Stephanie Slade. Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right. $30.00. 304 pp.

In the 1960s, National Review editor Frank Meyer united two different factions of the postwar conservative movement that were at odds: traditionalists and libertarians. 

Libertarians (such as Friedrich Hayek) believed in individual freedom, while traditionalists (such as Russell Kirk) believed in moral regulation. The two groups had many differences. Libertarians saw nothing wrong with drug legalization, for instance, but traditionalists did. Libertarians made it their highest goal to limit the reach of the state, while traditionalists were willing to expand state power to enforce morality. But the two groups agreed in their opposition to communism, so they became unlikely bedfellows in an enduring conservative alliance known as “fusionism.”

Or so the story has sometimes been told. Stephanie Slade tells a different version of the story.

In her account, fusionism was not simply a pragmatic alliance but rather a cohesive ideological synthesis “that combines two rich strains of philosophical thought: the classical liberal political tradition and the Judeo-Christian moral tradition.” 

Classical liberalism promoted liberty; the Judeo-Christian tradition promoted virtue. The genius of fusionist conservatism was its insight that virtue could be promoted through political and economic freedom.

Slade, an editor of Reason magazine, is both a Catholic and a libertarian, so she believes in the necessity of cultivating virtue (long a central goal of Catholic social teaching) even as she insists that the state cannot play a direct role in this process. She argues that her views reflect what fusionist conservatives have been saying for decades, because fusionist conservatives have largely resisted the temptation to use state power to enforce virtuous norms. Instead, they have protected the freedom of private entities (especially churches) to cultivate virtue through voluntary means. 

Churches are much more effective teachers of morality than the government is, Slade argues. When the state forces people to be moral, citizens do not develop virtuous character; at best, they learn moral conformity, but not genuine moral decision-making.

But citizens can learn virtue when the state gets out of the way and allows churches and families to flourish. In the early postwar conservative movement, both so-called libertarians and so-called traditionalists understood this. Even such an avowed free-marketer as Friedrich Hayek was concerned about virtue formation, Slade argues. And even such a strong social conservative as Russell Kirk believed in the free market as well.

Today this fusionist understanding is under threat from a new postliberal right that doesn’t trust the private market to foster virtue. Instead, postliberals such as Adrian Vermeule and J.D. Vance want the state to enforce virtue directly rather than relying on private organizations to teach virtue through voluntary means. They want the state to give financial incentives for marriage or childbearing or use immigration policy to restrict those from religious or ethnic backgrounds they think are a potential threat to conservative Christian values. Some postliberals are willing to use state power to restrict the free speech rights of their opponents. And many are suspicious of the free market, preferring to use tariffs to control trade. 

Slade is right to be worried about postliberalism. That’s not just because postliberalism would represent a distinct turn away from Reaganism and the fusionism that sustained the conservative movement for more than half a century. It’s also because it would likely veer toward authoritarianism, since it lacks the strong commitment to civil liberties that has kept any movement grounded in some form of classical liberalism from becoming too autocratic. 

But while I agree with Slade’s critical portrayal of postliberalism as a departure from fusionist conservatism, I’m also not convinced that the conservative movement was ever as averse to moral regulation as she seems to think. It’s undeniably true that the conservative movement always had libertarian-leaning people in its midst. Even a few of its standard-bearers, such as Barry Goldwater (the Republican presidential nominee of 1964), were pretty strongly libertarian. But those people—Goldwater included—eventually found themselves out of step with much of the right, because the majority of conservative Republicans were a lot more willing to tolerate moral regulations on pornography, drugs, abortion, and some types of sex acts than consistent libertarians were. 

We have never had any presidential administration (conservative or otherwise) that really leaned toward libertarianism. Fusionist conservatives of the late twentieth century did believe in using the private market as much as possible, but when necessary, they were also willing to use state power to directly regulate morality—something Slade generally opposes. Slade winces at President Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs, which she calls a “glaring exception” to his fusionist principles. But with the exception of libertarians, conservatives at the time widely supported Reagan’s attempt to get tough on drug pushers.

But even if the particular type of fusionism that Slade favors may be more strongly libertarian than the version that most American conservatives of the late twentieth century favored, she still presents some compelling arguments in favor of cultivating virtue exclusively through private organizations, not state regulation.

Slade argues that state enforcement of a moral code will inevitably become corrupt. Especially in culturally liberal areas, the state’s view of morality may be very different from the morality that particular groups of socially conservative Christians might hold—and if that is the case, the “morality” that the state enforces might actually be what Christians consider immoral. (If you doubt this, just look at the moral regulation that California’s state government has enacted to enforce its views on sexuality and gender). 

The troubling track record of widely flouted government regulations on recreational drugs, illicit sex, and abortion over the last century gives one plenty of reason to suspect that Slade is correct in suggesting that the state cannot do an effective job of cultivating moral virtue through regulation.

But at the same time, I don’t think that there is much evidence to suggest that when regulations on vices were repealed—as was the case when state governments legalized no-fault divorce and abortion in the early 1970s or when restrictions on obscenity were removed through the courts—individual moral behavior improved. A virtue-minded libertarian like Slade may argue that when individuals are free of government constraint, they will learn to exercise their own moral decision-making and cultivate virtue, but the evidence of public behavior in the immediate aftermath of drug legalization (or any other vice legalization effort, for that matter) suggests that large numbers of citizens do not use their newfound freedom for virtuous ends.

That doesn’t mean that fusionism is misguided. Instead, it may suggest that the intractability of human corruption is beyond the capacity of either the free market or state regulation to fully reform. The challenge for a Christian is to figure out when state regulation can improve public virtue and when it instead impedes it. Fusionists probably offered a much better answer to that question than postliberals have—provided, that is, that we acknowledge that even the classic fusionists understood that there were a few moments that justified state intervention on behalf of morality.

This essay will be featured in the winter edition of the Mere Orthodoxy print journal. To receive it along with other member benefits, including access to our Discord server, become a member today.

Malcolm Guite, Galahad and the Grail. Rabbit Room Press, 2026. $34.99. 372 pp.

Malcolm Guite, The Coming of Arthur. Rabbit Room Press, 2026. $34.99. 372 pp.

In an age of AI slop and shortened attention spans, Malcolm Guite’s epic poetry about King Arthur is nothing short of miraculous. Somehow, this professor-poet-priest (who, by the way, looks a bit like a Hobbit) has hewn from ancient sources a modern classic, a series of galloping English ballads celebrating faithfulness, courage, and self-sacrificial love. 

I almost cannot believe it exists.

Guite started his four-volume cycle with Galahad and the Grail, recounting a young knight’s quest to liberate the Fisher King and restore the land. The second, out in November 2026, jumps back in time and tells of Arthur’s attempt to unify Britain. While Galahad and the Grail reads like an adventure tale—the red-cross knight travelling a forest and over mountains to rescue the world from the powers of darkness—The Coming of Arthur is a soberer reflection on the proper education of a prince, the need for a just political order, and the consequences, to both man and land, of rash disobedience. (The remaining two installments are scheduled for publication in 2027 and 2028.)

Guite takes up these legends in the spirit of the Inklings. Following in the footsteps of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, Guite makes timely the timeless, drawing new life from ancient stories.

Why retell Arthurian legends? Because the old stories are wiser than we are, Guite is fond of saying. As C. S. Lewis famously wrote, every age has its own blind spots. Echoing the contemporary outlook, modern books tend only to confirm our biases. “The only palliative,” Lewis prescribed, “is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds” by “reading old books.” Whether for the wisdom they offer or simply because they do not share our assumptions, old books are part and parcel of an education that aims at freedom.

In Galahad and Arthur, Guite has given us new old books. These are not translations. They are not summaries of the classics, such as children are forced to read in some schools—what Winston Churchill called “pemmican” (essentially dried spam, flavorless survival food that hardly nourishes the soul). Nor is the language pummeled to a pulp in the name of readability, such as the twaddle churned out by artificial intelligence. Instead, Guite reimagines the wisdom of the old stories for a modern audience, all in gorgeous verse. Indeed, in Guite’s second book, an elven poet says to Arthur:

I take what’s beautiful and true
and by my art I make it new,
till that great Bard whose Word is true
makes all things new again.

Such is the sacred responsibility of the artist—one Guite has taken seriously. Faithful to the legends, Guite brings forward their Christian themes in a way modern audiences can hear—baptizing the “magical Celtic inheritance” of the British Isles with “the light of the gospel” in simple, beautiful poetry. 

Creation Care

One way Guite channels the spirit of the legends, while reimagining them for modern readers, is by emphasizing the knight’s chivalric responsibility to commune with creation and care for it. 

In The Coming of Arthur, for example, the wizard Merlin notices the boy’s love of trees and teaches him how to hear “their ancient speech.” Under Merlin’s direction, Arthur can hear an oak tree singing to him, encouraging him to have the patience of an acorn, to remain rooted in the ground, and to “remember us amidst your victories. The lord of men must be the friend of trees.” Returning another evening, Merlin transfigures himself and Arthur into owls. Gazing with nocturnal eyes at “a hundred million stars,” Merlin asks Arthur to see the magnificence of the heavenly bodies—and to see that the great Poet placed the same order within the human heart. “Mankind is Creation’s crown,” he says. Thus does Guite urge Christian men (and women), not to return to a pre-Christian worship of the natural world, but to observe God’s fingerprints on all of creation.

Our role as image bearers of the creator, ambassadors of the king, demands that we rule, not dominate, creation for his glory. In Galahad and the Grail, as the red-cross knight rides his jet-black steed “through forests waste and wild,” he hears the sorrowful song of a naiad, the spirit of a babbling stream in human form. I have been poisoned, she sings to Galahad, by a knight who was once like you. He “won my heart and hand” and then turned cruel, despoiling “his lady and his land.” The corrupted knight harnessed her power, she says, “to serve his greed and lust. His engines churn the limpid burn and turn life back to dust.”

While the wasteland motif is, of course, common to the ancient legends, Guite depicts the knight’s corruption in definitively modern terms. As Francis Bacon would have recognized, the knight attempted to conquer nature in order to satisfy his greed for more. Rather than stewarding God’s created order, the knight sought to master nature, by scientific knowledge and technological means, in order to live longer and more comfortably. Similarly did Machiavelli liken lady fortune to a violent river who must be dammed by “virtuous” men. “It is better to be impetuous than cautious,” Machiavelli wrote, “because fortune is a woman; and it is necessary, if one wants to hold her down, to beat her and strike her down.”

But, for Guite, this advice not only violates the chivalric code of honor; it also leads to death. Rescuing the naiad, Galahad challenges and defeats the knight-turned-necromancer only to find that the man of flesh and blood had become a machine:

Beneath the mask of hardened steel
no human face remained,
just springs and bolts and cogs and wheels
all rusty, worn and stained.

Having revealed the true end of the tyrant, Galahad reflects:

…where he set his mind and heart
His soul flowed in their wake
For sometimes we ourselves become
The idols that we make.

Guite masterfully connects the wasteland motif with the modern attempt to conquer nature, not only amplifying the spirit of the legend but also responding to Bacon and Machiavelli. In this manner, it is a new old book, an ancient story written anew, with centuries of hindsight.

Modern disenchantment and portals to other worlds

In the second book in the series, Guite places Arthur’s coming-of-age story within “the tale all Britons know” as told by the great mytho-histories of Homer’s Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century Historia. Surviving the fall of Troy (so the legend goes), Brut sailed across “the savage seas” to found a new kingdom on the “enchanted isle” of Albion. For generations, his royal line ruled the united British Isles until King Leir left the throne “without a son and heir,” plunging the Britons into tribal chaos and inviting the Saxons to invade, “bloodthirsty pagans in their ships, with oaths and curses on their lips.”

Arthur’s birth to King Uther presents the opportunity for reunification. But, fearful for the infant’s life, Merlin hides Arthur away with kind Ector, to be raised as a foster son alongside Ector’s own son. Instructing Ector to keep Arthur’s identity a secret, Merlin advises:

…when the two lads come of age
let Arthur be his brother’s page
for we have learned from saint and sage
those who would rule must serve.

This second book in the series is grittier than the first. But unlike the many petty lords wrestling for power, those who “think that might is right,” Arthur learns to serve his brother as a preparation for kingship.

As in the old Arthurian legends, Guite’s tales take place in liminal spaces, “along a porous border between the realm of Faerie and the kingdoms of mortal men,” he explains in an appendix. He weaves together the tactile and the numinous. Reading the prelude of The Coming of Arthur, one can almost feel the wind blowing cold on Cornwall’s coast as it “flings the freezing rain” against Tintagel, the historic castle perched “above the crags.” When Ector takes Arthur on a winter’s journey from Devon, “deep in the warm South West” of Britain, to bustling London town for holiday celebrations and games, it’s a grueling trip through wind and snow. When an alliance of rebellious lords rejects Arthur’s claim to the throne and lay siege to his castle, Arthur refuses to “skulk within this tower, like [a] rat[] within a cage,” and rides out to meet them, Excalibur drawn.

But the map of Britain is “overlaid” with strange, yet familiar, worlds. On a midsummer night, Merlin escorts Arthur into the woods, where a grey stone, “set there in ancient days,” seems to turn to mist and then open as a gate to the land of Elves, right before Arthur’s bewildered eyes. Ordinary landmarks become portals to fantastical realms—as Anodos discovers Fairy Land in an old desk drawer (in George MacDonald’s Phantastes) or the Pevensie children stumble into Narnia through the back of a wardrobe. As Merlin says,

…there are worlds, more wondrous worlds,
Than ever you can think
And there are worlds inside of worlds,
And every world is linked.

The cynic in me is tempted to say that all this sounds like a quaint children’s story. Portals to magical realms is the stuff of graphic novels and board games, not real life, where the price of gasoline, my family’s social calendar, and deadlines at work dominate my attention. Life is immediate and material, no?

In a recent podcast interview, Guite said that his aim is to recover the imagination as a truth-bearing faculty. The modern world is not disenchanted, he added. We are disenchanted to it. “What we really have to do” is not reenchant the world but “un-disenchant ourselves.” 

Guite’s poetry aims to reenchant the imagination of a generation led to believe that the world is purely material, merely transactional.

In The Coming of Arthur, an elf lord hints to Arthur that their two worlds were at one time in closer contact, before the human world “grew dim” by some “dire calamity.” Men “wait a King to set them free,” he says. As C. S. Lewis supposed in the first book of his Ransom trilogy, perhaps the earth went radio silent when humankind rebelled against its creator and king; the human condition is to see through a glass darkly. Following Lewis, Guite asks us to consider whether there are other worlds beyond our sight, a trillion-trillion galaxies blocked by light pollution. Perhaps modernity has not killed mystery, only blinded us to it. As a friend recently reflected, what if we've mistaken a quiet God for a noisy life?

Like Merlin, Guites hopes to help us listen to the wisdom of the still, quiet voice in the woods; to give us an owl’s eyesight that we might see the multitudes of stars; to encourage us to defend the good in an inhuman age. Sometimes “lowly things men hardly see are more than what they seem.”

Guite wields the magic of the Inklings for the twenty-first century. There is wisdom in old stories. We just need someone to help us hear it.

One final word: to get the benefits of this tonic, please take as directed. In an introduction, Guite asks readers to enjoy these stories. Read them aloud, preferably with friends or family. They are best “heard in the ear and tasted on the tongue,” he writes. (Or listen to the audiobook, read by Guite, for a similarly immersive experience.) Go slowly; don’t rush. This is a feast to be celebrated, not medicine to be endured. (Plus the original artwork by Stephen Crotts is breathtaking.) These are the first Arthurian legends in verse form since Alfred, Lord Tennyson, but don’t be intimidated: the poetry is plain and simple, surprisingly easy to follow.

Will you take up the tale?

It has become common to look back on our cultural and historical heroes, today, and wonder if we ever really understood them or knew them at all. When evaluating our heroes, we consistently choose a deconstructive lens: Nolan’s Odysseus, Tom King’s Batman, or the hit show The Boys. Heroes lay on a cold metal slab, dissected and rearranged to our liking. We take apart our villains too, revealing that they didn’t actually have evil intentions but rather were misunderstood or broken people. Perhaps you’ve seen Disney’s Maleficent, the Broadway (and now Hollywood) hit Wicked or one of my favorites in recent years, The Joker. In the modern age, we like to hold our heroes and villains up like a jeweler, twisting and turning them to find a new angle, a different perspective and maybe, something glistening in a place previously unseen. 

There’s nothing intrinsically negative about the idea. Although, one could suppose confusing our ideals with our dysfunctions will rear some undesired consequences. The most recent example is The Death of Robin Hood. It is not the Robin Hood you know. He is not a CGI rendered fox, and this is far from a Disney live-adaptation of the classic. But neither is this a young, spry trickster donning green apparel as he runs from authority. Instead, we meet a grizzled, gray-haired and distraught Robin played by Hugh Jackman. Robin is near the end of his life, puzzled and rather disturbed at the glorious renown his name and coinciding stories carry. 

