The temptation and peril of theologized politics

The question of the proper interrelationship between religion and politics in this country is a complex one.  There are those who argue that, essentially, there should be no relationship between them—that religion should be kept rigidly separate from politics; but as I wrote last month,

There’s a certain superficial appeal to this suggestion, but a little more thought shows it for the discriminatory idea it really is. Why, after all, should non-religious people be permitted to vote on the basis of their deepest convictions, but religious people be forbidden to do the same? Any attempt to make religion the problem is ultimately an attempt to privilege one mode of thought (the secular) over others, and thus is essentially antithetical to the nature and purpose of the American experiment.

That doesn't mean, however, that an uncritical fusion of the two is a good thing, either; as I also noted in that post, that tends to result in religion becoming the handmaiden of politics. When our faith becomes “a tool to advance a political agenda,” and as such is no longer “free to critique and correct that agenda,” what we have is in fact a betrayal of Christian faith; we have the political heresy that I labeled “theologized politics.”

Now, it should be obvious why politicians encourage such a thing and seek to make every use of it they can; the short-term political benefits are undeniable.  This approach essentially seeks to mobilize Christianity, with its adherents and their assets, as a political force to accomplish the political purposes of one party or the other. The goal is to deploy the church (or as much of it as possible, at any rate) as foot soldiers for the party in this or that political struggle. It’s an effective way to rouse people to active political participation, and to win not merely votes but enthusiastic and committed support. The theological side of the equation, however, is problematic, because the political side is primary; this results in a purely instrumental view of Christian faith, one which “make[s] men treat Christianity as a means,” as C. S. Lewis put it. It moves us from valuing social justice (or any other good) because God demands that of us, which is a good thing, to “the stage where [we value] Christianity because it may produce social justice.” This is a serious problem, because God “will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist’s shop.”

The problem with theologizing politics is that it can be a good political strategy in the short term, but in the long term it has a toxic effect on both the church and the political process. One negative consequence for the church should be obvious: if Christians come to value their faith primarily for the excellent arguments it offers for their chosen political agenda, they will value it less for everything else—and this is not good for the church. Beyond this, it’s bad for our spiritual health, in that it’s essentially a replacement of true faith with something else. It’s bad for the community life of the church, because that “something else” is something outside the church, and fundamentally distinct from it. It could well also be financially bad for the church: if the primary goal is the advancement of a political agenda, then contributions should primarily go to that agenda, rather than to the local congregation. And finally, it’s bad for the witness of the church, because when the church becomes identified with one party, then those who don’t support that party will view the church as the enemy and respond to it with hostility.

The toxic effect of this approach on our political system in this country may be less apparent, but it’s still very real. The problem is that good politics requires a mix of passion and dispassion. One must care about one’s own positions and believe in one’s own ideas enough to want to articulate them and fight for them; one must be passionate enough about the problems in this country and committed enough to one’s proposed solutions to be willing to put the work in to address those problems and implement those solutions. At the same time, however, one must have the necessary dispassion to be able to step back and evaluate those ideas and solutions when they aren’t working; to be able to disengage from one’s own positions enough to consider what may be learned from someone else’s; and to be able to work with those with whom one disagrees, to come to compromises when necessary, and to make common cause when the time is right. When religion is brought uncritically into the political mix, only as a way of supporting one’s own positions (and not as a means of critiquing them), it is excellent at stirring people to passion, but not so helpful in creating the dispassion necessary to balance that passion. The result is something which has been aptly called “the politics of inflammation.”

At this point, again, someone might argue that the solution is to remove religion from politics; and again, the response needs to be made that the true solution is not to break that connection, but to repair it. What is needed is to break ourselves of the habit of using the language of Christian faith to support what we have already decided we believe, and to teach ourselves instead to use our faith to critique our politics, and ultimately to rebuild our political convictions on the ground of our faith.

Sarah Palin for the Hoosier unborn

I would have loved to have been down in Evansville to hear RNC Chairman Michael Steele (even after his recent bout with Foot-in-Mouth disease, I still like the guy) and Gov. Palin, but there was no way I could justify the time; and really, it was an event for the folks in Vandenburgh County, and it would have felt like horning in.  So here's the next best thing, courtesy of the folks at C4P—the complete video of her speech in Evansville, beginning with Chairman Steele's introduction:

Note on building a movement

Quoth Robert Stacy McCain,

So if you're a conservative out there in Ohio or Florida or Colorado who's waiting for RNC HQ to save the GOP, you're part of the problem. If you want to be part of the solution, you've got to become an activist. You've got to organize.

Create a movement, and don't worry about who the leader of the movement is. Be your own leader.

Wise words.  One thing though, Mr. McCain:  We're doing it.  We're doing it one flash at a time.

Update:  David Bozeman has some good thoughts on this as well.

One thumb up, one thumb down

I've been meaning to post on the recent pirate attack on the Maersk Alabama and its aftermath, for a couple reasons.  First, President Obama deserves credit for giving the go-ahead for military action; I believe the appropriate response to pirates, terrorists, and anyone else who would hold innocent lives in pawn for their own benefit is best illustrated by the Israeli raid on Entebbe:  no mercy, no quarter, no hesitation.

But second, that requires one other thing:  no negotiation.  Here, in my opinion, is a major black mark on this administration; to first offer to negotiate and then strike was a deeply problematic move, for reasons that Cornell's William Jacobson lays out:

There are two choices when negotiating with hostage takers/pirates. One is the Israeli model of no negotiation. The only thing to be negotiated is the life of the hostage taker. Money, free passage, and other benefits are not on the table. The purpose of this approach is to deter further hostage takers, even if it means the death of the hostage.

The other model is the model of negotiating over almost any benefit, as long as the hostage is freed safely. This is the model Obama initially appeared to follow with the pirates. But if one believes the spin coming out of the White House, then negotiation was a ruse to buy time.

The problem is not in this case, which ended successfully, but in the next hostage taking situation. If one is going to follow a negotiation approach, the trust of the hostage takers in the negotiation process is key. If hostage takers believe negotiation is a ruse, then the hostage is in more danger. Words cannot be just words in a negotiation.

So negotiating as a ruse is the worst of all alternatives. It does not have the deterrent effect of the Israeli approach, or the hostage-safety effect of the negotiation approach.

This point was actually illustrated quite nicely on last Friday's episode of NUMB3RS, for those who follow that show.  The likely result of this approach by the administration will be what the pirates are already threatening:  escalation.  This tactic worked, this time, but it won't work again—and as a consequence of its use, the pirates are much more likely to preemptively kill any Americans they take.

The ironic thing about this is that, all in all, the pirates are probably the best allies we have in the Horn of Africa.

Piracy is not a strategic threat to the US, it is a big problem for Europe and Asia but not for us. It wasn't until Asia and Europe realized we weren't going to solve this problem for them that they stepped up themselves.

Terrorism in Somalia has long driven Navy operations off that coast. On one side, we have a high visibility piracy problem that does not threaten the interests of the United States directly, at all, and our only current national interest regarding the piracy issue is one man with 4 guys in an orange boat 200 yards off the bow of the USS Bainbridge (DDG 96). There is a national economic interest, but the impact to date has not risen to a level that has created a serious concern among global leaders to the point they are willing to commit serious resources toward solving the problem.

On the other side of the Somalia problem, we have the terror problem no one else in the world is interested in doing anything about. And in the middle is the reality that while both the pirates and terrorists are operating in the same black market space, the pirates and terror groups don't like each other.

Then there is another problem. What if we support a government strong enough to remove piracy, but too weak to do anything about the terrorism cells? Piracy is what has the international community involved in the problems of Somalia right now, if that goes away, we are left with the bigger threat to our national interests and no one internationally to help.

