Page 3996 – Christianity Today (2025)

This is the last in a series of three responses to Brian McLaren’s book, A New Kind of Christian (Jossey-Bass), followed by some concluding reflections from McLaren.

Recently I received this email from a youth pastor:

Tony, Thanks for your advice … I am kinda discouraged because I have been finding a ton of opposition to the whole postmodern movement—people are just misinformed, from that they misunderstand, and then they base their whole view of judgment on one thing. I have given several people in my church (including my pastor) a copy of McLaren’s New Kind of Christian. My friends love it, but everyone else hates it. I’ve heard everything from “liberal” to “satanic” to “heresy.” They’re all looking at it from modern eyes. They accept some of it, but, as you would guess, they are stuck on the Bible issue and the “one-way-ness” of Christ. They see the book as taking a stance that it obviously does not take. They say that it is submerged in culture instead of trying to minister to culture. Is this normal, or is it just that I’m in the South?

I have had several talks with my pastor (we usually agree on most things), and they haven’t been great. He just told me that he could not support or allow me to use my budgeted money to go to the Emergent Village conference in Houston [at which McLaren spoke]. So that leaves me, a minister who is also married and a college student, to come up with that kind of money. I want to go very badly, but I just don’t think we can afford it. I feel like I’m alone and maybe I missed something! Hopefully you can relate. I truly feel like I have finally found my faith again, but everyone else seems bent on destroying it. Sorry if I rambled. Thanks for your comments. Nate

If it weren’t about Brian McLaren’s book, one might think this email came from McLaren’s book, for it is the very dilemma of Nate’s email that swirls around A New Kind of Christian—both between and beyond its covers. Within a number of evangelical organizations, the book has stirred passionate responses, pro and con.

So what’s the fuss about? Postmodernism? That’s one way to frame the debate over A New Kind of Christian, as Nate’s email does, and McLaren himself seems to invite that response. After all, doesn’t he refer throughout the book to the contrast between the mindset of modernity—which dictates the way the church is currently doing business—and postmodernity?

Yes, but … postmodern is a term that has been bandied about in the evangelical world in a promiscuous way. If you live in a city of 50,000 people, there’s almost sure to be a “postmodern” worship service at one or two of the evangelical churches in town. Here’s how you tell: the service is on Sunday night; the speaker/pastor is under 40; the worship space is dark, and there are lots of candles on wrought-iron stands; and images from ancient and medieval Christianity are used as the background for PowerPoint presentations. There’s another way to tell: they probably refer to themselves as “postmodern” on their website.

And books written by pastors and consultants about “doing church in a postmodern world” are nothing new, nor are treatments of postmodernism by Christian academics. Leonard Sweet and Stanley Grenz have garnered thousands of readers in the pastorate and seminaries. Theirs are thoughtful cultural and philosophical studies.

McLaren, however, is saying something much different. He goes beyond promoting a change in pastoral technique. He’s challenging pastors to rethink their message, not just how they deliver the message. He’s not writing about a change in context, he’s writing about changing the content. In fact, he’s doing precisely what the founders of evangelicalism did: he’s suggesting that in certain vital ways, the church has become alienated from the source of its life—that evangelicalism, a reform movement with a profound impact, has itself hardened into an establishment deeply in need of reform.

Dan, the evangelical pastor in McLaren’s fictional telling, feels like “I’m losing the whole framework for my faith.” Neo, a Presbyterian pastor-cum-Episcopalian layman, tells him, “You have a modern faith, a faith that you developed in your homeland of modernity. But you’re immigrating into a new land, a postmodern world.” And from that point on, the two discuss most, if not all, of the issues that evangelicals have made central. At every point, Neo tries to push Dan beyond the confines of evangelicalism, into new land.

On the Bible, Neo says, “What if the real issue is not the authority of the text … but rather the authority of God? What if the issue isn’t a book that we can interpret with amazing creativity but rather the will of God, the intent of God, the desire of God, the wisdom of God—maybe we could say the kingdom of God?”

On exclusivism: “Look, my understanding of the gospel tells me that religion is always a mixed bag, whether it’s Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism. Some of it reflects people’s sincere attempts to find truth, and some of it represents people’s attempts to evade the truth through hypocrisy … Look, Dan, I believe Jesus is the Savior, not Christianity. Is that so bad?” (This provokes Dan to respond, “Damn You!”)

Salvation: “I don’t think it’s our business to prognosticate the eternal destinies of anyone else.”

Evangelism: “Stop counting conversions, because our whole approach to conversion is so, I don’t know, mechanistic and consumeristic and individualistic and controlling. Instead, I’d encourage us to count conversations, because conversation implies a real relationship, and if we make our goal to establish relationships and engage conversations, I know that conversions will happen. But if we keep trying to convert people, we’ll simply drive them away. They’re sick of our sales pitches and our formulas.”

At one point, Pastor Dan has the thought that many evangelicals have when mentally agreeing with one or more of the above statements: “Oh no. I’m becoming liberal! I said to myself, with an almost physical shiver of fear.” The problem that Pastor Dan and many like him are beginning to face is that Neo is voicing some possible post-evangelical positions.

As a minister to youth and young adults—and thus to their parents—I am committed to the depth and the riches of Scripture and the testimony of the church. Much of what passes for “postmodern” youth ministry is mere gimmickry, a pale substitute for genuine instruction and discipleship. But I am also one among a growing host of young pastors of evangelical heritage and training who are desperate for some post-evangelical voices to articulate theological positions on biblical authority, on critical realism, on ecumenism.

Becoming liberal is not the issue. The issue is that both liberal and evangelical expressions of Protestantism are based on modern epistemology and, as such, are running out of gas in a postmodern world. The answer is not retrenchment. Neither is the answer changing the frame around the picture. The picture itself needs to be redrawn, with new colors and new media. It might look different—no, it will. And instead of fearing the new expressions that will follow evangelicalism, we should release Brian McLaren and others to follow the Spirit’s leading and begin to paint.

Tony Jones is the author of Postmodern Youth Ministry: Exploring Cultural Shift, Creating Holistic Connections, Cultivating Authentic Community (Zondervan/Youth Specialties), a senior fellow at Emergent (www.emergentvillage.com), and the minister to youth and young adults at the Colonial Church of Edina, Minnesota.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Some days I can hardly contain my emotion when I check my emails. Today a reader wrote in the early hours of the morning: he couldn’t put down A New Kind of Christian until he finished it at 2 a.m., weeping because he felt understood. Both “paid” and “amateur” Christians say the book helped them in profound ways. They often say the book disturbed them, yet in spite of the discomfort, they—almost always—say thanks, often using those little emoticons the Internet is famous for, as if to be winking or smiling through the pain of being stretched in their thinking. Very seldom is heard a discouraging word.

Not quite so here in Books & Culture. While Tony Jones expressed appreciation for the book, Andy Crouch offered some gentle critiques (“Let’s Get Personal,” January/February 2002), and Mark Dever’s piece (“Reform-ed or Deformed,” March/April 2002) judged the book downright bad.

I found Andy Crouch’s reflections stimulating in too many ways to cover here. Just one example: Crouch wondered, as have several others, if post-September 11, “postmodernity” may be over or nearly so. For some, this is a deeply held wish, understandably so if they associate postmodern with all that is nihilistic, relativistic, dark, dank, and otherwise distasteful in contemporary culture. My understanding of the term is less jaded, so I am not disposed to wish for postmodernity’s quick demise—especially because I think it offers more space for Christian life and mission than modernity did. (And if that statement seems incredible to you, that’s a good reason to read the book.) Actually, I sense the world becoming more postmodern in the wake of September 11, not less, shown nowhere more succinctly than in a striking passage from President Bush’s speech to Congress after September 11: “This is the world’s fight. This is civilization’s fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom.” That sounds like something beyond standard modernity to me. Bush doesn’t identify the United States as either Christian or secular, but rather as allied with pluralism; it’s not all about nationalism but rather globalism. On March 11, six months after the attacks, he ended his speech not with the traditional “God bless America” but with “God bless our coalition.” Even for those who don’t like the term postmodern, it seems pretty clear that the times are changing.

