Sacred Selling

I have been thinking a lot about the way we sell church-related goods and services.

I have been thinking about that and about Jesus overturning the tables of the money changers and sacrificial animal sellers in the temple.

The marketing inside the church has probably never been more feverish than it is today.  Hollywood hires savvy Christian marketers to try to gin up interest in certain films among our demographic.  We trademark little phrases for sale to Christians.  I recently heard an acquaintance excitedly describe a system for integrating Prayer and Your Priorities.  I shall not share the catchy name for this system so as to avoid smearing the person working on it.  This results in a marketing platform for an inspirational book, a devotional, a daily planner for the system, calendars, sticky notes, etc.    I imagine it will prove attractive for some Christian publishing house.

My question, though, is whether this is a wholesome thing for the church.  As the author of a book, though not a super consumer-oriented one, I think about it all the time.  For example, if called upon to preach at a local church, should I take along a box of books to sell at the end of the service?  Should I even mention the book?  Should I ask whoever introduces me to mention the book?  Should we sell ANYTHING in the church?

The question is not as easy as it may appear.  For example, the market instincts of new publishers spread Martin Luther’s work to a large audience.  Without the printing press, Luther probably would have died as just another dissenter.  Marketing and the honest profit motive are surely reasons why the Bible is as incredibly widely available as it is.

But the question remains.  How far do we go in making a profit from the gospel of Jesus Christ?  I don’t have a good answer.

Kind Words from a Respected Colleague

We held a book signing at the university recently and a former dean bought my book.  He sent me an email last night that meant as much to me as any endorsement so far.  Here it is:

 

Hunter:

I have read your book and come away from the experience with two points of praise and one regret.  The style is masterful and the logic is persuasive.  It is the clearest exposition I have read of what secularism is, where and how it originated, and what constitutes its inherent limitations.  It is a work I shall revisit.  I admire your ability to address divisive issues with a clear command of your rhetorical tools.  This is no small feat in an age given much more to heat than light.

My regret is related to the excellence of your work: I am sorry it was not available when I wrote [title withheld by me to protect his identity].  Had I known the work, I would have shifted some of my positions, particularly regarding the Reformation.  Since I used to teach courses in the Enlightenment, I feel more sure of myself there and may be guilty of attributing things to the eighteenth century that more properly have their roots in the Reformers.

Now that I have had the pleasure of reading your work, may I impose on you the penance of reading mine?  I’ll send you a copy unless you tell me otherwise.

Congratulations, Hunter.  I am sure you will go on to write many other notable works.

I must confess I feel a special pride in seeing a fellow Morgan Countian [Editorial comment: It turns out he and I come from the same county in Alabama] produce such an impressive book!

God bless you and yours . . .

 

 

Ken Myers and Two Kingdom Theory

Over at Justin Taylor’s blog, he offers a transcribed interview conducted with Ken Myers of the great Mars Hill Audio.  I want to talk about this part:

Question: One of the arguments out there by what I am going to call a “high two-kingdoms view,” is that there is not a distinctively Christian way of doing “X” vocation, even that we should resist that because that would be to mix the kingdoms, and if you were to, for example (this would be the anti-Abraham Kuyper position), be a politician, your Christian thought should not come in. Could you interact with that a little?

Myers: First of all I would agree…I am a believer in natural law. Let me put it this way. Let me say for the sake of the argument that I’ll agree with that, there isn’t a distinctively Christian view of politics and art, or anything. But there is a distinctively human view; that is there are de-humanizing possibilities in those spheres; Christians we are necessarily humanists. That is, Christians are necessarily interested in sustaining the best for human beings as human beings.

What I take issue with, and not in a pugnacious way, is the statement that “there isn’t a distinctively Christian view of politics.”  I feel quite certain there is such a thing.  Contrast, for example, some of the Christian socio-political values that took the place of their Greco-Roman predecessors.  Mercy becomes desirable rather than contemptible.  The church becomes a brake upon the state’s unrighteousness rather than a servant of it (thinking Ambrose and Theodosius here).  The exposure of unwanted children to the elements and wild beasts goes way, way out of style.  The gladiator games cease.  Constantine closes the courts on Sunday unless there is a slave to be set free.  He ends the practice of branding criminals’ faces.  We could go on.  A Christian politics is a distinctive thing.  I suspect we think it is not only because of the degree to which the world now accepts many of those ideas and values as the correct ones.

Thoughts on Secularism and Poverty

A colleague recently mentioned that a wag had observed the church had failed to solve poverty, so why not let the federal government have a try?

