Testing Tolerance

Until now I have tried to stay above the fray involving Chick-fil-A.  I post this only to say that the main point of an editorial in today's The New York Times strikes me as correct:  Government officials, such as the mayors of Boston and Chicago, the Speaker of the New York City Council, and an alderman of Chicago, ought not to discriminate against a lawful business enterprise on the basis of the personal views of the business owner.  Those officials have said that they would block additional expansion of Chick-fil-A franchises in their jurisdictions.

The editors at the Times, as well as NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg, hold a view of the permissible parties involved in and the moral nature of marriage that is opposed to that of Chick-fil-A owner Dan Cathy.  What they both accurately recognize, however, is that the public relations campaign and business threats by government officials against Mr. Cathy amount to intolerance of his religious beliefs and his entitlement both to hold and to express them.  As Mr. Bloomberg is quoted in the editorial as saying, “You can’t have a test for what the owners’ personal views are before you decide to give a [business] permit to do something in the city.”

The Chicago and Boston mayors', the NYC councilwoman's, and the Chicago alderman's views are intolerant because they seek to deny public rights (the rights to pursue property and lawful enterprise) as an attempt to censure private rights (the rights to free religious belief, free speech, and liberty of conscience).  These officials may attempt this in protest to, or as an expression of disagreement about, some other closely-held matter, but they are still intolerant.

And they are intolerant, moreover, because they deny in practice something at the heart of political liberalism, the fact of reasonable pluralism.  In a contemporary democratic society, John Rawls observes, the fact of reasonable pluralism is "the fact of profound and irreconcilable differences in citizens' reasonable comprehensive religious and philosophical conceptions of the world, and in their views of the moral and aesthetic values to be sought in human life" (Rawls, Justice as Fairness, 3).  The government officials do this -- deny in effect the fact of reasonable pluralism -- precisely by seeking to banish from their political communities (because they cannot be tolerated) those who differ in moral and civic viewpoints from them.  They do not accept profound and irreconcilable differences in worldview; they wish to eliminate them.  The officials make no room for public debate about how to balance in the community all agreed upon liberties with those that may be disputed.  In fact, they make little to no room for the exponents themselves who hold and express differing viewpoints.

In this vein, a creative thought experiment was narrated by Mona Charen in a column that she titled "Al-Rahim and Chicago Values."  She describes a situation in which a Muslim business owner of convenience stores articulates to a Muslim periodical his belief in the traditional, Quranic view of marriage, which is a man's having not more than four wives.  Apparently this differs from the view of marriage held by the mayors of Chicago and Boston, who go on record that they will do all within their power to prevent him from opening up more convenience stores in their cities, because his personal beliefs about heterosexual matrimony are at odds with their and their cities' approach to marriage and civil unions.  What would the response be to this Muslim man's comments?

This is a thought experiment, because it is retelling the story of Mr. Cathy as Mr. Al-Rahim, the story of a Christian businessman's expression of his personal viewpoint as the story of a Muslim's.  As Ms. Charen explains, "Rahim is an invention to illustrate the selective outrage of liberal Democrats. It is simply impossible to imagine that liberal Democrats would treat affirmations of Muslim faith with the kind of bullying that Cathy and Chick-fil-A have received.  Yet Islam is at least as doctrinally tough on homosexuality as Christianity is, and considerably tougher in practice."

The fact of reasonable pluralism, as Prof. Rawls understands it, is an unavoidable fixture of contemporary democratic republics such as the one in the United States.  It is also, as the present brouhaha attests, difficult to navigate in conjunction with a commitment to the core and treasured liberties of the moderns:  freedom of thought, speech, property ownership, and liberty of conscience.  (I borrow the phrase "liberties of the moderns" from Prof. Rawls; see Justice as Fairness, 140-45.)  As much as definitions of fairness still need to be clarified carefully, about which I wrote in a previous post, so, too, does the concept of tolerance.

Tolerance of a belief is not the same as acceptance of that belief.  In my view, however, in common, everyday practice, tolerance has become in many people's minds synonymous with conforming to, or acceptance of, their viewpoint.  This conception of tolerance is the converse of the popular conception of intolerance:  If you accept my view about P, then you are tolerant; if you do not accept -- do not agree with, do not conform to -- my view about P, then you are intolerant.  Disagreement is designated intolerance; reasonable difference of opinion is often quickly labeled bigotry.

But this popular conception, where it prevails, not only may serve as easy ad hominem argumentation.  This conception evacuates tolerance of all its meaning, for tolerance assumes non-acceptance.  It presupposes disagreement.  It says that a differing viewpoint and the one who holds it are not to be excluded from public discourse and the public square.  Reasonable disagreement will be endured and respected -- tolerated.  By contrast, to be intolerant is to be unwilling to grant equal freedom of expression or to penalize people unjustly for making free expressions.

The fact of reasonable pluralism tests real and workable conceptions of tolerance.  We may not agree with the fictional Mr. Al-Rahim's endorsement of traditional, Quranic marriage.  We may object to the real-life Mr. Cathy's advocacy of traditional marriage as a conjugal union.  These sorts of expression of speech and conviction of conscience are rights protected by the Constitution and enshrined as Constitutional essentials.

What we may not do, however, is this.  In advocating for fairness for all, we may not practice a selective view of fairness for some.  In an attempt to prevent certain Muslims and Christians from supposedly treating a group as separate but equal (for so goes the argument for same-sex "marriage"), we may not treat these Muslims and Christians themselves as separate but equal.  We may not, in other words, claim that they are equal but seek to separate them from our civic and business life.

But this is what the mayors of Chicago and Boston have done.  They say, "You may have your beliefs, but you cannot pursue your conception of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in our community through your business enterprise.  You are equal, but you must remain separate from us.  We can discriminate, but you cannot."  In so doing, that is, by practicing a real separate-but-equal approach to matters of freedom of speech and lawful employment, these officials have undermined their professed moral justification for same-sex marriage on the basis of the same, namely, ending a purported practice of separate but equal.

Whether, in fact, the debate about the definition of marriage admits, as some parties believe, the separate but equal line from Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) is another matter.  The black community, for instance, does not on the whole view the subject in that light, and they might be positioned better than others to know separate but equal when they see it.  Separate but equal sounds nice; it is a powerful sound bite with a known civil rights pregnancy; but I am not sure that upon closer inspection it fully applies.  The debate about marriage seems to me fundamentally about the wisdom and propriety of redefining -- and thereby changing -- an indispensable cultural/civil (and arguably religious) institution, as well as about the moral consequences entailed by such a redefinition.

Be that as it may, the mayoral hubbub about Chick-fil-A demonstrates the ways in which so-called tolerance is frequently championed but inconsistently practiced.  For calling out what would amount to unjust policing and penalizing of law-abiding citizens and businesses for protected First Amendment rights, The New York Times editorial board is to be commended.

