Lincoln & the Methodists

By Matthew May
Touchstone Magazine

Circuit Riders, Secret Missions & the Trials of a Civil War President

In Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, the protagonist, Howard Roark, is told that though he does not believe in God, he is “a profoundly religious man, in your own way.” While he did believe in God, Abraham Lincoln, too, was a profoundly religious man, but he was so in his own inimitable style—so much so that close friends and associates considered him an agnostic. A friend of Lincoln’s who was a member of the bench spoke of Lincoln’s complete lack of taste for the rituals and ceremonies of traditional Christianity, and others at times even considered him an infidel.

While it is true that Lincoln outwardly disdained many of the trappings of organized religion, he was wisely never dismissive of organized religion itself. This was especially true of his dealings with Methodism. As we will see, despite the accusations and insinuations of infidelity leveled at him by one of the American West’s premier Methodists during his first run for national office, Lincoln found that the support and zeal of the Methodist Episcopal Church in his favor were vital to the successful prosecution of the Civil War and to the success of his presidency.

From Rowdy to Circuit Rider

In 1846, Lincoln clashed with a prominent representative of early American Methodism in the person of Peter Cartwright, a circuit rider who vied against Lincoln for a seat in the US House of Representatives from Illinois.

Peter Cartwright was born in Virginia in 1785 and raised in Logan County, Kentucky. The son of a Revolutionary War veteran, he was also, like Lincoln, a true child of the frontier. As he wrote in his memoirs, he was able to “turn in and split rails, go to the harvest field, reap, cradle, mow, plow or dig.”

Cartwright often witnessed worship services conducted right in the family cabin by a Methodist circuit rider—the Reverend John Lurton—when Lurton stopped in Logan County. The growth of Methodism on the American frontier led to the Western Conference being organized in 1801 at Cane Ridge; 2,000 people were converted to Methodism on and near the Cartwright property. Peter was not among those called; he was rambunctious and rebellious, interested in gambling on horses and cards while imbibing at a frightening pace.

A few years of such activity came down hard on Cartwright when, after a night of drunken debauchery at a wedding, he recognized his sloth and began to pray. As he later described it,

Divine light flashed all round me, unspeakable joy sprung up in my soul. I rose to my feet, opened my eyes, and it really seemed as if I was in heaven; the trees, the leaves on them, and everything seemed, and I really thought were, praising God.

Soon he was preaching as a “local,” and he was received into the ministry in 1804 and ordained as an elder in 1806 by Bishop Asbury. He rode the circuit in the Cumberland district until moving to Sangamon County, Illinois, in 1824.

Cartwright quickly made a name for himself among the prairie pioneers. He could preach a sermon lasting as long as three hours on anything from the doctrine of the water baptism to the excess of wealth. He obeyed impulsive calls to evangelize, such as when he would sometimes accept a lady’s invitation to dance, then fall to his knees to start a revival. He was an early and vociferous opponent of slavery and co-sponsored a resolution at the 1828 Methodist General Conference calling for inhumanity toward slaves to be treated as cases of immorality.

A contemporary preacher, Peter Akers, later said in praise of him that Cartwright preached “when the settlements were few and far between. . . . With your horse, saddle, or saddlebags underneath, you often sat and inquired . . . not for the way, which might not be open, but for the course to the next place.”

Sparring with Lincoln

One of the “next places” was the Illinois state capital, where, as a Democratic member of the legislature, he distinguished himself as a rough-and-tumble debater, unwilling to flee from a fight. As Paul Findley noted in Lincoln: The Crucible of Congress, Cartwright “had a ready wit, dealt with deriders at his meetings with force, and was widely admired and respected.” In the election of 1832, he defeated the Whig candidate for office, a young man named Abraham Lincoln.

Fourteen years later, Cartwright ran against Lincoln again, this time for a seat in the US House of Representatives, and he brought the flamboyantly aggressive traits he had displayed in the statehouse and on the circuit to this race. He ran, in the words of Lincoln’s first biographer, John Scripps, a campaign strategy chosen of “his own peculiar way of electioneering.” This included branding Abraham Lincoln as an infidel, a scoffer of Christianity in general, and one who disdained its practice within particular denominations.

The 1846 congressional campaign began in the typical fashion of the day, with thrusts and parries, and with the sort of witty eviscerations by each candidate against the other that makes today’s plaintive wailing about contemporary partisanship sound laughably soft. Consider Cartwright’s blatant insult to his opponent as Don Seitz relates it: “This Lincoln is a man of six feet four inches tall, but so angular that if you should drop a plummet from the center of his head it would cut him three times before it touched his feet.”

For his part, Lincoln unleashed his preferred method of mockery, the use of homespun stories, entertainingly recounted by Rufus Rockwell Wilson. In one instance, writes Wilson, Lincoln responded to Cartwright’s elusiveness on a particular economic issue by saying that his opponent’s non-answer

reminded him of a hunter he once knew who recognized the fact that in summer the deer were red and in winter gray, and at one season therefore a deer might resemble a calf. The hunter had brought down one at long range when it was hard to see the difference, and boasting of his marksmanship had said “I shot at it so as to hit it if it was a deer and miss it if it was a calf.”

A Trap Foiled

Cartwright’s popularity within the heavily Methodist district presented a significant obstacle to Lincoln, as the Methodists seemed certain to overwhelmingly support the circuit rider. Cartwright himself was greatly bothered by what he perceived as Lincoln’s shortcomings in religious matters. He was convinced that Lincoln was not a Christian but a Deist and, as such, unworthy to represent the people of the district.

Certainly not without the clergyman’s approval (“I’m Peter Cartwright and I approve this message”?), many of Cartwright’s supporters spread the accusation of infidelity throughout the district. Characteristically, Lincoln chose to meet the charge with both pen and a well-timed public appearance, namely, at one of Cartwright’s evangelistic rallies.

Noticing his political foe in the audience and keen on producing a dramatic effect, Cartwright gave a rousing presentation calling for the conversion of those in attendance. He demanded to receive their reply instantly. He instructed those who desired to give their hearts to God to stand, and did the same for those who did not wish to proceed to the underworld. Everyone at the rally stood with the exception of Abraham Lincoln.

Believing his trap well laid, Cartwright went in for the kill, declaring gravely,

I observe that many responded to the first invitation to give their hearts to God and go to heaven. And I further observe that all of you save one indicated that you did not desire to go to hell. The sole exception is Mr. Lincoln, who did not respond to either invitation. May I inquire of you, Mr. Lincoln, where you are going?

Lincoln rose to deliver a short reply that demonstrated his precision of mind, punctuating his response with a confident prediction documented by Carl Sandburg:

I came here as a respectful listener. I did not know that I was to be singled out by Brother Cartwright. I believe in treating religious matters with due solemnity. I admit that the questions propounded by Brother Cartwright are of great importance. I did not feel called upon to answer as the rest did. Brother Cartwright asks me directly where I am going. I desire to reply with equal directness: I am going to Congress.

Respecter of Religion

To disseminate the similar message that his religious beliefs were his and his alone, Lincoln published a pamphlet to combat Cartwright’s offensive. He did not attempt to claim to be something he was not (in this case, a member of a particular denomination), nor did he necessarily disagree with the basic proposition that religious observance was a requirement for public officials. He wrote:

That I am not a member of any Christian Church, is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular. . . . I do not think I could, myself, be brought to support a man for office whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at, religion. Leaving the higher matter of eternal consequences between him and his Maker, I still do not think any man has the right thus to insult the feelings, and injure the morals, of the community in which he may live.

Lincoln made good on the prediction he made at Cartwright’s rally and won the 1846 election, serving in the US House for one term. He then wandered in the political wilderness until the great controversies over the extension of slavery and his debates and Senate races against Stephen Douglas brought him national attention and, ultimately, world renown.

From Adversary to Supporter

While Cartwright supported fellow Democrat Douglas over Lincoln for the Senate and the presidency, the preacher came not only to admire Lincoln, but also to defend him publicly in own his blunt manner once Lincoln did reach the White House. As Henry Rankin recalled, Cartwright scorched for their pettiness a dinner party of New Yorkers vehemently opposed to President Lincoln:

Once we were opposing candidates for a seat in Congress, and, measured up in the ballot-box, I went down in defeat. But it was defeat by a gentleman and a patriot. I stand here tonight to commend to you the Christian character, sterling integrity, and far-seeing sagacity of the President of the United States, whose official acts you have, in your blind money-madness, so critically assailed tonight. I am confident that he is the man to meet and go forward in this crisis to lead his countrymen amid and through the terrible strife in which we are now engaged. He has a cool-headed, God-fearing, and unselfish love of his country, and knows from top to bottom the life and spirit of men both North and South.

When you go from here to your homes tonight I want you to bear with you the assurances of his neighbour and once-political opponent that the country will be safe in his hands. I wish to have you understand that back of him will stand an unflinching host of Western men, who have no financial ghosts that terrify them and who are destined to rescue this nation from the perils now before us. We have got the men who have got the right kind of grit in them out West. Why stand ye here idle critics? May God send patriotic light into your stingy souls!

For his own part, Cartwright forged ahead as a cornerstone figure in the growth of Methodism in the American West. He published a well-regarded autobiography and a number of influential pamphlets. Remarkably, he never mentioned the 1846 congressional race against Lincoln in his autobiography.

His leadership as a presiding elder, and his service and contribution to the denomination as a whole were lauded at the 1869 Illinois General Conference, whose hierarchy laid aside the usual order of the Discipline to hold a day in honor of Cartwright, then age 84. At this jubilee, many ministers praised his life and career at length. Then Cartwright at last took the rostrum, slumped and with shirt collar loose and voice weakened. He declared to the assembled that

with all the labors and sufferings peculiar to the life of a Methodist traveling preacher, I would take, if it was left to my choice, the same track over again with the same religion to bear me up, rather than be President of the United States.

These remarks were delivered in the town of Lincoln, Illinois, at Lincoln Methodist Church.

Hicks Holds Maryland

Lincoln’s ultimate success during the Civil War was due in no small part to the contribution of loyal Methodist clergy and laymen, as well as to the significant relationship he shared with one of the nineteenth century’s most esteemed Methodist leaders.

Beset by the division of opinion and the threat of disunion immediately upon becoming president in 1861, Abraham Lincoln had at least one prominent Methodist to thank for the Union’s tenuous hold on the state of Maryland. With the notable exception of the Baltimore Conference (part of which lay in Virginia), the border Conferences all passed resolutions in 1861 expressing loyalty to the national government and to the Lincoln administration.