I think it is interesting that anyone, such as the wag in question, could think that the federal government can effectively solve the problem of poverty. I don’t think it can because it resolutely refuses to confront the sources.

Really, truly, don’t we know the cause of a great deal of the poverty in our midst? Here’s a hint: Adam Smith thought the poor who gravitated to the fiery preachers were wise. Why? Because the hell and brimstoners alone preached the doctrines that might prevent the poor from the catastrophic consequences of things like losing their jobs and money on liquor and gambling.

I can recall having lunch with Micah Watson, a colleague who teaches at Union, and he was talking about the trouble Jackson, TN has with some of its public schools. He said something that stuck. He said, “Many families in our school district lack the cultural capital to succeed.”

And he is right. Anyone who looks at the research in a dispassionate way will discover that people who do just a few things will almost never live in poverty. Those few things are that they will graduate from high school, get married, and delay childbearing until after marriage. If you do that, you will probably not spend your life below the poverty line.

Going a little further you will also find that children who come from intact, two parent families are significantly more likely to do better in school, to have fewer behavioral problems, to commit fewer crimes, to stay out of jail, to avoid sexual and physical abuse, and to stay off of public assistance than are their peers from broken homes or from single parent homes. These things are true even if you control for race.

For some reason, and I would argue that it is partially because of our silly secular mindset that favors avoiding moralism, we are unwilling to embody some of this knowledge in our public policy. When President Bush suggested that maybe we just might consider trying to encourage marriage among the poor, protest erupted. It was the same old thing, theocracy, blah, blah, blah . . . For some reason the morality that extends welfare to poor people is perfectly fine while the morality that would gently urge them toward the things that help human beings flourish is threatening and terrible and ultra-religious.

Does the church do enough? It does not, but I would argue that in part we fail to combat the problem of poverty adequately in the church because we think the duty has been subcontracted out to the state. The larger the state becomes, the less air is left in the community space for everyone else, especially the church because we buy into the idea of a secular state. (This is a point I talk about, by the way, in The End of Secularism.) The state eats up both resources and social influence. The system does not realize it has a soul, or if it does it is busy trying to kill it.

Machiavelli, the Prince, and the Tradition of Liberty

Machiavelli’s succinct and semi-diabolical advice to the prince is one of the most enduring works of political philosophy in the world. This man, writing in a time roughly contemporaneous with the Reformation, was less concerned with seeking the will of God than with winning at all costs. I wrote about him in my book The End of Secularism.

He is famous for advising the prince that it is important to appear honest, humane, religious, faithful, and charitable, but that it is equally important the prince be ready to abandon any of those attributes when opportunity presents itself. The prince should not worry about whether he will gain a bad reputation for deception, because, as Machiavelli suggests, there are always ordinary people willing to be deceived and the world is FULL of ordinary people.

The primary thrust of the book is advice about how to gain principalities and to maintain control of them. Many things work to a prince’s advantage, such as traditions of servitude and customs that reinforce the reign of a prince. But there is one thing that puts sand in the princely engine and grinds things to a halt. That thing is a tradition of liberty. If a people are accustomed to liberty, Machiavelli writes, then they will never stop trying to regain it. Even if they haven’t had it for a hundred years, the ancestral memory of liberty will be overpoweringly strong. It may be so strong that no manipulative device of the prince will be able to defeat it and he may have no other option than to destroy such a city.

Might I suggest to you that on Tuesday night we saw Americans in New Jersey and Virginia issue notice that they are not prepared to trade their liberty for hyper-statism and that they are not ready to become Europeans, always more subservient to the state than we have been, instead of free citizens of a great republic? The tradition of liberty is one of the greatest weapons we have in this struggle.

When William F. Buckley thought about the possible triumph of the United States in the Cold War, he imagined that American children would someday be thankful that “the blood of their fathers ran strong.” Let our blood, too, run strong with the cherished memory of our past and present liberty.

Evangelicals and Fatima

Cross-posted at First Things’ Evangel blog:

As I may have mentioned earlier, I grew up with Catholics on my mother’s side and the Church of Christ on my father’s side.  Not exactly a recipe for happy relations.  For the record, the Catholics were more gracious about it.  I found the tension painful, difficult, and unnecessary and thus tried to avoid religion as a young person.

The Hound of Heaven got to me, anyway, while at college in Tallahassee, Florida.  A story for another time.

