BkRev: Carroll's The New Faithful

Colleen Carroll, The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy, Chicago, Loyola Press, 2002, 321 pages.

SUBJECT. In The New Faithful, author Colleen Carroll looks mainly at two subjects: (1) the motivation of the young men and women who are becoming orthodox Christians; and (2) the nature of their activism as young, orthodox Christians.

For various meanings of "orthodox" among Jews and Christians, see the Jan. 27, 2013 post here on TME. Carroll defines Christian "orthodoxy" as a set of ideas about God, God's relation to man, and God's ethics for man's guidance:

The Apostles' Creed [supposedly formulated by Christ's twelve apostles inspired by the Holy Spirit, and possibly written as a set by later Christians as early as the 100s CE] confesses belief in a triune God who created heaven and earth; in the full divinity and humanity of his son, Jesus Christ; and in the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. The creed also affirms the existence of a universal church, one baptism, the forgiveness of sins and eternal life, among other doctrines. Its embrace … has implied adherence to the Ten Commandments … as well as … faith, hope, and love, and acceptance of the Beatitudes delivered by Jesus at the Sermon on the Mount. For the Christians introduced in this book, the acceptance of a transcendent moral authority as revealed in the Scriptures translates into a commitment to regular worship and prayer, a belief in absolute truth, and a recognition of objective standards of personal and public morality. (pp. 13-14)

THE AUTHOR. Colleen Carroll (here) wrote speeches for President George W. Bush, worked as a journalist for news magazines, and now hosts a television show, "Faith and Culture."  She herself is an orthodox Catholic. Without God, she says (p. xi), "nothing else would be possible or meaningful." Her worldview, plus her youthfulness at the time of her research for the book, around the year 2000, gave her an entrance to interviewing other young Americans who are the "new faithful."

The individuals she interviewed were aged nineteen to thirty-seven. (p. 13) Those individuals who had committed to a particular denomination of Christianity were generally either Roman Catholic or evangelical Protestant (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelicalism for various meanings labeled today by the term "evangelical"), but some were from eastern Orthodox Churches or "mainline" denominations such as the United Methodist Church. (See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainline_Protestant).

STYLE. The author's style is effective in communicating her theme. She describes individuals in their settings. You can see them and hear their voices speaking of their spiritual aspirations and identifying the problems they face. With those concretes established, the author can then occasionally draw conclusions. Those are the abstractions, the generalizations, she forms from her personal experiences and her research.

THEME. The theme of the book is multipart. First, there is a movement of young individuals into orthodox Christianity. How large is the movement? That is not clear in the book. Overall, the author is cautious about using statistics, as she should be. Measuring movements and gauging their direction are difficult to do with confidence. The author occasionally reminds readers that the "new faithful" are a minority of the youth of the country, but an articulate, ambitious minority that is upcoming and will probably have a cultural effect in the decades ahead.

The author is also careful to note contrary evidence. For example:

Countertrends clearly exist, especially in the realm of sexual behavior and morality. Divorce is rampant among evangelicals. Many Catholics disregard Vatican bans on contraception, premarital sex, and remarriage without annulment. And New Age spirituality—which often accompanies a movement away from moral absolutes—is gaining steam in many circles of American culture and in many American churches. Many polls of young adults reveal a high tide of moral relativism among the next generation and a deep suspicion of objective standards of truth and beauty. Indicators such as these do not portend a universal embrace of Christian orthodoxy and conventional morality. (p. 8)

A second part of the theme is that many individuals who become orthodox Christians do so as a reaction to two factors in their environment: the emptiness, even nihilism, of secular culture in the USA; and the relativism that infects much of the culture, even sections of religious culture. (The "new faithful" struggle as much against "liberal" Christians as they do against atheists.) The antidote to the meaninglessness of modern secular culture, the new faithful believe, is traditional Christianity with its emphasis on the "objective truth" of an ethics provided by God not humans, all known or at least substantiated by a mystical connection to God through one's personal relationship with God (held especially by evangelicals) and through rituals such as the Eucharist, in which the wafer and wine actually become the body and blood of Christ (a practice held especially by orthodox Catholics).

Across the nation, from the runways of beauty pageants to the halls of Ivy League universities, a small but committed core of young Christians is intentionally embracing organized religion and traditional morality. Their numbers—and their disproportionately powerful influence on their peers, parents, and popular culture—are growing. The grassroots movement they have started bears watching because it has thrived in the most unlikely places, captured the hearts of the most unlikely people, and aims to effect the most unlikely of outcomes: a revitalization of American Christianity and culture. (p. 4)

RECOMMENDATION. The New Faithful is worthwhile reading for anyone interested in beginning a study of a relatively small, but potentially very influential religious movement dedicated to activism, a movement that could affect the course of cultural and political history in the United States. The book explains the reasons interest in orthodox religion has arisen among some young "spiritual seekers."

The book also shows the wide range of forms of activism that these young individuals have undertaken to bring their views to others. Someday this movement may have political power and thereby force their  views on the whole culture.

Burgess Laughlin
Author of The Power and the Glory: The Key Ideas and Crusading Lives of Eight Debaters of Reason vs. Faith, described at reasonversusmysticism.com/

BkRev: Micklethwait's God is Back

John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World, New York, Penguin Press, 2009, 405 pages.

OVERVIEW. God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World, by Micklethwait and Woolridge, is a long, but easy-to-read and fascinating book. Authors Micklethwaite and Wooldridge are editors for The Economist. They take a journalistic rather than academic approach, although the authors' Oxford University background emerges in their philosophical and historical commentary.

The authors first show the gradual rise of secularism from the ashes of the Wars of Religion in Europe in the 1600s. From that trend toward secularism arose the secular thesis, the expectation that modernity—the advent of democracy, respect for reason, rising prosperity, and advancing technology—would marginalize religion, pushing it gradually into a private realm and out of the "public square." Europe exported this secular view through colonialism and trade. The worldwide secular movement peaked in the 1950s and has been slowly retreating in the face of renewed enthusiasm for religion among Christians, Muslims, and others. This enthusiasm could lead to new wars of religion, but now on a global scale. The book does not stop with description of resurgent religion. It goes further.

When religionists force their ideas onto other individuals, they attack individual rights. Politically that is the problem commonly caused by resurgent religion. The solutions that the authors offer range from proven to failed. The most sensible prescription by these two British authors is their recommendation to adopt the American ideal of separation of Church and State, a relationship that leaves religious movements free to compete with each other for adherents. The authors' faulty prescriptions are many. Essentially they consist of applying religion as a solution to the problem of religious threats to liberty: Seeking compromises with religionists and "interfaith dialogues" between religionists, for example, do not work to protect individual rights. In a nutshell, the value of the book is in its descriptions, not in its prescriptions.

ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK. The complexity of the book is demonstrated by the authors' own description of the plan of the book:

The first part of the book tries to explain why Europe and America have evolved in such different ways over the past two hundred or so years. The second part examines the way that religion (and especially [religious] pluralism) is thriving in today's America—as an economic force, an intellectual catalyst and a political influence. The third part examines how America is exporting its version of religion. The fourth part examines the spread of wars of religion, in various guises, from the battles for people's souls to culture wars to terrorism and violence. In the conclusion we look for the best formulas for avoiding future explosions. (p. 26)

In the Introduction, the authors make a rapid but vivid tour of religious developments around the world, but the heart of the book is about religion in America. The authors propose an ironic theme: Separation of Church and State leads to vibrant religious movements.

The Founding Fathers' clever compromise over religion not only allowed God to survive and prosper in America, it also provided a way of living with religion—of ensuring that different faiths can coexist, and of taming a passion that so often turns the religious beast to savagery. This was one of the Founders' greatest gifts to man: getting rid of the established church, establishing a firm distinction between public reason and private faith, and consigning theocracy to the past along with monarchy and aristocracy. Our instinct is that this is a lesson that people the world over—believers, atheists and agnostics—need now more than ever. (p. 27)

Besides geographic breadth, the book has historical depth too. In the four chapters of Part One, "Two Roads to Modernity," the authors examine the long roads that have led to today's religious and secular movements, roads that started back 300 years in the Enlightenment and ran in diverging ways through European and American history up to today. For the authors, the milestones along the way were the thinkers and their thoughts: Locke, Voltaire, Jefferson, Comte, Hegel, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and others. To the authors of God is Back, ideas matter because ideas lead individuals to actions. Ultimately, actions are the authors' main concern: positively, the freedom for individuals to pursue their religious interests, and, negatively, avoiding wars of religion that range from verbal conflicts to slaughter.

