Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture » 2007 http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org Your home for traditional conservatism. Thu, 24 May 2012 22:16:13 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Establishing Christian America http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2009/12/29/establishing-christian-america/ http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2009/12/29/establishing-christian-america/#comments Tue, 29 Dec 2009 20:57:46 +0000 Thomas Fleming http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?p=3544 Spectator (“America: Not A Christian Country,” August 27, 2005), I demonstrated the hollowness of this claim. Whatever Americans may say they believe, they do not act like Christians.]]> We Americans like to think of our country as the most religious, the most Christian nation on the face of the earth.  In an irritating article I wrote for the Spectator (“America: Not A Christian Country,” August 27, 2005), I demonstrated the hollowness of this claim.  Whatever Americans may say they believe, they do not act like Christians.  In a comparison of America’s rates of divorce, teenage pregnancy, and abortion with those of E.U. countries, America’s reputation for Puritanism takes a beating.  Some of our rates are skewed by the somewhat different sexual mores of African- and Mexican-Americans, but they are, after all, Americans, and even discounting those minorities will not produce a statistical profile of the model citizens of the City on a Hill.  We do attend church services more frequently than Europeans do, but here, too, the numbers are skewed by the high number of churchgoing Christians who are elderly, Southern, and female.
Despite the number of religious fanatics who landed on our shores early on, America has never been a Christian nation.  Conservative evangelicals are fond of saying that the Founding Fathers were all pious Christians, but few of the men who led the Revolution or drafted the Constitution could be described as pious or even orthodox.  George Washington was an ordinary Episcopalian who showed no conspicuous attachment to religion.  His biographer Parson Weems has preserved touching stories about Washington’s faith, but Weems was a notorious liar, and his morale-building stories have repeatedly been debunked.  The chaplain to the First Continental Congress knew Washington well and respected him, but, when asked in 1832 about the first president’s religion, he replied, “I do not believe that any degree of recollection will bring to my mind any fact which will prove General Washington to have been a believer in the Christian revelation.”
Revelation, miracles, and mystery were a stumbling block to John Adams, who was an undoubted Unitarian, like his wife, Abigail.  Ben Franklin turned deist at the age of 15, before turning into a freethinker and Freemason.  He was also a notorious philanderer who fathered bastards and wrote a famous essay on how to get and keep a mistress.  Small wonder that Newt Gingrich says Franklin was “great in the way he lived his life.”  Thomas Jefferson was also a mildly anti-Christian deist.
As Tocqueville told us 150 years ago, we are a conventional people, afraid of controversy.  Going to church, in most periods of our history, has entailed fewer social complications than a reputation for atheism.  No known atheist has ever been elected president: Lincoln learned to keep his skepticism to himself.  America’s tradition of toleration—a peculiar blend of public hypocrisy and personal indifference to religion—is often explained by the First Amendment.  Anti-American Catholics and ACLU liberals agree that the development of a Christian social order (much less a religious establishment) was prevented by the so-called wall of separation between Church and state.  The phrase comes from a letter that Thomas Jefferson addressed to a Baptist association in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1802.  The Baptists were afraid that the Congregationalists who dominated their state might not grant them full religious liberty.  In the view of the Connecticut constitution and state government, freedom of religion was not a natural right but a concession from the legislature, as “favors granted.”  At this time, Connecticut did have a Church establishment: One had to be a Protestant to hold office, and taxes were raised for the support of the Congregational Church.  To calm their fears, Jefferson assured the Baptists that he favored religious freedom:
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man & his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.
Jefferson was President at the time, but this letter is not an official state paper, much less a part of the Constitution or even a court decision.  Nonetheless, this sentence is usually taken as a radical interpretation of the First Amendment.  Some color is given this interpretation by the following sentence, which he bracketed for deletion, to avoid giving offense:
Congress thus inhibited from acts respecting religion, and the Executive authorised only to execute their acts, I have refrained from presenting even occasional performances of devotion presented indeed legally where an Executive is the legal head of a national church, but subject here, as religious exercises only to the voluntary regulations and discipline of each respective sect.
What President Jefferson is saying is that he found a public display of religion to be incompatible with his role as a chief executive whose powers to act were limited by Congress.  He did not, however, say that it would be unconstitutional for him to preside over a national religious ceremony—only that it might be inappropriate, since there was no national church.
There is a serious problem with Jefferson’s statement—at least it would be a serious problem for most Christians throughout history and is still a problem for Catholic and Orthodox Christians, of course, but also for serious Anglicans, Lutherans, and Presbyterians.  The problem is the dangerous notion that religion is a matter solely between an individual and the god in whom he chooses to believe.  In fact, from the beginning, the Christian Church acted as a community, not a random association of individuals, and, from the beginning, the Church spoke with the authority of the Holy Ghost, not only on matters of faith, but on morals and politics.  Calvinists and Catholics might have wished to burn each other at the stake, but neither thought it was a matter of indifference whether a Christian followed the pope or John Calvin.  Jefferson’s opinion derives from his own indifference to religion, a habit he picked up from French Enlightenment thinkers from Montaigne to Voltaire.  It is a dangerous idea, but it has nothing to do with the U.S. Constitution.
To be fair to that good man, Jefferson was in something of a bind.  His indifference (at best) to religion was well known, and he knew that anything he wrote could and would be used against him by political rivals who had always tried to represent him as the enemy of Christianity.  Cleverly, Jefferson did not even answer the Baptists’ main point: He wrote nothing about the rights of Baptists in Connecticut or the power of the legislature but spoke only of the national legislature—that is, the U.S. Congress—which is forbidden to establish a church or interfere in the exercise of religion.
J
efferson’s wall of separation cannot honestly be used to justify the government’s campaign to eliminate Christianity from public places.  The President thought, rightly or wrongly, that he was merely restating and applying the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, which says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
It is not easy today to get the point of this clause, since so few of us have lived in a country with an established religion.  At its most severe, an established church is not only the official church of the country, it is the only legal church.  In Elizabethan England, the Church of England was established, and members of other churches, whether Catholics or Anabaptists, could be punished in a variety of unpleasant ways.  By the time of the American Revolution, the Anglican establishment, though milder, was still strict.  The Church was supported by compulsory tithes; the parish churches were the basis of poor relief; no Catholics, much less Jews, could attend a university or one of the great public schools, and none could hold office.  On the eve of the American Revolution, all 13 colonies accorded privileges to the Christian religion, and nine of them had established churches.  In 1788—the year the Bill of Rights was adopted—six states had religious establishments supported by taxpayers, and eleven required officeholders to be Christians.
The First Amendment, then, forbids Congress either to establish a national church or to interfere in the exercise of religion.  Why Congress, specifically?  Because Congress, elected from the people, is the supreme lawmaking body.  As Jefferson understood, it was up to Congress to pass laws, which the president executed.  The president could not have his own policies on religious freedom any more than he was entitled to have his own policies on war (much less the special “war powers” that Lincoln invented and subsequent presidents have abused): For a president to impose his own ideas on the nation would be tyrannical.  Nor did anyone (except possibly Jefferson) ever think the federal courts would get involved in such an issue, since their role was to interpret the Constitution and federal laws, and they had virtually no authority to intrude themselves into the affairs of the separate sovereign states.
The fears of the Danbury Baptists were legitimate: Under the First Amendment, the states could, theoretically, interfere in the exercise of religion or establish a church, whether Anglican or Congregationalist.  The fear of a national establishment came natural to Americans.  What sort of national church could America have that would unite the Anglicans of Virginia and South Carolina with the Puritans of New England and the Quakers of Pennsylvania?  Even the Southern states were religiously diverse.  The Carolina backcountry was dominated by Presbyterians and, eventually, Methodists, Baptists, and Campbellites, while Charleston had a significant Catholic population even in the early 19th century, and eventually the number of Irish Catholics in the lower South and, after the Louisiana Purchase, French and Spanish Catholics in Louisiana was too great to be ignored.  So, although Christianity held a privileged position, it was, for practical reasons, virtually impossible for states to maintain a church establishment.
Although the Bill of Rights is interpreted today as a guarantee of individual and minority rights to exercise freedoms of expression and religion, this was not the original reading.  In this respect, Jefferson’s letter points in the wrong direction.  The primary object of the Bill of Rights was to restrain the national government, particularly the Congress.
The rights guaranteed by the First Amendment are primarily collective political rights exercised by the citizens within the states.  (On this point, the first part of Akhil Reed Amar’s The Bill of Rights is conclusive.)  The freedoms of speech, press, petition, and assembly are intended to protect the people from a strong national government that might increase its power by abridging these rights, while the Establishment Clause, which says nothing about an individual’s religious freedom, prevents Congress from interfering in a state’s right to establish or not establish a church.
In each of the clauses of the First Amendment, the Framers (James Madison, primarily) were responding to past abuses of the British government.  Britain had censored political speech both in and out of the press, restricted political assemblies, and (so some Americans believed) shown signs of wishing to establish the Anglican Church in Puritan New England.
Many of the specific incidents to which Americans objected took place in the decades before the American Revolution, which they helped to ignite, and, of the actions taken by the British government, none were so seriously resented as the Coercive Acts, a series of edicts, issued by the British government in 1774, whose primary objectives were to punish New England’s rebellious commercial and political leaders and to impose tighter restraints on all the North American colonies.  Thrown in for good measure was the Quebec Act, which, although it was unrelated to the problems in Boston, also aroused suspicions, partly because it transferred jurisdiction over the Ohio country to Canada but, even more, because it offered protections to Catholics and allowed their clergy to collect tithes from professing Catholics.  Strangely, this was taken as evidence that Parliament was preparing to establish the Church of England in New England.  The Quebec Act, in other words, is partly the inspiration for the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, and what the Yankees objected to was any guarantee of religious freedom for the Catholics they hated so much.  The last thing a New Englander wanted was freedom of conscience for those of a different faith.
Because of the differences among Christian sects even in fairly uniform areas such as New England, state religious establishments proved to be unworkable, and, one by one, they were abandoned with little controversy.  Nonetheless, the American people were probably more Christian in 1850 than they had been in 1780, when the influence of Deism and rationalism were stronger.  The federal government had no authority to interfere in the religious affairs of the states, though the passage of the 14th Amendment would eventually turn the Constitution—and American society with it—upside-down.
To explain the decline of American Christianity, conservatives continue to cling to the myth of a nation settled by pious believers seeking to found “a shining City on a Hill.”  But this republican Eden, on which God has uniquely bestowed His blessings, was corrupted by the Tempter.  The American people are still, for the most part, good and faithful Christians, but they are under assault from immoral Hollywood movies, wicked journalists, and pointy-headed intellectuals, etc.  Setting aside the obvious problem of equating New England (particularly the worst aspects of it) with all of America, we should ask ourselves this: Could men and women of strong faith really be corrupted by Hollywood movies that no Christian has any business going to see?  Can you imagine Saints Peter and Paul attending the premier of Kill Bill or Saint Monica watching Lost with little Augustine?  If America were, in fact, a basically Christian or moral nation, Hollywood would be out of business, and so would most colleges and universities.
Conservative Christians are right to complain that they are being persecuted by the government, and I do not have a solution to this grave problem except to suggest that they are wasting their time in trying to change the laws.  Instead, they might consider the example of early Christians living under the pagan Roman Empire.  Most Christians paid their taxes to Caesar, served in Caesar’s army, and were good neighbors and loyal citizens of Caesar’s empire.  They did not engage in futile protests about infanticide, nor did they abuse and insult their pagan neighbors.  They minded their own business, went to church, and prayed for the empire’s conversion.  If today’s American Christians had the faith of a mustard seed, they would spurn the false prophets who have enslaved them to a party or political ideology and go about their Master’s business.
We Americans like to think of our country as the most religious, the most Christian nation on the face of the earth.  In an irritating article I wrote for the Spectator (“America: Not A Christian Country,” August 27, 2005), I demonstrated the hollowness of this claim.  Whatever Americans may say they believe, they do not act like Christians.
In a comparison of America’s rates of divorce, teenage pregnancy, and abortion with those of E.U. countries, America’s reputation for Puritanism takes a beating.  Some of our rates are skewed by the somewhat different sexual mores of African- and Mexican-Americans, but they are, after all, Americans, and even discounting those minorities will not produce a statistical profile of the model citizens of the City on a Hill.  We do attend church services more frequently than Europeans do, but here, too, the numbers are skewed by the high number of churchgoing Christians who are elderly, Southern, and female.
Despite the number of religious fanatics who landed on our shores early on, America has never been a Christian nation.  Conservative evangelicals are fond of saying that the Founding Fathers were all pious Christians, but few of the men who led the Revolution or drafted the Constitution could be described as pious or even orthodox.  George Washington was an ordinary Episcopalian who showed no conspicuous attachment to religion.  His biographer Parson Weems has preserved touching stories about Washington’s faith, but Weems was a notorious liar, and his morale-building stories have repeatedly been debunked.  The chaplain to the First Continental Congress knew Washington well and respected him, but, when asked in 1832 about the first president’s religion, he replied, “I do not believe that any degree of recollection will bring to my mind any fact which will prove General Washington to have been a believer in the Christian revelation.”
Revelation, miracles, and mystery were a stumbling block to John Adams, who was an undoubted Unitarian, like his wife, Abigail.  Ben Franklin turned deist at the age of 15, before turning into a freethinker and Freemason.  He was also a notorious philanderer who fathered bastards and wrote a famous essay on how to get and keep a mistress.  Small wonder that Newt Gingrich says Franklin was “great in the way he lived his life.”  Thomas Jefferson was also a mildly anti-Christian deist.
As Tocqueville told us 150 years ago, we are a conventional people, afraid of controversy.  Going to church, in most periods of our history, has entailed fewer social complications than a reputation for atheism.  No known atheist has ever been elected president: Lincoln learned to keep his skepticism to himself.  America’s tradition of toleration—a peculiar blend of public hypocrisy and personal indifference to religion—is often explained by the First Amendment.  Anti-American Catholics and ACLU liberals agree that the development of a Christian social order (much less a religious establishment) was prevented by the so-called wall of separation between Church and state.  The phrase comes from a letter that Thomas Jefferson addressed to a Baptist association in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1802.  The Baptists were afraid that the Congregationalists who dominated their state might not grant them full religious liberty.  In the view of the Connecticut constitution and state government, freedom of religion was not a natural right but a concession from the legislature, as “favors granted.”  At this time, Connecticut did have a Church establishment: One had to be a Protestant to hold office, and taxes were raised for the support of the Congregational Church.  To calm their fears, Jefferson assured the Baptists that he favored religious freedom:
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man & his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.
Jefferson was President at the time, but this letter is not an official state paper, much less a part of the Constitution or even a court decision.  Nonetheless, this sentence is usually taken as a radical interpretation of the First Amendment.  Some color is given this interpretation by the following sentence, which he bracketed for deletion, to avoid giving offense:
Congress thus inhibited from acts respecting religion, and the Executive authorised only to execute their acts, I have refrained from presenting even occasional performances of devotion presented indeed legally where an Executive is the legal head of a national church, but subject here, as religious exercises only to the voluntary regulations and discipline of each respective sect.
What President Jefferson is saying is that he found a public display of religion to be incompatible with his role as a chief executive whose powers to act were limited by Congress.  He did not, however, say that it would be unconstitutional for him to preside over a national religious ceremony—only that it might be inappropriate, since there was no national church.
There is a serious problem with Jefferson’s statement—at least it would be a serious problem for most Christians throughout history and is still a problem for Catholic and Orthodox Christians, of course, but also for serious Anglicans, Lutherans, and Presbyterians.  The problem is the dangerous notion that religion is a matter solely between an individual and the god in whom he chooses to believe.  In fact, from the beginning, the Christian Church acted as a community, not a random association of individuals, and, from the beginning, the Church spoke with the authority of the Holy Ghost, not only on matters of faith, but on morals and politics.  Calvinists and Catholics might have wished to burn each other at the stake, but neither thought it was a matter of indifference whether a Christian followed the pope or John Calvin.  Jefferson’s opinion derives from his own indifference to religion, a habit he picked up from French Enlightenment thinkers from Montaigne to Voltaire.  It is a dangerous idea, but it has nothing to do with the U.S. Constitution.
To be fair to that good man, Jefferson was in something of a bind.  His indifference (at best) to religion was well known, and he knew that anything he wrote could and would be used against him by political rivals who had always tried to represent him as the enemy of Christianity.  Cleverly, Jefferson did not even answer the Baptists’ main point: He wrote nothing about the rights of Baptists in Connecticut or the power of the legislature but spoke only of the national legislature—that is, the U.S. Congress—which is forbidden to establish a church or interfere in the exercise of religion.
Jefferson’s wall of separation cannot honestly be used to justify the government’s campaign to eliminate Christianity from public places.  The President thought, rightly or wrongly, that he was merely restating and applying the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, which says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
It is not easy today to get the point of this clause, since so few of us have lived in a country with an established religion.  At its most severe, an established church is not only the official church of the country, it is the only legal church.  In Elizabethan England, the Church of England was established, and members of other churches, whether Catholics or Anabaptists, could be punished in a variety of unpleasant ways.  By the time of the American Revolution, the Anglican establishment, though milder, was still strict.  The Church was supported by compulsory tithes; the parish churches were the basis of poor relief; no Catholics, much less Jews, could attend a university or one of the great public schools, and none could hold office.  On the eve of the American Revolution, all 13 colonies accorded privileges to the Christian religion, and nine of them had established churches.  In 1788—the year the Bill of Rights was adopted—six states had religious establishments supported by taxpayers, and eleven required officeholders to be Christians.
The First Amendment, then, forbids Congress either to establish a national church or to interfere in the exercise of religion.  Why Congress, specifically?  Because Congress, elected from the people, is the supreme lawmaking body.  As Jefferson understood, it was up to Congress to pass laws, which the president executed.  The president could not have his own policies on religious freedom any more than he was entitled to have his own policies on war (much less the special “war powers” that Lincoln invented and subsequent presidents have abused): For a president to impose his own ideas on the nation would be tyrannical.  Nor did anyone (except possibly Jefferson) ever think the federal courts would get involved in such an issue, since their role was to interpret the Constitution and federal laws, and they had virtually no authority to intrude themselves into the affairs of the separate sovereign states.
The fears of the Danbury Baptists were legitimate: Under the First Amendment, the states could, theoretically, interfere in the exercise of religion or establish a church, whether Anglican or Congregationalist.  The fear of a national establishment came natural to Americans.  What sort of national church could America have that would unite the Anglicans of Virginia and South Carolina with the Puritans of New England and the Quakers of Pennsylvania?  Even the Southern states were religiously diverse.  The Carolina backcountry was dominated by Presbyterians and, eventually, Methodists, Baptists, and Campbellites, while Charleston had a significant Catholic population even in the early 19th century, and eventually the number of Irish Catholics in the lower South and, after the Louisiana Purchase, French and Spanish Catholics in Louisiana was too great to be ignored.  So, although Christianity held a privileged position, it was, for practical reasons, virtually impossible for states to maintain a church establishment.
Although the Bill of Rights is interpreted today as a guarantee of individual and minority rights to exercise freedoms of expression and religion, this was not the original reading.  In this respect, Jefferson’s letter points in the wrong direction.  The primary object of the Bill of Rights was to restrain the national government, particularly the Congress.
The rights guaranteed by the First Amendment are primarily collective political rights exercised by the citizens within the states.  (On this point, the first part of Akhil Reed Amar’s The Bill of Rights is conclusive.)  The freedoms of speech, press, petition, and assembly are intended to protect the people from a strong national government that might increase its power by abridging these rights, while the Establishment Clause, which says nothing about an individual’s religious freedom, prevents Congress from interfering in a state’s right to establish or not establish a church.
In each of the clauses of the First Amendment, the Framers (James Madison, primarily) were responding to past abuses of the British government.  Britain had censored political speech both in and out of the press, restricted political assemblies, and (so some Americans believed) shown signs of wishing to establish the Anglican Church in Puritan New England.
Many of the specific incidents to which Americans objected took place in the decades before the American Revolution, which they helped to ignite, and, of the actions taken by the British government, none were so seriously resented as the Coercive Acts, a series of edicts, issued by the British government in 1774, whose primary objectives were to punish New England’s rebellious commercial and political leaders and to impose tighter restraints on all the North American colonies.  Thrown in for good measure was the Quebec Act, which, although it was unrelated to the problems in Boston, also aroused suspicions, partly because it transferred jurisdiction over the Ohio country to Canada but, even more, because it offered protections to Catholics and allowed their clergy to collect tithes from professing Catholics.  Strangely, this was taken as evidence that Parliament was preparing to establish the Church of England in New England.  The Quebec Act, in other words, is partly the inspiration for the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, and what the Yankees objected to was any guarantee of religious freedom for the Catholics they hated so much.  The last thing a New Englander wanted was freedom of conscience for those of a different faith.
Because of the differences among Christian sects even in fairly uniform areas such as New England, state religious establishments proved to be unworkable, and, one by one, they were abandoned with little controversy.  Nonetheless, the American people were probably more Christian in 1850 than they had been in 1780, when the influence of Deism and rationalism were stronger.  The federal government had no authority to interfere in the religious affairs of the states, though the passage of the 14th Amendment would eventually turn the Constitution—and American society with it—upside-down.
To explain the decline of American Christianity, conservatives continue to cling to the myth of a nation settled by pious believers seeking to found “a shining City on a Hill.”  But this republican Eden, on which God has uniquely bestowed His blessings, was corrupted by the Tempter.  The American people are still, for the most part, good and faithful Christians, but they are under assault from immoral Hollywood movies, wicked journalists, and pointy-headed intellectuals, etc.  Setting aside the obvious problem of equating New England (particularly the worst aspects of it) with all of America, we should ask ourselves this: Could men and women of strong faith really be corrupted by Hollywood movies that no Christian has any business going to see?  Can you imagine Saints Peter and Paul attending the premier of Kill Bill or Saint Monica watching Lost with little Augustine?  If America were, in fact, a basically Christian or moral nation, Hollywood would be out of business, and so would most colleges and universities.
Conservative Christians are right to complain that they are being persecuted by the government, and I do not have a solution to this grave problem except to suggest that they are wasting their time in trying to change the laws.  Instead, they might consider the example of early Christians living under the pagan Roman Empire.  Most Christians paid their taxes to Caesar, served in Caesar’s army, and were good neighbors and loyal citizens of Caesar’s empire.  They did not engage in futile protests about infanticide, nor did they abuse and insult their pagan neighbors.  They minded their own business, went to church, and prayed for the empire’s conversion.  If today’s American Christians had the faith of a mustard seed, they would spurn the false prophets who have enslaved them to a party or political ideology and go about their Master’s business.
This article first appeared in the June 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

