James E Hartley

Wonderless Woman

Who is the most famous female superhero? Is there even a doubt? As much as it pains aficionados of Marvel Comics to admit it, nobody beats Wonder Woman. Not only has she been around vastly longer than all the new female superheroes, she had a hit TV show in the 70’s, was a hero in the Saturday Morning cartoon about the Justice League of America that I used to watch as a kid, and starred in what is inarguably the best DC superhero movie since Christopher Nolan hung up his spurs. (Joker doesn’t count in this category—different type of movie.)

So, I launched into Wonder Woman: A Celebration of 75 Years with great anticipation.

Sigh.

The short version: If this selection of comic books from the last 75 years represents the Best of Wonder Woman, you have missed absolutely nothing by not reading Wonder Woman comic books.

There are 19 comics in this book. It starts with a two part origin story. That leaves 17 more selections. Of those, another half-dozen or so are more or less revamps of the origin story. So, a third of the time, we get a “Who is this Wonder Woman?” storyline.

What about the other stories? What does she do in them? Whom does she fight and what is accomplished?

Well, that leads to the Big Question: what are Wonder Woman’s Powers? Well… she is kinda strong. She can punch and kick really, really well. She sorta can fly…maybe. A quick glance at her Wikipedia page reveals a whole bunch of other powers which seem to come and go—none of which are on display in the selection of comic books collected here.

OK it’s not all about her shifting set of superpowers. She does have a magic lasso! It makes you tell the truth! She has these bracelets and she is really fast so she can move her hands to cause all the bullets to hit her bracelets. And she has an invisible jet—in which oddly, you can still see the pilot, so it isn’t clear what good an invisible jet is.

So, with all those powers and cool toys, she must have a mission, right? Yep. Stop war. Which apparently you do by running around breaking things.

OK. You think I am being harsh. Well, you are wrong. I am being kind.

What is the real point of a Wonder Woman comic book? You just have to look at them to know. The creator of the comic book has four issues collected here. And there is a remarkable visual feature in those. There are sure a whole lot of women in bondage. One might think the whole point of Wonder Woman was to be able to draw pictures of women who are tied up.

One would be right, by the way. That was exactly what the creator of the character, William Moulton Marston, was keenly interested in doing.

(Side note: Every now and then, someone at Mount Holyoke likes to brag about the connection between Mount Holyoke and Wonder Woman. As it turns out Marston’s wife, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, was a Mount Holyoke alum. She helped Marston dream up this superhero, patterned after Mary Olive Byrne, who was (cough, cough) the third member in their little ménage a trois involving lots of not-so-magic ropes. Yeah, people at Mount Holyoke brag about this sometimes.)

OK, what about later on? Well, in the later issues, there are not nearly as many people being tied up. Insert sigh of relief.

However…

…there is a much larger number of ridiculously scantily clad women running around beating people up. When I say scantily clad, by the way, that means that the clothing all these female superheroes are wearing seems designed to make sure that the clothing doesn’t actually you know, clothe anyone. The skin to clothing ratio throughout is somewhere in the vicinity of 25:1.

Now don’t get me wrong. I understand that comic books are often being marketed to adolescent boys. Before reading this book, I would have thought someone making this complaint was just exaggerating for effect. But is there any reason at all that the creators of these comic books, spanning 75 years, could not have included a plot in any of these stories? I mean other superheroes have comic books, also often marketed to adolescent boys, but they often manage to have something in them that is fun or interesting. Why don’t any of these?

It’s not like Wonder Woman can’t potentially be interesting. But, again maybe it is just the selection here. Maybe there is a wealth of Wonder Woman stories which have an interesting villain worthy of Wonder Woman. But here, there are no clever plot twists or ingenious plans which are foiled. There are a couple of times which someone comes along to compete with Wonder Woman to be the new Great Scantily Clad Superhero, but in every case, this doesn’t actually generate all that much of a story line.

The oddity is that the rebooted origin stories are above average selections in this volume. Which tells you a lot about the volume.

