Rod Dreher: July 2007 Archives

Still thinking about why Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism are so appealing to the poor, and why more traditional forms of Christianity are lagging (except, in many cases, when they take on the trappings of charismatic Christianity). A Pentecostal reader has a terrific post about this in the "Church big enough for us all" thread. In short, he or she says that Pentecostals believe in a personal and ongoing relationship with the living God -- one that is direct and vivid, not mediated. I think TMatt has spoken of how the Anglicans in Africa are hugely successful in part because they are Pentecostal-ish in the way the present and live out the Gospel. So there is absolutely a theological component to it.

But I want to focus for a moment on why the older churches, especially the more hierarchical churches, may be ill-suited to speak to the modern listener. I have a half-baked theory, and I'd like to offer it for consideration, comment and revision.

Consider Jose Ortega y Gasset's 1930 classic "The Revolt of the Masses." Ortega writes that modern -- that is to say, 20th century -- man lives in a condition without parallel in human history: "life presented itself to the new man as exempt from restrictions":

We are, in fact, confronted with a radical innovation in human destiny, implanted by the 19th century. A new stage has been mounted for human existence, new both in the physical and the social aspects. Three principles have made possible this new world: liberal democracy, scientific experiment, and industrialism. The two latter may be summed up in one word: technicism.

Ortega writes that for all men in the past, "life was burdensome destiny, economically and physically. For birth, existence meant to them an accumulation of impediments which they were obliged to suffer, without possible solution other than to adapt themselves to them, to settle down in the narrow space they left available." In the second half of the 19th century, the rise of democracy made social barriers begin to fall. Social and technological revolution has created mass man, and imbued wiht the "the radical assurance that to-morrow, it will still be richer, ampler, more perfect, as if it enjoyed a spontaneous, inexhaustible power of increase." Ortega goes on to say that mass man has forgotten that such advances as have been made for his social and material benefit "still require the support of certain difficult human virtues, the least failure of which would cause the rapid disappearance of the whole magnificent edifice."

What does this have to do with religion and modernity? This, I think. More and more of us live in a world in which we think that everything around us is a given. We live in a time of immediacy, which entails ignorance of and indifference to the past. We also live in the time of Philip Rieff's "psychological man," which radically redefined the proper aspirations for human beings. Today, the complete man is one who is psychologically untroubled, who is satisfied ("senorito satisfecho" is Ortega's withering term). As Rieff interpreter Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn writes:

As Rieff showed in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, authority traditionally worked through moral interdiction and culture's provision of legitimate releases. Remissions were expected and accepted. But the elites of the second culture took a "radically remissive" stance, attacking their culture head-on. Replacing traditional authority with a new antiauthoritarianism that cast all interdiction as intolerable restraint on individual freedom, the third world constituted an anti-culture, replacing humility with a sense of unlimited possibility and the everyday reality of restraint and satisfaction with the gospel of self-fulfillment through personal experience, "always ending in the name of a better world elsewhere."

What form of the Christian religion is modern man (mass man, psychological man) most prepared by this culture to respond to? It would have to be one that's therapeutic, experiential, individualized, and non-hierarchical. It would have to be one that believes strongly in progress and self-improvement, and not merely giving one the wherewithal to endure suffering. It would have to be one that doesn't rely on historical precedent, traditional authority, or a physical place -- one that is highly exportable and transmissable amid a mobile, increasingly rootless population.

The modern world was made for Pentecostalism.

I don't say that as a criticism of Pentecostalism. The Christian religion in all its forms is to some degree experiential and personal, and offers hope for divine intervention to lift invididuals out of their seemingly hopeless circumstances. And it is true that human beings have legitimate emotional and spiritual needs that are beings that are being met by Pentecostalism in ways that the old Christian churches are struggling to do. But it's important, I think, to keep in mind that the old forms of the faith developed over time in cultural milieux in which structure and hierarchy were necessary and natural in a way they simply aren't -- or aren't perceived to be anymore. They developed in a time in which death and suffering and privation were far more acute facts of daily life than they are now. True, for the elites, modernity meant the loss of faith. The poor by and large still crave it -- but they seem to be moving toward a form of the faith that is more immediately apprehensible to them in their condition.

Does any of this make sense?

Listening last night to an interview with Al Jean of "The Simpsons" production staff, in which he talked about the early days of the show, reminded me of an interview I did back in 1993 with David Mirkin, who was then the show runner or somesuch person. I asked him for an example of something they'd cut from the show for taste reasons.