We Americans like to think of our country as the most religious, the most Christian nation on the face of the earth.  In an irritating article I wrote for the Spectator (“America: Not A Christian Country,” August 27, 2005), I demonstrated the hollowness of this claim.  Whatever Americans may say they believe, they do not act like Christians. In a comparison of America’s rates of divorce, teenage pregnancy, and abortion with those of E.U. countries, America’s reputation for Puritanism takes a beating.  Some of our rates are skewed by the somewhat different sexual mores of African- and Mexican-Americans, but they are, after all, Americans, and even discounting those minorities will not produce a statistical profile of the model citizens of the City on a Hill.  We do attend church services more frequently than Europeans do, but here, too, the numbers are skewed by the high number of churchgoing Christians who are elderly, Southern, and female.

Despite the number of religious fanatics who landed on our shores early on, America has never been a Christian nation.  Conservative evangelicals are fond of saying that the Founding Fathers were all pious Christians, but few of the men who led the Revolution or drafted the Constitution could be described as pious or even orthodox.  George Washington was an ordinary Episcopalian who showed no conspicuous attachment to religion.  His biographer Parson Weems has preserved touching stories about Washington’s faith, but Weems was a notorious liar, and his morale-building stories have repeatedly been debunked.  The chaplain to the First Continental Congress knew Washington well and respected him, but, when asked in 1832 about the first president’s religion, he replied, “I do not believe that any degree of recollection will bring to my mind any fact which will prove General Washington to have been a believer in the Christian revelation.”

Revelation, miracles, and mystery were a stumbling block to John Adams, who was an undoubted Unitarian, like his wife, Abigail.  Ben Franklin turned deist at the age of 15, before turning into a freethinker and Freemason.  He was also a notorious philanderer who fathered bastards and wrote a famous essay on how to get and keep a mistress.  Small wonder that Newt Gingrich says Franklin was “great in the way he lived his life.”  Thomas Jefferson was also a mildly anti-Christian deist.

As Tocqueville told us 150 years ago, we are a conventional people, afraid of controversy.  Going to church, in most periods of our history, has entailed fewer social complications than a reputation for atheism.  No known atheist has ever been elected president: Lincoln learned to keep his skepticism to himself.  America’s tradition of toleration—a peculiar blend of public hypocrisy and personal indifference to religion—is often explained by the First Amendment.  Anti-American Catholics and ACLU liberals agree that the development of a Christian social order (much less a religious establishment) was prevented by the so-called wall of separation between Church and state.  The phrase comes from a letter that Thomas Jefferson addressed to a Baptist association in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1802.  The Baptists were afraid that the Congregationalists who dominated their state might not grant them full religious liberty.  In the view of the Connecticut constitution and state government, freedom of religion was not a natural right but a concession from the legislature, as “favors granted.”  At this time, Connecticut did have a Church establishment: One had to be a Protestant to hold office, and taxes were raised for the support of the Congregational Church.  To calm their fears, Jefferson assured the Baptists that he favored religious freedom:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man & his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.

Jefferson was President at the time, but this letter is not an official state paper, much less a part of the Constitution or even a court decision.  Nonetheless, this sentence is usually taken as a radical interpretation of the First Amendment.  Some color is given this interpretation by the following sentence, which he bracketed for deletion, to avoid giving offense:

Congress thus inhibited from acts respecting religion, and the Executive authorised only to execute their acts, I have refrained from presenting even occasional performances of devotion presented indeed legally where an Executive is the legal head of a national church, but subject here, as religious exercises only to the voluntary regulations and discipline of each respective sect.

What President Jefferson is saying is that he found a public display of religion to be incompatible with his role as a chief executive whose powers to act were limited by Congress.  He did not, however, say that it would be unconstitutional for him to preside over a national religious ceremony—only that it might be inappropriate, since there was no national church.

There is a serious problem with Jefferson’s statement—at least it would be a serious problem for most Christians throughout history and is still a problem for Catholic and Orthodox Christians, of course, but also for serious Anglicans, Lutherans, and Presbyterians.  The problem is the dangerous notion that religion is a matter solely between an individual and the god in whom he chooses to believe.  In fact, from the beginning, the Christian Church acted as a community, not a random association of individuals, and, from the beginning, the Church spoke with the authority of the Holy Ghost, not only on matters of faith, but on morals and politics.  Calvinists and Catholics might have wished to burn each other at the stake, but neither thought it was a matter of indifference whether a Christian followed the pope or John Calvin.  Jefferson’s opinion derives from his own indifference to religion, a habit he picked up from French Enlightenment thinkers from Montaigne to Voltaire.  It is a dangerous idea, but it has nothing to do with the U.S. Constitution.

To be fair to that good man, Jefferson was in something of a bind.  His indifference (at best) to religion was well known, and he knew that anything he wrote could and would be used against him by political rivals who had always tried to represent him as the enemy of Christianity.  Cleverly, Jefferson did not even answer the Baptists’ main point: He wrote nothing about the rights of Baptists in Connecticut or the power of the legislature but spoke only of the national legislature—that is, the U.S. Congress—which is forbidden to establish a church or interfere in the exercise of religion.

J

efferson’s wall of separation cannot honestly be used to justify the government’s campaign to eliminate Christianity from public places.  The President thought, rightly or wrongly, that he was merely restating and applying the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, which says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

It is not easy today to get the point of this clause, since so few of us have lived in a country with an established religion.  At its most severe, an established church is not only the official church of the country, it is the only legal church.  In Elizabethan England, the Church of England was established, and members of other churches, whether Catholics or Anabaptists, could be punished in a variety of unpleasant ways.  By the time of the American Revolution, the Anglican establishment, though milder, was still strict.  The Church was supported by compulsory tithes; the parish churches were the basis of poor relief; no Catholics, much less Jews, could attend a university or one of the great public schools, and none could hold office.  On the eve of the American Revolution, all 13 colonies accorded privileges to the Christian religion, and nine of them had established churches.  In 1788—the year the Bill of Rights was adopted—six states had religious establishments supported by taxpayers, and eleven required officeholders to be Christians.

The First Amendment, then, forbids Congress either to establish a national church or to interfere in the exercise of religion.  Why Congress, specifically?  Because Congress, elected from the people, is the supreme lawmaking body.  As Jefferson understood, it was up to Congress to pass laws, which the president executed.  The president could not have his own policies on religious freedom any more than he was entitled to have his own policies on war (much less the special “war powers” that Lincoln invented and subsequent presidents have abused): For a president to impose his own ideas on the nation would be tyrannical.  Nor did anyone (except possibly Jefferson) ever think the federal courts would get involved in such an issue, since their role was to interpret the Constitution and federal laws, and they had virtually no authority to intrude themselves into the affairs of the separate sovereign states.

The fears of the Danbury Baptists were legitimate: Under the First Amendment, the states could, theoretically, interfere in the exercise of religion or establish a church, whether Anglican or Congregationalist.  The fear of a national establishment came natural to Americans.  What sort of national church could America have that would unite the Anglicans of Virginia and South Carolina with the Puritans of New England and the Quakers of Pennsylvania?  Even the Southern states were religiously diverse.  The Carolina backcountry was dominated by Presbyterians and, eventually, Methodists, Baptists, and Campbellites, while Charleston had a significant Catholic population even in the early 19th century, and eventually the number of Irish Catholics in the lower South and, after the Louisiana Purchase, French and Spanish Catholics in Louisiana was too great to be ignored.  So, although Christianity held a privileged position, it was, for practical reasons, virtually impossible for states to maintain a church establishment.

