On a good day I’m only of three of four minds on the issues of war and violence. I’m not well read enough to discern the differences between various theories of Biblical justification for killing someone. I’ve heard a variety of coffee-table arguments, of course, but I always get hung up on Christ’s admonition that we turn the other cheek. At the same time, I keep a handgun and practice with it for the sole purpose of ventilating anyone who tries to hurt my family. But then there are plenty of gaps between my convictions and my actions.

I thought about this as I passed one of those signs in someone’s yard yesterday, the one that proclaims:

Another neighbor for peace.

It seems such a sign is only telling half the story, and ought fully to read:

Another neighbor for peace at any cost, up to and including the slitting of his own throat.

There’s an inherent silliness to notions that the peace-producing solution, in the face of believers in a murderous death cult who think they can earn a place in heaven by beheading Jews and otherwise murdering men, women, and children, is to make nice with them.

Then I think: Good thing the Christians in Rome didn’t concur. I easily forget that God’s plan in the world is not necessarily my physical security. And then I think about this turning the other cheek business, and I’m back where I started, suspecting that Christians should not engage in war and capital punishment, yet keeping my 9mm Smith & Wesson oiled, and being thankful for well-armed U.S. Marines standing in the gap.

I suppose I can sort it out when I get the time and inclination (though I’m still likely to get it wrong). The reality is that I benefit from the protection provided by thousands of men who have no qualms about killing people they suspect to be bad. In some church services, when Memorial Day is upon us, the pastor will ask veterans and servicemen to stand, so the rest of us can applaud. I don’t know when violence is justified for a Christian, but I know I am thankful for the men who stand. And I believe I would be proud of my sons, regardless of my own conclusions about war, were they one day to stand with them.

Posted in Editor's Choice, Front Page, The World | 42 Comments »

With gasoline over four dollars a gallon, the U.S. Senate interrogated executives from the five largest oil companies on Wednesday. At issue were record profits on the part of the oil companies, and record prices at the pump.

Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) was perhaps the most vindictive, claiming that “people can’t afford to go to work” because of the gas prices. “The issue is simple,” he said. “People we represent are hurting, the companies you represent are profiting.”

However, Leahy’s accusations may simply be accusations among the guilty. In a 2007 study called Who Gets What from Imported Oil, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) showed that the world’s richest countries averaged an annual income of 460 billion US dollars from oil taxes. Comparatively, OPEC claims to have made an annual average of 410 billion US$ from oil profits, suggesting that taxes form a more significant portion of the cost of oil than the industry profits. The report then partitions the cost of a liter of oil into three categories: tax, industry margin, and the cost of crude production. In 2007, U.S. taxes constituted roughly 26% of the cost, while industry profits made up less than 10%.

Another report—this one from the U.S. Governmental Accountability Office in 2007—demonstrates that gasoline price inflation is disproportionately concentrated in areas where government requirements give companies an excuse to raise prices, such as in California.

On Wednesday, CBS reported a nearly 30-cent difference across state lines—due to Illinois taxes. “It was $4.20. I can come over here and get it for $3.93,” said one customer. According to the Civic Federation, which studies political and economic issues in the Chicago area, taxes account for nearly 80 cents of a $4.00 gallon of gasoline.

In a statement released Thursday, the head of OPEC said the recent oil price surges were unwelcome to producers as well as consumers. Prolonged price increase suppresses the demand for oil and gives more momentum to the search for alternative fuels. He blamed the increase in oil prices on inflation in the U.S. dollar.

“Largely ignored was the role taxes are playing — an astounding 10 levels of taxation,” noted the CBS article on the Senate hearings. Sen. Leahy did not address the government’s participation in gas taxes, government requirements, or economic inflation, but it might have been wise to note the logs before digging for specks.

Posted in Editor's Choice, Front Page, The World | 50 Comments »

I mentioned the other day research by Syracuse University professor Arthur C. Brooks into the causes of happiness among Americans. In his new book Gross National Happiness (Basic), he shows that self-ratings of happiness are statistically reliable, and then writes about “three basic things that make people happy: meaning in their lives, control over their environment, and success in creating value in the world. And the way people get these things is not with money, or power, or fame—it is with their values. People who are serious about healthy values in their lives, families, and communities are much happier than others.”

