The C. S. Lewis Test

I’ve written before about the need for American evangelicals to press the pause button on their love affair with C. S. Lewis, and in particular for American evangelical writers to take a break from quoting Lewis as well as a dozen other big names like Chesterton, Tolkien, Guinness, Chambers, Schaeffer, Henry, Graham, Kuyper, Piper, Keller, Stott, Packer, and Machen. Not because they’re not worth reading, learning from, or excerpting, but because their prominence in Protestant writing is so prominent that it crowds out other voices. More to the point, focusing overmuch on these figures—lionizing them, quoting and re-quoting them, treating them like the only doctors and saints the church has to offer or learn from—fails to learn the first lesson one ought to take from their example, namely, their vast erudition and mastery of fields and authors not themselves. I call this “aping the Inklings.” And we should cut it out, myself included.

Having said that, I’ve realized over the years that, when I’m reading non-evangelicals or non-Christians, I find myself unconsciously applying to them a kind of inverted test. Call it the C. S. Lewis Test. It is what it sounds like: I want to know whether the author in question, if he or she lived and wrote in the last seventy-five years, appreciates Lewis’s work. By “appreciates” I do not mean “is a fan of,” much less “worships at the feet of.” I mean, simply, “appreciates.” Lewis is renowned for a reason. He was a wonderful stylist, a sharp thinker, and a medieval scholar. He wrote poems, allegories, novels, children’s stories, essays, reviews, academic monographs, and apologetics. The man had, and has, much to edify anyone with an open mind, on any number of subjects. He was catholic and ecumenical in his tastes, his friends, his topics. I’m thinking, for example, of his late (recorded and transcribed) conversation with Kingsley Amis on the subject of science fiction. These two writers couldn’t have been more different. But you can sense each of them feeling the other out, poking, jabbing, teasing, querying. And each man comes out unscathed, with, I take it, a measure of respect for the other.

So, as I say, when I read someone—anyone—writing since World War II, if I read much of his or her work, I wait for the choice Lewis quote, the unapologetic citation, the sly allusion. If the writer is worthy of respect, be he pagan or skeptic or anything else, it usually comes. You don’t have to love Narnia to appreciate his criticism, or to like his Space Trilogy to value his writing on education, or to share his faith to take his philosophy seriously. And it also tells me the writer in question isn’t ashamed to quote someone as popular or ostensibly middlebrow as Lewis, as if associating with a writer that evangelicals love might sully one’s reputation with readers who matter. It tells me, in other words, that the writer cares more about truth, style, or both than about superficial appearances. And that’s enough to win over this reader.

DiCaprio

Since Titanic came out in 1997, when Leonardo DiCaprio gained the clout to make whatever he wanted, with whomever he wanted, he has chosen to work with the following directors:

• Martin Scorsese (six times)

• Quentin Tarantino (twice)

• Paul Thomas Anderson

• Steven Spielberg

• Christopher Nolan

• Woody Allen

• Ridley Scott

• Alejandro González Iñárritu

• Clint Eastwood

• Sam Mendes

• Danny Boyle

• Baz Luhrmann

That’s not counting James Cameron (who directed Titanic) or Sam Raimi (The Quick and the Dead, 1995). All together that’s more than a dozen of the greatest, most influential directors of the last fifty years. Leaving aside de Palma and Coppola, who are past their active years, the only other major names that come to mind that DiCaprio hasn’t worked with are Soderbergh, Malick, the Coen brothers, Spike Lee, Fincher, del Toro, Linklater, Cuarón, and Paul Schrader. It would have been something to see him work with David Lynch before he passed. Is there anyone else?

This point was brought home to me by the Scorsese documentary on Apple TV+. I had no idea how important DiCaprio was to rescuing and preserving Scorsese’s career after the ’90s. I had assumed it was the other way around. The man has taste, and he’s willing to put his money where his mouth is. Just imagine all the paychecks he turned down to work with these guys instead. For DiCaprio, apparently, there’s no “one for them, one for me” dynamic. He only makes the movies he wants to make, and if people want to see them, so be it.

Scorsese

I was impressed with Mr. Scorsese, the new five-part documentary (or “film portrait”) about Martin Scorsese on Apple TV+, directed by Rebecca Miller. I’ve never been a true devotee of Scorsese, but I’ve always appreciated his work and usually defended him from detractors. Over the years I’ve seen most of his films and all the major ones. (I’ve not seen, e.g., Boxcar Bertha or Cape Fear. I keep trying to get Kundun on DVD via ILL, but no luck so far.) Even those who don’t prefer his work can admit his status as a great American artist with a recognizable moral, political, religious, and stylistic perspective.

