Milton’s Satan and our Polarized Republic: Not “Reason vs. Faith” but “Faith vs. Faith”

That we were form’d . . . say’st thou?
. . . strange point and new!
Doctrine which we would know whence learnt: who saw
When this creation was? remember’st thou
Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being?
We know no time when we were not as now;
Know none before us, self-begot, self-rais’d.

--Satan in Paradise Lost, V, 853, 855–60

Though politically on the left, in recent years I’ve had to engage more in “culture war” issues, and my stance, being Catholic, is more aligned with the right. Thus America's neat polarization into a unified "liberal" camp and a unified "conservative" camp often puts me at cross-purposes. Given the odd and historically contingent way our camps are constituted, I can agree with neither side, which results in a political loneliness that prods me to think and argue at the level of philosophical differences. The arguments are necessary, because when such differences aren't plumbed, no actual communication takes place.

At least for myself this constant digging at the root brings some deeper perspective. During the Obama years especially, certain insights about what drives our American polarization have become almost second nature to me. My main frustration is that it's now nearly impossible to communicate these insights to liberal friends; the resultant feeling of separation, that I'm speaking a different language from nearly everyone, grows worse by the year.

How to get across what I see in our endless talking past each other--that’s the challenge. A challenge I fail time and again.

Writing on our liberal order back in the 1990s, Stanley Fish put his finger on the crux of what divides religious from secular Americans. He underlined just the kind of problems that nag me to no end every time I discuss the culture with friends, foes and that ever growing group: frenemies.

Fish, a literary critic and law professor, begins by contrasting the distinct ways of reasoning followed by Satan and Adam in Milton’s masterpiece Paradise Lost. This contrast is then taken as a lens through which to clarify our ongoing American scuffles. A fine lens it proves to be, and Fish’s article, appearing in the journal First Things, is compelling reading for anyone who wants to grasp some of the maddening paradoxes inherent in our “pluralist” culture.

Milton’s Satan, a self-conscious being unable to remember how he was created, concludes that he must have created himself or somehow arisen from his own being. As Fish rightly points out, Satan’s initial conclusion on this point colors all his subsequent reasoning: “The habit of identifying the limits of reality with the limits of his own horizons defines Satan--it makes him what he is and is everywhere on display.” To figure forth such a character, Milton had to be keenly aware of the stakes of seeing oneself as a self-made being. For Fish, and I would heartily agree, we Americans have largely lost such awareness.

Adam’s path, which is Milton’s own, is radically different. Adam, coming to awareness as a self-conscious being in a world governed by complex laws, and like Satan unable to remember his own creation, concludes that there must be a Creator. Adam’s goal as a conscious being is to know and connect with that Creator. His is a path, an epistemology, that the modern liberal mind can no longer so much as grasp in its implications. Fish:

I make the point [about Adam’s way] strongly because it is so alien to the modern liberal-enlightenment picture of cognitive activity in which the mind is conceived of as a calculating and assessing machine that is open to all thoughts and closed to none. In this [modern liberal] picture the mind is in an important sense not yet settled; and indeed settling, in the form of a fixed commitment to an idea or a value, is a sign of cognitive and moral infirmity. Milton’s view is exactly the reverse: In the absence of a fixed commitment--of a first premise that cannot be the object of thought because it is the enabling condition of thought--cognitive activity cannot get started.

Two philosophical points might be made about Adam and Satan’s distinct paths: first is that they begin with equally valid starting perceptions, equally rational reactions to the fact of self-consciousness in a universe; second is that they are both built entirely on initial gestures: for both Satan and Adam, the first step is a leap of faith, but it sets the course of all reasoning that is to follow.

Satan’s faith corresponds more closely to the secular liberal vision of human consciousness--that it arose from impersonal forces in a universe with no Creator. Adam’s faith corresponds to the religious perception: that there is a consciousness undergirding both ourselves and the universe.

But if both liberal and religious epistemology depend on an initial act of faith, and are thus similar in a way, the universes that come to be constructed on these different grounds will be radically different. What's more, those who hold to the path of Adam rather than the path of Satan will hold radically different elements of the universe as significant when it comes to constructing a system of values. And again this is a matter of the initial gesture. For both sides “evidence comes into view (or doesn’t) in the light of [that] first premise or ‘essential axiom’ that cannot itself be put to the test because the protocols of testing are established by its pre-assumed authority.” That is key: the authority in each case is a pre-assumed one. Once Satan’s initial assumption has been made as to his ultimate origin, his criteria for what will subsequently count as evidence in any given case is set. Likewise for Adam.

