In 2003, I was a senior in college. I had recently returned from a semester spent studying in Nairobi, Kenya. September 11,2001 was still fresh in my mind, and I was exploring Christian pacifism. Two short years earlier, I began to develop a sense of my own politics and I was surprised to find, when opinions began to emerge, that I slanted strongly left.

I had a job at a small, family-owned motel. It was my favorite job; some days when I’m deep in grading papers, or behind on a deadline, I wish to be back there. My office was in an old New England house in an old New England town. During the off-season it was quiet and I could read or write or listen to music. It was peaceful.

Except when my boss came in. He was this gruff and loud kind of guy. Lovable in a strange way, actually, but not very likable. He was also extremely conservative. One of the few disturbances in this tranquil space was a signed photograph of George W. and Laura Bush smiling at me from across the room that he bought with campaign contributions. Another disturbance was when he stormed into the office.

He’d turn off the radio, which was either set on some quiet, folky station or NPR. He’d grab the remote and flip the television on to Fox News. He’d talk at the television, grumbling about what this or that democrat did or didn’t do. I kept quiet.

But there was one day that I didn’t. This was in the early weeks and months of the Iraq War. I hated that war with a passion I didn’t know I could conjure for anything beyond myself. The words “shock and awe” literally moved me to nausea. And on this day, when my boss’ friend, who also happened to be the motel’s plumber, joined him in front of Fox News, joined in his chorus of rants and raves, I finally spoke up.

I can’t remember quite what the plumber said, but it was something about how he wished we could just wipe them all out and start over to repay them for what they did to us on September 11. In awkward, stumbly sentences, I pointed out that Iraq had nothing to do with the tragedy of 9/11. My boss turned to me, surprised to hear me speak up, but I could tell he wasn’t surprised by my view. This time, it was he who kept quiet.

The plumber and I exchanged some words. He was enjoying himself; I clearly was not. Finally, my boss mercifully intervened; he said something like, “Okay, back to work.” And the plumber left me with his parting words. He quoted the old adage, sometimes attributed to Winston Churchill, that “If you’re not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you’re not a conservative at forty you have no brain.” And then they left. Without turning Fox News off.

I sat there fuming. A million things I could have said rushed into my head and evaporated just as fast.

I have often thought about that day, about that plumber and the sentiment he expressed. And, of course, I’ve heard it many times since. That same flawed reasoning, that same acquiescence to world-weariness. The way we are all supposed to justify our inevitable fall to selfishness and pessimism.

Last night, I read that same argument again — this time, from David French, prominent Patheos evangelical blogger. In response to recent dialogue about what it might look like to move beyond the culture wars (as in my friend Jonathan Merritt’s new book and my latest Patheos column), French steps in to tell us naive youth that he was once like us. Idealistic. Wanting to be nonpartisan.

But then, through “encountering life,” he realized that “nonpartisanship had a steep price.” Essentially, he learned it was too difficult to take positions that are not clearly black or white. He learned that people find it challenging to classify a person — that they may even misunderstand him — when he doesn’t fit neatly into a prescribed category. And, of course, in true culture warrior fashion, it was the abortion issue that made this clear. Abortion, to him, is a black and white issue, and thus must everything else be.

He ends his condescending “open letter” by posing a couple of questions to those who attempt to be “post-partisan.” He asks, “are you willing to forego any effective voice at all for unborn children?  Are you willing to keep silent when the secular world demands your silence?” Because, he concludes, the “true price of non-partisanship” is silence. Finally, we’re supposed to read Jesus’ death on the cross and “tiniest handful of followers” as justification for being partisan prats.

French tells his story, but he doesn’t make an argument. Rather, we are supposed to accept his implied point because 1) he was once like us and 2) now he’s “a religious liberties lawyer, a pro-life activist, the founder of Evangelicals for Mitt, and the most recent winner of the American Conservative Union’s Ronald Reagan Award.”

But the point that French’s story ends up making is that when he wandered into life’s grey areas, when he couldn’t say for certain in an op-ed or talking point where he stood on a particular issue, it just got to be too hard. When he began to look into same sex marriage, for example, from the position of a lawyer, he saw that the issue was going to become complicated in areas such as religious liberty. He wrote an op-ed to announce that he was anti-gay marriage.

Reading French’s post last night conjured up the same feelings I had, almost a decade ago, when my boss’ plumber friend dismissed my view as the naiveté of youth. You’ll grow out of it, they both say.

I haven’t grown out of it. I don’t intend to. And, if I do, it will be a great loss — an assent to my fallen nature and that of the world around me, rather than a persistence against that nature. When you hear people make this argument — and if you’re young and progressive, you will — listen to them. Smile and nod. Disagree respectfully if you feel so bold.

