Category: General
Big Fish
GeneralMovie Review
How will you tell the story of your life? How will you capture and remember the people, the moments that are the unfolding drama of life? Is there a story in your life worth telling?
Big Fish, directed by Tim Burton and adapted from a Daniel Wallace novel by John August (Charlie’s Angels, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle), is a fairy tale – heroic, romantic, and fantastic. It is about the telling of one man’s life, Edward Bloom (Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney). Edward has narrated his life through a string of unbelievable tales, stories he has told a thousand times and which his son, Will (Billy Crudup), can recite by heart… with disdain. Now that Edward is dying, Will wants to discover the truth about who his father really is – he wants to uncover the man behind the myths, or as Will insists on referring to the stories, “the lies.” “In telling the story of my father’s life, it’s impossible to separate fact from fiction, the man from the myth.”
Matthew Kirby (www.metaphilm.com) describes Big Fish as “a tall tale about the necessity of fiction if there is to be any truth in the world.” Exactly. James Berardinelli (Reelviews) writes, “In addition to telling a wonderful fairy tale, Burton is lauding the importance of storytelling and emphasizing the need to keep some element of magic and mystery in a world that has become coldly cynical.” The great irony of the film and the heart of the film’s metaphor is that the myths reveal the real Edward. Big Fish is a cinematic fairy tale about the transforming power of art.
The title calls to mind the wistful fisherman telling the tale of how the big one got away. Who is the “big fish”? How is the fish caught, and how is the fish set free?
The cinematic world of Tim Burton is a quirky blend of fantasy and reality (Batman, Batman Returns, Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow) – the surreal mingles with the real often creating a jarring, rejuvenated view of the familiar. Burton’s films are often dark and cynical, but Big Fish is a hopeful and noble story infused with a determined idealism. The confidence and optimism of the tale, actually of Edward’s life, is the answer to a question posed early in the film: How would you live your life if you knew today how your life would end?
Big Fish features a splendid blend of characters and performances by Albert Finney as the older Edward Bloom, Jessica Lange as the older Sandra Bloom, Ewan McGregor as the younger Edward, Danny DeVito, Helena Bonham Carter, Steve Buscemi, and Robert Guillaume. The film is beautifully shot and edited, and glides effortlessly between the reality of fantasy and the fantasy of reality. Burton has given us a celebration of the art of storytelling and the storymaking of love.
-Steve Froehlich
Questions for discussion:
- Big fish in a small pond… The big one that got away – how do these familiar expressions fit into the story of the film?
- How does the element of water figure into the imagery and ideas of the story?
- Is Edward Bloom self-centered or unselfish? What leads you to that conclusion?
- What motivates Edward to live his life the way he has?
Blue
GeneralMovie Review
Watching any of the films by Krzysztof Kieslowski is like meditating upon an impressionist painting by Renoir or being embraced by a tone poem by Richard Strauss. His films are compositions even more than they are stories – they are contemplations of the human condition, explorations of the soul that do not lose their grip on the real world. As with the 2 segments of Kieslowski’s The Decalog that we watched last year, the background for his cinematic canvas is the world as we know it and the dilemmas of life that real people face in the throb of life.
Blue is the first installment of Kieslowski’s majestic Trois Couleurs (Three Colors) trilogy: Blue, White, and Red. The colors are drawn from the French national flag that memorialize the themes of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, and fraternity. Each film is a parable meditating on each of these themes.
Freedom. Often in film literature, freedom is depicted as that liberation realized only in death (Braveheart), or as that throwing off of the chains of repression (Easy Rider). However, in Blue, Kieslowski invites us to think about freedom amid the toil of life, that freedom which will not allow us to escape into self-pity, revenge, or indulgence. In Kieslowski’s own words, “in Blue, liberty is not treated in a social or political way, but [as] the liberty of life itself.”
