Page 4065 – Christianity Today (2024)

Christian America is an exercise in iconoclasm. In this engaging and forceful book, Christian Smith sets out to destroy the “myth” that evangelical Protestants are a monolithic force for—depending on your worldview—reaction or reform in American political and cultural life. This book is particularly aimed at critics, journalists, and academics outside evangelicalism who cling to the belief that evangelicalism is a “demonic” force in our national life determined to undercut basic American freedoms, as well as at Christian conservative activists who are convinced that evangelicalism is an “angelic” force for cultural and political renewal in America. Smith’s essential argument is twofold: first, evangelical political and cultural attitudes are much more complex, ambiguous, and ambivalent than is commonly acknowledged; and, second, to the extent that there are common beliefs and strategies guiding evangelical political and civic engagement, these beliefs and strategies pose no fundamental threat to American canons of political moderation and tolerance.

Smith unravels the complexity of American evangelicalism by relying upon more than 200 in-depth interviews with evangelicals around the country. He begins by pointing out a number of fallacies that cloud academic and popular understandings of American evangelicalism and conservative Protestantism more generally. The first is “the representative elite fallacy,” which holds that the opinions of average evangelicals can be understood by consulting the opinions of evangelical elites. Smith dispatches this fallacy by arguing that prominent evangelical elites cannot possibly represent the diverse opinions of evangelical laity and that such elites often stake out controversial positions that place them outside the mainstream of evangelical lay opinion.

Another fallacy is the “ideological consistency fallacy”—the assumption that most evangelicals hold an “internally consistent and nonparadoxical worldview.” Smith notes that virtually all persons, including evangelicals, hold contradictory views that reflect tensions in their own lives and cultural repertoires.

Observers, critics, and supporters of American evangelicalism also make the mistake of assuming that this subculture has a monolithic approach to cultural and political matters—what Smith calls the “monolithic religious bloc fallacy.” But such an assumption overlooks crucial religious, racial, and class differences—among others—that divide evangelicals. These differences, in turn, are linked to different orientations to key cultural and political issues. Indeed, Smith argues, the ideological makeup of American evangelicalism reflects a good deal of ambivalence, ambiguity, and diversity about the core cultural and political questions facing the nation.

Are American evangelicals poised to launch a putsch on behalf of “Christian America”? Hardly, Smith says. A substantial minority of evangelicals reject the notion that America ever was a Christian nation, nor do they think it will ever be one. And even the majority of evangelicals who think that America was once Christian hold sharply differing visions of what a Christian America might now look like. Some aim to promote religious freedom, others seek a religious but not a politically imposed revival of Christian faith in the populace at large, and still others seek to impose laws informed by biblical principles. But the latter group, whose spokesmen can be found in the likes of James Kennedy, of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, constitute a small minority of evangelical believers. Thus, there is no consensus in the evangelical world for the kind of theocratic political strategy that worries groups like Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

At the same time, Smith’s book makes it clear that the mainstream of evangelical opinion is culturally conservative. Most evangelicals would like the vast majority of Americans to be Christians. Most evangelicals oppose abortion and hom*osexuality and express concern about the general state of the nation’s moral life—especially with respect to the family.

But the cultural conservatism of American evangelicalism does not translate into uniform support for a conservative political agenda because most American evangelicals also hold quintessentially American values about social change, civility, and tolerance. Their commitment to these values limits their ability to link their beliefs to larger political or social agendas.

For instance, most evangelicals embrace the contemporary American faith in “tolerance,” which has become confused with unconditional acceptance in popular discourse. The respondents interviewed in Smith’s book can be found voicing their support for tolerance by invoking mantras like “to each his own” and “live and let live.” Such facile expressions of support for tolerance suggest that many evangelicals have accommodated themselves uncritically to contemporary understandings of tolerance.

But Smith is also at pains to show that some evangelicals are tolerant because they draw on deeper, Christian understandings of the importance of respecting persons regardless of their beliefs or practices. For example, one respondent expressed support for tolerance because “Jesus didn’t cast out the sinner; he loved them wherever they were.” This more deeply grounded desire to be tolerant makes many evangelicals hesitant to support causes, legislation, or groups that are commonly depicted as intolerant—such as vocal anti-abortion groups.

Moreover, Smith argues, evangelicals are keen on an innocuous, individualistic approach to social change that he calls “strategic relationalism.” Because they believe that true change flows from spiritual conversion, Smith says, most evangelicals believe the best way to change the nation’s religious and moral environment is by changing individuals on a one-by-one basis.

This strategy suits the individualistic religious ethos that has deeply shaped evangelicalism, and it is also in keeping with American canons of civility, but it leaves evangelicals unable or unwilling to focus on strategies for social change that address underlying structural or political forces. For instance, Christian America shows that evangelicals’ reluctance to advocate fundamental and systematic change in education that might advance their cause—through support for vouchers, for instance—flows from their conviction that social problems “have spiritual roots and that spiritual is a matter of individual hearts” rather than “political, cultural-war solutions.”

So there we have it. Evangelicals, it would seem, have been tamed by the American experience in much the same way that Catholics were in the 1960s and 1970s, their “Americanization” fueled by fantastic increases in education and affluence over the last three decades. They are democratic, civil, and—above all else—tolerant, even if their views tend toward cultural conservatism on family-related matters. Moreover, their views on matters of public import are often admirably complex, ambiguous, and ambivalent. So, the quicker that their opponents and advocates come to recognize how American evangelicals have become, the easier it will be for all Americans to “work together more successfully toward a common life of civility and justice in a genuinely pluralistic society.”

Smith may be right. But one could just as plausibly argue that the relationship between evangelicalism and the national political culture is likely to become much more antagonistic than it currently is.

There are three reasons for not being sanguine about the relationship between evangelicalism and American democracy. First, Smith does not prove as much he thinks he does by showing that complexity, ambiguity, and ambivalence mark evangelical public opinion. A careful reading of American history in the late 1850s, for instance, reveals similar levels of attitudinal complexity within and between the North and South. Yet the play of events, differences in central ideological tendencies between the regions, and the impact of small but determined advocacy groups (many of which had strong religiously rooted convictions) brought the United States to a wrenching and bloody civil war.

Similarly, continuing differences in central ideological tendencies between evangelicals and other Americans—especially secularists—on cultural matters like abortion and hom*osexuality, the ongoing work of advocacy groups, and the play of events may yet promote sharp, and possibly even violent, conflict between evangelicals and the American political order.

A second, related possibility is that the American government will itself become so vested in supporting cultural liberalism that it becomes hostile to evangelical institutions or institutions with which evangelicals identify. In 1999, for instance, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the New Jersey Boy Scouts could not discriminate against hom*osexuals in deciding who was fit to be a Boy Scout leader. Although this ruling was overturned in 2000 by a 5-4 ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, it is quite possible that future rulings from a Supreme Court with one or two new members would make discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation illegal. Given the trajectory of American legal and political culture—George W. Bush’s win notwithstanding—possibilities like this cannot be ruled out. Should evangelical institutions fall afoul of the law, evangelical commitments to political moderation, civility, and tolerance would probably wither.

A third possibility is that a serious economic depression would undercut Americans’, and especially evangelicals’, current support for an expansive understanding of tolerance. It’s true that, as Alan Wolfe’s recent work suggests, Americans have embraced a spirit of “moral freedom” that leaves them unwilling and unable to hold their fellow citizens—either publicly or privately—to an overriding standard of morality. But this laissez faire approach to morality is structurally dependent on the historically unprecedented affluence that most Americans enjoy. Most Americans can literally afford not to care about neighbor and family behavior precisely because they are not financially dependent upon others.

A serious economic depression could undermine the affluence that has made the spirit of moral freedom attractive to so many evangelicals (and other Americans). A serious downturn would force Americans to rely more upon their neighbors and family members in ways that might make traditional understandings of moral obligation more attractive. Such a downturn might also make extremist voices more palatable. In an America wracked by economic need, many of the cultural issues that have ceased to roil American political life might re-emerge as salient points of division precisely because they bear on common understandings of obligation, especially familial obligation.

If evangelicals are given a voice in public affairs, especially on matters dealing with deeply divisive moral issues, if evangelical (and other civic) institutions are given sufficient autonomy to set their own course on matters like hom*osexuality, and our economy recovers from its mild downturn and returns to sustained growth, we might indeed look forward to a “common life of civility and justice in a genuinelypluralistic society.” But given the weak commitment that all parties in America’s culture wars have to genuine pluralism, American democracy and American evangelicalism could still be in for a major collision. Only time will tell.

W. Bradford Wilcox is a research fellow at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion at Yale University.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Jews, Christians, and God

Thank you for publishing Lauren Winner’s five-part series on “Jews, Christians, and God” [November/December 2000, January/February, May/June, July/August, September/October 2001]. This informed and thoughtful collection of essays has provided an excellent format for exposing the root and struggles of an oft neglected yet important historic relationship within our contemporary religious culture. Winner’s work is insightfully written, sensitive in spirit, and tuned in to many of the critical current issues being faced in the Christian-Jewish encounter. Readers may glean much from her lucid and perceptive analysis. Congratulations to B&C for providing this relevant series. Winner’s reflective articles demonstrate the vital niche in religious journalism B&C has continued to carve out for itself since its inception.

Marvin R. WilsonGordon CollegeWenham, Mass.

I enjoy your newsletter and find a number of the articles challenging. I am a Catholic Christian married to a Protestant Christian (Church of Scotland). Together we have made tremendous steps to bridge the divide between our traditions—hence my interest in your Web site.

I read with interest your article on Edith Stein—a martyr whose anniversary we celebrated recently [“The Problem of Edith Stein,” July/ August]. However, I found the author gave a fairly one-sided argument. There are a number of helpful articles relating to Edith Stein at the Web site, Catholic Exchange (www.moff.org).

I find it narrow-minded to see Edith’s conversion to Catholicism as a rejection of Judaism. Would you lay that accusation at the feet of Jesus and the Apostles? At heart we are all semites—Christianity is the fulfilment of the Old Covenant. If you research Catholicism you will find that we hold true to many of the Jewish beliefs and traditions.

Ian Maxfieldimaxfield@yahoo.co.uk

Promise Keepers’ theology of gender

A decade ago, when I still counted myself an evangelical, I remember having fierce debates about gender roles, especially about the Promise Keepers’ theology of gender. For me, and for many of my peers, the single largest concern standing in the way of approval of the movement was its patronizing, borderline-misogynistic ideas and “macho” aesthetic about leadership and manhood.

That’s why I was stunned not to see the Promise Keepers’ theology of gender listed among the “Persisting theological concerns” church leaders and lay people have about the movement [“The Strange Decade of the Promise Keepers,” September/October]. Even if Mr. Mathisen does not personally share those concerns, I’m surprised that in his careful treatment of the subject the issue completely escaped him.

I seem to remember gender roles as a serious issue in the evangelical circles I frequented. Is the battle already over, and are men once again sitting around making promises about sticking to a tougher spiritual workout while the women serve dinner?

Kristofer WidholmBroken Hill Music

Unsacramental John?

In Robert Gundry’s manifesto [“A Paleofundementalist Manifesto,” September/ October] I find something to agree with (his critique of therapeutic evangelism in “seeker sensitive” churches); something to disagree with (his false dilemma between “vibrant sectarianism” and “torpid institutionalism”); and something to be absolutely incredulous of. The latter occurs when Gundry describes sacramentalism as “un- if not anti-Johannine” and then later speaks of “John’s anti- or un-sacramentalism.” His hermeneutic is interesting but essentially an argument from silence.

John, however, is not silent about the Body and Blood of our Lord. The most challenging passage in all of Holy Scripture for those who deny the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist comes from the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel. Verses 53 through 55 read: “Jesus therefore said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.'”

To the extent that Ignatius of Antioch and Polycarp were associated with the discipleship of John, the idea of his being anti- or even un-sacramental is historically myopic. This suggests what might be the proper etiology of Gundry’s lack of vision (which seems to be as narrow as his sectarian interests). At the end of the essay, he ponders the question of the relation of biblical and systematic theology; it apparently does not occur to him to look to historical theology for help. Alister McGrath in his masterful Historical Theology (Blackwell, 1998) states, “Historical theology. … has both a pedagogic and critical role, aiming to inform systematic theology about what has been thought in the past.” Gundry’s use of history in his essay skips from before A.D. 100 to the 1920s (which I find to be the typical approach of fundamentalists). Mr. Gundry, a lot happened in between, and most of it was sacramental.

This brings me to my final point. It is the height of irony that Gundry identifies John, of all people, as anti- or un-sacramental. The root of sacramental thinking is in the Logos doctrine of John. When the Second Person of the Holy Trinity took on human nature, when “the Word became flesh” (to quote our alleged anti-sacramentalist), to a certain extent he exalted all flesh, even all matter, and made it capable of being an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual reality. This is what sharply divides mere Platonism, which is ultimately the source of most Gnostic heresy, from Christian philosophy.

It is worth mentioning that the fundamentalist mindset has proven quite susceptible to Gnostic thinking, from its overly dualistic interpretations of Paul to its degradation of the body and of the visual arts. Historical sacramentalism in general and the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicea II) in particular make explicit appeal to incarnational theology, to that amazing Logos doctrine found in John, that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

John unsacramental, forsooth!

Trent DoughertyColumbia, Mo.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In Sonic Boom, cyberjournalist John Alderman recalls a crucial moment in rock history when a band of young upstarts called the Rolling Stones first set foot in the Chicago studio of Chess Records, the label home of various blues legends who helped form the Stones’ sound. To their amazement, they found themselves in the formidable presence of bluesman Muddy Waters. But he wasn’t there as a creative consultant, a CEO, or a musical impresario. It just so happened that the Stones’ visit coincided with the day a decidedly unwealthy Muddy Waters showed up to paint the studio roof. Keith Richards summed up the irony effectively: “Welcome to the music business!”

To be fair, Muddy Waters would gain an income through his music, not least from those record buyers who would begin with the Stones and work their way back to the Delta. And without the promotion, distribution, and recording facilities of Chess Records, his music might have never made its way across the Atlantic to the impressionable ears of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in the first place. Nevertheless, the history of recorded music is a boulevard of broken dreams. Many artists struggle to make ends meet and die broke, even as royalties from their music enrich the canny copyright-holders. As Herbie Hanco*ck puts it in the preface to Sonic Boom, “For the hard work involved in being a middleman, the label is certainly entitled to a decent profit. But not a killing. To make huge amounts of money on the backs of artists who are not fairly compensated sours the relationship and creates bad will that lasts a long time.”

