“The End of Racism: Principles for a Multicultural Society,” by Dinesh D’Souza. Free Press, 724 pp.: $30

Born in Bombay, India, in 1961, Dinesh D’Souza is a first-generation immigrant who became a U.S. citizen in 1991. D’Souza, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of the widely debated bestseller “Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus” (1991), in which he documented the sometimes bizarre manifestations of the academy’s commitment to political correctness. In August of this year, Michael Cromartie, director of the Evangelical Studies Project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., talked with D’Souza about his new book, “The End of Racism: Principles for a Multicultural Society,” which promises to be even more controversial than its predecessor.

Dust-jacket blurbs are rarely worth quoting, but the startling tribute from political scientist Andrew Hacker that graces “The End of Racism” is an exception to the rule: “The End of Racism is wrong, dead wrong, on almost every topic it discusses and the explanations it offers. Yet it is an entrancing book, and I could not put it down. If I found myself arguing with every sentence, that shows how Dinesh D’Souza compels his readers to reassess their own assumptions.”

WHAT DOES YOUR TITLE THE END OF RACISM MEAN?

I am not saying that racism has come to an end. I am saying that racial discrimination has abated considerably from what it used to be. I am saying that racism is not the main problem faced by blacks today. I am saying that racism does not explain black failure. I am prescribing the end of racism–what we should do to get there–and I’m arguing that, in contrast, the liberal enterprise has been devoted to giving us 175 reasons for black failure: Why do blacks fail in college? It’s because the curriculum is Eurocentric. Why don’t they do as well on tests? The tests are biased. Why don’t they do as well in high school? Because the teachers have low expectations. This goes on and on. Ultimately, this edifice becomes increasingly implausible, and liberals themselves begin to suspect that Charles Murray may be right and maybe the reason that blacks are failing on so many levels is because they can’t succeed.

I’m saying that it’s not genetic, it’s cultural. The end of racism comes when blacks can show through experience that they are competitive, which discredits racism at its foundation. Black achievement dispels what some African American scholars have called “rumors of inferiority.” I began writing this book as a discussion of America as a multiracial society, and I came to realize that racism remains a problem focusing on blacks because, while people may not like Hispanics or Asians, they don’t think they are inferior. It is this suspicion of inferiority that is the heart of our problem.

The campaign for the end of racism is a political enterprise, but it’s also a moral enterprise. Ultimately, it is an attempt to realize the Christian principle of brotherhood, which transcends particularistic or polarizing affiliations based on race or ethnicity.

WHY DO YOU SAY THAT ANTIRACISM TODAY IS A MORE FORMIDABLE BARRIER FACING BLACKS THAN RACISM?

Antiracism is a problem for two reasons. The first is that it has begotten the increased racialization of American life. Even after enacting Martin Luther King’s entire public-policy agenda as far as race neutrality is concerned, Americans more than ever are encouraged to think of themselves in racial terms–and people who try to live without thinking of themselves in those terms are finding it increasingly difficult to do so. Our laws and policies are imbedded with racial categories and racial classification and racial discrimination. Race is the basis for hiring, for scholarships, for promotion, for government contracts, for voting districts. This is the legacy of the civil-rights movement having embraced the categories of the oppressors. The merchants of race have become the mirror image of the racists whose views they deplore.

Antiracism responds to black problems, whatever they may be, with one all-purpose slogan: “just say racism.” As a result, you have ever-more coercive campaigns against white racism and for sensitivity classes, sociologists who write papers on well-intentioned racism and unconscious racism, speech codes, hate-crime laws. Racism is the windmill in this quixotic crusade; tilting against it yields no dividends, except to those with a vested interest in perpetuating the antiracism industry. Blacks become more and more frustrated thinking that they haven’t toppled this adversary, and real problems become worse. We need a tremendous refocusing of attention on the basic problem, which is the uncompetitiveness of blacks in American society.

I don’t want to live in a society where equality of rights leads to scandalous inequality of results. That is a racial caste society. If colleges like Berkeley were to admit based solely on merit, almost the whole campus would be white and Asian. Of the remaining seats, Hispanics would have the majority, and blacks would have very few seats at all. One solution to this is to fool around with the rules, using racial preferences and so on to camouflage the embarrassing reality of black failure. The other approach, which I think is better, is to raise the competitive standards of blacks.

Ultimately, I’m making a statement of confidence in black ability, because if you believe that blacks can’t do it or are inherently deficient, then you are led to affirmative action. If someone has a natural handicap, then you have them run in the Special Olympics. I don’t think that kind of paternalism is necessary. What I’m trying to do is move the argument beyond affirmative action (which is merely the tip of the iceberg) to a comprehensive rethinking of our views of racism.

WHAT IS YOUR DEFINITION OF RACISM, AND HOW DOES YOUR ANALYSIS DIFFER FROM THE CONSENSUS?

The term racism is so promiscuously used today that very few people know what it really means, but the historical definition of racism is very clear. It is a belief in intrinsic group superiority or inferiority. To be a racist, you must believe (a) in race, believe that human beings can be distinguished into races; (b) that these races can be ranked hierarchically in terms of superior and inferior; and (c) that these rankings are biological or intrinsic. Typically, racism is accompanied by a desire to discriminate or segregate, to deprive people of rights.

In this book I challenge almost every received opinion about racism. I argue that racism is not universal, has not always existed; rather, it’s a product of the modern West. In contrast, ethnocentrism–which is simply tribalism, a preference for one’s own–is universal. People all over the world, all through time, have preferred their own families to their neighbors and their neighbors to strangers. That is a universal impulse, and its origins can’t be traced.

Racism, on the other hand, is a historical phenomenon that began in a particular culture at a particular time. It grew out of the Western enterprise to understand the world. To view racism solely in psychological terms as an irrational prejudice, a form of ignorance or fear or hate, misses the point that it developed in the West as an explanation–plausible at the time–for enormous observable differences between cultures. If you lived in the nineteenth century and looked around, you would see that one civilization had mapped the heavens and the globe, had invented the telescope and the microscope, had built the cathedral of Notre Dame and of Chartres. Other cultures by comparison appeared to be hopelessly primitive, rowing around in little boats and shooting blowpipes.

The origins of racism lie in comparativism–in the comparative study of culture, which became the science of anthropology. To most of the leading Western thinkers of the eighteenth century, it appeared transparently obvious that the races were not equal in endowment. (Eugene Genovese points out that Thomas Jefferson was in some ways more of a racist than the average Southern slaveholder precisely because he kept current with the latest scientific discoveries.) That outlook was reinforced in the nineteenth century by Darwinian thought: the races were seen as representing different stages on the evolutionary scale.

YOU WOULDN’T DENY THAT THERE IS AN ELEMENT OF IGNORANCE AND FEAR IN RACISM? YOUR AVERAGE KLANSMAN IN ALABAMA IS A PERSON WHO IS AFRAID OF ANOTHER RACE. ISN’T THAT ELEMENT THERE?

Absolutely. Racism began at the top, but it quickly migrated to the bottom, where it developed into a bogus aristocracy of color. Simply by virtue of the color of your skin you gained a certain degree of social prestige. Racism appealed to whites at the bottom of the totem pole because they could say: “Look, I may be an ignoramus, I’ve never been to school, but because I’m white I belong to this exclusive club, and therefore I’m better than W. E. B. Du Bois or Martin Luther King.”

YOU ARE QUITE CRITICAL OF THE CIVIL-RIGHTS MOVEMENT. WHY?

I argue that the problems of the civil-rights establishment today are rooted in the mistakes of the civil-rights movement from the beginning. This goes back to the debate in the early part of the century between Booker T. Washington and Du Bois, two great black leaders. Basically, Du Bois said that blacks face one problem, white racism, and we should fight it. Washington said, No, blacks face two problems: white racism and black cultural deficiency. Washington agreed with Du Bois that the reason for this cultural deficiency is the history of oppression–the legacy of slavery and the emerging culture of segregation. But he thought that despite that, blacks should work on both fronts, because it is black cultural pathologies that give a commonsensical support to white racism. White racists can say: “Look, obviously they are inferior, look at the way they behave.”

Du Bois was the founder of the NAACP, and from the very beginning the organization was shaped in his image. Its members fought a valiant and largely successful battle to overturn the legal structure of segregation and to outlaw racial discrimination. However, they paid little or no attention to the other side of the equation, which was to raise the cultural standards of blacks so that when blacks were given equal rights they would be equally competitive with other groups. The dilemma we face today is that equality of rights for individuals does not lead to equality of results for groups.

Competition based on merit, just like the old racism, produces inequality, and because it produces inequality, it is merit itself that is now suspected of being a racist concept. We hear the argument that racism has gone underground, it’s become more subtle, it operates through institutional structures, and so on. There’s a ferocious attack on the very idea of merit.

HOW DO YOU ACCOUNT FOR THE PERSISTENCE OF THESE “CULTURAL PATHOLOGIES,” AS YOU DESCRIBE THEM, THAT UNDERMINE BLACK ACHIEVEMENT?

What we see today among African Americans is the perpetuation of patterns of behavior that developed as an adaptation to historical oppression but are dysfunctional now. The anthropologist Elijah Anderson talks about two rival cultures in the inner city. There is a small, besieged culture of decency, made up of blacks who try to play by the rules, keep their families together, hold steady jobs, study hard, and so on. We don’t hear enough about this segment of the African American community, which tends to be ignored by the media. But there is also a rival culture characterized by incivility, promiscuity, and violence. And this is the culture that dominates the inner city.

Scholars have shown how many of the distinctive features of this culture can be traced to the archetypal “Bad Negro,” a figure celebrated in various guises throughout African American history. Under slavery, if you were a runaway or a rebel or if you burned the master’s barn down, you could be admired because you didn’t allow your spirit to be crushed. Similarly, under segregation the outlaw figure was revered–take, for example, the bluesman Robert Johnson, with his womanizing and his pact with the Devil.

In a system where you have little or no chance to succeed, even though you play by the rules, this defiant “oppositional culture” makes sense as a response to oppression. But in the America of the 1990s, it is profoundly dysfunctional. “Bad Negroes” end up in the hospital or in jail or in the morgue, and they are taking whole neighborhoods down with them. And yet there is a paralyzing inability on the part of leading black intellectuals and political pundits to proclaim one of the two cultures in the inner city as better than the other.

WHAT IS YOUR VIEW OF SIN AND EVIL AND THE SHEER PERVERSITY OF THE HUMAN HEART? IT SEEMS THAT IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO UNDERSTAND RACISM WITHOUT LOOKING AT SOME OF THESE ISSUES.

Much of the public-policy dilemma that we face seems at first glance to be a betrayal of the classical liberal notion that we should be judged as individuals, and that all of us have the same rights. That is my premise in the beginning of the book, and it was Martin Luther King’s premise. But as I began to work on this book, I came to realize that the color-blind society cannot work if it’s not accompanied by a deeper project of cultural reformation. And the reformation of the culture begins with the reformation of the individuals within it. The classical liberal solution is not enough. It has to be complemented with an embrace of more conservative or traditional understandings that make the old distinction between civilization and barbarism.

Tocqueville was right when he said that American society is held strong by the reciprocal tension between liberal institutions (free markets, free discussion, religious freedom, separation of church and state), on the one hand, and on the other hand, a Christian ethic. While capitalism and freedom lead to self-expression and a focus on the self, Christianity leads to a focus on the other and the otherworldly. We need that balance. No solution is possible that simply says, Let’s go back to the liberal society. We should do that, but we also need a complementary project of raising personal and social standards. The beginning of that is to abandon relativism and recognize that standards do exist; only then can we begin to aspire to them. We need to aspire to truth in our educational system and to virtue in our personal and social lives.

