Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture » June 2007

Establishing Christian America

Thomas Fleming — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 20:57:46 +0000

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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

Modern Chinese Secret?

Ted Galen Carpenter — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 20:30:25 +0000

Beijing announced in early March that it plans to boost China’s defense budget by 17.8 percent in the coming year. That fairly hefty increase continues a pattern of double-digit hikes over the past decade. Both the United States and China’s neighbors in East Asia are expressing growing uneasiness about the trend.

Far more troubling, however, is Beijing’s continuing dishonesty about the actual extent of its military spending. According to the Chinese government, the new defense budget will be $44.9 billion. However, China’s official defense budget omits several pertinent items. In a moment of unusual candor in 2005, defense-ministry official Gen. Cao Gangchuan admitted that China excludes “some funding for the development of equipment” from its budget. The omitted categories are actually far more extensive and include various weapons purchases, as well as most military research and development expenditures.

Admittedly, all communist regimes tend to lie as a matter of principle. That habit may have persisted in China even as the officially communist system there has adopted economic policies more attuned to Milton Friedman than to Karl Marx. Moreover, having misrepresented the actual extent of military spending for years, the Chinese government would find it awkward (at the very least) suddenly to offer accurate figures.

There may be a less mundane and more troubling explanation, however. The refusal to divulge the real amount of military spending could be a clumsy attempt to conceal the scope of the effort to modernize China’s military. The PRC’s forces are certainly no match for those of the United States, but China has come a long way in the past decade from the antiquated, personnel-intensive “people’s army” conceived by Mao Tse-tung.

Beijing is trying to create a smaller but much more capable force—a true 21st-century military apparatus. Among other things, the PRC has deployed more than 900 missiles across the strait from Taiwan, and it is purchasing first-rate fighter planes from Russia. Beijing has embarked on a campaign to expand and modernize its fleet of submarines. China is also trying to strengthen her capability to strike at U.S. naval forces deployed in the Western Pacific in the event of war. Purchases of the sophisticated Sunburn antiship missiles from Russia clearly point to that objective, and the recent test of an antisatellite capability is intended to neutralize the most prominent feature of America’s military superiority: our unparalleled ability to use satellites to see and manage a battlefield.

It is unlikely that China is attempting to challenge America’s global military dominance. In any case, that would be an utterly unattainable objective for at least another generation. It is possible, though, that Beijing may have more limited but still troubling goals: attempting to create a force capable of intimidating Taiwan (and, eventually, other neighbors in East Asia) and to discourage the United States from honoring her security commitments in the region, as the prospect of confronting China would be both too costly and too dangerous.

While we should be concerned about the lack of transparency regarding the PRC’s defense buildup, there is no need to inflate the Chinese military threat, as the war hawks in Washington tend to do. The Pentagon’s annual report to Congress last year concluded that Beijing’s real military spending was at least $70 billion and could be as much as $105 billion. Given the recently announced increase in China’s official budget, the Pentagon’s estimates in 2007 will likely be about $82 billion to $124 billion.

Most independent experts, however, emphatically dispute the Pentagon’s high-end figures. James Mulvenon, one of the top experts on China’s military, has even accused the Pentagon of making “wild assed guesses” about PRC spending that are “not based on empirical fact.” Other independent estimates usually come in below even the Pentagon’s low-end estimates.

That is an important point. If China’s actual military expenditures are in the $60 billion to $70 billion range, as most analysts believe, that is comparable to what other major powers, such as Russia, Japan, and Great Britain, spend on their military establishments and is only modestly greater than what France spends. And, of course, the PRC’s outlays are utterly dwarfed by the more than $600 billion U.S. defense budget.

The Pentagon does the American people a disservice when it exaggerates the extent of China’s military spending. But the Department of Defense’s foray into threat inflation is mild compared with the efforts of some nongovernmental hawks. The most egregious is a new study from Heritage Foundation analyst John Tkacik, Jr. Using “purchasing power parity,” Tkacik alleges that Beijing’s military budget is really $450 billion, “putting it in the same league as the United States.” His calculations, he states, “reflect the reality that a billion dollars can buy a lot more ‘bang’ in China than in the United States.”

That thesis has superficial plausibility, but even a cursory examination shows its fundamental flaws. Purchasing-power parity may have some validity when it comes to personnel costs (a dollar would buy more Chinese infantry than it would American infantry), but it has little, if any, application to weapons purchases. A Russian Kilo submarine or a Sukhoi-30 fighter plane would cost the same whether purchased by China, the United States, or any other country shopping at the global market. Sellers do not provide a special Chinese discount.

The absurdity of Tkacik’s thesis is even more evident when one considers the extent of military outputs. If Beijing had been spending in the neighborhood of $450 billion in recent years, we would have already seen an enormous expansion of PRC military capabilities. So, where are the numerous aircraft carriers (to compete with America’s 12), the long-range bombers, the vast expansion of China’s tiny fleet of intercontinental ballistic missiles, etc.? If China has been spending in the area of $450 billion per year on her military, she has been getting results that are extraordinarily anemic even for a communist system. If China’s defense budget were comparable in size to America’s, the PRC would be fielding a military establishment comparable to America’s. Yet not even the Pentagon is making that argument. The overwhelming evidence is that China’s military is no match for the U.S. military—and won’t be for decades.

Unfortunately, Beijing’s penchant for understating its actual defense budget plays into the hands of panda-bashers in the United States. The lack of candor and transparency breeds suspicion that China’s “peaceful rise” might not be all that peaceful. If the PRC wants to allay such suspicions and neutralize the influence of the hawks, it needs to come clean about its real level of military spending. The United States and the nations of East Asia should expect nothing less from what former Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick termed a “responsible stakeholder” in the international community.

Ted Galen Carpenter is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.

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

Americanism, Then and Now: Our Pet Heresy

Christopher Check — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 18:43:16 +0000

On January 22, 1899, Pope Leo XIII addressed an encyclical (Testem benevolentiae nostrae) to James Cardinal Gibbons, archbishop of Baltimore, intended “to suppress certain contentions” that had arisen in America “to the detriment of the peace of many souls.” In essence, Leo feared that some American Catholic intellectuals, including a number of bishops, were finding canonical and theological lessons for the Church where they should not be looking for them: in the American cultural and political experience of democracy and individualism.

“The underlying principle of these new opinions,” wrote Leo,

is that, in order to more easily [sic] attract those who differ from her, the Church should shape her teachings more in accord with the spirit of the age and relax some of her ancient severity and make some concessions to new opinions. Many think that these concessions should be made not only in regard to ways of living, but even in regard to doctrines which belong to the deposit of the faith. They contend that it would be opportune, in order to gain those who differ from us, to omit certain points of her teaching which are of lesser importance, and to tone down the meaning which the Church has always attached to them.

