Alan Jacobs

It grieves me to see that as religious freedom for American Christians comes increasingly under attack, some American Christians — I'm not even going to link to them — are hoping to undermine religious freedom for Muslims. They are depressingly unaware that they are eagerly weaving the rope from which their own religious freedoms will be hanged. In such a climate I want to re-post something I wrote for The American Scene six years ago, when there was a fuss over the possibility of a mosque being built near the World Trade Center site. I would especially call your attention to the link to George Washington's letter to the Newport Synagogue, one of the most important documents in the history of religious liberty and far too little noticed today.

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Of course Mayor Bloomberg is right — of course. It’s sad that there should even be debate about the core legal principles involved. Whether the building of a mosque so near Ground Zero is a good idea — whether it promotes the health of the city, as some of the proponents of the scheme say they want to do — is a completely different question, a matter of social prudence. About this reasonable people will disagree.

But legally the situation is simple, as the mayor points out: “with or without landmark designation, there is nothing in the law that would prevent the owners from opening a mosque within the existing building. The simple fact is this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship. The government has no right whatsoever to deny that right – and if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as a violation of the U.S. Constitution.” He could delete the “almost” in that last sentence.

But the really sad thing is that people who call themselves conservatives — Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin — should be crying out for apparatuses of the state to limit and police voluntary religious association. This is a profoundly anti-conservative view in two ways. First, it is historically myopic, as Mayor Bloomberg’s brief history of controversies about religious freedom in New York City demonstrates. It’s remarkable that people who invoke the Founders so regularly and in such tones of devotion could be utterly deaf to the Founders’ concern to ensure freedom for mistrusted minority religions. They might start by reading George Washington’s once-famous letter to the Newport synagogue, paying special attention to this sentence: “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent national gifts.” In Washington’s understanding, it is misbegotten even to ask the question, “Should we tolerate this?”

Moreover, the Gingrich-Palin view of the matter is as blind to the future as it is to the past. No one would make such an argument who did not anticipate that his or her own religious preferences will forever be enshrined as the socially dominant ones. Having endorsed the principle that minority religions can be policed by the state, Gingrich and Palin may well be unpopular figures to their descendants, if Christianity continues to decline as a force in American culture.

In its origins, with Burke, conservatism was supposed to be about taking the long view, having proper deference to the wisdom of our ancestors and taking proper care for the flourishing of our descendants. This is also what Chesterton meant when he said that tradition is “the democracy of the dead.” Burke thought this long view was most likely to be taken by the aristocracy, but in a society without an aristocracy there needs to be a body of intellectuals who take it as their special mission to meditate on the “first things”, one might say, that link us to those who went before us and those who will come after.

The approach Gingrich and Palin take to the proposed lower Manhattan mosque has nothing to do with conservatism in this sense. It is neither conservative, nor liberal, nor anything else worthy to be called “political thought.” It is an infantile grasping after a fleeting and elusive cultural dominance.

Judge Aaron Persky empathized with Brock Allen Turner and could easily imagine what it would be like to lose sports fame (as Persky enjoyed), to lose a Stanford education (as Persky enjoyed), to lose the sort of easy success and high regard that a young, reasonably affluent Stanford graduate (like Persky was) can expect as a matter of right.  Judge Persky could easily imagine how dramatically different a state prison is from Stanford frat parties, and how calamitous was Turner’s fall.  That’s how Judge Persky convinced himself to hand such a ludicrously light sentence for such a grotesque violation of another human being.

But most people fed into the criminal justice system aren’t champion athletes with Stanford scholarships.  Most aren’t even high school graduates.  Most are people who have lived lives that are alien and inscrutable to someone successful enough to become a judge.  Judges might be able to empathize with having to quit their beloved college, but how many can empathize with a defendant who lost a minimum-wage job because they couldn’t make bail?  How many can empathize with someone more likely to sleep by a dumpster than exit a frat party next to one?  They can conceive of the humiliation of being on the sex offender registry after getting into an elite university, but can they conceive of the humiliation of being stopped, frisked, detained, and beaten with impunity because of the color of their skin?  Experience teaches that the answer is usually no.

This means that the system is generally friendly to defendants who look like Brock Allen Turner and generally indifferent or cruel to people who don’t look like him.  No high school dropout who rapes an unconscious girl behind a dumpster is getting six months in jail and a solicitous speech from the likes of Judge Persky.  Judges take their youth as a sign that they are “superpredators,” not as grounds for leniency.  If you tell a judge that they aren’t a danger to others, the judge will peer over his or her glasses and remark that people who rape unconscious girls in the dirt are self-evidently dangerous, and don’t be ridiculous.  Judges don’t think that a good state prison stretch will have too severe an impact – after all, what are they missing, really?

— Ken White

I developed a hatred for neckties in my youth, when I worked for several years in a bookstore that required me to wear at all times a big plastic name tag and a tie – even though I did most of my work in the stock room. (Once I severed the lower reaches of a tie while opening a box of books with a box cutter.) I would regularly loosen the tie so as not to be choked as I was bending and lifting, and my manager would just as regularly order me to tighten it again.

I took out my frustrations on these requirements by wearing on my name tag the name RASKOLNIKOV. Then one day a lady came up to me as I was shelving books, gently touched my arm, beamed at me, and said in a near-whisper, “It’s so brave of you not to Anglicize your name.”

