Statutory Construction for PCA Commissioners

For members of the Presbyterian Church in America, June 24, 2025, marks the start of this year's General Assembly, the high point of the PCA's ecclesiastical calendar. The GA will consider 49 overtures (proposals/motions). You can read a summary of all of the overtures here. I'm writing this post in connection with four of them: 3, 4, 47, and 48.

The theme of Christian Nationalism animates each of these overtures. The first three ask essentially for the GA to appoint a study committee with a broad remit to evaluate, analyze, and report back to the 2026 General Assembly on topics of Christian Nationalism, "Moscow [Idaho] Theology", Reconstructionism, and similar viewpoints. Such a report would, specifically, address whether any or all of these viewpoints are inconsistent with the confessional standards of the PCA.

Overture 48 asks only for the appointment of a committee to draft a pastoral letter "applying the doctrine of the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church in America to questions of Christian citizenship and church-state relations."

What's the kerfuffle? For those who haven't been living under a rock for the past decade, some form or other of Christian Nationalism has been a rallying cry for a small but very public segment of the American Chrisitan Right. Even more vocal than its advocates are folks in the legacy media who find a Christian Nationalist under every non-Progressive policy they don't like. For them, CN ≈ MAGA 🡢 Trump.

There are, of course, folks who provide a defined version of CN and a cogent argument for it. While I have posted on the topic of nationalism (here, here, and here), I have largely foregone CN because, frankly, I believe it will be of only modest long-term significance in America.

In any event, in this post my concern is very narrow. In 1788 the Synod of the American Presbyterian Churches revised the original 1646 version of the Westminster Confession of Faith in several respects. The principal field of revision was Chapter 23 of the WCF, "Of the Civil Magistrate." In particular, subchapter 3. Both versions are precise but written with long sentences featuring colons, semicolons, and commas. I'm using this July 2024 piece by Rev. Kevin DeYoung for a representation of the differences:

Historic Text (1646) Chapter XXIII Of the Civil Magistrate The civil magistrate may not assume to himself the administration of the Word and sacraments, or the power of the keys of the kingdom of heaven: yet he hath authority, and it is his duty, to [i] take order, that unity and peace be preserved in the Church, [ii] that the truth of God be kept pure and entire; [iii] that all blasphemies and heresies be suppressed; [iv] all corruptions and abuses in worship and discipline prevented or reformed; and [v] all the ordinances of God duly settled, administered, and observed. For the better effecting whereof, he hath power to call synods, to be present at them, and to provide that whatsoever is transacted in them be according to the mind of God.

American Revision (1788) Chapter 23 Of the Civil Magistrate Civil magistrates may not assume to themselves the administration of the Word and sacraments; or the power of the keys of the kingdom of heaven; or, in the least, interfere in matters of faith. Yet, as nursing fathers, it is the duty of civil magistrates to [i] protect the church of our common Lord, without giving the preference to any denomination of Christians above the rest, in such a manner that all ecclesiastical persons whatever shall enjoy the full, free, and unquestioned liberty of discharging every part of their sacred functions, without violence or danger. And, as Jesus Christ hath appointed a regular government and discipline in his church, no law of any commonwealth should interfere with, let, or hinder, the due exercise thereof, among the voluntary members of any denomination of Christians, according to their own profession and belief. It is the duty of civil magistrates [ii] to protect the person and good name of all their people, in such an effectual manner as that no person be suffered, either upon pretense of religion or of infidelity, to offer any indignity, violence, abuse, or injury to any other person whatsoever: and to take order, that all religious and ecclesiastical assemblies be held without molestation or disturbance.

At the outset, the original version of the WCF and the American revision concur word for word on the disabilities of the civil magistrate. The American revision expands on this disability mid-way through when it adds that "no law of any commonwealth should interfere with, let, or hinder, the due exercise thereof, among the voluntary members of any denomination of Christians."

By contrast, the 1646 text prescribed five affirmative duties for the civil magistrate: (1) to preserve unity in the Church, (2) to ensure that the truth of God is preserved "pure and entire," (3) to suppress all blasphemies and heresies, (4) to reform all corruptions and abuses in worship, (5) to require that all other clear ordinances of God be observed. Two other powers--not duties--of the civil magistrate included (1) calling synods and (2) ensuring that the decisions reached by such a synod were "according to the mind of God." In short, five duties, two powers.

