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Annie Dillard’s Fictions to Live By

Buckminster Fuller once suggested that the purpose of people is to counteract the slide toward entropy described in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Human beings put things together, and this keeps the universe from falling apart. This notion, says Annie Dillard, appealed to her, and she elaborated on it, taking Fuller “to mean something even he probably did not intend: that imaginative acts actually weigh in the balance of physical processes. Thoughts count. A completed novel in a trunk in the attic is an order added to the sum of the universe’s order. It remakes its share of undoing” (Living by Fiction [Harper & Row, 1982], p. 124).

This passage illustrates Dillard’s distinctive voice. In 1982 she published two books, Living by Fiction and Teaching a Stone to Talk (Harper & Row). The humor, the light touch with serious intent, the provocative linking of opposites are all marks of her style. Fuller’s is the kind of notion that attracts Dillard in all her work, from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek to Teaching: a metaphor to describe the human encounter with nature. In this article I look at her two most recent works, hoping to put them in context with the earlier ones, locating some unifying threads, and identifying some new departures as well.

Living by Fiction is apparently a discussion of modern and postmodern fiction. But it is actually less a contribution to critical theory than a continuation of several themes from earlier books, including the search for a metaphor or bridge from the self to the physical world. Living by Fiction is also an extreme book, one that troubled me and seems to have troubled Dillard greatly. Its ambiguities, evasions and general lack of enthusiasm suggest that she was working out questions beyond or behind the ostensible subject of her book.

Reimagining the human place in creation and seeking to overcome the alienation of the modern self were major 19th-century romantic projects. Together with Christian faith, romanticism is the heritage Dillard claims; knowing that is essential in order to understand Living. In “The Uses of Natural History” (1883), Ralph Waldo Emerson recounted the experience of going through a collection of preserved animals in the laboratory of a French scientist. Emerson was stirred by a feeling of common creatureliness, and felt that he was simply the latest link in a chain that included these specimens. His sense of that link was largely intuitive: “We feel that there is an occult [hidden, mysterious] relation between the very worm, the crawling scorpions and man” (Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson [Harvard University Press, 1961], I, 10).

In her first two books Annie Dillard approached this question of the relation of self to nature experientially and rhythmically, entering and then withdrawing from the natural environment. She frequently responded to nature’s brutality, mindlessness, struggle and appalling death with her own suffering. Her pain took her deeper into nature’s grandeur and agony, and her deeper reflection led to more dis-ease, but to intense creativity as well, if these books are any indication. Dillard re-enacts the journey of many 19th-century English and American romantics who sought to construct a poetry of nature that was actually a record of their own interior lives stimulated or prompted by encounters with nature. The intensity of her first two books, and especially of Pilgrim, arises from the way in which Dillard sticks close to her own experience, rarely needing a theory to handle the tough questions she poses. The bridging from self to nature in her early works is a bridge made of the self’s suffering, vulnerability and intense feeling.

Constructing a bridge to nature is the theme of Living by Fiction as well, although that might not be immediately apparent. On first reading, we see that Dillard wants to account for the fascination with surfaces, with play, with the mixing of genres in postmodern fiction, and she wants to know why those traits fascinate her so much. She tells us, in a historical review, that by the end of the past century, increasing awareness among intellectuals that rationality was only a tiny sliver of the whole of human consciousness prompted artists in several fields to break up and reshuffle the continuities of time, place, plot and character. Contemporary modernists like Barth, Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon and Gass offer works that are, in Dillard’s estimate, nearly completely artifactual, objects of wonder, amusement or contemplation, but not to be taken in any sense as mirroring reality “out there.”

The world of writers, texts and audiences has been kept from succumbing entirely to this new emphasis on technique by two factors, says Dillard. Many authors, including some of our most popular, prolific and respected, still insist on writing novels of ideas. And the presence of a mass market inclines fiction toward the mixing of genres. We eagerly read stories that pretend to make sense of the wider world. So “the fact that fiction is not the prerogative of specialists militates in favor of its traditional virtues simply because nonspecialists prefer depth to abstract surface. Specialists are interested in form; nonspecialists like lots of realized content’’ (p. 77).

Whether a work features the kaleidoscope of broken and rearranged images or reminds us of 19th-century novels, Dillard wishes to judge fiction on its own internal integrity: Do the parts cohere? Is there an order? Does it make sense, according to its own inner logic?

While the apparent subject of Living by Fiction is thus modern fiction, Dillard seems more interested in the notion of fiction as a metaphor for culture and creativity. She delights in the idea of Octavio Paz that criticism is the contemporary version of religion, springing from the faith that the object of inquiry is intelligible. She extends this insight to all products of human consciousness: politics, oil tankers, superhighways, codes on the groceries. They are subject to interpretation since they are human products, and only in humanity and its creations may we search for meaning. In fact, says Dillard, we may divide up the world of inquiry into interpreters and scientists. In their operation on the natural world and on humanity as biological creatures, scientists are interested not in discovering meaning but in discovering truth. On the other hand, questions of value, intent and consequence apply to humanity and its cultures in ways we do not and cannot apply to nature. This gives rise to Dillard’s fundamental distinction in Living by Fiction: “The boundaries of sense are actually quite clear. We commonly (if tacitly) agree that the human world has human meaning, which we can discover, and the given natural world does not.” Thus, we live not by nature but by fiction. If we confuse this distinction and look to “raw nature” for meaning, “[We] will have regressed historically” to the period before Protestantism, modern science and the Enlightenment, before the time when

Christianity and science, which on big issues go hand in hand intellectually as well as historically, everywhere raised the standard of living and cut down on the fun. Everywhere Christianity and science hushed the bushes and gagged the rocks. They razed the sacred groves, killed the priests, and drained the flow of meaning right off the planet. They built schools; they taught people to measure and add, to write, and to pray to an absent God. The direction of recent history is toward desacralization, the unhinging of materials from meaning [p. 136].

Is there anyone left to speak for nature, given this way of thinking? For Dillard, scientists properly refuse to make value judgments on the objects of their inquiry. Many religiously minded people speak uncritically of nature as a revelation of God, but, Dillard suggests, quickly abandon nature to the prerogatives of science if challenged. In her scheme, writers of fiction are the last remaining commentators on the physical world. Out of materials drawn directly and intuitively from the world around them, they construct models of it. These miniatures are interpretable as human products, and so we can “examine the small world to gain insight into the great one” (p. 175).

So, for Dillard, art does not so much represent as present “an ordered alternative built of materials of this world” (p. 175). But, she asks, do artists invent the order, the context, or do they discover it? It may be, she suggests, that this question is irrelevant; the purpose of humanity from a biological point of view, our successful adaptation, has been to make meaning.

Even this answer, however, does not satisfy her. She circles back again and again, looking for a clue to the relation. She ends Living this way: “Which shall it be? Do art’s complex and balanced relationships among all parts, its purpose, significance, and harmony, exist in nature? Is nature whole, like a completed thought? Is history purposeful? Is the universe of matter significant? I am sorry; I do not know” (p. 185).

It has seemed clear all along that Dillard is interested in something besides an account of trends in modern fiction. A book about fiction that is really about culture is really about metaphysics. This is her confession in the introduction: “This is, ultimately, a book about the world. It inquires about the world’s meaning. It attempts to do unlicensed metaphysics in a teacup. The teacup at hand, in this case, is contemporary fiction” (p. 11). We should not expect that the historical and critical aspects of the book will abide by the rules, either: “Although my critical training and competence, such as it is, is as a careful textual critic, I have here flung this sensible approach aside in favor of enthusiasm, free speculation, blind assertion, dumb joking, and diatribe” (pp. 14-15).

Living is, in fact, a kind of experiment in extremism. Dillard wants to know how far she can go in stripping the physical world of any inherent meaning, and where the resources might lie to build it up again. Unlike Pilgrim, with its several moments of intense oneness with nature, or Holy the Firm, with its more complex treatment of nature as a site of worship, Dillard here is bound by the project of the book, which has to do with human design and artifice, to see how far she can go in resisting all humanizing of nature.

This is not to say that Dillard is very happy with her experiment. Living cannot decide what kind of book it wants to be. Is it a history, even personal and informal, of contemporary criticism? The reader is barely introduced to structuralism, deconstruction, reader-response theory and the intricacies of the various Marxist schools. Is its purpose to share Dillard’s appreciation of contemporary fiction? Her description of it as geometric sounds faint and unenthusiastic: “It dissects the living, articulated joints and arranges the bright bones in the ground” (Living, p. 62). Is it a celebration of the human ability to make meaning, to impose order? Our doing this as a function of our evolutionary status -- “Our brains secrete bright ideas and forms of order; armored insects secrete wax from their backs” (p. 182) -- hardly seems cause for rejoicing. It is no wonder that the book ends on such a note of doubt and ambiguity: “I am sorry; I do not know.”