Fish’s point that these two approaches to truth are equally "faith-based" is no longer grasped in liberal culture. In my view, the widespread failure to grasp this basic epistemological insight is at the root of the endless miscommunication between secular and religious. For people of faith like myself, such miscommunication is often maddening, because, no matter how one tries to explain, the secular liberal sitting across the table just doesn't get it. But besides the fact of constantly talking past each other, there's another more menacing element in play. This widespread liberal inability to think to the depth of first premises results in a dangerous false assumption: namely, that their secular liberal viewpoint is somehow “neutral”.

I call it dangerous for various reasons. First, secular minds, unable to see the act of faith on which their worldview rests, are prone to assume that science and “reason” will always bring progress. Thus if we just let science and reason “run their natural course” (whatever that might mean) humanity will continue to grow more truly human. Amazingly, given the horrors of the 20th century, contemporary liberals still don’t see that this is little more than a shopworn 18th century ideology, a delusional misconstrual of the role of science. It seems their “postmodern” sophistication still hasn’t managed to unseat their deeper Enlightenment fundamentalism.

Second, secular liberals assume that those who argue against their conclusions are “scientifically illiterate”, an assumption that has led them to draw ideologically narrow borders around science itself. How so? Anxious that science is being offended against, they've upgraded its status to that of a "pure" and "universal" method, forgetting that it is in essence a philosophically grounded approach to acquiring only certain kinds of knowledge. Of course, when liberal thinkers accuse the religious of being scientifically illiterate, the accusation is sometimes true, but very often it is not. Educated religious people daily witness liberals tendentiously using scientific facts to draw ethical conclusions that don't necessarily follow from those facts. It's not the science that is at issue, but the way that science is used by liberals as a sort of exculpatory imprimatur.

The deep truth in all this is as follows: American liberals have become philosophically illiterate. Our secular liberals are people who can’t see that their own basic principles are not in fact grounded in the science they assume grounds everything. Their whole case rests on various leaps of faith no more rational or scientific than that of Adam in Milton's epic. Their worldview is a religion like other religions, except that they can't see that it is a religion. That they can't see its faith-based elements allows them to impose it with ever more authoritarian zeal. (In April, Yuval Levin argued persuasively that the liberal mainstream is in fact behaving as if it were the official national religion--and thus directly violating our Constitution's establishment clause.)

The danger this liberal blindness represents for a pluralistic culture is clear. If the faith of the secular liberal is that science and “open debate” will naturally lead to progress, what the smart religious observer sees is that this is not science, but merely scientism. And what Stanley Fish sees, and brilliantly underlines, is that the "open debate" the liberal order allows is usually rigged from the start.

But I've written too much here. I intended this post as an invitation to read Fish’s trenchant analysis. Aside from laying out the liberal hypocrisies I always have trouble getting my many frenemies to recognize, the article serves as a case study of how these hypocrisies affect even those who try to fight them. Indeed Fish shows that many who seek to defend religious insights still cannot think outside the box secular liberalism has put them in. As has been widely commented, the "liberal" vision, especially since the start of this new century, is growing ever more authoritarian in its basic gestures.

If you care, whether from a secular or religious point of view, about the deep gash running down the center of America, about why this gash never manages to heal, this article offers some solid answers.

Eric Mader

Planned Parenthood? What about PLANNED RETIREMENT?

Imagine the year is 2035. And imagine that in most American cities one can find branches of a new national organization called Planned Retirement.

Planned Retirement has many defenders, and many detractors.

The organization’s policies are progressive. With help from the federal government, they provide low cost housing, food and limited medical care to people over 65. When a resident has reached the ripe age of 77, the organization sends a doctor to the resident’s room with the medical equipment needed to crush the resident’s head, thus ending his or her life. Any salvageable organs are sold to research institutes, and residents’ bodies are buried in landfills.

Many Americans, especially Christians, are strongly opposed to Planned Retirement’s practices. They argue that killing the elderly in this way is a form of murder and that the difficulty of caring for elderly people is no excuse to end their lives. They also argue that mass burial in unmarked graves and the marketing of the dead’s organs as “research material” is an obvious ruse to avoid facing the painful truth--namely, that each of these elders was a unique human being with the inalienable right to life.

