10th President of the U.S.A., in a letter dated July 10, 1843. Cited by Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans (Oxford University Press: 2004), p. 331.
The United States have adventured upon a great and noble experiment, which is believed to have been hazarded in the absence of all previous precedent — that of total separation of Church and State. No religious establishment by law exists among us. The conscience is left free from all restraint and each is permitted to worship his Maker after his own judgment. The offices of the Government are open alike to all. No tithes are levied to support an established Hierarchy, nor is the fallible judgment of man set up as the sure and infallible creed of faith. The Mohammedan, if he will to come among us would have the privilege guaranteed to him by the constitution to worship according to the Koran; and the East Indian might erect a shrine to Brahma, if it so pleased him. Such is the spirit of toleration inculcated by our political Institutions… The Hebrew persecuted and down trodden in other regions takes up his abode among us with none to make him afraid. …and the Aegis of Government is over him to defend and protect him. Such is the great experiment which we have tried, and such are the happy fruits which have resulted from it; our system of free governement would be imperfect without it. ¶ The body may be oppressed and manacled and yet survive; but if the mind of man be fettered, its energies and faculties perish, and what remains is of the earth, earthly. Mind should be free as the light or as the air.
For example. If I stood up in a classroom at Brown or Harvard or Yale and declared, “Let the best man win,” the students would turn into a human sprinkler-system of deconstructing inquiry. What do you mean by “man”? What are your criteria for “best”? Why does someone have to “win” at all? Couldn’t we define the task more cooperatively? When you say “let,” who is doing the “letting”? Isn’t that just another way of saying we should “let” the patriarchal capitalist system continue to reward those already deemed “best” (and, therefore, most advantaged)? This word “the,” it seems to connote that there is only a single criterion for determining a privileged status; couldn’t there be a more pluralistic approach? Etc., yawn, etc.
It is easy for those who do not live under a totalitarian regime to expect heroism from those who do, but it is an expectation that will often be disappointed… it should be less surprising that the mass of Christians were silent than that some believed strongly enough to pay for their faith with their lives.
Again and again, the authors of these manifestos open with a mighty trumpet blast, issuing the most lofty and passionate denunciations of the imbecilic, stale, decadent, safe, bourgeois, vile, outmoded, mechanical, academic, etc. tradition they are rejecting. But when it comes time for them to reveal their epochal new vision, the mighty doctrine that will overthrow the past, turn art on its head and lead mankind into a dazzling new era of truth and beauty, it turns out to be, well, “spatial forms arising from the intersection of the reflected rays of various objects” (Rayonists Mikhail Larionov and Natalya Goncharov). Or a theater in which the actors read aloud from their parts (the Russian symbolist Fyodor Sologub). Or a placard proclaiming “No Girdle!” (The nunist Pierre Albert-Birot, who also incorrectly asserted that nunism is “an ‘ism’ to outlast the others.”) Without discounting the originality of these ideas — rayonist paintings are among the first abstract works ever executed, Sologub’s theater anticipates Brecht, and Birot would have burned Andy Warhol in a game of one-on-one — after the mighty windup, there’s something banana peel-like about these aesthetic punchlines.
All my reporting life I have thrown small pebbles into a very large pond, and have no way of knowing whether any pebble caused the slightest ripple. I don’t need to worry about that. My responsibility was the effort. I belong to a global fellowship, men and women, concerned with the welfare of the planet, and its least protected inhabitants. I plan to spend the rest of my years applauding that fellowship and cheering from the sidelines. Good for you. … Never give up.
One reason American history is no longer told in terms of redemptive purpose is that we no longer think of history itself as having a purpose. History is a matter of this happening and then that happening and then the other thing happening, and who is to say what it all means? As the man said, “History is just one damn thing after another.” The very idea that history should have a meaning strikes many of our contemporaries as highly improbable, maybe even nonsensical. If there is no purpose, there is no meaning. There is, although perhaps only on the surface, something attractively modest about this way of thinking. Especially when it is contrasted with the pride, presumption, and delusions of divinely ordained power that sometimes attended talk about “Christian America.”