For me, one of the most troubling features of Living by Fiction is the way Dillard has taken her search for the bridge between self and nature down a long dead-end path, attempting to make the bridge out of the materials of one’s own life. Dillard edges toward the trap of subjectivity, a trap largel of her own making. Does the art object necessarily resemble the larger world? We cannot know. And if “fiction” and “art” are shorthand for all works of human culture, then the connections between all human cultural life and the physical life of nature are also unknowable. Dillard recognizes this unhappy position: “By those lights, there is not order anywhere but in our brains, which are uniquely adapted for inventing and for handling complex abstractions. . . . The only significance and value which obtain anywhere are in the mind’s discernment of these fictive qualities in its own manufactured models. . . . This is the most dismal view -- of art and everything -- I can imagine” (pp. 181-82).

Fortunately for her growing audience, Dillard’s imagination outstrips her theory. Her most recent book, Teaching a Stone to Talk, is very much connected in theme and style to her earlier ones, but there are some important new directions as well.

The human desire to put off death, to slow the pace of time, links this most recent book to the others. Awareness of mortality sets humanity off from the rest of creation. In an essay called “Aces and Eights,” Dillard recounts taking a nine-year-old girl for a weekend in the Appalachians. In the mountains, they visit a local eccentric, Noah Very, descendant of the Transcendentalist poet Jones Very. Very tells them that once when his own children were small and playing outside the house where they now sit, he said to himself: “‘Noah, now you remember this sight, the children being so young together and playing by the river this particular morning. You remember it.’ And I remember it as if it happened this morning. It must have been summer. There are another twenty years in there I don’t remember at all” (p. 173).

At the close of the essay, Dillard returns to the sense of loss that accompanies the passing of time. As they leave the cabin,

a ripple of wind comes down from the woods and across the clearing toward us. We see a wave of shadow and gloss, where the short grass bends and the cottage eaves tremble. It hits us in the back. It is a single gust, a sport, a rogue breeze out of the north . . . Fall! Who authorized this intrusion? Stop or I’ll shoot. It is an entirely misplaced air -- fail, that I have utterly forgotten, that could be here again, another fall, and here it is only July. I thought I was younger and would have more time. The breeze just crosses the river then blackens the water where it passes, like a finger closing slats [p. 177].

Such an awareness of the implications of time seems to be solely a human trait. In all her work, we can see the way Dillard deliberately sets humanity apart from the rest of nature. In Pilgrim, it was ethical issues that seemed intrusive yet unavoidable; in Holy the Firm, it was human suffering that led to mystic insight; in Living, the construction of fictions; and in Teaching, it is the awful silence of nature, or at best, its “hum,” which is all we hear from the rest of creation these days.

But Teaching goes beyond her earlier works as well. The sometimes intense individualism of the earlier books is complemented here by the presence of other people, so that a kind of tension is created between personal vision and collective insight. Two essays in particular convey this new dialogue.

In “An Expedition to the Pole,” Dillard sets polar exploration next to the worship of a small Catholic parish to see what this juxtaposition might produce. Polar explorers, she found, were almost uniformly high-spirited, heroic and incredibly ignorant of the silent and wasted landscape they would encounter. The Franklin expedition of 1845, for instance, took no special equipment for Arctic conditions. Instead, they took the trappings of Victorian civilization: an organ, china, silver service, glassware, and dress uniforms. Years later skeletons clutching these objects could be found scattered across the Arctic Sea.

Her fellow worshipers at mass likewise struck her as singularly unprepared for encountering the unknown. The miracle of the incarnation was being reenacted on one occasion while the pianist pounded out tunes from “The Sound of Music.” Plunging into the abyss of the polar regions, explorers were stripped of their pretensions, reduced to essentials. They sought the sublime, she writes; ‘‘perfection” and ‘‘eternity’’ were recurrent words in their journals. Similarly at mass, the inept folk group who demanded that the congregation sing with them prompted in Dillard the feeling that this too was a descent into mystery, the well of the absurd, where one sacrificed education, dignity, distance and propriety for the sake of a glimpse of the sacred.

The linked descriptions of diseased and snow-blinded explorers and her fellow worshipers are brilliant. Toward the end of the essay, she imagines leaping onto an immense shiplike floe, the church as frozen ark. At the bow, several clowns are lashed down. At the stern are families around cooking fires; among them wander polar explorers from the past, including Sir John Franklin and his crew, resplendent in their impractical uniforms. As the ship/floe nears the Pole, the author sings loudly, with the rest, banging a tambourine she finds in her hand.

Strongly reminiscent of the metaphysical poets’ discordia concors, the linking of opposites, “Expedition to the Pole” suggests a new direction for Dillard. Dialogues among self and others, self and God, self and nature generate rich possibilities that go beyond the individualism and subjectivity seen in Living.

In another essay, Dillard pursues the theme of self and others in a natural setting. “Total Eclipse’’ tells of Dillard’s witness of that awesome event. Gathered on a mountain in Washington State, she and a group of observers wait for the moment. As the sun disappears, the people, the mountain, all appear in an unearthly platinum hue. Dillard feels as if time were unraveling back toward prehistory, to the darkness before consciousness. “There was no world. We were the world’s dead people rotating and orbiting around and around. . . . Our minds were light-years distant, forgetful of almost everything. Only an extraordinary act of will could recall to us our former, living selves and our contexts in matter and time. We had, it seems, loved the planet and loved our lives, but could no longer remember the way of them. . . . It was all over” (p. 93).

Just before the shadow of the moon snapped into place over the sun, the witnesses on the hillside, including the author, screamed. The reason, she explained, was “the wall of dark shadow . . . speeding at us. We no sooner saw it than it was upon us, like thunder. . . . This was the universe about which we have read so much and never before felt: the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds. How could anything moving so fast not crash, not veer from its orbit amok like a car out of control on a turn?” (pp. 100-101).

While the terror at the power and indifference of nature can be found in her other books, and is the foundation insight in Living by Fiction, the difference here is that she has claimed a place with others. And it is, surely, not a very comfortable place. This eclipse reminds us of nothing so much as a prophecy of nuclear devastation, the gathered observers reminiscent of those awaiting the end of the world. In such a moment, she suggests, she wishes to be with others.

Dillard need not have fought her way through Hegel and hermeneutics in Living to reach such a point in Teaching. From her very first book, she has identified herself as one who seeks, however ambivalently, the Christian community. But Dillard is not just a Christian meditative writer; she is also a romantic. A working out of these two tendencies requires long struggle.

In Pilgrim, she detaches herself from the ordinary, conventional human world, plunging into nature to wrestle with the question of nature’s ethics. In Holy the Firm, she wades into the issue of human suffering. Here we see her as a woman on the edge of despair, cursing God for dishing up so much pain so arbitrarily. In Living, she uses the language of criticism to make the paths we choose to walk matters of individual aesthetic choice. But in Teaching, she seems to halt this movement. Neither unreflective loyalty to community or institution nor narcissistic self-absorption will do. A dialogue with the Other and others completes the incomplete self, writes the unfinished text, rounds out the group, gives voice to silent nature, humanizes an absent God. Annie Dillard takes us on a remarkable journey, out from naïve unreflection into nature, suffering and despair, into an adventure with subjectivity and out the other end into commitment to others and the Other. In such a commitment, trust and engagement may be glimpsed, touched and embraced.

C. S. Lewis: Natural Law, the Law in Our Hearts

The human race is haunted by the desire to do what is right. People invariably defend their actions by arguing that those actions do not really contradict a basic standard of behavior, or that the standard was violated for good reasons.

The first five chapters of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity (1953) discuss this objective norm to which people appeal and by which they expect others to abide. Lewis claims that although everyone knows about the law, everyone breaks it. He further asserts that something or somebody is behind this basic law. This obvious principle of behavior is not created by humans, but it is for humans to obey. Different people use different labels for this law -- traditional morality, moral law, the knowledge of right and wrong, virtue or the Way. We will call it the Natural Law.

According to Lewis, we learn more about God from Natural Law than from the universe in general, just as we discover more about people by listening to their conversations than by looking at the houses they build. Natural Law shows that the Being behind the universe is intensely interested in fair play, unselfishness, courage, good faith, honesty and truthfulness. However, Natural Law gives no grounds for assuming that God is soft or indulgent. Natural law obliges us to do the straight thing regardless of the pain, danger or difficulty involved. Natural Law is hard -- “as hard as nails” (Mere Christianity, (p. 23).

Lewis uses this same phrase in his moving poem “Love.” In the first stanza he tells how love is as warm as tears; in the second, how it is as fierce as fire; in the third, how it is as fresh as spring. And the final stanza tells how love is as hard as nails.

“Love’s as hard as nails/Love is nails.” They are blunt, thick and hammered through the medial nerve of our creator. Having made us, he knew what he had done. He foresaw our cross and his (Poems, p. 123).

In Lewis’s first chronicle of Narnia, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), the lion Asian predicts this hardness of God’s love by promising to save Edmund from the results of treachery. He says: “All shall be done. But it may be harder than you think” (p. 104). When he and the wicked White Witch discuss her claim on Edmund’s life, she refers to the law of that universe as the Deep Magic. Aslan would never consider going against the Deep Magic; instead, he gives himself to die in Edmund’s place, and the next morning comes back to life. He explains to Susan that though the Witch knows the Deep Magic, there is a far deeper magic that she does not know. This deeper magic says that when a willing victim is killed in place of a traitor, death itself begins working backwards. The deepest magic works toward life and goodness.

