Well rejoice and be exceeding glad, Gentle Reader, for sun and warmth have well and truly arrived even here. The landscape has exploded with growth and color, and the birds of the air, the beasts of the field, yea, every living thing have burst forth into song and bleat and pollen and beauty. You walk outside and are dazzled by how green everything is. Bright, pulsing, screaming green. It’s enough to make the heart sing, except we upper Midwesterners only allow that to happen in private. Like kissing. There’s a room for such things; for singing, it’s called church.

        I’m not grousing about this warm turn one little bit. It’s just that the suddenness of it all cost me my annual turn to recite Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” A great professor of mine used to take his class outside to read that poem on just that pivoting day when spring makes it clear that it’s here to stay, that resurgent life is about to create a thick new covering in the trees above and on the ground below. Frost found this magical moment to be a little bittersweet: “Nature’s first green is gold/Her hardest hue to hold/. . . So dawn goes down to day./Nothing gold can stay.” I love to recite that verse. Maybe in honor of Ken Kuiper, maybe out of the sort of Calvinism that led a senior colleague of mine, one glorious June 23^rd morning years ago to sit down heavily at lunch and sigh: “Yep, days start getting shorter now.”

        Since green blurred past gold too fast to notice this year, here’s a prose ode to the color. Green tends to have such (as the commentators say) contradictory valences. The balladeer waxes nostalgic for the green green grass of home, but it’s definitely wrong to be green with envy or so greedy as to pile up the green. The monetary green comes from greenbacks, a paper currency floated in the Civil War, then withdrawn to keep the bankers happy. A phenomenon unknown these days. Rather, green in today’s public discourse is very definitely a Good Thing, a sign of concern for sustainability, ecology, untoward waste, and the survival of the planet. Unless you’re in the Right, where it’s all black oil and red meat—and white skin. Al Green, an erstwhile fellow Grand Rapidian, is one of my favorite singers. At the first pop concert I ever attended The New Christy Minstrels opened with the folksy “Green, Green” (“… it’s green they say/on the far side of the hill./Green green I’m going away/to where the grass is greener still.”), while the nonpareil Gordon Lightfoot of my 20s nailed the color’s paradoxical character perfectly in “Bitter Green.” (I’m running up my word count—google the lyrics.)

        Oddly enough, the same paradox runs through biblical references to green. To descend from the lofty heights of redemptive-historical hermeneutics to Dwight Moody’s sermon-building by concordance, we find green laid out promisingly in Genesis as the hue of those plants expressly given to sustain animal life. By Leviticus it’s turned into a suspicious sign of mold (“reddish” is there right next to it) to be reported to the priest for ritual purification. In the Psalms and the prophets the same alteration: the righteous flourish like green plants and trees planted by the living stream, but punishment comes down upon the fickle and faithless in the sign of green things being blighted at noonday. Mark has people sitting down on green grass to receive the bounty of the loaves and fish, but Luke cites it in one of Jesus’ warnings, and Revelation has all of the green grass burned up but only a third of the earth and the trees (8:7).

        So where does this litany end? For me, in one of the few sermons I remember precisely. Oh, many of the rest have sunken in and shaped my heart and mind, no doubt about it, but perhaps because there have been so many, so few live on whole and clear. This one treated the most famous citation of green in all of Scripture: Psalm 23: 2, “He makes me lie down in green pastures.” Our pastor, who made a specialty out of Old Testament context, explained what this meant. Not the lush meadow of England’s green and pleasant land. Not the lawn-with-lamb on that cheesy sympathy card. But scattered sprigs of grass, peeping out of rock and dust in the cool of a Palestinian morning, glistening with beads of dew, just enough of them here and there for the sheep to find and make it through another day. A good shepherd knows where these few and fleeting things are likely to be, and so brings the flock around to avail themselves of the offering. Nature’s only green is soon gone, is the point, but it will be enough for those who feed in faith.

Each has a body count, but the least counts most. That would be the Boston explosion: three dead, over 200 injured, some of them critically, half of them seriously. The explosion at the West, Texas fertilizer plant killed fourteen and injured another 200. The fatalities from firearms in America this year will probably top 30,000 again (32,000 was the toll in 2011, the most recent numbers I could find). That represents over half of the 55,000 violent deaths that occur every year in the USA. Fully 20,000 of that total are suicides by handgun— by far the most effective, most impulsive, and most predictable means of suicide.

