While We’re At It

• Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Wales, is being touted as the likely successor to George Carey as Archbishop of Canterbury. In the Times Literary Supplement, Arnold Hunt reviews a book edited by Williams and others, Love’s Redeeming Work, and has this to say: “The defining mood of Anglicanism is a conservative skepticism, self-critical rather than iconoclastic, striking a ‘note of sobriety and penitence, of realism interwoven with reticence and indirectness born of gratitude or wonder,’ and finding its most characteristic expression in a language of ‘concentrated but unhurried delight.’ This is some way away from the classical Anglican triad of Scripture, reason and tradition, let alone the Thirty-Nine Articles; and it signals a shift away from a purely doctrinal or dogmatic definition of Anglicanism to something more subjective and elusive: an Anglican attitude rather than an Anglican orthodoxy. It is a deeply attractive vision of Anglicanism. . . . Yet there are considerable difficulties in applying it retrospectively to the Anglican tradition of the past five centuries.” I have mentioned before a conversation of some years ago with another archbishop in which I asked him how he would define the mission of the Church of England. After some hesitation, he opined, “I suppose it might be to keep alive the Christian alternative for people who are interested in that sort of thing.” It is perhaps too easy to make fun of the C of E, and the English are very practiced in doing just that. The truth is that I would wonder about anyone who has never felt the attractiveness of Anglicanism. It may well be argued that no other communion has provided a spiritual ambiance of such gentility, combining aesthetic appeal and intellectual nuance. The “Anglican attitude” is undoubtedly a winsome way of being Christian. It is also ethnocentric, vestigial, and averse to the truth claims, disciplines, and passions that make for mission. The more vibrant, orthodox, and missionary Anglicanism of Africa and Asia is now making a bid to transform the Anglican communion. One watches with considerable interest to see whether such a transformation is compatible with maintaining what Arnold Hunt and many others admire, not without ambivalence, in the “Anglican attitude.

• For a prognosis somewhat more hopeful than is usually found among serious scholars, see Graham E. Fuller’s “The Future of Political Islam” in Foreign Affairs. Political Islam, or Islamism, is frequently a democratizing force, says Fuller, which uses religion, sometimes in its extreme expression, to challenge the corrupt regimes dominating almost all Muslim societies. Perhaps so, but his argument would be somewhat more persuasive if backed up with examples. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, Wahhabism is, to put it gently, not markedly democratic, and the ruling princes buy it off by lavish funding of its terrorist purposes. In any event, Fuller’s argument leads him to this more general conclusion: “Most great religions have elements of both tolerance and intolerance built into them: intolerance because they believe they carry the truth, perhaps the sole truth, and tolerance because they also speak of humanity, the common origins of mankind, concepts of divine justice, and a humane order for all. Violence does not flow from religion alone—even bigoted religion. After all, the greatest horrors and killing machines in history stemmed from the Western, secular ideologies of fascism and communism. Religion is not about to vanish from the face of the earth, even in the most advanced Western nations, and certainly not in the Islamic world. The West will have to deal with this reality and help open up these embittered societies. In the process, the multiple varieties of Islam—the key political realities of today—will either evolve in positive directions with popular support, or else be discredited when they deliver little but venom. Muslim publics will quickly know the difference when offered a choice.” He’s right, of course, about the bloody history of militant secularism in modern times. But his conclusion reflects a common confusion abut the connection between truth and tolerance. If they are pitted against one another, truth—whether religious, philosophical, or ideological—will always be a threat to tolerance, and vice versa. Tolerance will never be secure unless people believe that it is an imperative demanded by what they acknowledge as the commanding claims of truth. Still today—and, indeed, increasingly today—those claims are carried by religion. For Christians, with relatively few exceptions, tolerance is affirmed because of, not despite, religious truth. Although secularists find it almost impossible to understand, the apparent paradox is that it is the “sole truth” of Christianity that requires the acknowledgment of universal truths such as “the common origins of mankind, concepts of divine justice, and a humane order for all.” In other words, the humanly universal is discerned and affirmed through the religiously particular. A more hopeful view of Islam and Islamism must not be based on the prospect of secularization or the expectation that Islam will become less Islamic. Tolerance and other aspects of modernity can be secured in Muslim societies only by the truth that Islam claims to carry. Whether, in fact, Islam is capable of religiously legitimating tolerance and other necessary goods is, of course, one of the most important and unsettling questions of our time.

• The rule was quite clear. The Book of Order of the Presbyterian Church (USA) specified that ordained leaders were “to live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness.” Last year, PCUSA’s General Assembly voted to delete that language, allowing single homosexuals and those involved in same-sex unions to be ordained. The change had to be approved by a majority of 173 presbyteries around the country, and by early this year it was clear that it had been rejected, and massively so. A similar proposal for change in 1997 was defeated 114 to 57, and this time around it is projected that the final vote will be 124 to 49 against the revision. The vote has, of course, greatly cheered conservatives in PCUSA. At the same time, the denomination’s highest judiciary had earlier ruled that congregations could conduct blessings of same-sex unions, so long as they are not called marriages. That ruling was upheld by a 58 percent vote of the presbyteries. Gay advocates understandably ask why, if people are living in a morally acceptable and, indeed, blessed relationship, they should be deemed unqualified for ordained leadership. So it would seem PCUSA still has some work to do in putting its Book of Order into moral and theological order.

