Anti-Christian America?
As usual, I find myself in substantial agreement with much that Midge Decter
writes (“A Jew in Anti-Christian
America,” October 1995) ”in this instance, especially her healthy refusal
to become paranoid about the glitches in the dominant society, and especially
also her concern for Israel’s security and well-being. If the largest vital
Jewish, Roman Catholic, and Protestant communities in the world are to live
together in America in mutual civility and good humor, her quality of spiritual
robustness combines with a sense of humor to create a better model than the
litigants who make a Federal case out of every impoliteness or indiscretion.
Since I made the pilgrimage from Iowa to New York City about the same
time she made the trek east from Minnesota, many of her discoveries about
American religiosity may resonate with mine for reasons other than purely
rational.
Why does the article, with which I agree in substance, leave me unhappy?
Pondering this, I must conclude that my historical perspective is quite
different; I cannot accept as true the concept of contemporary America
as “anti-Christian.” At best, such an idea has a place in an
overwrought political or evangelistic sermon. But such an overheated setting
can just as well give welcome to the truths conveyed by the shout that
“God is dead!” or “Yet forty days and [the city] shall be
destroyed!”
We could say that America is appallingly religious, confusing “spirituality”
and “patriotism” and “Christianity” in an (un)holy
and sweet-smelling potpourri. But then why is an intellectual as well versed
in the Bible as Midge Decter yet unable to identify that sweet smell of
incense with the idolatrous “high places” (1 Kings 3:2)? We could
say with some church historians that America is the last great intact block
of the nineteenth-century Kulturreligion (“Christendom”).
We might hear the cultural historians who say America is “ post-
Christian,” or the lively evangelists who proclaim it “ pre -Christian.”
But “ anti -Christian” it is not.
Militant anticlericalism and atheism have been the characteristic products
of the union of church and state, particularly since the Enlightenment
exposed alternative systems of being. Religious liberty, with its “free
churches” (a generic term), does not arouse the kind of hatred of
Christianity that appeared in European Christendom in its decline.
But religious liberty, with its voluntary participation and support,
also requires that a distinction be made between “Christians”
and gentiles”a distinction that neither Jews nor Christians have been accustomed
to make in Europe, where of the 96 percent “Christians” counted
in a Lutheran country less than 5 percent have any effective connection
with the church, and of the 99 percent “Christians” counted in
a Roman Catholic land only 11 percent go to one confession and one mass
a year.
What has been the course of Christianity in the New World? For half
of our history in English, French, and Spanish North America, we followed
the model of European state churches. But from the beginning there were
Mennonites, radical Puritan churches (e.g., Baptists, Quakers), radical
Pietist churches (e.g., Brethren, Moravians) and other radical reformers
who always made the necessary separation between the claims of the faith
and the ways of the world. It cannot be said that these Christians, far
more influential in America than ever in European Christendom, “did
not think about it” (i.e., “Christian America”). Thinking
about it and talking about it and living the differences between the present
reality and the coming Kingdom was their major activity.
Christianity in America is no longer a chip off European “Christendom”:
with the Virginia Bill (1786) and First Amendment (1789–91) it became religiously
unique, although now its setting and style are shared with the new and
vital Christians of Africa and the Pacific Rim. Midge Decter would serve
well herself and the rest of us to remember the uniqueness of the American
experiment in religious liberty, which, among other things, means that
America is a gentile country, with substantial minorities of Protestants
and Roman Catholics and a smaller minority of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists,
Hindus, Baha’i, and other proferred options.
Franklin H. Littell
Professor Emeritus of Religion, Temple University
Philadelphia, PA
Midge Decter’s otherwise compelling article seems to me to have a major
flaw. She writes that an indictment of the European Enlightment as the
source of “our troubles” is “at once too convenient and
too iniquitously ungrateful for either a Jew or a Christian to entertain.”
