When the film industry was in its infancy, the mere presence of “moving pictures” was enough to keep audiences spellbound. A pre-1900 viewer marveled at a film that simply showed a seashore: amazing, he said, how much the waves on the screen resembled real waves. The same was true of early animation, as Hugh Kenner observes in his wonderful book Chuck Jones: A Flurry of Drawings:

Moviegoers had a passion. … for nothing more subtle than the sheer illusion of motion. It sufficed that on a wavery screen they saw—galloping horses! (And therein lay the germ of the Western.) Chuck Jones remembers when it was hilarious if an animated walker just hopped once in a while, an effect he’s used himself in several films. A story? That could emerge from whatever some animator happened to think of next.

A similar logic seems to have been at work in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, the first animated feature in which the protagonists are “played” by nearly lifelike digital actors. Is it enough simply to watch animated characters who look so uncannily real—and never mind the cobbled-together story, the excruciating dialogue? Not just the characters, for that matter, but also the ravaged streets of post-apocalypse New York, the lifting rockets, the dreamscapes with their preternatural clarity of detail, realer than real, like the great sci-fi cover art of Paul Lehr and John Berkey and Robert Andre. (And isn’t the banality of the title and subtitle sufficient warning for those who wouldn’t be satisfied by skin of almost human texture?) Maybe it is enough. But in any case there’s another compelling reason to pay attention.

The front page of The New York Times for July 17 showed the interior of the first artificial heart. (In its June 23 issue, The Economist reports that “every part of the human body is being studied to see how it can be replicated artificially.”) The cover of the August issue of Wired shows the wheelchair-bound writer John Hockenberry coming at you, kamikaze-style, framed by a mini-manifesto: “Your body. Get over it.” (Inside, Hockenberry explains: “Bodies are perhaps an arbitrary evolutionary solution to issues of mobility and communication.” Hence the disabled—wedded to assistive technology—are leading the way for the rest of humanity, heralding “a whole range of biological-machine hybrids.”) And at the local cineplex this summer, you could take in a matinee of Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, break for nachos, migrate a couple of screens down the hallway for the carnage of Jurassic Park III (live action seamlessly melded with superbly plausible computer-generated images), pick up a hot dog and a Coke, and finish the night with Final Fantasy.

Clearly something’s afoot, some mind-bending change in the rules that heretofore have neatly distinguished the real from the simulated and the human from the not-human, the rules that have defined the nature and the boundaries of the body and its relation to soul or spirit or self. “Movie Stars Fear Inroads by Upstart Digital Actors” reads the headline of another New York Times article (July 8), illustrated with a still from Final Fantasy. Did a rogue tabloid writer or maybe a wit from The Onion hack into the Times? No, the story is straight. “I’m very troubled by it,” Tom Hanks is quoted as saying. Could this movie offer insight into whatever it is we’re in the midst of?

Four years in the making at the Square Pictures studio in Honolulu, Final Fantasy takes its name from the enormously popular series of computer games created by Hironobu Sakaguchi, who was also the principal architect of the movie. (The first version of the game appeared in 1987; the release of Final Fantasy X, scheduled for this spring, was pushed back a bit.) The link between the film version and the games is a sensibility, a style of visual storytelling strongly influenced not only by anime (Japanese animation, a whole universe of its own, ranging from the confections of Pokemon to darker, deeper films like Akira and Princess Mononoke) but also by Sakaguchi’s passion for movies in general. The “world” of the film Final Fantasy and its characters are not based on any of the games.

The year is 2065. Much of Earth lies in ruins, laid waste by mysterious aliens (“Phantoms,” as they’re called) that were loosed decades earlier by the impact of a meteorite. In the never-ending war waged since that catastrophic event, humans have been steadily losing ground until they are restricted to the refuge of a few intact “barrier cities.” Extinction looms; it’s a time for drastic measures.

General Hein (voiced by James Woods) has a plan. He’s supervised the construction of a superweapon, the Zeus Cannon, positioned on a space station. He is impatient to unleash it on the Phantoms’ “nest” on Earth. But the governing council hesitates to approve the plan, restrained in part by the influence of Dr. Sid (voiced by Donald Sutherland), a scientist, who has asked for time to pursue an alternative strategy. Dr. Sid’s protege, the brilliant, resourceful, and beautiful Dr. Aki Ross (Ming-Na), is the central character in the story.

If this sounds awfully cliched in summary, it’s even worse in the theater. The incongruity between the artistry and craft and imagination—the painstaking making—of the animation and the lameness of the story is staggering. Even so, Final Fantasy does not merely touch on what it means to be human incidentally, by accident as it were, in the course of its ambition to create lifelike animated characters. In fact, along with the usual furniture of the futuristic thriller, including a good deal of gunplay and even the 2065 equivalent of a car chase, Final Fantasy serves up a simplified and highly didactic version of James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, a sort of Gaia for Dummies™ with embellishments by Dr. Sid.

Lovelock, you’ll recall, has notoriously argued that the Earth itself is a purposeful organism, a self-regulating system encompassing all living things. Dr. Sid goes further. Each living being, he says, has its own spirit, and upon death that spirit returns to Gaia. He has discovered that from the spirits of eight organisms representing the spectrum of life he can create an “energy wave” that will cancel out the negative energy of the Phantoms. Much of the action of the movie consists of Aki’s efforts to track down those spirits.

How does this sit with the audience?

I would be interested to know. (In an interview, one of the film’s producers commented on the importance of defining a core audience; the core audience for Final Fantasy, he said, is teenage boys and young men in their early twenties.) But one thing is sure. It gives the movie a dimension that most action films assiduously avoid: reflection on what is left, if anything, of the person who is killed in combat—and thus, by extension, what is left of any of us when we die. Are we something more than our bodies, finally—or are we, as the cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky maintains, simply machines made of meat?

In quite a different and less conscious way, the character of Aki prods us to uncomfortable awareness of our confusions about body and spirit and self—confusions that seem most deeply entangled in the notion of Woman, where the old rules are out and new ones have yet to be established.

Like so many real women at the center of recent movies, Aki is a study in unresolved contradictions. On the one hand, to the point of caricature, she is a formidably “independent” woman, smarter and more competent than anybody else in the story—more stubborn, too. On the other hand, she is deeply vulnerable, infected by a barely contained Phantom, lodged in her chest, that threatens to take her life. She is a scientist, a master of reason and analysis, yet she is also a seer: it’s the alien presence within her body that prompts the dreams which allow her finally to solve the mystery of the Phantoms. It’s as if to be a proper twenty-first-century woman she must exemplify traditional male qualities and certain traditional female attributes.

Such tensions are most acute in the treatment of her body, her sheer presence. She is onscreen in almost every scene, and the “eye” of the film dwells on her. Every detail—every explosion, every bit of rubble, every gesture—required extraordinary effort, but the care and invention lavished on the creation of Aki were unmatched. Chris Lee, one of the producers, says that Aki has “60,000 individual strands of hair, which took 20 percent of the entire production time to create and render.” These prodigies of attention did not go to waste. You can’t take your eyes off her.

Yet Aki is at once seductively sexual and strangely unphysical. Her kiss with her love interest, the jut-jawed Captain Gray Edwards (Alec Baldwin), is almost antiseptic. In fact, the only moment in the film when her body becomes palpably physical is the revelation of the Phantom coiled and writhing inside her—and even that is managed by a futuristic version of an MRI.

I imagine a reader protesting: In our hypersexualized culture, you are complaining that this animated woman—in a movie partly aimed at young teenage boys!—is not physical enough? Good grief! But the point is that the movie tries to have it both ways, and somehow ends up with a woman who is virtually disembodied—as so many women in movies are.

Dr. Frankenstein had many predecessors. The desire to create a simulacrum of a human being is so deeply rooted as to be untraceable. In that long history from Homer to the Golem to Philip K. Dick—a history, almost exclusively, of the male imagination—there’s a recurring fascination with the notion of creating a woman. Hence the myth of Pygmalion, King of Cyprus, who carved a statue in the form of a beautiful young woman and then fell in love with it, or her. Legend has it that the philosopher and scientist Albertus Magnus, Aquinas’s teacher, created a lifesize mechanical woman that Thomas destroyed, regarding it as a diabolical work. A recent version is the “replicant” Rachel in the movie Blade Runner.

And then there’s Aki. In the creation of such a character, there’s a comically transparent attempt to pay homage to new, approved notions about women while at the same time old notions are smuggled in. It’s easy to see from the outside, easy to mock, but much harder to correct. Who is going to throw the first stone?

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

At the end of his interesting book Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Harvard Univ. Press, 2001), Simon Cole turns to DNA typing. Skeptical of the claims made for fingerprinting, he’s not impressed by the newer method either. “DNA typing,” Cole writes, “is a product of a technology that may someday undermine the identification technique itself.” How so? Well, consider the prospect of human cloning: “If individuals can be cloned, then DNA typing will be of as little value in distinguishing them as it is now in distinguishing identical twins.” Even at this moment, I’d wager, two or three mystery writers who’ve read Cole’s book are already sketching the plot for a near-future story based on this premise. Was it Colonel Mustard who did the deed—or Colonel Mustard’s clone!

But Cole isn’t finished. He suggests that

the body itself may become a rather antiquated way of defining the individual. A wide variety of new technologies—sex reassignment, cyberspace, artifical intelligence, cosmetic surgery, organ transplantation, and so on—all point toward the demise of the nineteenth-century notion of the body as solid, stable entity and the advent of some new conception of bodies as mutable and flexible. As these technologies come to fruition, we may cease to associate individual identity so closely with the body. … and begin to think of ourselves as somewhat more ethereal entities for whom bodies and body parts are merely resources.

That will make the job of identifying criminals even more difficult. Was it Miss Scarlet in the conservatory with a knife—or merely one of her ethereal manifestations? And come to think of it, where’s the body?

Yet we can’t entirely laugh away Cole’s speculations. Even when we’ve discounted all his huffing and puffing—for instance: “the equation of identity with a unique body that begins at birth and ends at death. … is a product of the nineteenth-century Western imperialist culture”—there’s an uncomfortable residue of truth in his observation that our traditional understanding of personal identity is being challenged.

That understanding, rooted in the Christian belief that human beings are uniquely created in the image of God, has been the default mode for Western culture since the time of Christ, influencing even those who did not share Christian belief. But increasingly it is rejected. A salient case in point is the philosopher Peter Singer, the subject of an article in this issue by J.L.A. Garcia (“Professor of Death“).

Singer wants to “unsanctify” human life not because he is indifferent to our joys and sorrows but because he believes that humans, although more complex in certain ways, are not different in kind from other sentient animals. While he starts rhetorically with “human rights,” such as the right to be free from discrimination on the basis of race or sex, proceeding to argue that such ethical sensitivity must logically be extended to nonhuman animals, other thinkers start at the opposite end of the biological continuum to argue against human uniqueness.

Consider, for example, the book What Is Life? (1995; reissued, with a glossary added, by the University of California Press, 2000) by the biologist Lynn Margulis and her son, science writer Dorion Sagan. Written to revisit, armed with new knowledge, the issues raised by physicist Erwin Schrodinger’s 1944 classic of the same title, What Is Life? is as stimulating a book as you’re likely to read this year—and one that is radically at odds with the traditional understanding of the place of humanity in the larger scheme of things.

This is clear at many points in the book, but perhaps most unmistakably so in a chapter devoted to fungi. It is a tour de force, and it will help me to look with new eyes when my wife and I take our daily walk on the Prairie Path through Lincoln Marsh. It is also the first thing I’ve read, I think, in which humans are contrasted with fungi and found wanting.