• One does not ordinarily expect rarefied theological dispute over listings in the telephone directory. But the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), which has offices all over the country, is pressing phone companies not to list messianic Jewish congregations under “synagogues.” Says Philip Abramowitz, director of the New York JCRC Taskforce on Missionaries and Cults (that’s NYJCRCTMC), “These people are becoming more brazen.” Messianic Jews, says the Forward, the New York-based Jewish paper, “observe some Jewish customs but also deify Jesus.” Well, not quite. Like other Christians, they believe he really is true God and true man. Jews are not united in the telephone book campaign. Rabbi Avi Shafran of Agudath Israel, a very Orthodox group, says that the very liberal Reconstructionist movement and groups such as the Society for Humanistic Judaism should not be permitted to advertise themselves as Jewish. “The Jewish community draws the line at messianic [Jews].” “Why?” he asks. “Why is that the line? Is Judaism just the rejection of Jesus? It’s unfortunate that that’s the way the Jewish world sees Judaism.” The argument among Jews as to whether Jesus is or is not the Messiah has been going on for almost two thousand years. I expect that Peter, Paul, and, for that matter, Maimonides would be surprised that so many centuries later some Jews are asking the telephone companies to decide the question.

• I don’t know whether the gods are getting ready to destroy them, but they’ve sure done something funny to their minds. Here is Julie Bosman writing in the New Republic: “As Cass Sunstein, the University of Chicago constitutional law expert, notes, giving legal protection to a fetus doesn’t undermine Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision establishing abortion rights in America. ‘I don’t think it gives any ammunition to the critics of Roe. If the state says that it’s a crime to kill an unborn fetus, that doesn’t do anything to intrude. Roe v. Wade doesn’t say that fetuses can’t receive legal protection.’ Indeed, a number of states already have laws protecting unborn children. But those laws haven’t led to the arrest and imprisonment of doctors performing abortions or women seeking them. Rather, it has merely led to murder and manslaughter convictions for people who attack pregnant women, an outcome in which most people can find certain satisfaction. ‘Many people who want Roe to remain on the books agree that it’s important for the state to protect unborn children,’ Sunstein says. ‘There’s no necessary conflict between concern for unborn kids and the commitment to freedom of choice for the mother.’“ Now let’s see if we’ve got this right. There is no conflict between the state saying it is a crime to kill unborn babies and the state saying it is all right to kill unborn babies. Or maybe the key word here is “necessary.” Or maybe . . . oh, forget it.

• Here’s another column, this one by E. J. Dionne in the Washington Post, about Catholic priests being so embarrassed by the sexual-abuse scandals that they no longer wear their Roman collar in public. To put it delicately, that is wimpish wrongheadedness of grotesque proportions. Sure, some bad priests have brought disgrace upon the Church. So what else is new? We should not be complicit in letting that small minority of miscreants define the public presentation of the priesthood. In another column, a priest is quoted as saying that the scandal has discredited the Church’s teaching on sexuality. Quite the opposite is the case. As Father C. John McCloskey of Washington says in a letter to the New York Times, appearing the same day as Dionne’s column, if the wayward priests had lived according to the Church’s teaching, there would be no scandal. This is not a time for craven retreat but for unfurling the flag, and wearing the collar is one small way of doing that. Each day on the streets of New York, I encounter hundreds of people who greet a priest with friendly respect. Who knows what they’re really thinking? Perhaps their smiles hide suspicion or even contempt. I doubt it, but it is no matter. This is who I am, one who bears the immeasurable honor of being, all undeserving, a priest of Christ and his Church. There are few things so shameful or sinfully presumptuous as a priest who is ashamed of the Church. The question is not whether she is worthy of us but whether we are worthy of her. Allegiance is tested only when it exacts a price. This is no time for self-pity and whining about being misunderstood. When the earthiness of the vessels is on such embarrassing public display, all the more is the need for bold identification with the treasure, bearing witness to the truth that “the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us” (2 Corinthians 4:7). So there. End of homily for the day.

• Oops. In the March issue I said that, since John O’Sullivan left as editor, National Review had pretty much dropped the question of immigration policy. I sit corrected. It has been pointed out to me that the issue has been regularly addressed in the pages of NR, although not so regularly as under O’Sullivan’s editorship. For instance, NR gave major attention to the very Christopher Jencks article in the New York Review of Books that was the occasion for my comment. This, I am told, is a sensitive point at NR because both the “immigration reform” and the “abolish national borders” parties claim that NR has lost its nerve on the immigration question, and it ain’t so. NR lose its nerve? Get real

• “One Nation Under Many Gods“ (Public Square, October 2001) was an extended reflection on the many meanings of “religious pluralism” in America, occasioned by the book A New Religious America by Diane Eck of Harvard. Among my points in that reflection was that America remains an overwhelmingly Christian society, which, needless to say, is not without its problems. Now the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago has rendered a useful service by pulling together the numbers. Aside from Christianity and Judaism, the three largest religious groups in the U.S. are Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. In the 1970s, these three accounted for a little under 1 percent of the American population, and the best estimate today is that they are 2.4 percent. The three make up about half of all those following religions other than Christianity and Judaism. The other half is made up of religions so numerous and so minuscule that it would be impossible to list them. Top among these other groups are Native American religions, pagans and witches/Wiccans, and followers of what are described as “personal” religions, each of these having about 0.1 percent of the population. Using its own data and that collected by others, NORC’s best estimate is that there are about 1.4 million adult Muslims, or a total population of 1.9 Muslims, in the country. The report offers some analysis of why the presence of non-Christian and non-Jewish religions is so frequently exaggerated in the media and elsewhere. For instance, “New temples, celebrity converts to Buddhism, turbaned Sikhs, and visits by the Dalai Lama have all created an impression of prominence beyond the actual size of these groups.” A second reason is that so many Americans have come in contact with aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism through Transcendental Meditation, New Age fashions, and practices such as yoga and meditation. A reason for the exaggeration that is not mentioned is that media attention is focused in parts of the country, New York City, for example, where religio-ethnic diversity is on inescapable display. Yet another unmentioned reason is that so many champions of multiculturalism—Diane Eck, for example—desperately want American society to fit their idea of “religious pluralism.” For some of them, as well as others, the exaggeration also serves the purpose of challenging the Judeo-Christian “hegemony” and opposing the “privileging” of Judaism and Christianity in our public life. The NORC study is an important reminder that we cannot escape the problems, ambiguities, and opportunities implicated in our being at present, as in the past and in the foreseeable future, “Christian America.”