Beyond the historical background and the geographic survey, the main value of the book is the author's skill in selecting individuals, past and present, who represent ideas in action, and then in presenting a concise, vivid profile of each. The reader meets Wang, a management consultant living in an apartment in a gated community in Shanghai. He is also the organizer of a quasi-legal Christian "house church," a group of rising, mostly young professionals who meet to discuss passages from the Bible, and, along the way, to denounce homosexuality and the theory of evolution. (pp. 1-2)

The reader sees Bill Hybels, a "pastorpreneur" who applied business techniques to founding Willow Creek Community Church, an Evangelical group that has built a "church" that contains food courts, basketball courts, coffee shops, parking spaces for 3,850 cars, meeting rooms for specialized groups such as Christian motorcyclists, and large auditoriums for sermons. (pp. 183-185)

The reader meets Amr Khaled, the world's most popular Islamic preacher:

Amr Khaled is an even more American [influenced] figure. He turned himself first into Egypt's most popular [Muslim] preacher and then into Islam's answer to [Christian evangelist] Billy Graham by eschewing almost everything associated with traditional imams. He has no official religious credentials or position. He dresses in Western clothes—suits and polo shirts mostly—rather than religious robes. He performs on television and in cavernous conference chambers rather than in mosques—and he puts on a dramatic performance, raising and lowering his voice and sometimes bursting into tears.… He urges his audience to take control of their lives and make sure that they succeed in business.… Hopeful Westerners regard Khaled as a possible bridge to the Islamic world. But in fact, much as with Billy Graham, there is a hard core to his soft-edged faith. He tells people that Allah loves them… [b]ut he also insists on the literal truth of the Koran. He talks about women's empowerment. But he also supports sharia and is an important force behind the growing fashion for the veil. (pp. 240 and 241)

THEMES. What is the point of the authors' descriptions of the individuals, organizations, and movements that are reviving religion today? The authors emphasize several subthemes throughout the book. These subthemes lay the groundwork for the authors' final conclusions. First, the authors emphasize the failure of the theory long held by secular intellectuals, that modernity—which the authors define as the culture of secularity, technology, the marketplace, and material prosperity—will steadily displace religion from the public square and into the sphere of private belief, if any.

Today an unsettling worry nags at Western liberals: what if secular Europe (and for that matter secular Harvard and secular Manhattan) is the odd one out? They are right to be worried. It now seems that it is the American model that is spreading around the world: religion and modernity are going hand in hand, not just in China but throughout much of Asia, Africa, Arabia and Latin America. It is not just that religion is thriving in many modernizing countries; it is also that religion is succeeding in harnessing the tools of modernity to propagate its message. The very things that were supposed to destroy religion—democracy and markets, technology and reason—are combining to make it stronger. (p. 12)

The authors do demonstrate that "democracy," (representative government respecting basic rights), adoption of business techniques for spreading ideas, and the use of technology created in a market economy are fueling the growth of enthusiastic religious movements. The authors do not demonstrate that reason—as distinct from mysticism—is making religion stronger. However, the authors do show that the Evangelical movement, formerly noted mostly for its "hot" behavior, that is, its emotional displays, is now moving toward more intellectualism. (That is bad news for advocates of reason; a veneer of intellectualism laid over mysticism gives mysticism an unearned place in public discussion.)

The authors' portrait of King's College, an evangelical school located in the Empire State Building at the time of writing the book, is one piece of evidence the authors use to show the intellectualism and ambition of the growing religious movement. The authors quote Stan Oakes, the chancellor of the college, to show the movement's ambition in activism:

The stated mission of King's College is to create 'ambassadors of Jesus Christ to lead and serve the world': it wants its students to leave with a biblical worldview but also prepared to beat the best and brightest from the secular world. It offers two majors, business and what Oxfordians call PPE (politics, philosophy and economics). It focuses on 'three freedoms', spiritual freedom, political freedom, and economic freedom. Indeed Oakes is almost as enthusiastic about Adam Smith as he is about the Almighty. (pp. 352-353)

King's College deliberately brings young Christians to the heart of the beast. 'Every sin in the world is within five blocks of The Empire State Building', [Oakes] says. Where better to strengthen your faith than a city that is rife with temptations? And where better to train people to exercise influence on the world than the capital of the media and financial world, not to mention the home to the United Nations? (p. 353)

Another subtheme of the book is the authors' view that global capitalism, which the authors appear to support in a vague way, inevitably causes problems—but religion can solve those problems, the authors say. One of the problems is "quest for community in an increasingly atomized world." Throughout the book the authors show that successful churches create an active social life for the religious. A second problem that the authors think arises from global capitalism is the religionists' "desire to counter-balance choice," which the global market brings in great abundance, "with a sense of moral certainty" (p. 139) which is missing from conventional, relativistic secular culture. The authors explain:

In a world of greater competition, displacement and opportunity, faith has become a useful (though obviously not necessary) attribute for prosperous people. But religion also fulfills a role lower down in society, providing support for those who have lost out in global capitalism or feel bewildered by it. Faith acts as a storm shelter. (p. 145)

The authors seem to be unaware of a third alternative: neither relying on mysticism (faith, revelation, holy scripture) for moral guidance, nor abandoning absolute morality through relativism, but an absolute morality drawn by reason from observation of man and the world.

FLAWS. God is Back contains other flaws. They range from the particular, such as misidentifying philosopher Immanuel Kant as a supporter of the Enlightenment instead of marking him as a destroyer of it (p. 33), to misunderstanding concepts crucial to a free society. For instance, the authors say: "Americans have surprisingly little difficulty in reconciling their [religious] faith with their country's secular creed of individualism. More than one in four American adults (28 percent) have swapped the religious tradition in which they were raised for another tradition (e.g., Catholicism to Protestantism or Judaism to 'no religion')" (p. 132). Having the freedom to change one's religion, a worldview that holds that God or some supernatural dimension is sovereign, is not the same as individualism, which is the ethical view that the human individual is sovereign in making decisions about his own life.

Some of the authors' proposed solutions to the foreign policy problems raised by revived religion are seriously flawed. For example, the authors suggest that Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood (which is now bringing sharia to Egypt) should be part of the discussion of the future of the Middle East: "The cost of excluding Islamist groups from discussion is often higher than that of letting them in" (p. 364). The authors also recommend "interfaith dialogue" (pp. 364 and 365-366) as a way to reduce conflict between religious groups. The authors seem to downplay an Islamist threat when they object to calls for military action against Iran because, they say, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, "has closer relationships with secular-minded populists in Latin America, particularly Hugo Chavez [dictator of Venezuela], than he does with coreligionists next door [to Iran]" (p. 363). Also, the authors see a "substantial difference" between "nihilist groups like Al Qaeda, with whom there is little room for compromise" and the "more territorially minded ones like Hamas" (361), which continues to attack Israel, an ally of the United States.

VALUE FOR PRO-REASON ACTIVISTS. What matters most about God is Back is not the authors' prescriptions for dealing with the renewal of religion but their descriptions of the modern religious mentality, in its various forms, the movements that are competing for followers, and the intellectual basis that the modern religionists have for their aspirations and their demands. All of that provides useful background to those who are consistently pro-reason and working for a completely secular political system.

In particular, God is Back aids secular activists who want to learn to be more effective in their activism by selectively adopting techniques that have worked for religionists and probably will work as well for their opponents. For example, the authors explain the quiet but long-term rise of "theocons" in the decades after World War II. An example of a theocon is Michael Novak, author of The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982). Novak "argued that capitalism is based on theological underpinnings" (p. 201).

The theocons started from a tricky position. As Americans, they were treated with suspicion by the curia in Rome; as Roman Catholics, they were treated with suspicion in America by both the Evangelicals, who dominated the religious right, and the secular Jews, who wielded growing influence on the intellectual right. Yet again, like the neocons, they succeeded in making their influence felt both nationally and internationally by founding magazines and think tanks, by writing books, by forging working alliances with other conservatives and, above all, by producing new ideas. (pp. 200-201)

[O]ne of the theocons' achievements was to fashion a nondenominational language that allowed conservatives to talk about religion and morality in the public square. This was an area where Evangelicals had struggled. [Christian activist Jerry] Falwell found it hard to discuss a political issue like gay rights without bringing in scripture and indeed sin almost immediately. [Theocon] Richard John Neuhaus discussed it in terms of philosophy and social policy. This made it more difficult for secularists to hide behind [Harvard philosophy professor] John Rawl's idea that religion was too private and personal to influence public debate. And it made it easier for Jews and Christians, Catholics and Protestants, to make their way back into the public square together. (p. 203)

CONCLUSION. God is Back is worth reading for anyone who is a serious student of global and particularly U.S. culture today. Secular activists—in fields ranging from philosophy to "bioethics" to politics—will gain doubly, partly from knowing better the nature of today's general religious revival, and partly from analyzing the techniques that religious "renewalists" have used to push their way back into the "public square." They may talk about their religion in general or they may campaign for particular issues such as a ban on abortion, but the underlying principles of religious activism are always the same: supernaturalism and mysticism.

The Term "Orthodoxy"

In studying social movements that support mysticism, the term "orthodoxy" appears often. The purpose of this post is to identify and distinguish uses of the term as a label for various mystical movements. This post collects my notes from a first look; I am using only easily available online sources.