Those are the counts; here’s what counts. In response to Boston: a million people shut up in their homes, a city brought to a standstill, and day upon day of saturation coverage by national news networks and papers. From Texas, a recurrent place in the news cycle that day, but fading interest once the smoking crater had been pictured and the lack of any ‘terrorist’ agent behind the blast established. From Washington: a pride of the Senate minority gloating at a news conference that they had stopped a dastardly assault upon American freedom. So dear is that freedom, one of their number (South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham) has said since, that while a terrorist suspect may be denied jury trial, he may not be denied the right to possess whatever firearms his addled heart or mind desires even if he’s on a watch list.

How do we make sense of this, other than by joining the long line of commentators pointing out hypocrisy, lunacy, or ignorance’s firm hold on the American mind? For me it comes down to the power of narrative in the national culture: which ones compel attention and belief? To be sure, production values have something to do with it. I mean, how exciting is that gaping Texas hole once the camera has settled on it for five minutes? The poor schlumps who off themselves in a fit of despair? Meh—that happens. Their choice. Plus private and secret, with a hushed-up aftermath. Not good drama. But Boston? Can you say reality TV on steroids? Blood, mayhem, panic, throngs fleeing from—and lesser numbers jumping into—the fray? Endless eye-witnesses to interview; a manhunt to follow; terse-talking cops to pump for information. And oh those cops! All SWATed up in the full panoply of military gear, many of them. Not the ones who caught the perp, but never mind. Focus rather on the files of Darth Vader types streaming down the streets, assuring us that Security is at hand.

My father used to tell me about cop shows he tuned in on the radio as a boy in the 1930s, featuring G-Men, T-Men, and other heroes tracking down Public Enemy #whatever. Boston gave us the 24-hour news-TV version of the genre. But it also gave us a resonant Bad Guy. This was lacking in Texas. After all, death by negligence is very common and undramatic; we have people falling every day to workplace accidents. And the American public like the tax reductions and small government that spell fewer inspections of questionable factories. The Texas plant was last certified in 1986; neighbors’ complaints about noxious odors and haphazard conditions went a-gleaming. Until the plant became one big bomb bursting in air. But if you couldn’t find live footage thereof, the viewer draw just wasn’t there.

But the Boston Bad Guy was made to order. At least once his ‘foreign’ credentials had been established. Never mind that he’s lived half his life in the USA, is wired up like any good American youth, participated in no mosque or Islamic study club, and has disappointingly light skin. Muslim he is and dark he counts and rights—so says the Right—he does not have. He and his dead brother can be thus fit into an older American story than even my father’s crime-busters radio serial. One of our oldest stories, in fact, and certainly the most precious. The story of the Savage Indian. Savage Indian, first, incarnates pure evil; secondly, is not one of us but comes from the outside; thirdly, threatens children and women-folk; fourthly, can be brought to heel and eliminated by the Strong Brave Hero, which elimination—fifthly—restores peace and quiet and equilibrium so that the good folk of the community—for good we all are, every mother’s son of us—can go back to their business.

That negligence kills far more every year than ‘terrorism,’ and suicidal despair, guns handy, far more yet; that the leaders of the good people do little in the first instance and maximize gun-availability in the second; and that the High Rulers of the good people, Presidents Barack Bush and George W. Obama, exercise freely the right to rain death from above on anyone they decide is a Savage Indian on whatever frontier around the world, levying that particular bit of terror by a surgically precise weapon which nonetheless racks up the collateral damages once known as the death of innocents, thus triggering more resentment and more likelihood of terrorism—well, it all adds up to a story of a good people and true trying to preserve their liberties from bad actors who hate them.

Only, the Hero in the saga of the Savage Indian has to ride off into the sunset at the end of the show, heading over the next mountain range so as to carry out his purgative vengeance anew, for civilized society offers him no abiding place. Our hero, on the other hand, has become collective: the military abroad and a militarized police at home and fevered talking-heads who sell their story. These all do not, cannot, abide across the range in the wilderness but come back home, where the good citizenry in the meantime arm themselves to the teeth. How, then, to invoke Francis Schaffer, shall we live, and where?

The evangelical church world turned upside down last week when news of Matthew Warren went viral. The 27-year-old was the son of Rev. Rick Warren (The Purpose Driven Life) and Kay Warren. After a years-long battle with depression, Matthew took his own life. As far as I could tell from the outpouring of prayers and messages of love and support flooding social media, Christians responded most appropriately.

As Reformed folk, we look to Scripture for answers to life’s greatest questions. Unfortunately, there is no specific text that addresses mental illness. What is a Reformed Christian to do? How are we to understand mental illness?