With the discussion generated by the Napster phenomenon and the efforts of the Recording Industry Association of America to protect what is now a $15 billion-a-year enterprise, a new awareness is gradually developing among the listening/buying public concerning the small percentage allotted the artist in the sale of a compact disc as well as the millions spent in anticipating and, to a large degree, manipulating the desires of the buyer. This allows progressive young people to feel righteous even as they download thousands of dollars’ worth of music for free. (Nonprogressive kids couldn’t care less who is or isn’t making money on the deal.) By doing so, you see, they’re punishing the exploitative conglomerates who dominate the recording industry.

The irony isn’t lost on the artists, but they are by no means of one mind when they contemplate what Napster hath wrought. Some see the change as ultimately for the best, despite the immediate loss of royalties. With the increasing availability of music on the Internet, the listener is now peculiarly free to cultivate category-defying listening habits while discovering and, ideally, supporting artists whose work and sales owe nothing to corporate market research.

A service like Napster (and sites like Morpheus, Aimster, and KaZaa, which have quickly formed to take its place) affords music seekers a selection of unprecedented eclecticism, while sites dedicated to particular artists and genres provide avenues of conversation, recommendations, and issues which only have a tangential relation to the music itself. Cynics might suggest that this blessed situation can only continue until the Internet meets the fate of commercial radio and degenerates into a pure marketing tool, but a visit to any number of message boards, sustained by nothing so much as the committed enthusiasms of various subcultures, suggests that something a little more hopeful is going on.

In the case of the Smashing Pumpkins, for instance, we have a band who officially ended their career together by making their final album available only on the Internet. While their retirement occurred more than a year ago, their Web forum contains, at a recent glance, nearly 64,000 messages. This is the section devoted exclusively to the band. The “Non-Smashing Pumpkins” portion of the message board is nearing 100,000 messages with discussion devoted primarily to religious issues. The Pumpkins’ lead singer/songwriter, Billy Corgan, recently penned a message of encouragement and gratitude to his audience, whose interest in maintaining the conversation and energy generated by his music is, in his view, an ongoing inspiration to keep on keeping on. He was reluctant to speak too specifically concerning what some listeners had identified in his work as a summons to revolution, but he did note the presence of a kindred spirit in Radiohead’s Kid A while mentioning that some might find much of worth, as he has, in the novels of Philip K. Dick.

While talk of revolution might be premature, it surely isn’t too much to say that there is a spirit of resistance taking root within the music-buying public, especially among young people. And Corgan’s reference to Philip K. Dick is particularly telling. For many, the most convincing metanarratives of our age are films like The Matrix and The Truman Show, whose protagonists discover themselves in carefully scripted, immersive environments which create the illusion of freedom while using inhabitants to fuel their own death-dealing machinery. Dick perfected such parables of intense paranoia in the sixties and seventies, but he might have had trouble overestimating the power of MTV to create demand and move product.

As the music business becomes more connected to the online community, it’s probably not overly hopeful to predict that the painstakingly manufactured pop of Eminem, Britney Spears, and the Backstreet Boys will appear more contrived to more people. The disenchanted may even begin to see through the disguise of a band like Limp Bizkit, whose sedulously cultivated image of authentic rage against the machine is the brainchild of lead singer Fred Durst, a 30-year-old vice president of Interscope Records. He could just as easily be directing a campaign to re-brand Ford trucks.

For the time being, it’s true, downloads of bands like Limp Bizkit and ‘NSYNC are proportional to their CD sales, but this owes more to their easy perpetuation through radio and television (especially via MTV) than to any Internet-specific momentum. Their image-driven success will doubtless continue for some time to come, but in the long run the Internet won’t lend itself to those tried and true marketing strategies. A message board dedicated to Christina Aguilera can’t indefinitely sustain discussion of her clothing, her hair style, and who she’s dating.

But the Internet will reward the artist whose music embodies a movement that makes of the listener more than a consumer. As Alderman points out, it’s no accident that it was Grateful Dead fans who first saw the potential of the Internet as a site for a music-centered community. And the most recent Internet success story is certainly Radiohead, whose aforementioned Kid A reached number one on the Billboard charts without providing any pre-releases to news organizations or music magazines. They simply made sure it was available on Napster long before its official release, and their Internet fans took care of the rest.

Appropriately enough, Radiohead’s music describes (among other things) the terror of waking up in a purely commercial reality where your imagination has been hijacked and the consequences of your spending and the forces that guide your consumption are hidden from view. It should come as no surprise that many of the band’s fans are the type of people who protest G8 summits. As a visit to their Website makes clear, they assume that their listeners are at least as intelligent as they are. And by answering their fans’ questions themselves, they supplement their appearances in the media with their own means which can bypass the hype altogether. It’s also interesting to note that Radiohead’s last two albums have been available in the slightly more expensive format of ornately illustrated books (one hardcover) that also include the actual CD. It could be that they’re anticipating a time when, in order to make a profit, they’ll be forced to offer a product that can’t be downloaded.

The larger movement of which I suspect Radiohead would happily consider themselves a part is the emergence (or rather the re-emergence) of the mindful consumer. Readers of Naomi Wolf’s No Logo and Adbusters magazine would certainly be included in the ranks, but in a broader sense, there’s an increased public awareness that our spending supports certain endeavors while contributing to the degradation of others. Musicians whose success is dependent upon their Websites will have an enhanced appreciation for the fans who make their livelihood possible, and the fans, likewise, come to understand that they’re participants in a relationship. A record store that feels like an unceasing advertisem*nt fast becomes less appealing than an independently owned, new & used record store or even an active Website that offers limited interaction with other aficianados and occasionally the artists themselves. Mindful affection resists commodification.

Whether big record companies (whose role as middlemen is becoming increasingly obsolete) have anything to gain from mindful affection remains doubtful, especially when, in survival mode, they blindly foist upon the listening public whatever hateful and hollow sounds they’ve successfully manipulated a teen culture into buying. While the Internet may signal a new day, it should also be noted that, even now, employees of major record labels fulfill their job description by posing as disinterested fans on message boards while praising their employers’ latest releases in an effort to direct traffic toward their site. Perhaps the mindful online consumer can develop the skills to know when this is happening. Or maybe genuine affection, like genuine art, will prevail in time despite the efforts at heavy-handed market coercion. We can assume that it will; that, in fact, everything that rises must converge, and we can act and spend accordingly.

J. David Dark is a high school English teacher residing in Nashville with his wife, singer-songwriter Sarah Masen, and their daughter, Dorothy Day Dark. His essays have appeared in PRISM magazine, and he is at work on a collection of essays on popular culture called Everyday Apocalyptic.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

If you have a daughter who’s passed through adolescence in recent memory, you’ve probably seen a bedroom shrine dedicated to Leonardo DiCaprio, he of the delicate features, full lips, and smoldering eyes. Just another Hollywood pretty boy, you say? Take a look at What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1994), in which the heartthrob convincingly portrays a mentally challenged child. And if you never saw William Shakespeare’s Romeo +Juliet (1996), you missed the aplomb with which the adolescent icon could handle iambic pentameter. It was Titanic (1997) that nearly sank Leo DiCaprio’s career.

But isn’t Titanic one of the biggest box-office hits ever? Yes—but DiCaprio’s character, Jack Dawson, is so simplistically conceived, so shallow, that it’s easy to confuse the actor with the role. Jack can do no wrong; not only does he deftly dance with peasants in steerage, he can also hobnob with the wealthy on their upper decks; he is artistic enough to draw the semi-clothed Rose but tough enough to hold his own in violent confrontations; and, of course, he allows himself to be left behind in freezing waters in order that Rose might live. In contrast, Rose’s supercilious fiance seems petty or malevolent in all his actions. Jack, of course, is blond and almost always dressed in white or light-colored clothing, while his swarthy antagonist is always in black. Hi ho, Silver!

But this is what mass-market audiences love: clear signals as to whom to love, whom to hate. And although Jesus blurred such distinctions with stories about blackened Samaritans and whited sepulchres, Christians all too often buy into the binary. What else could explain the outrageous popularity of the Left Behind series, which is filled with cliched phrasing and simplistic characterizations (not to mention dubious eschatology)?

Significantly, repeated several times in Left Behind is the assertion that prophecy appears “in black and white in the Bible.” The black and white marks on the Bible page are turned into black and white demarcations between the saved and the unsaved, as when authors Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye employ the sheep-and-goats metaphor of Matthew 25 to distinguish those who accept or reject the Mark of the Beast.

Ironically, of course, Matthew 25 muddies the waters about the conditions of salvation. Prophesying about the end times, Jesus states that the Son of Man will return to separate the sheep from the goats, placing the former at his right hand and the latter at his left. Those to his left will ask, “Lord, when did we see thee hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to thee?” He will answer, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me,” and send them “away into eternal punishment” (Matt. 25:31-45, RSV).

But simplistic divisions between good and evil are not limited to any party or persuasion. The discourse of political correctness spread like wildfire because it so easily and clearly divided the good people—those who employ sensitive and inclusive terminology—from those benighted individuals who fail to consider how traditional language conventions marginalize others.

The defiance of convention also marks the “political correctness” of movie heroes. This easy binary between the good individualist (Jack Dawson) and the evil establishment (on the Titanic’s upper decks) even applies to films that seem to be morally ambiguous, like American Beauty (1999), where the character played by Kevin Spacey becomes a hero, practically a martyr, in his defiance of upper-middle-class suburban convention. When I saw this unpleasant film, the audience cheered as Spacey threw a dinner dish against the wall. The binary was quite clear.

The American mythology of individualism, according to Alexis de Tocqueville, “disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself.” This myth is addressed by another Leonardo DiCaprio film, The Beach (2000). Directed by Danny Boyle, the film sank at the box office, I would argue, because it swamped the easy distinction between good and evil.

The Beach not only allowed DiCaprio to leave behind the two-dimensional Jack Dawson and reinvigorate his subtle acting abilities but also enabled its viewers to reach conclusions consonant with Christian perspectives on human behavior. Perhaps this is why it was so thoroughly reviled by critics; indeed, one fueled his condemnation by saying the film’s themes came straight from the Bible, while another despaired that “all of DiCaprio’s natural appeal is submerged here.” We might aver that human nature is not always naturally appealing.

The Beach is about the natural appeal of clear waters, about human desires for Eden. It begins with DiCaprio doing a voiceover as his character, Richard, wanders through the streets of Bangkok. The lurid lighting, along with scenes from Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) on a television in the background, add disturbing piquancy to Richard’s words: “Never resist the unfamiliar. … just keep your mind open and suck in the experience.” When I heard this I groaned, thinking I was going to have to sit through another film about the “authentic” individual defying bourgeois conformism. But the film presents Richard’s adolescent desires in order to expose their dark naivete. Like Apocalypse Now, The Beach is inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but while Coppola explores human attraction to and immersion in evil, Boyle addresses the human need to define and sustain “the Good.”

The Good here is located along a beach filmed in brilliant sun-infused colors that contrast dramatically with the garish squalor of the Bangkok scenes. Richard, having been given a map to this fabled site of pellucid waters and sparkling sands, recruits a French couple, Francoise and Etienne, to swim with him to an island off the coast of Thailand, where they discover a commune that, for six years, has operated beside the still waters of the secret beach. Their community is kept pure by the near-inaccessibility of their locale, as well as through the strong leadership of Sal, a woman committed to protecting the good life they have created.

Richard and his French companions are welcomed into a paradigmatic postmodern paradise: different ethnicities and sexualities live, work, and play together in peace. For Richard, the beach becomes even more Edenic when Francoise leaves Etienne to couple with him, something that does not surprise us. After all, it’s very similar to the scenario in Titanic, when Rose leaves her fiance for the more gutsy, handsome, and winsome Jack Dawson. But Francoise’s decision to leave Etienne for Richard is endorsed by the commune, which operates by a utilitarian “Happiness Principle”: the greatest good for the greatest number. Jeremy Bentham would be proud.

Ripples disturb the clear waters of this utopia when two commune members are attacked by sharks. After the victims are pulled to higher ground, we are given a dramatic high-angle shot of the beach’s preternaturally clean sands, now marked by a trail of blood cutting across the white like a wound to the beach itself. This slash, which fills the screen from top to bottom, is symbolic of more than death entering the community.One victim does, indeed, die and is respectfully buried, but the other, suffering from a partially devoured leg, screams in pain from his bed all night long, driving the other residents to distraction. They remove his body from the communal hut, taking it into the woods. After all, he’s bound to die soon anyway.

The only one who protests the abandonment of the shark victim is Etienne, who stands by the blood-covered body and screams out to Richard, “This is wrong! It is wrong!” Richard looks over his shoulder at Etienne and gives a dismissive shrug as he follows the others back to the now scream-free hut. And thus our handsome hero, who at the beginning of the film contemptuously asserts that “the only downer is that everyone’s got the same idea,” has ended up a conformist, colluding in evil in order to protect a self-serving, pleasurable definition of the good: not what audiences want to see in their name-brand stars.

The denouement of The Beach—you’ll have to rent the movie—is a tribute both to DiCaprio’s gifts as an actor and to the moral complexity of Boyle’s vision. We may see more of that DiCaprio in Martin Scorcese’s Gangs of New York, set in the late nineteenth century, a December release with Leo in the lead role. For those who prefer Leo lite, there’s always another viewing of Titanic.

Crystal Downing is associate professor of English at Messiah College.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Since she passed her bar exam on July 25, 1978, the day the first test-tube baby was born, Lori B. Andrews has been a pioneer working at the juncture of medicine and law. By the time the National Law Journal named her as one of the hundred most influential lawyers in America, Andrews had become an internationally acclaimed authority on biotechnologies.

She regularly advises the institutions that are trying to come to terms with the consequences of the biotech revolution—the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control, and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, among others—and she chaired the Working Group on the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of the Human Genome Project. She recently served as a consultant to the science ministers of various countries on gene patents, embryonic stem cells, and DNA banking. Increasingly her counsel is sought by artists, who are taking the biotech toolkit from the laboratory to the studio.

Andrews’s ability to translate scientific concepts into language understandable to ordinary people, her imaginative grasp of the potential consequences of biotechnologies, and her dry sense of humor make her a favorite of the popular media; she’s appeared on The Oprah Show, Nightline, and many other programs. Distinguished professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law, director of the Institute for Science, Law, and Technology in Chicago, and senior scholar at the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago, Andrews is also the author of nine books, including most recently Body Bazaar: The Market for Human Tissue in the Biotechnology Age (Crown, 2001), written with Dorothy Nelkin, and Future Perfect: Confronting Decisions about Genetics (Columbia Univ. Press, 2001). In September, Agnieszka Tennant talked with her about the extraordinary promises and perils of biotechnology.

