Christians as Citizens of Two Nations

Nicholas Wolterstorff, The Mighty and the Almighty: An Essay in Political Theology

Christians once had an adversarial relationship with the state: many Roman believers went to martyrdom for refusing to recognize the Emperor as God made manifest. As Europe became Christian, however, the church enjoyed power and privilege, built on the belief that all citizens were parishioners, and vice versa. Now the church finds itself in a third arrangement: no longer persecuted, but no longer the peak of earthly power, either.

Yale philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff endeavors, in his newest scholarly book, to address how Christians can frame this third arrangement for life in modern liberal democracy. Instead of longing for the past or fleeing the dilemma, as too many have tried, Wolterstorff proposes embracing the difficulty. Only then, he implies, will we have a meaningful relationship, not only with our God, but also with our state.

As Wolterstorff emphasizes around the middle of this short but remarkably rich book, “political theology” is a species of political science, not theology. That is, rather than dealing with the nature and desires of God, it addresses how people of theological insight should approach the institutions of power in this world. How should the church, and members thereof, conduct themselves toward the state? The answer defies easy summary.

Christians have traditionally struggled with our relationship to the state. In political discussions, some wag inevitably cites Romans 13:1-7. But if we must submit to the state, what of those Christians whom the Empire ordered to renounce Christ? Wolterstorff bookends this essay with the story of Polycarp, who as both a Roman citizen and Christian bishop, died when he could not appease this duality. Remember what Christ says about the servant of two masters.

Many recent theologians have tried to answer this same conundrum by asserting that Christians are under only God’s authority, or that earthly polity cannot extend to Christians or the church. Wolterstorff demonstrates how such views don’t withstand scrutiny. All Christians have the duality of earthly citizen and transcendent disciple, and if we try to smooth over that duality, we blunt the richness of life that both identities provide.

Wolterstorff reconciles the problem by reframing Romans 13. He believes most interpretations, since at least the Renaissance, have treated as central what he demonstrates to be a subsidiary argument. Wolterstorff believes Romans 13 actually specifies the state’s domain, and in so doing, circumscribes its authority. When the state exceeds its authority, as in enforcing racist laws, it has abandoned Romans 13, and Christians are right to resist such false power.

Instead, Wolterstorff proposes a dual interpretation, in which state and church exist in tandem, each placing certain limits on the other. The state cannot, for instance, say who may attend worship, or even require any worship whatsoever. The church is free to practice what it believes right. By its very existence as a separate community within the polity, the church places limits on state authority.

But the state also imposes limits on the church. Christians cannot baptize anyone by force, as they once tried, or impress piety on secular laws. Individual believers may hold earthly power, but the church itself must stay out of power. When the church and state become entwined, each loses its distinct authority: the state has religious justifications for injustice, and the church loses sight of its divinely ordained mission in the vain pursuit of earthly power.

That’s not to say that church and state don’t have coinciding domains. Recent religious jeremiads on poverty and war come to mind. Consider a Venn diagram: two circles may overlap while retaining their unique identities. But when they become so enmeshed that we cannot tell where one ends and the other begins, or one swallows the other, we have a new breed, and one or (probably) both circles lose their distinct nature.

This book epitomizes the bromide “this book isn’t for everyone.” Wolterstorff’s approach, reliant on compressed language, intricate Aristotelian terminology, and numerous footnotes, requires a committed reader willing to take time. The author makes many points through allusion: having written on this topic for decades, Wolterstorff refuses to repeat himself, directing our attention to his prior publications. This book is for scholars and specialists, reflected in its steep price.

Rereading what I’ve written, I fear I’ve made Wolterstorff seem less complex than he is. Not so: he abhors the intellectual passivity with which some prominent theologians have tried to paper over modern polity. This book, though slim, is very, very hard. But it also more than justifies the effort in its ultimate liberating rewards.