Conjugal Haves and Have-nots

In Sunday's The New York Times on July 15 appeared an article by Jason DeParle on "the way family structure deepens class divides."  Among the observations is that children in two-parent homes tend to fare better than children in single-parent homes.

Much of this faring well is understood in the article economically:  "striking changes in family structure [in the U.S. over recent decades] have also broadened income gaps and posed new barriers to upward mobility."  Mr. DeParle continues, albeit in a somewhat attention-grabbing, Marx-related way of articulating these descriptive trends:

Estimates vary widely, but scholars have said that changes in marriage patterns -- as opposed to changes in individual earnings -- may account for as much as 40 percent of the growth in certain measures of inequality.  Long a nation of economic extremes, the United States is also becoming a society of family haves and family have-nots, with marriage and its rewards evermore confined to the fortunate classes.

This is empirically revealing and helpful data for informed debate.  But is marriage really "confined" to one segment of society in the sense that it is out of reach, or in the sense that a man and woman who wish to marry are not permitted to do so?

It may be the case, as Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, says, that “[i]t is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged.”  So the main question in my mind is, Why are not people marrying who might stand to benefit in numerous ways by so doing?

Education level is cited as a factor correlated to one's state of marriage and parenthood.  The more educated a woman is, the less likely she is to have a child out of wedlock.   A racial correlation exists but is decreasing.  Multiple factors are interrelated, to be sure.  I wonder, however, if the view of one of the subjects of Mr. DeParle's story about income levels and family structure is closest to the mark:  “I’m in this position because of decisions I made.” 

These are not the words of a privileged outsider looking in on someone less wealthy.  These are not the words of controversial sociologist Charles Murray, who argues in his most recent book that moral decline is responsible for matrimonial decline.  (That book is reviewed in the NYT and WSJ; also available are a chat with readers, an op-ed, and summary essay.)  These are the words of someone who is actually and personally affected -- by the decisions that she says that she made.

All of this brings to mind a topic from a previous post on poverty.  In it, I reproduced a statement by Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution.  His main point in recent Congressional testimony is that certain behavior is an extremely accurate predictor of adult poverty or, alternately, of general economic success:  "Young people can virtually assure that they and their families will avoid poverty if they follow three elementary rules for success -- complete at least a high school education, work full time, and wait until age 21 and get married before having a baby."

Consider these statements from the article in the Times, which are congruous with Mr. Haskin's remarks:

• "Nearly half the unmarried parents living together at a child’s birth split up within five years."
• "Marital decline compounds economic woes, since it leaves the needy to struggle alone."
• "Forty years ago, the top and middle income thirds had virtually identical family patterns: more than 95 percent of households with children in either tier had two parents in the home. Since then the groups have diverged, according to [two researchers] Mr. Western and Ms. Shollenberger: 88 percent at the top have two parents, but just 71 percent do in the middle." [A different but related research finding is depicted in the nearby chart.]
• "While many studies have found that children of single parents are more likely to grow up poor, less is known about their chances of advancement as adults. But there are suggestions that the absence of a father in the house makes it harder for children to climb the economic ladder."

In other previous posts (two in May, here and here; and one in April), I also commented on family matters.

Upon continuing reflection, two important considerations occur to me.  One is that the heightened contemporary concern about income discrepancy among Americans, the so-called haves and have-nots, may be legitimate, but it may need to be examined and discussed from a wider perspective than purely monetary differences.  Mr. DeParle's article serviceably suggests that conjugal differences are related to income differences.  To put a finer point on the broader perspective that may be required, increasingly cultural or lifestyle or -- may we actually say it -- moral differences, too, must be brought into the conversation about differences in income levels.

In addition, our examinations and analyses will benefit if we can move beyond the passive victim explanation (i.e., "Those people over there wholly did this to me!").  We may not be able to be content either with the opposite, active agent explanation (i.e., "You did this completely to yourself!").  The proper weighting of these two reasons for a certain state of affairs may be difficult in general to quantify.  Neither may be the whole story.  Both, however, passive and active, object and subject, victim and agent, explanations are relevant.  Still, in the public debate, more room than currently seems popularly acceptable may need to be made at the table for the this-is-a-result-of-your-choices element.

In so saying, I do not wish to be misunderstood.  Environmental factors beyond one's control do often influence the opportunities (or the perception one has of opportunities) about which one may make active decisions and in light of which one may pursue certain goals.  Examples may include being born into a family in a violent neighborhood, which entails pressures that limit educational possibilities, or being born to a parent who has few inhibitions, which leads to destructive effects that harm the child.

However, it seems equally obvious that individuals do, by and large, voluntarily if not always deliberately make decisions that have undesirable consequences for themselves.  Individuals are not forced but rather choose whether or not to be married.  They choose whether or not to behave in such a way that they may have children out of wedlock at a certain age.  They choose whether or not to commit themselves to the laborious task of reconciling with a spouse in the wake of the contentious situations that arise in a marriage rather than divorcing.  They even choose whether to (behave in such a way as to) complete at least a high school education or to seek full-time employment.  All of these bear on one's financial prospects, income level, and upward mobility.

Why is this view, that an individual's decisions may bear on one's financial situation and that these decisions may be moral in nature, controversial?  Let me offer a few suggestions.

First, a possible reason is the nation's drift in culture, or character.

In the article in the Times, Mr. DeParle remarks, "Across Middle America, single motherhood has moved from an anomaly to a norm with head-turning speed."  The language of anomaly and norm reflects not just frequency of occurrence in the culture, as in a move from uncommon to common, but also a moral acceptance of single motherhood in the culture, as in a move from not acceptable to acceptable.  If single motherhood does not carry the same social stigma, then that is because single motherhood is not viewed with the same moral disapprobation as previously.  Whether this is because divorce, too, is more common and less stigmatized that earlier, or because reproductive technology is more accessible to more people, or because the sheer number of single parents makes it hard for people who know single parents to be critical of them, or even because being critical itself is frowned upon -- all of these things reflect both changing behaviors and a changing attitude toward matters of morality.

Answers to questions -- and the questions themselves -- are different.  What shape should a nuclear family take?  What sort of commitment does one actually make in marriage?  What is marriage?  What sort of family structure both is appropriate to and should best foster becoming a parent and discharging that loving, sacrificial duty?  If I wish to be a mother but marriageable men are hard to come by, perhaps because men lack the desired and necessary moral qualities or character, should I go it alone through a means like sperm donorship and in vitro fertilization?  A positive answer assumes that one has the means to pay for the technological procedure.

Or in the case of many inner cities, where poverty and violence are more common, if I have the same desire for a child and find few or no marriageable men not only because of the previous reasons but also because they are unemployed or incarcerated or dead, do I just have a child with my current boyfriend outside of marriage?  This potential answer, of course, assumes something about the permissibility of pre-marital sex, itself a moral topic about which society's public moral opinion has changed.  Pre-marital sex used to be frowned upon; now it is expected. 

