The national coverage of the recent conventions of the Episcopalian Church, U.S.A., and of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has been mostly fixated on the politics of homosexuality, but, beneath that cloud of confusion, there is a larger story with a longer arc. The story of the Episcopal Church is a substantial part of the history of America, considered as an Anglo-Saxon settlement; and the disestablishment of the old Anglican churches is an illustration of the meaning of revolution. Add to that the history of the Presbyterian Church or churches, the demography represented by that church, and add again the history of the Methodist Church, the preaching of George Whitefield and another demography (and the founding of the first orphanage in America—where and when? Quiz later), and you have the story of the mainline churches in America. Their transformations are the changes of the country and a register of the history of the nation.

But these churches (and other churches such as the Congregationalist and the Lutheran ones) have a longer history going back through England and Scotland to the Continent. And, if you want to get picky, the history goes back further through the Reformation to the Middle Ages, all the way back to the Apostles. I have always thought, by the way, that the most difficult point of Christian theology is not the doctrine of the Atonement or of the Trinity but of Apostolic Succession. I had already begun to doubt this doctrine providentially, after meeting contemporary seminary graduates and Protestant ministers and reading the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, even before a certain lady told me of the remarks of her plumber—a preacher of some obscure sect, who declared that the Epistles were the wives of the Apostles.

So, having clarified at least that point of orthodox theology and established an historical perspective, we are ready for the news that the delegates to the convention of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) have voted to “receive” (rather than “approve”) a policy paper on “gender-inclusive” language for the Trinity. Congregations are not required to use the language—yet. But how could they resist “Mother, Child, and Womb” and “Rock, Redeemer, and Friend,” as Andrea Dworkin- and Mary Daly-style replacements for “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”? We will magisterially declare the winner for the New Liturgical Language Award at the end of this essay, but, for now, we will only remark that “Presbyterian” is literally an odd name indeed for a “church” that is governed by the spirit of radical feminist blasphemy.

In the prevailing American tradition, the delegates to the convention of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) have demonstrated that absurdity is justified by votes, and that theology, the logic of God, is just too tough for us girls and girly-boys. If there is a principle here, it is that, in modern Protestant America, nothing serious can be addressed without a gross collapse of mind and language, a feeble affirmation of banal Pelagianism, and a groveling display of servility before the gods of the marketplace. Why is it that there can be no grand image in America of great issues clashing—no Henry at Canossa, no Luther nailing his theses to the door, no Galileo hedging his recantation—but only the droning of another committee, limp-wristed ayes that have it, pathetic appeals to false authority, all mummy-wrapped in the smothering strands of liberal clichés.

There is, however, an exception to the parade of the insipid and the inane which fills the collective memory, and that is the remarkable film Inherit the Wind (1960), though there may be a question about just why or how it is “remarkable.” Based on the Broadway play written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (!), Inherit the Wind is quite a cultural statement—some movie, indeed, taking as it does the Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1925 as its subject. Interestingly enough, Inherit the Wind has been filmed three more times since 1960, suggesting either that producer/director Stanley Kramer did not get it right, or that the powerful message of the play cannot be told often enough, or perhaps that it cannot be shown often enough in the high schools of America. But the quadrupled presence of Inherit the Wind may also suggest that it is the play and its burden that matters, not its embodiment on film.

Even so, there remain a few points to be made about the original film, one of which is that it is, indeed, a very bad movie, and there are a lot of reasons why. Of course, there is an inherent difficulty in filming a play, but then that challenge is one that was inherent in the project. Another major flaw is the acting, and this is perhaps not to be blamed so much on the principals as upon the source and the director. Spencer Tracy certainly had his moments, but not with Stanley Kramer. The names were changed to protect the guilty, but this Clarence Darrow is no representation at all of anything like Darrow. (By the way, Orson Welles was just as bad or even worse as Darrow in Compulsion.) Fredric March was also a formidable actor, in his younger days a matinee idol and a star, but his version of William Jennings Bryan is a vicious grotesque—the sheer malice of the performance, unjustified by any notion of a pageant-like reenactment, is quite revealing of the agenda. And Gene Kelly as the H.L. Mencken figure is utterly inadequate in that role. Inherit the Wind is a big nothing as a movie, yet it is “important,” and, even more, it is an X-ray or, better, an autopsy of the liberal imagination, or lack thereof.