On to Mark Dever’s critique. There are a number of ways in which I think Dever’s response suffers from flaws not unlike those he finds in my book. For example, I was puzzled by a question like this: “Why not care about being saved from Hell and sin?” The “and” in his rhetorical question was clearly my point, contrary to his implication. And when he judges the book devoid of “substantial positive understanding of the local church,” I (as a pastor who writes books late at night) can only conclude that we must define “substantial positive understanding” by different criteria. Of course, the pursuit of new and better criteria was pretty much the storyline of the book.

Speaking of new and better: Dever says that for me, “old comes to equal obsolete.” Actually, the playful name “Neo,” which Dever mocks for its lack of subtlety, carries meaning the subtlety of which he may have missed: “neo-” doesn’t simply suggest new, but rather the rediscovery and re-presentation of something old (in a new way), as in “neoclassical.” Couldn’t Dever see that the new approaches I am exploring are intended to rediscover and cherish our ancient spiritual practices and resources more than modern Christianity has? Even if we disagree about the efficacy of those approaches, we are in agreement that this heritage must not be squandered.

There are other questions I could raise about Dever’s judgments and assumptions. But far more interesting are the ways in which I found his critique somewhat helpful. In particular, it helped me define more clearly the audience for whom I wrote the book. I never expected the book to change the minds of happy campers. Rather, I wrote the book for those who find themselves increasingly dissatisfied with the status quo of modern American Christianity (including both sides of its liberal/conservative polarization/paralysis/preoccupation). At the same time, as I react to Dever’s criticism, I’m forced to look inward: I regret any places in my book (or this response) where my tone is needlessly harsh.

Dever is dead right on this: the book admits on occasion to “gross simplification,” and it is guilty thereof. I wish I could have simultaneously achieved conversational simplicity, brevity, and readability along with a scholarly level of complexity, nuance, and thoroughness. I did not do so to Dever’s satisfaction—or now, thanks to him, to my own.

More substantively, Dever’s Reformed perspective offers a helpful way to define the project that I and others in the same boat are pursuing. John Calvin’s lifework, as I understand it, involved a creative attempt to construct a bold new framework for theological thinking and faithful living for those who (on biblical and experiential grounds) were dissatisfied with and moving beyond existing late-medieval Roman Catholic frameworks.

There are two ways to honor the work of Calvin and the Reformers more generally, I suppose: 1) to faithfully defend and promote their post-medieval formulations through all time, or 2) to follow their example in seeking to construct formulations of faith that are as fitting to our postmodern times as theirs were to their post-medieval times. Dever and I apparently agree on honoring the Reformers, but perhaps not on which is the best way of doing so. Here is my hope: that Christians wiser and better than I am will successfully undertake a creative project as suitable to our day as the Reformers’ was to theirs.

Perhaps the most evocative phrase in Dever’s review came near the beginning, when he said forthrightly that he found the book “less helpful than I would have hoped, and more dangerous than I would have thought.” That was well put, and actually quite helpful and perhaps even dangerous in its own right.

I agree: the kind of deconstruction/rearticulation attempted in my book is dangerous. Like marriage, it is not to be entered into lightly. That’s why I value Mark’s critique. Meanwhile, I would hope that he and all who are temperamentally and conceptually of his tribe will consider another danger, one which Tony Jones’s piece makes very clear. There are thousands of sincere and gifted Christian men and women, many of them under 35, bright and creative and passionately dedicated to Christian mission, who seem to resonate with a longing my book seeks to convey, in spite of its imperfections. Pointing out my book’s dangers, as Dever sought to do, is a valid enterprise. But doing so without also listening, without also seeking to understand (with compassion) the dissatisfaction, longing, and hope that resonate in the hearts of thousands of younger readers (and even some older ones, like me)—that could be dangerous too, don’t you think?

If the doorkeepers of evangelicalism want people afflicted with these dissatisfactions and longings to either leave the premises or stay and argue, it won’t be hard to be rid of us, because we find no pleasure in the harsh, grinding polemics that too often characterize religious dialogue. Practicing stridency, we are certain, will turn us into exactly the kind of Christian we don’t want to be. We’d prefer to reinvest that time and energy doing the kinds of things A New Kind of Christian sought to highlight: presenting the gospel in deed and word, making disciples (of a new kind), building community, serving the poor, creating art, playing with our kids, loving neighbors whatever their religion, all in Christ’s name. Of course, we hope for a third option: with a humble, respectful, and irenic spirit, to continue to enjoy the good company of our more traditional evangelical brothers and sisters while we quietly continue our work.

The cost of exclusion, if it occurs, will be high: how many churches already lament the absence of younger voices between 18 and 35, and the graying of their shrinking constituency? Such emerging voices, hopeful for a new Christian ethos, may well be the target of critical blasts less charitable than Dever’s restrained critique—blasts intended to frighten them into silence (hardly a victory, but a more common persuasive strategy in the religious world than we like to admit). If those intimidations appear to succeed, the silence won’t be acquiescence: it will be the quiet sound of an empty room, a “safe” room devoid of young people asking tough questions.

I look at my four young-adult children: any standard modern picture of what it means to be a Christian just doesn’t work in the emerging world they have been born into. That’s why the accepted portrait of what a Christian is “needs to be redrawn, with new colors and new media,” as Jones (himself a minister to youth and young adults) puts it so well. Ironically, then, a book like A New Kind of Christian, in spite of its many imperfections, may prove helpful to the children and grandchildren of those who are most critical of it.

So, I thank Mark for bringing up the word danger. I hope readers will ponder both the many dangers he fears from my book and this danger I am bringing up. I suppose dangers tend to come in (at least) two’s. Attempts (in Jones’s words) to go beyond retrenchment or “changing the frame around the picture” deserve critique no less careful than this dialogue made possible by Books & Culture. I hope that readers have benefited, as I have. I also hope that someday soon, others will paint (and please, God, exemplify!) far more compelling and beautiful portraits than mine in A New Kind of Christian, perhaps motivated in part by this conversation among Crouch, Dever, Jones, and myself. Then, the four of us will have become partners in helping inspire those better portraits, a pleasant thought to me, and a great reason to thank God, who works all things together for good—even including, as Dever said (sort of), mixed reviews and imperfect books.

Brian D. McLaren is the founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church in the Washington-Baltimore area. He is at work on a sequel to A New Kind of Christian.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

You’d think that Christians would have a head start in America’s belated effort to get a handle on the geography and history of the Middle East and Asia Minor, the cradle of their faith. It’s true that many have made the pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and even the stay-at-homes are likely to retain a vague familiarity with the pastel maps in the backs of their Bibles where the missionary journeys of Paul are marked with dotted lines. But for all that, most American Christians—excepting the Orthodox—are woefully ignorant of the history and present conditions of their fellow believers in the Eastern tradition.

Help is close at hand in William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain: A Journey among the Christians of the Middle East, a book that’s partly travelogue, partly cultural history, partly eulogy, and totally absorbing. In 1994, Dalrymple, a Scots journalist and travel writer, made a pilgrimage to Mount Athos in order to find the original manuscript of “The Spiritual Meadow” by John Moschos, an Orthodox monk. With his sidekick Sophronius, John circumambulated the Byzantine Empire in the sixth century, visiting monasteries and hermitages, recording sermons, spiritual counsel, and miracle stories. The manuscript inspired Dalrymple to retrace the monk’s route in order to observe how Christianity is faring in the lands where it first took root.

He begins the journey in the city known to John and his contemporaries as Constantinople, built by and named for the emperor who made Christianity the empire’s official religion. Today we know it as Istanbul, a city in Turkey, our newest nato partner, 99 percent of whose people are Muslim although the state is emphatically secular.

Dalrymple finds Turkey alternately charming and terrifying. Military checkpoints frequently block the roads. Sometimes he and his driver are waved through; at other times they are detained for hours of questioning. Their interrogator may be either a bored officer educated at Oxford or a Turkish version of Dr. Strangelove, who suspects them of being Kurdish spies. When they finally make it through the checkpoints, they have to worry about being ambushed by the ppk, the Kurdish resistance movement. Dalrymple is never certain when showing his press credentials will improve his chances (he’s received conflicting advice on this point) or when it could turn him and his driver into roadkill.