Our first appearance of the legend is in the opening segment and it is clear how the mythology of Robin Hood will be depicted. Unaware they are conversing with the man himself, a traveler esteems the character of Robin and lifts up the heroic nobleness of Robin’s deeds. To which, Robin replies with spitting responses stating the man praised was no hero. He never prayed in his life. There should be no love for one such as him and there is no one who protects the meek. The people see meaning where there is no meaning and sing lies of the hero. The man killed for the joy of it and there is no one more wicked than the falsely-famed Robin Hood. It is clear from the outset of the opening scene, this is not the Robin we know and love. This is, in fact, a Robin Hood for the modern world. 

In medieval culture, Robin Hood was without a doubt a heroic figure. How one defines heroism could certainly be debated and would drastically shape one’s retrospective assessment of the figure. But first, he must be properly placed in his time. For the sake of this article, we will be leaving aside whether or not Robin Hood was a literal, real person, considering it is irrelevant to the actual existence of him in the minds of the medieval world. Robin Hood was “real” in one sense because people told stories about him. They influenced, encouraged and comforted the dejected and lowly. His name birthed hope into the hearts of the needy—an undeniable real hope. 

The classic picture of Robin Hood to the vast majority of people in our time is as follows: The government is corrupt and taxing the citizens egregiously, so in comes Robin Hood to steal money from the government and give it back to the people. In today’s climate, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who would scoff at such a mission. This would even be celebrated or defined as heroic in our day and age. But this is not original to the stories of Robin Hood. Our well-known image of Robin is indeed a later modification to address the political issues of the 16^th century. When we go back to the earliest 14^th century stories of Robin Hood we find something packing a heavier punch. 

At the University of Hull, Lesley Coote lectures on medieval studies and Medievalism and has a specific fascination with our evolving Robin Hood. Her book, Storyworlds of Robin Hood: The Origins of a Medieval Outlaw, attempts (and succeeds in my opinion) to paint the full picture of this notorious figure. What world are these stories born out of? What ideas and theological assumptions orbit such lasting folklore? The results reveal Robin Hood lives in a world of religion and virtue, of Marian devotion and persistent corruption within both the church and the state. By sampling a few of the texts we’ll gain a cursory understanding of who the early Robin Hood was.

In the oldest full text we have, Robin Hood and the Monk (~1461), something is grieving our friend Robin. On a day of Solemnity, he cannot attend Mass due to his outlaw identity and strife with the Sheriff of Nottingham. He decides to attend with Little John as his protector until a spat between the two leaves Robin in the city all alone and without disguise. He prays to God and “mild Mary” and kneels “before the Rood.” Caught and betrayed during Mass by a monk whom Robin had previously robbed, the legend is imprisoned only to be rescued by his returning friend, Little John. Little John has intercepted the disloyal monk and murdered him, using his letters to beguile the king into allowing him into the prison where Robin is being held. The King is astonished by the loyalty between Little John and Robin only to realize Robin Hood’s bandits exhibit loyalty and faithfulness more than any of his own servants. The tale ends with an exhortation: “God, who is always a crowned king, bring us all to his bliss!” 

Robin Hood and the Potter (~1468) may not contain a stop off at Mass but the elements of faith are far from absent. Here we have Robin described as:

“One of the best that ever carried a bow,
His name was Robin Hood.
Robin Hood was the yeoman’s name,
That was both courteous and free:
For the love of Our Lady,
All women worshipped he.”

When a potter comes along through the forest and is demanded to pay a road tax by Robin, the two have a fight that leads to Robin’s loss. In the wake of being bested he offers fellowship to the potter and to sell his pots in town for him. When warned of the danger of the Sheriff of Nottingham by his friends, Robin replies: “Through the help of Our Lady, Fellows, leave me alone: Ho, walk on!” Robin proceeds to sell the potter’s pots for cheap, utilizing the deal to sell to the sheriff’s wife and get himself an invite to dinner. Robin, in disguise, tricks the sheriff into following him with a promise he’ll lead the lawman to Robin Hood. In classic trickster form, this is indeed an ambush and Robin’s men rob the sheriff. With the newly acquired funds, Robin pays the potter fifteen times what his pots were worth. The potter is exalted, the sheriff humbled. 

A little later on, roughly late 1490s, comes a compilation of stories entitled The Little Gest of Robin Hood. Here we find Robin ever pious—perhaps to a Protestant’s chagrin: 

“A good custom then had Robin,
In whatever land he were,
Every day before he would dine, 
Three masses would he hear.
The one in worship of the Father,
And another of the Holy Ghost;
The third of Our dear Lady,
That he loved altogether most.”

It would be an injustice to attempt to summarize this collection of stories as vast as it is. In fear of being unjust in the presence of Robin, may I alone suggest some themes which appear within. We see a knight who has fallen into the hands of a corrupt abbot, the traditional crooked sheriff, a lying monk and the betrayal and death of Robin. The king notices once again the loyalty of Robin’s men versus his own and the lowly are exalted while the proud and corrupt are humbled. 

What stands out in these early stories in comparison to our modern understandings or retelling of Robin, especially The Death of Robin Hood, is the deep religiosity of Robin Hood and his stories. He was a yeoman. A trusted servant of a higher order, of the Virgin Mary herself. He lived on the outskirts, symbolically in another realm, and fulfilled a higher law than the rest of his surrounding world. Robin was not a vigilante who stole money from the rich and gave to the poor but rather executed judgments in a world filled with religious leaders attached to vice and oppressive civil authorities. Coote notes that “Robin Hood may be anticlerical not in the sense of objecting to the clergy perse, but because they were seen as obvious practitioners of this particular vice [avarice], which was hated by everyone.” He was a representative of God’s law and justice when the leaders who were supposed to do so were found lacking.

In the medieval mind, the forest wasn’t a place where towering trees lived and quiet streams flowed. It was a place of judgment, similar to the ancient views of the sea, with divine qualities. This forest is where the outlaw, defined in Old Norse as someone placed outside the protection of society and its laws, Robin Hood sits in judgment. But it isn’t his own judgment he wields but rather the Virgin Mary’s and thus by correlation, a divine judgment. Coote also notes that “the Virgin is reversing the unfairness of society’s values and paradigms, and the vague and often serendipitous nature of justice and law.”  Yes, Robin goes about exacting justice through violent and trickster means but this wasn’t a problem for the medieval mind, for the message wasn’t the enjoyment of violence but rather the enactment of true justice in an unjust world. 

Through this lens, it is apparent that Robin Hood and his early stories were similar to Revelation’s role in the canon. It was an unveiling of the true justice and spiritual reality behind the evils and injustice playing out in the daily life of the commoner. As John’s words written on Patmos were sent around to the early churches in what is now modern-day Turkey, so were the stories of Robin Hood told, performed and celebrated in the medieval towns under the oppressive hands of authoritarians who had no regard for God’s justice. This is where Robin’s heroics show through, in his divine purpose and revelation of spiritual reality. 

Unfortunately, the new modern adaptation of Robin Hood’s story, The Death of Robin Hood, throws all of this away. Instead of the divine witness who seeks the virtuous and condemns the unjust, we have an old man who is burdened by the lies and stories told about him. When asked what difference we see between the original storyworld of Robin Hood versus the ones we receive today, Coote tackles this issue head on: “The most important difference between the medieval Robin Hood and now? Probably the need to contend with Robin’s moral goodness (or lack of it). Since he lost his medieval justification (his relationship with the Virgin Mary), people have mostly felt the need to give Robin and his men a backstory to explain why they’re into robbery with menaces, general thuggery and personal violence.” If modernity sees Robin’s relationship to the God and the Virgin as irrational, they are left with a puzzle missing pieces. The box with the finished image is buried in the trash can and we’ve no source point for the solving of the puzzle. We end up with a man of untamed violence and absolute cruelty who is desperate for death. A fraud who stands in the shadow of stories which paint a false picture. 

The original medieval story from the 17^th century called The Death of Robin Hood is about a betrayal, attributed to the prioress and her lover who want Robin dead. The prioress is supposed to help Robin but instead drains his blood, which leaves him for dead. Traditionally this crime is committed because of a shared disdain for Robin and his judgment against corruption and authority. Although, the writer and director of the new film, Michael Sarnoski, thought “maybe she’s not some evil nun, maybe she’s a healer, and maybe she has a community unlike a lot of places back then, and it’s a place where lepers and orphans can come, and she’s kind of incredible. And maybe Robin wasn’t the sweet, goodly hero that we think of.” The entire narrative has been flipped for a deconstruction experiment. 

Storytelling is another critical piece of the film. The stories about Robin surround his journey as others remind him of his supposed legend. When discussing stories with the prioress, Robin states: “I have seen the power in stories. They can be used to make men do terrible things and then those terrible things become stories and stories. No. You cannot trust any of them. We cannot be trusted with them.” To which the prioress replies: “knives cut bread as well as they do flesh.” Sarnoski interprets for us: “…what she’s saying is that she uses stories to help and heal people, whereas Robin used them to perpetuate violence. That doesn’t make the stories themselves good or bad. They’re just tools that humans can use for various reasons, but we need to be responsible in how we use them and how we let them be used upon us.” 

The gymnastics of reshaping Robin Hood are entirely unnecessary to tell a story of healing. If this was Sarnoski’s goal it seems bizarre how an assisted suicide to put an end to Robin’s grief over the violence of his life is truly healing and responsible. It’s a modern concoction that is truly confused on what is flesh and what is bread. It seems quite backwards to use storytelling in a seriously graphic film to criticize a traditionally revered legend who is being painted as unworthy of such a cultural position because of the violence attributed to him all the while giving him a violent ending. Perhaps Sarnoski sees this as his own justice being enacted. The stories of Robin Hood are healing all on their own. They served this purpose for the medieval people and still are accessible today in a world where injustice and corruption persist. 

In our modern times, Robin is celebrated for his wealth redistribution ideology: take from the rich and give to the poor. A perusal of the early sources shows this is far from the reality of Robin Hood’s original purpose. Violence followed him, surely, often enacted by his own hands. But it was apocalyptic violence, not the celebration of cruelty. 

Modernity isn’t to bear the entirety of blame. While the Reformation certainly provided undeniable and necessary changes, it damaged the original message of Robin Hood by ridding the culture of everything related to the Virgin Mary. Thus, Robin’s true purpose eventually faded. But today, we can know that Robin was uniquely tied to a divine purpose. Robin knew what bread was and he knew what flesh was. He knew the old story which with judgment, cut flesh and with mercy, cut bread. These two are not separated but rather divinely intertwined. We see this at the Lord’s Table where in a mysterious way, flesh and bread are served to us, cut by the knife of the true Storyteller. Kill Robin you may, but as time has shown he always reappears in culture. Whether it be medieval manuscripts, men in green tights, an animated fox trotting through the forest or even a gray-haired Hugh Jackman—our hooded hero has a penchant for resurrection, much like the Lord whom he serves.

According to Lifeway Research, up to half of US Protestant pastors say they “frequently hear members of their congregation repeating conspiracy theories they have heard.” It is tempting to minimize this problem by dismissing it as a simple intellectual error, which is perhaps concerning, but not anything more significant. In reality, however, conspiratorial thinking pushed to its extremes acts as a spiritual counterfeit to Christianity. It becomes a rival theology, carrying its own doctrine of providence, its own form of gnosis, and a rejection of genuine reason and truth-seeking. The Christian who adopts the conspiratorial mind has not simply gotten some facts wrong, but has begun to worship at a different altar, a broken cistern that can’t hold any water.

Providence

Conspiracy theories go far beyond a mere set of factual claims. Rather, they are a hermeneutical lens that offers a more comprehensive interpretation of history. This takes the form of weaving disconnected facts and events into a single thread, where causation is assumed and prescribed, however undeservedly. In the mind of the conspiracist, nothing merely “happens.” Major events, including the 2020 election, the attacks of September 11th, or even the Holocaust, must have emerged as a result of elite overlords or “the deep state” working behind the scenes. The reality of these events only becomes discernible to those who know how to interpret such events - who possess the correct “lens.” This may sound familiar to those who understand the Christian doctrine of providence. As the Westminster Confession of Faith (5.1) points out,

God, the great Creator of all things, doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to the least…

Similarly, the Heidelberg Catechism Q27 confesses that providence is,

“the almighty and ever present power of God by which he upholds, as with his hand, heaven and earth and all creatures, and so rules them,” that all things “come to us not by chance but by his fatherly hand.”

The conspiracist interacts with historical events in an eerily similar way, arguing that nothing happens by chance or accident but is directed by larger forces. The difference, however, is that this theorist confesses man-made rulers in control, rather than the sovereign Lord.

This is, in part, why Christians often succumb to conspiracy theories so often in the US. Followers of Christ have been rightly taught to reject a secular history that sees world events as meaningless and accidental. Believers understand that history is going somewhere, and that a deeper order underlies the day-to-day appearances of modern life. Conspiratism takes this theologically healthy instinct and transfers its object from God’s governance to the hidden hand of the deep state, or some similar body. The allure of conspiratorial thinking is that it can make sense of complexity in the moment. However, it quickly turns into a restless existence, forcing investigators to spend time decoding messages that do not exist. This internal striving devolves into a broad-strokes labeling of friend versus enemy, and obscures the complexity and confusion of reality. Eventually, the conspiracist does not need God in order to understand the world, because his theory can do so. 

Gnosticism 

A related problem with conspiracism among believers is the gnosticism it latently assumes. In the early church, gnostics claimed that salvation came through secret knowledge, accessible only to a select few and hidden from most, contrary to Scripture. They maintained some key claims of Christianity, such as the resurrection, but obscured them to make them instrumental to the real truth. This comes with rites of initiation, which in our world today are often presented as “doing your own research,” always looking past and subverting readily available information for what is said to lie beneath the surface. This contrasts with the Apostle Paul’s declaration in Acts 26 that “this was not done in a corner,” since Christianity’s truth claims are public and available to all. The faith was always preached in the open and handed down through visible institutions, and not in secret.

The church father Irenaeus argued directly against the Gnostics, insisting that Christian belief and doctrine be catholic and universal, consistent across space and time, and not reduced to a select few. By contrast, the Gnostic epistemic habit was to seek hidden knowledge that actively discredited the public testimony of the Resurrection. Furthermore, a basic understanding of the Fall would suggest the limits of human cognition in light of sin. These noetic effects are remedied especially by special revelation, the confession of the Creeds, the communal study of Scripture, and church structures that maintain truth, often through elders and bishops. The conspiracist treats institutions as presumptively corrupt, and self-discovered propositions as the most inherently reliable. “Doing your own research,” completely untied from community, tradition, and structure, is a doctrine which inadvertently promotes an untainted individual intellect.

False Witness 

The Westminster Larger Catechism’s exposition of the ninth commandment does not restrict “bearing false witness” to deliberate lying by commission. It addresses censuring, gossip, intentionally and incorrectly misconstruing good intentions, and receiving or countenancing evil reports. A person still bears false witness by perpetuating unverified or unsubstantiated theories, big or small. This is not a victimless activity, and in recent years has affected the likes of doctors, poll workers, corporate executives, Haitians, and others. The Christian tradition largely forbids believers from participating in such targeting, especially without cause or significant evidence. Instead, it demands a charitable esteem for our neighbors (and enemies, for that matter) and an unwillingness to accept unverified and defamatory reports without necessity. The catechism rejects the notion that conspiracism can be “just asking questions,” and treats it as a moral act, not a neutral one.

Conclusion

None of this requires Christians to become gullible or naive. Psalm 2 describes kings taking counsel together against the Lord, and the crucifixion itself was a conspiracy carried out jointly by religious and governmental authorities. True connivance does occur, and wisdom to discern the truth is necessary in a complex and fallen world.

However, we must defend against a totalizing hermeneutic of suspicion, lest it become its own form of faith. The remedy for conspiratorial thinking is not simply fact-checking (although some basic reality acknowledgment can go a long way). The Christian faith supplies the meaning, truth, and power to make sense of the world, and by our own sobriety and charity, we can bear witness that our God steers the course of history for his good pleasure.

I sometimes think about what my childhood and teenage years would have been like if I had the same kind of technology available to me that my preteen children now have available to them. I doubt it would have gone well. I learned from an early age the kind of permissions I could get by labeling myself “introverted.” Even without broadband internet, I played the bookish loner. It’s hard to wrap my mind around where I would have ended up with unfettered access to online creations. Infinite scroll? Influencers who looked and sounded like the people I wanted to look and sound like? An AI bot that told me I was an interesting person and enjoyed talking to me? 

Thinking along these lines can induce panic. What possible chance do our kids have today? How can healthy attention spans, pure imaginations, and relationship skills survive such an immersive and unchecked technological regime? 

