If You’re Intent on Joining the Chattering Classes, At Least Try to Chatter Better
August 29, 2006
Once in a while the Evangelical publication, Books & Culture, prints something that is unabashedly immersed in movement politics. When that happens, it is, to my recollection, always motivated by a more or less authentically conservative impulse against liberalizing theology that moves away from orthodoxy, or against a statist politics that skews socialist or “communitarian.” I suppose this is a mostly good thing even when I disagree with the political points being made.
Often it seems it is Allen Guelzo who produces the best and perhaps the only direct critique and polemic in B&C, and I wonder why that is. For many, such stuff is regarded as “unseemly,” which I believe is code for “not having the balls to participate in public arguments of historic, cultural consequence because one chiefly fears the professional and social consequences—or just the prospect of being defeated, wrong, misunderstood, ‘badly received,’ &c.,…”
A periodical largely for Intellectual Evangelicals (hereafter “intelligelicals”), there is no doubt a certain conditioning pressure inflicted on B&C by the audience and contributors whose occupational hazard is a malady similar to the “narrow escape syndrome.” Seeing themselves as the cutting edge of an informed and culturally engaged neo-neo-evangelicalism (or neo-reformed and usually “post-confessional” Calvinism), and having little to no direct experience with the complexities and pragmatics of wealth and power, intelligelicals tend to resemble the secular liberal-left professoriate out of which they sprang and to whom they look for approval in more or less fawning ways. (For an in depth-analysis of this deadly vice forming mindset, see Proust and René Girard’s commentary on his depictions of the snob and envier relationships comprising the old Parisian salon society.)
Guelzo, in probably his best original B&C contribution to date, took this intelligelical ethos to task in a feature on Evangelical colleges. He scrutinized the material and spiritual causes of liberalizing tendencies and what they portend for the future. Astonishingly there was no reaction to the substance of this piece. That is too bad, since articles like Guelzo’s have at least the potential to spark the real and substantial conversations that are needed but have not been happening in the intelligelical world.
Case in point: Now John Wilson has written a somewhat muted critique of Randall Balmer’s new contribution to the “narrow escape” genre—apparently a book of cheap polemic by another suffering “Great Soul” who feels menaced by his erstwhile Evangelical brethren. Wilson’s short editorial/review reduces to a justified complaint about inaccuracy and unfairness, particularly in Balmer’s attacks on William Dembski and George Marsden whom I see as highly misguided though for rather different reasons than Balmer, apparently. It may be simple a rhetorical gesture, but Wilson says he wants a fair critique of these men and their ideas. I hope that is a real desire backed by some editorial labor to search out or produce such a critique. My editorial inclination would have been to ask Lauren Winner, a former student of Balmer’s and an intelligelical suspected of being a liberalizer herself, to review Balmer’s book. But unfortunately B&C is no Partisan Review. Still, while lacking such crowd-drawing intellectual bloodsport, there is much of value that could be said, motivated by more purely philosophical than partisan spirits.
Rather than being inept ideologues who want to somehow Christianize science and academe, I think Dembski and Marsden have made fatal concessions to the deeper institutional and ideological structures they purportedly wish to change. They are figureheads for two strategically similar negotiations between Evangelicals and established elites in the institutions and regimes of expertise, mainly the academic world. ID is a very hard-line, anti-positivist, anti-materialist-reductionist movement with specific agendas, but it actually makes major concessions to positivism and materialist reductionism as the necessary rules of the game to which one must adhere to get any hearing at all. Marsden represents or helped foment a soft and very loosely organized movement with a vague agenda of softening or subverting anti-religious secularism in universities. Unlike ID, no particular scholarly theory or goal is prescribed; this is simply advocacy for an ill-defined “Christian scholarship” that proceeds by appealing (and thus conceding) to the the rules of “tolerance” and “inclusivity”—the “multicultural” model of “pluralism” that prevails in academe and other segments of American society today and which is rightly perceived by many as inherently an assault on Anglo-European and Judaeo-Christian history, culture, and tradition. Though similar as “wedge strategies,” Intelligent Design and “the outrageous idea of Christian scholarship” are not at all comfortably united efforts to purchase status, credibility (if not authority), and influence for certain Christians. (It is odd that Balmer does not seem to see the internal divisions and that Wilson was not moved to point them out.)