What compelled you to work on establishing legal limits to genetic technologies?

I’ve been very interested in the effect of medical technology on individuals since college. Scientists often get wrapped up in what a new technology can do in the abstract, without looking at the fact that technologies can change people’s lives in a profound way—and sometimes not for the better. So I’ve been very interested in putting a human face on technology and seeing ways in which even some things with a potentially beneficial medical impact can cause social and psychological problems for people.

What makes you cautious about the multifaceted salvation that genetics is said to offer?

For many people genetic tests create more problems than benefits because of a therapeutic gap. Many of the diseases that can be diagnosed through genetic testing cannot be successfully treated at this time. That has enormous implications: Health-care insurers might refuse to grant insurance to people because their genes predict that they’re at a higher likelihood of getting cancer. Or an employer may decide to not give a job to persons with children who might use more health insurance because of their genetic makeup.

Increasingly, people are being judged based on their genes rather than on their abilities. In what for me was a very traumatic case, a South Carolina court actually ordered genetic testing on a woman in a divorce case at the request of her ex-husband. The ex-husband wanted to see if she had a genetic mutation that would make her die at an earlier age, perhaps around age 50. If this case were to set a precedent, genetic testing could become routine in custody battles; a child might end up with the parent who has the predicted longest life span rather than the better parent. You can see how in the future, fundamental parts of our lives might erroneously be governed by genetics.

How widespread are these types of genetic discrimination today?

It’s hard to monitor because some people who are turned down for a job don’t realize that the employers secretly tested them for genetic mutations. In one survey, 30 percent of employers admitted to collecting genetic information about their employees. More than 20 percent of people with family members with genetic diseases say they have had problems getting insured as a result of that, even when they were healthy themselves. So I think we’re just in the first stages of genetic discrimination. In the future we might see nursing homes wanting to do genetic tests related to Alzheimer’s disease in order to turn away potential residents who might become harder or more expensive to manage.

Right now the Department of Defense keeps DNA from every soldier so that if bodies are found, they can be identified through DNA matches. But will this giant DNA bank be accessed to find out which soldiers have a genetic propensity to early heart disease so that maybe you would not promote that person to be a general? Will these samples be analyzed to see who has the controversial “gay gene”?

Who are the most common exploiters of genetic information?

A variety of social institutions that want to predict health-care costs of future behaviors have an interest in people’s genetic makeup. So, genetic testing has been undertaken by insurers, employers, schools. In the future it might be undertaken by your mortgage broker or, as I mentioned, a nursing home. The question is whether social institutions should have the power to require people to find out their genetic makeup. We’re a culture that generally has always thought that more information is better. And yet sometimes genetic information is toxic knowledge—you can’t assume that everybody wants to know their genetic makeup. I’ve worked very hard in other areas of medicine to provide more and more information to people so they can make informed judgments, but genetic knowledge is different. It often turns out to be harmful.

What about our genes are we better off not knowing?

With Huntington’s disease, a neurological disorder that is untreatable and that is usually fatal by age 50, only 15 percent of the people at risk actually decide to get tested. They’d rather live with hope than know that they’re going to die young of an untreatable disease. That causes a problem if the court requires genetic testing in a custody case or if an insurer requires it. I know of at least one medical school that did not want to admit a student who was at risk of Huntington’s disease because of the concern that the money would be spent training a doctor who would die young.

If people learn they have the genetic mutation predisposing them for Alzheimer’s disease, they may erroneously think they’re getting the disease earlier than they actually are. Imagine if you’re told you have a mutation for Alzheimer’s disease; every time you forget your car keys, you would think the disease is manifesting.

This will become an even bigger problem as we start to do more behavioral genetics testing. There are reports that certain researchers have found genes predisposing to aggression. One study suggested that infants be tested and their mothers be told so they could monitor their children to see if they actually were more aggressive. But these things can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you tell mothers that their children might have an aggression gene, will the mother raise the child differently? If the child gets upset and hits a friend, will the mother think that this child is going to become a criminal? In a different scenario, parents might withhold emotional or financial support from a child who has a genetic mutation that might cause that child to die at a younger than average age. That’s why, increasingly, we’re seeing medical organizations saying that parents should not be able to get genetic information about their children unless it’s relevant to their children’s health before age 18.

You’ve often compared the task of developing policy in the field of genetics to writing science fiction. Why is that?

We’re at an unprecedented juncture in making policy. We’re the generation that will decide what the human race is going to look like in the generations to come. Will we live among cloned human beings? Will we watch sports played by genetically enhanced athletes?I think it’s important to ask what the world will look like in the future if a particular set of technologies is chosen or a particular set of laws versus another.

For example, if some parents are going to choose to genetically enhance their children by putting genes in embryos to make children taller or smarter, then we may turn into a population of genetic “haves” and “have nots,” and the inequalities we see in society will be magnified. Already biologist Lee Silver of Princeton has suggested we could turn into two completely different species—the poorer people who cannot afford genetic enhancements won’t even be able to have children with the people who have been genetically enhanced. I think rather than sitting back as we go through incremental steps to fundamentally change the human race, we should decide whether technology should serve human values or whether humans should be just remade to fit technology. There are scientific articles suggesting, for example, that we clone people who were born without legs so that the clones can serve as astronauts.

Scientists have proposed putting the photosynthesis genes in human embryos so that people wouldn’t have to eat. I asked my students when the human rights would click in. What if you had half plant genes or half animal genes? One of my students, who is a lawyer and a doctor, said, “If it walks like a man, quacks like a man, and photosynthesizes like a man, it’s a man.” The boundaries of what’s human are changing. I believe that we are capable of making moral judgments about whether those changes are appropriate or not.

So how much success have you had in getting legislators to imagine these things?

Lawmakers have finally begun to focus on this area, often making references to science fiction. Our president wondered if we were moving toward a brave new world. The House of Representatives recently passed a ban on cloning human beings, admitting that they were humbled by the task of having to imagine the future in this situation and that they weren’t in the least prepared for the human cloning debate.

A growing number of states have passed laws banning genetic discrimination in insurance. Most of those laws fall short, however, because a federal law is necessary to reach the vast majority of companies that self-insure their employees. That cannot be done as a state measure. I am now constantly being called by staff people in the Senate and Congress wanting to address issues such as germline therapy and genetic engineering. They ask if parents should be able to give traits to children that children never had before, such as the running speed of a cheetah.

In part what we are struggling with is a deficiency in the very nature of law itself. Law looks backward. When we had the first cases that involved airplanes, courts looked to earlier cases involving horses and buggies. When we had the first cases about computer programs, courts looked to earlier cases about books. But medicine looks forward. If you were to put a lawyer from 100 years ago in a modern courtroom, he would be completely at home. But if you put a doctor from 100 years ago in an in vitro fertilization clinic, he would know less of what was going on than passersby on the street. It’s very hard to create policy at the intersection of a forward-looking discipline with a backward-looking discipline. We are facing questions where there are no precedents. It is demeaning at some level to use precedents created for other purposes to deal with something as important as human life at every stage.

We don’t have any social accord about the moral and legal status of the embryo. In infertility cases, there are now about 180,000 frozen embryos, about 20,000 of which are the subjects of dispute. In divorce cases, when courts in different parts of the country consider the same case, some are saying the human embryo is property, and some are saying the human embryo is a person.

I happen today to be working on draft language for an international treaty with George Annas from Boston University. One of the things that has struck us as we’re working on it is that it doesn’t seem right that a particular individual, nation, or corporation should be seen as having the moral or legal warrant to engage in a technology that profoundly alters the species. I am a big supporter of individual choice, but genetics is an area where individual choices have profound social implications. If 10 percent of the population decides to make their children a lot smarter than the others, it’s hard for the rest of us not to follow suit. So, these things should not be decided by a biotech company or even a particular country.

What people and groups have collaborated with you?

In just the past few months an exciting collaboration is emerging among people who traditionally have been so divided on the issue of abortion that they have not been able to work together to create policy. I am heartened to see that prolife and prochoice groups that traditionally only focused on the abortion issue are beginning to join together. If we put aside the abortion issue, we can come to an agreement about the regulation of a variety of other important things, like human cloning, germline therapy, genetic engineering, gene patents, and genetic discrimination. Many arguments about human dignity and the future of human values can be made both in religious and secular terms. We’re just starting how to find out how to do that.

What interest groups tend to resist regulation of genetic technologies?

The biotech companies, of course, of which there are over 1,800, have put up barriers to laws that protect people’s genetic privacy. They want to have access to people’s genetic information and their DNA without people’s knowledge or consent for research purposes. Another stumbling block is that many people who have been discriminated against don’t want to testify in favor of protection, risking that their employers and insurers will find out about their conditions.

In Body Bazaar, you contend that our bodies have become gold mines. What do you mean by that?

Body tissue has long been used as a source of information to diagnose health-care problems, but now human blood and body tissue are also the raw material for commercial products. They are valuable. For example, human eggs can be worth tens of thousands of dollars. A human gene can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. One gene that the biotech company Amgen owns is worth $1.5 billion a year because of a treatment that can be made out of it. Consequently, patients have become treasure troves whose bodies have been exploited without their knowledge or consent by scientists and biotech companies.

I am amazed at the many uses of human body tissue, on top of transplant procedures. Human foreskin is used to grow artificial skin to treat burn patients. Stunningly, DNA can potentially be used to run computers, since its replications can provide memory. Artists have begun to sculpt in blood, and interior decorators buy human skulls in body boutiques to decorate people’s apartments. Every body tissue has a price tag now.

How is this new market influencing genetics research?

I’ve seen some heartbreaking examples. Rather than sharing the tissue samples of research subjects, universities that are doing research on a particular genetic disease will hoard them so that their researchers will be the first to discover the gene and be able to patent it. I don’t think most people realize that there was a profound change in law in the 1980s, when Congress said that university and government medical researchers who use taxpayer funds in their research can patent their findings and can enter into joint ventures with biotech companies.

What are some of the most perceptive commentators outside the United States saying about these issues?

I think internationally there is more of an attempt to look at these issues as human rights issues, not just scientific progress issues, and to suggest that people have a right to be born with an unmodified genome. In other parts of the world, you see less of a tendency to uncritically embrace every new technology. In Italy, various towns have formed an association of “slow cities,” holding themselves out as places that make judgments about what sort of technologies are appropriate. For example, some have banned fast-food establishments because they think that they interfere with family life. A member of the French Parliament suggested that maybe they would have to start having ethical labels on things like drugs, similar to the labels on clothing that say “not made by child workers.” The ethical label would inform people that the drug had not been developed with a patented gene or by using embryonic tissue.

Some have suggested that the common denominator for all bioethical dilemmas, including the stem-cell debate, is defining personhood. Do you agree?

I think the common denominator is that we must determine what our relationship should be to technology. Perhaps I am more skeptical about the benefits of technology because science has failed to deliver on so many things that have been promised. I’m of the generation that heard scientists promise to cure cancer by 1979. In 1984, they said that within three years gene therapy would fix every health-care problem. And then fetal-tissue transplants were supposed to cure Parkinson’s and other diseases. And so now when I’m pressured, even coerced, by scientists with the idea that embryonic stem cells are going to be the complete cure to any disease, I can ask whether we should run roughshod over the values of a lot of people for a cure that might not materialize. Perhaps it’s time to shift the burden of proof to the scientists to show more about the potential benefit, more about how they’re going to deal with individual and social risks, before allowing profoundly novel technologies to proceed.

Agnieszka Tennant is an assistant editor at Christianity Today magazine.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

This essay was given as a talk at Union Theological Seminary in New York, during a conference on “Catholicism and the Public Square,” sponsored by Commonweal magazine and the Faith and Reason Institute and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Thanks to all parties for the chance to listen in on the conversation.

1

A couple of years ago, when he was still up in Connecticut and some of the priests there were charged with sexually abusing children, Archbishop Edward Egan testified in court that the archdiocese and the church shouldn’t be held accountable for the priests’ behavior. As far as the church was concerned, he said, the priests were “independent contractors.”

When this testimony came to light I happened to be rereading Death Comes for the Archbishop. You’ve probably read it yourself: the story of Archbishop Jean-Marie Latour and his sidekick Father Vaillant, French priests and best friends who come to America and go west to hunt out the “lost Catholics” of the desert and call them back to the faith.

Because the novel is about Catholics, it is easy to forget that the author, Willa Cather, was an Episcopalian. And because it takes place in the nineteenth century, it is easy to forget that it was written in 1925. When we think of American Catholicism circa 1925, we usually think of the Catholic masses: packed city parishes, red-brick schools, armies of nuns, saint’s-day parades. But there are no crowd scenes in Death Comes for the Archbishop. It is a novel about two men, their faith, and their companionship. The two priests are companions—they live in the same country; they eat the same bread—and their companionship comes to suggest the things that bind them in faith: the body of Christ, the life of the church, the communion of saints.

It would be easy to contrast those two priests with the so-called “independent contractors” of today. But what struck me as I read the novel again was that it is about Catholics who are, in their way, independents. The desert is vast. Other Catholics are few. Rome is far, far away. The priests must live according to their lights. Together, each is essentially solitary. Apart, they are lonely. When Father Vaillant gets an order from Rome to go to the Colorado gold rush, the archbishop is devastated. He passes his nights in the rectory longing for France while his friend goes over the mountains on a specially equipped wagon, big enough for one man to sleep in, with a portable altar hooked to the back of it.

The missionary efforts of the real-life Latours and Vaillants were successful. Today the Catholic Church is the largest church in the United States, and Catholic leaders miss no chance to say so. Yet companionship is sorely lacking. The individual Catholic feels not only independent but—fill in your adjective of choice—alone, lonely, ignored, alienated, solitary, separate, set apart, estranged.

The reasons for this circ*mstance are best left to other discussions and other experts. What interests me here is how this independence or aloneness affects the Catholic writer.

2

The other day I looked over the books on the shelves in my apartment, and I was struck by how many of them could be classified as “Catholic literature” or “Catholic writing.”

There are big histories of Christianity in Europe and of Catholicism in the United States. There are scholarly books about Lourdes and Italian Catholic Harlem, which depict those places as worlds of wonder, where the religion was thicker and richer than it is today. There is a history of the Irish saints that reads like a novel, and a novel about an alcoholic Irish Catholic that reads like the life of a saint.