Julie, the central figure played exquisitely by Juliette Binoche, is “brutally liberated” (Jonathan Kiefer in Salon) in the opening scene when her husband, a renowned composer, and her daughter are killed in an automobile accident. She then systematically disposes of all the relics of her former life, including original drafts of the score her husband left unfinished at his death. “I don’t want any belongings, any memories,” she says. “No friends, no love. Those are all traps.” She escapes to an anonymous life with “no memories, no love, no children.” But she discovers that she cannot be really free – she cannot gain the freedom to control her life simply by burying everything that has been a part of her life that she wants to forget. She is eventually recognized and found, and she admits that all during her self-imposed exile, the music that had been her husband’s inspiration, proved irrepressible within her soul. She completes the unfinished symphony for her husband, and with a quiet realism discovers freedom not as a thing unto itself but as part of the precious fabric of life. While this film and last month’s selection (About a Boy) are quite different, they bring us to very similar conclusions about freedom. Freedom can never be ours when we hoard it to ourselves and claim ownership of it like some trophy. Real freedom can only be known in that ironic tension described by Jesus, when we give ourselves away: “If you cling to your life, you will lose it; but if you give it up for me, you will find it” (Matthew 10:39).
The film is “visually sumptuous” (Kiefer) and plays wondrously on every variation and image of blue imaginable. Blue can be the water in which Julie swims. It can be ink, flowers, or the sparkling crystals in a lamp. Blue is the world that Julie inhabits, and it is only in that world that she can find the freedom in which her soul longs to rest. The emotive palette of the cinematography and the uncluttered study of human character reminds us that this is our world too.
-Steve Froehlich
Questions for discussion:
- How does Julie feel like her life is taken from her?
- How does Julie attempt to reclaim control of her life?
- In what way does Julie’s attempt to gain control comment on your efforts to gain control of life?
- Or, to escape those parts of your life that you believe will keep you from being free?
- Why does Julie give herself sexually to her long-time friend and admirer?
- What convinces Julie that she cannot find what she is looking for by escaping?
- How does Julie express the freedom she finds in the end?
- How do you think the use of color reinforces the theme of the film?
- In what way does the music of the film, musical elements within the film, and music within the character of Julie blend to expand the idea of the film?
- What is freedom?
Chocolat
GeneralMovie Review
Chocolat is sinfully scrumptious cinema. Rarely does a film look good enough to eat, but Lasse Hallstrom (My Life as a Dog, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?) gives us a fairy tale that will tease your taste buds. Really. But feast your eyes — you won’t do any damage to your waistline.
Set in an idyllic French country village in 1959, Chocolat tells a simple story, a fable. Once upon a time, a “sly wind from the North” blows the beautiful gypsy, Vianne (Juliette Binoche), and her daughter, Anouk, into the village. Their arrival, just in time for Lent, disrupts the ancient ordered way of life. The Mayor, the Counte de Reynard (Alfred Molina), is the self-appointed moral authority of the community. He even scripts and rehearses Father Henri’s Lenten homilies which call for “abstinence, reflection, and sincere penitence.”
Vianna shocks and startles the staid community by her indifference to the Mayor’s conventions and intimidation. She is an unwed mother. She does not attend church. She brazenly opens her chocolaterie — her tantalizing and seductive treats, her ancient recipes, boldly and temptingly set on display for all the the penitent and sober worshippers to long for as they wind their way to the church.
Therein lies the conflict and questions of the film. Does God approve of pleasure? Are joy and Christianity incompatible? Is religion repressive? Does the Christian faith offer any hope that hurting people can find healing for the deep longing of the human spirit?
Ironically, the one who brings joy is herself haunted by sadness, the weariness of being blown by the wind and never being truly at home, the ache of shame and rejection. But Vianna meets a river wanderer, Roux (Johnny Depp), and the gifts of kindness and loyalty that he offers her have the same magical effect upon Vianna that her chocolates have upon the good people of the village.
This is a fairy tale in which a cup of hot chocolate can soothe away an old woman’s fear of dying, chocolate covered almonds can tame the anger of a selfish husband, and truffles can give a lad courage. This is a romanticized reminder that age-old gnostic asceticism is still with us and still has the power to crush and wound even the most delectable of God’s creations, men and women who bear the glory of his image. Chocolat, much like Babette’s Feast, invites us to contemplate what life would be like without beauty and the joy of delighting in good things.
