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FoxNews "War on Advent" Isn't New
Some people will write anything to fill up server space:
With FOX News seeking to expose those who refuse to say “Merry Christmas” as secular collaborators to the War on Christmas, I confess that I am confused. FOX holds itself up as the network that stands by traditional values defending America and faith from heresies and infidelities of all sorts.
Did FOX get the wrong memo? According to ancient Christian tradition, “Christmas” is not the December shopping season in advance of Christmas Day; rather, it is Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and the Twelve Days following that run until early January. During most of December, Christians observe Advent, a four-week season of reflection, preparation and waiting that precedes the yearly celebration of Jesus’ birth.
Diana Butler Bass commits the logical fallacy of a sweeping generalisation when she says that “(all) Christians observe Advent”. They don’t, for reasons that long antedate Fox News, the Huffington Post or even a venerable liberal organ like the Nation.
To properly celebrate Advent, you have to be in a church that follows the liturgical year. Now like Linux, the liturgical year has a single kernel but many distros, so you have the Roman Catholic distro, the traditional Anglican distro, the Episcopalian distro, the Orthodox distros, etc. (I think the Episcopalians have become their own OS, but I digress…) Advent–the penitential and anticipatory time before Christmas–is in the kernel.
Starting with the Reformation (unless, of course, you’re a Baptist succession adherent) some churches began to reject the liturgical year along with the liturgy. They did so because they felt that both were man-made. Generally they would pare down what was celebrated to Christmas and Easter. Some over the edge (like the Jehovah’s Witnesses) don’t even celebrate those. There was a time not too long ago when these churches wouldn’t countenance anything like Advent, its wreath or a reasonable facsimile. A few still take that position.
That rejection–along with the secularisation of the holiday that started in the nineteenth century–made it easy for the culture to forget about Advent and its sombre ways. But it’s one thing to start the Christmas celebration the day after Thanksgiving (or earlier for shopping malls). It’s quite another to pitch any reference to our Saviour in favour of the Solstice or Winter Holiday, and that’s what the current culture war has been all about.
In recent years there has been a softening of attitude towards Advent by churches which have up to now refused to acknowledge its existence. Some of this can be attributed to die-hard Episcopalians like Lisa Robertson going on her Baptist father-in-law’s show and doing presentations like this. But old habits die hard. FoxNews’ non-emphasis on Advent isn’t a war, but represents the understanding of Christmas in our culture.
Personally I’m glad to see a broadening of Advent’s understanding among Christians of all types. Bass’ attempt to create a “War on Advent” is absurd. But it’s worthy of note that many of the churches which resisted Advent also resisted state sanctioned and enforced religion, and in a country where the government expands while trying to become everyone’s god, that’s a war that’s worth fighting.
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Will The Chinese Repay the Favour on Height Restrictions?
Washington, like old Beijing, has height restrictions on its buildings:
An increase in the supply of leasable square footage in the district would solve the problem. But D.C. real-estate developers are constrained by a 113-year-old federal law, the Height of Buildings Act of 1910, under which no city building can be taller than the width of the street it faces plus an additional 20 feet. The maximum building height on a commercial thoroughfare—with a few minor exceptions—is 130 feet. The maximum height in a residential neighborhood is 90 feet. The district also has its own municipal height limits; and in many neighborhoods, the local limit is actually lower than the federal one.
Although the original motivation of height restrictions in the District was a reaction to an ugly hotel overlooking a neighbourhood, the idea of commercial buildings overlooking–let along blocking the view of–the White House and the Capitol has helped to keep these in place. In some places builders have placed very stout foundations to their buildings, hoping that someday their dream of a higher skyline in Washington would come to pass. But their dreams are, as of now, unrealised.
Although the article mentions Paris, there’s a far more important capital that had one for many years: Beijing. At the centre of Old Beijing was the Forbidden City, the residence and seat of power of the Emperor. There the Son of Heaven could forbid any tall buildings to overlook his palace. That changed with the failure of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900-1, where a multinational force entered Beijing and forced the Chinese to accept their concessions and privileges. Part of that was breaking the height restriction around the Forbidden City. The French were the first to take advantage of that, building the Beijing Hotel just down the street from the Gate of Heavenly Peace (the Tienanmen).
