harmonicminer

Previous posts have pointed up the huge problems in Mexico, and the very real danger that it is about to become a failed state. And the killers there aren’t just killing each other.

Mexico is getting out of control. While we should be sure not to make more out of this incident than it is, the killing of a US Consulate employee and her husband as well as the slaying of the wife of another consulate employee in Juarez is bad enough on its face and a sign that Mexico is having a difficult time curbing the drug violence ravaging the notoriously corrupt country.

Gunmen believed to be drug traffickers shot an American consulate worker and her husband to death over the weekend in the violence-racked border town of Ciudad Juárez, and killed the husband of another consular employee and wounded his two young children, the authorities said Sunday.Jorge Alberto Salcido Ceniceros, 37, the husband of an employee of the American Consulate in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, was killed in a drive-by shooting on Saturday in Ciudad Juarez.
Related

President Obama expressed outrage at the “brutal murders” and in a statement from the White House vowed to “work tirelessly” with Mexican law enforcement officials to bring the killers to justice.

We echo the president’s outrage while also acknowledging that Mexico is tip-toeing the tightrope of democracy and civility with a hungry, drug trade-infused anarchy waiting below for a fall.

It’s not looking good. And the fundamental facts of the nature of Mexican society, culture and government have much more to do with why the USA has been invaded by illegal aliens than any “structural unfairness” in the relationship of the two countries.

We probably can’t solve our problems here without helping them solve their problems there. But it will take a creative approach that is nevertheless hardheaded… two qualities not in evidence in Washington very often, and very rarely found in the same person, or policy.

The previous post in this series is here.

Yet another of the many archaeological indications of the Bible’s historicity is announced as Archaeological Discovery Supports Scripture

Israeli archeologist Eilat Mazar has reported an exciting discovery-evidence that newly unearthed fortifications in Jerusalem were built 3,000 years ago. Based on the age of pottery shards that she found at the site, Mazar believes that the fortifications were built by Solomon, just as described in the Old Testament. Of course that’s interesting news for Jews and Christians, but there’s a lot more to this than you might expect. As the Associated Press reported, “If the age of the wall is correct, the finding would be an indication that Jerusalem was home to a strong central government that had the resources and manpower needed to build massive fortifications in the 10th century B.C.”

That’s a direct contradiction to the views of some scholars who believe, as the AP puts it, “that David’s [and Solomon’s] monarchy was largely mythical and that there was no strong government to speak of in that era.”

No wonder that Mazar calls the wall “the most significant construction we have from First Temple days in Israel.” And if she’s right, we will have another link in the long chain of evidence that demonstrates the basic historical veracity of the Bible.

I don’t know about you… but this sort of thing simply makes me want to shout for joy, and gives me chills. It’s exciting.

At the same time, as Chuck Colson’s article points out at the link above, our belief isn’t based solely on external confirmation of specific data points in scripture, but also on the internal witness of the Scripture itself.  I can speak from my own experience that it was certain external aspects of the universe as described by science that first made me begin to take seriously some of the Bible’s claims.  But it wasn’t until I began to research the Bible on its own terms, and in its own context, that my confidence in the scripture was built. And it was built. It didn’t appear fully formed one day.

It continues to be built.

So, my opinion is that the primary value of external evidences  (archaeology, astronomy, other aspects of historical research, biology, etc.) is to suggest to skeptics that maybe just part of the Bible might be true, and make them curious enough to consider the rest.

The thing is, when you start to study it, read about the work of the best scholars, etc., you begin to realize you’re holding in your hands something utterly remarkable, and without precedent in your life.  And little by little, you begin to hear God speaking to you through it.  And so, in a sort of boot-strapping operation, you find that reading it leads you to God, who leads you to understand a bit more of it, which leads you back to God, who leads you to yet new understanding….  and so it goes.

It’s a lifetime activity.  You’ll never know all you need to know about the Bible, on the one hand, and on the other, what you have to know in order to seek God in it is remarkably little, just to start.

Not many books are suitable for beginners as well as the most advanced readers.

The next post in this series is here.

When an abortionist is killed by a crazy anti-abortion nutcase (which happens about once every decade), it makes big, big news, dominates the news for days, results in all kinds of editorials and dark pronouncements indicting Christians, talk radio, the political Right, the Republican party, and generally results in fulminations of all kinds.  But I’m willing to bet that most readers here have not heard that a  Jury Finds Michigan Man Guilty Who Shot Pro-Life Advocate Over Abortion Signs

A jury yesterday found guilty the man who shot pro-life advocate James Pouillon because he was upset with the graphic abortion signs he used when protesting abortion outside a local high school.