Although my parents now go to the Southern Baptist church, my mother still bears the imprint of her Catholic upbringing and relates easily on religious matters to her brothers and sisters.  I went through a period at the beginning of this century where I thought I might convert to Catholicism.  Yet, here I am, still evangelical and probably not changing, although my mentor Francis Beckwith has crossed the Tiber.

Though I feel pretty settled as an evangelical — and the Reformation is part of why I feel that way — I do not understand why something like the claimed appearance of Mary at Fatima would be so disturbing.  We are talking about a woman who, if scripture is to be believed, bore the son of God in her womb.  We embrace the thought that God does everything for a reason.  And for some reason he chose her.  There is something I am missing, probably something obvious.  Someone on this list will tell me why I should find the purported appearance of Mary more unsettling than I do.

What is it exactly that is so objectionable about the claim that she appeared to some children?  I readily admit that I am not a theologian, but am instead more of a religio-political analyst.  My many Catholic relatives may be blinding me, too.  I just don’t see it.

What I can tell you is that I went to Mother Angelica’s beautiful church in Hanceville, Alabama a few years ago with my aunt and uncle, both of whom fit the old description of being more Catholic than the pope.  (My uncle, a good and godly man, died of an agressive brain tumor earlier this year.  He was the kind of man who wrote encouraging letters to prisoners.)  I sat in that place on a wooden pew and heard cloistered nuns (out of sight behind a screen) sing the most beautiful music I have ever heard in my life.  Even now, I can feel the sensation of it, vibrating into my soul.

What grieved me at that time and in that place was not whatever feeling those people had about Mary, but that I could not take communion with them because they did not wish it so.  Though I claimed Christ, just as they did, I was a separated brethren who could not share the sacrament.

The division of the church scandalizes me, especially in the world we live in.  Part of the reason we lost as much as we did in American culture is because the Protestants worried more about “Romanism” than they did about secularism.

I wish I could see the Reformation’s end in sight, in a way that would somehow satisfy us all.

Christian Academics Doing What They Do . . .

Benjamin Wiker interviews me at To the Source.  Fun stuff.

We talked about . . .

Wait for it . . .

Secularism.

What’s an Evangelical? An Adult Convert’s View

I’ve recently joined an evangelical group blog at First Things.  Think of it as The Corner for evangelicals.  So far, things are going swimmingly.  Lots of activity.  Joe Carter started us off by asking for a definition of an evangelical.  Here’s my entry:

When I became a Christian at Florida State University at the end of the eighties, I encountered a different kind of Christian from the ones I knew as a southerner from Alabama.

Growing up, virtually everyone was some kind of churchgoer whether they were Southern Baptists, Episcopalians, Church of Christ, Catholic, etc.  But that didn’t necessarily mean anything.  It was just a default.  To me, going to church was simply something people did.  My family did it more or less often over time.  Catholics, like my mom’s family, had stained glass, candles, and statues.  The Church of Christ, like my dad’s people, worshipped in spare chapel rooms with acapella singing.  ”There is pow’r!  Pow’r!  Wonder working pow’r!”

The Christians I met at Florida State through Intervarsity were faithful and committed to a real relationship with Christ well before any denominational identity came into view.   We didn’t spend a lot of time debating differences in Christian flavors.  We talked about knowing Christ and his Lordship in our lives.  To me, it was endlessly interesting and challenging.  The first time I heard the word “evangelical” it was IVCF’s sister organization, the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES).

Over time, I began to hear the word “evangelical” more frequently.  I associated it with liking C.S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, and Wheaton College.  I ended up marrying a girl in a classic evangelical family.

To me, it just meant taking your faith seriously.

General Thoughts on Being Reviewed

It is fascinating to read what other people have to say about the book (The End of Secularism).  So far, all the reviewers seem to like it.  Some show unconditional positive regard.  Others emphasize what they like or don’t like.  It seems to hit different people different ways.

For any would be reviewers who are curious, here’s what I’d say up front.

1.  The End of Secularism is not a prediction so much as it is an argument for secularism to retire as a supposedly neutral philosophy.

2.  The book is designed to make the average reader much more aware of the complexity of the question of religion and politics.  A simplistic separation approach doesn’t really do anyone much good.

3.  The book is a critique of secularism much more than it is a proposal for a great system of Christian thought.  I’m trying to tear one house down in the effort to clear space for a new one.

4.  If you take anything away from the book, please pay attention to my arguments about the nature of science and the inadequacy of science as a basis for political thought.  To me, this was one of the places where my critique strikes the deepest.

5.  Understand the separation of church and state.  Support the separation of church and state.  DO NOT let it morph into secularism, which goes much too far.