As a product of the 1950’s, the playwrights’ vision was distorted by contemporary anxieties relating to McCarthyism and other such hysterias. The exposure of the left’s entanglement with communism required many a deception, and Inherit the Wind was far from the only such example of willfully misleading agitprop, quite a bit of it emanating from Stanley Kramer—Twelve Angry Men, for example. The justification of liberal obscurantism led necessarily to outrageous misrepresentation, and that included the falsification of the characters and motives of men, and of events as well. Clarence Darrow was hardly the “thoughtful,” “sincere” advocate of humane values whom we know from the film. He was, instead, a nasty piece of work, a grandstanding village atheist who took sadistic pleasure in baiting his inferiors—a very large group. We would not know from Inherit the Wind that, for reasons of discretion, the defense at the Scopes Trial did not want Darrow but could not keep him out.

The caricature of William Jennings Bryan in that film is so crude as to eclipse all the baggage that he brought with him to Dayton in 1925. Bryan was “the Great Commoner,” an important player in the Democratic Party for decades, Democratic and Populist presidential candidate in 1896, Democratic candidate again in 1900 and 1908, and secretary of state in the Wilson administration until he resigned on matters of principle in 1915. A Presbyterian, populist, and progressive, anti-imperialist and antimilitarist, Bryan was the star of the Chautauqua circuit, the advocate of the common man, the foe of privilege and occulted power, the champion of a rural America that was fading before urban ascendancy and industrial combinations of wealth. He clung to “left wing” positions for reasons of Christian principle: the vote for women, temperance, the popular election of senators. The world was passing him by in 1925—he died five days after the trial ended—but it was Christian principle that required his attack on Darwinism and his defense of biblical inerrancy, a defense he hedged. The smug liberal fantasy of Inherit the Wind misrepresented everything about the Scopes Trial, including its real issue, about which Bryan was lucid. The complexity of Bryan is nowhere suggested in Inherit the Wind, and neither is his opposition to Darwinism on the grounds of the damage to the Western mind known as Social Darwinism. “The survival of the fittest” (a tautology meaning the “survival of the survivors”) had suggested to many in America, including Mencken, that fraternal concern was a mistake: The poor, the sick, and the unfit should go under for the improvement of the species. Teutonic militarism was a product of Darwinism, Bryan thought, and Adolf Hitler and Margaret Sanger were later to confirm his convictions. Broadway and Hollywood were more comfortable with a twitching hick from the sticks than they were with William Jennings Bryan.

H.L. Mencken is another story altogether. When we think of him, it is words, not images, that come to mind, for Mencken was an extraordinary journalist—a prose poet—and he has been called the best writer in the America of his time. His brilliance of style and wit, however, was never matched by wisdom, for Mencken was trapped by his own limitations and unfortunate early influences. To admire extravagantly Wagner, T.H. Huxley, Nietzsche, and James Gibbons Huneker is a shaky foundation, however much Mencken made of it. His contempt for religion led him to what he called “prejudices” and errors of all sorts. In his famous essay “The Sahara of the Bozart,” Mencken was quite wrong about the state of education in the South, and about the state of culture there as well; but that did not matter, for the engine of Mencken’s prose hummed so efficiently that actual inquiry or observation was quite out of the question. In the case of the Monkey Trial, our intrepid reporter was Johnny-on-the-spot, but he was even more a hoofer going through the old song and dance than he was an observer. Mencken might just as well have stayed home in Baltimore and wired in his articles, for they did not get to the heart of anything. His reportage was just Menckenizing, and no one did that so well as he—the subject was irrelevant to the processing. When he described Bryan’s hold over the people of the West and the South, he continued as follows:

But out where the grass grows high, and the horned cattle dream away the lazy afternoons, and men still fear the powers and principalities of the air—out there between the corn-rows he held his old puissance to the end. There was no need for beaters to drive in his game. For miles the flivver dust would choke the roads. And when he rose at the end of the day to discharge his Message, there would be such breathless attention, such a rapt and enchanted ecstasy, such a sweet rustle of amens as the world had not known since Johann fell to Herod’s ax.

I.J. Semper has called attention to the triple combination thrice repeated and the blank verse of this musical passage. But Semper has not asked any question about the attitudes displayed: Rustics are “game”; piety is illusory; a farm is a lazy place. These formulations are not the result of observation but are mere incantations, and the more removed they are from experience, the more musical they become. We can hardly expect that the mercurial, paradoxical Mencken could be even remotely portrayed in a hack movie.