Leo named this heresy Americanism, after the country that had spawned it. Debate continues to this day over what, exactly, the elements of the heresy are, and some question whether those whom Leo addressed in his encyclical were guilty of any doctrinal error. One priest at the center of the controversy as it played out in Europe, Abbé Felix Klein, called Americanism the “phantom heresy,” and Cardinal Gibbons assured the Holy Father that he and his brother bishops were prepared to defend and promote the Catholic Faith—all of it—in America. Nonetheless, Leo’s concerns were not without warrant. He knew well the end of a soul encouraged “to follow out more freely the leading of his own mind” and where “the assumed right to hold whatever opinion one pleases upon any subject and to set them forth in print to the world” would lead—even though he did not use the word blog. Indeed, 70 years after the promulgation of Testem benevolentiae nostrae, progressives would celebrate as the great glory of the Second Vatican Council a revolutionary idea that nowhere appears in the Council’s not inconsiderable documents: “freedom of conscience.”

For dissident Catholic priests and theologians, this high-sounding phrase became the reason to reject centuries of Church teachings, particularly those pertaining to sexual morality. Charles Curran, Daniel McGuire, Michael Novak, and other celebrity dissenters promoted artificial contraception to an all too easily manipulated faithful. Divorce and abortion followed. Today, not a few Catholic politicians defend abortion and think that cohabiting homosexuals should have the right to get married.

Americanism, doubtless more virulent in our day than it was in Leo’s, combines a collective sense of Christian exceptionalism (America as the “Shining City on a Hill”) with the hubristic conviction that America can draw up her own moral code—or, rather, a limitless number of moral codes, arising from each individual’s conscience. Acknowledging the heresy and its internal contradictions helps us understand why Americans today can insist that we are a Christian nation while indulging in all manner of public and private behavior that is decidedly not Christian, from delighting in degenerate diversions, to sanctioning the murder of children, to supporting and prosecuting an unjust war. Although the heresy began as a Catholic controversy, it is hardly less manifest in American Protestant denominations where far too many are eager to cooperate with the “spirit of the age,” using “freedom of conscience” as an excuse to relax some of their own severity.

If the chief Catholic scandal that finds its origin in Americanism is the widespread flouting of the Church’s immutable teaching on contraception, the chief Protestant scandal is the high divorce rate found even among regular churchgoers. For some time, of course, many Protestant denominations have permitted divorce (and subsequent remarriage) in cases of adultery or abandonment. However, in, for example, the United Methodist Church, these terms have been relaxed. As the self-proclaimed church with “open hearts, open minds, open doors,” the UMC, in its Book of Discipline, declares that,

God’s plan is for lifelong, faithful marriage. . . . However, when a married couple is estranged beyond reconciliation, even after thoughtful consideration and counsel, divorce is a regrettable alternative in the midst of brokenness . . . [D]ivorce publicly declares that a marriage no longer exists. . . . Divorce does not preclude a new marriage.

To put a friendly face on this mush, a divorced Methodist man shares his experience on the UMC’s website:

Both my ex-wife and I were pleasantly surprised by how easily things went after the first few times in church as a separated couple. In fact, the reactions and support of the people there helped make this very difficult time somewhat less trying. They not only demonstrated how to be nonjudgmental with us, but we were able to carry that into our divorce proceedings and were nonjudgmental with one another most of the time, too. . . . And although my ex-wife and I will never again be married, we have been able to find a depth of Christian love for each other that was completely unexpected. What a blessing!

Divorce rates are even higher among those American denominations, such as the Baptists, in which the promptings of individual conscience are afforded even greater authority. This would come as no surprise to Leo, who rejected out of hand the idea that the teaching Church is outmoded because the Holy Spirit now speaks directly to souls, “the contention being that the Holy Spirit pours richer and more abundant graces than formerly upon the souls of the faithful, so that without human intervention He teaches and guides them by some hidden instinct of His own.” To Leo, it was a “sign of no small overconfidence to desire to measure and determine the mode of the Divine communication to mankind.”

Today, in the absence of objective rules and standards, ready divorce is, according to one study conducted by well-known evangelical researcher George Barna, no less a part of evangelical culture, in particular, than it is of American culture, in general. In fact, Barna’s data indicates that “born-again” Christians divorce at a higher rate than self-professed agnostics and atheists. Roughly 25 percent of the general population is now or has been divorced. Barna’s study puts the figure at 34 percent for nondenominational Christians, 29 percent for Baptists, 28 percent for Presbyterians, and 26 percent for Methodists. Only Roman Catholics and Lutherans have divorce rates below the national average.

Where sexual morality is concerned, the Episcopal Church—a thoroughly American institution—is a piece apart. As recently as 1998, Anglican bishops had, if somewhat tepidly, maintained much of traditional Christian teaching on marriage: “[I]n view of the teaching of Scripture, [the Conference] upholds faithfulness in marriage between a man and a woman in lifelong union, and believes that abstinence is right for those who are not called to marriage.” Nonetheless, the Episcopal Church has ordained a lesbian bishop and permitted the “blessing” of same-sex unions. In March, when asked by the Anglican primates to renounce what amounted to the approval of homosexual acts, the Episcopalian bishops refused to submit to correction. Nonetheless, they stated their desire to remain part of the Anglican Communion because, in their words, membership in the Church of England gives them “the great privilege and unique opportunity of sharing in the family’s work of alleviating human suffering in all parts of the world.”

What of proclaiming the Gospel? Well, the Episcopalian bishops “proclaim the Gospel that in Christ all God’s children, including gay and lesbian persons, are full and equal participants in the life of Christ’s Church,” and they proclaim “a Gospel that welcomes diversity of thought and encourages free and open theological debate as a way of seeking God’s truth.”

As Leo XIII predicted, this Americanized Christianity has led to a mess of contradictions. Remarkably, bishops of the Episcopal Church are bold enough to declare the reprimand from the Anglican primates to be “spiritually unsound,” as it points out that their

pastoral scheme encourages one of the worst tendencies of our Western culture, which is to break relationships when we find them difficult instead of doing the hard work necessary to repair them and be instruments of reconciliation. The real cultural phenomenon that threatens the spiritual life of our people, including marriage and family life, is the ease with which we choose to break our relationships and the vows that established them rather than seek the transformative power of the Gospel in them.

And this from a House of Bishops that includes divorced men.