• In the department of things that only an intellectual could believe is an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled, “The BBC: How to be Impartial in Wartime.” Anthony Collings, former Newsweek bureau chief in London, holds up the BBC as a model in contrast to “the cramped and jingoistic bias” of the American media. He notes, for example, that in speaking about terrorists the BBC prefers the term “attackers.” Why, of course. The bin Laden gang “attacks” the World Trade Center and the Bush gang “attacks” the bin Laden gang. They are both attackers. The delusion of moral symmetry has a long and dishonorable pedigree. During the Cold War years, those who were “impartial” in the conflict between the evil empire and the free world were rightly compared to a fellow who saw someone push an old lady into the way of an oncoming bus and someone else who pushed an old lady out of the way of an oncoming bus. “What’s the difference?” he opined. “They both push old ladies around.” News reporting should be honest and truthful, to be sure. But, between the world of al-Qaeda and the West they have vowed to destroy, what is there to be impartial about?

• “As God Intended” is an article by a San Francisco therapist and graduate of a Jesuit high school. Writing in America, the Jesuit weekly, he reports on being invited back to the school as a homosexual to speak about his experience there. “The head of the school asked me to say what I had needed to hear at Prep in 1963 and what gay Prepsters need to hear today. I believe they need to hear three things. First: you are created exactly as God intended you to be. Second: you are not damaged goods, neither sick, nor evil. Third: you and the love you provide are essential, mysterious graces in God’s plan for the world.” In other words: God is responsible for the way I am; my sexuality is untouched by human sinfulness; the way I express my sexuality is in accord with God’s will. His advice to the school is quite simple: it should teach that he is right and the Church is wrong about human sexuality. The editors do not say that Jesuit educators should accept the advice, but obviously think they need to hear it. Perhaps it is just as well not to speculate about why they think that. Surely it cannot be because they think Jesuit educators are not aware that there are people who reject the teaching of the Catholic Church. Jesuits do not lead such sheltered lives as that, even when their society is limited to other Jesuits.

• In deciding what does and does not count as defamation, Catholics, and Christians more generally, frequently claim that media or artistic attacks aimed at them would never be tolerated if aimed at Jews or blacks. It is an often legitimate although somewhat tired complaint. Here is a different twist. New York City’s Jewish Museum is sponsoring an exhibit, “Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art.” It is very “creative,” including “designer” poison-gas canisters, cute concentration camps made with Lego sets, and a campy photographer holding a Diet Coke as he stands among skeletal survivors at Buchenwald. An organization of Holocaust survivors has called for a boycott of the exhibit, and it is seconded by the Catholic League. Good for both of them. Trivializing the Holocaust is obscene, and anyone to whom that has to be explained would not understand. What is deemed to be the cutting edge of “the artistic community” is increasingly an awful bore. The goal, obsessively pursued, is to be “transgressive.” Creativity and artistic courage consist in giving the finger to any piety, convention, or authority figure suspected of being respected by the less talented masses. What is respectfully, even reverently, referred to as “the arts” by the uncritical critics of the cutting edge is little more than a sustained snit of adolescent rebellion. So what else is new? As has been said, everything changes except the avant garde. Now the Jewish Museum presents the equivalent of “Yeah, yeah, yeah, so what’s the big deal about Auschwitz?” My, but aren’t they the clever ones. In response to the protests, the museum has put the controverted items in a separate room, with a sign indicating that some viewers might find them offensive. That should draw the crowds.

• Keep it simple, stupid. The admonition is frequently in order, especially when simplifying does not result in the simplistic. “Why Marriage Matters: Twenty-One Conclusions from the Social Sciences” is simple without being simplistic, and it comes with ample footnotes for those with a penchant for nuances. Put together by thirteen distinguished scholars of marriage and the family, the twenty-five page booklet is ideal for classrooms and discussion groups and is available from the Institute for American Values at 1841 Broadway, New York, New York 10023 or its website, www.americanvalues.org. Granted, the findings cited in favor of marriage do not deal with the deepest levels of spiritual fulfillment, but they do appeal to self-interest, rightly understood. For instance, keeping kids out of jail and off drugs; helping them do well in school and get good jobs; reducing litigation and miseries such as suicide among parents; and so forth. Those may not be the highest ends in life, but they’re pretty good.