Apparently a murdered late-term abortionist is an object of public pity, virtually the loss of a national resource, but a murdered abortion protester is somewhere between routine and a big yawn.

Funny…  but I don’t recall hearing about this at the time it happened…  and I pay attention to a lot of the news.

Maybe I just missed it, but ABC, NBC, CBS and so on gave it a big play.  Somehow, I doubt it.

Maliki appears to have narrow edge in Iraqi elections

First results from Iraq’s parliamentary election showed the prime minister and his secular rival locked in an extremely tight contest amid fraud allegations by rival parties and a chaotic, unpredictable vote count.

Looks like Iraq and Florida have something in common.

The meta-message: Iraq has a good chance of “making it” as a democratic nation. That would have seemed an unbelievable pipe dream 20 years ago.

Why only “a good chance”? Because there are still forces that could destabilize Iraq sufficiently that an over-reaction into more authoritarian government would ensue. Iraq’s leaders will have to walk the (pretty narrow) line between being tough enough to suppress terrorism and attempts to violently subvert the democratic will, and leaving enough freedom and self-determination for markets to work, the economy to grow, and people to feel that they are largely in control of their lives, all radical departures from the Baath era.

The biggest test yet to come? A peaceful transfer of power between political foes, as the result of elections, always the defining characteristic of a modern democracy, and the thing which set the US apart from the world a couple of centuries ago.

George Bush is looking more like Harry Truman every day, though it will take awhile for the success (admittedly delayed) of his essential Iraq policy to redound to his credit.

I would give a lot to know what will be taught to Iraqi school children in 30 years about George W. Bush. If Iraq stays a democracy, it ought to be much more positive than the American (and European) Left would ever have dreamed.

Some of this material appeared in an earlier post, but I have some additional comments to make about it, so I’m reproducing the gist of it here.

I see the group-think phenomenon all the time, in the world of university faculty governance and general academic life. There are grandiloquently ill-defined buzz terms, common phrases and references, whose use sometimes seems to stop all thought or discussion, and anyone who questions their use, what they mean, why they matter, etc., is likely to be automatically marginalized. Since the higher levels of government are populated disproportionately by academics, this does not fill me with confidence about our government’s ability to keep an open mind, either.

Group-think results in failure to ask hard questions about the real effects of previous policy and perspectives, and confusion of action with effect.   (The busier we are, the more we must be getting done.)  Some people seem to think “meaning well” is enough, without regard to the actual effect of policy. I see people who, when confronted with the failure of previous policy, seem often to be reflexively in favor of even more of it, believing the real problem was that not enough of it was tried. Sometimes that’s true, but not nearly as often as they seem to think.

Signs that you’re succumbing to group-think:

1) You think it is practiced by the other side, not your side. Fair warning: when most people around you agree with you, it’s probably ludicrous of you to accuse the other side of group-think.

2) You don’t directly grapple with data from the “other side,” preferring to respond to specific data you don’t like with ideological generalization.  Your failure to either directly challenge the data, perhaps also to provide countervailing data, or else to include it in your understanding of a situation, is a clear sign.  You should either show that the data presented by the other side is wrong, or not representative, or include it in your perspective.

3) Your ability to talk about something is limited by your vocabulary, which is highly idiosyncratic and ideological in tone, yet you struggle to give clear definitions to terms you frequently use.   What is an “Islamic extremist”?  What is “diversity”?   What is “critical thinking”?  What is a “moderate”?  And so on.   If you find it difficult to express your meaning using alternate vocabulary, in a clear and unambiguous way, you may be “group-thinking”.

Educational institutions are famous for creating (or co-opting) buzz-terms, fancy sounding rhetoric that pretends to denote something new, when it either denotes the same old thing (which isn’t necessarily bad, but is certainly confusing and misleading), or much worse, it may denote nothing at all.  These terms tend to show up in promotional materials, and are usually used to try to make the claim that, “We’re not like those other schools, because we practice (insert buzz-term here).”   Definitions may even be provided, but they are likely to be more aspirational than operational; that is, they’ll sound nice, and seem to point to something good on the surface, but the definitions will not be something that can be used to decide if the institution is actually DOING the thing claimed in the buzz-term.  Mostly, this phenomenon is an example of the primacy of advertising copy over academic clarity.

When entire academic and/or administrative departments and/or councils are created to manage the implementation of the buzz-term, which still cannot be defined in an operational way (so that you can tell whether or not you’re actually doing it), a tragi-comedy of futile flailing around generally ensues, at considerable expense to the institution, not the least of which may be the lessening of the institution’s ability to carry out its basic mission, the one that existed before the creation of the buzz-terms and jargon.

