Less than the Least

Thanks to Crazy for God, a new tell-all memoir by his son Frank, Francis Schaeffer is back in the news in evangelical circles. Twenty-four years after his death, the height of his fame has long since passed, but Schaeffer had an incalculable influence on the contemporary evangelical mind.

In 1955, Schaeffer and his wife Edith founded the Christian retreat center L’Abri in Switzerland. Schaeffer, a Presbyterian minister, took all comers, engaging college students, dropouts, and others in debates about the meaning of life.

One of the more interesting things I learned (thanks to Vanderbilt Earth & Environmental Sciences professor Jonathan Gilligan) at a very interesting conference on consumption and climate change at Vanderbilt Law School this weekend was a tidbit from Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign. In an NPR interview, Huckabee argued that creationists should be more concerned about the environment than Darwinists. For a Darwinist, Huckabee reasoned, there's no reason to fear global warming because it can be seen as the planet's natural adaptation to industrial civilization, whereas he sees the earth as God's creation---something we hold in stewardship and which is not ours to deface.

Equally interesting was a finding by Columbia sociologist Dana Fisher that more than 75% percent of environmental activists have college degrees, and more than 33% of them have advanced degrees, percentages much higher than among antiwar demonstrators and other protest groups. (Fisher’s website, with links to her work on activism, is here). These two data points seem to me to nicely illustrate both the likely growth of evangelical environmentalism, and its likely limits.

Three follow-up comments about evangelicals and climate change, inspired in large part by the comments to the earlier post:

1) Perhaps the biggest point of disagreement among evangelicals, which shows up in spades in the comments, can be traced to differing perceptions of the implications of accepting scientists’ warnings about climate change. For skeptics, the science is a Trojan horse paving the way for massive governmental intervention. Most envangelical environmentalists seem less worried that socialism is right around the corner. Mike Vandenbergh, a leading environmental law scholar and co-organizer of the Vanderbilt conference mentioned in the earlier post, pointed out to me that the divide among evangelicals echoes a fault-line among Americans generally: work by Dan Kahan at Yale suggests that people’s perception of the importance of climate change is closely tied to whether they think the societal response will be more governmental regulation. Those who believe that accepting the science is likely to mean lots more regulation are much less likely to credit the science.

The response to “An Evangelical Manifesto”-- which was released a week ago, with the endorsement of many prominent evangelicals, and is designed to “address the confusions and corruptions that attend the term Evangelical in the United States” and to describe the proper role of evangelicals in public life– seems to be a collective yawn. There have been yawns in the media (see Alan Jacobs’ excellent Wall Street Journal op-ed) and everyone I have queried personally has responded with an electronic yawn. But is everyone yawning for the same reason? I don’t think they are.

Many of those who would not call themselves evangelicals are likely to read the manifesto, if they do read it, to try to understand just who evangelicals are. The most obvious ways to define evangelical would be to develop a single theological definition that includes most of this jelly-like group, to attempt to identify the major subgroups of evangelicals, or both. “An Evangelical Manifesto” seems to adopt the first approach, providing a list of seven beliefs that evangelicals hold. Seven is already a bit on the cumbersome side– the best known definition, which is discussed in the first footnote of this article, has four.

“So, whatever happened to immigration as a presidential campaign issue?,” Wall Street Journal editor Jason Riley asked in an interesting op-ed last week. He speculates that the candidates have been avoiding it because Americans are “basically pro-immigrant but conflicted about it,” and goes on to suggest that one reason many social conservatives want to seal the border is in reaction to multiculturalists who have attacked the traditional American ideal of assimilation.

The conventional wisdom about immigration is that it doesn’t decide elections, and I think the conventional wisdom will hold true this year, in part because Americans are conflicted generally, and in part because of the sharply opposed views of several of the particular constituencies McCain and Obama will be fighting over.

David Brooks argued in his column yesterday that traditional norms of thrift and frugality have been displaced in America by norms that “encourage debt and living for the moment.” Among the causes of this shift, he blames state governments’ promotion of the lottery, pay day lenders, credit card companies, and Congress’s own profligacy with debt. The column is well worth reading, as is the think tank report he discusses, “For a New Thrift: Confronting the Debt Culture.”

Two thoughts on these issues:

1) Gambling and Risky Debt. It seems to me that the state lawmakers’ aggressive promotion of lottery play, and the culture that creates, makes it much harder than it should be to criticize borrowers who gambled on subprime mortgages in recent years. The states themselves have been sending a message that rolling the dice is a good thing. (In a notorious New York ad from a few years ago, a mother poked fun at her hardworking daughter, saying there’s no need to study because the mother had bought lottery tickets).

Will the pernicious effect of gambling on financial responsibility be a big campaign issue this summer and fall? Not likely.

I agree completely with Bill’s comments about (non) bias against evangelicals in the university. My own experience is very similar. Like Bill, I’ve always been up front about my faith, and it has never hurt me in any discernible way at the law schools I’ve been associated with (Penn and Temple on a full-time basis, three others as a visiting professor). To the contrary, I’ve often gotten the impression that my being an evangelical is viewed positively, as a source of diversity.