Like Darrow, Mencken showed a revealing streak of sadism. Darrow delivered a nasty crack about Bryan’s death, and, privately, Mencken actually gloated: “We killed the son-of-a-bitch!” Such remarks show something about the emotions surrounding the trial, and urban contempt for rural images was unmistakably involved. The city versus the country, the North versus the South and near West—these are familiar themes that played themselves out in Dayton. And though much has changed in America since 1925, these themes are still regularly sounded, like gongs. There is something frenzied about the hatred of religion and specifically of the Bible that I have heard violently expressed on many occasions, always in an academic setting. The city slicker is smarter than the country hick, but not so smart that he won’t rub it in.

Today we still hear about controversies in the schools. “Creationism” is taught in the public schools in certain places, in parallel with or even eclipsing Darwinian expositions. Such an outrage to modernist complacency has to be misrepresented as an encroachment upon the separation of Church and state, which it certainly is not, for that doctrine has to do with the establishment of religion, as in the old Anglican dispensation. The real issue of the Scopes Trial, as Bryan knew and as the judge in the case knew, was the right of local authorities and even people to determine what was taught in the schools financed by taxes those people paid. That is still the issue today, and the issue is pointed, for it challenges us to think about what “education” means. Biology is one thing, and we know a lot more about it today than Darwin did, and science must be respected. Of course, science would be more respected if it did not so crudely adapt itself to politics, as it does deplorably in the weekly Science section of the New York Times, and as it did for the Nazi and Soviet regimes.

We can fully expect witch doctors in black robes to interpret the law and the Constitution to mean that scientism should be taught in the schools, and that the Bible should not be taught in the schools, and we should be prepared to deal with the consequences. The ideology that declares man to be an animal and nothing more is reflective of modern values and of the contemporary economy, which is arranged to appeal behavioristically to gross instincts. The contrary doctrine, that man was created in the image of God, imposes responsibilities that are counterindicated by driver education, condom adjustment, and an accepting, diverse community. Private schools, homeschooling, taxpayer revolts, and Catholic schools are all answers to problems that the present regime denies. If the young are not to know the Bible, then what is it that they should know? The list of what they are not learning in school—grammar, languages, literature, history, geography, mathematics, science, and so on—is an imposing one, so that even if the Bible were taught in school, it might well become just another item on the list of what the students do not know.

And another curricular item that should replace the mendacious and misleading Inherit the Wind is Edward J. Larson’s excellent work Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (1997). This unlikely Pulitzer Prize winner was published by Harvard University Press—yes, miracles happen every day! I rest my case, only to add—in response to many requests—that the winner for the New Liturgical Language Award is the following trendy Trinity: The Margarita Mix, the Nachos, and the Tequila. Adios, mainline Protestantism.

Contributing editor James O. Tate is a professor of English literature at Dowling College on Long Island.

This article first appeared in the September 2006 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Along the same lines, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in an address to the American Society of International Law: “Yes, we should approach foreign legal materials with sensitivity to our differences and deficiencies, but those differences and deficiencies, I believe, should not lead us to abandon the effort to learn what we can from the experience and good thinking foreign sources may convey.”

Justices Stevens, Breyer, Souter, and Kennedy have signaled their agreement. Indeed, in 1988, scholar Anthony Lester, writing in the Columbia Law Review, spoke of the then-emerging globalist court as “giving fresh meaning to the principles of the Bill of Rights.”

With the predisposition of these justices to learn from foreigners, shouldn’t they take a second look at the judicial prohibition against religion in our schools? Currently, the very presence of a Bible on a teacher’s desk is cause for alarm. School-bus drivers pounce on little girls telling their beads. Religious clubs are ordered off campuses. Recently, school authorities turned off a student’s microphone in the middle of her valedictory address because she was about to say the word “Chr--t.”

Are we following the lead of the rest of the world in this regard? Most people would answer, “Yes.” We like to hang out with European nations, and everyone knows Europeans have stopped going to church. They no longer believe in God. They certainly would not allow a religious thought to poke its nose into the classroom.

A quick survey of educational practices in European countries belies that assumption.