In other words, the pirates aren't hurting us that much, but they are hurting the Somali terrorists that are a much bigger threat to us.  I don't like the idea that we might be better off working with them than fighting them—allying ourselves with thugs has never worked out all that well in the past—but from a Realpolitik point of view, it actually makes a lot of sense.  Really, who else is there?  That being the case, even if we leave that aside (as, morally, I believe we should), it does still suggest that our focus in Somalia should continue to be where it has been:  not on fighting pirates, but on stopping terrorists.

HT (for the last article quoted):  Smitty

Political machines hate reformers

That, in a nutshell, is the meaning of most of the news stories about Sarah Palin in recent months. It's the reason for the wrangling between her and the Democrats over the Juneau-area state senate seat; it's the reason for the fight over her AG nominee, Wayne Anthony Ross; it's the reason for the sniping from machine tools in the state legislature like Fairbanks RINO Jay Ramras; it's the reason the New York Times paid a visit to Alaska. This is what all the badmouthing boils down to.

Obviously, the stories about members of her family are not, in and of themselves, in this category; however, the fact that the MSM is more interested in the likes of Levi Johnston than they are in, say, President Obama's child-rapist half-brother Samson is also a reflection of the fact that political machines don't like reformers. Now, I don't happen to think that Samson Obama ought to be a major political story, or indeed that he has any greater significance than anyone else who likes to rape 13-year-old girls, which is one reason I haven't blogged about him; Barack Obama is human, and therefore a sinner like all the rest of us, and the same is true of his family, and some of those folks are going to be worse sinners than others. What matters is who he is and what he does. However, the same is true of Gov. Palin, even with respect to her children—anyone who thinks it's possible to be a good-enough parent to ensure that your 17-year-old daughter is immune to the kinds of bad decisions and sinful acts to which 17-year-olds are prone is probably expecting that check from Nigeria any day now.

If Bristol Palin deserves attention from the MSM, well, what Samson Obama did was a heck of a lot worse—by that standard, he ought to be on front pages as far as the eye can see. And he isn't. Why? Because of ideology, to be sure, but also because President Obama doesn't threaten the machine—he's of the machine, he owes it, and he can be trusted to behave accordingly. Gov. Palin isn't, and doesn't, and can't, and so every bit of influence she gains is a direct threat to the (bi-partisan) political establishment that can neither predict nor control her.

This goes all the way back to the very beginning of her political career. (Note: much of this is covered in R. A. Mansour's excellent post “Who Is Sarah Palin?”) In her first step into politics, she won a seat on the city council of Wasilla. At that point, she had the backing of her mayor. Did she repay his support by being a loyal supporter of his administration, following the expected rules of political patronage? No, she didn't; when she decided that he was governing badly and in a manner that she considered bad for the community, she challenged him, ran against him, and defeated him. He's still complaining about her ingratitude.

Later, after she lost the race for lieutenant governor in 2004, the new Republican governor, Frank Murkowski, one of the entrenched leaders of the oil-money-fueled Alaska GOP political machine, appointed her as ethics supervisor and chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. One of her fellow commissioners was Randy Ruedrich, who also chaired the Alaska Republican Party; when she discovered he was guilty of ethics violations, she blew the whistle on him, even though she ended up having to quit the commission (giving up a six-figure salary) to do so. Gov. Murkowski backed Ruedrich, but he ended up paying a significant fine for his actions. In 2006, at least in part because of this and other dubious actions on Gov. Murkowski's part, she ran against him as a Republican but a party outsider, and beat him.

If you're keeping score, that's twice that she was recruited by a Republican incumbent to be a good little foot soldier, declined to be a good little foot soldier in the face of her political patron's bad conduct, and knocked said incumbent out of office. Those of you with a taste for old political fiction will probably understand why, even more than Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, the politician of whom Gov. Palin reminds me most is Orrin Knox, the fictional senior U. S. Senator from Illinois (small irony there) in Allen Drury's Advise and Consent. When it comes to dealing with her own party, she has definitely acted in line with Sen. Knox's motto: “I don’t give a ---- about being liked, but I intend to be respected.”

Now, up until about August 28 of last year, none of this posed any particular problems for the Democratic political machine, either in Alaska or nationally. You see, the national political machine's biggest concern (in both parties) for holding statehouses has to do with the redistricting that takes place every decade, and Alaska has only one House seat and isn't likely to gain a second one; as such, that doesn't apply. Democratic interest in Alaska, then, was primarily focused on trying to unseat the state's senior U. S. Senator, the corrupt but wily and very powerful Ted Stevens, and its lone House member, Rep. Don Young—and in that effort, Gov. Palin was a great help, which made her the Democrats' favorite Republican. Sure, they had every intention of trying as hard as they could to unseat her in 2010, but at that point, she was more a help to them than a hindrance. She'd worked with Democrats in the Alaska legislature to replace laws that had essentially been written by oil-company lobbyists—specifically, the tax code on resource extraction and a gas-pipeline bill—with laws that were better for the people and state of Alaska. Back then, while Alaska Democrats weren't above trying to take her down, they were happy to give Gov. Palin the credit for killing the “Bridge to Nowhere,” because it helped them make their case against the Alaskans who really mattered in her party.

And then John McCain named her his running mate—and everything changed. Suddenly, she was the Alaskan who mattered in her party, because she mattered in the presidential race; she gave the McCain campaign an energy it hadn't had since the New Hampshire primary—the 2000 New Hampshire primary, that is—and thus became Public Enemy #1 for the national Democratic machine, and so for the Alaska Democratic machine as well. Conservatives4Palin has chronicled at length how the Obama campaign's officials in Alaska, folks like State Senators Hollis French and Kim Elton, tried to bring her down (even going so far as to promise an “October surprise”), and how St. Sen. Elton got his payoff for his actions in support of the Obama campaign.

That, by the way, was supposed to be a cascading payoff; the Alaska Democratic Party machine thought it could giftwrap St. Sen. Elton's seat for St. Rep. Beth Kerttula (one of those Democrats who'd supported Gov. Palin until she became a threat to the Obama campaign), and then giftwrap her seat in turn for Kim Metcalfe, who chairs the local party in Juneau. But Gov. Palin doesn't appreciate machine politics when practiced by either party—she's willing to work with Democrats, but she's as opposed to the Democratic machine as she is to the Republican machine, and so she's been refusing to play along with their back-room maneuvers.

Gov. Palin is now in a difficult, though probably inevitable, position: she is opposed by a bi-partisan coalition of the machine politicians in Alaska, who oppose each other on policy but share a common higher loyalty to the old boys' club and the perks and procedures to which they're accustomed. Gov. Palin has the support of a strong majority of the Alaskan people, but only a minority of the state's politicians. This has meant that the state legislature has been in full foot-dragging mode through the entire session—a fact which they now intend, via the Democratic Party PR department (aka the MSM, specifically the New York Times), to blame on her.

That the MSM will coordinate with the Democratic/Republican machine in Alaska on this is, I believe, a sign of their deepest agenda here—not just their general bias against conservatives, but a deeper bias yet: as much as they bleat about "speaking truth to power," they are not the outside critics of the machine that they pretend to be. Rather, they are a part of the machine, they are inside the corridors of power, that's where they want to be, and they really have no true understanding or interest of the world outside those corridors.

This is true, I believe, even of the conservatives within the MSM, which is why a lot of the elite conservative writers have been almost as unfair to Gov. Palin as their liberal colleagues; and if a Democratic version of Gov. Palin were ever to emerge, a true reformer who bucked the party machine, I don't think the likes of Eleanor Clift and Paul Krugman would be any kinder to that individual than the likes of David Brooks and David Frum have been to Gov. Palin. The initial MSM reaction to the appointment of Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand to Hillary Clinton's vacant seat in the U.S. Senate certainly supports that thought.

In other words, what we're seeing here is the utter bankruptcy of the MSM as an "independent free press"; they are nothing of the kind. They are organs of elite opinion, constituent parts of the political machine. This, more than ideology, is the reason why they're so determined to bring Gov. Palin down, because she represents a threat to their worldview on a more basic level even than ideology: she threatens their sense of their own superiority, and the rules by which they operate, and the perks and the comfort zone which those rules ensure, just as much as she threatens all those things for the machine politicians she's been relentlessly at work to overcome and bring down.

