expects to enjoy on the other side of Election Day. … But there is also a kind of despair in politics that is the same excessive and misplaced hope, only jilted and embittered. I see it among Republicans who are migrating toward third parties. They have good reason to be down. …

When people allow themselves to get carried away by millenarian political fantasies, it is easy to become discouraged. Now we will recover our republican constitution! Now we will be a land of social justice! Now America will be free! American will be fair! But in a world of sages and fools and a relatively confused massive middle, politics is about incremental improvements and setbacks.

In politics, it is hard to do good without giving wicked people a platform for their wickedness, or without falling into wickedness oneself. But political life is not optional, and neither is doing good.

P.S., subscribe to The City, free of charge.

Kendall on Our Civil Religion

Grant Havers at Trinity Western University in British Columbia, Canada, has published this review of Willmoore Kendall’s and George W. Carey’s The Basic Symbols Of The American Political Tradition (Catholic University of America Press, 1970). You can find the essay, “Willmoore Kendall for Our Times,” at www.VoegelinView.com.

This work, which is primarily based on Kendall’s lectures on the American political tradition given at Vanderbilt in 1964 (including additional lectures edited by Carey in the last chapters), reveals one of the most astute minds ever to shape American conservative thought. As Kendall’s last work, it also provides an essential antidote to the ailments afflicting American conservatism today.

Grant’s recent book is Lincoln and the Politics of Christian Love (University of Missouri Press, 2009).

Social Justice of a Different Sort

Anthony Bradley comes to the defense of the concept of “social justice” in his recent WORLDmag.com column “‘Social Justice’ has Christian history,” Sept. 15, 2010). But he comes at from the right (so to speak), showing the roots of the phrase in Pius XI’s 1931 papal encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno (QA).

For Pius XI in QA, social justice referred to the central and necessary set of conditions where each person makes free, non-government-coerced contributions to the common good. It included keeping in check the power of the State and the freedom of Christians to form their own institutions in civil society. It ensured that economics and morality were not alien to one another in concept or in practice. Social justice according to Pius XI referenced the necessity of private property against the tenets of socialistic thinking, because the right of private ownership not only enabled individuals “to provide for themselves and their families but also that the goods which the Creator destined for the entire family of mankind may through this institution truly serve this purpose.” It mentioned the importance of wealth creation to provide a basis for charity and prohibitions against arbitrary wage demands by third-parties “which a business cannot stand without its ruin and consequent calamity to the workers.” Pius XI’s definition of social justice included the importance of subsidiarity and a return to the moral formation so that people would not confuse freedom to do good with passions that have been disordered because of original sin.

Anthony Bradley is associate professor of theology and ethics at The King’s College in New York City, a research fellow at the Acton Institute, and author of Liberating Black Theology. He has recently joined the Evangelical Political Scholars Association.

Humbling Presidents Under the Law

David Corbin and Matthew Parks, both at The King’s College in New York, have proposed a useful political tradition that would be inspired with biblical wisdom, and they have posted it at First Things, “The Constitution Pledge” (Sept. 8, 2010).

It was the duty of the Old Testament kings of Israel to administer justice according to the law that God had given to Moses. Embedded within that law, long before any king actually reigned in Israel, was the following command: “And when he [the king] sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law…. And it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the Lord his God by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes.” (Deut. 17:18-20 [ESV])

This was to remind each Israelite king, ” that he is yet a servant, rather than a master.”

Corbin and Parks suggest that a candidate for the office of President of the United States pledge during the campaign that, if elected, he will write out by hand the Constitution in its entirety, and hand the manuscript to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court just before he administers oath of office.

Dr. Corbin is an Associate Professor of Politics and Chairman of the Politics, Philosophy, and Economics Department at The King’s College in New York City. Dr. Parks is Assistant Provost and a Lecturer in Politics at The King’s College in New York City.

Their proposal received a mention from Jon Seidl at The Blaze, something that Glenn Beck operates.

Havers on Johnson on Churchill

EPSA’s Grant Havers, professor of philosophy and political studies at Trinity Western University in Vancouver, has reviewed Paul’s Johnson’s recent book on the great man, Churchill (Viking, 2009), “Oblivious to the Weight of History.”

Anyone in search of a short yet useful introduction to the life of Sir Winston Churchill will find it in Paul Johnson’s biography.  Johnson, a long-established historian of the modern age, has penned a readable and informative account of the life, personality, thought, and actions of a political leader who is aptly described as a “mass of contradictions.” (p. 19)  Out of these contradictions Johnson has culled a portrait of a statesman who not only saved Britain from Nazi tyranny; he saved the cause of civilization itself. 