“Life creates,” Margulis and Sagan write. “The global autopoietic system, Gaia, spins off creatures increasingly strange. For a while, at least, even for millions of years, the global environment will tolerate bizarre sports, rapidly spreading pioneers, opportunistic monsters. But in the long run organic beings confront the limits of their own multiplication.” And lest you wonder whom or what we should have in mind as admonitory examples of those “bizarre sports, rapidly spreading pioneers, opportunistic monsters,” enlightenment soon follows:

In English the word “fungus” is virtually synonymous with an unwanted, surgically expendable outgrowth. Such a meaning might apply better to the hoarding, materalistic species we have become than to the organisms that nobly serve as biospheric undertakers, investing animal waste with life and turning corpses into soil.

Well, that’s life.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Imagine a future historian or sociologist attempting to capture the status of American Christianity at the turn of the twenty-first century. Among the movements she will have to consider is Promise Keepers. Indeed, the 1990s might well be characterized as “the decade of Promise Keepers” in American Christianity.

Consider: On March 20, 1990, Bill McCartney—the highly successful football coach at the University of Colorado—and his friend Dave Wardell from the university’s physical education faculty drove from Boulder to Pueblo for a Fellowship of Christian Athletes banquet where McCartney was speaking. Among their topics of conversation en route was the need for a new group specifically aimed at meeting the spiritual needs of America’s men. McCartney verbalized to Wardell his dream of filling a football stadium with thousands of men willing to commit themselves to God, to their families, and to “Christlike masculinity.” From that chat grew a group of 70 men who dubbed themselves “Promise Keepers,” which in turn led to a 1991 meeting of 4,200 men at the university’s basketball arena and the launching of the decade’s most unexpected and immediately successful movement within the American church.

Promise Keepers grew from that single meeting in 1991 to 22 stadium rallies nationwide attracting nearly 1.2 million men in 1996. In its peak years, the movement received enormous media coverage, much of it presenting McCartney and PK in exaggerated rhetorical extremes. For some, McCartney was a Hitler-like cult figure, stealthily seeking to manipulate the PK organization to impose his right-wing political and cultural agenda on the unwitting and beleagured men of America. For others, he was a muscular Christian exemplar of virtue and godliness, bearing witness in a postmodern and pagan world.

By mid-1997, however, the movement had clearly begun to sputter, with Promise Keepers trimming its staff by 20 percent even as it prepared for the much-trumpeted “Stand in the Gap” gathering that October in Washington, D.C. By March 1998—two weeks after McCartney announced he intended to lay off 345 members of PK’s paid staff and rely mainly on voluntary help—religion editor Steven Kloehn of the Chicago Tribune could observe that it did not really come as a surprise when the Promise Keepers edifice was suddenly swallowed into the earth, leaving hardly a trace.

In fact, the organization has proved to be more resilient than many people expected; an obituary would be premature. And the real story of this movement—its rise and fall and scaled-down continuing existence, and what it tells us about the peculiarities of religion at the end of the millennium—is only now beginning to unfold.

In early 2000, Dane Claussen of Southwest Missouri State University’s Department of Communication and Mass Media published two edited volumes, The Promise Keepers and Standing on the Promises, consisting of 39 essays that look at Promise Keepers from multiple angles. Shortly after, the quarterly journal Sociology of Religion released a special issue edited by sociologist Rhys Williams that included six more essays on PK. In addition, PK’s first decade inspired a number of theses and dissertations, with the field of mass communications and rhetoric best represented and historical, theological, and biblical studies underrepresented.

Taken together, these essays show that the published literature in the first decade of PK consisted mainly of articles in a wide variety of sources, ranging from newspapers and popular magazines to academic journals. Most of these pieces were of the polarizing sort mentioned above. Negative responses to McCartney and PK from journalists and activists tended to center on the culturally explosive issues of race and gender. Simplistic misrepresentations of PK as merely a version of the larger men’s movement, as essentially homophobic, and as inherently repressive of women were common. For example, the National Organization for Women passed a resolution in 1997 denouncing PK as militaristic and anti-woman. Less noticed were similarly harsh, theologically based critiques that attacked PK for its biblical and theological naivete, its misinformed ecumenism, and more.

At the same time, affirmations of McCartney and PK also emerged; indeed, Claussen remarks that secular press coverage of PK in its first decade was more favorable than one might have expected. Positive treatments of PK were typically sprinkled with anecdotal, experiential, or apologetic emphases. (One example is Ken Abraham’s book Who Are the Promise Keepers?, published in 1997 by Doubleday.) PK itself, along with affiliated groups such as Focus on the Family, published numerous articles and books seeking to justify and advance the rapid growth of the movement.

So, after ten years, we know something about Promise Keepers, but less than we might have hoped. Where should we begin to dig deeper? A good place to start is PK’s strategic fusion of conservative religion and bigtime sport. The sport stadium settings, the frequent rhetorical use of athletic metaphors to depict a stereotypically masculine approach to the Christian life, the featured appearance of Coach McCartney as keynote speaker—all these and more dramatized PK’s successful synthesis of “muscular Christian” religion and sport. Men were frequently exhorted, “We are not here to play games, but to claim the victory! We have read to the end of the book, and we win” (Big cheer!). Similarly, McCartney would note in his 1997 book Sold Out, “Steering a nationally-ranked football program and calling men to godliness through an upstart Christian men’s ministry were, to me, incomparably significant, worthwhile callings. Each required total focus, commitment, and dedication.” This sort of rhetoric has continued to be pervasive in the movement’s stadium events.

Some of this has been noted, of course, in the earlier literature. What hasn’t been adequately explored is the way in which PK combined features of three types of earlier gatherings in American sport and religion: the pep rally, the camp meeting, and the men’s retreat. One is struck first of all with how similar PK gatherings are to the pep rallies that often precede spirited athletic contests between rival institutions. Obviously the stadium setting is a powerful environmental determinant, and it is clear that many of the male attendees have been there before, as part of a sports crowd. PK crowd members are casual, even festive, and ready to participate, not unlike youthful pep rally participants. Perhaps an hour prior to the formal beginning of the first session, a group from one side of the stadium begins to chant, “We love Jesus; yes we do; we love Jesus; how about you?” with the final you emphasized. After a 10- or 15-second pause, a second group from the opposite side of the stadium responds in kind. Later, during the actual meeting, the pep rally atmosphere persists, although in a more restrained form. Participants cheer for the speakers, for themselves, for Jesus, or for no apparent reason.

Most of the speakers, and especially McCartney, make liberal use of sport metaphors, jargon, and allusions to—and contrasts with—experiences from their own participation. As McCartney speaks, presumably his listeners project from the success he experienced as a coach to his new calling and then, most important, to their own needs and goals. They recognize that he chose to walk away from success in the ultimate male domain of bigtime sport for the greater service of the kingdom. His shortcomings as a coach and a family man only give him greater credibility as a flawed male and fellow pilgrim. Not a polished speaker, certainly not an intellectual, McCartney represents what many culturally conservative, middle-class, middle-aged American men would like their own lives to include: persistent faithfulness to what is really important, and success despite warts. In this sense, McCartney is both the coach and the ultimate cheerleader, preparing his team and his fans for the only game that really counts.

PK stadium gatherings are pep rallies, but they are also adaptations of two tried-and-true forms of gatherings that characterized conservative Christianity for over a century. PK gatherings are camp meetings for our time. Now nearly extinct in their historically recognizable version, camp meetings were annual gatherings of like-minded believers. Offering opportunities for religious teaching, they were also important sociologically as settings for fellowship, affirmation of group identity, and (within obvious limits) fun and recreation. The religious teaching was attained both cognitively and experientially—both taught and caught. The past was rehearsed, and bridges to the future were put in place. Individual members could be assured by a series of biblically oriented speakers that they had an identity as part of a larger clan. Perhaps most important, symbolic boundaries were reinforced to mark off who “we” are in contrast to who and what we do not wish to be. But all of this took place in a casual, almost festive, and participatory setting that clearly aided the more overtly religious purposes of the camp meeting.

Finally, PK gatherings resemble a men’s retreat on a massive scale. For several decades, one staple of religious education and programming, typically at the parish level, has been the two- or three-day getaway retreat. Retreat participants are often grouped along demographic lines—high schoolers, college aged or early career, young couples, middle agers, or senior citizens. Retreats may be open to both sexes or segregated along single-sex lines. As with camp meetings, retreats fulfill both religious and nonreligious functions that sociologically are intertwined. Religiously, retreats provide an opportunity to escape from the usual church setting in which parish-based religious learning and experience occur—a chance to “get away from it all.” Instead of listening to a minister or priest who has become too familiar, participants are exposed to “experts” from outside the parish. Same-sex retreats have been especially popular, apparently because many American Christians assume that certain topics, concerns, and explanations are more appropriate for learning and discussing within such a setting.

But if Promise Keepers effec- tively blended evangelical religion and bigtime sport, responding effectively to the perceived needs of millions of American men, how can we account for the movement’s precipitous decline? After all, religion and sport continue to maintain their symbiotic relationship in American culture. Moreover, it seems incongruous that such a spectacularly successful movement could fade from public view so rapidly. So what happened?

Before pursuing an answer, two caveats are helpful. One is that any movement or organization inevitably reaches an optimum size or level of growth. Such growth may be rapid and visible early in its history, but it is unrealistic to expect that PK, or any other movement, would expand forever. In that sense, PK is partly a victim of its own early success. Between 1991 and 1996, the number of men attending its stadium rallies increased by nearly 300 times. Had PK grown more slowly, as new movements or organizations usually do, an eventual plateau or even a decline such as it now experiences would seem less dramatic.

A second caveat is that PK is also partly a victim of having achieved a modicum of success in accomplishing one of its primary goals of sensitizing and even mobilizing thousands of American men to take some spiritual and interpersonal responsibility for making important changes in their lives and relationships. A body of anecdotal and survey data exists today that verifies that PK did help many men change as it had implied it would. (How to measure that level of success relative to the high expectations PK helped create, however, is another matter.)

With these caveats in mind, let’s consider eight overlapping factors that may account collectively for the decline of PK.

1. Bill McCartney. McCartney has always been a “hot” personality—good news and bad news. Clearly, not everyone responds positively to him, as evidenced by varying reactions to him prior to and during his PK career. His personal charisma, infectuous enthusiasm, and solid identity with bigtime sport all stood him in good stead during the formative days of PK. Just as any personal and organizational limitations he had as a coach could be overlooked when his teams were winning, so these limitations were more easily discounted during PK’s growth spurt—when PK was “winning.” But eventually McCartney’s feisty defensiveness, stubbornness, and singlemindedness may have shifted from being charming assets to troubling liabilities. Along the way, McCartney’s attempts at transparency and self-disclosure also may have betrayed him. His brutally frank confessions in Sold Out can be read in more than one way and likely were upsetting for some. “In the ugly final analysis,” McCartney wrote, “in most situations I think about myself first: my comfort, my reputation, my rights. My, my, my. … And when I am confronted or criticized, I have a strong propensity to defend myself.” And again: “A man of integrity is someone whose public persona is squarely reconciled to, and in full agreement with, his private reality. Therein lay the problem. Therein had always been the problem—the undeniable contradictions between who I wanted to be and who I was. … Circumstances seemingly out of my control accentuated gaping discrepancies between who I was portrayed to be and who I was in private. By the latter definition, I wasn’t a man of integrity.”