ETYMOLOGY AND BASIC MEANING. Coming from ancient Greek words, the term "orthodox" means "correct opinion."[1] Correct by what standard? Each form of orthodoxy has its own answer.

NATIONALISTIC CHURCHES. A nationalistic church is an institution; as such it is part of a movement. One example is the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.[2] It today has eight million members, mostly in Bulgaria, but around the world too.  Its roots go back to Christians who traveled there before 100 AD, while the area was part of the Roman Empire. Christianity became the dominant religion by 300 AD. In the 300s to 500s, waves of barbarian raiders damaged the Church as an institution. By the 800s the area was again largely Christian. By the late 1300s, the Muslim Ottoman Empire, centered in Turkey, had conquered the Christian Byzantine Empire. Conquest of the Byzantine Empire brought control of the Greek Orthodox Church. Extending its political control into Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire used the Greek Orthodox Church to crush the nationalism of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. Bulgarian monasteries preserved their religious traditions. In the 1800s, Bulgarian Orthodox began rebelling against Greek Orthodox domination. In 1895 Bulgarian Orthodox Christianity became the official religion again. From 1944-1989, Bulgarian Communist rulers controlled rather than destroyed the Church. After that, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church again became an independent nationalist church.[3]

For the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, "orthodoxy" refers as much to a tradition of nationalism as it does to religious principles and doctrines that it shares with other Eastern Orthodox Churches (Greek, Serbian, Russian, and Georgian).

LUTHERAN ORTHODOXY. In 1517, Martin Luther (1483-1546) broke from the Catholic Church as a protest against various Church doctrines.[4] He and his followers developed their own Protestant doctrines. From about 1580 to the Enlightenment (roughly 1700-1800), some Lutheran theologians worked to develop a set of doctrines that Lutherans could follow as a standard. Today some Lutherans refer to those doctrines as Lutheran Orthodoxy.[5] The term now has three possible referents: the period of history in which Lutheran theologians developed the unifying set of doctrines; (2) the set of doctrines; and (3) a modern movement among some Lutherans to establish churches (as institutions) that represent a selection of features from Lutheranism and Catholicism.[6] In the Lutheran world, sometimes the term "orthodox" simply means "standard," "conventional," or "strictly interpreted," as in the case of contemporary theologian Robert W. Jenson being described as an "Orthodox Lutheran."[7]

For Lutheran Orthodoxy, "orthodoxy" refers primarily to a set of doctrines that guide individuals and groups of individuals interacting with each other. Though formulated in the last five hundred years, the doctrines rely on a Christian context established 1900 years ago in holy scripture and in the writings of ancient theologians. Lutheran Orthodoxy thus depends on (1) revelation, as the ultimate source of guidance, (2) tradition (the handing down of the guidance), and (3) relatively modern articulation and elaboration of that guidance.

ORTHODOX JUDAISM. In Judaism, orthodoxy is defined by multiple layers of authority. The fundamental layer is God's words about ethics and about laws for daily living revealed to a few men thousands of years ago and recorded in the Torah, also called Pentateuch, the five books about Moses, which are the first five books of the Bible.[8] A secondary layer of authority is the Talmud (Hebrew word for "instruction,"[9]) which is a collection of interpretations written by religious scholars. A third level of authority that shapes Orthodox Judaism is the Sanhedrin, also called the "Oral Torah," which is a body of interpretations that were formulated by the "supreme court" of Jewish scholars operating in Roman Palestine (c. 165 BCE to c. 425 CE).[10] In a fourth layer of authority and interpretation, Jewish scholars after the period of the Sanhedrin interpreted earlier sources.[11] Other -- and more explanatory -- names for Orthodox Judaism are Observant Judaism, Traditional Judaism, and Torah Judaism.[12]

There are two main branches of Orthodox Judaism. The first branch is Haredi Judaism, which requires segregation from non-Jewish culture, though not completely from non-Jewish society. Hasidic Judaism is a sub-stream of Haredi Judaism. Hasidic Jews are distinctive socially, in forming their own communities (often centered around a particular rebbe, a "grand rabbi"); in customs, including ways of dressing; in language, by speaking primarily in Yiddish; and in epistemology, by emphasizing mysticism for everyone. The second branch of Orthodox Judaism is Modern Orthodox Judaism, which accepts Jewish law as a guide, but expects to gain from interactions with non-Jewish society.[13]

How did Orthodox Judaism arise? Orthodox Judaism, its advocates say, is simply traditional Judaism, with its religious views and customs going back to the time of Moses. Motivated in part by the advances of the European Enlightenment period, some Jews sought to reform Judaism. These Reform Jews rejected the more consistent traditionalists as "orthodox," a pejorative term. Eventually the orthodox Jews accepted the term and carried it proudly.[14]

Socially and culturally, Judaism has split into streams within streams. For instance, Orthodox rabbi S. R. Hirsch (1808-1888) led a "neo-Orthodoxy" movement of individuals who agree with traditionalists that revealed words of God, as recorded in the Torah, apply to all aspects of life, including secular studies. Hirsch differed from other Orthodox thinkers in that he and other neo-Orthodox Jews believed that Jews should be involved with and should try to change the modern world outside of Judaism. In reaction to this neo- (also called "modern") Orthodoxy, other, more traditional Orthodox formed the Haredi Judaism movement, sometimes called "Ultra-Orthodox."[15]

In Judaism, as in Islam but unlike Catholic Christianity, there is no single hierarchical structure for defining religious law -- and therefore no single structure for determining orthodoxy and heresy. Likewise, Judaism has no canon for deciding which ideas are orthodox and which are not. Differences among Jews arise over issues such as: the degree to which it is proper to integrate into non-Jewish society; whether Zionism is compatible with Judaism; and the role of women in religious society.[16]

Orthodox Judaism is growing steadily in the USA, in part because the Orthodox tend to have larger families and in part because of an apparent trend among Jews generally to follow stricter forms of their religion.[17]

CHRISTIAN NEO-ORTHODOXY. In 1918, Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) published Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. It proclaimed God's absolute control over the world of man. It thus rejected the prevailing view among "liberal" theologians in Switzerland and Germany, the view that God is a sort of distant helper to man, whose institutions should be the center of Christian attention. "Faith," Barth said, "is awe in the presence of the divine incognito; it is the love of God that is aware of the qualitative difference between God and man and God and the world." Barth made his view of man clear: "Men have never been good, they are not good, they will never be good."

In the following decades, Barth (pronounced "Bart") edited and reissued the book six times. It infuriated "liberal" theologians. They attacked Barth, who was, in effect, rejecting the ameliorating effects that the Enlightenment had on Christianity, in theory and practice. Barth proposed to make God's revelation through Jesus the center of focus, replacing the "liberal" focus on man. Jesus, for Barth, was not a teacher of religion. "Jesus does not give recipes that show the way to God as other teachers of religion do. He is himself the way."

"Many pastors," says a modern historian of Christianity, "in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, desperate for an antidote to liberalism, eagerly awaited the publication of each [new] book [from Barth]." His influence spread to some Protestant and Catholic theologians until the 1950s. Some of his detractors rejected him as a "Bible-thumper," while others doubted his orthodoxy, for he refused to say the Bible is infallible. Only Jesus is infallible, Barth said.

Barth fought with allies as much as with opponents. For example, Barth rejected "natural theology," the notion that God reveals Himself in the world around us. While teaching in Germany, Barth's main fight, however, was with supporters of the "German Christian church." They were rallying behind Nazism in the 1930s. The German university employing Barth fired him for refusing to swear allegiance to Hitler.  Barth moved back to Switzerland to teach, while campaigning to support Jews and other victims of oppression. By the 1970s, the movement he had founded was declining. It had always been an intellectual (theological) movement.[18]

In Europe, the theology of the neo-orthodoxy movement was called "crisis theology" (because it arose during World War I and the decades that followed, a time of intellectual crisis. Another name was "dialectical theology."[19]

In the USA, the main channels of neo-orthodoxy's influence flowed through Emil Brunner (1889-1966), Reinhold Neibuhr (1892-1971), and Paul Tillich (1886-1965). They too rejected theological liberalism (and its desire to "adjust" Christianity to modern science and culture). They disliked the term "neo-orthodox," which had been applied to them by others, because it implied Biblical literalism, which they shunned in favor of modern "critical," scholarly examination of the Bible. Like Barth, they focused not on the Bible but on Jesus as the Word of God. The believer, they held, must therefore make a personal connection to Jesus, God willing, not merely read the Bible.[20]

Neo-orthodoxy has had little influence on evangelical Christians, though evangelicals agree in rejecting "liberal" Christianity as it was influenced by the Enlightenment. Also, evangelicals, who form a broad mass movement, reject modern Biblical criticism in favor of Biblical literalism.[21]

In summary, Christian "neo-orthodoxy" names a small but influential intellectual movement among mostly Protestant Christian theologians and pastors. They disagreed about some issues, but generally united to reject "liberal" theology with its accommodation to modern culture under the influence of the Enlightenment.