And by the way, the talented Matt Lee Anderson has reviewed the book.  I really respect his work and have enjoyed much of what he has written.  You can see it here.  He focuses the heavy beams on my critique of secular neutrality, but I think other parts of the book are equally important, maybe more so.

Andrew Klavan Digs The End of Secularism

Andrew Klavan has been my favorite writer of thrillers for several years now and has provided some of the best reading moments I’ve ever enjoyed. His books have been made into films starring Michael Douglas and Clint Eastwood. He also happens to be a conservative who writes sympathetically about Christianity.

For all of those reasons, I asked my publisher to send him The End of Secularism.

Amazingly, he read it:

Anyone who works in the writing business will understand: I don’t have time to read books sent or lent to me unrequested. What with informational reading, professional reading and reading for my craft and spirit, even books I want to get to sometimes have to wait as long as a year.

Plus I don’t remember ever having met Hunter Baker of Houston Baptist University so I don’t know why he had his publisher send me his new book The End of Secularism. But I’m startled to report I glanced at it while laying it aside, then picked it up again, then read it through. This is a very well written, concise and learned primer on the secularization of the public square. It gives a fair recital of the arguments in favor of it, and a strong but sensible and moderate outline of the arguments against. It has a firm grasp of history and neither falls for the usual “This is a Christian country!” rhetoric that makes its way onto television nor accepts the “separation of church and state,” pieties that were rendered obsolete by the state’s aggressive intrustion into what Dr. Baker calls “the life-world,” ie. our values and private lives. It’s a book you’ll be glad you read the next time you get in an argument about religion’s role in politics.

I wish I had time to write a full review of this book in a respectable venue (as opposed to this Blog of Ill Repute!). I just don’t. But if anyone from First Things or World Magazine or even the Weekly Standard or NRO is skulking through here and sees this, I think the book is well worth discovering.

Great Review of The End of Secularism

At ReformedBooks.net. Here was the part I really liked:

In some of the most compelling parts of the book, Baker turns a scathing critique on the secularist movement itself, and in particular, its claims to take a solely neutral and scientific approach toward social and political science. If the secularists really employ the scientific method in sociology, where do they even come up with their cardinal rule of the equality of every person? Certainly not by scientifically quantifying the potential and actual achievements of each individual. In reality, they are on entirely borrowed ground. “If we are equal,” Baker wisely notes, “it is almost surely in the sense of being equal before God, because we are in fact equal in virtually no other way” (p. 177, emphasis original).

A big thank you to Nathan Pitchford for his very perceptive reading of the book.

And by the way, if you are looking for a place to buy The End of Secularism, then here it is.

The Political Double Standard for Religion

The point has been made by outstanding thinkers like Stephen Carter and Richard John Neuhaus that the New York-Washington, D.C. establishment eats up left wing religion and declares it delicious. Give a radical a cross and we have activists bravely “speaking truth to power” and “speaking prophetically.” Put the cross in the hands of a conservative and suddenly secularism is the better course and church and state must be rigorously separated lest theocracy loom every closer.

I tried to draw attention to this double standard in my new book The End of Secularism by talking about both history and current events which prove the point. Mollie Ziegler Hemingway provided an excellent example in her Houses of Worship column for the Wall Street Journal last Friday as she reminded readers about the way faith-based initiatives have been viewed in this administration and its predecessor.

Bush filled the faith-based initiatives office with a prominent Ivy League sociologist and then with a former lawyer for Mother Theresa. Obama has chosen a Pentecostal preacher in his twenties to head up the office. Barry Lynn of the Americans for the Separation of Church and State was an avid critic of the Bush office. His position today? He serves on the advisory council’s task force for the office. Strangely, his concerns about the interaction of religion and politics seem to have dissolved now that the presidency has changed hands.

As I read Ms. Hemingway’s cutting piece, I couldn’t help but think about the Swedish socialists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who were determined to destroy the tie between the nation’s church and state. Once they gained power, however, they had a change of heart. The church could prove useful under their enlightened leadership. I wonder if Barry Lynn feels the same way.

Al Kresta Interviews Me on EWTN Catholic Radio

I’ve done Al Kresta’s show before and really enjoyed the process. He is a very knowledgeable interviewer.

So, we talked about The End of Secularism. Here’s the link. I come on about five minutes in.

The Secularism of a Religious Country – Mike Potemra – The Corner on National Review Online

Mike Potemra at National Review offers his review of The End of Secularism.