In Austria, religious education is “compulsory,” and, to a degree, the courses are unapologetically sectarian. According to the Austrian Press and Information Service, “78% of the Austrian population are Roman Catholics, while a further 5% are Protestants, most of them belonging to the Augsburg confession. About 4.5% belong to other groups while the remaining 9% are non-denominational and 3.5% provided no information.” APIS explains how the system works: “Religious education in Austrian schools is not restricted to the Roman Catholic confession: children belonging to smaller churches, and religious communities receive religious education in their own confession. Their teachers are paid by the State.”

The Roman Catholic Church trains Her religious teachers, and teachers from other faiths are trained in special academies, then examined by their respective religious bodies. So, in the Austrian system, all faiths are represented in the classroom.

Historically, Belgium has contained two large and distinct populations—one, culturally French; the other, culturally Dutch. For this reason, there are essentially two Belgian school systems: one for the French-speaking sector, one for the Dutch-speaking sector. Both systems require religious or ethical instruction as part of the curriculum. The Belgian government officially recognizes six religious categories: Catholics, Protestants, Anglicans, and Orthodox, as well as Jews and Muslims. Where sufficient support exists, these religious groups can request that the beliefs of their respective faiths be incorporated into the curriculum of local public schools. Thus, in Belgium, students may have a variety of choices in religious instruction; and, in some instances, the state actually funds the propagation of specific creeds. On the other hand, nonbelievers are accommodated by the provision of an alternative course in nonreligious ethics.

While we are at it, let’s look at Canada, whose culture is derived from Europe. In recent years, the Canadian government—in a lurch to the left—has appeared more and more hostile to religious values. The passage of a “hate crimes” bill prohibiting the criticism of homosexuality has alarmed some clergy, who fear they will be dragged from their pulpits if they read certain biblical passages. However, the law specifically exempts condemnation of homosexuality in religious discourse. Besides, Canada has a highly decentralized school system that the federal government does not control.

Until quite recently, Quebec, Newfoundland, and Ontario—three of Canada’s ten provinces—supported Roman Catholic education. In recent years, Newfoundland and Quebec have modified their systems, but Ontario still maintains publicly funded Catholic schools. In some respects, this system resembles practice in the early days of the United States, when some states had established churches.

In Finland, the law mandates that all children attend school for nine years. The system is divided into two levels of “comprehensive school”—a lower stage (grades one through six) and an upper stage (grades seven through nine). At both levels, students are required to take a course called Religion or Philosophy of Life.

Again, we see an accommodation to nonbelievers. Because Finland has a national church whose beliefs are taught in the public school, Finnish Freethinkers complained to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights about the “dominant role of the national religion in the curriculum of the history of religions.” That was in 1979. In response, the Finnish parliament passed legislation establishing the Philosophy of Life course restricted to pupils unattached to religious communities.

By law, French students must receive moral and civic instruction, as opposed to “religious” instruction. However, all types of schools—private as well as public, religious as well as secular—receive funding from the French government, though with an admonition that there be no religious discrimination. However, even sectarian instruction is permitted in some publicly funded schools (e.g., in Alsace-Moselle). Thus, while the French—in their highly centralized and micromanaged educational system—do not include religious instruction in the curriculum, they see nothing wrong with funding religious schools with state-collected taxes.

The German school system requires religious instruction at several levels. However, students who object to studying religion have the option of taking a course in ethics. Whether the teaching of religion is designed to present a body of knowledge or to build character, it is an integral part of German education. Religion stands side by side with social studies, history, geography, biology, chemistry, and other traditional disciplines.

Americans who object to any relationship between Church and state would be shocked by the “church tax,” a method of funding churches that exists in several European countries. This “tax” is actually a contribution by members to their respective churches—withheld from a worker’s paycheck along with income taxes or collected in prepayments from the self-employed. The amount of the church tax is calculated on the basis of income tax, with the government taking a cut for its collection services. Churches may choose to collect the taxes themselves if they so desire. About 70 percent of church revenues in Germany come from these taxes.

In many respects, Holland is the most libertine nation in Europe, and Amsterdam has replaced Paris and Hamburg as the most permissive city. The Dutch have legalized physician-assisted suicide and prostitution, lowered the age of consent almost to early adolescence, sanctified homosexual “marriage,” and allowed marijuana to thrive in its coffeehouses. Yet, like Germany and other European countries, she gives students the choice between religious education (either Protestant or Catholic) and an ethics course.