PALEO-ORTHODOXY. Late in the 20th Century, a new movement calling for Christian orthodoxy appeared. This movement defines orthodoxy as conformance to the doctrines of "Classical Christianity," which means the Christianity articulated by consensus among the Church Fathers (such as Augustine, 354-430) and the Ecumenical Councils.

The dominant theologian in the paleo-orthodoxy movement has been Thomas C. Oden (b. 1931). He is Protestant (Methodist), works for Drew University (New Jersey), and is the Director of the Center for Early African Christianity. Oden rejects the term "neo-orthodoxy" because he disagrees with some elements of Barth's and Brunner's theologies. Oden adopted the term "paleo-orthodoxy" because it points back to the Christian church in the ancient world.

Oden says he expects "to make no new contribution to theology." He relies on the authority of the founders of the ancient church. His influence has spread beyond his own religious stream, Methodism, to include some individuals in other streams of evangelical Christianity.[22]

RADICAL ORTHODOXY. In an October 8, 2012 post in this weblog, The Main Event, I summarized a first look at Radical Orthodoxy, a movement which rejects modernity (as influenced by the Enlightenment), looks back to the ancient Christian church, and wants to apply Christian principles to all fields of knowledge, from politics to science. Thus Radical Orthodoxy is radical both in going back to roots in history and radical in making Christianity the standard by which to judge all of life.

CONCLUSION. To generalize, the term "orthodoxy" primarily names the idea of strictly following a mystical standard—such as revelation, holy scripture, or an ancient consensus—in one's beliefs and in one's actions in all aspects of life. Secondarily, the term names the consequence of such an adherence: rejection of the use of reason to develop standards, specifically to reject the compromising effects of the Enlightenment.

Burgess Laughlin

Author of The Power and the Glory: The Key Ideas and Crusading Lives of Eight Debaters of Reason vs. Faith, here

[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/orthodox. [2] http://www.bg-patriarshia.bg/. [3] "History," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_Orthodox_Church. [4] http://www.theopedia.com/Martin_Luther. 

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutheran_orthodoxy. [6] http://www.locindiana.info/. [7] http://www.theopedia.com/Robert_W_Jenson. [8] "Orthodox Judaism," Wikipedia, viewed Dec. 19, 2012, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodox_Judaism. [9] "Talmud," http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/talmud. [10] The dictionary and concise encyclopedia entries for "Sandhedrin,"  http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sanhedrin. [11] Introduction, "Orthodox Judaism," Wikipedia, viewed Dec. 19, 2012, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodox_Judaism. [12] "Streams of Orthodoxy" section, "Orthodox Judaism," Wikipedia, viewed Dec. 19, 2012, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodox_Judaism. [13] "Streams of Orthodoxy" section, "Orthodox Judaism," Wikipedia, viewed Dec. 19, 2012, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodox_Judaism. [14] "Streams of Orthodoxy" section, "Orthodox Judaism," Wikipedia, viewed Dec. 19, 2012, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodox_Judaism. [15] "Streams of Orthodoxy" and "Diversity within Orthodox Judaism" sections, "Orthodox Judaism," Wikipedia, viewed Dec. 19, 2012, ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodox_Judaism. [16] "Diversity within Orthodox Judaism" section, "Orthodox Judaism," Wikipedia, viewed Dec. 19, 2012, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodox_Judaism. [17] Aaron Hoover, "As Hasidic population grows, Jewish politics may shift right," University of Florida News, filed Nov. 27, 2006; http://news.ufl.edu/2006/11/27/hasidic-jews/; and http://people.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/363_Transp/08_Orthodoxy.html. See also: Michael Kress, "The State of Orthodox Judaism Today," Jewish Virtual Library, viewed Dec. 24, 2012, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/orthostate.html. [18] Mark Galli, "Neo-Orthodoxy: Karl Barth," Jan. 1, 2000, Christianity Today, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ch/2000/issue65/5.23.html. See also: http://atheism.about.com/library/glossary/western/bldef_neoorthodoxy.htm. For an exposition and critique of the positions on reason and faith of the two leading proponents of Christian neo-orthodoxy: Emil Brunner and Karl Barth, see Chapters VII and VIII in Brand Blandshard, Reason and Belief, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1974, http://www.amazon.com/Reason-Belief-Brand-Blanshard/dp/0042300134. [19] For the names "crisis theology" and "dialectical theology," see: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/409012/neoorthodoxy. [20] For the neo-orthodox theologians in America: http://www.theopedia.com/Neo_Orthodoxy. [21] For the differences between neo-orthodox theologians and evangelicals: "Relation to other theologies" and "Influence upon American Protestantism," in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-orthodoxy. [22] For an overview and bibliography of paleo-orthodoxy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo-orthodoxy. For Thomas C. Oden see: http://www.theopedia.com/Thomas_C_Oden. [23] http://reasonversusmysticism.blogspot.com/2012/10/example-movement-radical-orthodoxy.html.

BkRev: Goldberg's Kingdom Coming

Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, New York, W. W. Norton, 2007 (adding an Epilogue to the 2006 edition), 253 pp.

In Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, investigative journalist Michelle Goldberg has two main purposes. The first is to raise an alarm about the threat from Christian Nationalism. Much of the book focuses on conservative political assaults and modern liberal responses, which are subjects outside the scope of The Main Event. However, Goldberg's description of Christian Nationalism exposes the movement's roots in supernaturalism and mysticism, particularly the notions of God's revelations in holy scripture as guides to personal and political action.

The Christian Nationalism movement advocates mysticism—for example, when a preacher encourages his flock to have faith—but its advocacy is only one element in a stream of other, narrower activities such as campaigns to create or abolish laws, organize efforts to raise funds for a new church building, and sermonize about the need to follow God's commandments. The rule of inverse interest applies: The more fundamental the concept, such as reason or mysticism, the less time is spent talking about it. Though not intended by the author, part of the value of Kingdom Coming is demonstrating that point.

Goldberg's second purpose is to suggest, to her audience of "liberal" activists, actions they could take to counteract the threat. Some of her suggestions could be useful to activists for reason, egoism, and capitalism as well, but again that subject is outside the scope of this review for The Main Event.

THREE ISMS. What is Christian Nationalism? Goldberg's answer involves two other, related isms. The best way to understand these three ideas is to move from the general to the particular. The general doctrine that sets a context for Christian Nationalism is Judeo-Christian dominionism, the belief that Jews and Christians have a God-given right to rule this world. (Dominionists cite Genesis 1:26-27 for justification.) Christian Nationalism is an application of that world-wide principle to a particular country, the USA. It is the political belief that the USA was founded by Christians for Christians. One element of Christian Nationalism is Christian reconstructionism, which is the belief that Christians should replace “American civil law with Old Testament biblical law,” says Goldberg. (p. 13)

By citing their holy scripture—whose authors were mystically inspired to write a text which contains ethical principles mystically revealed by God—Christian Nationalists are demonstrating the fundamental role of supernaturalism and mysticism in their worldview.

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK Chapter by chapter, the author shows that, by applying their mystically acquired ethical principles, Christian Nationalists are:

- Intending to end secularism (Ch. 1, “This is a Christian Nation”).

- Threatening the rights of homosexuals (Ch. 2, “… The Political Uses of Homophobia”).

- Assaulting science (Ch. 3, “… Intelligent Design and the War on the Enlightenment”).

- Hijacking the welfare state (Ch. 4, “The Faith-Based Gravy Train”).

- Attacking sexuality (Ch. 5, “… the Abstinence Industry”).

- Undermining constitutional checks and balances that protect the separation of Church and State (Ch. 6, “… The War on the Courts”).

As the table of contents suggests, the author and the Christian Nationalists she examines are focused on "social issues," not economic issues.

THE AUTHOR'S APPROACH. Goldberg makes her descriptions of the ideas of the Christian Nationalists vivid by describing a string of individuals who advocate those ideas—their physical appearance, their clothing, their setting (in a church, for example), and their careers as activists. Her descriptions include explanations of the special terms that Christian Nationalists use in their thinking and in speaking to others:

Michael Farris, the founder and president of the evangelical Patrick Henry College calls his campaign to turn Christian homeschooled students into political cadres Generation Joshua. The name has a very specific biblical … meaning. Joshua was Moses's successor as leader of the Israelites; … Joshua led them in seizing the holy land. … Farris's Generation Joshua … [is] imbued with an Old Testament dream of exile redeemed by conquest. The holy land is America as Farris imagines it. The enemy is America as it exists right now. … As Farris wrote in his book Generation Joshua, the homeschooling movement ‘will succeed when our children, the Joshua generation, engage wholeheartedly in the battle to take the land. … [Winning will be very difficult because this] is the land of MTV, Internet porn, abortion, homosexuality, greed, and accomplished selfishness‘ he observed. (pp. 1-2)

A CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIAN SUBCULTURE. One of the benefits of a close reading of Kingdom Coming is seeing in detail the breadth and depth of an ever-growing conservative Christian sub-society and the conservative Christian subculture it produces. Many conservative Christians, of course, work as employees of religiously neutral companies, alongside atheists, agnostics, pagans, Muslims, and "liberal" Christians. As Goldberg demonstrates, however, a growing number of conservative Christians—especially the activists—work for other conservative Christians in organizations that advocate for conservative Christian ideals or produce Christian cultural products such as videos and books. In their nonworking hours, these conservative Christians can then socialize with other conservative Christians in churches that have large congregations. Their children—often in large families—meet mostly other conservative Christian children through their Christian school networks

In effect, these conservative Christians are slowly supplanting rather than converting the "liberal" world around them. For serious students of history familiar with the long, slow process of Christians supplanting pagan society in the Late Roman Empire, the process of supplanting is more disturbing than any particular ballot victory conservatives may enjoy.