The five specific duties disappeared with the 1788 American revisions. They were replaced with a duty to "protect the church of our common Lord" yet "without giving the preference to any denomination of Christians above the rest." In other words, disestablishment. And a downstream duty to protect all people and institutions in the exercise of their religious duties.

More specifically, and wearing my lawyer's hat, the deletion of a series of "musts" from among the duties of the civil magistrate means not only does the magistrate no longer have the affirmative duties prescribed in1646 but no longer has even the discretionary power to do so. The adverbial phrase, "as nursing fathers" is not an independent source of power but simply describes the affective manner in which the magistrate should provide the protections noted above.

This conclusion follows from (1) the lack of reference to (discretionary) powers in the 1788 revised WCF and (2) a rule of construction (i.e., the rule by which English, Colonial, and early American Republic courts would determine the legal meaning of a legal instrument (like a statute, contract, will, etc.) to the effect that the meaning of a subsequent legal instrument is determined in light of the changes from the prior instrument. (This rule of construction would have been common knowledge in both 1646 and 1788.)

In short, omissions (silences) speak; in other words, there is no gap to be filled by implication. In yet other words, the five specific duties of the magistrate in 1646 are affirmatively prohibited by their omission in 1788.

None of this, however, should be understood as prescribing a naked public square. For the men gathered in 1788, the truths of the Christian religion remained public truths. The disestablishment of churches did not entail the eradication of the public truths of Christianity from either public discourse or as a ground for legislation as well as public policy. The changes of 1788 did, however, make it impossible for a teaching or ruling elder to teach to the contrary. Whether such an office bearer may hold privately to the doctrines of 1646 is beyond the scope of this post.

A Modestly Revised Homily

This afternoon, I read the homily of the newly-elected Pope Leo XIV to the College of Cardinals. As a Reforming Catholic, I appreciated much of the new Pope said. While I could have made more changes, below is my effort to retain his words with as few emandations as my conscience permits.

________________________________________________________________________

I want to repeat the words from the Responsorial Psalm: “I will sing a new song to the Lord, because He has done marvels,” and indeed, not just with me but with all of us.

My brothers Cardinals, as we celebrate this morning, I invite you to reflect on the marvels the Lord has done, the blessings that the Lord continues to pour out on all of us through the Ministry of Peter the Holy Spirit

You have called me to carry that cross, and to carry out that mission, and I know I can rely on each and every one of you to walk with me, as we continue as a Church, as a community of friends of Jesus, as believers, to announce the Good News, to announce the Gospel: ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God" (Mt 16:16)

In these words, Peter, asked by the Master, together with the other disciples, about his faith in him, expressed the patrimony that the Church, through which the apostolic succession witness, has been preserved, deepened and handed on for two thousand years:

Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God: the one Saviour, who alone reveals the face of the Father.

In him, God, in order to make himself close and accessible to men and women, revealed himself to us in the trusting eyes of a child, in the lively mind of a young person and in the mature features of a man (cf. Gaudium et Spes, 22), finally appearing to his disciples after the resurrection with his glorious body. He thus showed us a model of human holiness that we can all imitate, together with the promise of an eternal destiny that transcends all our limits and abilities.

Peter, in his response, understands both of these things: the gift of God and the path to follow in order to allow himself to be changed by that gift. They are two inseparable aspects of salvation entrusted to the Church to be proclaimed for the good of the human race. Indeed, they are entrusted to us, who were chosen by him before we were formed in our mothers' wombs (cf. Jer 1:5), reborn in the waters of Baptism regenerating work of God and, surpassing our limitations and with no merit of our own, brought here and sent forth from here, so that the Gospel might be proclaimed to every creature (cf. Mk 16:15).

In a particular way, God has called me by your election to succeed the Prince of the Apostles, and has entrusted this treasure to me so that, with his help, I may be its faithful administrator (cf. 1 Cor 4:2) for the sake of the entire mystical Body of the Church. He has done so in order that she may be ever more fully a city set on a hill (cf. Rev 21:10), an ark of salvation sailing through the waters of history, and a beacon that illumines the dark nights of this world. And this, not so much through the magnificence of her structures or the grandeur of her buildings – like the monuments among which we find ourselves – but rather through the holiness of her members. For we are the people whom God has chosen as his own, so that we may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called us out of darkness into his marvellous light (cf. 1 Pet 2:9).

