Lewis and St. Maximus the Confessor

By Mark Krause
The Right House

What Lewis is so darn good at, is translating his knowledge of old books, and in particular the deeper, ancient truths of the Christian faith, into literary tidbits that the non philosophically inclined can grasp ahold of. I find this most of all in his great work the "Chronicles of Narnia." For instance, if one cares to notice, his view of the atonement in the first book is very reflective of the so called "ransom theory," found in the Fathers. It doesn't line up nicely at all with the innovative (that word is not a compliment when I use it about theology generally) substitionary or penal substition views of the atonement as articulated respectively by Anselm and the reformers.
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For St. Maximus, it is necessary to tame all the passions and put them in subjection to our reason so that the whole person can be saved, because his anthropology was such that it did not merely place sole importance on the reason, but the complete unified human being. Christ saves all of us by uniting all of human nature to himself, and we must participate in that by taming the passions to bring them in subjection to Christ. Our passions are not evil because human nature is inherently good. Sure we inherit a corruption, but this is simply a dissordering of the inherently good components that make up human nature. Evil, or sin is in the use. Sin is personal not natural. We cannot attribute evil to any passion, but merely evil in our indulging that passion outside of its proper context, which is ultimately subjection to Christ.

Now to tie this in with Lewis, we must go to the scene in "Prince Caspian," the second Narnia book, where we see Bacchus dancing in Aslan's camp with the nymphs and the children. Now, when many people read this in the story they were horrified because of the horrorble obscentiy of Bacchic worship in ancient Greece. However, Lewis was really, I would argue, trying to show the same truth as Maximus. Bacchus is not inerently evil, because, as I mentioned, sin is in the use. Sin is personal, not natural. What we see here is the affirmation of the inherent goodness of Bacchus when he is put in subjection to Aslan, the Christ figure. So we see that Lewis seems to again be placing a complex theological truth, in an easier to swallow literary dose. This is Lewis' genius. (more)

The Folly of Biblical Ignorance Since the Bible Is a Great Book

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

There is evidently something about the Bible that irritates a few Americans the way the sight of a stake disturbs a vampire.
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Four Reasons for Weird Anger

Problem 1. The “Science-Guy”

There is always the “science-guy” (it is almost always a guy) who thinks nobody should waste their time reading any old book since only science contains knowledge. Give them a list of great books and they will complain that the latest technical journal article in their sub-field of physics is not there. The Bible makes them the most angry, because defenders of it (some ill advised) have been the least eager to leave all knowledge to the white jacket priesthood in the laboratories.

These are the people who think Richard Dawkins has a clue about philosophy of science.

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Their souls are dead to the importance of the human things (literature and art) as they have been taught to reduce humans to computers made out meat.

This is the kind of person who thinks any reference to the soul is “magical” thinking or that the goal of an educated man is to become a great fact-grinding machine.

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Whatever the merits of philosophical naturalism (and it has merits), anybody who cannot learn from Bach, Spencer, or Shakespeare what it means to be human has confused a good thing (science) for the only good thing.

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Problem 2. Understandable Reaction to an Error By Some Christians

The second common reaction is the fault of some Christians. Since a few Christians use the Bible in conversation with non-Christians in a way that assumes non-Christians should simply fall down and repent on hearing the Bible, non-Christians are turned off by any mention of the Bible.

Use of the Bible in public discourse should not be a conversation stopper, but a wise place to begin. Who wants to stop a dialog anyway? Certainly not a traditional Christian! We love dialog.

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Problem 3. Some People Cannot Read the Bible Well

There a few sad souls that take hard passages in the Bible and allow them to so consume their understanding of this highly complex book that they can no longer get anything else out of it.

I have known people so hung up on the interesting question of how Genesis relates to Darwin that they cannot get beyond that or ever give the topic a rest to learn other things from the book.

Joseph and his brothers? They cannot stop talking about days in Genesis.

Even more absurd, given the expansiveness of the text, is the person so worried about working out the chronology of the kings of Judah that they cannot pause to hear the central message in the Book about the King of Kings.

There is another kind of chronic misreading that leads to ignorant disrespect for the Bible.

Some people believe the Bible says things it doesn’t or read it woodenly. They forget the Bible is a collection of books and has to be approached that way. They don’t check context or try to understand what the author might be doing.

