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Who Lives? Who Dies? The Utility of Peter Singer

You could make the case that Peter Singer has done more good than anyone else alive. A professor of ethics at Princeton University, Singer is the author of Animal Liberation (1975), which instigated the modern animal rights movement. Singer didn’t give us cruelty-free cosmetic production or vegetarian restaurants, but he has done more than anyone else to popularize such ideas. What’s more, by writing persuasive articles about people’s moral obligation to give away money, Singer has caused tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars to be donated to famine relief organizations. Yet Singer also believes that it is OK to kill babies.

These may strike you as contradictory beliefs, but they make sense once you understand that Singer is a utilitarian. For utilitarians, the moral task is to create utility -- to increase the amount of happiness in the world, or at least decrease the amount of pain. If curing cancer requires doing research that requires the death of ten infants, then the infants should be sacrificed for the cause.

For people whose ethical views are based in a religious tradition, that choice seems monstrous. The medical victory would seem tainted. We would be haunted by the ghosts of dead babies. Even though countless people might be able to live longer and more fully because of the cancer research, the world would be less godly.

Monotheistic traditions hold to a few main assertions: that suffering can be redemptive; that people may be called to unexpected and unusual tasks; that a lone human life can have inviolable worth; and that there is something greater than humankind that deserves to be worshiped. So believers in God bear children, make art or worship God because they feel called to do so -- even if they realize they could be spending their time more "usefully" fighting hunger or building houses for the poor. Of course, many religious people do fight hunger and build houses for the poor. But they don’t believe that that’s all human beings are called to do. The religious world also values cathedrals, scriptural study, and time spent in contemplation. That too is part of godliness.

This article is about the most famous living philosopher who would say that there is no such thing as godliness.

Singer is a 55-year-old, lanky, balding Australian, soft-spoken and indifferent to fashion. He is the son of Jewish refugees from Europe, and three of his four grandparents died in the Holocaust. In college he studied utilitarian philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and Henry Sedgwick. With them, he decided that ethical action cannot be inferred from a set of rules, like the Ten Commandments, or Hammurabi’s code, or Kant’s categorical imperative to "act in such a way that the maxim of your action could be universally applied." The utilitarian takes account only of the amount of human happiness, or utility, that a given action will produce. The fact that utilitarianism does not involve political or religious convictions, or a list of commandments, appealed to the irreligious Singer, who as a child had refused to have a Bar Mitzvah ceremony.

At Oxford, where he studied with R. M. Hare, and then as a professor at Melbourne’s Monash University, Singer slightly modified his philosophy into what he calls preference utilitarianism. The preference utilitarian is concerned not so much with pain and pleasure as with allowing people to satisfy as many of their preferences as possible.

In Practical Ethics (1993), Singer declares that "an action contrary to the preference of any being is, unless this preference is outweighed by contrary preferences, wrong. Killing a person who prefers to continue living is therefore wrong, other things being equal . . . For preference utilitarians, taking the life of a person would normally be worse than taking the life of some other being, since persons are highly future-oriented in their preferences. To kill a person is therefore, normally, to violate not just one, but a wide range of the most central and significant preferences a being can have." And the more preferences satisfied in the world, the better.

This means that rules like "Thou shalt not kill" are poor guides to action. If killing one person -- say, Hitler -- would save the lives of many others, then one ought to begin oiling one’s pistol. Yes, that dead person will not be able to fulfill any of his preferences. But others will be able to lead lives in which thousands, even millions, of preferences will be fulfilled,

Utilitarians find talk of rights somewhat beside the point. If a policy of affirmative action violates white people’s rights to equal treatment but produces beneficial results for the world in the long run, such as increasing the number of black doctors and lawyers or reducing poverty on Indian reservations, then there’s no reason to worry about rights. If one white person’s preference to go to Stanford is thwarted, but the disadvantaged black girl who goes instead is likely to bring pride to a community and serve as a desperately needed black role model, one must conclude that more preferences will be satisfied by admitting the black student.

Utilitarian conclusions can make a lot of sense. If two Siamese twins are both going to die, and separating them would kill one twin while possibly saving the other, most of us think it is better to save one rather than watch both die. Religious or natural-law notions about the sanctity of life, according to which a doctor may never take a life, even to salvage another life, can seem needlessly strict. The utilitarian can confidently say, "Better to save one life than none at all"; no abstract rules about justice or fairness should count more than increasing the utility in the world.

Utilitarian views matter in these technological days, when religious ethics often seem insufficient. We can do so much now. We can keep a brain-dead baby alive while harvesting its organs for transplant; we can annihilate a country’s population in a matter of hours, or we can airlift it food. It’s not always apparent how best to apportion our money or our wisdom. Utilitarians have provocative, sometimes compelling answers to moral questions.

Singer argues, for example, that since $1,000 can keep several children alive for years, each of us is obligated not to spend it on a nice audio system but to donate the money to Oxfam or the Red Cross -- and to keep donating as much as we can. "That’s right," Singer told the New York Times Magazine. "I’m saying that you shouldn’t buy that new car, take that cruise, redecorate the house or get that expensive new suit. After all, a $1,000 suit could save three children’s lives."

There are many utilitarian philosophers, but Singer is the only one to receive death threats. Philosophical conferences, not usually of much interest to the public, have occasionally been canceled because of the controversy that Singer ignites. After Princeton hired him in 1999, a graduate wrote to the Princeton Alumni Weekly, "Nothing I have seen or heard epitomizes the decline of Western civilization so much as the hiring of Peter Singer."

Singer is loathed in part because he writes lucidly, and for a wide audience. His books have a clarity that few scholars can achieve. He once ran as a Green Party candidate for Parliament, and he lectures frequently. His essays have appeared for 30 years in the New York Review of Books. And Singer is drawn to the difficult, sometimes sensational cases in applied ethics. He happily leaps from the philosophical mountain into the muck below, where he coolly follows his principles to their logical ends.

Two of his conclusions are especially startling. He argues that some animals have higher moral status than some humans. His argument begins with the observation that many animals prefer to avoid pain. We know this the same way we know that people prefer to avoid pain: we see dogs and cats and dolphins and rats recoiling from pain, we see them whimper when beaten, and we see them playful when they are pain-free. (We also know that their nervous systems closely resemble ours.) They have other preferences, too. They couple, and they become visibly depressed when separated from their mates and families. They prefer to move freely rather than be confined in cages. And so forth.

Therefore, Singer says, causing these animals pain -- killing them for food, caging them while they produce eggs, shackling them and kidnapping them for exhibition in a zoo -- subverts their preferences and is wrong. The fact that animals are nonhuman makes no difference. In fact, an intelligent adult ape has more conscious interests than a newborn human infant. Therefore, faced with the choice of rescuing from a fire either a severely retarded infant, who is unlikely to develop many preferences in the future, and an ape, we should rescue the ape. To think otherwise is simple bigotry, an example of speciesism. We should no more be speciesists than racists or sexists. Singer quotes Jeremy Bentham’s 1781 dictum about animals: "The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?"

In Animal Liberation, which has sold half a million copies, Singer preaches against eating meat, consuming eggs or milk produced by maltreated birds, and wearing leather or fur. Today’s commonplaces of animal rights discourse -- concern about the factory farms, the unnecessary lab experiments on monkeys, the cosmetics tested on rabbits -- are familiar because of Singer and the tremendous influence of his book. Many of us are kinder people because we, or people we know, have read that book. Singer is one of the few thinkers, like Darwin and Freud, who within their own lifetimes have changed the way people think.

So it’s preferences, rather than human life, that we ought to value, and this means that animals fall within our sphere of moral obligations. But if we have rights only insofar as we have preferences, then what about those humans, like the severely retarded, who lack preferences? What about newborn infants, who prefer to eat, excrete, and avoid pain, but prefer little else?

This brings us to Singer’s second startling conclusion: doctors and parents should be permitted in some circumstances to kill humans. Singer notes that doctors often withhold medical treatment or nourishment from crippled or prematurely born infants, or from elderly people who have asked that no extraordinary measures be taken to save them. Letting people die, Singer says, is often crueler than a humane form of euthanasia would be.

Many people are inclined to agree that the distinction between passive and active euthanasia is an ethical fiction: why let an anencephalic infant, born without a brain, starve to death, prolonging the parents’ agony, when the baby could be painlessly killed? These anencephalics, like some elderly Alzheimer’s patients, are simply not persons in the sense of being rational, self-conscious beings. They can’t decide for themselves, and it may be compassionate to decide for them. (In the case of persons with preferences, Singer is opposed to any kind of forced, involuntary euthanasia.) But Singer then takes his argument further:

If the fetus does not have the same claim to life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby does not either, and the life of a newborn baby is of less value to it than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee is to the nonhuman animal.

If we can put aside these emotionally moving but strictly irrelevant aspects of the killing of a baby we can see that the grounds for not killing persons do not apply to newborn infants. (Practical Ethics)

Fetuses have no preferences before they can feel pain. Even after they can feel pain, they still have very few preferences; unlike, say, a six-year-old, fetuses can’t make future plans, don’t prefer green Legos to blue, don’t want to lie in Mommy’s bed at night. So while advanced fetuses have very few preferences, those may easily be outweighed, for all sorts of reasons, by the preferences of parents to abort. And whatever can be said of an advanced fetus may also be said of a newborn baby, which in its earliest stages has very, very few preferences. If parents may abort a fetus with Down’s syndrome -- whether to make room for another baby, to spare it a life of possible frustration, or simply to avoid the expense and fatigue of caring for a retarded child -- then they may also painlessly kill an infant. Nothing about the mere fact that the infant is human, and born, should make a difference. We ought, Singer writes, to replace the old dictum that all human life has equal worth with a First New Commandment: Recognize that the worth of human life varies.

To Singer, this is only common sense. If we didn’t think some lives were better than others, then why would we try to prevent birth defects? Why would we try to help blind people see?

Many disagree, including most of Singer’s fellow philosophers. "It’s the height of epistemic arrogance," says Adrienne Asch, an ethicist at Wellesley College, of Singer’s approach. "Saying that because you have a disability means your quality of life is lower -- I think that’s just wrong. The only thing I’ll say if you can’t walk is that you can’t walk, and people who like walking will feel sorry for you.

Singer would reply that he doesn’t favor mandatory euthanasia of anyone. He wants to leave it to parents to decide if a child they don’t want, and who has few prospects for being adopted, should live. He would remind us that those same parents might replace it with a much healthier child, or they might give the thousands of dollars they would have spent on physical therapy and round-the-clock nursing to UNICEF instead. Wouldn’t it be rather heroic, the thinking goes, to save scores of healthy lives, with bright futures of romance amid productive careers, at the expense of one quite damaged life?

While Singer believes that killing a three-day-old is no worse than killing a late-term fetus, he does believe in drawing the line somewhere. He used to suggest 28 days after birth. "I now think a 28-day cutoff is impracticably precise," he told me. "But the point remains you need cutoffs." I asked him whether he would extend the "cutoff" for euthanasia to, say, three years old, an age when children still have rather few preferences. "A three-year-old is a gray case," he said.

Before getting outraged, we ought to recognize that Singer’s views are, perhaps more often than we’d like, our own. Many of us have read about people languishing in vegetative states, restrained in wheelchairs or totally unconscious, and have thought, "What a waste of money." If we also note that the money could be doing real good, curing malaria or feeding a hungry child, and if we further grant that it wouldn’t be so hard to spend the money one place instead of the other, then we have to acknowledge Singer for having the courage to say publicly what most of us can hardly admit to ourselves.

Many philosophers, like Brown’s Dan Brock and Tufts’s Norman Daniels, agree in good part with Singer. The philosopher James Rachels made many of Singer’s points before he did. And Bentham got there before everybody, even on seemingly modern issues like animal rights.

"As a theoretical contributor, he’s not the most philosophically significant," says Shelly Kagan of Yale, who often agrees with Singer. "But he moves the reader, shows the reader what’s already inherent in the reader’s own beliefs. Compare the gobs of money given to charity because of his article ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’ to the three dollars given because of my book.

"I think Singer is very admired among professional philosophers, whether or not you’re a utilitarian," said Kagan. He said that while his wife was reading a New York Times piece about the controversy at Princeton over Singer, "she looked up and said, ‘These are the same views as you have -- why aren’t they picketing your classes?’ It’s because he defends his views to the popular press. And more power to him. He’s fighting the good fight."

The philosophers who don’t think Singer is fighting the good fight fall into several camps. Some, like Asch, wonder how Singer can be so confident about assigning preferences and guessing at people’s happiness. Religious philosophers like Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff would wonder how Singer can be so sure that there is no God. And many ethicists remain committed to rule-based systems of ethics. From Abraham to Jesus to Kant, adhering to certain rules, whether from religious obligation or abstract duty, has been the core of the ethical life. If you have an ethical or religious commitment to pacifism, for example, you won’t accept the utilitarian’s willingness sometimes to kill. And if you have an unshakable belief that even severely handicapped children have an equal claim on our time and money, then you won’t like the utilitarian’s favoring of healthy, conscious, rational persons.

Still others, like the Aristotelian virtue ethicists Alasdair MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas, worry that human beings who do unpleasant deeds are more likely to do them again. Good people are those who practice being good people, who assiduously work to acquire such virtues as hope, patience and sacrifice. We can only be peaceful by practicing being peaceful. If we get used to killing retarded babies, even for humane reasons, aren’t we just a bit more likely to kill again? The best people, it would seem, don’t kill for expediency. In fact, they don’t kill at all.

Ethicists who concede some of Singer’s points still challenge his narrowing of the moral sphere. Is it really possible that only conscious, rational, wishful persons have the highest moral claims on us? "Peter’s proposals regarding infanticide are among the weakest points in his philosophy," says Tony Coady, an Australian philosopher who has known Singer for many years. "Human infants are already part of our moral universe -- the universe of persons. I think they are already palpable, though immature, persons." According to Bonnie Steinbock of Albany University, "Somebody’s being a blood relative matters. Morality is a network of relations. If rats invade our houses and bite our children, we can’t have moral arguments. We have to exterminate them."

And some people just cannot abide a person who thinks in such calculating terms.