-Steve Froehlich
Bruce Almighty
GeneralMovie Review
“I don’t need to sit here and explain this movie to you, do I?” So opens the review of Bruce Almighty by Christopher Null of filmcritic.com. He has a point. The film concept is painfully simple, and the point is glaringly obvious. Isn’t it? So, don’t be prepared for a labyrinth of intellectual exploration or profound psychological musings – that would be diving in the shallow end of the pool only to miss the universally obvious – which is the point.
Just about everyone at some time or in some way, maybe deep down (c’mon, fess up), has thought about how life would be better if she were God or if he were in charge just for a day to set things straight. It’s true. Alice Cooper sings the confession for all of us in “I Just Wanna Be God”
I’m in control
I got a bulletproof soul
And I’m full of self-esteem
I invented myself with no one’s help
I’m a prototype supreme
I sit on my private throne
And run my lifestyle all alone
Me, myself and I agree
We don’t need nobody else
I’m just trying to be God
I only wanna be God
I just wanna be God
Why can’t I be God
Maybe watching the rubbery improvisational antics of Jim Carrey as Bruce Nolan, goofy local TV reporter from Buffalo, will cajole us into agreeing: I just wanna be God.
Tom Shadyac (Liar, Liar; Ace Ventura: Pet Detective; The Nutty Professor) unleashes Carrey in a frolicking comic playground, and Carrey delivers nicely. Jennifer Anniston counters as Bruce’s girlfriend, Grace, and her steady and earnest focus keeps the story from skipping across Lake Erie. Morgan Freeman brings an easy and amiable maturity to the setting as God. Sometimes bemused, often genial, at moments sad, Freeman assures us that God is always in control even when he shares his power with Bruce.
The question is simple: Could I do a better job than God in running the world – ok, not the world, just my little corner of the world? The complexity of the world makes the question absurd, yet why do we still want to try? Why do we still keep reaching for the controls? Why do we still keep shaking our fist at God, or our idea of God, when we confront the circumstances of life that don’t go our way or which we think should turn out differently (and certainly would if we were in charge)?
Do we really need someone to explain it to us? If we are even a little bit honest don’t we have to recognize that there are only 2 options: either God is God, or I am God? The truth is that we don’t understand everything that happens in life when God is God. But the alternative, even when we have great power, is that we are selfish and foolish and destructive when we are God. The alternative is laughable, but when we see ourselves on the screen, will we laugh at ourselves?
In the end, Bruce needs 2 people in his life: God and Grace. Is it any different for us?
-Steve Froehlich
Questions for discussion:
- If you had the power, what would you change about your life, the world?
- Why are we often angry at God?
- Where do our ideas of who God is and what God is supposed to do come from?
- In what ways have you tried to take control of your life? What have been the results?
- What is success?
- In way does Bruce’s use of power comment on the way you would use power?
- Have you ever discovered in yourself a deeply rooted selfishness? How was it exposed?
- What is grace? How does the theme of grace relate to the moral of this comic parable?
Changing Lanes
GeneralMovie Review
A fender bender on the FDR brings the lives of two men into collision as they both hurry to meet the demands life is pressing upon them. The lives of Gavin Banek (Ben Affleck) and Doyle Gipson (Samuel L. Jackson) are interrupted, and the delay resulting from the accident disrupts the order of their lives. In facing each other, they discover that they must be honest about the real root of the chaos in their lives. Is it the corruption pressing in from without or the pollution bubbling up from within that makes us wrestle with the hard choices of doing what is right and good?
Under the exquisite direction of Roger Michell and with the support of a superb cast, Changing Lanes is a character study told in a way that is surprisingly free from Hollywood convention and artificiality. Banek, the fast-paced corporate attorney, and Gipson, a recovering alcoholic working feverishly to keep his family together, are people we know living in the world as we recognize it from our own experience. These are the kinds of accidents that happen to ordinary people, like us, and these are the kinds of things that ordinary people, like us, do when we find ourselves in circumstances like these. The clarity of these characters portrayed on the screen draws us in, and we know that we are learning something about ourselves. Interior rooms of our heart are opened, and we ask of ourselves, What kind of person am I?