RECOMMENDATION. Kingdom Coming is entertaining and informative for anyone who wants a closer look at a major—and still developing—stream of mysticism in the USA today. Goldberg's documentation is not scholarly, but it is thorough enough to allow serious readers—including specialized activists—to pursue narrower interests such as the fight over evolution, the movement against gay marriage, and the conservative Christian plans to remake the USA into a theocracy.

Especially valuable for pro-reason activists would be reading Kingdom Coming before reviewing the 4.5 hour series of lectures by Brook and Ghate, "Cultural Movements: Creating Change" on the ARI website (PARTICIPATE, ACTIVISM, right column):

aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=participate_arc_activism

Burgess Laughlin

Author of The Power and the Glory: The Key Ideas and Crusading Lives of Eight Debaters of Reason vs. Faith, described here.

BkRev: Peikoff, The DIM Hypothesis

 Leonard Peikoff, The DIM Hypothesis: Why the Lights of the West Are Going Out, New York, New American Library, 2012, 378 pp.

The DIM Hypothesis is an ambitious book. It sets out to explain the essential nature of Western culture, the path Western history has taken from the ancient Greeks to U.S. culture today, and our most likely route for the next two generations. Will we see prosperity, advances in science, and greater freedom for individuals to pursue happiness? Or will we see decline? The DIM Hypothesis provides a framework for answering such questions. The book is "[a]n essentialized account" but "not of course a proof" of the hypothesis, which would require multiple specialized studies rather than a single volume. (p. xii)

The author of the book is philosopher Leonard Peikoff, PhD. As the Acknowledgments section of the book shows, he has drawn on the expertise of a gallery of specialists in four major fields of our culture and in each of the major periods of Western history.

THE ARGUMENT. In Part One ("Epistemology"), Peikoff explains the key that he thinks opens the lock on our doorway to understanding the past, grasping the present, and predicting the future. The key, he says in Ch. 1, is identifying the mode of thinking that representative individuals in a society use to create their culture. Why is the mode important? The mode shapes the "cultural products" that result from the thinking. (For a concretizing analogy, I view mode of thinking as the narrow "waist" of an hourglass, with the sand in the top compartment being a society's dominant philosophy, and the sand in the bottom compartment being culture; the nature of the culture depends not only on the broadest philosophical principles, the heavy "sand" at the top, but also on the nature of the very narrow "waist" through which those principles are applied to culture.)

A mode of thinking is a person's way of mentally connecting the multitude of bits and pieces he knows ("the Many") into a system of thought ("the One") that explains the world and our role in it. Peikoff sees three major modes of thinking: Integration (I), Misintegration (M), and Disintegration (D).

The I mode, Peikoff explains in Ch. 2 ("The Three Archetypes"), is the mode of Aristotle: start with sense-perception of nature, form concepts of the things we see, produce wider concepts, infer principles, and organize -- that is, integrate -- those principles into a system of thought about the world as a whole, which is philosophy.

The M mode is superficially similar in that its practitioners (originally Plato) do attempt to connect up what they see in this world, but to foundational ideas that come to them from another world, a transcendent world (the world of Forms for Plato, or God's supernatural realm for Jews, Christians, and Muslims). This is a misintegration because it is an attempt to connect the world of nature to the (non-existent) world of the supernatural.

The third major mode, the D mode, is an anti-mode; it is the mode of disintegration, the mode that philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) originated: the mode of rejecting a connection of any item of knowledge to another, leaving only a pile of individual bits of knowledge ("the Many"), if anything.

In looking at history, Peikoff works from the premise that the ideas individuals hold are the causes of their actions. The broadest ideas are philosophical ideas. Broad ideas have broad effects in history, which is the record of human actions. (Peikoff demonstrated these views in his book, The Ominous Parallels, an examination of the ideas that caused the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1920s.) How, though, do broad philosophical ideas -- from Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Rand, and others -- actually translate into particular human actions and therefore the flow of history?

In Ch. 4 ("DIM and the Hypothesis"), Peikoff says the mode of one's thinking -- where one looks for the elements of thought and how one connects those elements -- determines the results in thought and action. The Integration mode led to the philosophical, literary, and mathematical creativity of ancient Greek culture and especially the scientific creativity of the Enlightenment period. The Misintegration mode produced an increasingly oppressive pagan Roman Empire, the Christian Middle Ages, and the supposedly secular regimes of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. The Disintegration mode, which first appeared in modern times, has led to the culture of our own world, a world in which children are educated but cannot think; physicists deny the possibility of knowledge of reality; serious literature lacks plot and theme; and politicians heap up a pile of arbitrary regulations that destroy productivity.

In Part Two ("DIM in Modern Culture") the author -- striving always to practice the mode he champions, the mode of Integration -- illustrates and tests this hypothesis -- that mode of thinking, more than any other factor, explains the nature and trajectory of a culture. Peikoff starts, not at the beginning of history, but with our own, modern time, a culture that most readers know best. He looks at four fields of our culture -- literature (Ch. 5), physics Ch. 6), education (Ch. 7), and politics (Ch. 8).

In Part Three ("DIM in Pre-Modern Culture"), Peikoff examines the same four fields but in the I culture of Classical Greece (particularly Athens), the initially mild M ("M1") culture of pagan Rome, the severe M ("M2") cultural of most of the Christian Middle Ages, the return to a mild M ("M1") culture during the Renaissance, and the I culture of the Enlightenment. In all these cases, Peikoff approaches a field by looking at particular cultural products. He says:

"Cultural products," as I use the term, are not academic treatises. Rather, they are things such as the Aeneid, the discovery of heliocentrism, Progressive education, the welfare state -- i.e., entities that are familiar in some form to the people in a given society and that influence their lives uniquely, in both thought and action. Cultural products in this sense are not theories of aesthetics, but plays, concerti, the David. They are not philosophizing about science, but the publicly known conclusions of working physicists, who tell us about an absolute law of gravity or about big bangs and anti-causal quarks. They are not philosophy of education, but the curricula and teaching methods of the K-12 schools children attend daily. They are not political abstractions, but the behavior of actual governments wielding defined or purposely undefined powers. The sum of such products is the culture of a society. (p. 71)

In Part Four ("The Future"), Peikoff continues to build his hypothesis but in "the other direction -- not from hypothesis to [cultural] products, but from the observed facts about [cultural] products to hypothesis." (p. 251) This is an inductive test of the hypothesis. The first chapter of this part, Ch. 12 ("Identifying a Culture's Essence"), is an example of one element of his approach. This element will be welcomed by serious readers, but will slow the reading of casual readers: He explains the method he is using at each major step. Some of the discussion is abstract, but Peikoff guides the reader with aids such as: inserting subheadings that show the reader the main steps; summarizing major points in short statements; and explaining where in the thought process the author's account now stands.

In Ch. 13 ("The West's Modal Progression"), Peikoff examines the nature of the changes from one mode of thinking to another.