Indeed, it would be criminal for Jews to make light of the hope of liberty
(and, sometimes, of the reality of liberty) that the Enlightenment awakened.
I agree. Letting the Enlightenment wholly off the hook, she locates the
source of our troubles in a less hallowed time: the sixties. It was the
sixties that sanctified a mounting civilizational hubris (“why not?”);
an egoism indifferent to everything but its own hedonism (“so what?”).
I do not think that this is an adequate or fair Jewish response to the
sixties. The period deserves, at least, the same qualified ambivalence
as the Enlightenment, for much of Jewish worth emerged from it. I doubt
that the surge of Jewish studies in the universities or of scholarly and
popular work on Jewish mysticism would have occured without the cultural
upheavals and reorientations of the sixties. I doubt that the havurah movement
and the energy it tapped for a generation of rabbis and lay leaders could
have occurred without the sixties. (Would there be any Chabad houses on
American college campuses?)
The sixties gave a new cachet and legitimacy to ethnicity and spirituality.
American Jewish life has been a beneficiary. There remains, of course,
much about that period and its effects to regret. Certainly, it was not
entirely “good for the Jews.” But it seems to me “too convenient”
to ignore its contributions.
Alan Mittleman
Muhlenberg College
Allentown, PA
Midge Decter replies:
First, let me thank both my correspondents for their kind words. As
for Professor Littell’s argument with me, I am frankly at something of
a loss to understand what he really means when he calls America a “gentile
country with substantial minorities of Protestants and Roman Catholics,”
etc. Gentile? This seems to me a very odd use of the term. Is it not, perhaps,
merely a euphemism? Does he not, when all is said and done, really mean
a secular country? If that is what he does mean, the answer to him is,
“Well, yes and no.” There are surely a lot of secularists around;
if there weren’t, we wouldn’t all be engaged in this discussion in the
first place. But it still, as the old joke has it, seems to make all the
difference in the world whether you are a Christian secularist or a Marxist
secularist. Joking aside, the American Revolution was not the French Revolution.
That in fact was, and remains, its glory”it was a product not of the new
intellectuals against the old order but of people seeking to manage their
political affairs in a decent and enlightened manner. The kind of tolerance
that is uniquely enshrined in the American political order, while, to be
sure, not “a chip off European Christendom,” was on the other
hand certainly not born in some mythically neutral “gentiledom,”
either. True, it is the product of a long historical process, but surely
the view of man central to that process was Jewish–Christian, rather than
merely “a proferred option.”
With Alan Mittleman, I’m afraid, the differences run so deep they cannot
be bridged. If he finds the havurah movement to have been a source of spiritual
energy, and I understand it”correctly, as I believe history will one day
show”as an attempt to import some of the attitudinal junk food of the counterculture
into the theory and practice of Judaism, what can we say to one another?
There remain only a couple of details to sort out. The great interest in
Jewish mysticism of the sixties had little to do with scholarship, and
the great scholarship in the field of Jewish mysticism had nothing to do
with the sixties. The Chabad houses on American college campuses initially
owed much of their momentum to the fact that they were undertaking to rescue
young Jewish druggies and other kids who were feeling the pain of the emptiness
of their own culture and making religious penitents of them. Now they represent
not the result of, but precisely a counterforce to, the various “isms”
that are the legacy of those radical years and that have been permitted
to worm their way into the fabric of Jewish relgious life.
Whose Jerusalem?
The Public Square article “There
Is Only One Jerusalem” (October 1995) struck me as unusually aggressive
and hateful as to its attitude to the historic Jewish claim to Jerusalem.
Such a hostile tone is fortunately not often heard anymore, except in leftist
PLO circles where reason and historic facts do not count.