When I posed some of these objections to Singer, he answered swiftly: "The notion of what makes a better person is secondary to the notion of the right thing to do." That is, we may believe that the best possible person is a soft-hearted nun who cares for orphaned pigeons, but in Singer’s eyes, the rather disagreeable cur who cheats at checkers, ignores his children, and is rude to waitresses may be the more ethical person if by giving away lots of money he saves lives. Singer, by the same argument, may seem like a monster, but he is the one whose philosophy saves both animals and malnourished children. While you are congratulating yourself on buying your crippled daughter an expensive operation, or paying for nursing care for your senescent uncle, Singer has let them die and now is writing checks that will save hundreds of lives. Who is being more just? Who is more virtuous? Who is -- if we want to introduce religious language -- doing more for God’s children?

That way of posing the question may offend both sides. Singer never objects to people’s devoting time and money to their close relations. While unnecessary luxuries may be unethical, spending money to help sick relatives is not unethical in his view. And he sees the gray areas. When his own mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, he did not put her down. Rather, he bought her expensive nursing care. Almost every critic of Singer mentions this fact, implying that he is a hypocrite. That’s not entirely fair. His books make clear that even when the ailing person has no preferences left, the family that loves her still might.

But Singer could be right about ethical actions without being right about whether those actions are always desirable. Perhaps being ethically perfect is not the most worthwhile way to live. In her article "Moral Saints" (collected in The Virtues), Susan Wolf of Johns Hopkins University suggests that the ethically perfect person would in fact be dreary. Always trying to alleviate pain, create joy or allow people to fulfill their preferences, he or she would never do anything fun. "In other words," Wolf writes, "if the moral saint is devoting all his time to feeding the hungry or healing the sick or raising money for Oxfam, then necessarily he is not reading Victorian novels, playing the oboe, or improving his backhand." Always trying to be kind, he would never have an ironic or sarcastic wit; it follows that he would be unlikely to direct a good movie. A world filled with such people would be positively unbearable. We’d all be well fed and sheltered -- and bored out of our skulls. The real world has misery, yes, but it also has gorgeous peaks of achievement. It has cathedrals. The utilitarian world, in which everybody must first be fed, would be bleak.

Kagan is not impressed by this argument. If everybody were a utilitarian, he points out, then we’d each have to give up only a little bit of money or time in order to cure the world’s ills. And if only a few of us were utilitarians, then we could confidently give away everything without worrying that the frivolous pursuits might die off. We’d have plenty of resources left over to help us be interesting, joyous people. The philosopher Robert Adams has another objection to Wolf: actual saints, like Jesus and St. Francis, are really quite interesting people, hardly bores.

We might well finally admit, however, that utilitarian values -- utility, pleasure, preferences -- seem peculiarly barren. Most of us, religious or otherwise, believe, as Asch puts it, "there are things other than ‘happiness’ that matter: peace, justice, equality, wisdom. When the utilitarians want to say everything reduces to happiness, they’re making a claim broader than happiness."

The utilitarians’ claim is, in fact, quite metaphysical. It’s a belief about what we’re here for. A religious person would say we live to glorify God; an artist might say we’re here to create lasting beauty; a libertarian would choose freedom above all else; and the utilitarian would say we’re here for pleasure or the fulfillment of preferences. There’s still a leap of faith involved -- though it’s one that excludes the grand religious narratives, as well as the wondrous examples of human contemplation, like Thomas Merton and the Buddha, or connoisseurship, like Nabokov with his butterflies.

For reasons utilitarians might wish to explain, many of the people who create the most utility are deeply religious. The religious life would therefore seem to merit more consideration that Singer gives it. When I asked him about religion, he said: "I think religion has created some wonderful works of architecture. It’s inspired some beautiful music. I can’t think of a lot more good to say about it. I can’t think much of taking consolation in an illusion."

Yet when Singer asks what exactly life is for, in a book called How Are We to Live?, his answer sounds religious. "If we regard time as a fourth dimension, then we can think of the universe, throughout all the times at which it contains sentient life, as a four-dimension entity. We can then make that four-dimensional world a better place by causing there to be less pointless suffering in one particular place, at one particular time, than there otherwise would have been. . . . Sisyphus might find meaning in his life, if, instead of rolling the same stone endlessly up the hill, he could roll many stones to the top and build a beautiful temple with them."

That phrase about building "a beautiful temple" suggests that there is a transcendent goal of sorts in utilitarianism. As the Berkeley philosopher R. Jay Wallace writes in an unpublished paper:

Utilitarianism is often thought of as the paradigmatic secular moral theory. . . . In light of this it is a matter of considerable irony that utilitarianism itself should implicitly rely in its ideal of the goodness of a life, on the idea that the moral personality has an essentially religious structure: the utilitarian agent must be sufficiently devoted to a transcendent value outside the self that contribution to that end makes their own life good itself.

Singer’s aversion to questions of transcendent value, even as he asks us to view morality as the building of a "temple" in a "four-dimensional world," reveals a philosophic blindness. We should still read Singer. His honesty about tough questions befits the philosopher, who is supposed to say what others will not. But deep down, we don’t want to live with Singer because we can’t live with ourselves that way. Singer can’t understand why Hindu vegetarians, Catholic paupers and Jewish scribes -- some of the best people there are -- are rarely built of utilitarian principles. Animal lovers, Singer’s biggest fans, usually love animals, not utility. And that’s true of lovers of humans too,

Singer wants the best for all humankind, a distant arrival in the Elysian Fields of preference fulfillment. But if, by some chance, he’s found the way to get us there, it’s despite not understanding us at all

The Liberal Choice: Adam Smith or FDR?

Book reviews:

The Strange Death of American Liberalism

By H. W Brands. Yale University Press, 191 pp.

Religion and the Demise of Liberal Rationalism

By J. Judd Owen. University of Chicago Press, 218 pp. Also in paperback.



Liberalism in America is either dying or alive and well -- depending on whom you listen to or how you define the term. The practical liberalism of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society has lately appeared to be moribund as a political force. Yet liberalism as a political theory, understood as a cooperative enterprise for mutual advantage among free and equal persons, is considered by friend and foe alike the essential expression of what it means to he a political animal in the modern West. These two hooks address these quite different understandings of liberalism, and reach quite different conclusions about its prospects.

H. W. Brands, a historian at Texas A&M, offers not so much an obituary as an autopsy of liberalism. His thesis is striking and simple: Americans always have been conservative in the sense that they are distrustful of big government and skeptical of its efficacy and legitimacy. The "one conspicuous exception" is wartime: "In the name of national defense -- most conspicuously during wartime -- Americans accepted an expansion of government authority that they tolerated under no other circumstances."

Brands’s reading of American history in light of this hypothesis is plausible if not always convincing. Periods which appear as a triumph of liberalism, especially the period from the New Deal to the Great Society, are anomalies which last only as long as the crises of national security which gave rise to them. The cold war was the "real" foundation of post-World War II liberalism; the end of the cold war marked the "death" of practical liberalism. Following Brands’s logic, this death is strange since the patient was never really alive to begin with, but existed only parasitically upon people’s concern with national survival.

Although Brands’s account is stimulating, I would raise two critical points. First, it is not clear why, even if Brands is right, liberals should be downhearted. The cold war may be over, but isolationism is not in the cards for the world’s one remaining superpower." Serving as international policeman will require a massive governmental apparatus. If "liberal" periods in our history are the security-based exceptions to the rule of a skeptical libertarianism, the exception is perhaps the rule if security concerns are a constant in American life.

Second, conservatism for Brands is essentially libertarianism -- a distrust of governmental authority and a fear of expansive governmental power. Assuming these traits are fundamental to the American political mind, most political theorists see this as reflecting the classical liberal mind -- distinct from the "modern liberal" view which accepts the legitimacy of the welfare state -- not a conservative mind. "Conservatism," unlike liberalism and libertarianism, maintains that the state may, and indeed must in some respects, aim at shaping the moral character of its citizens. This sort of moralistic, communitarian conservatism, an important and growing force in American politics, is often at odds with the libertarianism that Brands calls conservative. Brands ignores it, though at one point he does announce the difference between "the genuine conservatism of small government and the pseudo-conservatism of ‘family values."’ What is left unclear is why communitarian conservatism is the pseudo form while libertarianism is the real thing.

This is not to argue over what American conservatism really is, but to point out that beyond the libertarianism Brands champions there is a broader sense of "liberal" that includes both his libertarianism and the welfare-state liberalism rejected by it. This liberalism is defined by its vision of society as a contract among naturally free and equal persons, and its antitypes are communitarian visions of the left (socialist, egalitarian community) and of the right (traditional, hierarchical, moralistic community). This broader liberalism may oscillate between its libertarian and welfare-state expressions, but it stands as orthodoxy in America because those are the dimensions that define us as a nation. So if, as Brands argues, libertarianism is genuinely American and moralistic communitarianism is not, this may be evidence not of the strange death but of the everlasting life of American liberalism.

Judd Owen addresses liberalism in this more general sense. Owen, an assistant professor of political science at Emory, believes that liberal political institutions are poorly served by contemporary liberal theorists who speak in their defense. His criticism is directed at the "antifoundationalisin" that now characterizes liberal political thought. Owen says that liberal institutions, especially those embodying religious freedom and the separation of church and state, were spawned by the Enlightenment. Enlightenment liberals believed liberal institutions to be the rationally best institutions. They were worthy of affirmation and support not simply because they were "ours," but because they were deemed the universally best, as evidenced by reason.

This foundationalist understanding of liberalism is decidedly out of fashion these days. Owen traces antifoundationalism back to the attack on the pretensions of reason launched by Nietzsche in the 19th century. What is new is that liberals themselves have increasingly come to embrace the antifoundationalism that was once deployed against them, abandoning their Enlightenment heritage of rationalism. Owen describes antifoundationalism as follows:

All claims to knowledge are from a particular human, all too human, perspective, or are socially constructed. There is nothing to which we can appeal in order to settle the most profound human disagreements. and thus there is no possibility that the awesome variety of conflicting opinions about the things most important to human beings, including the best political order, can be transcended toward universal and objective knowledge. The original claim that liberalism is grounded in natural right and reason and therefore the claim that it is universally legitimate are naive and even arrogant fictions.

The question is whether liberal institutions need philosophical foundations in order to survive and flourish. Richard Rorty is the most well-known exponent of the view that they do not, and Rorty, along with Stanley Fish and John Rawls, is a primary target of Owen’s criticism.

Rorty debunks Enlightenment rationalism, renaming it "postmodern, bourgeois liberalism." He openly proclaims liberalism to be "ethnocentric," but cheerfully embraces it because it is, after all, "ours. ‘‘We" are the citizens of the "rich, North Atlantic democracies," and our institutions require our allegiance. which has little if anything to do with philosophical foundations. Indeed, Rorty believes that the (false) belief that our institutions are only as good as their philosophical foundations is itself a serious impediment to our affirmation of them. To put it in religious terms, Rorty’s view is that it is faith, not theology, that matters, and too much theology can be at odds with a living faith.

Fish shares Rorty’s antifoundationalism, and while he does not attack or reject liberal institutions, he is merciless in revealing the philosophical confusions that characterize many of their theoretical defenses. Rawls is a slightly different case. Unlike Rorty and Fish, he neither denies nor affirms the tenets of rationalist foundationalism, but he has decided that liberal institutions are best defended not in terms of their truth, but as part of our historical inheritance. Many different religious and philosophical views can be used to support liberal institutions, and Rawls is concerned with the pragmatic fact of affirmation, not with the truth of the grounds from which that affirmation arises. So Owen is correct, I think, in placing Rawls, Fish and Rorty in the same analytical category.

I don’t think Owen succeeds in showing that politics needs philosophical foundation, though his hook is an excellent resource for engaging that difficult and important question. Part of the problem is Owen’s ambiguous stance as an author. He describes himself as a "friend of liberalism" rather than a liberal, and so one is never quite sure which aspects of liberalism he accepts. More important, his aim is to present the case for foundationalism in general, which is not the same as actually presenting the case for any particular foundationalist account purporting to be true. If one were persuaded by Owen that it is desirable to have philosophical foundations for liberal institutions, one would still be no closer to having them.

Owen’s response to Rorty and Fish turns out to be relatively meek. His claim is that they have failed to "decisively refute" liberal rationalism insofar as they have failed to show that it is impossible. Therefore, the admittedly "Herculean task" of articulating a particular, true account of liberal rationalism remains a possibility. While this is tine, it is doubtful that either Rorty or Fish would disagree, or take the point as criticism of their own views. I imagine Rorty responding like this: "No one has ‘decisively refuted’ the existence of witches or gods in the sense of proving their impossibility, but this by itself provides no reason for me to change my current belief, which is that both are figments of the human imagination. Produce one, and I’ll change my mind. But I am not impressed to know that it has not been proven impossible that one might someday be produced."

The real issue for the health of liberal institutions, it seems to me, is not philosophical foundations, but social and cultural foundations. Like all regimes, liberal ones seek to nurture individual characters who will support and cherish that regime so as to perpetuate it. Unlike all regimes, liberal ones recognize limits upon their right to pursue that aim directly, since they must respect the legitimate freedom of individuals and individuals in association with one another to pursue their own conceptions of what is good and valuable in life. In a fortunate liberal regime, the forms of group, family and associational life characteristic of civil society yield citizens who cherish liberal political institutions, though perhaps for different reasons. In an unfortunate liberal regime (which probably won’t be liberal for long), the forms of group, family and associational life yield indifferent or even illiberal citizens. When the political state has to move in the direction of forcing associational life in a liberal-yielding direction, the liberal regime is weakened, if not undermined. So political liberals have an enormous interest in the social and cultural foundations of associational life in liberal regimes.

For example, even though the liberal state has no right to require its citizens who are Christians to accept Locke’s proposition that toleration and a respect for religious freedom are the marks of the correct understanding of the Gospels, it has every reason to hope that they do, and perhaps to do more than hope -- to educate and persuade, if not to coerce. The communitarian critique of liberalism, whatever one may think of it as philosophy, has succeeded in reminding liberals that liberalism does have social and cultural presuppositions, and that these must be attended to if liberalism is to survive.

Nowhere have the weak social foundations of American liberal institutions been more evident than in the battered and tattered nature of the welfare state, and in the cynicism with which it is viewed by nearly the entire populace -- from the wealthy to the poor, for different reasons. The liberalism of the past generation expressed the ethos of the welfare state in terms of individual right and entitlement, a language ill-suited to the needs of community. What is needed, and what may or may not be available to us, is the possibility of expressing that ethos in the language of shared need as a common body.

