Renewing Our Church, Renewing Our Nation

July 30, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

A pall hangs over America and her churches. There is a sense not merely that our economy has fallen into a slump, our political system has deteriorated, and our culture has lost its way, but that something essential to our national character has been lost and may never be recovered. A sense not only that the greatness and prosperity of America have dimmed, but that whatever produced them in the first place may be gone.

As Peggy Noonan wrote not long ago, ”The biggest political change in my lifetime is that Americans no longer assume that their children will have it better than they did.” I won’t pretend to foresee a “coming collapse” of our society or our Church. But I will say that I’m increasingly concerned not only that the material conditions of our prosperity are disintegrating, but that the deeper moral and spiritual conditions of our prosperity have long since degenerated. What made America’s democracy and economy so uniquely successful was not only the genius of her founding documents but also the character of her people, a character born from faith and nurtured in houses of worship. Yet now it appears that our collective moral musculature has so severely atrophied that it can no longer power and guide the engines of the American economy and government — indeed, can no longer prevent those engines from flying off the rails.

With regard to the economy, we find ourselves asking whether this is not the middle of a Great Recession but the beginning of a Great Decline. The American economy was never driven primarily by greed, but by a strong sense of familial responsibility and the virtues of industry and self-reliance. A free market flourishes when the people within the marketplace believe in the dignity of work, the value of working hard, and the pride of working well. It flourishes when the culture emphasizes saving and spending wisely, living simply, dealing with one another honestly, and building loyalty between employee and employer, vendor and customer. Shame functioned as a hedge against shoddy work, broken promises, conspicuous consumption, and foolish debt. Today these virtues seem quaint, and shame is politically incorrect. What if the moral and spiritual capital that once sustained the growth of our nation is now spent, and we have begun to slide in reverse?

With regard to the government, the debt-ceiling crisis has done a fine job of illustrating its dysfunctions.  But what if the problems that beset us cannot be rectified by a new President, a new party, new policies? What if the problem is us, that we no longer hold our representatives accountable; that we no longer vote and legislate on the basis of principle but according to the whims of fashion and self-interest; that we too (and not just our representatives) are addicted to government spending and unwilling to confront the appalling realities of our collected indebtedness and the sacrifices it will require of us; that we have self-segregated into a thousand warring camps, and would rather bicker and demonize than stoop into the trenches of social problems and strive together with every bone, muscle, and tendon to solve them?

With regard to the Church, the intuition is felt especially among younger believers: that the American evangelical Church, in spite of the good it still accomplishes, has lost its way. In the vision of Christian life that has been passed down the stream of generations, something essential seems to have been lost. Call it a hunch, buried deep in the inner folds of the spirit, that Christ calls us to something more than this. God did not become incarnate, endure the indignities and humiliations of the human condition, suffer rejection and persecution, torture and death, so that we could live comfortable lives of suburban complacency, lives more characterized by rampant consumerism than radical obedience, by cultural accommodation than counter-cultural witness, by potlucks and stewardship seminars than the persecutions and sufferings of the saints. Again, this is not a matter of leaders who indulge in extramarital affairs, who are quicker to squabble than serve together. It’s a matter of us, all of us. We must be who we are called to be.

Each of these intuitions, in my view, is correct. And all are related. Christians are existentially committed to the proposition that Jesus Christ is the hope of the world. The Church is the bearer and messenger of that hope. If our nation has lost its hope, it is because the Church has failed to be the Church. If the light of our nation is fading, it is because we are failing to be the light.

Yet what exactly is the disease that ails the Church, that prevents the church from shaping and enriching the culture in the way it should? Interpreting an intuition is no easy matter, and evangelicals have differed in their sense of it.

[Read more...]

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Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Destructive Power of Politically Correct Intentions

July 28, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

A first-rate essay at Philanthropy Daily reports on a book from New York Times reporter Gretchen Morgensen and housing finance expert Joshua Rosner, Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon.  Although it comes with immaculate center-left credentials, it places the blame for the cratering of the housing market — and the great American financial collapse of 2008 — squarely on the ideology of structural racism and the way in which this was leveraged to justify abandoning responsible lending standards in favor of politically correct measures to increase minority homeowner rates.