He cited the "Rosebud" episode -- one of the all-time great episodes, in which Monty Burns is Charles Foster Kane. There's a sequence in the episode in which ... well, here's the Wikipedia narrative:

As a child, Burns lived with his family and cherished his teddy bear Bobo. But he drops Bobo in the snow when he leaves to live with a "twisted, loveless billionaire". His father shouts after him "Wait, you've forgot your bear! A symbol of your lost youth and innocence!" but he goes unnoticed and all his parents had left after that was his little brother George. Bobo lies in the snow until the spring, when a thaw washes him downriver to New York. There, he is picked up by Charles Lindbergh and flown across the Atlantic Ocean.

Upon arrival in Paris, Lindbergh tosses the bear out the window, where it is caught by a young Adolf Hitler. In 1945, in his Führerbunker in Berlin, Germany, Hitler blames Bobo for losing (and possibly causing) World War II and tosses him away. In the next scene, Bobo lies onboard the submarine Nautilus headed for the North Pole. He becomes encased in a block of ice until picked up by an ice-gathering expedition. The bag of ice with him in it is sent to Apu's Kwik-E-Mart in Springfield. Bart Simpson buys the bag of ice, finds Bobo and, after remarking "It's a teddy bear! Ugh gross, its probably diseased or something!" gives it to Maggie to play with.

Burns discovers that Maggie has the bear and goes to incredible lengths to get it back, including interrupting all TV shows and cutting off the beer supply to Springfield, in order to get Homer to give it back.

Mirkin said that in the sequence in which Bobo travels throughout history, causing misfortune, there was a clip in which Bobo was seated on a shelf by a window in the Texas Book Depository. Lee Harvey Oswald stood inside the room, aiming his rifle at some sort of pesky varmint. Bobo fell off the shelf at just the wrong moment, striking the gun barrel as Oswald fired, forcing the barrel down, and the shot out the window. I believe Oswald said, "D'oh!"

That never made broadcast. I think you can see why.

Over on the DMN book club blog, we're continuing to talk about Paul Fussell's "The Great War and Modern Memory," and Dr. Allums recently posted a reflection on the palpable anger that infuses Fussell's acclaimed work. Where does that anger come from? Here's Fussell, a World War II infantry officer, from his 1996 memoir "Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic":

At dawn, I awoke, and what I now saw all around me were numerous objects I'd miraculously not tripped over in the dark. These were dozens of dead German boys in greenish gray uniforms, killed a day or two before by the company we were replacing. If darkness had mercifully hidden them from us, dawn disclosed them with staring open eyes and greenish white faces and hands like marble, still clutching their rifles and machine pistols in their seventeen-year-old hands. One body was only a foot or so away from me, and I found myself fascinated by the stubble of his beard, which would have earned him a rebuke on a parade ground but not here, not anymore. Michealngelo could have made something beautiful out of these forms, in the tradition of the 'Dying Gaul,' and I was astonished to find that in a way I couldn't understand, at first they struck me as awful but beautiful. But after a moment, no feeling but horror. My boyish illusions, largely intact to that moment of awakeneing, fell away all at once, and suddenly I knew that I was not and would never be in a world that was reasonable or just. To transform silly conscripts into cold marble after passing them through unbearable humiliation and fear seemed to do them an interesting injustice. I decided to ponder these things. In 1917, shocked by the ghastliness of the Battle of the Somme and recovering from a nervous breakdown, Wilfred Owen was seeking relief by reading a life of Tennyson. He wrote his mother: "Tennyson, it seems, was always a great child. So should I have been but for Beaumont Hamel." So should I have been but for the forest overlooking St. Die'.

David Brooks today writes (behind TimesSelect) about the different approaches Barack Obama and John Edwards have toward poverty policy. He doesn't have a lot of confidence in either scheme, but he concludes:

If I had to choose between the two, I guess I’d go with the Obama plan. I’d lean that way because Obama seems to have a more developed view of social capital. Edwards offers vouchers, job training and vows to create a million temporary public-sector jobs. Obama agrees, but takes fuller advantage of home visits, parental counseling, mentoring programs and other relationship-building efforts.

The Obama policy provides more face-to-face contact with people who can offer praise or disapproval. Rising out of poverty is difficult — even when there are jobs and good schools. It’s hard to focus on a distant degree or home purchase. But human beings have a strong desire for approval and can accomplish a lot with daily doses of praise and censure. Standards of behavior are contagious that way.

