The article makes several valid points, and I encourage you to read it.

Parents aren’t specialists in the areas that high school teachers are, and so theoretically they can’t teach as well, according to critics of home schooling. The article points out that frequently the teachers of many subjects aren’t specialists, but are simply moved into a particular course because of the needs of the school, regardless of their own preparation. And I know that does happen, because I’ve seen it and experienced it myself.

But, bluntly, the fact is that too many teachers can’t teach effectively in the area that is their purported specialty.  And their school systems usually can’t get rid of them, even if they want to.  The only way to fire a teacher, short of criminal acts on the part of the teacher, seems to be when the state is broke, and can claim “financial exigencies.”

I have known some great public school teachers.  I know some now.  But I’ve also known some pretty bad ones.  They are all still teaching, as far as I know.

Public school has become a giant political correctness factory in too many places.  It virtually always indoctrinates in a left-leaning direction, sometimes radically so.  If your child is assigned to an incompetent teacher, or simply a doctrinaire leftist one, there is not much you can do about it, all too often.  I’ve tried.  And failed.

Some of our kids have had some decent teachers in the public schools.  But they are swimming against the tide, and there is no way for even a competent teacher to avoid the political correctness that masquerades as “critical thinking” in the schools.

And there is no way for even a good teacher to do much about all the social/political nonsense and experimentation that goes on in the schools today, that wouldn’t have been tolerated 30 years ago, because much of it is mandated by the state.

That’s why we are a home-schooling family.

America’s enemies are no more entitled to counsel in pursuing legal claims than, say, a pro-life group that chooses to file a lawsuit. If I went out of my way to contribute my services for free to a pro-life group, do you suppose the New York Times would have the slightest hesitation about drawing the inference that I was sympathetic to the pro-life cause? Of course not. The Gray Lady wouldn’t pretend that I was just, in the Gillers lexicon, promoting “the administration of justice.” After all, no one would have forced me to take that case. There are countless causes that a lawyer willing to donate his services can find. When you’re a volunteer, you’re doing what you want to do, not what you have to do.

As the law is currently understood, it is legal for a lawyer to volunteer his services to America’s enemies. It is absurd, however, to suggest that we have to applaud that decision. And it is equally ludicrous to suggest that we are forbidden from drawing the obvious conclusion that a lawyer who makes such a decision is predisposed to condemn the United States and to sympathize with America’s enemies on some level.

Here’s the landscape: The Obama Justice Department is staffed with many lawyers who volunteered their services to America’s enemies. Since those lawyers have been running the department, there has been a detectable shift in favor of due-process rights for terrorists, a bias in favor of civilian trials in which terrorists are vested with all the rights of American citizens, a bias against military tribunals, the extension of Miranda protections to enemy combatants, a concerted effort to publish previously classified information detailing interrogation methods and depicting the alleged abuse of detainees, efforts to subject lawyers who authorized aggressive counterterrorism policies to professional sanction, the reopening of investigations against CIA interrogators even though those cases were previously closed by apolitical law-enforcement professionals, and the continued accusation that officials responsible for designing and carrying out the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies committed war crimes.

You may think this is a coincidence. I don’t. And I’m not going to pretend it is because some lefty lawyer screams “McCarthyism.” This isn’t demagoguery. It is cause and effect. And if it is hurting President Obama politically, that is because he deserves to be hurt for indulging it.

It’s worth remembering that Obama was the preferred candidate of Wall Street, and the industry gave to Democrats by a 2-1 margin at the beginning of last year. The top business donor to Democrats in 2008 was Goldman Sachs, and nearly 75 cents out of every dollar of Goldman’s political donations from 2006 to 2008 went to Democrats. Few can gainsay the investment, given how well Goldman Sachs has done under the Obama administration.

It’s not just Wall Street. Obama led in fundraising from most big business sectors, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Aside from the desire to back the winner, and the cultural liberalness of East and West Coast plutocrats, why did Obama get so much support from precisely the constituency he demonizes?

Because it was good business. A host of big corporations bet that the much-vaunted Obama era would materialize. For instance, nearly 30 major corporations and environmental groups invested in Obama’s promise to force the American economy into a new cap-and-trade system via the United States Climate Action Partnership (CAP).

Whatever the benefits of such a scheme for the economy and environment as a whole, these corporations, led by General Electric, were looking simply to cash in on government policies. GE, which makes many wind, solar and nuclear doodads that would be profitable under “cap-and-trade,” was poised to make billions if Obama succeeded in seizing control of the “carbon economy.” GE is still protecting its bet, but after the failure in Copenhagen, the “climategate” scandals and perhaps most significantly, that implosion of Obama’s new progressive era, several heavyweights — Caterpillar, BP and ConocoPhillips — have pulled out of CAP, with rumors that more will follow. There are similar rumblings of discontent within the ranks of PhRMA, the trade association for the pharmaceutical industry, which had cut an $80 billion deal with the White House last year for its support of ObamaCare, only to see the whole thing unravel.

The lesson here is fairly simple: Big business is not “right wing,” it’s vampiric. It will pursue any opportunity to make a big profit at little risk. Getting in bed with politicians is increasingly the safest investment for these “crony capitalists.” But only if the politicians can actually deliver. The political failures of the Obama White House have translated into business failures for firms more eager to make money off taxpayers instead of consumers.

That’s good news. The bad news will be if the Republicans once again opt to be the cheap dates of big business. For years, the GOP defended big business in the spirit of free enterprise while businesses never showed much interest in the principle themselves. Now that their bet on the Democrats has crapped out, it’d be nice if they stopped trying to game the system and focused instead on satisfying the consumer.

Go back and read the title of this post. Then read this, to which I’ve linked before.  Ignore the reviews, pro and con, and just take it on its own terms… and see if you can refute the history.  I think you can’t.

There hasn’t been a “free market” in the USA for sometime.  The government’s power to tax and regulate, and to give tax breaks and regulatory exceptions, is the reason there is so much lobbying in the Beltway.  It could not have been otherwise, once corporate taxes got high, and the regulation of business became one of the chief functions of government.  The merry-go-round career path of government “service” to lobbyist, and often back to government “service,” is the biggest indicator of this.  The essential role of a lobbyist in the modern world is to figure out who should get the money that the lobbyist’s principals have to donate.

When big business couldn’t count on government to help it get captive markets, and to restrain competitors, it had to compete for consumers on the basis of price and quality.  That’s why Rockefeller kept cutting the price of kerosene in the 19th century, not exactly an act of violence against the consumers of the day.

It’s unfortunate that so many people still believe that we live in a “free market” economy and that “the market” is the cause for so much economic woe today.  But we have had a “mixed economy” that often crossed the line into “crony capitalism” or just plain “state capitalism” (especially in time of war), for over a century.  The government is by far the most responsible for our current economic mess.  The lobbyists of big business (the johns) wouldn’t have any place to spend their money if politicians weren’t pimping themselves out.  Those lobbyists are often the ones who write campaign finance law and regulations.

It’s simple.  If big business didn’t think it was going to get something out of it, why would it donate so much money to politicians?  And more particularly, why did it give so much to Obama?

Let’s hope that if the Republicans do get some power back, they don’t blow it this time.

VDH for president.