The family is a sphere of life that is inherently moral in nature.  In families we confront the messiness of human relationships; we realize the power of human sexuality, which connects us most intimately with another human; we find our notions of and capacities for commitment, sympathy, fairness, patience, and self-control tested.  Insofar as marriage is integral to family structure, which inescapably entails these things, marriage also, and any conception or pursuit of it, is moral in nature. 

This drift, first of individual behavior in community and then society's view of it, involves unavoidably the social conception of what is in fact moral.  I mean "what is in fact moral" in the sense both of what is a moral matter and what is the proper way in which one ought to think or act about a particular matter.  Both have broadly changed.
 

Second, and closely related, this morphed view of what is moral does not include cultural "lifestyles" or has relativized them.  For this reason, so-called lifestyle choices are deemed irrelevant to the morality inherent in the income debate.  To introduce them is to make a contested move.

If it is controversial that an individual's decisions may bear on one's financial situation and that these decisions may be moral in nature, then this may be because activities like pre-marital sex, cohabitation, and single-parenthood are not viewed as moral matters.  Where they are viewed as moral matters, they tend, as I have suggested, to be viewed as equally morally acceptable alternatives to abstinence, marriage as a conjugal union, and two-parent households.  This shapes politically correct debate.  These behaviors, in other words, are either off-limits (because they not seen as ethical in nature) or accepted (because ethical standards have been flattened).  It is perhaps because they are accepted that they are off-limits.  Certain family-related behavior is not illegitimate, but criticizing another lifestyle is impermissible.  "You just don't do that these days."  This is the new morality.

The nature of the family and its role in the social fabric used to be expected; now raising questions about variations from that previous expectation is frowned upon. 

Third, accompanying the drift in the nation's culture and its reconfiguration of what is moral has been a greater abdication of individual responsibility and a tendency to assign blame to other agents.

In a previous post, I drew attention to a suggestion made by Roger Scruton about his perception of growing ingratitude.  According to his (quite sensible) view, when one receives something by grace, gratitude follows; when one receives something by justice, ingratitude follows.  Grace is understood as an undeserved gift; justice is understood as an expected right.

In American society over the last fifty years (and even longer), more citizens receive monetary assistance of some kind from the federal government in greater amounts than in previous generations.  These distributions are made in the name of justice.  The discourse about them focuses on the distributions, and often prejudges them, as rights, a supposed right to health care, for instance.  They are even referred to in the federal budget as "entitlements."  Slowly and sometimes not-so-subtly the culture's assumptions about its own nature shift in this direction, too.  The way in which I think about what I have in life, or should have in life, increasingly includes a component of that which I expect to receive from others owing to a form of justice.

Entailed in this evolving mentality is a diminished, although not obliterated, sense of individual responsibility and local community.  Entailed also, on the other hand, is a magnified, although not total, sense of third-party (often state) responsibility for the national community.  When I do not have what I expect to have by right (and often I may confuse what I wish to have and what I ought to have by certain just deserts), I find fault with some third party.  I blame someone else.  This is usually the third party that I believe is supposed to guarantee my rights (the state).  It also often is the entity that I believe is preventing me from receiving what I suppose, whether by desire or justice, is now rightfully mine (the state and/or an economic system or a party or an industry or a company or a person).

How does this relate to conjugal haves and have-nots?  Recall that the discussion about income discrepancies in the United States generally takes place at the level of those who have agency, those who earn X and those who earn Y.  This is helpful to recall because the argument that I am trying to make is a moral one, namely, that an individual's decisions may bear on one's financial situation and that these decisions may be moral in nature.  When we speak of rights or what ought to be the case, we are squarely in the moral sphere.  Assigning blame is a moral action and reflects a moral judgment.

A curious irony exists.  The fact of disparity in income levels is presented as a moral issue (e.g., "I am not receiving what I ought to receive"), but it is often also seen as illegitimate and prejudicial to explain that disparity by way of other moral issues (e.g., the consequences of individual moral choices and habits some of which relate to family and sexuality).  Put the other way around, why is it legitimate to cast the disparity in income levels among persons in society as driven by immorality (greed, exploitation, cronyism) but illegitimate to offer as a contributing factor other forms of immorality (lack of self-control, failures of duty, infidelity)?

I suspect that one answer, not far off the mark, is that the former immorality (greed, exploitation, cronyism) is committed by other agents but the latter (lack of self-control, failures of duty, infidelity) are committed by the persons with the lower income levels who claim to be hurt by the greedy, exploiting cronies.

What we find, then, is a propensity to criticize but not an openness to be criticized.  We can "call out" other people's immorality, but we cannot bear to have them call out our own.  We moralize selectively.  Whether this is perhaps another moral shift in culture, or just intrinsic to human nature, it is strikingly reflected in contemporary American individual character, at least at the level of public debate.

Why is a moral understanding of the matter important?  What is gained by identifying morality as involved in the descriptive relationship between marital and parental situation, on the one hand, and financial situation, on the other?

One benefit is that a moral understanding allows us consistently to hold together both passive and active causes of the income gap.  Not only may an individual in some sense be on the short receiving end of some other group's morally dubious actions, but also individuals are in a real sense active agents in producing their own financial state of affairs.   The former covers the "I'm not receiving what I ought to receive" notion; the latter covers the "these are some of the consequences of your individual moral choices and habits" idea.  When we see both elements as moral, we may open up to better view than if we do not the nature of the problem, its origins, and potential remedies.

A second benefit is that we can thereby more acutely perceive the effect of the morality of public culture on public debate -- and we can talk more openly about that effect.

Public culture, what is accepted within a community, does imply notions of personhood and society to which persons and society should aim.  These are goals of the group, and as goals they function as constraining norms.  In this way we see that public culture influences behavior, which leads to consequences both for persons and for the group.

This is a significant observation that is all too often dismissed when it is claimed that culture is neutral.  Usually that happens when culture is influencing ideas and behavior in the way that a partisan likes.  In Justice as Fairness, John Rawls, the towering figure of modern political liberalism, writes:  "We suppose, as a general fact of commonsense political sociology, that those who grow up in a well-ordered society will, in good part, form their conception of themselves as citizens from the public culture and from the conceptions of persons and society implicit in it" (122).  Political liberals and conservatives both understand this "general fact":  Culture's influence is always operative; that influence is powerful; and it powerfully influences identity and morals.

If the current debate about the sources of income gaps and class stratification is lopsidedly moral, namely, to the passive/victim/environmental explanation, then the lopsidedness itself says something noteworthy about the morals of the culture that the nature of the debate reflects.  Less cumbersomely put, the focus of the debate reflects the prevailing moral disposition of the culture.  In this case, the moral disposition may be a decided shift to rights-based thinking, enlarging statist institutions, moral blame-shifting, and ingratitude.  Whether this is entirely accurate, we should, at the very least, pause to ponder whether how people conceive of themselves and of society is true to other moral sentiments that we may have (we might not be consistent), or that it may be legitimate to have (we might not have a monopoly on morality).

