Alan Jacobs

This long and characteristically thoughtful post by Alastair Roberts — you should read it all, it covers so many important issues, some of which I hope to return to later — says of my Harper’s essay on Christian intellectuals, “Reading Jacobs’s … essay, I was struck by a curious absence at the heart of his analysis: the barely explored role of mainline churches in the developments he discusses.”

That “absence” was intentional — perhaps unwise, but intentional. Early in the essay I write,

If we wish to know why this species became extinct, the short answer is that the Christian intellectual was the product of World War II, and when that war was over, the epiphenomena it had generated simply faded away. But there is also a longer and more complex answer.

This answer will necessarily connect itself to the broader issue of the declining place of Christianity in American life — a subject of evergreen interest, it would seem, especially among Christians. In recent years we have seen Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, Joseph Bottum’s An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America, and George Marsden’s The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief.

All of those books consider in great detail the question Roberts raises. And it is because they deal with the question so thoroughly that I felt feee to explore the narrower matter of the American Christian intellectual, who may have been associated with several different traditions but did not feel obliged to speak specifically for any of them. As I’ve said several times before, Harper’s gave me 6000 words. I had to exclude many, many issues that were relevant to my topic.

Annie Karni in Politico:

But in general, Bill Clinton’s viewpoint of fighting for the working class white voters was often dismissed with a hand wave by senior members of the team as a personal vendetta to win back the voters who elected him, from a talented but aging politician who simply refused to accept the new Democratic map. At a meeting ahead of the convention at which aides presented to both Clintons the “Stronger Together” framework for the general election, senior strategist Joel Benenson told the former president bluntly that the voters from West Virginia were never coming back to his party.

There are many things, good and bad, one might say about Bill Clinton, but the first thing should always be this: He is the smartest politician of our era — the most gifted one of my lifetime, so far, and the race isn’t even close. And the people running Hillary’s campaign thought they were so much smarter than him that they could dismiss his arguments “with a hand wave.”

It’s always hubris, isn’t it? The story of disasters like the Hillary Clinton campaign is always hubris. And the people at the heart of the story never know. That’s why the title of the article is “Clinton aides blame loss on everything but themselves.” Well of course they do.

The Bush/Clinton era in American political history is definitively over.

Reaganism is over.

It is easier to shame people out of admitting how they’ll vote than to shame them out of voting how they want to.

Clinton had no clear vision, no clear program, nothing positive to offer except a claim to competence — and yet the evidence suggested that she isn’t very competent.

If in the next four years a younger politician can take up the mantle of Bernie Sanders, we’ll have a barn-burner of an election in 2020.

I am not at all confident that Trump will want more than four years of being President, no matter how well or badly his term goes.

Nothing succeeds like success, so anyone hoping that the GOP leadership will act to restrain Trump is whistling past the graveyard. They’ll fall in line.

But I also suspect that Trump is too lazy and disorganized to bring about major change.

Therefore the changes that do come will surely be generated by the GOP leadership in Congress, not by the executive branch.

In the next four years we’ll find out just how powerful the Deep State really is.

There’s a lot of talk about Trump dominating the evangelical vote, but most of the enthusiasm for him came from people who call themselves evangelicals but don’t go to church. Church-going evangelicals stayed home in large numbers. However: people who call themselves evangelicals but don’t go to church are the future of American evangelicalism.

To people saying this election is “the last stand of white supremacy”: if y’all don’t get your act together, it may well be the third-from-the-last stand. A great many of those Trump voters are still going to be voting in 2028, and if they’re producing more children than you are….

If the political and media establishments were merely out of touch with much of the country, that would be one thing. But it's worse than that. They presume to know, they presume to judge, and most astonishingly, they presume that this will work out at the voting booth.

— Damon Linker is right. Right now my friends on the left are angry, bitter, disbelieving, and I don't blame them. I'm shocked and awed myself, and believe the we have just elected the least qualified person ever put forth by a leading American political party.

But after a few days, or weeks, I hope self-reflection will kick in, and my friends on the left will get beyond simplistic denunciations — they hate women, they’re racists — and start to own some of their own responsibility, not just for Trump, but for a government that’s now entirely run by the GOP. They mocked people they didn’t have to mock; they supported policies that ran roughshod over people’s most deeply held beliefs; many of them treated everyone who disagreed with them with undisguised contempt. And they did all this because they felt that they stood for #Reason and #Data and #History — they were “on the right side of history” — they thought hashtags and cheap slogans were tools sufficient for the job of transforming America. Their smugness was titanic.

This morning my internet friend Kathleen Fitzpatrick, who is a supremely decent person, remembers how troubled she was by George Bush’s election in 2004 — and, interestingly, shared that with her students, who I suppose all (all?) shared her politics — and reflects on how different this election feels: “In 2004, I felt that I might have a lot that I could teach. Today, I cannot help but feel like I have much, much more to learn.” If the majority of the people on the left take this attitude, then there will be a good chance for the renewal of their hopes, and for them to win over politically complicated people like me … should they want to.