In the final analysis, no one knows how many men may have been turned off from identifying with PK because of some of McCartney’s warts, just as no one knows for sure how many had signed on because of him. Arguably, however, some of the personality flaws that contributed to his wife Lyndi’s widely publicized near-collapse in 1993 also were detected by others who in effect tried McCartney and PK and found them wanting.

2. PK as an organization. As described in the sociological literature on the “routinization of charisma,” an interesting moment occurs for any organization or movement—particularly religious ones—as the charisma of the founding leader is gradually patterned or “routinized” along more structured, organizational lines. The Book of Acts gives one partial account of what successful routinization might look like, but the history of the church is littered with examples of the unrealized or stunted charisma of visionaries who were not able to perpetuate their original vision in subsequent organizational forms. For Bill McCartney and Promise Keepers, it became problematic in the mid-1990s just how Coach Mac’s charisma could be given shape. Indeed, in sheer numerical growth PK was more successful before McCartney signed on full time in early 1995. How adequately McCartney was able to transmit his personal vision, goals, and charisma through existing organizational channels, once he assumed that leadership, including what his role would be vis-a-vis PK president Randy Phillips’s responsibilities, is not clear. Whether to lay off paid staff in 1997 because of growing financial exigencies, whether to require rally participants to continue to pay a registration fee, and how best to allocate the gross revenues in excess of $100 million being generated annually—answers to these and other organizationally related matters emerged practically as difficulties of perpetuating McCartney’s charisma.

3. PK’s programmatic approach. Related to the ambivalence about charisma and structure is a corrolary matter of PK’s “program.” Claussen cites a two-time PK rally attendee who “assumed that the third year’s [content] would be yet the same. Not interested in the potential ritual value of attending annually, he was looking for new substantive content and not getting it.” Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen makes the same point more emphatically: “Like going to a Billy Graham crusade, once you’ve been to one PK rally you’ve pretty much been to all of them.” Here PK was caught in a dilemma. In the stadium rallies, typically the men were asked how many of them had come before, and those who had were lauded. But an obvious scheduling constraint concerned how much PK could attempt to accomplish programmatically in about 28 hours—whether to take the previous attendees to a “more advanced” level as spiritual leaders, or to emphasize incorporating the first-time initiates. Eventually those attending, particularly the returnees, did an informal “cost-benefit” calculation, and some likely began to wonder how much bang they were getting for their buck. One possible solution was to adapt and transfer some of the stadium events’ goals to local churches and to local PK groups. For a time, this appeared to be the direction PK would take, particularly in developing a “curriculum” that could be communicated, thereby transmitting the “Seven Promises” at the local level in conjunction with continuing stadium gatherings. That it has not worked well is suggested by one survey of PK event participants that cited both “content concerns” and “national rather than local focus” as two criticisms they had of PK. So how to provide the optimum content, continuity, and “quality control” necessary has proven to be a major strategic concern that PK has yet to resolve programmatically.

4. PK’s anti-denominational stance. If the two previous explanations for PK’s recent difficulties are related, they are perhaps reinforced by PK’s persisting ambivalence about denominations. Recently I re-read notes I made after attending a 1996 PK rally in Chicago. One of the “problems” I observed was PK’s “avowedly anti-denominational stance.” It perplexed me then, and it still does. The PK “Statement of Faith” begins with, “Promise Keepers is a non-denominational, Christ-centered ministry dedicated to uniting men,” and PK Promise #6 states, “A Promise Keeper is committed to reaching beyond any racial and denominational barriers to demonstrate the power of biblical unity.” McCartney and those closest to him obviously reflect a long-standing suspicion that many Protestant Christians have harbored about the way the American church is patterned, and they are entitled to their view that denomination is a barrier among Christians. But their antipathy has been shortsighted in at least two ways.

First, the denominational structure of American Christianity has long been a sociological and historical reality, and McCartney and PK are not going to transform that reality. Despite the waning of denominational loyalty, especially among young people, many Christians continue to find one primary aspect of their identity as Christians in also being Presbyterian or Lutheran or Baptist. To them, the notion of denomination as a barrier is counterintuitive, if not offensive. So, why not advocate “inter-” or “trans-” denominational ministry? Why raise an issue that causes some men to think twice about signing on?

Second, and related to the programmatic difficulty, has been the awkward reality of simultaneously objecting to denominations while having to cooperate with them. Major denominations, such as the Southern Baptists or Missouri Synod Lutherans, include large numbers of conservative men who do not respond positively to the nondenominational posture of PK. In such cases, groups of men from local parishes attend the stadium events, and upon their return home they likely turn to their local or denominational leadership for some means of achieving continuity. But if the men’s new identities as Promise Keepers threaten their denominational allegiances, then their local leaders have had little reason to accept PK on its terms. Developing a denominationally based alternative to PK becomes a real possibility. That this in fact has occurred was borne out in a Christianity Today article on the prospect of “PK lookalikes.” So in terms of both denominational identity and programming, the PK strategy has been unnecessarily self-limiting. (Ironically, McCartney was already suspect among some fundamentalist Protestants because of his close personal identity with the Vineyard, the charismatically inclined quasi-denomination he has affiliated with and from which he has chosen several in PK leadership.)

5. American demographic realities. The brief allusion to the sociology of denominationalism raises a demographic reality, partly in conjunction with the programmatic limitation noted above. The harsh demographic reality is that while PK identified a niche within American Christianity, that niche was smaller and more limited in its potential for longtime growth and stability than one might have anticipated. Obviously, PK was tremendously successful in identifying quickly a niche among white, culturally conservative, middle-class, early adult to middle aged men. But that is not an infinite population from which to draw ardent supporters.

One survey found that some PK participants felt that the homogeneity of rally participants was a disappointment, an “overwhelming number of middle-aged white men,” as one put it. Indeed, survey results consistently found that about 85 percent of the rally attendees were white, nearly 90 percent were married, with a median age of 38, and half had had absentee fathers when they were growing up. This vast majority of attendees also represented a relatively narrow spectrum of evangelical Protestant backgrounds—Baptist, nondenominational, and Assemblies of God accounted for well over half.

What PK appears to have been successful at, then, was identifying a “choir” of loyal evangelicals to preach to, while not diversifying its constituency as broadly as it should have for growth and stability over the long haul. Stated differently, demographically what PK inadvertently fell into was a version of what missiologists have long called “the homogeneous unit principle.” PK identified a large group of similar evangelical men, tapped into their felt needs, communicated with them on the basis of familiar biblical and cultural symbols, and reinforced their ready desire to be more effective men of God. But homogeneity became a disadvantage when the movement sought to recruit from a broader spectrum to build a demographically diverse base for continued growth.

6. Persisting theological concerns. Almost completely overlooked by PK’s secular observers was the fact that not all evangelical Protestants were responding positively to McCartney and the movement he founded. While the popular press noted the 1.2 million men who turned out in 1996, it had little reason to ask about those who stayed home, some to write critically and passionately about their disdain. If Promise Keepers could be defined theologically as “broadly evangelical,” there were alternative theological “subtraditions” within evangelicalism which at best did not support PK, some actively opposing it.

Three theologically based objections to PK were frequently heard. The first objection was that in its effort to be ecumenical, PK blurred theological distinctions that mattered. While PK did have a five-point statement of faith that many evangelicals could support, for others it did not go far enough. For still others, if its five points were broad enough that Catholics and Mormons could include themselves, that meant evangelical orthodoxy was being threatened. A second objection was to PK’s lack of ecclesiology and how it undermined the church—in both its universal and local manifestations. Ironically, in its anti-denominational zeal, PK appears inadvertently to have elevated itself as a nondenominational, parachurch organization with little theological sense of its role as part of God’s church. Evangelicals of a Reformed bent were particularly less than enamored with Promise Keepers. And third, some Baptists, independents, and fundamentalists were suspicious of PK’s emphasis on the Holy Spirit and acceptance of charismatic gifts. For those “cessationist” evangelicals, McCartney’s close ties to charismatic theology was a hurdle, not a bridge.

7. Evangelicalism as subculture. The subculture of evangelicalism can be a two-edged sword, as several historians and sociologists of the movement have noted. In his recent book, American Evangelicalism, sociologist Christian Smith argues convincingly for a theory of “subcultural identity” to explain why evangelicalism has thrived in the past generation. At the same time, however, “many of the subcultural distinctives which foster evangelicalism’s vitality. … are the very same factors which can foster its ineffectiveness.” So it is with PK—subculturally-situated explanations for its success may also point to weakness.

Smith cites six or seven qualities of evangelicalism, perhaps three of which are shared by PK, that may help explain PK’s apparent demise. First, suggested strategies for change that rely on “personal influence” constrain evangelicals’ “ability to understand how the social world actually works,” and therefore limit their “capacity to formulate appropriate and useful responses and solutions” to those problems. PK clearly operates on the basis of a “personal influence” model, whether addressing issues of gender, race, or other matters. By contrast, notions of collective action or underlying social structures and the importance of effecting change corporately or structurally have not been on the PK agenda.

Second, if evangelicals typically begin with a personal-influence strategy to solving problems, then they proceed relationally—by seeking to exert influence upon those with whom they relate. Smith suggests that this “‘personal benevolence’ framing” is widespread among evangelicals, and it clearly defines PK’s approach, particularly in framing men’s relationships to the women in their lives, as well as whites’ relationships to persons of color. And third, evangelicals “have not persuaded one of their major target audiences—Americans who are not conservative Protestants—that they have solutions. … to America’s social, economic, and political problems.” Part of the reason why PK has not continued to grow is that the movement has not been able to present an agenda that nonevangelicals find persuasive.

8. Cultural concerns and the cultural milieu. Here the salient instance is PK’s emphasis on racial reconciliation. In Sold Out, McCartney notes that of the men who had complaints after the 1996 stadium events, “nearly 40 percent reacted negatively to the reconciliation theme. I personally believe it was a major factor in the significant fall-off in PK’s 1997 attendance—it is simply a hard teaching for many. … Even within Promise Keepers there has been pressure to de-emphasize or soften the racial message. But we hold firm. We press on.” Despite that admirable determination, PK never really “sold” its message of racial reconciliation to either the white majority audience or the minority audience—but for different reasons.

In part this failure fits Christian Smith’s depiction of the larger evangelical failure to grasp the structural dimensions of racism in America. PK’s “solution” was relational and interpersonal—get together in small groups with men of other racial and ethnic identities to know and appreciate them as persons loved by God. (McCartney often takes off his shoes before he speaks to symbolize his interpersonal intentions.) The possibility that such a solution is good as far as it goes, but not adequate to “solve” much at a deeper level, has not been grasped by McCartney or PK.

But another part of the explanation for rejection of the racial reconciliation themes comes from the minority communities. Although PK involved selected leaders from minority communities in planning for and speaking at the stadium events, those leaders did not represent sufficiently broad-based minority constituencies. Part of the problem may have been generational, but part was also more philosophical. When one combines a possible white backlash against the reconciliation theme with PK’s unwillingness to consider racism in its structural dimensions and its inadequate strategy for involving minority communities, it is understandable that race as a cultural concern could have contributed to the sharp decline of PK in the late 1990s.

In a 1997 interview with an Associated Press writer prior to the “Stand in the Gap” gathering, I noted that race and theology were two important concerns that might stem the growth of Promise Keepers. Now that I have thought about the subject further, those two problems remain significant and have been joined by several more. Without sounding too deterministic and while believing firmly that “the spirit moves where it wills,” I am not sure if or how Promise Keepers will be able to reverse five years of stagnation and decline.