The End of Everything Ain't What It Used To Be

Tracy Spiridakos and Billy Burke anchor the ensemble on NBC's Revolution

In the fourth episode of NBC’s well-meaning apocalyptic drama Revolution, after listening to a bandit whine about the looters who took the medicine that could have saved his daughter, series lead Charlie Matheson (Tracy Spiridakos) says breathily: “I’m so sorry. I am. But people just aren’t like that anymore.”

“They’ve always been like that,” he growls back, staring through brows heavy and grey with years of loss.

Bonhoeffer noted, decades ago, that humans cannot comprehend true beginnings, because we seek what came before. Creation ex nihilo evades our limited thinking. The same applies to ends. Science fiction has long traded on post-apocalyptic scenarios, because we always believe that something must come next. But our expectations about that succession have grown distinctly more bleak in recent years.

Though set fifteen years after a yet-unexplained catastrophe caused electricity to fail worldwide, apparently taking hydrocarbons with it, Revolution depicts a world in which anarchy reigns. Feral dogs and roving rapist wolfpacks make overland travel a fatal proposition, and the ad hoc government is little better than a well-armed street gang. Charlie’s exchange with her bandit could serve as a thesis for the show.

This makes a radical change from past apocalypses. Movies like The Terminator and books like Stephen King’s The Stand may not showcase the best in human nature, but they show people organizing some form of civil order. Revolution, by contrast, indicates that only our glossy technology stands between humankind and our base impulses. Light bulbs and TV, not the social contract, keep us from killing each other, implies creator Eric Kripke.

The ensemble pose, evidently mandatory in TV promo packages

In the pilot episode, the heroine and her family live in a circle of houses apparently built around a small cul-de-sac. Inside is so safe that children run and play in the former traffic circle, but outside, soldiers and bandits rove freely. Charlie’s father and his common-law wife repeatedly lecture her on why the world is dangerous and offers nothing she could want. It’s the suburban white parental terror come true: if you wander off our street, somebody will kill you.

Therein lies the problem: though Earth has suffered changes that should transform civilization, Kripke offers only a caricature of today’s world. And not even today’s world, but what comfy white Americans stereotypically think of as today’s world. From a bucolic nucleus of rural truck patches, the characters venture into cities that are not meccas of opportunity, but decaying cesspits. Nothing shields the clean, Caucasian countryside from the cities but miles of trackless waste.

In this world, everybody you meet has your harm in mind. Parents have always cautioned children about strangers, but kids learn that most people behave honorably if given the chance. Here, though, your mama’s worst warnings prove true: literally everyone Charlie meets when venturing away from home wants to kill, rape, or rob her. Only well-placed violence keeps her alive.

Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, asserted that humans must learn, from parents, states, churches, and others, not to indulge our desires for domination through violence and sex. This thesis is roundly rejected by current psychologists, yet remains influential in pop culture. This series takes that further, implying that nobody is teaching our kids to restrain themselves. Take away our electronic distractions, and our animal sides will run wild.

One of the show's trademark landscapes. Squint closely
for a glimpse of creator Eric Kripke's fleeting optimism.

Beneath this bleak present, the characters keep glancing over their shoulders at the past. An enigmatic artifact evidently restores electricity (from where? Don’t overthink things), and the monomaniacal general running the East Coast strives to turn the power back on. A band of rebels wants to “bring back the United States.” These characters seek solace, not from what they can build, but from rebuilding what others already tore down.

This longing for the status quo ante reflects a certain brand of American conservatism. Not the principled conservatism of George Will and Bill Buckley, but the reactionary reflexivity of believing that things used to be good, and now they’re not. By excoriating the decadence of the present, and lionizing the idealized past, Kripke showcases a vision of America that says only: we used to be better than we are.

In the 1990s, The X-Files taught that two zealots could “fight the future.” In Revolution, it’s too late. The Disaster is already upon us. The transition is much broader than two titles (witness the gulf between Terminator 2 and Terminator 3), and it’s risky to attach cause and effect, but differing apocalypses in different decades speak to wild, rapid changes in Americans’ view of ourselves and our prospects.