This is one of the reasons why we need the continued rise of the citizen punditry via the blogosphere—we need to reclaim the national discussion on issues from the machine almost as much as we need to reclaim our government. (I say "almost" because whatever its failings, talk radio has also been outside the political machine, for the most part.) And it's why we need to support Gov. Palin, and why I so much appreciate the independents and moderate Democrats who do, because if she goes down to defeat—if the Alaska political machine defeats her, or the national Democratic machine defeats her—the odds that someone else will try to buck the machine and bring real political reform to this country approach zero . . . from beneath.

Remember this, as you read the stories about Sarah Palin: remember that she's spent her career trying to reform the machine politics of Alaska, and remember that political machines hate reformers—and they're the ones who have the money, and the media. All Gov. Palin has is the truth, and the support of those of us who are fed up with the machine. Remember that, and don't believe the hate.

Update: Welcome to folks dropping by from C4P; my posting has tilted toward religious topics in the last week or so, but even if that isn't up your alley, you might also find my post in defense of the citizen punditry of particular interest. I hope to have a reflection on Gov. Palin's visit to Evansville up in the next day or two as well.

Seven stanzas for Easter

I'm not sure why I didn't think to post this earlier; John Updike is best known for his prose, but this poem is a jewel.

Seven Stanzas for Easter

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.

Jesus victorious

Atheists often talk about “the problem of evil” as though it were primarily an intellectual issue requiring an explanation, and then they ding God for not providing an explanation they deem adequate.  The truth is, though, the philosophical problem of evil is secondary—the real problem is much more basic:  what are we going to do about it?  God doesn’t offer us an explanation for evil, but that doesn’t mean he has no answer for it.  Jesus is God’s answer to the problem of the evil and sin in this world; in him, God gave us, not the answer we thought we wanted, but the answer we actually needed: he offered us himself. He came down to live our life, to identify with us, to endure the darkness of our fallen world with us, and to defeat that darkness, not with its own weapons, but with light.

When people ask, “Where’s God when it hurts—in the tragedies we see so often, and the large-scale injustices of this world?” they often assume the answer must be “Nowhere”; after all, if there really is a God out there, and he actually heard our suffering, wouldn’t he do something about it? But the truth is, as Easter shows us, God has heard our suffering—he has heard every cry of anguish, felt every blow and every betrayal, and caught every tear in the palm of his hand—and in Jesus Christ, he has done everything about it. In Jesus, he came down to share our suffering with us, drinking that cup to the very dregs. He took the weight of all our sin on his shoulders—the entirety of human evil and human suffering, of all the brokenness and wrongness of the world—and he carried it to the cross, its cruel thorns digging into his forehead, its sharp splinters shredding his back; and there, for the guilt of all the crimes he never committed, he died.

He died for us. He died to pay the price for all the sins we’ve ever committed and ever will commit, for all the pain we’ve endured and all the pain we’ve caused, for all the darkness and brokenness and agony and grief in our poor misshapen world. Our sins deserved death, and more—even our death wouldn’t be enough punishment; not only could we never do enough in this life to make up for them, we couldn’t even die enough to even the balance. Morally, we were in the same position as so many mortgages these days: we were under water, owing more than we were worth. Only Jesus’ death—the death of one whose life was of infinite value and infinite goodness, the life of God himself—only his death could be enough to pay that price, to satisfy the demands of justice for the sins of the world, so that salvation could come to all the nations.

But if his death was sufficient to pay the price of redemption, it still wasn’t enough to accomplish the work; nor was it enough to satisfy God’s promise to his servant. “See my servant,” God says in Isaiah 52: “he shall accomplish his purpose; he will rise and be lifted up, and be exalted most high.” And again in Isaiah 53, “If you make his life an offering for sin, then he shall see his offspring, he shall prolong his days; . . . Because of his anguish, he shall see and be satisfied. . . . Therefore I will give him the many, and he shall divide the strong as the spoils of his victory.” Justice for the Servant, the fulfillment of God’s promises to him, demanded that his death not be the end; and indeed, for his great work to end in victory at all rather than defeat required something more. If his story had come to its conclusion in that tomb, if he had died and stayed dead like any other man, then in the end, it would have been just another victory for the powers of evil; the price would have been paid for our redemption, but there would have been no redeemer left to complete the deal, and the sacrifice would have been for nothing.

And so, though the powers of evil capered and celebrated across that black, black Saturday, thinking they had won—thinking they had tricked the God of the universe into taking a bridge too far—God’s resounding answer to evil came on Easter morning. The Creed tells us Jesus descended into Hell, and I believe it; and after spending a couple nights there, that morning he got up, reached out his hands, and tore the gates of Hell from their very hinges. He stretched out his carpenter’s hands, those hands that could be so gentle to the weak and the suffering, and his shoulders flexed, and he tore the wall of Death apart. He heaved, and the grave burst open in a soundless explosion that shook the universe from one end to the other, a blinding flash of light that lit the sky from horizon to horizon; and he who had been dead got up, and was dead no more, never again to die.

And in that, you see, is the victory; in that, and nothing else. In that moment, the price that had been paid for our redemption was realized, and we were stripped from the power and control of the prince of darkness.  God in his love has chosen to direct his anger at sin against his Servant—which is to say, against himself—and to take on himself the punishment that justice demanded; all that remains is for us to accept the gift and revel in the love of God.

(Excerpted, edited, from “The Victory of the Servant”)

Who has believed our report?

See my servant: he shall accomplish his purpose;
     he will rise and be lifted up,
     and he shall be exalted most high.
Just as there were many who were shocked at him
     —one whose appearance was disfigured beyond that of any man,
     whose form beyond human likeness,
           so that his blood sprinkled many nations—
so kings shall shut their mouths because of him;
     for that which had not been told them they shall see,
           and that which they had not heard they shall contemplate.
Who has believed our report?
               And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?
For he grew up before him like a young plant,
        and like a root out of dry ground;
    he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
        nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised, lacking supporters,
        a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering;
    and as one from whom others hide their faces
               he was despised, and we thought him of no value.
Surely he has borne our suffering
        and carried our sorrows;
    yet we accounted him stricken,
        struck down by God and afflicted.
But he was pierced through for our rebellions,
        crushed for our iniquities;
    upon him was the punishment that reconciled us with God,
        and at the cost of his wounds we are healed.
All of us, like sheep, have gone astray;
        we have all turned to our own way,
    and the LORD has laid on him
               the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed, and he allowed himself to be afflicted,
        yet he did not open his mouth;
    like a lamb that is led to the slaughter
        and like a sheep that is silent before its shearers,
        so he did not open his mouth.
By a perversion of justice he was taken away;
        and as for his contemporaries, who realized
    that when he was cut down out of the land of the living,
        he was stricken for the rebellion of my people?
They made his grave with the wicked
        and his tomb with the rich,
    although he had done no violence,
               and there was no deceit in his mouth.
Yet it was the LORD who willed to crush him, causing him to suffer.
    If you make his life an offering for sin,
        then he shall see his offspring, he shall prolong his days;
    the will of the LORD shall prosper through his work.
               Because of his anguish he shall see and be satisfied;
        by his knowledge, my righteous servant shall make many righteous,
        for he shall bear their iniquities.
Therefore I will give him the many,
        and he shall divide the strong as the spoils of his victory,
    because he poured out himself to death,
        and was numbered among the sinners;
    yet he bore the sin of many,
    and made intercession for the transgressors.

—Isaiah 52:13-53:12

Hymn for Good Friday

Ah, Holy Jesus, How Hast Thou Offended?

Ah, holy Jesus, how hast thou offended,
That man to judge thee hath in hate pretended?
By foes derided, by thine own rejected,
O most afflicted.

Who was the guilty who brought this upon thee?
Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee.
’Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee:
I crucified thee.