Unfortunately, buzz-terms (reflecting a sort of “group think” when someone tries to “implement” them) are often chosen to hide as much as to reveal the intent that lies behind them.  For example, the word “diversity” was created at the moment when “quotas” became legally and socially less palatable.

I’ve been on academic “councils” that were tasked with implementing a program of (supply buzz term here).  When I have asked for a definition of the buzz-term, there have been embarrassed glances around the room, followed by someone offering me a definition in the institution’s advertising materials.  When I have asked how we can apply the definition to specific cases and data to see whether or not they exemplify the buzz-term, there has been more embarrassed silence, followed by multi-syllabic obfuscation and more buzz-terms.  That’s because the definition was more about how someone wanted to feel about something, i.e., it was aspirational, not about what the something actually was, i.e., an operational definition that could be used to determine what did and did not qualify as an example of the buzz-term.

Humorously (I guess), the “councils” in which I have done this have sometimes discovered an urgent necessity to meet at a time when I’m teaching class.  This has happened to me more than once.

Once I was told by a “council chair” to just pretend that the buzz term meant something, and get on with it, because WASC (our regional accrediting agency) is coming to evaluate us, and we have to show that we’re doing what we said we’d do.  It doesn’t seem to matter if no one knows quite what that is, or how we’d recognize it if we saw it.  It is group-think carried to a whole new level.  Or maybe not.

More signs that you’re succumbing to group-think:

4) You resist identifying and accepting the ideological roots of your current positions.  In other words, you claim that now you have the right idea, even though those earlier people who thought something like this, who are now out of favor, were clearly wrong.   This can only be carried off, of course, in the presence of a group of people who have all decided not to remember where their current ideas came from, as long as they can all do what they want to do now, think what they want to think now, etc.   When this is pointed out, do you insist that it’s only guilt by association, and you really mean something very different than the discredited person or group that actually created the idea?  Keep telling yourself that, if it helps…  but if the central viewpoint for which previous holders of the position were discredited is the basic root of your own position, maybe it’s time to re-think, instead of group-think.

5) You think the solution to most problems is the consensus creation of a new policy that will require people to act differently than they normally do, and you devise administrative methods to force people to act against their own perspectives and natures in order to implement the new policy.  The “consensus,” in this case, is not likely to be made up of the people upon whom the pressure of authority will be brought to bear.  It’s more likely to be a consensus of some special group that was convened with the express intent of reaching a consensus whose outcome was foreordained by the people chosen to form it.  The outcome is often to make people into liars as they are forced to claim they are doing something that they really aren’t (and possibly can’t), and to create some piece of evidence for “assessment” purposes that will make it look like they are doing it.  In essence, a pay cut has just been imposed, since the workload has gone up without compensation.

6) Bluntly, if you’re in the majority, or in a position of some power in your institution, be very careful.  Group-think temptations are at their highest.   Not that minorities are usually right, any more than majorities… but minorities are constantly forced to confront countervailing perspectives, while majorities often are not.  (Read carefully here…  I am talking about ideological or policy majorities and minorities, not ethnic or racial ones.)

7) If you’re in a leadership role, and you don’t encourage people to present contending positions to you, positively seeking out and rewarding people who have different perspectives just for bringing them to you, you are encouraging group-think in the people below you in the hierarchy, and are probably not thinking too well yourself.  If the only people who ever get promoted are those who agree with you the loudest, you and your institution are in big, big trouble.

While I see all this in academic life (it seems to be a fixture in most schools), and I hear of it in the business world (mostly in businesses that are in trouble, or not dealing well with changes in the business environment), I have little reason to think things are better in the Oval Office, the Pentagon, Capitol Hill or the State Department, whether the occupants come from Left or Right.   You can include in that the state and local governments, school boards, and labor unions of all stripes, both public and private employees.

So what’s a leader to do?

Take careful stock of the points just listed, and evaluate yourself as objectively as you can.   If you discover that any of this describes you, or the systems you’ve helped create, it’s time to repent and reverse course.  You don’t have to do it convulsively with public mea culpas, necessarily…  but you do have to do it.  Create a plan to gradually dismantle things that aren’t working, in some combination of efficiency and compassion for the people who will be affected.  Start gathering input from people who disagree with you, or with some of your policies, and reward them for sharing their reasons.  Let them teach you what you don’t know.  If you aren’t in sufficient command of yourself to be able to withstand some uncomfortable input, you’re in the wrong line of work.  Ask them to recommend books for you, and read them.  If you must, get someone you trust to read some of them and summarize, but do read some of them yourself.  Don’t choose a surrogate reader who already agrees with you about everything.