Writing Like an Entrepreneur

Dara M. Beevas, The Indie Author Revolution: An Insider's Guide to Self-Publishing

Every day I receive two or three requests to review books which the authors have published (or rather printed) at personal expense. Most look like fly-by-night operations, typeset on an antique Smith-Corona and mimeographed in the author’s basement. They may have good content for all I know, but they don’t look like their own authors took them seriously. I wish these aspiring writers would read Dara Beevas’ new guide.

Beevas, a professional publishing mentor, makes her living guiding would-be independent writers through the difficulties of getting a professional-quality book on the market. Because the publishing business has so many aspects, many of which are not visible when you browse bookstore shelves, many guerilla writers miss important steps. Beevas’ solution is to stop thinking like a writer and start thinking like a legitimate entrepreneur.

Though the author gets the byline and the glamor of writing, dozens of professionals have a hand shepherding a book from raw idea to marketable commodity. You can do some of this yourself: Beevas gives detailed instructions on how, for instance, to devise your marketing plan. But I especially appreciate Beevas’ explicit advice on knowing when to bring other professionals into your “self-publishing” fold.

For instance, you absolutely need an editor, to act as a sort of surrogate audience. Your best friend who spells really well is not an editor. Beevas describes not only what an editor does, and what you can expect to pay for an editor’s services, but what you need to do to get a manuscript in shape to present to an editor. Remember, you’re a professional; don’t give collaborators product below your ability, or below their dignity.

Likewise, resist the temptation to think that, just because you set your Word document in PDF format, you know how to design your product. Book designers make books look clean and polished for today’s media-saturated market. We say not to judge books by their cover, but we do so just to winnow today’s overcrowded shelves. (Beevas gives many good pointers, but Joel Friedlander goes into even more detail, if you need it. And you do.)

Dara M. Beevas

And marketing means more than buying ads or listing your book on Amazon. Beevas discusses topics like knowing if your book meets a real marketplace need, and how to distinguish your book from similar, but not identical, titles. Will you sell more print or e-books? Do you know how to sell your book on social media and other new platforms? Nobody knows with scientific accuracy, but Beevas knows which questions to ask in finding the answers.

Beevas repeatedly claims throughout this book that we have entered the age of the independent author, when writers armed with a little ingenuity have the market power once exclusive to media conglomerates. I’m willing to say that’s possible. However, I have a cabinet full of books, mostly from vanity presses, that indicate such an age faces an important counter-influence. Indie authors still need to pay their dues if they want the prestige.

Many vanity presses like to point out that William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, and Virginia Woolf self-published the books that made them famous. This is true, and it does not jeopardize their prestige with literary history. But all three were more than just authors. They were skilled entrepreneurs who managed their careers the same way they would manage their own store or factory. Too few self-starter writers have learned such business acumen. Yet.

Unfortunately for contemporary aspiring authors, going it alone means the dues you must pay have become more intense. In Hemingway’s day, he had to be the best writer he could be. Today’s guerilla authors need to be business-savvy, technologically forward-thinking, and engaged in all aspects of publication. That’s where Beevas steps in, providing us the questions we need to ask our inevitable partners, and the facts we need to evaluate their answers.

Though Beevas includes a chapter on writing for publication (as opposed to writing for enjoyment or a class), this is not a book on writing. This book empowers writers to manage their careers without the sometimes myopic interference of multinational conglomerates. This book guides entrepreneurs who have the potential, but not the know-how, to get in the ring with publishing’s major contenders, and play to win.

Going indie is not for everyone. Some writers are better off following the old rules, which do survive for a reason. But for writers ready to plow a new path, Beevas is the mentor you’ve waited for. Follow her guidance, and go get ‘em.