My favorite example of this is the confused person who worries notices that “back to back” verses in Proverbs say to answer a fool and to not answer a fool in his folly.

Isn’t that a contradiction? The writer of Proverbs must have been really foolish not to have noticed that he contradicted himself in two parallel lines!

Of course that could be true, but isn’t it more likely that the editor of Proverbs is making a point about there being no way to safely deal with a fool? I wonder sometimes if such readers are capable of catching written irony or humor.

Problem 4. Isn't quoting any old book as an authority a bad argument?

Finally, there are a few people who don’t understand the difference between the legitimate use of authority and the logical fallacy of the “false appeal to authority.” They think any helpful quotation from any book (but especially the Bible) must be fallacious.

It is not bad to quote experts or people who put complex ideas in pithy ways!

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We trust (as we should) to authorities. Our knowledge, such as it is, is derived from them. These recognized authorities give us “operating assumptions.” When we want to challenge the authorities (as we sometimes should), they still the background where we begin to do our Socratic work.

Cultures work like people in this respect. There are certain formative ideas that are at the bottom of societies that certainly can be challenged, but usually are not. Most of us are not equipped to sensibly challenge those assumptions most of the time and have to live as if they are true.

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Authority is good and useful in normal life (though it can be dangerous). The trick is in finding good, culturally accepted, general authorities.

The “false appeal to authority” is (generally) an inappropriate reliance on an authority or an appeal to a questionable authority. The problem is determining when an authority is being relied on “inappropriately” or is “questionable.”

There is an easy example of the false appeal to authority in the tendency to think any authority outside of “science” lacks weight. Many of us wait for “science” (really certain scientists) to pronounce on an ethical topic, when science is perfectly incompetent (on all but the most extreme view of science) to show us how we SHOULD live.

Science might tell us how we DO live. Science might tell us what actions will lead to certain outcomes, but science alone can never tell us which outcomes humankind should prefer.

Unless scientism is shown to be true, a scientist cannot use his authority (as a scientist) to make pronouncements on ethics.

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Now of course I personally believe more than this about the Bible. I accept, based on reason and experience, that the Bible is the written Word of God.

If this is true, it would simply be stupid of me to ignore God’s opinion. I don’t need any other argument to take the Bible seriously. (Of course, coming to that conclusion took time and was much more difficult for me.)

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In other words, the Bible is a (generally) useful authority that can be a good place for Western people to start a discussion about how we should live. (For Christians it will frame that continuing discussion inside the Church, since we have come, through discussion, to stronger conclusions about it.)

Five Non-Religious Reasons for Thinking the Bible is a Very Great Book

First, the Bible has shaped and continues to shape foundational social assumptions in the United States.

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Second, the Bible tells a compelling story (at least in places) that rings true to human experience. Especially in the context of the life of Jesus, this story can make complex issues and propositions “three dimensional” for us.

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Third, the Bible is very likely to endure globally.

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Fourth, the Bible (whether uniquely or not) contains many wise sayings and teachings.

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Finally, the Bible is a sublimely beautiful work of art.

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Ignorance of the Bible or undue resistance to its obvious importance as (at least) a highly influential book is too often bigotry, ignorance, and anti-intellectualism tricked out as skepticism. (more)

On Growing Old: Lines You Love

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

I was marveling at this fact to Hope, still the Fairest Flower in All Christendom, when she asked me what I expected. Here is roughly what my wise woman said:

“Growing old is what people do. You did not,” she pointed out, “do so well as a young man. You have done much better in middle age. We will,” she said with confidence, “grow old together and do better still.”

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Some of these shallow lines were put there by laughing with our children. The death of our baby, Edmund Saint John, contributed to them in a harsher way. I know, God have mercy, that some are there through my selfishness. (more)

America the Murderous

By Mark D. Tooley
FrontPage Magazine

The Religious Left, in its historical commemorations, rarely if ever recalls the great holocausts committed by the totalitarian tyrants of the 20th century. The tens of millions slain by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Tojo, not to mention the hundreds of thousands killed by Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Kim Il Sung, among others, never have reached a high level of importance.

But never do the anniversaries of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August 6 and August 9, go by that the Religious Left does not mournfully don its sack cloth and ashes to atone for the mass murders purportedly committed by a vengeful United States.