Some have answered, “They can’t.” So the answer is to remove our families and communities from the technological regime as much as possible. I’m sympathetic to this answer and think it’s truer and more helpful than its mirror opposite. But I think this answer misses something important. In Job 28, Job reflects that true wisdom cannot be found in this world. Mankind’s strongest and most enriching industries cannot locate wisdom, nor does nature, in all its vast, untamed wonder, possess it. Job concludes: 

“God understands the way to it,
and he knows its place.
For he looks to the ends of the earth
and sees everything under the heavens….
And he said to man,
‘Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom,
and to turn away from evil is understanding.’” (Job 28: 23-24, 28). 

In other words, we are not wrong to despair over wisdom from this world. Looking to society, law, and technology to shape the world so that wisdom is obvious and natural is a fool’s errand. Wisdom is not found here. It is found with God. 

Withdrawing from mainstream society to form intentional anti-technology communes may not be intrinsically wrong, but it’s not intrinsically right, either, because no such strategy can render wisdom. To be wise is not to be strategic. It is to fear the Lord. It is to turn toward our Creator and away from evil—even when said evil rests in our pockets. 

My book Digital Liturgies was an attempt to help my fellow evangelicals approach technology with the right theological and philosophical categories. I wanted myself, my family, my church, and my theological tribe to change the way we saw digital technology, from a lifeless tool that responded to whatever the user wants, to a heart-shaping habitat that’s pressing a particular kind of life into us. After the book came out, however, several people pointed out a dilemma I had dimly felt but resisted confronting: If the arguments in this book are true, shouldn’t our daily routines be radically different; and if so, what are those differences going to look like?

Scroll Less, Live More is my attempt to complete the project I started in Digital Liturgies. 

From the beginning, I knew I wanted to talk to a younger audience. Why? Because I’ve become convinced that, when it comes to transforming tech habits, no arena matters more than the home. I represent a Millennial generation that was given digital powers so quickly and so thoroughly that most of our parents were overwhelmed. The discontinuity between the Internet and TV took them by surprise. 

As a result, I’ve talked to many fellow millennials, and older Gen-Zers, who grieve the way their intellectual and emotional lives were dominated so early by technology. The way we learn to encounter the world as young teenagers is astonishingly powerful. It calibrates our entire lives. For that reason, Scroll Less, Live More primarily addresses Christian teens who are encountering their own digital technology maybe for the first time. The book is not a lecture. It is what I wish I would have known at 17. 

Scroll Less hammers some particular themes hard. One of the most important is the disruption of a worldly notion of “privacy,” especially when it comes to devices. I think one of the most important things Christian families can do right now is to challenge and disassemble the notion that it’s normal for a teen (or an adult!) to have an entire world of images, videos, conversations, and hobbies that nobody else in their family is privy to. A “no-secrets” household is one where parents know passwords; where family computers are set up in common spaces; where texts, DMs, and search histories can become public at any time. It’s not just about accountability or safety. It’s about all of us unlearning mass media’s liturgy of a private existence of consumption. 

The book is also about aiming for a life that is far richer than what you watch. In my own life I see very clearly how media consumption has frequently been the center of my existential gravity—the reason I declined invitations, or stayed up too late, or ignored that person. Life is risky. Content is safe. Now that the era of social media is over, replaced by a catalog of content producers and influencers, the temptation to numb the anxieties and uncertainties of life via our devices is intense. 

Where does the inner resolve to resist it come from? Many things help (screen time limits, daily sabbaths, etc.), but one thing matters most: Feeling the gift and purpose of life. Our screens dominate our souls first and foremost because our souls have shrunk. I wrote Scroll Less, Live More to help teens see life as the blessing and adventure it is. No app can compare. 

The final chapter of the book is titled “Live by Grace Alone.” Of all the tech-wise habits in the book, this is the one that determines how everything else will go. Christians are not just people with a worldview that makes them tech-skeptical. Christians are people who believe that our lives are more than the sum of the good choices we make. Ironically, the world of digital influencers is often a legalistic, punitive culture, where one wrong parenting or health choice can doom us. That’s not the gospel. Christ—wisdom incarnate—died and rose again, not only so that we could be wise like him, but that every moment of foolishness can be turned by grace for our good. That means it’s never too late to become wise with our technology. No one is too far gone. 

Scroll Less, Live More is dedicated to my three children: Charlie, Ruthie, and Wesley. I pray the world they grow up in is a world where joy in real people and real things is easy. And I pray most of all that those real blessings lead invariably to the Giver of all good and perfect gifts, who makes all things new.

One of the most astonishing descriptions of pastoral ministry in Holy Scripture focuses upon the sense of smell:

But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things? For we are not, like so many, peddlers of God’s word, but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God, in the sight of God we speak in Christ. (2 Corinthians 2:14–17, ESV) 

This olfactory metaphor is not trite or sentimental; it is a matter of life and death. Those who variously hear the sacred and imperishable word of the gospel of Jesus Christ with either faith or unbelief find in it either the pungent smell of death, or the sweet-smelling aroma of life. 

On a certain day of ministerial service I had a tangible reminder that “Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” that through the means of grace, God uses ministers to spread the fragrance of the knowledge of God everywhere as the aroma from life to life, (Eph 5.2). 

In the morning, I had the awesome and sacred privilege of administering the holy sacrament of baptism. After the service, I received a phone call and went to visit a newly bereaved family. When you administer baptism, the oil used to mark the sign of the cross upon the newly baptized is Sacred Chrism, a mixture of oil and sweet fragrances that linger on your fingers for some time after administering it, even after you wash your hands well afterwards. On that day, the aroma of life, from the chrism at this morning’s baptism, was there at the house of mourning.

Were I to try to describe what pastoral ministry is like, it is difficult to convey it in prose; that smell — baptismal chrism in the house of mourning — is what pastoral ministry is like. Pastoral ministry requires a certain watchfulness. In Paul’s pastoral instructions to St. Timothy, the work of preparation is not merely antecedent to or prior to the work of actual ministry, but rather is itself part of the work of pastoral ministry:

[15] Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth… [1] I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: [2] preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. [3] For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, [4] and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. [5] But as for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry. (2 Timothy 2:15, 4:1–5 ESV)

Very regularly, ministers of the gospel are called upon to shepherd souls and care for the flock of God amidst trying and heartbreaking circumstances for which there is little to no notice for everyone involved. Occasionally, one is asked to preach, administer the sacraments, or officiate other pastoral rites — especially the Anointing of the Sick or Ministry to the Dying — with little to no notice.

In the pastoral epistles, the preparation ministers must have is not less, but is far more, than the acquisition of pastoral techniques, credentials, or skillsets. Since “ministers” of the gospel do not principally give themselves, their own wisdom, life experiences, and charisma, but rather are appointed to administer the Word of God and the visible word of the sacraments, they must actually be following Christ themselves. 

We are not prepared to ministerially pronounce the words of absolution to others if we have not regularly and recently confessed our sins and heard the words of absolution ourselves. We are not prepared to invoke upon others the blessing of a thrice-holy God whom we do not adore, love, confess, and burn with zeal to know and be known by. We are not prepared to read and proclaim the Holy Scriptures to others if we have not attended to them ourselves with rapt attention. We are not prepared to lead others in prayer if we have not been faithful in our own devotions. We are not prepared to counsel backsliders if we are not sincerely intending to lead a new life by following the commandments of God and walking in his holy ways. 

Of course, even the greatest ministers remain sinners, and our sufficiency for ministry is not ourselves (2 Cor 2.16) but only the grace of God in Jesus Christ (1 Cor 15.10). Even so, we must actually follow Christ. Not only can the church’s public ministry be harmed by scandal when it is undermined by a minister’s private conduct (1 Cor 9.27). 

But further, if character is who we are when no one else is looking, then who we will be in public can either be greatly strengthened and emboldened or damaged and degraded by our private habits. The mortification of sin (Col 3.5; Gal 5.16; Rom 8.15) and the vivification of holiness (Col 3.12; Gal 5.22; Heb 12.14) are not merely antecedent to Christian ministry, nor ancillary, nor optional add-ons, nor adjunct to it; without them, the minister threatens to wreak havoc both for others and oneself. Hence, Paul charges Timothy, “keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers” (1 Tim 4.16).

In her famous essay "The Lost Tools of Learning," the magnificent Dorothy L. Sayers mourned the misunderstandings that arise because of conversationalists’ failures of understanding language. How can it be that people could hear something and misunderstand it so profoundly as to be unable to have a coherent conversation about the topic altogether? For Sayers, this problem came down to educational failures. This is often true in our time no less (and arguably more) than it was in 1947, when Sayers first gave her speech. Yet I have been noticing in our public discourse of late, even very highly educated people are struggling with the same issue Sayers noted—and not necessarily because of inadequate education. Rather, sometimes at fault are underlying assumptions that individuals bring to a topic—worldview baggage, if you will. I thought about this baggage and its ability to utterly distort perception when reading Maibritt Henkel's essay for The Argument last week about the September Fairer Disputations convention in Rochester, at which I had the privilege of speaking on a panel on care work, along with Ivana Greco and Stephanie Murray. (I also wrote my impressions of the convention for Mere Orthodoxy.)

The convention in Rochester in September gathered for the first time many of the regular writers from the online journal Fairer Disputations. In addition, though, the public and in-person nature of this event meant that it was the first opportunity for some who have never encountered the ideas of sex-realist feminism or read Fairer Disputations to be introduced to the general idea of what such an unusual feminism might mean in a world where, since the Second Wave at least, feminism has meant something rather different than what this community is after. 

Sex-realist feminism, at its most basic level, affirms the dignity of women qua women—and the dignity of men qua men. It seeks to erase competition between the two through encouraging flourishing for both—in the context of family relationships, in particular, but also in a modernity that is defined by all kinds of casual violence against women. Furthermore, in a world that increasingly attempts to erase all differences between men and women (and transgender ideology is the pinnacle of such erasure), sex-realist feminism affirms the importance of recognizing the biological differences between the two sexes, and the significant implications to women's lives that their physical bodies present. 

Maibritt Henkel was present at the conference, and her essay, "My weekend with the 'sex-realist feminists," is subtitled "The pro-life conference that wasn't." It is a report of her subjective impressions. But what I found most striking in reading her report is the profound misunderstandings of the basic premises of sex-realist feminism. In a nutshell, Henkel found that the conference was not really interested in the important questions she had hoped to find addressed—and that it was not even pro-life in her understanding of the term. She furthermore found herself bewildered by the questions the conference speakers were interested in, including the devaluing of mothers and children. "No one hates children. Please be serious," she writes in one of the subheadings in her article. 

As multiple mothers at the conference would be happy to tell Henkel, this, alas, is not true. In so many policies that she notes she would like to see revised, we see a profound devaluing of motherhood and of children's lives. Modern America is profoundly "family unfriendly", argues journalist Tim Carney in his best-selling book by this same title. Furthermore, multiple writers associated with Fairer Disputations have published not only essays but also books on a variety of topics related to this—meaning, there is significant research that these writers have put together following years or even decades of work. In other words, there is much more research and reading I would encourage Henkel to do first—before reporting back on whether she still thinks as she does.

For this recommended reading list I could name Erika Bachiochi's The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision; Mary Harrington's Feminism Against Progress, which addresses the ways modern feminism dehumanizes women; Louise Perry's striking research in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution; Angela Franks's remarkable book Body and Identity: A History of the empty Self; Abigail Favale's excellent The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory; Leah Libresco Sargeant's The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto; and my own book, Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic. All of these authors, in addition to regularly writing for Fairer Disputations and elsewhere about issues pertaining to women and sex-realist feminism, were present at the conference—and Henkel spoke in person with at least some of them, as she notes. Other prominent speakers writing on these topics who were present at the conference include Freya India, whose recent book, Girls, is a NYT sex-realist feminist bestseller. Finally, Henkel attended the care work panel, on which, as I already mentioned, Ivana Greco, Stephanie Murray, and I spoke about the history of care work from antiquity to the present (the subject of my remarks) and on policy changes we would like to see today (the subject of Ivana's and Stephanie's remarks). 

Henkel seems deeply uncomfortable, though, with the idea of any "biologically fixed gender roles." She writes in concluding her piece, "By the logic of sex realism, it is always women who are at fault. You can't very well blame men for not taking on the burdens of childcare if they're just following their reproductive destinies. You can only blame the girlboss with frozen eggs for shirking hers." But this view does not express the view of any of the speakers at the conference! Indeed, as Henkel herself remarks, several women had expressed concern over some far-right men, whose anti-feminist stance includes support for repealing the 19^th Amendment. And the care work panel emphasized the contributions of fathers as well as mothers to the work of the home—indeed, one of the historical figures of care work that I talked about in my paper on the history of care work was Jesus as the Good Shepherd, a masculine model of compassionate care for children and adults alike. 

So how might someone who attended this conference misunderstand some fundamental premises of the sex-realist project so profoundly? Henkel's profile at the magazine states that she is "The Argument’s Gender, Families, & Culture fellow. Originally from Copenhagen, she graduated from Harvard in 2025 studying economics and social studies, with research focused on men’s role in feminism. She has previously worked at the Danish magazine Zetland, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and in political consulting." This background is important, because it highlights where she is coming from in her impressions of the conference and the ideas surrounding sex-realist feminism.

There are key things to note about Henkel's experiences in life so far, because they clearly color her coverage of the event. First, she has just recently graduated from college—so she has no personal familiarity with motherhood and the rearing of children. As one of the speakers at the conference—former British MP Miriam Cates—noted, studies in the UK show a significant difference in the political views and concerns of mothers and women who are not mothers. This is a grave concern for the evolution of British politics, Cates noted, because the absence of mothers in the voting booth makes for a less family friendly society. Second, "men's role in feminism" is a topic that FD has covered in various ways, but perhaps not in the way Henkel has learned about it so far. In my skepticism, indeed, I would like to know more about what Henkel means by “men’s role in feminism.” 

For instance, a former colleague of mine, who was a historian researching this very topic, has written a book arguing that Hugh Hefner and the Playboy empire were key players in advancing feminism. Indeed, Hefner and the Playboy project were feminist to the core, she argued. Their work is the model of men promoting feminism. Of course, sex-realist feminists would disagree. If this is the role of men in feminism Henkel has studied, a different kind of feminism would certainly be... confusing. And third, Henkel hails from Copenhagen, not America. While Scandinavian countries are well regarded for their exceptional support for maternal leave, they also have had exceptionally low birth rates of late. Last but not least, while Fairer Disputations is emphatically not a Christian project, a significant portion of speakers at the conference (and writers for the magazine) are Christians (whether Catholics or conservative evangelicals, like myself). This too makes a difference in worldview and in our interest in the larger questions of the purpose of men and women in God-created world. 

But perhaps it makes sense that a childless recent college graduate (and from a very secular college—and a very secular country of origin) would have a hard time wrapping her head around this project. About a year ago, I had a conversation with a Christian woman who had been a progressive feminist on gender roles much of her life. And then she had a baby. She was explaining to me, with utter surprise over her own life, just how completely her views on all matters of gender have changed. Overnight, she admitted, she had become a gender essentialist. 

Theory and ideas are all fine and dandy. But then real life crashes in, in the form of an eight-pound squish who will not sleep at night. So there you too will be, thinking about Aristotle (or, in my case, the Roman Empire), all while breastfeeding at 2:00am. 

And so, I want to thank Henkel for attending this conference that included a record number of babies and small children (my seven-year-old included) in attendance. And I want to encourage her and others who perhaps feel a similar sense of curiosity mingled with confusion about sex-realist feminism: Please keep coming to such events, join the conversations, and ask questions. In the Middle Ages, disputations were formal debates, where participants could ask difficult questions and debate over them, with the ultimate purpose of learning for all sides. Today, Fairer Disputations, deliberately echoing that tradition in its very name, continues to encourage this same spirit in support of the dignity of all women.

Throughout the Gospels, Jesus talks often about the heart. He warns against being clean on the outside, while harboring inward sin. It’s fitting for Christians to share this concern. However, at times our well-intentioned focus on “the heart” has heralded a kind of dualism, causing us to separate our spiritual and physical selves in a way God never intended.

We need a better theology of the body. And this need is especially urgent for teens.

We’re already seeing the reverberating effects of gaps in this area of discipleship. The fallout of “purity culture” gone awry, the normalization of artificial beauty enhancement, and the creeping influence of LGBT+ ideology—among other ethical issues—are symptomatic of a failure to teach a thoroughly Biblical and holistic view of the body. The things said and left unsaid have left a mark.

If we want to guard against the errors of the past—and equip our teens to navigate the cultural pressures of the present—it is essential to teach them why their bodies matter.

What We Risk Losing When We Lack a Robust Theology of the Body

Recently, I was asked to share about my book, Young Womanhood: Finding Joy and Purpose in the Body God Gave You, at a retreat. I was surprised when nearly every follow-up question centered on modesty, even though I hadn’t mentioned the topic. It’s not that I think modesty is unimportant (it’s indeed a Biblical issue, which I address in the book!), but if that’s the first or primary concern we have for teen girls when it comes to their embodiment, it shows that we’ve missed the bigger picture. Such inordinate focus is damaging. If a teen girl only ever hears what she should cover up—without a firm foundation about the goodness and purpose of her body—she will begin to view her body as a problem and an object of shame. But modesty isn’t about covering up something bad, it’s about honoring what God created good and displaying who we are in Christ.