In Narnia, as in this world, if an absolute goodness does not govern the universe, all our efforts and hopes are doomed. But if the universe is ruled by perfect goodness, Lewis says, we fall short of that goodness all the time; we are not good enough to consider ourselves allies of perfect goodness (Mere Christianity, p. 24). In Narnia, Edmund falls so far short of goodness that he finally realizes, with a shock of despair, his need for forgiveness.

At the end of Mere Christianity’s chapter titled “Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe,” Lewis claims that until people repent and want forgiveness, Christianity will not make sense. Christianity explains how God can be the impersonal mind behind the Natural Law and also be a person. It declares that, since we cannot meet the demands of the law, God actually became a human being to save us from our failure.

Lewis was aware, of course, that the presence of natural and moral evil in the world makes governance by absolute goodness seem questionable at best. He understood the poet A. E. Housman’s bitter complaint against “whatever brute and blackguard made the world” (Last Poems, IX). But Lewis asks by what standard the creator is judged a blackguard. Any such lament for Natural Law or its rejection in itself implies an objective order.

Lewis was deeply concerned that many people in this century are losing their belief in Natural Law. He spoke about this in the Riddell Memorial Lectures at the University of Durham, published in 1947 as The Abolition of Man.

In Abolition he uses “the Tao” as shorthand for Natural Law or First Principle. This word choice is perhaps unfortunate. It is hard to believe that Lewis read, received (to use his own language) and savored the Tao Te Ching, Taoism’s scripture, and concluded that “Tao” is the most accurate and succinct term for the moral law. Although the Tao is finally ineffable, according to the Tao Te Ching, it is best described as ‘‘the Flow,’’ ‘‘the way things change,” “the Life” or “the Source.” To follow the Tao is indeed to live morally, for it requires respecting the lowly and avoiding oppression and pride. However, the Tao ultimately accepts the status quo, whether good or evil. Lewis might have done better to stay with the term moral law, Natural Law or, if he preferred Chinese thought, “the Will of Heaven.” (Confucianism occasionally does use “the Tao” in the narrower sense of “the Will of Heaven”; however, this is not the word’s primary meaning in Taoism.)

Lewis claims in Abolition that until quite recent times everyone believed that objects could merit our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt. Some emotional reactions were assumed to be more appropriate than others.

This concept is vividly represented in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Edmund’s emotional responses are inappropriate from the very beginning: When his brother and sisters imagine pleasant creatures they would like to meet in the woods, he hopes for snakes; when the children meet the wise old professor, Edmund laughs at his looks; when Edmund meets the White Witch, his initial fear quickly turns to trust; and when the Witch gives him a choice of foods, he stuffs himself with sinister Turkish Delight candy. He is resentful and aloof toward his sister Lucy and is suspicious even of the good Robin and Beaver who come to guide the children to safety. Instead of noticing the Beaver’s house, he looks at the Witch’s castle in the distance. When the name Asian first is spoken to the four children, they all have wonderful feelings, except Edmund, who senses a mysterious horror. Later events teach Edmund to respond like the others.

Lewis notes that Aristotle believed that the aim of education and the essence of ethics are to make pupils like and dislike what they ought. According to Plato, we need to learn to feel pleasure for the pleasant, liking for the likable, disgust for the disgusting, and hatred for the hateful. In early Hindu teaching righteousness and correctness corresponded to knowing truth and reality. Psalm 119 says the law is “true.” The Hebrew word used for truth here is “emeth,” meaning intrinsic validity, rock-bottom reality, and a firmness and dependability as solid as nature.

This meaning is reflected in the final book of Narnia, The Last Battle (1956), in which Lewis introduces a young man named Emeth who had grown up in an oppressive country where people worship an evil god named Tash. Despite his upbringing, Emeth is an honorable and honest man who seeks to do good. He dies worshiping Tash but finds himself in Asian’s presence. He responds with reverence and delight. Everything he thought he was doing for Tash was counted as service to Aslan instead. Because he liked the likable and hated the hateful, Emeth was Aslan’s friend long before he knew Aslan.

Lewis was alarmed by the number of people who deny that some things are inherently likable, debunking traditional morality and Natural Law, and thinking that basic values can -- and should -- change. Some try to substitute necessity, progress or efficiency for goodness. To have any meaning, however, necessity, progress or efficiency must relate to a standard outside themselves. Often that standard will be, in the last analysis, the preservation of the self-proclaimed moral innovator or the propagation of the society of his or her choice. Such people are skeptical of all values except their own, disparaging other frameworks as “sentimental” (Abolition, p.19).

Lewis’s analysis shows that if Natural Law is sentimental, all value is sentimental. No propositions like “our society is in danger of extinction” can give an adequate basis for a value system; no observations of instinct such as I want to prolong my life” give any substance to a value system. Why is our society valuable? Why is my life worth preserving? Only the Natural Law -- asserting that human life has value -- gives a basis for a coherent value system.

“If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved,” Lewis claims. “If nothing is obligatory for its own sake, then all conceptions of value crumble. No values are independent of Natural Law. Anything judged to be good is such because of values in the Natural Law. The concept of goodness springs, from no other source.

Thus, modern ethical innovations are simply shreds of the old Natural Law, sometimes isolated and exaggerated. If values are retained, so is Natural Law. According to Lewis, there never has been and never will be a radically new value or value system. The human mind can no more invent a new value than create a new primary color.

Admittedly, imperfections and contradictions appear in historical manifestations and interpretations of Natural Law. Some reformers help improve our perceptions of value. But only those living by the Law know its spirit well enough to interpret it successfully. People who live outside Natural Law have no grounds for criticizing it, or anything else. A few who reject Natural Law intend to take the next logical step as well: living without any values, disbelieving all values, and choosing to live governed only by whims and fancies.

Lewis’s poem “The Country of the Blind,” published in Punch in 1951, presents an image of these people (Poems, p. 53). He imagines life as a misfit with eyes in a country of eyeless people who no longer believe vision ever existed.

This poem tells of “hard” light shining on a whole nation of eyeless people who are unaware of their handicap. Blindness developed gradually through many centuries. At some transitional stage a few citizens still have eyes and vision after most people are blind. The blind are normal and up-to-date. They use the same words their ancestors had used, but no longer know their concrete meaning.

They still speak of light, meaning an abstract thought. If a person with sight tries to describe the gray dawn or the stars or the green-sloped sea waves or the color of a lady’s cheek, the blind majority insist that they understand the feeling the sighted one expresses in metaphor. There is no way to explain the facts to them. The blind ridicule the sighted one for taking figures of speech literally and concocting a myth about a sense perception no one has ever really had.

If one thinks this is a far-fetched illustration, Lewis concludes, one need only try talking to famous people today about the truths of Natural Law which used to stand huge, awesome and clear to the inner eye.

One of those famous people is B. F. Skinner, who answers in Beyond Freedom and Dignity that the abolition of the inner person and traditional morality is necessary so that science can prevent the abolition of the human race. Lewis had already exclaimed in Abolition, “The preservation of the species? -- But why should the species be preserved?” (p. 40). Skinner does not provide an answer, but embraces Lewis’s devious scientific “Controllers” who aim to change and dehumanize the human race to fulfill their purposes more efficiently.

Lewis satirizes this kind of progress in his poem “Evolutionary Hymn,” which appeared in the Cambridge Review in 1957 (Poems, p. 55). Using Longfellow’s popular hymn stanza pattern from “Psalm of Life,” Lewis exclaims: What do we care about wrong or justice, joy or sorrow, so long as our posterity survives? The old norms of good and evil are outmoded. It matters not if our posterity turns out to be hairy, squashy or crustacean, tusked or toothless, mild or ruthless. “Goodness = what comes next.” The poem concludes that our progeny may be far from pleasant by present standards; but that is inconsequential if they survive.

Lewis has often been carelessly accused of attacking science. In fact, he gives us an admirable scientist, Bill Hingest in That Hideous Strength (1945). Significantly, the supposed scientists who direct the NICE have Hingest murdered. For Lewis the enemy is not true science, fueled by a love of truth, but that applied science whose practitioners are motivated by a love of power. In Lewis’s opinion technological developments called steps in humankind’s conquest of nature actually just give certain people power over others. Discarding Natural Law will always increase the danger that some people will control others. Only Natural Law provides human standards that overarch rulers and ruled alike. Lewis even claims that ‘‘dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery” (Abolition, p. 46).

The Magician’s Nephew (1955), the tale of Narnia’s creation, portrays two characters, Jadis and Uncle Andrew Ketterly, who exemplify the Controllers. Both claimed to be above Natural Law; they have “a high and lonely destiny.” Jadis is a monarch and Uncle Andrew is a magician, but both typify modern science gone wrong. Each believes that common rules are fine for common people, but that singularly great people must be free -- to experiment without limits in search of knowledge, and to seize power and wealth. The result was cruelty and destruction. In contrast, the sages of old sought to conform the soul to reality, and the result was knowledge, self-discipline and virtue.

