Letters

Still Breathing

I appreciated Matthew Burdette’s insights into “Progressive Supersessionism” (October 2024), drawing out continuities between today’s anti-theological progressive claim to supersede traditional religion and culture and that movement’s forebear, a theological liberal Protestant claim that the Church supersedes the People Israel.

Reading Burdette, I thought back to being at the Union League Club to hear the 2013 Erasmus Lecture delivered by the late, great Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (ZTz”L). Engaging with a call from Pope Benedict XVI for Christians to meet the rise of secularism by becoming what Arnold Toynbee called a “creative minority,” Rabbi Sacks shared lessons from the Jewish people’s long experience with this calling. He also called for “a new meeting of Christians and Jews” around shared values, including the sanctity of life and human dignity.

Such an alliance, he noted, is only possible because traditional Christianity, in Nostra Aetate and other manifestations, “has made space for the existence of Jews and Judaism in a way that was not fully articulated before.” In other words, it has turned away from supersessionist strands in its history. The people in the room that day confirmed this observation. For centuries the Christian consensus was that Jews were superseded and disgraced, but looking around that 2013 crowd, I saw (if my memory serves me correctly) men in the frocks of Catholic religious orders, alongside other Christian clergy and believers, listening to a rabbi hold forth. From a historical perspective, that’s an astounding realignment.

Burdette’s description of a domineering progressivism, blind equally to its liberal Protestant origins and to its supersessionist hatred for the past, the particular, and the Jewish, is painfully accurate—for now.

Let’s keep our minds and hearts open for the future. To my ancestors, the idea of, say, a rabbi and a Dominican friar speaking together in front of a crowd would have suggested a hostile disputation leading to an antisemitic decree; to me today, it would suggest a First Things symposium and the prospect of a fascinating evening. Similarly, progressivism may eventually find reasons and ways to turn away from its supersessionist errors.

Perhaps part of our calling, for those of us here in the growing camp of the purportedly superseded, is to regard the camp of “the superseders” with a steadfast defiance that is nonetheless kind, charitable, and ready to receive them with open arms if and when (unexpected as it could seem) the world realigns again, as it has done before.

Seth Chalmer
teaneck, new jersey

Matthew Burdette replies:

A few years ago, an Episcopal priest friend of mine called to share a strange experience: the family of a dying church member had asked her to schedule the funeral.

“Wait—while he was still alive?”

“Yes!”

Unfortunately for the young and inconvenienced, the old and burdensome sometimes just keep on living—and even when they are dying, we are in no position to schedule their funerals.

I found myself thinking of this episode after reading Seth Chalmer’s kind response to my short essay. “Have I slipped into the role of trying to plan a funeral for the living, impatient with their refusal to die?”

There is no doubt: Liberal Protestant institutions are in crisis, enough to qualify for hospice care. And more than that, they have become victims of their own legacy, having perfected the pattern of replacing the old with the new and now finding themselves on the receiving end. And yet, as Chalmer suggests, it is moral cynicism to treat the dying as though they are already dead. Even those who are dying are still alive—and, as Robert W. Jenson wrote, “The decisive difference between a living person and a dead one is that the former can surprise us as the latter cannot.”

The evidence we need to support this claim is precisely what Chalmer points out: the relationship between Jews and Christians, which spent generations suffering decline and decay but now surprises us with new vitality in places like First Things.

Gunman Preacher

I wrote the comments below after having read “Clint Eastwood’s Law” (October 2024), but before listening to the podcast where R. R. Reno interviews its author (“The Editor’s Desk”).

Matthew Schmitz eloquently describes the enduring power of a classic American pattern of belief in the films of Clint Eastwood: sometimes upholding a legal or moral system requires operating outside its boundaries. I would like to point out that Eastwood’s work, albeit obliquely, is in conversation with the great Westerns of John Ford.

Ultimately, the recurring subject of the two directors is a two-pronged question: (1) What does it mean to be “civilized”? (2) What does it “take” to be civilized? In Eastwood, the issue is explored through solitary individuals; in Ford, individuals in a community, or becoming part of one.