That’s only one example. When we neglect teaching a robust theology of the body, it impacts everyday life. Teens may misinterpret the meaning of sex and the reason behind God’s boundaries for it, viewing him as a killjoy instead of a loving Father. They may eat and exercise to “fix” what they feel is deficient, instead of to strengthen and steward what is already valuable. Or, they may be tempted to neglect physical wellness, because why bother caring for bodily health if the heart is all that matters?

Without a robust theology of the body, we risk losing the most powerful and enduring motive for obedience: joy and trust in God. Instead of submitting our bodies to him because we trust his wise and generous design, our obedience will be motivated by legalism, fear, and shame. The best way to fight temptation isn’t just to point out what’s bent out of place, but to offer a better alternative.

What We Gain When We Teach a Robust Theology of the Body

God created us as embodied image bearers. So, our bodies are essential to how we were designed to know, enjoy, and honor him. Therefore, God doesn’t just care about our hearts. He cares about our bodies. He values them so much that he put on flesh, lived, died, and rose again so that we might enjoy the blessed reality of a bodily resurrection too.

Our bodies are also a part of God’s general revelation, which means they reveal truth about him (Rom. 1:20). This is especially poignant when we consider the meaning of our sexed bodies. Men and women reveal different truths about the nature of God through our bodily distinctions.

And the distinctions between us go beyond reproductive capacities and muscle mass. Differences in brain structure, hormones, and vascular systems all have God-ordained purposes—to help us know and image him more. Far from pigeonholing us into stringent stereotypes or caricatures of what it means to be a man or a woman, the wonder of these differences shows how expansive God’s design for us as men and women is. What clarity that brings to all this confusion over gender!

Ultimately, we must teach our teens how their embodied experiences and physical desires—though distorted by sin—are intended to point them to Jesus. Their senses are meant to stir their souls to worship. When they enjoy the pleasure of delicious food, beautiful music, or competitive sports, their hearts can be filled with gratitude to the Giver of every good gift. As they look in the mirror and cultivate their own beauty, they can be reminded to behold God as the ultimate expression of beauty.

When we give our teens a solid theology of the body, they gain better footing to fight temptation and seek satisfaction in Christ. Sexual immorality becomes less enticing the more their longing for intimacy leads them to joyfully anticipate when Christ comes for his Bride. Lip fillers, Botox, and other artificial body enhancements grow less appealing the more they gaze upon the beauty of Christ.

An Encouragement For Moving Forward

It’s no secret that the world has impoverished views of the body. And sadly, sometimes we do too. But the good news is this: God created our bodies with more meaning than we realize, and for more joy than we currently experience. When we mine what Scripture has to say on this topic, we gain—and can impart to our teens—a compelling and beautiful picture that embraces the value of our embodiment and moves us to worship God. With our hearts and our bodies.

In life or literature, tragedy is not so simple. My students may not live in a war zone, but they do know what it is to lose a home or family member to flood, fire, or tornado. They know that cancer or a car wreck can wreak havoc. They live with loss. For every educator, the hard realities of violence, death, and tragic circumstances often complicate what we teach, or more accurately, they complicate our thinking. 

When we think of how our modern culture uses the word tragic or tragedy, we might assume it does not relate to the genre of tragedy or the study of Greek, Shakespearean, or modern tragedies. The word is as overused as the word hero or epic. But the overuse of the word tragedy does not negate its relevance. I think the greater understanding comes when we ask ourselves, “In times of tragedy, what is my human response?”

A Modern Response

A decade ago I read that tragedy seeps into a classroom eventually but teachers have a choice about what to do with it. At that time, it was a response to the Las Vegas shooting in 2017. An article in the Atlantic Journal Constitution posed a question to two Georgia literature teachers—“How Do Teachers Respond When Tragedy Seeps into Classrooms?”

In this article, one teacher says her classroom is a haven. Yes, she explores “canonical literature” but she is content to leave the struggles and crises outside. She explains, “While this may seem callous, I remember my school days and how classroom time was a reprieve from chaos outside of school...I craved the day-to-day regularity.”

The second teacher teaches current events and politics in her Advanced Placement Language course. She writes, “We face these very relevant social and political issues head on in the daily experience of the classroom environment. This experience can get emotional...personal. But what we work hard to do as AP Language teachers is to create a safe environment...Sensational news is not the nature of the classroom.” She explains how issues are investigated from many angles and how students must use evidence to support their opinions. Above all, they avoid “divisive, tribal labelling.”

The article, however, poses only two camps. The first teacher wants the comfort of routine, her classroom a haven, while tragedy remains outside. The second teacher implores logic and analysis in a safe environment. “Let’s discuss, use evidence, cut away sensationalism.”

I was left wondering if these teachers truly dealt with the reality and heartbreak of tragic circumstances with their students. What was real life like? It can’t be ignored. How much of the responsibility becomes ours as teachers? The article brought some clarity, but as an educator, a more pressing question came to me—how do we understand and treat with tragedy while also teaching it? Where do the lines blur for life and literature? Or do they at all?

When I took a classroom management course in college, I learned that before a certain behavior occurred in the classroom, I had to know by heart what I would do if I had any hope of being a consistent disciplinarian. Would I really give a detention every time I caught a student chewing gum? If two students stole class time by heatedly arguing in class, what would I do? I had to know how I would respond. My first few years of teaching taught me the truth of this.

In the same way over the years, I realized I had to know how I look at tragic circumstances, to consciously think of it. In the world of psychology, this practice is known as prepared response, to anticipate how we hope to respond to a negative situation. It has been part of company and education training since 2001, but it was nonexistent in my second year of teaching when one of my high school students died in a car wreck. I could express sympathy to his friends and family, but my interaction was limited. After a one semester class, we had not been close, yet his classmates were. They were carrying the sorrow and heavy loss of a young life cut short. I offered what comfort I could and gave some time in class for students to share memories. It felt like so little because it was.

As teachers, we can read about psychological biases and the stages of emergency preparation. We can take the required training and acknowledge that yes, we will talk about hard subjects in the classroom. But it is never easy. As much as we care for our students, we are not trained counselors, especially as we encounter grief and pain. Here we are as literature, history, and humanities teachers. We teach tragedies and likely know them better than we do the hearts of the individuals in the seats in front of us. And that uniquely is where I think part of the answer lies.

A Medieval Response

In the 13th century, Dante Alighieri was compelled to delineate between comedy and tragedy since many misunderstood the comic nature of his divine trilogy. Gene Edward Veith, Jr., addresses this in his chapter “Tragedy and Comedy: The Literature of Damnation and Salvation.” From Latin and Italian, la commedia meant “amusing spectacle” or “happy ending.” In light of a spiritual worldview, Dante asserted that his trilogy was comic because a man’s portrayed life could contain suffering and trial, but he knew of a joy to come, the hope and reality of eternity. His end was happy.

However, a story was considered tragic when the man depicted had lived a life with some measure of pleasure and joy yet had no hope of an afterlife or eternity with God. Though this view was rooted in the Aristotelian principles written before the time of Christ, Dante defined the two terms in light of how they begin and end. It was a simple view, but it was undeniably about a greater perspective. 

Consider an inverse example. Twentieth century tragedies often reflect a lack of perspective, a lack of an eternal view. My students see this quite easily. Think of Willy Loman, even his son Happy, so ironically named in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Does either have any idea of why they are on this earth? Do they know why they are unhappy and discontent? That is what is clear to the audience. This context, this lack, reveals so much in contrast to the earliest tragedies.

A Greek Response

In 300 BC Aristotle fully analyzed the measure of tragedy and comedy and literary theory according to his live observations in Poetics. He shows that it is more about actions than characters, saying “Tragedy is an imitation of action...an image of people acting.” Today, most students learn of Aristotle’s definitions in a much too simplistic way. 

Several well-known student-help websites explain how Aristotle’s tragic hero should be virtuous, flawed, and suffer a reversal of fortune. Oh, and the audience should be sympathetic to the hero. That’s it. A bulleted list, nice graphics, and tragedy in a nutshell. No mention of fate or the role of the gods or any concept of a greater or eternal perspective.

It’s a good start, but I think the modern reader and student can appreciate the style and craft of the Greek tragedians. Aristotle saw the greater picture, the effect of the tragedy as a whole which he calls a “spectacle.” In her lecture notes Louise Cowan wrote about the spectacle as a work of art—

The work of art has its own world: that world is not cut off from the daily world in which we live, but it does not relate to it in any literal fashion. It is as works of art, then, that these tragedies must be seen; and that act, the act of seeing truly and clearly what is there is difficult enough.  

Seeing a great soul in pain or death should transform these concepts of pain and death for us because tragedy involves the dignity and significance of human life, man’s ability to endure suffering, and more so the depth of shared suffering. Aristotle spoke in great detail of his observations. And those distinctions should not be oversimplified.

Heroes and Hamartia

In the 21st century classroom, one of the most common elements discussed is the simplistic idea of a tragic hero, a character that has fallen from a great height, most often due to a tragic flaw. Aristotle does indeed refer to such a lead character, but he clarifies that “decent men ought not to be shown changing from good to bad fortune (since this is neither frightening nor pitiable but repellent).” It has to be more than just a bad-luck story or one fall from virtue. That is not complex enough or human enough or real enough for Aristotle. Unfortunately, many students are unaware that the Greek term “hamartia” does not mean flaw at all or even “missing the mark.”

According to Aristotle, the tragic figure does not have a flaw. Read his translators. Aristotle never uses the word. The tragic story progresses from “good fortune to bad, not through badness of character but on account of a great missing of the mark.”

In the introduction to his translation, Joe Sachs states that “there is no tragedy...unless a characteristically good central figure is aiming at something exceptionally high. For there to be a ‘hamartia,’ there must first be a mark to be missed.” Hamartia in Greek does not mean flaw, vice, sin, or “badness of character” according to Sachs. That is too simple. It is a good person attempting to do something admirable, and yet they miss. Few students however are aware of this context or the carefully crafted nature of the Greek tragic hero.

Death

Another notion many students believe is that all tragedies must end in death. Or, at the very least, a tragic ending means a negative one. Aristotle agrees with the negative end but includes this as a possibility without limiting his definition. He believes that tragedy speaks “more of things that are universal” and realistic. They include the use of sudden reversals, discoveries, and suffering. Part of the idea of a reversal is that a character can be surprised by new information, revelation, or a “discovery” that is “awe-striking,” such as discovering kinship after a terrible deed.

Macbeth suddenly chooses ambition over life-long loyalty to his king. Oedipus is ignorant that his action is a terrible deed until he discovers the kinship afterwards. Luke Skywalker acts in ignorance for some time, suddenly finding out who his father is. Aristotle would approve. He did not advocate having the protagonist battle a clear opponent either, but if the hero was pitted against friend or family the situation was more pitiable. Yes, the hero’s end and the play’s end could contain death, but the tragedy itself was shaped by many factors.

Emotion

Greek tragedy is also created with an intentional emotional effect. At a live play or with guidance in a classroom, students today do recognize such emotions and empathize with the characters. Our human response is hard to deny. Aristotle clearly states that we should feel pity and fear for our main character “undeserving of misfortune and fear for one like us [ourselves].” Again, human perspective raises its head. Sachs explains, 

It is by relation to the happiness or misery of that one character that the story comes to have a direction. If we are drawn toward that character rather than repulsed by him or her, our absorption in the story will dispose us to anticipate unfolding events with hope or fear, and to experience what comes to pass with gladness or regret.

Aristotle’s observations lend to a protagonist who is realistic, truly imitating humanity (“lifelike”), stirring our empathy. He can be both “responsible for and an undeserving victim of his own destruction...he is both guilty and innocent.” Our audience of modern students then can hopefully witness and appreciate the complexity of the tragic figure and experience the full effect Aristotle hoped for.

To me, this is the greatest benefit of reading and studying tragedy in story. Our humanness is clear, and perhaps our purpose in life is clarified, too. Tragedy can stir wonder because some assumption or opinion has been knocked away or held in abeyance for a moment. Seeing a great soul in pain or death should transform these concepts of pain and death for us because tragedy involves the dignity and significance of human life, and often, man’s ability to endure suffering. I could never claim to truly understand tragedy in our world today. It is not something I seek to understand either. But the glimpse into the realism Aristotle sought has given me a way of seeing I didn’t have before. It’s a seeing through and with tragic circumstances.

Trevin Wax has spent his career thinking about how to encourage believers to delight in both reading the Bible and in engaging in daily prayer. As it happens, both are areas in which many believers regularly say they do need more encouragement. Even some believers who read the Bible daily struggle with prayer—and some who love prayer find it difficult to really love some parts of the Bible. What if a liturgy could offer integrated support for both of these essential practices—and show how integrally connected they are? 

In the introduction to his new liturgy, The Lord Is My Light, Trevin explains his vision: “The Lord Is My Light is a structured plan for prayer and Bible reading that arranges biblical texts to highlight themes and connections in God’s Word and then surrounds them with confessions and prayers offered up from men and women throughout church history.”

***

Nadya Williams: You’ve mentioned that you first got the beginnings of the idea for this book during your time as a missionary in Romania. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Trevin Wax: More than twenty years ago now, I was a young evangelical studying at a Christian university in Romania, doing cross-cultural ministry in villages and cities with Romanians and the Roma people. I can’t say I got the idea for this book back then. But I did discover the ancient Christian tradition of praying with the church in a more formal way—making the words of forefathers and mothers in the faith my own—and leaning into the riches of The Book of Common Prayer. 

At first, praying the words of saints from years gone by made me feel like a child trying on his parents’ shoes. They felt too big and clunky. But over time, I could feel my heart expanding toward the intensity and clarity I found in those old words. That set me on a course of collecting prayers from church history and seeking spiritual benefit from prayers and practices from various traditions.

This project got going when readers of my In 30 Days series (a daily office for praying three times a day through the Psalms, the life of Jesus, and the letters of Paul) asked for a once-a-day rhythm that would take them through the whole sweep of Scripture, with a podcast version also. 

I see The Lord Is My Light as a gift for the Christian who loves the Bible but struggles to pray, and for believers from free-church traditions who are curious about liturgy but don’t know where to start.

Nadya Williams: Of course, there are many other daily liturgy resources—some Christian traditions have historically been very liturgical. How is your book different from these other liturgy collections? Why do evangelicals need this particular resource—and who do you think would especially benefit from it?

Trevin Wax: I’m grateful for the traditions that have provided helps for Christians in prayer, and this book draws deeply from them—often, in fact! I recently pointed to a few of my favorite resources and how I am indebted to them.

But anyone who has picked up a prayer book for the first time knows what it’s like to flip between sections and wonder which psalm goes with which day, or what the Bible reading is supposed to be, or what season of the church year it is. 

In The Lord Is My Light, everything you need is on the page, every word of the liturgy from start to finish. Even the elements that recur daily (the Lord’s Prayer, the Gloria) are printed in full—every time. 

The book is saturated with Scripture. Most of the words come straight from the Bible. (A sidenote: we dropped verse numbers from the biblical texts, so the readings feel like a Reader’s Bible.) The readings are arranged to highlight themes and connections in God’s Word, and so that participants can hear from every biblical author over a year. 

Many Christians are all about reading the Bible. Give us a reading plan, a study Bible, and a couple of commentaries, and we’re set. Prayer is harder. Consistent prayer that goes beyond a few minutes of repeating the same requests is a challenge. I know that feeling well. This book starts where many of us already are, with the Bible open, but then surrounds the day’s reading with confessions of faith and prayers from men and women throughout church history. It helps us set our personal requests within the larger story of redemption, unfolding daily through the structure of a liturgy.

Nadya Williams: Who were your sources and inspiration for this book? And what are your absolute favorites in this project?

Trevin Wax: Thomas Cranmer and the English prayer book tradition shaped a lot of it, of course, especially the confessions of sin and the collects. But I wanted to showcase a wide range of men and women from across time and from various parts of the world whose prayers have been recorded: the earliest Christians like Clement of Rome, African church fathers like Athanasius and Augustine, medieval voices like Anselm, Reformers like Martin Luther, preachers like Charles Spurgeon. You’ll come across prayers from the Anabaptist martyr Anna of Freiburg, the novelist Jane Austen, the social reformer William Wilberforce, the missionary Amy Carmichael, and the slave-turned-church-founder Richard Allen. The confessions of faith stretch from the Apostles’ Creed to selections from the Lausanne Covenant.

As for favorites, there are too many to count! Some of the collects are dear to my heart. Is there any prayer that better expresses what we want when we read the Scriptures than the one asking God to let us “hear them, read them, mark them, learn them, and inwardly digest them”? St. Patrick’s breastplate prayer is another favorite, for sure, as is the opening to Augustine’s Confessions. Those are well-known, deservedly so. 