And so, Dear Reader, while I really would like to draw some larger lesson here, some moral tale or fascinating or witty observation to make this all worthwhile, I am at a total loss. The best I can do: Don’t bother reading this book—just go rewatch the recent movie instead. It is vastly better than anything in this book.

The Rise and Decline of John Stuart Mill

Free speech is under assault these days. You know that. You don’t need more examples of what is happening on college campuses. Even the idea of discussing free speech is under assault.

It would seem to be a good time to read (or reread) John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.

First though, we have to overcome the idea that even talking about whether free speech is a good idea is permissible. You see, if you are going to seriously talk about free speech, then you can’t just talk about whether people should be allowed to say things you like. You have to talk about whether people should be allowed to say things you dislike. Things you intensely dislike. Things you think are wrong. Things you think are morally wrong.

Enter Mill:

If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

That is bracing stuff. That is the sort of thing that you hear and you want to cheer and say “Atta boy, Johnny!”

But, alas, it’s not so easy. Mill loves the idea of liberty to be sure. But, he also insists there are limits on my liberty. I have the liberty to swing my hand through the air if I want to do so. Well, I have that liberty up until my hand comes into contact with your head.

[The] sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

If you ask an undergrad these days what are the limits to liberty, they all cite Mill. Well, technically most of them just cite the principle that my liberties end when they infringe or your liberties. Most of them have never actually read Mill.

At one level, it is hard to argue with Mill on the end result. I surely don’t have the right to sock you in the face so hard that you stay plastered. (Bonus points if you get the reference without Google.)

But, does this also apply to speech? Suppose you say something that hurts me. Does your right of free speech end when it causes me pain?

Mill’s answer about liberty is fundamentally utilitarian. He says my liberty ends when it infringes on yours. But, then the canonical example is not sufficient. If I hit you, I am not depriving you of liberty to do anything. We also have to add that you have the liberty to not be hurt by my actions.

Consider this: I would be hurt if you hit me in the face. I would also be hurt if you tell me the Oakland Raiders are losers. Suppose the second hurts me more than the first. In Mill’s formulation, if the first is prohibited, why isn’t the second?

And from that line of reasoning comes speech codes and the attack on free speech. It looked like Mill was giving us grounds for a robust argument in favor of free speech, but in the end, he may very well have undermined his own argument.

So, if we are going to still have free speech, then we really need to build the argument for it on grounds other than Mill’s shifting sand. Natural Law gives firmer ground, but it has gone so far out of fashion, it is a tough sell today. That doesn’t mean it is wrong; it just means that we should not expect any sudden change in the attack on free speech. It will take some time to build up a more robust defense of free speech which is persuasive in the modern world.

Another way of saying the same thing, there is not currently a close race between the opponents of free speech and the defenders of free speech over the future of the academy. The opponents are winning. As the general climate of opinion on a campus turns against free speech, then it gets harder for the lonely individual to assert the right to say anything the individual wants to say. As the social pressures to conform mounts, it gets even more difficult.

The freedom to say what you believe is not guaranteed. If you think it is important, then you need to defend it. And that means you need to defend the right to speech by the very people with whom you disagree most.

Narrative Apologetics

Imagine a 1000 page book explaining Christianity. You don’t have to imagine every page, but think for a minute how you would structure it.

What comes first? What do you explain in it? How do you make it persuasive?

Now, ask yourself this: how similar is the structure of the book you just imagined to the structure of the Bible? Did you have lots of genealogies? Or the whole section of the Law? Or the minor prophets?

Most importantly, how many stories were there in your book?

Alister McGrath wants to convince you that you need more stories in your book. Narrative
Apologetics is a clever, short book trying to convince you that if you want to talk about the gospel, you really need to learn to talk about and tell good stories.

The starting point for thinking about this is the shock of realization from the thought experiment above. When most people imagine explaining Christianity, the default is a theological or philosophical set of propositions and arguments. But, when the Bible sets out to explain Christianity, the default is stories. Indeed if you think about the story to philosophical argument ratio in the Bible, it is really high. Why is that?