And then pity them. They lost something precious in losing their idealism. They lost hope that things can be better. They gave in to the pressures to fit neatly in a jingoistic box. They saw for a moment the fog that envelops all of life — all the issues and questions — and they backed away into the safety of an artificially clear environment.

You don’t have to follow them there. Their journey needn’t be yours. Becoming conservative, a culture warrior, or a partisan is not a foregone conclusion. Rather, seek out an elder who remains idealistic in her advanced years. Meet a progressive octogenarian. You will find love and beauty and encouragement. You’ll meet an example that you’ll want to follow into the grey.

Finally, when the plumbers or the David Frenches of the world condescendingly dismiss your idealism as the naiveté of youth, you too can conjure the image of Christ on the cross. You can point to a man who died to show us the way toward an idealized world — the kingdom come. French’s telling of the story ends with Jesus on the cross with just a handful of followers, but we know that’s not where the story ends.

Ross Douthat’s new book, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, reminds us that there is an alternative to the partisan culture of contemporary Christianity: Christian Orthodoxy.  The idea that Christianity is not intrinsically liberal or conservative, but instead is founded on timeless truths that will appear to be conservative or liberal depending on the particular fashions of a given cultural age, is not a new one.  It was just about a century ago that G.K. Chesterton (whose masterwork Orthodoxy was published in 1908) pointed out that, “The Church is not merely armed against the heresies of the past or even the present, but equally against those of the future, that may be the exact opposite of those of the present.”

In an exceedingly refreshing turn, Douthat marshals the forces of Christian Orthodoxy in order to criticize conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck’s “City on a Hill” American nationalism as well as Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert’s “God Within” theology, to dismantle both the dubious Biblical interpretations of revisionist scholars like Elaine Pagels and the outlandish “Prosperity Gospel” of televangelists like Joel Osteen.  According to Douthat, they are all heretics.

But Douthat doesn’t stop with his diagnosis; Bad Religion also repeatedly exhorts Christians to try to influence culture for the better.  But the guiding principle throughout is a wariness about making Christianity subservient to the platform of a particular political party or secular ideology.  And one suspects that as long as the Church is being criticized by small-government conservatives for championing the rights of the poor to obtain health care while simultaneously drawing the ire of knee-jerk liberals for championing the rights of the unborn, Douthat would say it must be doing something right.

One of the great myths that Douthat refutes is the idea that, in order to be a Christian, one must be locked in the anti-intellectual bomb shelter of fundamentalist conservatism or jettison virtually all traditional Christian doctrine and embrace a Jesus who is palatable to progressive liberalism. This dichotomy is perpetuated by influential Christians across the spectrum, from Creation Museum founder Ken Ham to best-selling Blue Like Jazz author Donald Miller.  And so I was disappointed to find that David Sessions’ criticism of Bad Religion here at Patrol  seemed to be coming from the doctrine-jettisoning-liberal end of the socio-political spectrum (though I imagine it would be equally frustrating to read a critique of Orthodoxy from the bomb-shelter-fundamentalist end).

Sessions first goes after Douthat’s assertion that Christian Orthodoxy should maintain its independence from the changing whims of culture and use the broad foundation of traditional Christian doctrine as a force for change, even against the prevailing cultural norms.  According to Sessions, this is impossible, “It is simply in the nature of religion…to adapt to the demands and values of the surrounding culture, and to either collude so much that it becomes a baptizing force of cultural trend or an isolated resistance.”

But Sessions’ claim flies in the face of the evidence presented in Bad Religion, and he fails to provide any evidence of his own to counter Douthat’s meticulous research.  For instance, Douthat points to the Civil Rights movement as one of the great galvanizing successes of Orthodox Christianity.  It can hardly be said that Christianity did nothing more than “baptize” an already existing “cultural trend” of desegregation.  Rather, as Douthat points out, Christianity was central to the Civil Rights movement (it was born in churches led by pastors) from the very beginning, as it moved from a counter-cultural “isolated resistance” to mainstream cultural acceptance, discrediting the heresy of “white-supremacist Christianity” along the way and re-affirming the Orthodox view that all people have equal human dignity in Christ.

According to Douthat, the Civil Rights movement is an example of Orthodox Christianity at its best, rising above partisanship and proclaiming the truth; whereas the various heresies he describes are examples of Christianity at its worst.  But Sessions appears to make no allowance for such distinctions, “Christianity,” he says, “has always been hand-in-hand with America’s delusions of grandeur, and with its worst impulses as well as its best.”  And in light of Douthat’s seemingly constructive efforts to use Christian doctrine to affirm certain uses of Christianity and reject others, Sessions’ desire to re-muddle the lines between Orthodoxy and heresy is confusing.