Peter, however, makes his profession of faith in reply to a specific question: "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" (Mt 16:13). The question is not insignificant. It concerns an essential aspect of our ministry, namely, the world in which we live, with its limitations and its potential, its questions and its convictions.

"Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" If we reflect on the scene we are considering, we might find two possible answers, which characterize two different attitudes.

First, there is the world's response. Matthew tells us that this conversation between Jesus and his disciples takes place in the beautiful town of Caesarea Philippi, filled with luxurious palaces, set in a magnificent natural landscape at the foot of Mount Hermon, but also a place of cruel power plays and the scene of betrayals and infidelity. This setting speaks to us of a world that considers Jesus a completely insignificant person, at best someone with an unusual and striking way of speaking and acting. And so, once his presence becomes irksome because of his demands for honesty and his stern moral requirements, this "world" will not hesitate to reject and eliminate him.

Then there is the other possible response to Jesus' question: that of ordinary people. For them, the Nazarene is not a charlatan, but an upright man, one who has courage, who speaks well and says the right things, like other great prophets in the history of Israel. That is why they follow him, at least for as long as they can do so without too much risk or inconvenience. Yet to them he is only a man, and therefore, in times of danger, during his passion, they too abandon him and depart disappointed.

What is striking about these two attitudes is their relevance today. They embody notions that we could easily find on the lips of many men and women in our own time, even if, while essentially identical, they are expressed in different language.

Even today, there are many settings in which the Christian faith is considered absurd, meant for the weak and unintelligent. Settings where other securities are preferred, like technology, money, success, power, or pleasure.

These are contexts where it is not easy to preach the Gospel and bear witness to its truth, where believers are mocked, opposed, despised or at best tolerated and pitied. Yet, precisely for this reason, they are the places where our missionary outreach is desperately needed. A lack of faith is often tragically accompanied by the loss of meaning in life, the neglect of mercy, appalling violations of human dignity, the crisis of the family and so many other wounds that afflict our society.

Today, too, there are many settings in which Jesus, although appreciated as a man, is reduced to a kind of charismatic leader or superman. This is true not only among non-believers but also among many baptized Christians, who thus end up living, at this level, in a state of practical atheism.

This is the world that has been entrusted to us, a world in which, as Pope Francis taught us so many times, we are called to bear witness to our joyful faith in Jesus the Saviour. Therefore, it is essential that we too repeat, with Peter: "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God" (Mt 16:16).

It is essential to do this, first of all, in our personal relationship with the Lord, in our commitment to a daily journey of conversion. Then, to do so as a Church, experiencing together our fidelity to the Lord and bringing the Good News to all (cf. Lumen Gentium, 1).

I say this first of all to myself, as the Successor of Peter, as I begin my mission as Bishop of Rome and, according to the well-known expression of Saint Ignatius of Antioch, am called to preside lead in charity over the universal Church (cf. Letter to the Romans, Prologue). Saint Ignatius, who was led in chains to this city, the place of his impending sacrifice, wrote to the Christians there: "Then I will truly be a disciple of Jesus Christ, when the world no longer sees my body" (Letter to the Romans, IV, 1). Ignatius was speaking about being devoured by wild beasts in the arena – and so it happened – but his words apply more generally to an indispensable commitment for all those in the Church who exercise a ministry of authority. It is to move aside so that Christ may remain, to make oneself small so that he may be known and glorified (cf. Jn 3:30), to spend oneself to the utmost so that all may have the opportunity to know and love him.

May God grant me this grace, today and always, through the loving intercession of Jesus Christ, the Power of the Holy Spirit, Mary, Mother of and encouraged by the witness of all the Saints of the Church in heaven and on earth.

 

"Funerals Mandatory"

You can go here to read Aaron Renn's most recent Substack, "Funerals Mandatory." In it Renn writes about his thoughts following the recent funeral of a college friend who had died of cancer.

