A Footnote on Welfare Reform

The year 2006 may for most people mark the tenth anniversary of the 1996 Welfare Act, signed by Bill Clinton, after he had vetoed two previous efforts, and just before crucial midterm elections that November. Some supporters apologized for him before his Democratic critics that he was forced into it, and many Democratic party leaders ripped into him for condemning a million or more poor kids to poverty. One even imagined gangs of very young poor children roaming the streets. Two distinguished Democrats once close to Bobby Kennedy, and old friends of mine, Marian Wright Edelman and her husband Peter distanced themselves from the Clinton administration when Peter resigned his high-level post at Health and Human Services in protest of the proposed reform. For my part, I always gave Bill Clinton credit for the substance of his act, signing the bill into law, whatever his motives. On large matters, substance makes all the difference.

So I was happy on August 22 to see Bill Clinton in an op-ed in the New York Times taking credit for signing the bill into law and for all the good things that have happened since. Especially the reduction in black poverty and the poverty of black children. And most important of all to the future, the decline in out-of-wedlock births.

For my part, though, I have been celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the welfare act, because in 1986 some twenty colleagues and I, Democrats and Republicans, from the Left and from the Right, got together in what we called a project in “social invention,” to see if we could agree on what went wrong and what went right in the War on Poverty during the preceding twenty years and then invent a battery of proposals for reform that we could all agree upon.

Since, naturally, no one is giving our study group any credit for changing the field of play with our left/right consensus, and our new definition of the problem, I think a footnote to history might be within the bounds of modesty and candor, especially since I cherish our work on the commission as one of the most important projects in which I have ever cooperated. Maybe a few of my colleagues do, too.

Let me pause here to mention their names. It was Michael Horowitz who put us up to it and insisted that I ought to be the moderator and drafter of the agreement, precisely because I was the least expert in the bunch on the material to be studied, and the least involved in mutual arguments among the professionals in the field. John Cogan, an expert’s expert, was made co-chairman to make some crucial decisions and to add some professional solidity to the public presentation.

Our great colleagues included Alice Rivlin, Robert D. Reischauer, Stanford Ross, Franklin D. Raines, Richard P, Nathan, Lawrence Mead, Charles Murray, Donald Moran, Michael Stern, Blanche Bernstein from New York City welfare studies, Douglas J.Besharov, Barbara Blum, Allan Carlson, S. Anna Kondratas, Leslie Lenkowsky, Glenn C. Loury, Richard John Neuhaus, and our brilliant young staff researcher and drafter was Karl Zinsmeister.

We began by studying the War on Poverty and compared its stated aims with what it actually achieved during its first 20 years. The book was published in 1987, to quiet but virtually universal acclaim—it won a cover story in The Economist. In our testimony before the U.S. Senate, both Republicans and Democrats praised it firmly and solidly. Senator Moynihan wrote of it quite warmly: “Rarely does a work of scholarship attain to statecraft. The New Consensus on Family and Welfare does that and more. It compels agreement and arouses energies where all has been dissentience and resignation. A wondrous work.” Perhaps one reason he liked the study so much was that it focused most on the family, not on the individual. Most works at that time didn’t, although all through Moynihan’s career he had singled out the family as a central axis of sociology, even when he was swimming against very powerful tides. Our study helped to turn that tide. It was not alone in that, but it was significant.

• We were the first to make prominent the term “dependency” as a better indicator than “poverty” for what was going wrong. Many people (immigrants from Africa and Asia, for example) who had income below the poverty line had high morale, worked hard, and were rapidly moving up the economic ladder. The problem of many of those young and healthy adults over twenty or so, who didn’t move up, was not really lack of money but some inability to become independent and govern their own lives, let alone to care properly for those who were necessarily dependent upon them.

We noted along with this that welfare programs for the elderly had really altered the lives of the elderly for the better, and dramatically. Many were now living more independently and comfortably than ever before. Many were now also living far beyond sixty-five, so that a new word had to be coined for those over 85: “the elderly elderly.” Yet the same welfare reforms had been disastrous for the young family, partly because increasing numbers of the young did not even form families. “Single, never-married” had become a larger and larger category in the profile of the poor, as also did “Single householder with children, never married.”

• We showed how it was reasonable to discuss illegitimacy as an issue without racial invidiousness, since it was now afflicting whites in larger numbers (although, of course, at lower rates) than blacks. It could be found in growing numbers in white rural communities, as in Iowa, Nebraska, and the like. Besides, whatever one’s moral feelings about illegitimacy, no one could deny that it was becoming financially very costly for the government, for the hospitals, for youth unemployment (or worse, unemployability), and for the criminal justice system. Once you turned your attention to what was going on in different types of families, the facts spoke with lightning and thunder in their stark clarity.

• We demonstrated for the first time that if a young couple did three things (this was the part that The Economist liked best), they had about a 93 percent chance of moving out of poverty:

– Complete high school (after all, it’s already mandatory, and it’s free)

– Work full time year-round, even at the minimum wage

– Get married and, even if not on the first try, stay married

Couples who did these three simple things had less than a 7 percent chance of remaining in poverty. You could look it up in the federal tables under “Characteristics of Poor Families, Households.”

• Then, looking toward the future, and a new period of social invention, we proposed about seventy different reforms in government legislation and regulation, as well as practical initiatives for active, caring citizens who mean by “compassion” not a feeling but a sharp eye on results.

As usually happens, today we get very little attention for our early arrival on the battlefield, but we did bring a lot of attention to Governor Tommy Thompson and many other local officials who were racking up success stories. We took care to spread the book on the Hill and to both the Bush I and Clinton White Houses.

Since our book was bipartisan and gave plenty of evidence for each assertion, and each new definition of terms, it became part of the common understanding, working like yeast in dough.

It was a good piece of work. The reforms that followed ten years later, under President Clinton, and then their almost immediate and still growing success—justly celebrated by his op-ed with facts and figures—vindicated our analysis, prescriptions, and predictions.

The project is a source of great satisfaction to me personally, because the experts provided the facts and arguments, while Karl Zinsmeister and I merely wrote up what they provided and got each sentence revised until it was approved by the whole group, sentence by sentence. We did not leave a sentence until everybody approved.

