The American Pope

Last updated on: May 9, 2025 at 11:00 pm By Gene Veith

The conclave of cardinals elected a new pope to rule the Roman Catholic Church, and to most observers’ surprise, they picked an American, Robert Prevost, who took the name of Leo XIV.

Prevost is from Chicago, went to school at Villanova just outside Philadelphia, and began his priesthood here in St. Louis. He spent most of his ministry as a missionary in South America and became a dual citizen of Peru. Most recently he has served as the head of the Vatican office in charge of the appointment of bishops.

Probably one of the few things the 69-year-old pontiff has in common with Martin Luther is that they were both members of the Augustinian order. Leo is the first Augustinian to be pope, just as Francis was the first Jesuit.

The world is wondering, what kind of Pope will he be? A liberal like Francis or a conservative like Benedict? It isn’t clear what faction he belongs to, and such neat binaries often don’t apply to Catholic leaders. He has been described as being progressive when it comes to social justice issues, while also supporting the church’s traditional moral teachings. That would describe most Catholic clerics.

One clue as to what kind of pope someone newly-elected to that office might be is in the name that he chooses. The scholarly conservative theologian Cardinal Ratzinger chose to be “Pope Benedict,” signaling his desire to be like St. Benedict in Christianizing Western civilization. Cardinal Bergoglio chose to be “Pope Francis,” signaling his desire to be like St. Francis in ministering to the poor and outcast.

The problem is, there are different Leo’s, and it isn’t clear which one Leo XIV wants to emulate.

There was the authoritarian Pope Leo I (reigning 440-461), of whom historian Lisa Diller says:

The first pope Leo (elected in 440) is credited with making the bishop of Rome into “the pope,” centralizing church authority. He placed a big emphasis on rooting out heresies such as Manicheanism and Pelagianism, calling on church members to denounce any clergy who wandered from orthodoxy, with heretics being tried and possibly tortured till they confessed.

And there was the progressive Leo XIII, the “workers’ pope” (reigning 1878-1903)described in his Wikipedia article this way:

He is well known for his intellectualism and his attempts to define the position of the Catholic Church with regard to modern thinking. In his famous 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum, Pope Leo outlined the rights of workers to a fair wage, safe working conditions, and the formation of trade unions, while affirming the rights to property and free enterprise, opposing both socialism and laissez-faire capitalism. With that encyclical, he became popularly called the “Social Pope” and the “Pope of the Workers”, also having created the foundations for modern thinking in the social doctrines of the Catholic Church, influencing his successors.

As is done today, people are trying to track down his online trail, looking for things he has said during his lifetime that can possibly discredit him.

Like most bishops, especially those who have worked in Latin America, he has criticized Trump and Vance on immigration, stoking indignation on the right.

He has also criticized the LGBTQ movement, stoking indignation on the left. The left-leaning UK periodical The Guardian published an article entitled Unearthed comments from new pope alarm LGBTQ+ Catholics. Here are some of the “alarming” things he said:

In a 2012 address to the world synod of bishops, the man who now leads the church said that “Western mass media is extraordinarily effective in fostering within the general public enormous sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the Gospel – for example abortion, homosexual lifestyle, euthanasia”.

In the remarks, of which he also read portions for a video produced by the Catholic News Service, a news agency owned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the cleric blamed mass media for fostering so much “sympathy for anti-Christian lifestyles choices” that “when people hear the Christian message it often inevitably seems ideological and emotionally cruel”.

“Catholic pastors who preach against the legalization of abortion or the redefinition of marriage are portrayed as being ideologically driven, severe and uncaring,” Prevost added.

He went on to complain that “alternative families comprised of same-sex partners and their adopted children are so benignly and sympathetically portrayed in television programs and cinema today”. . . .

The cleric also called for a “new evangelization to counter these mass media-produced distortions of religious and ethical reality”.

My impression is that he is exactly right, not only about the moral issues but also about how the media manipulates the public to disregard them. This strikes me as someone who understands the issues and is savvy about what Christians are up against.

In his first speech as Pope and in his first sermon at mass, he talked about the need for faith in Christ and the need for a missionary agenda. From his homily:

Even today, there are many settings in which the Christian faith is considered absurd, meant for the weak and unintelligent. Settings where other securities are preferred, like technology, money, success, power, or pleasure.