The 3,000 years of history of Jerusalem have been an almost unbroken
history of one nation or religion after the other attempting to wrest the
city from the Jews, as if the whole world cannot tolerate the idea that
Jews, too, have a capital of their own. Starting with Assyrian King Sennacherib,
Babylonia’s Nebuchadnezzar, Greece’s Antiochus Epiphanes, Rome’s Pompeii,
Titus, Vespasian, and Hadrian, the Muslim armies of Omar, the Christian
Crusaders, down to today’s PLO, all have one thing in common: Jerusalem
must not belong to the Jews.
It is true, as Father Neuhaus writes, that certain events in Christian
history took place in Jerusalem. But what were they and how long did they
last? Whatever the Gospels tell us about Jesus, his visit to Jerusalem
and ultimate execution by the Romans there took place because he was a
Jew, like all others who visited Jerusalem to attend the Jewish Temple.
His presence there lasted only a few days.
When Fr. Neuhaus invokes the argument that “Christian sons also
fought for it and won,” he presumably refers to the valiant Crusaders
who in 1099 captured Jerusalem and promptly butchered every Jew in the
city. Not much of a claim.
As to the Muslim claim, we all know that Jerusalem is not mentioned
a single time in the Koran (but 825 times in the Hebrew Bible) and that
the Aksa Mosque of today was the Church of St. Mary of the Byzantine Christians
till eighty years after Muhammad’s death. Even if we accept the legend
(appropriately called “mirage” in Arabic) of Muhammad’s flight
to heaven on his horse Baraq (which is only found in a few Arab sources),
one can ask how long the hoof of that horse rested on the Rock of the Mountain
to propel itself heavenward.
How can these short-lived episodes compare with the Jewish history of
Jerusalem, which goes back 3,000 years to King David? . . .
As to the complaint that the Christian population in Jerusalem (and
in Bethlehem) is dwindling, every unbiased Christian in Israel will tell
you that this is caused by Muslim pressure. Pastor John Willem van der
Heuven, the head of the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem, has
often begged the world to maintain Israeli rule over Jerusalem and Bethlehem,
lest the Christian shrines there share the fate of churches in Lebanon
during the PLO occupation, when they were destroyed and Christian worshippers
massacred. Not to speak of the Jewish synagogues in Jerusalem, every one
of which was destroyed by the Jordanians during their nineteen-year occupation
of the city . . . .
For those who want all shrines protected in the future, the best guarantee
is a Jewish rule over an undivided Jerusalem, the eternal Jewish capital.
Manfred R. Lehmann
Leadership Committee for a Free Middle East
Miami,
FL
RJN replies:
The comment was not hostile. It was sharply critical of what I took
to be the New Republic’s peremptory dismissal of Christian and Muslim
interests in Jerusalem. I will leave it to Muslims to respond to the significance
of the horse’s hoof, but in Christian conviction the point is not that
Jesus was in Jerusalem “only a few days,” but that in those few
days the world’s redemption was accomplished. More comprehensively, from
the Psalms that are prayed also by Christians through the book of Revelation,
the earthly Jerusalem is symbolically entangled with the promise of the
heavenly Jerusalem. For a considered examination of these questions, I
again recommend Robert L. Wilken’s The Land Called Holy (Yale University
Press). As to whether Jewish governance is the best guarantee for all the
interests involved, I said as much in my original comment.
Against Swinishness
Peter L. Berger, in his “Military
Necessities” (October 1995) , has inadvertently made an excellent case
for Christian nonparticipation in the military. To quote Mr. Berger: “Like
it or not, a measure of swinishness has been intrinsic to what makes soldiers
tick.” That any man (or woman) created in the image of God should be trained
to kill efficiently on command, and in the process should become “swinish,”
is a tragedy. For a Christian to subject himself to such training, and thus
deliberately debase God’s image within himself, verges on blasphemy . . . .
Paul C. Fox, M.D. Farmington, PA
While Peter Berger’s comments about gays and women in combat units provide
some basis for limiting their participation, he does not discuss the most
important consideration. Combat units should be manned (personned?) not
with the most benign or even average situations in mind but with the worst.