That’s a boilerplate paragraph, but I say it to say this: Something in the documentary nagged at me. Miller allowed herself a moderate degree of criticism, but less of Scorsese’s art than of his life. Regarding Scorsese’s actual critics, the lesson we learn from the entire film and from Scorsese himself is that, at the end of the day, they are haters or skeptics or simply confused; they fail to grasp the significance and rationale, in particular, of the gratuitous violence and sex in his films.

There is, regrettably, not a trace of aesthetic self-criticism in Scorsese the man, no Augustinian retractationes. He never says, “I went too far,” or, “You know, they had a point about this one.” Every decision about graphic content is justified because … well, why?

Because, so far as I can tell, “that’s what the world is like” or “that’s what American society is like.” Okay. But that doesn’t tell me whether rubbing our faces in it—while appearing to glorify it in the process—is morally or aesthetically warranted. Such a comment is the beginning of a conversation, not its end.

You don’t have to be a “trash in, trash out” puritanical simpleton (that’s me, to be clear) to draw moral and aesthetic distinctions between, for example, the depictions of sex and violence in Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, on one hand, and those in Casino and Wolf of Wall Street on the other. For me, Goodfellas resides somewhere in the middle. I marvel at the achievement while unable, in my heart, to keep myself from applying Truffaut’s rule about war films to mafia films, with Goodfellas even more than The Godfather the Platonic exemplification of the rule’s almost universal truth.

I just wish that someone would put this question to Scorsese himself, and that he would take it more seriously than he does here.

Simon Leys

2025 was the year I discovered Simon Leys.

The discovery came in the Regent College bookstore in Vancouver. The book was The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays. I’m a sucker for essay collections; this one was a NYRB Classics edition; it was big and hefty and the topics were gloriously wide ranging.

Somehow I’d never heard of Leys’ name. For the fellow uninitiated, “Simon Leys” is the pen name for Pierre Ryckmans (1935–2014), a Belgian essayist, novelist, translator, and scholar of Chinese literature, art, and calligraphy. He read, spoke, and wrote in French, English, and Chinese. His 1971 book about Mao was a bombshell in the playground of the postmodern French intellectuals—it woke everyone up to the unvarnished truth of the Cultural Revolution. He lived and taught for decades in Australia as a professor. He won a raft of awards, had a novel adapted into a film, and wrote gorgeous prose about everything under the sun. He was also Roman Catholic.

Above all, Leys was a man of letters. To read him is to be inducted into another world, the world of literature, a world made of books, words, and the men and women who write them. Yes, history and politics enter in, but it’s the words that matter, the selection of which words in what order to what end. The man knew style because he possessed it himself.

Simon Leys was a man of principle who did not flinch from criticizing living dictators, “China experts,” and academics full of hot air. He was a moralist who refused to moralize and an aesthete who believed in truth. He had no compunction about calling pundits’ and intellectuals’ bluff, as in his extraordinary reviews, respectively, of Christopher Hitchens’ book about Mother Teresa and of Edward Said’s Orientalism. (The final sentence of the latter review: “It is nice to see that Said is now rediscovering such a basic notion; I only deplore that it took him 300 pages of twisted, obscure, incoherent, ill-informed and badly written diatribe to reach at last one sound and fundamental truism.”)

Reading writers like Leys is more than a breath of fresh air. It’s a gust of wind at your back. It shows you your own moral and intellectual cowardice, not to mention the absolute void that is your learning compared to such a man. But far from enervating, the epiphany empowers. It’s a call and therefore a calling: This life, the writing life, the life of the mind in the life of letters, is possible. Don’t give up, not yet.

“There is no sublunary topic,” Leys wrote, “on which Samuel Johnson did not, at some time, issue a pithy and definitive statement.” You could say the same about Simon Leys. He was that good. I’m grateful to have discovered his voice, and through his so many others.

Why I’ve not been blogging

I’ve just been too busy. That’s the reason.

There are other reasons, or reasons behind the reasons. For instance, my sabbatical from teaching lasted from May 2024 to August 2025—a full sixteen months away from the classroom. During that time, I published two books, drafted a third, and kept up a publishing schedule of two to four essays/reviews per month. On top of that I did dozens of podcasts, mostly publicity for the books, but also more regular fare for Mere Fidelity. And I began traveling more than I ever have before, giving talks and lectures at colleges, conferences, and churches.

And then I returned to the classroom, without slowing any of that down. You can imagine how that went. September and October formed an airtight bottleneck of deadlines I barely met and in some cases did not. I’m out of that now, and mostly I’m recovering.

The obvious point is that I can’t keep up a sabbatical schedule of commitments while teaching a full course load of undergraduate classes. I was foolish to try to combine them without giving something up.