The Secularism of a Religious Country – Mike Potemra – The Corner on National Review Online

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First Things Spengler Blog Reviews The End of Secularism

A fellow named David Layman (not David Goldman, who I think is THE Spengler) has reviewed The End of Secularism for the First Things website.

Wow.

This was the first full contact review by a person who doesn’t know me at all.

Pretty exhilarating.

Layman is very complimentary of the book, particularly the first half where I review the history of church and state in the west and go through the American constitutional situation. He’s a bit less on board with me when I start talking about anti-foundationalism and the impact of postmodernism on the case for secularism. I think he says what Robert George would say, which is to suggest I should talk more about the case for our values than the weaknesses in secularism as a construct.

In my defense, I did what I set out to do, which was (as inspired by C. John Sommerville) to undercut secularism by being skeptical about it. It was more about deconstructing someone else’s castle than shoring up my own.

Still, a wonderful experience. And thank you to David Layman.

The Audio from My Prime Time America Interview

Here’s the link.

Inglourious Basterds Just Plain Inglorious

I admit that I saw the new Quentin Tarantino film Inglourious Basterds. Now that I’ve seen it, you don’t have to.

Inglourious Basterds is a cultural low point. It is the revenge fantasy of a poorly educated and completely unreflective thirteen year old. It is a jerky exercise in crudely manipulating the feelings of the audience in order to give them an excuse to hate the bad guys enough to want them brutally and cruelly dispatched.

I did hate the bad guys. But I hated some other things, too.

I hated the way the “good” guys acted.

I hated the way the film was put together.

I hated the extraordinarily hokey job of acting done by one Brad Pitt.

Let me dwell on that Brad Pitt issue for a second. He spends the entire movie oddly grimacing and occasionally growling out a line. Usually a cliche’. He is doing a bad impersonation of a cross between L’il Abner and R. Lee Ermey.

I think the theory of the film is that the Nazis are the one group of bad guys we can all agree were REALLY bad and therefore the audience will have the emotional permission needed to hate these men enough to unreservedly enjoy some completely gratuitous Hollywood graphic violence. I was unable to reach that level. I still had some reservations.

MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD.

The plot was a rip-off of the far superior The Dirty Dozen. You remember. All the big Nazis are going to be in one place. Let’s kill ‘em all while we have the chance. You’ve seen that movie before. Rest content. You don’t need to see it again.

Though Inglourious Basterds opened big, I don’t think it will carry over. I can’t imagine this film is going to capture many imaginations.

The innovation of this film is that you will see Nazi soldiers dispatched very cruelly and without any human feeling at all. You will see men scalped. You will see the survivors get swastikas carved into their foreheads. You will see a very large man nick-named The Bear Jew beat a Nazi soldier to death berserker-style with a baseball bat because the soldier will not divulge the location of his comrades. This is supposed to be very satisfying though the soldier passively takes the deathblows. Some in the audience cheered. I like seeing bad guys face terrible justice as much as the next guy. But it shouldn’t be filmed as the equivalent of a teenage wilding incident.

The film’s hook is that Brad Pitt and his Nazi hunters go about the countryside catching and killing Nazis. However, we don’t really get to know the men in the squad and most of their action is off camera or has already happened. The film is as much or more about a Jewish woman who survived the shooting of her family to escape into the countryside as it is about the “Basterds”. One has the notion that much of the footage that would help things make sense or help us to care has ended up on the cutting room floor. But one imagines that had to be the case because this is NOT a short film.

On the whole, I wish I’d seen G.I. Joe, instead. You know, the REAL American hero?

I’m on Prime Time America

At 5pm central today in Chicago and elsewhere. Listen live here.

Discussing The End of Secularism, by the way . . .

The End of Secularism Is Here!

Well, the book by the same name is, anyway. The End of Secularism is now in stock at Amazon.com and should be available in stores, too. Help me, faithful readers.

I don’t think I’ll disappoint you. Francis Beckwith, David Dockery, Russell Moore (of Touchstone fame), Father Robert Sirico, Herb London, Jennifer Morse Roback, and Glenn Stanton all liked it. I hope you will, too.

For those who want to help with promoting The End of Secularism

Here are some ad styles you can use on your website.  Please link to Amazon.com.

Beautiful Clip Left Out of Theatrical Version of The Watchmen

I give you the death of Hollis Mason, AKA The original Nite Owl.

I found this missing gem when I bought the director’s cut of the film.

New Endorsement for The End of Secularism

“Secularism was supposed to have displaced religion before the end of the last century. It failed. Hunter Baker has done every Christian interested in a faithful life in the public square an immense favor.  As an important and emerging young evangelical scholar and public thinker, Baker doesn’t cower at the seemingly imposing face of secularism but intelligently reads its vital signs and confidently declares its inherent weaknesses.”