The Forbidden City, taken from the “new” (Soviet) part of the Beijing Hotel, 1981. Now we have Washington, ruled by the Son of (well, you fill in the blank) and his mandarins on the opposite end of Pennsylvania Avenue. They’re dickering about easing the height restrictions, but compared to most American cities (to say nothing about the rest of the world) there isn’t much easing going on.
But perhaps the time has come for the Chinese to repay the favour we did them more than a century ago by breaking our height restrictions. There are two ways this could be done.
The first is the way the West did it in China: have the People’s Liberation Army roll into Washington, extract humiliating terms, and then build a big skyscraper with a nice view of the White House lawn. There are a few in the PLA that would like to see that happen.
But there’s an easier, less expensive way: let the Chinese take all the “hard currency” they’ve earned over here, buy enough land and politicians up, and then build the big skyscraper with a nice view of the White House lawn.
If we keep fooling around the way we do with this and the many other problems we have as a nation, Option 2 won’t be that hard to pull off. And then we’ll all need a fistful of yuan to get along.
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My Problem With Catholic Social Teaching
Pope Francis’ time as Pontiff has been one of misunderstanding, i.e., he says something and everyone takes his words out of context. His latest apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium is no exception to that. This time, however, instead of the usual left-wing leaping to conclusions, the opposite side has gotten into the act based on some of his remarks re capitalism. We thought he was a conservative, they say, but then find stuff like a denouncement of “unfettered” capitalism. (Finding such capitalism except at the highest levels of the world is hard to do, really, but…)
Conservatives are surprised that an institution like the Catholic Church, which dodged the bullet of radical liberalism that struck Main Line Protestantism, would come up with something like this. Part of the problem is that “conservatism” is an equivocal term, meaning different things to different people. What Francis is saying is of a piece with Catholic social teaching since the nineteenth century. The story behind it–and indeed the story behind Catholic social and economic teaching–needs to be understood in view of the way the Catholic Church developed and has interacted with the world around it.
Roman Catholicism, as the name implies, is…well, Roman. The Roman Empire was a brutal, patronage-driven system where power and money were closely intertwined and which did not have a very efficient banking system. The Church, when it finally got the upper hand in the fourth century, moved to transform this from patronage to charity, but its efforts were not uniformly successful. The thing that broke the patronage system more than anything else was the collapse of the Western Empire, at which point we have the Middle Ages.
In the midst of all of this the Church, mindful of Our Lord’s admonitions about God and Mammon, faced an internal reaction against respectability-induced laxity–monasticism. Now here was a deal–a group of people could renounce the world (including wealth) in a big way and live for God in community. Unfortunately one of the hard lessons that early monastic efforts (and that includes those of Jerome, who translated the Vulgate) is that a religious community without a workable economic game plan wouldn’t last, and every religious community formed from Benedict’s onward has had one.
With starvation in the rear view mirror, the success of these communities–and the Catholic concept of the religious life as the greatest way one could and should be a Christian–allowed the Church to indulge one of its pet prejudices–that business, and the people who conducted it, were basically dirty. The result of that is that business in Catholic countries is basically dirty. That wasn’t too bad of a deal in the Middle Ages, where neither technology nor the political/financial systems made wealth centralization possible to the extent that it was later. (The biggest centralizer of wealth in that time was the Church itself, but it’s always easier to find fault with others than to fix your own).
When secular governments and institutions actually could challenge the hegemony of the Church, several things happened. In some countries the Church split off or was nationalized, i.e., the Reformation. Getting property out of the hands of the Church was a boon to budding capitalist roaders and rulers. In countries that remained Catholic the Church kind of went along with things, which worked until revolutions hit secular and ecclesiastical ruler alike. And these revolutions were almost uniformly anti-Christian in their nature, which only encouraged the church to dig in with whatever “reactionary” rulers they could find.
As the nineteenth century wore on, the effects of really unfettered capitalism further corroded the Church’s hold on society, both at the top and at the bottom. Almost as serious was the emergence of a middle class, a group of people whom Roman Catholicism wasn’t really ready to deal with. At this point the Church began to proclaim the need for their Christian message to impact the way business was actually done and people actually made their living instead of simply calling people to withdraw. This included support for the various social welfare systems being trotted out at the time and syndicalism (the fancy Continental term for trade unionism).