Lo, the Good Shepherd for the sheep is offered;
The slave hath sinned, and the Son hath suffered:
For man’s atonement, while he nothing heedeth,
God intercedeth.

For me, kind Jesus, wast thine incarnation,
Thy mortal sorrow, and thy life’s oblation:
Thy death of anguish and thy bitter passion,
For my salvation.

Therefore, kind Jesus, since I cannot pay thee,
I do adore thee, and will ever pray thee,
Think on thy pity and thy love unswerving,
Not my deserving.

Words:  Johann Heermann
Music:  Johann Crüger
HERZLIEBSTER JESU, 11.11.11.5

Considering the Christian way of death

I've been thinking a lot about funerals lately, for one reason and another, and so earlier this week when I happened across my copy of Thomas G. Long's superb article "Why Jessica Mitford Was Wrong," I sat down to read it.  Dr. Long's piece, published ten years ago now in Theology Today, is a thoughtful and penetrating critique of the theology of Mitford's books, The American Way of Death and The American Way of Death Revisited.  He gives her the credit she deserves as a consumer advocate, but also the challenge she deserves as a cultural theologian.  I especially appreciate this section of Dr. Long's article:

What is often missing in the tug of war between the funeral-home-style service and the Mitford style is a thoughtful consideration of what a funeral—particularly a Christian funeral—could and should be. Obviously, a genuinely Christian funeral is not about the evils that Mitford found so easy to satirize—the vulgar, conspicuous consumption, the mawkish sentiment—but, strangely a Christian funeral is also not primarily about many of the good things that its friends claim for it: the facilitation of grief, helping people to hold on to memories of the deceased, or even to supply pastoral care and comfort to the bereaved. A Christian funeral often provides these things, of course, but none of these is its central purpose. A Christian funeral is nothing less than a bold and dramatic worship of the living God done attentive to and in the face of an apparent victory at the hands of the last enemy. Though the liturgy may be gently worded, there is no hiding the fact that, in a funeral, Christians raise a fist at death; recount the story of the Christ who suffered death, battled death, and triumphed over it; offer laments and thanksgivings to the God who raised Jesus from the grave; sing hymns of defiance; and honor the body and life of the saint who has died.

Dr. Long continues,

Thus, one measure of the veracity of a funeral is its capacity to face, without euphemistic smoke and mirrors, the reality of death. Death is, of course, the brute fact that occasions a funeral. Astonishingly, for all her talk about the funerals and the funeral industry, Mitford hardly mentions death at all, not real death. In Mitford's world, people do not die painfully or peacefully, well or poorly, blessedly or tragically, in despair or in trust, nor do those left behind have seasons of grief, memories to be cherished or forgiven, or faithful meaning to be wrested from sorrow, just a series of consumer choices. The American Way of Death and The American Way of Death Revisited cover many topics, but, ironically, death as a human experience, death as a force that robs life, death as a knife that severs bonds of love is not one of them. Milford jibes and smirks and hurls sarcastic witticisms at the blowhards among the morticians, and some of them, like clowns at a carnival pie-throwing booth, make themselves into easy targets, but one cannot help but see, lurking over her shoulder, the immense and terrifying mortal reality she will not turn to confront. To produce two books about death that do not actually speak of death is so strange, so inexplicable, that the sheer fact of it seems clear confirmation of William May's conviction that the unwillingness to name death betrays a repressed acknowledgment of its fearsome sacral potency. Contemporary people, he argues, "find it difficult to bring the word death to our lips in the presence of its power. This is so because we are at a loss as to how to proceed on the far side of this word. Our philosophies and our moralities desert us. They retreat and leave us wordless."

By contrast, the Christian funeral, at its best, speaks plainly of death. It does not shy away from naming death's power to pierce the human heart, to steal gifts of love, and to create empty places at the table of fellowship, and the Christian funeral bravely claims the victory over death won by Jesus Christ, and dares to trust the promise of the gospel's great mystery, "We shall not all die, but we will all be changed."

A second measure of the Christian funeral is the degree to which it treats the body of the deceased as the body of a saint. Mitford saved her strongest invective for the custom of embalming, restoring, and viewing the body, which she claimed is virtually unknown outside of North America and which she saw as utterly unnecessary, yet another sign of American bad taste, and an expensive trick pulled by funeral directors to con the gullible. She has a point, of course; the practice of paying someone a lot of money to put eyeliner and face power on an embalmed corpse so that it can be viewed under colored lights is difficult to defend. Nevertheless, two objections to Mitford's attitude toward the treatment of the body need to be raised. First, it is not simply that Milford has no use for chemically-treated bodies gussied up and on view in slumber rooms; she has little use for the body at all. As for the three women whom the Gospel of Mark reports were on their way to the tomb of Jesus to anoint his body with spices, Jessica would undoubtedly have said, "Don't bother." Beneath her righteous consumerist rhetoric breathes the spirit of a gnostic who, like many educated people in our society, views the body as a shell, finally an embarrassment, part of what Geoffrey Gorer has called "the pornography of death." What to do with the dead body? It can be burned or buried, donated or disposed, but, like all pornography, it should be done out of public view. The theological anthropology that defines human beings as embodied creatures, that calls for the honoring of the body in life and in death, is out of Mitford's range.

In his fine book The Undertaking, poet and funeral director Thomas Lynch, comments on the "just a shell" theory of dead bodies. "You hear a lot of it," he observes, "from young clergy, old family friends, well-intentioned in-laws—folks who are unsettled by the fresh grief of others." He remembers a time when an Episcopal deacon said something of this sort to the mother of a teenager, dead of leukemia, and promptly received a swift slap. "I'll tell you when it's 'just a shell,' she retorted. "For now and until I tell you otherwise, she's my daughter." Lynch goes on to say,

So to suggest in the early going of grief that the dead body is "just" anything rings as tinny in its attempt to minimalize as if we were to say that it was "just" a bad hair day when the girl went bald from chemotherapy. Or that our hope for heaven on her behalf was based on the belief that Christ raised "just" a body from dead. What if, rather than crucifixion, he'd opted for suffering low self-esteem for the remission of sins? What if, rather than "just a shell," he'd raised his personality, say, or The Idea of Himself? Do you think they'd have changed the calendar for that? . . . Easter was a body and blood thing, no symbols, no euphemisms, no half measures.

This is spot-on, as is Dr. Long's consequent point that

The most important measure of a Christian funeral is its capacity to place the event of a person's death into the larger context of the Christian gospel. "Funerals," says Thomas Lynch, "are the way we close the gap between the death that happens and the death that matters. It is how we assign meaning to our little remarkable histories." The Christian funeral is a liturgical drama, a piece of gospel theater, with roles to play and a time honored, if flexible and culturally varied, script. To understand Christian funerals as drama is not to say they are theater in the sense of Broadway entertainment, of course, but rather that they are community enactments of a formative narrative.

The unfortunate thing is that our culture has been so Mitfordized that even among Christians, there's no longer the awareness and understanding of this truth.  Instead,

The image of the deceased on a journey from this world to the next is now being replaced by the image of the mourner on a journey from grief to restoration. . . .  Deprived of the ritual of a saint marching into glory, we replace it with the psychically useful notion of a good, or at least somewhat interesting, person we will remember from time to time as life returns to normal. The Christian kerygma tends to fade in favor of biographical comments about the deceased, often delivered by a number of people, such anecdotes seemingly far more useful to the stabilization of the ego in grief than are comments about discipleship, eschatology, and mission.

This is a real loss, and part of the ongoing flattening and loss of spiritual depth of our culture, which is being mirrored in much of the church.  The challenge for the preacher who wishes to do a truly Christian funeral is to be concerned about more than just caring for the family, making the family happy, and doing the deceased honor—important as all three of these things are—but also about proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ and his victory over death.  All the other purposes of a funeral must fall into line behind this one, or they too will ultimately fail and fall short, because those purposes do not create hope; they depend on the gospel hope to function, and so ultimately lack any real substance without the proclamation of the gospel.

