Dan Barnett teaches philosophy at California State University, Chico.

James D. Bratt is chair of the Department of History at Calvin College. He is the author of “Dutch Calvinism: A History of a Conservative Subculture.”

Ethan Casey is a Bangkok-based correspondent for “The Globe and Mail” of Toronto and the “South China Morning Post” of Hong Kong. His book “Burning Paradise: Kashmir and the Tragedy of the Subcontinent” is forthcoming from HarperCollins India. John C. Green is professor of political science at the University of Akron.

Christopher A. Hall teaches biblical and theological studies at Eastern College.

William Hasker is professor of philosophy at Huntington College. He is the author of “God, Time, and Knowledge.”

Alan Jacobs is associate professor of English at Wheaton College (Ill.). He has just completed a book entitled “What Became of Wystan: Change and Continuity in Auden’s Poetry.”

Phillip Johnson, professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of “Darwin on Trial.” His most recent book is “Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law, and Education.”

Lyman A. Kellstedt is professor of political science at Wheaton College (Ill.). With his colleagues John Green (see above), James Guth, and Corwin Smidt, he studies the nexus of American religion and politics.

Helen Lee is an assistant editor at “Christianity Today.”

David Livingstone is a professor in the school of geosciences at the Queen’s University of Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is the author of “Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter Between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought.”

Ric Machuga is professor of philosophy at Butte College.

LaVonne Neff is a writer, reviewer, and editor based near Chicago.

Mark Noll is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College (Ill.). His most recent book is “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.”

Roger Olson is professor of theology at Bethel College (Minn.) and editor of “Christian Scholar’s Review.” With Stanley J. Grenz, he is the author of “Twentieth-Century Theology: God and the World in a Transitional Age.”

Dick Staub is the host of The Dick Staub Show, heard on the Salem Radio Network.

Stefan Ulstein is a film critic and freelance journalist based in Bellevue, Washington. His book “Growing Up Fundamentalist: Journeys in Legalism and Grace” has just been published.

Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen is professor of psychology and resident scholar at the Center for Christian Women in Leadership at Eastern College. She is the author of “Gender and Grace: Love, Work, and Parenting in the Modern World.”

Philip Yancey is a writer and editor at large for “Christianity Today.” His most recent books are “The Jesus I Never Knew” and “Finding God in Unexpected Places.”

Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

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A bank has swallowed up the bank that swallowed up my bank.

It condescends to smaller banks that it will now outrank.

My checkbook must be changed again, I fear.

The branch I was beginning to hold dear

Because it’s now familiar, and so near,

Will be well merged, and quickly disappear.

And so again I hardly know which c.e.o. to thank.

A bank has swallowed up the bank that swallowed up my bank.

–Calvin Trillin

Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

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“Science and Religion in the Era of William James, Volume 1: The Eclipse of Certainty, 1820-1880.” Paul Jerome Croce, University of North Carolina Press 350 pp.; $42.50, hardcover; $17.95, paper

Charles Templeton, who preached the gospel with Billy Graham in the 1940s, went to Princeton Theological Seminary and urged Graham to join him there, to lay a firmer academic foundation for his theology. Seminary study started Templeton down the road to agnosticism, however, and in subsequent discussions, he almost overwhelmed Graham with arguments for interpreting the Bible from a modernist standpoint. As the 1993 “Time” magazine cover story on Graham tells it (following the William Martin biography), Graham eventually concluded after prayer that “I don’t have the time, the inclination, or the set of mind to pursue [the intellectual questions]. I found that if I say ‘The Bible says’ and ‘God says,’ I get results. I have decided I’m not going to wrestle with these questions any longer.”

Templeton charged Graham with having committed intellectual suicide, although he admitted that his friend would not have been so effective a preacher if he had allowed his message to be compromised by doubt. The modernist Episcopal Bishop John Spong, who delivered newspapers to the Graham family farm as a boy in North Carolina, appears in the story as an example of what Billy Graham might have become. Spong commented to “Time” that “I would never seek to solve the ethical problems of the 20th century by quoting a passage of Holy Scripture, and I read the Bible every day. I wouldn’t invest a book that was written between 1000 b.c. and a.d. 150 with that kind of moral authority.”

The story of Graham and Templeton illustrates the difference between pragmatism and rationalism in philosophy. Even atheists might agree on pragmatic grounds that Graham made the right decision, if by closing his mind to Templeton’s arguments he was able to become the revered figure he is today rather than merely another compromising liberal. To the rationalist Templeton, however, Graham performed the secular equivalent of gaining the whole world by losing his own soul.

But did Templeton’s rationalism amount to anything more than a willingness to be seduced by the prevailing academic fashion? Graham may have been wiser than his friend if he distrusted his own ability to evaluate an academic “higher criticism” that was nominally Christian but steeped in naturalistic philosophy. Odysseus did not commit intellectual suicide when he denied the Sirens the opportunity to lure his ship onto the rocks.

Pragmatism teaches that when absolute truth is elusive, we are justified in adopting as provisional truth those beliefs that seem to work best. Modern pragmatism, America’s greatest contribution to philosophy, began with William James and his circle in the late nineteenth century. John Dewey carried pragmatism forward into the twentieth century, and Richard Rorty is its leading exponent today.

Paul Jerome Croce tells the first part of the story, beginning with the shattering impact of the Darwinian revolution upon an intellectual milieu in which religion and science had seemed to be united in a common enterprise. Croce’s first volume deals mainly with the events and arguments of James’s early life. It features not William James himself but the persons who most influenced his intellectual development: the Swedenborgian Henry James, Sr., father of William the philosopher and Henry the novelist; the Darwinist botanist Asa Gray and the anti-Darwinist scientific icon Louis Agassiz; the positivist Chauncy Wright; the early pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce; and the preeminent jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. A second volume, dealing with James’s mature thought, is in preparation.

Croce gets off to a dreadful start by apologizing for writing about “yet another white male from the cultural canon,” a man whose concern with the relationship between religion and science rather than with race and gender oppression might make him seem guilty of “barbarism.” Once he gets past this possibly mandatory expression of piety toward the Goddess Who Rules Academia, however, Croce regains his sense of historical balance and provides an illuminating description of the state of intellectual affairs in the James circle in the aftermath of the breakdown of certainty caused by the Darwinian revolution.

The main issue was not whether Darwinism was true or false, and it certainly was not whether the literal Genesis account was a viable alternative. Louis Agassiz argued against Darwinism at Harvard on scientific grounds but attracted little support despite his prestige. Whether all the objections could be answered or not, Darwinism was clearly the wave of the future in science. And whatever the backwoods fundamentalists may have thought, the Genesis chronology was not the sticking point even at Princeton Theological Seminary, where Charles Hodge led such resistance as there was to the Darwinian juggernaut.

What was the main issue was whether, in the light of Darwinism, there was still a place for “religious belief”–even in the very general sense of a belief that there is some sort of ultimate purpose or moral dimension to the physical universe revealed by science. Henry James, Sr., had encouraged William to study science in the confidence that scientific investigation and natural theology were partners in showing that nature is a rational system ruled by a benevolent deity. Darwinism described a world in which chance variation was the creator, however, and in which apparent design in biology was the product of a cruel and wasteful struggle for existence. Was it possible to find a place for God, or a firm foundation for morality, in a world like that? After Darwin, faith and reason seemed no longer to be allies, but rivals or even enemies.

Croce recounts that the triumph of Darwinism also raised an important question about the attainability of certainty in science itself. Although the theory was sufficiently appealing on logical grounds to gain overwhelming support, its crucial factual claims could not be proved. Scientists far more sympathetic to Darwinism than Agassiz conceded the existence of serious evidentiary problems. In “The Origin of Species,” Darwin had to take a defensive stance toward the fossil record, which then as now showed a remarkable stability in species rather than a pattern of gradual change from one kind of thing to another. Even

T. H. Huxley had substantial reservations, saying that Darwin ought to have allowed for evolution by sudden jumps and that the theory could not be considered confirmed until animal breeders had produced new species–a modest condition that has still not been met. Asa Gray, who was Darwin’s chief American advocate and the first theistic Darwinist, said that he accepted Darwinism only as a hypothesis and denied that the variations that powered change were random.

If this most important of scientific theories could only be defended on the ground that it was superior to any presently available alternative, then how could fallible human beings be certain of anything at all? Even in science, certainty seemed unattainable, and what was accepted as valid scientific knowledge in one generation might be overthrown or substantially modified in the future. As William James expressed the resulting problem, “Unless we find a way of conciliating the notion of truth and change, we must admit there is no truth anywhere.”

James argued that, in a world where we cannot be absolutely sure about anything, our wisest course may be to act confidently upon those beliefs that seem to produce the best consequences. Billy Graham did that in one way, and the nineteenth-century scientists, philosophers, and theologians who jumped aboard the Darwinian bandwagon did it another way. Whether Darwinism was true or not, the inability of giants like Louis Agassiz and Charles Hodge to impede its advance proved that it was irresistible. For anyone who did not want to be left behind and ignored, to believe wholeheartedly in Darwinism was the choice that produced the best consequences.

Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

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Now in his seventies, Shusaku Endo continues to write. “Deep River” (New Directions, 216 pp.; $19.95), published in English translation in 1995, revisits many of the themes of the earlier novels–trips abroad, a shattered faith, a bumbling fool–but explores the new territory of comparative religion.

A Japanese tour group visits a holy city on the banks of the Ganges in India. Thus modern materialists and Buddhists of varying levels of commitment encounter some of the beliefs of Hinduism.