McGrath argues that we have been thinking about apologetics all wrong.

Apologetics is not primarily about persuading people that a certain set of ideas is right, although the demonstration of the truth and trustworthiness of the Christian faith is clearly important. It is more about depicting its world of beauty, goodness, and truth faithfully and vividly, so that people will be drawn by the richness and depth of its vision of things.

This actually explains something that has been bothering me for some time. I have grown quite weary of all the attempts at apologetics which claim to offer Proof of the Truth of Christian Doctrine. It is a bizarre thing when Christians say, “We are saved by faith in God, and now let me prove by rational means that God exists and is who He says He is.” Take your pick—are Christians saved by faith or by reason? The problem here is that many Christians have forgotten what the word “faith” means.

As McGrath notes, this type of apologetics is fraught with problems. For example:

There is a danger that apologetics becomes fixated on questions about the historical reliability of the Bible and in doing so fails to set out its powerful vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.

So, if we are going to start thinking more broadly about apologetics, why narratives? The most obvious answer is that narrative is the way the Bible tells the story, so there must be something about the narrative form which is compelling. Again, we instinctively know this at one level. If someone came up to you to ask which book of the Bible would be a good first book to read, would anyone really suggest Romans? Aren’t the gospels the most obvious starting place?

A narrative is not some kind of literary embellishment of the basic ideas of Christian theology; rather, it is generally the primary form of disclosure of God’s identity and character, which gives rise to those ideas.

That is the key insight of this book. Christians tend to treat the narrative portions of the Bible as a flawed vehicle for communicating truth. We treat the narrative as perhaps a way of making a theological or philosophical truth memorable, but it is the underlying message which is the main point. The story itself is a purely a device for delivering the real content. Think about every sermon you have ever heard. How often is it just a story? If a preacher simply read a narrative story, offering no explanation or elaboration, would you feel satisfied with the sermon?

McGrath argues that Christians would have a more powerful witness, be more effective in communicating the gospel, if they would earn how to use narratives.

We are called to out-narrate the dominant stories that shape our culture, by exposing their weaknesses or showing how they are enfolded by our own or how they are eclipsed by more luminous and compelling story.

The bulk of McGrath’s book is giving examples of how narratives can be a better means of communicating truth than a theological treatise. He uses lots of examples, but let’s think about the chapter he devotes to C.S. Lewis. The Narnia tales are obvious Christian allegories. Once you know that, you are tempted to try to map the Narnia tales onto Biblical accounts. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe seems like an easy translation. The Magician’s Nephew is also pretty simple. The others? Well, not so much. When I was much younger, I tried really hard to believe The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was meant to imitate Acts; I always knew that was a silly comparison, but onto what else could it possibly map?

McGrath, however, ably demonstrates that looking for such one-to-one mappings misses the point of Lewis’ use of the story. Instead, Lewis is using stories to communicate larger truths.

Which truths? And here is where McGrath gets into trouble with his argument. He sets out to explain what Lewis is arguing. His explanations are interesting, to be sure. I suddenly saw things I wonder how I never noticed before. But, now that someone has read McGrath’s explanations, do we still need Lewis’ stories?

And therein lies the problem with narrative apologetics. It sounds great. There is no doubt that stories are powerful means to communicate truth. But once we hear the story, do we need to have it explained? After Jesus explains the parable, do we still need the parable? Why?

At this point, we realize McGrath’s argument is less an explanation of the power of narrative apologetics and more a suggestion that maybe he is on the right track. McGrath’s argument is quite powerful in demonstrating the limits of thinking of apologetics as a series of logical proofs. McGrath is extremely persuasive that there is some virtue in narratives themselves. But, what exactly are those virtues? Why is narrative explanation more powerful than theology? McGrath’s initial forays into answering these questions are suggestive, not definitive.