YOU DON’T DENY THAT A LOT OF THESE PROBLEMS ARE ROOTED IN OUR HUMAN NATURE?

I agree they are. I would argue that the universal tribalism of human nature, by which I mean selfishness, can never be eradicated, only moderated. Racism can be transcended. It had a beginning in time, and it can have an end. I am fairly optimistic about the younger generation, which I think is less race-conscious than any earlier generation in American history. Born after the civil-rights movement, young people today find it inconceivable to put people in the back of the bus or make them drink out of a separate fountain. And at the same time, they are more opposed to racial preferences than any other age bracket; having gone to the same schools and listened to the same music, they find it rather odd when groups are singled out for arbitrary preferences.

That is why my book, although a very tough book, is ultimately a hopeful book. If your problems lie in your genes, there is nothing you can do about them, but if your problems are a function of culture, there is a basis for hope, because culture can be changed. My book is based upon a certain degree of confidence in black cultural autonomy and the ability of blacks to transform their culture.

YOU HIGHLIGHT IN THE BOOK MANY NEW AFRICAN AMERICAN REFORMERS. WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE, AND WHAT ARE THE THEMES THAT THEY EMPHASIZE?

The black reformers are united by their rejection of racism as the sole explanation for the problems faced by blacks and other minorities. They are united by emphasizing the need to acknowledge black cultural deficiency and black cultural pathologies. They are not euphemistic. They are willing to confront the problem, which is the prerequisite to solving it. They do not accept the notion that identifying one’s own problems is simply blaming the victim. The reformers tend to believe that the victim is not to blame for his victimization, but he may be partly responsible for dealing with it.

The reformers look to concrete strategies that can be spearheaded within the black community to address its problems. There is a certain irony to the refrain of the civil-rights movement: “America is a racist society; whites are to blame for black problems; we expect the whites (the oppressors) to solve these problems.” The reformers are more realistic. They don’t deny the existence of racism, but they don’t pursue it with Captain Ahablike obsessiveness, either. They believe that every group ultimately advances on its own strength, and that what is really missing for blacks in American society is the freely given respect of their peers. Much of what is called “middle-class black rage” is a response to the failure to earn that respect. This cannot be conferred by affirmative action, which gives it patronizingly but not genuinely. The black reformers are a small movement, but they are a movement that I am trying to encourage. In their success is our hope.

AREN’T YOU FINDING THAT THESE BLACK REFORMERS ARE NOT ONLY CONSERVATIVES–THAT THEY INCLUDE LIBERALS AS WELL?

I think that there are a number of moderates and neoliberals among the reformers. I would name from the academic world Randall Kennedy at Harvard Law School, Stephen Carter at Yale, and William Julius Wilson at the University of Chicago. In the political sphere, Clarence Page, William Raspberry, Juan Williams. Many of these reformers realize how lethal it is to be viewed as dissenting from the civil-rights orthodoxy. They realize that they are likely to be called “Oreos” and “Uncle Toms.” As a result, they sometimes have to engage in an elaborate balancing act in which their criticisms are tempered so as not to be viewed as dissent.

TOWARD THE END OF THE BOOK YOU SAY THAT WE NEED A NEW PUBLIC ETHIC OF RESPONSIBILITY. WHAT WOULD THAT PUBLIC ETHIC LOOK LIKE?

Conservatives should respect the liberal doctrine of rights, and liberals should respect the conservative emphasis on accountability and responsibility. Rights acquire their moral significance when they are exercised responsibly. The voluntary embrace of Christ’s saving message acquires a greater significance because it is voluntary and is not coerced; I do it out of my free will. On the other hand, the value of my freedom is that it permits me to make that choice. The freedom exists, not for its own sake, but to allow me to choose wisely. Relativism has introduced the deification of choice, choice for its own sake.

A public ethic of responsibility would work at several levels. When we look at public policies over the last generation, we have basically been looking at their distributive impact, redistributing money progressively from the rich to the poor with little attention to the behavioral consequences of those incentives and disincentives. We need to rethink our public policy. Every public policy should be measured not solely by its redistributive impact, but also by its impact on the behavior and, indeed, the character of citizens. We are our brother’s keeper, and we do owe each other filial responsibilities.

One of the tragedies of the welfare state is that it has removed the moral fiber from the transaction between the giver and the receiver. So essentially, the government becomes an intermediary, the giver becomes an angry taxpayer, and the receiver becomes someone who feels entitled and thus not obligated in any way.

I am not of the view that we are spending too much money on welfare. I do think, however, that our welfare policy is asking us to act toward strangers in a way that we would not act toward our own relatives. If my cousin came to me and said that she had made a terrible mistake, that she had been deceived by this man and was pregnant and needed $300 a month to help her out, I would say yes. If she showed up a year later and said that she was pregnant again and wanted an additional $300 a month, this would make me angry, and at the very least I would want to impose some stern restrictions. Something that we would do unhesitatingly in our daily lives the government does not do.

Not only that, there is a tremendous uproar when even the least onerous of responsibilities are suggested for welfare recipients. For example, Congress is debating welfare legislation that would ask people to get off welfare in five years! This seems to me to be plenty of time to overcome a change in the weather of one’s fortunes. The Democrats have introduced proposed exceptions to this rule, so that if you live in an area that has 7.5 percent unemployment or more, even the five-year rule goes out the window. That basically applies to every single inner city in the country. In effect, the reform would be meaningless.

So we need to pay more attention to the effect of policies on behavior. I also agree with Gertrude Himmelfarb that we need to have a public debate that is conducted in the lexicon of right and wrong–right and wrong not necessarily oriented toward the salvation of one’s soul, but right and wrong in the sense of one’s civic responsibilities, one’s duties to fellow citizens. That language, which was at one time second nature, now seems quaint and outdated, but I think people are beginning to feel the need for it, and so there might be a movement for its recovery.

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

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There is justice in the criticism that movies generally treat Christianity with scorn, when they aren’t simply ignoring its very existence. Only rarely are earnest Christians portrayed sympathetically. Most often they are buffoonish foils or, as in the recent and despicable Just Cause, dangerous freaks on the sideshow of life’s carnival. But as I realized while watching John Boorman’s latest work, Beyond Rangoon, Western filmmakers do often engage Eastern religions with a mixture of curiosity and respect.

While we may rightly hope for more sympathetic depictions of Christian faith, I don’t think Christians need point East and complain, grade-school style, “You take their religion seriously, but not ours.” In the autobiographical “Now and Then,” Frederick Buechner recalls his days of teaching religion at Exeter boarding school. He found Buddhism a valuable subject to study alongside Christianity because “it was both so like it in some ways and so different in others that to study the two side by side was, both in comparison and by contrast, to discover something new about each.” His students (like many filmmakers?) found Christian ideas “stale and obvious” through overexposure. To juxtapose those ideas with exotic names and unfamiliar images was to have Christianity come alive again. Likewise, Christians–and Jews, who share the same roots and, to a degree, the same frame of reference–might enjoy films about Buddhists (and other Easterners) as opportunities to cast their faith in a new and sometimes revealing light.

Boorman’s Rangoon is the latest such promising film. I want to enlist with it an earlier piece with similar themes, the 1991 Australian movie Turtle Beach (released to video as Killing Beach).

Both stories are set in conditions of oppression. Beyond Rangoon unfolds in Burma in the late 1980s, when a military dictatorship violently stifles an emerging democratic movement. Turtle Beach concerns the plight of Vietnamese boat people fleeing to Malaysia in the late 1970s. Both stories feature female Anglo protagonists thrust into crises in lands and among people they barely understand, but come to appreciate. Rangoon’s Laura (Patricia Arquette) is a medical doctor on a getaway tour of the Far East, stranded in Burma due to passport problems. Beach’s Judith (Greta Sacchi) is an Australian journalist on assignment in Malaysia, drawn by a new friendship into more passionate involvement with the boat people. And both heroines, cast into the middle of political crises of extreme cruelty and desperation, must struggle with personal crises as well. Laura is touring the East to forget and heal from the horror of finding her husband and son murdered by a house burglar. Judith, divorced, faces a battle with her ex over custody of their children.

A comment from Turtle Beach may most immediately suggest the resonance of these films for Jews and Christians willing to look East. Malaysia hardly has the resources to deal with thousands of Vietnamese refugees, and so the boat people languish in stinking island camps. Many, when first arriving at Malaysia’s Turtle Beach, are beaten and hacked to death by the villagers, who feel threatened by the flood of immigrants. An Australian diplomat remarks that the boat people are the “Jews of Asia.”

This invites a question: Just how Jewish are the boat people? They are certainly suffering and oppressed, but how does the way these (mostly Buddhist) boat people suffer and bear their oppression compare to the way Jews have suffered and borne theirs?

The question of the suffering Buddhist is raised directly in Beyond Rangoon. Laura tours the Burmese countryside with her guide, a former Buddhist monk. One evening she confesses to him the awful personal tragedy she has come East to forget. Then she allows that, until the murders, she thought she lived with a “right” to happiness. Her guide responds that the (Buddhist) Burmese expect suffering, not happiness. When happiness comes, it is to be enjoyed as a gift, but with awareness that it will soon certainly pass.

I suspect this Buddhist estimation of happiness as a transient gift is closer to the attitudes of traditional Judaism and Christianity than is Laura’s presumption of the right to happiness. But her guide is not unaware of difficult ironies inherent in Buddhist detachment. At another time he suggests that his people, resigned to suffering, may too easily accept the cruelties of autocratic rule.

I take him to refer to the nature of Buddhist hope. The ultimate Buddhist hope is to leave the wheel of birth and rebirth and enter into the ineffable bliss of Nirvana. The Jewish (and, following it, the Christian) hope is different. It is a hope for a new heaven and earth. Consequently, Jews (and Christians, when they are truest to their own heritage) are never very tolerant of injustice. They not only follow Moses out from under Pharaoh’s mean hand, but take several cartfuls of Egyptian treasure with them. Their prophets do not counsel detachment, but call for lamentation and remembrance that Israel’s God will someday vindicate Israel against its enemies. As N. T. Wright has memorably argued, Jewish monotheism is a fighting creed.

Yet it will not do to leap to the conclusion that Buddhists have no “native” resources to resist injustice. After all, one of the most compelling figures in Beyond Rangoon is the leader of the democratic movement (and 1991 Nobel laureate) Aung San Suu Kyi. In a scene based on an actual incident, she leads peaceable marchers through the streets of Rangoon. Suddenly they are faced by dozens of soldiers, with rifles aimed and cocked. Suu Kyi stops the marchers and, armed only with a quivering smile, steps into the rifles. The soldiers, literally disarmed by her uncanny serenity, drop their guns and let the marchers pass. Apparently Suu Kyi’s Buddhist spirituality gives her courage to accept that she has nothing to lose but her life. And so, to borrow the title of her book, it grants her a politically potent “Freedom from Fear.”

This may lead us affluent Western Christians to some salutary self-examination. How much injustice, how much neglect, how much dilution of our faith do we permit in order to hang on to so much more than our lives? To what degree are we so inured to the comforts of modernity that we fail to imagine a world secure and peaceable not just for ourselves, but for all (or at least more and more of) earth’s people?