Probably the best chance for righting the course lies with reasons #2 and #3 above. PK can learn from the organizational and programmatic difficulties it has experienced and adapt accordingly, clarifying its organizational mission while shifting emphasis away from the repetitive stadium events. The family- and gender-related themes of the movement have caught the attention of many, and those could still be developed more fully than they have been. Expanding PK’s ministries to men within local churches to work either alongside or through compatible denominational structures also seems feasible and advisable. Similarly, some combination of smaller-scale stadium events with complementary local or regional meetings is possible. At the top, there are no signs that the PK leadership will change markedly, but some younger men will likely be in the next corps of leaders, bringing fresh ideas with them.

The past five years have been a time of significant decline and reluctant transition. Promise Keepers will not disappear anytime soon. But it will be quieter, more localized, and more specialized, as it seeks to identify and meet the changing needs of its audience.

James A. Mathisen is professor of sociology at Wheaton College. This essay is condensed from papers presented in several settings, most recently at the annual meeting of acts, the Association of Christians Teaching Sociology, Cleveland, Tennessee, June, 2000.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Matt Rourke / AP

Reflections on Exile and Other Essaysby Edward W. Said Harvard Univ. Press, 2001 617 pp.; $35

Edward Said may be the world’s most famous English professor, and its most famous Palestinian after Yasir Arafat. In the academy, he is best known for his influential critique of “Orientalism,” that is, of those images and judgments by means of which the West has stereotyped and devalued the Arab world over the centuries. Outside the academy, he is best known for his harsh criticism of the state of Israel and, in recent years, of Arafat himself.

Said turned 65 last year, having survived a life-threatening disease of the blood diagnosed nearly a decade ago. It is not surprising, therefore, that his recent publications have taken a retrospective turn, most notably his intriguing memoir of his early life, Out of Place. His latest book, Reflections on Exile—a monumental collection of essays spanning his 35-year career at Columbia University—is another result of his effort to impose thematic unity on his wide-ranging intellectual life.

Not that Said is preparing to go gentle into that good night—far from it. He remains as controversial a figure as ever. Last summer, while visiting Lebanon, he was photographed in the act of tossing a rock at the Israeli border. When the photo appeared in the world press, many were outraged at what they took to be Said’s endorsement of political violence. At Columbia, the administration was pressed to investigate the case. When it responded with a ringing endorsement of Said’s academic freedom, one bemused reporter decided to toss a rock at Columbia University in the name of free speech, only to be warned off by campus police.

Another mark of Said’s intransigence in the face of illness and age is his continuing hostility to religion, at least in its public manifestations. A self-proclaimed secular intellectual, Said loathes all forms of theocratic politics, from Zionism to Islamic fundamentalism to the Christian Right. (Ironically, the Said family home in Jerusalem is now occupied by the International Christian Embassy, a Zionist evangelical organization with 65 employees and an $8 million dollar budget.) More broadly, Said is suspicious of all forms of secularized religion, that is, of all secular entities—races, nations, cultures, texts—that have been invested with quasi-sacred authority.

Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Cultureby William D. Hart Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000 199 pp.; $19.95 paper

Said’s critique of religion is the subject of a recent book by William D. Hart, a self-described “pragmatic religious naturalist.” Hart’s quarrel is not with Said’s secularism, but rather with his assumption that secularism is opposed to religion. In Hart’s view, one can be both secular and religious; one can accept the truth of naturalism while continuing to value religion for pragmatic reasons. What Said should be criticizing, says Hart, is not religion, but those things that cause harm—dogmatism, arbitrary power, lies—in both religious and secular forms.

The interesting thing is that Said, despite his official secularism, has maintained his respect for certain religious traditions, such as that of his father-in-law Emile Cortas, former head of the Lebanese Quaker community. In Culture and Imperialism (1993), for example, Said defends the established Protestant churches of the Near East, now threatened with dissolution as their ecumenical patrons in the West pressure them, against their wishes, to rejoin the Orthodox fold. For Said, such pressure is merely a continuation of Western imperialism under the guise of anti-imperialism; one cannot correct a past injustice, he insists, by pretending that it never happened.

Another example of Said’s respect for particular religious traditions is his public support for the work of liberation theologians like Naim Ateek, former Canon of St. George’s Cathedral in Jerusalem, author of Justice, and Only Justice: A Palestinian Theology of Liberation (Orbis, 1990), and founder of the Sabeel Liberation Theology Center. In 1998, Said was the keynote speaker at the Third International Sabeel Conference in Bethlehem, “The Challenge of Jubilee: What Does God Require?” Confessing himself to be a “lapsed Anglican,” Said added that his friend Naim represents “what so often has been left out of Christianity; namely, Christianity.”

How are we to understand the apparent discrepancy between Said’s intellectual secularism and his emotional attachment to the older Protestant traditions of the Near East? The truth, as we learn from his memoir, is that Said’s family and personal history is inseparable from these traditions; they made him who he is, even as he rebelled against them. If Said thinks of himself as a lifelong exile, perpetually “out of place,” it is not only because he is a Palestinian living in New York, but also because he was raised a Protestant in a Muslim world.

Said’s family tree is a perfect illustration of the small world of Arab Protestantism. Prior to 1948, the Said family belonged to the Anglican community in Jerusalem whose center was St. George’s Cathedral. Edward’s mother was from Nazareth, the daughter of a Baptist minister. Her mother was the daughter of Lebanon’s first native evangelical minister; her cousin married Charles Malik, the famous Lebanese Christian philosopher and statesman, who played an important role in Edward’s intellectual and political development.

Edward was born and baptized in Jerusalem in 1935, but he spent his first sixteen years in Cairo, where his father managed a successful branch of the family business. In Cairo the family’s religious life centered on All Saints’ Cathedral, where Edward was confirmed by an Anglican bishop in 1949. It was from his English catechist, Said admits,

that I learned to love (and have still managed to hold in my memory) both the Book of Common Prayer and the spirited parts of the Gospels, John in particular. … but I always felt the rift between white man and Arab as separating us in the end, maybe because he was in a position of authority and it was his language, not mine.

After his first Communion, Said recalls,

I found myself trying to feel different, but only experienced a feeling of incongruence. My hope that I might gain insight into the nature of things or a better apprehension of the Anglican God proved fanciful. The hot and cloudless Cairo sky,. … the placidly flowing Nile immediately in front of us in its undisturbed immensity as we stood on the cathedral esplanade: all these were as I was, exactly the same.

Having failed to attain the spiritual insight he had hoped for, Edward entered Victoria College (where the head boy was Michel Shalhoub, later known to the world as Omar Sharif). After two rebellious years, however, he was packed off to boarding school at Mount Hermon in Northfield, Massachusetts, founded in 1881 by the evangelist D. L. Moody. It was at Mount Hermon, it seems, that what remained of Edward’s inherited faith was lost for good. Recalling his experience there nearly half a century later, Said’s contempt is undiminished:

There seemed to be unquestioned assent to [Moody’s] incredible importance: it was my first encounter with enthusiastic mass hypnosis by a charlatan, because. … not one teacher or student expressed the slightest doubt that Moody was worthy of our highest admiration. … And so it was with religion—the Sunday service, the Wednesday evening chapel, the Thursday noon sermon—dreadful, pietistic, non-denominational (I disliked that form of vacillation in particular) full of homilies, advice, how-to-live. Ordinary observations were encoded into Moody-esque sturdy Christianity in which words like “service” and “labor” acquired magical (but finally unspecifiable) meaning, to be repeated and intoned as what gave our lives “moral purpose.”

It is apparent, too, that Said felt himself the object of subtle discrimination:

While I was at Mount Hermon I was never appointed a floor officer, a table head, a member of the student council, or valedictorian. … although I had the qualifications. And I never knew why. But I soon discovered that I would have to be on my guard against authority and that I needed to develop some mechanism or drive not to be discouraged by what I took to be efforts to silence or deflect me from being who I was rather than becoming who they wanted me to be. In the process I began a lifelong struggle and attempt to demystify the capriciousness and hypocrisy of a power whose authority depended absolutely on its ideological self-image as a moral agent, acting in good faith and with unimpeachable intentions.

Plainly, the hypocritical power Said hates is not merely that of Mount Hermon, but that of America itself.

As previously mentioned, Charles Malik played an important role in Edward’s formation. Their families vacationed together in Lebanon, where Malik, who taught philosophy at the American University in Beirut, encouraged Edward’s interest in ideas. When Edward was sent away to school in the U.S., Malik, then serving as the Lebanese ambassador in Washington, took his lonely young relative under his wing. From “Uncle Charles,” Said recalls,

I learned the attractions of dogma, of the search for unquestioning truth, of irrefutable authority. From him I also learned about the clash of civilizations, the war between East and West, communism and freedom, Christianity and all the other, lesser religions. … During the forties and early fifties Malik’s comforting moral certainty and granitic power, his inextinguishable faith in the Eternal, gave us hope.

But Edward’s attitude slowly began to change, until Malik came to represent everything he despised most in politics:

He began his public career during the late 1940s as an Arab spokesman for Palestine at the U.N., but concluded it as the anti-Palestinian architect of the Christian alliance with Israel during the Lebanese Civil War. Looking back at Malik’s intellectual and political trajectory, with all that it involved for me as his youthful admirer and companion, relative, and frequenter of the same circles, I see it as the great negative intellectual lesson of my life, an example which for the last three decades I have found myself grappling with, living through, analyzing, over and over and over with regret, mystification, and bottomless disappointment.

Indeed, Said’s cosmopolitan, secular, leftist ideology is the reverse image of Malik’s communal Christian anti-communism.

Thus it would seem that all of Said’s adolescent encounters with the representatives of institutional Christianity—his catechist at All Saints’ in Cairo, the heirs of D. L. Moody at Mount Hermon, the charismatic Charles Malik—left him feeling “out of place.” Yet it was this involuntary feeling of exclusion, he concludes, that enabled him to become a secular intellectual, one who deliberately chooses to be out of place in order to speak the truth to power, preferring the freedom of exile to the bondage of blood, soil, and creed. The paradox is that this, too, is a secularized religious calling—that of the lonely social prophet, crying out against the sins of racism and imperialism. In this sense, Said remains a true Protestant despite himself. May his baptism in St. George’s Cathedral prove efficacious; may his long exile end in a homecoming.

Mark Walhout is professor of English at Seattle Pacific University. With Susan VanZanten Gallagher, he is the editor of Literature and the Renewal of the Public Sphere (St. Martin’s).

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In 1998, after a long search, Princeton University announced the appointment of the Australian philosopher Peter Singer, effective July 1, 1999, to fill a newly established chair as Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the university’s Center for Human Values. To many observers, the appointment recalled the perverse logic of Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal.” The DeCamp Professor of Bioethics is in fact an implacable enemy of life, going further than most of his colleagues in his enthusiasm for our society’s “little murders” (mercy killing, assisted suicide, abortion, infanticide, etc.), and decrying our tendency to regard life as sacred. As for “Human Values,” he has little use for most of the central elements of ethical sensibility and compunction, seeing rights and virtues as mere instruments in the service of maximizing the satisfaction of interests; and indeed he vigorously rejects the notion that there are distinctively human values—a view he dismisses as the pernicious consequence of “speciesism.”

Singer’s appointment provoked a flurry of protest and a number of articles in the popular press, pro and con. Before long, the furor died down with little apparent consequence, though Singer credits the controversy with inspiring his most recent book, Writings on an Ethical Life, in which he has compiled a representative selection of his writings.