Something in our souls suggests that narrative matters; something in our souls longs for a good story. Why? Why are we constructed to long for truth in the first place? Why are we constructed to long for the narrative form?

I don’t know the answer to that. But, McGrath convinced me that the answer is more likely to be found in Genesis or the gospels than in Romans or Hebrews.

Science Says…

“Science says…” That is one of those sentence starters which is designed to end discussion. If Science says something, then it is obviously True. Indeed, even those people who routinely deny the existence of Truth are perfectly happy asserting that if Science has said something, then even though there is no Truth, well…that doesn’t include Science because Science is True.

Scientists are the Priests of the world without God.

Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist, has written a few books now revealing the secrets of the temple of Science to those outside its walls. And it is, as Rovelli is quick to point out, not a pretty picture for those who want to believe in the all-knowing Science. Rovelli repeatedly come back to: “This permanent doubt, the deep source of science.”

The book: Reality Is Not What It Seems. In this case, the title is a perfect summary of the book. If you want to understand the state of science today, if you want to go on a mind-bending journey into what we know and what we do not know about the physical world, then you will love this book. Beautifully written, engaging and lively. It’s a masterpiece. (Also, the mathematics are kept to a minimum for those not interested in wading through the equations. Rovelli is a story teller, a good one.)

But, before you start, just look at that title again. What you will discover in this book is that Reality is not at all what you think it is.

There are two pillars of our current conception of reality. General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

General Relativity warps the old Newtonian view of objects moving linearly though time and space. Instead, as Rovelli summarizes:

[We] are immersed in a gigantic, flexible mollusk (the metaphor is Einstein’s). The sun bends space around itself, and Earth does not circle around it drawn by a mysterious distant force but runs straight in a space that inclines, like a bead that rolls in a funnel: there are no mysterious forces generated by the center of the funnel; it is the curved nature of the funnel wall that guides the rotation of the bead. Planets circle around the sun, and things fall, because space around them is curved.

Einstein continued to draw out the implications of this in all sorts of ways. Time is not a fixed thing; it varies with the speed of the object moving through time. The universe is neither infinite nor does it have a boundary—it curves, so if you got in a spaceship and sailed straight out from the earth, you would eventually arrive at the earth.

General relativity is hard to describe in words. It works in Mathematics. Understand the math and you understand general relativity. But, is the math a correct description of the world in which we live? Absolutely. There have been very many tests of General Relativity. It passes them all.

Set aside General Relativity for a moment. Think about Quantum Mechanics.

Think about an object. Any object. Where is that object? This seems like a really easy question to answer. Along come Heisenberg. Rovelli explains:

What if, effectively, electrons could vanish and reappear? What is these were the mysterious “quantum leaps” that appeared to underlie the structure of the atomic spectra? What if, between one interaction with something, and another with something else, the electron could literally be nowhere?

The conclusions of this line of thought are staggering. Matter and light are granular, like little pebbles which continually vanish and reappear. The future location of all these granular things is indeterminate; there is a probability distribution governing the world which makes the exact nature of the world unpredictable. Note this is not saying what you will do tomorrow is unpredictable (though it may be); it is saying the location of an atom in the future is unpredictable. And then, we cannot describe how things “are;” we can describe how things enter into relationships with other things instead, the relationships are what define the things.

Again, none of this really makes any sense translated into words. There are very many things wrong with the paragraph above. But the mathematics makes perfect sense. We just can’t translate the mathematics in anything less than a wobbly fashion. But, are the mathematics a correct way to describe the world? Absolutely. Quantum theory passes very single test it encounters.

You might think what has just been said is a bit weird and hard to understand. But, now we get to the really mind-blowing part.

1. General Relativity is a correct description of the world; it works mathematically and has been verified empirically.

2. Quantum Theory is a correct description of the world; it works mathematically and has been verified empirically.

3. General Relatively and Quantum Theory cannot both be true. They contradict each other.

A university student attending lectures on general relativity in the morning, and others on quantum mechanics in the afternoon, might be forgiven for concluding that his professors are fools, or they haven’t talked to each other for at least a century. In the morning, the world is a curved space-time where everything is continuous; in the afternoon, the world is a flat one where discrete quanta of energy leap and interact.