The Dutch government also funds religious schools. Its Ministry of Education and Science has stated that, in keeping with their constitution, “People have the right, and the opportunity, to found schools based on their own religious or other convictions, or on their own educational principles.” Lest anyone say that the Dutch system is like our own, consider what follows: “Under the terms of the Constitution, all schools are funded on an equal basis. In other words, the government funds public and private schools in the same way . . . The financial equality for similar kinds of schools irrespective of their denomination has produced an intricate network of legislation and regulations.”

Norwegians, like other Scandinavians, pay scant attention to religion. The average weekly church attendance in Norway is 5 percent, as opposed to 44 percent in the United States. Yet Norway has an established church—the Lutheran Church of Norway—and requires religious education in her schools. The Oslo Coalition on Freedom of Religion or Belief, a liberal group, describes the religious curriculum as follows: “Even though the subject shall provide knowledge about other religions as well as secular worldviews, it has a basic emphasis on knowledge about Christianity and the Christian cultural heritage of Norway.”

In Sweden, where four percent of the people attend church weekly, the government has been hostile to religion. In 2003, when a Pentecostal preacher in his pulpit described homosexuality as “abnormal, a horrible cancerous tumor in the body of society,” he was hauled into court, charged with inciting hatred based on sexual orientation, found guilty, and sentenced to one month in prison. (An appeals court reversed the decision.) Yet religion is taught in Swedish schools, though beyond the level where subjects are compulsory. Like the arts, another impractical discipline, it takes up the least number of hours; but it is still a part of the public-school curriculum and is offered in every program, including science, economics, and technology.

In Spanish schools, children are taught the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. After all, 94 percent of the population is Catholic. However, parents are asked when they enroll their children in school if they wish to opt out of religious education. So the course is not required of everyone.

In Italy, religious education is mandated by the Italian Concordat of 1984, which states that all state schools must offer such courses. They consist largely of the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. Religion is not a compulsory course, but between 93 and 96 percent enroll, perhaps because the Catholic population of Italy exceeds 97 percent.

After this cursory survey of religious education abroad, it is obvious that the United States is out of step with European practice, and probably more so than in areas the Supreme Court has cited to bolster recent majority opinions—for example, the legalization of homosexuality. Indeed, such organizations as the ACLU and People for the American Way seem almost reactionary in light of what’s going on in European education. So why have our justices refused to show the same deference to other more “progressive nations” when weighing the constitutionality of religion in public schools?

One argument immediately pops up, wagging its finger at those who would like to return God to the classroom: “In America, we have the First Amendment.” Well, several European nations have similar statements that are as legally binding as the Bill of Rights. Yet foreign courts see no contradiction between law and practice. Neither did U.S. courts for the better part of 200 years. Children recited prayers in school, listened sleepily to Bible readings each morning, and put on Christmas plays. Then the Age of Ideology overtook us, and we severed our ties with the past.

Will the activists on the Supreme Court follow their own advice and consult Europe the next time they decide a case involving the relationship between religion and education? More to the point, should concerned Americans try to introduce religion courses into the curricula of our public schools?

The answer to the first question is obvious: The present majority would never undermine Justice Brennan’s 1963 prayer decision or its subsequent expansion. In other cases where foreign law runs contrary to their inclination, these same justices ignore it. At American University, Justice Scalia made this point in a debate with Justice Breyer on the subject of foreign law. “[W]e are one of only six countries in the world that allow abortion on demand at any time prior to viability. Should we change that because other countries feel differently? . . . Or do we just use foreign law selectively?” By “we,” Justice Scalia means “they,” because he has never cited foreign legal sources in an opinion, unless you count English Common Law.

As for the second question—whether we should introduce European-style religious courses into American schools—would we want the current educational establishment to write the curriculum? If so, our children would be studying Wicca, Santeria, and the religious uses of peyote. As for the section on Christianity, it would deal primarily with the Inquisition and the Salem witch trials. We would be wise to live with the status quo until times change.

Too bad: The Europeans have it right this time. If approached properly, religion is a legitimate discipline, one that could be taught at almost any level in our public schools. It has its own set of facts, its own history, and its own way of perceiving reality. Like philosophy, you can study it without believing in it. And it has the relevance to everyday life that the pragmatists have called for in education. Religion is one of the most important forces in the shaping of society—any society. You cannot walk down the street of a town or city without seeing steeples, crosses, stars of David, hospitals, soup kitchens, and other reminders of its presence. Yet in America, children are forbidden to discuss it in school, as if it were either totally irrelevant or obscene.

