Page 2904 – Christianity Today (2024)

Hugh Kennedy describes the opening stages of what is arguably the most important fact in Christian history over the past 1,900 years, namely the replacement of Christianity by Islam over the Middle East and much of North Africa and Asia. If this statement seems hyperbolic, recall that at the end of the first millennium, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia still had good claims to rank as the cultural and spiritual heartlands of Christianity, and that the Church of the East—the so-called Nestorian church—was expanding enthusiastically across Central and Eastern Asia. But ultimately, the Eastern churches would succumb before the rival power of Islam, in a series of disasters that tore Christianity from its roots, cultural, geographical, and linguistic.

This uprooting created the Christianity that we commonly think of today as the historical norm, but which in fact resulted from the elimination of alternative realities. Critically, the fall of the Asian churches made Christianity much less Semitic in thought and language. A thousand years after the world depicted in the Book of Acts, some of the world’s most active and dynamic churches still thought and spoke in Syriac, a language closely related to the Aramaic of Jesus’ own time. They still called themselves Nasraye, Nazarenes, and followed Yeshua. Through such bodies, we can trace a natural religious and cultural evolution from the apostolic world through the Middle Ages. If there is a decisive break between the New Testament world and modern Christianity, it occurs with the fall of these churches, chiefly during the 14th century. Christianity does indeed become predominantly “European,” but about a millennium later than most nonspecialists think.

Knowing as we do the end of the story—the creation of a dar al-Islam stretching from Morocco to Indonesia—it can be difficult to realize what a startling historical departure it represented, in a world that seemed set for Christian, rather than Muslim, conversion. In The Great Arab Conquests, Hugh Kennedy describes and convincingly analyzes the astonishing story of how the Arabs took over the Middle East. Beginning around 630, Arab forces burst initially into Syria and Mesopotamia, and then into Egypt and Persia. By 651, the Arabs had conquered the Persian Empire, which then stretched deep into the “stans” of Central Asia, and they were already pushing into Roman North Africa. Carthage fell in 698, Spain followed after 711. In 751, Arab forces defeated the Chinese in the struggle for Turkestan.

Why were they so successful? Muslims knew, of course, that God was guiding their victories, and many Eastern Christians agreed. For the large majority of the Syrian and Egyptian Christians who belonged to sects condemned by the Byzantine Empire, the Nestorians and Monophysites, the Arabs were evidently God’s scourge in the chastising of the vicious Orthodox regime. Kennedy offers other, more secular, explanations, above all the mutual devastation through which the Byzantine and Persian Empires had so weakened each other over the previous two centuries. And far from being crude barbarians crashing ignorantly into this alien world of civilization, the Arabs had ancient contacts with both Persia and Byzantium. These linkages are suggested by the extensive network of Christian bishoprics and shrines that stretched from southern Iraq deep into the Yemen. (Incidentally, Kennedy’s maps are excellent.) The Arab leaders were skilled and worldly-wise, quite sophisticated in the ways of the civilized empires, and they made excellent use of diplomacy as needed. By the end of the book, we are much less inclined to see the Arab conquests as a near-miracle, but rather as something close to a foregone conclusion, and that shift of perception is vastly to the author’s credit.

Kennedy summarizes his argument thus: “In the final analysis, the success of the Muslim conquest was a result of the unstable and impoverished nature of the whole post-Roman world into which they came, the hardiness and self-reliance of the Bedouin warriors, and the inspiration and open quality of the new religion of Islam.” Significantly, his very plausible list of factors ends rather than begins with the motivating power of Islam. His book gives no support to those who see the story of Islam as an incessant tale of bloodshed and massacre in the guise of holy warfare, and he is very fair in quoting contemporary observers who saw both the good and bad sides of the new regime. Christian critics easily distinguished between those Arab rulers, like the Caliph Yazid II, who were monstrous tyrants, and the others who were decent and just. The Arabs varied enormously in their treatment of Christians, Jews, and other conquered peoples, and it is hard to generalize over the whole region. As Kennedy notes, however many people may have disliked the new regime, few moved to active resistance: “The fragmented nature of the response of the conquered was an important reason for the success of the Muslims, both in the initial conquest and in the consolidation of their rule.”

Critically too, it is useful to be reminded that most contemporaries saw their new masters as a social or ethnic category, rather than a religious movement. In Mesopotamia, the central political division was not between Muslims and Christians but rather between Arab masters and Suriani [Syrian] subjects, and the latter happened to be Christian. In Egypt, Arabs confronted a majority of Copts, that is, native Egyptians. This was an Arab conquest, rather than a Muslim one. Indeed, Kennedy devotes surprisingly little attention to acknowledging the widespread modern theories suggesting that Islam emerged as a separate religion decades later than the official accounts say, and that the first Muslims located themselves on the same theological spectrum as Christians and Jews. This question about the nature of Arab religious identity during the first wave of conquest is of course vitally important, as it would have affected the attitudes of the conquered nations, in which Muslims remained an élite minority for at least for two hundred years after the initial takeover. Whatever the real roots of Islam, Kennedy reminds us how open the early conquerors were to using non-Muslims as administrators, especially under the Umayyad dynasty that held power from 661 to 750.

Also making the transition of power easier, it was far from obvious for the first two centuries that the Arab conquest would mark a permanent transformation, rather than a passing phase: countries like Syria and Egypt were well used to transient empires. History also suggested that the Roman Empire tended to strike back very successfully against intruders, even though retaliation might take centuries. Of all the barbarian invaders who had seized portions of the Western Empire in the 5th century, the Byzantines conquered or expelled some, while the others all accepted Catholic Christianity by the 8th century. After seeing the Persians overrun their whole Eastern Empire by 616, the Romans had staged a stunning comeback in which they in turn destroyed Persian power. Even when Roman armies were not obviously in the neighborhood, the empire had an impressive ability to project its power through allies and proxy states, making great use of diplomacy and intelligence. The Muslims suffered a traumatic setback in 717-18, when the Byzantines threw them back from the approaches to Constantinople. Adding to the shock, the Romans owed their victory to their secret weapon, Greek Fire, a kind of napalm that wrought havoc with enemy ships, and which must have had a daunting effect on apocalyptically minded Muslims. Hadith composed about this time suggest real concerns that a revived Byzantine and Christian power might be able to roll back Islam to Mecca and Medina. As late as the 10th century, these prophecies seemed on the verge of fulfillment when the Byzantines reoccupied most of Syria and northern Mesopotamia and approached the gates of Jerusalem and of Baghdad itself. They were stopped only by the manpower shortage that was the eternal curse of later Rome.

As Kennedy has written so extensively on later Islamic history, we can scarcely fault him for ending the present book in the eighth century, and on something like an optimistic note. The great age of conquests was largely completed, the subject peoples were accommodating to the new regime, which for many was scarcely more oppressive than the older Roman or Persian states. But a note of caution is in order: historians of Islam differ substantially on just when and how the subject peoples accepted the new faith. Kennedy follows those who see the conversion as an early and fairly easy transition: Islamization and Arabization were “a gradual, almost entirely peaceful result of the fact that more and more people wanted to identify with and participate in the dominant culture of their time.” To say the least, that is a very optimistic statement, which is hard to reconcile with the continued existence of mass Christian populations across the Middle East in the 13th and 14th centuries, or with the brutal persecutions that they suffered in those years. The Great Arab Conquests does a splendid job of showing how the core territories of early Christianity fell under Muslim power; but the decline and ultimate collapse of the older faith in the conquered regions demands much more detailed examination.

Philip Jenkins is distinguished professor of religious studies and history at Penn State University. He is the author most recently of God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis (Oxford Univ. Press).

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Why can’t those people just get along? You know—the Arabs and the Jews. Isn’t it obvious that, whatever is at the base of their inexplicable mutual hatred, the two parties are getting further and further away from even trying to understand each other? With each passing day, it seems, some new offense of one party against the other adds another layer of grievance, one more complication to be unwound before we can get the parties thinking again about putting it all behind and getting on with what everyone else on earth is getting on with.

Perhaps if we walked the parties backwards over the chronological ground, they could observe the intensity of the quarrel getting less and less (retrospectively), until we find the moment when the two parties were actually talking to each other civilly; and then we could walk the parties forward from that same point and show them that it had all been about a failure to communicate.

Amy Dockser Marcus believes that she has found that moment. It was during the year 1913 when there took place “what can only be described as the first Arab-Israeli peace negotiations over the future of Palestine,” indeed the “[first] serious effort to negotiate what we today would call a Middle East peace agreement.”

Marcus is certainly entitled to respectful attention. She lived nearly a decade in Israel as a journalist for the Wall Street Journal and has developed a valuable network of friends and colleagues in the land, with whose help she has found her way into several private family archives. Working in these materials, she has brought to our attention a number of sturdy personalities who were significant movers and shakers in several of the component communities of pre-Mandate Palestine. In her introduction, she announces that if we keep our eyes on the comings and goings of these actors we will find our way to the moment of truth announced in the opening pages.

This is not, however, as easy to do as she suggests. Her characters are introduced abruptly, then re-introduced in flashbacks from 1913 and later escorted past that year in a few flash-forwards. There are so many digressions that we fear she has forgotten the pivotal significance of the year 1913; and when she does get to her rendezvous, she glances off it at once and heads down other poorly lit byways.

The pivotal section occurs on pages 124 to 133. What is disclosed here will, I believe, disappoint most readers. It is a somewhat vague account of conversations between certain freelance Arab nationalist thinkers and politicians active at Istanbul in months prior to World War I and subsequent contacts of these parties with two Jewish figures with middle-level Zionist connections. One of these latter, a certain Sami Hochberg, shows up as a participant at the Arab National Congress held in Paris in June of 1913, an assembly attended by 23 persons, including 11 Muslims, 11 Christians, and one Jew. Hochberg is said to have talked about Zionism with the others; but no evidence appears that these Arabs (Muslim and Christian) incorporated any of his insights into their program. This is no surprise since, by Marcus’ description, Hochberg “was neither an official employee, nor a high-ranking member of the Zionist movement … [and thus] his mission could be disavowed at any time.” The point of this story seems to be that since the declaration that issued from this Congress did not contain a tirade against Zionism—and since Arabs would never again meet in any kind of formal setting without putting such a tirade at the heart of their conclusions—it must have been a fruitful moment for Arab-Israeli relations.

This is a frail foundation for such an ambitious thesis. Nothing remotely resembling “a serious effort to negotiate” anything seems to have taken place in 1913 or thereabouts. Certainly nothing took place that has any bearing on “what we today would call a Middle East peace agreement.” The argument that by moving the threshold of scholarly examination of the “origins of the Arab-Israeli dispute” back a few years from its usual place (in the Balfour Declaration of November, 1917) we could find the answer to why Arabs and Jews cannot get along will not cause historians to sit up and notice. It is not at all clear that the parties were getting along any better then than now. Even if we had no other historical evidence than what appears in this present book we could not fail to see that the Arab population of these Ottoman domains were resolved to prevent Jews from taking root in the land. If, here and there, there are edifying illustrations of toleration and even friendship across the divide, the same can be found today.

What this account lacks is some sustained address to the ancient causes of Arab hostility towards the Jews; for that, we need at least some acknowledgement of the theological root of the matter. Marcus’s assumption seems to be that nothing really justifies the refusal of Arabs and Jews to get along, and therefore there is no point in inquiring into the causes of this failure.