What we aimed at was consensus, with complete agreement and no minority reports. It was a thirty-Excedrin-long and painstaking project. It took a certain amount of diplomacy and, most of all, honest reporting of what people in the field had learned and were now willing to stand behind in public. It took great bipartisan generosity on the part of all who participated.

Looking back on it, I think bipartisanship operated as protection for everybody. No one could score partisan points, and everybody worked to make sure that what we were all going to publish under our own names had solid intellectual support. What we were finding was not then common knowledge, and many on all sides were prepared to be opposed to our analysis and our proposals. In our group, everyone’s reputation was at stake.

On publication, astonishingly to many people, our main arguments carried the day almost universally, although of course at various points disagreement continued, quite properly.

When we finished our report of our findings to a Senate hearing, and submitted to a long round of questioning, one of the senators (I think it was Senator Dole) looked at the political range of our group and said, “Well, if you cowboys and ranchers can be friends, I think we might rustle up support in both parties over here, too.” The domestic side of the White House cabinet, including President Reagan, met with us for a seminar. They concurred that they would welcome a bill from the Congress along these lines but doubted the time was quite ripe for the whole Congress to go that far. President Reagan said such a bill would fulfill the third of his original promises to the nation, which he had not yet been able to get to: welfare reform.

I should end by thanking the Bradley Foundation for its support, and especially the visionary advice of Michael Joyce; and also Marquette University and the American Enterprise Institute, which both turned over to us space for all-day meetings during the year 1985-86, on those occasions fed us and paid for many costs.

Ideas really do have consequences. But they often take a long time to gestate and mature. One of the great satisfactions about working at a think tank is to watch this maxim at work, over and over again.

Published in First Things August 23, 2006

Did I Make Two Mistakes ... or One?

In my blog on Bobby Kennedy, I know I made one mistake, and at least two readers have written the editors (not me) to allege that I made another one, “a terrible error.” The mistake I know I made was to give the wrong name to the great little journal of the Methodist Church, edited by the very smart and gentlemanly B.J. Stiles, Motive magazine. My 73-year-old memory is still photographic, but when I need a clear picture, I don’t have enough film. My memory came up with Momentum magazine. Wrong name. Very sorry. Especially since Motive also published my wife Karen Laub-Novak’s sixteen prints on The Apocalypse and pointed out that Laub-Novak was the first artist since Dürer to create so ambitious a series on that book. They are powerful prints. She executed them in Rome and is still selling them (a few favorite numbers are sold out or virtually so). You can see some of Karen’s work on our joint website, www.michaelnovak.net, and on her own website, www.laub-novakartist.com.

The “terrible” error I am accused of is that I mixed in the Protestant and agnostic W.B. Yeats among the “Catholic writers” of the twentieth-century Catholic Renaissance. Well, I confess that I would have been more guarded if I had separated one long sentence into two sentences: the first on Yeats, as a favorite of Gene McCarthy, and the second on the Catholic writers in whom Gene was so well read.

Still, a blog is a conversation, not an academic essay or a public written lecture. In one sentence, I first mentioned Gene’s special love for Yeats (at least for reciting whole reams of Yeats, forty-five minutes at a time, from nothing but memory). Then, in the same sentence, I went on to offer a selected list of some of the Catholic writers who gave him great pleasure and much enlightenment. Not many in our generation, certainly among politicians, were equally literate in their faith. There were a few thousand, maybe; a good community, but not a large percentage of all graduates of Catholic or other colleges.

But really, when my own eyes were opened to this powerful literature—at least four or five Nobel Prize winners in the set—I remember being struck by the capacious sense of “Catholic” used by my professor Fr. Joseph Keena, C.S.C., himself a student of the legendary Frank O’Malley of Notre Dame. I remember his including C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, and others who were not actual members of the Catholic Church. He included them because they manifested a respect for the thickness of the Catholic imagination–not exactly correct doctrine and not necessarily a flawless moral life—in fact, sometimes a quite scandalous moral life.

It would take me too far afield now to define what we meant then by “the Catholic imagination.” We certainly would have agreed that William Shakespeare, whatever his personal affiliation, exhibited a Catholic imagination and sensibility; so did Alexis de Tocqueville, whatever his exact formal relations with the Church. But our real interest lay with the Catholic Renaissance of the twentieth century. We found Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, and the medieval studies of C.S. Lewis to be marvelous, and sometimes rollicking, definitions of the Catholic imagination. Chesterton, in paraphrase: Catholicism is a thick steak, a glass of stout, and a good cigar. And analogous expressions in Sigrid Undset and Leon Bloy. (“This place reeks of God!” the latter protests against one Catholic setting, whose sensibility disgusts him by its narrowness.)

I would not assert that Frank O’Malley or Fr. Keena listed W.B. Yeats as a Catholic writer. But I would even then, back in the 1950s, have enjoyed the challenge to show convincingly how Catholic his imagination was. And today I judge his imagination, after more experience of my own, to be even more so than I might have seen then.

Obviously, others disagree. Is that not the beauty of literary studies? We try to define standards and definitions, and then we argue where x fits with w, y, and z.

It would not be a bad time to define again, as we yield place to a younger and smarter generation, “the Catholic imagination.” And to see how many would include Lewis, Eliot, Yeats, and others among the artists who express that imagination in their work. And how many would, by contrast, limit their list of Catholic writers to the formally inscribed, the orthodox, and the relatively virtuous (or at least repentant).

Published in First Things August 18, 2006

Dear Heather...

Heather Mac Donald opens up one of the most important arguments necessary for this nation to face soon, that is, What is the relation of atheism to Jewish-Christian belief? Her immediate wish is that there were more respect for atheists within the Republican party, or at least a diminishment of her feeling of being an “outsider,” which she now often feels when there is—if I may put it this way—“Christian talk” in the air. She is “bewildered” during times in which President Bush speaks of God in a personal way. Again, she doesn’t understand how Christians can thank God for the recovery of an unharmed kidnapped child but not blame God for those times when a kidnapped child is not recovered, but horribly abused and viciously killed. No matter what God does, he is clung to either way. This is, she said, a “double standard” worthy of the worst aspects of affirmative action.

