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Strategies of Global Development

Book Review

The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities of our Time. By Jeffrey D. Sachs. Penguin 397 pp.

 

Crisis books usually follow a predictable pattern: first a searing depiction of the problem at hand, then some broad and sweeping assessments of how great changes in attitude might begin to address the issue, and then some piddling and timid policy proposals that clearly won’t begin to meet the challenge. The authors are then charged with failing to provide solutions, and they in turn take refuge in the idea that at least they have diagnosed the problem.

Jeffrey Sachs does not fall into this rut, and as a result he has written a book of enormous rhetorical power. He convincingly presents world poverty as a manageable problem; indeed, he offers a plausible and very nearly painless plan for dealing with it, and all with an unruffled self-confidence that can’t help sweeping a reader up in his optimism. That optimism, as we shall see, may be somewhat misplaced; still, there is no denying that it is a psychological relief to encounter such a hopeful, simple prescription.

Indeed, prescription is the right word, for Sachs styles himself an aspiring "clinical economist" with the goal of diagnosing the causes of ailing economies just as his wife, a pediatrician, diagnoses illnesses of ailing infants. The book is presented in standard medical form, with an abstract of the problem at the outset, and then a series of case histories of patients (Bolivia, Poland, Russia and so on) that he and his team have carved up with varying degrees of success. The disease he concentrates on eliminating is "extreme poverty," whose sufferers he estimates at about a billion people concentrated in Africa and South Asia. These are our brothers and sisters subsisting on the equivalent of a dollar a day or less. Sachs initial goal, "the very hardest part of economic development," is to get this group a "first foothold on the ladder" of the modern economy.

"The end of poverty, in this sense, is not only the end of extreme suffering but also the beginning of economic progress and of the hope and security that accompany economic development." Once these people have reached "moderate poverty" -- average income between one and two dollars a day -- then the worst is over; as long as the rich countries do not "advertently or inadvertently set snares along the lower rungs" with protectionist trade barriers and the like, these people should make steady progress, "even if it is uneven and sometimes painfully slow." In any event, he points out (just like a pediatrician with a height-and-weight chart), we have a set of targets already in hand: the UN, with the rare approval of the United States, agreed in 2002 to the Millennium Development Goals, which call for the elimination of extreme poverty by 2025. It is to this task that Sachs sets himself not only in this book but also in his work as a special adviser to Kofi Annan and as director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute.

Sachs offers a short overview of development economics, explaining why some countries have grown rich in the past few centuries while others have barely groxvn at all. It was technological change, above all the discovery of how to use the energy concentrated in coal and oil, that led to the Industrial Revolution and subsequent boom. "The steam engine unlocked the mass production of goods and services on a scale beyond the wildest dreams of the preindustrial era. Some nations were better poised than others to take advantage of innovation -- England in particular, because it had a relatively open society with more scope for entrepreneurship; strong institutions of political liberty; a commitment to the scientific method exemplified by Newton; lots of seaports and colonies; a relative isolation that reduced the risk of invasion; and lots and lots of coal.

It is just such advantages, Sachs argues, that many of the world’s poorest countries do not enjoy. Many are hindered because they are mountainous or landlocked so their transportation costs are high; their corrupt or weak governments can’t maintain necessary infrastructure; and innovators lack patent protection and the capital necessary to bring their inventions to market. And so nations languish, even decline -- vulnerable in their poverty to scourges like AIDS that further hinder economic prospects.

It is not enough, Sachs argues, to preach "free markets" as the solution to such woes. Free markets are necessary but not sufficient. These countries need help in achieving what he considers the crucial first step: raising grain yields enough that farmers can move beyond subsistence to providing cheap food to support a growing urban economy, which is the real wellspring of prosperity. He offers Bangladesh as a case in point. The T-shirt factories that American activists have decried sweatshops may be grim, he says, but they are preferable to the poor rural villages their employees have left behind. "For these young women, these factories offer not only opportunities for personal freedom, but also the first rung on the ladder of rising skills and income for themselves and, within a few years, for their children."

For Sachs, Bangladeshi workers are akin to the immigrants who once worked on New York’s Lower East Side, "where their migration to toil in garment factories was a step on the path to a future of urban affluence in succeeding generations." Their fertility rate will drop as their condition and education improve; all in all, Bangladesh has a chance "in the next few years to put itself on a secure path of long-term economic growth" such as that now enjoyed by China and India.

The same transition could happen, Sachs insists, in the continent-sized poverty trap we know as Africa -- if only the rich world would help with a few essential ingredients. He identifies the "Big Five" development interventions that would spell the difference between a country characterized mostly by hunger, disease and death, and one characterized by health and economic development.

The Big Five are: agricultural inputs such as more fertilizer and better seed; investments in basic health to prevent malaria and treat AIDS; investments in education, such as providing meals at school to improve health and attendance; power, transport and communications services, including electricity for lights and computers at schools and for milling grain, as well as trucks and roads to provide transport to market; and safe drinking water and sanitation to save women the endless toil of fetching water. His calculations -- doubtless spuriously specific, but still indicative -- reveal that such basic needs could be met by transferring about 31 cents a day per extremely poor person from the rich nations -- a total of $124 billion, or 0.6 percent of the total income of the rich world. That’s not 6 percent -- that’s six-tenths of 1 percent.

This is obviously a trivial amount to us. As Sachs points out, "if the United States were on track to reach a $40,000 disposable annual income by, say, January 1, 2010, it would instead reach the same income on May 1, 2010, one-third of a year later. This four-month lag in attaining a higher level of consumption would mean that a billion people would be given an economic future of hope, health and improvement." Indeed you could pay for the U.S. share simply by repealing the Bush tax cuts for people making over $500,000 a year.

In the face of such compelling figures, the last few chapters of the book, which are devoted to proving in earnest but painful detail why we should make these investments, are almost superfluous. Certainly for Christians anyhow: I was hungry and you gave me 0.6 percent of your income. We should be very grateful for getting off so lightly.

Sachs’s plan should cheer not just soft-hearted liberals, but also every conservative with a conscience and a calculator: if this is the price for bringing the entire world into the ambit of the modern economic system, what argument could there be against it? None, really -- only a churl could read this book and say no.

Still, that endorsement doesn’t end the discussion. Yes, we should try much of what Sachs envisions; there is no doubt we must do something about extreme poverty, and his plan qualifies as something. But there are reasons to suspect that it won’t be as straightforward as he suggests -- and that some parts of his preferred path may even prove to be counterproductive.

Even if you accept Sachs’s basic premise -- that the developing world should, indeed must, develop along the same lines and with the same strategies as the West -- the process is never so easy in the real world as on paper. To his credit, Sachs is careful to explain that every situation is different; the clinician must scope out the conditions his patient presents instead of using the one-size-fits-all approach of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which is an approach that has failed at least as many times as it has worked. But Sachs has lost his own share of patients, though he stubbornly refuses to admit more than a few small miscues. He oversaw the early stages of the Russian transition to a market economy, for instance, and though he blames American stinginess for much of Russia’s trouble, and repeats with a little too much vehemence that he had stopped offering his counsel when the looting of that nation’s economy began in 1994, there’s little question that his advocacy of a lightning transition away from a static economy helped pave the way for the many abuses (and deep poverty) that have eroded hopes for the emergence of a relatively prosperous democracy.

Equally important, the neoclassical framework within which Sachs works leaves some things out. For instance, he pays next to no attention to the distribution of incomes within nations; the orthodox fixation on a country’s total GNP makes less and less sense in a world where disparities grow ever sharper. (Take a look at our own country.) The export-led economies he advocates exacerbate this division; the gamble is that it’s worth the cost, that a rising tide really will lift all boats high enough that they won’t be swamped by the wake from the giant yachts.

There’s another gamble too, which is that the planet can actually absorb, along Western lines, the continued development of its entire population. Lay aside for the moment conventional pollution -- the smog above Chinese cities -- which may well subside as these cities become more prosperous. Consider instead the ever-growing cloud of carbon dioxide pouring from China’s utilities as they power the nation’s industrial and consumer boom; all the computer modeling suggests that this is joining with America’s profligate over-consumption to quickly undermine the earth’s climatic stability.

One way of saying this is: Sachs understands pretty clearly what made America rich. But it’s not clear any more that the same set of steps will bring prosperity around the globe. Let’s take his example of a nation that is climbing out of poverty -- Bangladesh. Its economy has been growing at 5 percent a year because it became a production center for cheap textiles to export to the U.S. T-shirt sweatshops line the outskirts of Dhaka, and as Sachs says, they have to some degree emancipated some young women from a rural life of "chronic hunger and hardship in a domineering, patriarchal society." Eventually, he says, the country’s economy will move up a notch,, concentrating on, say, fubric design, even as the sweatshop labor moves to poorer areas. This is the basic prescription for poor countries that Sachs and others envision -- get most people out of rural areas and into the cities "because modern economic growth is accompanied first and foremost by urbanization."

And the key to this development, in turn, is to increase agricultural production -- mostly through Green Revolution -- style technologies -- so that "as food production per farmer rises, an economy needs fewer and fewer farmers to feed the overall population," a situation which ends up "inducing farmers and especially their children to seek employment in nonfarm activities." I recall that on one visit a government official handed me the World Hank’s Bangladesh 2020 report, which called for the country to convert more and more of its tiny farms to large, efficient, export-minded agribusinesses. In particular, it recommended pursuing the cut-flower industry -- growing bouquets for the Japanese market. Colombia was cited as the fortunate precedent.

Here’s a list of possible problems with that scenario. One, a ruthless global competition keeps factories cutting ever more corners in an effort to compete with labor pools like that of China. Indeed, this is what seems to be happening around the planet -- garment workers in places like Mexico or Guatemala or Honduras find themselves having somehow to match the wages of Chinese or Vietnamese or Laotian employees, not to mention the demand of Wal-Mart executives for ever-cheaper prices. That the race is more to the bottom than the top was perhaps illustrated a few weeks ago when a garment factory in Bangladesh collapsed, killing dozens of workers. Officials interviewed later said that even basic safety inspections were skirted because they ran up the price of production at a time when profits were already falling.

Two, the precise path ofendless industrial expansion that Sachs sees as salvation carries with it great ecological cost that will fall most heavily on those least able to deal with it. Bangladesh is a river delta, low to the ocean like many of the most densely inhabited parts of the tropics. As the planet warms, driven by Western excess and cascading Asian growth (China adds the equivalent of southern California’s electric grid annually), life may become increasingly untenable. The Ganges and the Brahma putra will find themselves crashing into a rising Bay of Bengal, and the resulting floods will swamp any effort at economic expansion. Already the country falls prey to new threats -- when I was last there a plague of mosquitoes was spreading dengue fever, relatively new to the country but estimated by the World Health Organization to he the great emergent disease of this century as growing warmth and moisture expand the range of Aedes egyptii, the mosquito in question. Having come down with dengue fever myself I can say with some conviction that this does not augur well for the future of Bangladeshi development. If Western industrialization is destabilizing the planet’s ecosystems, adding Eastern and Southern industrialization may not be the wisest plan.

If there were no other way out of the brutish conditions that Sachs describes, the gamble might be morally mandatory. There may, however, be other options -- options that Sachs pretty much ignores by patronizing antiglobalization activists as people with "the right moral fervor and ethical viewpoint" but "a knee-jerk antipathy to capitalism."

In fact, if he’d cast his net of acquaintances a bit wider than the officials he concurs with, he’d meet some interesting people. Bangladesh’s leading feminist, for instance -- a woman named Farida Akhter -- ran the nation’s antisterilization campaign. She spends much of her time working on stabilizing rural areas so that agribusiness doesn’t push waves of people to settle in the slums on the edge of Dhaka.

I asked her what the most important improvement for women’s lives in Bengal would be, and she said, "If we got away from the Green Revolution hybrid seeds, and went back to seed-saving." That, it turns out, had always been women’s work. The advent of hybridized rice varieties has eliminated women’s economic role in village life and opened the door to the domineering paternalism that Sachs believes is ancient and rooted in religion. I’ve seen villages in Bangladesh that have reverted to what we could call organic growing -- they have taken over zones the size of American counties. People there report being healthier; and credit the nutrients of vegetables and greens planted in land reserved for rice. They also report that their villages are working culturally; people want to stay on the land, sell food to local and regional markets, and maintain the structure of their lives.

You can find the same thing on a larger scale in India. Sachs spends plenty of pages saluting the emerging software industry. But if you want to see the most interesting development story on the subcontinent, head for the heavily rural southern state of Kerala, a state as populous as California. In terms of per capita income -- Sachs’s Favorite measurement -- it’s no richer than the rest of India, But in terms of life expectancy, literacy (including female literacy) and fertility, it compares favorably with parts of the U.S. The key there has been not export-driven agriculture but the opposite: the most thorough land reform in the world, reform that has given immense numbers of people the security of a small plot of land.

Increasingly agronomists like the UK’s Jules Pretty are demonstrating that yields are highest not on industrial-scale farms, but on five-acre and ten-acre spreads where intense concentration can be brought to bear on each square meter of cropland. Here human skill and attention compensate for the lack of high-priced and ecologically disruptive petroleum-based inputs. But development of the kind that Sachs foresees is often the clearest enemy of such projects; when nations decide to drain their country-sides and join the global economic system without reservation, communities are washed away in the flood.

Sachs’s confidence is his most appealing asset -- and it may well be what is needed to convince stingy Americans to make the incredibly modest contributions that really would wipe out the useless misery of malaria, of the two-mile trudge for water and firewood, of illiteracy. But his brashness also blinds him to the work that others are doing closer to the ground, where things are more complicated. I imagine there will be a sequel to this book in a decade, and I imagine it will be a little humbler.

Facing up to Global Warming

As I write these words, the season’s first named storm -- Alberto -- is developing in the Caribbean. We’re now in what everyone refers to as hurricane season, which is joining winter, spring, summer, autumn, Christmas and football as a fixture on the calendar. (It probably has a brighter future than winter.) A few years ago, words like these would have been scoffed at by most mainstream Americans, treated as the unlikely emanations of radical greens. (Trust me on that.) But within the past year or so the tide has turned. Katrina had something to do with that. So did Al Gore.

The success of Gore’s movie and book, An Inconvenient Truth, has consolidated public sentiment. Americans now understand, as Europeans and Japanese did a decade ago, that global warming is real and dangerous. The doubters have dwindled to an insignificant minority, lobbing increasingly erratic volleys from their Exxon-funded bunkers.

The reason, as Gore makes clear in his movie’s PowerPoint presentation, is that the scientific evidence is overwhelming. Burning fossil fuel = carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide = more trapped heat. More trapped heat = a world going increasingly berserk. Look at the pictures of melting glaciers, look at the charts for increased rainfall, look at the data on storminess.

Last year saw 27 named storms, breaking the old record of 21. Hurricanes appeared off the coasts of South America. Hurricane Wilma set a record for lowest barometric pressure recorded in our hemisphere. The year’s last hurricane, Zeta, formed on December 31, was still circling in the Atlantic on January 6. This is the way God used to deliver messages back in the not very subtle day of plagues and floods.

Gore is calm and precise -- if anything, he is conservative in his use of the data. He also uses PowerPoint better than almost anyone on the planet. The DVD should be required viewing for anyone putting together a presentation on climate change. (He does not put words on the screen and read them aloud, as if to slow first-graders.)

Gore begins with hero scientists like Roger Revelle, who first began to imagine the magnitude of this tragedy, and continues through the latest scientific findings, like last fall’s revelation that the ice over Greenland seems to be melting much faster than anyone had predicted -- news that carries potentially cataclysmic implications for the rate of sea-level rise.