WOW: You examine “the politics of happiness” and come to some conclusions about liberals and conservatives that would surprise our academic colleagues who stereotype conservatives as emotionally rigid, insecure, and angry…

ACB: I look at strange data results all day, but the evidence on liberals and conservatives surprised even me. People who say they are conservative or very conservative are nearly twice as likely to say they are “very happy,” than are people who called themselves liberal or very liberal. Conservatives are much less likely to say they are dissatisfied with themselves, that they are inclined to feel like a failure, or to be pessimistic about their futures. A 2007 survey even found that 58 percent of Republicans rated their mental health as “excellent,” versus just 38 percent of Democrats.

WOW: What is the relationship between economic inequality and unhappiness?

ACB: We hear from a lot of politicians these days that income inequality makes us unhappy. This is not correct. What makes people unhappy is the belief that they do not have opportunities to get ahead in life. What they often complain about, however, is income inequality. Studies show that when people feel economically mobile, they actually like income inequality even if they have less than others because it shows them what they can achieve. The irony is that when politicians fight income inequality they often lower economic mobility by wrecking the rewards to hard work. And this makes the real problem worse, not better.

WOW: The mantra of this year’s election campaign so far is “change,” with partisans evidently feeling a spurt of joy every time a candidate mentions the word. Why does that word have that effect?

ACB: This is due to what psychologists call the “Principle of Adaptation.” We get used to life’s status quo very quickly, and crave improvement as a source of happiness. This is why we get the most pleasure from a pay raise not when it shows up in our paychecks, but rather when we find out we’re going to get it. Lots of people forget that we are the most prosperous, free nation in the world. Americans are accustomed to feeling safe in their homes, being able to express their political opinions without being arrested, and finding food in the supermarket. Some politicians can and do degrade the importance of these things and convince us that we are unhappy—and only significant change will make things right.

Posted in Books & Music, Editor's Choice, Front Page, Interview | 44 Comments »

The managers of an online bookstore I have patronized in the past sent me an email announcing that they are going on a march to end world hunger. They’ve invited me to contribute to the cause. I was struck by how folks who are surrounded by books on history and economics can still come to the conclusion that people are starving in the Third World because nobody has thought to mail them a box of beef jerky.

It’s a coincidence of factors, I suppose: inadequate economics understanding, a bumper-sticker mentality, an overindulged democratic sense that leads perfectly rational Westerners to think that the world can be made better by their collectively saying: “Boo, bad things.” I’m inclined to blame John Lennon’s insipid song.

The reality is that people are hungry because they live under governments that undermine entrepreneurial initiative at every turn, that confiscate property, that wage war internally and externally, that are composed of inveterate thugs. March all you want against hunger, ship as many crates of cereal as you like, it won’t be enough.

It doesn’t help that our foreign aid often serves to prop up the very regimes that are the problem. Or that U.S. agribusiness has such a chokehold on our politics that we restrict food imports from Third World farmers, while at the same time depressing their home markets by dumping our surplus food on them. Not to mention the other business opportunities we deny the poor by highly taxing imports of their clothing and other goods. The data are clear that international trade tends to help the impoverished, yet politicians and their supporters on both sides in this country are indifferent to that fact. They care about votes, and making sure that our producers are protected from competition.

Which has worked wonders for the U.S. auto companies, hasn’t it?

So as I think about how the deluge of campaign mail is about to begin in earnest from both parties, I can only think: a pox on both your houses. Politicians from each party pay lip service to helping the international poor, and compete to see who will allocate more pennies to the losing cause of funding them out of poverty, but the reality is that all we who have cheered import restrictions, or short-sighted realpolitik aid to the thugocracies which from time to time we convince ourselves are in our best interest to support, have contributed to this problem we call Global Hunger.

And the truth is that we are too selfish to fix it. So let’s just march instead.