She also regards speech about “natural law” as a kind of mysticism. At the same time, she writes in a later blog that the main point she wished to make in her earlier article is that atheists like her don’t need belief in the biblical God in order to maintain certain ethical principles by reason alone, in the light of experience, and thus in a “conservative” manner. But this is exactly what many of us mean by “natural law”—the law discovered by reason alone, without revelation.

The Ten Commandments, for example, long Jewish and Christian intellectual traditions hold, are discoverable by reason alone, but as a short cut also by revelation. That short cut is very helpful to those who are neither philosophers nor abstract reasoners. The short cut seems to them like common sense, perfectly reasonable in the light of common experience. (Tocqueville even adds that the short cut by way of revelation is also convenient because it tells people what to do now, without waiting to sort out all the arguments of competing philosophers, whose arguments sometimes seem never to end.)

I very much like Heather’s main point, about the common strait in which believers and unbelievers often find themselves. She even points out that from the outside—if she never told you she was an atheist—you might easily think that she held values very much like those of other Christians that you know. (“What do they lack but churches, these atheists of our generation, to distinguish them from being Christians?”—if I may again paraphrase Albert Camus, as in an earlier blog a few days back. As if anticipating an objection, Miss Mac Donald brushes aside the old argument that atheists are simply living off the spiritual capital of a distinctive Jewish and Christian civilization.

“Miss Mac Donald,” rather than “Heather,” that is no doubt the way I ought to have been addressing her since the top of this piece. After all, we have met only glancingly in a large meeting, and it would seem I have no right to use her first name. Yet I have so long been in internal conversation with her writings, and so frequently admired her steadfast realism and intellectual bravery, that the formal address seems untrue to the conversations my mind has had with her. After reading an especially sharp point made by her, I mentally exclaim to her: “You go, girl!” And friends are likely to ask, “Did you read Heather today!” A blog is a kind of conversation, a conversation of minds, and that is why so often in them first names replace formal address.

A roundabout way of saying that the rest of what I write here is intended to be personal—not secret, but still one-to-one. The question Heather has raised is the most important one humans can address in each other’s presence. For the difference between Jewish or Christian belief and atheism is so profound that it utterly shifts the axis of one’s personal life. Conversion stories tell us that—in both directions, from belief to atheism, and from atheism to belief. And thus to address these matters openly requires a personal and somewhat mutually trusting circle.

I would hope that my earlier blogs—read here, here, and here—have made clear the kinship I feel with serious atheists. I am certain (from experience) that we walk very much in the same night. On the other hand, what it means to walk “in the presence of God” is so all-embracing a presence, so weighty, that it places one’s life on a wholly new axis, which is difficult to clarify. Let me begin by trying to place myself in Heather’s shoes, if I can at all do that.

If the words of George Bush bewilder her, as when he says that his foreign policy is much affected by his Christian faith, it seems to me that she must often have had to bracket, as well, the words of Washington, Lincoln, virtually all our presidents and Congresses, and even the language of many of our founding documents. Is she bewildered by “endowed by their Creator” and the Declaration’s other words about “Nature’s God,” “Supreme Judge of the world,” and our nation’s “firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence”?

I think that atheists must often feel like outsiders with regard to a certain dimension of our national experience. That does not make them any the less true and good citizens. But it must cause a twinge of pain now and again, as obviously President Bush’s occasional religious language does, and perhaps the even heavier use of religious language by President Clinton. (The two presidents seem to have had a different personal relation to their own religious words, however—or is that only my errant imagining? It is in any case possible that a different personal relation to particular words results in two different reactions by the public.)

Sometimes in the questions raised in Miss Mac Donald’s article, it seems that she is thinking of God as though he were just a larger-than-life human being, or another item in the inventory of the universe. I don’t think she quite feels the overpowering sense of God’s sovereignty over all things, painful or pleasant, virtuous or perverse, in human experience. She must think this way, because her point of view places her in judgment over God.

Thomas Jefferson felt this overwhelming sovereignty of God over all things, because he wrote (in his bill for religious liberty in Virginia) that no sooner did a person become aware of the proper relation between creature and Creator, to whom the creature’s very existence is owed, than the creature becomes aware of a self-evident duty to worship and give thanks to so infinitely superior a Being. On that inviolable duty is based a right, in whose exercise no one whatever—not parent, not friend, not foe, not state, not even civil society—may legitimately interfere.

To grasp this relation of awe, thanksgiving, and worship owed to the Creator is to place ourselves under his judgment, not him under ours.

I feel that I am not making my words here nearly clear enough.

Although neither the atheist nor the believer actually “sees” God, not with the naked eyes nor even with the eyes of the mind, the believer has felt the earth shift under her feet. The axis of her identity is no longer what it was. One cannot see other things in the same light as before. Everything is somehow altered—while in another way, nothing has changed. If the believer did not reveal it in so many words, one might never perceive that the believer is really a believer. (A really good friend who is an atheist may from time to time probe a little: “Do you really believe that…? What do believers really mean by…?”) Unless the atheist had learned from earlier conversations about one’s own faith, and the manner in which to discuss it, he probably would not know for sure, nor care, what we believed. From the outside, we are all just human beings doing our best.

In the twelfth century, when the lost works of Aristotle were finally uncovered in a library in Spain, and especially Nicomachean Ethics, it became evident that Aristotle, the pagan, had described a quite noble and brilliantly thought-out approach to human ethics. That system, as it were, came to be referred to as natural law, in order to distinguish it from the pattern of ethics discernible in the Bible. This was discernible by reason alone, as distinguished from reasoning derived at least in part from revelation. One of the points on which Thomas Aquinas is held in such high repute in Catholic circles is his careful exploration of the stretches of territory that lie between reason and revelation, giving full validity within their own sphere to the discoveries of reason alone.

Can a man be good apart from revelation and the grace of Christ? Thomas answered, as he almost always did, by making a distinction (his method was “distinguish in order to unite”): If you mean, can a man be good within the boundaries of the civitas, make a good citizen, be a good person according to the canons of reason, then the answer is yes. Just look at Aristotle. There’s some of the evidence.

But if you mean, Can a man be saved without the grace of Christ, the answer, alas, is no.