Highly regarded here and abroad for some thirty works of cultural history and criticism, master historian Jacques Barzun has now set down in one continuous narrative the sum of his discoveries and conclusions about the whole of Western culture since 1500. In this account, Barzun describes what Western Man wrought from the Renaisance and Reformation down to the present in the double light of its own time and our pressing concerns. He introduces characters and incidents with his unusual literary style and grace, bringing to the fore those that have “Puritans as Democrats,” “The Monarch’s Revolution,” “The Artist Prophet and Jester” — show the recurrent role of great themes throughout the eras. The triumphs and defeats of five hundred years form an inspiring saga that modifies the current impression of one long tale of oppression by white European males. Women and their deeds are prominent, and freedom (even in sexual matters) is not an invention of the last decades. And when Barzun rates the present not as a culmination but a decline, he is in no way a prophet of doom. Instead, he shows decadence as the creative novelty that will burst forth — tomorrow or the next day. Only after a lifetime of separate studies covering a broad territory could a writer create with such ease the synthesis displayed in this magnificent volume.
It is not surprising that in a country where the vast majority of citizens believe in God, it is controversial to require that the public schools teach as fact (or as implicit in the very definition of “science”) that God played no discernible part in the creation of plants, animals and human beings. It is also not surprising that many citizens, unpersuaded by official reassurances that “science and religion are separate realms,” suspect that a religious or antireligious ideology lies behind the enormous importance science educators attach to persuading young people that evolution is their creator.
But politics cannot begin to put the conecting tissue back in society. It is ill-equipped to reconstruct traditional moral beliefs. The best policies cannot recover courtship or marriage, make fathers responsible for their children, restore shock or shame where it once existed, or recover legitimate social authority to institutions that have been hollowed out by a pervasive ideology of individual autonomy. The vast majority of moral problems that trouble us cannot be eradicated by law.
The reason, I think, is that politics itself has failed. And politics has failed because of the collapse of the culture. The culture is becoming an ever-wider sewer. We are caught up in a cultural collapse of historic proportions, a collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics.
Preachers should not be known for condemning others. If God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, what gives them the authority to condemn? If the ordained believe “the king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord; he directs it like a watercourse wherever he pleases,” they have a biblical mandate not to trash a President they don’t like or mawkishly support one they do admire.
Politics is not the answer to our national spiritual salvation. Only personal evangelism, marriage enrichment, the rebuilding of a child-centered culture, and spiritual revival can do that… But surrendering politics would essentially condemn future generations to the failed policies of the Left. And make no mistake: without our check, there would be no balance. Our withdrawal would condemn millions in this nation who otherwise might have struggled to maintain our culture. It would send countless more unborn to their premature deaths. It would consign too many children to lives without hope or opportunity in the inner city. It would mean a crushing burden of higher taxes that weighs too heavily on the middle-class families struggling to give their children a chance at the American dream. This we cannot and must not do.
But if the earlier hope to “save Amerca” was overblown, so too is the current counsel to withdraw from politics — an overreaction against an original overreaction. In the elegant words of Richard Neuhaus, such pessimism “expresses a painful deflation of political expectations that can only be explained by a prior and thoroughly unwarranted inflation.” Were Christians in fact to withdraw, we would simply ride a pendulum swing back to the isolationism of the fundamentalist era.
Conservative Christian activism has been largely ignorant of and disinterested in a philosophy or theology to guide such action. In some circles it’s more dangerous to disagree with Rush Limbaugh than with the Apostle Paul. Running roughshod over the long-standing distinction between the “two kingdoms,” Christian activism over the last few decades has been shallow, confused, reactionary, and narrowly focused on behavior almost to the exclusion of larger questions of justice, community, selfhood, duty, and so forth. We simply haven’t given much thought to the theological framework.
The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind. Despite dynamic success at a popular level, modern American evangelicals have failed notably in sustaining serious intellectual life. They have nourished millions of believers in the simple verities of the gospel but have largely abandoned the university, the arts, and other realms of “high” culture… The historical situation is… curious. Modern evangelicals are the spiritual descendants of leaders and movements distinguished by probing, creative, fruitful attention to the mind.