The long prelude is over -- the nearly two decades when those of us who knew about global warming felt like prisoners in a bad dream, unable to convince anyone else that the bear was real, the poison deadly. As the strange reality-defying fog of the current administration finally lifts, global warming will become, as it is elsewhere, a political given -- something like crime or low test scores that every politician is pledged to fight. Their methods will differ (and those differences will be crucial), but the essential facts will be noncontroversial. It shouldn’t have taken us 20 years to reach this point (and it wouldn’t have, if the energy lobby hadn’t poisoned the waters of public debate with bogus research), but it’s cause for celebration that we’ve come this far.

In an odd way, it’s also cause for celebration that we’ve reached this point with only modest contributions from the realms of business and religion. That means that there are reserves unspent in two crucial institutions.

Like their European counterparts, American insurers have begun to signal that the core of their business (actuarial tables, which depend on the future behaving something like the past) are increasingly unreliable; meanwhile, investors have begun to understand that the next set of energy technologies, whatever they turn out to be, represent a money-making opportunity dwarfing even the Internet.

Just as interesting is the role Christianity has and hasn’t played in responding to this crisis. So far climate change hasn’t been a central concern of any faith communities, but that may be starting to change. Earlier this year, a group of leading evangelicals released a proclamation of sorts, saying global warming is real, is caused by humans and needs to be brought under control.

It wasn’t, on the face of it, all that much, and not as rhetorically strong as resolutions adopted by the mainline denominations years ago. But consider the circumstances: this was the first major issue on which important evangelical leaders had broken with the Republican right -- something that took real courage. In fact, the signers came under immediate attack from the tub-thumpers like Pat Robertson and Jerry FaIwell. But most -- including pastors like Rick Warren and a slew of seminary presidents -- held firm.

Such change doesn’t happen overnight, of course. In fact, many years of careful organizing and writing by men like Calvin DeWitt of the Au Sable Institute of Environmental Studies and Paul Gorman of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment had helped set the scene. Sir John Houghton, an evangelical scholar and scientist who played a key role in the international panels studying climate change, sealed the deal with a speech to a prayerful meeting that gathered quietly more than a year ago in a Maryland conference center.

Liberal church leaders were disposed to look kindly on environmental issues, and global warming joined the list. Liturgies have been written and Sunday school curricula developed. But none of the churches have taken any comparable step outside their comfort zones.

Indeed, much of what progress has been made has come from remarkable people working on the edges of their denominations -- among them Steve MacAusland and Sallie Bingham, who founded Episcopalian Power and Light, which now boasts many interfaith branches, and Fred Small, Unitarian architect of the fledgling Religious Witness for the Earth. Other small groups working on their own have come up with campaigns like ‘What Would Jesus Drive?" Indeed, there may have been more political action in the 1990s, when the NCC funded organizers in more than a dozen states. That effort has subsided, and though climate change remains on the overstretched agenda of the council’s talented Ecojustice Task Force, much of the heavy lifting is being done in avery few states like Oregon and Maine.

With its carefully woven cloak of doubt and controversy finally ripped away, the fossil fuel industry may soon be ready to cut a deal. The bar has been set so low by the current administration, however, that many environmentalists may be ready to settle for almost anything -- a lite version of the Kyoto treaty, say, such as the one proposed by Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman (which would doubtless have even more loopholes by the time it emerges from Congress). Such a deal would probably call for very modest reductions in the emission of carbon dioxide in the next 20 years, making sure that nothing upset the economy in any way.

The latest science mentioned by Gore -- and developed in far more depth in a series of remarkable recent speeches and articles by NASA’s chief climatologist James Hansen -- makes it clear that we can’t afford to delay dramatic action. Hansen’s assessment is simple: we need, as a planet, to be emitting less carbon dioxide inside of ten years -- an enormous task given that China and India are finally beginning to use power in appreciable quantities (and not for luxuries but for the second light bulb or first refrigerator in a house).

To give some sense of the scale: most scientists estimate that merely to hold climatic disruption at its current Katrina-spawning level we’d need an immediate worldwide 70 percent reduction in fossil fuel use. That is, we need an all out and truly radical commitment both to developing new energy sources and to changing behavior so we use far less. Not only hybrid cars (and no other kind) but also hybrid buses; not only solar panels but also new building codes demanding real insulation; not only biodiesel but also bike lanes. We’d need to change the tax laws so that carbon gets expensive fast, and then rebate the proceeds to reward the most efficient (and to make sure that poor people don’t get too badly hurt in the process).

None of this is impossible. Western Europeans use half as much energy per capita as Americans do, and not through different technologies but through different lifestyles and different policies. But none of this is easy.

It’s almost mandatory, I think, that the churches help lead the way. Mandatory because by now this is a theological issue. All the forces of nature that we used to call "acts of God" have become, at least in part, acts of humankind (excepting volcanoes and earthquakes -- though scientists this winter announced that lurching ice had more than doubled the number of earthquakes under Greenland). Go through the hymnal excising all the tunes that locate God’s majesty in the operations of nature and you’ll be left with half a book (and almost none of the songs people really like to sing).

Mandatory, too, because taking on climate change would mean taking on the central unchristian element of American culture: its wild individualism. More than anything else, fossil fuel has allowed us to stop being neighbors to each other, both literally -- we move ever farther into ever emptier suburbs -- and figuratively -- we depend less and less on each other for anything real. (The SUV, with its almost invariably single passenger, is the symbol of this trend.) This is what makes the politics of real change so difficult. Politicians are not willing to ask anyone to change. Not when three quarters of American Christians tell pollsters that they think the phrase "God helps those who help themselves" can be found in the Bible.

To break that spell, to wake us up to the love of neighbor demanded both by Jesus and by the physics and chemistry of our predicament. will take something shocking. The evangelicals delivered with their statement, and there are signs that they’re prepared to go farther. I’m not sure what a comparable gesture from the mainline would look like, but I have a hunch that it would resemble the civil rights movement. That is, church people in jail, arrested for protesting outside Environmental Protection Agency offices and coal-fired power plants. That is, churches demanding deep and dramatic changes from parishioners: walk to church or come on a bus, or in a car-pool at the very least. Most of all, since this is a mass problem that will be helped only by mass action, we need to make it clear that any politician whose plan doesn’t call for cutting carbon by half’ or more simply hasn’t understood the situation -- or has understood it and sold out.

The crisis we face is at least as morally urgent as the civil rights movement -- maybe even more so, since this is a ruthlessly timed test. Get the right answers fast, or don’t bother.

If we don’t get the right answers, the results are entirely predictable. Christian Aid estimated a couple of months ago that 184 million Africans could die this century from the effects of climate change. Half of all species could disappear.

On the other hand, if we even start to get the answers right, it will amount to a real revolution -- for the society but also for the church. Especially given the connection between climate change and poverty, this issue could bring together Christians of all stripes. The fuss over creationism seems mighty unimportant, for instance, when you stop to consider what a blasphemous decreation we’re engaged in.

The Case for Single-child Families

The building was nondescript; four stories of modern concrete just down the street from Ottawa’s Civic Hospital. The receptionist greeted me politely, told me the doctor was running a little late. And so I sat on the couch next to the old and dog-eared magazines and read one more time the list of questions Dr. Phil McGuire wanted his vasectomy patients to answer before he performed The Procedure:

"What would you and your partner feel if you were told tomorrow that she was pregnant? Joy? Despair? Resignation? What about in five years?

"Would you want the chance to have children with another partner if your current relationship ended through separation or death?

"Would you want to have the chance to have more children if one or more of your children died?

"Would more children be in your picture now if your financial circumstances improved significantly?"

These are tougher questions than you usually get asked in a doctor’s office. If you have heart disease, you have to choose what to do; it’s rare to have to choose, until the very end, whether you want to do anything at all. But I could have gotten up and left, no harm done. I have one child. I’d decided to have no more. But this seemed so final.

Then Dr. McGuire came in, wearing khakis, old Nikes, an earring, a plaid shirt. So far that day, he said, he’d done nine vasectomies, pruned branches of nine family trees. He was calm, gentle—sweet. "I had a couple this morning who’d had one child when they were in their 30s, spent the next ten years trying to have another, and failed. Now they were in their early 40s and just couldn’t conceive of conceiving again, so they wanted some insurance." He’d had a police officer, and a guy who builds Web pages, and several couples in their early 30s, each with two kids.

And he’d talked with all of them. "I try to protect people if I don’t think they’re ready," he said. "I’m a general practitioner and I’ve seen so many women come in who are unexpectedly pregnant, and completely delighted about it." But when people have made up their minds, he’s ready to help—he’s done 1,100 vasectomies, more and more each year. Someday I hope to have a clinic just devoted to vasectomies—a fish tank and all the hunting and fishing and outdoors magazines," he said.

I’d come to him because Ottawa is not far from my home, because I could afford him (he charged just over $200, less than most American operations), and because I could tell from his Web site (www.ottowavas.com) that he thought pretty deeply about the whole issue. He had a sense of humor (his toll-free number is 1-800-LASTKID), but he also had a sense of purpose. "Sometimes I turn people down," he said. "But it’s so much safer than having a woman get a tubal ligation, which is a big operation inside a major body cavity with general anaesthesia."

So I sat on the table and pulled my pants down around my ankles. He swabbed my scrotum with iodine ("The iodine needs to be a little warm—the last thing we want is any shrinkage before we start") and then injected a slug of anaesthetic into each side of my testicles. Yes, it was a needle down there, but no, it didn’t hurt much—by chance I’d spent the previous afternoon in the dentist’s chair, and this was much less painful. (And no flossing!) He cut a small hole in my scrotum, and with a forceps pulled out the vas deferens, the tube that carried sperm to my penis. Then he cauterized it and put it back inside, repeating the procedure on the other side. I could feel a little tugging, nothing more. The wound was so small it didn’t require stitches, or even a Band-Aid. For a few days, he said, my groin would be a little sore. After that it would take 20 ejaculations or so to drain the last of the sperm already in my system. And that would be that. In evolutionary terms, I’d be out of business.

Its easy for me to explain why I was lying on the table at the Ottawa Vasectomy Clinic: all I need is a string of statistics. In one recent study, condoms broke 4.8 percent of the time that they were used. Sixty percent of all pregnancies in the U.S. are unintended—60 percent. That doesn’t mean all those children are unwanted; half just come when their parents weren’t planning on it. But half end in abortion. In fact, six in ten women having abortions did so because their contraceptives failed; among typical couples, 18 percent using diaphragms and 12 percent using condoms managed to get pregnant. And no one’s doing much to improve the situation—a nation that spends $600 million developing new cosmetics and fragrances each year has exactly one pharmaceutical company still conducting research on improved methods of birth control. So if I was serious about stopping at one child, this was where I belonged. For my wife, Sue, getting sterilized would have meant a real operation, real risk; for me it meant a bag of ice on my lap as I drove home. It all added up.

Not that we’d come to our decision to have one child easily. Although my work on environmental issues keeps bringing population questions front and center, I have avoided the issue of population for years. I know that by 2050 there will be almost 50 percent more Americans (and nearly 100 percent more human beings) than there are now. I know that in the last ten or 20 or 30 years, our impact has grown so much that we’re changing even those places we don’t inhabit—changing the way the weather works, changing the plants and animals that live at the poles and deep in the jungle.

I am convinced, too, that simplifying lifestyles alone, although crucial, will not do enough to reduce our impact in the next 50 years. Americans’ lifestyles are just so "big." During the next decade India and China will each add to the planet about ten times as many people as the U.S., but the stress on the natural world by those new Americans may exceed that from the new Indians and Chinese combined. My five-year-old daughter has already used more stuff and added more waste to the environment than many of the world’s residents do in a lifetime.

When Sue and I faced the issue of how many children to have, these abstract issues of population became personal and practical. What about Sophie? Would being an only child damage her spirit and mind? I explored the myths surrounding "the only child," and the clichés about one child being spoiled and overly dependent. Although these questions are emotionally charged and complex, every bit of research in recent decades shows that only kids do just fine—that they achieve as much and are as well-adjusted as children with siblings. So that wasn’t the hitch.

Along with doing all the research, however, I had to confront the deeply ingrained sense in many of us that there’s something inherently selfish about not being willing to have children. It’s not as strong as the sense of selfishness that can attach itself to abortion, but it’s there nonetheless, and particularly strong, I think, in people of faith. It’s the relic of our long theological wrestle with the issue of birth control. And it is not easily dismissed. Condoms may not be sinful, but selfishness must be, if anything is. The children of small families are no more selfish than any other kids—but are the parents?

In a consumer society, where we’ve been drilled relentlessly in selfishness, it’s a peril to take seriously. In her book Beyond Motherhood, Jeanne Safer interviews dozens of men and women who have decided against children. I have no wish to judge them, for it’s often an honorable decision, and people should not bear children if they feel they can’t cope with them. On the other hand, I have no wish to become them. They are selfish, and proudly; one New York literary agent describes herself as "an advocate of selfishness." Safer says she herself felt her biological clock ticking, but heard other clocks as well:

My practice is just starting to take off—I’ll lose all the momentum if I cut back to part-time. That summer I thought, it’ll have to wait until after we get back from Bali and I’m no longer taking medication to prevent malaria. And what about the trip to Turkey we want to take next summer.

She was, she said, "particularly aware that children would change my marriage drastically.. . . Parenthood, I believed, would certainly spell the end of our nightly candlelit sandalwood-scented bubble baths complete with silly bath toys, where we played like children in a deliciously adult incarnation." Not only that, "I realized that having a child of my own would force me to spend a great deal of time doing things I’d disliked; I’d never been crazy about children’s birthday parties when I’d attended them years earlier, and a trip to the circus is my idea of purgatory."

Safer found many like-minded folk. Sandra Singer, for instance, a photographer who moonlights as a belly dancer to "guarantee her allure" and who insists that "I’ve seen too many women who have children lose their sexuality as well as their identity. They let their bodies go, and they complain about their husband’s sexual advances. I complain about the lack."

Safer reconciles herself to her decision not to have kids, and celebrates by giving her own belly-dancing performance. "Working through feelings about motherhood had unleashed hidden reserves of creativity and femininity, and I emerged liberated, energized and strong," she reports. In fact one night she dreams of a cantaloupe growing on a vine in her parents’ garden in the middle of winter: "The cantaloupe was myself, the fruit of my parents’ loins, which, though barren in the biological sense, was ripening out of season."

It’s wrong to ridicule such attitudes, at least in a culture that still assigns the work of raising kids mostly to women and allows men to continue their careers at full tilt. Sometimes people have to rescue themselves; in Toni Morrisons novel Solo, the heroine won’t marry or bear children in order to preserve her "Me-ness." When her grandmother wants her to have babies to "settle" her, Sula says, "I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself." Often it’s women from very poor backgrounds who decide to remain childless, realizing that it’s their best hope for upward mobility against strong odds; in a 1985 study of poor Southern high school students, the 16 percent who wanted no children were the ones with the loftiest ambitions, the ambitions that in other contexts we want such children to have.

But it’s also possible to understand the concern of popes and rabbis and just ordinary folk that, for some people, the decision to have no children or a small family represents a decision to indulge yourself without a thought for anyone else, a decision to take sandalwood-scented candlelit baths without the danger that there might be stray Legos left in the tub to poke you in the backside.

Theologian Gilbert Meilaender quotes one young man who says, "When you have children, the focus changes from the couple to the kids. Suddenly everything is done for them. Well, I’m 27, I’ve used up a good portion of my life already. Why should I want to sacrifice for someone who’s still got his whole life ahead of him?" Such an attitude is, among other things, environmentally problematic; even if this fellow has no kids, thereby sparing the planet some burden, he seems unlikely to do much else to ensure its future—he’s the same guy who’s going to be voting against gas taxes and demanding the right to drive his Suburban into the overheated sunset.

John Ryan, an American Catholic theologian of the first half of the 20th century, made this argument most powerfully. A man of impeccable progressive credentials, Ryan was known as "the Right Reverend New Dealer" for his unwavering support of the Roosevelt administration. But this same John Ryan also wanted everyone who married to have many children, not simply as proof that they weren’t using birth control but because he thought that raising large families makes people better human beings.