Although the Bill of Rights is interpreted today as a guarantee of individual and minority rights to exercise freedoms of expression and religion, this was not the original reading.  In this respect, Jefferson’s letter points in the wrong direction.  The primary object of the Bill of Rights was to restrain the national government, particularly the Congress.

The rights guaranteed by the First Amendment are primarily collective political rights exercised by the citizens within the states.  (On this point, the first part of Akhil Reed Amar’s The Bill of Rights is conclusive.)  The freedoms of speech, press, petition, and assembly are intended to protect the people from a strong national government that might increase its power by abridging these rights, while the Establishment Clause, which says nothing about an individual’s religious freedom, prevents Congress from interfering in a state’s right to establish or not establish a church.

In each of the clauses of the First Amendment, the Framers (James Madison, primarily) were responding to past abuses of the British government.  Britain had censored political speech both in and out of the press, restricted political assemblies, and (so some Americans believed) shown signs of wishing to establish the Anglican Church in Puritan New England.

Many of the specific incidents to which Americans objected took place in the decades before the American Revolution, which they helped to ignite, and, of the actions taken by the British government, none were so seriously resented as the Coercive Acts, a series of edicts, issued by the British government in 1774, whose primary objectives were to punish New England’s rebellious commercial and political leaders and to impose tighter restraints on all the North American colonies.  Thrown in for good measure was the Quebec Act, which, although it was unrelated to the problems in Boston, also aroused suspicions, partly because it transferred jurisdiction over the Ohio country to Canada but, even more, because it offered protections to Catholics and allowed their clergy to collect tithes from professing Catholics.  Strangely, this was taken as evidence that Parliament was preparing to establish the Church of England in New England.  The Quebec Act, in other words, is partly the inspiration for the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, and what the Yankees objected to was any guarantee of religious freedom for the Catholics they hated so much.  The last thing a New Englander wanted was freedom of conscience for those of a different faith.

Because of the differences among Christian sects even in fairly uniform areas such as New England, state religious establishments proved to be unworkable, and, one by one, they were abandoned with little controversy.  Nonetheless, the American people were probably more Christian in 1850 than they had been in 1780, when the influence of Deism and rationalism were stronger.  The federal government had no authority to interfere in the religious affairs of the states, though the passage of the 14th Amendment would eventually turn the Constitution—and American society with it—upside-down.

To explain the decline of American Christianity, conservatives continue to cling to the myth of a nation settled by pious believers seeking to found “a shining City on a Hill.”  But this republican Eden, on which God has uniquely bestowed His blessings, was corrupted by the Tempter.  The American people are still, for the most part, good and faithful Christians, but they are under assault from immoral Hollywood movies, wicked journalists, and pointy-headed intellectuals, etc.  Setting aside the obvious problem of equating New England (particularly the worst aspects of it) with all of America, we should ask ourselves this: Could men and women of strong faith really be corrupted by Hollywood movies that no Christian has any business going to see?  Can you imagine Saints Peter and Paul attending the premier of Kill Bill or Saint Monica watching Lost with little Augustine?  If America were, in fact, a basically Christian or moral nation, Hollywood would be out of business, and so would most colleges and universities.

Conservative Christians are right to complain that they are being persecuted by the government, and I do not have a solution to this grave problem except to suggest that they are wasting their time in trying to change the laws.  Instead, they might consider the example of early Christians living under the pagan Roman Empire.  Most Christians paid their taxes to Caesar, served in Caesar’s army, and were good neighbors and loyal citizens of Caesar’s empire.  They did not engage in futile protests about infanticide, nor did they abuse and insult their pagan neighbors.  They minded their own business, went to church, and prayed for the empire’s conversion.  If today’s American Christians had the faith of a mustard seed, they would spurn the false prophets who have enslaved them to a party or political ideology and go about their Master’s business.

We Americans like to think of our country as the most religious, the most Christian nation on the face of the earth.  In an irritating article I wrote for the Spectator (“America: Not A Christian Country,” August 27, 2005), I demonstrated the hollowness of this claim.  Whatever Americans may say they believe, they do not act like Christians.

In a comparison of America’s rates of divorce, teenage pregnancy, and abortion with those of E.U. countries, America’s reputation for Puritanism takes a beating.  Some of our rates are skewed by the somewhat different sexual mores of African- and Mexican-Americans, but they are, after all, Americans, and even discounting those minorities will not produce a statistical profile of the model citizens of the City on a Hill.  We do attend church services more frequently than Europeans do, but here, too, the numbers are skewed by the high number of churchgoing Christians who are elderly, Southern, and female.

Despite the number of religious fanatics who landed on our shores early on, America has never been a Christian nation.  Conservative evangelicals are fond of saying that the Founding Fathers were all pious Christians, but few of the men who led the Revolution or drafted the Constitution could be described as pious or even orthodox.  George Washington was an ordinary Episcopalian who showed no conspicuous attachment to religion.  His biographer Parson Weems has preserved touching stories about Washington’s faith, but Weems was a notorious liar, and his morale-building stories have repeatedly been debunked.  The chaplain to the First Continental Congress knew Washington well and respected him, but, when asked in 1832 about the first president’s religion, he replied, “I do not believe that any degree of recollection will bring to my mind any fact which will prove General Washington to have been a believer in the Christian revelation.”

Revelation, miracles, and mystery were a stumbling block to John Adams, who was an undoubted Unitarian, like his wife, Abigail.  Ben Franklin turned deist at the age of 15, before turning into a freethinker and Freemason.  He was also a notorious philanderer who fathered bastards and wrote a famous essay on how to get and keep a mistress.  Small wonder that Newt Gingrich says Franklin was “great in the way he lived his life.”  Thomas Jefferson was also a mildly anti-Christian deist.

As Tocqueville told us 150 years ago, we are a conventional people, afraid of controversy.  Going to church, in most periods of our history, has entailed fewer social complications than a reputation for atheism.  No known atheist has ever been elected president: Lincoln learned to keep his skepticism to himself.  America’s tradition of toleration—a peculiar blend of public hypocrisy and personal indifference to religion—is often explained by the First Amendment.  Anti-American Catholics and ACLU liberals agree that the development of a Christian social order (much less a religious establishment) was prevented by the so-called wall of separation between Church and state.  The phrase comes from a letter that Thomas Jefferson addressed to a Baptist association in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1802.  The Baptists were afraid that the Congregationalists who dominated their state might not grant them full religious liberty.  In the view of the Connecticut constitution and state government, freedom of religion was not a natural right but a concession from the legislature, as “favors granted.”  At this time, Connecticut did have a Church establishment: One had to be a Protestant to hold office, and taxes were raised for the support of the Congregational Church.  To calm their fears, Jefferson assured the Baptists that he favored religious freedom:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man & his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.

Jefferson was President at the time, but this letter is not an official state paper, much less a part of the Constitution or even a court decision.  Nonetheless, this sentence is usually taken as a radical interpretation of the First Amendment.  Some color is given this interpretation by the following sentence, which he bracketed for deletion, to avoid giving offense:

Congress thus inhibited from acts respecting religion, and the Executive authorised only to execute their acts, I have refrained from presenting even occasional performances of devotion presented indeed legally where an Executive is the legal head of a national church, but subject here, as religious exercises only to the voluntary regulations and discipline of each respective sect.

What President Jefferson is saying is that he found a public display of religion to be incompatible with his role as a chief executive whose powers to act were limited by Congress.  He did not, however, say that it would be unconstitutional for him to preside over a national religious ceremony—only that it might be inappropriate, since there was no national church.

There is a serious problem with Jefferson’s statement—at least it would be a serious problem for most Christians throughout history and is still a problem for Catholic and Orthodox Christians, of course, but also for serious Anglicans, Lutherans, and Presbyterians.  The problem is the dangerous notion that religion is a matter solely between an individual and the god in whom he chooses to believe.  In fact, from the beginning, the Christian Church acted as a community, not a random association of individuals, and, from the beginning, the Church spoke with the authority of the Holy Ghost, not only on matters of faith, but on morals and politics.  Calvinists and Catholics might have wished to burn each other at the stake, but neither thought it was a matter of indifference whether a Christian followed the pope or John Calvin.  Jefferson’s opinion derives from his own indifference to religion, a habit he picked up from French Enlightenment thinkers from Montaigne to Voltaire.  It is a dangerous idea, but it has nothing to do with the U.S. Constitution.

To be fair to that good man, Jefferson was in something of a bind.  His indifference (at best) to religion was well known, and he knew that anything he wrote could and would be used against him by political rivals who had always tried to represent him as the enemy of Christianity.  Cleverly, Jefferson did not even answer the Baptists’ main point: He wrote nothing about the rights of Baptists in Connecticut or the power of the legislature but spoke only of the national legislature—that is, the U.S. Congress—which is forbidden to establish a church or interfere in the exercise of religion.

Jefferson’s wall of separation cannot honestly be used to justify the government’s campaign to eliminate Christianity from public places.  The President thought, rightly or wrongly, that he was merely restating and applying the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, which says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

It is not easy today to get the point of this clause, since so few of us have lived in a country with an established religion.  At its most severe, an established church is not only the official church of the country, it is the only legal church.  In Elizabethan England, the Church of England was established, and members of other churches, whether Catholics or Anabaptists, could be punished in a variety of unpleasant ways.  By the time of the American Revolution, the Anglican establishment, though milder, was still strict.  The Church was supported by compulsory tithes; the parish churches were the basis of poor relief; no Catholics, much less Jews, could attend a university or one of the great public schools, and none could hold office.  On the eve of the American Revolution, all 13 colonies accorded privileges to the Christian religion, and nine of them had established churches.  In 1788—the year the Bill of Rights was adopted—six states had religious establishments supported by taxpayers, and eleven required officeholders to be Christians.

The First Amendment, then, forbids Congress either to establish a national church or to interfere in the exercise of religion.  Why Congress, specifically?  Because Congress, elected from the people, is the supreme lawmaking body.  As Jefferson understood, it was up to Congress to pass laws, which the president executed.  The president could not have his own policies on religious freedom any more than he was entitled to have his own policies on war (much less the special “war powers” that Lincoln invented and subsequent presidents have abused): For a president to impose his own ideas on the nation would be tyrannical.  Nor did anyone (except possibly Jefferson) ever think the federal courts would get involved in such an issue, since their role was to interpret the Constitution and federal laws, and they had virtually no authority to intrude themselves into the affairs of the separate sovereign states.

The fears of the Danbury Baptists were legitimate: Under the First Amendment, the states could, theoretically, interfere in the exercise of religion or establish a church, whether Anglican or Congregationalist.  The fear of a national establishment came natural to Americans.  What sort of national church could America have that would unite the Anglicans of Virginia and South Carolina with the Puritans of New England and the Quakers of Pennsylvania?  Even the Southern states were religiously diverse.  The Carolina backcountry was dominated by Presbyterians and, eventually, Methodists, Baptists, and Campbellites, while Charleston had a significant Catholic population even in the early 19th century, and eventually the number of Irish Catholics in the lower South and, after the Louisiana Purchase, French and Spanish Catholics in Louisiana was too great to be ignored.  So, although Christianity held a privileged position, it was, for practical reasons, virtually impossible for states to maintain a church establishment.

Although the Bill of Rights is interpreted today as a guarantee of individual and minority rights to exercise freedoms of expression and religion, this was not the original reading.  In this respect, Jefferson’s letter points in the wrong direction.  The primary object of the Bill of Rights was to restrain the national government, particularly the Congress.

The rights guaranteed by the First Amendment are primarily collective political rights exercised by the citizens within the states.  (On this point, the first part of Akhil Reed Amar’s The Bill of Rights is conclusive.)  The freedoms of speech, press, petition, and assembly are intended to protect the people from a strong national government that might increase its power by abridging these rights, while the Establishment Clause, which says nothing about an individual’s religious freedom, prevents Congress from interfering in a state’s right to establish or not establish a church.

In each of the clauses of the First Amendment, the Framers (James Madison, primarily) were responding to past abuses of the British government.  Britain had censored political speech both in and out of the press, restricted political assemblies, and (so some Americans believed) shown signs of wishing to establish the Anglican Church in Puritan New England.

Many of the specific incidents to which Americans objected took place in the decades before the American Revolution, which they helped to ignite, and, of the actions taken by the British government, none were so seriously resented as the Coercive Acts, a series of edicts, issued by the British government in 1774, whose primary objectives were to punish New England’s rebellious commercial and political leaders and to impose tighter restraints on all the North American colonies.  Thrown in for good measure was the Quebec Act, which, although it was unrelated to the problems in Boston, also aroused suspicions, partly because it transferred jurisdiction over the Ohio country to Canada but, even more, because it offered protections to Catholics and allowed their clergy to collect tithes from professing Catholics.  Strangely, this was taken as evidence that Parliament was preparing to establish the Church of England in New England.  The Quebec Act, in other words, is partly the inspiration for the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, and what the Yankees objected to was any guarantee of religious freedom for the Catholics they hated so much.  The last thing a New Englander wanted was freedom of conscience for those of a different faith.

Because of the differences among Christian sects even in fairly uniform areas such as New England, state religious establishments proved to be unworkable, and, one by one, they were abandoned with little controversy.  Nonetheless, the American people were probably more Christian in 1850 than they had been in 1780, when the influence of Deism and rationalism were stronger.  The federal government had no authority to interfere in the religious affairs of the states, though the passage of the 14th Amendment would eventually turn the Constitution—and American society with it—upside-down.

To explain the decline of American Christianity, conservatives continue to cling to the myth of a nation settled by pious believers seeking to found “a shining City on a Hill.”  But this republican Eden, on which God has uniquely bestowed His blessings, was corrupted by the Tempter.  The American people are still, for the most part, good and faithful Christians, but they are under assault from immoral Hollywood movies, wicked journalists, and pointy-headed intellectuals, etc.  Setting aside the obvious problem of equating New England (particularly the worst aspects of it) with all of America, we should ask ourselves this: Could men and women of strong faith really be corrupted by Hollywood movies that no Christian has any business going to see?  Can you imagine Saints Peter and Paul attending the premier of Kill Bill or Saint Monica watching Lost with little Augustine?  If America were, in fact, a basically Christian or moral nation, Hollywood would be out of business, and so would most colleges and universities.

Conservative Christians are right to complain that they are being persecuted by the government, and I do not have a solution to this grave problem except to suggest that they are wasting their time in trying to change the laws.  Instead, they might consider the example of early Christians living under the pagan Roman Empire.  Most Christians paid their taxes to Caesar, served in Caesar’s army, and were good neighbors and loyal citizens of Caesar’s empire.  They did not engage in futile protests about infanticide, nor did they abuse and insult their pagan neighbors.  They minded their own business, went to church, and prayed for the empire’s conversion.  If today’s American Christians had the faith of a mustard seed, they would spurn the false prophets who have enslaved them to a party or political ideology and go about their Master’s business.