Read the whole review at Voegelinview.com.

Political Theologian, Know Thyself

EPSA member, Marvin Olasky, issued politically leftist Evangelical, Jim Wallis, this exhortation to self-knowledge in a recent WORLD editorial, “Let’s Admit Who We Are: I’m on the right; Jim Wallis should be willing to say he’s on the left.”

…It’s 10 years since I was active in the Bush campaign and 60 Minutes thought it worthwhile to smear me—but I walked right into it. The CBS producers cited my conservative positions and had the on-air talent ask me to define myself. “I’m a moderate,” I chirped, and viewers who weren’t bored probably dissolved into laughter. Well, I would have been a moderate a century ago, but I should have said that, in today’s spectrum, I’m on the right.

And so, with my own folly in mind, I have a humble suggestion to make to Jim Wallis, whom I enjoyed debating recently (listen to part 1, part 2, and part 3 of that debate): Fess up. Here’s Jim’s standard line: “Don’t go left, don’t go right, go deep.” Or, slightly more elaborate: “We’ve seen religion made partisan. . . . When I talk, I talk about a moral center. I want us to go deeper, not left or right.”

Jim has tried to have it both ways. He advises Obama while calling himself a “nonpartisan evangelical minister.” For years he attacked Christian conservatives for letting the GOP rent their mailing lists, but in 2007, according to The Washington Post, Obama rented the mailing list of Jim’s organization, Sojourners.

George Soros, one of the leading billionaire leftists—he has financed groups promoting abortion, atheism, same-sex marriage, and gargantuan government—bankrolled Sojourners with a $200,000 grant in 2004. A year later, here’s how Jim rebutted a criticism of “religious progressives” for being allied with Soros and MoveOn.org: “I know of no connections to those liberal funds and groups that are as direct as the Religious Right’s ties to right-wing funders.”

Since then Sojourners has received at least two more grants from Soros organizations. Sojourners revenues have more than tripled—from $1,601,171 in 2001-2002 to $5,283,650 in 2008-2009—as secular leftists have learned to use the religious left to elect Obama and others.

As 19th-century novelist William Dean Howells may have put it, financial hazard has become new fortune: According to IRS form 990s, the expenses of Sojourners overran its revenue early in the past decade, and on June 30, 2002, the organization had a negative balance of $375,154. But Sojourners then became more politically useful, and on June 30, 2009, it had a positive balance of $2,316,233.

…But what I want is an open admission: “I am partisan. I’m for Barack. I’m glad that Soros helped us to overcome our poverty. When I recommend ‘going deeper,’ I’m calling for a deep route down the left sideline.” Maybe we can move toward such glasnost by pretending we’re at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. I’ll stand up first: “My name is Marvin and I’m [gasp, choke, sigh] on the right.” Then Jim says, “My name is Jim and I’m [gasp, choke, sigh] on the left.” That will work.

Marvin Olasky, provost at The King’s College in New York City, is editor-in-chief at WORLD magazine, a Christian newsmagazine, and author of many books including The Tragedy of American Compassion.

Innes in Washington Times on State Compassion

From the Washington Times, July 2, 2010: “Netherlands Tragedy of State Compassion,” by D.C. Innes:

Even young Mick Jagger, bless his heart, could see that it’s hard getting old.

But Mrs. van Breda, at 90, is managing just fine. This is not because her two daughters and their husbands live just a five-minute walk from her apartment, which they do. Neither is it because her four grandchildren – three of them in their 20s – also live nearby. They offer little help because they don’t have to: The van Bredas live in the Netherlands, a caring society. For this reason, Mrs. van Breda’s course of life is smoothed by a welfare state that has institutionalized compassion. Quality of life is about more than just what you get, however. Much of it has to do with the relationships involved in the giving, relationships that even a caring government cannot deliver and even can destroy.

When her husband, Gert, died 13 years ago, Mrs. van Breda sold their house and moved into a government-subsidized apartment. The government sends a woman once a week to clean her apartment, but because she has the woman for up to four hours, Mrs. van Breda also has her do the grocery shopping. She pays something toward the cost of this help, but her contribution is based on her income – a government-funded pension – and so the service is highly subsidized.