His first stop is Antioch, once a center of commerce for the great Silk Road to China and a city second only to Rome and Alexandria. The biblically literate will be familiar with Antioch as the city where Jesus’ followers were first called Christians. Neither its grandeur nor its religious legacy survives today. After the massacres of 1915 at the hands of Turkish Muslims, thousands of Christians fled Antioch, most of them ending up in Brazil. Now the ancient city is a derelict ghost town. The only Christian clergy Dalrymple is able to rake up is Father Dominico, a Roman Catholic priest with scarcely 200 souls to guide. Orthodox families, living a low-profile life in the surrounding mountains, slip into town for the priest to baptize their babies surreptitiously. “Their official papers say Muslim,” the priest tells Dalrymple, “but they know who they are.”

Between Antioch and Aleppo, Simeon Stylites, that fourth-century trailblazer for the Desert Fathers, climbed up on his stone pillar in hopes of escaping the spiritual groupies who constantly hounded him, plucking out his body hair for relics. His flight had the unintended effect of drawing even more followers and imitators. Other cities in the region are still circled by stone pillars standing like limbless, ossified trees—an eerily apt metaphor for what Dalrymple finds as he pushes eastward.

Armenia was reputedly the first nation to officially embrace Christianity. But the country was soon divided between the Byzantine and Persian empires, and over the centuries its people have been subjected to Persian, Arab, Turkish, and Russian rule. Astonishingly, despite the periodic dissolution of their political identity, Armenians have maintained their language, literature, and religion.

The most devastating blow suffered by the Armenians came in 1915, in what they continue to mourn as a genocidal Turkish assault. Historians in Turkey, and other scholars partial to the Turkish view, dispute every aspect of the Armenian account, while many other scholars concur in describing the event as an act of genocide. What cannot be disputed is the intent of the present Turkish government, which has undertaken the systematic extinction of all traces of Armenians from Eastern Turkey. Dalrymple sees ancient churches and monasteries bulldozed to destroy any architectural evidence of Armenian—and thus Christian—historical presence. References to Armenia are eliminated from public documents. Foreign scholars and researchers find themselves harassed, and sometimes jailed, by officials.

In Diyarbaker, on the banks of the Tigris, only a handful of Christians remain. The region’s Christian population has fallen from 200,000 in the nineteenth century to only 900 at the time of Dalrymple’s visit. One village, once home to 17 churches, now has none, and only a single resident, the aging priest.

Moving west again into Syria, Dalrymple makes one of his more esoteric finds—10,000 Nestorian Christians living in poverty in a refugee camp on the Iraqi border. In the camp with them are 2,000 survivors of a bizarre heretical sect, the Yezidis of Iraq. They worship Lucifer, the fallen angel whom they believe God has since forgiven. Renamed the “Peacock Angel,” he has been entrusted with the job of running earthly affairs.

Neither Syria nor Lebanon nor Israel provides Dalrymple with many signs of hope for the survival of Christianity in its own cradle. Consider these numbers:

• A quarter of a million Christians have left Syria for other lands since the 1960s.
• In 1922, Palestine was 10 percent Christian. In 1948, roughly 55,000 Palestinian Christians, 60 percent of the total, fled or were driven from the country. A second exodus followed in the years between 1967 and 1992. Today, perhaps 3 percent of Palestinians are Christians, while only 175,000 Christians remain in Israel and the West Bank, less than 0.25 percent of the total population.
• In 1922 the population of the old city of Jerusalem was 52 percent Christian. That number has shrunk to 2.5 percent. Sydney, Australia, now has more Jerusalem-born Christians than Jerusalem itself.

In Beirut, Dalrymple sees what he fears will be the future of the entire Middle East, the city’s glitzy westernization blown to rubble by its own inhabitants. Maronite Christians, once Lebanon’s power class with about a quarter of the population, war with the Muslim majority, who turn on the Druze, whose religion is an amalgam of both Christianity and Islam.

By tradition, St. Mark is credited with having brought Christianity to Egypt. Yet since the fall of the Byzantine Empire, the Coptic Church has struggled to survive, its only respite coming during the British occupation. Egypt’s present government, anxious to appease Muslim fundamentalists, officially tolerates but only reluctantly protects its Christian citizens, despite the fact that they account for at least 10 percent of Egypt’s population. Few Christians occupy any significant positions within the government, and during the last decade, a million Christians have left the country.

Leaving Cairo, and heading south toward the upper Nile, Dalrymple finally reaches the outer limits of Byzantine monasticism. Just beyond the great Kharga Oasis he finds the last Coptic monastery that John Moschos and Sophronius visited. Since the end of World War II it has rained only once in Kharga, and then only for ten minutes during the winter of 1959. The dunes are not made from sand but a fine white powder that boils up like choking fog. Human enemies here are equally harsh. Only weeks before Dalrymple’s arrival, several monks had been hacked to death by the Islamic Brotherhood.

Yet strangely enough, only in this surreal landscape, among these beleaguered monks, does Dalrymple find a spark of hope. For the first time, he discovers a group of Christians actually adding to their numbers. The Coptic orders, despite violent persecution, have no dearth of applicants.

In summing up, Dalrymple says he had expected that “Islamic fundamentalism would be the Christians’ main enemy in every country of the Middle East.” But only in Egypt did he find explicit religious persecution. In southeastern Turkey, the civil war rages between the Turks and the Kurds, both Muslim. Christians there are simply caught in the crossfire.

In Lebanon, the Maronites’ failure to compromise with the Muslim majority has led to civil war, which in turn resulted in the mass exodus of Christians from the area. And Palestinian Christians suffer not because of their religion but because they are Arabs, like their Muslim compatriots.

Very likely, life has changed for the Christians of the Middle East even more since September 11. While Christians of the West have never shown much interest in these faraway brothers and sisters, Dalrymple points out the great debt we owe them. The missionary Augustine returned to Rome from his first trip convinced that the savages he had encountered in Gaul could never be tamed. Eastern monks, on the other hand, carried the traditions of the Desert Fathers to Northern Europe and England, providing the original models for Celtic monks. The seventh Archbishop of Canterbury was himself a Byzantine priest from Tarsus who had studied at Antioch.

Yet the Western brethren abandoned their Eastern counterparts in their hour of need. In 1400, Stephanos, Syriac Archbishop, traveled to Rome to plead with the pope for help against the invading Turks. As a gift he brought with him an illuminated copy of the Diatessaron, a second-century compilation of the four gospels in a single continuous narrative, one of the earliest manuscripts of the Christian church. Stephanos was not even granted an audience.

Small wonder we still have so much to learn today.

Virginia Stem Owens is a novelist, essayist, and poet.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

God has come back as an important character in the story of war. Since September 11, political and military leaders claim God’s side, while characterizing their opponents as satanic, pure evil. Daily newspapers expound ancient religious texts, and in the next day’s op-ed, contrary texts are cited. Mosques and churches are full. Millions of ordinary people pray to God for victory, though they pray on opposite sides for opposite ends.

So it was also in our American Civil War, so much so that the wisest and shrewdest politician in our history, Abraham Lincoln, devoted his most important speech of 1865 largely to religious claims. Ronald White has written a book about Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, a speech so brief it fits easily on two pages of a book. This might seem to be the ultimate in scholarly overkill, 234 pages to account for only two, but White’s efforts pay off.

Lincoln gave the speech just when the end of the war seemed in sight, only weeks before Lee’s surrender. Any decent speechwriter would have found the occasion easy. First Lincoln ought to celebrate promises fulfilled. The Union had stayed the course and won the war, saving the world’s last best hope and freeing millions of slaves to boot. Then, Lincoln should turn to plans and prospects. How soon could they expect the final triumph, and what policies would peace bring? How would the evil of slaveholders and traitors be punished? How would the faithfulness of Union soldiers (and their widows and orphans) be rewarded? But Lincoln spoke to none of these issues. He gave a quiet, deep speech in which every crafted line tolls like a funeral bell.

Lincoln began by indicating what he would not do: any of the above. Instead he took up an extremely peculiar topic: how little the war had lived up to anyone’s hopes and prayers and manipulations. Both sides had tried to avoid a war. Both sides had prayed for victory in the war. Neither side had anticipated the awful duration of the war, or its side effects. By implication, all parties had believed themselves masters of the war, but the war had taken its own course quite independent of their plans. Lincoln spoke of this with astonishing even-handedness. The war had humbled both sides, including the victorious side.