Glenn T. Stanton, cultural researcher, speaker and author of Marriage on Trial and My Crazy Imperfect Christian Family.

Browse or pre-order from Crossway here or from Amazon here.  Available in bookstores everywhere starting August 31.

Healthcare, Democracy, and Freedom – The Acton Institute

I wrote a column on the tension between government healthcare and freedom for Acton Commentary.

Healthcare, Democracy, and Freedom – The Acton Institute

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Momentum Building for The End of Secularism

I’m excited. Crossway has created a product page for the book with lots of features.  Here is the back cover:

The product page also allows you to browse the book.  Check it out.

In Fairness to Zenni . . .

Okay, I have revisited the glasses I received from Zenni.  My conclusion is that the plastic frame glasses are still poor and the photochromic lenses do not work.  However, the bendable titanium pair of glasses is quite good except for the fact that they failed to include the anti-glare lenses I paid for.

A Deeply Beautiful Book: Karl Stern’s The Pillar of Fire

From the foreword to The Pillar of Fire:

A few years ago, at a psychiatric convention, I ran into a girl with whom I studied medicine and with whom I interned in the Neurological Department of one of the municipal hospitals in Berlin.  We met in a big hotel in Chicago.  It was a most fortunate meeting and we were both overjoyed.  We had not met for fourteen years, and had heard little of each other.  She had the same halting, absent-minded way of speaking, as if she were always thinking of two things at a time.  She looked older and there were lines in her face that had not been there before.  There was so much we had to tell each other.  While she spoke of her didactic psychoanalysis in Zurich, her marriage, her child, her practice, about mutual friends who had perished in Europe, I was asking myself: “Shall I tell, or shall I not tell?”

If I were to say to her, “Since we last met, I have become a Catholic,” it would be a statement entirely different from any other I could make.  We both had many startling and unexpected things to tell; it could not be otherwise with two Jews who had parted in Germany in 1932 and met again in America in 1946.  But the fact is that with that simple sentence, “I have become a Catholic,” there arises a cloud of estrangement.  No matter how much one attempts to break this estrangement down to the elements of social or political separation, of prejudices from childhood, and so on, there is something additional which cannot be explained so easily.  What is it?

While the conversation was as far removed as possible from speculations of this kind, I told her of this decisive event in my life.  She paused for a moment and then said simply and shortly: “Oh!”  Her polite exclamation contained a cosmic abyss.  It is about this “Oh!” that this book is being written.

When I meet a friend with whom I used to work in the Zionist Youth Movement or in a group of radical students, I realize the extraordinary fact that, when we come to the bottom of things, I have not really departed from their ideals.  There is a core to their beliefs which I still share with them.  It is contained in my belief.  What must appear to them as a betrayal, is to me a fulfillment.  I still understand everything they are talking about, but they cannot possibly understand me.  This is what makes these scenes, as human encounters and as meetings of friends, so agonizing.  We talk about the Histatrut (the Labor Unions in Palestine), about the Poale Zion (left wing Zionism), the Kibbuz (the movement of cultivation of the land in Palestine, without private property), about my brother who lives as a teacher in one of those co-operative settlements, or of old friends who were killed as Trotskyites, as Social Democrats, or simply as Jews — and then it comes.

“What has happened to you?”

“I have become a Christian.”

Some of my friends even pale and their pupils dilate.  A common world falls asunder.

Ordering Glasses Online: The Conclusion

Okay, I finally got my glasses from Zenni Optical.  Ultra-long wait.  Crappy glasses.  The photochromic lens on one pair barely changes in the sun.  Barely enough to notice.  The other pair was ordered with anti-reflective coating.  They don’t have anti-reflective coating.  Low price gets you big hassle and low, low quality.

On the other hand, I ordered a pair from 39dollarglasses.com and they are spectacular.  Great pair of glasses.  High quality frames.  Great worksmanship.  Highly recommended.

Reflection on Abortion, Wilberforce, and Amazing Grace

I came across this piece in my personal archives and thought it might be worth running here.  I was thinking along these lines because my pastor asked me to preach about the sanctity of life this week in church.

I never learned about William Wilberforce in my twelve years in the public school system. Neither did I run into him in any of my history courses at a large state university. It wasn’t until my summer associate work at Prison Fellowship during law school that I learned anything about the man who ended the slave trade in what was then the most powerful nation on earth.