The accident makes both Banek and Gipson late for court appearances. Banek drops the file he was delivering to court on the freeway, and the judge gives him to the end of the day to produce the file, the file that Gipson has retrieved. Gipson has to repair his flat tire, and his late appearance at family court results in the judge awarding custody of his children to his wife. Both men blame each other for the trouble that has resulted, and each has leverage on the other – Gipson has the missing file, and Banek has legal clout to hurt Gipson.
“Better luck next time!” Banek shouts over his shoulder as he speeds away leaving Gipson to repair his flat tire. “Better luck next time!” Gipson scrawls on a fax to Banek letting him know he will not return the file. But luck has nothing to do with the circumstances facing these two men. They are faced with choices that arise from character. They are faced with the decision of what kind of man each will choose to be.
Gipson is a hard-working man, doing all he knows how to do to get control of his life, rescue his marriage, and keep his family. But when his wife observes how he is responding to the day’s events, she comments, “This is the sort of thing that always happens to you–and never happens to me unless I am in your field of gravity.” Later that day, his AA sponsor tells him, “Booze isn’t really your drug of choice. You’re addicted to chaos.”
Banek is an aggressive legal shark exploring how many ethical boundaries he is willing to cross in order to be successful. He is confronted by his wife who realizes that his crisis of conscience may cost her the way of life she wants to maintain. She asks him, “Did you know my father has been cheating on my mother for 20 years?” “No,” Banek responds, then adds, “Well, I didn’t know it was for 20 years.” His wife informs him that her mother knew all along, “but she thought it would be unethical to leave a man for cheating on his marriage, after she has an enjoyed an expensive lifestyle that depends on a man who makes his money by cheating at work.” Then, she looks across the table at Banek and informs him, “I could have married an honest man.” She is prepared to make the same ethical sacrifice that her mother made.
These lives collide on “a stormy Good Friday, and this noisily introspective salvation allegory is doggedly literal about treading on Jesus’s footprints” (The Village Voice). Changing Lanes is a journey worth taking even if it brings you into collision with some of the order you may be desperately trying to maintain in your life. Better luck next time? or, Better choices next time? Better choices will require some renovation of the soul if you are willing.
-Steve Froehlich
Vocation, Justice, and a New Creation
General
According to a popular parable, an architect asked three bricklayers what they were doing. One said, “I’m working”; the second answered, “I’m building a wall”; but the third responded, “I’m constructing a cathedral.” Sometimes attributed to the great British architect Christopher Wren, the anecdote effectively illustrates the role of purpose in dignifying labor.
It also helps illustrate the doctrine of vocation. Whereas prior to the Reformation, “vocation” was used to refer to those with religious orders, Reformation thinkers refuted the supremacy of the spiritual over the secular. By emphasizing the priesthood of all believers, they suggested that all persons can glorify God regardless of whether they labor as monks or masons.
Today, we need the doctrine of vocation as much as ever but for mostly different reasons. Whereas Luther argued that “vocation” ought to include labor, today’s secularized version of the work ethic reduces vocation to nothing but labor. Instead of holding too low a view of work, many students suffer from careerism, associating work not so much with service as with self-fulfillment.
At Chesterton House, we teach that an individual’s calling is a response to God’s calling. It’s a liberating frame of reference because it reframes our work as worship. Some churches and ministries encourage young graduates to spend a year or two doing missions work before settling into a career. But to suggest, implicitly or explicitly, that missions work is somehow superior to other work is to undo the Reformation doctrine of vocation. By contrast, all of our discipleship and discussions encourage students to consider the ways they can serve and glorify God in a plethora of possible paths–as engineers and entrepreneurs, public servants or even professors.
Thinking of our calling as a response to God’s calling also expands the notion of calling to include all of life. “The word vocation is a rich one,” writes our recent guest Steven Garber, “having to address the wholeness of life, the range of relationships and responsibilities. Work, yes, but also families, and neighbors, and citizenship, locally and globally—all of this and more is seen as vocation, that to which I am called as a human being, living my life before the face of God.” Or as Os Guinness puts it in The Call, “everyone, everywhere, and in everything lives the whole of life in response to God’s call.”