The closest Scripture comes to speaking of mental illness is its mention of those who are inhabited by demons. (See for instance Mark 5:1-20, Matthew 17:14-20, and Acts 16:16-18.) This reflects antiquity’s understanding of how the world works. Sickness was not the cause of bacteria, viruses, or cancer cells. It was the result either of sin or of malevolent spirits’ capricious play.

If someone behaved, spoke, or moved his body in an uncontrollable or inexplicable way, he was declared to be demon possessed. She may be epileptic, she may be depressed, she may be schizophrenic, she may have obsessive compulsive disorder. Lacking the knowledge, vocabulary, and trained psychotherapists, wise and common people alike lumped all of these ailments into one evilly-oriented category.

While we understand more today, the church still lacks a good response to mental illness. Amy Simpson, editor at Christianity Today and author of the forthcoming book Troubled Minds: Mental Illness and the Church’s Mission (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013) found the church ill equipped to serve its mentally and emotionally ailing sheep.

• Ninety-eight percent acknowledged they had seen some kind of mental illness within their congregation.
• Only 3 percent of church leaders indicated they feel like experts in ministering to people suffering from mental illness.
• More than 77 percent of church leaders said they are approached at least two times and even up to 12 times per year for help in dealing with a mental illness.
• Almost 30 percent of those church leaders said mental illness is never mentioned in sermons at their church.
• Just over half of church leaders have reached out to the family of someone with mental illness within their congregation.

“Very few churches have ministries specifically geared toward reaching out to and helping people with mental illness,” Simpson reports. “So people with mental illness and their families continue to be lost in the church.”

So, when Scripture provides either outdated answers or no answer at all, what is the church to do?

Perhaps we pray that God cast out our demons that prevent us from caring from the mentally ill, – fear, ignorance, anxiety, etc. – and do what God does. We love and care well for those who are sick and their families, as those who suffer from mental disorders are indeed ill. In a recent article, Simpson suggests starting simply and practically.

Step one, which may be the most important one of all: the church must break its silence. Merely talking about mental illness serves to normalize it, remove social stigmas, and help remove the shame that people who suffer and their families often carry.

Also, the church could care for a mentally ill person and his family the same way that it does those who are physically ill or recovering from surgery.

“Families affected by mental illness need the same kinds of practical help,” Simpson says. “We can help with the cost of medications, which can be exorbitant. We can help with the expenses of hospitalizations and ongoing treatments. We can provide food, we can make sure their children have rides, we can simply ask them how they’re feeling, how they’re doing, how their treatment is going. We can tell them that we care about them and what they’re going through. We can visit them in the hospital.”

Additionally, the church can remain a journey partner with congregants who are in treatment. Oftentimes pastors and church leadership will acknowledge their lack of psychological expertise and refer someone to a professional. At this point, it is important that the church not lose contact with the hurting person and her family. If the church fails to do this, it sends a painful message.

“Unfortunately, [this] suggests that the church is not willing to stick with the person now that their problem is known, that their problem is too overwhelming for the church and perhaps too overwhelming for their faith and for their God,” Simpson writes.

As the body of Christ, we can do better. 

“Share each other's burdens, and in this way obey the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2).

Good Friday when I was young was a day for bargaining. Not just between the pulpit and my ear, as I tried to do the mental math implicit in the inevitable substitutionary-atonement sentiments of the day, but even before that in respect to what sermon I’d have to hear. What set of mini-sermons, in fact.

The deal was, you could get out of going to your own church that night if you took in X percent of the three-hour service on the Seven Last Words from the Cross held at one of the neighborhood churches that afternoon. The attraction was not in hearing something new or exotic, since the dominies on the list were almost all Christian Reformed. (They let in one RCA pastor of sound theological repute.) Part of the lure was negative since the noon to 3:00 p.m. slot was too sacred anyway to permit shooting hoops in the neighbor’s driveway, much less trying out softball at the park. By contrast, you could get in some TV at night while your parents were at church, maximizing the utility of the reduced pleasurable hours that Good Friday afforded.