For my wife, and other Peep lovers

with thanks to Alan W (who blogs here) for pointing it out:  Peep Research.  I have to agree with Alan, you should especially check out the research on the health effects of alcohol and tobacco on Peeps.

The hunt for Gollum

My thanks to Bill Roberts for posting this—it's the trailer for a fan-made movie about Aragorn's search for Gollum, a chapter in the story of The Lord of the Rings which isn't told, only recounted briefly by Aragorn.  It is, obviously, a low-budget production, but from the trailer, it seems to be an impressive piece of work nevertheless.

The work of faith

This from John Piper, via Of First Importance:

Faith is looking away from ourselves to another. Faith is total dependence on another. When faith stands in front of a mirror, the mirror becomes a window with the glory of Christ on the other side. Faith looks to Christ and enjoys him as the sum and judge of all that is true and good and right and beautiful and valuable and satisfying.

Amen to that.  That's the reason we resist faith, just as it's the reason we resist grace.  The Reformed tradition emphasizes that salvation is by faith, not by works, and that even faith comes to us as God's gift, not as the result of our own efforts; but there is one work, of a sort, that is required.  The work of faith, if you want to call it that, is accepting our displacement from the center of our universe; it's the willingness to look away from ourselves, not only to acknowledge our dependence but to acknowledge our insufficiency and our need to follow rather than to carve our own path, and to find our joy in another rather than in ourselves.

Pastoral subtext

Of all of the workshops I attended at Calvin’s Worship Symposium this past January, my favorite was the one led by Craig Barnes, working out of material from his book The Pastor as Minor Poet:  Texts and Subtexts in the Pastoral Life.  I was glad, a week or so ago, to see the audio go up on the Symposium website; it's from the Friday session, not the Saturday one which I attended, but that’s fine.  (Warning:  there are some glitches in the audio.)

Craig Barnes, “Moving from Text to Subtext”


• download

The Rev. Dr. Barnes defines “subtext” this way:  “not the reality of what is said but the truth of what is meant”—the truth that lies beneath the surface, if you will.  There’s a lot in his talk, so I’m not going to try to post on all of it at once, because he looks at the movement from text to subtext in a few different (though connected) areas.

He starts off with the subtext of the pastor—the truths that lie beneath the surface of the pastoral life.  He uses the example of  the little Apostle Paul flannelgraph figure from his childhood Sunday school—worn from overuse, purple from Kool-Aid spilled on him, taped together after two kids, fighting over him, tore his head off—as a parable of sorts of how hard God can be on those he uses.

What I particularly appreciate about what he has to say here is that he sees meaning in this—which can be hard to do from the inside.  If the subtext of the call to be a pastor is, “You’re going to look purple and taped-together by your retirement party,” there’s a purpose to that:

That’s how you know how to do better ministry.  How could you possibly provide ministry to the subtext of people’s lives unless you knew about brokenness yourself? . . . God breaks apart his people by putting them into ministry, precisely so that they’ll be better pastors—if they respond well, as the invitation always is, if they respond well to that brokenness.

This is a profound truth about ministry, and one which has profound implications for every part of pastoral work and life (including, as he goes on to discuss, preaching).  One of the things I’ve been thinking about of late is how this fits together with Andrew Purves’ pastoral wisdom about the crucifixion of ministry, John Berntsen’s understanding that ministry must therefore necessarily be cross-shaped, and Steven Seamands’ insight that ministry is equally necessarily trinitarian in form; I have the sense that if you put all these concepts together, at the point where they cross, there’s something important about the nature of ministry and human brokenness, but I’m not quite sure what.

It seems clear that we must be broken if we are to minister—broken before God and before his people—and perhaps even that the awareness that we aren’t qualified to do the work is the first qualification we must have; it is, I think, the complete eversion of the kind of attitude Jared Wilson was talking about last week that sees pastoral ministry as a form of worldly achievement.  I think the key here is that ministry isn’t something we do, but rather a way that we live, and that in particular, it isn’t something we do to other people.

Instead, it seems to me that ministry is primarily a matter of identification—identifying with Christ, and particularly in his crucifixion, and with his people.  It requires the recognition that it is Christ who is qualified, it is Christ who is adequate, it is Christ who is capable; we aren’t any of those things, and it isn’t our job to be any of those things.  Our job is to be conduits of a sort, to be open to whatever God wants to do in us by his Holy Spirit, and to be open to our congregations to understand and identify with the subtext of their lives, the part they don’t want other people to see, so that Christ can exercise his ministry through us by the power of his Spirit.  It’s something we have to do to understand—it only makes sense when lived.

Coming down to earth

I'm a big fan of Pixar's Andrew Stanton, the writer/director behind Finding Nemo and WALL-E; I have tremendous respect for his creative gifts and approach (which he discussed in a fascinating interview last June), and I think he tells great stories well.  My lovely wife disagrees with me, but I think WALL-E's the better of the two; that's no putdown to Nemo by any means, it's just that WALL-E works on so many levels and really connects the intimate story of the two main characters to the epic background story of the human race and the fate of the planet Earth.

I'm also a fan of Peter Gabriel, and I'll admit that the crowning touch for me to WALL-E was the superb closing credit sequence with Gabriel's song "Down to Earth."  Gabriel's still one of the better songwriters going, I think, and this is a great song that fits the movie well.  It doesn't give God the credit, of course, but it's a wonderful paean to the simple goodness of creation.

Down to Earth

Did you think that your feet had been bound
By what gravity brings to the ground?
Did you feel you were tricked
By the future you picked?
Well, come on down.

All those rules don't apply
When you're high in the sky,
So, come on down . . . come on down.

We're coming down to the ground—
There's no better place to go;
We've got snow up on the mountains,
We've got rivers down below.
We're coming down to the ground;
We hear the birds sing in the trees,
And the land will be looked after,
We'll send the seeds out in the breeze.

Did you think you'd escaped from routine
By changing the script and the scene?
Despite all you made of it,
You're always afraid of the change.

You've got a lot on your chest;
Well, you can come as my guest,
So come on down . . . come on down.

Chorus

Like the fish in the ocean,
We felt at home in the sea;
We learned to live off the good land,
Learned to climb up a tree.
Then we got up on two legs,
But we wanted to fly;
When we messed up our homeland,
We set sail for the sky.

Chorus

We're coming down (down)
Coming down to Earth (down)
Like babies at birth (down)
Coming down to Earth (down to Earth)
We're gonna find new priorities (down)
These are extraordinary qualities (down)
(Down, down to Earth)

Chorus

Words:  Peter Gabriel; music:  Peter Gabriel and Thomas Newman
©2008 Pixar Music/Wonderland Music Company Inc.
From the movie WALL-E

Is the Obama administration leading us to . . . fascism?

It sounds startling, especially with all the voices calling him a socialist—but in one way, at least, that's actually correct, as Thomas Sowell points out:

Socialists believe in government ownership of the means of production. Fascists believed in government control of privately owned businesses, which is much more the style of this government. That way, politicians can intervene whenever they feel like it and then, when their interventions turn out badly, summon executives from the private sector before Congress and denounce them on nationwide television.

It's a great piece; Dr. Sowell covers a number of topics in his inimitable way, putting his own spin on the standard "notes" column, and it's well worth your time to read the whole thing.  Here's another excerpt to encourage you to do so:

Barack Obama seems determined to repeat every disastrous mistake of the 1930s, at home and abroad. He has already repeated Herbert Hoover's policy of raising taxes on high income earners, FDR's policy of trying to micro-manage the economy and Neville Chamberlain's policy of seeking dialogues with hostile nations while downplaying the dangers they represent. . . .

Barack Obama's favorable reception during his tour in Europe may be the most enthusiastic international acclaim for a democratic government leader since Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich in 1938, proclaiming "peace in our time."

Frightening thought, that.

Reader's guide: posts on faith

Keeping faith in mind
Is it a choice between brains and belief? No.