There is a Catholic’s book about how one man—Otto von Schindler—saved Jews from the Holocaust, and another Catholic’s book about how one man—Pope Pius XII—failed to save Jews from the Holocaust.

A trilogy on the moral life by a “philosopher’s philosopher” who started out as a Marxist in Edinburgh and has wound up a Thomist in Nashville, Tennessee.

A book by a convert who became famous as a naturalist but sees herself as a theologian.

Several slim volumes of poetry, each of them dedicated “to the glory of God.”

A big book of “all saints,” one for each day, including Galileo and Gandhi as well as Baron von Hugel and Jacques Maritain, and a biography of Thomas More organized around the question posed to the nascent saint at his baptism: “Thomas More, what seekest thou?”

Book-length essays by the best liberal political commentator and the best conservative one, each of them a Catholic in his fashion.

A novel in which four Jesuit priests set out in the year 2019 on a mission of exploration to the planet Rakhat.

And half a shelf of books by the most acclaimed poet in the English language, a Catholic of Belfast. When this poet accepted the Nobel Prize, he described himself in Catholic terms, as a man “bowed to the desk like some monk bowed over his prie-dieu, some dutiful contemplative pivoting his understanding in an attempt to bear his portion of the world.” To explain what poetry is, he told the story of St. Kevin, a monk of old, who was kneeling with his arm stretched out when a bird made a nest in the palm of a hand—whereupon he “stayed immobile for hours and days and nights and weeks, holding out his hand until the eggs hatched and the fledgeling grew wings, true to life if subversive of common sense, at the intersection of the natural process and the glimpsed ideal, at one and the same time a signpost and a reminder.”

All this variety suggests that Catholic writing abounds and that Catholic writers are thriving. But in my own experience the Catholic writer feels strongly otherwise.

If you are a Catholic writer, you probably know the feeling yourself. It is as though you are the only person left who takes this stuff seriously—the only writer who cares about religion, and the only Catholic who has any literary taste. You are the last Catholic writer in America, and you are afraid the species is dying out. That is one of the reasons you stick around.

Your independence becomes the linchpin of your faith, which is not held or practiced or prayed for so much as it is fostered imaginatively, through your reading and writing and your running conversation with the dead. You feel uncertain, even ashamed, to define yourself as a Catholic writer, but nobody is fighting you over it, so you persist.

And in fact in many ways you are indistinguishable from any other writer. The laptop computer. The grants. The symposia. But you burn interiorly, like one of the French Jesuits of the seventeenth century, the North American martyrs.

You hear that religion is a “hot” category in the publishing world, yet you identify with those martyrs. In theory, they belonged to the church militant, a worldwide multiform communion headquartered in Rome. In fact, “they” were a priest who was alone in the forest trying to translate the Lord’s Prayer into Huron in the hope of making himself understood by one of the natives before the others decided to cut out his heart.

3

If the Catholic writer’s sense of aloneness is genuine, it seems a remarkable development, since it runs counter to all that we are told we should expect. By most reckonings, there should be a broad and lively Catholic literary culture.

You know the reasons. There are the numbers. Sixty million Catholics—one American in five—and many of them among the most literate and best educated, etc. Then there is the communal character of Catholicism: Here Comes Everybody and all that. Big families, big holiday meals, big crowds outside St. Peter’s Basilica on Christmas Eve and Easter Sunday. Mass in 37 different languages. Social salvation. The communion of saints.

And there are our predecessors. The era before this one was a remarkable one for Catholic writing. There were authors who were undoubtedly Catholic and unquestionably literary, who were read, understood, and appreciated by Catholics and everybody else.

So what makes the Catholic writer today feel so fixed in isolation? Why do we feel, each of us, that we are working alone in the dark?

I don’t think there is any one answer any more than I think there is one kind of Catholic writer. But there are reasons, and they have to do as much with the nature of writing as with the nature of American Catholicism today. For one thing, much of the rhetoric about the communal character of Catholicism was just a theological stereotype, one half of a textbook comparison with Protestantism. If it was ever true, it is less true each day. And in truth, Catholicism and Protestantism seem to have switched places. The evangelical Protestant megachurch is the successor to the urban Catholic parish where there was something going on at any time of day and all needs could be met. There is nothing more atomized than 50 suburban Catholics loping across the parking lot to 50 parked cars after Mass.

For another thing, if you are going to understand culture you can’t go by the numbers. I work for a publisher, and when I get a proposal from an author who says there are 60 million Catholics and every one is a prospective reader of his book, I send it back. “It takes a lot of culture to make a little literature,” Henry James said, but there is no guarantee that a lot of culture will make a little literature, or that the culture will want to read the literature that does get made.

Twentieth-century American Catholicism gave rise to half a dozen books that will last another century. This brings me to the point I really want to make. It is worth remembering that the great Catholics who wrote those books were independents. They started out alone. They chose solitude. They took trouble to maintain it. They considered their independence fundamental to their writing.

4

I‘d like to dwell on that generation a bit. I am writing a book about them, and about our relationship to them, as readers and writers. I would call their era a renaissance—a Renascence—except it was not a rebirth or revival. It was something new under the sun.

Here in the United States were four great Catholic writers at once: Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor. (Yes, there were others, and I have had many a friendly argument about which names to add to the list, but concerning these four there is a high degree of consensus.) They knew one another just a little. But they shared aims and strategies to a remarkable degree. They all spoke the same language.

Their work is a kind of “wisdom literature.” They were obsessed with the question of what it means to be a human being and how a human being ought to live. Their sense of the human person was Christian, so the question of how to live was, often, how the Christian ought to live.

A friend of theirs had a notion of “the School of the Holy Ghost,” and that is what I call them. They had as much in common as the Bloomsbury Group, the Harlem Renaissance, the Inklings, or the New York intellectuals.

But what they had in common is not nearly as important as what made each of them unique. One of them issued a stern warning: “Today there are no good writers, bound even loosely together, who would be so bold as to say that they speak for a generation, or for each other. Today each writer speaks for himself, even though he may not be sure that his work is important enough to justify his doing so.”

5

Yes, those four were great. Yet for the Catholic writer their greatness is cold comfort, even a reproach. It compounds your isolation. It suggests what you are not. If you try to identify with them, claim them, write the way they did, it just doesn’t work.

Why? One reason, of course, is that the times were different. When you read their books you confront this again and again. Merton’s autobiography implied that there was no salvation outside the church. O’Connor asked a priest for permission to read Madame Bovary. And here is Dorothy Day, in the confession scene at the beginning of The Long Loneliness:

“Bless me father, for I have sinned,” is the way you begin. “I made my last confession a week ago, and since then . …” Properly, one should say the Confiteor, but the priest has no time for that, what with the long lines of penitents on a Saturday night, so you are supposed to say it outside the confessional as you kneel in a pew, or as you stand in line with others.

That might as well be the week after Trent. Times have changed. So has the church.

We don’t like to acknowledge it, but what we admire in them is not their books alone but the whole package—the books and the lives all together. We’d like to have them as companions. We’d like to be like them. We’d like to efface ourselves in them, to bury our unbelief in their belief, and in fact many of their readers have lost themselves in this sort of veneration.

But to want to be like them is to miss their point. If there is a single point all their work tends toward, it is this: God wants each of us individually. God calls us one at a time. We are on the same pilgrimage, perhaps, but each of us has to get to the destination. There are no proxies and no rain checks. No matter what church or culture you come from—Catholic or Protestant, in the monastery or on the Bowery—you finally have to believe or disbelieve for yourself.

Day, Merton, and Percy were all converts: the story of their lives is how they embraced the Catholic tradition and made it their own. O’Connor was a so-called “cradle Catholic.” But the drama at the heart of her work had to do with the moment when a person accepts or rejects the invitation to an act of faith—the moment of grace, she called it.

6

When somebody asked O’Connor why she wrote about Protestants and not Catholics, she replied that Protestants had more interesting fanatics. If you are a Catholic fanatic, she explained, you disappear into a convent and are heard from no more, whereas if you are a Protestant fanatic “there is no convent for you to join and you go about in the world getting into all sorts of trouble and drawing the wrath of people who don’t believe anything much at all down on your head.”

Well, today Catholics as well as Protestants are staying away from monasteries in droves. We too go about in the world getting into trouble over matters of faith.

The Catholic writer might wish to identify with O’Connor, who claimed that the Catholic faith was so much second nature to her as to be the light she saw by, and who was confident enough of the truth of “Christian orthodoxy” to speak of her characters as people deprived of the sacraments and the fullness of truth—religious primitives, grotesques, freaks.

But the fact is that the Catholic writer today has less in common with O’Connor than with the primitives and grotesques she wrote about. Think of Hazel Motes, the evangelist in Wise Blood. Here is a young man, raised religious, who on the one hand is determined to show that Christ didn’t literally redeem him, and who on the other hand would rather establish his own church than tolerate the imperfections, the blasphemies, the profanations of the church that already exists. He doesn’t believe in Christ but still thinks the church has betrayed Christ’s message. If he had written a book, it would be taught in the divinity schools.

O’Connor explained Wise Blood by saying that as far as she was concerned Hazel’s virtue consisted in his integrity—in his refusal to let go of God without a struggle. That integrity is the closest thing to a virtue that the Catholic writer has today. This writer still harbors the suspicion that he or she was made in the image of God and that the Catholic tradition has something to say about it. But what does it have to say?

In his book on God and the American writer, Alfred Kazin said that Melville “retained faith even if he did not always know what and where and in whom to believe.” He added, “An agony in the nineteenth century, wistful confession in the twentieth.”

That seems to me a good description of the situation of the Catholic writer in America. The Catholic writer still has confidence in the value of the Catholic tradition—as a tradition. Catholicism is interesting. It offers good material. It is a storied history. It is a language we speak. Religiously, however, that confidence doesn’t take you very far. And it won’t take you very far if you are writing a book, either.

The Catholic writer envies, say, Jewish writers, who seem to have achieved a freedom to write about their tradition as their own without having to agonize over the literal truth of biblical and theological claims.

But our tradition compels us to regard statements about God as true or false. It insists, as Hazel Motes put it, that either Jesus was God or he was a liar. It urges us to look not upon the religious drama of our people but upon the drama of each individual person called to reckon this truth or falsehood—to accept or reject this God in faith.

The religious question of our time is whether religion itself is legitimate. The stumbling block to faith is religion, and even “the faithful” have to ask themselves constantly whether religion is a way to God or stands in the way of God—if God exists. The characteristic believer of our time is a seeker, and what this seeker is seeking is not God so much as a context where God can be sought authentically.

This is especially true of the Catholic writer. The Catholic writer tries to find that place, that context, in the work itself. In my experience there is no better or more excruciating way to find out what you really believe than trying to write about it.

Alice McDermott has said that she doesn’t like novels in which Catholicism is a problem. She thinks it should be there in and through and behind everything, informing the way the characters see life and the world around them. I understand what she is getting at, but I think that Alice McDermott is just about the only writer alive who can write that kind of book. In anybody else’s hands the Catholic background turns gauzy and sentimental.

I see the situation differently. In my own view, the Catholic writer today is in the same predicament as the person I’ll call the characteristic Catholic, and the best Catholic writing will be that which really confronts the problem that, for most of us, Catholicism is.

There are advantages to the Catholic writer’s position. The characteristic Catholic feels independent, alone, estranged. Well, the Catholic writer takes independence as a precondition and an opportunity. Most books are written alone, and are still read that way. The Catholic writer, like that Jesuit priest in the forest, hopes to make himself or herself understood to one other only. A single convert will do. The reader must be persuaded personally, one at a time.

The Catholic writer’s independence means, too, that this writer can focus on the individual person’s struggle with the act of faith. When the life of the church is usually discussed in aggregate and demographically—the bishops, the declining numbers of priests, all the Catholics marrying outside the church; young Catholics, gay Catholics, Hispanic Catholics, disaffected Catholic women—the Catholic writer keeps in mind that every religious person ultimately must accept or reject faith for himself or herself. The best Catholic writing is the writing that honors, and probes, that act of faith.

Sixty million Catholics: sixty million acts of faith. The Archdiocese of Chicago has recently taken out billboard space on the sides of the highways. The billboards say, If your looking for a sign from God, this is it. Well, the Catholic writer is interested in the story of the individual person driving on the Dan Ryan Expressway who sees one of those billboards and really does see it as a sign from God—and, say, winds up becoming a priest. How does that happen? What is that person thinking as he drives by? How does he overcome the bad pun, the shameless manipulation of the pitch, the knowledge that a hundred thousand other motorists have seen the billboard as well, and believe this is what the Lord meant for him?

Traditionally, the doubter is a solitary. We don’t read about crowds of doubters. In art, doubting Thomas is set apart from the other apostles. He shows up late for the meal in the upper room where Jesus appears. He gets to the Virgin’s bedside just after she dies.

A writer like Flannery O’Connor apparently knew doubt only secondhand and imaginatively. But the Catholic writer today knows doubt firsthand, from the inside. No matter how deep or assured your faith, as a Catholic writer you are perpetually unsettled. You are thrown back to first principles at your desk every morning. Everything must be plumbed, established again on the page. Nothing can be taken for granted.

So it happens that the Catholic writing of our time is often written not out of faith, but out of an aspiration. The act of writing is a kind of act of faith, similar to the act of religious faith but prior to it. The writer is testing the Catholic view of life to see what it looks like and whether it will suffice.

The writer would like for the Catholic religion to be true, indeed yearns for it to be revealed as such. So the writer adopts that point of view, some place between revelation and projection. If it can be made believable in writing, maybe it really can be believed in.

There are consequences to this state of things. It means that there are many sincere books about Catholicism that are bad books—bad writing and bad faith. The writer tries to “correct” Christianity to make it persuasive. The writer unwittingly reduces Christianity to his or her own sense of things. The writer takes the supposedly robust faith of a past age as a subject and supposes that the subject matter makes faith plausible for the reader in the present. Or the writer mistakes a sincere act of inquiry for good writing.

This state of things also means that we can’t confidently point to “Catholic writers.” A writer will take a run at the act of faith once, then move on to the Civil War or sexual politics. Or a writer, having made a run at the act of faith, will go at it again and again, but the thrill is gone.

It means that there are Catholic books whose Catholic character is not immediately apparent. The successors to the two priests in Death Comes for the Archbishop are the two bums in William Kennedy’s novel Ironweed, companions who hear the dead speak as they dig graves for spare change. The descendant of the Jesuit missionary in the forest is the essayist Richard Rodriguez on a tour of the California missions, a man whose aloneness is as vast as the Americas.