Students of the Ottoman regime in its last days will certainly enjoy reading this well-written book, with its convincing character sketches and glimpses into daily life of the time and place. Some glaring misinterpretations and errors of fact will, however, diminish confidence in the value of Marcus’ estimable archival research. For example: (i) Muslims do not hold that Muhammad “took his last step on earth” at the site of the cave which is enclosed under the Dome of the Rock (p. 36); (ii) Simon the Just is not “a popular biblical figure” (p.44; he was a High Priest of the Second Temple Period); (iii) Theodor Herzl’s encounter with the Kaiser in Jerusalem on November 1, 1898 was not his one and only “chance to present his ideas to the German leader”(p. 37; he had done this already on two previous occasions, once through a highly placed intermediary in the Kaiser’s court and the other face-to-face, just a few days earlier in Istanbul).

Michael B. Oren, hitherto best known as the author of a major scholarly account of the Six Day War of 1967, has undertaken to draw together into one large book everything that can be found about the entire history of American involvement in the Middle East—a history, he demonstrates convincingly, as old as the Republic itself. The result is a truly awesome book, the fruit of prodigious research expressed in a commanding style.

Is it a stretch to begin a narrative about America’s involvement in the Middle East in the year of the Declaration of Independence? Not at all. Oren demonstrates that in the moment of declaring their independence the leaders of the Continental Congress were fully aware that among other more obvious and immediate consequences (such as that they might all be going to the gallows very soon) was that the new nation, should it succeed, would then go out into the world unprotected by the British navy, without the advantage of membership in the British Empire. Most American eyes were on the dim prospects for American trade in the British West Indies, but this issue was cleared away diplomatically over the first few years of the existence of the independent nation. A more formidable obstacle—one that could only be removed by a demonstration of power—was the harassment of American trade by the pirate regimes of the Barbary Coast, nominally fiefs of the far-flung Ottoman Empire. Britain and France had signed treaties of understanding with these states, acquiring protection from piracy. It seemed shameful at the time and does so still today, but it was the price of admission to the Mediterranean. It was the new United States of America that eventually put finis to this shameful practice. But before that could happen, the loose confederation of states had to become a nation.

So it happened that when the authors of the Federalist Papers made their case for a central executive power capable of directing a unified foreign policy and a unified military and security policy, it was the matter of the Barbary States that they highlighted in making their case. It is thus no stretch at all to make the first adventures of Americans into the Middle East the backdrop for the first serious discussion of America’s rightful place in the world and the location for its first use of power to assert that right.

Oren describes the motivations of all the participants in this story under three categories: Power, Faith, and Fantasy. Typically, elements of all three were at work in most characters and most institutions involved. As might be expected, Oren’s attention is not distributed equally over the three categories. “Power” gets the lion’s share of the attention. Under this category we find most of the work of the presidents, the foreign policymakers (both those holding office and those in the corridors) and the economic imperialists (again, in and out of office). The first intimations that the Republic was preparing for resort to American power in the Middle East are found in the surreptitious dealings of certain brave adventurers having more-or-less approval (covert, of course) of President Thomas Jefferson as they sought influence in the courts of the Barbary princes and then at Istanbul itself. These initial exercises in power become more and more overt, eventually becoming incorporated into the declared foreign and military policy of the Unites States. All this culminates in the sending of a huge American army (and a limited cohort of Allies) into Iraq in 2003.

“Fantasy” makes its appearance at many junctures, when the heavy political and diplomatic narrative needs lightening. This category is a warehouse of inchoate images, piled up by fiction writers and moviemakers and Broadway composers and even television sitcoms, whose ultimate sources are the Arabian Nights, rumors about casbahs and seraglios, and great public entertainments beginning with the Chicago World Fair.

Oren’s analysis of “Faith” is much less convincing than his analysis of “Power.” Oren is respectful of Christian faith but astonishingly vague about its content. His only explicit reference to the Bible—the ultimate source of all that “faith”—does not inspire confidence: The Bible, he says, is “the principal source of Middle Eastern fantasies. The Old and New Testaments presented a panorama of pyramids and temples, of hanging gardens and shimmering oases, and, most majestically, the desert”—a stunning misrepresentation of the contents and influence of the Bible, all the more egregious coming from such an accomplished scholar. To put it as generously as possible: it is an error to equate the religious motive with fantasy.

Oren’s knowledge of the history of Christian faith in America, alas, is equally shallow and confused. Among many other bits and pieces that need correction we note that John Smith was not the founder of the Mormons (p. 142) but the significant other of Pocahontas. The English Puritans did not address their appeals on behalf of the Jews to the rulers of Holland but to Cromwell, the Lord Protector of England (p. 89). It is a sad but revealing insight into the low level of general knowledge about our religious heritage that no one among that large cohort of researchers, assistants, proofreaders, and assistant editors who worked on Oren’s book could espy such egregious errors.

Oren seems determined to minimize the actual contribution of people of Christian faith to Israel and to the Middle East generally. It is not true, as he says repeatedly, that missionary efforts among the Arabs amounted to nothing. Substantial congregations of Anglicans and Presbyterians and Baptists and others, still alive and mostly Arab in leadership and in the ranks, attest to the contrary even today. A large number of Oren’s pages describe colorful but aborted efforts by fringe cultists and freelancers who sought to establish colonies of believers in the Holy Land, but there is nothing about experiments along the same line that succeeded—for instance, those of George Gawler (1796-1869) and Laurence Oliphant (1829-1888), among many others whose names are remembered for blessing in Israel today. Oren imagines that he is somehow making the best of the wayward behavior of the missionaries by upgrading their pious motivation so that it can be presented as one face of the larger “idealistic” approach that some people have to life and which accounts for philanthropic enterprise, medicine, education, and so on. And he merely glances at the story of collaboration between American Christian Zionists and official (Herzlian) Zionists—a story of great strategic significance in winning American politicians to support for creation of the Jewish State.

Oren’s main point regarding the religious motive as a historical force is perfectly sound, however. That is, that within the whole American public there still operates a residual and vaguely comprehended vestige of the original Puritan belief in Restoration of the Jews to Israel. This spiritual force is the source of the general pro-Israel disposition in the American public and, in the last analysis, explains the difference between the policies of the United States and those of European states.

So well does Oren do his work that when we are done we will find it makes perfect sense to draw connections of cause-and-effect from the story of the earliest American excursions against the Barbary States to front-page news today. Near the end of the book, Oren observes: “By 10:30 [of September 11, 2001], the Twin Towers had collapsed and surrounding structures were teetering. A cloud of viscous, death-white smoke enveloped the southern portion of Manhattan, the very place from where, two hundred years earlier, the USS Essex had departed for America’s first war in the Middle East.” A few pages later, he notes: “As the image of the collapsing Twin Towers faded, the French and German governments resumed their long-standing efforts to distance themselves from America’s antiterrorism tactics in the Middle East and to engage the region on an independent, nonconfrontational basis.” Thus Oren recapitulates a major theme of the book, namely, that there has always been a fundamental difference of understanding between Americans and Europeans about what can and cannot be done to shape up the Middle East and make it a place where exchange of ideas and visions—not to mention commerce—can operate freely, as our history has persuaded us to believe these things ought to operate freely, among human beings everywhere on earth.

The thoroughness of Oren’s research and his gift for both analysis and narrative will impress all historians, regardless of field. Until he gets into the last quarter-century, for which primary and archival documentation is not available, he pioneers behind the monographic wall, working the archives on his own, scouring the volumes of Foreign Relations of the United States, the presidential libraries, collections of papers in the Library of Congress archives, various university archives, and the Central Zionist Archives in Israel—among other sources. The pace of his narration picks up considerably in the later chapters (as he tells us in advance that it will), because: (a) there are so many more published books as we get closer to the present highly polemicized moment; and (b) the archives are still closed. Being an authentic historian, Oren knows that there is a connection between (a) and (b). God grant that he should live many more years and lead the pioneers in clearing away the mountains of poorly researched and ill-considered books about the Middle East which our talking heads are pretending to read.

The key to Churchill’s Zionism, Michael Makovsky tells us repeatedly in Churchill’s Promised Land, was a motto which he inherited from his beloved father, Lord Randolph: “The Lord deals with the nations as the nations deal with the Jews.” Winston Churchill, who carried so much Scripture (along with massive passages from other “great works”) around in his head ready for quotation, would surely have recognized (as Makovsky evidently does not) that “Disraeli’s dictum” (as Makovsky calls it) is really nothing more than a clumsy gloss on Genesis 12:2-3: “I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing. And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee; and in thee shall all of the earth be blessed” (KJV). Every Christian Zionist in the world has this text on a plaque on his wall.

Makovsky describes Churchill as a “Zionist,” as Churchill himself did. It makes more sense, in my view, to speak of him as a pro-Zionist. He was certainly not a Christian Zionist. Churchill’s pro-Zionism was established in his earliest years. It was founded on a solid philo-Judaism inherited from his father and was improved by many Jewish connections and some friendships (the most notable of these being with Chaim Weizmann). These circ*mstances armed him against the anti-Semitism which thrived in most corners of the political and social establishment into which he was born. His pro-Zionism, Makovsky concludes, was “predominantly sentimental,” a compound of “racial, civilizational, humanitarian, paternal, personal, historical, romantic, mystical and religious considerations.”

Disraeli’s dictum did not suffice, however, to keep Churchill on the straight-and-narrow of devotion to Zionism. For Winston Churchill, “strategic imperatives always trumped sentimental and romantic causes.” Accordingly, his pro-Zionism waxed when holding to it was not an obstacle to advancement of Britain’s primary strategic goals (as Churchill understood them) and waned when it was. The latter was the case in the years immediately following the proclamation of the Balfour Declaration in November, 1917, when establishing the Jewish homeland in Palestine seemed to Churchill likely to cost far more than it was worth, using up money and military resources which could more profitably be applied to propping up India and Egypt. These “strategic considerations”—which would seem fantastic in less than thirty years—inspired his decision in 1921 as Minister of Colonies to create the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan out of three-quarters of the Mandate, a great blow to Zionism.

Churchill made several brief visits to Jewish Palestine during the 1920s and 1930s, and each time came back more impressed than the time before by the practical and scientific achievements of the Jewish communities. In Jewish Palestine he saw “nothing but good gifts, more wealth, more trade, more civilization, new sources of revenue, more employment, a higher rate of wages, larger cultivated areas and better water supply.” As he told the Peel Commission in 1936, “If I were an Arab, I would not like it, but it is for the good of the world that the place should be cultivated and it never will be cultivated by the Arabs.” Yet by the time this perception of Jewish Palestine had been fully confirmed in his heart and mind, he was out of office (1929-1939).

Once back in office (as First Lord of the Admiralty in September, 1939 and then as Prime Minister in June, 1940) and confronted by anti-Jewish attitudes in the Foreign Office and in the administration of Palestine, Churchill adjusted to the White Paper of 1939 (which proclaimed Britain’s abandonment of the Balfour pledge). As for opening the gates of Palestine to Jews in flight from Hitler during the war, “there was a limit to which he would expend political capital on such a subordinate and divisive matter.” Similarly, during the three years that were critical for the accomplishment of the Zionist dream, 1945 to 1948, while he was Leader of the Opposition and when the Attlee government walked away from the Balfour pledge, Churchill yielded to the intense anti-Jewish mood of the British public and simply forgot about Zionism and the Jews: “He betrayed them in their hour of need, and said and did nothing on their behalf for almost four key years,” Makovsky writes, an unsparing but well-founded judgment.

This stimulating essay, the fruit of scrupulous research and careful reasoning, documents the interaction of romance and realism in the heart and mind of one of the most powerful statesmen of the 20th century. It will afford many insights to students of the life and work of Winston Churchill and will be required reading for students of the history of Zionism.

Paul C. Merkley is the author of American Presidents, Religion and Israel (Praeger).