The tougher, more intriguing bargaining came with your parents—and then in comparing the deal you had wrangled with those struck by the other kids. My folks were of the moderate maximalist school: you had to take in four of the Words plus the hymns following each, which probably spelled a net elapsed time of an hour and a half. That was four 15-18 minute homilies, which made for much more sermon than you’d have at night, but four brief prayers instead of the long one, plus you could exit while the fourth hymn was being sung. Other parents seemed more liberal—three Words. But, if you took them at the start of the service, that entailed sitting through part of the organ prelude, plus the opening prayer (neither Long nor Short), plus an extra opening hymn. So your net time wasn’t that much less. No one I ever heard of had to stay for all seven Words, and only teenagers with cars would try getting away with going in to grab a bulletin and then taking off for the beach or a movie.

Once you had settled up, the debate turned to which Words to attend: the first, the last, or the middle block? Denny liked “I thirst” because it reminded him of “Jesus wept,” his favorite verse in the Bible, being the shortest. The mother and son exchange further down always struck me as a little creepy, and “It is finished” got to be very doleful, the minister in charge of that Word having to outdo all his predecessors at seriousness and woe. Personally, I liked the opener, on forgiveness, and its follow-up when Jesus assured the baddest guy on the hill that he, the thief, would be that day with Him in paradise. Did I like these because they came early and so promised quicker release into the free afternoon air? Or because all the bargaining, like the dicing at the foot of the cross, so missed--or made--the point as to make the Savior’s load heavier?

We had Bible teachers at our Christian school that could have helped with that question, but even then I was too uneasy to ask it. I probably didn’t even see it. I sensed it a bit, though, which helped give an authentic pang to the played-up ones the ministers were trying to conjure from the pulpit. Maybe we do make our own best sermons after all.

It happened like this. The selection of Cardinal Jorje Mario Bergoglio as pope, and his selection of Francis I for his papal name, set some virtual tongues wagging on social media among people  who get geeked about such things. Like historians and theologians and especially historians of theology and of religion more generally. Which Francis is His New Holiness invoking? That of Assissi? Or Francis Xavier, perhaps. A Jesuit, like Bergoglio. A Jesuit whose sixteenth-century mission to Japan ran  afoul of rivalries with the order of friars bearing the Assissi man’s name, starting a series of machinations and diplomatic backstabbing that eventually fed into the suppression of Christianity in Japan altogether. So maybe Francis I, Jesuit, is making nice between the two orders and wondering what might have happened in the land of the rising sun instead. Brother Sun and Sister Moon and all that.

No, one of my colleagues retorted, the new pope is really invoking Francis Albert Sinatra, both because he made young people swoon in his day and because his Mafia connections give an idea of the offers that Francis I will make to the Curia tomorrow. Ok, Godfather III’s already been made. Not such a hot movie, or idea.

Another colleague suggests we might be getting two Francises for the price of one: Francisco Franco, dictator of Spain, buddy of the fascists, big fan of the Church. Francis I seems, as of this writing, to have had a not-uncheckered relationship with the military junta that ruled Argentina by ‘disappearing’ purported enemies of the state. You wonder: do papal candidates get vetted with one percent of the care that goes into background checks on American vice-presidential hopefuls?

Other Francises that have had political careers…. Francois I, king of France 1515-47. Calvin dedicated The Institutes to him in one edition, trying to play nice for the sake of gospel truth. Oops that. American side, we have one of the most and one of the least successful presidents bearing the name: Franklin Roosevelt and Franklin Pierce. At least Pierce could claim the greatest writer in the annals of campaign biographers: college buddy Nathaniel Hawthorne. In fact, Nathaniel died on the road with Franklin during the Civil War that both opposed. Hmmm.

Saint Francis the purported namesake of Francis I has some cities named after him. The one in California is not associated with a lifestyle of which His New Holiness approves. But then the fervently religious American folk who agree with the new pope on that issue diverge markedly from him on economics. Luckily for them that’s not a moral issue so it doesn’t come under the teachings of Jesus. Though it did seem to do so for Francis. The Assissi saint guy, I mean. Maybe we can resolve this all by invoking the real American St Franklin—cunning capitalist, yet no strait-laced puritan. Benjamin was his name.

Maybe. What’s your suggestion?

Theresa’s response to all of this is a model of sound pastoral care: abide, breathe, and communicate. My own reaction, as reports on bits and pieces of Calvin’s predicament have been released on campus over the past few months, usually ends up rattling between sorrow and anger bordering on rage. Yesterday’s release brought it all back; you can read it at http://www.calvin.edu/admin/president/finances/. Names are not included per campus policy, but exercise a bit of intelligent inference and you’ll get the picture. Particularly precious tidbits include the facts that—though not the reasons why—the debts in question were hidden, their interest payments not entered into the budget, the fund where they were lodged not audited, the committee in charge of investments not properly supervised by the college’s Trustees, etc. And etc., as the old comedian used to say. But since I’ve vented about this before in this space (see my post of last October 26: http://the12.squarespace.com/james-bratt/2012/10/26/if-sex-dont-getcha-the-money-will.html), I’ll try something else today.