When then Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (now Governor of New York) Andrew Cuomo launched “new and aggressive affordable housing goals for Fannie and Freddie” in 1999, he predicted it would “help reduce the huge homeownership gap dividing whites from minorities.”  President Clinton was pleased.  Morgenson and Rosner write:

Regulators were relaxing rules, Fannie and Freddie were inflating their portfolios, homebuilders and subprime lenders were flexing their muscles too. To meet the goals Fannie and Freddie had to buy riskier mortgages, such as those defined as subprime.

Some $160 billion in subprime loans would be underwritten in 1999, up from $40 billion five years earlier. And in another four years, that figure would jump to $332 billion.
Many of those loans wound up in Fannie’s and Freddie’s portfolios. By 2008, some $1.6 trillion of toxic mortgages, or almost half of those that were written, were purchased or guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie.

The essentials of the story, says Scott Walter, are “oceans of tax dollars flowing to private groups – for-profit and nonprofit – that are praised by politicians who want credit for the subsidized housing boom, with the whole party lubricated by the dissolving of traditional lending practices, which in turn is justified by claims that unfettered lending will remedy racial disparities in housing.”  Advocates of “structural racism” cite those disparities as evidence of systematic discrimination against minorities, and Fannie and Freddie were given a new charter, new powers, and so further distorted the housing market by innoculating banks against the risks of reckless lending practices when they were lending to minorities.  It’s the law of unintended consequences at its most thoroughly destructive.

ACORN — the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a key ally for Fannie/Freddie, the Democratic party, and, as it happens, Barack Obama — was instrumental in helping the federal government draw up the blueprints for its social engineering.  A later-discredited study from the Boston Fed fueled the rage of accusing the housing industry of endemic racism, and became more reason to expand Fannie/Freddie power.  Then, as the power of government expands, so do the opportunities for corruption with organizations like ACORN and politicians who enjoy sweetheart mortgage deals, bottomless pits of campaign cash and the aura of social justice.

[A]s Congress mulled over the company’s future, Fannie Mae began making significant grants, hundreds of thousands of dollars each, to consumer and community groups favoring increases in low-income housing. The groups, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, had been agitating for tighter regulations on Fannie Mae. But after receiving the grants, ACORN and most of the other groups changed their tunes.

James Johnson established a massive slush fund to curry favor with politicians like Barney Frank, community organizations like ACORN and special interest groups like the National Council of La Raza, and then leveraged all of them to continue expanding their charter for more and more lending at greater and greater risk, all of which led to hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses for James Johnson.  So Morgenson and Rosner:

Even nonpolitical neighborhood groups funded by the Fannie Mae Foundation helped the company play its power game. When a nonprofit applied for funding from the foundation, it had to supply a list of political contacts within their area or organization. These contacts gave Fannie Mae a roster of influence that grew to four thousand names at its peak.

The army of partisans was called to arms whenever someone in Congress had the audacity to suggest that Fannie and Freddie ought to reduce the size of its exposure — and thus you ended up with people like Barney Frank denying that there was any problem at all, right up to the point where the whole system imploded.

Listen, I’m not saying there were no other contributors, even major contributors on both sides of the aisle, to the housing collapse and the ensuing financial crisis.  There were.  But it’s not hard to understand how (1) chartering the government-sponsored entities and encouraging the banks to walk further and further down the plank of subprime home loans, while (2) insulating them from the dangers of their risky lending practices by purchasing the subprime loans and backing up the loans with implicit promises was just a recipe for disaster.  Ultimately the scheme exploded and did incalculable harm to those it was meant to help.  As Walter writes, the “villians” of both parties “enriched themselves, while bringing far more hardship to the poor and minority Americans whose struggles were used to justify the scams.”  Now, in the midst of the financial crisis, African-American and Hispanic-American households are arguably worse off than they have ever bee

The expansion of opportunities for corruption, and the extraordinary harm caused by unintended consequences, explains as eloquently as possible the dangers of a large and ever-expanding government.  These are not abstract concerns.  The African-American community stands decimated, in part, because of the exploitation of honorable intentions.

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Farewell, John Stott

July 27, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

InterVarsity Press released the following:

World-Renowned Evangelical Leader John Stott Dies

Westmont, IL — John Stott, world-famous pastor, theologian, author of numerous bestselling books and Rector Emeritus of All Souls Church in London, died July 27, 2011. He was ninety.

John Stott

New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote (quoting Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center) that if evangelicals chose a pope, they would likely select John Stott. As a principal framer of the Lausanne Covenant (1974), a defining statement for evangelical Christians, Stott was at the heart of evangelical renewal in the U.K. for more than half a century. In 2005, he was honored by Time magazine as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World.” His many books and sermons have inspired and transformed millions throughout the world.