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

As I write, the two chief political factions in Palestine, Fatah and Hamas, are engaged in a civil war, as Israel ponders helping Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas restore order and the United States prepares to release previously impounded aid to Abbas’ newly-formed government. One of those called upon to help Abbas should certainly be Sari Nusseibeh, the President of East Jersualem’s Al-Quds University. He would seem to be the ideal negotiating partner both for Israel and the West. An Oxford- and Harvard-educated philosopher who cherishes the ideals of Jeffersonian democracy, Nusseibeh has already played a role in many peace efforts, both formal and informal, as well as being a clandestine leader of the first intifada or Palestinian uprising and head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in Jerusalem. He recounts all this and more, with the help of co-writer Anthony David, in his fascinating memoir Once Upon A Country: A Palestinian Life.

Nusseibeh’s memoir allows the reader to experience the dislocations visited upon the Palestinian people by the creation of Israel, not as a loss abstractly registered but rather in a narrative that a novelist or filmmaker would envy. His family has lived in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Palestine since the Arab invasion of the 7th century, when Caliph Omar granted to the Nusseibehs the keeping of the key to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Nusseibehs have been opening its door each morning ever since, in a cooperative arrangement with the monks who live there. As landowners and proprietors of such businesses as the Gold Souk, the Nusseibehs were firmly established among the oligarchs of Jerusalem prior to the UN partition of 1948 that created Israel. After losing a leg in a skirmish with the Israelis, Sari Nusseibeh’s father served as mayor of East Jerusalem and later as ambassador to England during the Jordanian protectorate before the Six Day War of 1967. Sari Nusseibeh grew up watching loss after loss: his mother’s family’s lands, and his father’s olive grove, and more—all confiscated by the ever-victorious Israelis. He does not voice his outrage at these injustices so much as assume the reader will empathize and therefore find his efforts on behalf of his people right and natural.

Our identification with the Nusseibehs’ plight opens the way for the author’s retelling of contemporary Palestinian-Israeli history. Like all partisans, even the most generous, Nusseibeh tends to feature his enemy’s misdeeds and excuse his own peoples’ failings as dictated by circ*mstance or ignorance. He assumes that the Palestinians and their Arab allies simply could not have accepted the creation of Israel in 1948 and concentrates on the way the Israelis used their military advantages to empty their territory of its Palestinian population and consolidate their rule. He does recount some of his elders’ second thoughts on this question, but the Israelis remain the true aggressor. As a young man, persuaded that the pan-Arabism of his father’s generation was an illusion, Sari Nusseibeh gave his loyalty to Yasser Arafat and the PLO. While he recognizes Arafat’s failings, particularly his reliance on payoffs as an organizing principle, and once fled a conference in the wee hours of the morning to avoid coming too directly under Arafat’s control, Nusseibeh never questions the historical necessity of the PLO’s longtime role as the Palestinians’ sole political representative in peace negotiations. Yet unlike the leaders of Hamas, he believes firmly in a two-state solution and longs for the day when Palestinians and Israelis recognize what he sees as their fundamental alliance as stewards of the Holy Land. It’s impossible not to want to join hands with Sari Nusseibeh and make peace.

How is this to be done? I have to admit that as someone raised as an evangelical Christian I have my tribe’s sympathy for Israel and the reflex to defend her. I take seriously God’s covenant with Israel and his continuing promises to his chosen people. At the same time, the Palestinians’ long history in the Holy Land certainly establishes a valid counter-claim. The Kingdom of God is characterized by justice, peace, and love. It’s best, I think, to concentrate on these ends being realized in Palestinian-Israeli relations and let God orchestrate history as God will.

That’s a position many Westerners instinctively embrace, a vantage point from which it’s hard to understand the combatants’ refusal to recognize what seem to be their own best interests. A patronizing judgment? Read this memoir and make up your own mind. Surely, fifty years is time enough for bloodshed and enmity and recrimination. Let there be peace. So say the Sari Nusseibehs of the world.

But not Hamas, Fatah’s Al Aqsa Brigade, and other radical Islamic groups who believe Muslims must never cease to fight for lands they once ruled. At the same time many Orthodox Jews in Israel still believe in what they call Greater Israel, and seek the annexation of additional Palestinian territory, particularly the West Bank.

I’m afraid that Sari Nusseibeh is guilty of his own wishful thinking. He tells us that “Islam is not the problem.” But Islam—or rather certain strains of it—certainly constitutes part of the problem as do factions within Judaism. The problem ceases to exist if we do not have a Palestinian people seeking an Islamic state versus Israelis who believe keeping the Torah demands a Jewish state—or who find in Zionism a secular substitute for religion.

Nusseibeh’s account of the 2000 Camp David negotiations in which Israel’s Prime Minister Barak offered Arafat nearly everything the Palestinians had asked for underlines this point. “After all the years of fighting,” Nusseibeh tells us, “[Arafat] had a chance to get most of what we needed; the rest he could have achieved by building a modern state under the rule of law. But he didn’t do it.” Why? Because Barak demanded partial sovereignty over the Temple Mount. He argued that the Jews should be allowed to pray on Muslim ground. This sent Arafat into such a rage that he never made a counter-offer to Barak’s generous first proposal.

Both Islam and Judaism have theocratic roots, although Israel has been better able to separate church and state. As a secularized Muslim, Nusseibeh avoids talking about this entirely. His Islam is, frankly, a pretty thing of his own construction—the Night Journey of the Prophet as a metaphor for an existentialist quest; affinities between the philosophy of al-Ghazali and Avicenna and Enlightenment rationalism. During his years working on his Ph.D. at Harvard, he was profoundly impressed by Thomas Jefferson’s thought. “Jefferson believed in the dignity of the moral conscience, and that human freedom was a good in itself, not needing the sanction of tradition or religious authority,” Nusseibeh writes. “A revolution must have at its core belief in the moral integrity of the individual; otherwise it will inevitably degenerate into despotism.”

What never comes into view is the way in which “religious authority,” namely Christianity, made Jefferson’s belief in moral conscience, human freedom, and the separation of church and state possible. The Enlightenment helped disabuse Christianity of its establishment tendencies, but Christianity recognized the validity of purely civil authority from the beginning. The Enlightenment attempted to separate Western values from their basis in Christian doctrine and found the task impossible, as post-Enlightenment thought eventually came to deny the idea of authority itself.

With his education Nusseibeh’s personal history became enmeshed with the West’s post-Christian denial of its heritage. At Oxford and Harvard he was told that rationalism and its principled disbelief created the freedoms the West enjoys. For more than 30 years he’s been trying to build up his people into a nation on the basis of this lie. The West has not only blinded itself to the religious basis of culture, it has also blinded its potential allies in the Mideast and elsewhere—those thousands of young men and women who attend our universities. If only Nusseibeh had run into Christopher Dawson at Harvard and read his Religion and the Rise of Western Culture.

That’s not to say that Nusseibeh does not know much of what the Palestinian people need to do to attain a just independence. One of his most far-sighted initiatives was to put together study-groups which issued reports on the many aspects of civil administration. These groups effectively provided the PLO with “shadow ministries” that could be brought forward to run the country. Nusseibeh understands that democratic government depends on democratic institutions like universities, a free press, and bureaucracies that enjoy a measure of independence from political control. Peace will only come to Palestine, it’s my guess, when the Palestinians begin to govern themselves on another basis than payoffs and thuggery. Nusseibeh avoids criticizing his own people in such frank terms, but his life and his persuasive memoir embrace this remedy.

Will Mahmoud Abbas and his allies be able to incorporate the Christian principle of separation of church and state into their new government? In what circ*mstances can democratic institutions divorced from Christian culture trump a hostile culture? The resurgence of postwar Japan demonstrates that this can happen. May it happen again in Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East. That key to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre would open up many treasures if the West would only invite its keepers to step inside.

Harold Fickett and Charles Colson will release The Faith: Given Once, for All in February, 2008 (Zondervan).

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

I hate the middle class. I am a snob and an ingrate, an erudite ignoramus unappreciative of the market that puts food on my table and books on my shelves. I and my left-wing ilk are responsible for at least one global war, the persistence of poverty and despair among the wretched of the earth, and a culture that maligns the genuine virtue of hard-working entrepreneurs. I should be thoroughly ashamed of myself, and I should run to the nearest small business and beg for forgiveness and instruction. I should get a real job.

In short, Deirdre McCloskey has exposed me for the fraud that I am—or so she tells me in The Bourgeois Virtues. We lefties have endured quite a lot of disappointment over the last three gilded decades: the pyrrhic victory of global capitalism; the near-erasure of serious critical voices from the broadcast media; the erosion of unions and the welfare state; the enormous expansion of corporate power, and the attendant shrinking of the political imagination; the elevation of the Marketplace into the ontological sublime, the anointment of trucking and bartering as the telos of humankind. All of that is quite enough History, thank you very much. But to be told that we represent “the high orthodoxy of the West” and that now it’s “time to listen to the other side”? Where has McCloskey been for the last twenty-odd years? We’ve been hearing “the other side” for two centuries, and in the last generation it’s been 24-7 about Business, Business, Business. The Other Side is advertising, public relations, the plague of twaddle from pompous moneybags like Welch, Buffett, and Trump. It’s the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Economist, and Business Week; it’s management-speak, the financial news, and the stream of stock prices that frame every image on MSNBC. It’s the students who tell me that accounting class is more valuable than poetry. The other side. Give us a break.

Declaring one’s bold rejection of Conventional Wisdom is a standard move in branding these days. And the market in capitalist apologetics has been getting more crowded of late, creating a brisk and voluminous trade in the wares of ideology. Two major firms are the service providers for bourgeois cultural authority. One is Bobo Triumphal, and it features a growing product line of bite-sized intellectual confections: “freakonomics,” “tipping points,” “blink,” “substance of style,” “flat world,” “creative class.” A herd of independent intellectual contractors, it includes Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, Malcolm Gladwell, Virginia Postrel, and Richard Florida. Disdainful of those ancien bourgeois drones with gray flannel suits and briefcases, they’re the leading public relations flacks for the professional-managerial elite, the winsome “creators” of goods and services that help “grow” Your Small Business. (Judging from contemporary advertising, everyone has a Small Business these days.) Appealing to the tasteful suburban consumer of news and digitalized gadgetry, they celebrate the spread of globalized capitalism as the coolest imperium in history. (If you’re one of the uncool in sweatshops or slums, you still never had it so good.) What apocalypse has ever been so awesome? The market is the site where Vanity Fair and the School of Athens meet, a forum for the harmonic convergence of glamour and science, desire and calculation, hipness and instrumental reason.

Less tony than Bobo Triumphal, the other provider is Theodicy, Inc., where God and Mammon settle their differences and negotiate a lucrative partnership. Fearless defenders of the rich and powerful, this company specializes in a blend of theology, moralism, ruling-class self-pity, and populist fellow-traveling. Safely ensconced in think tanks, university institutes, and media conglomerates, these voices for those who already have a voice portray themselves as beleaguered mavericks, daring to say Unfashionable or Politically Incorrect Things to the Cultural Elite, the Liberal Media, or the Academic Establishment. Often funded by the trinitarian economy of Scaife, Coors, and Olin—groaning, in other words, in what has to be the plushest marginality in history—this outfit sports an embarrassment of riches from the unharried service of two masters. Attentive to the denominations of currency, it’s cheerfully ecumenical—Richard John Neuhaus, Ted Haggard, Pat Robertson—but its model employee is Michael Novak, whose “theology of the corporation” is a minor masterpiece of theo-sophistry. The corporation is “a metaphor for the ecclesial community”—in fact, it’s the “best secular analogue to the church”—and “its creativity mirrors God’s.” As knock-offs of the body of Christ, Microsoft and Wal-Mart become “Suffering Servants”—and judging from their quarterly reports, these poor, oppressed creatures are carrying their crosses all the way to the bank. (At Robert Sirico’s Acton Institute, neo-classical economics weds scholastic philosophy to produce the love child of Ayn Rand and Thomas Aquinas. Now there’s an ugly baby.) If you have a hard time thinking of stocking Wal-Mart shelves as an imitatio Christi, you’re just an arrogant pedant too lazy and proud to go out and name it and claim it—sorry, I meant serve and suffer.