Almost a decade before this American controversy, Singer was confronted in Germany by activists for the handicapped, who were appalled by his views that brain-damaged and otherwise disadvantaged individuals might be subpersonal, without rights, and entitled to little protection against being put to death for what others perceive as their interests or others’. The German protesters’ refusal to let him address a conference led to a physical scuffle in which Singer’s glasses were broken, an incident he describes, not without indignation and self-pity, in his essay “Being Silenced in Germany,” first published in The New York Review of Books and reprinted both in the second edition of his notorious book, Practical Ethics, and in Writings on an Ethical Life.

Princeton has, predictably, defended his appointment on the grounds of academic freedom (which doesn’t really reach the issue of whether he is a suitable person to hold such a chair) and, more to the point, by pointing out the quantity and prominence of Singer’s professional work. Certainly, Singer has been both active and productive. A founder of the chief international professional organization in bioethics and also founder of one of the field’s major journals, Singer is a prolific author as well, with more than two dozen books and scores of articles to his credit. In fact, he has enough terrible ideas to fill all these and many more volumes that are sure to come. Here is a sampling:

• Your Alzheimer’s-stricken grandmother isn’t a person, but her healthy cat is. Grandma stopped being a person, for Singer, when she lost her sense of herself as someone who endures through time. She doesn’t think (certain things), so she isn’t, in a kind of parody of Descartes. If the family hasn’t enough money to support both the grandmother and the cat, you can see whom it’s more efficient, rational, and therefore, in Singer’s view, more moral to put down.
• Parents of defective newborns should be granted an indefinite waiting period (perhaps a month or more, constituting what Singer considers the infants’ “pre-personal” stage), during which to decide whether to kill them and try again later in hopes of doing better.
• We ought to do more to distribute usable organs to those likely to benefit most from them, even if that means killing me, once my prospects get quite poor, and transplanting my vital organs to you. Yes, that will shock when we kill some to help others, but as we move in a direction Singer regards as progress, he reminds us that we’ll need to leave behind the doctrine that human life possesses a distinctive sanctity and, with it, the “dead donor” rule requiring us to take transplant organs only from those who have died (without our killing them).
• We should experiment even lethally on brain-damaged people rather than healthy higher animals. Singer is a moral vegetarian, but one who has no strong objection to your eating a dead animal you happen across. His kind of utilitarianism is willing to embrace worse futures (e.g., aborting a healthy fetus for the mother’s convenience) because of its favoring a restrictive notion of existent persons’ “interests,” not those of persons who might come to be (if we didn’t, for example, kill this fetus or use these contraceptives).
• In Singer’s worldview, your not giving away all your money to the world’s neediest till your plight approaches theirs is morally equivalent to your nonchalantly reading your newspaper beside a pool while ignoring the screams of a drowning child. (Indeed, he thinks it morally equivalent to drowning the child yourself.)

And so on. In this context, one might wonder how Singer’s professional colleagues in moral philosophy and medical ethics react to his views. The 1999 volume Singer and His Critics is instructive—and disappointing. Some books are more interesting for what’s not in them than for what is, and this book is notable mainly for what it is not. That is not to take anything away from the group of first-rate British, American, and Australasian philosophers whom editor Dale Jamieson has assembled to discuss Singer’s work, nor from the essays they have written, some of them quite thoughtful, intricate, intelligent, and all of them unfailingly professional. Rather, it is the professionalism of this book that gets it into trouble and makes it the curious work it is.

One philosopher points to difficulties in Singer’s view that moral judgments are more like imperatives than like statements describing the world. Another, one of Singer’s Oxford teachers, defends his own “demi-vegetarianism,” which permits him a little meat-eating here and there—for example, when abstinence might be socially awkward—against Singer’s more stringent regimen. A third takes Singer to task for restricting his extension of moral status only to sentient animals, therein missing virtues the “critic” thinks he has found in the concern “deep ecologists” have for plants and other parts of nature. Others treat more intricate matters, such as the kind of impartiality best suited to utilitarianism or certain difficulties in Singer’s claim that neglecting Third World starvation is morally equivalent to shooting its victims. The book concludes with a long final word from Singer himself, responding to his colleagues’ theoretical critiques.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong when philosophers, writing in a philosophy book, engage chiefly in philosophical criticism. This is as it should be. However, philosophers are also humans, and moral philosophers should be especially sensitive to the inhumanity of the views they discuss, and willing to provide moral criticism of the act of saying certain things as well as criticism of the logic and conclusions of what is said. There are too few charges here stronger than the contention that this or that position of Singer’s is counterintuitive.

Not all of Singer’s fellow philosophers have been so limp in their criticism. Jenny Teichman, for example, has published stinging critiques, as witty as they are devastating. [1] She has pointed out important similarities between some of Singer’s doctrines and those of the Nazis, while also acknowledging differences. But Jamieson includes no essay from Teichman, nor any critique like hers. Instead, in his introductory essay, Jamie-son rages over Teichman’s comparing what Singer calls his German “silencing” to someone’s not getting a letter to the editor printed. (But he was invited! Jamieson insists, as if that were enough to make it clear Singer was the victim there.)

Any suggestion that Singer has gone too far and needs moral reprimand is beyond the pale, in Jamieson’s view. He is in high dudgeon that the editors of an experimentalists’ journal, annoyed by Singer’s support for the animal liberationists who make life hard for them, allow contributors to “abus[e]” Singer by saying, among other things, that he “presents himself as an ethicist and moralist.” Jamieson fumes, “it is clear that no scientific journal would publish such an abusive article on any other subject. Nor would the editors of a scientific journal treat other authors who were under attack so cavalierly.”

The experimentalists’ exasperation with Singer—and Jamieson’s exasperation with them—contrasts illuminatingly and disturbingly with most philosophers’ blase reaction to the Singers in their midst. There have been a few high-profile criticisms of Singer’s views in non-academic media, but some of them were off-target. For example, a minor (and largely wrongheaded) fuss followed the revelation in The New Yorker of Singer’s practical inconsistency in providing a comfortable trust-fund for his daughters and making intercontinental visits to see them (when, say, Oxfam could have done more good with the money), and in his spending money on care for his sickly and irrational mother, though the latter may no longer qualify as a person by his ethical theory.[2] Even the academic writer Peter Berkowitz picks up this theme in the very title of his New Republic article, “Other People’s Mothers,” as if the problem were Singer’s favoritism toward his own family.[3]

George Will complains about utilitarianism’s hedonism, apparently unaware that Singer, with most recent utilitarians, wants to maximize not pleasure but the satisfaction of preferences. He also chastises Singer and other utilitarians for a shallow view of life, which denies it meaning.[4] Again, this is not quite right. Singer’s view is shallow not for denying that life has any meaning, but in its account of that meaning. In How Are We to Live?, Singer maintains that the meaning of a person’s life comes from commitment to any of a wide variety of causes “larger than oneself” and one’s own happiness. However, he recognizes that this is a claim only about human psychology—about what makes life “feel” meaningful to someone—and that he has no real rebuttal to the charge that such an account invests comparable meaning in evil lives dedicated to evil causes and in silly lives committed to silly causes.

The New Yorker‘s quotations from thinkers who insist that humans cannot live up to Singer’s strict principles seem to suggest we ought to read Singer’s own inconsistent behavior as evidence these criticisms are correct. Yet one man’s behavior must be weak evidence for so sweeping a conclusion. After all, thousands of Buddhist and Catholic monks (to mention just these obvious examples) are ample proof that at least some human beings are capable of going well beyond Singer’s demands for self-denial, personal sacrifice, willed hardship, subordination of appetites to a higher cause, and service to strangers.

These complaints miss the real point. The problem is not that Singer doesn’t always live by his principles. Often, that would mean living down to them. Nor is it that doing so would be very difficult for most of us. Nor that he is uninterested in whether they can provide us meaningful lives. The problem is those principles themselves, and their implications.

Consider, for example, Singer’s program of medicalized homicide—of abortion, of assisted and do-it-yourself suicide, of euthanasia, of parents free to kill off their disabled children for their (the parents’) benefit, and so on. In Singer’s scheme, such behavior is not uncharitable; rather, it is compassionate. But the chief way in which medicine reflects charity or love or compassion is in its essence as the practice and art of healing. (This is a point dear to the heart of Leon Kass, Edmund Pellegrino, and a few other beacons in the night of contemporary medical ethics.) That is the mission that historically has defined and characterized medicine. Even in this time of everyday miracles, there will be circumstances in which the physician can no longer heal, and then all she can do is to provide care. That there is nothing she can do to enhance health offers no rationale for trying to destroy it. Yet that is precisely what she does when she aims to put her patient to death or help facilitate the patient’s suicide.

When some, like Teichman, have gone so far as to compare Singer’s views with Nazi practice and rhetoric, he and his defenders have pointed out that Singer’s own (Jewish) grandparents were put to death under the Reich. Yet our bearing that in mind, as we should, ought not silence the legitimate criticisms or the hard questions. It can still be asked, with due sensitivity: Did he learn the important lessons from their tragedy, and from the larger atrocity of which it was a part? Did he learn that every human life is sacred? That no one‘s life is “unworthy of life”? That minorities have rights that may not be sacrificed to the interests of majorities? That the value of a human being cannot be reduced to how much value others place on her? That the neediest and most defenseless people must be protected even against their own despair? That no one is to be put to death simply because of her condition? That living morally is more a matter of protecting the vulnerable from others’ preferences than of maximizing the satisfaction of our (and some animals’) preferences?

No one who knows Singer’s ideas can think he has learned these lessons. His skepticism about the very language of human rights; his insistence that the severely brain-damaged, the unborn, the persistently comatose, and the unborn have no value beyond others’ interest in them; his single-minded emphasis on the preferences the majority of people happen to have (and those he imagines animals to possess); his preference that the least healthy be killed for some supposedly greater good—all these views and more serve to place his ideas at the service of our society’s victimizers rather than its victims.

Indeed, the philosophers’ relative silence about Singer and his views—their curious lack of affect—points to larger problems afflicting the realm of mainstream practical ethics, especially “bio-ethics,” in the United States. Elsewhere in the university we hear calls for a new sensitivity to the marginalized and the voiceless. It is a sad and revealing irony that it is precisely in university bioethics programs, centers, and institutes that we still hear some people derided as “vegetables,” others classed as “marginal humans” or (in Singer’s terminology) as “defective infants.”

Singer objects to those who still complain that in the original (1979) edition of Practical Ethics, he called some severely handicapped children “defective infants.” That’s “unfair,” he says, pointing out that for the 1993 edition “the language has changed to ‘disabled.'” He’s not insensitive; he knows that “fashions change in terms of the language you use.”[5]

Perhaps it is worth recalling that the context of these discussions of handicapped children is Singer’s doubt about whether there is much reason not to kill them. Compare chapter 7, “Taking Life: Euthanasia,” in the first edition of Practical Ethics with chapter 7, “Taking Life: Humans,” in the second. The former includes Singer’s line that killing such infants is not like killing persons: “Very often it is not wrong at all.” The language has changed in the second edition, but one would be hard-pressed to see the latter as evidence of a changed heart, of a reformed and refined moral sensibility. Singer’s own remarks make it plain that any change is purely cosmetic, restricted to terms of expression, not of substance. He refers to lives “not worth living” (and, by implication, not worth saving), and suggests that we should vivisect those in a so-called “persistent vegetative state.”