In writing this, specifically about a possible marked shift of this sort, I wish to be clear.  I am speaking of the broad culture, not of every individual.  Indeed, as we will remember, the lead subject in Mr. DeParle's article says of her situation:  “I’m in this position because of decisions I made.”   

I do hope that these reflections add some balance to what I see as an uneven public debate.  The element of individual responsibility is not only marginalized in the media; it is also frequently vilified or scorned, as are those who suggest it.  In asking why some moral elements are permitted in public discourse and others are not, I am not only pointing out an inconsistency; I am also suggesting that something valuable is lost in our understanding of real social situations like marriage and sexual behavior.  That something valuable but lost is recognition of a more holistic moral dimension that is inherent in social life.

A Taxing Problem

Ari Fleischer writes in an op-ed in Monday's The Wall Street Journal about the latest Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report on U.S. taxation.  Mr. Fleischer discusses this in connection with the presidential campaign rhetoric about the income tax system.  He produces a graph, similar to a table produced recently by Harvard's Greg Mankiw, that helpfully illustrates the actual distribution of taxes paid by income level.

Mr. Fleischer's main point is this:  "If fairness in paying taxes means the amount you pay is based on the amount you make, then the only group in America paying at least a 'fair share' is the top 20% — people who make more than $74,000. For everyone else, the tax code is a bargain."  He substantiates his position based on a comparison of data that is summarized in the following graphic.

Based on the CBO report, Mr. Fleischer examines "the top 20% of income earners (over $74,000).  They make 50% of the nation's income but pay nearly 70% of all federal taxes.  The remaining 30% of the tax burden is borne by 80% of the taxpayers, those who make less than $74,000. In short, this group's share of taxes paid, 30%, is lower than the share of income they earn, 50%."

He compares not just income level to percentage of federal taxes paid in the period under review (through 2009).  He also tries to put this into historical perspective:

the share of taxes paid by the top 20% has gone up over the last 30 years, while the share of taxes paid by everyone else has gone down. … The top 20% in 1979 made 44.9% of the nation's income and paid 55.3% of all federal taxes. Thirty years later, the top 20% made 50.8% of the nation's income and their share of federal taxes paid had jumped to 67.9%. … Meanwhile, the federal tax burden on middle- and lower-income earners is lighter. In 1979, the bottom 20% paid barely any taxes at all, just 2.1%. Now their share of taxes is a minuscule 0.3%.

I doubt that the data that Mr. Fleischer presents will be disputed.  What will be disputed is his interpretation of the data.  It is important to remind ourselves of this distinction (data and interpretation of it), even generally, because it will help to clarify the moral issues that are debated and thereby to promote improved public discourse.

Although I sympathize with the perspective that Mr. Fleischer advances, I also think that he misses something critical to the ongoing national conversation about monetary and tax "fairness."  This is a complicated topic, but let me offer one observation.

When the president and others object to the current tax system on the grounds that many citizens do not pay "their fair share," they are objecting, among other things, not just to the rate at which certain citizens pay taxes (that the rate is too low) but also to the level of income on which taxes are paid (that the level is too high).  It is both the tax rate and income level, taken together and with a view to a certain social end, that is viewed as unfair.

To say the same thing slightly differently, the issue in question is both the progressivity of the tax system and the spread between income levels.  The wide spread between income levels now versus thirty years ago -- that is, the difference in earned income between the top and bottom quintiles -- may in fact be what prompts the outcry for greater progressivity in taxation than prevails at present.  (This income discrepancy, by the way, is not a uniquely American phenomenon.)  

I suspect that if the spread were narrower, then demands for greater tax fairness might be more muted.  If some people did not make so much more money than others, then the issue might not seem in certain quarters to be so problematic.

This is important to note.  It is a sense of unfairness about the spread between income levels that is effectively prior to -- and therefore it is this that motivates -- the sense of unfairness about the spread between average tax rates and share of income taxes paid.  The widening income gap seems to some to be wrong (unfair); so current taxes paid on the high levels of income also seem to be wrong (unfair).  At issue, in other words, is the understanding of fairness itself.

Mr. Fleischer himself seems to recognize this, which is why he begins the op-ed in the way that he does, namely, by proposing one understanding of fairness:  that "the amount you pay is based on the amount you make."  This is fairness as equity.

His construction helps him to make his case, since he presents his data in light of that construction.  He spotlights disparities in taxation relative to earnings.  He, too, identifies unfairness; however, it seems to him to be "unfair" to those who have higher incomes.  It is not unfair because they have higher incomes.

When viewed thusly, Mr. Fleischer's objection may not be to progressivity itself but to the degree of progressivity:  that discrepancy in taxation is out of proportion to the discrepancy in income earned; it is too progressive; this spread is too wide.  It is not equitable.  The increase in the amount of taxes paid is greater than the increase in the amount of the nation's income earned.  (See the nearby table.)
 

But others will object that "fairness" is not really or ultimately to be conceived in terms of the amount of tax that one pays compared to the amount that one earns.  If it is, Mr. Fleischer will probably win the argument on that assumption along the lines of his op-ed.  According to his detractors, however, fairness is not a matter of proportionality in Mr. Fleischer's sense, whether proportionality of contributions or proportionality according to merit.  The driving sense of fairness on their view is not one of fairness as equity, but fairness as equality.

On this view, fairness is that system which leads to more equal social outcomes regardless of contributions or merit.  (In some versions it may perhaps be fairness precisely in contradistinction to them.)  It is fair to tax people differently, often very differently, if it is done with the goal of making more equal the primary goods of income and wealth (often through federal programs) across society but especially among those defined as the least advantaged.

This view, as I have articulated it, echoes that advanced by John Rawls, justice as fairness, a theory in which what he calls the "difference principle" operates:  "the difference principle requires that however great the inequalities in wealth and income may be, and however willing people are to work to earn their greater shares of output, existing inequalities must contribute effectively to the benefit of the least advantaged.  Otherwise, the inequalities are not permissible" (John Rawls:  Justice as Fairness:  A Restatement, 64; see also 122-24).

According to Prof. Rawls, the operative principle is not equity but his own special brand of reciprocity.  (I say that it is special because reciprocity is usually, is ordinarily, an in-kind exchange between two parties, whereas that in view in Prof. Rawls's theory involves unlike transfers among multiple parties.)  A controlling idea, then, in Prof. Rawls's view of justice, which has been in the air that many government officials have breathed for the last forty years since he first proposed it in 1971, has to do with acceptable differences across society as judged by a notion of reciprocity.  And it is this notion of reciprocity that sheds light on one current group's sense of fairness:

To sum up:  the difference principle expresses the idea that, starting from equal division, the more advantaged are not to be better off at any point to the detriment of the less well off.  But since the difference principle applies to the basic structure, a deeper idea of reciprocity implicit in it is that social institutions are not to take advantage of contingencies of native endowment, or of initial social position, or of good or bad luck over the course of life, except in ways that benefit everyone, including the least favored.  This represents a fair undertaking between the citizens seen as free and equal with respect to those inevitable contingencies. (124)

Professor Rawls advances this notion of justice as reciprocity, or fairness, by way of a thought experiment:  what sort of society would representatives behind a veil of ignorance choose to create in a hypothetical original position?  Policymakers advance something akin to this notion of justice as fairness not in an original position but at a different stage; they regulate society that is in its current position with constitutional essentials already settled.  The goal of many current policymakers is, with reciprocity as a guiding light, to make progress toward the ideal through social and economic legislation and through the administration of related rules (see 47-49).