Ryan argued that supporting large families demands "forms of discipline necessary for the successful life," a life "accomplished only at the cost of continuous and considerable sacrifice, of compelling ourselves to do without the immediate and pleasant goods for the sake of remote and permanent goods." One of 11 children himself, Ryan thought that most people practicing birth control would be doing it from a "decadent" frame of mind; that bachelors were not building the kind of character necessary to contribute to the common good of society. Not only that, those with few children might become too wealthy, which was as dangerous as being too poor. In the words of ethicist John Berkman, "He was appealing to hard work, and building character, and he thought that was best achieved for most people in the context of having a large family."

This pragmatic argument comes straight from the American sense of purpose. And it is by no means a negligible or stupid argument: successfully raising a large brood of well-adjusted children is a great accomplishment, one that cannot help but change and deepen the parents. You emerge different people when you spend your life focusing, as good parents must, on someone else’s well-being. If maturity is the realization that you are not at the center of the world, then the most time-honored way to become mature is to be a parent many times over, and a good one. Not just because parenting is tough, but also because it’s so joyful, because it shows you that real transcendent pleasure comes from putting someone else first. It teaches you how dull self-absorption can be.

Such lessons don’t always take, of course. As essayist Katha Pollitt points out, the tendency to ascribe "particular virtues—compassion, patience, common sense, nonviolence—to mothers" is an overdone, and in some ways oppressive, cliché; telling yourself that toilet training a string of two-year-olds is good for your soul may keep you away from other worlds. And in a country where incredible numbers of fathers walk away from their kids, you could argue that fatherhood seems to barely dent the culture’s pervasive selfishness. And yet when I think of my circle of friends and acquaintances, the single most common route to maturity has been through raising children, often lots of them.

The problem, of course, is that now we live in an era—maybe only a brief one, maybe only for a few generations—when parenting a bunch of kids clashes with the good of the planet. So is there a different way to achieve some of that maturity, with no children or only a single child to change your life? It’s not that one kid won’t alter most things in your life; he or she will. But Ryan was right—it’s not the total commitment that comes with a large brood. Your career or a calling continues, however hobbled you may sometimes be. Alice Walker, in a pithy essay titled "One Child of One’s Own," called her single daughter a "meaningful digression," and that’s right in many ways; if she had borne five children, she probably wouldn’t have been writing many books. But those books represent a serious attempt at maturity in another way, and perhaps that’s a clue. We need to find ways to be adults, grownups, people who focus on others, without being parents of large families.

In the weeks leading up to the 1994 Cairo Conference on population, the pope led the fight against many of the provisions in the draft documents for that conclave. Though I disagreed with some of his stands, I found much of his language powerful and intriguing. The Catholic Church, he said, does not support "an ideology of fertility at all costs," but instead an ethic in which the decision "whether or not to have a child" is not "motivated by selfish or carelessness, but by a prudent, conscious generosity that weighs the possibilities and circumstances." True, he added that such an ethic "gives priority to the welfare of the unborn child," but several weeks later, arguing that radical individualism and "a sexuality apart from ethical references" was inhuman, he called for a "culture of responsible procreation."

In those words, and the words of many others, I think we can see the outline of an ethic that avoids self-indulgence yet does not deny the physical facts of a planet with 6 billion people who may soon nearly double their numbers—a planet that grows hotter, stormier and less stable by the day, a planet where huge swaths of God’s creation are being wiped out by the one species told to tend this particular garden. I don’t pretend it is an ethic that can be embraced by the Vatican, or the Hasidim; but I do think it is an ethic that might undergird a more sustainable world.

The beginning of Genesis contains the fateful command, repeated elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, to "be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth." That this was the first commandment gave it special priority. And it was biological, too, a command that echoed what our genes already shouted.

But there is something else unique about it—it is the first commandment we have fulfilled. There’s barely a habitable spot on the planet without a human being; in our lifetimes we’ve filled every inch of the planet with our presence. Everywhere the temperature climbs, the ultraviolet penetrates more deeply. In furthest Alaska, always our national metaphor for emptiness, the permafrost now melts at a rapid pace, trees move on to the tundra, insects infest forests in record numbers, and salmon turn back down streams because the water’s gotten too warm to spawn. "There’s been a permanent and significant climate regime shift," says an Alaskan scientist. "There has been nothing like this in the record." There’s not a creature anywhere on earth whose blood doesn’t show the presence of our chemicals, not an ocean that isn’t higher because of us. For better and for worse, we are everywhere. We can check this commandment off the list.

And we can check it off for happier reasons as well. There’s no denying that we’ve done great environmental damage, but it’s also true that we’ve spread wondrous and diverse cultures, full of love and song, across the wide earth. We should add a holiday to the calendar of every church to celebrate this achievement.

But when you check something off a list, you don’t just throw the list away. You look further down the list, see what comes next. And the list, of course, is long. The Gospels, the Torah, the Koran and a thousand other texts sacred and profane give us plenty of other goals toward which to divert some of the energy we’ve traditionally used in raising large families, goals on which we’ve barely begun. Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, comfort the oppressed; love your neighbor as yourself; heal the earth. We live on a planet where 3 billion people don’t have clean water, where species die by the score each day, where kids grow up without fathers, where violence overwhelms us, where people judge each other by the color of their skin, where a hypersexualized culture poisons the adolescence of girls, where old people and young people need each other’s support. And the energy freed by having smaller families may be some of the energy needed to take on these next challenges. To really take them on, not just to announce that they’re important, or to send a check, or to read an article, but to make them central to our lives.

I have one child; she is the light of my life; she makes me care far more about the future than I used to. And I have one child; so even after my work I have some time, money and energy left to do other things. I get to work on Adirondack conservation issues and assist those who are fighting global warming; I’ve helped my wife start a new school in our town; I can teach Sunday school and help run a nationwide effort to decommercialize Christmas and sit on the board of the local college. (And I belly dance too, though in my case it’s hiking, cross-country skiing, mountain biking.) If I had three kids, I would still do those things, but less of them; either that, or my work would come at their expense. As it is, once in a while I’m stretched too thin and don’t see Sophie for a day, and that reminds me to slowdown, to find the real center of my life. But I want to get further down that list.

So the pope strikes me as largely right in his reasoning if not his conclusions. Radical individualism is inhuman. Living as if you were the most important thing on earth is, literally, blasphemy; recreational sex may not bother me, but recreational life does. Our decisions should be motivated "not by selfishness or carelessness, but by a prudent conscious generosity." It’s just that at the end of the 20th century, on this planet, the signs of the times point me in the direction of the kinds of caring, the ways of maturing, that come with small, not large, families.

The church should not find that argument so foreign. Priests are celibate at least in part because it allows them to make Christ their bride, to devote all their energies to the other tasks set before us on this earth. And the wisdom of that argument is proved daily in a million places around the globe where committed priests and nuns take on the hardest and dirtiest challenges the earth has to offer. If we now have plenty of people to guarantee our survival as a race, and if lots more people may make that survival harder, then it’s time to follow the lead of those clerics a little—not to embrace celibacy necessarily, but to love your child to pieces, and with whatever you have left to start working your way down the list.

And the same logic should make it clear, of course, that all sorts of other kinds of people—childless gay people, infertile people, people who do not feel called to parenthood—can become every bit as mature (or immature) as a parent of six, as long as they can find some substitute discipline for repeatedly placing someone or something else at the center of their lives.

Sometimes those disciplines are quiet and private, sometimes public. In Allan Gurganus’s novel Plays Well with Others, his main character describes taking care of one friend after another as they succumbed to AIDS—describes the almost hydraulic outpouring of love it took to tend them. "My own loved ones were not brought into the world by me, but only, in my company, let out of it," he writes. His own obituary, he knows, will show that he left "no immediate survivors." "And yet I feel I’ve earned a family too." More so, of course, than many parents.

When she began studying the differences between pro-choice and pro-life advocates in the abortion dispute, Kristin Luker noticed something interesting. It was true that they differed over the morality of terminating pregnancy, but those differences were the product of other, more fundamental splits in their view of the world. They felt differently about God, about the role of women and, most interestingly, they felt very differently about the nature of planning.

Pro-choice activists, she observed, were almost obsessed with planning for their children, trying to give them "maximum parental guidance and every possible advantage," while parents active in the antiabortion movement "tend to be laissez-faire individualists in their attitude" toward child-rearing. "Pro-life people," she wrote, "believe that one becomes a parent by being a parent; parenthood is for them a ‘natural’ rather than a social role The values implied by the in-vogue term ‘parenting’ (as in parenting classes) are alien to them." One woman she interviewed said, "I think people are foolish to worry about things in the future. The future takes care of itself." Too much planning, including too much family planning, means "playing God."

One of my favorite magazines comes from a small Ohio town. Called Plain, it is edited (and its type hand-set) by "conservative" Quakers, which is to say a group of men and women who live more or less in the fashion of Old Order Amish. The magazine recently reprinted a dinner conversation about the subject of family planning. The participants, each of them the parent of four children, were discussing their unease with contraception, and in terms very reminiscent of Luker’s study:

Miriam: It breeds the mentality that "I want what I want, when I want."

Scott: It leads back to self-seeking, which eventually knows no bounds.

Marvin: Actually, it leads to a bottom-line refusal to accept God’s will for our lives.

Scott: I think that one of the things Mary Ann and I have learned along the way, and which has further separated us from the mainstream culture, is the realization that we can always make room for one more. Because the room to be made is in our hearts.

That way of seeing the world attracts me—there is in its spontaneity and confidence something of real beauty. It offers a kind of freedom. Not the freedom of unlimited options that we’ve come to idolize, but a freedom from constant worrying and fretting. Sometimes I hate the calculator instinct in me, the part of me that constantly weighs benefits and risks, the part that keeps me safe and solvent at the expense of experience. There is something incredibly attractive about the mystery of the next child, and the next; I’d love to meet them. I’d love to leave it to God, or to chance, or to biology, or to destiny, or to the wind. Part of me thinks that those conservative Quakers, those pro-lifers, are unequivocally right.

The trouble is, there are now other ways to play God in this world, and not planning is one of them.

This was not always the case. In the Book of Job, God appears as a taunting voice from the whirlwind: "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?" God asks Job. "Who shut up the sea with doors ... and said here shall thy proud waves be stayed?.. . Who has cleft a channel for the torrents of rain, and a way for the thunderbolt?" Job has no way to reply, and no need; the earth is infinitely bigger than he; how absurd he would look standing at the edge of the sea and trying to whistle up the waves. God—the world—was huge, and we were tiny. Creation dwarfed us.

But now there are so many of us, and we have done such a poor job of planning for our numbers, that for the first time we can answer God back. We can say: we set the boundaries of the ocean. If we keep heating the planet at our current pace, the seas will rise two feet in the next century. Every one foot will bring the water 90 feet further inland across the typical American beach, drowning wetland and marsh. It’s our lack of planning that changes the rainfall, that means more severe storms and worse flooding. It’s not an "act of God." It’s an act of us.

We no longer have the luxury of not planning; we’re simply too big. We dominate the earth. When people first headed west across the plains, they didn’t need a zoning board; now Californians try to channel and control growth lest they choke on it. In a crowded world, not planning has as many consequences as planning. This is a special time, and that turns everything on its head.

The Promised Land of Weight Loss:

Thirty-nine years ago the CHRISTIAN CENTURY printed a waggish but eloquent essay by William B. Mueller titled "Of Obesity and Election." An article so named today would likely be one more tiresome exposé of Bill Clinton’s struggle for girth control, but Mueller intended "election" to ring predestinarian bells as he reviewed the latest book by a then youthful Presbyterian minister, Charlie W. Shedd: Pray Your Weight Away (1957). As Mueller observed with due irony, Shedd had managed to blend the tone of a down-home preacher with the shrewdness of an entrepreneurial fitness broker in order to peddle the gospel of slimness, condemning portly bodies in the unequivocal lexicon of sin and guilt while touting born-again reduction through sustained and humble prayer.

Though Mueller winced at Shedd’s theology, he confessed its resonant power in his own life, remembering his weight-obsessed Presbyterian mother over whose dressing table hung portraits of John Calvin and fitness guru Bernarr Macfadden in paired consecration. Mrs. Mueller had apparently labored hard to instill fear of all things flabby in her young son, awakening him daily at 6 A.M. for strained carrot juice, a brisk jog around Baltimore’s Lake Ashburton and "a grueling order of calisthenics" before sending him, exhausted, off to school. Mueller’s wry commentary on these weighty matters, mixed with tenderness for his well-intentioned mother, doubtless prompted many readers to chuckle sympathetically, though I suspect more than a few paused long enough to order Shedd’s popular book for themselves.

Those who did obtain the book could reflect on what it really meant to pray their weight away by pondering such apparently irrefutable points as, "When God first dreamed you into creation, there weren’t one hundred pounds of excess avoirdupois hanging around your belt." Shedd, who claimed to have divested that much from his own body, recommended various treatments for successful slimming, including vocal mealtime affirmations such as: "Today my body belongs to God. Today I live for Him. Today I eat with Him." He also advised, as a useful time-saver, combining daily devotions with 15 minutes of calisthenics, and encouraged readers to follow his own regimen, which included executing karate kicks while reciting the third chapter of Proverbs and timing sit-ups to the spoken rhythm of Psalm 19. All the while, readers could emulate Shedd in imagining the mountain referred to in Matthew 17:20 as a mountain of flesh, able to be moved (i.e., lost) by the person of true faith. With a heavy dose of positive thinking to balance his rebuke of excess poundage, Shedd assured readers that beneath their bulk "there is a beautiful figure waiting to come forth. Peel off the layers, watch it emerge, and know the thrill which comes when you meet the real you."

Shedd and his readers could hardly have foreseen the impending explosion of Christian diet literature into a multimillion-dollar industry, one that rode the back of the American diet craze and capitalized on it by creating a message specially geared to the evangelical multitudes. Today the shelves of Christian bookstores bulge with material that makes Charlie Shedd look like a prophetic sage (even if he did recommend only a trifling 15 minutes of exercise per day) rather than an object of easy derision. However amusing William Mueller may have found Shedd’s dieting strategies, Shedd seems to have had the last laugh, judging from the millions of Americans who consume Christian fitness publications, sweat to the industry’s exercise regimes and otherwise venerate the gods of reduction.

I suspect many Christians are, as I am, puzzled if not troubled by recent developments in this industry. Perhaps it is time to try to assess the full scope of this movement and formulate a cogent theological response.

Since the 1950s American Christianity has seen the rise (and sometimes fall) of groups and concepts like Overeaters Victorious, Believercise, the Faithfully Fit Program, and the Love Hunger Action Plan. Episcopalian Deborah Pierce, transformed from a 210-pound object of campus ridicule to a "highfashion model" in Washington, composed I Prayed Myself Slim in 1960, followed seven years later by pastor Victor Kane’s Devotions for Dieters, a book that was reprinted in 1973 and again in 1976.

When Christian diet literature underwent its initial boom in the 1970s, Charlie Shedd again led the way: his 1972 book The Fat Is in Your Head remained on the national religious best-seller list for 23 months and sold more than 110,000 copies by 1976. Evangelist Frances Hunter produced God’s Answer to Fat in 1975, a top religious best seller that far exceeded even Shedd’s numbers, with 1977 sales figures nearly matching Charles Colson’s Born Again and the inspirational autobiography Joni. Other striking successes in this period include C. S. Lovett’s Help Lord—The Devil Wants Me Fat! (1977), Patricia Kreml’s Slim for Him (1978) and Neva Coyle’s Free to Be Thin (1979), which sold more than half a million copies and spawned a virtual industry of Coyle-authored diet products, including an exercise video and an inspirational low-calorie cookbook.