What it means to be “saved” is to be invited into the love and friendship of God, and that capacity is far beyond anything we have in ourselves. We need to be enabled to dwell in that relationship by saying “Yes” to God’s invitation to us, and by welcoming in ourselves the superabundance of living in God’s presence. When we are living in active friendship with our Creator, it is a delight to take up the duties imposed on us by that unimagined, undeserved friendship. These duties do not contradict those we discover by the use of our reason alone (and that we call the natural law). But they go far beyond those duties and invite us to participate in an inner life far beyond our poor powers to conceive.

The fundamental question of our age is this: Can humans really maintain a civilization if a predominant majority live etsi Deus non daretur, as if there is no God? If there is no God, humans are likely to live one way, at least in a few boundary territories, such as life, family, and daily, humble self-sacrifice. If there is a God (the true God, no false gods before him), at least some—and not altogether minor—decisions are likely to be taken in a quite different direction, along a different axis.

The answer to the question “Who am I, under these stars, with the wind upon my face?” is quite different in the two cases. To choose not to believe is to choose for oneself an identity quite different from the identity of one who chooses to believe.

Both choices, springing from the most profound of inner sources, are worthy of infinite respect. From the Christian and Jewish point of view, the Creator himself set before every single individual this inalienable choice and thus gave to every human being a dignity higher than that of any other creature on this earth.

This difference in radical choices is, therefore, the epicenter of human dignity. Each person is created free. This fact demands more than tolerance—more than the mutual agreement, for reasons of peace, merely to put up with (tolerate) each other. It requires, not tolerance, but something higher—mutual respect.

Published in First Things August 16, 2006

Bobby Kennedy: The Secular Saint

In about March or April of 1968 (is it really so many years ago?), I received a call in my Stanford office asking me whether I could meet with Robert F. Kennedy in San Francisco on his first trip to the Commonwealth as a presidential candidate. I said yes, for Bobby was already my favorite among the Kennedy brothers, the one I felt a closer bond to. But the invitation also troubled me. One night at the beginning of the year, all over California, election parties were being held at candlelight dinners to gather signatures so that Eugene McCarthy would run for the presidency, and I had been among the minor-level instigators of the effort.

At that point, Bobby was not running, and it looked as though no one on the sane anti-war side would challenge Lyndon Johnson. In addition, Senator McCarthy was a close friend of mine. We had met and talked a number of times, both of us “Commonweal Catholics,” and from the first talked as old friends talked, citing the same books and similar experiences. Gene had attended St. John’s in Collegeville and was an exceptionally literate and gracious Catholic. He had read with pleasure and intelligence hundreds of serious Catholic works by Claudel, Peguy, Yeats (maybe most of all, Yeats), Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Graham Greene, Francois Mauriac, G.K. Chesterton, Belloc, Maritain, Yves Simon, Romano Guardini, Sigrid Undset, Heinrich Böll—all the writers of the “modern Catholic Renaissance.” Thus, if Bobby invited me to join him, I would face a painful dilemma.

The Senator from Minnesota’s Catholicism didn’t think much of the unlearned “Southie’s” Boston-style Catholicism. McCarthy wanted to blaze a new path for Christians and Jews in public life. A path of learning and poetry and joyous fun.

The day after the phone call, I was met at the San Francisco hotel by John Seigenthaler of the Nashville Tennessean, who ushered me up to meet Senator Kennedy. Either he told me, or Bobby told me, two things. The first was that my article in Motive magazine, a Methodist journal then edited in Nashville by B.J. Stiles, had had a profound influence on Bobby’s decision to get into the race. The article was called “The Secular Saint” and made a case for a kind of heroic existentialism, beyond the then prevalent value-free liberal realism.

The second was that I was among the first people Senator Kennedy wanted to see on his first day in California. Even then I knew enough to discount what a politician says in passing praise, even a political leader with such clear and penetrating and vulnerable eyes.

The bottom line was that Kennedy asked me to join his campaign. He urged me to help, especially among the young, among whom he said I had a certain influence. He asked if I could first go up to Oregon for the campaign—the campaign would pay the fare and put me up and provide transport. He wanted me then to help him in the truly decisive campaign in California.

“I’ve had a talk with Mayor Daley,” he told me, in whose Chicago the Democratic Convention would be held, “and he will not support a loser. I have to win in California. I have to win California.” He looked into the distance (something he often did while talking with others). “Then I have to persuade him I am going to win in November. Odd how it’s two totally different campaigns, winning the nomination, winning the presidency. I’ve got the job of my life winning California. But then it will be even tougher, going into November. But it’s doable. Can I have your help?” He turned those clear blue eyes full on my eyes: “Will you help?”

I told him I had urged Gene McCarthy to throw his hat in, and that it would be hard for me to abandon him now. I asked for twenty-four hours to think about it. Both the candidate and Mr. Siegenthaler respected that. They said they would be hoping for a good answer the next day.

Even at that time, I was thinking of the working-class ethnic wards of Chicago, Milwaukee, Toledo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and other cities, and of the need to unite both blacks and working-class whites. If not Bobby, I couldn’t see who else could do it.

Later, after Bobby’s assassination, and Hubert Humphrey’s defeat of Gene McCarthy at the convention, it became clear to me that Humphrey could also unite those two wings of the Democratic party. But earlier that summer, because of a visceral disgust that rose in me from a silly talk on the Vietnam War that Humphrey had given on the Stanford campus (which I have described in Politics, Realism, and Imagination), I could not envisage Humphrey as a candidate. For months, I could not support him.

Reflecting on the primaries already concluded, it seemed to me that Gene McCarthy was doing better in the suburbs—energizing a whole new type of Democratic electoral “machine”— but was not doing so well in the “ethnic” cities that preoccupied me then. (I believed then, and still believe, due allowance being made for changing times, that they are the key to presidential politics.) The more the elite press sneered at Bobby as “ruthless,” the more it seemed to me that white ethnics were flocking to him. If he was an s.o.b., so much the better, because they had already decided that it would take some really ruthless s.o.b. to straighten out the way the Democratic party—and the country’s elites—were marching backward in the name of “progress.”

I loved Gene McCarthy. The verb is not too strong. Many an evening, before and afterward, he would sit in our living room after dinner and respond to the invitation to recite some poetry—especially Yeats—and he would demur, and wisecrack, and then launch out into thirty or forty minutes of long ballads he had committed to memory. He had the perfect Irish voice for the part, understated but full of music. Occasionally, he’d stumble on a line and have to begin it again. Once or twice a tear would appear in his eye at an especially affecting part. “Michael, do we have time for another one?” he would ask. “Just this short one,” he would rush on with a smile. He loved reciting poetry and had too few occasions for it. He much preferred poetry to political speeches, but at the latter he also excelled.

