Alan Jacobs contra Ross Douthat on Douthat's public Christian intellectuals of our time--Douthat keeps picking as Christian intellectuals people who heap contempt on everyone who differs with them (Hart comes to mind)

There's a bit of set up for this one by way of quotation.

https://douthat.substack.com/p/decadence-and-the-intellectuals

https://douthat.substack.com/p/the-cul-de-sacs-of-the-christian

…

But for exclusive Holy Week Substack content, let me try to extend my prior post, on Western intellectual life under decadence, with some thoughts on the specific position of the Christian intellectual in the Year of Our Lord 2021.

 

In my casually-chosen list of influential public intellectuals from the last twenty years, I represented Christianity with Fr. James Martin, Rod Dreher, Charles Taylor, David Bentley Hart and Tim Keller. I picked Taylor because he’s the scholar who’s produced something closest to a conventional definition of an Important Work, 2007’s A Secular Age, and Keller because he’s the most mainstream embodiment of the Calvinist revival within evangelicalism. But I picked Hart, Dreher and Martin because their work — more popular in the latter two cases, more idiosyncratic in Hart’s case — seems especially responsive to the dilemmas that confront Christian thinkers right now, and the challenges facing Biblical religion amid the decadence of its stepchild, liberalism.

 

Those dilemmas follow from the prior quarter-century of Christian argumentation about the church and the culture, when the most influential religious intellectuals were neoconservatives of various descriptions (you can take Richard John Neuhaus as a paradigmatic case) who felt that Christian thinkers and activists in the 1960s and 1970s had taken a wrong turn: In trying to make Christianity relevant to secular liberalism or to the revolutionary left, they had allowed the faith to be swallowed by politics, its doctrines effaced and its supernaturalism tamed. The neoconservative answer, then, was a vigorous reassertion of Christian distinctives — but not, crucially, in order to overthrow liberalism itself. Rather, the goal was to return the liberal order to the road it had seemingly been taking prior to the revolutions of the later 1960s, to a path where Christianity and liberalism need not be enemies or rivals, but could meet instead as cooperators and friends.

 

This neoconservatism still has partisans and influence, but in the last two decades it has fallen on hard times. (A good part of the controversy surrounding a figure like David French reflects the fact that he still hews to the basic synthesis when so many others have abandoned it.) In resisting capture by left-wing politics and liberal culture, much of religious conservatism has seemingly fallen into right-wing political captivity instead, dividing conservative Christians against one another in response. In seeking to call liberalism back to its mid-century form the neoconservatives had some successes (a resilient pro-life movement, some victories for religious liberty) but many conspicuous debacles. And the general effort to re-evangelize American culture has been undercut by scandals within the Christian churches (the Catholic sex abuse crisis above all), overwhelmed by social and technological changes, undermined by persistent racial divisions, and impeded by the stumbling block of the sexual revolution.

 

From this apparent cul-de-sac, what is to be done? Well, one possibility is to go back to the ideas that the neoconservatives rejected or critiqued. That’s arguably what you find, in different forms, in the recent work of Hart and Father Martin (with Pope Francis looming behind them as a spiritual inspiration): New attempts at moral or theological adaptation, new attempts to find common ground with liberalism or to embrace some of the commitments of the left. This is not, crucially, an adaptation to secularism and anti-supernaturalism; that road I think almost everyone concedes is the deadest of dead ends. Instead in Martin’s writings and ministry you see an attempt to stretch, expand or adapt the Christian tradition sufficiently so that much of the sexual revolution, with abortion as the major exception, can be encompassed and accepted: Maybe not always formally, with new dogmatic pronouncements to contradict the old ones, but at least in a de facto way, with a theology of welcome that resolves the tensions between the church and post-1960s sexual culture and enables Christianity to breathe and preach anew.

https://blog.ayjay.org/strategy-and-vocation/ 

It’s rare for me to disagree with Ross Douthat as thoroughly as I disagree with this reflection on Christian intellectuals. I disagree not because I doubt his particular judgments, but because I think he has misconceived the entire subject. He has done so, I believe, by approaching the role of Christian intellectual as a matter of strategy, when it is more properly a matter of vocation. As the bearer of a vocation — a particular calling within the general calling of the Christian life — the Christian intellectual someone who engages in a practice — and (following MacIntyre here and therefore following both Aristotle and Aquinas) to be a practitioner in this sense means that your calling is circumscribed by the requirement to exhibit certain virtues, virtues the possession of which enable you to follow your calling faithfully — and, therefore, virtues whose absence will compromise or vitiate your ability to fulfill your calling. And for the Christian those must be, to start with, the core Christian virtues. (To which are added certain specifically intellectual virtues.)  