Turtle Beach can sharpen these questions with its consideration of the theme of sacrifice. The friend who draws our Australian journalist more intimately into the plight of the boat people is herself a former boat person. She is Minou (played in a mixed key of bravery and vulnerability by the beautiful Joan Chen). Minou, formerly forced into prostitution, has been discovered and married by the Australian ambassador, Lord Hobday. This gives her status to head up an international refugee relief committee. But, as Judith learns, Minou’s passion for the boat people is not fueled only by national kinship. Minou has three children who did not escape Vietnam with her; she wants desperately to get them out safely.

The greatest danger her children face, if they make Malaysia, are the machete-bearing hordes likely to meet them at the beach. Only once has Minou seen the villagers drop their weapons: when a boat sank offshore and 200 Vietnamese drowned, the Hindu Malaysians saw this as sacrifice enough and let the survivors be. Minou takes this to heart. Later, while at her Buddhist prayer, she is struck by a vision, a possible way of getting her children ashore safely.

Obtaining information through the black market, Minou learns when her children have embarked from Vietnam. Since she cannot swim, she has before enlisted Judith to help starving and emaciated boat people out of the surf. She does so again. And her boat–her children’s boat–comes in. But while it is still a few hundred yards from shore, the armed villagers appear. Judith looks on in confusion as Minou rows a raft out to the boat, greets her children, then rows away from the boat. She stands in the raft, secures the villagers’ attention, then throws herself into the ocean. Seeing that she does not surface again, that she has deliberately chosen death, the villagers put down their weapons and cease their clamoring.

Judith, who has rescued Minou’s children, is horrified and outraged. A Malaysian friend, on the scene with her, lashes back, “You Westerners know nothing about sacrifice. … It’s a very noble act.” As if to confirm the Malaysian’s suspicions, at a subsequent press conference an Australian journalist characterizes Minou’s “noble act” as “suicide.”

At last summer’s Christian Booksellers Association convention, one booth, vending athletic wear, featured a larger-than-life-size sculpture of Jesus doing pushups with the cross resting on his shoulders. In light of such travesties, movies like Beyond Rangoon and Turtle Beach ask some probing theological questions. Do modern Westerners understand sacrifice? Can Westerners understand sacrifice?

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

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“Public Religions in the Modern World,” by Jose Casanova. University of Chicago Press, 320 pp.; $49.95, hardcover; $17.95, paper.

A generation ago, scholarly observers of religion generally believed that faith was rapidly retreating from active, organized engagement with public life. Today that view seems blatantly wrong. People of faith have become significant forces in the politics of most Middle Eastern, Eastern European, and Latin American countries, and they are not without importance in Korea and Taiwan, India, Ireland, and the United States.

Understanding why religion has rediscovered its political voice is one of the urgent tasks of our time, and it is complicated by the fact that different religious traditions and national customs must be understood in their own contexts. In “Public Religions in the Modern World,” Jose Casanova usefully examines how Christians in four societies have entered into a new engagement with civil society in recent decades. In Spain, leaders of the Catholic church have struggled successfully against efforts to disestablish it and transform it into a purely voluntary church; the church has managed to maintain itself as an established church with considerable influence over the Spanish government. In Poland, the Catholic church emerged from suppression under Communist rule to serve as an important mobilizing force for the Solidarity movement in the 1980s and now has an active voice in the new government. The Brazilian church, under quite different conditions, has survived disestablishment to become an influential national church in alliance with the secular state. Finally, Catholicism in the United States after the Second Vatican Council and evangelical Protestantism after the middle 1970s provide further instances of Christian groups learning new ways of playing a role in political affairs.

The U.S. case becomes especially interesting in light of these comparisons. Whereas Christianity was an established national church in each of the other countries, it has always been separate from government in the United States, and its diverse manifestations have resulted in a denominational pattern that encouraged Christians to respect one another even when they disagreed. But denominationalism also meant staying out of politics and thinking of faith largely as a private matter. The fact that religious groups have become politically active in recent years is all the more notable for this reason.

Casanova argues that the “deprivatization” of religion poses an important challenge to understandings of religion that have emphasized the idea of secularization. This is a timely argument because it reinforces the view that academics have used such a wide brush in dealing with religion that they have painted themselves (and it) into a corner. Ethnographic and comparative studies, feminist approaches, and discussions of postmodernism all suggest that social reality is more complicated than it was once thought to be. Casanova’s perspective retains some of the valuable insights of the older literature while contributing a more nuanced understanding of secularization. As he argues, secularization happens in multiple ways, depending on its social location. In the United States, membership and attendance at religious services has remained relatively constant, yet this fact does not disprove the secularization thesis, as some have suggested, because important spheres of social activity, such as counseling, education, and hospital care, have also become more autonomous from religious organizations. Secularization is also evident in the ways in which religious services adapt to consumerist and therapeutic motifs in the wider culture. Casanova’s point, nevertheless, is that religion’s return to public life runs counter to these other forms of secularization.

In Casanova’s view, public religion is here to stay–a thesis that many observers are likely to find credible for at least two reasons. One is that religious organizations have developed the leadership, communications technology, and financial base with which to perpetuate themselves into the foreseeable future. Their fortunes may wax and wane, depending on the political and economic climate of particular societies, but they are unlikely to recede willingly from articulating their claims. The other reason is the shift away from strong, centralized political regimes capable of suppressing religious movements. The collapse of the Soviet Union has unleashed ethnic and regional rivalries in Eastern Europe that have often been organized along religious lines, and these struggles in turn have encouraged religious groups in the Middle East, Latin America, and Western Europe to champion similar ethnic and regional causes. In the United States, the collapse of the welfare state and widespread cynicism about the role of federal government have created similar opportunities for grassroots religious movements.

The return of religion to public life has, however, raised widespread concern about how responsibly its influence will be exercised. Militant fundamentalists who overthrow regimes in the Middle East and violent anti-abortion protests in the United States evoke fears that religious convictions may tap more deeply into mass hysteria and personal passion than even the best democratic institutions are capable of handling.

In a word, the issue is trust. When Christians keep quiet about their convictions, they tacitly agree to trust one another and to behave in ways that do not give offense, but when Christians claim that their beliefs have implications for public policy, it becomes relevant to ask whether they can be trusted to participate responsibly in civil society.

Certainly mistrust has been much in evidence. Adherents of one faith distrust those of another faith because they do not understand it, and they wonder if spiritual conviction is actually at work or if political agendas are being manipulated in the name of faith. Public officials who are used to governing on the basis of legal principles and common administrative procedures distrust religious groups whose values may not be so easily reducible to those principles and procedures. Some Christians generate mistrust because their convictions are so strong that they seem intent on imposing them on everyone else; other Christians generate mistrust because their beliefs seem incapable of giving them any moral guidance on public matters at all.

The problem of mistrust has a long history. Framers of modern democratic theory in eighteenth-century Europe were profoundly influenced by the religious wars that had dominated the previous century and a half. Locke’s emphasis on tolerance and Rousseau’s idea of a social contract were efforts to find unifying agreements that would discourage religious groups from appealing absolutely to a higher source of authority. The idea of civil society emerged as a way of saying that people who disagree with each other about such vital matters as religion could nevertheless live together in harmony.

The privatism that came to characterize modern religion during the first half of the twentieth century was the result of long-term social processes that gave religion a place in which it could be exercised with relative freedom and in a way that did not undermine public trust. Privatism meant that individuals could believe as devoutly as they wished and practice their faith as actively as they wanted to as long as they did not intentionally try to curb the rights of others to do the same. It did not exclude religion from influencing public life but encouraged it to do so through the involvement of devout individuals in other institutions, rather than through organized religious efforts by themselves. Privatism nevertheless depended on a wide variety of free, voluntary religious organizations that could support individuals in their quest for faith and, indeed, that could also represent these individuals in public according to commonly accepted norms. The fact that Catholics were expected to bring their convictions to public life primarily as individuals did not mean, for example, that the Catholic church was prevented from functioning as a voluntary, nongovernmental institution.

Trust of religiously minded people was reinforced by this arrangement, because individuals with deeply held convictions were expected to work through established institutions to achieve their aims, and because religious institutions themselves were understood to be part of a specialized system of organizations that worked together. For example, a church board might formulate statements about doctrinal or ethical matters, and even participate in discussions of policy matters, but recognize that the special expertise of scientists, transportation engineers, and professional planners was also important.

The breakdown of this arrangement had as much to do with religious organizations’ growing emphasis on the purely personal aspects of private faith as it did with any deliberate effort by secularists to marginalize religious organizations. What analysts of privatism found worrisome even in the 1960s was church leaders’ tendency to treat faith as a kind of therapy, concerned chiefly with making people feel happy and with adjusting emotionally to contemporary life, rather than linking these concerns with civic participation. As faith became increasingly subjective, it was thus harder for people to know who they could trust and, indeed, whether they could trust themselves (as illustrated by Robert Bellah’s famous example of Sheila in “Habits of the Heart,” the woman who invented her own religion–“Sheilaism”). Mistrust of others and questions about one’s own identity went hand in hand.

When religion becomes so thoroughly privatized that people are no longer sure who they can trust, one solution is to promote greater social interaction, as is being done by advocates of the communitarian movement and by leaders of voluntary associations. Churches, too, increasingly speak of themselves as communities in hopes of overcoming privatized spirituality. When people interact with each other in these communal settings, they are likely to develop interpersonal trust. This kind of trust gives people confidence that they are not entirely alone in their views and thus, as Tocqueville argued, can participate in civil society. Christians who are members of such communities can answer confidently that other Christians –at least ones like themselves–can be trusted.

But communal interaction of this kind is not sufficient to guarantee trustworthy civic participation. The Branch Davidians and the Michigan Militia are evidence of that. Members may trust one another, but they give the wider public scant reason to believe that they can be trusted. Short of such extremes, congregations also fail to promote genuine trust when they are too large or too diverse for members to gain an understanding of one another. Under such circumstances, the fragile trust on which harmony in congregations is built may be fractured when people break their silences and say what they believe, or when the congregation’s decision to become involved in social issues forces members to confront one another.

There is a second kind of trust, however, which might be called institutional trust, that does not depend entirely on firsthand, personal acquaintance. The reason that Jaycees, Kiwanis, Lions Club, scouts, labor unions, and Sunday-school classes play an essential role in civil society is not only that members interact with one another in intimate settings, but also that these organizations are linked to one another, to community leaders, and to public officials through a complex set of network ties and institutional arrangements. In a large, diverse society like that of the United States, institutional trust is especially important. People may not know each other well enough to trust their neighbors, but it is possible to trust the system of laws, roles, and organizations in which these neighbors are embedded.

Whether or not Christians can be trusted is thus a question about the institutional arrangements on which civil society depends as much as it is about individual benefits, commitments to absolute values, or even extremism. Christians can be trusted to participate responsibly in civil society to the extent that they form organizations that connect them to broader social institutions and to the extent that they participate in a wide variety of civic organizations. The Christian Coalition’s effort to work within the Republican Party is an example of such integrative efforts. Were there comparable organizations giving Christians a voice in the Democratic Party, public trust in the ability of Christians to consider social issues from a variety of perspectives would be enhanced. Were the Christian Coalition shunned by the Republican Party to the point that it chose to pursue its own autonomous objectives, there would justifiably be greater public mistrust of its members.