Until about age 35, people cannot emotionally connect with the idea that they will continue changing into the future. They know they have changed - oh, how we know we’ve grown and changed - but don’t really understand in more than a nominal intellectual sense the story arc of life. 

Today, I understand that I’m going to start having new thinking and new experiences as I pass through different stages of life. This seeing people at funerals thing wasn’t one that I had anticipated in advance, but it doesn’t surprise me. I know expect that I’ll be running into these new experiences and shifts regularly.

As someone nearly 30 years older than Renn, I am surprised at how few funerals I have attended of friends and my generation of family. That will change as (if) I continue to age, of course. As Renn comments to his readers:

I’ve always been one of the most peripherally attached members of all of my friend groups. But I’ve made a commitment to try my best to attend any funerals for people I’ve been connected to over the years. In a book he wrote long ago, Rudy Giuliani had a chapter called “Weddings Optional, Funerals Mandatory.” I’ve come to appreciate that in ways I didn’t when I was younger.

For my thoughts about funerals and burial practices, you can go here, here, and here.

2025 Faculty Openings at Campbell Law

American law school hiring cycles begins earlier each year. For those interested in beginning a faculty position or moving to Raleigh as a lateral transfer, check out the link for applying for one of three open positions here.

A short description of the openings:

Campbell University School of Law seeks outstanding applicants for up to three, entry-level or lateral, full-time, tenured or tenure-track, faculty positions.  We welcome candidates in all subject areas, with a particular interest in filling curricular needs in (1) Civil Procedure, (2) Contracts and Sales and (3) Torts.  The positions are nine-month academic appointments that will begin in August 2025, at the rank of Assistant, Associate, or full Professor. Salary and rank will be commensurate with experience.

Note: as a former member of the Campbell FRC, I recommend that you follow precisely the instruction for applying.  

My Conversation With Anton Sorkin

For anyone who'd like to listen to me, you can go here for my conversation with Anton Sorkin. Anton is Director of Student Ministries with the Christian Legal Society. We talked about my upcoming article, Person Centered Pluralism About Contract Law, that is set to be published in vol. 39 of the Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy.

"Religion and Republic"

In Religion and Republic: Christian America from the Founding to the Civil War (Davenant Press 2024), Miles Smith, associate professor of history at Hillsdale College, presents a masterful but readable recalibration of the interminable debates surrounding Christian Nationalism. Rather than arguing from the perspective of myopic secularism, ahistorical biblicism, or even Magisterial Protestantism, Smith draws on American history to explain how leading persons, institutions, and doctrines of disestablished Protestant Christianity were woven into the fabric of American political and social life during its first 80 years.

Kevin DeYoung summarizes Smith's thesis in the Foreword:

Throughout our history as a country America was neither a repristination of Calvinist Geneva or Constantine's Rome nor a secular novus ordo seclorum. ... From 1789 onward, there existed a sometimes contentious but often complementary set of convictions that (1) America would never have a federally established Christian Church and that (2) America was and always had been an obviously Christian country. (v)

In short, for at least its first 80 years, the United States enjoyed a disestablished "established" religion. And that religion was a wide but theologically deep Protestantism. "Especially in the nineteenth century, America could be fairly described as a nation held together--in law, in culture, and in shared assumptions--by a broadly Christian order that privileged Protestant Christianity while also tolerating religious minorities." (v)

Smith substantiates his thesis through fulsome chapters on legislation (primarily but not exclusively at the state level), common law courts, protection of the Sabbath, "the world" (i.e., federal foreign policy), Indians, and education. I was aware of some aspects of what Smith covered but much of it was entirely new to me. Smith also devotes a chapter to Thomas Jefferson, the ideological and political bête noire of the disestablished Protestant establishment. In brief, Jefferson's anti-Christian program of anti-clericalism proved a failure: 

Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, intellectual, religious, and judicial elites remained committed to older Protestant understandings of church and state whereby two separate institutions worked hand in hand to maintain the civil and social orders. ... From the election of Jefferson onward, historical Protestant legal frameworks in state laws, judges, colleges and universities, and the burgeoning American literati all upheld Protestantism's fundamental place in American culture, politics, and society, whether Jefferson liked it or not. (55)