It’s hard to imagine a more extraordinary claim than that some hidden intelligence created a universe of more than a hundred billion galaxies, each containing more than a hundred billion stars, and then waited more than 13.7 billion years until a planet in a remote corner of a single galaxy evolved an atmosphere sufficiently oxygenated to support life, only to then reveal his existence to an assortment of violent tribal groups before disappearing again.

— The Fantasy of the Deathbed Conversion. Indeed. I wonder who makes that claim, or ever has? Also, there have been a great many deathbed conversions, even if Christopher Hitchens isn't one of them. (Oscar Wilde was, though: see Richard Ellman's biography for the definitive treatment of the issue.)

Nothing is more common in New Atheist rhetoric than the bald unsubstantiated assertion. Surely no group in history have ever prattled so much about “evidence” while not rousing themselves to seek any.

In writing about the Benedict Option, I have often lamented American Christians’ comparative neglect of the church in favor of something like obsessive focus on American electoral politics.

But the more that I think about how these people behave when they indulge those political obsessions – angry, intolerant, quick to fling bitter insults towards any who disagree with them – maybe it’s not the best idea to get them more interested in the church.

So: Never mind.

Some thoughts about this interview with Jürgen Klinsmann:

1. He’s remarkably explicit about the players who have disappointed him and why they have disappointed him. E.g.: “The Czech game, we gave the first cap to Emerson Hyndman, he disappeared.”
2. I don't know whether I should call that explicitness “commendable honesty” or “throwing his players under the bus.”
3. He agrees with the interviewer — and most other observers — that American soccer players don't get an early enough start, don't commit to the game at an early enough age: in Europe and Latin America “they select the kids very early and you have to swim in the cold water very, very early.”
4. But in this particular interview his emphasis seems to be on the players’ lack of progress between their late teens and their mid-twenties. His message is that they look great when they’re first being folded into the USMNT but then they fail to live up to their promise. “We drive an amazing amount of young talent in all different ways and then once they turn toward the professional level, from 17 or 18 until 22 or 23, that is where we kind of lose a lot of quality kids, because they don’t find their right footing.”
5. He sends mixed messages about the dominant cause of this disappointment. At one point he says “That talent is not there yet when it comes to the national team,” but he places a great deal more emphasis on a lack of will: “They don’t fight their way through into the club teams. Whatever they choose, wherever they go, whatever their direction is, they find ways to accept it instead of saying I’m not accepting it.”
6. At no point does he suggest that coaches — at the club or the national level — bear any responsibility for players’ failing to live up to their potential. Players who disappoint either are not talented enough or not committed enough. Period.

Anyway, here’s my take: Most academics who were raised as Christians and remain so have gone through a process of sifting their inheritance, taking what they perceive to be the wheat and burning the chaff. And they want to make it possible for their students to do the same. But I think they may not realize how hard that is for many students to do: a given student can easily go from thinking that all of the beliefs she inherited from their parents and her home church are wheat to thinking they are all chaff. When we’re introducing our students to new ideas, to a more capacious model of what Christianity is and can be — and this is something we all do for our students, whether we’re on the liberal or the conservative end of the theological spectrum, and whether we are intentional about it or not — we need always to be aware that as students try to accommodate this new knowledge, these new-to-them models of faith, their whole Christian lives can go up in flames. This is something we can’t afford to forget, ever.

… As someone who was raised in a functionally non-Christian family and became a Christian in college, I have something like an anthropological take on those of you who were raised in the faith. But X strikes me as one of those people who just can’t get past his conservative-evangelical upbringing: there’s so much about it that he hates and wants to repudiate, but whenever he tries to throw it away it ends up sticking to his hand, so back in his pocket it goes. This gets repeated with slight variations for decades.

I think it’s a matter of wanting to retain absolutely everything that’s good about an evangelical upbringing and discarding absolutely everything that’s bad, but life doesn’t work that way. You’re going to end up keeping some things you wish you could lose and losing some things you wish you could keep. Sad but inevitably true.

The powers and duties assigned to the emperor were broad and comprehensive. They were, moreover, rapidly enlarged as functions traditionally attached to republican magistracies were transferred one after another to the new executive, and executive action invaded fields which, under the former system, had been consecrated to senatorial or popular control. Finally, by virtue of specific provisions, the substance of which is indicated in the maxim princeps legibus solutus, the emperor was freed from constitutional limitations which might have paralyzed his freedom of action; while his personal protection was assured through the grant of tribunician inviolability (sacrosanctitas) as well as by the sanctions of the Lex Maiestatis. The prerogative was thus built up by a series of concessions, made by the competent authority of senate and people, no single one of which was in theory unrepublican.

— ibid.

In the light of these ancient concepts, Ceasar emerges as a figure at once fascinating and dangerous. For the spirit thus depicted is one of sublime egotism; in which the libido dominandi asserts itself to the exclusion of all possible alternatives and crushes every obstacle in its path. We have spoken of Caesar as a divisive force. That, indeed, he was: as Cato had put it, "he was the only one of the revolutionaries to undertake, cold-sober, the subversion of the republic"; … A force like this, however, does more than divide, it destroys. Hostile to all claims of independence except its own, it is wholly incompatible with that effective equality which is implied in the classical idea of the commonwealth. To admit it within the community is thus to nourish the lion, whose reply to the hares in the assembly of beasts was to ask: Where are your claws?

— Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (1940)