Remember that sentence that starts “Science says…”?

Theoretical physicists are still working to figure out how to reconcile theories which seemingly both cannot be true. Rovelli sketches out his preferred answer, and if you are ready for some even more mind-blowing description of what you used to call reality, well, enjoy.

Rovelli sets out to describe quantum gravity, a possible explanation of the world.

The first conclusion: Space does not exist. We think of space as a continuum in which particles move, but instead, maybe space doesn’t exist. There is a minimum quantum of volume. No space smaller than that unit exists. So there is no such thing as a space between these quantum units.

The second conclusion: Time does not exist. Time like space has minimum units and indeterminacy and, well, by the time your work out the mathematics, there is nothing recognizable as time anymore.

So if space doesn’t exist and time doesn’t exist, what does exist? Rovelli calls it the covariant quantum field, but he really doesn’t have a coherent description of this in words.

Indeed reality is not what it seems. We don’t really know what reality is. We don’t really have any ability to explain it. But, you can safely toss out all those ideas you have about what physical reality is. Science says it just ain’t so.

Make the Holy Roman Empire Great Again

For the last year, Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen has been one of those books of the moment in conservative intellectual circles.

(No, conservative intellectual is not an oxymoron. I know you thought that. The joke was already old in the 1960s.)

The first thing to note about the book’s title is that the Liberalism that Failed is not that found in the Democratic Party. This is not a Republican tirade against Democrats. The Liberalism here is the old use of the term, the liberalism of John Locke and the Founding Fathers. It isn’t the Democrats that have failed. It’s also the Republicans and, indeed, the entire American Experiment.

What has caused this failure? The very successes of liberalism—from our political system to the massive technological advances—have led to a collapse of society. Look around. Whatever social ills exist do so because liberalism has succeeded all too well. Truly, pick your poison and Deneen is here to show you that the problem you just described arose because of the triumph of liberalism and that your idea that more liberalism will solve the problem is foolish at best.

As a result, the book is incredibly repetitive. I read it with a reading group and every single student thought the book would have been vastly better as a journal article.

Tedium aside, does the argument hold? Somewhat.

Deneen notes, quite correctly, that there is a sharp break in the conception of the idea of “liberty” during the Enlightenment. It is one of those breaks where it sure would be nice if we just had two different English words to describe the two different meanings, but, alas, we do not.

Calling them the ancient view of liberty and the modern view of liberty is clunky, but accurate. The ancient view of liberty was that we were liberated from our degraded lives, living like animals, when we found ourselves free to live lives of a higher order. The modern view of liberty is that I am free when we remove any external constrains on allowing me to do what I want to do.

Deneen explains the problem of the rise of the modern view of liberty:

[The] classical and Christian emphasis upon virtue and the cultivation of self-limitation and self-rule relied upon reinforcing norms and social structures arrayed extensively throughout political, social, religious, economic, and familial life. What were viewed as the essential supports for a training in virtue—and hence, preconditions for liberty from tyranny—came to be viewed as sources of oppression, arbitrariness, and limitation.

Therein lies the fundamental problem. Deneen dresses it up a bit, but stripped to its essence, Deneen is noting that the modern view on liberty has completely destroyed all the norms and social structures that used to make it possible to live as free people in the ancient sense of liberty.

It is an interesting argument. Is it true?

Deneen gets into horrible trouble in this book when he tries to explain his vision of the better society. If Liberalism is so bad, is he arguing that we should just go back to those good old days before the Enlightenment? Well, he doesn’t want to say that, and in a rather “Stamp your foot when you say that” conclusion insists that he is not saying we should go back. We have to go forward.