• Tunku Varadarajan, an editor with the Wall Street Journal, attended a meeting in Istanbul between the foreign ministers of the European Union and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the latter being, he notes, “the only international organization of states defined purely in terms of religion.” The meeting, he thought, was a farce, with the Europeans declaring how wonderfully peaceful and humane Islam is, and the Muslims warmly agreeing. He quotes Amre Moussa, Secretary General of the League of Arab States, who said that “the people who carried out the Sept. 11 attack do not represent Islam, just as the Baader Meinhof doesn’t represent Germany or the Red Brigade Italy.” Varadarajan observes, “Neither group claimed to speak for Germany or Italy in the way that al-Qaeda claims to speak for Islam. Yet this point was lost on Mr. Moussa, and this failure of analogical reasoning, so common among so many Muslim interlocutors, is part of a general intellectual calamity in the Islamic world. That world, with the valiant exception of Turkey, has yet to graduate from self-pity to self-criticism, and unless its spokesmen and thinkers are able to know themselves, there is no hope that they may ever be able to know the West.” In the Islamic world, only Turkey has embraced the ways of the West, and Mr. Varadarajan is full of praise for the fact that the Istanbul conference was sponsored in part by a Turkish winemaker and brewery, and that the Turkish imam he met wore a pinstripe Western suit and only the slightest trace of a beard. The way of Kemal Ataturk, who in the 1920s radically secularized Turkey, is the only way for Islamic societies to go, according to Mr. Varadarajan. Ataturk’s policy, imposed by the military to this day, is to create a naked public square in which the religio-cultural influence of Islam is coercively confined to what is defined as the private sphere of life. As some of us have been arguing for many years, the goal in a just and democratic society is not a naked public square and not a sacred public square but a civil public square. Almost all Muslims, supported, it would seem, by their authoritative texts, believe that Islam mandates a sacred public square. Outside of Turkey, as Bernard Lewis and other scholars have explained at length, there is determined opposition to the kind of naked public square imposed by Ataturk and his military successors. Lewis was at the Istanbul conference and said that “there are many civilizations and have been through history, but there’s only one modernity.” Mr. Varadarajan thought nobody was listening to him. One has to hope that he is wrong. One has to hope that there are thinkers and political leaders within the Islamic world who can, in the decades ahead, find an authentically Islamic way of legitimating modernity. Until now, the assumption has been that secularization is a necessary condition of modernity. Indeed, many thinkers have come close to equating the two. It seems safe to say that, if the only choice is between a naked public square and a sacred public square, Muslims will, with near unanimity, choose the sacred public square. The great new fact of our time—in the Islamic world, in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, and almost everywhere else except Western Europe—is the desecularization of world history. A much neglected aspect of globalization is the global search for ways of embracing modernity on religious terms. Nowhere is that search more urgent—with enormous stakes for all of us—than in the world of Islam. Kemal Ataturk is historically interesting, and wine—bibbing imams may be charming, but they do not represent a believable way for Islamic societies to secure a civil public square.

• Almost half a century ago, Episcopal Bishop (as distinct from a non-episcopal bishop) James Pike and Eugene Carson Blake, Presbyterian, said there was not a doctrine’s worth of difference among the several Protestant denominations and so they should all get together. Thus was born the Consultation on Church Union (COCU), which many people wrongly thought had gone out of business ages ago. As of this year, COCU is CUIC—Churches Uniting in Christ, which they hope to do by the year 2007. The CUIC members include the African Methodist Episcopal Church, African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, Episcopal Church USA, International Council of Community Churches, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), United Church of Christ, and United Methodist Church. The constituting vision of CUIC includes a commitment to ongoing dialogue to “deepen the participating churches’ understanding of racism.” Lest there be any misunderstanding, the statement says that the purpose of such deepened understanding of racism is “in order to make a more compelling case against it.” It says here that a chief obstacle to the merger of the nine bodies is disagreement on ordained ministry, specifically on the meaning of “bishop” (cf. above aside on “non-episcopal bishop”). It is possible we may be hearing more about all of this, so you might want to go to your Rolodex or database and change COCU to CUIC. On the other hand, if you have never bothered to enter COCU, you might want to wait to see whether in the years ahead there are further sightings of CUIC. Acronyms come and go, but denominations denominate the ties that bind.

• The best-selling Bible translation in the English-speaking world is the New International Version (NIV). It is the overwhelming favorite among evangelical Protestants. In 1997 there was a very big fuss when it was reported that the International Bible Society, which holds the copyright, and Zondervan, the exclusive publisher, contemplated a “gender inclusive” version of the NIV. As a result of the ruckus, they agreed to cease and desist. But now, lo and behold, Today’s New International Version. Many evangelical leaders are furious. Here is a statement of protest noting that “evangelical Christians confess the plenary, verbal inspiration of Scripture. Plenary means ‘every,’ verbal means ‘word.’ Thus God inspired each of the words of the original text of the Bible, not simply the concepts behind those words.” Never mind that plenary actually means full, or that many evangelicals and most other Christians do not subscribe to a “dictation theory” of divine inspiration. TNIV, like some other contemporary translations, does have big problems. For instance, Hebrews 2:6, echoing Psalm 8 and other Old Testament passages, has it, “What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?” TNIV has this: “What are mere mortals that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?” Apart from the clumsy language, there is a theological distortion in that “son of man” has been understood, from the apostolic era to the present, to be a messianic reference to Christ. Revelation 3:20: “I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.” TNIV: “I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with them, and they with me.” The latter is simply grammatically wrong. And what’s the point? Does anyone seriously fear that people will think that Jesus does not eat with women? There are numerous other such examples. One need not get worked up to a high dudgeon over theories of biblical inspiration to find repugnant this incessant meddling with texts, aimed at pandering to people who are too sensitive for decent company. And, of course, aimed at selling “new, improved” Bibles that nobody needs.

• I’m a bit late on this one, but the New York Times had a lovely picture of young nuns and a huge crowd of others at the annual March for Life in Washington. The caption read: “Roe v. Wade, Pro and Con. People on both sides of the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling that legalized the right to abortion converged in Washington yesterday for the anniversary.” Crowd-counters estimated that about 100,000 were in the pro-life march, while ten to fifteen pro-abortion proponents demonstrated in front of the Supreme Court. Some “convergence.”