In Congress there is a new effort to defund the organization because of its snuff policies. But liberals are up in arms in support of Planned Retirement. They want to focus the debate on the health care and housing Planned Retirement offers elderly people, thus diverting the public's attention from the issue that led to the push to defund, namely: Planned Retirement's practice of terminating human lives.

And so: “This is just another attack on elderly health care!” the liberals scream.

Besides being an obvious attempt to change the subject, there's a second element of dishonesty in this cry. Liberals actually mean to imply that those seeking to defund Planned Retirement are somehow motivated by a disrespect for elderly people. Which is interesting, to say the least.

But consider another detail of Planned Retirement policy: If the family of an elder resident chooses to terminate Mom or Dad or Grandma or Grandpa’s life before the age of 77, they can provide written consent for such termination.

The reasons people give for wanting their parents’ termination are various: “We don’t have time to visit her any more.” “We have a right to live our lives as we choose!” “The fees to keep Mom there are too much for my budget.”

In a widely shared rant in defense of Planned Retirement, liberal senator Elizabeth Warrick argues: “How can we dare interfere with these families when they are making what is probably the single most difficult decision of their lives? How can we dare?”

Senator Warrick seems think that the moral difficulty individuals might face in deciding to kill their parents or grandparents should carry more weight than the lives of those whose heads are to be crushed.

Again: Interesting argument.

My point:

If in the current American debate about defunding Planned Parenthood you’ve found yourself arguing that “This is an attack on women’s health care!” or “Abortions only account for 3% of Planned Parenthood’s services!” or “It’s a difficult decision! We shouldn’t presume to judge!”--well, congratulations: To me, as a Catholic, you sound precisely like those future liberals above arguing in support of “Planned Retirement”. Your arguments ring equally hollow are are equally beside the point.

The fact is that Christians and others are not opposed to Planned Parenthood because of some vague lurking misogyny. No, they are opposed to Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers because of one obvious truth: Just like the unfortunate elders in the above future scenario, the unborn are each unique human beings.

This is not merely Christian teaching, or some religious teaching, it is a scientifically demonstrable fact. Each unborn person has an integral human body and unique human DNA. As such, she or he is a unique human person and deserves the defense of the law, regardless of whether or not she or he has a name.

In terms of the ethics involved, my above dystopian tale of “Planned Retirement” offers a precise parallel to what the real organization Planned Parenthood is doing right now. Planned Parenthood serves the “health” of young mothers and their children in the same way that my fictional Planned Retirement serves the “health” of the elderly and their families. In both organizations, when people are judged to be inconvenient, they are snuffed.

Because of Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers, we already live in a dystopia. Defunding is the least they deserve.

What kind of wool is it, of what thickness, do American liberals have to keep pulling over their eyes to avoid seeing this? It must be morally exhausting to have to defend, for decades on end, such an Orwellian vision of humanity. Women's "health care"?

Last year Planned Parenthood ended the lives of an estimated 165,000 women, tossing their broken bodies, or at least those parts that couldn’t be sold, into the trash bin.

American liberals really don't get it. That wool must be damn thick.

Eric Mader

Expatriotically Speaking

Since I'm often challenged to explain myself politically--how can I be "so far left" is usually the gist of the question--I'll actually try to do so here. Or if not explain myself, I'll at least lay my cards on the table. 

Yes, the terms "conservative," "liberal," "right" and "left" aren't very useful, but I'll try to use these terms even so. 

And so. . . .

The problem for most people, especially those who've known me since youth, the thing they can't get their heads around, is that I actually believe in government. I believe it has a role to play in managing and regulating the economy. It's true that Americans with such wacky ideas as this rarely hail from my childhood demographic: suburban Republican Wisconsin.

But folks get even more confused in discussion with me when they learn I'm a Christian. This is because people in my hometown assume Christians are all naturally Tea Party supporters. After all, everyone knows that big government means secularism means communism. And everyone knows Barack Obama wants big government and that he's a socialist or even a Muslim. (An "atheist Muslim"? Sometimes I can't keep track of how these people use the terminology. Perhaps I've lived overseas too long, so my grip on the meaning of English words has begun to slip.)

In fact I don't fit the political categories of the sector of American society I hail from. I'm culturally conservative but politically on the left. This doesn't make any sense to the folks back home. I represent an impossibility. 