But all was not straightforward during Protestantism's hegemony. Smith's discussion of controversies about the Sabbath demonstrates that there could be sharp disagreement within disestablished Protestantism. Conservative Presbyterians took the first step in 1808 by barring a local postsmaster from communion for opening mail on Sunday. Virtually all Protestants believed that commercial activity should be suspended on the Lord's Day but for most, the work of government--including mail delivery--could take place as a "work of necessity." Some Presbyterians, however, following the letter of their Westminster Standards, agitated in favor of taking political action to prohibit mail delivery on Sundays. They failed. For many other conservative Protestants,

The definition of the Lord's Day used by the prohibitionists ... was in many ways a sectarian [Presbyterian] one, and [thus] the Sunday mail campaign was in many ways a misguided attempt to force the United States not into a rejection of secularism but into an explicit adoption of a Calvinist doctrinal expression ... (140-141)

I'll leave it to followers of this blog to read Smith book for themselves. They should. (And they can order it here.)

Nonetheless, two quibbles. First, there's no index. I had assumed in this digital age that including an index to a book of this sort was easy and thus standard. And second, Smith overlooked a significant effect of Protestant political efforts in the Bankruptcy Act of 1841. The power to seek a voluntary discharge of one's debts, and that only every seven years, owes its legislative success to Northern Whig Protestants. See my article The Missing Piece of the Puzzle: Perspectives on The Wage Priority in Bankruptcy (here or here) for more on this.

"American Made"

I first heard of Farah Stockman's "American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears" (Random House 2021) when she was interviewed by Aaron Renn on his podcast here. I ordered a copy of the book the next day. It's taken me over a month to finish it, not because it was a hard read--it's very engaging and well-written--but because, well, it's summer and lots of stuff has been happening.

Following the 2016 election and for several years after, Stockman, a reporter (and now member of the editorial board) for the New York Times spent extended stretches of time in Indianapolis following the lives of several of the employees of Rexnord, a leading manufacturer of steel bearings. Three weeks before the election, Rexnord announced that it was moving its manufacturing equipment to Mexico. Not only would hundreds of workers ultimately lose their jobs, but they would also be required to train the Mexican workers who would replace them.

At the outset, Stockman observed that

Work matters. Too often, those who champion the working class speak only of social safety nets, not the jobs that anchor a working person's identity. ... Jobs matter. For better or for worse, work provides an essential context of our lives; it contributes to our perceptions of ourselves and our expectations for our children. ... It formulates who we are, who we meet, who we marry, and who cries at our graves after we die. (9-10)

Despite her elite familial and educational pedigrees, and notwithstanding working at the pinnacle of America's print media, Stockman does an eminently fair job of describing the individual lives and enormous personal struggles of several soon-to-be-displaced Rexnord employees. Just how elite?

Despite their differences, [Rexnord employees] Shannon, Wally, and John had a lot in common that they didn't have in common with me: They were grandparents in their forties. (I gave birth to my daughter at forty-two.) They smoked or chewed some form of tobacco. (No one in my social circle did.) John and Wally were both proud gun owners, like the men in Shannon's life. (I didn't know a single person in Cambridge who owned a gun that shot anything but glue.) ... They had friends or family members who had served in the military. (No one I spoke to on a daily basis had ever put on the uniform.) Perhaps most crucial of all .. none had graduated from a four-year college. (Nearly everyone in my immediate circle of family and friends had not only a bachelor's degree but a master's degree, PhD, JD or MD.) (162-163)

Just how fair? Her straightforward account of Wally's coming to faith in Christ while watching a preacher on television and her excoriation of NAFTA are two examples. Nor does Stockman sugar-coat the series of poor life decisions notably made by Shannon and Wally. While life constrained the opportunities of many of her subjects, Stockman does not infantilize them; they exercised agency.

Exceptionally fair-minded, that is, until the final chapter set in the context of the trifecta of COVID, the death of George Floyd, and the 2020 election. It's not that her opinions of many aspects of Trump's presidency are wrong, it's that Stockman was caught up in the hype surrounding COVID (recall that the book was published in October 2021, which means that she had finished her manuscript early that year when the negative effects of many COVID policies were not yet widely appreciated) and loses some of her grip. 