While I was at it, I ran across a definition of music that I’d written many years ago, when a professor essentially forced me to do it, even though I thought it was an impossible task.  For the record, I still think it’s an impossible task.  But, for your entertainment and derision, and because I can’t think of anything better to post today, here it is:

Music is sound, created by a human being or surrogate (such as a computer programmed by a human), designed to be heard and understood at some level other than language. It isn’t just explicitly referential sound effects (as in the work of a foley artist for film). It isn’t a more or less accidental result of some other process, whose main purpose isn’t the creation of sound (as in the sweetly purring motor that is “music” to the mechanic’s ears). It is sound created primarily to be experienced as sound, designed to he heard without a specific extra-musical meaning attached to its elements. (This doesn’t mean that a given composition can’t have a program assigned by the composer to some element or other. It does mean that there is no automatic understanding of extra-musical meaning built into the “musical language” itself.) Its closest linguistic analog is poetry, as opposed to prose. Its closest physical motion analog is dance, as opposed to athletics of a team or solo nature. Music itself is neither language nor dance, though it partakes of certain similarities, having to do with the ways that events are organized temporally.

If communication requires a shared language with clear definitions for terms, music is NOT communication. It is possible to listen to a language that one does not know, recognize that it is a language, and yet understand nothing that was said, not even emotional overtones or context. In such cases, the only thing that is communicated is that no communication is taking place, beyond the fact that someone is trying unsuccessfully to communicate! When we listen to a musical style whose basic precepts escape us, we usually still know it’s music, or at least that it was intended to be.

Different kinds of music depend on different kinds of listening on the part of a presumed audience. Therefore, except in the most general of terms, no single kind of listening can be termed “musical listening”, without reference to the particular type of music being heard.

If you enjoy this sort of philosophical wool-gathering, you can find more of it here, on another site that I haven’t been maintaining much lately…  probably because I have little that’s new to add to the topic, that I haven’t already written and posted there.

The year is 1865. The Civil War finally comes to an end and the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution officially abolishes slavery.

For awhile, things looked pretty good for freed slaves. Just a year after the Civil War ended, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, conferring citizenship and equal rights for black people. A few months later, Congress approved the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing due process and equal protection under the law to all citizens.

Two years after the Civil War, in 1867, Congress passed Reconstruction Acts. The status of the Negro was the focal problem of Reconstruction. Though slavery had been abolished the white people of the South were determined to keep the Negro in his place, socially, politically, and economically. Enter the notorious “Black Codes.” These codes were regarded as a revival of slavery in disguise. The first such body of statutes was enacted in the state of Mississippi in November 1865.

That same year in Tennessee, a group of ex-Confederate soldiers formed the KKK, a group of domestic terrorists with a focused objective: to intimidate freed former slaves and their white supporters. Klan terrorism succeeded in preventing African-Americans from using their newly won rights. The Klan’s aim was to prevent African-Americans from voting, getting an education, competing for jobs and owning property.

By 1869, Congress approved the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteeing African Americans the right to vote.

Congress approved the Civil Rights Act in March of 1875 and by 1883 it was overturned. On October 15, the Supreme Court declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. The court declared that the Fourteenth Amendment forbids states, but not citizens from practicing discrimination.

From 1870 to 1895, many blacks gained elective office throughout the Nation, but outbreaks of violence against blacks in the South became more and more common.

It wasn’t long before America’s cities were over-flowing with former slaves and their extended families. They were migrating north to seek employment opportunities in industrial cities and to escape racism, and violence. The Great Migration from the south to north began around 1915. More than 4 million blacks –former farmers and field workers became bell hops, butlers, maids, doormen, cooks, and nannies–they shined shoes and cleaned toilets. They attended schools—many started businesses or became teachers and by 1920, African American writers, poets and artists emerged in a period of creativity known as the Harlem Renaissance. Black people started to realize the American Dream came not only in white–but black and shades of gray, as well.

Meanwhile, the KKK was raging a lynching war on Negroes in the south and Margaret Sanger and friends were devising an evil plan of their own. She was a staunch believer in eugenic controls to enforce what she called “race hygiene.” She associated with known racists and in 1926 she was the guest speaker at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Silverlake, New Jersey.

In Margaret Sanger’s book The Pivot of Civilization, (published 1922), she also called for the elimination of “human weeds,” for the segregation of “morons, misfits, and maladjusted,” and for the sterilization of “genetically inferior races.

In 1939, Sanger’s NEGRO PROJECT was initiated. The plan was simple-get rid of black people. Kill them off by limiting the growth of the population by abortion and sterilization

She knew that some blacks would figure out their sinister plot so it was decided by Sanger to take the plan to the clergy and charismatic members the black community to have them deliver the death message to their congregations.

In a letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble Sanger stated, “We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population. And the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

Notice that Sanger said the ministers should be “hired.” There are many black ministers, politicians and community organizers today who support abortion, Sanger’s form of ethnic cleansing–most of them are still “hired.” They have sold their souls for “30 pieces of silver.”

Margaret Sanger went on to become the founder of Planned Parenthood an organization that makes most of its blood money by killing children—especially black children.

Abortion providers are still being located for the most part in black neighborhoods and are still delivering the same old message–that black, poor children, living in urban areas–are not worthy of life. America would be a better place without black people.

The KKK brutally killed about 3500 black people since it began in 1865—Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood is responsible for the more than 17 million black deaths since 1973.

Every day more than 5000 babies are slaughtered by the blades of the abortion butchers—decapitated, ripped apart…killed.

How can America say we are better than the regimes of the Holocaust, Darfur, Sudan or China if we allow the butchering of America’s innocent children to continue?

This is Black History Month. Let’s remember why the killing began and then vow in Jesus’ name to end it…

Problem 1: A Stifling Approach and Sweeping Caricatures

For all the rhetoric about desiring an honest dialogue and inviting criticism as “a gift” (13, 25), McLaren’s actual approach to argumentation makes probing conversation more difficult. When he positions himself as a martyr (243) and equates attacks on him with attacks on the abolitionists (87), it hardly encourages disagreement. In fact, he ends the book by referencing the first-century Jewish rabbi Gamaliel who famously advocated a “wait and see” approach to the new Christian movement (242ff.). The idea being: let’s give McLaren a break and just see how things turn out. That’s one approach, and appropriate in some situations (though Luke never actually commends Gamaliel). But the apostles never advocated a “wait and see” approach with false teachers in their midst. There’s a time to wait and a time to correct, reprove, and rebuke, (2 Tim. 2:25; 4:2; Titus 1:9).

It’s also hard to engage in conversation when McLaren paints such an unflattering picture of those he imagines will oppose him. Traditionalists, he argues, approach Scripture the way they do so they won’t get fired from their jobs and so the “love gifts” will keep flowing in. Insiders “who depend on the constitutional system [of reading the Bible] for their salary and social status will be unlikely to question it and equally likely to defend it passionately” (80). This is grossly unfair. If you are serious about receiving critique, it doesn’t help to position yourself as a martyr all the while slashing and burning the opposition to whom you have indiscriminately imputed the worst possible motives.

No group can exist without a devil, McLaren says at one point (175). This is probably true. In which case I suggest the best devil is the devil. But for McLaren, the devil appears to be fundamentalist conservatives.