Each of the travelers has his or her own story of emptiness and loss, and the river with its animal corpses and human ashes floating by comes to symbolize the final swampland of life. Yet once again a Christ-figure lurks in the background: Otsu, a clumsy, homely Japanese seminarian who was found unfit for ordination when he expressed his belief that “God has many faces, and … exists in all religions.” Rejected by his order but still seeking to follow Jesus, he spends his days helping men and women of the lowest castes fulfill their last wish of dying by the Ganges.

Also in 1995, an early novel by Endo, “The Girl I Left Behind” (New Directions, 194 pp.; $21.95), was published in English for the first time.

A naive young woman, Mitsu, treated with casual brutality, chooses to live in a leprosarium where she can help the nuns who minister there. In an afterword, Endo frankly acknowledges the book’s flaws. Nevertheless, he writes,

Through the medium of this novel, I sought to portray the drama of “the Jesus I left behind.” Mitsu can be seen as modelled on Jesus, abandoned by his own disciples; she is modelled on the Jesus whom all Christians are guilty of abandoning on a daily basis in their everyday lives. Mitsu has continued to live with me ever since and can be seen reincarnated in my most recent novel, “Deep River,” in the person of the protagonist, Otsu. It is my profound wish that my readers will acknowledge the connection between these two novels.

Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

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“Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation.” By Jonathan Kozol, Crown 288 pp.; $23

I remember my first visit to Egypt. I was met at the airport late at night. I was taken to a beautiful hotel. I couldn’t really see much, but I did notice that at least the final quarter of a mile of the trip was along a road bordered by an ornately decorated ten-foot-high plaster wall. And the next morning I found out why. I discovered that my four- or five-star hotel was planted right next to one of Egypt’s worst slums. The creative folks in Cairo had simply walled off the slums so that you were living in luxury, and you could look out from your room onto this zone of squalor and deprivation.

The columnist Clarence Page recently described a visit he made to the Dominican Republic. He said he felt like he was witnessing America’s future: grinding poverty next door to breathtaking opulence.

Jonathan Kozol has seen these situations up close; he has written about what he has seen, and it has accrued to the benefit of all of us who have been reading him for a while. His first book, “Death at an Early Age,” based on his experience teaching fourth grade in a segregated Boston public school, won the National Book Award. With “Illiterate America,” he drew attention to the scandal of widespread adult illiteracy. “Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America” changed our perception of the homeless. And, 30 years after the civil rights movement, “Savage Inequalities” documented the persistence of segregation and gross inequities in funding for our public school systems.

Now, in “Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation,” Kozol has returned with a personal look at the children who are being raised on the other side of the wall from America’s opulence in America’s poverty. It’s the story of a neighborhood in the South Bronx, Mott Haven. Forty-eight thousand people live there, and the median income is $7,600. Last October in Chicago I talked with Jonathan Kozol about the book and particularly about the luminous faith of the children he met in Mott Haven.

WHEN YOU LOOK AT THE TRAJECTORY OF YOUR CAREER, IT’S OBVIOUS THAT SOMETHING ABOUT ISSUES OF SOCIAL JUSTICE GRABBED YOU EARLY ON. WHAT WAS IT THAT FIRST DREW YOU TO THOSE ISSUES? AND WHAT HAS SUSTAINED YOU IN THAT COMMITMENT?

Well, I had a religious upbringing. I’m Jewish, and my mom and grandma were religious, but, as happens to many people who go on to places like Harvard College, that got washed out of me very quickly. At Harvard, you didn’t talk about religion. Even if you believed in God, you didn’t mention it, because people would make fun of you.

I went on from Harvard to Oxford, where I had a Rhodes scholarship. And then after a few years I came back to the States, in 1964, to Boston, my hometown. I probably would have done something normal like going to medical school or law school if it hadn’t been for the civil rights movement. In the summer of ’64, you’ll remember, those three young men were killed in Mississippi–two white, one black. One of them happened to be Jewish, from New York. And I identified with him.

So one day I just got on the subway. The end of the line was Harvard Square. I went to the other end, which was the ghetto of Boston, and signed up and became a teacher of little kids–black kids in a segregated school. And, in a sense, that was my formative decision. I didn’t think of it that way. But, in a sense, that 20-minute ride took me to a place from which I’ve never returned.

When I wrote “Amazing Grace,” I replayed that same experience 30 years later, in New York instead of Boston. I got on the subway in the richest part of Manhattan, right in front of Bloomingdale’s. If you’ve been to New York, you know where that is–15 E. 59th St., the richest section of the richest city in the world. And 15 minutes away is the South Bronx, the poorest congressional district in America. I ended up spending most of two years talking to children there. I’ve always preferred talking with children to talking with grownups.

WHY ARE CHILDREN A WINDOW TO TRUTH FOR YOU?

I didn’t think of it this way at first, but I now believe that if you’re seeking God, you have to look in the eyes of a child. And if you can’t find a child, you should try to find the child in yourself. Now, I look for real children. I love to be with children, even the poorest kids–and most of my adult life has been spent with very poor black and Latino kids in our big cities.

The children in South Bronx are certainly the poorest and sickest children I’ve ever met. The South Bronx has the highest rate of asthma in the United States, pediatric asthma, because there are so many toxic installations there. New York, like many cities, tends to put its sewage plants and its waste burners and all its dump sites in the places where the poorest black and Latino kids live, because we don’t really value their lives.

You have kids who are already sick, already very vulnerable, and then a huge, medical-waste incinerator is built right next to where they live. It was supposed to go in the ritzy part of town, in Manhattan, but the white parents there have clout. They were told it would pose a cancer threat to their babies, and respiratory dangers. So they resisted it. Naturally, it ended up where the poorest children live, in a neighborhood that has the worst medical facilities in the city. New York’s hospitals are completely segregated, as its schools are. In fact, New York is as segregated today as Mississippi was 40 years ago.

And one other thing that I must say, because of the age we’re living in, this neighborhood also has the highest AIDS rate in the developed world. One-quarter of the mothers here are HIV-positive. So you can imagine what the pediatric AIDS rate is like.

Despite this, a lot of the younger children speak with a transcendent beauty and charm and innocence that can take your breath away. Most of the kids I met there do not speak in obscene words. They don’t speak like rap singers. They don’t call women whores and bitches. These are beautiful children. And I particularly like to be with the little kids because they aren’t dirtied yet by what we’ve done to them.

I often say these children are not yet soiled by the knowledge that their country does not like them. Many of them will be soiled in time, because they’re going to discover that when they get a little older. But at this age, they still believe in God and they believe in humanity, and they even believe in the United States.

I’ll tell you, as a grownup it’s hard for me to believe in all those things sometimes because I see so much injustice. But the children speak of heaven all the time. They speak of God. They ask tough questions. “If God is good, why does he let the innocent die?” They always want to know what heaven is like, and I want to know, too. I ask them all the time. I’m very susceptible to children’s words.

A little girl told me to my delight that dogs will go to heaven. I had just lost a beagle I’d had for ten years. And you know how you can mourn for a dog. When she told me that, I was so happy. I said, “Do we live in the same place?” She said, “No, the dogs go to animal heaven.” But seeing I was distressed by that, she said, “You can visit on the weekends.” There’s a childish charm in that, but there’s also something deep in it, because this is a little girl who values love. She loved her dog, and she needs to believe there’s a heaven for her dog, too.

I need to believe in heaven. I’m still probably a little bit agnostic. Going to Harvard makes you skeptical. But I long to believe in heaven now. It seems unbearable to think that there won’t be something wonderful for these children after they die, because the lives we give them in the slums just aren’t enough to justify existence.

We’re familiar with organizations that say they work with the poorest of the poor, but when they talk about that we think of Somalia or Bangladesh. Yet the poorest of the poor also live among us in the U.S., though they are an avoidable reality for most of us. You don’t have to get on the subway at Bloomingdale’s and end up in the neighborhood that you chose to end up in.

In the course of their everyday lives, very few white, middle-class Americans have much intimate contact with the poor. They might see them on the street and shy away from them because it frightens them to see the homeless, for example. And because they don’t go into poor neighborhoods, I think they accept stereotypes–for example, that all the inner-city mothers, many of whom are single parents, have bad values. You hear that all the time–“bad family values.” To me, that has no connection with reality. The mothers that I’ve met in Mott Haven, and the grandmothers especially, are the rock of this neighborhood. They’re some of the most religious people I’ve ever met in my life.

Alice Washington is the central woman in my book–an HIV-infected woman who did nothing wrong, got it from her husband. She has more religion in her left thumb than many of the severe right-wing TV preachers I hear. There are women in Mott Haven who are scared to go out at night to church because the streets are so dangerous. One woman said to me, “I don’t need to go to church. I pray right here.” And in front of me she kneels down in the kitchen and prays. I’ve had women sing gospel music to me in their kitchen–including the song “Amazing Grace,” which gives the book its title, of course.

I said to one woman–because I keep asking these questions–I said, “Do you really think God hears you?” And her answer was so strong. She said, “God hears. He sit up high and look low, even here.” I never heard that kind of absolute faith in God expressed in the privileged white suburbs where I grew up. Never in my life had I heard that before.

SPEAKING OF BREAKING STEREOTYPES, YOU SPEND A LOT OF TIME IN YOUR BOOK WITH A BOY NAMED ANTHONY, WHO DOESN’T FIT THE STANDARD IMAGE OF A GHETTO KID. YOU ASK HIM WHAT HIS LIFE IS LIKE, AND HE SAYS, “I’M EDGAR ALLAN POE.”