When historians see a mess, they look for precedents, parallels, or analogies from the past. As it happens, I’ve been reading a remarkable collection of letters and reports pertaining to the early days of a sister institution: Envisioning Hope College, edited by Elton Bruins and Karen Schakel of Hope’s affiliated Van Raalte Institute. The bulk of the volume consists of letters from Hope’s—and Holland, Michigan’s—founder, the Rev. Albertus C. Van Raalte, to Philip Phelps, Jr., the east-coast Reformed Church man brought in to run a fledgling academy that grew into the college and its related Western Theological Seminary.

All these institutions have a solid record and sterling reputation today, making all the more glaring the financial struggles from which they emerged. We see the pious churchman Van Raalte—in other letters all absorbed in the conversion of sinners—bouncing from church to church in New York and New Jersey in a quest to raise $3000, battling stingy donors, negative press, and looming competition from other schools, mission societies, and every other good cause. Back home, he’s wrapped up in bank deals, land deals, medical practice, aspersions against his theology, a sickly wife, a slew of kids, and yearnings to escape to South Africa, where he can be a missionary and just tend to souls. Right--no complications there! Two sons having fought in the Civil War army, Van Raalte comes up with a scheme to start up a Dutch colony in conquered Virginia, the one he had originated in West Michigan apparently not having provided enough fun. He quickly learns that things going South has an unhappy metaphorical meaning.

But the post-Civil War North was a place for big thinking and bold schemes. Philip Phelps concocts a plan to expand the barely adequate Hope College into Hope Haven University. Does not the newly instituted theological branch constitute a graduate school? Is there not demand for a Female department? Does not a new donation of land offer possibilities for a cash-cow orchard that will simultaneously form the basis of a Scientific School? Phelps was present at the creation of a higher education boom in America, with land-grant colleges and tycoon-atonement projects popping up across the land, from Michigan Agricultural College (now Michigan State University) to Vanderbilt, Stanford, and Carnegie Tech. Phelps had a noble vision of totally integrated Christian education, from grammar school through grad school, sustaining an integral Christian culture. The same vision was dawning upon Abraham Kuyper in the Netherlands at much the same time.

Sometimes vision is cankered by bad financing, sometimes crippled by meager financing, sometimes thrives on modest financing achieved through sweat and sorrow. These things are not preordained by human reckoning. We simply have to strive on doing our best, acting always with honesty and integrity. In the tough times remembering Theresa’s council: to abide, to breathe, and to communicate. To which I will only add: to remember, and to try to remember aright.

When President LeRoy called me up with news of this prize, I immediately replied no, no, you can’t mean it. I was afraid that the awards committee was going to visit my next class, observe for five minutes, then quickly meet to revoke its decision. I started a mental list of four or five people just in my department who are better teachers than I. So, first denial, then anxiety, then bargaining—why was I responding to such good news by recapitulating the five stages of grief? I decided to drop that line and go for gratitude instead. Here then my simple, heartfelt thanks for this wonderful tribute. I accept it, as my predecessors in this prize all have, as a tribute to all Calvin College faculty­­ for the unrelenting commitment it takes to sustain good teaching day by day over the long run. Most of all, I accept it as a tribute to our common project of Christian liberal arts education.

Some of my best moments in that project came in teaching the students on our honors floor last year. Every Monday night from September to May we met to discuss a great book, in this case Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. I chose this title not because De Tocqueville, much less America, got everything right, but because of the penetrating questions this French aristocrat asked of a strange new democracy 180 years ago. I wanted us to be provoked by his observations to better understand this country and other countries today, and also to demonstrate how various disciplines can converge to enrich our comprehension of a subject.

Our conversations in that class were spritely, wide-ranging and very revealing—especially to me as a teacher. Because more often than not, as I was driving home, it would hit me: so that was the question in the room! That was the issue in the text! Not the one I had thought of or prepped for. Why hadn’t I seen it ahead of time and set it up foursquare from the start? Because I couldn’t discover it on my own, nor could the students. We had to find it together, off our pre-set plans.

