I know a little boy who has developed some bad habits by reading funny books his father got him without thinking about the consequences of said little boy emulating the behavior of the main character.
We don’t need to go into who the boy is or who his father is. Let’s just say I have a friend!
I would very much like to buy this little boy some books featuring characters who are admirable and who would be great for him to emulate. Any good recommendations?
I am a person who occasionally receives free copies of books from publishers. They send them to me hoping I will comment upon them somewhere online. It has never occurred to me to attempt to sell any of these books.
When I wrote The End of Secularism, my publisher encouraged me to send them a list of influencers to whom they should send the book. I made out a list of about 75 people. I have been very pleased by the comments and reviews offered by many of these people. For example, I continue to be gratified that the New York Times bestselling author Andrew Klavan took the time to write about my book despite not knowing me or my work in advance. You can scroll down the page and see his review in the lower right corner.
I am less pleased with some of them.
Is this because they offered a negative review? No. What’s the problem, then?
As soon as the book became available, my Amazon page showed approximately 20 “new” copies available from third parties. I have a suspicion that some of the recipients of advance copies simply sold them to third parties for cash who then turned around and offered them for sale on Amazon. This is not exactly nice behavior.
If someone sends you an advance copy of their book and you don’t want to take the time to read it — which is understandable as many of us receive too many books to read — then don’t do the author the disservice of putting the free book up for sale and thus competing with their publisher. Do the kind thing which would be to find another person who is interested in the book and does want to read it and who might end up reviewing it.
At another blog, I posted the letter to the Financial Times where a college professor from India decried monotheism and declared the benevolent goodness of polytheism and its modern ally, secularism. The letter struck me as provocative and worth mentioning in its own right.
But now I think I see a connection.
Polytheism, of course, was the norm in the Roman Empire. The empire managed its many gods by uniting everyone in a common worship of the emperor. Worship as many gods as you like as long as you also worship the apotheosis of the state.
Secularism is, indeed, like polytheism in this sense. Have whatever religious sensibility you like as long as you recognize that your ultimate allegiance is to the secular state which is representative of the real world. Don’t ever let your religion get between you and the state. Keep it private. Keep it in hobby status.
Score one for the man from India.
When it comes to this issue, I unapologetically encourage you to read The End of Secularism. The more Christians (especially those of a pietistic bent who like to privatize their faith) who read it and understand it, the better equipped we will be to confront the creeping return of the rainbow assortment of gods frolicking beneath the banner of a state happy to tolerate them because they don’t count for much in the end.
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.
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 . . .
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.
UPDATE: I want to make it plain that I am not necessarily trying to rebut Ken Myers so much as to go against the perspective he chooses to inhabit in the course of this particular interview. I don’t think he agrees with that position so much as he proposes it for the purpose of consideration.
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’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.