I met him on the street. He was 12 then. He couldn’t pronounce my last name, but he liked my first name, because it’s from the Bible. He said, “Mr. Jonathan, my life is like the life of Edgar Allan Poe.” I looked at him, and I said, “How is your life like Edgar Allan Poe’s?” He said, “Because he had not a very happy life, and neither do I.” He often inverts words that way. I don’t know why he does it–it’s a quaint, poetic style.

IT’S ALMOST BIBLICAL, LIKE THE OLD KING JAMES VERSION.

Yes. This is a wonderful boy. He talks about heaven all the time. He’s the first child who’s ever told me about what he calls God’s kingdom. I said, “Why isn’t this God’s kingdom? Why shouldn’t God’s kingdom be right here on earth?” And he gestured toward the street, toward the drug dealers and the poor addicts for whom there’s no treatment in New York, the poor heroin-addicted men who do no harm to anyone. They’re just desperate. They’re standing there in despair, some of them crying in the street. He looked out, and he waved his hand like a little prophet–like Jesus. (He was about the same age that Jesus was when he first preached in the synagogue.) And he said, “This here is not God’s kingdom. God’s kingdom is a place of glory. This is a place of pain.”

I’m Jewish, and being Jewish is important to me, but I was drawn repeatedly into the church in Anthony’s neighborhood. Actually, I would go into the church at vespers every night I could, because otherwise I’d cry in the street. And I didn’t want people to see me crying.

SOME PEOPLE HAVE SAID THAT THE BLACK CHURCH EXPERIENCE IS JUST AN ESCAPE, THAT IT’S NOT REALLY EQUIPPING OR HELPING THOSE LIVING THERE.

That’s baloney. That’s just not true. And I’m of the generation that grew up in college reading Karl Marx, who said that religion is the opiate of the people. Let me tell you, in this neighborhood, religion is not the opiate of the people. Opium is the opiate of the people. There’s plenty of it. You get all the heroin you want there.

The churches in this neighborhood, particularly Saint Anne’s, which is an Episcopal church, are a blessed sanctuary. What they offer is no opiate. It’s political. The priest at Saint Anne’s is a white woman who went to the same college I did. She went to Harvard College. She went to law school. She was a Wall Street lawyer. And she gave it all up in the middle of her life when her brother died of AIDS. She asked for the poorest ministry in New York City. She is my idea of a modern saint.

And she is not just a sweet lady priest who pats children on the head and feeds them, though she does that. She keeps these kids from starving. Anthony was eating cold oatmeal for dinner when I met him. She feeds him. She feeds all these kids. But it’s not just that. She also talks tough about politics.

And when she speaks of sin, she doesn’t just mean the sin of the drug dealer or the sin of promiscuous sex. She’s much shrewder than that. She talks about the sin of the powerful white people in New York, her Harvard classmates and mine–the financiers, the powers on Wall Street, the banks that have red-lined New York and created this ghetto in the first place–and she uses the word sin. She says this isn’t just a “problem.” This is a sin in God’s eyes.

She’s very tough on the mass media. She condemns the “New York Times” because it lacks the moral courage to speak forthrightly against segregation in New York. It’s embarrassing for New Yorkers to admit that the city simply accepts as a matter of course what we condemned in Mississippi 40 years ago.

Copyright © 1997 by Christianity Today/Books and Culture magazine.

The children of these neighborhoods are not suffering by mistake. They are the outcasts of our nation’s ingenuity. We lock them up in modern lazarettos. We label them unclean just as in the Middle Ages. We give them the worst schools, the most vile hospitals, the filthiest surroundings in the Western world. Then we study them to find out why they do not have “good values.”

It isn’t the values of these children or their mothers or their fathers that concern me. It is the values of a society that increasingly and unmistakably has made it clear that it does not love children and that willingly and shamefully allows the innocent to be destroyed. … The children I have met who sing that song [“Amazing Grace”] in church are full of grace. And they see clearly. It is our nation that is blind and needs our prayers.

Jonathan Kozol

Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

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Black and white Americans live in parallel universes. Blacks are forced by circumstances to venture out into the white universe because it is the larger one, but many whites are unaware, except in the vaguest sense, of the existence or nature of the black universe. Two recent verdicts in Los Angeles demonstrate this clearly: In the videotaped beating of Rodney King, a mostly white jury saw police officers threatened by a deranged black man. In the Simpson trial, a mostly black jury was unimpressed by the white prosecutor’s mountain of tainted evidence.

“Devil in a Blue Dress,” based on Walter Mosely’s l990 debut novel, shows us Los Angeles half a century before these two watershed events. It is not yet the city of crack cocaine and drive-by shootings, but the City of Angels is already a land of broken promises and dreams deferred.

In Carl Franklin’s finely tuned second film, we meet Ezekiel (Easy) Rawlins in the Los Angeles of l948. Like so many blacks who served in World War II, Easy Rawlins has come home restless, and hungry for a piece of the American Dream he fought for. Hoeing rows and chopping cotton isn’t enough for him now. The mystique of the white man has been broken. In Europe, he killed white boys who looked a lot like his Texas field bosses, so he heads west to work in the booming factories of Los Angeles. California promises him a little breathing room and the chance to live in a slightly less repressive society.

As the opening credits roll, the camera moves languidly across a moody canvas depicting night life in “Colored Town.” The painting dissolves into a Los Angeles street scene so real that it could pass for archival footage. The cars, the clothes, even the baby carriages evoke the bustling prosperity and unbridled dreams of postwar America. As the camera closes in on a barroom where Easy Rawlins is scouring the want ads for a job, it is almost jolting to encounter the recognizable face of Denzel Washington.

Easy has just lost his job at an aircraft plant. Exhausted and sick from one overtime shift after another, he refuses to work another late night. The boss delivers a condescending lecture about having to work hard if you want to get ahead, and fires him. “He wouldn’t have fired a white man for that,” Easy observes sardonically. Now Easy is in a tough spot. He owns a tiny house, a twenties-era bungalow so cramped he can hardly turn around in it. But it’s his, the most valuable thing he has ever called his own, and he is not about to forfeit it to the bank.

Into the bar walks an opportunity–and trouble. An old friend introduces Easy to a slick white gangster by the name of DeWitt Albright, who needs to find a woman for a “friend.” The job pays cash up front, which is just what Easy needs to save his house. “I’d look for her myself,” Albright explains, “But she has a predilection for the company of Negroes. She likes jazz and pigs’ feet and dark meat, if you know what I mean.”

Easy knows what Albright means, and he knows he’s getting into something dangerous. But he also knows that he needs to make the payments on his house. Easy’s house represents an imagined future. When he goes home he gets a feeling of happiness that he has never known before. He likes seeing the neatly mowed lawns, the kids playing in the streets, the men washing their cars under the palm trees. It is a modest neighborhood, peopled by modest folk with modest dreams, and it is a far cry from the miserable shacks of Texas field hands.

Easy agrees to search for Daphne Monet, even though his gut tells him not to. He wants to believe that no harm will come to her if he finds her. He has to believe it, but he can’t. And he loathes stooping for money from one white man just after another has fired him.

Franklin begins by sticking close to Walter Mosley’s novel, but toward the end, he veers from the original and strips the enigmatic Daphne Monet of her chilling amorality. For that reason, it is best to read the book after seeing the film. Mosley’s novel is a page-turner, brimming with irony and insight far surpassing what you will find in most detective fiction. Mosley serves up a wealth of rich psychological detail as he builds Easy’s motivation–and much of this is cut from the film. In one particularly powerful passage in the novel, Easy goes, against his better judgment, to see Albright about the job. A white doorman stops him as he enters the building.

“Excuse me.”

The voice made me jump.

“What?” My voice strained and cracked as I turned to see the small man.

“Who are you looking for?”

He was a little white man wearing a suit that was also a uniform.

“I’m looking for, um … ah … ,”

I stuttered. I forgot the name. I had to squint so that the room wouldn’t start spinning.

It was a habit I developed in Texas when I was a boy. Sometimes, when a white man of authority would catch me off guard, I’d empty my head of everything so I was unable to say anything. “The less you know, the less trouble you find,” they used to say. I hated myself for it but I also hated white people, and colored people too for making me that way.

After Easy regains his composure and produces Albright’s business card, the little white man begins grilling him, forcing him to explain himself over and over. Remembering the war in Europe Easy thinks to himself, “I would have liked to rip the skin from his face like I’d done once to another white boy.”

Trimming scenes like this can eviscerate a novel, but Franklin knows how to tell a story visually. “Devil in a Blue Dress” does not preach, nor does it stack the deck with good black folks and nasty white ones. It simply tells the story from within the black universe rather than the white one. Instead of peeking into the black universe as most American films touching on black life do, it looks outward from it, into the bewildering and dangerous white world. When two white detectives administer a station-house beating that could have come straight from the diaries of Mark Furman, we experience it from the perspective of Easy Rawlins, who knows that he may never leave the interrogation room alive. When he is finally released, he is followed by two idly mocking white cops in a patrol car. “The game of cops and niggers continued even after I was released,” Easy observes, “But I didn’t pay it no mind.”

Franklin’s sharp eye for the realities of race in America was apparent in his first film, “One False Move.” On the surface, it’s a standard drug-deal-gone-bad plot, but under Franklin’s direction, it achieves much more. The cops are black and white, as are the drug dealers. Two L.A. detectives travel to a small town in Arkansas in search of the murderers and join forces with a young redneck sheriff. The sheriff sometimes refers to the two black criminals as niggers, in the presence of the middle-aged black cop (he calls the other criminal a piece of white trash).