More than that, I’ve simply realized that in the 40-45 hours I give to work each week, besides teaching, grading, meetings with colleagues, and meetings with students, I have time for the following (in order):

1. Email

2. Reading

3. Writing

4. Podcasts

“Blogging” is distinct, because writing means either paid work or academic work that will pay for itself later, in other currency. If I have a spare moment to write—for that matter, if I have even the germ of an idea for anything that could be written of interest to others—then I’m going to give it to an essay, a review, an article, or a book manuscript. I can micro blog because it takes mere seconds, and I never develop anything essay-like over there. Here at the mezzo blog, by contrast, it’s difficult to justify the time, even 15-20 minutes’ worth. I don’t read nearly as much as I should, which means that I’d always (without exception!) be better off reading than blogging. But in that case, as I’ve discovered in practice, the blogging will go by the wayside entirely.

What does that mean, then? For one, it means that I remain secure in my decision to stay off social media; for another, it means that I won’t be joining the Substack cinematic universe anytime soon. From the bottom of my heart I do not understand how anyone—by which I mean writers and academics—even owns an account on these platforms, much less gives them the time of day. If that were me, I would accomplish literally nothing: I would write nothing, read nothing, and do nothing but scroll, half-reading “notes” and tweets and suchlike, intermittently, in every nook and cranny of my days.

Since I would like to read and write, when I’m not doing other things, it stands to reason that I should stay off. So I will. Having said that, I’m going to give mezzo blogging one more try between Thanksgiving week and the New Year. If there’s just no way to squeeze it in, then this space may be reduced semi-permanently to a ghost town of occasional announcements and little more. If so, so be it. But I do love blogging, and I especially love reading others’ blogging, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t make it work again.

In the coming weeks, then, expect more posts. And if they don’t appear, then you’ll know what I’ll have already learned: in this season of life, there’s just no time for it.

My latest: del Toro’s Frankenstein, in CT

This past Tuesday Christianity Today published my review of Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. The title is “In Netflix’s ‘Frankenstein,’ Monster Is More Compelling Than Maker,” with the following subheading: “The Guillermo del Toro adaptation brings unique perspective—but fails to match the depth of its source material.” That’s a fair representation of the review, which is critical of the film but appreciative of some of its virtues, not least Jacob Elordi’s performance and some of del Toro’s marvelous compositions. The last lines of the review sums up my theological take, too.

I must say I love the opportunity to moonlight as a film critic for CT. The original review I submitted was basically a cinematic recap of del Toro’s entire filmography, some of which remains in the final version. Turns out I got multiple degrees in theology and a job as a tenured professor just so I could finally fulfill my heart’s desire as a teenage cinephiliac: to get paid to write about the movies. What a life.

My latest (four): radicals, connectors, gods, and devils

I had four pieces come out in the last month, but I’ve been so busy I haven’t even posted links to the blog. Apologies all. One of my goals for 2027 is to back into the blogging game; all my time for writing and editing has gone to paid pieces, so it’s hard to justify more time here. In any case, here are the relevant links:

• “You Don’t Have To Be Radical” (CT, October 7) is a fun little autobiographical ode to the evangelical aughts and the perennial dynamic of young Christians who get it in their heads that there’s only one way to follow Jesus: by being “radical.”

• “The Connector” (Arc, October 9) is a profile of the wonderful Leah Libresco Sargeant, timed to the release of her excellent new book, The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto, published in October with the University of Notre Dame Press. Thanks to editor extraordinaire Mark Oppenheimer for getting me to do this, or rather letting me try my hand at it as a non-journalist first-timer.

• “Keeping the Faith” (Chronicle of Higher Education, October 23) is a review essay of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s new book Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science, published in October with Yale University Press. My first time in the Review.

• Finally, the academic journal Modern Theology posted an early-access online version of my review of Philip Ziegler’s new book God’s Adversary and Ours: A Brief Theology of the Devil, which came out in September with Baylor University Press.

My latest (six): UFOs, leftists, Hitler, Scripture, doctrine, and PSA

I’ve been remiss of late, not sharing links to my latest pieces when they go up. I’ve had six essays or reviews published since August 7, the last time I posted on this blog. Here’s a quick round-up of links:

• “Lexicon for the Phenomenon” is in the latest issue of The Hedgehog Review, and is no longer paywalled. It’s about UFOs, or rather, how we talk about UFOs in public, and the ways theology can shed some terminological light on ufology.

• “Hating Hitler Is Not Enough” (CT, August 12) is my review of Alec Ryrie’s new book The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It. The book is very good—indeed, welcome and opportune—but the final two chapters, in which Ryrie gives advice to conservatives and progressives, left me underwhelmed.

• “The Bible Is About Jesus—but Not Jesus Without His Bride” (CT, August 26) is my review of Jonathan Linebaugh’s new book The Well That Washes What It Shows: An Invitation to Holy Scripture. Wonderfully written and engaging and Lutheran in the best way—but almost completely devoid of the church, both as an encompassing liturgical-sacramental context for the hearing of Scripture and as the corporate communal human agent for the writing of Scripture. Alan thought I was unfair, but I leave you to be the judge.