Case in point, this description of the Christian community in the 1980s and 1990s:

A large number of both Protestant and Catholic leaders aligned with a neoconservative political ideology, trumpeting what they called “conservative family values,” but minimizing biblical community values. They supported wars of choice, defended torture, opposed environmental protection, and seemed to care more about protecting the rich from taxes than liberating the poor from poverty or minorities from racism. They spoke against big government as if big was bad, yet they seemed to see big military and big business as inherently good. They wanted to protect unborn human life inside the womb, but didn’t seem to care about born human life in slums or prisons or nations they considered enemies. They loved to paint gay people as a threat to marriage, seeming to miss the irony that heterosexual people were damaging marriage at a furious pace without any help from gay couples. They consistently relegated females to second-class status, often while covering up for their fellow males when they fell into scandal or committed criminal abuse. They interpreted the Bible to favor the government of Israel and to marginalize Palestinians, and even before September 11, 2001, I feared that through their influence Muslims were being cast as the new scapegoats, targets of a scary kind of religious inspired bigotry. (7)

I have no problem critiquing the uneasy marriage of evangelicals and the Republican Party, but no conservative Christian would recognize himself in McLaren’s caricature. This description displays the same emotional badgering and intellectual bankruptcy that we find today in those on the right who think Obama is the anti-Christ and every liberal is a clandestine Bolshevik.

But McLaren writes like this all the time. For example, he describes those who haven’t entered the “postmodern transition” as “institutional children of the era of Sir Isaac Netwon, the conquistadors, colonialism, the Enlightenment, nationalism and capitalism” (8). Really? Are we that bad? I don’t think most people even know about the conquistadors, except maybe that they got trounced for a while on the tag-team circuit in the WWF.

And we haven’t even gotten to his description of exclusivists who believe conscious faith in Jesus Christ is necessary for a saving relationship with God. These sort of people use John 14:6 like a “revolver” (212). They are “inherently anxious,” “vulnerable to paranoia,” and intent on ridding the world of everyone they disagree with (212-13). “Ultimately, then, your group is normative and belongs here; others are anomalies and don’t belong. They don’t really have the same right to exist that you do.” Has anyone ever used John 14:6 to argue that non-Christians don’t have a right to exist?

McLaren’s not finished. He says that in this exclusivist mindset the only options are: (a) convert and eliminate otherness, (b) colonize and dominate, (c) ignore and exclude, (d) persecute and shame, or (e) cleanse the world through mass murder. I’m not making this up. You can find the breakdown on page 213. Why not say “Offer the bread of life that they might experience forgiveness of sin and enjoy God forever”? I can’t tell if McLaren thinks he is describing actual people and positions or if the “them” for him are so heinous that he can’t imagine describing them in any other way. Either way, the demonizing hardly invites ongoing dialogue.

Problem 2: Internal Inconsistencies

As the book unfolded, I felt like I was watching the inner struggle between good cop McLaren and bad cop. He starts out by saying he only wants to ask questions not make statements (18). But then he often makes statements like “this much is unmistakably clear…” (54). So he is on a quest or has he arrived? He is asking questions or making declarations?

Similarly, McLaren starts and ends the book with a conciliatory tone, urging his followers to be respectful and avoid controversy. Even though McLaren sees himself as farther along on the quest, he argues that every rung on the ladder is good because they all lead upward (237). He is careful not to portray himself as having it all figured out and everyone before him as benighted fools (27). This is good cop McLaren.

But then in the middle of the book there is a whole lot of bad cop, so much so that it is hard to really believe he thinks evangelical theology is anything other than oppressive barbarism. People who read Genesis in the traditional way have been “brainwashed.” The God of evangelicalism is the “dread cosmic dictator of the six-line Greco-Roman framework” (48). This deity—the one that saves sinners from the fall and punishes unbelievers in hell—“is an idol, a damnable idol” (65). We have a “tribal and violent God, a rather flattened view of Jesus, and a domesticated understanding of the gospel” (161). We worship an “ugly” God (102), McLaren explains, and our exclusivism makes him “want to cry, groan, or scream” (223).

At times, McLaren talks like all he wants is a chance to explore his theology in peace. He doesn’t mind us doing our thing, so let him do his. But 200 pages of the book tell a different story. Our view of God is, in his mind, dreadfully, tragically wrong. Of course, he is free to form his own opinions, whether I like them or not. I just wish he didn’t try to claim the high “I’m not judging you” ground. Mild-mannered McLaren knows how to go for the jugular.

Problem 3: Insistence on a Borrowed Story Line

Almost everything in the book depends on the assertion that the traditional biblical story line is a Greco-Roman perversion. And almost no argument in the book is less well-founded.

McLaren asserts that the six line Greco-Roman narrative (Eden, fall, condemnation, salvation, heaven, hell) is to blame for just about everything that’s ever gone wrong in the church and in the Western world in general. Thankfully, McLaren says, this isn’t the biblical story line at all. This is merely a parody of the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. They too had a six-line story: platonic ideal/being, fall into cave of illusion, Aristotelian real/becoming, salvation, Platonic ideal, Greek hades. So, as you can see the story we’ve been telling is nothing but an unwitting copycat of the Greeks.

I don’t know where to even begin with such a tangled mess of assumptions. Would any Plato or Aristotle scholar sum up their thought like this, much less mash the two philosophers together? And would anyone in the Greco-Roman world have articulated their worldview in this way? McLaren never proves this. Nor does he ever demonstrate, even if this was the story, how the Christians stole it, other than saying baldly that we did. McLaren’s six-line Greco-Roman story looks like something you come up with after one semester of Western Philosophy.

It gets worse. McLaren goes on to pit the Jewish Elohim versus the Greek Theos. Bad Theos, unlike the good Elohim, is the Platonic god who “loves spirit, state, and being and hates matter, story, and becoming” (42). So, argues McLaren, when we talk about the Fall we are on an unconscious level using the Greco-Roman story and reliving its fears of becoming (43). This is so bizarre as to make a response nearly impossible. How do we argue against something we are all doing unconsciously even though no one in our churches has ever heard of this, can make sense of it, or has any inclination for it? Not to mention that you’ll find no responsible theologian in the evangelical world who thinks in the dualistic categories McLaren supposes.

What you can find, however, is a lot of process theologians from the last century thinking in the categories McLaren does. For all the deconstruction of the supposed Greco-Roman myth, McLaren is the one, in the end, who fails to escape his own intellectual biases.

Problem 4: An Evolutionary Lens

Refuting the alleged Greco-Roman narrative is the first step in McLaren’s attempt to bury old Christianity. The second step is seeing religion through an evolutionary lens. This happens in a number of ways. For example, McLaren appropriates Harvey Cox’s story of progression which goes from the Age of Faith (marked by vitality and fruitfulness) to the Age of Belief (marked by control and the persecution of heretics) to the Age of the Spirit (where a new faith for the twenty-first century is born). I’ll give you one guess where McLaren thinks we are and where we need to go.

In the book’s conclusion, McLaren employs another evolutionary model. This time our religious quest moves through seven stages: survival, security, power, independence, individuality, honesty, and ubuntu (an African word for peace). McLaren and his followers are traveling in the honesty stage (because they question current systems), while the rest of us are stuck somewhere back down the road. To be fair, McLaren bends over backward not to sound haughty about this. But the fact remains: he considers our emphasis on personal salvation, systematic theology, and divine sovereignty to be less enlightened and less evolved (233).