Along the way, women who had failed to lose weight on their own took a cue from the strategy of such commercial groups as TOPS (for Taking Off Pounds Sensibly, founded in 1949), Overeaters Anonymous (1960) and Weight Watchers (incorporated in 1963) and began seeking help from other struggling dieters, adding a biblical dimension to the program. The New York wife of a Presbyterian pastor, for instance, gave up the strict regimen of Weight Watchers in 1972 to form 3D (Diet, Discipline, Discipleship), advertised as "a Christian counterpart to national weight-watcher programs" and expanding to more than 5,000 churches and 100,000 participants by 1981. About the same time, 248-pound Neva Coyle from Minnesota, having failed at every commercial diet program she tried, turned to the Bible, lost 100 pounds, and founded Overeaters Victorious in 1977, which launched her successful career as a best-selling author and inspirational speaker.

This trend hardly faltered in the 1980s and ‘90s. The recent plethora of publications includes books on "spiritual discipline for weight control," "biblical principles that will improve your health" and achieving "greater health God’s way." More Christian diet groups have emerged and gone national, including Houston-based First Place (founded in 1981), with programs in nearly .5,000 churches across the country and in 13 other nations, and smaller programs like Jesus Is the Weigh.

Currently, the largest of these programs is the Tennessee-based Weigh Down Workshop (founded in 1986), a 12-week Bible study program that is now offered in as many as 10,000 churches in the U.S. and elsewhere. That program is likely to gain new ground with the recent release of founder Gwen Shamblin’s The Weigh Down Diet, stocked at both commercial and religious bookstores across the nation. Just as Christian exercise programs have taken the country by storm (in 1996 Sheri Chambers’s "Praise Aerobics" video immediately went gold, fast selling over 50,000 copies to compete numerically with the latest offerings from Bon Joy and Janet Jackson), Bible-based diet programs are expanding rapidly, with no ebb in sight.

Concern with weight and dieting is hardly the sole province of religious conservatives. Readers of theologian Mary Louise Bringle and church historian Roberta Bondi, both of whom have written moving accounts of their struggles with food, recognize that eating compulsions of every variety bedevil liberal Christians no less than their evangelical sisters and brothers. Awareness of this point, and of the extreme suffering that accompanies such compulsions, should make us sympathetic toward Christian weight-watching. Yet I suspect that more than a few churchpeople, conservative and liberal, continue to scorn those who relish the earnest, homespun approach of Charlie Shedd, Neva Coyle and Gwen Shamblin—those who pray feelingly about issues that may not seem to the rest of us to be on God’s top list of concerns.

We may well chortle at Coyle’s belief that God actually urges faithful dieters to abstain from fattening treats, or at Shamblin’s insistence that the deity "is too smart to let somebody like Weight Watchers or Jane Fonda be your savior and get all the credit" and so "will not let other diets work." How can we not smile at titles like Slim for Him? Yet hundreds of thousands of downhearted dieters look to this kind of devotional advice for redemption as assiduously as they have ever listened to Sunday sermons, and often with a great deal more desperation. While it is easy to find the comic in this genre, we ought not lose sight of the living people generating and responding anxiously to these titles and teachings; Mueller’s own humorous account was, after all, laced with regret for the diet prison in which his mother had trapped herself.

The tone of Christian diet writers themselves is usually one part ebullience and two parts anxiety. Shored up by relief at having successfully reduced proportional body fat, they remain haunted by dread that the pounds, the scorn and the self-hating misery may surge back at any time. Neva Coyle reached her peak size at the age of 28 and recounts in grueling detail the immense shame and loneliness that accompanied her obesity. Joan Cavanaugh, author of More of Jesus, Less of Me (1976), grew up a fat child who was ridiculed mercilessly by other children and so made the cookie cupboard her "altar." "It was my heart that was hungry," she explains achingly, "but all I could think to do was feed my face."

Jim Tear, coauthor with Jan Houghton Lindsey of Fed Up with Fat (1978), crested at a perilous 425 pounds and remembers: "I didn’t feel God’s love. I felt like a joke to Him. My fat had become such a fortress around me that even God couldn’t penetrate it with His love and help." This is not pollyannaish Shedd-talk, capitalizing on positive prayer as the latest cure-all for those unsightly bulges around the aging midriff. These are stories of serious despair and alienation, and perhaps of grace as well.

These and scores of similar stories ought to make us cringe at the ease with which Bible-based diet books (and the writers of them) are fodder for highbrow derision, as when B. Laurence Moore in Selling God cattily dismisses them as "merchandise in questionable taste" and lumps them indifferently with "love-making manuals" and "the Christian equivalent of Harlequin romances." Or when Os Guinness, in Fit Bodies, Fat Minds, skewers Christian dieting as the anti-intellectual concern of the "slim, svelte, and tanned...striking blond in her twenties" who is basically either too lazy or too dumb (in his view) to care about the life of the mind. Perhaps those who have never felt ashamed of their own bodies or feared that God saw them as a "joke" are disinclined to take such matters seriously. In any case, these poignant accounts merit compassion, not cheap shots. Even where the theology seems highly questionable in its trivialization of the gospel, drowning in bathos, the issues addressed deserve serious reflection. What does it mean to be embodied in a culture that celebrates both thinness and indulgence?

The mocking of these texts also highlights a persistent tendency, both within and outside of the church, to devalue what are viewed as "women’s issues." Not that Bible-based diet literature is a purely feminine genre. From Charlie Shedd to Victor Kane, C. S. Lovett, Harold Hill, Jim Tear, Edward Dumke, Charles Salter and Nathan Ware, men have contributed significantly to it and have addressed a reading audience of men as well as women. But an unmistakable difference separates the writings of male and female authors: far more women than men identify their food habits as "compulsions" and testify to the depression, loneliness and shame that accompany obesity. Men (with a few exceptions) focus less on the emotional dimensions of being overweight than on its detriments to physical health, stamina and vigor. Perhaps the intensity of the women’s testimonies, accounts of uncontrolled bingeing and self-hatred that terminate in divine surrender and ultimate triumph, prompts critics to judge them delusional and overwrought.

But the pain and humiliation at the heart of these stories signal a powerful despair that ought not to be trivialized, nor should writers simply be indicted for reinforcing the very standards of thinness that gave rise to that despair in the first place. Failing to take their stories seriously, to let them stir us to understanding, intensifies the marginality and shame articulated by their authors, male but especially female; whereas opening our ears to hear them ought to sharpen our attentiveness to that same pain in the churches and communities that surround us.

What marks the more recent literature as distinctive is not its concern with corporeal thinness and good health per se but the apparent willingness of authors to accept, ardently and without flinching, the somatic standards of the wider culture and convert them into divine decree. "Think of your ‘promised land’ as a thin body," writes one author. Another insists that God wants us aware that "sloppy fat, hanging all over the place (or even well girdled), is not a good Christian witness and is not healthy." Here and elsewhere, diet writers display rather too little critical reflection on the profaner sources of these assumptions, such as the modern commodified images of seduction that make an idol out of hungry-looking, sexualized beauty.

On the other hand, advocates of Bible-based dieting do caution each other to keep their eyes on the holy prize rather than focus too intently on the material rewards of slenderness offered by the secular world. Patricia Kreml, author of Slim for Him, warns her readers against vanity even while assuring them that they will become more beautiful via her regimen. "We don’t diet, lose weight, and firm our bodies just so we can look nice and get compliments. This will be a result of our efforts but not the main reason for them," she earnestly avers. "Our first reason has to be keeping our bodies under subjection that we might live the temperate, Christ-like life we are called to live." The body is God’s temple, these authors remind their readers, and the real aim of keeping it "under subjection"—thin, firm, disciplined—is not mere self-gratification but sacrificial obedience to God.

The severest critics of this genre target the assumed equation of fat with sin. An irate writer published an essay in Daughters of Sarah in 1989 assailing the "holy hucksters peddling diet books preaching that thinness is next to godliness and faith can remove mountains of you-know-what. The message, whether blatant or subtle, is that fat-is-sin-and-the-righteous-are-thin-amen." In her 1992 book The God of Thinness, Mary Louise Bringle similarly denounced the Christian diet industry for "feeding off the facile conflation of fat and sin (and forgetting that the traditional teachings of the church condemn consumptive behaviors but say nothing about cosmetic matters of body shape and size)." Both writers justly protest that this simple conflation is not only false but cruel, as well as hazardous to everyone’s spiritual and physical health. In Bringle’s succinct avowal, ‘Thinness is a false god. Fatness is a pseudo-sin."

However apt this indignation and however fruitful its alternative perspectives, these critiques do not seem to reflect a thorough scrutiny of the literature being censured. Christian diet books, brochures for Bible-based weight-loss programs, and evangelical women’s stories about their bodies do not articulate a uniform message. In fact, these sources present strikingly varied interpretations of the role that food and weight-watching play, or ought to play, in the Christian life. Whereas Shedd presumed that excess weight was the result of gluttony, pure and simple, recent writers have given a distinctly therapeutic spin to the varied reasons why people eat more than their bodies require.

The most commonly voiced predicament now is addiction rather than greed: one confesses no longer to being a penitent sinner but rather to being an acute "foodaholic," one whose compulsive eating is triggered by forces that were previously beyond one’s knowledge or control (whether chemical, demonic or a combination of the two). As Frances Hunter put it as early as 1975: "I want to tell you that I am a ‘foodaholic’ and I have always been and I will always be, but with God’s help, this foodaholic is going to let Jesus control her appetite from now on!" While this classic model of addiction may like the therapeutic sensibility underlying it, be of limited value, it has significantly nuanced, if not displaced, the fat-sin equation so often debunked by critics of evangelical diet literature.

One of the truisms of religious weight-loss books, consonant with the wider American diet industry, is that so-called "head hunger" (the desire to consume when there is no physiological urge for food) is in fact hunger of an expressly spiritual kind. As Shamblin puts it in The Weigh Down Diet, the purpose of a Christ-centered diet program is to "learn how to replace head hunger with the will of God so that you transfer this urge for a pan of brownies to that of hungering and thirsting after righteousness." Cavanaugh’s More of Jesus, Less of Me makes a similar point: "Those of us who hunger for more than we need, for more than is good for us, have another hunger: we have emotional problems that we have not exposed to the healing of our Lord Jesus. . .But there is good news: the Holy Spirit can heal these unnamed hungers." Taking this idea to its ultimate therapeutic conclusion, another author maintains, "Jesus went to the cross so that His people no longer need be the victims of compulsive acts."

The recognition of gluttony has not dropped out of the picture altogether, but a perceptible, if subtle, shift has taken place in its articulation. Authors increasingly stress not the carnal sign ("fat") but the concrete act or practice of excessive overeating. Writers today do not declare, with Shedd, "We fatties are the only people on earth who can weigh our sin." Instead they assert with the author of Health Begins in Him (1995), "If people who do not know Christ can walk in discipline and self-control, surely we as Christians can walk free from bondage to food." Or, as the author of What the Bible Says About Healthy Living (1996) puts it, "Don’t let any food or drink become your God."

The old fear that being overweight may be a hindrance to one’s Christian witness has by no means disappeared but has begun to be put in ostensibly more positive (and therefore more broadly appealing) terms. Rather than choosing between sinful-but-scrumptious indulgence on the one hand and godly-but-tiresome obedience on the other, the challenge is to select between enslavement to unwholesome and distasteful foods—bondage to Boston cream pie is one author’s illustration—and deliverance into the possibility of living a truly energetic, salubrious and meaningful existence. The problem in view is not fat but loving food more than God. And the cure begins not with denying the flesh but with revealing the deeper, spiritual needs that trigger anxious eating.

A more conspicuous development in this literature is its growing systematization: it includes charts and graphs and regular pretensions to "scientific" authority. Well into the early l98Os a few Christian diet writers aspired to anything more scientific than a crude theory of the tripartite person—spirit, soul and body, in Harold Hill’s formulation—intended to shed light on the distinctive appetites motivating human desire. By the 1990s, however, authors seemed to catch on to the idea that readers accustomed to secular diet books distributed by physicians would be more likely to buy a devotional fitness manual if it laid claim to medical science. So one finds—along with assertions about the authors’ dietary credentials—Weight Graphs, Habit Charts, Calorie Worksheets, Menu Planners and Food Journals in the back of books like The Joy of Eating Right (1993) and Thoroughly Fit (1993). Inspirational testimonials written by ordinary nonprofessional folks, largely homemakers, who resolved their weight problems through improvised devotional regimens of their own making now seem almost obsolete.

An exception is Shamblin’s down-to-earth Weigh Down Diet. Though a dietician, she abandoned the pseudo-scientific techniques of her peers—even calorie and fat-gram counting—in favor of the simple (and perhaps simplistic) principle that one should learn to eat when hungry and stop, even if midway through a candy bar, when full. Her careful approach, fortified with a keen awareness of just how difficult it can be to distinguish physical needs from vaguer but no less powerful emotional ones, also eschews the fraudulent claims and dangerous practices perpetuated by the "five-day miracle plan" style of American dieting.

At the same time, increasingly thoughtful attention has begun to be paid to syndromes like anorexia and bulimia. Evangelical fitness maven Stormie Omartian led the way (even while plugging her own diet and exercise plan) by addressing, in 1984 and again in 1993, the tyranny of contemporary body standards and noting that most dieters carry on a self-defeating battle with food and exercise that is "a prelude to the most intense feelings of failure." Exploring the pathology behind 20th-century eating disorders, Omartian’s books deplore the pressure on women in American society to be perfect and entreat readers to remember that success and happiness are dependent not upon looks or weight but only on God. "You must make up your mind to have respect, love, and appreciation for the body God gave you, no matter what shape it is in at this moment," she urges. Such a respectful, appreciative attitude toward one’s body remains rare, even, and perhaps especially, among the most disciplined Christians. Omartian’s own books display her model-thin body, making her plea for inclusive appreciation rather feeble.

This heady mix of theology, pseudo-science and therapy remains profoundly disturbing in its implications for "overweight" Christians, many of whom incur no health risks from their weight and are merely a few pounds over some impossible cultural ideal. Others, the clinically obese in particular, may suffer from glandular or other physiological causes unrelated to issues of overeating or spiritual discipline—an issue not commonly treated in this literature. There is no doubt that the message of the Christian diet and fitness industry may still work to perpetuate the most harmful stereotypes of those in our society who are heavier than the latest faddish norm, reinforcing the double jeopardy of being a "fat" Christian in America. Often enough it slides alarmingly close to depicting a God who loves a size six woman more than a size 16.

Yet there ought to be a clear distinction in our thinking between a critique of the effects of this genre, with its deceptive promises of liberation, and a more empathic inquiry into the writers and especially the readers of this literature, those searching for some kind of encouragement and relief that they have failed to find elsewhere. Given the pressures on all of us, women especially but also (and increasingly) men, to be thin and attractively "fit," it would be wise to view these writers and readers as simultaneous casualties, ambivalent promoters and intermittent resisters of these cultural pressures. In this respect, they are much like the rest of us. And it would be too cynical to conclude that everyone contributing to this body of work is simply out to exploit cultural obsessions for a fast buck. The narratives, often supplemented with corroborating photos, are too wrenching and the tales of childhood ridicule, adolescent exclusion and adult shame too authentic.

Southern fiction writer Clyde Edgerton managed, in his 1990 novel Killer Diller, to bestow a tender dignity on Christian dieters through the character of Phoebe, a 230-pound resident of the Nutrition House for Overweight Christians whose abundant size obstructs neither her vigorous self-respect nor her attainment of love. Yes, Phoebe is embedded deeply enough in the culture around her to want to lose weight, but she is a sparkling and animated young woman who mostly enjoys her life and refuses to be so controlled by her diet, or the social norms around her, that she won’t defiantly consume a bag of buttery popcorn now and then.