The dramatic and moral detonator at the heart of the Ford Westerns is the irruption of violence—physical or moral, material or spiritual—that provokes a crisis of conscience in the protagonist and elicits a response with moral consequences. An Eastwood hero, as noted by Schmitz, reacts to violence with a larger dose of violence, putting himself outside of a moral order to which he cannot return. His crisis of conscience is not shown, or else is disposed of very quickly, but the consequences are real and tragic. In Ford, the crisis leads the hero to an awareness that propels his fight for the good of the community, the town, or an institution like the military.

It is not surprising that, for both directors, the gun is a metonymy for violence and moral mayhem—a trope of the classic, revisionist and contemporary Westerns. But what connects Ford and Eastwood in a Venn diagram is the role of the gun in its unavoidable clash with the law. The gun plays an indispensable and paradoxical function in making civilization possible. It is the unsolvable conflict in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: Law and progress supposedly come to the West, as epitomized by the idealistic lawyer played by Jimmy Stewart; in reality, it was the rough, individualistic Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) who shot the outlaw Valance, understanding it was the only path for law and order to come to Shinbone. This paradox is made explicit in the film’s memorable line by the reporter Maxwell Scott, who could have set the record straight but chose not to: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Dirty Harry, Will Munny in Unforgiven, the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach, Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, Tom Doniphon in Liberty Valance, and the two cowboys in Wagon Master resort to violence so that law can become the rule of the land. At play in Ford films is a Catholic vision of human affairs, one grounded in ideas of communion, redemption and mediation. In Eastwood’s, as Schmitz suggests, the hero cannot transcend his boundaries, unable to marry his agency to the larger good.

The question about how to become, or remain, a civilized society, literally and figuratively, is still integral to our political conversation, an important one in this electoral season. Two great American filmmakers give artistic shape to this very American dilemma.

María Elena de las Carreras
northridge, california

Matthew Schmitz argues actor and film director Clint Eastwood illustrates a need to work outside of the failing law, make scandalous decisions, and violate norms, while he “cannot envision a world in which obedience to even the highest law is fully consistent with human freedom” across films of which he played the protagonist and or directed.

Unfortunately, Schmitz supports his argument on select reference points of Eastwood’s expansive work while omitting works that would conflict with, or ultimately reshape, his thesis. While referencing his characters “Dirty” Harry Callahan (Dirty Harry and subsequent sequels), Will Munny (Unforgiven) and Captain Chelsey Sullenberger (Sully), he relies almost exclusively on Million Dollar Baby, a film in which he directed and in which he stared as the main character, Frankie Dunn, a daily communicant Catholic, who decides to conduct a “mercy killing” as the ultimate resolution of the film’s conflict after telling his local parish priest the reasons for this action.

Schmitz fails to inform the reader that Eastwood’s Walt Kowalski in Gran Torino, the aged Catholic widower and Korean War veteran with the meticulous lawn, ice chest of Pabst Blue Ribbon, yellow Labrador, and classic hot rod, makes an entirely different choice than Dunn. Kowalski consults with a determined and pursuant priest, makes his final reconciliation, and advances on a plan where he will sacrifice his life at the hands of his enemies, to resolve an ongoing conflict, and ultimately secure freedom among members of the immigrant community in his neighborhood, members of which he has befriended, albeit begrudgingly.

Eastwood makes it entirely obvious, as the final scene ends, that this was a Christian sacrifice, laying a life down for another, adhering to the highest law.

I applaud Schmitz for writing and First Things for publishing the article on Clint Eastwood and his works. I simply wish that they would give readers evidence of Eastwood’s works that highlight their striking and positive contributions to our Christian culture.

Kyle Swartz
round rock, texas

Matthew Schmitz replies:

Prof. de las Carreras is right to draw a contrast between Clint Eastwood and John Ford (something I discussed on the podcast of this magazine’s editor). The typical Ford hero inhabits sets of overlapping identities. He is at one and the same time a cavalryman on the Western frontier and a veteran of the Civil War, an American patriot and an Irishman. He is attached to institutions: regiment, family, country. And he experiences the healing of sectional wounds through the grand project of westward expansion and the hierarchical institution of the U.S. Army. By contrast, when Eastwood’s character in The Outlaw Josey Wales at last overcomes the resentments bred in the Civil War, he does so by escaping the reach of the federal government and the U.S. Army. He comes from somewhere, but his background does not define him.