Yet the black cop relates to him more easily than the white cop does. An ex-southerner himself, the black cop understands the two parallel universes and has made an uneasy peace with them. The redneck is blissfully ignorant. Halfway through the film festival screening of “One False Move,” a particular scene made me realize, “This movie was made by a black director. A white director couldn’t have evoked these characters so truthfully.” My hunch was confirmed when Carl Franklin stepped out onto the stage for a Q and A session after the screening.

Franklin is an intense yet unassuming man whose films operate on many levels. Like “One False Move,” “Devil in a Blue Dress” can be appreciated simply as a tightly constructed detective movie. But it is much more than that. Franklin shows us that the worlds of black and white America are far more divided than most whites want to acknowledge.

American schools are still, to a large extent, segregated by race. So are many of our neighborhoods and, to our enduring shame, our churches. The parallel universes barely touch when God is being worshiped. The gospel continues to be studied and preached to two homogeneous flocks that rarely speak to one another.

Until white people can acknowledge the existence of the parallel universes, they will be unable to understand the depth of alienation felt by so many blacks. “Devil in a Blue Dress” is a tough, uncompromising film that allows seekers to learn something profound about life in America.

Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

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Imagine a festive rally staged by the Daughters of the American Revolution–held annually on the seventeenth of October to commemorate the American defeat of the British at Saratoga in the year 1777–and featuring brass bands, colorful displays of the American flag, and thousands of paraders marching through Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, and other Canadian cities where the memory still lingers about who fought whom for what in the American Revolution.

Or imagine–in a sadly much less far-fetched example–that you lived somewhere near a border between Serbs and Croats or Serbs and Bosnian Muslims in the former Yugoslavia and that you knew you and your family might today be menaced by someone whose parents had been killed by “your folk” during World War II (or whose grandparents to the sixth generation removed had been cast off their land by “your folk”).

If you can imagine both situations–the flaunting of partisan victory square in the face of the defeated or the threat of ethnic violence beclouding every day–and if you can put yourself in a frame of mind in which the effects of history really and truly matter, then you have come to Northern Ireland. Or at least you have come to what Northern Ireland has been for much of its population for much of the last four centuries.

As set out succinctly, though not for the first time, in Michael Hughes’s “Ireland Divided: The Roots of the Modern Irish Problem,” a helpful combination of interpretation and documents, the tension between Unionists and Nationalists in Northern Ireland (or “Protestant” and “Catholic” in a rough simplification) could not exist apart from an “obsession with history.” This obsession, as Hughes phrases it, has led to parallel, but antithetical, “myths by which each defines itself and its position regarding the other.” One of the myths goes like this:

The Nationalists believe that they are the heirs of the original inhabitants of Northern Ireland. … Even after the decline of the Irish language as a consequence of the Great Famine of the 1840s, the distinctiveness of this group did not disappear. The Roman Catholic religion replaced language as the most obvious badge of Irishness. A major element in the consciousness of this community has been … an idealized vision of Gaelic Christian culture, something pure and uncontaminated, long protected by the sea against the Romans, Dark Age barbarism, and the horrors of industrialization.

A contrasting myth has been constructed by the Unionists who trace their origin to Scottish settlements on the Antrim coast that were augmented dramatically by the “plantations” of Scottish and English settlers during the seventeenth century. In this myth, the settlers had come not merely to cement England’s control of Ireland but also to civilize the wild and dangerous native Irish. … These regard themselves as custodians of an idealized vision of the “British way of life” and British liberty, symbolized by the Crown and the Union between Britain and Northern Ireland, which they see as protecting them against destruction by an alien Catholic Irish state.

Hughes’s book offers a good introduction to a modest review of recent historical studies on Northern Ireland because it features a discussion of the historical revisionism that has overtaken myth-making as the dominant approach to Irish history by professional academics in the twentieth century. However vigorously the myths survive in other domains, for at least two generations most professional historians writing on Northern Irish subjects have been more concerned about discovering what actually happened in the past than with providing ideological inspiration for one side or the other in the contemporary struggle. And in the works of such scholars, one begins to measure the long reach of Northern Irish history:

* Origins. In 1155, Pope Adrian IV awards overlordship of Ireland to King Henry II of England and so establishes the relationship of imperial dependency between England and Ireland that survived for nearly 800 years.

* Middle Ages. English efforts to subdue the Irish are successful only in Dublin and the surrounding region–the Pale, that is, the zone in which English jurisdiction is established. To be “beyond the pale” thus carries ethnic, political, and religious as well as geographical significance.

* Plantation. Following more effective efforts by her grandfather (Henry VII) and father (Henry VIII) to promote English interests in Ireland, Elizabeth I from 1584 begins the “planting” of English and Scottish settlers throughout Ireland. In the reign of her successor, James I, these efforts are intensified, but also concentrated in the six easternmost counties of Ulster. The “flight of the Irish Earls” aids this process when in 1607 the leading Celtic chieftains in the North abandon their land and go into exile. (Ulster is the most northern of Ireland’s four provinces; Protestant settlement was strongest in counties Antrim and Down, which includes Belfast; and also very substantial in counties Armagh, Londonderry [or Derry], Fermanagh, and Tyrone. These are the six counties that now make up “Northern Ireland”; the other three counties of Ulster, with smaller Protestant populations, are part of the Republic of Ireland.)

* Massacre I. Taking advantage of confusion during England’s Civil War, Catholics in 1641 arise and slay approximately 2,000 Protestant settlers, with most of the deaths taking place in Ulster. Further thousands of Protestants are stripped of everything–including the clothes on their backs–and driven from their homes. Reports of this revolt reach horrific proportions in Protestant retellings.

* Massacre II. In the fall of 1649, the English Parliament sends an army to Ireland under Oliver Cromwell to subdue the supporters of King Charles I (those supporters include some Protestants and English as well as Catholics and Irish). At Drogheda, Cromwell offers the garrison a chance to surrender, but, when that offer is refused, he overwhelms the garrison and kills virtually all of the soldiers, all Catholic priests he can find, and quite a few civilians–a total of around 4,000 dead. A similar scenario is played out at Wexford. Reports of these battles reach horrific proportions in Catholic retellings.

* The Battle of the Boyne. In 1690, the deposed English king, James II, tries to stage a comeback for the English throne, from Ireland as his base. He is met in battle by King William III, whom Parliament had summoned as James’s replacement the year before. The decisive battle in this encounter is the defeat of James on July 1, 1690, at the Boyne River, not too far from Drogheda. (Because of changes in the calendar in the mideighteenth century, this event is later celebrated by Protestant Unionists on July 12.)

* Penal Laws. During the first half of the eighteenth century, the Irish Parliament, which “represents” only the Anglican “ascendancy,” under the general oversight of the English king and Parliament, passes measures that strip Catholics of almost all civil, religious, and political rights. (These measures also affect non-Anglican Protestants.) Though never enforced systematically, the penal laws forbid Catholics to own arms, ban priests from the island, bar Catholics from all professions except medicine, withdraw the franchise, and in effect outlaw higher education for Catholics.

* Amelioration and Vigilantes. In the second half of the eighteenth century, several Relief Acts are passed in both English and Irish Parliaments that ease legal restrictions on Catholics. At the same time, levels of vigilante sectarian violence rise dramatically, especially in those parts of the North where Catholic and Protestant populations are roughly equal and where cloth manufacturing disrupts the older agricultural economy.

* Revolution. Inspired by the political revolutions in America and France, a corresponding movement arises in Ireland that seeks liberation from traditional hierarchical rule. The most visible manifestation of this spirit is the United Irishmen movement, which has some success at bringing together theologically liberal Protestants, theologically conservative Protestants, and Catholics in a political alliance against British rule. When, however, an armed revolution actually begins in 1798, it quickly degenerates in the South into sectarian slaughter (with Catholic peasants rising up against Protestant landlords). The British army and Ireland’s loyal militia brutally suppress the rebellion, with many times more fatalities (in only one summer of fighting) than had occurred in the six years of military action during the American Revolution.

* Union, Emancipation, and Home Rule. In the wake of the 1798 Rebellion, the Irish Parliament votes itself out of existence, and Ireland is incorporated into the United Kingdom (which already includes England, Scotland, and Wales). Immediately agitation begins to end legal restrictions on Catholics, which continues until Catholic Emancipation is won in 1829. By that time, however, agitation has begun for “home rule,” or the transformation of Ireland into a semi-autonomous dominion (as Canada would soon become). Throughout the nineteenth century, Home Rule is blocked by a coalition of English political conservatives, Ulster Protestants uneasy about absorption into a Catholic Ireland, and some elements of the older Anglican ascendancy.

* Revolt and Division. During and after World War I, agitation for home rule is transformed into violent revolt. During Easter week 1916, Irish patriots stage a rebellion in Dublin that Britain puts down, but not before the cause of Irish independence gains much ground. At the same time, Protestant agitation in the North grows ever more intense to maintain the tie with Britain. In 1920, an act of the British Parliament partitions Ireland into two home rule states–the six northern counties under Protestant domination, the rest of Ireland heavily Catholic. In 1922, Nationalists proclaim the creation of an Irish Free State. After brutal civil war in the South and much violence between Irish and British fighters (both military and guerrilla), the republic gains its independence. (In 1937 a new constitution is adopted that transforms the Irish Free State into Eire, or the Republic of Ireland.)

* The Troubles. In 1969 Catholic demonstrators in Northern Ireland initiate public protests against Protestant discrimination and what they perceive as the long-standing evils of British rule. These demonstrations, which begin in Derry, quickly spread to other parts of the province and soon are linked with terrorist campaigns, and then reprisal terrorism. In 1972, the British Parliament suspends Stormont, Northern Ireland’s parliament, and assumes direct control over Northern Irish affairs. This is the situation, with undulating levels of violence from paramilitaries and a massive British military presence, that prevails until the summer of 1994 and the start of the current cease-fire.