Her daughter, Johanna, could easily help her with these tasks. In fact, Mrs. van Breda asked Johanna, who also cleans houses, if she would like to help in place of the state worker. It’s better that the money benefit her family, after all. But Johanna said no: Why bother helping her mother when the government will do it?

When she developed arthritis, the state sent around someone to change the handles on all her doors and the taps on her faucets. In a less “compassionate” society, measured very narrowly by how much the government does, her sons-in-law or grandsons would swing by and take care of that sort of thing. But there is no need, and so they do not – and they would not.

Ironically, but perhaps not surprisingly, the Netherlands’ “compassionate” social policy, with its preference for state provision, has made individual Dutch people less compassionate. A 2006 international study of charitable giving found that the supposedly less compassionate Americans individually gave 1.67 percent of the country’s gross domestic product to charity. The Dutch gave just 0.45 percent, and the more moderate Canadians and British gave 0.72 percent and 0.73 percent respectively. Mrs. van Breda’s expatriate son, Pieter, who lives in New York, notes that people have become personally unmindful of the needy as a result of these social-welfare policies. Personal relations are colder, he says, more businesslike, even within families.

The Dutch government serves Johanna’s mother because it serves everyone, securing a minimal standard of living for all to enjoy. Through an array of birth-to-death social services that are either free of charge or subsidized according one’s income, the state redistributes income widely. There is no reason for anyone in the Netherlands to be without a suitable home, to cut short his or her education anytime before senility or even to give any thought to feeding and clothing one’s children. The Dutch have decided that a good society is a compassionate society, and so people should provide for one another’s dignity and basic quality of life … but only through the state. People needn’t actually have anything to do with one another directly.

The Dutch state is said to be quite efficient in its delivery of services, and the Dutch people are happy with it. To be sure, neither Mrs. van Breda nor any of her children has any complaints. But this system comes at a human cost that its boosters must consider. My friend Pieter tells me that when it comes to serving the needy, regardless of the family relationship, the modern Dutch consider it enough that they pay taxes. In fact, they have come to bear a striking resemblance to none other than Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” Approached by two men who came collecting for the poor, he rebuffed them, asking, “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?” Granted, Dutch provisions for those in need are on a level of humanity far higher than those Mr. Scrooge was satisfied with funding. But the spirit of personal indifference is the same. People simply don’t want to be bothered, says Pieter – not even for their parents.

Daniel Henninger wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal, “One of the constant criticisms of Barack Obama’s first year is that he’s making us ‘more like Europe.'” Those on the American political left are eagerly working to make us precisely that. They see our individualism as selfish and immoral, and they view our reliance on private charity as ineffective and degrading in comparison to government services and entitlements. The lesson of the Dutch experience, however, is not that the welfare state is the defining feature of a compassionate society, but that our choice in providing for those who are helpless and suffering is between the nanny state and a caring citizenry.

Henninger’s article is “The We’re-Not-Like-Europe Party,” May 13, 2010.

Alexis de Tocqueville addresses this matter of what he calls “legal charity” in his profound little tract, “Memoir on Pauperism.” Click here for a pdf copy.

My Principalities and Powers post has some additional reflections on the Dutch in America.

Christian Culture War in the New Century

In his April 2009 farewell speech to the Focus on the Family staff, Dr. James Dobson surveyed what his more than thirty year defense of the Christian American family had accomplished. Far from triumphalist, he described the work of his mammoth organization on behalf of the unborn child and the dignity of the family as “a holding action.” He seemed to concede defeat, but if so it was only for the present. “We are awash in evil and the battle is still to be waged. We are right now in the most discouraging period of that long conflict. Humanly speaking, we can say that we have lost all those battles, but God is in control and we are not going to give up now, right?”

It does look bad on the culture front. Thirty-six years after Roe v. Wade, abortion is still legal. All manner of depravity is broadcast over the airwaves, taught and tolerated in the public schools, and pressed into our souls from every direction. It is more difficult than ever to raise godly or even just polite children without sealing one’s family off from the world. Like Dobson, I do not think that the war is over. It cannot be. As God has not rescinded the cultural mandate to “take dominion over the earth” (Gen. 1:26), neither has Christ told his people to be anything other than salt and light in the world (Matt. 5:13-14), taking captive every thought for him (II Cor. 10:5).

John Barber and David Brooks have separate responses to the state of the Christian culture war in the age of Obama.

John Barber

In a conference address at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church this spring entitled “Have Christians Lost the Culture-War? ,” John Barber challenged the way Christians assess success and failure in our efforts to transform culture by comparing it to our view of evangelism.