I have only one caveat to add. Christian scholars (not just an evangelicals but Catholics and main line Protestants as well) seem to have more difficulty persuading top law reviews to publish work that they write from an identifiably Christian perspective, than work that looks more like traditional scholarship. I suspect that there may be a similar dynamic on many tenure committees: scholarship from a Christian perspective doesn’t carry quite as much weight as scholarship that looks more like the other, secular scholarship in the scholar’s field. This doesn’t necessarily reflect any bias: it may be the scholarship is simply unfamiliar or seems hard to evaluate. But when young evangelical scholars ask me for advice about faith and scholarship, I encourage them to write both kinds of scholarship: some scholarship from an explicitly Christian perspective, but also more traditional scholarship that directly engages the best secular scholarship in their field on its own terms.

Judge McConnell, the former law professor and leading First Amendment scholar who is now a judge on the Tenth Circuit, issued a potentially important religious liberty case yesterday. As described by Rick Garnett over at Mirror of Justice, the court ruled “that Colorado violated the Constitution when it refused, on the ground that the school is "pervasively sectarian", to permit otherwise-qualified students to use publicly funded scholarships at Colorado Christian University.” (Link to Mirror of Justice here, and to the case here).

I haven’t read the case yet (that’s on the to-do list for today), but the facts may be an important test of the Supreme Court’s skepticism in recent years of rules that exclude religious groups or schools from benefits that are broadly available to other groups, and of the one case (Locke v. Davey) running against this trend. More on this soon.

Judge McConnell’s opinion in the case involving Colorado’s denial of Colorado Christian University’s request to participate in the state’s scholarship program because the university is “pervasively sectarian” seems completely persuasive as an application of the Supreme Court’s recent First Amendment Religion Clause decisions. (The case is linked to yesterday’s post: here). Judge McConnell points out that the exclusion of pervasively sectarian institutions both discriminates among religions (sectarian institutions qualify, but not pervasively sectarian ones) and requires the state to pass judgment on religious belief and practice.

My one qualm about the decision is really a qualm about the path the Supreme Court has taken in these cases over the past decade or so. It seems to leave no room for state institutions to distinguish among potential recipients when deciding who to fund or not fund. The usual test case is an organization like, say Ku Klux Klan University, which might be difficult to deny funding to on some readings of the analysis in cases like this one.

Last week I finished reviewing the coverage of environmental issues in Christianity Today over the past forty years (for an article described in this post), and in Sunday school heard a discussion of Christ’s warning at the end of the Lord’s Prayer that “if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” (Matthew 6:14) Forgiveness and evangelicals’ stance toward environmentalism don’t seem to have a great deal in common. I wonder if perhaps they should.

I suspect I'm not the only one who feels vaguely guilty when I'm not thinking about or talking about or trying in some small, inept way to do something about the financial crisis. Everything else seems secondary. How can we go about our ordinary lives in a time like this?

Some of the most helpful answers I've heard come, as is so often the case, from C.S. Lewis. Speaking to university students at the height of World War II in an essay called "Learning in War-Time," he asked how they could continue studying "when the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe are in the balance?" Lewis points out that, because times are never truly "normal," if we took the assumption that we should stop our ordinary activities when things are amiss to its logical conclusion, we would never engage in ordinary activities.

He then argues that the seemingly frivolous activities in which we engage are part of what makes us different from animals: people "propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache: it is our nature."

A month ago, 33 pastors around the country preached sermons that overtly endorsed a candidate (usually John McCain) as part of Pulpit Freedom Sunday and the Pulpit Initiative organized by Alliance Defense Fund, a prominent Christian legal fund. The Pulpit Initiative is designed to challenge a tax law that takes away nonprofit status if a church or other nonprofit organization endorses a political candidate. (Here's a link to an article about the challenge).

My biggest question is why challenge this law, and why now? This is very much an evangelical initiative, but the evangelical churches I'm familiar with rarely if ever talk about the merits or demerits of particular political candidates. When I first heard about the initiative, I wondered if it might designed less to protect white Protestant churches than to force the IRS to investigate black churches, which historically have mixed politics and religion much more freely. But from what I know about the Alliance Defense Fund, I can't imagine this was their motivation.

            A few weeks ago, I was struck by a line in Abraham Kuyper's "Lectures on Calvinism" (1898), one of the great (and accessible!) modern Protestant works on politics and law.   In a world without sin, Kuyper wrote, "every rule and ordinance and law would drop away, even as all control and assertion of the power of the magistrate would disappear."  Heaven, he suggests, is no place for law or lawyers.

            We lawyers come in for a lot of abuse, much of it justified, but I'm not so sure our work will disappear in heaven.  The conclusion that law and thus lawyers will be unnecessary seems to assume that in heaven we will be all seeing and all knowing, and all complexity will simply disappear.  I'm not sure where that assumption comes from; it doesn't seem especially consistent with the hints of heaven, with all its richness and diversity, that we get in the Bible.  The absence of sin doesn't necessarily mean the absence of complexity, and where there is complexity law and lawyers seem to have a role to play.