This situation can be altered only by a different kind of Supreme Court—one willing to consider the intent of the Framers in drafting the First Amendment and to respect the long history of religious observances in the American public-school system. In examining both intent and history, another set of justices might also want to take a look at the law and practice in foreign countries. Such an approach might prove instructive.

Contributing editor Tom Landess is a retired English professor who has published a number of books and articles, a few of which have appeared under his name.

This article first appeared in the September 2006 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

“This has been a happy time: I’ve spent all day with my family, eaten a fine meal, played with my grandchildren, been to a baptism, and I went to communion.” These were the words of my uncle—with their telling rhetorical climax—on leaving his sister’s house in Eastern North Carolina one Sunday evening last fall. I was back visiting, and the family had converged for the baptism of a little “first cousin once-removed.” The baptism had been held on a communion Sunday at the Methodist church. After, there was a reception at home, with the preacher and his wife, friends, and the usual compliment of children running around the yard on all four sides of the house, messing up their good clothes.

At the buffet table, groaning with biscuits, tiny butter beans, field peas, squash, green beans, chicken, gravy, rice, “congealed salad,” chess pie, and sweet iced tea, my favorite cousin declared, “Well, John and Anne [the little neophyte’s parents] didn’t do any better than Adam and Eve, but we fixed that today!” As a true theologian, the embarrassment of bodily delights laid out before us did not distract him from contemplating in concreto the lofty revealed truths of the Gospel. I sat down and took in the beautiful scene, breathing in that specific and memorable fragrance, a combination of cool forced air and dried eucalyptus, blended with coffee, perhaps, or a whiff of tobacco, that tells one he is at home in the South.

Such words and such a picture are as hard to imagine among such tradition-minded, observant Catholics or Protestants as there still are in the Southern California where I live and work, as they are (still?) not unusual in the South. Yet there are, in the scene so briefly described, indications of what it is that they need to obtain and preserve, if they are to survive in any measure at all.

At first glance, it might seem that the principal thing to be noted is the persistence of faith in the power and worth of the Christian Sacraments. This surely is the most important aspect of life—the means to eternal beatitude beyond this world. Yet the Sacraments as signs are rooted in the stages and needs of human life, both individual and common: birth, growth to maturity, nourishment, hygiene and healing, procreation and education, and government. In order for them to be significant enough in the lives of the faithful for them to persevere in their celebration, it is usually—barring moral miracles that do, in fact, occur—necessary that the natural sense of these rhythms be felt. This sense should become instinctive and not reflective, taken for granted, not subject to doubt or skepticism.

The most serious and dangerous challenge for Christians today is not precisely the loss of faith and religious practice among the fallen away, but a more material, basic human threat—namely, the lack among believers of a human cultural foundation capable of disposing them and their offspring to persevere in the Faith. I mean here not a lack of cultural Hoch­formen, but a lack of culture in its everyday, domestic, and social sense. This deficit produces among devout Christians a “mere” religiosity, a reduction of Christian life to explicit devotion and moral uprightness, and the sense that these things suffice, and that culture is at best an accidental thing, harmful if secular and amoral, helpful to the extent that it is or can be made explicitly religious.

In this case, religious practice either takes the place of culture or is indifferent to it so long as it is not clearly contrary to faith and good—especially sexual—morals.

These two extremes are easily found among pious Christians today. Both of them discount the essential continuity between faith and culture: the former, by way of defect; the latter, by way of excess. On one end of this movement between contraries of the same genus, I have found pious people who educate their children at home. In order to keep their little imaginations free from dangerous phantasms, they do not let them play any games or sing any songs that are not explicitly religious. I recently witnessed such little children in a group of others at a reception, unable to sing “Three Blind Mice” or “Do, Re, Mi.” On the other end, I have found among the same homeschoolers enthusiasts for “Christian rap,” science fiction, or advertising, to whom it seems that cultural forms are neutral and that anything can be “baptized” for use with the young. These can be seen wearing “Got Jesus?” T-shirts or holding coed youth conferences with such slogans as “Chastity is Hardcore.” In the case of either extreme, there is an inability to sense a distinction between the sacred and the profane: If everything must or can be sacred, nothing will be clearly and securely so.

Accidentally, some might persevere in the Faith through—or better, in spite of—such excesses, but they are utterly incapable of guaranteeing the perseverance of most of us. Yet traditional Christian culture—particularly in the quotidian, familial forms described in the scene depicted above—always has and still can assure this perseverance in all but the most depraved. This is the culture in which we must strive to educate our children, and in which we must strive to live ourselves. I say “strive,” since, in most places, what was once taken for granted is now a conscious choice. This is itself a great disadvantage, but such is our lot in these latter days.