In this analysis, the concerns expressed by Stephen Carter, Richard John Neuhaus, and others about the exclusion of Christians from public life are well founded for no other reason than the fact that exclusion, real or imagined, discourages Christians from working with other organizations. But, by the same token, organizations that claim to be the exclusive bearers of God’s truth isolate themselves in ways that damage both their own cause and the degree to which Christians can be trusted to participate in public life.

In the end, mistrust of Christians is ultimately less about the potential for fanaticism among believers than it is about Americans’ broader sense that the institutional fabric of civil society is becoming frayed. Militias, cults, radical anti-abortionists, and people who hear voices from God worry many Americans precisely because they fear that others care too little about America to stand up for what is right about its political system, and because they suspect that public officials are too distant or too corrupt to respond adequately to such threats. In asking whether Christians can be trusted, therefore, the real question must always be whether Americans trust themselves enough to support the institutions on which civil society depends.

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

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One of the most important lessons we can learn from an examination of economic life is that a nation’s well-being, as well as its ability to compete, is conditioned by a single, pervasive cultural characteristic: the level of trust inherent in the society. …

The liberal democracy that emerges at the end of history is therefore not entirely “modern.” If the institutions of democracy and capitalism are to work properly, they must coexist with certain premodern cultural habits that ensure their proper functioning. Law, contract, and economic rationality provide a necessary but not sufficient basis for both the stability and prosperity of postindustrial societies; they must as well be leavened with reciprocity, moral obligation, duty toward community, and trust, which are based in habit rather than rational calculation. The latter are not anachronisms in a modern society but rather the sine qua non of the latter’s success.

–Francis Fukuyama in Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (Free Press, 457 pp.; $25).

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

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Sometimes it is polite and oblique: “What, ah, do you hope to do differently?” Other times it is blunt, even accusatory: “Why in the world do we need another translation of the Bible?” The consensus seems to be that America needs another Bible translation like it needs more law schools. At times I feel like joining a 12-step support group: “Hello. My name is Dan, and I am a recovering Bible translator.” And yet the same people who ask the question–one I initially asked myself–are often very curious about how a Bible translation comes about. Allow me to play Beatrice (or is it Virgil?) on a brief tour of one translation now in progress.

I fill the role of stylist on a new translation of the Bible financed by Tyndale House Publishers of Wheaton, Illinois. The primary role of the stylist in a translation is to worry over the effectiveness of the language into which the text is translated. In general, Bible scholars worry first about accuracy; stylists worry first about effectiveness. Together they labor to create a final product that is both faithful to the original text and compelling to the modern reader–Scylla and Charybdis goals that have brought many a translation to grief.

The final outcome of a Bible translation is greatly influenced by the organizational structures created to produce it. Flow charts change the end product of the processes they purport merely to describe. Some projects are very hierarchical. Scholars work on portions of a translation at the fundamental levels and pass that work up to a higher level, never to see what becomes of their work until, years later, they get their free copy of the translation in the mail.

Others, like ours, are more democratic. Six major translators are responsible for various sections of the Bible–the Pentateuch, History, Poetry, Prophets, Gospels, and Epistles. Each translator has three advisers for each book within that section. These advisers are chosen for their expertise in that particular book and aid the major translator in creating an initial translation of it. That version is sent to the stylist, who goes over it, making suggestions for changes–a process that may take several months. The translator and the stylist then meet in person, usually for three to six days, to go over every word of the translation and agree tentatively on a new draft. That draft is then sent to each of the original advisers of the translator, as well as to the publishing company’s editor.

Subsequently, a meeting takes place bringing together the three advisers, the main translator, the stylist, and sometimes the publisher’s editor, producing yet another draft. (One must sometimes have a great tolerance for daylong meetings to do God’s work.) After various further steps, still another version of the translation of that book comes to the Bible translation committee for further changes and final approval. That committee consists of the six major translators, the stylist, and representatives from the sponsoring publishing company.

It is said that people should not see how either their sausage or their laws are made. Perhaps the same could be said of their Bible translations. There is, sad to say, no angelic music heard in the background at most of these meetings. I am greatly impressed by the scholarship, hard work, goodwill, and genuine devoutness of my colleagues on this project. I am also keenly aware how human we are. A phrasing that would die an unlamented death at nine in the morning will somehow survive if it comes up instead at four in the afternoon after a long and tiring day. God willing, it meets its just reward at the next level of review, but I have spent too much time noting the infelicities in existing translations to have overwhelming confidence in that.

It must have been late in the day, for instance, when the New Jerusalem Bible translators nodded approval for “when the guests are well wined” (John 2:10), or the NIV had the psalmist declare, “To this I will appeal: the years of the right hand of the Most High” (Ps. 77:10), or the NRSV translators thought they were using modern English with “they have subverted me with guile” (Ps. 119:78). Like Guido da Montefeltro (see the epigraph to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”), I hazard these examples only because my own sins are years from public revelation. In fact, my admiration for existing translations has only grown, seeing as I do now how daunting is the task.

It is impossible, in fact, not to feel the accomplishment of existing translations even as one tries to make them somewhat obsolete. They are both friends and competitors, pioneers who have paved the way and impediments to a fresh expression of the timeless message. Harold Bloom argues that all poets feel the need of slaying the masters who have taught them, and some of this “anxiety of influence” is at work beneath the surface in each new translation.

My personal experience has been simultaneously profound and mundane. A sense of great privilege and responsibility alternates regularly with one of inadequacy and tedium (try building the tabernacle in Exodus–curtain by curtain, ring by ring, measurement by measurement–twice). The feeling that this is the most important thing I will ever do alternates regularly with the question, “Why I am doing this?”

My stylizing contribution is strikingly low-tech. For the first time since grade school, I am back to using a pencil. A computer is not helpful initially because I need to suggest multiple alternatives at any one point, while still retaining the original version. Nothing is deleted until agreement is reached at a later stage. (And speed is definitely not a factor.)

I typically work with a triple-spaced, typed manuscript with liberal margins. I might pencil in three or four alternatives, stacked on top of each other above a noun or verb. Or I might suggest a change in word order, or even a radically different approach to rendering the verse. I draw lines and arrows, cross out without obscuring, ask questions and make pronouncements in the margins, and sometimes doodle. (Doodling keeps the analytic mind busy while the more creative parts work on an improvement for one translation’s description of the parting of the Red Sea–dare any version accurately call it the Sea of Reeds?–“the deep waters congealed / in the heart of the sea.”)

The single most common thing I do, however, is eliminate unnecessary words. In one example among hundreds, I suggested changing an early version of Exodus 2:2, She noticed immediately that there was something special about the child, so she hid him for three months (18 words), to Sensing that he was special, she hid him for three months (11 words). As a class, Bible scholars love words like a mother loves her children. Even the homely ones are precious, and parted from with reluctance. (I would just as soon not know what Bible scholars say about stylists.)

As the stylist, I do what T. S. Eliot accused Tennyson of doing in his poetry–I ruminate. I chew over each word and phrase of the Bible, and, as my mother instructed, I chew slowly. This usually is not for me, as many assume, a devotional experience. The pace is too slow and the units of text too small to feel very often the devotional impact of the Scripture at hand. Neither is it an academic experience. I learn a great amount–both from the text and from the scholars I work with–but it is disjointed and anecdotal knowledge.

Primarily, my work is a daily encounter with language. I ponder connotations and nuances of meaning, listen to the sound of words echoing off words, feel for their rhythm as they jostle for position. And after doing all that and seeing I still haven’t gotten it right, I find myself hoping a colleague across the country is having better luck with the passage than I am.

But what does getting it right mean? How does one know a good translation when one sees or hears it? These questions, and many more, cannot be answered without recourse to translation theory. And the test of every theory is the text produced when that theory is worked out in practice.

All translation is interpretation, as George Steiner and others have pointed out. At every point, the translator is required to interpret, evaluate, judge, and choose. Every text is thickly layered with unique and sometimes incommensurable features of form (Hebrew parallelism and puns, for instance), content (emotions associated with the liver or kidney), and context (ancient ideas about where gods live and how they are to be appeased), not to mention the very sound of words. Because no translation can hope to do justice to every feature in the original, choices are made. Every choice entails a value judgment. This does not mean that translation is merely subjective, but we should guard against the illusion that there is a single right way of treating translation in general or any one passage in particular.

The Holy Grail of contemporary Bible translation is the often elusive combination of accuracy and readability. No translation that aspires to wide use within the church and academia can afford to be labeled inaccurate (or, heaven forbid, a paraphrase); no translation that hopes to be read by the laity can be found difficult or dull. These twin concerns set the agenda for the great majority of our project’s discussions, both theoretical and practical. Assertions of “That’s what it says” are constantly balanced by “Is that how we would say it in English today?”

Consider, for example, the almost universal practice of contemporary translations in using the word fullness in John 1:16, as does the NRSV: “From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.” What does the idea of receiving something from someone’s “fullness” convey to the average reader today? Almost nothing, I would argue. And is fullness the only accurate translation of the underlying Greek word? In fact, is it even accurate itself if it hides the meaning of the text rather than revealing it? (This is the only use of the word in John; it is an important concept for Paul.)

The first draft of our translation’s rendering of this verse also used fullness. Further discussion raised multiple alternatives: completeness, all-sufficiency, complete sufficiency, divine abundance. Our tentative rendering, subject to change at later stages, is From his abundance we have all received overflowing grace, a reading that we believe is accurate, understandable, and felicitous.

The theories lying behind most Bible translation in the last 35 years are some form of the dynamic equivalence theory, most closely associated with Eugene Nida. He offers the following guideline: “A translation should be the closest natural equivalent of the message” in the original language. Unfortunately, all the key words in such definitions–natural, equivalent, message–are slippery and subject to a range of interpretation and application. The same is true for other words often used in translation discussion: free, literal, and so on. Among the many possible combinations of terms and phrases, our translation has chosen equivalent message and effect to summarize what we are trying to convey. This approach insists on the inseparability of form and content in all effective communication.

All such theoretical statements seek to clarify the relationship between text and audience. Bible translation, like all writing, is shaped by audience. Two translation efforts committed to the same goals of accuracy and readability, but aimed at different audiences, will create very different translations. In contemporary Bible translations, ours included, the pressure generally is to seek the widest possible audience and to do whatever is necessary stylistically to reach that audience. Nevertheless, if a translation allows the least literate, least educated, least churched, least inquisitive, least motivated reader to become the de facto norm, it will not only fail to do justice to the text but will alienate many other potential readers.

Related to audience is the question of the appropriate level and kind of language to use. An equivalence theory of translation requires assessment of language usage in the original text as compared to the common speech of the original audience in order to reproduce the same relative usage in a present-day audience. That is, if certain words or passages would have seemed elevated (or mysterious, or ambiguous) to the common reader or listener in the original audience, then we should in theory retain that sense of elevation today. If the language of the original text was colloquial, it should be translated into the colloquial language of our own time. A translation that uses only a single level of language (whether entirely plain, entirely colloquial, or entirely formal) is inaccurate if there is a variety of levels in the language in the original.

And what, after all, is common language? We have decided that for our purposes it will not be street language (badmouth me was removed from an early draft), or heavily vernacular, or slang, or breezy talk-show English. Descriptive words such as fresh, dignified, precise, colorful, and understandable recur in our discussions. In fact, of course, everyone has an idiolect as individual as his or her fingerprint.