Beyond Separation of Church and State

Book Review: Separation of Church and State.

By Philip Hamburger. Harvard University Press, 492 pp.



Most Americans assume that the separation of church and state is a fundamental principle deeply rooted in American constitutionalism; that the First Amendment was intended to ensure that government does not involve itself with religion (and vice versa); and that contemporary debates over such vexing issues as school prayer, voucher programs, government funding of faith-based organizations, and the rights of religious minorities represent ongoing attempts to realize the separation intended by the Founders and like-minded early Americans.

None of these views is true, argues Philip Hamburger in his provocative new account of American religious liberty. Though the language of separation traces back to Thomas Jefferson -- whose 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association described the First Amendment as "building a wall of separation between church and state" -- and still further to Roger Williams and early Baptists, the notion that such separation prohibited contact between church and state appears in only a few of the most radical voices in the nation’s past. Virtually no one called for separation in the way that the Supreme Court understands it today: that legislation must evince secular purposes and effects, and foster no "excessive government entanglement with religion" (see Chief Justice Warren Burger’s 1971 opinion in Lemon v. Kartzman). In fact, a mutually supportive connection between religion, politics and society was acknowledged and endorsed almost without reservation during the nation’s early years.

Not only is the metaphor of separation historically erroneous, Hamburger argues, but Americans from Jefferson to the Ku Klux Klan have used separationist language for discriminatory, exclusionary or narrowly partisan ends. For that reason, Hamburger suggests, "the idea of separation should, at best, be viewed with suspicion." When Americans -- whether presidents, Supreme Court justices or ordinary citizens -- refer to the "wall of separation" desired by the Founders, they not only perpetuate a historical inaccuracy; they unwittingly revive some of the most distasteful episodes in American history. The rhetoric of separation has been directly and repeatedly implicated in anti-Catholic, indeed antireligious, political movements. By limiting the actions of government and religious institutions, as well as the degree of contact between them, this rhetoric actually undermines religious freedom.

How can this be? How could the separation of church and state represent something undesirable and downright dangerous? There are a number of villains in this story, and Hamburger goes out of his way to portray them not only as mistaken about constitutional meanings but also as disingenuous or morally suspect. Prominent among these is Jefferson, whom Hamburger describes as "bolder with a pen than a sword" (no doubt a reference to Jefferson’s disastrous military career as governor of Virginia during the Revolution, in which he fled Monticello on horseback just ahead of British troops), and as ‘so bold on paper, yet so timid in life." Jefferson "[took] delight in his own creativity" yet remained "as cautious in person as he was bold in imagination."

Jefferson’s Republican allies used the language of separation to denounce New England clergy for speaking against him from the pulpit, thereby introducing separationist claims "for the transient purposes of an election contest." One of Jefferson’s supporters, Nehemiah Dodge, deployed anti-Semitic rhetoric and "the violent sexual imagery of anti-Catholicism."

Other advocates of separation included anti-Catholics (e.g., the Know-Nothings) as well as businessmen like P. T. Barnum and the nameless gentleman who, outraged at his inability to find a cigar on the Sabbath, donated 50 dollars to help repeal Sunday closing laws. As Hamburger puts it, "by the end of the [19th] century, this flood of desires -- even merely the need for a smoke -- carried increasing numbers of Americans toward the separation of religion, especially a separation of church and state."

The 19th century also witnessed the growth of the Liberal movement, which campaigned for a separationist constitutional amendment but was undone in part by the unpopularity of it’s equivocal position on obscenity. "For many atheists among the Liberals, sexual freedom seemed of almost religious importance," Hamburger writes. He goes on to present a litany of unsavory 20th-century separationists: anti-Catholic groups, including the Masons; the Ku Klux Klan (and various out-growths thereof); the True Americans; and the Prohibition Party. The historical account culminates in a consideration of the Klan career of Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black.

This book is controversial because its central thesis, that "the First Amendment has been interpreted to limit religion in ways never imagined by the late 18th-century dissenters who demanded constitutional guarantees of religious liberty" and that "the constitutional authority for separation is without historical foundation," challenges the widely held view that separation is a necessary corollary to disestablishment. It is unsettling because the depth and breadth of Hamburgers scholarship (he is John Wilson Professor of Law at the University of Chicago) make it impossible for critics to dismiss his arguments as an ideologue’s pining for "Christian America," or as a case of shrill partisanship.

More broadly, Hamburger’s intriguing historical account raises a number of important questions about church and state, not merely in the American past but in

the present and for the future as well. If an erroneous, and indeed pernicious, metaphor has dominated American jurisprudence and public discourse for years, then correcting that error would yield real-world changes in law, politics and society.

Yet Hamburger does not take up this practical question. Indeed, the contemporary ramifications of Hamburger’s historical argument are the dogs that don’t bark in this book. (I must admit that pointing out what is not covered in a nearly 500-page book opens a reviewer to charges of masochism. But if a strict separation of church and state is not justified historically, we may reasonably ask what some of the implications of repairing such a misconception might be.)

In other words, if Hamburger is right, what difference should it make in the day-to-day relationships between religious individuals, religious communities, religious institutions and the state? He rightly points out that "there are myriad connections between religion and government that do not amount to an establishment. . . . [Separationists] have mistakenly assumed that such connections infringe upon their constitutional freedom." But certainly at least some of these potential connections do impinge on religious freedom, and deciding which do and which do not deserves a bit of attention after the thought-provoking narrative that makes up the bulk of the book.

One possible approach to the issue is to replace "separation" with a better metaphor, one more faithful to the intentions of those who drafted the First Amendment. A number of scholars who resist the metaphor of separation are attracted to that of "accommodation." Indeed, something akin to Hamburger’s own argument, directed explicitly to contemporary church-state issues, has appeared in the pages of this magazine (Michael McConnell, "Why ‘Separation’ Is Not the Key to Church-State Relations," CHRISTIAN CENTURY, January 18, 1989). But this too is a metaphor into which a wide variety of political content can be poured, and whose adherents display a remarkably wide variety of perspectives and programs. One ends Separation of Church and State wishing that its author had at least suggested a few elements of an alternate jurisprudence or public philosophy to take the place of misguided separationism.

Lurking behind the scenes in this story are important questions about constitutional interpretation. Hamburger makes two implicit, related claims: 1) we can know with relative certainty what early American Founders or dissenters intended regarding church and state, and speak about those intentions as a coherent body of thought; and 2) continuing decisions about church-state relations ought to remain faithful to the intentions of those groups. Many of Hamburger’s critics would agree with his first claim. Witness, for example, Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore’s The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (1996). Despite calling the idea that we can know what the Founders really thought on religious issues "an illusion," Kramnick and Moore criticize those who view the U.S. as a Christian state: "The principal framers of the American political system wanted no religious parties in national politics. They crafted a constitutional order that intended to make a person’s religious convictions, or lack of religious convictions, irrelevant in judging the value of his political opinion or in assessing his qualifications to hold political office."

Justice Harry Blackmun himself cited the Founders’ intentions in his dissent in the 1990 Smith case: "I do not believe the Founders thought their dearly bought freedom from religious persecution a ‘luxury,’ but an essential element of liberty." The notion that the Founders possessed a coherent set of "intentions" seems deeply entrenched among commentators and judges alike.

Then again, what does it say about the coherence of those intentions when, by Hamburger’s own account, at least three of our first seven presidents, including an influential drafter of the Constitution and the author of the Declaration of Independence, seem to have held separationist views outside the mainstream of their time? Hamburger admits that Roger Williams, along with Jefferson, Madison and Jackson, departed radically from the views of their contemporaries. Should we perhaps reconsider the coherence of such "intentions"?

If instead, as Hamburger at times suggests, we should look to the intentions of those early religious dissenters so active in the disestablishment movement, why should we transform the views of unelected citizens who held no governmental office into constitutional orthodoxy? The whole task of identifying intentions seems fraught with peril; for a sophisticated attempt to grapple with these problems, and a forthright account of the difficulties involved in speaking of such intentions, a reader could do no better than to consult the first chapter of Jack Rakove’s Pulitzer Prize -- winning Original Meanings: Politics and ideas in the Making of the Constitution (1997).

Out of the claim that we can ascertain what the Founders (or their allies) intended about church and state grows the notion that we have our standard of constitutional interpretation ready-made. But why assume that the religious intentions of early Americans ought to direct contemporary jurisprudence? If the American religious landscape has changed radically since the 18th century, why should we expect to replicate the intentions of Founders in our legal decisions? In other words, might it be possible that Jefferson’s "wall of separation" -- though neither appropriate nor a dominant opinion in 1802, nor intended by constitutional authors or early American dissenters -- might be precisely what an increasingly religiously pluralistic nation needs 200 years later?

Taking such a possibility seriously would suggest that we worry less about whether our political discourse fits the purported intentions of our Founders, and more about whether our political or legal practices accord with an evolving notion of the requirements of religious liberty. This possibility, I suspect, may lie close to the reason why Jefferson comes in for such criticism from Hamburger: if anyone in early American history embodies an unwillingness to defer to the past, and embodies the notion that a constitution needs to serve the living rather than remaining bound by the intentions of the dead, it is Jefferson.

Of course, my claim that the Founders’ intentions are not the constitutional gold standard is hardly uncontroversial. Consider, for example, Chief Justice William Renquist’s dissent in Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), perhaps the most explicit presentation of his views on both constitutional interpretation and issues of church and state.

It is impossible to build sound constitutional doctrine upon a mistaken understanding of constitutional history, but unfortunately the establishment clause has been expressly freighted with Jefferson’s misleading metaphor for nearly 40 years. Thomas Jefferson was of course in France at the time the constitutional amendments known as the Bill of Rights were passed by Congress and ratified by the States. His letter to the Danbury Baptist Association was a short note of courtesy, written 14 years after the amendments were passed by Congress . . . There is simply no historical foundation for the proposition that the framers intended to build the "wall of separation" that was constitutionalized in Everson.

Rehnquist continued:

The greatest injury of the "wall" notion is its mischievous diversion of judges from the actual intentions of the drafters of the Bill of Rights. No amount of repetition of historical errors in judicial opinions can make the errors true. The "wall of separation between church and state" is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.

The First Amendment is packed with political and legal content: in just one sentence, it attempts to secure the freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly and petition. With regard to religion, it is helpful to recall that this phenomenon we call "American religious liberty" has always been made up of two general areas: establishment and free exercise. Hamburger is clearly correct in his claim that disestablishment, historically speaking, did not imply a strict notion of separation. Yet it may still be true that making free exercise a reality for Americans of all religious affiliations requires a minimization of contact between church and state, and that separation might be helpful as a metaphor in those contexts. There is very little about the free-exercise clause in Hamburger’s book, and the seeming equation of the disestablishment/separation issue with "American religious freedom" more generally seems to leave out one half of a complex and at-least-two-sided constitutional reality. Indeed, many of the contemporary activists and academics most concerned about the marginalization of religion in American public life frame their critiques as issues of free exercise and not establishment.

Hamburger has provided the most eloquent and richly documented account of the argument against separationism in its contemporary guise. His cogent profiles of important figures in the history of American religious liberty are themselves reason enough to read the book. I have attempted to raise some questions that linger as the nation (through its citizen activists, legislatures and courts) seeks to articulate a robust religious liberty for the 21st century. But whether one affirms or questions the appropriateness of separation as a metaphor; whether one looks to the original intent of our constitutional authors and their allies or views the law as an evolving entity; whether one points to establishment or free exercise as the key to American religious liberty, Hamburger’s Separation of Church and State is a book destined to ensure that the argument continues. This is perhaps the highest praise of all.

Why Monotheism Makes Sense

Some ideas are so potent as to be world-changing. For Rodney Stark, Christianity encompasses just such a set of ideas. In his view, Christian beliefs and images of God shaped the course of Western civilization. And not only that; they changed it for the better.

Stark is a leading sociologist of religion who draws on a formidable body of empirical research to explain how religious beliefs spread and why religious groups flourish or fail. While some thinkers regard belief in the supernatural as incidental to the practice of religion, Stark finds it essential.

He is also convinced that a prejudice against religious belief has distorted modern scholarship and continues to infect academic opinion. He has challenged most of the prominent modern theories of religion, including Marxism (religion is a mask for class consciousness), functionalism (religion serves as a moral restraint or social glue) and psychological reductionism (religion is a form of infantile wish fulfillment).

Stark also dissents from the views of two giants of sociology: Max Weber, who regarded religious consciousness as nonrational, and Èmile Durkheim, who contended that ritual, not belief, is the core of religion and that society itself, not God or the gods, is the real object of worship.

Stark offers an alternative theory. His main propositions: religion is a reasonable human activity; beliefs about the supernatural are religions’ central and most consequential aspect; beliefs are spread not by cultural fiat or coercion, but through networks of family and friends; religious practices and institutions may rise and fall, but the human demand for religion will not wither away.

Looking to broaden the application of his sociological tools, Stark, who recently joined the faculty at Baylor University, has in the past decade turned his attention to history. This work has led to another of his contentions: the most powerful and progressive religious idea is monotheism.

In his two most recent historical analyses, One True God (2001) and For the Glory of God (2003), Stark argues that monotheistic belief not only shaped Western history but also cultivated and in some cases gave birth to values that changed the world for the better. In the forthcoming Victories of Reason he will go even further, contending that the most significant advances in knowledge, liberty, human rights and material well-being -- what we like to call progress -- stem not from Greece or the Enlightenment or modernity but from Christianity itself.

"There comes a time when you have to choose sides," he observes. "Either you think Western civilization is a good thing and that Christianity has been a major piece of it, or you don’t. I do believe in Western civilization, I make no bones about that. The politically correct doesn’t cut it for me."

Much of the debate over Stark’s work has focused on his application of "rational choice theory" to religion. Originally derived from economics, rational choice theory is now used across the social sciences to explain human behavior as a self-interested, choice-making affair. Applied to religion, the theory holds that humans will choose and pursue spiritual goods in the same way they pursue material ones -- according to their interests and by calculation. When choosing religious affiliation and level of commitment, people will weigh rewards against costs and they will try to get the most for their investment. Religion, by this reckoning, is an exchange of goods with God or the gods.