To me, then, it’s noteworthy that some of the people he singles out as exemplary Christian intellectuals are people notorious for their belittlement of, their mockery of, their contempt for pretty much anyone, Christian or not, who disagrees with them. Douthat’s exemplary Christian intellectuals seem often to think that, because (in their view) they hold the right positions, and have the right strategy, they are therefore exempt from any of the Biblical commandments about how to deal with our Christian siblings and our enemies alike. [emphasis added]

 

That habitual sneering at dissenters is not especially relevant if you think of the Christian intellectual life simply as a mater of strategy; but it matters very much if you think of that life as a vocation which has certain standards intrinsic to it, standards that emerge from the Christian account of the virtuous (the Christlike) person. Considering Christian intellectual life as a matter of vocation might lead to a different list of exemplary figures than the one Ross employs — and would demand a different conceptual framing too.  

 

Douthat, according to Freddie deBoer, doesn't do culture war.  Mentioned in a footnote ...

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/if-you-want-to-make-it-as-a-writer-293

Don’t come at me with the Times please. I’ll give you Brett Stephens. But modern conservatism is about tax cuts and culture war. Ross Douthat doesn’t seem to care about tax cuts and doesn’t do culture war. David Brooks is a sentient Juicero and no conservatives think he’s one of them. (Gail Collins supposedly said “I was looking for a conservative that wouldn't make our readers throw the paper out the window.”) Frank Bruni’s not even conservative, he’s just an asshole.

Not necessarily in the "culture war" of 1990s GOP partisans but culture wars are hard to avoid.  Arguing that both liberal and conservative Americans have embraced heresies and that a return to something like orthodox Catholicism is a good idea might not look like culture war post-Trump but pre-Trump it would have been seen as part of a culture war dualism.

Still, I'm trying to get to Alan Jacobs' reaction to Douthat, which is saying that Douthat has picked as public Christian intellectuals guys who are known to heap contempt on anyone who differs with them.  Perhaps David Bentley Hart is the easiest example because even his fans concede that arrogance is unavoidably part of Hart's writing.  I've encountered enough hipster contempt in Puget Sound in the last thirty years I'm not sure I'm eager to just swim in it by way of reading Hart.  It may be he's got a case for universalism by talking about the problem of evil if there isn't universalism but Ivan Karamazov's complaint about the final cosmic harmony was what was involved in getting there, human suffering.  God is on the hook for creating a universe in which any suffering happens at all, regardless of the universalist final harmony/ No doubt Hart knows that. 

I have other things I want to do with my life than to dwell too much on a David Bentley Hart or a Doug Wilson who, of late, has blogged about "a Jehoiada situation" with the predictable invocation of the lesser magistrate in the wake of the illegitimate victory of Biden and talking about how rebellion against tyrants is a godly duty. Everyone is a prepper, then, but what is everyone prepping for? It's too bad that Doug Wilson's idea of cultivating his Calvinism has entailed claiming Biden isn't a legitimate executive.  There may be no sermons on Exodus 22:28 from Doug Wilson while Biden is in office.  But since I live in the Pacific Northwest and since among religious conservatives of the Christian variety Doug Wilson has had some influence I can't altogether ignore him even if I would sometimes prefer to (actually, make that "I often prefer to"). 

Whether it's the religious right or the religious left what Americans who identify as Christian seem to finally want is a more prominent seat at the table of American civil religion, i.e. prestige and cultural capital to invest in the future of the United States of America.  That is, in a phrase, why I'm an anti-revivalist Christian because I am not eager to endorse revivalism that has as its end goal not worship of Christ but a revitalization of a specific nation-state known as the U.S.A.  I'm grateful to live in the United States for a variety of reasons but gratitude for being alive to begin with has to be cultivated.  

Because I'm not a postmillenialist or a premillenialist I'm not interested in endorsing utopian views that posit that we can abolish poverty or make America great again or any of that.  We should do what we can to ameliorate poverty and deal with injustice but we should be cautious about the ever-present temptation to imagine we will eliminate poverty in our time.  The Great Society didn't manage to do that (which is not necessarily a standard conservative argument against the Great Society policies as such, more an observation that LBJ had a lot of guns to go with that butter and that progressives and leftists might need to consider the extent to which the largesse of what could be redistributed within the United States is predicated on the bloodshed of empire and a fossil fuel economy, which a progressive friend of mine said is something that should give progressives pause--i.e. maybe we need to wean ourselves off the fossil fuel economy and redistribute after we find out what's left).  

Doug Wilson is still postmillenialist and way back in the Mars Hill years I heard some guys who were getting into theonomy talking about pessimillenialism, i.e. any view that wasn't postmillenialism.  Yes, I'm an apocalyptic pessimist and a fatalist about the world at large.  Christians are not going to so Christianize the world that we can hand it to Jesus on a silver platter when He returns.  Nope, I think that Western Christians need to keep repenting of Western Christendom.  

Yes, I absolutely admit that being part Native American from the Pacific Northwest has played a role in my rejection of postmillenialism!  I reject postmillenialism on other grounds but in terms of the policy legacy of a bunch of Americans pursuing Manifest Destiny I don't think for a moment that postmillenialists get a "no true Scotsman" about the colonial and imperial expansionist practices in the U.S. to which postmillenialism contributed.  As post-Hegelian metahistorical conceits go I reject postmillenialist Christian theonomy for much the same reasons I reject Marxism (which is not necessarily identical, as popular level conservative discourse in the U.S. tends to have it, with "socialism"). Now I know that in theory a person "can" disconnect eschatological schools of thought from practice but that begs the question of why postmillenialism should be optimillenialism if its fans suddenly want to say that postmillenialism should be in any way on the hook for the displacement of Native Americans. I'm not talking about evangelism as such, a good chunk of the Nez Perce converted to Christianity.  

