Embracing the Same Old Thing
July 25, 2005
The magazine Comment has recently published two articles in response to my earlier discussion with Prof. Koyzis, one quite good (Greydanus) and one quite bad (Dijkema). I don’t have a great deal to add to the substance of the discussion regarding liberalism, etc., as my views have already been made clear elsewhere. Readers, no doubt, will want to peruse the Comment offerings and draw their own conclusions.
(Readers appreciative of Mr. Greydanus’s insightful remarks may also benefit from his earlier reflections on my debate with the Professor here and here. The latter comments on the flaws of the Dooyeweerdianism underlying the neo-calvinism of Prof. Koyzis’s political thinking. Also relevant but quite a piece in its own right is Mr. Greydanus’s more recent essay on Chesterton’s assessment of Aquinas.)
I do wish, however, to address one point raised by the latter of these responses which, in the end, is the most important point of all. In his rather embarrassing defense of Prof. Koyzis, Brian Dijkema (recently graduated prize student of Dr. K., it would seem) fails entirely to address any of my substantive claims and chooses instead this interpretation:
Upon reading Fr. Jape’s position, one comes to the conclusion that for a Christian to avoid the taint of this ubiquitous virus of liberalism and for the society to remain pure one must either (a) resort to guns, bombs, terrorism or warfare to force your beliefs upon others or (b) go into your own community and do not do business, politics, arts, medicine, etc., with anyone except those whom you know to be pure.
Yes, I suppose one could come to this and almost any conclusion. But neither I nor tNP have ever advocated anything remotely resembling this. We have, however, consistently stood on the side of submission to local and familial obligations and concerns over and against political and personal pipe-dreams. It is quite instructive, though, to compare records with my interlocutors on questions of national political involvement. While neo-calvinists such as Mark Noll and others (regrettably, also the non-neo-calvinist MacIntyre) went soft during the election of 2004 and advocated staying home from the polls (like spoiled children who couldn’t have what they wanted), I consistently advocated the opposite. Who is the real respecter of the political process of democracy? When neo-calvinists such as Jim Skillen and other Evangelicals began urging “nuance” to the masses, I demanded conviction. Which position is more likely to gain some measure of justice in this world?
Even my chief interlocutor [see definition 2] in this dust-up, Prof. Koyzis, sided in his heart, at least, with Noll, and he went so far as to use an obscure internal memorandum on the conduct of war as an excuse to justify Christian support of a pro-choice politician. Koyzis did, it must be said, concede to the necessity of “strategic voting” and lamented that there weren’t more Christians talking about this. Perhaps at that time Koyzis had not yet discovered the synaptical delights of my snapping prose, so he may be forgiven for overlooking my own very clear discussions of the tragic nature of politics in this world.
If my advice to Christians on this issue can be reduced to anything, it would be to pursue the tragic necessities of political involvement with a Machiavellian shrewdness while maintaining and exemplifying personal and familial distance and withdrawal from the corrupting disorders of the present age. For most people, the emphasis should heavily tilt to the latter of these two, though I have never denied that some will by necessity compromise more with the structures of modernity in order to implement good and necessary political goals. My counsel in such circumstances is simply this: the path of worldly power is corrupting beyond measure and places the Christian soul in mortal danger; few navigate that path without succumbing to evil and damnation; for the saints and near saints, a purgatorial reward should be expected.
Readers may at this point be confused, used as they are to viewing this debate through convenient stereotypes. They may wonder how it is that I can both denounce Christian political theory and remain steadfast in my call for Christian political involvement–in contrast to theorists of the public square who wilt when forced into its heat. How can I be both a “pessimist” with little to no hope that the current order will last yet remain mirthfully involved in the “wild enormities of ancient magnanimity”–in contrast to Christian triumphalists and back-slapping boosters who suffocate in a humorless terminal earnestness? It is the Pantagruelian paradox. In the absence of this paradox, the very categories of the discussion are corrupted by the context in which they occur. Allow me, if I can, to bring some renewed clarification to the situation.
With apologies to H. L. Mencken, who was a Jesuit in all but name, I may say that the Evangelical culture exists in three layers. The plutocracy on top, a vast mass of undifferentiated suburblicans (and exurblicans as the case may be) on the bottom, with a forlorn intelligentsia gasping out a precarious life between–a life dependent on the plutocrats, whom they despise, to pitch their wares to the suburblicans, whom they despise even more. The Evangelical plutocracy consists mainly of those in the political, business, and publishing classes whose primary occupation is portraying suburblicans as victims of a society which hates them and selling a version of religion-as-snake-oil as antidote and crutch. This traveling medicinal fraud-wagon carries numerous potions and concoctions, from Kuyper’s Kingdom Elixer (guaranteed to induce the delusion that every square inch of creation is yours!) to Christian Women’s Powder (a snuff every morning to brighten up your dull career, marriage, and living room decor!) to Warren’s Water (imbues all your day’s activity from your morning shave to your fantasy football league with a serene sense of meaning and purpose!) to Novak’s Nutrition Supplements (miraculously allows you to be a selfish bastard, imperial exploiter, and disciple of Jesus all at the same time!).
Embarrassed by this cultural sham, the Evangelical intelligentsia are nevertheless ham-strung by their commitment to the pillars of personal autonomy and individualism which prop up and create this market in the first place. No longer sharing the relatively simple faith of the suburblicans, yet needing the market provided by the plutocracy, they expand the constituency with new products and slogans. Skillen: “Discern God’s will!” Wallis: “God hates Republicans!” McClaren: “Despite what you’ve heard, God is not a meany!”
The point, if I may be permitted to put it bluntly, is that the whole “debate” regarding “Christian involvement” is a monstrous hoax; a fraud; a demonic sham perpetrated on the church to ham-string its true witness to faith and life and truth. The answer is not “withdrawal” or “entering the fray” as Mr. Dijkema would have it, as those terms draw their entire meaning from a lie. As my friend Mr. Lewis, speaking as senior to junior tempter, put it:
What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call “Christianity And.” You know–Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring. Work on their horror of the Same Old Thing.
Woe are we, for Screwtape has been all too successful in instilling in Christianity a deep revulsion and horror of the Same Old Thing. I am here, on the other hand, to proclaim the necessary and sufficient grace of a life bounded by the Same Old Thing: children, church, the Eucharist, confession, voting, laughing, friendship, work, play, citizenship, birth, growth, death, joy, suffering, devotion, prayer, and love. More than this is less than the call of faith, and less is just more of the Next New Thing.
This is Embracing the Same Old Thing in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Against Progressives and Progressivisms | Next: The Georges | TrackBack (1) | Comments (0)
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» De-theorizing the public square from BrinkReview
Just as an interjection into the debate between Mssrs. Greydanus and Dijkema and Fr. Jape, it would seem to me that our cleric is not really advocating jihad or retreat from the public square (though he is certainly warning of… [Read More]
Tracked on August 8, 2005 12:36 AM