One can see this dynamic as well in the films’ settings. The classic location of the Ford Western is Monument Valley, and Ford’s men are likewise monumental. They stand for things, exist in public spaces, give expression to common hopes and histories. Eastwood’s gunman, by contrast, appears before relatively flat and undifferentiated landscapes. He is “the man with no name.” He does not signify.

Eastwood, with his greater distrust of institutions, his more intense pessimism about the possibility of human values being expressed through any system, represents a deviation from the faith handed down by John Ford. But for those who share Ford’s more Catholic and communal outlook, it is worth acknowledging Eastwood’s genuine insight. He recognized, before many others, the profound isolation of American men. He dramatized their failure to find purpose within larger institutions. If he rejects some truths, he gets at others.

Gran Torino presents a significant variation on the classic Clint Eastwood hero, as Mr. Swartz observes. Walt Kowalski finally chooses not to inflict violence, but to suffer it. He falls to the ground, riddled with bullets, arms spread like the crucified Christ. We’ve seen this before—notably in In the Line of Fire, where Eastwood’s secret service agent finds purpose in taking a bullet for another man—but here it appears in explicitly religious form.

Is Eastwood, then, a finally Christian director? It depends what one means by the term. Raised by a mother who took him to whatever church was nearest, so long as it was Protestant, Eastwood can be seen as a secular expression of a longstanding religious type, one that is suspicious of authorities, impatient with dogma, and mistrustful of institutions. Though it comes out of Protestantism, it is by no means coterminous with it. It is, as Edmund Burke wrote, “a refinement of the principle of resistance . . . the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.”

Eastwood professes no formal Christian belief, but he can be seen as truer to a certain religious tradition than those who do. By casting off faith, he is loyal to his conception of it. And he retains a certain insight into the Christian story because he knows that the outlaw is closely related not only to the sovereign but to the sacrificial victim whose death is required for the preservation of the community. On this level, if no other, he is drawn to the image of Christ. His gunman is a preacher, and he testifies to the continuing power of an American creed.

A Different Ballgame

Liel Leibovitz (“The Screwtape Election,” October 2024) is surely correct when he identifies a profound dearth of “reason, logic, and basic human decency” in this U.S. presidential election. But it is highly puzzling and problematic that he discusses it as if it emanates only from one side of the two-party ticket. To the questions “Should a nation have borders?” should also be added questions such as “Should the judiciary be used to punish political opponents?” and “Should the constitution be suspended in favor of the power of the executive when he is on our side?”

It is truly amazing and distressing that Leibovitz seriously proposes continuing “the cheerful scorn” of “name-calling and internet memes” as the best way to move forward in this election. It would be one thing to have a discussion of why one choice of a deeply flawed set of candidates could be considered and selected as a lesser evil rather than the other. It’s completely a different thing to move further away from reason, logic, and basic human decency, and instead promote reductive polarization. This is a new low in the apologetics of Trumpism.

Joseph Stanford
murray, utah

 Liel Leibovitz replies:

 I applaud Mr. Stanford, truly, for his commitment to this great nation’s storied civic virtues. But to pretend as if the rules of the democratic game haven’t been corrupted beyond recognition, or that they may be restored by strictly adhering to the norms of yore, is a feat of the imagination worthy of the author of The Chronicles of Narnia. Never do I argue that the perfidy which is our political coin emanates exclusively from one side of the political aisle. But any dispassionate student of American history, observing the chaos of the previous decade, will emerge with a rather clear picture and a rather clear culprit.

It was the omnivorous machine, controlled by Barack Obama’s Democratic Party but now incorporating everything from our newsrooms to our classrooms to our boardrooms, that spread the wild conspiracy that America’s forty-fifth president was a Russian asset. It was the same machine that refused to repudiate this story, even when the facts were available and clear. It was the same machine that harnessed law enforcement agencies to harass and intimidate public servants, and that pursued the flimsiest of legal pretexts to pursue political enemies.

This sordid history doesn’t lack documentation. Nor is it, sadly, history: When fifty-one former heads of our intelligence community, including several retired heads of the Central Intelligence Agency, vow that the “rumor” concerning Hunter Biden’s laptop is misinformation peddled by Moscow, only to remain completely silent when said laptop appears in court and confirms precisely what anyone willing to listen and think had known all along—namely, that Hunter Biden Jr., and most likely his father as well, have had some questionable dealings for fun and profit with Ukrainian magnates and other shady characters—then you know we’re in Screwtape territory.