A matter of trust
Do we really believe God knows and wants what's best for us?

Thoughts on the nature of Christian faith
Flannery O'Connor was right: it's harder to believe than not to.

For a 90° turn: meditation on faith and reason
Learning from St. Augustine.

Thought on belief
We're wired to believe.

Statement of faith
Just because I believe in God doesn't mean it came—or comes—easily.

The stubborn faithfulness of God
In the end, this is what really matters.
 

God’s specialty: life out of death

“Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness, you who seek the Lord:
look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug.
Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you;
for he was but one when I called him, that I might bless him and multiply him.
For the Lord comforts Zion; he comforts all her waste places
and makes her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Lord;
joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of song.”

—Isaiah 51:1-3 (ESV)

There are a lot of folks in the church these days who are lamenting the state of American culture and saying pessimistic things about the future of this nation; I know this in part because there are days when I’m one of them.  I think, though, that we would do well to step back from that a bit and realize that while it certainly might well be all downhill from here for the USA, our pessimism on that point isn’t justified by our faith.  The unstated assumption behind that pessimism is that God can’t overcome the unrighteousness of Americans—and that just isn’t true.  On this point, we would do well to consider this passage from Isaiah, and think about it carefully.

“Listen to me,” says the Lord. “Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness, you who seek me; listen and look.” He’s addressing the faithful remnant within Israel—the people who are still seeking God and pursuing his righteousness, who have neither turned their backs on him nor rejected his servant. These are the ones who are willing to trust God—but even for them, it’s hard.  

Indeed, maybe for them it’s especially hard, despite their faith, because they see their people’s dire situation much more clearly than their more secular friends and relatives. They can see beyond Israel’s physical exile to their much deeper and more serious spiritual exile, the distance of the people’s hearts from God, and their consequent spiritual barrenness and deadness; they can see past the obvious difficulty of Israel’s deliverance to the real difficulty that underlies it, and so they worry—not that God is unable to deliver his people, or that he doesn’t care enough to do so, as other Israelites do, but that the faithlessness of their people will somehow sabotage everything in the end anyway. They trust God, but they know better than to trust his people.

To them, God says, “Listen to me: look to the rock from which you were cut and to the quarry from which you were hewn.” A quarry is not a place of life; nothing comes out of it but dead stone. This is an apt metaphor to describe Abraham and Sarah, the father and mother of their people, for Sarah was barren, and both were far past childbearing age; even now, with our advanced technology, we don’t see 90-year-olds having children. When God says, “When I called Abraham, he was but one,” he’s not kidding; and yet, as God points out, “I blessed him and made him many.”

The very foundation story of the family that became the nation of Israel is a story of God bringing life out of barrenness and deadness; that sort of miraculous birth is at the core of their national identity. “Trust me even in this,” God is saying, “because I’ve done even this for my people before.” What is now a wasteland, he will make “like Eden”—and this doesn’t just mean physical life, but also spiritual life, for Eden isn’t merely a physical paradise, it’s the place before sin, and before the curse of God that fell on us because of our sin.

As such, we should think long and hard before concluding that anyone, or any nation, is too messed up and too spiritually dead for God to revive.  God spoke, and a 90-year-old woman had a baby; he spoke, and a virgin bore a son.  He spoke, and Jesus who had been crucified rose from the dead.  What can he not bring to life, if he decides to speak?

(Partially excerpted from “The Herald of Salvation”)

In defense of the citizen punditry

When the term-limits movement began, I was initially a big supporter of the idea. Over time, that changed, as it became apparent that the real effect of term limits for politicians is primarily to shift influence from elected officials to unelected staff and lobbyists; but I'm still a believer in the underlying principle, even if term limits are a bad way to realize it. We should not have a separate class of professional politicians; that undermines the very nature of representative government.

Our leaders are, in large part, representative of no class and no group but their own; while they retain some connection to the voters who elect them, they have shed any real identification with us, any real sense of belonging to and with us and being a part of us, in favor of their new class, their new group, their new culture. It's a class and a culture which has some resemblance to the country as a whole, including a roughly similar ideological spectrum from left to right, and so we can select people whose voting patterns are more or less congenial to our beliefs—but this doesn't mean that they share our cultural referents or that they actually think like the rest of us, and we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking they do. We should expect most politicians, even those with whom we most agree, to at least occasionally do something we find completely incomprehensible, because they're operating in a different reality than ours, with different priorities.

I don't know how we solve this; I don't even know that there is a solution. Happily, however, I believe we're seeing a solution arising for a linked problem: the hegemony of the professional punditocracy.

Just as I don't think there should be professional politicians, so I don't think we're better off for having professional pundits; I believe in citizen pundits just as I believe in citizen politicians, and for the same reasons. Living in the echo chamber does bad things to your understanding of the world. You can imagine the effect if the only mirrors you ever saw were funhouse mirrors—it would distort your vision and give you a false view of yourself and the world around you; the effect of becoming entirely a creature of the political inside is similar. Even the best of the pundit class suffer the effects of having no real perspective on the outside world.

Here, however, the Internet and the rise of the blogosphere is providing a counterweight. While I grant that the blogosphere can't simply supplant the news media because it is itself dependent on the work of professional reporters, and while Sturgeon's Law applies here as well as everywhere else (if anything, we might be lucky if as much as 10% of the stuff out there is worth reading), yet what Seattle sports blogger John Morgan says about sports media is true on a much broader scale:

There are two layers of media at work. A nascent shadow media of questionable reputability and standards that, ironically enough, actually pursues the truth, and an established media that reports naïve truth as it's fed to them.

I would argue that the best of our online commentators have already rendered most professional columnists and talking heads redundant. The MSM haven't realized this yet, of course—or they haven't admitted it if they have—and so folks like David Brooks, David Frum, Ellen Goodman, and Jeff Jarvis continue to wield influence; but at this point, they're only significant because people are still trained to think they're significant. They're already obsolete. The only thing keeping them in service is that their true obsolescence hasn't registered with most of the media consumers in this country . . . yet.

In their place we will see the continued rise of the citizen punditry. This is a development with significant downsides, no question, most notably the sort of vicious nastiness we see in the online comments on newspaper websites like that of the Anchorage Daily News. We've had, thanks in considerable part to the professionalization of the media, a period of relative sanity and civility in our political discourse. That's been unraveling for a while, though, and the growing deprofessionalization of our political commentary will likely only hasten that unraveling; given the behavior of the MSM in the last election, I don't see any reason to believe that they would be any better in the end.

Over against that, I think the proliferation of citizen pundits will in the end bring a sort of Wikipediazation to our political commentary. The free market doesn't work perfectly, but it works better than a command economy; what we currently have is something of a command economy of opinions, and as the free market of the Internet supersedes it, I think we'll see a more balanced commentariat emerge than what the MSM has given us for generations. Individual pundits may well be less fair and/or farther from the center (or maybe not, I don't know), but in the aggregate, I would bet that the result will provide a relatively even portrait of American politics. It's not that we'll have a neutral point of view (something which I don't believe exists anyway), but rather that each point of view will have its equal and opposite, which should make it easier to identify the truth among the competing claims.

Doing so will of course take work on the part of readers; but then, for readers who are willing to put in that work, this may well be the best part of all. It won't be as easy as simply believing what the newspapers tell them, but it will be far more satisfying . . . and far more free.

Remembering Louie

Three years ago today, Louie Heckert died from injuries suffered when he was attacked by a rogue bull moose.  Louie was a long-time member of the congregation I served in Colorado, and he was the most universally beloved man I have ever met.  He was the character in chief in a town full of them, but unlike so many of the others, he was a gentle and welcoming man who always seemed to have a good word for everyone he met.