But the Church had its blind spots. One of them was a lack of differentiation between large and small business people. Capitalism’s greatest weakness is its tendency to centralise through the elimination of competitors and the development of monopolies. You can fix this problem by breaking up the monopolies from time to time (a simple fact that has eluded our banking regulators, who can’t get rid of “too big to fail” to save their lives). But the Church doesn’t seem to think any more of small businesses than large ones–they’re all tarred with the same brush, it seems.
Another development the Church didn’t come to grips with was the United States. The idea here is that a business could be easily started and develop in a system of consistently and fairly applied laws (fairly meaning that everyone was equal before the law). The last point is a way of decoupling the acquisition of money and political power, perhaps not completely enough but sufficiently to give opportunity for economic success to a wider group of people. Although such a regime is not unique to this country, it’s one which was developed on the largest scale here, at least up to now.
Getting back to the old country, Catholic social and political action was always a step behind the secular, socialist and communist kind, especially after Marxism-Leninism reared its ugly head. The twentieth century saw all types of Christianity fight for their lives against a system which sought the church’s annihilation, and under those circumstances social teaching got put on the back burner. But with that gone (sort of) we’re back to attacking the “evils of capitalism”.
With that as prologue there are several things worth noting about the Church’s social teaching.
The Catholic Church doesn’t have a practical game plan for a successful economy. Its concept of dirty business and a concept of the laity which leaves much to be desired isn’t much of an incentive to inspire Catholics to do business at all, let alone in a Christian way. Catholic lay people have been successful in business largely in spite of the Church and not because of it.
Collectivistic solutions are not the answer for problems created by an individualist system. That’s the basic weakness of Liberation Theology and, for that matter, Marxism. Collectivistic solutions of this kind inevitably concentrate power–and money–in the hands of the “vanguard” that leads it, which defeats the purpose of the movement. I hate to see the Church, having forgotten what it suffered (and still does in places like Cuba) under communism, play footsies with these people, but that’s what’s going on.
A centralised institution will always see a centralised solution. One of the better products of the Catholic intellectual tradition is distributism. Its chief proponents are people like Hillaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton and of course the incomparable J.R.R. Tolkien. The key concept here is subsidiarity, i.e., pushing the decision making processes down the system as far as practical. That’s why distributists are enamored with cooperatives and the like.
Catholics will trumpet their support of this system. But an Ultramontane system like Roman Catholicism during the last two centuries is ill-suited to communicate subsidiarity in its own life. In the Middle Ages, with the poor communications and the extensive rights of secular rulers over the church, this idea had credibility, but not now. (It’s interesting to note that Tolkien took some of his inspiration for the Shire, a distributist model if there ever was one, from unCatholic American Appalachia, but that’s another unlearned lesson).
Catholicism and its critics need to differentiate between small and large/monopolistic enterprises. As noted earlier, capitalism’s greatest fault is the tendency to centralize and monopolize. We need to fix the system by breaking up monopolies, not grinding down small businesses in the name of social justice. And we need to realize that capitalism, like any human system, has flaws; these flaws need to be addressed objectively and not always in the context of an ideal.
For me personally, Catholic social teaching is a big deal, because it was the immediate reason why I left the Church for the last time. As I noted in an earlier piece:
Back in the early 1980′s, I was involved in a Catholic Charismatic prayer group. We were under a great deal of pressure, some of which was of our own making and some of which came from a Church which didn’t really care much for what we were doing. It was also the days of “if you want peace, work for justice,” the nuclear freeze, and other left-wing emphases which tended to deflect hierarchy and faithful alike from their relationship with God.
A major turning point for me took place on day when, while discussing things with one of our prayer group leaders, she mentioned that, because of the high tuition, she could not afford to send her eight children to Catholic school. So they went to public school.
That revelation was the beginning of the end of me as a Roman Catholic. I concluded that any church that was too bourgeois and self-satisfied not to subsidise its own needful children to attend the schools it wanted them to attend was too bourgeois to be an advocate for social justice. So I took my leave on a course that’s best encapsulated in The Preferential Option of the Poor.