It also means that the authors of the best Catholic writing may not be known to us as Catholics. They may not be Catholics at all.

I think of Denis Johnson, who is known for his book of stories called Jesus’s Son (the title is taken from the Velvet Underground song “Heroin”). His book Resuscitation of a Hanged Man is the best novel I know about the struggle for faith. The hero literally doesn’t know whether he is a saint or crazy. He goes to see a priest. It is Provincetown, Massachusetts, and he is wearing a dress. The priest asks him if he has sought help, and the hero says, That’s why I’m here, isn’t it—a scene that seems to me to say it all about the mismatch between the religious impulse and the church’s “resources” for dealing with it.

I think of Richard Bausch, author of a story called “All the Way in Flagstaff, Arizona.” Walter is Catholic—a lapsed one—and the father of five young children. He is also an alcoholic, and at a family picnic he nips at a fifth of Jim Beam while the kids make a hash of the catechism. That night, he chases the kids around the yard—first playfully, then demonically—and his wife tells him she is leaving him. Haunted by memories of his own father, an alcoholic and child abuser, Walter sees a psychologist, but “there is no use talking about childhood drama and dreams: Walter is versed in the canon; his hopes are for something else.” And so he finds himself in the back of an empty church in Flagstaff, wondering if he should tell the priest “how he walked out to the very edge of the lawn and turned to look upon the lighted windows of the house, thinking of the people inside, whom he had named and called sons, daughters, wife. … trembling, shaking as if from a terrific chill, while the dark, the night, came.”

A Catholic writer who isn’t Catholic? This is not as unorthodox as it might sound. Chesterton’s ideal Catholic writer was Charles Dickens. Flannery O’Connor said that “the Catholic novelist doesn’t have to be a saint; he doesn’t even have to be a Catholic; he does, unfortunately, have to be a novelist.”

How else to explain that the best writer about religious life today is a Presbyterian laywoman who has found, in the disdained, uninhabited plains of the Dakotas, a correlative for the experience of monastic life today, and the setting of religious faith?

7

As an independent, the Catholic writer is especially clear on some things. The writer hopes the church will like the work, but doesn’t count on it. The writer knows the old language of service and responsibility is provisional. This writer doesn’t write on behalf of the church. But this writer also knows that the church doesn’t believe on behalf of the writer.

Such a state of things isn’t necessarily desirable. Most Catholic writers would like to be fully vested members of the church. That said, it is the situation. Catholics often make a fetish of the ideal. It seems to me that the most important thing is not to posit a shared system of values or yearn for a Catholic literary community that doesn’t exist. These things have to be earned, one believer at a time, not simply asserted.

The Catholic writer has to seek a companion in the reader first and foremost. Further companionship isn’t strictly necessary. It might even hinder the work Catholic writers are trying to do.

There has been a run of memoirs of Catholic childhood. I’d give a hundred of them for one great memoir of Catholic adulthood, and I’d bet that such a book would mean more to the life of the church than a hundred polls.

As Catholics, too, we believe that we are bound together in ways that we do not realize, and that this binding is taking place in ways we cannot see. We are bound to one another, bound back to the dead, and bound to the future in hope in ways that are as yet unknown to us.

Perhaps in the future we shall be a community of writers—or we will be seen as such. But for the time being, the Catholic writer has to make his or her way independently. The work, and the life of faith, depend upon it.

Paul Elie is an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and the editor of a collection of essays, A Tremor of Bliss: Contemporary Writers on the Saints. His book, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, on Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor, will be published next year.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Academic linguists are used to laymen assuming that we are professional polyglots—we are given to mimicking the eternal question “How many languages do you speak?” with affectionate exasperation. Many people also naturally assume that the linguist is a steward of the grammatical “pitfalls” one is taught to avoid, such as Billy and me for Billy and I—friends often joke that they feel like they need to “watch their grammar” around us.

Yet in reality, many linguists speak only one language, and not only are the tricky “blackboard grammar” rules irrelevant to what we do, but the very theoretical underpinnings of our field render them laughable little hoaxes. Mark Baker’s The Atoms of Language is a welcome introduction to what many linguists are actually engaged in every day, helping to fill a glaring gap in the popular nonfiction literature until recently occupied only by Steven Pinker’s bestseller, The Language Instinct.

Pinker built his presentation around the question of whether humans’ ability to use language is innate. The book was masterfully written and provided an introduction to some fundamental tenets of modern linguistic theory. But the breadth of topics germane to the innateness argument, including data on infants’ speech and language disorders, allowed for only brief consideration of the conception of grammatical structure with which Noam Chomsky revolutionized the linguistics field in the 1960s. Baker’s is the first book aimed at a general readership that outlines the nuts and bolts of one of the main courses of current linguistics training and research—what is called the “Principles and Parameters” school.

The languages of the world differ in structure much more than is obvious from the typical American experience, where the languages we usually learn are relatives of English, thus built on a game plan familiar to us. For example, we all know that words for a given concept differ from language to language. But in the Native American language Mohawk (Baker’s specialty), the entire sentence “He made the dress ugly for her” is expressed in a single word, Washakotya’tawitsherahetkvhta’se’.

Yet Baker’s main point is that underlying the almost netherworldly appearance of a word like this are basic principles (i.e., those indicated in Principles and Parameters) that are constant across all of the world’s languages, and that languages differ only according to a small set of binary choices as to how those principles will be expressed. A given pair of such alternate “settings” is a parameter in the Principles and Parameters framework.

For example, Baker shows that languages like Mohawk are built upon a parameter that requires that the entities that a verb in a sentence is driven by (i.e., the subject) or affects (e.g., its object) be hung on the verb itself rather than expressed as separate words as in English. Thus in the Mohawk word above, the –shako– part near the beginning is a prefix that means roughly “he acting upon her,” incorporating what English would express with the separate pronouns he and her. The core of the whole word is the –hetkvht-, a verb meaning “to ‘uglify,'” while the –tya’tawi– in the first half of the word means “dress.” The whole word in a sense translates as “He dress-uglied her.” While in English, words like baby-sit instead of sit the baby are relatively rare, in languages like Mohawk objects are regularly combined with verbs in this way. One “house-buys” rather than buying a house, and thus one “dress-uglifies” rather than uglifying the dress.

This parameter is one of a number which, while simple in themselves, can render languages radically distinct in appearance. In Japanese, “John read the letter in Tokyo” is John-ga Tokyo-ni tegami-o yonda, which comes out as “John Tokyo in the letter read.” That seems unnatural to a native English speaker, but the difference between the Japanese and English sentences all boils down to a parameter choice. In Japanese, words with what we might call the semantic “juice” come after their “minions” rather than before them as they usually do in English. This means that verbs come after the objects that they affect (and thus “read” comes after “letter”), and prepositions come after what they apply to (thus “in” comes after “Tokyo”). Thus while to the layman, Japanese word order looks like an imposing scattering of random differences from English, in fact the difference all hinges on one difference in how the two languages set the parameter determining which side “minion” words fall on.

Baker shows that parameters get even more interesting in that they are not merely an unconnected collection but instead appear to constitute a flow-chart hierarchy: a given parameter setting leads to other parameter choices that a language that chose the other setting will never encounter. For example, one “principle” is that when the brain first produces what will become a sentence, a tense marker like the past-tense –ed is generated separately, and is “linked” with a verb like walk before the sentence is uttered, with the tense marker and the verb then united as “walked” when the sentence is pronounced.

Yet there are many languages that do not have tense endings like –ed, and instead express tense with separate words. In Mandarin Chinese, what marks the past in the sentence for He ate the meal is a separate word, le:

TaHe

chieat

fanmeal

le“-ed”

In languages like this, then, there is no need for a verb to be linked with a tense-marking suffix. These languages have set what Baker calls the Verb Attraction parameter on “negative.”

This seemingly ho-hum observation becomes significant in light of the fact that many of the world’s languages allow two or more verbs to be strung together in a single sentence. For example, in the African language Edo, to say Ozo will push the pot down one says:

OzoOzo

ghawill

suapush

akhepot

defall

Here “push” and “fall” are squeezed into one sentence in a way that we would never dream of in English. Where we have two verbs in a sentence, one of them is an infinitive—I wanted him to know. In Edo, neither verb is an infintive—both are as “live” as the wanted in I wanted him to know. Edo exemplifies the Serial Verb parameter. Interestingly, all languages with this parameter are ones like Chinese with no tense-marking suffixes like -ed. In itself, there would seem to be no reason that it would be contrary to some cosmic sense of propriety to cram two verbs into one sentence even if both had tense suffixes on them.

But Baker shows that there is a systematic reason languages like this do not exist; e.g., why we cannot say Ozo pushed the pot fell in English. In a language with tense-marking suffixes, before the sentence is uttered, the universal principle dictates that the suffix must be linked to a verb. But that automatically means a sentence can have only one verb—any second verb that tried to “horn in” would have no suffix to “hook up” with (Baker cutely describes this as the second verb having “hurt feelings”). Thus you only get second verbs in languages like Chinese where there is no suffix to hook up with, the tense indicated instead with a separate word.

This demonstrates how parameters are “nested” in one another: if a language chooses the Verb Attraction parameter (that is, has suffixes to mark tense), then it is barred from opting for the Serial Verb parameter (that is, having sentences like Ozo pushed the pot fell). Only languages that have no Verb Attraction can set the Serial Verb parameter set on “positive.” Baker ultimately ventures a “flow chart” of parameter settings that any language in the world can be situated upon. The genius of the chart is in the fact that there are only a dozen or so parameters, these simple binary alternations determining the seemingly vast differences between languages like English, Japanese, Chinese, and Mohawk which, on the surface, give the appearance of having arisen in different universes. The task of identifying these parameters and investigating the interactions between them occupies many professional linguists, and Baker’s book is a valuable exposition of this project for the interested layman.

Yet in the end, The Atoms of Language does not quite hit home for a general audience to the degree I wish it did. Part of the problem lies beyond Baker himself. Pinker’s book is driven by the conviction that “the language instinct” is a product of natural selection, a point he has argued widely since in general public venues. Baker, however, articulately argues against the idea that parametrical alternations, in particular, could have been somehow beneficial to the propagation of hom*o sapiens sapiens, and in this he is, in my view, quite correct.

Then many linguists would attribute the differences between languages to cultural traits: here, presuppositions traceable to linguistics’ deep roots in anthropology are reinforced by modern academia’s enshrinement of cultural relativism. Yet Baker deftly dismisses this paradigm as well. Obviously certain aspects of languages reflect cultures—Japanese has special verbs and verb endings according to the social rank of the person spoken to or about, and this clearly responds to the rigidly hierarchical structure of (traditional) Japanese society. But in any given language’s structure, things like this are but a sliver: there is nothing common to the cultures of Japan, India, Ethiopia, Germany, and New Guinea that would somehow leave verbs at the end of sentences rather than in the middle. Languages with the Serial Verb parameter are found in West Africa, China, Cambodia, and the Caribbean, among other areas; yet we search in vain for a cultural trait that would explain why preliterate villagers in southern Nigeria have this parameter choice while culturally similar preliterate villagers in northern Nigeria do not; and so on.

But having refuted these two arguments, Baker is left with no explanation as to just why human language appears to be built on parametrical alternations. He ventures that the answer may only come to us via dramatic paradigm shifts in linguists’ approach to their subject, as yet inconceivable. The intellectual honesty in this is laudable, but it must be admitted that it deprives the book of a certain payoff. By the end, the general reader cannot help but seek a reason to care about the fact that, well, languages he has never heard of are less different from one another than they seem. Baker makes some dutiful genuflections to the idea that this realization will illuminate how the world’s peoples can build bridges of understanding, but let’s face it—one neither writes nor reads 200-plus pages about the likes of the Verb Attraction parameter and Washakotya’tawitsherahetkvhta’se’ with this foremost in one’s mind.

Baker also suggests that awareness of the diversity among the world’s languages heightens one’s appreciation of the diversity of human cultures and their perspectives upon life and the world. But this would seem incommensurate with the unifying thesis of the book, especially given his previous refutation of just such reflexive culture-based arguments. The truth is that syntacticians study parameters because it’s neat, period. Of course if that alone could stand as the primum mobile of books for the general public, many more academics would go to the trouble of writing them. Baker cannot help trying to hang the book on something larger, but the subject does not make this easy, and thus the problem remains.

A more serious problem with the book is that Baker is not consistently successful in ushering the lay reader into concepts that can be initially rather obscure. It is notoriously tricky to impart modern linguistics’ conceptions of grammar to the uninitiated. While hardly as inherently intricate and counterintuitive as, say, the tenets of astrophysics, these grammatical categories and assumptions are much less transparent to the novice than is often apparent to the academic linguist who has spent decades living and breathing them. At too many places in the text, Baker casually uses terms like “embedded clause,” “ergative language,” and “antipassive” as if he were addressing a graduate seminar in syntax, having not yet explained them or, in some cases, never explaining them at all. Terms like this are Hittite to the novice, and they shouldn’t have passed unchallenged by an editor. There is a glossary, but some of the terms are not in it, many readers will not consult it, and many of those who do will lose the thread of the argument being made.

This is especially true with concepts where a careful explanation within the text is the only really useful approach. For example, only someone who has already had at least one university course on linguistics will benefit from learning that ergative means “a case marker that attaches to the subject noun phrase only in transitive sentences.” Thus it is difficult to see just what audience this book is best suited for. It is pitched too low for linguistics students, but—happy as I was that Baker, a linguist of imposing reputation, had written such a book for a general audience—I could not help feeling that many lay readers would feel overwhelmed around the middle of the third chapter.

This is not to say that the book is a thicket of opaque jargon. On the contrary, Baker makes a sincere effort to communicate, and the reader will benefit if aware that the spoon-feeding will have a limit. The Atoms of Language clues the interested reader into what many linguists are up to, given that we are neither interpreters nor policemen of “good grammar.” The modern syntactician is embarked on a quest to find order in chaos, and Baker’s book is a useful progress report on the endeavor.

John H. McWhorter is associate professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and the author most recently of The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, which will be published in January by Times Books.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

By the time “Donald” was 16 years old, he had ten years of Christian influence through his foster parents. Yet, although he was thoroughly conversant with Scripture, his adolescence was dominated by drugs. He broke into his foster parents’ house in search of some money he had hidden, got into a fight with his foster mother, and bludgeoned and suffocated her to death. Now serving a life sentence for second-degree murder, he makes weekly calls—”trying to figure out what happened and who he is”—to Ellen Charry, a longtime friend who was also a friend of his foster mother.