In any event, I highly recommend American Made. It is an excellent and intimate account of the lives of those for whom the deindustrialization of America is not some exotic tale. Stockman situates the appeal of Donald Trump to many of American's "deplorables," an appeal that continues to reverberate in 2024.

"A Prayer for Owen Meany" by John Irving

The warm thanks to Frederick Buechner in the Acknowledgments of John Irving's 1989 novel A Prayer for Owen Meany first caught my eye. Then, not far into the book, I noticed Irving's carefully expressed theological and liturgically accurate descriptions of Episcopal (and Anglican) worship and piety in the childhood and adult life of the novel's narrator, John Wheelwright. Over the course of the novel, Irving unironically treats themes of divine providence, a seer’s prophetic dream, and active participation in the sacrificial death of Christ. Irving also deploys Dickens's Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come explicitly but with just enough ambiguity to keep A Prayer for Owen Meany from becoming allegory. All the while telling an engaging story of two friends becoming adults as the seeds of the war in Vietnam ultimately bloom.

Of course, symbol, foreshadowing, plausible character development, and religiously serious characters (much less theologizing) simply may  not  be  done in modern literary fiction. Tediously detailed descriptions of settings are in; coherent accounts of profound internal lives are out.

All of which were mere personal observations until I read "Yesterday's Men: the death of the mythical method" by Alan Jacobs in the July 2024 issue of Harper's Magazine. Literary critic Northrop Frye is Jacobs's archetypal example of a "yesterday's man" but others include George Frazier (The Golden Bough), T.S. Elliot (The Wasteland), Mircea Eliade (The Myth of the Eternal Return), and Joseph Campbell (The Hero With a Thousand Faces). In brief, these writers were shaped "by a fascination with the distinctive forms taken by various societies, as well as a syncretic interest of myths." The myth of a sacramental rather than a mechanical universe was the myth that provided coherence in a chaotic world.

But by the 1980’s, mere discursivity came to replace coherence. No longer should critics (and hence the primary objects of criticism, novelists) “conceive of [of their task to identify] myth, archetype, and symbol [ultimately forming] a cathedral-like structure.” Texts now came to be seen only as means to generate other texts. Providing a coherent account for meaning had been, it turns out, a disguised power play.

During World War II and while the credibility of Aryan exceptionality remained in play, the US government had commissioned a "myth" aimed at fostering belief in human equality among American soldiers. The Races of Mankind even made passing reference to humanity’s common ancestry in Adam and Eve as the ground for human unity and equality. But not until the 1950's did Northop Frye turn the mythopoeic vision of humanity's repeated accounts for its own sensed meaning into an exceptionally recondite but endlessly fecund framework for literary criticism. Quoting Jacobs,

Frye provided a theoretical scaffolding for these scattered insights into the great Romantic and post-Romantic artists. He would make literary criticism a “science”... built on a quasi-Jungian study of myth as intrinsic to the deep structures of human consciousness, where archetypes dwell.

Nonsense, wrote Terry Eagleton in 1983. Quoting Jacobs quoting Eagleton, “Frye’s work ‘is marked by a deep fear of the actual world, a distaste for history itself,’ and is primarily an exercise in nostalgia.” For Eagleton the 1960’s—the central decade of A Prayer for Owen Meany—had removed the cataracts from our eyes so that deployment of myth “came to be seen as an evasion of political realities.” Whatever one might say of A Prayer for Owen Meany, it does not evade political realities. Instead, it frames political (and personal) realities in a larger—dare I say—archetypal reality.

John Irving certainly knew of the critical theories that followed the passing of yesterday’s men. But such theories were ignored in A Prayer for Owen Meany. Irving’s novel is chock full of the mythopoeic.

The structure of Irving’s novel stands as a rebuke to the anti-mythologists. But Irving’s extensive deployment of Thomas Hardy in the high school English classes of narrator John Wheelwright undercuts confidence that such myths necessary be true. If Irving is channeling Hardy, then whatever their veracity, myths are simply the best ways of addressing questions of human meaning. If Buechner, then Irving intimates the fundamental veracity of the Christian myths at work in his novel. I have an opinion but will leave it to other readers of A Prayer for Owen Meany to form their own.

And other readers there should be. A Prayer for Owen Meany is a fine novel with gripping characters, serious themes, and several laugh-out-loud accounts. Take up and read.