A personal favorite that’s lesser known comes from Columbanus, an Irish monk and missionary who carried Celtic Christianity into the heart of Europe. I love how the prayer progresses. A single flame is first kindled in the soul, it makes the body a temple, then leaps outward to brothers and sisters and finally to the whole world. One small fire becomes, line by line, a lit landscape.

Lord, I pray that you may be a lamp for me in the darkness. Touch my soul and kindle a fire within it, that it may burn brightly and give light to my life. Thus my body may truly become your temple, lit by your perpetual flame burning on the altar of my heart. And may the light within me shine on my brothers and sisters that it may drive away the darkness of ignorance and sin from them also. Thus let us be lights to the world, manifesting the bright beauty of your gospel to all around us.

Nadya Williams: This is just such an ambitious liturgy, and there is a lot going on—but there is a method to it too. Could you tell a bit about the organization—what are the key themes, and what would someone get from persevering and going through this entire liturgy in a year?

Trevin Wax: Each day follows the same flow of ten elements: a Call to Prayer, a Confession of Faith, a Confession of Sin with a word of assurance, a Canticle (usually a psalm), the day’s Reading, the Gloria, the Lord’s Prayer, Intercessions and Personal Requests, the Prayer of the Church, and a Blessing from Scripture. Some elements (such as the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed) repeat every week or two weeks to encourage memorization. But there’s a lot of variety, too. Trying to keep the experience both familiar and fresh requires a delicate balance, something of a dance.

The year follows the broad contours of the church calendar, so every year we walk again through the life of Jesus. We begin Advent with prophecies of the Day of the Lord and New Testament readings that point to Christ’s return. Christmas celebrates his first coming while looking ahead to his second. Epiphany showcases his glory in his earthly ministry. Lent leads us in repentance as Jesus sets his face toward Jerusalem. Holy Week takes us to the cross and the grave. Then comes Easter’s fifty days of celebration, the Ascension, Pentecost, and Trinity Sunday. In Ordinary Time, we follow the early church and then journey through the main storyline of the Old Testament.

By the end of the year, you’ll have heard from every biblical author and prayed at least a portion of all 150 psalms. You’ll have the creeds and some of the church’s most beautiful prayers in your heart and mind. And I hope you’ll have spent a year drawing near to God with these words and readings, so that he can shape your heart and desires according to his Word.

Nadya Williams: What would you tell someone who says they don’t like written prayers?

Trevin Wax: I understand the concern. It’s possible to treat a daily liturgy as a formula, a bargaining chip to secure God’s blessing. In our fallenness, we can turn prayer into a way of evading God, saying the right words while we keep him at a distance. Our practices can become a mask.

But spontaneous prayer isn’t immune to that danger. I like how the singer songwriter Andrew Osenga compares a lot of evangelical praying to a jam band. In youth group, he talks about knowing a few of the right phrases. He could sound deep and worshipful even when his heart wasn’t in it. His prayer was “spontaneous,” but that didn’t make it genuine. He just played the licks he knew. I suspect many of us pray that way.

Of course, Scripture itself gives us written prayers. The psalms were Jesus’s prayer book, and he’s the One who gave us the Lord’s Prayer: “Whenever you pray, say . . .” If prayer is only about voicing what we already feel, then of course we’d never borrow someone else’s words. But prayer also forms the feelings we want to have. Written prayers and spontaneous prayers can go together. The written ones can elevate our spontaneous prayers, and the spontaneous ones breathe life into structures that could grow stale. And in the end, whatever patterns we pick, we trust the Spirit to form us.

Nadya Williams: How do you envision people using this daily liturgy—did you have individuals in mind? Or families? Small groups? Churches? All of the above?

Trevin Wax: All of the above. Most people will pray it on their own, and they’ll finish in ten to twenty minutes. Those who want to spend more time in intercession may take half an hour. 

The podcast version features more than 100 voices from across the country and around the world: pastors and laypeople, young and old, men and women, singers and songwriters. Some are names you’d recognize, but no one is credited. I asked everyone not just to recite the words but to address God, so the recording captures real prayer. Each episode opens with a melodic line from a hymn suited to the season, then settles into an ambient soundscape. The Scripture reading has no music at all, so you hear only God’s Word. The result is a 10–12-minute audio sanctuary.

For families, I’ve included a responsive way to pray the liturgy in the introductory material. A small group could open its weekly meeting with the day’s liturgy, or decide together to do it day-by-day, whether or not they’re together physically. Pastors can use it to shape a prayer meeting or service, adding songs between the elements, a sermon after the reading, and the Lord’s Supper after the Lord’s Prayer. 

However it’s used, my prayer is the same: that people will receive this liturgy as a gift, placing themselves before God day after day with open hands.

Trevin Wax is vice president of resources and marketing at the North American Mission Board and a visiting professor at Cedarville University. A former missionary to Romania, Trevin is a regular columnist at The Gospel Coalition and has contributed to Mere Orthodoxy, World, and Christianity Today. He is the author of The Gospel Way Catechism, The Thrill of Orthodoxy, and Rethink Your Self.

~ E. A. Abbott

Away from our workplaces, and especially in churches, we scientists often find ourselves alone. 

Yet an ideology now commonly called “scientism” has “a popular hold on the imagination,” according to Alister McGrath. On the popular level, much of the trouble began with the New Atheists, who wielded science into an “ism” after wrenching it from the death throes of positivism. These authors convinced many to buy into their claim that science is the only rational way of understanding reality. Away from popular non-fiction, fictional characters tout seemingly wise lines, like from Dana Scully: “what I find fantastic is any notion that there are answers beyond the realm of science.” 

The circularity of this view has been pointed out by many, even secular, philosophers and scientists. The only way to verify (and science is enamoured with verification) the claim that science is the only rational way of investigating reality is to somehow get ‘outside’ of science and obtain an overarching vantage point from where we can assess the relative rationality of science. But, as writes philosopher Edward Feser, “the very existence of that extra-scientific vantage point would falsify the claim that science alone gives us a rational means of investigating objective reality.”  

Science, I learnt the hard way when it left me flailing in quantum uncertainty, is fundamentally empirical: it observes nature. It cannot, in the words of the great scientific essayist Stephen Jay Gould, “adjudicate” on what might lie beyond what we observe. Nor can it, writes McGrath, determine “what the world ought to be like.” That quantum uncertainty exists or that objects fall under gravity in a predictable fashion is something we have learnt from observation, not by knowing beforehand that it must or will always be so. Epistemology cannot determine ontology, as McGrath succinctly argues. 

Yet scientism, like most plain language terms, is a slippery beast. A. C. Grayling, who is philosophically trained and might be thought of as a second wave New Atheist, claims to distinguish his views from scientism in the first few pages of his book The Frontiers of Knowledge. But two pages later he asserts that the question of whether there might be limits to our knowledge is “meaningless” because it is unanswerable, thus aligning himself with the positivists and scientismists and distancing himself from historical atheists. 

Even Bertrand Russell acknowledged unanswerable questions were worth asking. Grayling’s contention that we are in a “primitive stage” of science whose “frontier—so different from a boundary” may be one day crossed with the knowledge borne of our “best and most rigorously supported belief” clearly privileges science as the pre-eminent way of knowing and fits atheist philosopher Massimo Pigliucci’s definition of scientism as a “totalizing attitude that regards science as the ultimate standard and arbiter of all interesting questions.”

When weighing the truth claims of science vs religion, especially Christianity, I find the perplexing question is not why there are philosophical debates about the nature of knowledge and reality. It’s not even why the rise of naturalistic science cut a line between itself and the natural philosophy and Christian theology it had co-existed with for centuries. Of course there was going to be conflict where its findings and that of long held theological beliefs overlapped. 

The real conundrum is why science was eventually recognized by many as the ultimate arbiter of rational knowledge and became entrenched as such in the popular imagination. This has persisted beyond first-wave New Atheism in the works of current best-selling authors like Grayling and Yuval Noah Harari. 

This can’t just be a reaction against a poorly lived out Christianity that I suspect fuels at least some New Atheist positions, nor can it be boiled down to purely ethical objections (like the problem of evil) or traditional philosophical arguments that old-school atheists relied on. There is also something drastic going on with the perception of science, even amongst many scientists.

Rationality Makes Knowledge and Explains

What we know is what we deem rational. “The production of knowledge across culture and history” has been “characterized” by “criteria of rationality,” writes McGrath. And, indeed, rationality is the fulcrum on which the modern debates (if we are kind), or dismissive rants (if we are not) between science and religion turn. 

But whose rationality? Rationality was once thought to be the “proper functioning of human cognitive processes.” The problem is that “proper functioning of human cognitive processes” is not a singular thing universally understood in the same way. Rather, we find both across cultures and across time wildly different accounts of what “proper functioning” actually means. Just consider the differing beliefs held as “rational” by physicists in 2022 France, theologians in 1680 Geneva, or a lone woman in 1162 Australia. This problem is not just a question of intellectual progress. 

Even modern science has retreated from the idea of there being such a thing as the scientific method. Instead, “scientific methods” write McGrath, “emerge though scientific practice.” In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Scientific Objectivity, Julian Reiss and Jan Sprenger write that “good scientific reasoning cannot be captured by rational method.” Summarizing particularly the work of Paul Feyerabend, a philosopher of science, they go on to say, “no methodology whatsoever is able to capture the creative and often irrational ways by which science deepens our understanding of the world.” Indeed it was “just because he deliberately violated rules of scientific reasoning” that Galileo “managed to achieve groundbreaking scientific progress.” Science isn’t a plodding algorithmic approach to truth. Rather, McGrath writes, scientific theories often come in a “flash” of “insight.”

It’s hard to regard something as supremely rational when it resists being rationally categorized and employs irrational elements. 

Injecting a bit of philosophy of science into the science vs Christianity debates thus begins to subvert scientismic claims of science’s rational supremacy. In his project to map human rationality, especially that of science and theology, McGrath gives a thorough injection. Of particular import is his deep dive into the concept of “explanation.”

Explanation Comes in Many Forms

Quoting neuroscientist Steven Rose, McGrath outlines how when a frog jumps into a pond there are multiple explanations—or explanatory theories. All are “rational” in some sense. A physiologist may examine causality from the point of view of connection between the frog’s leg muscles and its brain. A biochemist will focus on organic chemistry, including that of the frog’s muscles that trigger the jump. An animal behaviourist explains the frog jumped to escape a snake. The latter is of particular interest as it is an example of top-down rational explanation. So often, science is viewed as only a bottom-up, reductionistic source of explanation: the parts explain the whole. 

But unification, McGrath reminds us, has also “played an important role in the development of the natural sciences” as a form of explanation. When Isaac Newton explained how planetary movement and the terrestrial tendency of objects to fall were due to the same phenomena of gravity that was explanation via unification. It was not a purely deductive process from first principles, like a mathematical theorem, that led to proving the existence of an entity called gravity. Such explanations are a “top-down” result of collecting observations of the world and looking for patterns and extending this collection of finite observations to a general theory. The observations are the evidence for the theory as are any correct predictions the theory makes. 

Recognition of the importance of unification then opens the door to similar explanations in other knowledge systems. Christianity, writes McGrath, also offers a unifying “explanatory framework.” Lewis’s famous argument from desire is an example, proposing God as the explanation for why we have desires which nothing finite can satisfy. Going back ten centuries, McGrath also argues that Aquinas’s ‘Five Ways’ and other ancient arguments commonly classified as proofs for God’s existence should more accurately be seen as affirmations of “the fundamental rationality of Christian belief” that, for Aquinas at least, unified his human experience and provided an “explanation of various aspects of our experience of the world,” such as goodness and beauty. The evidence for the explanation is our experience. Of course, Christianity or, indeed, any religion, is not reducible purely to its explanatory or rational elements. But these elements of faith are vital and also a lifeline for the scientifically minded. 

But Science is Better

The New Atheists stop the conversation here. Theology, or any sort of Christian apologism, is excluded from discussions of rationality because they are deemed irrational from the outset. Their influence is widespread. A 2017 survey of non-religious Australians found 47% “prefer a scientific and rational, ‘evidence-based’ approach to life,” implicitly ruling religion as incompatible with such an approach. In the United States, a 2015 Pew Research Centre Survey found 59% of Americans hold that science and religion are in conflict, with nearly a quarter giving reasons related to rationality and perceptions of “facts vs. beliefs.” Personal discussions across a broad spectrum of professions, faiths and educational backgrounds over many years reveals similar dichotomous views of science and faith.

In a way, I get it. I didn’t for a long time share McGrath’s view that “it is the Christian vision of reality as a whole—rather than any of its individual components—that proves rationally compelling.” That Christianity shares explanatory methods with science doesn’t automatically make Christianity rationally compelling. Combined with unfortunate early encounters with Christians unwilling to engage with Christianity’s rationality but who instead pushed me to just “feel” and “believe,” I dismissed the explanatory claims of Christianity as weak at best, cruel at worst. They lack science’s massive theoretical framework scaffolded around repeatable observational evidence and mathematical language that my certainty-seeking post-Enlightenment analytical mind desired. Science was just more rational. But I’ve since wondered: Did I just mean more controllable? Hold that thought. 

You will be hard pressed to find a thorough definition of what qualifies as rational in most New Atheist texts that usually tend toward the polemical. In a way, that’s understandable. Even McGrath acknowledges that “rationality has proved remarkably resistant to clarification.” Grayling makes an attempt. Rationality, he writes in The God Argument has the “primary mark” of “reliance on evidence, taking relevant experience seriously, and using associated knowledge and theory appropriately.” I’m reminded of the meme about how the word “reasonable”  holds up the western legal framework but will cut him some slack given that such fuzziness is inevitable in language. 

Grayling goes on to say, “to be rational about beliefs means ‘proportioning the evidence or grounds one has for holding that belief to the belief itself.’” Science is the shining example. He frequently links science with “common sense” that will be our “deliverance” from “irrational” religious claims. The rational and naturalistic worldview is one where “what exists is the realm of nature, describable by natural laws” which is accordingly “premised on observation, reason and science, and excludes any kind of faith-involving element. He goes on to argue that religious apologist arguments are not rational because they “only make sense to anyone who has accepted the premises and parameters of the belief system already.”

Taking Grayling’s views as representative of the scientism movement, we see that the elevation of science and simultaneous denigration of religion rests on three related bases: derivation from evidence leading to warranted belief, the “common sense” and obvious existence of the natural world that we can observe and reason about, and the absence of a parochial and limiting system. 

Slippery Photons and the Failure of Complete Objectivity

To the first criteria—where does the evidence lead: This was a question physicists in the 1920s were angsting over. Fresh from the upending of seemingly common sense notions of Euclidean space independent of time by Einstein’s theories of relativity, they were now faced with perplexing results from experiments investigating the structure of atoms and light. “Can nature possibly be as absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?” Werner Heisenberg, co-developer of Quantum Physics, asked himself one evening in near despair.

One of the experiments he was talking about was the famous double slit experiment. First performed in the 19th century, light is shone through two very narrow slits and then collected on a screen. 

According to the wave theory of light (that started with Christiaan Huygens in 1687 and explained experiments just like this one) the waves will diffract on passing through the slits then interfere at the screen, like ocean waves colliding, sometimes re-enforcing each other and sometimes cancelling out each other, producing a series of bright and dark bands. According to the particle theory of light (that started with Albert Einstein in 1905 and explained, for example, the photoelectric effect), each particle, or photon, of light would go through one slit or the other, like a car through a tunnel, and just two light bands would form on the screen, directly opposite the slits. 

On performing the experiment, the wave nature of light seems obvious with the appearance of the interference pattern. Yet scientists in the 1920s, noted that the light was also behaving like a particle as it was collected at the screen in a series of blips. Which was it? Was light a particle or a wave? A particle always has a path. So then, we must be able to determine which slit each photon passed through on its path to the screen. But if a detector was placed at either of the slits to determine which one the photon had passed through, the interference pattern would disappear, and the two bands of light opposite the slit consistent with the particle picture would instead appear. 

Whether light behaved as a particle or a wave thus depended on the measurement and, if a particle, its path could not be determined. We cannot, in Heisenberg’s words, “objectify” the light photon. (This is the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, but other interpretations are just as upending.) Similar experiments have been done with electrons. The common sense idea of local realism, of bits of matter in certain places at certain times—the particle “must have been somewhere between two observations,” surely—was thus challenged. 

For Heisenberg, as he relates in his highly lucid 1959 book, Physics and Philosophy, the extreme difficulty he and other physicists had in accepting the these results arose because the science of classical physics had “started from the belief—or should one say from the illusion?—that we could describe the world or at least parts of the world without any reference to ourselves.”

Newton, that ubiquitous founder of modern science in the popular imagination had “left the impression that there were no assumptions in his physics which were not necessitated by the experimental data” wrote F. S. C. Northrop when introducing Heisenberg’s work. Instead, Newton claimed he had “deduced his basic concepts and laws from the experimental findings” in a way that would make the New Atheists proud. But there were assumptions. Newton had, most tellingly for Heisenberg, assumed objects exist in Euclidean space independent of observation, and set modern physics off on a path where it had “accepted the premises and parameters of the belief system already.” In other words, one of history’s greatest scientists went directly against our third Grayling criteria without even realising he had done so. The natural world is out there for us to discover and observe objectively. Obviously.

