The American Conservative

Brad Birzer has a superb series running at CatholicVote.org, “Bearers of the Word,” in which he interviews such thinkers and artists such as Gerald Russello, Jef Murray, and (coming soon) Mike Church. He was kind, and reckless, enough to interview me for the most recent installment, which can be found here. I discuss the seemingly fading Catholic voice in American life and the dangers of absorption in politics, while suggesting a few bright lights and looking at the future of the faith in in what threatens to be a monolithically liberal world.

How the Church can go on spiritually is clear enough, but what can the institution and way of life mean in such a world? I don’t have an answer, but readers may find the discussion of some interest.

The 933rd Republican debate last night did not add much to the sum of human knowledge. Viewers were treated to extensive discussion of Newt Gingrich’s lunar colonization plans, the revelation that Mitt Romney has no idea what’s in his own TV ads (never mind that “I’m Mitt Romney and I approved this message” tag), and confirmation that Rick Santorum has borrowed his misunderstanding of the Declaration of Independence from Alan Keyes.

Ron Paul repeated his call to end the embargo against Cuba. Shocking to pundits, who thought it a suicidal move, but the audience cheered. (Cuban politics in Florida has been changing; there’s a segment of younger Cuban-Americans that has been waiting a long time to hear this message.) A question about healthcare from an unemployed woman was Paul’s most difficult of the night and illustrated one of his weaknesses: he gave a thoughtful, historical account of why healthcare costs are so high (largely due to federal involvement, particularly Medicare), but now that costs are astronomical, what are Americans — especially those out of work — to do?

One of the hardest challenges all libertarians face is how to sell the transition from a statist system to a freer one: we’ve seen plenty of examples worldwide, perhaps most appallingly in the former Soviet Union, where a botched transition has discredited anti-statist ideas and exacerbated human suffering. Congressman Paul and his staff have given this some thought — hence his repeated insistence that he won’t end welfare-state programs while people are dependent on them — but his presentation is still long on diagnosis and short on prescription.

Near the end of last night’s debate came a question about how each candidate’s religious beliefs would influence his administration. A trap for Mitt? He gave a bland answer about the importance of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Ron Paul again dared to say something that wouldn’t win him many votes: that his oath to uphold the Constitution would be more important than his religious beliefs. Read More…

On Tuesday Judge Randy Bellows of the Fairfax Circuit Court ruled against seven breakaway Anglican parishes in Virginia, finding that if their congregations wish to break away from the Episcopal Church in the USA, the mainstream branch of the Anglican communion in America, they have to return their church property to the diocese. If the churches don’t appeal, about $40 million in property will be turned over to the Diocese of Virginia and some will likely be sold off to pay down the line of credit the diocese took out to fund the litigation.

The case is especially high-profile because of the growing Anglican conservative movement, the millions of dollars in combined assets between the breakaway churches and  - in The Falls Church and Truro parish’s case – colonial roots.  Time and time again, the Episcopal Church has resorted to vindictive litigation against the property of dissenting congregations, they’ve made it clear that they aren’t going to let the breakaway Anglicans go gracefully, despite the overwhelming wishes of the congregations themselves.

The Washington Post reports:

During the 2006-07 votes, almost all the churches’ congregants sided with the conservatives [to leave the ECUSA]. Just four, much smaller groups that did not want to leave the Episcopal Church remained together. They have been worshiping in basements and other temporary spaces during the litigation.

The ruling means, for example, that more than 2,000 worshipers affiliated with the Nigerian Church would move out of The Falls Church and an Episcopal congregation of fewer than 100 would come in.

…

According to a news release from the Diocese of Virginia, one of the largest Episcopal dioceses in the country, Bellows ruled that the national denomination and the diocese have “a contractual and proprietary interest” in each of the properties subject to the litigation. The court ordered that all property subject to its ruling be turned over to the Diocese, the release said.

Bellows’ ruling comes after the Virginia Supreme Court kicked the case back down to him, saying Bellow’s initial assessment in favor of the breakaway Anglicans – citing an 1867 statute on schisms in the church – was improperly applied. The legal team for the breakaway churches should have looked back even further.