These “wedge strategies” have been concocted in order to make superficial gains—to acquire some mainstream intellectual careers for certain Christians of approximately one’s own kind. It has, predictably, become very much a game of “Who benefits?” (Marsden’s Pew-funded purse fed “Evangelical” and then broadly “Christian” scholars, including certain Catholics and others who are not necessarily Evangelicals in the usual sense and who may or may not be differently “evangelical” than Evangelicals.) The great common ground has been simply a desire for “Access” that is at times more and less disguised as a process of “cultural transformation” or “redemption.” This very Evangelical desire to be an “instrument” ends up becoming more than a means to an end but an end in itself as a pillar of identity. There is little discussion and no real answer to the question about ends. Why would it be good to have a Deistic Theism regarded as respectable and relevant in science? Why would it be good to have “Christian perspectives” regarded as respectable and relevant in all fields of research and education? Good, I mean, in results other than greater cultural prestige, access, and authority for certain religionists.
I suspect this elite institutional access-seeking mentality is producing more Evangelicals like Balmer than anything else. Here is an Evangelical with a PhD and an endowed chair at an elite university, who regards Marsden’s desire to create scholars like himself as a desire for a kind of affirmative action for Evangelicals. Balmer is not willing to tolerate this, especially if it means promoting neo-anti-evolutionist para-professors like Dembski as practitioners of real scholarship. While there is a relevant issue of truth and value at stake, one senses keenly how it has been eclipsed by the classic snob-envier psychology.
Once one has elite status and access, why should one tarnish it by consorting with non-elites and dubious elites with dubious credentials or associations? Because Chuck Colson, thrust upon you as a kind of Evangelical peer leader, would like you to?
The best one can do is say Evangelical social climbing will steer the culture, shaping the law, government, and public policy on issues that….presently divide the hell out of Christians, especially ill-defined, fad-chasing, deracinated Protestant Evangelicals and other “post-confessionalists.” Lacking ecclesial and political solidarity—the latter ideally following from the former (though this is precisely what many Evangelicals fear)—one cannot expect to be able to do anything with “access” once one has it.
Perhaps a better way is to be found in building identity and fighting for solidarity and power on a more populist and local level. This would be a rejection of the managerial, social-engineering premises of conservative and liberal, religious and secular statists and institutionalists.
As Brad Lowell Stone writes of the communitarianism favored by many intelligelicals such as Randall Balmer,
The main features of this world view are a Rousseauean-styled belief in political participation as an end in itself; a deep fear of egoism and economic inequality; the conviction that the American problems associated with individualism result exclusively from the misarrangement of “the large structures of the economy and state;” and a fervent belief in the unifying, equalizing, and redemptive powers of the state.It is those “redemptive powers” that are seen in distinctly theological terms by Christians across the political and theological spectrum; it unites them—and threatens to assimilate them—with the enduring secular liberalism of elite society on the basis of their common creed of what Santayana called “moral materialism.”
The circumstances of his life hitherto have necessarily driven the American into moral materialism; for in his dealings with material things he can hardly stop to enjoy their sensible aspects, which are ideal, nor proceed at once to their ultimate uses, which are ideal too. He is practical as against the poet, and worldly as against the clear philosopher or the saint. The most striking expression of this materialism is usually supposed to be his love of the almighty dollar; but that is a foreign and unintelligent view. The American talks about money, because that is the symbol and measure he has at hand for success, intelligence, and power; but as to money itself he makes, loses, spends, and gives it away with a very light heart. To my mind the most striking expression of his materialism is his singular preoccupation with quantity. …
…it is astonishing how much even religion in America (can it possibly be so in England ?) is a matter of meetings, building-funds, schools, charities, clubs, and picnics. To be poor in order to be simple, to produce less in order that the product may be more choice and beautiful, and may leave us less burdened with unnecessary duties and useless possessions that is an ideal not articulate in the American mind; yet here and there I seem to have heard a sigh after it, a groan at the perpetual incubus of business and shrill society. …
This is If You’re Intent on Joining the Chattering Classes, At Least Try to Chatter Better in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Make this Man a Cardinal | Next: Islamicized Mass in Milwaukee and the Latest Spengler | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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