But Maryland was governed by Thomas H. Hicks, an active member of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and Union to the core. Throughout the South, special sessions of the several state legislatures were called to debate and vote on secession. Governor Hicks refused to call such a session in Maryland, and that state’s symbolic and strategic importance was thereby held for the United States.

The Baltimore Conference retaliated at its 1862 session, when 66 ministers and over 22,000 members withdrew, many of whom resurfaced among three independent churches in Baltimore. Throughout the remainder of the war, these congregations and clergy were under constant scrutiny for disloyalty; in fact, one minister—John H. Dashiel—was imprisoned by the military in 1863 for disloyalty.

On the other hand, according to William Warren Sweet in The History of American Methodism, the Philadelphia Conference—which also lay partly in slave territory—required every candidate for admission at its 1862 session to answer the following question: “Are you in favor of sustaining the Union, the Government, and the Constitution of the United States against the present Rebellion?”

Northern Methodist Fervor

Methodists in the North were swept up in patriotic fervor. Various Conferences passed resolutions, administered oaths of allegiance to the Union, and listened to orators expound on causes related to putting down the rebels. The 1862 Cincinnati Conference declared its will to “besiege the Throne of God in behalf of the cause of liberty and good order.” Likewise, the Central Ohio Conference the next year announced that “loyalty to our government is our motto; that we hate treason under whatever garb it appear.”

As Sweet notes, many clergy took part in recruitment drives—which were often held inside Methodist churches—and in 1862 it was reported that 63 Methodist ministers held Union army commissions as colonels, lieutenant colonels, captains, and other officers. It has often been cited that Methodists comprised 15 percent of the Union ranks, and that among those Methodist ranks were the future presidents Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, and William McKinley.

President Lincoln himself publicly acknowledged the extraordinary contribution Methodists made to the war effort and the Union cause. The General Conference of 1864 sent a committee to the White House carrying the sympathy and support of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Lincoln’s response, which he read aloud to the committee, stated in part:

Nobly sustained as the government has been by all the churches, I would utter nothing which might in the least appear invidious against any. Yet without this it may be fairly said that the Methodist Episcopal Church, not less devoted than the best, is by its greater numbers the most important of all. It is no fault in others that the Methodist Church sends more soldiers to the field, more nurses to the hospitals, and more prayers to heaven than any. God bless the Methodist Church! Bless all the churches! and blessed be God, who in this our great trial giveth us the churches.

Fighting Preacher for Peace

One Methodist in the Union ranks was the Reverend James F. Jaquess, who was integral to the organization of the 73rd Illinois Regiment, also known as the “Preacher Regiment” because of the inordinate number of ministers in it.

The paths of Jaquess and Lincoln had crossed in the 1840s in Illinois during each man’s trips upon his respective circuit: Lincoln on the barrister’s, Jaquess on the circuit rider’s. The two men roomed in the same home in Petersburg, and they began a warm friendship. They had had similar boyhoods of great toil on the frontier, though, unlike Lincoln, Jaquess had gone on to receive the benefits not only of a college degree (Depauw University) but also of a doctorate in divinity. Jaquess and Lincoln remained friends for the rest of the latter’s life, and Lincoln’s respect for and trust in Jaquess eventually led him to place the minister in circumstances necessitating a secret mission to the Confederate capital.

The circumstances were these. Despite the fervor of the Northerners, as exemplified by the various Conference resolutions and proclamations, by the summer of 1864 the Union cause looked like a lost one. As James McPherson points out in Tried By War, by July 4 of that year, two main Union armies were seemingly trapped, one near Richmond and the other near Atlanta, after having suffered 95,000 casualties combined. Grant’s Army of the Potomac suffered nearly two-thirds as many casualties in two months as it had in the preceding three years. The North was tired of war and grief-stricken over what seemed to be senseless, aimless slaughter. Pressure mounted on Lincoln to heed the several calls by Democrats for a cease-fire and peace talks.

Jaquess had been one step ahead of such an action, though not for tactical or political considerations. Already in May 1863, moved by the gruesome spectacle of Christians killing fellow Christians, he proposed sending a mission to the Confederacy with the aim of mobilizing anti-war Methodists. He enlisted journalist James R. Gilmore to present Lincoln with details of his plan.

While telling Gilmore that Jaquess was extraordinarily level-headed (“I never saw a man more so,” Gilmore credits Lincoln with saying), and after seeking more details directly from Jaquess, Lincoln ultimately concluded that he could not give government authority for such a mission. He also worried that if Jaquess persisted on his own, he would expose himself to great personal risk, such as being apprehended and executed as a spy. The plan fizzled.

Encounter with Davis

But 1864 changed everything. Not only did Lincoln have military strategy and the costs of war on his mind, there was the 1864 general election to consider. By summer, to say that his prospects for reelection looked bleak would be an understatement. Northern Democrats were agitating for peace at any price, and the Confederacy was basing its own military strategy on achieving decisive victories and on seeing the North suffer inordinate casualties, both of which it saw as helping the electoral chances of Democrats in the Union.

As casualties indeed mounted, Confederates grew more confident that Northerners would go so far as to accept Confederate independence as a condition of armistice. Lincoln found himself in the uncomfortable position of being unable to reject all of the various plans floating around to seek peace with the rebels.

The Jaquess-Gilmore peace initiative was thus revived. On furlough from the 73rd Illinois, Colonel Jaquess—along with Gilmore—was given a presidential pass through Union lines in Virginia on the auspices of unofficial business. Confederate president Jefferson Davis agreed to meet them in Richmond.

Upon meeting the Confederate executive, Jaquess and Gilmore reiterated Lincoln’s terms from the previous December’s “Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction,” which were, simply, amnesty, reunion, and emancipation. According to Gilmore, Davis became irate: “Amnesty, sir, applies to criminals. We have committed no crime. At your door lies all the misery and crime of this war.” Davis argued that the Confederacy’s cause was independence, regardless of any and all acts of emancipation issued by the United States government. He rejected the overture.

Following their meeting with Davis, Jaquess and Gilmore inspected several hospitals to see how Union prisoners were being treated. Altogether, they spent about 48 hours in Richmond, but were fortunate not to be forcibly required to stay longer. According to an October 8, 1898 review of Gilmore’s memoirs in the New York Times, they “narrowly escaped detention” in Virginia when Judah P. Benjamin pleaded with Davis to detain the two Northerners until after the 1864 Union elections. Davis wisely refused, saying, “Probably a bad business for us anyway, but it would alienate our Northern friends should we hold these gentlemen.”

Gilmore published an account of their mission in Atlantic Monthly, which, in showing that Davis was unwilling to reunite under any circumstances, somewhat shifted the burden of negotiation from Lincoln to the Confederate leader. Davis’s rebuff of Jaquess and Gilmore thus served Lincoln’s immediate purposes, but it still did not quiet the Peace Democrats, who focused on Lincoln’s insistence upon emancipation as a term of any cease-fire. As a Democratic newspaper bluntly put it, “tens of thousands of white men must bite the dust to allay the Negro mania of the president.” Lincoln nearly reached the point of conceding, but Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan saved his presidency and the Northern cause in the autumn of 1864.

After the war, Jaquess returned to ministry. Very belatedly, in 1872, Congress reimbursed him for the expenses of his mission to Richmond. He died in St. Paul, Minnesota, in June 1898.

Lincoln’s Bishop

Of all the Methodists serving the war effort on the battlefields, in the church, or in and among the counsels of government, none was perhaps more valued by Lincoln than Matthew Simpson, one of six Methodist Episcopal Civil War bishops.

Simpson was born on June 21, 1811, in Cadiz, Ohio. Methodist historian Charles Ferguson writes that he was baptized by no less a figure than Bishop Francis Asbury, who enjoyed the hospitality of Simpson’s parents when traveling through the area. Simpson enrolled in Madison College in Pennsylvania, taught school, and practiced medicine until 1833, when he felt compelled to enter the Methodist ministry. The Pittsburgh Conference received him, and he was elected a bishop in 1852.

Lincoln and Simpson first became acquainted when the latter was living in Evanston, Illinois, and serving as president of Garrett Biblical Institute there. After the 1860 election, Simpson traveled to Springfield to visit the president-elect regarding support for Northwestern University. At the outbreak of war, he moved to Philadelphia and quickly became one of the nation’s leading orators in support of the Union, Lincoln, and emancipation.

Rousing Speaker

Nearly as flamboyant on the stump as Peter Cartwright, Simpson spared no quarter in weighing the costs of war against the costs of surrender, as illustrated in this speech, cited by biographer George Richard Crooks:

I tell you here to-day I would not give one cent on the dollar for your national liabilities if you allow a single dividing line to be run through your country from the Atlantic to the Pacific. I deprecate war, it is terrible; much of the best blood of the nation has flowed, and more, possibly, will moisten the earth; but if we should divide this land into petty sections, there will come greater strife, which will waste the blood of your children and grandchildren, and there will be sorrow and wailing throughout the generations to come. When I look at this dark picture, much as I dislike war, I yet say, better now fight for twenty years and have peace than stop where we are.

Simpson traveled throughout the country delivering such speeches, and Lincoln came to trust and respect both his views and his gauges of public opinion; in the days before instant polling data, such a widely traveled ally was indispensable. Simpson’s main device was a lecture entitled “Our Country,” which was more than once announced as his “War Message.”

Wherever he happened to speak, he extolled the virtues of the local regiment. For example, Ferguson tells us that in Pittsburgh, Simpson spoke of the 73rd Ohio Regiment, describing the tattered colors it flew on the battlefield as having “been baptized in blood,” and their beauty as “some patch of azure, filled with stars that an angel had snatched from the heavenly canopy to set the stripes in blood.” It is no exaggeration to say that the thousands who gathered to listen to Simpson responded to his speeches with unmitigated patriotic fervor.

Trusted Counselor

Lincoln himself said of him: “‘Bishop Simpson is a wise and thoughtful man. He travels extensively over the country, and sees things as they are. He has no axe to grind, and, therefore, I can depend upon him for such information as I need.” The president sometimes called Simpson to the White House specifically to discuss the people’s sentiment in various parts of the nation, as well as other matters relating to the war. Simpson more than once persuaded Lincoln toward leniency in cases of Confederate sympathizers.