I had to telephone Gene that night to tell him I was switching to Bobby, and why. He was wounded, I could hear it in his voice. From such as me, especially, he expected better. But the gentlemanly senator never let that deed of mine injure our friendship. He still came to our table for many years afterward for an evening, after dinner reciting poetry.

So I called back Mr. Siegenthaler in the morning and said yes. That is how I came to campaign for Senator Robert Kennedy in Oregon (and had to be corrected during my very first outing how to pronounce the name of the state). It was the first primary that Bobby Kennedy ever lost.

At the end of the California campaign a few weeks later, I had another call from the Kennedy campaign, inviting me to join the senator and his traveling staff in a small plane at the San Francisco airport for the ride down to Los Angeles. I was thrilled, but my wife had two babies at home, the youngest only nine months old, and it seemed I really ought not to go. Later that evening, after it was clear that Senator Kennedy had won, I went to the other room, the children being asleep, and then heard Karen shouting out to me to come quickly to the television. There he was, in replay, falling under a sudden shot, on his way out to the arena, in the midst of his closest staff. I would have been among them, relative outsider though I was. Plunging downward from the exultation of a decisive electoral victory, it was a sickening, devastating night, and morning, and night again.

A few days later, I was lucky enough to sit quietly at the funeral at St. Patrick’s to take the family funeral train down to Washington and to attend the sorrowful burial in Arlington Cemetery. Is my memory deceiving me, or do I remember a priest from Ireland presiding at the grave and calling Bobby Kennedy a saint for his efforts for the poor and downtrodden? It was a note I did not like.

Yet in my mind, Bobby was, in fact, a kind of “secular saint” such as I had described in the article by that name in Momentum. True, I had in mind people even more secular than he, who show compassion and do good deeds and work with hope. They may be secular and yet they act as Christians would want to act. How can that be, not to believe, and yet to act as though one were a Christian? Albert Camus pondered that puzzle.

In Bobby’s case, I tended to agree with Gene McCarthy. Bobby seemed to me, like his brothers, Catholic by birth, habit, and perhaps even sentiment—but not by intellect or the learning appropriate to his station. One wondered which serious religious authors he or his brothers had read, if any.

Thus, in a sense, Bobby, too, struck me as a “secular” saint. He seemed to touch a lot of nonbelievers in a highly moral, aspiring way. It is said that “at the heart of Christianity lies the sinner.” So I am by no means arguing that Bobby Kennedy was sinless. We didn’t know then about his liaisons with Marilyn Monroe. Yet even if we had, some of us would not have been too hard on his weaknesses in certain areas, but more inclined to look upon his sheer raw guts and the burning determination of his eyes when he glimpsed something he had to do and fight through, whatever unknown difficulties he must face.

In those days, I was fascinated by the overlap, in actions at least if not in words, of many people I knew, some of who were believers and some unbelievers. The latter seemed to me, in action, far more Christian or Jewish than they would admit to being. (They certainly were not nihilist nor even amoral, and not relativist nor morally indifferent.) And the Christians seemed to me to live in a deeper, darker night than they much speak about, closer in many ways to unbelief than to belief—at least so far as feelings go. There are many days when the believer, trying to become conscious of God’s presence within, feels nothing at all, sees nothing at all.

Sometimes it is easier to act as a particular way of life demands than to say one believes in it. And it may be a quite noble way of life, indeed.

Let God sort us all out, I used to think (and still do). He sees it all more clearly.

Published in First Things August 12, 2006

Belief & Unbelief, Part III of III

Allow me to pick up a thread I began to weave in our last conversation. My experience is that believers and unbelievers live in a darkness that is remarkably the same. More than once I have been in conversation with a respected scholar who confessed to me that he would like very much to believe in God, but when he looks, he finds nothing at all, only silence. I have sometimes replied that that is pretty much what I have found. Nothing. Silence. Once or twice I have quoted for my companion some texts from St. John of the Cross, about the nada y nada y nada. St. John writes in poetry of his much-sought Lover:

My house being now at rest. In the happy night, In secret, when none saw me, Nor I beheld aught, Without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart. This light guided me More surely than the light of noonday, to the place where he (well I knew who!) was awaiting me— A place where none appeared.

It is the teaching of St. John of the Cross that the mature Christian ought to expect to dwell in the darkness. And he offers some guides for doing so. (These guides go back to the First Epistle of St. John, mentioned in my previous post.) When the mind goes dark, one can with confidence fall back upon acts of kindness toward one’s immediate neighbor. Love is a dim but steady guide when the light fails.

Sometimes I have also told the story of the drunk who is looking intently up and down the curb under a street light. The policeman on the beat, before hurrying him along, asks him what he is doing. “Dropped a half-dollar. Looking for it.” The cop hesitantly asks, “You sure you lost it here?”

“No,” the drunk says. “Down there,” waving down the dark street.

“Then why aren’t you looking down there?”

As if deeply pained, the drunk looks up at the cop incredulously:

“Any fool can see there’s more light up here.”

If you are looking for God, it makes a big difference what you think you are looking for, and where you are looking. If you think God is going to show up in the searchings of your senses—some voice or blinding light or scent or taste or touch—you are bound to be disappointed. God isn’t like that. He is not like the golden idol of Baal. The senses are not his wavelength, so to speak.

If you think you might be able to imagine him, sorry—can’t be done. Except by little children. (“Where is God?” the nun asks her second-grade class. “Louise?” Louise shakes her head, but Mary Margaret is waving her hand. Called upon, she blurts out: “In the bathroom.” Amused, the sister asks Mary Margaret, “And why do you say that?” “Because every morning my father knocks on the bathroom door and yells out to me and my sister: ‘God, are you still in there?’”)

That leaves you with the best efforts of your mind. You try to form a coherent, plausible concept of God. Sorry again. God is not on the same wavelength, so to speak, as our poor minds. He is much more full of intelligence, light, and benevolence than our minds can handle. Approaching his vastness, our minds blow out like a 120-volt hairdryer in a 220-volt socket. Or worse. No one can conceive adequately of God. Any concept we form will be found to be conspicuously ridiculous.

