Shortly after he announced he had cancer, Christopher Hitchens said that the time may come when he is reported to have had a religious conversion. Don’t believe it, he said. Even if he were to say the words that indicated conversion, they could only come from someone whose mind is so addled by disease or fear that his words could not be trusted. Jeffrey Goldberg reminds us of that this morning, in response to Mark Judge’s speculation that Hitchens may be on the verge of conversion.

I published a semi-long reflection on this on my old Templeton Foundation blog, but that no longer exists. In summary, I wrote about two ways of seeing suffering. In Hitchens’s view, the mind perceives truth (of the spiritual and metaphysical sort) when the body is healthy, and unencumbered by pain, either physical or emotional. Only then, when not under duress, is the mind capable of sorting out truth from falsehood.

In the Christian view, a mind embodied in a healthy body is one that finds it all too easy to deceive itself, especially about its own finitude and frailty. Suffering has a way of forcing the mind to understand that the body will die, and to recognize how much it depends on others — especially God. On this view, suffering, when properly embraced, is a mode of understanding that brings us to the truth — a truth that it’s easier to ignore or to deny when one is in good health.

I think there’s something to both positions, though obviously I take the Christian side of the dispute. If suffering were always a reliable way to get to the truth, we wouldn’t discount confessions made under torture. But I do find it sad, and a philosophical mistake, that Hitchens ruled out at the beginning of this cancer journey the possibility that his suffering might reveal something to him about God, himself, and eternity. That, it seems to me, comes not from a place of courage, but of fear. I could be wrong.

So, what do you think? Is suffering more likely to lead one to metaphysical/spiritual truth, or to lead one to make metaphysical/spiritual error (e.g., converting to a religion out of fear)?

UPDATE: On second thought, whatever else one may say about Hitchens, that he has ever shown cowardice is not one of them. I don’t understand why he is so fierce and even spiteful in his atheism, but a monent’s reflection on his career reminds one that he has shown huge personal courage in his foreign reporting. I wanted to make it clear that I recognize that.

Just a quick break from packing to tell you that I found my road companions. Rather than buy an audiobook (and obsess over which one to buy), I went to the local library to see which audiobooks they had. Not a great selection, but I’m really happy to say that I’ll be traveling with Christopher Hitchens, whose memoir “Hitch-22” is now on my iPhone. When that’s done, I have David McCullough’s “1776,” so I can learn about all the great places in Philadelphia I ought to have visited while living here. There are eight “This American Life” episodes I’ve been saving up, and of course it’s always rewarding to listen again to old episodes of the Mars Hill Audio Journal.

So, there you are.

I wish I could adequately express how stressful things are here tonight, trying to make sure everything is boxed up and ready for the moving crew, which arrives in the morning. I went to pick up the truck today. They didn’t have the 22-footer we’d ordered, so they upgraded me to a 26-footer at no additional cost. You have anything you want moved from Philly down south? Because we have the room now. I’m not looking forward to driving that big sucker for 1,300 miles. I’m definitely getting my Jerry Reed on; Roscoe will be riding shotgun, just like Flash in “Smokey and the Bandit,” which, as you know, is the Odyssey of my people.

Sorry I can’t join in combox conversations. I’m basically just going to be posting your comments for the next few days, unless I can get wifi from the hotel room(s). I’ll have wifi here till tomorrow afternoon. Maybe I’ll have time for a comment or two. Hope so.

Southbound and down, in about 36 hours!

I didn’t see the Huntsman-Gingrich “debate,” but the reviews are pretty uniformly negative. Ross Douthat has even withdrawn his previous statement that more intimate debates (versus these unwieldy panel debates) would be a good thing. Plus:

And if Huntsman’s supporters want to know why their man has struggled to inspire any excitement or strong support, despite an impressive record and solid conservative bona fides, the answer begins with the fact that he just spent 90 minutes on a stage with the candidate leading in the polls and never once said anything that might actually make some real news for his own struggling campaign.

Ain’t that the truth. I saw Huntsman a few weeks ago being interviewed on some cable news show, and the host set him up to rip into Gingrich, Romney, the whole lot. He very politedly — and repeatedly — declined to say anything unkind about any of his opponents. Does this man actually want to win? It’s fine to criticize Obama, but when you’re at one percent in the polls, you have to give GOP primary voters a reason for thinking you’re a better candidate than those other Republicans who are beating you. Which in Huntsman’s case is just about every Republican except Buddy Roemer.