However, Sessions reasons for wanting to keep the lines muddled between Orthodoxy and heresy become clear when he reprises familiar liberal criticisms of Christian Orthodoxy’s truth claims: they are “judgmental,” “absolutist,” “rigid,” etc.  But while Sessions purports to use these terms to criticize the inflexibility of Christian doctrine, he doesn’t really end up criticizing inflexibility per se.  Instead, he agrees with Douthat that certain ideas floating around within Christendom should be stridently affirmed while others should be categorically dismissed.  Their only difference is who should decide what is affirmed and what is dismissed.  And according to Sessions, Douthat’s primary mistake is maintaining his fidelity to Orthodox Christianity “even if the policies his religion prefers have to exclude people in ways that just aren’t acceptable to modern liberal society.”

In other words, Sessions seems to be fine with Christian doctrine so long as it doesn’t contradict what he sees to be the higher authority of modern liberalism, which has a whole different set of doctrines it regards as absolute, including many which are at odds with Orthodox Christian doctrine: the right to an abortion, the right to same-sex marriage, and all the other hot-button issues that garner headlines.  And so the question isn’t one of “absolutism,” the only dispute between Douthat and Sessions seems to be which set of absolute doctrines supersedes the other: Orthodox Christianity or modern liberalism.

While it’s easy to make the case in secular America that Christian doctrine should be made subservient to modern liberalism, it is harder to make that case within the Church. This is especially true in denominations where Orthodox doctrine has been passed down through the centuries and carries the weight of both revealed truth and apostolic tradition.  And it is in light of the weight of Orthodoxy’s historic lineage that Sessions’ claim that Douthat ascribes to a “religious ideology that is unable to see past its own particular politico-cultural moment” rings most hollow.

Seeing past its own particular politico-cultural moment is precisely what Orthodoxy does.  As Chesterton once said of his own Orthodox Catholicism, “It is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.  It is the only thing that talks as if it were the truth; as if it were a real messenger refusing to tamper with a real message.”  And to that end, Bad Religion is nothing if not a compelling case for a Christian doctrine that transcends time and place — particularly our time and place.

There is hardly a moment’s pause in the discourse about the culture war both in the mainstream media and in evangelical circles: who’s winning, who’s losing, who’s conceding, who has the best long-term strategy, etc. I’ve written a few of those pieces myself. But on the occasion of Rachel Held Evan’s post on the matter and Fitz’s and Matt Lee Anderson’s different responses, I think we take a moment to acknowledge how slippery the term “culture war” is, what it may actually mean, and where that leaves us.

First of all, let’s look at the usual way this is discussed. Often in both the media and among hip, moderate-to-liberal evangelicals, only the right fights the culture war. Conservatives are culture warriors, but gay marriage activists are not. Thus when the topic turns to “getting beyond the culture wars,” what is really meant is conservatives giving up or at least shutting up. We will get beyond the culture wars when the conservatives at least admit they’ve lost and decide to stop talking about this stuff so much. Again, I’m sure I have expressed a version of this view on various occasions; the only excuse I can offer is that seeing debates from the outside is a constant struggle.

So one problem with the dominant discourse on the culture wars is that one side of the battle is mostly ignored. The other problem is even bigger: with so much media usage and partisan co-optation, the meaning of the term has become incomprehensibly broad. Does it mean political activism? Championing a particular side of a divisive issue in intellectual debate? Does it just mean tone—ie, does being hyperbolic and hysterical make you a culture warrior, while making the same argument in measured, sophisticated tones means you’re just someone with an opinion? And on which front of the culture war are you fighting? The whites-vs-minorities one, the sexual traditionalist vs. the sexual progressive one, the rural vs. urban one, the Keynes vs. Hayek one?

I think most of us loosely think of culture warring as a special class of ressentiment, combat driven by a mentality of besiegement, symbolic struggle, and supposed existential threat to a cultural identity. But I’m not so sure we can make a clean separation between that and good old democratic disagreement. Democracy as we generally conceive it is a structure for managing and containing conflict, a framework for legitimate political struggle. There will always be factions, sides, particular interests, etc, and those imply we will have political friends and enemies. Deep down, I think describing serious political conflict as a “culture war” is part of the liberal allergy to vigorous debate; it tries to shove deep disagreements into a corner with some kind of label indicating that this is not welcome in “reasonable” discourse. “Culture warrior” is an epithet, used by the “sides” against each other and by bipartisan elites against all that shrill partisanship. But the reality is that certain issues like abortion, gay marriage, etc, are deeply divisive, and they symbolize and encapsulate dearly-held views about what is good and right in our country and the identities of people who hold those views. Despite what Washington pundits might tell you, people should have strong feelings about these issues, and they should fight about them. It’s called politics.