Some years ago, the then-Surgeon General of the United States coarsened the tone of discourse with her sneer that those disturbed by atrocities against the unborn should give up their “love affair with the fetus.” If medical ethics and, more important, ethical medicine are to survive in this moral sewer, they must consciously swim against the current. Certainly, the public is poorly served when it entrusts policy and decisions over life, death, health, and justice to a clerisy of academic elites trained to evaluate moral positions mainly for the cleverness, rigor, and originality with which they are formulated, oftentimes with scant attention paid to the indecency of their conclusions and the moral poverty of the thought that informs them. This danger is acute today, when medical insurers exert pressure to cut costs and to maximize “efficient” use of resources.

In a decent society, those who speak for ethics would respond to such a context by taking up the cause of the despairing against those whose idea of mercy is to “assist” them in suicide, the cause of the unwanted against those eager to dispatch them before birth (and, like Singer, even a little after), the cause of the severely brain-damaged against those who can see in them only nonpersons fit for unconsented-to experimentation or a speedy death. They would champion the cause of panicked poor women against those who offer them the cruel “choice” between the Republicans’ reduced public assistance and the Democrats’ state-subsidized abortions, the cause of human dignity against those bent on subjecting human life at its earliest, most malleable, and most vulnerable stages to destructive, degrading, and sometimes literally monstrous experiments.

In our society, unfortunately, the academy’s most celebrated ethics specialists are sure to weigh in on the other side, brushing off the lives and needs of the least fortunate and the voiceless with condescending rhetoric about people whose lives are of insufficient “quality,” with rigged and insulting criteria of “personhood,” with an assortment of specious “principles,” with hubristic fantasies of “autonomy,” “human enhancement,” and “self-creation,” and with the rest of the intellectual apparatus that those privileged in health and education employ as they vindicate our victimizing and destroying the worst-off.

Singer was right when he wrote in The New York Times Magazine, almost three decades ago, that “philosophers [were] back on the job.” He meant the job of evaluating the social world in which we live and helping design and defend programs of reform. More recently, in an interview in the Princeton Alumni Weekly, Singer sees himself as fulfilling “the philosopher’s role. … of challenging society to think clearly about some things it might take for granted. … Their role is to get people to question things that they might not otherwise have questioned.” (In contrast, he tells his interviewer, “Religion has a major impact—basically in stopping people from thinking.”)

Singer and other like-minded thinkers have certainly been “on the job.” Can we say the same for the defenders of life? Views which were widely regarded as outrageous when Singer first proposed them three decades ago now command wide assent. This is evident in the recent demand for assisted suicide not just from some of the nation’s most prominent moral theorists but also from many prominent physicians—and in surveys indicating substantial physician support for such assistance in theory and practice. The contamination of contemporary medical ethics has already escaped the seminar room to infect the air of ICUs, maternity wards, and neonatal wards. This is a challenge for philosophers, theologians, lawyers, physicians, and others working in the field to address in their own professional and personal lives. It is also one for the directors of bioethics institutes and think tanks to address, along with their superiors in academic administration, on boards of directors and trustees, and for donors as well.

We all need to avoid self-righteousness. Few of us can claim to have done enough to protect the most innocent and victimized—the brain-damaged, the un- and newly born, the persistently comatose, and the others—from their victimizers. Still, fear of appearing self-righteous can itself be a way of abdicating our common responsibility to face down evil and call it by its name.

J.L.A. Garcia is professor of philosophy at Boston College.

Books discussed in this essay

Practical Ethics, by Peter Singer (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979, 1993).

How Are We to Live? Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest, by Peter Singer (Prometheus, 1995).

Writings on an Ethical Life, by Peter Singer (Ecco Press/HarperCollins, 2000).

Singer and His Critics, edited by Dale Jamieson (Blackwell, 1999).

Footnotes:

1. See for example Jenny Teichman, “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” The New Criterion, October 2000, pp. 64-67.

2. Michael Specter, “The Dangerous Philosopher.” The New Yorker, September 6, 1999, pp. 46-55.

3. Peter Berkowitz, “Other People’s Mothers: The Utilitarian Horrors of Peter Singer.” The New Republic, January 10, 2000, pp. 27-37.

4. George Will, “Life and Death at Princeton.” Newsweek, September 13, 1999, pp. 80, 82.

5. Kathryn Federici Greenwood, “Dangerous Words: An Interview with Peter Singer.” Princeton Alumni Weekly, January 26, 2000, pp. 18-20.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

If Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and the remaining books of the Bible offer theologies that vary according to the different circumstances in and for which these books were written (without any negative prejudice I leave aside the question of an underlying theological unity), if we accept the entirety of the Bible as canonical and therefore its various theologies as all divinely authoritative, and if it is not enough for us to know these theologies, if we must also apply them variously to circumstances like those for which they were originally tailored, then we might well ask ourselves whether we North American evangelicals are fast falling, or have already fallen, into circumstances that call for a reinstatement of John’s sectarianism with its masterly, totalizing, but divisive Christology of the Word that speaks truth so incisively that as the Word, Jesus is the truth over against the father of lies, Satan, who has deceived all unbelievers. Extreme? Yes, but there are times for extremes.

Habitually, those who recognize the sectarianism of John, in particular the narrowing down of the love commandment, minimize as much as possible that narrowing (if they do not reject it altogether) and then expatiate on its dangers. Those dangers include an isolation from the world that goes beyond separation, makes impossible an effective Christian witness to the world, and hardens the world’s opposition to the gospel and oppression of the church. Other dangers often cited are a tendency to let the division of believers from unbelievers degenerate into divisiveness among believers themselves, and a repression of non-Christians in the event that sectarians gain political power: “Christian universalism linked to christological exclusivism, when given the power to enforce its will, can result (and sometimes has resulted) in coercion or repression of all that refuses Christianization.”[1] Even those who see in the narrowing some positive values—mutual encouragement, nonassimilation to worldly culture, and the like—overhastily stress the dangers, or hastily overstress them, rather than perceiving in general an equality of values and dangers, variations depending on particular circumstances. David Rensberger, for example, describes John’s sectarianism as “the defiance of a sect that has suffered exclusion itself and now hurls exclusion back in the teeth of its oppressors,” yet adds, “Whether this can bear theological fruit today. … remains problematic.”[2] Richard B. Hays comes close to perceiving an equality of values and dangers, but even he considers some amelioration necessary: “exhortations for love within the community sound less exclusionary and more like an urgent appeal for unity within an oppressed minority community.”[3]

But despite its dangers and because of its values, do our circumstances call for Johannine sectarianism? On the one hand, the sociological research of Christian Smith has led him to trace the thriving of North American evangelicalism to a sense of embattlement with the world:

American evangelicalism. … is strong not because it is shielded against, but because it is—or at least perceives itself to be—embattled with forces that seem to oppose or threaten it. Indeed, evangelicalism. … thrives on distinction, engagement, tension, conflict, and threat. Without these, evangelicalism would lose its identity and purpose and grow languid and aimless [italics original].[4]

On the other hand, the sense of embattlement with the world is rapidly evaporating among many evangelicals, especially evangelical elites, among them those who belong to “the knowledge industry.” In the last half century they have enjoyed increasing success in the world of biblical and theological scholarship. They reacted against the separatism of their fundamentalist forebears, who precisely in their separation from the world knew they had from God a sure word for the world. Penetration replaced separation. Evangelical biblical and theological scholars began holding their meetings in conjunction with those of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature, both of these societies populated with heretics, non-Christians of other religious persuasions, agnostics, and outright atheists as well as with true Christian believers. And in droves evangelicals (including me) started joining these societies and participating in their activities.

Would John approve? I do not know, and maybe it does not matter whether he would; but noncanonically he is said to have fled from a public bath on perceiving that the heretic Cerinthus was there.[5] At the same time there is cause to celebrate that the expanding presence of evangelicals in the mainstream academy and the improved quality of their scholarship have made it increasingly inexcusable and intellectually unrespectable to ignore their research and argumentation, which are now exerting much more influence than before outside the confines of evangelicalism. So I do not condemn penetration by evangelicals any more than I condemn separation by fundamentalists. Separation was necessary to save the gospel against the inroads of modernism, I think; and penetration has been necessary to save the gospel from irrelevance and a seclusion that threatened to keep it from being heard in the world at large.[6]

But what about now? What present circumstances should we evangelicals take into account? With nonevangelicals’ increasing recognition of our contributions to biblical and theological scholarship and with the consequent whetting of our appetite for academic, political, and broadly cultural power and influence are coming the dangers of accommodation, of dulling the sharp edges of the gospel, of blurring the distinction between believers and the world, of softening—or not issuing at all—the warning that God’s wrath abides on unbelievers (John 3:36), in short, of only whispering the Word instead of shouting him, speaking him boldly, as the Word himself did.

Besides these dangers, we have as a matter of fact— especially among liberally educated, aesthetically attuned evangelicals—a shift of emphasis from preaching to liturgy and sacrament.[7] As noted by sociologists of religion, this shift marks antisectarianism inasmuch as especially among conversionist sects “there is a grave distrust of ritual and rite,”[8] and inasmuch as “in the church [as opposed to a sect]. … the spirit is remote and can be brought nearer only by formalized means.”[9] So Robert Webber is correct to link his advocacy of ritual and rite with a rejection of sectarianism.[10]

But the stress of John the sectarian on verbal communication by Jesus the Word leads him to depress sacrament and liturgy. The baptism of Jesus goes unmentioned. His baptism of others is introduced only to provide an occasion for John the Baptist’s testimony to Jesus’ superiority as the one who “speaks the words of God” (3:22-36, esp. 34) and to be qualified as a baptizing performed not by Jesus himself but only through the agency of his disciples (4:1-2). Nor does John’s version of the Great Commission (20:21) contain a command to carry on the practice of baptism (contrast Matt. 28:19 and the emphasis in Acts on baptism in carrying out the Great Commission). The water in 3:5 represents the Holy Spirit as the agent of birth from above (cf. 7:37-39, where drinking the water that is explicitly identified with the Spirit rules out baptismal water). The wine that Jesus produced at the wedding in Cana (2:1-11) replaces the wine of the Eucharist and represents the superiority over Judaism, represented in turn by the water of Jewish purification, of the new order brought by Jesus (cf. Mark 2:22) and bought at the cost of the blood that flowed from his pierced side (John 19:34). And despite John’s devotion of several chapters to the Last Supper, he omits the institution of the Lord’s Supper and transmutes the words of institution into metaphors for the life- and Spirit-giving benefit of believing Jesus’ words (6:52-65).

Accompanying the un- if not anti-Johannine shift to sacramentalism and liturgy among a growing number of evangelicals are a curtailment of the doctrine of eternal punishment; a migration from exclusivism to inclusivism; an edging toward universalism, so that it has become acceptable in evangelical ranks to express the hope—not always a wistful hope, either, but sometimes a half-expectant one—for universal salvation; a cooling of missionary ardor; and a growth of worldliness.