Posted in Editor's Choice, Front Page, The World | 13 Comments »

Since many college students define “evangelical” as “anti-homosexual,” it’s worth noting “The Washington Declaration of Evangelical Identity and Public Commitment” that a bunch of evangelicals signed last week. This Manifesto stresses “the Evangelical message, ‘good news’ by definition, is overwhelmingly positive, and always positive before it is negative…. Just as Jesus did, Evangelicals sometimes have to make strong judgments about what is false, unjust, and evil. But first and foremost, Evangelicals are for Someone and for something rather than against anyone or anything.”

The declaration, developed by evangelicals including Rick Warren and Os Guinness, opposes both “liberal revisionism and conservative fundamentalism.” Liberals “have tended to accommodate the world… to the point where they are unfaithful to Christ; whereas those more conservative tended so to defy the world that they resist it in ways that also become unfaithful to Christ.”

Theological liberals, the declaration contends, typically have “an exaggerated estimate of human capacities, a shallow view of evil, an inadequate view of truth, and a deficient view of God. In the end they are sometimes no longer recognizably Christian.” But the declaration also accurately criticizes the tendency of fundamentalism “to romanticize the past, some now-lost moment in time, and to radicalize the present, with styles of reaction that are personally and publicly militant to the point where they are sub-Christian or worse.” What’s important to remember: “The Gospel of Jesus is the Good News of welcome, forgiveness, grace, and liberation from law and legalism.”

What does all of this mean for public policy? “We cannot back away from our biblically rooted commitment to the sanctity of every human life, including those unborn, nor can we deny the holiness of marriage as instituted by God between one man and one woman.” At the same time, “we must follow the model of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, engaging the global giants of conflict, racism, corruption, poverty, pandemic diseases, illiteracy, ignorance, and spiritual emphasis.”

The declaration also calls for neither a Christian America nor a secularized one, neither a sacred nor a naked public square, but rather “a civil public square – a vision of public life in which citizens of all faiths are free to enter and engage the public square on the basis of their faith, but within a framework of what is agreed to be just and free for other faiths too. Thus every right we assert for ourselves is at once a right we defend for others. A right for a Christian is a right for a Jew, and a right for a secularist, and a right for a Mormon, and a right for a Muslim, and a right for a Scientologist, and a right for all the believers in all the faiths across this wide land.”

The declaration’s bottom line: “We should neither privatize nor politicize faith; the church should be identified neither with the religious right nor the religious left.” In contrast with “being unquestioning conservatives and unreserved supporters of tradition and the status quo, being Evangelical means an ongoing commitment to Jesus Christ, and this entails innovation, renewal, reformation, and entrepreneurial dynamism…. Evangelicals part company with reactionaries by being both reforming and innovative, but they also part company with modern progressives by challenging the ideal of the-newer-the-truer and the-latest-is-greatest by conserving what is true and right and good.”

Posted in Editor's Choice, Front Page, The Nation | 65 Comments »

Controversy-laden Canadian pastor Gretta Vosper’s Christ-less Christian theology—in vogue now after the release of her new book espousing it—has met with endless mockery, but not everyone is convinced it’s a trivial matter serious believers should dismiss like a “freakshow,” as Beliefnet’s Rod Dreher calls it.

“Protestantism evolves with every generation,” laments one concerned blogger, Jesse Cone, an Orthodox. “It has already begun to morph into more subtle forms of this monstrosity. This in turn has left thoughtful Protestants with a choice—and it was this pushed me towards Orthodoxy—do I succumb to ‘popular monotheism’ or find a tradition that is stable? Is it about community or Christ?”

Vosper’s Christianity, after all, only differs from Moralistic Therapeutic Deism in terminology—meaning it’s a sort of next step (the final step?) in a progression to build up a church without “a god,” Jesus, any traditions or catechism or moral absolutes. It’s already common among American youth; 61 percent of respondents to this 2007 LifeWay Research survey said the God of the Bible is “no different from the gods or spiritual beings” of other world religions.

In an interview with Canada’s National Post, David Giuliano, who heads up Vosper’s United Church of Canada, considered Canada’s most liberal mainline denomination, said if he were her, he would’ve left the ministry. Predictably, though, he told the paper “it is not his job to condemn,” adding the church “is structured in such a way that complaints have to come from the congregation.” So far, no congregant has complained. (Giuliano did make sure the Post understood he thought the word “Christian”—one that “carries the baggage of colonialism and other ills”—should “probably be phased out” in favor of “Follower of the Way” or “Follower of Jesus.”)