• Georgetown, a university “in the Jesuit tradition,” offers GOVT 463 on “Political Terrorism.” Here’s the course description: “This course is not about passing moral judgments on terrorism and terrorists. Its first objective is to understand terrorism as an alternative political action that certain people and organizations resort to under certain conditions. Its second objective is to figure out the evolutionary dynamics of terrorism and to answer the most significant question about the terrorist phenomenon: How and why do good people get involved in committing terrible acts? The course tries to reach these objectives through the study of historical cases as well as theoretical discussions. Though short, the course covers terrorist organizations from the French Revolutionaries to September 11, 2001.” The phrase “terrible acts” does seem to be edging dangerously close to a moral judgment, although on terrorism, not terrorists. The latter, presumably, are “good people.” Do you have any idea what tuition is at Georgetown?

• It didn’t really get my attention until one of our parishioners was arrested and spent a night in jail. The charge? He was drinking beer with his buddies and he is only eighteen years old. Then there was the business of one of the Bush daughters using a phony ID to buy beer, although she didn’t go to jail. Why have we been so passive about this cock-eyed business of making twenty-one the legal age for drinking? There are, it seems to me, many things wrong with that, not least the violation of federalism when the national government blackmails the states into raising the drinking age by threatening to cut off federal revenues. Brett Deal of North Carolina writes: “I have lived in several college towns, and the ridiculous consequence of these laws is to burden the college administrations and communities with problems inherent in criminalizing a conduct for three-quarters of the student body that is not criminal for the other 25 percent. It doesn’t stop the drinking in the younger group, yet threatens their futures with criminal records or places them in the loving care of the substance-abuse business, which has no reason to put itself out of a job by actually mitigating the problems attendant to drinking. This situation creates a culture in which most college students are instructed that they are not adults. I’m not surprised they often make no attempt to behave as adults. In my more irritable moments, despairing of a return to the eighteen-year-old standard, I have suggested that colleges should try a policy of making twenty-one the minimum age for enrollment; at least the college-bound might spend that three years earning some of their own tuition and becoming familiar with the working world.” In addition, one might reasonably expect that raising the drinking age increases problem-drinking by moving eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds from bars, where other people can see them, to binge drinking in dorm rooms. But the craziest thing is that young people who are thought to be old enough to enlist in the military and risk dying, and mature enough to exercise their franchise in elections, are deemed to be too irresponsible to buy a beer. Goodness knows, I’m not looking for additional causes, but, if anyone is launching a campaign to change this law, sign me up.

• On what he describes as the protection and sheltering of priests involved in child molestation, Andrew Sullivan writes, “This was a policy organized in detail, and approved at every level of the church hierarchy. Rome knew. Of course they knew. And they knew what they were doing was evil.” That is a very ugly slander, in no way excused by Mr. Sullivan’s manifest ignorance of how the Church works. But of course, and once again, the occasion for his being so upset is the Church’s teaching on homosexuality, the subject that is, regrettably, the polestar of his journalism. He cites a story in the New York Times in which a Vatican official, speaking of homosexuals, is quoted as saying, “People with these inclinations just cannot be ordained.” The official, says Sullivan, is using “the ancient slur of associating pedophiles with homosexuals.” It is not an ancient slur but an evident connection, when, as in the instances of abuse that have come to public attention, boys are involved, and, when the other sexual activities of the offending priests are known, it turns out that they are homosexual. There may be some exceptions, but that is the general rule. Of course there are priests who have same-sex desires and yet are entirely chaste and faithful to their vow of celibacy. But it is not surprising that disorder breeds disorder, and it is the Church’s teaching that homosexuality is “objectively disordered” that drives Mr. Sullivan to such furious distraction. That teaching he labels as “hate and bigotry,” and it is why, he says, “I couldn’t go to Mass today.” In the same piece, he attacks that “reliable Vatican—defender Richard John Neuhaus” and my comments reported in the Boston Herald, which he characterizes this way: “Another pernicious trope from the reactionaries is the notion that the pedophile explosion was a function of liberalizing attitudes in the Church after the Second Vatican Council.” I did say and do believe that widespread dissent from authoritative teaching on faith and morals—including what was called the acceptance of alternative lifestyles—is related to the laxity that has been only partially remedied under the pontificate of John Paul II. On such matters, it seems to me, people should be able to disagree in a civil manner. In Washington a few days before Mr. Sullivan’s attack, he and I publicly debated the connection between religion and violence. I was impressed, and deeply saddened, by his anger at the Church. Not that there is not a good deal to be angry about. But righteous anger is prevented from becoming self-righteous by remembering that we are all disordered in various ways—objectively and subjectively, innocently and culpably. Which is why Christ gave us the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Which is why we prepare for each Mass by saying together, “I confess . . .”

• It’s not as though peccant clerics were unknown in the good old days, but it really is disingenuous of commentators who have promoted sundry revolutions, including the sexual revolution, in the name of “the spirit” of Vatican II to now claim that their promotion has no bearing on the priestly misconduct now so much in the public eye. It is a major factor, as evident in this personal testimony recorded by California journalist George Neumayr: “Psychologist William Coulson knows this well. In the 1960s, he counseled priests and nuns to ‘get in touch with their feelings,’ as he told me in an interview for a 1997 story in the San Francisco Faith newspaper. ‘My theories made priests and nuns feel good about being bad.’ Working with his mentor Carl Rogers, an icon of the 1960s relativistic nondirective therapy, Coulson conducted ‘sensitivity’ training and ‘self-esteem’ workshops for the Jesuit Order and several other religious groups eager to absorb the New Morality. ‘Once we began to peel the onion at these workshops, there was no end to the shocking things people would say,’ he said. ‘They became persuaded of this subjective theory of morality which says that the highest morality is the one you locate within you. And after a while these religious forgot about the teachings of the Church. After our workshop at Alma [the Jesuit seminary then in California], one of the young Jesuits wrote, “Never in my life before that group experience had I experienced me so intently.” He added, ‘The Franciscans were so enamored with our psychology that they introduced it to Saint Anthony’s seminary in Santa Barbara. Years later, eleven or twelve friars were accused of molesting thirty-four high school boys. I’m afraid we planted the seeds and they carried the seeds to the next generation and they germinated.’ Both Coulson and Rogers later repudiated their relativistic theories. ‘I greatly underestimated the reality of evil,’ said Rogers. ‘I hope Rogerian theory goes down the drain.’

