Liberty

Liberty: The God That Failed: Policing the Sacred and Constructing the Myths of the Secular State, from Locke to Obama by Christopher A Ferrara, 642 pages

In Liberty, Christopher Ferrara takes aim at the "moderate" Enlightenment, as exemplified by Locke and the American Revolution, demonstrating that it was just as essentially inimical to classical and Christian conceptions of politics and virtue as its more extreme counterpart.  "Liberty", it follows, is nothing but a euphemism for the revolt against Christendom.  In his view, Social Contract theorists merely applied the Protestant notion of private judgement to the political sphere, and in so doing rejected every form of natural human affection in favor of a supposedly "rational" individual consent.  For moderns, then, "Liberty is Power unrestrained by moral or theological limits", and necessary unity is maintained in good times by social conformity and general complacency, in bad times by naked force.  Any sacrifice being worthwhile in defence of Liberty, the State inevitably asserts a level of control unthinkable in traditional "authoritarian" societies, while the "enemies of freedom" or "democracy" or "the people" are persecuted.  The result is not the separation of Church and State but the subordination of churches to the State, so that political dogmas are made the judges of the creeds of the churches.  

In an anti-intellectual climate where memories are short, the presence of Obama's name in the subtitle is likely to immediately raise suspicions that Ferrara, writing in 2012, was primarily concerned with the politics of the moment and that his primary target was the then-current president.  The opposite is the case.  Ferrara attempts to demonstrate that the Obama administration's assaults on religious liberty were not a deviation from but in continuity with the views of the Founders.  Along the way, he demolishes the cherished libertarian myths of a pure Jeffersonian constitutionalism corrupted by Hamiltonian centralism and a small-government Confederacy overpowered by the big-government Union.  Even more importantly, he warns against the pernicious theological effects of a social order which elevates the will of the people over the will of God.

Ferrara is an unabashed Catholic partisan, and he takes every opportunity to praise the Church and elevate her above merely human institutions.  In a history where Catholicism is more visible in its rejection than in its affirmation, this often takes the form of digressions, some of which are fascinating but distract from his central arguments.  This tendency is also likely to alienate non-Catholics who might otherwise be sympathetic to at least some of his contentions, although Ferrara would likely maintain that such a partial truth would represent a first step along the road to total error.

Images of Eternity

Images of Eternity: Studies in the Poetry of Religious Vision from Wordsworth to TS Eliot by James Benziger, 272 pages

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Deism had established itself as the intellectually respectable theological position.  Yet Deism, whatever its strengths as natural philosophy and usefulness as a compromise between hostile creeds, signally failed to satisfy man's emotional, moral, or aesthetic needs, or to explain the intimations of transcendence experienced in encounters with the sublime.

Images of Eternity is James Benziger's magnificent exploration of how the Romantic poets (and, to a lesser extent, their successors), despite being alienated from Christian orthodoxy, nonetheless employed "love and imagination" to break out of what Kant described as the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom.  Throughout, he emphasizes how their approach to the transcendent was influenced by Platonism as much, if not more than, straightforward Christianity, presenting a difficulty for many 20th century critics for whom the former was even more alien than the latter.

Beyond Radical Secularism

Beyond Radical Secularism: How France and the Christian West Should Respond to the Muslim Challenge by Pierre Manent, translated by Ralph C Hancock, 115 pages

In this short book, French political scientist Pierre Manent describes the latter half of the twentieth century as a long process of depoliticization, the delegitimization of the state as the embodiment of the common good of the nation.  In its place a view of the state has devolved in which it is nothing more than the - sometimes aggressive - guarantor of individual rights against other individuals - a "life without law in a world without borders".  Such a state, he avers, is too weak to overcome an assertive Islam with a strong sense of itself as a moral community.  While secularists hope vainly for an "Islamic Reformation" that shows no signs of occurring (or, more likely, is occurring, but is not what they imagine), the only option for both the survival of free societies and the peaceful integration of Muslims into the French nation is a renewed appreciation for its religious roots and a recognition of the contributions of Catholics, evangelicals, and Jews precisely as members of religious communities.  Only then can a concept of the common good be rediscovered as the basis for a national community which can include Muslims, and in which Muslims will want to be included.