The National Religious Partnership on the Nuclear Weapons is now the main interfaith apologist for America's crimes against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Founded by the late preacher-activist William Sloane Coffin, its members include the National Council of Churches, the Islamic Society of North America, Pax Christi, Sojourners, the United Methodist Board of Church and Society, the Episcopal Church, the American Baptist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Quakers.
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In the Religious Left's mythology, the U.S. willfully murdered hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, rejecting numerous less destructive alternatives. The mythology asserts that Japan would have surrendered anyway. But the imperialist U.S., already anxious to stoke the fires of Cold War, wanted to intimidate the Soviets by demonstrating the first atomic weapons. Or, more benignly, the U.S. simply valued the lives of its military personnel more than it did Japanese civilians.

The mythology rests on the Religious Left's skewed assumption that the world is by nature a place of peaceful indigenous peoples, disrupted only by the violence of oppressive systems primarily originating out of Western Civilization: patriarchy, capitalism, militarism, imperialism and racism. None of the various Hiroshima/Nagasaki litanies focus on the years of vicious imperial expansion by the Japanese military junta; its slaughter and brutalization of millions of fellow Asians; and its plans to enslave the populations of the neighbors it invaded under its benignly named "Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere;" justified by the extreme racist chauvinism of Japanese Shintoism and worship of the Emperor; and culminating in the surprise attacks on American and British possessions on December 7, 1941.
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Thanks to the war that Japan's fascists had created and would not end, the U.S. decision makers in the Summer of 1945 had no pleasant options that would result in anything less than hundreds of thousands dead. The planned U.S. military invasion of Japan would have entailed tens and likely hundreds of thousands of dead American soldiers, sailors and airmen. It also would have assured the deaths of hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of not only Japanese military personnel but also civilians, all of whom were expected actively to resist the first ever military invasion of the Japanese homeland. Little Japanese children were trained to tie bombs onto their backs and crawl under American tanks. Japan's warlords, not unlike Hitler, thought their honor required national suicide before surrender.
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The lives of America, British, Canadian and Australian military personnel, as agents of Western imperialism, of course are not important to the Religious Left. But why are the lives of millions of Asians oppressed and killed by the Japanese occupiers not worthy of mention in any of the somber remembrances?

A Hiroshima/Nagasaki litany from the United Church of Christ asks God to forgive America "for being a nation that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent children, women and men."
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After Imperial Japan had killed tens of millions throughout Asia and the Pacific, starting with its invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had mercifully ended the nightmare.

At the dignified surrender ceremony on the U.S. Missouri on September 2, 1945, Douglas MacArthur showed more theological acumen than any of the Religious Left's painful remembrance liturgies:

"As I look back on the long tortuous trail from those grim days of Bataan and Corregidor, when an entire world lived in fear, when democracy was on the defensive everywhere, when modern civilization trembled in the balance, I thank a merciful God that He has given us the faith, the courage, and the power from which to mold victory. We have known the bitterness of defeat and the exultation of triumph, and from both we have learned there can be no turning back. We must go forward to preserve in peace what we won in war." (more)

Help! My Student is Starting College! What Should I Read?

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Here are seven good reads that can help any parent to become one of the men of Issachar, men who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do:

First, read Paul Johnson’s Birth of the Modern to find out how we got into this mess. (If history is not for you, then try Chesterton’s Orthodoxy (the screen crawl describing the birth of the modern)).

Second, read Phillip E. Johnson’s (no relation to Paul) most important book: Reason in the Balance. Johnson outlines the disastrous situation in education and proposes what should be done about it. Phil Johnson was influential in setting up the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University.

Third, read the most important essay of the twentieth century C.S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man Lewis attacks educators who teach children to depart from “the Way” of civilized humans of all eras.

Fourth, in a culture that has confused erotica with romance read A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken. Vanauken learns that the even the best romance cannot compete with the Love for which all earthly affection is just a sign.

Fifth, the best quick and up to date guide to the “cultural captivity” of Christianity is by Torrey Visiting Faculty member Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth.

Sixth, an important book on the state of Christianity and what should be done about it is J.P. Moreland’s Kingdom Triangle.

Finally, do read C.S. Lewis That Hideous Strength a nearly prophetic novel about what can go wrong not just in education but in a scientific culture that forgets God.

Having limited myself to fairly contemporary books, I cannot emphasize enough the need for all of us who are of that parental age to reread the classics of our own college years. Get Dante out and work your way back through his journey. Read Republic. Netflix some Shakespeare. Grow mentally with your college age student. You will find the life experience you have gained over the years give you new insight into the classics! (more)

What Really Buys Happiness?