This presents a dilemma for Christians on opposite sides of political issues, who need to both remain faithful to their theological/moral/political beliefs and to love other Christians who disagree about those very charged issues. It’s hard to do, but it’s not impossible. And the worst thing that can be done, I think, is to keep using the term “culture wars” against people who disagree with your politics while, in the same breath, claiming you are tired of fighting. I don’t mean to pick on Rachel here, because she is a lovely person who is doing much worth admiring. I get what she’s trying to say, and I have even made these same arguments in the past. But in a post like this, she is taking a fairly clear political position: that evangelical political opposition to gay marriage is wrong.  She opposes Amendment One. I agree with that position, but I can’t deny that it is a position, and that it puts me on a “side” of the “culture war.” (Similarly, Matt cannot convincingly claim he’s “not much of a culture warrior” when a significant amount of his work is devoted to energizing a conservative Christian worldview that has political dimensions he cares about passionately.)

For the evangelicals who lean more to the left, I think it’s better to be honest about that than to try to make the typical liberal move of framing your own position as non-political while blaming the reactionaries for being so mean and political. Being non-political shouldn’t be anyone’s goal because it’s both cowardly and inherently hypocritical; there is no such thing. If you want to preach a message of peace, focus on the way that political rhetoric impacts Christianity, maybe, rather than pretending people are going to give up their convictions and interests for the sake of harmony. Your convictions will tell you whether, for you, certain issues are battles worth fighting politically, theologically, rhetorically, etc, or whether your energy would be put to better use washing feet. I fully support fighting the other “side.” But just because one decides service is better than activism doesn’t make all activism illegitimate—and it doesn’t make the struggle go away.

The fallout continues. Evangelicals of all shades are showing their colors over Obama’s affirmation of gay marriage. The arguments are often predictable and not worth rehashing here. Rather, I’m always interested in the tangential quarrels that arise when we’re all provoked to debate. And many are happening out there, but I thought I’d briefly share just one in particular.

Over at “Ethika Politika,” the blog for the Center of Morality in Public Life, Andrew Haines, president and founder of the Center, takes on Rachel Evans’ massively popular post, “How to win a culture war and lose a generation.” Haines begins his critique frankly, stating that articles like Evans “tick me off.” From there he fumbles around a bit (he says Evans argument boils down to “ignorance and trepidation,” in one paragraph, but then insists “never does defending moral values entitle one to degrade or humiliate another person” in the next) until he finally lands on the brunt of his argument in the last couple of paragraphs.

Haines goes after Evans in much the same way Patrol has been attacked in the past. This line sums it up: “If Christianity is a cohesive and meaningful thing, then it must remain unified in the face of threats and challenges.”

There you have it, the tired, old argument that being critical of Christianity is the actual problem. It’s not, as Evans points out in her post, that we’ve elevated the culture wars above loving people; it’s that we’re not unified “in the face of threats and challenges.” I received this criticism en masse around my response to Jeff Bethke’s “Hate Religion” video this past January. The argument consistently went, So what if he’s not right on every theological point, it’s people like you who are critical of other Christians that show the world how much we suck, or something to that effect.

And here it is again being leveled against Evans.

Then, in his last paragraph, Haines goes one step further in assuring us that his ability to argue with Evans is limited to prepackaged attacks. Evans is not making a stand based on her faith, he claims. But rather, she is “bending to the whim of popular acceptance.” If Patrol earned a dollar for every time we were accused of “bending to the whim of popular acceptance,” no one here would have to work day jobs.

So, here’s the thing, religion is not above criticism, Christianity included. It is an actor within culture, and an extremely powerful one at that. It has the potential to do great good as well as great evil. History has shown us the effect of unchecked religion so many times that it has become the best argument atheists have against religion as a whole.

Further, if pointing out its flaws divides Christianity, so be it. We should strive toward unity, but it is better to be divided, with some people at least moving in the right direction, then to be united and all of us wrong.

No, when necessary let’s disagree; it’s for our own good.

It’s been busy (and controversial) week around here, so I thought I’d send us into the weekend with a bit of art. My wife and I had the opportunity to see the fabulous Regina Spektor in concert last night and it was incredible. I’ve always loved her song “Laughing With,” but to see it live was really quite moving. Though I can’t replicate that experience for you, I can share the song. Enjoy.

My schoolmate Caleb Jones has written up a conversation he had with a Planned Parenthood volunteer that is earning him predictable applause on Facebook for his brave truth-telling. I think he did a good thing by at least trying, however unsuccessfully, to engage with someone on the “other side” of the issue. But where his commenters and friends see a compassionate attempt to communicate, I see a story that is dripping with self-righteousness and that is emblematic of the gulf between how pro-lifers imagine their arguments as opposed to the actual quality of their arguments.