I have seen and interviewed a lot of women like that in my research on evangelical and charismatic Christian women—women who are concerned about their girth yet not to the point of hating themselves or losing their faith in a loving, gracious God. I have also observed many others whose obsession with weight has become a curse, an endless source of self-recrimination and spiritual insecurity. Despite all the determined efforts to maintain a triumphal optimism about the liberating possibilities of weight loss, the oppressiveness of fleshly disciplines may well prevail, as the command to love oneself, including the body, is contradicted and undermined by the directive to amend its defects and unceasingly refine its contours.

The empathy that I’m calling for certainly does not preclude critique of Christian diet and fitness books. My own feelings toward the genre remain ambivalent at best. I am persuaded, however, that recent programs like First Place and the Weigh Down Workshop are at least more sensible than their forebears. Whatever our final assessment, we ought to be able to separate the trivial and sometimes truly ridiculous from what is potentially worthwhile in this literature: the affirmation of embodiment, the recognition of suffering, the hopeful quest for healing and the special attentiveness to women’s lives and stories.

Against the Death Penalty: Christian Stance in a Secular World

Those rejecting the death penalty," social critic Ernest van den Haag once remarked. "have the burden of showing that no crime deserves capital punishment—a burden which they have not so far been willing to hear." This is a challenge to which opponents of capital punishment need to respond. In my experience, the most passionate calls for retention of the death penalty come from those who are certain of the inherent rightness of killing killers. And those who initially defend capital punishment as a deterrence to crime often respond to the conflicting evidence on this point by abandoning their utilitarian approach and asserting simply that killers deserve to be killed. Until this argument loses its force, capital punishment probably will continue to be regarded as a legitimate form of retribution, and executions will seem neither "cruel and unusual" nor in conflict with what the courts call "contemporary standards of decency."

Many who oppose the death penalty dismiss retributive justice in this context as merely an expression of revenge rather than a legitimate moral ideal. Christians may point out that the Old Testament law of an "eye for an eye" tried only to set human limits in a world of excessive punishments, and that the New Testament recommends Christlike acts of forgiveness rather than retribution. Such approaches may be exegetically correct and religiously instructive, but they do not address van den Haag’s complaint.

Do Christians really want to hand the concept of retribution over to the secularists or the vengeful? I think not. The wisdom of retributive justice is its insistence that the punishment must fit the crime. This approach does not explain why bad acts deserve punishment, but it is congruent with some intuitions we should be slow to give up—that the government should not imprison the innocent or those who nonvoluntarily or through no fault of their own cause injury to others, and that punishment must be proportionate. We would not imprison a petty thief for life when a mass murderer receives only a year.

The question is, can we hold on to these judgments and nevertheless answer van den Haag’s challenge? Can we say, in other words, that criminals deserve proportionate suffering but that no criminal deserves the death penalty? I think we can.

In making this argument I will assume that each of us has a fundamental moral obligation to respect the inherent worth of persons. This assumption is a good one for the Christians opposed to the death penalty to use in speaking to the secular world. It finds considerable affirmation in the Christian story of God’s relationship to humankind, and has strong, though not uncontested, support in secular realms. The principle of respect for persons is also usually accepted by retributivists who support the death penalty. My model of punishment will show the inadequacy of their position.

Two general rules follow from respect for persons. First, we cannot treat people as mere instruments to our survival, success or fulfillment. Second, we must value in each individual his or her distinctively human capacity for moral agency—the ability to assess situations rationally, to make judgments about what is right and wrong, and to act according to those judgments.

These two rules are of course closely connected. If for the sake of my entertainment I coerce someone into performing an act that threatens both of our lives, then I have both used her as an instrument of my own ends and denied her the opportunity to assess the situation and decide for herself whether to participate. In denying her this opportunity, I have failed to treat her as a moral agent. Moral agency, like any capacity, may be underdeveloped and poorly used; but when people act immorally, they are still moral agents in the sense intended here. Hence, even a wicked criminal deserves this fundamental respect.

What, then, is our reasoning for punishing a criminal? Why do bad acts deserve punishment instead of loving-kindness and pity for the errant soul? To answer these questions, let us consider some possible responses to wrong behavior. Imagine that I know someone who relishes telling my friends lies about me. I might refuse to confront or reprimand him, perhaps out of fear or pity, or because I do not consider the matter worth the trouble. Maybe I think I am taking the higher road and responding with loving-kindness. However, the net effect of my action is that I avoid treating him as a moral agent. Rebuking bad behavior is part of treating someone as the kind of being who can enter into moral debate, make decisions about right and wrong, and morally assess past behavior and future plans.

Generally, holding someone responsible for his or her actions takes the form of a reprimand. But if the harm done is severe, a verbal rebuke may not be enough; we may, in this case, decide to withdraw from the friendship or withhold our confidence. We try to do something that expresses the degree to which we have been hurt, thereby holding the friend responsible for the harm he has done.

In a similar way, crime can be considered as wrongdoing for which the government holds the wrongdoer responsible. By isolating the criminal from the community, society makes it clear that the person’s behavior will not be tolerated, impresses upon the offender just how wrong the community finds that behavior, and insists that the wrongdoer morally assess her actions. Punishment of this kind demonstrates a respect for the individual’s inherent worth as a moral agent. Thus, from our obligation to respect persons we can derive what I call the moral-accountability criterion of just punishment: punishment by the state is justified if and only if it serves the function of holding persons accountable. Punishment that fails to serve this function is unjustified.

While the theory of punishment I am proposing affirms the moral significance of proportionate punishment, it would nonetheless exclude forms of punishment which by their nature fail to hold the offender responsible. Holding an offender responsible necessarily includes demanding that she respond as only moral agents can: by re-evaluating her behavior. If the punishment meted out makes reflective response to it impossible, then it is not a demand for response as a moral agent.

Death is not a punishment to which reflective moral response is possible. A moral response to the certainty of death at sunrise is possible. But waiting to be executed is not the criminal’s punishment; death is. Death terminates the possibility of moral reform. We can believe that an executed prisoner responds as a moral agent after death only if we assume, as many Christians do, that there is conscious life for the individual after death. Such an assumption, however, is not only religious in nature, but is peculiar to certain religions and not others. A government committed to the separation of church and state cannot operate on such an assumption. Therefore, insofar as the state is concerned, death terminates conscious life and cannot be considered a punishment prompting the offender to respond as a moral agent. The death penalty therefore lacks an essential ingredient of just punishment.

The argument formulated here is for several reasons a useful one for Christians living in a secular world. The fundamental moral obligation it assumes—respect for people as moral agents—is compatible with but not dependent on specific Christian beliefs. Furthermore, it relies on the theory of retributive justice, popularly thought to justify capital punishment.

What if some Christians deny the value of the separation of church and state and argue that it is their religious duty to see that the state operates under the assumption that there is individual immortality? To argue successfully that murderers can deserve the death penalty, Christians of this persuasion would still have to argue that killing criminals successfully fulfills the function of punishment: holding the offender responsible. And to do this they must show that by killing offenders and assuming an afterlife, the community successfully allows the punished ones to respond to their punishment as moral agents. There are reasons for doubting that this is the case.

Though dead criminals can—according to this theory—make their response to God, they cannot make it to the community that punished them. Since they are not allowed to act out within the community either a will to reform or a defiant challenge to the community’s judgment, I question whether they have really been allowed the opportunity to respond in the requisite sense. Is a meaningful response possible if the realm offended, the human community, is not the realm in which the offender is allowed to respond? And is the act of holding someone accountable complete if the one who solicits the response cannot be the one who receives it? In leaving it to God to sustain the disembodied soul and make moral response possible, this approach in effect abandons the effort to inflict a punishment that makes a moral response possible.

Killing is not a coherent way for the community to solicit moral responses from those who have offended it. And since killing criminals is not a coherent way to solicit a moral response, it fails to hold offenders responsible. Thus, even though death is proportionate to death, killing killers violates the principle that justifies punishment in the first place.

Church and State: The Ramparts Besieged

Every now and then I feel the need to renew my spirit with a visit to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. The austere beauty of that classic estate is as soothing to the soul as to the eye, and well rewards a morning’s drive through the Virginia countryside.

On one such recent pilgrimage to Charlottesville, my route took me through Bull Run Park, the site of two major Civil War battles. It occurred to me as I drove that freedom’s battles were fought both in the calm of Monticello and in the tumult of Bull Run. Jefferson fought with words as his weapons and the armies fought with bullets—both striving mightily for human liberation. The outcome of each struggle was a new measure of liberty which marked another lurching step toward the promise of freedom Americans had made to themselves.

I wish those victories had been won forever, and the banished despots of mind and body would stay at their St. Helenas. But it seems that every generation must fight the battles of Monticello and Bull Run all over again. In the high-tech 1980s, Americans are called on anew to say No to ancient and recurring tyrannies.

Now, 200 years after Jefferson, the country is gripped in a battle for religious liberty. Through overt and covert means, political and religious leaders want to control religious impulses and reshape spiritual sensibilities. Agencies of the state want to define the church. Politicians want to dictate modes of prayer. Church leaders exhort the government to enforce a religious agenda, though this goal flouts the principle of religious liberty through separation of church and state (a principle which now sustains attacks as never before in this century).

Not long ago I addressed a group of pastors. In detailing some of our recent activities, I noted that Americans United had opposed the appointment of William Rehnquist as chief justice of the United States. One of the pastors, obviously disturbed, asked, "Why would you oppose Rehnquist?" He seemed unmoved and certainly unconvinced when I told him that Mr. Rehnquist has the worst record on church and state of any justice on the Supreme Court. Well before moving to the court’s central chair, Rehnquist had stated his position, dissenting in the 1985 school prayer case, Wallace v. Jaffree.

In that case Justice Rehnquist wrote that Alabama has the right to enforce government-sponsored prayer in public schools, and even to establish a state-sponsored church if it wants to—which questions the premise (based on the Fourteenth Amendment) that constitutional prohibitions on infringement of rights extend to the states. Rehnquist mounted a vigorous attack on the wall of church-state separation, saying that Jefferson’s metaphor was "useless" and should be "abandoned."

By promoting Rehnquist and nominating the archconservative Antonin Scalia to the court, President Reagan has turned the tables on religious and civil liberty advocates. Once fairly certain of a fair shake if their cases reached the high court, church-state separationists will now have to try harder. They need more cases and better cases to illustrate their points. And they need to engender public outcry: even Supreme Court justices care what they read about themselves in the newspapers.

The 1986 elections saw a renewal of religious/political campaigning. Many candidates, making their Christianity a prime qualification, calling for a return to Old Testament law, or promising to get "prayer back into the schools," secured major party (mostly Republican) support. Most voters rejected such efforts, and on the whole, candidates closely tied to the religious right did not fare well. But the religious right is rapidly gaining in political savvy, and its threat will grow. Dozens of lawmakers who lean heavily to the right are already firmly entrenched in Congress and will continue to assault the Jeffersonian wall that protects both church and state. This right-wing faction has promoted the school prayer amendment to the Constitution and similar initiatives to declare America a "Christian nation"; it is working intently to bring about a constitutional convention at which its representatives could propose curtailments of various freedoms, is drafting laws to confer official favor on specific religious establishments.

One example of the threats to religious liberty that have arisen in Congress is the current bill proposing a "voucher" system directing education funds to either public or private (including religious) schools. The administration, twice defeated on this issue, still seems determined to pursue it. The position of Americans United is that public funds should go to public schools. By law all children have the right to benefit from certain federal programs, but the voucher system—through which funds can be spent to benefit the school, not just the student—is both unconstitutional and poor public policy. To fund religious schools is to fund religious teaching. And to aid parochial and other private schools at the expense of the already beleaguered, underfunded public schools plunges the nation further into bankruptcy.

On other issues, such as the family, or "morality," for which it claims support, the Reagan administration has the worst record of any recent administration with regard to religious liberty. This unsatisfactory performance has been evident in three areas.

( 1) School prayer: Despite the over-whelming weight of constitutional scholarship opposing state-sponsored school prayer, President Reagan has made known his wish to "get prayer back in the schools" (though in point of fact it has never been expelled). He threw his weight behind the school prayer amendment, and even the defeat of that proposal has not made him reconsider.

(2) Parochial school aid: In addition to supporting a voucher system, the Reagan administration has been indefatigable in its desire to channel public money generally into private schools. It has proposed, at various times, tuition tax credits, tax deductions for private schooling, "bypasses" and other devices. Though these proposals are actually unconstitutional, the administration’s efforts continue on their behalf.

(3) Ambassador to the Holy See: The administration rejected various objections and forged ahead to appoint an ambassador to the Holy See, at the same time granting full diplomatic status to the pope’s envoy in the United States. A number of Protestant, Catholic and civil liberties groups challenged this special nod to one faith, declaring that such recognition jeopardizes the rights of other churches (and of individual Catholics) by creating a direct government link with the Vatican. So far the courts have turned aside the legal challenge on the technical grounds of standing, or the right to sue. Last December the Supreme Court rejected the case and spurned a bid for reconsideration.

Public schools have never been more reviled than they are today. Teachers are often painted as villainous "secular humanists," guilty of corrupting our youth. Certainly, the public schools are far from perfect; but public educators should not be asked to pick up the slack for parents who are too busy or otherwise unable to fulfill all of their children’s needs. It is poor education and even poorer religion to ask the public schools to become evangelists. Parents ought to take an interest in what is happening in their children’s classes. And they can work with the schools to foster the growth of morals and values—and patriotism. They can even urge the schools to talk about religious freedom and to discuss the role of religion in national life. But they should abjure religious indoctrination in the public schools. Despite the ambiguities, schools can teach religious freedom and discuss morality, while still rejecting the preaching of religion.

If the ominous portents concerning the Supreme Court hold true, the fight for religious liberty will take on added urgency at the state level. In some states a condition of de facto establishment of religion already exists. In Louisiana, for example, massive state aid to religious education is a way of life. And in 1986 proposals for church-school aid passed in South Dakota and Utah. The decreased chance of a sympathetic hearing at the Supreme Court calls for intensified vigilance to keep this condition from spreading. In Massachusetts, a campaign by church-state separationists was successful in convincing voters to defeat a proposal to allow tax support for private and religious schools; the vote was 70 per cent to 30 per cent. Most states’ constitutions include provisions for church-state separation that are actually stricter than those of the U.S. Constitution—but they are often violated.

Intractable as they are, all these problems are relatively clear-cut in comparison with the subtle attempts to read into the Constitution a mandate for a state-blessed civil religion. Many religious leaders, as well as public officials, talk of friendship between church and state, and claim that in charging the government to be neutral regarding religion the founders meant "neutral among different sects." Almost always, what these people mean is that the government should be neutral among Christian denominations, but should decidedly favor Christianity (or, in their more generous moments, they may refer to "Judeo-Christian" religions). In fact, the founders by no means envisioned such a system of church-state cooperation. The logical result of such proposals would be not a stronger church but an innocuous, bland religion. Religion has nothing to gain from a cozy relationship with the state that could cost it its independence and moral vigor.

Even more frighteningly, the nation has become besieged by zealots who wish to make one particular, exclusive form of Christianity the national faith. Electronic preachers who command the ears of millions rail against the "myth" of church-state separation. One of the most powerful of them, Pat Robertson, now in the midst of an as-yet-undeclared presidential campaign, has equated church-state separationists with communists and decries the "unelected tyrants" of the Supreme Court, encouraging defiance of its rulings.

Robertson’s religious beliefs, and those of others like him, are assuredly sincere. But so many clergy today seem to have forgotten their origins—theological, political and historical. They seem unable to remember, or to accept, that their freedom of religion also extends to all others—as pure freedom, not as the mere shadow of liberty we call "toleration."

It is to protect that freedom of belief (which of course includes the freedom not to believe) that the church-state battlelines are drawn today. The struggle promises to continue.

Marrying Well

Book Review:

The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier and Better off Financially

By Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher. Doublday, 256 pp.