 

Podcasting a Timeless Theme: Puritanism and Contract Law

Go to your preferred podcast provider (Apple podcasts here; Spotify here) to listen to an hour of a scintillating conversion between Timon Cline (host of the Hale Institute podcast) and me about the development of the common law of contracts in sixteenth/seventeenth England. And, oh yeah, the influence of those disciplined Puritans.

Cline's interest in my co-authored piece goes to show that even old articles (like The Puritan Revolution and the Law of Contracts; download here or here) can have a long afterlife.

I also got to talk about my review of Dairmaid MacCulloch's definitive biography of Thomas (of Wolf Hall fame) Cromwell (here). And even some hints about my upcoming piece (Person-Centered Pluralism About Contract Theory).

A great time all around.

Envying Isabelle Butker

I've waited until the kerfuffle about Harrison Butker's commencement speech has almost--but not quite--faded into the trash bin of the 24-hour news cycle to make an observation. Not about the whole address but some responses to the following remarks:

For the ladies present today, congratulations on an amazing accomplishment. You should be proud of all that you have achieved to this point in your young lives. I want to speak directly to you briefly because I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you. How many of you are sitting here now about to cross this stage and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you are going to get in your career? Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.

I can tell you that my beautiful wife, Isabelle, would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother. I’m on the stage today and able to be the man I am because I have a wife who leans into her vocation. I’m beyond blessed with the many talents God has given me, but it cannot be overstated that all of my success is made possible because a girl I met in band class back in middle school would convert to the faith, become my wife, and embrace one of the most important titles of all: homemaker.

Fairly anodyne for a commencement speech at a small Catholic college in the heartland. But apparently warranting febrile sputtering in the negative world of contemporary American secularism. From my Facebook feed:

You know who we HAVEN'T heard from? His wife. Shouldn't SHE be explaining to us how much SHE loves her trad-wife situation? Crickets? Silence says everything. [Apparently she's not an idiot.] 

Unfortunately, many white women feel protected by and comfortable in the patriarchy, so they go right along with it. Case in point: their support of Trump. [White women?]

I was wondering what her response is but honestly she's not really going to say anything against him or her privileged life. Even if she regrets not having a career. If they were thrust into poverty and she was forced into the workplace, their outlook would be different. [And you know this ... how?]

Apart from the borderline IQ typically displayed on social media, is there anything wrong about these comments? More specifically, is one of the seven capital vices on display? Oh, I don't know, perhaps envy? Drawing on the book by Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins (2009), let's consider what exactly is envy.

Envy beginis when we perceive ourselves as an individual person. Envy then proceeds to consider oneself relative to another and culminates with a negative comparison. Negative, that is, of oneself. Envy targets the goods of another person that contribute to his (or her) worth, honor, standing, or status. While the envious may also desire an external object, it is primarily because that object represents the other's high standing.

For the envious, the bottom line is how they compare to others because that is how the envious measure their self-worth--relatively. The envious feel sorrow over another's success because it surpasses their own, highlighting not only one's deficiency in a particular area but also his self-perceived lack of worth. Envy is as much about envier's felt inferiority, revealed by comparison, as it is about any specific good the envious may lack.

Envy involves a sense of inferiority and is often first expereinced through feelings of offense at another's talents, successes, or good fortune. It is expressed in ill will, by attributing false motives to the actions of others, by fostering antagonism, and in scorn for another's success.

If the envious fail to undermine a rival, bitterness deepens, and the envious come even more to resent the other's success. Unchecked, envy can escalate into full-scale hatred. The envier comes to hate the other and her goods because of perceived damage to her own self-worth.

Envy sees the world as fundamentally antagonistic. Life unfolds in a me-versus-you framework where only one can have the good of high standing. In this zero-sum game, where the envious lack what they desire, a common reaction is to try to undermine their rival's success. And, if destroying the rival is not feasible, in the age of social media the envier can at least commiserate with others who share the same object of envy. In short, as Frederick Buechner observed, the envious desire that "everyone else [be] as unsuccessful as [they] are."

Of course, envy is not limited to the online world; it is deadly and unwell in all communities. Nor is envy a vice especially associated with women. Behind the scenes passive-aggressive behavior is found on both sides of the gender dichotomy. But to conclude, while we can see the vice of envy in the quoted comments, we must be on guard against envy in our own hearts.

