Alan Jacobs

[gallery] (via the foot of a diving beetle)

Matthew's "judge not" passage is a warning to Christians not to judge self-righteously, uncharitably, hypocritically, hypercritically, in a spirit of harsh condemnation. It is a valuable reminder of how easy it is to fall into traps set by a heart grown cold and hard. It is a reminder, too, that all of us need to be appropriately self-critical. But this passage is not — it cannot be — a call to withhold all judgment or never to express a critical opinion of another.

Note that at the end of the passage in Matthew, Christ instructs us not to "give dogs what is sacred" and not to "throw your pearls to pigs." But of course this means that one has to make discriminating judgments about others. The implied conclusion by Clinton apologists that Christ-like forgiveness should render a person incapable of moral criticism collapses under the sheer weight of biblical evidence. Throughout the New Testament, Christians are called upon to judge false teaching; bad doctrine; idolatry; immorality; and more.

— Bill Bennett, The Death of Outrage (1999)

I've been walking forty miles of bad road If the bible is right, the world will explode I've been trying to get as far away from myself as I can Some things are too hot to touch The human mind can only stand so much You can't win with a losing hand... People are crazy and times are strange I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range I used to care, but things have changed

When people say, as they sometimes do, that New Yorkers are the most provincial people on the planet, here’s the kind of thing they’re referring to:

I think mine is still Caro's Power Broker. https://t.co/58rQvfn0e8

— Anil Dash (@anildash) October 6, 2016

If everybody — everybody in the world, I guess — were going to read one book, it should be an exhaustive account of urban planning disputes in New York City. Because what could possibly be more important?

Similarly, here’s Jane Kramer in the New Yorker (natch):

If you’re looking for true Southern comfort in “Ten Restaurants,” you might want to forget about Antoine’s and go straight to the chapter on Sylvia’s, the enduring soul-food restaurant on Lenox Avenue, near the Apollo Theatre, which a waitress named Sylvia Pressley Woods and her husband, Herbert, bought for twenty thousand dollars in 1962, transforming a local luncheonette into a celebration of the African-American kitchen that had seen her through a hardscrabble South Carolina childhood. Woods’s grandfather was hanged for a murder he did not commit; her father died of complications from German gas attacks suffered during the First World War. But her mother, raising her on a farm with no electricity, no water, and only a mule for transportation, kept the culinary legacy of black America—what we now call Southern food—alive, warm, and sustaining on the kitchen table.

Sure — because nobody in the South was keeping Southern food alive, were they? We Southerners would be completely lost if it weren’t for New Yorkers bravely sustaining the culinary traditions we’ve (apparently) forgotten.

Seriously: what is with these people?

This long article/essay/meditation by Ruth Graham on the disturbing events at Wheaton College last year — click on the “wheaton” tag at the bottom of this post for some of my thoughts about that situation, and other issues related to Christian higher education — is by far the best thing that anyone has written on the subject: the most deeply researched, fair-minded, and thoughtful. I commend it to you whole-heartedly.

I’m going to take a personal turn now. Ruth was a student of mine, so I’m especially gratified by passages like this:

During my four years at Wheaton, I drifted away from evangelicalism. But I never contemplated transferring to another school. I was reading Foucault and Judith Butler (Shakespeare and Milton too); my professors were brilliant and kind and I found plenty of kindred spirits. When the religion scholar Alan Wolfe visited Wheaton for a cover article about evangelical intellectualism in The Atlantic in 2000, halfway through my time there, he found a campus whose earnestness was both endearing and impressive: “In its own way, campus life at Wheaton College resembles that of the 1960s, when students and a few professors, convinced that they had embarked on a mission of eternal importance, debated ideas as if life really depended on the answers they came up with.” At a suburban dive bar on the edge of a marsh, we drank illicit Pabst on Saturday night and talked about politics, music and philosophy like undergraduates anywhere. Then we got up on Sunday morning and went to church.

(By the way, Wen Stephenson, who became my friend during his work as an editor on that Atlantic story, interviewed me about its topic. I can’t bring myself to re-read that interview, but there it is.)

During my 29 years teaching at Wheaton, I saw many students “drift away from evangelicalism.” I didn’t always regret that — it depended on what they drifted to. Evangelical Protestantism is by no means the only way to be a faithful Christian, and for some people it proves impossible, or at least very difficult, to be a faithful Christian in that tradition. But sometimes I did regret the drifting, if it led away from Christian faith altogether.