His presence always warmed the president’s heart. On one occasion, Methodist minister Thomas Bowman happened to be conversing with Lincoln in the executive mansion when the door to the Blue Room opened and in walked Simpson. Bowman recalled to author Edgar DeWitt Jones that the president “raised both arms and started for the bishop almost on a run,” expressing how grateful he was to see him, and retiring with him to a private area for an extended discussion.

Such proximity to Lincoln, as well as to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (who shared the hometown of Cadiz with Simpson) must have seemed somewhat providential to Methodists of the day, who were looked upon as anything but a highly esteemed class. Methodists, Ferguson notes, “were a religious body still fairly far down the social scale. Their humble origins among the rejected and their early appeals primarily to the outcasts could not be forgotten.” Because of Simpson’s renown, Methodism not only became respectable, but also came to be continuously linked to the actions of Lincoln and the leaders of government.

Despite his access, Simpson refused to allow the esteem of President Lincoln to cause him to overstep proper bounds in relation to his duties to the church. Indeed, he seemed to take remarkable care in this regard. For example, both Lincoln and Stanton wanted him to accept an appointment to a national commission regarding the war effort. Simpson declined on the grounds that it would be inappropriate to do so considering his station in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Indeed, biographer Robert D. Clark argues that Simpson was, all things considered, “cautious and a little uncomfortable in the presence of Lincoln and official Washington, whether he sought political preferment for his friends, or bounties for his church.”

An Appropriate Coda

Lincoln felt no such discomfort, and it must have amused (or bemused) his old nemesis Peter Cartwright to read of such a public embrace of a Methodist minister. Lincoln sometimes worshiped at the historic Foundry Church in Washington when Simpson preached there. Another Simpson biographer, George Richard Crooks, describes a scene in which, following one such service, Lincoln greeted the bishop warmly and congratulated him, in a voice that all could hear, on a “splendid lecture.” On another occasion, Lincoln sent Simpson in his stead to address the Philadelphia Sanitary Fair, providing the bishop with the opportunity to congratulate and thank its organizers on behalf of the president and the government of the United States.

Ironically enough, Lincoln’s death brought a most appropriate coda to his interactions with American Methodism. In the wake of his assassination, Bishop Simpson attended the Lincoln family, delivered a prayer at the White House funeral service, and was chosen to preach the funeral sermon in Springfield. Near the place where, seemingly a lifetime before, the foremost Methodist of the West had attempted to gain political office by sticking Lincoln with the moniker of “infidel,” a Methodist bishop presided over the bier of the slain president.

Standing beside the coffin at Oak Ridge Cemetery, Simpson tacitly acknowledged the ongoing mystery surrounding Lincoln’s faith and his distance from formal religious ceremony and ritual. Yet this leader of an organized Christian denomination perhaps best described that faith. The bishop said of Lincoln, according to Crooks, that he

read the Bible frequently, loved it for its great truths, and he tried to be guided by its precepts. He believed in Christ the Saviour of sinners, and I think he was sincere in trying to bring his life into harmony with the principles of revealed religion. Certainly if there ever was a man who illustrated some of the principles of pure religion, that man was our departed president.

Matthew May is the historian and archivist for the Detroit Conference of the United Methodist Church and co-editor of Michigan Methodism, Methodists, and More. He is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker website and has written for The American Spectator and Good News Magazine.

Losing Our Grips

By James Hitchcock
Touchstone Magazine

On the Cultural Suicide of the Newly Enlightened

As the European birthrate continues to decline—a demographic catastrophe that may result in a predominantly Muslim continent within fifty years—it is tempting to see in it a pattern of conscious cultural suicide, validating one of the numerous theories of history that postulate human society as following a biological lifecycle, like aging animals resigned to being left behind by the pack.

But the reverse is more nearly true. Most Europeans probably prefer that the ethnic character of their various countries survive, but only so long as other people bear children and accept the responsibility for raising them. Self-consciously modernist Europeans, and their disciples in the United States, are governed by feelings not of obsolescence and exhaustion but of arrogant self-regard, and crucial to their self-identity is their belief that they have purged themselves of the prejudices of their ancestors and have reached a new level of enlightenment.

This arrogance is obscured by the phenomenon of “multi-culturalism,” which seems to require the humility of Westerners before other cultures. But multi-culturalism is now simply the chief way by which Westerners manifest their enlightenment, in that being multi-cultural does not mean being inferior to non-Westerners but being superior to other Westerners.

Disconnection at the Root

The cultural decline of Western Europe is most extremely manifest in the European Union’s refusal, in its Constitution, to acknowledge Christianity as having even historical importance. If properly respected, that Christian past would require contemporary Europeans to look beyond themselves and their own sensibilities to connect with enduring truths in ways that impinge on the modernist notion of liberation.

The modernist project, which inevitably culminates in “postmodernism,” has been the systematic “unmasking” of all claims to self-evident truths—religious belief is held as irrational, the family as repressive, patriotism as ignorant chauvinism, democracy as a cover for privileged interests—and in each case a continued commitment to traditional beliefs would require people to transcend their sense of themselves as the focal point of the universe.

At the root of cultural modernity is man’s disconnection not only from a sense of eternity but from a coherent understanding even of human history, a fragmentation and isolation that preclude any sense that people are part of realities larger than themselves. The general decline in the knowledge of history and the corruption of historical studies by ideological orthodoxies are both causes and effects of a cultural malaise in which people believe in no world larger than themselves and in which the traditional grand narratives—religious faith, patriotism, freedom—have been discredited.

In the United States the conflict over the nature of modernity is conveniently represented in the division between “red” and “blue” states, but not only are questions still alive in America that were long ago settled in Europe, thus far some of them seem to get resolved in ways opposite to the path Europe has chosen.

Malaise of Church & Media

However, the symptoms of cultural suicide naturally manifest themselves in those American institutions that are self–consciously modernist and enlightened. The story of the liberal churches has been told many times, but their catastrophic decline is merely one instance of a pattern that exists throughout the culture.

Journalists chronicle, and to some extent celebrate, the malaise of institutions, often warning religious leaders, for example, that they risk alienating the faithful with their orthodox teachings. But those same journalists are understandably more circumspect in acknowledging something only recently noticed by the public—that there has also been a major decline in public attention paid to the “prestige media” and, as with the mainline churches, efforts to stop this hemorrhaging have not been successful. In a sense, the troubles of the Episcopal Church and the New York Times are identical.

Both the churches and the media have brought their troubles on themselves, and in the same way—by systematically alienating their more conservative supporters, driving away precisely the people who were at one time the most loyal—and the unanswered question is why they fail to attract newer and more liberal constituencies in equal numbers. As the cliché has it, nothing is so dead as yesterday’s newspaper, but that was no less true a century ago than it is now. Most newspapers of the past were deliberately ephemeral, many no better than today’s National Enquirer, but the best of them aspired to be in effect guardians of the culture.

Through much of its history the Times disdained even to publish comic strips and ignored popular culture almost completely, an austerity that was only somewhat less severe in other self-consciously “serious” publications. But in the past four decades even the most pretentious media have come to traffic in gossip about film stars and rock singers and to treat pornography as an art form due the reverence once given to religion.

Simultaneously, serious treatment of public events has declined, as journalism struggles to find “human interest” angles that spare readers the necessity of engaging in serious thought. No particular media can make compelling claims for attention, because what is “significant” is merely whatever catches public attention at a particular moment.

Self-Negating Institutions

The problem of the liberal churches was diagnosed long ago. People seek in religion guidance to the meaning of life, and a church that in effect tells people, “We have no unique wisdom to offer, only the common human search for meaning,” eventually loses even many of the people who share that uncertainty, because there is nothing the churches can offer that is not better available in many other places. Something similar has happened to the media, which embody the postmodernist outlook that makes the forest of cable television channels and the infinity of websites more appropriate means of communication than the Times or CBS. There are no longer any authoritative journalistic voices.

Many a religious leader has worn himself out, and spiritually bankrupted his church, in futile efforts to win credibility with self-consciously postmodernist people for whom secularity is fundamental to identity. Similarly, Arthur Gelb, a retired editor of the Times, laments in his memoirs that his paper lost credibility with “the young” during the 1960s by being insufficiently sympathetic to the New Left, and he worries that it never regained that credibility. Just as liberal clergy failed to understand that the counterculture was of necessity antagonistic to any even remotely orthodox kind of religion, so Gelb misses the point that the New Left was a standing negation of everything that “prestige journalism” was supposed to stand for, beginning with any notion of objectivity or even fairness.

The embrace of postmodernism by both the media and the churches is like attempting to quench a thirst by drinking salt water—whatever temporary relief it provides merely exacerbates the underlying problem. Not coincidentally, this has been accompanied by an ideological lurch in which, for example, the National Council of Churches has become nothing more than a propaganda agency for leftwing causes and the screeds of Frank Rich, Michael Moore, and Maureen Dowd are offered as serious political commentary. Both the “mainstream” churches and the “mainstream” media helped create, and now cater to, people who consider their own feelings the ultimate criteria of reality and who are unreachable on any other basis.

High Culture Discredited

The “public” is no longer a public at all but an infinite number of individuals and groups locked into an endless variety of small worlds, uninterested in connecting with the larger world. The importance of “blogs” in the 2004 and 2008 elections was due precisely to the prevailing belief that there are no sources of objective information, only a series of “viewpoints,” just as the truth of religion is judged by the degree of “relevance” it has to the individual.

In some ways an even more telling crisis, much less noticed than the churches and the media, is the decline of support for classical music. As the sales of classical recordings decline, many radio stations, including public radio, abandon music for a “talk” format.

This decline is the direct result of the postmodernist discrediting of the very idea of high culture, of the abandonment of the idea of the canon on the part of cultural leaders. Left to themselves, most children always found serious music difficult to comprehend, but they understood that, as part of the process of becoming educated, they should learn to appreciate it and that failure to do so would brand them as not fully civilized.

But in the 1960s it became almost de rigeur for classical composers and performers to profess their great love of rock music, hoping to prove the relevance of classical music to “the young” by pointedly refusing to affirm the superiority of the classics, just as liberal clergy refrained from affirming that belief ought to triumph over doubt. Now cultural leaders, including the “serious” media, offer no basis for claiming that Mozart is superior to Eminem; any such claim would immediately provoke indignant charges of snobbery and “elitism.”