When politicians say that they only want the group with greater monetary wealth to pay its fair share of taxes, they do not refer to the statistics that Mr. Fleischer adduces.  They appeal, instead, to a moral idea that is not dissimilar to that of Prof. Rawls's, even if it is not directly dependent on his teaching.  The moral idea is that such a wide discrepancy in income as exists now between the top 20% of earners and the bottom 20% of earners -- which has widened over the last thirty years -- is permissible if and only if the wealth amassed by the top 20% works to the greatest benefit of those in the bottom 20%.

These politicians believe that such a benefit has not been realized.  Because the more advantaged seem to be better off to the detriment of the least advantaged, it follows for them that unfairness exists and that greater taxation is a justified means of producing fairness.  And fairness is what would be to the greatest benefit of the least well-off.  Increased taxation -- which is a form of coercive state power -- on one group of society is a justified means of producing "fair undertakings," or just plain fairness, for the rest or whole of society.  Hence, "fair share" on this view is the share that secures a fair distribution of monetary goods across society.

The debate about taxation, precisely because it is tethered to the ongoing debate about the best American political scheme for the future, is not going away soon.  It is therefore critically important to make explicit the assumptions about what is fair that are often unarticulated but that are nevertheless powerfully at work in people's thinking and speaking.  Taxation is a material manifestation of a more formal matter:  competing conceptions of fairness.

Until and unless we engage each other candidly at the formal level, inquiring sincerely about a person's view of fairness and pressing respectfully why that person believes in this sense of fairness and not another, we will be fruitlessly volleying material arguments back and forth.

Forcing the Issue

Today's The New York Times runs with a front-page story on forced abortions in China.  A woman is pictured whose child at around 36 weeks (a universally recognized point of viability) was killed by Chinese officials.  (Supposedly third-trimester terminations are illegal in this woman's province.)  The article reports on the growing push by some segments to end the policy.

The Chinese government insists that it will maintain its one-child policy, which was begun in 1980 and is a cause of many terminations in China.  The government attributes the policy to avoiding 400 million births.  Assuming that only 1 out of every 1,000 -- that is, only 0.1% -- avoided births were so avoided by termination of the child, that still amounts to 400,000 deaths.

That amount of deaths might garner "epidemic" status if the issue were different, say, West Nile virus.  That hypothetical figure of 400,000, as large as it is, still is less than one-half of the actual number of abortions performed in the United States each year, for example, about 860,000 in 2006 which were aided by publicly funded family planning services.  For comparison, the Rawandan genocide in 1994 involved the murder of an estimated 800,000 people.  That was genocide and in one year, not a "political disagreement" and per annum.  Maybe the problem in China is an epidemic; apparently it is not at home.  To the child in utero, however, that abortion to end life is, well, forced.

The Job of Grammar

Kyle Wiens has written a sensible article on the importance of grammar:  "I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar.  Here's Why." 

Yes; people like Mr. Wiens do exist in the real world.  I know folks who will shy away from doing business with people who make grammar mistakes in introductory e-mails.  These folks also do not look favorably upon job applicants who make the same blunders.

Mr. Wiens touches on the import of grammar, that it reflects something more fundamental about a person than mental skill, when he writes:  "Grammar signifies more than just a person's ability to remember high school English.  I've found that people who make fewer mistakes on a grammar test also make fewer mistakes when they are doing something completely unrelated to writing — like stocking shelves or labeling parts."

That something more is both self-control and dependability.  These are ethical qualities.  Someone who does not write according to whim but follows conventions in order to communicate clearly with others in the same society typically may be relied upon to follow instructions and discharge one's duty.

Grammar sticklers care about more than just good grammar; they care about good character.

Making Sense of Wilson, pt. 2: Sympathy

In part 1 of this series of my reflections on James Q. Wilson's book The Moral Sense, I summarized the book's main aims and shared a few of the most salient points that I found of conceptual and practical value.  In this post, I begin to tackle the book's second section, which examines four key moral sentiments:  sympathy, fairness, self-control, and duty.  Specifically I focus on sympathy.

As preparation for a review of moral senses such as sympathy, it may be helpful to recall what Prof. Wilson is and is not doing by exploring these sentiments:

I am not trying to discover "facts" that will prove "values"; I am endeavoring to uncover the evolutionary, developmental, and cultural origins of our moral habits and our moral sense. But in discovering these origins, I suspect that we will encounter uniformities; and by revealing uniformities, I think that we can better appreciate what is general, nonarbitrary, and emotionally compelling about human nature.  (26)

In the chapters on the four moral sentiments, Prof. Wilson does just this.  He weaves together the evolutionary, developmental, and cultural origins of these respective moral habits and senses.  In doing so, I find his descriptive observations -- which are helpful in their own right as an organizing heuristic for thinking about moral matters -- to pull me toward practical considerations and action.

I offered a few remarks on sympathy, "the human capacity for being affected by the feelings and experiences of others" (30), in the earlier post.  It helped to exemplify the basic approach to the subject that Prof. Wilson takes.  Sympathy, like the other sentiments, functions in human life as both a motivation for moral action and a standard for it.  A few other brief notes are worth mentioning.

In all of his chapters on the sentiments, if to varying extents, Mr. Wilson explores the relevance of evolutionary biology on the moral sense in view.  The theory of inclusive fitness, advanced by William Hamilton after Charles Darwin, fills out the latter's theory of a species' successful self-propagation over time:  "An individual is reproductively successful to the extent that his genes occur in the next generation, and he can assure that occurrence not only by reproducing himself but also by assisting in the reproduction of individuals who have his genes" (41).

Professor Wilson admits that this theory might explain why we humans sacrifice ourselves for our kin, but it does not go very far in explaining why we humans are willing to sacrifice ourselves for our grandmother, who is past childbearing age and cannot deposit genes to future generations.  It also does not explain why we may rush into a burning building to save a dog or adopted children, with whom we have no genetic similarity (42).

Maybe the notion of reciprocal altruism can help:  "we engage in altruistic acts -- such as helping nonrelatives, caring for adopted children, or being affectionate toward pets -- in order to impress others with our dependability and hence to increase our opportunities to have profitable exchanges with these others" (43).  Mr. Wilson points out that as an explanation this utilitarian idea has truth elements to commend it, but a more basic motivation -- "a prior, dominant fact" (44) -- must be recognized.  We more basically value reciprocity in human relationships to which we are naturally drawn because we fear isolation and loneliness and we value human sociable companionship.  This human trait governs the theory of altruism, and it is at the heart of sympathy.