But it's not just my small-town Midwest roots I don't jibe with. In America as a whole, I'm something like the polar opposite of normal. The things on which I'm conservative, Americans are generally liberal; and vice versa--where I lean to the left, Americans are on the far right. America's current default settings have been decades in the making; perhaps it's worth outlining how I see them.

In terms of culture, then, I would say that my country is largely what could be called liberal. It brings the world things like MTV, Facebook, "Sex and the City," hip hop. Yes, America is full of outspoken people who call themselves conservative, but this is hardly to the point when one looks at larger trends. America has long been a force of cultural liberalization, both domestically and abroad. 



In terms of politics, on the other hand, America is largely conservative. (I might say this with a caveat: America is "conservative" at least according to the degraded parlance of American Republicans.) My country's economic system is rigged to suit an oligarchy, its foreign policy is nationalistic, self-righteous, trigger-happy. America is far to the right of most of its Western allies and is moving ever further rightward. 



Both trends--America's cultural liberalism and its political "conservatism"--have only gotten more pronounced since I've become an adult. Thus as my country's culture drifts further and further from any respect for traditional Western learning, its economic order becomes more and more a matter of unfettered capitalism. I'd like to see the opposite of this trend; as the trend continues I only feel ever more alienated from the country I grew up in. 

In some respects, then, my politics are "un-American," as are my cultural ideals.

Politics: If we assume that a far right position favors pure free-market capitalism and that a far left position favors a centrally regulated socialism, I'd position myself a few inches to the right of Fidel Castro. This is to exaggerate a bit, no doubt. In fact I do believe free markets have a role to play. Nonetheless I also believe in strong central regulation of all business and finance, a tax policy that takes increasingly large bites as a person's income reaches the top of the scale, strong government protection of the environment, and strong government oversight of education. Government, in my mind, fulfills its role when it ensures against gross income inequalities, when it educates citizens, when it establishes an even playing field, when it protects resources for future generations. These are some things my own leftism would stress.



Culture: If we take education policy as a central arena of cultural debate, I could make my thinking clear by saying that I've always (with some differences) supported the idea of education put forward by Allan Bloom in the 1980s in his book The Closing of the American Mind. I am strongly in favor of a book-centered, classics-centered education, starting in high school and including, certainly, anything that would dare call itself a "university education". I am against the political correctness that seeks to make American schools a culturally neutral space where no tradition of thinking is assumed. In my America, students would start reading the Western canon in elementary school and would continue wrestling with it in high school and during most of their college years. To imagine that someone could graduate from any university without having studied Homer, the Greek philosophers, the Bible, European history, the Enlightenment--this would be out of the question. Only on the grounds of a thoroughly Western learning would students be able to opt for study of other cultural traditions. 



But why, some might wonder, why stick so tenaciously to the study of these old books? Don't we live in the 21st century? Don't we face a different spectrum of issues than our ancestors?

Absolutely not. In fact the Western canon is still the only place where Americans might ground themselves in the crucial questions they need to consider as citizens. These questions include: the relation of the state to citizenry; the meaning of public and republic; the bases and effects of different economic orders; the question of freedoms and responsibilities in the context of a democratic republic. 



Citizens in a democracy must first understand ideas before they can debate them. More to the point: they must understand the grounds of their political system in order to be able to judge where it needs reform and change, or even to judge the possibility of change.

Americans, as far as I can tell, are at present entirely unable to do this. The oligarchy is just fine with that. In fact, looking at what counted as a liberal education in previous decades, and comparing it to the present, I'm more or less convinced the oligarchy orchestrated, or at least expedited, the changes.

 A solid education in the humanities is the last thing the capitalist class wants.

And so it is that my compatriots enter adulthood with scant idea of how their political institutions developed or where their culture came from. They think of their culture as a kind of natural phenomenon to be taken for granted, not the result of historical struggle and the ascendance of a particular set of ideologies. Only a canon-based education can address this blind spot. With a stronger grasp of actual history, citizens would be less susceptible to the politics of warring soundbites and fear-mongering that's currently passed off as political debate. They'd also be more able to recognize a common good and thus more resistant to the absurd demonization of government we hear constantly from the American right. 



Of course most Americans are such hard-wired anti-intellectualists that they'd probably howl in protest at my idea of canon-based education. For them, university is a matter of job training on the one hand, football games on the other. And they're howling already, in any case, about my left-leaning idea of good government.

Go ahead, compatriots and sports fans, go ahead and say it: "If you like Fidel Castro so much, why not move to Cuba!" 