But, why can’t we go back? Well, Deneen knows you aren’t going to like going back. Why not? Because back means we get rid of all the evil things liberalism has brought. Things like, you know, the internet, which has destroyed your need for a local community. And penicillin, which is a perfect example of humans trying to assert control over nature. Deneen doesn’t want to get rid of the internet and penicillin. So, we aren’t going back. Just forward.

How does that work? In a very telling remark, Deneen explains one of the problems with the Liberal vision, nicely echoing Edmund Burke.

Liberalism’s founders tended to take for granted the persistence of social norms, even as they sought to liberate individuals from the constitutive associations and education in self-limitation that sustained these norms. In its earliest moments, the health and continuity of families, schools, and communities were assumed, while their foundations were being philosophically undermined.

Now replace “Liberalism’s founders” with “Patrick Deneen.” And replace the list of things that pre-liberalism had created with the things liberalism has created. How exactly is Deneen any different than the early Liberals? Deneen wants to assume that in the Brave New World he imagines, we get to keep all the benefits of liberalism and just get rid of the things he doesn’t like.

Which leads one to wonder: what are the things in our Liberal World Order that Deneen wants to keep and what are the things he wants to abandon? What will be the shape of this new society? Do we get to keep the internet? Do Marvel movies still get made? Does Deneen still get to teach at Notre Dame?

He is surprisingly silent on how all this is supposed to work. And that points directly to the fact that Deneen is being rather disingenuous in this book. We can see this in the strange case of Martin Luther.

As Deneen frequently notes, the original sin of liberalism is the idea that we are primarily individuals, not members of a community.

Liberalism is most fundamentally constituted by a pair of deeper anthropological assumptions that give liberal institutions a particular orientation and cast: 1) anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice, and 2) human separation from and opposition to nature.

Now where in the history of the West is the first articulation of this idea of anthropological individualism, this idea that the individual is the fundamental deciding unit? Martin Luther, of course. In a series of tracts, Luther stands against Europe and declares that we are all priests before God, that we do not need a priestly caste to intercede with us before God, that the Bible should be translated into the language which the people can read, and that every individual with the help of the Holy Spirit can interpret that Scripture. Luther is obviously the ultimate villain in Deneen’s argument. What gave Luther the right to assert this vision of autonomous individuals before God?

So, it is not a surprise that in the paragraph immediately following the passage just quoted, Deneen notes the originator of individualism is…Thomas Hobbes. OK, that was a surprise. A few paragraphs down we find John Locke. What happened to Luther? Deneen pulls a fascinating sleight of hand. In the paragraph immediately following the one above, he writes:

The first revolution, and the most basic and distinctive aspect of liberalism, is to base politics upon the idea of voluntarism—the unfettered and autonomous choice of individuals. This argument was first articulated in the protoliberal defense of monarchy by Thomas Hobbes.

Note the insertion of the word “politics” into the sentence. Luther wasn’t (only) talking about politics, see, so it makes sense to talk about Hobbes and Locke.

OK, not that big of a deal. In the endless examples of individualism which Deneen discusses, he is certainly allowed to talk about political individualism too. So, he must discuss the problem with Luther elsewhere, right?

Where does Martin Luther, the founder of individualism and thus liberalism get mentioned in Deneen’s book? Curiously he is only mentioned once in the entire book. On page 223. In the Index. Note: that does not mean that the Index only gives one place where Luther is mentioned. It means the Index is the only place the name Martin Luther appears at all. The Index lists page 112 after Luther’s name, but Luther is not mentioned on page 112. Nor anywhere else in the book for that matter.

This is rather curious. How did Luther end up in the Index if his name is not even in the book? Well, it turns out there is a sentence on page 112 in which it would have been quite easy to have slipped Luther’s name:

[The Liberal arts] reflect, instead, a pre-modern understanding—one found in the teachings of such authors as Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, and in the biblical and Christian traditions, articulated not only in the Bible but in the works of Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, More, and Milton.