This article first appeared in the June 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

]]> http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2009/12/29/establishing-christian-america/feed/ 30 Breaking Bibi http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2009/06/05/breaking-bibi/ http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2009/06/05/breaking-bibi/#comments Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:01:49 +0000 Patrick J. Buchanan http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?p=2165 "I have to admire the residents of Iroquois territory for assuming that they have a right to determine where Jews lives in Jerusalem."

Thus did Israeli government press director Daniel Seamen caustically dismiss President Obama's opposition to Israel's right to "natural growth" of its settlements in Arab East Jerusalem and on the West Bank.

Though Obama's address in Cairo broke no new ground, it confirmed to the world that a new day has arrived and a sea change has taken place. The Israel-centric Middle East policy of George W. Bush is dead. And with the policy change has come rhetorical change.

With Bush, it was "axis of evil," "you are with us or you are with the terrorists," "regime change," a "green light" for war on Hezbollah in Lebanon and on Hamas in Gaza, and "this war is a struggle between good and evil."

With Obama in Cairo, it was all about "a new beginning" and "mutual respect" between the United States and an Islamic world of 1.2 billion.

Where Bush sought to isolate Syria as a state sponsor of terror, Obama has sent diplomats and is sending the U.S. military to Damascus to work together to halt al-Qaida infiltration into Iraq. Return of the Golan Heights may be back on the table.

Where Bush said Iraq's drive for weapons of mass destruction threatened America and the world, Obama calls Iraq "a war of choice," and re-commits to bring all U.S. combat troops home before 2012 and to seek no permanent bases there.

Where Israeli hawks push for pre-emptive U.S. strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, Obama says Iran "should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power if it complies with its responsibilities under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty."

As there is no hard evidence Iran has gone beyond the NPT, this points to a resolution of the nuclear issue, if Tehran can provide solid assurances it has no clandestine weapons program.

Where Bush refused to meet with Yasser Arafat or recognize Hamas' election victory, and outsourced Mideast policy to Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, Obama has confronted Bibi Netanyahu and handed Israel an ultimatum: Halt all settlement growth, now, and come back to me with your plan for a Palestinian state.

A collision that could shatter the coalitions of both Bibi and Barack now appears inevitable and imminent. Either the president or prime minister is going to have to back down.

Netanyahu was elected on solemn pledges never to negotiate with Hamas, permit a Palestinian state ("a second Hamastan") or let Jerusalem be divided. He is committed to the "natural growth" of Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria.

Obama has said publicly that there is to be no growth of any kind on the West Bank and all illegal outposts must come down.

There are reports that while Defense Minister Barak was in the office of National Security Adviser Gen. Jim Jones, Obama popped in for 15 minutes to tell Israel's most decorated soldier he wants to see an Israeli plan for peace and a Palestinian state by July.

That state would necessarily have a Jerusalem enclave as its capital, as no Palestinian or Arab leader could agree to a peace that did not include part of Jerusalem, the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock without putting himself in mortal peril.

Behind this clash lies a shift of perspective in Washington.

Obama is directly challenging the thesis of Israel and its lobby, AIPAC, that U.S. and Israeli interests are one and the same, that we are partners. Barack is saying that settlements are an impediment and an independent Palestinian state indispensable to peace. And even if Israel believes its interests are being subordinated and security imperiled, the United States disagrees—and the United States will prevail.

In Israel, the betting is that Barack will break Bibi because Israel cannot defy its last great friend, the lone superpower, upon whom it depends for security, weaponry and diplomatic shelter from U.N. Security Council sanctions. As Rick Wagoner of GM can tell Bibi, you take the king's shilling, you play the king's tune.

Indeed, Obama can make a case that he better represents the Jewish community in the United States than the Israel lobby, as he won 78 percent of the Jewish vote.

Netanyhau was outpolled by Tzipi Livni of Kadima, who is waiting in the wings.

Bibi is in a terrible box. If he defies Obama and orders new housing in the settlements, he could face rebellion at home for alienating Israeli's indispensable ally.

If he goes along with halting settlement growth and moves to accommodate a Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem, how does he explain the capitulation to Likud—and to Avigdor Lieberman?

Next weekend, Iran heads to the polls, and President Ahmadinejad faces strong opposition. If the moderate Mir-Hossein Moussavi wins, the possibility of a U.S-Iranian detente rises dramatically.

For Israel and the United States, the days of wine and roses are over.

COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.

]]> http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2009/06/05/breaking-bibi/feed/ 7 The Food Crisis http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2008/06/13/the-food-crisis/ http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2008/06/13/the-food-crisis/#comments Fri, 13 Jun 2008 21:56:09 +0000 Gregory McNamee http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?p=626

These are bad times to be an eater in America, as anyone who has suffered sticker shock at the supermarket can tell you. The cost of necessities such as bread, milk, and eggs has risen steadily in the last two years—by as much as 30 percent in some parts of the country. Vegetables, fruits, meats, cheeses—all are climbing. Even that most sacred of goods, beer, is skyrocketing in cost.

In part, the rise in food prices is a function of the cost of gasoline. Food travels a long way—1,200 miles, on average—to reach American stomachs. It does so because American manufacturers, giddy at the bounty wrought by the Green Revolution and the advent of jets and container ships, long ago taught American consumers to abandon the idea of seasonality. We have come to expect bananas, oranges, tomatoes, corn, and the like to be available year-round, requiring the transportation of strawberries from Chile, citrus from South Africa, tomatoes from Ecuador, hothouse lettuces from France.

Our farmers return the favor. Near my home in the Arizona desert stands a vast complex of greenhouses. Its name, EuroFresh, tells the story, for those greenhouses, 164 acres devoted to tomatoes alone, provide much of the produce consumed on the continent in wintertime.

Why European greenhouses do not grow food for Europe, and American greenhouses for America, is a complex matter of international trade, treaties, and government subsidies, too complex to do more than wonder at here. Suffice it to say that for many reasons it is good to be a farmer these days—not the small farmer of the kind celebrated in Jeffersonian ideals of democracy, but the farmer as agribusinessman, with millions of dollars of expensive machinery and miles-long rows of monoculture crops.

Those industrial farmers have long enjoyed federal largesse unavailable to their Jeffersonian counterparts in the form of massive subsidies, some in payment for not growing crops that are too abundant on the market, some simply handouts to the already wealthy. A landowner is allowed to earn up to $2.5 million per year in adjusted gross income and still be entitled to a broad portfolio of subsidies. In a rare fit of fiscal restraint, the White House recently proposed to trim this to $500,000—but not to close the many loopholes in the tax code that would make even this figure attainable to anyone with the slightest talent for creative bookkeeping.

Couple all that with other incentives, totaling $2.4 billion, that take such forms as optional self-employment tax, full write-offs for racehorses, and generous allowances to reduce personal income taxes with farm losses, and it seems curious that farming should not be the career choice of the best and brightest of our current crop of college graduates.

Nonetheless, many farmers are now shunning subsidies altogether and uncoupling themselves from federal price controls, for, as if to honor Marx’s dictum that capital has no country, there is gold to be made by growing crops that are too abundant here but in terrific demand elsewhere. Corn is one such crop, shipped as ethanol and syrup, the twin fuels of the modern world—for ethanol is an ever-more-important ingredient in gasoline blends, and corn syrup underlies the First World diet of processed food and soft drinks.

The energy-hungry European Union has been buying great quantities of American ethanol of late, though E.U. ministers are increasingly skeptical about the environmental value of the stuff, which uses more energy to produce than it yields. For its part, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations recently opined that food crops should be used for food—particularly in countries not so thoroughly subsidized as ours, countries in which, on average, food costs have risen 83 percent in the last three years.

Meanwhile, food riots are breaking out across the world, in Haiti, Cameroon, Egypt, even normally tranquil Thailand—which, though a major rice producer, now limits [...]]]>

These are bad times to be an eater in America, as anyone who has suffered sticker shock at the supermarket can tell you. The cost of necessities such as bread, milk, and eggs has risen steadily in the last two years—by as much as 30 percent in some parts of the country. Vegetables, fruits, meats, cheeses—all are climbing. Even that most sacred of goods, beer, is skyrocketing in cost.

In part, the rise in food prices is a function of the cost of gasoline. Food travels a long way—1,200 miles, on average—to reach American stomachs. It does so because American manufacturers, giddy at the bounty wrought by the Green Revolution and the advent of jets and container ships, long ago taught American consumers to abandon the idea of seasonality. We have come to expect bananas, oranges, tomatoes, corn, and the like to be available year-round, requiring the transportation of strawberries from Chile, citrus from South Africa, tomatoes from Ecuador, hothouse lettuces from France.

Our farmers return the favor. Near my home in the Arizona desert stands a vast complex of greenhouses. Its name, EuroFresh, tells the story, for those greenhouses, 164 acres devoted to tomatoes alone, provide much of the produce consumed on the continent in wintertime.

Why European greenhouses do not grow food for Europe, and American greenhouses for America, is a complex matter of international trade, treaties, and government subsidies, too complex to do more than wonder at here. Suffice it to say that for many reasons it is good to be a farmer these days—not the small farmer of the kind celebrated in Jeffersonian ideals of democracy, but the farmer as agribusinessman, with millions of dollars of expensive machinery and miles-long rows of monoculture crops.

Those industrial farmers have long enjoyed federal largesse unavailable to their Jeffersonian counterparts in the form of massive subsidies, some in payment for not growing crops that are too abundant on the market, some simply handouts to the already wealthy. A landowner is allowed to earn up to $2.5 million per year in adjusted gross income and still be entitled to a broad portfolio of subsidies. In a rare fit of fiscal restraint, the White House recently proposed to trim this to $500,000—but not to close the many loopholes in the tax code that would make even this figure attainable to anyone with the slightest talent for creative bookkeeping.

Couple all that with other incentives, totaling $2.4 billion, that take such forms as optional self-employment tax, full write-offs for racehorses, and generous allowances to reduce personal income taxes with farm losses, and it seems curious that farming should not be the career choice of the best and brightest of our current crop of college graduates.

Nonetheless, many farmers are now shunning subsidies altogether and uncoupling themselves from federal price controls, for, as if to honor Marx’s dictum that capital has no country, there is gold to be made by growing crops that are too abundant here but in terrific demand elsewhere. Corn is one such crop, shipped as ethanol and syrup, the twin fuels of the modern world—for ethanol is an ever-more-important ingredient in gasoline blends, and corn syrup underlies the First World diet of processed food and soft drinks.

The energy-hungry European Union has been buying great quantities of American ethanol of late, though E.U. ministers are increasingly skeptical about the environmental value of the stuff, which uses more energy to produce than it yields. For its part, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations recently opined that food crops should be used for food—particularly in countries not so thoroughly subsidized as ours, countries in which, on average, food costs have risen 83 percent in the last three years.

Meanwhile, food riots are breaking out across the world, in Haiti, Cameroon, Egypt, even normally tranquil Thailand—which, though a major rice producer, now limits how much rice an individual can buy, the better to sell the crop to an insatiable China.

[amazonify]0803216327[/amazonify]There are no easy solutions, and all the signs point to hard times for eaters for years to come. But I have a few modest proposals for producers and consumers alike. Producers, remember what land your land is in; common decency would suggest that you repay the taxpayers’ generosity by marketing your wares close to home. If compulsion is required, then we might insist that any farmer who has ever been issued a subsidy turn over a proportionate share of the current harvest to stock food banks, feed pensioners, and serve other such worthy purposes.

And to eaters, I say, now is the time to learn to grow your own food, to return to local agriculture. Eat a little lower on the food chain. Do without bananas and tomatoes in February. Know where your food is coming from. Buy from local Jeffersonian-scale farmers. Plant a victory garden, and declare righteous victory over foreign powers and our own strange government. All these things are your patriotic duty, and your stomach and pocketbook will thank you for doing it.

Gregory McNamee writes from Tuscon, Arizona. He is the author, most recently, of Moveable Feasts: The History, Science, and Lore of Food (Praeger).

This article first appeared in the June 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

]]> http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2008/06/13/the-food-crisis/feed/ 8 Clueless in the Congress: The Reauthorization of a Reckless Bill http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2007/12/08/clueless-in-the-congress-the-reauthorization-of-a-reckless-bill/ http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2007/12/08/clueless-in-the-congress-the-reauthorization-of-a-reckless-bill/#comments Sat, 08 Dec 2007 19:40:59 +0000 Beverly K. Eakman http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?p=1667 The Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the No Child Left Behind Act are up for reauthorization again.  This process typically entails legislators tweaking the bill—a caveat here, a zinger there.  Almost always, it translates into more money.

Representatives George Miller (D-CA) and Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-CA) of the Committee on Education and Labor recently released a “discussion draft” of NCLB.  They probably meant well, but it is clear, from the Title I portion alone, that the acts remain mired in nonacademic pursuits, far removed from proficiency in the basics.  (Where is there a place for information relating to real learning capabilities—visual and auditory memory, visual identification, spatial and abstract reasoning, concentration, perceptual speed, hand-eye coordination, and thought-expression synchronization?)  Pages 307-317 confirm that a primary goal of the legislation is to build a permanent profile of every student and teacher, and to make these accessible on a need-to-know basis to any entity that calls itself a research or civil-rights group.  While there is a refreshing nod to parents (they get to view materials) and language concerning security from unauthorized parties (including a requirement to destroy files after a prescribed period), none of these stipulations carry viable penalties for noncompliance.  In fact, most of them are not technologically feasible—i.e., there is no way to “prove” that a backup file has not been created or that a parent has been given complete, unaltered records.

Concern over dossier-building has risen since the September 11 terror attacks, when the term data mining hit the news.  Most people had never heard of it.  But schools have been doing it since the 1970’s.  Back then, it was called psychographics.

Psychographics, which targets specific population segments through market research, has its origins in advertising.  The concept was picked up by political strategists to target socio-demographic groups so that each voting bloc heard what it wanted to hear about a candidate or issue.  A primary weapon in their arsenal was the questionnaire (or survey)—in effect, a “test.”  The information was gathered both blatantly and surreptitiously.

Webster’s New World Communication and Media Dictionary defines psychographics as “the study of social class based upon the demographics . . . income, race, color, religion, and personality traits.”  These characteristics, it states, “can be measured to predict behavior.”  So advertisements are based on surveys seeking out people who have certain characteristics in common.

The marketing rationale behind collection of behavioral data is that the best predictor of what you might buy tomorrow is whatever you bought yesterday—your “purchase history.”  Political experts realized that the same could be said for what a person believes.  Psychologists with advanced degrees in statistics had a new job.  Whether the product being “sold” was coffee, “same-sex marriage,” or a candidate for public office, the best predictor of what a person (or a voting bloc) would do in the future was whatever he (or it) did, believed, or supported in the past.  Much of this is ascertainable from public records—publications subscribed to, religious and political affiliations, charities and causes contributed to, shopping habits, hobbies, stocks, occupations.  Then the technology evolved.  Computers proved excellent tools for cross-matching and linking information in such a way as to entice special interests—pharmaceutical companies, college admissions officials, insurance companies, and government agencies—who were willing to pay well for such insights.