 

Recently Time magazine published a cover article titled "Who Needs a Husband?" It chronicled, if not celebrated, the trend of women "flying solo" -- never getting married, and even learning to like their single state. The article reported that currently 40 percent of all adult females are single, up from 30 percent in 1960. In 1960, 83 percent of all women between 25 and 55 were married; today, that figure has dropped to 65 percent. Are women panicked by such statistics? Apparently not the women interviewed by Time.

These women say that they are enjoying their space, their freedom, their ability "to be themselves," their money, their travels, their friends and, indeed, sex with some of those friends. Many still want to marry, but only if the right man comes along. The Time article makes it seem that the majority of single women are living the life depicted in Sex and the City, HBO’s hit series about single women in the fast lane. The article’s portrait of single life is consistent with the recent report on singles from the Rutgers University National Marriage Project called "Sex without Strings, Relationships without Rings." The Time essay quotes Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, one of the report’s authors: "The reality is that marriage is now the interlude and singlehood the state of affairs.

Of all the reasons it gives for why women are marrying less, Time does not include one of the most common -- the belief, popularized 30 years ago by sociologist Jessie Bernard, that marriage is a bad deal for women. And it turns out this is one of those social science factoids that is being contradicted by new research, including that presented by sociologist Linda Waite and journalist Maggie Gallagher.

Waite broke ground on this subject in her 1995 presidential address before the Population Association of America, when she argued that marriage pays off in big ways. Married people live longer, are healthier, have fewer heart attacks and other diseases, have fewer problems with alcohol, behave in less risky ways, have more sex -- and more satisfying sex -- and become much more wealthy than single people. There was one exception to this rosy picture: cohabiting couples do have more frequent sex. But they enjoy it less.

And single women -- how do they fare? Not as well as Time implies. When one examines the big picture and the large data sets that sociologists love to analyze, married women come out far ahead of women who have never married or who are divorced. True, marriage is still slightly better for men than for women, but it is a much better deal for women than Jessie Bernard led people to believe.

Waite and Gallagher’s book is neither theological nor philosophical. It never defines marriage or traces its origins and development in Western society and thought. This is a book about data -- lots of it -- on the consequences of marriage.

Take health: mortality rates are 50 percent higher for unmarried women and 250 percent higher for unmarried men than they are for married women and men. Married surgical patients are less likely to die than the unmarried. Of men matched in every respect except marital status, nine out of ten married men who were alive at age 48 made it to 65; only six out of ten bachelors lived to the usual retirement age. Nine out of ten married women alive at age 45 made it to 65, while only eight of ten unmarried women did.

The selection effect -- that is, the likelihood that healthier people get married and less healthy people don’t -- explains some of the difference, but not all. According to Waite and Gallagher, the evidence shows that married people start practicing healthier lifestyles after they marry. "Researchers find that the married have lower death rates, even after taking initial health status into account. Even sick people who marry live longer than their counterparts who don’t." Marriage is also better for your health because married people take more responsibility for one another even than those who cohabit. They nag each other more, remind their partners of appointments and take care of each other when sick. Marriage also generally reduces stress and boosts the immune system.

What about sex? Many people believe that marriage dampens the sex life, and for some it doubtless does. But most married couples have much better sex and more of it than singles. According to a University of Chicago National Sex Survey, 43 percent of married men reported having sex at least twice a week, while only 1.26 percent of single men not cohabiting had sex that often. Single men were 20 times more likely to be celibate than married men. Familiarity does not dampen sexual ardor; indeed, Waite and Gallagher argue that marriage facilitates sexual activity. Sex is easier for married couples. Any single "act of sex costs them less in time, money and psychic energy. For the married, sex is more likely to happen because it is so easy to arrange and so compatible with the rest of their day to day life."

According to the survey, cohabiting men and women made love, on average, one more time per month than married couples. But cohabiting couples are less satisfied with their sex lives: 50 percent of married men and 42 percent of married women find sex physically and emotionally satisfying, while only 39 percent of cohabiting men and 39 percent of cohabiting women do.

The greater wealth of married people may be the most interesting set of statistics. After all, isn’t marriage expensive? Isn’t it true that many couples say they "can’t afford" to get married? And aren’t children expensive, robbing couples of the discretionary income that might be spent on fancy vacations or high-yield mutual funds?

Some singles may do better financially, but on the whole married couples accumulate more wealth. They invest in real estate more readily, they save for the future and of course they enjoy economies of scale. "On the day they married," write Waite and Gallagher, "Cathy made about $25,000 a year and Doug, $34,000. Marriage made them both instantly better off financially. Together they made almost double what each enjoyed previously, but now they only had to pay for one apartment, one utility bill, and they could split the labor needed to care for house and home." It takes only 1.5 times as much money to support two people living together as it would if they lived apart. Knowing this provides an additional temptation to cohabit. But cohabiting couples seldom accumulate wealth in the same way that married couples do. They are far more tentative about their relationship; less inclined to invest together in homes, stocks and furniture; and more likely to do such things as keep separate bank accounts and take separate vacations. On the verge of retirement, the typical married couple has accumulated a total of about $410,000 -- or $205,000 for each person -- as compared to $167,000 for the never married, $154,000 for the divorced, $151,000 for the widowed and just under $96,000 for the separated. Since married households accumulate far more than twice the amount of any other households, something more is happening here than the simple aggregation of individual earnings.

Here are some facts to consider: Wives are far less likely to be crime victims than single women. When all crimes are considered, single and divorced women are four to five times more likely to be victims. They are ten times more likely than wives to be victims of rape and three times more likely to be victims of aggravated assault. The national Crime Victimization Survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice reports that of all violent crimes against partners that occurred between 1979 and 1987, 65 percent were committed by boyfriends or ex-husbands. Husbands presently living with their wives committed 9 percent of these crimes. A redesigned study changed the statistics somewhat; 55 percent were committed by boyfriends, 31 percent by husbands and 14 percent by ex-husbands. Waite and Gallagher speculate that boyfriends and cohabiting men are more prone to violence because the two in such couples are less committed to each other and more isolated from wider social networks and controls.

The data show that good marriages also reduce violence between parents and children. The physical and sexual abuse of children is much higher in cohabiting families and stepfamilies. Boyfriends and stepfathers are far more likely to abuse the children of their girlfriends or wives than married husbands and biologically related fathers are likely to abuse their own children.

Waite and Gallagher’s book corrects many popular misunderstandings about the institution of marriage. On this score alone, we strongly recommend it. However, the book’s overall thesis is a bit unclear. It could be read to say this: if you want to be healthy, wealthy, safe and sexually satisfied, then it is prudent to marry. Philosophers will recognize this argument as a form of the "hypothetical imperative" -- an approach to ethics generally considered a weak reed for supporting commitments and obligations of any kind, let alone those connected with marriage. It might lead one to think something like this about marriage: "This relationship is supposed to yield big dividends, therefore I will try it. But if it doesn’t pay off as advertised, I will get out quickly."

Or the book’s message could be this: marriage as an institution entails public commitments not only between the husband and wife but also between them and their friends, extended families, the state and the church. Make this public commitment as a promise -- possibly even as a covenant or sacrament -- and these benefits are likely to follow from it. This may be true even if the benefits themselves were not what motivated these public promises and commitments in the first place.

Is the second message really what the authors have in mind? One clue may be found in some of the book’s chapter headings, which repeat the marriage vows from the Book of Common Prayer. Citing this language is a way for Waite and Gallagher to suggest the meaning that they believe many people have in mind when they get married. Marriage scholar Kenneth Stevenson calls the Book of Common Prayer’s ceremony the "Cadillac" of Western marriage rituals. It combines elements from ancient Judaism with a host of other ceremonies, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, that were developed over the centuries. There is little doubt that phrases such as "for richer for poorer," "in sickness and in health" and "with my body I thee worship" linger in people’s consciousness and help define marriage as an institution even for those who do not repeat these actual words when they tie the knot. These vows have become part of the "cultural capital" representing the hopes and aspirations of people of all beliefs.

Waite and Gallagher appear therefore to be working with some assumptions about the institution of marriage. But this institution did not just materialize out of thin air. It is a massive theological and historical accomplishment. Our marriage rituals took centuries to develop. When couples make a public commitment -- using these or similar vows -- it tends to transform their lives. They place themselves within the power and meaning of these affirmations about the institution of marriage. Yes, many material and measurable good things also often flow from this commitment. Waite and Gallagher show that, for the most part, when we say "for richer or poorer" it is likely to be for richer. When we say "in sickness and in health," it is likely to be more in health than sickness, at least when compared to the situation of the non-married, divorced and cohabiting. But the point of these vows is this: even if poor health and economic hardship come, the commitment should be sustained nonetheless.

Waite and Gallagher demonstrate that commitment to marriage as a public social institution provides couples support from a variety of social networks. However, by focusing primarily on empirically measurable goods, they come dangerously close to capitulating to a secular view of religious institutions. It almost seems as if synagogues and churches are alternative social-welfare institutions. This implied view obscures the formative role that these institutions have played and continue to play in crafting our understanding of marriage as a delicate mix of public and private, religious and secular obligations and benefits. From marriage as a covenant between two families in ancient Judaism, to the free consent of parties upheld in medieval Catholic canon law, to the Reformation’s emphasis on marriage as a public institution given by God for the mutual support of couples and their children, the historical understanding of marriage exhibits a range of both goods and obligations, social as well as personal, that cannot be reduced to measurable prudential advantages for individuals.

The languages of health and wealth certainly should not be excluded from churches’ reflections on marriage. The facts Waite and Gallagher record may seem prosaic and mundane when compared to the lofty ideals of self-sacrificial love, mutuality and spiritual union typically heralded by religious traditions, but they highlight an important dimension of "natural" human behavior, and they point out the goods that we properly seek to realize through such behavior. However, when churches and synagogues incorporate these social scientific viewpoints into their rhetoric about marriage, they must enrich and transform them by rooting them in deeper theological and philosophical ideas about the permanence of the marital bond, its significance as a spiritually and morally edifying force, and the religious meanings of love, fidelity, forgiveness and commitment. Marriage is simultaneously a public institution that serves individual and social welfare and an avenue through which human beings can live out their faithfulness to one another and to God.

Second, churches and faith traditions must resist the latent consumer model of marital love that lurks beneath the rational-choice language of contemporary social science. In cases where marriage doesn’t make us richer or happier, do we simply exchange it like a faulty product or, worse, seek other avenues to satisfy our preferences? Certainly not. Social science alone will never give us the language or the tools to discover the durable and meaningful core of marital commitment. Theological and philosophical languages must step in, providing the moral and religious foundations for discussion of marriage.

Finally, a robust discourse on marriage within faith communities can never eclipse a concern for single, divorced, separated and widowed people and for stepfamilies. Indeed, it is in part by listening and ministering to the unmarried, the formerly married, the unhappily married and the remarried that we can formulate an adequate response to urgent questions about the meaning of marriage.

Why, for instance, do Time’s interviewees treasure the "space" they have discovered in single life? Might this tell us something about a lingering patriarchy in our current marriage culture and the comparative lack of consideration given to women’s full professional, educational, emotional and spiritual flourishing? How can churches constructively address these issues and articulate a truly egalitarian marriage ethic? Why, to take another case, do hardworking and devoted people exit marriages that have become crippling? Do people’s reasons for divorce and singleness tell us something important about marriage today? Even more pressing, do they tell us something theologically about our need for grace, about the dynamics of suffering and healing and about the drama of divine faithfulness?

Churches must not only take these questions seriously; they must integrate them into their pastoral and theological vision. Listening to the variety of voices about marriage will help churches speak to all persons about its real meaning and articulate a compelling and inclusive ethic of marriage.

The Collapse of Marriage

Book Review Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. By Stephanie Coontz. Viking, 400 pp.

The central message of Stephanie Coontz’s history is that marriage is in big trouble. In fact, it is about to collapse, she says, and there is little anyone can do about it. The forces disestablishing marriage in Western societies are so overwhelming and intractable that all efforts to stop or slow the decline will appear moralistic and coercive to the general population. Therefore, Coontz would probably say, neither churches nor the marriage education movement nor the government should do much to try keep marriage from moving toward the margins of our personal and social lives.

Coontz starts with the refreshing acknowledgment that the message of her earlier books was wrong. In The Way We Never Were (1992) and The Way We Really Are (1997), she developed the familiar thesis that families are changing but not declining -- and that, furthermore, they are not changing nearly as radically as religions conservatives and the popular press would lead us to believe. There have always been lots of fatherless children (fathers have always died in wars and from illness and have frequently deserted their wives and children). Fathers in the past were mean to their children, and husbands often beat their wives. Mothers often died in childbirth, were overworked or were depressed because of the patriarchal men in their lives. Therefore, contemporary increases in the number of divorces, nonmarital births and fatherless children are just new wrinkles on perennial problems of life.

In Marriage, a History, Coontz announces that something new is happening that her first books did not take into account. The institution of marriage is in trouble after all. Marriage is no longer a central feature of modern life. In the future, fewer people will marry, more people who marry will divorce, more people who many will do so later in life, more people will cohabit, fewer people will have children, more people who have children will do so outside of marriage and more people will want to form informal unions of various kinds and experiment with reproductive technologies outside of either marriage or heterosexual unions.

Because of these trends, some commentators believe that marital sexual unions will become increasingly private matters. They argue that marriage should therefore be delegalized -- that is, it should lose its status as an institution that is of interest to the state and subject to its sanctions and protections. Proponents of this view believe that the state should take no interest in who is having sex with whom, no interest in what legal scholar Martha Fineman calls the "sexual family."

Coontz does not go that far, but she does think that marriage is being disestablished; it is coming to be only one among several ways to organize human sexuality. Marriage is becoming little more than an option -- a lifestyle choice like whether to drive a Ford or Chevrolet or whether to take a train or bus.

Why is this happening? Coontzs answer, which is both insightful and problematic, has to do with the triumph of love. For the first time in history, culture and social circumstance induce and permit people to get married for love.

For Coontz, love is a mixture of sexual gratification, interpersonal comfort and interpersonal fit. Modern people are now free to marry someone who is simultaneously a soul mate and an exciting sexual partner.

Coontz acknowledges that people in the past wanted both friendship and sex from their marital partner, but in reality it was necessity, economics, politics and the gaining of good in-laws that were the dominant motivators of marriage. Now women no longer marry to gain a breadwinner, nor do men marry to get a good cook and housekeeper. Nor do couples now choose each other to elevate their social status or to develop tribal and national alliances. They get married for love -- and love, Coontz claims, is a fragile reed on which to build a marriage. With love come disappointments, frustrations and failures. Hence, marriage will move to the sidelines of modern life. Love alone is the death of marriage.

This account is partly right and partly wrong. Coontz agrees, with good reason, with historians such as Edward Short, Carl Degler and Lawrence Stone that beginning about 200 years ago, with the rise of Enlightenment individualism and the forces of modernization and industrialization, couples increasingly had the freedom, social space and reinforcing cultural values to be both less financially dependent on each other and more self-regarding in their values. This made love and sexual satisfaction more central in shaping the reasons for marriage.

Coontz’s argument seems to work, however, only because she exaggerates the distinction between love and the economic, kinship and social-networking elements of marriage. In her narrative, marriage is either all necessity or all love. Many other modern interpreters of marriage have made the same mistake, and so have many people in American churches, who are tempted to join with Coontz and insist that couples get married for reasons of love alone, Economic, kinship and network issues and even the desire to have children are sometimes seen as contaminations of the purity of marital love. Churches often use the language of sacrament and covenant to bless and sanctify extremely narrow views of love that are not far from what Coontz describes. Such a view of marriage is neither good theology nor an accurate view of what marriage -- and marital love -- has been about.