• Before he was Imam Jamil Al-Amin, he was H. Rapp Brown, the 1960s incendiary who persuaded blacks that burning down their neighborhoods was a great revolutionary strategy for overthrowing “Amerika.” He has now been convicted in Atlanta of shooting two Fulton County sheriff’s deputies, killing one and wounding the other. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and eleven other Muslim groups are steadfast in their support of Jamil Al-Amin. Citing prejudice against minorities, they say he was railroaded and will be exonerated on appeal. These are the groups that would persuade us that Muslims are, in the memorable phrase of Mr. Brown, as American as cherry pie.

• Since moving from Brooklyn to Manhattan many years ago, I have not owned a car. And, if I did have one, it almost certainly wouldn’t be one of those huge SUVs. So I have no dog in this fight. Bill McKibben, author of Maybe One: A Case for Smaller Families (no doubt a big hit in dying Europe), has an article titled “Driving Global Warming.” About the world-destroying threat of global warming he has no doubts. Writing in the Christian Century, he says, “If you care about the people in this world living closest to the margins, then you need to do everything in your power to slow the rate at which the planet warms, for they are the most vulnerable. I was naked and you did not clothe me. I was hungry and you drowned me with your Ford Explorer.” I knew they had a reputation for flipping, but drowned by a Ford Explorer? That’s what the man says. Forget about the war on terrorism. The SUVs are out to do us in. “This,” McKibben writes, “is a moral issue every bit as compelling as the civil rights movement of a generation ago, and every bit as demanding of our commitment and our sacrifice. It’s not a technical question—it’s about desire, status, power, willingness to change, openness to the rest of creation. It can’t be left to the experts—the experts have had it for a decade now, and we’re pouring ever more carbon into the atmosphere. It’s time for all of us to take it on, as uncomfortable as that may be.” He adds, “Calling it a moral issue does not mean we need to moralize.” Oh, good. For a moment there, I thought he was stepping—not driving, mind you—over the line.

• The debate went on until after midnight at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in Colorado Springs, but the resolution rejecting “open theism” finally passed by 70 percent. Open theism—a.k.a. free-will theism—is the teaching that God does not know the future because people shape it through their own decisions, and that’s the way God made the world to be. The catholic (also upper case) tradition, of course, affirms God’s omniscience, while acknowledging that the Divine epistemology, so to speak, far surpasses what we know about knowing. Irenaeus, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and a host of other worthies have pondered this mystery in depth. Evangelicals are inclined to launch questions from scratch and demand knock-down proofs from explicit biblical passages. In the absence of a Magisterium, or authoritative teaching office, this makes for lively arguments. One proponent of open theism described the vote as the work of the “evangelical Taliban,” and said it was laying the groundwork for kicking him and his friends out of the society. The leaders of the society said he should cool it. As to whether the society will kick them out, only God knows.

• The European Parliament was set to debate a report from its Women’s Rights Commission that was vetted also by the Citizens’ Liberties and Rights Commission. (The duplication of commissions is simply reflective of the Brussels bureaucracy and should not be taken to mean that women are not citizens.) The report condemns “religious organizations” and “extremist political movements” that are guilty of “the exclusion of women from leading positions in the political and religious hierarchy.” Read women priests. The report also deplores “the interference of the churches and religious communities in the public and political life of the state, in particular when such interference is designed to restrict human rights and fundamental freedoms, for instance, in the sexual or reproductive sphere.” Read abortion. But the really interesting phrase is “interference . . . in the public and political life of the state.” Statist hostility to social pluralism as articulated in, for instance, the Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity is deeply entrenched in the political culture of Europe, and is unquestionably established in the European Union and its Brussels apparat. Mussolini first came up with the formula, “Everything within the State. Nothing against the State. Nothing outside the State.” It is still the most useful definition of totalitarianism, which is, in aspiration if not in fact, very much alive in Europe. And not only in Europe. (After some of the more extreme anti-Catholic language was removed, the report was approved, 242–240.