Most troubling, McLaren uses the evolutionary model to discount parts of the Bible he doesn’t like. Though God himself has not changed, he argues, our ancestors’ understandings of God have matured. In particular, we see in Scripture the evolution of God’s uniqueness, ethics, universality, agency, and character. This approach to Scripture allows McLaren to dismiss a story like the Flood, which he finds “profoundly disturbing.” He cannot “defend the view of God in the Noah story as morally acceptable, ethically satisfying, and theologically mature” (110). But he doesn’t have to defend it because in our stage of maturity, McLaren claims, we now know God is not blood-thirsty, capricious, and vengeful. In fact, the story of baby Moses floating helplessly down the Nile suggests that people were beginning to understand that God identified with the weak and is no longer to be thought of as a might potentate (110).

There are too many problems here to even mention: 1) God kills all firstborn sons of the Egyptians a few chapters later, so how is he no longer a mighty potentate? 2) Come to think of it, God pours out his wrath in almost every book of the Bible after this, including the very last one. 3) Jesus and the apostles quote from the Old Testament indiscriminately, without any hint that they considered some parts of God’s revelation more evolved than others. 4) How does the evolutionary hypothesis account for repeated references to God’s longsuffering love and mercy in the Old Testament? The “good” God is in the Bible from start to finish, right alongside the “bad” God. 5) No first century Jew, including Jesus himself–Jesus of the “don’t erase a jot or tittle”–would have tolerated such an approach to Holy Scripture. When McLaren can say with a straight face that the Jews did not tolerate idols because “idols freeze one’s understanding of God in stone” (111) the shark has been officially jumped. This is not even an attempt to understand the Bible on its own terms. With the evolutionary lens, McLaren has simply created a one-sided cartoon God who looks and behaves as he wants him to. The spirit of Marcion lives on.

Problem 5: Baffled By the Bible

I haven’t said much about McLaren’s doctrine of Scripture because he doesn’t say much he hasn’t said before. He thinks the Bible is very special and has a unique role. But he does not think it is internally consistent nor the word of God (81). It is inspired in the sense that is inspires (83). It is not to be read as a legal constitution but as a community library. God’s revelation happens as we enter the text together (91). We’ve heard these sorts of arguments before and tried to address them in Why We’re Not Emergent. D.A Carson and Michael Wittmer did so as well.

But one new idea deserves brief mention. McLaren employs the book of Job in defense of his community library metaphor. Job, you’ll recall, has long speeches by Job, his “friends,” and finally God. So, McLaren asks, how can all of these speeches be the very words of God? They don’t even agree with each other, so how do we make sense of Job? If we read the Bible as a constitution, McLaren posits, there’s no easy answer to this dilemma. Actually there is. We simply understand the book as a whole. Does McLaren the former English teacher really think he’s got traditionalists on the ropes here? It is not hard to understand that in a book like Job with competing speeches the point of the story is not necessarily found in what each character offers as advice. Every word is the word of God. But the applicability of these words is determined by the context and their role in the larger narrative. Or does McLaren really get confused and wonder if he should listen to Herod and Pilate just because the gospel writers quote them?

Problem 6: The Liberal Lens

Sincere evangelical Christians can disagree on politics. A few issues are clear matters of right and wrong. But most political issues call for prudential judgments. So the fact that McLaren is a political liberal does not make him un-Christian in any way. But when his liberal political beliefs equal Christianity (at least the new kind), that’s a problem.

For McLaren the peaceable kingdom is all about left-wing causes: nuclear weapons engineers being redeployed into green energy, health care coverage for all, attention to the growing ecological crisis (63, 68). In one section, McLaren envisions a more enlightened world in the future, a kind of shalom-utopia, where all conflicts are negotiated peacefully, people no longer eat meat, and we don’t use fossil fuels (106). The real important issues for God’s people include: global climate change, peak oil prices, endangered species, sustainable economies, Muslim claims to the Temple Mount, and justice for non-Jews in Israel.

McLaren’s politics are nothing if not apoplectic. Describing from the future what transpired through our use of fossil fuels, McLaren writes “They felt their personal comfort, convenience, and transportation needs justified toxifying the planet and throwing the climate into imbalance, which as we all know resulted in billions of deaths and millions of extinctions” (107). Elsewhere he laments that we’ve burned the rainforest, covered the earth with cement, and created enclaves of prosperity while leaving most of the world behind in deprivation (231-32). The kingdom is a left-wing political kingdom. Pacifists, vegans, and apocalyptic climatologists are almost certainly walking in the way of Jesus. Meat-eating, pro-Israel, just war, petroleum engineers probably aren’t.

McLaren is not a moral relativist who thinks anything goes. He does not believe every belief about God is fine as long as it’s sincere (208). He very definitely believes there are right ways and wrong ways to live. The right way just happens always to be on the left.

Problem 7: A Barn Full of Strawmen

McLaren excels at knocking down arguments no one holds. So again we learn that the Bible is not a divinely dictated science textbook (68) and that God is not a puppet master or divine chess master or a machine operator pulling levers (196). One can’t help but wonder if McLaren has ever read an evangelical treatment on the inspiration of Scripture or a Reformed work on divine sovereignty. These caricatures have been put to rest numerous times and for hundreds of years. If McLaren doesn’t know better, he should.

The best/worst strawmen are found in the field of history. Although the footnotes occasionally provide a little nuance, McLaren’s general approach to history is to move from hyperbole to generality to indictment. So the history of the Western world is: slavery, anti-Semitism, colonialism, genocide, chauvinism, homophobia, environmental plunder, the Inquisition, witch burning, and apartheid. To make matters worse, this list is the product of a constitutional understanding of the Bible and/or the Greco-Roman storyline (85). The age of Christendom is never told as the story of sacrifice, cultural advancement, scientific breakthrough, artistic excellence, and moral uplift. It is, for McLaren, always about the extinction of native peoples, the subordination of women, sending six million Jews to the ovens, and dropping atomic bombs (231).

McLaren’s strawman view of history is essential to his theology and ethics. The past, as he sees it, has been a huge disaster of hate and oppression. This past is due in large part to the wrong kind of Christianity. We will keep repeating these mistakes unless we get a new kind of Christianity (19). Hyperbole to generality to indictment.

Problem 8: Missing the Trees for the Forest

To his credit, McLaren includes a lot of Scripture in his argument. He even deals with specific passages and walks through different books of the Bible. This is good. The problem: McLaren hovers above the text with one eye closed and blinders on.

Genesis, for McLaren, is about how blessing triumphs. It’s about human foolishness and divine faithfulness. It’s not about what he calls the six-line Greco-Roman story line (54). But McLaren does not deal with the flood, the curses of the Abrahamic promise, God’s sovereignty in choosing the patriarchs, or even mentioned the covenants. He’s after a general theme and doesn’t want to be bothered by the particulars that could upset his thesis.

Similarly, McLaren concludes Exodus is about God getting involved with and siding with the oppressed, the vulnerable, the downtrodden, working for their liberation (57). All that is true, but McLaren admits to skipping over “a hundred fascinating—and at times troubling—details” (57). He doesn’t mention the Israelites are liberated so they can worship the one true God, or that God reveals himself as a jealous God, or that God’s hardens Pharaoh’s heart for his own glory. For McLaren, Exodus is about liberation. That’s all.