Defending her pro-church stance, Vosper says sticking with one “is extremely important because it can be a transformative element in individuals’ lives and communities”—a role nonspecific to Christianity, played by every religion, including the Church of Oprah, the satirical term for the religious mishmash Oprah embraced after leaving Trinity United Church of Christ (yes, that Trinity) more than two decades ago.

In Vosper’s With or Without God, which was “officially launched” this week, she dismisses Jesus as a “Middle Eastern peasant with a few charismatic gifts and a great posthumous marketing team.” Vosper likewise puts zero stock in the Virgin Birth, the necessity of sacraments or creeds, the veracity of any of the miracles or—the coup de grace—that Jesus was the Son of God.

Vosper pastors West Hill United Church (Web address: simply coolplace.ca). Its tagline: “A place to find yourself.” Short of “Being the Spirit,” the church refuses to say what it believes in for fear of alienating someone. “Jesus Christ” is excised from hymns and replaced with “glorious hope.” In fact, nothing “Christian” seems to remain at all. “There is no single meaning for the word god,” Vosper writes at her blog. “In other words, what do you mean when you ask me if I believe in god? Without knowing what you mean by that word, I simply can’t answer you.”

New York ran a feature in April on the growing squabble among atheists over whether they need to bond communally in order to have the strength and clout of a “church.” Vosper’s gospel must indeed be good news to them.

Posted in Editor's Choice, Front Page, The World | 302 Comments »

Editor’s note: Larsen, a Wheaton professor, writes here about a college controversy that’s getting national attention — and distortion, he says, with various media outlets charging that a new inquisition is arising. WOW will welcome a counterpoint from Professor Kent Gramm.

There is no reason why you should know about a faculty member leaving Wheaton College (Wheaton, Illinois), so, in case you did not happen to see the front page story in the Chicago Sun-Times, or the one of the cover of the Metro section of the Chicago Tribune, or the national coverage by ABC or Fox news—not to mention the numerous other media outlets that carried the story—here is a quick recap. Wheaton is an evangelical school at which all employees sign annually a “Community Covenant” in which they agree to pursue a way of life consistent with biblical Christianity as understood and articulated in it. Kent Gramm, a long-serving professor of English, resigned because he did not want to have a conversation about his divorce with the administration. He explained to the Tribune, “I think it’s wrong to have to discuss your personal life with your employer.”

Every year, Wheaton College hires divorced employees or retains newly divorced ones. In the six years I have taught at Wheaton this has been the case with two colleagues I consider close friends, and I don’t know how many other people as these matters are handled discreetly. (I’ve observed this firsthand by discovering in conversation that other faculty members are still not even aware of a colleague’s divorce that happened some years ago.) On the other hand, I have never known or heard of anyone, since I first joined the Wheaton community as an undergraduate in the mid-1980s until the present, who has been dismissed because of their divorce. In other words, the problem is not that Gramm is getting divorced but that he has refused to be transparent enough with the community for a discreet community leader to discover whether or not there are sinful patterns of behavior being revealed in this situation that need to be addressed.

Wheaton is the kind of deeply counter-cultural place that thinks that the whole person matters. You couldn’t be a member of a white supremacy group and teach at Wheaton, for example, however brilliant you might be in your discipline and effective as an educator. We are just uptight about racists that way. Likewise, if your spouse is divorcing you because she has finally got the courage to leave after years of emotional and physical abuse, that is the kind of thing Wheaton wants to know about. (I know personally, like, and admire Kent Gramm, and I would bet a heap of good money that there is no such thing going on in his marriage.)

The media and blogging story has been one of outrage against Wheaton as a prying, legalistic, puritanical, authoritarian institution. Watching from the inside, this situation has abounded in ironies. First, Gramm in exclusive interviews with major news organizations has defended his right to privacy – to get a quiet divorce that nobody ought to be concerned with except himself, his wife, and the readers of Sun-Times . . . He could have said that he was leaving us and it was nobody’s business why and that really would have been the end of it. In that case, I am quite confident that most members of the Wheaton community would have never even learned that he was getting divorced – it would have been handled in a truly private manner.