The “seeker sensitivity” of evangelicals—their practice of suiting the gospel to the felt needs of people, primarily the bourgeoisie—contributes to their numerical success but can easily sow the seeds of worldliness (broadly conceived).[11] How so? Well, in a society such as ours where people do not feel particularly guilty before God (though in fact they are), seeker-sensitivity—if consistently carried through—will softpedal the preaching of salvation from sin, for such preaching would not meet a felt need of people. As a result, the gospel message of saving, sanctifying grace reduces to a gospel massage of physical, psychological, and social well-being that allows worldliness to flourish. Since evangelicals fall into the category of what Bryan R. Wilson has called “a conversionist sect,” i.e., one that vigorously seeks converts,[12] the Niebuhrian development from antiworldly sect to worldly church may apply especially to evangelicals; for it is only “sects less interested in recruitment or better insulated from secular forces [that] tend to retain sectarian characteristics more or less indefinitely.”[13]

The question before us is whether we can or will cut short what sociologists describe as the likely if not inevitable evolution of a successful sect into an institution through accommodation to the surrounding culture, and whether John’s Christology of Jesus as the Word who entered the world of unbelievers to separate the elect, who are not of that world, from it and thus save them from the wrath of God that abides on unbelievers—whether that Christology is just the sort of message which, if recaptured, might halt our journey from vibrant sectarianism to torpid institutionalism. So I ask, are we overdosing on the this-worldly ethical, social, and psychological benefits of the gospel? Is it time for some Johannine counterbalancing that puts emphasis on other-worldliness, on the final fate of human beings, and on the authoritative Word from above more than on the merely suggestive words of human counsel that most preachers minister these days? With John’s relatively apsychological, asocial, anethical stress on the Word, is it time for evangelical elites to remind themselves of the preeminence of evangelism over private therapy, political activism, and moralistic pronouncements in the public sphere?[14] Is it time for John’s anti- or at least un-sacramentalism to halt our drift into the sacramentalism that characterizes institutional churches and into the liturgies that frame such sacramentalism?

I have been asked, Why turn for correction to a fundamentalistic sectarianism that entails a Johannine separation from the world? Why not call North American evangelicals to break out of their provincialism and attend to voices from the church in the Two-Thirds World and from nonwhite, nonmiddleclass churches in their own backyard? Well and good, but we would probably learn from those sources precisely what John writes about, a sectarian separation from the world accompanied by a powerfully proclaimed Word from above. Or, as I have also been asked, why not call North American evangelicals to do their biblical and theological scholarship without embarrassment in the context of a worshiping community (cf. John 4:21-24), so that their scholarly agenda does not react to the interests of the academy so much as it responds to the needs of the church? Again well and good, but such a doxological and ecclesial turn strikes me as precisely sectarian rather than an alternative to sectarianism.

The Bible offers more than one theology of church and world—Luke-Acts represents almost the polar

opposite of John’s, for example (as a sidelight, contrast the typically institutional emphasis on sacraments in Luke-Acts with the typically sectarian deemphasis of sacraments in John, not to detail Lukan cosmopolitanism)—and circumstances differ from place to place as well as from time to time. Judgments will differ accordingly, and for other reasons, too. But the question is a serious one: Do our present circumstances call for John’s Word-Christology, for North American evangelicalism to take a sectarian turn, a return mutatis mutandis, to the fundamentalism of The Fundamentals and their authors at the very start of the twentieth century? Like that early fundamentalism and unlike the fundamentalism which evolved in the 1920s through the ’40s,[15] this new old fundamentalism, comparable in its neopaleoism to the new old commandment in 1 John 2:7-11; 3:11, would be culturally engaged with the world enough to be critical rather than so culturally secluded as to be mute, morally separate from the world but not spatially cloistered from it, and unashamedly expressive of historic Christian essentials but not quarrelsome over nonessentials. Such a renewed fundamentalism would take direction not only from fundamentalism at the very start of the twentieth century but also, and more importantly, from the paleofundamentalism of John the sectarian, whose Christology of the Word has Jesus come into the world (there is the engagement with it), sanctify himself (there is the separation from it), and exegete God (there is the message to it).

A Postscript on Some Theological Desiderata

As Christians should we bring to bear the totality of the Bible in our every situation so as to avoid imbalances and extremes? Or should we choose parts of the Bible that seem particularly relevant to a current situation and with a situational change shift to other parts so as to avoid the homogenizing of distinctive messages and a consequent loss of special applicability? Since the Bible is a collection of books written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit at different times and places by different authors in and for different circumstances, I have adopted here the situation-sensitive alternative. But these alternatives deserve full discussion.

Doubtless some will argue for both/and rather than either/or. Others will propose further possibilities. But the basic questions remain: Does the Bible present theological data to be organized neatly, or a range of canonical options to be kept discrete? To what extent should the theological enterprise be systematic? To what extent selective? Ought systematic theology to dominate biblical theology, or vice versa? Or ought they form a partnership of equals, or go their separate ways? What weight should be assigned to theological common ground in the Bible? What weight to theological peculiarities? How important to good theologizing is a perceptive exegesis of the world, or worlds, in which we live as well as a perceptive exegesis of the Bible? And in practice, if not expressly, what answers to these questions has recent evangelical theology given?

Robert H. Gundry is scholar-in-residence at Westmont College. Among his books are commentaries on Matthew and Mark. This essay is excerpted from his book Jesus the Word According to John the Sectarian: A Paleofundamentalist Manifesto for Contemporary Evangelicalism, Especially Its Elites, in North America, published in September by Eerdmans.

Footnotes:

1. John M. G. Barclay, “Universalism and Particularism: Twin Components of Both Judaism and Early Christianity,” in A Vision for the Church: Studies in Early Christian Ecclesiology in Honour of J. P. M. Sweet, edited by Markus Bockmuehl and Michael B. Thompson (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), p. 222.

2. David Rensberger, “Sectarianism and Theological Interpretation in John,” p. 146 in “What Is John?” Vol. 2, Literary and Social Readings of the Fourth Gospel, edited by Fernando F. Segovia (Society of Biblical Literature Symposium Series 7/Scholars Press, 1998); see also Rensberger’s Johannine Faith and Liberating Community (Westminster, 1988), pp. 135-54, where it is said that John’s sectarianism is not wholly negative but has some positive value.

3. Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics (HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), pp. 145-47.

4. Christian Smith, with Michael Emerson, Sally Gallagher, Paul Kennedy, and David Sikkink, American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 89. For Smith’s whole discussion of this point, see pp. 84-153.

5. Irenaeus, Adv. haer. 3.3.4.

6. See the classic discussion in H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (Harper & Brothers, 1951). I am not unaware of the view that fundamentalism itself was a kind of modernism, particularly in its sharing historicism, and therefore evidentialism, with modernism (see, e.g., Thomas C. Oden, After Modernity. … What? [Zondervan, 1990], pp. 66-69). But here I am using the vocabulary of fundamentalists, who called modernists those who denied historic tenets of the Christian faith.

7. See especially Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World (Baker, 1999), pp. 27, 94-96, 100-101, 107-15; cf. Nathan O. Hatch and Michael S. Hamilton, “Can Evangelicalism Survive Its Success?” Christianity Today, October 5, 1992, pp. 24-25. Webber argues for liturgy and sacrament, ritual and rite—which he calls “symbolic communication” with “pomp and ceremony”—on the ground that postmoderns are audiovisually oriented rather than verbally oriented or print-oriented. But the audio may feature the verbal, indeed usually does feature it; and one wonders how Webber would explain the proliferation of large, thriving bookstores that sell a lot more than picturebooks. I should add that abetting the shift to liturgy and sacrament is a sharp decline in the biblical, theological, and rhetorical quality of most preaching.

8. Donald E. Miller, “Sectarianism and Secularization: The Work of Bryan Wilson,” Religious Studies Review, Vol. 5 (1979), p. 165.

9. Peter L. Berger, “The Sociological Study of Sectarianism,” Social Research, Vol. 21 (1954), p. 480.

10. Webber, Ancient-Future Faith, p. 73. To the extent that Webber rejects a sectarian fragmentation of the church, I agree; but to the extent that he rejects a sectarian separation from the world, I disagree. John presses for the latter kind of separation, but stresses the unity of the church (10:16; 11:52; 17:11, 21-23) and regards heretics as split-offs who never did truly belong to apostolic Christianity (6:60-71; cf. 1 John 2:18-19).

11. By worldliness I mean not merely the disregard of fundamentalist taboos against smoking, drinking, dancing, movie-going, gambling and the like, but more expansively such matters as materialism, pleasure-seeking, indiscriminate enjoyment of salacious and violent entertainment, immodesty of dress, voyeurism, sexual laxity, and divorce (cf. “the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of livelihood” in 1 John 2:16).

12. Bryan R. Wilson, “A Typology of Sects,” in Sociology of Religion: Selected Readings, edited by Roland Robertson (Penguin, 1969), pp. 364-65; see also Wilson’s “An Analysis of Sect Development,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 24 (1959), pp. 5-6.

13. Benton Johnson, “On Church and Sect,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 28 (1963), p. 543. I, not Johnson, make the application to evangelicals; cf. Bryan R. Wilson, “Analysis of Sect Development,” pp. 11, 14, though he does wrong to contrast adventism—an emphasis on Jesus’ return in the case of Christianity—with evangelism, for the two have gone together in evangelicalism despite a recent decline of adventism among evangelical elites.

14. I say “relatively” in acknowledgment of some ethical, social, and psychological implications in John’s references to sins and evil deeds (but he never provides a list, as is often done elsewhere in the New Testament), to loving one another (but only in the Christian community, as noted above), and to an untroubled heart (but only in reference to Jesus’ departure from and return to the disciples). Ethics may deal as much with the formation of character as with rules of behavior, but John does not relate even the new birth from above to character-formation.

15. But see some words of appreciation for mid-twentieth-century fundamentalism by Richard J. Mouw, The Smell of Sawdust: What Evangelicals Can Learn from Their Fundamentalist Heritage (Zondervan, 2000).

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Ending a three-year hiatus with a much-hyped new sci-fi film, Steven Spielberg is back, and better still, he is back in familiar territory. After years of “stretching” to heavy-duty subject matter—the Holocaust, slave ships, and Normandy Beach—seemingly to prove he has grown up after all, Spielberg is telling another “lost boy” story.

Given the high profile of his recent films, it’s easy to forget that Spielberg’s fame and considerable fortune were built in the first instance on tales of boys in danger, boys threatened with the loss of innocence, family, and joy. So enamored of the notion of lost boyhood was Spielberg that in very successful mid-career he actually went so far as to make Hook, a frenetic, overstuffed sprawl about Peter Pan that starred, appropriately, the eternal pubescent cut up Robin Williams. But that misfire came after a string of momentous, inventive films, most of them completed before he turned forty: Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (featuring men who would like to be kids again), E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and the much neglected Empire of the Sun—not to mention the three ultimate boy-adventure movies featuring the exploits of archaeologist Indiana Jones.

With A.I., we run again into a “young” Spielberg, though now in his mid-50s. While it is good to see that he still has his youth about him, it is also clear from A.I. that the young fellow is now a good deal wiser, braver, and darker. And Spielberg knows it, freely admitting that he would not have made such a film 20 years ago. Even in comparison to Schindler’s List (1993), Amistad (1997), and Saving Private Ryan (1998), where he set out to grapple with darkness, A.I. is grim. Gone, or at least greatly modulated, is Spielberg’s bent for what one prominent critic recently called “ruthless sentimentality.”

Special effects don’t overwhelm the story; more important, the cinematography is muted, Spielberg containing his penchant for the visual pyrotechnics that make so many of his climactic scenes look like the Transfiguration of Jesus. Tempered, too, is his haste to deflect uncomfortable emotion with a joke, as was his wont in his early days; he’s now far more willing to let characters’ fear or sorrow have their way with viewers. In A.I., in fact, there is remarkably little humor of any kind, and that little is mostly darkly satiric. Finally, and most notably, A.I. simply lacks heroes and a clearly happy ending.

In this imagined future, the human prospect has turned bleak, global warming having melted the ice caps, submerged coastal cities, and caused catastrophic climate change worldwide. What remains of America now prospers because of strict population control and the use of very smart robots. In most ways these “mechas” (future slang derived from mechanical) are indistinguishable from people, setting about their narrowly designated tasks with pleasantness and efficiency, whether as nurse, nanny, or gigolo. They don’t fret about their own fate—whether they “live” or expire—nor about the fortunes of others. In short, what they lack is “feelings,” a big part of that mysterious innerness that makes people people.