How are we to maintain this balance and continuity? I offer here an insight that may guide us in the concrete. Saint Augustine sums up the efficacious power to persevere in the good with the expression delectatio victrix, “the pleasure which overcomes”—overcomes, that is, all resistance to the good proposed. While he is careful, as are all the Fathers, to stay miles away from any Epicurean speculation, Saint Augustine expounds the working of grace in terms of a concretely irresistible attraction and enjoyment. The notion derives directly from the psychology of classical rhetorical discourse. The separation of the pleasures of daily life from the practice of religion, either by eliminating them or by pursuing them independently of the Faith or incompatibly with It, makes perseverance in the Faith difficult indeed. In order to believe in the higher delights offered by the mysteries of faith, one must experience the reasonable, ordinary pleasures of earthly life as good and as readily available. This continuity is what is seen in the Sunday-afternoon scene illustrated above.

In the second part of the Summa Theologiae (I-I, q. 34, a. 1, ad 3), Saint Thomas responds to the notion that all bodily pleasure is evil. He, of course, rejects this opinion, and with considerable practical psychological insight. An objection has been raised that there is no virtue or art whose purpose is to produce pleasure, and, thus, no pleasure can be good. The Angelic Doctor responds:

Art is not concerned with all kinds of good, but with the making of external things . . . But actions and passions, which are within us, are more the concern of prudence and virtue than of art. Nevertheless there is an art of making pleasure, namely, “the art of cookery and the art of making arguments,” as stated in the Nicomachean Ethics vii, 12.

Here, “the art of cookery and the art of making arguments” are the chief components of culture at the higher and the lower ends of human happiness. Simply put, if, in a believing family, there is close attention to the quality of meals in both their culinary and their social aspects, and if, in the same family, care is taken to read and discuss the best sources, then the pleasure concomitant with these bodily and rational requirements of our nature will serve as a strong motivation for the will to retain the revealed Faith and moral virtue celebrated and proclaimed in the same family. Passing pleasures form the memory and stir up a nostalgia for the good things that never end.

The miracle at Cana, the double multiplication of the loaves and fishes, the Last Supper, the supper at Emmaus, the Risen Savior’s eating in the Upper Room, the lakeside breakfast of fish grilled by the Lord Himself—all of these accompany His most sublime teachings and promises. Similarly, the sharing of food in the circle of the family and the sharing of thoughts in conversation are like two brackets between which all that is of any value in our culture can be contained. If we do not form our children after this evangelical model, is there any wonder that they fall away? The authority of our teaching is founded on the concrete care we take of those we educate. Alumnus means “one who has been nourished.” The analogy is telling and immediately intelligible. A father must ask himself what the quality is of his children’s experience of the taking of bodily nourishment. Do they eat with him? Do they speak of what they have learned as they eat? Does he listen and respond? Burdened with the responsibility of teaching his children mysteries so sublime, he dare not fail to give them the most fundamental motives of credibility for what he asserts. Why else would Our Lord sum up all our requests for good things with, “Give us this day our daily bread”? Dad may be a frequent communicant, but if he hopes that his son will be one, he should ask himself when the last time was that he passed him the bread at his own table.

Christians of orthodox profession should not leave the natural analogies for Christian life to the left. Feuerbach—whose influence in the English-speaking world, sad to say, can be attributed to his translator George Eliot, of whom I would have expected better, or at least not so bad—began the whole materialist reduction of the Gospel miracles and Christian Sacraments to signs and celebrations of nature and life. It did not take much to vulgarize his already banal analyses, and so they can be heard in “religious ed” and liturgy workshops anywhere and in any mainstream denomination (among whom, I sadly admit, Catholics must be included), repeated by those who have not the slightest idea that they are heirs of the great low-church Hegelian protocommunist. The shallow emoting and mediocre religious enthusiasm of current approaches to worship, so ugly and destructive, would not, perhaps, have been possible, if the right-believing had taken seriously the necessity of attending to the quality of the rhythm of family observances. Our people lost an instinctive revulsion to the shallow and shoddy. Television took them away from the table and became the measure of their mealtimes—and the limit of their conversation.