However, there is a lot of information in this book that people should know. Coontz ranges widely over the cultures and societies of the world, discussing a great variety of marriage practices. She ranges so widely that there is at times a "gee whiz" quality to the book. She shows the difficulty of even defining marriage. If you think marriage has always entailed sexual fidelity between a husband and wife, think again. Eskimos share their spouses sexually, and their children often have warm feelings toward their parents’ lovers. Some Tibetan brothers in isolated mountain areas share the same wife, allegedly without jealousy. In Botswana cowives of polygamous men see each other as allies rather than competitors. Whereas Western wives often say, "A woman’s work is never done," in Botswana co-wives say, "Without cowives, a woman’s work is never done."

But Coontz tendency to search the cultures of the world for examples with which to shake up a provincial view of marriage misses the point. Many of these exotic practices are dead or on the defensive. The major question should be, How did the grand consensus come about that influenced the construction of marriage in Western democratic societies? Here Coontz’s analysis is informative but incomplete.

Her narrative of the development of marriage goes like this: Once upon a time in hunter-gatherer societies, relatively egalitarian unions between men and women formed that were generally procreative and unencumbered by property and structured hierarchies. In the move to agricultural sodcries, marriage became the vehicle for creating stable kinship groups that would control land and exchange goods.

For much of human history, then, marriage and kinship were ways to wealth, power and respectability. This was true to some extent even for the poor within the limits set by feudal landlords and slave owners. But for the rich and for royalty, it was true to the point of being an obsession. In a very interesting chapter, "Playing the Bishop, Capturing the Queen," Coontz is at her best as she chronicles the wild maneuvers of European royalty as they tried to protect their holdings and amass political power and fortune by arranging marriages with royal families of foreign provinces and nations.

Where Coontz falls short is in explaining the unique marriage system that began to take shape in Western societies between the 12th and 17th centuries. The continued uniqueness of this marriage system may have had something to do with the economic and political success of Western democracies. Of crucial importance is the fact that the Roman Catholic Church took a stand against political marriages that were arranged against the will of the couples involved. Catholic canon law declared that the mutual consent of the couple, rather than the will and manipulations of powerful parents, was the defining essence of marriage.

The church put polygamy on the defensive as well, especially among ruling elites. This helped to democratize marriage by making more women available to poorer men rather than allowing wealthy men to hoard females in their harems. Families became smaller and more companionate. Rather than women always marrying older men, the age of the husband and wife became closer, and marriages occurred later in life. After working for a few years outside the home, often as servants to other families, young couples formed their own households rather than returning to live with parents in family compounds or under the same roof. All of these shifts in the Western marriage and family system have been well documented over the last 40 years in the research of Cambridge University social historian Peter Laslett and his colleagues.

Although Coontz alludes to these shifts, she misses some of the crucial reasons they came about. Mainly she argues that they were the result of social-systemic changes such as emerging commercial life, early capitalism and nascent industrialization. Societies became more fluid, patriarchal families lost control and young people earned incomes beyond the parentally controlled farm or craft. All of this is indeed part of the story of the emergence of modern marriage in Western democracies, but Coontz downplays the role of religion in this radical and unique transformation.

Scholars such as Max Weber, Alan Macfarlane, Steven Ozment, Jack Goody and Laslett would all say that elements of Judaism, early Christianity, Roman Catholic canon law and the Protestant Reformation -- of both Luther and Calvin -- provided much of the religiocultural value system that fueled this revolution in marriage. Coontz gives scant attention to these sources. Furthermore, she gives no attention at all to Genesis 1 and 2, which informed the marriage traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In a book of 430 pages, the role of Judaism gets no discussion whatsoever, early Christianity receives little more than two pages, and Luther and the Protestant Reformation appear on a meager three pages. Augustine and Aquinas, two of the greatest theorists of both Christian and Western marriage, appear nowhere in the book. Peter Lombard, who crafted the crucial Catholic canon-law emphasis on marital consent, gets only a few words. Calvin, who extensively influenced the city of Geneva’s marriage law in both church and civil courts and subsequently the shape of marriage in Calvinist countries throughout the world, is not mentioned.

Building on the Catholic emphasis on the importance of free marital consent, Luther and Calvin developed further the covenantal understanding of marital commitment, elevated the status of women, emphasized the freedom of young adults to choose their partners, helped make marriage more compassionate and established marriage as a civic institution regulated by secular law yet also blessed and given meaning by the church. These beliefs and values interacted with early capitalism and the emergence of the nation-state to give us the Western marriage system that Laslett describes and most of us assume.

Although Coontz neglects the role of religion in shaping Western marriage, she is on to something when she says that reducing marriage to romantic love and sexual satisfaction will contribute to its near collapse, if not its death. The last chapters of her book document the present decline of marriage through the disconnection of childbirth and child-rearing from marriage, the rise of cohabitation, and the increase in single people living their lives and organizing their sexuality outside of publicly identifiable relationships, whether marital or nonmarital.

Coontz errs in overemphasizing the inevitability of her marriage scenario. Even today marriage has powerful social and economic dimensions. Economists and social scientists such as Gary Becker, Linda Waite, Steven Nock and Robert Michaels are uncovering once again the economic and health benefits of marriage and demonstrating what kinfolk such as grandparents, uncles and aunts contribute both to marriage and to the children born to marriages. They are also revealing what marriage contributes to the common good and explaining why, as both Luther and Calvin understood, it should be an interest of the state. We learn these things experientially when divorce contributes to the poverty of children and of mothers and when dual-income parents become frantic without the support of kin.

Many experts both within and outside of the church think that there is much we can do to help couples and modern societies learn to hold together genuine covenantal love (a much stronger concept than that of romantic love) with the economic, kinship, networking and child-rearing aspects of marriage. But such a cultural work requires focused effort by couples, religious institutions, the state, the law and our entire educational system.

Coontz is fatalistic in her predictions about the triumph of love at the expense of all the other goods of marriage. The great Christian theorists of marriage, such as Augustine, Aquinas and Luther, had multidimensional misunderstandings of those goods. Sacramental or covenantal love was central to marriage, but mutual helpfulness (the economic aspect of marriage), children, sexual exchange and the values of kinship were emphasized as well. The theorists developed a view of marital love that integrated these diverse goods and held them together. To accomplish this, love must be thick and strong. It must be sacramental and covenantal as well as interpersonal and communicative. Sacramental and covenantal love can include the romantic and the sexual, but the romantic and sexual alone are not large enough to encompass the sacramental and covenantal.

Christians should clarify their own understanding of marriage. They should not, in the name of love, reduce marriages to the thinness of what sociologist Anthony Giddens calls "pure relationships" -- that is, relationships of affection and sexual satisfaction unencumbered by work, children, the necessity of earning a living or the responsibility of contributing to the world outside the couple. The church can help the rest of society recapture a more muscular view of love as well. The first step would be a reconstruction of the history that has formed our marital traditions. We need to do this not only for the Western tradition but for the other major religiocultural traditions as well.

Besides undertaking this cultural retrieval, Americans need better socialization into the ways of marriage. The marriage education movement, both within and outside the church, is worthwhile. Couples in Western societies who are free to select each other without being limited by the dictates of parents and society and who are free to work out their life trajectories together must be able to communicate with respect and justice. Marriage communication is about more than just love and sex. It is about how to make a living, who will work when and where, whether to have children, who will care for the children, how to relate to in-laws, how to relate to the community and how to organize political commitments.

Marriage is work, and the reconstruction and revitalization of marriage will be a great cultural task. Coontz is right that couples can’t make it on their own in today’s society. Government, the market and the law need to support marriage. Because needy children deserve support no matter who raises them, the state, the business community and the law should support them wherever they are located -- whether with single, married, divorced, cohabiting, same-sex or foster parents. Christianity has never absolutized marriage. Nor has it ever said that marriage is a means to salvation. But it has always had a deep investment in marriage as a highly important good and in maintaining the integrity of the institution -- that is, the integration of covenant love with its other classic goods.

Neither the church nor society should accept Coontz’s account of marriage or her anemic response. She tells us to simply relax and accept the disestablishment of marriage while asking law and government to stand ready to pick up the pieces for children, women and even men as best they can. Both church and society should and can do more than this.

How Faith Shapes Fathers

Book Review:

Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands. By W Bradford Wilcox. University of Chicago Press, 337 pp., and paperback.

 

By exploring the contradictions between official theologies and the actual behavior of religious communities, sociologists of religion help religious people to view themselves more honestly -- a sometimes deflating and even painful process. Such may be our experience in reading W. Bradford Wilcox’s Soft Patriarchs, New Men, perhaps one of the most important studies of American religion to come along in recent decades.

Wilcox explores how American Protestantism shapes the behavior of husbands and fathers. He asks, "Does religion in general and Protestantism in particular oppose or support the emergence of the new father -- the father committed to egalitarianism in the home on issues of paid employment for both wife and husband, child care and domestic chores?" He defines the "new man" as the father and husband who supports his wife’s work outside of the home, spends time with the children, washes the dishes, attends Johnny’s soccer games, helps with the school work and brings home his share of the cash.

Who does a better job of being this new husband and father -- unaffiliated secular men, evangelicals who listen to the Promise Keepers or Focus on the Family, or liberal mainliners who attend older and well-established churches? Ask college students from elite schools that question, and they will probably say that most of the new fathers belong to the secular and unaffiliated group. Ask mainliners and they will say that liberal Protestant men are certainly better husbands and fathers than are the conservatives who follow the blatant patriarchy of a James Dobson or Jerry Falwell. Ask conservative Protestants and they may tell you that they are not sure that being a new father is a good thing. According to Wilcox, none of these answers is accurate.

A rising star in the sociology of religion, Wilcox thinks there is much to admire in the new fatherhood. But it is a complex phenomenon. And the sociological evidence shows that evangelical men are not the obstacles to the new manhood that many feminists, liberals and academics have thought.

Wilcox sets the entire discussion about religion and family within the context of the impact of modernization. Participants in the present conflict over families within American churches and denominations would do well to take the modernization factor more seriously than they have in recent debates.

Wilcox uses a widely accepted explanatory principle in sociology called the "family modernization perspective." This is a theoretical view of modem societies that attempts to explain why families become weaker and less important in advanced industrial societies. The increased differentiation of institutions and their autonomy from religion, the expansion of the power of the state, the higher rates of participation by both men and women in the wage economy, the increased delegation of family functions like education, leisure and food preparation to the market and the state -- all these trends weaken family functions. These developments "diminish the strength and authority of the family as an institution, thereby reducing the incentives and dependencies that once fostered high levels of commitment to and investment in the family"

The differences between conservative and mainline Protestants in family ideology and practices can be seen in how the two groups cope with the modernization process. This process is attuned to the needs of a technological society, in which gender differences increasingly are less important, functional equality for technical roles is more useful, cooperation and tolerance make the workplace more efficient, and sexual behavior and family life are less relevant to work life. Conservatives tend to resist the family modernization process; mainliners tend to accommodate it.

From 1970 to the present, mainline churches have officially been more tolerant than conservative churches of divorce, abortion, gender equality, family pluralism and homosexuality -- all changes in keeping with the family modernization process. Conservatives -- in spite of the fact that they are now better educated and wealthier than in the past, and have witnessed a significant increase in the number of religiously conservative women working outside the home -- still resist most of these changes on the ideological level.

So who are the heroes and heroines of this drama – the liberals supporting family modernization or the conservative resisting it? Is the mainline really serving justice and equality, or is it serving the functional demands and leveling universalism of a technologically driven market economy? Are conservative Protestants a bunch of patriarchal Neanderthal men and kitchen-bound, barefoot and pregnant women, or are they people courageously building a wall against the depersonalizing and family-destructive trends of modern societies addicted to efficiency and profit? One’s answer to these questions is influenced by one’s theological and philosophical critique of modernity.

Wilcox argues that this question is more difficult to answer than Protestant liberals might like to think. Here is his punch line: Protestant conservatives may be far more innovative in coping with modernity than most theological and religious liberals have believed. Furthermore, liberal Protestants may be more culturally conformist and have more difficulty living up to equality in family relations than they realize. Wilcox trots out a bucket of data to support these conclusions. He analyzes the statistics of three massive national surveys -- the National Survey of Families and Households, the Survey of Adults and Youth, and the General Social Survey.

Wilcox also is extremely perceptive about the role of theology, ideology and history in the shaping of religious identity and behavior. He tells the cultural story of how mainline and conservative Protestants came to respond so differently to the family modernization process. He reviews the amount of attention given to family, sexuality and justice in the liberal Christian Century and the conservative Christianity Today. Until recently, the Century has paid a lot more attention to justice and sexuality than to marriage and family, while Christianity Today has spilled much more ink on family, marriage and sexuality than on issues dealing with social justice. The two journals both reflect and shape the views of their readers.

Here is a fast review of some of Wilcox’s findings, all worth thinking about: Conservative Protestant men are more likely to believe in the principle of "male headship" than mainline and unaffiliated men, and they do less housework than men in either of these two groups. They also are inclined to spank their children a bit more, though liberal Protestant men do their fair share of that as well, especially if they are regular church attenders. But there are some surprises. On most other measures evangelical men do better. Conservative Protestant men are more engaged with their children, more affectionate and expressive toward them, more likely to praise and hug both their children and their wives, more likely to know their children’s whereabouts, and more likely to supervise their television time. The more active they are in church, the more likely they are to show these behaviors.

In short, mainline men may be a tad fairer about sharing housework, though they still do not share the load equally with their wives. But they are less affectionate with both wives and children and less inclined to praise and show gratitude to their wives for the contributions they make at home and in their paid employment. Evangelical women feel more appreciated and report more happiness with their marriages than mainline women do.

How does Wilcox explain this? He thinks fairness in work-sharing and decision-making is important; it is something women want. But it is not the only thing they want. Women also value affection and appreciation. University of Washington psychologist John Gottman provides insight into this issue. The central factor in good marital communication, according to Gottman’s research, is the amount of positive over negative affect that is expressed between couples. Gratitude means a lot, and it seems that evangelical women think they get more of it.

There is a big difference between men who are nominal Protestants, whether conservative or liberal, and those who actively and regularly attend church. Active liberal and active conservative Protestant men look very much alike. In short, liberal men who are active in their churches look more traditional than nominal Protestant men and are more traditional than the official gender and family ideologies of their denominations. There is a looser fit between the liberal ideology of the mainline Protestant churches and what their men actually think and do than there is between conservative Protestant family ideology and the behavior of conservative men.

But both active conservative and active liberal Protestant men exhibit more behaviors consistent with the ideal of the new man than do unaffilated men. Unaffiliated men are more likely to lack a positive devotion to the family, whether they are conservative or liberal. But this generalization is true only when paternal engagement, emotional expressiveness, warmth and praise are figured into the equation, Conservative Protestant men have a way to go in demonstrating fairness with their wives, who increasingly choose to be in the paid work force. But liberal Protestant men have a way to go in expressing warmth, being engaged with their children and showing gratitude to their wives.

Wilcox speculates about the future of fatherhood. He is not deterministic in his attitude toward the inevitability of the modernization process and what it means for the decline of the family, the increased marginalization of fathers and the growth in the number of divorces, single parents, out-of-wedlock births and nonmarried couples. The future will bring a variety of responses to modernity, he predicts. But the particular response of conservative Protestantism may contain more creativity, justice and health than the wider public has been led to think. Many conservative Protestant men are both soft patriarchs and, in their own way, new fathers. And many liberal men have some distance yet to travel before truly becoming new fathers.

This book deserves serious study by both conservative and liberal Protestants. Many of the tensions on family issues between these two groups could be ameliorated if leaders and lay people read and understood this excellent book.

The Revival of Practical Theology

As Don S. Browning notes below, several scholars are currently doing creative work in the area of practical theology. For this year’s theological education issue, we asked Dr. Browning, who is one of those scholars, to comment on his own research as well as that of others in the field. He has paid special attention to a book that has provoked considerable discussion in seminaries and divinity schools, Edward Farley's Theologia (Fortress, 1983), which received an initial Century review in the August 17-24, 1984 issue, p. 754.



