excerpt from my Sent folder: execution
I’m absolutist about these matters, I guess. I think universal rules for police should be:
- If someone is unarmed, you can’t execute him.
- If someone is behaving strangely, even extremely strangely, you can’t execute him.
- If you think that someone might possibly be armed, you can’t execute him.
- If someone refuses to obey your orders, you can’t execute him.
- If someone runs away from you, you can’t execute him.
- If you shoot at anyone in any of the above circumstances, you will be fired. (Maybe prosecuted too, but that's outside the scope of a police department.)
- If you find the above rules unfair, or are unable to follow them, you need to go into another line of work.
Do you remember those kids in high school who used to brag that they laughed while watching horror films? The impulse is almost scarier than the movies themselves. Cracking up at The Exorcist is possible only if you agree that jokes are indeed epitaphs on the death of feelings and you don’t mind committing emotional suicide in order to feel aloof and edgy. This is what I thought of when the audience snickered at the moment Kee unbuttons her robe and reveals that she is mysteriously, probably miraculously, pregnant. It was what I thought of when the audience went on tittering and gigging and hooting at dozens of other inappropriate points in the film. The shot of her swollen belly is one of the most beautiful in all of cinema. To laugh at it is like walking into a museum and pointing out the genitalia in Renaissance paintings, or belching along to Wagner at the Met. The first time I heard unexpected laughter I thought it was a fluke. There are a handful of grimly amusing moments, but no real belly-laugh material in this dystopian drama about the consequences of worldwide infertility. Eventually I found myself wondering whether these people were watching a different film. The only other possibility was that they were sociopaths who had never been to the movies before.
I want us to be free – just long enough – that I have time to tell my brothers and sisters who do not know Jesus and tell them about a deeper and wider freedom. I want to tell them about the truly good and free one who came to liberate us all, not only from the ongoing legacy of racism, but also brokenness that traps us all in our sins. I would love to tell them about the king who has reconciled all of us: Black, White, Asian, and Hispanic in his blood. But that message is hard to hear when you are afraid and discouraged. That message becomes nearly impossible to appreciate when you turn to Christians for help only to be told that your complaints are an exaggeration or are rooted in your own sin. It is heartbreaking to be told that you must earn the right to be treated like what you are: someone made in the image of God. When God’s people don’t love us, it makes it harder (humanly speaking) to hear and properly respond to the Gospel.
[gallery] Mat Bingham, the badgers and foxes of Cutlers Rough
As women have taken greater positions of leadership in the United States, they have also left a leadership vacuum behind them. In middle-class, highly educated communities, women may be busier and more tired than their mothers and grandmothers once were, but they mostly figure out ways to advocate for their kids at school-board meetings or volunteer to chaperone a class trip to the zoo. The people who have suffered most aren’t white and well-off; they’re lower income, poorly educated, and largely disconnected from the rich network of membership-based associations that used to provide both a local sense of community and a national voice in politics. Women in these positions have lost access to one of their only means of gaining leadership skills. And while many of their educated, wealthier peers now have alternatives to the suffocating housewife’s life that so enraged Betty Friedan seven decades ago, some experience it as an opposite kind of suffocation: a never-ending, ladder-climbing work life, the height of which is making money for someone else rather than building a world in which they’re invested.
pigeonholes
One of the most frequent comments I’ve heard in response to my essay in Harper’s is that it’s self-refuting: If a Christian intellectual is writing for such a prominent magazine then the problem Jacobs seeks to identify is either non-existent or minor. To that I have two answers, one short and one longish:
Short: A handful of swallows do not a summer make.
Longish: What was Jacobs allowed to write, as a Christian, about in Harper’s? Answer: Christians. I could have written about other things for the magazine — and indeed I have, at least for the website. (That was originally going to be a piece for the magazine, but it got bumped.) But I was not writing there in Christian terms. And in general I think that’s how it goes: consider, for instance, my friend Ross Douthat, who is welcome to write (even in the New York Times!) as a Christian, as long as he is writing about the Pope or the church more generally. When he writes about politics he’s expected to write as a conservative. I don’t say that he keeps always to his pigeonholes; but usually he does, and I suspect that that’s an unspoken condition of his employment. The notion that the intellectual resources of Christianity might be useful in reflecting on politics — or technology, or the arts, or engineering, or war, or climate change — and useful not only to Christians but to everyone — that’s a long-lost notion indeed. We generally assume that on any given issue of social import there might be a socialist take, or a feminist take, or a take rooted in the experience of a particular ethnic identity, that we’d benefit from hearing; but a Christian take? Not typically one of the options. There are no prominent Christian intellectuals addressing whatever happens to concern the body politic in a distinctively Christian way and for a general audience.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. As Stanley Fish commented (a passage I cite in my article): “If you persuade liberalism that its dismissive marginalizing of religious discourse is a violation of its own chief principle, all you will gain is the right to sit down at liberalism’s table where before you were denied an invitation; but it will still be liberalism’s table that you are sitting at, and the etiquette of the conversation will still be hers.” A good warning, and the history of Christianity is littered with examples of Christians editing out the prophetic elements of their faith in order to meet the etiquette of various tables of power. But it’s also true that only those who have a seat at the table can hope to shape, gently and patiently, its etiquette.
So it seems to me that Christians can either look for ways to get back to that table or accept their exile from it and make the best of the possibilities that exile affords. (Learning to be dissidents rather than intellectuals.) But the claim that Christians really are comfortably seated at liberalism’s table seems to be an unsustainable one.
If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, perhaps they might begin to appeal anew to a frazzled digital generation. Christian leaders seem to think that they need more distraction to counter the distraction. Their services have degenerated into emotional spasms, their spaces drowned with light and noise and locked shut throughout the day, when their darkness and silence might actually draw those whose minds and souls have grown web-weary. But the mysticism of Catholic meditation — of the Rosary, of Benediction, or simple contemplative prayer — is a tradition in search of rediscovery. The monasteries — opened up to more lay visitors — could try to answer to the same needs that the booming yoga movement has increasingly met.