Christian Crisis

Christian Crisis by Michael de la Bedoyere, 210 pages

Surveying the world in the dark year of 1940, Catholic journalist de la Bedoyere chose to explore the truth and meaning of the cliche that the solution to the world's ills could be found in Christianity.  He begins with the fundamental truth that man is a moral animal - that is, that all human beings seek the good.  It is the identification of the good that is at issue in the struggles between men and nations.  In these conflicts, Christianity has yielded its place as the major spiritual force in Europe to "Dawnism", the progressive drive expressed in distinct yet complementary ways by British laissez faire capitalism and the demands for egalitarian utopia and national renewal emerging out of the French Revolution, inspiring the mass movements of Socialism and Nationalism.  Unfortunately, in de la Bedoyere's view, the response of Catholics to the discontinuity this shift introduced between the sacred and the secular spheres has generally been either to retreat into an entirely ecclesiastical understanding which wholly denies the importance of the secular or to prioritize the secular and restrict the sacred sphere to what happens inside a church.

For de la Bedoyere, these changes are self-destructive, both for secular society and for the Church.  The values central to Dawnism and its offspring are Christian values, but removed from their Christian context and fetishized.  This being so, what the Church offers society is a framework into which these values are integrated and within which their competing claims can be assessed, without which they become warring absolutes and end in tyranny, as with fascism and communism.  In order to carry out this task, however, the Church requires an educated and energized laity aware of the dignity of both the secular and the sacred.

Plot to Kill God

The Plot to Kill God: Findings from the Soviet Experiment in Secularization by Paul Froese, 199 pages

When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1918, their Communist ideology predicted that with the destruction of the old political order religion would gradually but inevitably wither away - an especially plausible theory for Russians, for whom the Orthodox Church and the tsarist regime were virtually indistinguishable.  When this did not happen, the Soviet perspective on religion shifted from that of symptom to that of disease, resulting in a more active persecution.  Attempts to destroy religious belief ranged from the desecration of churches and mass murder of clergy to the integration of atheist propaganda with every subject in the school curriculum and the institution of atheist rituals to replace the traditional religious ceremonies solemnizing birth, marriage, and death.

Froese takes the results of this Soviet attempt to impose atheism on its population as an empirical test of various theories of secularization.  In his view, the Soviet experience invalidates theories which attribute religious belief to ignorance, indoctrination, political utility, social pressure, or mass enthusiasm.  According to Froese's economic model, although the Soviets were somewhat successful in diminishing the supply of religion from traditional institutions, they were utterly unable to eliminate the demand for religion.  This suggests that the Soviet regime never correctly understood the nature of that demand.

The Plot to Kill God is not a history of Soviet anti-religious policies, but an analysis of the results of those policies.  There are a number of typographical problems ("Protestants sects", "League of Militant Atheist", "ingenuity in alluding authorities"), but those mostly disappear after the first dozen pages.  There are also some suspect claims and sweeping generalizations ("secular alternatives to religious marriage ceremonies, for example, have always existed") somewhat sloppily thrown about without support.  Neither of these flaws affects Froese's argument, which is strong enough to deserve more thorough study.

Politicizing the Bible

Politicizing the Bible: The Roots of Historical Criticism and the Secularization of Scripture 1300-1700 by Scott W Hahn and Benjamin Wiker, 566 pages

The historical-critical approach to the Bible - examining Scripture as a historically conditioned collection of texts - is generally considered a dogmatically and politically neutral approach which is rooted in the Enlightenment.  Hahn and Wiker trace its origins back 400 years earlier, to disputes over nominalism and realism at the end of the Middle Ages.  In the process, they reveal how the development of historical criticism was involved in the process of secularization, and how both were entangled in the rise of nationalism.  In addition to the expected (Machiavelli, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke), the authors manage to draw in figures that secularized history tends to undervalue and misunderstand (Marsilius of Padua, William of Ockham, Wycliffe, Luther).