Discipline yourself to be able to articulate an idea very clearly in an operational way, not merely an aspirational one, before you start creating ad hoc committees to “reach consensus” on something you just wanted to do anyway because you liked the sound of it.  Make sure you’ve thought about possible unintended consequences.  Has some other institution already tried what you’re considering?  How has it worked out?  Would you like your institution to be like that one in other ways?  Is it possible that if you emulate them in one way, then other things you don’t like will come along with it?

Read.  Make sure you know the ideological roots of the underlying ideas that support what you want to do.  Are you really sure you want to get in the same ideological bed?  Ideas tend to travel in families, especially when they flow from a shared worldview.   Be sure you’re comfortable with that entire worldview, because when you marry an idea, you often marry the family.  You don’t want your ideological in-laws to give you heartburn at family gatherings.

One of the saddest things I see is when someone tries to rip an idea out of its ideological family and sneak it into another household where it doesn’t really fit the local DNA.  The only way to cover up the kidnapping is often to resort to group-think, and pretend the idea was locally invented out of the local DNA.

The problem, of course, is that sheep with deer antlers sort of stick out in family photos.

The previous post in this series is here.

I’m posting this  without much comment.   Some of you may have seen it, and some not, but it speaks for itself.  Even if you allow for some percentage of hyperbole, if it’s even HALF true, Wheaton is in big trouble.  I suppose the logical question is this: is any of this going on at your Christian institution of higher education?

There’s hardly an evangelical who doesn’t know about Wheaton College. Alma Mater of the Reverend Billy Graham, Wheaton boasts a student body of superior intellect and an education rivaling much of the Ivy League. Wheaton College graduates can boast of presidential speech writers and Speakers of the United States House of Representatives along with doctors and executives and professors and missionaries and pastors across the globe.

But Wheaton is different. Founded by an anti-slavery father and son, Jonathan and Charles Blanchard, Wheaton was established as a chain in the Underground Railroad to help runaway slaves. Wheaton’s distinctive has always been to educate students not only with knowledge but with wisdom. All truth is God’s truth. The knowledge of God brings greater understanding, not less … the acknowledgement of Him brings order from chaos in science, mathematics and economic systems. To be a Christ follower can bring the highest of intellectual pursuits, not the Bible thumping ignorance Hollywood would portray.

So imagine the dismay of many to learn that, in an effort to educate its students, Wheaton has moved to the left, so much so that in a survey by the Wheaton Record, 60 percent of its faculty voted for President Barack Obama, the most pro-abortion, pro-homosexual agenda, spiritually confused president the nation has ever elected.

How can this be? Perhaps much of it can be attributed to a movement widely embraced by the campus known as “social justice.” In its truest form, justice is synonymous with Christian teaching. Why else would Christians through the ages have left the comfort of their home and culture to go to remote villages and treat the sick and preach the “good news” of a universal savior, Jesus Christ. Why would the William Wilberforces and the American abolitionists have sacrificed so much to eliminate the slave trade? Why would most hospitals trace their beginnings to founders compelled by their faith to treat the sick? Soup kitchens … homeless shelters … inner city missions the same? Why if not for the cause of justice?

But as is often the case for the Left, words are co-opted and meanings changed. To be “gay” is to be homosexual. To abort a baby is to exercise “choice” and to exercise “social justice” is to identify the oppressed and the oppressors and define all of history past and present as a series of injustices. Whites oppress blacks … even 6-year-old white children are intrinsically racist. Big business oppresses the working man…even business owners who are honest and generous. To be successful in business is to oppress and the score must be evened to obtain justice. Heterosexuals oppress homosexuals with no allowance for moral objection. According to this definition of “social justice,” the oppressor and the oppressed must be identified and actions taken accordingly.

In the current document known as the “conceptual framework” of the education department at Wheaton College which must be endorsed by each of its faculty, the thinkers cited include among others, the father of the social justice movement, Brazilian Marxist, Paulo Freire and former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. Just a glimpse at Freire’s foundational treatise “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” will clearly display his sources: Marx, Lenin and revolutionary murderers Mao Tse Tung, Fidel Castro and Che Guevera (see, “Pedagogy of the Oppressor,” March 28, 2009, in National Review by Sol Stern).

Professor Bill Ayers, co-founder of the Weather Underground, wanted the violent overthrow of the United States Government. Now elevated as a teacher of teachers, Ayers publicly states he has no regrets for his violence and only wished he had done more. The overthrow of the capitalist society was the goal of all these men and violence was their method. Today’s radicals condense their rage into college curricula under the guise of “social justice.” The method is more cunning, but the goal no less sinister.