I actually really liked the beginning of Caleb’s exchange with the volunteer. He told her that that abortion makes him uncomfortable even if it amounts to only 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s budget. That’s his conviction, and I respect him for standing by it. But the conversation continues, and almost right away Caleb starts bludgeoning the volunteer with his moralizing and wondering why she doesn’t repent on the spot.

The moralizing, in particular, is his insistence that fetuses are babies being killed. That’s the motivational core of the pro-life argument, and Caleb has every right to be passionate about it. But his conversation with the volunteer reveals something all-too-common among pro-lifers: the conviction that no one could possibly disagree with them if that person were not indoctrinated, confused, or lying to themselves. Caleb, in his own description, forces the woman to confront the word kill rather than “let her hide the subject at hand with clichés and meaningless words.” Controlling the terminology of the debate is a classic propaganda strategy that both sides of the abortion issue deploy ferociously, and that’s exactly what Caleb is doing here. It appears that the Planned Parenthood volunteer is not well prepared to defend her views on the moral status of the fetus at the level Caleb is—in fact, she may not even have strong convictions about it. But once Caleb has “scored” against her by getting her to admit that aborted babies are killed, he says, with a fairly shocking degree of smugness:

You would think that at this point in the conversation the woman standing across from me with the clipboard and the umbrella would see the moral depravity laced throughout her organization, walk in a restaurant bathroom, turn her Planned Parenthood t-shirt inside out, and walk home right then and there. But she didn’t. The conversation went on.

Well, no, I wouldn’t wonder that at all, and neither would anyone who doesn’t already agree with Caleb’s dogmatic views. He has not revealed a hopeless contradiction in her position or really even communicated with her at all. He has insisted upon his own definition of what an abortion is, and considered himself the victor because his interlocutor doesn’t know how to respond. This is what he does for the rest of the conversation: keeps on saying kill, kill, kill without listening or trying to imagine the real world situation of someone who might seek an abortion as vividly as he imagines the inner life of her fetus.

Again, I’m not blaming Caleb for believing abortion is murder, even though I do not. I remain uncomfortable with abortion even though I strongly believe it should be legal. But what the volunteer is doing, and what I would have done in her shoes, is challenging his absolutist logic. The woman rightly points out that the world can be an ugly, violent place that all the platitudes about “endurance for the sake of righteousness” do little to salve. Fetuses can have horrific disorders, they can threaten their mothers’ lives, and they can grow into babies that are certain to be born into poverty, abuse, and neglect.

The woman Caleb was talking to has lived that—she has lived in 15 foster homes and knows what growing up in those conditions is like, and she believes its necessary for women to have the option to end an unwanted pregnancy in certain conditions. At the same time, Caleb’s story—he lives a valuable life despite having a genetic disease that could have made him a candidate for abortion—makes him believe every fetus should be given the chance he got, no matter what. I respect both of these positions, and it is ultimately why I believe  every mother deserves the absolute right to decide what happens inside her own body. Only she really knows her situation and what she and her future child can survive. Caleb seems to believe that only his experience is valid, that everyone must be forced to make the choice he’s glad his mother made. It’s a difficult, painful reality to talk about, but I think any of us who considers it long enough, or listens to enough real-life stories, can imagine situations where that choice would not have had a happy ending. Caleb believes the world kill overcomes all of this complexity, shuts out the experience of others who have not reached his conclusion—just like he’s doing to the woman he met in the rain under the pretense of “communicating” with her.

I do not pretend, unlike many other people who support the legality of abortion, that this is not a difficult issue, that it doesn’t and shouldn’t come with sadness, regret, or the many other emotions it brings up in people who have been through it. I don’t even believe we can deny that abortion is violence or killing. (For more on that, please read Kristen Dombek’s amazing essay in Issue 10 of n+1, entitled “The Two Cultures of Life.” I’ll email you the PDF.) But the world is full of painful choices, and I ultimately cannot accept that the activist’s passion for the unborn should deprive the living, flesh-and-blood woman in a painful situation the right to make a choice that only she can comprehend. Pro-lifers, even passionate ones like Caleb and his many admirers, would do well to do more listening and communicating and less shutting down the conversation.

Update, 9:18 pm: Several commenters have chastised me for the meanness of my title. I tried to explain myself in various spots below, but I think they are right that it’s a poor choice for a post accusing someone else of smugness and condescension. More than that, judging motives and attitudes is more often than not unfair. I’m not going to try to erase my mistakes, but I apologize to Caleb for being less gracious than I should have.