John Robert Walmsley Stott, CBE, was born April 27, 1921, in London to Sir Arnold Stott, a leading physician, and his wife, Emily. His father was an agnostic, while his mother was a Lutheran who attended church at All Souls, Langham Place. He converted to Christianity at Rugby School in 1938, and after finishing there he went on to study modern language at Trinity College, Cambridge. After earning double firsts in French and theology, he transferred to Ridley Hall Theological College, Cambridge, and was ordained as an Anglican clergyman in 1945. Stott became a curate at All Souls Church (1945–1950) and then rector (1950–1975). He resigned as rector in 1975, although he remained in the church and was appointed Rector Emeritus. In 1974 he founded Langham Partnership International (known as John Stott Ministries in the U.S.), a ministry that seeks to equip Majority World churches for mission and spiritual growth. Stott finally retired from public ministry in 2007 at the age of eighty-six.

Stott’s influence on evangelicalism throughout the world is extensive. He has written more than fifty books, including various Bible studies and Bible commentaries. As Stott’s main publisher in the U.S., InterVarsity Press enjoyed a wonderful partnership with the man they called “Uncle John.” IVP associate publisher for editorial Andy Le Peau said that Stott’s works were embraced for their “clear, balanced, sound perspective on Scripture and life. He was filled with a grace and strength that will be dearly missed in this era of extreme viewpoints and harsh rhetoric.”

Stott is best known for his many books, especially Basic Christianity (InterVarsity Press), a clear statement of the gospel of Jesus Christ that has been translated into over sixty-three languages; The Cross of Christ (InterVarsity Press), which former InterVarsity Press publisher James F. Nyquist says “demonstrates the depth of Stott’s understanding and lifetime commitment”; Christian Mission in the Modern World(InterVarsity Press), in which Stott makes the case that Christian outreach must encompass both evangelism and social action; Your Mind Matters (InterVarsity Press), a forceful appeal for Christian discipleship that engages the intellect as well as the heart; and The Birds, Our Teachers (Baker), a study on birds combined with biblical truths and personal anecdotes. InterVarsity Press has also published a biography of John Stott entitled, Basic Christian by Roger Steer. Stott was also the New Testament editor and a major contributor for the highly acclaimed Bible Speaks Today commentary series.

“We are deeply grateful for this long publishing partnership and friendship with one of the most influential and beloved evangelical leaders for the past half-century,” saidInterVarsity Press publisher Bob Fryling. “John Stott was not only revered; he was loved. He had a humble mind and a gracious spirit. He was a pastor-teacher whose books and preaching not only became the gold standard for expository teaching, but his Christian character was a model of truth and godliness. We will miss ‘Uncle John’ but we celebrate his life and writings as an extraordinary testimony of one who was abundantly faithful to his Lord Jesus Christ.”

Founded in 1947 as an extension of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, InterVarsity Press serves those in the university, the church and the world by publishing thoughtful Christian books that equip and encourage people to follow Jesus as Savior and Lord in all of life.

Below is a video on the 50th Anniversary of Stott’s “Basic Christianity”:

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Anders Breivik as a Pragmatic Agnostic

July 27, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

Stephen Prothero writes at CNN that when ideas accomplish positive change, we speak of the power of ideas, but when ideas “do things we do not want them to do, as in Oslo,” then we pretend that ideas are powerless.  The contention that Anders Behring Breivik’s actions “had nothing to do with his Christian faith or his anti-Islamic ideology” is, according to Prothero, “wishful thinking of the most dangerous sort.”

I agree with Prothero that Christians should be mindful of the uses to which their ideas will be be put, and should examine the resources within the Christian tradition – its scriptures, its history, its thought – that can be assembled into a case for violence against the innocent.  Christians should have the humility to confess that they are not immune to criticism and to look for faults within themselves and their tradition.

The problem, in this case, as Prothero would have seen with a careful reading of Breivik’s manifesto, is that Breivik had no Christian “faith” to speak of, and the “ideas” that most influenced him were not Christian in any sense of the term.  Prothero makes no reference to Breivik’s insistence that he is not a “religious Christian” with a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, or to Breivik’s confession that he has no confidence that God exists but chooses to believe in God and the afterlife in order to give himself the courage for action.  Yes, Breivik appropriated the title of the Knights Templar, but it’s to Christianity’s credit that he could not find modern Christian precedents for the kinds of acts he wanted to commit, but had to reach back over seven centuries to a repudiated series of military ventures in which Christian Europeans sought to secure the safety of Christians and ultimately recapture the territory of the Holy Land.