Two examples from Lewis’s verse illustrate this traditional wisdom. The 1956 poem “After Aristotle” praises virtue, describing Greeks who gladly toiled in search of virtue as their most valuable treasure. They would willingly die, or live in hard labor, for virtue’s beauty. Virtue powerfully touched the heart and gave unfading fruit, making those who love it strong.

A second example is “On a Theme from Nicolas of Cusa,” published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1955. The first stanza notes how physical foods are transformed by our bodies when we assimilate them. In the second Lewis suggests that when we assimilate goodness and truth they are not transformed, but we are.

Abolition ends with Lewis’s admonition to pause before relegating Natural Law to no more than another accident of human history in a wholly material universe. To “explain away” this transcendent reality perhaps explains away all explanations. To “see through” the Natural Law is the same as not seeing at all.

This urgent defense of Natural Law has acquired new meaning in our time. Since Lewis published Abolition in 1947, the locus and imminence of the threat to the world has shifted radically. The danger of nuclear armaments was obvious in 1947, but too few existed to threaten all life on earth. Since then weapons have proliferated and metastasized beyond the imaginations of most people of Lewis’s day. Now we face the potential sudden massive destruction of human life (and also, incidentally, libraries and literary heritage). Additionally, the horror would include catastrophic biological aftereffects from probable destruction of the ozone layer and a nuclear winter likely to end all plant and animal life on earth. This scenario echoes the end of the world as foretold in the Norse mythology that Lewis found so compelling.

Religion and the Moral Rhetoric of Presidential Politics

Neither of the 1984 presidential candidates has fully understood the complexity of the other’s views on the religion-in-politics issue. Reagan is no theocrat and Walter Mondale no secularist, despite what each has implied about the other. More important, neither candidate’s recent statements have made clear the complexity of his own views on this issue. If one compares Reagan and Mondale’s moral rhetoric over the past several years, one sees how distinctively each candidate draws on the moral tradition of biblical religion in American culture and, significantly, how much more directly both of them are indebted to the nonreligious traditions of classical republican humanism and modern individualism for their visions of a good society. This belies simple characterizations of one candidate as more, or more genuinely, religious than the other. It also sheds light on the moral basis of their respective appeals to the religious right and to the mainstream.

President Reagan has often repeated the themes of his 1981 inaugural address in subsequent major speeches, such as his 1984 State of the Union message. In the inaugural address he finds the moral answer to our economic ills in the individual’s obligation to balance his or her own budget: “You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why then should we think that collectively, as a nation, we are not bound by the same limitation?” Respecting these economic limitations amounts to self-governance, and this is the only solution to our present political crisis. Economic self-governance yields specifically political results, enabling us to “preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom.”

Individual freedom -- for Reagan, the central political virtue -- rests on and makes possible industry and initiative, the economic virtues of a self-reliant and self-disciplined character. ‘‘We are a nation that has a government -- not the other way around.” he states. “Our government has no power except that granted it by the people.” People precede polity in this Lockean view of civic association by contract and government by consent, and the economic realm precedes the political. ‘‘We the people” are identified by our occupations, and we make up a citizenry defined as an all-inclusive “special-interest group,” chiefly concerned with “a healthy, vigorous, growing economy that provides equal opportunity for all Americans.” Conversely, Reagan argues that we have “prospered as no other people on earth” because “freedom and dignity of the individual have been more available and assured here than in any other place on earth.”

This libertarian tie between political and economic freedom underpins Reagan’s diagnosis that “our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government.” He proposes to “reawaken this industrial giant,” composed of economic individuals, by getting the government off its back. Throughout the address Reagan’s moral emphasis remains on the negative liberty of modern individualism as it derives from and applies to our economic activities, not on republican justice or biblical authority. He follows a libertarian moral logic, in which freedom from restraint comes before freedom to do our duty and obey God, even as he evokes traditional moral values of “family, work, neighborhood and freedom.”

Since 1980 Reagan has taken “profamily” and “ProAmerica” stands on specific social issues of crucial moral and symbolic importance to the electorate’s cultural conservatives, not just to fundamentalist Christians. He argues that we must “protect the rights of unborn children” by outlawing abortion on demand, readmit God to the classroom, and practice ‘‘military and moral rearmament” against the “evil empire” of Soviet communism. Critics have seen these stands as calculated efforts to win back the religious right’s electoral support through moralizing talk, in the absence of strong legislative action on these issues.

Despite his presumably sincere stand on such matters as school prayer, however, Reagan’s religious position is not essentially theocratic, nor is this the basis of his ideological fit with most of the religious right. Rather than preaching the ruling role of religion in public life, he champions governmental noninterference in “traditional” religious and family life. His 1984 speech to the National Religious Broadcasters is particularly revealing, for there he most obviously makes public a piety which is essentially personal, even private -- a piety which takes social form in intimate, bounded and family-like voluntary associations that see themselves in tension with the larger society even as they claim to be its spiritual center. Reagan begins his speech by calling the occasion a “homecoming,” since “under this roof, some 4,000 of us are kindred spirits united by one burning belief: God is our Father; we are his children; together, brothers and sisters, we are one family.” He concludes by describing the personally comforting, otherworldly salvific “promise from Jesus to soothe our sorrows, heal our hearts, and drive away our fears,” for whosoever believeth “will be part of something far more powerful, enduring, and good than all the forces here on earth. We will be part of paradise.”

Reagan’s religious understanding is, in short, sectlike, in Ernst Troeltsch’s generic sense of sects as one legitimate expression of the Christian gospel and tradition, and as one deep-rooted mode of American Christianity. Such sects can, in extraordinary cases, turn aggressively toward the larger society and seek to conquer it by overtly political and legal means. But much more commonly, sects are tempted instead to withdraw from the larger society and to reject its culture. By remaining aloof from the moral argument of public life, sects play into the secular drive to privatize and depoliticize religion, to let “the world” and its economic individuals go their own way -- as they are usually all too willing to do.

Ronald Reagan stands at the crossroads of the economic and religious right, favoring a minimal state and free enterprise in a complex corporate society. His moral rhetoric flows more directly from the economic than the religious right, as do the items at the top of his policy agenda. (Only national defense takes on its special urgency in the spotlight of a cosmological dualism that shines most brightly from the religious right, to whom Satan and his powers and principalities remain most actively evil.) But Reagan’s economic individualism complements sectlike religion’s special concern for personal piety and salvation, and for holding polity and government at arm’s length from work and family life. Moreover, it rings true to the entrepreneurial experience of many fundamentalist ministers, whose independent churches succeed by dint of their own labor, God’s grace and the direct contributions of those in the pews or in front of the television set, unsupported by national denominations analogous to big government. Reagan’s economic individualism also fits with the small-town and small-business orientation of many who fill these independent churches.

At the same time, the president’s laissez-faire vision, like Adam Smith’s, relies on personal piety to civilize a free-market society of mutually disinterested individuals by shaping their consciences and filling their hearts with charitable sympathy, especially for those whom the market fails. Such a society needs churches for providing “a very worthwhile safety net” for have-nots and for “promoting fundamental American values of hard work, family, freedom, and faith” for all citizens, as President Reagan put it this spring in thanking the National Association of Evangelicals for its ministry. Religion paves the moral main street of a white-clapboard America inhabited by independent individuals who lend each other a helping hand to earn their own way, support their own families and worship their own God, instead of depending for handouts on a welfare state that regulates hardworking individuals out of existence and replaces Christian charity with legal entitlements.

Reagan’s remarks at the Dallas prayer breakfast paint a picture of an America raised on religion but growing secularized since the 1960s. Who is to blame? In particular, it is the courts and the American Civil Liberties Union secularists who sued against school prayer and Bible reading, church tax exemptions, and the like. In general, it is “those who care only about the interests of the state” against whom “religion needs defenders.” In the president’s view, attacks on religious faith, economic freedom and the traditional family run together, and come chiefly from big government and its liberal, secular partisans. Against them, Reagan stands up for his economic and defense record, and argues for school prayer, tuition tax credits and abortion restrictions -- not to impose any religious establishment but to restore religious freedom, strengthen traditional “social mores” and protect the unborn.

If religion guarantees the freedom of economic individuals for Ronald Reagan, how does it figure in Walter Mondale’s vision .of a good society? By contrast to the “partisan zealotry” and “moral McCarthyism” that the religious right breeds and Reagan embraces, Mondale affirmed to the B’nai B’rith convention his commitment to religious pluralism and tolerance as mandated by the First Amendment. Its aim of free exercise comes first, and nonestablishment serves to ensure it. “Our government is the protector of every faith because it is the exclusive property of none,” he stated. Unlike the Queen of England, who is the defender of an established church’s faith. “the president of the United States is the defender of the Constitution -- which defends all faiths.” Mondale’s alternative vision is clearest in his depiction of life as a forum rather than a pulpit. ‘‘The civility of our public debate depends on our willingness to accept the good faith of those who disagree,” he told the B’nai B’rith. Emphatic that “faith is personal and honorable and uncorrupted by political influence,” Mondale is less clear about how religious and moral meaning should enter into the public forum. “I believe in an America where government is not permitted to dictate the religious life of our people; where religion is a private matter between individuals and God, between families and their churches and synagogues, with no room for politicians in between,” he states. But presenting religion as a private matter is hardly a full response to theocratic threats or to Reagan’s individualism. What does public morality mean to Mondale, and what is its relation to religion?