I wrote several thousand words on Ross Douthat’s new book, Bad Religion, that ended up in my iMac’s trash bin. I felt my reactions to the book were either hazy or uninteresting, and, unfortunately, was too busy last week to spend enough time thinking about it. Now that’s it’s been widely reviewed, and Ross and Will Saletan have had a great debate over it, I feel like there’s even less point in writing a standard review that has to summarize and deal with arguments most people have by now already read. So I thought I would instead try to articulate what hasn’t been said. (Here’s some of the reviews worth looking at: my friend Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry; New York Times religion columnist Mark Oppenheimer; liberal Catholic writer Michael Sean Winters, to whom Douthat responded; and from an evangelical perspective, Books & Culture’s John Wilson.)

The obvious thing one could take issue with is Ross’ portrait of American history post-World War II, which he claims was a period where small-O “orthodox” Christianity kept America’s unique penchant for religious heresy in check, and had broad cultural influence both among intellectual elites and the majority of the population. We can quibble with what I feel is Douthat’s dubious notion of an American “orthodoxy,” and even he suggests there are other ways of looking at the history, but I don’t think the basic thrust of his account is incorrect. In simple terms, there was a time when Christian intellectuals were regularly on the covers of Time and Newsweek, and theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr had a significant voice in mainstream political thought. And I think it’s safe to say that time is over, a situation Douthat blames on both the accomodationism of mainline Protestantism to cultural trends and the anti-intellectual retrenchment of conservative evangelicalism. Douthat, who is more or less in line with official Catholic doctrine on most political issues, sees this weakened, discredited state of Christianity as bad for America, the stuff of hubristic foreign policy, Wall Street greed, crumbling social morality, etc.

What I’m not convinced of is that the direction of the country would have been any different even with a Christianity that had worked to maintain a broad appeal while preserving the judgmental aspects of Christian orthodoxy. It didn’t stop the greed that led to the Great Depression, it didn’t stop the paranoid hubris of the Vietnam War, and it didn’t stop the arrival of the Sexual Revolution. It is simply in the nature of religion—particularly America’s hyper-flexible modernist-individualist Protestantism—to adapt to the demands and values of the surrounding culture, and to either collude so much that it becomes a baptizing force of cultural trend or an isolated resistance. Even if Christianity has always been the loose doctrine that organized American society, I don’t think it has ever had the sort of purity or power Douthat seems to ascribe to it in that little window of post-war history. It has always been hand-in-hand with America’s delusions of grandeur, and with its worst impulses as well as its best.

Late in the book, Douthat’s familiar ground starts showing through his argument: the thing he is most concerned about is the abandonment of the Christian “sexual ethic,” on which he blames the abortion rate, the rise of illegitimacy, the decline of marriage, etc. Contraception is Douthat’s central cultural enemy; while far from the only cause of this moral breakdown, for him it’s a huge one. The idea is that Christianity gave up on defending its fundamentals, its moral demands, and American society has suffered from the ensuring license.

But this is where I disagree with Douthat the most, though perhaps in a predictable and rather uninteresting way. Underlying his argument is a kind of American exceptionalism, the idea that the United States’ success has had at least something to do with its religiosity, and that its religiosity has had played a central role in keeping it on track as a society—that it needs some kind of orthodox, metaphysically energized Christianity, which implies judgment, to keep society’s excesses in check. But this is obviously not true: almost every advanced Western nation besides the U.S. is predominantly secular, and all of them have lower abortion rates, lower teen pregnancy rates, and lower divorce rates than we do. But, as Douthat has said explicitly, the ways they accomplish these things—sex education, contraception, legalized abortion, policies supporting unmarried cohabiting parents—are not things he believes a Christian can accept.  So he’s choosing a view of America—that religion is socially necessary—and excluding policy options that don’t accept that premise. And here’s the kicker: he makes this choice even if those policies he can’t accept are more likely to be more effective in ameliorating the real-world problems he is concerned about, and even if the policies his religion prefers have to exclude people in ways that just aren’t acceptable to modern liberal society.

I don’t necessarily disagree with Ross that the collapse of Christianity in the U.S. has, for example, seriously undermined marriage among lower-class Americans and put an increasing number of American children in single-parent homes. This is a problem we should be concerned about. But I’m not nearly as optimistic as Douthat that a revival of conservative religion is going to turn back the clock. The fact is, there has been a blossoming of conservative religion, and the broad ecumenical success of people like Rick Warren and the energy of the neo-Calvinist movement has not turned stemmed the cultural tide. Douthat is worried that the “world contraception has made” has “de-emphasized the moral weight of the sexual act,” but the reality is that the world advanced capitalism has made has de-emphasized the moral weight of every kind of human action. All the religious dogma in the world isn’t going to make community values widely credible and urgent in an environment commoditized to the extent ours is.