• “The Way We Debate Atonement Is a Mess” (CT, September 16) is my attempt to arbitrate between pro- and anti-PSA Christians, who very rarely either argue well or even get each other’s views right. I’m not much of a PSA-er myself, but nine times out of town I’m unimpressed by the anti-PSA brigade: its posture uncharitable, its rhetoric overheated, its arguments overcooked. Then again, neither are pro-PSA folks faultless in these debates. So I say: Let’s argue better—as Christians.

• “Politics for Losers” is in the latest issue of First Things, paywalled for now but not for long. It’s my review of Phil Christman’s new book Why Christians Should Be Leftists. I see that Phil has read it and isn’t angry but isn’t sure whether he’ll reply. While he holds us in suspense, check out some other reviews of the book by Matthew Loftus, Todd Shy, Adam Roberts (paywalled for me), and (not yet published, but forthcoming in Mere Orthodoxy) Bonnie Kristian.

• Finally, The Heythrop Journal published my review of Frances M. Young’s two-volume Doctrine and Scripture in Early Christianity. If you know Young, you already know how fortunate we are that we have these two works of extraordinary patristic scholarship. I’ll close this post with the paragraph that opens the review:
  
  Midway through her ninth decade of life, after nearly sixty years of prolific and wide-ranging scholarship, Frances Young offers us, if not a parting gift, then a fitting one: a two-volume summative account of Doctrine and Scripture in Early Christianity. At around 650 pages total, and running from Justin Martyr to Theodoret of Cyrus, or the roughly 300 years from the middle of the second century through to the middle of the fifth, this single work is the capstone to an extraordinary career. The books, articles, and accolades are too many to count. I pause here at the outset, then, instead of waiting until the end, to register my thanks and not a little awe. Young has not only deepened scholarly understanding of early Christianity in all its vast complexity. She has built up the people of God. Would that all of us could say the same.

My latest: gentiles and the Torah, in CT

Earlier this week Christianity Today published my latest article, called “Put Down the Shofar.” Bluntly stated, it’s a call for gentile Christians to stop cosplaying as observant Jews. It’s written much more gently than that, though. Here’s how it opens:

One day a student approached me after class with an urgent question. The course was on the doctrine of the church, and we’d spent a few weeks on Abraham, Israel, and the law of Moses. Some years back, my student’s family left a mainstream congregation to found a house church which sought to be more like the Christian communities in the Book of Acts. Though Gentiles, they began observing Jewish customs and celebrating the festivals commanded by Moses, including Passover.

My student asked me earnestly, “Were we wrong?” This small church was trying to heed the admonition of James to “be doers of the word,” following “the perfect law, the law of liberty” (1:22–25, RSV throughout). And their logic was impeccable: The Torah (the Hebrew word for the law of Moses) is God’s Word for God’s people. Baptized Gentiles are members of God’s people; therefore, they ought to obey these commands.

The question is not a trivial one, nor is it obscure in American Christian life. You’re likely familiar with shofars blown in public, Seder meals for Passover, and circumcision for baby boys. But as common and well-intended as these may be, I want to explain why I told my student that, yes, his house church was wrong—or at least, misguided. The New Testament is not silent on the question of Gentile observance of the law of Moses. And its answer is a firm no.

Read the rest here.

My latest: a review of American Heretics, in LARB

I’m in the Los Angeles Review of Books today with a review of Jerome Copulsky’s American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order. Here are the opening paragraphs:

CHRISTIANITY HAS NEVER been certain of its place in the United States. True, from the beginning, it has been more or less acknowledged as the state religion. In fact, the nation’s frontier spirit seized the faith and multiplied it a hundredfold: in the time between George Washington and Abraham Lincoln alone, the former colonies sprung forth Methodists, Mormons, Adventists, and Stone-Campbellites. The US is infamous for its energetic, fissiparous, and entrepreneurial religiosity, a religiosity essentially Protestant in style, if not always in substance.

At the same time, the Constitution is conspicuous in its failure to mention Christ, scripture, or even a generic deity. The government is said to derive its powers from the consent of the governed, not from any transcendent source. The voice of the people supersedes, or perhaps constitutes, the mandate of heaven. Lacking formal establishment or official preeminence, therefore, American Christians have had to rely on the ambient culture, social activism, voting, and sheer numbers to maintain a dominant presence in public affairs. Anxiety about the decline of that presence is itself a long-running measure of Christian involvement in, acceptance of, and alienation from the American project.

It is this third category, the politically alienated, that forms the subject of Jerome E. Copulsky’s recent book American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order (2024). Specifically, Copulsky considers seven groups of Christians who have dissented from the American consensus, in part or in whole. Some rejected democracy; others, disestablished religion; still others, liberal modesty with respect to human nature and the common good. All of them marshaled arguments and movements to reform, repair, renew, or replace the given constitutional order. Copulsky calls his book a “heresiography” of the individuals, ideas, and institutions dedicated to these aims, since they understood themselves to be “theological-political adversaries of the American order” and, thus, “American heretics.” Having departed from political orthodoxy, they stood under liberal anathema. They stand there still.