Time after time, McLaren gives the illusion of dealing scrupulously with the text, but in actuality he is skating across the surface. So you don’t hear McLaren talk about the essential role faith, even propositional faith, plays in the gospels (Mark 1:15; John 8:24; 20:31). You don’t hear him talk about the keys that open or close access to the kingdom (Matt. 16:19), or the curses Jesus utters (Matt. 23; 11:21-24), or the parables of judgment (Matt. 25), or the fact that Jesus explicitly mentions outsiders (Mark 4:11) and teaches repeatedly that some get in and some don’t (Matt. 7:12-27).

McLaren will talk at length about 1 Corinthians and how the aim of the church is love. But you don’t hear him deal with church discipline in chapter 5, or the centrality of the resurrection in chapter 15, or Christ as a stumbling block in chapter 1, or the command to flee sexual immorality in chapter 6, or the warnings against idolatry in chapter 10.

McLaren can give a passable synopsis of Romans, but then when you dig into the text you realize he’s putting Paul’s letters into McLaren Categories. Thus, the new life in Christ is not about personal holiness but living as agents of God’s restorative justice (150). Romans 14-16 means don’t judge on another because love is the only universal policy (155). Paul’s anguish over his hell-bound kinsmen becomes a sadness that they are “not experiencing the ‘no condemnation and no separation’ of the kingdom of God (152, emphasis mine). Divine predestination and reprobation in chapter 9 tails off by suggesting Paul wasn’t completely comfortable with his own solution.

The devil’s in the details, and there are a lot of details McLaren misses. He argues that Revelation 21-22 gives a beautiful picture of God’s openness. There’s no condemnation, he says, because the doors to the city are still open and the Spirit and the bride say “Come” (286). Has McLaren not read 21:8 where the wicked are assigned their portion in the lake that burns with fire?

He uses Acts 17 and the sermon on Mars Hill to show that we are all God’s children, with no “us” and “them” anymore. But he fails to mention that Paul was provoked in his spirit to the city full of idols, commanded the people to repent, and warned of a fixed day of coming judgment. And when McLaren takes apart John 14:6 bit by bit, trying to prove that this text has “absolutely nothing” to say about the pluralism question, he never considers that the purpose of John’s gospel is to get people to believe in Jesus (John 20:31) and that Jesus himself often warns of the consequences of not believing in him (3:18, 36; 6:29, 53; 8:24).

The strangest bit of exegesis, however, is back in Genesis. I knew A New Kind of Christianity would be tough sledding for me when I heard the Fall described as “a classic coming-of-age story, filled with ambivalence—a childhood lost, an adulthood gained” (51). Never mind the descent into sin that unfolds in Genesis 4-11, never mind Romans 5:12-21, never mind Ephesians 2:1-3, never mind the curses and banishment from the garden, the Fall is really “the first stage of ascent as human beings progress from the life of hunter-gatherers to the life of agriculturalists and beyond” (50). To be fair, McLaren acknowledges the presence of sin in the world, but in his theology there is no Fall, no original sin, no inherited guilt. Genesis 3 is about a loss of innocence and a journey into maturity. With this interpretation as the first building block, it’s no wonder McLaren’s theology is optimistic about human potential for doing the right thing and devoid of any notion of substitutionary atonement. When sin is “ultimately a refusal to grow” and not ultimately an offense against God, you’re going to wind up with a new kind of Christianity (238).

Problem 9: Canon Within a Canon

McLaren believes strongly that Jesus Christ is the center of biblical revelation, the hinge on which all else turns. This is obviously true, but not in the way McLaren understands it. It’s true that all Scripture points to Christ and that God reveals himself to us fully and finally in Christ, but this does not mean the gospels trump other parts of the Bible. But this is what the centrality of Christ means in McLaren’s interpretive grid. Therefore, exclusivism and hell, even if they pop up in parts of Revelation, can’t be accepted because that’s not the type of God McLaren thinks we see in Christ in the gospels (115, 118).

McLaren spends the better part of one chapter countering Mark Driscoll’s line about not wanting a Jesus he can beat up (he also takes on John MacArthur in a different chapter). Driscoll argues that in Revelation “Jesus is a prize fighter” who makes people bleed. Granted, this may not be the most felicitous turn of a phrase, but Driscoll is right: the Jesus of Revelation is a conquering warrior. According to McLaren, though, Revelation is “literature of the oppressed” and only means to remind the suffering church that the way of Jesus is the right way and will triumph (123-24). True, Revelation was an encouragement to the oppressed not to give up. But the encouragement was found in the assurance that faithful martyrs would be avenged (6:10). There’s simply no way to make Revelation into a non-violent book with a non-violent Jesus. The wicked don’t flee from the wrath of the Lamb because he wants to hug them (6:16).

Homosexuality provides another example of McLaren’s canon within a canon. In addition to arguing that homosexuality is acceptable because the Ethiopian eunuch, the “sexually other,” was baptized—a strange argument that presumes homoerotic behavior is no more a choice than physical castration—McLaren suggests: “If Jesus’s life and example are simply textual data on equal par with Leviticus, and if Jesus can make no claim to be Lord and teach over Paul, then perhaps the conventional approach wins” (179). What a masterfully confounding sentence. Who wants to reduce Jesus’ life and example to textual data? No one. And yet, all we know about Jesus’ life and example comes from textual data. McLaren’s choice is no choice at all. In both instances—with Leviticus and with the life of Jesus—we are dealing with divine self-disclosure in the pages of Scripture. To be sure, Christ shows us God more clearly than Leviticus, but the life of Jesus does not erase other books of the Bible.

Similarly, who doesn’t think Jesus is Lord over Paul? But that’s not the issue. The gospels do not matter more than other books. All of Scripture is breathed out by God (2 Tim. 3:16). More to the point, if McLaren wants to pit the apostolic teaching against the life of Jesus, he won’t have anything left in the second column. Virtually everything we know about Jesus comes from the inspired apostolic testimony about him. Besides the promise of John 16:12-15 is that the Holy Spirit will come and lead the disciples into all truth. Jesus doesn’t promise new kinds of Christianities two thousand years later. He promises that the Spirit will speak only what he hears and reveal the fullness of who Jesus was and what he accomplished.

One last comment on this business about a canon within the canon. McLaren’s theology depends on cherrypicking the books and themes he likes best. Why develop your narrative of the Bible based on Genesis, Exodus, and Isaiah? Why not Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus? Is it because Leviticus is about laws and holiness? Why not Deuteronomy, 1 Kings, and Jeremiah? At the very least, don’t skip the second half of Exodus when it doesn’t fit the paradigm, or the parts in Isaiah that speak of God’s judgment and Christ’s atonement for sins. And why is 1 Corinthians the model for the purpose of the church? 1 Corinthians a fine book, but why not Ephesians or something from the Pastoral Epistles or Hebrews? It’s hard not to conclude that although McLaren makes an effort to find chapters to prove his points, he’s not terribly concerned to take the whole counsel of Scripture into account.