My own sense of language is informed by more factors than I can enumerate: where I have lived, how the people around me have talked, what I’ve read and heard and seen. I spent 16 of my early years in California, interrupted by a crucial five years in Texas. Another four years in Georgia give me nearly ten years surrounded by the varying speech patterns of the South, to go with the 16 in the West. And for the last 20 years, I have lived in the upper Midwest, learning, with Garrison Keillor’s help, to speak Minnesotan.

Equally important, perhaps, though who can precisely weigh these influences, I have been a long-time reader–of newspapers, magazines, journals, cereal boxes, and, of course, many books. The likelihood that my career as a literature and writing professor has rendered my sense of language overly literary is diminished by the kind of literature I have typically read and taught: the self-consciously pared-down language of Hemingway, the early Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams. At any rate, a stylist who prefers Williams’s “A Red Wheelbarrow” to Tennyson’s In Memoriam will have a different sense of language and a different influence on a translation than one who prefers the opposite. And then there is the linguistic influence of watching countless reruns of The Honeymooners and Cheers, and of having lived for the better part of a decade with teenagers in the house.

If I am sometimes in danger of letting novels or television overly influence my sense of what constitutes contemporary language, some of the biblical scholars must guard against their very expertise in the original languages. For them, Hebrew or Greek is common language. They have breathed so long the ancient syntax and rhythms that some find clear and natural in English what a typical reader might find opaque and convoluted. Steeped in biblical diction and that of traditional translations, they sometimes fail to see the datedness of not only conceptually significant words like fullness in John 1, but also common descriptive words such as the following from first drafts of other books: cast (throw), charge (command), cut off (kill), dash (destroy), deliver (rescue), fetters (chains), and so on. The hope is that the sensibilities of many people with a wide variety of experiences and idiolects will produce a widely understandable and yet accurate text.

And if cast and dash are potential problems, what are we to say about those most explosive little words: him and man? Inclusive language may be to our generation of Bible translations what virgin versus young woman was to an earlier generation. The consensus in our translation is that unobtrusively inclusive language has now become the norm in public discourse. It is simply how the English language functions in public usage in America at the end of the century. With our guideline of equivalent message and effect, it is clear that in the great majority of cases the original writer is addressing all humanity and therefore would use inclusive language if speaking or writing in English today. To use language that now is widely taken as referring only to men simply would not be an accurate translation. Traditional use of gender in references to God is being retained.

These are just a few of many theoretical questions that any Bible translation must address. But theory is useless unless it is incarnated in an effective text. Pale theory must give way to bloody practice. Our translation begins with the question, “What is the message, and how would the writer say that today?” Our key exegetical goals are accuracy (in rendering the general message), precision (in capturing subtle nuances), and clarity (in conveying understanding). Serving the exegetical goals are the stylistic goals of economy (maximum effect from each word), felicity (sense of aptness, beauty, elegance), lucidity (the wedding of economy and felicity to produce illumination), and contemporaneity (use of today’s language). In sum, the goal of the translation is to be exegetically faithful and stylistically compelling, understanding that the full message of the text includes the rhetorical strategies used in conveying it.

Economy, for instance, does not necessarily mean brevity, but it does call for each word to carry its weight. Less is more unless the advantage of more is apparent. Ecclesiastes 2:8b, for instance, was first rendered as follows: I surrounded myself with singers–both men and women. And then there were my many beautiful concubines. The proposed revision reads, I surrounded myself with singers–both men and women–and with many beautiful concubines. Combining sentences enhances economy and improves the rhythm, at the same time eliminating the weak “to be” verb.

Greater felicity is achieved in any number of ways, including using stronger verbs. Ecclesiastes 7:9 first began, Keep firm control of your temper. The revision, Control your temper, makes the verb the defining and energizing part of the sentence and reflects the central idea of the verse–control–as well as eliminating unneeded words.

Felicity is also enhanced by effective repetition. The nicely economical Generations come and go, but the earth remains forever the same (Eccles. 1:4), was thought stronger as Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains the same forever. Repeating the word generations was judged effective, in both sense and rhythm, in conveying the endlessness and evanescence of human generations. Repetition in this case underscored the message of futility that the opening of Ecclesiastes explores (and the same forever is more contemporary word order than forever the same).

Repetition can create a sense of rhythm and balance that reinforces meaning. In the first draft of our translation, Mark 3:23b asks, How is it possible for Satan to cast himself out? The question was revised to How can Satan cast out Satan? The revision is more economical, more balanced rhetorically, and therefore more powerful and easier to remember.

At least that’s what I think. Fortunately, what I think is not conclusive. At each stage, individual judgments are weighed against the judgments of others. Overall, there is a strong sense of common purpose and responsibility, coupled with a healthy awareness of the impossibility of fully succeeding. As a group, we genuinely seek the presence and inspiration of the Spirit who was present with the original writers. Being broadly evangelical, we believe we are working not just with a text, but with revealed truth (truth being a word we use without irony or embarrassment).

Another sign of our evangelicalness, perhaps, is the Bible translation committee’s discomfort with close votes. Especially when the issue is the fundamental meaning or implication of a passage, close votes usually result in another round of discussion, a speech (often impassioned) from the translator responsible for that book, rebuttal speeches, and another vote. Whether the Spirit prevails or people just get worn out, even close votes usually become more of a consensus upon revoting.

Whether there eventually will be a similar consensus about the value of our translation, I do not know. But after more than three years of immersion in the process, I now have an answer to the question of why we need another translation of the Bible. My answer is twofold and schizophrenic. First, we don’t. The church will not falter for lack of another translation at this time. Second, we need a new translation for the same reason we needed the translation you now like best. The English language changes, our understanding of Greek and Hebrew and the nuances of the text change, our knowledge of biblical cultures grows, and every generation feels the need to do some important things for itself. C. S. Lewis said we need new translations for the same reason that a teenage boy occasionally needs a new suit: the old one simply doesn’t fit as well as it used to.

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

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A daredevil skier and sports enthusiast, he organized underground resistance to the Nazis during World War II. The first book he published was filled with sex; a recently published book-length interview with him enjoyed a long run on the bestseller list. A compulsive globetrotter, he frequently visits exotic locales. The rich and famous come to him; actresses from his checkered past still write to him. No, not Ernest Hemingway. Karol Wojtyla, a.k.a. Pope John Paul II.

The most influential pope in the twentieth century, John Paul has also been one of the most visible public figures in our media-saturated era. Yet for all that, one of the most striking facts about him has been little noticed. He is, most improbably, a poet.

Historically, popes have been many things: administrators, pastors, politicians. But not since the fifteenth century, when Pius II wrote erotic verses for the court of Frederick III, has the Roman church had a poet for a pope. Indeed, John Paul II’s wide-ranging cultural abilities give new meaning to the term Renaissance man. He is fluent in seven languages and holds two doctoral degrees, one in theology and one in philosophy. Though the press often caricatures him as a hidebound traditionalist, he is so in touch with his times that he postponed his coronation till noon so as not to interfere with a previously scheduled morning soccer match.

During his 17-year tenure as pope–twice as long as the eight-year average reign–he has piled up a long list of innovations. The first pope ever to enter a Jewish synagogue, to call on a U.S. president in the White House, or to tour a communist country, he is also the first to install a monastic group within the Vatican: a convent of eight Poor Clares from Assisi. He transformed papal fashion as well by wearing trousers under his vestments and white sneakers with papal-yellow laces–a gift from teenagers at Denver’s World Youth Day.

On a more somber note, violence has provided John Paul another interface with the modern world. Though not the first pope whose enemies have attempted to assassinate him, he is the first to have had the event captured on television. In 1981, he was shot twice at Saint Peter’s Square by Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turk who, according to New York Times reporter Tad Szulc, may have been acting for the Bulgarian secret police. On the first anniversary of Agca’s attack, John Paul was again assaulted while visiting the shrine of Our Lady of Fatima to give thanks for his recovery, this time by a renegade Spanish priest with a knife.

Anyone familiar with Karol Wojtyla’s early years, however, realizes that he is not a man to be diverted by fear of sudden violence. He has spent a lifetime enduring far harsher trials. He was born in the Polish village of Wadowice in 1920, just as the Red Army was advancing on Warsaw. When he was only nine, his mother died giving birth to a stillborn child. (One of his first poems, “Over this your white grave,” is addressed to her.) Four years after his mother’s death, his only sibling, a brother 15 years older, succumbed to an infection caught in the hospital where he worked.

The solitary boy lived alone with his aging father in their stark flat, subsisting on Karol Sr.’s army pension. Wadowice’s public school was superb, providing eight years of Latin and five of Greek–as well as a social setting that included as a matter of course the town’s large Jewish population. His Jewish schoolmate Jerzy Kluger has recently given us a glimpse of his years at the village public school in Gian Franco Svidercoschi’s Letter to a Jewish Friend: The Simple and Extraordinary Story of John Paul II and His Jewish School Friend. The young Karol played goalkeeper on the school soccer team as well as serving as altar boy at the parish church. When a visiting cardinal, impressed by an essay he had written, asked if he might be a priest some day, he replied that he intended to study literature and the theater.

After Karol’s graduation in 1938, the two Wojtylas moved into a basement apartment in Krakow so he could enroll in Jagiellonian University, the alma mater of the fifteenth-century astronomer Copernicus. A fellow student remembers that while Karol was religious, even pious, “religion was not his main interest in those days.” Poetry was, along with acting in student theatrical productions.

But the following year, Poland was invaded by Germany. On September 6, 1939, Krakow was occupied by Nazi troops. The Wojtylas joined the river of refugees streaming eastward on foot, only to be turned back after 100 miles by news of the Russian invasion on that front.

Returning to Krakow, they found the university closed and 138 faculty members arrested. Hans Frank, Krakow’s new German governor, announced that henceforth Poles would be slaves in the German empire. In order to avoid deportation to a labor camp and to support himself and his aging father, Wojtyla went to work first in the limestone quarry on the outskirts of the city, later in the factory furnaces where the limestone was turned into explosives.

Wojtyla also helped to organize an underground network of lectures after the universities were closed, setting up secret meetings around the city while avoiding the military-enforced curfew. To the Poles, maintaining their intellectual life was a means of cultural resistance against the Nazi occupiers. By 1942, the underground university had grown to 800 students.

In addition to work at the quarry and his clandestine studies, Wojtyla was a founding member of a drama company, the Rhapsodic Theater. This enterprise, too, was forced to operate covertly, a restriction that led to a dramatic form he later called “theater of the word.” Because the company lacked a regular stage, lighting, costumes, and other theatrical accoutrements, they necessarily pared down productions to bare words and live voices. Wojtyla found it a particularly congenial form.

“The company discovered,” he wrote in a postwar essay, “that the fundamental element of dramatic art is the living human word. It is also the nucleus of drama, a leaven through which human deeds pass, and from which they derive their proper dynamics.” The technique focuses attention on meaning rather than method. The stark production, more akin to reading a novel than watching a play, gives the audience access to the characters’ interior life in ways realistic theater does not.

While Wojtyla was working to salvage his city’s intellectual life, he suffered yet another personal loss. Returning home from the quarry one day, he found his father dead. He knelt by the bedside all night in prayer. Some biographers have located his decision to become a priest at that point. Another major influence at this time came from a tailor, Jan Tyranowski, who formed a student discussion group that read Saint John of the Cross. Whatever the catalyst, in 1942 Wojtyla shifted his academic focus to theology with the intention of becoming a priest.