In even subtler terms Lincoln moved on to ask what the war meant. If its course escaped the plans and directions of both North and South, whose plans and directions, if anyone’s, did it reflect? Here White makes a signal contribution in spelling out the difference between fatalism and providence. Lincoln, he is convinced for a number of good reasons, believed in providence. (One reason is that the churches he attended throughout his adult life were consistently Old School Presbyterian, deeply indebted to Charles Hodge and his understanding of God’s sovereignty.) Historians sometimes say that Lincoln grew increasingly fatalistic through the war, that his faith in human agency was scored by tragedy and severe disappointment. White agrees about the loss of faith in human agency but claims cogently that Lincoln believed (and spoke in the Second Inaugural) of something quite different than fatalism. “For Hodge, the recognition of the personality of God was the key to the distinction between providence and fatalism.” To correctly read the Second Inaugural, then, one must look for Lincoln’s judgments as to God’s purposes—the expression of his personal attributes—in the events of the war.

By all accounts, Lincoln had a settled distaste for claims to identify God’s will—especially to identify God’s will with your own. He was always skittish about religion, unwilling to speak plainly about his own faith though he might have made political capital from it. Nevertheless, in the Second Inaugural he speaks plainly, if provisionally, about God’s purposes in the war. They are two. One is to remove slavery from America. (Notably, neither side had intended to do so. At the outset of the war Lincoln had pledged not to attempt to do so.) The other is to judge both sides, North and South, for the offense of slavery—to take back all the wealth that slavery had piled up on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, and to pay for every drop of blood drawn with the whip by another drawn by the sword. If these are indeed the intentions of God in the war—and they were never contemplated by either side as they planned and prayed to God—then nevertheless they comport completely with what we know of the righteousness of God, his character. So Lincoln says.

Only in the last brief paragraph, a single winding sentence, does Lincoln come to the point of these theological reflections. He is not a theologian but a politician. More, he is the President of the United States. It is important to understand the war theologically because that is the truth about the war, as vital for a clear-headed view of conduct as a knowledge of supply lines and railroad schedules. God’s will cannot be thwarted. The penalty for the offense of slavery must be paid, and it has been paid by both sides. God has not separated them, punishing only slaveholders. He has punished them together. And he has removed the offense that drove them to war. There is no more slavery. The ground for rebuilding the nation in humility, in charity for both sides, is established already by providence. Therefore, “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan.” Lincoln’s concluding phrases have to do with building peace within America between opposing factions, and with the rest of the world.

That, it seems clear, was Lincoln’s interest all along. The war was all but over. How to establish peace? How to bring forth from the horrible carnage and hatred something like brotherhood again? Having saved the Union from dismemberment, how could they establish a Union that was more than a legal fiction? Such questions Lincoln could only answer based on an understanding of what God’s work had been in the war. All other claims of victory were false, he said. God had won the war, and established the basis of peace.

Reading this speech again, and thinking of its message, one cannot help wishing that God would send another Lincoln. It is now 137 years since his Second Inaugural, and rarely in all time has an American political leader even come close to speaking with such depth and wisdom.

Lincoln’s wisdom has currency today, to remind us (whose claim to a righteous cause cannot surpass the North’s, certainly) that God’s ways are not our ways, that his providence seldom provides precisely what we ask for. The lesson God teaches most commonly in war is humility. As we consider the peace that must follow the war, as contending sides who have claimed God’s blessing try to reestablish a way to live together—an altogether necessary project, given our shrunken globe—we need the watchfulness of Lincoln. He was not content, as he might have been, to cheer his victories. He sought to understand God’s victories.

Tim Stafford is a senior writer for Christianity Today magazine. Among his many books is Knowing the Face of God (NavPress).

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

“Original intent” is a game constitutional lawyers and political theorists love to play. It can usually be won by playing a single card, marked “slavery.” One has only to point to the protections the Constitution originally conceded to slavery—its tolerance of the slave import trade, its willingness to grant the slaveholding states an extra three-fifths worth of representation in the Federal Congress based on their slave populations, its requirement that states return fugitive slaves to their owners—to present a take-all demonstration that the original intentions of the framers of the Constitution are tainted, and consequently useless to modern federal jurisprudence. In the words of constitutional historian Paul Finkelman, the Constitution was a “proslavery compact,” and in that case, all notions of limiting judicial interpretation to the “original intent” of the framers become guilty by association.1

This has opened the way for modern constitutional theorists like Charles L. Black, George P. Fletcher, and Mark Tushnet to declare that the Constitution of 1787 is a dead letter, that what we today call the Constitution was only reborn with the Fourteenth Amendment, and that its interpretation is a constantly evolving process, moving inexorably toward a future of Kantian (or Rawlsian) egalitarian absolutism. It also opens the way for the advocates of slave reparations to insert their claim that the Constitution’s protections for slavery make the federal government liable for reparations payments, since the Constitution presumably rendered the federal government the central culprit in the establishment of slavery in the United States. And it offers a comforting sense of communion with the most radical heroes of abolitionism—William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips—who had no compunctions about describing the Constitution as a covenant with death, and burning it publicly in the same spirit of adolescent showmanship that later generations would burn the flag.

On the other hand, this makes for somewhat odd bedfellows, historically speaking, since it lands Black, Tushnet, Fletcher, and Co. in the unpleasant position of echoing precisely the position of the slaveholding South and its most nauseating spokesmen—James P. Holcombe, J. Randolph Tucker, Frank H. Alfriend, Albert Taylor Bledsoe, Jefferson Davis, Alexander H. Stephens, and the whole dreary pageant of indignant Southern fire-eaters who believed that Constitution put the whip and the slave together into their hands. (This is reminiscent of the remark of an Alabamian to John Calhoun, that Wendell Phillips’s abolitionist denunciations of the Constitution as a proslavery document could be circulated “to great advantage” in the South merely by dropping a few inconvenient paragraphs.)2

A good deal of this had just been starting to harden into an academic consensus when Don E. Fehrenbacher died suddenly on December, 13, 1997, in the arms of his wife of 53 years, Virginia. Fehrenbacher was a longtime Lincoln scholar, winner of the 1979 Pultizer Prize for The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics, and served as the finisher of the late David Potter’s Pulitzer-winner, The Impending Crisis, in 1979. Like Potter, Fehrenbacher left unfinished at his own death “my book about the federal government and slavery.” Virginia Fehrenbacher commissioned one of her husband’s former students, Ward M. McAfee, to complete two partially finished chapters and add a conclusion to what was published four years later as The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery. I have only one judgment to offer on it: No book has done more damage to the Constitution’s neo-abolitionist detractors in the last 50 years.

There is both madness and method in the title, because it was Fehrenbacher’s abiding contention that the authors of the Constitution had no intention at all of making slavery a permanent or national institution. “The intrusions of slavery into the work of the [Constitutional] Convention were largely side effects of progress toward a new constitutional design,” Fehrenbacher insisted. “Even the fugitive-slave clause was a late-hour extension of the provision for interstate rendition of fugitives from justice.” Surveying the members of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Fehrenbacher found scant evidence that slavery was much of a topic of discussion. “A good many delegates, including some of the slaveholders, seem to have believed or hoped that somehow in the flow of time, slavery would disappear,” and consequently took no pains in the writing of the Constitution to grant slavery “any legitimacy in federal law.”

The Convention mysteriously pulled shy even of using the word slave or slavery in the Constitution itself (preferring the euphemism, “persons held to service”), and the few places where it did allude obliquely to the South’s peculiar institution—the allowance for twenty years more of the slave trade, the three-fifths clause—were actually tilted in an antislavery direction. The three-fifths clause was intended to keep slaveholders from packing Congress by basing representation from their states on a count that included all of their slaves; the slave-import allowance was more significant for the fact that at the end of 20 years, the federal government was empowered to shut it down (which it did).

What governed the writing of the Constitution was neither an overtly proslavery, or overtly antislavery, bias; if anything, it was controlled simply by the unwillingness of the Convention to involve the Constitution at all in the slavery issue, beyond absolute necessity. In pursuit of a consensus which would allow the Constitution to be quickly ratified and implemented, slavery was left out of the Constitution and left in the hands of the individual states, where presumably the shutdown of the slave trade would lead gradually to slavery’s abolition.