Given the current interest in poverty and justice issues (see “The Church on a Justice Mission”), part of our task is to help students discern their vocation in light of their desire to effect positive social change. A helpful rule of thumb in this regard is Frederick Buechner’s famous quip that “The place God calls you to is where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” (For a compelling illustration of this principle see The Hole in Our Gospel, in which Richard Stearns ’73 tells of his journey from luxury china CEO to World Vision president.) Of course, interest and need are not sufficient to discern one’s vocational calling. Ability also matters. If I believe I have the gift of singing, Tim Keller says, but others don’t seem to have the gift of listening to me, then I need to reconsider. Indeed, not all are called to serve the poor directly.
The connection between poverty and vocation runs much deeper than the matter of discernment. According to Brian Fikkert of the Chalmers Center for Economic Development, Americans tend to think of poverty in material terms because we tend to be materialists. Poverty, which he describes as “the absence of shalom in all its meaning,” consists of brokenness in each of the relationships for which we were created–with God, self, others, and all creation. And because we serve creation through our work, one aspect of poverty is poverty of purpose or vocation.
Fikkert’s relational model of poverty suggests that there is wisdom in relational solutions such as “micro-enterprise development.” And micro-enterprise, along with social entrepreneurship and business-as-mission, is of great interest to students for obvious reasons. Students long to lead lives that matter–lives that are integrated rather than fragmented–and to find work that is an expression of who they are. “In part, your vocation is just you being you,” Ebony Walden recently put it. “But it is also about helping to create a new heaven and earth and bringing Christ into those places.”
As we begin a new year with the incoming class of 2016, we won’t waste any time starting this conversation. By God’s grace, we again have the privilege of encouraging a new class of students to “help create a new heaven and earth,” whether they do so as doctors, dietitians, masons, or musicians.
Go With God
General
Leaving home for college is no small transition. Much ink has been spilled in advice columns on what to do and what not to do upon arriving at college. Perhaps the best such advice column ever comes from Duke theologian Stanley Hauerwas. Entitled “Go With God: An open letter to young Christians on their way to college,” it begins like this:
“The Christian religion,” wrote Robert Louis Wilken, “is inescapably ritualistic (one is received into the Church by a solemn washing with water), uncompromisingly moral (‘be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,’ said Jesus), and unapologetically intellectual (be ready to give a ‘reason for the hope that is in you,’ in the words of 1 Peter). Like all the major religions of the world, Christianity is more than a set of devotional practices and a moral code: it is also a way of thinking about God, about human beings, about the world and history.”
Ritualistic, moral, and intellectual: May these words, ones that Wilken uses to begin his beautiful book, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, be written on your soul as you begin college and mark your life—characterize and distinguish your life—for the next four years. Be faithful in worship. In America, going to college is one of those heavily mythologized events that everybody tells you will “change your life,” which is probably at least half true. So don’t be foolish and imagine that you can take a vacation from church.
Be uncompromisingly moral. Undergraduate life on college campuses tends in the direction of neopagan excess. Good kids from good families too often end up using their four years at college to get drunk and throw up on one another. Too often they do so on their way to the condom dispensers. What a waste! Not only because such behavior is self-destructive but also because living this way will prevent you from doing the intellectual work the Christian faith demands. Be deeply intellectual. We—that is, the Church—need you to do well in school. That may sound strange, because many who represent Christian values seem concerned primarily with how you conduct yourself while you are in college; they relegate the Christian part of being in college to what is done outside the classroom.
The Christian fact is very straightforward: To be a student is a calling.
Read the whole article at First Things.
Postsecularism & the Resurrection
General
In December 1999, The Economist published its “millennium issue,” including an article entitled “God: After a lengthy career, the Almighty recently passed into history. Or did he?” After a millennium of being on the defensive, the editors wrote that God was very nearly dead, except for the pesky fact that “the corpse just wouldn’t lie down.”
We started Chesterton House that same winter, and some matters did seem rather bleak at the time. Students compartmentalized faith apart from learning. Scholars studied religion primarily as a dependent variable in the lives of believers. And the general giddiness over economic growth further seemed to render religious faith relatively useless.