The mining of the frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts during the Gulf
War is a recent case in point. The superhuman effort required to shore
bulkheads, patch underwater holes in the hull, and perform many other essential
damage control actions would not have been possible had a large fraction
of the crew been women. They just don’t have the necessary strength and
leverage. As it was, the saving of the ship was a near-run thing, as the
Duke of Wellington described his victory at Waterloo . . . .
Robert C. Whitten
Cupertino, CA
Science and Infallibility
Surely, the scholarly Avery Dulles (“The
Gospel of Life: A Symposium,” October 1995) knows that one may not
kill what is even doubtfully “not yet a human person.” I may not even
shoot at a moving target that I presume is a deer when I have any suspicion
that it may be human.
The “science” upon which much abortion bioethics is based
has been disproven and is false. I dare any biological scientist to establish
that the embryo in the early stages is not yet a full human person as a
subject of rights. The redefinition of pregnancy as beginning at implantation
has been invented as a pure fiction to rationalize abortion of a “pre-embryo,”
a term that no responsible human embryologist accepts as valid . . . . Neither
Dulles nor Fr. Richard McCormick can scientifically establish that “the
embryo in early stages is not yet a fully human person.” The scientific
evidence since Roe v. Wade is overwhelmingly against any scientific
support for it or the later Webster decision . . . .
On another point, there appears to be no formula to guarantee that an
infallible teaching must be accepted as such. One can always, it seems,
deny an irreformable teaching to be infallibly taught by requiring a formula
for definition that nowhere previously exists. On this basis someone could
deny the Immaculate Conception or the Assumption as infallibly taught.
. . .
Vernon Sattler, C.Ss.R.
Professor Emeritus University of Scranton
Scranton,
PA
Avery Dulles replies:
Father Sattler evidently holds that there can be no justified doubts
regarding the presence of “fully human life” in the early stages
of the development of the embryo, but many experts disagree. I do not know
how one could prove the presence of a spiritual soul from the moment of
conception, and the Pope, as I interpret him, allows for some legitimate
diversity of opinion on this point. I accept the principle that forbids
the direct killing of even doubtful human life. Whether other moral theologians
agree is for them to say.
The question whether the three key propositions in Evangelium Vitae
are infallible will continue to be discussed. One reason for hesitation
is the statement of Cardinal Ratzinger that the term “infallible,”
present in earlier drafts, was dropped from the final text. Whether one
uses the term “infallible” or not, one must recognize that the
Pope claims to be setting forth the universal and definitive teaching of
the magisterium, based on Scripture and Tradition. He does not, however,
invoke his powers to make an ex cathedra definition, with all the canonical
consequences that such a definition would entail. Earlier popes, in proclaiming
the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption, declared them to be dogmas
revealed by God, to be believed on a motive of divine faith under pain
of heresy. No such language is contained in the present encyclical. As
Ratzinger said in his press conference, John Paul II stopped “short
of the formality of dogmatization.” Father Sattler seems to overlook
this difference, which I take to be significant.
More Than a Rant
Janet Marsden’s review of E.
Michael Jones’ biography of Cardinal Krol (October 1995) begins by calling
it “a disjointed rant,” but proceeds to underscore its extraordinary
importance. As a biography of the Cardinal, it departs at times from His Eminence,
seeming to use him merely as a point of departure to explore other things. Even
so, the Cardinal comes out standing tall. At least with respect to two issues
in which I was deeply involved”government family planning and freedom of parental
choice in education”I can testify to Jones’ accuracy in describing what proved
to be fateful developments.
The first issue concerned not merely the unprecedented idea of using
taxpayers’ money to promote contraception but also that of bringing the
coercive power of government to bear upon the poor. The Gruening family
planning bill, described by Mr. Jones, was designed as an opening move
for American population control. Disgracefully, critics of Humanae Vitae
within the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC) deliberately undermined
the efforts of Archbishops Krol and O’Boyle (and, notably, Bishop John
Wright) to oppose the Gruening bill and its Planned Parenthood supporters.