By canvassing for opinions and preferences, technically known as values and lifestyles (VALS) data, and cross-matching these with public and private records, analysts found that they could establish areas of commonality across socioeconomic, demographic, political, and religious groups.  If necessary, they could get down to the individual level.

By using VALS data, public-relations and advertising firms began to target marketing “packages” to specific groups, and even to individuals—through the mail, the news media, the internet.  It then occurred to educators that they could do likewise.

The Miller-McKeon draft demonstrates a troubling lack of historical context.  There seems to be no awareness that yesterday’s psychographic surveys are today’s school “assessments.”  Experts have become so skilled at phrasing their questions, inserted into academic tests and class questionnaires alike, that the “target subjects” (pupils) have no idea just how much they are divulging.  The result is a behavioral baseline, a profile—retained in databases for posterity.

Michigan’s school code specifies that only those who have “earned doctorates in psychology . . . and related behavioral sciences” are qualified to “interpret” assessments.  If assessments were not psychological profiles masquerading as tests, would such a requirement be necessary?  Worse, the seemingly unrelated pieces of academic and personal data, which reveal political leanings, have been fed into “predictive” computer models.  Today, these can serve to eliminate undesirables from any profession that might entail leadership or influence.

Herein lies the danger of out-of-control data collection, especially of nonacademic, subjective opinions.  Not only is a child denied the luxury of changing his mind on controversial topics, but youthful opinions can now be linked with family and other proprietary information.

Complaints that even top students were being shut out of prestigious universities, for reasons that had little to do with ability or grades but everything to do with beliefs, started surfacing ten years ago.  Today, it is not unusual for a prospective student to get a letter stating that, even though the applicant has a stellar record, university officials have decided that he or she “might be happier somewhere else.”  How does a parent argue with that?  Yet, page 307 of the Miller-McKeon draft trusts “authorized” organizations to represent their interests truthfully when seeking access to data-collection systems.

Cradle-to-grave data gathering on citizens was conceived within the education establishment.  It started with the eight-state Cooperative Accountability Project in the 1970’s.  A decade later, a watershed document out of the National Institute of Education (then an agency within the U.S. Department of Education) entitled “Measuring the Quality of Education” was quietly circulated.  Coauthored by NIE’s Archie LaPointe and Willard Wirtz, this paper advocated collecting “noncognitive data” from students—subjective, opinion-oriented information.  This paper built on two separate 1969 works: Walcott Beatty’s Improving Educational Assessment and an Inventory of Measures of Affective Behavior and the anthology Crucial Issues in Testing, by the late Ralph Tyler and Richard Wolf.

Measuring the Quality of Education recommended exchanging excellence for “functionality” and “getting into students’ personal characteristics” by improving upon existing “educational” databanks: the Common Core of Data, the Universe Files, and the Longitudinal Studies—already collecting massive data on schoolchildren in clunky, but nevertheless viable, systems, of which the public was unaware.  Walcott Beatty’s tome emphasized the importance of collecting “noncognitive” details on students’ lives, noting that implementation must “avoid the appearance” of a national initiative.  LaPointe and Wirtz echoed the latter point.

Ralph Tyler, a pioneer in the field of behavioral testing, was the father of the “whole-child” theory of schooling, which led to a general glorification of youth and, eventually, to children’s tyranny over adults.  Tyler was also a former head of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and its multimillion-dollar offshoot, the Educational Testing Service.  In Crucial Issues in Testing, he emphasized the need for deception in testing, asserting that there “are occasions in which the test constructor [finds it necessary] to outwit the subject so that he cannot guess what information he is revealing.”

These documents should have set off alarm bells with investigative journalists.  What kind of “tests,” after all, would require deception?  Instead, reporters were diverted by teacher-union press releases over salaries, “open” classrooms, eliminating classroom competition, and other matters.

In 1985, a white paper coauthored by computer experts George Hall, Richard M. Jaeger, C. Philip Kearny, and David E. Wiley was released, entitled “Alternatives for a National Data System of Elementary and Secondary Education.”  It offered the federal government two options for obtaining nonacademic information from students.  The following year, Education Week announced the selected option as an innovation in information-gathering with the headline “Radical Overhaul Offered for E.D. [Education Department] Data Collection.”  The pilot version morphed into the Elementary and Secondary Education Integrated Data System (ESIDS).  Bigwigs in the Department of Education alleged in 1991 that ESIDS never existed.  Confronted with Appendix E of their own Nation’s Report Card, where it was listed, they changed their tune.

ESIDS evolved into the Standardization of Post-secondary Education Electronic Data/Exchange of Permanent Records Electronically for Students.  SPEEDE/ExPRESS replaced the old paper folder with an electronic portfolio of pupil information, including psychological profiles and a rudimentary examination of students’ families.

This chronology is critical to any reauthorization debate.  Representatives Miller and McKeon should know that the collection of such information as a student’s membership in groups, advocated in their proposal as though it were new, is already part and parcel of school data collection.  In 1991, the Department of Education denied collecting noncognitive data; now it celebrates doing so (and, indirectly, federalizes curriculum, too)—all under the umbrella of “compelling state interest.”

Noncognitive questions are carefully inserted into assessments (formerly called tests) so as to “avoid the appearance” of a nationalized curriculum, just as the 1969 and 1981 documents advised.  Scores are based primarily on knee-jerk responses, not facts.  For example, in May 2004, a 194-question survey, given to 11th-graders at University/Rincon High School (Tucson Unified School District) as part of an Advanced Placement U.S. history course, asked students to identify themselves using the following criteria:

—I consider myself outgoing and spontaneous.

—I consider myself basically quiet and shy.

—I consider myself able to persuade my peers that my opinion is correct.

—My parents feel they should make a significant contribution of time and energy to society.

—My family relationships are generally satisfying.

No single response to one of these options is likely to brand anyone.  It is the totality of the responses—the trends—that produce a behavioral profile.

Most assessments ask about time spent with family members; use of tobacco, alcohol, and drugs by the student and family members; suicidal thoughts; and contraception.  Such information can be especially revealing when it is cross-matched with responses from such computerized queries as the following (taken from an older version of the Metropolitan Achievement Test):

—Number/type of books in the home

—Receipt of a daily newspaper

—Number of parents (and others) in the home

—Time spent with friends (after school and evenings)

—Time spent watching television or videos

—Frequency of home computer use

—Frequency of discussing things studied at school with someone at home

A Nebraska Adolescent Health Survey created by the University of Nebraska asked high-school students whether they considered themselves “religious” and what they thought about when they thought of sex.  Parents of students at Jefferson High School in San Antonio, Texas, were shocked when “assessments” revealed dozens of explicit sexual questions too offensive to reprint here (the terms oral and anal being the least repugnant).  Other questionnaires involve the degree to which a pupil is attracted to persons of the same sex; whether the pupil cries a lot; if the student has trouble getting his “mind off certain thoughts”; and a list of “worries”—among them, “Dad hitting Mom.”  Suppose Junior was angry with his father that morning; he might well check the highest rating (“very much”) on “Dad hitting Mom”—with life-altering results.

The only “testing” that is directly tied to teaching methodology is in noncognitive areas—which have as their goal modifying student viewpoints instead of demonstrating knowledge.  Numerical codes linking assessments to curriculum in such subjects as sex and social studies sometimes are found right on the covers of the teachers’ guides.  Social studies may include politically charged queries—on race, the United Nations, abortion, war.  Academic knowledge is included, but it appears to be of secondary importance.

The Miller-McKeon proposal defends the “unique student identifier” to ensure privacy.  These have, in fact, been around for decades.  Identification schemes have run the gamut from bar codes, to birthdates linked to class hour, to color-coded sticky labels—all aimed at deceiving the child into believing that assessment responses are anonymous.

Since Columbine, every attempt is being made to link child-supplied personal data to everything from a parent’s financial information to health records; after all, the “dangerous” kids need to be ferreted out.  Thus, educators say it is essential for psychologists to “get into a pupil’s belief system” and screen for evidence of aberration.  The new indicators for deviancy, however, may surprise you; maverick and religious are just two of the red flags signaling a “troubled pupil.”

In 2004, the House Appropriations Committee approved $20 million in new federal funds to begin a nationwide implementation of President Bush’s “New Freedom Initiative”—a plan to screen the entire U.S. population, beginning with schoolchildren, for mental illness and to provide a continuum of “services” for those identified as mentally ill or even “at risk” of becoming so.  Under the plan, schools will become hubs of a mass project for screening first children, then their teachers and parents.  Do Representatives Miller and McKeon realize their proposal will help the New Freedom Initiative “go national”?  Are they aware that expanded involuntary-commitment laws carry political implications?

School officials have long known that student data are not anonymous and are disclosed on a “need to know” basis.  Who needs to know?  Maybe nobody—unless a child (or his parent) runs for election, offends some politically correct group, or sits on a controversial committee.  Meanwhile, the volume and complexity of computerized data collection continues to evolve.  Fledgling projects such as the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System constantly enhance and replace existing ones.  (A feasibility study for an IPEDS-like student-unit record-collection system was submitted to Congress in February 2005.)

Stopgaps such as the Miller-McKeon draft are typically written in a vacuum.  Congressional staffers, usually young and relatively inexperienced, do not know enough to provide substantial background information for their elected bosses.  Consequently, even the best-intentioned legislators lay the groundwork for something very few people want.  Once enacted, legislation may get enhanced, but it is rarely reversed.

Despite the glut of articles on data mining that have appeared since September 11, there is still scant awareness of just how much private—and traceable—information is available.  One can catch a glimpse of the future on C-SPAN, which routinely airs hearings in which prospective appointees are grilled for things they said decades ago, often when they were young.

The status quo means future administrations will find it easy to regulate and restrict liberties to which older generations were once accustomed.

This article first appeared in the December 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

]]> http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2007/12/08/clueless-in-the-congress-the-reauthorization-of-a-reckless-bill/feed/ 0 WASHINGTON AND JERUSALEM—December 2007 http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2007/12/01/washington-and-jerusalem%e2%80%94december-2007/ http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2007/12/01/washington-and-jerusalem%e2%80%94december-2007/#comments Sat, 01 Dec 2007 22:52:05 +0000 Chronicles http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?p=428 Freedom of Conscience
by Thomas Fleming

Politics and ancient traditions.

VIEWS

With Malice Toward Many
by Tom Landess

Washington, Lincoln, and God.

The Conversion of a Culture
by Harold O.J. Brown

Crisis and revolution.

Dobson's Choice
by Aaron D. Wolf

Politics and the spirit of martyrdom.

Throne and Altar
by Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.

Imposing our religion.

NEWS

Clueless in the Congress
by Beverly K. Eakman

The reauthorization of a reckless bill.

REVIEWS

Epicene Europa
by Derek Turner

Walter Laqueur: The Last Days of Europe

plus

Roger D. McGrath on John Ferling's Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence

Clyde Wilson on Kevin R.C. Gutzman's The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution and Marshall L. DeRosa's Redeeming American Democracy: Lessons From the Federal Constitution

Herbert Arthur Scott Trask on Chalmers Johnson's Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From Burma: The Lady Vanishes by Jeffrey Meyers

VITAL SIGNS

POLITICAL THEORY: Abortion: No Libertarian Triumph by Doug Bandow

THE ARTS: Like Talking to a Wall: Some Further Thoughts on Photography by Andrei Navrozov

COLUMNS

SINS OF OMISSION by Roger D. McGrath

THE ROCKFORD FILES by Scott P. Richert

EUROPEAN DIARY by Andrei Navrozov

THE AMERICAN INTEREST by Srdja Trifkovic

IN THE DARK
In the Valley of Elah, Michael Clayton
by George McCartney

THE HUNDREDTH MERIDIAN by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES

AMERICAN PROSCENIUM

CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY

Song of an Old Rake and
Song of the Shovel by Ruth Moose

ON THE COVER

Cover courtesy of Scala / Art Resource, NY.
Inside illustrations by Melanie Anderson.

]]> cover1207.jpgPERSPECTIVE

Freedom of Conscience
by Thomas Fleming

Politics and ancient traditions.

VIEWS

With Malice Toward Many
by Tom Landess

Washington, Lincoln, and God.

The Conversion of a Culture
by Harold O.J. Brown

Crisis and revolution.

Dobson's Choice
by Aaron D. Wolf

Politics and the spirit of martyrdom.

Throne and Altar
by Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.

Imposing our religion.

NEWS

Clueless in the Congress
by Beverly K. Eakman

The reauthorization of a reckless bill.

REVIEWS

Epicene Europa
by Derek Turner

Walter Laqueur: The Last Days of Europe

plus

Roger D. McGrath on John Ferling's Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence

Clyde Wilson on Kevin R.C. Gutzman's The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution and Marshall L. DeRosa's Redeeming American Democracy: Lessons From the Federal Constitution

Herbert Arthur Scott Trask on Chalmers Johnson's Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From Burma: The Lady Vanishes by Jeffrey Meyers

VITAL SIGNS

POLITICAL THEORY: Abortion: No Libertarian Triumph by Doug Bandow

THE ARTS: Like Talking to a Wall: Some Further Thoughts on Photography by Andrei Navrozov

COLUMNS

SINS OF OMISSION by Roger D. McGrath

THE ROCKFORD FILES by Scott P. Richert

EUROPEAN DIARY by Andrei Navrozov

THE AMERICAN INTEREST by Srdja Trifkovic

IN THE DARK
In the Valley of Elah, Michael Clayton
by George McCartney

THE HUNDREDTH MERIDIAN by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES

AMERICAN PROSCENIUM

CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY

Song of an Old Rake and
Song of the Shovel by Ruth Moose

ON THE COVER

Cover courtesy of Scala / Art Resource, NY.
Inside illustrations by Melanie Anderson.

]]> http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2007/12/01/washington-and-jerusalem%e2%80%94december-2007/feed/ 0 In the Garden http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2007/11/25/in-the-garden/ http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2007/11/25/in-the-garden/#comments Sun, 25 Nov 2007 12:56:54 +0000 Scott P. Richert http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?p=408 “How’s your garden doing this year?”  It’s a familiar question, as normal as the greeting that began the conversation and the goodbye that will end it.  I cannot start a conversation with my grandmother, or an aunt or uncle or cousin, without being asked the question within a minute or two—or, depending on the time of year, one of the related questions: “So, are you going to put out a garden this year?” and “How did your garden do?”To the outside observer, the question might seem like idle chit-chat, the kind of thing you say when you don’t know what else to talk about—like asking about the weather.  But listen a little longer, and you realize that there’s more to it; the question is only the beginning of the conversation, because they each have gardens, too.  How many tomato plants did you put out?  What varieties of peppers?  The melons are doing well, but the squash failed early in the season.  It’s been a great year for okra.  You grow everything in raised beds, don’t you?