McCloskey’s leviathan tome borrows capital from both overvalued firms. (Call it Bobo Theodicy.) Coming in at just over 500 pages of padded and lazily written text, The Bourgeois Virtues is a tower of babble, a bloated and inglorious mess of a book, the first of a threatened four-volume series that will cover the history and ethics of capitalism. (If you want an outline of this unfolding disaster, read the postscript.) Don’t be fooled by the gorgeous trappings of erudition, the hundreds of quotations from economists, philosophers, poets, novelists, theologians, and historians. For all its attempts at philosophical, historical, and theological depth, it’s a Sargasso Sea of intellectual froth. The only possible reward in reading this awful book is the instruction it provides in the overpriced art of ideology. From its inadvertently portentous cover—a 16th-century merchant vends a large and smelly fish—to the shameful blurbs on the back, The Bourgeois Virtues is a sign of how shallow and overrated The Other Side can be.

McCloskey is a distinguished professor of economics, history, English, and communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. (Talk about multi-tasking.) Educated at Harvard and tenured at Chicago as Donald, McCloskey is the author of two previous books on economics—The Rhetoric of Economics (1985) and If You’re So Smart (1992)—in which he tried to demonstrate that economists don’t have to be dismal scientists. “Economists are poets,” he wrote in If You’re So Smart. (I can’t wait for that Norton anthology.) In the mid-’90s, Donald became Deirdre, an existential metamorphosis she chronicled in Crossing (1996). Later, McCloskey became a Christian, or as she describes herself in the present book, “a progressive Episcopalian, the quasi-Quaker branch of the Frozen Chosen.”

Welcome to the literary and polemical style of The Bourgeois Virtues. In the acknowledgements, McCloskey tells us that her editor “disciplined” her prose. This is demonstrably untrue, and McCloskey herself hints at its falsity early on when she praises “loose and baggy” arguments. Her book is certainly that, if you want to call what McCloskey does “argument.” (“You ask me to preach. I’ll preach to thee.” Well, I didn’t ask, so get back in your pew.) Many chapters (and there are forty-eight of them) read like first drafts. She’s “anxious to chat,” and natter on she does, filling pages and pages with personal anecdote, Regular People She Knows, in-house references to her fellow economists, and banalities not quite worthy of Polonius. (“All human communities work with prudence and solidarity. Both.” Stroke chin, furrow brow.)

But I suspect there’s more than mere lack of style at work here. Eager to tear off the rhetorical regalia of middle-class academe, McCloskey litters her prose with the prattle of the Streetwise Professor: “Point, schmoit”; “Oh, I dunno”; “Shame on you”; “Damned right”; “How’d you know?”; “Don’t laugh.” Like the unprovoked assurance that she’s “a tough urban girl who can take it as well as dish it out,” this seems calculated to earn street cred for McCloskey as a Woman of the People. It’s the tried-and-untrue strategy of egghead-bashing, in which the author displays a wall of diplomas from the University of Hard Knocks. This discomfort with her own intellectual identity also explains the frequent and annoying frivolousness, as though McCloskey is unable to take her own argument seriously. “Capitalism has triumphed in our time, which I claim is a good thing, though boring.” So why spend 500 frigging pages on it?

This gal-in-the-street act should have tipped off the luminaries who blurbed this book, all scholars who really ought to know better. “Like a classic bard from ancient days,” swells Benjamin Friedman. (Point, schmoit.) “Like no other book on this topic,” gushes Martha Nussbaum. (Damned right.) “Stunningly fresh,” avows Ellen Charry. (Don’t laugh.) “A graceful writer,” assures Jean Bethke Elshtain. (Oh, I dunno.) The air must be pretty thin at the Parnassian heights of Blurbdom.

An avowed free-marketeer, McCloskey trains her sights on the usual suspects in libertarian demonology: selfish and shiftless unions, tax-happy politicians, dull and incompetent bureaucrats, and—last and certainly least—”the clerisy,” those ungrateful leftish intellectuals who are “proud to be living off a business civilization and yet remain ignorant of how it actually works.” If, like your humble servant, you’re one of these bespectacled louts who batten on the spoil produced through real labor, don’t take offense: McCloskey thinks that “your opinion deserves sympathetic scrutiny.” Just don’t expect it from her. 450 pages later, people like us get scolded again. “You exhibit a nasty snobbishness, you misled member of the Western clerisy. Shame on you.” Well I’m certainly turning red, but not with shame. Disdain for intellectuals is the ecstasy of the lowbrow, and it’s regrettable that someone as intelligent as McCloskey works overtime at this anxious trade. The ruse gets tiresome, and more than a little pathetic, when you remember that it comes from a Distinguished Professor.

Tilting at the anti-bourgeois “high orthodoxy of the West”—the bohemian and often leftish wisdom of intellectuals—McCloskey contends that bourgeois life exhibits more than the standard traits of diligence, punctuality, and self-restraint. Contrary to the caricature of a money-grubbing middle class, the personal and commercial lives of the bourgeoisie display both the pagan virtues—courage, justice, prudence, and temperance—and the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love. What’s more, capitalism, she proclaims, is “compatible with” the virtues, and it’s even the grand occasion for the formation of “ethically complete” individuals.

To prove her point, McCloskey traces the demise of the virtue tradition in Western ethics. It’s a repetitive and meandering declension narrative from Aristotle to Kant—from Character to the Categorical Imperative—but it contains some incisive aphorisms: “To last like bronze, the virtues must be alloyed with each other”; “Kant helps bourgeois men without a god feel nonetheless proud of who they are”; liberals and conservatives and radicals are “entangled in a bourgeois conception of justice.” (That last point is especially sharp, even though McCloskey seems unaware that Marx dismissed equality as a bourgeois concept.) Impatient with the terminal inability of Kantian (or utilitarian) ethics to “articulate the meaning of life”—why should I submit to the categorical imperative if I have no discernible end or telos? —McCloskey calls for a return to classical and medieval concerns with character, habit, and virtue. Dutifully—and in the end, for her case, unfortunately—she cites Alasdair MacIntyre’s definition of virtue: “an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices [such as statecraft].”

Still, for all her allusive range and baroque exposition (as well as a fondness for charts), McCloskey winds up with a thoroughly unexceptionable point: that a bourgeois can be a good person. Despite the volume’s intimidating heft and its hinting at a Big Idea, we get a hedge fund of equivocation and back-pedaling. A “bourgeois virtue is a virtue the capitalist system could honor, at least in its preachments“; “Sins, failures, cowardices are not peculiar to capitalism”; “bourgeois life does not participate in the transcendent any more than non-capitalist life”; numerous insistences that capitalism is “compatible with” virtue (all italics mine). This is a bold, brash defiance of Conventional Wisdom? It is conventional wisdom, disguised in a fog of learning, bluster, and charm. McCloskey reveals her pedestrian orthodoxy—and her maladroit grasp of the virtue tradition—when she declares that “charity is not socialism. Generosity is not a system at all. It is of a person, then two, then a few.” Virtue is utterly personal, McCloskey implies, and any attempt to “systematize” Christian love will rob it of its authenticity. Whatever you make of that claim, it’s certainly not unconventional. In fact, it’s arguably been the ideological basis of Anglo-American resistance to social reform of almost any kind.

Virtue ethicists have always acknowledged that a chasm between personal goodness and social vice is common in any historical period. One of the ghastlier paradoxes of chattel slavery, for instance, was that individual masters could be kind and even generous while occupying the command posts of a monstrous institution. (Augustine St. Clare, and even Little Eva, depended on a Simon Legree.) What has often provoked the ire of artists, writers, or socialists is not so much bourgeois virtue as bourgeois hypocrisy—the Christian Gentleman who blathers about family while frequenting brothels, the Christian Capitalist who prays for his brethren while cutting their wages and busting their unions.

But in emphasizing the discrepancy between public “preachment” and personal conduct, bohemians and leftists have also preserved an insight that’s central to the virtue tradition: virtue can’t be merely personal. From Aristotle to MacIntyre, champions of the virtues have insisted that they can only be exercised properly in a community, be it a polis, a commune, or some other arrangement of human affairs that encourages the performance of those practices indispensable to flourishing. Indeed, those practices are those arrangements, and if virtues only exist in those practices, then they are always already social, comprising a “system,” to use McCloskey’s pejorative.

More to the point, if virtue is, as McCloskey maintains, “compatible with” capitalism, she’s implicitly conceding that capitalism as a system is not virtuous. The bourgeois who cuts wages and benefits, speeds up the pace of factory or office work, introduces technology that deskills or unemploys, or makes useless or tawdry products in an ecologically destructive way, may be a very nice person, good to spouse, children, neighbors, and pets. He or she may donate money to the poor, time to the local soup kitchen, or informed attention to the arts. But none of that changes anything about the injustice, waste, and fraud of the capitalist system. (It’s worth recalling—and McCloskey does, curtly—that MacIntyre was once a Marxist, and that, as a Catholic, he continues to express a virulent aversion to capitalism. She might want to ponder why.)

I’m perfectly willing to concede that, on this side of the Kingdom, no economy will ever erase our fallen condition. When socialists maintain that socialism is a political economy of virtue, we’re aspiring to no more—and no less—than what Dorothy Day wanted: “a system that makes it easier for people to be good.” Socialists (and other opponents of capitalism) maintain that the property relations and productive practices of capitalism make it difficult for people to live out their natures as creative, social beings. (If they’re Christians, they hold that capitalism thwarts, and even commodifies, the imago Dei.) Obviously, we and McCloskey disagree about that; but let’s at least be clear about the subject of debate. As a system of property and production—not simply “of a person, then two, then a few”—capitalism confuses and even erases what John Ruskin considered the most elementary distinction in genuine economics, that between “wealth” and “illth.” That’s why, when McCloskey barks that “having a lot is not immoral,” or that “Americans have a great deal … because they produce a great deal,” she’s missing the point. A virtuous evaluation of that “lot” or “deal” might conclude that it’s a mountain of shabby, meretricious crap, and that the human and material despoliation involved in its making is an iniquity.

This indifference to social practice as the matrix of virtue explains, I think, why McCloskey can be so insouciant about the effects of capitalist production. Aiming implicitly at renewed interest in localism and handicraft, she envisions the super-charged industrialization of everything. Manufacturing, she hopes, will follow the same fate as “the preparing of food in kitchens and the growing of crops on farms.” Oh, that’s reassuring. You don’t need to have read Wendell Berry, or Michael Pollan, or Eric Schlosser to rue that bountiful day. She even looks forward to the day when academics will join serfs in the dustbin of history. “If the Internet replaces professorial lectures, I will retire gracefully,” she assures us. Ponder that, students of McCloskey, for what that swan song suggests is that she doesn’t really care about the virtues or practices of teaching. She’d rather you stare at a computer.