Rational choice is a presupposition of another sociological model embraced by Stark: the "theory of religious economies," which posits that churches and other religious groups operate in a market in which they must compete for adherents. The more open the market, the stronger the competition will be.

Critics of these approaches worry that the language of "cost" and "risk," and the model of churches as religious "firms" competing for market "share" and of believers as "investors" whose religious preferences and affiliations are likened to "portfolios," reduce religion to yet another marketable product and turn believers into consumers. Proponents, on the other hand, point out that Jesus himself spoke repeatedly of loss and gain, of pearls and treasures, of hoarding farmers and investing stewards. He was, after all, a man of promises, and he made offers.

"The songs we sang when I was growing up," Stark points out, "almost all told about a religious reward -- what a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear; we’re not alone; there is salvation out there."

That economic terms apply to religious behavior indicates a larger truth for Stark: both economic and religious choices are governed by reason. "To the extent that I’m a rational choice person, with a small R and a small C, all I’m saying is that religious commitments are not discreditable acts. They’re sensible, sane, often very well-thought-out kinds of behaviors.

"Of course, we make lots of mistakes and we have lots of impulses, but people are as sensible about their religion as they are about everything else -- no more sensible perhaps, but surely no less. What I’ve fought my whole life is the ‘irrational choice theory’ -- that people are religious because they don’t know any better or they can’t help themselves. In any other area of social science, scholars recognize that people are choosing and thinking, but many scholars don’t like religion, and so people aren’t allowed to choose that."

Boston University sociologist Nancy Ammerman is sympathetic to Stark’s point that religion is rational, but has reservations about focusing on exchange and reward. "The notion that religion is fundamentally about getting doesn’t ultimately ring true to me," said Ammerman. "It seems to me religious life is about a relationship between human beings and a divinity, and relationships have other dimensions besides exchange. They’re about persons, emotions, shared experiences -- a whole range of things that aren’t captured inside an explanatory scheme that says what we’re about is I’m after things I can’t otherwise get and that you can give me."

Ammerman also finds rational choice theory vulnerable in its emphasis on the individual. "It’s a particularly modern notion that I’m going to look at my world and assess all the options and figure out what’s best for me. Too much of life was routine and delimited in earlier times, and there wasn’t enough of a range of possibilities to make such choices. It’s not that individuality or choice never existed before, but that these are rather dramatically accentuated in the modern situation."

Stark does not deny that the world limits choices, but he insists that options almost always exist: "Even in a society with only one religion, most people choose not to be very religious. In other words, if you can’t choose denomination, you can choose [level of] intensity. Anthropologists will tell you that in the smallest tribes there are atheists. And lots of Amish kids leave, after all. So there are choices out there, and in the end we have to decide."

While Stark’s early sociological research showed that people come to new religions and new churches through the testimony and influence of others, he maintains that the message is as important as the messenger. In fact, the stronger the message, the more zealous that messenger is likely to be -- and the more effective. This, he argues, accounts for the success of strict or conservative churches in a so-called secular age.

"Strong churches are strong in the first instance because of doctrine," he says. "It’s their conception of God -- is it vivid or is it vague? -- that determines the power of churches. One of the things that I’ve found ironic about most of the declining denominations -- and they’re mostly the liberal ones with the fairly vague theology -- is that there must be millions of people out there for whom those are the compatible religious ideas. But the difference between them and those growing Baptist churches is that the Baptists go out and scare up some members and the liberals don’t -- and I think the reasons are doctrinal. There isn’t enough there to fire them up to go out and call on their neighbors. You can look at the Episcopalians and the United Church of Christ and find some congregations that are doing very well, but they tend to be more conservative theologically."

For Ammerman, the notion that strong beliefs determine the success of churches suggests "a very Protestant and for that matter a very conservative Protestant way of understanding the strength of religion. Within Catholicism or Judaism you can be a very strong, practicing religious person without necessarily knowing what the beliefs are supposed to be or believing very strongly. The point is that you’re orienting your whole life around a set of practices that puts you into a kind of relationship with the sacred, with God. It’s not about having strong beliefs about salvation or about the Bible or about the afterlife; it’s about how you practice a set of rituals or how you live your life, as in the case of orthodox Judaism, that orients you toward God. A lot of people argue that you can be a very good Jew and not believe in God!"

Stark maintains that strong belief is precisely why traditional Catholicism and orthodox Judaism are experiencing a revival. "If you don’t think there’s a higher power to appeal to," he observes, "prayer is nonsense. Rituals are powerful because they have meaning, and it seems to me this meaning is the ball game. What does the Bible say? That he who believes is baptized. So there’s pretty good company out there arguing that the core of Christianity is a set of beliefs."

If strong images of God impassion evangelizers and attract converts today, Stark reasons, such images should also explain the historical appeal of monotheistic faiths. In fact, he is convinced it is the content of monotheistic belief -- that there is one true, ubiquitous, compassionate, just, all-powerful God -- that has given the three great monotheistic faiths a decided advantage.

"The one true God has enormously attractive features compared to a whole rabble of little gods," he says. "First of all, those little gods can’t do much for you. Second, you’re not at all sure they would. That’s why it seems to me historically that the great monotheisms have always overwhelmed the polytheisms. And at the philosophical level it makes better sense. The God of Christianity or Judaism was a much more credible kind of presentation to Romans than was that whole pantheon."

A large part of that credibility is based on trust: God cares. "The monotheistic gods offer an enormous amount of concern for us," Stark explains. "And to the extent they’re concerned about us, there are certain protections that we call morality that those kinds of gods really get behind. They say, ‘I can see you anywhere, and I care, and I punish.’ One of the great things that distinguishes the monotheisms is the assumption that God really does care and consequently imposes a moral standard."

In his first historical work, The Rise of Christianity (1997), Stark revealed how faith in a compassionate God revitalized Western culture. Because Christians believed in a loving God who in turn enjoined them to love one another, and because this love was not restricted to family or even tribe, Christians cared for one another in ways that were unusual in the pagan and Jewish worlds. By sharing things in common, nursing the sick and protecting women and children, Christians made the promises of God effective and thus attractive. Converts, Stark argues, "rationally chose" Christianity because it offered the best life -- and the most humanity -- they could get.

But conversion alone did not account for the growth of the early church. It grew for internal reasons, which Stark proposes were also a fruit of faith; respect for women and unborn life led to increased fertility, care of the sick to decreased mortality. If Christianity had not offered a credible, compassionate God, it not only wouldn’t have flourished, it might not have survived at all.

The monotheistic God possesses another, equally powerful advantage: rationality. For Christians, the fact that God’s ways are rational means that they can be understood, gradually and in part, by human reason.

In For the Glory of God, Stark makes a case for the progressive and rational nature of Christian belief by exposing a number of falsehoods and antireligious myths that have enjoyed a long run in the popular imagination and the academic world. These myths include the notion that fanatical inquisitors were responsible for the execution of millions of alleged witches; that benighted medieval churchmen suppressed scientific knowledge; and that plantation economics, not Christian moral fervor, brought an end to slavery. All these notions, Stark insists, are untrue.

Stark dismisses claims by popular writers that religious zealots executed "millions" of witches. His sources put the death toll closer to 60,000. The historical record yields other statistical surprises as well. Between 1540 and 1700, for example, the Spanish Inquisition reviewed 44,701 charges of heresy, blasphemy, sexual offenses, superstition and witchcraft. Only 826 of these resulted in executions. "I was astonished when I began reading on the Inquisition and realizing, my God, these people hardly ever executed anybody! I was led to believe they executed tens of thousands and that it wasn’t a good Saturday afternoon unless they burned 480 people. They probably burned 480 people in Spain all told. The idea that the real purpose of the Inquisition was to welcome people back into the church properly just escapes everybody."

Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell of the University of California at Santa Barbara believes Stark has correctly identified misconceptions about witch hunts, including claims about the death toll. That kind of exaggeration, says Russell, "distorts not only the facts but the entire perception of the role of the church and the role of Christianity and the nature of society. It’s like believing that people in the Middle Ages thought the earth was flat. It gives us another club with which to beat those ignorant people back then, who were of course mainly Christians."

Russell also confirms Stark’s finding that the Inquisition acted as a brake on the public craze rather than as fuel. "In fact," Russell notes, "both the Inquisition and the Parlement or supreme court of France, where you have some strong central authority, were very effective in restraining the convictions for witchcraft -- most of which come out of isolated areas of weak governance. ‘When those cases are appealed up to responsible bodies of lawyers, judges and administrators, a vast number and even a sizable majority of them are thrown out, because these authorities are trained to examine evidence and to evaluate it. So just because Mrs. Smith says that Mrs. Brown is a witch isn’t enough."

"The better educated people wanted some strenuous proof," says Stark, "and that was the attitude of the Spanish Inquisition: ‘I believe in witches, but I’ve never met one! I’ve looked at 1,800 people, not a witch among them, and I’ve rebaptized all of them."’

The appeal to reason also dominated Christian learning. Science, Stark points out, did not emerge in opposition to Christianity but within it: the first universities were established by the church, and early science was conducted almost exclusively by people in holy orders. Stark’s roster of the most eminent 16th- and 17th-century scientists reveals that a majority were personally devout and many were themselves church officials. What is significant for Stark is that the first scientists were not only religiously affiliated but religiously inspired. Science was a calling to discover God’s plan in the arrangement of nature, or, as Stark puts it, to "know God’s handiwork."

Such knowledge was considered attainable, he says, because monotheisms are motivated by what God has revealed and promised; they are thus future-oriented. Polytheisms, essence religions and mystery cults, on the other hand, invoke unalterable forces and eternal returns; they attribute events to inevitability, inscrutability and whim. Real science -- meaning a system of generalized, testable principles -- emerged only where belief in a rational creator and an orderly creation prevailed.

"The ultimate basis for a scientific society requires that you make the assumption that God created something," Stark explains, "and in the major monotheisms the sky is a lot higher. Gods aren’t in every tree and rock. Stars don’t move because God has sent angels to push them. I do think the philosopher was right who said you’ve got to believe that God is a mystery that can be solved -- that the universe inns on the basis of rules that, once established, need no supervision."

Even today, Stark says, the alleged incompatibility of science and faith is not supported by the facts. Recent surveys show that more than half of "hard" scientists such as physicists and chemists report a belief in God. A similar profile emerges in the life sciences. And if hard science is not antagonistic to religion, neither is strong religion inimical to science, insists Stark. "The most ardent evangelical Christians assume that the truth exists. And they don’t just mean that God is there but that the world is there."

As for secular scientists, Stark surmises that they "now take as a given and very frequently don’t know the origin of the kinds of principles that people like Newton and Copernicus and others took from Christian theology. But once those principles -- that the universe is lawful and predictable and knowable -- are out and accepted, people can affirm them directly and don’t necessarily need to see the foundational statements that got us there."

Jeffrey Burton Russell points out that among historians of science "there’s a strong debate going on between those who understand that the development of science is basically a Western European phenomenon, and that this is because of its Christian or Judeo-Christian roots, and those who maintain that religion blocked the progress of science until the 18th and 19th centuries, and that [science has] to struggle against religion. Scholars feel very, very strongly about these things."

Strong feelings also attend the scholarly debate over the role of Christianity in the abolition of slavery. Historians agree that abolition was born in religious circles. What they don’t agree on is the extent -- if any -- to which religious beliefs informed the movement and guaranteed its eventual success. Stark argues that only adherents of monotheism, with their faith in God’s universal justice, compassion and uncompromising moral code, were in a position to deduce that slavery was sinful and thereby propel the liberation of slaves.

Christians reasoned their way from believing in divine righteousness to seeing the immorality of human bondage to advocating total, outright abolition. That it took 1,800 years reflects, for Stark, both the progressive nature of theology and the fact that slavery virtually disappeared from Europe following the collapse of the Roman Empire. It was not until the age of exploration that the issue arose again for Christians.

One of the misconceptions about New World slavery that Stark is eager to correct is the role of the Catholic Church and Catholic teaching. It was not, he argues, that the Catholic Church did not condemn slavery, as many believe; it was that no one listened. In the 15th and 16th centuries, not one but five popes issued bulls condemning in no uncertain terms the enslavement of Indians, and eventually Africans, in the New World. Two more weighed in during the 19th century. Yet New World colonies, Stark explains, were controlled by crowns, not churches. Thus while Jesuits fought for the rights of slaves and defended converted native communities, Spanish and Portuguese authorities supported slavery wholeheartedly -- and armies are stronger than friars,

Stark also finds that slave "codes" adopted in Catholic French and Spanish colonies allowed slaves a greater measure of dignity and even freedom than codes installed by the Protestant British and Dutch. Historians know that slaves living under Catholic-influenced codes were baptized and permitted to marry. In some places slaves could even own property and purchase their own freedom.

To these facts Stark adds an overlooked piece of data: the U.S. census of 1830 shows that the percentage of free blacks was significantly higher in Catholic New Orleans (41.7 percent of the total black population) than in other southern cities (6.4 percent in Charleston, South Carolina; 1.2 percent in Natchez, Mississippi). In Louisiana as a whole, Stark notes, "thirteen times as many slaves were freed as next door in Mississippi.

"Now if some policies that apply to slaves make it easy to become free and other policies make it almost impossible, that is a real demonstration that ideas, and in this case religious ideas, matter. The fact that the Church of England declared that the slaves were not baptizable humans and that the Catholic Church baptized them made a huge difference in the lives of the people we’re talking about."

The story of abolition is a complicated one, as Stark’s investigation attests. Historian Mark Noll of Wheaton College points out that "what makes Christian support of abolitionism tricky [to analyze] is that there were also substantial Christian voices and movements oriented in two other directions: one actually in support of slavery and the other against abolition. Some Christians felt that abolitionists were social and theological radicals -- and in fact, some of them were -- and so they opposed abolitionism. The main stance of the Catholic Church, for example, was not so much proslavery as anti-abolitionism, because the church associated abolitionism with extreme individualism."