Still, we all, among the faculty, accepted that risk — it was and is built into the DNA of Wheaton (as it is in my current academic location, the Honors College at Baylor). As I’ve commented elsewhere, “The likelihood of producing such graduates is a chance Wheaton is willing to take. Why? Because it believes in liberal education, as opposed to indoctrination.” So I understood and accepted that the exposure to new and powerful ideas, some of them quite alien or hostile to Christianity, has a tendency to change people, sometimes quite dramatically.

But here’s my True Confession: what I’ve always found hard to accept is how many of my students — how many of my best students, including the ones I’ve invested the most time and energy in — become so embarrassed about having attended Wheaton that they never, later in life, publicly acknowledge the quality of the education they received there. In their determination to separate themselves from the religious world they grew up in — and also, it must be said, in attempts not to have their careers or social lives torpedoed by anti-evangelical prejudice — they are just not willing to say what Ruth says here: that however frustrating they found the chapel services, and however stiff-necked they believed the college’s administration to be, at least they received a first-class liberal-arts education from smart and caring teachers, most of whom also understood and sympathized with and did not judge students for any drifting from evangelical orthodoxy.

Let me emphasize again that I very much understand the impulse: many of these students can pay a social or vocational price for acknowledging that they attended Wheaton. What a blessing it is that there’s another Wheaton College, in Massachusetts: Maybe people will think I went there. And if people do find out that you graduated from “that fundamentalist school,” then perhaps the best strategy for moving forward is to say that you hated every minute of it, and repudiate it with all your being.

So I get all that. But it makes me sad, you know? Because I devoted my best energies to teaching those students — it was always a heart-and-soul thing for me, it really was. And because, while some graduates of Wheaton hated everything about it and can’t stand anyone involved with the place, many of them place a great value on the education they received there. I know: they tell me. But they only do so in private. And for my part, I keep their shameful secret.

Thanks to those who responded to my Harper’s essay by writing letters to the editor — or to those whose letters were published, anyway (there are others that I haven’t seen).

I am especially grateful to hear this from Marilynne Robinson: “The essay on fear that [Jacobs] imagines I wrote for The New York Review of Books and its secular readership was actually a speech written for and read to a conservative church in Michigan.” That’s very encouraging and tempts me to withdraw or at least significantly modify my criticisms of her approach. It would be fascinating to know whether her arguments were understood differently by those two rather different audiences.

I am not sure why Robinson writes “I think the word ‘secularist’ itself is a crude presumption, disrespectful of the mysteries of the soul” — I don’t use the word “secularist” in the essay, though I quote Robinson herself saying “I have other loyalties that are important to me, to secularism, for example.” Why “secularism” is something she can be loyal to while “secularist” is crude and disrespectful I cannot guess, but in any case it’s not relevant to anything I wrote.

Lindsey Kerr’s point that “If the last shall be first and the first shall be last, we who seek to emulate Jesus Christ should aspire to a place in the street rather than a seat at the table” is one that I think about all the time. I wish I did a better job of living up to it. I think Cornel West, for all his showmanship, does that pretty well, which is why I think his career is so interesting and his lack of current influence (in comparison to his stature) so sad.

Pace Jack Jenkins, my decision not to name Martin Luther King, Jr. as one of my signal figures isn’t inexplicable: I explained it to him on Twitter and I developed the argument further here. I suspect that Jenkins is one of those people — I have heard from many of them — who can’t escape the thought that “intellectual” is always and necessarily a term of praise, Karl Mannheim be damned. Whaddyagonnado.

P.S. I’ve tagged all my posts about that essay “christianintellectuals.”

So why am I not voting for Hillary Clinton?

• I think she’s seriously afflicted by dishonesty and hubris, and has demonstrated no ability to learn from, or even seriously to acknowledge, her past mistakes;
• Her longstanding hawkishness, especially in Middle Eastern affairs, is dangerous to the United States and to other countries — and no, I certainly don't think I can count on her “no ground troops” pledge, not given her history in these matters;
• Her deep indebtedness to Wall Street means that she’ll take no action to address serious economic injustice;
• The Democratic Party platform on abortion, which was already more extreme than that of any European country, has grown still more extreme in ways that Clinton enthusiastically supports;
• A Clinton administration would unquestionably continue — and very probably extend — the Obama administration’s assaults on religious freedom.

In short, I believe Hillary Clinton is a terrible candidate whose Presidency would — at this point I should probably say will — be very bad for this country, and if the Republicans had nominated a sane person I would very likely be voting for their Presidential candidate this year for the first time in a long time.

I bought my first Bob Dylan record 45 years ago, and I’ve been listening to him closely and frequently ever since. I’ve written about how much he means to me, and I’ve even taught his music and lyrics in classes. I’m gratified that he is the only contemporary songwriter to be surveyed by a great literary critic. But I don’t think he should have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, because I don’t think what he does is literature.