So now the Attorney General is going to tackle the racist menace of states that require citizens to show state-issued photo ID when they come to vote. I swear, I will not for the life of me understand why expecting someone to prove that they are who they say they are when they turn up to vote is Kluckery on parade. I mean, I know this is all about exciting the Democratic base going into an election year, but still. Literacy tests in the Sixties — I see what’s wrong with that. But this voter ID thing is a mystery. I can even see thinking these laws are ill-advised, but honestly, does the AG have so little else to do that he’s making this a priority?

I noticed the other day that I spent about twice as long with the Review section of the Weekend (Wall Street) Journal than I’d done with the entire NYT. It’s such a great section. This piece — a review essay of a new biography of the late British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper — was the best of a wonderful lot. Here’s something from it that I did not know:

Weber launched his thesis about the Protestant ethic and capitalism at the turn of the century and for the next hundred years everybody said it was All Wrong—in other words, Weber was onto something. Trevor-Roper recognized this, then pursued an explanation. The capitalists were not especially Protestant, he showed, and the Protestants were not especially capitalist. The difference with Catholicism was that the Counter-Reformation in Europe, beginning in the mid-16th century, drove out the capitalists with taxes and bureaucracy, so they set up in Holland, or England, or America—just as happened, though Trevor-Roper did not spell this out, with the Jews of Central Europe in the 1930s. It was emigration, not religion, that made the difference. The explanation was an ingenious one, though in some ways it does just push the question back, leaving questions about the Counter-Reformation unaddressed.

Did you hear that between 80 and 90 members of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in New York City have been arrested over the past three years in connection with what authorities say was a massive case of child sexual abuse? New York magazine calls the revelations “seismic.” The New York Post reports:

He’s one of an astounding 85 accused Orthodox child molesters that Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes’ office says it has busted in the past three years in an initiative called Kol Tzedek, Hebrew for “voice of justice.”

The cases involve 117 victims — a number that has the community reeling from the extent of the horrors of pedophilia.

Launched amid complaints that Hynes was soft on Orthodox child predators, Kol Tzedek aims to coax victims to come forward, despite strong pressure in the insular religious community to cover up such crimes.

All but two of the suspects are men, and more than half the victims are male, said Assistant DA Rhonnie Jaus, chief of the sex abuse and crimes against children division.

Of the 38 cases closed so far, 14 perps got jail time, ranging from a month to 10-to-20 years for crimes that included sex abuse, attempted kidnapping, and sodomy, Jaus said.

The other 24 have walked free. They got probation, pleaded to minor charges, or saw their cases dismissed — often because victims or their parents backed out under community pressure.

Agudath Israel of America, a prominent body of Torah sages, requires anyone alleging sex abuse by a fellow observant Jew to first report to its rabbis, who decide whether the case should go to secular authorities.

No, no, a thousand times no! Shame on Agudath Israel of America, which by its disgusting ruling is helping to perpetuate the sexual abuse of children. Did they learn nothing from the Catholic scandal? Apparently not. The AP reports:

Assemblyman Dov Hikind says it’s difficult to get people in the Orthodox community to come forward in such cases because of intense social consequences.

It also doesn’t help when the Brooklyn DA appears to have been dragging his feet on this case, and stonewalling the press. The Jewish newspaper The Forward has been all over this story, an just last week demanded to know why the DA Charles Hynes was refusing to answer their questions about the arrests. Has Hynes been protecting members of the politically powerful Brooklyn ultra-Orthodox community? This strikes me as a much bigger story than it has been to this point.

Continuing yesterday’s discussion about Russian literature, a private e-mail exchange between English prof Micah Mattix and me resulted in his mentioning that people either liked Jane Austen, or they liked Russian novels of the period, but rarely did they like both. I asked him why. Here is his answer.

What do you think? Erin Manning, I’m looking at you especially.

UPDATE: For the record, I cannot stand Jane Austen, or 19th-century British literature. Reading it (for me) is like walking around in a hot day with a starched collar. I want to like it in theory, but I’d be dead asleep by the end of the first chapter. I say this knowing that as soon as my wife reads it, she will wallop me. Austen, Eliot, she reads all that stuff — except Trollope, which she once said to me she cannot stand for the same reason I don’t like any 19th c. British lit.