A neighborhood is a moral ecosystem, and Obama, the former community organizer, seems to have a better feel for that. It’s not only policies we’re looking for in selecting a leader, it’s a sense of how the world works. Obama’s plan isn’t a sure-fire cure for poverty, but it does reveal an awareness of the supple forces that can’t be measured and seen.

That phrase -- "a neighborhood is a moral ecosystem" -- reminded me of something I learned from an inner-city firefighter on my recent trip to Louisiana. He works in a poor, predominantly black part of Baton Rouge, though he doesn't live there. He said that one of the strangest things he had to get used to when he started working at that fire station was seeing young children out in the streets till the wee hours of the morning. Night after night, he says, you'll drive through the streets of his service area seeing children, some in diapers, hanging out till past midnight -- in fact, he said, they don't come out till dark. He wondered how on earth those kids managed to make it through school living like that. He has acquired a very, very dim view of their parents.

His story brought to mind something a regular reader of this blog -- who may want to tell the story herself in the comboxes below -- told me recently. She'd had lunch with an African-American preacher, a woman she's known over the years, who ministers to poor black folks in the city. The preacher was pretty downcast about the community, saying that you can see children -- little children -- hanging out late at night, while their mothers are sitting in their houses watching TV with their boyfriends, as if they didn't have a care in the world. As I recall the reader's account, the preacher despaired of helping children whose parents cared so little for their welfare.

Another story: in Dallas, there's a prominent African-American minister who has a thriving church in south Dallas (no, not T.D. Jakes). When he and his wife first moved to Dallas, they wanted to start an afterschool ministry to give children of their (all-black, inner-city) church somewhere to go after school, so they'd stay away from trouble. What the minister and his wife discovered, much to their surprise, is that when the kids would come over, they wouldn't seek help with their homework. They'd fall asleep. All of them. What the pastor learned was that these poor kids had to live lives of such constant chaos -- particularly in the matter of their mothers staying up all night, partying with boyfriends -- that when they stepped into a well-ordered home, where there was peace and quiet, they slept.

How widespread is the "up all night" problem -- and how does a government program address it? Or is this something that only pastors and community leaders like them can tackle? How do effectively improve the moral ecosystem of poor neighborhoods by turning self-centered, neglectful parents into ones who put their children first?

Here's my column from Sunday's Dallas Morning News, about Cullen Murphy's book "Are We Rome?" Excerpt:

Are we Rome?

That is, are we Americans, citizens of the mightiest empire the world has known since the days of the Caesars, living in the last days of our civilization? Is the United States, like the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, doomed to collapse from its own decadence? Or can we avoid Rome's fate?

As historian Arnold J. Toynbee famously observed, "Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder." While any number of Rome's particular poisons could have been most responsible for its demise, the generally accepted view is that wealth and power corrupted its character, eroding the virtues that made Rome great and leading to its ultimate dissolution.

In his fascinating new book Are We Rome? journalist Cullen Murphy argues that yes, contemporary America is unnervingly like the Late Roman Empire. But it also has saving graces and resources that the doomed Romans lacked.

Unsurprisingly to regular readers, I conclude that if we are Rome, we can either take the Cincinnatus Option, and work to rebuild our flagging institutions and restore our republican (small-r, nota bene) vigor ... or, if that seems hopeless, there's always the Benedict Option -- the path pioneered in the fifth century by St. Benedict and his followers:

Those men and women decided that the survival of the moral community would not be possible under the old order – so they pioneered the nucleus of a new one. They became the Benedictine monks and nuns and their followers, who spread throughout the Europe of the Dark Ages, preserving the remnants of Christian and classical virtues and laying the groundwork for the rebirth of a new civilization.

The question facing men and women of good will today: Do we believe that America can and should be renewed, and therefore seek restoration through the exercise of heroic republican virtue, like the venerated early Roman Cincinnatus? Or do we believe that America is bound to succumb to the process the great 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon identified as "the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness" – and so await what Mr. MacIntyre identified as "a new, and doubtless very different, St. Benedict"?

The Cincinnatus Option or the Benedict Option – sooner or later, the choice is going to be upon us. As Gibbon saw, it is a law of history and human nature that prosperity ripens the principle of decay. To live as if our present peace and prosperity will last forever would be a most foolish mistake.