My answer to this is simple: Because I'd rather not live in Cuba, thank you. An experiment in authoritarian socialism, Cuba has serious problems, probably the main one being that it was built on a Leninist model. But Cuba with limited free markets, Cuba with elections and a range of political parties vying for who gets the right to manage a socialist economy--that would be something else. And so, though I'm glad I don't live in Castro's Cuba, I'm glad I didn't have to live in George W. Bush's USA either. 



Yes, I've lived overseas since the mid-1990s. The country I'm living in has its problems too, but I certainly don't feel I've missed out on much in the US. And what can I have missed--the Bush/Cheney years, the rise of the reality TV, Charlie Sheen? Though I had some hope when Obama was inaugurated, I see I was mistaken. In fact America is an echo chamber that gets only more idiotic with each passing year. Obama, if re-elected, does not seem likely to stand up to the oligarchy and push for any of the actual change he once promised. So rather than watch four more years of Compromiser-in-Chief up close, I'm grateful I don't have to live there. 



Maybe you think only lunatics (or perhaps Europeans) could be in favor of the kind of political order I advocate. Fair enough. But I'll ask you a few simple questions: How long do you think humans will be able to survive on this planet if unfettered capitalism is allowed to continue its onslaught on the natural environment? How long do you think the earth will survive the frenetic over-consumption we see in our country and other developed nations? If you recognize, like me, that the earth cannot long survive such pillage, who or what do you think will be able to regulate it? A different political order is needed to moderate excesses: to knock down the monopolies that tend to develop ("too big to fail"), the outrageous wealth that begins to gather, the rampant consumption that ignores what is happening to the environment. These are things only strong central governments can address--governments with a human agenda.

 Governments entirely in the pocket of corporations will never be able to address these issues.

Before closing, I'd like to return to the question of Christianity. As noted above, I'm a Christian, and this seems odd to many who hear me talk about political issues. I really don't know why. In fact both my political leftism and my cultural conservatism are informed by my faith. As for the leftism, this again, I know, is not the norm for American Christians. But so what? I myself find nothing particularly Christian about the things many other American Christians seem to support: free-market capitalism, militarism, greed as good, unbridled consumerism. Some Christians reading this now, maybe they'd like to say, "Hey, I don't support greed as good or militarism or unbridled consumerism!" Well, maybe you don't. But if you support the political status quo, especially if you vote Republican, I don't see how you can imagine you're not supporting these things. Think about it. What is it that the policies of the American right are grounded on if not the belief that 1) greed is good, 2) rapacious consumerism is a God-given right, and 3) American bombs bring peace, not war? Do you really think you don't stand for these things when you vote Republican? Heck, even if you vote Democrat you are supporting these things. If you consider my idea of Christian politics to be "weird" compared to yours, on what grounds are you making this comparison? Have you ever read, say, the Gospels?

* * * P.S.-- But might I, to raise the sense of contrast even higher, add Marx to that list of Western classics that should be required study? Certainly Marx was wrong about many things, but he remains a massively important thinker, maybe even especially now. Terry Eagleton wrote a fine piece on Marx last year:

http://chronicle.com/article/In-Praise-of-Marx/127027

Merest Christianity: A Correspondence

--T.H.L. on the Problem with my Christianity; E.M. on the Problem with American Christians--

Dear Eric:

Let me begin this letter by stating that I respect your faith in Jesus and your interest in Him. On the other hand, as a fellow Christian, I must tell you that I think your writing shows you are missing the forest for the trees. Your essays show a mind that is losing the focus that one needs for a true Christian faith.

Your essay about Guy Davenport's book will be my main example. I think modern Christians often come too much under the influence of scholars, and this seems to happen to you in your unbounded admiration for Davenport. Why does Guy Davenport have the right to neglect nearly all of the Gospels? Did you ever ask yourself this when reading his book? And why do you, as a Christian, decide to come out in support of him? Do you really think his tools of the trade as a scholar are so reliable?

To read Davenport's remarks, which you quote with approval, it would seem that Jesus was just a kind of smart aleck. That is about all the impression I can get of Jesus Christ from this supposedly poignant account.

Jesus was not a smart aleck or a tricky weaver of riddles, and you as a Christian should know this. He was who He said He was: the Son of God who died for the sins of the world. If this truth about Jesus Christ is not remembered, then all the rest of His words are misunderstood. They will become merely riddles or word games for scholars like Davenport to write their books on.