On August 1, 1944, the citizens of Warsaw, encouraged by broadcasts from the Red Army promising aid, staged an uprising against their German occupiers. The Nazis retaliated with wholesale slaughter. The archbishop of Krakow, fearing for his carefully nurtured band of seminarians, rounded them up and sequestered them inside his residence, even managing to have Wojtyla’s name expunged from work records at the explosives factory so that no official trace remained of his existence. For the duration of the war, the seminarians lived and worked hidden in one room.

Besides saving a remnant of the clergy for the Catholic church in Poland, the plan may have preserved its future pope as well. During the war, almost 4,000 priests were imprisoned in Polish concentration camps. Most of them died there–a tragedy the reigning pope, Pius XII, did little to prevent.

The end of World War II did not bring the same relief to Poland that other parts of Europe enjoyed. As a Soviet satellite, Poland experienced scarcely more religious freedom than it had under German occupation. Church property was confiscated, religious education forbidden. Thus, after Wojtyla’s ordination to the priesthood in 1946, he was sent to Rome to study at the Pontifical University of the Angelicum, where he wrote his thesis on Saint John of the Cross.

Before returning to Poland, he was sent by his archbishop to observe new pastoral methods being put into practice in France and Belgium, notably the worker-priest movement. Since Wojtyla himself had been working in a factory under desperate conditions only three years before, this “new type of apostolate” impressed him deeply. “Catholic intellectual activity alone will not transform society,” he wrote in his report. These workers needed “a new type of liturgy, understandable to the modern proletarian. It must convince him.”

Several years after returning to Soviet-dominated Poland, Wojtyla wrote a cycle of poems titled “The Quarry,” a commemoration of a fellow worker whom he had seen die in an accident with the limestone cart. The poem affirms that “man matures through work / which inspires him to difficult good.” Work has continued to be a major preoccupation of John Paul. In his 1981 encyclical, Laborem Exercens, he insisted that the most important factor in the economic equation is neither the product nor the employer, but the worker.

Meanwhile, in 1952, Polish priests were being transported to Soviet concentration camps in Siberia. The archbishop of Krakow was arrested, and then Poland’s primate, Cardinal Wyszynski. Once again the Polish clergy were abandoned by a pope whose policy of political neutrality during World War II had contributed to the sufferings of the Polish church.

As he had done under the Nazis, Wojtyla chose cultural means to resist the oppressive Soviet regime, publishing poems under the pen name Andrzej Jawien, first in Tygodnik Powszechny (Catholic Weekly) and later in Znak (Sign). During the next 30 years, he composed primarily cycles, individual poems clustered about a central thematic axis.

Far from being “inspirational” or even devotional, they take seriously the problems of modern consciousness, which seeks clarity despite the fog of despair hanging over the psychic landscape. The cycle “Thought–Strange Space,” for example, describes the futility and inadequacy felt by those who “stand facing truth and lack the words.” Another cycle, “Profiles of a Cyrenean,” employs 14 different voices, mingling biblical characters such as Mary Magdalene with stylized contemporary figures.

Threshold, border, frontier: These terms appear throughout both the poems and plays of Karol Wojtyla, naming that narrow zone where crucial events occur and pivotal decisions are made. “It is very hard, this borderline between selfishness and unselfishness,” says Anna, the unhappy wife in Wojtyla’s 1960 play, The Jeweler’s Shop. Described in its subtitle as “A Meditation on the Sacrament of Matrimony,” it deals with “the whole span of love and its precipitous edges.” Written in the simplified style of the Rhapsodic Theater, the play treats the denuded, burned-over landscape of modern married love by capturing significant reminiscences and conversations of three couples. Its portrayal of the three women in particular shows surprising insight on the part of the author, often accused of insensitivity to women.

Yet it is hardly a play with a happy ending. The old jeweler, who never appears and serves as the play’s figure for God, is disregarded by the younger couple. One of the characters wonders if he “does not act anymore with the force of his eyes and his word?” Like his poems, Wojtyla’s plays often end with questions.

Once he became pope, John Paul could no longer publish such open-ended literary works. As spiritual leader of the world’s largest Christian flock, he was obliged to supply answers to their hard questions. His recent bestseller, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, owes its success in part to its question-and-answer format, designed to attract even nonreaders with its talk-show flavor. Italian journalist Vittorio Messori poses the 20 questions, dealing with issues as diverse as Protestant difficulties with papal authority and the claims of Christianity in the face of other world religions. John Paul shows particular sensitivity in these areas. Unfortunately, the question regarding women receives only a scant page-and-a-half reply.

Messori does a good job of representing the secularized Western sensibility, asking for clarification of terminology as basic as “salvation,” for example. Since John Paul has lived most of his life under ideologies that distorted or denied spiritual concepts, he responds seriously to this lacuna in the modern consciousness. He recognizes that elemental knowledge of the holy is in danger of being deleted from the world’s collective memory.

The blame lies not simply with totalitarian regimes but with “developed” Western nations, where technological considerations have gradually overshadowed human values. All modern nations depend for their survival on infrastructures demanding efficiency of time and resources, often at the expense of humaneness. Within such value-neutral systems, citizens metastasize into consumers, culture degrades to GNP, values float up and down like adjustable-rate mortgages. In response, John Paul has made “the mystery of the human person” the focus of his papacy. In doing so, he has remained faithful not only to his vocation as a priest but also to the passion for the “living human word” that animated his early love for poetry and drama.

SOURCES FOR THIS ESSAY

John Paul II, “Crossing the Threshold of Hope” (Alfred A. Knopf, 244 pp.; $20, 1994)

James Oram, “The People’s Pope” (Chronicle Books; 1979, o.p.).

Gian Franco Svidercoschi, “Letter to a Jewish Friend: The Simple and Extraordinary Story of John Paul II and His Jewish School Friend” (Crossroad, 96 pp.; $12.95, 1994).

Tad Szulc, “John Paul II: The Biography” (A Lisa Drew Book/Scribner, 542 pp.; $27.50, 1995).

Karol Wojtyla, “The Collected Plays and Writings on Theater” (University of California Press, 450 pp.; $45, 1987).

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

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The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts, by Ellen Herman. University of California Press, 406 pp.; $35

How are we to account for the rise to prominence, even dominance, of psychology in contemporary American culture? Christian critics of psychology are partly right in saying that the various psychologies offer world-views that compete with Christianity. From this perspective, the rise of psychology marks the triumph of a secular faith; its practitioners are invested with the authority that once belonged to priests and pastors. Another explanation is that psychology has prospered because, in the course of its troubled and complex history, it has genuinely helped and healed countless people (here the analogue is science rather than religion, and the rise of psychology is seen in the larger context of the spectacular success of modern medicine). Alternative explanations can be complementary rather than mutually exclusive.

Ellen Herman’s intriguing book, richly referenced with primary source footnotes, offers yet another complementary perspective on the striking rise of psychology to public prominence in the period between 1940 and 1975. Whereas psychology’s own account of its growing influence is a story celebrating the inexorable advance of scientific understanding, Herman emphasizes the role of contingent historical circumstances. In Herman’s account, war was the critical element in psychology’s rise to prominence. War provided a theater within which psychology could test its skills on a mass scale. War provided access to the inner corridors of power within the U.S. government wherein broad public legitimacy could be obtained. War also created a societal context conducive to a psychological vision of the person because of the widespread perception that what human beings were doing or considering doing to each other was fundamentally irrational and explicable only by those familiar with the contours of madness.

World War I provided the initial impetus for the development of intelligence- and ability-testing. World War II added widespread screening of draftees in an attempt to predict “neuropsychiatric disability,” expanded treatment of psychiatric war casualties, and utilized “experts” from the behavioral sciences to wage psychological warfare within our country and among our own troops (because maintaining military and civilian “morale” was judged crucial to victory) and against the enemies of the United States in the form of analyses of and responses to their “national character” and propaganda methods.

The transition into the Cold War accelerated psychology’s broad acceptance. A 1943 “Psychologist’s Peace Manifesto” had declared that “an enduring peace can be attained if the human sciences are utilized by our statesmen and peace-makers.” The Cold War led to military sources providing lavish research funding of various studies of other peoples in an effort to predict and hence control the emergence of a certain type of culture–democratic, capitalistic, pro-American. Individual personality, with its needs, drives, and irrationalities, became the theater for psychological warfare, because it was presumed that the ideologies of individuals, and hence of nations, were a function of personality. “Society had become the patient. Psychology had become the cure.”

Herman’s account of Project Camelot, an ill-conceived plan to study and control social and political development abroad, provides a case study of psychology’s imperial ambitions. Although this project resulted in international scandal, expulsion of scholars from Chile and other countries, and the creation of policy barriers in many countries to prevent further U.S. meddling in their domestic affairs, Herman alleges that Camelot-related research continued apace, and that a subsequent psychological computer simulation of social change was a crucial factor in triggering the CIA-backed assassination of Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973.

The wartime practice of therapeutic psychology transformed the commonly held understanding of human psychological distress from that of “mental illness” (an unchanging personal attribute) to that of “maladjustment” (a person-environment mismatch that could be prevented and ameliorated). This made psychology potentially applicable not just to the “sick,” but to all of society.

The postwar rise of therapeutic psychology was fueled by the widespread contact of millions of GIs with psychological testing and screening, with self-help morale-enhancing educational materials, and with therapeutic services for concerns of all sorts while they were in the service and later through the Veteran’s Administration. From the consumer’s side, this process reduced the stigma previously associated with seeing a “shrink,” while from the provider’s side it opened the eyes of budding entrepreneurs to the possibilities for service provision in a propsychology society.

In multiple ways, psychology (broadly defined; Herman includes psychiatry-and psychology-oriented professionals in other social science fields, such as sociology and anthropology) developed a grandiosity of vision in the 1950s and ’60s, a vision of “fashioning a new civilization,” of using social engineering to ensure mental health and personal satisfaction for all Americans and eventually all humans. Meanwhile, the self-definition of government was expanding to emphasize the promotion of the general welfare of all citizens–a trend that greatly enhanced psychology’s influence on public policy, particularly concerning racism and urban violence. In striking ways, the psychological vision of well-being influenced many facets of public policy, most visibly in the concept of psychological harm central to the 1954 Supreme Court desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education. Government became for some psychologists the logical tool for extending their impact. Their goal became to develop tools and services that “from birth to death shall guide and minister to the development and social usefulness of the individual” (in the words of one of psychology’s earliest advocates).

There are haunting questions implied that are unanswered or tantalizingly evaded by Herman–for example, the real effectiveness of psychology in accomplishing its grandiose agenda, and the extent to which psychology curried favor with policymakers and power brokers by saying what they wanted to hear. A weakness of the book is its failure to provide adequate exposition of the content of the numerous projects and initiatives it discusses; for example, the actual methodology of Project Camelot is never described.

This book could add fuel to the antipsychology movement in the conservative church, especially its juicy quotes documenting the “salvific” vision of some of psychology’s most ardent proponents. But like historical analyses of the power politics of the American Medical Association over the last century, The Romance of American Psychology begs the question of whether some substantive good has not come out of psychology’s maneuvering for power.