Click here to read the rest.

My latest: a review of Ryan Burge, in The Lamp

In the latest issue of The Lamp, which just went online today, I have a review of Ryan P. Burge’s new book The American Religious Landscape: Facts, Trends, and the Future. The review is called “The Stickiness of Religion." Here are the opening paragraphs:

Social science fiction—this was Albert Murray’s term of art for the kind of “pseudo-scientific” analysis he saw applied to black life in the 1960s. Too many, he observed, were tempted “to mistake the jargon of social science for insight into the nature and condition of man.” The result was “social science fiction fiction,” namely, novels posing as gritty, revelatory art that merely rendered in narrative form the pathologies and policies proposed by “current survey methodology.” By contrast, Murray’s approach was “distinctly proliterary,” that is to say, humanist in its presumption “that interpretations of human behavior in the raw require at least as much respect for the complexity of human motives as the interpretation of a poem or play or a story.”

Although Murray, a distinguished critic and novelist himself, was primarily concerned with the subject of race in America, his point stands as well for the academic study of religion. Murray may not have known what a “wonk” was, but had he seen one coming down the street, he would have turned and run on the spot.

Ryan P. Burge is the premier wonk of American religion today. A professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University and the author of the Graphs about Religion Substack, Burge has contributed to just about every major newspaper and religious or political magazine. When journalists want to know what’s going on with American religion—usually evangelicalism or Catholicism—they turn to Burge and his trove of ready-made charts. He was at the forefront of popularizing and explaining “the rise of the Nones” and co-operated in the study, published two years ago in The Great Dechurching, that found forty million American adults who used to attend church but no longer do so.

Click here to read the rest. When I wrote the piece I had no idea it would be in the issue commemorating the passing of Pope Francis—nor that I would be just one review separated from Christopher Caldwell. I’m grateful to be included.

Evangelical gentrification

Last month at the Christian Scholars’ Conference I gave a response to a set of papers addressing the future of catechesis in Churches of Christ. These papers doubled as a response to my article, published last year in Restoration Quarterly, on the catholic past and evangelical future of Churches of Christ. One recurring challenge in attempting to make myself understood is what it means to talk about “the end” of Churches of Christ. Since no one knows the future, even if a given institution appears to be in statistical, numerical, or demographic terminal decline, there is understandable hesitancy about signing on to confident claims about present trend lines persisting unchanged. There’s also a certain unspiritual resignation bound up with such claims that rightly worries any believer in providence.

So in my paper I attempted to clarify what I meant. Here’s what I wrote:

There are two kinds of institutional death. One is to go out of existence altogether. Another is for one’s identity to be changed so thoroughly that, while the literal entity in question is numerically identical, it is no longer what it once was. There are positive and negative versions of this. One is adoption: I was the child of so-and-so; now I am the child of another. Or perhaps religious conversion: I was raised Hindu, but now I’m Muslim. Or think of countries: France is now in its fifth republic, which began in 1958. It is not the first republic that was dissolved under Napoleon, nor the third, which ended with World War II. Yet the country still goes by the name of France. Finally, consider gentrification. Take an inner-city neighborhood whose long-standing population is replaced slowly, then all at once, by upper-middle-class professionals who drive up housing costs. Eventually all the locals move away. Technically it is the same neighborhood: it is the same physical plot of land. But the look, feel, and makeup of residents are utterly different. Those who were replaced would not recognize what it has become. Indeed, they would reject it.

It is this second kind of change that I was trying to unpack in my article. Whether you call it institutional death or evangelical gentrification, the reality is the same. The external bulwarks that protected identity and the internal mechanisms that reinforced identity were both so profoundly weakened that the transformation took place in basically a single generation. As the Boomers exit leadership roles, the starkness of the change will only become more evident.

With this analogy I felt, and feel, that I have at last made myself understood. The question is not whether, now or in the decades to come, there will be buildings with “Church of Christ” on the side, people within them, or Christians who care very much about that name or those buildings or what happens inside of them. It is that a fundamental transformation is occurring and has already occurred, analogous to gentrification of a neighborhood, whereby the character of an institution across time has recognizably and irrevocably altered.

In discussion of these matters, I’ll be referring to “evangelical gentrification” from here on out.

My latest: why we shouldn’t pronounce God’s Name, in CT

I’m in Christianity Today this morning with a column called “The God Who Must Not Be Named.” It addresses the trend, bordering on a fad, of evangelical pastors and scholars pronouncing the Name of YHWH aloud. I sympathize with the reasons why they do so, but argue that they (and we) should not.