These are contexts where it is not easy to preach the Gospel and bear witness to its truth, where believers are mocked, opposed, despised or at best tolerated and pitied. Yet, precisely for this reason, they are the places where our missionary outreach is desperately needed. A lack of faith is often tragically accompanied by the loss of meaning in life, the neglect of mercy, appalling violations of human dignity, the crisis of the family and so many other wounds that afflict our society.

Today, too, there are many settings in which Jesus, although appreciated as a man, is reduced to a kind of charismatic leader or superman. This is true not only among non-believers but also among many baptized Christians, who thus end up living, at this level, in a state of practical atheism.

This is the world that has been entrusted to us, a world in which, as Pope Francis taught us so many times, we are called to bear witness to our joyful faith in Jesus the Saviour. Therefore, it is essential that we too repeat, with Peter: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Mt 16:16).

It is essential to do this, first of all, in our personal relationship with the Lord, in our commitment to a daily journey of conversion. Then, to do so as a Church, experiencing together our fidelity to the Lord and bringing the Good News to all.

We’ll see what this means in practice. I suspect Pope Leo XIV will project the kindness of Pope Francis, but be much more careful in what he says. And he will have more of the theological rigor of Pope Benedict XVI, without being quite the formidable theologian that he was. He will be a good administrator, which is what the Catholic church desperately needs right now, and will work to hold things together. I suspect he will OK the Latin Mass, reversing what Francis did to restrict it, but he will continue some of his predecessor’s reforms, though not to the point of adjusting church teaching about sexual morality, female priests, or life issues.

Lest you think I’m being too generous to an antichrist, read tomorrow’s post, in which we will discuss what Luther said about the papacy, both as antichrist and in a sense in which he could sort of accept the bishop of Rome.

Photo: Pope Leo XIV by Edgar Beltrán / The Pillar – https://x.com/edgarjbb_/status/1920590815472108021, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=164970023

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My Christmas Presents to You, 2024

Last updated on: December 20, 2024 at 6:13 pm By Gene Veith

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Merry Christmas! A custom of this blog has been to give Christmas presents to my readers. I don’t know your size and Amazon is on strike, so these have to be virtual gifts. Specifically, I am going to put you on to things I think you will enjoy that you can find online for free. So unwrap these:

River

I haven’t been all that impressed with the movies out of Hollywood this year, but I found a favorite from Japan that I know you too will get a kick out of. It’s called River and is described as a science fiction comedy, but that hardly does justice to this utterly unique motion picture that is so creative, so different, so hilarious, and so satisfying that you’ve got to see it.

In a Japanese inn beside a river, the employees and guests are going about their mundane business. A waitress takes a break standing outside by the river then goes back to work. Two-minutes later, she is back outside by the river, not knowing how she got there. She goes to do something else, and then two-minutes later, she is back by the river. She is caught in a time-loop. But unlike the day-long time loop in Groundhog Day, everyone in the inn is experiencing the same thing.

The film proceeds with these two-minute segments, each of which is filmed in one shot. The characters get together to try to figure out what is happening, though their meeting is cut short after two minutes, whereupon they blip back and have to pick up where they left off, until they blip back again after another two minutes. In the course of these two-minute repeats, funny stuff happens, then a love-story develops, then things get poignant, then philosophical, then interesting as the truth comes out. River is a very positive movie, reflecting on the value and meaning of every moment, or, rather, every two minutes.

This review says, “It’s been 12 hours since I watched River. I’ve seen three movies in the meantime, all of which I loved, and yet I still can’t stop thinking of River. It’s that good, that funny, that smart, that just plain awesome. It’s a flat-out phenomenal sci-fi comedy that everyone should see.” This review sums up the critic’s reaction in the headline: “‘River’ Is a Hilarious and Sweet Palate Cleanser for the Soul, with the deck, “No joke, this Japanese Indie might just be the best and most satisfying film of the year.”

River is actually the sequel to another time travel flick about that short interval of two minutes by the same filmmaker, Junta Yamaguchi. Entitled Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, it’s about some techies who have a computer monitor that shows what will happen two minutes into the future, and then things get complicated. In this movie, the whole movie with its incredibly complex farming is filmed in one long shot! A critic calls Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes “arguably one of the decade’s best science-fiction films.” I’ll throw this one into your virtual Christmas stocking too.

I would recommend, though, that you watch the sequel, River, first. You will have to be able to handle subtitles, but you’ll get used to them soon.