By the effects of his intelligence and efficacity in the universe, which our minds try to grasp, however, we are led to aim our minds in a certain direction, like arrows that are bound to fall short. We are led toward awe. Wonder. At times, silent admiration. And by the drive to push further. As if like deer in the wood, we run swiftly and somewhat in panic toward the infinite.

“Our hearts are restless, Lord,” St. Augustine addressed the Creator of the sun and all the nighttime stars into which he stared on the shores of the Bay of Tunis. “And they will not rest until they rest in Thee.” That is to say, one path along which we aim our arrows upward is by reflection upon the quarry our restless minds seek, and upon the working of our own minds as they relentlessly pursue. “I sought Thee everywhere, and when I found Thee, Thou wert within.”

I remember a British-American journalist telling me—a man who often says he is a hater of God, a man who attacks religion with delicious ferocity again and again—that one argument that almost does convince him about God is the mystery of our own conscience. Why do we cling so to telling the truth and seeking out what is true amid all the lies? Why do we have so fierce a longing for justice and such burning outrage at all the myriad swamps of injustice that life drags us through? Why, that is, if everything is at bottom meaningless? If it is all random? Then who the hell would care about honesty or justice or outrage? That would all be wasted breath, a bit of utterly pathetic histrionics. A very silly pose.

“That is,” he intimated, “almost enough to turn me toward God.” But, instead, he is sickened by the hypocrisy of the religious, so he turns back from his most promising lead.

Yet what on earth have the moral failings of others to do with what he himself pursues with all his heart? With what he himself decides to make of his own life? So long as there are only a dozen just men, or even one just man on earth, the teeth of his original question still cut into the flesh. How are we to account for the persistence of a burning sense of justice and truth and, yes, even love in this bitter world as we know it?

As I said at the beginning, neither the believer nor the unbeliever actually sees God. But they do reason a bit differently about what their own experience presents to them. They understand their own destiny under these stars, with the wind on their faces, a little differently. Perhaps, most strikingly of all, they reflect quite differently upon their own inner experience of the relentless drive to understand within them, and their striving for truth, for justice, for love.

They read the clues differently. But neither one actually catches sight of the quarry they ardently pursue. This fact—that they both stand in darkness—is not often brought to attention and meditated upon. It is pregnant with clues—about, for instance, how humbly we ought to proceed.

Published In First Things Online August 10, 2006

Belief and Unbelief, Part II of III

Writers who call themselves atheists have often surprised me by their reasons for not believing in God. In the long history of humanity, of course, their unbelief is an anomaly, a distinctly minority position. Even Clarence Darrow once said that he certainly did not believe in the Jewish or Christian God, but any damn fool knows there is a force and an intelligence that has shaped the universe we live in. But a few others, oddly, do not even believe that much. I remember once reading a book about atheism by an atheist, who after considerable study of the situation in the United States wrote that (I forget the exact number) something like 70 percent of those who call themselves atheists do actually believe in a force or energy or ordering intelligence within the natural order. If that is what “God” is, they believe in God. They say “atheist,” it seems, to distinguish themselves from being Christians or Jews. For a similar reason, some call themselves “naturalists,” as if Christianity and Judaism mean “supernaturalist.”

One reason I have often encountered for not believing in the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus runs like this: As long as there is even one orphaned child, who uncomprehendingly sobs alone in the dark, I will not accept a God who permits such a world to exist. I refuse.

Another reason I have heard is this: Any God who would throw human beings into unmitigated torture in hell for all eternity, just because of a minor infraction of some silly taboo, is a being to despise, not to accept.

Doubtless there are other reasons besides these two. A full inventory would make a marvelous anthropological study. Yet, the tribe of atheists worldwide is, after all, a small one. Check out the estimates for the religious beliefs of humankind published in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Despite the efforts of communist Russia and China to coerce people into atheism, the number and the proportion of atheists are still impressively small. To return to the two reasons for unbelief given above: The first is a rather odd one. The inquirer assumes a position of moral superiority to God, as a person more intelligent, more pure, more noble, more compassionate. It suggests that the inquirer cares more about the child sobbing in the dark than that child’s Creator and Father does. That would certainly be odd.

The second objection, concerning hell, evinces a most primitive notion of hell, and also of what constitutes a sin. A sin, writes St. Thomas Aquinas, is an “aversio a Deo,” a turning away from God, a turning away from Light, a deliberate and fully considered turning away from the light, however dim, of one’s own conscience.

From this it follows that hell is the utter absence of God, made fully conscious to the unfortunate one who with full deliberation excluded God from his life. In his lifetime only dimly aware of the vastness of God’s love for and friendship toward humans, such a person recognizes too late that it is only by his own personal choice that he forever cut himself off from the presence of the Divine Lover. It was pride that led to his total isolation, cold and dark. Pride that led to a fully considered and deliberate choice to live as though there is no God.

No one can complain about being in hell. Hell cannot be entered inadvertently but must be deliberately chosen. The choice that constitutes it is to exclude deliberately the God of Love from one’s own heart. It is to push away the extended arms of the divine friendship.

Some choices, like diamonds, are forever.

In a word, if the rest of us had the same notion of God as such atheists seem to have, if their words are to be trusted (and are not simply rationalizations), we would reject God, too. That is, if God had less compassion than we for those he has created. And if God out of pettiness chose hell for some, rather than giving all a personal choice to accept or to reject his eternal presence in their lives.

Intelligent people, one would think, would spend a little more time in inquiry before squeezing tight to such primitive notions. The real scandal is that atheists appear to think so shallowly about God. But the worse scandal is that believers do not inspire in atheists much desire to inquire more deeply.

Still, for curious minds, let me propose a path to investigate. One might, for example, take Christians at their word; check out the First Epistle of St. John, for instance. There St. John writes that no one sees God. How do we know, then, that we love God? Certainly not just by uttering the words. “No one has ever seen God; but as long as we love one another God will live in us and his love will be complete in us” (I John 4:12).

And again: “A man who does not love the brother that he can see cannot love God, whom he has never seen” (4:20). St. John has much more to say in this epistle. But questioning this much is a good first step.