The question of the fundamental integrity of theological education has been raised with new force in recent months, and what some theologians call practical theology” is being put forth as a possible new foundation for theological education. Although the phrase “practical theology” has been associated in recent decades with the least prestigious theological disciplines, there are several authors now trying to rehabilitate its meaning.

Thomas Ogletree, David Tracy, Dennis McCann and James Fowler have written groundbreaking articles on the subject in the recent book I edited titled Practical Theology: The Emerging Field in Theology, Church, and World (Harper & Row, 1983). John Westerhoff in his Building God’s People in a Materialistic Society (Seabury, 1983), after making the standard distinction between fundamental, systematic and practical theology, further differentiates practical theology into the liturgical, moral, spiritual, pastoral and catechetical. Although Thomas Groome in his widely celebrated Christian Religious Education (Harper & Row, 1980) does not actually use the term, he does in fact present a powerful practical theology of Christian education that constitutes the major reason for the book’s success. The idea of a practical theology of care is also set forth in my recent Religious Ethics and Pastoral Care (Fortress, 1983). And earlier stimulation to this discussion came from Evelyn and James Whitehead in their Method in Ministry (Seabury. 1980).

The liberation theologians in general can be understood as practical theologians, but to date few of them have addressed the issue of theological education. In Germany, under the leadership of Rolf Zerfass and Norbet Mette, there has been an important revival of practical theology But a very powerful recent statement pointing to its revival can he found in Edward Fancy’s recent book, Theologia: The Fragmentation and Unity of Theological Education

At first glance, one might think that Farley’s Theologia is a devastating critique of the possibility of practical theology. He is certainly critical of the traditional view of practical theology associated with the standard division of the theological disciplines in the Protestant encyclopedias. The encyclopedias arose in the 18th and 19th centuries; Schleiermacher’s Brief Outline of Theological Study (1811) is one of its more enlightened forerunners. This literature gave rise to the standard fourfold division of theological studies into Bible, church history, systematic theology and practical theology. At its best, practical theology in this model simply applied the results of exegetical, church historical and systematic theology to the concrete operations of church life or, more narrowly, to the activities of the clergy. At its worst, especially in more recent times, practical theology has been used as a catchphrase to refer to the practical training of candidates for the clergy -- a training or pedagogy largely divorced from theological foundations and dominated by assumptions, knowledge and technologies taken over from the social sciences.

In either of these expressions, practical theology has been seen as the problem of theological education rather than the solution. It has been seen more as the cause of fragmentation and incoherence than as the source from which the restoration of integrity might flow.

On the surface, practical theology certainly gets this kind of press in Farley’s Theologia. But at a deeper level, the entire book can be understood as a call for the rebirth of practical theology; i.e., as a making of theologia into a thoroughly critical and practical enterprise, effecting a renewal of both university theological studies and the seminary education of the clergy.



Great similarities exist among the authors writing about practical theology. In varying degrees, most of them want practical theology to become more critical and philosophical, more public (in the sense of being more oriented toward the church’s ministry to the world rather than simply preoccupied with the needs of its own internal life), and more related to an analysis of the various situations and contexts of theology. Most of these authors want practical theology to transcend what Farley aptly calls the “clerical Paradigm.” By this he means the tendency to center both practical theology and theological education on the skills that professional ministers need in order to run local congregations effectively. And most of them want practical theology to continue its close relation with the social sciences, but to do this in such a way as not to become overidentified with these secular disciplines. The social sciences -- psychology, sociology, economics and, increasingly, cultural anthropology -- are seen as crucial tools. But although practical theology must use them, it still retains the primary task of critically appropriating and testing its own sources: the central events, stories and themes of Judeo-Christian history.

Despite some of these broad similarities, there are also important differences among the major speakers in this emerging dialogue. There are disagreements about just how philosophical, public and dialectical practical theology should be. Here Tracy, McCann and I probably would want to go further than, for instance, Farley, Fowler or Westerhoff. There is also variance on the centrality of theological ethics for practical theology and, in addition, there are different ideas about how theological ethics should be conceived.

For instance, when Fowler and Westerhoff think about theological ethics, they tend to think in terms of an ethics of virtue or disposition, in contrast to a theological ethics emphasizing principle and procedure. This is especially true of Westerhoff, who is attracted to the theological ethics of Stanley Hauerwas, with its emphasis on how the Christian story functioning through Christian communities shapes the character and forms the virtue of the faithful. On the other hand, Tracy, McCann and I (and possibly Groome and Ogletree) would want to abstract from the Christian story a more philosophically identifiable set of principles and procedures which could be used in public debates over the common good. The Christian story would still inform and enrich these principles and procedures, but they would be stated and defended to people in our pluralistic society who do not necessarily begin with Christian presuppositions. Both principle and procedure (method) and virtue and disposition are important for these thinkers. But theological ethics as principle and procedure is crucial if practical theology is to equip the church to take a thoroughly critical role in public life.

Farley is actually somewhat difficult to pin down on this set of issues. On the whole, he seems to emphasize both sides of the discussion. He characterizes theologia as both a habitus and a dialectic. Under the rubric of habitus, he speaks of theology as both wisdom and science. It is also a paideia, an excellence of areté or virtue. Farley depicts theologia as being characterized by a certain objective cognition, as well as being a highly existential enterprise that shapes our lives and characters. This should be true for the theology taught in the university just as much as for the theology taught in the seminary. His heroes in this respect are Jewish scholars such as Abraham Heschel, Franz Rosenzweig, Jacob Neusner, Lou Silberman, Samuel Sandmel and Emil Fackenheim. As he writes, “The notion that specialized pursuit of scholarship would exclude the possibility of being a theological interpreter of Judaism would be utterly foreign to all of these figures.” Farley believes that not only Judaism but Christianity and the other major religions of the world should be taught in the university with this twofold attitude of criticism and appreciative interpretation; i.e., with both a hermeneutics of suspicion and a hermeneutics of restoration.

Under the rubric of Farley’s vision of theologia as dialectic, more of what I have called practical theology as procedure begins to emerge. (It is not clear, at least in Theologia, just where Fancy stands on the question of practical theology’s need for an ethics of principle.) In fact, it is precisely in Farley’s discussion of theologia as dialectic that one can see how Farley is trying both to bury the old practical theology of the fourfold pattern and to replace it with a practical theology of an entirely different kind.

Theology as dialectic is what turns Farley’s recommendations about theologia into a truly practical theology. The dialectical aspect of theologia involves several different steps or procedures. Something similar to these procedures can be found in Groome’s five movements, the Whiteheads’ four aspects of method, or my four steps of practical theological thinking. First, Farley points to the primacy of the situation, interpreted, to be sure, both from the perspective of faith and from the perspective of the relevant social science disciplines. Second, he denies the normativeness of the existing situation or, as I take it, the various autonomous and distorted cultural interpretations of the situation.

Third, Fancy applies a similar hermeneutic of suspicion to the tradition, in an effort to cleanse it of its distortions and ideologies. Fourth, a more restorative moment occurs when the truth, reality and normativeness of the tradition are discerned. The final stage is a return to the situation to give it a more theonomous interpretation from the perspective of the central themes of the tradition, especially the symbol of the Kingdom of God. These five aspects of theologia as dialectic are a step in the direction of going beyond practical theology as habitus and paideia (and their leanings toward an ethics of character), and toward practical theology as procedure.

In a more recent unpublished document, Farley has much more directly addressed the issue of practical theology. He points out that from its early usage in Catholic theology, where it was strongly associated with moral theology, the concept gradually underwent a series of narrowings in Protestant circles -- first, to the idea that it dealt with the theology of the church’s activities; second, to the idea that it dealt primarily with the theology of the cleric’s activities as leader of the church. In both of these strictures, the role of theological ethics or moral theology in practical theology was minimized, and the idea that practical theology dealt with the church’s attempt to influence the order of the public world subsided. In the old fourfold model, practical theology was confessional, applicational, parochial and clerical. It lost its dialectical relation with situations and contexts, and thereby diluted the church’s mission to the world. It failed to provide the church with a genuine practical theology for the laity. And it isolated the specific regions of practical theology -- pastoral care, religious education, homiletics, liturgics, etc.--from both fundamental and systematic theology on the one hand and critical engagement with world situations on the other.

It should not be thought, however, that Parley, in his efforts to liberate theologia from its captivity to the clerical paradigm, is uninterested in making it relevant to ministerial education. In depicting theologia as more practical than is generally thought to be the case, he is simultaneously making it more relevant to clerical education and not allowing it to be exhausted by those demands. He is simply interested in bringing theologia as a practical enterprise into all the traditional regions of practical theology -- education, care, worship, preaching, spirituality, etc. Educators, counselors, preachers and liturgists must always and everywhere, time and time again, re-establish the critical theological grounds of their ministries just as they must, time and time again, listen to and re-establish a theological interpretation of the situations which they address. One does get the impression, however, that if Farley had his way, there would be in many of our seminaries much less preoccupation with education for the professional tasks of the clergy and much more concern with learning how to discern theologically the meaning of “ecclesial presence” in the various situations of life in the world. This task, Parley would claim, can be done in the seminary, can even occur with laypeople, but also can be accomplished in departments of religion in secular colleges and universities.

 



Farley has accomplished much in his thoughtful book and in other writings on theological education. He has made theologia simultaneously more praxis-oriented and more appropriate for the university and college classroom. If we followed Farley’s suggestions, education for the tasks of the professional clergy would have more theological integrity and theology could be taught as a respectable university discipline. In addition, if seminary education were informed more by theologia as he conceives it, ministers would be better equipped not only to run their churches but to relate them to the major issues being debated in the public realm.

Farley’s book should be seen as a major step in the direction of rehabilitating practical theology. It will not be the last word, nor does he present it as such. But one sometimes wonders if Farley fully realizes how far we must yet travel before we arrive at a thoroughly practical theology critical and philosophical enough to fit in the university and fine-tuned enough actually to give direction to the church’s ministries in the public world.

In brief, I would like to see Farley do more with what I have been calling practical theology as procedure. I fear that much of what he has said about theologia as habitus and paideia will be absorbed by many readers into the current widespread interest in a theological ethics of virtue, character and disposition. Not that this emphasis is wrong. but it is not enough. Good people, even good people living out of the same story, can come up with vastly different judgments on the major issues being debated in the public world. A practical theology of virtue and character must be supplemented and supported by a practical theology of procedure and one, I believe, that also builds an important role for ethical principles in theological reflection.

Farley attempts to refine, in the last sections of his book, what he means by the dialectic of theologia. There he goes further than at any other place in building a central role for theological ethics in his understanding of theologia and practical theology. Theologia is fundamentally a matter of appraisal. He writes:

The life of theologia is a dialectic of interpretation impelled by faith and its mythos occurring in and toward life’s settings. It is faith’s way of self-consciously and critically existing in the world. It has, accordingly, the general character of appraisal. . . . All theological education, the paideia of the community of faith, be it for church leader or believer, is centrally an education in theologia as an appraising, assessing activity [p. 186].

 

But Farley’s account of the dimensions of appraisal is still relatively molar and seems not to be fine-tuned enough to carry the church very far into the dialogues and conversations of the public world. Appraisal, he tells us, involves discerning (1) the ontological features of the human, especially in its relation to the divine, (2) what is “enduring, true and real” about the tradition, (3) what this truth implies for concrete “choices, styles, patterns and obligations” of life, and (4) the connection between these different levels of truth in the tradition and concrete situations that we confront in our everyday life.

All of this takes theologia very decisively into the realm of theological ethics, and into its method and procedure. It is clear that although his emphasis includes, it also goes beyond, an ethics of virtue or disposition. It is also clear that Farley wants theological ethics to be part of a larger description of the essential features of the church. But even if this is true, I still want more clarity about the nature of practical moral thinking than Farley seems interested in discussing.

 



In some of my own recent writings. I have argued that practical theology can and should be the center of theological studies (both in the seminary and the university) and that this practical theology needs a clear understanding of the nature of practical moral thinking (practical reason). I also have argued that it should go beyond the clerical paradigm, although, as Farley argues, it should still be able to include it. I have argued that there should be both an ecclesial and a public expression of each of the traditional regions of practical theology.

But to make theology genuinely practical and able to address issues in the public world, I have thought that a far more rigorous method or procedure of practical moral reflection is required than is called for, not only by Farley, but by most of the other writers working for the renewal of practical theology. In an effort to help establish such a method, I have introduced the idea of levels of practical moral reason. It has seemed to me that practical moral reason has (1) a metaphorical level, (2) an obligational level, (3) a tendency-need level, (4) a contextual or situational level and (5) a rule-role level.

The metaphorical level is the most explicitly religious level and refers to the metaphors and stories we use to represent the ultimate context of our experience. Embedded in these metaphors and stories, but often somewhat independent, are rather general principles of obligations. In Christianity, the principles of agape and justice generally are thought to be the preferred principles of obligation. The fact that these principles have such great similarity to principles of obligation found in other religions and philosophies has led many theologians to believe that what is unique about Christian principles of obligation is not so much their context as the particular view of the world that follows from the metaphors and stories which surround them and which are found in the Christian drama. This simple observation suggests the usefulness of seeing at least a partial autonomy between the preferred metaphors of the Christian faith (for instance, the metaphors of creator, governor and redeemer applied to God) and its preferred principles of obligation.

When correctly understood, these principles of obligation help Christians discern what they should do and lead them in both actualizing and mediating between various tendencies and needs (the third level) which Christians believe are essential for human existence. Even important human needs can conflict with one another, not only within an individual but also between individuals and groups. It is also known to Christian theology that humans tend to make stronger claims for their own needs than they do for their neighbors’. But it is precisely the task of our Christian principles of obligation both to actualize lovingly and to mediate justly between these overstated and conflicting needs. But however this goes, it is clear that even a religiously informed practical reason must have some theory, knowledge or intuition about these needs if it is to serve the purposes of a practical theology

Fourth, practical reason must have some knowledge of the contexts and situations which it is addressing. Of course, as Farley, Groome, the Whiteheads and many others have pointed out, knowledge of the situations of praxis and awareness of their problems, crises and challenges is the first step in engendering practical moral reflection. Practical thinking flows from a sense of the tensions of these concrete situations and returns to them after some necessary theoretical clarification. But the situations themselves do not provide us with the metaphors, theories of obligations and indices of needs that are required to address them normatively. Every situation of praxis must have within it that theoretical interlude during which answers relevant to these higher levels of practical moral thinking are achieved.

When some reflection has produced clarity, we return to our situations and try to develop new rules and roles for concrete action. This is the fifth level of practical moral thinking. Of course, all of these levels of moral reason require more interpretation than I can provide here. I have tried to do this in my Religious Ethics and Pastoral Care. These levels clearly have some analogues in Farley’s understanding of the four dimensions of appraisal. But what we are both trying to do -- Farley in his understanding of the dimensions of appraisal and I in my five levels -- is the kind of thing I believe is necessary in order to provide practical theology with the theory of practical reason that it needs. Doubtless both of us will need to do more work, especially on the logical relation that exists between our various levels. This work is necessary to provide for practical theology a method and procedure (built at least in part on an ethic of principles) and help it to avoid the danger of associating the ethical core of practical theology with an ethic of virtue and character.

Unless our new practical theologies can advance reasons for the positions they take in their public debates, they will not be effective. An ethic of virtue and character -- either in its more Christian form, as in the theology of Stanley Hauerwas (A Community of Character [University of Notre Dame Press, 19821), or its more secular form, as in Alasdair McIntyre’s After Virtue (University of Notre Dame Press, 1982) -- can never advance convincing reasons in public conversation. Its ethic must necessarily be an ethic of example.

As much as this ethic is needed, as much as we are all indebted to the new clarifications which have come from the contemporary ethics of virtue and character, and as much as we must never lose its accomplishments, the new practical theologies must strive for something more rigorous. Farley’s work points in the right direction, but more work needs to be done to establish practical theology as procedure and as method before it can become the center of theological education.