The progression of modes is not a march of reified abstractions propelled independently of worldly events by the dictates of some preordained logic beyond human control. On the contrary, a mode is a method of thinking, and method entails content; thinking, if it is non-Platonic, is about particulars. The rise and fall of any mode, therefore, can be understood only in conjunction with a specific triggering event or events -- that is, event(s) which, in the context of the period, lead people to question and to conclude that the established mode is unsafe, backward, invalid, and/or evil. The result, other things being equal, will be a modal changeover. (pp. 266-267)

Throughout the book, Peikoff is careful to say what the DIM hypothesis is not, as well as what it is. For example:

The DIM theory has no distinctive means to predict the rise of disaffection [with the dominant mode of thinking] in an era; nor can it identify in advance the concretes that will trigger a changeover [to another mode of thinking]. The basic question that modal theory does attempt to answer is this: Given a society's established mode, along with the eruption of such concretes [as triggers for change] if and when they come, which new mode will people choose to embrace and why? (p. 267)

In Ch. 14, Peikoff examines the four "secular modes" in the United States today. The secular modes are the disintegration modes (both mild D1 and the radical D2); the integration mode (surviving now in our culture mostly as an Enlightenment sense of life, but also as the tiny new Objectivist movement); and the mild form of misintegration (M1), which Peikoff labels as Worldly Supernaturalism, meaning that the advocates of this mode accept this world as fully real, but not as a source of guiding principles. (pp. 65 and 305)

In Ch. 15, by contrast, Peikoff considers the fifth and and last mode, the radical misintegration movement (M2). They are pure Platonists, but now in a religious form. In the U.S., the dominant religion, at this time, is Christianity. Among Christians, the greatest threats are the "New Christians," a group distinguished by "the consistency of their religious ideology." This group includes fundamentalists, evangelicals, Pentecostals, and the "born-again." (p. 310). They are calling for "dominionism." This doctrine "holds that the secular authorities in the United States must be replaced by men of faith who will refashion American life according to God's teachings." (p. 315)

In the last chapter, Ch. 16 ("What's Next?"), Peikoff makes his prediction: "religious totalitarianism in America." (p. 333) After considering many factors that might speed or slow the rise of a religious totalitarianism in some form, he says:

Given all these factors and being as specific as one can be, I estimate the M2 triumph to be complete within another forty to fifty years at the latest -- say, two generations. On current evidence, though, it might very well be a generation earlier. ... (p. 340)

My claim that an M2 success is not yet certain depends on my view that a resurgence of Aristotle is still possible. There is some evidence now pointing to the germ of an I revolution in the United States -- that is, to an I philosophy with cultural potential here. (p. 342)

In the final pages, Peikoff says: "The high probability of a monstrous evil should not induce paralysis in those who see it coming. It should not lead to the end of action, but to the beginning." (p. 346)

EVALUATION. The DIM Hypothesis covers 2500 years of Western history. It rapidly plumbs the depths of all those cultures from the concretes of daily life down to the broadest abstractions of philosophy as represented by the dominant mode of thinking. The book presents a hypothesis of what causes a culture to be what it is and change as it does. Overall, the author's presentation of that chain of causes and effects is reminiscent of the mechanical clocks developed in the Enlightenment, a period of triumphant integration in some fields. The clocks' mechanisms were complex, intricate, and at some points delicate, but always including precision-made components that provided a check on other components that might drift in operation. For some viewers, such clocks were a marvel to contemplate. The same is true for The DIM Hypothesis.

Is the book persuasive in its conclusion that the USA is headed to religious totalitarianism within two generations? Peikoff says he holds his conclusion to be "so highly probable as to border on certainty." (p. 341) Will readers agree with him? Equally objective readers may reasonably come to different conclusions, depending on their knowledge of Western history. For me, the answer is yes and no. Yes, there is some probability of such a dictatorship. No, there is not a probability so high it borders on certainty, and for three reasons. 

First, two slow readings of The DIM Hypothesis uncovered dozens of puzzling or doubtful statements (out of the thousands of evidential and methodological statements that constitute the book). Most of the doubtful statements are about debatable particulars of history cited as evidence, but a few of the doubtful statements are about methods. For instance, is the author presenting a "hypothesis" (as stated in the book title and elsewhere) or a "theory" (the term used on pp. 72, 74, and 78)? And when the author says, "The overwhelming dominance of M [throughout most of history] ... would mean that its fundamentals have been so entrenched in the mind of our species that we have never truly escaped them" (p. 285), what is he saying? In particular, what does "entrenched in the mind of our species" mean?

That sounds like innate ideas, but Peikoff has a long track record of opposing innate ideas. Most likely, given evidence throughout the book of ruthless editing to abbreviate the text, Peikoff was using short-hand, so to speak, to say that elements of the Misintegration mode of thinking (wedding what we see in this world to a supernatural realm) are now and always have been so common in our culture that most individuals simply absorb them into their subconscious in childhood onward, making acceptance of religion likely. Clarification of such statements would reduce readers' doubts about the author's near certainty in his disturbing prediction.

Second, also inducing caution are Peikoff's own careful reminders to readers that he is explaining only Western history, the flow of Western culture, a culture shaped, Peikoff holds, by philosophy that was originally Greek, but later combined with the non-Western religion of Christianity. His modal analysis does not apply to Eastern culture, which Peikoff has not studied. (p. 264) Yet we live in a fluid world that is mixing cultures, with Western elements spreading eastward and Eastern elements spreading westward. Will this situation affect a modal change in the U.S. or elsewhere?

Example "other factors" which the author sets aside as not part of modal analysis are: the historical role of philosophical skepticism and other forms of "non-integration" (pp. 37-38, 39, and 67); the effects of pre-philosophical culture (pp. 264, 284, and 285); and the place of cultural elements that do not reveal a particular mode (pp. 68 and 74-75). This list should make the reader extra cautious in evaluating the author's level of certainy about his conclusions.

Third is the problem of explaining the appearance and rise of the integrative mode to prominence in particular cultures at particular times. Why did it arise when and where it did arise -- ancient Greece; in the late medieval period (leading to the Renaissance); the Enlightenment period, but beginning in the 1600s; and, at least as a seedling, in our own time with the philosophy of Ayn Rand?

I have written two books on somewhat related subjects: The Aristotle Adventure: A Guide to the Greek, Arabic, and Latin Scholars Who Transmitted Aristotle's Logic to the Renaissance, especially the chapters on the revival of Aristotle scholarship in the late Latin-Christian period; and The Power and the Glory: The Key Ideas and Crusading Lives of Eight Debaters of Reason vs. Faith, especially the chapter on Thomas Aquinas and Siger of Brabant. I am thereby somewhat familiar with the facts of the long, slow rise of the integrative mode. In each case, how did advocates and practitioners of the Integration mode manage to survive and eventually flourish, even if only in mixed cultures? This needs to be explained before accepting as nearly certain a prediction of domination by radical misintegration, that is, a religious totalitarianism.

RECOMMENDATION. Is this a book for everyone? No. It is useful, challenging, and important for long-term students of at least three fields: philosophy, history of philosophy, and philosophy of history. It will also aid serious philosophical and intellectual activists, those individuals who have a well defined, long-term purpose as activists and who know the importance of spreading fundamental ideas as preparation for narrower changes later.

Peikoff himself suggests that general readers, those without requisite background in history and philosophy, "need not flee" from the book but might "browse the sections pertaining to modern literature, education, and politics (chapters five, seven, and eight), and above all ... take a look at the book's final three chapters, dealing with America's future." (p. xiii) The most difficult sections for general readers are the very ones that will probably fascinate serious students of history and philosophy: the sections which describe Peikoff's methodology in thinking and explanation. Both are delightfully integrative.

For that reason, Peikoff's The DIM Hypothesis, as well as his long stairway of labor before it, may itself be one reason why his own prediction -- the triumph of misintegration, in the form of religious totalitarianism -- might fail. Taught and led by thinkers such as Leonard Peikoff, the integrators may yet win.

(This review is provisional. I may revise it after leading a 17-week study group examining the book in Study Groups for Objectivists. The study group begins in January, 2013, for registered members.)

Burgess Laughlin

Author of The Power and the Glory: The Key Ideas and Crusading Lives of Eight Debaters of Reason vs. Faith, described here.

Example Movement: Radical Orthodoxy

 In 1990, British university professor and Christian theologian John Milbank published his first book, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. In it, Milbank rejects the Enlightenment idea of secularity. It is, he says, a myth produced by intellectuals who pretend to rely on religiously neutral reason but who are actually pagans. Thus the "secularists" are religious but in a way contrary to Christian teachings. Christian theologians, who have been trying to adapt their theology to the conclusions reached by supposedly neutral secular scholars, should instead, Milbank says, reject the "secular" sciences and insist that all the sciences be based on Christian theology, the queen of the sciences. (n. 1)

Milbank went further. He proposed a new Christian theology. Initially he called his views "postmodern critical Augustinianism." ([11], p. 1) His new theology is critical in the sense that it challenges traditional ideas and their underlying assumptions. Milbank's theology is largely Augustinian because Milbank thinks Augustine (354-430 CE) was a genius in developing Christian theology and philosophy; Augustine faced opponents whose religion was paganism (as Milbank believed in the 1990s he himself was doing); and Augustine believed that reason and the sciences it produces are invalid unless based on Christian theology. ([1], p. 47) Last, Milbank's views are postmodern in using some of the terminology and methods of French postmodernist philosophers while attacking their nihilism. ([1], pp. 42-43) Milbank's antidote for nihilism? Christianity.

Milbank and a few like-minded Christian academics at Cambridge University continued publishing articles and books. Their movement had no name until 1998, when Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward published Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, an anthology of articles by Anglicans and Roman Catholics. ([4], p. 1) Radical Orthodoxy (RO) is an ecumenical movement. It is open to any Christian, regardless of denomination. ([1], pp. 64-65) A consequence is disagreement among advocates of RO about such issues as the value of particular organizations. For example, some members of the movement oppose the papacy of the Catholic Church and prefer administration of the whole Christian church by bishops; others support the papacy.