In her professional life Charry teaches systematic and historical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary and is coeditor of of the journal Theology Today. Her book By the Renewing of Your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine is dedicated to Donald.

Although Charry’s book was published fairly recently, it has already assumed the status of a contemporary classic, one of those books that influence a generation of students. The suggestion of the subtitle—that Christian doctrine ought to shape one’s living—may seem unremarkable, even banal. But at a time when the gap between theology and the life of the church is wider than ever before, Charry offers a powerful corrective. Academically rigorous and informed by a deep knowledge of Christian tradition, her book never forgets about Donald.

The Pastoral Motivations of Classical Christian Theology

Charry was reading Aquinas when she noticed statements with a pastoral intent in the midst of his theological formulations. As she worked backward through various theologians, she realized that this pattern was no happenstance; classical theologians actually believed that God forms us to be excellent persons by our knowing him. Moreover, classical theologians believed that happiness is tied to virtuous character.

As a result, Charry undertook a more thorough study of what motivated these theologians to formulate doctrine. Along the way, “a constructive thesis emerged: when Christian doctrines assert the truth about God, the world, and ourselves, it is a truth that seeks to influence us.” To support this thesis, she selected Matthew, Paul, Athanasius, Basil of Caesarea, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Julian of Norwich, and John Calvin—”precisely,” as she puts it, “the most distrusted of Christian theologians. … who are now widely regarded as useless or harmful.” (Here one must recall the setting in which Charry is writing.) In each case, a multitude of citations will demonstrate that their theological creativity pulsated with pastoral urgency.

For instance, Matthew’s Gospel contains an intricate portrayal of Christ as the fulfillment of various Old Testament hopes and constructs a new understanding of righteousness radically opposed to that of the Pharisees. Yet the purpose was not academic: Matthew wanted Jews to be God’s chosen people in terms of living the Beatitudes, not relying on Jewish birth. Hermeneutically, they were to follow Jesus Christ, rather than the Pharisees, as the authoritative interpreter of the Torah. Thereby they would believe righteousness to be accessible, they would learn how to extrapolate from the Torah for a variety of situations, and they would gain dignity by leading other-centered lives.

To take an extracanonical example, Athanasius’s dogged commitment to defeating Arianism was no mere intellectual exercise. For Athanasius, God called humanity to live in accord with the beauty and order of his creation. But, bound by sin and its effects, we are unable to do so; therefore, Christ must break through our fear to reveal God and his ordered goodness. Without the truth of incarnation—God breaking through—we could not experience God’s vision as Athanasius saw it; hence, Arianism had to lose, and Athanasius had to fight.

Charry sustains her argument well throughout, even regarding theologians such as Aquinas, whose pastoral intentions might surprise some of us. Indeed, those who do not find pastoral value in the Christian tradition will receive a double cure in By the Renewing of Your Minds: not only has Charry rigorously documented the pastoral dimension of classical Christian theology, but also she has shown that this pastoral function is not an unintended consequence. Virtue is neither an occasional nor accidental side-effect of good theology; pastoral relevance is the heartbeat and lifeblood of the Christian tradition. We are commonly told that we ought to study great theology in order to gain truth and apply it. Charry issues an even greater challenge: we ought to study great theologians because they have already applied the truth, and because they discovered truth out of a motivation to apply it!

The Rejection of Classical Christian Theology

Urging that we must “let the dead speak to us,” Charry endeavors to explain and oppose the modern rejection of classical theology’s value. She explores premodern epistemology and its notion of sapience, or wisdom. Prior to the Enlightenment’s elevation of detached objectivity, knowledge could be acquired by an interested seeker and would affect the knower’s living. The ancients would have been puzzled to hear that knowledge and practice do not reinforce each other.

But while Charry traces the flawed assumptions of Enlightenment rationality, and seems quite pleased that the trusses of modernity have collapsed on themselves, unable to bear their own weight, she does not embrace a postmodern relativism or a naive appeal to the past. She proposes an alternative via an analogy between the practices of theology and medicine. If Christianity is a sort of therapy, reconstructing what persons ought to be and can become, then Christian theology is a great deal like medicine. But isn’t medicine based on science, real knowledge, verifiable, in stark contrast to theology? Not so fast, Charry says: “theology and medicine both require three elements working harmoniously, only one of which is hard science. Both rely on experimental knowledge which is open to revision; both use inferential knowledge based on accumulated cases; and both employ clinical judgment.”

In joining the two via analogy, Charry proposes a “cautious critical theological realism”: “While the parallels do not mesh in every detail, I think the similarities are close enough to suggest that grounds for trust in the power of God to effect spiritual transformation need be no more stringent than grounds for trust in modern medicine.” To flesh out the parallels further, medicine and theology both require judgment as well as information, and that judgment relies heavily on inferential reasoning from accumulated experience. A final parallel regards the need for trust and obedience: “Often there are several courses of treatment that could be tried, and the decision may not always rest with the physician, or even with the patient, but with the patient’s family (or a clerk in a managed care company).” More than knowledge and judgment are involved in healing, then, and elements of risk and uncertainty cannot be overcome.

Whether or not we concede that theology is more mysterious than medicine, the basic point of the analogy stands. Medicine, a paragon of our ultra-modern society, has its subjective side. Accordingly, we need not win a hearing for sapiential theology by trying to deny its subjectivity. Instead, we may argue that “clinical medicine and theology both employ a soft rationalism whose findings are useful even if they later need to be adjusted in light of subsequent cases or information.” Moderns ought to approach the Christian tradition sympathetically, ready to trust and obey, and find there healing for their souls.

The Recovery of Classical Christian Theology

What, then, should be the relationship of Christian theology to character formation? Today neither the academy nor the church operates from a classical conception of the theological task. On the one hand, the academy prizes detached objectivity whereas, claims Richard Muller, pre-Enlightenment theology never arose apart from the church’s religious life.[1] On the other hand, today’s church clamors for seminaries to emphasize practice in theological training and to define practice in terms of ministry technique.

Various responses are emerging to the tension between the academy and the church regarding how to define theology and the theological task. In his now-famous Theologia and subsequent work, Edward Farley pioneered one stream, which criticizes “a contemporary scholarship that is specialized to the point of triviality, preoccupied with technologies of method and with reworking already surfeited subjects with ever more ingenious procedures.”[2] Farley does not reject critical study in theology, but rather wants to see it integrated in a theological education oriented toward the cultivation of wisdom (paideia).

In response, David Kelsey has argued that critical methodologies ultimately can’t be fully integrated with the paideia approach. A theological school, Kelsey says, cannot equally serve the church’s interest in forming spiritual leaders and the academy’s interest in forming critical inquirers who just want to know. Each approach needs the critique of the other to avoid imbalance, but inherent tensions make them fundamentally incompatible.[3]

Faced with this impasse, Charry proposes that we circumvent some pathological, peculiarly modern forms of critical inquiry. Theology, according to the classical approach resurfacing in her work, ought to be “aretegenic,” virtue-shaping, from the Greek word arete. (It’s a clumsy term, but the meaning is straightforward.) She laments the academy’s fragmentation of theology into various disciplines, for in the classical texts “evangelism, catechesis, moral exhortation, dogmatic exegesis, pastoral care, and apologetics were all happening at the same time.”

At this point the analogy between theology and medicine raises a potential objection: what about a theological parallel to research laboratories? Surely a great deal of pharmacological research is undertaken from detached professional interest, without firsthand exposure to practicing medicine. Whether this makes room for a form of theological research isolated from pastoral, virtue-producing ministry, or whether we have pushed Charry’s analogy past its breaking point, remains food for thought. Regardless, to follow in the classical Christian tradition, all theologizing ought to operate on a “salutarity principle”: how will the resulting theology transform people’s virtue and therefore their flourishing?

And herein lies the prophetic value of Charry’s work for the church. A truly practical theology is not about, first of all, meeting “needs”—certainly not “felt” needs, at least. The church’s mistake does not lie in its demand that theology be relevant, but in its faulty definition of relevance. Genuine relevance lies in producing virtue, for God’s sake and then, as a result, for our own sake.

At a number of points throughout the book, Charry suggests that, beginning in the medieval period, Western theology shifted the Christian focus away from God-given virtue and dignity to issues of guilt and shame. Divine wrath was construed as the dominant activity of an implacable and emotionally immature God. Thus, in the Reformation, faith became the means of overcoming feared divine rejection, while the cultivation of virtue was marginalized. Heirs of the Reformers must cautiously appraise this subtheme, which drew considerable discussion from a panel of reviewers at the November 1998 meeting of the American Academy of Religion. If Charry is correct, then certain theological and pastoral implications, even for presenting the gospel, follow—particularly the need for a renewed emphasis on virtue, given by God and modeled by God.[4]

Post-Enlightenment humanity, both inside and outside the church, disdains the Christian tradition as a toxin rather than a balm that restores persons to excellence. Through Charry’s book, the dead beg for a fresh hearing, so that Donald and the rest of us might virtuously flourish. Perhaps such a recovery of Christian theology’s “salutarity principle” will reduce malpractice claims and restore healing efficacy to the church.

Daniel J. Treier is assistant professor of theology at Wheaton College.

Footnotes

1. The Study of Theology: From Biblical Interpretation to Contemporary Formulation, Foundations of Contemporary Interpretation (Zondervan, 1991), p. 156.

2. The Fragility of Knowledge: Theological Education in the Church and University (Fortress Press, 1988), p. 15; see also Theologia: The Fragmentation and Unity of Theological Education (Fortress Press, 1983) and the essays edited by Farley and Barbara G. Wheeler in Shifting Boundaries: Contextual Approaches to the Structure of Theological Education (Westminster/John Knox, 1991).

3. To Understand God Truly: What’s Theological about a Theological School (Westminster/John Knox, 1992); Between Athens and Berlin: The Theological Education Debate (Eerdmans, 1993).

4. Other recent books that are especially important for theology and theological education include Robert Banks, Reenvisioning Theological Education: Exploring a Missional Alternative to Current Models (Eerdmans, 1999), and Reinhard Hutter, Suffering Divine Things: Theology as Church Practice, trans. Doug Stott (Eerdmans, 2000). When connected to Charry’s work, they generate questions about virtue formation and the gospel vis-a-vis the nature of theology. Specifically, must theology and theological education aim at virtue only indirectly, by being primarily situated in Christian mission or within church practices?

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

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Like many teachers of literature, I am sometimes asked to name the Greatest Living Writer. (I can hear the capital letters in the voices of those who ask.) Invariably I name two candidates: the Polish-Lithuanian poet Czeslaw Milosz and the Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka. These names are usually greeted by puzzlement, for, though both have won the Nobel Prize for literature—Milosz in 1980 and Soyinka in 1986—and both have been on The McNeil-Lehrer Newshour, neither has entered the American public consciousness in a potent way. Milosz is more likely to be familiar, though, and apparently my interlocutors think him a more plausible choice; my claim for Soyinka almost always earns skeptical looks.

I imagine that this skepticism derives from the still-common picture of Africa as the dark continent, full of illiterate savages (a picture that the Western media do little to dispel); and also from the suspicion that any African Nobel laureate must be the beneficiary of multicultural affirmative action. But if anything, Soyinka is a more comprehensive genius even than Milosz. Here is a writer of spectacular literary gifts: he is an acclaimed lyric and satirical poet, a brilliant novelist of ideas, a memoirist both nostalgic and harrowing, and almost certainly the greatest religious dramatist of our time. The assumption that he has come to our attention only because of academic politics is profoundly unjust—though perhaps understandable, considering the number of mediocre talents who have assumed recent prominence for just such reasons.

That assumption also carries a heavy load of irony, given the distance between the triviality of American academic politics—what Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has aptly called our “marionette theater of the political”—and the real political crises which have continually afflicted Soyinka and his work. Soyinka’s 1996 book on the political collapse of his native Nigeria, The Open Sore of a Continent, teaches us how absurdly misbegotten our whole literary-political conversation tends to be. Through this book, and through the shape his career has assumed, Soyinka brings compelling messages to our warring parties. To the traditionalists who deplore “the politicization of literary discourse,” Soyinka serves as a living reminder that writers in some parts of the world don’t get to choose whether their work will be political; that is a privilege enjoyed by those who happen to be born into stable and relatively peaceable societies. Others have politics thrust upon them. But Soyinka also tells our Young Turks that their cardinal principle—Everything is Political—is true only in an utterly trivial sense. To adapt a famous phrase from George Orwell, if everything is political, some things are a hell of a lot more political than others.

Whichever side of this dispute one tends to be on, or even if one isn’t on either side, Soyinka’s story is worth paying attention to, because his career has been virtually derailed by the collapse of his native country into political tyranny and social chaos. Soyinka has not eagerly thrown his energies into protest and polemic in the way that, for instance, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did in the days of the Soviet empire; unlike Solzhenitsyn, he is no natural polemicist. However, Soyinka has also been unable to follow the route of Solzhenitsyn’s older contemporary Boris Pasternak, which was to combat political tyranny by ignoring it, by cultivating a realm of personal feeling impervious to the corrosive solvent of Politics. (As Czeslaw Milosz writes of Pasternak, “confronted by argument, he replied with his sacred dance.”) Soyinka has felt called upon to respond to the collapse of Nigeria, and as a result his career has taken a very different direction than it once promised to do. It is hard to question his choice; it is equally hard to celebrate it, for it has led a fecund and celebratory poetic mind into an abyss of outrage.

Soyinka’s homeland has suffered from the same consequences of colonialism that have afflicted almost every modern African state. The area now called Nigeria is occupied by many peoples, the most prominent among then being the Hausa, the Yoruba, and the Ibo. The boundaries of the country do not reflect the distribution of these ethnic populations; there are Ibo people in Cameroon, Yoruba in Benin, Hausa in Niger. The physical shape of Nigeria is an administrative fiction deriving from the way the colonial powers parceled out the “dark continent” in the nineteenth century. (Somalia alone among African countries is ethnically hom*ogeneous.) So when the British granted independence to Nigeria in 1960, this most populous of African nations had some considerable work to do to make itself into a real nation, as opposed to a collection of adversarial ethnicities. These problems have been exacerbated by almost continually increasing tensions between Christians and Muslims in the country.

No wonder, then, that civic rule has been the exception rather than the norm in Nigeria’s history, and that civilian governments have served only at the behest of the military, who have been quick to take over and impose martial law whenever they have sensed the coming of chaos, or genuine democracy—for them the two amount to more or less the same thing. And with martial law has always come strict censorship of all the media, which makes it difficult for even the most apolitical writer to avoid politics. Besides, respect for intellectuals is so great in most African cultures that writers can scarcely resist the pleas of their people for help.