Not even a fully believing Christian, an Evangelist, then, can claim to see God. The Christian is in as much darkness, really, as the atheist. So the atheist uses Ockham’s razor and cuts away the excess babbling about what cannot be seen, and just sticks to the darkness. The believer is not surprised by the darkness but interprets it very differently.

Granted that we all live in darkness, even the atheist must decide how he should live. Many in our generation claim that they are every bit as moral as the Christians they know, and maybe even more thoughtful about the needs of others and more compassionate.

In that case, maybe they should go back to another line in St. John’s first epistle, near the end of the New Testament: “God is love and anyone who lives in love lives in God, and God lives in him” (4:16).

So many of the atheists of our generation do in fact live (at least in many respects) as though they were devout Christians or Jews. What do they lack but churches or synagogues, to distinguish themselves, so far as praxis goes, from being Christians or Jews?

That was the question Albert Camus put after watching the secular saints of his generation sacrifice themselves under conditions of war. That was the paradigm he sketched in the life of the heroic Dr. Rieux in The Plague.

If you listen to their words, they are atheists. But if you watch how they actually live, they are Christians or Jews.

Recognizing this paradox in his own conduct, Jean-Paul Sartre committed himself to scrupulous efforts to live as a true atheist. He tried his best not to draw upon Jewish or Christian capital. He tried to eliminate every trace of Christian or Jewish faith from his practice, even from his thoughts. This task, he wrote, took full-time concentration. Even he, Jean-Paul Sartre, when not on guard, on a truly fresh May morning in Paris, in the brilliant and fragrant air, was tempted to utter a silent “Thank God.” Or in a time of acute danger, to cry out for help. Each time, he had to stop himself.

It is not easy to live as an atheist all the way through.

Published in First Things Online August 9, 2006

Belief & Unbelief, Part I of III

People who call themselves atheists often say rather strange things about people with faith—things like, “Well, if you need the comfort, go on and believe.” An odd notion, that there is “comfort” in faith. Serious believers often don’t find it so.

Actually, it has sometimes seemed to me that the persistence of horrible evils in the world creates no discomfort at all for consistent atheists. Why should the world be otherwise, since everything springs from absurdity, chance, meaninglessness? For that matter, the obviousness of great evil in the world is often used by atheists to account for their atheism.

It is the believer who suffers great pain internally in coming face to face with horrid poverty in Haiti, and in the heat of swarming, overcrowded Bangladesh, and with images of human brutality and sadism, generation after generation. For the believer holds that God is good—all-seeing, all-powerful—and yet he allows so much human suffering to continue.

Who feels in tumult internally about evil in the world—the believer or the unbeliever?

And who feels discomfited when seasons of dryness and aridity blow through the soul, when no God appears, when there is in imagination, senses, memory, and intelligence no presence of God at all, no sign, only nothingness?

If it is comfort that you seek, do not go to belief. Stay with those who take malicious pleasure in chance, meaninglessness, and nothingness “all the way down,” in what Richard Rorty calls “nihilism with a smiling face.”

And feel superior to those so weak they still need the “comforts” of belief.

Published in First Things Online August 2, 2006

Who Was Washington's God?

The need for this book stems from the lack of interest in religion on the part of most biographers of Washington, especially since World War II. The occasion for this book was a magnificent outdoor candlelight dinner on the veranda at Mount Vernon three years ago, at which the executive director James Rees asked me if I would write a book on Washington’s religion. More than a million visitors come to Mount Vernon each year, he said, and at the bookstore, the book they most request is a book on Washington’s religion—which they do not have.

I had a theory that Washington was more religious than most people thought, but I was basing this only on his public, official statements as General and President. I would not have been surprised if more research showed that he was actually not much more religious than Thomas Jefferson, probably the least religious of the founders.

Since a large percentage of Washington’s writings are now available online, research is infinitely easier than it used to be. Moreover, immense generosity was shown us by theMount Vernon historical researcher Mary Thompson, who has been working on her own marvelous book on the religion of the Washington family. Washington’s personal library of some 900-plus volumes was also made available to us, both by second copies collected at Mount Vernon, and by the originals, owned and beautifully maintained by the Athenaeum in Boston.

And Washington’s God? There is no doubt that Washington was a lifelong Anglican as his ancestors had been, and as his progeny (through Martha’s children) were to be. Because of a clergy shortage,Washington ’s local parish church had services on average twice a month; he attended a little more than once a month—much more often in later years than in earlier. He was an active vestryman, and church warden, giving the parish both his time and hisfinancial help. His pastor cherished him as an unusually helpful parishioner.

My daughter Jana and I were able to find only a very few clear confessional statements in which Washington openly declared his faith as a Christian. The example of his life is clearer than his words. From his twenties on, as a Major in theVirginia militia, he was a leader of men of diverse religious beliefs, and he made it his practice to use a general religious language that excluded as few as possible.

He preferred to speak of “the Governor of the universe,” “the great disposer of human events,” the “Beneficent Author of all good that was, that is, or that will be,” and especially “a kind Providence,” “a gracious Providence.” We never found him saying “Redeemer,” “Savior,” or other such more confessional language, although he did commend the figure of Jesus Christ to the Delaware Chiefs, and urged his men to conduct themselves as “Christian soldiers” worthy of thefavors they asked of divine Providence.

Washington’s favorite word about Providence was “inscrutable.” He knew that Providence brings evil and suffering as well as victory and success. He knew the trials of a “Pilgrim’s Progress,” the depths and the Slough of Despond. But in his view,Providence was not bound by Fate or any other necessity, but Sovereign, and Disposer of all events. Although he thought God acted chiefly through the contingencies and “concatenations of causes” in natural events, in the timing and placement of “acts of nature,” he also spoke occasionally of what seemed to him truly miraculous. Jana has already described several events of both kinds—both happy arrangements of natural events and, on the other side, events so improbable as to appear to be miraculous. (Washington, in one instance, used the word “miraculous” himself—when every other officer on horseback fell, and Washington’s own coat took four bullet holes, and he lost two horses, yet kept remounting, and stayed throughout the battle unhurt.)