If McCloskey were to retire, students would no longer receive the historical miseducation she inflicts on her readers—especially about that system of property and production derided in “the high orthodoxy of the West.” Indeed, many if not most undergraduates display a keener historical consciousness than McCloskey, who writes, in all apparent seriousness, that “Abraham shows the bourgeois virtues.” McCloskey is serious, of course, because she clearly sees history, as the historian T. S. Ashton once put it, as “the perennial rise of the middle classes.” In this view, the bourgeoisie—like capitalism—is always there, slouching toward Wall Street to be born, needing to be released from the repressive or protective restraints of governments, religious institutions, or other impediments to progress. From Babylonian merchants to Flemish tradesmen to English manufacturers to Japanese brokers, history is the Biography of the Bourgeoisie.

McCloskey adopts the same question-begging manner when she defines capitalism as “private property and free labor without central planning, regulated by the rule of law and by an ethical consensus.” That second clause is smoke and mirrors—what economic system isn’t regulated by law and ethics?—and the first one contains two conflicted concepts. “Private property” is one of the most ambiguous terms in moral and political thought, while the “freedom” of “free labor” is precisely one of the points at issue in any discussion of capitalism.

Indeed, this definition obscures the inextricable histories of property and labor. It’s worth noting here that neither Weber nor Marx believed that greed was the most salient feature of capitalism. This was particularly true of Marx, who quite unambiguously explained, in the first volume of Capital, that capitalism is not distinguishable from other economies by accumulation, or a drive for profit, or reinvestment of surplus. In addition to the ongoing commodification of all social and material life, the primary feature of capitalism involves a metamorphosis in the nature of property relations, specifically between producers and appropriators. Under capitalism, producers are barred from direct access to the means of production. (In England, this process was bound up with the history of parliamentary enclosures, which evicted farmers from land and ended numerous customary rights.) These propertyless producers gain access to productive technology through the sale of their labor to the owner—the capitalist or bourgeois. Unlike slavery or serfdom, capitalist property relations do not entail the use of the state or of other extra-economic forces to compel labor. Capitalism rests on a form of coercion which is purely economic. (You get to choose your master.) The occlusion from visibility of these conditions, prior to the market encounter of worker and owner, enables the ideology of “free labor.”

The creation of capitalism was thus a long process of dispossession, compulsion, and re-education into a moral economy of industrial discipline. There are thousands of books on this history, but McCloskey clearly hasn’t consulted them. Paying almost all of her historical attention to the burghers, she can assert that England and Holland were “always bourgeois” only because she practices a willful blindness to the stories of labor. When she gets around to those next three volumes, she might want to crack open a few—no, a lot of—books on peasants, artisans, and industrial workers. In the present volume, she only updates the obfuscations of Adam Smith, whose scholarly rehabilitation over the last generation has been a case study in cultural politics. Like many recent students of Smith, McCloskey proudly reminds us that he was a moral philosopher, not a modern, professionalized “economist.” Casting Smith as a “radical egalitarian,” ardently devoted to the poor and assiduous, McCloskey holds up “sympathy” and “benevolence” as the strongest digits of that “invisible hand” at work crafting a “trusting society.”

This is nonsense. Smith’s “sympathy” never extended very far beyond ambitious tradesmen and artisans. For the poor and the laborers, Smith recommended hunger as a form of moral education. When corn merchants raise prices, he sagely opined in The Wealth of Nations, they “put the inferior rank of people upon thrift and good management.” This early example of compassionate conservatism partakes of a larger indifference to empirical reality. If you know anything about slavery or parliamentary enclosure, you’ll know that Smith’s magnum opus exhibits his gargantuan historical amnesia. In 1,000 pages, Smith barely mentions the dependence of English manufacturing on American slavery, or the dreary tale of dispossession in the English countryside. With his smoke and mirrors about “natural liberty,” Smith inaugurated what E. P. Thompson would later memorably call “the enormous condescension of posterity.” (For greater honesty about the ravages of enclosure and “natural liberty,” read Smith’s near-contemporary James Steuart, whom McCloskey doesn’t even mention.)

Aside from his talents in the art of historical camouflage, Smith was a prophet of what Peter Sloterdijk has dubbed “cynical reason”: “I know what I’m doing is wrong, but I’ll do it anyway.” In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which admirers fondly hold up as evidence of their hero’s thoughtful probity, Smith praised the civilizing effects of avarice. Fully aware of the folly of pursuing riches—”people ruin themselves,” he appeared to scold, “laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility”—Smith mused nonetheless that “it is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner.” “This deception,” he continued, “rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.” That’s a pretty clear wink at the duplicity of desire, and despite what they’ll say at the Liberty Fund, it really isn’t all that far from Bernard Mandeville’s more scandalous (and more engaging) celebration of hedonism in The Fable of the Bees. Long before the economist of fashion Paul Nystrom coined the phrase, Smith was pointing to a “philosophy of futility” as the moral economy of capitalism.

McCloskey’s remarks on Marx and the Marxist tradition are equally disingenuous. You’d gather from reading her that Marx was just another lazy and spiteful malcontent loitering in the British Museum. We get the standard roster of iniquities laid at Marx’s rickety doorstep: envy, economic ineptitude, the horrors of the Gulag. She even grouses that Marx “never picked up a shovel for pay, never so much as set foot in a factory or farm.” Well, to borrow from McCloskey’s rhetorical repertoire: So What? Neither did Aristotle, nor Aquinas, nor any number of McCloskey’s other fondly cited interlocutors. (Neither, by the way, has McCloskey, who writes, two pages later, “I have not worked in a factory.” As Mark Twain said, good liars must have good memories.) We’re also treated to slander, straight from the latrines of the Ann Coulter Institute of Historical Revisionism. “One can think of the calamities of the twentieth century as caused by the sins of capitalism,” McCloskey asserts. “The left does.” (Remember: bardic, refreshing, graceful.)

As anyone who’s read the Communist Manifesto can avow, Marx praised the bourgeoisie with greater prescience and lyricism than McCloskey could ever muster or acknowledge. Though enraged by the callousness and injustice of capital, Marx wrote with compelling albeit dialectical grandeur about the productive marvels of the bourgeoisie. Its wonders of enterprise, he wrote, surpassed the pyramids, aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals, and its commercial expeditions “put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.” Linking together the most far-flung peoples, dissolving local prejudice in the expansiveness of cosmopolitanism, upsetting the most ancient tyrannies of gender, superstition, and birth, “the bourgeoisie,” Marx affirms, “has played a most revolutionary role.”

There’s more cavalier “history.” Workers got the eight-hour day, we learn, “because we got rich.” It’s hard to know where to begin parsing the fraudulence here. Aside from violating the “we” fallacy—who’s we, tough girl?—it takes only a trip to the library to discover that when and where workers got an eight-hour day, they did so as the result of worker agitation and political struggle, both opposed, often viciously, by the virtuous bourgeois McCloskey celebrates. Moreover, as Juliet Schor, Jill Fraser, and Richard Sennett would remind us, the getting of those riches has lengthened and intensified the contemporary working day. (McCloskey, by the way, denies this. Having clearly read too much management theory, she states that “modern capitalist life is love-saturated.” It’s a great big Group Hug at Wal-Mart and Goldman Sachs. So that’s why they’re called pink slips!) And if you’re waiting like I am for Volume 3, you’ll discover why World War I can be blamed, not on powerlust among nation-states, but on the “demoralization” of capitalism by artists and intellectuals. Sorry, Kaiser Wilhelm; thanks, Balzac and Dickens.

But the epitome of inanity comes near the beginning, in a preemptive strike intended to deflect any charges of special pleading. Let me cite it with only a few elisions:

… a middle class is capable of evil, even in a God-blessed America. The American bourgeoisie organized official and unofficial apartheids. It conspired against unions … it delighted in red baiting and queer bashing … . During the Second World War, Krupp, Bosch, Hoechst, Bayer, Deutsche Bank, Daimler Benz, Dresdner Bank, and Volkswagen, all of them, used slave labor, with impunity. The bourgeois bankers of Switzerland stored gold for the Nazis … . Even the virtues of the bourgeoisie, Lord knows, do not lead straight to heaven.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the theater?

Both the tendentious history and the befuddled account of virtue are inseparable from McCloskey’s theological confusion. She doesn’t hide her ambition to be a theologian of economics. The problem is that, like so much else in this book, her attempts at theologizing are clumsy and haphazard. Her scriptural exegesis, for instance, is dreadful. To her credit, McCloskey doesn’t deny that the Gospel is a scandal to the acquisitive. She calls the Sermon on the Mount “the most socialist of Christian texts,” and concedes that Jesus would not “have thrilled to the modern bourgeoisie.” But ah, she recovers, the Sermon mentions rewards, so Christianity can’t be entirely selfless and imprudent; and Jesus, far from being a saintly hobo, was a carpenter who “lived in a thoroughly market-oriented economy.” Now, as a Christian and a socialist, I was never aware that either commitment entailed indifference to material life. If the meek inherit the earth, or the laborer receives his due, that’s a moment or a foretaste of the Kingdom to come. The land of milk and honey and the City of many jewels are the voluptuous images of redemption. And as a distinguished professor of economics and history should know, a “market-oriented economy”—whatever that is, given that there are all sorts of markets—isn’t necessarily capitalist, so the comparison is inapt.

When McCloskey turns from Scripture to theology, things get even worse. In a characteristically brief and scattershot chapter on “economic theology,” she praises the work of Robert Nelson, a curmudgeonly libertarian who is also an “environmentalist.” (Of the “wise use” variety. I once saw Nelson in action at Baylor. He informed his mostly fawning audience that resistance to the “religion of the market” was futile. They ate it up, and begged for seconds.) Seconding Nelson’s belief that economics is “the theology of a new religion of economics,” McCloskey also shares his conviction that “the American civil religion needs renewal.” What we need, she agrees, is a “postmodern economic theology,” a new benediction on the free market.

As that bland and uncritical remark about “civil religion” suggests, McCloskey’s understanding of religion and theology is fundamentally utilitarian. For all her concern about the spiritual poverty of economics, she never allows theology to seriously interrogate the conceptual architecture of the discipline. Too often, McCloskey’s moral reflection becomes indistinguishable from algebra. Despite her assurance that she’s eschewing “literally quantitative research” in morality, she actually translates human conduct into what can only be called an econometrics of virtue. Her challenges to the rhetoric of pecuniary reason are half-hearted at best, revealing her persistent allegiance to the metaphysics of capitalism.

Consider McCloskey’s comments on the Anglican Confession of Sin. Noting the Confession’s acknowledgement that we have offended God through sins of commission and omission, she glosses the avowal as a statement of “our ordinary inability to balance our virtues in a world of scarcity.” This doesn’t just let us off the hook too easily; it never puts us on the hook. The Confession of Sin makes no sense unless the world is a place of abundance. A world of scarcity—the ontological template of capitalist economics—mandates a “balancing” of virtues, a mealy allocation of limited resources in virtue, especially charity. (“Balance” is one of the more noble-sounding buzzwords in the lexicon of compassionate stinginess. Like bourgeois bleating about “wanted” children, it conceals a parsimonious and resentful reluctance to share the fruits of the earth.)

We can make no sense of Christ’s injunction to heavenly perfection if we accept this ontology of penury and violence. The God who calls us to be like Him is a lavish and spendthrift Creator, a prodigal Father who will never cut production of material and spiritual provision. (So much for the corporation as “the mirror of God’s creativity.”) As Augustine realized, the imperfection of sin consists in privation, our lack of trust in God’s plenitude, our mean and shameful holding back in a fearful desire for power. If the world were a place of scarcity, sin would become necessity—in other words, not sin. Capitalist economics is the theology of scarcity, or a narrative in which the expulsion from Eden is the opening chapter of Genesis. To see the world as unending bounty is not to deny the consequences of the Fall; it’s to recognize the nature and magnitude of the tragedy, and the difficulty of living well.