I deem it a blessing that Jones was granted full access to the Krol files
so that the story of those events could at last be brought to light. Unhappily,
the major constitutional issues involved in government family planning
still remain largely unconfronted . . . .
Thanks to Cardinal O’Boyle, the Human Life and Natural Family Planning
Foundation came into existence in 1968 as a positive response to Paul VI’s
call in Humanae Vitae for scientific research on human reproduction.
All too widely in the Church today that encyclical is a dead letter and
pastoral instruction on its precepts largely nonexistent. It is hence not
surprising that the population planners have greatly succeeded. But the
genesis of their whole development can be found in the events of thirty
years ago. Church leaders today should learn from those events, and for
that Mr. Jones is “must” reading.
The second issue in Mr. Jones’ book that I can personally say he deals
with accurately is that of freedom of parental choice in education. His
story of the events that culminated in the Lemon and Tilton
cases is highly instructive in light of the continuing efforts today of
Catholics, Orthodox Jews, and evangelicals to achieve parental freedom.
As in the case of government family planning, forces within the Church
sabotaged the best efforts of the best of our bishops. This came about
by the move of NCWC staff to bring about a Supreme Court decision in line
with the secular academic thinking among Catholic educators that Mr. Jones
so well describes. That effort succeeded in the case known as Tilton
v. Richardson . First Things readers interested in that development
will find the picture completed in my book, Mere Creatures of the State.
The NCWC bankrolled a legal defense of federal grants to colleges in
Connecticut based on the secularization of those colleges. The success
of that defense gives Catholic college presidents today the pretext (“Without
federal money, we will have to close our doors”) to defy Ex Corde
Ecclesiae ”John Paul II’s apostolic constitution on Catholic universities”and
those few bishops who insist on observance of that document.
William B. Ball
Harrisburg, PA
Whose Obstacle?
I read with interest “That
They May Be One” (Public Square, October 1995) . As a well-educated
religious woman, I don’t comprehend Father Neuhaus’ rather jaundiced statement
that women’s ordination is “a major obstacle to unity.” Let’s
put the shoe on the other foot for a change: rather, many Anglicans and
Lutherans have looked at sexism as the sin that it is, and have called
women as ministers for their churches. The Vatican, on the other hand,
continues with business as usual, refusing to admit that its sexist attitudes
are a major stumbling block . . . .
Carol Bodenheimer
Winston Salem, NC
Not Necessarily PC
David Love Glazer (“FT
Goes PC?” Correspondence, October 1995) complains about RJN’s
use of “a politically correct their in place of the grammatically
correct his” in the examples “Anyone can, for instance, publish
a novel titled Moby Dick , so long as they put their name on it”
and “Everybody worth their salt in sociology . . . “ Mr. Glazer
takes this as the first step on the slippery slope toward transmogrifying
God the Father/Son into God the Parent/Child. In fact, these are two distinct
cases. I agree with him on the stupidity of the latter, but it does us
no good to mix it with the former. A letter does not permit full explication
of the problem, but I can give some indications.
To begin with, English does not have a generic he. The generic-he rule
of English grammar was invented in the eighteenth century. As nearly as
I can tell, it first appeared in a grammar by a man named Dinnsen in 1731.
He reasoned approximately as Mr. Glazer did: everybody is singular but
not explicitly feminine; therefore, it must be masculine and should be
replaced by he.
There are three flaws in this reasoning. First, the initial premise
is wrong. Everybody is not necessarily singular: Everybody waved at the
guest of honor and she (or he, depending on the guest’s sex) waved back
at them. Second, though everybody is not explicitly feminine, neither is
it explicitly masculine. Thus the second premise is incomplete. As a result,
the inferences drawn by Dinnsen and Mr. Glazer do not follow. It is at
least as valid to reason that, since everybody is not explicitly masculine,
it must be feminine and should be replaced by she. Of course, this is also
an incorrect conclusion.