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Wole Soyinka’s people, in the ethnic sense, are the Yoruba, and there is no culture in the world more fascinating. The Yoruba are traditionally among the greatest sculptors in Africa, and their labyrinthine mythology is so coherent and compelling that even the selling of many Yoruba people into slavery could not eradicate it: especially in places where great numbers of Yoruba were transported (most notably Brazil and Haiti) it survived by adapting itself, syncretistically, to certain Catholic traditions. The chief Yoruba gods (the orisa) became conflated with the popular saints; the results can be seen even today in religions, or cults, like Santeria. The notorious Haitian practice of voodoo is largely an evil corruption of Yoruba medicine, which typically seeks to confuse the evil spirits who cause illness and draw them from the ill person into a doll or effigy, which is then beaten or destroyed. This form of medical treatment is crucial to one of Soyinka’s earliest and most accessibly powerful plays, The Strong Breed (1959).

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Yoruba have long practiced the arts of drama, and Soyinka is an heir of that tradition. It is really inaccurate to say that Yoruba drama is religious, because even to make such a statement one must employ a vocabulary which distinguishes between religion and other forms of culture in a way alien to Africa. For the Yoruba, as for almost all Africans, every aspect of culture is religious through and through—it simply is worship or celebration or healing or teaching—and religion is thoroughly cultural. In Africa, the notion of “the aesthetic” as a distinct category of experience is unthinkable. No Yoruba arts can be identified as part of the human realm as distinct from that of the gods and spirits. In part this is because of the animism of Yoruba culture, but such a complete integration of religion and culture does not require animism. It seems to have characterized ancient Israel, for instance: the poetry of the Israelites is inseparable from their covenantal relationship with Yahweh. Similarly, Westerners seem to have difficulty understanding why Muslims insist upon the universal application of sharia, or Islamic law, and tend to think that Muslims don’t know how to respect the appropriate cultural boundaries. Yoruba drama arises from what one might call such a “total culture.”

Soyinka, though, was raised in a Christian home. His mother’s brand and intensity of piety may be guessed at from this: in his memoirs he refers to her almost exclusively as “Wild Christian.” But it seems that his chief interest in the doctrines and practices of Christianity derives from their similarities to Yoruba traditions. Biblical themes always echo in his work, especially early in his career: the story of the Prodigal Son in The Swamp Dwellers (about 1958), the Passion (with staggering force) in The Strong Breed. But, as in his fascinating adaptation of Euripides’s The Bacchae (1973), so do the themes of classical tragedy. It is clear that Soyinka has been interested in the primordial mythic truths that lie behind the doctrines and practices of particular religions: he shares the Jungian view that all religions are concretized and particularized versions of universal experiences. Moreover, he seems to espouse the Feuerbachian projection theory of religion: as he says in his critical book Myth, Literature, and the African World (1976), “myths arise from man’s attempt to externalise and communicate his inner intuitions,” and more recently he has written, in oracular tones. “THE WILL of man is placed beyond surrender. … ORISA reveals Destiny as—SELF-DESTINATION.”

These universalistic and syncretistic tendencies are more easily reconcilable with Yoruba than with Christian or Muslim beliefs, as Soyinka observes in the essay “Reparations, Truth, and Reconciliation,” one of a series of lectures given at Harvard University in 1997 and published as The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness (1999):

Just what is African, for a start, about any section of that continent that arrogantly considers any change of faith an apostasy, punishable even by death? What is African about religious intolerance and deadly fanaticism? The spirituality of the black continent, as attested, for instance, in the religion of the orisa, abhors such principles of coercion or exclusion, and recognizes all manifestations of spiritual urgings as attributes of the complex disposition of the godhead. Tolerance is synonymous with the spirituality of the black continent, intolerance is anathema!

Soyinka’s imagination is thus secondarily and derivatively Christian at best, despite his upbringing and his long-term fascination with Christian doctrine. And as we shall see, he has sought to exorcise that fascination in rather frightening ways.

When, as a young man, he came to study in England at the University of Leeds, it is not at all surprising that Soyinka fell under the influence of the controversial Shakespearean scholar G. Wilson Knight. For Knight’s career was devoted chiefly to the contention that Shakespeare’s plays, however “secular” they might appear, were really Christian (in a mythic or archetypal sort of way) through and through. It must have seemed perfectly natural to Soyinka, coming from his Yoruba world, that such would be the case; indeed it must have been hard for him to think of drama in any other terms. No wonder he ultimately decided to adapt The Bacchae: the Euripedean original, so obviously shaped by and angrily responsive to the Athenian worship of Dionysos, was a clear picture of what he had always understood drama to be. Soyinka’s version, a turbulent tragic fantasy half-Greek and half-African, is one of the most striking and provocative plays of our time, and in its exploration of irreconcilable worldviews often seems a veiled commentary on the troubles of modern Africa.

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Soyinka’s plays are often said to be about the modern “clash of cultures” in Africa between Western and African traditional ways, but this is a phrase for which Soyinka has a singular contempt. In an “Author’s Note” to what may well be his greatest play, the tragedy Death and the King’s Horseman (1975), which is based on a historical event, he complains that “the bane of themes of this genre is that they are no sooner employed creatively than they acquire the facile tag of ‘clash of cultures,’ a prejudicial label which, quite apart from its frequent misapplication, presupposes a potential equality in every given situation of the alien culture and the indigenous, on the actual soil of the latter.”

One might think that Soyinka is here reminding us that the British came to Africa with technologies and forces that traditional African cultures could not hope to resist; in other words, that he is reminding us of his people’s status as victims. That would be a misreading. The British did indeed bring superior physical force to Nigeria; but Soyinka is more concerned to point out that the spiritual and cultural forces upon which the Yoruba relied were far more impressive. Now, Soyinka is never shy about offering potent critiques of his culture, and not just in its modern manifestations; from those early plays, The Swamp Dwellers and The Strong Breed, we can see a fierce indictment of how power corrupts even at the level of the village, where leaders pervert their people’s traditions and manipulate them for their own gain. But those traditions themselves, Soyinka is always eager to say, have enormous power, and when rightly used and respectfully employed can overcome the humiliations inflicted upon the Yoruba by British imperialism. This is indeed the central theme of Death and the King’s Horseman, where tradition finds a way to rescue the dignity of a people even when the colonial power seems to have things well under control.

In Nigeria during World War II, a king has died. Oba Elesin, the king’s horseman and a lesser king himself (“Oba” means “king” or “chief”), is expected, at the end of the month of ceremonies marking the king’s passing, to follow his master into the spirit world of the ancestors. In other words, he is to commit ritual suicide. It is his greatest wish to do so, and in the village marketplace, surrounded by people who love and respect him, he awaits the appointed time.

All is prepared. Listen! [A steady drum-beat from the distance.] Yes. It is nearly time. The King’s dog has been killed. The King’s favourite horse is about to follow his master. My brother chiefs know their task and perform it well. … My faithful drummers, do me your last service. This is where I have chosen to do my leave-taking, in this heart of life, this hive which contains the swarm of the world in its small compass. … Just then I felt my spirit’s eagerness. … But wait a while my spirit. Wait. Wait for the coming of the courier of the King.

But Simon Pilkings, the district officer in this British colonial outpost, intervenes to prevent the suicide, which violates British law and which he considers to be a barbaric custom. And his intervention succeeds in part because at the crucial moment Elesin hesitates, and thereby cooperates with Pilkings in bringing shame upon himself, his people, and his king (who is by Elesin’s cowardice “condemned to wander in the void of evil with beings who are the enemies of life”). Elesin’s son Olunde—who had been in England studying medicine and returned when he heard of the death of the king—explains this to Simon Pilkings’s wife Jane before he knows that the interference has succeeded. When she suggests that Elesin “is entitled to whatever protection is available to him”—that is, available from her husband as instrument of the colonial Law—Olunde quickly replies,

How can I make you understand? He has protection. No one can undertake what he does tonight without the deepest protection the mind can conceive. What can you offer him in place of his peace of mind? In place of the honour and veneration of his own people?

And it is Olunde—the one who Elesin feared would in England forget or repudiate the old tribal ways—who finds a way to rescue his people and his king from the shame brought by Elesin.

In his preface Soyinka is determined to insist that the colonial situation of the play be seen as a catalyst for an exploration of what is permanent in Yoruba society: the play is about “transition,” the transition from this world to the world of the spirits and the ancestors, and as such cannot be reduced to a single historical moment. The colonial era simply troubles the waters, it cannot dam the river of Yoruba tradition. “The confrontation in the play,” Soyinka writes, “is largely metaphysical, contained in the human vehicle which is Elesin and the universe of the Yoruba mind—the world of the living, the dead, and the unborn.” Simon Pilkings thinks he holds the power in this situation, that he participates in a story which his people are writing and of which they are the protagonists; but Soyinka reveals him as merely a plot device, a means by which “the universe of the Yoruba mind” is explored.

This potent tragedy marked a return to Soyinka’s early themes and concerns, arresting a drift toward political satire that had begun some years before. One sees this tendency in his two wickedly funny plays about the shyster preacher and self-proclaimed prophet Brother Jereboam (The Trials of Brother Jero [1960] and Jero’s Metamorphosis [1968]), who ultimately becomes the “general” of a Nigerian version of the Salvation Army, sending his “troops” out into a dangerous world while he remains secure in his office. Lingering just below the surface of these plays is a commentary on the ambitions and absurdities of Nigeria’s hyperactive military. The Jero plays were followed by Soyinka’s darkest, bitterest play, Madmen and Specialists (1970), which reveals his disgust at the crisis of Biafra in 1969.

Biafra was the new country proclaimed by leaders of the Ibo people of eastern Nigeria; but their attempt to secede from Nigeria ended when they were beaten and starved into submission. Soyinka’s sympathy for the Biafran rebels led to his arrest and lengthy detainment, an experience chronicled in his searing memoir, The Man Died (1972).

Madmen and Specialists emphasizes the ways that the lust for power, and not just power itself, corrupts gifted men and turns them into tyrants who cannot abide dissent or even questioning. One can easily see why after writing this play and The Man Died, Soyinka would produce Death and the King’s Horseman, with its passionate commitment to the maintenance of a great spiritual tradition that cannot be extinguished or even derailed by the traumas of political history. But as passionately as Soyinka expresses that commitment, what speaks still louder than the brilliance of the play is that in the quarter-century since it appeared Soyinka has severely curtailed his theatrical writing. (And most of the plays he has written are topical political satires, like the The Beautification of Area Boy.) It is hard to imagine a greater loss for modern drama.

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This is not to say that Soyinka has fallen silent. But since the ’70s he has largely forsaken the communal and necessarily collaborative work of the theater for political commentary and memoir; and for a time early in the 1990s he was a government official. Perhaps the most remarkable product of this period is not the properly celebrated memoir Ake: The Years of Childhood (1981), but rather its successor, Isara: A Voyage Around “Essay” (1989). “Essay” is Soyinka’s father, the schoolteacher S.A. Soyinka, and this novelistic attempt to imagine and describe Essay’s youth and young manhood is a moving act of filial devotion, a tribute to a wry, dignified man and his colorful circle of friends.

Interestingly, the narrative revolves around the successful attempt by Essay and his friends to influence a matter of local politics, the selection of the Odemo (or chief) of the town of Isara. The frustrations of trying to shape a nation must have made such local concerns seem less painful and more rewarding. But in any case, we see in all the works of this period Soyinka’s continued determination to follow E.M. Forster’s famous advice: “Only connect!” Connection is Soyinka’s constant goal, his natural tendency as a writer; but it is immensely sad to see him cut at least some of his ties to the theater in order to participate in a political realm from which he seems to find little real hope of connection.

Soyinka’s experience as a minister in the Nigerian government ended badly, as he probably knew it would. In 1994, after the national police told him that they could not protect him from others who wanted to kill him, he took the hint and left Nigeria covertly. During his exile over the next four years, he launched rhetorical missiles at the dictator General Sani Abacha and his corrupt regime.

The Open Sore of a Continent is a product of that period—not so much a book as a collection of projectiles. Only rarely do Soyinka’s literary gifts shine through, but some of the great dramatist’s flair for characterization is evident in this comparison of Abacha with his predecessor, General Ibrahim Babangida:

Babangida’s love of power was visualized in actual terms: power over Nigeria, over the nation’s impressive size, its potential, over the nation’s powerful status within the community of nations. The potency of Nigeria, in short, was an augmentation of his own sense of personal power. It corrupted him thoroughly, and all the more disastrously because he had come to identify that Nigeria and her resources with his own person and personal wealth. Not so Abacha. Abacha is prepared to reduce Nigeria to rubble as long as he survives to preside over a name—and Abacha is a survivor. … Totally lacking in vision, in perspectives, he is a mole trapped in a warren of tunnels. At every potential exit he is blinded by the headlights of an oncoming vehicle and freezes. When the light has veered off, he charges to destroy every animate or inanimate object within the path of the vanished beam. Abacha is incapable of the faculty of defining that intrusive light, [or] even to consider if the light path could actually lead him out of the mindless maze.

But prose so vivid is rare in this book. Mostly, it is the wrathful detailing of the indignities Abacha and his henchmen inflicted on Nigeria, a detailing interrupted only by the repeated mastication of what have become for Soyinka the fundamental questions: in Africa, is the concept of “nation” viable? Does “Nigeria” exist? Has it existed? Can it exist? Soyinka is not quite ready to abandon the project of nationhood, but he is not far from it.

In 1988 Soyinka published a collection of essays titled Art, Dialogue, and Outrage (an expanded second edition appeared in 1993), and there, as in The Open Sore of a Continent, outrage is certainly the chief note sounded. One is tempted to ask what, exactly, Soyinka wants, since everything seems to make him so angry. What, for instance, is a plausible alternative to the almost-bankrupt project of the Nigerian nation-state? What artistic practices does he find healthy and proper?

I think the answer to these questions is pretty clear: the Soyinka who speaks in these works is concerned, as was T.S. Eliot, with the “dissociation of sensibility,” with the fragmenting of a culture and thus of the minds that inhabit it. He wants unity and wholeness. And this can only be achieved within the context of a particular ethnic tradition; that is, for him, within the Yoruba tradition. Furthermore, the Yoruba tradition can only flourish again if its competitors are, forcibly if necessary, extracted from the cultural space of Nigeria. Olunde’s victory over Simon Pilkings was local and temporary; greater victories call for more drastic measures.