Much of good teaching consists in simply asking the right question, but the right question is not so simple to find. It’s not evident at the start. We happen upon it by working our way through a puzzling maze of experiment and deliberation, in the lab, in the field, in the text. We think the answer is this and so the question must be that, but we learn when we discover that the question is really something else. This quite simply is what liberal arts education is at heart, and only by its means does this kind of learning occur. Don’t worry—the skills it teaches are readily transferrable and highly valuable, whether for crafting a legal brief, designing medical tests, or reading a balance sheet with integrity.

We may come to faith by the same process. At least so it happened for this good Grand Rapids boy. I was reared within the full matrix of Christian Reformed education (catechism, Sunday School, Christian day schools, and 110 sermons a year). Early on I learned that faith was the most important thing—the only gateway to salvation, the only hope in life, the only ground of lasting value. So I set out intently to get this faith. I worked hard at it. In fact, faith became the hardest work I’d ever done—hard, and quite unavailing. The quest left me hovering in mid-air, battering my head against a sky of brass. My professors here at Calvin did me the enormous service of listening to my doubts and giving me methods for interrogating those doubts. But in my case it was not until I became a father that the issue was ultimately joined, for then I finally had to face up to the existentialism I had encountered in philosophy and German literature classes here: is love forever? Could I love unreservedly in the face of death; commit utterly to these tiny new persons in full knowledge that separation and loss stand at the end of the road?

That was the question, and it unfolded its own answer: yes. And that answer itself opened up on the person of Jesus Christ who made precisely that same commitment to us. And in making it, broke through the wall of death into the mystery known as life everlasting. It’s not the theology that’s important right here—notice the process. Only when the question of faith changed to precisely the right question for me did Christ become Christ to me, and for me.

Faith and learning typically do not yield to direct assault. They come by indirection. We don’t even so often pose the right question as have it dawn upon us, a different proposition altogether. We stumble over it on the path to somewhere else. As we go forward together in recalibrating this college in the face of the harsh winds of change in higher education, may we remain open—no, resolutely committed—to this unmeasurable, seemingly inefficient process of searching and learning, for it is the true and proven way to wisdom, most worthy and irreplaceable.       

The matter involves big biographies by two journalists—the 500-page (not counting 215 more of notes) Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by former Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, and Henry Wiencek’s (once Time-Life) Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves, half the size but triple the TNT. The arguments over these books might be more interesting than the volumes themselves as the coalitions  confronting each other across the battle front keep shifting: pro- vs. anti-Jeffersonians, naturally, but running athwart and not along that line, defenders of journalistic good reads vs. the guardians of academia, and devotees of complex portraits vs. champions of the driving thesis (not to mention ideology). Remembering too that “complex portrait” might itself amount to an ideology.

Meacham lauds Jefferson for being a consummate politician—an extraordinarily bright and broadly read politician, to be sure, a philosopher and scientist and architect and all that, but withal, a canny judge of people and the moment of opportunity, a guy that could get ‘er done. And get ‘er done he did. Jefferson was, Meacham avers, far and away the most successful politician of his generation, of the whole half century from Washington to Jackson, perhaps of all American presidents save for two or three others. To be sure, he had this blind spot about slavery. Tragic. A blight on his legacy. But what a genius—in the corridors of power and in the empyrean of learning and in knowing what of the one could be imported to the other.

To which Wiencek replies with a simple indictment. The young Jefferson opposed slavery; the post-Revolutionary planter endorsed it, profited from it, turned aside all objections to it, worked against measures that might undo it, limit it, ameliorate it, or put it on the road to eradication. All for the love of money. The Monster of Monticello, insists the author, was not a mild, conscience-stricken master caught in the toils of history and circumstance, as Jefferson’s apologists argue; nor was he first of all driven by racism, as other critics have charged. No, he consciously calculated how much money each live birth in the slave quarters netted him, and so turned them into a breeding pen, displacing his guilt into a rage against any notion that freed blacks and whites could ever live together in a free and harmonious society.

Wiencek’s book has elicited a cannonade, Meacham’s a meh. Too much extraneous detail that obscures whatever analysis his narrative might be venturing, it is said of the latter. A resolute hewing to the moderate middle ground. A book quite more ambitious in size than in argument. Wiencek is savaged for the opposite sins. Tendentious, manipulative of evidence and ignorant of that evidence’s context and meaning. An author in hate of his subject, a provocateur who exaggerates his originality and hides his reliance on established scholarship. Wiencek’s critics are not, as he appears to be, shocked! shocked!! to discover that Jefferson was an affluent (yet bankrupt) planter who championed democracy while living like an aristocrat off slave labor, nor do they dismiss the contradictions in the man as Wiencek accuses them of doing in his worst passages. Meacham’s critics, on the other hand, merely wonder what weight his book will finally pull in the rows of Founders Chic on bookstore shelves.