This is one critical difference that explodes any simplistic moral equivalency between “extremist Christians” like Breivik and Islamic Jihadists.  While Breivik cites numerous Bible verses in his manifesto, he employs those verses in a way that no significant theologian or church authority has approved for centuries.  There is a kind of liberal Christian who is deeply committed to the proposition that conservative Christians are just as dangerous as al-Qaeda, but when they are pressed for equivalents to 9/11 they have to reach back centuries to the Inquisition and the Crusades (which they portray in exaggerated and decontextualized forms), or else they refer to the actions of Timothy McVeigh, or the Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph, or the Holocaust Museum shooter James von Brunn, who are all expressly non-Christian.

My point here is not to indict Islam, but to note how the liberal illuminati seem incapable of distinguishing between ancient military conquests that were justified by a pre-modern way of thinking abandoned centuries ago, or individual madmen who resided in Christian cultures but were the opposite of devout believers, and (alas) the legions of pious Muslims whose acts of terrorism are supported by a vast infrastructure and celebrated by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Imams throughout the Muslim world.

So, yes, as I noted yesterday, Christians should be the first to self-examine and self-criticize when someone perpetrates a terrorist act in the name of “our Lord Jesus Christ.”  But this does not mean that they should allow themselves to be slandered or lumped in with Imams who use their Mosques to recruit young men for the Jihad against the Great Satan.  Christians should present the facts.

And the facts in this case are pretty compelling.  So compelling, in fact, that the attempt to smear conservative Christians with the blood of the 85 children (at last count) that Breivik slaughtered is morally appalling.

Breivik explicitly denies that he is a “religious Christian.”  He admits that he does not possess what most evangelicals consider essential to faith: a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, which means a life of devotion, a life of seeking Christ and seeking to be like Christ, a life that honors what God revealed in and through Christ and accepts and celebrates the grace of God and forgiveness of sin that were made available to any person who would trust in them.  Rather, Breivik possesses the husk without the kernel, the cultural residue of faith and piety without the faith and piety that gave them life and direction.  He is not even sure that God exists, but chooses to believe in God and the afterlife (if this is any kind of belief at all) in order to give himself courage in the face of the dangers of his terrorist act.

What exactly, then, is Breivik’s “Christianity”?  He cares not for Christ or Christianity, but for Christendom.  Rod Dreher gave perhaps the best definition I’ve seen so far.  Breivik, he says, “sees the faith much as the Nazi leadership did: as a European tribal religion that can be instrumentalized to provide the basis for an ethno-cultural war against the Other.”  The Nazis were not fond of what Breivik calls “religious Christianity.”  Hitler, rightly, did not believe that “a personal relationship with Jesus Christ” would suit his purposes.  Personal devotion, a living and breathing relationship with a God who is Love and a Son of God who teaches the love of enemies, does not “instrumentalize” well into the wholesale slaughter of Jews, gypsies, political prisoners and Christian resisters.  Neither does it instrumentalize into the murder of 85 innocent children.

One of the most revealing portions of the manifesto comes when Breivik’s imagined interlocutor asks him what a person must believe in order to take up arms alongside his reconstituted Knights Templar.  You must be, he says, “a practising Christian, a Christian agnostic or a Christian atheist (cultural Christian).”  Since he has already identified himself as a cultural Christian and not a Christian atheist, it may be inferred (though this is not entirely clear) that he is a “Christian agnostic.”  The “cultural factors,” he says, are “more important than your personal relationship with God, Jesus, or the holy spirit.”  In fact, Breivik speaks admiringly of “Odinists,” or Neo-Pagans who honor the ancient Norse gods, because this is a part of the Nordic cultural heritage.  One should prefer Christianity at least as a cultural matrix, he says, due to “pragmatic considerations.”  Only the the cross and only the Christian church (of which, in its present form, he is intensely critical) have the symbolic and ecclesial power to bind Europeans together in their battle against the Muslim threat.

As a cultural Christian, I believe Christendom is essential for cultural reasons. After all, Christianity is the ONLY cultural platform that can unite all Europeans…As for secularism, are there any strong uniting symbols at all? I think not. In order to protect your culture you need, at the very minimum, strong, uniting symbols representing your culture. In this context, the cross is the unrivalled [sic] as it is the most potent European symbol.