Is this advanced religious confusion and the moral decay it sires unique to America? Hardly. Pornography is more readily available on European television than on American television. With the possible exception of Las Vegas, there is not an American city that can compete with Amsterdam in the public approbation of moral rot. In Moscow, the average number of abortions per woman approaches four. In Prague, a city whose architecture testifies to the Faith, churches are empty on Sundays. In France, Italy, and Spain, the descendents of crusaders and conquistadors are contracepting themselves out of existence even as they invite the enemies of Our Lord inside their borders to make up the demographic difference. Unlike America, however, the nations of Europe—excepting, perhaps, the Poles, the Slovaks, and the Maltese—have long given up on insisting that they are Christian. Indeed, the European Union is determined to reject Europe’s Christian roots, and its subjects, by and large, are not protesting. The remnant in Europe know that they are a remnant.

Americans, on the other hand, ignoring the signs that indicate that we are on the same cultural path as Europe, continue to insist on the thinnest evidence—“under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, “In God We Trust” on our currency—that America is a Christian nation, whose material prosperity and political dominance are, like the atom bomb (as one famous professional conservative put it), signs of God’s favor. (If any country is permitted to make so astonishing a claim, it is France, to whom God did directly and obviously send a military advantage—and a moral one—in the person of Saint Joan of Arc.)

The American soul, if it is to be saved, will require more than a list of proscriptions to obey, no matter how energetically they are thundered from the nation’s pulpits. Fire and brimstone sermons do not stop Baptists and evangelicals from divorcing. Nor will a mere understanding, however widespread, of the social consequences of deviant behavior suffice. Men shackled by unnatural desires are intimately familiar with the physical toll their sins exact, yet far too few of them refuse to indulge themselves. That divorce harms children is universally acknowledged, but the rate of divorce has not slowed. By now, any honest abortion enthusiast knows that abortion takes a human life, but mothers still murder their children.

The churches in America have failed to hold the line on the fundamentals of morality, but their deeper fault lies in their failure to lead the transformation of the culture in Christ. American society is not one in which a person can cultivate the kind of piety that illuminates his understanding of his relationship to God. In such a culture, man can see the real value of his nature and struggle against Original Sin to live up to it.

There are some signs of hope among the American hierarchy. Bishop Robert W. Finn of the diocese of Kansas City-Saint Joseph recently issued a pastoral letter on pornography that is well worth reading. Noting that “disciples of Jesus Christ are called to the happiness that comes from a clean and undivided heart,” Finn condemns the “steady increase of pornography in our culture,” calling it a “plague in our society, reaching epidemic proportions.” Although Finn is clear in calling the “[u]se of pornography . . . a serious sin against chastity [that] . . . robs us of sanctifying grace,” and in insisting that “sin is real and it is destructive,” he takes care to explain that “sin makes us less human” and that only by living up to our nature as sons of God, made in His image and likeness, can we overcome the culture in which we live, “one that is increasingly dark and death-dealing.”

As Leo did a century before, Finn centers on the supernatural virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity, which are the products of a sacramental life. Such a life, he explains, cultivates an “awareness of the presence of God”—the surest antidote to the besetting sin of Americanism.

Christopher Check is the executive vice president of The Rockford Institute.

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

Border Math: A Study in Priorities

George Ajjan — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 14:31:01 +0000

A rare crack in the fortified wall of the Bush administration’s diplomatic obstinacy seemed to appear as U.S. diplomats sat down in March with their Iranian and Syrian counterparts to discuss stability in Iraq. Foreign-policy realists of both parties hailed the move as a potential breakthrough: Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE) offered a characteristically self-righteous lecture, while Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE), the enigmatic might-be presidential candidate, echoed, “We will not achieve peace and stability in Iraq without a regional framework that includes Iran and Syria.”

This apparent crack in the wall turned out to be an illusion, however, as the opportunity to engage one another face-to-face represents not honest hope for progress but a platform for one-upmanship by both the United States and her regional adversaries.

Despite being targeted for attack by the same neoconservative hawks who pushed us into Iraq, Iran could afford the most happy-go-lucky attitude toward the talks, considering that, whatever their outcome, she would continue to exert substantial influence on political developments in Iraq through Shiite political parties. As Srdja Trifkovic describes the Iranian perspective, “They are playing Iraq for the long term, and they know that if they play their hand right, it may fall into their lap like a ripe fruit.” Iran will want significant incentives if she agrees to facilitate a face-saving American withdrawal from Iraq, which will be difficult to offer, considering that the United States and Iran have not had actual diplomatic ties in nearly three decades. Therefore, a polite roundtable discussion in Baghdad devoted to Iraqi security and unrelated to nuclear issues was not likely to mend years of mistrust or alter the dynamics behind a potential large-scale military invasion.

The Syrian government relishes any opportunity to dress up as a choirboy, tout its regional influence, and wax poetic on Iraq’s woes, because it has far fewer time constraints than the Bush administration does. While Bush will be gone in less than 20 months, Syrian President Bashar Assad will be on the ballot this year in a Sham referendum designed to garner him a second seven-year term. So he will be saying “I told you so” to America about Bush’s Mesopotamian Misadventure for a long time to come. Given this longevity, coupled with the White House’s demonstrated inflexibility, Assad knows that he cannot hope for a full rapprochement with the United States until Washington is remade after 2008. This means that, for the moment, Syria will use any direct diplomatic access to Washington to rehabilitate her image by appearing helpful, while loudly broadcasting her traditional grievances and positioning herself for a variety of post-Bush contingencies.

President Bush’s calculus, like Assad’s, is based on spin. By engaging in highly publicized diplomacy with Iran and Syria, he can rebut his critics who have been whining about the need for dialogue. Of course, he can later claim that the outcome of the talks strengthens his original position—that America has certain expectations regarding her enemies, who already know what they need to do—and that the March Iraqi initiative was used to reinforce the desired change in behavior. In other words, this White House likes to talk at its international adversaries, not with them, and then maintain that the entire affair was a waste of time, because the rogues never comply with the unilateral orders shouted at them. In a recent speech on U.S.-Iran relations, Senator Hagel referred to this approach as “international blackmail.”

Nevertheless, President Bush—perhaps motivated by guilt over ignoring the findings of the Iraq Study Group (ISG)—did agree to the flirtatious talks. By sitting down, however meaninglessly, with Iran and Syria, perhaps the President can at least pretend to have heeded the advice of his father’s secretary of state, James A. Baker. The trouble with the ISG and Baker’s approach, though, especially as it pertains to dealing with Syria, is that it moderately tweaks the status quo of U.S. foreign policy without challenging it in any substantial way. Baker deserves credit for recognizing the boost in America’s regional credibility that would result from a successful resolution of Israel’s land disputes with her neighbors, but how this would pay off in the Iraqi debacle, particularly in the short term, is vague.

Basically, since the Bush administration has blasted “Iran and Syria” ad nauseam, any mainstream Washington discussion, such as the ISG report, simply cannot fail to address external factors, however dubious their supposed influence (in the case of Syria) on what is essentially an internal Iraqi conflict and a fight against foreign occupiers. President Bush has painted himself into a corner by continually harping on Syria. The Syrians themselves have picked up on this and milked it for all it is worth. In a recent interview with ABC News’s Diane Sawyer, Assad took an unsubtle swipe at the Bush administration: “It doesn’t matter how strong economically or what army you have; it’s a matter of credibility. We have credibility. We have good relations with the other factions. They should trust you to be able to play a role.”