For Conservatives Who Can't Stand Mitt

As Mitt Romney’s Presidential campaign fails to generate heat, or win converts to Republican principles, many American conservatives wonder whether they have a home in today’s political landscape. The Republicans have become dominated by doctrinaire drum-beaters who apparently abhor discussion, or even viewing issues from multiple angles. Polls indicate undecided voters find the calcified Republican party at least distasteful.

A month from election day, Romney enjoys support from partisans and a handful of voters who explicitly oppose President Obama. But Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan, like Sarah Palin before him, is blatantly bracing for his own future without the ticket. Conservatives unwilling to follow party orthopraxy feel alienated from the current debate. Who could blame them if they chose to skip our small-D democratic processes this year?

The answer is that the American two-party system has no legal foundation. George Washington, in his farewell address, openly called Americans to resist parties, which he called “factions,” as divisive and opposed to America’s best principles. He knew that two of his closest deputies, Jefferson and Hamilton, had organized parties to advance their own candidates, and their small squabbles had threatened to derail Washington’s own cabinet.

Two parties have dominated our politics since 1854, forcing Americans into one of two boxes. If you believe in social justice and poverty protection, you must also support gay marriage and UN multilateralism. If you believe in firm law enforcement and national security, you must also support unlimited gun ownership and abortion control. But few voters really accord that completely with an either-or vote.

Libertarian Party Presidential
candidate Gary Johnson

Noam Chomsky notes that, in the 2000 Presidential election, one candidate shared more of the general electorate’s stated principles. While Bush and Gore ran largely interchangeable campaigns, Green Party candidate Ralph Nader’s positions should have touched voters, left and right. He favored strict trade controls and labor laws, sparing military engagement, and warm relations with our NATO allies. Naturally, the media laughed Nader off as a mere Loony Lefty.

Fortunately, American conservatives have alternatives in this year’s election. You do not have to go Red or Blue to have a say; a truly free society has choices beyond what some quasi-official organization gives us. If conservatives want to vote, but can’t support one of history’s most lackluster campaigns, they might want to consider some of America’s alternate options:

The Libertarian Party began in the early 1970s as a loose conglomeration of nudists, pot smokers, and Star Trek fanatics. The Republicans have adopted many of its economic principles, but not its emphasis on civil liberties. The Libertarians believe the same freedoms afforded to corporations should apply to individuals. As such, they favor relaxing speed limits, abolishing tariffs, and decriminalizing soft drugs like marijuana.

Though the Libertarians are America’s largest third party, they are something of a political outlier. They have adopted Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, slightly watered down, as the party’s economic platform, and as such are the only party actively courting atheists and agnostics. In past elections, they were less interested in winning than in disseminating their message, but under Bob Barr in 2008, that reversed, and they are now considered contenders.

The Libertarians are running former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson for President in 2012.

Constitution Party Presidential
candidate Virgil Goode

The Constitution Party, formerly the US Taxpayers’ Party, takes a mixed view on important issues. They favor states’ rights in law enforcement, and value the Federal system of conjoined local governments. But their views on issues like border enforcement and national security take a hard line on the national level. Former concerns about homosexuality and teaching evolution in schools have given way to more practical concerns like illegal immigration.

This party is explicitly Christian, and many disillusioned Christian Right leaders have migrated here from the Republicans. While the party has a policy of strict non-intervention in personal affairs, they have strong connections with the Christian Identity movement. The Constitution Party’s unusually strict platform on abortion and euthanasia was copied almost verbatim into this year’s Republican platform.

The Constitution Party is running former Virginia congressman Virgil Goode for President in 2012. This party is incorporated under different names in some states; check the web or your local registrar of elections for more details.

Other third parties, including the Independent American Party, the Modern Whig Party, and Ross Perot’s Reform Party reflect important principles of American conservatism. Allowing one party to hold as noble a tradition as conservatism hostage to its leadership is distinctly un-American. Hopefully, American conservatives will investigate their options in the month between now and Election Day.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Short Stories

Tom Perrotta, editor, The Best American Short Stories 2012

I keep hitting the same problem reading new short story collections: they’re not short. I first noticed this problem in 1996, though it probably began much earlier. As the magazine market contracts, well-funded glossies find they can sell 50,000 extra copies by slapping a famous novelist’s name on the cover. It doesn’t matter if the story reads like an unfinished outline, or an orphan chapter from a phantom manuscript. Fame outranks content every time.