Universities as Conduits

If the roots of the cultural malaise lie in the nature of postmodernism itself, the universities are the principal conduits through which that malaise is spread, so that the ironically named institutions of “higher” education offer courses in rock music, pornography, and comic strips that are treated as having equal validity with the study of Shakespeare or Rembrandt. Many educators see their task as precisely that of disabusing students of any notion of objective, enduring values transcending the experiences of individuals and favored social groups and of providing their students with spurious justifications for a culture of mere impulse. The attitudes that have led to a continuing decline in the patronage of the liberal churches, the media, and classical music have been propagated in the universities for at least four decades.

There is great irony here, because the universities are themselves institutions whose existence presupposes classical values and enduring truths, and educators’ role in society can only be justified on the assumption that they possess a wisdom that the young lack. But while the corrosive acids of modernism have been effectively poured on many traditional aspects of the universities, from classical languages to fraternities, they have not been used on the universities as such, which continue to flourish solely for a reason that traditional humanistic education always sought to overcome—they are thought to be the key to economic success. Having attained the power of certification in the workforce, universities continue to be indispensable in ways churches, media, and symphony orchestras no longer are.

The parallel decline of American religion, communications media, and music, like the decline of the European birthrate, shows cultural suicide not as an inevitable and impersonal force but as the result of innumerable limited, not fully deliberate, personal decisions by people who are products of a culture that gives them no sense of anything larger than themselves and who, in Livy’s famous judgment about his fellow Romans, have reached the point where they can neither endure their vices nor face the remedies needed to correct them.

James Hitchcock is Professor of History at St. Louis University in St. Louis. He and his wife Helen have four daughters. His most recent book is the two-volume work, The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life (Princeton University Press, 2004). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.

Take & Give

By Bruce Brander
Touchstone Magazine

On Two Words That Describe the Workings of Love

Social researcher William Kephart once asked university students, “Do you feel that you know what love really is?” Seventy-five percent of males and 64 percent of females were uncertain.

Sociologist John Lee of the University of Toronto asked people from Britain, Canada, and the United States what love meant to them. Some said a frivolous game. Others described chaotic emotion, loss of appetite, and sleeplessness. Some talked of merging with another person or completing themselves. Others spoke of serene, sweet companionship. Some cited altruism as exemplified by great religions, with its patience, kindness, and seeking nothing in return.

Many say they mean to love but don’t know what love means: That’s a big reason for our present epidemic of broken hearts, broken marriages, broken families, and broken children.

Science & Eros

Psychologists Ellen Berscheid of the University of Minnesota and Elaine Hatfield of the University of Hawaii in 1973 argued that love is not one single thing. Rather, they identified two separate kinds of love: passionate and companionate.

Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, in his classic book The Art of Loving, isolated three types of love: eros (romance), philia (devoted friendship), and agape (free giving).

Clyde and Susan Hendrick of Texas Tech University’s psychology department named six kinds of love: eros (romantic), ludus (game-playing), storge (companionate), pragma (practical), mania (roller-coaster emotionalism), and agape (altruism). They drew the names from classical Greek probably because the ancient Greeks had at least ten different words for love.

Robert J. Sternberg, a premier love researcher from Tufts University, named eight types of love. Psychologist Beverley Fehr of the University of Winnipeg outdid everyone; she listed twenty different kinds.

I propose that two words can make love clear and show us how to love successfully: need and gift.

Need-love has other names. The Greeks called it eros, after a winged god of love who shot arrows of life into a barren earth. Eros is our natural desire to fulfill ourselves by reaching outward to take something into our lives. Thus, I can love chocolate and London and ocean travel in the same way, because when I take them into my life, they fulfill me for a while. Likewise, I can fall in love with a woman and draw her into my life for personal fulfillment.

The woman brings to mind other names for need-love. Berscheid and Hatfield called it “passionate love.” Other professionals call it dependency, addictive love, or erotomania.

We sometimes label it “infatuation,” especially when we’re skeptical of someone else’s romantic fantasies or we’re dismissing a past relationship of our own. Puppy-love or a “crush” are words for the same emotional experience among the very young.

Most of us simply call it “romance.” Americans adore romance. Romantic emotions can strike one at any age, from 4 to 94 and beyond. The average American emotes through seven to ten romances in a lifetime.

Swept off our feet by romantic love, we idealize our Special Someone, endowing him or her with unearthly beauty, talent, and charm, seeing even flaws and defects as delightful. One psychologist calls this dazzled vision the “halo effect.”

Obsessive thoughts about our Special Person dominate our mind, often interfering with studies or work. We long to be with our loved one. Most of all, we want our beloved to love us in return; Mark Twain called this an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.

Advance of Romance

Romance is not an invention of Western culture, as some have claimed. Anthropologists William Jankowiak of the University of Nevada–Las Vegas and Edward Fischer of Tulane University in New Orleans studied 168 widely varying societies and found evidence of romantic love in at least 147 of them.

Yet many cultures disapprove of romance’s need-love. Ancient Egyptians deemed it a shameful weakness. Greeks called it “madness from the gods.” Present-day Bedouin peoples of North Africa and the Middle East regard it as disgraceful; their marriages are made by families.

Confucianism declared romantic love an unworthy sentiment linked to low moral standards and social disorder. Among traditional Australian aborigines, a girl who paired off to satisfy romantic desires was judged little different from a prostitute. In Korea until 1910, marriage based on romance was illegitimate and subject to severe punishment.

In much of European culture until about two centuries ago, people shunned romance as a basis for marriage. Wedlock was a family arrangement for economic or social advantage. Then, in the late eighteenth century, the Romantic movement in art and attitudes overthrew this tradition. The young were allowed freer choice of mates, while courtship gradually took on more sentimental tones.

For a long time, romance was generally sweet, upheld by ideals of candor, self-giving, and sexual control. That changed in the aftermath of World War I. The Lost Generation of the Jazz Age danced onto the scene as stylish pleasure-seekers. Erotic dress, literature, and motion pictures filled young minds with sensual ideas, ushering in the first modern sexual revolution in the 1920s.

The practice of “dating” was the biggest shift in courtship in centuries, with its casual and uncommitted intent. Parents were shocked to hear of a new practice known as “necking,” while the automobile made “sparking” and “pitching woo” readily accessible.

Hungry & Selfish

The 1960s brought a further sexual revolution, perhaps less a change in habits than an acceleration of behavior already underway, along with a rebellion against sexual hypocrisy. Around the same time, dating began to wane, replaced by hanging out, by vague, confusing, and unpredictable “relationships,” and by random sex, all lacking the protection provided by etiquette and rules.

The young have inherited a mode of love that leaves almost everyone disenchanted. Impaled on Cupid’s arrow, they make and unmake love with more despair than hope. Romance as it stands simply isn’t working. No serious endeavor in our society begins with such soaring hopes yet fails so often and so dismally. For all its zest and lyrical excitement, it leads more frequently than not to disillusion, disease, unhappiness, breakup, divorce, and other personal calamities.

The reason is more or less obvious. Romance as we do it is too laden with need. It’s hungry. And hunger produces few gifts.

Plato called Eros “the son of poverty.” Psychologist Roger Callahan observes: “Romantic love is selfish! When it comes to an authentic romantic relationship, it is your pleasure, and your happiness that’s the central base of emotion. . . . A selfless romantic love is absurd.”

Romance says, “I want, I need, therefore I love.” It’s concerned more with getting love than giving it, with consuming love than producing it. Yet when two people are trying to get, and neither is giving much, someone is sure to feel emotionally drained or injured after a time. According to psychologist Dorothy Tennov, the emotional highs of an average romance last between eighteen months and three years. After that, if the burning power of need-love has led to wedlock, the man and wife often wake up in shocked disillusion, married to a stranger, stranded on an emotional desert island. That’s probably why the fourth year of marriage is the commonest year for divorce.

Unconditional Love

Gift-love is the answer to most travails of romance. The earlier it’s added to need-love, the sooner it will stabilize a relationship. It also will raise the whole character of love and enrich the lovers.

Like need-love, gift-love also has other names. Ancient Greeks and the Christian Scriptures called it agape. We sometimes name it “altruism,” from the Italian word altrui, or “others.” Modern social scientists often speak of “unconditional love.”

Theologically, it is akin to God’s limitless love for his creation. On the human plane, gift-love is best exemplified by the love of an emotionally healthy mother for her baby, which she gives with no thought of what the baby can do for her in return.

Our society, which encourages mad consumption of both things and people, would have us believe that hot-blooded, sensual, gimme-gimme

romance is the only worthwhile love, perhaps the only kind that exists. Yet nothing less than a healthy infusion of gift-love can build sound and lasting relationships.

Gift-love is the classic “true love,” in which the lover has no motive but the welfare of the beloved. In some ways it seems as different from need-love as day from night. Need-love is a condition we fall into, and enjoy passively. Gift-love is freely chosen, independent of any outside stimulus, motivation, or control. Gift-love changes “love” from a noun to a verb; it’s an intentional act of the will.

Need-love is desire, gift-love a decision. Need-love is a hope, gift-love an assurance. In need-love we feel, in gift-love we act. Need-love wants the other person; gift-love wants the other person’s well-being. In need-love we marry the person we love; in gift-love we also love the person we marry. The question moves from “Do I love her?” to “Will I love her?”

As need-love seeks self-fulfillment, gift-love seeks to fulfill the beloved’s needs. Gift-love is generous service offered solely to aid the highest welfare of another person, with no strings attached. As Martin Luther described it, “To love means to wish from the heart what is good for the other person, or to seek the other person’s advantage.”

Blending Loves

Psychologists tell us that most couples whose marriages endure add healthy doses of gift-love to their need-love. The blend creates justice, an interplay of rights and duties, and a more or less equal self-seeking and self-giving. As couples merge the two types of love, they transform their entire relationship.

I once wrote an article for National Geographic on tribal Bushmen people in Africa’s Kalahari Desert. My interest led me to learn about what a woman of the !Kung tribe named Nisa said about love. She described the graduation from need-love to blended love as well as anybody could: “When two people are first together, their hearts are on fire and their passion is very great. After a while, the fire cools and that’s how it stays. They continue to love each other, but it’s in a different way—warm and dependable.”

Some researchers name this new connection “friendship” or “affectional bonding.” This is the “companionate love” of Berscheid and Hatfield. Ancient Greeks named it philia, a stage between raw passion and saintly compassion. We might also think of it as devoted camaraderie. People who grow into this more generous loving come to know and accept each other far more than romancers ever do. As passion loves because, they love although.