What was significant about the Constitution, Fehrenbacher noted, was an issue which was unrelated to slavery itself, but which came to be the principal point of rage over the next half-century. That was the substantial expansion of the federal government’s powers granted by the new Constitution. Compared to the mere pittance of authority conceded by the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution awarded the federal government responsibility for organizing the federal lands beyond the Appalachians into territories, and then states. It granted Congress immediate jurisdiction over the District of Columbia (which was sandwiched between two slave states, Virginia and Maryland), and put control over foreign relations in the bailiwick of the executive branch.

And while none of those constitutional powers had anything to do directly with slavery, slaveholders and abolitionists alike quickly reached for those powers in an effort to turn the Constitution to their purposes. “The Constitution as it came from the hands of the framers dealt only minimally and peripherally with slavery and was essentially open-ended on the subject,” Fehrenbacher wrote. But it could be made into a proslavery or antislavery document, depending on how the federal government could be made to implement it.

That, of course, depended on who succeeded in winning control of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the federal government. And from 1800 until 1860, pro-slavery Southerners won that dominance with almost insolent ease. Between Jefferson and Lincoln, eight of the presidents were Southerners and slaveholders, while three others were Northern “doughfaces” who were party-ridden into proslavery policies. Over the same period, Southern Democrats (with the help of the three-fifths clause) controlled the House of Representatives in every session but 1841-43 and 1847-49, while the two long-lived chief justices of the Supreme Court from 1801 to 1864, John Marshall and Roger Taney, were both Southerners.

This meant that every issue which involved slavery and federal jurisdiction was liable to jump in a pro-slavery direction, not because the Constitution mandated it, but because the document was mute enough on the subject to allow pro-slavery conclusions to be enforced as federal law. Despite long-standing agitation to end slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia, the Southern majority in the federal government fended off all efforts to end slavery in the national capital. Abolition in the District would have to wait until April 1862, and even then, Maryland slaveholders demanded the right to retrieve from the District any of their fugitive slaves who had fled there for freedom. (One Maryland Congressman, Charles Calvert, actually wrote directly to Lincoln to have the president direct him “what course to pursue to have the Fugitive Slave Law executed.”)3

In foreign affairs, a State Department consistently top-heavy with Southern appointees signed treaties that recognized the legality of slavery, demanded (and paid) compensation for slaves lost in wartime, and acquired border territories like Florida and Texas in order to expand slavery’s boundaries and deny fugitives safe havens. And although Congress banned the importation of slaves in 1808, as permitted by the Constitution, that did nothing to keep Americans from participating in the larger international slave trade.

But what went up would inevitably come down. Southerners disastrously overreached themselves in 1854 by shuttling the Kansas-Nebraska Act through Congress, opening almost half of the old Louisiana Purchase to slave settlement. They tried to quiet the storm Kansas-Nebraska raised with an even more provocative over reach, the 1857 Dred Scott decision, handed down by Roger Taney, which forbade the territories from erecting their own barriers to slavery.

It was exactly this overreach which triggered the election of Lincoln as president in 1860, and that election exposed just how flimsy the constitutional platform underneath slavery really was. The capture of the presidency for the first time by an avowed enemy of slavery made cruelly clear how little slaveholders had to expect from the actual letter of the Constitution. Under Lincoln, all executive appointments, from cabinet selection to the appointment of postmasters, would go to antislavery decision-makers, and they would lift no eager hand to protect slaveholders in the manner to which they were accustomed. A Republican vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, would preside over the Senate, and Republicans would enjoy a majority in the House and elect its Speaker. Army commissions would go to anti-slavery officers, and those officers would take command of arsenals and forts all over the South.

Reading the electoral demographics and knowing that they could probably never elect a proslavery Southern president again, the Southern states tried to form a breakaway slave republic, the Confederate States of America. The Confederate Constitution, Fehrenbacher delights in pointing out, did what the federal Constitution did not—it explicitly recognized slavery.

Fehrenbacher’s book makes no secret of its intention to overthrow the “neo-Garrisonians” who dismiss the Constitution “as culpably proslavery,” and Fehrenbacher’s determined plea for the comparative neutrality of the Constitution on the slavery issue will sit uneasily with those constitutional anti-literalists who build their contempt for “original intent” on the imbecility of reverencing a Constitution that established slavery in the heart of the Republic. Still, he was careful not to make the equally untenable plea of many antebellum Republicans that the Constitution was an antislavery document in drag: “The case for an antislavery Constitution is just as strong as the case for a proslavery Constitution, but both depend upon special pleading that ignores the evidence.” So there is not much advantage to be gained for “original intent” theorists either, since, as far as slavery is concerned, there wasn’t any clear “intent” on the part of the Founders to take account of.

Curiously, this puts Fehrenbacher somewhat at odds with the main subject of the final chapters, Abraham Lincoln. By political instinct a constitutional literalist, Lincoln picked his ground carefully by interpreting the Constitution rather as Fehrenbacher does—not perhaps as literally antislavery, but certainly not proslavery. “I believe that the right of property in a slave is not distinctively and expressly affirmed in the Constitution,” Lincoln said in 1859,

… a European, be he ever so intelligent, if not familiar with our institutions, might read the Constitution over and over again and never learn that Slavery existed in the United States. The reason is this. The Framers of the Organic Law believed that the Constitution would outlast Slavery and they did not want a word there to tell future generations that Slavery had ever been legalized in America.4

Yet Lincoln was substantially more confident than Fehrenbacher that the Founders were guided by an original intention against slavery which, even if it was not written into the Constitution, could still be discerned pretty directly and could still have interpretive authority: “There was nothing said in the Constitution relative to the spread of slavery in the Territories, but the same generation of men said something about it in [the] ordinance of [17]87,” the Northwest Ordinance which restricted the spread of slavery into the old Northwest Territory. This, Lincoln explained, was why he had not stepped forward as an anti-slavery partisan before the Kansas-Nebraska bill. “I have always hated it, but I have always been quiet about it until this new era of the introduction of the Nebraska bill began. I always believed that everybody was against it, and that it was in the course of ultimate extinction … The adoption of the Constitution and its attendant history led the people to believe so.”5 Certainly, there was no sense in which Lincoln regarded the Constitution as a wax nose which each generation could rework as it saw fit.

All of this suggests that slavery, far from being a ward of the Constitution, acted more in the role of a sinister perverter of it, a notion which sits well beside Leonard L. Richards’s revival of the theory of the “Slave Power” in The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780-1860 (2000). What is left hanging in the air, though, is the problem of why Lincoln, if the Constitution was slavery-neutral and the original intent of the Founders so patently antislavery, dallied so long in moving to emancipation. That was to have been the burden of Fehrenbacher’s final chapter, “The Republican Revolution,” and in McAfee’s reconstruction, that last chapter offers a vigorous defense of Lincoln’s bona fides as the Great Emancipator.

But this defense of Lincoln is also strangely disconnected from the larger argument The Slaveholding Republic makes about the Constitution and the federal government, since most of “The Republican Revolution” is concerned with explaining and defending Lincoln’s progress toward the Emancipation Proclamation, not about the Constitution, the federal government, and slavery. One looks in vain for a discussion about the key constitutional issue in emancipation—Lincoln’s “war powers” as president—even though that would have been the logical complement to showing how antislavery as well as proslavery politicians were adept at making the Constitution ventriloquize for them. It is almost as though Fehrenbacher or McAfee, having cleansed in some measure the reputation of the Constitution, felt similarly burdened to cleanse Lincoln on emancipation. Gratuitous almost—but still worth every word.

Allen C. Guelzo is dean of the Templeton Honors College at Eastern University and the author most recently of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Eerdmans, 1999).

1. Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson (M.E. Sharpe, 1996), p. 31.

2. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 86.

3. Calvert to Lincoln, May 6, 1862, in the Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress.

4. Lincoln, “Speech at Elwood, Kansas,” November 30, 1859, in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler (Rutgers Univ. Press, 1953), Vol. 3, p. 496.