The books that try to push past myth-making to explain the complexities and significance of these events now range widely and deeply, from surveys such as R. F. Foster’s “The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland” to sharply focused monographs. Of multitudes of studies that treat circumstances since the partition in 1920, two are especially noteworthy. “Catholicism in Ulster, 1603-1983,” Oliver Rafferty’s general survey of Ulster Catholicism, details the extent to which the Catholic hierarchy and the overwhelming majority of Catholic priests have opposed the violence perpetrated, often in the name of Catholicism, by Nationalist extremists. And “Shaping a City: Belfast in the Late Twentieth Century,” Fred Boal’s wonderfully illustrated history, contains a treasure of insights on the settlement patterns that have made this city a focal point of sectarian tension. Of Boal’s many illuminating prints, charts, and maps, the most telling are those that show the steady growth of segregated housing patterns, from a situation in 1850 where about 50 percent of Belfast’s population lived on streets where 90 percent or more of the residents were Catholic (or Protestant) to the situation today where almost 90 percent of Belfast’s citizens live in such segregated districts.

Other especially notable volumes include fresh approaches to the role of women in the tangled history of Northern Ireland. The essays in “Coming into the Light: The Work, Politics, and Religion of Women in Ulster, 1840- 1940,” edited by Janice Holmes and Diane Urquhart, are important for showing how women sometimes abetted sectarian tension, but also how, especially in times of religious revival (whether Catholic or Protestant), intense religious experience could overwhelm, at least for short periods, preoccupation with sectarian differences.

The most illuminating series of recent historical works arises out of fresh attention to the last decades of the eighteenth century and first decades of the nineteenth. The conclusion conveyed by these books is that this period was the crucible from which Northern Ireland’s seemingly intractable Troubles emerged. A number of volumes are helpful on the reasons for increasing sectarian violence in the countryside among what today would be called the lower and lower-middle classes, especially David Miller’s “Peep O’Day Boys and “Defenders: Selected Documents on the County Armagh Disturbances, 1784-96.” Miller’s book excels at showing how and why Catholic Defenders and Protestant Peep O’Day Boys felt it was necessary to adopt guerrilla tactics in the years surrounding Britain’s response to the American and French Revolutions. What Miller details with special clarity is how thoroughly fear of the other religion led to specific local acts of vigilante terror, expulsion from homes, and contention over economic opportunities. Modern Catholic and Protestant sectarians who look upon violence as a noble option in defense of noble causes would do well to ponder the documents Miller presents, for they present a sordid struggle for power much more than a high-minded defense of lofty religious ideals.

The greatest concentration of outstanding recent writing, however, concerns the other major story of the late eighteenth century, which was the momentary alliance of some Protestants and a few Catholics in the United Irish movement against British rule. Protestants in the United States should have a special interest in this tale, for it reveals a situation with some parallels to the alliance between evangelical religion and republican politics that fueled the American Revolution. The dynamics of the United Irish movement–with connections to events in France, America, Italy, and elsewhere on the continent–have been depicted in two outstanding volumes by Marianne Elliott, in Nancy Curtin’s recent monograph, and in a wide-ranging symposium edited by David Dickson, Daire Keough, and Kevin Whelan.

One of the intriguing religious questions raised by these works is whether political liberalism–the desire for greater freedom vis-a-vis Britain–acted as a solvent for traditional theology. It is a fact that the influence of Tom Paine–as a religious as well as political radical–was strong among United Irishmen in the 1790s. And it is also true, as outlined especially in “A Deeper Silence: The Hidden Origins of the United Irishmen”–A. T. Q. Stewart’s sensitive study of the intellectual roots of the United Irish movement–that Irish political liberalism drew directly from the secular side of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Yet, at the same time, the religious liberalization at work among the United Irishmen is not the whole story, for, just as in America, there were also intensely biblical Protestants who thought that their conservative faith demanded a politics of republican liberation as well. The way in which such theologically conservative strands contributed to the anti-British, pro-reform movement of the 1790s is an important theme in Stewart’s book and also in Pieter Tesch’s contribution to the symposium on the United Irishmen.1 What is especially intriguing from an American angle is the fact that some of the Irish political radicals used the same kind of apocalyptic interpretation of Scripture that was so common among patriotic evangelical supporters of the new American nation. The Irishman who promoted such speculation most intensely was Thomas Russell, a tormented, unstable, but uncompromisingly biblical figure who is the subject of a judicious biography by Denis Carroll.

In the unrolling of events, however, the Rebellion of 1798 failed, and with that failure vanished both efforts at bridging the divide between Catholics and Protestants and links between Protestant evangelicalism and republican politics. To be sure, the lock-step alignment of Northern Protestants with militant anti-Catholicism, ardent Unionism, and strict political conservatism did take several decades to develop. But the failure of the Revolution in combination with a growing surge of Catholic self-assertion moved inexorably in the direction of hardened sectarian boundaries.

That process receives scrupulous, and scrupulously fair, treatment in Finlay Holmes’s history of Irish Presbyterianism. Its genesis among the Methodists and other evangelical Protestants is also illuminated with breadth of research and economy of interpretation in David Hempton and Myrtle Hill’s history of Ulster evangelicalism, as well as in Hempton’s forthcoming book on Methodism and popular religion in the British Isles. “Religion and Society in 19th-Century Ireland,” a substantial booklet by Sean Connolly, first published in 1985 but reprinted once again last year, provides a most helpful summary of religious-political events in the first half of the nineteenth century. In Connolly’s picture, several circumstances–a rising evangelical tide among Protestants, a revival of self-conscious Catholic devotion, and a new politicization of religion among both Protestants and Catholics–combined to fix sectarian antagonism on all parties in the North.

This whirlwind tour of recent historical writing is hardly sufficient to indicate the depth of sectarian feeling that four centuries of religiously charged animosity and two centuries of hardened religious-political battle lines communicate to the present situation in Northern Ireland. But it is enough to suggest why, with such a past, it is a temptation to despair for the future, despite the apparent opportunities created by the present cease-fire.

In the current situation, voices of realism must contend with voices of hope. One of the most realistic of such voices during the last half-century has been Conor Cruise O’Brien, a peripatetic journalist, diplomat, historian, politician, and savant. As described nicely in Donald Akenson’s recent biography (and illustrated in Akenson’s carefully chosen anthology of selections from O’Brien’s shorter writings), O’Brien has offended the Roman Catholic church by criticizing its influence over the Irish Republic, the IRA by denouncing its violence in the North, and serious believers both Catholic and Protestant by abandoning religious solutions to sectarian strife. Such a range of offense suggests that O’Brien’s relentless realism is close to the mark. He seems to be reminding all concerned that it is not so simple to deny what, over the centuries, you have become.

Next to such realism, hope may seem insubstantial. But believers in the Prince of Peace cannot afford to let go of hope entirely. The path of hope may be hard to discern in Northern Ireland, but it is there–in occasional acts of charity across the sectarian divide and in moments when leaders urge reconciliation upon their followers. Such moments appear regularly, if also somewhat sparsely, in the books cited in this essay. As an example, I was pleasantly startled to read in Rafferty’s history of Ulster Catholicism that in 1838 Protestants in the village of Roslea, County Fermanagh, actually assisted their Catholic neighbors in constructing a bell tower for the Catholic parish church of Saint Tiernagh; this magnanimous occasion took place only 15 years before my great-grandfather and his family, who were serious Methodists, migrated from Roslea to the United States.

Hope has also been sustained by voices as memorable in their way as Conor Cruise O’Brien is in his. In the fall of 1979, a notable visitor stepped up alongside the courageous Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland who appeal for reconciliation. In his first visit to Ireland as head of the Catholic church, Pope John Paul II chose Drogheda as the site of the major address of his trip–Drogheda, where 330 years earlier (almost to the very day) Oliver Cromwell’s troops had massacred the town’s garrison; Drogheda, near where 289 years before William, Prince of Orange and King of England, had defeated the deposed Catholic James II. At this place, and (if memory of television coverage serves) turning north to face the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, the pope said: “[Violence is] unacceptable as a solution to problems. … Violence is a lie, [it] destroys what it claims to defend: the dignity, the life, the freedom of human beings. … To those engaged in violence, I appeal to you in language of passionate pleading. On my knees I beg you to turn away from the paths of violence and return to the days of peace.”

Even if–as reported by Oliver Rafferty–the IRA soon rejected the pope’s appeal, and even if buses and trains carrying Catholics from Northern Ireland to hear the pope at Drogheda were stoned in the course of their journey by Protestant toughs, the pope’s words still pointed to a way of hope. If there ever is to be a new Northern Ireland of peace, the way is going to lead not around but–in repentance and faith–through such places as Drogheda.

1. Both of these works, in turn, draw on the most detailed studies showing the links between conservative Protestant theology and radical political dissent in the years before the 1798 Rebellion: D. W. Miller, “Presbyterianism and ‘Modernization’ in Ulster,” Past and Present 80 (1978), pp. 66-90; and A. T. Q. Stewart, “The Transformation of Irish Presbyterianism in the North of Ireland, 1792-1825” (master’s thesis, Queen’s University of Belfast, 1956).

Books mentioned in this essay

Donald Harman Akenson, “Conor: A Biography of Conor Cruise O’Brien” (Cornell University Press, 573 pp.; $39.95, 1994).

Frederick W. Boal, “Shaping a City: Belfast in the Late Twentieth Century” (Institute of Irish Studies, 127 pp.; 10, paper, 1995).