During the primaries Mondale steered clear of explicitly biblical moral language, leaving to Jesse Jackson prophetic exhortations to “feed the hungry, save the children,” pursue peace, and “restore the conscience of this nation,” lest we be punished by a just God. He comes closest to republican eloquence in his stump speech calling for “social decency, not social Darwinism.” We need “a restored sense of fairness and justice -- a fairer America,” he contends. “We are not a jungle; we are a community of family and nations -- we need a president who causes us to care for one another.” In Mondale’s eyes laissez-faire politics leaves us with a Hobbesian jungle of tooth-and-claw individuals instead of a Smithian marketplace of conscientious Christians.

Fed by the social gospel and the Farmer-Laborite progressivism of his youth, Mondale’s standpoint holds that ‘‘Christ taught a sense of social mission” and that churches should commit themselves to justice for the whole of society and the welfare of all its members, especially the needy. “I was taught that we bear witness to our faith through a life of commitment, consideration and service to our fellow men and women,” he declared to the B’nai B’rith. Government should have the soul of a caring church, actively bearing responsibility for society’s welfare and justice. Democrats are “the party of caring,” and they “believe in strong, efficient and compassionate government,” Mondale declared at the 1980 convention. There he attacked Reagan’s view that “the best thing government can do is nothing,” and defended the New Deal legacy of social welfare programs and reforms, from Social Security through civil rights to Medicare.

In the America that Mondale idealizes as he describes his own small-town upbringing, churchgoing neighbors of modest means work hard, not so much for the sake of individual success and freedom, but to serve the family, faith and community they love. “We never had a dime,” he says of his parents. “But we were rich in the values that are important. . . . They taught me to work hard; to stand on my own; to play by the rules; to tell the truth; to obey the law; to care for others; to love our country; and to cherish our faith.” Here we find a community of implicitly biblical memory and hope set out in terms that usually sound more populist and progressive than religious: “America is not just for people on the make; it’s for everybody, including people who can’t make it.” So stated, Mondale’s moral contrast to Reagan comes through most sharply when he addresses labor unions, not religious groups.

Before the Building and Construction Trades Union convention last year Mondale counterposed to Reagan’s “Darwinism” his ideal of “a fair, a hopeful, a kind, and a just nation” for all persons, especially those who are old, black, brown, handicapped, or simply “overwhelmed by problems beyond their reach”:

This President teaches a philosophy of survival of the fittest . . . . that the only thing that works is the market. If you re not OK, that’s too bad. Whenever we want to do something, rebuild this nation, put people back to work, educate our children, prohibit discrimination, protect our environment, help the sick, no matter what you want to do -- this administration says, let the market take care of it. That’s not going to work. This nation needs a strong President and a strong government.

Not only individuals, but government as an institution must possess a compassionate heart and a just conscience, and it must be empowered to act accordingly.

In explaining his sense of justice to the United Mine Workers in 1983, Mondale first invoked the republican premise that all citizens are ‘‘human beings entitled to dignity and rights.” Then he turned to more individualistic terms to define fairness as “a bargain in American life”: “When you work hard and pay your taxes; when you’re a good parent and citizen; when you obey the law and play by the rules you have a right to expect certain things in exchange, as a part of the bargain. You’re entitled to a safe job, a good job with dignity,” a decent income, a safe community, good schools, a secure retirement, a chance to enjoy life, and “a government that’s on your side.” Although each of us earns these rewards by living according to American values, government must secure this exchange. Thus Mondale reworks the idea of the social contract to justify the individual entitlements of the welfare state, not the individual freedoms of the market. He emphasizes the institutional centrality of the state, not the economy or the church, in public life, although he draws indirectly on Christian ideals of love and community for his notion of a just and caring nation.

Central to Mondale’s republican faith is respect for the integrity of public debate. He insists on the need for honest debate as we struggle toward “new foundations and new rules” in the face of the institutional changes and the uncertainties that have swept our nation over the past generation. The “yearning for traditional values” can divide us, he cautions, if it is exploited to polarize public debate for partisan advantage. So “family must not become code for intolerance.” Nor religion for censorship, or law for repression. Public morality does not mean the shoring up of lax morals through legislation demanded by a culturally conservative voting bloc. In fact, such efforts go hand in hand with group-interest pluralism and economic individualism. They cannot take the place of a publicly argued and shared understanding of the common good. While Mondale barely sketches this vision, he ties it more firmly to its classical humanist than to its biblical anchorage in our culture.

The counterbalance to Reagan’s position is not the simpleminded, sociologically impossible attempt to generalize church-state separation into the separation of religion and politics, private and public life. Such an attempt is part of the problem, a problem that is not obviated by Mondale’s notion of a government with the soul of a church, but without a church’s creed, rites and congregational community. Indeed, Reagan comes closest to grasping the civil religious truth of the matter when he states that “politics and morality are inseparable. And as morality’s foundation is religion, religion and politics are necessarily related.” But we can acknowledge this truth without accepting the president’s reasoning for it. We can recognize that the humanist and individualist moral traditions are also necessary to public life. We can rebut Reagan’s assumption that religious practice automatically guarantees moral virtue and justifies favoring the ethical views of conservative over liberal Christians, Jews or agnostics on such specific issues as school prayer.

The genuine alternative to Reagan’s position is a civil religion that is in conversation with truly churchlike and public denominations that seek neither privilege nor establishment for themselves, but dignity, justice and moral community for all of God’s children. Such churches, respecting the difference between church and state yet recognizing the cultural and practical interconnection of civic and religious life, can serve as schools for civic as well as personal virtue, for public-spirited citizens as well as for devout believers. Mondale has only obliquely hinted at such a churchlike alternative to Reagan’s sectlike understanding of religion and politics.

In the long run, however unlikely it may now appear, the religious New Right may mark theologically conservative Protestants’ first step in this more churchlike direction, propelled as they are beyond sectarian shelter by their ongoing social and cultural integration into the more educated and urban middle class. If this is so, they should eventually part ways with economic individualists and theocrats alike, as they come to broaden the range of public theology and deepen its conversation with civil religion. The mainline denominations can make this constructive outcome more likely by engaging the religious right in attentively and civilly sustained debate, by counterorganizing and pressing for compromise on specific issues, as Martin Marty has urged, and by consistently decrying religious intolerance, but not moral activism.

Moral rhetoric is, of course, no substitute for moral conduct and practical virtue, in politics as elsewhere. Personal piety and decency are no replacements for a wise and just public policy, and they do not necessarily translate into it. In a purely procedural constitutional state, religion and morality are private matters of personal preference and opinion. Opinions are like noses: everybody has one, and you cannot really argue about them. All you can do is line them up and count them, in opinion polls and at the voting polls. In this sense “public opinion” is actually the sum of private opinions. Trying to mobilize such opinion by simply endorsing candidates, “scoring” their voting records, and lobbying for or against particular positions is secular electioneering, not moral crusading. It is something religious institutions have no business doing. If they persist in it, they risk being damned to private life in a secular society they have attempted to manipulate by its own means, rather than reconquering for Christ.

In a republic, morality is public because it has more or less good reasons and coherent ideals, truthfulness to tradition and to the present. Public life takes the form of a moral argument, a dramatic conversation. It is a forum, not a pulpit, or a mere marketplace for exchanging ideas and brokering interests, or an arena where power blocs fight it out. For religion to deserve its place in this forum, it must tell and enact sacred stories and teach universal ideals, defining what it means to be a good person, and what makes life worth living and a society worth living in and working for. It must bring these ideals to bear on particular issues, illuminating their moral meaning in the light of Scriptures, the life of Jesus, the laws of nature and the Kingdom of God. This kind of reasoned, argued, exemplified and Bible-supported moral illumination -- not electioneering and lobbying -- is what American public life needs from religion.

As Alexis de Tocqueville saw, moral ideas and sentiments rooted in religious traditions and institutions are necessary to sustain the ethical argument and civic friendship of public life in a republic such as ours, whose fate finally rests on the habits of the heart of its citizens. Such ideas and sentiments are not sufficient to do so, nor are they monolithic in doing so. But they are essential if we are to understand our moral ambivalences and our disagreements over the conduct of our common lives, and to move toward their resolution. To make this clearer to our presidential candidates, we need to do more than vote and pray for them. We need to argue with them and with one another. And we need to live out the gospel that we preach, teaching our neighbors by example. At both tasks we have made only a beginning.