And we are about to commence the season of recriminations. The election won’t end anything except a certain form of speculation; all the hatreds will simply find new points of focus. It’s pointless to talk about the election being “over.” Weren’t you listening to Rust Cohle? “Nothing’s ever fulfilled, not until the very end. And closure - no, no no, nothing is ever over.”

Reno was no drama queen, but she participated in a number of dramas: the Waco siege of the Branch Davidians, the Oklahoma City bombing, the impeachment of the president who appointed her and the return of Elian Gonzalez to his Cuban father. She always did what she believed right, even when it was unpopular, and she always took responsibility for mistakes.

— Judith Hicks Stiehm. One thing missing from the list of “the rules that guided Janet Reno’s life”: killing religious weirdos and their children. I guess ordering the deaths of the Branch Davidians is merely “participating in a drama.” And as for “taking responsibility for mistakes”: when asked, when leaving office, whether she had made a mistake in sending in troops to attack the Davidians, she said, “We’ll never know."

(Reno is the beneficiary of the same logic that excuses President Obama for killing people with drones: liberals believe only Republicans are killers. Let us turn aside decorously from deaths ordered by Democrats.)

Here in Waco, there are still plenty of people whose children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews were killed in the siege that Reno ordered. If you have any decency, you’ll pause for a moment in your praise for the wonderfulness of Janet Reno and remember the people who on her orders were burned to death.

I shall not cease from mental fight Nor shall this axe sleep in my hand Till we have built Jerusalem In the wreckage of this land

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I view my Anglican confession of justification by faith as, in this sense, a gift to the Church Catholic. I want, precisely as an Anglican, to continue to hold it before Rome and the East and to commend it as the clearest way I know of articulating the singularity and finality of Christ’s person and work. I want it to affect future ecumenical discussion, and I want it to be included, in whatever transformed way, into the confessional bedrock of a future reunited church.... I’d want to write my tale of modern Canterbury pilgrimage in such a way that my distance from Rome could be seen — precisely so that I might speak a Reformational word that I hope can benefit the cause of a future visible union with Rome. Talking about what makes Anglicanism distinctive, such as I understand it, can be an ecumenical gift rather than an impediment, if done in a spirit of charity and of hope.

— Here. I think this is beautiful and correct, and it's an encouragement to me. Over the years, I have written a good deal about Christian unity (click the "ecumenism" tag at the bottom of this post for a sample), and have worked within local communities to try to build cooperation,  but I have to admit that I have become completely discouraged and don't plan to pursue such matters any further.

This discouragement is probably a sin, and I expect that some day I will need to repent of it, but it feels like simple exhaustion (compounded by the exhaustion that arises from a decade of dealing with serious health issues in my family). I have never been able even to encourage rival factions in Anglicanism to be more charitable towards one another, much less get Catholics interested in the idea that Anglicans might have something to contribute to Christ's Church.

It is quite possible, indeed likely, that my failure to make any progress in these ecumenical endeavors is a result of character flaws that I cannot now see but that will be revealed to me on the Last Day. Perhaps more winsome and charitable people like Wesley Hill will be able to make the difference I hoped but failed to make. This is my prayer!

Ross Douthat is trying this morning to bring some perspective to American liberals:

Liberal analysis of right needs to recognize ways in which a liberal society, while procedurally "open," can be experienced as a *regime.*

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) November 7, 2016

But the “open society” isn’t merely “experienced as” a regime; nor is it genuinely open. It is open to some ideas and some people that its predecessors were closed to, but newly closed to others. (In precisely the same way, people who talk about the value of “inclusion” are always including some formerly excluded groups while simultaneously excluding some formerly included groups. When you move the Overton window, the left and right sides of the frame shift together.)

Stanley Fish explained this long ago, in an essay I recommend to liberals willing to dispense with some of their illusions. The essay focuses on public education but is equally relevant to all public institutions. Read and heed:

The idea, then, is that the right kind of education, faithful to the First Amendment, gives you practice in making up your own mind about values and agendas, while the wrong kind of education captures your mind and binds it to values and agendas that go unexamined. The problem with this idea is that it is itself an agenda informed by values that are themselves unexamined and insulated from challenge. The name of the agenda is "free and open inquiry"; and despite that honorific self-description, it is neither free nor open because it is closed to any line of thinking that would shut inquiry down or route it in a particular direction. It is closed, for example, to most forms of religious thought (which it will stigmatize as dogmatic) or to any form of thought that rules some point of view — for instance, that the Holocaust did not occur — beyond the pale and out of court. To put it in a way that may seem paradoxical: openness is an ideology, in that, like any other ideology, it is slanted in some directions and blind (if not downright hostile) to others.

Now, to say that openness is an ideology is not necessarily to criticize it, much less reject it, but merely to deprive it of one of its claims. Openness (or free inquiry) may still be the ideology we choose, but if my analysis is right, we cannot choose it as an alternative to ideology. What, after all, is the difference between a sectarian school which disallows challenges to the divinity of Christ and a so-called nonideological school which disallows serious discussion of that same question? In both contexts something goes without saying and something else cannot be said (Christ is not God or he is). There is of course a difference, not however between a closed environment and an open one but between environments that are differently closed.