Hat tip to Kendall Soulen, whose fingerprints are all over this piece. And hat tip also to my local Sunday morning Bible class, who in May patiently heard a dress rehearsal of this argument when I kicked off a new series on John Mark Comer’s book on the Name.

My (two) latest: reviews of Morell and Huerter, in CT

Last Tuesday Christianity Today published my review of Clare Morell’s new book The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones. The title is “Finally, a Tech Book That Doesn’t Pull Punches,” and that captures the tone of the review, which is overwhelmingly positive. Morell has officially joined my personal Mount Rushmore of tech books to assign and recommend to others—alongside Crouch, Haidt, and Newport.

Michael Huerter’s new book is not among them. This morning CT published my review of Huerter’s book, titled The Hybrid Congregation: A Practical Theology of Worship for an Online Era. In fact, “Just Say No to Online Church” is probably the most negative book review I’ve ever written. The opening sentence is a single word: Nein! That probably tells you all you need to know. But it’s worth reading on for the issues that Huerter raises for pastors and theologians alike. If DJ Soto, bishop of the metaverse—i.e., “Virtual Reality Church and MMO Church”—didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him. But he does, and the claims he makes call for an answer. For the time being, this review is mine.

My latest: the fate of American Protestantism, in Public Discourse

A couple months back First Things published my essay “Goldilocks Protestantism.” An editor at The Public Discourse asked if I might follow that focus on the global context with an essay on the American context. Et voila, I’m in Public Discourse today with “Low Church in High Places: The Fate and Future of American Protestantism.”

Here’s a preview:

Protestantism as we know it, both nationally and globally, is on life support. The Christian world has become either “high,” meaning catholic, or “low,” meaning evangelical. The one includes bishops and priests, liturgy and tradition, creeds and councils, icons and saints, relics and mystics, Mary and monks, whereas the other includes none of the above. The excluded middle is the Protestantism of the Reformation, a “Goldilocks” Gospel that strives to be neither too high nor too low, but just right. By my reckoning, this style of faith makes up no more than 10 percent of global Christianity. In truth it may be as low as 5 percent, and its numbers continue to decline.

That’s the global story. Now I’d like to focus on the national story. As Hemingway once described the onset of bankruptcy, American Protestantism collapsed slowly, then all at once. Precisely while it was building to an extraordinary, dominating height in the 1960s, its competitors and eventual replacements were growing as well, biding their time. They only had to wait. Termites had long since found their way to the foundation. Once it was destroyed from within, there was no way to reverse the damage. The house was doomed to fall.

Let’s date the pinnacle to the late 1950s. By one estimate, in 1958, more than half of all Americans belonged to a “mainline” Protestant denomination. Think Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Episcopalian. It’s a mistake to wonder how many of these were “actual” as opposed to “nominal” Christians. The social prestige was the point. A prestigious institution is powerful just to the extent that it attracts members regardless of their beliefs. The “mainline” was what you belonged to if you aspired to join—or sought the respect of, or wanted to remain in—the class that ran the country. Presidents, politicians, and businessmen placed formal membership in a known and vetted Protestant denomination. They were neither irreligious nor part of the riffraff (fundamentalists, Pentecostals, Mormons). Like Roman philosophers, their private skepticism and unchristian habits were beside the point: civil religion binds society together. Pay your tithes, say your prayers, make the sacrifices; otherwise the center might not hold.

The center did not hold anyway. Today perhaps fewer than one in ten Americans is a mainline Protestant, and most of them don’t go to church. Demographers predict that in the next dozen years this percentage will trend downward until it settles around one to three percent. So what happened?

Go read the rest here.

My latest: on the joys of Dude Perfect, in CT

My latest for Christianity Today is called “How Dude Perfect Won Me Over.” At one level it’s a sincere thank you letter to DP for giving my boys something silly and fun to watch over the last couple years; at a deeper level it’s an excuse to think out loud about screens, boys, and adult masculinity. At a minimum it’s my attempt to show that I’m not a total Luddite, and that I do live and raise my children in the world as it is and not as I wish it would be…

My latest: Goldilocks Protestantism, in FT

I’ve got an essay in the latest issue of First Things called “Goldilocks Protestantism.” Here are the opening lines:

Imagine a world without Protestantism.

I don’t mean a world without Christians who are neither Catholic nor Orthodox. I mean a world in which there are only two groups of Christians. The first group encompasses believers who belong to ancient fellowships led by bishops and ordained priests, who confess the Creed and their sins and celebrate the Eucharist in a traditional liturgy of word and sacrament. These believers hand on tradition, petition the saints, venerate icons, and baptize their babies. Call them “catholic.”