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

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“Congregation: The Journey Back to Church,” by Gary Dorsey. Viking, 388 pp.; $24.95

“American Congregations” Volume 1: “Portraits of Twelve Religious Communities;” Volume 2: “New Perspectives in the Study of Congregations,” edited by James P. Wind and James W. Lewis. University of Chicago Press, Vol. 1, 712 pp.; $34.95, Vol. 2, 292 pp.; $22.50

“The Black Churches of Brooklyn,” by Clarence Taylor. Columbia University Press, 297 pp.; $27.50

The boomers are returning to church: of that the Lord Hucksters, spiritual and temporal, are well aware as they kneel in reverence once again to milk their demographic cash cow. Academics, too, have been quick to identify a trend: a subject ripe for conferences and monographs. And we experience the familiar paradox of a phenomenon so widely proclaimed that it begins to seem unreal, cover-storied and talk-showed to death. To get at the reality of the “return to church,” we need to see it in the larger, messier context suggested by the books under review: the history of American congregations.

Gary Dorsey’s “Congregation: The Journey Back to Church” offers a Tracy Kidder-style immersion in the life of a single congregation. The author first appears on stage as Boomer Rampant: the journalist returned from an overseas assignment, seeking out a new project to go along with the new house and the new wife. Why not religion, a pretty sure bet in the bookstores? Why not, in particular, the secret heart of an ordinary parish, the mystery he senses in the “erotic” smells of a musty Connecticut church? But if conceived as Couples Redux, Congregation becomes a story of a plot gotten out of hand, of how voyeur turns visionary. The book may or may not stand as the chronicle of the boomer’s quest, but it memorably etches the path that quest follows and raises some worries about its destination.

“Congregation” is reader friendly. Its tone modulates nicely between the poignant, the comical, and the deadpan. Its narrative follows the church year, though–significantly–backwards, beginning with Holy Week and ending at Epiphany. Its greatest strength lies in its dead-on portraits of the staff members at a mainline Protestant church that (risking the redundancy) doesn’t quite know what it is supposed to be doing: the minister for social activism who has mastered the choreography of outrage, to no discernible effect; the minister of education whose portfolio thickens with passing fads; the senior pastor who believes in energy and happiness as much as in God–or who might not know the difference. Less passionate than Arthur Dimmesdale, more circumspect than Elmer Gantry, the Reverend Van Parker merits a small place in American literature’s clerical hall of shame. He rebels at Ecclesiastes for its not being a happy book. He has little use for H. Richard Niebuhr, his professor at Yale Divinity School, since Niebuhr had not seemed a happy man. Parker’s call to the ministry came in the form of a family entitlement. A scion of wasp culture driving on after that culture has lost its lead, he is most distinguished in this account as the manipulator of a $1 million fund drive. We don’t see him preaching much; in fact, we see little formal worship at all. In short, what was first for the congregation’s Puritan founders comes last among their descendants.

What we see in abundance are women, especially women in small groups. Here communion flourishes in every kind, and individuals link together and spin off in their quest for healing, wholeness, social ministry, and depth of soul. Here pass the solitary New Age traveler, the deadened suburban housewife, the fundraising headhunter–all these and more, but also among them some paragons of common sense. Dorsey himself gets fit counsel from “JoAnne,” a worthy heir of Anne Hutchinson, big on intuition, down on institutions, no longer needing to bother with meetings for sermon critique, but quick to zero in on the author’s own religious block, the multiple conversions he endured in his Carolina childhood. Laywomen are the driving agents in Congregation; their male counterparts–a silently mourning widower, a NASA technician turned parish historian–sit on the sidelines or come to life only when it’s budget time. One of the women, another engineer, resolves an impasse with the suggestion that greater faith might improve stewardship. That had not occurred to the pastors.

Engaging them all, the author unwittingly starts to show the mind of Christ. He waxes indignant; he comforts and mourns; he never ceases to be amazed at the hypocrisy, meanness, decency, and joy of these believers, half-believers, and fellow travelers. Dorsey himself passes through these three categories in reverse, leaving his original design for the path of faith. His book thus becomes the analogue of a Puritan’s spiritual diary, with one vital difference. While that diary fought the self and closed with God, Dorsey’s fights formlessness and closes with others. Puritan communal solidarity lives well at First Church, Windsor, but what of the soul’s saturation with the Transcendent? The “divine” lurks in others and peeks out ambiguously: Is it God or just somebody else?

Then again, the narrative can’t quite mask the author’s hunger of soul. Narcissism seeps out of his final resolution “to be gracious to myself and finally [to] satisfy my desire to belong.” Besides, one crucial community goes neglected in his quest, for the author pursues church fellowship partly to escape a sobbing, angry wife–or better, to escape the plight of their infertility. This, ultimately, is what drives Boomer Repentant: the specter of sterility in body and soul, of being found at the final day to be without substance or legacy.

Where does the penitent find release? Less at the cross than at the cradle. During Advent, he and his wife pray for a virgin birth; the next Good Friday they announce that a baby will soon be born for them. These pages capture depths of joy with quiet effect but quit on a disconcerting note. He has learned, Dorsey tells us, to give up his mania for control, to receive gifts with gratitude; but then he feels free to leave the community that made such trust possible. He joins another church closer to home but does not have much fellowship there. If the 1950s suburbanites had a family and rushed to church, this chronicle for the nineties runs that course in reverse.

Central to the media narratives of the “return to church” is the assumption that successive generations are unique and discontinuous. Thus “boomers” are one thing, “busters” another, each to be marketed to with a brand-new sell. The most influential church planners have adopted this model, according to which the history of a particular church or tradition counts for little in sustaining its life, just as local variations seem insignificant next to national trends. Much of this talk passes as “evangelical,” but in its cult of novelty and its cultural accommodation it more nearly resembles Protestant liberalism a century back. It must be divine humor, then, that has called forth from a bastion of that liberalism, the University of Chicago Divinity School, a giant project celebrating just the opposite themes: the local, the particular, the historical.

The project began eight years ago on funding from the Lilly Endowment. After winding down a long chain of seminars, it has finally produced the two volumes under review: an anthology of twelve congregational case studies that sprawl over 700 pages, and a defter collection of essays interpreting the same. The profiles circle the compass, from New England Congregational to prairie Muslim by way of (inter alia) African American Baptist, Greek Orthodox, Jewish Reform, and multiethnic Roman Catholic. Beyond serving up a nice smorgasbord, the studies were all supposed to promote congregational history as a subdiscipline, in two ways: by capturing felt memories on local ground, the better to explain why Americans still join religious associations more readily than any other type; and by demonstrating how the world’s great religions are passed along by parochial adaptation and rejuvenation.

Measured by those aims, the profiles must be judged a mixed success. In certain cases, like Jeffrey Burns’s account of Saint Peter’s Roman Catholic Church in San Francisco, voices from the past sound so fresh, and the neighborhood is etched so clearly that we know what Irish Catholic once meant there and what Latino Catholic means there today. Quite another method, a statistical analysis of all 7,379 members that have ever joined Center Church in New Haven, Connecticut, enables Harry Stout and Catherine Brekus to plot the inexorable sociological fate awaiting a church that loses its theological memory and its demographic role. But some of the other essays mostly recount pastors, programs, and building projects, the dreary doings that give congregational history a bad name. Members of the traditions represented in this volume will nod in recognition at the piece on their own group, and historians will go away newly aware of the genre’s possibilities, but not all these pieces will serve as models of execution.

The studies do help explain what sustains congregations, in the absence of which they die. What Gary Dorsey found at First Church, Windsor, seems to turn up in every time, place, and tradition. First, a well-run congregation needs women, small groups, and money–better yet, small groups of women to raise the money. Second, the United States may be the land of democracy, but democracy wants leadership; lay initiative will call up–not squelch–clerical professionalism. Third, parishioners sooner or later will want the clergy to do their believing for them; good leaders don’t let them, but they then run the risk of being thought ineffective. Fourth, the chief purpose of a congregation is to pass on its tradition to its children. That implies, fifth, that every congregation has a tradition, especially those (in this volume, Rockdale [Reform Jewish] Temple, Cincinnati; and Calvary Chapel, Costa Mesa, California) that think they don’t. It further implies, sixth, that the core of a congregation is family. Gary Dorsey’s fertility instincts led him aright.

So how, and how well, do congregations pass tradition along? The question defies answer since different bodies occupy such different social spaces. The Swaminarayan Hindu Temple in suburban Chicago is so fully first-generation immigrant that the process of differentiating religion, language, and regional (Indian) origin has barely begun. The Muslim congregation of Lac La Biche, Alberta, has surmounted regional for national (i.e., Lebanese) identity; the members at Baltimore’s Cathedral of the Annunciation have become self-consciously Greek American and Orthodox, and notably active in city politics for erstwhile “outsiders.” In all these cases tradition-passing is easier, if conflicted, because ethnicity remains strong. The toll that ethnic change exacts on religion is evident in the trials some of the Roman Catholic parishes surveyed suffered after World War II, and in the extinction of one of them, Saint Boniface, Chicago, in 1990.

But if the God of Yankee imperialism is bad, are not these ethno-religious entanglements also lamentable? Probably, but no better alternative comes into sight, at least in these volumes. Center Church, New Haven, merely hid its tribalism behind class and entitlement; when these faded, it slumped. The Mormons of Sugar House Ward outside Salt Lake City built a total religious enclave on the basis of their calling as a chosen people. In moving toward privatization since World War II, they have taken on more of an All-American identity–not a safer option, all things considered. The most haunting alternative rises at Calvary Chapel among the feckless, prosperous Anglos of Orange County, California. Here abides no memory of any kind, ethnic, religious, even congregational. Rather, their “Spirit-filled” worship lifts the audience up to timeless ecstasy, while the pastor’s apocalyptic preaching cancels out the future. The present, meanwhile, orbits between right-wing politics and mass consumption throttled by traffic jams.

Perhaps the happiest trail out of this thicket has been blazed by African American churches. Here ethnicity is a given and a prize, while American identity operates less as an idol than as a reformist aspiration. The church, meanwhile, can adjust to any new challenge and remain the heart of the community. Such is the thesis developed by Clarence Taylor in The Black Churches of Brooklyn. But even the African American case is complicated by the cross-cutting movements of local and mass culture. Taylor argues that black churchgoers adapted generic products to their own purposes; yet they had the resources to control neither the production nor the distribution of these products and might not have been well served by being absorbed into the culture of consumption. Ironically, gospel music, the group’s seminal contribution to mass culture, emerged from holiness-Pentecostal circles that were otherwise closed to that culture’s ways and wares.

In this light, how should we assess an African American congregation today, such as Bethel African Methodist Episcopal in Baltimore, the Chicago project’s selection? Long a flagship of middle-class dignity, the church has recently gone “soft” Pentecostal in liturgy, African in decor, and off the chart in growth rate. Yet the upbeat gospel music that links these three together is so mainstream that the church might actually be in the process of re-Americanizing. Here again, as in Gary Dorsey’s pilgrimage, it is the younger middle class that has taken hold on church; the boomers can be black. Those at Bethel can afford the change; their group memory lies so deep and their faith so central that, for the foreseeable future, their tradition cannot be expunged.

For the other congregations gathered in these volumes and scattered across the country, the question remains whether they have the spiritual resources to command a sacrifice for their God, and for a future that can unfold their past.

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

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The first question … that a Christian intellectual should ask is not “what should be believed?” or “what should one think?” but “whom should one trust?” Augustine understood this well, and in his early apologetic work, “On True Religion,” he links the appeal to reason with trust in the community and authority. Our notion of authority is so attenuated that it may be useful to look a bit more closely at what Augustine means by authority. For us, authority is linked to offices and institutions, to those who hold jurisdiction, hence to notions of power. We speak of submitting to authority or of obeying authority, and assume that authority has to do with the will, not with the understanding.