What can be said about evolution and sympathy, then, is this:  "If sympathy is widespread, it must have been adaptive, but what was selected for is a generalized trait that both encourages reproductive fitness and stimulates sympathetic behavior.  That trait, or adaptive mechanism, is attachment or affiliative behavior" (44; emphasis original).

We are naturally more sympathetic to those to whom we are most similar.  Humans naturally think of themselves first in terms of a small group (a nuclear family, an extended kinship, a local community, religious group), but we can imagine ourselves as part of a larger sphere and, with extra effort, behave sympathetically toward those who differ from us in race, religion, and culture.  Earlier, Prof. Wilson makes the keen insight that "life-styles" today is the nonjudgmental word for what used to be called "character," and I might broaden that to say "culture" (7).  This is a point that illumines the linguistic shift which has occurred in morality and permissible moral discourse, on the one hand, and that, on the other, contemporizes the tendency toward small group affiliation, toward those who live life as we do.

Two towering moral philosophers, both Scotsmen, in their own way identified sympathy as either the source of moral sentiments (Adam Smith) or at least as one of the two extremely powerful and basic sources along with utility (David Hume).  Both men viewed moral philosophy as inextricably linked to the study of human nature.  The place of sympathy in the thought of other philosophers could be mentioned, but the central place of it in Smith's and Hume's writings should prompt us to reflect more than we typically do -- or I have done -- on what it is, how it is manifested, and how it might be cultivated.

Sympathy can lead to benevolent feelings and actions, Mr. Wilson notes, but we should not limit sympathy to the rosier side of life:

Sympathy is often expressed by phrases that convey not tenderness or concern, but anger and vengeance.  If we see an abominable act -- say a man laughing while torturing an innocent baby -- our first reaction is not likely to be an expression of sympathy for the child but rage at its tormenter; and this will be true even if it is not our child.  Sympathy is often wrongly portrayed as entirely a tender sentiment:  sympathetic people are sometimes described as soft, warm, or weepy.  They often are; but they are much more than that, and some of the most sympathetic people have no trace of cuddliness in their temperament.  Even so staunch a utilitarian as John Stuart Mill recognized this:  "It is natural to resent and to repel or to retaliate any harm done or attempted against ourselves or against those with whom we sympathize." (40)

If we do not limit sympathy to the soft and warm side of life, then we should perhaps also be prepared to view anger and vengeance as legitimate moral responses that stem from not just a sense of justice but also of sympathy.

In this way, we may also have stumbled upon an important observation:  moral senses such as sympathy and justice are connected.  We may not be able to say (yet) with someone like Adam Smith that sympathy is the primary cause of moral sensibility.  But we recognize that there is interplay between the moral senses.

Moreover, if there is any truth to the commonplace that men and women are different (a truism to which some do in fact object), and if on the whole it is the case that women naturally display the tender and sensitive side of sympathy more than do men, then men would do well to remind themselves that such sympathy may be a manifestation of moral sense.  And it may be a commendable moral expression just as much as the stereotypical male tendency to display the more violent and vengeful side of sympathy.

If they are so tempted, men, in other words, should not diminish women's proclivity to soft sympathy.  Women, likewise, should not diminish men's proclivity to hard sympathy.  Both may be appropriate, admirable actions stemming from a developed moral sense.  If morality is valued, then the various expressions of the moral senses should also be valued.

To be sure, members of each sex can and often do display the moral trait that I have associated as more typical of the other.  The point is not gender stereotypes per se but better mutual appreciation among the sexes.  Professor Wilson's discussion of sympathy, which recognizes its pluriformity, provides men and women enhanced grounds for doing what they already know that they ought to do:  live patiently in an understanding way with one another.  Sympathy has come full circle.

Upgraded from Minimum Wage

It looks as though the New York Knickerbockers will not match the three-year offer that the Houston Rockets recently extended to Jeremy Lin.  This allows the restricted free agent to move to a state without an income tax and to collect $25 million over the next three years.

In a previous post in March, I noted the fact that Mr. Lin, a Harvard alumnus who is presumably smart enough not to squander his new wealth like so many athletes, was at the time making the NBA's paltry league minimum for his tenure, $800,000 per annum:

Lin's "minimum wage," given an 82 game season, is $9,756 per game, which itself is 48 minutes.  So that is equivalent to $12,195.12/hour for game time (assuming Lin plays the entire game, which he doesn't).  By contrast, the current regular minimum wage in the U.S. is $7.25/hour.

For the next two years, Mr. Lin will make $5,000,000 per year, which by the same metric as above comes to $76,219.51 per hour.  In the third year of his contract, Mr. Lin will earn $25,000,000, which translates into $228,658.54 per hour.  The federal minimum wage remains $7.25 per hour.

The Knicks might have balked at that $25 million over three years amount in the end, although according to a July 5th Tweet by ESPN's Marc Stein:  "Source with knowledge of Knicks' thinking: 'They will match any offer on Lin up to 1 billion dollars.'"  One billion dollars ended up being too much, I suppose -- not that too many people would have actually cared.  Only the Knicks seem to care about $30 million, and that because it does not want to pay a tax for exceeding the league's salary cap.

The point I made in my prior post still stands, only more so now.  It is that temporary tent-dwellers will raise a hue and cry over, for instance, Jamie Dimon's base salary of $1.5 million as CEO of J.P. Morgan in 2011.  Curiously, that happens to be less than twice that of Mr. Lin's NBA approved minimum wage last season and, what is more vivid, less than Mr. Lin's new $5 million salary for the coming season.

Masses in Zuccotti Park might raise pitchforks in protest of Mr. Dimon's total compensation in 2011 of $23 million, a vast sum, but a sum still less than the $25 million that Mr. Lin will report to the IRS in three years.  To my knowledge, there are no protests over Mr. Lin's package.

Let's be honest.  Mr. Dimon's job is more demanding than Mr. Lin's.

The former's company employs in Manhattan alone more people than the entire NBA employs worldwide.  And this comparison is still true even if you don't count the NBA layoffs last year, which were 11% of its workforce.  One can argue that Mr. Dimon does not deserve his lofty pay package for steering a financial institution that is systemically important to the global world order.  But one might also argue that Mr. Lin does not deserve his similarly lofty package for the game-time intervals of pleasure that he provides to New York and now to Houston basketball fans.  (Of course, the Wilt Chamberlain example in Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia comes to mind; see pages 160-64.)

Maybe Mr. Lin relieves through his job the stress that Mr. Dimon creates in us through his.  We worry about the financial system, our money, and what might happen if the system breaks down.  We do not worry about the collapse of the NBA in the same way, and watching Mr. Lin juke a defender or drop a trey helps us to forget about the risks associated with the banking sector that will funnel to Mr. Lin his $60,976 per game next season.