Call the other group “evangelicals.” They have no creed but the ­Bible. They have no bishops or priests; instead, they have ministers and elders, who are rarely ordained. They baptize not infants but adults, who can make a public declaration of faith. They reject the interposition of anyone or anything between the individual and Jesus, who is known immediately in the soul and clearly through the Scriptures.

Imagine a world in which every Christian is either catholic or evangelical, with nothing in between. It is a world without Protestantism—for the religion of the magisterial Reformers in the sixteenth century did not desire, commend, or practice either of these options. Theirs was a via media. They baptized babies, recited the Creed, ordained pastors to the service of word and sacrament, practiced baptism and communion as sacraments (not as symbols), and insisted on the validity of the early councils.

The world I invite you to imagine, then, is one in which this middle way—neither Roman nor Anabaptist, both traditional and reformed—has vanished. Is such a world possible? It is. In fact, we are living in it right now. Ours is a world without Protestantism.

Read the whole thing here. For folks who don’t subscribe to the magazine, the essay is not paywalled, though it may seem that way; you just have to create a free account with your email and you’ll get immediate access.

My latest: Luddite pedagogy, in the CHE

This morning I have an “advice” essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education called “Luddite Pedagogy: It’s OK to Ignore AI in Your Teaching.” From the middle of the piece:

Although I’ve had, over the years, a handful of mild objections to my classroom tech principles, my students rarely if ever complain. They don’t negotiate or beg for relief. A few years back, they even voted me Teacher of the Year. Far from coming at me with pitchforks, in fact, a majority of my students thank me for my “strict” rules. Why? Because they’re well aware of the effects the ambient techno-pedagogical infrastructure produces in them.

Take an online grade sheet. It’s perpetually accessible and constantly changing, with every update generating an automatic notification to a student’s phone. That doesn’t relieve anxiety — it exacerbates it. As for the classroom itself, my students know and hate that they can’t concentrate in a typical screen-populated course. They are distracted by their own phone or laptop, and even when they find the will to turn it off, their eyes drift to a classmate’s device.

Put it this way: If we set out to design an environment that would undermine educational success — to interfere with listening, thinking, and conversing, and disrupt sustained focus and rapt attention — we would invent the contemporary college classroom. Why must we accept it as given?

Click here to read the whole thing.

I first described “Luddite pedagogy” here on the blog back in 2018. I see now that Audrey Watters (my ed-tech-critic hero) used the same phrase in 2020, drawing on a 2014 essay by Torn Halves. Haven’t read either yet, but hoping to get to them soon.

My latest: why Christians are conspiracy theorists, in CT

I’ve got a column up this morning in Christianity Today called “Christians Are Conspiracy Theorists.” Here’s a sample:

By any reasonable definition, Christianity is a conspiracy theory. Let’s say it’s a theory of two conspiracies, in fact: the conspiracy of sin, death, and the Devil to put humanity and all creation in “bondage to decay” and the conspiracy by God to liberate creation and redeem his people through Christ (Rom. 8:18–23, RSV throughout).

I realize it seems odd to describe our faith this way, but that’s the proposition I’d like you to ponder. Because if Christianity is a conspiracy theory, then what follows for how believers approach other conspiracy theories in our culture?

Start with a working definition. A conspiracy theory is a form of stigmatized knowledge formally repudiated by elites and/or experts that alleges malign forces behind public events. Knowledge of this truth is kept from the public through official channels and is therefore difficult to prove. As a result, those who learn the truth tend to be suspicious of authorities and may form communities of dissent, or at a minimum be drawn to them. Within these groups, rejecting the public story on a given topic becomes a badge of honor—and belonging.

It seems plain to me that, on this definition, the church’s faith in the gospel qualifies as a conspiracy theory. This was certainly true at its inception, and I think it’s true in our time too.

Click here to read the whole thing.

Readers of the blog may recall of a post on here from back in September 2023 with a similar title. Clearly the idea lodged in my brain; this was a chance to unpack it for a general audience and at length, with a particular view to how Christians behave themselves, so to speak, “epistemically” in the public square and the consequent social dynamics at work. Looking back at that post now, I focused much more then on the spooky, strange, and non-empirical beliefs of Christians: an invisible deity, angels and demons, the blood of a Galilean rebel cleansing an American gentile from his sins against the Creator two thousand years later, and so on. The focus in the CT piece is more about suspect convictions and the way “common sense” functions to ostracize, cordon off, and exclude them—and thus why Christians should be allergic to this strategy when society deploys it about others and tempts us to do the same (even and especially when the convictions in question are genuinely suspect!).

But that’s to summarize in advance; go read the piece for the full argument.

Toward a definition of Dad TV

Last December Joshua Rivera wrote a piece for Slate called “Why ‘Dad TV’ Shows Are So Popular—and Why It’s Time to Stop Calling Them That.” The tone is all over the place and the result is a mess. The author is both outraged and unmoved by the plethora of Dad TV shows and the ensuing discourse about them. Sure, they’re bad; but they’re also watchable; but they do have bad politics; but then, they go down easy.