Objectivity, our second Grayling criteria, is a necessary assumption for science. We must believe that there are statements about and phenomena in the world whose content does not depend on whether and how they are being observed, and it is sensible, for example, to live each day assuming tables and chairs are there even if we aren’t looking. But just because some statements or parts of the world can be objectively identified in this way, it does not follow that they all can. The assumption that “the direct 'actuality' of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range” is false, warned Heisenberg. The atomic range where quantum effects are most pronounced may seem far removed from everyday experience, but it is just these realms, of unusual and ineffable experience, of consciousness, of elusive meaning, that scientism wants to claim.

The Road from Evidence to Scientific Knowledge is not Straight

There is no arrogant suggestion from Heisenberg or most physicists today that Quantum Mechanics is a final theory. Here they agree with New Atheist claims that science will keep expanding with new theories and new insights. But Quantum Mechanics’s role in exposing and overturning seemingly self-evident assumptions about how we look at the world and how we do science is a warning of how we can’t always immediately recognize the limitations of our scientific concepts.

Quantum Mechanics has been a remarkably successful theory, making predictions and explaining phenomena to high accuracy. But so did Newtonian Mechanics for two centuries until Quantum Mechanics and relativity came along as more complete theories that reduced to Newtonian values in the realms of everyday experience of large objects and small speeds. This exposes at least in transitory form another concern in the philosophy of science: the underdetermination of theory by evidence. More than one theory can explain the same data. “In other words,” write Julian Reiss and Jan Sprenger, “there is a gap between the evidence and the theory supported by it.”

In getting to new theories it is wise, as Grayling asserts, to have evidence for what we believe, for what we hold as knowledge. But how observations and evidence feed into theory and intertwine to make knowledge is not straightforward. Aside from flashes of irrational insight, imperfect objectivity, and underdetermination of theory by evidence, observations are entangled with the theories they confirm. When measuring temperature, for example, you use a thermometer, which operates by assuming temperature causes an expansion or contraction of material in the thermometer. The reading or observation is thus entangled with the theory that explains how temperature causes expansion and contraction. This entanglement, and indeed the gap between theory and evidence, doesn’t mean science is useless or wrong. But it does mean, as Thomas Kuhn postulated, that science is a “web of belief” rather than a logical train. 

Leading an evidence based life is not straightforward.

We Want Control, but Are Stuck in the Science System

What science does that, for example, theology does not is yield to our control. This is, I think, the real charm that has led to its elevation to the ultimate way of knowing in the minds of so many. 

Verifiable, repeatable experience, such as the results of a scientific experiment, feels safe. We don’t need to become entangled in questions of whether our spiritual experiences or those of others—experiences that cannot be summoned at will and tested in a scientific environment—are actually real. (Yet this is also where we need to be careful; we have not experienced or seen blackholes or quarks, but the repeatability of experiments that give evidence for their existence makes them seem more trustworthy than the uncontrollable “evidence/experience” of people who have, for example, had non-scientifically explainable experiences.)

Our control of scientific experimentation and the knowledge it offers, combined with the assumption that there are no assumptions in science, instils an undeniable authority into scientific practice and also into us, as its wielders. 

The historian of science, Steven Shapin, has written well on the turn in 20th century science from contemplation to pragmatism. As technology and broadscale publicly funded scientific institutions rose, scientific goals became focused not just on understanding nature, but on how we could use and control it. But the allure of authority goes deeper. We were not just using science to control nature but using our control of scientific experiment to define what nature was, subconsciously or not. Anything not scientifically understood or verifiable was not real, and thus we stayed in control. 

The problem, as Heisenberg realised, was that classical science, based on classical physics and its “fundamental concepts” of “space, time, matter and causality” was a framework “so narrow and rigid that it was difficult to find a place in it for many concepts of our language that had always belonged to its very substance.” For instance, how can someone operating within the confines of this classical science make sense of “mind, of the human soul or of life”? Religion now seemed “only imaginary.” Science may have been instigated as the new reality, yet how were we and how are we to marry this with the fact that “our existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality”?

Grayling, to his credit, also engages with our limited scientific concepts, referring to it as the “pinhole problem” whereby “we exist in a very narrow band” of slow speeds and large objects. This classical world seems so obvious and is therefore “very hard to escape.” We form our classical concepts from everyday experience, but these concepts don’t always apply in the far reaches of reality. 

Grayling writes:  

the cognitive architecture of our thought imposes conceptions of order, causality, linearity, consistency, monotonicity, uniformity, predictability, and so on, which are as useful to conceptualizing quantum phenomena as it would be to apply dog-grooming techniques to solving quadratic equations.

We are, writes Grayling, just not configured to “naturally” think in certain ways; for instance, quantum mechanically. But, we are, writes Grayling “able to think that way mathematically.” 

The way out of our conceptual cage for Grayling is thus mathematics. Mathematics becomes its own justifier, better than the natural language at explaining the world, and we should rely on it to probe into the remote parts of nature and experience. Mathematics, Grayling claims, will one day draw the noumenal out of the pinhole and make it phenomenal: it was just electricity, not a ghost.

Maybe. Scientific discovery will no doubt continue, aided by mathematics, but there’s no scientific reason to believe its remit will ever be complete nor that it is the only rational way to comprehend our world. We have no scientific basis to assume we will one day be Spheres, looking down smugly at a complete model of the reality of which we are embedded. 

Besides, I often find mathematics gives people a false sense of certainty. Not because it is axiomatic—to dismiss those axioms would be to dismiss the basis for human reasoning—but because the way mathematics encodes reality in science is not perfect. We must make approximations whenever constructing a mathematical model of the world. Mathematics, within its own system, proves results. But when used to construct a mathematical model of the world, we have, writes Heisenberg, “idealized” that world. At University, our physics class had a joke that began: “I can prove the existence of God. First, assume God is a sphere…” “Thinking mathematically,” as Grayling posits, only embeds us further in a system (that of mathematical science) that is somewhat detached from aspects of the “real world.” 

For Heisenberg, the way out of the cage is not mathematics but instead ordinary language. For even though its terms may be “not very well defined,” its concepts are “formed by the immediate connection with reality” in a way that hyper precise and “idealized” mathematical scientific language is not. And although ordinary language and its concepts are what led us into the limitations of classical physics in the first place, this occurred precisely when we started to try to exactly codify that language into mathematical and logical terms, thus rendering it smaller than the reality it was trying to represent. Ordinary language and the realms of art and religion in which it is used to represent and comprehend the “interplay between the world and ourselves” should not, says Heisenberg, be discarded.

Christians Often Consolidate the Divide

Thus faced with the repressed metaphysical assumptions of inflated science, a recovering adherent of scientism might start to look outside the science system and examine Christianity more closely. When they do, I fear they may, like I was, be swiftly repelled by encountering that subset of Christians that espouse irrationality as a virtue. For them, “it is more spiritual,” writes Roger Olson “to believe against logic and evidence than to believe with them.” Thus we have found antiscientism. 

Here, non-Christian knowledge is not just unwelcome, but, in McGrath’s words, a “category violation,” a clearly implicit claim to the completeness and ultimacy of Christian knowledge. Yet, while God may be ultimate, our knowledge of him is not. Scientists are not Spheres and neither are Christians. 

For someone who loves science, who does not see explaining the geometry and cause of crepuscular rays as taking away from their beauty (as I have been told it does), antiscientism makes them have to “choose between being a Christian and being a scientist,” a false dichotomy not dictated by science or by the scriptures. The latter rather command us to “test everything; hold fast what is good,” ie: to use our God-given rational minds. 

Rationality Roulette

The problem we return to when using rationality as a lever into science-Christianity complementarianism is of ranking. Often, science and Christianity are not, as McGrath summarizes, “competing for the same explanatory territory.” Science is better at questions of function while religion and art speak more often to value and purpose. 

Yet science can seep into commenting on value and purpose. In constructing our theories, including scientific ones, we inherently inject values into what we examine and how we can examine it, as Heisenberg so eloquently reminded us with assumed objectivity. I think also of the medical model of the human as a biomedical machine. This assumption can overlook and implicitly render less important poorly understood mental and spiritual sickness. If you are mentally ill, do you take medicine, take psychiatric therapy or pray? With no agreement on such epistemological boundaries, it seems we have slipped into a sub-form of relativism where we must decide the boundary ourselves. McGrath acknowledges that ‘consilience’ is the hardest part of the discussion—that

[w]hat remains stubbornly elusive is their [rationalities] failure to provide means of calibrating their respective reliability or to offer a theoretical framework that allows the settling of boundary disputes.

This sub-relativism held me back from Christianity for years. It is hard to relinquish the control of an overarching view. Yet the voyage through a history of physics with Heisenberg and McGrath does still help navigate the “stormy story sea of reality claims.”

Any assertion that science is the only rational system is a metaphysical claim, not a scientific one and certainly not an obvious or inevitable endpoint of examination of evidence, or at least it isn’t unless you’re someone who has accepted the premises and parameters of the scientism belief system already.

The easiest group for most of us to belong to is a mob.

Mobs do not require one to think. They do not require sacrifice. They do not require vulnerability. They do not require patiently tolerating another person, or seeking to understand the person.

They simply require one to act—and to act in the same way that everyone else is acting.

Most of that has always been true, of course. Mobs have always been with us. And the best amongst us have always feared them. But the technological tools available to us now make us uniquely vulnerable to these problems. And if you, like me, think that mob behavior is both dangerous to our neighbors and demeaning to the individual members of the mob, that should concern you.

Mobs and Digital Technology

Why are we more prone to mob behavior today? There are several reasons.

First, digital technology makes it very easy to self-isolate. The public places we once gathered, which were weakened by the rise of television, have been further harmed by the rise of smartphones, video streaming, meal delivery apps, and much else besides. In many places it is harder, now, to find third places to gather with others—places neither residential nor commercial, but purely social. Additionally, as has been happening for decades now, voluntarily societies and group memberships of various sorts, including church attendance, are in decline. Our front porches are empty, our coffeeshops close early and the rotary clubs and bowling leagues are dwindling in numbers.

In short, the groups we once belonged to outside of our home and our employer are harder for many to access, for a variety of reasons.

At the same time that face-to-face community has become more complicated and challenging, online communities have arisen to fill that void. And so we now find many disembodied communities of a sort online–Facebook groups, group chats, communities gathered around podcasts or blogs, and so on. The profound limitation with these groups is that they are disembodied. What that means is these groups are not bound by the same rules and practices that embodied groups share. We cannot read each other's body language online, nor can we hear voice intonation or simply notice that a person looked especially stressed when they first walked in the room. All of that is invisible to us online.

In fact, it's worse than that: It's not just that those non-verbal signs are invisible to us online. It's also that the kinds of responses we offer to those signs are discouraged online: You don't stand out in an online community by being patient, generous, or kind. You stand out online by being extreme, the most devoted, the most radical, etc. When we opt out of our in-person communities and turn more and more to online communities, we are being formed to being less thoughtful and more angry, less patient and more reactive, less generous and more combative.

Most of us don't choose this for ourselves. What happens, rather, is that finding in-person community is difficult and so we turn to online versions as a last resort. But the formation that happens online happens regardless of what your original motivation was for turning to the internet to provide you with a community. And so over time all of us, if we aren't careful, find ourselves schooled in the habits and thoughts of the mob, rather than those proper to a human person committed to the love of neighbor.

If you desire something better for yourself, then there is an obvious problem here: If the devices we spend so much of our lives absorbed in are shaping us to be angry, reactive, and combative, and if the communities that would help shape us in better ways are scarce, what can be done?

Reading as a School of Friendship

We started by talking about mobs. Let's now turn to friendship.

Friendship as a form of community is almost entirely opposite to the mob. Mobs do not think or understand; they simply act. But in friendship we learn, through patient observation and conversation, to recognize another person, to understand them, even in some sense to think their thoughts after them. We learn to enjoy shared goods together, and to see the things that delight us in new ways precisely because our friend has taught us how. We sometimes say, "Oh, I wish so-and-so were here to see this," precisely because we know they would love whatever it is we're seeing. In friendship, we learn what it means to be human in a deeper way, what it means to share our life and our mind with another.

I want to suggest that the reading of books gives us a way to practice a version of friendship, one that doesn't perfectly mimic in-person friendship, but that offers the best version of friendship one can find, apart from the possibility of a face-to-face conversation. There are many reasons for this. I'll briefly list three.

First, a great deal of friendship is about attention. It's about attending to the thing you share with your friend that brought you together, delighting in whatever that thing is, be it a game, music, cooking, or something else. But it's also about attending to your friend directly—being aware of what other things they enjoy, what might be happening in their life, and so on. If you don't pay attention to anything, you will find it very hard to form and maintain friendships. Taking the time to closely read a book or even an essay, short story, or poem is a school for learning to pay attention. It is also a good school for learning to handle complexity without feeling anxious or threatened and to sit patiently as a story or argument builds. These are all qualities we need in order to grow and mature in our capacity for friendship.

Second, the reading of books opens up the possibility of a form of friendship stretched over space or even time. When you read, you are encountering the ideas, thoughts, and stories of a person who almost certainly lives far from you. If you read enough of the person, they almost become a kind of mental companion to you—and you carry them about with you, even if they live far away. Not only that, but in some cases that person you first encounter in writing might one day become a friend. My own career began with a chance email sent to Mere Orthodoxy founder Matt Anderson in 2009 while I was still in college. I had read an essay of his and wanted to understand his argument better. On a whim, I sent him an email. He replied. 17 years later... here I am.

But reading doesn't just open up friendships across space; it opens up friendships across time. It is not friendship in the truest sense, but certainly I feel as if some of the writers I know best have become friends of a sort to me, friends separated by time. Indeed, some of these friends are people I once knew in the flesh, but who have since gone to their rest. The friendship we once had face-to-face is now a friendship that exists across time, experienced by me through reading, not conversation. It will not always be so. But until that day when faith is sight and the dead rise incorruptible, I am grateful that reading allows me to reach across the years and meet new friends and renew old friendships.

Lastly, friendships often develop around some third thing that the two friends enjoy together. We've hopefully all had the experience that C. S. Lewis wrote of so well when he spoke of how a friendship begins when we say, "you too? But I thought I was the only one..." It follows, then, that as we cultivate a love for more things, we develop a capacity to form new friendships, for there are more things that we love and which we might share with another.

One of the easiest, cheapest, and best ways to cultivate new interests, loves, and affections is reading. Even earlier today, I took my boys to the public library and while they browsed the kids section, I scanned some of the other shelves and came across a book on the friendship between the US president Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill that I'm looking forward to reading. And, who can say, perhaps in deepening my understanding of that friendship, I might find new friends of my own in the years to come.

How might churches develop a culture of reading?

The simplest way to develop culture is to simply begin doing the things you want to see normalized and practiced more broadly. So, begin by reading for yourself. But it needn't stop there.

Churches can build their own libraries to be used by members and to help introduce their congregants to the devotional, biblical, and theological riches of the Christian tradition. They can also encourage starting reading groups, either to go through great devotional or theological classics of the faith or simply to read great novels, short stories, or poetry together.

The key thing is that healthy reading cultures begin not with anxiety or antagonism, but with a sense of joy and delight over the world. Our world is cursed and, therefore, quite imperfect and frequently painful. And yet even so it is worth loving. And we can learn how and what to love in it better through the reading of books.

On the face of it, it is strange that Christians who confess their God as the Maker of all things both seen and unseen should balk at the possibility of paranormal occurrences in the world he has made. This is not true across the board, thankfully. But significant numbers of Christians reduce to “delusion” or “fraud” any report of hauntings, strange creatures, or eerie phenomena.

But more than strange, it is not fitting that Christians should deny the reality of the paranormal. Why should we who affirm the reality of angels, of prophecies, Jesus’s virgin birth and resurrection, and the efficacy of the sacraments, dismiss the possibility of ghosts, cryptids, remote viewing, or precognition? If these things are so closely adjacent to religious phenomena then Christians have every reason to interrogate them and ask where they fit within a Christian account of the world.

Religion and the Paranormal

Sociologists of religion have theorized a “bounded affinity” between religion and the paranormal, rooted in how both “share inherent physiological, psychological, and ontological similarities.” It’s an affinity that is so intuitive as to be impenetrably opaque to those who have not seen and felt their common spirit.

Jeffrey Kripal is a prominent scholar whose work focuses on this overlap. His most recent book, How to Think Impossibly, documents strange encounters myriads of experiencers have undergone and invites readers to consider the possibility of things they have been assured are impossible. Though these things are not supposed to take place, they do and always have throughout humankind’s history. What implications might phenomena as pervasive as this hold for us? And what resources might help us to understand these implications?  