In other words, the postmillenialist who wants to argue why postmillenialism had no connection to how Manifest Destiny played out can be in a comparable situation to a Marxist explaining why what happened in the Soviet Union wasn't "real" Marxism.  I suggest that we consider a possibility, that "real" Marxism and "real" postmillenialism have comparable problems as utopian visions, the people who have historically attempted to implement those visions ended up perpetrating genocides. If apocalyptic pessimism isn't your thing that's fine I'm just eluding to some of the reasons for how and why I arrived at my convictions. 

The temptation of "no true Scotsman" will always be with us.  I was reading a couple of books by Ephraim Radner recently and in A Brutal Unity he had a dry but heavy observation about how whether Catholics or Protestants or Orthodox there has been a long temptation within theological disciplines to come up with some version of how "the Church as such" can't be guilty of sin, not really.  This flies in the face of literally everything we see in the Old Testament/Tanakh about how Yahweh dealt with Israel but for some reason a long-running strand in Christian ecclesiology imagines that, nope, "we" can't be collectively guilty of stuff.  A way to put that is, perhaps, to talk of an over-realized eschatology.  Churches repenting of their historic contributions to injustice was part of Radner's theme and he dealt with the Rwandan genocide as an Anglican who served in Africa for a formative part of his career.  His observation about how churches, by way of their theologians, exempt themselves from having perpetrated atrocity is something I'll have to revisit at some other time. 

Jim West linked to a review of David Bentley Hart's book on universalism a while back. The reviewer noted the irony of how Hart seems really contemptuous of people who don't espouse the universalism he espouses, which seems to fly in the face of the literally ultimate optimism you would think a universalist would have.  In a similar way, it's been curious to see postmillenialists of the Doug Wilson variety go the last decade or so writing about how Christians gotta prepare for what amounts to a liberal zombie apocalypse and consider rebellion against tyranny (and this would be basically any time a Democrat is elected to the executive branch). If postmillenialism is more optimistic in its outlook and ethos than premillenialism or amillenialism what is it optimistic about?  A resurgence of Western Christendom?  

I was reading Bradley Birzer's review of Alan Jacobs' The Year of Our Lord 1943 a while back. I was struck by Birzer's conclusion that Jacobs seemed to be saying Christian humanism had ended.  I didn't get that impression from the book at all when I read it. The idea that Christian humanism ended at 1943 wasn't the point of the book, the point of the book was to explore who Christian humanists before and during the Second World War discussed the nature of education in the West because they were concerned that a technocratic ethos was permeating the West; there were men and women who feared that how the West would win might evacuate the moral foundations of what the leaders of the West thought they were fighting to preserve.  There were also Christians who believed that Christianity as practiced in the West would have to face the reality of the functional end of Christendom.  Thus Alan Jacobs ended his book with a reference to Jacques Ellul as a Christian thinker who, unlike the others who took up most of the book's length, both saw that Christendom had ended and warned that technocracy was ultimately the greater long-term threat than either the fascism or communism that Western technocrats had defeated?  Why?  Well, I could rabbit trail across half a dozen Ellul books but I don't want to bore you with technique as ideology stuff.  

That can, maybe, provide some context for what Alan Jacobs finds baffling about Ross Douthat's choice of Christian public intellectuals because the distinction Jacobs has been making is between the "what" of status designated to people and the "how" of, well, how those Christian public intellectuals behave toward people who aren't on board with what they say.  

Pertinent to deBoer's plea that people not traffic in snide, sneering contempt and that earnestness is undersold I think he's got a point.  But then I think we do well to consider our sins. There's no shortage of them and many times we sin unawares, to say nothing of times where we choose to sin. 

Whether in its progressive or reactionary forms there are a variety of American and Americanist Christians who want to salvage some form of Western Christendom and that is exactly what I think we don't need more of.  Given the death spiral of the Protestant mainlines and the coasting down in their wake trajectory of the evangelicals in the last twenty years I don't think the religious right or the embers of the religious left in the United States should be trying to grab a seat at the table of an empire who I really think is pasts its shelf-life.  I am not an Atlanticist, I'll put it that way.

What seems to happen across the board among those who are looking for Christian intellectuals to speak to our moment is ... I'm trying not to be too cynical here ... they're speaking to the self-perceived crises of their own prestige more than to the issues that are likely to effect people outside of the academy.  Where Alan Jacobs is going to go with his no doubt post-Winkian concepts of demonology remains to be seen ... .  But I don't disagree with his basic objection that the Christian intellectuals that Ross Douthat thinks are charting a path to ... somewhere ... are all such jerks we shouldn't be looking to those people as models of scholars either in terms of the ideas they propound or how they heap scorn on the people who don't agree with their ideas.