• In a review titled “Unpardonable,” Robert S. Wistrich once again gives evidence that he is incorrigible. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, he praises David Kertzer’s polemic against the papacy, The Popes Against the Jews, concluding that Pius XII’s alleged silence about the Holocaust “was less the result of any special moral insensitivity than it was a reflection of the long-established and pervasive culture of Vatican anti-Semitism.” See the discussion of Russell Hittinger’s critique of the Kertzer book, in which he devastatingly demonstrates that Kertzer is apparently ignorant of the major sources for the pontificates he presumably studied, and gravely distorts a number of minor sources, making his book virtually worthless as historical scholarship (While We’re At It, March). None of that bothers Wistrich. It is enough that Kertzer’s book serves the purposes of his ongoing campaign. In the same review, Wistrich discusses Jose M. Sanchez’s Pius XII and the Holocaust. “It is also unfortunate,” he writes, “that Sanchez concludes his otherwise valuable survey by implying that many critics of Pius XII have an ax to grind against the papacy or the Church.” Who could Sanchez possibly have in mind? Wistrich was part of the Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission, and Vatican officials reproached him for torpedoing the commission’s work by his egregious public criticisms. Wistrich describes the Vatican reproach as an instance of “absurd conspiracy theories out of the repertoire of classical anti-Semitism.” No, he was reproached for violating the rules of the commission of which he was part; and yes, he is a Jew; and no, that does not make the reproach anti-Semitic. And there were no “conspiracy theories,” absurd or otherwise. By his obsessive ax-grinding, Wistrich has thoroughly discredited himself as a scholar and putative authority on Christianity and anti-Semitism. Very different is the review of Kertzer in the New York Review of Books by Owen Chadwick of Cambridge, who is an authority on the history of the papacy. Kertzer, writes Chadwick, wrongly assumes, first, that anything done or said by Catholic priests (many of whom have been anti-Semitic) represents papal policy. Second, he writes, “the more damning parts of the book rest on arguments from silence.” He points out that the Pope did not condemn the Allied obliteration bombing of Dresden—a blatant war crime—which can hardly be taken to mean that the Pope approved of it. Third, Kertzer attributes to the Vatican statements made by Catholics overtly in opposition to, and condemned by, the Vatican. Fourth, Kertzer criticizes Pius XII for helping only some Jews, to which Chadwick asks the commonsensical question, “Is it safe to infer from this that the Pope, because he helped a small number of people, could not have wished to help a larger number of people if he or his advisers thought that to be possible?” “The Holocaust,” Chadwick declares, “was born in Germany, with roots in the German nineteenth century. It was not born in the last years of dilapidated papal [states of] Rome. Nor was it born in the anti-Semitism of some members of the clergy.” He very generously concludes with the allowance that Kertzer’s book is nonetheless “valuable” and “makes a case that calls for an answer.” After critiques such as Hittinger’s and Chadwick’s, one has to wonder whether any further answer might not be an instance of overkill.

• An article in the Christian Century argues for the “right of return” for more than a half million Palestinians to what is presently the State of Israel. Marc Ellis is quoted favorably: “This future of integration, under two flags or one, will one day see the creation of a new identity for Jews and Palestinians in Israel Palestine that will carry aspects of each people’s past and elements of joint experiences forged in blood, struggle, and solidarity.” A “new identity,” as in defeated Jews and triumphant Arabs. It would be more straightforward to call for the death of the State of Israel. Which, not incidentally, is what its enemies have been calling for over the last fifty-four years, and call for today.

• Melle Pufe is a big advertising agency in Germany that has had great success in promoting the Afri-Cola soft drink and various tobacco products. The Evangelical (Lutheran) Church is a new client, and Melle Pufe is launching a huge campaign centered on the motto, “Protestants Ask Questions.” If you’re looking for questions, go to church this Sunday. Barbara Kotte, creative director of the agency, says Protestantism is a “problematic brand” because it has no pope or other symbol to “feature the church’s history and identity.” Billboards in a hundred cities will display the campaign’s motto. I’m sure ecumenical sensibilities will preclude putting up next to them billboards declaring, “Catholics Have Answers.”

• The Brownback—Landrieu bill in the Senate is scheduled for early debate. It would ban all human cloning. Senators Ted Kennedy, Arlen Specter, and others are backing another bill, misleadingly called the “Human Cloning Prohibition Act.” It allows “therapeutic cloning” while outlawing bringing such clones to birth in “reproductive cloning.” J. Bottum, writing in the Weekly Standard, has got the number of these “prohibitionists.” “The attempt to allow cloned embryos and then to ban the birth at which they naturally aim is a bizarre and unworkable compromise. How exactly could we enforce it without the courts ordering women to have abortions? How could we prosecute violators without an unattainable knowledge of a scientist’s intention in creating a clone? And how could we call the compromise ethical when it would establish in law a class of embryos that it is a crime not to destroy, not to treat as disposable tissue? The attempt to ban only reproductive cloning will prove simply an invitation for scientists to get their techniques right until the pressure to bring one of those clones to birth becomes overwhelming. In truth, the only way to ban reproductive human cloning is by banning all human cloning, and the only bill now before the Senate that will do that is the Brownback—Landrieu bill.” Bottum writes that the biotech project is like a giant jigsaw puzzle, the picture only becoming apparent after the fact. “But this is how the brave new world project advances. Each small piece of the jigsaw puzzle is held up by its advocates as though it existed in isolation, as though it implied nothing about what is to come. And then we are asked how we could possibly be opposed to it. Last year, it was how we could object to embryonic stem-cell research when that doesn’t require cloning embryos for research. This year, it is how we can object to cloning embryos for research when that doesn’t require bringing clones to birth. And next year, it will be how we can object to bringing clones to birth when that doesn’t require the genetic redesign of our descendants.” And, of course, a year or two after that comes the genetic redesign of our descendants. “Why not?” as the serpent said to Eve.

• Remember “consciousness raising”? The phrase was big about thirty years ago, mainly in connection with the feminisms of the day. Yes, the activists admitted, most women do not view marriage as a trap or sex as rape, and they don’t hate men as they should, but that is only because they don’t understand their own oppression. They need to have their consciousness raised, and consciousness raising workshops sprang up all over the country. Now we have a similar thing with Indians. According to Native American activists and the wildly out of control U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the use of Indian names, mascots, and symbols in sports is an outrageous offense against Native Americans. So Sports Illustrated hired the Harris Research Group to poll Native Americans, with the result showing that 81 percent favor the use of Indian nicknames for high school and college teams, while for professional sports the approval rate is 83 percent. The civil rights establishment is not deterred. Its response is, What do you expect from people who have not had their consciousness raised? Maybe the commission will find funds for reeducation workshops. “Ve know best. You vill be offended.”