Yet Noll does credit the early antislavery views of Dominican missionary Bartolomé de Las Casas, and he notes the importance of Pope Paul III’s pronouncement condemning the treatment of natives as if they were animals. "That’s not abolitionism," observes Noll, "but it is a statement about human nature and human worth. The really critical mass of anti-slave activity, however, came in Britain, with the whole circle of mostly Anglican evangelical philanthropists. For the British, it was the actual experience of slavery in some of its most brutal forms in the West Indies that precipitated thinking hard about slavery, which then precipitated biblical and theological arguments against it, which then led to political action."

Stark allows that the British abolition movement succeeded sooner -- thanks to strong parliamentary action and Britain’s vigorous interdiction of slave vessels. But in British colonies, too, he maintains, it was not secular Enlightenment notions or economic shifts or naval superiority that brought an end to slavery. It was devout Christian advocacy.

In the forthcoming Victories of Reason, Stark will attribute to Christian rationality and advocacy nothing less than the emergence of capitalism (pioneered by medieval monks, not industrious Protestants) and the foundational principles of equality and individual liberty that informed that most conspicuous Western achievement of all: modern republican democracy. While this last argument has a distinguished pedigree, Stark puts the case in boldest terms: "All that 18th-century philosophizing on things like individualism and liberty was coming straight out of 1,800 years of Christianity."

"Nobody asks where we got our notion that people ought to have some kind of moral equality," he observes. "But it seems to me the origins of these notions are in the New Testament. Jesus was constantly breaking the rules about whom you associated with. The fundamental Western assumption is that we’re all equal in the eyes of God and that that matters above and beyond everything else. You’ve got Paul saying this repeatedly and Jesus demonstrating it and theologians progressively stressing it."

For Stark, refusing to acknowledge the influence of Christianity on Western civilization suggests an advanced stage of wrong-headedness: "What I find so astonishing is that the people who are willing to blame Christianity for having ‘destroyed’ civilization for 2,000 years are unwilling to see that it had any effects on another level. If we think that there is such a thing as Western civilization, that it is one of a kind and changed the world in very good ways as well as perhaps in bad ones, to fail to see that the central institution throughout most of this period is the church, is ignorant."

The walls of prejudice have weakened over recent years, Stark reports, as religious believers have entered the social sciences. Yet the secular curriculum has not begun to tremble, let alone crumble. Jeffrey Burton Russell suggests that a full recovery of Christianity’s contributions to Western civilization is far from imminent: "I think it’ll take a generation or two, probably two or three, even to get back to some kind of a balance."

The value of Christianity to Western culture is no point of contention at Baylor. After a 30-year teaching career at the University of Washington, Stark recently became Baylor’s first University Professor of the Social Sciences. As such, his role will be to attract talented Christian scholars in the field, enhancing the school’s academic profile in accordance with its renewed religious mission. The goal, as Stark sees it, is "to give Baylor the resources it needs to participate in the national cultural wars." He adds: "There’s no reason that a good Christian university can’t be a good university."

Of his own religious beliefs, Stark is reticent to speak at length, in part, he says, because they are in some ways fairly new. He had considered himself a cultural Christian but not a professing one. That has changed. "At Baylor they do require a profession of faith, and I made one in good conscience. I could not have made such a profession years ago. I’ve never been an atheist, but I had difficulty with much of the paganism of the New Testament. But I worked through it, realizing that God speaks to people in terms they can understand and that this is what the pagan world could understand at that time.

"Calvin had a wonderful line about revelation being the ultimate condescension, that we are incapable of understanding God in his reality and so he has to condescend to us, to speak to us within our limits. That doesn’t mean it isn’t tine, only that this was the form the message had to take. And when you recognize, as Augustine did, that theology is progressive, the paganism becomes an irrelevance."

What remains deeply relevant, in Stark’s eyes, is the potency of religious ideas, of individual faith in those ideas, and of one person telling another the good news. That an intimate acquaintance with God and a handful of New Testament notions could have seeded the civilization we call Western -- rational, bountiful, progressive and free -- surpasses the concept of relevance altogether. The irony is that while Christianity inspired a moral fervor for things unseen but possible, its achievements are now so embedded in the culture as to be practically invisible.

"In our time," Stark reflects, "people can be doing Christian things and not even know it." One thing we do know is that Jesus instructed his followers to become leaven in the world. As Stark sees it, that is precisely what they did -- and history proves it.

What Can We Learn from the Mystics?

To think that that mystics are engaged in a series of private, transcendent encounters with God betrays a superficial understanding, says Bernard McGinn. Christian mystics, in particular, are not breakaway contemplatives who find their own way to God. They are bearers and interpreters of a common tradition built upon a concrete revelation: God became human so that humans might become God. Christian mystics do not dabble in altered states. They seek radically altered lives.

McGinn is widely considered the preeminent scholar of mysticism in the Western Christian tradition and a leading authority on the theology of the 14th-century mystic Meister Eckhart. He has also written extensively on Jewish mysticism. He is the author, most recently, of The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing (Crossroad), and he has co-edited and translated two volumes of Eckhart’s sermons, treatises and instructions for the Classics of Western Spirituality Series (Paulist Press). In 1991, McGinn published the first title in a projected five-volume work, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (Crossroad), the first comprehensive history of Western mysticism in English. Three volumes have appeared to date. He has just completed work on a smaller project co-written with his wife, Patricia, a psychotherapist, titled Makers of Mysticism, an introductory guide to a dozen mystics.

I spoke with him at his office at the University of Chicago Divinity School about the nature of mysticism and about the contemporary interest in mystics and in spirituality.

In The Presence of God, you describe some of the great shifts that occurred in the ways people looked for God. In early Judaism, for example, God was traditionally found in the Temple, but in the Second Temple period a literature emerged in which God is sought in the unassailable heavens. And in Christianity during the Middle Ages, groups like the Beguines and the followers of Francis showed that the spiritual life need not be confined to the monastery and the cloister but could be lived in the world. Do you think we are in a new position today in the search for God?

I think we are. The spiritual traditions of the world are in conversation with one another in a way they never were before, and that is bound to create a dramatically different situation. There’s a worldwide ecumenism now, in which we try to understand other traditions because they’re no longer "out there," far away.

We’ve also seen a return within the various traditions to an emphasis upon the spiritual and mystical. Two generations ago Jewish mysticism, especially the Kabbalah, was thought of as kind of bizarre, kooky stuff. The work of people like Gershom Scholem and others has shown increasingly that mysticism is really essential to the Jewish tradition.

When I grew up in Roman Catholicism in the 1950s, mystics were out there -- Teresa and John of the Cross, for example -- but you weren’t supposed to read them because this was very strange, dangerous stuff. That’s changed dramatically in 50 years’ time. And "spirituality," which was a kind of technical Roman Catholic term then, has become not only generally used by all Christians but used by other traditions as well.

Why do you think there is this renewed interest in spirituality?

In describing religion I often use the model created by Baron von Hügel in his book The Mystical Elements of Religion, written in the early 20th century. He says that religion has three elements: the Petrine element, which is both authority and organization; the Pauline element, which is the intellectual side; and the mystical element, which he identified with the apostle John and which has to do with some kind of consciousness or experience of God. For von Hügel all of those elements need to be in balance if religion is going to be healthy.

One of the things that developed in the 20th century was an imbalance -- authority and sometimes intellect became more important than the heart. That’s why I think a lot of people are now finding tremendous resources in spiritual and mystical texts.

Mysticism is sometimes thought of as a dangerous pursuit because of the potential for self-deception or self-delusion. Is it any more risky than Christianity itself?

I don’t think so. One of the things that most spiritual traditions insist upon, though, is that at some stage a spiritual guide is very important. Sometimes that guidance takes places within a communal framework or in a mentor relationship. This is true in Islam, Judaism and Christianity.

The figure of the solitary sage on the mountaintop is really the exception. Even St. Anthony, who lived in the desert for 20 years, returned to form a community. And in the desert the notion of the father teaching the younger disciple is very important. So it’s rare, actually, that mystics are very isolated figures.

Reading through the Presence volumes, I couldn’t help seeing the mystics as distinct personalities. Do you see them that way?

Very much so. Each of them is very distinct. Of course, there are a number of themes that most Christian mystics will touch upon, like the role of love, the relation of love and intellect and of action and contemplation, the role of Christ, the understanding of mystical union, the trinitarian life and ascetical practice. But how the mystics understand and relate to these themes is going to differ.

The great Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, whose works are deeply imbued with his knowledge of the mystics, talks about truth as symphonic, and I think that’s a good way of looking at mysticism too. There’s a tremendous symphony of voices.

One of the things that really was unfortunate in the previous study of mysticism in Catholicism and elsewhere was that one or two mystics were taken as paradigmatic cases. If a mystical text didn’t agree with Teresa and John, it was like a theologian not agreeing with Thomas Aquinas! We’ve come to see in the past half century that no matter how great Thomas Aquinas was, he’s one theologian among others. And no matter how great Teresa was, she’s one mystic among others. It’s much more creative and attractive to look at the full symphony. We have all these different kind of instruments -- maybe playing together somewhere in eternity!

But the mystics are also playing within a tradition. We can look at these figures as individuals, but we will discover more about them if we look at them as part of a tradition in Christianity dating back to Origen in the third century, at least, and building upon scripture and enriching itself for almost 2,000 years.

When you get to the 13th century in The Flowering of Mysticism, the mystical encounter seems to take on a decidedly charismatic expression in which the individual is somehow visibly touched by the divine -- Francis being perhaps the prime example of the believer who so puts on Christ that he bears Christ’s wounds. What is the difference between the mystical encounter and what we think of today as charismatic experiences -- if in fact they are distinct? Is one an inward experience, the other an outward sign?

Well, I think that would be one way to put it, but charisms as described by Paul in First Corinthians, which is really the foundational text, can involve a whole range of things, from speaking in tongues, to prophesying, to being given gifts of wisdom, and so on. So it’s a very diffuse term. Sometimes the experience can be accompanied by a kind of inner, transformative consciousness of God, but not necessarily.

Some people use the terms visionary and mystical interchangeably, so that every kind of vision is a mystical vision, and I really don’t think that is the case. A good example would be Birgitte of Sweden in the 14th century, who has all sorts of connections with God but whose message -- 99.9 percent of the tune -- is a reformist and prophetic message, not a mystical message. I see her as a prophet of reform rather than a mystic.

The special kinds of experiences that we would call ecstatic experiences and visions and the like can be mystical, but they need not be. For long periods in Christian history, particularly in the Patristic period and the early Middle Ages, there was a kind of suspicion of these special charisms. With what I call the "new mysticism" that begins around the year 1200 there’s a return to these experiences in a wide variety of figures, and often the experiences do involve what I would call mysticism -- that is, the charism is transformative of the individual and puts them in the status of spiritual teacher.

It’s interesting that Francis never talks about his own experiences, not even the stigmata. But Francis’s hagiographers talk about him as an ecstatic, as a visionary. And of course a lot of the women in the 13th and 14th centuries also speak at great length about what we would call charismatic experiences, but so do some male mystics.

You’ve edited and translated a number of collections and editions of Meister Eckhart’s sermons and theological writings over the years, and you’ve just written a full-length study of him. Why is he important to you and perhaps to anyone seeking a deeper spirituality today?

He certainly is very important for me. He’s fascinating historically because he was a very prominent scholastic and Dominican administrator who was charged with heresy and condemned posthumously. So he has this whiff of danger about him. Of course, I think the condemnation was incorrect in every possible way. Even the Dominican order has petitioned the pope to revoke this judgment.

We think of the medieval people as very simple -- many of them were illiterate and so on. But Eckhart preached very difficult sermons to general audiences, not just to clergy. And even today, despite the complex nature of his preaching, he has a powerful impact on people. In fact, the Eckhart Society, which began in England in the 1980s, was founded by an Anglican man and Catholic woman who previously had been very attracted to Buddhism. Their spiritual director, a famous Buddhist scholar, told them not to become Buddhists but to go read Eckhart! And so they remained Anglican and Catholic and were able to find in Eckhart what they had been missing in some forms of Christianity.

That arresting subtitle, The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing, suggests that Eckhart had an elevated kind of insight or status.

That phrase is actually from a contemporary description of Eckhart, and one of the reasons I used it is that it’s profoundly ironic and paradoxical. It seems to single him out, but if you put it in Eckhart’s framework of thinking about God, it shows his commonality, because God hides his nothingness from all of us. We’re all essentially in flue same boat. And of course the mystical life, the mystical search, is the search for the God who is nothing. It’s the realization that God is a hidden god.

You say in The Presence of God that mysticism is an original, essential element of Christianity -- is this because of the "hiddenness" of God?

I think the fact that God is a hidden God puts mysticism at the center of Christianity, but what I emphasize is that mysticism is one element of religion. I’m profoundly dissatisfied with the notion that mysticism is a kind of true religion, or the hidden core of the true religion, while institutions and teachings occupy some kind of periphery. I think it’s much better to see religion as a complex of beliefs and practices in which mysticism plays an essential role. Mysticism doesn’t float free of religion -- with the exception of the past hundred years, when the dissatisfaction with organized religion has led some people to turn to mysticism as a kind of private religion.

The idea that mysticism floats free is something that Christianity, Judaism, Islam and other religions would react against because their mystical teachings are a part of the complex of being a Christian, Jew or Muslim, and they coexist with practices, beliefs, institutions and so forth. Even Eckhart’s notion of inwardness and detachment didn’t lead him outside the framework of medieval Christianity. That’s why he’s so terribly upset when he’s accused of being a heretic. I cannot be a heretic, he says, because being a heretic is a matter of the will, of wanting to persist in an incorrect view. I can be mistaken intellectually -- show me where I’ve made a mistake and I’ll retract it.

Despite Eckhart’s emphasis on detachment from the self and the will, his account of the soul’s pursuit of God makes the soul seem decidedly willful and forceful -- it’s the soul that compels God, that calls the shots, that conquers. Eckhart even says of God, "He cannot shut me out."

Eckhart does talk about compelling God, but you compel God by your emptiness and by getting rid of all your selfishness and by total detachment. Eckhart and his followers often use what we would call a gravitational model -- that is, water has to flow downhill, but it can only flow into what’s empty. So it’s in the process of emptying yourself of your self-will that you compel God, because God can’t come in if there’s something else there, meaning yourself.

And the self here means the selfish self. Eckhart and his disciples are always preaching to get rid of the self that’s concerned with its own desires, wishes, characteristics, success, fulfillment -- everything that centers on us. That’s what they’re talking about when they talk of detachment, which is the cutting off, or of a "releasement." Eckhart uses both those terms.