Problem 10: No End In Sight

McLaren rejects a linear view of history. He does not believe in a single fixed end point (194). He does not hold to a “soul-sort” theology where some people go to heaven and some people go to hell (195). He does not believe “eternal life” refers to life that is eternal. He does not believe in future condemnation. At the final “evaluation” we can be sure God will not open our brains to look for certain beliefs. What he will do is look for signs of Christlikeness. Lest this sound like a frightening ordeal, McLaren assures us the part of a person’s life worth remembering will be saved and raised to a new beginning, while all that is unloving will be burned away and forgotten (204). Although we can refuse to participate in the kingdom now, we trust that God’s grace will prove more durable than our stupidity (201). In the end those opposed to God in this life will not be condemned but gently converted until God will be all in all, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well (205).

At this point, the old kind of Christian realizes he and the new kind of Christian do not share the same Christianity. We can quote verses like John 5:29 where Jesus says those who have done evil will go to the resurrection of judgment. We can remind folks that Paul talked of a “fixed day” of judgment in Acts 17 and that Jesus will come again in the same way he went into heaven (Acts 1:11). We can point out that McLaren’s view on “eternal life” and a tame final “evaluation” would have been bizarre to early church fathers, even those untainted by Augustine’s supposed corruption. We can reference verse after verse about wrath or judgment or the lake of fire and point out that the Jewish God was a jealous God who demanded universal worship and obedience. We can do all this and more and we’ll still be talking past each other. Call it Greco-Roman, blame Constantine or the Enlightenment, find a canon within a canon, or resort to an evolutionary approach—if you want to find a way to rid the Bible of the uncomfortable parts of wrath and judgment, you’ll find a way.

Conclusion: We’ve Seen This Before

Well, 6000 words later, what is possibly left to say? Hopefully not much. It would not sadden me in the least if I never talked or wrote about the emergent movement again. I don’t think any of us will be talking about the “great emergence” twenty years hence, let alone a hundred. All that remains is to highlight one final irony.

For all the talk of being new (xi) and at the same time ancient (255), McLarenism is neither. It is old fashioned liberalism. McLaren, despite his historical plundering, has no right to claim he is in tradition of Martin Luther because he finds “sustaining inner strength,” or in the tradition of the Wesleys because “our hearts can be ‘strangely warmed’” (227). This is like saying I’m in the tradition of Ignatius because I have strong convictions. It doesn’t work. McLaren stands in the tradition of Ritschl, Harnack, Rauschenbush, and Whitehead, plain and simple.

In their book 20th-Century Theology, Grenz and Olson, no rabid fundamentalists they, describe classic liberalism in five points:

1. Liberals believe doctrine needs to develop to meet the needs of contemporary thought.

2. Liberals emphasize the need to reconstruct traditional beliefs and reject the authority of tradition and church hierarchy.

3. Liberals focus on the practical and ethical dimensions of Christianity.

4. Liberals seek to base theology on something other than the absolute authority of the Bible.

5) Liberals drift toward divine immanence at the expense of transcendence.

McLaren fits each of these points like a glove. H. Richard Niebuhr’s famous description of liberalism has not lost its relevance: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of Christ without a cross.”

The message of McLarenism is pretty simple: God is love and wants everyone to be kind and inclusive and care for the poor and the environment. This is what Jesus was like, and we should be like Jesus. This is, of course, not wrong in so far as it goes. The Liberal/McLaren emphasis on the kingdom is right, their concern for the “other” is right, much of their ethics is right. But McLarenism, like liberalism, cannot be right. It has its emphases all out of proportion, its right statements thrown out of whack by all that is missing. In McLarenism there is no original sin, no wrath, no hell, no creation-fall-redemption, no definite future, no second coming that I can see, no clear statement on the deity of Christ, no mention of vicarious substitution or God’s holiness or divine sovereignty, no ethical demands except as they relate to being kind to others, no God-offendedness, no doctrine of justification, no unchanging apostolic deposit of truth, no absolute submission to the word of God, nary a mention of faith and worship, no doctrine of regeneration, no evangelistic impulse to save the lost, and nothing about God’s passion for his glory. This is surely a lot to leave out.

McLaren’s Christianity is not new and certainly not improved. I don’t believe you can even call it Christianity. It is liberalism dressed up for the 21st century. We can only hope this wave of liberalism fades as dramatically as did the last.

I suppose the only question left unanswered is how many Christian colleges and universities will be inviting McLaren to speak in chapel this year.

In keeping with the spirit in which this degree will be awarded I’d like to propose some additional honorary degree candidates:

The Culinary Institute of America should nominate Hannibal Lechter for an Honorary Doctorate in the Culinary Arts for his “passionate dedication to exploring new culinary possibilities combining fava beans, chianti and human organs”.

The Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government should nominate Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for an Honorary Doctorate in International Development for their “unswerving commitment to world peace through open international trade and free exchange of technology”.

The USC School of Cinematic Arts should nominate Larry Flynt for an Honorary Doctorate in Film & Television Production for his “body of work celebrating group copulatory interpretive movement”.

The Cleveland Institute of Art should nominate Charles Manson for the Sharon Tate Honorary Doctorate in Biomedical Art/Interior Design for his “bold, fresh and daring integrated use of human blood as both interior design element, artistic-political statement, and Beatles tribute.”

Fuller Theological Seminary should nominate Madelyn Murray O’Hair for an Honorary Doctorate in Practical Theology for her “lifelong activism related to the subject of the theological equivalent of the unified field theory”.

The Claremont Graduate University, Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management should nominate Bernie Madoff for the P.T. Barnum Honorary Doctoral degree in Financial Engineering for his “proven commitment to wealth redistribution and contributions to the Obama model of economic justice”.

As for the University of Tennessee I only wish they had their tongues firmly planted in the esteemed Chancellor Cheek.  In light of recent disclosures concerning the reliability of anthropogenic global warming data the truth of this latest accolade for Al Gore is more bizarre than anything that could be imagined.

It’s really funny, almost.  And sad.

There is a too-large group of faculty at Christian universities who are more afraid of “fundamentalism” than they are of agnosticism, outright atheism and its secularist implications, or, most dangerous of all, simple Christian Leftism, which acts almost exactly like agnosticism or progressive secularism, and supports approximately the same social and political policies, but simply quotes scripture while doing it.

To those suffering from fear of it, “fundamentalism” equates to willful ignorance, stubborn resistance to fact, anti-intellectualism, blind faith, and probably barely suppressed violence in the defense of rigidly held values.  Most frightening of all, some “fundamentalists” appear to think that some things are actually true.

To the Left, of course, and the Christian Left is little different, nothing is really true.  Certainly nothing that can be stated in human language, anyway.  Everything is up for endless re-interpretation.  Not to mention re-interpretation of the re-interpretations.  There is always a way to tease a new meaning out of something whose meaning has been understood for centuries, or even millennia, and then simply replace the old meaning with the new, while claiming to be “faithful to the text.”  So Leftist Christian academics are busy finding support for diversity, multi-culturalism and affirmative action in the Old Testament, socialism and “anti-nationalism” in Luke, pacifism in the Sermon on the Mount, and abortion-on-demand and same-sex marriage in (apparently) “emanations of the penumbra” of the New Testament.  None of these things (with the possible exception of some strains of pacifism) were discovered in the Scripture by the previous 19 centuries of exegesis.

Why do these new meanings point in the direction favored by the secular-progressive left, in terms of social and political implications?   I think a case can be made that outcomes were chosen, and that interpretive methods were selected to support those outcomes.