• I earlier remarked on a Maine-based operation that sells “Brother Curry’s Breads.” These include pumpkin bread, date nut bread, blueberry ginger loaf, all baked “in the Jesuit tradition.” The latest ad in America reads, “NEW!!! Brother Curry’s Dog Biscuits.” Also in the Jesuit tradition, of course. I feared it might come to this.

• We all know about the Red and Blue Americas. The first voted overwhelmingly for Bush and the second overwhelmingly for Gore. (I’ve never heard a satisfactory explanation of how the colors were chosen for that famous map, since red has traditionally signified the left and blue the right, as in “true blue.”) David Brooks, who is among our favorite observers of the American follies, examines what are supposedly two Americas in the Atlantic Monthly. His article, “One Nation, Slightly Divisible,” based on his comparison of upmarket, and very Blue, Montgomery County, Maryland (where he lives), and downmarket, and very Red, Franklin County, Pennsylvania, about sixty-five miles north. He did his admittedly unscientific research before and after September 11. Among his findings is that neither class warfare nor culture warfare explains much of anything. There are big differences in religious belief and observance, but the real divide is what he calls “the ego curtain.” The liberal Blues in Montgomery County think they are very big and special, while folks in Franklin County insist they are small and very ordinary. Brooks concludes with this: “If the September 11 attacks rallied people in both Red and Blue America, they also neutralized the political and cultural leaders who tend to exploit the differences between the two. Americans are in no mood for a class struggle or a culture war. The aftermath of the attacks has been a bit like a national Sabbath, taking us out of our usual pleasures and distractions and reminding us what is really important. Over time the shock will dissipate. But in important ways the psychological effects will linger, just as the effects of John F. Kennedy’s assassination have lingered. The early evidence still holds: although there are some real differences between Red and Blue America, there is no fundamental conflict. There may be cracks, but there is no chasm. Rather, there is a common love for this nation—one nation in the end.” I expect that’s true after September 11, and we’ll see how long it holds. But I also expect that Brooks is too ready to discount the reality of the culture war. On the “ego curtain,” on the importance of religion, on marriage, family, and homosexuality, on abortion, on patriotism, and on much else, the cultural divide is very deep. What has happened since September 11 is that the Reds with their normative morality are dramatically in the ascendancy (although their principled humility prevents them from gloating about it) and the Blues with their expressive individualism have been temporarily sobered. Real crises tend to have that effect. The driven self-indulgence and blithe nihilism of Montgomery County is dependent upon being secure and affluent. There, and even more in New York City, the sense of security has been severely shaken. The people of Franklin County, on the other hand, did not really need the President to tell them, as he did in the State of the Union message, that there is evil in the world, that life is fragile and must therefore be grounded in truth—as in Truth. As has often been said in these pages, the aggressors in the culture war are the Blues. Deep down, it is more true than not that Harvard hates America. More precisely, Harvard hates America as it imagines it to be and wants to remake it in its own image. Blues are inclined to be not very nice when it comes to what they think is wrong with America, which is just about everything. Like sociologist Alan Wolfe in One Nation, After All, David Brooks has discovered that people in Red America, by way of sharp contrast, tend to be, with few exceptions, nice. In visiting “middle America” both Brooks and Wolfe admit to a sense of venturing into terra incognita. Both express surprise that these folk do not come across as angry partisans in the culture war. Of course not. They are nice. That doesn’t mean they don’t know what side they’re on.

• It is true, there are millions of evangelical Protestants who don’t read FT. Also millions of Orthodox, Catholics, Jews, and people who aren’t sure what they believe. In remedying this sad state of affairs, we suggest starting small. For instance, send us the names of friends and acquaintances who you think might subscribe, and we’ll send them a free issue. Please send names and addresses to [First Things—>old.firstthings.com], 156 Fifth Avenue, Suite 400, New York, New York 10010 (or e—mail to subscriberservices@pma—inc.net). On the other hand, if they’re ready to subscribe, call toll free 1–877–905–9920, or visit old.firstthings.com.

Sources:

Israel and anti-Semitism, Commentary, February 2002.

while we’re at it: PCUSA on same—sex unions and ordination of homosexuals, Associated Press, February 19, 2002. Jews in the telephone book, Forward, February 15, 2002. Abortion doublethink, New Republic, February 2, 2002. E. J. Dionne on the priesthood, Washington Post, February 22, 2002. On religious pluralism, National Opinion Research Center, January 2002. On “attackers,” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 21, 2001. “As God Intended,” America, May 21, 2001. On “Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art” at the Jewish Museum, Catholic League press release, February 14, 2002. Tunku Varadarajan on Turkey, Wall Street Journal, February 21, 2002. From COCU to CUIC, Origins, February 7, 2002. March for Life “convergence,” New York Times, January 23, 2002. On drinking age laws, InstaPundit.com, February 27, 2002. Andrew Sullivan on priests, pedophiles, and homosexuals, AndrewSullivan.com, March 4, 2002. On Jamil Al—Amin, CAIR press release, March 9, 2002. Bill McKibben on SUVs and global warming, Christian Century, May 16, 2001. On open theism, Christian Century, December 12, 2001. On Women’s Rights Commission report, ZENIT, March 12 and 14, 2002. Robert Wistrich and Owen Chadwick on David Kertzer on Pius XII, Times Literary Supplement, March 1, 2002; New York Review of Books, March 28, 2002. Marc Ellis on the “right of return,” Christian Century, May 2, 2001. On marketing Protestantism, ZENIT, March 4, 2002. “Consciousness raising” and Indian nicknames, National Review Online, March 8, 2002. Brother Curry’s dog biscuits, America, November 5, 2001. David Brooks on Red v. Blue America, Atlantic, December 2001.