Charity–and real social justice–begins at home, especially when “home” is the single largest religious institution on the planet. I’m cautiously optimistic that Pope Francis will move the Church in that direction, which would be a salutary thing for all of us.
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The Daniel Fast: It's a Diet After All
An interesting analysis of one of Evangelical Christianity’s more popular trends:
Motivated by both faith and fitness, today many protestant Christians around the country are, like Daniel, occasionally limiting themselves to fruits and vegetables for 21-day increments. Several such believers told The Atlantic that while their intention for the initial fast was simply to enter a period of Lent-like self-denial in deference to their Lord, they have since found that the fast broke a life-long pattern of unhealthy eating and seems to have set them on a course toward better nutrition even after the 21 days ended. Now, a longer-term version of the Daniel fast is being promoted by the California-based Saddleback Church, the seventh-largest church in the U.S.
This is a big deal. My own church does this at the beginning of the Gregorian calendar year (I make this distinction because, if they really want to go all out, they’d synch it with the Jewish calendar). The one thing that has always bothered me about this is that it is characterised as a fast. I don’t think that is deserves that characterisation and I don’t think the Scriptures warrant that characterisation either.
It’s good to go back to the incident where Daniel and his companions “invented” the discipline:
And the king appointed them a daily provision of the king’s meat, and of the wine which he drank: so nourishing them three years, that at the end thereof they might stand before the king. Now among these were of the children of Judah, Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah: Unto whom the prince of the eunuchs gave names: for he gave unto Daniel the name of Belteshazzar; and to Hananiah, of Shadrach; and to Mishael, of Meshach; and to Azariah, of Abednego. But Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the portion of the king’s meat, nor with the wine which he drank: therefore he requested of the prince of the eunuchs that he might not defile himself. Now God had brought Daniel into favour and tender love with the prince of the eunuchs. And the prince of the eunuchs said unto Daniel, I fear my lord the king, who hath appointed your meat and your drink: for why should he see your faces worse liking than the children which are of your sort? then shall ye make me endanger my head to the king. Then said Daniel to Melzar, whom the prince of the eunuchs had set over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, Prove thy servants, I beseech thee, ten days; and let them give us pulse to eat, and water to drink. Then let our countenances be looked upon before thee, and the countenance of the children that eat of the portion of the king’s meat: and as thou seest, deal with thy servants. So he consented to them in this matter, and proved them ten days. And at the end of ten days their countenances appeared fairer and fatter in flesh than all the children which did eat the portion of the king’s meat. Thus Melzar took away the portion of their meat, and the wine that they should drink; and gave them pulse. (Daniel 1:5-16 KJV)
One of the big problems that Daniel and his friends would have had with the king’s food was that it was not prepared in accordance with Jewish dietary laws. (Kinda like that boneless ham that WalMart tried to sell in California for Hanukkah…) That includes both the prohibition of pork and other meats and the requirement that any meat be absent of blood. Doubtless the Babylonians did not follow this. The simplest way to get this done was to eschew meats altogether, and that’s the way that Daniel called the eunuch’s bluff on this. It worked.
It’s noteworthy, however, that the Scriptures are not concise on what Daniel’s diet really was, other than vegetarian. Did it really, like the Mormons, prohibit caffeine? (Hardly: the ship taking those first worthies in the Book of Mormon had already sailed for America…) The connection between what Daniel and his friends ate and what we’re told is “from the throne room” in the Daniel Fast isn’t precise. And, most importantly of all, the “Daniel Fast” cannot be characterised as a fast any more than observing the dietary requirements of the Law. (Whether it was God’s intention that we be vegetarians from the start is one I address here, and it’s a popular piece, too.)
The core problem that the Daniel Diet addresses is simple: Evangelicals, on the whole, eat too much and much of what we eat isn’t good for us. That’s especially true since the centre of Evangelical Christianity has shifted to the South, and that gets us into the alcohol business. We’ve tried to make a deal with God on this: we’ll dry out (and get away from some our other destructive practices) if you’ll overlook gluttony as a sin. Unfortunately it’s getting to the point where our swelling waistlines are making it hard for God to overlook much of anything.
The health benefits of a regimen such as the Daniel Diet are undeniable. And, if can clear our bodies and minds out, we can spend more time looking upward than downward. But it’s not a fast.
Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Positive Infinity 