It isn’t clear that McCloskey really believes in original sin, anyway. Like so many other religious conservatives, she pulls it out when she needs an exculpatory witness for the inexorable unpleasantries of the free market. When removed from the realm of structure and causality, original sin becomes the perfect alibi when the powerful can’t deny their prints on the weapon. But what are we to make, then, of McCloskey’s throwaway espousal of “a capitalist version of Pelagianism”? It could be another instance of her magpie erudition, but I think that McCloskey is right. From Pelagius to Charles Grandison Finney, Pelagians have always insisted on salvation through works. What better economy than capitalism could there be for the moral and spiritual over-achiever? In its obsessions with industriousness, achievement, and “personal choice,” capitalism is the paradise of the Pelagian heresy.

Paradise and beatitude are, in the end, the unacknowledged longings of economic life. Our imperium of money has been an elaborate attempt to divert our attention from those desires. For the last generation, we’ve been admonished to lock “utopia” in the attic of historical nightmares and dwell within the cheerfully commercial boundaries of the capitalist imagination. It’s been busy and entertaining and, until recently, it’s been safe. The poor were forgotten or chastised, the critics were stifled or bribed, and the billions in the slums of globalization’s wake were silenced with promises and missiles. But as Mike Davis puts it in Planet of Slums with grim and austere eloquence, “the gods of chaos are on their side.” The wretched are increasingly unwilling to abide our imperial theodicy and our condescension. And as even McCloskey concedes, the imperium has gotten boring—a possible symptom of ontological dread, a dim recognition of some failure or lack in the fulfillment of our real desires. Perhaps soon—sooner than we think, or has it already begun?—much of what passes for realism will appear as the romanticism of venality, the mythology of avarice and dominion. “All is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil.” Hopkins knew that avarice was a yearning for the dearest freshness deep down things. Like him, I’ll wager that only theology can truly tell us the name of our desire; only theology can reveal love as the metaphysical foundation of the world. It can unfasten the padlock on “utopia,” soar over the walls of mercenary realism, commence a breakthrough to the other side.

Eugene McCarraher is a professor of humanities and director of graduate liberal studies at Villanova University.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

This study of mysticism and possession in early modern Europe is a model of scrupulous scholarship, not only on account of its detailed scrutiny of a very complex historical literature in half a dozen languages, but on account of its refusal to apply reductionist frameworks at the expense of the integrity of the data. There are many questions and problems which inhere in specific human projects, in this case the pursuit of immersion in the pure love of God. Notoriously, the imposition of a modernist framework does violence to other discourses, other worlds, other vocabularies and motivations, because such a framework assumes that it occupies an objective scientific viewpoint capable of telling it as it really was. Rejecting this kind of violence is not to relapse into a post-modernist relativism, but it does at least require an initial respect for the specific trials and dangers entailed in the attempt to give oneself over to what St. Francis de Sales called high, dry acts of love, as well as the suspension of the spirit in the being of God. These trials and dangers cannot simply be tidied away under the heading of a transition from medieval cosmology to a modern cosmology, or construed as merely a hysterical female sexuality reacting against the imposition of an intolerable disciplinary rigor. That is to say nothing about the insistence of a dogmatic scientism on eliminating the category of soul altogether as primitive and pre-scientific.

Moshe Sluhovsky introduces his theme as the relation between bodies and souls, as well as a built-in uncertainty about whether body and/or soul were possessed by the Friend of souls or the Enemy of souls. Three quests for truth are involved: of the encounter with the divine; of the interior movements within the soul; and the truth of somatic signs in the body. For Sluhovsky, possession by spirits came to pose a major hermeneutic challenge between 1400 and 1700 in the course of which new explanatory frameworks were developed for the relations between the demonic and the divine, the body and the soul, interiority and exteriority, and the natural and the supernatural. New webs of interconnection emerged between the psychological and the physiological, experience and explanation, and the boundaries between the normative and the extraordinary. Whereas for some observers these were primarily theoretical questions, for others, especially women, they touched closely on the authenticity of markings on their bodies and their souls, as well as the reliability of their own witness.

Over these three centuries diabolic possession moved from being a marginal issue for theologians, viewed as a physical affliction, to being a major issue of spiritual disposition. Exorcism was no longer an unregulated trivial pursuit undertaken by mere health practitioners, but became instead a liturgical mode of deciphering interior truths in an atmosphere of increasing suspicion. Of course part of the suspicion arose because profound issues were at stake: subjective experience rather than defined dogma, simplicity and innocence rather than wisdom and learning, equality of access for all sorts and conditions of men and women, and the freedom of the spirit rather than the hierarchical mediation of the Church. There were those who sought to dispense altogether with the embodied imagery of the incarnation and the creation in their pursuit of pure ecstasy, and others for whom demonic temptations were a necessary trial before final purgation.

Given such dangers, some of the most advanced practitioners of the way of the spirit—Teresa of Avila and Jean de Chantal, for instance—became wary and watchful, concerned lest aiming too high only presaged a terrible fall. Like madness and genius, transfiguration and disfigurement were closely allied. Moreover the appointed guardians of appropriate forms of spirituality could themselves become too curious about the precise provenance of demonic activity, to the point where horrified fascination turned into abusive forms of complicity with the Father of Lies himself. Those interested in the details should read the book, in particular with respect to the problems likely to arise when demons fled from the higher faculties to the lower regions, with exorcists following close on their heels.

Sluhovsky undermines more than one standard cliche about possession, especially collective female possession in the 17th century. It has for example been all too easy to suppose there was a major link between possession and the reaction to it, and witchcraft and the persecution of witches. For the most part the two phenomena were quite distinct. It has also been possible to connect spiritual restlessness with the anxieties generated by the new scientific/naturalistic paradigm. In fact medical and naturalistic explanation was part of the confrontation with possession throughout the later Middle Ages, and was no novelty in the early modern period. Spiritual directors were constantly on guard to prevent melancholy taking over nuns.

Again, although the diagnosis of hysteria has indeed functioned to dismiss and prevent female access to speech, power and equality, as feminist scholars have suggested, recent work has shown that in what Wordsworth called their “narrow room” many nuns lived unfretful, creative lives, praying, meditating, composing music and texts, copying manuscripts, and painting, as well as conducting business transactions and running their communities. The problems they encountered arose as part of their active participation in the reform movements of the time and the new forms of spirituality. Quite often it was the onset of reform itself that brought in its train disturbance and confusion. As interior techniques purged themselves of the more extreme and suspect practices the designation of demonic possession lost much of its utility.

Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises instructed practitioners to visualize concrete images, such as episodes from the Passion, and to advance slowly and with moderation, under appropriate supervision. Exorcism once again became the mundane healing ritual it had been in the Middle Ages, though under greater control. In the meantime, of course, there had been some major casualties of disciplinary action, including Molinos, and Fnelon in his classic controversy with Bossuet. One had to be very careful to make sure the higher reaches of Counter-Reformation devotion did not bear a suspicious resemblance to Protestant heresies, especially when it came to placing faith above works.

Sluhovsky has a rather piquant modern postscript to this curious history. The Pontifical Academy in Rome, Regina Apostolorum, has recently opened a new course in exorcism, using a modified form of the Roman rite of 1614, to combat Satan’s growing presence in the world, for example among followers of heavy metal. Practitioners are advised to consult appropriate medical experts, and to make quite sure all natural explanations are first excluded.

Two modest queries occur to me. With demons so much in evidence I am surprised that angels do not figure more largely, with maybe greater reference to the neo-platonic mysticism prevalent over the same period. My own reading in 17th-century poetry suggests that neo-platonic mysticism had recourse to angels and ministers of grace with relatively little fear of demonic intrusion. I am also intrigued by the reappearance of possession and exorcism in contemporary Pentecostalism. Were Sluhovsky interested in pursing contemporary forms of the mundane healing of troubled souls, caught between the Friend of souls and the Enemy of souls, his next project might involve a visit to Brazil or Nigeria. But in such places possession is a taken-for-granted experience, whether divine or demonic, and exorcism likewise not a critical issue of disciplinary control. Freedom of the Spirit and equality of access are the very basis of the faith, though in an old African tradition Big Men can easily deploy the charisma of the spirit to create a charisma of office, and combine quasi-papal powers with those of a CEO in a major conglomerate. The only way to exorcise that kind of corruption of the spirit is to set up in business on your own.

Moshe Sluhovsky is plainly very sophisticated in his use of English, but he is not a native speaker, and the copyeditor used by the University of Chicago Press seems to have been selected on the basis of equal opportunities for those who do and those who do not speak the language. The book is riddled with incorrect usages by any standard, English or American. A work of this distinction deserves better, even though Satan’s mignons encourage charming speculations about the infernal diet.

David Martin is the author of On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory (Ashgate). He was recently elected as a Fellow of the British Academy.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Since the 19th century, much ink has been spilt attempting to “justify” theology as a legitimate discipline in the “modern university.” Gone are the glory days of 13th-century Paris, theologians have conceded, but surely a chastened theology deserves a place at the table with other academic fields. A quiet dignity for the erstwhile queen of the sciences might consist precisely in her voluntary dimunition and willingness to “play by the rules” of the university at large. Or so some have argued.

The Barthian revolution in theology excoriated this line of reasoning, even as it happily burned many bridges to the 13th century. Barth thought that theologians ought to quit fretting about their institutional share and attend to the actual tasks of theology, which he regarded as inseperable from the mission of the church. Paradoxically, the practice of theology in service to the church, not its success at academic legitimation, gave theology a voice in the university, if no absolute right of residency. But theology should never settle for being a normal member of the academic community; it functioned as a “signal of distress,” a flashing siren this side of modernity proclaiming the crisis of mortal existence and the indefectible love of God.

Few contemporary theologians have taken Barth’s advice to heart quite like Duke Divinity School’s Stanley Hauerwas. Those who rue the Barthian-Hauerwasian line in modern theology might be tempted, after picking up this book and then quickly setting it aside, to quip with Marx that history tends to repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. But this would be to forfeit the probing insights, and pleasures, of hearing a first-order theological provocateur as he turns his sights on one of the most influential institutions in modern society: the university.

Like many of Hauerwas’ works, this is a collection of writings and addresses prepared for disparate audiences. It is a “book” because Hauerwas says it is; but enough chapters hang together to provide an overall sense of coherence—and the chapters that dangle make for lively reading. The idea for this volume originated in his Gifford lectures, published as With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology, where Hauerwas began to examine what his appropriation of Barth’s account of “natural theology” entailed for the types of knowledge found in the modern university and the relationship of Christian theology to them.

Critics have long charged that Hauerwas’ theological accents and modus operandi encourage a “sectarian” withdrawal from the world, not an engagement—especially not a serious and sustained cognitive engagement—with it. Hauerwas picks up the gauntlet: “The burden of the argument of this book, indeed, of everything I have written, is to challenge that presumption by suggesting that theology is a knowledge that should rightly be represented in the curriculums of a secular or a church-sponsored university.” Or, in a more Barthian vein: “[T]heology should never be done to pass muster in the university. Theology must be done to glorify God … . It has always been my conviction that when theology is so done, those in the university will take notice because what we have to say is so interesting.”

If Hauerwas argues that theology deserves representation in the university, he can’t be accused of flattering the institution he seeks to engage. Indeed, his criticisms of the extant university seem to overpower his constructive efforts to state why theology deserves a hearing. But one might construe this as the point: theology deserves a hearing because if its practitioners do what they should, they are able to raise the difficult questions and level the stinging criticisms that members of other disciplines—and proliferating subdisciplines—have neither the ability nor will to do.