Denis Carroll, “The Man from God Knows Where: Thomas Russell, 1767-1803” (Dublin: Columba Press, 256 pp.; 9.99, paper, 1995).

Sean Connolly, “Religion and Society in 19th-Century Ireland” (Dublin: Dundalgon, 69 pp.; 4.50, paper, reprinted 1994).

Nancy J. Curtin, “The United Irishmen: Popular Politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791-1798” (Clarendon/Oxford University Press, 317 pp.; $52, 1994).

David Dickson, Daire Keogh, and Kevin Whelan, eds., “The United Irishmen: Republicanism, Radicalism, and Rebellion” (Dublin: Lilliput, 378 pp.; 15, paper, 1993).

Marianne Elliott, “Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France” (Yale University Press, 411 pp.; $22, paper, 1982).

Marianne Elliott, “Wolfe Tone: Prophet of Irish Independence” (Yale University Press, 492 pp.; $22, paper, 1989).

R. F. Foster, “The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland” (Oxford University Press, 382 pp.; $45, 1989).

David Hempton, “The Religion of the People: Studies in Methodism and Popular Religion, 1750-1900” (Routledge, forthcoming).

David Hempton and Myrtle Hill, “Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster Society, 1740-1890” (Routledge, 272 pp.; $74.95, 1992).

Finlay Holmes, “Our Irish Presbyterian Heritage” (Presbyterian Church in Ireland, 187 pp.; 3.95, paper, 1985).

Janice Holmes and Diane Urquhart, eds., “Coming into the Light: The Work, Politics, and Religion of Women in Ulster, 1840-1940” (Institute of Irish Studies, 213 pp.; 6.50, paper, 1994).

Michael Hughes, “Ireland Divided: The Roots of the Modern Irish Problem” (St. Martin’s Press, 143 pp.; $16.95, paper, 1994).

David W. Miller, ed., “Peep O’Day Boys and Defenders: Selected Documents on the County Armagh Disturbances, 1784-96” (Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, 155 pp.; 6, paper, 1990).

Conor Cruise O’Brien, “Conor: An Anthology.” Selected by Donald Harman Akenson (Cornell University Press, 356 pp.; $39.95, 1994).

Oliver P. Rafferty, “Catholicism in Ulster, 1603-1983” (University of South Carolina Press, 306 pp.; $39.95, 1994).

A. T. Q. Stewart, “A Deeper Silence: The Hidden Origins of the United Irishmen” (Faber & Faber, 225 pp.; $29.95, 1993).

Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

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In a famous slip of the pen in the Washington Post from February 1993, a writer asserted that evangelical Protestants were “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.” When the dust had finally settled in the letters columns, it was clear that at least a few evangelicals were educated enough to offer such an ascription the comeuppance it deserved. More recently, in a much-discussed article in Dissent on “The Death of Intellectual Conservatism” (Winter 1995), Michael Lind opined that “the hitherto silent majority of white evangelical Protestant conservatives” had hijacked the mind of America’s right wing. But are evangelicals, in fact, really a majority in America–and are they all right wing?

Loose talk about “evangelicals” or “evangelicalism” reveals a failure to make critical distinctions. Differences between “evangelicals” and “fundamentalists” are a good case in point. More subtle distinctions recognized by insiders–such as the differences between the “Pentecostal” and “holiness” families under the evangelical umbrella–are even more frequently blurred by commentators. Some evangelical scholars go so far as to suggest that the term evangelical be abandoned altogether. Indeed, attempts to clarify the meaning of evangelicalism recall the king of Siam’s words to his schoolmistress, Anna: ” ’tis a puzzlement!”

Such a puzzlement cannot be ignored by social scientists who study contemporary American religion. With two colleagues (James Guth and Corwin Smidt) we carried out a large-scale survey in 1992 of 4,001 Americans (with a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts) for the express purpose of clarifying the size and the impact of American evangelicalism. What follows is a brief report on our results.

We began with the assumption that evangelicalism is a multifaceted phenomenon, and that there is no one single way to define the term. Instead, we employed three approaches: doctrinal essentials; religious movements closely associated with these doctrines; and affiliation with churches and denominations associated with these doctrines and movements.

DOCTRINAL ESSENTIALS

Evangelicals, however defined, naturally turn to questions of doctrine and theology when talking about the Christian faith. In our work we used four criteria to define evangelicalism doctrinally: (1) belief that salvation comes only through faith in Jesus Christ (“Jesus Only” in the tables); (2) experience of conversion, “Born Again” in the tables; (3) belief that it is necessary to spread the gospel through missions and evangelism (“Witness” in the tables); and (4) belief in the truth or inerrancy of Scripture (“Bible True” in the tables).

Not all observers would agree with these choices, but we feel they capture beliefs historically associated with the term evangelical. In addition, these measures allow us to explore some sticky questions that routinely generate controversial discussions–such as, is a person an evangelical if he or she has not had a born-again experience but passes the other tests?

We find (table 1) that from 31 to 46 percent of the population affirmed these evangelical distinctives. Does that mean that the size of the evangelical population in the United States is somewhere between 31 to 46 percent? The answer is yes if a single measure of evangelical doctrine is used. If all four of the distinctives are employed, however, only 14 percent of the population meet the four criteria.

RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS

Our approach to defining evangelicalism also focused on religious movements. Religious movements, the crucial “change agents” in religion, are made up of individuals dedicated to reforming and revitalizing existing institutions. American evangelicals have viewed established institutions and dogma with great suspicion as they strive for a vital faith. As a result, they are famous for their movements, some of which are alive and well today: fundamentalism, Pentecostalism, the charismatic movement, and “evangelicalism” (not to be confused with “evangelical” doctrines or tradition).

We asked our respondents if they “affiliated” with these movements. The results of our analysis are presented in table 2. In contrast to the individual doctrinal measures, movement affiliation is much smaller, with just under one-twentieth of the population affiliating with evangelicalism and fundamentalism and about twice as many with the “Spirit-filled” movements (Pentecostals and charismatics). Altogether we found that 17 percent of the population could be classified as “evangelical” by this approach.

This measure gets at the “card-carrying” and often the most dynamic members of the evangelical community, but it also highlights the complexities involved in defining that community. Some of those who affirmed two, three, or even all four of the doctrinal distinctives did not wish to use the term evangelical (or a similar label) in identifying themselves. At the same time, some who affirmed only one of the four distinctives were nonetheless self-identified as evangelicals.

RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS

Our third approach was to group denominations and local church bodies that loosely affirm the above doctrinal essentials and/or are linked to the above religious movements and to others now faded. This approach taps affiliation with churches and related religious institutions and, as a result, gets at the locales where evangelicals spend a great deal of their lives.

This avenue of research presumes accurate measurement of the religious affiliations, a care rarely taken in surveys. To illustrate the problem, the answer “Presbyterian” is of little value in itself since it does not allow the analyst to distinguish between the moderate-to-liberal Presbyterian Church U.S.A. (PCUSA) and the conservative Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). Once good measurement was achieved, we examined the doctrinal and institutional history of denominations and independent churches (for example, Bible churches) to sort out distinct religious traditions. We identified five relatively large groupings: White Evangelical Protestant, White Mainline Protestant, Black Protestant, Roman Catholic, and a group of nonpractitioners we call “Seculars.”

Assigning denominations to one of the three Protestant traditions was very complicated and, of course, subject to error (especially in the case of smaller denominations, of which there are hundreds in the pluralistic American religious environment). The separation of Black Protestants from Evangelical Protestants is particularly touchy, since the religious beliefs of these two traditions are very similar. Yet the two are very different in terms of historical evolution and contemporary practices.

This definitional effort (see table 3) revealed that roughly one-fourth of the American population is Evangelical Protestant, slightly less is Roman Catholic, somewhat less than one-fifth affiliate with Mainline Protestantism, about one-fifth are Secular, and 8 percent are Black Protestant. (Smaller traditions, including Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others, account for the remaining 7 percent of the population.)

A FINE-TUNED DEFINITION

The results so far show that the simple question What is an evangelical? quickly produces a complex answer. And things get even more complicated if we combine these various measures of evangelicalism. A simple version of these combinations is presented in table 4. The second entry identifies what might be called the “true-blue evangelicals,” a group that holds all four doctrinal distinctives, affiliates with an evangelical movement, and belongs to a church or denomination in the evangelical tradition. This group is relatively small–about 5 percent of the adult population–but is still significant, outnumbering Jews and Episcopalians two to one. If an “almost true-blue” category is added (those holding three doctrinal essentials plus affiliation with an evangelical movement and tradition), the 5 percent figure jumps to almost 9 percent.

In contrast, note that Mainline Protestants who affirm at least three doctrinal essentials and identify with an evangelical movement make up only 1.5 percent of the U.S. population. Catholics with three or four evangelical doctrinal distinctives number a rather sizable 4 percent of the population (only a handful of Catholics identify with evangelical movements).

These findings force us to examine a tough question over which you hear fierce arguments in evangelical coffee klatches: Are Roman Catholics evangelical? The answer obviously depends on the definition of the term. If doctrinal distinctives are the basis, Catholics can meet the criteria specified. If religious tradition or movement is the basis for definition, they cannot. Thus, table 4 suggests that there are millions of Catholics with whom Evangelical Protestants share common doctrines, but not necessarily liturgy, historical ethos, or notions of church authority.