Hahn and Wiker ably expose the manner in which a supposedly disinterested quest for truth is, in fact, a mission of disenchantment itself inspired by prior ideological commitments, enabled by the Averroistic doctrine of double truth and the Polybian conception of religion as a tool to control the unenlightened masses.  More than a simple study of one form of biblical scholarship, Politicizing the Bible, like A Secular Age and The Unintended Reformation, is an intriguing, enlightening exploration of the intellectual currents flowing into modernity.

How (Not) To Be Secular

How (Not) To Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor by James K A Smith, 139 pages

Perceptive reviewers have called Charles Taylor's A Secular Age "An unqualified masterpiece."  It is, however, a complex work calling upon formidable philosophical resources to explicate 500 years of history over 776 pages of text - without counting notes or index.  Both for those who don't want to invest the effort to tackle Taylor's work and those for whom 776 pages weren't enough, Smith offers a short work that is part summary and part supplement.

Smith does excellent work just to reduce the central points of Taylor's masterpiece down to 139 pages without becoming overly dense or losing all nuance.  With admirable sensitivity, he lays out Taylor's thought in a way that renders it more comprehensible both to unbelievers and to Reformed Christians.  Smith's pop culture references misfire more often here than in his Desiring the Kingdom (he zings Rob Bell twice in as many pages and misattributes Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus" to Nine Inch Nails), but this is redeemed by his on-point discussion of Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace.

Great for anyone interested in the rise and nature of modern secularity, whether or not they have already read A Secular Age.

So Many Christians, So Few Lions

So Many Christians, So Few Lions: Is There Christianophobia in the United States? by George Yancey and David A Williamson, 142 pages

This study by a pair of sociologists from the University of North Texas finds that the frequency of anti-Christian attitudes is in line with anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim attitudes, with the difference that the latter prejudices tend to propagate on the lower levels of our society, while the former is endemic on the upper levels, particularly in the media and academia.  As a result, bigotry against Christians in the US, while sharing some root characteristics with other prejudices, is distinctly different in many of its manifestations.

Unfortunately, the study is handicapped by its treatment of "Christian", "conservative Christian", "fundamentalist Christian", and even "conservative Protestant" as equivalent terms.  While the authors attempt to justify this by pointing out that those with anti-Christian attitudes often conflate these categories, this does not entirely convince, especially since many of the same respondents also confused "Christian" with "conservative".  As a result, it is difficult to extricate political animus from anti-religious hatred.  This reduces the book to an excellent presentation on the nature of prejudice with the equivalent of a bunch of randomly selected anti-Christian internet comments attached.

Secular Age

A Secular Age by Charles Taylor, 776 pages

The conventional account of the process of secularization is a simple negative.  Scientific discoveries disenchanted the world, providing natural explanations which proved superior to the old supernatural explanations, stripping away the mystery and superstition of the past, leaving behind secularized society as the natural norm.  Taylor, by contrast, sees the progress of secularity as the replacement of a transcendent, transformative ideal of human life with an immanent concept of human flourishing.

It is impossible to accurately summarize such a long, nuanced, rich work, but, briefly put, Taylor describes how the Reformation (in both its Protestant and Catholic forms), in part an implementation of the desire to raise the spiritual level of the ordinary Christian, also involved, necessarily, the imposition of new forms of social order.  This reordering of society produced an increased focus on purely immanent models of social and individual flourishing.  This combined with a disenchantment of the world, driven not only by scientific advances but also by the theological rejection of mediating agents between God and man, to create a secular sphere in which the supernatural was irrelevant.  The concept arose of a God-created order accessible to human reason and achievable by human effort, but this proved vulnerable to challenges based on theodicy and utility.  Ultimately, the existence of God became viewed by many as unnecessary or even detrimental to human flourishing.  The desire for a transformative encounter with the transcendent remained, however, but was frequently rechanneled into a natural connection to the distant past, a present connection to an identity group, or an utopian connection to the future.  As these declined, an expressivist, experiential spirituality rose to dominance in a multicultural era, and it is this which is the dominant form of belief (or unbelief) today.

An unqualified masterpiece.