I recently saw Amazing Grace, which is the story of the British politician’s drive to end the slave trade in the world’s greatest superpower within his lifetime. The film was impressive, both artistically and in its emotional impact. Wilberforce’s story brings you within the power of a quest for justice. You can literally feel the passion to save the Africans from the brutality of the slave trade and the tremendous frustration of Wilberforce and his group as they are blocked at every turn. Stress, anguish, and overwork led Wilberforce to ruin his health battling against the hold of slavery on his culture and its conception of economic interest.

This film is needed today. One of our great debates as we talk about sacred and secular America is whether the Christian faith has anything to say about public policy. Does Christianity have anything to do with the social order or is it purely a “heart religion” that the individual should work out only on his own or behind church walls?

Wilberforce answered those questions decisively in favor of a publicly relevant faith working hard against injustice. He thought a compartmentalized Christianity was a sign of spiritual bankruptcy. Wilberforce’s dedication to Christ and his fellowship with a group of like-minded believers unconcerned about damaging their standing in a slavery-minded society led him and his Clapham sect to mount a tireless decades long assault on the barbarism of the slave trade and then chattel slavery.

Those who wish to understand how Christians can make a difference in their society would do well to study the model of William Wilberforce. He and his friends lived close together in Christian community, but they were not exclusive. They welcomed everyone and engaged in a great deal of hospitality, particularly toward members of Parliament. They took prayer and Bible study seriously. And they endeavored to seriously work out the implications of the Christian faith for politics, economics, social welfare, etc.

To make what may be an obvious connection, Amazing Grace caused me to think about abortion. When I became a Christian in college, I began to be exposed to the case for ending the practice of abortion. Over time, I grew strong in the conviction that abortion ended a human life, that it was violent and barbaric, and that all possible steps should be taken to prohibit the procedure.

Law school took my feelings to a new level. A barely tolerable, white-hot fire rose up in my heart. I read Roe v. Wade carefully and concluded (with most of the intellectually honest legal world) that it was a travesty of cut and paste scholarship. Looking into that case damages one’s faith in the court. Blackmun went home to Minnesota, spent some time in the library studying the question, and then popped out an opinion that got everything wrong, particularly the history of abortion and law in the West. (In retrospect, I’m not sure you can blame him. The forces wanting to legalize abortion had done the recent historical work on the question. It’s only been after Roe that critics have picked apart his many questionable assertions.)

During that time, I decided that if I spent the rest of my life ramming my head against the law of legalized abortion it would be acceptable. I read about people who gave their lives to abortion protest. I regretted the fact that I was married because that meant it would be unfair to my wife for me to get arrested on a regular basis. I wrote a law review article on the topic where I took my best swings at Roe. I became a state-level policy director and lobbyist working, among other things, to require a period of reflection before any abortion could be performed. I testified before legislative committees. I argued the question of the law and the state of the current jurisprudence. I wept with a combination of sadness and rage when I listened to a young black woman report the nightmares she’d had since her abortion. “My son comes to me in my dreams and asks me why I did it.” My feelings about the injustice of abortion and what I felt were the misrepresentations of the pro-choice advocates sometimes led to incredibly dark moods.

When you feel there is an injustice that happens every day, multiple times a day, dripping like a faucet, and that there is nothing, absolutely nothing you can do to prevent it, the anger and frustration can be tremendous. I eventually dealt with it by distancing myself from the problem. I intellectualized and played the game so many conservatives play by backing off from the world and coolly observing its troubles.

I vote pro-life. I write pro-life. But it’s been a long time since I participated in any rallies, followed the issue very closely, or thought about what I could do to drive the cause forward. I backed off because I got hurt.

All this reflection takes me back to Wilberforce and why he was a great man. Wilberforce drove forward for a couple of decades. He struggled and fought and never allowed himself to stop caring and working. He knew exactly, through hard experience, what Paul meant when he exhorted us to keep the faith.  And in the end, he achieved his object. The slave trade ended in the British empire and so did slavery, in part because Wilberforce endured familiarity with injustice.

I never learned about William Wilberforce in my twelve years in the public school system. Neither did I run into him in any of my history courses at a large state university. It wasn’t until my summer associate work at Prison Fellowship during law school that I learned anything about the man who ended the slave trade in what was then the most powerful nation on earth.