Both movies can be streamed for free on Tubi and via Prime. (There is a lot of material on these channels entitled “River.” Search for “River 2023.”

The Bee and Not The Bee

Hamlet struggled to decide which one is better, “To be, or not to be.” For your next present, I am giving you both “The Bee” and “Not the Bee.”

You may well already have Babylon Bee, the Christian satire site that made it big when it also started satirizing the rest of the world, including politics, whereupon it kept being flagged by social media censors without a sense of humor as “fake news.” It still covers religioin sometimes (e.g., 7 Ways “Die Hard” Points Us to Jesus and Newly Discovered Scroll Reveals Fourth Wise Man Who Brought Baby Jesus A Priceless Lego Millennium Falcon). But its sharpest skewers are for our culture (‘Liberals Are Disrespecting Marriage!’ Says Man On 3rd Marriage), our government (Congress Proposes New Law Banning Anyone From Reading Spending Bill Until It’s Passed), and our politics (Newsom Says With Another $25 Billion He Could Double Homelessness By 2030).

But you might not be aware of Not the Bee. This is a site run by the same people who run The Babylon Bee, but it features not fake news but actual news that just sounds like it’s a Bee satire. For example,

Flat-Earther travels to Antarctica to prove Earth is flat, finds out it’s not

A murderer was captured by Google Maps while moving a body out of his trunk

White House hid Biden’s mental decline as early as the first day of his presidency.

Pick up your presents at The Babylon Bee and Not the Babylon Bee.

The Didache

On Thanksgiving, I posted a prayer from The Didache. The title of this text of only 2,300 words means “teaching” and has the subtitle “The Lord’s Teaching Through the Twelve Apostles to the Nations.” It’s the earliest document we have from the early church, with some scholars dating it 100 A.D.

It lays out the ethical principles of the earliest church, very much in the line of the Sermon on the Mount, also addressing some of the practices that were commonplace in the Greco-Roman world and that have come back, so that today’s church also has to deal with them. Specifically, it addresses homosexuality (“you shall not commit pederasty”) and abortion (“you shall not murder a child by abortion “).

It also speaks about the church leadership of those days, in which we learn that the very earliest churches did indeed have pastors. We also learn about how baptisms were conducted back then: by immersion if there was enough water available but if not, by pouring three times in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

The Didache is a fascinating window into our heritage as Christians and into the church of our some of our earliest brothers and sisters in the faith. You can read it here, a site that features five English translations, the original Greek, and a wealth of scholarship.

You can also download the Kindle edition of The Didache: The Original Greek Text with Four English Translations for free on Amazon.

Pokey LaFarge

Finally, I give you the gift of music, presenting an artist that I have come to enjoy greatly and maybe you will too, the singer-songwriter-musician known as Pokey LaFarge.

I would describe him as an retro Americana artist who takes rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, country, swing, blues, and every other kind of American music you can think of, and mashes them together into a catchy, tuneful style uniquely his own. Here is how his style is described in his Wikipedia article, from music critic Aarik Danielsen who says of Pokey and his band of excellent musicians, that they are “artfully dodgy ambassadors for old-time music, presenting and representing the glories of hot swing, early jazz and ragtime blues” who have “made riverboat chic cool again.” Whatever the heck that means.

Let me give you some samples from YouTube so you can get a sense of his music, and then I want to tell you something surprising.

Here was my first introduction to him, from his appearance on the Marty Stuart show, his tribute to the great Midwest and to St. Louis where he used to live, “Getting by on Central Time”:

Here is a happy one:

Here is one I can’t get out of my head:

A few weeks ago, Pokey was in his old stompin’ ground of St. Louis, so we went to his concert. It was incredibly energetic and filled with virtuoso performances from him and his band. But towards the end, after a break for the band, he came on stage and got serious. Pokey is a funny, quirky guy, and his songs are often ironic in that postmodern kind of way. So the hall got dead silent. He told about how he had cheated on the woman who meant more to him than anything and that in doing so, he ruined his life. But then he said how he found forgiveness in Jesus, and how the woman he loved forgave him too, and how now they are married and blissfully happy. He said how he still slips up sometimes, but now his life is filled with joy. He said, “And this is where you leave.” No one in the audience, comprised mostly of hipsters, except for our party, left, as far as I could tell, and instead they applauded and called out their support.