Other mystics talk about reaching God through purification, or an attitude of humility. Are detachment and releasement just different terms for these traditional notions or are they new concepts?

Here’s the way I would summarize Eckhart and his followers’ preaching: People think they know what humility is -- acting humble. People think they know what purity is -- avoiding this, avoiding that. But those are practices, whereas detachment and releasement is something much, much deeper. It is ultimate humility and total purification. It involves a much deeper annihilation of the self. And then, paradoxically, if you can do that, the self returns to you, but it’s no longer the selfish self. It’s the purely spontaneous good self.

This is the notion of Eckhart and some other 13th-century mystics of living "without a why." "Living without a why" means that you don’t ask, What’s in it for me? or Why am I doing this? You just do the good spontaneously, the way that God acts. God doesn’t act because of the why or for any interest of his own.

Many of the mystics start with small practices, like prayer, or ascetic habits, or meditation on a passage of scripture, and gradually work their way up to a transcendent state or a God-consciousness. With Eckhart it appears to go the other way. Is that correct?

There are not a lot of concrete things that you do in Eckhart’s form of mysticism. What Eckhart is most concerned with is this change of attitude, which he says can happen instantaneously if you can just get into the frame of mind in which you give up the self. Eckhart is in some ways pretty impractical, and that’s evident in his constant speech about how if you’re using ways to find God you’re finding ways and not God.

To some people, of course, this sounds extremely challenging -- and it is, in a way. But Eckhart was not a radical. He lived as a group monk, prayed his office and practiced penance, and did all the things he was supposed to do. But his point would be that these things in themselves mean absolutely nothing. They have meaning only if the attitude in which you do them is the attitude of detachment.

In his treatment of the Martha and Mary text (Luke 10:38-42), Eckhart defends Martha’s focus on the tasks of hospitality. Is that a striking departure from the traditional understanding?

Yes, Eckhart is the first commentator to elevate Martha above Mary. The earlier commentators tried to show that both Martha and Mary were necessary, though Mary’s approach is higher. Eckhart says that Mary is the one who’s still learning, whereas Martha is the one who has learned perfectly because she combines contemplation and action -- though Eckhart doesn’t use those words -- in an unselfish, detached way She can now operate as the soul "without a why" and be effective spontaneously without losing that contact with God. Mary’s just on the way to that. She needs to learn life.

I get the feeling that living spontaneously in God, or living without a why, is a lot like living the Christian life generally. At some point it becomes second nature, and goodness and holiness seem effortless. But getting to that point is the hard part.

Eckhart’s radical formulations are sometimes found to be impossible. But he very deliberately tried to wake people up out of a kind of moral and dogmatic slumber, to wake them up to the possibilities of recognizing that the union with God already exists in the soul -- and recognizing it in order to live it out. When you reach that realization, the things that seemed impossible, paradoxical and outrageous somehow take on a new light. I think Eckhart felt that the kind of shock therapy of his preaching was the only way to wake people up to that message, because it was so easy to get lost in the ordinary round of pious activity and to think that through this activity we are pleasing God. That’s why we get those famous phrases of his like, "Well, if you think you’re finding God better in the church than in the stable, you’re wrapping God in a towel and stuffing him under a bench!" The point is not that God isn’t in church, but that he’s also out in the stable -- if you learn to live in the proper way.

Eckhart’s preaching style seems to have a lot in common with that of Jesus in the New Testament, who appears contradictory and paradoxical.

Who challenges, yes. Eckhart’s preaching is deeply scriptural in that sense, and in fact he says at the end of his Commentary on John that you have to speak excessively when you preach or talk about scripture because scripture speaks excessively -- that’s the nature of speaking about God. God is always beyond anything that we can understand or say so excessive speech both in scripture and in the scriptural preacher should be the norm. Of course, the mystery is hidden underneath this tremendous rhetorical flourish.

How do you answer the charge that Eckhart’s theology of mystical union, in which the soul achieves "indistinction" and becomes one with God, is really a form of self-deification?

I think that’s looking through the wrong end of the telescope. I would put it the other way and say that God deifies himself in us when we become perfectly detached, and that’s the nature of God’s creation of humanity as the image and likeness of God -- imago Dei. I think Eckhart would say no, we don’t deify ourselves, but if we totally negate ourselves, then God deifies himself in us.

Global Gospel: Christianity is Alive and Well in the Southern Hemisphere

Christians throughout history may be justly accused of many failures, but it appears neglecting evangelism is not one of them. Observers of Christian growth have been suggesting over the last few decades that the faith is experiencing a significant migratory moment, not unlike the first explosive venture outside the tribe of the Jews into the unfamiliar world of the gentiles. That movement internationalized Christianity, then Hellenized it and eventually Europeanized it. The point historians of religion make is that Christian expansion was not just a matter of adding more people but of adding other people and cultures to its family. The point missiologists would add is that evangelization did not succeed by assimilating local cultures but by converting them. That is how a religion with a Palestinian homeland came to be associated with a European heartland.

Now the map has changed again, and in this geographical shift lies the future of Christianity. Historian Philip Jenkins of Penn State University believes the recent burgeoning of Christianity in the non-Western world could represent a seminal moment in Christian history, perhaps even world history. Jenkins has marshaled the statistical evidence and the scholarship in his new book, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity.

A capsule of his findings would include the following facts: Over the past century, Christian populations in the West have either been holding steady or declining, while in Africa, Asia and Latin America -- the "global South" in current geopolitical coinage -- the numbers have been rising significantly and in some cases dramatically. Today there are more Christians living in the global South than in Europe, North America, Russia and Japan. Roughly two-thirds of all Protestants live outside Europe and North America. This is partly a reflection of general population trends in both the South (rising) and the West (steady at best), and of the triumph of secularism in Western nations.

But the statistics also reveal something far more meaningful: a boom in conversions across the South and the rise of new and independent churches. Not only are there more people in the developing world but more of those people are becoming Christian. In 1965 the Christian population in Africa was around 25 percent of the continental total. Today it is 46 percent. In 1920 there were some 300,000 Christians in Korea; today there are between 10 and 12 million, approximately 25 percent of the total population.

Add to this the fact that many of the largest and fastest growing megacities, among them São Paulo, Manila, Mexico City Kinshasa and Kampala, already boast large and in a few cases majority Christian populations -- and these are swelling too. In some cities churches can’t be built fast or big enough. Moreover, while this growth is occurring across denominations, and within the mainline churches as well as newer, independent churches, some of the most striking gains are occurring within the Pentecostal or charismatic fold. Even the traditional churches -- Catholic, Anglican, Methodist and so on -- have themselves developed a more "spirited" style since the great missionary period, first in convergence with local religious expression, more recently in response to evangelical pressures. If Pentecostal groups, independent churches and charismatic movements continue to gain converts, the traditional denominations may lean even further in that direction. For Jenkins this all adds up to the possibility that the Western model of Christianity, for so long a conceptual affair, could soon be superseded by a decidedly charismatic Southern model.

There are worlds of difference between Korean Pentecostal movements and African independent churches, between mainline Catholicism in the Philippines and evangelical Protestantism in Brazil, Jenkins observes. African Christianity by itself is a many-splendored thing, with prophet-healing churches, radical charismatic sects, new Pentecostal groups, plus strong traditional congregations. But there are some common characteristics. "The most important one," Jenkins says, "is the idea of the direct, divine intervention in daily life. The idea that religion can provide healing of mind, body and soul, and the three can’t be separated, is an absolutely fundamental notion in the South,"

"That’s obviously not an idea that’s unfamiliar in the West," he adds. "You can go to many Pentecostal churches and say, ‘I’m sick,’ or even, ‘I’m possessed,’ and they will try to cure you. If you go to an Episcopal or Catholic church they will point you to an emergency ward, and they might even point you to a psychiatric emergency ward. And I think that’s the fundamental difference."

The mainstream tendency to discount or rationalize the supernatural leads to all sorts of Western anxieties when confronting the spectacle of world Christianity. "I think there is a genuine embarrassment/horror when people in the West look at, for instance, some of the Pentecostal traditions, and I’m always very worried when people look at Asian or African religion and present it as a kind of syncretism, as a kind of survival of the pagan," says Jenkins. "In virtually every case you can see exactly where they’re getting these ideas: they’re getting them from the New Testament. That may be the single biggest factor that people writing on Third World Christianity often miss, which is the completely biblical nature of a lot of what’s happening."

In fact, Jenkins says, his own research "radically changed the way I read the New Testament. It has made it make much more sense. You tend to see the quantities of space that are devoted to certain themes that we tend to skip over. The New Testament is a book about miracles; it is a book about healings, exorcism, how to deal with persecution. If you take those themes you’ve probably got -- and this is a totally nonscientific figure -- about 85 percent of all four Gospels. Just open the New Testament at random and I bet you’re going to find something about healings, exorcisms, persecutions and miracles."

"We tend to read very selectively. When we read a passage like, ‘Don’t worry what happens when you’re called before a judge, the Holy Spirit will tell you what to say,’ that doesn’t really mean much. But it’s really good practical, worldly advice if you live in a lot of countries.

Many if not most Southern Christians endure conditions and afflictions the West has largely overcome: poverty, persecution, disease, exile. Their world may look nothing like ours, Jenkins says, but it bears a striking resemblance to the world of the New Testament. Churches can offer sanctuary, community and a social safety net where governments can’t or won’t, and they can also offer what the New Testament offers: divine assistance. Jenkins believes this fit between the New Testament and the needs and aspirations of the developing world is in large part what makes Christianity so appealing.

This does not preclude Christianity’s being compatible with local faiths. Jenkins observes that local beliefs about visions, prophecy and healing have also contributed to Southern Christianity’s distinctive supernaturalism. Other scholars concur. Missiologist and historian Lamin Sanneh of Yale Divinity School has written widely and deeply on the flowering of Christianity in Africa, from the second century through the mission period to the present, and he believes the seeds of success were already present in African soil. "Christianity," says Sanneh, "came into Africa equally as fulfillment and challenge, but in either case as reinforcement of the religious worldview of Africans concerning spiritual and divine agency, the sacramental sense of community, the ties between the living and the dead, the potency of dreams, prayers and invocations."

But the old religions, Sanneh notes, "had only a limited ethical range: the family, the clan, the village, the tribe. Small-scale societies insulated people from historical pressures and thus removed the need for adjustments in people’s worldview. Christianity answered this historical challenge by a reorientation of the worldview so that the old moral framework was reconfigured without being overthrown."

Christianity has always, if fitfully, adapted itself to local languages, customs and even rival religions. Yet inculturation is not the process of making Christianity adaptable but of making it believable. In fact, Spiritan Father Anthony Gittins, a former missioner in Sierra Leone and now professor of missiology at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, points out that inculturation is what happens not between cultures but between God and culture. "When we’re talking about inculturation, the first word that comes to mind is ‘faith.’ Not Christianity, because Christianity is culture. So the question then is how do you get Christianity, as a culture, and Africa or America, as a culture, to create a new form of faith. That’s inculturation."

Gittins calls this new form of faith a "hitherto unknown or unimagined part of the body of Christ," much as Jesus was a hitherto unknown revelation of God. The incarnation, in a sense, was the first act of Christian inculturation. But the fact that Jesus himself was enculturated, or socialized, by a Jewish culture under Roman authority suggests "why it would not be sufficient for me to be exactly like Jesus," Gittins observes. Jesus himself had a "context," in other words. So did the disciples, so do we, and so does the gospel. The gospel is "already recontextualized . . . we take the recontextualized gospel and recontextualize it for our own lives. At least that’s what we’re supposed to be doing. We’re not here to do an archaeological re-dig. Practically speaking, inculturation, which would be the local incarnation of the local church, has to be a local experience."

Nonetheless, "the old medieval adage about things being received according to the recipient is the great stumbling block for inculturation in the Roman tradition" Gittins admits. Despite a highly articulated theory of inculturation, he says, the structures of centralization and hierarchy in the Catholic Church are major obstacles. "If you think that the context becomes the ground on which the seed of the gospel grows, and if you’re willing to allow the gospel to fall onto rocky ground or fertile ground, then you will tend to cultivate the context on the understanding that whatever grows out of it is at least some kind of an authentic expression of Christianity. But Roman Catholicism is a little leery of context, because context bespeaks local church, and local church is always in tension with universal church."

The tension becomes frustratingly evident, he adds, in the efforts of those on the ground who "want to pursue the local but then begin to lose their nerve because they feel they’re becoming too parochial -- people of initiative, people of courage, pastors and local communities, who try to pursue the agenda of inculturation nevertheless looking over their shoulder all the time wondering when they’re going to be asked or called to account." Says Gittins: "If I go to Africa and sit down in a local community, far away from the centers of power, I can actually get on with inculturation, and in fact that is the only way I can get on with inculturation."

But new Christian communities also want to belong to the larger church, especially in a globalized world. "They want both to emphasize their indigeneity and to emphasize their relationship to what is beyond," Gittins says. "Thirty years ago," he recalls, "I was in West Africa, and there was an ordination to the priesthood of a young African. And I sat with the local community for a long time to determine how we were going to do this ordination -- what kind of music and what kind of dance and what kind of liturgy -- and I was all gung-ho for the fact that they had so many possible ways of incarnating the liturgy through their own African embodiment and rhythms and so forth, but they were absolutely adamant: they wanted Gregorian chant. And when I asked them why they wanted Gregorian chant they said, ‘Because this is how we know that we are universal, we are catholic.’ And I couldn’t persuade them otherwise."

Local cultures do have the habit of frustrating Western desires for them. Jenkins notes that Western Christians looking south are continually finding their own agendas reflected there, with mixed results. "There’s a great ‘mirror effect’ if you look at what people wrote about African and Latin American theologians in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. The view in the West was, ‘Oh, this is wonderful, they’re saying all these things we wanted to hear.’ Of course they were! They’d all been educated at Cambridge and Harvard and Louvain and they were just feeding back what they’d been taught in the West." Today, Jenkins points out, in light of the moral conservatism of Southern cultures and of rising Pentecostal Christianity, it is Western conservatives who like what they see.