Thoughtful Christian writers have better models than Guy Davenport or Elaine Pagels. Have you ever read the writer C.S. Lewis? C.S. Lewis was a great scholar and a great Christian apologist for our modern age. He is the kind of writer who could inspire you in your own essays, and he is one who surely keeps the whole Christian truth in mind in everything he writes. If you haven't read Lewis, I would recommend starting with Mere Christianity. If you have read him, I hope you would write something about him. It would be more interesting for Christian readers than these writings about Gnosticism or Guy Davenport.

There is very much at stake in the paths we choose in modern times. I am an American Christian. I see from your webpage that you live in Taiwan. But even in Taiwan you must see how much the world is in need of the complete redemptive message of the Bible. In America there is more and more divorce, more and more violence and perversion and addiction of all kinds. It is all because people are lost: their values are mistaken. Many of them don't have any values at all. As a Christian, you should see that such people don't need these supposed fragments and riddles that Davenport tries to give us in his book. They need the real message of Jesus Christ. They need the complete message. They need to know why He really came into our world.

As I said in my opening words, I do respect your faith, but as a Christian I feel your writing needs more. I feel you have missed the forest for the trees.

Sincerely,

Thomas H. L----- * * * Dear Thomas:

Thank you for your thoughtful response to my writings. I respect and understand your suggestions, and believe you touch on an important issue: What might it mean to be a Christian and a scholar? Your letter suggests some of the problems that immediately arise. Though I myself am not a scholar, I am interested in scholarship and how it illuminates Christian history, and so these problems are important to me.

As for your recommendation of C.S. Lewis, I will definitely take it up. I've read some of Lewis, but not Mere Christianity. I've wanted to read this book for some time, but haven't gotten around to it.

You say that in my faith or at least in my writing I am missing the forest for the trees. I will take a sapling from your idiom and watch it grow as follows. Consider how you might respond to my assertion:

Most American Christians believe they are wandering in a forest planted by Jesus Christ. But look! The forest they wander in is really one planted by American social conservatives and the Apostle Paul. Jesus and his teachings are hardly to be found there.

Here is how I see the crisis in American Christianity, or rather one of the main reasons for the crisis. Jesus' teachings are not acceptable to the churches. He is hidden behind a more palatable Paul and the neurotic social attitudes of the Religious Right. This situation has occupied my thoughts for a long time.

So let me ask you: Is this forest I've described the one you yourself prefer to wander in? I believe those trees planted by Paul are certainly very important, but why is it they tower so high over the few little shrubs of Jesus that are allowed to survive? And as for all those acres that come from the Religious Right--if it were up to me, I would cut them down. And you?

So let me ask you: What precisely is the Christian message you think I should be pressing? That Christ died for our sins? Yes, I could focus on this message, but it is perhaps the only authentic New Testament message that the American churches are good at preaching. And many of them stress it to the exclusion of everything else about Jesus. As a writer I don't feel the necessity of taking it up, of explaining it. It is explained repeatedly by firebrand preachers all over the world. And nowhere more so than in America.

You mention America's divorce rate. So should I focus on "Christian family values"? I hope you don't think so. Because although American preachers go on and on about family values, Jesus' statements show us that he thought of the family as a stumbling block: one should step over it, never bothering to look back. Here are two examples of Jesus' family values:

1) "Master, your mother and your brothers are waiting for you outside." Jesus: "Who is my mother? Who are my brothers? Those who hear and follow the words of God, these are my mother and my brothers." (I.e.: the accidents of birth do not determine any binding tie: it is only kinship in the spirit that counts. Jesus clearly rejects the traditional stress on family and lineage.)

2) "Master, I want to follow you, but let me go and bury my father first." Jesus: "Let the dead bury their own dead. Those who put their hand to the plow and turn back are not worthy of the Kingdom." (I.e.: your father is dead, and so what? Family ties mean nothing to me or my ministry. Until you recognize that the work of the Kingdom is more important than any respect for family ties, you are not worthy to be a disciple.)

And these two instances are not all. I could offer more quotations from Jesus that show contempt for the family as an institution. The conclusion is inescapable: for Jesus the family is irrelevant. The only relevant thing is the work of the Kingdom.

So what gives with the Bible belt and this "family values" song and dance? I can tell you one thing: it has nothing to do with Jesus or his teachings. Where then do they get it? From themselves, that's where. The same place they get most of their sordid preaching. Jesus was a radical, something the Bible belt cannot stomach.