They can relax in one another’s presence. They can be themselves and feel confident of being appreciated as they are. They cultivate a common core of tenderness, caring, understanding, trust, loyalty, and the ability to rise above petty annoyances. Their camaraderie is based on mutual respect rather than power or control. As need-lovers often strive to dominate, gift-lovers seek to cultivate. They are more outward-looking, no longer standing face to face engrossed in each other but side by side pursuing mutual interests and goals. They also make greater willing sacrifices. A need-lover will die dramatically with the beloved; a gift-lover will live and die sacrificially for the beloved.

Born for Love

Need-love and gift-love are not only types of love but also levels of love on a rising scale of quality and human benefit. Love is no static condition, but a dynamic exercise in growth toward emotional and spiritual health and maturity.

Need-love is born into us, the urgent drive of the helpless infant to get its desires met from outside itself. This basic level of love says, “I want, I need! And if you give me what I cry for, I’ll dote on you (but if you don’t, I’ll probably hate you and throw a tantrum).”

Gift-love is born in us only as potential. From our earliest years, we hold seeds of compassion, of giving and serving, of generosity and kindness, of honesty, fairness, and justice. But these seeds must be nurtured if they are to develop into strengths and virtues. “In love every man starts from the beginning,” Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard noted. Yet, for effective love, no one can stay at the beginning. As C. S. Lewis cautioned, “Mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step, for lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair.”

To be sure, progress in gift-love is not accomplished in one giant leap. Rather, it comes a little at a time. Like building strong bodies and intelligent minds, productive love is slow and sometimes rigorous in its development. The process was described aptly by the seventeenth-century French churchman Francis de Sales: “You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; and just so you learn to love God and man by loving. Begin as a mere apprentice, and the very power of love will lead you on to become a master of the art.”

Gift-loving with honesty, kindness, patience, forbearance, and forgiveness leads us gradually from emotional infantilism toward maturity, from self-absorption toward liberation from the self’s demands, from spiritual poverty toward gracious inner wealth. As we willingly accept day by day the joys, inconveniences, and sacrifices of gift-love, our love grows, as once we promised, eternally. Then we come to understand that falling in love is easy, but rising to love is everything.‣

Bruce Brander is a sociological journalist and the author of seven books on travel and social issues. Formerly a staff journalist and editor for National Geographic and World Vision Christian relief and development agency, he now works from his home in Colorado Springs. His latest book is Love That Works: The Art and Science of Giving (Templeton Press). He regularly attends both Catholic and Evangelical churches with Mary, his wife of 24 years.

When Gentile Meets Jew

By Peter J. Leithart
Touchstone Magazine

A Christian Reading of Ruth & the Hebrew Scriptures

Nostra Aetate, the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, is widely seen as a breakthrough in Christian relations with Jews. Implicitly chiding centuries of anti-Jewish polemic, Pope Paul VI proclaimed that while “the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ,” yet “what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.” Thus, “the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.”

The Supersessionist Critique

This was not enough for some. Though acknowledging Nostra Aetate as a “dramatic reversal” in the church’s traditional “supersessionist narrative,” Christopher Leighton, Executive Director of the Institute for Christian and Jewish Studies in Baltimore, has written that the document continues to express the “ambiguity” and “triumphalism” of past Christian attitudes toward Jews.

In asserting that “the Church believes that by His cross Christ, Our Peace, reconciled Jews and Gentiles, making both one in Himself,” the church left Jews where they always had been, “in a subordinate role within the grand Christian narrative.”

For Leighton, supersessionism triumphed in the early Church because it became embedded in hermeneutical methods. By finding typological correspondences between the old and the new, by seeking Christ as the looming figure beneath the surface of the Old Testament, Christian readers of Scripture nullified the Jews’ interpretations of their own Scriptures.

Jewish readings were replaced by Christian ones, just as Israel was replaced by the Church. Rosemary Reuther was expressing a common sentiment when she called upon the Church to repent of imperialistic Christological readings of the Bible, which necessarily disallow Jewish interpretations.

Worries that the New Testament and its interpretive strategies are inherently anti-Semitic hang over the recent flurry of efforts to recover traditional Christian modes of interpretation.

Ultimately, this is an unavoidable clash between Jews and Christians. Christians condemn medieval pogroms, but few want to give up Paul; Christians agree that the Crusaders often treated Jews horribly, but they are not willing to admit that this is inherent in our canon. Unless all Jews or all Christians convert, the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament will remain a battleground.

Yet, the supersessionist critique has pointed up weaknesses in some traditional typology. Christological interpretations have often been guilty as charged—they do nullify Jewish interpretations because they are inattentive to the specific contours of the Hebrew text and the history it records. When Bede claims that the combination of wood and gold in the tabernacle boards typifies the double nature of Christ, we have reason to be suspicious that he has not thought very carefully about what the tabernacle was and meant to ancient Israel.

No Christian interpreter of Exodus or Leviticus would dare go into print today without absorbing the work of Jacob Milgrom, Menahem Haran, Baruch Levine, and a host of other Jewish experts. Literary interpretation of the Bible has been all the rage for several decades, and many of the best practitioners (Robert Alter, Michael Fishbane, Moshe Garsiel) are Jews.

Increasingly Complex Figures

Christological reading that integrates the detailed studies of Jewish scholars has the potential to address some of the complaints against the historical practice of typology. Taking cues from Luke 24, typological interpretation has traditionally plundered the Old Testament for shadowy types of Jesus.

This is consistent with the New Testament’s Christological use of the Old: Jesus is the Seed of Abraham, Melchizedek, Moses, David, the sage-king Solomon, Elisha, a prophet like Jeremiah, and, above all, the Last Adam. What traditional typology has often missed, however, is the complexity of these Old Testament types. Each type is itself a rich tapestry of antitypes.

Jesus is David, but David himself is Adam, Jacob, Moses, and Israel. According to the Davidic covenant (2 Sam. 7), for example, David’s sons are sons of Yahweh; but Yahweh already has a son, Israel. Thus, David’s sons personify Israel, and a Davidic Christology is at the same time an Israel Christology.

To say that Jesus is the Son of David seems to give us only a skeletal royal Christology, but once we see that the figure of David is elaborated by overt or implicit typological links with earlier figures, we begin to put flesh on the bones. Jesus is not the “second Adam,” as if history skipped from Eden to Golgotha without anything intervening. Jesus is the Last Adam, the last of a series of increasingly complex Adam figures, and as such He embodies, and surpasses, them all.

As with cooking, so with hermeneutics: The proof is always in the pudding. In place of a theoretical argument, then, it is best for me to offer a reading. Here, I focus on the book of Ruth.

Tantalizing Hints

At first, Ruth seems unpromising territory for a Christian interpreter. Ruth herself is mentioned exactly once in the New Testament, on page 1, in the genealogy that begins Matthew’s Gospel (1:5). After that, she’s ignored. Boaz gets (slightly) more exposure, gaining a place in Luke’s genealogy as well as Matthew’s (3:32). Beyond that, there are no explicit references to Ruth, nor does the New Testament contain any obvious allusions to Ruth’s story.

Christian interpreters face the obvious question: If the New Testament writers found little or nothing to say about Ruth’s relation to the Christian gospel, how can we hope to be more successful? This book, at least, seems to be exclusively Jewish terrain, impervious to Christian colonization.

On the other hand, the story itself is pregnant with tantalizing hints. We have not one bereft widow but two, many references to food, a hero repeatedly described as a “redeemer,” and a concluding genealogy that leads from Judah to David the king. And this is not even to mention that this book of bread and redemption and miraculous birth takes place largely in the vicinity of Bethlehem. It’s not surprising that pre-critical commentators, such as Isidore of Seville, discovered in the hero of this romance a type of the divine Bridegroom, and in the heroine, a prefiguration of the Church.

Elimelech’s Inverted Exodus

Let’s begin at the beginning. With famine in the land, Elimelech removes his wife, Naomi, and his sons from the ironically named House of Bread to the land of Moab; and before the story is six verses old, Naomi returns to her homeland. It is an exodus and return narrative at MTV speed, but it is a strangely inverted version of the story.

Elsewhere in the Bible, when people leave the land, they return enriched. Abram brings home flocks and herds and servants when he returns from Egypt (Gen. 12). Jacob leaves the land with a staff but comes back with two companies (Gen. 28–32). Israel’s numbers increase so rapidly in Egypt that Pharaoh is afraid of them, and on their way out of Egypt they plunder their hosts.

At the climax of the ages comes the great exitus et reditus of Jesus, who begins in the humble form of a child, but by the time he returns to his Father, he has grown rich, head of two companies. Just as Jesus himself is the composite fulfillment of all types and shadows, so his exodus is a fulfillment of all previous exodus events.

Elimelech’s exodus is nothing like this. Elimelech and Naomi are saved from starvation in Bethlehem, but it’s a bitter rescue, since all the men die when they arrive in Moab. Instead of multiplying, his family diminishes; instead of gaining children, Naomi loses her sons; Leah’s womb opens while Jacob sojourns with Laban, but Naomi’s closes. Every normal exodus moves from emptiness to fullness, from famine to feast. Not Elimelech’s; as Naomi says, she went out full and comes back empty (Ruth 1:21).

The upside-down exodus story at the beginning of Ruth suggests that the book is something more than a domestic drama, and the political frame around the book reinforces the national dimensions of the story. Ruth begins when the “judges judged” (1:1), and ends with the name “David.”

Naomi Transformed

The book is telling not only the story of Elimelech and his family, but the story of Israel, who, throughout the period of judges, cries out: Where is the God of the exodus? Has he forgotten us forever? Where is our Kinsman Redeemer? The movement of the book of Ruth is the movement of Israel’s redemption, her restoration to fullness, which is also a movement from anarchy to monarchy.

From this angle, it becomes clear why Naomi is as central to the story as the title character. She’s the one emptied, then filled; bereft and restored; dead and risen again. The son of Boaz and Ruth is “Naomi’s son” (4:17), and his birth chiastically reverses the loss of Naomi’s sons at the beginning of the book. Naomi is the Hebrew widow, and the story, for all its interest in the Moabite Ruth, is about Israel’s redemption.

The list of barren women in the Old Testament is a who’s who of the wives of the patriarchs, each of whom is—allegorically speaking—Israel (cf. Gal. 4). Naomi’s story is a replay of theirs, with the important difference that Naomi doesn’t even have an elderly impotent Abraham to father her children. Yet, once again the barren woman becomes a mother of children, and thus Naomi becomes a new Sarah, a new Rebekah, a new Rachel, and ultimately a type of the virgin mother who bears David’s greater Son.