This baffled episode in an unending argument might simply testify to this: that Jefferson and every one of his contemporaries at the birth of America as an independent nation was not the god that Americans want ad fontes. That slavery was not incidental but fundamental to such freedom as early Americans could attain for themselves and their posterity. And that the bill thus overdue is still ours to pay.

Of course, when Reagan uttered that phrase he happened to be the oldest person ever to occupy the Oval Office, and by several accounts his last years therein were marked by incipient senility—not in the metaphorical sense of the term. That paradox points to the irony attending this slogan: “America as new” is one of the oldest, most tradition-worn ways to view the United States. What happens if we see America instead as old? It might help us understand the reality right in front of our face. Sensible, modest gun control in the face of the Newtown massacre? No can do. Reaching for more than the lowest-hanging fruit of fiscal reform? No can do. Avoiding another month of playing chicken over the debt ceiling? No can do. Recognizing the reality of global warming and taking bold measures now to diminish dangers ahead? No can do. Even if those steps helped generate new good-paying jobs at home? Don’t even wanna talk about it. Let the Mighty Mississippi drop and the Great Lakes shrink and the Midwest parch and the Great West burn and the average mean temperature hit repeated annual highs across the nation. Can’t do nuthin’ but drill more wells, frack more gas, and build up more fleet in the Persian Gulf. Always done it that way.

Reduced strength, reduced mobility, reduced flexibility, reduced resources, the constraints of the past and the iron cage of habit: when we hear these symptoms described of a person, we readily conclude that he or she is aging, and not so gracefully. Apply it to the nation and the United States comes off like one of those ageing couples trying to carry on in the old house where they raised the kids. The title to this property (the Constitution) is 225 years old, and the building, or infrastructure, last renovated sixty years ago, is showing alarming signs of deterioration. Yet the residents are worried about their fixed income and so refuse to undertake the significant short-term borrowing that would yield long-term benefits. This particular couple, as part of the Greatest Generation, profited immensely, along with their own, now middle-aged children, from massive public investments made after World War II; but somewhere in their own middle age they became convinced by Ronald Reagan, himself an abject beneficiary of public largesse, that, in their current situation, “government is not the solution, government is the problem.”

On the other hand, our couple will spend without stint on anything labeled “security.” However much their elected representatives pick over any discretionary social spending, they will pass an annual defense budget of over $700 billion with virtually no discussion or objection. Our retirees will also open their wallets for perceived neighborhood safety, particularly to lock up young men of color for non-violent offenses. Thus the American house still stands tall in the global village on certain indices: it controls nearly half of the world’s military expenditures and three-quarters of the international weapons trade, and imprisons a higher percentage of its citizens than does any other nation in the world. Never mind that military spending has a lower multiplier effect for economic growth than does infrastructure investment. Never mind that a year in jail costs almost as much as a year at Yale. To update the indignant cry over the XYZ Affair: "Zillions for the military, sir, but not one cent for welfare!"

Hyper-sensitive though they are about their limited means, as is not unknown among ageing people our American household is still susceptible to scams and risky speculation. Most recently this was a massive real estate bubble whose explosion sent a shock through the entire world economy and has the home-front still struggling for revival. Consequently the neighbors have been saving against an evil day rather than spending and restarting the economy. Unemployment after three years of “recovery” is still about 8 percent; underemployment more than double that. Figures for traditionally vulnerable sectors like young males of color are far worse, but the prospects for white males lacking advanced education are moving in the same direction with no end in sight. The social dysfunctions that our retired couple has long associated with the black inner-city are—and have been—rising without evident curtailment among rural, working-class, and even middle-class whites.

When, in face of this dire prospect, our elderly couple—unable to spend any more on prisons, and reluctant to invest in schools—turns to its political class for leadership, they see an advanced case of arteriosclerosis indeed. A filibustering forty-one senators can block or at least dilute any approach toward the bold changes needed for recovery or sound investment going forward. The strong Right majority in the House is dragged extreme Right by its ideologues worried about Even Further Right rivals at home. The president who stands for reform names yet another Wall Street crony as Secretary of the Treasury.