In twelve wise, stimulating essays and lectures, a noted Columbia University scholar examines today’s declining culture. Ours, he observes with disgust and discernment, is a period of specialization in which the “torrent of information” compiled is unnecessary, in which college students are diverted to the “minutiae of analytic methodism,” in which the over-production of art has made us into “gluttons who gorge and do not digest.” Barzun examines aspects of literary and art criticism, retrospective sociology, the abandonment of intelligibility, the “rhetoric of numbers,” the effects of relativism on moral behavior and the differences between Art with a capital A , “high art,” public art and domestic art. He avers that the oversupply of fine art increases the need for subsidies; yet, although we pay farmers not to grow crops, we do not pay artists to stop making art. Still, Barzun is consoled by the realization that as long as humans exist, there is hope for “new” civilization and all its works. ~ Reed Business Information, Inc.
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A great social achievement of the early Middle Ages was the imposition of the same rules of sexual and domestic conduct on both rich and poor. The king in his palace, the peasant in his hovel: neither one was exempt. Cheating might have been easier for the mighty, but they could not claim women or slaves as a right. Poor men's chances of gaining a wife and producing progeny were enhanced. It is very likely that the fairer distribution of women across society helped reduce abductions and rapes and levels of violence generally, in the early Middle Ages.
If a man in the fullness of his days, at the end of his life, can pass on the wisdom of his experience to those who grow up after him; if what he has learned in his youth, added to but not discarded in his maturity, still serves him in his old age and is still worth teaching the then young—then his was not an age of revolution, not counting, of course, abortive revolutions. The world into which his children enter is still his world, not because it is entirely unchanged, but because the changes that did occur were gradual and limited enough for him to absorb them into his initial stock and keep abreast of them. If, however, a man in his advancing years has to turn to his children, or grandchildren, to have them tell him what the present is about; if his own acquired knowledge and understanding no longer avail him; if at the end of his days he finds himself to be obsolete rather than wise—then we may term the rate and scope of change that thus overtook him, “revolutionary.”
Here we must stress a paradox to which we cannot, I think, direct our attention too closely; theoretically one might have imagined — and this indeed was what many people did in the nineteenth century — that as soon as the majority of men in a given society ceased to believe in an afterlife, life in this world would be more and more lovingly taken
care of and would become the object of an increased regard. What has happened is something quite different, the very opposite in fact: this cannot, I think, be overemphasized. Life in this world has become more and more widely looked upon as a sort of worthless phenomenon, devoid of any intrinsic justification, and as thereby subject to countless interferences which in a different metaphysical context would have been considered sacrilegious.
Others may protest that intellecutal discussion can neither build Christianity nor destroy it. They may feel that religion is too sacred to be thus bandied to and fro in public debate, too sacred to be talked of — almost, perhaps, too sacred for anything to be done with it at all. Clearly, the Christian members of the Society (Oxford Socratic Club) think differently. They know that intellectual assent is not faith, but they do not believe that religion is only ‘what a man does with his solitude’. Or if it is, then they care nothing for ‘religion’ and all for Christianity. Christianity is not merely what a man does with his solitude. It is not even what God does with His solitude. It tells of God descending into the coarse publicity of history and there enacting what can — and must — be talked about.
The God Who Is There, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1968), p136.
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But if I live in a world of nonabsolutes and would fight social
injustice on the mood of the moment, how can I establish what social
justice is? What criterion do I have to distinguish between right and
wrong so that I can know what I should be fighting? Is it not possible
that I could in fact acquiesce in evil and stamp out good? The word
love cannot tell me how to discern, for within the humanistic framework
love can have no defined meaning. But once I comprehend that the Christ
who came to die to end the plague both wept and was angry
at the plague's effects, I have a reason to fight that does not rest
merely on my momentary disposition, or the shifting consensus of men.
The God Who Is There, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1968), p136.
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The fact that [the Christian] alone has a sufficient standard by which
to fight evil, does not mean that he will so fight. The Christian is
the real radical of our generation, for he stands against the
monolithic, modern concept of truth as relative. But too often, instead
of being the radical, standing against the shifting sand of relativism,
he subsides into merely maintaining the status quo. If it is true that
evil is evil, that God hates it to the point of the cross, and that
there is a moral law fixed in what God is in himself, the Christian
should be first into the field against what is wrong — including man's
inhumanity to man.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered at New Covenant Baptist Church, Chicago, Illinois (April 9, 1967).
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What I’m saying to you this morning, my friends, even if it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, go on out and sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures; sweep streets like Handel and Beethoven composed music; sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry; (Go ahead) sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, "Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well."