Middle East analysts could not help but chuckle at the poised assertion, recognizing Assad for having the gall to exaggerate Syria’s clout so wildly. Yes, Syria may have certain footholds in Iraq, among the now-seated politicians she sheltered from her rival Ba’ath faction during the Saddam Hussein era; in the tribes in the Anbar Province on Syria’s eastern border; and with the mercurial cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who reportedly adored his stay in Damascus a year ago and “didn’t want to leave,” as one official joked. But Syria is far from being a major powerbroker in Iraq. Iran, Saudi Arabia, and, to a lesser extent, Turkey will have to drive America’s endgame in Mesopotamia.

As far as U.S.-Syria relations go, Washington is far more obsessed with the infiltration of foreign fighters into Iraq through Syria’s eastern border. This matter pervades practically every discussion of the Iraq war, no matter who is talking. For example, during a recent high-profile congressional visit to Damascus, Princess Pelosi, as the attention-loving Speaker of the House seems to fancy herself, hunkered down with her colleagues to confront Assad on the foreign-fighter issue, even as they spited Bush by touting their faith in the ISG.

This is nothing new. As far back as 2003, the Bush administration set the tone in Washington by referring to foreign fighters as the “backbone” of the insurgency. Since then, just about everyone has followed in lockstep. Rarely will a politician, even a staunch critic of the President, forego the opportunity to slap Syria on this basis. It is a slam-dunk position on which seemingly everyone can agree: If only Syria and Iran would cease to allow free transit to insurgents, 25 million peace-loving pro-American Iraqi angels would be free to scarf down Big Macs while bopping along to Britney Spears on their iPods.

All along, however, the official word from military commanders on the ground betrayed this neoconservative fantasy, while Princess Pelosi and her colleagues in the congressional minority simply abdicated oversight. Washington representatives, including a majority of Senate Democrats who rubber-stamped Bush’s Mesopotamian Misadventure from day one, could have reshaped the parameters for Washington debate regarding Iraq and held the White House accountable on more pressing concerns, had they demonstrated a better grasp of simple arithmetic in the form of “border math.”

About two years ago, Gen. John Vines, who commanded all the coalition forces in Iraq, estimated that no more than 150 foreign fighters entered Iraq per month, mainly from Syria, though he cited Sudan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt as the infiltrators’ main countries of origin. Divided by roughly 30 days per month, that makes an average of five new foreign fighters per day.

Apparently, no one in Congress questioned whether a handful of infiltrators per day logically posed a threat to 150,000 of the best-equipped, best-trained military personnel in the world. At that rate, about 1,800 foreign fighters enter Iraq annually. It would therefore take a whopping 75 years to reach parity with the number of U.S. troops currently in country. Even so, these mere five encroachers per day do not possess superhuman ability to engulf Iraq with violence, as the American public has been led to believe. One need not be a military expert to determine that the foreign fighters could be and should be stopped, but their infiltration is tolerated as a political scapegoat, because the American public, put to sleep by neoconservative lullabies, generally does not want to believe that the United States could sink in the swamp of Iraq on her own.

The calculations are simple. Iraq’s border with Syria is 375 miles long, or 1.98 million feet; 15,000 troops assigned to patrol the border in two 12-hour shifts would equate to 7,500 round-the-clock patrols; 1.98 million feet divided by 7,500 troops yields one fully equipped American soldier for every 264 feet. At that concentration, in a mostly barren desert area, American soldiers patrolling the Syria-Iraq border could easily spot suspicious movement and apprehend any potential terrorist, even in the dead of night.

Those 15,000 troops would create a virtual human net to stop infiltrators—quite apart from the use of infrared technology, helicopter flyovers, or human intelligence. Fifteen thousand troops may sound like a lot, but it represents less than ten percent of the total American deployment, and less even than the “Surge” on which the Bush administration has pinned its hopes for Baghdad’s security. If foreign-fighter infiltration truly presents such a major threat to stability in Iraq, we should naturally have expected U.S. forces to divert ten percent of their manpower to break this “backbone” of the insurgency. That never happened, because American military commanders have accepted all along the predominantly homegrown nature of the insurgency in Iraq.

Witless congressional staffers read the hawkish think-tank memos offered them very carefully and never bothered to investigate thoroughly or pay very close attention to the testimony of military officials who warned about the hype of foreign fighters. Moreover, the Bush administration could have solved the border problem, essentially, by outsourcing it. A three-party cooperative-patrol solution, including a 5,000-strong Syrian contingent and 5,000 Iraqi recruits, with a supervising presence of another 5,000 American troops, would have nullified foreign-fighter infiltration, while simultaneously rebuilding critical diplomatic bridges. Instead, the White House and its media allies opted at every stage to employ the inflammatory rhetoric of its “stay the course” talking points.

Chronicles readers and other Americans concerned about border security should also take particular note of Syria’s ridiculous effort to defend herself by claiming that, since the United States has great difficulty in keeping illegal immigrants from crossing the Mexican border, Syria should not be expected to seal its eastern frontier. While Princess Pelosi happily prances around the souqs of Damascus to embarrass the Bush administration, she and her colleagues fail to connect the Iraq war to illegal immigration on the U.S.-Mexico frontier. In fact, the numbers are even more staggering than the Iraqi border example. Given a 2,000-mile southern boundary, the American military manpower currently deployed to “stand with the Iraqis who have made the choice for freedom” could easily cut off illegal immigration and potential terrorist incursions completely.

Think of it: 150,000 troops divided into two 12-hour shifts would yield 75,000 round-the-clock patrols; 2,000 miles is 10.56 million feet. Dividing that by 75,000 yields one solider for every 141 feet, keeping America secure from the Pacific Ocean all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

Sadly, the United States will continue to spend precious lives, treasure, and political capital thousands of miles from her own unprotected frontiers, so long as American policymakers remain hopelessly fixated on grandiose sentiments about “the decisive ideological struggle of our time.” Furthermore, our unwillingness to engage our adversaries in the Middle East in a substantial way has undercut America’s regional credibility dramatically. Even worse, most of the “realists” in Congress who have finally found the courage to distance themselves from the status quo do so not out of principle, but for political expediency. Tough talk on Iran and bullying Syria may score quick points in cable-news shouting matches, but without a revamped diplomatic strategy, we may not only fail to extract ourselves from Iraq honorably but soon end up scratching our heads wondering how Washington blundered its way into yet another ill-advised military boondoggle.