Not everything about the spiritual landscape has changed over the last decade, but much has. In a speech given one month after 9/11, philosopher Jurgen Habermas called the West a “post-secular” society. “That the world has become postsecular,” Peter Steinfels wrote in the New York Times just one year later, “is now virtually beyond debate” (as evidenced by the loss of the hyphen).
What exactly “postsecular” means is a matter of considerable discussion. In sociological jargon, secularization entails the “privatization” and institutional “differentiation” of faith–e.g. the separation of church and state (and, in the case of public universities, of church and academy). Postsecularism, by contrast, entails “de-privatization” and “de-differentiation”–i.e., a new intermingling among previously more distinct realms such as religion and politics, religion and health, religion and sport, etc. This “religious turn” is apparent not only in areas such as international relations and film, but also in academic disciplines such as history, philosophy, and literary studies (see, for example, the many professional associations that seek to “integrate” faith and learning within particular disciplines).
Postsecularism thus entails the return of religion, and even The Economist’s editors recently produced a volume entitled God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World (Penguin, 2009). But this return of religion is not a return to the past. What we now witness is neither the displacement of religion by secularism (as predicted by secularization theory) nor the displacement of secularism by religion (as desired by many persons of faith), but rather the rise of religion amidst continual secularization. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Habermas says, the relationship between religion and secularization is not a zero-sum game.
Sociologist Peter Berger observes that Habermas has experienced a conversion of sorts–not a conversion of faith, but a conversion to the view that Judaism and Christianity are on balance forces for good in the world. In The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion (Ignatius, 2007), Habermas identifies Judaeo-Christianity as a resource for reason, individual rights, egalitarianism, and democracy. Whereas he once regarded religion as useless, now it appears useful. (See “What Happens when a Leftist Philosopher Discovers God?”.)
There are indeed hopeful signs of change. Whether the third millennium will be, as the late Pope John Paul II used to say, “a great springtime for Christianity,” we know not. What we do know, as Diane Winston put it in the Chronicle of Higher Education, is that “Like the sexual revolution that swept through campuses beginning in the late 1960s, the current religious revival won’t be stopped by clucking tongues and disapproving glances. It won’t disappear even if we ignore it. Now, as in the past, young people are exploring new ways of believing and behaving in their search for a richer, more meaningful way of being in the world.” The times they are a-changin’.
The dilemma, of course, is that for religion to be useful, some must also believe it to be true. Our hope is that the postsecular era will take religion more seriously not only with respect to its social utility but also on its own terms. Given that the corpse of the Almighty just won’t lie down, rumors of resurrection are as relevant as ever.
POSTSCRIPT: April 2012 – Here is an interesting blog post on postsecularism in art.
A More Inclusive Pluralism
General
Shortly after 9/11, journalist David Brooks came to understand what sociologists of religion have been saying for some time. “Secularism,” he realized, “is not the future; it is yesterday’s incorrect vision of the future. This realization sends us recovering secularists to the bookstore or the library in a desperate attempt to figure out what is going on in the world.” Indeed, rumors of the death of religion have proven to be greatly exaggerated. (See “Kicking the Secularist Habit”).
What 9/11 did for Brooks, the culture wars have done for others—including, apparently, Cornell President Emeritus Hunter Rawlings III. As if following Brooks’ recipe for overcoming secular prejudice, Rawlings acknowledges that secularism is not the norm, and that the culture wars are at least partly the fault of secular fundamentalists among the intelligentsia. “Academic disdain for religion,” he writes, “diminishes the capacity of many academics to understand American culture and politics.” (See “Intelligent Design and the Place of Religiously-based Ideas in American Politics”).
Rawlings’ address is occasioned by his concern that American culture is slouching toward theocracy. Given that liberal democracy and the separation of church and state emerged as a way out of the religious wars of previous centuries, today’s “massive movement of religion back into the public square,” he writes, would cause founder James Madison to turn in his grave. Such concerns are part and parcel of the question of modernity: How can we all get along?