I recently saw Amazing Grace, which is the story of the British politician’s drive to end the slave trade in the world’s greatest superpower within his lifetime. The film was impressive, both artistically and in its emotional impact. Wilberforce’s story brings you within the power of a quest for justice. You can literally feel the passion to save the Africans from the brutality of the slave trade and the tremendous frustration of Wilberforce and his group as they are blocked at every turn. Stress, anguish, and overwork led Wilberforce to ruin his health battling against the hold of slavery on his culture and its conception of economic interest.

This film is needed today. One of our great debates as we talk about sacred and secular America is whether the Christian faith has anything to say about public policy. Does Christianity have anything to do with the social order or is it purely a “heart religion” that the individual should work out only on his own or behind church walls?

Wilberforce answered those questions decisively in favor of a publicly relevant faith working hard against injustice. He thought a compartmentalized Christianity was a sign of spiritual bankruptcy. Wilberforce’s dedication to Christ and his fellowship with a group of like-minded believers unconcerned about damaging their standing in a slavery-minded society led him and his Clapham sect to mount a tireless decades long assault on the barbarism of the slave trade and then chattel slavery.

Those who wish to understand how Christians can make a difference in their society would do well to study the model of William Wilberforce. He and his friends lived close together in Christian community, but they were not exclusive. They welcomed everyone and engaged in a great deal of hospitality, particularly toward members of Parliament. They took prayer and Bible study seriously. And they endeavored to seriously work out the implications of the Christian faith for politics, economics, social welfare, etc.

To make what may be an obvious connection, Amazing Grace caused me to think about abortion. When I became a Christian in college, I began to be exposed to the case for ending the practice of abortion. Over time, I grew strong in the conviction that abortion ended a human life, that it was violent and barbaric, and that all possible steps should be taken to prohibit the procedure.

Law school took my feelings to a new level. A barely tolerable, white-hot fire rose up in my heart. I read Roe v. Wade carefully and concluded (with most of the intellectually honest legal world) that it was a travesty of cut and paste scholarship. Looking into that case damages one’s faith in the court. Blackmun went home to Minnesota, spent some time in the library studying the question, and then popped out an opinion that got everything wrong, particularly the history of abortion and law in the West. (In retrospect, I’m not sure you can blame him. The forces wanting to legalize abortion had done the recent historical work on the question. It’s only been after Roe that critics have picked apart his many questionable assertions.)

During that time, I decided that if I spent the rest of my life ramming my head against the law of legalized abortion it would be acceptable. I read about people who gave their lives to abortion protest. I regretted the fact that I was married because that meant it would be unfair to my wife for me to get arrested on a regular basis. I wrote a law review article on the topic where I took my best swings at Roe. I became a state-level policy director and lobbyist working, among other things, to require a period of reflection before any abortion could be performed. I testified before legislative committees. I argued the question of the law and the state of the current jurisprudence. I wept with a combination of sadness and rage when I listened to a young black woman report the nightmares she’d had since her abortion. “My son comes to me in my dreams and asks me why I did it.” My feelings about the injustice of abortion and what I felt were the misrepresentations of the pro-choice advocates sometimes led to incredibly dark moods.

When you feel there is an injustice that happens every day, multiple times a day, dripping like a faucet, and that there is nothing, absolutely nothing you can do to prevent it, the anger and frustration can be tremendous. I eventually dealt with it by distancing myself from the problem. I intellectualized and played the game so many conservatives play by backing off from the world and coolly observing its troubles.

I vote pro-life. I write pro-life. But it’s been a long time since I participated in any rallies, followed the issue very closely, or thought about what I could do to drive the cause forward. I backed off because I got hurt.

All this reflection takes me back to Wilberforce and why he was a great man. Wilberforce drove forward for a couple of decades. He struggled and fought and never allowed himself to stop caring and working. He knew exactly, through hard experience, what Paul meant when he exhorted us to keep the faith.  And in the end, he achieved his object. The slave trade ended in the British empire and so did slavery, in part because Wilberforce endured familiarity with injustice.

The Big Review of Russell Kirk’s Ancestral Shadows

Read it here at Touchstone Magazine’s Mere Comments blog.

Just in case you’re crazy enough not to click through. . . click through anyway!!!

Christian Worldview Bootcamp for Houston High School Students

At Houston Baptist University, we’ve started up a really nice partnership with John Mark Reynolds and Wheatstone Academy to offer Christian worldview programming for high school students during the summer. If you live in or around Houston and have a student who could use (or would enjoy!) an intellectual boot camp for the faith, this is it. The program goes from July 26 to August 1. The cost is $850 and is all inclusive of food, lodging, events, etc.

This is exactly what your student needs before going to college, especially if you will be sending them off to a state school.

Read more here.