Worrying about disciplinary specialization itself serves as a case in point—something Hauerwas does quite well, even if he is not alone in this effort. Narrow financial and professional interests, he writes, render it “crucial that the university insure that learning be organized not to be a conversation among disciplines, but rather that disciplines be organized as competing opposites. As a result, accountability is lost.” Even Christians today are duped to regard their own texts—say Milton or Dante—as belonging to a “field” called “literature” rather than as works that speak to our common humanity as creatures of God. Instead of working against the downsides of specialization, theologians too often transmit them. While individual expertise is no evil, Hauerwas insists that “theology only makes sense as a discipline of the church,” and this higher loyalty places both demands and limitations upon specialization. At the very least, Hauerwas humorously notes, “the disciplinary divisions that invite theologians to say, ‘I cannot comment on X or Y because scripture is not my field,’ must come to an end.”

Moreover, specialization too often serves the interests of the state. If there is a villain in Hauerwas’ account—indeed, in his entire theology—it is “the modern state,” purveyor and beneficiary of the ideologies of secularism and liberalism. The book’s title is in fact a double-entendre meant to convey just how much modern universities have become creatures of the state. As such, universities willy-nilly legitimate a secular understanding of time, knowledge, and freedom (liberalism broadly understood) profoundly at odds with the church’s countervailing conceptions of time, knowledge, and freedom. Today, Hauerwas writes,

the state and the university reflect the symbiotic relationship that once pertained between the university and the church. In the Middle Ages the university was used to produce clerks for church and state. Now the university is expected to produce people educated to serve the bureaucracies of modernity in which it is assumed the state is crucial for an ordered world. That the university serves this function should not surprise us given the fact that the modern university and the modern state developed together.

He ably points out the disparity between liberalism’s progressive understanding of time that shrinks in abject horror from human mortality (think of the academy’s enthusiasm for genomics) and a church that tells people at the beginning of Lent that we are dust and to dust we shall return.

Hauerwas bristles at the contemporary university’s putative universalism. As products of the Middle Ages, universities were originally universal in the sense that they expressed the catholic mission of the church. (Those receiving doctorates in fact possessed the legal prerogative of ius ubique docendi, the right to teach anywhere in medieval Christendom.) While shedding no tears for Christendom, Hauerwas views the diminished universalism of the contemporary university as coextensive with the rise of the modern nation-state, the powers of which grew to the extent that the state absorbed forms of localism and particularism into its ambit and drowned Christianity’s more demanding pronouncements under an ideology of liberalism.

And it is in the local, Hauerwas insists, that the genuinely catholic mission of the church—and the academy—is best retained. He develops this point in a chapter conversing with Wendell Berry and in another entitled, “Pro Ecclesia, Pro Texana”—both of which bear witness to a certain frontier-cum-Southern-agrarian ethos that suffuses his thought and gives it its salty edge.

Many of Hauerwas’ claims merit assent, few require outright dissent, some invite constructive criticism. If I may hazard the latter, one is struck in this book, and in his other writings, by the sheer size of the categories that Hauerwas inveighs against—”the modern state,” “Constantianism,” “America,” “civil religion,” “liberalism,” “Christendom,” “capitalism,” “individualism,” and so forth. Put differently, Hauerwas is a “lumper” not a “splitter”—predisposed to lump even slightly similar phenomena into capacious categories, which in turn earn either praise or indictment from the theologian’s prophetic office.

One might cherish the theologian’s prophetic office while maintaining that its beauty shines more brightly coupled with discriminating sociological and historical analysis. In my (more limited) office as a historian of the modern university, I wonder if Hauerwas’ contention that the “modern state” has sucked the lifeblood from the university bears a deficit of this discrimination. In particular, his (theological) account of the nation-state at times lumps so sweepingly that it ignores crucial differences in the various political arrangements and outcomes of modernity.

One observes, for example, a salient difference in the effects of state formations on higher education in North America and in Continental Europe. Hauerwas’ arguments apply well to European realities, but less so to those in North America. More than a few modern-day Tocquevilles have been struck by the relative freedom and diversity of higher education in this country: private Ivy Leagues, church-related colleges, denominational seminaries, community colleges, diversely funded foundations and think tanks, massive educational philanthropies, independent liberal arts colleges, and so forth. The creeping reach of the state (and unsavory aspects of the market) on these institutions should be a genuine cause of concern, but the enduring existence of this diversity, in contrast to a more statist Europe, should not be elided in the headlong rush to prophetic lamentation.

Hauerwas’ own professional path—Yale (private Ivy), Augustana College (Lutheran), Notre Dame (Catholic), and now Duke Divinity School (Methodist)—bears witness to a vocational trajectory, and a heady theological cross-pollination, improbable in many other countries where the state has had more hom*ogenizing, secularizing effects on education. At the very least, let theological prophets and provocateurs alike consider sparing our Republic a few lashings for its artful midwifery in rendering prominent the very distinguished, very distinctive mind of Stanley Hauerwas.

Thomas Albert Howard is associate professor of history and directs the Jerusalem & Athens Forum at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts. He is the author of Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (Oxford Univ. Press).

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

This book consists of 19 autobiographical statements of sociologists, all of whom have some claims to be considered as social theorists. Most were born between 1947 and 1950, and the events of the 1960s—civil rights and Vietnam—fundamentally shaped their growing up (1968 was a pivotal year for most of them). Many of the scholars hold prestigious chairs, and not just at major universities, but at the world’s leading institutions of higher learning: Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, Berkeley, Yale. They are mainly U. S. nationals. Nonetheless, the editors have included some Europeans, most with close connections to the United States, at places like Oxford, Cambridge, and the Sorbonne. These academics are also heads of their departments of inquiry, presidents of their professional associations, and editors of leading journals in the field.

The basic idea is that these members of the professoriate had their later scholarship decisively influenced by the radical events of the 1960s, and that this scholarship has been in some way unconventional, “disobedient.” For the editors this situation has made the work of the authors more penetrating than it otherwise would have been, or more penetrating than that of other scholars. And so the collection is to illuminate not merely the connection between the personal and the intellectual, but also perhaps to suggest the precondition of incisive academic writing. In any event the editors invite collective appraisals of the scholars, their work, and the role of the 1960s in developing social theory.

What is social theory anyway? This is not an easy question to answer. Maybe even a harder question: is it the same as sociological theory? All of those who have contributed to this volume teach in departments of sociology, but most of the academics have connections to the other social sciences and are often associated with centers for research that have wide-ranging agendas. The scholars themselves have admirably broad interests, from economics and politics to statistics and philosophy. Social theory is a little more elevated than sociology. One way to think about it is to relate the matter in this book to those of the great men most cited as historical predecessors—Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Talcott Parsons get regularly mentioned.

Another way of understanding social theory is to enumerate the learned interests of the contemporary followers of the four great men. The Sixties theorists are interested in the role of religion in the social order, the growth of egalitarian democracy and citizenship, racism, and issues of class and capitalism. A chief area of scholarship is to explore how economics shapes the position one has in life. These are big and crucial questions about how society functions, and why. For the 19, the explicit and somewhat conventional way to talk about these concerns is to use the favored phrase “social justice.” The achievement of social justice is the end of their efforts, and the work of social theory is, roughly, the knowledge to gain it. That is, social theory combines learning with social engagement to get to the desired state.

This sounds to me something like social work, but social workers are far less exalted than social theorists, and far more part of the bourgeois establishment. For the theorist, practical social choice is far more a hypothetical desideratum than a daily consideration. Many of the thinkers in this volume have notable stories of knocking about in their youth and of finding their paths with some difficulty. Some of them have had working-class employment at some time or another in their lives, or have been organizers of the downtrodden. But only a few have such commitments in their professional careers today, and one announces that he has never held “a nine-to-five job with fixed hours and a boss telling me what to do.” For the great majority of theorists in the present, the 1960s have left them with a stance toward academia but not with much of a foot in the real world of work. One writes that he has retained from that era “several nonacademic friendships, … [a] passion for Italian sports cars, … [and] devotion to the restaurants of New Orleans.” The social theorists, then, are people who think about the ways to achieve progressive change, or even to give advice about how to think about such change, but don’t actually do much themselves. One talks about “visionary pragmatism” and another about “real utopias.” They are policymakers without a polity.

We all grasp that individuals are not to be congratulated on, or condemned for, the accident of the circ*mstances of their birth. The hard thing is fairly to appraise what people make of these circ*mstances, how individual character is connected to them. This is not easy for the social theorists to deal with. Some of them in this collection are from the lower end of the class system. They take responsibility for their disadvantage—they write as if it were their achievement that their families had no money. Most of the theorists, however, are from the very high end of the class system, and these children of well-to-do households take a different tack. They explain their future good fortune as a product of chance and not of privilege, and maybe as really a drawback.

Andrew Abbot (who has chaired his department at the University of Chicago) went to private school because it was more “challenging” than his public school. Unaware of class and ethnic differences, he became a boarder at Phillips Academy because “a flood of talented outsiders” to the old Protestant elite “swarmed” into Andover, Massachusetts. John Hall (an Englishman now at McGill University in Canada) went to an English “public” school “for family reasons,” but being in the higher classes and not of them, says Hall, has been an enduring burden. Karen Cook (now a dean for the social sciences at Stanford) went there as an undergraduate because her aunt from California sent her a catalogue and an application. Along with a number of these people, Erik Wright (at Wisconsin) has a Harvard connection. Like Cook applying to Stanford, Wright applied to Harvard because someone gave him an application during his senior year at high school: “Going to Harvard in a way just happened.” Some analysts would connect the upscale educations of the children to their families’ place in the social hierarchy.

Once they get to college, a main problem with these people as a group is that they are so unappealing, at least as they reveal themselves in their autobiographies. A variety of reasons, which interested readers will need to sample for themselves, account for this lack of appeal. One professor (Stephen Turner at the University of South Florida) has been in a rage for over thirty years. His anger at his perceived low ranking in the prestige pecking order lights up each of his twenty-five pages, and gives readers an unwanted glimpse into his psyche. One woman (Saskia Sassen, who holds a chair at Chicago) is the most monumentally narcissistic name-dropper I have ever read. Steve Woolgar (a chair at Oxford University) is a self-indulgent embarrassment. He thanks his therapist for comments on the essay, and writes things such as, “We can conclude that the forms of disobedience that differentially inform our perspectives as social analysts definitely have profound consequences for the nature and kinds of inquiry we perform.” The therapist has not helped much with the writing, but I wonder if the doctor told the patient about how he over-intellectualized the depiction of his experiences.

Responses to people differ. My irritation at the autobiographies would not be worth a fig if intellectually we could say the critical work of these figures cut to the bone. The real problem with these men and women is that they don’t think clearly. One autobiography (by Laurent Thevenot, a French scholar) is literally unintelligible. His twenty-page account of his life is filled with sentences like these: “Each of the experiences [in my life] I have described casts a different light on social representation, in every sense of the word: in social science, in politics, in the common sense. Each of them can foster a contestation of representations in full accordance with the atmosphere of the time.”

Jeffrey Alexander is sometime chair of the Yale Department of Sociology. He tells us about a formative moment in his life when, as a member of the Harvard Students for a Democratic Society in 1969, his organization voted down a proposal in favor of “taking over an administration building … [in order to help] to stop the war.” In the early dawn of the following morning, a minority group of militants who had lost the vote stormed a central edifice at Harvard anyway: “They threw the deans from their office and threw them violently down the stairs. Fearing the revolution would pass us by, the New Left caucus sucked in their pride and joined the occupation.” From a perspective of over thirty-five years, writes Alexander, “administrative missteps, police brutality, and a restive youth culture transformed this political misadventure into an act of political liberation.”