In her transformation from barren woman to mother, Naomi, like Sarah, also becomes a type of Mother Church, the woman who bears children by the power of the Spirit. Paul, I suspect, could have written the allegory of Galatians 4 from the book of Ruth as readily as from the Abraham narrative.

The Name of Moab Redeemed

Yahweh’s mechanism for achieving this restoration is an unusual one. The book of Ruth begins with an inverted exodus, and the inversions continue throughout the story. With Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel, he intervened to give them children directly; with Naomi, he works through a surrogate mother, a substitute.

The narratives of Judges also provide a neat counterpoint to Ruth. When Israel worships idols and is oppressed by the nations, she cries out until Yahweh raises a judge to save her (Judg. 2). When Naomi complains in the bitterness of her soul, Yahweh gives not a judge, but a woman, a poor woman, another widow, and a Moabite widow at that. Some redeemer!

Moab is triply disqualified from association with Israel. Moab himself was the son of the incestuous daughter of Lot (Gen. 19); at Baal-Peor, Balaam unleashed the daughters of Moab into the camp of Israel to seduce Israelite men to fornication and idolatry, provoking Yahweh to bring down a plague that stopped only when Phinehas impaled a fornicating couple with his spear (Num. 25); and when Israel first passed through Moabite territory, the Moabites refused to offer bread and water (Num. 22:1–6; Deut. 23:4), but instead hired Balaam to spout imprecations.

Elimelech’s decisions are almost comically ineffectual, doomed from the outset: He goes to the stingy Moabites for food, and he seeks wives for his sons from the incestuous daughters of Lot.

Yet, a daughter of this triply notorious nation, the Moabitess Ruth, clings to Naomi and her people. By identifying herself with Naomi’s people and God, Ruth becomes an alter ego to her mother-in-law, and, in her place, busily goes about redeeming both the name of Moab and the Israelite widow Naomi.

Ruth the Anti-Type

Her redemption of the Moabite reputation has a double twist. When she sneaks onto the threshing floor the night after the harvest festival to find Boaz—a man old enough to call her “my daughter” (Ruth 3:10)—she is every inch the Moabitess. Like Lot’s daughters, she appears to be approaching a wine-filled “father” seeking a son; like the Moabite women who seduced Israel, she seems to be preying on an unsuspecting Israelite man, and we almost expect a Phinehas to loom up, spear poised.

Yet this Moabitess has already pledged herself to the Israelite widow, and all her Moabitish actions are acts of hesed (cf. 3:10). She does want a son from Boaz, but she acts out of loyalty to Naomi. Unlike her Moabite forebears who refused to bring food to Israel, Ruth is an inexhaustible source of bread for Naomi. Every time she leaves the city, she returns with baskets full of grain (2:17–18; 3:15, 17). This Gentile woman fills the empty Naomi (2:18).

Ruth is the antitype of Lot’s daughters and of the Moabite women at Baal Peor— anti-type because she plays against type, fulfilling the earlier history of Moab by reversing it. In a more straightforward sense, she is an antitype of Tamar, the daughter-in-law of Judah who dressed herself as a prostitute and seduced her father-in-law in order to gain a son for her dead husband (Gen. 38).

Both Tamar and Ruth dress up and seductively approach a father figure to get a son, and, as the mother of Perez and Zerah, Tamar is in the same Davidic genealogy as Ruth. Judah had other sons, but Perez and Zerah, sons of incest, are the ones that figure in all the royal genealogies, all the way to Jesus. Tamar is the savior of Judah’s seed, and so is Ruth.

Boaz the Prototype

Only after Ruth attaches herself to Naomi does the redeemer appear on the scene. Boaz is as complex an antitype as Naomi and Ruth. He is a “mighty man of valor” ( gibbor chayil), which links him with Israel’s military heroes, though his might is displayed in acts of generosity rather than prowess in battle.

As he provides food for the hungry, and permanent land for Elimelech’s widow, he plays the part of Moses and Joshua. Reversing the inverted exodus at the beginning of Ruth, Boaz leads Ruth, and through her Naomi, out of the wasteland into a land of barley, wheat, and wine.

In this respect, Boaz also serves as a prototype of the future kings of Israel, who, according to Psalm 72, render justice to the poor and satisfy the needy. Boaz is Moses-shaped, and David, Solomon, and every faithful king of Judah is a Boaz. More fundamentally, Boaz is an Adam.

This is most striking in the threshing-floor scene in Ruth 3, when Boaz awakes from a deep sleep astonished to find a woman at his feet. He is an improved Adam, who feeds Ruth without seizing forbidden fruit, who protects his bride from want, who fathers the seed that produce the seed who will crush the serpent’s head.

Boaz is Adam, Moses, and Joshua. By conforming to the pattern of Boaz, David also becomes a composite of these types, and as Son of David, Jesus is all this and more. To say that Jesus is a greater Boaz doesn’t strike a note; it strikes a chord.

A New Pattern of Redemption

The specific pattern of Boaz’s redemption is worth some scrutiny. Boaz does all he does as a “near relative” of Naomi, but though he acts on behalf of Naomi, all his kindness to Naomi is mediated through Ruth, Naomi’s Moabite surrogate. He brings Ruth into the company of his own maids, feeds her bread and wine at noon, and insists that she glean only in his field.

Through his attentions to Ruth, he provides bread for Naomi. He agrees to spread the wing of his robe over Ruth, and so provides a son to Naomi, to keep Elimelech’s name from failing in Israel (Deut. 25). He saves the Hebrew Naomi by redeeming the Gentile Ruth.

The typological redemption of Ruth follows this pattern: Naomi, the Jewish widow, is bereft; the Gentile daughter Ruth joins her; Naomi gets a redeemer when Boaz attaches himself to Ruth. The pattern is not “salvation, then incorporation of Gentiles” but “incorporation of Gentiles, then salvation.”

Prior to Ruth, this is a nearly unprecedented sequence in the Old Testament. Only in the Joseph story does Gentile salvation precede Israel’s. After Ruth, it becomes familiar: Nineveh is delivered to invade and conquer Israel, which is later redeemed from exile; Daniel witnesses to Nebuchadnezzar and Darius, and the “salvation” of these Gentile rulers brings the salvation of Israel.

Familiar it may be, but it was enough to make the Apostle Paul gasp: “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable his ways!” (Rom. 11:33). The mystery that leaves Paul in silence is the gospel’s revelation both that Israel’s rejection will be the salvation of the world, and that the ingrafting of the Gentiles will in turn lead to the salvation of Israel.

It is a mystery, but a mystery already unfolding under the shadows of the story of Ruth. For the gospel of Ruth is summed up in this: “All nations shall be blessed in you” and, “So all Israel shall be saved.”

Inexhaustible & Unfathomable Riches

The presence of internal typologies within the Old Testament breaks down any simplistic binary contrast of Old and New. In an important sense, Christian interpretation does not acknowledge the Old Testament as a separate entity. There is only the Christian Bible, compiled in clumps over many centuries and completed with the Gospels, epistles, and Revelation. Such a claim obviously sharpens the differences between Jewish and Christian readings, since it implies that the Jews are working with only a partial book.

At the same time, a refined Christological reading is open to Jewish insight on specific texts, careful about the internal workings of the Hebrew Bible, and honors Israel by being attentive to the institutions and events of her history.

By refusing to “jump to Jesus” and by treating the elaborately woven texture of the Old Testament with serious delight, Christians curb the habit of skimming the surface of the book the Jews call the Bible. No doubt, many will see this as another form of imperialism, more insidious because more subtle. I don’t deny it is imperialistic, but it has the advantage of being an imperialism that respects the customs of the colonized, while hoping for their entry into full citizenship.

Whatever their merits as an example of interpretation or as hermeneutical theory, these musings, I hope, confirm the intuition shared by church fathers and rabbis both, neatly summarized in a breathless catena of patristic descriptions of the Bible assembled by Henri de Lubac in Medieval Exegesis:

Scripture is like the world: “undecipherable in its fullness and in the multiplicity of its meanings.” [It is] a deep forest, with innumerable branches, “an infinite forest of meanings”: the more involved one gets in it, the more one discovers that it is impossible to explore it right to its end. It is a table arranged by Wisdom, laden with food, where the unfathomable divinity of the Savior is itself offered as nourishment to all. Treasure of the Holy Spirit, whose riches are as infinite as himself. True labyrinth. Deep heavens, unfathomable abyss. Vast sea, where there is endless voyaging “with all sails set.” Ocean of mystery.

Peter J. Leithart is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and teaches theology and literature at New St. Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho. He is the author of Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy and Against Christianity (both from Canon Press). He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.

Notre Madame et le President

By Anthony Esolen
Touchstone Magazine

There Was No Moral Common Ground

Well, the long-awaited commencement chez Notre Madame is past, God be thanked, with the father of the college and the father of our country fairly falling into one another’s arms in an ecstasy of mutual admiration and relief. I’ll leave it to the right people to express their feelings of betrayal—I mean the Catholics who have spent many years praying in front of abortuaries, passing out literature on abortion to their students in Catholic schools, donating time and goods and money to homes for unwed mothers, and fighting the patient and frustrating political fight one fence-sitting politician at a time.

Instead, I’d like to focus on the moral aphasia of our times. I don’t know how else to describe what President Obama said, and how it was received by faculty and students at the commencement on May 17—people who one presumes have had at least a passing acquaintance with moral philosophy. The President said—by way of holding forth what he believes is a compromise between his position and that of every Christian group before the last misbegotten century—that we should all work together to reduce the number of “unwanted pregnancies.”

And with a single phrase he showed, to anyone there who was paying attention, that there is no compromise possible between his position and the ancient Christian teaching.

American Roulette

Let us suppose I have a fancy revolver with twenty chambers. Suppose that we put one bullet in the revolver, in one of the chambers. Suppose also that I and my pal enjoy the frisson of terror and risk that rushes up our spines when we spin the chambers and hold the revolver to the other fellow’s head and pull the trigger. Of course, I do not want to kill my friend, and he does not want to kill me. But we are both willing to incur the risk of death to have that spasm of glee and fright.

Now, it won’t do to compare our actions to those of, say, a bridge-painter, who knows when he climbs up his ladder that there is a measurable chance that he will fall to his death (it is, I’m told, one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, and therefore fabulously well remunerated). That is because the purpose of a ladder is that it be climbed, not that it be fallen from, whereas the very purpose of a gun is to shoot a bullet.