I will never forget telling my oldest daughter, who was then five years old, that he had been hurt and was probably going to die; her face grew sad and solemn, and she said, “I like Mr. Louie. He’s a nice man; he gives me candy.” There are a lot of things people will remember about him, and the candy is certainly one that children of all ages will remember fondly. There are others that stick in my mind as well, like his standard response when I asked him how he was doing: “Can’t complain, and nobody’d listen if I did.” I knew he had to be joking, but he said it as seriously as he ever said anything, with that twinkle in his eye.  I wish I’d heard all his stories.  I wish I had a good enough memory to recall all the ones I did hear.  I’m glad I got the chance to get to know him.

After his death, folks in Grand Lake put a couple videos together, to help raise money to restore his old black Jeep and to advertise the town (something Louie would have considered an honorable tribute, given how much time and effort he put into advertising the town himself).  Here’s the shorter one, with just the song and the ad at the end; this is the inimitable pairing of Steve Cormey on guitar and vocals and Walter Holland, the Swiss Army Knife of woodwind players, on clarinet:

This is the longer video, with added interviews with Gene, John Cook, Cormey, and others:

Where does experience come from? Bad judgment

I haven't had anything to say about Levi Johnston's decision to exploit his inadvertent fame by going on national TV to trash his ex-fiancée, because I don't think there's all that much to be said, really, and because the folks at C4P have been doing a good job of saying it (here and here); this leaves me with a low opinion of the kid and a lower one of her sister (who does indeed seem to be jealous of Bristol Palin and glad that her brother's no longer engaged), but so what?  Something did occur to me, though, which I thought might be worth noting:  while I really don't care all that much about Johnston, being far, far more concerned about the Palin family, I do have to wonder—while all the attention's on what this kid's doing to his ex and her family, did any adult sit down and try to tell him what he'd be doing to himself?  Or did any adult in his life even think that far ahead?

Someone should have.  For the short term, this no doubt seems like a great idea to him—make some money, hurt his ex, hurt her parents while he's at it (since it appears they never cared for him much), get some attention.  But what about the long term?  What effect is this likely to have on his adult life?  It's hard to say for sure, but it can't be good.  This whole thing will blow over, the news cycle will move on, the PR effects will fade . . . and then the real meaning of his actions will set in.

Obviously, he's permanently alienated the mother of his son and her family, which is going to do bad things for his relationship with that son in the future; maybe he's shallow enough that that will never bother him, but while I think he's pretty shallow, I don't see any reason to believe he's that bad.  And whether he is or isn't, this is going to hang over any future relationships he might have; any woman who comes along is going to look at him as a man with a son from whose mother he's estranged because he took advantage of her and betrayed her.  Which is to say, if he wants to get married, have kids, etc., he's set up a heck of a hurdle for himself to get there.

Then there's the question of the wider consequences of his actions.  In Alaska, of course, he's a marked man—everybody knows who he is, and that's going to be the case for a long time.  There are probably those whose desire to bring down Sarah Palin is so great that his dishonorable behavior won't hurt him in their eyes . . . but before he goes and applies for a position on Hollis French's staff, he ought to consider that his evident immaturity, irresponsibility and bad judgment still won't recommend him for anything.  Folks like that want to use you, kid, not employ you; they see you as a tool, not someone on whom they want to rely (even if they thought you were actually reliable—a conclusion which your behavior to this point does not tend to support).

Meanwhile, those without a strong political animus against Gov. Palin will focus mainly on what this reveals about Johnston's character and judgment—and what it reveals isn't good.  For the rest of his life, he's going to be the guy who got a girl pregnant, dumped her, then went on national TV to make a quick buck trashing her.  That's the sort of thing that gives most people a built-in prejudice against you; it's the sort of thing that makes it hard to convince folks that you're trustworthy, responsible, and a man of integrity.  As such, it's the sort of thing that tends to work against your ability to get good jobs and make a good living; if you do get a job, it can be the sort of thing that makes people not want to do business with your employer.

And that's not just in Alaska, either.  It will be worst there, no doubt, but even if he leaves the state to get away from the stigma, this is the age of the Internet; anyone looking to hire him, or date him, or work with him, is going to Google him if they don't know who he is, and if they do that, it will all be there.  Those folks will have to ask themselves whether they want to be associated with the guy who got a girl pregnant, dumped her, then went on national TV to make a quick buck trashing her—and I suspect that not all that many people will.  Even if they like the political effect of his actions, the fact remains that he didn't do what he did because he was a deep-cover Democratic Party dirty-tricks specialist, he did it because he's an immature, low-character jerk (or something of that sort).  What he did before, he might very well do it again—and if you're associated with him, this time it might be your daughter, or someone else you care about.  As such, even those who like and appreciate his actions at a distance aren't likely to approve of them close up.

All of which is to say, there's likely to be fallout from this whole episode for many years into Levi Johnston's future, and there's no good reason to think that any of it will be positive.  I could always be wrong, but it seems to me that what Johnston has done is likely to make it harder for him to form another stable romantic relationship, harder for him to get a woman to trust him enough to stay with him, harder for him to get good jobs, and harder for him to keep them.  The support of political liberals for his actions will probably prove to be abstract, not translating into meaningful support for him at a personal level, while the animus of political conservatives will most likely be very concrete and very direct; those who judge him without regard to political concerns will find little good to say about him from his behavior in recent months.  I hope Tyra Banks paid him well for the ratings boost, and I hope he's smart enough to save most of it . . . I think he may need it.

Pride (in the name of love)

This video was produced, as far as I can tell, as an ad of sorts for the History Channel's show on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; it features John Legend's version of U2's "Pride (In the Name of Love)"—which is a rare accomplishment: a cover of that song that's actually good—accompanied by footage and photos of Dr. King and other participants in the civil-rights movement.  Ad or otherwise, it's a worthy tribute.

Congratulations to the Spartan Nation

I root in all things for my Washington teams—the Seattle teams in the pros, the University of Washington, Gonzaga as well in basketball, and really, I'm usually happy to see Washington State do well, also—and of course for my alma mater, Hope College; but at the college level, I pull for Michigan State, too, since between my own extended family and my wife's family, I'm related to a large number of Spartans.  I have of course been cheering MSU on in the NCAA tournament this year (and especially since Purdue took out the Huskies, which made me quite unhappy)—I even called them beating Louisville, since I thought they matched up really well with the Cardinals, and I have great faith in Tom Izzo as a coach.  I figured, though, that Izzo would have to be content with his fifth Final Four in twelve years, since I didn't see them beating Connecticut (in fact, UConn was my pick to win it all); even with the home-court advantage, I figured the UConn front line would be too much for them.  I even expressed that belief to my father-in-law this morning.

I was wrong.  Michigan State 82, Connecticut 73.  Congratulations, Coach Izzo and the Spartans—and good luck against North Carolina Monday night.  They'll be your third straight #1 seed, which is quite a gauntlet to run . . . but I think you can take 'em.

Thought on prayer and the routine

Today was taken up with a trip down to Indianapolis.  On the way back, we saw two overturned semis—one by itself, one at the center of a multi-vehicle accident (in the lanes going the other direction) that had drawn upwards of a dozen emergency vehicles, all with lights going.  One of my daughters asked, after we passed the big one, why it had happened; I said I didn't know, but the comment was made that probably someone hadn't been paying attention.  There was a little red car, undamaged, stopped a short distance ahead of the accident, which made us wonder if perhaps that car had cut someone off or made a sudden move of some other sort, setting off a chain of events that made the semi swerve and overbalance, among other things—the sort of careless move that people make and get away with all the time, but this time at just the wrong moment to cause a tragedy.

We take so much for granted, most days.  We take for granted that we can drive wherever we need to go and get there and back safely—and if we don't, people call us worrywarts.  We take for granted that we can do whatever it occurs to us to do and it will all be okay, and that if we're a little careless, no harm will be done.  We may pray for God's protection as we travel or do other things—I had asked for prayer Wednesday for traveling mercies for us—but we do so lightly, more in the spirit of "just in case" than with any sense that it's actually important.  We take for granted that the routine and the mundane really is, of its essence, the routine and the mundane.