By Arthur C. Brooks
City Journal

Not income equality, but mobility and opportunity

The United States is a rich nation getting richer. According to the U.S. Census, between 1993 and 2003 the average inflation-adjusted income in the top quintile of American earners increased 22 percent. But prosperity didn’t end with the top earners: those in the middle quintile saw their incomes rise 17 percent, on average, while the bottom quintile enjoyed a 13 percent increase. This isn’t a short-term phenomenon, either. In the 30 years leading up to 2003, top-quintile earners saw their real incomes increase by two-thirds, versus a quarter for those in the middle quintile and a fifth among the bottom earners.
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Edwards is one of a group of liberal politicians, policymakers, and social activists who want to reduce economic inequality through greater taxation and redistribution of wealth. And their plan draws inspiration from a particular academic theory: that inequality is socially destructive because it makes people miserable. As a scholar working in the field of public policy, I have long witnessed hand-wringing about the alleged connection between inequality and unhappiness. What first made me doubt this prevailing view was not some new scholarly study but rather that when I questioned actual human beings about it, few expressed any shock and outrage at the enormous wealth of software moguls and CEOs. On the contrary, they tended to hope that their kids might become the next Bill Gates.

Were these people somehow unrepresentative of America? Or was the academic consensus wrong? I set out to discover which it was. What I found was that economic inequality doesn’t frustrate Americans at all. It is, rather, the perceived lack of economic opportunity that makes us unhappy. To focus our policies on inequality, instead of opportunity, is to make a grave error—one that will worsen the very problem we seek to solve and make us generally unhappier to boot.

The egalitarians’ argument usually starts with the assertion that prosperity is all relative. So long as we are above the level of basic subsistence, they say, we care more about our financial position relative to others than about our absolute income. Experimental evidence, they continue, supports this claim. In one study, two-thirds of subjects said that they would be happier at a company where they earned $33,000 while their colleagues earned $30,000 than at one where they earned $35,000 while their colleagues earned $38,000. In another, 56 percent of participants chose a job paying $50,000 per year while everyone else earned $25,000, rather than a job paying $100,000 per year while others made $200,000—forgoing $50,000 per year simply to maintain a position of relative affluence. In a world of economic inequality, the egalitarians point out, some people have less than others—and as these studies seem to show, that very fact will make them unhappy, even if they are suffering no actual deprivation. The solution to their unhappiness is to impose greater economic equality.

And the way to do that, of course, is to tax the haves and redistribute their income to the have-nots. Cornell economist Robert Frank, a major critic of income inequality, adds that such a move might not make the rich as unhappy as you’d think, since they tend to use their income on things they don’t really want or need. “We could spend roughly one-third less on consumption,” Frank writes, “and suffer no significant reduction in satisfaction.” Some egalitarians even make the astounding argument that we should tax the economically successful in order to discourage them from working, since their work will only make them richer and thus sadden the less successful. According to British economist Richard Layard, “If we make taxes commensurate to the damage that an individual does to others when he earns more”—the damage to others’ happiness, that is—“then he will only work harder if there is a true net benefit to society as a whole. It is efficient to discourage work effort that makes society worse off.” Work, according to this postmodern argument—contrary to millennia of moral teaching—is no different from a destructive vice like tobacco, which governments sometimes tax in order to discourage people from smoking.

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But there is another, more fundamental, reason that the arguments linking economic inequality to unhappiness are mistaken. If the egalitarians are right, then average happiness levels should be falling. But they aren’t. The GSS shows that in 1972, 30 percent of the population said that they were “very happy” with their lives; in 1982, 31 percent; in 1993, 32 percent; in 2004, 31 percent. In other words, no significant change in reported happiness occurred—even as income inequality increased by nearly half. Happiness levels have certainly shown some fluctuations over the last three decades, but income inequality explains none of them.

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But happiness does rise if people believe that their families have a chance of improving their standard of living. That belief is worth 12 percentage points in the likelihood of being “very happy.” The GSS asked respondents, “The way things are in America, people like me and my family have a good chance of improving our standard of living—do you agree or disagree?” Those who agreed were 44 percent more likely than those who disagreed to say that they were “very happy,” 40 percent less likely to say that they felt “no good at all” at times, and 20 percent less likely to say that they felt like failures. In other words, those who don’t believe in economic mobility—for themselves or for others—are not as happy as those who do.