            I don't think it's entirely coincidental that the Holy Spirit is described in the Bible as an advocate and a counselor, both distinctively lawyerly roles.  The lawyers in heaven will be much better lawyers, but I suspect they will still be dispensing legal advice.

            I'd be curious as to whether others agree.

David is right:  Father Neuhaus was indeed one of a kind, and also a deeply admirable man.  He was the happy warrior of the culture wars:  eager to mix it up with those with whom he disagreed, but always with respect.  There seems to have been no anger or spite in him—a rare thing among those engaged in hot-button cultural debates.

Neuhaus embodied one of the most important developments of our time, and also one of the most surprising:  the hold conservative Catholics have on the political and legal views of conservative Protestants.  Though he converted in middle age (he was a Lutheran minister when he became a public figure), Neuhaus was every inch a Catholic.  Yet his work—both in his books and in First Things, the magazine he ran—attracted a wide and attentive audience among Protestants.  I feel confident saying that Neuhaus was far more influential in evangelical Protestant circles than figures like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, or James Dobson.

Great as his influence was, the trend was the work of more than this one man.  The most admired legal intellectual in evangelical circles is Antonin Scalia, a conservative Catholic.  Catholic academics have spawned large and sophisticated bodies of work on the role Christian faith does and should play in law, politics, and culture.  Of course, Protestant academics work in these areas too, and some of them—Mark Noll, Alvin Plantinga, and Nicholas Wolterstorff come to mind—are every bit as smart and knowledgeable as their Catholic counterparts.  Just as Michael McConnell, longtime law professor and judge on the 10^th Circuit, can match wits with anyone in wide world of legal thought.  But the Nolls and McConnells are few; their Catholic equivalents are many.  Much as Father Neuhaus will be missed, his death does not alter that state of affairs.

At one level, the Catholic influence in Protestant circles has been a source of great good:  there is more unity across denominational lines than perhaps at any time in American history.  But there is a downside.  Today’s American Protestants are optimistic about the potential for politics and law to move the culture in positive directions.  That has led to the too-casual embrace of Republican party orthodoxy by many believers.  (I say this as a registered Republican: I’m part of the problem, not part of the solution.)  Likewise, American Protestants of my generation have placed more weight on cultural symbols—crosses and crèches in public spaces, prayers at public school graduations and sporting events, the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance—than our predecessors in generations past.  Battles over those symbols have absorbed too much of Christians’ political attention, and a host of other problems too little.

Father Neuhaus was a large part of the reason for those intellectual tilts—his thought was shaped by a religious tradition that found the exercise of government power more comfortable and Christian symbols more important than most Protestant traditions would suggest.  Maybe Neuhaus and the tradition that shaped his legal and political views got these issues right.  If so, the increasingly blurred line between Catholicism and Protestantism we see today is an unmitigated blessing.  If not—well, suffice it say that some of us often find ourselves wishing that a more distinctively Protestant voice might emerge in the ongoing conversation about the role of Christian faith in American life.

Ever since Ronald Reagan first banned funding to international organizations that promote or provide abortions in developing countries and elsewhere in 1984, this executive order has been the most visible culture wars prize of our presidential elections. Like many culture wars battlegrounds, it has heavy symbolic significance. Unlike many, it also has significant real world consequences.

My wife asked me if I felt as though I’d been kicked in the stomach, as she did, when I heard that President Obama had rescinded the order (which had been reinstated by Bush after having been removed by Clinton) yesterday. I didn’t, since there was never any doubt that this would be one of Obama’s first actions if he was elected.

For me at least, President Obama’s order didn’t bring a kick in the stomach so much as a seeping sense of sadness. Obama softened the effect slightly by waiting until the day after the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, rather than trumpeting it on the anniversary. But the fact is that our government will be funding organizations that facilitate the deaths of unborn children in other countries. The order wasn’t unexpected, but that doesn’t make it less saddening.

That Sam Harris, one of the leading “new atheists,” criticized the president’s nomination of Francis Collins, a professed Christian, to serve as director of the National Institutes of Health in this New York Times op-ed yesterday was hardly news. But I found the column interesting in several respects. 

I happened to be reading the transcript of the 1925 Scopes (“Monkey”) trial the other evening, then woke up to front page pictures of Ardi, who was described “a 4.4 million-year-old human forbear.” Scopes and Ardi prompted a swirl of competing thoughts and emotions, but two thoughts stood out.

At a law and religion conference at Seton Hall’s law school yesterday, Rob Vischer, a law professor at St. Thomas, gave a fascinating talk that touched on the debate over religious exemptions—the question whether religiously oriented individuals and businesses should be protected from discrimination claims. This issue arose when a photo shop was sued for refusing to provide photography services at a gay wedding, and in cases challenging pharmacists’ refusal to dispense birth control or abortion pills. Vischer argues that the cases should focus less on the parties’ competing claims of conscience than on whether the declinations genuinely interfere with the plaintiffs’ access to these services (in many of these cases, they don’t). Among other things, such a shift might better protect the ability of businesses and other associations to govern themselves as they see fit.