But Luther isn’t in that list on p 112, though the index would suggest that maybe he was there in an earlier draft. And, lo and behold, Milton, the person with the six letter name in that list on page 112 is (obviously totally coincidentally) not listed in the Index.

Why does this absence of Luther matter? It tells us something interesting. Imagine Deneen’s book as he could have written it with Luther front and center. Reading the book, you can even imagine a whole extra chapter about the problems of Individualism in religion. You see when people got this crazy idea that they could stand before God as individuals, they remove all the societal authority the Universal Church had to rein in society in order to help us retain that ancient source of liberty. If Deneen’s argument in this book is right, then the Protestant Reformation, not Hobbes and Locke, was the break point.

Why doesn’t Deneen just say this? It would show his cards.

This book isn’t just a complaint about a secular liberal order; it is a complaint about a fractured religious order. And once you see that, you realize why the book does not end in a clarion call to move to a beautiful vison of the future. Deneen wants to bring back the Holy Roman Empire, a society in which there is just one Church, the true Church, the Church of Rome, with the power to limit all the damages of liberalism causing all the social ills of the world around us. Of course we get to keep the internet, but it will no longer have all the degrading locations to visit. Of course we get to keep modern medicine, but not those things that fundamentally degrade the human being. Of course Deneen gets to keep teaching at Notre Dame, but it will be a religious school again.

But, if Deneen had said all that, we wouldn’t all be talking about this book. Indeed, one might think the Protestants would have just rolled their eyes at it. And in modern America, Deneen needs the help of the Protestants to bring about his vision. Hopefully they won’t notice where this is heading until it is too late.

In the end, this is an incredibly disappointing book. One hopes that next time, maybe Deneen will have the courage of his convictions and write a more honest book.

Tartuffe, Kanye, and Saul of Tarsus

Consider Tartuffe, Moliere’s play about a scoundrel who pretends to be a pious man in order to convince a wealthy dupe to hand over all his wealth.

The play is funny, which you knew became Moliere wrote it. It raises some interesting questions about what it means to be dishonest.

If I act better than I am, does that mean I am dishonest? Suppose I am a terrible person, but in public, I act like a good person. Is that bad? Hard to say Yes to that.

We read this in one of my reading groups. Consider the following situation. Someone befriends a very wealthy person and then spends years being the best friend the wealthy person could ever have. The wealthy person lives and dies very happy to have had such a truly wonderful friend, and then leaves the entire estate to this good friend. That is a great story, isn’t it? But, the friend was only pretending to be a friend in order to get the money. Does that change the story? Is that morally acceptable? The wealthy person really was happier having such a good friend and never discovered the deceit. Yet, the students in the reading group were nearly unanimous that this person pretending to be a friend would be doing a terrible thing.

Curious. Does intention or action matter more?

But, while that is what we talked about in the reading group, what I thought about during and after reading the play was…Kanye West. I realized that the current national discussion about Kanye is highly related to the plot of Tartuffe.

As I recently noted in a blog post, I have been convinced for a couple of years now that if Kanye decides to run for President, he cannot be beat. The last couple of weeks has been a perfect example of why.

Yet, part of the national discussion is whether Kanye is being serious with this album. It appears that many people have a sneaking suspicion that this is all some elaborate scam, that Kanye has not really converted, that this is just another money grab by a guy who has grabbed a lot of money in his time.

Kanye, as you know unless you live under a rock, just released a new album, Jesus is King. I listened to it expecting a sort of mild nod to Christianity. I was wrong to expect that. Kanye, who goes all in on everything, has gone all in here. This is a good old-fashioned gospel album. The lyrics aren’t subtle at all; this is Billy Graham Crusade levels of overt Christianity. You could play this album in a fundamentalist Baptist church and not be able to tell the difference between the content of the lyrics and the content of the sermon.

Why? Why would anyone doubt that Kanye is serious here? It is because we have all been culturally conditioned by plays like Tartuffe to equate expressions of religious belief with charlatans.

