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Chapter 15:
The Worldwide Explosion of Pentecostalism
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American philosopher Lee Harris tells us with surpassing clarity what is going on when Christianity erupts somewhere in the world. It means that a people has declared itself ready for self-government, just like the burghers of Germany around 1500 who
Had learned to handle an enormous complexity of human interactions without the continual appeal to the decision-making authority of some outside agent… What happened was that one day, in their great pride as their achievement, they noticed what they had done, and they decided to turn their spontaneously evolved ethos into a consciously articulated and explicitly confessed principle. (Harris 2004 p187)
What they had discovered was conscience. This Protestant conscience was the faith of people who had learned to control their behavior into an ethos of professional respectability. It is the autonomous self-regulator in a man whose well-being depends upon his reputation as one who can be trusted. It is what makes sense of the priesthood of every man that would seem to be a recipe for anarchy. “If the ultimate law was God’s Book, and the ultimate authority on this law was you, who was in a position to contradict you?” Only your conscience.
The problem with a trustworthy, self-governing middle class is that it leaves no role for powerful political leaders. That is why it has been necessary for left-wing activists to drill with inexhaustible ferocity into the edifice of bourgeois trustworthiness. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels punch all the buttons. Not only were the capitalists shamefully oppressing the proletarians but they were swapping wives and dishonoring their female servants. This accusation is a constant theme of the war on the middle class. Businessmen are exploiters, they are robber barons, they are monopolists, they are price fixers, they are unsafe at any speed, they are killing little birds, they are raping the earth, they are exporting jobs, they are exploiting Third World peasants.
Every coin has two sides. Capitalism is built upon the notion of buying low and selling high. That means giving jobs to young teenage girls just off the farm at very low wages (but indoor work that is much easier than planting rice in all weathers). But capitalism is also the world of the self-governing, conscientious, creative team. It worships the aggressive, creative, reliable individual who can leverage his skills across a team and deliver services to the world. Entwined with world capitalism is world Protestantism. Together they form the road to the middle class.
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©2005 Christopher Chantrill
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Liberal Coercion
[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
Drang nach Osten
There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion
Government Expenditure
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