This important fact is another reason that the two studies cited above don’t show what the egalitarians think they do: they posit a static universe, a fictional place where incomes don’t change. Perhaps in a world where you have no opportunity for advancement, the most important thing about your income really is how it measures up to other people’s. But in the real world, our attitude about the future matters a great deal. In the 1990s, economist Andrew Clark found that the happiness of British workers actually rose as their reference group’s average income rose relative to their own income—because they saw that rise as evidence of what they themselves could achieve. People take the average income in their group as a measure of their own potential. Rising inequality can even raise our happiness by demonstrating the success that our future may hold.

Believing in mobility helps make people happy, then. But does mobility actually exist in the United States? The Left doesn’t think so. Liberals, including rich liberals, are far less likely than conservatives to see a better future for people who work hard. Just 26 percent of liberals with incomes above the national average believe that there’s a lot of upward income mobility in America, versus 48 percent of conservatives with below-average incomes. And 90 percent of the poorer conservatives said that hard work and perseverance could overcome disadvantage, versus 65 percent of the richer liberals. If a liberal and a conservative are exactly identical in income, education, sex, family situation, and race, the liberal will still be 20 percentage points less likely than the conservative to say that hard work leads to success for the disadvantaged.

It is small wonder, then, that conservatives tend to be happier than liberals today. The 2004 GSS showed that 44 percent of people who identified themselves as “conservative” or “extremely conservative” were “very happy” about their lives; only 25 percent of self-identified liberals or extreme liberals gave that response. Conservatives believe that they live in a more promising country than liberals do, and that makes them happier.

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And those left behind, it’s important to note, will almost certainly not become happier if we redistribute more income. Indeed, they will probably become less happy. Policies designed to lower economic inequality tend to change the incentives of both the haves and the have-nots in a way that particularly harms the have-nots. Reductions in the incentives to prosper mean fewer jobs created, less economic growth, less in tax revenues, and less charitable giving—all to the detriment of those left behind. And redistribution can, as the American welfare system has shown, turn beneficiaries into demoralized long-term dependents. As Irving Kristol put it three years before the federal welfare reform of 1996, “The problem with our current welfare programs is not that they are costly—which they are—but that they have such perverse consequences for people they are supposed to benefit.”

Further, policies to redress economic inequality hardly affect true inequality at all. Policymakers and economists rarely denounce the scandal of inequality in work effort, creativity, talent, or enthusiasm. We almost never hear about the outrage that is America’s inequality in leisure time, love, faith, or fun—even though these are things that most of us value more than money. To believe that we can redress inequality in our society by moving cash around is to have a materialistic, mechanistic, and totally unrealistic understanding of the resources that we truly care about.

Finally, arguments against inequality legitimize envy. Americans may indeed have strong concerns about their relative incomes and may seek status as reflected in their economic circumstances. But to base our policies on the anxieties of those at the back of the status race is to bow before Invidia. A deadly sin is not, in my view, a smart blueprint for policymaking.

A more accurate vision of America sees a land of both inequality and opportunity, in which hard work and perseverance are the keys to jumping from the ranks of the have-nots to those of the haves. If we can solve problems of absolute deprivation, such as hunger and homelessness, then rewarding hard work will continue to serve as a positive stimulant to achievement. Redistribution and taxation, beyond what’s necessary to pay for key services, weaken America’s willingness and ability to thrive.

This vision promotes policies focused not on wiping out economic inequality, but rather on enhancing economic mobility. They include improving educational opportunities, aggressively addressing cultural impediments to success, enhancing the fluidity of labor markets, searching for ways to include all citizens in America’s investing revolution, and protecting the climate of American entrepreneurship. (more)

Religion and the Arts in America

By Camille Paglia
Arion

A primary arena for the conservative-liberal wars has been the arts. While leading conservative voices defend the traditional Anglo-American literary canon, which has been under challenge and in flux for forty years, American conservatives on the whole, outside of the New Criterion magazine, have shown little interest in the arts, except to promulgate a didactic theory of art as moral improvement that was discarded with the Victorian era at the birth of modernism. Liberals, on the other hand, have been too content with the high visibility of the arts in metropolitan centers, which comprise only a fraction of America. Furthermore, liberals have been complacent about the viability of secular humanism as a sustaining creed for the young. And liberals have done little to reverse the scandalous decline in urban public education or to protest the crazed system of our grotesquely overpriced, cafeteria-style higher education, which for thirty years was infested by sterile and now fading poststructuralism and postmodernism. The state of the humanities in the US can be measured by present achievement: would anyone seriously argue that the fine arts or even popular culture is enjoying a period of high originality and creativity? American genius currently resides in technology and design. The younger generation, with its mastery of video games and its facility for ever-evolving gadgetry like video cell phones and iPods, has massively shifted to the Web for information and entertainment.