“Much of the modern paranormal material,” he writes, “and especially the ufological material, looks a good deal… like what a traditional theologian might call angelology or demonology.” Such encounters are a liminal category bringing obstinately separate discourses and paradigms uncomfortably together. Indeed, as Kripal has posited in an earlier work, the paranormal is “the sacred in transit from the religious and scientific registers into a parascientific or ‘science mysticism’ register.” The paranormal resists easy categorization by either discourse and shows how the numinous exceeds the ideological limits with which we attempt to constrain it.

Kripal advocates for the experience-source hypothesis, the idea that global religious convictions are rooted in and sourced from events directly experienced by individual subjects and mediated to others. If they are derived from real events then they are more than merely social constructions and channels of power originating in superstition or deception. This hypothesis funds a renewed comparative task, allowing us to “move away from a strict social production thesis and toward a global phenomenology of religious experience.”

Kripal notes how Husserl’s phenomenological method once deeply informed the comparative study of religion. This was fitting, as the study of religion can and should draw upon religious insight and practice, and Kripal finds significant similarities between Husserl’s phenomenological reduction and the method of medieval apophatic theology. The reduction brackets “the ‘naturalist standpoint’ of the sciences and their naive sense-based positivisms about the fact-world.” This approach allows for phenomena to disclose themselves and to be studied in their givenness with all their existential import.

However, contemporary religious studies tend toward historicist approaches that preemptively flatten the possibilities of the phenomenon it studies. It settled instead for cataloguing the features of different belief systems, safely within the bounds of a detached naturalism. This approach protects the subjectivity of the researcher by keeping at bay any of the claims made by the object of their study.

Why do many Christians dismiss the paranormal?

What is peculiar, then, is that many Christians functionally honor those same boundaries, boundaries they otherwise oppose on principle. They do so, it seems, for three main reasons. 

First, some Christians treat accounts of the uncanny and the paranormal as irrelevant, citing Christ’s victory over the powers (Colossians 2:15) as warrant for ignoring them. This approach treats these forces and entities as powerless and therefore as distractions from the tasks of the Christian life. But it risks triumphalism when it celebrates Christ’s victory in such a way that it assumes the existence and activity of these entities are unworthy of acknowledgment. 

Second, it is sometimes asserted that the spread of the gospel in the ancient world unmasked the hoaxes and lies that deceived our predecessors. But this approach is wrong for how it uses some instances in which this was true to comprehensively conclude it was true in each and every case. We bear false witness if we claim the ancient or the medieval world was wracked with superstition and fraud and nothing else. In fact, to make such an assertion is to align oneself with the historical narrative of scientific naturalism. Like the alliance of Pharisees and Sadducees against Jesus, this cooperation between opponents reveals a motive they share that is deeper than the disagreements that distinguish them. 

Piety may motivate these denials from Christians but with that and beneath it is also, likely, a fear. It is likely a fear that such entities are real and maliciously opposed to them. But perhaps there is more lurking beneath that simple surface explanation. What does the strange threaten? This is the question we often do not allow ourselves to ask. 

The deeper fear, undoubtedly, is that such entities destabilize the order they and we take for granted: the assurance that we wield a control over the world and our destinies. Some part of us always knows we do not wield such control, but fallen human beings habitually suppress such knowledge. The denial of the paranormal and the miraculous protects the disbelieving subject from the disruptive implications of the thing denied.

One of the most dangerous positions one can be in is that of presuming they are invulnerable. Devotion to Jesus Christ can be genuine and yet coexist with a presumption of imperviousness. Consider the psalmist who in his prosperity said, “I shall never be moved” (Psalm 30:6). One need not speak those words to live from such a sentiment. Confidence in God is good, but even it must be examined; all things must, as every thing is a fallen thing. What one confesses with their lips as confidence in Christ can be haughtiness cloaked in pious garb. This warning is not only for our others, but for us: “The one who thinks they are standing firm should take heed so as not to fall” (1 Corinthians 10:12).

More than presumption, though, is this not arrogance? An arrogance not unlike that of the scientific naturalist whose stultifying certainty contends the world is nothing more than what is visible, measurable, and manipulatable. This is neither humble nor a just orientation towards the world and its creatures.

For some Christians there is also a fear that to acknowledge these phenomena is to afford them an attention they do not deserve, that endangers our allegiance and worship. But acknowledgment and study is not preoccupation, much less worship. Of course interest can become unhealthy but it isn’t inherently so. One should be cautious but this is necessary for all objects of study as mastery should not be our goal. And in the specific case of the paranormal, faith should seek understanding so as to reckon with the world God has made and to unmask the enemy’s schemes.

Is accepting the paranormal dangerous?

There is, to be sure, a danger in accepting that strange things do occur. Pioneering paranormal researcher John Keel warns that belief is a double-edged sword as some nonhuman entities disastrously manipulate people through it. “The phenomenon is dependent on belief,” Keel observes, “and as more and more people believe in [for example] flying saucers from other planets, [these things] can manipulate more people through false illumination.” 

Keel names the process by which contactees undergo shifts in self-understanding and their orientation to the world “false illumination.” It is a process like conversion, refashioning the contactee in a new subjectivity. However, the entities responsible seem to enjoy disgracing and shattering the subjects of their illumination. Keel documents how false illumination ruins lives as contactees are supplied with esoteric information or with predictions that come to pass for a season, but are eventually abandoned to ridicule and ignominy when obsession or bogus predictions isolates them or destroys their credibility.

Conventional wisdom imagines three options available with regard to the paranormal. 

• Deny the reality of these phenomena
• Acknowledge their reality and live in perpetual fear of them
• Acknowledge them and order our lives around their veneration. 

The easier option to take with regard to these phenomena is ignoring them. But convenience is rarely an indicator of the best course to take. If we are Christians worship is categorically ruled out, but so is servile fear. The irony is that if we treat acknowledgment as tantamount to serving and revering these entities then we are already living in such a way that we are dominated by fear.

We should not live in constant terror but we are unwise to pretend they are powerless against us. We have not arrived at eschatological fullness and so we are still liable to harm. That harm, however, is limited, as entities that are hostile to God can only tyrannize us to the extent we permit them to do so.

Acknowledging the Paranormal in an Apocalyptic Key

Another alternative, however, is possible: acknowledgement in an apocalyptic key, acknowledgment that is disciplined by the gospel. This opens onto an activity of critical sifting by which Christians commit themselves to a phenomenology of encounter but not to an ontology of the things encountered. 

Scripture enjoins exactly this: ”Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 John 4:1). We are not to deny the reality of non-human entities but are to critically examine them. Christians can adopt a dialectical response patterned after God’s posture towards fallen humanity. God affirms humanity as his creature, as his image bearer, and as his covenant partner. But he denies humanity’s bid for divinity, for self-definition, and for autonomy. God says both “No” and “Yes” to Adam’s race and never less than both.

Analogously, Christians can affirm the reality of strange and uncanny phenomena without divinizing them or according them a status similar to God. Acknowledgment is part of our task, not belief. Acknowledgment is not belief in the sense of faith in or fidelity to something: it simply attests that a thing is. In fact, a Christian response to the paranormal should caution against giving such entities our belief. To grant them belief is to grant them power over us. “Theological exorcism,” Karl Barth wrote in Church Dogmatics, “must be an act of unbelief which is grounded in faith.” Faith in Jesus Christ, the apocalyptic emancipator of Adam’s race, grounds the only substantive freedom that can be had.

An entity that positions itself as an interpreter of reality but denies the Son of God assumed flesh or that he was raised from the dead does not speak as a commissioned messenger of God’s grace. It may speak true things, as when the demon-oppressed man in the synagogue at Capernaum identified Jesus as “the Holy One of God” (Mark 1:21-28; Luke 4:31-37), but it doesn’t speak on God’s behalf. It cannot but disclose some aspect of reality but it does not in itself mediate God’s character or salvation.

Even so, God may use even such an entity as this to demonstrate his power or to dissuade someone from a path they were considering. Or he may permit an individual to take up a life of obsession with or servitude to these things to lead them to repentance and deliver them from their bondage to these counterfeit gods (Galatians 4:8).

But not all that is strange or uncanny is a minion of the Enemy. Though there is validity to this concern it is a foregone conclusion to assume this is so in all cases. Consider how nearly every angelic encounter recorded in Scripture inspires such terror that the visitant must assure the witness, “Be not afraid.” The bizarre creatures witnessed by Ezekiel may seem grotesque or monstrous but they accompanied God’s speech to the prophet. Who can guarantee God would not dispatch a Sasquatch or a sylph to do his bidding, either?

We do not have to preemptively interpret and force phenomena into preconceived categories such as “angelic” or “demonic.” Instead we can weigh and judge eyewitness accounts on the basis of what actually transpired and how it accords with the witness of Scripture. The Pauline concept of powers and principalities usefully broadens Christian vocabulary and imagination in just such a way. It forces recognition that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in conventional Christian theologies: some for good, some for evil, and some, like us, that fall between the two. 

Keel and other researchers such as Jacques Vallee have drawn attention to the similarities between the bizarre behaviors of UFOs and other strange phenomena in the modern era and fairies, goblins, and other preternatural creatures of the past. As a result they decided upon something like the experience-source hypothesis. Rather than fitting the data into a Procrustean bed of extraterrestrial or uncatalogued animal theories they attended to the details of the encounters themselves. They asserted the accounts of thousands of eyewitnesses testified to the reality of something much stranger and much older. Their conclusion was that the same strange things that have always haunted our world are still here, still carrying out their inscrutable purposes. 

Keel notes that these beings have always been accompanied by “explanatory manifestations” and that “these manifestations have always been adjusted to the psychology and beliefs of each particular period in time.” This is important to bear in mind because the paranormal encompasses an immense field of phenomena, much of it so strange, in fact, that researchers in some of its subdomains (such as Bigfoot and UFOs) routinely downplay the ghostly or magical aspects of their subjects. There is an outlandishness to such accounts that threatens the potential respectability of their study as scientific endeavors. This is why so many eyewitness accounts are ignored or suppressed as researchers construct “plausible” narratives and paradigms from miniscule data sets that fit their preconceived notions. 

This shows how ideologically captured by scientific naturalism even investigators of strange phenomena commonly are. Their notions of what is impossible have not been sufficiently strained to accept the strangest instances. The average person would probably never guess that UFOs habitually behave more like specters than spacecraft, or that some Sasquatches and gray aliens can be repelled at the invocation of Jesus’s name. On the other hand, some apparitions of the dead have helped to convict murderers and others have persuaded surviving unbelieving friends or family to believe the gospel. This means that no single predetermined judgment is adequate for understanding the anomalous or knowing how to respond to it when it occurs.

Reenchantment Is Not Intrinsically Christian

It is important that we reckon with these phenomena because whether they are increasing or not, they are becoming more mainstream. The question that many residents of the modern period want to ask is, “What is really possible?” The human heart desires the world to be more mysterious and more profound than the reductive stories they have had inculcated to them their entire lives. People are weary of a world and of plausibility structures that diminish wonder and meaning. They are starved in their souls and will inevitably seek sustenance for them. 

Re-enchantment will be enticing for the dissatisfied but enchantment doesn’t carry an intrinsically Christian valence. Mystery and wonder are good but they can be misleading if they do not direct the individual to Jesus Christ. Some people seeking mystery and wonder will be curiously trying doors that open onto horrific things. Others will receive entities that perceive and take advantage of their half-formed invitation. False illumination will follow naive dabbling in the paranormal precisely because these individuals have little to no formation and, lacking this, will become subject to the entities they encounter. 

Many are coming to see that what they had presumed to be impossible does in fact occur in our world. And there are many evangelists ready to shape their reception of the impossible: new stories and new gospels will interpret these experiences to the detriment of those that are persuaded by them. 

And they will need guidance as they undergo what is known as ontological shock. This phraseology, fascinatingly, was first used by Paul Tillich in his Systematic Theology to describe the effects of encountering the ground of all being. In recent years the term has been appropriated from its theological origins to name the radical dislocation one experiences following a paranormal encounter. This dislocation is rooted in the discovery that the world is not what the experiencing subject was assured it was. The encounter shatters the constraints and the presuppositions of the subject’s worldview. It is often traumatic because the subject undergoes deep suffering as they are forced to reckon with something that is “simply not possible within the framework of the Western scientific worldview.”

This shock closely corresponds to another kind of upheaval, one that, fittingly, returns to the domain of Christian theology. This upheaval is not only depicted in Scripture but informs its witness in both form and substance. For New Testament apocalyptic also drastically reconfigures the experiencer’s presuppositions of what is and what is possible. But it is sourced in the eschatological activity of the Son’s and the Holy Spirit’s missions, in the life of the age to come that arrives and invades the present evil age (Galatians 1:4). 

Life and new creation interrupt the “normal” operations of the world in its occupation by and thralldom under powers hostile to God and to his creatures. Apocalyptic, at its root, is the consistent application of eschatology to the present conditions of the world. The resurrection of Jesus Christ contests those conditions and irrevocably changes them for those who encounter Christ in the power of the Spirit. The upheaval it unleashes shatters and reconstitutes the subject for whom an entirely new world has just dawned.

A realist objector may say that there is only one world and in an important sense this is true. But its objectivity doesn’t guarantee its reception by any knowing subject. Human beings habitually resist and deny reality though they are only ever in its midst. Scripture itself testifies that a thing can be so but for the hard-hearted it is impossible to see and more importantly, impossible to align oneself with (John 9:39-41, Romans 1:18-23). Jesus could perform miraculous signs before his opponents’ very eyes and those signs could go unrecognized as good works of God. Hardheartedness will not submit its preconceptions to God’s activity and sees only the work of demons (Matthew 12:24; Mark 3:22; Luke 11:15; John 7:20, 10:20).  

The idea of the apocalyptic names the truth that the world can be what it is and nevertheless not be recognized as what it is. Revelation—unveiling—is necessary because the truth of the world and of themselves is not translucent to fallen human beings. Revelation, properly understood, is disclosure: not simply of propositions and prophecies but the unforeseeable and uncontrollable unveiling of the reality of God, his character and his purpose, manifested in the flesh of this man, Jesus of Nazareth. 

With its emphasis upon disruption and upheaval, the apocalyptic threatens the presumption of stability and mastery we in our fallenness so prize. The mood of New Testament apocalyptic literature is urgent and distrustful of appearances because it sees through the illusions we, in our fallenness, have become habituated to. It sets in motion a fervent drive to announce the astonishing news that conventional reality has been unmasked and overturned in the wake of Jesus’s resurrection and ascension. 

The theological importance of continuity across salvation history is no simple defeater of the profound disruption that is the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Even with regard to the paranormal, sometimes what is particularly frightening to eyewitnesses is how the creature they encountered and the strange behavior it exhibited showed itself in a world in which the everyday laws we take for granted held true in every other regard. 

The continuity of important features of the world’s operation or of redemptive history does not negate the unique and unusual things that determine the world or history in their actuality. The guarantor of continuity is God, not any ability or feature of human beings in general or of the covenant community in particular, but the gracious superintendence of a God whose character always remains the same. Upheaval is not so much the secret heart of reality as it is a consequence of an upside down world being turned right once more.

Ontological shock, whether in a paranormal or a theological key, means that the world we had presumed and the security we had relied upon are delusions. And because it is intrinsic to the Christian tradition and the encounter in which fallen human beings become subjects of discipleship, we can sympathetically receive those who have encountered things that burst the limits of our culture’s plausibility structures and pastorally guide them into the truth beyond the rupture they have experienced.

In an important sense this is no new undertaking. Christian witness has always been tasked with framing the world’s possibilities within a larger account than the world has believed about itself in any of its local variations. Now it must recognize stranger possibilities, as it has before, and situate them within an unlikely but beautiful story of homecoming, a story that confirms the reality of the strange things more and more people are encountering but further confirms their place in the economy of God’s works.

If an austere worldview, in screening out the possibility of the weird and the eerie, discourages those that have experienced such phenomena from embracing Christ and joining themselves to his body then that worldview fails to love. It clings, instead, to a safe comfortability it prizes more than its witness to the truth or compassion for the confused and afflicted.

This means the problem is more than just an intellectual one. For worldviews and paradigms and ideologies are always more than ways of seeing the world. They are modes of belonging, postures by which we position ourselves relative to ourselves, to others, to creatures, to place, and to God. Worldviews and ideologies admit certain features of reality and screens out others.and they do so because they are orientations towards the world and its Maker. It is always the heart that determines what we will see and what loves and fears we will justify.

What does your theology allow you to see? What does it allow you to expect? And how does it aid you in understanding events in your world as belonging to the economy of God’s purposes or striving against it? Does it allow you to recognize the mundane as pregnant with significance? Does it allow you to acknowledge the unusual and see it as governed by God all the same? Is there not a wonder that we allow ourselves to be robbed of when we dismiss these phenomena?

If not, then does your theology truly comport with the world? Or does it quarantine you from its unsettling fullness? If in our ontology and our moral imaginations there is no room for the eerie and the otherworldly; if we appropriate the promise of Romans 8 that nothing can separate us from the love of God and assure ourselves nothing can undo us or upset the lives we have built, then we live presumptuously. And if we shrink from our dimly understood fears we will not have the awareness or the fortitude to confront the darkness.