So, to me, the real question is not why does the Christian Left tend to favor textual deconstruction and relativistic interpretations, thus aping the secular Left.  The real question, to me:  Why is the Christian academic Left  so enthusiastic about those outcomes listed above, so much that it is willing to distort its traditional hermeneutics into intellectual pretzels in order to prefigure the desired outcomes?

There are many possible answers.  I may suggest a few of them in a subsequent post.  But for now, I simply observe that the word “fundamentalism” is sometimes hurled as an epithet on some Christian campuses, in response to the suggestion that maybe the Bible simply means what it says (or at least that should be our first assumption until evidence and context prove otherwise).  Just as the new McCarthyism in politics starts by calling someone else a McCarthyite, the new “fundamentalists” these days are the Christian Left, for whom socialism, sustainability, diversity, climate change and same-sex marriage are the badges of “five point progressivism.”  And from their point of view, anything and anyone who challenges this new orthodoxy or its presumed intellectual underpinnings is dangerous, and probably a “fundamentalist.”

From where I sit, what the Left calls “fundamentalism,” these days, is simply historic, traditional Christianity.  Maybe “fundamentalists” should co-opt the word and make it into a badge of honor.  I’ll bet it would look good on a t-shirt.

But on too many Christian campuses today, “fundamentalist” is the new F-word.  It is used to stop conversation, and to intimidate voices that dissent from the emerging leftist orthodoxy.

And that’s fundamentally wrong.

American Jews have been the only definable well-to-do cohort over the past 40 years that has not moved to the Right, even though the evolution of the American Right has been in a frankly philo-Semitic direction—and among whose ranks come the most ardent non-Jewish supporters of the state of Israel in the world.

There are many interesting comments at the link above, but this, from Michael Medved, really got my attention.

For most American Jews, the core of their Jewish identity isn’t solidarity with Israel; it’s rejection of Christianity. This observation may help to explain the otherwise puzzling political preferences of the Jewish community explored in Norman Podhoretz’s book. Jewish voters don’t embrace candidates based on their support for the state of Israel as much as they passionately oppose candidates based on their identification with Christianity—especially the fervent evangelicalism of the dreaded “Christian Right.”

This political pattern reflects the fact that opposition to Christianity—not love for Judaism, Jews, or Israel—remains the sole unifying element in an increasingly fractious and secularized community. The old (and never fully realized) dream that Zionist fervor could weave together all the various ideological and cultural strands of American Jewry looks increasingly irrelevant and simplistic. In an era of budget plane flights and elegantly organized tours, more than 75 percent of American Jews have never bothered to visit Israel. The majority give nothing to Israel-related charities and shun synagogue or temple membership. The contrasting components of the American Jewish population connect only through a point of common denial, not through any acts of affirmation.

Imagine a dialogue between Woody Allen and a youthful, idealistic emissary of the Hasidic Chabad movement—who might well be the proud father of nine religiously devout children. Both the movie director and the Lubavitcher may be publicly identified as Jews, but they share nothing in terms of religious belief, political outlook, family values, or, for that matter, taste in movies. The one area where they find common ground—and differ (together) from the majority of their fellow citizens—is their dismissal of New Testament theology, with its messianic claims for Jesus.

Anyone who doubts that rejection of Jesus has replaced acceptance of Torah (or commitment to Israel) as the eekur sach—the essential element—of American Jewish identity should pause to consider an uncomfortable question. What is the one political or religious position that makes a Jew utterly unwelcome in the organized community? We accept atheist Jews, Buddhist Jews, pro-Palestinian Jews, Communist Jews, homosexual Jews, and even sanction Hindu-Jewish meditation societies. “Jews for Jesus,” however, or “Messianic Jews” face resistance and exclusion everywhere. In Left-leaning congregations, many rabbis welcome stridently anti-Israel speakers and even Palestinian apologists for Islamo-Nazi terror. But if they invited a “Messianic Jewish” missionary, they’d face indignant denunciation from their boards and, very probably, condemnation by their national denominational leadership. It is far more acceptable in the Jewish community today to denounce Israel (or the United States), to deny the existence of God, or to deride the validity of Torah than it is to affirm Jesus as Lord and Savior.

For many Americans, the last remaining scrap of Jewish distinctiveness involves our denial of New Testament claims, so any support for those claims becomes a threat to the very essence of our Jewish identity. Many Jews therefore view enthusiastic Christian believers—no matter how reliably they support Israel and American Jews—as enemies by definition. Rather than acknowledge the key role played by Christian Zionists (prominently including Harry Truman) in establishing and sustaining the U.S.-Israel alliance, liberal partisans love to invoke 2,000 years of bloody Christian anti-Semitism. Today, however, the echoes of that poisonous hatred, complete with seething contempt for the allegedly disloyal and manipulative -“Israel lobby” in American politics, turn up far more frequently in the newsrooms of prestige newspapers or the faculty lounges of Ivy League universities than they do in Baptist churches in Georgia or Alabama.

Nevertheless, the association of members of such churches with the Republican party has served to limit GOP progress with Jewish voters. President Reagan appealed powerfully to the Jewish community (as Podhoretz documents in his book), but one of the chief factors that prevented a significant, long-term partisan shift involved the increasing association of Christian conservatives with the Republican party. In 1992, Jewish voters deserted the Republicans in part because of the troubling record of the first President Bush on Israel but also in response to the prominent, passionate “culture war” speech at the Houston convention by “Pitchfork Pat” Buchanan—a rare conservative who combined support for Christian Right domestic issues with bitter hostility to the state of Israel.

The anti-Christian obsessions of American Jews lead not only to skewed perceptions of our true friends and enemies but also to anomalous definitions of “Jewish issues.” Much of the communal establishment insists, for instance, that their support of same-sex marriage and “abortion rights” expresses timeless Jewish values. Why and how? In 3,000 years of well-documented tradition prior to, say, 1970, there was not the slightest hint of any sort of endorsement of homosexual coupling. Moreover, Jewish law has always frowned upon abortion, authorizing the procedure only in extreme cases where the welfare of the mother is profoundly threatened.

The liberal belief that Jews should be pro-choice and pro–gay marriage has nothing to do with connecting to Jewish tradition and everything to do with disassociating from Christian conservatives. According to this argument, Catholic and evangelical attempts to “impose” their values on social issues represent a theocratic threat to American pluralism that has allowed Judaism to thrive. The one segment of the contemporary community least concerned with this purported menace is the Orthodox—the less than 10 percent of the Jewish population that gives nearly as disproportionate support to Republicans as their Reform, Conservative, and secular Jewish neighbors give to Democrats. The reason for this contrasting response goes beyond the Orthodox tendency to agree with conservative Christians on most social issues and relates to their much greater comfort with religiosity in general. The Orthodox feel no instinctive horror at political alliances with others who make faith the center of their lives.

Those who seek to liberate the bulk of American Jews from their reflexive and self-defeating liberalism must do more than show the logic of conservative thinking. They should recognize that Jews, like all Americans, vote not so much in favor of politicians they admire as they vote against causes and factions they loathe and fear. Jews fear the GOP as the “Christian party,” and as the sole basis of Jewish identity involves rejection of Christianity, Jews will continue to reject -Republicans and conservatism. Podhoretz poignantly describes the way many Jewish Americans have adopted liberalism as a substitute religion. A more positive, engaged attitude with our real religious tradition would lessen the resentment toward religious Christians and, in an era when even Albania, Moldova, and Iraq have built functioning multiparty democracies, introduce for the first time in nearly a century a true two-party system to the Jewish -community.