Being a Christian can mean many things, Breivik says.  It can mean that “you believe in and want to protect Europe’s Christian cultural heritage.”

It is not required that you have a personal relationship with God or Jesus in order to fight for our Christian cultural heritage and the European way. In many ways, our modern societies and European secularism is a result of European Christendom and the enlightenment. It is therefore essential to understand the difference between a “Christian fundamentalist theocracy” (everything we do not want) and a secular European society based on our Christian cultural heritage (what we do want).

So no, you don’t need to have a personal relationship with God or Jesus to fight for our Christian cultural heritage. It is enough that you are a Christian-agnostic or a Christian-atheist (an atheist who wants to preserve at least the basics of the European Christian cultural legacy (Christian holidays, Christmas and Easter).

Indeed, in his account of the secret meeting that reconstituted the Knights Templar, the largest contingent is “Christian atheist.”

Why the self-appointed guardians of nuance want to ignore these facts — that Breivik was no kind of Christian in the ordinary sense, but more like an agnostic committed to Christian symbols for pragmatic reasons — in their rush to portray Breivik as a “Christian fundamentalist” or “Christianist” (which Andrew Sullivan uses to associate Breivik with conservative American Christians), is a question well worth asking.

But one thing Breivik gets right.  Secularism is fragmenting and hard to hold together in any coherent or animating vision for life, and multiculturalism in its current form is failing both the immigrants and those who have been residents for generations.  Breivik sought to retain the most outward cultural forms but not the living essence of Christian faith.  His fundamental impulses are areligious.  He found no inward guidance or transformation in his cultural Christianity, only symbols and structures he thought he could repurpose for violent ends.

It’s not wrong to ask the question, “To what extent was Anders Breivik a Christian and to what extent did this shape his deeds?”  The answer is that he was not a Christian at all, unless we make Breivik the authority on what the term means.  But we should go on to ask, “To what extent was Breivik the inheritor of an inward secularism dressed up in the outward trappings of a long-since-abandoned Christian faith, and to what extent did this shape his actions?  If he had inherited not just the fossil of faith, but the living reality, would it have stopped his hand?”

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Guest Post: Louis IX, Richard the Lionheart Welcome Renaming the Crusades as "Cru"

July 26, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

And now for something completely different.

Let it be noted that we’ve published pieces (for example this interview with Rodney Stark) correcting misperceptions about the Crusades.  Nonetheless, the following guest post was sent to me by Hillary the Adequate (no, it’s not me), and he is entitled to his perspective.

Louis, Richard the Lionheart Welcome Renaming the Crusades as “Cru”

(Paris, France) King Louis IX, celebrated throughout the western world for his murderous onslaughts in the Holy Land, has decreed that the campaign to wipe Islam from the map and restore Christianity to Jerusalem will no longer be called a “Crusade.”

“Despite serving us well, the term ‘Crusade’ has unfortunately taken on a bad connotation,” the French monarch stated from his throne room at the Palais du Louvre. “For whatever reason, some find it offensive, even.”

The next time the King leads an army of Christians to the Levant to plunder Mohammedan holy sites, disembowel imams and impose the faith at the edge of a sword, it will be called a “Missions Festival” or just plain “Cru”.

Richard the Lionheart: "Crusades" language creates misunderstanding amongst Saracen dogs.

“Surely these Saracens dogs will see our actions in a much more favorable light when we change the name of our forays into the Holy Land to ‘Cru,’” said Richard the Lionheart, enjoying the “Third Cru” as he set fire to the grand mosque of Acra.

Evidently the new public relations approach is working.  “When the various parts of the Caliphate hear that Pope Urban has offered plenary indulgences to any Roman Catholic who dies during a ‘Crusade,’ we tremble, knowing full well what that means: an army of bloodthirsty Europeans  bent on our destruction are about to besiege us,” said Zeydoun Islamabad, a Jerusalem-area goat farmer.  “But now, when the pope whimsically summons his ‘crew’ to embark on a ‘Cru’, we all smile and think, ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’  I mean, we laugh at the Second Crusade that Louis VII and Bernard of Clairvaux tried to pull off — we call it 2 Live Cru now — and we expect all future Christian excursions into the Holy Land to have a similar comical quality to them.”

Mr. Islamabad was subsequently set upon by “Cru-ers”  who broke him on the wheel, and flung him into a noisome dungeon where he awaits his execution at the stake.

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