And they rail on and on about sexual morality, as if they were all obsessed with sex sex sex, whereas Jesus almost never talked about sex (I can find only two instances in the Gospels: two sentences out of hundreds and hundreds). And they are so certain that homosexuality is un-Christian because, they insist, it is against nature, whereas there is no record of any reference to homosexuality ever coming from Jesus' mouth: not a single word. So given this repeated and hysterical concern with 1) family values and 2) sexuality, why don't they just call themselves The American Church of Social Conservatism because, to tell the truth, Jesus probably wouldn't recognize their movement as his, and he doesn't have a very large place in their movement in any case.

I'm sorry to quote Jesus in so "offensive" a manner on family values. It's just that I tend to stick with this annoying principle: If you want to teach something in Jesus' name, you should show that it goes back to Jesus himself. In other words, in trying to assess whether or not the family values movement in America is Christian or not, I think it's important to search out what Jesus himself said. Although Pat Robertson is respectable and all, I do think Jesus' words have precedence even over those of Pat Robertson.

Jesus preached a doctrine of open sharing of goods. The open sharing of goods was how one demonstrated that one understood the Kingdom; it was also a means of helping the Kingdom grow. This is one of the most oft-repeated of Jesus' themes: that one should not collect goods in preparation for the future and that one should share openly and always. This teaching, although repeated in all four Gospels, is never stressed in American churches. It is far easier for the churches to dwell on the abstract things offered by Paul. This is the route the churches chose long ago: it is an effective way of avoiding Jesus himself.

I hope I am not being misunderstood here. That I explain this core part of Jesus' doctrine, namely his teaching on property, isn't to imply that I claim myself to have the strength to follow it. I am not strong enough to follow it. But at least I recognize what this weakness of mine means: not strong enough to follow Jesus' teaching on property, I can hardly be righteous by Jesus' standards. By Jesus' standards, after all, anyone with a bank account is hardly righteous.

And another thing. Although I disparage parts of the stress put on Paul in American churches, I would not be confident asserting that Paul misrepresented Jesus' teachings. We cannot really be sure about this. All we can say with confidence is that the voice of Jesus we know from the Gospels and the voice of Paul have certain differences. Certainly that is in part a matter of the genre of the writings in question. But isn't it also possible that the sayings of Jesus preserved in the Gospels are more crucial than the letters of Paul? Wouldn't it be better for us, as Christians, to quote Jesus, say, three or four times as much as we quote Paul? I don't think I'd be exaggerating if I said that many Protestant churches give Paul just as much if not more space than they give the man Paul proclaimed as Messiah.

I believe I recognize much of the essential in Jesus' message. And what I see convinces me of the following: Those American Christians who think of sexual behavior or sexual orientation as a major Christian concern have not read the Gospels. Those Christians who feel so righteous that they give themselves the right to rail against their neighbors' sexual mores--but who still themselves have bank accounts--are hypocrites who have not read the Gospels. Those Christians who worry constantly about how the media is infecting youth but then teach their children to be materialistic and to judge success in life by income--such Christians have obviously not read the Gospels.

Jesus behaved like a vagabond and a hippy. He and his followers refused to settle down, refused to acquire property (he told them they must not) and preached among the outcasts and the marginal . If Jesus showed up in Texas or Utah or Florida or Alabama--if he showed up in any "good neighborhood" at least--I can assure you he'd be arrested within a few days. If he came to your door or my door with James and Peter in tow and asked to stay for the night it's more than likely neither you nor I would let him in. This is something a Christian should at least recognize: That we ourselves do not live up to what is expected, that we are far from the mark, that in fact many of our supposed Christian values would be scoffed at by Jesus himself if he were here to see us.

So, my friend, to conclude: You may believe that my interest in a writer like Guy Davenport shows that I can't see the forest for the trees. But I feel the truth of the situation may be quite different. The truth may be that you and I are not exactly in the same forest. I may be wrong about this, for I can't be quite sure from your letter just how you understand Jesus and his words. But this at least is my suspicion, given the tone and concerns I note in your letter.

Are you sure that you as a Christian have really taken Jesus' teachings into account in your remarks about America?

I will take up your suggestion to finally read C.S. Lewis' book. And I welcome any reply you may have to my remarks here.

Sincerely,

Eric Mader