5. Lincoln, “Speech in Chicago,” July 10, 1858, and “Speech in Indianapolis,” September 19, 1859, in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 2, p. 492, Vol. 3, p. 465; “Fifth Joint Debate at Galesburg,” in The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, ed. Harold Holzer (HarperCollins, 1993), p. 263.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Several years ago I attended a lecture by Eamon Duffy sponsored by the history department of a major Midwestern faith-based university. The exact title escapes me, but I distinctly remember the word “disenchantment” appearing on the posters advertising the talk—as in, “The Disenchantment of the World in a Sixteenth-Century English Town.” I was surprised that a leading historian would use such an old-fashioned, Weberian concept to analyze a process of historical change whose complexity his professional peers relentlessly insist eludes all such simplistic sociological modeling. I was even more surprised when his talk, primarily an account of the architectural changes Protestant Reformers inflicted on the church at Morebath, “a tiny Devonshire sheep-farming village,” proved true to its title. Duffy’s account of the dismantling of the rich symbolic universe of medieval Catholicism would have fit nicely into any of Weber’s essays on the sociology of religion, except for its bald concluding assertion that this disenchantment was a bad thing. Behind the closed doors of a department meeting, several of the hosting historians denounced Duffy as an ideologue.

Partisan, yes. Ideologue, no. Some ten years ago Duffy caused a stir among historians of early modern Europe with the publication of his magisterial The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580. In that book, whose influence quickly spread beyond narrow disciplinary borders, Duffy advanced what for some was (and still is) the outrageous thesis that the Reformation was forced on an English populace largely content with a vital lay piety that was the legacy of Catholic reforms initiated in the late medieval period. Even those unconvinced by his overall argument acknowledge Duffy’s re-creation of the structures of traditional religious life on the eve of the Reformation as a marvel of historical scholarship, one of those books that comes along once in a generation. With the weight of such scholarship behind him, Duffy has more than earned the right to indulge in the occasional partisan polemical assertion.

The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village, is as narrow a study as The Stripping of the Altars was broad. Duffy calls it “a pendant” to that massive book. It is less a community study than the study of a single text, the parish accounts of Sir Christopher Trychay, Morebath’s only priest through the middle decades of the sixteenth century. As a document of social history, these records confirm Duffy’s earlier account of the rationalization of Christian belief and practice during the transition from Catholicism to Anglicanism. Perhaps wary of being accused of simply repeating himself, Duffy offers his study as “above all … a convincing portrait of a remarkable man” and a faithful reconstruction “of what the world looked like through his eyes.”

That Duffy succeeds as a social historian should come as no surprise to those familiar with his previous work; that he fails as a biographer is less a reflection of his skills than his sources. Still, Duffy bears some responsibility for his choice of “voice” as a framing device for his study. The contrast between his modernist frame and his medieval subject matter points to a serious challenge facing even partisan Christian scholars who continue to work within the established conventions of the historical profession.

Duffy’s account of Sir Christopher’s Morebath draws on many of the classic tropes of organic wholeness conventionally associated with the sociological concept of Gemeinschaft. This wholeness presents itself immediately in the very documents that are Duffy’s main source. No mere financial accounting, the warden’s records were a public performance, “the recitation of which served to display the community and its relationships to itself in a particularly concrete way.” As seemingly mundane an activity as tracking the movement of church-owned sheep from the care of one parishioner to another “enacted the sharing of communal burden, the bond of neighborhood.” And “neighborhood” is the right word, for Duffy explains at the outset that in the sixteeenth century the village consisted of only 33 families. In a world where “no rigid distinction was drawn between the community at prayer, and the community as it went about its business,” secular responsibilities needed the sanction of religion and religious responsibilities needed secular reinforcement.

Duffy diverges from these standard tropes by rendering Morebath a particularly democratic version of the premodern community. The constant revenue-generating concerns of the church provided the laity with numerous opportunities through leadership of the various “stores” or devotional funds raised by parish organizations responsible for general maintenance and special church projects. The diversity of these stores (very roughly analogous to the deacons’ fund, the trustees’ fund, and so on in modern churches), reflected the diverse social groups that made up the parish. Women were in charge of their own stores, and could even hold positions of power over men in mixed-sex stores.

A large part of the fundraising was directed toward Masses for the dead and upkeep of the statues and altars of various saints, a practice that symbolically extended the community of Morebath back through time and beyond this world into the next. Still, avoiding nostalgia, Duffy gives ample evidence of tension and conflict. Dabbling in the language of cultural anthropology, Duffy writes of the Tudor parish as “a forum in which the sometimes troublesome obligations of neighborhood were prescribed and enacted.” His concern is less with showing how well people got along than with evoking the richly communal social forms through which they adjudicated conflict.

It was these forms, rather than conflict as such, that came to an end with the religious reforms imposed from Henry through Elizabeth. The symbolic reduction—and financial consolidation—of these reforms is perhaps best captured by the changes in the management of the parish’s sheep: “Our Lady’s sheep, St. Sidwell’s sheep, and all the sheep of the other stores are from henceforth ‘the church sheep.’ ” Duffy argues convincingly for Morebath’s general resistance to these reforms, culminating in the participation of several parishioners in the bloodiest popular resistance to the Reformation, the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549. Edward VI’s violent crackdown on Catholic resistance caused Sir Christopher to mute his Catholic sympathies, a strategy of prudence he continued until his death in 1574.

Sir Christopher’s ultimately religious loyalty lay with place rather than doctrine. Morebath, not Protestantism, triumphed over Catholicism. Accommodation, not zeal, secured the ultimate victory of the Reformation in England. Generally sympathetic to Sir Christopher, Duffy nonetheless sees a general decline in the “warmth and humanity” in his writing over the course of his settling into the new order. In the dismantling of the stores Duffy sees a “process of cooling and disenchantment”; in the general decline of traditional Catholicism he sees “a coarsening of social fibre.” Despite such loaded judgments, he insists that he does not intend his study of Morebath as proof of any thesis.

The only aspect of the book less convincing than this disclaimer is Duffy’s effort to extend his argument for the vitality of popular resistance to the Reformation from the objective level of external events to the subjective level of internal beliefs. Duffy is too good a historian not to leave evidence of wrong turns taken on his journey to the “hidden places” of popular piety. He opens his chapter on “The Piety of Morebath” by conceding: “We are forever shut out from all but the surface of Morebath’s religion.” Basing most of his account of Morebath on Sir Christopher’s records, he acknowledges that “neither the solemnities of the liturgy nor the secrets of the heart leave much trace in churchwardens’ accounts.” Duffy further points to a fundamental paradox in the study of popular religion, or popular culture in general: “Routine … leaves few records, even though most of what is fundamental to ordinary existence is a matter of routine.”

Such tough-minded realism as to the limitations of sources might reasonably lead Duffy on to subjects where existing evidence promises more fruitful inquiry. As is so often the case with such studies, however, a kind of academic populism leads Duffy to boldly go where paradox has had the good sense not to go. Attacking a strawman of academic Élitism, he defends the integrity of the “undocumented, invisible” world of routine that has been “far too easily discounted by the historian seeking to touch the texture of the life of the past.”

Some of the invisibility of Morebath’s popular piety is the work of history: most of the records of the parish were lost when a Luftwaffe bomb destroyed the Exeter Probate Office in 1942. For this lost evidence, Duffy draws on surviving records from neighboring parishes to make his responsibly guarded inferences as to popular practice in Morebath. Some of this invisibility is, however, the work of culture: that is, a late medieval culture that did not feel the need to document the practices of everyday life, much less the personal feelings and perceptions with which people regarded those practices. For this lost evidence, Duffy attempts unsuccessfully to translate the popular piety of late medieval England into the contemporary category of “voice,” a concept that as used in current academic writing suggests a deep interiority nowhere evident in Duffy’s account of Morebath.

Indeed, much in Duffy’s book works against such a simplistic translation. To his credit, he does not attempt to render the “textures” of life through the conventions of the social and psychological realism bequeathed to the historical profession when novelists decided to move on to more interesting problems—but to his shame, and to this reader’s frustration, he often writes as if he has done just this. Duffy introduces his account as the rendering of “a chorus of forgotten but fascinating voices,” but by the end of the second chapter concedes that “All the voices of Morebath are one voice,” that of Sir Christopher. This voice is on the one hand representative, expressing the shared values of the community, yet on the other hand highly distinctive, even idiosyncratic. When it comes to what Sir Christopher actually thought about the outlawing of the cult of the saints, for instance, Duffy concedes “we can only guess.” The book is full of such qualifications and speculations regarding motives and beliefs. One can appreciate Duffy’s honesty and caution yet still question the reasons for pursuing a line of investigation that requires such repeated caveats.