The core of evangelicalism is small but intense. From data not presented, we know that this core is regularly in the pews and feels that religion is the central force in their lives. If “evangelically oriented” Mainline and Black Protestants, as well as Roman Catholics, are added to the 9 percent in the evangelical tradition with three or four doctrinal essentials and movement affiliation, about one-sixth of the population is “distinctively evangelical.” Attempting to mobilize such a disparate group is not easy, but its size makes it an important force for moral values in American society.

Does all this complexity make a difference? While we can only scratch the surface here, the answer is a resounding yes.

Just one issue, abortion, demonstrates the point. Most people would expect evangelicals to be pro-life, and table 5 confirms this expectation. But for this exercise in definitions, the results show that how you define and measure evangelicalism determines your findings. The material at the top of the table shows the impact of each of the definitions of evangelicalism on pro-life attitudes. The doctrinal essentials (in the upper left-hand corner of the table) have about the same impact, between 52 and 58 percent. And the evangelical religious tradition (top center in the table) shows a similar result. However, it is defining evangelicalism by a religious-movement measure that has the greatest impact (see the upper right portion of the table). Fully 70 percent of the card-carrying evangelicals are pro-life, and those who identify as fundamentalist or charismatic/ Pentecostal are not far behind.

Single measures of evangelicalism, however, be they doctrinal distinctives or religious tradition or religious movement, do not adequately show the strength of pro-life attitudes. It is the combination of all four doctrinal essentials, affiliation in an evangelical denominational context, and identification with the movement that produces the strongest pro-life attitudes (see the bottom of table 5). Note the decline in pro-life positions as one moves down the table and examines other possible combinations. What stands out is that all three of our definitional possibilities (doctrine, movement, and religious tradition) make a difference.

What does this suggest? Being in an evangelical religious tradition makes one more susceptible to picking up pro-life cues, as does holding evangelical doctrinal positions. But, finally, considering oneself a card-carrying evangelical makes a big difference, too.

To conclude, answers to the question What is an evangelical? depend on how you define the term. Our results suggest that the size of the evangelical community could range from a low of about 5 percent to a figure as high as 46 percent. We have found that a fine-tuned definition that includes doctrine, affiliation, and movement is better than any single definition or measure. Given this complexity, it is no wonder that commentators on American religion often produce unsatisfying and often contradictory results.

We need not be thorougly skeptical whenever we hear the word evangelical used in a public report. We should, however, ask how the term is being used and assess the information provided from that perspective. This will begin to lift the fog of imprecision and help us to assess the difference that the evangelical community is making in American society.

DATA IN TABLES

TABLE 1

Bible True 44%

Jesus Only 46%

Witness 37%

Born Again 31%

All Four 4%

Percentage of the U.S. population who can be identified as evangelicals with doctrinal criteria

TABLE 2

Evangelical 4%

Fundamentalist 5%

Charismatic/Pentecostal 8%

None 83%

Percentage of the U.S. population who can be identified as evangelicals by movement criteria

TABLE 3

Evangelical Protestant 26%

Roman Catholic 23%

Mainline Protestant 17%

Secular 20%

Black Protestant 8%

Other religious 7%

Percentage of the U.S. population in major religious traditions

TABLE 4

Percentage of U.S. population who can be identified

as evangelicals through a combination of criteria

4 doctrines only14.0

4 doctrines, evangelical tradition, evangelical movement 5.1

3 doctrines, evangelical tradition, evangelical movement 3.8

3 doctrines, evangelical tradition, no religious movement 4.0

4 doctrines, evangelical tradition, no religious movement 3.2

3 or 4 doctrines, mainline tradition, evangelical movement 1.5

3 or 4 doctrines, mainline tradition, no religious movement 5.1

3 or 4 doctrines, Roman Catholic tradition 4.0

3 or 4 doctrines, black Protestant tradition, evangelical movement 1.9

3 or 4 doctrines, black Protestant tradition, no religious movement 3.0

1 or 2 doctrines, evangelical tradition, no religious movement 5.6

0 doctrines, evangelical tradition, no religious movement 2.7

0 to 2 doctrines, evangelical tradition, evangelical movement 1.1

TABLE 5

Pro-life positions on abortion according to varied ways of identifying evangelicals (percentages in the table are pro-life only)

Pro-life Attitudes for the Total U.S. Population 38 Percent

Doctrinal Essentials

Born Again 58%

Witness 56%

Bible True 53%

Jesus Only 52%

Religious Tradition

Evangelical Protestant 53%

Black Protestant 45%

Roman Catholic 40%

Other traditions 38%

Mainline Protestant 30%

Secular 18%

Jewish 8%

Religious Movement

Evangelical 70%

Charismatic or Pentecostal 64%

Fundamentalist 63%

No movement identification 32%

Combinations of Doctrinal Essentials, Religious Tradition, and Religious Movement:

4 doctrines, evangelical tradition, evangelical movement 81%

3 doctrines, evangelical tradition, evangelical movement 70%

4 doctrines only 69%

4 doctrines, evangelical tradition, no religious movement 65%

3 or 4 doctrines, Roman Catholic tradition 56%

3 or 4 doctrines, black Protestant tradition, evangelical movement 56%

3 or 4 doctrines, mainline tradition, evangelical movement 55%

3 doctrines only 55%

3 doctrines, evangelical tradition, no religious movement 50%

3 or 4 doctrines, mainline tradition, no religious movement 46%

2 doctrines only 39%

1 or 2 doctrines, evangelical tradition, evangelical movement 36%

1 doctrine only 31%

1 or 2 doctrines, evangelical tradition, no religious movement 29%

No doctrines, evangelical tradition, no religious movement 28%

Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

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“Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness.” By Roger Penrose, Oxford University Press 457 pp.; $25

“The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain.” By Paul M. Churchland, MIT Press 329 pp.; $29.95

Possibly the most challenging and pervasive source of problems in the whole of philosophy. Our own consciousness seems to be the most basic fact confronting us, yet it is almost impossible to say what consciousness is.

So begins the entry on consciousness in “The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy,” by Simon Blackburn (Oxford University Press, 1994). Few would dispute the author’s judgment that the nature of consciousness is a particularly daunting puzzle. It is also, however, a puzzle that a number of thinkers in a variety of disciplines claim to have solved–in principle, at least. Witness the title of Daniel C. Dennett’s widely praised book, “Consciousness Explained” (Little, Brown, 1992).

There is no scholarly consensus here, and some prominent skeptics–Jerry Fodor and Colin McGinn, for example–have suggested that the problem of consciousness is by its very nature unlikely ever to be solved. Still, the problem is attracting an extraordinary amount of attention. Dennett’s book is just one of a large shelfful of recent studies of consciousness, beginning with “The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics,” by the mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose (Oxford University Press, 1989)–a book that appeared on bestseller lists at university campuses.1 In addition to the books intended for general audiences, there has been a steady flow of more specialized works. And in 1994, “The Journal of Consciousness Studies” began publication.

The surge of interest in consciousness has been driven in part by developments in two areas: neuroscience and computational models of the mind. Claims based on advances in these areas tend to set the agenda for consciousness studies–even in the case of thinkers who reject many of those claims (Roger Penrose and John Searle, for example). Two new books–“Penrose’s Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness” and Paul M. Churchland’s “The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain”–suggest the range of current attempts to establish the physical basis for human consciousness and underline the significance of that search.

“Shadows of the Mind” is a sequel to “The Emperor’s New Mind.” In part 1, “Why We Need New Physics to Understand the Mind,” Penrose argues as he did in the first volume that human mathematical understanding is inherently noncomputational, meaning that it could not, in principle, be simulated in its completeness by a computer. In part 2, “What New Physics We Need to Understand the Mind,” he speculates about the possibilities for developing a scientific understanding of consciousness, an understanding he argues is impossible in terms of current science.

The entirety of part 1 is really an extended development of a single argument, based on the famous mathematical result known as Godel’s Theorem. (The discussion inevitably becomes technical at points. Penrose tries to simplify it and to avoid relying on prior specialized knowledge, but the reader who is not fairly knowledgeable about science and mathematics is likely to find the going tough in places. Penrose encourages such a reader to skip the mathematics when it becomes impenetrable and to omit whole sections not needed for the basic understanding of the argument.) Godel’s Theorem asserts that every sufficiently complex, consistent, mathematical system is “incomplete” in the following sense: There is a true statement (the “Godel sentence”) that cannot be proved within the system, yet the sentence in question can be shown to be true, by the special methods devised by Godel himself.

This shows, according to Penrose, that human mathematical understanding cannot be represented by such a formal system. For the system cannot prove that its own Godel sentence is true, whereas the human mathematician, using mathematical insight, can prove this. Thus the human can do something the system itself is unable to perform. Of course, the point is not that mathematical understanding is unique in being noncomputational; rather, all true understanding is said to be noncomputational, but the rigorous nature of mathematical thought is what makes it possible to prove this conclusively in the area of mathematics.

Is Penrose right about this? I have no doubt that human understanding is noncomputational, but does Penrose succeed in proving it? His argument is complex and deserves a more thorough evaluation than is possible in this review. It seems to me, however, that at best what he has proved is the following: If human mathematical reasoning can be captured in a computational system, then the system is one no human being can grasp. (A human mathematician cannot prove her own Godel sentence.)

This result, if accepted, might be somewhat discouraging to those pursuing the goal of “artificial intelligence.” If they are unable to grasp the “human computational system” in its completeness, they will also be unable to construct an artificial system that possesses all the mathematical capabilities of human beings. It is not clear, however, that those who favor a computational theory of the mind need find the result unacceptable; it follows (if I am right about this) that Penrose has not proved that human consciousness is noncomputational. But readers interested in this type of argument should consult “Shadows of the Mind” for themselves.