George Ajjan, a Republican activist and member of the Arab-American Institute’s National Policy Council, writes from Clifton, New Jersey.

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

True Grit

Christopher Sandford — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 12:06:33 +0000

A remark one often hears from the current crop of film critics is that John Wayne might indeed merit the iconographic status conferred on him by tens of millions of ordinary cinemagoers around the world, were it not for the troubling matter of his alleged evasion of military service during World War II—an issue, it would seem, of rather greater consequence to the more ideologically pristine of the professional reviewers than it is to the civilians who actually pay to watch the movies.

We can only admire the pundits’ own unstinting patriotism, freedom from self-righteousness, exquisite probity, and universal wisdom—particularly the last, in having an opinion about everything. Wayne himself was by no means as self-assured as many of his detractors, and he winningly remarked that “most acting is forgotten in a day, as any good actor knows.”

This was one of his guiding principles, and those who hated him were infuriated not merely by his unparalleled fame, and the quietly disciplined manner in which he went about achieving his uniquely relaxed style, but by the way in which he never aggrandized his profession or believed that a person influences the course of events purely because he happens to “slap on makeup [and] dance around in tights” for a living. He was a standing reproach to the sort of performer who takes himself very seriously indeed and thinks that his work is destined to guide affairs of state.

Wayne was born a century ago, on May 26, 1907, in Winterset, Iowa, where he was baptized as Marion Robert Morrison. The all-important name change came about with his first starring role, in the 1930 movie The Big Trail, and, for all the critical sniggering, seems relatively modest compared with that of certain modern counterparts. (To give just two examples, both of a different political stripe from Wayne, the pleasantly demotic-sounding “Alan Alda” entered the world as Alphonso Joseph D’Abruzzo, while this year’s Best Actress for her performance in The Queen is better known to her loved ones as Ilynea Lydia Mironoff than she is as “Helen Mirren.”)

Wayne had an austere and, it seems reasonable to assume, character-building Midwestern upbringing broadly similar to that of Ronald Reagan, four years his junior. Both men were the product of an only fitfully successful father (an itinerant druggist, in Wayne’s case) and a more obviously formidable mother. Both families eventually migrated to Southern California, where, in a decidedly mixed review of his new surroundings, Wayne recalled,

I had to ride to school on horseback. The horse developed a disease that kept it skinny. We finally had to destroy it, but the nosey biddies of the town called the humane society and accused me, a 7-year-old, of not feeding my horse and watering him.

It was around this time that the boy became “Duke,” because he had an ever-present Airedale terrier of that name; he appears to have been closer to it than to any human relative.

In 1925, Wayne won a football scholarship to the University of Southern California and took a summer job as a scene-shifter and uncredited bit player for nearby Fox Studios. While there, he fell in with the director John Ford, already a veteran of some 60 silent films, turned out at the rate of roughly one per month, whose later product included such screen classics as Young Mr. Lincoln, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Beginning in 1928, Wayne would appear in more than 20 of Ford’s features, not least among them 1939’s Stagecoach. Here, we’re treated both to a riveting character study and to incomparable action in the form of a protracted Indian attack featuring Yakima Canutt’s celebrated stuntwork. Wayne’s own arrival on the scene as the Ringo Kid remains one of the more arresting entrances in cinema: The audience first sees him framed against the towering flat mesas of Monument Valley, an indelible image that established his quintessentially American, larger-than-life persona that came to assume mythical proportion in such films as The Long Voyage Home and Howard Hawks’s Red River. Of the latter, in which Wayne played a maniacally driven and yet not unsympathetic cattleman named Tom Dunson, Ford remarked, “I never knew the big son of a bitch could act.”

The Searchers (1956) is widely regarded as Wayne’s finest and most complex performance and remains as fresh today as it was more than a half-century ago. It is a continually gripping, sometimes chilling saga, spanning a biblical seven years, which, on one level, works as a straightforward chase story. Wayne’s character, Ethan Edwards, seeks revenge on an Indian named Scar for the kidnap of his young niece. Far from being a mere prototype for the likes of the Death Wish franchise, however, The Searchers offers several beautifully underplayed performances, and Wayne is a revelation as a man given to brooding self-doubt verging on despair, even as he doggedly pursues his quarry. At least one erudite critic has invested the character of Ethan Edwards with classical gravitas and made the connection to Achilles’s fury on the theft of his war prize by Agamemnon. That may be a stretch, but Wayne’s portrayal does have a sense of haunting moral melancholy beneath the obsession that firmly belies the macho stereotype.

Howard Hawks once said of Wayne that his greatest skill lay not so much in his being an all-action hero as its exact opposite. “He [was] observant. He could always find what it had been in an earlier scene that led, logically, to what he was doing just then. Nobody quite grasped the poetry in the flow of film like he did.” It may seem odd to speak of John Wayne and poetry in the same breath, but, in addition to Ethan Edwards, there were to be a number of exquisitely nuanced roles down through the years: His splendidly named Captain Brittles in Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, for example, has a tension, a depth, and a poignancy about him that Wayne’s many imitators could only feebly approximate. Part of the appeal came from the vast physical presence of the man (Wayne remains one of the few actors to have mastered the art of lumbering gracefully), but those increasingly craggy Mount Rushmore features were surely only half the story. Time and again, Wayne manages to combine a stoicism and a vulnerability that embody both sides of the classic frontier myth. The films may not always have been realistic, but, by and large, they felt real and they felt right: If they weren’t, strictly speaking, what the West was like, they were what audiences like to think it was like. By showing us the characters’ inner faltering, Wayne offers a more rounded view of the march of our nation’s history than was provided by Clint Eastwood, at least until the latter embarked on his Late Period with 1992’s Unforgiven.

Wayne’s own latter-day output included the breezy self-parody True Grit (1969), in which he played a hard-drinking Western lawman with an eyepatch, and its mildly lackluster sequel, Rooster Cogburn. These were not the career choices of a man abandoned to his own myth. Along the way, there would also be a variety of less distinguished fare, of which 1963’s McLintock!—in which Wayne treats his estranged wife, played by Maureen O’Hara, to a public spanking—represents a leaden nadir, at least from the feminist standpoint. His final role, as the graying cowboy John Bernard Books in The Shootist (1976), took no small degree of courage to carry off: It’s the tale of a onetime gunslinger who attempts to live his last days dying of cancer in peace, but cannot escape his reputation. Although Wayne had bridled at the psychobiographical interpretation that certain of his films evoked, this one accurately reflected his real-life struggle. In 1963, he’d had a tumorous lung removed; he underwent further major surgery in 1978 and died of stomach cancer in June 1979, aged 72.