The rub comes when the leader of Cybertronics, Inc., Dr. Hobby (William Hurt), decides to create a mecha that can feel and love. Since there’s a large potential market among childless couples, he starts with a child-bot. Twenty months later, the prototype, named David (Haley Joel Osment), is ready for testing.

He’s placed with an upscale family, the Swintons, whose ten-year-old son, Martin (Jake Thomas), has died, sort of. For five years, Martin has lain cryogenically preserved, waiting for a cure. His mother, Monica (Frances O’Connor), hopes still, going daily to read to her frozen son, until one day husband Henry (Sam Robards) shows up with David in tow.

In time, Monica’s initial aversion to the child-bot erodes, and eventually she decides to “imprint” the boy’s circuitry: thus she becomes definitively his “mom-my,” for whom he lives and, after a fashion, breathes. For his part, David soon adapts to the modes and mores of people.

All goes well until doctors cure Martin, who proves both jealous and nasty. Subsequent misadventures prompt the parents to “return” David, even though Cybertronics will destroy him (once imprinted, he cannot transfer his affections). But at the last moment, the tearful Monica, rather than consigning her surrogate son to certain destruction, instead abandons him in the woods.

Sorrowful and alone, he encounters a host of fellow fugitives who congregate at a “mecha dump” where they scrounge for spare body parts. And so begins David’s long quest to find his mother again, the one who is supposed to care for him as much as he cares for her. The “child” can’t help caring, wired as he is for this bond, despite the fickleness of her affections.

Here the question of who’s truly “human,” the robot or the mom, gets dicey and stays that way. The predicament and the stakes are vintage Spielberg; the dark conclusions come from Hawthorne or, in movie terms, Stanley Kubrick, the late writer-director of 2001, A Clockwork Orange, and other masterpieces, with whom Spielberg collaborated on A.I.

At their best, Spielberg’s dramas display the deepest human longings for love—meaning trust, care, and delight—for and from others and God, all that we pour into the notion of “home,” both personal and cosmic. These longings animate Close Encounters of the Third Kind, still an impressive film, and E.T., replete with the “phone home” mantra and two abandoned creatures.

This is the immemorial turf of fairy tales, everyone’s initiation into the terrors and dreams of humankind, at least until Disney began to take possession of the genre. In A.I., the master stories are Hansel and Gretel, The Wizard of Oz, and, at the very center, the tale of Pinocchio, the puppet who wants to be a real boy so everyone will love him. Like it or not, and sophisticates of various sorts usually don’t, this is the stuff of which we are made, deep down and forever, and it is this very craving for mutuality or “at-homeness” that is the image of God “imprinted” within the human psyche. When done well, as Spielberg usually manages, this drama of psyche and soul recalls everyone’s deep thirst to find the haven of home, the ever-elusive realm of complete and unconditional love.

David’s hope is the promise of the Blue Fairy, remembered from bedtime readings of Pinocchio. The child-bot takes this fairy-tale dream dead literally: he sets out to find the magical being who will make him a real boy, so he can win back his mother. And here Spielberg, who wrote A.I. as well as directing it, stumbles.

No, the conclusions of his earlier films were never quite as happy as critics have portrayed them. In Close Encounters, Roy Neary has to leave this world to maybe find happiness with those not-so-nice aliens, and in E.T. young Elliott is left behind, alone and still fatherless, after the ascension of ET. But the close of A.I. is less hopeful still—a day with mommy, and then what, an “everlasting moment,” benign sleep, or a fall (or rise) into humanness?

What leaps out most clearly from this ambiguous ending is Spielberg’s somber comment on the potent forces within that seek love and, amid all that, what humankind—selfish, deceitful, and mean—does to mess it all up. In A.I. those strange creatures that follow humankind, whoever they are, do better, although probably not enough—as if anyone could.

A.I. is striking, enchanting, moving, haunting, challenging, and vexing, a rueful meditation on what’s best and worst about being human and the huge bother of expecting very much out of life. That’s a grim homily, however lovingly dreamed and etched it is in A.I. Nonetheless, Spielberg’s accomplishment recalls what movies can do, and what Hollywood rarely even so much as thinks about attempting anymore, enamored as it is of rank profit. So it is nice to have young Steve back to remind everyone of the splendor of film—and to marvel at the wants and ways of heart of the human creature.

Roy M. Anker is professor of English at Calvin College and co-editor of Perspectives.

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Editor’s Note: Shrekked

Of all the pieces we’ve published this year, none has provoked as passionate a response as Eric Metaxas’s review of Shrek, the summer hit that is now second only to The Lion King in the all-time box-office rankings for animated features [“Shrek: Happily Ever Ogre,” July/August 2001]. CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S online Film Forum has been a particularly lively site, with responses to Metaxas from a host of readers, including film reviewer Peter Chattaway, who has frequently appeared in the pages of BOOKS & CULTURE. Leaving aside the specifics of agreement or disagreement, what’s striking is not only the sheer volume of response-evidently an astonishing number of our readers saw Shrek almost as soon as it was released-but also the degree of engagement. Movies, for better or worse, are the lingua franca of our culture, or as close to a common language as we come. Here are three letters selected from the many we have received.

Eric Metaxas’s preachy, indignant review of Shrek forgets that the rose-colorization of fairy tales is largely an invention of the twentieth century, and that in his quest to create palatable entertainment for large audiences Disney had to strip folklore of much of its moral and cultural authenticity. In the fairy tales of Grimm and countless others, moral frailty and bad taste figure just as prominently as Prince Charming and Snow White. Crude humanity can be the difference between an instructional tale that has relevance to the reader/viewer and one that is mere entertainment. Shrek is not high art, and as Metaxas rightly points out, it goes over the top at points. But the moral and aesthetic universe it operates in is far more interesting than that of the old Disney movies.

Italo Calvino, a great student of the genre, wrote: “Those who know how rare it is in popular (and nonpopular) poetry to fashion a dream without resorting to escapism will appreciate these instances of a self-awareness that does not deny the invention of a destiny, or the force of reality which bursts forth into fantasy. Folklore could teach us no better lesson, poetic or moral.”

David Noll New York, N.Y.

I read Eric Metaxas’s review of Shrek with interest and appreciation. His argument that we should resist all such forms of what I have called metaphor-morphing was cogent and well-taken. But at the same time, his bio noted (and apparently without embarrassment) that he works for the very worst offenders in the world of metaphor-morphing, which is to say, the makers of VeggieTales. And then, in the same issue, another article [Otto Selles, “What’s Cooking When Martha Stewart Meets the VeggieTales?”] undertakes to praise VeggieTales, despite a minor quibble here and there.

Let me see if I have your argument down. We should take great care not to twist or distort our ancient images of ogres, princesses, and the like, so as not to mess with our kids’ heads. Scriptural metaphor and image, however, is fair game, so long as we are trying to impart “biblical values.” Notice the implicit assumption that a scriptural, literate, aesthetic sense is not a biblical value to be imparted to children. King David as a broccoli, or whatever it is they have him as, changes nothing essential about the story-if you are an evangelical.

This issue shows, despite your name, that cultural soul and modern evangelicalism still go together like whiskey and ice cream.

Douglas Wilson Christ Church, Moscow, Idaho

How do I hate this review? Let me count the ways. Shrek did not “dwell in the swamp happily alone,” he struggled with bitterness and depression because of the xenophobic persecution forced on him by the “normal” world. Shrek is not “grotesque”; he’s just a big, strong, homely guy with a sense of humor and loyalty-in other words, a catch for any woman with the maturity to overlook the “defect” of his failure to somehow endow himself with Chippendale good looks. And thank goodness Eddie Murphy is the donkey; for my money, he is light years funnier than Ms. Goldberg.

Shrek does not “subvert the glorious and mysterious and ennobling idea of fairy tales themselves.” Many fairy tales are frightening, violent, and depressing, and often encourage children to long for unrealistic and unwholesome “magical” solutions to their problems. E.M. says Shrek is “tiresome in its unalleviated puncturing.” Tiresome to whom? My husband (age 50) laughed his head off, our 16- and 14-year-old sons roared, and our nine-year-old daughter told her little friends “it’s really funny.” Of course I, the Mom (age 47), loved it also. And evidently so do millions of Americans. (Don’t get me wrong, millions of Americans can be blind as bats, as shown by ’92 and ’96.)

Nevertheless, Metaxas claims that Shrek is “disturbingly inappropriate for children.” The normal adult humor in Shrek is typical of all the best cartoons through the last four decades. Eric, are you one of those blighted souls who think there is nothing funny about sex? Like the political/social commentary and humor of, say, Rocky and Bullwinkle (more of our faves), the psychological/sexual commentary and humor of Shrek flow over the heads of the children in the audience. Also, Robin Hood is not over-sexed, he is just cheerful and mildly randy. His sex drive appears to be markedly less than my own husband’s, but excuse me-I see that I have strayed unwittingly on to that offensive topic: cheerful sexuality appreciation.

And then there is Mr. Metaxas’s “worst example,” his “most ugly moment-when the robin explodes while reaching for the high note, and Fiona, instead of trying to sit on the eggs herself, thoughtfully fries them up for Shrek and the donkey in an attempt to atone for her former selfish ways.” God forgive us! My own family had eggs this morning. What are you, E.M., a vegan?

But let’s settle down to the serious and tragic paucity of Mr. Metaxas’s position: Fiona and Shrek are not “ugly” by any but the shallowest standards of Disney and Playboy. Fiona and Shrek as ogres are merely homely in a cute sort of way, a condition that God in his wisdom has chosen to bestow liberally upon the human family since our beginning. And how heartbreaking that Mr. Metaxas can actually claim in all seriousness that “neither she [Fiona] nor Shrek is transformed.” Both Shrek (formerly a gloomy, lonely, self-hater) and Fiona (formerly a bratty, self-centered, dominatrix) are sweetly and beautifully transformed by humility and love. ‘Tis not the gospel truth we find in fairy tales, O Eric Metaxas. The gospel truth is that our blessed savior Jesus Christ died once for all, and even the “grotesque” and “ogres” are beautiful and beloved in his sight and their sins are covered by his precious blood if they will but call on his name. Magical (and easy) solutions plus riches (another fairy tale staple) are not the answer to life’s ills. It is the love of God and death to self (e.g., Fiona turning her back on fantastic beauty for the love of a good man) that leads to life.

Cheri Davis Camilla, Georgia

Revolutionary Moravians

Thanks for the very interesting special section on the Revolution [July/August 2001]; I was particularly interested to read about the retaliation my Moravian forebears suffered in Pennsylvania for their less than enthusiastic support of the war [Mark Noll, “Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times”]. In thinking of our history, we Moravians typically focus more on our relations with the Native Americans than the powers of the time.

I would like to point out, though, that some readers may be misled by A.C. Roeber’s comment [“Colonial Modern”] that characterizes Moravians as giving “a very good impression that they were a church.” In fact, as Roeber surely knows, the British Crown (and other governments) accredited them as such for the simple reason that the Moravians were a separate denomination. Despite chief restorer Count Zinzendorf’s best efforts to make them part of the Lutheran church (in which he remained a minister to his dying day) or, later, an ecumenical parachurch organization, the renewed Unitas Fratrum quickly became just that: the renewal of the independent church of Jan Hus’s followers and Comenius. This identity tension between being truly new and truly old was likely the root cause of problems suffered both in Colonial days and in the young republic.

Karl-Dieter Crisman Chicago, Illinois