Reclaiming the City: A Church Stays Put

It’s Tuesday morning and time for my weekly meeting with Jack, the senior pastor of our church. It’s a beautiful day in Missoula, so I suggest we have our meeting at Bernice’s, a local coffee shop. Just before Big Dipper Ice Cream, we turn down Hazel Street and bead north toward the river. In the span of two blocks we pass three residential houses, two apartment buildings, two churches, a microbrewery, a bakery and a photography studio. Bernice’s occupies the site of the historic Knowles Building, designed in 1905 by Missoula architect A. J. Gibson. Gibson, a local legend, also designed the county courthouse, Main Hall at the university, the central high school and our own church sanctuary.

As we get our coffee, we notice that almost every table is filled. There are students studying, workers having their morning break, moms or dads with young children, and a local politician planning her campaign strategy. We spot two open chairs and ask others at the table if we can join them. Once settled, we begin our meeting, and become oblivious to the gentle hum of conversation and activity going on all around us. We end with prayer and head out the door and back to church. Across the street, we see a line beginning to form outside of the Missoula Food Bank and remember that it is near the end of the month, a time when paychecks are starting to get a little thin for some of our residents.

A trip to Bernice’s with Jack or anyone from our church family seems so ordinary to me that I hardly notice it in the scope of my day. However, if our church were not in a city -- or even if our church were in a different part of the city -- this kind of experience would not be possible. It’s not too hard to imagine such a scenario. A recent proposal, if our church had accepted it, would have radically altered our interaction with the surrounding environment by taking us out of the city.

The proposal was one solution to two ongoing problems at our current site. Our buildings are too small for our growing congregation, and we didn’t have sufficient parking -- and being hemmed in by two busy arterial streets limited our options. The proposal was to move our church to a rapidly developing commercial area on the fringe of the city. This would have allowed our building and parking needs to be solved much more inexpensively than they could be in our current location. We could start from the ground up and design a facility optimally suited to meet our needs.

On the other hand, if we made this move we would be choosing, consciously or unconsciously, a suburban model of development, one which would put a different kind of limitation on our church’s ministry. Whatever the size or type of building we constructed, we would ultimately end up with some kind of large, monolithic building surrounded by an ocean of parking. We would be about half a mile from any other business and would not be connected with sidewalks. If Jack and I wanted to get coffee for a meeting, we would have to drive some distance from our church and would not be likely to greet any of our commercial or residential neighbors on the way.

Conversely, anyone who wanted to come to our church would have to either drive there or be driven by someone else. Those without access to a car -- many of our college students and elderly members -- would not get there at all. Aesthetically, every building within view of our site would have been built within the same decade as ours, with very little architectural style or integration with the surrounding environment. We would be hard-pressed to see any details of construction that would suggest a sense of quality in workmanship.

This is not to say that such a move would have been catastrophic. There would have been many advantages to the new site, and there is a great need for ministry on the growing edges of our city. My point is that there are implications for a church and its ministry that are more far-reaching than those we see when we’re examining only the parking and square-footage needs. The location of a church and the character of its surrounding context have a major impact on the kind of ministry that can be done. What we preserved by staying at our current site is the possibility of doing ministry in a city.

Without really being aware of it, Jack and I experienced -- in our short meeting -- six markers that are distinctive of the city. We shared public spaces with other residents of our community by using the sidewalk and by meeting in a coffee shop. We were able to walk rather than drive to our meeting because of our mixed-use neighborhood, which allows residential and commercial buildings to coexist. We enjoyed the nonessential beauty in the quality of a locally designed and built structure as well as in the artist’s work on its walls. We saw some of the results of a local economy as workers recycled their wages at a locally owned establishment. Our hearts were burdened with the presence of strangers at the food bank who have needs beyond their resources. And we saw friends and minicoalitions gathering around tables at Bernice’s, who found one another through the critical mass of the city.

Most of these markers exist or have existed in locations around the world that we call cities. However, because of the aggregate effect of decisions like the one we contemplated as a church, our cities are becoming distinctly less city-like. Culturally, we are losing a sense of what it means to function within the context of a city, and in many cases we have slipped into radically different models of existence without even realizing it.

Over the past decade or so, there has been a growing awareness of this problem and a concerted effort to preserve and restore many of these markers of the city to historic cities as well as to new developments. This trend has been dubbed New Urbanism and has attracted an eclectic mix of architects, builders, city planners and even sociologists to its front lines. However, to most Christians, the idea of urban planning seems as relevant to faith as the current additions to the American Kennel Association’s list of approved dog breeds -- interesting to some, but certainly not vital to faith.

It’s not as if we have no interest in the city. There are numerous Christian books on the city and about urban ministry. It’s just that as Christians, we tend to treat the city as a problem to be solved or a burden to be borne. We see the city as an abstract place where humanity is gathered in the greatest concentration and therefore where the problems and needs of humans are most obvious and pressing. We have not, as our secular contemporaries are beginning to do, taken seriously the physical form or context of existing cities as a model for our shared community life. Nor have we seen constructive models for new development in our historic cities.

I became interested in the city and in urban planning in Missoula, a place that barely qualifies as a city in terms of population (65,000). Though I have spent most of my life in the urban locations of Seattle and the San Francisco Bay area, I am now here, in the heart of the Rocky Mountain range, partly because Missoula seemed like a good place for us to start our family. We are not alone. Despite the city’s poor job market and low pay scale, people want to be part of this community. They seem to be looking for something that we’ve lost in our culture -- the notion of a city as a place where the population is mixed and interesting, and where life is lived on a human scale.

I first became aware of this concept in The Good city and the Good Life, written by former Missoula mayor Daniel Kemmis. Kemmis reminds us that "what makes a city a good city is not its capacity to distract, but the way in which it creates presence." Also, "the city in grace . . . answers to a deep longing for a spiritual dimension in public life." And finally, "I was reminded of how often I saw scenes like this at the market, and it occurred to me that this had become, in fact, a kind of sacrament,"

Reading words like "presence," "grace" and "sacrament" in a book about the city made me realize that there is potentially a lot more theological interest in city planning than I had previously understood. In the works of Kemmis and other authors in the New Urbanist movement, I found convergent themes of longing for community, joy beauty, place, connection with our past, and meaning. Many of these ideas and issues generate strong interest and reactions in church communities. Yet in each of the Christian books that I consulted, the city was vilified or exalted and always treated as an abstraction. It might be a place of deep human need or sometimes a place of divine possibility, but never a place with sidewalks or plazas.

This is unfortunate. Church people have a deep history of interest in the city, one that is rooted in biblical tradition. Long before the New Urbanists began envisioning something inherently redeemable in our cities, John the evangelist was engaged in urban visioning. When he is given a picture of our redeemed state during his exile on Patmos, he does not see Eden restored in some kind of an agrarian utopia, nor does he see the American ideal of a single-family detached house surrounded by a huge yard for every inhabitant of the Kingdom. What he sees is a city -- New Jerusalem descending from heaven onto earth.

And because a city is what John sees, we Christians must take this vision seriously and not replace it with our own visions of the ideal human environment. For the past two decades, Christians have been tempted in this direction. We have been abandoning our strategic locations within city cores and traditional neighborhoods, and trying to create a new kind of society in the form of suburban megachurches. We have marched along with the rest of our culture and moved our homes outside of the urban core into the sanitized world of the suburbs. Even when we have not participated directly in this radical shift, we have come to view the particularities of functioning in the midst of the city (restricted parking, unsympathetic neighbors and pushy transients) as inconveniences rather than as opportunities for ministry.

After a brief discussion, our church decided to forgo the greener pastures of Reserve Street in order to continue doing ministry in the place to which we had been called. In order to meet our growing program needs, we ended up doing a major renovation of our current site. And we still haven’t solved our parking issue. But the possibility of doing ministry in this neighborhood in this city has more than compensated for the trouble and expense.

The “Highest Standards” of Clergy Morality

The ancient Hebrews thought of emotions as being generated in the liver. Western tradition has generally represented love as coming from the heart. United Methodism, perhaps unwittingly, has recently added to our corporeal mythology by rendering its judgment that fidelity is located in the genitals.

Ever since the 1980 General Conference declined to take a definitive position on the ordination and appointment of “self-avowed practicing homosexuals,” the 1984 General Conference, which met last spring in Baltimore, was targeted by several groups within the church to accomplish just that purpose. Through time the focus on homosexuality became judged too narrow, and thus the discussion was broadened to include clergy morality in general. Eventually, the majority report that seemed acceptable to the whole conference focused on the following phrase as a full and appropriate guide for clergy morality: “fidelity in marriage and celibacy in singleness.” In its context, the statement to be inserted in the introductory section of The Book of Discipline’s chapter on ordained ministry reads:

While . . . persons set apart by the church for the ministry of Word, Sacrament, and Order are subject to all the frailties of the human condition and pressures of society, they are required to maintain the highest standards represented by the practice of fidelity in marriage and celibacy in singleness. Since the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching, self-avowed practicing homosexuals are not to be accepted as candidates, ordained as ministers, or appointed to serve in the United Methodist Church.

The addition of the last sentence overshadowed the statement on clergy morality. Nevertheless, I would like to consider this entire, more far-reaching judgment on the part of the church.