Conversely, English does have a generic pronoun, and it is they. Alfred
the Great used it in the ninth century and so did Cardinal Newman in the
nineteenth.The former defined Old English, and the latter is generally
recognized as a good stylist of Modern English. Neither was a barbarian.
Moreover, I conducted an extensive study in the early 1980s. In truly generic
cases, somebody, everybody, nobody, and the like are replaced by they almost
85 percent of the time, by he or you about 6 percent of the time each,
and by he/she about 3 percent of the time. Thus, even after two and a half
centuries of indoctrination by English teachers (all of mine were women),
the generic-he rule is not observed. I do sympathize with Mr. Glazer on
this basis, however: women (teachers) made him learn the rule and now women
(militant feminists) attack anyone who observes what women taught him.
To take another case, consider the masculine pronoun in “he who
has ears to hear, let him hear.” This usage is the result of a translation
from a language with a structure differing from that of English in having
grammatical gender. I haven’t the space to expand on this question here.
Suffice it to say that a better translation would be “Whoever has
ears to hear, let ‘em hear.” The listener can then decide whether
the ‘em is a contraction of them or of him.
In short, RJN stands falsely accused, and as a professional linguist
who has published extensively but to no avail on the above subjects, I
argue for dismissal of the charges.
However, in the matter of the neutering of God, I suspect Neuhaus, Glazer,
and I agree. It shouldn’t be necessary to point out that Jesus was male,
so God the Son is a factual epithet. The Holy Child also has its place,
but its place does not include usurpation of the Son. He is obligatory
for Jesus. Nor should it be necessary to point out that Jesus referred
to His Father, Who had sent Him. The correct pronoun for father is also
he. There is no pronominal reference obligatory for the Holy Spirit. But
since two of the three persons are He and since we are dealing with one
God, He cannot possibly be wrong. Anyone who finds it offensive can do
whatever they like, but they should not be permitted to bully the rest
of us into denying both Scripture and Tradition.
I hope this clears things up.
William J. Sullivan
Gainesville, FL
Northernizing the Evangelicals
I would like to point out that, in addition to demonstrating wishful
thinking, Michael Lind’s New Republic article profoundly misunderstands
the historic role of evangelical Protestantism in American public life
(“Conservatism?
What Conservatism?” Public Square, October 1995) .
Rather than southernizing the nation, politically active evangelicals
have themselves been “northernized” in their attitudes. This
is ably pointed out in James Reichley’s book Religion in American Public
Life (Brookings, 1985) and in D. G. Hart’s Defending the Faith:
J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism (Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1994).
Like the northern Protestants of the nineteenth century, today’s politically
active evangelicals (Southern and otherwise) support family values and
a more accommodationist understanding of the First Amendment. Southern
evangelicals have also publicly repented of their previous quiescence in
the face of racial injustice and have sought better relations with black
Christians. This trend is further reinforced by the Southern evangelicals’
emphasis on world mission and outreach in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
It is most unjust to link Southern evangelicalism as a whole with doctrines
of white supremacy or separatism or anti-Semitism. I’m a Catholic myself
and disagree with evangelical Protestants on many important issues, but
I don’t like seeing them gratuitously slandered.
Another striking development in Southern evangelicalism is a neo-Puritan
encouragement of economic initiative, education, and the work ethic. Not
that these concerns have ever been absent in the South, but they show a
mentality quite different from both old-style Southern conservatism and
sixties-style liberalism. Like their northern antecedents in Lincoln’s
day, the new evangelicals have naturally been drawn to the Republican Party.
. . .
So I think Michael Lind would be more accurate to say that Northern
church life and Lincoln’s GOP have at last taken root in the South”and
under the rubric of conservatism, yet!
Who would have expected it?
W. Robert Aufill
Princeton, NJ