In a scathing essay titled “Neo-Tarzanism: The Poetics of Pseudo-Tradition,” first published in Transition magazine in 1975, Soyinka responds to critics who have thought him insufficiently African in his allegiances by gleefully trumping their best cards. He makes a proposition:

That the very existence and practice [in Africa] of non-traditional religions be declared retrogressive and colonialist. So let us. … ban these religions from our continent altogether. This is a serious proposition as [my critics] will discover when they find the energy and determination to launch a movement for the eradication of islam and christianity from the black continent. I cannot alas find the will to place myself at the forefront of such a movement but I shall readily play John the Baptist to their anti-christ.

This is followed immediately by an ironic reflection on how even an “anti-christian” statement finds itself drawing on “the metaphors of christian religious history”: such is the “endemic effect of great religions.” It is hard to be sure if Soyinka really believes wholeheartedly in this “proposition,” or rather has been driven to it by his critics’ accusations; still, that he chose not only to write the essay in the mid-’70s but also retrieved it to serve as the concluding piece in Art, Dialogue, and Outrage seems, to me, telling. Even if one takes Soyinka’s proposition as a bit of Swiftian satire—even if, in other words, he recognizes the practical impossibility of “banning” Christianity and Islam from Africa altogether—there is no doubt that such an outcome constitutes an ideal for him.

If this radical excision of the alien faiths, this intolerance in the name of tolerance, and a consequent restoration of Yoruba cultural purity, are the only ways in which Soyinka’s anger can be soothed, then outrage will continue to be his portion. And that is not only because Christianity and Islam are now too deeply implicated in Nigeria for their removal, but also because all such dreams of cultural purity, of “unified sensibility,” are illusory and deceitful. No human culture ever has been or ever could be whole and pure and undefiled by external “contamination.” And such laboratory purity, if achieved, would be lifeless: as Mikhail Bakhtin repeatedly insisted, it is at the boundaries of culture, languages, and faiths that the real excitement happens; the most dynamic cultures are those called to respond to the strange, the other, the different in their midst. Soyinka’s plays amply testify to this: it is Olunde’s response to Pilkings’s colonial paternalism that energizes Death and the King’s Horesman; it is the competing understandings of sacrifice in the Yoruba and the Christian traditions that give The Strong Breed its peculiar power. Soyinka’s desire to eliminate cultural and religious otherness from Nigeria is not only regrettable as an example of what some people call “the new tribalism”; it would mean death to the very Yoruba tradition he wants to save.

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Whenever modern cultures reach a certain stage of political development they seem to turn toward their artists and intellectuals for guidance and leadership: one thinks also of Vaclav Havel in the Czech Republic, and Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru. (Earlier examples from Africa include the first president of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, who was an anthropologist, and the first president of Senegal, Leopold Senghor, who was a poet.) None of these men seems fully comfortable with his political role. But this is work that they know they must do, a call they cannot refuse.

Soyinka continues to proclaim the continuity of Yoruba tradition and its ability to survive the traumas of history; but he plays the role of political actor too. In October 1998, several months after the death of Abacha, Soyinka returned from exile. Less than a week after his arrival he gave a blistering speech to a university crowd, excoriating Abacha (whom he compared to Hitler) and expressing hope that Nigeria was at last on the way to democratic rule. (Three years later, under the elected leadership of President Olusegun Obasanjo, a former general, the country has so far maintained a shaky commitment to reform.)

But if Soyinka’s condemnation of dictatorship and his hope for reform alike appeal to a notion of shared humanity, why should anyone pay attention? His contempt for “the colonizing hordes,” whether “Euro-christian” or “Arab-islamic,” knows no bounds, but he is equally contemptuous when he turns his gaze on his fellow Africans. Wherever he turns he sees folly, hypocrisy, “mendacity, ineptitude, corruption, and sadism.” He is a humanist disgusted by humanity.

This descent into bitterness is not pleasant to record; would that it were arrested and the direction of Soyinka’s thought reversed. But there is something inevitable about such bitterness, I think, for ethically earnest intellectuals living in the various post-Christian worlds. The moralistic humanism which is Soyinka’s chief weapon against the dictators arose in Western culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a substitute for a Christianity which was then thought to be dying. But, it turns out, belief in a common humanity seems to require the support of Christian doctrine and cannot be sustained without an appeal to the imago dei and Christ’s universal offer of salvation. And when humanism collapses, as it must, what is left but Sani Abacha’s will to power or Soyinka’s retreat into tribalism?

Indeed, the two choices may be one: I cited earlier Soyinka’s own prophetic claim that “THE WILL of man is placed beyond surrender.” The Yoruba tradition is rich and potent; while often cruel, it is in many ways beautiful; but it lacks the resources necessary to wage the battle for “the rights of man as a universal principle” that Soyinka now finds himself called upon to wage. Thus the last movement of a brilliant literary career may necessarily echo with rage and wrath.

Alan Jacobs is professor of English at Wheaton College. He is the author most recently of A Visit to Vanity Fair: Moral Essays on the Present Age (Brazos Press).

For Further Reading

Conversations with Wole Soyinkaedited by Biodun JeyifoUniv. Press of Mississippi, 2001223 pp.; $18, paper

Perspectives on Wole Soyinkaedited by Biodun JeyifoUniv. Press of Mississippi, 2001242 pp.; $46

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

“This is a book about evil,” Bill Berkeley warns the reader at the beginning of The Graves Are Not Yet Full. “Its setting is Africa.” Evil, he’s reminding us, has no particular address: “These stories are a measure of how much Africans have in common with the rest of mankind, not how much they differ.” Berkeley, who spent ten years reporting on Africa for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post, writes with an easy authority. His central argument is that—contra what we’ve been told repeatedly, especially in the wake of the Hutu massacre of the Tutsis in Rwanda—ethnic hatred is not the primary cause of bloodshed in Africa; rather, it is a tool deftly used by “Big Men” to create anarchy, which allows them to stay in power. Instead of focusing on victims, Berkeley meets and describes the tyrants. His aim is to describe how evil people operate and how they gain and stay in power. Most of his subjects are African warlords and political kleptocrats.

In Liberia, Charles Taylor attempts to legitimize his campaign of terror, which left 150,000 dead and half of the nation displaced in a prolonged civil war. One of Taylor’s tactics was to recruit drug-addicted war orphans to serve in so-called Small Boy Units, fanatically loyal to Taylor (their “father”) and willing to rape and kill without restraint. Yet Taylor blandly presents himself as a statesman dedicated to his people. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), Berkeley and his wife are detained for four days by SNIP, Mobutu Sese Seko’s secret police, after interviewing victims of state-sponsored ethnic aggression in the south of the country. We listen to General Pieter Hendrik “Tiene” Groenewald, South Africa’s chief of military intelligence in the mid-1980s, explain his government’s instigation of tribal violence to aid in the fight against Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. And we hear the voices of agents of genocide in Rwanda—from political leaders to villagers who acted in fear for their own lives.

In Sudan, Berkeley interviews the Arab religious leader and two independence fighters largely responsible for 2 million deaths since 1983 and a displacement rate of 85 percent in the southern part of the country. Hassan al-Turabi is the Islamic leader who issued a fatwa exhorting the Islamic faithful to jihad against the Christian and animistic South. The puppet-master behind several political leaders, al-Turabi is responsible for purges, torture, and state-induced famine. John Garang and Riek Machar fought together against the Arabic Islamic North, before turning on each other and inciting a war between the two largest black tribes in the country. Both factions are known for widespread human rights violations, for which neither leader seems willing to accept responsibility. “I don’t feel responsible for the deaths. We all want to fight for our liberation. So we pay a high price,” said Reik after one massacre. Garang also dismisses his role. “There are individuals who rape and steal. But what I want to underline is that is not the movement.” Explaining his role to Berkley, Turabi said, “There is a vacuum now. That vacuum is being filled by an Islamist spirit. I just happened naturally to be on the track where history is moving.” With a little tweaking, their words of self-justification could have come from Serbia. All three leaders have ph.d.’s, from England, the United States, and France.

In each of these accounts, Berkeley deftly mixes historical background and firsthand reporting to show how political leaders use the absence of functional institutions of law and accountability to maintain or increase their own power and wealth: “It takes leadership, operating in a context of great political upheaval and insecurity—and impunity—to translate hostility and suspicion into violent conflict. The challenge for the beleaguered despot with his back against the wall is to harness that resentment—to stoke it, channel it, even arm it, in order to destabilize opponents and discredit alternatives to the status quo.”

While Berkeley intends to universalize the evil he so meticulously documents, the sheer scale of the atrocities he describes may tempt readers to do otherwise, to read his book as an account of uniquely African horrors. Berkeley may have done well to draw parallels between the events he decribes and similar ones in Asia, Latin America, and in the recent history of North America and Europe.

If genocide and tribal violence represent one extreme on the continuum of our commonly traded images of Africa, then exotic adventureland would be the other extreme. That’s the mode of Ann Jones’s idiosyncratic travelogue, Looking for Lovedu.

With Kevin Muggleton, a British photographer, Jones hatches a plan to drive across Africa. To give the expedition legitimacy, and to aid in raising sponsorship, the duo propose to search for Modjadji V, the Rain Queen of the Lovedu (“low-BAY-doo,” also sometimes spelled “Lobedu”), a tribe where women rule. In this African version of Shangri-La, set in a high valley surrounded by mountains in the northern region of South Africa, the Lovedu place “the highest value on traditionally ‘feminine’ ideals: appeasem*nt, compromise, cooperation, helpfulness, tolerance, generosity, peace.” Framed thus, Jones’s plan may sound rather dramatic. In fact, there was no mystery about where to find the Lovedu. As the obituaries reported when Queen Modjadji died in June of this year, politicians, Africanists, curiosity-seekers, and assorted supplicants regularly made the pilgrimage to see the rainmaker. But the “quest” serves its purpose, as Jones confesses at the beginning of the book: “the Queen was really nothing to me but a good excuse for gallivanting.”

After months of preparation, Jones and Muggleton set out from London in a Land Rover heading south through Europe and enter Morocco, proceeding directly to Mauritania. They drive through the Sahara and pass through Senegal, Mali, Cote d’Ivoire, and Ghana. Most of the description focuses on difficult border and police officials and the company of other “over-landers” from Europe and Australia, with whom Jones and Muggleton travel for the early part of the journey. Jones sprinkles in historical background of each country, but we meet precious few Africans, and indeed see little of Africa apart from what is visible from the front seat of the car as it careens along bumpy roads. At one of the few stops along the journey, at the Basilique de Notre Dame de la Paix in Cote d’Ivoire, Jones laments that those who built it “bought the whole egocentric Western package: capitalism, Christianity, modern technology, monumental architecture.”

Jones finds herself in a predicament. Despite obtaining ample funding (they are traveling with a Compaq laptop, Nikkon binoculars, and “thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of state of the art gear”—what was that about “the whole egocentric Western package”?) and despite Muggleton’s youth (he is half her age), Jones doesn’t seem to be able to influence him to slow down and experience Africa. Eventually she leaves him in Kenya and proceeds with two new traveling companions, both women: Caro Hartsfield from Australia and Celia Muhonuja from Kenya. Finally, on the last leg of the journey, we begin to meet Africans.

Jones’s encounter with the Rain Queen? A rather disappointing two hours translated through two interpreters who don’t seem to be conveying Queen Modjadji’s sotto voce comments. (That’s a pity; judging from the obituaries, she was a memorable character.) Jones’s attempt to make it seem like a transforming encounter falls flat. It is a fitting anticlimax to a book that celebrates the willful self-indulgence of a glorified Tourist.

With Ryszard Kapuscinski’s new book, The Shadow of the Sun, we move into entirely different literary territory. In more than four decades of global coverage for the Polish Press Agency, Kapuscinski has witnessed 27 coups and been sentenced to death four times. He is the author of many books, of which the best known is The Emperor: The Downfall of an Autocrat, an account of the last years of Haile Selassie I through the eyes of his courtiers. A masterful storyteller with an eye for the luminous detail, Kapu´ sci´nski’s arrived by his own devices at a form somewhat like the “nonfiction novel” of Truman Capote and Norman Mailer. Indeed, his critics have charged that there is too much novel and not enough nonfiction in Kapu´ sci´nski’s books.

The Shadow of the Sun is an episodic account of his “40-year marriage with Africa.” While he has traveled widely, he has returned repeatedly to Africa since his first sojourn in Ghana in 1957. “The continent is too large to describe,” he says. “It is a veritable ocean, a separate planet, a varied, immensely rich cosmos. Only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, can we say ‘Africa.’ In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist.”

Kapu´ sci´nski has a gift for meeting, observing, and listening to ordinary but fascinating people. Rather than living in the expatriate community in each city of residence, Kapuscinski chooses to immerse himself in the local community. “You often see two (or more) people standing in the street and dissolving with laughter,” he writes. “It does not mean that they are telling each other jokes. They are simply saying hello.”

Even in the midst of reporting on high-profile events (including racing from one newly independent country to another in the heady days of the ’50s and ’60s), he makes countless friends, and he tells us about them. These friends then help to interpret the surrounding events. In this way, Kapu´ sci´nski gives us a glimpse of some of the many facets of Africa: colonialism, family, the process of independence, tribalism, gift-giving, malaria, settlement patterns, meal pre-paration, development, forced labor and slavery, humor, swelling cities and slums, friendship, traditional spirituality, civil service, lush jungles, home-brewed beer, literature, nomadic life in the Sahara, celebrations, children soldiers, missionaries, aids, steam locomotives and their passengers, political despotism, Asian immigrants, Apartheid, market women, deforestation, and life-saving acts of kindness from strangers.

In his passion to convey all this and more, Kapu´ sci´nski is true to the “mission” he described to an interviewer[1] some years ago:

Why am I writer? Why have I risked my life so many times, come so close to dying? Is it to report the weirdness? To earn my salary? Mine is not a vocation, it’s a mission. I wouldn’t subject myself to these dangers if I didn’t feel that there was something overwhelmingly important—about history, about ourselves—that I felt compelled to get across.

Kapu´sci´nski insists on the multiplicity and particularity of Africa and Africans, on the strangeness of this “separate planet,” but he doesn’t stop there, with an unfathomable Other. Like Berkeley, he’s also telling us stories about ourselves.

Alexis Beggs Olsen is technical advisor with Opportunity International, a Christian microenterprise and development organization based in Oak Brook, Illinois.

Footnotes

1. Kapu´sci´nski was interviewed by Bill Buford in Granta 21 (Spring 1987), pp. 81-97.

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