I found this simply a stunning assertion. My first impulse was to say that it could not be so simple. But I have been unable to marshal any serious argument to it. Jews don’t like the Right because the Right is likely to be Christian, and Jews cannot agree with Christians about anything that happened after the Maccabees, and not even about everything before that.  Add to that the historic persecution of Jews by Christians (though the USA has been by far the best place for Jews to live since the exile), and it may be simply a case of Jews failing to see who their true allies are.

And then there is this, from Jeff Jacoby:

Most American Jews, on the other hand, seem to have learned from an early age that to be Jewish is to be a liberal Democrat, no matter what. No matter that anti-Semitism today makes its home primarily on the Left, while in most quarters of the Right, hostility toward Jews has been anathematized. No matter that Israel’s worst enemies congregate with leftists, while its staunchest defenders tend to be resolute conservatives. No matter that Republicans support the Jewish state by far larger margins than Democrats do. No matter that on a host of issues—homosexuality, abortion, capital punishment, racial preferences, public prayer —the “Torah” of contemporary liberalism, as Podhoretz calls it, diverges sharply from the Torah of Judaism. As Why Are Jews Liberals? convincingly and depressingly demonstrates, the loyalty of American Jews to the Left has been unaffected by the failure of the Left to reciprocate that loyalty.

The Jewish predilection for ill-advised political choices isn’t new. The Bible describes the yearning of the ancient Israelites for a king and God’s warning that monarchy would bring them despotism and misery. Appoint a king, God has the prophet Samuel tell the people, and he will seize your sons and daughters, your fields and vineyards: “He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his servants. Then you will cry out in that day because of your king whom you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”

His warning fell on deaf ears: “Nevertheless, the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel, and they said, ‘No, but there shall be a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations.’”

The longing to “be like all the nations” is a recurring motif in Jewish history. Baal worshipers in the time of the prophets, Judean Hellenists in the Chanukah story, 19th-century assimilationist maskilim, Jewish socialists enthralled by Marx’s classless Utopia, modern post-Zionists in quest of a non-Jewish Israel—down through the ages, in one way or another, innumerable Jews have fought or fled from Jewish “otherness” and embraced ways of life or beliefs that promised to make them less distinctive. Given the cruelty and violence to which Jews were so often subjected, it is not surprising that many would seek to shed or neutralize their Jewishness.

Even in America, a haven of security and prosperity without parallel in the long Jewish Diaspora, many Jews wanted nothing to do with the old Jewish identity. There are stories, perhaps apocryphal, of Jewish men throwing their tefillin into the ocean as the ship bringing them to America came within sight of New York Harbor. “Because tefillin were something for the Old World,” explains a character in Dara Horn’s acclaimed 2002 novel, In the Image, “and here in the New World, they didn’t need them anymore.”

Apocryphal or not, there is no disputing that countless European Jewish immigrants to the goldene medina—the “golden land”—took advantage of their new circumstances to cast off the old faith. Or their children did. Or their grandchildren. As a result, Jews today are the least religious community in the United States. According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, only 16 percent of Jews attend religious services at least once a week, compared with 39 percent of Americans generally. Just 31 percent say religion is “very important” in their lives (vs. 56 percent of Americans).

Such data led Jonathan Sacks, Britain’s chief rabbi, to quote a comment made by the late hasidic troubadour Shlomo Carlebach after a lifetime of visiting American campuses: “I ask students what they are. If someone gets up and says, I’m a Catholic, I know that’s a Catholic. If someone says, I’m a Protestant, I know that’s a Protestant. If someone gets up and says, I’m just a human being, I know that’s a Jew.”

“Just-a-human-being” liberalism, secular and universalist—there is the dead end into which the flight from Jewish separateness has led so many American Jews. To call it a dead end is not to deny its allure. Much of liberalism’s appeal lay in making Jews feel good about themselves, secure in the conviction that they were part of a broad and enlightened mainstream. Liberalism freed them from the charge of parochial self-interest that had so often been leveled against Jews. It replaced the ancient, sometimes difficult burden of chosenness—the Jewish mission to live by God’s law and bring the world to ethical monotheism—with a more palatable and popular commitment to equality, tolerance, and “social justice.”

To be sure, loyalty to the Democratic party came naturally to Jews, with their inherited memories of a Europe in which emancipation had been a project of the Left and where reactionary anti-Semites had (usually) attacked from the Right. As Norman Podhoretz writes, that loyalty understandably intensified during World War II, when the most lethal enemy in Jewish history was ultimately destroyed by an alliance led by a liberal Democrat named Franklin Roosevelt.

But liberal Democrats no longer lead such alliances, and they heatedly oppose those who do. The Soviet Union was defeated not by Jimmy Carter, who urged his countrymen to shed their “inordinate fear of Communism,” but by Ronald Reagan, who labeled the USSR an “evil empire” and was denounced by the Left as a warmonger. Bill Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act, but it was George W. Bush who carried out that liberation in the face of scathing liberal hostility. Republicans constitute the party that sees the current conflict against global jihadists as the decisive struggle of our time, while the few Democrats who express that view—as Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman can testify—are scorned by their party’s liberal base.

FDR and Harry Truman are long gone, and so too is the muscular Democratic liberalism that defeated Adolf Hitler and brought the Holocaust to an end. To deal with the would-be Hitlers of our era—Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Jew-hating mullahs in Iran—-today’s Democrats counsel pacifism and appeasement and endless negotiation. These days it is the Right that calls for strong and decisive action against the enemies of the free world. Today the beleaguered Jewish state’s most unshakable American allies are Republican and conservative. Yet American Jews remain what they have been for so long: unshakably Democratic and liberal.

This liberalism isn’t rational. It isn’t sensible. It certainly isn’t good for the Jews.

But it is, as religions often are, deeply reassuring.

It is reassuring for liberal Jews to believe that all people are fundamentally decent and reasonable, and that all disputes can be settled through compromise and conciliation. It is reassuring to believe in a world in which nothing is ever solved by war, so that military force is unnecessary and expensive weapons systems are wasteful. It is reassuring to believe that America is a secular nation, that God and religion have no place in the public square, and that no debt of gratitude is owed to the Christians who created the extraordinary society in which American Jews have thrived. It is reassuring to believe that crime is caused by guns, that academia is the seat of wisdom, and that humanity’s biggest problem is global warming. It is reassuring to believe that compassion can be achieved by passing the right laws and that big government can create prosperity. It is reassuring to believe that tikkun olam—healing the world—is a synonym for the liberal agenda and that the liberal agenda flows directly from the teachings of Judaism.

Above all, it is reassuring to believe that Jews are no different from anyone else, that they are not called to a unique role in human events, and that the best way to be a good Jew is to be a conscientious citizen of the world. To be liberal, in short, is to be “like all the nations.” It is a seductive and comforting belief, and American Jews are far from the first to embrace it.

This is a pretty dramatic statement.  It’s bound to be controversial that Jews are acting, again, like they did in the Old Testament, when they got in so much trouble from failure to obey God.

I think I might agree, though.

h/t: Melody