The Episcopal Church in Virginia has a very unique place in the history of Christianity in America, being the first church to be disestablished after the revolution. A General Assembly wary of consolidated church power repealed the church’s incorporation in 1787, finding it in conflict with the new Statute on Religious Freedom. Fueled by Baptist outrage at the Episcopalians’ perceived pride of place, in 1799 the Assembly went even further by repealing a number of religion statutes including laws that granted the church the right to own property. Over the next several years, Virginia gained the distinction of being the only state in American history to systematically confiscate land from the church, via the Glebe Act of 1802. The Glebe Act authorized officials in each county to seize and sell all church farmland purchased prior to 1777 upon the death or resignation of whatever clergyman was currently residing there.

In a legal battle that rivals today’s in convolution if not sinister undertones, the vestry of Manchester Parish challenged the state’s claim in 1802. When George Wythe, the famous lawyer, judge, Constitutional Convention delegate and mentor to Thomas Jefferson ruled against the parish, they appealed to the highest court in Virginia, a five-judge panel comprised mostly of sympathetic Episcopalians at the time.

Though one judge appropriately recused himself due to his membership in the parish in question, the panel was expected to deliver a ruling finding the Glebe Act unconstitutional in October of 1803. But the 81 year-old presiding judge Edmund Pendleton died in his hotel before delivering the 3-1 verdict in favor of the churches and the decision was rendered void. Appointed in his place was St. George Tucker, a student of Wythe who proceeded to vote for the act’s constitutionality, leading to a split decision that upheld the law.

The ruling devastated the Episcopal Church in Virginia; most of the parishes simply dried up as other denominations gained steam and they could no longer count on the glebes for income with which to pay the clergy. Parish vestries and congregants simply had no reason to invest in the upkeep of their churches with no right to the property. Many of the buildings themselves were looted, and accounts abound of churches in disrepair, organs being melted down, liturgical objects being sold off and, in Middlesex County, a large sycamore tree growing up through the floor of the nave where a congregation once worshipped.

In one of his last initiatives as bishop, in 1840 Richard Channing Moore petitioned the General Assembly for the right to incorporate, because as the law stood there was no way to ensure that money raised for the benefit of the family members of deceased clergy would ever actually make it to them. “Whilst the legislature are continually granting Charters to Companies and Associations of every kind and description” his petition read, “your Petitioners cannot believe that they will refuse one to a Society which has for its object the relief of the Widow and the Orphan!” His petition was denied, but an 1842 law finally granted trustees the legal title to church property, which spurred a wave of church expansion and rebuilding.

All this is to point out that at no time in Virginia’s history were parishes seen as anything other than self-determined entities, who from the very beginning were largely responsible for their own financing. I suspect Virginia’s early legislators would have balked at the notion of the diocese owning, or even implying the ownership of the aggregate property of all the parishes in the state, as Judge Bellows contends. The irony of all of this is that Virginia’s courts are betraying its historic low-church disestablishmentarianism by preventing Anglicans from freely affiliating with more high-church strains of the Anglican Communion. The sad part is that the Virginian breakaway Anglicans probably had – or have, should they choose to appeal – a stronger case than those in other states.

Update: A commenter posted the following -

“… You seem to be assuming several things, including at least the following: that the decision released under the signature of the judge invokes everything that the attorneys considered and submitted before the judge. Just because the Glebe Act and the 1842 law you cite may not appear in the decision, that does not mean that the attorneys did not look back to those things. In fact, I have asked one of the attorneys … whether they considered the Act & 1842 and this is what he said: “Yes, we did consider both. We cited the 1842 law in more than one brief and I personally examined our historical expert witness about it at the trial in 2011.””

Thanks for the note. Apologies. I did not intend to be disparaging of the legal team, it was a poorly chosen pivot to what I was interested in getting at; the historical context and difference in legal treatment of the church between then and now, which is all the more stark given that the 1842 law was in fact brought up and the judge didn’t consider it.

As Rick Perry’s bid collapses, religious and social conservative leaders who once supported the Isaian Texas governor have planned a secret meeting to decide which candidate to beatify next and appear likely to roll over to the other Rick in the race, out of a choice between two Catholics. Politico‘s Jonathan Martin reports:

The meeting is being hosted by such right-leaning figures as James Dobson, Don Wildmon and Gary Bauer. Many of the individuals on the host list attended a previous closed-door session with Rick Perry this summer.

Movement conservatives are concerned that a vote split between Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum among base voters could enable Mitt Romney.

A source who shared the invitation said the meeting was about how to avoid such a possibility.