Granted, we all understand that General Conference is made up of more varied parts than an Indian elephant. Some members opposed the idea, and others may have presumed to hear and conceive the language in a fuller sense. But at bottom there is no dodging the fact that the General Conference used this language with the intention that it have a genital referent. If the conference had added the words “among other things” following the words “represented by,” then I would not be so concerned. But the deliberate intention clearly is to say that “fidelity in marriage and celibacy in singleness” exhausts “the highest standards” of clergy morality in general. How appropriate is such an understanding?

Let us consider a parable of two pastors. Both happen to be men. Both have several years in the parish. Both are married to their first wives, both have two children about the same ages, and both feel they love their wives and children. The first is a good, hard-working pastor. In fact, he works too hard. His appointment book is always filled with a plethora of night meetings and weekend engagements, and he never takes a weekday off. He is not given to vacations. Only rarely does he give extended attention to his children. His wife has thought for some time of re-entering her career now that the children are older, but the idea makes him uncomfortable, so she hesitates to bring it up. He usually sends her to bed by herself while he stays up to read or write. When his bedtime does occasionally coincide with hers, he is usually too tired to make love, or at least to do it well. He says that he loves her, but his habit of inattention leaves her feeling uncertain. This pastor has never laid hands on another woman since his wedding day. Eyes, maybe, but not hands.

The second man is also a good, hard-working pastor. In addition, he manages to create significant amounts of enjoyable time to work and play with his family and friends. He takes an active interest in his children’s lives. He gives his wife ample encouragement for her work outside the home, which she finds fulfilling. He makes love to his wife often, with energy and enthusiasm. He tells her that he loves her, and she believes it. She feels loved. Because of his generous and outgoing nature it is easy for him to form deep, meaningful relationships with many people. In fact, over the years some of his relationships with women have led to sexual intimacy. He expects that some other relationships will also follow this course in the future.

Now I ask you, which of these pastors is faithful to his wife? Is either one? Neither? The judgment of General Conference is that the first is faithful, the second is not. Does this understanding represent the highest standards of morality?

For that matter, what of the possibility that both pastors in the above parable are faithful? Is it possible that one specific standard may not be appropriate across the board? With respect to the food laws, for instance, Paul upheld private conscience as the legitimate determiner of right and wrong, so that two different people could eat the same meat, and for one it would be a sin yet for the other it would not (Rom. 14:22 ff.). To what degree, if any, can the rule of conscience be applied to blessing or condemning sexual behavior? Clearly, the way in which some parsonage couples freely make love would be regarded by others as downright sinful.

All of these questions plead for a contribution from moral development theory. Without tying these comments to any single scheme of moral development, most of us can say that normal human development carries us through successively higher stages of moral perception and valuation. And surely we believe that not all adults attain the same level of moral maturity but that instead various stages of moral development are present within the adult population. Further, we recognize that the need to reduce moral dilemmas full of gray zones to black-and-white issues, and the desire to be able to declare moral certitude in tight, precise phrases, characterizes a stage of moral development which is somewhat less than the highest. Is it possible that the majority of the members of General Conference were just plain limited to a tight, legalistic conception of clergy morality because of their stage of moral development? We know, at least, that where differing stages of moral development clash in society, the result can be a melee, and that usually those at a lower stage simply cannot comprehend, and thus they resent, the moral suggestions of the more mature party. The classic example in our tradition is the encounter of Jesus with the Pharisees.

As they are portrayed in the synoptic Gospels, the Pharisees were a people whose moral understanding required a rigid code of specific, legalistic commands and prohibitions. They were both befuddled and angered by Jesus’ relative freedom, by his morality rooted in a grand vision of the respect for personhood and the abundant grace of God, who loves us like a doting parent.

I would contend that we in the United Methodist Church have settled for a pharisaism. In one tight, legalistic phrase we actually believe we have captured morality. Like all pharisaism, though, it is basically only wishful thinking. We would like for life’s moral dilemmas to be so easily discerned and treatable, so we define them as such, and pretend that our short-sightedness and intellectual sloth can pass for true morality. With the phrase “fidelity in marriage and celibacy in singleness” we have only constructed an artificial stage on which we now comfortably assume that we can honestly (faithfully) play out life’s dramas. In this we are guilty of a sad self-deception.

What practical effects of this action can we anticipate? The legislation is not very likely to change the basic sexual behavior of even one ordained minister. Twenty years ago Methodist clergy lived under an ordination vow to abstain from drinking and smoking; those who drank and smoked simply did so discreetly.

The real significance of the old morality language and the new is that they stand as opportunities for judgment and trial. The effect will be to cause people to live in greater fear and suspicion of one another. It will be to cause people’s real selves to sink further out of sight -- unavailable for honest relationship -- to be replaced to a greater degree by their shallow, defensive, political selves. The effect will be to provide greater occasion for destructive rumor and selective justice. The single minister is now an easier target for the church’s small-minded, of which there are plenty. There is no exoneration from rumor. Indeed, simply for having probed these matters as I have done here, my own moral behavior is bound to come under suspicion. There is no acquittal from suspicion.

The highest standards? They apparently were beyond the grasp of United Methodism’s General Conference. We have instead settled for standards well below the highest. So where is fidelity seated? Is it in the genitals, the heart, the will or the actions? Is it a combination of all these, and yet more? In any case, we can say with confidence that whatever fidelity is, it is much more intricate and complex than the shallow definition with which we have, in ostrich fashion, now prematurely satisfied ourselves. In our effort to define fidelity we have become unfaithful to the higher standard of moral perception and action to which Jesus sought to call the human community.

The 40th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy was grandly celebrated and widely reported by the media. This year also marked the 20th anniversary of another invasion, but this one was little noted. Few of its veterans returned either to celebrate or to relive the harsh experiences of the summer of 1964. Those who did were not besieged by representatives of the press. I was a small part of that exciting “Freedom Summer,” when hundreds of students, lawyers, teachers, doctors and clergy descended on Mississippi. “the last bastion of segregation.” My return exactly 20 years later, in August 1984, was even briefer: it was just a pass through the state on the way to deposit our youngest son (he wasn’t even born in 1964!) at his college in New Orleans and to see an old friend and comrade-in-arms in Greenville.

We entered Mississippi in broad daylight, traveling south from Memphis down U.S. 62. What a contrast to our night crossing at Vicksburg in August of ‘64. President Lyndon Johnson had spoken to the nation over radio and television about the Gulf of Tonkin incident near North Vietnam. As we were on the bridge over Old Man River, the announcement came that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had found the bodies of the three missing civil rights workers. I was traveling with my fellow pastor from a little town in upstate North Dakota. Roger Smith was Methodist, I Presbyterian. As far as we knew, we were the only two pastors from our state to take part in the Mississippi Project. Each of us, independently of the other, had responded to the mimeographed National Council of Churches’ letter appealing to the clergy to join the students and other professionals in voter registration work in “the most segregated state of the nation.”

Today the vast flat expanse of the delta cotton fields looks much the same as then. Gone, of course, was the feeling that we were traveling through enemy territory. No need now to phone ahead to our destination and, on arrival, to phone back to home base that we were safe. The green fields stretched for miles. Few houses of any size were visible as we raced along the straight highway, just clusters of dilapidated shacks. Now that machines had replaced hand pickers, many of the falling- down houses were vacant.

Hours after entering the state we passed the small hamlet of Winstonville. Here was located the headquarters of the COFO (Council of Federated Organizations, an alliance of several civil rights groups that sponsored the Mississippi Summer Project) for Bolivar County, where Roger and I had been assigned. We lived and worked at the Freedom Center in Shaw, a few miles down the road, but came to Winstonville several times for meetings with project director John Bradford. John was a young man with but a year or two of college -- very different from the dozens of highly educated, articulate white volunteers working under him, who often chafed at his direction. Roger and I sometimes served as buffers and interpreters between the critical white students and the frustrated black director. Today Winstonville is a small collection of houses barely discernible from the highway that curves around it.

U.S. 62 now bypasses Mound Bayou as well. I recall when the road led us right by the large brick church where we had once attended a freedom rally. Mound Bayou was the largest all-black community in the state in 1964. You didn’t need to fear the local police here. No one stood outside to take down the names of those who attended the night freedom rallies, as the civil rights meetings were called. We came up here, too, to mail letters which we did not want the Shaw postal people to open -- or when we thought we were being charged too much for our mailings, as we were once or twice.

A few more hot minutes past Mound Bayou and we were approaching Cleveland. But my thoughts turned to Ruleville as we waited for the light to change and I saw the sign pointing east to the seat of Sunflower County, home of that great lover of liberty, Senator James Eastland. It was also home to a genuine freedom fighter, Fannie Lou Hamer. We met her a number of times, this fiery orator who could fill a church with her contralto voice leading us in a freedom song or hymn. She was often in pain due to a back injury caused by a beating in jail. Her crime: speaking out against injustice and trying to use a bathroom at a bus station.