I would argue that the route to a renaissance of the American fine arts lies through religion. Let me make my premises clear: I am a professed atheist and a pro-choice libertarian Democrat. But based on my college experiences in the 1960s, when interest in Hinduism and Buddhism was intense, I have been calling for nearly two decades for massive educational reform that would put the study of comparative religion at the center of the university curriculum. Though I shared the exasperation of my generation with the moralism and prudery of organized religion, I view each world religion, including Judeo-Christianity and Islam, as a complex symbol system, a metaphysical lens through which we can see the vastness and sublimity of the universe. Knowledge of the Bible, one of the West's foundational texts, is dangerously waning among aspiring young artists and writers. When a society becomes all-consumed in the provincial minutiae of partisan politics (as has happened in the US over the past twenty years), all perspective is lost. Great art can be made out of love for religion as well as rebellion against it. But a totally secularized society with contempt for religion sinks into materialism and self-absorption and gradually goes slack, without leaving an artistic legacy.

The position of the fine arts in America has rarely been secure. This is a practical, commercial nation where the arts have often been seen as wasteful, frivolous, or unmanly. In Europe, the arts are heavily subsidized by the government because art literally embodies the history of the people and the nation, whose roots are pre-modern and in some cases ancient. Even in the old Soviet Union, the Communist regime supported classical ballet. America is relatively young, and it has never had an aristocracy—the elite class that typically commissions the fine arts and dictates taste. In Europe, the Catholic Church was also a major patron of the arts from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation. Partly because of the omnipresent Greco-Roman heritage, furthermore, continental European attitudes toward nudity in art are far more relaxed. In Europe, voluptuous nudes in painting and sculpture and on public buildings, fountains, and bridges are a mundane fact of life.

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The Puritans who arrived in New England in the early seventeenth century brought with them the Calvinist hostility or indifference to the visual arts. A motivating principle of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation was its correction of Roman Catholicism's heavy use of images in medieval churches—in statues, paintings, and stained-glass windows. The Protestant reformers reasserted the Ten Commandments' ban on graven images, idolatrous objects that seduce the soul away from the immaterial divine. The Puritans, a separatist sect that seceded from the too–Catholic Church of England, followed the Reformation imperative of putting the Bible at the center of their faith. Through direct study of the Bible, made possible by Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, believers opened a personal dialogue with God. This focus on text and close reading helped inspire the American literary tradition. Both poetry and prose, in the form of diaries, were stimulated by the Puritan practice of introspection: a Puritan had to constantly scrutinize his or her conscience and look for God's hand in the common and uncommon events of life. Oratory, embodied in Sunday sermons, was very strong. Literary historian Perry Miller identified the jeremiad or hellfire sermon as an innately American form, the most famous example of which is Jonathan Edwards' sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” which was delivered in Connecticut in 1741 during the religious revival called the Great Awakening. This enthusiastic style of denunciation and call to repentance can still be heard on evangelical television programs, and it is echoed in the fulminations of politically conservative talk radio (which I have been listening to with alternating admiration and consternation for over fifteen years).