In the second part of the book, Penrose takes the reader on an impressive tour of contemporary physics, arriving at the conclusion that no currently known physical theory can account for the noncomputational nature of the mind. Yet he insists that he does want a physical explanation of the basis of consciousness, and so he speculates about where in physics and biology such an explanation might be found.

After chapters on “Does Mind Have a Place in Classical Physics?” and “Structure of the Quantum World,” we reach the chapter on “Quantum Theory and the Brain,” where Penrose’s positive suggestions are presented; a chapter entitled “Implications?” ends the book. Perhaps most significant is Penrose’s recognition that, if consciousness is something that in the end has a physical explanation, the physics involved–the account of the nature of what we call “matter”–must be considerably different from physics as we know it at present.

Paul Churchland, professor of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, agrees with Penrose in seeking the physical basis of human mentality, but in most other respects their books stand in contrast. Penrose argues at length that human consciousness is noncomputational; according to Churchland, on the other hand, it is computational through and through–though admittedly in a different sense of “computational” than Penrose has primarily in mind.

Penrose argues that existing science offers no adequate basis for understanding the nature of consciousness and proceeds to probe the outer limits and unsolved problems of science in search of such a basis. Churchland, in contrast, seems quite satisfied with current science, so far as foundational understanding is concerned, and invites the reader to share his excitement in exploring the various dimensions of contemporary “cognitive science.” Last but perhaps not least, there is the difference in style. Penrose’s book, though well written, will prove a challenge in places to all but the most advanced readers. Churchland, on the other hand, has written Engine of Reason in a breezy, engaging style that will appeal to readers from undergraduates on up.

“How does the brain work? How does it sustain a thinking, feeling, dreaming self? How does it sustain a self-conscious person? New results from neuroscience and recent work with artificial neural networks together suggest a unified set of answers to these questions.” The first part of the book, entitled “The Little Computer that Could: The Biological Brain,” aims to “make those scientific developments available, in a lucid and pictorial form, to the general reading public.” (The book is generously illustrated, with both line drawings and photographs. There is even a simple stereo viewer, stored in a pocket inside the back cover, to enable the reader to appreciate stereo images that occur in two chapters.) The developments are indeed impressive and should prove fascinating to readers irrespective of their previous theoretical orientation.

The substance of the first part of the book lies in information about the brain gleaned from neuroscience and reports on the successes that have been achieved in simulating brain function on artificial “neural networks.” A key idea here is that of parallel distributed processing (pdp), in which one pattern is transformed into another by “passing it through a large configuration of synaptic connections.” This is a different style of computing than the more familiar serial processing found in conventional computers, in which a computer performs specified logical operations one at a time according to a predetermined sequence (the “program”). Neural networks are not “programmed” to perform their tasks; rather, they “learn” to perform them by being “trained” on a set of examples and gradually adjusting the “weights” of the “synaptic connections” between the artificial “neurons” in the computer. An interesting feature of this process is that a neural net can develop impressive abilities (such as the ability to recognize particular faces from a set on which it has been trained) without human beings having any detailed understanding of the processing involved.

Neural nets have been remarkably successful on many tasks, especially the sorts of tasks, such as perceptual recognition, that have proved intractable for traditional computers using linear processing. A neural net designed and trained to translate English-language text into spoken phonemes (thus enabling a computer to “read aloud”) achieved in a fairly brief period a proficiency comparable to that of a commercial “linear” program that took several man-years of programmer time to prepare. Other neural nets have developed proficiency for stereoscopic vision and the recognition of human facial expressions, among many other examples. There is, furthermore, considerable evidence that the methods used by the neural nets approximate those employed by the brain itself in solving similar problems. At a minimum, pdp using neural nets is much more similar to actual brain function than is traditional linear processing.

The second part of Churchland’s book, entitled “Exploring the Consequences: Philosophical, Scientific, Social, and Personal,” is where the controversial issues are fully joined. Perhaps the most important chapter here is chapter 8, “The Puzzle of Consciousness.” Unfortunately, this is also the most disappointing chapter in the book.

A central aim of the chapter is to refute the claim of philosophers such as Thomas Nagel, Frank Jackson, and John Searle that the qualitative nature of conscious experience is something that cannot be explained in terms of physical science. In a famous article, Nagel asks “What is it like to be a bat?” His point is that there must indeed be “something it is like to be” a bat; we don’t seriously doubt that bats do have subjective conscious experiences. But just what it is like to be a bat is quite unknown to humans; we lack a particular sort of sensory experience–the capacity to locate objects in our environment by bouncing sound waves off them–that is crucial for bats. Furthermore–and this is the essential point–no amount of scientific knowledge concerning the structure and function of a bat’s brain can tell us what it is like to be one.

Churchland’s answer to this argument contains serious misstatements about the philosophers he is criticizing. He implies, wrongly, that Nagel and Jackson are Cartesian dualists. And he criticizes Searle, in a thoroughly patronizing way, for adhering to a doctrine Searle himself explicitly repudiates, namely, the “infallibility of introspection … [which] has by now been so thoroughly discredited that it is plain curious to find a philosopher of Searle’s prominence still clinging to it.” Curious indeed–especially since Searle doesn’t!

More important, however, Churchland’s answer to the argument simply misses the point. He agrees that we have a particular way of knowing our own conscious experiences that we do not have in the case of other creatures, such as bats, or even for other human beings.

“Each individual gets information about the moving tapestry of his own sensory activity via a specific set of neuronal pathways that only he has.” But, he says, the fact that one has a way of knowing one’s own conscious states that is unique to oneself in no way shows that what is known in this way is different from what someone else knows by the ordinary methods of third-person observation. After all, each of us has a special way of knowing–through the proprioceptive system–about the positions of our own limbs, but this does not imply that the object of knowledge is different for oneself than it is for others.

This, of course, is true, but it misses the point. Nagel’s point–and Jackson’s, and Searle’s–is that the experiential quality of the conscious experience lies beyond the reach of physical science, something that obviously is not true of the positioning of one’s limbs. It seems to me that Nagel, Jackson, and Searle are just right about this, and this fact, while not necessarily fatal to materialism, is one with which materialistic philosophers like Churchland have to deal. Churchland, however, manages to ignore it.

And in the next chapter, “Could an Electronic Machine Be Conscious?,” he contends that a computer that functions in the same way as a brain could in principle be built using pdp and neural nets, and that such a computer, just because it functions this way, would be a conscious machine. There is no need to go looking, with Penrose, on the murky frontiers of science for the basis of consciousness; all we need is the right combination of copper wires and silicon chips, and your “friendly neighborhood robot” becomes a reality.

There is much, much more in the book that invites discussion. Churchland rejects–apparently with good reason–Noam Chomsky’s contention that the human brain contains a special “language organ,” hard-wired with the rules of universal grammar. And he criticizes Daniel Dennett’s theory of consciousness, on the grounds that Dennett has not properly appreciated the advantages of pdp over traditional serial processing.

Readers of BOOKS & CULTURE may be especially interested in Churchland’s attitude toward religion. In a word, it is dismissive; the most significant thing he says about religion is that religious ethics, because of its traditionalism, keeps us from learning from our mistakes and making moral progress. Presumably Churchland is delighted that the lessened influence of religion at present has opened the way for a much greater latitude in moral experimentation.

As has been noted, the one thing Penrose and Churchland conspicuously agree on is the need to find the physical basis of human consciousness. This could be a mistake–but then again, perhaps not. There is a large amount of evidence, some of it described by Churchland, that the functioning of the human mind is highly dependent, in very specific ways, on the functioning of the brain and nervous system. Mind-body dualists, who think the mind or soul is not fundamentally dependent on the brain, owe us a plausible account of these functional dependencies–an account that, so far as I know, is not yet forthcoming.

On the other hand, the view that the mind is somehow produced or generated by the brain is not in conflict with any essential Christian doctrine, including the belief in eternal life. It may be that we need to take more seriously than has generally been done the truth that we are created from the dust of the earth.

Beyond this point of agreement, Penrose and Churchland diverge radically. Penrose’s speculations, though in no way conclusive, should on the whole be welcome to Christian thinkers: he recognizes the profoundly mysterious nature of mind and consciousness and eschews simplistic, reductive solutions. Churchland, on the other hand, is reductivist to a degree that even many philosophical naturalists find implausible; he actually thinks we will eventually replace our present ways of talking about the mind, in terms of beliefs, desires, intentions, and the like, with talk in the language of neuroscience. (This is his “eliminative materialism.”)

At present, leadership in the philosophy of mind is largely, if not exclusively, in the hands of naturalists and materialists. There is need and, I believe, also a genuine opportunity for serious, constructive work by Christian philosophers in this vital field of philosophy. An excellent (and extremely readable) book on the subject written from a Christian standpoint is Charles Taliaferro’s “Consciousness and the Mind of God” (Cambridge University Press, 1994); let us hope it will be followed by many more.

1. Among the other books on that shelf are “The Mind Matters: Consciousness and Choice in a Quantum World,” by David Hodgson (Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 1991); “The Problem of Consciousness,” by Colin McGinn (Blackwell, 1991); “Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of Mind,” by Gerald M. Edelman (Basic, 1992); “Consciousness Reconsidered,” by Owen Flanagan (MIT Press, 1992); “A History of the Mind: Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness,” by Nicholas Humphrey (Simon & Schuster, 1992); The “Rediscovery of Mind,” by John Searle (MIT Press, 1992); “The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul,” by Francis Crick (Scribners, 1994); “Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain,” by Antonio R. Damasio (Grosset/Putnam, 1994); and “Mental Reality,” by Galen Strawson (MIT Press, 1994).

Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

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