As Wayne was a more accomplished actor than might be gleaned from his enduring public image—a male Statue of Liberty—so, too, his politics defied easy characterization. It is true that, from time to time, he delivered propaganda tools of considerable handicraft but limited artistic value. In 1968, at the depths of the Vietnam War, Wayne and his son Michael brought to the screen the seven-million-dollar “epic” The Green Berets, a clichéd salute to the Special Forces about which even the Department of Defense had its doubts. In the context of an implausible yarn about the kidnap of a Vietcong general, the film is content to trot out the stock characters: an Irishman named Muldoon; a noble and largely mute Negro; a cynical journalist; and a feisty neighborhood kid with a pet dog. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the reviewers greeted the Waynes’ military-recruitment exercise with restraint, but, for once, the public joined the critical consensus. Although the film eventually recouped its costs, the U.S. box-office take was less than a third of that of True Grit.

In that fast-dawning Age of Aquarius, which transformed the nation into a cultural and political war zone, Wayne represented an almost archaic figure: the unabashed patriot who helped sustain the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, paid his annual dues to the John Birch Society, and—as if there could be anything worse—supported Barry Goldwater for president. Less well publicized was his extreme personal generosity and espousal of a whole raft of causes not typically associated with the far right. Wayne not only gave his time and money unstintingly but dispensed his favors to those in no position to return them. There is at least one well-equipped children’s ward in a depressed area of Los Angeles that owes its existence to him. Further, he spoke out, 30 years before it became the vogue, on a wide range of environmental and (what would now be called) animal-rights issues. I happen to have spent some of my summers in the early 1970’s on the San Juan Islands, off the coast of Washington state, where Wayne was known to appear regularly on board his boat The Wild Goose. As I remember, he was more than happy to deflate his public image and was frequently to be seen, sans toupee, engaging the locals in a detailed discussion of the islands’ world-renowned but chronically underfunded bird sanctuary. It was later found that he had quietly donated a five-figure sum of money to the enterprise.

Who knows exactly what happened when Wayne was faced with the prospect of military service? At the time of Pearl Harbor, he was 34 years old, with a shaky marriage and four young children to support. He had just completed a breakthrough performance (in Stagecoach), after 12 years of unrewarding B-movies and bit parts. Perhaps Wayne had his current employer, Republic Pictures, lobby to obtain 3-A status (“Deferred for [family] reasons”) on his behalf. Perhaps the studio needed no encouragement to do so. At any rate, the War Department had already made provision to keep the movies alive by all means possible, the theory being that they contributed to national morale by proving that aspects of normal life could be sustained. From 1941 to 1945, Wayne completed 18 pictures, entertained the troops in the Pacific Theater as part of a USO revue, and toured indefatigably in support of the War Bond Drive. He never sought to varnish or obscure his military record, or lack of it, and ruefully acknowledged toward the end of his life that it would continue to be “manna to whole generations” of critics. He was not mistaken in this belief. Meanwhile, it seems reasonable to assume that the infiltration of the real world by other, more deluded movie stars will continue.

Christopher Sandford is a Seattle-based journalist and author. His biography of Roman Polanski will be published by Century in September.

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

Sex Slaves

Roger D. McGrath — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 01:17:41 +0000

By the 1950’s, professors at our universities were teaching American history, “warts and all.” By the late 60’s, it was mostly warts. Now, it is all warts, all the time.

The Japanese have taken a different tack. They have sanitized their history, especially their actions during World War II, and only in response to pressure from the outside world have they acknowledged any wrongdoing at all. Even then, their grudging admissions are euphemistically phrased and conspicuous for what they do not include. Most recently, the ugly topic of sex slaves used by Hirohito’s army during World War II has caused the Japanese to squirm, omit, equivocate, euphemize, and deny.

The Japanese kidnapped more than 200,000 girls (some researchers argue the number is as high as 300,000), mostly from Korea and China but also from countries in Southeast Asia, including the Philippines, and transported them to “comfort stations” to service Japanese troops. Many of the girls were as young as 11 or 12, and few had reached 18, yet the Japanese, to this day, call them “comfort women.” Moreover, the Japanese claimed that the girls were not kidnapped but willingly participated as professional prostitutes. In 1993, after several international protests, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono issued a qualified apology, still calling the sex slaves “comfort women” and the military brothels “comfort stations.” No government program of compensation to the few remaining survivors accompanied the apology.

In March 2007, some 120 members of Japan’s parliament demanded that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe rescind the apology, arguing that Japan was engaging in a “masochistic view of history” to please foreigners. Nariaki Nakayama, chairman of the group of parliamentarians making the demand, claimed,

Some say it is useful to compare the brothels to college cafeterias run by private companies, who recruit their own staff, procure foodstuffs, and set prices. Where there’s demand, businesses crop up . . . but to say women were forced by the Japanese military into service is off the mark. This issue must be reconsidered, based on truth . . . for the sake of Japanese honor.

Deputy Cabinet Secretary Hakubun Shimomura said, “I believe some parents may have sold their daughters. But it does not mean the Japanese army was involved.” Before he became prime minister, Abe said the same things. Now, in an attempt to improve relations with China and South Korea, Abe says the apology will stand, but, “The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion.” Proof of coercion, Abe insists, is “complete fabrication.”

There is a kernel of truth in what Abe and the others say. Some parents did sell their daughters into slavery, and, initially, many of the comfort women were Japanese prostitutes who received bonuses for working overseas servicing Japanese troops. Nonetheless, the prostitutes could meet only a fraction of the demand, and the Japanese government thought that they were tarnishing the image of the Japanese as the Oriental super race. By the early 1940’s, Japanese prostitutes had been mostly replaced by kidnapped girls from conquered territory. Documents found during 1992 in the archives of the Japanese Defense Ministry provide proof that the Japanese military was responsible for the program.

Then, too, there is the testimony of hundreds of surviving comfort women. Lee Yong-soo, 78, says she was 14 when Japanese soldiers dragged her from her home in Korea and forced her into sexual slavery in Formosa. “The Japanese government must not run from its responsibilities,” she insists. “I want them to apologize, to admit that they took me away when I was a little girl to be a sex slave, to admit that history.” Lee is typical of the survivors.

Not typical is Jan Ruff-O’Hearn, now an Australian from Adelaide, who, in testifying before the U.S. House of Representatives, called the procurement and use of “comfort women” “the most shameful story of the worst human rights abuse committed by the Japanese during World War II . . . ” She also revealed that “In the so-called ‘Comfort Station’ I was systematically beaten and raped day and night. Even the Japanese doctor raped me each time he visited the brothel to examine us for venereal disease.”

There is also testimony from Japanese soldiers. Yasuji Kaneko, 87, an infantryman in China during World War II and now living in Tokyo, recalls, “The women cried out, but it didn’t matter to us whether the women lived or died. We were the Emperor’s soldiers. Whether in military brothels or in the villages, we raped without reluctance.” Other soldiers have admitted that, under orders, they kidnapped girls for the brothels.