I had read an interview with him in which he said he had returned to his faith. But, he assured the interviewer, he doesn’t proselytize. “I’m not a gospel singer. I’m not a Christian making Christian music, but a Christian making secular music. I’m supposed to be a witness … just being a bridge.”

Whereupon at the concert, he proselytized, telling the crowd that they probably had burdens too and that Jesus could help them. And then he sang a a gospel song.

(Pokey has a notorious song built around a bad word–which he said he doesn’t perform any more–so you might want to skip that one on his Spotify play list. It’s on the album “Rock Bottom Rhapsody.” The other albums could be rated PG, which is how he advertised his concert.)

Photo: Two Kids Opening Presents, VFW National Home via Flickr, CC BY 2.0

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A Conversation Between Two Lutheran Humorists

Last updated on: September 26, 2024 at 6:28 pm By Gene Veith

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Humor can have salutary moral and religious effects. The function of satire, according to classical critics, is to ridicule vice. Though it often portrayed bad behavior, it did so in order to mock it, thus discouraging the audience from imitating that behavior since no one wants to be mocked.

Then there is the Renaissance tradition of serio ludere (serious play), the use of laughter to teach serious truths, as practiced by writers such as More, Rabelais, Erasmus, and, I would say, Luther.

Two contemporary Christian practitioners of these arts from the confessional Lutheran persuasion are Anthony Sacramone, of Luther at the Movies and Strange Herring fame, and Hans Fiene, of Lutheran Satire.

Sacramone is also the editor of the Acton Institute’s publications, the hardcopy journal Religion & Liberty, (which does have some of its articles posted online) and the separate Religion & Liberty Online. Both are outstanding. Fiene is also the pastor of Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Crestwood, Missouri, one of the 91 municipalities that constitute St. Louis.

In the latest issue of Religion & Liberty, Sacramone interviews Rev. Fiene in a feature available online entitled Conversation Starters with Rev. Hans Fiene. As the editor, Sacramone pretty much plays the straight man here. I’d now like for Fiene to interview Sacramone. But here are a few highlights. The two discuss straightforward topics, such as “de-churching,” the appropriateness of Christian satire, and the prospects for Christianity in Hollywood productions–all of which are well worth reading–but I want to concentrate here on examples of serio ludere that shed light on today’s issues.

Sacramone asks Rev. Fiene about the problem of pastoral burnout: “Pastors don’t get burned out from being a pastor, really. Rather, pastors get burned out from having to be something other than pastors. So the way I avoid burnout is by pushing things off my table that aren’t really “pastor things” when I feel that sense of despair looming. I’ve never wanted to leave the ministry after doing devotions with the preschoolers or spending an hour visiting a 95-year-old shut-in.”

Sacramone asks Rev. Fiene about Christian nationalism: “I think the Christian Nationalism debate is equal parts intriguing and idiotic. On the one hand, I agree with Martin Luther that God hasn’t charged secular rulers with binding and forgiving sins, but He has charged them with defending and preserving the preaching of the Gospel. Luther wouldn’t recognize anything biblical in the view that the Ten Commandments and statues of Baphomet must be equally welcome in the courthouse. So if God gave me a world where I could have a faithful Lutheran government, I would gladly take it.

On the other hand, any Christian student of history should be able to see that Caesar is a pretty terrible judge of what is orthodox and what isn’t, so the best way Caesar can serve the church is by staying out of the heresy business. And this is where I find the hyper-online clamoring for Christian Nationalism to be so silly. We don’t have faithful princes. We don’t have faithful voters. We don’t currently have the ingredients necessary to establish Christian Nationalism. We won’t have them any time soon, and we won’t have them very long if we get them. So arguing with people about the superiority of Christian Nationalism is like arguing about whether we should use a DeLorean or a phone booth when we invent time travel.”

Serious film buff Sacramone asks Rev. Fiene, who must also be at least a semi-serious film buff, what are his favorite black and white movies: He says The Apartment with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, with close runners up being “The Seven Samurai (for the battle scenes), Casablanca (for the ending), and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (I’ve been told that this is not a black-and-white film and that I need to see an ophthalmologist).”

Illustration: Rev. Hans Fiene, by, I think, Matthew Carver, via Lutheran Satire.

Photo: Anthony Sacramone via The Stream

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Monday Miscellany, 2/26/24

Last updated on: February 23, 2024 at 5:18 pm By Gene Veith

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Censoring both “old climate denial” and “new climate denial”; saving university education; and we’re just tired of superhero movies.