There is evangelistic opportunity in the recognition that these phenomena genuinely take place as Christians can guide contactees and the curious to the Maker of all things. Importantly, however, we can do so in a way that reckons seriously with the disruptions these individuals have undergone and accord them the dignity of acknowledging the reality of what they have encountered.

Again, acknowledging the phenomenology of the encounter doesn’t thereby commit us to the interpretation suggested by the encounter or offered by these entities or the subcultures that form around them. With this approach Christians can combat the false illumination some of these beings aim to engender in those to whom they reveal themselves. 

And we ought to do this. We are sent into the world by Jesus Christ as he was sent by his Father (John 20:21). Christ always remains distinct from us but if we love him and are united to him, then we share in his mission. By this means we can simultaneously witness to the depth and mystery of the world and witness against the inhuman actants that would degrade and destroy our fellow image-bearers. 

The question is, will we do so? Will we forgo the illusion of mastery to serve our seeking and ontologically shocked neighbors? Or will we cling to an image of our world that will, sooner or later, apocalyptically unravel?

“What will happen to the body?” I asked. 

“Oh, it will go out with the medical waste, it won’t be recognizable as a body,” said the doctor. “Do you have any other questions?”

“Oh. Uh.” I looked down at my note pad and studied a short list of questions. I felt silly for asking this one, maybe I had a more serious question on there, one he wouldn’t dismiss so easily. 

I muddled my way through the rest of the appointment and then stopped at the desk to schedule my D&C for two days later. 

It was only Wednesday, but that week already had felt like eternity since the appointment on Monday when we learned our baby’s heartbeat had stopped. No matter what I did that week to process the grief, I felt like a walking tomb. It wasn’t until the D&C was over that I rested—the morning sickness stopped, the waiting stopped, the finality brought peace. 

But the weight of death lingered. 

Now, twelve years, two more miscarriages, and two live births later it is not the D&C I regret; it is my own shame at that single question that haunts me. This was the most important question I asked all week, or maybe ever: what will happen to my baby’s body?

What will happen to my baby’s body?

We never had the opportunity to dignify our miscarried babies through a Christian burial. We did what we could through private memorials, intentional prayers, and symbolic remembrances to mark their lives with solemn honor. We celebrated their entry into eternity with the Father, and we rested in their union with the Son. But we never got to lay them to rest. This will remain a grief for as long as I live—not a guilt, not a shame—but a grief. 

I hope strongly and securely for eternity and the promises of the world to come. There will be no death in heaven and therefore no need for burial. Additionally, one’s entry into heaven is not dependent on proper burial. All who mourn must remember that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor power, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord, Romans 8:38-39. 

Yet my inability to bury my babies and to honor their bodies properly is a loss and one that I still grieve, even with my hope of heaven. 

As the Feast of All Souls (November 2) approaches I am grateful for the time to think of my dead and this year my ponderings have led to a new question: 

What remains of the remains?

We must not look away from the dead. Nor should we simply look back to their lives, forgetting their death. It is good and right to remember with joy the moments of happiness or love. But our dead are not simply “missing” or away—they have died and how we treat their bodies in death reflects much on how we value bodies as image bearers in this life. 

So what remains of our remains? 

Even as death rituals shift culturally we are all familiar with a common progression. Following death bodily remains are mourned communally and then placed in the ground peacefully and intentionally. My family and I did not have the opportunity to process our grief through the communal funeral ritual. The carefully articulated rite guides loved ones through grief, points our gaze toward heaven, and reminds us that there is quite literally life after death - both in the eternity - but also at the potluck following the committal of the body. There has been death, yet life continues. Funerals serve the living in many ways. 

This rite is intended to surround the actual remains of the deceased. We accompany our dead to the grave in love, care, intention, and seriousness. We do not simply throw them out with the medical waste. This process cannot be replicated without the body of the dead present. While it might be necessary in certain circumstances, the lack of body at a memorial service or the lack of a memorial service at a burial is something to be grieved. 

The funeral rituals and the presence of the dead must go together. Divorced from each other, it serves neither the dead or the living. 

Without this ritual I found my body stuck, my thoughts a little confused, and ultimately I was quite lonely. Instead of receiving hugs amidst tears and funeral potatoes, people tiptoed around me—not sure if they should offer condolences—no place to put the sadness. A great cloud of grief simply hung above me, and I wasn’t sure if anyone cared. 

Twelve years later, I still mourn that my babies have no earthly resting place. I know their souls no longer live in their bodies. I know that one day their bodies will be resurrected, and my ensouled children will sing into eternity. I know they are cherished beings that carry the image of God. But it is precisely because I know this, I grieve. 

Most simply there is no ground for me to return to or for others to find. It would be too easy for my life to move on in the business of motherhood and midlife matters. To find myself distracted. There is no physical ground that holds their bodies that might stop me or pull me back. While they are deeply written into my body and my heart, I too am fickle. Their names are not etched in stone—risking that I might start to see something ephemeral about their being. Too often for us to ignore, scripture includes the rolls of the dead called among the people. These recitations are not long and boring - they are evidence that God’s people are not ephemeral, and that we must not forget. And not only must we remember, there is something crucial about laying the body to rest as we see Abraham buy a field from the Hittites so that he might bury Sarah. 

So how is it we remember one another? One of my rather macabre hobbies, I’ll admit, is walking historic cemeteries. Shortly after the miscarriage of our second baby, my husband and I spent a long weekend in Salem, Massachusetts. Amidst the visits to wonderful restaurants, churches, museums, and historic buildings we also stopped to walk the cemeteries. There, over 300 years later, I stopped at the graveside of many children and babies and had the opportunity to honor them and their grieving mothers, even if briefly.

And now years later I am blessed with a happy thought that I can’t help but imagine. Perhaps one day, in heaven, those prayers I said then will bear an effect I had not even imagined until now: there will be a moment when we all meet. Not just the whole host of heaven, but me and the women over whose bones I prayed. I will join the young puritan mother with all of her children in her lap and me, carrying my many children in my arms and we will weep no more. Instead we will sing together to the Glory of our risen Lord, knit together by the prayers of my heart on that cool October day standing at their graveside. 

So what remains of our remains? 

As I think of the young puritan mothers burying many of their children in the new world, I am struck by how different our lives might be; even if we might embrace each other with knowing hearts one day in heaven. For most of human history parents have not had the opportunity to bury their miscarried babies. It is only recent science that lets us see inside the womb, to watch the flicker of life on the screen, to see the baby grow carefully, and to identify the body at its earliest stages of development. 

This science gives us evidence that our miscarried babies existed, and therefore they must be counted among the dead. They are ensouled creatures and counted by God. Their life is a gift and through scientific advancements we have the opportunity to look at the earliest moments of that divine spark. 

Our remains might only be a vessel that once held that spark—now empty as we all wait for the return of Christ. But that vessel, knit carefully by the creator, was the vessel through which he chose to place his image for all. And for the redeemed, it is where Christ comes to dwell - the vessel serves as a temple of flesh.

It is obvious that this story isn’t over yet. Despite the holy presence of our Lord, we must still suffer death. But that does not undo our place in the redemption story. While our bodies turn to dust, they are not trash to be forgotten. Our bodies serve as artifacts that tell the story of a living God, an animate spirit, and a present Christ. And as artifacts they point to the new body promised in the new heavens and new earth. 

What remains of our remains might be the whole story of the universe from Genesis to Revelation. We do not bury our remains out of humanist pride, no, our death itself is evidence of our curse, our limitations, and our very distinction from God. Our remains tell of failure - like the ruins of an ancient city. What remains of our remains is not human centric, but God honoring. It is in this vessel he put his image and it is for that purpose we should bury our dead. 

God will redeem my grief when I hold my babies in my arms. But today I honor their bodies with the grief I carry inside of me that they have no resting place on this side of heaven. This is not done in shame nor is it an attempt to heap on myself unnecessary guilt. Instead it is held as an honest testament and act of love for myself as a young mother grieving my first pregnancy that day in the doctor’s office. I must see my tender heart and honor those needs when I simply asked: “what will happen to my baby’s body?” This grief I carry today gives myself and my baby the dignity that the doctor did not. 

Perhaps I have asked the wrong question. It is not what remains of our remains that demands we treat our dead with dignity, but precisely what has departed and what is to come.

It has become commonplace for conservatives and libertarians to characterize the New Deal as socialist. Indeed, it was one of the core contentions of the post-WWII conservative movement that the New Deal represented part of a fundamental shift in the American political and economic order, away from the free enterprise system. This skewed and often alarmist interpretation of the New Deal actually originated in criticisms of FDR that surfaced as early as his first presidential term. 

For example, the American Liberty League was created in 1934 by wealthy industrialists (including several members of the DuPont family) and a few disgruntled Democrats (indeed, former President Herbert Hoover declined to join the League because of the prominent role of certain Democrats). The League spent an enormous amount of money (at least one million dollars) on an extensive anti-New Deal campaign. It published dozens of pamphlets that characterized the New Deal as part of a nefarious plot to introduce a kind of anti-capitalist collectivism in America—though sometimes the League’s authors seemed uncertain as to whether FDR was a communist or a fascist.  

For instance, the Liberty League denounced the Agricultural Adjustment Act for reflecting a “trend toward Fascist control of agriculture.” Disgruntled Democrat and League supporter John W. Davis predicted that the role of Congress under Roosevelt would become “little more than that of the present Congress of Soviets, the Reichstag of Germany or the Italian Parliament.”

Most academic historians today, however, don’t concur with this alarmist and partisan interpretation of the New Deal. As one recent anthology puts it, “Few historians accept the view that the New Deal was socialistic either in its goals or its results.” Don’t misunderstand me here –many historians are indeed critical of the New Deal, but they don’t view it as truly radical, or as an attempt to implement socialist ideas in a systematic way.

This essay seeks to answer five basic questions: 1) How should one define socialism?  2) What were FDR’s political and economic views?  3) Were FDR’s advisers (the famed Brain Trust) socialists?  4) Were the chief policies of the New Deal socialist in any meaningful sense?   5) How did some on the bona fide ideological Left evaluate the New Deal?  

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1) The socialist label can be an effective weapon in partisan polemics, but scholars usually endeavor to employ the term with more precision and care. The Oxford Learner's Dictionary, for instance, defines socialism as "a set of political and economic theories based on the belief that everyone has an equal right to a share of a country’s wealth and that the government should own and control the main industries." Meanwhile, Merriam-Webster explains it as “any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.” Only by embracing an ahistorical and simplistic approach that sees anything that isn’t thoroughly laissez-faire capitalism as “socialistic” can one press FDR’s policies into a socialist pigeon hole.  Nevertheless, for reasons mostly ideological and partisan, many conservatives since the 1930s have unfortunately embraced this sort of either/or binary thinking.

2) As for FDR’s personal ideological orientation, his economic views were notoriously unsystematic and ill-defined. The economic principles he expressed publicly actually sounded pretty conservative. Both as governor of New York and as president, Roosevelt was usually a fiscal conservative and often expressed concerns about big deficits. Roosevelt scholar Frank Friedel describes FDR as always “a staunch believer in a balanced budget.” During the 1932 presidential campaign, Roosevelt often attacked Hoover for reckless spending. Moreover, prior to the late 1930s, President Roosevelt sought to cut federal spending. Several historians have noted his failure to grasp Keynesian theory that the federal government should spend money to prime the pump to promote economic growth and employment. Overall, FDR seemed more committed to saving the existing political and economic order (with some tinkering) rather than adopting a radical alternative. On more than one occasion, FDR spoke of his efforts "to save our system, the capitalist system," while dismissing the "crackpot ideas" of "radicals" on the Left.  

3) Moreover, Roosevelt’s celebrated Brain Trust included Raymond Moley who actually favored a flat tax and who later became a strong critic of the New Deal. Another FDR associate, Hugh Johnson, attacked what he saw as Hoover’s reckless spending and long advocated a conservative fiscal policy. Columbia University professor Adolph A. Berle, Jr. rejected the concept of a planned economy, though he did favor a greater role for the federal government. Some Roosevelt advisers (such as Rexford Tugwell) were indeed fond of national economic planning, but they were far from the majority and exercised limited influence, mostly after 1936.  

4) The actual policies that comprised the New Deal proved mostly unsuccessful in ending the Great Depression (they were especially ineffective in lowering the unemployment rate), and most of them didn’t reflect socialist ideas or models. The Emergency Banking Act of 1933 closed many banks temporarily to calm panicked depositors but, notably, the President resisted nationalizing the banking system, despite calls from many quarters to do so. Strikingly, these banking measures had actually been drafted by Treasury officials in the Hoover administration!  The Securities Act of 1933 was a moderate reform that enjoyed substantial support from big business. Through the ill-fated National Recovery Administration (NRA), the federal government attempted to act as a kind of honest broker between business owners and labor but it mostly benefited large corporations. The heads of several large corporations actually defended the NRA publicly before the Supreme Court ruled one of its key provisions unconstitutional in 1935. 

The Social Security Act of 1935 was a very modest old-age pension scheme that contrasted dramatically with ambitious government pension systems in Western Europe. SSA was, after all, financed by a regressive payroll tax on employees. This sort of tax normally hits the poor especially hard.  As Ronald Radosh wrote in 1972: “Social Security may have been a symbolic measure of the new Welfare State. But, to the corporate liberals in the governing class, it served as the type of legislation that eased tension, created stability, and prevented or broke any movements for radical structural change. Hence, it served an essentially conservative purpose because it helped maintain the existing system of production and distribution.” Nor were New Deal programs successful at lowering unemployment—which remained unusually high as late as 1940 and was finally reduced only by America’s participation in World War II.

Presumably, a socialist or socialist-leaning government would have been very interested in redistributing incomes to correct a maldistribution that had long favored the top earners.  As Norman Thomas (the Socialist Party’s perennial presidential candidate) declared in 1934:  redistribution represented “the essential feature of any immediate program for Socialism.” The New Deal, however, does not appear to have achieved any significant redistribution.  Distinguished economic historian Douglas C. North studied this question and concluded that FDR’s programs did not significantly alter income distribution; indeed, it does not appear to have even been a clearly targeted administrative goal. 

FDR and most of his advisors seemed uninterested in tax policies of any kind. Neither did the New Deal’s pro-organized labor policies improve incomes in the lowest brackets. The share of income earned by the very top bracket did decrease slightly between 1933 and 1939 but that was mostly the product of the Depression itself; North concludes, “the significant decline in inequality” came instead during “the war years.” The welfare payments that some conservatives love to hate were never during the 1930s, in fact, large enough to produce a significant shift of income from high to low brackets. As North explains: “It is not at all clear that the New Deal measures provided any significant redistribution of income. The really significant fall [in income inequality] is clearly related to the high progressive tax rates imposed during World War II.”

5) Moreover, one might have thought that committed socialists would have supported the New Deal. Many did not. Instead, bona fide socialists such as Socialist Party of America presidential candidate Norman Thomas were often very sharp critics of the New Deal. Thomas was the son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers and was ordained in the northern Presbyterian Church shortly after graduating from Princeton in 1905. His pastoral ministry in New York convinced Thomas of the need for social reform. Although sympathetic to FDR’s concerns, Thomas wrote a book eviscerating New Deal policies and once famously quipped that FDR was "trying to treat tuberculosis with a cough drop.” Thomas’s assessment of the New Deal was consistently pointed and dismissive.  A few humorous examples may suffice here: 

“Emphatically, Mr. Roosevelt did not carry out the Socialist platform, unless he carried it out on a stretcher.”

“…there is nothing Socialist about trying to regulate or reform Wall Street. Socialism wants to abolish the system of which Wall Street is an appropriate expression.” 

“There is no socialism at all about taking over all the banks which fell in Uncle Sam's lap, putting them on their feet again, and turning them back to the bankers to see if they can bring them once more to ruin.” 

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To conclude, a dispassionate assessment of the New Deal does not support the extreme characterizations of conservative editorialists and talk radio polemics. Indeed, many of Roosevelt’s goals can actually be described as conservative—in that he sought to conserve key features of the American economic order through some regulatory tinkering and the introduction of several modest reforms. As Stanford University’s Barton Bernstein argued back in the 1960s: 

Though vigorous in rhetoric and experimental in tone, the New Deal was narrow in its goals and wary of bold economic reform. Roosevelt's sense of what was politically desirable was frequently more restricted than others' views of what was possible and necessary… Operating within very safe channels, Roosevelt not only avoided Marxism and the socialization of property, but he also stopped far short of other possibilities… The President and many of his associates were doctrinaires of the center, and their maneuvers in social reform were limited to cautious excursions.

In short, a thoughtful historical assessment of the New Deal confirms that it wasn’t socialist by design or intent. While its failures were significant, it would be more honest and constructive for conservatives to evaluate those problematic policies (such as the National Recovery Administration, ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court), rather than simply continuing the sort of polemical and inaccurate name calling that first began back in 1933.