Rawlings’ address reads like a good faith effort to understand a foreign tribe. Indeed, as a member of the ‘tribe’ of non-secularists, I find much to applaud in his attempt to navigate a way out of our “badly polarized state of affairs.” Most notably, his emphasis that there are two equal and opposite errors is right on the money. On the one hand, “to disdain religion is to antagonize and radicalize many Americans with deeply held beliefs.” On the other hand, “to use religion for political purposes, to create political religion, is an affront to religious values and a violation of the great American tradition established by James Madison and deepened by Abraham Lincoln.” Religious fundamentalists and secular fundamentalists alike would do well to heed that wisdom.
That said, the balance Rawlings seeks seems just beyond his grasp. First, to say that “most academics are secular humanists” is overstated. According to recent research by Harvard sociologist Neil Gross, atheists and agnostics are overrepresented among academics relative to the population at large, but “do not comprise a majority of professors even at elite schools.” So, when Rawlings writes that “we academics” have undervalued religious arguments about abortion, what he really means is “we secularists.” Academics and people of faith are, after all, often the same people.
Second, Rawlings depicts science and religion as starkly opposed in their methodology. Science hypothesizes and tests results, he says, whereas religion “emanates from authority.” Even setting aside the gross conflation of all the world’s religions, as if there were no meaningful differences in this regard among them, this generalization misses both the role of authority in science and the evidentiary nature of many religious claims. This is a caricatured and dated understanding of both scientific and religious knowledge claims. Western religions, for example, are generally grounded in historical claims. And in contrast to Rawlings’ account, they posit little to no conflict between reason and revelation.
A more interesting problem is that Rawlings sees “religion” more nearly as an enemy than a friend of liberal democracy.
Although Rawlings notes that religion is “too important a source of ideas and values to ignore or to privatize completely,” and that the deepest issues we face “require religious engagement for political resolution to become possible,” these seem reluctant concessions, as if the accommodation of religious language in the public square were a necessary evil. Anxiety about the relationship of religion to liberal democracy comes through in references to Galileo, the Inquisition, “Europe’s long history of religious conflict,” and even the “dangerous precedent” of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. The problem, Rawlings writes, “is that the absolutist tendencies of religion frequently become incompatible with democratic pluralism.”
In keeping with conventional wisdom, Rawlings seems concerned primarily with conservative Christians. However, academics who study religion caution that much of what we think we know about religious conservatives actually proves to be wrong. Historian Martin Marty, for example, has cautioned against conflating the categories of “evangelical” and “religious right” for twenty-five years. If we make the mistake of taking fundamentalist groups such as the Moral Majority as representative, Cornell professor of government Jon Shields writes, we nurture “the false assumption that orthodox believers more broadly are a grave threat to a democratic culture that depends on civil and reasonable citizens.” Many sociologists of religion, such as Andrew Greeley and Michael Hout, writing in their recent book The Truth About Conservative Christians: What They Think and What They Believe, make the same observation. As Shields puts it, “Christian conservatives have long been regarded as a grave threat to a democratic culture that is sustained by public civility and reason. Yet, it is also one of the least examined beliefs.”
Rawlings doesn’t single out evangelicals, but is troubled also by Catholic Democrats in the House of Representatives who have affirmed a statement that their faith informs their policy-making. Why? To Rawlings, the separation of church and state means that religiously grounded arguments are somehow uniquely undemocratic because they are grounded in assumptions not shared by all persons. “Religiously-derived arguments,” he wrote previously, “must bear two burdens: they must be clearly identified as propositions of faith; and, in acknowledging that others do not share these propositions of faith, they must be supported by other arguments.”
Rawlings might consider being more inclusive still, and extending his critique to secularism. After all, secular arguments are no different in this regard from religious arguments—they too are grounded in propositions not shared by all persons. What is needed here is to distinguish between secularization and secularism. Secularization is the institutional separation of religion from government. This separation is essential to liberal democracy, and perfectly compatible with most faith traditions. Secularism is an ideology that essentially competes with religious faiths as a comprehensive world-view. In the end, the view that religious reasons should be excluded from public debates effectively establishes secularism as a kind of state religion, which is, needless to say, illiberal.