Censoring Both “Old Climate Denial” and “New Climate Denial”

“Climate denial” does not mean denying that we have a climate. Rather, it has become a term used to denigrate those who are skeptical that global warming and other projections of climate change are as big a problem as many environmentalists say it is.

A new organization in the UK called the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which has worked with the federal government in its collusion with Big Tech companies to censor “disinformation” on the internet, is targeting those it is accusing of hating the climate. It is now distinguishing between “old climate denial” and “new climate denial.”

Old climate denial, which is already censored on many platforms, simply denies that climate change is happening or that burning fossil fuels is to blame. New climate denial says that “global heating” (the new term of choice for “global warming,” emphasizing the threat) is harmless, or even beneficial; that scientists who warn about climate change and the climate movement in general can’t be trusted; and that solutions put forward to address “global heating” won’t work.

That last one is the biggest puzzler. What if a solution really won’t work? Is it “hate” to say so? Don’t scientists and engineers need to be able to test, falsify, and argue about their findings? There are lots of proposed solutions, from making everyone buy electric vehicles to injecting particles into the air to block sunlight. Are journalists not allowed to report on the troubles of the electric vehicle industry? Or can environmentalists not object to polluting the air in order to bring down the earth’s temperature? Are all proposed “solutions” to be considered automatically valid and immune to criticism?

I think any needed solutions would be more likely to come out of the free exchange of ideas, untrammeled debate, and open-ended scientific inquiry.

Saving University Education

The Utah state legislature is considering a measure that could go a long way towards reforming higher education. Stanley Kurtz thinks that this new approach could become a model nationwide.

As it is, the so-called “general education” requirements that all students have to take are run out of the various specialized departments. As a result, students end up picking from a vast menu of topics reflecting the arcane research interests and the radical politics of the faculty. No two students will graduate with the same courses, which means that it’s almost impossible to assure that graduates have acquired the knowledge and skills that they need.

The “School of General Education Act” (S.B. 226) would create a separate department with its own dean and its own faculty to teach general education courses. All students would take the same courses, thus creating a true “core curriculum,” which would emphasize the great books and the great ideas of our civilization, as well as the intellectual skills necessary to handle them.

Says Kurtz,

No one political party or ideology has a monopoly on classic general education. No doubt plenty of traditional liberals as well as conservatives will be hired to teach the core curriculum. And while some current faculty will be let go, plenty of adherents of today’s postmodern orthodoxies will surely remain. In other words, no professorial point of view will be excluded from the university. Thus, a happy by-product of the return to traditional general education will likely be greater overall intellectual diversity at UU.

Students, for example, might take the new, required American history survey, focused on more traditional topics, in freshman year, followed if they choose by an elective race/ethnicity/sexuality-focused upper-level U.S. history course in their junior year. In other words, over four years, students will experience a mixture of the new, required classic general-education courses and the older postmodern-style courses already on offer. Students will be able to compare and decide which approach, or combination of approaches, they prefer. The marketplace of ideas will return.

Such a true “core curriculum” grounding each student in the “liberal arts,” in the sense not just of the humanities–as another academic specialty as universities define it today–but in the sense of forming a free citizen (libera), is what Patrick Henry College has, where I was the provost. I can testify and give quantitative data for the effectiveness of this approach in giving students a first-rate education.

One big obstacle to universities adopting this sort of thing is that the specialized departments are dependent on general education courses to subsidize their graduate students, thus advancing their main priority, which is not education but research. And the new Deans of General Education would have a challenge to find faculty adept in teaching the kind of broad-based, interdisciplinary courses that would be called for, since most academics’ skill set is in their narrow specialties.

But there I am, thinking like a college administrator. If Utah would pass such a bill, that state’s universities would hate it, but if the structure were imposed by law, it could create a market for general education teachers–and give a foundation that could equip such teachers whatever their specialties might be–and its academic effectiveness might make it catch on.

We’re Just Tired of Superhero Movies

Another comic book movie bites the dust. According to Hollywood Reporter, Madam Web, a Spider-Man spinoff, had the lowest average score on Rotten Tomatoes (a site that averages critical responses) of any superhero movie over the last decade, a mere 13%. Its domestic box office was just $26.2 million despite a prime Valentine Day’s release, and the international sales were just $25.7 million from 61 different countries. The movie cost around $100 million to make.