Fears of the gospel being corrupted, Jenkins argues, are largely unfounded. Even the independent churches and radical evangelical groups remain recognizably within the tradition and usually preach a "strong and even pristine Christian message." What these rising communities really signal, Jenkins believes, is a deep spiritual hunger in the developing world and the wide appeal of the Christian God and the Christian story even where local religious faith is strong -- perhaps especially there. Even in the West, "Christianity is a much odder religion than many of us think," he observes. "You have all these strange, strange religions, many of which claim to be variants of Christianity and are denounced as cults, but actually when you look at them, maybe they have as much claim to be authentic as anything else."

In fact, the issue of syncretism is largely a straw man in the view of these scholars, albeit for different reasons. Sanneh says "syncretism represents the unresolved, unassimilated and tension-filled mixing of Christian ideas with local custom and ritual, and that scarcely results in the kind of fulfilling change signaled by conversion and church membership. Besides, syncretism is the term we use for the religion of those we do not like. No one calls himself or herself a syncretist!"

Perhaps, Sanneh allows, "local ideas of spirit possession have persisted into Pentecostalism and into other forms of enthusiastic religion. . . . The difference now [is] that instead of the disruptions of exorcisms and witchcraft eradication rites we have the Lord’s anointed being vindicated with miracles, signs and wonders."

Anthony Gittins observes that "anthropologists have spoken for years and years about the inevitability of syncretism, and they’ve become a little bit more sophisticated in talking about bad syncretism and good syncretism. But when you hear mainstream theologians talking about syncretism it is always and everywhere wrong. And it is always and everywhere whatever happens when Catholicism encounters something else, Well, there’s no way you can move forward if you’ve got that kind of attitude."

Actually, Gittins offers, "it is probably still true to say that there are far more cultural Christians in the United States than there are Christians, and it is certainly worth arguing that there are more African cultural Christians than there are African evangelical, disciple-like Christians as some of the theologians would like to imagine. And it’s too easy to accuse everybody else of being syncretic when in point of fact the normal way of receiving Christianity is in a syncretic kind of way. The very superficial epidermis of the cross-section of Christianity is a theological orthodoxy, but beneath that the flesh of Christianity is not very theological in an articulated way and it is not very orthodox. The kind of orthopraxy that exists among many Christians is a devotional orthopraxy, or a syncretic orthopraxy, and so long as some of the clergy don’t know about that, it coexists, and to the degree that some of the clergy find out about it, they get themselves terribly excited and think that they should be able to eradicate it."

"There are a number of voices," says Gittins, "and one listens to them sympathetically, but at the end of the day I think they don’t detract from the principle of inculturation as synonymous with incarnation of the faith in particular places in the contemporary world."

Pentecostal conversions in Latin America mostly account for the Protestant ‘sweep" of the continent that so alarms the Catholic Church. Allowing that these defections from Catholicism may have been overestimated, Jenkins says the rapid increase in conversions is nonetheless phenomenal, and in some countries -- Guatemala, Chile, Brazil -- Pentecostals already represent a powerful numeric bloc. In their book Pentecostalism and the Future of the Churches, Richard Shaull, emeritus professor of ecumenics at Princeton Theological Seminary, and his colleague Waldo Cesar, a Brazilian sociologist, argue that Pentecostalism may represent a new paradigm of salvation in which the problem of human sin and the solution of repentance and forgiveness have been reconfigured along more hopeful, even joyful lines. "Pentecostals," Shaull says, "discover that their experience of salvation -- as the gift of life in the midst of death -- incorporates them into a dynamic movement of the Spirit for the reconstruction of broken lives." Shaull describes his and Cesar’s encounter with Pentecostals as "entering into a type of spirituality in which experience is fundamental and sets the terms for everything else." And, he adds, "at the center of their new life is a call to evangelism, to make this life available to all."

But the evangelistic impetus alone does not explain why Pentecostals have had such extraordinary success, Shaull says. "I think the reason lies in the fact that this present globalized economy leaves masses of people uprooted and abandoned on the periphery of ever growing large cities, where they are engaged in a desperate struggle for daily survival. Moreover, all the structures that normally sustain human life in community are breaking down. In this situation they are seeking and finding in Pentecostalism an experience of the Divine which helps them to put their lives together, heals their wounds, and gives them hope for the future."

The middle classes, for their part, "are realizing that their dreams of upward mobility for themselves and their children will not be realized, and they find few if any political options which challenge them. In this situation, they are also looking for a spiritual experience that might give meaning and purpose to their lives." Yet Shaull considers this "much less important than what is happening in the Pentecostalism of the poor. Poor Pentecostals often experience a presence and power that turns their lives around and compels them to struggle for a new future." For them it is often a radical experience of "supporting life in precarious forms of community," he explains. "That is why, at least in Latin America, a Pentecostal experience focused on day-to-day reality may well become a major force for social change."

"The older Pentecostal movements," Shaull notes, "have been quite moralistic and quite conservative. But it’s important to remember that this is often challenged within Pentecostalism by those who are open to the possibility that life ‘in the Spirit’ doesn’t always settle for this moralism. This is especially true in the Universal Church of the Reign of God, which has already challenged the traditional moralism in other movements."

"In many Pentecostal movements," Shaull points out, "women have no part in ministry, no leadership role. At the same time, in Brazil, there is one offshoot of the Universal Church started by women and largely directed by them, and the testimony of many women is that their experience of the Spirit has given them a new identity. They have ‘gifts’ of healing, prophecy, discernment, etc. And their newfound strength leads them to gradually change the pattern of relationship with their husbands, and contribute to the conversion of many and thus to the transformation of family life."

Shaull perceives signs that Pentecostal movements are gradually coming into their own. "They no longer have to prove to Protestants that they are evangelical," he observes, "and as their numbers increase and they move farther away from their origins in North America, they are less influenced by fundamentalism." Shaull believes that Pentecostal movements today have a much larger space than before in which to develop their own unique life in the Spirit -- "if they keep closely connected with their biblical roots."

The importance in the global South of "biblical roots," and the ability of the Christian scriptures to attract and convert, or claim and be claimed, can hardly be overstated. Jenkins sees striking instances in Western Christianity as well. "It’s always very strange if you read the 17th-century Puritans in, say, Scotland or England, because they would say things like, ‘And we have traveled across the whole land from Dan to Beersheba.’ Now obviously they’re not living in Palestine. What they’ve done is annex the whole story of the Bible as their internal reality." The Bible, says Jenkins, offers a complete world history and a complete ethic. "It’s an astonishingly complete package. And I certainly would not underestimate the idea of an aesthetic appeal. In different ways, different kinds of Christianity have this immense power for people who love words. The Christian scriptures are immensely powerful and they’re often in your own language.

For Sanneh, translation is crucial to the success of evangelization. "Bible translation has marked the history of Christianity from its very origins," he points out. "The Gospels are a translated version of the preaching and message of Jesus, and the Epistles a further interpretation and application of that preaching and message. It was through vernacular translation in particular, he adds, that Christianity could offer the world "a genuine share in the heritage of Jesus." Mother-tongue translation "conforms to the insight of the incarnation, namely, that divinity is not a human loan word but rather humanity is the chosen language of divine self-expression."

In Africa, Sanneh explains, "the African names for God were adopted almost without exception as the name of the God of the Bible," with potent results then and now. "In Nigeria, Yoruba converts to Christianity have the rich heritage of Ifa divination to draw upon. The name for savior, Olugbala, for instance, is preloaded with older Yoruba theological notions of divine solicitude and redemption."

Some Yoruba terms for God are startlingly suggestive in the Christian context: the "One who came whom we have put to death with cudgels causelessly"; the "One who is mightiest among the gods and prevailed to do on a certain occasion what they could not." Sometimes the language is ordinary, almost bashful. The Maasai of East Africa cast their African Creed in similarly concrete terms, says Sanneh, in notable contrast to the abstract Christology of the West. "The Jesus of the African Creed is a historical figure, steeped in his Jewish culture, swept up in the controversies of the day," Sanneh explains. "The Maasai speak of a journey of faith in a God who out of love created the world and us, of how they once knew the High God in darkness but now they know this God in the light. The creed continues with God’s promises in scripture and momentously in Jesus. ‘a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe, born poor in a little village, who left his home and was always on safari doing good, curing people by the power of God,’ until finally he was rejected by his people, tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died. Then the irony of the historical Jesus is clinched with a stunning understatement with the words, ‘He lay buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch him, and on the third day he rose from the grave."’

Such refreshed, hope-filled language and the theology it inspires could have reverberating benefits in the West. "The tradition of exegesis that has been practiced in the West seems to have run its course," Sanneh says. "There are too many instances of recycling and cultural off-loading for us not to think that the envelope can’t be pushed much further." And yet, in Africa and elsewhere fresh materials are "being introduced into scripture, prayers, hymns and liturgy" which could have an effect on "how people in the West think and speak about the gospel and the church." This creativity could have a tonic effect on the West’s "twilight" mood, Sanneh suggests. "The African Creed may be the sign that the indigenization and inculturation of the gospel stand to benefit the wider church."

Gittins agrees that African Christianity is bounteous with riches, particularly in the area of theology, but worries that in the Catholic Church "a lot of the liturgical appurtenances of Africa tend to be regarded as baubles by the universal church." Local communities, he says, "are not able to understand themselves as mature, grown-up, interdependent churches, One of the best examples is the Zairean liturgy, which should have been called the ‘Zairean Liturgy,’ but it is called the ‘Liturgy of the Roman Rite for Zaire.’ In other words, it has been co-opted, it has been colonized by the Roman Rite."

Gittins suggests the most transformative aspect of African Christianity concerns "the question of integration over against the disintegration of life." He explains that in the U.S. "we identify the separation of church and state and we regard the separation as a value. In Africa you would identify the encounter between religion and life, and marriage, and hunting, and every aspect of daily life as part and parcel. So the implications . . . are that religion should penetrate every part of life or it is no use. In our Western culture we can privatize and isolate religion and think it is a whole lot of use. So one of the things that I’ve learned not only from Africa but from elsewhere in the world and from other kinds of people is the idea that it is rather idle for us to think of religion in separation from, and unless we can think of it in integration with, we’ll never be able to discover its potential."

But to integrate, Gittins points out, does not necessarily mean to harmonize. The gospel challenges, it confronts. Sanneh says the fact that the indigenized gospel is both "novel and patriotic" makes it a force for moral reckoning in the prevailing culture. The biblical promise of liberation, for example, was clearly resonant during the period of American slavery. "I became convinced after my study of the subject in Abolitionists Abroad," says Sanneh, "that 18th-century evangelical Christianity represented a social revolution of enormous import for the New World and for Africa by offering outcasts, slaves and captives a moral perspective on their oppression and exclusion. . . . The universal message of divine empowerment is particularly potent in situations of social injustice and political privilege. I had not seen it that clearly before. At any rate, outcasts, slaves, and captives responded overwhelmingly to the gospel, resulting in the first mass movement of blacks into Christianity. Christianity in that sense is more than the nemesis of slavery; it is the nemesis, on the right, of hereditary privilege and natural entitlement, and, on the left, of ideologies of power and state absolutization.

The colonial "imposition" of Christianity was never the whole story. Where issues of liberty and oppression are unresolved in the global South today -- and that is a large area -- Christianity is frequently a catalyst for reform. This is true in newly independent states and in older colonial offspring where conservative traditions have dominated. Jenkins notes that in Latin America and in the Philippines -- two obvious examples -- Catholic Christianity has found itself in alliance with power but also in opposition. Shaull says he sees even more evidence today of Pentecostal involvement in social struggles. "In fact, I have seen several groups of creative Pentecostals who have basically accepted liberation theology while revitalizing and transforming it by bringing their experience of the Spirit into the center of it."

Even in the West, the notion that freedom grows in opposition to the church is something of a popular mythology, says Jenkins. "The whole idea of representative democracy is actually a medieval idea, not Greek. The other example is that very often what seem to be some of the most intolerant or narrow Christian ideas over time evolve into the greatest version of liberty and enlightenment. Calvinism was incredibly restrictive -- you know, ruled by ‘ayatollahs.’ But if you look at the Calvinist states, they are the centers of the Enlightenment. So maybe that is a suggestion that some of these new kinds of Christianity do contain within themselves the seeds of liberty."

Whatever the demands -- and the promises -- of Christianity in the West may be, they appear to have retreated more and more behind the altars of private life, even private imagination. To take the public Jesus at his word is by now, for many Christians, simply unthinkable. But in the global South the gospel promise is alive, and the sense of expectation is palpable. "I have witnessed eager crowds pressing to get into church," remarks Sanneh, "their only motivation being their irrepressible desire to be included in the fellowship of faith." Perhaps in the dawning of Southern Christianity the West might begin to glimpse, if not the substance of things hoped for, at least a ray or two to dispel what Sanneh calls the "lengthening shadows" over Western Christianity. Heaven is not closed, and today doors are opening across the South. As the Maasai announce at the conclusion of their creed: We are waiting for Him. He is alive. He lives. This we believe. Amen.

Up for Adoption (Romans 8:12-25)

Last Sunday’s family conflict story in Genesis 25 offers preachers an opportunity to talk about family conflict in their own communities. This is risky business for preachers. As they gaze out on worshipers and prepare to begin a sermon, they know -- and see -- individuals who are currently embroiled in a family dispute or who have been scarred by a family battle.

In this Sunday’s epistle reading, Paul’s use of the word "adoption" offers preachers an opportunity to discuss how children become part of families. Again, this is risky business. Pastors know that the mere mention of the word "adoption" or "childbirth" will cause many in the congregation to recall their own infertility problems, adoptions, loss of children or parents. But reckoning with the genuine depths of God’s grace compels us to speak a word of hope.

Most scholars agree that Paul borrowed the concept of adoption from Greek or Roman law. The Jews did not practice adoption, and the word never appears in the Hebrew scriptures. In The Epistle to the Romans, Leon Morris says adoption is "a useful word for Paul, for it signifies being granted the full rights and privileges of [belonging to] a family [in] which one does not belong by nature." One is not born a Christian; one becomes a Christian. This reminds me of my three-year-old friend Grace, who was not born a Roberts, but became a Roberts when her parents adopted her.