But the main reason I can’t accept Douthat’s prescription is what he believes it entails: teaching that rejects the advancement for women represented the availability of contraception, and the continued exclusion of homosexuals from the institution of marriage. This puts Douthat a lot closer to Christian fundamentalism than he would like to believe; not fundamentalism in the historical sense, but in the sense of a religious ideology that is unable to see past its own particular politico-cultural moment. Douthat is a fundamentalist because his ideology is total; if you reject any part of it—say, that contraception is bad—the entire thing collapses. This kind of rigidity is in no way necessary;  there is simply no reason that even an energetic “orthodox” Christianity has to be absolutist on sexual issues to preserve its particularity and its demandingness, the characteristics supposedly required for religion to make a real difference in the way people live and behave. Christianity can still preach the importance of marriage and fidelity without rejecting gender equality and condemning gays and lesbians to lives without intimacy. But for Douthat, those particularly modern conservative shibboleths are integral to the kind of Christianity he thinks is necessary to save America. And I’m sorry, but I think we have more than enough of that already.

Last month I had the opportunity to see an advanced screening of the film “Blue Like Jazz.” I drove 45 minutes outside of Boston to an AMC Loews theater in Methuen, MA to join a modest crowd composed mostly of Christian youth workers. I collected my bag of “Blue Like Jazz” swag and found my seat. After a brief introduction, during which we were promised a Q&A session with the film’s director Steve Taylor and author Donald Miller, and a warning that the movie had “earned its PG-13 rating,” the wait was over, and the movie that almost wasn’t began.

Most readers will be familiar with the tumultuous journey of the film adaptation of Blue Like Jazz. It was the movie every young Christian who had read the book wanted made. It was rumored and then confirmed; it was on again, off again. When it seemed to be terminally off, a few young fans revived it via a Kickstarter campaign. And, after six years of drama, it is being released today nationwide.

I was one of those anxious young Christians looking forward to the film adaptation. I may have even contributed to the Kickstarter campaign – I can’t actually remember. But I’m also a critic, and I think that means I can’t just be a fan.

I was leery of Don Miller’s book back when it came out and every Christian I knew insisted I read it. But I finally did. “It’s like ‘Traveling Mercies’ Lite,” I concluded. But there was also a lot to like; it looked fresh and new against the backdrop of Christian publishing.

I was critical, too, of the trailer for the film version when it was released last June. In my Patheos column I wondered: Would the movie be good art, or just “Christian art”?

And as I watched the film last month, that remained the central question occupying my thoughts. But by the time the lights came up, it was clear: “Blue Like Jazz” is just another Christian movie.

As I noted in the Patheos column, it should go without saying that Christians can and do create good art, but they don’t call it Christian art because it is art first. That it was made by a Christian, that it may even in some way communicate something of Christianity, is secondary to its existence as a work of art. If this is not the case, if it is primarily didactic — or in the case of much Christian art, derivative — it cannot be good art.

“Blue Like Jazz” is not really derivative, at least no more than anything else: it’s a coming-of-age story in which young Don leaves his home and his church in Texas to attend the über-liberal Reed College. He loses some faith, hurts some feelings, and drinks some beers, but by the end, of course, he’s found his faith again.

But it is didactic. Do you remember Miller’s note at the beginning of the book? He first explains that he once disliked jazz music because it “doesn’t resolve” (apparently some jazz aficionados took issue with this), but then did come to like it, and concludes by applying the same assertion to God: “I used to not like God because God didn’t resolve.” What I liked best about his book was that he doesn’t go on to say, “God does resolve!” in the author’s note. Nor does he reach that conclusion at any point in the book. Miller didn’t feel the need to do that Christiany thing where all the loose ends are tied up and we are taught an easy-to-follow message in three simple steps.

The film version definitely resolves. Every loose end is tied up. Don gets his faith and he gets his girl…in the same scene, amazingly enough. The elements of narrative — setting, conflict, climax, resolution — act as an overly self-conscious guide through the movie (they play a part in the book as well). The result, though, is an ever-present awareness of the hands of the writers guiding a story not meant to resolve, to its inevitable resolution.

Sure, it pushes some of the limits of what can comfortably be called a Christian movie. There’s some cursing, drinking, a lesbian friend, and a giant condom, but even in this, the movie seems disturbingly aware of just how far you can get a young Christian audience to go. And, of course, this is because Miller himself pushed the limits in his book and arguably created the demographic for whom the movie was made.

During the Q&A session after the film screening, I asked the director Steve Taylor why he fought for six years, against all kinds of adversity and rejection, to make this film. He said he wanted to show that Christians could create better art than what was out there. He noted, remarkably, that Miller’s story felt real to him because it didn’t tie up at the end. (If I could have followed up, I might have asked why, then, his movie does tie up so neatly.)