Against its title, The Voices of Morebath is less about personal voices than religious forms. Its strengths are those of The Stripping of the Altars; its weaknesses are those of the “fashions” of historical revisionism about which Duffy himself expresses some skepticism. The turn to voice obscures the point made crystal clear in his earlier book and in the talk through which I first encountered his research on Morebath: for Duffy, the Reformation was a bad thing.

Again, he is no simple-minded polemicist. He acknowledges the deficiencies of medieval Catholicism and the strengths of the Protestant critique, particularly with respect to the accessibility of Scripture. Still, for Duffy, the Reformation brought a drastic flattening out of the rich, symbolic devotional and communal world of late-medieval Catholicism. For partisans on either side of this divide, the issue of agency—whether the common people of England, let us say, embraced the Reformation or had it rudely forced on them—is at best secondary to the issue of the substantive truth value of the two formal spiritual orientations. And all historians, even secular ones, have some partisan stake in this issue.

The Reformation has a prominent place in a broader progressive narrative of the triumph of reason and liberty over superstition and authority. The secularization of intellectual life in postwar America celebrated by David Hollinger, for example, may have shut Protestants out of the enlightened present, but even a hardcore secularist like Hollinger would acknowledge the significant role of the Reformers in the advancement of enlightenment in the past. Catholicism remains the “other” of this story, and consequently the “other” of a profession dedicated to the legitimation of modernity.

Duffy does neither his partisan Catholic cause nor the larger debate much good by framing his position in terms of human agency. The willing adoption of the Reformation by powerful English nobles no more proves the truth of Protestantism than the loyalty of the Spanish nobles proves the truth of Catholicism. A work like The Stripping of the Altars is an indispensable reminder of the world we have lost, but it is not particularly helpful as a guide to whether that world is best left lost. A work like The Voices of Morebath is positively harmful in its attempt to translate the world-historical transformation of the Reformation into one man’s personal story of loss and accommodation. History has said all that it can on the subject. It is now a matter for theologians and philosophers.

Like Orson Welles after Citizen Kane or Spike Lee after Do the Right Thing, Eamon Duffy carries the burden of having created a masterpiece far in advance of the decline in his powers of productivity. Sometimes productivity does more harm than good. The Voices of Morebath bears the stamp of a great historian embarked on a minor professional exercise.

Christopher Shannon is the author most recently of A World Made Safe for Differences: Cold War Intellectuals and the Politics of Identity (Rowman & Littlefield).

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

• A Jan. 17 Op-Ed article about Mark Twain misattributed a phrase about poetic language as the “precision that creates movement.” The author is E.E. Cummings.—The New York Times, Jan. 28, 2002.
• A Jan. 28 correction on this page inadvertently misattributed a phrase in a previous article about Mark Twain to the author E.E. Cummings. The phrase should have been misattributed to the poet e.e. cummings.—The New York Times, Jan. 31, 2002.
• A Jan. 31 correction on this page inadvertently stated that a phrase in a previous Op-Ed article about Mark Twain should have been “misattributed” to the poet e.e. cummings. Of course the phrase should have been “attributed” to the poet e.e. clemmings.—The New York Times, Feb. 3, 2002.
• A Feb. 3 correction on this page stated that a phrase in an article about Mark Twain should have been attributed to the poet e.e. clemmings. In fact there is no such poet. The poet to whom we meant to attribute the quote is, of course, e.e. cummings.—The New York Times, Feb 5, 2002.
• A Feb. 5 correction that appeared on this page misstated that there is no poet named e.e. clemmings. In fact e.e. clemmings emailed us that day, stating that the reports of his demise had been greatly exaggerated! Mr. clemmings informs us that he is no relation to either the poet e.e. cummings or to Mark Twain, whose pen name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens.—The New York Times, Feb. 12, 2002.
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• A Feb. 25 correction on this page inadvertently referred to the poet Mr. T. as an actor. In a threatening letter we are in-formed that while Mr. T. is principally known as an actor, Mr. T’s lawyers have asked that, in future, we refer to him as a poet. We were also informed that Mr. T. writes verse under the pen name Samuel “Clubber Lang” Clemens.—The New York Times, Feb. 28, 2002.
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Eric Metaxas is a Books and Culture contributing editor.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Somewhere in Manhattan, a precocious eight-year-old is asking that question. She's had Adorno and Benjamin for bedtime stories. Mommy teaches Critical Theory at the New School; Daddy's a photographer specializing in corpses. They know what the Right Answer is supposed to be. ("No, pumpkin, of course not: we're all postmodern now.") But they're beginning to have doubts.

No shelf space is available. Atop the heap of recent arrivals in their hallway, books and journals higgledy-piggledy, are two new books on zeppelins: Dr. Eckener's Dream Machine: The Great Zeppelin and the Dawn of Air Travel, by Douglas Botting (Holt), and Zeppelin! Germany and the Airship, 1900-1939, by Guillaume de Syon (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press). The mere image of a zeppelin evokes a complex mix of nostalgia and cultural condescension, as you might feel turning the pages of a nineteenth-century photo album.

And there's more of the same in The Ride to Modernity: The Bicycle in Canada, 1869-1900, by Glen Norcliffe (Univ. of Toronto Press). Norcliffe's first chapter is called "Modernity and the Bicycle." Is any further proof needed that we've passed beyond modernity? These comical figures with their velocipedes and long skirts and funny hats: we see them as across a great gulf.

But the style of our own moment, as Hugh Kenner has observed, is invisible to us, and how long will it take before the characteristic artifacts of today seem as quaint as zeppelins? Perhaps there's more continuity between the era of these books and the early twenty-first century than the Postmod Squad would have us believe. We might even learn something about the present from these retrievals.

"Upon receiving news of an airship raid on London," de Syon writes, "Thomas Edison had argued that the next war should be fought with machines instead of men. He suggested that such an approach to war would offer efficiency and also have a deterrent effect." Sounds like the rhetoric that fueled many accounts of the Gulf War, but with the values reversed. The war was deplored as a computer-game war, a living-room war, its public face masking the reality of killing—and said to be the very quintessence of postmodernity. But to a significant degree, it could be said to have realized Edison's vision—and that of many of his contemporaries—for better or for worse. Whatever modernity was or is, are we really past it or out of it or otherwise definitively somewhere else?

You may find the whole question pointless, in which case you've probably already stopped reading. But it's not such an esoteric matter. After all, as we noted in introducing the series of responses to Brian McLaren's book, A New Kind of Christian (the series concludes in this issue; see pp. 32-33), if you've been to a conference on the state of the church anytime in the last five years, chances are you've heard it said that while we live in a postmodern world, the church is still largely stuck with assumptions and practices shaped by modernity. And this is said to have all kinds of practical consequences for ministry.

In fact, assertions about the state of religion—and Christianity in particular, its currency, its authority, or rather lack of same—are never far below the surface of talk about postmodernity, and often right in the foreground. A book we'll be reviewing in Books & Culture is called Meaning and Modernity: Religion, Polity, and Self, edited by Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton (Univ. of California Press). It's a Festschrift of sorts, a collection of essays in response to the work of the sociologist Robert Bellah, and Bellah contributes a substantial epilogue responding in turn to the essays. Here's the way the book begins:

There is a painful contradiction between what modernity promises and what it delivers. It promises—indeed demands—intellectual, moral, and political emancipation. Yet it delivers an iron cage.

What are the alternatives, according to the editors? Well, there's "the movement commonly called post-modernism," ultimately nihilistic, presuming "that, if religion, moral obligation, reason, and freedom are only human creations, then these ideals, however desirable, have no authoritative status in human social life." The editors present a "third way" based on the "symbolic realism" of Bellah: the notion that "religious symbols, created by human beings as ways of grasping the ultimate conditions of existence, could nevertheless have transcendent meanings that made powerful claims on individuals and communities for moral self-understanding and judgment."

Interesting. Notice that people who believe that what are here called their "religious symbols" are not exactly "created by human beings" don't even rate a mention, except in a dismissive passing reference to "earlier approaches to religion and morality." Evidently such "approaches" don't even constitute a "way" to be rejected; history has already passed judgment.