THEIR VIEW OF HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. Leaders of the RO movement look back to Plato (424-347 BCE) for a fundamental element of his ontology: This world is a projection from another dimension and thus dependent on that dimension. ([1], pp. 48-49) The early centuries of Christian history produced Christian theologians, such as Augustine, who are worthy of critical study today. The assessment of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) is mixed. On the one hand, RO says approvingly, he shared the Neoplatonist view that everything's very being, in this world, is an effect of God ([1], p. 14 and 19); but on the other hand, the early RO movement believed Thomas took steps toward a split of the sacred and the secular, thus making the secularizing Enlightenment possible ([1] p. 47 n. 56). Worse, Aquinas developed "natural theology," which is the "science of God" formed through observation of and thinking about nature (the effect) rather than revelation from God (the cause). ([1], p. 51)

Advocates of RO believe theologian John Duns Scotus (1265-1308) attempted to save faith by splitting faith from reason, a split that led slowly but inexorably to a divorce between theology and the secular sciences, which are the sciences of this world, the sciences that claim they rely on a universal, religiously "neutral" reason. ([1], pp. 93-94 and 96-100) Secularization accelerated in the Enlightenment period, which gave birth to modern culture, and continues largely unopposed today, in the postmodern period.

THEIR THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY. "The movement," says a writer for Wikipedia, "reclaims the original early church idea that theology is the 'queen of the sciences'. This means that if the world is to be interpreted correctly, it must be viewed from the perspectives of theology. Radical Orthodoxy critiques and dismisses secular sciences because their worldview is considered inherently atheistic and therefore nihilistic, based on acts of ontological violence (of which the faith/reason, nature/grace separations are examples)." ([11], p. 2)

Theology should apply to everything, RO's supporters say. ([3], p. 8) RO is "a massive theological project [whose goal is] to re-narrate reality," notes observer Ashley Woodiwiss ([5], p. 1) In philosophical terms, the branches of that new narration are politics, ethics, epistemology, and ontology (metaphysics). Ethics among the leaders of RO seems to be the standard Christian altruism, a focus on sacrifice and love for others, primarily God and other humans.

1. POLITICS. RO rejects classical liberalism, a product of the Enlightenment, "a worldview that prioritizes individual freedom and thus values autonomy as a fundamental value," says advocate James K. A. Smith. Autonomy here is both political (a freedom of action constrained only by the rights of others) and epistemological (relying on "secular reason" unconstrained by non-rational commitments). Instead of classical liberalism, RO offers the political alternative of submission to a lord (God) and the epistemological alternative of gaining wisdom through revelation from God. ([1], p. 60, n. 113)

RO "sees the only authentic Christian politics to be socialism," Smith explains. ([1], p. 45, n. 50) Rejecting capitalism (the market), RO advocates "the Christian enterprise of a 'universal gift exchange'," not "state socialism." ([1], pp. 18-19) Leaders of the RO movement are not dismayed by the nearly worldwide disintegration of secular socialism. "In the collapse of socialism as a secular political force," says Graham Ward, a founder of the movement, "I see Radical Orthodoxy as offering one means whereby socialism can be returned to its Christian roots." ([1], p. 80)

2. EPISTEMOLOGY. As part of its critique of modernity, RO rejects "modern dualisms, such as the opposition between faith and reason," says advocate James K. A. Smith. With the ending of modernity "there ends also the modern predicament of theology. It no longer has to measure up to accepted secular standards of scientific truth or normative rationality." ([1], pp. 70-71)

"By calling into question the dualisms of modernity, [RO] eliminates a significant distinction between the secular and the sacred, thus undoing the very notion of secular reason. As a result, the modern distinction -- or better, opposition -- between faith and reason is called into question." Secularity is "the belief in purportedly objective accounts of human life untainted by faith perspectives." ([1], pp. 73 and 74)

"[D]istinctly Christian thought is 'a thinking out of the resources of revelation alone'." ([1], p. 51, Smith quoting Milbank) What is an example of using revelation as a source of principles?  "Because God has become flesh and dwelt among us, we have beheld his glory (John 1:14); thus is established the general principle that God reveals himself in the sensible or material." ([1], p. 77, italics added)

RO emphasizes "aesthetics and the arts as a medium of revelation and worship." The arts lead "to a knowledge that is 'more profound and prior to rationality'." ([1], p. 78, Smith quoting Ward) Why worship God? Operating under the assumption that everyone has a natural yearning for the supernatural, RO advocates believe "all human knowledge is subject, under [God's] grace, to theological modification and qualification." ([1], p. 12)

Leaders of the movement deny they reject reason. "The RO critique of reason is not a critique of rationality as such, as if RO sought to reject theoretical or scientific investigation. Nor does it entail ... a rejection of pagan learning," says Smith. ([1], p. 53) Instead, Milbank, founder of the movement, "indicts modern secular reason for thinking it is autonomous and neutral [that is, having no religious foundation] when such neutrality is impossible." ([1], p. 57, n. 96)

RO advocate Catherine Pickstock rejects the correspondence theory of knowledge. "[T]emporal things are only adequately known when they are received as gifts [from God] and offered back as praise of the divine. This [approach to knowing] contradicts the idea that truth is primarily a matter of mirroring inert objects." ([4], p. 4)

Milbank's early writings have led some academics to question "the universal competency of secular reason." In a later phase, particularly with Milbank's anthology, Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, the movement went "on the offensive against secularism," says Milbank. The RO movement argues for a return to medieval times, when "faith and reason were inseparable." The major turning point, philosophically, came with the work of John Duns Scotus, which eventually led to the separation of reason from faith and the supernatural from the natural. Instead the RO movement looks back to Thomas Aquinas and the earlier Church Fathers, all of whom, Milbank says, held everything in life to be dependent on God. ([6], pp. 1-2)

3. METAPHYSICS (ONTOLOGY). RO advocates a metaphysics of participation, which is the view that the creator "participates" in the creature and thereby gives the creature meaning. The postmodern belief in the independence of this material world leads to nihilism because it cuts off the source of value, God. The primal gift of God is existence; God gives existence to his creatures. ([1], pp. 74-75) This is "incarnational ontology." This is not Platonic ontology. ([1], p. 76 and n. 47)

RO's ontology is Augustinian. The divine purpose of a God of peace -- rather than Nietzsche's violence of an aggressive omnipotent will -- holds the universe together. ([3], pp. 2-5) Further, RO accepts the Neoplatonist view that meaning emanates from the One because we emanate from the One. ([3], pp. 6-7)

IDEOLOGY.  An ideology applies a worldview (a philosophy or religion, which is meant to be universal in time and place) to a particular milieu. What is the ideology of RO , a worldview that has an ontology of God causing everything, an epistemology of revelation as primary, an ethics of altruism, and a politics of socialism? Consider three elements.

1. THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO CONTEMPORARY CULTURE. RO's supporters reject the current culture, one still influenced by Enlightenment ideas of secularity, individualism, and capitalism. For radicals, rejection is not enough. "According to Graham Ward, Radical Orthodoxy is really a form of Christian cultural criticism, clearing away the rubbish of the Enlightenment" and moving toward a "fully Christianized ontology." ([4], p. 1) "There is no ideology-free zone," says Ward. ([4], p. 2) "Against these efforts [by postmodernists and modernists] to carve a place free from divine purpose -- 'the [realm of the] secular' -- Milbank argues for a conception of social reality governed by the supernatural vocation of fellowship with God," says R. R. Reno, an observer of the movement. ([3], p. 8) "Milbank, Pickstock, and Ward hope to articulate an encompassing Christian perspective that will supersede and replace secularisms both modern and postmodern." ([3], p. 2)

2. CREATING A NEW CULTURE. RO rejects all secularity, where "secular" means a neutral (nonreligious) viewpoint. RO sees secularity as ultimately (at the roots) pagan, which means religious but apostate from Christianity. ([1], p. 42) "Radical orthodoxy," in summary, says James K. A. Smith, "is a recent, particularly intense call for the development of a theoretical framework and sociopolitical involvement that are distinctly Christian at their foundation." ([1], p. 42)

After clearing away the brush of Enlightenment culture, RO advocates hope to create a "post-secular" culture, one in which no part of life is set aside from religion's influence. Because an essential characteristic of modernist culture is the drive to expand the realm of the secular, a truly post-modernist culture would be a post-secular culture. To create that culture, RO supporters are critiquing modernist (Enlightenment) culture in general and those streams of modern Christian theology that have been corrupted by trying to adapt to modernist culture. ([1] p. 33) "What we are seeing, then," says Milbank, "is the stepping back of theology into the public domain and a consideration of its relation to the whole of human thought and action." Thus, RO does not carve the world into religious and secular. It banishes the secular. ([1], p. 12)

3. SPECIFIC STRATEGIES. The RO movement looks at the past, present, and future. For the past, one goal is to retrieve the writings of Christian theologians who lived before modern times, and then working from them to develop new doctrines or continue with the old ones. ([1], p. 65)

Today, RO's main contribution to fighting the nihilism of postmodernism is to "draw aside the curtain that hides this procedure [achieving the postmodernist drive for domination by using euphemisms] from the view of postmodern fellow travelers." ([3], pp. 5-6) Further, the leaders of the RO movement believe that theology should apply to everything in life and in the world. ([3], p. 8) "Radical Orthodoxy is very clear: it wishes to renounce the compromises and half-measures of [mainstream] modern [Christian] theology and recover an Augustinian boldness on behalf of Christian faith and practice." ([3], p. 12) In particular, advocates of RO reject modern Christian theologians' acceptance of the notion that philosophy is and should be autonomous in relation to theology. ([1], p. 35)

What about the future? From the beginning of the RO movement, its leaders intended to influence politics. ([6], p. 2) RO, however, remains a theological, philosophical, and intellectual movement. It is not a mass political movement.