It’s not a lesser thing than literature; it’s just different. Singer-songwriters practice a hybrid art, because to their words they add music and performance. Dylan’s lyrics rarely offer great satisfaction when detached from his music and his voice — if you can find a way to detach them, which, if you’ve ever heard them sung by him, you can’t. The novelists and poets, even the playwrights, are working with a different set of restrictions, a different set of potentialities. Zucchini and pomegranates.

I have a few thoughts about this op-ed by Eric Metaxas. (FYI, I don’t know Eric well, but I do know him, and I think he’s written and done many good things over the years, though I’m not crazy about the political turn he seems to have taken in recent years, starting with the publicizing of his otherwise fine Bonhoeffer biography.)

First, Eric assumes that there are three options: vote for Clinton, vote for Trump, stay home. But you could vote for someone other than the major-party nominees. That’s what I’m going to do. Does that dishonor God? If so, why and how?

Second, Eric says that some of Trump’s comments have made him angry, and acknowledges that many people find him “odious.” But he never acknowledges that many of us wouldn’t vote for Trump even if he treated women with unfailing courtesy. Michael K. Vlock said of Trump, “He’s an ignorant, amoral, dishonest and manipulative, misogynistic, philandering, hyper-litigious, isolationist, protectionist blowhard.” If he were merely an ignorant, amoral, dishonest and manipulative, hyper-litigious, isolationist, protectionist blowhard, wouldn’t all that be enough to disqualify him from the Presidency? And each of those words accurately describes The Donald.

Third, Eric writes, “It’s a fact that if Hillary Clinton is elected, the country’s chance to have a Supreme Court that values the Constitution — and the genuine liberty and self-government for which millions have died — is gone. Not for four years, or eight, but forever.” Essentially, this is to say that Hillary is Sauron, and the Presidency the One Ring. “If [she gains] it, your valour is vain, and [her] victory will be swift and complete: so complete that none can foresee the end of it while this world lasts.” But is there any evidence whatsoever that this prophecy — Eric’s about Hillary, I mean, not Gandalf’s about Sauron — is true? It’s the same claim that Decius makes with his “Flight 93” analogy, but as far as I can tell, none of the people who prophesy so boldly have ever defended it. They just assert it. Saying “it’s a fact” doesn’t making it a fact. The prophecy of ultimate and endless doom is just a guess.

And a despairing guess — which is the element of all this that isn’t poor judgment, but rather a sin. If Hillary Clinton is elected, that will not foreclose the possibility of Christian revival in America. And if there ever is Christian revival in America, then surely Eric Metaxas believes that that would be good news for the cause of “genuine liberty and self-government.” Hillary is not mightier than Sauron, and American democracy is not quite that fragile, even if it is profoundly flawed, and the possibility of spiritual renewal is always at hand.

My fellow Christians, don’t give in to despair. Despair can make intelligent and decent people do very strange and very destructive things. Like voting for Donald Trump.

We must set aside our Christian convictions to support Donald Trump so he will protect us against Hillary Clinton’s war on our Christian convictions.

This morning, in the weekly newsletter of Books and Culture, John Wilson announces that the coming November/December issue of the magazine will be its last. I am pretty heartbroken about this, not primarily as a writer (though I expect that I have written for B&C as much as anyone), but rather as a reader.

For twenty-one years, Books and Culture has been one of the most consistently interesting magazines in the English-speaking world. I have often been surprised at the number and range of people who agree with me about that. Alex Star, a former editor of the New York Times Magazine and now an editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, once told me that he read every issue in full. Cullen Murphy, former editor of the Atlantic, told me that John Wilson is the best editor in the business.

And yet Christianity Today International, the parent company of B&C, couldn’t make it work; nor did another buyer for the magazine come forth. This is an immensely distressing state of affairs, for anyone who cares about the state of Christian intellectual life, and I hope there will be some thoughtful post-mortems on the whole business. (Though what I really hope is for some deep-pocketed person or organization to decide that raising B&C from the dead is more important than giving money to Donald Trump or the RNC.)

But for now, I just want to thank John Wilson for the consistently superb work he has done on this magazine for twenty-one years. He has recruited first-class writers, paired them with fascinating books, found ways to juxtapose reviews on similar themes — he has done it all. And for me personally, working with John over the years has been enormously rewarding and enjoyable. I am hoping against hope that our working relationship will not end here, though even if it does our friendship will remain strong.

Thank you, John, and may God bless you.