Podcast on Elections, Non-Profits, and Separation of Church and State

I'm featured on Breakpoint This Week talking about church and state issues and particularly the Johnson amendment, which is what made it illegal for nonprofits to advocate for candidates in elections: http://www.breakpoint.org/features-columns/discourse/entry/15/20361

Why You Think the Way You Do hits its sixth printing

My book Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home has just had its sixth printing, bringing the total number of print copies to 9,144. It's also available in e-book form. The next printing will bring the total to over 10,000.

My new E-Book is out

Portals: Entering Your Neighbor's World, my new e-book on comparative worldview, is now available. You can get it at Smashwords for all e-book formats at Smashwords,  https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/236946, and at Amazon specifically for Kindle, http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009CJEH40. The print edition should be out in a couple of weeks.

I wrote this book at the request of Chuck Colson. He wanted me to expand out his worldview grid, writing a page or two on each box of the grid. We had planned to publish it through a few Christian publishers, but they dragged their feet until it became clear that it didn't fit their requirements. It seems that it was too short to be considered an academic book. So I'm self-publishing it under my own imprint, Every Square Inch Publishing.

Augustine's The City of God and the Western political tradition

I've got a new article at the Colson Center on Christianity and the development of Western political ideas. This one focuses on the impact of Augustine's The City of God and the problem of corruption in politics.

Racism and Republicans

A friend of mine posted this article by Steve Schneider on Facebook. On one level it is hard to take it seriously: Eastwood’s admittedly bizarre performance at the RNC made no mention implicitly or explicitly about race that I could see. Schneider’s post falls into the familiar theme of accusing anyone who criticizes the President of racism and contributes to the ever increasing list of words and phrases that are now claimed to be code words for race (including cool, Chicago, golf, food stamps, experienced, kitchen cabinet, Obamacare, professor, and now empty chair, among others).

Why in the world would someone look at what Eastwood did and think it was racist? To me, that accusation looks like a cynical attempt to manipulate opinion in the Black community.

Then the answer hit me. As H. M. Tomlinson observed, we see things not as they are but as we are.

While some of the accusations of racism may in fact be cynical, some people genuinely see the world in racial terms, whether because of their education or their experience, and so they naturally assume that everyone else likewise has race as a primary element of their thoughts, words, and actions.

But race is not at the center of everyone’s worldview. I rarely think in terms of racial categories; in fact, I rarely think of race at all. To people who think in racial categories, that statement would probably smack of “white privilege” and would be de facto evidence of a racist attitude. Or the argument could be framed in terms of subconscious racism. Or more simply, it could be argued that I’m lying.

My response? It ain’t necessarily so (to quote Sportin’ Life in “Porgy and Bess”). I would simply ask if you have any evidence of racism beside your assumption that it must be there. If not, then maybe you should consider whether your assumptions about how other people think are correct. Just because race is central to your mental framework doesn’t mean it is to mine. Or to Eastwood’s.

This whole situation is a fine example of postmodernism at work. The postmodernist argues that truth either doesn’t exist or can’t be known, and therefore all viewpoints are equally valid. So from Schneider’s perspective, Eastwood was a racist. From Eastwood’s perspective, he wasn’t. This means that both sides can yell at each other and feel perfectly justified and righteous in their anger, and the rest of us are free to accept whichever side confirms our political position. It’s a win-win—everyone can have the moral high ground while holding the other side in contempt.

It is also a great example of the problem with postmodernism. Both perspectives cannot be true. If you claim Eastwood’s a racist, prove it by what he said or did, not by the intellectual construct you superimpose on his performance. If you can’t, take him at his word that he’s criticizing the president’s policies because he thinks they didn’t work, not because of racism.

The Golden Rule says we are to do onto others what we would have them do onto us. That means that unless you want people to attribute the worst motives to you, don’t do it to them. And if you want people to take your words and arguments at face value, do the same for them.

That’s a lesson people on all sides of the political spectrum need to learn.

The Separation of Church and State

I'm taking a break from the series on Christians who changed their world to start a new, shorter series on the impact of Christianity on the development of Western political and economic thought. The first deals with the separation of church and state, which affects a whole lot more than most people realize. Check out the article here.