Despite the fact that Wildmon has already endorsed Gingrich, the former speaker’s personal history makes it unlikely that a family-values conservative consensus will emerge in support of him, leaving the former Pennsylvania senator who finished just eight votes behind Romney in Tuesday’s Iowa caucus. Both Bauer and Dobson have long-standing connections with the candidate.

In a later interview with Martin, Bauer — the President of American Values and founder of pro-life PAC Campaign for Working Families — was more ecumenical, conceding Romney’s inevitability and denying that the purpose of the meeting was to sabotage the Massachusetts governor, who supported taxpayer-funded abortions as late as 2002:

“There’s only one person I’m interested in stopping and that’s Barack Obama,” said Bauer, a former presidential hopeful.

Bauer said a meeting planned for next weekend by social conservative leaders to find a “consensus” candidate was not intended to be a strategy session for how to take down Romney. Even as some attendees claimed that was just the idea behind convening the eleventh-hour meeting in Texas, Bauer said he’d withdraw from participating if it was intended to plot against the former Massachusetts governor.

Sabotage or not, it’s probably too late for them to stop Romney. New Hampshire looks like a lock for him, and anyway the Granite State’s primary voters aren’t nearly as religious as Iowa’s. And as TAC‘s Daniel McCarthy points out, despite the media stereotype of Southern religiosity social conservatives tend not to do too well in South Carolina.

Half a century ago, American children were schooled in Aesop’s fables. Among the more famous of these were “The Fox and the Grapes” and “The Tortoise and the Hare.”

Particularly appropriate this Christmas season, and every Christmas lately, is Aesop’s fable of “The Dog in the Manger.”

The tale is about a dog who decides to take a nap in the manger. When the ox, who has worked all day, comes back to eat some straw, the dog barks loudly, threatens to bite him and drives him from his manger.

The lesson the fable teaches is that it is malicious and wicked to deny a fellow creature what you yourself do not want and cannot even enjoy.

What brings the fable to mind is this year’s crop of Christmas-haters, whose numbers have grown since the days when it was only the village atheist or the ACLU pest who sought to kill Christmas.

The problem with these folks is not simply that they detest Christmas and what it represents, but that they must do their best, or worst, to ensure Christians do not enjoy the season and holy day they love.

As a Washington Times editorial relates, the number of anti-Christian bigots is growing, and their malevolence is out of the closet:

In Leesburg, Va., a Santa-suit-clad skeleton was nailed to a cross. … In Santa Monica, atheists were granted 18 of 21 plots in a public park allotted for holiday displays and … erected signs mocking religion. In the Wisconsin statehouse, a sign informs visitors, ‘Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.’ A video that has gone viral on YouTube shows denizens of Occupy D.C. spewing gratuitous hatred of a couple who dared to appropriate a small patch of McPherson Square to set up a living Nativity scene.

People who indulge in such conduct invariably claim to be champions of the First Amendment, exercising their right of free speech to maintain a separation of church and state.

They are partly right. The First Amendment does protect what they are doing. But what they are doing is engaging in hate speech and anti-Christian bigotry. For what is the purpose of what they are about, if not to wound, offend, insult and mock fellow Americans celebrating the happiest day of their calendar year? Read More…

If there is any better example of the Republican establishment’s dismay at Newt Gingrich’s surge in the presidential primary polls, I’d like to see it. Michael Gerson, the evangelical Christian and The Washington Post’s Republican faith & politics columnist, came out swinging Tuesday in an unusual fusillade calling into question Newt’s intellectualism, religious tolerance and judgement. If one didn’t know Gerson to be a former top official in the Bush White House, scribe of the infamous “axis of evil” reference in Bush’s 2002 State of the Union speech, reflexively dismissive of foreign policy “realism,” and promoter of regime change in Iran, you would think he was writing, at least on Tuesday, for the Democrats. Or Ron Paul.

But he wasn’t. He was writing as one of a growing number of alarmed Republicans who I’m guessing recognize Mitt Romney as the only safe bet to face President Obama in 2012, and see that chance slipping away every time Gingrich bests Romney at a debate or ticks up in the polls. So they go for Gingrich’s biggest weaknesses with the general electorate : his tendency to indulge in “shallow  ideas” and vacillating red meat gasbaggery at the expense of anyone deemed too small or politically gainless to be represented by a Big Voice in Washington (in other words, those who cannot afford Gingrich or advance his career). In this case, Muslims.