Furthermore, Taylor remarked, he wanted to film the “confession scene,” in which Reed students enter a confession booth to hear a kind of reverse confession — a Christian confesses wrongs committed in the name of Jesus. He rightly noted the intense power of that scene in Miller’s book, and said it felt important to make because he wanted non-Christians to know Christians understand how they are perceived. I see two fundamental flaws with this reasoning, however: the scene already existed in the book, and, as a Christian film, it’s not likely many non-Christians will even see the film.

This, of course, is the problem with all so-called Christian art, be it film, music or books: it purports to carry a message for those outside Christianity, while appealing only to those within. Perhaps “Blue Like Jazz” will be the exception, but my guess is that today, and for however long the film is in theaters, it will be attended almost entirely by youth groups and Christian college students. I’m glad they will be exposed to a kind of Christian film that neither ignores nor bemoans the existence of gay people or alcoholic beverages, but I’m afraid pushing the limits of what Christian moviegoers find acceptable may be the film’s greatest accomplishment.

In the end, the movie does not supersede the genre of Christian film, and it doesn’t add anything to what Miller did in his book almost a decade ago. That said, go see it if it’s playing in a theater near you; decide for yourself. And then come on back here and let us know what you think. I’m not a film expert by any stretch, and thus there are a lot of aspects of the movie I haven’t touched upon.

As a parting note, it took me about a month to get up the courage to write this review. There is a part of me that wanted just to ignore the film, rather than offer a negative critique. I worry about a backlash of readers calling me a jerk, of course, but more than that, I worry about whether writing a critical review actually makes me one. But a good friend, a musician and a Christian who, if not actively, eschews the label of Christian artist, called me on this.

This is why Christians continue to make such subpar art, he told me, because we’ve decided it’s not nice for other Christians to critique it.

He’s right, and yet it is still difficult to do. I met Steve Taylor after the screening and thanked him for personally inviting me to the event. He sincerely hoped I liked the film and showed genuine appreciation for the work of Patrol. I was struck by his earnestness and inspired by his and Don Miller’s attempt to push the limits of Christian art, but I wish they could move beyond it entirely; I truly want to be both a fan and a critic.

The center of my exchange with Andrew Sullivan was a liberal assumption that he holds as a conviction and which I challenged: that liberalism allows rational, disinterested analysis of facts and policies that then should be worked out in an arena of pragmatic compromise. Critics of liberalism, on the other hand, are skeptical about this;  there are no “facts,” per se, and the so-called scientific knowledge on which liberals often base their “objective” view of the world is itself the product of a certain assumptions and faiths. This is the simplest meaning of “there is nothing outside the text”: there is no point where interpretation ends and cold, hard facts settle the question. Human discourse, thought, and history are interpretation all the way down.

I ran across this nice encapsulation of the criticism I was trying to articulate against liberalism, which the philosopher Stanley Fish wrote about after appearing on a television panel with Richard Dawkins and Stephen Pinker. Here’s how Fish summed up his disagreement with Dawkins and Pinker, who are basically unreconstructed modernists:

The desire of classical liberals to think of themselves as above the fray, as facilitating inquiry rather than steering it in a favored direction, makes them unable to be content with just saying, You guys are wrong, we’re right, and we’re not going to listen to you or give you an even break. Instead they labor mightily to ground their judgments in impersonal standards and impartial procedures (there are none) so that they can pronounce their excommunications with clean hands and pure — non-partisan, and non-tribal — hearts. It’s quite a performance and it is on display every day in our most enlightened newspapers and on our most progressive political talk shows, including the ones I’m addicted to.

This is the reason I’m so dismissive of things like cult of nonpartisanship in Washington, manifested in absurd political third-way projects like Americans Elect, and why I have serious questions for liberalism as a political philosophy. Liberalism (note I mean the whole liberal system, not the American left) is anti-political; it has a constant need to hide its biases, limit the field of discourse,  and pretend and that any kind of actual political conviction is a product of “fundamentalism” or crazed partisan zeal. If you read Andrew’s blog or any op-ed columnist in a major American newspaper, you know the deal. The greatest sin in liberal politics is believing in something and refusing to compromise.

I realize this sounds a lot like the complaint of the theocrats on the Christian right, but I am not suggesting we’d be better off with some sort of re-theologized politics. One of the reasons I’m not sure we should be quick to throw liberalism out with the bathwater is precisely that it has more or less protected us from dangerous theocratic politics. But we have an obligation to be aware of liberalism’s limits, and to insist that it be forthright about its assumptions–which, sorry, Andrew, are always and necessarily metaphysical. There is no political worldview or any other kind of worldview without that sort of assumptions. What I want from liberals is that they own up to their beliefs, and drop this deeply ingrained pose of Olympian purity. Who knows, showing some conviction might even help left-liberals win in the era of an increasingly and proudly illiberal right wing.