The visual arts, on the other hand, were neglected and suppressed under the Puritans. The Puritan suspicion of ornamentation is symbolized in the sober black dress of the Pilgrim Fathers depicted every year in the Thanksgiving decorations of American schools and shops. The Puritans' attitude toward art was conditioned by utilitarian principles of frugality and propriety: art had no inherent purpose except as entertainment, a distraction from duty and ethical action. The Puritans did appreciate beauty in nature, which was “read” like a book for signs of God's providence. The social environment in England from which the Puritans had emigrated to America (either directly or indirectly via the Netherlands ) was overtly iconoclastic. Destruction of church art was massive during the Reformation in Switzerland and Germany as well as England, where destruction of churches, priories, and abbeys followed Henry VIII's severance of the English church from control by the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the 1530s. Crowds smashed medieval stained-glass windows and intricately carved wooden altar screens and decapitated the statues of saints carved on church facades. Walls were whitewashed to cover sacred murals. Politically incited damage to churches was even more severe during the English Civil Wars (1642–51), when Puritan soldiers dispatched by Parliament attacked even the cathedral at Canterbury, which Richard Culmer, Cromwell's general and the leader of the ravagers, called “a stable for idols.” Puritan iconoclasm was a pointed contrast to the image mania of the contemporary Counter-Reformation, the Vatican's campaign to defeat Protestantism that would fill Southern Europe with grandiose Baroque art.

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The Protestant reformers were bitterly split, however, over the issue of music in church. Luther encouraged the composition of new hymns and was the author of a famous one—“A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” (“Ein' Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott”). In contrast, John Calvin, the father of American Puritanism, maintained that only the word of God should be heard in church; hence songs had to strictly follow the biblical psalms. Like his fellow reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, Calvin opposed the use of organs or any instruments in church: organs were systematically destroyed by Protestant radicals. Furthermore, Calvin condemned the complex polyphonic music endorsed by the more artistic Luther. Calvin rejected harmony or part-singing, so that the Holy Scripture could be heard with perfect clarity. Thus the American style of Protestant church song, based on Calvin's principles, was simple, slow, serious, and cast in unaccompanied unison. That intense, focused group sound has descended through the centuries and can be heard in the majestic hymns that have been adopted as stirring anthems by American civil rights groups, such as “Amazing Grace” and “We Shall Overcome.”

The Quakers, who were pivotal to the abolitionist movement against slavery, were even more restrictive about such matters: they frowned on music altogether, even at home, because they believed it encouraged thoughtlessness and frivolity. But the German and Dutch who emigrated to America from the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries held the more expansive Lutheran view of church music. The German influence was especially strong in Philadelphia, to which German Pietists imported a church organ in 1694. By the start of the nineteenth century, hymn writing exploded in America. Over the next hundred years, hymns of tremendous quality poured out from both men and women writers. In many cases, they were simply lyrics—pure poetry that was attached to old melodies. A famous example from the Civil War is Julia Ward Howe's “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which Howe wrote overnight in a fever of inspiration after visiting a Union Army camp near Washington, where she heard the soldiers singing “John Brown's Body,” a tribute to the executed abolitionist rebel. Several other songs would become political hymns to the nation, such as “My Country 'Tis of Thee,” written in 1832 by a Baptist minister, Samuel Francis Smith, and “America the Beautiful,” a lyric written by Katharine Lee Bates, a native of Massachusetts whose father was a Congregationalist pastor. Bates saw the Rockies for the first time when she taught here at Colorado College in 1893. She wrote “America the Beautiful” after a wagon trip to the top of Pike's Peak. When it was published in 1899, it became instantly famous and has often been described as America's true national anthem. The huge nineteenth-century corpus of Protestant songs became part of common American culture for people of all faiths—thus the tragic power of that final scene on the sinking Titanic in 1912, when the ship's band struck up the hymn, “Nearer My God to Thee.”

Hymnody should be viewed as a genre of the fine arts and be added to the basic college curriculum. One of the most brilliant products of American creative imagination, hym­nody has had a massive global impact through popular music. Wherever rock 'n' roll is played, a shadow of its gospel roots remains. Rock, which emerged in the 1950s from urban black rhythm and blues of the late 1940s, had several sources, including percussive West African poly­rhythms and British and Scots-Irish folk ballads. But a principal influence was the ecstatic, prophesying, body-shaking style of congregational singing in the camp meetings of religious revivalists from the late eighteenth century on. All gospel music, including Negro spirituals, descends from those extravaganzas, which drew thousands of people to open-air worship services in woods and groves.

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The brilliant folk hymns of nineteenth-century camp meetings were inherited by modern revivals, such as the Billy Graham Crusade. In popular music, the spasmodic undulations and ecstatic cries of camp-meeting worshippers were borrowed by performers like Little Richard, Elvis Presley, and the late, great James Brown, whose career began in gospel and who became the “godfather of soul” as well as of funk, reggae, and rap. Gospel music, passionate and histrionic, with its electrifying dynamics, is America 's grand opera. The omnipresence of gospel here partly explains the weakness of rock music composed in other nations—except where there has been direct influence by American rhythm and blues, as in Great Britain and Australia. The continuing impact of gospel music on young African Americans in church may also account for the current greater vitality of hip hop as opposed to hard rock, which has been in creative crisis for well over a decade.