We talk about the weather, too, because it tells us something about the state of our gardens.  We’ve had too much rain; they haven’t had enough.  The hot, dry weather, ironically, has made for the best watermelons in years, because they grow like wildfire and send down amazing taproots.  The last frost was early, and it looks like the first frost will be late; this may be the longest growing season in years.  Some of our fruit trees bloomed too early, however, because we had a stretch of warm weather before that last frost, so we’ll have no plums or mountain ash berries this year.

We never talk, though, about “the environment” or “global warming” or “greenhouse gases” or “carbon emissions.”  More often than not, the people who chatter on endlessly about such things would have to answer “How’s your garden doing this year?” with “I don’t have a garden.”  Too busy worrying about “the environment” while spending most of their day engaged in activities that increase carbon emissions and greenhouse gases, they do not have any time left to spend with, and in, nature.  They have never consciously reduced nature to the abstraction of “the environment”; the very structure of their lives has done it for them.

When I was younger, talking about our gardens was a common activity among most of the people I knew.  Now, I rarely hold such conversations with anyone other than family or coworkers.  Partly, that’s because I grew up in a small village along a river that flowed through some of the best farmland in the Midwest.  Our yards were large; our soil, fertile; and families had plenty of children to send out to weed and water and harvest.

Now, though, I live in a mid-sized city, which surrounds a river that flows through some of the best farmland in the Midwest.  City folk today are less likely to plant a garden (at least a vegetable garden), but you can still see, especially in certain older neighborhoods, where gardens and home orchards used to be.  Raised beds and terraced sections of back yards are covered with grass.  Apple trees, beechnuts, mulberries, edible crab apples go unharvested except by birds and bugs and squirrels, while the homeowners purchase unripe pears from California and Chile, hazelnuts imported from Turkey, and gigantic but tasteless Mexican-grown raspberries at $3.99 a pint.

There’s an inverse relationship between the rising cost of industrially raised fruit and vegetables and their declining flavor and quality.  You simply cannot ship a ripe tomato to Rockford from Mexico or California, so they are picked green and artificially ripened in the trucks on the way here.  (Any that ripen on the vine are sold to canners for tomato juice or paste or sauce.)  For the dubious pleasure of eating a bland and often mealy tomato, we pay for the cost of transportation and [...]]]> Scott P. Richert“How’s your garden doing this year?”  It’s a familiar question, as normal as the greeting that began the conversation and the goodbye that will end it.  I cannot start a conversation with my grandmother, or an aunt or uncle or cousin, without being asked the question within a minute or two—or, depending on the time of year, one of the related questions: “So, are you going to put out a garden this year?” and “How did your garden do?”To the outside observer, the question might seem like idle chit-chat, the kind of thing you say when you don’t know what else to talk about—like asking about the weather.  But listen a little longer, and you realize that there’s more to it; the question is only the beginning of the conversation, because they each have gardens, too.  How many tomato plants did you put out?  What varieties of peppers?  The melons are doing well, but the squash failed early in the season.  It’s been a great year for okra.  You grow everything in raised beds, don’t you?

We talk about the weather, too, because it tells us something about the state of our gardens.  We’ve had too much rain; they haven’t had enough.  The hot, dry weather, ironically, has made for the best watermelons in years, because they grow like wildfire and send down amazing taproots.  The last frost was early, and it looks like the first frost will be late; this may be the longest growing season in years.  Some of our fruit trees bloomed too early, however, because we had a stretch of warm weather before that last frost, so we’ll have no plums or mountain ash berries this year.

We never talk, though, about “the environment” or “global warming” or “greenhouse gases” or “carbon emissions.”  More often than not, the people who chatter on endlessly about such things would have to answer “How’s your garden doing this year?” with “I don’t have a garden.”  Too busy worrying about “the environment” while spending most of their day engaged in activities that increase carbon emissions and greenhouse gases, they do not have any time left to spend with, and in, nature.  They have never consciously reduced nature to the abstraction of “the environment”; the very structure of their lives has done it for them.

When I was younger, talking about our gardens was a common activity among most of the people I knew.  Now, I rarely hold such conversations with anyone other than family or coworkers.  Partly, that’s because I grew up in a small village along a river that flowed through some of the best farmland in the Midwest.  Our yards were large; our soil, fertile; and families had plenty of children to send out to weed and water and harvest.

Now, though, I live in a mid-sized city, which surrounds a river that flows through some of the best farmland in the Midwest.  City folk today are less likely to plant a garden (at least a vegetable garden), but you can still see, especially in certain older neighborhoods, where gardens and home orchards used to be.  Raised beds and terraced sections of back yards are covered with grass.  Apple trees, beechnuts, mulberries, edible crab apples go unharvested except by birds and bugs and squirrels, while the homeowners purchase unripe pears from California and Chile, hazelnuts imported from Turkey, and gigantic but tasteless Mexican-grown raspberries at $3.99 a pint.

There’s an inverse relationship between the rising cost of industrially raised fruit and vegetables and their declining flavor and quality.  You simply cannot ship a ripe tomato to Rockford from Mexico or California, so they are picked green and artificially ripened in the trucks on the way here.  (Any that ripen on the vine are sold to canners for tomato juice or paste or sauce.)  For the dubious pleasure of eating a bland and often mealy tomato, we pay for the cost of transportation and of the ripening agent.  As late as a decade or two ago, most people purchased such produce only in the winter, because even chain supermarkets bought what fruit and vegetables they could locally during the growing season.  Now, you can’t find a naturally ripened tomato or peach in a Rockford supermarket in August.  In part, that’s because there’s less and less locally grown produce for stores to buy; but sadly, it’s also often a conscious decision based on corporate logistics and supply lines, as well as a desire to provide “consumers” with a consistent “product” throughout the year—even if it’s consistently bad.

When the “fresh” produce that’s available is so unappealing, is it any wonder that people turn to processed foods that at least have flavor, however artificial and unattractive that flavor might be to anyone with even a slightly refined palate?  But processed foods, of course, require more energy and more chemicals and travel farther between field and plate than even raw industrial produce does.

In the end, it all takes its toll—on “the environment,” on our culture, our neighborhoods, our families, our health.  Congress and the United Nations spend time and resources debating the causes of global warming and environmental degradation and negotiating treaties and laws to set standards and goals and restrictions, and taxpayers pay—both monetarily and in loss of freedom—to implement it all.  Of course, we also pay taxes to support federally subsidized industrial agriculture and state and local tax breaks for the national chains that contribute so much to the very phenomena that Congress and the United Nations wish to eradicate.

How much, I wonder, could carbon emissions and greenhouse gases be reduced if all those who could devoted a little corner of their yard to a garden, and bought other produce at their local farmers’ market or through a CSA (community-supported agriculture) or coop, and patronized, when possible, those locally owned grocery stores that still try to purchase produce nearby?  What if people lived the way that people used to live, instead of neglecting their own responsibilities and clamoring for legislation to deal with the consequences?

One thing is certain: Children would grow up once again knowing what a tomato really tastes like.  And they would have something to talk about the next time their grandmother calls.

Scott P. Richert is the executive editor of Chronicles.This article first appeared in the November 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

]]> http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2007/11/25/in-the-garden/feed/ 8 Reflections on Immigration Reform http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2007/11/23/reflections-on-immigration-reform/ http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2007/11/23/reflections-on-immigration-reform/#comments Fri, 23 Nov 2007 11:56:10 +0000 David A. Hartman http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?p=407 The most significant event of President George W. Bush’s second term (thus far) has been the defeat of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 (S.1348). This bill was initiated by President Bush in collaboration with the Democratic congressional majority, over the opposition of the Republicans and a few rebellious Democrats. The real winners of this battle were the usually silent majority of conservative Americans who rose to protest the next wave of illegal-alien invasion, which would have followed the amnesty proposed by S.1348. The subsequent resignation of Bush’s senior Machiavellian, Karl Rove, was not surprising.

It is difficult to know if conservatives were primarily concerned with the sheer magnitude of immigrants or with the threat of terrorism. Both problems would have been exacerbated by the S.1348 amnesty, which could have resulted in as many as 100 million more immigrants, as estimated by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. After being double-crossed by the immigration acts of 1965, 1986, and 1996, our dissident conservatives seem to be saying, “What’s wrong with taking control of our borders by enforcing the laws we already have?”

Among its key proposals, S.1348 offered a virtual fence to monitor our Southern border, presumably as a replacement for the physical fence ordered by both houses last year, which remains unconstructed. It also proposed the use of biometric IDs in visa-entry, monitoring, and exit procedures, which would be administered by the Department of Homeland Security. Of course, the most important way to reduce the chief incentive for illegal immigration—restricting employment to legally approved aliens—is already provided for by present law. That law simply is not enforced with reasonable policing, a conclusion that is supported by the fact that there were only 718 employer arrests in 2006, despite estimates that more than half of the 13 million illegal aliens here are employed. The amnesty of 1996 only served to swell the flood of illegal aliens and increased pressure for additional legal immigration of relatives (who account for 83 percent of those naturalized every year). These figures validate conservative concerns about the prospects of yet another (and greater) flood tide.

In Washington, the political pressure for increases in immigration allowances is, first and foremost, a matter of supply and demand for cheap labor (both salaried and hourly). As of 2003, foreign-born workers made up one sixth of the U.S. civilian workforce. Since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, according to U.S. Department of Labor statistics, real compensation per unit of output (including fringe benefits) for workers in the private sector declined by one quarter, while real paycheck earnings per unit of output declined by one half. Before 1965, however, earnings and compensation per unit of output were relatively stable, so it is not difficult to conclude that immigration has had a negative effect on returns to labor. Admittedly, in the medical and high-tech fields, immigration has helped relieve inflationary shortages. In general, however, the massive flow of migrants has depressed middle-class wages. In addition, immigration enables employers to risk less capital in exchange for more return. Yes, as the mantra goes, the immigrants “are doing the jobs Americans won’t do”—but that is because Americans want reasonable living wages. The historically low U.S. unemployment rate (4.5 percent), which is regularly cited as proof that the current demand for labor is unsatisfied, does not reflect declines in both female and male workforce participation: 17 percent of American males, ages 16 to 26, refuse to take jobs that pay less than babysitting, but, when combined with welfare benefits, those jobs look good to unskilled immigrants. American workers—who, since Colonial times, were among the highest-paid laborers in the world—are being marginalized by the globalists’ manipulation of immigration and trade.

Why shouldn’t Americans at least take advantage of the bargain-priced services offered by unskilled aliens? The answer [...]]]> David A. HartmanThe most significant event of President George W. Bush’s second term (thus far) has been the defeat of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 (S.1348). This bill was initiated by President Bush in collaboration with the Democratic congressional majority, over the opposition of the Republicans and a few rebellious Democrats. The real winners of this battle were the usually silent majority of conservative Americans who rose to protest the next wave of illegal-alien invasion, which would have followed the amnesty proposed by S.1348. The subsequent resignation of Bush’s senior Machiavellian, Karl Rove, was not surprising.

It is difficult to know if conservatives were primarily concerned with the sheer magnitude of immigrants or with the threat of terrorism. Both problems would have been exacerbated by the S.1348 amnesty, which could have resulted in as many as 100 million more immigrants, as estimated by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. After being double-crossed by the immigration acts of 1965, 1986, and 1996, our dissident conservatives seem to be saying, “What’s wrong with taking control of our borders by enforcing the laws we already have?”

Among its key proposals, S.1348 offered a virtual fence to monitor our Southern border, presumably as a replacement for the physical fence ordered by both houses last year, which remains unconstructed. It also proposed the use of biometric IDs in visa-entry, monitoring, and exit procedures, which would be administered by the Department of Homeland Security. Of course, the most important way to reduce the chief incentive for illegal immigration—restricting employment to legally approved aliens—is already provided for by present law. That law simply is not enforced with reasonable policing, a conclusion that is supported by the fact that there were only 718 employer arrests in 2006, despite estimates that more than half of the 13 million illegal aliens here are employed. The amnesty of 1996 only served to swell the flood of illegal aliens and increased pressure for additional legal immigration of relatives (who account for 83 percent of those naturalized every year). These figures validate conservative concerns about the prospects of yet another (and greater) flood tide.

In Washington, the political pressure for increases in immigration allowances is, first and foremost, a matter of supply and demand for cheap labor (both salaried and hourly). As of 2003, foreign-born workers made up one sixth of the U.S. civilian workforce. Since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, according to U.S. Department of Labor statistics, real compensation per unit of output (including fringe benefits) for workers in the private sector declined by one quarter, while real paycheck earnings per unit of output declined by one half. Before 1965, however, earnings and compensation per unit of output were relatively stable, so it is not difficult to conclude that immigration has had a negative effect on returns to labor. Admittedly, in the medical and high-tech fields, immigration has helped relieve inflationary shortages. In general, however, the massive flow of migrants has depressed middle-class wages. In addition, immigration enables employers to risk less capital in exchange for more return. Yes, as the mantra goes, the immigrants “are doing the jobs Americans won’t do”—but that is because Americans want reasonable living wages. The historically low U.S. unemployment rate (4.5 percent), which is regularly cited as proof that the current demand for labor is unsatisfied, does not reflect declines in both female and male workforce participation: 17 percent of American males, ages 16 to 26, refuse to take jobs that pay less than babysitting, but, when combined with welfare benefits, those jobs look good to unskilled immigrants. American workers—who, since Colonial times, were among the highest-paid laborers in the world—are being marginalized by the globalists’ manipulation of immigration and trade.

Why shouldn’t Americans at least take advantage of the bargain-priced services offered by unskilled aliens? The answer is simple: The immigrants and their employers may be better off for getting the business, but only at the expense of the average working and tax-paying citizen. The low-income aliens pay little or no income or FICA taxes, either by taking advantage of the Earned Income Tax Credit or by avoiding paying taxes altogether. On average, these aliens have double the poverty rate and criminality of the rest of the population, and they secure substantial welfare benefits from both legal and illegal sources, including free medical care and education, paid for by U.S. taxpayers. Eventually, many of them become citizens and then qualify for Social Security and Medicare at a total net cost to taxpayers of over $150,000 per family (after comparing taxes paid to benefits accrued or received).

The fury of the grassroots at the soaring numbers of illegal aliens is warranted, but somewhat misdirected. After all, it is hard to blame aliens when they walk through an open door and help themselves to a better standard of living—and when it is obvious to them that the immigration police could not care less. The traffickers who locate and deliver them, those who employ them illicitly, and the border patrol and the federal overseers who do not enforce the law are at least as guilty as the aliens—perhaps more so.

Of equal or greater importance is the loss of the successful American way of life. For decades, conservatives have warned that excessive immigration would result in the loss of traditional communities, on which American success has been built; now these predictions are becoming realities. Michael Barone, in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal (“The Realignment of America”), shows that masses of native-born Americans are migrating from the East and West Coast cities to the cities of the Heartland. The population loss on both coasts is being driven and replaced by immigrants. It would appear that the prospects for the “pursuit of happiness” by native-born Americans—who have seen their former communities increasingly overrun by immigrant strangers—have deteriorated to such an extent that it warranted seeking new communities where they could live among other native-born Americans. In another Wall Street Journal op-ed, Daniel Henninger records the findings of Prof. Robert Putnam of Harvard University, who studied the effects of “diversity” by conducting 30,000 interviews in 41 U.S. communities: “Short version: People in ethnically diverse settings don’t want to have much of anything to do with each other. ‘Social capital’ erodes. Diversity has a downside.” Putnam’s composite findings are perturbing:

Inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.