What is wrong with this picture? I am sure that there were administrative missteps and police brutality, and Alexander is not a historian, and autobiographies are notoriously partial. But we have an assemblage of Harvard students who decide that there is a significant causal connection between occupying a building on their campus and ending the conflict in far-off Southeast Asia. To shorten the war, they abridge their own democratic procedures, invade a building, and throw some middle-aged professors “violently” down its stairs. This is “a restive youth culture”? Very well-off white boys have acted in a frenzied, aggressive way that borders on the psychopathic. In part we can explain their behavior by noting that knowledge of their privileged place in society probably motivated the students. They thought that being at Harvard would prevent their being punished. An explanation based on class might suggest that the police who engaged in their own brutality recognized this. Maybe the police, from a lower class, went to work to mete out punishment to the students that the police sensed the undergraduates would otherwise not get.

Yale is surely not Harvard, but what if a bunch of Yalies threw Professor Alexander “violently” down the steps of Williams Hall, where his office is located in New Haven. Would Alexander say this was a product of “restive youth culture”?

Here is another extended example. Patricia Collins (holder of a chair at the University of Cincinnati) has advanced a set of ideas she calls “standpoint epistemology.” It “links experiences with consciousness, power relations with knowledge.” Collins says that this “constructionalist” approach must be made complex, but in brief, she argues, “where you stand will shape what you see … and stand for.” Several pages later she tells us that the central question that frames her work is: “How do we bring about social justice?” If we don’t fight for it, we “capitulate to oppression,” and “despite what social constructionists might say, there’s no ethical mid-point.” These two positions, outlined on pages 98 and 108, are contradictory.

Rather than reading these social theorists for wisdom about, and insight into, our precarious social world, I think there is more advantage in seeing how they display certain elements of our predicament. Overall, in the last thirty years, the impartiality of scholarship has been at a discount. Thinkers outside the hard sciences have stressed that our social knowledge is compromised in a range of ways. One form or another of “standpoint epistemology” is the fashion of the day. But the social theorists of the 1960s have gone one step further. The objectivity that was once attributed to one’s scholarship is now ascribed to one’s politics. The latter realm, which used to be thought of as filled with passion, seasonal blindness, and the partisanship of competing groups, now possesses the absolute quality of physics. The two realms of scholarship and politics have then been mixed together in the heady co*cktail of social theory.

It would be nice if we had a little more objectivity in our scholarship and a little less certainty in our moral outrage, and if we kept the two a little more separate.

Bruce Kuklick is Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author most recently of Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (Princeton Univ. Press).

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Three conservative bishops of the Episcopal Church are under fire from the church’s national leaders and are being threatened with dismissal for seeking to pull their dioceses out of the church in protest of its leftward drift.

The attempted purge of conservative bishops Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh, Jack L. Iker of Fort Worth, and John-David Schofield of Fresno from Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori marks a new stage in the battle over church doctrine and discipline that has threatened to split the Episcopal Church since the hotly contested 2003 consecration of a non-celibate gay priest as bishop of New Hampshire.

On January 11, Bishop Jefferts Schori stated that a secret review panel had handed down an indictment against Bishop Schofield for “abandoning the Communion” of the Episcopal Church. In November delegates to his diocese’s annual convention voted to pull out of the Episcopal Church and seek the oversight of an overseas archbishop from the Anglican Communion.

Bishop Schofield’s support for the secession would result in a trial before the church’s House of Bishops in March, Bishop Jefferts Schori said, and he was ordered to “cease from exercising” his ministry as bishop of the diocese of San Joaquin.

Four days later, Bishop Duncan was told that he had also been indicted by the secret church panel as a result of his diocese’s having taken the first steps towards pulling out of the church last year, and would face trial this September. However, Bishop Duncan was not suspended from office as the Episcopal Church’s three senior bishops declined to support the request for an “inhibition,” or suspension from office pending trial.

Bishop Iker reported he too had received a “threatening” letter from Bishop Jefferts Schori on Jan 15, saying he would be liable for trial on “charges of violation of [his] ordination vows” for asserting that congregations or diocese could quit the Episcopal Church, but no charges were made against him.

Bishop Schofield’s assistant, Canon William Gandenberger, told Christianity Today, “Bishop John-David will be performing his normal actions as bishop,” and would not obey the suspension.

He “will labor on as he has been called and elected as bishop of the diocese of San Joaquin” and he and the diocese will “continue to build unity with the worldwide Anglican Communion based upon the Good News of Jesus Christ,” Canon Gandenberger said.

If a majority of American bishops judge Bishop Schofield to be guilty, he will be removed from the House of Bishops. However, Southern Cone Primate Gregory Venables stated this was a moot point.

In November, the diocese of San Joaquin formally withdrew from the Episcopal Church and affiliated with the Buenos Aires-based Province of the Southern Cone of America. The plan to try Bishop Schofield was moot, the Bishop of Argentina Gregory Venables said on Jan 11 as Bishop Schofield “is not under the authority or jurisdiction of the Episcopal Church or the Presiding Bishop. He is, therefore, not answerable to their national canon law but is a member of the House of Bishops of the Southern Cone and under our authority,” he said.

The San Joaquin diocese is further down the path that the Fort Worth and Pittsburgh dioceses are walking, Bishop Iker said.

“San Joaquin approved measures to separate from the Episcopal Church with a second, ratifying vote on December 8th, whereas the Pittsburgh Convention approved of their measures at the preliminary, first reading vote in November, an action which will need to be ratified at the 2008 Convention. Fort Worth is in the same position as Pittsburgh,” he said.

In a statement released late Tuesday night, Bishop Duncan denied that he had been unfaithful to the tenets of the Church. “Few bishops have been more loyal to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the Episcopal Church. I have not abandoned the Communion of this Church. I will continue to serve and minister as the bishop of the Episcopal diocese of Pittsburgh,” he said.

Liberal leaders in the diocese of Pittsburgh said the indictment was a cause of “hope” for them, as well as an opportunity for “reconciliation.” The review panel “gives all of us in Pittsburgh serious cause to reflect,” said Dr. Joan Gundersen, president of Progressive Episcopalians of Pittsburgh. “This can be an opportunity for all of us to consider how we can change course and restore relations with one another and with the Episcopal Church.”

Bishop Iker stated it was “tragic and deeply disturbing” that Bishop Schori would move against Bishop Duncan before Pittsburgh took “any final decision” to separate from the Episcopal Church.

The Episcopal Church gives “lip service” to the mantra of dialogue “to heal our divisions,” he said, while “at the same time closing off any possibility of continuing conversations by aggressive, punitive actions such as this.”

Though divided over the proper response to the church’s leftward drift, conservative Episcopalians were united in their outrage over the latest moves by the national church leadership in New York.

The Episcopal Church’s 30-year membership hemorrhage took a dramatic turn last year after seven conservative bishops quit the church: four joining the Roman Catholic Church, and three other branches of the 80 million-member Anglican Communion.

Several dozen congregations, including the largest congregations of the dioceses of Dallas, Georgia, Kansas, and Virginia have also quit the church for other Anglican groups such as the Anglican Mission in the Americas, the Convocations of Anglicans in North America, and fellowships led by American bishops appointed by the Anglican Churches of Uganda and Kenya.

However, other conservative leaders have urged Episcopalians to hold fast, as help was coming from abroad. In October Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams counseled patience saying that Anglicans who were “rushing into separatist solutions” were “weakening that basic conviction of catholic theology.”

Affiliation with the national church was not the most important bond in church life, he argued. In Anglicanism, it was the “Bishop and Diocese” who were the “primary locus of ecclesial identity rather than the abstract reality of the ‘national church’,” Williams said.

The call for patience in the 30-year battle for the soul of the Episcopal Church does not resonate as loudly as it once did, however, as the doctrinal differences between the liberal and conservative wings of the church deepen.

For the diocese of Fort Worth, Bishop Jefferts Schori’s Christmas card epitomized the two faiths co-existing within the Episcopal Church. The card sent to all of the church’s bishops shows a mother and child surrounded by three wise women. No mention of Jesus appears on the card, while the card speaks of “wise women throughout time and in every culture know themselves to be seekers and seers of the divine.”

This card “defies explanation” the diocesan leadership said. Bishop Jefferts Schori is an “intelligent woman, so this re-interpretation of Scripture to exclude masculine images must be intentional. This card illustrates in many ways the core problem of the General Convention Church. Scripture cannot be made to conform to us, we must conform our lives and our faith to Scripture,” the diocese said.

Copyright © 2008 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

Our ongoing coverage of division in the Anglican Communion is available online.

The cover story of The Wall Street Journal‘s weekend section begins:

On a quiet Sunday morning in June, as worshippers settled into the pews at Allen Baptist Church in southwestern Michigan, Pastor Jason Burrick grabbed his cellphone and dialed 911. When a dispatcher answered, the preacher said a former congregant was in the sanctuary. “And we need to, um, have her out A.S.A.P.”

The 71-year-old Karolyn Caskey was arrested and put in jail for returning to the church where she had recently been expelled for spreading “a spirit of cancer and discord” after questioning the pastor. Caskey had tithed regularly during her nearly 50-year membership at the church.

“It was very humiliating,” says Mrs. Caskey, who worked for the state of Michigan for 25 years before retiring from the Department of Corrections in 1992. “The other prisoners were surprised to see a little old lady in her church clothes. One of them said, ‘You robbed a church?’ and I said, ‘No, I just attended church.’ ”

The Journal reports that this “ancient practice” of church discipline is making a comeback. “The revival is part of a broader movement to restore churches to their traditional role as moral enforcers, Christian leaders say. Some say that contemporary churches have grown soft on sinners, citing the rise of suburban megachurches where pastors preach self-affirming messages rather than focusing on sin and redemption.”

But I wonder if it isn’t just an excuse for heavy-handed leadership. “Last week, the pastor of a 6,000-member megachurch in Nashville, Tenn., threatened to expel 74 members for gossiping and causing disharmony unless they repented. The congregants had sued the pastor for access to the church’s financial records.”

About 10 – 15 percent of churches discipline in this way, according to the article, but there’s no proof to the claim that the practice is rising. It does seem, however, that lawsuits following church discipline may be increasing.

In 2005, CT published a cover package on church discipline, which included the article “Keeping the Lawyers at Bay.”

Apart from the outreach of the church, there are many ways individuals can encourage widows on their journey. But it’s often hard to know what to say, for fear of making things worse. So let me offer some “Please do” as well as some “Please do not” suggestions.

1. Please do stay connected. Do not assume we need “space” to grieve. There is already a huge hole in our universe.

2. Please do say you are sorry for our loss. Do not tell us you understand, unless you do from personally experiencing the loss of a spouse. We would rather you tell us you do not know what to say than tell us the story of losing your friend or even close relative. We may be able to listen to your story later, but not now.

3. Please call and ask specific questions, such as “Can we go for a walk together? May I run errands for you? Meet you for coffee?” Do not say, “Call me if you need anything.”

4. Please refer to our husband’s acts and words, both serious and humorous. We are so comforted by knowing our husband has not been forgotten.

5. Please invite us to anything. We may decline but will appreciate being asked. Do not assume we no longer want to participate in couples events.

6. Please accept that we are where we are. Marriages are brief, long, healthy, dysfunctional, intense, remote. Death comes suddenly or in tiny increments over years. Again, our experiences are so different, as are we. So are our journeys through grief. Do not assume we go through the grief process “by the book.”

7. Do say, “I’ve been thinking of you” rather than make a conversation-only offer, such as “We’ll call you, and we’ll go out to dinner”—unless you can follow up. We’d love that, too.

Copyright © 2008 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

This accompanied Miriam Neff’s article on “The Widow’s Might“.

Rob Moll wrote about taking care of widows in Liveblog.

Other articles on dealing with death are in our special section.