Mark Oppenheimer asks, “Why are American politicians always switching religions?”:

But it’s not just that Americans don’t mind a politician who switches religion: It almost seems as if we like it when they do. In that way, it’s natural to wonder whether the two converts of the day, Gingrich and Obama, were actually motivated by a particular electoral strategy. If your mind had a cynical bent, you might ask whether they found religion simply in order to make themselves more electable. But the more interesting question may be how we can gauge the authenticity of any politician’s conversion at all.

American politicians switch religions because they’re contemporary Americans. Americans like it, or at least tolerate it, because they can relate. According to a 2009 Pew study:

Americans change religious affiliation early and often. In total, about half of American adults have changed religious affiliation at least once during their lives. Most people who change their religion leave their childhood faith before age 24, and many of those who change religion do so more than once.

Why did Gingrich convert to Catholicism? Surely because he married his mistress, who is Catholic, and who takes her faith seriously (or, to be blunt, more seriously these days than she did when she took up with the married Gingrich). That’s not to say that Gingrich’s is not a genuine faith. Many people convert to the church or religion of a spouse, and sometimes it happens that the convert becomes as enthusiastic as his or her spouse, and even more so. It could well be, as Oppenheimer says, that some politicians convert because they perceive it to be politically advantageous. This, he suggests, might explain why a rising black Chicago politician named Barack Obama, who had not before been religious, hooked up with a megachurch frequented by black Chicago elites. But really, who can know what’s in a man’s soul?

Still, this is a fair point from Oppenheimer’s piece, coming at the end of a discussion about how Mitt Romney, by being true to the faith in which he was raised, is increasingly out of touch with the country he seeks to lead:

Romney is known for changing his mind, but he has had two fewer wives, and two fewer religions, than Newt Gingrich. So who’s the flip-flopper?

TNC looks at North Carolina’s efforts to come to terms with the state’s forced sterilization of thousands of its own “feeble-minded” citizens. Who decided who was feeble-minded? Why, the “Eugenics Board.” More from the NYT:

The board operated from 1933 to 1977 as an experiment in genetic engineering once considered a legitimate way to keep welfare rolls small, stop poverty and improve the gene pool.

Thirty-one other states had eugenics programs. Virginia and California each sterilized more people than North Carolina. But no program was more aggressive.

Only North Carolina gave social workers the power to designate people for sterilization. They often relied on I.Q. tests like those done on Mr. Holt, whose scores reached 73. But for some victims who often spent more time picking cotton than in school, the I.Q. tests at the time were not necessarily accurate predictors of capability. For example, as an adult Mr. Holt held down three jobs at once, delivering newspapers, working at a grocery store and doing maintenance for a small city.

Wealthy businessmen, among them James Hanes, the hosiery magnate, and Dr. Clarence Gamble, heir to the Procter & Gamble fortune, drove the eugenics movement. They helped form the Human Betterment League of North Carolina in 1947, and found a sympathetic bureaucrat in Wallace Kuralt, the father of the television journalist Charles Kuralt.

A proponent of birth control in all forms, Mr. Kuralt used the program extensively when he was director of the Mecklenburg County welfare department from 1945 to 1972. That county had more sterilizations than any other in the state.

Over all, about 70 percent of the North Carolina operations took place after 1945, and many of them were on poor young women and racial minorities. Nonwhite minorities made up about 40 percent of those sterilized, and girls and women about 85 percent.

The program, while not specifically devised to target racial minorities, affected black Americans disproportionately because they were more often poor and uneducated and from large rural families.

Do notice that the Eugenics Board did not disband until 1977. Nineteen-seventy-seven! That’s a generation after the horrors of Auschwitz, the ultimate telos of the German eugenics program, were made known to the world. But see, in North Carolina, the program only affected poor, uneducated country people, white and black alike. The people who were the least powerful in our society.

1977. The past isn’t even the past. And yet, on we go, into a eugenic future, convinced that the bad eugenics of the past are behind us. Don’t say this was just a relic of a racist state that was once part of the old Confederacy. As TNC reminds us:

Now North Carolina is trying to make amends for the past, but can’t quite figure out how. The fact is that sterilization was perfectly legal, if shockingly immoral. Moreover, eugenics was national program enacted, in some form, in most states throughout the country. North Carolina is one of the few states that’s actually trying to grapple with the issue.