Fifth Monarchists. Or, One Way Not To Be a Christian Nation

Some observations by Austin Woolrych in his fine book "Commonwealth to Protectorate" (Clarendon Press 1982). While Woolrych's book focuses on the events of 1653, when the New Model Army deposed the remnants of the Long Parliament (the so-called Rump Parliament) and England's republican Commonwealth in favor of a Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell, he backs up to address the problems that had been simmering below the surface for almost a decade.

In 1653 the army, back from its victorious campaigns in Ireland and Scotland, was frustrated that little (really, almost nothing) had been effected to created the godly commonwealth for which they had been fighting. Significantly influenced by a group that believed that the execution of Charles I in 1649 would usher in Christ's millennial kingdom (the Fifth Monarchists), more than a few "believed not only that the reign of Christ on earth was imminent, but that it was their mission and duty to bring it about ..."

Of course,

There was an inherent contradiction between their goal--government by the saints for the saints--and those of believers in civil liberties (including Cromwell) who held that the promised kingdom was a spiritual one, that the spheres of nature and of grace should be distinguished, and that therefore mere natural men should not be debarred from their right in the choosing of their temporal legislators.

Already in 1649 a group of Fifth Monarchists had addressed Oliver Cromwell with a question: 

"How can the kingdom be saints ... when the ungodly are electors and elected to govern?" Parliaments must be put down as well as kings, they declared, before the one true kingdom, that of Christ, could be established.

Matters were reaching a head in 1653, but what was to be done? As it turns out, the Fifth Monarchists did not get their way. True, Cromwell forcibly dissolved the Rump Parliament but he replaced it with a new parliament dedicated to reforming England, not a revolution. Of course, the new "Barebones" Parliament ultimately failed, too, in part because of the presence of a minority committed to the Fifth Monarchist agenda of what nowadays would be called "immanentizing the eschatological."

In short, if history is any guide, any program of radically reducing the remit of the American liberal political order in favor of "the rule of the saints" is most unlikely to succeed.

"The Great Escape"

Written by Saket Soni and subtitled "A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America", The Great Escape is the first-person account of an Indian-born community organizer who, over the course of three years (2007- 2010), fought relentlessly for the freedom of 300 Indian workers brought to America by fraud and kept here as unfree laborers.

Over the past two decades, the reality of human trafficking has reached the consciousness of more Americans. Many Americans now know that young girls, both native-born and brought from elsewhere, are are trafficked as commodities and compelled to trade sexual services for the financial gain of their pimps.

But Soni's book shows a different face of human trafficking, one in which skilled laborers beg and borrow to scrape together tens of thousands of dollars to pay a "broker" to come to work in the United States (without a work visa) on the promise of green cards. Once here, the laborers in The Great Escape found themselves kept under guard in housing worse than they had experienced in India or the Middle East. After seeing "rent" deducted from their paychecks, the workers eventually came to realize that the promise of green cards was a fraud. Only modest remittances could be returned to their immediate families in India, which, in turn, left them deep in debt to their extended families or money lenders.

Soni, originally from India but having lived abroad and in the United States for many years, dedicated himself to protecting undocumented aliens from the oppression and violence they suffered as a result of their illegal status. He had worked to free many individuals from sex trafficking and oppressive (and illegal) working conditions. He had never, however, worked to rescue 300 men working for a single employer.

Soni's account of the nighttime breakout, hiding in a post-Katrina New Orleans, marching to Washington, hunger strikes, political negotiations, and raising money to feed his shrinking band is a gripping tale. The narrative of his long-standing efforts, conflicts from without (with ICE, the FBI, and the US Department of Justice) and within his group of escapees until final success is gratifying.

The story of Soni's ultimate breakthrough with John Cotton Richmond, an attorney with the Department of Justice who had worked in India for several years with International Justice Mission, is greatly encouraging. His years-later meeting with Alvin Ladner, his arch-nemesis from ICE, then suffering from dementia, adds a coda of forgiveness. 

The Great Escape is an excellent book and I encourage folks to read it for themselves. Deep gratitude to daughter Rachel for giving it to me for Christmas.