If the Foundations Be Destroyed
November 02, 2005
While NPR and PBS whinge about conservative conspiracies to take them over, balance and “equal time” seem ever more wanting in the wake of their coverage of the Alito nomination. I feel very unsympathetic for their plight after seeing parts of a recent PBS documentary that valorizes Alfred Kinsey despite and seemingly because of his pseudo-scientific, self-interested, and utterly compromised “research” which viewer are actually led to believe was vindicated by the hippies and “free-love.” The liberationist rabble of the 60s apparently represent for the filmmakers a self-evident moment of real progress for the culture as the constraints of “culture” were abandoned, having been “seen through,” in favor of an embrace of the “natural.” Only a few intrusions of good sense from T. C. Boyle amid scattered and undeveloped reflections from some of Kinsey’s associates (e.g., on being pressured by him into trying out gay sex) punctuate the general lunacy.
And now some of PBS/NPR’s biggest corporate donors (pharmaceutical companies) have backed some hefty propaganda designed to promote any and all vaccines while fanning the flames of epidemic hysteria. In one scene, a group of American parents legitimately concerned with some questionable (arguably unneccessary, sometimes impotent and occasionally harmful) common vaccines for children are posed as bad examples. If their attitude had been common in the past, polio would not have been beaten, the viewer is admonished. The scene then shifts to images of suffering disease victims, warnings of “super bugs,” and life-saving pills rolling through a drug factory–the “super drug” to save us from the next superbug. Next up is some coverage of current efforts to vaccinate Indian children for polio in the face of suspicion and hostility attributed to religious primitivism. (Cue images of poverty and squalor.) Nevermind that, as Edward E. Ericson, Jr. writes in a review of several recent books on polio, “Polio is, counterintuitively, ‘a disease of cleanliness.’ Until modern hygiene and sanitation kicked in, newborns picked up the virus from their mothers, but in mild doses that produced the antibodies needed for lifelong inoculation.”
That is not to say that the polio vaccine is or was a bad thing, but it is not representative of all vaccines, and even it should not be idealized. One learns other interesting, complicating details in Ericson’s review, which concentrates more on the meaning of human suffering which he takes to be inevitable. This is a viewpoint that is unlikely to receive attention on a Merck-funded PBS where narratives of utopian scientific progressivism abound, regardless of partisan politics.
In the same issue of Books & Culture where Ericson’s review appears, there are other items worthy of note. (Not all are online yet, and if you do not have a subscription, articles will only be readable in full online for a short time after their appearance.) The cover feature by Amy Laura Hall is quite fascinating, as it tracks the twentieth-century transformation of parenthood in mainline, mainstream Protestant America from a rather natural, unplanned, commercially and technologically unmeddled with vocation into its current status as “meticulously planned.” Hall discusses popular women’s and parenting magazines from the Cold-War era where the ideology promoted by DuPont and other corporations is so overt as to present good family/bad family images where the former is the antithesis of the latter with its images of unkempt children, well-worn clothes, a lack of a manicured lawn and up-to-date home appliances.
Hall moves from women’s magazines to the current manifestations of “meticulously planned parenthood,” which includes prenatal genetic testing. If a disability is found by amniocentesis, 9 out of 10 women choose to have an abortion. Hall then quotes an interview from Rayna Rapp’s Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America (Routledge, 2000) where a woman who was suffering emotionally after aborting her child who tested positive for Down’s syndrome saw a family with a child with Down’s and felt much better because this child clearly “[didn’t] belong in that family” and seemed “not quite from the same race.” Hall feels that this woman’s view is widely shared but seldom articulated. One can only hope that isn’t true and that parents of Down’s children like Patricia Bauer will not be overshadowed by a new crop of neo-Nazi eugenicists thriving in the culture of death produced by the collusion of late capitalism and liberal individualism. Intriguingly, Hall says this outcome is due to a particularly “Protestant heresy” that Protestants should be able to name.
And speaking of Protestantism and the demonic forces of its secular, liberal, and market-rationalist outcomes, another must-read is Harry Stout’s review of Eugene and Elizabeth Genovese’s In The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview. (The book and review are complemented well by Eugene Genovese’s critique in The New Republic of Mark Noll’s America’s God and an interview with the Genoveses that I mentioned recently.) In Stout’s telling, the Genoveses paint a picture of a genuinely Christian South with a cultural richness and depth to match the Northeast as well as the virtues of a traditional order constraining and opposed to liberal ideological and economic liberalism. This, as Stout notes, is rather unPC today and as some readers will observe, suspiciously romantic, especially when coming from two ex-Marxist Catholic reverts who have made their home in the South. However, Stout defends the integrity of their argument, which is one of great irony and tragedy: orthodox evangelicalism (i.e., trinitarian and biblically literalist) in the south had coherent, self-consistent arguments for slavery that northern evangelicals could not and did not deny except to the extent that they became unorthodox (i.e., non-trinitarian and biblically historicist). Liberal theology in the north got the right and proper Christian answers on slavery in ways that entailed secularization, heterodoxy, and the decline of Evangelicalism; conservative theology in the south got the wrong answers on slavery in ways that entailed Evangelical orthodoxy and meant the greater persistence of it in what would become in that term of Yankee condescension, “the Bible Belt.”