CHANNELS OF ACTIVISM. Members of the movement write books, such as Catherine Pickstock's After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (1998), James K. A. Smith's Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Secular Theology (2004), and John Milbank's The Radical Orthodoxy Reader (2009). They participate in debates, as John Milbank did with Marxist intellectual Slavoj Zizek in 2009. ([6], p. 2) They create churches such as the Holy Trinity and Saint Anskar Episcopal Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (n. 2) They write essays for journals and publish their own, The Journal of Radical Orthodoxy: Theology, Philosophy, Politics. (n. 3) They maintain websites listing resources for advocates of Radical Orthodoxy. (n.4)

CRITICISMS. Criticisms of RO have arisen from both the religious and the secular subcultures. In particular, RO has upset a lot of other theologians. A few have suggested constructive criticisms to improve RO. Some criticisms have been accurate; and some have been false. E.g., one philosophizer accused John Milbank of being a follower of Karl Barth (he isn't) and a fideist (Milbank's supporters say he isn't). ([1], pp. 52-53) Some criticisms leveled against RO contradict each other. ([1], p. 64) Some critics of RO have misunderstood it. ([1], p. 63, but also pp. 49-60). Perhaps that is inevitable since there were multiple founders writing on a variety of subjects scattered through essays and books over a decade.

Members of the RO movement, as in any philosophical or intellectual movement, have been criticized for their scholarly methods, writing style, themes, idealism, personalities, and incompleteness: "Radical Orthodoxy remains loosely put together, defined by strong intuitions and theological thought experiments and lacking a systematic gestalt." ([3], p. 14) Critics say RO lacks an ecclesiology, that is, a study of the church as a seedbed for theology. RO instead emphasizes tradition but the movement has not yet identified the role of the Virgin Mary ("the living heart of the Church," says one Catholic critic). ([4], p. 1)

Some have criticized RO for not being in conformance with the critics' own denomination -- for example, for not being Roman Catholic. Secularists have criticized RO for not being secular, which of course is a main point of RO. ([1], pp. 49-50) Other critics have challenged RO's reading of history, especially its interpretations of Plato and Aquinas. ([1], p. 50) At least one reader derogates Milbank's scholarship (selective reading of history), his nearly exclusive use of Christian sources, and his attitude ("ill tempered"). ([7])

Criticisms of style include use of post-modernist jargon. ([3], p. 2) "The literature of the movement is often dense, abstract, complex, impenetrable, out-of-reach, and off-putting." ([5], p. 2) (Such criticism raises the question of how RO writers managed to be so influential if they were so obscure.)

The leaders of the RO movement attract the most criticism. For example, some of Milbank's critics attack his idealism. ([7]) The critics say leaders of the movement are generally unable to talk with RO's opponents. ([7]) Critic Eugene McCarraher attacks Milbank for being theocratic and for not addressing the issue openly but evading it. ([7]) Also, McCarraher dismissively rejects Milbank's admiration for medievalism -- an economy that consists of small-scale enterprises and is cooperative rather than competitive. ([7])

Many of the opponents of RO, but especially the ones in academia, apparently do not understand that Milbank and other supporters of RO are offering a whole worldview, a positive one. His opponents demand that he be "critical," in an academic fashion, but the critics themselves offer nothing positive. ([7], for an example)

The criticisms have not stopped the movement. RO advocates continue their theologically-inspired work in their chosen fields: economics (Daniel Bell and Stephen Long), culture (Graham Ward), politics (William Cavanaugh), and theology and philosophy (John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock). ([5], pp. 1-2)

TRAJECTORY. Movements change. For example, as others outside the movement become aware of the movement, praise and criticism can ebb and flow. One observer of the RO movement has sketched the critical reaction to RO. She shows that, in the first stage of reaction, the earliest reviews of a central work by RO founder John Milbank were generally positive reports by readers who admired the wide range of his sources. Within a few years, in the second stage, critics were questioning Milbank's inferences from his sources. Soon after, in the third stage, critics were speaking more harshly, for example, making accusations of "falsification" of history. However, in a fourth stage, some defenders of RO responded by asking the critics to suggest a better alternative and to consider RO in the context of its time. ([8], p. 1 and p. 1, n. 1)

The nature of the individuals in the movement can change too. The first members of the RO movement, who gathered around John Milbank, were all Anglican theologians at Cambridge University. Soon Roman Catholics joined. ([4], p. 1)

According to some observers, the RO movement -- which is an intellectual movement and will therefore always be narrow -- has been surfing on an already existing wave of religious revival, especially among young intellectuals. ([6], p. 2) The future will tell how much influence the RO movement has on other Christians and, perhaps through inspiration, on supporters of other religions such as Judaism and Islam.

CONCLUSION. RO is an intellectual movement that is bringing a thoroughly religious approach to Christian interactions with secular culture. The movement is radical in several ways. First, it is politically a movement that wants to make broad and deep changes: rejecting the marketplace and building a "cooperative" socialist economy based on mutual gift-giving. Second, the movement is radical in that it traces its esthetics, politics, and ethics to the foundation of the movement's worldview. Its metaphysics (ontology) is a belief in God's total responsibility for creating everything that exists; and its epistemology is mystical, a belief that reason, where it has any role at all, must start from principles revealed in holy scripture.

The Radical Orthodoxy movement is thus a philosophical and theological movement that is applying an enthusiastic and coherent mysticism to our world.

Burgess Laughlin, author,

The Power and the Glory: The Key Ideas and Crusading Lives of Eight Debaters of Reason vs. Faith

(This post, which is based on only a few sources, is an early sketch of one sub-movement in the broader movement working for mysticism in our time. Corrections are welcome.)

NOTES

[1]. This post, like most on The Main Event is mostly a record of my preliminary notes. For the description of Milbank's TST:BSR, I have drawn from secondary sources, several online book reviews. Note that in 2006 Milbank published a second, updated edition.  I have not yet read either edition. [2]. Described at: http://holytrinity-saintanskar.org/index.html. [3]. http://journal.radicalorthodoxy.org/index.php/ROTTP. [4]. http://www.calvin.edu/~jks4/ro/.

WORKS CONSULTED, SO FAR

[1] James K. A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-secular Theology, Grand Rapids, Baker Academic, 2004, 291 pages. [2] "James K. A. Smith," Wikipedia, printed Sept. 2, 2012; 3 pages; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_K._A._Smith. [3] R. R. Reno, "The Radical Orthodoxy Project," First Things, Feb., 2000; printed July 23, 2012; 20 pages. [4] Stratford Caldecott, "Radical Orthodoxy," Catholic Culture, no date of publication, but original interview was in 2001, according to last page; printed July 30, 2012; 7 pages; http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=4174. [5] Ashley Woodiwiss, "What's so Radical about Orthodoxy?," Christianity Today, May 24, 2005; printed July 23, 2012; http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/mayweb-only/22.0c.html. [6] Melanie Newman, "Lazarus-style comeback," Time Higher Education, April 16, 2009; printed July 31, 2012, 4 pages; http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=406157&oo=0. [7] Gene McCarraher, "McCarraher on Radical Orthodoxy," Inhabitatio Deiposted by "Halden" on Feb. 1, 2010, printed July 31, 2012; 2 pages; http://www.inhabitatiodei.com/2010/02/01/mccarraher-on-radical-orthodoxy/. [8] Katie Terezakis, "J. G. Hamann and the Self-Refutation of Radical Orthodoxy" (a draft of an article to be published in The Poverty of Radical Orthodoxy, eds. Lisa Isherwood and Marko Zlomislic, 2011), no date, 23 pages. [9] The Journal of Radical Orthodoxy, http://journal.radicalorthodoxy.org/index.php/ROTTP/index. [10] "Holy Trinity and St. Anskar Episcopal Church Welcomes You!." http://holytrinity-saintanskar.org/index.html. [11] "Radical Orthodoxy," Wikipedia, last updated July 12, 2012; printed July 20, 2012; 4 pages; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_Orthodoxy.