But what is most striking in the present circumstance is our couple’s constricted imagination —a constriction predictable at their later stage of life but foreign to their younger years. A trillion dollars of their money went to a war of choice in Iraq on the insistence of old men from the Nixon administration who, among other motives, were determined to exorcise once and for all the memory of defeat in Vietnam. On television, our couple can listen to ranters declare that the entire record of progressive legislation going back to and including Theodore Roosevelt needs to be wiped off the map. That is, Gilded Age policies for the not so golden years at hand. And why not? Income stratification in the American apartment complex is nearing that of the Gilded Age, and bankers and entrepreneurs of new industries are once again triggering panics and collapses. Railroads then, hi-tech now; Jay Cooke then, Lehman Brothers now; and J. P. Morgan all the time.

If neither the return to Vietnam nor to the Gilded Age goes back far enough, there is the solution posited by Tea Party devotees and some Supreme Court justices: a return to the plain and simple meaning of the original Constitution, as if two centuries had not happened in the meantime. The most popular icon (using the word in its religious sense) of this mentality is the firearm, and the individual’s right to bear the same is taken to be the most sacred and inviolable of rights. Miranda rights, the right to a jury trial, citizenship and life itself may be stripped from an accused terrorist by state fiat, but not that same person’s right to own an assault weapon. The American populist today is fixated upon the eighteenth-century frontiersman and his musket.

Bold, new, innovative thinkers and can-do confidence? Look not to America, frozen in fear, nostalgia, and bills overdue. Donald Rumsfeld sneered about "old Europe." Wrong continent, pal.

This post is adapted from my article "America the Old?" published in the European Journal of American Studies, March 2010. Available at http://ejas.revues.org/8479.

I have watched snatches of the event as it’s been streaming on 268generation.com the past few days. Some old friends of mine led the worship music for one session. It has been fun to see their faces and hear a few of their new songs. Yet my feelings about the proceedings are complicated. The truth is I’ve been conflicted about the Passion worship movement since I attended an early event in Ft. Worth back in the ‘90s. These same friends of mine were leading worship for some 13,000 in attendance, a number that was shocking at the time.

It was my first experience worshipping with a worship leader’s face projected on several 50-foot screens hung from the ceiling around the room. Charlie, my friend who leads worship, wears a goatee that protrudes several inches off his face. When projected on the screen, his scruffy chin whiskers must have been 15 feet in height. It was a surreal experience to see the face of someone so familiar transformed into something so incredibly public.

More than a decade later, concerns about the cult-of-personality should be so glaringly evident. Apparently they aren’t. Video screens are everywhere—in the lobbies and worship spaces of larger churches today.

The cult-of-personality around worship leaders and celebrity preachers is only part of my concerns. Yet tearing apart an arena rock worship music extravaganza is easy. Add sensationalism, emotionalism and sentimentalism to the cult-of-personality and it is easy to check the Passion movement off your list of things to bother paying attention to.

I am prone to disparaging certain sections of evangelicalism. I am guilty of gross cynicism, of being dismissive and condescending. Yet the Passion movement continues to pique my interest if only because it has such a large reach. Whether some of us like it or not, the Passion movement and its counterparts like Hillsong of Australia and Jesus Culture of Redding, California—these movements are shaping the spiritual lives of hundreds of thousands of Christians around the world.

So I log onto the live stream of Passion 2013 conflicted. My charismatic self is drawn in. I imagine that if I were in attendance I could lose myself in the enormous, collective worship catharsis. I listen to Louie Giglio encourage the gathered to wait in God’s presence. I want that. I want to experience the tangible presence of the living God.

My reformed self is overwhelmed and distracted by the spectacle. Why are there so many people singing and dancing with hand-held microphones on such a large obstacle-course looking stage? Can these smiling faces and raised hands sincerely be that eager to worship? I don’t want that. I don’t want to force a smile and participate in a circus.

My charismatic self hears Louie Gigilio rehearse the story of Passion 268. How he’d learned about thousands of young South Korean Christians filling the Olympic stadium in Seoul. How he and his ministry began to pray that this kind revival might spread in America.

My reformed self wonders, if a large revival is happening, if millions of young people decide to follow Jesus, which churches will teach these young Christians how to go to school and work, wake up in the morning and keep track of the details of their lives with integrity and wisdom?

My charismatic self wants to witness God do something beyond anything I could ever ask or imagine.

My reformed self wants to rest in the witness of what God has already done in and through the church that is beyond anything I could have ever asked or imagined.

My charismatic self considers that with such a large number of voices, this might indeed be a glimpse of what heaven’s eternal worship will be like.

My reformed self hopes that there will be no video screens in heaven.