Which leads on to a second irony. Gramm has said that he does not want to discuss this because it would put him in a situation where he is being tacitly invited to accuse his wife. In reality, he indicates, a divorce would be better off without the finger pointing. The irony is Wheaton College already has a no-fault divorce policy. You can walk away from our Community Covenant at any time with no questions asked. You can just say, “none of your business,” about anything, and leave this covenant relationship instantly. Instead of pursuing this discreet, no-fault option, however, after a twenty-year covenantal relationship with Wheaton, Gramm has decided to start the blame game and accuse Wheaton of being the unreasonable partner. This relationship could have ended with a lot more class, but instead Gramm’s use of the media has dragged his long-term partner’s name through the mud.

This spills into a third irony regarding the outrage over Wheaton’s policy in the general media and blogging world. It has been loudly said hither and yon that Wheaton should not be allowed to have such a policy because marriage should be a purely private matter. Anything can happen in someone’s marriage—however cruel, unjust or despicable—and the key thing to keep in mind is that this is none of your business. On the other hand, the media coverage indicates, Wheaton’s voluntary covenant community is a kind of relationship that is so unseemly that the cops need to burst in and shut in down. It is not enough that right-thinking people would never choose to join such a community themselves: society should not even allow consenting adults to have such relationships. As one blogger has put it, “Shouldn’t common sense, or more importantly the law, prevail? If this is legal, then the law is an ass.”

The final irony centers around the issue of hypocrisy. The fact that evangelical Christians are hypocrites is so axiomatic that this card is played in a damned if you do, damned if you don’t sort of way. The classic hypocrite is the one who preaches one thing but does another. If a conservative Christian minister is found to be engaging in behavior which violates traditional Christian standards you can bet the media and the bloggers won’t say that it is happening in their private life and therefore is none of our business. (For example, I don’t recall a chorus of media and blogger voices saying that Ted Haggard was a good preacher and that this professional competence is all that should matter and we and his church employer should not be prying into his private life.) On the other hand, if Christians themselves do enforce their standards rather than break them this somehow also means that they are hypocrites. The blogs are filled with the knowing comment that, according to conservative Christian theology, everyone is a sinner so, ipso facto, the line must be being drawn arbitrarily and therefore should not be drawn at all (as if Christian organizations should not try to weed out spouse-beaters because they can’t successfully enforce a zero-tolerance policy on vanity.)

Well, what’s a Wheatie to do in response to all this? I suppose try, by God’s grace, to live by the Community Covenant. What does it say again?

According to the Scriptures, followers of Jesus Christ will:

Show evidence of the Holy Spirit who lives within them, such as “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Gal. 5:22);

“Put on” compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forgiveness, and supremely, love (Col. 3:12-14) . . .

Help us all, O Lord. Amen.

Timothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois. His most recent books are Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford University Press) and The Cambridge Companion to Evangelical Theology (Cambridge University Press).

Posted in Editor's Choice, Front Page, The Nation | 221 Comments »

Eighty evangelical leaders are signing an “Evangelical Manifesto” that rebukes both liberal and conservative evangelicals for diminishing the Gospel to fight the culture wars, becoming “‘useful idiots’ for one political party or another.” It encourages political engagement, but it says evangelicals have sometimes spoken “truth without love” and it calls on evangelicals to “reform our own behavior.”

The document is embargoed until Wednesday, so most of the discussion centers on who is involved in writing and signing the manifesto.

Warner Todd Huston calls the manifesto “another attempt by the political left to undermine the devotion of Christians to the political right,” and asks why the project “studiously excluded so many prominent conservative Christians.”

Warren Cole Smith says the document has both virtues and flaws, but he also questions the list of people who either haven’t signed or say they weren’t included in the process: Gary Bauer, Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, Southern Baptist Convention’s Richard Land, Michael Farris, and Concerned Women for America’s Wendy Wright.