At this point Stout notes his perception in the Genovese’s book of too much contrast between Norht and South that favors the South, and he interjects a few paragraphs of his own historical knowledge to leave readers with a more honest telling of a story of boundless ruin:
Both [North and South] adhered to a Christian orthodoxy grounded in Puritan notions of a “covenanted nation,” a chosen people who, by virtue of their orthodoxy, could claim God was on their side. With that claim, both sides could enter into the bloody business of killing one another without any effective limits on the butchery. Since both sides read their Old Testament alongside their Puritans to arrive at an identical national jeremiad, they knew that defeats were only calls to reform and repentance–which, when properly pursued, would induce a covenant God to render victory to “His” people. Only when we recognize the profound similarities between Northern and Southern Protestantism does it become possible to understand the ferocity of the conflict. In fundamental ways, the Civil War represented a fratricidal war between two similarly grounded theologies struggling for the soul of the continent.
The originally Puritan idea of a covenanted Christian nation dominated Confederate discourse. Indeed, in a rare slip, the Genoveses assert that the Confederate clergy mounted an “unsuccessful campaign � to declare the Confederacy a ‘Christian society.’ ” Sorry, but nothing could be further from the truth. Confederate pastors and moralists enjoyed an immense rhetorical advantage over the North because of their Christian Confederate Constitution. And they didn’t hesitate to exploit it. Following the resounding Confederate victory at First Bull Run, the Rev. Edward Reed preached a thanksgiving sermon at Flat Rock, South Carolina and reiterated the stock Confederate truism that the Federal Constitution was fatally secular: “Whether through inadvertence, or, as is unfortunately more probable, from infidel practices imbibed in France by some members of the Convention � it contained no recognition of God. Our present Constitution opens with a confession of the existence and providence of the Almighty.”
Much to their dismay, orthodox Northern Protestants found themselves forced to agree, and issued repeated calls for a constitutional amendment identifying America as a “Christian nation.” So adamant were they in seeking to emulate the South with a constitutional amendment that a desperate Abraham Lincoln threw them a sop with piously phrased proclamations of fasting and thanksgiving and a new national motto, “In God We Trust.” Ironically, when Lincoln determined that his new theocentric motto would be stamped on the nation’s coinage, he inadvertently fashioned a telling symbol of the North’s conflation of capitalism and Christianity.
Small wonder that, as Stout tells us, “By war’s end, some Southern intellectuals were actually wondering if the Reformation–with its individualistic ethos–was a good thing after all.” For Stout, who notes the Genovese’s agreement with Perry Miller’s tale of Northern Puritan declension, the South cannot escape a similar tale of decline, where the present can never match a past that has been irrevocably lost. Further, Stout implies that that past was never sound or idyllic at all since “both sides” applied the same faulty Calvinist ecclesiology and doctrines of covenant and election to doomed regionalist/nationalist causes that could not co-exist without a conflict that would destroy both.
Here one thinks that the proper biblical model was and is not of Israel the conquering, redeemer-nation which in the Calvinist conception bred civil division and ruin for Anglo-American Protestant culture and its churches but of the pilgrim church, of penitent Israel in exile as captured in the words of the poets of the Jewish diaspora. They were and are faced with the same problem of declension that led to the question, “How can the Temple sacrifice be performed when there is no Temple?” Just as “The modern state of Israel is not the Two Kingdoms united under David and divided after Solomon, and its Jerusalem is not a happy home,” it is the same for western Christendom. Here too I recall an article in First Things on Ephraim Radner:
One of Radner’s signal contributions is to have shown that there is a clear scriptural paradigm for coming to grips with the divided Church and its sober fate: that God’s Spirit is no longer with us. Biblical Israel serves as the chief figure or type of Christian division. Willfully sundered into conflicting kingdoms, scriptural Israel is abandoned by God for its loveless disobedience (see Ezekiel 10-11). Even the Lord’s beloved Zion must weep over the absence of the comforter (Lamentations 1). The destiny of divided Israel is exile, destruction, and death. Why should a divided Church expect a better fate?
This is If the Foundations Be Destroyed in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: The Resumé Gap | Next: Iain Murray’s Novel Idea | TrackBack (1) | Comments (0)
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Tracked on November 16, 2005 07:40 PM