Suppose that my friend and I play this game of American Roulette once a year, on one of our birthdays. Now suppose that my friend’s number comes up, and I shoot him through the head. By law, and by the moral philosophy that undergirds the law, I do not get to plead that I did not intend his death. Perhaps I did not want him to die, but I certainly did intend the chance that he would die: I intentionally used a weapon against him, a weapon whose purpose it is to kill, and I used it in a way that would ensure his death, if the right chamber came up. It would be up to judge and jury to assess the correct punishment in my case, but as a matter of fact, I am a murderer.

Unbridgeable Chasm

Except in the case of rape, there are no “unintended pregnancies,” none. There are plenty of women who do not want to be pregnant, and plenty of men who do not want them to be pregnant, but in all those cases the pregnancies are the results of intentional actions that have pregnancy as their perfectly natural and perfectly predictable consequence.

Contraception does not change the nature of the act itself; indeed, it makes the actors more keenly aware that they are doing what makes babies, since otherwise they would not go so far out of their way (donning or inserting into the body uncomfortable devices, or flooding the system with pregnancy-mimicking hormones) to thwart the body’s natural functions. The “problem” in the case of Sexual Roulette is not that the body fails, but that it succeeds.

So the pregnancies are the result of intention. The problem is that the children are not wanted, and that is a very different thing. For the question we should immediately ask is not, “How do we dispose of this child we do not want?” but “What is wrong with us that we do not want this child?” The abominable Peter Singer has said that, given the choice in a fire to save a kennel full of beloved dogs, a clinic full of newborns, and an orphanage full of unwanted children, he would save the dogs. What a disgusting display of self-justification on the part of whoremaster man. He sins first by not wanting those who need his love, and then justifies disposing of them by saying that, well, he does not want them.

He never asks why not; he takes his egocentric desires, or in this case his egocentric callousness, as normative. So it is that President Obama stands on the wrong side of an unbridgeable chasm, separating those who believe that good and evil are independent of what we happen to want at the moment, and those who believe that our wanting determines what is “good for us.” It is the very principle of the Culture of Death that the “value” of human life depends upon the valuers, and not upon the God-given nature of the human being in question.

What compromise with that principle is possible? “Human life is sacred,” say the Christians, and “Human life in the womb is to be valued according to the price list provided by the pregnant woman,” says the President. There is no middle position between these principles, exactly as there is no middle god between the God of Israel and Baal or Moloch. Though perhaps I am being unfair to the old Moloch-worshipers. They at least did not sacrifice their children for the sake of mere convenience.

Hollow Plea

What we need, of course, is not to reduce “unintended pregnancies,” but to grant children what we owe them, which is, at the minimum, a married mother and father. We want, in other words, to reduce unwed motherhood, not by killing the children, but by persuading people to get married before they start acting as if they were married.

But that is quite impossible if one accepts the tenets of Sexual Roulette—a thrill for everyone, and everyone for a thrill. And President Obama cannot reject the sexual spin-the-revolver of our times without leaving his party, which is committed to it, lock, stock, and barrel.

And that brings me to the callous, self-serving, and hypocritical plea that each side stop “demonizing” the other. Again, what kind of moral philosophy is this? Courtesy in a debate implies nothing about who is right and who is wrong. Worse, what looks like courtesy is sometimes only moral tepidity; and a plea for courtesy is sometimes just an a priori denial of the rights of one side to plead its case most truly and forcefully.

Should the West in the time of Hitler have treated the madman with more courtesy? Was it not at fault for failing to show him, as soon as possible and as forcefully as possible, for the demon he was? And does this plea not ring hollow, anyway, from someone who has supported using racketeering laws against abortion protesters, and whose allies are attempting to compel their opponents to provide abortion services against the dictates of their conscience?

Sometimes the rational thing to do is to recognize that one’s opponent has denied the very foundations of moral reasoning. At that point, to continue to debate is like arguing with a drunk. But the chief procurer at Notre Madame apparently likes to keep the champagne flowing.

Unhappy Fault

By Leon J. Podles
Touchstone Magazine

On the Integration of Anger into the Virtuous Life

Any institution tends to preserve itself by avoiding conflict, whether external or internal. In addition to this universal tendency, many Christians have a false understanding of the nature and role of anger. It is seen as something negative, something that a Christian should not feel.

In the sexual abuse cases in the Catholic Church, those who dealt with the bishops have consistently remarked that the bishops never expressed outrage or righteous anger, even at the most horrendous cases of abuse and sacrilege. Bishops seem to think that anger at sin is un-Christian. Gilbert Kilman, a child psychiatrist, commented, “What amazes me is the lack of outrage the church feels when its good work is being harmed. So, if there is anything the church needs to know, it needs to know how to be outraged.”

Mark Serrano confronted Bishop Frank Rodimer, asking why he had let his priest-friend Peter Osinski sleep with boys at Rodimer’s beach house while Rodimer was in the next bedroom: “Where is your moral indignation?”

Rodimer’s answer was, “Then I don’t get it. What do you want?” What Serrano wanted Rodimer to do was to behave like a man with a heart, a heart that is outraged by evil. But Rodimer couldn’t; his inability to feel outrage was a quality that had helped make him a bishop. He would never get into fights, never rock the boat, never “divide” but only “unify.” Rodimer could not understand why he should feel deep anger at evil, at the violation of the innocent, at the oppression of the weak.

Emotional Deformation

The emotions that are now suppressed are hatred and anger. Christians think that they ought not to feel these emotions, that it is un-Christian to feel them. They secretly suspect that Jesus was being un-Christian in his attitude to the scribes and Pharisees when he was angry at them, that he was un-Christian when he drove the moneychangers out of the temple or declared that millstones (not vacations in treatment centers) were the way to treat child abusers.

Conrad Baars noticed this emotional deformation in the clergy in the mid-twentieth century. He recognized that there had been distortions in “traditional” Catholic spirituality. It had become too focused upon individual acts rather than on growth in virtue; it had emphasized sheer naked strength of will. In forgetting that growth in virtue was the goal of the Christian’s moral life, it forgot that the emotions, all emotions, including anger and hate, are part of human nature and must be integrated into a virtuous life.

Baars had been imprisoned by the Nazis. He knew iniquity firsthand and that there was something wrong with those who did not hate it:

A little reflection will make it clear that there is a big difference between the person who knows solely that something is evil and ought to be opposed, and the one who in addition also feels hate for that evil, is angry that it is corrupting or harming his fellow-men, and feels aroused to combat it courageously and vigorously.

Just Wrath

Wrath is a necessary and positive part of human nature: “Wrath is the strength to attack the repugnant; the power of anger is actually the power of resistance in the soul,” wrote Josef Pieper. The lack of wrath against injustice, he continued, is a deficiency: “One who does good with passion is more praiseworthy than one who is ‘not entirely’ afire for the good, even to the forces of the sensual realm.”

Aquinas, too, says that “lack of the passion of anger is also a vice” because a man who truly and forcefully rejects evil will be angry at it. The lack of anger makes the movement of the will against evil “lacking or weak.” He quotes John Chrysostom: “He who is not angry, whereas he has cause to be, sins. For unreasonable patience is the hotbed of many vices, it fosters negligence, and incites not only the wicked but the good to do wrong.”

Pieper observed the disappearance of the concept of just wrath in Catholic moral theology and spiritual life:

The fact, however, that Thomas assigns to [just] wrath a positive relation to the virtue of fortitude has become largely unintelligible and unacceptable to present-day Christianity and its non-Christian critics. This lack of comprehension may be explained partly by the exclusion, from Christian ethics, of the component of passion (with its inevitably physical aspect) as something alien and incongruous—an exclusion due to a kind of intellectual stoicism—and partly by the fact that the explosive activity which reveals itself in wrath is naturally repugnant to good behavior regulated by “bourgeois” standards.

Pieper’s quote from Aquinas’s commentary on John is relevant to both anger and forgiveness. Aquinas is commenting on the passage in which Jesus tells us to offer the other cheek:

Holy Scripture must be understood in the light of what Christ and the saints have actually practiced. Christ did not offer the other cheek, nor Paul either. Thus to interpret the injunction of the Sermon on the Mount literally is to misunderstand it. This injunction signifies rather the readiness of the soul to bear, if it be necessary, such things and worse, without bitterness against the attacker. This readiness our Lord showed, when He gave up His body to be crucified. That response of the Lord was useful, therefore, for our instruction.

The philosophical error that is at the root of this rejection of the passions is not stoicism so much as nominalism and a false concept of freedom which has become ingrained in Western Christianity.

Anger as Energy

The Reverend Kevin Culligan, a priest in his sixties, was angry when he was a teenager, but says, “Since then I have been uncomfortable with anger.” He has been afraid of losing control of himself and doing something “I would later regret or have held against me.” He feared becoming “irrational.”

But then he saw a television program about a boy who had been abused by a priest when he was eight years old, and he saw the arrogance of the church officials who dismissed the boy’s cries for help. Culligan shouted at the TV set: “Those bastards! Look what they’ve done to the Church!” He felt the hot wrath of God in him against those who had made the Church a den of sexual predators.

Culligan reflected that “many current spiritualities regard strong emotion—fear, joy, anger, sadness, hope, pity—as ‘obstacles to spiritual growth.’” But Jesus felt the full range of human emotions, including anger, and Culligan decided that “our emotions too—our rage as well as our compassion—are sacred” because they give us the energy needed to rebuild the Church and do God’s work.

One Irish bishop said the calm way everyone approached sexual abuse helped mislead him about the seriousness of the matter:

“I think if it had come to me differently . . . if the parent had come roaring and shouting at me, it would have affected the response. It would have made me sit up more and be aware. The experience of having direct contact with a parent who was very angry and very upset would have alerted me more too. If someone had come thumping at the door outraged and making demands, which they are quite entitled to do, I would have learned a lot faster.”

As Gregory the Great said, “Reason opposes evil the more effectively when anger ministers at her side.”

Diplomatic Weakness

This lack of aggressiveness among clerics has been noticed by psychologists. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops published a study that said, “Priests are often, by temperament and personality, anxious to establish harmony and to please. By theology and vocation they are concerned to be healers, reconcilers, and builders of the community.” Almost all psychological studies support this assessment: Priests and seminarians are “unassertive, dislike violence . . . and have a high need for abasement (i.e., want to give in and avoid conflict).” This dislike of conflict is present in other churches and their clergy as well.

Diplomats rule in the Vatican, and diplomats dislike confrontation, anger, and hatred, because such emotions make diplomacy difficult. The Vatican has appointed the bishops; the bishops have trained the clergy. Therefore, hatred of iniquity has been felt to be something that did not fit into the Christian life. The Catholic bishops had and have this lack of anger, and thereby betray a defect or weakness of the will in their rejection of child abuse.