Morris continues, "This is a good illustration of one aspect of Paul’s understanding of what it means to become a Christian. The believer is admitted into the heavenly family," a family to which the believer has no rights of his or her own. Not only did the concept of adoption help Paul explain how gentiles and Jews could be part of the same family of God, but it also allowed him to emphasize that salvation is not achieved through birthright but through God’s act of grace alone.

An adopted child is received as a gift by her new family, just as the adopting family is a gift to the child. In the same way, the spirit of adoption that Paul commends to the reader is one of gift. It is Paul’s way of describing the gift God gives to us in Christ.

David and Sandra Roberts know this gift well. They have adopted four children. One was born with cerebral palsy. Another came from an abusive home. Each, in his or her unique way, is a gift to the Robertses, and the Roberts family a gift to each of them. Their experience of adoption has given the Robertses a special understanding or what it is like to receive God’s gift of grace in Jesus Christ.

The intimacy with God the parent is apparent in the use of the name "Abba." When we cry "Abba! Father!" says Paul, the Holy Spirit is bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God. His use of "Abba" recalls Jesus’ use of the word in Mark’s Gospel. Morris explains that "the word is from the babbling of a little child (like ‘papa’) and is the familiar term used in the home." Jesus probably used this word in the Lord’s Prayer and, when he did so, he was giving his followers "the privilege of being in the heavenly family and of addressing God in this warm and friendly way."

We are brought near to the heart of God through the spirit of adoption, and not shut in the back room to make way for the "real" children, whoever we think the real children may be. Sometimes we think the elders in the church, pious Christians, pastors or other brave souls who make sacrifices for their faith are the real Christians, the real children of God. But Paul says "we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ." Through the spirit of adoption we become part of the family, and are invited forward to whisper "Mommy" or "Daddy" into the ear of our great parent, the one true God. We don’t have to wait in the back room.

If our relationship with God is in the spirit of adoption -- if God is the gracious parent who freely and lovingly chooses to parent us -- might this concept then challenge our own cultural assumptions about "real" parenthood? The modern American legal system favors the rights of biological families, and tends to try to keep biological families intact. In recent televised legal battles, juries returned an adopted child to a biological parent years after the adoption had been finalized. Does that action fit with a Christian understanding of God’s family, where all of us are adopted and none has a birthright? If we say God’s love for us is like that of a parent and Christian community is like family, aren’t we saying that adoptive relationships are as worthwhile as biological relationships?

If our families of origin invoke pain and suffering in our hearts (our experience of the flesh, as Paul would say), we can be comforted by the knowledge that we are adopted into another family -- literally, as is the case for the Robertses, or spiritually and ultimately, for everyone who becomes a Christian and is redeemed by God in Christ. Whatever our experience of family loss and brokenness we will always belong to God.

Family Feuds (Genesis 25:19-34; Romans 8:1-11)

My two sisters are instruments of God’s grace -- God’s unconditional, steadfast love. No matter how far I travel, no matter how old I become, or whether they die before I die, I will never be free of my sisters. They are intricately woven into the fabric of my being. My own identity is wrapped up in theirs.

I believe that my sisters help me understand the gift of grace we receive from God, and that God loves us much as my sisters and I love each other. I am never free of God either. No matter how far I wander, God is always searching for me. My identity is intricately tied to who God is, and I come to know myself as I come to know God.

When I was growing up, I shared in the sibling conflicts -- name-calling, competition, tears. Yet my sisters and I enjoyed a relationship of deep trust. No matter what controversies or disagreements arose, we knew that our bond could not be broken. We are our most loyal allies, our best fans, our staunchest defenders. We thank our parents for teaching us the blessings of having siblings.

But I am not naive. Not all sibling relationships are instruments of God’s grace. I am a pastor, after all, and I have watched many brothers and sisters hurt each other. I have ministered to wounds still open years after vicious battles. And even when relationships among brothers and sisters have created many blessings, relationships may go awry and cause unbearable pain. When love and care are abused or withheld, the damage can crush the spirit.

In the movie K-Pax, the main character Prot seems content and happy. He’s intelligent. He has a gift for helping people. But he claims to come from another planet, K-Pax, where families do not exist. Families of origin are never identified, he says, and the community raises the children. The citizens of K-Pax never marry nor connect with their kin. Prot suggests to his psychiatrist that this is good, for on the planet K-Pax there is no conflict. No pain. No strife. Everyone is content and happy. His psychiatrist, however, wisely concludes that Prot is a human being who has experienced an event so traumatic, so unbearable that the only way he could cope with it was to create another identity, one free from human relatedness. In Prot’s case, he even frees himself from membership on Planet Earth.

Like Prot, Jacob is fleeing his family The strife between him and Esau is so severe that they cannot live together. The conflict begins even before they are born, when Rebekah reports that the twins inside her womb are tearing each other apart. An oracle tells her they will always be at odds. Jacob, the younger, has hold of Esau’s heal when the two are born, as if he were already trying to usurp Esau’s position. The account of their birth gives no definitive clue as to why the two suffer sibling conflict all their lives. But suffer they do. Esau loses his birthright to the sly Jacob; Jacob flees the wrath of Esau.

Norman J. Cohen suggests that reconciliation between Jacob and Esau is possible because they are part of each other’s identity. They are like two halves of a whole, and each needs what the other has. Esau needs the patience and forethought of Jacob, while Jacob needs the position and strength of Esau. Each is identified by his relationship with the other. They can never escape their bond. How does scripture address the brokenness in our relations with family? Even though vicious sibling rivalry is not a given, the possibility of it haunts our lives and our hopes for joy and blessing. This is our potential for sin, Paul says. In Romans 8, however, there is good news. Paul explains that the flesh cannot have the last word about us if we walk in the spirit of Christ. If we put sibling conflict into the category of "sin in the flesh," then it is a sin from which "the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set [us] free." When Paul speaks of "sin in the flesh," he’s referring to that capacity in all human life to turn from God. He is speaking of those ways in which human life is so mired in sin that it is unable on its own steam to set things right and be reconciled fully with God. The kind of sibling conflict that crushes the spirit and leaves battle wounds can be healed, Paul would say, in "the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus." For it has set us free from all that destroys and kills.

It maybe in the flesh itself, in the interweaving of identity among siblings, that the potential for being instruments of God’s grace resides. For it is in our very being, created in God’s image, to reflect the divine grace of God in our relationships. However, we need the freedom Christ offers to heal the injuries and embrace the profound connectedness of our sibling relationships and all relationships. Without the grace of Christ, who makes God’s reconciliation a reality despite human sin, the devastation of relationships might get the best of us.

When I minister to parishioners who have been hurt by familial conflict, I find myself saying, "God makes a way where there is no way." No matter how far we travel, no matter how old we get, no matter if we die, God will search for us and offer us freedom from all that would destroy and kill us.

Anxious Moments (Matthew 11:16-19, 28-30, Romans 7:15-25a)

Most years, Americans celebrate the Fourth of July with hot dogs and homemade ice cream. Most years, we mention justice, liberty and the pursuit of happiness when the fireworks paint red, white and blue across the evening sky and the ice cream is finally ready to eat. But this year, American Independence Day observances will have a decidedly different tone as Americans take seriously the freedom we have after seeing that freedom threatened in an attack. This year at our cookouts, "The Star Spangled Banner" won’t be served up with dessert as an afterthought, but offered as the main course.

A few years ago, William H. Willimon questioned the quality of this freedom. He predicted that "our age shall be known, not as the age of freedom, but as the age of anxiety. We are anxious about many things: having enough money, having good enough health, being secure and safe." Indeed, the economic downturn of the last few years has my home state of Indiana in a frenzy as the government slashes state programs. As the baby boomers age, the whole country seems worried about how their declining health will affect their successors. We struggle to make sense of the "terrorism alert" warnings, wondering what our reaction should be and how or if we should live differently. As a result of all this anxiety, we’ve accepted tighter security measures at airports and public buildings, despite the potential infringement on personal rights.

Yet, like Paul in Romans 7, we may feel "anything but free." "I can decide what I want to do, but I am powerless to do it," he says. Sometimes I feel like Paul. Although I may carefully deliberate about what I ought to do or how I ought to act in a certain situation, my decision may finally have little to do with how I behave. Non-Arabic Americans this year confessed in the media that they take precautions around someone who appears Arabic or Islamic, despite their own opposition to racial profiling. We also experience this contradiction between desire and action in our broader culture. The U.S. Constitution says that everyone has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but we have been unable to eradicate poverty, bigotry and violence, things that radically hinder life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Table fellowship is at the center of the controversy in the reading from Matthew 11. The keepers of the laws, those who govern what one eats, with whom one eats and when one eats, have declared that Jesus and John the Baptist are in violation of the law. John is chastised for not eating with anyone. They say he must have a demon. Jesus is criticized for eating with everyone. They call him a glutton and a drunk.

Today we may no longer have laws governing our table fellowship, but our social and cultural expectations about food can be just as burdensome. For many people, holiday meals do not conjure up images of happy backyard cook-outs, but rather a never-ending internal struggle about what to eat, when to eat and with whom to eat. American society is obsessed with food and body image, and the two are usually in battle. Many of us create our own laws around eating as we struggle to control our own consumption. Our young women are prone to anorexia, even as our newsmagazines announce the phenomenon of a wealthy culture with more and more children who are overweight and underexercised.

We may have constitutional freedom in America, but many of our personal, social, cultural and even religious customs and practices severely limit any experience of "true freedom." Why is this? We Christians look to the claim at the heart of the Christian gospel, where we are reminded that it is only when our lives are given over to Christ that we are truly free. Freedom does not mean being free to do whatever we want to do. Freedom for a Christian means being the one whom God intends us to be. Before that, our lives will be tossed about by other forces or desires that hinder us from being the children of God we are. It is a blessing when we finally leave those forces, those desires behind, and find our lives caught up in the life of God. When we trust God, when we accept the gift of mercy and love that God gives us in Christ, we become free to be who God created us to be in the first place. That is true freedom. Not a burden but a blessing, a grace and a liberation that can empower us to change the world for the common good.

Chapter 11 of Matthew’s Gospel concludes with words that are often used as an invitation to the Lord’s Supper. "Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."

In Christ, God graces us with forgiveness when we cannot do the good that we want to do, with rest when we cannot bear the burden, with freedom to be who we are created to be. What is anxiety when we truly know this freedom? What is burdensome when we take on the yoke of Christ? The Lord’s Supper is no Fourth of July cookout. Within it we find true freedom. With this meal come not the expectations or laws of society. With it come life, revelation and grace.

Midwife’s Tale (Exodus 1:8-210; Matthew 16:13-20)

The "Midwife’s Tale" told in Exodus begins on an ominous note. There arose a new king over Egypt, we are told, one who did not know Joseph. That is to say, not only did the king not know Joseph, he did not know the God who had sent Joseph to Egypt so that Joseph might preserve his brothers through famine and keep alive a remnant of God’s people on earth. Now that remnant had multiplied and their numbers were threatening those who wielded power in Egypt. So the order came to make the Israelites’ lives "bitter with hard service." Yet, curiously, the more the Israelites were oppressed, "the more they multiplied and the more they spread abroad."

Enter the Hebrew midwives, the players poised to receive the future that God had promised. They were summoned and ordered to end each new male life before a breath could be drawn. "When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live." By keeping the opposition’s numbers down, the king thought, he could preserve his power. But the king did not know Joseph, nor the God who preserves a remnant. The midwives, on the other hand, feared God alone. To put it another way, the midwives Shiphrah and Puah knew they were players in a drama that was bigger than they were. So they played their part as God’s people, and let many babies live. Then the king said, "Every boy that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile . . ."

"Now a man from the house of Levi went and took to wife a daughter of Levi," the story goes on. The woman conceived, and bore a son." But under the king’s sentence of death, this child was doomed to die in the waters of the Nile. Until, that is, his mother saw something of God, something goodly in his face. Then she hid this babe among the reeds along the Nile, where he was found by Pharaoh’s daughter. In Moses the midwives’ small saving act was then magnified by God’s mighty hand.

The rest of the tale we know. Moses stuttered God’s truth to Pharaoh’s power. But power had and still has no ear for truth, so God spoke to Egypt’s powerful in the language of power, and the first-born in Egypt died. Then the late-born of Egypt -- in fierce pursuit of God’s people -- drowned in the Red Sea.

A remnant of the Israelis was preserved and the people wandered in the wilderness. Then Moses went up a hill and returned with God’s word written upon stone tablets. "The content of the law," said John Calvin millennia later, "is God himself . . . ‘God’s face in a manner shone forth therein."’ The law was given not only to outline human existence by a revealed set of dos and don’ts, but also to turn the people Godward in every movement and moment of their lives. "The end of the law," as Calvin said, "is that we should love God."

Over the centuries, human beings consistently broke and neglected God’s law, then struggled with the results of despair and misery. In Augustine’s words, human beings who had been made for God were restlessly wrong without God. When the law was abandoned, they could not turn their lives rightly toward the One for whom they were made.

These men and women are a mirror for us in their stories of high intentions and horrible disobedience. Whether we are trying to obey the commandments and achieve righteousness on our own, or turning toward other gods, we walk in darkness. And in this wilderness of our own making, we cry out for a word that -- like the divine Presence in the wilderness -- will dwell with us in the flesh.

Where do we learn of the Word that is grace and truth? For this mid-wife’s tale, we turn to Matthew 16, where the midwives are men who "have journeyed blind" with a new prophet. "Who do you say that I am?" Jesus asks his companions. And Peter responds with a new word and a new birth. "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." God’s word has been revealed in flesh and blood.

Like Helen Keller when she realizes "that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand," Peter connects God’s word with the person of Jesus Christ. Says Keller of her moment, "The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!" So said the disciples of Jesus Christ when the remnant of believers gathered around him.

There is a part still to be played by those of us who believe in his name. We have not seen him with our eyes, but we have beheld the light his life shines upon our darkness. We have taken comfort in his nearness and courage from his suffering. We have been upheld by his grace, forgiven by his mercy and given a mighty hope in his resurrection. Through him we have been turned Godward.

We are to bear witness, to receive him as midwives receive a life long-awaited. We receive him not for ourselves alone, but so that another might be given life. Our part is to act as those summoned by God’s grace to confess him as the Christ of God.

Suddenly the birth is our birth, and Christ the midwife is pulling us out of darkness into his marvelous light, giving us power to become the rock on which Christ’s church may be built.