Meanwhile, critical theory has put forth increasing evidence that short stories—real short stories, I mean, which are actually short—are a different order of beast than novels. Short stories aren’t compressed versions of full-length books, or mere incidents that authors could string together to make a novel. Critics like Charles May and Susan Lohafer show that authors create, and audiences receive, well-made short stories completely differently than they do novels.

This makes it frustrating when TC Boyle or Haruki Murakami pulls an unfinished novel outline from a bottom drawer, sells it to McSweeney’s, and make more for one half-assed sale than I’ve ever made for all my writing combined. The Best American Short Stories, published annually by Harcourt since 1978, has sometimes compounded this trend by spotlighting the wrong works, sometimes resisted it. And sometimes, as in this year’s edition, it does a little of both.

In his intro, editor Tom Perrotta contrasts his early short story influences, tightly controlled writers like Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff, with more recent writers, specifically David Foster Wallace. Where Carver and Wolff drill down on one viewpoint and hold taut focus, Wallace’s sprawling, digressive stories use egregious erudition to display the postmodern tragedy. You can view it that way, sure. Or Wallace was an unreadable smart-ass. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.

I stand amazed at how fast this collection rockets from laser-focus insight to unsightly mess, apparently without intended irony. On one page, you can have something like Mike Meginnis’ “Navigators” or Julie Otsuka’s “Diem Perdidi,” stories in which not one word is wasted, nor one narrative beat adrift. Then you George Saunders’ “Tenth of December” or Taylor Antrim’s “Pilgrim Life,” both of which feel like outlines the authors haven’t gotten around to writing yet.

Tom Perrotta

The twenty stories in this collection come from writers at different stages in their careers. Some, like Edith Pearlman and Jennifer Haigh, are mid-career journeyman writers, who write to get paid with little expectation of pop cultural acclaim. Others are younger in their careers, with only a few publications, or even Taiye Selasi, whose first professional sale ever is reprinted here.

Importantly, seniority doesn’t affect story quality. Alice Munro, probably this anthology’s best-known writer, turns in “Axis,” a story that is more idea than narrative, so lacking in through-line that I got to the end and shrugged. But Nathan Englander, a jack-of-all-trades who writes so slowly that he goes a decade between books, describes a mighty collision between past and present in “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.”

It would be easy to blame the sources Perrotta culled from. Several stories debuted in glossies like The New Yorker and Granta, or well-funded literary journals like Ploughshares and Tin House. These magazines’ large subscriber bases make them naturally leery of offending sponsors. Smaller, funkier, less risk-averse rags like Hunger Mountain, Denver Quarterly, or n+1 see their stories appear in the Honorable Mentions appendix.

That would be easy, but it would be facile. My two favorite stories in this collection, Mary Gaitskill’s psychological thriller “The Other Place” and Eric Puchner’s touching science fantasy “Beautiful Monsters,” first appeared in The New Yorker and Tin House, respectively. Both strike cobra-quick, every sentence quivering with potential. I never sensed, reading either story, that any details needed filled in or that any iota of type was wasted.

The problem lies not in the purveyors, but in the marketplace. Working writers have lost interest in short stories, because novels pay the bills. And readers who eagerly embrace long, discursive novels, have grown unaccustomed to short stories’ inherent intimacy. It’s easier to shield our hearts from sprawling romances and epic conflagrations, which are too big to comprehend anyway, than to lay ourselves bare to one moment of intimate frankness.

Perrotta does an admirable job trying to peddle shorts under those circumstances. I don’t blame him for the stories which leave me unmoved, and I thank him for bringing the best stories to my attention. He only suffers for his milieu. I just wish more short stories today were actually short.