There was a cadence to her speech that lifted the spirits of the ragged people who risked so much to come to hear her. A few samples recorded in my journal: “If you see a preacher not standing up [for civil rights], there’s something wrong with him. . . . There’s something wrong with teachers who don’t teach citizenship and what it means. There’s something wrong about not knowing about the history of Negroes.” She could be funny in a barbed way, too: “When a preacher says he doesn’t want polities in his church, he’s telling a lie! The pictures on those bills you pay him are of presidents -- he sure doesn’t keep them out!”

We were at the outdoor party to celebrate the second year of the Freedom Movement in Ruleville the day that Hamer was served with an injunction by the sheriff. Long before the northern press was interested in covering the beatings of the black Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee workers, Charles McClaron had come to Ruleville to begin voter registration work. There were too many people and it was too hot to meet in the little church, so we ate our chicken outside. You could still see the scorched area above the church door where local whites had hurled a fire bomb. You could also see the cars slow as they passed, their white occupants scarcely believing that whites and blacks would eat and socialize together. The sheriffs injunction was an attempt to scare Hamer from running for the U.S. Senate and from challenging the segregated delegation at the Democratic Convention later that month. She read it and said, “it’s just a scrap of paper. It don’t scare me or anything. I’ll be in Atlantic City, even if I have to go by myself.”

We drove on by Cleveland. It was late and my wife and son were too hot and tired to make the side trip to see the courthouse where we had fruitlessly brought people to register to vote. One woman had been a schoolteacher with two years of college, yet she didn’t pass the same test that hundreds of semiliterate whites were eased through. And what courage it took for the registrants to brave the hate-filled stares and the insolence of the courthouse staff.

I wondered if the monument to the Confederate soldiers still stood, proclaiming that never had so noble a cause and nation risen so cleanly. There would be no statue of Amsie Moore, longtime National Association for the Advancement of Colored People leader who bravely carried the torch for justice. His Amoco station no longer stood by the highway -- the only place where we had been able to buy gasoline safely. He had been an eloquent speaker, lacing his speeches with quotations from the Gospels and I John about loving and praying for our enemies.

I wondered too what had happened to the white Presbyterian minister whom Roger and I had called on. He had many of the same books in his library as I, yet we were worlds apart. He knew of no poverty in his area nor of any wrongs committed. Polite to us, he nevertheless regarded us as outsiders, not fellow American Christians who could help each other. He urged us to tell the students to shave and bathe more often. We refrained from telling him how difficult maintaining one’s personal grooming was, when the only running water available for a square block was a pump in the backyard of the shack we slept in.

Fifteen minutes later we were at Shaw, our home base for the two weeks and a few days we had spent in Mississippi. This I couldn’t bypass, filled as I was with the memory of hot, nausea-producing (if you moved too fast) days filled with knocking on doors, talking with adults, and playing with and teaching children at the Freedom Center. The laundromat at the edge of town where we were bawled out by the owner was gone. I still have the slide Roger took showing the large “White” and “Colored” signs on each side. Downtown Shaw itself looked awful -- rundown and seedy. Only a few blacks were out on the sidewalk as we drove along the main street. It appeared so small now; surely it was not the home of 2,300 people! Back then, that street had seemed so long as we walked down it while trying to ignore the hostile stares of the whites who knew -- and disapproved of -- our reason for being in town.

I looked in vain for the library which “our” local youth had so proudly integrated. There was the railroad depot, however, where the white bus had stood, together with hordes of white, helmeted state troopers with their riot guns at the ready. I had cruised slowly down that same street 20 years ago to see how the three brave teenagers who had won the right to integrate the library were faring, since none of us outsiders could accompany them. Fear rode with me and my companions, for a large crowd of angry whites stood on one side of the road. Held back by sheriff’s deputies, they made it clear that they didn’t like what was happening. Even if black taxes also supported the facility, no “nigra” had ever entered it, except to clean up. We had called the FBI to inform them of the planned integration, and the Bureau in turn had notified the state and local authorities. All the chairs had been removed from the little storefront library, but the youths were allowed to take out the books they asked for, a small victory.

On our way back down the main street I saw the new library on the opposite side. It was still a storefront, but neat and well painted, in marked contrast to the faded appearance of most of the shops and stores in town. We passed the large Baptist church which we whites had attended one Sunday. No warm greetings or ‘‘Y’all come back” for us. Nor did we want to, so irrelevant and ‘‘spiritual’’ was the lifeless sermon.

The big white church faced the bayou that divided Shaw. Behind the row of fine homes on the other side was “Colored Town.” I was appalled at how dilapidated the area looked, despite a large sign proclaiming the renovations taking place. A closer look showed us that curbs had been put in. The open ditches that had served as a sewage system were gone. Even blacks could have sewers and indoor plumbing now, apparently. There were a few street lights. But the houses and the people seemed locked into a bygone era. Could this be the prosperous America that Ronald Reagan extols so often?

We felt like the outsiders that we were, so I didn’t take time to find the churches where we had met to sing freedom songs and make fervent speeches. No doubt the white policeman who had stood outside taking down names had long since been pensioned off. When the black audience recited, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow . . . ,” they meant it. When they chanted prayers asking to be delivered from the “terror by night and the arrow that flieth by day,” we all meant it. Those meetings -- so filled with joy and the hope of deliverance from Mr. Charlie -- and our daily work with the local blacks came as close to the church of the Book of Acts as I’ve ever been privileged to see. The people taught us so much about faith, hope and love.

We found the grocery where we often ate our breakfast of doughnuts and orange juice. I couldn’t be positive about the present identity of what had been our Freedom Center: a three-room house stuffed with library books, sports equipment, telephone (the only one in the black section) and mimeograph machine and a thousand posters and handbills. There we had talked with people, written reports and letters and kept in touch with the outside world.

We drove out of the black area, crossing the bayou bridge to head south again. Passing the cutoff that led to the settlement of Choctaw, I thought of our forays into the country to register people for the Freedom Democratic Party -- and of the fear that we felt each time a white-driven truck, rifle resting on the rear-window rack, had slowed down to look us over. We had been stopped by one irate white and warned to get moving. As he pulled away, the teens in my car got out to write down his license plate number so we could report the incident to the FBI. The driver saw the kids, screeched to a stop, and backed into a driveway, where he got stuck in the mud. The loud laughter of the teens didn’t help his temper, I’m sure -- though we didn’t wait around to find out.

Our day ended in Greenville. That night we dined with my companion of two decades ago, Roger Smith. Roger had returned to North Dakota for a year and then asked to be assigned to the staff of the Delta Ministry. He was now the only white person on the staff of the Delta Resources Committee, under the direction of native Mississippian Jean Phillips. This Greenville-based group provides emergency assistance, counseling, advocacy and other services for the poor blacks (and those whites who are beginning to see that they too are victims of an unjust system) of a large portion of the Mississippi Delta.

I’ve often wondered if all the work, beatings, bombings and deaths of that 1964 summer were worth it. The World War II veterans who returned to Normandy could be proud and satisfied that their invasion had ended in total victory over the most vicious system in human history. None of us Freedom Summer vets could make such a claim. We succeeded in registering only about 8,000 new voters that summer. Fannie Lou Hamer never made it to the Senate. And some of the people Roger and I knew have been killed. Life still looks much the same: blacks are at the bottom of society and maybe even worse off than before, since machines have taken over much of their work in the cotton fields. There is no longer a government in Washington that cares whether they live or die.

When Roger and I were preparing to leave Shaw 20 years ago an old man told us, “You know why the whites here hate you so? Because you all came down here and opened our eyes. Now we see that things don’t have to stay the same!” (Today they call this process “conscientization.”) Two elderly women thanked us as we came out of the church on our last night there. One said, “I’m old and won’t see the day of freedom. But my grandchild will.” That day still hasn’t come. But as Roger and Jean point out, there are now black mayors, council members and other county and state officials in Mississippi. We could enjoy our dinner together in one of Greenville’s finest restaurants -- whereas once, just a few miles away, we had nearly been attacked because an integrated group of us rode in the same car. Instead of the pitifully few thousand blacks registered to vote, there are now tens of thousands. And there will soon be more, if the Delta Resources Committee staff has anything to do with it.

No monuments or celebrations commemorate the 1964 invasion of Mississippi. Instead, there are dedicated people living and working here, resolved to carry on the way begun then -- and largely abandoned by the rest of the country. Maybe someday, when people can again sing, “We shall overcome” with integrity, there will be celebrations and speeches commemorating slain civil rights workers Andy Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney -- and all other who gave so much, yet received so much more from the quiet courage and faith of the people whom they had come to help.

Archives: Articles

Annie Dillard’s Fictions to Live By

C. S. Lewis: Natural Law, the Law in Our Hearts

Religion and the Moral Rhetoric of Presidential Politics

The Joke Is On Us (Matthew 13:31-33,44-52)

Reclaiming the City: A Church Stays Put

The “Highest Standards” of Clergy Morality

Looking Past Abortion Rhetoric

The Mississippi Freedom Summer Twenty Years Later

Taking the Bible on Its Own Terms

Hidden Dynamics Block Women’s Access to Pulpits