What is successful evangelism? Is it successful only when you share the gospel with someone and that person becomes a Christian? What if no one comes to Christ? Are we to say that we failed? Isaiah preached for nearly fifty years and hardly anyone responded positively. Was he a failure? I think of Bill Bright’s helpful definition of successful evangelism. Bright often said, “Successful evangelism is witnessing in the power of the Holy Spirit and leaving the results to God.” Now apply what Bright said in reference to the Great Commission to the cultural mandate, and let’s define the cultural mandate. “Successful Christian activism is laboring in culture in the power of the Holy Spirit and leaving the results to God.” You see, if we looked at evangelism the way some look at the culture-war, we’d look at all the people we’ve witnessed to, and see how few have come to Christ, and [following Dr. Dobson] say, “We are awash in evil and the battle is still to be waged. We are right now in the most discouraging period of that long conflict. Humanly speaking, we can say we have lost all those battles.” But no one who is biblically informed thinks this way regarding evangelism. So we ought not to think this way regarding the cultural mandate.

David Brooks, whether or not he thinks that these old battles (are they so old?) over abortion and the normalization of homosexuality are obsolete, is certainly convinced that we have missed one of the great battle fronts of the age. He has a point.

In “The Next Culture War” (New York Times, September 28, 2009), he writes:

[D]espite the country’s notorious materialism, there has always been a countervailing stream of sound economic values. The early settlers believed in Calvinist restraint. The pioneers volunteered for brutal hardship during their treks out west. Waves of immigrant parents worked hard and practiced self-denial so their children could succeed. Government was limited and did not protect people from the consequences of their actions, thus enforcing discipline and restraint. …

Over the past few years, however, there clearly has been an erosion in the country’s financial values. This erosion has happened at a time when the country’s cultural monitors were busy with other things. They were off fighting a culture war about prayer in schools, … and the theory of evolution. They were arguing about sex and the separation of church and state, oblivious to the large erosion of economic values happening under their feet.

He cites widespread and government sponsored gambling and the avarice it incites, scandalously huge executive compensation packages, supersized restaurant meals, a sharp rise in personal consumption as percentage of GDP, the explosion of personal debt (133% of national income vs 55% in 1960), and runaway government spending.

Our current cultural politics are organized by the obsolete culture war, which has put secular liberals on one side and religious conservatives on the other. But the slide in economic morality afflicted Red and Blue America equally.

Brooks calls for a “moral revival” in the form of a “crusade for economic self-restraint.”

He sent the same message in his June 10, 2008 column, “The Great Seduction.”

The people who created this country built a moral structure around money. The Puritan legacy inhibited luxury and self-indulgence. Benjamin Franklin spread a practical gospel that emphasized hard work, temperance and frugality….The United States has been an affluent nation since its founding. But the country was, by and large, not corrupted by wealth. For centuries, it remained industrious, ambitious and frugal.

Over the past 30 years, much of that has been shredded. The social norms and institutions that encouraged frugality and spending what you earn have been undermined. The institutions that encourage debt and living for the moment have been strengthened. The country’s moral guardians are forever looking for decadence out of Hollywood and reality TV. But the most rampant decadence today is financial decadence, the trampling of decent norms about how to use and harness money.

Evangelical Christians have had to mount counter-offensives on seemingly innumerable fronts as the culture has been unraveling, hastened on by the ubiquitous and (yes) demonic efforts of the nihilistic left. We have rallied to the defense of babies in the womb. Murder is a bloody and obvious evil. We have stood against public acceptance of the horror and perversity of homosexuality alongside its wholesome and natural counterpart. Prompted by these conflicts, evangelicals have thought seriously about the nature of healthy family life and have developed helpful resources to support people in their marriages and child rearing.

But the seductions of wealth and comfort and self-indulgence were harder to discern, and they so went largely unopposed. The megachurches went as far as embracing them. Why should I not sit in my own theater-quality chair? Why should I not be entertained on Sunday morning the way I was on Saturday night? Why should I not enjoy a Starbucks coffee after or before church, and why should I not be able to buy it in the church lobby? But Christians in small churches too went heavily into debt and voted for governments that did the same, and also supersized their drinks.

The Institute for American Values has initiated the sort of moral reform movement that Brooks has advocated. Indeed, Brooks praises them for this in his 2008 column. David Blankenhorn, the institute’s founder and president, has written Thrift: A Cyclopedia, as well as “There is No Paradox of Thrift” (The Weekly Standard, June, 15, 2009). You can learn about the organization’s Thrift Initiative here: http://www.newthrift.org.