Gerson spends several paragraphs condemning Gingrich for assuming and proclaiming that Islamic Sharia law  “is inherently brutal,” “the heart of the enemy movement from which the terrorists spring forth,” and “totalitarianism.” He says for believing this, Newt actually has more in common with the “Iranian clerics, Taliban leaders and Salafists of various stripes” who believe Sharia should be interpreted that way and use it as a tool of oppression and punishment.

Wow. Though I cannot disagree with Gerson’s assessment of the former Speaker of the House (I wrote extensively about Gingrich’s Summer of 2010 crusade against the coming “tyranny” that is Sharia law in America, and Islamophobia as a campaign tool in that year’s congressional elections) it is amazing to hear this come from an evangelical Christian conservative. As a group, these Republicans typically flock to the same conveniently oversimplified and politically charged view of Sharia and of Muslims that Gingrich is  espousing for such Grand Effect. According to a Pew Research Poll in March 2011, 60 percent of White evangelical Protestants said Islam “is more likely than other religion to encourage violence.” This, compared to 42 White mainline Protestants and 39 percent White Catholics who said the same thing.

More importantly, Gerson seems to be willing to buck the overall thrust of the base on Islam to cast aspersions on Gingrich. According to Pew, 66 percent of self-described Republican conservatives think Islam encourages violence more than any other religion, compared to 38 percent of  independents, 41 percent of moderate/liberal Republicans and 40 percent of respondents overall.

Meanwhile, during the heat of the “Ground Zero mosque” controversy, of which Newt was no small part in fueling — at one point on FOX News he compared the organizers for the new Islamic center to Nazis after World War II – as many as 76 percent of Republicans polled said they would rather see a strip club built near the crater that once was the World Trade Center towers. Newt, as always, saw an opportunity to cash in politically. Interestingly, in the end, he backed out of an invitation to mix it up in the streets with the rabble he had roused.

Though he actually stopped short of calling Gingrich an Islamophobe, Gerson is still taking a risk with his loyal audience with this tack, but I think it’s fair to say he’s looking at the long game, for which Republican insiders, many albeit off-the-record, say Gingrich’s overall chances at winning are slim.

“Bigfoot dressed as a circus clown would have a better chance of beating President Obama than Newt Gingrich, a similarly farcical character,” quipped one Republican to National Journal nine days ago. Ouch.

Here’s a taste of what Gerson said  in The Washington Post:

…Gingrich insists: “Shariah in its natural form has principles and punishments totally abhorrent to the Western world.” With due respect to the speaker and his recent reading, what qualification does he have to identify Shariah’s “natural form”? In America, public officials respect the conscience of citizens while protecting them from violence. The proper role of government is to aggressively fight terrorism, not to engage in theological judgments.

The governing implications of Gingrich’s views are uncharted. Would President Gingrich reaffirm his belief that the most radical form of Islamic law is the most authentic? Would he tell American Muslims that to be good citizens they should renounce Shariah? Would he argue in his inaugural address, as he has argued before, that “America is experiencing an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization”? No strategy would be more likely to produce resentment, alienation and radicalism. Read More…

Several days ago Rod Dreher brought up comments by Britain’s chief rabbi, Lord Jonathon Sacks, relating to the problem of mass consumerism.

“What does a consumer ethic do? It makes you aware all the time of the things you don’t have instead of thanking God for all the things you do have. … the consumer society is in fact the most efficient mechanism ever devised for the creation and distribution of unhappiness.”

Marx claimed religion to be the opiate of the masses, but Judeo-Christian religions, which preach respect and love for life, may be on the decline in America. Is a culture of nihilistic mass consumerism the contemporary substitution? Before the Thanksgiving turkey could even be digested, Black Friday kicked off — on Thursday. Several videos captured the chaos that ensued; people being trampled, shoved, and disregarded. One incident even had people getting pepper-sprayed. Let me not forget to mention the shootings, and fighting over $2 waffle makers. Here is one clip among many floating around the web:

Imagine this kind of chaos, elevated, if the American economy follows the Eurozone into crisis. Dreher is also pessimistic about such a development:

Can you imagine most Americans, whether on the left, right, or in the middle, in the 1930s having such an attitude? What happens to a generation that believes in nothing more than consumerism and sexual autonomy?