To express sorrow but not anger at the mystery of evil that is child abuse demonstrates only part of the virtue of fortitude, as Thomas Aquinas explained:

Whereas fortitude . . . has two parts, namely endurance and aggression, it employs anger, not in the act of endurance . . . but for the act of aggression. . . . Sorrow by its very nature gives way to the thing that hurts; though accidentally it helps in aggression . . . as being the cause of anger.

Sorrow at evil without anger at evil is a fault, a fault that the Catholic bishops have repeatedly fallen into in their handling of sexual abuse and that the late pope fell into when he tolerated the bishops’ faults. Until just anger is directed at the bishops, until bishops (including the pope) feel just anger at their fellow bishops who have disgraced and failed their office, the state of sin in the Church continues.

Virtue Without a Name

Meekness, which is the virtue that moderates anger, is misunderstood as passivity. Moses angrily confronting Pharaoh was the meekest of men, because he moderated the plagues to allow Pharaoh time to repent. Meekness moderates anger so that it is in accord with reason. Since most people suffer from an excess of anger, the virtue that increases anger in those who are deficient in it so that it is in accord with reason does not have a name, but it needs one.

Leon J. Podles holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia and has worked as a teacher and a federal investigator. He is the author of The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity and the forthcoming License to Sin (both from Spence Publishing). Dr. Podles and his wife have six children and live in Naples, Florida. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.

Waiting for Epimenides

By Ken Myers
Touchstone Magazine

We are living in an age marked by skepticism, intellectual incoherence, and hostility to great, commanding ideas. In such a time, many Christians spend a great deal of time and emotional energy simply holding onto their faith—holding on, that is, to their assent to the most basic, core beliefs of the faith.

Our time is also marked by widespread ethical illiteracy and moral carelessness, a setting in which the alleged vocation to “authenticity” displaces any other trajectory of virtue. Encouraged by powerful social forces to “follow our bliss,” that is, to trust the innocence of our untrained desires, the perennial struggle against sin has become for many Christians an alien and exotic pursuit at best. Heroic holiness has never been common, but it was once at least more commonly coveted. Today, it seems implausible to many Christians to keep the bar set so high.

An Obstacle to Maturity

The properly ecumenical ideal of “mere Christianity” upheld by this magazine has great benefits, but it is surely not a call to be content with being “barely Christian.” Called to make disciples, teaching them to observe everything the Lord of heaven and earth has commanded, the Church and its shepherds should emulate the Apostle Paul in his zeal of “warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ” (Col. 1:28). That goal of maturity is a recognition of the fact that the faith of the Bible and the Church is a faith with profound and myriad ramifications, intellectually and morally.

A passion for Christian maturity is easily obscured when church leaders become preoccupied with the Church’s cultural relevance. The widespread desire to be (as the common term of art puts it) “culturally engaged” is often a distraction from the Church’s mission, not because it takes culture too seriously, but because it has not paid close enough attention to the actual state of our culture.

The prevailing strategy is to make the Church more congruent with the current cultural ethos, with fashionable sensibilities and forms, so that those outside the Church will be more likely to assent to a few Christian propositions. But this strategy fails to account for the depth and breadth of our culture’s disorder. It may nudge some toward the profession of faith, but it does so by removing from sight the glorious image of a fully ramified Christianity.

We might be able to sustain some resonance with our confused culture by remaining barely Christian, but becoming thoroughly Christian, exploring and enacting the cultural ramifications of our faith, requires us to be more prophetic toward the cultural status quo. Real cultural engagement requires the wisdom to repudiate and shun cultural disorder.

Shifting Styles & Values

The moral and intellectual liabilities of our moment are evident in our dominant cultural styles. For example, it is obvious that our society is less sympathetic toward formal patterns of behavior than it was forty years ago. Well into the 1960s, men thought nothing of wearing a tie to a baseball game (and the hats they commonly wore were not ball caps), women rarely wore jeans in public, and the display of torn or frayed clothing at school or at a shopping center would have been a source of embarrassment to members of either sex. What one wore to the gym was not what one wore to go out to dinner. There were generally recognized proprieties—socially sanctioned expectations—to which one (without much thought) deferred.

Today, we defer (without much thought) to the complete absence of any sense of deference. That shift toward informality, toward the abandonment of proprieties, is not, as many assume, simply a meaningless evolution of style. Numerous cultural observers, from Richard Weaver in 1948 (in Ideas Have Consequences and in other essays) to linguist John McWhorter in 2003 (in Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care) have argued that the contemporary preference for informality is deeply tied to suspicions about authority and about metaphysical hierarchy.

As McWhorter points out, “Formality in all realms, be it sartorial, terpsichorean, culinary, artistic, or linguistic, entails the dutiful acknowledgment of ‘higher’ public standards considered beyond question, requiring tutelage and effort to master.” The move toward informality is, at its deepest level, an expression of our culture’s valuing of individualism and moral autonomy.

Symbiosis of Form & Content

If Christians were really culturally engaged, really serious about recognizing meaning in forms of cultural expression, they would be much more reluctant to embrace certain cultural trends. Carelessly adopting cultural change without understanding the meaning of that change is to treat culture as something inherently frivolous. It represents a failure to take symbolic action seriously.

Convictions and conventions always live in a kind of symbiotic ecosystem. That, after all, is what a culture is: a network of mutually reinforcing conventions and convictions, interlocking patterns of form and content. Bad convictions bring forth and are sustained by certain (and suitable) conventions. Because we are embodied creatures, good convictions are not sustained simply by attaching good teaching to whatever conventions happen to be popular. We couldn’t use heavy metal music to instruct listeners about the virtues of gentleness and humility simply by changing the lyrics.

St. Paul exhibits a deep understanding of this symbiosis of form and content in his letter to Titus, a young pastor serving on the Aegean island of Crete, struggling in a congregation plagued by false teaching and division. The apostle recognizes that the disorder in that church is not going to be addressed unless Titus and his flock become very deliberate in repudiating the cultural mood of the society in which they live. Paul is not content to attribute the problems faced by Titus to a generic human cussedness. He sees that the barriers to faithfulness in that setting have been erected by an array of sensibilities deeply engrained in the culture of Crete, and he calls on the testimony of a shrewd cultural observer to identify the problem.

That witness is Epimenides, a poet of the sixth century B.C., who is held in high esteem by his fellow Cretans despite his blunt assessment of certain national characteristics. After St. Paul reiterates the tasks that have been assigned to Titus, he quotes from Epimenides. Informed by the pagan poet’s cultural discernment, Titus is to continue searching for reliable leadership for the church on the island, the ideal elder being a man who is

above reproach. He must not be arrogant or quick-tempered or a drunkard or violent or greedy for gain, but hospitable, a lover of good, self-controlled, upright, holy, and disciplined. He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it.

The apostle thus describes a form of living capable of sustaining the content of the gospel. From the beginning of the letter, he is eager to underscore this unity of truth and goodness; in the first sentence of the letter, he asserts that he has been called to be an apostle “for the sake of the faith of God’s elect and their knowledge of the truth, which accords with godliness.” Belief cannot be separated from a way of life.

A Bracing Rebuke

But the way of life typical of Cretan culture was not one that accorded with truth or goodness, and this is where the insight of Epimenides is introduced. “One of the Cretans, a prophet of their own, said, ‘Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.’ This testimony is true. Therefore rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith.” There are people in this church who “claim to know God, but they deny him by their works. They are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work.” (By the way, this letter is a useful resource in rebutting the claim that the author of the letter to the Romans didn’t share the interest in good works shown in the epistle of St. James.)

In the second chapter, St. Paul goes on to tell Titus to encourage a countercultural set of manners and convictions among his people: “Teach what accords with sound doctrine.” He doesn’t mean, “Teach those things that can be deduced from a core of dogma.” Rather, he wants Titus to encourage the forms of life that establish a cultural ecosystem in which truth and goodness might thrive: self-control, dignity, reverence, integrity, purity, submissiveness, temperance, and steadfastness.

The list looks like St. Paul constructed it with the stereotypical Cretan described by Epimenides in mind—impulsive, undisciplined, self-serving, and shameless. The believers in Crete were to take their culture so seriously as to repudiate and counteract it deliberately and zealously. Far from looking more like their neighbors in the interest of winsomeness, they are enjoined to live lives that put their neighbors to shame.

St. Paul’s letter to Titus is a bracing rebuke to much of the vague talk about cultural engagement one hears in so many Christian settings. It displays a magnificently holistic view of faithfulness, in which doctrine, spirituality, action, and sensibilities are interwoven. It recognizes that cultural moods and styles can be enemies of faithfulness.

Most notably, the apostle (moved by the Spirit) draws much of his insight from the wisdom of a pagan member of the very culture under scrutiny, a native poet who prophetically (if somewhat paradoxically) zeroed in on the fatal flaws of the world outside the Church. In God’s providential economy, the Church is truly aided when it honors those who speak unpopular truths.

Pagan Discernment

The practice of cultural engagement in a disordered culture requires that we look first to the revelation of God and to the history of the Church’s wrestling with that Word to determine who we are and how we ought to live. Thus informed, we can benefit from those outside the Church who, like Epimenides, discern culturally generated obstacles to our faithfulness.

There have been and will continue to be many such voices, men and women who recognize the fashionable but dehumanizing follies of the moment. People who are morally serious and intellectually honest but who have no transcendent faith are often more discerning than Christians in spotting the problems in their culture. They have nothing beyond this life to sustain them, and no evangelistic motive to be winsome, so they have an incentive to be more rigorous in their inspections.

But all too often, these prophetic voices are ignored, as American churches have emulated the most popular trends of our time in order to attract people who want a spiritual supplement to the cultural status quo instead of a radical critique of the conventional wisdom. Christian leaders have assumed that “engaging the culture” means finding out what the majority wants and figuring out how to exploit those desires in the name of Jesus. They have tended to look kindly toward the leaders and defenders of institutions that represent the cultural majority. Churches are more likely to emulate the practices of successful cultural enterprises in business, entertainment, sports, or education than to examine those practices critically to ascertain how they might contribute to cultural disorder and deflect thorough Christianity.

Following St. Paul’s advice to Titus suggests that we would do well to look for and listen to our own pagan prophets. While waiting for a new St. Benedict, we should also heed the heirs of Epimenides.