[This entry is a repost from EPSA member David Innes’s blog, Principalities and Powers, in October 2009.]

Harold Kildow Reviews Hunter Baker’s The End of Secularism

Harold Kildow Reviews Hunter Baker’s The End of Secularism

Science is a method masquerading as a metaphysics. E.A. Burtt long ago captured the hubris and spirit of religious antipathy inherent in the secularist temptation in this memorable aphorism. The pretension of scientific knowledge to a larger place than is warranted has been there from its modern rebirth in sixteenth century Europe, and, like the worrisome tendencies one sometimes sees in a toddler, has grown to be its defining character. This pretension to set itself up as an all encompassing and totalizing form of knowledge did not take long to express itself socially and politically. The gain in confidence for philosophy from the stunning early (and continuous) progress in what we now call the hard sciences came almost completely—at least among the educated—at the cost of Christian and biblical belief in a creating and sustaining God whose providential ordering included the moral and political world. As scientific investigations proved increasingly accurate and profitable in their own proper fields, a longing for equal progress in morals and politics promoted the slow motion catastrophe of modernity’s self delusion as mankind’s maturity. Religion and superstition belong to mankind’s childhood; Reason and Science mark the beginning of man’s taking responsibility for himself, and the putting away of childish things. The rationalization of the world, including the human life world, seemed to modernity and its adherents the obvious path forward, the darkness and violence of religion left behind.

The branch office of Science spearheading social and political operations is Secularism, and is the focus of Hunter Baker’s admirable The End of Secularism (Crossway Books, $17.99). Secularism has taken the brilliant results of scientific rationalism as the superior basis for extending the social peace and toleration that were the lauded benefits of the settlement coming out of the Reformation, beginning with the 1555 formulation cuius regio, eius religio. The later work of such as John Locke in formulating the political liberalism that perhaps marked a climax run in the history of liberty, had as one of its pillars religious toleration. A corollary is that government is not in the business of caring for souls—and thus a salutary separation of church and state is called for. It is but a short rhetorical step from there to the default understanding regnant to this day, to wit: toleration, liberty, and all the good things of our Western political patrimony depend upon a strict neutrality in government when it comes to religion. Thus secularism is the sine qua non of a well-ordered, and peaceful, democratic nation. Of course, Baker’s title announces the end of secularism, not its ascendancy; his brief but thorough treatment (194 pages not including notes and a very valuable bibliography) belongs in the hands of students and their professors, parishioners and their pastors, and everyone concerned that the referee has entered the game as a contestant.

Elite opinion, at least since the French Enlightenment, has tended to secularism and outright atheism. But the baleful effects of elite belief are less pronounced in societies or eras where government does not imagine itself to have authority over all or most of the public’s life. The era of Big Government is, sadly, still with us; and as its power and authority have increased, the number of perches for self styled elites has increased, and like the branches of a well watered tree, offers refuge and sustenance for many an obnoxious bird. What makes secularism especially obnoxious in Baker’s telling is its deceptive posture as morally neutral—and its concomitant assertion that the threat to social comity is solely from religion. Remove religion and its entirely unwarranted moral certainty from the public square, and, voilà!, problem solved, the era of life and light can begin in earnest.

But secularism, to bring another metaphor, has its hand on the scale while selling us the goods. Baker surveys the various settlements between Church and States and the theories underpinning them, beginning with Constantine and Augustine, the medieval church fathers, the English revolutions, the French Revolution, and on to the American Founding, to establish in fine fashion the predicate for the problem. The historical and social science background given in the early chapters perfectly unfolds into the dissection of the philosophical fraud of scientism that gives secularism its current, but waning, street cred.

The overlap of the Christian and postmodern critiques of the totalizing knowledge structures of modernity are reaffirmed in this volume, as the increasingly interesting (because honest) Stanley Fish makes an appearance to call out secularism on its rigged game. Always good when one can enlist an opponent as an authority for one’s argument.

The End of Secularism is a tightly reasoned, well presented primer on a hugely important topic of interest to every Christian and every open minded skeptic, and will reward close attention; the highlights, underlines, and marginalia throughout my review copy each would form the basis of an essay. Go and get this book, and absorb its lessons.

Harold Kildow earned his Ph.D. from Fordham University. He partners with EPSA member David Innes to discuss current events on their joint blog, Principalities and Powers.