It appears that the vaunted “diversity” provided by increased immigration has proved no friend either to American communities or to America’s middle class, which has been the pride of our republic since its founding. Low-wage illegal-alien workers and their welfare subsidies are really subsidies to their U.S. employers—subsidies that drive up profits while depressing middle-class earnings.

The Christian churches of America, particularly the traditional denominations, represent the potential swing vote of the electorate, which could restore limited immigration. The leaders of these denominations have been purveyors of socialism and globalism for over a century. As a result, their congregations have been brainwashed into believing that taking in the world’s poor through an open-borders policy is the requirement of a good Samaritan. But consider the sobering picture painted by Peter Brimelow, in his comprehensive overview of immigration, Alien Nation: The Census Bureau predicts that, by 2050, the U.S. population will be 392 million; Leon Bouvier of Tulane University estimates that 139 million of them will be post-1970 immigrants and their descendants; and, David A. Coleman of Oxford University estimates that, currently, 60 million people wish to emigrate from the Third World to the United States. Should each of them be followed by seven relatives, as is the present trend, the result of our de facto open-borders policy could be an influx of as many as 480 million new arrivals—quite a burden for America’s good Samaritans. At some point, these good Samaritans will have to wake up to the fact that open borders mean putting their incomes, standards of living, culture, governance, and even law and order at risk. No country has ever survived when its citizens have given charity to mankind priority over the wellbeing of their families, friends, and neighbors.

Realistically, the 13 million illegal aliens who are currently residing in the United States cannot be abruptly returned to their native countries en masse. Their status should be resolved by our adoption of the temporary legal categories of alien-labor quotas proposed in S.1348, in agriculture, high-tech, and services, but not on the terms proposed by S.1348—that is, not by amnesty. Present illegal employees who “surrender” should be allowed to apply for these temporary jobs. Their employment should be contracted on an annual basis, and, after each year, they should be required to return home. Temporary residency should be monitored by biometric IDs. Alien workers’ wages and their numbers should be regulated to prevent any further depression of domestic compensation levels. Aliens without criminal records (other than border violations) who are granted temporary employment should be allowed to apply for naturalization, but with no promises and with no priority placed on their applications. Naturalization should require not only proficiency in English, civics, and history but a high-school degree or the completion of a GED taken in English. The Constitution should be amended so that citizenship is not automatically extended to those born to noncitizens in the United States, and so that English is established as the national language. As employers of illegal aliens are identified when their illegal employees surrender, they should be convicted and fined or incarcerated, as required by law. Hereafter, no illegal alien should be allowed employment in the United States or given any other basis for staying.

The Democratic and Republican parties have been content to use the immigration invasion to their political benefit, providing empty rhetoric to their respective bases, without regard for the tragic consequences for America and Americans. The Bush Republican machine has pandered to Central Americans and Mexicans, the principal source of illegal immigrants, with offers of bilingual education and citizenship, an approach that promises to turn the American Southwest into Kosovo. After all, President Felipe Calderón of Mexico has all but endorsed a reconquista by declaring that “Mexico does not end at its borders.” Meanwhile, the Democrats have worked toward a broad expansion of Third World immigration, in order to increase their voting base and thereby displace the Bush Republican regime. The rebellion of congressional Republicans in response to the demands of their core electorate could signal a movement toward sound immigration reform that would protect American communities and workers. Such a movement might even be joined by Democratic rebels intent on returning their party to its populist roots. Unfortunately, it is more likely that both parties, financed by corporate and Wall Street greed, will continue to profit from excessive immigration, making a mockery of the American experiment and its once optimistic prospects—both for Americans and, by example, for the rest of the world.

David A. Hartman, a retired banker, is the chairman of The Rockford Institute's board of directors and a contributor to Immigration and the American Future.

This article first appeared in the November 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

]]> http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2007/11/23/reflections-on-immigration-reform/feed/ 12 At Home Abroad http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2007/11/22/at-home-abroad/ http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2007/11/22/at-home-abroad/#comments Thu, 22 Nov 2007 11:36:20 +0000 Chilton Williamson, Jr. http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?p=406 The Eternal City is home to many eternal things—or, rather, their representatives, among them St. Peter’s, the Castel Sant’Angelo, the Capitoline Hill, and the Forum. Nevertheless, on recent travels to Rome, my wife’s and my first visit has been to none of these things, but, instead, to our good friends Asha and Bellamy, who reside on the north side of the Villa Borghese gardens two streets over from Il Ristorante The Meeting—an establishment which, though heavily patronized by Americans and Britons on account of its proximity to the U.S. Embassy on Via Veneto, offers a superb Italian menu and wine list. Our friends are hardly Roman notables or intellectuals, and this estimable restaurant in an upper-middle-class residential neighborhood is not listed in any guidebook I know of. Rather, they belong to the quotidian society of the great city they inhabit, away from the worn track beaten by the paparazzi and the guidebooks, in which the foreign and the familiar merge invitingly. In such company, we experience Rome as living Romans experience it—as a vital modern metropolis, not a dead historical one. The Eternal City can wait 24 hours. Our first day in Rome, we are more than content with the contemporary one.

My fundamental inability to regard a foreign capital as either a gigantic museum or a superuniversity is related no doubt to my having grown up in a great American city, New York. Residing in Manhattan, my family, and our friends and acquaintances, were scarcely in awe of the place in its aspect as a cornucopia of learning and culture. My sister, brother, and I received our educations from the Spence, Buckley, and Trinity Schools, not from the School of New York, the metropolis itself. While retaining the impression of having grown up at the Metropolitan Opera to which my parents had subscription tickets, I have probably visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art no more than a dozen times in my life, and the Museum of Modern Art perhaps once (and that once was more than enough). I was up in the Statue of Liberty on one occasion; the Empire State Building, once also. Fortunately, New York is not rich in historic buildings, or, indeed, in any architecture worthy of the name, so there were no great cultural opportunities missed in that respect. Most Saturdays when we remained in town over the weekend, my father and I taxied to the North River Piers and went through one of the berthed North Atlantic liners for several hours before sailing time. Afterward, we watched from pier’s end as she was nudged into the river and headed downstream by tugs. (Thanks to my father’s passion for ships and the sea, I have been aboard all the great liners of the middle part of the 20th century, including the old Europa—a German ship confiscated by the French after the war and rechristened Liberté—the first Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, Mauretania, America, Andrea Doria, Cristoforo Colombo, Ile de France, United States, and France. And most of them were architecture, incidentally.)

My experience of London was quite different, the year I spent in England with my family when in my middle teens. My father, an Anglophile who was doing research at the British Museum at the time and for many years taught a two-semester graduate-level course on the history of the British Empire at Columbia, ruthlessly dragged my sister and me (and my mother and infant brother) around the city and its environs each weekend on what he, mischievously, called “culture tours.” We greatly resented these “CTs” (or thought we did, or maybe just pretended to) but we saw a prodigious number of marvelous things in a year and learned a great deal as well—mostly from my father but also, of course, from the various professional tour guides who took [...]]]> Chilton Williamson, Jr.The Eternal City is home to many eternal things—or, rather, their representatives, among them St. Peter’s, the Castel Sant’Angelo, the Capitoline Hill, and the Forum. Nevertheless, on recent travels to Rome, my wife’s and my first visit has been to none of these things, but, instead, to our good friends Asha and Bellamy, who reside on the north side of the Villa Borghese gardens two streets over from Il Ristorante The Meeting—an establishment which, though heavily patronized by Americans and Britons on account of its proximity to the U.S. Embassy on Via Veneto, offers a superb Italian menu and wine list. Our friends are hardly Roman notables or intellectuals, and this estimable restaurant in an upper-middle-class residential neighborhood is not listed in any guidebook I know of. Rather, they belong to the quotidian society of the great city they inhabit, away from the worn track beaten by the paparazzi and the guidebooks, in which the foreign and the familiar merge invitingly. In such company, we experience Rome as living Romans experience it—as a vital modern metropolis, not a dead historical one. The Eternal City can wait 24 hours. Our first day in Rome, we are more than content with the contemporary one.

My fundamental inability to regard a foreign capital as either a gigantic museum or a superuniversity is related no doubt to my having grown up in a great American city, New York. Residing in Manhattan, my family, and our friends and acquaintances, were scarcely in awe of the place in its aspect as a cornucopia of learning and culture. My sister, brother, and I received our educations from the Spence, Buckley, and Trinity Schools, not from the School of New York, the metropolis itself. While retaining the impression of having grown up at the Metropolitan Opera to which my parents had subscription tickets, I have probably visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art no more than a dozen times in my life, and the Museum of Modern Art perhaps once (and that once was more than enough). I was up in the Statue of Liberty on one occasion; the Empire State Building, once also. Fortunately, New York is not rich in historic buildings, or, indeed, in any architecture worthy of the name, so there were no great cultural opportunities missed in that respect. Most Saturdays when we remained in town over the weekend, my father and I taxied to the North River Piers and went through one of the berthed North Atlantic liners for several hours before sailing time. Afterward, we watched from pier’s end as she was nudged into the river and headed downstream by tugs. (Thanks to my father’s passion for ships and the sea, I have been aboard all the great liners of the middle part of the 20th century, including the old Europa—a German ship confiscated by the French after the war and rechristened Liberté—the first Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, Mauretania, America, Andrea Doria, Cristoforo Colombo, Ile de France, United States, and France. And most of them were architecture, incidentally.)

My experience of London was quite different, the year I spent in England with my family when in my middle teens. My father, an Anglophile who was doing research at the British Museum at the time and for many years taught a two-semester graduate-level course on the history of the British Empire at Columbia, ruthlessly dragged my sister and me (and my mother and infant brother) around the city and its environs each weekend on what he, mischievously, called “culture tours.” We greatly resented these “CTs” (or thought we did, or maybe just pretended to) but we saw a prodigious number of marvelous things in a year and learned a great deal as well—mostly from my father but also, of course, from the various professional tour guides who took us about the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, Hampton Court Palace, Chiswick House, the Tate Gallery, and the rest.

Unfortunately, Trinity did not offer a course in British history until the following year, so that much of what my father taught fell into no comprehensive context and was, therefore, to some extent wasted; had we visited England two years later, all of what I saw and learned would have had far more meaning for me. As it was, my memories of London (and of Cornwall, where we rented an 11th-century farmhouse near the hamlet of Marhamchurch for two weeks in April and, later, the month of August) remain, more than four decades afterward, intense and indelible. And yet the basis of memory is less—far less—of the monuments, the cathedrals, the paintings, the formal 18th-century gardens than of the homely reality of English town and country life. My sister and I went every day to school in London (she, to St. Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith; I, to a tutorial establishment based in Knightsbridge, since Trinity perversely refused credit for a year at the Haberdasher School where I had been admitted), and otherwise made ourselves as free of the place as we had of New York. London, to us, was not a monument to the past but a living city—the more so since my grandfather Philpotts, a native-born Londoner, was still around in those days. I think I should have been thrilled far more to see Evelyn Waugh (who died only four years later) emerge unsteadily from White’s than by a view of the Tower room in which St. Thomas More was imprisoned.

Still, background aside, it seems to me that my approach to foreign travel would be fundamentally different were I less of a novelist and narrative writer and more of a scholar and critic. My immediate interest, as I have said, in traveling abroad is to observe how foreign peoples live today and to share their experience insofar as I am capable of doing (which, of course, is ridiculously little). The history—political, social, religious, and cultural—behind that experience is not so much secondary in value as it is in the temporal sense: I am too impatient to hold back from seizing immediately on what is directly apprehensible, while understanding that the past usually means more to me when fixed in the context of the known and felt present; and so I prefer to investigate the present first, and move on to the past after that.

My chief preparation before going abroad is always to learn as much of the language of the place I am traveling to as I can, language being for me, a man of words, at once my natural milieu and my sole defense. Not having language as a traveler for me is at once an inordinate inconvenience, a humiliation, and a scandal. In France and Italy, whose languages I have studied, I would rather keep my mouth shut than attempt, in extremis, to communicate in English—since, speaking English, I might as well never have left home. Once on foreign soil, my immediate, overwhelming, and lasting impulse is to set out on foot and almost in random direction, carrying with me a guidebook, it is true, but mainly as an orienteering reference and for its maps. Museums are wonderful places—and so are the streets, the mean and commonplace just as much as the elegant and historic. To walk all day across Rome, poking into this and that, stopping in at a wine bar to sit with La Reppublica over espresso and a cornetto or a glass of wine, consuming a three-course Roman lunch lasting two hours and chatting afterward with the waiter, dropping into a neighborhood church to hear part of a Mass being said, taking a walk in the park or the Bioparco and warming up afterward with a martini at Harry’s Bar at the top of the Veneto across from the Porta Piciana before going on to a performance at the Rome Opera—finally, at the end of the day, to catch a cab or ride a crowded bus back to the hotel through medieval byways, past the lighted windows of elegant shops where, earlier in the day, one bought an elegant silk necktie, a pair of fine leather gloves, or a well-printed and strongly bound messale—these things, for me, come even before investigation of the magnificent buildings, museums, and galleries. Living in Rome for a week or two, I live much as I lived in New York for 30 years, although on an unimaginably grander scale.

In New York, too, I was a walker, mainly on the weekends and especially in late fall (mid-October to the beginning of December) which is always the best time of year in the city. Often on a Saturday, I would walk from my apartment on East 93rd Street down Madison Avenue as far as Greenwich Village and back again up Fifth Avenue, looking into shop windows and ducking inside secondhand bookstores and tobacconist shops, eating lunch in some cheap but excellent neighborhood restaurant, admiring the beautiful, well-dressed women who were still to be seen around town in the 70’s. The canyoned streets of New York are justly famous, yet nothing can make up, in my mind, for the city’s lack of a natural eminence from which the entirety of the metropolis can be taken in at a glance. New York has the Empire State Building as Paris has the Eiffel Tower and London, the Tower and the column on Fish Street commemorating the Great Fire. But these are artificial vantages, with no mediating ground between the foot and the spire. Paris has also, of course, the hill of Montmartre, affording a splendid view of the city below to which the eye descends by degrees. But not even Montmartre compares with Rome’s Gianicolo, the long, partly wooded ridge extending south of Vatican City to Trastevere from which Garibaldi defied the French troops in 1848. The Gianicolo is dominated by the impressive Garibaldi monument and the Villa Farnesina, which I have not visited but expect to look into some day. A crest of umbrellaed Roman pines surmounts the ridge, decorated on its eastern slopes by a number of elegant villas, some of them surrounded by vegetable gardens and even a modest vineyard or two. For years, I had wanted to climb the Gianicolo and take in the city from the summit. On a recent trip, when we lodged in a convent at the foot of the hill, I decided to make the ascent without further procrastination.