But this is only the low point of a larger trend. As Hollywood Reporter observes,

Madame Web joins a troubling trend for the superhero genre. Every live-action comic book movie last year underperformed (aside from Marvel Studios’ Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3), regardless of studio. “Superhero fatigue” has evolved from a term used by some corners of the fandom to something reluctantly accepted as industry fact. And it’s coming at a time when Marvel, DC and Sony are all attempting the difficult work of birthing new franchises.

One of those new franchises was going to be a whole series of movies about Madam Web, but now that’s not going to happen.

Let me give Hollywood some free advice that will save them millions of dollars: The public is tired of superhero movies! The public is also tired of remakes, sequels, and franchises. (I have some hopes for Dune 2, which is not so much a sequel as the continuation of a literary saga, but the point remains.)

So many films today consist of little more than what Milton called “tedious havoc.” It’s little wonder that the movie industry is having yet another “rough year.”

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Napoleon Complex

Last updated on: December 13, 2023 at 8:24 am By Gene Veith

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I’ve been reading about Napoleon, so I had to see the movie directed by Ridley Scott. What a disappointment!

As other critics have noted, the movie’s portrayal showed no reason why the people of France–or even Josephine–found him so compelling. There is no trace of his vaunted charisma or his powerful and persuasive personality. Joaquin Phoenix is a good actor and he could have chewed up the scenery with a role like that, but his director must have held him back, wanting to portray the Emperor of France and much of Europe as a petulant, sulking bore.

Critics have praised the battle scenes, but I was disappointed even with those. I have never yet seen a film that portrayed 19th century battles with the massed formations and troop movements that were central to early warfare. Instead, we get individuals sword fighting or shooting at each other, which happened, of course, but with no sense of the bigger picture.

The movie’s depiction of the Battle of Austerlitz focused on cannonballs breaking the ice on a vast frozen lake that the Russians and Austrians were standing on, plunging them into the icy waters to drown. That was a cool visual effect, to be sure, that did convey how grisly war can be. Something of that happened at Austerlitz, with troops that were standing on frozen ponds, but it was on a far smaller scale than the movie showed.

But the way Napoleon used his military genius to win the battle despite being outnumbered by two other emperors, was to have the middle of his lines fall back under the allied attack as if they were defeated. Whereupon his two flanks moved to encircle the attackers as the middle turned around to counterattack, resulting in a total defeat of two armies. Showing that would have made great cinema.

The biggest problem of the movie, though, is that it conveyed nothing about why Napoleon was so important and the impact that he had not only on France but on Europe. And we need to come to grips with that today because, in our current illiberal mood on both the right and the left, many are yearning for and opening themselves up to a Napoleonic figure to put things to rights.

The French Revolution degenerated into a chaotic Reign of Terror, but then Napoleon, a young army officer who rose through the ranks on his own merits as opposed to the previously prevailing rights of aristocracy, took power and imposed order. (No society can exist under anarchy. There must be social order.) But Napoleon still believed in the “liberty, equality, fraternity” ideals of the Revolution.

In defending France from the European powers who sought to bring back the Bourbon king, Napoleon defeated them–all pretty much but England–and in the lands that he conquered he imposed the new “liberal” ideals. With the defeat of Austria at the Battle of Austerlitz we just discussed, Napoleon abolished the Holy Roman Empire. (Lutherans should appreciate that!) He basically dismantled what remained of the feudal system throughout Europe. He abolished the privileges of the nobility, making everyone equal before the law. And he drew up a law, the Napoleonic Code, which replaced unwritten customs with a written legal system, one that protected private property, defined contract law, guaranteed civil liberties including religious freedom, provided for the prosecution of crimes, and would serve as the main alternative to England’s “common law” tradition to this very day.

When Napoleon lost much of his army in a futile attempt to conquer Russia in winter, he was deposed and went into exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba. But after nine months, he escaped, went back to France, and was embraced again by the public and by the army, sending the restored Bourbon king running off again and recommencing his wars.

When he was finally defeated by British and Prussian forces at Waterloo, Napoleon was once again sent into exile, this time to an island farther away, St. Helena, a thousand miles west of Africa in the Atlantic, this time guarded by 2000 British troops. Six years later, he died at the age of 51.