Why would Wheaton College embrace such a philosophy? “…these are people you can learn from because they’re going to teach us Christians that maybe we have some blind spots here, that we’ve been oblivious to certain areas of injustice,” said President Duane Litfin.

Dr. Jillian Lederhouse, chairman of the department of education defended the conceptual framework by saying “we don’t teach our students to be afraid on an ideology as long as we give them a critical perspective. We do not have a list of people we do not read. Our goal is to produce a thinking Christian teacher.” And that is as it should be in an institution of higher learning, except for one thing. Lederhouse went on to admit that the people who were foundational to Wheaton’s conceptual framework were all on the far left.

There is deep concern by Wheaton graduates over the current trajectory at Wheaton. They are lobbying the board and the administration to make the deep changes necessary to pull Wheaton back from academic fads that threaten its future and guide it back to its true foundations, the wisdom of the ages displayed beautifully at the entrance to the campus: “For Christ and His Kingdom.”

If you wish, discount the quotes by assuming they are “out of context.”  The author of the piece didn’t link to a source for the quotes.  Maybe she made up the president’s comments.  Maybe she did the same to Professor Lederhouse.  Maybe she lied about the faculty survey that said 60% voted for Obama.  (I’ve looked a bit, and can find no evidence that anyone from Wheaton is denying the quotes or data about Wheaton.)

The problem is that none of this is surprising in the modern upwardly mobile Christian institution, which craves high USNews and World Report ratings, and has to teach the dogma of the state education establishment in order to produce credentialed teachers.  Keeping in mind that Illinois is a pretty left-liberal state, the fact is that the education establishment of most states is quite far left of center, more or less by definition.  The revolving door, reverse handshake, and high five, shared by the NEA, state/federal education bureaucracies, and university education departments everywhere, is well documented.  It is quite simply impossible to GET an education credential, almost anywhere, without mouthing at least some proportion of liberal-left pieties, force fed to future teachers under the guise of “teaching how to teach.”

Stockholm Syndrome sets in after awhile, and many of these “teachers in teacher training” begin to believe it all, if they didn’t when they began.  It’s hard to “live a lie” when you’re under the academic inquisition.  It’s far easier to convince yourself that you’ve become a new convert, and hey, this can’t be heresy, because it just feels right.  And look around; doesn’t everyone else agree, too?

Christian university education departments ought to be providing future teachers (and current ones back for graduate degrees) with the tools to really think critically about the education establishment and its postulates.  There ought to be a class in “keeping your head and surviving the ideological indignities” of teaching in the public schools.  It could be called “Self-Possession 501.”  Graduate numbering, you know.  Instead, the “critical thinking” that is taught is mostly about how to criticize traditional assumptions about students, the nature of teaching and learning, the role of families and the church in education, and the development of moral values.  And make no mistake about it, the schools (and university education departments) are teaching moral values, though you may not recognize them as such.

There are many fine Christian education professors, in both secular and Christian universities.  The problem is that they are in the grip of a system (government and education establishment) that sometimes forces them to teach things that they suspect are lies, or forfeit their careers.  It’s a bitter choice, one they will not often acknowledge having made, particularly by the time they’ve climbed the ranks of the establishment.

An interesting side-note: I know of quite a few professors in Christian universities who are homeschooling their own children.  Some of them even teach in the Departments or Schools of Education.  Think about that.  And add to that the number of public school teachers who send their own kids to private schools….

But hey, Wheaton isn’t doing so bad, if only 60% of faculty voted for Obama.  At UCLA it’s probably more like 95%.

Unfortunately, Wheaton and too many other Christian institutions are busy trying to catch up.

The next post in this series is here.

You really must read this.  And this.

VDH for president.

Following on the heels of my post about the “F-word,” and a previous comment on Kevin DeYoung’s series on Brian McLaren’s new book, today I’m linking to his post on Christianity and McLarenism

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.

Continue reading “Christianity and McLarenism part 2”

The previous post in this series is here.

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.

The next post in this series is here.

Many have commented on the apparent disconnect between the leftist political tilt of Jews in the USA and the apparent disdain of the left for Israel and concern about anti-Semitism worldwide. Venerable author and editor Norman Podhoretz has written a book titled Why Are Jews Liberals? In a symposium of sorts at Commentary, several notable American Jews have added their comments, and while the whole thing is well worth reading, some of the comments were simply very arresting to me. The introduction to the symposium notes that

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