Yet there is another sense of authority that traces its source to the auctor in auctoritas. Sometimes translated “author,” auctor can designate a magistrate, writer, witness, someone who is worthy of trust, a guarantor who attests to the truth of a statement, one who teaches or advises. Authority in this view has to do with trustworthiness, with the confidence a teacher earns through teaching with truthfulness, if you will. To say we need authority is much the same as saying we need teachers … , that we need to become apprentices.

Augustine expressed his idea of authority in “On True Religion” by saying: “Authority invites trust and prepares human beings for reason. Reason leads to understanding and knowledge. But reason is not entirely absent from authority, for we have got to consider whom we have to believe.” In the Library of Christian Classics translation of this passage, the first words are rendered: “Authority demands belief.” Translated this way, especially the word demands, the sentence is misleading. For Augustine is not thinking of an authority that demands or commands or coerces (terms that require an act of will), but of a truth that engenders confidence because of who tells it to us.

–Robert L. Wilken, “Memory and the Christian Intellectual Life,” in Remembering the Christian Past (Eerdmans, 180 pp.; $16.99, paper).

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

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“The Feminist Question: Feminist Theology in Light of Christian Tradition,” by Francis Martin. Eerdmans, 461 pp.; $29.95, paper

“Sex, Priests, and Power; Anatomy of a Crisis,” by A. W. Richard Sipe. Brunner/Mazel. 220 pp.; $24.95

In the preview edition of Books & Culture, William H. Willimon observed, “At its best, feminism is a critique of the ways in which our marriages with the culture have hurt us. At its worst, feminist theology is yet another chapter in the long story of how [the churches have] embodied American liberalism’s exaltation of the self” (Christianity Today, July 17, 1995, p. 35). Between them, these two books by Catholic priests–the first a Dominican biblical scholar, the second a retired parish priest and practicing psychotherapist–attempt to deal with both aspects of Willimon’s assessment. Francis Martin’s book regards church tradition with more trust than suspicion and tends to damn feminist theology with faint praise, while Richard Sipe–writing about the hypocrisy and corruption of Catholicism’s “sexual/celibate system”–leans toward the reverse approach, even though he does not invoke feminist theory or theology directly.

To Martin, the feminist question–namely, “How are women to move towards a more adequate expression of their dignity and rights within the Christian community?”–is a specialized expression of the modern concern for individual rights, which derives in turn from Judeo-Christian teaching on the dignity of the person. But he maintains that feminism in general, and feminist theology in particular, while presenting valid criticisms of contemporary culture, suffer from an emphasis on the individual over the relational (particularly, in his view, the relationship of “essential” masculine instrumentality to equally essential feminine receptivity), and on experience and reason over revelation and church tradition.

Martin’s book is a scholarly tour de force that will remind Protestant readers just how much is missed by assuming that most of the important events of church history began with the Reformation. He documents the vital role of women in the early church and their steadily increasing legal, economic, and social power up through the eleventh century. He considers the problematic decline of women’s influence thereafter within the framework of historical and ecclesiastical forces: among the former, the rise of feudalism, patrilineage, the dowry system, and the nuclearization and privatization of family life; among the latter, the replacement of monastic pluralism by rigid hierarchical oversight, the isolation of theological reflection from the liturgy and piety of ordinary women and men, and the exclusion of women from the emerging universities because of the latter’s mandate to train male clergy.

During the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the gendering of the public/domestic dichotomy solidified further, as biblically based notions of gender equality were eclipsed by classically based concepts of women’s inferiority. Not coincidentally, this also correlated with the re-emergence of slavery and a valorizing of instrumental reason over Christian (and stereotypically feminine) ideals of receptive, faith-based obedience and servanthood, all of which Martin sincerely deplores, and for which he realizes the rise of modern feminism was intended to be a remedy.

With its copious footnotes and 40-page bibliography, Martin’s book amounts to a detailed historical survey of gender relations in church and society, and it is encouraging to see a Catholic priest-scholar give such issues the attention they deserve. But problems remain, for in this book the Devil is not so much in the details, which are assembled with great erudition, as in the author’s assumptions about theological method, about the locus of religious authority, and about lack of diversity in feminist thought.

To begin with, Martin’s assumption that most feminist theorists accept Enlightenment rationalism and individualism, and endorse the myth of women’s total subjection prior to that era, is simply wrong. Various feminist historians have pointed out that European women had, in effect, neither a Renaissance nor an Enlightenment, losing rather than gaining mobility and influence in both periods. Indeed, Anne Carr, one of the Catholic feminist theologians Martin takes to task, has coedited a book with historical chapters detailing this very process. Other chapters in the same volume (Faith, Feminism, and Families, Westminster John Knox, in press) support both “family-friendly” feminism and the lodging of individual and family within a primary loyalty to the larger kingdom community.

In the second place (and here my Protestant bias shows itself), Martin places too much confidence in the norm of “obedient listening” to Scripture in the process of “indwelling the authoritative church tradition,” which he contrasts to the supposed feminist theological sellout to human standards of reason and experience. While freely conceding that feminist theology is as vulnerable as any other kind in its temptation to reduce theology to anthropology, I note that the Wesleyan quadrilateral calls for a dialogue among all four authorities–Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience–even as the Reformed tradition elevates Scripture above the other three. (In this context, it also bears noting that Martin appears to know nothing about contemporary Reformed and evangelical expressions of feminism.) Moreover, while quick to decry the “reason-based” and “individualistic” approaches of his feminist targets, Martin himself borrows selectively from various authorities (e.g., Aquinas, Eliade, Ricoeur, Rahner) to craft a “theory of analogy” for the interpretation of scriptural imagery, not questioning whether his own resulting method constitutes anything other than an obedient listening to revelation, free of rationalist and individualist taint.

Finally, while decrying the advocacy stance of feminist theologians, Martin appears to have his own vested interest in preserving a male-led Catholic church, albeit in a kinder, gentler form. For while he clearly deplores the past marginalization and oppression of women, he distinguishes in great detail between Christian “charisms, ministries, and offices,” and invokes a relational anthropology grounded in presumed gender essentialism to defend the continued exclusion of women from church office. Thus, the issue is not so much orthodox Christian respect for relationality versus feminist individualism, but rather whether relational theology points to the inclusion or exclusion of women from certain avenues of Christian service.

The institution that Martin implicitly upholds as God-ordained and unchangeable–namely, a celibate, Catholic, male church hierarchy–is what Richard Sipe takes so bluntly to task in Sex, Priests, and Power. Motivated by the now-public crisis of priestly sexual abuse, Sipe’s book follows on an earlier study of religious celibacy, which he defends as a personalized calling and quest but rejects in the overly institutionalized and politicized form it takes within Catholicism. (See Sipe’s A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy, Brunner/Mazel, 1990.) Originally intended as a vehicle of self-knowledge and freedom for service, priestly celibacy in Sipe’s view has become so intertwined with nature-grace dualism, with the power to regulate sexual expression among the faithful, and with alternating attitudes of idealization and denigration of women, that systematic (and systematically denied) sexual abuse has become almost inevitable.

By Sipe’s estimates, based on 25 years of international, team-based research (and conceding the difficulty of gathering accurate statistics in the light of institutional reluctance to do comprehensive, random-sample studies), half of all priests at any given time are more or less successfully celibate. This includes half of the 30 percent of all priests estimated to be of homosexual orientation. Of the rest, 20 percent are in ongoing relationships with women, about 10 percent are sexually experimenting or involved in ongoing homosexual behavior, and the remainder, in descending order, engage in “problematic” masturbation, sex with adolescents or children, or transvestism.

Because others have documented the crisis in priestly child abuse so well (e.g., journalist Jason Berry’s Lead Us Not into Temptation, Doubleday, 1992), the most powerful part of Sipe’s work may be that which documents the continuing extent of, and hypocrisy surrounding, priestly abuse of women. Steeped in the belief that since Jesus was a male celibate, male celibates are a breed superior to everyone else and especially to women, much of the Catholic hierarchy covertly tolerates the sexual exploitation of women to help priests prove their masculinity, to relieve their loneliness and sexual tension, and to support the fiction that it will help them understand married people better. If exposed, the priest is routinely forgiven as “only human” and continues up the ecclesiastical career ladder. The woman, by contrast, is paradoxically both blamed for the priest’s lapse and implicitly told that she should be “grateful and silent for the privilege of such selection or closeness,” mindful of the fact that “it is the special grace and gift of a woman to be able to save a priest by her love.” It is not uncommon for women who have been impregnated by priests (Sipe mentions a group of 50 who have compared notes with one another) to have undergone abortions at the insistence of their lovers, sometimes with financial settlements that required their silence. Understandably, “it is especially galling … to witness the promotion and advancement of the priest abortionist … while the women struggle to work out the pain of loss, abandonment, and confusion of the scarlet ‘A’ emblazoned on their memory and soul.”

Sipe asserts that many straight and gay priests distinguish, often without the least sense of guilt or hypocrisy, between celibacy (giving up marriage) and chastity (refraining from sexual activity altogether). He does not see seminaries as homosexual subcultures, despite evidence of increasing homosexual activity in such settings; but seminaries are “homosocial” in that men are central to their organizational definition, men alone occupy the power hierarchy, and women are “adjunct and dispensable.” Thus, whether seminaries attract men of homosexual inclination, or their homosocial organization fosters homosexual involvement (Sipe believes both are true), they lack the human and spiritual wholeness “that can come only from a system wherein men and women are tied together in an interdependent system of reciprocity.” Especially disturbing are accounts of a novice master drawing young seminarians into simultaneous or sequential sexual relationships, each hidden from the others until the priests themselves compared notes years later, and of a superior pressing an unwilling junior priest into a sexual relationship with a powerful bishop by reminding him, “If you want to progress in this organization, you are going to need friends.”

Because Sipe’s book claims only to be the “anatomy of a crisis,” he does not spell out solutions in any detail. But it is clear that he supports optional celibacy and the equality of women with men at all levels of the church. Somewhat disturbing is his theoretical allegiance to a combination of Wilsonian sociobiology and the optimistic evolutionism of Teilhard de Chardin, along with a certainty that “scientific materialism” is the tool of choice for purging religion of magic and superstition. Moreover, despite his documentation and indictment of clerical sexual abuse, he seems naively confident that just by getting rid of mind/body dualism and accepting sex as a healthy, creational good, the “crisis” will be solved. Many Protestants, surveying the wreckage of the sexual revolution in their own ranks, could tell him otherwise.

As a Protestant trying to evaluate works by and about Catholics, I often feel like Oliver Sacks’s anthropologist on Mars, anxious to understand the mindset of the subculture–or, in this case, the competing mindsets within it–while still maintaining some critical distance. I believe quite strongly that by eliminating, rather than reforming, the monastic system, Protestants lost a valuable institution, and I agree with priest/sociologist Andrew Greeley (Confessions of a Parish Priest, Pocket Books, 1987) that what is needed is something like a “priest corps,” equally open to men and women, who take short-term vows of celibacy (for example, five to seven years) that they can either renew or renounce with a completely honorable discharge in order to marry and/or take up other callings. In this way, perhaps the church could harness the communal energies of well-trained celibates, equally honor both marriage and singleness, and greatly reduce the misogyny that both Martin and Sipe rightly deplore.

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

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