In fact, I climbed up three times over a period of twelve days, the view on the first morning having been obscured by clouds and rain squalls. In the end, I beheld the Eternal City from the heights at three different times of day and in three wholly different kinds of weather. Most enchanting by far was the third and last time, toward sunset on a short January day, with the sun low at my back behind the great pines and the snowfields glinting on the blue indistinct Apeninne Mountains 70 kilometers (or so I judged the distance) to the east. The spoking, obtuse rays illumined the city in a golden glow and picked out its every salient feature—San Giovanni in Laterno, Santa Maria Maggiore, the Forum, the Spanish Steps, the Pantheon, Piazza Navona, Castel Sant’Angelo (the dome of San Pietro was out of sight around the wooded shoulder of the Gianicolo), and, behind the Villa Medici, the emerald expanse and dark green canopy of the Villa Borghese stretching to the northeast suburbs. (I thought of the lovers at the conclusion of Gianni Schicchi, regarding Florence from a balcony: “Fiorenze è bella . . . ” At that moment, I felt that I possessed Rome.) We had our farewells yet to make to Bellamy and Asha before the impending departure two days later.

The gardens of the Villa Borghese lay shrouded in a misty rain next morning, silent and peaceful as an English estate park, as my wife and I passed through the ivied Porta Piciana from the bus stop at the head of the Veneto. It is a 10- or 15-minute walk along the broad gravel path of the Viale S. Paolo de Brasile to the aviary, and on to the Bioparco. On account of the rain, there was no one ahead of us at the ticket window that stands to the left of the tall, stone-columned iron gates surmounted by a pair of statuary lions. At the gate, we surrendered our tickets to a pleasant young woman to whom we were by now familiar and went round past the elephant exhibit to an enclosed yard surrounded by a wall whose three wide observation windows gave upon the lush Indian rainforest beyond.

Bellamy reclined close by the lowest window with his left paw and chin resting meditatively on a short log. Behind him at a distance, Asha had just emerged from a dense grove of tropical foliage at the back of the extensive yard. On seeing us, the black brush at the end of her tail waved gracefully, and she started forward on her great, silent, well-sprung, deliberate paws, but Bellamy continued to doze with his amber eyes closed, insensible as yet of our presence, his mane beaded with droplets of moisture.

Asha and Bellamy, our great friends, are a gift from the government of India to the Italian government. As only 300 Asian lions remain in the wild on the Island of Gir, and these few are greatly endangered, they are fortunate to have had the good luck to end up in Italy, where they are making great progress with the language. The four of us—Bellamy, Asha, my wife, and I—chatted for a time in broken Italian before falling silent ahead of the arrival of a pair of keepers. The keepers confirmed for us that, indeed, there are as yet no cuccioli leoncini, but that the zoo is hoping for a blessed event some time in the next year or so. Perhaps, on our next visit to Rome, we shall find confirmation of the divine primeval truth that one and one indeed make three, or even four or five.

Chilton Williamson, Jr., is Chronicles' senior editor for books and the editor of Immigration and the American Future.

This article first appeared in the November 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

]]> http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2007/11/22/at-home-abroad/feed/ 4 Materialist Dogmatism http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2007/11/21/materialist-dogmatism/ http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2007/11/21/materialist-dogmatism/#comments Wed, 21 Nov 2007 16:33:27 +0000 Mark Shea http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?p=405 We all know that religious believers are fools who will tell themselves anything to prop up their preconceived notions, while atheists are hard-headed rationalists who look the evidence in the face and follow the Truth no matter the cost. Still, one’s faith in this common narrative of the chattering classes is shaken from time to time. Consider the case of Matthew Parris, a columnist for the London Times who demonstrates the fact that some allegedly rational people are every bit as bull-headedly resistant to the blandishments of empirical evidence as the most hermetically closed-minded geocentrist or six-day creationist.

Parris, a self-described unbeliever, is much exercised over the healing of Sister Marie Simon-Pierre of Parkinson’s disease, which is currently under investigation by the Catholic Church. According to CNN, the 46-year-old nun “was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2001. Her symptoms worsened with time: Driving became practically impossible, she had difficulty walking, and her left arm hung limply at her side.” Then she prayed for the intercession of Pope John Paul II:

Her cure came on the night of June 2, 2005, exactly two months after the pontiff’s death, she said. In her room after evening prayers, she said an inner voice urged her to take up her pen and write. She did, and was surprised to see that her handwriting—which had grown illegible because of her illness—was clear. She said she then went to bed, and woke early the next morning feeling “completely transformed.”

She had written John Paul’s name.

Parris’s response to all of this is a textbook example of a dogmatist who dislikes being confused by facts and evidence. He begins by linking the story with an absolute and complete irrelevancy, with the declaration that

one determinant of US foreign policy towards Israel is the belief, widely held on the Religious Right, that before the prophecy of the Second Coming and the end of the world can be fulfilled, the Israelites must be given their Biblical lands of Judaea and Samaria.

What on God’s green earth that has to do with the claim of a miracle by the good nun is never explained. We are simply to understand that any claim of the miraculous automatically puts the one who believes it in the class of a fundamentalist with some crazy dispensationalist notion about the Rapture (which, for fundamentalists, is distinct from the Second Coming).

After this sample of lucidity, Parris then calls for “intelligent Christians” to voice their “righteous anger” and “contempt” for this “nonsense” (apparently meaning “any belief in the supernatural”). Cool, impartial consideration of the evidence, that. He speaks mysteriously of the “excesses of Lourdes” and of “the woeful confusion of faith with superstition.” He suggests that “this stuff is the petrol on which the motor of a great Church runs; that without these delusions to feed on, the unthinking masses would falter.” He frets that, even worse, it may be that the bishops of the Church are stupid enough to “honestly entertain the possibility that from beyond the grave the late Pope John Paul II interceded with God to cause a woman to be cured of Parkinson’s disease.” He concludes this dispassionate consideration of the evidence with the following dogmatic declaration:

“But how can you be sure?” Oh boy, am I sure. Oh great quivering mountains of pious mumbo-jumbo, am I sure. Oh fathomless oceans of sanctified babble, am I sure. Words cannot express my confidence in the answer to the question whether God cured a nun because she wrote a Pope’s name down. He didn’t.

And to shut down all criticism of this farrago of non sequiturs, evidence-free claims, baseless dogmatism and insults, he preemptively denies that he is doing what he is, in fact, doing: “Churlish nonbelievers like me are made to feel it is we who are being arrogant, dogmatic, closed-minded.”

Precisely. You [...]]]> Mark SheaWe all know that religious believers are fools who will tell themselves anything to prop up their preconceived notions, while atheists are hard-headed rationalists who look the evidence in the face and follow the Truth no matter the cost. Still, one’s faith in this common narrative of the chattering classes is shaken from time to time. Consider the case of Matthew Parris, a columnist for the London Times who demonstrates the fact that some allegedly rational people are every bit as bull-headedly resistant to the blandishments of empirical evidence as the most hermetically closed-minded geocentrist or six-day creationist.

Parris, a self-described unbeliever, is much exercised over the healing of Sister Marie Simon-Pierre of Parkinson’s disease, which is currently under investigation by the Catholic Church. According to CNN, the 46-year-old nun “was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2001. Her symptoms worsened with time: Driving became practically impossible, she had difficulty walking, and her left arm hung limply at her side.” Then she prayed for the intercession of Pope John Paul II:

Her cure came on the night of June 2, 2005, exactly two months after the pontiff’s death, she said. In her room after evening prayers, she said an inner voice urged her to take up her pen and write. She did, and was surprised to see that her handwriting—which had grown illegible because of her illness—was clear. She said she then went to bed, and woke early the next morning feeling “completely transformed.”

She had written John Paul’s name.

Parris’s response to all of this is a textbook example of a dogmatist who dislikes being confused by facts and evidence. He begins by linking the story with an absolute and complete irrelevancy, with the declaration that

one determinant of US foreign policy towards Israel is the belief, widely held on the Religious Right, that before the prophecy of the Second Coming and the end of the world can be fulfilled, the Israelites must be given their Biblical lands of Judaea and Samaria.

What on God’s green earth that has to do with the claim of a miracle by the good nun is never explained. We are simply to understand that any claim of the miraculous automatically puts the one who believes it in the class of a fundamentalist with some crazy dispensationalist notion about the Rapture (which, for fundamentalists, is distinct from the Second Coming).

After this sample of lucidity, Parris then calls for “intelligent Christians” to voice their “righteous anger” and “contempt” for this “nonsense” (apparently meaning “any belief in the supernatural”). Cool, impartial consideration of the evidence, that. He speaks mysteriously of the “excesses of Lourdes” and of “the woeful confusion of faith with superstition.” He suggests that “this stuff is the petrol on which the motor of a great Church runs; that without these delusions to feed on, the unthinking masses would falter.” He frets that, even worse, it may be that the bishops of the Church are stupid enough to “honestly entertain the possibility that from beyond the grave the late Pope John Paul II interceded with God to cause a woman to be cured of Parkinson’s disease.” He concludes this dispassionate consideration of the evidence with the following dogmatic declaration:

“But how can you be sure?” Oh boy, am I sure. Oh great quivering mountains of pious mumbo-jumbo, am I sure. Oh fathomless oceans of sanctified babble, am I sure. Words cannot express my confidence in the answer to the question whether God cured a nun because she wrote a Pope’s name down. He didn’t.

And to shut down all criticism of this farrago of non sequiturs, evidence-free claims, baseless dogmatism and insults, he preemptively denies that he is doing what he is, in fact, doing: “Churlish nonbelievers like me are made to feel it is we who are being arrogant, dogmatic, closed-minded.”

Precisely. You are arrogant, dogmatic, and close-minded, Mr. Parris. You have a theory of materialism, and you are radically uninterested in considering anything inconvenient to that theory. So you dogmatically declare that it could not happen without, like, seeing if the nun was in fact inexplicably cured of Parkinson’s disease after prayer to John Paul II.

Parris demonstrates clearly that, despite the common cultural narrative mentioned above, the atheist, when faced with stories like that of the good nun, really only has two choices: He can maintain his ignorant bigotry by simply refusing even to look at her story, or he can entertain the possibility that his All-Explaining Theory of Everything might have some holes in it.

Parris takes the former route, fulfilling to an exacting degree the words of the Prophet Chesterton:

The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. . . . It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence—it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed.

The great disadvantage under which the atheist materialist invariably places himself is that, in despising the supernatural, he refuses to look and see if it does, in fact, occur. Instead, he fools himself with self-deluding sleight-of-hand. He points to the false miracle and pretends that it stands for all miracles. Or he adopts a mocking tone of voice and pretends that it substitutes for a rational argument. Or he links an honest nun with a crazy fundamentalist political theory. Or, in this case, he simply clamps his eyes shut, plugs his ears and screams “Noooooo!” at the top of his voice while declaring that he is the cool rationalist who follows the evidence wherever it leads.

Meanwhile, the nun who no longer has Parkinson’s continues to exist and praise God for her healing, in defiance of the loudest shouts of some ignorant dogmatic scribbler that “He didn’t!”

Mark Shea blogs at Catholic and Enjoying It!

This article first appeared in the November 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

]]> http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2007/11/21/materialist-dogmatism/feed/ 21 WANTED! ENEMIES OF THE PLANET http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2007/11/01/wanted-enemies-of-the-planet/ http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2007/11/01/wanted-enemies-of-the-planet/#comments Thu, 01 Nov 2007 15:39:50 +0000 Chronicles http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?p=403 Wiccan Warming
by Thomas Fleming

Planet-worshiping environmentalists.

VIEWS

Agrarians, Greenies, and Goreites
by Tom Landess

To the next generation.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
by Tobias Lanz

The high environmental cost of too much freedom.

Edward Abbey
by Gregory McNamee

Conservative conservationist—and controversialist.

NEWS

Reflections on Immigration Reform
by David A. Hartman

The battle for America's communities.

REVIEWS

A Democrat of the Head
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Hugh Brogan: Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life

plus

Daniel Larison on Colin Wells' Sailing From Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Changed the World

Mary Anne O'Neil on Catharine Savage Brosman's Range of Light

James O. Tate on Zachary Leader's The Life of Kingsley Amis

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From Russia: Iran, Russia, and Debt by Andrea Crandall

VITAL SIGNS

FOREIGN AFFAIRS: The End of the Balkan Interlude? by Ted Galen Carpenter

CHRISTIANITY: Materialist Dogmatism by Mark Shea

COLUMNS

THE BARE BODKIN by Joseph Sobran

LETTER TO THE BISHOP by Joe Ecclesia

THE ROCKFORD FILES by Scott P. Richert

EUROPEAN DIARY by Andrei Navrozov

THE AMERICAN INTEREST by Srdja Trifkovic

IN THE DARK
3:10 to Yuma, The Nanny Diaries
by George McCartney

THE HUNDREDTH MERIDIAN by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES

AMERICAN PROSCENIUM

CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY

Woodrow Wilson, 1917 and
John Brown Canonized by Robert Beum

ON THE COVER

Cover by Sandy Faulkner.
Inside illustrations by Melanie Anderson.

]]> The November 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American CulturePERSPECTIVE

Wiccan Warming
by Thomas Fleming

Planet-worshiping environmentalists.

VIEWS

Agrarians, Greenies, and Goreites
by Tom Landess

To the next generation.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
by Tobias Lanz

The high environmental cost of too much freedom.

Edward Abbey
by Gregory McNamee

Conservative conservationist—and controversialist.

NEWS

Reflections on Immigration Reform
by David A. Hartman

The battle for America's communities.

REVIEWS

A Democrat of the Head
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Hugh Brogan: Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life

plus

Daniel Larison on Colin Wells' Sailing From Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Changed the World

Mary Anne O'Neil on Catharine Savage Brosman's Range of Light

James O. Tate on Zachary Leader's The Life of Kingsley Amis

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From Russia: Iran, Russia, and Debt by Andrea Crandall

VITAL SIGNS

FOREIGN AFFAIRS: The End of the Balkan Interlude? by Ted Galen Carpenter

CHRISTIANITY: Materialist Dogmatism by Mark Shea

COLUMNS

THE BARE BODKIN by Joseph Sobran

LETTER TO THE BISHOP by Joe Ecclesia

THE ROCKFORD FILES by Scott P. Richert

EUROPEAN DIARY by Andrei Navrozov

THE AMERICAN INTEREST by Srdja Trifkovic

IN THE DARK
3:10 to Yuma, The Nanny Diaries
by George McCartney

THE HUNDREDTH MERIDIAN by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES

AMERICAN PROSCENIUM

CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY

Woodrow Wilson, 1917 and
John Brown Canonized by Robert Beum

ON THE COVER

Cover by Sandy Faulkner.
Inside illustrations by Melanie Anderson.

]]> http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2007/11/01/wanted-enemies-of-the-planet/feed/ 4