Today’s Christian parents cannot presume on a renewal of the miraculous interventions narrated in the Gospels. They have already occurred for our instruction. Those charged with the education of children must do what they can, not tempting the Divinity to supply for things that He has given them the power to provide. That which is truly beyond our power He gives us as a free gift, but, nonetheless, there is much that we can do. Xenophon’s Socrates has no patience with those who rely on higher powers to do what is in a man’s own ability to accomplish. In his Memorabilia, he tells us that

It is . . . irrational to seek the guidance of heaven in matters which men are permitted by the gods to decide for themselves by study: to ask, for instance, Is it better to get an experienced coachman to drive my carriage or a man without experience? Is it better to get an experienced seaman to steer my ship or a man without experience? So too with what we may know by reckoning, measurement or weighing. To put such questions to the gods seemed to his mind profane. In short, what the gods have granted us to do by help of learning, we must learn; what is hidden from mortals we should try to find out from the gods by divination: for to him that is in their grace the gods grant a sign.

In the Sacraments, which are at the apex of Christian culture, God has truly given us a sign that is in His grace to give. So we need not seek to divine more. The rest (and it is a great deal), He has given us to accomplish. When our children know the content of the divine oracles of Sacred Scripture and share the graced signs thereof, we cannot then count ourselves as having done all we can, for that is profane presumption, evidence that, far from appreciating heavenly gifts, we expect even earthly things for free. They will surely notice this lack of effort—literally, of “study”—on our part, and so the authority on which our teaching rests will be undermined. Constant care and sustained effort go into providing a setting like that described at the beginning of this article. True pleasures, pleasures which make it easier to believe, and carry one safely through the challenges of daily life (what other kind is there?), are obtained with a lot of work. Delectatio victrix, I said, is the Augustinian expression; it might be translated as “pleasure which comes with struggle.” These are the pleasures that bring our children home and make them want to be good. One does not have to be a Luddite or a Hobbit to put these insights into practice. Our children simply need to learn in a context where the basic needs of human life are met with care.

A word to the parents who have done all they can, and whose sons and daughters have fallen away. There is a parable for you, that of the prodigal son: a parable of a successful domestic education. Was it not the basic human pleasures found in his father’s house that moved him to come to himself and return with a heart full of hopeful compunction? Delectatio victrix: If there is a fatted calf, and music, and dignified vesture, and paternal discourse, we will all persevere until that Sunday afternoon at home comes which no evening shadow will follow.

Father Hugh is prior of St. Michael’s Abbey in Trabuco Canyon, California.

This article first appeared in the September 2006 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

PERSPECTIVE

Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off
by Thomas Fleming

The right to an opinion.

VIEWS

Educated at Home
by Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.

The pleasure that comes with struggle.

The Supreme Court, Globalization, and the Teaching of Religion
by Tom Landess

Shaping society.

Education to the Rescue
by Troy Kickler

How Radical Republican teachers reconstructed the South.

Too Much Monkey Business
by James O. Tate

Inherit the agitprop.

NEWS

Nation-Building and the U.S. Military
by Robert D. Hickson

Reexamining America’s Role.

REVIEWS

Is Ann Coulter Among the Prophets?
by Robert Stacy McCain

Ann Coulter: Godless: The Church of Liberalism

plus

Thomas Fleming on George Garrett’s Empty Bed Blues

Mark Royden Winchell on Walter Sullivan’s Nothing Gold Can Stay: A Memoir

Leon Hadar on Ted Galen Carpenter’s A Collision Course Over Taiwan: America’s Coming War With China

Christopher Check on William Gilmore Simms’ A City Laid Waste: The Capture, Sack, and Destruction of the City of Columbia

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From Arizona: Tax Credits and Education Reform: No Simple Task
by Tim Sifert

VITAL SIGNS

FOREIGN POLICY: Neocons, Naxalites, and National Demise
by Joseph E. Fallon

COLUMNS

The Bare Bodkin
by Joseph Sobran

Heresies
by Aaron D. Wolf

The Rockford Files
by Scott P. Richert

European Diary
by Andrei Navrozov

In The Dark
Superman Returns
by George McCartney

What’s Wrong With the World
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

DEPARTMENTS

Polemics & Exchanges

American Proscenium

Cultural Revolutions

Poetry

Riderless Horses
by Peter Hunt

ON THE COVER

Cover by George McCartney, Jr.
Inside illustrations by Melanie Anderson.