Some sex slaves served in traveling brothels—boxcars on trains stopping intermittently to the delight of Japanese troops. Not infrequently, the girls serviced up to a hundred soldiers during a 48-hour stopover. One such stretch of rail line was made famous by The Bridge on the River Kwai. While 60,000 British, Dutch, and Australian POWs—and some 700 Americans—worked to built roadbed and trestles and lay ties and track from Thailand into Burma, sex slaves were often worked to death by the Japanese soldiers guarding the Allied POWs. The POWs did not prosper, either. More than 12,000 of them died.

Perhaps most disturbing about the latest controversy is the endorsement of Prime Minister Abe’s remarks by the Japanese media and by the general populace. His approval ratings plunged during March—not because he denied sex slavery, but because he refused to rescind Japan’s 1993 apology.

If you want to find a truly “masochistic view of history,” don’t seek it in Japan—try American universities.

Roger D. McGrath is the author of Gunfighters, Highwaymen, and Vigilantes.

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

The Business of Souls: When Experts Attack, Part II

Aaron D. Wolf — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 15:26:46 +0000

Here’s what I can’t figure out: How in the world did Saint Patrick evangelize all of those Druid priests and clan chieftains without a mission statement? After all, history and tradition tell us that he walked around preaching and performed an occasional miracle. But how did he know what his mission was?

And then, there are purpose and strategy and vision—all three of which cannot be left to chance, if today’s business and Church-growth experts are right. (“Christ before me, Christ behind me”—what does that mean, practically speaking?) If you want to be effective, if you want to achieve success, if you want your enterprise to grow, you have to be on top of these things, or else you will simply stand still. And, as we all know, there is no such thing as “standing still”: If you’re not moving forward, you’re falling backward.

A leader moves forward and induces others to follow him into the future. He does this by casting a vision—by explaining, concisely and concretely, where the organization is heading. (If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time!) This vision helps to define the mission, which must also be articulated and repeated, mantra-like, in order to give followers a sense of identity and purpose. Imagine what Patrick’s success would have been, had he and his merry band recited, as the road rose up to meet them, “Bog Ulster Ministries (BUM) is a loving, caring family that earnestly desires to help tree-worshiping spiritual seekers become transformed believers who model Purpose Driven lives.”

What, exactly, drew the Irish to Patrick? Was it the thrilling promise of a miracle? Did Patrick pass out vellums advertising a Three Night Life-Changing Crusade? “Watch Snakes Vanish, Before Your Very Eyes!” Did he carefully compose relevant, contemporary music (so as not to frighten away the hipster Celts) for singing “The Breastplate”? “Ooh, ooh, ooh, the splendour of fire! / Whoa, oh, oh, the flashing of light’ning! [Repeat 6x’s.]” Did he speak to their felt needs, urging them to trade in all of their cares, their anxieties, and their depression for a relationship with Christ?

And how did he ensure that those he persuaded to make Life-Changing Decisions would keep coming to church? Did he create special ministries for Celtic youth, for young Irish families, for the Mothers of Preschoolers? “Today, after Mass, Pastor Pat will be talking with the Nifty Fifties about living with osteoporosis.” Or “Irish Youth In Service (IRIS) will be having its annual God-Hain bonfire this Saturday night. (Parents, please: No devil masks.)”

No, Patrick preached. He evangelized (“gospelled”) as he went, wherever he went. He did not have a mission statement: He had the Great Commission. He did not have marketing techniques: He had the Holy Ghost, the Word of God, and his ordination. He did not have slick music or a “relevant message”: He had the Body and Blood of Christ, the stern rebuke of God’s Law, and the promise of the forgiveness of sins.

That is all very high-sounding and wonderful, but the fact remains that we do not live in the same world that Saint Patrick (or Gregory the Great or Thomas Aquinas or take your pick) inhabited. The past century has witnessed the complete transformation of Western society: the destruction of communities, cities, farms and the small towns they supported, small businesses, jobs in general, the social order, etc. What is left of public Christian morality is quickly vanishing; divorce is universally accepted; contraception, abortion, and sodomy are rights by default; and those who argue against them are immediately branded as sinister “phobes” of some sort who wish to impose their own morality on, and enslave, others. In this era of MySpace and e-mail and cell phones, the old method of walking around and talking to people, sharing the Faith as one goes, inviting unbelieving friends to church, and even impromptu preaching seems impossible, outdated, even insincere. Every seminarian knows that modernity brought specialization, which brought isolation, which brought alienation. Modernism has made us all naked individuals, and postmodernism has made everything relative. No matter what ism we slap on the problem, however, many of us arrive (enthusiastically or reluctantly) at a similar conclusion: Since the world has changed, the Church must change; we must adapt, or die. And the fact that our churches are dying means that we must not be adapting enough.

Few of today’s Church-growth experts would call the Gospel a product, but that is, in essence, how it is treated. And, as one great business guru said, half a century ago, “There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.” Unbelievers are treated as customers, consumers, “seekers” with identifiable needs. Thus, many American churches have adapted themselves, in varying degrees, to a business model. The extent of this adaptation is significant: How many churches today have mission/vision/purpose/strategy statements? How many of them have added a “contemporary” service, or transformed their “traditional” service by including various modern trappings (video projectors, “praise bands,” psycho-babble sermons, a general air of informality)? How many of them anguish over advertising campaigns designed to bring in more people on any given Sunday?

Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Church and pastor of one of the largest megachurches in America, Saddleback Church of Lake Forest, California, is the guru of the hour when it comes to Church growth. Because of his success, he is a highly-sought-after consultant, speaking to assemblies of clergy on the principles of effective leadership and sustainable growth. And, given the fact that so much hangs in the balance, when it comes to the business of souls—Heaven and Hell, life everlasting—shouldn’t we listen to the experts, to those who are sowing more seed for the Great Harvest? And shouldn’t Warren, blessed with success and the knowledge that brought it to him, be eager to share it with others, to the glory of God?

Perhaps we should say “to the glory of G-d.” For Warren does not limit his consulting to evangelicals, Protestants, or even trinitarians. In June 2005, he addressed Synagogue 3000, an alliance of Jewish rabbis in Orange County who want in on the success that Warren has achieved. Synagogue 3000’s desire to help Jews “to be center stage active players instead of disengaged spectators” led them to contact Warren for a “pathbreaking” meeting. Of course, a good portion of Warren’s shtick (the need to use creative methods to attract today’s young people and to do away with boring old traditions that drive them away) is nothing new for evangelicals—or the Jews of Synagogue 3000, for that matter. (In their literature, they cite examples of Jewish leaders who are already combining “traditional beliefs with personally meaningful practices,” including a “young female rabbi” at the Mid-Wilshire Ikar Synagogue who is “attracting crowds of next generation hipsters to Yom Kippur yoga and disco breakfast.”)