But FundamentaList’s Sarah Posner points out that it’s unlikely that some of the most dedicated culture warriors would want to sign a document clearly criticizing some of their tactics: “The list of names Smith claims were excluded represents the generals who issue the orders to the foot soldiers in the religious right’s politicized culture war.”

The list of participants isn’t easily boxed, either. Rick Warren is a Southern Baptist pastor who is hard to categorize politically. For instance, some religious right leaders criticized him for inviting Barack Obama to speak at his church’s annual AIDS conference, but Democrats criticized him for inviting four Republicans and only one Democrat to speak at the same conference.

Several others – at least the few whose names are public — aren’t primarily political figures. Os Guinness is an academic and author. So are Richard Mouw, the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, and Timothy George, founding dean of Beeson Divinity School.

Posted in Editor's Choice, Front Page, The Nation | 101 Comments »

“Then the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed” (John 20:6-9).

If you skimmed that verse quickly you missed the great philosophical debate of the next two thousand years of Western civilization: what constitutes “evidence”?

Let’s have an instant replay of the scene: It’s dawn and two men are racing. John outruns Peter (perhaps he is younger) and reaches the crypt first; he does not enter. Peter arrives second and, being Peter, barges in. He takes in the following brute data at a glance: linen cloths lying; Jesus’ head-covering apart from the linens, folded up. No body. (A reporter would have scribbled notes, perhaps looked for signs of struggle, foul play, forced entry.)

John crossed the threshold second. We are told he “also went in, and saw and believed.”

You might think, “Wait! Wait! John is skipping too many steps! What about this possibility, and that possibility?” And you proffer a dozen theories to explain the missing corpse, and each generation after you generates a dozen more.

When I was on the threshold of becoming a Christian, in the early 70s, pestering Christians with objection after objection, a patient man named John finally said calmly: “You know, Andrée, there comes a point where you have to stop accumulating evidence and decide.”

Of making many books there is no end. In the final analysis, there is this: the linen cloth neatly folded, the empty tomb, and your choice.

Posted in Editor's Choice, Front Page, The World | 263 Comments »

In his now infamous remarks at the National Press Club, Rev. Jeremiah Wright said to applause from black leaders, “This most recent attack on the black church is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright; it is an attack on the black church.”

He went on to say, “It is our hope that this just might mean that the reality of the African-American church will no longer be invisible. …. Maybe that religious tradition will be understood, celebrated, and even embraced by a nation that seems not to have noticed why 11 o’clock on Sunday morning has been called the most segregated hour in America.”

He was right about a few things: American churches are still segregated and until now, many white Christians were ignorant of black liberation theology. But just how mainstream are Wright’s views?

In the Globe and Mail, Michael Valpy says Americans are finally realizing the scope of black liberation theology, calling Wright “not a radical kook but a mainstream voice” and adding, “There are a lot of Jeremiah Wrights across their land.”

Other accounts paint a more complicated picture. God-o-Meter and The New Republic note that Wright’s church is more liberal and socially progressive than many black churches. NPR quotes another Church of Christ pastor in agreement with Wright: “”It is an attack on the black church — to muzzle us to silence the preaching and the power of that form of teaching and preaching and action in the world.”

But a Pentecostal pastor disagrees: “Jeremiah Wright is not mainstream. … He doesn’t represent the majority. … My guess is maybe 25 percent of black pastors may hold that view.” Another pastor told Bloomberg.com that Wright’s comments “were just totally ridiculous and do not reflect mainstream thought in the African-American community.” A Chicago pastor said Wright has done good in the Chicago community, but he’s a “very militant minister” who “took advantage of the big stage.”

The Associated Press finds pastors divided between their admiration of Obama and Wright and their disapproval of the way they handled the disagreement. The New York Times says parishioners are less likely to defend Wright than their pastors. Bloomberg.com quotes one of Wright’s ex-parishioners saying he partly agrees with Wright, but that Wright doesn’t represent the black church: “I feel like he’s trying to be a spokesperson for the black Christians, but we don’t want different races to look at us through Jeremiah Wright.”

Posted in Campaign 2008, Editor's Choice, Front Page, The Nation | 29 Comments »