David Barton, The Jefferson Lies

I’ve gotten pulled in on the periphery of the controversy surrounding David Barton’s book, The Jefferson Lies. I was asked for an evaluation of the book my Jay Richards. I sent him my comments, which were then forwarded with my permission to World magazine. In light of the controversy which followed, I would add a few additional remarks now which I may put in a future post, but for those who are interested, this is what I wrote:

I would like to preface my comments by addressing the key historiographic issue at play in Mr. Barton’s work. There has been a tendency among secularists to argue that the Founding Fathers were all Deists and/or Free Thinkers rather than adherents of historic Christianity, and that they intended religion to be eliminated completely from the public square. Mr. Barton rightly recognizes that this is an untenable reading of the Founders and has worked very hard to document the gross exaggerations and misrepresentations involved in this argument as well as to provide evidence to the contrary. However, in trying to correct the lurch to the left by the secularists, he lurches too far to the right, exaggerating the degree of religious orthodoxy of some of the Founders, the influence of the Bible on the Constitution, and similar matters, while denying in many ways the influence of the Enlightenment. While this reaction is understandable, it is not an appropriate way to deal with the problem. You do not respond to one exaggeration by offering another. This is methodologically inappropriate, rhetorically dangerous, and quite simply intellectually dishonest, whether intentionally or not.

For a balanced approach to the question of religion and the Founders, I strongly recommend Michael Novak’s On Two Wings, which rightly notes the influence of both the Enlightenment and historic Christianity in shaping the American experiment.

Turning to The Jefferson Lies, as a professional historian I found his terminology and explanations in the introduction rather puzzling. He has, to say the least, rather idiosyncratic definitions of Deconstructionism and Poststructuralism that make me doubt whether he actually understands those movements. I would dispute his use of the word “Modernism,” though as the problem he describes is real, as is the tendency to find fault with historic “heroes.” On the other hand, however, it is equally wrong to whitewash historic figures, and the solution is not found in denying the ethical questions raised by their lives but by placing them in their historical context and recognizing the bad with the good. Most historians I know try to do that. The terms “Minimalism” (in this context) and “Academic Collectivism” are unique to Barton. Neither is something I see in academic scholarship, though Barton himself seems guilty of his definition of “Minimalism” in much of his work in this book. In particular, every academic historian I know makes use of primary sources and doesn’t just cite other [modern] historians, contrary to Barton’s claims. In short, Barton is largely setting a straw man argument that has only a marginal resemblance to the way professional historians actually work.

After this rather rocky start, I think Barton did a very good job with his discussion of Sally Hemmings in the first substantive chapter. His conclusions here are convincing, though I would need to run down all his footnotes to be absolutely sure that he is correct. I normally would not have to say that, but his subsequent chapters make me very cautious about even his conclusions here. To put it bluntly, his arguments about Jefferson’s religious views are not at all convincing and are terribly supported. Many of his “facts” on, for example, what he included in his edited Bible are simply false; others, such as the idea of missions work among the Indians, are unsupported and contradicted by other statements of Jefferson; still others are exaggerated to the point of fantasy, such as interpreting his subscription to the hot-press Bible as support for congressional subsidies to put that Bible into every home in America. His conclusions are simply unsupportable.

Jefferson was a Unitarian rationalist who rejected biblical authority in any meaningful sense of the word, and with it, many of the doctrines of historic Christianity. While Barton is correct when he says that many Unitarians held the Scripture in high regard and fashioned their ideas from it (particularly surrounding ethics), it is not accurate to describe them as “evangelicals.” Having a worldview influenced on some points by Scripture does not mean that their worldview was fully shaped by Scripture. Jefferson specifically rejected many aspects of the biblical worldview, including Jesus’ atoning death and resurrection. It is difficult to reconcile that with any form of historic Christianity, much less with evangelicalism. [n.b. Barton doesn't actually claim Jefferson et al. was an evangelical per se, but his association of Jefferson with revivalist movements certainly implies it, and I suspect most of his readers won't realize the difference.]

While I am sympathetic with Mr. Barton’s aims, I am quite disturbed by a number of examples of clearly dishonest reading of texts in this book. As Throckmorton et al. demonstrate in Getting Jefferson Right, Mr. Barton misuses a number of his quotations, cutting them short in some cases and taking them completely out of context in others, to twist their meaning into almost the opposite of what Jefferson intended. Perhaps this was because Mr. Barton wanted so much to prove his point that he had tunnel vision in his reading of Jefferson, but whatever the reason, his use of these quotations qualifies as academic misconduct by almost any standard.

Overall, Getting Jefferson Right is a far more accurate portrayal of Jefferson and a far more honest reading of the evidence than The Jefferson Lies. As someone who has used Mr. Barton’s material before and who respects the work of Wallbuilders, I am very sorry to have to report this conclusion, but the cause of truth is never served by misleading statements and exaggeration. In this case, at least, this is precisely what Mr. Barton has done.