But then what are all those unreconstructed believers up to, running around the postmodern landscape like dinosaurs in the Parthenon? Someone forgot to tell them: we're all postmodern now.

—John Wilson

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The Darkest Hour of the Soul

After reading your interview with Hanan Ashrawi [“The Darkest Hour of the Soul,” March/April], I wonder how many Palestinian Christians go along with the Muslim hatred of Israel out of fear. Here is a portion of the testimony of Senator Connie Mack (R-Florida), who decried the condition of Christians under the Palestinian Authority’s jurisdiction, after a trip to the Middle East in early-1999:

[I met] an energetic man, in his early 40s, at the end of the table. . . . He had many children and very little money. He converted to Christianity in 1993.-He clearly loved God, and hg loved to tell

people about his conversion. He described to me how in 1997, the Palestinian Authority asked him to come to the police station for questioning. When he arrived, he was immediately arrested and detained on charges of selling land to Jews. He denied this charge, since he was very poor and owned no land. He was beaten. He was hung from the ceiling by his hands for many hours.

After two weeks, he was transferred to a larger prison where he was held for eight months without trial. He was released in February 1998, after his family borrowed thousands of dollars to pay off the local authorities. And even though he is free, they are keeping his father in prison. They believe it is for his son’s beliefs. He feels his father is being held hostage to prevent him from talking with people about his faith. Needless to say, these Christians met With me at considerable risk. They conveyed to me a message of fear and desperation. But their mere presence in the room with me demonstrated their hope, and it also caused me to ask, how can the people of Israel find peace with the Palestinian Authority while the Palestinian Authority engages in coercion and torture based upon religious beliefs.

(www.senate.gov/~mack/issues/StatementFP.htm)

And Ashrawi wants us to believe that all Christians in Palestine support Arafat and the Muslims wholeheartedly? And she wants us to believe that Israelis can live in peace with these murderers?

Roger McKinney, Tulsa, Okla.

More letters can be found at www.booksandculture.com.

I have been reading Sandra Mackey’s dated but still informative book The Saudis, about Saudi Arabia’s oil boom in the seventies and eighties. Despite Mackey’s sympathetic voice, her reporting revealed an extreme xenophobic culture trying to enjoy the fruits of modern technology and wealth while preserving their Bedouin culture. Especially troubling was Mackey’s description of Saudi women, who existed in a cloistered world of gender-specific stores, banks, and portions of homes. They could not hold jobs, drive, or be out in the world without a male family escort. Many were educated in order to be more valuable in the mate market, but they could not do anything with their education.

And so it was with genuine excitement I picked up the May/June issue of Mother Jones and saw a picture of a veiled Muslim woman on the cover. Under the banner “False Prophets,” I expected an updated report on the plight of these women. I even felt admiration at the idea that the politically liberal, underdog-loving folks at Mother Jones having the courage to apply their modern notions of gender justice to Muslim cultures.

But these thoughts were fleeting. After the striking photo and arresting words, my eyes took in the cover’s full title: “False Prophets: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Aims to Eliminate Islam.” What? Did they unearth a secret plot by extreme Christian fundamentalists to declare an evangelical jihad? Who on earth wants to “eliminate Islam”?

Missionaries, that’s who. Writer Barry Yeoman does uncover a plot, all right, but one that shouldn’t have shocked any educated person today. Yeoman sat in on a short, intensive class at Columbia International University—a conservative Christian school in South Carolina that has a missions emphasis—taught by Rick Love, the international director of Frontiers, a large missionary organization devoted to reaching Muslims. Here is what Yeoman discovered: Evangelicals are sending 3,000 missionaries into Muslim cultures; these missionaries often find jobs that mask their true intentions—such as teaching English to nationals. Then these people invite local Muslims into their homes and have religious conversations with them. Shocking!

But that’s not all. It turns out that evangelicals think Islam is a false religion and feel it is their duty to convert Muslims to Christianity—some even believe that Muslims will go to hell unless they embrace the Christian gospel. So these missionaries often bring in aid and offer medical services and then muddy these good works by insisting on telling people why they are doing these things. This, according to Mother Jones, fuels “distrust and resentment toward Westerners.” Yeoman describes how Warren Larson, a former missionary in Pakistan, lived through a riot where “200 armed Muslims stormed Larson’s home, throwing bricks at the ministry’s two Land Rovers, kicking down his door, and setting fire to religious literature.” MJ strongly implies Larson deserved what he got.

And here is most scandalous finding: “Missionaries themselves acknowledge that their work endangers the lives of converts,” Yeoman writes. He reports that converts are usually disowned, stripped of their possessions and families, and often killed. Now why would anyone want to be rescued from a culture with this kind of toleration factor?

The religious illiteracy demonstrated by Mother Jones should be embarrassing. What did they think missionaries do? Do they know why we are called evangelicals? Did they ever stop and think what would motivate affluent American Christians to go live in a hostile Third World country? Both Dayna Curry and Heather Mercer, the rescued American aid workers imprisoned by the Taliban, have said they dream of going back to Afghanistan. This is the “stealth crusade” to “eliminate Islam”?

Besides the article’s religious ignorance also lies a specifically anti-Christian bias. Yeoman describes Islam as an aggressive, mission-minded, intolerant religion that kills those who opt out, and yet we are supposed to be upset with the Christian missionaries because they provoke Muslim violence. We are supposed to be critical of those who are trying to instill notions of freedom, human dignity, and the ideal of noncoercive religious choice into a culture that opposes them? (But doesn’t that come close to the very mission statement of Mother Jones?) We are supposed to label as “bad guys” the Christian missionaries who are willing to risk their lives for the opportunity to persuade others about the truth of the gospel and see as victims violent Muslim mobs who oppose the missionaries.

If this is our attempt to eliminate Islam, then we are guilty as charged. (In the same vein, then, Pepsi is guilty of wanting to eliminate Coke drinkers. And Mother Jones is out to eliminate readers of the Wall Street Journal.) And so God bless the great Eliminator, Jesus Christ, who wanted so much to eliminate the whole world that he was willing to bear the cross. Amen.

Michael G. Maudlin is the executive editor of Books & Culture.

Copyright © 2002 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere

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This weekend’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution noted both the Mother Jones cover story and the recent issue of Books & Culture.

appears Mondays at ChristianityToday.com. Earlier Books & Culture Corners include:

‘A Peculiar People’ | The uniqueness of the Jews. (April 29, 2002)

‘Nebuchadnezzar My Slave’ | Was the Holocaust God’s will? (April 15, 2002)

‘In the Beginning Was the Holocaust‘? | Blasphemy, rage, memory, and meaning of the Shoah. (April 8, 2002)

The Gospel According to Biff | A conversation with novelist Christopher Moore. (April 1, 2002)

Baseball 2002 Preview | Part 2: Saving the game? (March 25, 2002)

The State of the Game | After one of the best World Series ever, baseball faces a crisis. (March 18, 2002)

America’s Homegrown Islam—and Its Prophet | The strange story of Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam and onetime mentor of Malcolm X. (Mar. 11, 2002)

‘Must Be Superstition’ | Rediscovering spiritual reality. (Mar. 4, 2002)

Science Holds a Meeting | A report from the annual convention of the AAAS. (Feb. 25, 2002)

Saint Frodo and the Potter Demon | The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter series spring from the same source. (Feb. 18, 2002)

Dictionary of the Future | Trendspotter Faith Popcorn on the words that will define our tomorrow. (Feb. 11, 2002)

Does Creationism Equal Holocaust Denial? | Yes, says Michael Shermer in Scientific American. (Feb. 4, 2002)

Theodore Rex | Is “popular history” getting a bad rap? (Jan. 28, 2002)

Letter to Martin Luther King, Jr. | A progress report. (Jan. 21, 2002)

Keeping the Dust on Your Boots | Remembering the Afghan refugees—and the church in Iran. (Jan. 14, 2002)

Coming Attractions | Books to watch for this year. (Jan. 7, 2002)

Books of the Year, Part 2 | After the top ten, here’s the best of the rest. (Jan. 4, 2002)

Books of the Year | Part 1: The Top Ten (Dec. 17, 2001)

“Daddy, What Is the Soul?” | Does the church have an answer? (Dec. 10, 2001)