Be that as it may, the real question in my mind still is this:  Why is a large compensation package in one industry (finance) more fundamentally objectionable than that in another (sports and entertainment)?  Why is the one protested and the other not?

And what does the fact that one is protested and the other not say about the basic nature of what is being protested?  And about the protesters?

I suppose we should all be happy that Mr. Lin has finally broken free from the enslaving shackles of his minimum wage.

Why bother?

A Friday op-ed by Jay Akasie in The Wall Street Journal and a Sunday op-ed by Ross Douthat in The New York Times both addressed the same topic:  the current state of the Episcopal Church in the United States.  According to both men, the current state is distressing.  What is said of the Episcopal Church could be said of any of the mainline Protestant denominations.

Mr. Douthat's main point is that the less distinctively Christian in teaching mainline, or liberal, Christian churches in this country become, the more they hasten their demise.  Their member ranks and financial giving dwindle.  This is a trend that has been continuing for decades and threatens the very future existence of these bodies.

When, as Mr. Akasie reports of the Episcopal General Convention, "During the day, legislators in the lower chamber, the House of Deputies, and the upper chamber, the House of Bishops, discussed such weighty topics as whether to develop funeral rites for dogs and cats, and whether to ratify resolutions condemning genetically modified foods. Both were approved by a vote...," then it is the case, as Mr. Douthat observes, "Today, by contrast [to a previous era], the leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism."

This observation might be new to the regular readers of the Times.  It is not, however, a subject that is new at all.  In 1923 a Presbyterian minister named J. Gresham Machen published a book the title of which crystallizes his concern:  Christianity and Liberalism.  The conjunction and in the title signifies the difference between the nouns on either side of it.  His concern then was that Protestant churches were being overrun by the Social Gospel movement, which under his examination turned out to be mostly social and little to no gospel:

But one thing is perfectly plain -- whether or no liberals are Christians, it is at any rate perfectly clear that liberalism is not Christianity.  And that being the case, it is highly undesirable that liberalism and Christianity should continue to be propagated within the bounds of the same organization.  A separation between the two parties in the Church is the crying need of the hour. (160)

Dr. Machen's point was essentially that which Mr. Douthat articulates, something that might be colloquially put this way:  "Why bother?"  Why would the world bother with the church if it is little more than an imperfect version of the world?

History has proven in the time since Dr. Machen's publication that the liberals in the world do, on the whole, in fact become less inclined to attend liberal churches.  That is something characteristic of the way that liberalism and its exponents interact with the Christian church.  The world of secular liberalism does a much better job of offering liberalism than the clumsy ways of liberal ecclesiastical bodies trying to resolve a religious identity crisis.

Despite the similarities between Sunday's op-ed in the Times and Christianity and Liberalism, there is a point at which Dr. Machen would disagree with something noted in Mr. Douthat's column.  It is when Mr. Douthat quotes Gary Dorrien, who argues that the exponents of the original Social Gospel movement were much more dogmatic (read: orthodox) than current Protestant liberals.  The impression given is that as a class the first Protestant liberals were both orthodox and sufficiently socially minded.  Professor Dorrien, himself a Protestant liberal, might view the past with a little more nostalgia than all of the evidence warrants.  Mr. Douthat quotes him as saying of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Protestant progressivism:

Its leaders had a “deep grounding in Bible study, family devotions, personal prayer and worship.” They argued for progressive reform in the context of “a personal transcendent God ... the divinity of Christ, the need of personal redemption and the importance of Christian missions.”

That is debatable, and in fact it was debated.  To be sure, Mr. Dorrien's description is true of some Social Gospelers, but it is not necessarily true of them all.  Reading a person's heart is a tricky business.  Interpreting one's doctrinal statement of faith, what is affirmed and denied, is a bit easier.  And it was precisely on this front that Dr. Machen was prompted to pen his book.

It was, in other words, precisely because things like the transcendence of God, the divinity of Christ, and the sole effectiveness of redemption through Jesus' substitutionary atonement were denied that Dr. Machen felt compelled by conviction to, in today's term, "call out" these very denials.  See, for instance, chapter 3, "God and Man," chapter 5, "Christ," and chapter 6, "Salvation." 

About these things, one can disagree, and Dr. Machen was the first to admit as much.  What he desired most was honesty.  He wished for the churches in his day to be clear that the message that it advanced about these subjects was not the historic Christian teaching:

In my little book, Christianity and Liberalism, 1923, I tried to show that the issue in the Church of the present day is not between two varieties of the same religion, but, at bottom, between two essentially different types of thought and life. There is much interlocking of the branches, but the two tendencies, Modernism and supernaturalism, or (otherwise designated) non-doctrinal religion and historic Christianity, spring from different roots. In particular, I tried to show that Christianity is not a "life," as distinguished from a doctrine, and not a life that has doctrine as its changing symbolic expression, but that -- exactly the other way around -- it is a life founded on a doctrine. (Machen, "Christianity in Conflict")

This brings up another point both in Dr. Machen's own writings and in Mr. Douthat's article:  the life that is connected to Christians and their institutions.

It is said, by Mr. Douthat for one, that "[t]he defining idea of liberal Christianity -- that faith should spur social reform as well as personal conversion -- has been an immensely positive force in our national life."  This is not something that people should wish to sacrifice.  That it would be sacrificed if non-liberal versions of Christianity were to be ascendant is a false inference.  It was leveled at confessional Christian churches in the 1920s, just as it is the working assumption today.

One can see from Dr. Machen's own reflection on Christianity and Liberalism that thought and life, or we might say teaching and social outworkings, go together; they are inseparable.  The point that he never ceased to emphasize was just the logical priority of the one to the other.  As he put it, it is "a life founded on a doctrine."

And it is not just the individual life that is in view.  Human institutions, as well, may be positively affected, the very institutions that some fear that a so-called conservative approach to Christianity would ignore.  Once again, Dr. Machen:

It is upon this brotherhood of twice-born sinners, this brotherhood of the redeemed, that the Christian founds the hope of society.  He finds no solid hope in the improvement of earthly conditions, or the molding of institutions under the influence of the Golden Rule.  These things indeed are to be welcomed.  But in themselves their value, to the Christian, is certainly small. ... Human institutions are really to be molded, not by Christian principles of the unsaved, but by Christian men; the true transformation of society will come by the influence of those who have themselves been redeemed.  (158)

Now, what it means to be redeemed and to what end society should be transformed are open to debate, and it is just these two things that were debated as modernism swept through American churches at the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s.

Dr. Machen meant redemption in the historic Christian sense of someone's deserving punishing condemnation by God for rejecting God as God in thought and life, but that person receives, instead, demerited favor because God condemned as a substitute Jesus to whom the sinner is united:  the human is united with Jesus in his death (condemned really but not physically with Jesus on the cross) and in his resurrection (vindicated really now and in the future physically with Jesus in his glorified life in the Spirit).