None of this is to suggest that the only morally commendable solution is a vote for Donald J. Trump come November, or, for that matter, that the Republican candidate is an unblemished moralist worthy of the priesthood. That, of course, is equally untrue. But, as a great American once said, the bastards changed the rules and they didn’t tell us. Now that we know, though, we’ve but one obligation: Fight back, fight hard, and win.

A Public Metaphysics

Oren Cass’s Constructing Conservatism (October 2024), and the three thoughtful responses, lay out with great clarity the complex and contentious issues entailed in determining whether the rules that govern a modern, successful society do (or should) ultimately derive from religious foundations. In pursuing this debate going forward, we might give more attention to motivation. Rules founded in religion have the considerable advantage that the religious among us will be motivated to abide by the rules on the grounds that God is constantly aware of whether we are abiding and that our failure to abide may result in punishment after death. Similarly, rules that explicitly contradict religious belief will be difficult to enforce against the religious among us. In contrast, on what basis will the nonreligious among us abide by any rules at all, without regard to whether they have a religious or secular foundation? Put differently, if a given rule, followed by all, enhances everyone’s well-being, what is the nonreligious motivation to follow such a rule when, in one’s particular case, it has a negative economic or personal consequence?

William W. Chip
washington, d.c.

May Oren Cass’s tribe increase, and with his continuing efforts, one trusts that it will. His own journey would seem an exceptional one, however. George Washington said it well in his celebrated Farewell Address: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. . . . Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

Lawson Bowling
purchase, new york 

In their responses to Oren Cass, David Novak, Michael Hanby, and R. R. Reno misunderstand Cass’s plea for secular moral argument.

Novak thinks Cass ignores the religious ancestry of his secular moral vision: His morality is “a dependent descendant of a religiously informed public philosophy.” But Cass does not deny the religious heritage of our shared morality. He demonstrates that there are secular reasons for accepting it.

Hanby contends that Cass cannot have morality without a prior metaphysics: “In order to determine ‘what is good,’ we must first determine ‘what is.’” But Cass, a nonbeliever, already agrees with Judeo-Christian morality. He remains unconvinced of Judeo-Christian, or Aristotelian, metaphysics. A secular conservative, Cass is a counter-example to Hanby’s dictum.

Reno worries that Cass’s advice conflicts with the mission of First Things, as it silences religious voices in the public square. But Cass’s goal is that religious voices be heard by the secular public. “By anchoring our account of virtue in an explicitly religious foundation,” Cass writes, conservatives “quiet our own voice.”

Cass is correct. To fulfill the mission of First Things, we must heed his plea. Our secular fellow citizens await our “moral case for a politics of virtue.”

Joel Carini
indianapolis, indiana

Winning on Campus

It was with real encouragement that I, as a Protestant, read Professor Kawash’s article on Catholic student ministries.

For too many years, we parents have surrendered our children to the demons residing within secular universities, without providing them any help or guidance. We might as well have thrown them into a shark tank. Same results, but much less expensive.

These children do become educated, but it is the worst form of education: lies. Lies that are relentlessly drummed into them by men and women who “neither know God nor honor him.” Thus they sink into the mire of alienation and despair, with only sex and booze as comfort. Professor Kawash presents a delightful contrasting image of places where refuge is found in the truth of the gospel and the fellowship of love.

I agree with the mild criticism of Protestant campus ministries. Yes, too often they are “generic Christian,” and avoid the hard doctrines of faith. The truth is that it is the “hard doctrines” that are often the most crucial, comforting, beautiful, and freeing.

John Thro
st. louis, missouri

Samira Kawash replies:

Thank you for your comments. I, like you, am encouraged; my reporting left me much more optimistic about the prospects for students in our universities. While it is not always easy to find or cleave to the path of Truth, the young people who are choosing for Christ and the Church inspired me with their optimism, dedication, seriousness of purpose, and resilience.

The flourishing of many Catholic campus ministries and the growth of the FOCUS campus missionary program reveal the saving power of the gospel message of love, forgiveness, and life, even in the places where it sometimes seems the demons have full sway.

Image by Isidor Kaufmann, public domain. Image cropped.