But after his death, there was little interest in restoring the Holy Roman Empire or in rebuilding the feudal system. And pretty much every country that had been put under the Napoleonic Code kept it. And still follow it to this very day.

Napoleon was complex, as is his legacy. He was a liberal dictator, an absolute ruler who promoted freedom, someone who seized power for himself and then used it to impose the rule of law. He was an individual who changed entire cultures and social systems according to his will. He was a great leader by every definition, but he led thousands of his followers into death and slaughtered thousands more. Historians estimate that he was responsible for the deaths of between three and six million people.

Napoleon embodies the deceiving dream that a strong ruler will save us, that a brief and temporary state of tyranny is all we need to solve our problems and usher in a social utopia, that we can conquer people in order to help them, that we can dominate people for their own good. He embodies the political temptation of dictatorship for a good end. Napoleon was complex, but we must beware lest we develop our own Napoleon complex.

Portrait of Napoleon by Robert LeFevre (1850) via PICRYL, Public Domain

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Why Diversity, Equity, Inclusion Seminars Don’t Work

Last updated on: September 22, 2023 at 1:48 pm By Gene Veith

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One of the rituals of today’s employee training sessions, continuing education activities, manager retreats, and student orientations is the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Seminar. Research is showing, though, that the DEI training is not working to eliminate racism and other kinds of bias in the workplace. Rather, it seems to be making it worse.

Two social scientists, including one whose research is highlighted in the typical DEI curriculum, explains why that is so in an article published in the Wall Street Journal (behind a paywall) entitled Why DEI Training Doesn’t Work—and How to Fix It.

To sum it up, the approach DEI seminars typically use is first to make participants feel guilty by exposing their hidden prejudices. Then they make participants fearful about losing their jobs and breaking the law for those prejudices that have been exposed. What this does is make participants angry, defensive, and more biased.

I’ll let the authors, Mahzarin Banaji and Frank Dobbin, explain:

Most training programs fall short on two fronts. First, they use implicit-bias education to shame trainees for holding stereotypes. Trainers play gotcha. . . ., Instead of training people about research that finds that bias is pervasive, trainers use the test to prove to trainees that they are morally flawed. People leave feeling guilty for holding biases that conflict with American values.

“Gotcha” isn’t going to win people over. The approach is disrespectful, and misses the main takeaway from implicit bias research: Everyone holds biases they don’t control as a consequence of a lifetime of exposure to societal inequality, the media and the arts. . . .

The second problem with most trainings is that they seek to solve the problem of bias by invoking the law to scare people about the risk of letting bias go unchecked. . . .Trainees leave scared that they will be punished for a simple mistake that may land their company in court. . . .

Trainings with this one-two punch—you are biased and the law will get you—backfire. The research shows that this kind of training leads to reductions in women and people of color in management.

Why would diversity training actually make things worse? Making people feel ashamed can lead them to reject the message. Thus people often leave diversity training feeling angry and with greater animosity toward other groups. . . . And threats of punishment, by the law in this case, typically lead to psychological “reactance” whereby people reject the desired behavior.

For these two authors, racism and other kinds of bias are not individual vices. Rather, they are “systemic,” being so pervasive that individuals cannot help but be biased. They recommend that DEI trainers simply expose participants to the research showing that, so that the institution they are involved with can counter it the best they can.

That racism is systemic is a core assumption of progressivism and critical race theory, and yet the DEI seminars, in trying to advance that cause, end up working against it.

Then again, isn’t the individual morality approach a more Christian take on the topic? It at least holds out hope that people can change their views, as opposed to the notion that those views are inevitable.

I’m thinking that what the authors are documenting and rightly criticizing is just inept teaching. If the goal is to change people’s perspectives, they must be reached on the inside. That would be a job for literature and the arts. Have participants watch some movies and read some books that would help them identify with and increase their compassion for victims of discrimination. That would do more to make them sensitive to the problem than trying to guilt them into submission.

At any rate, as we Lutherans have been saying for centuries, simply hammering people with the Law cannot make them change their behavior, let alone become righteous before God. It can, however, make them open to hearing the Gospel of forgiveness through Christ, resulting in an inner transformation that really does change behavior, with “faith working through love” (Galatians 5:6).

But if there is no Gospel, no grace or forgiveness–something notably missing in today’s secular ideologies–breaking someone with the Law causes them to either rebel or to despair.

Photo: Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement Employees Attend Diversity Training Week, via Flickr, Public Domain

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