And Dr. Machen envisioned a societal transformation organically flowing from the charity that became increasingly manifest in the words and actions of those who both were already and were in the process of being transformed by the power of the life-giving Spirit -- the same life-giving Spirit by which Jesus was raised, even redeemed, from the dead.  This is not the redemption that, treasured though it rightly is, an alcoholic experiences by becoming and staying sober.

To note these things does, however, raise a question about terms.  It is not just questions about terms like "redemption" and "transformation" but also about terms like "liberal" and "conservative."  We should admit that these are slippery terms.  They can obscure and hinder conversation perhaps more than they can advance it.  Such terms advance conversation and thinking when they summarize in a word a more involved nexus of ideas and when the defined or connoted summaries are agreed upon by all parties.  That does not always happen today.  These words are often used instead as pejoratives imbued with animosity and unfair attributions.  This is a danger to recognize and to avoid, but I am less sure than perhaps others that the term liberal as Mr. Douthat and even Dr. Machen used it fall into that trap.

The Protestant liberals that Mr. Douthat has in view self-identify as liberals.  They wear their liberalism on their sleeve as a badge, and they don it, often, in their culture wars as a coat of mail.  Typically the self-conception of Protestant liberalism will nod to historic Christian doctrines such as sin and salvation so far as they do not get in the way of the perceived to be more important matter of "social justice" -- the contemporary term for the societal reform and progressivism that Mr. Dorrien identifies.

Or, to put it differently, in view are the denominations as such, not necessarily every member within them.  When Mr. Douthat refers to liberal Protestants and displays the Episcopal Church and its leaders as the poster child, most people generally know what liberal Protestantism is through such an example.  My point is that clarifying terms is important, but the terms in this conversation are filled with sufficient meaning for the conversation to take place without embarking upon a Socratic dialogue to define them.

What is worth embarking upon in dialogue is the relationship between Christian doctrine and its (social) outworkings.  What Dr. Machen predicted was that taken to its conclusion Protestant liberalism ceases to be Christian.  What Mr. Douthat describes is a denomination, the Episcopal Church, whose very identity and life seem troubled by the loss of historic Christian markers and the addition of politically and religiously liberal ones.  How the institutions that persist in promoting distinctively Christian teachings should manifest those professed realities in their lives is another question for another time.

What I wish to emphasize is that the topic of Mr. Douthat's column is not new.  We would do well to heed lessons from a fuller history.

One lesson is the necessary step of identifying the relationship between Christianity and liberalism.  Yes; what is in fact, as I have called it, distinctively Christian is open to debate.  But that debate itself should signal by its very fact that some perceived shift is occurring.  Is an implication of Mr. Douthat's column that the Episcopal Church is showing itself increasingly, because of its self-understood liberalism, to be concerned with matters that are not clearly Christian and are not clear implicates of historic Christianity?  If so, was not this the institution-threatening tendency that Dr. Machen identified in 1920s Presbyterianism?

Another lesson is that the supposed dichotomy between liberalism as leading to admirable social outworkings of Christianity, on the one side, and historic, or "conservative," Christianity as leading to no admirable social outworkings, on the other, is fallacious.  What has always existed is a difference between the two groups on how the beneficial effects of the change of thought and life, change that takes place in individual Christians and that is supposed to be apparent in their institutions, would and should manifest themselves in the body politic and society at large.

It may be that liberalism of an earlier era was more self-consciously focused on doctrine than it is now, but liberalism may not have been thereby more distinctively Christian than it is now.  Both versions, in their own ways, may have been more political, social, and cultural than Christian, as Dr. Machen understood it.  Even many of his contemporaries, although of course not all, agreed that he had reliably represented the liberal viewpoint.

H. L. Mencken, for instance, believed that Doctor Fundamentalis, as he called the Princetonian, was accurate in his depictions of modernist versions of Christianity.  In the Baltimore Evening Sun, the ardent atheist Mr. Mencken noted that liberals within Dr. Machen's denomination had "been trying, in late years to convert the Presbyterian Church into a kind of literary and social club, devoted vaguely to good works" (quoted in D. G. Hart, "J. Gresham Machen and the Problem of Christian Civilization in America," 2; see also Mencken's full obituary).  Who knows?  They might have even debated whether to develop funeral rites for dogs and cats or to condemn certain mass-produced foods.

Because it gets at the matter of individual and corporate refreshment provided by the church and of organic transformation of society that flows from that ministry, it is worth rereading the closing words of Dr. Machen's book:

At the present time, there is one longing of the human heart which is often forgotten -- it is the deep, pathetic longing of the Christian for fellowship with his brethren. ... There are congregations, even in the present age of conflict, that are really gathered around the table of the crucified Lord ... But such congregations, in many cities, are difficult to find.  Weary with the conflicts of the world, one goes into the Church to seek refreshment for the soul.  And what does one find?  Alas, too often, one finds only the turmoil of the world.  The preacher comes forward, not out of a secret place of meditation and power, not with the authority of God's Word permeating his message, not with human wisdom pushed far into the background by the glory of the Cross, but with human opinions about the social problems of the hour or easy solutions to the vast problems of sin. ... Thus the warfare of the world has entered even into the house of God.  And indeed sad is the heart of the man who has come seeking peace.

      Is there no refuge from strife?  Is there no place of refreshing where a man can prepare for the battle of life?  Is there no place where two or three can gather in Jesus' name, to forget for the moment all those things that divide nation from nation, race from race, to forget human pride, to forget the passion of war, to forget the puzzling problems of industrial strife, and to unite in overflowing gratitude at the foot of the Cross?  If there is to be such a place, then that is the house of God and that the gate of heaven.  And from under the threshold of that house will go forth a river that will revive a weary world.  (179-80)

More could be said.  This is a thorny subject.  I have attempted to introduce a perspective from an earlier time descriptively, because it seems to me to relate rather closely to the debates raging and the distressing church situations in our own time.  It is perhaps sufficient to observe here that the import of the columns by Mr. Akasie and by Mr. Douthat is that as the Episcopal Church, and perhaps mainline Protestantism generally, becomes more of an institution advocating for principles similar to a political and social segment of society, it becomes to that extent less relevant to society as a Christian institution.

This seems to these observers to be the case today, but it may not always be so.  There are times when, for instance, the moral vision of Christian institutions like the Episcopal Church has been mirrored in society in general.  Then the church was, although perhaps troubled and always imperfect, not in the state of dangerous demise that it is today.  The church may thrive even as its advocated ways are adopted in the culture.

The problem may not be with alignment of church and culture but, as Dr. Machen clearly argued and Mr. Douthat implies, with liberalism -- with liberalism itself within the church.  If the church increasingly reflects the liberal political and cultural order, but does it more poorly than the political punditry and cultural structures, then the question that every institution must ask itself relative to its members is, Why bother?