Rivera asks at one point: “here’s my problem with calling it ‘Dad TV’: What does that even mean?” He half-heartedly gives some possible answers, but they’re so enraging he moves on. It’s impossible to define! Not for him tongue-in-cheek taxonomies like this one by Hillary Busis in Vanity Fair. At the same time, he writes, “I have no issue with these shows or the people who watch them. Frankly, who cares!” Ah, yes, the culture critic writing with passion about the thing he cares nothing about. Paging Dr. Freddie.

In any case, Rivera’s question got me thinking. Dad TV is a thing—we know it when we see it—and it is, somewhat to my surprise, a pretty relaxed topic. Most critics appear to have stopped worrying and embraced Dad TV. At least, they no longer scold viewers for their simple (“conservative”) pleasures. Maybe it’s the poptimist period in TV criticism. Whatever it is, Dad TV isn’t embarrassed about itself and critics refer to it with a kind of gentle affection, as though they’re writing about their own dads’ actual viewing habits.

So what is Dad TV? Sure, it’s a mood, a vibe, a set of recurring epochs, subjects, and themes. There’s a clear family resemblance among the shows in question, even if not a set of necessary and sufficient conditions to meet. Let’s say that, in the world of Dad TV, there are certain premises that either never go questioned or, when questioned, are always upheld. Here, in no particular order, is an incomplete list of these givens; if they emerge as the invisible motor of a show you’ve watching, then you’re probably watching Dad TV:

• Men are protagonists of history and society: they are necessary agents who solve problems. It is desirable for men to fulfill these roles.

• The world is full of problems, some of which are perennial, others intractable.

• The world contains ineradicable evil, which manifests in evil men.

• Evil men cannot be thwarted except by good men willing and able to do what is necessary.

• Evil as such is never fully or finally defeated.

• That said, enemies are defeated, not conciliated or forgiven.

• Physical strength, a firm will, and decisive action are virtues when used to protect the innocent and the weak.

• Actions is preferable to words; words are liable to be impotent, ineffective, or a means of excusing or explaining away evil.

• Forces of law and order, however imperfect, are necessary.

• When just, law and order are to be praised, held in honor, and participated in.

• When unjust, law and order call for emergency exceptions that restore them to their proper just place and purpose.

• Men are the primary, if not the unique, instruments of law and order.

• Punishment is necessary and just. The fundamental question is the balance to be struck between (societal) justice and (personal) vengeance, granting that retributive punishment must play a role in both, not just the latter.

• Suffering is acceptable, necessary, and even good when it benefits others; it is not good in itself, except as purgation or self-improvement.

• The behaviors and virtues worthy of pursuit and exemplification are not: empathy, politesse, social decorum, interpersonal subtlety, moral gray, both-sides-ism, intuition, asking permission.

• Instead, the behaviors and virtues worthy of pursuit and exemplification are: honor, duty, courage, loyalty, sacrifice, truth-telling, brotherhood, stoicism, hierarchy, rationality, skilled excellence, hard work, and getting the job done regardless of the risk, pain, or obstacles.

• Although (at a meta level) the viewer is a sedentary consumer, the show in question does not glorify but ridicules the easy consumerist pleasures of passive, sedentary, inactive men. It holds all of bourgeois society in contempt.

• What then is good? The family is good.

• Protection, provision, and procreation are good.

• Religion, at least in the sense of religio or piety, is in general good.

• Tradition, if just and time-honored, is good.

• Friendship with other men is good.

• Men who are live on the outside of these goods—who, for example, have neither wife nor children or who lack faith or friends—nevertheless are called to serve and protect them, sometimes to seek them in their absence.

• It is pleasing, to men and women alike, to tell, read, and watch stories that confirm any and all of the above.

• In fact, it is wholesome to enjoy such stories and what they celebrate; to do so is, in a way, a ballast to society.

• Human society is, among other things, one continuous if often failed attempt to bind fathers to sons and sons to fathers and, in turn, to their own (eventual) children. When successful, everyone benefits; when unsuccessful, everyone suffers.

• Hence, failed versus faithful fatherhood is at the heart of all Dad TV. Every man at the center of such stories is a son who either has a good father or, lacking one, is looking for a surrogate.

• Likewise, every man in such stories is an actual or would-be father to others, and the crux of the drama is the test of his fatherhood, if only metaphorical.

• Likewise, and therefore, every man in such stories is on a journey bound for home in whatever form; if not—if a rōnin or a wanderer—his business is entirely helping others finding theirs, usually by removing obstacles in their path.

• In a word, Dad TV is nothing more than a set of variations on The Odyssey. Which suggests that Christopher Nolan, currently adapting Homer’s epic into a film, is the chief auteur of Dad Content for our time.