When religion is linked directly with state power, Rawlings points out, it tends to be repressive and exclusionist. But this only shows that secularism functions the same way as religion. When Rawlings writes of “the absolutist tendencies of religion,” one wonders what he makes of the absolutist tendencies of secularism? When he writes that “religion serves society best when it acts with restraint,” is not the same true of secularism? Violence, after all, is not a religious or a secular problem—it is a human problem.
In early modern times, following the era of religious wars, the longing for a public square cleansed of religious discourse perhaps was understandable. Today, after a century of secular wars, it is mere nostalgia. It is what one philosopher has called “a politics of a community with a shared perspective.” The good news is that there is a better way—“a politics of multiple communities” in which all persons, no matter what their religion or irreligion, have as much liberty as possible to live their lives as they see fit and to speak in the public square in a voice of their own. Simply put, this is a more vigorous—and more inclusive—version of pluralism.
But if we tolerate all traditions, including secularism, in the public square, we are back to the question: How can we all get along? This is perhaps where the secularist account of religion is most mistaken, for not only is religious faith generally not anti-democratic, but many faith traditions have resources that can be called upon to breathe life into and sustain liberal democracy.
Miroslav Volf is a Croatian theologian now teaching at Yale who specializes in conflict mediation and peace-making. Addressing the human longing for peace, Volf doesn’t pull any punches. “When it comes to violence,” he writes, “the track record of secularism is no better than that of religions. Most violence perpetrated in the twentieth century—the most violent in humanity’s history—was done in the name of secular causes.”
The way forward, Volf argues, is not to deny or set aside differences of conviction, but to acknowledge and engage those differences. “The only way to attend to the problem of violent clashes among differing perspectives on life—whether religious or secular—is to concentrate on the internal resources of each for fostering a culture of peace.” Taking Christianity as but one example, Volf offers the following. “At the center of the Christian faith,” he writes, is “some version of the claim that God loved the sinful world and that Christ died for the ungodly (John 3:18; Romans 4:5), and that Christ’s followers must love their enemies no less than they love themselves.”
This is not merely wishful thinking. According to Shields’ research, conservative Christians practice “deliberative norms” such as civility precisely because they understand these norms to be grounded in Scripture. Because “Christ commands Christians to love their neighbors,” he observes, “the violation of deliberative norms is not merely impolitic, it is also unfaithful.”
Kicking the secularist habit, to borrow the title of Brooks’ article, requires one more thing. Just as latter-day Puritans must let go of their romanticized account of the American past as a Christian nation, secularists must let go of their idealized account of the American future as a secular nation.
To those who believed that pluralism would result in the privatizing or even the “withering away” of religion, the resurrection of religious faith at the turn of the twenty-first century has come as a surprise. But maybe it shouldn’t. After all, the democratic ideal of inclusion is linked to faith in more than one way.
Historian Joel Carpenter, also addressing the question of whether evangelicals are a threat to democracy, observes that evangelical students not only differ from Pat Robertson in their politics, but they increasingly differ from him in color. Why? Because of the Immigration Reform Act of 1965. New immigrants are primarily from the global south—especially Asia and Latin America—which also happens to be the most Christian part of the world. “Eighty percent of the Koreans in the US are Christian,” Carpenter notes. “Half of the nation’s Arab population is Christian.” Nowhere is this more evident than on college campuses that have prioritized diversifying their student bodies. Some campus ministries that were 100% white just 25 years ago are 90% Asian today.
In other words, not only have faith traditions contributed resources to liberal democracy, but democratic ideals have further facilitated the flourishing of faith. Generalizations about religion are almost impossible, but as for the Christian faith, it is inextricably linked as both cause and consequence of liberal democracy.
The final irony, then, is this. Secular academics and university administrators like Rawlings who would like to see religion remain private have embraced policies that ensure just the opposite. We are becoming more religious precisely because we are more diverse. Moreover, the religious faith of the global south knows nothing of the Enlightenment’s private-public compartmentalization. Secular nostalgia notwithstanding, we are headed for a more inclusive pluralism. Long live liberal democracy.
This article appeared simultaneously in the December 2006 issue of the Herald Examiner.