Washington saw the “interpositions” of Divine Providence in small events and in large—in the timely discovery of Benedict Arnold’s plot to turn over to the British the forts on the upper Hudson—at daybreak over the East River in the Battle of Brooklyn, when only half of Washington’s army had escaped by boat, a sudden fog fell thick, murky, and yellow over the River for another six hours, until the whole army got across. He sawProvidence in the almost impossible unanimity of the constitutional convention, which completed its work in 53 days. He saw Providence in good harvests, and in prosperity. He saw it in the fortitude of his ragtag, wounded, and sickness-ridden amateur army during the darkest days of defeat in 1776 and 1777.

It was Washington who in his written General Orders of July, 1776, twice told his men that they, “under God,” were the only supports of American Independence, for the sake of millions yet unborn–the very words that Lincoln read there, and then made immortal in his Gettysburg Address, the very words that are repeated by Americans today when we recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

Washington had a layman’s (but also a sophisticated) grasp of what he himself called “the Doctrine of Providence,” and this doctrine shaped the prayers he advised his army, and later the whole country, to address to God for His “favorable interpositions” in the American cause.Washington knew that both the British and the Americans prayed to the same Providence. But he also believed that (in Jefferson’s phrase) “the God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time.” And with William Penn, Washington believed that the reason God created humans was so that they might walk in friendship with Him—but freely. No freedom, no friendship.

Therefore, Washington held that to be faithful to His own promises, God was bound to favor those who fought for their liberties against those who tried to deprive them of those liberties.Washington’s God is the God of liberty.

Often Washington reminded Americans of how many times they had experienced the “interpositions” of a “kind Providence” on their behalf, and told them that they must be “worse than infidels” and even “wicked” not to give thanks to that Providence on every occasion.

Recently, a new story has come to light. One of the great figures in American Lutheranism, Henry Muhlenberg, wrote in his diary of a report he had just heard from Valley Forge (probably from his son General Peter Muhlenberg, who was an officer on duty inValley Forge, not far from the Muhlenberg home). This is what the older Muhlenberg wrote:

"I heard a fine example today, namely, that His Excellency General Washington rode around among his army yesterday and admonished each and every one to fear God, to put away the wickedness that has set in and become so general, and to practice the Christian virtues. From all appearances this gentleman does not belong to the so-called world of society, for he respects God’s Word, believes in the atonement through Christ, and bears himself in humility and gentleness. Therefore the Lord God has also singularly, yea, marvelously, preserved him from harm in the midst of countless perils, ambuscades, fatigues, etc., and has hitherto graciously held him in his hand as a chosen vessel."

A chosen vessel? On one occasion, in the dark, two units of Washington’s army were firing on one another, killing and wounding in ignorance—and Washington, on seeing the carnage, spurred his horse right through the center of the fire shouting and knocking rifles upwards with his sword right and left. It was a reckless thing to do.

On another occasion, rallying his troops in flight, he turned them around into a vigorous counterattack against the British units coming up, who themselves then took flight. Getting well ahead of his troops, sword flailing,Washington called out “It is a fine fox chase, my boys!” His men finally stopped him, lest a marksman take down the General they loved.

No wonder his people saw this man as “under the protection of a kind Providence.” No wonder he persuaded them that so was their country.

Published in First Things March 23, 2006

Just War and the Iraq War

A pair of articles on the justice of the Iraq war have appeared on the website Right Reason, in the form of a review of a new book bitterly opposing the war, President Bush, and the neoconservatives. The book’s title typifies the seriousness of the essays it includes: NeoCONNED. The reviewer at Right Reason, Edward Feser, measures the traditional criteria of the just war according to the moral manuals of the pre-Vatican II period, in order to employ a fair meaning of “traditional,” at least from (one would think) the paleoconservative side. In doing so, he collects some absolutely marvelous texts.

But since the paleocons in this instance, although not in others, fall all over themselves in exclaiming how they are faithful to the guidance of John Paul II and Benedict XVI in regard to the war in Iraq, the reviewer also includes a passage from Cardinal Ratzinger in 2004, when the morality of the war in Iraq was precisely the central issue. This gem cuts through moral pretense like a diamond:

Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia. For example, if a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment or on the decision to wage war, he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion. While the Church exhorts civil authorities to seek peace, not war, and to exercise discretion and mercy in imposing punishment on criminals, it may still be permissible to take up arms to repel an aggressor or to have recourse to capital punishment. There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia.

Published in First Things March 17, 2006

The Springtime of Life

On Monday one tree here, another there, burst into blossom in Washington, and when the weather the next day hit eighty-five fahrenheit, more and more trees burst out white, pink, and a very light violet. Including, I am told, at least one cherry tree near the Capitol. The innocence of newborn spring gives the lie to the weariness of Washington politics. What we knew as the blossoms appeared is that the first midwest candidate for the presidency in 2008 chose to announce informally by calling for a censure motion against President Bush for listening in on phone calls from al-Quaeda to the United States–a motion that brought delight to elected Republicans and panic to elected Democrats. The former called for a vote, the latter delayed, evaded, and soft-shoed away. As I say, a weary season, given the lie by oncoming spring.

Which put me in mind of a passage from the splendid article on demography to which Father Neuhaus linked yesterday. Did you know that religious women are having many times more babies in America than secular women? Not to put too partisan a ring on it, but the same article–and the discussion it has prompted–points out that women in the red states are having 12 percent more babies than women in the blue states.

The 17.4 percent of baby boomer women who had only one child account for a mere 7.8 percent of children born in the next generation. By contrast, nearly a quarter of the children of baby boomers descend from the mere 11 percent of baby boomer women who had four or more children.

The great difference in fertility rates between secular individualists and religious or cultural conservatives augurs a vast, demographically driven change in modern societies. Consider the demographics of France, for example. Among French women born in the early 1960s, less than a third have three or more children. But this distinct minority of French women (most of them presumably practicing Catholics and Muslims) produced more than 50 percent of all children born to their generation, in large measure because so many of their contemporaries had one child or none at all.

In the U.S., even without counting the loss of millions of black votes through abortion (at a rate of something like three to one with respect to white babies aborted) sheer demographics are killing the Democratic future. Feminism, gays, and abortion have not been demographic plusses. But how on earth did I get back into weary politics?

Well, spring got me thinking about new birth, and babies, and that got me thinking about demography ... and that wound me back into...

But it is out of winter and decaying autumn that spring comes, isn’t it?

Published in First Things March 16, 2006