Now I understand why people outside the church would think like that. If you do not realize the truth of Christianity, then there is no way you could understand the notion of a life-changing conversion to Christianity.

But, what if you are inside the church? One of the foundational stories of the church, one of those stories we tell each other all the time, is the story of Saul of Tarsus being blinded by the light of Christ and turning from being the Church’s greatest persecutor into its greatest evangelist. Christians believe in conversion. It is central to Christian doctrine. So, why doubt Kanye?

Kanye talks about exactly this phenomena on the album itself:

Told the devil that I’m going on a strike
I’ve been working for you my whole life
Nothing worse than a hypocrite
Change, he ain’t really different
He ain’t even try to get permission
Ask for advice and they dissed him
Said I’m finna do a gospel album
What have you been hearin’ from the Christians?
They’ll be the first one to judge me
Make it feel like nobody love me

What are you hearing from the Christians indeed. Isn’t it a part of Christian doctrine to accept the convert at his word? Isn’t it part of the role of the church to accept the prodigal son with open arms? Doesn’t finding the lost coin or the lost sheep bring great joy in heaven? Yes, we know that sometimes people enter the church on false pretenses, but what gives anyone in the church the right to prejudge another’s conversion?

We get called halfway believers
Only halfway read Ephesians
Only if they knew what I knew, uh
I was never new ’til I knew of
True and living God, Yeshua
The true and living God
(Somebody pray for me)

A guy puts out what could easily become one of the top selling gospel albums. Every song is a testament to Christ and the significance of conversion and the importance of belief and an explanation of the life we should lead. And people in the church doubt him? Imagine an album with lyrics like this:

Everything that hath breath praise the Lord
Worship Christ with the best of your portions
I know I won’t forget all He’s done
He’s the strength in this race that I run
Every time I look up, I see God’s faithfulness
And it shows just how much He is miraculous
I can’t keep it to myself, I can’t sit here and be still
Everybody, I will tell ’til the whole world is healed
King of Kings, Lord of Lords, all the things He has in store
From the rich to the poor, all are welcome through the door
You won’t ever be the same when you call on Jesus’ name
Listen to the words I’m sayin’, Jesus saved me, now I’m sane
And I know, I know God is the force that picked me up
I know Christ is the fountain that filled my cup
I know God is alive, yeah
He has opened up my vision
Giving me a revelation
This ain’t ’bout a dead religion
Jesus brought a revolution
All the captives are forgiven
Time to break down all the prisons
Every man, every woman
There is freedom from addiction
Jesus, You have my soul
Sunday Service on a roll
All my idols, let ’em go
All the demons, let ’em know
This a mission, not a show
This is my eternal soul
This my kids, this the crib
This my wife, this my life
This my God-given right
Thank You, Jesus, won the fight

Or how about this message for the culture?

Get your family, y’all hold hands and pray
When you got daughters, always keep ’em safe
Watch out for vipers, don’t let them indoctrinate
Closed on Sunday, you my Chick-fil-A
You’re my number one, with the lemonade
Raise our sons, train them in the faith
Through temptations, make sure they’re wide awake
Follow Jesus, listen and obey
No more livin’ for the culture, we nobody’s slave

You really want say this isn’t a Christian album?

OK, some of the lyrics are a bit groan inducing

The IRS want they fifty plus our tithe
Man, that’s over half of the pie
I felt dry, that’s on God
That’s why I charge the prices that I charge
I can’t be out here dancin’ with the stars
No, I cannot let my family starve

Yeah, Kanye, without charging high prices, Kim Kardashian would surely starve.

But the point remains. Kaye isn’t perfect. That too is part of Christian doctrine. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Why assume Kanye is like Tartuffe instead of like Saul of Tarsus?

And note, if (well, when) Kanye does run for President he will be the most explicitly Christian candidate for President since Pat Robertson. Imagine uniting Christians and aficionados of rap music and reality TV into a giant coalition. Who is going to win against that?

Keeping up with the Kardashians: The White House Years. Gonna be a big hit.