What was unique about Warren’s long series of presentations to Synagogue 3000 was his emphasis on relationship-driven, goal-oriented, decentralized leadership. “We are in an increasingly fragmented and lonely world,” he told the rabbis, because “Americans have taken individualism to such an excess.” A successful, growing “ministry” will not attract and keep new people through gimmicks: The real attraction is a “sense of community”—the opportunity to be not just a believer but a “belonger.” To create this sense, Warren insists that leaders refuse to dictate new teachings from on high: “You need an Aaron,” a spokesman in each age and socioeconomic group, who will tell his fellows, “You know what, she’s right, [or] he’s right.” These “Aarons” can, in turn, serve as the heads of small groups—little conventicles where believers become belongers, and where the lead leader’s vision is recast.

Warren understands that the individual needs a sense of parameters in order to belong, a clear definition of what makes an “outsider” and an “insider,” which means knowing that “we believe this is right, and this is wrong.” Therefore, “You need to decide what the parameters are in your particular congregation, and stick with them.” This is important, because, as the “sociology” data have proved, “congregations that grow have clearly defined parameters . . . whether they’re right or not.”

Warren, trained as a Southern Baptist pastor, did not come up with these ideas on his own. He, too, had a leader: the late Peter F. Drucker, who, in his obit in the Washington Post (November 12, 2005), was described as “the world’s most influential business guru.” The author of numerous books, Drucker is credited with single-handedly transforming corporate America by redefining the role of management and exchanging the “command and control” model for a decentralized small-group approach befitting the “corporation as social institution.” For 20 years, Warren sat at Drucker’s feet, in extensive private meetings at least twice per year, in which Drucker helped Warren to reconceive the local church according to his own relationship-oriented business model. So close was their relationship that, in late 2004, Warren was able to coax Drucker into granting Forbes a rare interview (Drucker had retired from the public spotlight because of his declining health), in which he said that “Leaders communicate in the sense that people around them know what they are trying to do. They are purpose driven—yes, mission driven.” Indeed, Drucker’s business-school concepts—“management objectives,” “knowledge workers”—were baptized by Warren and became the essence of his approach to ministry, so much so that Warren became chief among Drucker’s disciples. As Warren told a meeting of the Pew Forum in May 2005,

I spoke at Harvard last month. I did a series of lectures for the faculty in the Kennedy School and also in the law school. I spoke to several groups of faculty and several groups of students and I started with this quote from Peter Drucker: “The most significant sociological phenomenon of the first half of the 20th century was the rise of the corporation. The most significant sociological phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century has been the development of the large pastoral church—of the mega-church. It is the only organization that is actually working in our society.”

It is truly breathtaking that, with all of the degradation that modernity has brought to American society, a man would be so bold as to claim that, by embracing that degradation—consumerism, corporatism, individualism—he has helped to make the Church “workable” in that same society. It is remarkable that he would find his method of evangelization applicable to those who deny the divinity of the One Whose Name he bears. And it is incredible that he freely admits that, in order to achieve success, not only must leaders “define their own parameters of faith,” but the “truthiness” of said parameters is irrelevant to the potential for ministerial “success.”

The hubris that inspires Rick Warren’s approach to ministry is not unique to him; it is a manifestation of the heresy Pope Leo XIII called Americanism over a century ago. The cockeyed optimism that gives birth to this heresy is the uniquely American perspective that we are the terminal generation, that we are special on the stage of world history, that everything must conform to our vision of ourselves. This hubris makes it easy for us to conclude, as Leo suggests, that today, “the Holy Spirit pours richer and more abundant graces than formerly upon the souls of the faithful, so that without human intervention He teaches and guides them by some hidden instinct of His own.” Our problems are so great that, unlike the saints of old, we require the wisdom of Rick Warren or Peter Drucker—wisdom derived not from Sacred Scripture, the Church Fathers, or tradition (even our own Protestant traditions) but from some inner voice called “God”—if souls are to be saved. It is the Americanism embedded in our souls that causes us to wonder whether plain old preaching, whether old-fashioned evangelism, backed up by lives of obedience to Our Lord’s commandments, is enough.

Against this heresy, Saint Patrick’s ministry is a witness. For he sowed his seed in the face of danger, against all odds, and in ground recently polluted by Pelagianism, another heresy that exalts the will of the individual at the expense of divine grace. Thus, Leo’s question reveals our hubris and alleviates our fear that we must “adapt or die”: “[S]hall any one who recalls the history of the apostles, the faith of the nascent church, the trials and deaths of the martyrs—and, above all, those olden times, so fruitful in saints—dare to measure our age with these, or affirm that they received less of the divine outpouring from the Spirit of Holiness?”

Aaron D. Wolf is Chronicles’ associate editor.

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

AMERICANISM: June 2007

Chronicles — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 13:57:12 +0000

PERSPECTIVE

Establishing Christian America
by Thomas Fleming

The Master's business.

VIEWS

Americanism, Then and Now
by Christopher Check

Our pet heresy.

Protestantism, America, and Divine Law
by Harold O.J. Brown

A personal reflection.

The Business of Souls
by Aaron D. Wolf

When Experts Attack, Part II.

NEWS

Border Math
by George Ajjan

A study in priorities.

REVIEWS

Dixie for Dummies
by Jack Trotter

Clint Johnson: The Politically Incorrect Guide to the South (and Why It Will Rise Again)

plus

James O. Tate on Don Huber's Kick Butt

Derek Turner on Christie Davies' The Strange Death of Moral Britain

Catharine Savage Brosman on The Book of Irish American Poetry, Daniel Tobin, ed.

Andrei Navrozov on Nikolai Gogol's The Portrait and Leon Steinmetz's The Portrait: A Fantasy in Twenty-One Sheets

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From England: It's Chavtastic, Baby!
by Emma Elliott

Letter From England: A Time to Stand
by Martin Vianney

VITAL SIGNS

THE COURTS: A 60-Year-Old Error
by Stephen B. Presser

FILM: True Grit
by Christopher Sandford

COLUMNS

SINS OF OMISSION
by Roger McGrath

BREAKING GLASS
by Philip Jenkins

THE ROCKFORD FILES
by Scott P. Richert

EUROPEAN DIARY
by Andrei Navrozov

IN THE DARK
The Wind That Shakes the Barley
by George McCartney

THE HUNDREDTH MERIDIAN
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES

AMERICAN PROSCENIUM

CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS
—Ted Galen Carpenter on the Chinese military buildup
POETRY

The Intrepid Traveller
by Sara Hill

ON THE COVER

Cover and inside illustrations by Melanie Anderson.
Additional inside illustrations by Nicholas Garrie.