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Catholic immigration in the nineteenth century brought a radically different aesthetic to church architecture and decor. The typical American church had been in the Protestant plain style, white and rectangular with a steeple that formed the picturesque apex of countless villages—a design bequeathed by the British architects Sir Christopher Wren and James Gibbs. Originally, American churches were often simply a meeting house (a word still retained in Quaker practice). Also used for local government, the meeting house was a boxy space with exposed timbers and benches but no ornamentation—a template that was borrowed by town halls across the nation. Catholic taste was far more lavish. The influx of Irish immigrants in the 1830s and '40s—which caused anti-Catholic violence (including the burning of churches in Philadelphia)—was soon registered in New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral, designed by James Renwick and constructed from 1850 to 1877. With its soaring spires, delicate stone­work, and stained-glass windows, it exemplified the current Gothic Revival—a grand style that was also adopted by Episcopalian churches in America.

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Catholic surveillance of American public life would come with the rise of Hollywood. At the start of the studio era, movies were still viewed as vulgar. In the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, there was a new rule-breaking energy and sexual adventurism in urban areas. Responding to audience demand, movies began pushing the limits with bare flesh and sexual innuendo. Small communities across the US felt they were being invaded by an alien cultural force. Resistance came from a collaboration between the Catholic Church and local Protestant women's groups, speaking from the perspective of concerned mothers. There were tinges of anti-Semitism in this protest, because so many of Hollywood's early producers and financiers were Jewish. A series of guidelines was instituted in moviemaking throughout the 1920s, but compliance remained uneven. The Motion Picture Production Code, written by a Jesuit priest, was adopted by Hollywood in 1930 but laxly enforced by the Hays Office. Finally, in 1933, a conference of US bishops created the Catholic League of Decency (later renamed the National League of Decency) and threatened a nationwide boycott. Hollywood responded by appointing a tough Irish Catholic, Joseph Ignatius Breen, to administer the Code, which he did through the Breen Office for the next twenty years. The Code, which wasn't officially abandoned until 1967, required scripts to follow a moral formula: crime had to be punished and marriage respected, with homosexuality and miscegenation forbidden.

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As avant-garde modernism triumphed in the first half of the twentieth century, it was only the movies that addressed or expressed the religious convictions of the mass audience. With few exceptions, most modern artists and intellectuals were agnostics or atheists, above all in Europe, where anti-clericalism has raged since the Enlightenment. In its search for ticket sales, Hollywood returned again and again to the spectacular bible epic, one of my favorite genres. Cecil B. DeMille, for example, made The Ten Commandments twice, in 1923 as a silent film and then as a wide-screen Technicolor extravaganza released in 1956. The latter is regularly broadcast on religious holidays and remains a masterpiece of heroic narrative and archaeological recreation of upper-class Egyptian life. The best-selling American religious novel of the nineteenth century was General Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, published in 1880 and widely imitated. Ben-Hur was also made into two films, the first a 1925 silent and the second yet another wide-screen masterpiece, released in 1959. The dynamic star of both The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur was Charlton Heston, who afterward became a conservative activist and president of the National Rifle Association.

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To fully appreciate world art, one must learn how to respond to religious expression in all its forms. Art began as religion in prehistory. It does not require belief to be moved by a sacred shrine, icon, or scripture. Hence art lovers, even when as citizens they stoutly defend democratic institutions against religious intrusion, should always speak with respect of religion. Conservatives, on the other hand, need to expand their parched and narrow view of culture. Every vibrant civilization welcomes and nurtures the arts.

Progressives must start recognizing the spiritual poverty of contemporary secular humanism and reexamine the way that liberalism too often now automatically defines human aspiration and human happiness in reductively economic terms. If conservatives are serious about educational standards, they must support the teaching of art history in primary school—which means conservatives have to get over their phobia about the nude, which has been a symbol of Western art and Western individualism and freedom since the Greeks invented democracy. Without compromise, we are heading for a soulless future. But when set against the vast historical panorama, religion and art—whether in marriage or divorce—can reinvigorate American culture. (more)