And it isn't, as the folks involved in that accident were reminded, and as we were reminded, passing by in the other direction.  It isn't at all.  There is always the possibility for the unexpected and the uncontrolled to intrude—and if, at any given point, that possibility may be quite low, it does build up after a while.  There's always more out of our control than we like to admit, and more variables (many more) than we can possibly track, and far more ways that things can go wrong than there are ways they can go right.  We expect routine good fortune, take it for granted, and consider ourselves ill-used when we don't get it, when we really ought to realize that even that much is a great gift, an act of God's grace.  It is, truly, no small thing to pray for traveling mercies—and no small blessing when our request is granted.  Every such answer to prayer is a victory over the chaos in our world; and every such victory should be taken seriously as reason for gratitude.

Franklin Graham likes Sarah Palin's coattails

I have an envelope sitting on my desk from Samaritan's Purse, the organization founded by Franklin Graham; on the outside, the envelope references two of the many projects in which they're involved:

Ministry in the Slums of Honduras

Feeding Families on the Alaska Frontier

Now, had you asked me in advance which of these two would get top billing, I would have figured from past experience that it would be Honduras, which sounds more exotic and a bigger deal.  Past fundraising appeals from Franklin Graham, whether for Samaritan's Purse or for his father's ministry, have featured evangelistic work in places like India for just that reason.  But no, Honduras is relegated to a small strip below the address window of the envelope.  Most of the front of the envelope is taken up with the mission to Alaska.

Why? My best guess in two words:  Sarah Palin.

Most of the right side of the front of the envelope, somewhere between a quarter and a third of the total space, is occupied by a picture of Graham standing next to Gov. Palin, both grinning (he looks very like his father in this shot), handing out a big box of food.  The picture dominates the envelope; the eye goes first to Graham, looking down into the box, then moves immediately to the Governor, because she's dressed in red and so stands out from the rest of the colors in the picture.  The message in this one is very clear:  Franklin Graham is allied with Sarah Palin—they're working together to minister to the people of Alaska.

Lest you think I'm overemphasizing this, I'm not.  Open the envelope and pull out the letter, the first thing you see is a different photo, filling the top half of the page, of Graham and Gov. Palin giving away another large box of food; the only major difference in composition is that Graham is significantly closer to the camera and therefore looms larger.  Gov. Palin is still dead-center in the shot, and her red still draws the eye.  The caption, at the top of the page, reads, "EMERGENCY FOOD:  Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and I delivered much-needed boxes of food to native families in the wilderness of western Alaska."  In the text of the letter, the governor's office is mentioned in the second paragraph, she's mentioned by name—and praised in strong terms—in the third, and the entire fourth paragraph is her praise of Samaritan's Purse.

In other words, one of the main things this letter wants you to take away is that Gov. Palin loves Franklin Graham and Samaritan's Purse, and that they're allies in ministry.  This is, of course, a fundraising letter, so what this tells you is that Graham and his staff think that invoking her name is a good way to get people to give money—and that's no small judgment, because these folks are past masters at this craft.  When most folks think of Billy Graham, they don't think of him as a fundraiser, but all those crusades cost a great deal of money; who exactly was responsible for raising it initially I don't know, but over the years, that's one of the areas at which the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association has gotten very, very good.  If they think Gov. Palin's picture and imprimatur will help them raise money from the sort of folks who support them, they're no doubt right.

Why does this matter?  Well, besides the fact that Samaritan's Purse is a good ministry that will do a great deal of good work with that money, it also matters because those same folks make up a sizable chunk of the Republican base—and for that matter, the Blue Dog wing of Democratic voters, many of whom now self-identify as Palin Democrats.  The calculation of Franklin Graham and the development folks at Samaritan's Purse with regard to Gov. Palin's probable effect on their fundraising isn't a political one, but it has political implications; at its root, it's the same calculation Saxby Chambliss made when he invited Gov. Palin to be the closer for his campaign in the runoff election for Senate in Georgia:  Sarah Palin has big coattails.  She inspires a lot of people across this country, and if she supports someone or something, that will encourage many, many other folks to do the same—with votes, time, money, whatever.  Whether it's "Vote for Saxby" or "give money to Samaritan's Purse," if she says it, millions of people take it a lot more seriously than if someone else says it.  That matters.  It matters a lot.

This also matters because it's a good gauge that all the Democratic efforts to smear this woman aren't really working.  Sure, they're no doubt serving to fire up the Party faithful, but outside of the elite echo chambers where people pull out lines to convinced each other of things of which they're both already convinced, when it comes to actually changing the minds of the citizenry, they aren't taking root.  For all the work the Democrat smear machine is putting into breaking her image as someone of high morals and ethics, that's clearly how most people in this country think of her, or else her support wouldn't be this useful to an evangelical ministry like Samaritan's Purse; they clearly don't see her as damaged goods, or they wouldn't be parading her support the way they are.

One might also point out that it matters because it means that Graham and his staff have a better feel for the political realities in this country right now, even without trying, than the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the various other party organs that exist inside that great echo chamber of the DC-NY corridor.  Were that not the case, the NRSC and NRCC would have hung on and waited for her to agree to attend their event (as she probably would have done) when she could do so at an appropriate point, rather than turning to Newt Gingrich as a speaker.

The bottom line is that this fundraising letter is just one more piece of evidence of Sarah Palin's extraordinary appeal and connection to a vast swath of the American populace; Palin Power is a very real thing, and the folks at Samaritan's Purse clearly judged it well worth their while to make a deliberate and intentional effort to tap into it.  (Which, since she supports and appreciates their efforts, was an entirely appropriate and valid thing for them to do.)  The sooner the national GOP starts doing so as well in an intelligent way—namely, without asking her to tap-dance to their tune for the privilege—the better off they'll be.

Update:  When I posted this, I was so focused on the letter that I wasn't thinking about the trip it recounts, so I didn't link to the post Joseph Russo put up on that trip at the time.  That omission is now corrected.  It's particularly significant because that post sparked people to donate to Samaritan's Purse in honor of Gov. Palin, which probably contributed to their decision to highlight the trip.

Problem solved

OK, the Internet issues here at the house have been resolved—apparently, Embarq had a problem which was affecting a lot of people here in the area (because of the flooding, someone said) which they've now been able to repair.  It's good to have this working again.

John O'Sullivan sees Margaret Thatcher in Sarah Palin

Thanks to Joseph Russo for posting the link to this—it's a great piece.  (Since it's 1 AM and I can't sleep, I also appreciate my computer working well enough so I could read it.)  O'Sullivan writes,

I know Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher is a friend of mine. And as a matter of fact, Margaret Thatcher and Sarah Palin have a great deal in common. . . .

Mrs. Palin has a long way to go to match [the world-historical figure who today is the gold standard of conservative statesmanship]. Circumstances may never give her the chance to do so. Even if she gets that chance, she may lack Mrs. Thatcher's depths of courage, firmness and stamina—we only ever know such things in retrospect.

But she has plenty of time . . . to analyze America's problems, recruit her own expert advice, and develop conservative solutions to them. She has obvious intelligence, drive, serious moral character, and a Reaganesque likability. Her likely Republican rivals such as Bobby Jindal and Mitt Romney, not to mention Barack Obama, have most of these same qualities too. But she shares with Mrs. Thatcher a very rare charisma. As Ronnie Millar, the latter's speechwriter and a successful playwright, used to say in theatrical tones: She may be depressed, ill-dressed and having a bad hair day, but when the curtain rises, out onto the stage she steps looking like a billion dollars. That's the mark of a star, dear boy. They rise to the big occasions.

Mrs. Palin had four big occasions in the late, doomed Republican campaign: her introduction by John McCain in Ohio, her speech at the GOP convention, her vice-presidential debate with Sen. Joe Biden, and her appearance on Saturday Night Live. With minimal preparation, she rose to all four of them. That's the mark of a star.

If conservative intellectuals, Republican operatives and McCain "handlers" can't see it, then so much the worse for them.

John O'Sullivan knows whereof he speaks.  Check it out.