The world is rapidly changing, says Andrew Bacevich, and Americans need to change with it. The “Freedom Agenda” of neoconservatives is unraveling as America is gripped by recession, the Middle East faces an uncertain future, and Europe looks for a lifeline from financial chaos. All the while, Bacevich says, American politicians continue to fiddle obliviously, chanting mantras of American greatness that will offer no comfort if the populace is lulled into believing America remains the postwar superpower of 1945:

American politicians stubbornly beg to differ, of course, content to recite vapid but reassuring clichés about American global leadership, American exceptionalism, and that never-ending American Century. Everything, they would have us believe, will remain just as it has been — providing the electorate installs the right person in the Oval Office.

Doug Wead and Charity Campbell review Darryl Hart’s new book, From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism. While there has been a convenient alliance between evangelicals and conservatives, the evangelical movement is not always fully grounded in conservative philosophy. Hart nonetheless concludes that evangelicals should embrace traditional conservatism:

What might this look like? Evangelicals should first “reconsider the source of American greatness,” which rests not in what is said to be America’s Christian origins but in her heritage of limited government, religious freedom, and the prioritization of “culture and character formation” to political solutions.

Tom Engelhardt recalls foreign films he watched during his youth in the 1950s and explains how they helped shape his view of the world and America’s wars.

Occupy Wall Street crowds seem to be losing favor with the general populace, including those on the left who may have once been sympathetic to the movement. Rod Dreher says they’ve become a parody of themselves.

Daniel J. Flynn reviews Julia Scheeres’s A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown. He finds the book about Peoples Temple and the Jonestown Massacre to be solid on a factual basis, but it takes the wrong lessons from the incident. The cult was born of the idea that socialism was an enlightening experience that could replace religion.

Such delusions cost more than 900 people their lives in South America. It merely costs the author a more complete understanding of her subjects. She marvels at the paradox of noble ideas unleashing ignoble deeds. But in the aftermath of the Lenin/Stalin/Hitler/Mao-century, socialism manifesting as horror show isn’t ironic. It’s clichéd.

Evangelical churches have made use of technology like PowerPoint for years, but now some Catholic priests think the stodgy environment of older parishes might be enhanced by installing LCD screens in the pews. The New Yorker reports:

Monsignor Donald Sakano, of Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral, in Little Italy … has long since stopped feeling embarrassed when people ask him tricky theological questions and he has to Google the answers. “Before, I would just have to look smart and try to respond to them,” he says. Now he never gets it wrong. Sakano sees tremendous potential in the Catholic Church’s embrace of the digital. He is currently working on a project to outfit Old St. Pat’s sanctuary with flat-panel monitors in a way that won’t disrupt the vertical sight lines of the Gothic design. “Ideally,” he told me, “we’d have tiny screens on the back of the pews, like at the Metropolitan opera. Can you imagine? We’d be able to send parishioners personalized messages.” He wonders if a digital offertory could be incorporated into the mass somehow, so that the moment of giving would be preserved, but people wouldn’t have to carry cash. And he thinks that digitizing all the books in the church would help with the clutter problem: the Catholic Church is currently making changes to the mass (a version “more faithful to the original Latin” goes into effect on November 27th), he told me, and new books and hymnals have been pouring in. Wouldn’t it be better without “these big, fat books?”

Msgr. Sakano is probably also excited about the iPhone app for confessions, which is billed as the “the perfect aid for every penitent” — until the penitent gets a notification about the latest sports scores or Facebook updates while receiving the sacrament.

Catholic mass is one of the few public places where people still look askance at smart phone usage. The individual screens would seem a detriment to a central goal of the mass: bringing a parish community together to celebrate the mystery of the real presence that takes place up on the altar — not on some pocket or seat-back LCD screen.

There’s also an argument for tithing via old-fashioned cash or check, so Visa or Mastercard won’t be taking a cut from the church.

So no, it wouldn’t be better without those “big, fat books.”

Appearing the other night on the Catholic network EWTN, I was asked by Raymond Arroyo what should be done about Muslim students at Catholic University demanding that the school provide them with prayer rooms, from which crucifixes and all other Catholic symbols that they found offensive had been removed.

After a nanosecond I replied, “Kick ‘em out!”

Let them go to George Washington, the university on the other side of town.

Indeed, had Muslim students shown so little loyalty to a school that welcomed them, and of whose Catholicism they were aware when they entered, expulsion would have been justified.

Looking further into the matter, that was a rush to judgment.

For it seems that not a single Muslim student at CUA had gone to the District of Columbia Office of Human Rights to file a complaint. Read More…